There was a moment of frozen silence as the guards goggled, clearly taken by surprise to find Neil spitting out a mouthful of nutribar as the rest of it flew from his hand. Junebug whirled a moment before the guards could react. A short birth, shatteringly loud in the confines of the small room, chattered from her rifle, tumbling the three men down in a spray of blood and tangle of limbs. Rather belatedly she remembered Aiden’s admonition to try not to kill any of the palace guards. Well, worse things happened in war time.

“I agree,” Junebug said dryly, “we should steal something.”

Outside she heard yells and distan reptilian shrieks as the gunfire alerted other guards human and otherwise. It would only be a few minutes before they were pinned down. Sayeeda stripped a weapons belt from one of the guards and pushed the door open. A burst of gunfire smashed the door frame to flaming splinters and she ducked back inside barely avoiding decapitation as a thundering combat shotgun added its roar to the cacophony.



With a twist of her wrist she plucked a grenade from the weapons belt, thumbed the arming switch.
“Fire in the hole,” she announced from reflex and then lobbed the explosive down the hallway in the general direction of the shots.  There were shouts of alarm and then a concussive boom that rattled Junebug’s teeth. She leaned out around the corner and fired a burst into the coiling smoke and shattered masonry. There was another doorway about three meters along the hallway and the opposite side which stood ajar, its polished wooden surface scuffed and pitted by the grenade blast.

“Follow me, I’ll cover you,” she snapped and made a diving roll across the hallaway, batting the door open with her modest weight. The shotgun roared again and the blast came close enough that she felt the wind of its passage as she tumbled through the shattered doorway. A conference room with wall to ceiling glass windows and a massive white marble table stood in perfect condition save for where the concussion had knocked over a stack of papers.  A massive foot came down towards her and she barely managed to squirm aside as one of the Hexangallion’s drove a foot down at her with enough force to crack the marble tiling.

“Fuck!” she yelled and swung her rifle awkwardly at the things ankle, driving it into the mass of bone and sinew with an audible crunch. The alien made an undulating hiss and dropped on top of her grabbing at her throat. She kneed it in what would have been a humans groin to no noticeable effect and then barely managed to catch its thick wrists before its hands could close on her throat. For a moment they were frozen together like status of effort, but then the aliens superior weight began to tell and its mandibles descended millimeter by millimeter towards her face. 

Outside the volume of fire redoubled. This one must have ducked in here when the grenade came out, its weight rather than the grenade had smashed the door. Junebug kicked viciously at the thing but the angle was poor and robbed the blow of much of its force. The things tongue lolled out in anticipation of its triumph.