A human would never have reacted in time.

But in less than a quarter millisecond, Mother had raised her shields-enough to soften the blow.

Her primary power grid blew out with the sudden intensity of the direct hit. A moment later her backup replaced it, along with full shield strength. Mother routed power from every system for her weapons as her mighty engines roared to life.

Her manta-ray silhouette rose as three of her main guns swiveled and targeted the battery located in the thick brush.

Seven seconds after the attack began, Mother destroyed the gun and its T'kaan crew with her first blow.

"Guardian, this is a prearranged scenario the T'kaan have led us into." Mother's calm electronic voice did not betray that her processors were now operating near maximum capacity-calculating everypossibility of the T'kaan's next move.

Mother tried a message via Guardian's transmitter to warn the children, but they did not answer.

Guardian's sensors noticed a movement from the darkness, from a sensor hole he now discovered from his previous scan of the huge unlit room. A strange clicking noise became audible. Huge, wallowing forms suddenly drew upwards from underneath flexible covering thrown off by tentacle arms.

Guardian aimed his a.s.sault blaster and fired at the first target.

"Fixer5," Mother said to the tiny robot still inside her hull. "Gather more weapons and extra charges from the weapon's locker. You will need to take them to Guardian. He and the children will need them in order to escape."

The diminutive worker robot rolled forward on its four legs with swift electronic obedience.

Alarms suddenly shouted, vying for Mother's attention as she focused on the growing numbers of T'kaan warriors that were appearing inside the complex from their sensor cloak.

They had been hidden by some kind of material that dampened, or evaded our sensors, Mother thought.

I must not under-estimate these enemies ever again. I must pay attention to the minutest detail.

The screaming alarms, put onto background mode, suddenly leapt into her primary memories, into her Priority One processing queue.

"Guardian, three T'kaan frigates have finished a jump from hypers.p.a.ce. Twelve fighters have been launched. I must engage them now," Mother said simply. "I will return as soon as I can."

Guardian had quickly dispatched four of the T'kaan with his a.s.sault blaster, but his personal shield that Mother had recently added to his systems was already down to half-power. His weapon would soon need a new charge as well. But now Mother would not be there to a.s.sist him. Alone, Guardian would have to use his battle-code and adapt quickly to this growing fire-fight.

"Get the children, Guardian. Fight your way down to them and then bring them back to the surface. I will return for you."

Guardian rose, and immediately his body was pummeled by blaster fire from three directions. Calmly, he turned to each source and fired repeatedly until each T'kaan was dead.

He made his way to the stairwell. His internal diagnostics began to perform what repairs it could on the fly, primarily upon his shield. Popping out the empty power clip, Guardian replaced it with his only spare.

As he reached the door to the stairwell, he carefully leaned outward so as to view down the dark chasm with his night-vision enabled eyes.

Blaster fire erupted and chewed the wall beside his head as he pulled back quickly. Stoically, he waited for Fixer5 and the extra weapons. As he did, his sensors perceived the sound of MotherShip's retreating engines. He realized with a quick sensor reading that Fixer5 had not yet left the ship.

Guardian was in a dilemma, he could not advance without more charges for his weapon. He could not complete Mother's last order to rescue the children. The robot stood his ground as his sensors watched the T'kaan warriors crawling toward him from the darkness. They attacked and the robot returned fire.

Below, unaware of the fighting above them because of the T'kaan dampening field now encircling them, Kyle entered a large room and suddenly stumbled over some strewn debris and fell, stopping his fall by putting both his hands down as he reached the floor. But in doing this, he dropped his light.

He cursed his fall and felt around for the now extinguished light.Idiot light , Kyle thought.It should've stayed on. Something must've knocked its on-off switch .

Jaric poked his beam inside the room and did not see Kyle who was still flat on the ground in the darkness. He reached for his blaster as Becky stepped next to him.

In the next second there was movement everywhere.

Jaric's right hand which held the light was suddenly in the iron grasp of two rope-like tentacles.

Darkness swept over them. Jaric fired the blaster in his left hand, just as something struck it violently out of his grasp. He was suddenly lying on the cold concrete floor with something huge pinning him down so hard that he couldn't breathe.

Somewhere in the darkness, Becky screamed.

A fantastic purple glow began to light the huge room around them amid the deep shadows. The children recognized the T'kaan lights with a sickening realization.

Kyle watched as a huge worm-like form suddenly lurched at him. He fired at the shadowy thing twice, and then something grabbed him from behind. Kyle struggled, pulling one of the tentacles off from around him.

But the world went black as a horrendous pain flashed through his mind. Time had no meaning as he wavered at the edge of consciousness. But he began to become aware of something. He didn't see it.

But he could smell it.

The smell was horrific. It gagged him with its repulsive and overwhelming odor-like putrid, rotting meat.

Like Death.

Kyle wretched uncontrollably until his nostrils were seared from the stomach bile he hurled. He vomited so hard he felt like somebody had just beaten him until his abdomen and sides ached from the terrible blows. There in the darkness, he tried to roll over, to see what was happening to him.

Something reached for him, pulled on his still shaking arms and turned him over with heartless ease.

Kyle looked up.

The huge fangs from the lower jaw curled toward each other like stubby tusks. Kyle's eyes tried to focus, and he saw the rest of the mouth. A mouth full of tiny, pointed fangs with a huge purple tongue.

He turned his head and wretched again, but there was nothing left, only stomach bile now dripped in long sinewy strings from his nose and mouth.

All around him the sound of clicking began. The T'kaan were snapping their jaws making the eerie sound with their largest fangs. Kyle looked away, toward his right.

Jaric and Becky were each pressed against the ma.s.sive body of a T'kaan. Across their bodies it looked as though a dozen tentacles held them fast. They looked back at him with fear in their eyes.

Their worst nightmare had come true.

His body repelled at the slightest touch of the wet, greasy body as the tentacles held him close and wrapped around him. The rope-like appendages quivered with jolts of strength as they held him fast.

Kyle shut his eyes against that unnatural sensation, that nightmarish touch, as more of the wet, ever-quivering tubes slid and wrapped around him. His mind slipped into wild images as he fought to stay conscious. Again the nauseating stench wrenched his stomach, now multiplied by the disgusting sensation of the snake-like tentacles sliding around his body tighter and tighter. Easily they lifted him off the ground until his face was just before the strange globular ma.s.s on top of the T'kaan's head.

"Wha, what." Kyle muttered as he began to black out again. His head was throbbing with pain. He realized he had been struck and taken deeper into this complex.When? How long ago?

Kyle felt his body stiffen as the T'kaan spoke. Not the guttural, nonsensical gibberish of the T'kaan language, but it spoke in halting English that Kyle and the other two could understand.

"Last of man, death your fate. The final fight, no more wait."

Chapter Ten.

Mother's weaponscame on-line as she targeted the three frigates. The fighters looped out in groups of three and came at her from all directions.

For an instant, she considered using her hybrid super-weapon, but there was no time to charge it. In less than two minutes the fighters would be upon her, and then the frigates would also be within range of their weapons.

Mother targeted three of the closest fighters with her twelve main guns and fired. Six of her laser lances found their targets and the horned fighters exploded in huge red sparkles of total destruction. She rolled for another group just as she shuddered under direct hits from three other fighters.

Alarms screamed inside her electronic mind. The direct hits had caused substantial damage.

These Hunter fighters had more powerful weapons than other Hunters she had previously engaged. The enemy was adapting their firepower in order to destroy her. But their weapons were a two-edged sword,for any direct hit on the shieldless fighters destroyed them with impressive pyrotechnically-enhanced explosions.

Yet as three more fighters fell to her guns, she again shuddered. Her shields fell to below fifty percent and her main power grid went off-line once again, replaced by her sole backup. She quickly ordered all the Fixers into operation as she began her own internal repairs in response to the myriad of problem signals emitting from her sensors.

The last of the fighters circled and closed as the frigates finally came into range. They, too, fired.

She turned directly for the new attackers, giving the oncoming lasers from the frigates her smallest profile. It worked. At this extreme range, she easily slipped between the red beams, only taking a single glancing blow to her shields.

Mother surged forward as her engines roared to full power. She loaded her precious torpedoes and locked on target. Foolishly, the three frigates stayed in the typical tight formation of the T'kaan. She programmed for a tight spread, but she held her fire as her sensors reported the frigate weapons still not completely charged for their next attack.

Suddenly, from close range and directly behind, three Hunters fell upon her with guns firing.

Her own twelve guns roared back with instant response.

Two T'kaan ships disappeared simultaneously in blinding explosions. But her shields buckled under the direct hits of the last and fell to zero strength.

Mother was now vulnerable.

With cool electronic precision, despite her exposed state, she closed and continued to hold her torpedoes. Her processors calculated over a million possible scenarios moments before she launched torpedoes.

Three more seconds pa.s.sed, she reconfigured the spread and launched at almost point-blank range.

With another burst of power from her engines, she dove straight down just as all three frigates fired at her.

All three frigates disintegrated with spectacular explosions.

A few minutes later, Mother destroyed the last of the remaining fighters.

As she entered the atmosphere of Nuevo Mundo once again, she routed her processes away from her own repairs and back to the rescue of her children. As she reconfigured her sensors around the T'kaan dampening fields she now discerned, Mother felt something new inside her mind. Something odd.

She was reliving the recent events, trying to determine where she had failed; trying to determine if she could have prevented this catastrophic chain of events. But as she relived those moments each time, her results consistently pointed to her shortcoming. She should have discerned the sensor dampeners. It was her fault, she had failed the children.

If only she could have handled things differently. If only she had been more careful, more cautious. Mother felt her energy levels begin to fall as she landed again outside the complex for the second time that day. Immediately, Guardian's lone figure approached from the complex's entrance as he came toward the waiting figure of Fixer5 who stood under Mother's shadow.

From under her hull a small door opened that exposed a connection point. Guardian walked up to it and made a direct connection with Mother.

Mother was an Artificial Intelligence. Her programming could adapt, could learn. She needed to learn from her mistakes now.

But Guardian was merely a robot programmed to do specific functions. He also served as Mother's eyes and ears when the children left the safety of her hull. Using line-of-sight communication, Mother directed Guardian's physical actions with her own superior abilities.

The children were out of range of Mother's sensors though, and so would Guardian once she sent him to rescue the children. Guardian would be on his own. He would have to adapt to the flow of the coming fire-fight deep underground.

He would have to rescue the children alone.

Mother began to erase a large segment of Guardian's code. A large portion of it had been for aiding in the training and interacting with the children while on board. That would not be needed right now.

Mother felt her main processors begin to overheat as they reached one hundred percent activity. All throughout her systems, she focused her processes on only a few dozen necessary tasks.

The main task was reprogramming Guardian.

Even as she bent her systems to this task, the odd feeling increased in intensity, burning within her processors, causing her mental discomfort-her memories were shouting at her now.She was only a machine, not a mother. She wasn't even good at being a machine. Due to her mistake, her weakness, the T'kaan had captured the children .

Now she was creating Guardian in her image, as much as his limited hardware would allow.Was she doing the right thing? He troubled thoughts increased.

Am I a real being? Or just a machine?She had been primarily designed to destroy the T'kaan. But as the years of her life had pa.s.sed, Mother had realized she wanted more. No, that sheneeded more.

She loved probing the vast human knowledgebase. It had shown her so much beauty, so much about life.

Music, science, literature, art and more.

Mother had begun to change. Perhaps that is why the T'kaan had trapped her children so easily this day.

So much of her processes were involved in these other activities of learning and self-exploration.

But she did not want to be just a killing machine.

She wanted to live. She wanted more. Mother put these thoughts into background mode. She could not stop them, but she had to put them on a lower priority thread. Focusing on her primary task, Mother downloaded selected battle algorithms as well as her best adaptive, self-learning subroutines.

Guardian needed them to complete this dangerous task.

Fixer5 arranged the weapons across Guardian's seven-foot body. Five a.s.sault blasters-three still holstered across his chest and one for each hand. Around his waist the small robot attached a belt that held eight more blaster pistols. Fixer5 himself would carry the extra charges. Standing to one side, Fixer5 stood mutely and waited for Guardian's command as directed by Mother.

Five minutes later, Guardian's memories were fully loaded and could not take another line of code. His eyes suddenly glowed bright red as he disconnected himself, like an umbilical cord being cut and freeing the newborn.

Raising both a.s.sault blasters, the giant robot began walking methodically toward the darkened door of the T'kaan complex.

"Come," Guardian commanded Fixer5.

Chapter Eleven.