“Hey, Cthulhu! Over here, sslimeball!” Uful’lan roared, abruptly leaping out from his hiding spot.
The gargantuan creature froze, temporarily halting its relentless battering of an overturned booth behind which a pair of terrified Cardassians were trying to compress their frames. As Cthulhu’s attention locked onto the K’rell, its internal nerve endings violently crackled, producing a strobe-like sequence of brilliant purple sparks. To better anchor the monstrosity’s focus, Uful’lan aggressively flapped his massive wings.
“Thiss way, buddy!” he added, splitting his maw to flash a crown of serrated fangs in a smile that was desperately intended to look disarming.
Cthulhu emitted a pair of hesitant, wet gurgles. For a heartbeat, an eerie, suffocating silence blanketed the ruined lounge, punctuated only by distant, muffled shrieks bleeding through the floorboards. Finally, the massive, jelly-like sphere made an executive decision: contracting its mass, it began rolling at rapidly increasing velocity, hurtling directly toward its former drinking partner.
Just a microsecond before being flattened into organic paste, Uful’lan threw himself to the side. “Now! Leth ’em have ith!” he bellowed.
The spiked servodroid popped up from behind the counter like a jack-in-the-box. Shouldering a heavy-duty soda siphon like a bazooka, the machine pulled the trigger without a shred of electronic hesitation. Powerful, pressurized jets of carbonated, brownish Janxx-Cola penetrated deep into the translucent nucleus of the roaring, drunk entity. Unabated by the chemical injection, Cthulhu’s momentum carried it forward until it crashed violently into the steel framework of the bar counter.
The droid was instantaneously flattened and completely overwhelmed. Even Uful’lan, far too clumsy and top-heavy to clear the blast radius in time, ended up being violently engulfed by the churning, viscous mass. He thrashed desperately to break the surface, but the more he struggled against the protoplasm, the deeper he sank, his consciousness rapidly dulling from the revolting, bio-hazard stench.
He was just about to throw in the towel and suffocate when a ray of hope pierced his panic: the creature’s internal electrical discharges spiked exponentially, and a violent, unmistakable shudder began rippling across its entire membrane.
Suddenly, a thunderous, catastrophic explosion rocked the establishment’s structural foundations.
Cthulhu blew apart into absolute smithereens, vaporizing outward and drenching the entire lounge in a torrential downpour of purulent, smoking shreds of alien flesh. Stunned and coughing, Uful’lan found himself sitting flat on his tail on the deck. All around him, the scraping screech of tables and chairs being hauled away echoed through the room. The remaining patrons realized the biological threat had been neutralized and began crawling out of their makeshift foxholes.
“The fire! Move, move!”
The automated alarm had been blaring for several agonizing minutes; now the desperate screams of retreating customers were clawing closer by the second, and the echo of the recent explosion left no doubt about the lethal gravity of their predicament.
The first entity to take decisive action was a heavily muscled reptiloid hailing from the outer rims of Acheron. Just before bolting into a dead run, the brute swung his massive tail in a vicious arc, shattering the lounge’s reinforced plastiglass security doors into millions of fragments. A fraction of a second later, Uful’lan and the rest of the surviving clientele swarmed out into the main corridor, stampeding toward the fire escapes.
The landing of the eighth tier had degenerated into absolute bedlam.
A dense bottleneck of panicking citizens was cascading down the emergency stairs, while a counter-current of survivors was clawing their way up from the lower levels after finding their escape routes completely blocked by active fire zones.
Uful’lan navigated the chaotic sea of bodies by relying entirely on his nasal receptors, sniffing through an atmosphere that was thick with acrid smog and raw, primal terror. Now that he was clear of Cthulhu’s toxic, paralyzing stench, his advanced olfactory matrix was back online.
Suddenly, he skidded to a dead halt, gasping as if an invisible fist had slammed directly into his gut. Mingled with the overwhelming stench of plasma fire, melted wiring, and the biological secretions of hundreds of panicking species, a highly specific, unmistakable scent profile stood out in stark relief.
Twiglet!
The Mahjit had crossed this exact coordinate barely minutes ago. And… yes, Kyle was trailing her. There was zero margin for error. They were both driving upward, scaling the stairs toward the Nine Wonders’ penthouse roof.
Wading brutally through the stampede and throwing his massive weight around, Uful’lan dug his claws into the steps and began to climb.
On the twelfth floor, Kyle dropped Twiglet to the deck, leaning against the wall to catch his ragged breath.
“Here we are,” he gasped, his lungs burning from the smoke. “That tech-guy Binx should be stationed somewhere on this level… assuming the bastard hasn’t already bolted for the hangers.”
He stepped carefully over the long, trailing tail of a Jamreshanter from Dschubba XI who was passed out in the hall, and slammed his palm against the emergency access pad.
“Shirl should be somewhere in this residential block too,” Twiglet noted, keeping tight at his heels as they crossed the threshold.
“Right. Big Guy, however, is still nowhere to be seen.”
“Oh, he’ll pop up sooner or later,” Twiglet muttered. “Uful’lan always manages to vanish into thin air the exact second there’s actual physical labor to be done.”
Kyle flashed a grim, fleeting smirk. “Yeah. My thoughts exactly.”
The long hallway before them appeared to be completely deserted. They navigated the first major corridor bend without crossing paths with a single living soul.
“I’m afraid we played this too slow,” Kyle muttered, his hand tightening on the stolen weapon. “They must be long gone…”
He skidded to a dead halt. A few paces ahead, a scene of impossible, nightmarish horror unfolded. Every combat instinct he possessed commanded him to react—to take immediate action, to fire, to yell, to turn and run—but his nervous system refused to comply. It felt precisely like waking up inside a sleep-paralysis nightmare. He could only stand there, staring blankly at Shirl. The synth girl was crouching in a traumatized ball next to a shapeless, blood-soaked bundle on the floorboards, and standing right over her…
“It’s them, Kyle! The Lycans!” Twiglet’s voice cracked, dripping with sheer terror.
“W… what?”
Kyle was stammering like a brain-dead amateur. He violently shook his head, fighting a sudden, unnatural drowsiness that was rapidly hijacking his cognitive functions. The predators’ pupils had narrowed into sharp, vertical slits, and their exposed, razor-sharp fangs shed an eerie, luminescent glow in the smoky corridor.
“Kyle, look at me! Listen to my voice!” The Mahjit dug her claws into his arm, squeezing with all her might. “Did you hear me? DO NOT look into their eyes!” She thrashed against his side, trying in vain to rouse him from his supernatural torpor. “Damn it, wake up!”
The two werewolves moved in unison, exchanging a grotesque, knowing sneer. Kyle was only vaguely, distantly aware of the heavy Imperial stun gun slung over his shoulder. He possessed the mathematical certainty that he had mere seconds to act, yet he couldn’t marshal enough neural focus to make even the slightest defensive movement.
Suddenly, Shirl tore her hands away from her bruised face, her blank eyes snapping back into focus as if breaking free from a trance.
“Kyle!” she screamed, scrambling violently to her feet.
The entire universe converged into a single, frantic millisecond. Kyle’s adrenaline spiked, snapping the hypnotic tether; he slammed the stun gun’s power regulator down to maximum output and roared:
“Shirl! Duck!”
The blinding energy discharge erupted from the muzzle, hitting the Lycans dead-center—but absolutely nothing happened. The violent kinetic payload swept right through their forms and slammed into the reinforced corridor wall behind them, leaving a massive, scorched, blackish crater in the masonry. The monsters appeared to slow their advance by a mere fraction of a second, but then they casually resumed their predatory march. Mysteriously, they had absorbed the weapon’s catastrophic thermal blast completely unscathed.
“But… that’s impossible! I know damn well I clocked them!” Kyle shouted, his voice cracking with disbelief.
He backed away in a panicked retreat, squeezing the trigger in rapid succession, sending a barrage of violet energy bolts down the hall.
To his absolute dismay, the incoming plasma had zero structural effect. It defied all logic. Elite Space Force shock troopers were equipped with heavy-duty tactical energy shields, but no personal shielding matrix in the known Galaxy could remain non-porous against point-blank bursts of that magnitude. The closest werewolf tensed its hind legs, preparing to spring.
Instinctively, Kyle brought a hand up to his own throat. It wasn’t the first time he had looked death in the face. This time felt fundamentally different, though; he found himself analyzing the situation with a strange, serene detachment, his brain focusing exclusively on irrelevant, minor details: the rhythmic swishing of the fire escape door, the ugly swelling of Shirl’s black eye, the heavy leather boots of the werewolves, which looked completely ridiculous and ill-fitting stretched over their mutated, clawed paws…
Beside him, Twiglet stifled a desperate sob.
Then, a bizarre anomaly occurred.
The lead beast aborted its lethal leap almost mid-air, landing awkwardly on its paws with a comical, bewildered expression painted across its fur-covered muzzle. Turning sharply to its packmate, the creature growled a couple of harsh, unintelligible syllables. The second werewolf reacted in a panic, frantically flapping its front claws in the air as if suffocating.
Kyle sensed an instantaneous shift in the tactical atmospheric variables. He decided to leverage it for one final, desperate gamble.
He threw a sharp nod toward Shirl, who immediately hit the deck again, flattening herself against the floorboards.
Kyle clamped down on the trigger, firing a continuous, unrelenting stream of maximum-charge plasma, holding the position until the thermal backdraft almost scorched the flesh clean off his hands.
This time, the roaring environment worked in his favor. The superheated flames aggressively caught onto the creatures’ chemically altered bodies. The Lycans ignited instantly, dying a rapid, agonizing death punctuated by blood-curdling, inhuman screams.
When the conflagration finally subsided, only a few charred, smoking, and unrecognizable remains were left sizzling on the deck.
A slender figure, wearing a ridiculous checkered jacket, collapsed into his arms. Kyle held her tight, listening to the frantic conversation over his shoulder.
“What happened? Why did they drop the energy shields?”
“Buth… Thwigleth… don’th look ath me! I didn’th do thiss! I justh ssmelled you, sso I came in and…”
“Hey, no need to apologize, Big Guy! You saved our necks!” Kyle said. “Ugh… you smell awful, you know that?”
“Uhm! I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Twiglet snapped. “There’s something wrong here…”
“You mean besidess thosse thwo monstherss? Who were they, anyway?”
“The ones I told you about, the werewolves, remember? I wonder what happened to them. They looked terrified…”
“Look, we don’t have time for a post-mortem here,” Kyle cut in. “The building is on fire, or did you forget?”
“Right,” Twiglet agreed. “We need to move fast and find Odie…”
“Are you crazy? Staying here is suicide!” He pointed down the length of the corridor. “Besides, can’t you see everyone else has already cleared out?”
“I have to try anyway… Without the third coordinate, our mission is dead in the water!”
Shirl opened her mouth to speak, but nobody was paying attention to her.
“Yeah, the mission… Why didn’t you bother to mention those brutes are invulnerable? They can even mess with your head! I thought I was a goner!”
Hit where it hurt, the Mahjit glared at him, looking him up and down.
“I told you they were incredibly dangerous! Besides, I never claimed to know everything about them… I only wish I did!”
“Um, excuse me…” Shirl tried to get Kyle’s attention.
“Oh, really? Back at the restaurant, you sure acted like it… You want to know what I think?”
“No, I don’t, and I don’t care. Now you listen to me, Captain. If you want to quit—”
“Who said anything about quitting? From now on—”
“I know where he is!” Shirl yelled, her patience snapping.
That finally shut them up.
“I managed to track down Odie Binx, but then the werewolves broke him!”
“They broke him? You mean… they killed him?” Twiglet asked, her voice cracking.
“Pretty much… they tore him to pieces.” She pointed toward a mangled, formless shape a few yards away. “That’s his head.”
Twiglet rushed over to Odie’s remains.
“A droid…” she muttered, probing the metal casing with her short, stubby fingers. “But wait… all is not lost! We can take him with us and try to fix him!”
“Hold on…” Kyle said, kneeling down to inspect the wreckage. He fumbled with the back of the casing until something clicked softly. “This isn’t a droid.”
The front section of Odie’s head popped open, releasing a tiny creature that looked like a narrow cocoon covered in soft grayish fur.
“A Mufrid!” Twiglet gasped, her eyes wide with wonder.
“There was another one of these things,” Kyle muttered, “down in the club on the first floor.”
The creature gave a soft chirp, then turned its head, stretching its slender neck toward the Mahjit. Its eyes, buried deep in thick fur, looked like three watery buttons blinking in rapid succession. A small cartilaginous tube began to unfurl from its face, opening up like a flower.
“They come from a moon orbiting Alway X,” Twiglet explained, her voice softening. “They are the noblest, most intelligent creatures in the Galaxy.”
The fluffy thing chirped again.
“Can you understand a word it’s saying?” Kyle asked.
“No, unfortunately I can’t.”
“Well, then there’s no point in standing around wasting time.” He stood up abruptly. “Let’s move! We’re making a break for the roof.”
“The… the roof?” Twiglet stammered, her long tongue unrolling. “But… what about Odie?”
“He’s coming with us, obviously. We’ll figure the rest out later… And where the hell did this one come from?”
A little human boy with a thick mop of dark curls had just stepped into the hallway, appearing out of nowhere. He stared in utter bewilderment at Odie’s shattered chassis.
“Is he… dead?” he asked, looking at Shirl.
“Oh, no, don’t worry!” she comforted him. “He’s right there, see?” She pointed at the tiny, furry creature. “He just needs a new host.”
As she spoke, the other children began peeking out from their hiding spots, timidly creeping closer.
“Come on out, guys!” Shirl urged them. “It’s okay, they’re friends!”
“What is going on here?” Twiglet asked, growing alarmed. “Who are all these kids?”
“They’re synths. We have to take them with us, or they’re going to die!”
“Are you kidding me? There must be at least… thirty of them!” Kyle groaned.
“She’s right, Kyle. We can’t just leave them behind,” Twiglet said.
“Damn it! It was already a long shot with just the four of us…”
As if on cue to back up Kyle’s grim outlook, a second explosion rocked the structure, much more violent than the first. The lights flickered wildly and died, plunging the corridor into darkness before the emergency backup system kicked in, bathing the smoke in a harsh auxiliary glow.
“Let’s move, double time!” Kyle barked, throwing the rifle back over his shoulder.
The flames had already breached the eleventh floor, turning the emergency fire escape into a literal stairway to hell. Twiglet and the rest of the crew burst onto the roof, coughing hysterically, their hair, fur, and scales violently singed by the blistering, radiant heat.
On the penthouse roof of the Nine Wonders, the structural chaos was absolute.
The few luxury private shuttles available had already evacuated, taking off into the smog. At this point, a terrified, desperate bottleneck of patrons was violently brawling to force their way onto the clumsy, slow-moving atmospheric barges deployed by the emergency rescue teams. Even out in the open, the air was stagnant and thick with toxic ash, a direct consequence of the complete lack of wind inside New Xanadu’s artificial biodome atmosphere. Media drones hovered everywhere like mechanical vultures, broadcasting the carnage live to the primary interstellar holo-stations.
Kyle shook his head in grim silence. Since the exact millisecond he had touched down on New Xanadu, he’d drifted into an endless, cascading series of complications. This particular disaster, however, was highly tracking to be his absolute last. Only a miracle would allow them to escape this inferno alive. The rescue barges were docking at an agonizingly slow pace, and the atmosphere was scorching and functionally unbreathable. Soon, the structural integrity would give out, and the entire roof would cave in. Emergency fire-fighting aircraft vomited thousands of gallons of chemical fire-retardant fluids from above, but the payload did absolutely nothing against the supernatural properties of that plasma blaze.
Suddenly, a heavy dropship bearing the distinct, stark insignia of the Imperial Police punched through the curtain of black smoke, landing with visible difficulty on a nearby, dangerously overcrowded pad. Kyle let out a cold, dark smirk, remembering that the local precinct’s droids were technically still hunting him.
“Hold hands and lock onto my position!” he roared over the din. “Follow me!”
Twiglet quickly pocketed the tiny, furry Odie Binx. She noticed that Uful’lan had gone completely rigid, seemingly mesmerized by the unfolding destruction. His thick glasses vividly reflected the conflagration’s rhythmic, pulsing glow.
“Hey… look ath thath!” the K’rell hissed, gesturing with a heavy claw.
The rest of the crew immediately processed what had triggered his focus.
The police shuttle had barely touched down on the deck when dozens of desperate survivors violently swarmed the hull, attempting to breach the main hatch. A robocop leveled its heavy service rifle to assert compliance, but a chaotic multitude of alien feet, thrashing tentacles, and razor claws instantly grabbed the machine, dragging it down and trampling it into the deck. The retaliation was fierce and unhinged. Two more precinct droids popped out from the interior bay, opening fire at point-blank range into the dense crowd. A human male was thrown backward, his chest cavity instantaneously turned into a smoking pulp by the kinetic impact. Once again, the desperate mob surged against the shuttle frame, only for a second, as a sustained volley of automated gunfire drove them back. This time, the casualties could be counted by the dozens.
“Bastards!” Kyle hissed under his breath.
The sheer, cold-blooded carnage made his stomach churn with revulsion, but there was absolutely nothing he could do. The droids were too numerous, too heavily armored, and packed military-grade ordnance. Trying to play the hero would only get him liquidated. He didn’t have much time left anyway; the deck plating beneath his combat boots was turning red-hot, a verified indicator that the core fire had fully compromised the Nine Wonders’ highest tier. Almost on pure muscle memory, he checked the energy readout on his stolen stun gun: less than 10%. Not much, but more than enough to drag a couple of those tin cans down to hell with him.
Right then, a blood-curdling, thunderous roar erupted, an acoustic shockwave that—for a fraction of a second—completely drowned out the screams of the dying and the blare of the sirens. A massive silhouette, winged and terrifying, plummeted from above onto the shuttle’s roof and slammed into the robocops. Two metallic skulls collided with a sickening, hydraulic crunch.
“Uful’lan!” Twiglet shrieked in disbelief.
Only then did Kyle’s brain register the attacker. The Big Guy had mapped out the exact same tactical play; he’d just executed it a microsecond faster. If the overgrown ape thought he was going to monopolize all the credit for this extraction, though, he was wide off the mark. Let out a battle cry of his own, Kyle aggressively elbowed his way through the panicked crowd to reach the K’rell’s flank, just as two more enforcement droids deployed from the interior hatch. Kyle raised his weapon, fired a continuous burst, and caught the lead cop dead-center. The surviving droid, its back pinned against the interior bulkhead, desperately tried to slam the reinforced pressure door shut, but Uful’lan jammed his massive foot into the gap and pulled with raw, monstrous strength until the hatch was flung wide open.
This time, there was no containing the screaming crowd’s stampede.
A couple of desperate civilians ripped the service rifles from the mangled wreckage of the fallen droids and emptied the cells into the surviving units inside the bay. For several chaotic seconds, a barrage of structural impacts and dying electronic screeches echoed from deep within the chassis.
“Twiglet! Shirl!” Kyle bellowed, checking his perimeter. “Move your asses! Get inside, now!”
He locked eyes with Uful’lan, who was currently occupied with aggressively stomping a robocop’s severed torso into scrap metal.
“Cut it out, Big Guy! Get your ass to the cockpit and ensure they don’t initiate liftoff without us!”
The K’rell bared his serrated fangs, his orange eyes sparkling with chaotic adrenaline. Without a single syllable, he vanished into the shadows of the cockpit access corridor. Twiglet scrambled in right after him, trudging forward alongside Shirl and the heavy bottleneck of synthetic children. Kyle stood at the threshold, physically hoisting the little synths aboard and shoving them into the crowded interior. He vaulted inside last, sealing the hatch frame behind him, and screamed toward the front:
“Punch it, Uful’lan! Go, go, go!”
Impossibly, dangerously crammed past maximum operational capacity, the Imperial shuttle listed heavily to one side, its antigravity thrusters whining in protest as it slowly clawed its way off the burning pad. Dozens of abandoned civilians made a final, suicidal gamble to escape the inferno, hanging onto the structural struts of the landing gear with their bare hands.
The dropship had barely ascended a few feet into the toxic sky when the central roof of the Nine Wonders completely succumbed to the plasma fire, detonating inward in a violent cascade of sparks.
Rather than face the agonizing certainty of being incinerated alive in the collapse, many of those left behind chose to step off the ledge, plunging into the void.
The ship seized from the police forces dropped like a stone, landing right in the plaza directly in front of the blazing Nine Wonders. It touched down in the dead center of a chaotic perimeter swarming with emergency response vehicles, medical rescue teams, traumatized survivors, and the ubiquitous crowd of civilian onlookers whom the remaining precinct droids were trying in vain to keep at bay. Screams and agonized moans echoed across the asphalt while news reporters swarmed the barricades like locusts, their lenses capturing the most gruesome sights for the late-night feeds.
The shuttle’s civilian passengers poured out of the main loading hatch into the square, frantically congratulating one another on being still alive. Some broke down crying, embracing in tight huddles, while the vast majority immediately started barking into their personal datapads.
Kyle scrambled straight into the cockpit. Crossing the threshold, his combat boot stepped over the charred, melted framework of an enforcement droid. Another droid was slumped motionless in the co-pilot’s seat. Aside from a few massive structural dents and a gaping puncture wound in its chest armor, the chassis appeared to have emerged from the melee relatively intact. Kyle slid into the pilot’s bucket seat and rapidly began cross-examining the flight systems. Fortunately, the avionics were standard and simple enough, and the fuel reserves were comfortably high. The dropship’s localized communications matrix was still broadcasting.
Twiglet’s green head suddenly popped through the hatchway of the cockpit partition.
“What exactly are you doing?” she demanded.
“Can’t you see? I’m firing up the thrusters. We’re pulling out,” Kyle replied, his fingers flying across the input keys and tapping through digital icons without looking back at her.
“What about the little synthetics?”
“The synths? They’re down in the square and out of the fire, aren’t they? Mission accomplished.”
Twiglet let out a heavy sigh, her long tongue involuntarily unrolling. “Technically, yes. More or less. Still…”
She hesitated, her stance rigid, until Kyle finally abandoned his control panel check to glare at her over his shoulder.
“Look, Captain…” the Mahjit added, her voice dropping. “… that was the cyber-juvenile fantasy block. If we just leave them stranded here…”
“So what? We can’t act as a permanent charity case for every malfunctioning sector of New Xanadu.”
“Well… you know how the corporations operate. If we abandon them to the authorities, sooner or later they’ll end up right back inside those alcoves.”
Kyle opened his mouth to launch into a fierce complaint, but Shirl cut him off, stepping into the cabin flanked by a pair of the younger synthetic children.
“Alia and T’zork want to know if Odie’s going to be okay,” she announced, a trace of cheerfulness returning to her voice.
“Odie?” Twiglet repeated, her eyes widening as she frantically began patting down her pockets. “He’s fine, I thin— Oh, no!” she shrieked, her skin turning a sickly shade of yellow. “I lost him!”
“Are you kidding me?” Kyle blurted out, incredulous. “Keep digging! He has to be on you!”
Twiglet violently turned the pockets of her tattered, blood-drenched jumpsuit inside out. “I don’t have him! I don’t have him, I’m telling you he’s gone!” She was rapidly spiraling into a frenzied panic. “Oh my God, that is just perfect! If I dropped him during the stampede on the stairs, someone will have stepped on him and crushed his shell by now! Oh, no… this is entirely my fault!” she sobbed, burying her face in her short hands.
“Please, Twiglet, take a breath and calm down,” Shirl whispered, resting a gentle palm on her shoulder. “It might not be that bad. Mufrids are pretty smart. We’ll keep searching and—”
Meanwhile, Uful’lan and a group of synthetic children had swarmed up onto the shuttle’s bridge deck.
“If thiss bringss you any comforth, Thwigleth,” the K’rell interjected, framing his massive silhouette in the cabin doorway, “there are absoluteley no ssquasshed Mufridss outh there!”
The Mahjit’s frantic sobs only intensified.
“Don’t… tcshhhh… bzzzzz… CLICK… Don’t lose your heads, everyone! I am perfectly functional!” a distorted, metallic voice chimed in.
“Who the hell is talking?” Kyle demanded, his hand instantly dropping toward his captured weapon.
“It’s me—Odie!” The synthesized voice seemed to be radiating from somewhere within arm’s reach.
“Odie?!” Shirl blinked in utter bewilderment. “Where exactly are you hiding?”
“Right here. I patched my neural telemetry directly into this dead droid’s voice box.”
Every eye locked onto the co-pilot’s seat. All of a sudden, the bridge was packed to maximum capacity with cheering, ecstatic children. Twiglet let out a profound gasp of relief, overjoyed to realize her deep-cover colleague was safe.
Under the Mufrid’s seamless biochemical override, the heavy, mangled carcass of the robocop violently twitched, gears grinding as it forced itself into an upright, standing position.
“Give me a little breathing room, kids, please! We can throw a proper party later!” The repurposed machine turned its optical sensors toward the Mahjit. “I’m Odie Binx.”
“I am Twiglet Skunks, representing the Bageechaa branch,” the Mahjit introduced herself, her voice shaking slightly as she offered a formal tilt of her head. “It is an honor to finally cross paths, though I certainly anticipated a more professional occasion.”
“The pleasure is mine, Twiglet. I’ve heard exceptional things about you—back on Avalon.”
She hesitated, but only for a fraction of a second, before cutting straight to the core of the contract. “Then you know precisely why I tracked you down, correct?”
“Yes. Shirl filled me in on the entire situation. But shouldn’t we…” Odie’s mechanical voice box suddenly shifted into a tone of sharp alarm. He swiveled the droid’s cracked photoreceptors toward the reinforced glass of the cockpit windshield. Outside, the structural apocalypse had reached a crescendo; the plasma fire was systematically consuming the Nine Wonders from the penthouse level down to the foundation blocks. “… shouldn’t we punch it and get the hell out of this sector? If the operative teams track our telemetry, they might stage a secondary ambush!”
The droid turned its armored skull toward Kyle, who was currently pinning him with an aggressively hostile, untrustworthy glare.
“Can you navigate this dropship down to a place on the Seven Hundred and Thirty-Fourth Level, Thirty-Ninth Sector?”
“Finally!” the pilot snorted in immense relief, slamming his palms onto the primary console. A holographic display map snapped into view, flashing an array of hostile red threat icons. “Hold onto your seats, people. The precinct droids are locking onto our vectors right now.”
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