It scrambled up the wall like a spider, drew a saber with a blade edged in light, and launched itself at Khar.
Khar dipped his head in a bull’s motion, avoiding the lethal arc, and impaled the attacker on his horns.
The creature convulsed once, then stilled.
Khar tore the body off and hurled it at its comrade, but the smuggler’s shockingly white blood sprayed over Khar’s head, shoulders, and chest, turning him into something otherworldly and terrifying in his raw destruction.
Lily watched as his muscles flexed and released, as his eyes promised the afterlife to anyone foolish enough to stand against him.
The dagger-thrower barely dodged the corpse, but it was not fast enough to escape Khar.
One charge.
One slash.
Khar ripped it apart with his claws.
Now only Horos remained, the cockroachlike creature that had been keeping him at bay, and the smuggler boss, still twitching in a questionable state.
Khar’s two brothers surged toward him like bulldozers to crush the last scraps of resistance.
The boss trembled like unstable jelly as he forced himself upright and shouted at his final ally.
“Tztz. The sphere.”
The cockroach creature froze at the command, then moved, impossibly fast, toward the golden orb.
Horos, panting, scrambled to run, but Khar’s voice cracked across the hangar like thunder and stopped him cold.
“Run if you want, Horos. All you’ll achieve is dying tired.”
Lily sprang up the second she saw Horos move. Khar’s intervention gave her the opening she needed.
She threw herself at Horos, slammed him sideways, and rose as he gasped for air. She planted her boot on his throat, pressing down just enough to crush his windpipe and keep him from producing anything more than a broken wheeze.
No scream. No song.
Meanwhile Khar’s brothers reached the smuggler boss. Khar lunged after Tztz, but the cockroach beat him to the sphere.
It slapped a crude-looking beacon that had clearly been attached after the fact. The device emitted a mechanical whine and crackle. The creature immediately turned and sprinted away from the orb.
It did not get far.
The sphere opened like a flower calyx. Its interior reshaped in a blink, unfolding into a towering figure of white-and-gold titan metal, at least twice as tall as Khar.
Lily stared.
The machine looked as if someone had taken the best traits of every humanoid species and fused them into a perfect artificial hybrid. Its base color was platinum-white, threaded with gold lines that traced flawless functional geometry down its body.
Then it opened its eyes, and Lily’s breath caught.
One iris was gold, continuing the pattern in its body, the pupil elongated like a serpent’s, equal parts exquisite and instinctively threatening.
The other eye was ruined. A burned-out hollow, an old wound that somehow made the machine even more dreadful.
The shouting of Khar’s brothers yanked Lily out of her trance.
“You idiot!” one of them roared. “You unleashed a Colossus on us?”
