“Aros,” she gasped. “We have to help him. He’s almost at the crane.”
She started to move, but Aros caught her by the collar and yanked her back. Lily hit the deck with a painful grunt, but she was at least in cover again.
“Lily, we can’t.” His voice cut like steel. “A Colossus is not a toy. It was the greatest trump card in the Ancient Artificial Intelligence Uprisings. I don’t know how it got here, but it can destroy armies on its own. The crane won’t stop it. Khar’s sacrifice cannot be wasted. We have to go.”
Lily’s blood hammered in her ears. Her hands clenched into fists.
Her world narrowed to one thing.
Khar.
Maybe she had made poor choices. Maybe she had been timid and weak and ashamed. None of it mattered now.
Khar mattered.
And Khar would not be without her.
“Then go,” she said. “I’m staying.”
She sprang up and burst from cover in a tiger-smooth roll.
The Colossus stood beneath Khar’s climbing form, terrifyingly still, as if to say resistance was beneath it.
Khar reached the crane, but he had no chance if the Colossus turned its focus back to him.
Lily would not let that happen.
She snatched up one of the abandoned smuggler daggers and hurled it at the Colossus’s back.
She knew it would not damage it. That was not the point.
She only needed its attention. Just long enough for Khar to engage the crane’s magnet systems.
The Colossus turned.
Its single serpent-pupiled eye fixed on Lily.
She went rigid.
Then, slowly, she began to step backward.
Even that pathetic motion took everything she had, as if the machine’s stare alone reduced her to trembling prey.
Above, the crane’s machinery roared to life.
Khar clung to the magnetic clamp and threw himself at the Colossus.
The jump was perfect.
The clamp swung in a clean arc toward the Colossus’s neck. The machine, for one impossible second, seemed entirely focused on Lily.
Lily stopped moving. She did not dare provoke even a flicker of motion.
Time slowed.
The clamp’s swing. Khar’s fall. The Colossus’s ominous stillness.
One eternal instant that carried their hope of survival and, with one wrong breath, the promise of both their deaths.
