I started moving to my room to gather some materials I had left there.

  The window exploded.

  Not cracked. Not splintered. The entire far wall detonated inward. Ten meters of reinforced smart plasteel that I'd been assured was as strong as a ship's hull. Shaped charges. The sound hit me before the shards did, a deep concussive boom that I felt in my sternum, in my teeth, in the hollow spaces behind my eyes.

  Cornelius had been in his armchair, facing the window. Reading. Drinking coffee. Enjoying the view of the station's merchant district sprawling a hundred meters below.

  He was directly in the blast path.

  I saw the shards: hundreds of them, spinning, catching the light, a wall of razor-edged plasteel flying at killing speed. My mind simply stopped. Mouth open. Frozen.

  The window...

  Then Cornelius moved.

  He was on his feet in a heartbeat, hands extended, and I felt a rush of air from deeper in the room. A pressure wave in reverse, like the suite itself was exhaling. The shards stopped. Hung in the air for a fraction of a second, trembling, glinting. Then they reversed, blasting back outward through the ruined window frame with the force of his will behind them.

  The debris cloud punched into the open air and revealed what was behind it: six figures in dark tactical armor, hovering on anti-grav harnesses against the open sky. The redirected plasteel hit them like shrapnel. One figure jerked, spun, and dropped, instantly out of view. The suite was hundreds of meters high. He would not survive a fall like that. Five remained.

  Cornelius's coffee mug lay shattered on the floor. His book was across the room. Sweat was already beading on his forehead. His hands remained raised outward. A barrier manifested. I could feel it in the air, a subtle pressure, like standing near a charged field.

  It was my first time observing psionic powers used for physical effects. I was amazed by how effective it was.

  There were now five armed figures outside our window, several hundred meters above the street.

  They swung in. Fast. Practiced. They cleared the window frame in a fluid sequence, and their boots hit the floor almost simultaneously. The anti-grav harnesses detached: quick-release clasps. A practiced snap and drop move. They immediately grabbed the rifles attached to their sides and fanned out. Cover positions behind the overturned furniture, the structural columns, the entertainment center that was now a shattered ruin. No hesitation. No confusion. Professional breach formation.

  Then they opened fire.

  The sound was brutal: a heavy, crackling roar of energy weapons, multiple rifles firing in controlled bursts. Bright flashes turned the room into a strobe. The bolts hit Cornelius's barrier, dissipating in ripples of distorted air, like heat shimmer made visible. The barrier held. Cornelius kept his hands up, jaw locked, every muscle in his body rigid with concentration. He couldn't do anything but hold the wall.

  Gear. I need my gear.

  My shield. My gun. Both on my nightstand, meters away through my bedroom door. I was unarmed, unshielded, standing in a doorway while five professionals poured weapons fire into the only thing keeping us alive.

  My body made the decision before my brain finished the thought. I spun and sprinted for my bedroom door. Behind me, the hammering of energy bolts against the barrier, each impact sending a vibration through the air that I could feel against my back. A thump hit the barrier too close. I felt the heat of displaced energy as I dove through the doorframe.

  I hadn't been carrying my equipment; that would have been paranoid, Rosalia said so, and she was right, we were in the safest hotel in the merchant district, reinforced plasteel, private security, top-floor suite. But I'd kept them accessible. Just in case. The personal shield generator, a compact rectangle about the size of a thick book, and the Starburst, matte black, deceptively small.

  I clipped the shield to my belt. The activation hum was immediate. A low vibration against my hip, almost soothing. My holobracer synced and the HUD overlay flooded my vision in its familiar blue tint.

  SHIELD: 100%

  The Starburst settled into my right hand. The quiet whir of the power-up cycle felt reassuring.

  I turned and started running back to the common room.

  Okay. Time to show those guys what I can do. Cornelius needs me.

  My bedroom window exploded.

  The blast made me stumble. My shield flared instantly, the freshly activated barrier catching the worst of the debris spray in a ripple of blue-white light. I hit the floor hard, rolled, came up with the Starburst raised.

  Two attackers swung through the destroyed window. Same dark armor, same anti-grav harnesses, same practiced detachment as they unclipped and landed. They were already spreading apart, weapons up, moving to flank me.

  The wind tore through my bedroom. Papers scattered off my desk. The greenery partition, a wall of living plants I'd actually started to enjoy, swayed violently, soil spilling from its base. The temperature dropped.

  My holobracer chimed. A new notification. The HUD was populating with new data as it handshook with the hotel's security network. Red dots appeared on a mini-map overlay: approximate positions of living entities tracked by the building's sensors. Privacy dampening inside the suite meant these were rough locations only: dots, not outlines, no movement data. I could see the cluster in the living area. Cornelius and five attackers. And two new dots in my room, closing on my position. The minimap and the colored dots brought back memories from the game. It was familiar. I relaxed.

  I flicked to the corridor feeds. Camera views from the hallway outside our suite filled a small window in my peripheral vision.

  Empty. The corridor was empty. No guards. No security response. No one.

  A security response ETA counter blinked in the corner of my HUD. No estimate available.

  Where is hotel security?

  No time. The two attackers in my room were moving, flanking wide, weapons trained on where they'd last seen me.

  I dove behind the greenery partition.

  It was the best cover available: floor to ceiling, sitting on a dense composite base filled with soil and hydroponic substrate. Half a meter of dirt and polymer. It hid me, and it had mass. I pressed my back against it, Starburst raised, and tried to get a read on my attackers.

  They did not rush in. They'd split the moment they landed: one moving left along the wall, the other on the right toward my desk. They moved with certainty, like they knew exactly where I was crouching.

  Thermal overlay? Motion tracking in those helmets?

  Whatever it was, hiding wasn't working.

  Energy bolts punched into the partition above me. The heavy crackle of military-grade rifles. Burning leaves and chunks of soil rained down on my head. The acrid smell of scorched plant matter filled my nose. The base shuddered, and two bolts pierced clean through, crossing the space where my torso had been a second ago.

  They connected. My shield flared, the energy dissipating across the barrier's surface in brief blue-white ripples.

  SHIELD: 97%… 95%.

  Each hit ate two, maybe three percent. Quick math. Thirty to forty hits before I was in real danger.

  The shield holds. I can work with this.

  I felt relieved. My body moved automatically. The shield was absorbing the hits. It felt surreal. I could feel the impacts as no mor ethan little pokes. And, like in the game, there was a health bar being depleted. I was in my element.

  I rolled out from cover, rising to one knee, Starburst leveled at the attacker on my left, the one who'd moved along the wall. A bolt hit me as I exposed myself. I barely registered the impact as I fired.

  SHIELD: 93%.

  The Starburst made its sound: a small, precise whir, almost gentle. Nothing like the heavy crackle filling the room from the other side.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  The bolt hit the attacker square in the chest. His personal shield engaged, a brief flicker of resistance trying to disperse the energy. It lasted a fraction of a second. Then it failed. Overwhelmed. The shot punched through like it wasn't there, leaving a hole roughly ten centimeters wide, center mass. The reinforced wall behind him cracked from the residual energy transfer. He dropped. Didn't twitch.

  I smiled.

  A crackle of garbled audio cut through my holobracer, like someone trying to tune a broken radio. I didn't have time to parse it. My attention snapped right.

  The second was almost on me. He had done something I didn't expect, dropping his rifle. The weapon lay discarded on the floor. In his hand was a whip, energy coursing along its length in visible arcs, crackling, spitting, a blue-white line that was almost beautiful.

  I recognized it instantly. A neuro-whip. I'd seen dozens of them in the game. It was a nasty weapon designed to coil around a target and overwhelm the nervous system with incapacitating agony. In the game, getting caught meant a forced-stun status and a trip to respawn.

  In real life, I didn't want to find out.

  He was fast. I was turning, trying to bring the Starburst to bear, but he was too fast and reached me while I was still oriented toward the man I'd just killed. The whip cracked forward.

  My left arm came up on reflex. Pure instinct. The whip coiled around my forearm.

  The energy hit my shield and held. Not a single impact. Sustained contact. A continuous pour of crackling current, centimeters from my skin, held back only by the barrier. I could feel the heat through the shield.

  On my HUD, my shield's health started falling.

  78%… 68%…

  No no no no...

  58%… 52%…

  On instinct, I tried to moving my arm, pulling. Trying to make him lose his grip. But he was holding.

  41%…

  The numbers kept dropping.

  33%.

  My right hand. The Starburst. Still free.

  Finally, I managed to bring my right arm in his direction. Panicking, I did not waste time aiming. As soon as it was in the general direction of my attacker, I shot.

  The bolt hit the arm holding the whip, just above the elbow. It vaporized what it hit, completely severing the limb. The elbow, forearm, and hand still gripping the whip hit the ground with a thump as the man screamed. A primal scream of pain and surprise. The stump was cauterized immediately by the heat of the plasma. He fell to his knees, left hand reaching to hold his stump.

  The whip died. The energy crackling along its length collapsed and it uncoiled from my forearm, inert.

  SHIELD: 31%. The drain had stopped.

  It's over. He's done for.

  It had felt like an eternity, but whip had held on me for a fraction of a second. My breathing was ragged. I was already thinking ahead: to Cornelius, alone with five attackers. I started to turn my hips then froze.

  The screaming had stopped.

  I stared at him. At the stump. There was a powerful smell of ozone and something I couldn't help but think smelled like cooking pork. His armor was moving. The material at the stump's edge flowed like liquid, extending to encase the wound completely. His body went rigid , every muscle locking at once.

  I took a step back. Then another. Unsure of what was happening before my eyes.

  Then he was on his feet. Lunging. His remaining hand reached for my right wrist, for the Starburst, trying to disarm me. His movements had the jerky efficiency of a body running on chemicals.

  I yanked the gun back. His fingers closed on air. But he didn't stop his movement, continuing into a low pivot. When he was back to facing me, there was a blade in his remaining hand. A monomolecular edge, pulled from a thigh sheath in a motion too fast and too smooth for a man who'd lost an arm seconds ago.

  What the hell are they on?

  I was already adjusting my aim on him with the Starburst when he lunged forward.

  I fired point-blank. Right on his head. At that range, the Starburst's output was... His head vanished. I quickly turned away. The view was gruesome.

  The room went quiet.

  Relative quiet. The firefight in the living area continued, muffled through the walls, but in my bedroom it had stopped.

  SHIELD: 31%.

  I moved toward the bedroom door. As I did, my holobracer chimed. The hotel's security systems had been working on that garbled interference I'd caught earlier. The attackers' encrypted comms channel. Cracked.

  My earpiece filled with voices. Clipped. Professional.

  "Target Two holding position. Barrier still active. Cannot advance past five meters."

  Another voice: "Entry Team Alpha, status on Target One?"

  Silence.

  "Alpha, respond."

  More silence.

  I crouched at the doorframe. Peered into the living area.

  The living area looked like a warzone. The luxury furniture was overturned, shattered, scorched. The entertainment center was a ruin of cracked screens and exposed wiring. Scorch marks streaked the walls in ugly black fans where energy bolts had missed their target. And the window, the entire north wall, was gone.

  Cornelius stood in the center of the room.

  It looked insane. Completely exposed, no cover, standing like a man waiting for a train. Until I saw what he was doing.

  His psionic barrier stretched from roughly the midpoint of the living area to the destroyed window. The wide, shimmering wall of distorted air, was barely visible except where energy bolts hit it and splashed outward in ripples. He'd walled off the entire north half of the suite. The five attackers were pinned between the barrier and the open sky. He was not attacking, only maintaining his wall. The did not bother with cover. They were firing in controlled bursts. Testing. Probing. Looking for weaknesses in the barrier. And Cornelius was holding but the cost was written across his body. Drenched in sweat. Veins standing out at his temples. Jaw locked. Hands raised and trembling with sustained effort. His eyes were fixed forward, unblinking.

  I tried my comms. Rosalia, Seraphine, station security, emergency frequency. Anything.

  Static. Every channel, dead. Jammed.

  We're on our own.

  "I'm here," I called from the doorway. I did not need to shout, he was close enough. "Two down in my room."

  He didn't turn. Couldn't afford to. But I caught the edge of a grim smile.

  "Hah. That explains why it took you so long." A breath. A pause. "They came through your window too?" The smile turned grimmer. "Then I've been wasting my energy."

  He meant the barrier. He'd stretched it wide enough to cover the entire suite, including the hallway to the bedrooms. If they'd breached my window anyway, all that effort to shield the eastern half of the room had been burned for nothing. He could have held something half that size and conserved his strength.

  "Pull in toward me," I said. "Contract the shield. I'll shoot from the doorframe ."

  That was Cornelius under fire.

  Of course, our attackers had not stayed idle. As soon as I had started to talk with Cornelius, they'd reached for covers. Despite their efforts, one was still exposed, still moving toward an overturned couch.

  The Starburst whirred. The bolt crossed the living area in a line of superheated plasma. The man fell.

  One down. Four to go. The gamer brain was still there; counting targets, calculating angles, tracking red dots on the mini-map. Easier this way. Think about the dot disappearing.

  The survivors reacted fast. They intensified their fire on Cornelius while pushing forward in the suite, now that he'd retracted his shield and was no longer blocking their advance.

  Cornelius was standing next to me. Still sweating. But his breathing seemed less labored. Clearly, the area to shield was more important than the amount of fire it received. The trembling in his hands lessened. He positioned himself just inside the living area, a meter from my doorway, the contracted shield covering the space between us and the attackers like a narrowing funnel.

  The trade-off was obvious. They now had free run of the living area. They could flank, push toward the corridor, try other rooms. But doing any of that meant leaving their cover. And leaving their cover meant the Starburst.

  "I can hold this," Cornelius said quietly, between breaths. "As long as you need."

  I've got my tank. Time to dish out the DPS. An incongruous thought formed. Could I configure my holobracer to keep track of hits. If I had allies, we could keep track of each one's stats. Having a DPS-meter is important.

  I shook my head. Now was not the time. But I filed the idea for later. While Cornelius turned his head to look at me with an exasperated look.

  I studied the minimap and the disposition of our attackers, then fired at the kitchen island. The Starburst's bolt hit the composite countertop and punched halfway through. It held. Barely. The attacker behind it stayed down.

  Then Cornelius did something I hadn't expected. A brief pulse of telekinetic force aimed at the island. A shove that slid the heavy composite block sideways by half a meter, scraping across the floor with a grinding shriek.

  The attacker behind it was exposed. A fraction of a second.

  I was ready.

  The Starburst whirred. He dropped.

  Three remaining.

  "Thanks for the assist. Can you repeat while maintaining your barrier?"

  "It's costly, so not too often, but yes, I can do it a few more times."

  We work together. We actually work together.

  I smiled at him.

  "Good. I don't need more than a couple more assists to finish them off."

  Then the comms spoke.

  "Lighthouse, this is Entry Team. We've lost four. Two targets consolidated, east side of the suite. Requesting immediate reinforcement."

  I swore. A pause on the channel. Then:

  "Reinforcement inbound. Ninety seconds."

  My blood went cold.

  More chatter, rapid: "Corridor team, status?"

  "Charges set. Elevator access denied. Security neutralized on this level."

  There was a corridor team. They'd killed the guards on this floor and rigged the elevator access. Help was not coming. We were on our own.

  One more exchange, almost buried under the tactical chatter: "Overwatch, surveillance team epsilon is not responding."

  A beat. "Doesn't matter. Proceed as planned."