Chapter 9

Descendingthe collecting turret six hours later was a challenge.

She wasn’t all loose and gooey—that didn’t happen to Royal Delta Marines, especially not this RDM. Her on-a-mission happy smile usually only came out when she was in the thick of it, but she could feel it plastered on her face.

And her hands felt hypersensitive, as if the fingertip controls inside her suit were no longer perfectly configured to the pounding pulse she could feel right out to her extremities.

Focus! She seriously had to focus.

Sure, on his Earther pectoral muscles. She’d managed to get his suit down to his waist and— Just the memory of it made her palms sweat and her head go light.

Focus!

The constant thrust to hold the Mirror Moon in place against its too-low orbit meant they weighed only fourteen percent less than on Earth’s surface. Falling off the platform would offer a rapid and fiery descent into the thick mud that Earth called an atmosphere. She’d hit atmo in five minutes moving at three kilometers per second—not her idea of healthy orbital dynamics. A few of her molecules might survive to rain down on the India Beam weapon itself. Not that it would matter.

Down the tower, she approached the next challenge carefully. According to the plans that Lucius had found, the station was mostly automated…except for a detachment of the Special Frontier Force.

Once she slipped up to the first camera, she felt much better. Their particle beam might be cutting edge, but even a first-year grunt knew enough to blur an Oticus III SecureCam.

Instead of sending a blur, she flicked on both of their suits’ mirroring functionality. They now projected on the front of their suits whatever appeared behind them. There was a little compounding problem, the back of her suit picking up the front of Lucius’ suit, which in turn was projecting what was behind him. It wasn’t the best image, but as it was supposedly impossible that they were standing on the backside of the Mirror Moon, she’d trust to lax security.

Twenty minutes and an unseemly amount of corridor later, they walked into the control room at the center of the structure to find one guard, fast asleep with her feet propped on the main panel and her mouth hanging open. She woke at the moment Syra slapped on a binder that wrapped her and her arms to the chair.

“Where are all your pals?” Syra asked, but didn’t expect an answer through the heavy gag she’d shoved in during the woman’s initial squawk. She shot a glob of QuickFoam on both her hands, just so that she couldn’t do something tricky with her fingers.

Instead Syra turned to the monitors. Thankfully they were all labeled in Standard instead of some throwback like Hindi or English.

“Oh, you guys are making this too easy.” There was a fierce game of cricket going on in one of the cargo bays.

It was only a matter of a few minutes’ work to set up the routine, and mere seconds to lock down all the internal accesses and then depressurize the bay. They were Special Frontier Force, so several of them made it to their weapons.

No one made it to the emergency air masks.

“Earthers! You always go for the air first,” she made a tsking noise at the idiots on the display.

“You killed them!” Lucius looked at her in horror.

Syra didn’t like seeing that look on his face. Goddamn it! After living together in the cockpit for three days, she’d forgotten that he was a civilian. And she’d…

Double damn it!

She’d thought that just maybe she’d found someone to be with for a while. It was certain that no one had ever made her feel as good as he had— Ever! And now he looked at her…the way civilians always looked at warriors.

Well, let him become reentry burn-off.

“They’re Special Frontier,” she waved a hand at the screen as the last of them died, in a final, futile reach for air. “Those guys are tough. You want them running around loose to find us and off us? Five billion dead first time they used this weapon. You want five billion and two? That would make you happier?”