The Complete Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  They reached the front gate and waited under the guards’ stares as it slowly crept open for them.

  “What an asshole,” she said when they were on the other side and the gate was groaning shut behind them.

  “Your behavior toward our host in there was most undiplomatic, Rachel Cross,” Krogoth said.

  “Our host was a prick,” she pointed out.

  She diplomatically withheld the point that Krogoth, by general virtue of association, among other things, was a prick in her eyes as well.

  Krogoth shot her an even stare, and then he emitted a chuffing growl of laughter. “You speak truth. Were we not on a diplomatic mission, I would have extracted the respect he failed to show me.”

  “Hey, we could go back. No arguments here.”

  By “extracted respect,” she was pretty sure Krogoth meant, “removed Ashida’s insolent head.” She wasn’t a scholar of raknoth sociology, but he probably would have been in his rights to kill the Nan for his lack of respectful address, especially now that he’d ascended from the title of Al to Zar—coincidentally after he’d removed Zar’Golga’s head a couple of weeks earlier. She could think of a lot worse ways to spend the rest of her morning than watching Krogoth repeat the act on Ashida.

  “Rachel…” The look Lea shot her was decidedly disapproving.

  Krogoth gave another guttural chuckle. “The lady warrior is fierce,” he said to Lea. “Perhaps there is yet hope for us in the coming war.” He glanced at Rachel. “Even if it is her kind we have to thank for our current predicament.”

  Rachel only just managed to hold back the gasp at the words that hit like a sudden gout of icy water down her back. Krogoth and Lea paused, and she realized with an internal curse that she’d frozen in shock.

  Krogoth couldn’t know… Could he?

  Alton might have been the only one left who’d been around for the business that had left Rachel without a family, but she had no idea how many of his kin had known that the virus that’d left them mortally dependent on human blood had been born of an arcanist’s enchantment, and that said arcanist had in fact been Rachel’s mom.

  Something told her it was better if no one who didn’t already know—least of all one of the three most powerful raknoth left on the planet—ever found out.

  “See?” she said, weakly trying to force a wink at Lea. “You say undiplomatic, he says fierce. Krogoth gets it.”

  “He said undiplomatic,” Lea said, not missing a stride though Rachel was pretty sure the younger Resistance fighter had guessed roughly what was going through her head.

  Aside from Jarek and the Enochians, Lea and Alaric Weston were the only ones who knew about her mom’s role in all of this, and neither one had seemed hasty to spill the beans and add yet another source of tension to an alliance that was already more a teetering tower of dry kindling next to a bonfire than a secure fortress.

  “Whatever.” Rachel waved a hand, hoping Krogoth would chalk up any oddness to the fact that she was a human and an arcanist rather than anything more sinister. Hell, the raknoth probably didn’t care enough to even notice odd behaviors to begin with. “Let’s just go home.”

  Krogoth was already turning to continue on, clearly having lost interest in their petty human chit chat. Rachel exchanged a relieved look with Lea, and they followed after the Zar without a word.

  Yeah. She was definitely going to be having that talk with Alton the first chance she got.

  Thinking of the Enochians on the way to Krogoth’s ship, she checked her comm and realized she’d missed a call from Haldin.

  She dropped back just outside the ship to return the call. Lea joined her as the comm holo sprang to life with an idling icon and a chirping tone.

  There was a small crackle of static, then the holo enlarged and shifted into a pixelated, stuttering image of Haldin Raish’s pretty boy eyes and thinly bearded jawline. The odd purplish hue of the wall behind him confirmed he was aboard the borrowed raknoth ship that had brought the Enochians to Earth.

  “Hey… achel,” came Elise’s choppy voice from somewhere off screen.

  They must’ve still been somewhere in the mountains. Not that Rachel’s connection was all that much better right now.

  Haldin turned with his comm and, frame by choppy frame, Elise came into view on the couch next to him, beautiful and raven-haired, as did Johnny and his flaming red hair, sprawled out and resting his legs over both of them.

  “Hey. You guys look cozy over there.”

  Elise frowned at Johnny. “Certain parties may… -main unclear on the… -er points… couch etiquette.” The connection seemed to stabilize, and Elise continued. “I’d like to say it’s a culture shock thing, but we did bring these couches from Enochia.”

  Johnny raised a helpless hand. “Sometimes a guy’s gotta sprawl! It can’t be helped.” His gaze shifted from Rachel to Lea, and he waggled his eyebrows. “Hey, Lea.”

  “Hi, Johnny.” Lea’s tone was level, but she didn’t quite manage to keep the smile from tugging at her features.

  Rachel resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Not that Johnny couldn’t hold his own in a fight, but half the time it seemed like he’d flown here for no other reason than to bring them bad jokes and cheesy pickup lines from across the galaxy.

  When the video connection sputtered out and died, leaving them with only audio, Rachel decided it might actually be a mercy.

  “How did it go?” Haldin asked, his voice a bit clearer now that they weren’t wasting precious bandwidth.

  Straight back to business. That seemed like Haldin’s style, all right.

  “Iffy,” Rachel said. “We definitely left Ashida with a lot to think about. I’d say it’s fifty-fifty whether the little prick comes around, though.”

  “How about you guys?” Lea asked.

  When Haldin spoke, Rachel pictured him with a sour frown.

  “Worse,” he said. “We didn’t even get a maybe. Those idiots wouldn’t even—”

  He paused, distracted by something on their end.

  “They didn’t believe us,” Elise finished for him.

  “Seems to be a lot of that going around,” Rachel said. “If only we could just up and leave the stubborn bastards behind.”

  “Damn those pesky hundreds of millions of helpless innocents,” Johnny agreed in a tone that made her picture him hunching over and waving his fist like a bitter old man.

  Yeah. That was the kicker, wasn’t it?

  “Have you guys heard any word from Jarek?” Rachel asked.

  “No,” Haldin said. “I was just about to try him.”

  “Stay on. I’ll add him.”

  Rachel swiped through the holo menus and threw Jarek Slater onto the call from her contact list. They waited for nearly half a minute, their comms chirping in unison.

  She was about to give up and drop Jarek from the call when the chirping halted in a soft click.

  “I’m sorry to say that now is an exceptionally bad time, ma’am,” Jarek’s AI companion, Alfred, said in his smooth English tone. “Jarek wishes me to inform you that he’ll call you once the, uh… negotiations are complete.”

  She stymied the river of questions that poured through her head. “Exceptionally bad time” sounded an awful lot like “active warzone” to her ears where Jarek and Al were concerned, but he was too far away for her to do anything in a timely manner.

  “Keep him safe, Al.”

  “Of course, ma’am.”

  Al cut Jarek’s line from the call with a soft click.

  “That didn’t sound great,” Haldin said.

  Rachel shook her head, too busy trying to ignore the gnawing feeling in her gut to remember the Enochians couldn’t see her.

  What the hell had they been thinking, sending a cowboy and a freakin’ Jarek to Japan?

  2

  Jarek Slater poked his armored head around the corner of the stone wall. “Was it something I said?” he called.

  A burst of gunfire from the front of the large
, ornate house was the only answer he received.

  He jerked behind cover and pressed his back to the stone wall, smooth and cool through Fela’s tactile sensors.

  “I’d hazard a guess that your comment about the nuclear fortitude of the Japanese people didn’t help matters, sir,” Al said, talking through Fela’s speakers rather than directly into Jarek’s ears so that their companions could hear as well. “And I told Rachel you’d call upon commencing negotiations.”

  “Well thank you, Mr. Robot.”

  “Al has a point,” Alaric said beside Jarek. “It wouldn’t kill you to hold the wise cracks for fifteen minutes.”

  “You can’t prove that.” With a careful thought, Jarek slid his helmet’s faceplate open so the wiry old Resistance commander could see the pointed stare Jarek fixed on his straw-woven hat. “And besides, you’re not exactly alleviating racial tensions walking in here looking like a goddamn cowboy samurai.”

  He didn’t miss the way Alaric’s eyes drifted to the long, lovely claw trails Zar’Golga had left across his face a couple weeks ago. He was almost getting used to it by now, though that wasn’t to say he was a fan.

  “And further besides,” Jarek continued, pushing the thought aside and leaning past Alaric to address the raknoth behind him, “I thought we were supposed to be in the company of friends here, Stumpy.”

  Al’Drogan—also known as the Red King by many and as Stumpy by Jarek—showed Jarek a frown under sandy blond hair and lightly glowing crimson eyes. “Because all raknoth must be such great friends, yes?”

  Jarek willed his faceplate closed. It snapped shut with a decisive click. “Mayhaps mistakes were made,” he said as the helmet’s internal tactical display came alive.

  The faceplate Pryce and Al had cobbled back together from the one Golga had wrecked with a far-too-close-for-comfort club swing wasn’t perfect, but it was far better than nothing.

  Armored as it was, he hesitated to poke his head back out. The house guards had only fired a few warning shots, presumably because they weren’t looking to shoot the ever-living crap out of their master’s estate, but he wasn’t so sure the silence would last once they caught sight of him again.

  “So do we have a volunteer to go first?” Jarek looked pointedly at Drogan. “I vote the bulletproof raknoth, personally.”

  Drogan only crossed his arms.

  “Dammit, Stumpy. My armor doesn’t regrow like your hide. You could walk straight up there and give those guys a good whack on the head—no problem.”

  “Do not talk to me about whacking anything,” Drogan muttered.

  Jarek smiled and reached up to pat the hilt of his beloved Big Whacker, the same sword he’d used to relieve Drogan of his hands a few weeks prior, before this entire alliance between human and raknoth had even been a twinkle in their wide, desperate eyes. Drogan’s hands had since grown back, and creepily fast at that, but he hadn’t stopped calling Drogan by the nickname Stumpy, if for no other reason than that it seemed to get under the raknoth’s skin. Or hide. Whatever.

  “Fine,” Jarek said. “I’ll go do all the work. Again. Might I trouble you for some cover, Commander?”

  Alaric drew his mismatched revolvers and nodded. Jarek drew one of his own pistols. It wouldn’t do to go killing potential allies, but a little suppressing fire might let him close on the gunmen without putting Fela through more abuse than need be. The poor exosuit had already been through too much lately. They all had.

  He flicked a salute to Alaric and took off underneath the ornately carved arch that spanned the wall’s entryway.

  Under his own power, Jarek was pretty fast. Aided by Fela’s strength and stability, “pretty fast” was upgraded to “impossibly fast”—at least for a human. At a full out sprint on nice flat ground, he could hit nearly sixty miles an hour.

  The rock garden sand pit wasn’t exactly nice running terrain, and the Big Whacker strapped to his back, not to mention the people shooting at him, didn’t really promote textbook running form, but he was still well into the manicured yard before the first shots dinged off his armor.

  He fired back in their general direction. Behind, Alaric’s revolvers added their own voices to the chaos in the courtyard. There was a pained cry from the front porch as Jarek rounded a giant boulder at the corner of the house. A second cry followed, and the thunderous roar in the courtyard dimmed to a few traded shots every couple of seconds.

  “I thought the plan was not to shoot our potential allies,” Al said in Jarek’s earpiece.

  “Yeah. And then there’s the hat too. Guy’s clearly out of control.”

  In truth, he would bet money—if anyone had cared about money anymore—Alaric had only winged a couple of the gunmen to give the rest of them pause.

  “Do you have a plan, sir?”

  Jarek holstered his pistol, looked up to the first of the giant house’s multiple slanted layers of roofing twenty feet above, and smiled. “Have you ever known me to be a man without a plan, Al?”

  Before Al had time to point out the alarming frequency of times he’d led them into dangerous situations without a scrap of a plan, Jarek gathered himself and jumped. With Fela’s legs, he easily cleared the edge of the rooftop and landed in a light crouch.

  From the vantage point, he could see Alaric’s revolvers poking around the wall to fire a couple of blind shots.

  Jarek took off over the slanted, rust-colored rooftop. Several tiles cracked underfoot as he went. Al dropped four pins on his tactical display, designating the locations of the gunmen. Nearing the first two pins, Jarek went into a slide and allowed the roof’s slant to carry him over the edge.

  As he shot out to open air, he grabbed the rooftop edge and swung back under to land between the two men on the stone porch. Or at least he tried to.

  Tiles shattered and slipped under his grip, and instead of reversing direction and swinging onto the porch, he ended up landing in the well-groomed bushes in front of it.

  “Shit!”

  “Well executed, sir.”

  He looked up from the tangle of greens and his retort died at the sight of the two repeater rifles trained at his face.

  “Ah. Hey, fellas.”

  For a brief moment, the two Japanese men only stared at him in surprise. Then they snapped to it, tensing to fire.

  Jarek leapt up and swatted the barrels aside hard enough to tear the rifles from their owners’ grasps. He landed on the porch and sent one of the guards into the wall—no, through the wall, it turned out—with an open palm strike to the chest. Feeling an inkling of remorse at the damage, he caught the second guard’s wrist to keep him from drawing his sword, bopped him “lightly” atop the head, and dumped him off the porch and into the bushes. That would keep him dazed for a minute or—

  “Behind you, sir.”

  Jarek spun in time to deflect an incoming blade with a raised forearm. Said blade clapped thunder, and he realized it was a freaking shotgun bayonet he’d just narrowly avoided.

  “Holy shit, dude.” He yanked the weapon free, swept the guard’s legs out with a kick, and planted a foot on the man’s chest before inspecting it more closely. “This is hardcore.”

  Ahead, the last standing gunman snapped something at him in Japanese.

  “He says, ‘Put down the weapon, steel demon,’” Al said. “Or something like that.”

  “Great.” Jarek held the gun non-threateningly to his side. “Well tell him we came here to talk and that we wouldn’t have—”

  Footsteps from inside. Rapid, padding thumps of—

  Shit!

  “Incoming!” Al cried.

  Jarek was already dropping the gun and throwing himself backward. Too late.

  The wall to his left exploded outward with a tearing sound, and what felt like a small freight train plowed into his side. Only the freight train appeared to have arms, mint green ones that wrapped around his midsection as they flew off the porch and into the courtyard below.

  Jarek grabbed at strong mint gr
een fingers and waited until the moment they hit the ground to rip and roll.

  In a contest of pure strength, Jarek would have had his work cut out for him, even with Fela’s strength. Breaking free in the wild tumble of their landing, on the other hand, was easy enough.

  He reoriented himself as they bounced to a halt and drove a heel straight into Minty’s face as the raknoth scrambled to regain his feet.

  The blow sent Minty tumbling backward and bought Jarek a moment to roll to his feet.

  “I was wondering if the adults were gonna come out to play. We need to talk to your boss. Uh, unless you are the boss… Sorry, I’m not great with faces. Zar’Kole?”

  Minty pulled himself to his feet and brushed some dirt from the shoulder of his dark kimono. “Zar’Kole is not here, human. And I have no interest in talking.”

  “Ah.” He caught a glimpse over the raknoth’s shoulder of Alaric and Drogan entering the courtyard. “Is it all right if I call you Minty, then?”

  Raknoth tended to fight as if they were invincible, which made sense seeing as they nearly were against most foes. This one was no different.

  He lunged straight for Jarek’s throat.

  Jarek caught the raknoth’s wrists and pivoted to drive an elbow into his temple. Minty ducked the blow, hooked an arm through Jarek’s armpit, and stepped forward into what felt like the setup of a raknoth-powered body slam.

  Jarek lifted his legs, and Minty reflexively supported his weight long enough for Jarek to replant his feet on the raknoth’s thigh and torso and kick off as hard as he could. The grating shrieks of claws on armor made him flinch, but the kick landed him back on his own two feet with Minty staggering backward to catch his balance.

  The raknoth gave a battle roar and was tensing to spring at him again when Drogan stepped in on his flank and drove him to the ground with a devastating punch to the head.

  Jarek threw his fists to the air. “Stumpy with the KO!” He walked over, grabbed Drogan’s hand, and raised it in victory. Or tried to.