Go To the Left

Discretion seems to be the better part of valor in this instant. You don’t want to deal with a pissed-off cat trying to rip off your face. Besides, if Kvarau says there’s no scent of your attackers, you believe him. Her. It. Whatever.

“Then left it is,” you say.

Together you hurry down the increasingly bare halls. Your footsteps, human and Wranaui alike, echo through the empty chambers.

Perhaps a quarter of a kilometer from the intersection, Kvarau slows and stops. “The scent is very strong here, human.” It points toward a doorway to your right.

“Let’s try to sneak up on them,” you say.

Quiet as you can, you approach the doorway. Kvarau keeps pace behind you, its angular torso looming. The alien’s boots are harder than your own, but somehow the Jelly manages to walk with such precision, they produce nearly no sound. No wonder it had been able to stalk you for so long without you noticing.

You peer around the edge of the doorway.

The room beyond is a long, wide metal box. Bare walls, bare ceilings . . . but with a thicket of enormous, tree-sized flowers in the center. The drooping blossoms are a deep purple broken by white speckles in the mouth of the trumpet. You recognize them as Midnight Constellations. They were everywhere in the station—an artifact of Kira Navárez’s interests—but these are massively oversized compared with the ones you’ve seen elsewhere.

Within the thicket are three humans and a suit of heavy power armor that’s been removed from the logo-stamped box you’d spotted in the cargo hold. The box stands off to the side, empty and open like a nut cracked in half. You’re impressed the assholes managed to wheel it all the way out here. Couldn’t have been easy.

But what really catches your attention are the arms of the exo, on which a pair of enormous rubbery tentacles have been mounted. They’re an exact replica of a Jelly’s tentacles, and you have no doubt that if the exo swung its metal arms at full power, the rubbery appendages would be more than capable of breaking someone in half. Like Umesh.

So that’s how they did it.

One of the humans—a man with a slight stoop—has a blaster strapped to his thigh. The rest appear unarmed, although you see rifles and blasters stacked on a storage crate by a fallen blossom. Sleeping bags are on the floor, along with a small heater, and stacks of foil-wrapped ration packs. Whoever these folks are, they’ve been here for a while.

You withdraw around the doorway.

Only three hostiles, and none of them in the exo. There’s a chance you and Kvarau could subdue them by yourselves (the Jelly can handle itself in a fight, and you have the advantage of surprise). But the assholes have weapons, and you don’t, and you’re well aware of how fast shit can go south. The murder suspect on Deimos, for one. He was supposed to be an easy collar, and instead had cost three good soldiers their lives.

But if you wait, the assholes could escape, and if they decide to use the exo, stopping them will be difficult, if not impossible.

You hesitate, undecided.

Do you: