FSE

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Chapter 29

Solomon Sign cruised through the battle-rent sky, dodging thunderheads and riding updrafts that jangled his aerospace troop transport about like a cork in hurricane seas. Below him, the living force of war tore across a blighted, blasted city-scape, thousands of lives ending in violence and slaughter as lightning strobe-lit the pitched battlefield of crumpled industry and burning vehicles.

He watched as great hordes of artillery answered that lightning with a thunder and flash all their own. Their shells mostly arced on high trajectories, up and over the jagged, leaning skyscrapers of a city ripped to ruin, to crash down on battles below and leave hamburgered flesh and clouds of asphalt rain in their wake. The lizard chewed his lip, running the hard bone-ridge that was his teeth along the flesh there, worrying at it in mirror of how he worried for his squad-mates in the horror and chaos that spread below him.

For too long, he'd circled, avoiding the areas where dogfights filled the sky with fireworks and hot death. He'd waited for any sign or signal from his team, from the furs who were on the ground so he didn't have to be. He'd monitored the frequencies filled with enemy transmissions, passively listening as their cadence and content had slowly gone from confident and active to frightened and frantic.

He was about to make another pass out of the city, to scout the outskirts, when the sky began to light red through the clouds of rain and smoke and debris. A quick glance upward, and the lizard's calculating mind began running through possibilities. An orbital strike could briefly light the sky red, but that would have come to pass before he had any chance to react or think about it. A plasma weapon could have been used to light the upper atmosphere on fire, but there would be little purpose to such a tactic under the current circumstances. The only remaining reasonable option was a mass orbital drop, of thousands of objects re-entering atmosphere simultaneously and pushing their retro-rockets to guide their descent through stormy sky and dogfight chaos.

His theory was confirmed moments later, when a massive shape plunged straight through a nearby thunderhead, arcing with electrical discharge as it opened fire with heavy cannons, obliterating a Junta artillery position before alighting on the ground like an enormous metal albatross. From its gut, a massive hatch opened downward, and Solomon Sign couldn't help a relieved ghost of a half-smile as advanced heavy Mjolnir tanks began rolling out in squadron formation, their escorting infantry already perched atop the lumbering hover-behemoths.

Junta fire teams immediately began responding, almost seeming to light up with energy as they heard what was landing in their midst. Streaming away from slogged-down gunfights and building to building combat, enemy reinforcements began to scramble toward the landing zone that was quickly being born right atop where their supporting field artillery had hunkered down. Howitzers meant for dealing with entrenched infantry near the mid-point of their range were taken by surprise and overrun in moments, as dozens more of the heavy landing craft plummeted from the sky, slamming to earth in great clouds of water and kicked-up slag and ash.

Solomon Sign, Randy Kerrick, only wished he could radio the good news to his unit. They were still deep underground, far behind enemy lines and hours away from rescue. At this point, it was clear something had gone wrong - they should have been out an hour ago. At least, he knew, the reinforcements were en route.

Void Shadow screamed his laughter to the darkness, serenading the great celestial playground of stellar battle with his rolling guffaws of glee and chaos. He sling-shotted around the enormous, writhing, living planetary mass of Sacred Song-Haven, using its gravity to accelerate his fighter like a massive incorporeal sling-shot, before hurtling into the midst of a massive enemy response to the enormous terror that had singularity-jumped right into the battlefield's center.

All around him, billions of Ix'kat drones hurtled through the void. Their wings, in atmosphere, would have been used both as thrust and attitude control, directing the terrifying creatures to their screaming, pissing prey with terrible ominous buzzings that kept veterans awake in cold sweats at night. Here, in their native void of space, the Ix'kat drones bore a horrible grace, their diaphanous gemstone-rainbow wings flittering only the slightest bits to direct their spine-covered multi-hued bodies gracefully through the nothing on trajectories to intercept enemy craft.

Void Shadow let rip with his cannons, clawing an enemy bomber from the sky that had managed to win through the great seething cloud of death and chitin, evidently with the intent to dump ordnance onto the great mobile planet's surface. The bulbous craft, already trailing smoke, exploded in a white and blue-green nuclear fireball as its heavy torpedo payload lit off. In instants, the Ix'kat had swormed the explosion sight, gathering fissible material as it scattered at high speed from the point of impact. Void only took a moment to bother wondering why, before his attention was stolen by alarms in his cockpit.

"Hahaha, good! You've got some fight left!"

Enemy fighter craft swarmed towards him and the Ix'kat like a massive shoal of piranhas, agile and sharp-toothed, with blood on their minds. As the two forces slammed together, he laughed, images of a man trying to hold back a hurricane with his bare paws popping to mind.

Soundless death ripped from his weapons as pushed the throttle full forward and held down his triggers. Something exploded, an enemy fighter holed straight through the cockpit half a heartbeat before his invisible fighter smashed right through the space it had been occupying, in time to blast another of the dead fur's wingmates before breaking off in a great split-s to look for more opponents.

To his port and above, Ix'kat drones flew in perfect harmony. A third of them, perhaps, were grabbing onto hurtling enemy fighters, crawling onto them, ripping at the armor plates and more delicate pieces. Some smashed straight through cockpit canopies, spittng acidic bile onto the void-sealed space suits standard among starfighter pilots, melting them to death if they were lucky and exposing them to the sucking void if they weren't.

Some fighters were hit so hard they simply exploded, drones sacrificing themselves without a second thought to jam their engines or rip their cores apart.

Void Shadow barrel-rolled to avoid a short-range missile locked onto someone else behind him, and contemptuously returned fire, blowing the right wing and engine nacelle off an incoming escort bomber, sending it into a horizontal spin through space that would likely leave its crew vomiting and disoriented if they survived more than a few moments. Then he was through the dense-packed dogfight, escorted by two thirds of the Ix'kat drone warriors as they washed right over and past the enemy's great attempt at a counterattack, utterly ignoring the UGF's desperate try to put them on the defensive.

Far behind him, blocked from easy sight by the great light show of space combat, his sensors saw Sacred Song-Haven, golden and glistening in the light of Centaurus, utterly uncaring as a few enemy fighters got close and dumped every ounce of their armament on its surface to no effect. Their attack had been one of utter panic mixed with bravado, the squirrel knew. To attack a planet-sized mass, built by the great insects of the Ix'kat to withstand every rigor of space, with anything less than multiple battleships was just laughable. It was like watching a teacup poodle try to take down the Mongol Horde.

Ahead of him, the most well-propelled Ix'kat drones were swarming in, great tendrils of a massive living cloud, toward the large capital ships that had made up the UGF armada's frontal formation. Lacking the maneuverability for quick turns, the four great battleships had been momentarily abandoned by their escort craft, likely as the result of a poorly thought-out order to pull back and regroup. Their offensive formation, designed to crush Rear Admiral Vernier's smaller fleet, was not well-made for turning or re-deployment.

Void Shadow roared at no one, and folded into a tight dive, letting loose with his cannons at the same moment his quarry opened fire with its withering batteries of point defenses, sending tremendous blasts of plasma and iron-core chaff into the swarming tsunami of insects.

Some were splattered, vaporized, atomized. Others crushed by impact, or hurled away from the fight by shockwaves of near-misses, unable to correct without actual thrusters. Most simply flew straight through the withering barrage, utterly unafraid and unintimidated, smashing into the hull with terrible force before beginning to rip at the metal, spitting globs of powerful acid to soften nano-steel plating.

Void fired off a rocket from his right wing, blowing a neat little hole where two Ix'kat had softened the armor with their saliva. As if they could read his mind, the Ix'kat nearby swarmed toward the hole, tearing it wider and wider as Void Shadow pulled his throttle all the way back and engaged his retro rockets, hovering in position to blast through the same spot six more times with six more rockets.

Then he pulled away, slamming his throttle to full as thousands of gnashing, fluttering warrior scarabs streamed into the enemy battleship, intent on feeding and massacre.

Derrywinced, the disorientation of optically linking with his rifle nearly making his already-agonized body vomit all over his weapon. Through his mechanical right eye, the big black wolf could see the ruined hallway beyond, and get some idea what the enemy were doing without risking his now-unarmored head being blown off.

Sure enough, there was no sign of the black jaguar whose tongue he'd bitten off, who had nearly slaughtered his entire team like cattle, though the bits of brain and skull Nivea's shot had splattered along the wall were still more or less in place. Enemy dead lay heaped in the hall, from a charge they'd made just a minute before, trying to overwhelm Candace and himself with sheer force of numbers. The butcher's bill was high, he saw to his grim satisfaction, high enough that it had created soft cover for advancing enemies to hide behind.

Olliver's voice came over the headsets again, andDerryhad to grab for a discarded hood and press it to his ear, rifle still held one-pawed and aiming as the enemy moved behind cover.

"Say again, Four, I missed your last."

"This is Four," the otter's clipped, educated voice repeated. "I am approximately four minutes from your position. The hospital is badly damaged and partly filled with civilians, so cutting straight through the outer walls is no longer an option. Can you hold?"

Derrygrimaced. Deep inside, he knew he agreed with the otter. Collateral death of civilians wasn't something he wanted, even if he'd never be brought up on charges given the circumstances. He could order the otter to drive Black Jack right through the outer wall and be here in a minute or less, but to do so would risk the lives of every innocent fur in the building if the structure started to collapse. However, the enemy's numbers were growing, and sooner or later they would disarm the throw-mines he'd tossed down the opposite side of the hallway that ran past his unit's makeshift fortification. Once that happened, there would be no holding against a two-pronged assault.

"I'll make it happen, Four. We are in a supply room on the first floor. 132-A, according to the door. Use the fire escape maps, and see if you can't come through our back wall. I doubt it's structural. Just do it at slow speed, we've got wounded."

Olliver's voice sounded tinny through the damaged headset, butDerrycould nonetheless pick up the otter's grim determination.

"Understood, Lead. Stay alive."

He set the head mask aside, and ducked reflexively as a spatter of enemy fire flew past the doorway, forcing him to pull his rifle back for fear of damage to the weapon. He left the neural jack attached, and tried to keep his left eye shut while talking to his two remaining combat-worthy squad mates.

"Derkin, when Olly comes through that wall, get the wounded out. Waters, you'll cover his six."

The vixen's voice was pinched, pained, andDerryknew she was hiding more injury than she'd let on. There wasn't time to bawl her out about it, though.

"You'll be right behind us, yeah?"

Derry's rifle slid around the corner again, and he let off a one-pawed burst of fire, cutting down a pair of cats who had tried belly-crawling to get within grenade-tossing range.

"Leave your trip wires and grenades with me. I'll make sure they don't catch you on the way out."

"That's not a fucking answer, Sergeant!"

The sudden flare of fire-hot furious anger was so strong he almost turned and grabbed her. Almost. If he had, he knew, he would probably have decked the vixen and roared in her face. The battle adrenaline was doing funny things, he realized in an odd sort of detached lucidity. Instead of attacking her or yelling, he reined himself in and spoke in a soft tone, entirely at odds with the thrumming terror-fury that sat acidic and fiery in his chest and nervous sweaty paws he actually felt.

"It's simple math, Lieutenant Waters. None of you can move as fast as they can right now, and our stealth equipment is fucked. Olliver can only cover you from one side. I'm not planning to throw my life away, but if I have to get killed, I'm going to do it saving the rest of you. Now. You can either agree to follow my orders, or I can butt-stroke you with my rifle and have Derkin drag your ass out of here."

"I'm not leaving you here to die!"

"Let me clue you in on something, Waters. You're a spy and a damn good operator, but you're ultimately still not military. I'm a Marine. My job is to fight and die so you don't have to. If I get killed, your job is to get my sister out of here, understand?"

Candace just stared at him, and though he wasn't able to see it, instead watching the enemy staying low and behind cover down the hall, he could feel the daggers she was glaring at him. Derkin's voice, low, rumbly, and full of quiet authority, spoke up from behind them as he worked with quick efficiency to create drag-pallets for their wounded.

"He's right, Candace. Just please don't hit her with a rifle butt, Sarge. She's already concussed, and I don't have the equipment to treat cerebral hemorrhages in my bag."

The wolf snorted, despite himself, and then started to laugh as a sensation of strange relief and hilarity tried to force its way up and out of his body. He managed to keep it clamped, just giving a good guffaw before cutting it off with a snarl and the firing of more rounds down-range.

Waters didn't say a word. She just threw another grenade out into and down the hallway, then started snapping equipment off her belt as he'd ordered. There was no need for words, when she was done. They switched as if of one mind, both understanding what the other needed, as Candace took up his firing position and Derry began putting the trip wires and grenades in place with duct tape and ages-old military trickery.

Olliver's voice came in again.

"Black Jack's scanners are tracking over a hundred enemy infantry heading your way, Lead. I'll be through your back wall in thirty seconds. This won't be a clean exit."

"Let me worry about that, Four. I have a plan."

Stalker coughed and spat, hate and blood spilling from his muzzle as the nanites struggled to repair the extensive damage to his throat and brain. Nearly insensate, eyes filled with redness and savage fury, only the vaguest sense that his brain was still damaged kept him from lashing out at his own troops until such time as he could evaluate the situation.

Slowly, sentience returned. Lust and fury and fear polymorphed to hunger and pain. Redness faded to black and white, then greys, then colors and textures again, as his brain's lobes were rapidly reconstructed. Finally, he found himself staring into the face of a terrified, bloodied lapine soldier, maw hanging open as he stared down on the Stalker, transfixed at watching his forehead knit itself back together.

Before Stalker could think, his paws shot out, grabbing the squeaking hare by the ears and yanking him forward. Not that he would have stopped himself, even if he could have. His teeth sank into the squealing creature's soft throat, ripping the flesh open and filling his maw with delicious redness redolent with all the nutrients his body needed.

The chaos all around served to conceal his act, as he chewed and licked and slurped, and felt the terrified pulses of blood and movement slow to a stop. Finally, he jerked his head back, tearing off a flap of flesh that slid down his gullet to soothe his aching belly. The dead fur, a soldier in his own army, was motionless but for the slightest of twitches as Stalker shoved the useless husk away.

Now all that filled his mind was a laughing sense of hatred, loving desire to commit havoc and mayhem. He stuck out his long, barbed tongue, and traced a fingerpad along it to feel for where it had been bitten off. No sign remained, not even so much as a smooth patch where the skin was healing. He chuckled, which rolled from his chest in a sinister hiss, slowly cresting in a laugh as soldiers continued to rush past, firing and advancing and retreating as a hail of accurate fire and tossed grenades kept them from getting in close.

Soon, he saw, the dam would break. Enough of his soldiers would come that no defense, no matter how dedicated, would hold. He looked forward to seeing his newfound friend helpless, bleeding, dying. He wanted to eat the wolf's heart to take his strength, and make the dying creature watch with his last moments of life.

Derrystuck his rifle out to fire again, squeezing the trigger twice, before searing-hot pain flew up the back of his paw. Shouting out gutturally, he yanked his arm back, nerveless fingers dropping his rifle into the hallway just as thunder blew over him from behind in a shower of plaster dust and paint chips.

"GO GO GO!" he roared out, diving flat to grab his rifle clumsily with his left paw, yanking it back into the room as his right paw throbbed sickeningly with the shrieking swollen pain of smashed bones. Behind him, Derkin and Waters had just finished wrapping the drag-pallet leads around their chests, and as masonry crumbled under Black Jack's entrance, they rushed toward him without stopping to look back.

Derryregistered a salute from the great armored behemoth, and moved to wave it off, only to have his newly-broken right paw throb hard and fill his vision with red sparkles of crisp agony. A quick glance down showed him that someone had hit it from behind, the wrong side of the hallway, with a .50 caliber round that had mushroomed against his armor right over the middle knuckle. Cursing, he dropped the rifle and grabbed out with his left paw, yanking a pair of trip wires into place, so that their tension cords would pull grenade pins when enemies started coming through.

He felt Olliver and Black Jack's thundering steps telegraph right through the juddering floor tile, as the mighty war machine led his wounded squad-mates away, toward the mayhem it had left in its own wake. Derryonly hoped Olliver had someplace to lead them, rather than just from the pressure cooker to the firepit. With the trip wires in place, he grabbed up the rifle again with his left paw and began backing down the newly-formed hallway to cover his squad's retreat.

The enemy advanced slowly, at first, for which he was grateful. He'd been pinning them down and retarding their advance for what felt like hours, piling the hallway with enemy corpses thanks to Candace's very accurate help. They had finally surrounded his position, though, simply choosing to defeat the flung land-mines he'd put down the opposite hall of their main advance by grenading their way straight through.

Now he just had to pray they didn't realize what was going on until his people were away. Doubling back would be easy for the enemy, and doing so would pincer his people in an open hallway.

The first fur who stuck his head around received a rail round through the eye and dropped like a sack of potatoes, asDerrygrunted in choked pain. Even using his left paw, the jostling caused by firing his rifle had jostled his wounded right, that slight movement sending streamers of tooth-grinding agony up his arm.

A second fur was smarter, sticking his rifle around the corner and opening fire, not realizing he was shooting into an open hallway and not an enclosed space. The bullets weren't even close. The black wolf fired again, missed, and fired a third time, slamming a rail round right through the enemy fur's unarmored paw and reducing it to hamburgered flesh and scraps of bone. The opponent's scream hit a crescendo that hurtDerry's already-ringing ears.

All the while he kept backing up, praying his left-pawed luck kept up. He'd never practiced off-paw marksmanship with any seriousness, and now cursed himself for an idiot. Behind him, Black Jack cleared the two parallel hallways where enemy reinforcements could double back and trap them. Derrykept backing slowly, though, knowing he might well have to use the grenades on his vest to slow the enemy further. Candace had about flipped when he'd tied a trip wire through all four pins and duct-taped them to his body.

More rounds spattered toward him, chewing up damaged wall and floor, as a rifle came around both sides of the door frame and opened up full-auto. A sensation like being hit in the gut by a heavyweight boxer blew the air from his lungs for the second time in the past few hours, andDerryyelped as his back and right paw smashed to the ground from the impact, his armor holding enough to spread the force and keep his ribs un-broken.

Then the enemy charged, with a roar, straight through the doorway in a rush of rifles and wild battle-maddened eyes. Derryfelt like grinning, and like hating himself for it, when one of them ran straight into the trip wire and registered what it was with a look of sorrow and shock.

The blast momentarily blinded him in his left eye, as three high-explosive grenades went off. The wall exploded, blasting into the hallway he and Waters had defended and filled with the dead, and masonry hurtled through the air at lethal speeds. Of the dozen furs who had rushed the door, nothing was left but drifting scattered clouds of pink spray that spattered across the walls, ceiling, and floor. Everything fell to a shocked silence for a few moments, and he dared hope that was all of them. He knew it wasn't the truth.

Derrystruggled to his feet, breathless, his limbs aching and leaden as he began limp-running down the long, open, debris-festooned hall. Behind him, a crinkling sound like a thousand pounds of tin foil in a clothes drier sounded out, as the load-bearing wall collapsed and brought down the whole chamber they had forted up in just a short time before. The wolf dropped his rifle, filled with regret at doing so, and filled his left paw with a grenade, yanking it off his vest to pull the pin before tossing it side-pawed into the double-back hallway.

Not thinking, he wrapped his right paw around a grenade as well, and stumbled as the pain blew through his mind, broken knuckles in his paw shrieking for attention and in indignation as the muscles failed to do what he'd told them. Cursing, tears running down his face, he smacked into the wall, gasping, and pulled his shaking, swollen, twitching ham hock of a right paw away from the metal device. He could feel the blood, trapped by his suit, as it trickled down his wrist.

Somewhere all too close behind him, the first grenade went off, blasting plaster dust out of the hallway in a cloud. Someone shrieked, the kind of throat-busting noise someone made when the pain of an injury was beyond their ability to comprehend. Another crinkling sound told him the explosive had brought down parts of walls, slowing the enemy advance. Clinging to that fact,Derryused his left paw again, yanking another grenade off his pin-chain, and flung it awkwardly to his right. It exploded a few seconds later, filling that hallway with rubble as well, as the wounded and rifle-less Marine stumbled and limped through a hallway that seemed increasingly dark and chilly, trying to catch up with his fast-running squad.

They must have turned off down one of the side halls ahead, he realized muzzily. Derrywondered why he couldn't remember the planned route, as he ended up with his shoulder against a wall for a second time. His head lolled, and his right knee went weak, as his left paw shot out and grabbed at a steel water-fountain, holding himself up by the thing's riveted frame. The tunnel of darkness that filled his vision told him he was going shocky, or maybe losing blood internally. A constant adrenaline rush had been with him for hours now, keeping him going despite the bullet wound in his right glute, the cracked ribs and multitude of bruises from his fight with that jaguar psychopath, the low-grade but repetitive concussions from being too close to grenade blasts in enclosed spaces, and now the screaming agony of having his right paw crushed with the sledge-hammer impact of a non-penetrating .50 conventional round.

Something hit him from the side, so hard his whole abused body bounced off the wall and smashed to the floor in a nerveless roll. Water fountained over him, from the broken water fountain, the force of his impact having torn it free of the wall. Before he could react, even to think, he was hit again in the upper chest, this time by a pair of paws that grabbed and dragged his kicking, flailing body to one side of the hall.

He yelled, and tried to grab for his grenade vest, when those sinister sallow yellow eyes came into his vision, full of savagery and grinning blood-shotedness. His paw was intercepted, yanked out to the side and twisted until it crackled like celery under a boot. The pain of a sudden break didn't register in his adrenaline rush, andDerryslammed his forehead forward, smashing it into the jaguar's shallow snout with a 'whop!' noise that reverberated through his aching head and sent the jaguar's head snapping backward.

Something laughed, and booted feet by the dozens were moving past, as his once dead and now alive opponent grabbed his right paw and slammed it to the ground. The jolt of pain made him grunt and open his eyes again, blearily staring in fascination, as the jaguar stood and brought his booted footpaw down onDerry's mangled paw.

He screamed so hard his lungs felt like they'd been stabbed through with rusting razors. He thrashed, and squealed, and felt hot wetness explode from his crotch as he writhed on the ground, contorting in an agony so powerful it felt unreal, a signal from another world. Above him, the bloody-snouted monster wiped a paw back across his black nose pad, and licked the stickiness with a gourmand's grin, while staring down at the shrieking wolf and grinding his booted foot onDerry's pain-seared right paw.

Words sounded distant, as if being spoken from underwater and far, far away. The wolf thrashed, kicking, snarling, trying anything to stop the agony in his paw.

"You actually killed me for a moment! Well done!"

His lungs feeling fit to burst, vision swimming with darkness,Derry's adrenaline finally gave out. In a horrible slow-motion world of agony and blackness, his head slipped backward, hitting the ruined floor tiles with a crunchy thump, while his lungs tried desperately to fill his broken body with sweet air. Something felt tight, crushing on his chest, as the nightmarish immortal continued to speak.

"I would return the favor, little wolfy, but you can only die once. I'll just have to make it last and last and last..."

Incoherent with pain,Derrymanaged to lift his right leg, and drove it upward, perpendicular to his writhing body. The jaguar contemptuously batted his powerful kick aside, and with an almost-careless flick of his augmented wrist struck him alongside the kneecap. With a sick pop, another point of pain filled his agony-drenched world, and his leg went limp from the knee down.

A foot moved to his crotch, though the jaguar's weight stayed somewhere off to his side. Unable to move, flat on his back like an upended turtle,Derrytried to spit defiance. All that came out was a cough, and a dribble of drool down his cheek. His body desperately begged him to let go, to lose consciousness. Slowly increasing pressure on his soggy crotch had him curling forward, biting his tongue till it bled to keep from screaming again. His chin met his chest, bumping agains the cool, yellow-striped steel of his two remaining grenades.

His mind swam, and in that moment he recalled the conversation he and Nivea had, in the surgical observation room on board the Fist, sometime around a thousand years ago.

"I don't really know how to approach this, so this is what I'm going to say. I'm a lesbian, like you know...Not really attracted to guys. Never have been, honestly. Thing is, though, you're the best friend I have, even if we fight sometimes. I uh...Have never tried anything with a guy though, and..."

_ _

She coughed, and he could have sworn there was a flush there in her ears.

_ _

"Look anyway, when we're done with this mission, we need to talk. Like...Serious talk, about what we're going to do after this war is over. It can't last forever, and...I don't want to go home. Fuck working for my uncle."

_ _

The sudden change in subjects had his head spinning. Had she just asked him to help her experiment? Was she asking about living together after the war? Derry wasn't sure, and as he digested the words, just sort of stared at her dry-mouthed. It wasn't as if he could offer her any real future - When the war was done, as likely as not, he'd end up back on Centauri trying to scrape some sort of living out of the grinding poverty there.

_ _

"Uh...Sure. When the mission's done and we're back on station at Atria...Uh...Should I bring Jenny?"

_ _

"Dude, absolutely. She's nuts, I like her."

_ _

"Heh, okay."

A tear slid down his face, knowing he'd never get to have that conversation. Never have the chance to kiss the beautiful wolf-girl he loved, tell her how happy he'd been that she'd had his back on this horrible fucked-up mission to rescue his little sister and old mentor. Never have the chance to see about building a life with her, and maybe Jenny too, if the little cat could be pried away from the genetic studies she was no doubt neck-deep in by now, trying to make something of the genetic tampering her government had been up to.

He had to at least make sure she could get away. If the massed enemy group overtook his wounded, exposed unit, they wouldn't have even a slight fighting chance. Only Olliver could potentially escape, and he didn't put it past the jaguar's superhuman strength to bring even him down somehow.

The noise of boots was gone now, replaced by a ringing, thundering sound. Even the jaguar's voice was becoming distant, as pain shocked his system, making him shiver despite the close heat of his enclosed body suit. With a final noise of defiance,Derrylooked up at the leering gold-eyed shadow, and jerked his muscular neck. Its golden eyes went wide, as the wolf wrenched his head to the side, ignoring the snap of a broken fang as he yanked the pin from one of his vest-mounted grenades. Derrygrinned, with a bloody mouth and tears of regret and victory streaming down his face, as the jaguar cursed and grabbed for the thing. Derrybarely registered the spoon popping free as it bounced off his face.

He had saved the two fusion bombs for last.

Tenh thundered through the swirling melee on the hospital's first floor like a god of tempests in his very realm of storms. The locals had broken through, with such casualties that the remaining force was rabid in its fury, killing anything they could catch as they overran the main chamber's defenses, charging right over sandbagged fortifications and ignoring bullet and plasma wounds to wrap their paws around enemies' throats, to drive knives into their faces, to fire makeshift or stolen pistols into their chests.

A spike-haired gangster, canine face shaved to the skin and covered in tattoos, came at him with a spiked chunk of steel rebar. Tenh didn't lose a bit of his forward momentum, taking the berserker by the throat as he moved past and slamming the psychotic creature into a concrete wall. He tore out the creature's trachea with an utterly reflexive movement, tossing the fleshy chunk aside as he strode past and left the dog to gurgle and die. A soldier came at him then, panicked and firing an empty rifle, covered in blood from tall feline ears to long orange tail.

Tenh grabbed the rifle's overheated barrel with his blood-covered paw, letting the meat juice sizzle off instead of his skin, and yanked the fur forward. Stumbling, unable to resist the momentum and power of the move, the cat shrieked in mixed horror and rage as he came. Tenh's grip on the rifle jerked it down, then around, and the much smaller cat flew away into the mobbing horde head over heels, leaving his weapon in Tenh's enormous paws. The great mountain of a lion wasted no time in using it as a swift and terrible carbon-fiber club, slamming aside a pair of soldiers that rushed at him in the mad, foolish attempt to slow his inexorable advance.

A final soldier, bewildered and wounded, blood and gooey whiteness streaming from a shiv-punctured eye, raised his pistol and fired it somewhere past Tenh's shoulder as the lion rushed and bobbed. The tiger dropped his weapon, as Tenh grabbed him one-fisted by the ballistic vest, and threw him aside like a dog tossing a dead rat. Wounded and concussed, the tiger slumped in a bloody heap, to all appearances just another battlefield corpse. The old mountain spared him, as much for expediency as for sympathy. To stand and fight like that, overwhelmed and so badly wounded, was admirable in his mind. To finish him off would have wasted precious seconds.

His opportunity came, and he took it, darting through a break in the defending soldiers' desperate ranks to charge straight through a locked steel door, battering it aside like a cannon round hitting a wooden-frame portal. As enemies behind him were assaulted by the growing roaring horde, they ignored his passage, unable to respond and unwilling to risk themselves for a single massive foe. They couldn't have caught him if they had tried.

He emerged into a hall full of debris and a stink of explosives, death and blood heavy in the acrid piss-stink. To his left, a sleekWalkerthundered down the hall, kicking up dust and dropping down shell casings as the automatic grenade launcher in its arm cleared a path heading away from him. Behind theWalker, just as he had suspected upon intercepting the radio transmissions,Derry's unit straggled, dragging wounded and moving as quickly as they could. There was no sign of his young protégé though, and Tenh's growl was restrained only by a need for stealth.

When he looked right, all desire for stealth evaporated.

Tenh sprung from his doorway and plowed straight through the oncoming mass of soldiery like a bull through sheep. Knocked aside like ninepins, they had no time to react as the massive creature blitzed straight through their center at a blur, powerful nanite-enhanced musculature hurling him down the hallway.

He hit the Stalker like a freight train, plowing into the smaller, sleeker feline with such force that the physical hit blew him halfway across the room. In the same motion, both paws went down, grabbingDerry's vest and the grenades pinned to it, ripping them free with the sound of shredding fabric. He spun, on that same momentum, and hurled the paired devices overhand, praying Derry had properly tied the trip wire pullcord, and didn't bother watching as the two yellow-striped devices landed somewhere in the midst of the platoon behind them.

Stalker was just as fast as Tenh remembered, and hit him from the side before the lion had turned fully around. Hardening his muscles with training so deep it was in his bones, Tenh shrugged off the hit that would have instantly slain his protégé, and grabbed the offending footpaw in an iron-crushing grasp. The second kick that came for his face he dodged, whipping his head back with what should have been impossible dexterity for a lion of his musculature and stature.

He wrenched the foot in his handpaw to one side as he continued the move that had protected his face, spinning and releasing to hurl Stalker bodily into a concrete barrier wall. The jaguar should have folded backward around it, broken, like a sack of flung potatoes. Instead, he balled as he flew, reflexes impossibly fast, and bounced off the wall leaving a spiderlined series of cracks in his wake. Tenh followed, before the jaguar could stand again, and drove a massive fist down like a steam piston, shattering the reinforced concrete floor as Stalker rolled nimbly between his legs and came up behind.

Tenh was far slower than Stalker. Where the great lion had enhanced strength and masterful training in all forms of weaponry, the jaguar was a truly mighty close-combat specialist with wired reflexes faster than most computer systems. The true difference between them, however, came from their mindsets. The Stalker was a serial killer, a hunter, predatory and inhuman. Tenh was a strategist.

The jaguar came forward, eyes gleaming with victory as he aimed both claw-tipped paws for Tenh's kidneys, intending to rip them straight out the massive lion's back. Instead, he ran straight into a rearward kick that had started in the same moment he had begun his predicted roll. The blow smashed into his face with a thunderous crack, the heel-bone crushing his snout into his skull cavity and shattering his vertebrae as his body cartwheeled backward to land in a sagged heap on the concrete.

A hundred feet away, the fusion grenades exploded with all the subtlety of a dying star. Forty-some soldiers, dazzled and shocked by the sudden bull-rush straight through their middle, had turned in confusion, halting their advance. The bombs had bounced right into their middle. The twin explosions of light and fusion reaction wouldn't have spared them even if they had tried to dive aside.

Tenh never looked toward the blast, knowing precisely what would happen. The wash of heat and stench of burnt gasses and plastic confirmed what he already knew, and he turned toward Stalker's crumpled body. Before he could take a second step toward the other Shadow, intent upon finishing him for good, booted footfalls sounded from the back hallway. He growled, lips curling back to expose his many razored teeth.

In his place, some would have stayed and finished the enemy at the cost of a wounded, possibly dying Marine. Tenh didn't even need to think about it. He hadDerryup over his shoulders in a fireman's carry, limp as a rag doll, and was running at full tilt after the boy's unit well before the first enemy reinforcements arrived to view the scene of carnage and holocaust.

Olliver whipped his right arm around, targeting reticles blossoming up in a wave across his jacked-in vision as he unloaded a hundred rail rounds down a long open hallway in the span of two seconds. By the screams and graying-out red outlines, he knew the blast had been effective, and continued his ground-pounding rush toward the hospital's side exits.

A voice cut through the reverie of sound, straight into his brain, rumbling and authoritative.

"Walker pilot, I have your squad sar'nt and am coming up behind. Do not shoot. Please confirm, over."

Startled, Olly twisted his head around, the nimbleWalker's joints sliding perfectly to allow an acrobatic torso movement old Lady Luck's boxy frame would never have been able to perform. Behind them, approaching with incredible speed for a fur on foot, the largest lion he'd ever seen came rushing from the flickering darkness, the familiar form of Darryl Blake over his shoulders.

The otter squinted, zooming his view on the fur's face. A heavy brow ridge over squinted and glare-lined eyes gave the male a somewhat sinister affect, especially when combined with what he judged to be four hundred pounds or so of solid slab-hard muscle that festooned the creature's frame. His steps were certain, bounding over corpses and cracks in the cement as if they were flat ground, eating the distance at incredible speed.

Olly almost turned and fired, before the dawning of recognition cropped up in his head, sending a tingle up his spine. This was their primary VIP, less thirty or more years of age, and carrying the perfect hostage if he was hostile. Olly preyed he wasn't, while running his eyes over the badly wounded wolf.

"How are you communicating on this channel? This is a proprietary military line!"

The lion's mouth didn't move, as he slowed, Derkin and Waters halting in their tracks and turning, grabbing for weapons as the creature came to a stop and knelt down, holding up his paws as best he could with the load on his shoulders.

"That isn't important, Whip. I presume you came here to rescue Tenh Kandal and Patricia Blake. I am Tenh Kandal, and this is my adopted grandson, who I believe is also your squad sar'nt."

Olly tilted his head, and the mechanical monster tied to his cerebral cortex did so as well, servos in its neck whining slightly from the unusual motion.

"I take it you are a Marine, sir? Only Marines use the shortened term for 'Sergeant'," the otter enunciated. Meanwhile, monitoring the conversation through the squad's single remaining functional headset, Derkin lowered his rifle and put his paw to Candace's, lowering hers and explaining via gesture, before rushing forward to get a closer look at their leader's unconscious form.

"I was, once. A very long time ago. Now, if you are not going to shoot me or tie my paws, we should continue moving. There are enemies behind us, and you are going the wrong way."

Olliver narrowed his eyes and glowered at the creature, frowning.

"My name is Captain Olliver Tense. As our unit commander is out of commission, I am now in command. What makes you say we are going the wrong direction?"

"If you wish to escape this place alive, we need to reach the roof. Your insertion pilot is circling somewhere on the surface, is he not?"

"Yes, if nothing's gone wrong upstairs."

"We need to detour. Basement level. I have an intelligence asset on ice down there. Then we should ascend the staff-only stairwell. Once we reach the roof, give your pilot my directions, and he will be able to pick us up himself."

Olliver stared for just a second longer, before his sensors began picking up dozens of approaching soldiers, a few halls away but only a minute or so from being in firing range. With a grunt of annoyance, he turned theWalkeragain, cornering into another hallway and firing off a burst of lethal cannon-fire into a pathetically insufficient blockade of desks and piled equipment.

"Fine then. This way to the basement, if my guess is right."