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faint outline of half a footprint at the juncture where the wall met the floor. He smudged the footprint with the claw on his big toe. “Your secrets would be better kept if you maintained cleanliness, Lieutenant.”
    â€œOf course, Captain.” Sibed’s embarrassed pheromones mixed with resentment and anger. “I will make note of this.” He placed his top right lesser hand against the wall. Pale infrared lights cycled under the wall’s surface.
    Zhoh glanced around the hallway. “You have other points of egress from the hallway.”
    â€œYes sir.” Sibed watched Zhoh with the eyes in the back of his head.
    Certain that the lieutenant would not tell him where all of the entrances were, Zhoh remained silent. If he had designed the fortification, he would have put a few of the doors in some of the rooms as well. Doing so was expensive and redundant, but it would help with security. There would be other surprises hiding behind the walls too, and many of them would be lethal. The waiting lift so readily in sight probably didn’t do anything. It was bait in a very lethal trap.
    A section of the wall slid to the side to reveal a lift large enough for six Phrenorians. Other wall sections probably held fighting points where warriors could trap invaders or kill them at will. The setup impressed Zhoh. It meant that whoever had designed it had recognized the chances of one day being found out. Or maybe, when the installation had served whatever purpose it was there for, it would be turned into a kill box against enemies.
    Those enemies could get in, but they couldn’t get out.
    Sibed gestured for Zhoh to precede him.
    â€œYou go first, Lieutenant.” Zhoh still wasn’t certain why he’d been brought to the command post, and he was certain that was what this place was. General Rangha could have been merely throwing his weight around, or he could have summoned Zhoh there to kill him. Either was possible given Zhoh’s current predicament.
    With the ill-­fated brood his treacherous wife had given birth to, and the blame she had placed on him for the genetic defects that had required the immediate deaths of those spawn, the titles and office Zhoh had been given by the Phrenorian Empire primes had been negated. He was just a warrior once more, and only bravery and success would lift him back to a place of honorable standing in the Empire. He should have been at the front of the war, leading warriors into battle and claiming the flesh of those he defeated, eating those enemies and joying in victory, not shepherding researchers working only to create poison to sell to the humans and other lesser species.
    As he stepped into the lift, Zhoh slid a lesser hand closer to his Kimer particle beam pistol and another to his patimong . In close quarters the honor blade would prove instantly more lethal. If things went badly, he would bury the length of orange-­red daravgane resin in the sergeant’s thorax. The patimong would have no problem slicing through the sergeant’s chitin. The blades were designed to do exactly that.
    The other accompanying warriors started to board the lift too, but Sibed waved them back. It was an obvious attempt to put Zhoh at ease, or to show that Sibed did not fear Zhoh, but that didn’t insure that weapons would not come out.
    Or that the lift would not explode somewhere deep in the bowels under the base. It was a trap that Zhoh had used before. He had entered the lift because sometimes chances had to be taken in order for enemies to reveal themselves.
    Sibed waved a lesser hand with a key cube over the control panel. Lights glowed briefly, then the lift dropped at a rapid rate and stopped to shift sideways for a time, shifted still again, then dropped some more before shifting twice more. The path to wherever they were going was not straightforward. Zhoh’s equilibrium rocked slightly, but he maintained his balance.
    The lift did not blow