‘Other than that they’ve been expecting us.’
‘Do you want to abort?’
‘No.’
The troop carrier swooped around the arkship and eased its way into one of the craters circling the midsection. The crater floor had a rectangular entrance cut into it, with a tunnel that curved up into the interior. It was barely wide enough for the troop carrier to fit in.
Twenty seconds later they emerged into a hangar.
‘What the Saints happened here?’ Falar asked.
‘Explosive decompression,’ Xante said. ‘That’s probably why the message got cut off.’
‘The emergency seals activated,’ Mallot said. ‘It’s a hard vacuum now.’
‘Egress, pattern three,’ Dellian ordered. ‘Assume hostiles.’
‘Don’t you mean hostages?’ Falar said.
‘Pattern three.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Eighteen different hatches opened in the troop ship’s fuselage. The cohort leapt out, speeding into the big empty hangar. Several of them nuzzled up at the sites of the most violent damage, where there’d clearly been a lot of gunfire.
‘Proton pellets,’ Dellian read off his optik display. Which was almost a relief. Their armour’s mirrorfabrik carapace could withstand those quite easily. You’d get shaken up inside, but the cohort would take care of the attacker swiftly enough.
‘Let’s get a picture of what’s up those corridors,’ Dellian said. ‘Falar, Janc, Uret, take the left-hand side of the hangar. The rest of us: right.’
The cohorts began to scamper into position, splitting into duos at the start of each gap that led out of the hangar. There was nothing in the immediately visible parts. Small airborne drones floated along the hangar roof and hovered by each tunnel entrance. They drifted in.
‘I got a burst of air here,’ Xante said. ‘The emergency seal up there may be failing.’
‘Okay,’ Dellian said. ‘Whatever happened in here was recent, so let’s be—’
An explosion registered up the tunnel.
‘Delta cover,’ Dellian declared. It was all he could do not to smile. His cohort might be able to read his every intention, but his friends were equally empathic. They were already deploying as he gave the order.
Xante and Uret jumped and clung on to the ceiling. Clawing up into the battered pipe trunks, they were joined by a dozen of the cohort. Dellian himself leapt back under the troop ship, where one of the landing struts acted as a barrier. The rest of the cohorts fanned out, some sinking onto their haunches ready to lunge at whatever came out of the tunnel.
‘Visual,’ Xante yelled. ‘It’s a . . . Saints! Human.’
‘Confirm,’ Dellian told him.
‘Human shape. Mass and thermal authentic. Crude suit design, not armour. Small weapons.’
Dellian studied the image in his optic, feeling his heart rate climb. Either this was an astonishingly detailed lure that even Yirella could only dream of, or – ‘Okay, back away. Let them come.’ Two shoulder-mounted cannon slid up and aligned on the tunnel entrance.’
‘You getting this?’ he asked Yirella.
‘Yes.’
The spacesuited figure charged into the hangar and immediately saw the exoarmour hellhounds that were the cohort, hunched down poised to jump. Its reaction verged on comical – limbs flailing, desperately trying to slow. Boots slipped on the floor slicked by juices, and it fell on its arse, skidding along.
Dellian’s suit detected a radio signal.
‘Shit shit shit,’ a woman yelled. ‘Jessika, I got made. They’re everywhere.’
‘Hold fire,’ Dellian commanded. His suit genten was flashing up a voice pattern match. For a moment his throat wouldn’t actually work. ‘Saint Kandara?’ he gasped. ‘Is that you?’
‘What?’ The suit shifted around fast, pistol swinging in a wide arc, switching between the two closest cohort exoskeletons. ‘Who’s that?’
That’s military training, was all Dellian could think. ‘I’m squad leader Dellian,’ he said. ‘I’m under the troop carrier. I’m going to stand up. Just . . . let’s take this easy.’
The pistol swung in his direction. He held his arms above his head and stood.
‘Are you things actually human?’ Kandara asked.
‘Well, yeah!’
‘Mary, limbs got strange since we left. And you’re big, too.’
‘No, this is just my suit.’
The rest of the squad was emerging from cover.
Kandara rolled around abruptly, pointing her pistol along the corridor she’d come from. ‘I hope it’s a combat suit!’
‘Are you really Saint Kandara?’ Xante asked breathlessly.
‘Fuck,’ she yelled. ‘Here they come.’
Sensor alarms from the aerial drones went off. A dark tide slithered out of the tunnel. Dellian stared in shock at capturesnakes right out of the history files. The squad and their cohorts opened fire.
Saints
Salvation of Life
Callum was trying to keep his cool. Not easy. He’d been tense for so long now that he was frightened any attempt to relax and go with the flow would make him cry. Not that it mattered, because no one would see it. Nothing human. Or nothing he recognized as human, anyway.
Kandara had led a squad of invasion soldiers to the cave – two types in frankly terrifying exoskeleton armour. The first were human-ish, with limbs that had too many joints, while the second were a pack of demonic robot warriors arisen from nightmares. Both were too big to get in through the gap in the tunnel wall unless they ripped the rock apart. By the look of their suit limbs, they probably didn’t even need weapons to do that.
His arm was throbbing badly by then – the kind of drug-dulled pain that was frightening because the sedative couldn’t eliminate it. And the ridiculous balloon Jessika had fabricated in the initiator made it look like he’d got his arm stuck inside a beach ball.
The squad escorted them to the hangar, where a ship from the human armada was waiting. Their leader was called Dellian, whose voice over the radio came over as a strange mix of teenage excitement and religious reverence. And why the bloody hell does he keep calling us Saints?
That question died on Callum’s lips when he saw the hangar. The firefight had left it strewn with the wreckage of busted capturesnakes and huntspheres that’d been cracked open like metallic eggs – eggs whose insides were a churn of molten metal and plastic . . . and charred quint flesh.
It was a vivid contrast going into the troop carrier, which was like being inside a
