Moments later, I was back on my side of the street behind cover with Nyna.
After a full minute, she peeked around her side of the pillar, looked around, ducked back, and turned to me.
“Is it safe?” she asked. “Can we keep going?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Look around you. The locals are still hiding. There’s a reason for that. Always watch the locals. They know what’s what around here.”
Not long after I spoke,, my suspicions were verified when I heard the thrumming of approaching hover-vehicles.
“Incoming,” Reaver’s voice said in my ear. “Two hoverbikes. Looks like local law enforcement. I’m about 50 yards to your six. I’ve got you in sight. They just passed us. We weren’t spotted. Better hide the gun.”
I took her advice and snapped my fingers to get everyone else’s attention. When they looked, I showed them I was concealing my gun and sliding Ebon completely back into its sheath. They got the hint and did the same with their own weapons, trying to look as harmless as possible, which wasn’t as easy for the tentacle-headed Beatrix. She tightened her tentacles to look as much like a tight bun as possible. We pretended to be just another collection of concerned citizens waiting for law enforcement to save us.
A few seconds later, two hoverbikes roared in from a side street and came straight for us. Their pilots were more of the one-eyed rushadas we’d killed when we’d rescued Nyna from the powerplant. They wore helmets that completely covered their heads, but the rest of their bodies were unmistakable leathery sacks of sinewy muscle.
They carried short-barreled energy rifles, not the variety that had made the first noises earlier. If I killed the guards, I could take their weapons. My team could use them. I was the only one armed with anything for range. I wasn’t even sure the Ish-Nul knew how to use rifles, but a quick lesson could pay off huge dividends.
Instead, I decided to wait and see what would happen. I made no move to draw Ebon or my pistol. The rushadas might take it as a threat and open fire first. I wasn’t worried for myself. I’d faced tougher odds against similar foes and knew how to handle myself. But I didn’t want them communicating back to their headquarters to call for more reinforcements.
A moment later, another two shots rang out, soon followed by a third. The guards glanced at each other, probably speaking into their helmet communicators, and gunned their hoverbikes. They screamed past us, turned left around a tight corner, and disappeared from sight.
“What’s going on?” Reaver asked.
“Looks like they’re going after someone else,” I said. “Whoever’s shooting out there is about to—” My words were interrupted by the hiss of high-powered energy weapons discharging. “Correction: looks like someone just got what they were looking for, if what they were looking for was the attention of the police.”
“Roger that,” Reaver said. “We’ll start moving when you do.”
A few seconds later, the first dirty face peeked out from a creaking doorway into the street. It was soon followed by another a few buildings down. A third, the face of a small kakul—possibly the one Nyna had fed earlier—peeked around the corner of another building further down the street.
“Now, we move,” I said to Nyna.
She nodded and waved for the rest of the team to follow.
I continued to guide the team in the direction of the most congestion. From what I could tell, the closer we got to the palace, the older the buildings became, and the more repairs and retrofits they’d been subjected to. It also meant our pace had to slow, as there were too many blind corners, obstructions, and sharp ends to watch out for.
I could have cut my way through it all, but I couldn't tell what was important, what was powered, and what would fall down. Instead, we maintained our stealth.
Reaver was having a more difficult time of it, though. As the buildings got closer together, her team was finding it difficult to keep us in sight. They were close enough that I caught a glimpse of one or all of them from time to time. Having our overwatch so near wasn’t ideal, but it was better than nothing.
The palace came into view all at once. It was tall, but not as tall as some. It was wider than any building I’d seen within the city, though. Each of the two visible walls stretched to at least a thousand feet in width. It was well-constructed and looked like it could contain an entire town within its polished concrete walls.
The exterior was tilted slightly inward as it reached for the sky, and, based on what I could see, I suspected it was octagonal in shape. From my vantage point, I also spotted a second tier, and possibly a third.
There were no windows down low, but, starting about a third of the way up, the walls had horizontal indentations that were probably narrow openings. They traveled along the outside of the building in neat rows every twelve feet up to the top of the 100-yard-tall walls. It was an extraordinary amount of opulence compared to the city surrounding it.
We’d approached on the side that seemed to have the main entrance. The palace was 50 yards away across open ground, which looked like it had been recently raked, then stomped into submission, then raked again. The dirt was parched and cracked. There weren’t even any weeds growing anywhere.
There were two metal doors, the kind I used to see along the hulls of starships, and they presented a challenging obstacle. That, and the four-armed rushada guards, two hoverbikes, and mounted ship-sized energy weapon above the doors delivered the intended message loud and clear: Go away!
I didn’t care about messages, though. Not when I had my own to deliver.
“Damn,” Reaver said through the comm. “So, what’s the plan?”
My plan was to charge ahead, draw fire
