Shine, Lock, and Enigma leapt into the railcar, and Shine punched the button for activation. They ignored the firmly polite voices that reminded them to buckle their seatbelts and to remain in the car at all times.
The magrails sparked to activation, sending a cascade of icicles shattering to the faraway floor. The railcar began to speed along at a good trotting velocity. Behind them, Shine could see another car pulling into the station, their following railcar.
There were things getting onto that car!
Shine activated the binocs in his visor.
They were assuredly not human- it was visible in their body motions, the way they carried those too-wide torsoes, even the odd, subtly-delayed fashion in which they moved. He kicked the lenses into higher magnification- these were aliens! They seemed slightly larger, overall, than humans. They could not fit comfortably together in the aisle of the car. They had strange, dog-like stroke legs, and long arms with flat-fingered hands and claws. They had short, meaty tails and longish necks. He could not see their faces or much of their flesh through the incredibly colorful, intricately embellished armor which they wore.
"Aliens!" Shine marvelled, before he noticed the long-muzzled weapons which the carried with obvious ease. "Hostiles," he reassessed, and pointed them out to the others. "These must have been the intruders that the other Units were talking about before we got split up."
One of them hunted about the cockpit of the railcar before finding the activation button, which it punched with something like frustration.
The aliens' railcar began to glide smoothly after theirs.
"This isn't good," Shine said, right before one of the aliens snarled something loudly and the first beams of purplish death began lancing in the battleroids' direction.
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In human beings, there is a latent danger-sense, like the Spider-Sense of a certain long-ago superhero. This is an atavistic thing, the true sixth sense, and as human beings have evolved, and gradually lost the wild luxury of constant honing of the race through danger, they became complacent and lost traits which were merely, shall we say, taking up space in the racial hard-drive. Of course, you can still notice danger-sense in humans- a strange sense of foreboding, a "bad feeling about this", or sometimes, what may seem like irrational fear.
The Szchra danger-sense is not so eroded. Honed by an evolutionary period of near constant bloodshed and warfare, which has not ended in their expansion into space, the Szchra sometimes are able to sense oncoming danger.
This saved many of the alien warriors, who jumped as the battleroid electrified the plasteel under their feet. Others, the ones with high-caste armors, were saved by energy dampeners which redistributed energy into batteries and storage centers to be bled off into the air. The unlucky ones were fried in an almost comic manner not unlike one would see in an ancient cartoon.
"Those wretched beings!" snarled Tschuho-!manxu, as the aliens regrouped. "We shall have to track them down. They now owe us blood for blood, my warriors, and they will pay their debt."
"Yes, high one," replied the other warriors, deferring to his authority.
Seven had plummeted downward through his impromptu escape hatch into an unused maintenance level, falling several stories through piping and wiring, his fall broken by a metal walkway for maintenance crews and cleanerbots. He could now detect the injuries sustained by the fall-
Damaged servos and movement circuitry in left leg and hip, damaged servos in right arm, separated wiring in left shoulder, melting damage incurred to shoulders and back by superheated plasteel, and cracked visor-plate.
Two was luckier- falling through the path left by Seven, he managed to grab hold of a bit of wreckage, and his martial-arts-honed dexterity allowed him to drop pipe by pipe to where Seven lay.
One by one, warriors climbed down through the smoking, melted hole in the plasteel deck. One by one, they dropped onto lower and lower platforms and ladders through a maintenance level, following the wrecked piping and wires left by the fall of the battleroids.
One warrior waved on a control in his visor, activating heat-signature. There- there were the enemy beings. They didn't generate as much heat as the other beings on this ship he had seen. In fact, they were practically cold by comparison. Could these be automatons? Or something else? The warrior brushed aside a wave of superstitious imagining. The Szchra are a grounded, physical folk, who trust what they see with their eyes. But long ago, they were more superstitious and spiritual, indeed, than any human being.
"This way," he motioned, leading Tschuho-!manxu and the other warriors downward across a creaking bridge of conduits towards a ladder that would take them to the maintenance walkway.
