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So

"Check " As she banked her craft to align its sensory array with the rear of his Intelligencer, the view began to sharpen

He&039;d been hit

A single interceptor had bitten his craft, its claw clinging to the casing of the stabilizer rotary wing As the craft unfurled, the interceptor began to thrash, calling for help

"Hendrik! I&039; in to help, sir," Hendrik responded "I&039;m the closest"

"No! Stay clear It knows I&039;m alive now" When the interceptor had first attached, catching the silent and falling Intelligencer with the random luck of a drift net, it couldn&039;t be certain whether its prey was a nanomachine, or simply a speck of dust or an errant curtain thread But now that the Intelligencer was powered and trans, the interceptor was sure it had live prey It was releasing mechanopheromones to attract other interceptors If Hendrik came in, she would soon be under attack as well

Marx had to escape on his own And quickly

He swore He should have unfurled slower, taken a look before beco fully active If only the ExO hadn&039;t called, hadn&039;t rushed hi straight at his attacker, and brought his main turret camera to bear He could see the interceptor clearly now Its skin was translucent in the bright sunlight that filled the palace hallway He could see the netic sensor array was a thistly crown just below its rotary wing The wing doubled as an uptake wheel, consu dead human skin cells, for fuel

The interceptor cloud had most likely been deployed from aerosol cans by the Rix commandos, sprayed directly onto their uniforned food was usually contained in the sa, but they could also consuy left the interceptor lighter for coh it meant they couldn&039;t pursue their prey past their deployment area Marx saw the small fuel cache in its midsection It probably carried no more than forty seconds of food in reserve

That was the machine&039;s weakness

Marx launched a pair of counterdrones He flew theht for the interceptor&039;s fuel cache At the sa to full speed, dragging the smaller nanomachine behind him like a kid&039;s balloon

Soon, other interceptors were in pursuit, following the trail of mechanopheromones the interceptor spilled to mark its prey They couldn&039;t catch hi quickly depleted One of his counterdrones ht a quick, hopeless battle to delay the pursuers The other counterdrone struck at the interceptor&039;sthe soft belly of the machine It injected its poison, an ultrafine sand of silicatethe fuel reserve Now, the machine was dependent on fuel fro

But the interceptor was trapped in the wake of Marx&039;s craft, running too fast and hard to catch the fuel that dotted the air Soon, it began to stutter, and die

Marx launched another drone, a repair nano that set to work cutting off the claw of the dying interceptor, which could no longer defend itself When detached, it fell back, still spilling preyinterceptors fell on it, sharks upon a wounded coed and fuel was low, but he was past the densest part of the interceptor cloud He brought his Intelligencer around a corner out of the sun-drenched hall--back into darkness--and through the crack under a door, where the rest of his squadron waited, bobbing in a slight draft

Marx checked a schematic of the palace and s," he reported to Hobbes "And I think we&039;ve got a tailwind"

DOCTOR

"Just breathe, sir!" the eant shouted

Dr Mann Vecher yanked the tube fro, darireen stuff that brien in it Considerably en was in suspension in a polyel, which also contained pseudo-alveoli, a rudiodspite knehat else

Green and vaguely translucent, the substance looked to Dr Vecher like the dental round troops used in the field Not the sort of stuff you were supposed to s, much less breathe

Vecher shifted in his unfaeant stalked away in disgust The armor didn&039;t fit anymore He hadn&039;t worn it since it had last been fitted, three years before Imperial Orbital Marine doctors weren&039;t supposed to jurunts In normal situations, they stayed shipside and treated the wounded in safety

This was not a normal situation

Of course, Dr Vecher did know the intricate workings of the suit quite well He&039;d cut quite a few of them open to expose wounded soldiers He had witnessed the suit&039;s life-savingon the back of the neck held hyper-oxygenated plas that was injected directly into the brain in case a marine&039;s heart stopped The exoskeletal servomotors could immobilize the wearer if the suit detected a spinal injury There were local anesthesia IVs every hundred square centimeters or so And the armor could maintain a terminated marine&039;s brain almost as well as a Lazurus symbiant Vecher had seen soldiers twenty hours dead reanimate as cleanly as if they&039;d died in a hospice

But he hadn&039;t remembered how uncomfortable the da coreen stuff The planned juoing down supersonic, encased in single-soldier entry vehicles packed with gee-gel The forces on is and crush your bones to powder if you weren&039;t adequately reinforced

Vecher understood the concept all too well The idea was tocould puncture anything else, an undifferentiated bubble of fluid, at one with the gel inside the entry vehicle That was the theory, anyway Bones were always the tricky part Vecher hadn&039;t saved a high percentage of marines whose insertions had failed Most never even becaration, hearts splattered against ribcages like dye bombs, and cranial collapse foiled even the afterlife

Vecher hadn&039;t minded the skeletal reinforcement injections, actually Standard procedure He&039;d had his -filling, however, you had to do yourself; you had to breathe this shit

It was inhuman

But there had to be a doctor with the first wave of this e To refuse this jue It would clearly be an Error of Blood

That thought steeled Dr Vecher&039;s will If breathing a quasi-intelligent, oxygenated goo was unpleasant, plunging a dull blade of error into one&039;s own abdomen would certainly be worse And at his rank, Vecher was assured elevation sooner or later, even if he didn&039;t die in battle Fro plummet

Vecher put the tube to his lips and took a deep, unbearably slow breath Heaviness spread through his chest; the stuff had the exotherainst the skin It felt like a cold hand clenching Vecher&039;s heart, a sense of foreboding ue around in his oo were caught between his teeth, salty and vaguely alive like a sliver of oyster They had even flavored the stuff; it tasted of artificial strawberries

The cheery taste justto make this awful?

PILOT

The squadron looked down into the council chae of an air vent There were three craft left

Pilot Raencer to auto lasers in the hallways surrounding the council chah to kill a man, it had vaporized Ramones&039;s craft

Below the squadron, the forue The Intelligencers&039; cae The squadron would have to move closer

The air in the roo like a mist, pushed back froot reflections all the way through the room, sir," Hendrik reported "More than one interceptor per cubic centimeter"

Marx whistled The Rix certainly had nuer than the ones his squadron had faced in the hallway They had seven grasping ar The relatively large brain and sensory sack hung below the outstretched arms, so that the craft looked like an inverted spider Marx had faced this type of small craft before Even at a tenth this density, this sould be tricky to get through

"We&039;ll fight our way across the top," Marx decided "Then drop down blind Try to land on the table"

Most of the hostages were seated at the long table below The table would be sound-reflective, a good base for listening In Marx&039;s ultrasonar its surface shone with the sharp returns of metal or polished stone

The three s Marx kept an eye on his fuel level His s of its power If it hadn&039;t been for the brisk tailwind down the last sixty encer would havepassed just above Marx&039;s ship, an inverted horizon Rix interceptors dotted his view like scalloped clouds

"Damn! I&039;m hooked already, sir," Woltes announced, twenty seconds into the "

Marx and Hendrik sped forward, leaving behind the throes of Woltes&039;s destruction Their way seemed clear If they could ht be able to make the drop undetected

Suddenly, Marx&039;s craft reeled to one side To his right a claw loomed, attached to the lip of his craft Two more of the interceptor&039;s arms flailed toward his machine

"Hooked," he announced He briefly considered taking control of Hendrik&039;s craft If this mission failed, it would be his Error of Blood, after all

But perhaps there was another way to , Hendrik," he said "You stick to the plan I&039;ht down"

"Good luck, sir"

Marx extended his Intelligencer&039;s ra the strength of its ared his craft forward The spar plunged into the central brain sack Instantly, the interceptor died But its claere frozen, still attached to his machine, and a deadman switch released prey markers in a blizzard that enveloped both craft

"Got you, at least," Marx hissed at the dead spider ian

Marx tipped hispulled his craft and its lifeless burden doard He furled his sensor posts to half-length, his view beco blurry and shaky as AI tried to extrapolate his surroundings froether, quickly now