The hijackers in the hangar opened fire upon Rollo, then Medvig’s remotes were on them, slapping, gouging and generally making a nuisance of themselves. The Hiver’s body-frame was motionless, worryingly out in the open, as they devoted all their concentration to the task. Solace ran to back up Rollo, then shooting erupted behind her.
She whirled and saw that the hijackers had friends who’d been elsewhere, probably dealing with the docking controls. They’d just unloaded their weapons into the knot of cultists and cut them down. Worse, they had Idris. Kris was facing the human newcomers, her knife out against their guns. What had Idris was a Castigar, though. They came in all shapes, both natural and engineered, but this one looked the standard model: a four-metre black leech whose body terminated in a host of squirming eye-tipped limbs. It also sported a metal hood, equipped with pincers and weapon barrels. The pincers had closed about Idris’s body, lifting the Int partway off the floor.
‘Bring him! Get in the ship!’ someone yelled, and Solace saw numbly that the Tothiat was back on his feet, despite the lethal hole she’d put in him. He wasn’t even favouring his unhurt side, as he grabbed his comrade with the shot leg and practically threw him on board the Vulture. ‘Stand down or your man gets torn up’ he yelled at Rollo, facing down the captain’s levelled gun with equanimity.
‘You get off my ship,’ Rollo roared back furiously, gun shaking but not lowering an inch.
The Castigar surged forward. Rippling muscular waves swept down its body, sending it eeling along the gantry at the speed of a running man. Idris went jolting along in its vice-like grip. Solace had her weapon levelled at it, but it was deliberately keeping its victim between it and her. She didn’t know enough about Castigar physiology to be certain of taking it down. Medvig’s remotes hovered about it like flies, not daring a landing.
‘My employer regrets this,’ the Tothiat boomed, ‘but we need your ship to move that piece of junk. Maybe we’ll sell it back to you.’ His confederates had left cover to scurry over to the Vulture. Rollo took another frustrated step forward, right out into the open, his face purple with rage. The Tothiat levelled his gun as the Castigar and its fellows raced up a parallel gantry with Idris still jerking about like a doll.
‘Fuck you,’ Barney suddenly shouted from on high, finally getting his gun to work. His shot clipped the Tothiat’s temple, almost spreading the symbiont’s brains across the Vulture’s paintwork. Solace’s gun took out one of the men at the hatch as the others returned fire. She heard Olli’s cry of grief and froze, then Barney toppled over their walkway’s railing, buckling the gantry below with his dead weight.
All hell broke loose.
The Castigar and friends were entering the ship now, the Tothiat gesturing frantically for them to hurry. Then something burst out of the hatch, a thing of legs and arms with a whipping, saw-edged tail. The sight was sudden and monstrous enough to even startle a yell from Solace. It was Olli’s Scorpion frame and it moved like monkeys and spiders, claws and saw tearing into the nearest hijacker and ripping him apart. Up on the high gantry, Olli was slumped back in her walker, eyes closed as she remotely wrangled the Scorpion into a frenzy of destruction. Then the Castigar’s headmount jolted as it unleashed a searing beam of energy against the Scorpion, followed by a rattle of accelerator pellets. They punched a dozen holes in the frame without slowing it but the distraction allowed Idris to twist out of its grip and run for his life, heading back down the walkway towards the crew. One of the other hijackers tried to retrieve him, and Solace put a bullet in the man’s head on her second attempt.
The Tothiat rolled his shoulders then laid hands on the Scorpion’s far greater bulk. Before Solace’s incredulous gaze, he crouched and just tipped the half-tonne of machinery over a broken rail, leaving it flailing and clinging to the twisted metal with half its limbs. Then he leapt inside the Vulture, perhaps about to abandon his comrades and make off with the prize.
Medvig’s remotes grabbed him, all three of them, latching on like hands. As they jetted away, they dragged him halfway out of the ship. The Tothiat shouted and tried to bring up his gun, but they wouldn’t let him, yanking him left and right and spoiling his aim. Then the Castigar had lumped its long body up to the hatch, despite Solace putting a bullet into some part of it. Its weaponized hood swung round until it found the Hiver, and its beam lashed out again. Medvig’s chest unit glowed red as their outer layers ablated away. Something inside them blew, showering molten metal and sparks. In the aftermath, Solace saw blazing insectoid bodies crawling frantically out from the hole, dropping to the ground and spinning on their backs as they crisped and died.