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  She nodded once and then turned back toward the compound, the six of them returning to formation as they moved forward.

  Andy worked out in her head where the entry point for Epsilon Squad had been, and the place they would be returning to in order to exit. She adjusted their course as they walked, following the map in her memory. She knew they didn’t have much time, and this was a rescue mission likely to fail. She would not throw Alpha Squad into an entirely hopeless situation and would back out if it was tactically sound, but she would be damned if she left any of her Marines there without at least trying to get them out.

  The closer they got to the compound, the more she watched for signs of Epsilon, hoping they would get out ahead of her going in and everyone would meet in the middle.

  Luck continued to be scarce on her side.

  They reached the building, only encountering one patrol that they quickly dispatched before they were spotted.

  Epsilon had gained entrance much the same way alpha had, using their technological expert to hack into the panel and open the door. It was still open, the panel and its wiring hanging loose against the wall. There was no obvious sign of Arkana coming out of the door, but there also wasn’t any sign of Epsilon making it out either.

  She brought them to a halt for a moment, eyeing the open door and calculating things in her mind. After that moment ended, however, she gave the order to move in. They did so, cautiously and quietly.

  They split to either side of the door, listening before moving in one by one with practiced, ingrained precision. The bright lights remained, showing the length of an empty corridor, but the sounds of a fight were loud and clear toward one end. That made the decision pretty easy for them, and they started their passage toward it.

  The closer they got to the first turn, the louder the sounds got. When they made the turn, they saw Epsilon Squad pinned down just ahead. Only three of the five Marines were still on their feet, and they looked ragged.

  Andy signaled for them to take up firing positions, and they lined either side of the corridor. Each one took aim and picked off the unsuspecting Arkana. They dropped, and the remaining members of Epsilon looked up gratefully. “Major,” the leader said, out of breath, nodding in acknowledgement.

  One of the other bent over to pick up one of the fallen.

  “Thomas,” Andy ordered, nodding to the second. He holstered his weapon and went to pull the second fallen Marine into a fireman’s carry, trusting the others to cover him as they made their way out.

  Their exit was covered by seven Marines still on their feet—or technically, six Marines and one Marine-allied Arkana, but Andy had come to count Anath as part of her detachment. Two were carrying two, moving in the very center of the group so the others could keep up the defensive formation.

  Epsilon had been so close to making it out, before they’d been overwhelmed. Andy was aware that it took just one truly unfortunate stroke of luck to turn everything on its head.

  There were two occasions of solo Arkana soldiers searching the halls, but they were taken out easily enough.

  She saw the door just ahead. The sunlight coming in seemed to war with the artificial light from within, and she was glad to see it. “Just ahead. Roxanna and Jade go through to cover. Thomas and G’ral, go next.” The four acknowledged with sharp nods as the Marines at the front moved to the far side of the door and the ones behind to near side, letting Roxanna and Jade exit and scan the immediate area. Dan and G’ral followed a heartbeat later.

  The remaining five checked either side of the corridor for any incoming trouble—

  —and they found it.

  Coming from the other end of the hallway, too close for comfort, came a group of Arkana. They immediately opened fire, which the Marines returned.

  “Out!” Andy shouted.

  One by one, the Marines slipped through the door. The ones that remained laid down covering fire until it was only Andy left.

  She prepared to follow them and trigger the security door like she had on the other one, but before she moved, an energy bolt flew past her head into the wall next to the door. It was enough to pull her up short. In that moment, something else—something she couldn’t see—happened, and the security door slammed shut.

  With her, and her alone, on the wrong side of it.

  13

  The group had only gone a few steps before Roxanna stopped and turned her head.

  “Where’s the major?” she asked urgently. They all looked back, seeing that no one was pursuing them and there was now a closed door behind them. And their commander was not with them.

  “Something’s wrong,” Roxanna said. She felt—literally—Dan’s dry look, and she replied to it before he said anything. “Yes, I know that’s obvious, but this isn’t an accident, she’s under attack. I can feel her stress rising, and it was high before.”

  “No one has secrets from an empath,” Anallin commented.

  Roxanna felt her own stress rising in tandem. “Martin?” she asked, looking at the young human with the vibrant green eyes.

  Jade just nodded, hurrying to the panel and examining the work left by the Epsilon Marine who’d worked on it. While she was examining it, Roxanna’s mind raced. As Andy’s second in command, leadership fell to her. She had to do what was best for the squads here and waiting back at the rendezvous point, but she also had no intention of leaving Major Dolan behind.

  “Sergeant Forrest,” Roxanna said. “Take your people back to the meeting point. I will let them know, and I’m issuing orders for everyone to return to their shuttles and prep for an emergency takeoff as soon as we are all ready to leave. We’ll need to try to reach the wing commander and let him know that we’re about to ascend.”

  Forrest hesitated for a moment. “Respectfully, Sergeant, what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t intend to leave the major in there,” Roxanna said. “Now, get moving.”

  After a moment, Forrest nodded. Dan transferred his Marine cargo to one of Epsilon’s other Marines, and then joined his own group.

  “Anything, Martin?” Roxanna asked.

  “Not yet,” Jade replied, shaking her head and sounding frustrated. “This security door is on different wiring than the main door, and I’m not sure how it was shut in the first place. The damage to this panel should have kept it open.”

  Anath grunted. His fear was mounting, and Roxanna struggled to block it out and keep it from distracting her. “I guess there’s a few things they have going on that we couldn’t anticipate. Or we weren’t told everything about this building in the first place.”

  Roxanna stifled a sigh. “Anything is possible, really,” she said simply.

  They could try to blow the door up, but she had no idea how close to it Andy might be. She didn’t want to break back into the building to rescue their commander, only to end up killing her in the process. She knew that Andy hadn’t moved too far from the door, at least, given the intensity with which Roxanna’s empathic senses were able to read her.

  There was something else, though. Another emotion threading through the major’s feelings, but Roxanna struggled to identify it. If she wasn’t surrounded by a whole group of strong emotions, including her own, she would likely have better luck…but as it was, she just couldn’t put a mental finger on it.

  “Damn it,” Jade hissed, yanking her hand back as something zapped her finger. She shook it for a moment and then dove back in, then yanked her hand back again. This time, it was with an incoherent growl.

  “Just focus,” Dan said in a voice almost too low for anyone to hear. “You got this.”

  Jade’s shoulders rose and fell as she took a deep breath.

  Roxanna watched, until she felt something else tug at the edge of her empathic senses. She felt on the verge of overload, but she felt like that a lot in combat situations. It wasn’t something that she told the others much at all, lest they worry about her or think her incapable. She had learned to cope with it, but it could be a str
uggle at times.

  She turned and saw Anallin clutching a wounded shoulder. Moving closer, she pulled the blue hand away and saw that part of the armor and uniform had melted away. There was a hole down to the blue, bleeding skin beneath.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” she asked in a low voice.

  The Hanaran just looked at her blankly. The rapid eye clicking, however, told her the extent of it and she pulled out her medkit.

  “I already have the major trapped and in trouble on the inside while we’re out here,” Roxanna muttered. “I don’t need you falling down dead on us.” She knew she didn’t need to be saying these things, but they just came out. She was a professional but wasn’t quite as skilled at the “strong silent Marine” thing as Major Dolan was.

  Moving as fast as she could, she took her small medkit out and filled the wound with a sealant. It wasn’t much, but it would hold off any infection to the open wound and keep it from getting worse until they could get back on the ship.

  Assuming they did make it back to the ship…

  There was nothing she could do about the uniform, but at least the sealant hardened in moments. She tapped it to check, but it had closed off the wound from any outside intrusions.

  The emotions on the other side of the door spiked, and Roxanna looked toward it.

  “Mart—”

  “I got it!”

  14

  Major Andrea ‘Andy’ Dolan was staring down the barrels of seven Arkana rifles.

  So, this is how I die.

  Somehow, the thought didn’t scare her as much as she thought it would. It wasn’t that she wanted to die, far from it. She wanted to live. There was still much in her life that she wanted to achieve, and she very much needed to be alive to do it, but as she stared at those guns, knowing that she might be faster than one of them but not all of them, she pictured one firing.

  It hit her, and she died, but she was not afraid.

  She was angry.

  It pissed her off that this was when she was going to go down. The ‘how’ a little less, since she was stuck here because she had rescued her people and made sure they got out of the building. She would choose herself to die over them…but it still made her angry that an Arkana gun was what was going to do it.

  Andy had every intention of going down fighting, but she knew it wouldn’t last long.

  And yet…none of them were firing.

  They were all just standing there, staring at one another over their raised guns. She didn’t fire, because that was a surefire way to die fast, but they weren’t firing either.

  The answer parted the soldiers and stepped forward.

  “You,” she said with more venom than was presently in her now-useless rifle.

  The soldiers lowered their guns and stepped to the sides, creating a sort of clearing between them for father to face daughter.

  “Yes. Me,” he drawled.

  She had no idea how he had survived both of his children shooting him, and the red all over his grey uniform spoke of those injuries. Yet here he was. The wounds had done nothing to temper the imperiousness of his expression, which was so extreme that she found it almost…comical. Like he was a super villain in some kind of superhero story.

  The Attack of the Super Pale Egomaniac.

  Hysteria must have been poking around the edges of her brain for that to pop to mind at a time like this, but there it was and she almost laughed outright. Well, if she couldn’t go down fighting, she’d go down laughing, making them wonder what she had to laugh about.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, walking up to her. “You could be a part of something that far exceeds the humanity that birthed it. The children have outgrown the parents, and the students have surpassed masters. The only way to go is up, and your people—”

  “Your people,” she interrupted.

  His icy brows knit slightly. “The Arkana,” he said, giving it emphasis to add a little sarcasm in her direction, “have given you the chance to do that: to go up. To grow beyond what you are and into what you could be. Yet you have spurned us at every turn, fought against us, killed your own, and even lured your brother away.”

  She just barely kept herself from interrupting again to point out that it was entirely Anath’s choice. She didn’t think this guy really cared about that.

  “Why?” he finally asked.

  Andy sucked at her teeth for a moment, then made a face when she realized there was blood in her mouth. How had she not noticed that before? She turned her head and spat on the plain, grey floor. It stood out. It reminded her of the blood on the pale forms in front of her, and around her.

  She holstered her weapon to give them a show of peace. If there was a way to escape this, she wasn’t going to give them cause to shoot her before she found it. Holding up her hands, she stepped a little closer. Not too close, but closer.

  “I had never even heard of you until a few months ago when you stormed my ship and nearly killed all my friends,” she said. “That wasn’t the best foot to start off on, you know? It kinda irritated me.”

  “I suppose I can see that,” he said, although his tone suggested he didn’t.

  Did he even have friends, she wondered. Did he even know anything about family? He seemed to look on her and Anath as possessions, or pawns. Something that he was pissed to have lost because he could use them. His ego couldn’t handle that his own children had forsaken him.

  “Once you learned the truth, however, why not pursue it?” he went on.

  The immediate answer that jumped to mind was one she knew would not do her any favors.

  She looked down and shrugged slightly, lowering her hands with the gesture. Andy had never been much for theater and acting. She’d taken one class in it during school when she was a teenager and never understood why people wanted to do it for a living, but she was learning Acting Basics on the fly as she put on this little show for her father.

  “That’s hard to say…” she trailed off, hoping it made it seem like she was uncertain.

  “What should be easy to say now is that you have seen the light and will leave here with me,” he said.

  Still looking at the ground, staring at his boots, she took a casual step forward. More like she shifted her body in his direct. “What about Anath?”

  Her father made a disgusted noise in his throat. “I suppose I can keep from killing him if you really want him around,” he said. “You have an excuse. You were raised in humanity. He was raised among our people—the right way—and then he chose to forsake us and join the enemy. That is hard to forgive, but if you can bring him back to the fold, I can be merciful.”

  That makes one of us, she thought.

  “When you put it that way…” she said, again trailing off, shifting forward again. “I guess there’s only one thing I can say.”

  She looked up and saw his eyes light up.

  “Go to Hell.”

  Lunging forward, she lifted her military-grade heavy boot and slammed it down on his foot. He shouted and bent forward, but she stayed close. She was working on the assumption that as long as she was close to him, the others wouldn’t fire so they didn’t accidentally shoot their leader.

  She followed up immediately by driving her hand into the wound in his shoulder, two fingers entering the bullet hole.

  He roared with pain and rage, but responded like a trained warrior, a veteran of many battles. He didn’t lose his focus, instead reaching up to grab her wrist. He pulled her hand away but kept his grip as he jabbed a punch into her face. It was just shy of breaking her nose, but she felt the pain explode through her sinuses all the same and the skin over her cheek split open.

  Twisting her arm, she pressured the weak point of the grasp and got her arm free. Every instinct she had told her to jump back, and get space to work in—find a better defensive position—but she knew she couldn’t do that. So, she stayed in close. She punched him as hard as she could in the gut, discovering that his armor was light. Her hand didn
’t break from hitting it, and he wheezed air out of his lungs.

  As he bent over again, she made to jam her knee up between his legs.

  He was smart, though. He somehow knew she was going for that and he pressed his knees close, turning his hips. This pushed her knee to the side and threw her off-balance.

  Andy’s body turned slightly with her loss of balance, and he used the advantage to punch her face again, this time knocking her to the ground. His pride seemed to have been wounded enough to engage his anger. His “talk her back home” ploy was clearly over as he kicked her midsection. Her armor took some of the hit, but it still hurt.

  She saw his leg come back for a second, and she rolled out of the way—toward him instead of away, ending up between his legs. She had no space or leverage for a real hit, but she hit his ankle.

  He shouted but stayed standing. He managed to kick her again, this time with the back of his boot. It was her turn to shout as pain blossomed in her ribs. She twisted and put her hands out against his leg before he was able to kick her again. This was enough to send him off-balance, and he stumbled forward.

  Andy hurried to get to her feet, but also stay close to him.

  What was her end goal here? It was a lancing thought, wondering how she expected this to actually play out. Maybe get him in a submission hold and use him as a shield? As a hostage? Anything was possible at this point. All she knew was that she would not submit.

  It was escape or die. There was no middle ground.

  As she was scrambling to regain her footing and stay close enough to use him as a shield, there was a hissing noise from just behind.

  “Major!” Roxanna shouted through the door as it began to open.

  Andy saw the long distance between her and that door, but she knew it was her only chance.

  She blew past her father and made the fastest tactical retreat she had ever made, sprinting through the pain toward that door, and her Marines beyond it.

  15

  “Shut the door!”

  “I can’t! I broke it to get it open, sir!”

  “Well, shit!”

  Andy ran into the waiting squad, hoping to shut her pursuers in the compound behind her, but apparently that wasn’t going to happen. Already, energy bolts were shooting haphazardly through the door and she could hear her father shouting orders from inside.