“Communication, Matias,” she ground out. “Try it next time. Before you do something like that again.”
His eyes turned warm. He leaned toward her, and she had to retract the blade to keep from cutting his throat.
“I won’t let you die, Ramona.” His voice was quiet and intimate.
Suddenly the cabin shrank, and she was acutely aware that his presence seemed to take up too much of it. He was still looking at her with those warm, sincere eyes she’d never expected to see.
“You can berate me later,” he said in that same voice. “But right now, we need to get out of the vehicle, because the Vandals are coming.”
He reached over to the console with his left hand, still looking at her, and the aerial turned around, slid backward, and beached itself, the cargo area facing the manicured jungle.
Snap out of it, she told herself.
Matias’s fingers danced over the console without him looking. The cargo door rose, and the ramp slid into the golden sand.
“Show off,” Ramona growled and unbuckled her crash harness.
They were fifty meters from the exit when the Vandals attacked. Matias sensed them moving down the curving path toward them and stepped into the flower bed behind a palm. Ramona sank into the greenery across from him. It was as if they had coordinated this without speaking.
The atrium was full of life and sounds. Rare birds sang in the canopy. Small pretty animals from a dozen planets darted through the branches and snacked on orange fruit hanging from the vines. A lot of cover from the bioscanners. But cover didn’t mean complete invisibility. At most, it would buy them a few seconds.
Four soldiers rounded the bend, moving in a standard two-by-two formation. Their silver-and-black armor molded to their bodies without restricting movement. It would absorb a shot or two from a typical handheld energy or kinetic firearm, and it would block a thrust or cut from most blades. They carried standard Vandal burst rifles, designed to fire cartridges of tightly compacted pellets. When a single pellet tore into flesh, it exploded, shredding internal organs. When a full load from the cartridge hit at once, it turned human bodies into a bloody mist.
The Vandals didn’t value precision shooting. They sent out a wall of projectiles, indiscriminate and deadly.
The front pair of troopers took up positions behind two trees. The rear pair moved forward, covered by the first, the scanners on their helmets painting the jungle in green light. Ideally, Matias would’ve circled behind them to take out the rear soldiers first, but they didn’t have that luxury. In a moment, they would be detected.
Matias glanced across the path and saw Ramona looking back at him. He gave a short nod toward the soldiers. She winked at him.
They moved at the same time. She stepped onto the path a hair ahead of him. The seco in her left forearm spilled out, turning into a rectangular bloodred shield, while her right produced a long scythe blade. He’d opted for the same shield and a longer, slimmer sword.
The world slowed as they charged through it, too fast.
The pair of troops before them had no time to react.
Ramona slashed, slicing the man in front of her in half.
Matias thrust his blade into the neck of the trooper before him. The seco encountered no resistance. It never did.
Blood wet the paver stones.
The pair of remaining Vandals opened fire. In the split second before they pulled their triggers, he’d shifted both seco into shields and sprinted, aware of Ramona at his heels. The pellet barrage smashed into the double shield, glancing off and mincing the jungle around them, and then he was in strike range.
Ramona spun from behind him with breathtaking elegance, her two seco mutating into wide blades, and struck. Two heads rolled onto the path. She dismissed the seco with a flourish and stepped over the bodies.
He knew it was for the cameras. He had no doubt they were being watched and that whoever saw that on the other end likely wet themselves. But she had done it flawlessly. Every line of her body, every twist, every movement was the definition of deadly grace. Jealousy seared him. He wished she had done it just for him. He wished he was the one to parry it.
Ramona plucked a rifle from one of the dead men’s hands.
“The exit is about forty meters down this path,” he told her quietly. “They’d be fools not to guard it.”
She hefted the rifle and fired into a corpse with a metallic thump. The body jerked, spraying blood and liquefied flesh onto the path as the payload detonated.
“No genetic lock. What kind of door?”
“Hermetically sealed plasticore with a wood veneer.”
The atrium was around thirty degrees Celsius, about six degrees above what most people found comfortable, and a good deal more humid. Drewery meant it as a tropical retreat and took pains to insulate it from the rest of the house. Plasticore was a poor heat conductor and therefore perfect for his purposes, but an average firearm would punch a hole through it even with the smallest-caliber round.