Tain clutched his side as he ran. The deep puncture hurt terribly, and it bled profusely into his hand, staining his dark grey feathers a deep violet. His mind could hardly comprehend what had just happened. His pack was all dead. Every last one of them, cut down by fiends in armor with their humming aerogel blades and modified railguns with disabled safeties. His pack had fought. They’d died fighting like the rest of the colony. But they weren’t warriors or soldiers; none of them had been. They were colonists, scientists, hunters. Tain wanted to stop, sit down, and wait for the end. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to join his pack in death than to keep on struggling.

But Tain kept moving as fast as his legs could push him forward. The side of his chest dripped blood. His legs burned with exertion. Saiumi was all he had now. Saiumi and their little daughter. The rest of her pack had been there too, had died fighting alongside the others. They’d been busy delivering survey information and retrieving supplies, for they lived out in the barren, beautiful wilderness away from the main colony. Saiumi was an explorer. He was a geologist. That was how he’d met her, when she and her pack had shown him and his pack a good place for a potential mine. Carefree days, those had been.

Tain clutched his sword tightly with his free hand. The aerogel blade was chipped and damaged from the fighting earlier. Blood had spattered onto the hilt. Tain hadn’t known he had it in him to kill another Avali. He’d never been trained in combat. In fact he had only ever touched a blade to skin his prey. It would seem the old proverb was true that a person learned a lot about himself when he looked down the rails of a gun. He’d fought his way out of the colony, a whirlwind of blood and death that made him sick to recall.

The renegades had only killed the males; and the females who resisted. Those few females too weak to fight or unable to defend themselves had been captured. Tain had seen from a distance, had felt his heart flare with anger and fear. He had to get to Saiumi.

Tain ignored the surges of pain and ejected the aerogel blade from his weapon and let it forge a fresher edge. He could see the low-hanging nanocanvas of Saiumi’s tent in the distance, hidden under the shelter of dense needle trees. Maybe they hadn’t seen it yet. Maybe she was still okay.

Tain was breathing heavily by the time he reached the hanging cloth entrance, and from more than just the exhaustion of his relentless pace and the wound in his side. His heart was racing as he checked behind him and slipped inside. The interior was dim and powerless. The reactors had been destroyed early in the attack to disable any transmissions to the combat drones. The colony had been left practically defenseless. Tain felt a horrible dread in his chest. Saiumi wasn’t here. Had she been found already?

Then there was a hiss of deploying aerogel and a faint hum, and Tain felt the subtle vibrations of a knife laid across his thoat. “Make a move and I’ll take your head off,” Saiumi hissed. Tain exhaled in relief.

“Sai, it’s me.”

“Tain!” Saiumi put her knife away and hugged him tightly with her free hand. “Tain.” In the other she cradled their little daughter. Pale, ghostly white like her mother, but streaked with the deepest midnight essence of her father’s grey feathers. Tain grimaced as she brushed his wound. Saiumi’s voice turned calm and serious immediately as she noticed.

“You’re bleeding.”

“It’s not important.” Saiumi leaned in to look at it, but Tain pushed her back. “Saiumi. It’s not important. There’s nothing you can do to treat it. I need to get you away from here.”

Saiumi looked him in the eyes. “What about my pack?” She looked like she knew the answer already, but just needed to hear it from him.

“They’re dead. Everyone’s dead. Your pack, my pack…” Tain could feel a tone of panic seeping into his voice. He stopped himself. “You’re all that I’ve got left, Sai. You’ve got to get away, you’ve got to live. Our little Reksalya has to live. Please, Sai. I’m fine with dying as long as you live.”

Saiumi bowed her head, breathing haltingly. “It’s not fair of you to ask me that!”

Tain wrapped his sword arm around her and cradled her head against his. Saiumi held little Reksalya close to her and his chests. “I know Sai. None of this is fair.” Tain’s snapped his head up as he heard metal and polymer against rock some distance outside.

“Saiumi,” he hissed in a fierce whisper. “Run. Now.”

Saiumi shot him an anguished look. “Promise me though that you’ll try to make it, Tain. Promise.”

Tain gave her a fell grin, baring the sharp tips of his teeth. He felt like a stranger in his own mind. “You know me, Sai. I don’t quit.” Tain removed his hand from his side and touched Saiumi on the side of the head, and then lowered it to touch his daughter’s sleeping face. His caress left a faint smudge of his blood across her tiny ears. Tain looked at Saiumi. The faintest hint of tears were gathering in the corners of her eyes. “Out the back of the tent. Go.”

Tain turned to face the entrance of the tent. He spun his sword in his hand, feeling its unfamiliar weight. Was this him? It certainly wasn’t who he had been the day before. Tain brushed forward through the entrance and found himself facing three renegades in powered armor, thirty meters away. One of them had a heavily-modified Firelance leveled at hi-

The impact knocked Tain back into a support of the tent. For a moment the pain was all gone, then it came surging back even worse than before. Tain rose and started to walk forward. For all the Firelance’s power, its thin flechettes didn’t deal nearly enough damage to stop a wild animal with a mere flesh wound. And no animal was more wild, no animal more dangerous, than a predator cornered and turning to defend its own. He tried to charge, but all his legs could muster was a halting, stumbling forward stride. He looked the renegade with the Firelance straight in the eyes as he finished charging the weapon and raised it agai-

Tain caught his fall with his arm, hissing in pain. He had felt that one. Blood dripped from his wounds. He had been dead before he even entered the tent, even if Saiumi didn’t want to admit it. But now the longer he took to kill, the further away she could get.

Tain stood. He grinned now, a wide, full, horrifying grin. This was death, and he knew it. He continued to step forward. The next flechette hardly slowed him down. He was running now, somehow, despite his injuries and his exhaustion. The first renegade was too shocked to respond. By the time he raised his railgun, it was too late.

Tain gutted the first without remorse, pulled his blade out and swung it wide to catch the neck of the second as he fumbled with his weapon. He laughed as he moved. He felt like a marionette driven by some insane spirit of retribution. A frail puppet of meat and bone carried along by unstoppable purpose. The third renegade, the one with the Firelance, backed up and fired. Tain felt the flechette hit him, felt it rock him back on his feet, felt the pain.

But he didn’t care. He kept moving forward, continued swinging his blade. Blood poured down his grey feathers as he managed a long, shallow gash across the renegade’s face. Then something hit him from the side.
As everything dimmed, the last thing he remembered before he died was Saiumi’s precious face.

…

The renegade lay on his back. Blood dripped from the gash in his face. His friend approached from behind and to the left of the now-dead colonist. At least, he desperately hoped he was finally dead.

“You alright, Vaune?”

“Yeah, yeah I’m alright… What I want to know is what the hell,” Vaune kicked the colonist’s body in anger, “this bastard was on. It was like he was already dead and just wouldn’t die again until he took someone with him! We had him, and then next thing I knew he’d killed Ceai and Eikos!”

“Beats me. Stimmie, perhaps?”

Vaune muttered something unintelligible under his breath.

“Anyway, we caught one last one in the woods back there. Had a little daughter too, recently hatched by the looks of it. The Captain said to take them back in, and that we had everyone now.” The other renegade started to walk off, then looked over his shoulder at where Vaune continued to stare at the body as blood slowly pooled under it. “Vaune, you coming?”

Vaune shook himself. “Yeah. Coming.” He kicked the body once more for good measure. Stupid stimmie. He’d never understand how someone would be willing to disregard their own life like that. Stupid.