The Complete Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  “Get to the vehicles, people!” he bellowed. “Now! Go!”

  Wriggles was gliding back toward him through the thick brush now.

  Jarek glanced around to make sure everyone was clear. His stomach fell at the sight of the rakul ship hovering patiently above the battle—the one that must’ve carried Gada and his pals here. That ship had to go if they had any hope of losing these three. But how?

  He turned, painfully aware of Wriggles’ proximity at his back, and darted back to Krogoth and the other raknoth, who were still locked in a furious battle with Gada and the gargoyle.

  Blow the ship. Clear out.

  Simple.

  But he had no idea how the hell they’d pull it off.

  He caught Gada with a surprise hack to the right flank that left the Kul hobbling for balance. Then Wriggles caught up, and Jarek’s focus shifted solely to not dying as the battle resumed at full tilt.

  For the first minute, Jarek wondered if they might not just turn the tide and finish the three rakul then and there. But then Gada’s leg seemed to begin recovering from Jarek’s cut, his movements growing steadier, his attacks more vicious. Wriggles and the gargoyle, while both accruing their fair share of wounds, were dealing out far more damage than they were taking. One raknoth already lay dead, his body mangled and his head caved in.

  A wave of relief—tinged with a tiny hint of panic—washed through Jarek when he chanced a glance and saw most of the convoy rolling away down the road.

  All that was left, aside from the crumpled heaps Gada had made of two of their vehicles, was a single large truck, looping back around to get closer to them. That, and Jarek’s ship, which he realized with a jolt Al was guiding sneakily from the escaping convoy back toward the rakul ship above.

  “What the hell, Al?” he hissed.

  The lone truck cut into the adjacent field and kicked up a rolling cloud of dust as it circled around to point its back toward them and its hood toward the retreating convoy. Alaric was hanging out the open rear hatch, shouting and waving them on.

  “We have a plan, sir,” Al said, his words slightly strained, as they often were when he was running too many tasks and conversations all at once. “Get the raknoth on that truck. We’ll take care of the ship.”

  We?

  Jarek didn’t have time to question it as another raknoth shrieked and hit the dirt, his left arm dangling by little more than a thread of scaly hide.

  Either Al had reached out to Krogoth as well, or the raknoth had already had the same thought himself, because his kin were all shifting formation now, angling around their foes to give themselves better lines of retreat to the waiting truck.

  Then it was like a switch had been thrown.

  Rakul pounced. Raknoth leapt. For a moment, every single body in the fight seemed to be airborne.

  Krogoth, apparently not trusting Jarek to catch on, wrapped a powerful rust-red arm around his chest and hoisted him backward in a mighty jump that ended in an awkward landing right by the waiting truck.

  Before Jarek could buck free and ask Krogoth what the hell he was thinking, the raknoth bodily tossed him through the open hatch and into the truck’s trailer.

  Son of a bitch.

  Jarek scrambled to his feet.

  “Look out,” Alaric snapped.

  He turned and just managed to sidestep out of the way as one, two, three raknoth came diving into the trailer. The third overdid his jump and hit the front wall hard enough to dent it.

  A frustrated roar from outside. Gada’s.

  At the rear of the truck, Krogoth was waving like a goddamn air traffic controller while more raknoth continued to pile in.

  Jarek reached the hatch just as a raknoth came spinning limply through the air as if he’d been thrown—one arm wobbling bizarrely on a single thread of hide.

  Krogoth caught the raknoth, paying no mind when the dangling arm tore free with the force of the impact. He just hopped into the trailer with his raknoth in tow.

  “Drive!” he roared.

  But Jarek had just looked over and saw that they were still short one. Al’Brandt. He must’ve been the one who’d thrown that last raknoth. And Gada and the gargoyle were both closing on him.

  Jarek started to hop out, but Krogoth caught him in the chest and shoved him back in.

  “He will manage himself.”

  Jarek started to tell him to shove his barbaric sense of leadership up his ass, but it turned out Krogoth’s point was well-made.

  In a flat out race, any of the Kul might have bested Brandt. None of them, however, were as agile. In fact, Jarek was pretty sure he’d never seen anyone as agile as Brandt—save for maybe Haldin and Elise.

  The raknoth moved with preternatural grace and speed, dipping outside of the gargoyle’s long-armed grab, ducking Gada’s finger blades and actually using the Kul’s thick left flank as a springboard as he launched his way over the reaching tendrils of Wriggles’ swelling form and toward the accelerating truck.

  He turned neatly through the air and hit the ground running, Gada and the gargoyle in hot pursuit. He was fast. Maybe even faster than the two pursuing rakul. But that barely mattered, considering all three of them would be more than fast enough to catch the truck.

  Before they’d made it more than a few lumbering steps, though, Gada and the gargoyle pulled up short and spun around at something Jarek neither saw nor heard. His stomach sank when both of their heads snapped straight up at Jarek’s ship, which was now hovering with its rear hatch tight against the side of the dark purplish length of the rakul vessel.

  “Al, you have to get out of th—”

  “I can’t, sir.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t leave. Mosen’s aboard.”

  “What?!”

  We’ll take care of the ship, Al had said.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  Jarek’s panic only grew when Alaric looked at him then the ships, slow, horrible realization dawning on his wizened face.

  This time, it was Alaric who Krogoth had to catch before he could throw himself out of the open hatch in frantic desperation.

  “Let me go!” Alaric roared.

  “Al,” Jarek said, “you have to get him out of—”

  “I found your grenades, Slater.”

  Mosen’s voice, smooth and cavalier, but with a small undercurrent of fear Jarek didn’t miss. Al must’ve patched him through.

  “Mosen. Whatever you’re—”

  “I know what I’m doing. It’s too late to talk me out of it anyway.”

  As if in testament, the pop of a distant explosion carried down to the fleeing truck, and the rakul ship wobbled unsteadily in the air.

  Alaric’s struggles had weakened now. He was riveted on Jarek, sensing he was his only hope, his eyes pleading for him to somehow put a stop to this. To save his son.

  Brandt caught up and hopped into the speeding truck, his small victory like an icy slap in the wake of Mosen’s predicament.

  “Mosen,” Jarek growled, “get in the damn ship. Get out of there. Now!”

  Mosen just chuckled in Jarek’s earpiece, though Jarek could tell the nonchalance was forced. “I don’t really see the point of doing that unless you happen to be hiding one hell of a gun under that armor of yours. There’s no other way you’re getting out of here without them on your tail.”

  Below, the gargoyle gathered himself and sprang for the point where the two ships met. Al tried to swat him aside with the hull of his ship. It was a good hit, but the Kul managed to clamp onto one of the stubby wings anyway, using his own leathery wings to stabilize himself.

  With a hideous squeal of wrenching metal, the gargoyle tore the wing from the ship, which immediately began to spiral drunkenly downward.

  “Goddammit, Mosen, we’re n—”

  “Gonna get to Cheyenne and kill these fuckers, is what you’re going to do,” Mosen said through gritted teeth, “or I’ll see your ass in hell.”

  Jarek watched, wordless, stupefied
, as his ship smashed down beside the farmhouse and Gada joined his brother Kul in violently dismantling the sleek matte box that had been his home for over six years now.

  “Seth . . .” Alaric groaned.

  “My father…” Mosen said, as if he’d heard through Jarek’s comm.

  “He’s here,” Jarek said.

  He didn’t know what else to say—what else to do.

  “Just… just tell him . . .”

  Jarek waited, watching hopelessly as the rakul finished with his ship and turned their attention back to their own.

  “I will, Seth.”

  “Seth!” Alaric shouted, resuming his hopeless struggling against Krogoth’s iron grip with more ferocity than before. “Don’t you—don’t—don’t…”

  “Make it count, Slater,” Seth said quietly in his ear over Alaric’s broken groans.

  Then the rakul ship disappeared in a blossoming ball of teal fire.

  It started small, flames licking out from the stern and along the length of the ship until something critical ignited. The flames roared outward with a deafening boom, engulfing everything in a hundred-yard radius—the farmhouse, the rakul, everything—for one furious split-second, so blinding that Fela’s filters simply shut down.

  Then, as quickly as they came, the flames were gone, leaving nothing but smoke and charred Earth. A few larger hunks of debris thudded into the weeds on either side of the rode.

  They drove on.

  The farmhouse was a smoking wreck, fading into the distance. There was movement on the scorched lawn—Gada and that damn gargoyle picking themselves up, charred and hurting, but clearly not dead. Wriggles’ blackened shape swelled upright from the ground a few seconds later.

  The rakul were too far now—and hopefully hurting too much—to try to catch them on foot. Or so Jarek’s numb brain told him. The thought didn’t bring any sense of victory or relief. He couldn’t seem to move.

  Alaric had gone nearly catatonic, huddled at the rear of the trailer where he’d collapsed after the explosion.

  They drove on, dead silence hanging in the trailer, broken only by the hum of the truck and the faint pitter-patter of the smoky bits of ship debris still raining down, even this far away.

  Jarek fell to the bench behind him, head spinning.

  They drove on.

  21

  Just a few months ago, had someone told Rachel she was going to be leaving Unity to fight for the fate of the planet, at the very least, she would have called them stupendously imaginative. If they’d told her she’d be fixing up for a road trip with a raknoth, she would have laughed them off-stage.

  And yet here she was, staring down from the top of Cheyenne Mountain beside Drogan and Dola and trying to figure out which car it was they were taking.

  Life strangeness aside, it was still nice to get outside of the stifling walls of The Complex, even after having only been down there for a day. How some of those people had been living down there for over a decade was beyond her. Actually, it probably explained a few things.

  As Dola pointed out from the mountaintop, though, his people didn’t spend all of their time within The Complex. Some hunted. Others tended the crop fields they’d replanted north of the lots after they’d deemed the ones by the main road too much of a giveaway to passing marauders. Some even just stepped out for the occasional stroll—during the allowed hours and in the allowed locations, of course.

  Semi-daily strolls outside or no, Rachel still shuddered at the thought of years spent as an inhabitant of The Complex. Maybe she was just a hint claustrophobic. Or maybe the place’s vibe—the creepily zealous raknoth haters with their disguised raknoth leader—just gave her the heebie-jeebies.

  Either way, she’d been grateful for the secret lift Dola had excavated up to the mountain’s peak from a hidden room in his office over the long years. Apparently, Dola enjoyed fresh air and sunrises as much as he enjoyed privacy.

  Rachel was just relieved to have been spared another mini-interrogation with Zach and his goons, who might’ve initially been glad to see them go but would just as likely have raised hell when they’d realized they meant to return with more people—and quite possibly with more heat on their tails.

  Treading quietly was the name of the game here.

  “You might as well take my car,” Dola was saying, pointing down from the bushy ridge to the distant stretch of the southern lot. “The blue Subaru Sol down there. I’ve seen to it the vehicle has been well-kept over the years, though I’ve rarely had occasion to use it.”

  Rachel followed his pointing finger. She was still wondering how the hell he could even distinguish one car from another at this distance, much less make or model, when Drogan gave an affirmative grunt and turned to her with outstretched arms.

  “You are ready, Rachel Cross?”

  “Hardly,” Rachel said, deciding for the first time that maybe leaving through the front door wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world.

  Still, it was just falling. Nothing she couldn’t control. Even if it had to be in Drogan’s arms.

  “But let’s go,” she added, shifting her arms and her staff so Drogan could scoop her up with one arm under the crook of her knees and the other wrapped behind her back.

  “You are certain you can handle this?” Drogan asked.

  Her lip twitched. “Don’t tell me you’re worried about me, Drogan?”

  He only grunted and turned to Dola. “We will return as soon as we can. Do not let anything happen to our people.”

  If Dola had anything to say to that, Drogan didn’t wait around to hear it. Instead, he charged forward and bounded off the mountain ridge.

  It was one hell of a jump. And not exactly an insignificant deceleration act on her part seven or eight seconds later.

  They landed with a soft thump maybe two-thirds of the way down the mountain, Drogan’s arms as sturdy as the walls of The Complex beneath her.

  Her head lightly buzzed with the channeling fatigue of catching both herself and a plummeting raknoth, but it wasn’t particularly bothersome. One bright side of this whole catastrophic shit-storm—her abilities had grown by leaps and bounds.

  Drogan looked down at her thoughtfully. “That was… considerably more pleasant than I am accustomed to.”

  “Yeah, good times all around.” Rachel shook the residual tingles from her head and frowned. “Do those big jumps normally hurt?”

  “Hurt is a relative concept, but”—he gave a slight shrug—“they can be less than pleasant. Are you ready?”

  She nodded, and they were off again.

  Two bounds, a short walk, and fifteen minutes later, they were in Dola’s car, past the landmines, and turning north onto CO Route 115. Beyond backtracking east on 70 and seeing what they saw, the plan was sadly lacking. But without Net communications or anything else to guide them, it was all they really had.

  Neither of them could pretend like it was the smartest idea, but at least with just the two of them, they were highly mobile. They could tread softly and, should the worst happen, move quickly.

  Personally, Rachel wasn’t nearly so worried about herself and Drogan as she was about the others, both ahead and behind.

  It all felt so uncertain, so unsteady. All this work, all the fighting and hiding and soldiering on. And all of it ready to come crashing down around them with the faintest brush of bad luck.

  Looking at the entire picture, it was almost impossible not to despair.

  Everything they’d done in the name of preparing to take on the rakul, and yet, whenever she stopped to think about it, she couldn’t help but think that maybe it was all just a grand gesture at delaying the inevitable. That maybe, deep down, they all knew they were doomed. That pretending they were fighting it was just their way of deluding themselves that they’d done their best in an impossible situation.

  She closed her eyes, let out a long breath, and finally looked over at Drogan, wondering if he was having similar thoughts.

  Rach
el bit back a laugh at what she saw.

  It wasn’t like she hadn’t expected to find the raknoth driving the car. But something about seeing Al’Drogan—the freaking Red King and second eldest of the raknoth left on Earth—driving with eyes firmly on the road ahead and hands secured at the ten and two o’clock positions on the wheel nearly made her lose it.

  Apparently, her amusement wasn’t lost on him.

  “What is it?” he asked without looking over as he guided the car through a left turn onto what the sign dubbed Route 21.

  “Just…” She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  Drogan drove on silently for another ten minutes or so, until Rachel could no longer stand her mind’s dark ruminations.

  “Outside of Pittsburgh,” she said, not really sure where she was going with this, “when you said the rakul have forgotten what it means to fear death . . .”

  Drogan glanced at her, waiting for the conclusion to a question she hadn’t quite figured out yet.

  “Why do they do it?” she finally said. “The raknoth infiltrating, the rakul invading… What’s the point of any of it? What do they want?”

  Drogan didn’t answer for a long while. She couldn’t tell if he was debating what he should and shouldn’t tell her about his people or simply deciding where best to start.

  “The conventional answer among my people,” he finally said, “would be that they do it for what you might call sport.”

  That was the impression she’d gotten from much of what they’d first learned of the rakul. And yet…

  “What about the unconventional answer?”

  Drogan looked at her more closely this time, weighing her with his eyes. “I think they do it for the same reason any lifeform does anything. Because they are afraid.”

  Rachel looked out the passenger-side window, absentmindedly staring at the sprawling plains and crumbling housing developments flying by as she turned that over in her mind, trying to find Drogan’s angle.

  “They don’t look so scared to me,” she finally said.