You went to war on the battlefield you had. Uzoma said this access tunnel was the closest Callie could get to the observation area without risk of detection, so it would have to do. She bellied up to the opening and looked through – and then her perspective reoriented dizzyingly as she realized she was looking down: the floor was about twenty meters away. More games with gravity. The “down” inside the tunnel was perpendicular to the “down” out there on the observation platform. How would that affect her shot? If the bullet started out on one gravity plane and then abruptly entered another, its trajectory would be dragged downward in the new direction… The physics were annoying. She decided to poke the barrel of the gun out of the hole when she fired so most of the projectile’s journey would take place in the proper plane.

First she needed something to shoot at, and she didn’t have that yet. She saw Elena’s boots, just on the edge of her vision, and she was talking, not exactly pleading, but trying to reason with someone. Callie thought the time for reason was past, but then Elena didn’t have a gun, so she was doing the best she could.

Sebastien entered Callie’s view: she was looking at him top-down, and was nastily gratified to notice a bald spot on top of his head. Though the metal spider clinging to the back of his skull was a greater flaw in his physical beauty. She tracked him with the pistol, waiting for him to pause long enough for her to drive a bullet right through the top of his head, centered on that bald spot, but he didn’t stop moving until he was very close to Elena. Callie had a shot, and the bullets were soft-nosed, so they’d break apart inside Sebastien’s brain instead of passing through to do more damage, but if she missed, the ricochet could easily bounce into Elena.

The two of them were talking, but Callie couldn’t understand what they were saying. Sebastien stepped back, and she lined up her shot, but then he gestured and a pair of bizarre machines, like rolling polyhedral wireframes, tumbled past him and out of her field of vision, distracting her for a moment–

Then Elena was there. She looked OK. Mussed, sweaty, no helmet on, but basically fine. She was, however, moving right up to Sebastien, utterly ruining any hope Callie had of making her shot without risk to Elena.

Then Elena went up on her tiptoes, and she was kissing Sebastien. Callie let out a low growl. His hands were all over Elena, roving up her back, down her back, then lower, squeezing her ass, and she was pressing herself against him. It had to be a seduction ruse, right? Or else Sebastien had already compromised her brain somehow, and was using his control to gratify–