“You know who Cortes was?”

Asadi looked up from checking her beam pistol for the umpteenth time. She found that it helped to know every inch of her weapon before combat. It helped with nerves, too.

“You’re going to have to narrow it down a little,” she told Corradi. “There’s like a dozen Corteses we had to learn about in school. You’d be lucky if I remembered half of them.”

Corradi looked surprised at that, but then shrugged it off and returned to his original point. Like Asadi, they were standing on either side of the doorway leading into the command center, weapons at the ready. From time to time, his gaze would flick to the security cameras, but most of them had been reduced to static some time ago. So, tense as springs, they waited for the action to start.

“He was a Spaniard,” Corradi explained. “One of the conquistadors who invaded the Americas in the sixteenth century. Conquered the Aztecs, I believe.”

“I think I remember him,” Asadi lied. The only Corteses she knew were her instructors at the academy and that one captain back in the War of ‘58. “What’s your point?”

“He didn’t come to make friends, obviously,” Mark continued. “But he and his men ended up causing a virtual genocide from the diseases they carried. The Aztecs and other American tribes didn’t have immunity, so they were decimated. Or like how those left were westernized until their original culture was gone.”

By this point Asadi realized where he was going with his history lecture, so she gestured for him to continue. If nothing else, it provided something to do besides check her weapon.

“Same thing with my cryo tube,” Mark explained. “They’d never seen anything like it before. They built their own, added to them, and started selling them like they were hot tubs. Soon enough everyone had one, and after a few years nobody wanted or needed to come out. Those remaining modified these facilities to keep them comfortable, sure, but their old way of life was gone.”

“Where were you?” Asadi asked pointedly. She didn’t mean for it to sound so harsh, but Mark accepted the point with a despondent shrug.

“Nothing I could do,” he replied. “I was still learning their language by the time they started mass-producing the tubes; I tried to warn them against it, but by then it was too late. Everyone either had a tube then, or considered themselves purists.”

“Like these guys,” Asadi finished, nodding at the security cameras. Mark bit his lip and nodded back, still staring at the floor.

“Yeah,” Mark said. “Like these guys.”

They sat in silence for a moment, until they noticed another camera go out.

“That’s right outside,” Asadi noticed.

In response, Mark brushed back his hair, checked his pistol one last time, and leaned out into the hallway. Asadi did the same, and with machinelike precision they both pivoted around the corner and fired.

The Honraxi never saw it coming; he dropped to the floor like a sack of rocks, two smoldering holes in his chest. The rest of his comrades reacted quickly, ducking behind cover and firing back at them. Asadi and Mark did the same, popping out and firing at the purists every few seconds. The gold-tinted beams didn’t seem to faze the amphibious aliens, who kept moving forward as the sent neon green bolts of energy flying at the two.

“Overlap our fire!” Asadi ordered, targeting an alien on the far side of the hallway. The beam narrowly missed, singing its forearm and scoring the bulkhead behind. Corradi seemed to understand her, and began firing at targets on Asadi’s side of the hallway, their beams crisscrossing the corridor. Still, the Honraxi were undeterred; every few seconds Asadi would spot a pair of scarlet gills as one of the aliens advanced down the hall another few feet.

“We need to move,” she shouted as a green bolt of energy flew past her nose. “You’ve got the door controls?”

When Mark nodded agreement, she looked down at her pistol. Closing and locking the door would buy them maybe a minute or two; the Honraxi weapons could easily melt through if they were even half as powerful as their own. She needed a distraction.

Beam pistols were still used because of their durability, low cost, and high power output. However, more ‘civilized’ groups had stopped using them, for a reason that Asadi was about to demonstrate. She turned the weapon over in her hands; when she found the small knob near the trigger, she twisted it to its maximum setting.

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Realizing what she was about to do, Corradi took an instinctive step backward. Asadi gave him a reassuring smile, then gripped her weapon in both hands as she searched for a target.

She stepped out at just the right time, catching one of the Honraxi as they rushed to another bulkhead. She went to squeeze the trigger, then hesitated and shot fired a hair away from the alien instead, the recoil skewing her aim even more in addition to jamming her shoulder again.

The gold beam slammed into the bulkhead next to the Honraxi, blowing the steel open before lighting it on fire. As Corradi closed the door, Asadi could actually see the metal begin to melt from the fierce heat of the blaze. Had her shot hit an organic being, she would’ve expected a large and messy explosion. However, the spectacular firestorm in the hall was more than enough.

“Jesus,” Mark breathed once the door was closed. “That was… loud.”

“And hot,” Asadi replied, trying to stretch out her jammed shoulder. With the adrenaline running it didn’t seem so bad, but it still felt a little sore. She knew from experience that meant it’d be immobile for weeks after. But she had bigger priorities.

“We need to move,” she continued, turning the beam pistol back down before transferring it to her left hand. The downside of pulling that stunt, she knew, was that the battery could only handle about three of those blasts before needing a replacement or recharge. Replacements and chargers were among the many luxuries they didn’t have at the moment.

Mark led the way out the other side of the communications center, down a steel-lined hallway that took a sharp right turn after a few hundred feet. From there they were off to the races; the resulting junction branched off in nearly half a dozen places, creating a labyrinth of tunnels, supply rooms, and power generators. Mark ignored all of them, instead going for a small maintenance ladder near an unused corner of the intersection.

“It leads back down to the ground floor,” he explained. “Should throw them off.”

He gripped the ladder with his free hand, then descended until he was out of sight. After casting a look over her shoulder, Asadi followed.

The maintenance ladder didn’t look like it’d support Asadi’s weight, but the steel bars jabbed into the cement managed to hold as she clambered down after Corradi. There was no lighting within the tube; just a concrete pipe that reminded Asadi of her ride through the sphere launch tube awhile back. She tried to figure out how long ago it’d been, but couldn’t put an exact time on it. Was it a few hours ago? Days?

Before she could decide, she reached the bottom of the ladder. She stepped back into the light, pistol held at the ready. Just as Corradi had predicted, nobody was there. Apart from the stasis tubes, of course. It appeared almost identical to the room where they’d first met, with computers plastered across the walls and rows of stasis tubes in the middle.

“Alright,” Corradi said, licking his lips. “Where to now?”

“Where can we go from here? I don’t know this place,” Asadi said, her eyes flicking around the room as her mind raced. She didn’t know how many Honraxi were hunting them, but she saw at least four of them up by the communications center. It all depended on the security cameras, she realized. Without the cameras, they’d be able to evade the aliens easily, with the maze of twisting hallways and dead-end storage rooms. However, if they could repair the security systems somehow, then they’d need to leave.

“Where’s the nearest exit?” she asked. In response, Corradi nodded down a hallway snaking off to their right, although he raised an eyebrow.

“There’s only two ways out of here,” he explained. Then he furrowed his eyebrows.

“Won’t it be difficult to navigate out there?”

“We’ll need to be outside so the shuttle can pick us up anyway,” Asadi pointed out. “Might as well leave before they fix the cameras and spot us.”

“Fair enough,” Corradi said. “Follow me.”

“Cor Adi,” a disembodied voice called. Asadi whirled around with her pistol at the ready, before realizing that it came from the PA system. She shook her head, then gestured for Corradi to keep moving. Standing there like ants caught under a magnifying glass helped nobody but the Honraxi.

“Cor Adi,” the voice repeated. “Surrender yourself. You will die regardless.”

“Wonderful,” Corradi muttered.

As they headed for the exit, a dozen worries swirled through Asadi’s mind like eels in a tank. Trying to remain calm, she examined and discarded each one like a medical student dissecting some poor frog. They wouldn’t be outside long enough for food and water to become a factor, they didn’t have time to get spare weapons anyway, and they’d-

She stopped in her tracks.

“Alqarf,” she cursed. “We’ll be cut off!”

“What?” Corradi asked, stopping as well and sweeping the room with his beam pistol.

“Communications,” Asadi explained. “We won’t be able to contact the ship.”

“Perfect,” Corradi said. “Just perfect.”