Encrypted (31 page)

As they traveled deeper into the lab, new
higher pitched growls grew audible. They came from somewhere near
the back wall. The second creature. Tikaya hoped some of the
marines were moving that way too.

They eased closer. Twenty meters, fifteen,
ten. Around the corner, claws clacked, teeth snapped, lips smacked,
and a tearing sound ripped the air. Tikaya hesitated, certain she
did not want to see the source of those noises—or what it was
eating. Rias’s hand rested on her shoulder briefly. She nodded to
herself and peered around the corner.

Fifteen meters away, in a wide aisle, a huge
bipedal creature crouched over a ravaged human corpse. The beast
lacked fur, and powerful muscles rippled beneath oily black skin
that gleamed under the light. The only thing soft were full breasts
that swayed as it tore at flesh.

Tikaya slipped out and raised her bow.

The creature snorted. The head that came up
appeared simian except for the long fangs flecked with blood and
tissue. The arms and hands, too, were disturbingly human, though
claws flashed at the ends of those fingers. The creature reared on
its hind legs, powerful thigh muscles bunching. It sprang and
sprinted toward them.

A rifle fired over her head, the report
deafening. Tikaya expected it and did not flinch. Rias’s shot
grazed the creature’s jaw. She loosed her arrow at the neck. It
sunk in, and the beast cried out, its scream eerily human. But
neither shot slowed its advance.

Rias’s pistol fired, hammering the creature
between its breasts. Tikaya had time for one more shot and aimed
for an eye, but the beast was closing fast. Her arrow skimmed its
temple instead.

Tikaya flattened herself against the wall,
hoping she could dodge if those claws flashed. She thought the
beast’s momentum would carry it past her, but it halted with
amazing athleticism.

It whirled on her, claws raised. Rank breath
washed over her. She ducked even as Rias yanked her out of reach.
She almost lost the bow as he charged past, cutlass raised. She
recovered and stepped back to nock another arrow. Rias ducked a
swipe and darted in, but the muscled torso deflected his blade like
armor. He nicked a vein, drawing blood. Claws gashed his arm before
he could leap out of reach. Its speed was mesmerizing, but she
forced herself to focus.

With the creature sparring with Rias, she
could wait for a chance at a critical target. There. She fired, and
the arrow plunged into its eye.

The beast staggered into a counter, gashing
its own face as it clawed at the arrow. It stumbled, then pitched
backward. Still.

Tikaya leaned a hand against the wall for
support and let her bow droop. “Next time we attack a
twelve-foot-tall monster, we probably don’t need to worry about me
seeing over your head.”

“
Conceded.” Rias rotated
his arm to check the slashes below his shoulder, but dismissed
them. “One down. Let’s see if the other is still alive.”

A rifle cracked in the center of the
lab.

“
I’m guessing so,” Tikaya
said.

Rias jogged along the wall toward a
cross-aisle where he could cut over. He paused when he reached the
half-eaten man. It was wearing the black uniform of a Turgonian
marine. Though the neck had been torn out, the chest smashed and
ravaged, the face remained mostly intact.

“
That’s not one of ours,
is it?” Tikaya asked.

“
No.”

“
Somebody from the
fort?”

Multiple rifles fired.

“
Later,” Rias said,
already disappearing around a corner.

A bestial screech reverberated through the
lab, and men shouted orders. Tikaya raced after Rias, careening
around the corner to face another melee. A second creature, larger
and more muscled than the first, fought in the center. This one was
male.

Marines attacked from both ends of the
aisle, cutlasses and daggers struggling to pierce the resilient
skin. The creature whirled, slashing forward, then back, its wild
actions enraged, and Tikaya wondered if it knew its mate had
fallen. Blood streamed from its sleek flesh, but it batted men away
without faltering. As tall as the Turgonians were, they had little
chance of reaching the neck or head with their blades.

Rias charged into the fray. Tikaya drew the
bow, waiting to glimpse an eye, but the beast chose that moment to
escape. It sloughed off its attackers and charged her direction.
Her heart lurched. She loosed her arrow, but she lunged to the side
too soon, and her shot only struck muscle.

She glanced at the cabinets on either side
of her. There was no time to climb out of reach. She smashed
herself to the side again, hoping this creature would run past.
Though, even if it did, all it would have to do was rake her on the
way past and—

Steel zipped through the air from the aisle
behind her. A knife lodged in the creature’s eye.

It tripped and tumbled, skidding past her.
The prone form crashed into a cabinet, jolting it. The door flung
open, and trays of bones spilled out. Human bones, tagged and
marked with colored dots. Smaller ones, fragile with age,
shattered.

Tikaya found Rias’s eyes, thinking of his
admonition not to break anything. Chest heaving, he stood amongst
the other marines. He shook his head slowly.

“
Everyone back to the
entrance,” he said.

Before following the men, Tikaya tossed a
glance toward the back wall. Someone had thrown that knife, yet no
marines filed in from that direction.

A clunk echoed through the lab.

“
Hurry,” Rias
urged.

He led a sprint to the stairs where Bocrest
twitched an eyebrow at Tikaya and said, “Nice shot.”

She did not answer. It had not been her
attack that brought the second creature down.

“
Let’s go,” Rias said. “In
the hall. We don’t want to be here when the cubes
arrive.”

“
Cubes?” Bocrest
asked.

Tikaya thought of the square vials from the
rocket, but surely he could not mean those.

“
No time to explain.” Rias
pushed past and into the corridor. Leaving the lab without
exploring it seemed an abandoned opportunity, but Tikaya did not
question him, not when such grimness haunted his face.

Before they took three steps down the
tunnel, a door ahead of them slid open. A black one-foot-wide cube
floated out at chest level. Tiny red and yellow lights flashed on
its top, and a one-inch hole glowed red on its front. A few symbols
ran along the sides, and she leaned forward, squinting.

“
Back,” Rias said. “Back
into the lab.”

“
What does it—” Tikaya
started, but the glowing hole brightened and a red beam lanced out.
Rias yanked her to the side, and it caught the edge of her sleeve.
The beam burned a hole through the material.

She half ran and was half dragged back into
the lab. Marines crowded the landing, but Rias shoved his way to a
panel on the wall. He waved his hand over a pale square. The door
slid down from the top of the jamb.

Tikaya stared at smoke wafting from the hole
in her sleeve and swallowed.

A beeping started, soft but audible
throughout the lab. It came from the walls, the ceiling,
everywhere.

“
Two more of those cubes
coming from below,” Bocrest said.

“
If I can get close enough
to read what’s on the sides, maybe I can figure out how to stop
them,” Tikaya said.

“
If you get that close,
you’ll be dead,” Rias said.

“
There’re two more in the
back.” Agarik pointed. “Shooting, burning, er, incinerating the
dead creatures.”

“
Yes.” Rias rummaged in
his pack. “They do that to everything. And everyone. Also, I don’t
know how to lock the doors. The one outside will be in
soon.”

Tikaya bent to examine runes lighting the
wall by the door. She recognized one that had indicated “up” on the
rocket. When she pressed the symbol it indented, but nothing
happened. She found she could rotate it. A soft thunk came from
within the wall. “I think that may have—”

“
We’ve got to split up, or
we’ll be surrounded,” Bocrest said.

“
Actually, I want them all
in one spot.” Rias had opened his rucksack and knelt, mixing a
liquid and something else into a bottle. Caustic fumes stung
Tikaya’s eyes.

A red beam from below splashed against the
wall on the landing. It adjusted, lowering, and marines ducked out
of the way.

“
Forget that,” Bocrest
said. “Karsus, get these men under cover, and shoot at anything
that moves.”

“
Bocrest!” Rias
barked.

The squads were already running off, Bocrest
included this time, leaving only Tikaya and Rias on the landing.
Below, a pair of cubes, which had been floating languidly toward
the stairs, split and increased speed. One chased after each group
of men. Before one of the squads reached cover, a beam shot out,
taking the last man in the back.

He screamed. Tikaya gripped the railing,
unable to take her eyes from the scene.

The rear two men from the squad shot and
rifle balls clanged off metal. At the least, the force should have
propelled the cube backward, but it never moved. The beam
continued, piercing the marine’s body and coming out the other side
as it incinerating flesh, muscle, and organs. Even when he dropped
to the ground and curled into a ball, it stayed with him. It
cauterized as it burned an ever-widening hole in his torso. The
marine stopped moving, eyes glazed in death. The cube’s beam kept
breaking down the body, even burning blood away.

Tikaya, thunderstruck by the ghastly scene,
almost did not notice Rias racing down the stairs with nothing but
a jar of orange liquid in his hands. At first, the automaton
ignored him, busy finishing its incineration of the dead man. Rias
kept sprinting, one hand gripping the jar, one on the lid. The cube
abandoned its task and rotated toward him.

“
No!” Tikaya grabbed her
bow, though she did not know what good she could do if rifles had
not damaged the device.

Rias flung some of the liquid on the cube,
then ducked under it as the beam shot. It sizzled past, missing
him. It struck the stair railing, but the beam did not affect the
black metal. The viscous liquid on the cube smoked red. Pungent
fumes gagged the air as it oozed down the sides.

That did not stop the automaton from
rotating toward Rias, its ominous red hole glowing. Before its
deadly side disappeared from sight, Tikaya fired, aiming for the
orifice shooting those beams. Her shot flew true, and the shaft
lodged inside. But the red glow flared and a beam incinerated the
arrow.

Rias found cover behind a column.

A hiss sounded behind Tikaya.

“
Look out!” Rias
yelled.

She whirled. The door she had tried to lock
opened, revealing two cubes on the threshold. Their holes
glowed.

Tikaya leaped over the railing. The floor
came quickly, and she landed with an ankle-jarring jolt. Two beams
zipped over her head. Off-balance, she skittered into the shadows
beneath the landing.

Gunfire echoed elsewhere in the lab. She
sensed rather than heard the cubes floating down the stairs.

“
Over here.” Rias beckoned
with an arm. “Zigzag your path.”

With a wary glance at the cubes coming
down—they were only a few steps from the bottom—Tikaya raced across
the open space toward Rias.

“
Zag!” he
barked.

She angled left. A beam splashed the floor
inches from her feet. After a few more steps, she veered right.

Something crashed behind her, but she did
not slow to look. She skidded behind Rias’s column, nearly jabbing
him in the face with her bow.

He gripped her shoulder and started to
speak, but an agonized scream echoed from the back corner.

“
Curse Bocrest for not
listening,” Rias growled. He pointed at the cube he had doused with
the goop. It lay on the ground, part of its exterior burned away to
expose silvery innards. “It’s working. I made it in the vehicle
garage in Wolfhump. I wasn’t sure it’d be the same as—”

“
Those two are coming,”
Tikaya said.

“
Right, yes. We have to
get some of this on them, too, but I don’t have a chance unless
they’re distracted.”

“
You want me to do
that?”

“
Not ideally,” Rias
said.

The cubes floated closer, no urgency to
their movement, but an eerie inexorableness marked their
flight.

“
This way.” Rias led
Tikaya down the aisle to find cover behind the next
column.

“
I thought you wanted to
challenge me,” she said.

“
You saw how lethal one
can be, and we’ve got two to deal with. I don’t want you to get
hurt.”

More likely killed, Tikaya thought. She
smiled bleakly. “If not me, who else?”

“
I’ll do it,” an
emotionless unfamiliar voice said from behind them.

A young man—he could not have been more than
seventeen or eighteen—stood there, wearing fitted black clothing
and soft black boots. Several sizes of daggers adorned his belt,
and a set of throwing knives was strapped to his right arm. He
carried nothing else.

“
Go,” Rias said, hefting
his jar.

If the boy’s appearance surprised him half
as much as it did Tikaya, he did not show it. She lifted a hand,
intending to protest sending someone so young on a suicide mission,
but the youth had already jogged from concealment.