Tunnel Four wasn’t far away—just two buildings down the same street. We ran at a comfortable pace, thirty miles per hour or so. We didn’t have enough space to go faster. Kals didn’t have any problems keeping up.
Tunnel Four sat between two buildings that weren’t much different than the buildings at Tunnel Three—except that we didn’t see anyone here. Wherever the plant had gone, I hoped he was safe. My bet was that he’d gotten the last people out over here and gone with them when he realized that he’d missed Kamia and the others.
Katuk turned toward Kals. “Do you know how the colonists are escaping? If we can’t find her, it seems that our first duty would be to attend to their welfare.”
He had a point. I didn’t think that we should leave without telling Jaclyn, and was just about to try to use the comm, but I didn’t have to. Jaclyn jumped out the second floor window and landed next to us.
Superheroes don’t kill (most of the time). There are reasons for that, ranging from moral to legal to practical. Legally, most of us aren’t empowered to do it (even if we can get away with it). Morally, killing isn’t something you want to do unless you have to. Practically, society would come to regard us as a menace if we did it a lot even if it was justified.
Here almost none of that applied. We weren’t vigilantes. We were the law, empowered by the Alliance as part of the Xiniti Nation to do whatever was required to protect the colony. Continue reading Warriors: Part 10→
I formed the suit’s helmet and set the suit to triangulate the source of the sound. Then I pulled the cavern’s map out of the implant’s memory. Though it took longer than it would have with the implant’s network connection, I knew where the voice came from and how it happened.
I tapped my palm, going live on the League’s communication system, “They’re coming out of Tunnel Three.” Continue reading Warriors, Part 9→
“Crap,” I said, “implants? We’re going to have to turn them off or at least the communication part.”
I queried my implant to find out if we could turn them off. We couldn’t, but we could turn off outside communications. While I was at it, I checked what the Xiniti experience of fighting Kamia had been.
The plant’s fronds waved. Through my implant, I heard, “Drop the tunnel on them. You can do that, can’t you?”
The techs concentrated. Some of them closed their eyes. The screens in the air changed from black screens to new sections of the tunnel and not all of them the same section. Each screen was numbered, starting from 927 through to 978, but with a seven screen gap in the middle—the screens that had gone blank. Continue reading Warriors: Part 7→
Sian and Asan looked at each other. Asan said, “We need to go downstairs. It sounds like the Guard just showed up.”
“Showed up?” I kept on talking as they turned toward the stairs and motioned us to follow. “I wasn’t aware they’d gone missing.”
Sian turned to look at me. “We’ve been watching them since they left or we’ve been trying to. The Guard have chameleon tech. It doesn’t make them invisible to the eye if you know what to look for, but they’re invisible to sensors. After they left the tunnels, they disappeared. We’ve got visual sensors on the outside, but the better they are, the bigger they are, and the easier they are to detect. So we’ve got other sensors for longer distances, but chameleon tech can fool those.”
I couldn’t know that, of course, but if I thought in terms of the Ascendency’s situation and resources, it seemed reasonable. Our main protection was the caverns’ size in combination with the decoys and traps the colony’s techs created.
If the Ascendancy had genetically modified technical geniuses, they’d be throwing them up against that. That’s what I’d be doing anyway.
Jadzen waited as everyone sat at the table. “As we’re all too well aware, Maru died while fighting Ascendancy forces today. While I find a new assistant, I’m going to have Kals take over Maru’s role. She might not want to continue in it for the long term, but right now she’s familiar with everything I need her to know.”
“Meaning,” Kals sent to me via her bracelet, “she knows that everyone in the colony knows me and she knows that the group of you like me and don’t like her.”
Maru didn’t make it. Even as Jaclyn carried him away, I didn’t think he would. Despite having advanced alien tech, it’s not realistic to expect that they’d have the ability to handle disembowelment combined with massive blood loss in a colony’s medical center.
