by Lauren Esker
"Useless," Lyr muttered aloud in contempt, causing the rearmost of Tamir's complement of space marines to glance back at him. It was galling, having to fight to protect people who weren't even prepared to fight on their own behalf ...
As if in rebuke, memory sucker-punched him. He remembered teaching kids to fight, the motley bunch of younger fellow slaves that he, as the older child, had been put in charge of. Telling them, You fight not to kill, but to protect. You are strong and fast and well-armed. It's your duty to use the weapons that you have, the ones the Galateans gave you and the ones the Founders made you with, not to bully or hurt without reason, but to protect others weaker than you. Protecting others is your greatest responsibility.
He'd really believed it, then. Young. Idealistic. Stupid.
Anyway, some of the humans were fighting back. Lyr's gaze was drawn to a fight going on outside one of the vehicles in the roadside parking area. The human woman was dwarfed by the huge Hnee warrior looming over her, a man with the upper body of a human and the lower body of a hoofed beast. He could have trampled her to death without breaking a sweat. And the woman had no weapons. There was no gleam of gold or silver cuffs at her wrists, not even any sign of the handheld weapons that were used on the galaxy's more primitive planets.
But still she fought, hopelessly, courageously. She used some kind of small chemical weapon on the Hnee, and when that didn't work, attacked him with her bare hands. She started to run, but only a few steps, and then looked back to see if he was chasing her.
It was evident to Lyr that she was protecting something in that vehicle, maybe a child or another member of her family. Like a mother bird pretending to have a broken wing, she lured the Hnee warrior away, even though it would likely mean her capture or death.
That woman had the courage of a dragon.
He unfastened his seat restraint and stood in a single swift motion.
Tamir glanced back, noticing the movement. He was a good commander, always conscious of what his men were doing. "Where are you going?"
"Tell me when we're over them," Lyr said, and turned toward the back of the ship.
"Lyr, dammit!"
"The jump won't hurt me." Lyr looked back over his shoulder, mouth twisting in a humorless smile. "I'll clear the way for your non-expendable crew."
Lyr heard Tamir curse as he went into the back of the ship, but he wasn't ordered back to the bridge. The only way to really force Lyr to do anything was to use the collar on him, and so far, Tamir hadn't done that.
Tamir would have the collar controller with him, though. By law he wasn't allowed to leave the cruiser with a slave-soldier on his team and not bring the means to punish him for disobedience.
Lyr opened the cargo door. Wind whipped at his hair as he leaned out. Despite the immediacy of the visuals on the ship's screens, they hadn't reached the battlefield yet. Instead they were flying low over a dark field of some kind of crops. It had been a while since he'd been on a planet. He'd forgotten how much sensory input there was, so many smells and sounds, even in a place like this. They passed over a cluster of houses, marked with scattered lights, probably giving the inhabitants a story to tell their grandchildren if they happened to be looking up at the wrong moment.
Lyr smelled smoke, but he didn't see the battlefield until their ship came upon it abruptly, and suddenly it was beneath them. The scene was even more chaotic in person than through the ship's sensors, with the screams of the fleeing humans, the rough shouts of the pirates, the roiling smoke from flaming vehicles filling the night.
He found himself scanning the battlefield for the Hnee warrior he'd seen on the ship's long-range imaging. The Hnee had hold of his captive now, but she was struggling and kicking like a cornered wildcat.
Lyr had felt little except anger since his last septmates had died, but this was, at least, a new kind of anger, a surge of protective fury that rushed through him and made his dragon flare inside him. A woman with that kind of fighting spirit deserved better than to be taken by filthy pirate slavers. He would help her first.
He jumped.
There was a brief surge of exhilaration, his dragon rising in him only to be thwarted by the collar. He landed with a painful shock, rolled, sprang to his feet and slashed with his arm blades at a startled pirate.
His blades glanced off a shield. Lyr hissed in frustration. The pirates must have stolen Galatean weapons, giving them the ability to form shields around their bodies as the Galatean marines did.
Lyr himself hadn't bothered raising his shields. The idea of being shot didn't bother him, and it was easier to fight without it. You had to either deal with losing the effectiveness of your edged weapons, or constantly drop and raise your shields.
Instead, he grabbed the pirate's head in both hands, his fingers slipping on the shield, and fired full blast. The energy wave seared Lyr's hands as it rebounded from the shield, even on stun, but the pirate was momentarily blinded, and before he could recover, Lyr picked him up and threw him at the Hnee who had captured the human woman.
There was nothing quite like the element of surprise.
***
Meri had no chance to escape. The centaur ran her down easily and grabbed her arm in a bruising grip. She was dragged off her feet, stumbling along for a few steps before she lost her footing. She couldn't understand the vicious words he hurled at her in his strange language, but she could guess the gist of it. His curled lip and sneering tone suggested that what was going to happen to her once he got her onto his ship wouldn't be pretty.
Cora, stay down, stay hidden, please ...
Meri hadn't lived in cities most of her adult life without developing a few self-defense tricks, but they simply didn't work on someone who was half horse. There weren't any balls to dig her knee into. She remembered a female friend at her previous workplace telling her that the neck was as good a target and often easier to hit, but he was too tall. Meri wasn't short herself, but even standing on tiptoe she wouldn't have been able to reach the neck of a man whose torso was mounted on a horse body big enough to ride, let alone while being dragged along, struggling to keep on her feet.
So she twisted around and sank her teeth into the meaty part of his forearm.
She had never bitten another person before, but she ground down with all her strength. He bellowed in pain and she tasted blood. (Ew! Ick!)
But to her dismay, he didn't let go. Instead he smacked her hard across the face, and as she reeled, hauled her off her feet by the strap of her clownfish purse. Meri was too dazed and scared to think of squirming out of it. Instead she tried to kick at him, but couldn't get a good angle.
Spitting angry words at her, he held her off the ground and placed a fist under her chin. She almost went cross-eyed trying to look down and see what he was doing. There were green sparks glimmering on his silver bracelet. She'd seen what those green bursts had done to that car, and panic surged through her. At least she had the satisfaction of seeing the half-moon imprint of her teeth on his skin.
She grabbed his powerfully muscled arm and tried to push it away, but he was much too strong.
And then, out of nowhere, something slammed into him.
The impact knocked him down. Meri went sprawling as he released her, and a bolt of green energy sizzled past her ear and spent itself harmlessly on the night.
The centaur thrashed around, his hooves slipping on the pavement. It was one of his own men who had landed on top of him. As Meri pushed herself up to her hands and knees, she realized that while she was engaged in her own life-and-death struggle, a new kind of chaos had broken out around her. The night had erupted in yelling and cursing and sizzling green bolts of energy. Everywhere she looked, the aliens seemed to be fighting each other.
No—a new faction had arrived on the scene, and they were attacking the others. The newcomers were also cat-people, but they were all wearing dark blue sleeveless uniforms with gold piping. Some kind of alien cops or military?
The centaur heaved off
the limp body of his companion, just as someone else came out of the night. From her position on the ground, all Meri could see was a fast-moving shape, intercepting the centaur as he tried to reach for her again.
She was shocked at how fast they moved. Green blasts of light dazzled her, and then the centaur was down on the ground, still thrashing, with her ... rescuer? ... on his back. The newcomer seized the centaur's tangled chestnut hair and pulled his head back. He laid his other arm across the centaur's neck, and Meri stared in shock as a blade appeared directly out of his forearm, tearing through the skin to press against the centaur's neck.
The newcomer wasn't a cat-person like most of the others. His skin was a gleaming golden bronze that shimmered with hints of other colors. He looked like a metal statue, but was clearly made of flesh and bone. And he was about to kill another person in cold blood.
"Stop!" Meri cried.
He couldn't possibly have understood her—but he did stop, and turned to look at her. His face was beautiful, if that was indeed a word that could be applied to those sharp features, so hard and still that he might have been a gorgeous metal statue. The blade pressed against the centaur's throat. Chest heaving, the centaur stared wildly around with white-rimmed, terrified eyes. Spittle flecked his lips and beard.
"Stop," Meri said again. She pushed herself up to her knees. Her legs were shaking so badly she wasn't sure if she could stand. "I—I know he's an evil man. I know what he was going to do to me. But please don't kill him like that."
The beautiful stranger with the cold bronze-statue face stared at her. Then the blade slid back into his arm. He shook the centaur's head roughly by the hair and placed a hand against the man's temple. There was a quick green flash from his bracelet, and the centaur's eyes rolled up as he slumped to the ground. The flanks of his horse body heaved as he breathed.
"Thank you," Meri said shakily.
The stranger vaulted off the horse-man's back. He took hold of Meri and set her on her feet with strong hands so gentle, now, that it was hard to believe he'd been about to cut a man's throat a minute ago.
She stared up at him, amazed to find herself unafraid. He looked nothing at all like the others—nothing like anything she'd seen or imagined before.
Soft iridescent colors chased each other across his golden-bronze skin whenever he moved, as if his body was made of light. He was bare to the waist, and short spikes curved from his shoulders and the backs of his forearms, sharp and glistening under the parking lot's floodlights. His hair was a blue so dark it was almost black, oddly spiky, more like feathers than hair; it flowed in a loose mane past his shoulders.
Most striking of all, he had horns. Not big ones, just small golden horns sweeping back from his temples and curled slightly at the tips.
He looked down at her with tilted silver eyes above high cheekbones. His masculine beauty took her breath away, and somewhere inside her, something stirred—something that had been frozen to ice and walled away since Aaron's death.
"Who are you?" she asked, forgetting he wouldn't be able to understand her.
He answered, but the language he spoke was incomprehensible, musical and lilting, sounding almost like a symphony with the resonance of his deep voice. Then his head snapped up and he looked past her and brought an arm down across her back. As he did so, Meri felt tingling across her body, like a sudden rush of static electricity, raising the hairs on her arms. There was a green flash and when she looked around, she saw one of the cat-men lowering his hand with green light glimmering on his bracelet, looking furious. Her bronze-statue alien had just shielded them somehow.
The alien stranger gripped Meri's shoulder and said something to her urgently. The words might be unfamiliar, but she understood the gist of it. Get yourself somewhere safe! For a moment it was almost as if someone had spoken those words directly into his mind. His silver stare on her was so intent that she could believe, for an instant, that he'd somehow imprinted the words on her brain.
Meri nodded and, when he released her, she hurried behind a parked car, the only shelter nearby.
***
Lyr hadn't intended to use telepathy on the Earth woman. He just needed her to understand, to get to safety, and then suddenly she did understand and was scrambling for a hiding place.
He had never heard anyone mention telepathy as a quality of ordinary, unmodified Earth humans, but he felt as if she had used it on him earlier. He had been about to kill the Hnee pirate. He knew Tamir would disapprove, but Lyr felt no sympathy for the pirate; he was a slaver, most likely a killer and rapist as well.
But the woman had asked him not to. He couldn't understand her language, but the meaning came through loud and clear.
And he'd stopped.
He still wasn't sure why.
Having raised his shields to protect both himself and the woman, he left them up and closed the distance between himself and the pirate who'd shot at them. The man was shielded, so any attempts to shoot him would be deflected by his shields just as his plasma burst had bounced off Lyr's. Instead, Lyr leaped and kicked him with all his considerable draconic strength. Most of the force of the blow was absorbed by the shield, but the physical impact still knocked the startled pirate to the ground. He clearly wasn't expecting it. By now, these pirates had probably had some experience with the Galatean military, and Galatean soldiers weren't normally trained to fight up close. They would stay back and shoot from a distance, as Tamir's troop of soldiers were doing, trying to keep the pirates away from their ship and herd them into a group. Shields dulled the impact of blows on both sides, so hand-to-hand combat was generally considered ineffective against a shielded target.
Lyr had no patience with that. He jumped on the pirate and stomped him, kicked him again when he tried to get up. His attacks slid off the shield—it felt like fighting someone who was covered with soap—but the pirate was too confused to know what to do. He couldn't get up because every time he tried, Lyr knocked him down again.
There was something very satisfying about being able to stomp him as much as Lyr wanted. Of course, it would be infinitely more satisfying if he were actually doing damage to the pirate's face. Lyr looked around for something that might be heavy enough to drain and eventually collapse the shield.
One of the wheeled human vehicles was nearby, this one damaged by the pirates; it was flipped on its side, with its tires sliced through by the pirates' energy weapons, smoking faintly. Lyr braced himself and lifted it with a grunt of effort. The pirate tried to shoot him in the back; Lyr felt a dim burst of heat as his shield absorbed the plasma attack.
He turned around, holding the vehicle over his head. The pirate stared at him, too shocked to keep shooting. Even Galateans weren't strong enough to hold a couple tons of metal over their heads. But they weren't dragons. No one was as strong as a dragon in his prime.
Lyr grinned savagely. His arms ached from the strain, but it was worth it for the look on the pirate's face as Lyr swung his arms over and down, and brought the vehicle down on top of the pirate as hard as he could. The pirate's shield managed to absorb enough of the impact to keep him from being splattered, but it shimmered and then popped like a soap bubble as the vehicle's metal body bent around the shield's former span.
Pinned and hurting a lot, but not dead, the pirate struggled feebly. Lyr stunned him in the face with a blast from his cuffs. At this close range, there might be brain damage. Good.
"Lyr!" Tamir's voice spoke into his ear through their communication link via the cuffs. "If you're done playing with your prey, we're pinned down over here. We could use an assist from the rear."
"I'm not playing," Lyr grumbled. "I've taken out two by myself. How are you doing?"
"Feeling glad we brought you along."
Tamir's voice was light, teasing. Lyr locked down his feelings. He was not enjoying this. Of course not. It didn't remind him at all of training exercises long ago, of fighting side by side with Tamir and with his sept-siblings—
Th
ey're all gone now. And Tamir is one of the enemy who enslaved you. Don't forget that.
He fired at the group of pirates who'd pinned down Tamir's team, then ducked behind one of the human vehicles. He only realized as he dropped into a crouch that it was the same one the human woman had taken shelter behind. She stared at him, wide-eyed, and Lyr had a strange urge to offer her some words of comfort, perhaps tell her things were going to be okay. Instead he settled for giving her shoulder a rough pat before he leaned around the end of the vehicle and fired at the pirates again.
Strangely enough, they didn't shoot back. Instead they started falling back, not to their ship, but in the opposite direction, running for the open grassland beside the road. Some were dragging human captives with them; others just ran.
As if they expected something extremely bad to happen in the middle of the parking lot ...
"Tamir!" Lyr shouted, over the radio and across the space between them. "Get out of there!"
Tamir looked up, cursed, and began snapping orders at his team.
Lyr had a feeling what might be coming. He curled his body around the human woman, arms wrapped loosely around her, and raised his personal shield at full strength, extending it to cover them both.
Tentatively, he felt her arms reaching back, a light and cautious touch, almost a hug.
He hadn't been hugged since—
A beam of searing light, impossibly huge and bright, stabbed out of the sky, hit the Earth structure Tamir and his marines had been using for cover, and instantaneously turned it into a fireball. Lyr tightened his grip on the woman as sparks and debris rained around them.
The light winked out an instant later, leaving orange and yellow afterimages blazoned across Lyr's retinas. The pavement was buckled and bubbling where the laser had raked across it.
That was a ship-to-surface gun, one of the big ones. Their personal shields wouldn't have stood a chance. If any of Tamir's men had been caught in that, there wouldn't be enough left of them to put in a very small box.