by Tia Wylder
I gave chase. One of them landed on the roof and dug its claws into the metal with a loud screech. I flew over it and bit down hard on its neck as I passed. It lost its grip and struggled to break free as I flew upward into the sky. I released it from my jaws just as I painted it with fire. The crumbling creature fell through the air like burning paper and dissipated into nothing.
Two more came from either side and ambushed me. They latched their claws into my sides and dug their teeth into my flesh. Down below I saw the vehicle approaching its destination.
I closed my eyes and focused all of my energy inward. I felt pure light building inside of me. When it reached a breaking point, I saw Harley’s face as I unleashed the full extent of my power. The fire came out through the cracks in my skin and blasted outward in all directions at once.
The creatures were burned into dust and I was free to land as the humans climbed out of their machine. I landed and shifted back into my human form. The woman threw the clothes back to me and I dressed myself.
“Not bad, but we’re not out of the woods yet,” she said.
The very air surrounding us started to pull upward. I turned my head to the sky and saw the mouth of a World Eater breaking descending toward us. The light that show upward into the sky from the human’s lamps curved as it was devoured by the black hole above.
“Follow me!” the woman shouted.
One of the humans pulled out what looked like a metal staff. The top of it opened and we were suddenly enveloped in blue light. A dome above us seemed to protect from the World Eater’s pull.
The vehicle that had taken the humans here shot up into the air beside us. The ground beneath started to crumbled. We moved beneath the blue dome and into a massive building. It was breaking apart around us. The roof tore off and ascended into the sky as we entered. We sprinted across the open area and into another contraption. The room we stood in started moving down, no doubt protected by the blue dome’s influence.
“Dorian, listen to me, you have to save her!” the woman shouted.
“How?”
“They went back and killed her. Without her, the World Eaters succeed. If you save her, you’ll change everything. You’ll save us all.”
The moving room stopped and we moved out into a room with a massive metal circle. Colored wires ran into it, wrapping around the structure like snakes. The woman broke free of the blue dome and pressed several buttons on a metal box beside it.
“This is how it always happens Dorian, now it’s up to you!”
The metal circle filled with darkness.
“Go through Dorian, save her!”
Even underground, the space above us tore open. The blue dome faltered and I watched the humans and the woman ripped upward into the World Eater’s gaping maw. I ran forward as I felt its influence bearing down on me. I dove through the darkness.
I came out on the other side and found myself standing in a dark room. My entire body was glowing with a strange light. I looked to my right and saw a young girl in her bed. She had the sheets pulled up over her face, but I recognized her.
It was Harley, but she was just a child. I looked over and saw an Old One looming over her bed. I didn’t hesitate, I charged forward and took whatever hold I could on its shifting form. We stumbled backward through another portal. A terrible force all around me pulled in every direction. My body was being ripped apart. The pain was so great that I lost control. The light built up within me again until it was at a breaking point.
I exploded with the force of a dying star and pushed back the darkness around me. When I opened my eyes again, I was in my dragon from, floating in the ocean of stars. Around me, the body of a World Eater was crumbling. Had I destroyed it from the inside?
Around me I saw other World Eaters crumbling apart. Their infinite bodies stretched into the distance but even they were slowly dissipating. I was barely conscious, but I had enough energy to smile as I fell into a deep slumber. I don’t know how long I drifted through the stars, but I felt my strength coming back.
More importantly, I knew I had saved her. With her past-self safe and the World Eaters destroyed for now, Earth would be safe. I crashed after an endless amount of time. I slowly opened my eyes and found myself lying in the sand of a vast desert. The light from the star above was channeling energy into me.
A woman stood over me with a concerned expression on her face.
“Harley?” I asked.
Her eyes went wide.
“You know who I am?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Okay, wait right there, let me get you something to cover yourself with!”
She ran off to get the same blankets she had used last time I awoke on this planet. I did not know if the events would repeat as they had before, or if my influence changed the course of time.
Whatever happened, one thing was certain: we would be together.
Claimed By The Cosmic Warrior
By Jocelyn Bride
Chapter One
It happened the night of Tia Swift’s eighteenth birthday party. And there was nothing beforehand to suggest that this night would be anything but the celebration that Tia was expecting. The hours leading up to the party were quiet, calm, and prosaic, though filled with the expectation of the excitement that would follow them. Tia had no way of knowing exactly what kind of excitement awaited her. All that was on her mind at the beginning was what might be on the minds of any number of girls just turning eighteen and looking forward to welcoming in the first year of her young adulthood. All she was thinking about was choosing the perfect thing to wear.
She stood in front of the full-length virtual mirror in her bedroom, wearing just a T-shirt and workout shorts such as she would wear in the gym. Shiny black hair falling just to her shoulders framed a pretty face adorned with a broad smile. Her body was lean and tight, not stick-thin but pleasingly curved in all the right ways and all the right places, a testament to hours spent not just in the gym but on the dance floor. Inspecting herself, she found everything was ready except the wardrobe.
“Shuffle through party outfits,” Tia commanded the computer in the mirror. At her bidding, the imaging system in the glass put her in a series of simulated outfits, some low-cut, some high-cut, some skin-tight, some looser and more flowing, some luxurious, some fancy but less formal, in a range of colors. Tia saw herself as everything from elegant to scandalous to Bohemian and everything in between. Finally, she settled on one ensemble, all in deep blues and blacks. It had a low-cut top with puffed sleeves, underlaid with a camisole (because her father would be present), and Capri-type slacks with shoes whose heels were just the right height for dancing. “Accessorize,” Tia said, and the computer dutifully added to this ensemble a series of rings, bracelets, necklaces, and even a tiara, until she settled on a simple black choker with a single sapphire on it. Satisfied with her wardrobe plans for her special night, Tia ordered, “That’s it. Print it and hang it in the closet.” The computer hummed and the selected outfit, now stored in memory, disappeared from the mirror, and the specifications went to the material printer.
With that done, Tia turned away from the mirror and stepped into the center of her bedroom floor to begin a series of bends and stretches to limber up for the evening. She wanted both to look and to be in fine form for the night. Launching into her routine of bending forward and down and from side to side, and stretching and lunging while sitting and standing, Tia wished that all choices in a young girl’s life were as relatively easy as deciding what to wear to her eighteenth birthday party. Tia and her father had been on this planet for two years, having come here with colonists and settlers from across human-inhabited space, and she still did not have a steady boyfriend. It was not as if she had no options. There were plenty of boys in the colony on planet Sigma Cygni, and like any girl, Tia had been on her share of dates. The boys with whom she had gone out were handsome enough and fit enough. Some of them were varsity athletes. And some of them came from very fine
Colonial families, even some who could trace their ancestry all the way back to Earth. She had enjoyed being with them. She had let them kiss her. She had let some of them do a little bit more than kiss her, and she had done a little bit more than kiss some of them, though she had yet to allow any boy to do everything. To be sure Tia had thought about letting some of them do everything because they were of the type from whom a girl would certainly want it. But it had not come to that point—yet.
Being the daughter of the Chief Administrator of the colony, Tia could well have had her pick of any of them. And yet she had chosen none of them. It wasn’t that she was a parochial pre-Spacer type who thought the human body was a thing to be ashamed of and pleasurable, non-reproductive sex was an act of filth. Happily, such people were all but extinct now. It was only that space was vast and full of options, and Tia wanted to be sure of availing herself of the best options from all choices available. Sometimes she wondered if she denied herself unnecessarily. After all, some of her girlfriends were certainly helping themselves to some of the boys in the colony, including some of those with whom Tia had stopped just short of everything. But no…Tia didn’t mind being a virgin and taking her time. There was no more shame in virginity than there was in indulgence. When it felt exactly right, she would let it happen. Until then, she would just have a good time.
Tonight, Tia meant to have a good time.
Chapter Two
The party was held at night in a brightly lit outdoor pavilion, under the same Milky Way seen from Earth, on a planet a hundred light years away from there. Sigma Cygni was a thriving Earth colony planet—as evidenced by the nearly two dozen teenagers gathered on the pavilion around a stage where a holographically transmitted concert had gotten under way.
Front and center of the assembled teens was the birthday girl, Tia herself. The kids swayed and shook and squealed and laughed, listening to the band whose performance came through the interstellar media relays from Mu Eridani IV, some twenty light years away. The band was all done up in lights: luminescent piping and patches on dark clothing and dark-colored instruments; a light that surged and pulsed and throbbed and strobed to match the riffs and rhythms they played. Tia, surrounded by girlfriends and flanked by boys half interested in the girls present (or each other) and half interested in the musicians, was as enraptured by the whole thing as she had expected to be when her father told her he was patching her party into the transmission of this show. She and her friends were getting a front row seat for something beamed from millions of kilometers away. The anticipation of it had been the talk of the young people of the colony for weeks. Tonight, Tia was not only the birthday girl; she was their heroine. And she was loving it.
That was when it all broke loose.
Right in the middle of a song, the holographic display rudely cut out. There was a nanosecond of stunned surprise, followed by kids leaning forward in their seats or leaping out of them and looking around, upset and annoyed, complaining loudly and trying to figure out what the problem was. Tia, completely flustered and utterly confused—to say nothing of embarrassed in front of her peers, looked for her father, whom she last saw hanging back behind at the end of the pavilion behind the group. He was nowhere to be found. Bewildered, dismayed, and worried, she called out, “Daddy?”
The next thing they knew, the Colonial alarm system went off, sounding even more raucous than their interrupted concert. The sound cut through the assembled young people like a knife of electricity. Some jumped, others yelped—and all of them turned in the direction of another sound coming out of the darkness.
It was the noise of whirring aircycle engines, the kind of flying motorbikes used by Colonial Security. Into the lights illuminating the pavilion came a figure on an aircycle—but this was no Security Officer. He was like nothing that any of them had ever seen. He wore some strange garment that covered him from head to feet, marked with odd patterns all over, and stained up and down with something the looked like a mix of mud and pond scum. The figure on the flying bike was shooting right at them, and Tia and her friends all scrambled and dove and ducked to get out of the way. The stranger would have flown right through the pavilion if three other aircycles had not come charging in from the opposite direction, cutting off his path. Riding these bikes were actual Colonial Security members, and from the look of them, they were ready for business. The oddly garbed stranger swerved over the seats, with kids screaming and shouting at the sight of him, and tried to speed off in another direction, but from the direction from which he came, three other officers on flying bikes came speeding in, and from two other directions still more arrived, hemming him in. By this time Tia and all of her friends were either hugging each other on the pavilion floor or crouching between the seats, and the entire scene was filled with the din of shouts and whirring engines.
Tia, in the midst of the upheaval, knelt down at the end of one row of seats, peering up at the stranger and around at the uniformed personnel closing in on him, then back at where her father had been and where he still had not returned. And again she cried, “Daddy!”
Other Security personnel, on foot, came running in, ordering Tia and the other young people to vacate the pavilion. They moved quickly, conducting the Chief’s daughter and her guests away from where they had been partying only moments ago. They led the kids out onto the grass about ten meters away and told them to stay down. The terrified youths did as they were told, but kept their eyes on the pavilion as the stranger and the uniformed personnel surrounding him hovered there in a stand-off. For a moment, nothing happened, and Tia and the others wondered why. Then, the officers surrounding their quarry began to back off until they reached positions just outside of the pavilion. The stranger, hovering over the seats and the stage, began to rear up on his stolen bike as if on horseback, and gave the distinct impression that he was ready to leap up and over his pursuers…
…until, as one, each of the officers’ bikes shot forth a small, shiny object, aimed into the area of the party. Tia heard someone—it must have been one of the uniformed personnel on foot—shout, “GET DOWN!” The young people all made themselves flat against the grass and instinctively covered their ears, barely muffling the hellish sound of the upheaval happening ten meters away.
The minutes that followed were a throbbing, pulsing blur. The sound of the explosion rang in Tia’s ears. She felt dizzy and shocked. With an officer’s help, she managed to rise wobbling to her feet. She checked around to see if any of her friends were hurt. Thankfully none of them were, but there was plenty of moaning and crying all around her. People were gasping and choking and hugging each other, and Tia hugged the ones nearest to her and cried with them. In the midst of everything, Tia tried to make sense of everything that had just happened. Who was this man in the strange body suit? What was he doing there? Why was Colonial Security chasing him and why did they see the need to use enough concussion grenades to demolish a multi-story building to bring him down? He could not possibly be alive after all that. Why did it take that much power to stop him? What would he have done if they could not?
She squinted in the direction of the rubble and debris-filled crater where her birthday party had been. Mighty plumes of dust rose from it like the vast columns of smoke from an incendiary bomb. The bike-riding officers had extended cables and hooks into the shattered and pulverized ruin of the pavilion and grabbed onto something, and were now dragging it clear. Tia braced herself and thought she should look away from what they were certainly going to produce from the wreckage of that awful violence. To be sure they were going to bring forth the mangled remains of the stranger.
Except that what they dragged onto the grass did not look at all mangled.
The bike-riding officers produced torchlights and shone them onto the prone figure. The stranger’s body was in one piece, his alien-looking garment stained and scuffed but completely undamaged. Not a bone of the body underneath that arcane-looking covering seemed to be broken. Tia blinked incredulously. What had star
ted out shocking and terrifying had turned to something impossible.
The personnel on foot ordered the kids to stay back, and the personnel on floating bikes formed themselves into a cordon around the area where the stranger lay while those on foot went to examine their fallen quarry. In spite of orders, the kids, Tia foremost among them, moved in as close as they could to get as good a look as they could.
They heard the Security people saying things to each other and saying other things that must have been communications with other authorites—including, Tia was sure, her father, who had gone off somewhere before all this happened. She guessed his disappearance from the party must have had something to do with all this. Tia quietly watched, scarcely aware of her friends nearby, as the officers worked at the body in the grass and somehow managed to get the headpiece off of it. Now they would all see who it was who had crashed Tia’s celebration.
Even at a few meters’ distance, Tia could tell that the face lying in the grass was male, young, and incomparably handsome. It was, even from this far off, the most beautiful male face she had ever seen. And there was something more about it. There was a nobility about his features—nothing savage, nothing brutal. He looked almost like a prince out of an ancient storybook. Somehow, in spite of all the carnage and terror that this mystery man had brought into what was meant to be the most joyous night of Tia’s young life, he looked nothing at all like a monster or a menace—in fact, exactly the opposite.
Which begged the question even more: Who was he?
Chapter Three
The young man’s face filled the monitor in the Colonial Administration briefing room. At the end of the table nearest the monitor sat Liana Allen, the Executive Aide of the colony, a young woman with shiny black hair much like Tia’s, pulled back into a single braid. Merrill Swift, the head of the colony, sat at the far end of the table, and between him and Liana were the Administrative heads of the Colonial districts, as well as Nigel Patel, the Physician General, head of the Colonial Medical Corps. Merrill had taken a liking to Liana because she reminded him of Tia’s mother, who’d died some years ago from an outbreak of an exotic fever while exploring new planets.
