"Wait a minute," Parcival said, his voice quavery.
"What?"
"I'm looking at the other side. All this damage wasn't done in the crash. These holes are burned from the outside in. Half a sec-sergeant, there's something odd about that life reading-"
Almost without thinking, Bhodi began to take tentative steps in the direction of the wreck. Then from Pike came a frantic cry: "Look out!"
Bhodi did not wait to hear more. He took off at a run toward Majestic, his Allison in hand, the pod open and undefended behind him. The sound of phaser fire reached him faintly through the helmet mikes. Then came the words that chilled him like ice pressed to the middle of his back.
"Bhodi!" Li-hon cried. "Full alert! The ship's dirty! The vault's full of Dogs!"
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
With a mouth large enough to engulf a human head, jaws strong enough to snap a femur like a matchstick, and a spiked tail that would have been at home on a stegosaurus, a Dog was never a welcome sight. To have one spring at you without warning out of the darkness, snarling and clawing, was almost too much to bear.
Only the speed of Pike's reflexes prevented the surprise from being a fatal one. He had been standing a step behind and just to the right of Li-hon as the sergeant made the sign of the Light and entered the Guard's special override code into the vault controller. When the door began to slide open, Pike was the first to glimpse movement inside the vault.
The possibility that some of Majestic's complement had taken refuge in the vault kept Pike from firing blindly through the gap between the moving door and the jamb. But he was on alert, and when the stale-cooking-grease smell of Dog reached the olfactory sensors in the roof of his mouth, his fingers squeezed down on the trigger of his Allison without conscious thought.
As the first Dog lunged through the doorway, Li-hon started backpedaling in search of fighting room, barking out a warning to the rest of the platoon. His scope-sighted pulse cannon was slung on his back, out of reach but useless anyway in close quarters.
With a clear target at last, Pike fired into the Dog's gaping mouth, and a smell like burnt cinnamon flooded the room. The Dog screamed, shook its head violently, and prepared to launch itself at Pike. But Pike's next shot seared the Dog's eyes, unprotected under the rim of the ornate helmet. Its snarl turned into a squeal of pain, and the creature shied and rocked back on its tail, clawing at its face.
But by then a second Dog had burst through the opening and past Pike in pursuit of Li-hon. Pike finished off the first Dog with a long shot that burned down through its flat forehead and into its braincase, then he turned to see what he could do for his commander.
Vibrablade gripped in his right hand, Li-hon had stopped his retreat and was keeping the Dog at bay with powerful kicks from his booted right foot. But instead of ducking or flinching from the kicks, the Dog was perversely turning its head towards each blow, enduring the battering for a chance to snap at-and maybe snap off-Li-hon's foot.
So far Li-hon had been quicker, but his sledgehammer blows did not seem to be having any effect. The close calls with the Dog's jaws had already left deep gouges in the thick boot material, and the surface of the boot was coated with the Dog's acidic saliva.
Pike targeted the sensitive area near the base of the Arrian's tail and squeezed the trigger. It was not a potentially killing shot, but he expected the Dog to turn on him, giving Li-hon a chance to use the blade.
But instead, the Dog yelped and lunged forward toward the enemy in its eyes, seizing Li-hon's left leg above the knee and tearing away a dinner-plate-sized swatch of the reinforced fighting suit and a huge gobbet of the leathery flesh underneath.
The vibrablade came down and carved a canyon through the Dog's massive neck, and the beast's legs buckled. It fell slack-jawed at Li-hon's feet, the end of its tail twitching three times before the light in its black eyes died. Blood was everywhere, both the thick deep cherry-red variety coursing from Li-hon's wound and the Dog's thin ocher slime.
Li-hon rocked back on his heels, the tension draining from his limbs. He slipped the vibrablade into the half-shredded sheath on his left boot and looked toward Pike.
"Stupid, stupid, stupid," he said. "I always feel like I'm trespassing when I go into a vault without a crystal handler there. I never stopped to think that an Arrian might actually consider hiding inside. As if they would respect the place and what it means. Stupid."
"Don't kick yourself too hard. It's a new trick," Pike said. "Almost more creative than I thought they were capable of. You all right?"
Li-hon glanced down at his thigh. The concave wound was deep, raw and ugly, but the thick blood was already congealing into a rubbery jelly. "For now," he said. "Let's finish this."
They picked their way past the bodies of their attackers and into the vault. There were eight crystal receptacles in the arch-ceilinged chamber, four on each side. Li-hon was not surprised to see that they were all empty, the locking bars burned through and bent back by brute force.
"They got the crystals," Li-hon announced tautly on the command circuit. "Bhodi? Parcival? Report. What's going on out there?"
Bhodi and Parcival had their own problems. Li-hon's alert had brought Bhodi running, but also brought Parcival scampering back around to the near side of Majestic and the entry point the others had used. The moment Parcival saw Bhodi coming across the valley floor, he went wild.
"Get back to your post!" Parcival screamed. "Get back to your post!"
Uncertainty prompted by Parcival's words caused Bhodi to slow his steps. Just as he did, a high-powered phaser blast blackened the sand just in front of him, exactly where he would have been had he kept stride.
He stumbled into a dive roll and came up running once more. Since he was more than halfway to Majestic, he kept going in that direction, zigzagging as sharply as the footing would allow. His chest was tight with terror. His skin prickled with anticipation of the fiery heat that would take his legs out from under him and drop him in the open to die. Ahead, Parcival ducked into the shelter of Majestic's hatchway.
But it did not seem as though Bhodi were fired at again. When he joined Parcival in the hatchway, Bhodi could finally afford to look back and see why. The gunner had turned his attention to the pod, and with devastating effect, showing the power of the weapon he was using. There were two scorched holes in the hull already, and a flickering light inside showed that the pod was starting to burn.
"You were saying?" Bhodi said tersely.
Parcival ignored him. "I notified Captain Yier that we've got snipers and had him recall the Regulars. No sense bringing them down into the middle of this."
Bhodi peeked out the doorway again. "Awfully considerate, considering you didn't even bother to give me any covering fire. They're right up there on that high ridge, along the south rim-"
"Forget it. We can't do anything from here except get ourselves in more trouble," Parcival said. "Which is why you didn't get any cover fire."
"Why can't we do anything?"
"Too far." He glanced at his right wrist, checking the rangemeter. "They're 430 meters away."
"I can hit them-"
"But you can't hurt them. Inverse-square rule-distance costs power. You can't light up the new moon with a flashlight. And phasers are nothing but fancy flashlights."
With a whump that echoed off the rock faces of the valley, what was left of the pod exploded. Fragments large and small scattered in a circle around it.
"Then we'll have to go up and get them," Bhodi said.
"How? Charge the ridge? Face facts, Bhodi. We're outgunned. Let's be glad Majestic's got a thick skin and go see if we can help the Sarge."
That was when both heard the welcome sound of Li-hon's voice demanding their report. Parcival quickly summarized the situation for Li-hon, courteously leaving out any mention of Bhodi abandoning his post.