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“That’s fucked up,” Watts agreed. “But what’s your point.”

Sterns turned to face them with a grin. “I’m thinking maybe the bogeyman lives on Calliope, not Norway.”

Collins was about to suggest they move on to the next lab when Sterns suddenly arched forward. A hole twenty centimetres across appeared in her chest, blood spraying forward as her ribs angled out like reaching bony fingers. She looked down in surprise, uttering a quiet, “Oh.” The desk behind her was clearly visible through the hole, then she collapsed.

“The fuck?” Watts screamed, rushing over.

“Scan the fucking room!” Collins shouted. Not Henna. No, no, no, not Henna!

He crouched, moved in a circle looking for the source of the attack, but the lab was unchanged. There had been no muzzle flash, no sound. He quickly rewound the footage recorded in his HUD and watched again, playing close attention to Sterns. Nothing anywhere around her, then she launched forward, her chest exploded. Oh. She dropped.

Watts crouched beside the fallen marine shaking her head. “Dead before she hit the ground. Fuck. Henna!” As she rose to face Collins, she staggered to one side, then screamed as her left arm fell, sheared off at the shoulder. She sat down hard, blood arcing from the gaping wound. She scrambled for a patch can and frantically sprayed fast-expanding foam across the injury.

Collins began cycling through light bands. He swept his gaze left and right, looking through infra-red, microwave, gamma, ultraviolet, around and around, his vision a kaleidoscope of changing images, looking for anything that might be a source of the attack. Then movement. Subtle, almost immediately ceased. Without giving himself away, moving only his eyes, he looked back into the corner of the lab. Under the arm of some strange mechanism like a giant dentist’s light, something stood stock still. Visible only in ultraviolet, it was a shape made of mirrors, quicksilver. No discernible features or details.

Collins raised his weapon and it came directly for him. Bigger than a man, it seemed to project itself forward on four pounding legs that thrust vertically up and down against the floor without a sound. Four more upper limbs stretched out, reaching for him, each ending in a long hand of three blade-like fingers. Its head was a flat wedge, arrowing forward.

Collins fired, his finger grinding against the trigger on full auto. The weapon barked deafening projectile death and gouts of fire, ripping into the creature. It staggered back, the wedge head splitting open as though it were screaming in agony, but still it made no sound. With less than five meters between them, Collins thumbed a mini-grenade from the barrel-mounted launcher and it exploded against the thing’s torso, threw it back into the corner where it lay still. Collins staggered under the shockwave, but kept his feet.

“Lieutenant, everyone, we have aliens here!” he yelled over a squad-wide waveband. “Use ultraviolet!”

There was no reply. No blips marked their positions on HUD. He realised he hadn’t seen their blips for a while. How long?

“Lieutenant?” Nothing. “Daisy?” Nothing. “Fuck.” Collins hurried over to Watts, turning slow circles as he went, scanning everywhere.

“Make sure it’s dead!” Watts said, waving him towards the creature he’d shot. Her face was pale and sweaty behind her visor, the slash of freckles across her nose standing out clearer than ever, but her shoulder was sealed up in med-foam. “I’m dumping painkillers like a junkie,” she said. “I’m okay for now.”

Collins nodded once. His eye fell on Sterns and he tore his gaze away, stifling a sob of grief and fury equally combined. Weapon trained on the inert thing in the corner, he approached cautiously. It seemed to flicker slightly, the mirrored body switching between invisibility and a dark, shining greenblack shell. “Cloaking device?” Collins whispered, as much to himself as to Watts. “And a sound suppressor?”

The thing’s chitinous exoskeleton was revealed in the flickers to be split in several places by his bullets, a wider rent in the centre of its torso where the mini-grenade had exploded. Thick, black fluid leaked everywhere, presumably its equivalent of blood. The bladed fingers were extensions of its carapace, one or two of them spastically extending and retracting, a smaller many-tentacled hand-like appendage quivered under the shifting knives. It twitched and shivered, seeming to swell and collapse, its form fluid. It had no face to recognise, but a wide mouth in its wedge of a head and a thin, glistening line around the upper ridge that might have been some kind of visual organ.

It reached up weakly, blades flicking forward. Collins skipped back. Those things had gone right through Watts’ armour and her shoulder. Right through Henna’s body. He stepped back in, pressed the muzzle of his rifle to the band of maybe-eye, and fired a burst into its head. It danced and writhed under his attack and fell still. The flickering ceased and it lay there, a dark, ugly, armoured thing.

“Fuck you,” he said and went back to Watts. He helped her up and she leaned on him heavily. “We can’t leave Henna.”

“We’ll come back for her,” Watts said. “The drugs are kicking in but I’ll need your help for a minute. We gotta regroup.”

“Stay on ultraviolet and be extra eyes for me.”

She threw her arm over his shoulder and brandished her weapon. “I can still fire one-handed.”

Collins glanced at the rifle so close to his head, nodded. “Just keep the muzzle up.”

“Took my fucking arm,” she said, voice low with incredulity. “Took Henna!”

“They’ll build you a new arm once we get out. And everything here will die in Henna’s name!”

He looked over at Sterns laying in a widening pool of blood as he led Watts away. “We’ll avenge her,” he said through gritted teeth, pushing away the emotion of the loss. He loved Sterns. They all did. She was the best of them.

“Three o’clock!” Watts yelled. She grunted as she swung her rifle up one-handed and triggered short, controlled bursts.

Collins winced against the volume of her rounds, kept his left arm around her waist to keep them moving, and matched her method with his right, as three mirror-bright shapes raced into the room from the lab next door. He pumped mini-grenades, drove them back. One broke right and tried to get behind them so he swung Watts and they danced a pirouetting retreat, raking fire and grenades as they went, ears ringing with the ordnance in the confined space. Smoke and light filled the room, equipment shards rained down. Lights blew out and sparks fell like bright orange snow.

They stumbled into the corridor and Collins spotted an emergency lock down beside the door and kicked it. His heel smashed through the glass covering and drove into the large button. Red lights flashed around the doorframe and a thick blast shield dropped as the double doors whooshed shut. Metallic thuds rang out as several masses hit the other side. The same three, unstopped by their bullets and grenades, or a new wave he couldn’t know. And he didn’t have time to care.

“Let’s hope that holds them for now.”

“There are other ways around,” Watts said breathlessly.

“Let’s just get to the C and C.”

They ran for the Command and Control Centre, Collins calling for Capstan and Daisy the whole way, but comms remained dead. As the C and C drew within about fifty metres on their HUD map Capstan’s voice boomed out. “…asses in here now, we’re locking down in thirty seconds.”

“We’re ten seconds away,” Collins yelled.

Something smashed and clattered behind them, then a symphonic rain of shattered glass. Watts tipped her weapon upside down on her right shoulder, let loose random short bursts, strafing left and right. Collins glanced back to see two glimmering masses, wider and lower than before, galloping up behind them, less than ten metres away.