"Get down!” Avery yelled to Thune, as the shorter escort tossed the leader its hammer.

Then he tackled Jilan, driving her roughly to the ground. In an instant, the silver-haired giant had the cudgel above its head, ready for a cross-body strike. Thune would have gotten his head knocked clean off his shoulders if Captain Ponder hadn't
pushed him out of the way and taken the blow himself. The hammer hit the Captain in his prosthetic left arm and sent him twisting through the air. He landed north of Byrne and slid a good twenty meters on the dew-slick grass.-Chpt.15

# Run with: /usr/local/sbin/dhclient -6 -D LL -P -cf /etc/dhclient.conf -pf /var/run/dhclient6.vlan3001.pid vlan3001

option space my-vsio code width 4 length width 2 hash size 3;
option my-vsio.ntt6 code 210 = string;
option dhcp6.my-vendor-opts code 16 = encapsulate my-vsio;

Byrne was a big man. But the alien was a meter taller and outweighed him by half a metric ton. It bent Byrne over and hustled him headfirst into the data center's wall, just beside the hole. If the
Staff Sergeant hadn't been wearing his helmet, his skull would have shattered. Instead, the impact only knocked him unconscious.

The next thing Byrne knew, the alien had him by the wrists and was dragging him, belly-up, back into the raging firefight outside the tower. Byrne's helmet was gone, as were both his weapons. The alien had torn off his assault vest with a single, vicious swipe of its paw; there were bloody clawmarks down the center of his olive-drab shirt and his chest stung and throbbed. He tried to get his feet under him and break free of the alien's grip.

The alien wrenched its hammer free of the shattered
barrel and glared at Avery, teeth bared. But as it hefted its hammer a second time, Avery leapt headfirst over his barrel toward the control center, away from Jilan and his recruits. The alien's hammer smashed down where Avery had stood a moment before, buckling one of the walkway's diamond-grid metal panels.-Chpt.22

The Staff Sergeants fired back at the escorts closest to their positions-Byrne at the taller, Avery at the shorter. But their bullets had no effect on the aliens' armor. In fact, they never even touched it. Each round was deflected by invisible energy shields that followed the contours of the armor and shimmered with every impact.-Chpt.15

But then he saw a vaulting flash of gold. "Hang on!" Avery shouted, yanking the shift lever on the Warthog's steering column into reverse and stomping the accelerator. But before the vehicle had moved more than a few meters backward, the gold-armored alien thundered onto the avenue, dropping its hammer with a mighty roar. The weapon crushed the front of the Warthog's hood and sheared off its tow-winch. The Warthog's engine was unscathed, but the force of the alien's strike popped the vehicle's rear wheels clean off the pavement.
“Roll!” Byrne thundered, struggling to level the LAAG as the Warthog bounced back onto its tires.-Chpt.17

Avery raised his pistol and emptied his clip. He knew his rounds wouldn't punch through the alien's shields, but all he wanted was to draw the thing's attention and keep it from hitting any of the
recruits. As Avery's shots flashed harmlessly against its back, the alien turned. But by then Avery was already running south for the safety
of a boulder.-Chpt.15

"A wise observation, Deacon.” Maccabeus lifted a silver-haired paw and placed it on Dadab's head.
With a flinch of his fingers the Jiralhanae could have crushed the Unggoy's skull. But Dadab hoped the gesture was simply a sign of the Chieftain's growing appreciation for his assistance as minis-
ter to the cruiser's Unggoy and translator for its invaluable Hura-gok. In that moment all Dadab's fears began to fade.-Chpt.14

Maccabeus stood before the bridge's central holo-tank, his paws knuckled against its smooth metal railing. The Chieftain's armor was colored gold, but made of a much stronger alloy.-Chpt.14

Suddenly he saw movement to his left. As he leapt across the corridor into one of the recessed doorways, plasma scorched the air behind him. Turning around, he watched a salvo of searing green
bolts rake across the corridor. The metal boiled and buckled like the shells of beetles trapped on a burning log. -Chpt.8