They had found the center of the maze.
The rock had been excavated to make a wide, clear space. A dais was in the center, surrounded by rows of carved stone benches. The portal was on the dais, a huge stone circle with symbols carved into every inch that Alexis and Gabriel could see.
Another screech cut the air as they dashed through the benches to climb the steps.
The pterosaur came to roost on top of the portal, blocking Alexis and Gabriel’s exit from the game. They scrambled underneath one of the benches and huddled together.
Alexis peered at the beast, which was tearing chunks off the top of the portal and flinging them in its frustration. “How are we going to get past that thing?”
“I don’t know,” Gabriel answered in a soft, shaky voice. “Alexis…”
Alexis glanced in alarm at her brother’s pale skin and clammy hands. “Gabriel? Are you okay?”
Gabriel looked at her with unfocused eyes. “Don’t…feel sho goo…” He slumped to the side.
“Gabriel!” Alexis scooted over to him and cradled his head in her lap. “What’s happened?”
On the other side of the portal, Addix watched Gabriel slump to the ground on her tablet screen. “Was the arachnid necessary?” she asked Eve.
Eve shrugged. “They needed a nudge, and you are frankly rather inspiring.”
“I should go in and make sure Gabriel is okay.”
Eve shook her head at the agitation Addix was showing. “Don’t worry, he’s just asleep.”
“You ass! You bit Gabriel!” Alexis yelled, crushing the spider with a rock before it could bite her brother again. “Now what am I going to do?”
She put her ear to Gabriel’s chest. His heart beat slowly but steadily. “Aunt Addix! Aunt Eve! Gabriel is hurt!”
Neither of her aunts answered.
Alexis knew in that instant that this was a part of the game. She looked at the portal, her only hope of getting Gabriel out of here.
“Okay then, I’ll defeat the pterosaur all by myself.”
She made sure Gabriel was safe and crawled out from underneath the bench. The pterosaur lowered its head and bellowed at her, scratching at the portal as it beat its wings.
So it doesn’t leave the portal. I wonder if it will change when I get closer? Alexis bared her teeth at the dinosaur and took a step forward. “You have one chance to let me take my brother through that portal,” she yelled. Her mind worked the whole time furiously. How do I get it to leave? Do I have to kill it? What would Mommy do?
Alexis laughed aloud. She’d seen the videos of her parents kicking ass and taking names. Since this was a virtual reality, could she do the same?
Gabriel moaned, dragging her from the rabbit hole she’d almost fallen into. “Daddy and his traps again!” He knew she was susceptible to the beauty of pure thought. She snapped her attention back just as the pterosaur began to beat its wings in preparation for taking flight.
Mommy wouldn’t let anything stop her from saving someone, and neither would Alexis. She held up her hand just like she’d seen her mother do and willed the energy to come.
Nothing happened. “Hmmm…” Alexis knew that the energy came from the Etheric, but there was no Etheric here. Maybe there was some equivalent?
“How did Eve make the lightning?” she pondered.
She felt a tingle in her palm.
Addix laughed aloud. “Did you just give her the ability to make energy balls?”
Eve snickered. “She deserves it, just for having the courage to stand up to that thing armed with nothing but her temper. She’s going to get her first taste of battle. I’m such a proud aunt.”
A smug smile spread across Alexis’ face as the energy ball formed in her hand. She flung it at the pterosaur, scoring a hit on its beaky face. “Get away from the portal!” she yelled.
The pterosaur screamed its pain and launched at Alexis from the top of the portal. Alexis screamed in return and threw two more energy balls at it, singeing its wings.
It wasn’t enough.
Alexis thought on her feet as the pterosaur made an ungainly landing and came at her. She drew the energy, but let it build while she coaxed the beast away from Gabriel.
She led it step by step toward the opposite side of the dais, dodging the strikes from its razor-sharp beak and talons. The energy built inside Alexis, and she hoped she could hold onto it just a little longer.
The pterosaur took to the air again, manipulating its wings to hover awkwardly above her. It screeched, spraying her with hot saliva. She ducked a grab from its talons and scampered onto a bench to get a better shot.
Alexis grinned. “Just where I wanted you, sucker!” She unleashed the energy in a massive wave. The energy radiated outward from her, activating the portal and disintegrating the pterosaur in the process.
Alexis had another battle getting her legs to support her as she ran back to Gabriel through the falling ash. She scooped him into her arms with some difficulty.
“Come on, wake up!”
Gabriel muttered groggily but didn’t wake.
Alexis sighed. “Fine, sleep through it all.” She slid her hands under his armpits and dragged him onto the dais and through the portal.
Addix was waiting to take Gabriel from Alexis when she came through the portal into a cozy two-room cottage. She handed her brother over and allowed her legs to take the vacation they so desperately wanted.
Gabriel stirred in Addix’ arms as Alexis threw herself onto the couch in the corner of the main room. Addix peered at him closely. “Ah, good. He’s waking up already.” She placed him gently on the couch by Alexis to finish recovering and pulled a blanket over the both of them. “Well done, children. Sleep now.”
Alexis yawned. “Are we in the new game now?”
“We are, but we won’t begin until you and Gabriel have rested.”
Alexis nodded. “Will you tell me about the game for my bedtime story?”
“Of course,” Addix replied. “It’s an old story, like Eve told you. There’s a list of roles to choose from. You can be a mage, a fighter, a thief, a cleric…”
Alexis let out a soft snore.
Addix chuckled and tucked her in before taking out her tablet to review the game information. One of the character roles caught her eye. “Hmmm. I could be a Drow Ranger…”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Quarantined System, QBS ArchAngel II, Bridge
Bethany Anne paced the bridge with her hands behind her back. She glanced at the viewscreen for what could have been the hundredth time in the last two minutes and sighed impatiently. “ADAM, report. How are we fixed for position?”
“I have green lights across the board, Bethany Anne. The ships are in place and awaiting your orders.”
Michael sat back in his chair and laced his hands.
Bethany Anne nodded once and stopped pacing. “Good. Let’s see if they’re the talkative kind. Open a channel, ADAM.”
“Working on it,” ADAM replied.
Bethany Anne raised an eyebrow. “They’re not picking up?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Well, damn. How rude.”
“We have movement,” Michael stated. He pointed to the cloud of spheres that were detaching from the main structure and spreading out in all directions.
Tabitha sneered at the screen. “Guess that means early peace discussions are out the window.”
Bethany Anne snorted. “Good. I always thought those discussions were boring, anyway. I’d rather leave the talking to those who enjoy it.”
Kiel turned in his seat to face her. “They’re definitely not the talking type. The spheres have just released all sort of nasty things. I’m getting confirmation of everything from straight-up kinetics to nuclear warheads. They’ll be on us in less than thirty minutes.”
Bethany Anne was warmed by Kiel’s literal take on her words. She put a hand on his shoulder and chuckled. “Never change, Kiel.”
For his part, Kiel l
ooked at her blankly, then shrugged and turned back to his station. He’d stopped being embarrassed about being caught out by his Queen’s wordplay long ago.
Bethany Anne walked to the front of the bridge and clapped her hands, all humor gone from her voice. “You heard Kiel. We have less than thirty minutes to prepare a suitable welcome for these fuckers. Let’s go!
Fifteen minutes later they were speeding away from the ship in Black Eagles.
Bethany Anne opened the comm. “Everyone good?”
“Roger,” John answered for himself and Tabitha.
“Let’s fuck some shit up,” Scott commented from his and Darryl’s Pod.
“Ready,” Gabrielle and Eric answered in unison.
“Ready to turn tail if you need me to,” Jean grumped from the backup ship.
Bethany Anne grinned at Michael, who raised his eyebrows in amusement and went back to turning his mystery box over and over in his hands. “Quit your bitching, Jean. I can hear you rolling your eyes from here.”
“Bite me, my Queen,” came the reply.
“Love you too,” she shot back. “Everyone else, best of luck and I’ll see you all on that ship.” She turned to Michael again. “You need to bleed on it.”
Michael’s face dropped. “I would have gotten it by myself. I was enjoying the mystery.” He sighed and pricked the end of his finger with his canine, then smeared the resulting drop of blood on the box. It opened with a soft click. “Now half the fun is gone.”
She shrugged. “Save the mystery for when we’re not about to land on an alien ship with no idea what’s waiting for us. Open the box. The fun is just getting started, my love.”
He lifted the lid and took out the velvet drawstring bag inside. “Heavy.”
Bethany Anne nodded distractedly, her focus on getting their Pod through the battlefield unscathed. “Open it. We’re halfway to the ship already.”
Michael pulled the string and took out the gauntlets within. A look of appreciation crossed his face as he admired the intricate filigree worked through the black leather. “They are beautiful, my love.” He pulled them on. “From the same creature as my favorite boots of yours?”
Bethany Anne nodded. “I made sure to save enough of the hide for Jean to make them. It took a while to add the special feature since it’s so difficult to do anything with the leather.”
Michael flexed his fingers inside the gauntlets, feeling a slight surge of Etheric energy leave his fingertips. He looked at Bethany Anne quizzically.
“Now you don’t need my help to call lightning.”
He leaned over and kissed her. “Thank you. They’re perfect.”
A proximity alarm cut off any further thanks Michael may have offered. Bethany Anne turned back to the Pod controls as the EI dealt with the incoming kinetics. “It’s getting intense out there.”
“You have a gift for understatement.” Michael scrolled through the fleet data. “The dreadnoughts are laying it down pretty thick.”
“They’re doing some good work. Look at the spheres drop.” She slowed the Pod as it crossed into the shadow of the behemoth. “Are we ready to kick the doors in?” she asked over the comm.
The sound of six rifles being cocked simultaneously filled her ears.
“Ready when you are,” John deadpanned.
Bethany Anne cracked up, any pre-battle tension she might have had shattered. “Be careful out there, all of you.”
“We will,” Tabitha promised.
“You too,” Gabrielle added.
“See you all inside.” She closed the channel and turned to Michael. “Shall we dance by the light of the pale moon?”
The alien ship grew closer in their viewscreen. The closer they got, the less like a comet the structure looked. It was more spherical in shape underneath the cloaking. The sphere’s surface was made up mostly of shipwrecks packed in together in a way that made Bethany Anne’s head hurt. “It’s like somebody made a Death Star from junked cars,” she remarked.
Michael pointed out a group of cracked, dead ships floating along the curvature of the sphere. “Are those our missing Noel-ni ships?”
Bethany Anne scrutinized the floating wrecks. “Could be. John and Tabitha are coming in from that direction. Have them send some drones in to check it out.”
John brought the Pod in past the drifting Noel-ni ships and released the drones.
Tabitha pulled a face at the dark hulks as they left them behind. The ships emitted no signals, and they picked up no power signatures. The hulls were twisted in places. “It looks like they were torn open. I don’t think anyone could survive that.”
John grunted. “If they’re just holed up, then we’ll get them out of there when we’re done. Okay, brace yourself.”
Tabitha grinned. “Time to deliver that door-kicking you wanted?”
John smirked. “You betcha. And since we can’t find a door, we’ll have to make our own.” He mashed the button to send a complement of pucks at the rapidly approaching wall of wrecks.
The space beyond the twisted, blackened metal was pitch-dark.
Gabrielle and Eric were first-in since they had the closest point of entry. They stepped over the debris left by their big entrance with their new rifles raised and ready. They were in a wide workroom with computer stations spread throughout. They activated their HUDs and a window appeared at the top of their vision, ready for the video feeds from the other teams.
One by one they came on as the others breached the ship.
Eric and Gabrielle searched the room quietly while they waited for Bethany Anne and Michael to breach the far side.
“I can’t believe Jean did this.” Gabrielle indicated a small-but-heavy storage tank mounted on her rifle. “If it weren’t for my vampire strength, I wouldn’t even be able to lift it.”
“Just be glad she likes you so much,” Eric told her. “She didn’t give me a flamethrower.”
Scott’s voice barked over the comm. “We have contact, and oh my good lord these fuckers are weird-looking.” There was a burst from his and Darryl’s rifles. “They seem to die just fine all the same.”
He panned his camera down to show them the attacker, a mechanoid with eight deadly limbs placed in incongruous spots around its torso. The cameras that protruded from the top of its body waved weakly and gave up.
“It makes me a little worried that the archetype for this species’ robot technology is arachnid,” Bethany Anne muttered to the channel.
Tabitha’s response was a bit muted. “I don’t know what that means, but we have them too.”
Eric looked up, hearing an ominous scratching.
“Us too,” Gabrielle confirmed. She brought up her rifle and fired at the wall by the exit on the far left. The high-velocity flechettes passed through the wall like butter, and a metallic screech filled the room.
“It means,” Bethany Anne told them between shots, “that people tend to make things in their own image.”
Eric darted over and took out the two arachnobots Gabrielle’s blind shooting had missed.
They collapsed in a shower of sparks and were still.
Eric shouldered his rifle as they walked up the corridor. “That wasn’t too bad.”
Gabrielle rolled her eyes, hearing differently. She unslung her rifle and flipped the switch for the flamethrower. “You just had to say something, huh?”
Eric gave her a puzzled look but readied his rifle, since he knew better than to dismiss his wife’s instincts.
Then he heard the echo of a multitude of approaching feet.
“Now I really wish I had the flamethrower,” he bitched as the lights went out at the other end of the corridor, covered by the arachnobots on every inch of the walls and ceiling. He turned the dial on his rifle to switch to electrified scattershot. “Or an EMP. Now that would have been useful.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Quarantined System, Inside the Perimeter
The High Tortuga fleet had the alien ship surrounded on all
sides. It sent out wave after wave of spheres to retaliate against the heavy pounding it was taking from the dreadnoughts.
The dreadnoughts had disgorged their smaller ships and fighter Pods in response, and the void was repeatedly lit with silent explosions, high-velocity kinetics, and arcing plasma fire going both ways.
In short, it was as if Hell had come visiting without the volume having been turned up.
Pilot Brock Sanders darted in and out amid the chaos, dropping mines which would activate if a ship passed that didn’t perform the correct electronic handshake.
The sheer scale of the destruction completely awed Brock. He’d seen some major shit, but nothing as big as this.
The space all around him was littered with defunct spheres and pieces of shattered Pods. The dreadnoughts held the line, steadily beating back the larger spheres from a distance while the smaller ships like Brock’s did the up close and personal work.
“We’re getting to the end of this load,” the EI informed him.
“Let’s swing back, then,” Brock decided. “We’ll grab another load and finish it on the next run.” His Pod suddenly lurched. “What was that?”
There was no response from the EI.
Brock saw the second kinetic coming. His eyes widened in the brief second between the realization he was going to die and his Pod being blown to pieces.
Inside the alien ship, Bethany Anne and Michael stood back-to-back at the T-junction in the arachnobot-infested corridor. The inner ship was crawling with masses of the spider-legged bots, forcing them to battle for every step they gained.
“Every turn we make, we find more of the creepy fuckers,” Bethany Anne bitched. She blasted the seething mass with a volley of energy balls, and the next wave crawled over the jerking legs of the ones she’d just taken out.
“Are these our aliens, then?” Michael wondered as he waved his hand and sent a web of lightning out to disable more of the robots. “Surely something so simple could not have created all this?” He flicked the hand toward the ceiling and the arachnobots rained down and landed on the floor, twitching with residual electricity.
The Kurtherian Endgame Boxed Set: Books 1 - 4 - Payback is a Bitch, Compelling Evidence, Through the Fire and Flame, All's Fair in Blood and War Page 41