“Guys? I got a problem here. Two armed individuals,” Savoy subvocalized into the induction mic on his jaw.

“Can you recognize what type they are?”

Savoy responded, his jaw barely moving as he spoke with the short and guttural sounds of subvocal phrases: “For Chrissakes, Hilliard! They’re alien manufactured. For all I know, they’re pea shooters.”

Hilliard’s calm voice came back. “All right, do you see any others with weapons?”

Savoy’s eyes flicked around the dark room beyond the lift. “Negative, but there are a lot of people in there.”

There was a long pause. Savoy saw Milla try to move forward out of the corner of his eye and breathed a sigh of relief when the soldier at her side, Jaime, clamped a solid hand down on her shoulder and held her back. The two armed men weren’t professional soldiers—he could see that in their faces. They were scared kids, and that made them a thousand times more dangerous in this situation.

“All right, Savoy, we’ll use maneuver Trojan-Twelve. Jenkins, Mallard, don’t shoot unless you have to. Move to disarm rather than incapacitate,” Hilliard decided on the spot, shuffling around as he and the others slipped into place.

The acknowledgments echoed through the radio links. Savoy tensed up as he prepared to play his part in the maneuver.

“Uh…hi.” Savoy winced at how foolish that sounded, but forged ahead. “We come in peace…”

A single glance at the look on the faces of the two men facing him was enough to tell him that the translator had failed. Savoy was debating whether to risk asking Milla to translate when the choice was taken from him.

One of the gunmen uttered something unintelligible and roughly grabbed his arm and pulled him out of the lift, forcing him to the floor. As soon as he was on the ground, Savoy put up a token resistance, drawing the attention of both gunmen as they roughly forced him down, their weight pinning him hard. Then, seconds after the initial struggle, the weight abruptly vanished.

Milla watched as the two men manhandled Savoy to the ground, stunned by the sudden violence from a people she had thought she knew. A blur of motion made her blink as her attention was captured by the two soldiers—Jenkins and Mallard—as they leapt into the fray. Jenkins launched into the top gunman and carried them both over a dozen meters into the shelter. Mallard limited her leap to a shallow arc that caught the second gunman low and tumbled them both to the ground, just beyond where Savoy had landed.

Just as she was about to rush into the room herself, Milla was roughly shoved aside as Hilliard dropped into the lift, allowing the fall’s kinetic energy to be absorbed into the suit. He then launched himself into a long arc that landed him fifteen meters into the shelter, his rifle swinging side to side as he searched for more hostiles.