Brask had deduced something serious had happened. He must school his reactions better in future.
Talia hopped down from the stone seat. “Is something wrong?”
“There’s been a nuclear explosion at the farm where a woman called Ally was living. She’s like you and Brittany – gifted.”
“Frack again,” Brask whispered, staring at the ground, and likely calling up data via his more limited internal commlink. “How could that have been delivered without anything intercepting? The Doomslagger has systems monitoring airspace, as does the orbital platform. Did the shuttle register nothing incoming, Lord?”
“I don’t know, as yet.” He thought quickly, combing through what the shuttle had been doing at the farm apart from delivering Willow. There’d been several Bak-lal corpses on the property. With hindsight, one of them could have hidden an explosive device of sufficient size.
“I need to get back to the Doomslagger,” Brask snapped out.
Dassenze thought a message at the Doomslagger comm center. “I’ve ordered a shuttle to come here.” The ship sent extra emergency messages from the orbital. They were brutal. He eyed Brask and Talia. Neither was a wilting flower. “There have been seven other explosions worldwide. If the Bak-lal are resorting to random destruction, it will panic the humans.”
“We’re tougher than you think.” Talia said, determined despite her gender.
Such a curious package this female.
She licked her lips. Nervous?
“We’ve made movies about every possible disaster – from nuclear wars to meteors to Godzilla to plagues of cockroaches eating us. I’m sorry for your losses, as well as for ours, but we can survive. Especially if there’s only one of these mother-fucking factory queens to deal with.” She straightened her shoulders. “Just show us how to do it.”
The simplicity of the ignorant.
How do we show a primitive people how to defeat an enemy we haven’t defeated after centuries?
Uncertain, for once, Dassenze paused to consider his reply. Perhaps this was not the best moment to remind her of how she could potentially help – by mating with Brask. “Good.” More data blurted into his mind in an encrypted torrent.
Startling. Impossible even. The Doomslagger was launching fragthorn missiles, at the orbital.
A rumble trembled through the ground and, beyond the gardens, multiple skeins of cloud ascended to the sky. The Doomslagger had fired, with barely any provocation. One missile was targeting this city. A second rumble accompanied an eruption of light that scalded everything white in an instant. Luckily Talia had been facing away. Brask, he knew, would be fine.
More data flooded his head.
Today was a day for disasters.
“Come.” He grabbed Talia under his right arm, strode to Brask and offered his left. “Hold on tight. We’re going to the Doomslagger. She’s under attack.”
He leaped into the air, wobbling slightly until his balance asserted itself, and tore through the air. Once airborne, the location of the missile the ship had deflected was evident. The eastern suburbs of this city, Brisbane, were now a boiling mass of darkness. Luckily, it was a fragthorn missile, so radioactivity would be nil. Less luckily, it was from the orbital.
“What’s that?”
Above the roar of wind past his ears, he heard Talia swallow.
“A weapon hit part of your city. It was meant to hit our ship, the Doomslagger.”
“Oh. Ohmigod. How many...” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine.”
“The death toll will be great.”
“How?” Brask yelled.
“Something infiltrated and corrupted the strategic computing systems on both Doomslagger and the orbital. They’ve been trying to knock each other out. We here succeeded. They did not.”
He dismissed the crawl of dread across his skin. This Bak-lal would not win.
The lake was ahead, twenty seconds of flight time, though too soon to see anything. As he flew, he tilted his head, peering upward and imagining a curve of blackness and fire spilling across the sky as the platform plowed down through the atmosphere, stricken and breaking apart in flames.
“What are you looking at?” Talia asked.
“Nothing. Yet. The orbital is coming down. Soon, you’ll see the biggest structure to ever grace the skies of this planet plummeting to earth in flames and pieces. There are one thousand and forty-eight of our people on board.”
Silence met his gaze, that and a certain strain about her face, as if she were holding in emotion. It seemed this woman was sensitive to the pain of others.
Poor creature.
If he could shield her from this, he would. There were going to be many deaths during the next few days. They had almost nothing left to fight the Bak-lal.
“Their escape pods were frozen by the deliberate malfunctions. I’m recording many last messages. Some will survive, but I estimate a ninety percent casualty rate. The Bak-lal queen has accomplished terrible things today.”
“How?”
He glanced at Talia, tucked under his arm and so close. In other circumstances, he’d have kissed her by now, despite his problems with being intimate.
“I don’t know. Soon, I’ll find out.”
The emergency messages coming from the ship had become more organized, moment by moment. Data was pouring at him.
The Preyfinders were specialists in adapting to alien planets and could assess and respond as fast as any warrior. Whatever this was, it had happened lightning fast. The internal conduits had been breached, allowing corrupt viral codes to be shot up to the platform, triggering the mini war between it and the Doomslagger. Missiles had been flung by both, some had destroyed other cities on this planet.
The humans would not be happy.
They’d been out thought and outfought by this one factory queen.
Dassenze swept over the last tree barrier and the waters of the lake spread out before him. As he closed in, he visually checked the ship for damage. She’d surfaced and beached in the shallows. A small hole darkened one end, with water lapping in. The stern of the Doomslagger, the Preyfinder’s midget class attack ship and transport, had been penetrated by something unknown.
He landed feet-first on the upper hull and ran to a halt before releasing both his passengers. “Get her inside, Brask. Take care. A Bak-lal seems to have destroyed part of the hull before entering.
The man’s eyes almost bugged out at that information. Destroying the hull, rapidly, without the guns and weapons of a capital ship on hand, was about as easy as warping through a black hole on a bicycle.
Chapter 5
The factory queen purred, lying in her sealed cavity deep within her body. Nothing could get to her brain without dying. Safe and snug, she gorged on the data stolen from the Preyfinder ship and sent to her via a direct link as fast as the implant in the witch could feed it to her.
Sucked straight from the maw of her enemy. So many pretty secrets. So much destruction from their missiles. Her little rock witch had done well.
She’d never have dared try such a method before, a direct comm link, but for those moments she’d been free, in command of all communication space on this planet. The humans didn’t count, of course.
Such a pity their data had shown one of her nuclear devices might have killed the most prized witch of all – Ally.
It had been a daring gambit and striking boldly came with its penalties.
Best of all, she’d crippled the Preyfinders and could take a more open route to conquering this planet. Her wild nerve chewers, as many as she could manufacture, might do well if released in the cities.
Her cameras found the long room where they were assembled. It was an oasis of metal rising and falling, of flashing lights and welders. A pity she had no functioning robot assemblers.
Rust and chaos. Rust and chaos, she muttered.
The humans could assemble, but slowly.
All her human workers wore gloves and protective clothing but
one was scratching his ankle and had lost sight of the chewer he’d left on the table. It had fallen to the floor and lay upside down, wriggling.
She chortled, clicking her distant limbs and relays, watching as the little cockroach-sized device flipped itself upright and raced for the bared ankle of the worker. It burrowed in, sending spurts of blood across the floor. The worker hopped about screeching.
Yes, these would do well. And now, she giggled to herself in electronic buzzes, now she had leisure time to experiment on more humans. Gills had been easy. What next? Tentacles? Telescoping arms? Teeth that bit like sped-up sharks? The horror stories on the human internet had fed her for years. The spiciness in this strange planet’s soil seemed to mingle with the mythology and fantastical stories inside her mind and spew...endless possibilities.
The single message she’d sped to the fleet had spawned a single reply from them before the enemy had closed down all intergalactic communications from Earth.
They’d seemed puzzled by some of her sentiments and her way with the sacred code. They’d warned her of heresy and insanity from too much loneliness and separation. They knew nothing.
She was going to do magic on this planet. Then the fleet could eat her metal dust.
*****
Talia followed Brask through the ship. White metal and plastic structure. Brightly colored signage she couldn’t read. The floor was on a slight tilt. Muted sirens blared for a while before switching off and at the same time the lights flickered and dimmed. People hurried past, most seemed worried yet were efficiently going about their tasks. From their armor and weapons or their less warlike clothes, she gathered most of those manning this ship were warriors, few were female, and some were perhaps support staff.
If the women were only here for sexual use, they were going to be damn surprised by her. She clenched one fist but kept walking. Weaponless though, and it was making her want to hit someone – mostly Brask. The alien had shucked his coat and was striding along before her in that black-and-white armor, with her Edo sword, still in his hand.
“I’m going to the room where Dassenze is. Okay?” he tossed over his shoulder.
She nodded.
“It’s where the hull was breached. Things could be messy. Stay out if blood and a dead human woman bothers you.”
He cared enough to tell her? Maybe he just didn’t want her vomiting on his ship?
When they reached the room, another armored alien was examining the door, which hung off massive hinges that looked as if they’d been chewed on.
Inside, Dassenze stood over a corpse. The room was open to the lake. A gash in the three foot thick hull meant lake water lapped part of the floor, reaching to the foot of the corpse.
Yes, it was damn bloody. The wall and console beyond the woman’s body were splattered with red and her destroyed head was more pudding consistency than skull. Long strands and clumps of pink hair and scalp lay in the blood. She swallowed. Packaged samples in a plastic ziplock bag weren’t quite the same.
For a second, she tuned out the voices of Dassenze and Brask, only to be startled by someone grasping her upper arm. Brask was peering at her. His hand, his ungloved, unarmored hand.
Even with the gore about them, she was aware of the indentation of her skin and the pressure of every finger. His touch warmed her in an embarrassingly intimate way. From the startled blinking he was doing, maybe he felt it too.
“Will you be okay...Talia?”
Damn, that sounded good on his tongue too. Her name resonated. Mentally, she shook herself but she still couldn’t bring herself to back out of his hold. Which made her wonder if he would let her go, if she asked.
Fuck. Dead body, remember? Poor girl. Where had she come from?
“Perhaps you shouldn’t have brought her here?”
The question from Dassenze had Brask tighten his grip for a second. A muscle twitched on his face. Quietly, he addressed her again, “Talia?”
“I will be okay.” She paused and exhaled, then grimaced at glimpsing yet another splash of blood on the floor. “Yes, thank you.” Then and only then, she stared pointedly at his hand about her arm.
“Good.” He stroked her arm with his thumb, once, slowly, before releasing her.
Those blue cheek grooves: wild and untamed, they said. Scary man. Scary big man. Yes, she could probably take him in sword combat but that wouldn’t count in bed when he could simply squash all the resistance out of her.
No, no, no. Dead body. Focus on that. Not his body.
It was all the nanochem’s fault.
Dassenze had watched the whole exchange, like a damn voyeuristic hawk. “Let’s go outside to talk.”
When they’d gathered in the corridor, he started speaking again.
“There’s no reason for secrets now. This woman...” He jerked his chin toward the door. “Had some power that allowed her to dissolve the hull and then get into the processors and mess everything up in a very precise way.”
“What?” She pulled a disbelieving face. “You’re saying she’s a computer witch?”
His reply came slow, as if he wasn’t sure of the truth. “More that she had some sort of power over metal? Part of the hull structure is metal. The ability to understand and tap into our comm network seems to have been Bak-lal science. And this mess?”
He’d brought a small, hi-tech looking box from the room. When he held it at an angle, a blue fluid oozed and dripped from several points.
“I would have thought this entire attack impossible before now. We’ve lost all the shuttles except the one that was here. Lost any way to power this ship enough to fly. Many power conduits are leaking this fluid. This Bak-lal is steps ahead of us and most of the nations of this world will be addressing their own problems. Australia may get aid, but defeating this factory queen will be our responsibility.”
“So...” Brask stared into space. “We’re on our own, Lord?”
“Yes. This planet is also in quarantine. We fix this, ourselves. I’m going to consider our many options then set out a plan.”
“Lord, I’m ready to set in motion any strategy you decide on. The Preyfinders are used to working on their own. We can still destroy her, once we find her.”
So much had happened. Surely there was a positive? The spatter and hiss of the liquid as it hit the floor drew her to bend over. Thank god. It wasn’t eating the floor. Thinking out loud, as she straightened, she asked, “Do we know where she is? Has this revealed her to us? Can we attack her?”
Neither of them did more than stare, possibly at her cleavage. Surely not? The frozen silence continued. Had she stepped across some protocol law by speaking? Was there someone making rabbit ears behind her? Nope. Boobs it was.
A familiar heat crept onto her cheeks. She resisted the temptation to tell them they were only tits. Why was this so-called god so keen on her? “Speak, boys...men...aliens.”
Dassenze was the first to regain his speech. “No. We still don’t know where she is. We are still in the dark.”
In unison she and Brask swore out a “Fuck.”
The man had lost his frack anyway. Learning, slowly.
“This is where we earthlings say we’re up shit creek without a paddle.”
Chapter 6
Three gnarly trees with the twisted limbs and faded, gray-green foliage of Australian plant life overlooked the two-lane strip of black bitumen highway. Potholes were abundant.
Ally blinked, feeling the dust in her eyes. Seeing life here, any life, full stop, was good.
From their perch on the branches, three crows watched them approach.
They’d trekked through the night and Ally’s sneakers were full of sand and grit. Pieces of dirt were currently wearing away part of her ankle and big toe, despite her emptying her shoe and brushing off her feet, twice. They’d seen headlights in the distance, hours ago. If that had been a mirage, it was a night one, which she was sure wasn’t possible.
The distance must have been deceptive.
&n
bsp; It was only now with the sun breasting the eastern horizon to their left that they’d found the road.
“Thirsty,” she croaked then smiled apologetically. “Sorry.” They all were.
“I know, love. Wish we had some water. Forgot to pack. Not like me.” Betty smiled back then took Ally’s hand. “Least we found some trees.”
“Yes.”
They were all speaking quietly with minimum words. Anything to conserve energy. Rimmil had shed the upper half of his armor and had left it miles back and now only had a close-fitting ivory shirt to cover his torso – something that would normally have her staring nonstop, but she was too tired to care about man flesh. Even his.
They sat under the trees and each was surely praying for a car to pass by. A rain cloud would be nice too. Both at once would be best. Ally tried to run her tongue across her lips but the cracks made her go ouch then stop.
She watched one of the bolder crows which had hopped onto a low branch. It cocked first one eye then the other at her. Perhaps it was wondering whether they were food or foe? If it was alive, there must be water nearby.
“Can you eat crow?” she asked.
Rimmil chuckled. “The birds above? I would think so. First you must catch one.”
“Uhhh. Your gun?” She nodded at the holstered and shiny long gun he carried strung across to his back. Either the man had a thing for red, or they color matched their weapons to their armor.
“This?” He touched the butt where it projected above his shoulder. “If I use this on that bird.” He pointed. “It will be disintegrated into feathers and bits of flesh. You’d have to suck it off the ground.”
Betty turned her mouth down. “I might take you up on that in a day.”
“Yuck. Not me.” She lay back, using her forearms to prop herself up. “We’ll get rescued soon. We have to.”
And who would rescue Willow? She never lost the sinking feeling in her stomach, worrying. If this kept up, she’d have ulcers. Serve her right. Losing her cousin was bad. Losing her because she’d done something wrong was worse.
“I wish Willow was here,” she whispered.
“I know.” Betty sat with her arms around her knees. She stared out at the road. “I wish that too.”
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