Julio didn’t stop to study the image. Training had fully taken over and he rolled to his feet, trained his grav gun down the tunnel and fired a stream of relativistic projectiles down it before he even started to identify targets.

Two more doors had opened, the God-Kings darting into the passage, weapons up. The first God-King, though, was still in the way and barely starting to slump as Julio rolled to his feet and they had a moment of hesitation about firing. If the body in the way had been a normal they couldn’t have hesitated, but killing a fellow God-King of the same clan and sept was another issue.

Julio didn’t give them time to make up their minds; the stream of explosive kinetic rounds blew the two Posleen in half.

He flipped his hand down to his side and drew out two suicide bars, setting them both for a hundred kilo charge and tossed them down the passageway, one lightly the other hard. The CLANG! of another door breaking loose and a secondary from a Posleen plasma gun was all the information he needed; there had been more down the passageway. There were probably lots of Posleen down the passageway. But for now the corridor was…

“CLEAR!”

Mike had watched the encounter on a feed. He’d have rather been the person in the passage, killing Posleen and breaking things. But he knew his job was at a higher level. He’d actually been following that feed as well as feeds from all three divisions; multi-tasking in combat was so second nature he didn’t think about it. Positions were being captured all over the line but casualties were up; every passage seemed to be heavily defended. And they were defended by God-Kings.

The Posleen came in, broadly, two forms.