Or was there?

  He looked down at the holster on his thigh, glad the imposter hadn’t bothered to take the prototype handgun from him. Twisting awkwardly, he managed to pull the weapon free, letting it drop to the deck between his legs. From there, he shifted his position to pick it up cleanly in both hands, looking it over. It didn’t fire bullets like a typical handgun, but it still had a magazine-like insert in the grip.

  Gripping the gun in one hand, he pressed the release with his free forefinger and what slid out appeared to be nothing more than an access panel. He looked into the empty slot. Sure enough, there it was, a crystal battery connected to a miniature circuit board.

  “Jackpot!” he cried, forcing himself to slow down as he carefully removed the battery from the board. He held it up to look at it the same way the humanoid had with Dag’s original. It appeared to be identical.

  Leaning over the small bot, he fought hard to keep the weight of the pipe under control while he lowered the battery into the open space in Dag’s chest. His tired, stressed muscles shook, his face wrinkling with concentration over the delicate process until the crystal finally slipped into place, just before his arms gave out altogether. He grunted, his face pinching into a grimace as the pipe landed painfully across his lap. Squeezing his eyes shut, he sucked in a breath and took a moment for the pain to subside.

  “Dag.” He opened his eyes and resumed breathing normally again. “Can you hear me, buddy?”

  Dag didn’t respond.

  “Come on, man. I need your help. Wake up.”

  Still nothing. Nicholas waited, staring at the little bot, his shoulders slumping as he tried not to think about the imposter joining his crew and leaving him behind, or the fact that Yasmin thought that thing was him.

  “If you aren’t going to help me, I’m taking the battery,” he said, thinking a threat might work. “I’ll put it back in the gun.”

  Dag still didn’t respond. Nicholas got up on his knees, reaching out to pluck the battery back out of Dag’s chest. A small metal hand grabbed his wrist, holding it in place. Dag’s head rose from his prone position. His blades extended, slicing easily through Nicholas’ restraints. The bot caught the pipe before it could fall on him.

  “Yes!” Nicholas shouted, rubbing his chafed wrists, an angry smile creasing his face. He took the pipe from Dag and tossed it aside before getting to his feet. Dag stood up at the same time, the little bot looking up at Nicholas as he waited for instructions. Nicholas pointed at the door. “We need to get out of here. Fast.”

  Chapter 19

  Nicholas waited as Dag processed the task he had just been assigned. After a few seconds, the little bot hurried around the central terminal to the door, coming to a stop below the panel. He turned and raised his arms, asking to be picked up.

  “I appreciate that Grimmel left you for us,” Nicholas said, approaching him. “But why did he make you so small?”

  Of course, his size had come in handy, having been small enough to get into Foresight’s propulsion system to plug in the energy unit Grimmel had left for them in his London lab. Maybe that was the primary reason Dag had come with Foresight.

  Nicholas lifted the bot up to the door control panel so he could slice away the outer cover with one of his wrist blades to reveal the wiring beneath. Pulling at the wires, he expertly detached two and stripped them down before touching them to his exposed innards. Power returned to the door. Damaged by the imposter forcing it closed manually, it slid open in intermittent surges.

  “I knew you could do it,” Nicholas said, lowering Dag to the deck and moving into the main compartment. The bot didn’t follow. Instead, he retreated back into engineering. Moments later, he returned, with one arm locked in place across his chest plate, holding it on. Nicholas figured that losing the use of one arm was better than running around with his entire inner workings exposed.

  “Can you give me some light over here?” He pointed to where the bodies were pushed up against the bulkhead.

  A beam launched from Dag’s forehead, illuminating the deck. Nicholas went over to the corpses, pushing them around until he found one of the plasma rifles the Vultures had used. He picked it up and switched it on, grinning slightly as the weapon hummed to life, the charge counter indicating he had fifty rounds remaining. More than enough to deal with the impostor.

  He hoped.

  “Dag, let’s go,” he said, slinging the rifle over his shoulder and jumping onto the ladder to the lower deck. He slid down the rails, hopped off, and sprinted to the damaged hatch, unslinging the rifle to once more dive through the hole. Dag followed close behind.

  Nicholas rolled into a crouch, rifle at the ready. As expected, the ordnance they had scavenged from Foresight Three was gone, but Foresight was still at the LZ, likely waiting for team Bravo to return. They still had time.

  Nicholas took off, charging through the overgrowth, Dag tight on his heels. They reached the edge of the clearing, taking cover behind a tree. Nicholas carefully peered around it, watching as the ship rose from the grass. He didn’t notice the lone spine extending from the hull until it began to glow blue.

  ”Shit.” It was aimed directly at him.

  He pulled his head back behind the tree, looking down to find Dag gone. Smart move.

  Nicholas took off, running laterally as the single spine released its energy. Staying low, he looked back as the beam sliced neatly through the trunk, just above where he’d been standing. A loud snap and it began to topple.

  Toward him.

  He dived away as a large branch smashed to the ground behind him. Smaller branches whipped him painfully across the back, knocking him down and engulfing him in dense leaves. He stayed still, hoping lack of motion would convince Jennifer he’d been neutralized.

  He should have known better than to rush headlong back to the ship. Without his comm, he hadn’t been able to warn her of the situation. Maybe Dag could have sent a signal through to Frank, but he wasn’t sure it would have helped. If the impostor had already influenced Jennifer like it had Yasmin, she probably saw him as the threat too. Hell, they probably all did.

  He was lucky to be alive.

  At least the impostor wanted to go to the same place he did. If it hadn’t left for the broadcast source already, he could beat it to the source. And if it had reached the source ahead of him, then he would confront it there.

  A pair of small metal feet appeared on the ground in front of him. Nicholas lifted his head, looking up at Dag. “That son of a bitch is going to pay.”

  Dag didn’t respond.

  “We need to get out of here,” he continued, taking a few deep breaths to get ready for a sprint. As soon as he made any kind of movement, Jennifer was bound to start tracking him again. He could only hope she wouldn’t use the spines again if he was running away.. “You ready?”

  Dag didn’t move, but something about the bot’s posture told Nicholas he was.

  Nicholas drew his legs up into a crouch and pushed off, charging out through the leaves and sprinting through the vegetation toward the abandoned city, Dag running alongside. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that the ship’s spines remained active, though none of them showed signs of imminent use. At least he knew how far the ship’s sensors reached.

  He knew how far he had to run.

  “Dag, whatever sensor data you’re passing to Foresight, cut it off now if you haven’t already.”

  There was no outward indication from the bot that it had done anything, but he knew Dag would comply with his order.

  They reached the stream a few minutes later. Nicholas could barely make out the shape of the bridge in the distance, and a quick glance back the way he had come suggested Jennifer had guided Foresight back to the ground. He had to be nearing the edge of the ship’s sensor range by now, and passing through the streets of the alien city would obscure him further, at least for now. In fact…

  “I’ve got an idea.”

  He leaned over and scooped Dag up in the crook of his elbow and stepped into the stream. The water didn’t penetrate his boots, though he could feel the coldness of it through the material as he made his way across to the other side. He ran up the embankment and set Dag back down.

  They resumed their sprint into the city, circling the destruction and making their way back to the scene of the earlier battle with the squids. Returning to the building where they had recovered Caleb, they hurried inside.

  Shouldering the rifle, Nicholas approached the edge of the hole in the floor and gazed down into the darkness. “How much do you want to bet the tunnels go all the way to the source of the broadcast?”

  Dag didn’t respond.

  “Give me some light, Dag.”

  Dag activated his headlamp, illuminating the sloped entry into the tunnels. From what Nicholas could tell, the passages were easily large enough for him to navigate, and if it turned out they narrowed too much for him to get through, he could always climb back out. All he would lose was time.

  The one thing he couldn’t spare.

  He hesitated, wondering again if he should risk the more definitive overland route. He already knew Foresight would be flying cover for the others as they made their way to the broadcast source. He wouldn’t be able to get close without Jennifer shooting at him again. He had to stay off the ship’s sensors.

  And the only way to do that was to move underground.

  “Dag, stay sharp. We killed a lot of squids, but that doesn’t mean we got them all.”

  Dag responded by jumping into the tunnel, using the slope of the rock as a slide.

  Nicholas held the rifle in front of him and followed.

  Chapter 20

  Nicholas followed Dag through the tunnel, moving at a brisk but careful pace, his plasma rifle at the ready. The hard stone walls of the excavated passage remained burned from Foresight’s ion fire, dark scorch marks and ash marking the bodies of hundreds of tentacled aliens that had died during the attack. A rancid smell lingered in the stale air, turning his stomach.

  Dag waited a few feet ahead, having chosen one of three tunnels branching off from their location. Nicholas assumed the little bot knew which way to go, though a moment of worry passed over him as he considered that he could be wrong. If he was, they might spend hours they didn’t have trying to find the right passages. The alternative wasn’t much better. He needed to trust that Dag could sense the layout of the underground tunnels better than he could see them. And that he wouldn’t mistakenly lead him astray.

  The ceiling at the tunnel entrance had almost been high enough for him to walk normally. Now, as he trailed Dag down the new tunnel, it began quickly closing in on him, forcing him into a crouch.

  “Dag, the tunnel won’t get much smaller than this, will it?” he asked. “You can fit, but that doesn’t help me any.”

  Dag didn’t respond. Since the bot kept walking, Nicholas figured it counted as an affirmative answer.

  They followed the tunnel for nearly five hundred feet before it started sloping downward, gently at first, but then angling almost too steeply for Nicholas to easily reverse course if they got into trouble. The composition of the stone around him changed as the reach of Foresight’s ion blast faded, revealing a flint-like surface that looked as though the squids had eaten it away to make the tunnels. He shivered at the thought of the small, grinding mouths on the end of their tentacles taking thousands of bites out of the rock.

  After walking for ten minutes, they reached the first intersection. Dag stopped in the center of the junction, swiveling his head to illuminate each of the passages in turn with his headlamp. At first, Nicholas thought the bot might be lost.

  Dag faced the passage on the left, the blade extending from his right wrist, his left arm still locked over his chest plate and out of play.

  “Is something coming?” Nicholas asked, going down on one-knee beside the bot, rifle aimed down the tunnel. He spotted a shift in darkness near a bend in the passage, suggesting something had moved down there. “Stay close. I’m blind down here without you.”

  Dag didn’t move, keeping his attention fixed on the corridor. The shadow shifted again, tempting Nicholas to take a shot at it if only to reveal the source. However, he couldn’t waste the limited charges he had in the old rifle.

  “It would have been nice if Grimmel had given you a ranged weapon too,” Nicholas said. “I mean, you’re a badass with those blades, but they’re kind of useless when—”

  A green energy disc shot from the underside of Dag’s wrist, tracking down the tunnel, illuminating a tentacled alien and slicing through its central mass before the light from the disc faded.

  “Don’t tell me you could have done that at any time,” Nicholas said.

  Dag turned away from the alien in the left passageway and started down the right one, leaving Nicholas shaking his head as he followed along in the bot’s wake.

  Why hadn’t Dag used the energy disc weapon before? Maybe there hadn’t been a reasonable need, with so many other weapons around and people to use them. He imagined the disc would drain the crystal battery powering the bot a little bit with every use.

  In that case, why waste a shot now?

  He noticed Dag picked up the pace, shifting to a jog that forced him to walk faster along the passageway. They reached a second intersection in short order, and the bot turned left this time, following another descending tunnel to a third junction. Dag went right again, his pace continuing to increase.

  Nicholas picked up soft echoes of clicking and chattering, getting louder behind them by the minute.

  Foresight’s attack obviously hadn’t killed all the aliens. There was no way to know how many more had taken residence down here, but the extensive subterranean passages suggested it might be a lot.

  Maybe Dag had killed the first one in an effort to keep their position secret and buy them more time, but the aliens seemed to be able to communicate instantaneously with one another over long distances. He wasn’t hopeful it hadn’t been able to spread the word before it died.

  Nicholas was only guessing, but he received some measure of confirmation when Dag broke from a jog to a full run, sprinting along the passage at a speed that left Nicholas struggling to keep up. They dove through a fourth intersection into a tunnel on the right side, hitting another downslope that led them deeper underground. The clicking and chattering kept growing in volume and intensity, the sound echoing all around them. Nicholas couldn’t even begin to guess exactly where it was coming from. Behind or ahead.

  Both seemed likely.

  At another intersection they broke left, still moving as fast as Nicholas could manage in his stooped position. He knew Dag could run faster than his current pace, but the bot held back so Nicholas could keep up.

  A minute passed. Another. Nicholas lost track of any remaining sense of direction or spatial awareness as the tunnels all began blending together into a single, seemingly unending maze. A part of him wanted to panic over not knowing where he was or even what direction in which they were moving, for all the good it would do. Instead, he kept his faith in Dag, trusting the bot had some idea where he was going. Since the squids hadn’t caught up yet he had to assume they weren’t running in circles.

  But the squids were getting closer. Their clacking noises had grown annoyingly loud, echoing in the corridors and drowning out the sound of his boots and Dag’s metal feet on the rock. He was pretty sure he could hear the wet slapping noises of their tentacles behind their vocalizations, though he wouldn’t be able to see them if he looked over his shoulder even if they were only a few feet away. The only light in the place came from Dag’s headlamp, and it only faced in one direction.

  They reached another intersection, and Dag turned right. He immediately raised his arm and fired a series of discs past the reach of his light. The discs illuminated a group of tentacled aliens coming their way, allowing Nicholas to target them. He fired a volley over Dag’s head, his first bolt striking a squid in its mouth. The blast hit something vital, dropping it instantly. The second bolt hit another between its many eyes, killing it just as quickly.

  The aliens tried covering their more vulnerable places with their tentacles, sacrificing their limbs to his attack. The tactic worked to save them from his plasma fire but it didn’t save them from Dag.

  Nicholas held his fire when Dag whirled his wrist blade and rushed headlong into the mass of aliens. Spinning, ducking, and jumping around tentacles and gnashing teeth, he moved so fast his headlamp created a strobe-like effect that made it hard for Nicholas to distinguish exactly what was happening. It was clear, however, that one squid after another succumbed to the little bot.

  But it was still one against many.

  With only one arm, Dag began to struggle against the sheer volume of squids. Four tentacles reached out for him at once from four different aliens, wrapping around him. He sliced one off right away and then another, but it was immediately replaced by another. And then another.

  Checking the counter on the rifle, Nicholas saw it was nearly out of its charge. Once gone, he would be completely defenseless...except for the strange spear-like weapon Grimmel had left for him. He’d brought it with him, and he was glad he had.

  Nicholas turned the dial on the plasma rifle, setting it to stream. He only had enough charge for a handful of seconds, but it might be enough to get them through the squid blockade.

  “Dag, I’m coming in hot,” he shouted, pretty sure Dag’s exterior could hold up to a few seconds of plasma heat, though he still hoped the bot would duck when he saw him coming.

  He fired the weapon when he reached the edge of the melee, pouring gouts of superheated gas over the alien horde. They clacked and whined and died, burning away in an instant. Some of those in the back tried to run, but only two were able to clear the stream of burning death before it reduced them to ashes and ooze.

  Dag emerged from beneath the growing puddle of melted squids while Nicholas was still pouring on the plasma. Dag ignored the heat, rushing to attack the two runaway aliens trying to escape down the tunnel.