“It’s risky to split up,” she said.

  “I know, but we’ll need to move fast. We’re looking for David, but also Grizz’s wife and kids. And keep an eye out for Colonel Coil. He’s probably lurking in there somewhere.”

  “Blind as a bat and half as smart,” Emerald said.

  “Team Hondo, get into position,” I said.

  The others grouped into their teams behind me as I moved to the corner of the large rock to peer around the edge at the defenses. The flashes and bangs in the distance had thinned out considerably in the last minute, Tsu’s assessment of the situation spot on. The Blues were going down fast.

  “Captain,” Tsu said over the comms. Her resolute, confident tone sent a shiver of respect and awe down my spine. “Now.”

  CHAPTER 24

  The forces guarding the entrance to the Sashkur installation reacted as soon as Tsu and her Marines made themselves known by hurling grenades over the rocks. They landed amidst the defenders, scattering them as they frantically tried to escape the blasts. Some succeeded, some failed. Either way, the explosions drew all eyes toward the cover immediately in front of the overhang and completely away from the right flank.

  I motioned to my crew, taking off at a sprint across the open ground toward the nearly hidden door. My eyes stayed on the defenders, my hands on the guitar, ready to play if any of them caught a glimpse of us crossing the open area. Finding themselves under unexpected pressure, even the mechs with their sensors failed to notice us in the sudden chaos of Tsu’s suicidal diversion. They fired into the rocky terrain, blasting off chunks of the sharp stone while taking sprays of energy blasts from various positions along the outcropping. The firing positions made it seem as if there were ten times more Blues attacking them than there actually were.

  I reached the side of the facility without being seen, playing a chord for the first time and drawing the chaos energy into my construct. Rather than using push or pull and risk slamming the door into anything that might make a ton of noise, I separated it along the side opposite the hinge, peeling away layers of rust and metal, and finally the thick deadbolt holding it in place.

  I enhanced my strength to grab the door’s L-shaped handle, yanking it toward me. It came open without too much fuss, and I moved aside, allowing Emerald to lead us in, her rifle at the ready. Sheri followed her, matching her posture. They paused a short distance into a dimly lit, moss-covered passageway. It was immediately obvious this entrance hadn’t been used in some time. Some good news to go with the bad.

  I glanced out toward the front of the installation just before slipping into the corridor. The last thing I saw was Sergeant Tsu strafing as she crossed from behind one large stone to another. Her energy blasts slammed into the infantry advancing into the rock formations, killing at least one of them as she passed. An enemy plasma bolt caught her in the leg. She stumbled, crawling to get behind the rock. The infantry followed after, too numerous for her to kill them all.

  “Come on,” Quasar pressed, grabbing my shoulder and pulling me into the passageway before I could witness Tsu’s end. Whether Zar thought I was a good leader or not, I still felt like shit for sending Tsu and her Royal Marines to their deaths for this cause. It felt especially lousy because even though I was already dying, I was also the one who most needed to survive this mess.

  I followed Zar in, waiting for the others to enter before closing the door behind us and combining it with the frame and wall to seal it. From the outside, I had thought maybe the side door would lead directly into the vehicular bay the enemy was still busy defending against whatever remained of Tsu’s Marines.

  Instead, it made an immediate right turn, leading away from the primary entrance. Reeking of a musty stench, moss and mildew covered the roughly hewn stone walls and hung from slowly leaking pipes, all reinforcing my notion that Blorb’s forces hadn’t used this way in at all. In fact, I got the sense they didn’t even know it existed. That seemed impossible. While the door had been obscured, it wasn’t invisible. Then again, maybe it just wasn’t that important to them. We would never have seen it either without a xixitl on our side.

  We hurried along the corridor, splashing through slimy puddles we didn’t see in the near darkness. We had gone nearly three hundred feet when we came to the first turn in the passageway, and I motioned for Ixy to move ahead to take a look. She could see much better into the gloom than we humans could.

  “Clearsss,” she announced after slinking around the corner.

  I had intended for the group to split up, but there was nowhere to branch out to right now. We continued following the corridor, which only went fifty feet before ending at a stone staircase.

  “I’m not sure this goes where we want it to go,” Emerald commented, shining the light on her rifle into the stairwell’s darkness. It obviously led down into the bowels of the installation.

  “I don’t see any other way to go,” I replied. “We aren’t getting in through the front door. Ixy, stay on point.”

  “Yesss,” she agreed, skittering into the stairwell without hesitation. We followed her down, reaching a couple of landings and winding up nearly twenty feet below the main floor. The corridor continued without any doors or barriers, bereft of anything living save for the moss and now us. A few dozen feet ahead, it made another turn and then another, changing directions like a maze. Only it wasn’t a maze.

  The path altered whenever the corridor ran into what appeared to be thick deposits of the ore I had first seen on Earth. The same kind I had melted down and had etched into my chest. Seeing so much of it sent a chill down my spine. If the enemy had an etcher here, and I assumed they did, they could make an endless supply of catalytic jewelry, and Gild as many archons as they could train. With David toiling away for them, whenever he came up with a powerful new sigil, they could use it almost immediately.

  We reached the end of the tunnel, only to find another door blocking our path. As old and rusted as the door outside the facility, I repeated the same process as before to open it as quietly as possible. Emerald stood beside me, ready to shine her rifle’s light in as soon as I moved the door out of the way.

  “Well, I guess this really is the end of the line,” she said as I tugged the door all the way open, letting her in. I peered around the side, grimacing when I saw the mess of stone and debris that had collapsed in front of the door at some point in the last thousand years.

  I exhaled sharply, deflating like a popped balloon. We couldn’t go forward. We couldn’t go back.

  Now what?

  I slumped against the door, looking back at the rest of my crew. “I’m sorry. We came here for nothing. We lost so many good people. And we’re going to leave here empty-handed.”

  “There has to be another way,” Sheri said. “We can go back the way we came, out and around to the front. We can beat Blorb’s forces. I know we can. We have you.”

  “I’m already stretched too thin,” I replied. “I can’t take out four mechs with what I have left, even if you could handle the infantry.”

  “Maybe we can blow a hole through the rubble. Does anyone here have any explosives? Grenades? Anything like that?”

  Nobody did.

  “I can convert a plasma rifle into a plasma cutter,” Emerald offered. “But it would still take a few hours to get through that rock.”

  “I don’t think we’re going anywhere,” Ki said.

  “Prestige will only stay at the rendezvous point for an hour,” I said. “After that, Volker will assume we’re dead and relay the news to Keep, who’ll probably order him back to Atlas or out to the front line. This was supposed to be a quick hit. In and out. It’s bad enough none of the Marines survived.”

  “You don’t know that,” Quasar said.

  “What about Gia?” I replied. “Does she know?”

  “There’s no hyperlink on this planet, and Prestige is out of range. I don’t have sync with her mainframe.”

  “No hyperlink?” I said. “Then how are the forces here staying informed about…well, anything?”

  “Is that a collator in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” Emerald asked with a laugh.

  “Do you think?” I replied. I had left my collator on Head Case. “That could explain it.”

  “Or maybe there’s a sigil that allows communication like that,” Sheri said. “Converse or something.”

  “I suppose anything’s possible.” I thumped the back of my head against the door. “Kritchek warned me that if we came here we wouldn’t survive. Maybe I should have listened to him.”

  “He’s with the enemy,” George said. “You can’t believe anything he said.”

  “I believe that.”

  “You don’t have to transit back to Prestige,” Emerald said. “You can take us anywhere we’ve already been. I liked the beach on Bushara.”

  “The one the Gilded flooded with the tsunami and killed hundreds of people?”

  “I’m sure they cleaned up the bodies by now. But we can go back to boring Atlas if that makes you happier, Boo.”

  “We don’t have hours,” Quasar said. “The enemy will regroup and return to the inside of the facility. Not to mention, they might decide David’s better off dead at this point.”

  “Hmph,” Emerald said. “Well, we can’t do anything about what we already did, so what do we do next?” She looked around the group. “Come on, Team Hondo. We’re all intelligent life forms. Let’s put that first word to use.”

  “The basic problem is simple,” Quasar said. “We need to get through that cave-in to the other side. So the question is how. We already know we could do it with a plasma cutter, but that would take too long. We also know we could do it with explosives if we had any. Ben, I know you can sigil your way through it, but that’s going to leave you even more drained than you already are.”

  “We can’t use explosives,” George said. “We’re liable to bring the rest of the place down on our heads. And the noise will bring the enemy running.”

  “Me,” Shaq said.

  “What, bud?” I asked.

  “Me. Small hole. Squeeze through.”

  “You can’t get David out by yourself.”

  “Describe the room. Transit.”

  “It’s not enough for you to describe it to me. I need to see it. And transiting is an expensive series of actions.”

  “Ki, give me your rifle,” Emerald said.

  “No,” she replied. “Why?”

  “So I can make the cutter. We can burn through eight feet of stone Shaq’s size in ten minutes or less. We don’t have time to do it once we decide we want to do it. Give me your rifle. I’ll trade you.” She held out her ion rifle.

  Ki looked at me. I nodded. “Go ahead.”

  She traded weapons with Emerald, who dropped down to sit on the damp floor, pulling the weapon into her lap. She had already modified a gun once before to help take out an Aleal. She was a literal MacGyver with a firearm.

  “If we can get you through, then we’ll at least have a better idea of what we’re up against,” I said. “It’ll help us decide how to proceed.”

  “That’s what I said,” Shaq agreed.

  Quasar pulled off her helmet, turning it over in her grip. She started clawing at the padded lining.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “You said you need to see the room. The helmet has an embedded camera and a battery pack. We just need to strap them both to Shaq and he can provide a feed.”

  “Brilliant!” Emerald cheered, clapping in agreement with the plan.

  “If I transit us through this collapse, I won’t have enough to get us anywhere else. Not for a while.”

  “We’ll cross that rubicon when we come to it.”

  “One thing at a time, right?” I said. “Okay, let’s get Shaq camera’d up and put a hole through that rubble. We’ll go from there.”

  “In the meantime, you sit,” Sheri said, taking my arm. “You need to rest.”

  I nodded, letting her guide me back into the passageway.

  “Watersss,” Ixy said, approaching me. She had fashioned a bowl with her webbing and somehow managed to scoop up some water from the nearby puddles.

  “I don’t think I can drink that,” I said.

  “You can drink this,” Ki said, opening a hard case on her armor and lifting out a small canteen.

  “Thanks, Ki,” I said, accepting it from her.

  “No drinksss,” Ixy said. She dumped the water over my head without warning. “Wetsss.”

  My body was so hot, the cool water stabbed me like ice. Even so, I was grateful for it. “More, please.”

  “Yesss,” she agreed, skittering down the passageway and out of sight in the darkness.

  I opened Ki’s canteen and guzzled a couple mouthfuls before handing it back to her.

  “Drink the whole thing, Cap. You need it more than I do.”

  I didn’t argue, finishing the contents of the canteen and passing it back to her. “Thank you.”

  Ixy returned and dumped another bowl of cooling water over my head.

  “Now this is what I call ingenuity,” Emerald announced.

  CHAPTER 25

  We were ready to rock twenty minutes later. Between the water Ki had given me to drink and Ixy’s frantic efforts to douse me, I was running a decent amount cooler. After using the modified plasma rifle to burn a hole through the rubble as deep as possible, Emerald had helped Quasar mount the camera to Shaq, leaving the battery pack to drag behind him by its reinforced wire.

  “Are you sure that hole’s big enough?” Emerald asked, leaning over it and turning her head to look into the small space. Only three inches in diameter, I was nervous too that Shaq wouldn’t fit.

  “Big enough,” Shaq confirmed. “You’ll see.”

  “Here, Captain,” George said, holding his helmet out to me. I accepted it and put it on. He already had Shaq’s feed open on the visor. Right now, all I could see was the top of the hole, which still looked too small. I had to trust Shaq knew what he was doing.

  “Are you ready, bud?” I asked.

  “Ready,” he replied.

  “Move out.”

  He went to the edge of the hole, reaching out with his front claws and slowly pulling himself inside. His body seemed to collapse in on itself, shrinking until he completely filled the tiny tunnel.

  “Are you sure you can get back out?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he buzzed before vanishing as he scrambled ahead. I would have worried about him except I could see his movement in the feed. Quickly making his way along the bore, he reached the end in no time, my heart sinking when I realized the plasma cutter hadn’t been powerful enough to cut all the way through.

  “Damn it. Dead end,” I said. I could feel the mood shift among the rest of my crew. They’d had their hopes up as high as mine. “Shaq, if you can hear me, come on back.” He remained where he was, and for a second I thought maybe he had gotten stuck after all. I could pull him out, of course, but if he was wedged, I would need to be careful. “Bud, you okay in there?”

  He started digging out the rock in front of him, quickly clearing it away. I knew the rock wasn’t all that soft, which meant his claws had to be extremely strong. I already knew they were sharp.

  “What’s going on?” Sheri asked, concerned. “Is he stuck?”

  “I don’t think so,” I replied. “He’s digging.”

  He progressed a few inches within a minute. I watched the particles fly past the camera, his forelimbs speeding up around the three minute mark. He continued clawing the dirt, a pinpoint of light appearing in front of him that quickly spread as he finally made it the rest of the way through.

  “He’s reached the other side,” I said, the mood in the passage shifting again with the news.

  Shaq didn’t hurry out of the hole, instead inching forward and giving me a clear view of where he had emerged. A large room, bigger than I expected, stretched out ahead of him. From his low perspective, I could only make out the bottoms of boxy shapes I figured had to be power generators. Dozens of cables originating from the boxy shapes snaked across the same hewn stone floor as in the passageway, toward the room’s low light source in the back corner. The illumination was no more than what several computer monitors could put out. I didn’t see any guards or other signs of life near Shaq’s location, which meant it would be safe for me to separate the rubble instead of transiting.

  Rather than returning, Shaq exited the hole, crawling slowly along the floor, making sure not to make too much noise with the battery pack dragging across the stone behind him. He made it to the first of the boxy shapes and eased his way forward along the side of it until he reached the front corner. Turning his head and the camera with it, he gave me a much better view of the room.

  And David.

  “He’s there,” I said excitedly to the others. “David. He’s in the room on the other side of the collapse.”

  “What’s he doing?” Quasar asked.

  Shaq remained in place, giving me a long look at David. Wearing a Dragonball-Z t-shirt and jeans, he was unsurprisingly crouched over his laptop, typing away and staring at one of a half-dozen screens surrounding him. His hair was cut, his face clean-shaven. He actually looked better than I expected for a prisoner, particularly one held by the likes of Blorb. The camera didn’t have its own microphone, so I couldn’t hear him speak when his lips began moving. One of the screens in front of him changed, and Shaq smartly shifted his attention to the display. I watched the simulation of whatever sigil he was currently working on. In it, a half-eaten piece of fruit regained its pulp and skin until it was back to its original state.

  “No way,” I muttered as David pumped his fists joyfully. Apparently, he had just finished the sigil.

  A door near Shaq slid open, and he threw himself back under cover, barely making it before the newcomer walked right past him. He waited a few seconds before easing his head back around the corner to again spy on David.

  A woman approached him, her back to the camera, the angle from Shaq’s height giving me a great view of her rear end but not much else. David turned his chair as she approached, smiled and stood up, his eyes sweeping over Shaq’s hiding spot. He ducked back behind the boxy shape before David saw him, barely peeking out from behind it. From there, I watched David, his expression animated and excited, point to the simulation on one of the monitors. I wanted to punch the asshole in the face to wipe the shit-eating grin off it. How could he be so happy that he had just created a new sigil for the enemy?