They appeared to be of average height, maybe a little under six feet. Although they didn’t give any sign they were in pain, their bare legs appeared to be slightly bent at odd angles.I wondered if their legs had broken and healed in the odd positions.
They were standing directly in the center of a field of white, sparkling sand that extended all the way to a six-foot walkway along the room’s round wall. Behind them, I could make out a polished metal doorway with a small green light beside it on the wall. To the left, I could see the bottom of a winding staircase. To the right was another polished doorway, its door slightly ajar.
The two men didn’t make any move to attack. Nor did they attempt to retreat. They didn’t speak, and I wasn’t sure if they were breathing.
“What the fuck?” Reaver whispered. “I’ve got a clean shot on either of them. Want me to take them out?”
“Not yet,” I said from the corner of my mouth. “Tortengar isn’t going anywhere. I want to see what this is all about. I’m going to try to communicate with them.”
“I am right behind you,” Beatrix assured me.
I heard Reaver order the Ish-Nul and Yaltu to guard the doorway to prevent anyone from sneaking up behind us, and then tell Skrew to cover them. She was taking initiative, just like I’d taught her. Then, she stepped into the room, rifle still raised, and took a position to my right, where she’d have a clean line of fire should she need to drop one or both of the men.
When I stepped into the room, I became aware of a new sound echoing off the walls: breathing. It was rapid, shallow, and though I didn’t see either man’s chest moving, it seemed to come directly from them.
“Where is Tortengar?” I asked.
Neither man seemed to hear me, so I asked again. Still no response.
“Maybe they’re just here to waste our time?” Reaver whispered over the comm. “If so, they’re doing a good job of it.”
“I don’t think so,” I replied. “There’s something else going on here. Tortengar doesn’t seem like someone who would want to slow us down. He’d want us—or anyone else who invaded his sanctuary—dead. As fast as possible. I smell a trap.”
Beatrix sniffed the air. “I smell something too,” she confirmed.
I was tempted to explain that what I had said was only a figure of speech, but she had me curious.
“What do you smell?” I asked.
Beatrix’s tentacles unraveled from the tight bun and began to wave around in the air. “Fear,” she said. “Not from us—from them. They have more fear than I have ever sensed. And waste, filth, disease. I smell rotting things, but it is faint. And hunger. I do not know how they are producing so much odor. It does not make sense to me.”
Beatrix, apparently, had a better sense of smell than the rest of us. Whether it was her tentacles or just better olfactory nerves, I didn’t know, but she’d detected something. There were things nearby that we didn’t see. There was a trap, and whatever Tortengar thought we would do, we had to do the opposite. We had to trigger the trap without falling into it.
“Reaver,” I whispered, “shoot the sand near their feet. Just a single shot. Let’s see if they respond.” I watched the men and the sand around them closely.
A hyphen of energy melted a circle of sand, but neither of them budged. Then, I saw it. A small section of sand, no more than a few inches long and wide, shifted. It was too far away to have been caused by either man. There was something else in the room, and it was hiding beneath them.
I couldn’t tell if the men were being held hostage by the thing beneath the sand, or if they were the ones who tended it. All I knew was that things that concealed themselves could be dangerous.
“Skrew,” I said over the comm, “please make your way to the doorway. Stay outside, but point that big gun of yours at the two humans in the center of the room. If they so much as take a single step, I want you to turn them into a cloud of pink mist. Understood?”
Skrew giggled. “Understood much! Pew-pew and make humans dead, yes.”
Whoever had set the trap expected their prey to approach the humans, work hard to get their attention, and see if they could help. I had no intention of doing what the enemy expected.
I took a small step to my right as the stomping of the mech’s feet slowed and stopped. I knew the vrak would be behind me, and I wanted him to have a clear shot in case things went sideways.
“Reaver,” I whispered over the comm, “take out the one on the right. Headshot.”
Over the next two seconds, several things happened. First, an energy bolt struck the man on the right in the center of his head, just to the left of his ear. Instead of exploding, though, the head split, and green fluid sprayed across the pure white sand.
Next, Skrew’s minigun began to spin up as he prepared to fire. Third, the man on the left screamed in a voice that was far from human and shot into the sand like he’d been fired from a bow. Skrew’s minigun rounds peppered the sand for a half-second before he realized his target was gone.
Beatrix gasped. “Where did they--?”
Her words were cut off when the sand exploded in front of us.
The human men erupted from the surface and were flailed against the walls of the tower. At first, they looked like they were being held by their feet by segmented, tentacle-like appendages, but I soon realized the truth:
