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And that was his cue.
Sebastian left the guard on the ground, trusting someone else to deal with him, and took off toward the hangar. The time for stealth was far past.
Before Sebastian had even reached the end of the hall, screeching alarms blared to life, and red lights flashed overhead. He looked over his shoulder to see the guard still lying facedown on the floor, so it wasn’t that someone had already found the body. It was that the factory’s system had discovered the virus.
That or what the virus was doing to it.
A low grinding sound slowly rose into Sebastian’s conscious awareness, so slow he couldn’t say when it had started and gotten loud enough to hear over the screaming alarm. But it got louder and louder as Sebastian ran down the halls. When he passed a group of guards going the other way—themselves too panicked to question him—it was even louder than the sirens.
When he skidded to a halt in front of the hangar doors, it had become deafening, and the ceaseless grinding and the ceaseless increase ratcheted up his stress level even beyond the normal levels of escaping a hostile building.
Sebastian searched the door frantically with his eyes and hands, searching for a handle or a button or a keypad. He yelled with frustration when he found no keypad and only a—
A huge explosion roared from somewhere close enough to shake the ground but far enough not to take him out. And still, the grinding sound grew and grew. Maybe that damn virus was going to destroy the factory after all.
Sebastian turned back to the place where there was no keypad and only a stupid scanner. What the hell was it supposed to scan? Sebastian pressed every one of his fingers against it, then knelt down and stared into it with each eye even though it hurt and left little white splotches in his vision. Nothing.
He scrabbled around on his person, searching for a fob or data tablet, or a keychain, or—he let out a cry of success as he found a bar code on the other side of the ID hanging off his chest. He tore the ID from his shirt and pressed the code against the scanner.
The blasted little machine flashed green, and the door hissed open just as a smaller explosion sounded from the other side of the factory.
Sebastian rushed inside the hangar, finding it full of ships and empty of people. He had to give credit to the Turners’ guards. None of them seemed to think of fleeing an obviously doomed factory. They didn’t know it wasn’t going to be blown sky-high.
Then again, Sebastian wasn’t so sure of that anymore either.
He zeroed in on a ship small enough to pilot himself and fancy enough to have speeds up the level he needed to get back to Tava’s system and ran over to it. He had the codes to open the exterior hangar door courtesy of Turner, so as soon as he climbed into the ship, the giddy relief was already bubbling inside him.
He was unstoppable now.
He opened the exterior doors up to the sky and was just lifting the ship out of them as the horrible grinding finally ceased with a spectacular explosion. He saw the red plume of fire on the other side of the factory, then turned his ship away and hit the throttle.
Zooming away and leaving the destruction in his wake, Sebastian let out a cackling, delighted laugh. The escape was always his favorite part.
Chapter Four
Leon looked up from his stack of paper covered with conflicting intelligence reports and watched as Captain Mal’ik clapped a young man on the shoulder. When Mal’ik pulled the man into an embrace that could only be described as fatherly, he dropped his gaze back to his papers and scowled.
They were in Kaston now, at the local Resistance headquarters. Specifically, Captain Mal’ik was down in the back alley behind the building going over last-minute training with some of the soldiers on street fighting, and Leon was standing in his office window, which overlooked said back alley, watching him and regretting it.
It had been an easy and obvious choice to do so at first. After all, Leon had to be sure the turncoat klah’eel captain would be useful to them. Leon had heard too much of Mal’ik to think he would betray them. The man’s reputation for fairness and honor had preceded him even more than his combat abilities.
Leon had seen enough from his window to believe those things, but what he hadn’t counted on was seeing the open adoration in his soldiers’ eyes. They looked at him with trust and eagerness to please, and openness to feedback. Even now, as the session was closing, they clustered around him, hanging on his every word even though they came from a mouth armed with tusks.
They never did that with Leon.
Leon tossed the stack of hard-copy data reports on the table next to the window. They were only useless, frustrating, and confusing at this point. They would defend Kaston from the western side, where the northern forces would most likely come from. They would have contingency squads in the other entrances, hoping they would buy enough time for the bulk of the defenders to arrive if the attackers did something unexpected.
He glanced through his window again to see Mal’ik still talking to the young man he had embraced. Then Mal’ik looked up, and his bright orange eyes met Leon’s. The klah’eel nodded, and Leon forced himself to nod back politely rather than sneer out of some pettiness that should have been beneath him.
Then Mal’ik looked back at the young man, said a few words, looked back up at Leon, and headed for the building entrance. Leon sighed. He was coming up here. As well he might, he had finished with all the squads at headquarters, and he should debrief Leon. It was reasonable.
Leon snatched his mess of papers from the side table and plopped them onto his desk. He stood behind his desk, thought about how extreme their height difference was, and then sat behind it instead. He imagined Captain Mal’ik—every inch the huge, towering klah’eel that Leon had hated and feared in equal measure since he was ten years old—striding into the room while Leon sat in a chair and stood back up again.
He had just straightened his spine and pulled back his shoulders when Mal’ik’s heavy tread echoed down the hall, and the next minute there was a knock on the door.
“Come in.” Leon planted his hands on his desk and leaned forward as Mal’ik entered. “Report.”
“You’ve got good soldiers.” Mal’ik closed the door behind him and walked to the front of the desk, where Leon would have had chairs if he ever wanted anyone to stay long enough to sit in one. “Hardworking, surprisingly experienced for an unofficial outfit—”
