Eye Patch reached up with his left arm, trying to claw Sonya. He couldn’t reach her, and for some reason didn’t use his right. The arm appeared injured. Still, he slowly stretched toward where Sonya jerked back and forth, working her fangs in deeper.
Shadow lowered his head and leaped, driving the blade forward in both hands and dragging it upward. “For Father!” he screamed as the blade slammed into the Pushtal’s abdomen. Propelled by his velocity, Shadow felt bone crunch and organs split as he impaled the pirate scum on his deceased father’s blade.
The Pushtal’s eyes went wide, and he let out a gurgling scream. Sonya jumped clear, and Shadow saw bright streaks of blood on her chest where he’d clawed her after all. But the look on her face was savage glee, ears high and teeth bared. The momentum of Shadow’s strike knocked Eye Patch backward, and he hit the ground in an overly slow low-G impact and slid. He kicked twice and finally died.
Shadow allowed satisfaction to flow through him for half a second. A Pushtal nearly cut his head off with a swipe of his massive paw. He managed to lean back at the last minute, enough so that only a single claw tore at the facemask, gouging a line right above Shadow’s eye. The pain barely registered.
“Pull back into a circle,” Bana yelled. Only one of his arms was working; the other was crusted over with frozen blood.
Everyone moved closer, some dragging useless limbs, others dragging wounded comrades. The dead were everywhere. Lots of Pushtal, and lots of Humans.
“We’re not going to win this, are we?” Drake asked woozily after getting kicked in the head.
“I don’t think so,” Sonya said. She was holding her left hand against her chest, staunching the blood, her right holding a pistol. She had to sit because her right leg wasn’t working anymore.
“Almost out of ammo,” Ripley said. She visibly gasped with each breath and held her elbows against her side. Shadow guessed she’d undone some of her healing.
“No,” Shadow said. “We will not fall here.”
“You sure, bro?” Drake asked.
Shadow closed his eyes for a second and nodded. “Yes.”
A dozen hulking Pushtal rushed the siblings, who all raised weapons, despite the odds. But then all the enemy cats were torn apart as if god’s own chainsaw had ripped into them.
“We gotcha!” a voice blared on a loudspeaker, and the whoosh of jumpjets sounded. A Mk 7 CASPer braked to a landing.
“Captain Tucker!” Drake shouted, and a cheer went up from the beleaguered defenders. In a split second, 10 more CASPers were in the mix.
No longer facing soft targets, the Pushtal switched to their guns. It was completely ineffective. The armored CASPers tore into them with a vengeance. No doubt seeing many of their own down at the hands of the enemy, more than a few of the newly arrived troopers resorted solely to their integral arm blades. Swung with the force of electromechanical muscles, the carbon fiber overlay blades tore Pushtal completely in half.
An explosion rocked from the far right, and another of the transports collapsed in fire and shrapnel.
The rout began, with nearly 100 Pushtal rushing toward the base, the best cover left in the field of broken transports and wrecked bodies. It was an illusion of defense—before they could reach it, they came face to face with the Lumar pouring out. With CASPers on one side and Lumar on the other, the Pushtal surrendered in a ragged wave. The battle was over.
* * * * *
Chapter 15
Classified Engineering Guild Holding—E’cop’k System
Shadow looked over at his siblings, sitting on the bench of the freshly cleared rec room as the medics tended to their wounds. Sonya was the worst, with crushed bones in her leg. Drake’s bullet-wounded arm was already tended to, as was Ripley’s aggravated chest wound. For himself, the enemy had missed taking out his right eye by a millimeter. It would be a spectacular scar. For now, he refused medical attention while the men were tended to.
Veska’s fur was singed badly enough that she’d been slathered in anti-burn cream, but she’d dismissed the need for further treatment, and instead had kept to Shadow’s side as he paced, a few steps behind him with her head on a swivel.
Shadow resolved to ask her how she’d taken down the last active transport, but first he had to share with Tucker all that had happened…including the death of his father.
“It’s a miracle any of us survived,” Tucker said after delivering a healthy string of curses.
“How did you get out of there alive?” Drake asked. “Figure the cats would have had you for shark biscuits right off to get this ambush started.”
“Well, they almost did,” Tucker said. “But the Vergola half convinced the couple who came to kill us that they’d already done us in. The cats didn’t buy it completely and were trying to get to us when their boss chucked a wobbly. Seems the Zuul boss dog fucked up the cat boss right proper before she died.”
“So Captain Nillab is dead?” Veska’s step hitched, but she didn’t sound surprised.
“Aye, lass. All the Zuul there are dead that we could see, and the Vergola too.”
“I expected that when they didn’t join the battle.” Her ears drooped, and she panted through a wave of pain. “My whole company.”
Drake stood and put his uninjured arm over her. She gave him a small smile, though her ears remained low.
“What happens now?” Sergeant Bana asked, looking at Captain Tucker.
A part of Shadow wanted to hand everything over to Tucker or Anderle and call it a day. He could shower off three species’ worth of blood and
