“I’d say I’m sorry, Lord, but I can’t. I wish this were different even though I understand your reasons. The problem is...I don’t know if she feels enough for me to make this work as it should.”
“Ahhh.” A side effect he’d not considered. “You’re a good man, Brask. A great soldier- brother. I told you before. Let her see who you are. That’s all you need do.”
“Uh-huh.” Brask followed Talia again with his gaze. He shook his head. “I will do that then. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He reached over and squeezed the Igrakk’s shoulder. “If I could do more, I would.”
“Of course. One last thing.”
“Yes.”
“Stom has hardly left Willow’s side. It’s like a vigil before a shrine. What if she never comes back to what she was? What if she shows she’s dangerous? Have you decided?”
“If that happens?” He let out the air he’d been holding in. “We kill her.”
They exchanged no words after that. Brask had nodded, stayed a little longer then left.
This time he couldn’t stop watching the two of them. Watching Brask led to watching Talia. The Igrakk might be afraid they weren’t matched enough to bond mate but the sexual attraction was still extreme. After kissing her and caressing her sweet body, he led her away toward one of the houses. They didn’t quite make it and he took her up against the wall. From the angle and the shadows and trees, no one would be able to see. Not even he could see, but his hearing was enough. The sounds of their passion and mating gave his heart yet another reason to ache.
He lay on the porch, flat on his back, and stared out at the still sky. Beautiful country. Serene. That at least was something good about this. He’d always appreciated beauty when he saw it over the many centuries of his life, whether the scintillations of dust about the stars in outer space, the gleam on the horizons of planets when he was at orbit apogee, or the sexuality of the many females he’d encountered. Beauty was beauty, however he found it.
This beautiful female...if only he didn’t want to fuck her ass so much. Or cuddle her, kiss away her tears, or just hold her at sunset and dawn while yet another planet circled its sun. He could show her so much. Both of them could, he and Brask.
If he still had the capacity for tears, he would have cried. Being a god was sometimes a lonely thing.
The tight-beam message came in a few minutes later, unexpected and so highly encoded it took him more than three seconds to understand the contents.
The Bak-lal main fleet had fought their ships to a standstill and was holding them at bay while a small breakaway fleet of Bak-lal tore toward Earth. Something about Earth had made the Bak-lal command decide on this possibly suicidal action. Even if they gobbled up the Earth before any rescue could arrive, their purpose was obscure.
Conclusion: something on Earth was of high priority.
Whatever happened, the Bak-lal could not be allowed to have the Earth. He was to destroy it first.
Dassenze tapped his fingers on the sun-warmed timber floor of the porch. As if he could. High command had clearly not been told the orbital was gone. No messages had been allowed out, so that was not a big surprise.
The factory queen must have told its brethren and sisters she had something great and powerful. The witches? Or had she discovered a method of using whatever they had?
Either way, the estimated time of arrival of this fleet was disturbing. Two and a half days.
That was all the time he and these brave people had to find the factory queen and destroy her, then sit back and wait to be in turn destroyed or taken over by the incoming Bak-lal.
He wouldn’t tell anyone that last part. It would devastate their delicate psyche.
Dassenze put both hands over his face and stared into the cave of shadows. He’d lived a long life. He could take dying. It was the deaths of others that pained him – most of all it was knowing Talia and Brask would also die.
There must be a way around this.
It was almost five in the afternoon when Brask and Talia both ran out into the open yelling that Bak-lal were coming. Her senses were as in tune as his. Startling.
Chapter 16
Ally twined her finger up into her white-blond hair then let the twist of hair unwind and release her finger. Today was boring and yet not boring. After years of living inside a house and relying on the internet for socializing and entertainment, being outside had been a shock. Getting a lover like Rimmil, wow, that’d been an even bigger shock.
So she was both bored, because she craved him and he wasn’t here with her, and excited because, fuck, just because she was outside.
She had a lover. And he was everything. Not even everything she’d ever wanted, just plain everything to her.
She took a deep, long, ecstatic breath and smiled as she let it out. Princes really did exist. Heroes really did. Though currently he was over by the shuttle mucking around in engine bits and pieces, getting engine goop on him; he was her hero.
Her heart did that funny little kick it did before she got anxious. Something would go wrong.
Shit. Get a grip. Australia had been nuked. Most of the world maybe. Even the old US of A would be glowing in the dark. She hopped off the deckchair she’d set up under the trees so she could watch the men doing all their stuff. Most that could go wrong had gone wrong. Maybe now the only way left was up? All you could do now was live day by day. And today was looking fine.
“Bak-lal are coming!”
Or not.
The cries went up and she took off sprinting toward the shuttle where they were supposed to group in an emergency, scanning the horizon as she ran.
Warriors were scrambling up to the turrets. Did that mean they worked? Others were spreading out, weapons in hand, diving into prearranged firing positions. Rimmil was running toward her beckoning.
She whipped her head about. Everyone, yes, everyone was heading in.
Willow!
She and Stom were outside the perimeter arranged for an emergency. Dassenze had decided it wasn’t safe to let her so close to the shuttle. She wasn’t responding well and moving her without Willow doing it herself was not happening. They were scared to touch her, even mister god himself, Dassenze.
Of their own accord her legs took her to Willow and she slowed, stopped, panting. “Stom, what’re you doing? We gotta go!”
He barely looked around. Though he’d had a chair delivered to sit in, apart from that he was in the same place as he’d been days before. “Staying here with her. I’m staying.” The terseness of his words settled it.
Took one second to make her decision. “Okay. Me too. Willow kept me alive and sane for years. I’m not going either.”
Engine noises ramped up, coming from the south. Red dust clouds rose farther down the road.
“So these Bak-lal come in cars?” She shaded her eyes. It seemed an odd way to start a war.
“They come however they want to.”
At that, Rimmil arrived, trotting to a halt. Close behind him was every other soldier and human, Betty with her shotgun, Steve, and Talia, with Brittany at the back.
Whoever had climbed up to the turret had climbed down again. They mustn’t be working.
She swiveled on the spot and there they were – a horde of cars, trucks, and motorbikes screaming into view over the rise in the road.
“We have visitors,” Dassenze growled next to her.
“Why aren’t you all back at the shuttle?” she dared to ask him, squinting up at this weird scaly bronze hulk of a man. Well, man-like. There was gossip that Talia had...mated with him. So strange.
“We’re here because you’re here and because the shuttle houses nothing we can fight with.” He observed her with those gold eyes like he’d never quite noticed her properly before. “I will not abandon any of you witches, Ally. You may be the last hope of the Earth.”
“Oh.” She blinked at him and smiled. “Thank you, I think.” Being called a witch would never sit right wit
h her.
“Wait and see if you survive before you thank me.” Then he strode away, barking orders.
“Brave girl,” Rimmil whispered beside her. “Me, I’m afraid of his pointy teeth.”
“What? He has those?”
“Shhh!” He pulled her to the ground beside him and readied his chunky alien rifle. The thing was humming as if eager to get to work. Ally shuddered.
The sundry vehicles had spread out and swerved sideways off the road then curved to come in as a line. Some cars rolled as rounds from the Preyfinders’ guns hit them. One car burst into flame. Three or four others then rolled with pieces of metal flying high into the sky and tumbling down. It seemed as though none of them would get through the rain of projectiles. Ally wasn’t even sure the warriors were shooting bullets as the things zinged off, leaving brilliant spatters of yellow.
Then the first rolled car erupted with Bak-lal. These were not like the glazed-eyed humans that’d taken her and Willow prisoner; these were all manner of distorted humans. Some had blackened, bat-like heads; a few had backs punctured by sharp spines; and several ran along like spiders – she stared aghast at those. They’d been given extra limbs?
As more vehicles skidded in with their engines blown up by gunfire, Bak-lal threw themselves from doors and windows. Some were normal looking and carried weapons, but more were deformed or mutated somehow.
All of them moved fast and, when hit by rounds, they scrambled up and sped onward. The dead...the dead were tattered, gore-covered pieces of flesh before they stopped trying to get closer.
One lost his head, and kept coming until his legs were gone and he lay twitching in a circle in the dirt.
Horrified, Ally lay there trying not to panic despite her hammering heart.
When three of the spiderlike ones bored through the defenses, mostly intact, they leaped on one warrior. The convulsing pack of warrior and his covering of spider people rolled about until tens of rounds had been shot into the bodies. As the spider things slid aside, revealed beneath was the smoking body of the warrior, his armor still being devoured by some acid-like substance.
More live ones flooded in. Talia had a sword out, of all things, and she sliced and diced the things into pieces too small to move.
“Kill them before they get to us!” Dassenze roared above the screams and blasts.
A flesh-colored mermaid with red eyes and a mouth seething with nail-sharp teeth shot overhead. She slithered through the dirt straight at Talia, knocking soldiers flying with her two-yard-long blue tail. Rocks and bullets had left the underside of her tail scaleless, shredded, and bleeding.
Ally screamed a warning, her throat instantly hoarse and on fire from the power she put into her yell, yet the surrounding noise was so great she couldn’t even hear herself.
As if in slow motion, Talia pivoted, and cut at the mermaid creature, but too late, and her sword was caught by a swipe of tail and spun high. It fell into a stream of bullets and was knocked a hundred yards away in seconds. Weaponless, she faced down the monstrosity whose tail whiplashed forward again, divulging hundreds of tiny spiked tail-lets, all of them diving at Talia’s face and spraying a blood-colored liquid that smoked as it hit men’s armor.
Her death was incoming. Ally froze on her back, her nails clawing at the earth.
A wind of grey swept at Talia and a sword assembled in her hand, clanking, a cacophony of discarded steel jigsawing into place – bolts, rivets, scissors, nails, chunks of forgotten scrap. With the three-foot long sword of leftovers, Talia sliced from left to right, severing the mermaid’s tail-lets then her throat. Leaking blood, the mermaid thing slid onward, a lump of flip-flopping flesh, to end at Talia’s feet.
She panted and stared at the body then at her new sword, which promptly collapsed into a heap, the disconnected bits rolling down the dead mermaid’s back, through the blood, to the dirt.
Ally put her hands over her ears and watched. She watched because not looking seemed a good way to die. If anything tried to jump her, she was going elsewhere fast.
The fight was dying down, but everyone had turned away to watch the outer perimeter when a groan from off to the side penetrated her awareness.
A blond-haired girl dressed in a blue pinafore with a white apron was walking inward from the shuttle direction. Men lay sprawled beyond her, a path she had already trodden. Alice from Alice in Wonderland, only this girl had twin knives, one in each hand. Somehow she was stabbing that knife through Igrakk armor and killing them. Her figure flickered, wavering in and out of the sunlit hazed air.
No one could see her. No one turned.
“Rimmil!” But Rimmil was yards away, shooting at something that was barreling in.
It had to be her. Another soldier died as she hesitated...so, she sprinted.
“Stooop! Look behind you!” The girl’s next target turned, scrabbling back, and though he clearly registered his fallen soldier brothers, he looked about wildly, his rifle slewing across in a wide arc.
“What is it? Where?”
“There! See!” Heart threatening to vomit out her mouth, she rattled over the dirt, kicking up gravel, her breaths loud in her ears as she hurtled past another soldier who turned to see what she ran toward. Too late. Too late.
Smiling, the girl raised a knife above the first soldier.
As she stabbed down, Ally threw her hand out and knocked her sprawling, the blue dress flipping as she rolled. When Alice stopped, her grin spread again. She planted her palm on the dirt and pushed herself upright, but Ally grabbed her wrist and her hair.
The girl’s grin spread farther, wider. Her blue eyes focused on Ally’s, riveting and frightening. Her other hand slashed in.
The second knife.
Thoughts catapulted into Ally’s mind, evil ones, invading and making her past nausea a laughable thing. They ripped her apart from within. This girl was inside her head and she was inside hers. Memories that weren’t hers engulfed Ally and time slowed, spun. People, places, a white dog, a father – not her. They weren’t her. The foreign thoughts whispered past, howled past, speeding up into a blur of nonsense.
The knife...
She opened her eyes and saw herself, looking back. I’m not me. She was Alice. Revolted, scrambling, she opened her eyes again.
The shine of sun on a blur of crescent metal.
Betty and her shotgun arrived first, the muzzle nestling near fake Alice’s head, and the gun blew a hole straight through.
That had almost been her – she’d been in her mind.
What came out the other side of Alice’s head... Ally grimaced. Whoever this person had been, she was dead now.
“Thank you, Betty. Dear god, thank you.”
When she went to collapse into Betty’s arms, the absolutely most wrong thing happened – Betty grunted in pain and slid to the ground. A knife was imbedded in the opposite side of her head.
The world fuzzed out for a second and she staggered, dizzy with horror.
“Oh no. Oh no, oh no. Betty! Betty you can’t...” Ally gulped, tasting the bitterness of bile in her mouth, then she turned. “I need help! Please!”
A thunder of thoughts avalanched in a moment later, and it seemed as if all the crap she’d missed during the past few weeks since she’d turned up on Betty’s farm had been saved up and shot into her head just like what had gone into poor dead Alice’s.
She wanted to help Betty, but she couldn’t even stand anymore. So she curled into a ball with her arms over her head, begging someone to stop the madness from coming back.
“Ally. Ally, it’s me, Rimmil.”
“She can’t hear you. I think we’ve found out why she stopped hearing people’s thoughts like she used to. Betty was filtering them. It’s as if she and Ally were brought together deliberately. This only cements in place my theory.”
Was that Dassenze talking?
“What theory?” Rimmil asked, his voice cracking. He sounded petrified and distraught.
“Something f
ar bigger than me is orchestrating the defense of this planet. Something that could be as big as a planet.”
Go away. Go away. Ally rocked some more.
Where was Willow when she needed her?
The pain. The craziness. Make it stop.
Wait. Wait. There was something she needed to say. Had to say.
When she’d touched minds with the Alice girl, stuff, information, had gone both ways.
So she opened her mouth and whispered the words in spite of the hurricane happening in her mind.
“I know where the factory queen is. She told me.”
Had she said that loud enough?
Chapter 17
“That’s it, done,” the combat doctor said, as he pressed a button on the stasis bed. “That’s all we can do for her.”
Dassenze nodded. “Thank you.”
The bed was located in the stern of the shuttle, near the hold, and plugged into the last of the power. He sat down on one of the seats and stared at the long, tubular device. Many soldiers had been saved by these, kept in limbo until more sophisticated aid could be sourced.
Outside was night. Distant noises were mostly human ones. Yunta was dark to most eyes. Though lit up by predator-detecting night lights, only those in armor could easily see the effect. If the Bak-lal had come at night, would it have been easier to fend them off? He didn’t know. These new ones had abilities he’d never seen before. They had appearances that made no sense. What logic was there in mermaids or little girls with knives?
Human mythology was influencing this factory queen. Perhaps he should discuss this with a human? Brittany didn’t seem to have the comprehensive intelligence of her sister. Ally and Willow were incapacitated. Talia, no, not her.
He stopped for a moment, his eyes closed, imagining himself inviting her to discuss mythology and then...imagining how things might get out of hand. No. Absolutely not. Steve perhaps?
He waited for the doctor to leave the shuttle before going forward to look down at Betty. Her white hair had been stained by blood. Some of it had been shaved away to allow the doctor to assess the wound, but the discoloration was still there. Without diagnostic equipment all he could tell was that she had a brain injury. The woman had saved Ally and, though some of the Igrakks thought this a misuse of power, he was sure it was the moral thing to do.
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