CHAPTER 29
I grabbed for my rifle and raced to the hatch just as a Skorpis warrior stepped through, pistol in one hand, grenade in the other. My senses were so hyper that I could see the slits of his irises moving in his eyeballs as he raised his arm to throw the grenade into our midst.
I fired and the grenade exploded in his hand, hot shrapnel streaking through the transceiver bay. I was knocked off my feet by the blast, my arm and chest stung by searing bits of sharp metal. Most of my crew were already diving to the deck. Magro ducked behind the transceiver console as several shards of shrapnel peppered its plastic stand.
The bulkhead along the passageway began to glow a dull red and I realized that the Skorpis were doing what we had done: burning their way through the bulkhead.
“Get them away from the hatch!” I bellowed, scrambling to my feet. Automatically I closed down the pain receptors and tightened the blood vessels where I had been hit.
Almost a dozen rifle beams converged on the hatch, driving the Skorpis away from it. I raced to it, dived onto my belly and skidded partway out into the passage, firing point-blank at the armored warriors grouped around the hatch.
Someone yanked at my ankles and pulled me back into the relative safety of the bay. I kicked free and yelled, “We’ve got to clear the passageway of them! Otherwise they’ll burn through the bulkhead and pour in here!”
We made the hatchway our bastion. Kneeling, lying prone, standing along its curved metal rim, we fired into the passageway and drove the Skorpis back. They were on both sides of the hatch, coming at us from both ends of the passage. We cut down the warriors who were trying to burn through the bulkhead and drove their cohorts back out of range of our rifles.
But they came at us again, behind a barrage of rocket grenades. There were so many that I could pick off fewer than half of them before they exploded in showers of fragments that forced us away from the hatch. I saw my crew mates fall, chests ripped open, blood spewing, faces screaming in the sudden realization of death.
We backed away and the Skorpis resumed cutting open the bulkhead. I saw it all in slow motion, firing, shouting, men and women sinking to their knees, Skorpis warriors in their armored space suits falling as they shot at us, the bulkhead separating us from the passageway glowing cherry red under their laser torches. We retreated to the cryo capsule and hid behind it, hugging its massive flank for protection as the bulkhead finally crashed down in three separate places and scores of Skorpis warriors poured in upon us.
Their laser bolts splashed off the engraved flank of the cryo capsule, making its surface hot to touch. They were too close to us to use grenades without killing themselves, but they advanced, a centimeter at a time, past the bodies of their own dead, crawling along the deck plates to get at us.
I saw that they were trying to outflank us, get around to the sides of the chamber where we would not have the cryo capsule between ourselves and them. I fired at them until my rifle went dead, then started using my pistol.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” I shouted into Frede’s ear.
“Good thinking,” she snapped. “How?”
“Transceiver.”
“Not me!” She shook her head as she sprayed a quartet of Skorpis warriors with burning laser fire.
“We’re dead if we don’t.”
“We’re dead if we do. I don’t care if a copy of me lands on Loris.”
But I was thinking of Anya. She knew that coming to Loris would mean throwing herself on Aten’s mercy. She knew that surrendering to the Commonwealth could mean final, utter, irretrievable death for her. Yet she had come, she had insisted on this desperate gamble for peace, because she wanted to stop the war. I had thought that she—like the other Creators—cared only for their own safety. But now I realized that she also cared about the billions of humans who were enmeshed in this endless killing. She wanted to face Aten and stop the war, no matter what the cost to herself.