“ 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.
Two beams lanced toward his chest, but he anticipated the attack and dove, rolling beneath the cubes. They rotated to target him. This time he jumped to avoid the shots. Next, the mechanical assailants teamed up, showing a disquieting ability to work together. They tried to surround him, but the youth proved too quick. He darted away, keeping both cubes to one side of him.