“Is it true that you prefer me more as Admiral Vologorn than as Kalden Deltak?" Tejeda asked Shayla as his hand reached deeper under her dress. The tips of his fingers touched her gun holster.

The surprised glare and her parted lips made him want to kiss her again, but there was no time for that. He softly whispered in her ear. "When I say ‘duck’, you duck. Then you run, find a cover and stay there."

He slowly released the laser pistol from its holster and used his thumb to set it to kill. Tejeda’s now grey eyes were looking in her green ones, as both felt another kind of tension increasing. His left arm released her and moved to the chain around her neck. When he yelled, “Duck!” she let herself fall to her knees and rolled over to the left out of his line of sight.

With the gun in his right hand and Carmen in his left, Tejeda remained alone in the middle of the dance floor. He didn’t have to look around the room to see that only the Alpha Pirates and the members of the Universal Consensus, which for multiple purposes I will be calling them from now on Unis, remained.

The first laser beam went directly through the middle of the forehead of an egg-headed Uni. The other two next to him were already firing with the blue rays of their taser guns. When two high-voltage electricity bursts discharged on his right shoulder and left thigh, Admiral Vologorn’s muscles pulsed with energy and Tejeda was proud of his new body. But it also had disadvantages, as it was harder for him now to avoid the ballistic weapons of the pirates. Those guys loved their old-school rifles.

Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted seven guys with their fingers on the triggers. Tejeda smiled and charged them full-on, turning his back to the Unis and their useless stun pistols. During his headlong rush forward, things started to get really crazy. He fired his laser pistol two more times. Two pirates fell, one with a burning hole instead of a nose and the other with a thin stream of smoke coming out of his chest.

While he fired with his right hand and his legs were speeding up, Tejeda kissed Carmen before launching her at an extraordinary speed at the leftmost enemy. Exactly before reaching his destination, Admiral Vologorn bent his head forward, and his horns strife through the chest of his target.

Three more stun charges hit him on his back, each with more force than the previous one. A bullet grazed one of his ribs and another one remained lodged in his left shoulder, crippling his hand. Tejeda didn't have time to linger on his pain as more adversaries poured in through the doors.

With only one hand available, he had to decide on a weapon. He couldn't risk losing his only pistol, but he also couldn't abandon Carmen. In one fell swoop, Tejeda discovered a table turned on its side and a patch of crimson material hidden behind it. He threw his pistol there and grabbed Carmen’s tip with two fingers from the eye socket she had her handle stuck in.

The Nubilae ran as fast as his massive body allowed. Bullets and laser beams were shot through the air searching for him. A burnt scar appeared on his cheek, but there was also a smile on his lips when he saw Shayla was covering him, firing with the laser pistol he threw there. And damn, that woman could hit a mosquito in flight from twenty paces away!

Tejeda was breathing heavily when he crouched down behind the table. He understood how smart Shayla was to turn the table on the side with the upper part toward the enemies. A thin layer of highly reflective material coated the surface, rendering lasers almost harmless. Also, the table was thick enough to offer cover for regular bullets for a while.

Shayla shot another Uni before lowering behind the cover, her back leaning on it. She turned and looked at Admiral Vologorn. Blood seeped down from the tips of his horns across his face. On his left cheek was a burnt laser scar. His unbuttoned shirt was wet and had a crimson shade around his left shoulder and on the right side of his torso.

“Where is E00?” Tejeda asked.

“I shoved him beneath a table in the corner,” Shayla responded, gesturing with her head toward her left.

The nearest exit door was around thirty meters away, and E00's corner was another twenty. The Nubilae could see through the glass doors that all was clear; there was no trace of the Alpha Pirates or Unis. They filed in via the other doors. He couldn't, of course, get out into the open and try to escape.

Tejeda was trying to find a plan that would allow all of them to survive. Once he had decided on one, it was enough to think about it in detail and E00 would know all about it. Apparently, he had enough time to think as their cover was solid against the enemy weapons.

"Nubilae, give up! You have nowhere to go!" Uni1's impartial voice was heard. "We are bringing L-403 in less than a minute, and you will be destroyed. Surrender while you still have the chance!"

Shayla frowned. That name, L-403, she had heard it before. Last year, Kalden Deltak tried to put his hands on one of those prototypes, but it was too expensive for him. It was a particle cannon capable of sending a hyper-dense beam of negatively charged ions to disintegrate any target in range.

As she was remembering the details, Shayla’s eyes widened, and she turned to Tejeda. He was smiling sheepishly, making even that manly face look like a dumb fool. Admiral Vologorn placed a hand on her knee. "Shayla, I think I messed up things big time. I blew up our cover!"

“Do you think so, smartass?”