CHAPTER FIVE: Showdown at the Tempered Café

The zombie’s blood fell on Skreeok like rain as the grenade detonated, and he felt rather than saw the transparent membranes slip over his eyes and back again into the recesses under his bony brow, protecting his eyes. Noting that the corridor was now empty, save for the four surviving members of his team, he grunted his approval, and spoke into his wrist gauntlet.

            “[Corridor Sixteen is clear. Have the Snarrels proceed with the cleanup, and prepare my bath,]” he said in the pitched growls of his native language.

            “[Acknowledged, Kannok,]” came the irritatingly singsong reply from traffic control, which was serving as an ad hoc command centre for the hunt.

            The fight to retake the Pit’s lower corridors was entering its third week now, and the Deadmen were becoming a rare sight, but the Pit was a big place, and hunting them all down would take time. Not content to let his men do his fighting for him, Skreeok personally led all the raids in the lower levels; this one had gone relatively well, with only two casualties, and only one of them fatal.

            He and his fellow Rantors were becoming remarkably adept at locating the alchemical abominations of Deadside, using a combination of motion sensors and a tool the Kannok had not seen until a week ago: a vapor tracker, found by Concordance agents raiding the Peregrine’s Lightship several years ago. Apparently, the tracker could detect and localize the changes in the Pit’s atmosphere caused by breathing; where there was motion without breathing, there were Deadmen.

            Skreeok examined the corpses. The one he had killed last, by nailing it to a bulkhead with his crossbow and firing a grenade into its mouth, had, at one point, been a Saurian.

            He ran his claw along the former Rantor’s jaw, or what was left of it. Rantors believed that when killed by one of their own, they were serving their bloodline, weeding out the weak, and allowing the strong to maintain the honor of their kind. Death by the hand of an alien was heresy. Even suicide was preferable to being slain by an outsider.

            “[As it should be, brother. Sleep now. The strong persist.]”

            He also died for the cause, for the Pit, and for justice. He died for us twofold, Skreeok reflected. As a Deadman, he served the needs of whoever would usurp our place here by infesting the Pit with these wretches. With him and his kind laid to rest, I can hope to restore order here soon.

            A patient beep from his wrist gauntlet interrupted his reverie.

            “[What is it?]” he grunted, not taking his eyes from the Deadman’s shattered skull.

            “[Lord Kannok, we have a flitter leaving the north dock,]” came the voice of the head controller at traffic control.

            “[And?]”

            “[Well, you said you should be notified if any more flitters left without posting destinations.]”

            “[Only if they’re not registered to another port.]” Skreeok did not want refugees fleeing his station without him giving them some form of aid, or at least the opportunity to contact their stated destination and notifying its governing body.

            “[That’s just it, Trademaster. They’re not registered elsewhere, and gave no destination.]”

            Skreeok sighed deeply. “[Very well. If it is their wish to leave the Pit for good, then plot a likely trajectory for them, deactivate their residency here-]”

            “[No, Trademaster. They’re not registered here.]”

            Skreeok was growing frustrated. “[Well, where in Serean’s icy cloaca are they registered?]”

            “[Unknown, Trademaster. They did not give a registry location.]”

            “[Correct me if I’m wrong, Control,]” Skreeok grated out, dripping with condescension. “[But aren’t all docked vessels required to give out their registry before being issued a trade license?]”

            “[Y-yes, Trademaster. But this flitter didn’t dock for trade. It was illegally docked, and unregistered.]”

            Skreeok gave up. “[I see. I am on my way down there, Control, and after the estimated eight minutes it takes me to do that, I trust you will be able to tell me exactly what happened and the order it happened in, or you will be forced to find yourself another job. And another head.]”

            “[Y-yes, Trademaster.]”

            “[And Control?]”

            “[Yes, Trademaster?]”

            “[Please be so kind as to cancel my bath.]”

***

            Skreeok had to settle for wiping the coagulating zombie blood off his face, shoulder and chest with a damp cloth as he entered the low-ceilinged hall that was traffic control. Situated near the tip of the station’s northern arm, its three long walls were all transparent, offering a stupendous view of Uranus and the star-speckled heavens beyond. There was a mixture of about two dozen Snarrels and Rantors on duty, manning posts or consoles, or visually tracking flitters through the viewports.

            The Kannok was in a foul mood when he entered by way of the sloping catwalk from the foyer above, and Snarrels and Rantors alike wisely avoided his gaze. Singling out a Snarrel frantically jabbering at four of his colleagues by a bank of computer stations, Skreeok strode directly toward him.

            The Snarrel’s fellow controllers were all seated by monitors, but he himself skittered from station to station, hurriedly collecting printouts the others were offering him. By the time Skreeok reached the five yellow-skinned reptiles, they were truly terrified.

            “[Trademaster.]” The standing one offered by way of greeting, and Skreeok recognized Control’s nasal singsong voice.

            Skreeok said nothing. He just grabbed the Snarrel’s neck and lifted.

            “[You allowed an unregistered flitter to dock here illegally. On my station.]”

            “[But – ack – Trademaster, permit me to explain-]”

            “[And then you simply let them leave?]”

            The Snarrel clawed uselessly at Skreeok’s arm. The other Snarrels squealed and squirmed. The other Rantors in the room grinned, eager for bloodshed.

            “[But… ah…]”

            “[Come now, Control. I have seen leapers fight harder than that. Are you at least going to entertain me with an excuse before I eat you alive?]” Skreeok bared his teeth.

            “[They… ack… didn’t arrive here by their own power… I thought… they were… ab…an…doned… car…go…]”

            Skreeok stared into the Snarrel’s eye, and allowed a little drool to drip from his open jaws. Then he let go. Control collapsed into a heap at the Trademaster’s feet.

            “[Explain.]”

            Control wheezed, catching his breath. A fellow Snarrel tried to offer him water, but was waved off by his recovering superior.

            “[There… ah… was a flitter here… docked over a month ago, and registered to some university dig out of the Titania campus… apparently they purchased some… medical supplies, and then the crew disappeared. They had an old flitter with them, an archaeological find from somewhere on the Periphery. It was scheduled for demolition before the Deadmen attacked.]”

            Skreeok was doubtful. “[An archaeological find? And that was the flitter that just left?]”

            “[Yes… we tried to contact them, and it wasn’t until we realized where it had been docked that I made the connection.]”

            “[What are talking about? What ‘connection?’]”

            “[Don’t you see? It was never searched, and it was docked here through the attack. This is the flitter that brought the zombies here.]”

            That got Skreeok’s attention.

            “[Go on,]” Skreeok demanded.

The Snarrel seemed mostly recovered now, and allowed one of his colleagues to help him to his feet. “[I remember trying to talk to the archaeologist, or at least one of the students, and it proved very difficult to get a hold of him. It was… only when I checked the tariff-master’s report while you were on your way down here just no when I realized how grievous my mistake was, Trademaster.]”

            “[How so?]”

            “[Well… he was... his species was listed as…]”

            And then the Snarrel collapsed into a fit of coughing. The water bearer re-approached gingerly, and this time, Control accepted. As he drank, another controller approached Skreeok with caution, offering him a printout, and the Kannok squinted at it farsightedly, and mumbled to no one in particular:

            “[Oh, you have got to be kidding me.]”

            “You posed… as an archaeologist?” Elite asked, incredulous.

            “Gol-gol,” Mauler said, and clearly found it all very amusing.

            Mauler was a Pus-Tra. Not noted for their brightness or their scholastic abilities, the Pus-Tra were brutes, barely capable of coherent speech, let alone the intricacies of archaeological work.

            “That… that has to be the worst cover story I’ve ever heard,” Elite said, but in a way, he supposed it was perversely amusing, and he sat back, and let out a slight chortle of amusement underneath his ill-fitting power armor.

            Elite was posing as a Pus-Tra himself, but was actually a member of a mysterious race not even he himself was completely familiar with, or if he was even a ‘he.’ For all he knew, he could be female.

            What he did know was that he served the Peregrine. All other considerations were secondary. He had awoken one day about forty Human years ago on board the Lightship, an efficient fusing of flesh and machine, and existed for no other purpose than the glory of his master. His race was so rare and so closely associated with the ancient alien that a disguise was necessary on most civilized worlds, so as not to attract any undue attention.

Beneath the Juggernaut armor he currently wore, his face was grey, with violet eyes and facial tentacles that hung down past his mouth like barbells. To his sonic membranes, the speech of other races sounded raw, dry and scraping, so he supposed his speech, and that of his fellow Troopers (as they were called, and Elite had no other name for them) must have sounded watery and indistinct. His limbs were gangly, and seemingly incapable of supporting the weight of his body, which was easily about seven feet tall, and his footsteps were heavy. He was smarter than the average trooper, for one does not live through as much death and victory as he had without learning a few things.

            He had lived through some dark times, admittedly, and serving the Peregrine had not always been glorious. He had seen comrades slain in the Last Peregrine War, and battles bitterly lost. The Saurians had turned on them at Oberon, of course, and Terat had saved the Energy Pyres and killed the Glyphid Queen, throwing that race of allies into disarray and chaos. The Glyphid Kings now fought each other on Pluto in a bloody civil war that raged on even now.

            Terat. The name was a curse among those few of his kind that still survived. Almost ten years ago, the lone human had boarded the Peregrine’s Lightship and destroyed the assembly plants that mothered Elite’s race. A new Trooper had not been created since.

            At the time, they thought it was holy war, a lone human’s genocidal crusade against their people. They’d thought he was a lunatic, an evil force acting alone in the world to kill them all.

            But of course that was wrong. After the Peregrine’s battle with Terat, Elite and his men had done a fair amount of intelligence gathering and covert trading in a vain attempt to rebuild the assembly plants. Consequently, they had seen much of the Drift; they had learned that ‘Terat’ was simply a title, a hereditary protector of the Drift and an agent of its elders, the Daedalus Concordance.

            And so here he sat, in the dismal Tempered Café, an eatery on the rough side of Enceladus, talking to a Pus-Tra who was pretending to be an archaeologist.

            Their Saurian waiter brought them their order, two dishes of spiced lichen and the admittedly excellent local water. Mauler removed his helmet and ate hungrily, explaining between mouthfuls.

            “Ya, gol-gol, okay? When Old Boss talk to Mauly and call him in, Mauly was to haul big ship-of-zombie to Pit-place, ya?”

            “Yes, go on,” Elite said, silently wishing the Pus-Tra wouldn’t speak so loud, or that he hadn’t removed his helmet. Anyone paying even the slightest attention to them would be able to piece together that Elite was not a Pus-Tra himself, as they were speaking in Human, and the fact that Elite wasn’t eating probably wasn’t helping his cover, either; Pus-Tra appetites were famously voracious.

            Fortunately, most of the other patrons of the place, a rough-hewn brick construction with dim lighting and a long, trough-like bar along one side, didn’t seem terribly interested in the two of them. Most of them were in fairly advanced stages of inebriation, and those that weren’t, were, by the looks of them, asleep. Or dead. Not that Elite cared; the staff certainly didn’t.

            “So Mauly go hauly, then Mauly wait in Pit-place. Zombiemen come out of zombieship, and whole Pit-place go crazy with the blood and the screamin’. Mauly want to join, gol-gol, ya? Fight and kill, splatter with big sword, ya-ya?”

            Mauler gestured to his massive Powersword, which was propped up by a wall on Mauler’s right.

            “Of course.” Elite discreetly extended a straw through his helmet’s mouthpiece and drank the water. Not as salty as he preferred, but water was water.

            “But no. Mauly under stric’ order no to leave flit-flit, under any circumstance. Stay inside; eat supplies, wait order. Order come; Old Boss tell me ‘bout you-you, gol-gol? You grab special stuff from Triton for him and take to here, ya-ya? Ya-ya. Then, Mauly fly and flit to here, just like Old Boss teach.”

            “Your… boss taught you to fly a flitter?”

            “Oh, ya-ya! Mauly fly better than any Pus-Tra.”

            “So… you’ve met our ‘boss’ in person, then?”

            “Oh. Ya. Many-many. Talk much. Him trust. Mauly never speak.”

            “I see.” Either that, or he knows you’re just too much of an idiot to describe him if anyone asks you. Elite had not actually met their employer; he had simply been contacted by a computer message sent from a repeater on the Precipice, first to pick up the ‘special stuff’ on Triton, then fly it here to Enceladus and meet the contact, who was to receive the package.

The message had come to the Lightship in a code and electronic signature identical to the one the Peregrine had used to issue orders to the Troopers from his throne room before the war; either the sender was a sympathizer, someone Elite could trust, or he was an outsider who knew too much. Either way, it warranted investigation.

He had arrived on Enceladus with the package yesterday, and had found Tempered Café, the pre-arranged meeting place, quite easily. The Saturnian moon was the property of the Icelords, a Saurian water cartel that preferred to employ other species to work the ice tunnels, near the cryovolcanoes where the water was most pure.

Water melted by Power Cores was mildly poisonous for some unexplained reason, so it had to be packaged naturally melted. This was usually done by workers in spacesuits with simple tools, but whenever an eruption occurred, the Icelords would temporarily relocate hundreds of beings to the cryovolcanoes to harvest the runoff. Therefore, the most successful eateries that catered to non-Saurians were the ones closest to the volcanoes, protected from the pressure and the ice above them by Power Cores.

            “Will our boss be accepting the package from you personally, do you think?”

            The Pus-Tra pondered, chewing his food.

            “Prolly not, no, gol-gol. Package take to drop-off in elsey-place, then Mauly flit-flit back to home, ya?”

            Okay. Then it’s a simple matter of following you once this is done, and the ‘old boss’ will explain how he has those codes. You are an idiot.

            This reinforced Elite’s belief that whoever had contacted them was not acting on the Peregrine’s behalf; surely, he would never employ anyone as incompetent as this. Nevertheless, the ‘old boss’ could simply be a misguided fool, rather than a would-be infiltrator, but in either case, he would need to be tracked, silenced and eliminated, and his equipment retrieved or destroyed.

            “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m beat,” Elite said. “I think I’m going to go back to my flitter, call it a day. We’ll meet again here at Saturn-rise tomorrow for the hand-off, alright?”

            The Pus-Tra nodded, oblivious, and wolfed down the last of his plate.

            “You gon’ eat that, gol-gol?” Mauler asked, gesturing toward Elite’s still-full plate. Elite finished the rest of the water in his cup, and rose from the table.

            “No, you go ahead. You’ve earned it.”

***

            The walk back to the topside flitter bays was fairly uneventful, and Elite went unmolested by the Enceladean populace he encountered and the Icelord guards posted at regular intervals in the tunnels.

            In keeping with the covert nature of his mission, the flitter sitting in Bay 3 of Al-Bakbuk Flitport was a nondescript cargo hauler, like any one of a thousand that plied the Expanse at any given time. Elite opened the hand-cranked cargo door and entered the flitter.

            It was completely dark inside, save for the dull-glowing red light from Elite’s visor, which he extinguished before doffing the helmet. A portable overhead flicked on, and Elite’s troops were revealed to him.

            Twelve lanky, armored Troopers lay, sat or stood in the aft cargo bay in various states of awareness and readiness. They’d been crammed in here for almost three local days, waiting for their time.

            “(Leader),” said Elite’s second-in-command, a Trooper whom the others collectively referred to as Shooter. It was Shooter’s first time off the Lightship, and although his proficiency in combat was second to none (save perhaps that of Elite himself), he still had difficulty masking his eagerness. “(Is it time yet?)”

“(No),” he answered, and the disappointment in the bay was palpable. “(The alien I met with is an intermediary, not the original broadcaster. We’re going to keep our word and make the hand-off, then track the alien back to his employer. Is the cargo secure?)”

“(Yes, leader. In the forward compartment.)”

“(Good. I wish to speak to him.)”

            Shooter nodded, and gestured to another Trooper, Stinger, who stood by one of the four doors to the flitter’s other compartments. Stinger grabbed a hold of the rung to the heavy sliding door, and pulled it open.

            The forward bay was brightly lit, and much smaller than the aft bay. A Trooper Elite recognized as Flechette was slouched against the forward bulkhead, arms crossed over his chest, while in the center of the room, a leathery being sat in an awkward crouch, arms and legs bound uncomfortably with dried vine-rope.

            “Hello,” Cyclops said. The Blind One tilted his head at an assuredly defiant angle, his wrinkled face and smoothed tusks projecting an air of extreme indifference.

            “I thought we might have ourselves a little chat,” Elite said, pacing a small circle around Cyclops as he spoke. “It seems that whoever wants you has entrusted your fate to a Pus-Tra, so he obviously can’t be too concerned with your health. You might as well ‘fess up to me; I might even just let you go back home.”

            “I’ve already told you, several hundred times, it seems, I have no clue what all this is about.” the Blind One said, shifting as much as his bound limbs allowed him to in order to keep facing Elite. “The only time I’ve ever spoken to anyone working for the Peregrine, is when I first spoke to you when you kidnapped me a month ago. I don’t think I’d even ever met a Trooper before then.”

            “Come now, swordsmith. You’re, what, ninety? A hundred? You must have seen one at some point.”

            “First of all: I’m a Blind One; I’ve never ‘seen’ anything. Second, I don’t remember half of what I’ve experienced, and if I did, I’d have told you as soon as you asked, rather than have you lock me up in this tin can.”

            Elite regarded the old Blind One for a moment, taking care not to let his frustration show in front of Flechette. He had a strong feeling his time, as well as that of his troops, could be better spent doing something else.

            No, he reminded himself. This is important, and it looks like we’re going to have to be thorough about handling it, rather than succinct.

            “Very well, swordsmith. I’ll leave you to your musings. Make the most of tonight; I can’t promise you the Pus-Tra’s accommodations will be as comfortable as ours.”

“[But how long will you be gone?]” Control had wheedled plaintively as Skreeok packed a leaper-hide rucksack with spare power cells and dried meats. They were in the Trademaster’s personal quarters, a spacious collection of hand-carved chambers in the upper levels of the Pit.

            “[Long enough. We’ve traced the Pus-Tra to Enceladus, but he’s already almost half a day ahead of me; I’ll have to pick up the trail there and follow him onwards if I don’t find any other leads. If it means catching whoever did all this, I will spend the rest of my days in pursuit],” Skreeok had growled. “[I want you to get a message to Lady Chloe on Titan. Lobby the Concordance for an aether transmission, but if it takes more than a day, you might as well send a courier to the Rift Gate.]”

            “[But Kannok, Jupiter is not in transit; it’s on the far side of the Interior. It will take weeks to get there, if not months!]” Skreeok had shot Control a withering look.

            “[Who said anything about Jupiter? Have someone grab a flitter and drop down to the Swamp Gate; he might even get to the Cronian before I do.]”

            “[The Swamp Gate?]” Control had asked, voice trembling with fear. “[But that would mean going through the Death Marshes…]” Control had trailed off when he’d seen the look in Skreeok’s eyes.

            “[You know what? You’re dead right, Control, and your obvious expertise in the matter means that you’re the perfect lizard to be the forward scout for the courier’s armed escort. Report to the Rantor barracks as soon as I’m gone and explain the mission to the watch commander, he’ll know what to do.]” Control had positively withered. Skreeok had finished packing by then, and was making his way to the exit. “[One more thing, Control. If I get back and find out that you weren’t in that escort, I’ll think of some half-brained excuse to send you down to the Marshes anyway. Alone, and unarmed.]”

            Now, three days later, Skreeok sat in the cockpit of his personal flitter and found himself wondering if the courier had reached Titan. Luckily, Saturn was in transit, and a relatively short hop in a flitter. If the watch commander was any kind of strategist, he’d have sent at least two couriers: one through the Death Marshes with an armed escort, and one on a flitter to take the message to Titan directly. He might even have sent a third to the Europa rift gate, just to be sure.

            If Skreeok was extremely lucky, Control may have managed to convince the Concordance embassy on board the Leap Of Faith to grant them an aether transmission, which was damn-near instantaneous as far as Skreeok knew. He also knew, however, that the Concordance received thousands of requests a day to use their mysterious transmitter, and even a matter as pressing as this investigation would likely have to wait a long time while the embassy sifted through its backlog.

            Whatever he discovered on Enceladus, he hoped the trail would be warm enough for him to pick up as soon as he got there; he was in no mood for a prolonged series of interviews with the local riff-raff. The Saturnian moon was notorious for its lawlessness, and Skreeok had not been particularly surprised when the Pit astronomers had calculated the tramp flitter’s trajectory there. It was an ideal place to hide or meet with a co-conspirator in any number of nefarious schemes.

            Conversely, there was a small part of him that desperately wanted his stay on Enceladus to last a while, or at least long enough for knowledge of his whereabouts to reach Lady Chloe. He felt there was much he could learn from her.

In the weeks since their firefight in the Pit, he had played and replayed his memory of her in his mind, mowing down Deadmen in the Apex, and found that he greatly admired her fighting skills. She was an agile, aware warrior, always on the move, sweeping and strafing out of the enemy’s reach. Many a Rantor could have learned from her tactics, were they not dead.

He put his thoughts away. Enceladus floated not far ahead, with mighty Saturn looming behind it, and he had business to attend to on the ice ball.

            At that very moment, Mauler was in his own flitter, calling Big Boss on the fartalker.

            Big Boss had given Mauler the fartalker some time ago, and they’d use it when Big Boss needed Mauler to do things for him. Mostly, it was kill this, or blow up that; this was the first time Mauler had been asked to handle something as intricate as delivery of a live being to Big Boss.

            As the fartalker began its magic, Mauler thought a little bit about why Big Boss might need Old Blindey alive. Maybe they were friends? He didn’t know. Mauler didn’t know much, truth be told. But that had never bothered him before.

            The fartalker warbled; Big Boss’s face appeared.

            “Hey ho, Big Boss. Mauly here.”

            “I thought I told you not to contact me until you reached Enceladus.”

            “But I’m here! Ensellady is cold, but I do walkaround. Meet the Troopy-Troop earlier. Dressed as a Pus-Tra! Was much amusin’.”

            “I’ll bet,” Big Boss said, chuckling. “But I can’t believe you’re already at Enceladus… that was fast.”

            “Not too fast, I hope?”

            “No, not at all. You’ve done well, Mauler.”

            “Gol-gol.”

            “Indeed. Now, listen. I’ve run into some problems. It seems some Glyphids must have tracked one of us to Makemake, and we’re trying to lose them in the tunnels. We should be out soon, but you’ll have to go on to the meeting-point alone and wait for me there. Keep the package safe, but not too safe, like we discussed, remember?”

            “Yah.”

            “Good. With any luck, the Troopers should follow you there and trigger another ‘incident.’” Big Boss glanced furtively over his shoulder. “I’ve got to go. The Blind One and the other idiot were scouting out some tunnels, but I think they’re coming back.”

            “Gol-gol, I got it. Leave everything to Mauly, Big Boss. I gotcha.”

            Mauler thought he saw a look of mild contempt cross Big Boss’s face, but he’d never been too good at reading non-Pus-Tra faces. Maybe he was just nervous.

            “Right,” Big Boss said, and signed off, cutting the transmission. The fartalker wound down, and Mauler was left alone with his thoughts.

***

“[I’m afraid we can be of little assistance to you, Trademaster,]” said the Icelord of Al-Bakbuk, his back to Skreeok as he stared out at his domain.

Skreeok stood in the Icelord’s office, a modest-sized cavern arrayed with various trinkets and trappings, including ice sculptures, gold ornaments and several nasty-looking hi-tech weapons that Skreeok recognized as being of Flesh Eater design. One wall of the office (which was more of a throne room than an office, Skreeok thought) was a sheet of ice that functioned as a window, the window the Icelord was currently facing, claws clasped behind his back.

Beyond the window was a vista of the Al-Bakbuk semi-permanent water mining operation, a huge cavern partially obscured by billowing steam. On ledges carved into the sides of the cavern, miners of all species worked, carefully chipping the melting ice into huge buckets that were then transported to purification centers by use of a complex series of pulleys.

The cavern floor was obscured by the thick steam that billowed from the nearby cryovolcano, while the cavern’s roof was only a few stories above them, dirtied ice that Skreeok knew was less than half a kilometer from Enceladus’s surface. The eruption would soon melt its way through the moon’s outermost layer of ice, and the mine would have to be abandoned until the eruption ceased. Another eruption would then draw the crews back, desperate for the valuable water.

“[Why not?]” Skreeok growled, impatient. He was also freezing, despite the thick leaperhide coat he’d been offered. Asides from a purple ceremonial cape, the Icelord wore nothing, his hide genetically engineered to withstand the intense cold, and Skreeok found that this irritated him greatly. The Icelord let out a terrific sigh before turning to face Skreeok, staring at the other Saurian down his nose.

“[Because, my dear fellow, the volcano beneath our feet is about to send us all shooting into orbit,]” the Icelord said, and began pacing the office, stopping occasionally to fondle one of the baubles on display. “[The paucity of able-bodied workers this late in the operation has left me thoroughly underequipped, and I have had to allocate most of the warriors under my command to the relocation efforts in their place. I simply can’t spare the men, is what I’m saying,]” the Icelord whined plaintively.

“[You have warriors hauling boxes?]” Skreeok balked, claw curling into a fist. “[That is Snarrel work.]”

“[Needs must, my dear fellow. As you may or may not have noticed, there aren’t too many Snarrels about. They can’t take the climate.]” The Icelord took a sip of water from the hand-carved cup on his expansive, slab-like desk.

“[What of your personal honor guard? Surely you can spare them for half a day. There can’t be that many people here who want to kill you,]” Skreeok said, but found himself doubting his own words; after knowing the Icelord for just a few minutes, he felt like strangling the lizard himself. The Icelord stopped pacing and gave Skreeok another queer look.

“[Now, that is quite simply out of the question, Trademaster.]”

“[You do understand that this concerns the recent siege on our space station. More than your personal safety is at stake here, Bakbuk. The very honor of Sauriankind has been maligned,]” Skreeok said slowly, careful not to let his anger show.

“[I do not doubt it one second, Trademaster, but I have my orders from the House,] the Icelord said, referring to the Icelord council that sat on the other side of the moon, in the hollow volcano of Ek-Marekl. “[After the Glyphid raid on Mimas, we’ve had to increase security by order of a magnitude. My personal safety is as tantamount to the honor of our kind as the apprehension of your culprit, or culprits. We’re fighting the same battle, Trademaster, only on different fronts.]”

It was at that point that Skreeok lost his patience with the technocrat.

“[You dishonor every warrior I’ve ever lost if you think that honor is maligned by death, Icelord. In fact, if you doubt this, I would be willing to indulge you in a personal demonstration of your death-]”

“[Now you listen here!]” the Icelord yelled. “[You don’t think the death of an Icelord would brand us? Make us look weak? Why do you suppose this terrorist came here after unleashing Deadmen on our station? Enceladus is as important to us as the Pit, if not more so. An attack here would drive home the blade that pierced our skin on the Pit. You think we are dishonored now; wait and see what happens when an Icelord dies in his own mine.]”

The two Saurians stood in silence for a moment, eyes locked. The Icelord looked away first, relenting.

“[Look. There is… a clutch of Rantors here on a resupply stop, outbound from the Interior. They’re headed to the Pit, so technically, they’d be under your command in a few days anyway,]” the Icelord said. “[But don’t you forget what I said. We Icelords may not be out there, fighting wars and slaying enemies, but what we do is as important as what you do.]”

“[Consider that acknowledged, Icelord. Now, where can I find these Rantors?]”

“[Where all the offworlders go: the Tempered Café, just off the flitport tunnel.]”

“(Are there any changes to the plan, leader?)” Shooter asked Elite as they strode down the tunnel to the Tempered Café. Behind them were Scythe and Pistol, two more Troopers, who carried a closed, oversized cargo crate between them. Cyclops lay bound and gagged within the crate. All four Troopers wore Pus-Tra power armor.

“(No. You provide me with backup while I take Mauler’s money, then we hand off the cargo by Mauler’s flitter. Flechette and Ruse have been at the café since this morning scoping the place out, and Mauler does not appear to have any others with him, but keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary.)”

“(And they’re certain it’s him?)” Shooter asked. Elite stopped dead in his tracks and turned to face the junior Trooper. Scythe and Pistol came to an abrupt halt behind them, somewhat awkwardly due to the crate.

“(What?)” Elite asked Shooter.

“(I mean, they’re certain that the Pus-Tra they saw is Mauler?)”

“(Shooter, Flechette and Ruse are not idiots. They can tell one Pus-Tra from another.)”

“(Yes, leader, but could he have pulled some sort of bait-and-switch? Disguised another Pus-Tra as Mauler?)”

“(To what end?)”

“(I… don’t know, leader,)” Shooter said sheepishly. “(I was merely speculating. My apologies.)”

Elite gave Shooter a long, hard stare at an odd angle before shaking his head and marching onwards.

“(Try not to overthink this,)” Elite continued as they walked. “(I know it may seem implausible that a Pus-Tra could be involved in something this complex, but the situation might not be as complicated as it appears. We might just be tracking an idiot with stolen or salvaged equipment. Sometimes a Pus-Tra is just a Pus-Tra.)”

Sure enough, a clutch of four Rantors sat in a back booth of the Tempered Café when Skreeok walked in to survey the scene. There were about twenty beings of various species lounging around in the café, a couple by the bar and a few more by the tables arrayed across the floor in no discernable pattern. Most of the patrons, however, were tucked into rough-hewn booths, just like the ones the Saurians sat in.

For a moment, Skreeok eyed the Rantors, and the Rantors eyed Skreeok; then, he walked over to their corner, past two Humans and a Glyphid merc engaged in a low-stakes card game and a solitary Pus-Tra scarfing down a foul-looking meal. There were a million places just like this in the Cronian alone, never mind the Drift as a whole.

“[You are warriors?]” Skreeok said to the clutch

“[Yes,]” the leftmost Rantor said. “[And you are Kannok.]”

“[So I am. May I sit?]” he asked respectfully. They weren’t scheduled to become his troops for another three days, so for now, they were equals.

“[Please,]” the Rantor said. The rightmost Rantor shifted closer to his nearest brother, making room for Skreeok. He sat down, leaving his tail to flop into the specially carved groove encircling the booth’s horseshoe-shaped bench. “[Tell us, Trademaster, how can we offer you aid?]”

Skreeok was about to speak, when he was momentarily distracted by the appearance of two more Pus-Tra in the café entrance, both wearing power armor. Clearly, this would not be an easy task; Enceladus was rife with the brutes.

“[Kannok?]” the Rantor asked, pushing a cup of local ale towards Skreeok. Skreeok took a long drink before speaking.

“[There is a Pus-Tra somewhere on this moon who needs to be bled, slowly, and fed to the raptors.]”

The Rantors all bared their teeth in predatory grins.

“You have the money?” Elite asked pointedly as he sat down across from Mauler. Shooter remained standing, taking a position by a stack of empty food crates, which for some reason stood in the middle of the café floor. Being inconspicuous in their armor was fairly impossible, so they had opted for the opposite approach: be as blatantly obvious about this as they could, and hope that any experienced operators who saw them would write them off as the idiots they no doubt resembled. Certainly, they drew chuckles from the two Humans at the table next to theirs. Scythe and Pistol had, in the meantime, walked straight to Mauler’s flitter with the crate.

“Gol-gol, sure do. Leave it with barky, for, ya know, safekeepin and such. Ya,” Mauler babbled as he finished his meal.

“Barky?” Elite asked, confused. In reply, Mauler gestured excitedly at the frowning Human bartender. “Oh, right. ‘Barkeep.’”

“I go get?”

“Yes, you go get,” Elite said, deciding he wouldn’t bother to keep the condescension out of his voice anymore. Mauler, oblivious, rose from his seat and ambled toward the bar. Elite scanned the rest of the café’s guests surreptitiously, trying to ascertain who among them might be Mauler’s backup. Not that he didn’t trust Flechette and Ruse, but it never hurt to be thorough-

Elite froze.

Hello. What’s wrong with this picture?

“(Don’t look now,)” Elite said quietly to Shooter without looking away from the back booth. “(But see those Saurians over there?)”

“(Yes?)” Shooter asked, his voice just loud enough to be heard.

“(The one on the far right is the Trademaster-Kannok of the Pit.)”

“(Really?)”

“(I’m almost positive… yes, that’s him, alright. No other Saurian has scars like that. Now, what the terat is he doing here?)”

“[If only we’d known,]” the eldest of the Rantors, who had introduced himself as Kermas, was saying. “[We’ve been here almost eight days. It’s almost certain that we’ve run into this Pus-Tra at some point. If only we’d known.]” Kermas took a long sip of his ale, the claws of his free hand raking fresh scratches into the already well-worn stone tabletop.

“[The moon really is that small?]” Skreeok asked.

“[No, but Al-Bakbuk is, and right now, Al-Bakbuk is the only flitport he could conduct whatever business he has on Enceladus.]”

“[Explain,]” Skreeok said, sipping his own ale.

“[When a mine is being evacuated, the Icelord in charge takes less of an interest in the free trade being conducted in the port. Otherwise, he would be demanding tariffs and inspections, something I am sure this Pus-Tra would rather avoid, considering the circumstances.]”

“[What about a bribe? It’s likely he’s well-funded.]”

“[A bribe large enough to dodge a customs tariff would have to go to the Icelord himself. I take it you spoke to Lord Bakbuk of your mission?]”

“[Yes… he struck me as somewhat cowardly and a bit of a martyr, but certainly no traitor. I surmise you are right, Kermas. The Pus-Tra is, or was, here in Al-Bakbuk.]” Kermas finished his ale, and leaned back, leering in satisfaction.

“[What exactly would we be looking for, Trademaster?]”

Skreeok pondered this as a Glyphid waiter refilled their cups.

“[We would be looking for a lone Pus-Tra flying an old flitter, and that’s about the extent of the criteria…]” Skreeok trailed off as he saw the other Rantors exchange meaningful glances. “[You know something.]”

“[How old would this flitter be?]” Kermas asked.

“[Ancient. It was supposedly recovered on an archaeological dig on the Periphery.]”

“[By Serean,]” Kermas said. “[We know of just such a flitter. It is docked not far from here.]”

“[Then that is our starting point,]” Skreeok said, and the other Rantors nodded in assent. Skreeok spared a glance toward the bar, where the bartender was retrieving something from behind the bar and handing it to a Pus-Tra. There was something off about the room. Something…

Ah.

“[Allow us to pay our bill, then, and…]” Kermas began.

“[No; wait a moment,]” Skreeok said in a casual manner. “[That Pus-Tra is watching us awfully close, wouldn’t you say? The one standing by those crates, next to the table over there.]” Kermas finished his drink and scanned the café with an affected tipsiness, as if trying to locate a waiter.

“[He’s obviously a lookout for whatever deal it is they’re cutting, Trademaster. It’s his job to watch us, no?]”

“[Pus-Tra do not watch anything closely, Kermas. They nervously look around for things to beat into the ground. That Pus-Tra has not looked away from us for a solid two minutes.]”

“[You think the Pus-Tra finds us a bit too interesting, then?]” another one of the Rantors asked.

“[Quite, and in fact, I don’t think he’s a Pus-Tra at all.]” The table fell deathly quiet for a few seconds.

“[What do you suggest we do, Trademaster?]” Kermas framed it as a question to maintain his seniority in the eyes of the other Rantors, but to Skreeok, it was plain as day what he was really saying: we serve you. Lead us into battle, and we will follow.

“[Kermas.]”

“[Yes?]”

“[I want you to get up from the table and go straight to where you saw that flitter. Engage your active camouflage and stake it out. We’ll meet you there after we’ve gotten to the bottom of this. As for the rest of you, I want you covering Kermas as he makes his way across the café. This could get lively.]”

The Rantors nodded, and Kermas got up.

“Gol-gol?” Mauler said casually as he pushed the worn metal case to Elite under the table.

“If you’re asking me what happens now, then the answer is this: I am going to go back to my flitter and count the money, and when I have confirmed it matches the agreed-upon amount, I will send a signal to two of my men, who are currently waiting by your flitter with your precious cargo. They will release him to you, and we will go our separate ways,” Elite explained as slowly as he could. Behind Mauler, he saw one of the Saurians from the Kannok’s booth get up from his table and make his way toward the exit.

“And Mauly stay here, ya?” Mauler said, lightly drumming his fat, armored fingers on the tabletop.

“Whether you wait here or by your flitter is of little consequence to me. My men will have you under surveillance in either place.” Although Elite of course cared nothing about the money, it was to his advantage and in aid of his cover to handle the entire deal like a black marketeer; they had the cargo, so the deal would take place on their terms. His actual plan was to get back to the Troopers’ flitter, which Stinger had already prepared for immediate take-off, and wait for Mauler to take off so they could follow him at a discreet distance. Shooter, Flechette, Ruse, Scythe and Pistol would be stranded here, of course, but they were big boys, and could take care of themselves.

“Gol-gol,” Mauler said and stood up before ambling towards the exit. Evidently he’d opted for going straight to the flitter. Elite sipped his glass of water through his straw, and glanced back at the departing Saurian just in time to see him touch a control on his wrist gauntlet.

Elite chortled reflexively. He knew from hard experience what that control did: it began charging up an active camouflage field. Before the Saurians had turned on him in the last war, the Peregrine had equipped the lizards with the same active camo fields the Troopers had. With the help of the Humans of Umbriel, they had reverse-engineered the fields, and still used them in combat when appropriate.

“(Shooter,)” Elite said.

“(Yes?)” Shooter replied.

“(Keep your eye on the Saurians still at the table. If any one of them makes so much as a single move…)”

“...you tell me, because I’m going to follow that Rantor” would have been the rest of Elite’s sentence, but he never got to finish it.

The eldest of Kermas’s brothers rose from the table.

“[Go and pay our bill, but stay on this side of the room so you can cover us,]” Skreeok said to him. It was the last order the Saurian ever received.

A green-white lance of plasma shot out from outside of Skreeok’s field of view and straight into the Rantor’s chest. The wound was instantly cauterized, and there was the sharp crackle of searing flesh. The Saurian died with a raw exhalation, eyes rolling back into his head, and collapsed against the table.

An incredibly loud silence descended on the Tempered Café. The plasma bolt had clearly come from the ‘Pus-Tra’ who had been watching them; he wielded a smoking Concordance-issue Plasma Rifle, his grip and stance indicating that he was, indeed, anything but a Pus-Tra.

Skreeok fought panic. Him and the two remaining Rantors were trapped behind their table, in full view of the entire café. Killing them would be like shooting fish in a barrel. The being in the Pus-Tra armor, rifle still smoking, made an odd gurgling sound, like a bubbling swamp. The sound was familiar, but Skreeok was far too preoccupied to identify it.

Thinking quickly, Skreeok grabbed the smoking corpse on his table and punched in a five-digit code on its wrist gauntlet, activating the self-destruct. He then stood up, heaved, and threw the Saurian body as far as he could toward Smoking Gun’s table.

“[Get down!]” he roared at the other two Rantors.

“(We’ve been made!)” Shooter yelled.

Elite had time enough to reach for the auto-shotgun holstered awkwardly on his thigh armor and push his chair back from the table before something altogether unexpected came flying into the empty table one over from his: a dead Rantor, wrist gauntlet beeping ominously.

“(Bomb! Down!)” Elite called, and dived to his left, toward the exit. He was dimly aware of Shooter backpedaling frantically past the empty food crates, rifle still trained on the Saurians. The two Humans and one Glyphid seated at the table by the exit must have pieced together the beeping and the evasive acrobatics occurring all around them, and bolted out of their seats, knocking over their table. Elite dropped his shotgun and tried to curl into a ball behind the upended table.

Kermas had not been out of the Tempered Café for ten seconds when he spotted something very odd through the thin crowd of beings walking in the tunnel with him.

About thirty feet further down the tunnel he was taking to the flitport, there was an alcove in the wall, which led to a small tunnel. It was at torso height or so, and at a favorable angle to Kermas, so he could see directly into it.

There was nothing inherently unusual about this; Enceladus was riddled with tunnels, new and old, most of them carved over the last millennium or so by Human colonists. When the Saurians had taken over the moon in the Last Peregrine War, the Icelords had begun expanding the existing colonies in a piecemeal fashion, trying to connect them all with each other with tunnels, so as to avoid having to use flitters to get from place to place.

What was unusual about the alcove was the fact that Kermas could see a dull, diffuse red glow down the far end of the tunnel. Saurian architecture was almost exclusively curved in a show of respect to the egg that hatched their deity, Serean, and the tunnel was far too recent-looking to have been carved by Humans. Kermas should not have been able to see the end of the tunnel.

As he got closer to the aperture, a flicker of movement caught Kermas’s watchful eye, a flicker that should not have been there. The red light from the end of the tunnel moved, bending, somehow, and Kermas realized that he was seeing a mirage. Light from around a curve in the tunnel was being refracted down it by an active camo cloak. He was sure of it.

BOOM!

The explosion was incredibly loud in the enclosed space, and Elite was rocked by a jarring impact, but not hurt; he would realize much later that it was the remains of the table striking his armor. The force of the blast and the table spun Elite end-over-end until he struck what he somehow understood was the entryway doorjamb. A huge piece of a food crate struck the wall next to him and fell to the floor between him and the café proper, fortuitously providing him with limited cover.

He was dazed, but not too dazed to neglect caution. He poked his head out from behind the remains of the crate, visor coming just high enough to survey the scene.

It was carnage. The bomb had ripped the Rantor completely in two and taken several of the café’s patrons with him in the ensuing rain of shrapnel; chunks of bloody meat lay in a neat five-foot radius from the brand-new, white-blasted crater on the café floor, including the upper half of one of the Humans from the card game.

The force of the blast had blown nearly all the furniture in the establishment into complete disarray. Half-conscious beings of various species ambled about and wailed plaintively in the wreckage, most of them bleeding and some of them missing limbs.

The sturdy bar and all the booths remained intact, as did the walls of the café. The Rantors were rising from behind their charred but otherwise intact stone table. Elite looked around frantically, trying to find his shotgun. With a grunt of frustration, he ripped off his ill-fitting helmet, and began stripping off the rest of the armor, staying behind the ruined crate as well as he could. The armor may have saved him from the blast, but if he was going to get out of this alive, he would need to be unencumbered.

The explosion rang out from behind Kermas.

He had been unsure of precisely what to make of the cloaked being in the alcove, or what to do about it, but when the bomb went off, Kermas fought the urge to turn around and ascertain what had happened, and instead dropped and rolled to the wall on his right.

His instincts saved his life: the lime-green lance of a plasma bolt shot out from the alcove, burning through the air where Kermas had been a moment ago.

The bomb and the plasma bolt threw the few pedestrians in the tunnel into chaos, with most of them running away from the café and towards the flitport. Kermas would soon be in a firefight with a cloaked sniper and would have no cover at all.

Two can play at that game, he thought to himself, and activated his already powered-up cloak.

Something cracked behind Elite, and he turned to his right to find Shooter looking around confusedly among the furniture/bodies near the café’s far wall.

“(Shooter, get down!)” Elite ordered, but it was too late.

The lead Rantor, the Kannok of Pit Station, raised his gauntlet and fired four purple plasma flares across the room. Two of them struck Shooter in the faceplate, and he fell, reflexively firing a final plasma bolt into the roof before dying on the floor.

Flechette was next into action. He had spent the entire day against the far wall of the café, his disguise not the clunky power armor the rest of the Troopers had been forced to wear, but a simple hooded trenchcoat. He had dropped into a combat crouch when the action had broken out, but nonetheless had to toss away the remains of a chair that had caught him square in the face; Elite spotted a bleeding cut above his eye as the Trooper let down his hood.

He drew his weapon of choice, a Titanian Assault Rifle, from beneath the coat and opened fire, full auto, at the Saurian booth, where two of them struggled to assemble some sort of weapon on the tabletop while the Kannok covered them. One of the rounds clipped a Rantor in the shoulder; he growled and raised his own assault rifle and began taking potshots at Flechette while the other continued to assemble the weapon.

The hail of bullets from Flechette’s rifle forced the exposed Kannok to dive into the rubble strewn around the booths. Flechette tracked the Saurian as he sprinted past the other booths, all the while firing his wrist gauntlet blindly in Flechette’s direction. Another café patron, one of those seated in the other booths, died when Flechette missed the Kannok and hit the poor Snarrel in the neck.

The gunfire and the screams coming from the café sang to Kermas, but he resisted the urge to run back, knowing he could better serve the Trademaster here. He had no idea what kind of hell had broken out in the café, but he was certain that the sniper in the alcove was connected to it in some way.

The crowd of beings in the tunnel was almost completely gone now, reduced to an aged human on crutches trying to make speed and a hulking Glyphid Soldier, who simply looked around, confused.

Kermas deftly crept in the direction of the Soldier, reasoning that the sniper would probably be on the lookout for the telltale glimmer of active camo. The lava dust the Soldier was kicking up as he scampered around, trying to figure out what was going on, would at least provide temporary cover.

Suddenly, a second bolt rang out, striking the ground just a step ahead of Kermas. He recoiled, changing direction and heading on a diagonal course back to the tunnel wall. He’d have to make a mad dash at the alcove somehow, and was trying to get close enough so the sniper wouldn’t be able to track him with the scope.

He had not, however, taken into account how the Soldier would react. The massive, twelve-foot brute lashed out blindly with a blood-curdling squeal, his right arm catching Kermas behind his left knee.

The Rantor’s feet were swept out from beneath him, and as soon as his back hit the tunnel floor, knocking the wind out of him, he knew what was coming. He rolled to his left this time as the plasma bolt seared through the air. It singed Kermas as he rolled, catching him across the ribs under his right arm.

He growled as he completed the roll onto his back, and raised his wrist gauntlet. He pelted the alcove with plasma flares, and was rewarded with the flicker of the sniper’s cloak shorting momentarily in the darkness as the bolts struck him.

Confident that he could move freely, if only for a moment as the sniper recovered, Kermas rose to his feet… just in time for the Glyphid Soldier to knock him to his feet again. This time, Kermas fell forward, and let his training take over: he rolled flawlessly onto his feet, spun, and dropped, firing two plasma flares straight in the Soldier’s face. The sniper’s bolt hit the Soldier near-simultaneously, burning through the air exactly where Kermas’s head had been a split-second ago.

Finally, Elite spotted his shotgun, about four feet away in the mess of mutilated bodies surrounding the blast crater. Staying low, he shuffled over to it and grabbed it. A cursory examination revealed it to be intact, save for a few new dings and scratches and a lot of blood dripping off it.

Elite whirled in the Kannok’s direction and fired, silently praying the barrel wasn’t clogged up with wreckage or flesh. Much to his relief, the gun went off and didn’t blow Elite’s hand off. The blast was a miss, for the most part, but some of the buckshot must have made contact, as evidenced by the furious Saurian growl the Kannok let out. The wounded reptile came straight at Elite, talons at the ready, Flechette and his assault rifle momentarily forgotten.

Elite gripped the shotgun with both hands, silently wishing he was wearing his own armor, which was equipped with wrist-mounted auto-pistols and bayonets.

The Kannok’s first swipe came from below. Elite parried with the shotgun and tried to deliver a kick to the smaller being’s abdomen, but the Kannok’s form was flawless; he spun away, wrenching the shotgun with him. The weapon unsurprisingly snapped in half, ruined.

They disengaged, and had a split-second to size each other up. Elite was taller by almost a full two feet and his reach proportionately longer, but the Kannok had to be at least four hundred pounds of muscle backed up by a career of brutal murder that was longer than Elite had been alive. Elite realized that the lizard would tear him apart if this continued.

Then, there was a hollow, roaring rumble that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, and the ground beneath Elite’s feet seemed to shake. Everyone froze, confused. When the rumble subsided and it became clear that no further quaking was coming, Elite looked the Kannok directly in the eye, seeking an explanation of some sort, but his face was unreadable, even to Elite’s more-than-decent knowledge of Saurian body language.

The Rantors in the booth were the first to recover, and finally finished putting their weapon together: a Campaigner-designed minigun, complete with a translucent energy shield, emitted from a projector on its upper side.

The minigun whined to life, taking a half-second to spin to full speed before releasing a veritable torrent of bullets toward Flechette. The Trooper tried to duck back into the wreckage, but it was too late. The minigun peppered his armor relentlessly before finally striking the exposed flesh of Flechette’s midsection, and he chortled madly as the bullets literally tore him in two. His legs fell into the broken furniture beneath him, while his head, torso and arms went over the bar.

The huge Glyphid Soldier fell smoking to the ground.

Kermas abandoned all pretence at tactics or subterfuge, keeping low to the ground as he sprinted directly at the alcove, firing flare after flare toward the sniper as he ran. He bounded into the alcove in one leap, and struck the cloaked sniper feet-first.

There was a mad chortle from the sniper and Kermas felt a sudden dull pain in his knee. He reached reflexively for it as he fell to the floor of the smaller tunnel, and his claw came up against warm metal. He realized his knee had struck the sniper’s rifle; he curled his claw around the weapon and wrenched, hard.

The rifle decloaked as it left the sniper’s grip. Kermas got his other claw on the gun, and swung it like a club. It failed to gather much momentum in the enclosed space, but it had the intended effect: there was a flurry of cloaked movement, and the sniper lost his footing, falling onto the wall to Kermas’s left.

Somewhere in the back of Kermas’s mind, he realized that the sniper must be big, whatever he was, big and slender, by the looks of him. A Flesh Eater? A Blind One? Another Glyphid Soldier?

There was little time to ponder, however, as Kermas felt rather than saw a wicked-looking blade swinging out at him. He rolled under the blade, further down the tunnel, and blindly pummeled the mysterious being with his talon.

There was a wet squelch and a queer chortling sound, followed by mad thrashing, and again, Kermas rolled further down the tunnel. He kept his distance warily, watching the translucent gunman suffer. A thick, lumpy liquid was spilling onto the tunnel floor from the nothingness; blood, Kermas knew instinctively, but blood like he’d never seen before.

Elite and the Kannok had watched Flechette die, dumbstruck, but when the minigun died, its two hundred-plus rounds depleted in all of ten seconds, one of the Rantors behind the table in the booth again raised his assault rifle and trained it on Elite.

The Kannok leaped backwards to give his comrade a clear line of fire. This time, the reptile had set his rifle on full auto, and he tracked Elite as he raced for cover in the far corner of the café, rounds pelting the floor and walls behind him and ricocheting madly.

Elite grabbed a vacated stone table and turned it on its side, ducking behind it as rounds continued to issue from the Saurian’s rifle. He looked around, desperate for any kind of weapon.

Suddenly he spotted Shooter’s dead body about six feet from him, plasma rifle still in his grasp. He foolishly tried to reach for it, but a near miss from the Rantor ricocheted off the far wall and nicked Elite in the arm; he winced and jerked his hand back.

Terat.

It would only be a matter of time before they realized he was trapped, and there were three of them.

This is it. This is how it ends. After forty glorious years.

And then: movement. In the rubble and bodies lining the far wall. A Human girl of about twenty or so (Elite had never been terribly good at guessing the age of Humans) was still alive. She was prone, and trying to inch her way out of the Saurians’ line of fire on her hands and knees, away from Elite. She was easily within reach of the rifle.

“Girl,” Elite said in Human. “Human.”

The girl turned.

“Throw me the rifle. Throw me the gun.”

The Human girl simply stared at the Trooper.

“You think they’re going to care who they hit once they reload that minigun?”

The girl stared some more, and Elite realized she probably had no idea what a minigun was.

“They have more bombs, and pretty soon they’re going to throw one here. I have to kill them, or they will kill us.”

That seemed to have an effect: the girl snapped up on her haunches, grabbed the rifle and threw it to Elite, who caught it nimbly. The sudden movement caught the eye of the Saurian rifleman, and his shot went clean through the girl’s head, killing her instantly.

The distraction gave Elite enough time to roll onto his back. Straightening the rifle’s butt against his shoulder, he looked through the scope, found his target and fired.

The bolt hit its mark with pinpoint accuracy, striking the Saurian assault rifle’s magazine. The resulting explosion blew the rifleman’s left hand clean off, as well as the fingers of his right hand, and he fell back, screaming. The scream was then cut off when Elite put a second bolt in the reptile’s face. Elite panned the scope to the right, and found the head of the minigunner.

His eyes were bleeding from the magazine explosion, and Elite hesitated. He’s obviously blind. Perhaps I should show mercy.

But then he remembered how Flechette had died moments ago, and realized that the Trooper had probably had a few seconds of terrifying consciousness after being cut in half, more than enough time to realize that he was dying horribly. Elite squeezed the trigger.

The Saurian’s head burst like an overripe fruit, splattering the booth wall behind him with blood and brains.

Elite scrambled to his feet, lowering the rifle from his shoulder, and was unsurprised to find the Kannok charging directly at him with a crazed, blinding fury that had to be seen to be believed. Elite reflexively reached for the full-auto switch with his thumb, but it wasn’t there, and he realized dully that this must be a different model plasma rifle than the one he was used to. That idiot Shooter is going to be death of me in so many ways.

The sniper did not decloak when he died, and Kermas was no more enlightened as to his race or appearance than he was at the outset of the firefight. With the blood still roaring in his eardrums and the adrenaline coursing through his veins, it was a moment before Kermas realized that a quiet hiss was coming from the corpse. Kermas leaned closer, wary. The hissing was soft, and its frequency fluctuated gently.

            It’s a radio, he realized. No sooner had he come to this understanding than soft, tinny voices began issuing from it, speaking in Human.

            “What was all that?” asked a deep, dark, warbling voice.

            “Gol-gol, how should Mauly know?” answered an unmistakably Pus-Tra voice, rounded and basso. “Where you goin’?” continued the Pus-Tra, somewhat quieter this time.

            “We’ll have to go check it out. The hand-off will have to wait,” said the warbling voice, sounding more like a babbling brook that had somehow learned to form words by altering its flow than any kind of living being. Kermas noted it retained its volume, unlike the Pus-Tra voice; evidently, this was the being wearing the transmitter.

            “No, no! Make hand-off, then Mauly go help you ‘vestigate, yah?”

The Kannok roared a deafening challenge and pounced on Elite with stunning ferocity, pinning the rifle between them as they fell into the jumbled mass of furniture and bodies on the floor. Elite somehow managed to bring his left arm up to block the Kannok’s talons, and they raked into the wiry musculature on Elite’s exposed arm. Elite braced the arm against his waist, catching the Kannok’s hand in the crook of his elbow, and with his right hand, brought the butt of the plasma rifle into the Saurian’s jaw, hard.

The old reptile reeled, fazed. Elite pressed his advantage, and brought his not-inconsiderable weight down on the Kannok’s arm, which was still caught in the Trooper’s improvised lock.

Amazingly, the arm did not break, but there was a deep, dull pop and a snarl of pain from the Saurian. Elite realized he had dislocated the Kannok’s shoulder, but hastily disengaged from him when he realized his throat was within reach of the reptile’s mouth. He trained the plasma rifle on the Rantor, but before he could fire, the Kannok had thrown his good arm around Elite, trying to tackle him onto the floor.

Elite kneed the Kannok in the stomach, and the lizard went flying, crashing down into the remains of a table. Once again, Elite pointed the rifle at his head, and was surprised to see the Kannok entering a code into his wrist gauntlet. The self-destruct code.

“All I have to do is let go of this button,” the Saurian growled in Human.

“All I have to do is pull the trigger,” Elite said.

“I doubt you’d make it out of the room before I explode.”

“You’re probably right.”

The two warriors breathed heavily in the silence.

Kermas listened, fascinated, as the conversation turned into an argument.

“Listen, you fat fool,” came the watery voice. “We’re not going to stand here arguing with you while our buddies are getting shot at… or maybe you know something we don’t?”

“Nah-ah! Why would Mauly try to cross? He not in business of makin’ enemies!”

“Maybe you’re trying to screw us out of our fee.” There was a chortle, very much like the sniper’s death rattle, followed by a second, more distant and of a slightly different timbre. It seemed there were two of the mystery beings there with the Pus-Tra. Then, the second chortle shifted abruptly into awkward Human:

“Hey! Get hand off, foolish Terat!”

Then, there were half-finished grunts and yelps, mixed with more chortling, followed by the sharp, loud crack of gunfire. Kermas realized he could hear it echoing through the tunnels as well as on the dead alien’s radio, and took off, sprinting back towards the main tunnel and in the direction of the firefight.

Skreeok was wondering why the altercation hadn’t brought guards running to the café. The gangly alien who stood over him, plasma rifle leveled at his head, had to be thinking the same thing. Maybe he thinks he could kill them all, too, Skreeok thought. In fact, he probably could. I should just blow us both up right now.

But before Skreeok could end everything with another explosion, the sound of gunfire rang out from the tunnel to the flitport. Kermas, Skreeok surmised.

“Sounds like our warriors have decided to continue the fight without us,” Skreeok said to the alien.

“What inspiring leaders we are,” the alien said, somehow injecting sarcasm into his gurgling, guttural tones.

“You’re one of the Peregrine’s Troopers, aren’t you?” Skreeok heard himself asking, unsure of why he felt the urge to converse with the being that had just killed two Rantors and caused the death of at least one more, not to mention the civilians that had died in the firefight.

“And you are a scaly Saurian turncoat,” the Trooper warbled.

“Better to be a turncoat than a tool. The Peregrine would have killed every living thing in the Drift if he would have had his way.”

“The Peregrine doesn’t care if you live or die. He hates this stinking place and every being in it,” the Trooper barked, ire rising. “And you are still a tool.”

“The Concordance showed us the truth,” Skreeok countered. “They seek honor and justice. I can think of no purer path than to serve that.”

“If you think that is the truth,” the Trooper said slowly. “Then you are blind as well as stupid.”

The transmitter on Skreeok’s wrist gauntlet chose that exact moment to beep rather rudely, demanding his attention.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?” the Trooper said, an unmistakable hint of mirth creeping into his voice. Skreeok reached for the gauntlet with his good arm and depressed the flashing transmitter switch, his eyes never leaving the Trooper’s.

“[Skreeok,]” the Kannok spoke calmly into his wrist gauntlet.

“[Trademaster!]” The voice was Kermas’s, and judging by his tone and the ambient sound in the transmission, he was running as he spoke. “[I don’t know how much you already know, but we have hostile aliens on the moon. I killed one of them in the main tunnel, and I think they’re somehow affiliated with the Pus-Tra we’re looking for. I’m heading towards him now.]”

“[Yes. I’ve had a bit of a scuffle myself; you’ll have to proceed without me.]” Skreeok said, not taking his eyes off the Trooper. Better to not inform him of the situation. He might come running to my aid rather than find our prey, Skreeok reasoned, but something Kermas had said had intrigued him. “[Why do you surmise that the aliens are working with the Pus-Tra?]”

“[Well… I don’t think they’re working with him, exactly. I think they might be black marketers, or hired guns. I think the firefight we can hear in the flitport is them having a falling out over the money.]”

And there it was: the Trooper flinched. It was a very slight movement, a subtle twitch of his head, but it was unmistakable. The Trooper had just shown his hand. Skreeok was now certain of two things: the Trooper spoke Saurian, and his plans were no longer proceeding within acceptable parameters. The old reptile smirked.

“[That gunfire is not you?]” Skreeok asked, almost positive that the Trooper would want to know the answer to that, too.

“[No, it’s the Pus-Tra fighting the aliens in the flitport,]” Kermas explained.

“[Understood, Kermas. Proceed with caution, and die with honor, if necessary.]”

“[Copy that,]” Kermas replied, and with a beep, the conversation ended.

Skreeok tried to ignore the throbbing pain in his shoulder and jaw as he considered the implications of what Kermas had told him.

His initial assumption had been that the Pus-Tra had been working with the Troopers to infect the Pit with Deadmen, but it seemed unlikely that the Peregrine’s soldiers would employ two consecutive sets of middlemen to do the damage when they could easily have raided the station themselves.

Also, Skreeok could not conceive of a reason why the Troopers would want to attack the Pit in the first place, and in such a chaotic manner. The Peregrine was defeated, and Troopers had never left the Lightship while he was alive. He assumed that these Troopers must be mercenaries, and the only reason mercenaries would attack the Pit was if they had been paid to.

So why were these Troopers here, now, instead of on the Pit, completing whatever mission they’d been hired to do? Had Skreeok missed something about the attack? What was the Troopers’ role?

So perhaps his assumption had been wrong. Skreeok had learned long ago that when an answer to one question simply asked more questions, he was usually asking the wrong question to begin with. Perhaps the right question was not why the Troopers and the Pus-Tra had been working together, but rather why were the Troopers and the Pus-Tra fighting now.

Well. There is one way of investigating that.

 “[So,]” Skreeok said to the Trooper.

“[So,]” the Trooper replied in flawless Saurian.

“[Perhaps the Pus-Tra I came here looking for is the same one shooting it out with your friends in the flitport,]” Skreeok ventured. The Trooper took so long to reply that Skreeok began wondering whether or not the alien had understood him, but eventually, he spoke:

            “[Perhaps.]”

“[Perhaps we should make sure he answers for his crimes, whilst simultaneously ensuring he lives long enough to explain them,]” Skreeok suggested, his voice even.

The Trooper wavered slightly, shifting his weight, as if he was considering something.

“[Perhaps,]” the Trooper said.

The Troopers in the flitter bay had never really stood a chance.

Encumbered as they were by their disguises, Mauler had taken them out with a graceful elegance that had evidently surprised them. Big Boss has long ago rewarded Mauler’s loyalty with gifts that made him faster and more agile than a being his size had any right to be.

Mauler let the tip of his powersword drag along the flitter bay’s floor as he ambled nonchalantly past the two Troopers, one of them still dying and the other one decapitated, and towards their precious crate.

Cyclops lay bound and gagged within the crate.

He had known beings were dying around him when the fighting had started, and his perfect hearing had given him a fairly detailed picture of the nature of the violence. He had not believed it possible that something so big could be so fast, but there was something else about the Pus-Tra that disturbed Cyclops more. There was a deep and dark texture to the way the simian moved, a rhythm that belied the apparent simplicity of his technique.

He heard the huge being’s footsteps as he approached the crate, but it wasn’t until the crate was opened and Cyclops heard the air around the Pus-Tra, the muscles behind the armor, the heartbeat deep in the being’s chest that he realized the truth about the alien.

“You’re mine now,” the Pus-Tra said, and everything about him dripped of pure evil.

Kermas bounded into the flitter bay, assault rifle at the ready.

The Pus-Tra’s flitter dominated the scene, huge, ornate and archaic. Most of its hull was seemingly constructed of tanned and dried hide that had been stretched over a curving, sloping metal that created tent-like points all over it, jutting out like spikes.

In front of and to the right of the flitter lay the remains of two beings wearing power armor, a large cargo crate with its lid open, and a hulking being with a powersword staring into the crate. Kermas saw no reason to warn the Pus-Tra or alert it to his presence. He simply opened fire, full auto.

The Titanian bullets peppered the Pus-Tra’s helmet, ringing out almost musically as they ricocheted off the dark Uranian ore. The Pus-Tra responded with a muffled howl and spun to his right, bringing up the powersword and charging straight at Kermas.

Rather than keep running straight at the Pus-Tra, Kermas strafed to his left, knowing that Juggernauts were best fought from a distance. He lowered the rifle to his hip, never letting go of the trigger. It was unlikely that a rifle round would find its way through the armor, but it kept the larger being’s attention while Kermas began laying out a strategy for taking him out.

He made it to the side of the flitter and began to circle around it backwards, forcing the Pus-Tra to give chase so close to the flitter that its view of Kermas was slightly obscured. With his left hand, Kermas activated one of the grenades on his belt and detached it, simply letting it drop to the ground.

The Pus-Tra kept charging, and didn’t see the grenade until it was too late… or so Kermas thought. Amazingly, the bulky alien pushed off from the ground, as if to sidestep to his left, but rather than a simple step, he sped over the ground in a blur, almost as if he were hovering an inch over the ground. By the time the grenade went off, the Pus-Tra was well out of the blast range, twenty feet away in less than a second. The blast also did practically no damage to the flitter that Kermas could see.

The Pus-Tra stood still on the spot he had dodged to, tilting his helmeted head curiously as he eyed Kermas. This would be one of those moments where Humans say a chill runs down their spine, Kermas thought. The Pus-Tra cocked his head and resumed charging at Kermas.

In a split-second, Kermas realized he was fighting for his life against an opponent he had sorely underestimated. He fought panic, tossed aside his assault rifle and drew his flare gun, charging it to maximum power. He then pulled a second grenade off his belt and activated it. He counted to two and lobbed it straight at the charging Pus-Tra before bounding straight up and onto one of the odd protrustions sticking out from the flitter.

This time, the Pus-Tra was ready, just as Kermas had assumed; the second grenade had only been to buy time while the flare gun was charging. What Kermas had not expected, however, was the direction that the Pus-Tra would dodge this time: straight up.

The Pus-Tra leaped up and over the explosion, seemingly propelled by it. He landed on both feet, standing above Kermas on the inclined hull of the flitter at an angle that spat in the face of gravity and logic. Kermas didn’t have time to be terrified, however, as the Pus-Tra jumped down from his perch and straight at the Saurian.

This time, Kermas let his instincts take over. He fired the flare gun directly into the Pus-Tra’s face. The flare latched itself onto the right side of the Juggernaut’s faceplate, the violet-burning radioactive isotope at the flare’s core melting the armor into slag. The ore hissed and boiled as the Pus-Tra landed on the protuberance that Kermas stood on, but closer to the flitter’s hull than he was.

The Pus-Tra did not seem the least bit affected by the flare, standing immobile on the curving strut as the remains of his helmet bubbled away and the flare burned itself out. Kermas could see most of the Pus-Tra’s face, the flesh blackened and ruptured, crimson blood sizzling as it poured onto the neckpiece of the armor. The Pus-Tra grinned an awful grin, his black, glistening teeth visible inside the flash-cooked remains of the musculature in the right side of his face.

Kermas turned and leaped off the spoke. Before he hit the ground, however, he began feeling strange things. His spine suddenly bent to the left and his back felt too big; then there was an awful pressure on his ribs as his chest expanded.

Just before he hit the ground there was a strange combination of relief and searing pain and a sickeningly wet plop, and Kermas realized he could no longer feel his midsection. When he finally landed, he heard brittle cracking sounds and the pain completely engulfed him.

Elite had refused to cooperate with Skreeok unless the reptile agreed to stay in front of Elite and his plasma rifle for the entire run to the flitter bay. After awkwardly helping Skreeok push his arm back into its socket, the Kannok had led the way.

They were about three-quarters of the way down the tunnel when a deep, prolonged rumble came from all around them. Skreeok and Elite stopped running. Skreeok turned to face the younger warrior.

“The cryovolcano is erupting,” Skreeok said.

Well, that seems strangely appropriate, considering the kind of day it’s been, Elite thought to himself.

“Of course it is,” Elite said out loud, his tone approximating a sigh. “How long do you think we have?”

“An hour, maybe less,” Skreeok said. “Once the blast melts through the surface ice, the power cores won’t be powerful enough to contain the air rushing out into space.”

“The Icelords had to have known this was coming. They should have evacuated everyone days ago,” Elite said.

“As if you care whether Saurians live or die,” Skreeok snapped.

“Don’t be so testy. It’s amazing you’ve lived this long, considering how thin-skinned you are,” Elite said, inclining his head patronizingly.

“The Icelords only need about a half-hour to evacuate a mine; I suspect they’ve already finished,” Skreeok bit back at the Trooper.

“When would they have started?” Elite asked, but before Skreeok answered, he deduced the answer himself. “That quake in the middle of the firefight.”

“That was the fissure at the base of the cavern widening,” Skreeok said, nodding. “That’s why no guards came to stop the firefight; they were too busy evacuating everyone,” Skreeok mumbled, evidently thinking out loud.

They looked each other in the eye, and then resumed their run towards the flitter bay. This time, Elite did not care whether Skreeok was in front of him or not.

Mauler had been unaware of what the groundquakes meant, but Cyclops had been kind enough to tell him as the Pus-Tra lifted the old blind alien effortlessly onto the flitter and into a holding cell.

“That’s a volcanic eruption,” the Blind One had said warily from his cage as Mauler fastened his Inflator rifle onto a recharge rack. “And not bloody far away, either.”

“Gol-gol,” Mauler said, opening the viewport on the topside of the flitter and placing his hands on the power core.

The Al-Bakbuk Flitport was essentially a series of tunnels that reached from the icy surface of Enceladus and all the way through the dirty ice to the rock underneath. Leaving meant navigating through the often unstable tunnels, and making one’s way to the surface.

Mauler gently turned the power core over, and the flitter rose off the bay floor, drifting upwards into the dark cave.

Elite and Skreeok came running into the bay.

Skreeok immediately spotted a badly mangled Saurian body and ran to it, bellowing. Elite’s reaction was a bit more measured, but he felt every bit as wronged and defeated as Skreeok sounded, having spotted the bodies of Scythe and Pistol by the empty crate.

He took aim with his plasma rifle, seeking any kind of obvious target on the strange, ancient flitter. He fired blast after blast at anything even remotely resembling a weak point, including a recent-looking black scorch mark on its side, but to no avail: the flitter just kept rising.

Skreeok roared, his voice little other than a massive blast of hatred that rattled Elite’s brain like nothing else he’d ever heard. The Kannok raised his gauntlet and fired indiscriminately at the disappearing flitter. Elite relented before Skreeok did, lowering his rifle and walking to the bodies by the crate as Skreeok simply kept firing.

Scythe had taken a powersword to the shoulder that had torn through his armor like it was paper, cleaving his chest and bleeding him out slowly. Pistol’s head had been taken off by a similar blow. The kind of strength needed to inflict such damage, even with a powersword, was simply astonishing; Elite had never seen anything like it.

The flitter was gone, and finally, Skreeok relented, lowering his gauntlet. He just stood there for a moment, panting, before letting out one final howl, its impotent fury underscored by the hollow echoes of the cavernous bay.

Elite tossed the plasma rifle to the ground and walked over to the dead Rantor, who had evidently been killed with an Umbrielian Inflator Rifle, a horrible piece of weaponry by any standards.

The Saurian had taken several darts, judging by the still-gravid bulges jutting from his chest and side, but the fatal one had burst open his abdomen, splattering his intestines and abdominal muscles over a surprisingly wide area of the bay floor. The reptile’s skewed spine had been completely severed by some sort of impact, and Elite deduced he had fallen or been pushed from a fair height; without his innards to support him, his back had broken when he landed.

Then something twitched, and he realized that it hadn’t been fatal at all.

“(By the Peregrine,)” Elite said in his native tongue. “(He’s still alive.)”

“[Who… who in Serean’s name are you?]” the warrior gurgled, almost too soft to make out.

“[I fear it would take too long to explain,]” Elite said in Saurian.

Skreeok sprang into motion at hearing the other Rantor’s voice, kneeling by his side. The two reptiles said nothing, but no words were necessary. The Kannok ran a claw over the other’s jaw.

“[Sleep now. The strong persist,]” Elite said softly.

Skreeok either did not hear or chose not to react. He simply drew his assault rifle, steadied it against his shoulder, and shot the other Rantor through the skull.

***

Elite and Skreeok sat alone in the Kannok’s flitter as the reptile skillfully piloted the craft away from Enceladus.

“That was Stinger, my second-in-command, on board the other flitter,” Elite said after ending the transmission. “He says that as soon we have triangulated Mauler’s course and destination, we should radio him. Our flitter is much slower than this one, so he won’t be able to follow us; he’ll need to know where to meet us.”

Skreeok did not reply.

“He wasn’t exactly thrilled at the fact that I’d told him everything about our mission, or that I’d be riding with you,” Elite continued.

Skreeok did not reply.

“You know, if you’re going to be a grouch the whole way there, just tell me now, and I’ll make up some sort of song to keep me busy while we’re flying.”

“I was sitting right here. I heard what you said to your second, and what he said to you,” Skreeok said quietly. “And have you no respect for the warriors that died? That you yourself killed?”

It was Elite’s turn not to reply.

“Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about losing the others,” Skreeok said, all menace suddenly out of his voice as he peered through one of the forward telescopes. “Judging by his heading, I don’t think the Pus-Tra is even leaving the Cronian.”

“Really? Where’s he going?” Elite said, peering out into space as if he could somehow see the tiny flitter out there with his bare eyes. Skreeok consulted a paper chart of Saturn and its expansive family of rings and moons, and did some simple math with a stylus and a compass.

“Dione,” Skreeok said.

“Dione?” Elite asked.

“Dione.”