Page 55
Author: Rachel Bach
I was still reaching when the phantom died. I could actually feel it dissolving in my hand, and as it fell apart, so did the emptiness, but not before I felt them. Just like before, they were there, waiting for me. I didn’t have time for more than an impression, but what I got was enough. They’d seen me, and they were coming.
I slammed back into my body with a gasp, looking up to see Rupert right in front of me. His scales hid his worried expression, but I could hear his fear just fine. “Devi!” he cried when he saw my eyes open, but I was already scrambling away from him.
“Stay back,” I warned, throwing up my hand, the one that was still gloved. My blackened right hand I kept pressed against my chest. Rupert’s eyes flicked to it, and his mouth tightened to a thin line.
“Just stay back,” I repeated. Brenton had said symbionts were resistant to plasmex, but I didn’t know if that mattered to the virus, and I wasn’t taking any chances. I could smell the rot of my sickness now, and I didn’t want that anywhere near him. When I was sure he’d stay away, I closed my eyes and focused on calming my anger, pushing my mind down until the pins and needles faded. It was much easier now that I wasn’t trapped, and when I opened my eyes a minute later, my hand was clean.
“Devi. ”
I looked up to see Rupert standing over me, his fists clenched. I didn’t know if it was safe for him to be so close yet, but I couldn’t do anything to stop him as he reached down and pulled me to my feet. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” I breathed, letting myself lean into his chest. I wasn’t as disoriented as I’d been when I’d woken up to three dead xith’cal and Brenton screaming in my face, but I wasn’t ready to trust my feet just yet. “Guess that looked scary, huh?”
Rupert’s silence was answer enough. “Please don’t do that again,” he whispered, pulling me a little closer.
“I’ll try to keep it to a minimum,” I promised, absently running my gloved hand over the scales on his back I’d admired earlier. They were surprisingly smooth, my foggy brain noted, like a snake’s. “Did it work?”
Rupert pulled away. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t—”
The rest of what he said was drowned out by a deafening alarm. A split second later, the floor shook under my feet as something crashed into the tribe ship. Something big.
“Hyrek!” I shouted, dropping my visor back into place.
When there was no answer for several seconds, I started to get worried, but then Hyrek’s text filled the bottom of my screen. The next time you suggest a plan, remind me to say no. Before I could ask what he meant by that, a new camera feed patched into my suit, looking out through a small port window at the fleet of beautiful fishlike ships that now surrounded the tribe ship.
“And there’s our ticket,” I said with a grin, shoving my glove back on. “Go time!”
Rupert didn’t need to be told twice. He was already kneeling over the missile he’d set up. “On three,” he said as I got in position behind him. “Two. One. ”
Rupert hit the charge, and the missile launched, slamming into the ceiling of the slave road. The blast was so big I couldn’t see anything for several seconds, but when the hot white smoke started to clear, I saw the huge hole we’d blown in the arena’s floor.
The explosion had knocked us both over, and though Rupert got up first, I was right behind him. Together we jumped through the hole, Rupert with the second missile, me with my gun, landing on the sandy floor of the arena with enough smoke left to cover us. I could hear the xith’cal all around me, their alarmed screeches like tearing metal in my ears, but I didn’t pay them any mind. As soon as my feet were steady, I charged forward, throwing myself in front of the shocked, panting Caldswell just as Brenton’s crazed symbiont began to charge.
CHAPTER 15
I’d always said I’d shoot myself if I ever got roped into an arena fight, but to be fair, I don’t think I could have envisioned this. The bloody sand was soft beneath my boots as I skidded to a stop, the lights overhead like small suns as the alien crowd roared, literally. But my attention was on the alien in front of me, the one that had once been human.
Brenton charged with a roar of his own, launching at me with terrifying speed. Now that I was close, I could see the tube in his neck where they’d drugged him. They must have used a lot, because though he was fast as ever, the Brenton I knew would never have tried such a straightforward attack. He charged me like a bull, leaving me a good two seconds to jump if I wanted. But I didn’t jump. I held my ground, leveling Sasha until I’d lined up a perfect shot.
When Brenton was only a foot away, I fired. Sasha’s round struck him square in the head, right between the eyes just like Rupert had showed me. Of course, Sasha wasn’t a disrupter pistol, but I didn’t want to kill Brenton this time. I only wanted to blow him back, and there, at least, I succeeded. Sasha kicked him hard, and Brenton flew backward as fast as he’d flown at me, landing in the sand across the arena. I shot him again when he hit, trusting my targeting system to line up a shot that would get the tube on his neck. My pistol jerked in my hand, and I saw the tube go flying as the sand exploded around Brenton’s head.
I lifted my gun, scanning the arena for the next enemy, but all I saw was Caldswell gaping in my rear cam like he’d just seen me raise the dead. “Morris?” he got out at last. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Saving you,” I said, grabbing his arm. “Come on. ”
The captain was normally faster on the pickup, but all the fighting must have left him a bit punch-drunk, because he just stood there staring at me like my words made no sense. I didn’t have time to explain it again, though. The crowd was already getting louder as two more doors opened on either side of the arena, letting in a wave of warrior xith’cal. High overhead, Reaper was on his feet in front of his throne, roaring out orders loud enough to rattle my suit.
The sight of him almost made me drop my gun. Seeing the tribe leader on camera had been scary enough, but that was nothing compared to seeing him right above you. It wasn’t just his size, either. That was nothing new, but I hadn’t expected the feel of Reaper. Even though he was standing on his balcony almost fifty feet away, his presence was like a force of nature, a huge, undeniable gravity far larger than any physical size or charisma could account for.
I’d heard the xith’cal speak of their leader in awed tones plenty of times, but I’d always thought that whole “Reaper’s flesh” thing was just propaganda. Now, I realized it was much, much more. Reaper’s power was plasmex. A lot of plasmex, and he was using it with ruthless efficiency, soothing the panic even as another lelgis cannon strike shook the tribe ship. And when his huge, yellow eyes swept down to meet mine, I felt his control land on me.
I bared my teeth in response. Wrong merc to mess with, pal. “Rupert!” I shouted. “Do it now! Take out the head!”
Caldswell whirled around in surprise. “Rupert?”
The word wasn’t out of his mouth before Rupert ran up beside me, our final strategic anti-tank missile hoisted on his shoulder. There was no countdown this time. He took one second to line up the shot, and then the missile exploded off him in a blast of burning smoke.
Since it wasn’t aimed at a ceiling this time, I could actually watch the missile go. It streaked across the arena, flying so fast Reaper didn’t have time to move. He didn’t have time to do anything except stare as the missile shrieked through the air to land in his chest.
The explosion knocked me off my feet. I hadn’t realized until it blew how much stronger this missile was than the other. The explosion had blown Reaper’s entire platform down in a ball of black, billowing smoke. The wreckage landed in the sandy arena with a crash that sent a wave of sand flying into my face. For two heartbeats, all I could hear was the echo of the crash bouncing around the arena, and then every lizard in the place went insane.
If the xith’cal had been screa
ming before, I had no idea what they were doing now. The stands exploded into violence as the xith’cal began attacking one another with astonishing ferocity, ripping and clawing and biting like animals. The sheer magnitude of the carnage was so shocking I couldn’t do anything except watch in stunned silence for several seconds before I finally got it together enough to scramble back to my feet. “What the hell is going on?”
Caldswell stared at me in disbelief. “You killed Reaper. ”
“And that caused all this?” I threw out my hand at the slaughter going on in the stand.
“The tribe leader keeps order within the bloodlust,” Caldswell said. “It’s how they…” His voice faded as he shook himself. He blinked a few times, wiping the blood off his temple. When he turned back to me, he looked much more aware. He also looked pissed as hell.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he shouted. “You were supposed to be getting out of here!”
“I don’t take orders from you!” I shouted back.
Caldswell’s arm flung out, pointing at Rupert, who was brushing the ash from the blast off his shoulder. “He does! What the hell was that, Charkov?”
Rupert’s smooth answer made me proud. “A missile, sir,” he said crisply. “Our last one. We should go. It is foolish to waste time arguing here. ”
“This is not over!” Caldswell bellowed, but he started running toward the hole we’d made in the arena floor. “What’s our exit?”
“Hyrek’s got us a ship,” I said. “Let me grab Brenton and—”
I didn’t get to finish, because at that moment, Brenton grabbed me.
He must have recovered from the shot during the chaos, because the bastard came out of nowhere, taking me off my feet before my cameras had even registered him. We flew across the arena in a tangle that unfortunately landed with me on the bottom. But as I’d noted before, this Brenton was nowhere near as clever as he normally was. Though he landed on top, he didn’t pin my legs, and the second he got me down, I kicked him off. My suit flipped me back to my feet on the upswing, and I came up gun first, pegging Brenton in the chest.
Sasha’s bullet didn’t even get through his scales, but the force pounded him back into the sand again long enough for me to get the advantage. I jumped on him, getting him in a headlock. Symbionts might be tough bastards, but under all that armor and strength, they were still human, and they still needed to breathe. I twisted him tight, putting all my weight into the arm I was using to pinch his neck, but I was still barely holding him. I glanced at my cameras, scanning the arena for Rupert in the hopes I could get him to come help me deal with this craziness, and that’s when I realized that the arena had gone still.
Without letting my grip on Brenton slack, I jerked my head up. It wasn’t my imagination. The arena was silent, the xith’cal frozen like someone had hit pause. Only Rupert and Caldswell were moving, and they were backing away. A second later, I saw why.
Something was stirring beneath the smoking wreckage of Reaper’s box, the broken metal shaking like there was an engine rumbling under it. Then, without warning, the pieces exploded out as Reaper shot to his feet.
As he rose, the pressure of his presence rose, too. The strength of it was enough to make my body go slack, and I almost lost Brenton. I recovered at the last second, bashing the mad symbiont into the sand again, but I was sorely tempted to toss Brenton and run.
I’d never seen Reaper fight. Never seen him do anything actually except sit around, give orders, and survive a missile to the chest. But even if I hadn’t witnessed that last part, my instincts were enough to tell me that Brenton was now the lesser threat by several orders of magnitude.
Fortunately, though, the xith’cal wasn’t looking at me. All his attention was on Caldswell, and as he stared the captain down, his shoulders began to shake with a horrible, deep, metallic sound. Laughter, I realized belatedly. Reaper was laughing.