“There’s an entrance over here, sir,” Manley told me, gesturing with his plasma gun toward an oval doorway set in the side of the dome.
I’d been surprised at how similar some of the Tahni architecture was to ours. Doors were doors, and if they had little touches like kick plates to open them with a foot instead of a hand, they still served the same purpose and swung inward or outward or sometimes withdrew into a niche in the wall. There must have been a practical reason why they didn’t construct them to dilate like a pupil or slide up into the ceiling or something weird like that, and I was sure some university egghead would get a government grant someday to launch a multi-year study into the socioeconomic significance of Tahni architecture, because that was the sort of thing the Commonwealth liked to waste money on instead of useless things like reforming the foster care system or trying to rebuild the squatter cities.
This particular door would no doubt cause much consternation for my notional researcher because it was reminiscent of every depiction of a medieval castle door I’d seen in fantasy stories or historical epics, oval at the top, squared at the bottom, constructed from wood planks banded by metal. All it lacked was the big metal ring at the center to pull it open, since the Tahni liked to open doors with their feet. This one was four meters tall and nearly as wide, so I had to think the kick plate at the bottom was an electronic switch, but I did my part to show my respect for a different culture and slammed the flat of my suit’s right foot into the door.
The mechanism didn’t have the chance to do the polite thing and open the door for me, because my kick knocked it off its hinges and sent it tumbling inward. Light spilled out from inside the dome, and I took a step through the entrance. And stopped in my tracks.
I would have figured the dome would be divided into dozens of separate rooms, given its size, but it was a single chamber, huge and cavernous. The light came from panels stretched out across the ceiling in a fractal pattern, and beneath it, bathed in its amber glow, hundreds of Tahni females danced.
Well, it looked like a dance. If it had been humans, I would have said they were dancing. The sounds they were making seemed like a chant, and though some of them broke off their dance and their chant at our intrusion, others kept it up, as if they were lost in some sort of trance. The chant had no rhythm that I could recognize, but it did repeat, and the dance spun and leapt and lunged with it, bare feet kicking up spray of something that could have been sand or sawdust. The females wore clothing woven of multihued strips and the strips whipped around with their motion, turning each of them into a kaleidoscope of motion and color.
“What the fuck is this shit?” Manley blurted, squeezing through the door behind me.
The rest of the ad hoc platoon was stuck behind us, shuffling in place, their spiked, metal foot pads scraping against the pavement. I could feel their impatience but I stood in place. Either this was a trap of some sort or it was exactly what it looked like, a shitload of young Tahni females doing some sort of communal dance, and either way, I didn’t need thirty battlesuits busting through the door into the middle of it.
“Is this some kind of religious ceremony, sir?” Manley asked me.
I wished he could have seen the look I gave him, because he deserved it.
“How the hell would I know, Sergeant?” I replied. I was scanning the interior of the dome while I spoke, and the display told me exactly what I expected. Other than four hundred and thirty-two Tahni females, there was nothing in the chamber.
Then something changed. The females who had kept dancing and chanting despite our entrance finally seemed to notice us, and their waving, spinning motion took on a particular focus, heading our way. I thought of the females who had attacked us on Confluence and began to back away.
“Out,” I told Manley and the others, my voice taut. “Back out now.”
“I’ve heard about the Tahni females, sir,” Manley said. “They’re worse than the males. We should burn them all down before they can try anything.”
Looking at the black eyes shining with feral rage, coming ever closer, I could sympathize with the sergeant’s fear. But I couldn’t let myself be controlled by it. That was why they’d put the bars on my shoulders, or at least that’s what I told myself.
“Negative, Sergeant Manley,” I told him. “Back out of here and do not fire. Get the platoon back and set up a perimeter fifty meters from the entrance. Now.”
“Yes, sir.”
I could hear the skepticism in his tone, but he followed orders just the same and chivvied the loose collection of Marines back into their positions. I stood just outside the door, watching the females get closer, their ranks surging forward like a wave on the beach, slowly advancing. I took a hop backwards out of the doorway and aimed my plasma gun at the pavement just outside, firing before the civilians could rush after me.
The blast melted the pavement into black, steaming tar, heat rolling off of it, sending the Tahni females retreating from the exit despite their furor, religious or otherwise. It should keep them back for a few minutes, I thought. And a few minutes was all I needed.
“Cam!” I heard Vicky’s voice before I noticed the incoming Vigilantes on
