The other soldiers didn’t seem impressed. Two of them began extracting the corpse of the female trooper from the melted rubble of the wall.
“You really shouldn’t have done that, Shadow Man,” the trooper confided. “It’s going to piss off the she-hes, large. I’m supposed to report our battle casualties at once, but I’m not going to warn my CO about this one. She-hes tend to kill the messenger, if you know what I mean.”
Then the trooper shouted down the hole, addressing the rest of the companions. “Everybody else out of there. Now!”
When Ryan and the others stepped from the cave, they saw what had been leveled against them. The laser cannon on one of three gigantic vehicles was pointed at the entrance.
At the direction of one of the dozen or so battlesuits, presumably the commanding officer, troopers scanned each of them with a detection device. Their hidden metallic weapons—belly guns, throwing stars, stilettos, straight razors—were located and confiscated. The device didn’t manage to pick up Dean’s bone blade, however. While they sat on the ground with their hands on top of their heads, the troopers removed the bodies of their comrades from the cave. J.B. glanced at Ryan and winked. They had chilled three in all. Not bad for a first skirmish. The troopers carried out the female last. She was quite a sight. The flesh of her face was horribly bloated, puffed up red and shiny around the blackened craters and pits that had been burned clear through her head. Her brains dripped out the pinholes in the back of her skull, swaying like strands of pink melted cheese.
The commanding officer let out an animal cry and rushed over to the body as it was carefully lowered to the sand.
Ryan could see the officer’s face as the helmet visor cleared. It was another woman, of the same strange sort. The trooper had called his superior officer a “she-he.” Which didn’t figure to be an official term or a pet name the battlesuit grunts dared use in front of their superiors. It had a decidedly hostile and disparaging ring to it.
From the officer’s screams and gestures, she was taking this particular death mighty hard. Much harder than Ryan would have expected. Not only was the scene she was making unprofessional from a military standpoint, but on the world where she came from, he knew a single human life wasn’t worth spit. In full view of her command, the officer wailed and sobbed as if the two had been sisters, or mother and daughter. Rising from her knees, she sought a suitable outlet for her rage and grief.
She seized Jak by a hank of his white hair, jerked him to his feet, then locked her other fist around his throat. Jak’s dead white face went pink, then shaded quickly to dark purple, his red eyes bulging from their sockets. The officer clamped her fingers on the top of his head and lifted him from the ground.
Jak kicked his legs and swung his arms, but his heels and fists bounced harmlessly off the battlesuit’s armored plates.
The companions were already on their feet, but unarmed and facing a battery of laser rifles, they couldn’t assist in the fight. They watched helplessly as the officer started to slowly unscrew Jak’s head from his neck, like the lid of a glass jar.
“It wasn’t him!” Ryan cried. “He didn’t chill her.”
The officer paused in her neck twisting. “Who was it, then?” she demanded.
“It was me. Shadow Man. I’m the one who croaked your girlfriend.” He paused to flash the officer a broad grin. “I got to tell you, it was nuking big fun. Step over here, Jughead, and I’ll do it to you, too.”
The officer tossed Jak aside like a rag doll and charged. Six of her own troopers intervened and blocked her path. Straining with all their might, they managed to keep her from reaching Ryan, who resolutely stood his ground, a smile on his face.
“The CEO will want them in one piece, Captain,” a trooper reminded her. It sounded like the same guy who had spoken to Ryan in the cave. “There’ll be big trouble for us all if we bring them back dead, and she finds out that you took your own vengeance. If you hand them over alive for her to deal with, there could be a big reward.”