“Now, images of the crew,” I told Lyssa. “Those you have, at least.”
“Especially Mace,” Dalton said urgently.
Lyssa put up an image of Mace and left it there.
The speaker turned back to the others. They grouped together and spoke swiftly.
“Are you seeing linguistic patterns at all?” I asked Lyth.
He glanced at me and nodded. “It will be decipherable, eventually.”
The speaker came back to us. “Humans. Ours. You go. We go. End.”
“No!” Dalton shouted, hammering his fist against the nanobot wall. “Lyssa, give me a fucking door! Now!”
“No!” I shouted, as the door formed obediently.
But Dalton shot through, staggering into the circle of aliens. He put up his hands as he moved to the speaker. He lowered one long enough to tap his chest. “Me. For him.” He pointed at the image of Mace still hanging over the window.
I closed my eyes.
“Me for him,” Dalton repeated, his volume increasing.
The speaker considered Dalton for a good long moment. Then it croaked a single word. “Yes.” It slapped the armor over where a human hip would be. An elongated diamond of the armor popped out and shot toward Dalton, trailing a slender line.
At the same time, all the aliens in the rotunda slapped their hips and similar lines with things on the end snaked across the circle and through the door that Lyssa had made for Dalton.
Alarm crashed through me. “Kill the diamonds!” I screamed as I spun to face them as they wove through the air, seeking us out.
I fired and hit one squarely. It paused, then came on. I fired again and again, and it only slowed the thing down. “Lyssa! Loose the parawolves!”
There were too many lines, too many heads. I couldn’t fire at them all, all the time.
One whipped around my arm and squeezed. Pain exploded in my arm and my head. My limbs all stiffened. I couldn’t move them. I could feel myself falling as my vision faded but didn’t notice the impact with the floor. The pain running through my nerves smothered the smaller pain of falling. I heard the wolves snarling and the fast rasp of the aliens shouting at each other.
I could hear my friends, my family, crying out in pain, too.
And I heard the alien weapons firing.
—32—
The headache that greeted me as I roused was beyond the level of any I’d ever suffered in the past. I felt nauseous just trying to think. I tried to smother the groan which escaped me to avoid alerting anyone I’d come around. I kept my eyes closed.
I recalled what had happened. The shouting. The snake things. The panic in Vara’s emotions as I lay on the floor of the Lythion, not moving.
Especially, I remember the pain, which was the same class as the headache I had now, a silvered, biting-on-foil flaring of my nerves. My whole body felt numb, which made it difficult to figure out how badly hurt I was.
“Danny.” Dalton’s voice. “You’re okay. Talk to me.”
I opened my eyes, relief touching me, and looked around.
I was standing upright, although I wasn’t putting any effort into it. I was inside a form-fitting cage. Box. Shell. Whatever it was, it was holding me upright. A band of the same material ran across the front of the box at chest height and another at thigh height.
The room beyond was nearly completely dark. On the other side of the room, perhaps two meters away, a row of tiny lights flashed at shoulder height. I blinked, trying to make sense of that, and gradually made out the vaguely human outline, next to a set of the lights. Then another, with its own lights.
More shells, I realized. I peered closely at them, trying to discern details in the dim light. They were empty.
“Dalton?” My voice was scratchy.
“Here.” To my left. I turned my head and tried to lean out to see him, but the shell was at a slight decline, and I was too weak yet to fight the slope. I fell back. “I can’t see you.”
“I think you’re a couple of boxes down from me,” Dalton said.
“Are you the only one, besides me?” I had to ask, but I dreaded the answer, and my heart gave an extra heavy thump.
“I don’t know,” he said. “If any of the others are here, they’re not awake yet.”
“How did you know I was?”
“I heard you groan.”
“And that told you it was me?”
“I’d know your voice anywhere.” He sounded amused. “Even when you’re grunting.”
I wanted to be irritated about that, but there were higher priorities besides my bruised feminine ego. I turned my head around, trying to examine as much as I could see from this awkward angle. And I tried to move my arms and feet. They cooperated sluggishly.
“Can you move?” I asked Dalton.
“Couldn’t at first, but I can wave my arms a bit now. The bar over the top is in just the wrong place, though. I can get my hand out only a dozen centimeters or so.”
I thought about that. “Wave your hand. I want to see if I can see it.” I poured all my energy into leaning forward as far as the bar would let me and peering to my left.
“Waving,” Dalton said.
Nothing. I fell back, panting. “We’ll just have to wait a bit,” I decided. “If the others are in here with us, we should hear them wake soon, too.” If they weren’t dead. Perhaps we were supposed to be dead, too, and these were the alien’s version of coffins. But why not just leave our bodies where they’d felled them?
I had a thousand questions, and few information sources.
“Do you see the shells on the other side of the room?” I asked.
“Yeah. Human-sized. The aliens wouldn’t fit into them.”
“Not in their armor, but who knows what is underneath. This is their ship, then.”
“I figured,” Dalton said. “I can’t feel Darb,” he added, with a worried note.
I reached for Vara. Nothing. “Out of range?” I
