They were down on the planet, at the landing site that Lynx had found when he had rushed to pick them up after Vas had called for him. Before the bot had gone offline to allow Ciro to remove his power source, he’d given them two last predictions: they had roughly seventeen minutes to get ready, and there was a fifty-six percent chance of success with no casualties to allies.
“That is, however, contingent upon the level of violence with which you meet the xenos,” he’d said.
The pitch of Jane’s voice rose as she asked, “What does that mean?”
“It means that you shoot first,” Reyer said, “before they can hurt you or anyone else.”
“Then you say the romantic heroic line,” Ciro added.
Now Reyer was elbow deep in her emp bomb, securing Lynx’s power source to the device. She kissed her two fingers through the wrap covering her nose and mouth and laid it on the piece. “Thanks, buddy.” She shut the ill-fitting cover and began tightening the screws.
She felt someone come up behind her.
Adan put down the XM4s, e-pistols, and machetes he’d carried out and squatted down on the mostly solid ground with his back toward Reyer. He started checking the e-weapons. After an uneasy minute, he tugged down his wrap so he could speak clearer.
“Alix, about what I said earlier—”
She pulled down her own wrap. “Could we talk about this later, Adan? I’m a little busy.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Why are you smiling like that?”
“No reason,” he lied. It’s just you called me Adan and didn’t yell at me for calling you Alix. “Are you still mad about—”
“That, and a few other things.”
“A few other things?”
“I said we could talk about it later.” She closed up the multi-tool and tucked it in her pocket. When she was standing, she picked up the emp bomb and balanced it on her shoulder. The thing was heavy. Hopefully Jane wouldn’t have to throw it. Despite her best intentions to keep her mouth shut, Reyer found herself saying, “If we both survive, I’ll have a few things to say to you about timing.”
“Timing?” Vas stood up and faced her.
She turned to him. “All those nights, all that time we were alone, you could have said something. But no. You decided to wait until moments before I’m jumping out of an airlock! What were you thinking?”
“That it’d be the last chance I’d get to tell you?”
“You could have told me earlier!”
“I didn’t want to make it awkward.”
“Didn’t want to make it awkward? Adan, you cuffed me to your ship!”
“All right. True. But I didn’t know if you felt the same! So there I’d go, confessing my embarrassingly deep adoration for you, and you’d say, ‘sorry, not really into you,’ and I’d have to say, ‘oh, well, good night,’ and then stick around all day, every day, like a creeper, because I was still your bodyguard.”
Reyer laughed. “You have a point.” She held out her hand.
Vas gave her two e-pistols, one at a time, so she could tuck them in her holster and belt. Then he handed her an XM4. “It’s good to go,” he said as she looked it over. “Do you have your knife?”
“Always.”
“Turn a bit.” He tucked an extra machete into her belt. That done, he allowed his hand to linger on her hip as he looked at her face.
“Keep your head in the game, Captain,” she growled at him.
“Yes, ma’am.” He kissed the edge of her lips, then helped replace the wrap over her nose and mouth since her hands were full.
She went off to Jane’s position.
Ciro came up behind Adan. “Real smooth, bro. I guess that’s one way to get a girl.”
Vas slapped the last e-pistol into his brother’s chest. Ciro made an oof sound. “I didn’t get her by cuffing her up.” He added the sword to his personal arsenal, picked up the last XM4, and handed Ciro a machete. “It was the only way I could keep her.”
His brother grinned.
Vas grabbed Ciro’s shoulder and pushed him around. “Get into position before I shoot you.”
[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]
“It’s all right, Jane. You’ve got this. You know how to set off the bomb?”
“Yes.”
“And the e-pistol?”
“Safety off, point and squeeze the trigger. Is that really all there is to it?”
“For shooting? Yes. Look out for the predators—”
“And shoot anything silver in the water. Yes, Alix. I’ve got it.”
“All right.” Reyer reached out and put a hand on Jane’s arm. “Are you good?”
Dr. Jane closed her shaking hands into two fists. “No! I’ve never killed a person before!”
“Hopefully, you won’t have to kill a person now. If you shoot the ones holding guns, you should be shooting xenos.”
“What if one of them is a human?”
“Then they’re working with the xenos to kill twenty people and you should shoot them three times and spit on the corpse.”
“Is…is it hard to kill someone?”
Reyer felt touched. She knew that it must have cost Jane a lot to be so vulnerable.
“Sadly, no,” Reyer said. “Not in battle. At least, not for me. It’s the confusion and adrenaline. It always just happens.” She squeezed her Jane’s arm. “Listen, I don’t care if you kill anyone. I don’t. With luck, Vas and I will get most of them. All I want you to do is keep yourself alive.”
“Wow.”
Alix gave her a quizzical look.
“It’s such…an honor,” Jane said. “I’ve never met the galaxy’s biggest hypocrite before.”
As the battleship roared overhead, their muffled laughter stopped instantly.
“I have to go,” Reyer said. “Careful, Jane.”
“You too.”
[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]
Harlan looked over the crowd of humans sitting on the deck. They knew they had landed. Their faces looked scared, occasionally defiant. They had stopped asking questions hours ago, after one of the xenos had whipped the girl’s face with the butt of his XM4, but they stared at him. It must have been obvious he was in charge from the way the other xenos came to him for whispered consultations. Harlan could tell that all of them were hungry—desperate—to know what their fate would be.
He smiled. He didn’t know what his fate would be, but he knew theirs. At least he had that power.
Another xeno came up and whispered in his ear, “Everything’s in place, sir.”
“Excellent. Have the guards gather them up. Tell Hausted to find me.”
The xeno nodded and left.
As the guards ordered the people to their feet, Harlan walked by the crowd to the edge of the ramp. He lowered it himself, stepping out before it had even finished opening to get the first real look at his home world.
It was exactly like he remembered.
Hausted came up behind him, a tablet in hand. He handed Harlan an e-pistol and XM4.
“No machete?”
“Do you want one, sir?”
“I do.” That would be from Rurik’s nature. The Rising always had them carry bladed weapons to fend off bots.
Once the machete had been provided, Harlan and Hausted led out. The humans followed after them, corralled by the eight armed guards.
[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]
Ciro pressed himself against the tree and tried to breathe quieter. He’d always hated hide-and-seek as a child. He could never run. He was skinny and slow, so his best defense had been to learn to hide well enough he never had to run. The key was to let the nerves thrill you without acting on them. As the seeker passed you by, calling your name, you had to simply stand there, doing nothing. Your breath needed to be mere air passing through your body as an almost nonexistent breeze.
This was like that. Only worse. These seekers were armed with rifles, and his chosen spot should have been behind the battleship, not directly in the path they’d decided to take.
He briefly closed his eyes, but then Adan’s emphatic warnings echoed through his mind. They flew open again to check the water for the telltale slide of silvery white.
Eons must have passed before the group was far enough away Ciro felt safe pulling out his com. He pressed the button.
“Lynx was wrong.”
Adan’s voice came back to him. “How wrong?”
“They landed where he thought they would, but they aren’t taking the right path.”
Someone swore. He couldn’t tell if it was Reyer or Jane.
“Ciro”—that was definitely Reyer—“if you pretend the ship is a clock and the front is facing twelve, what position are you?”
“I think I can shortcut this conversation,” Ciro said. “You want to know which way they’re going? They passed right by me.”
“How close, right by you?”
“They were on the other side of the tree.”
Over the com, Vas said, “Doctor, stay where you are. Alix, meet me. We’ll figure out where they’re going and tell you what do from there, Jane.”
“Right,” Jane said.
“Ciro, your job is the same. Make it happen, then get back to the ship.”
“Yes, Captain.” Ciro put the com back in his pocket. Since he was alone he allowed himself a groan before he took the deep breaths he needed to brace himself.
He sloshed toward the battleship. As he did, he mumbled something about “desert planets” and “which is worse.”
His grumblings were interrupted by a rough metallic grinding noise coming from the ship in front of him.
Someone was raising the ramp. Ciro abandoned silence for what little speed he had. As he got closer, his feet went from sliding through silt to pressing down against firmer ground. He jumped and grabbed onto the massive door as it tilted up, only to instantly realize exactly how foolhardy that choice had been as he was pulled further away from the spongy earth.
Ciro Felix Vas, record holder for the all-time worst physical fitness score of any potential recruit and seven-time failure of the most basic obstacle training course, had worked for months to be able to do one pull-up before he’d decided to gracefully accept that God intended him to be a computer geek.
He prayed to God that he could still do just one pull up.
His arms quivered as they strained to lift his bodyweight, but he was able to get his arms and part of his chest over the edge of the door. The walls of the ship were coming up faster than he liked, but the desperation fed his strength. He was able to draw a leg up and roll himself down the other side.
His impact on the deck of the battleship was masked by the clanking of the closing ramp.
He was about to yell out a few choice words, but then he remembered—someone had raised that ramp. Someone was still on board.
Adan had warned him it was possible. That’s what the e-pistol was for. It wasn’t what Ciro had hoped for, but he could handle it.
He reached down to his belt.
The e-pistol was gone.
[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]
Vas and Reyer were muttering over the tablet when Jane found them. Reyer pointed her e-pistol at the doctor’s head for a nervous second before Alix realized who was at the other end of it. She lowered her weapon.
“I thought I told you to wait,” Vas said.
“I thought that was a stupid order,” Jane said. “If they’re not going to be on the path, I was going to have to move anyway.” She finished sloshing over. The emp bomb was perched on her shoulder the way she’d seen Reyer carrying it. “What’s the problem?”
“We’re trying to figure out which way they’re going,” Alix said.
“And we don’t have a lot of time,” Adan added.
“We have enough. They’re moving hostages. We have to figure this out.”
“Why can’t you figure it out?” Jane asked. “Wonder Boy should have put all the scans on there. We have at least three of them.”
“It’s a little trickier than that,” Vas said.
Jane let out a sharp pft noise. “Sure. A little trickier. Hand it over.”
Alix pulled the tablet from Adan’s hands and held it out.
The captain, with nothing better to do, took the emp bomb away from the doctor.
Jane twisted her head back and forth, then started moving her hand and fingers around the screen in a rapid series of taps and swipes. At one point, she looked up at the landscape in front of her with a critical eye, as if it had vexed her. Then she looked back to the tablet. When she was done, she held the tablet out so they could all see the new screen.
“What did you do?” Reyer asked.
“I modified and overlaid the scans to show the density of the materials. The darker the blue, the deeper the goo.” She saw Adan’s appreciative glance. “I worked as a field biologist for a long time, Captain.”
“And all this?” Reyer asked, pointing to the screen
“That’s really damn wet. This stuff is only mostly wet. This crap is what we’re standing in. The tiny areas of green? Yeah. That’s what a ship can land on.”
“Where’s the path that Lynx outlined?” Vas asked.
Jane flicked down a menu. She pressed a few buttons. “Which route?”
“He did more than one?”
“He has four in here.”
“Then why—” Vas started to ask.
“Because we only asked him which one was most likely.” Alix put her head in her hand. “Stupid pile of wires. What Ciro needs to do is teach that bot to read minds.”
“Give him time,” Jane said. She opened all four routes and had them overlaid on the existing map.
“That’s where Ciro was and where the ship landed.” Reyer pointed.
Realization dawned on all three of them at almost the same moment.
“We have to move,” Reyer said. “Now.”
“We’ll have to cut across country if we want to catch them,” Jane said.
“I know.”
“That’s a lot of dark blue, Alix!” Vas said.
“Are you asking if I can handle it, Captain? Because the answer is, we don’t have a choice. One of us has to be the guide. One should carry the emp. One should be the lookout.”
“I’ve got the emp,” Adan said.
“I’ll guide,” Jane added.
“Oh, good. My favorite.” Reyer pulled the XM4 down from her shoulder.
“No swimming and no climbing if you can avoid it, Doctor,” Vas said.
[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]
The beast—whatever it was—was probably only curious. It wasn’t a xeno, for which Harlan felt strangely grateful. It’s true that a xeno never would have attacked them, but Harlan was dimly aware that he would’ve found it uncomfortable to find one of his kind in the body of a beast. He was uneasy enough as it was. The stirrings of something like memories pulled at his mind in a way that the human brain was never meant to handle.
He recognized the beast in an intimate way, as if the smell and shape called out to him. He wondered if he’d ever been one.
It took three of the guards to take the thing down. While they were distracted, one of the prisoners tried to rush his closest captor.
Harlan pulled his e-pistol and shot the man in the back. The guard who’d almost been tackled, kicked the body into the swamp.
Hausted said, “That’s one less now.” He sounded almost accusing.
Harlan didn’t mind. He knew the other humans were listening. “I didn’t want to do it. Hopefully, I won’t have to do it again. We’ll have enough trouble keeping them alive without an insurrection.”
He watched the rest of the prisoners look from the corpse of the beast on one side, to the floating body of their comrade on the other.
There it is, Harlan thought. That will to survive. They hate not knowing what will happen to them, but there’s no greater unknown than death.
“We have to move away from here as fast as possible.” He was supposedly calling to the guards, but he was well aware of his other audience. “The smell of blood will draw more predators.”
He wasn’t lying. He knew it was true the moment he said it.
[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]
This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
Ciro didn’t know how to use a machete. Reyer had told him to take one anyway because, in a dire situation, flailing around with a sharp bit of metal was better than nothing. Now that he was holding it, he began to doubt she was right. He was liable to cut his own leg off.
All he knew how to use was a screwdriver. He was good with them. He felt uncomfortable if he was further than three feet from one—which is how he figured Reyer felt about her knife, or how Adan felt about his sword.
Of course, if they had to, they could turn anything into a weapon. Even a screwdriver.
Ciro looked at the machete in his hand, then back at the panel in front of him. He grinned.
He jammed the blade into panel and pried. When he heard the telltale squeak and saw the metal inch away, he moved it down to the next pressure point and did the same thing. It popped open. Ciro had to jump to catch it before it slammed into the wall.
A battleship was big—especially after a few weeks spent in the Golondrina—but it wasn’t that big.
There was a second cover. He carefully put the tip of the machete into the slot on the screw and spun the hilt. A minute later he had access to the wires. It wasn’t long after that, he was able to get the door open.
According to the schematics, the room was supposed to be an armory. Ciro thought there’d been a mistake, but then his heart sank. He wasn’t wrong. It was an armory, but most of the guns were gone.
He tried not to think about what his friends were facing.
At the back of the room, there were still some weapons. He found an e-pistol and picked it up.
“Now, how does this work?” he muttered to himself.
[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]
They were still up to their hips in water even though it wasn’t one of the dark blue areas that Jane was trying so hard to avoid. Reyer was in front. She wouldn’t say it, but the pain was making it hard going already. Vas followed after Dr. Jane, holding the emp bomb over his head.
They stayed as silent as possible. This allowed them to listen to the noises around them, as well as preventing them from being overheard. It also made it easy to hear Adan’s shout.
Reyer turned, her rifle already lowered, but there was nothing to see. Vas was struggling against something, but she couldn’t tell what. Then she realized whatever it was had his leg.
She couldn’t see into the murky water to aim and had no intention of shooting his foot off. She threw the rifle over her shoulder and drew her knife.
“The emp,” Adan said.
Reyer took it with her left hand, but as the weight came down, it pulled across her back. Helpless to hold it up, she dropped it into the water.
“Jane! Get it!” She ignored the eruption of pain as she reached down into the swamp. She found Vas’s hands and pushed his fingers aside to figure out what he was gripping. It felt like a wet snake, all muscle, bound around his leg. When she tried to put her hand all the way around one of the coils, she felt it move.
Adan let out another yell and splashed back into the water of the swamp.
The thing pulled him further under. Vas slid through her hands until she was able to wrap her arm around his thigh. She dug her heels into the muck and hauled back. The thing stopped pulling. Vas thrashed to the surface for a breath while Reyer dove for his leg again.
She sliced across the rows of scales, trying not to cut too deep. It uncoiled from Vas’s leg with a speed that Alix didn’t expect. Then, with the same whip movement, it latched onto her arm.
Now she knew why Vas had screamed. The thing had barbs.
She lifted her hand out of the water and drew the machete at her hip with an inverted grip, slicing through the scaled appendage.
Vas put his arm around her ribs and waist, and pulled her back as he shot down into the water with his e-pistol. Part of the blast was deflected by the water, but part of it found flesh.
The creature rolled over the surface of the swamp until its wounds were hidden. Reyer couldn’t guess how big it was. Aside from the prolonged undulation of gray-brown scales, all she saw of it was the tips of three more tentacles when they briefly waved outside the water.
Both she and Vas were breathing hard.
“Come on,” he said.
Jane had grabbed the emp and dragged it out of the swamp onto an island of solid ground that was only covered by ten centimeters of water. Reyer and Vas arrived and flopped down beside her.
“Something’s wrong,” Vas said.
Reyer was already ripping at her belt to get to the emergency first-aid kit that sat on her back hip. For some reason, her fingers didn’t want to respond.
“How—how bad are you hurt?” she stuttered. Why did her tongue feel so thick?
Jane slapped Reyer’s hands away, yanked the snaps open, and pulled out the kit.
“Tell me the symptoms,” Dr. Jane demanded.
“Everything’s slow.” Reyer was on her elbows and knees now, her face barely above the putrid water.
“My—my back—and legs,” Adan said. “My hips hurt.”
“Alix, does your back hurt?” Jane demanded
Reyer couldn’t laugh, but she wanted to. “All the time.”
“Right. It’s probably myotoxic. I really hope you people know how to pack.” She unrolled the medical supplies.
“It’s poisonous?” Alix breathed.
“It’s venomous.” Jane rolled her eyes. “No one ever gets that right.”
She jabbed Vas in the arm with an auto injector, then did the same to Reyer. She began dressing the wounds, starting with Vas.
Before Jane was done treating her, Alix’s head was already clear.
“Fast thinking, Jane,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Not a problem. I’m glad you had a full kit.”
“You are quite the doctor, Doctor,” Adan said.
Jane didn’t look up from tending Reyer’s wounds. “No, I’m a biologist. I study creatures.”
“Poisonous ones?”
“Yes. After all, the venomous ones are the most interesting.”
She looked back at the deeper water. “I wish I could study this place.”
“Better you than me,” Alix whispered. She sat up and looked at the emp bomb. Water was still seeping out of several cracks.
“It should still work,” Vas said.
“It should,” Reyer said. “Water won’t affect the power-source, and I was careful with the wiring.”
Jane watched them as they eyed the bomb. It occurred to her that even though they assured each other it wouldn’t be a problem, they had certainly been careful to keep it dry.
[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]
Ciro ghosted through the last of the aft rooms and up to the stairs. They were so steep and small, it was almost a ladder. When he took off his shoes, the metal of the ship tried to bite into his calluses. He crawled up the stairs until he could peak over the deck.
There was no one he could see, but he could hear talking. They had to be in the cockpit. Harlan must have left his pilot and copilot behind.
And they closed the ramp? What kind of idiots would do that? Don’t they know that most of the time you need a quick getaway?
Ciro pulled himself up into the control area and hid by a panel of computers, out of sight of the opening.
He checked for the fifth time to make sure the e-pistol’s safety was off.
Simple point and shoot—my ass.
It had taken him five guns before he figured out they weren’t bound, he just wasn’t as bright as he had hoped.
He stepped away from the panel and into the open doorway. Ciro pulled the trigger on the xeno to his right before it even had the chance to turn its head. The other one lunged toward him from its chair. Ciro saw the elongated fingers reaching toward his face and jumped back while firing six frantic blasts.
When it was over, the xeno was dead, and Ciro was breathing in ragged gasps.
He forced himself to breathe normally, then nodded.
He dragged the first body out of the way and dropped it at the back of the control room.
“That’s for Lynx,” he said in his best hero voice.
He dragged the other one over as well.
“And…that’s for Lynx too. Or maybe Miss Reyer.”
He went back to the cockpit and chose the less bloody of the two chairs.
“Oh, this is nice,” he said. “All leather and cushy. Hmmmm.” He began to tap on the console in front of him. “Seems a shame.”
It didn’t take him long to load up the program and bypass all the security systems. He felt mildly disappointed in the Supremacy. Then it occurred to him that most people probably wouldn’t expect someone to hack in to do what he was doing.
Right before he pressed the button to start the final program, it occurred to him that, for the first time in his life, he was on board a Supremacy battleship. He knew he couldn’t stay long, but…
But what a waste if he didn’t look around first.
The consoles back in the control room were so tantalizing.
Yes. He owed it to…someone. He’d figure out who later. First, he had to look around.
[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]
The hostages noticed the change in their captors’ moods. They had been grim—focused on the water, staring through the trees and the vines—but now they were looking up occasionally, gazing at nothing.
Some of them smiled. One laughed.
The prisoners huddled closer together.
“Yes,” Harlan said. “We’re getting close.”
[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]
At the top of the rise, Jane found a tree and squatted down at its base. She was able to grab an entire hand full of fungus (Please, God, don’t let it be toxic!) to support herself as she caught her breath. She looked back at Reyer, who was still making her way up the steep incline, one laborious step at a time. She was pale from the pain, and her lips were so tight they were nothing but a thin line—a hint of pink.
Alix noticed her looking and nodded to Jane.
It took the doctor a moment to understand, but then she turned the other way and peered down the steep angle to the swamp below.
Her eyes widened, but she kept herself from making any noise.
She turned back to Reyer and pointed over her shoulder.
How close, Reyer mouthed with deliberate exaggeration.
Jane held up her hand with all her fingers stretched. Five minutes or less, she mouthed back.
Alix turned to Adan, who was several small trees behind her.
“They’re over the ridge.” Her voice was mellow and low, but loud enough he could hear it. “They’re coming across the swamp now. We have five minutes. Will that be enough time for me to check the bomb?”
Vas matched her volume. “Get to the top and we’ll see.”
“If you have to pass me, do it.”
“I’m flattered you think I can,” he said, “but I’m not that strong. This thing is heavy. Now keep going.”
Reyer continued climbing.
When she reached the top, she crawled over to Jane, keeping low. Jane had pulled out the tablet.
“We finally have some luck,” the doctor whispered. “Their easiest route will be around this area here.”
“They’ll have to walk almost under us?”
“Yes.”
Reyer turned her body to face back the way she’d come, ignoring the new stab of torment which added to the dull roar of agony she’d had to accept. She made sure her boots were steady on some tree roots, then leaned down.
Vas saw her outstretched hand. “You must be joking.”
“We don’t have time, Adan. Pass it up.”
He lifted the emp over his head with the makeshift handle toward Reyer. Her hand closed over it. She braced her legs, but as she tried to pull, nothing happened except the pain in her back went from a dull, angry red to white hot.
She didn’t know what was worse, the fact she couldn’t lift something that weighed only slightly more than her old marching pack, or the fact she couldn’t scream out the profane word she wanted to use to express her frustration.
A thin white hand reach down to join hers. With Jane’s help, they were able to get it to the top of the ridge.
Reyer crawled up and straddled the narrow ledge, trusting the snarl of branches to shield her from sight.
“Will it work if we roll it down the hill?” Jane whispered.
“Impacts aren’t a problem.” Reyer got the multi-tool from her pocket. She had to use one hand and her teeth to pull out the screwdriver while the other hand supported the bomb.
Vas came up directly behind her and gazed down at the advancing crowd.
“We don’t have long, Alix,” he whispered.
“I know, Captain,” she grumbled. “Officers,” she hissed under her breath. She finished the cursory inspection the time allowed her, then glanced down at the crowd below.
“Not ideal,” she whispered.
“It’s reality,” Adan said. “It’ll have to do.”
“Very true.”
She yanked the blast cord to start the timer, then she and Jane shoved it down the hill without bothering to reseal the cover.
Halfway down, the crowd below noticed it coming. The humans in the middle fanned out, trying to make sure they weren’t under it when it hit. The baffled human-xenos pushed back, trying to keep some order without resorting to shooting. It landed in the hastily made space with a splash that splattered everyone around it.
It was emitting a loud beep that no one felt comfortable with.
Including Reyer.
“Cover me!” she yelled.
Turning sideways, she braced herself against the angle, then started the long slide down to the emp. The mud gave way under her boots, spattering her arms and face and drenching the side she was leaning back into the rise. It coated her all the way up to her ribs in black-brown muck.
Harlan noticed her decent and yelled for the guards to shoot her. He raised his own weapon and began firing. Beside him, Hausted fell into the swamp, his hip taken out by a blast. He lay panting in the water. Harlan had less than a second to make this out before the next blast scorched his shoulder and part of his neck and put a massive hole in Hausted’s chest.
Reyer almost slid all the way to the bottom, but then her foot hit something—a root or bit of ground. She never figured out what it was, but it was solid enough to interrupt her momentum, stalling her leg while her speed pulled her on. She tumbled down the rest of the incline, sputtering as the mud hit her face.
When she rolled to the bottom, it took her a second to become aware of anything other than the agony in her body, but there was fighting going on. Blasts were sailing over her and raining around her. She opened her eyes to look around, still dizzy from her tumble.
The beeping drew her attention to the nearby emp. She crawled through the shallow water toward it. When she got there, she slapped it until it was oriented correctly, reached into the open panel, and tore the wires away from the timer.
Goddamn timers, she thought as she stripped more cover from the wires with her fingernails and bare hands. Always the weakest connection—can’t handle anything.
She twisted two of the wires together, then sat there sparking the other two off each other. She ignored the shouted orders for her to stop. She ignored Rurik’s voice as the xeno yelled at them to shoot her.
At last she got a spark big enough to set off the emp. When she heard the tone change from a beep to an ear-piercing hum, she rolled back as fast as she could. Facing away from the bomb, she covered the back of her neck with her hands.
The shrapnel-scattering explosion wasn’t the important part of an emp bomb—it didn’t have to be big—but it was enough to concuss her ears and spray her back with hot jagged pellets as the compressed magnetic field found instant release as a massive electromagnetic burst.
She lay there, curled in the swamp water, waiting for her senses to return. When she thought she could sit up, she tried to. She got her hands and arms behind her back, and pressed up against the semi-solid ground. She was sitting down, facing the human-xeno when he walked up to her and raised his XM4.
He pulled the trigger.
She laughed when he looked down in confusion and pulled it again.
“It won’t work,” she said. There was a noise behind her—a scraping, sliding sound. “But his will.”
The xeno’s head disappeared in the blast.
Adan ran a few steps to reach her, grabbed her outstretched hand, and hauled her to her feet.
She let out a scream of pain as she rose out of the swamp.
“Stop trying to get yourself killed!” Vas shouted.
“I knew you were there!” she shouted back.
She threw off her now useless rifle and e-pistol and drew both her machetes instead.
Two more men—presumably xenos (they had to hope the hostages weren’t going to attack them)—were coming at them. Vas shot one in the head as he came closer. The other he managed to hit in the arm.
Reyer rushed the xeno as his hand began transforming. The xeno turned to the nearest hostage, reaching out with long white fingers. Alix hacked his arm down to the bone, stood on the disfigured limb, and slammed the other blade into his head.
“Stay out of their reach!” she yelled. “Don’t let them touch you.”
Her warning came too late for two of the prisoners. They were already charging their now unarmed captors. One impaled himself on a grotesque hand while the other was grabbed by the arm, pulled around, and had her skull pierced by another xeno’s fingers.
Vas shot both her and the xeno.
From her perch, Jane saw someone coming up behind Reyer. She took careful aim and let off a blast. Alix heard the impact and turned. She swiped a machete across the extended digits and took off all but one finger. The xeno screamed. She ran him through.
He stared at her with wide, wild eyes and raised his mutilated hand. There was no blood from the amputations. New points were already growing, white as bone, reaching out for her eyes. She let go of the machete and staggered back against a tree.
Vas stood in front her and shot the xeno twice in the chest with his rifle.
Sheathing her other machete, she pushed against the tree and reached out for the e-pistol at Adan’s hip. “You’re not using this? I’d rather keep my distance.”
“All yours,” he said.
It was easy to tell the xenos now. The hostages cowered away from them whenever one tried to approach. When Jane saw that, she realized she was less likely to hit an innocent human. She fired repeatedly from her perch at one of the menacing figures until five blasts had torn her apart.
Reyer took down the next one—three blasts to the xeno’s chest. Her barely elongated fingers flexed uselessly as she died.
The last xeno was focused on Vas. Five people were trapped between the ridge, the xeno, and Vas’s line of fire. Adan kept yelling at them to run. When they finally broke away, the xeno charged up the ridge in a low arch, running toward the captain. Reyer knocked him back into the mud with a shot to the side of his head.
The xeno slid down among a small group of hostages. A hand reached out and locked onto the leg of the nearest man. He was yanked down into the water and pulled toward the xeno until the creature could shift its hold onto the man’s neck.
The hostage’s eyes moved from the mutilated head with only half a face remaining to the hand stretching toward his skull.
Vas ran up to their sides and hacked off the xeno’s arm with his dao sword, kicking the body away. The rest of the corpse dropped into the water, but the severed hand was still stuck in the man’s head.
The hostage screamed.
“Alix!” Adan yelled. He pulled the man up, putting a knee under his back and an arm across his shoulders.
Reyer ran over and dropped to her knees with a splash, disregarding yet another wave of pain pounding through her back. She had her knife out and began prying out the fingers gouging into the hostage’s forehead. There was a gross squelching noise, and Reyer glanced up to assure herself it was only Jane, who’d elected to forgo dignity in favor of safety, and had slid down the incline on her butt.
Three fingers were free by the time the doctor reached them.
“My first-aid kit’s on my hip,” Reyer said.
Jane dodged around to grab it. “How bad?”
“I don’t know. Head wounds always bleed. I can’t tell if it’s completely penetrated the bone.”
The last finger came free. Reyer tossed the hand up on the mud bank. Vas shot it. No one questioned this act or thought it was remotely paranoid.
“Can you take care of him?” Alix asked.
“Yes,” Jane said.
Reyer stood up and addressed the group of humans. “Is that all of them?”
They all stared at her, but no one answered.
“Did we get all your captors?” Reyer said.
“We don’t know,” a woman said. “I don’t know. It was confusing.”
“Listen to me carefully, we don’t have a lot of time. Once Dr. Jane is done mopping this man up, you’ll follow us back to our ship. Stay with us. Walk quickly—”
“The leader is gone,” a man yelled.
“What?”
“They had a leader. A taller kind of guy. He was a colonel.”
Reyer’s heart went cold. “Harlan.”
Another voice: “Kelsey’s gone! I saw him grab her, but then I lost track.”
Jane took the injured man onto her own lap so she could dress the wounds. Vas stood up. “Look around. Is anyone else missing?”
Heads turned, but no one spoke.
“We can’t stay,” Reyer said to Jane and Vas. “Jane, have some people help support him. Use the maps. You’ll have to pick a route for both speed and safety.”
“Shoot anyone who seem suspicious or who tries to take your gun from you,” Vas said.
Jane didn’t even hesitate. “Not a problem.”
The hostages crowded closer to them as they spoke. One of the larger men smacked his friend on the arm. They reached down to help pull up their wounded colleague.
The doctor sloshed her way to her feet. “You’re going after Harlan?”
“At least one—” Reyer started.
“Yes,” Vas said. “Both of us.”
“Captain,” Alix said, “they’re going to need a rifle for predators. Especially with all this blood around.”
Vas motioned to a man standing at the front of the crowd.
“Name?”
“Payton, sir.”
“Are you human?”
“Yes.”
Vas handed him the XM4. “Do you know how to use this?”
“Yes.”
“Shoot anything dangerous and anything that looks remotely silver-white floating in the water.”
Alix stared at the captain. “That’s your test? Ask him if he’s human and give him a gun?”
“Lynx isn’t here. We don’t have time for a body count. What are the chances that one of them transformed without us noticing?”
“Low enough,” Jane said, “and I’ll shoot him if he acts suspicious. I’ll meet you back at the ship.”
[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]
Humming, Ciro yanked the nan-card out of the computer tower. He had to put it into his shirt pocket because his pants pockets were already bulging. He tucked the new tablet he’d commandeered under his arm, then reached out to the pilot’s console to finish typing in the command. He dropped his finger down on enter with a cheery thump and picked up his new e-pistol.
He calmly pulled on his shoes at the bottom of the stairs, even while the noises blared around him.
He lowered the ramp and walked away, careful to retrace the path he’d taken to get there.
[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]
Harlan dragged the girl along, his arm curled around her small frame. The machete he held as a threat wavered wildly. It was by her neck and head one moment, down at her ribs or across her back the next. He found it hard to hold since his left shoulder was peeled down to the bone by the blast and his right hand was becoming difficult to manage. His fingers—his straw-straight claws—were long and numb. He couldn’t control their shape or their trembling, but he managed to subdue the panic enough to resist the urge to transform.
That mastery was what made humans powerful. Control was power. His self-control would be the root of their evolution.
“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” the woman stammered. “You need to stop or you’ll faint.”
“I won’t faint.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“You’ll see.”
The gathering was nearby. He could tell. The sense of it was the only thing more powerful than the engrossing desire to survive. He used that heady sensation to dam up the waves of fear.
One or two creatures approached them—the woman felt pinched between horrors when they came into view—but they inevitably slunk away a moment later, as if they were afraid of him too.
He pointed over her shoulder with a finger longer than a man’s hand.
“It’s over there.” His voice was hoarse. “Follow along the left of that pool.”
“Stop!” a voice behind them cried.
The colonel put the machete’s blade across his hostage’s chest and used it to pull her close to him as they turned.
“Hello, Alix,” he said.
“Let her go, Harlan!” Reyer was holding up an e-pistol.
“How do you like the haven I found for us? It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I think we could’ve been happy here.”
“You never found this place for us. That body’s never been here before.”
“This is my home, Alix. I’ve been searching for it for years!”
“Well, there sure as hell was no ‘us.’”
“You humans don’t get it,” Harlan spat. “These brains of yours, so wrapped up in identity—drawing the line between the us and them, me and you. Isolate. Differentiate. But I am Ivan Rurik. I was him, I am him, and when I transform, I’ll carry him into a new life.”
“Not if I kill you.”
“You’d have to shoot through this precious little thing.” He gripped his hostage harder, making her grunt. “I know you hate killing, no matter how good you are at it. I know it takes a battle and a uniform to aim at before your hands stop trembling. Would you really kill her to get to me?”
“Stop moving, Harlan! Not one more step!”
Harlan smiled. “You know how close the pool is, don’t you? I’ve won.”
“You’ve lost. All the other human-xenos are dead!”
“Not all of them, Alix.”
“All of them. All the other hostages are free. Your twenty bodies have been reduced to one, and I won’t let you have her either. What would you do? If you take her to the pool, she’ll become nothing but a gibbering shell. Don’t you remember what you were like the first time you became human? She’d die out here in less than a day.”
“I’ll take care of her.”
“You’ll be dead soon if you don’t take a new body. And if you take hers, what have you gained? I’d shoot you the moment you rose.”
“I’m harder to kill than you think.”
“Not that much harder. I can do it from here. Or do you not remember what a good shot I am?”
“I remember.” He took a step back.
“I said, don’t move!”
“Yes, or you’d shoot. Killing me. Killing her. You haven’t done it yet.”
“I’ll do it, Ivan! She’s dead either way, and I’ll bet she’d rather die human, than as some blueprint for a body-stealing monster.”
“I’m Ivan now?”
“My mistake. You remind me of him.”
“I’ll bet we look a lot alike.”
“No, you’re both traitorous bastards who don’t mind watching your friends die.”
“I’m not a traitor! Those xenos died for a cause!”
“They died because they were compelled to obey you!”
“You know nothing. You understand nothing.”
“You’re also both cocksure and convinced of your mental superiority. Were you like this before you took over his body, or is that the part of him that’s still living?”
Harlan laughed.
“Let her go!” Reyer yelled.
“What do I gain from that?”
“I’ll let you live. I’ll let you walk away, and you can live out what little time you have left. Precious survival—right, Harlan? Maybe it’ll be enough time for you to take over the body of a beast.”
“No!” Harlan roared. The machete slid through the woman’s clothes, under her breast. A line of red dribbled down the blade. “I’m never going back. You, of all people, should understand, there’s more important things than one man’s survival.”
An explosion rocked the planet. The blast of sound ripped through the trees, and the waters around them shuddered and rippled from the concussion.
Harlan’s body jerked in surprise. Before his darting eyes could discover the cause of the commotion, he felt a blade slide into his ribs.
[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]
“What the hell was that?!” The man pulled his hands away from his ears, still shuddering from the sensation of the shock wave hitting his chest.
“A friend of mine is saying hello,” Jane said. “Keep walking!”
[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]
Ciro stopped to look back at the fireball. The red bloom faded into black smoke, losing its shape in the roiling air.
He smiled.
[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]
Harlan looked down at the dao sword in his side. As soon as he dropped the machete, Vas grabbed the young woman and pulled her away from him.
Vas yanked his blade free and stepped away. The xeno dropped to the ground, his body splashing into the swamp.
The young woman stared at the disfigured hand.
“Kelsey?”
She was in tears, but she nodded when she heard her name.
“This way,” Vas said.
He led her away from the figure of Jack Harlan, back into the tangle of trees he’d crept through to get to them.
When they reached Reyer, the group turned and started walking back to the Golondrina.
Vas pulled out his com. “Ciro?”
“Yes, sir, Captain-sir?”
“It’s about damn time!”
“I apologize. I was delayed. Is everything okay with you?”
“Yes.”
Jane’s voice came over the com. “You got Harlan?”
“We got him,” Vas said. “Kelsey’s alive. It’s over.”