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task of carrying her seem effortless as he and his companion sought the makeshift entryway they had blasted in the ship’s hull just a few hours earlier.
    Grant was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville who now served the Cerberus operation. He was a huge man in his late thirties, wide-shouldered with skin like polished mahogany. His head was shaved clean, and he wore a trim goatee beard that surrounded his broad mouth in a black circle. His clothes were in disarray, as were those of his companions, and his heavy boots splashed in the water as he leaped over the riblike protrusions that lined the circular-walled corridor. Grant wore a long coat over his shadow suit, both of them made of black fabric, the former fabricated from a Kevlar weave. The shadow suit boasted remarkable properties. Snugly fitting its wearer like a second skin, the one-piece garment had armorlike features sufficient to deflect a blade, redistribute kinetic shock and offer protection from environmental hazards.
    Grant continued to run, ducking as another chunk of the walls tumbled away in a crash of shell-like material. “Keep moving,” he instructed his companion, though the command was unnecessary. Perhaps he was really talking to himself, driving himself on as they both hurried toward the rent in the hull through which they might escape this nightmare.
    Running just a few paces behind Grant was his companion, a beautiful woman with olive skin and long dark hair that swung behind her in a ponytail. In her early twenties, Rosalia was a mercenary who had recently hooked up with the Cerberus organization during the ongoing Ullikummis infiltration. She had tucked the cuffs of her combat pants into the supple leather boots she wore, kicking out with long legs to keep pace with her taller companion. Her open denim jacket showed the shadow suit she wore beneath, and she had a Ruger P-85 pistol stashed in a low-slung holster on her right hip and a katana sword tucked through her belt loop across the opposing hip. The sword was two feet in length, and the blade had been blackened by flames to the color of charcoal. Rosalia’s chest rose and fell as she took deep breaths to keep up with Grant’s long strides, and her deep brown eyes seemed to burn with rage.
    Grant carried another woman in his arms, her petite frame much smaller than Rosalia’s. Her name was Domi and she was an albino, her skin a deathly white, her short hair the creamy color of bone where it framed her sharp-planed face in a pixie cut. Right now her pale flesh was marred with streaks of black where ash had smeared across her skin, and her eyes were closed in slumber. Open, those eyes were a vibrant, satanic red, like two pure rubies. Domi wore simple combat clothes in dark colors, but the clothes had been torn in places following a recent struggle.
    As the group reached sight of the hole in the hull of the crumbling spaceship, Grant heard someone calling to him. Up ahead, he saw the familiar form of their other companion—a modern-day samurai warrior called Kudo, who was dressed in supple armor and had a long sword sheath depending from his belt. Kudo was one of the Tigers of Heaven, a group of fearsome warriors who had joined forces with the Cerberus exiles as they defended themselves from the hostile campaign by Ullikummis.
    As Grant and Rosalia got closer, they saw that Kudo’s face was streaked red across the left-hand side where something had marred and puckered the skin, and the white of his left eye had turned a chilling bloodred. His dark hair was plastered to his head in short, wet curls.
    “What happened to you?” Grant asked as they made their way together to the hole in the ruined hull.
    “I mistimed the charge,” Kudo explained wryly before asking about his missing partner, Kishiro.
    “He didn’t make it,” Grant admitted solemnly as he ducked through the door-sized hole that an explosive charge had left in the ship’s outer hull.
    The ship was grounded. In fact, it had