— 10 —

For several days, Rader and Click made their way across the landscape, remaining hidden, staying alive, but without a plan. Each still possessed high-density ration packs, but the food would run out soon enough.

Despite the Deathguard’s best attempts to remain out of sight, they were repeatedly attacked by patrols—both human and Jaxxan—eluding some, killing others.

He and Click sat together at night, quietly brooding, thinking of what they could do next. Night on Fixion was oddly different from how Rader remembered nights should be. The dark sky was strewn with brilliant clumps of asteroids from the Fixion Belt, glittering almost-moons that added to the feeble starlight. He didn’t think he would ever get used to the low gravity, the thin atmosphere, the wrong constellations.

He would not see the skies of Earth again, no matter what. Even if he hadn’t fallen in with Click, if he’d been a good and loyal Deathguard, he would have rampaged behind enemy lines until the alien soldiers destroyed him, or until his systems shut down from cascading failures in the cyborg process. What remained of his human body—wired up and intertwined with weapons and armor—could not withstand the shock for long. Maybe biological tissue rejection would get him, or faulty mechanical and electronic integration.

The Werewolf Trigger was oddly quiet inside his head, and he felt no compulsion to rampage among Jaxxans and slaughter them. Maybe that compass of violence had also gotten skewed, the neural hookups damaged somehow by his second thoughts. But no, it was more than that.

Each day, Click focused his thoughts and manifested the shimmering holystal. After watching his comrade’s meditation, Rader had begun emulating the process as best he could. The Werewolf Trigger could send him into a murderous frenzy at any time, but he was learning to quell the urges. He hadn’t known that a Deathguard could control the trigger—no one had mentioned it in his training.

Now, Click rotated and inspected the glowing image he had manifested, and even Rader could see the extreme changes in the crystal pattern. As his mistakes piled up and his options became more limited, the three-dimensional map of Click’s life became more jumbled. The holystal was a sorry mess, a lump with no discernible paths leading into the future.

“We can’t just stay here and hope no one finds us,” Rader said. “We’ve got to get off of this asteroid.”

During basic training with his squadmates, Rader had studied the layout of the Fixion Belt. He knew the handful of human outposts and remembered one of the first facilities the League had built here: an automated observatory on a small outlying asteroid, established before the initial encounter with Jaxxans. Observation dishes mapped the deep cosmos and monitored the Belt’s other asteroids. Years ago, those telescopes had been the first to spot Jaxxan incursions into the asteroid belt, watching the aliens build their own bases on the handful of habitable rocks.

The observatory was out of the way and uninhabited, but with functional life support installed and left behind by the original construction crew.

“I know someplace safe. We’ll have time and breathing space—if we can get there.”

After Rader described the observatory, Click said, “But we cannot live there for long. It can only be a temporary measure.”

Rader’s voice was bleak. “My life is just a temporary measure. If we reach the observatory, maybe I’ll stick around long enough to help you find a safer place. One step at a time. First, we’ve got to get from here to that little asteroid.”

Click pondered for a moment. “If we need nothing more than an in-system ship to take us through the asteroids to the observatory, the Jaxxan base’s landing field has many capable vessels. We could take one.”

“I couldn’t fly it,” Rader said. “How about you?”

“That depends on the specific type of vessel. I flew several of those craft during my team’s work on the System Holystal. We could try.”

“We could try,” Rader agreed.

Click looked across the landscape to where the distant Jaxxan base and its landing field glowed above the foreshortened horizon. Suddenly his holystal shifted, adjusted itself to the new reality—and one new bright spire emerged.