“Em, we have five minutes at most before the Royal Marines are up our asses,” I said. “We don’t have time—”

  She put her finger to her mouth. “Shhhh. I’m working.”

  I glanced dubiously at Quasar, who shrugged.

  “We’re all going to die,” Shaq buzzed in his language, all words I had come to understand.

  “Gia,” I said. “You need to slow down the Marines.”

  “I can seal the blast door again,” she replied.

  “The Marines will have equipment to burn through,” Quasar said. “No matter how thick it is.”

  “How long will that take them?”

  “If they try to limit collateral damage…ten minutes.”

  “If not?”

  “Two.”

  “Do it,” I said. “Every second counts.”

  The door behind us swung closed again, thunking as it locked. I glanced at the plasma rifle in Emerald’s lap. She had opened up the receiver to reveal the electronics and was using the multitool to pry something off the circuit board.

  “On Melchior, we used plasma cutters to slice through the rock,” she said as she worked. “They’re hardwired to a power supply and built with industrial grade materials, but otherwise they’re not that much different from your standard military issue plasma rifle. Except instead of timed cut-offs of the injection, the cutters shoot plasma in a solid stream.” She got the piece off, not bothering to put the cover back over the board before turning the rifle and looking down into the muzzle. “The business end of the cutter has a muzzle bore only about a centimeter in diameter. The limited escape route keeps the plasma in the chamber longer, which heats it more, and when it comes out, it's tight for slicing, like a laser, but with more cutting heat using less energy.” She pointed the muzzle toward me. “Do you think you can make the bore wider by pushing the interior to create a conical shape at the end?”

  I leaned over the muzzle, looking in. Holding my hand over it, visualizing the shape in my mind as I pushed. “What is this going to do?” I asked as I completed the task.

  “You’ll see,” she replied, looking up at me and smiling.

  “Brilliant,” Quasar said. “But you won’t have much time, and there’s a good chance the system will lose integrity and the whole thing will blow up in your hands. It wasn’t meant to cut through rock.”

  Emerald laughed, her voice shifting from the serious tone of her explanation. “I know. Isn’t that fun?”

  “I’m glad you know what she’s up to,” I said to Zar.

  “I do, but I’m not sure how it’s going to help.”

  “That’s because you haven’t heard the rest of my plan,” Emerald said, giggling like a schoolgirl.

  CHAPTER 43

  “In posisss,” Ixy whispered, unable to get enough breath to properly say position. I didn’t respond for fear of giving away her location inside the power generation room.

  “Zar, Shaq.” Intent on scanning the huge power generation room for any enemy that might jump out of the shadows, I signaled them to move ahead of me.

  Quasar nodded before sprinting into the room with Shaq perched on her shoulder. She broke to the right, disappearing into the shadows, following a narrow aisle through the maze of machines and pipes, disappearing into the darkness.

  I glanced back at the sealed blast door. Sound didn’t carry well in the facility, but I thought I’d heard the thumping thunder of multiple boots on the stairwell. That gave us from two to ten minutes to get through the power generation area to storage, grab Hiro if he was there, and get the hell out of Dodge.

  Emerald’s plan was risky, but there wasn’t a way through this mess without risk, and I could imagine how it could potentially work if most of our assumptions went our way.

  But that was a big if.

  “Are you ready?” I asked her.

  She shouldered her modified plasma rifle, the casing pieces that covered the guts of the weapon still scattered on the floor. The gun wouldn’t last long enough to waste time putting it all back together. She stayed in lockstep with me as we approached the power generation room. I heard Quasar shout and pinpointed her location up and to the right before getting a glimpse of Ixy moving upside down along the ceiling just behind her. She let go and flipped over as she fell, vanishing out of sight. Pausing and counting to ten, I smiled when a web-wrapped package came over the side of a generator, landing on the stone floor in front of me.

  An Aleal, neatly bound and out of the fight.

  I didn’t get the sense that one of their brethren tied up in spider webbings was the signal they had been waiting for, but seeing their disabled kin drove them out of hiding. Armed targets rose from the crevices and shadows around Emerald and me as if we had stepped into a video game, rifles up and ready to fire.

  Assumption number one was dead on. We expected the enemy to focus their energy on me, and to do it by surrounding me and thereby making it more difficult for me to defend myself. I had practiced this same scenario with Kat's Litter before he died, and I was ready for the attack. I enveloped Emerald and myself in a sphere of absorb, catching dozens of plasma bolts as they lanced in toward us.

  I was close enough now to see Quasar crouched overhead on a catwalk. I didn't know how she'd gotten up there, but it put her in a strategically advantageous spot well above the action. She started picking targets and firing down on them. At the same time, I heard more than saw Ixitat skitter around behind a generator at the far end of the room, followed by scuffling sounds. Seconds later, another web-wrapped package emerged from the darkness, sliding across the floor toward us, stopping when it collided with the bundle already sitting there.

  An Aleal suddenly tumbled from the top of a generator, landing in the open passage right in front of me, his calves shredded by Shaq’s sharp claws. I lunged toward him, my absorbed plasma bolts burning through the alien's gelatin matter to its vital sack. It cried out and stopped moving, leaving nothing but a smoking husk behind.

  With three of their number eliminated, the Aleal stopped shooting, nearly a dozen of them rushing out of the darkness at Emerald and me. Golem-like in appearance, they flailed an array of barbed tentacles and spiked appendages at us. Unwilling to risk hitting the generators, I dispersed the collected plasma behind me, sending it sizzling into the blast door where it left nothing more than deep scorch marks.

  “Now?” Emerald asked.

  “Not yet,” I replied, waiting for the right moment to unleash Emerald on the Aleal as they continued to charge toward us. Faced with their attack, it wasn’t easy to convince myself to lower my shield. I could have pushed them all back like I had on Windfall or reflected them away from us, using their momentum against them.

  But that wasn’t the plan.

  Instead, I waited while they closed in on us like a bunch of linebackers going for the tackle. Ixy crawled along the ceiling looking for stragglers, and Quasar continued firing at them, putting plenty of holes in them but failing to land even one lucky shot.

  “Now?” Emerald asked again, more hopefully this time.

  “Not yet,” I replied. She stamped her foot like a petulant child.

  The Aleal were only a couple of meters away. It seemed like the right time to turn Emerald loose, but I wanted to be sure we got as many of them as we could.

  “Shit, Boo!” Emerald cried impatiently.

  “Now!” I barked.

  Good thing, because she had already started depressing the trigger. I ducked low as she opened fire with the modified plasma rifle. Intense heat poured from it like a short-range flamethrower, white-hot and unstoppable. It melted through the Aleal in front of us, turning their gelatinous matter to goop as she spun away from them. And me. The plasma melted the enemy behind us, but not before a barbed tentacle dug into my coat at the shoulder. As its owner's torso turned to mush, its claw lost its grip on my coat and clattered to the floor, bouncing off into the darkness.

  Emerald didn’t quite get to make a full circle. She shouted and threw the gun away as the stock overheated, burning her hands. It sparked and smoked as it hit the floor, the attack over. As devastating as we’d hoped, most of the Aleal were down, though a few continued to move as they changed into their natural forms but smaller in size due to loss of mass.

  In turn, it left them transparent, the vital sacks inside their bodies visible. One of them jumped on top of me, barbs flaying open my cheeks before Quasar could shoot it through its vitals. Another went for Emerald, but Shaq tackled it, ripping out its sack. Ixy dropped from the ceiling on a strand of silk, scooping up two others, quickly binding them together in a single silken package.

  It was over just like that. The Aleal were all dead or contained, the passageway through the power generation room clear. It felt surreal to me that the plan had gone so smoothly. That we had taken out the targets with such ease. The element of surprise and Emerald's ingenuity had won the day.

  More like the minute.

  A loud thud and the door at the base of the steps shuddered, the metal bending inward but holding. This time. It probably wouldn’t withstand another explosive charge.

  “Team Hondo, let’s go!” I snapped, glancing at Emerald. Her hands were badly burned from holding the overheated plasma rifle. She had to be in excruciating pain, but she nevertheless managed a smug smile as she joined me in a dash for the storage area door.

  Ixy leaped down from the top of the generator, trailing a silken strand she stuck to the floor. Quasar ziplined down it to the floor, joining Ixy and Shaq as they followed on my heels, racing for the storage room door. I nearly groaned out loud when I realized it was another secured blast door, but either the enemy had left it unsecured or Gia had already cracked it. The door opened at my approach, revealing a corridor behind it. Nearly fifty feet deep, the walls on either side of the passageway were lined with both doors and windows, though from my current angle, I couldn’t see through any of the windows.

  I looked over my shoulder and past Quasar and Ixy when the stairwell door thudded again. The second explosion ripped a hole in the center, jagged but large enough to allow the first Royal Marine to leap through it. Clad in hard combat armor, he swung his rifle our way.

  “Gia, close the door!” I snapped, just as Zar, the last of us, lunged past it into the storage room. I grabbed her, pulling her out of the line of fire, the Marine's conventional rounds pelting off the door as it swung closed.

  I exhaled a sharp sigh of relief. We'd made it!

  CHAPTER 44

  “Sealing that blast door won’t buy us a lot of time,” Quasar said, extracting herself from my arms.

  “With any luck, we won’t need much,” I replied, turning back to the passageway. Emerald had already started down it without us.

  “And you think I’m nuts,” she said, pausing at the first of several four-by-eight-foot windows lining the passageway and peering inside. “You’ve got to come see this.”

  Quasar and I followed in her footsteps, stopping to peer over her shoulder into a room filled with gas canisters, metal crates, and other containers—all stamped with Duke Sedaya’s seal. The second window afforded a view into the same room, while the third and fourth revealed where the supplies from the first room were used. The expansive setup immediately reminded me of a hydroponic garden. Narrow pipes layered on top of each other were fed by the canisters, providing nutrients for whatever was growing there.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, staring at a huge array of crystalline, snowflake-like structures evenly spaced along the length of the pipes. Each snowflake was slightly different in size and design. A dark red spot near the center of each gave me an idea of what I was looking at.

  “They’re growing their army,” Emerald said. “Literally.” She started laughing as if she had just told the funniest joke ever.

  There was nothing funny about seeing a room filled with hundreds of new Aleal. Worse, from what Alter had told me about her kind, I was pretty sure this wasn’t how new Aleal were normally made. The fact that Blorb was in on the process—or may have even created it—sent a toe-curling chill through me.

  How many of the snowflakes had he already harvested? Did all the Aleal we’d encountered down here originate from this place? I felt pretty confident the last group had. There was something about them that seemed less refined and intelligent.

  “We can’t let this thing remain intact,” Quasar said, peering over my shoulder.

  “I agree,” I replied.

  “Aren’t they alive?” Emerald asked.

  “Technically, yes," I said, "in the sense that they’re colonies of organisms being fed nutrients to duplicate themselves. But since they aren’t connected to their brethren on their homeworld they don’t have a brain, so to speak. They’re not even developing in any specific pattern, but rather growing chaotically.”

  “Okay,” Emerald said, accepting the explanation.

  Ixy ambled past us, stopping to look through the fifth window. “Moresss,” she said.

  I followed her, stopping beside her to find another growing chamber containing what had to be hundreds of tiny, premature Aleal.

  But where was Hiro?

  “We need to hurry up,” Quasar said. “Tick-tock.”

  As if to emphasize her statement, the blast door thumped and shuddered similarly to the stairwell door, indicating the Marines were on the other side, determined to break through.

  I ran down the corridor, passing six more grow rooms before freezing at a window allowing me to look into an altogether different space. I shuddered at the sight of a chair modified with restraints, but it was the bloodstains on the padded seat’s headrest that sent a different kind of chill coursing down my spine. Almost all of the enemies we had encountered were in human form. Blorb had likely fed the newly made Aleal the the essence of Usari and his staff right here, allowing them to evolve beyond their primitive mass. It was similar to how Sedaya had helped Alter become more than a group of cells in a petri dish.

  There was no doubt in my mind that the only reason more Aleal hadn’t been harvested from the growing rooms was because there weren’t enough people to feed them. There was also no question of what the Aleal would have done with us had they managed to win the fight. But there was one question I couldn’t answer.

  Where was Hiro?

  Had one of the Aleal we’d already killed taken his essence? Was he long dead and gone? I’d maintained the possibility of that outcome from the beginning, but I still couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it, much less accept it. Not after everything we’d been through to get here. Not when all roads had led us here.

  I had one more door left to open. One more place left to look. It sat at the end of the passageway, simple and unassuming. No window. No secure control panel. I didn’t waste time approaching and pressing the red button on the flat slab of metal beside the door. Time was one thing we didn’t have.

  The door slid aside, allowing cleaner, brighter light to filter into the passageway. I held position just over the threshold, looking in on what appeared to be an apartment, not unlike the suite Mae had stuck Meg and me in to wait for Usari. Except this one had holos on the walls. Moving images of the Empress Li’an, but not as anyone else would know her. In simple dresses, without makeup, on a beach, at dinner, candid not posed. Hiro was with her in a few of them, along with her late husband.

  “What the heck is this?” Emerald said, pushing past my shoulder to see.

  I ignored her, my gaze drifting to the back of the apartment, where a small hallway led to a bright yellow door with hand-drawn artwork pinned to it. The pencil work was impressive. A spike-haired boy wielding an oversized sword stood in front of the Empress. It had to be Prince Hiro protecting his mother.

  “This is…odd.” Quasar stood just inside the doorway behind me, Shaq perched on her shoulder, both looking into the room. Ixy peered in from behind us.

  I went to the yellow door and turned the simple, old-style knob. Finding it unlocked, I gently pushed the door open with my right shoulder, sliding into the room with my left hand up, construct active. A desk on the side of the room was buried in paper. Artwork covered the top, along with colored pencils, charcoal, and other drawing mediums. Dozens of crumpled, failed drawings littered the floor between the desk and a single bed, where a ten-year-old boy with thick black hair dozed peacefully, despite the noise from outside.

  “Hiro,” I said softly, a sense of relief washing over me. We had found him at last, safe and sound in a bedroom likely made to resemble his room in the Royal Palace. I looked to the doorway as Emerald entered, her eyes immediately glazing over when she saw the boy, no doubt thinking of her own son. “Em, pick him up. We need to go.”

  “You want me to carry him?” she replied as though she didn’t deserve the job.

  “Why not?” I looked past her. “Zar, Ixy, Shaq, form up behind me.”

  They filed into the room as Emerald moved to Hiro’s bedside. She had just started reaching for him when he awoke with a start, eyes snapping open to see a bunch of strangers standing over him. Of course, he screamed.

  “Help!” he cried. “Help me!”

  “Your Highness,” Quasar said, standing over him. “It’s okay. We’re here to rescue you.”

  “Help!” he continued screaming. “Help!”

  “Hiro, you’re safe now,” Emerald added.

  “Help!”

  “If he’s screaming help when the Marines break through, they’re going to blame us,” Quasar said.

  “They already blame us,” Emerald replied.

  “Help me!” Hiro screamed again.

  “We need to go,” I said, pushing past Emerald and leaning over Hiro. “Sorry Your Highness, but you need to be quiet.”

  I put my hand on his forehead and activated calm as he stared up at me with terrified eyes.

  He should have fallen asleep right away. Instead, as a loud explosive charge on the other side of the blast door shook the room, he continued screaming. My heart leaped into my throat, a cold chill of understanding racing down my back. I didn’t want to believe it, but it was the only way I could imagine that he hadn’t succumbed to my calm.