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Small darks, the same as those that had dripped from larger entities, advanced toward them, coming from behind various banks of machinery.
“Fuck!” Darir yanked his blaster free of its holster, sweeping its muzzle in an arc as he tried to decide which to shoot.
“Don’t fire. It won’t affect them. From what I understand, they’re more phased than we are.”
“What do we do?” Panic pitched Darir’s voice high.
“It won’t require much to take the plasma generator offline. Come on!”
They raced to the generator. The tiny shadows followed them, about a dozen of the horrors. They couldn’t seem to run as quickly as a Kalquorian at full blurring speed.
Ilid reached the generator several yards ahead of the darks. He started for the control panel’s shielding commands and realized it was missing. Why had they removed it?
No time to wonder. He wrenched the cover off the control panel. Darir hadn’t holstered his blaster, despite its uselessness against the riders. He continued to point it at the oncoming creatures.
Ilid came to a decision every primal instinct shouted against. He ignored the approaching enemy and zeroed his attention on the panel. He recalled the list ofdon’tshe’d been drilled on and proceeded to do them as fast as he could.
Warning beeps began to voice their alerts. He kept working. He was aware no alarms had been sounded on the ship, the automatic alerts poised to go off as soon as the crew was aware sabotage was happening. The bridge would have known almost at once and dispatched a security detail in all haste, with ship-wide alerts mustering every member of the weapons commander’s team to converge on Engineering.
Ilid’s few memories of being ridden during the first tests Umen had performed on him were hazy, but he did recall distant voices speaking an unknown language. It grew louder the closer together they were, and they’d been in his mind. He believed the darks were telepathic.
Alarms weren’t needed, because the smaller versions had no doubt reported in to their larger brethren the instant they’d realized Ilid was attacking the ship. Which meant wherever the crew had disappeared to, they were on their way to deal with him and Darir.
He’d managed to do the damage he could in the seconds allotted, and he turned to tell Darir to escape to the shuttle bay. As he did so, the Imdiko opened fire.
Ilid’s skull rang from the steady chatter of percussion blasts going off close to him. He shouted in surprise. Surprise turned to alarm as he noted the small shadows converging on him and Darir, whose shots rendered as little effect as Ilid had expected.
“Run!” the Dramok screamed, and leapt over the line of shadows scuttling mere inches from him.
Whether Darir was too panicked to do so or unable to hear him over the steadyshoo-whupof the bellowing blaster, Ilid would never know. As he dashed for the closest door, he glanced over his shoulder and skidded to a halt.
Darir had stood his ground, still shooting even as the first shadow leapt at him. The Imdiko clawed at it, but his hand slid through the dark blob. He continued firing at the rest, which also grabbed onto him and climbed his body.
They were all over the orderly, apparently trying to get at his head. Darir flailed, blindly trying to fling them off. His finger kept squeezing the trigger of the blaster, and shots shivered the air around him.
One hit the control panel Ilid had left exposed, disintegrating it. Another found a plasma conduit snaking from the top of the generator. With the control panel obliterated, the blast-proof containment shielding surrounding the conduit had disappeared. The conduit broke apart.
The last sight Ilid had of Darir was of a shadow slipping into his screaming mouth. The Dramok’s animal instinct took over. As the alarm, which his ship’s systems trainer had laughingly referred to as the “kiss your ass goodbye alert,” rent the air, Ilid ran as fast as he could to escape the chamber.
His surroundings blurred. The seconds following were a kaleidoscope of momentary impressions: snatches of his environment, instances of firing his blaster at familiar faces stretched in furious snarls as they appeared, the scream of the alarm changing to the strident abandon-ship claxon, red lights flashing everywhere.
Then he was pounding to a shuttle, having somehow reached the bay. He dove on board, sealed the hatch, and slid into the pilot’s chair. His fingers flew over the controls as he wondered if he’d stopped long enough to deactivate the containment sealing the bay from space. He couldn’t remember.
The shuttle quaked. Through the vid monitor he’d activated, he saw the bay outside the vessel cracking and crumpling. Explosions resounded.
The shuttle lifted from its dock and bolted toward space. Debris rained upon it, and Ilid was stunned by the sight of the bay bursting apart around him.
His console flared red for an instant. In that precious moment, Ilid had the happy thought he’d die unsaddled by a rider or helpless under a surgical cutter. He’d die free, he’d die strong, he’d die a real Dramok. Wherever the spyship had been headed, its alien invaders wouldn’t achieve their goal to spread anywhere else.
My fathers, my mother, you’d be so proud.
Chapter Sixteen
Earth II
After work, Stacy roamed the living area of the living section of Government Hall, restless and out of sorts. The place felt like a vast mausoleum compared to Clan Rihep’s cozy quarters. Five bedrooms, a living room, den, kitchen, formal dining room, casual eating nook, library…in short, too much space for a single woman when the house staff had left for the day.
She didn’t kid herself. It wasn’t the size of her living space getting her down. If Rihep, Kuran, and Etnil had been present, it would have been perfect. Anywhere they were was the ideal, whether cavernous or miniscule.
