She wore full combat gear, too. So did Calpurnia, who appeared right behind her.
“Twenty-five meters,” Lyssa warned. “They have what I presume are grappling hooks extending from the front of their craft. They are bigger versions of the line and head that tried to take Fiori.”
Fiori shivered.
“The chances are, they don’t have a molecular barrier,” Jai said. “They’ll have to bring their ship into contact with ours to board.”
The nanobots had all disappeared, leaving printers and concierge panels lying tilted at weird angles on the floor. Duffel bags and packs and personal possessions were strewn across the floor. The parawolves nosed at each one, sniffed and nudged them, then moved onto the next item.
“Can you sweep up everything and hide it, Lyssa?” I called. “Anything they see in here will tell them about us. I want to present them as blank a canvas as possible.”
“We should obscure the view to the bridge, too,” Dalton said.
“Got it.” Lyssa’s tone was remote.
Around us, nanobot puddles appeared and formed into platforms on wheels, that whizzed around the floor, extending claws to pick up everything scattered about and put it on the tray. The rolling trays hurried to the back of the ship and through a small hatch in the engineering bulkhead.
Where the ramp up to the bridge ended, a grey curtain of nanobots quickly built up from the floor, rising to the ceiling. The wall solidified. The bridge was blocked off.
“Ten meters. And…pausing,” Lyssa informed us.
My heart shuddered and hurried. I glanced at the portside hatch, which was the twin of the one which was open to the other two ships. I imagined the big, hooked nose ship hanging spitting distance from the other side of the door.
The single view I’d got of the alien inside his canopied fighter kept replaying in my head. The long snout with the circles of teeth at the end, and the red flesh around them. The enormous eyes.
Their implacable drive.
I was breathing too fast. I tried to slow it down.
“They’re extending what looks like a tunnel,” Lyssa said.
“A physical version of our molecular barriers,” Jai said, sounding curious.
The ship gave a little shiver.
“It has attached to me, right over the hatch.” Even Lyssa sounded subdued. “Filling with air. It seems to be a similar carbon-nitrogen-oxygen mix to ours.”
We could hear sounds on the other side of the fuselage, now. Scratching. Metallic clangs.
The parawolves were alerted and trotted over to us to face the hatch. Vara tilted her head, whining. I thrust my fingers into her scruff and tried to assure her, but my own near-panic would counter my soothing. “Quickly,” I said, coming to a fast decision and striding toward the back of the ship. “We put the wolves out of sight,” I added. “They won’t know what they are, and I don’t want them to know the wolves can fight. I want them as backup. Lyssa, open the access room. They can hide there.”
Lyth, Jai, Dalton and Sauli lead their parawolves over. We pushed them into the room, and I sent reassuring thoughts to Vara as I moved back to where everyone else milled, looking worried.
“They’re demanding I open the hatch,” Lyssa said.
Fiori drew in a loud, shuddering breath.
“Then I guess you’d better open the hatch,” I told her, taking up my position once more.
We all faced the port side hatch and waited for it to open.
—31—
As the hatch gave the preparatory clunking and hissing sounds it made just before it opened, Dalton’s hand settled on my shoulder from behind and squeezed.
And Jai stepped up beside me. He gave me a brief, strained smile.
“Guess you get a ringside seat after all, huh?” I murmured and faced the door once more.
It swung open.
I saw six of the blue people standing on a temporary, lightweight platform that extended from their ship. There might have been more behind them, but I couldn’t see past them, for they stood shoulder to shoulder. Their tunnel tech included a faux gravity, or they wore the equivalent of magnetic boots, and the platform was a type of metal.
I got a general impression of dark skin that gleamed a deep blue—I had not imagined that, then. I had reviewed my memory of the brief glimpse I’d got of the pilot of the fighter so often that I had begun to wonder if I had edited the memory and inserted the blue glow, along with the red mouth at the end of the snout and the concentric circles of teeth.
I could only absorb a vague impression of the rest of their bodies because my attention was yanked to their faces.
I hadn’t got the faces wrong at all. They were of the same midnight blue as the rest of the bodies, with the massive eyes and the elongated snout. The teeth were exactly as I remembered them. The red flesh around the teeth—gums, I supposed—was vivid, making me think of infected flesh.
I shuddered.
They raised what were clearly weapons, aiming them at us and I saw that they had jointed fingers, just like us, but much thicker. Their weapons didn’t have triggers, though. I couldn’t discern how they fired them. Not yet.
Sauli raised his hands. Sluggishly, reluctantly, I followed his example.
“Fuck me. It’s armor,” Dalton breathed, his hands raised, too.
I yanked my attention back to the bodies of the aliens as they stepped over the sill of the exit hatch and onto the floor of the ship. Forward-jointed knees at approximately the same place as ours. A foot that looked large and cumbersome but functioned just as ours did.
I examined what I had assumed was a carapace, looking at the joints, looking for seams, for signs of manufacturing. Assembly.
The joints were not joints at all, but merely places where one plate of armor ended close to the next, or actually overlapped it.
They were wearing all-over armor that also functioned, I guessed, as space suits. They would hardly design such
