I flew high, because low was hazardous as hell. Capricorn had used a water blast, and when that water hit the momentum barrier and stopped, he’d turned it to stone. Turning the enemy’s one-way fortification into something two-way. My dad peppered the outer edges of the stone ‘splash’ with grenades, still somehow firing them like he was using a railgun, and the chunks that flew up and over were raining down on the mercenaries.

But—there were fifteen of us, minus any injured I wasn’t aware of.

There were more than a hundred of them.

Just from the look of it, the grenade shots were coming from further back. Our team was steadily retreating.

An audible wet sound was my only clue that I was under attack. In any other place, I might have dismissed the sound, but I was too high up for something to sound so sharp and near. I changed direction, using the Wretch.

A geyser of vomit from the airborne Barfbat. Chugalug floated below, gas-filled trash bags buoying him. He was downwind and further down, which spared me the worst of the smell.

Barfbat spewed another geyser. Liquid and far too sustained for something from a human-sized package.

When I flew out of the way, avoiding his attempts to steer the spray my way, weaving below and then back, so gravity kept it from reaching me, he shifted modes. The ring of fluid-filled sacs around his neck contracted, then swelled, chunky.

A loogie, shot like a bullet.

I had too much experience with aerial warfare to allow something like that to hit me.

I monitored them, keeping a distance, while moving in the general direction of my team. I didn’t want to lead him to them, and I definitely didn’t want to put myself in a position where I had to choose between getting splashed, even if it was the Wretch getting splashed, or letting my people on the ground suffer.

They stayed on me, keeping me marked, no doubt ready to capitalize if I left them to it. If they reached a point where they could bombard the others—

Barfbat settled on Chugalug, and the weight of him seemed to sink Chugalug, driving him incrementally down, down, down.

Bending over, Barfbat shifted glands again, then emptied a seemingly endless stream of bile and vomit into Chugalug’s upturned face and open mouth.

Trashbags mutliplied and swelled. A caterpillar-like tail extended out behind and below. Other debris like a halo of chicken bones and stringy matter expanded out around and behind Chugalug.

I aimed the rifle the Wretch had claimed from one soldier, and I fired, gunning through the trash bags.

My first series of shots popped the ones to either side and below him. He began to drop, not as steeply as if he had nothing. No doubt some gas buoyed him.