“He knows what we are. And my guess, when you add those pieces together, is that he is descended from Xiphos engineers. Sure, I’m an original resistance fighter, and taking on Solcrue is in our blood. But I think we need each other even more now. He needed us to come here, to find something or see something.”
“Like this?” Evo lifts a case with another honeycomb chip. “There is a sketch here of a third.”
“Three?” I ask, walking up to him and looking at the chip. When I touch it, it doesn’t light up. “Strange.”
“A soldier, an engineer, and...” Evo shrugs. “I think it’s probably for another bloodline we have yet to encounter.”
He opens his armor and presses the chip into his side. It absorbs inside him. “I’ve scanned about everything I can. Therearen’t any other anomalies, nothing else we can use except maybe this tent.”
He slings a bag over his shoulder. “We need to move out in case they make it through the rubble.”
Evo takes my hand and leads me through a dark passageway.
“I can’t see.”
“I can,” he says. “Just say with me.”
We sink deeper into the rock until the air grows damp and the ceiling drips.
“Solcrue ironically don’t like tight dark places. They won’t traverse this,” Evo says with confidence.
We walk for what feels like an hour before I get a glimmer of sunlight. Evo peeks out at the end, holding me back. Then he sneaks outside and pans his rifle over the mountain we’ve descended.
“Okay, it’s clear. But we have to stay in these rocks. The heat will help hide us during the day. We’re going to need to find a cave for the night, or they’ll find us.” Evo motions me outside.
As I follow Evo through the rocks, I keep my hands steady on my Solcrue rifle. “You said you could replicate blood.”
“I did so with Leah’s.”
“Then map mine, just in case.” I don’t know what that’s going to take. But I’m willing if it helps keep Xiphos safe. Evo is more likely to survive capture than I am.
“No.”
“Why not?”
He smirks when he glances over his shoulder at me. “Call it life insurance.”
I scoff. “Fine. But I’d love to know why Solcrue don’t seem to care about protecting their own. I mean, I’ve seen their command sacrifice many of them just to win a battle. They keep showing up like their numbers are endless.”
“That’s what they want you to think,” Evo huffs. “It’s an intimidation tactic as much as it is a win-by-masses strategy. They have mating ships where the only job of females is to produce more Solcrue. They have growth chambers where they speed up the process to get them to adult stages within a year. Haven’t been on one of those, but I’ve seen holovid conferences with the mating ship command staff.”
“You’re serious?”
“Yeah. The females believe it is an honorable way to live and to die. One of our plans is to find and ground these vessels on a planet so that soldiers are forced to stay close to their females.”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
“We have no intention of harming the females,” Evo quickly adds. “We’re not that sadistic. We don’t want genocide. We just want them to stop killing us and our humans.”
We hike into the evening hours, and I’m starting to think we’ve finally slipped the Solcrue.
Evo motions to a crack in the mountain. “That’s a good spot to hide.”
As I hike after him, I notice movement at the top of the hill. It just barely registers in my periphery. “Nine o’clock!”
Evo looks just as a laser grid paints my shoulders in green light. My scalp prickles under the drone of Solcrue engines.
A gravity beam draws me upward. “Evo!”
