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“Tongue,” the Gold commands. I stick mine out. “Boil burns,” he says, and goes still. He knows I’ve been in vacuum.
“Expect hostiles,” he tells the group.
Ping…
The motion sensor displays a single dot traveling down the hall toward us. A Gray shoots a flare. The red light illuminates a single warrior. He swims down the hall like a shark, using what looks like a grapple gun to build velocity. “Germanicus, at one hundred meters, bring him down.”
But the alien warrior stops. He swims back and forth between the walls. “Naka, rheket zü Fá!” he bellows. A stunted metal crown seems to be fused to his naked head. “Naké, rheket zï Uud.”
A low groan rolls down the throat of the hall from his fellows.
“Fáaaaaaaaaa.”
Ping…Ping…Ping. Pingpingpingpingpingping.
Dots swarm the motion sensor, coming from all directions. “The ducts!” a wolfguard grunts. They shift their defensive position.
“They’re too big,” the Gold corrects. “They’d never fit.”
“They have small ones,” Volga says.
Even in panic, the Gold is impressive. He wheels, face absolutely still. “How small?”
Volga puts a flat hand above my head, and lowers it to my clavicles.
The Gold’s lips tighten and he draws his razor and pushes toward the ducts. Then blue light bathes us as the gravLift doors open from behind. No lift presents itself from inside the shaft. Only a single warrior floating in the blue dark.
He is the biggest human I’ve ever seen.
A long white tail of hair writhes like a pale snake over his head in the null G. His armor looks too heavy for any man to use in gravity, even him. It is weightless now—thick, rough, and jagged, festooned all over with spikes that are almost as long as those that make the crown atop his skull helmet.
“He’s real,” Volga whispers, gripped with awe. The dark fairy tale of her letters appears. “Volsung Fá.”
His voice is a deep vibration. He’s looking right at me. No. Through me to Volga.
“Volga. I offer you these Stains.”
He springs through the gunfire into the Gold leader. He bats aside the Gold’s razor with a long spear. Then they collide. Four of the spikes of his helmet pop through the Gold’s head like needles skewering a strawberry. Two from his shoulder punch out the man’s lower back. He slashes at the Gold’s neck with a crescent fist-blade, half severing the strong bone of the Gold’s spine. Using the man’s body as a shield, he pushes off the floor to find his next prey, his helmet spikes crowned now with the decapitated head of the Gold.
The giant kills everyone.
Some with his spear, some with his fist-blade, others with the spikes of his armor. And those he kills or wounds on his armor, he carries with him like a screaming crab shell made of the dying.
Volga fires her pulseRifle in quick bursts. The pulseblasts that find him sizzle on the armor, and send him ricocheting to kill more. The gun isn’t powerful enough. The monsters swim now down the main hall coming not to help the spiked man, but to watch him kill and drone that horrible sound. Volga shoots three in the head with blinding speed, but more are coming.
“Fáaaaaa.”
Volga and I run as soon as the second Gold is killed. Fá tries to come after us, but his own slaughtered victims weigh his spiked armor down as gravity returns to the ship with a downward jerk. Julii’s men restored it.
Not just Martian standard, but something far surpassing Earth’s gravity.
Clever.
It’s agonizing to run. I feel leaden. Volga stumbles with me, tearing through the maintenance corridors, until we reach a manual transit chute that runs between decks.
Volga grabs me before I slide down it. Her eyes survey the level-map beside the entrance. We’ve lost Fig’s trail. We’ll have to find our own way. Gods, she’s cool as ice. “Those are Ascomanni,” she says as she studies the map.
“Ascomanni are just pirates.”
