Free The Exiled Earthborn by Paul Tassi Page B

them approach?” another voice asked. Lucas recognized it. Tulwar .
    “We still don’t know. I’ll check—”
    Tulwar cut him off.
    “No matter. There will be time to dwell on your failures later. I must leave immediately. Kill the girl. They will earn no prize by coming here.
    “Tell the Xalan to meet me at the craft. And you’ve encrypted our communications?”
    “Um, of course,” said the other voice nervously. There were a few tones of virtual keys being tapped, and the comm squealed before going completely silent.
    Maston yelled into his chestplate.
    “Are you getting this admiral? Mission’s shattered, Tulwar’s making a run for it.”
    “We’ll head him off,” came Tannon’s voice through the speaker. “Pull everyone out.”
    No, they can’t. Asha.
    Lucas raced over to the cluster of monitors and whirled through the Xalan menus. It had been a while since he’d needed to read the language, but he could navigate the system well enough. He found the symbol for “holding,” and the view that awaited him sent ice through his veins. It was Asha, hunched over in a cell with a lightscreen guarding the entrance. The barrier flickered, then disappeared. Four armored men strode in and formed a semicircle around her as she sat with her head between her knees, blood already caked on the floor around her. One brandished a long curved knife that Lucas recognized from the ransom video.
    The feeds bathed Lucas’s face in white light as they were all wiped completely. He frantically ran his fingers through the controls, but all were locked. The station had been shut down, and he no longer had eyes on Asha. He had to reach her. He ran out into the middle of the room toward the door on the opposite end.
    As he found himself underneath the enormous light, the ground began to shake and he was thrown off balance.
    “Readings spiking,” yelled the woman to his right. Everyone clutched their rifles and spun in a circle as they searched for the source of the disturbance.
    It surfaced next to Lucas. A twenty-foot-tall colossus of metal with a blank spherical face and bladed arms. Heavy golden plating coated its chest and shoulders and its legs were mammoth canisters that looked like they could crush a car. By the time Lucas raised Natalie, he was flying across the room from a thunderous iron kick that sent him crashing into a pile of debris.
    “ Killbot !” Maston yelled, and Splinter Four opened fire. The metal behemoth was peppered with plasma rounds as Lucas extracted himself from the scrap around him. There was no official diagnosis, but he’d broken ribs before, and the old, familiar surge of pain came roaring back to his insides. His suit released a stream of painkillers into his system and his vision blurred like he’d just taken his fifteenth shot of the night at the bar.
    Mercifully, the effect was temporary. As he wiped his eyes he found the machine was gone. The rest of the team was searching for it, but it had presumably found a pile of metal to hide behind, or another floor panel to take cover inside. The thing could move fast. Lucas wondered if it was autonomous or if someone was directly pulling the strings inside. Hadn’t advanced machines been banished for ages now after the last war? Whatever the case, this one was clearly predatory.
    Lucas ignored the remaining pain radiating from his abdomen and flipped Natalie’s scope to thermal. The thing had to be emitting heat, right? He swept across the room, finding only the yellow-red shapes of his teammates against the cold blue, when suddenly the thing found them instead.
    The blond Guardian couldn’t even formulate a scream as a razor-sharp blade plunged through the mesh armor on his back and out his chest. The killbot, as Maston had called it, materialized from behind a pile of metal it had blended into perfectly. It whipped its dripping spiked arm to the right, and the body of the soldier flew off of it toward the wall, a stream of blood following