Free Comrades in Arms by Kevin J. Anderson Page A

would reflect the beam of his laser rifle.
    “I’ll take out as many as I can, but I doubt I’ll get them all,” he said. “Sorry we didn’t make it all the way.”
    “We made it this far, Rader, and now we are dead.” Click’s voice was strangely emotionless. “But so are they.”
    Rader identified an expression on the alien face that no other human would have seen. Click punched a sequence into the navigational computer, and the observatory asteroid shifted its position in front of them. “Our engines cannot outrun the fighterships, but we have enough power to drag them along.”
    Rader nodded approval. “A Deathguard’s mission is to cause mayhem.”
    “Yes, I believe we have caused a fair amount of mayhem,” Click said.
    “I just wish we had accomplished something more than that.” He wondered if the Commissioner would take the medal of honor away from his family … but that would be admitting something had gone wrong.
    The six members of the hunter squad advanced up to the control deck.
    Rader darted a farewell glance at his comrade. After setting their collision course, Click crouched in motionless silence, not even trying to fight. Instead, he hunched over a shining image, studying his last holystal. The glowing shape was a dazzling, perfect sphere.
    Rader took a quick breath. “What does that mean?”
    “It means that we have run out of alternatives.”
    The hunter squad let out a chorus of shouts as they stormed the final corridor. Rader opened fire, placing a neat, centimeter-wide hole through the head of one Jaxxan.
    Now the Werewolf Trigger clamored in his mind, but as he fired on the advancing squad members, his arm jerked and spasmed, spoiling his aim. The Jaxxans took shelter against door wells in the corridor, and Rader’s energy blasts reflected off the mirrored armor, ricocheting down the hall. The fractured beams dissipated, but he kept firing.
    Rader’s leg gave out beneath him, and he tumbled over like a mannequin. He tried to aim his laser rifle as momentum carried his body in a clumsy roll, and he lay face up on the deck.
    An energy-web hurled by the two remaining Jaxxans engulfed Click in luminous tangles. Click cried out as the web completed itself, but his words turned to scintillating shards of sound. His holystal dwindled to a last spark of light until that, too, vanished.
    The human fighters targeted the Deathguard and rushed forward, while the Jaxxans ran past him, urgently trying to reach the shuttle controls in time. Rader stared at them through his visor: A band of humans and aliens working together, to destroy a human and alien who had dared to work together. He wondered if they understood the irony.
    He looked past them to the cockpit to see the observatory asteroid rushing toward them. The cargo shuttle was going to crash into the spiny missile batteries instead of the telescopes … not that it made any difference.
    A short time was better than no time—and he had spent it with a friend rather than alone.

— 15 —
    Sobel grinned, ready to celebrate the news. “Well, Kiltik—we did it!”
    “Yes, not even one of your Deathguards could resist the two of us.” The Warlord sat across from him in the conference room on the Détente Asteroid. Kiltik had shuttled over to the Earth League embassy at Sobel’s invitation, so they could await the final report.
    The Warlord seemed troubled, however. The Commissioner would never have noticed it before, but now he could detect subtle differences in the alien’s moods. “You don’t seem as overjoyed as I expected.”
    “Perhaps I grieve for the loss of your … astronomical facility.”
    “Oh, that!” Sobel brushed the matter aside. “It was obsolete. We can always build another one—astronomy is low on our priorities.”
    “But it did provide a good hiding place for your weapons stockpile. Either astronomy is quite a volatile science, or your supposed observatory was merely a camouflage.”
    Sobel felt flustered