One or two more strikes would do it. Ze-4 watched the bulkhead bend inward. The groans sounded tortured. Its scutumsteel had held strong long enough. If he were honest, he'd rather the blue hurried up so he could get this over with.

  They'd avoid deaths so long as the turret was as good as he remembered. As good as Do-2's original schematic was. Once the pilots sortied, that'd be a different story.

  One more dent. He leaned closer, eyes dry from not blinking. No way would he miss the moment. Were the tiny, splintering cracks along the edges of the indentation a trick of the light? Or real?

  The scutumsteel thinned out like a curtain, allowing light through. Outside, sparks and blurred shadows were all he could differentiate. Not that he needed to know where his target was. It would position itself for him if it wanted in.

  It had no reason not to. What did the Aud think of humans? Did they even think? Ze-4's hands gripped the tripod tighter. Did it even consider the possibility it might die? That humans could harm it at all, even at its current power?

  The bulkhead surrendered. It partly blew free of the bolts holding it in place with a screech of metal tearing against metal. The next impact destroyed the rest and crashed it against the side of one of the compartments behind him. The desire to look behind him almost overshadowed the desire to keep his eyes on where the target would appear.

  That bulkhead might've caught him, though. Thank the Directory he'd positioned the tripod at an angle, instead of right in front of the bulkhead. The unexpected projectile had passed right by them with enough force to flap his jowls.

  He adjusted the turret until the red sight beamed out at the rushing darkness. The roar of wind and the crunch of stone and rock meeting an unstoppable force mixed with the Nyx Breaker's drills. Their ride moved so fast there wasn't anything else to hear. If he had more distance, he would've used a light to spot the blue sooner.

  That would be suicide, here. His quarry could follow the conical shape of the beam back to him, even if looking at it momentarily blinded the Aud. At least the red sight was small and thin enough that the blue might not notice. He would have to make the call with his eyes. One. Two. Three. Four.

  He stifled a yell as the blue's muzzle appeared at the edge of the breach. The familiar pang of dread that ran through him like fire felt infectious. It'd be too easy to give in to it. Fire right now. Avoid waiting at all costs and let it pull more of itself inside. Instinct and experience told him to forgo his restraint. Goodness, common sense told him to do it!

  But the Aud were crafty. At least those of the higher tiers were. He'd let the scholars hiding behind the Last Light's walls debate about that. He already knew in his gut those beady eyes and slanted skulls hid the potential to outwit panicked pilots.

  Panicked pilots were more common than the military might've wanted them to be, but it was like a fact of life. He'd been one of those who got outwitted many times, and he'd long accepted humans had fear. Their fear response activated in response to identifiable danger. The Aud were as identifiable a danger as it got.

  His feet spread and his neck craned forward. He didn't dare to move beyond the tripod. It was easy to recognize that the fragile combination of components couldn't shield him any more than he could it. If blows came to blows and he got it, that'd be it. Same if the turret did.

  The muzzle pushed in more, the hole bending open around it. A metal flower blossoming with death as the pollen centerpiece. The entirety of the maw was inside, and the nostrils flared. It already knew he was there. It had his scent. But he needed to see the eye. Crimson, flashing in the flickering lights…and malicious.

  No, not malicious. Fury was the only thing he could see in those depths, to the point it felt paralyzing. It growled. The deep sound left tremors shaking across his body. Facing them never changed. White, purple, or any of the tiers between them all were hysteria-inducing. All were awe-inspiring, too.

  No matter how many times he'd faced them, they were as awe-inspiring as they were hysteria-inducing. It pulled back, such a small movement that he would've missed it if he weren't staring it down. Its eyes had focused on him with such intensity that when the ruined bulkhead covered them, he felt the absence. His body was his own again.

  It was going to charge inside. He saw the eye come back. It couldn't pull out. Committing to going in was all it could do. 'Now, give it a splitting headache. Do it!'

  "Release!"

  The biolock beeped, and its interface flickered. He'd spun on his heels and started running before the locking mechanism was halfway open. His legs pumped down the corridor with as much vigor as he'd felt in his youth. With as fast as his claim to fame made him, escaping the twenty-meter danger radius was simple.

  The biolock shuddered in slow motion, its clamp retracting. It followed the pull of its cable and rewound itself when one side unlatched. The arc sent it skidding under the tripod and scraping off the emplacement itself. It clattered against a leg, swerving around and climbing back up…

  To strike the switch he'd left flipped off. Even outside of the immediate danger zone, he still flinched. His ankle almost rolled while he wasn't paying attention. The emplacement's retort echoed down both ends of the corridor, then rushed back. It was loud enough to silence the noise coming from outside the breach.

  Servicemen couldn't operate sonics on their most intense firing settings. Doing that when you, or others, lacked protection would sentence them to painful death. Sonics operating at that level would liquefy the internal organs of anyone within twenty meters. Outside of that, servicemen not wearing suits would still suffer backlash from being nearby.

  Being Blessed saved him in more ways than one. He could escape the radius after priming the turret himself. Staying on the fringes afterward instead of creating more space wouldn't disable him. His body's increased physicality was also what gave him the confidence to plan to confront the blue.

  Light on his feet, he turned around to check on it. The turret's aim was true. The barrel's end had exploded, where the cartridge escaped. The bullet's shiny base protruded from the blue's skull. He knew that would happen, but it still left a frown on his face.

  Had his target magically turned into an orange-fur, it'd died on impact. Even a green would've lost consciousness. It'd succumb to a fractured skull and brain hemorrhaging.

  But the blue was only jarred. Granted, this jarring was as close to a concussion as it would get. Ze-4 estimated the distance between him and it. Not enough. Although his instincts screamed at him not to, he turned his back on it.

  His legs were running again, taking him all the way to the tail end of the Titan. He ignored the trickle of blood from his nose and ears. His sense of balance wasn't impaired, so good enough.

  Despite the state of his opponent, none of the tension left his body. His mission wasn't yet ensured. His servicemen's lives still hung in equilibrium. The stubborn Aud attempted to raise its head, yet succumbed to its dizziness and thud back against the floor. Growles reached him.

  “Yeah, yeah, shut it. You don’t get to complain.”

  He braced himself against the rearmost bulkhead. There was nowhere else to go. His runner's position felt sloppy. Then again, if it expedited the process, who was he to complain? He tapped into the Nyx Breaker's internal communications as an afterthought.

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  "Ze-4 here. I'm removing a breach threat. Assume I cannot retake command after. I may become indisposed or KIA. Following the command hierarchy, Re-5 is my replacement." The acting sitesman. "Our objective hasn't changed. No matter what, no faltering."

  He swallowed the lump in his throat. Do-2 had told him that, once. "In futility, only we remain."

  He ended the broadcast. There was nothing else aside from making the blue freak in front of him regret the day it was born. He ran.

  Faster. He blitzed past the store where he'd looted the components for the turret. Faster. The generator stores he'd visited a few hours ago were behind him. Faster. He could see the Aud's head still poking through the bulkhead. The shiny bullet sticking out.

  Faster. This wasn't fast enough. It wasn't his best, and even that wouldn't work. The Aud were the apex. They could stomp all over humans because they had the strength to do so.

  They had the power to make humanity miserable. Make their past meaningless. Force their future to be hopeless. If humanity was ever to be free of that burden the Aud placed on them, they needed more.

  He felt something crack. Then another something. By then, his surroundings were a blur, and his eyes only existed for one thing. The stubborn Aud.

  The echo-room came and went. Only a few meters remained. With a cry containing all the pain and fury of a lifetime, Ze-4 pushed all the force he could into his fist. It made contact with the bullet before driving it into the Aud's skull. That small shock of cool metal felt satisfying. The warm, damp fur right after it had him cringing.

  One second, an Aud was hanging outside, the next, it seemed like it'd never been there. Swatted away, almost. He wanted to laugh at that, but damn, he'd never felt so much pain in a single part of his body in his life! His hand gripped the one that'd punched, and shakily lifted it.

  It looked like someone slammed a metal pipe into his knuckles at least a dozen times. His fingers felt permanently curled together, and the pinky on the end was hanging from sinew strands. His arm didn't feel any better. The skinsuit covering it spared him from more ghastly sights.

  He felt something like dismay. Shock dulled the pain, but it also dulled his thoughts. He spent a minute staring at his crushed club of a hand before realizing why he felt that way. Liquid sun couldn't fix this. Not even surgery could. He'd need a prosthetic replacement.

  But he liked his hand.

  His mouth was close enough that the warm, haggard breaths felt like icy shocks. He pulled back, self-compartmentalizing. He needed medical.

  "This is Ze-4. We're free of the attempted in-intruder. Need an engineering squad down here t-to patch the br-breach. Re-5 will remain in command. I'm...I'll...get..."

  His legs didn't feel like they could hold him up another second. He collapsed beside the breached bulkhead and listened to the sound of rushing wind outside. Common sense compelled him to scootch a little bit further away, in case he fell toward it when he fainted. Without the adrenaline, he became aware of all the little and big aches inside his body.

  He fell to the side, as predicted, just as he heard someone's footsteps.

  **********

  They'd evaded a serious breach and escaped the local horde of Aud. Re-5 didn't mind that, despite that, the command compartment's morale hung in the balance.

  Techs and engineers still raced around. They climbed to different platforms like jumping bugs and transferred data to other consoles. The officers noted in several reports that they appeared to still have similar coordination to when they'd first set out.

  She studied the eyes of each runner bringing her another microchip. That the crew hadn't begun to despair yet made sense. They hadn't faced defeat in any meaningful way. Their sole casualty hadn't even died. The Nyx Breaker was whole and remained on course.

  She skimmed through the Ze-4's medical report. The first engineers on the scene moved fast. They'd taken him to the medical compartment before he bled out. His condition wasn't good, despite the medics' ability to stabilize him.

  The Old Man's Blessing was a priceless gift that tech couldn't replicate. The problem with that was that something entirely unreplicable was esoteric. Something that they couldn't control or alter, much less gain a concrete understanding of the drawbacks of.

  Ze-4 could boost his acceleration, which was why he could move so fast and change directions so fluidly. It was an omnidirectional blessing that could push him onto any path he wished. But that was all he became: fast. He still needed to not clip a bulkhead or the edge of a doorframe. His body was just a little less fragile than theirs, in the end.

  If he kept his acceleration within reasonable limits, he wouldn't suffer. This time, he'd pushed too far past that. His body suffered microtears in its musculature, organs, and bones that reopened every second.

  The medics had gotten several doses of liquid sun inside of him after the fact. It'd taken some inventive procedures, since most of his blood vessels had ruptured. Someone with his constitution, hitting a blue head-on, couldn't avoid backlash when going that fast. She skipped the section covering his hand and arm in gruesome detail.

  He wasn't in any danger of dying, but they didn't have the equipment on hand to get him back on his feet. That would have to wait until the Nyx Breaker returned home and handed him off to a dedicated hospital.

  Another report came in from the engineer squad she'd sent to the breach. They'd detained two suited-up pilots to help. While the WAVs held replacement scutumsteel slabs in place, the engineers bolted and welded what they could. Over that went more layers in a makeshift patch that ended up looking quite impressive.

  Impressive-looking for what they had to work with, that was. In their defense, they couldn't do much while the Nyx Breaker was still in motion. A stray clump of rocks could kill an unprotected serviceman as they tunneled through a hazardous environment.

  Probability said that if they risked someone's neck out there long enough, something would happen.

  Her hastily appointed aide was somewhere below on the platforms. Qa-3 said something about mingling with the techs. She hailed him. "How are we looking on time?"

  "Analytics thinks we're going to lose another survivor, sir." She found him two platforms down, mumbling into his communicator as he read off one of the screens. He looked over his shoulder up at her and waved. "The echo room contacted me as well. They have a problem."

  "Can they fix it by themselves? We need their scanning to keep coming in to stay ahead of the hordes we run into."

  "They can't get the readings precise enough to locate individual sources of movement." The echo room could paint a picture of their surroundings. Other coordinates would appear relative to their own location in or out of the Hollow.

  At such a large scale, the Titan's movements and large groups of Aud would look clear. Going smaller, though, was beyond their capabilities. What they were searching for was individual sources of movement, like singular Aud--or the survivors.

  The echo room's staff must've had an idea if they called. Getting the command compartment's cooperation wouldn't've mattered otherwise. "How can we help?"

  "They want to use the Titan as a stationary point of origin. Doing that could narrow down the scans and zoom in on suspicious clusters of movement. One of them could be what we're here for."

  They had to stop traversing the tunnels? Mobility was their greatest asset right now. If the enemy was stronger and tougher to the point that being smarter didn't make up the difference, being faster was their sole equalizer.

  Keeping enough distance between them and the Aud was the best--and only--course of action. So they were asking her to turn them into a stationary target.

  "Please tell me they've got other options?"

  "We can keep going as is, but we'd have to enter back into the tunnels for a visual sweep. Not all connect, and that's not considering the lesser tunnels. Finding them before they fall prey to the Aud hinges on us taking the initiative now."

  Her lip stung where her teeth split the skin, but she hardly noticed. She took stock of their assets. The only crew member carrying the Blessing was out of the picture.

  They had enough munitions for their emplacements to fire nonstop for hours. Enough energy cycled through the grid to keep the anti-grav generators going for at least that long. Four lines of a hundred fifty WAVs each had heavy shock loadouts. The latter's pilots were on standby, ready to sortie at their officer's command.

  The Nyx Breaker could curl up, hide the center of its body. The most important compartments would come out okay that way. But was it worth it to possibly need to sacrifice one of the external compartments for the stationary scan?

  Every room and part of the Titan, down to the smallest wiring patch, was there for a reason. She'd prefer to avoid the prospect.

  "Sir? We're running out of time."

  "I know." She steeled herself. 'You do know, so why're you still debating with yourself?'

  The survivors depended on them and didn't know it. She ultimately did agree with Qa-3 and the echo room's reasoning. Speed was of the essence.

  Hoping she hadn't doomed them to brutal deaths seemed appropriate. The desire to consult with Ze-4 remained only as long as she ignored that he wasn't capable of thinking through the painkillers right then. "I'll call it in."

  She reconnected with the Nyx Breaker's broadcasting. "This is Re-5. Modus operandi is purple. Prep unused generators in case we need them back in the energy grid. Expect action and immediate targets when we enter a stationary battle position."