Brennan took all of this in with a glance, more interested in the four aliens standing guard. They didn’t look that different from their wounded companions, except that they were upright and alert, holding what had to be weapons and scanning the crater rim with glossy silver eyes. Sentries. The aliens were soldiers, Brennan thought, like recognizing like. Soldiers gone down in unknown but presumably hostile territory, and his heart started to hammer crazily at the realization.
He didn’t know what gave him and his men away, but suddenly the sentry aliens spun and focused on them, weapons coming up in what was probably reflex. Somebody on one of the other squads must’ve been spooked by the action—or the existence of aliens—badly enough to trigger a similar kind of impulse: they squeezed off a shot. Before Brennan could snap out an order to stand down, the aliens returned fire.
Things went to hell in a handbasket after that.
TWO
THIS had not been the plan.
The plan had been to cut transmissions and sabotage the Widowmaker’s navigation system so they’d decelerate and drift off course for a bit. They were off course, alright. No contact with anybody, internal communications disabled as well as external, doors sealed shut, engines pushed to full speed. The ship was hurtling through space deep into uncharted territory—until a planet got in the way, that is. Then they barely scraped through a ring of small, artificial satellites, smashing a few of them in the process, and went down headfirst with little to no control over anything.
By that point, System Six had long come to the conclusion that he should’ve stuck to something simpler, because obviously the finer points of programming were beyond him. He might’ve owned up to what he’d done, but that would’ve meant signing his own death warrant and would’ve also been pointless, seeing as there was no way to relay the information to the engine room. He was stuck in the crew quarters with his host and three of the other armor systems, all of them strapped into the padded wall niches designed for this kind of situation and wrapped protectively around their vulnerable carriers.
Rik had stopped contributing semiconstructive suggestions and mindless bravado a while ago and was screaming unthinkingly in tune with the rising and falling wails of the audio alarms as the walls grew perceptively warmer around them. System Six hadn’t expected better from a creature like Rik. He did his best to tune out the shrieking and prepared to detach himself from his unloved host forcefully, unwilling to die twined into the slime bag who’d driven him to such extreme measures in the first place.
Out. Out. He wanted out, damn it.
He’d already started to tug free, unwrapping himself from Rik’s skeleton, pulling the connectors from his host’s spine, and was about to rip out of Rik’s skin, determined to take the fastest way out no matter what it did to Rik. They were going to die anyway. Just when he was about to launch himself to freedom, though, the ship hitched and jerked under them.