The pain sears through me, but I grit my teeth and ignore it. I return their fire, knocking them down as fast as they come.

“Are you OK?” shouts Felia. She has to shout over the noise of the blasters.

“I’m fine,” I yell back. “Do you know which tube to head into?”

She nods.

“Go,” I say, waving one of my hands, not taking my other hand off the gun.

“Not without you,” she yells back.

“Go,” I say, pulling the trigger five times in quick succession, pivoting the gun, my eye fixed to the scope. “I’ll follow you. You know what you need to do. You know the plan. You go ahead.”

“How are you going to hold them off?”

“We don’t have any other options.”

“I’m not leaving you,” she yells. “After all, if you die here, I’ll be executed.”

“So glad to hear you care about me,” I say. But that’s the last of the banter we can manage, as we both concentrate fully on blasting as many of the antenna bastards as we can.

We’re making some headway, but there are just too many of them.

They’re using a formation now, marching forward, working their way slowly towards us. The ones in the front use themselves as shields, sacrificing themselves, and the ones behind push them forward, using the fallen limp bodies of their comrades to absorb the blaster fire. Of course, I can cut through most of them, still, but their strategy slows me down.

We’ll never make it out of here alive if we wait for them to get closer. They’re not very good shots, and we’re partially hidden behind a sloping segment of the wall. But if they get any closer, they’ll hit us for sure. There’s no way they’ll be that bad at aiming if they get close enough.

“We’ve got to make a run for it!” I shout.

“But how?”

That’s the question. And I don’t have an answer.

My cyborg circuits are overwhelmed for the first time that I can remember. There’s simply too much information for them to process. The aliens moving… shooting them… calculating possibilities and probabilities. And the odds are only getting grimmer. They’re not giving me any sort of exit strategy, just warnings of doom and death.

Suddenly, it seems as if Aisha’s presence is here with me. “Look to your humanness,” she “says,” the words coming into me with a warmth, appearing out of nowhere in my mind.

“But I’m a cyborg,” I mutter to myself.

Somehow, Felia hears me.

“You’re a human,” she shouts at me. “As human as any human I’ve ever met.”

Hearing Felia’s words changes something in me. It’s as if something clicks.

I need to look towards my human intuition, rather than my cyborg circuits.

With this knowledge, I look at the approaching group of antenna bastards.

There's something… it's not logical. It's just a feeling that I have, that one of these antenna bastards in particular is more important than the rest of them. I have the feeling that he's the leader or something, and that he's leading the rest telepathically.

He looks identical to all the rest, and there's no outward sign that he's the leader.

I just follow my gut and aim my blaster at him, even though it doesn't seem strategically viable to do so.

I pull the trigger, and he falls down.

The rest of them stop, frozen in position. Completely immobile.

“What happened?” says Felia, her voice loud over the sudden silence. There are no more blaster sounds.

The aliens don't move a muscle. A couple topple to the ground. The rest stay frozen where they were standing, their blasters aimed at us, but their eyes lifeless. Their antennae don't move a single centimeter.

“Come on,” I say, grabbing her hand. “There's no time to explain.”

We rush to the other side of the room, where the tubes are.

“I think it's this one,” says Felia, pointing to a smaller tube.

The blackness is inside of it, inky, moving slightly, as if it's an ocean unto itself.

“I think that will hold them off for a little while,” I say. “I hit the leader, but I'm sure there are more. They seem to have some sort of hive mind.”

“Like insects?”

“I guess so. I really have no idea. Come on, we'll go together.”

We hold hands as we walk into the blackness. I have to crouch slightly as I enter the tube, but Felia isn't tall enough for it to matter.

My blaster is in my right hand, my finger on the trigger. Felia holds her own. There's no telling what will be on the other side of this blackness, once we're transported near the general's ship. We've planned everything out. The general should be down inside the planet, negotiating the release of the prisoners. But who knows? I've learned to expect the unexpected.

The blackness swallows us up, and an instant later we're thousands of meters from where we were just moments before, on the planet's surface.

The air is much different up here than down below. It was suffocating and stale below the surface, but up here it's muggy and hot. It's not completely pleasant, but at least it's real air, not some air that's been recirculated millions of times by the aliens.

We planned it out well. The transporter took us behind a small building. This transporter was meant as some kind of access transport for when work needed to be done above ground. We're at one of the landing bases for foreign star ships, and the building that we're hiding behind is some kind of storage shed for the landing area.

Up here, it's completely different than the blank white walls. There are trees and plants. The ground is real dirt, and it feels wonderful to stand on it.

“I'm going to see if his ship is here,” I whisper to Felia. “We probably don't have much time.”

I move slowly and silently towards the corner of the building. I poke my blaster around the corner first, to see if anyone fires at it. But there's nothing, no response. So I poke my head around next.

The general's ship is there, looking absolutely enormous on the ground. It's a star ship that's impressively decked out with all manner of armaments, huge blisters of massive blasters hanging off all around it.

There's a single guard by the port entrance to the ship. That shouldn't be a problem, but there are probably more on board. The general would be foolish to bring his entire crew down below.

I motion Felia to come over.

“I'm going to make a run for it,” I whisper to her.

“But you don't know how many commandos he has on the ship.”

“It's our only option,” I say.

“Be careful,” she says, looking me right in the eyes. “I want you to know that…”

“Listen,” I say, interrupting her unintentionally. “I've wanted to tell you… that I…”

But before I can finish saying what I've been dying to tell her, but I've felt that I needed to tell her, there's a noise from behind us.

It's the sound of movement. Alien movement.

“It's those antenna bastards again,” says Felia, alarmed.

“They've sent more,” I say.

There are at least a dozen of them, their hands full of large blasters. They're out of range right now, but they're moving towards us steadily, marching in their bizarre formation.

“Can you tell which one is the leader?”

“I… I don't have a read on it,” I say.

I have a gut feeling just like last time, but my gut is telling me that there is no leader there.

“Maybe their leader is hidden,” I say. “I think they learn fast, and they don't want to put another hive mind leader at risk.”

“He must be close by, though,” says Felia.

“We've got to make a run for this ship,” I say. “I can't bank on finding the leader and blasting it again. The commandos are a bigger threat right now. I need to get into the ship and take them out. But it'll be too dangerous to bring you along before I take them all out. Can you hold out here?”

My heart aches as I ask her to do this. I do not want to leave her here by herself to fight off a dozen of the alien bastards by herself. But there's no other choice. This is the best long term decision I can make, and I know it. There's nothing else to do.

It's in this moment that I really realize that I seriously care about her, the way I've never cared about anyone before.

“I don't want to leave you here,” I say.

“It's the only way,” says Felia, putting her eye to the scope and aiming the blaster. “Now go get that ship cleared for me. I'll be fine.”