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They should have shot him where he stood. If he died here, there would still be hope—and hope was what had brought him from very different beginnings to this point. But if he surrendered, every gram of that hope would be lost.
Dr. Cyrus Chamberlain held the pistol in his right hand over his head with his fingers clearly off the trigger. Four elite soldiers settled in a modified phalanx and trained their assault rifles on him.
He should have been wracked with anxiety, should have been disabled by erratic breathing, high blood pressure, slowed reactions. But he was calm, his breathing in perfect sync with his heart rate. It was remarkable how losing a son could move the mind to places you could never have imagined when life went as planned.
"Drop your weapon we will finish you!"
The noise of the battle behind Cyrus muffled the voice of the soldier at the head of the phalanx, but his words could not have been clearer. Cyrus should have been dead or dying by now, but the soldier who was now repeating his threat was standing too far from the men in his formation. Cyrus realized he himself had pulled too far ahead of his own van, but the only chance any of them stood was him taking advantage of the chaos his own friends were causing behind him.
Chaos. That was not the right word. Chaos was what was going to happen in seven minutes if he did not make it to the ominous grey ship that was more than two hundred meters away. But that was what had to be done. The sun was setting them all, and that ship was the only way he, or anyone else he had grown to love in this forsaken place, would ever see the sun again.
