Slender Face dipped, rolled, and backpedaled with the best of them to keep clear of Jarek’s flurry of sword strikes, his skin darkening slowly to scaly green battle-hide. The raknoth was quick, but that went without saying.
Jarek was about to reverse direction and rotate into another strike when Al cried out. “Roll!”
Jarek threw himself to the left without hesitation. Al was literally the eyes in the back of his head. When he said move, Jarek moved.
What felt like a hunk of steel rebar clipped the back of his legs as he went, and he came back to his feet in time to see Toady stumbling straight into Slender Face after apparently having tripped on Jarek’s leg while trying to surprise him from behind.
“Good call, Mr. Robot,” Jarek said, peddling back toward the others while he had a moment to breathe.
Gunfire cracked from overhead as the enemy forces—the Overlord’s people, he was pretty sure—opened up on the four of them and the handful of armed Unity fighters approaching through the dwindling crowd. Jarek cringed at the lack of discrimination the shooters practiced for foe and fleeing innocents. A few town folk fell, along with one of Myers’ men. The rest of the armed Unity guards hunkered down behind whatever they could and began returning fire.
A few shots pinged off Fela’s armor. To the left, Rachel was dealing with the new threat in her own way.
A thin arc of spent lead slugs was accumulating a few feet in front of her, courtesy of that amazing bullet catcher of hers. Alaric and Lea were crouched behind her for cover.
A few more bullets slammed to a halt in mid-air a few feet from Rachel as Jarek watched. Alaric leaned around her and raised a revolver, his breath condensing in the air the bullet catcher had drained of heat to power its arcane function. Alaric fired twice, and a dark-clad enemy soldier fell from a transport above to topple lifelessly to the soft earth.
In response, the enemy fire picked up. The transports were pushing their way down to land in the quad when Toady and Slender Face, now both in scaly green raknoth mode, pressed in to renew their attack. Mosen joined them, and after that, things got hectic.
Jarek lost track of everything outside his immediate vicinity as he fell into a deadly dance with his three adversaries. He moved through sequence after sequence of attacks, dodges, and counters with trance-like focus. Kick there. Pivot. Swipe-dodge-riposte. Duck. Rising sweep. Take a hit. Give one back.
Don’t stop.
Impossibly strong arms grabbed him from behind. Jarek dropped his sword, grabbed an arm, and dropped his hips back, pivoting as he went to flip Slender Face over his shoulder and slam him to the ground. He raised an armored boot to stomp down on the raknoth’s head, then tensed as he caught sight of Toady charging in on his side.
There wasn’t time to avoid the tackle. The instant before Toady hit, though, he was bowled off course by what could have been an invisible semi-truck.
Score one for Goldilocks.
Toady flew past Jarek instead of through him, and Jarek thanked his stars that he had a strong-willed arcanist watching his back.
By then Slender Face had rolled out from under him. Jarek grappled with an oncoming Mosen and managed to turn and throw him at a now-oncoming Slender Face, buying him a moment to scoop the Whacker back up from the ground.
The moment of peace only made him an open target to the enemy soldiers. Several bullets slammed into Fela’s armor before Mosen and the raknoth stepped back within potential-friendly-fire range.
Jarek shook the shots off and brandished his sword at his three foes. “Bring it, bitches!”
“Not your finest work, sir,” Al said.
“Guess I’ll try to do better next time I’m fighting three—”
Slender Face lunged forward recklessly, as if he thought he’d caught Jarek with his pants down. Apparently he hadn’t gotten the message that Jarek was a multitasker.
“—superhuman assholes!” Jarek cried as he darted aside, swinging his back leg around to leverage a hard overhand strike.
The blade cleaved Slender Face’s right hand off at mid-forearm. Jarek followed up with a powerful sidekick to the stunned raknoth’s ribs and a loud cry of, “Booyah!” He readied his sword, staring down Mosen and Toady. “Who’s next for the choppy-choppy?”
“Jarek!” Rachel cried. “We’ve got a situation over here!”
“Sit-rep, Al.” He couldn’t afford to drop his eyes from his opponents, not when they could cover dozens of yards at a leap.
“Five of eight Unity men down, sir,” Al said. “Enemy forces still unloading.”
Well that was the opposite of good. And things weren’t going much better in his own fight. As satisfying as removing Slender Face’s hand had been, the raknoth was hardly incapacitated. The scaly bastard was already pulling himself to his feet. And—
A sound like a pride of lions roaring in perfect synchrony rattled the air.
“And there appears to be a third raknoth here, sir.”
“Gee thanks, Al,” Jarek said. “I hadn’t noticed.”
This was beyond not good. If they didn’t do something to balance the odds—and do it quickly—things were going to go downhill fast once raknoth number three cut through Unity’s meager forces and moved in on him and the others. Unfortunately, the raknoth decided to skip step one completely.
“Six o’clock incoming, sir!” Al cried.
The thudding impacts of the raknoth’s footsteps had been warning enough.
Jarek reluctantly dropped his eyes from Mosen and Toady and whirled to strike at the new threat.
The rust-colored raknoth darted under the top-down diagonal cut with disturbing agility and delivered an open-palm strike to Jarek’s lowered shoulder as he flew by. Even in passing, the raknoth’s blow was substantial enough to send Jarek tumbling haphazardly toward Rachel and the others.
They managed to scatter before his armored bulk plowed into them. Alaric grunted in pain as a shot found him now outside of Rachel’s protective barrier. Jarek scrambled to his feet and shielded the old cowboy with his armored body while Rachel and Lea closed back in tight. Jarek handed Alaric off to Lea and spun around, expecting to find a raknoth flying down on them from above.
Toady and the rusty-hided newcomer were both gathering themselves to leap when they jolted as if they’d received a strong shock. Behind them, Mosen and Slender Face were looking around, likewise confused.
The three raknoth whipped around in unison to face the woods where they’d tumbled with Haldin and Alton earlier.
Jarek realized the quad had gone quiet, and now everyone seemed to be following the gazes of the three raknoth.
There was a low hum from the tree line, steadily growing closer. Jarek eyed the nearest of the three raknoth, Rusty, and wondered if he should strike while they were distracted.
Before he could, the hum intensified—not really in volume so much as in the way it rumbled through Jarek’s chest.
He glanced back just as a large, dark shape crested the tree line.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Jarek mumbled as the ship that was unmistakably the one they’d been looking for pulled into view.
It was fairly large, longer than it was wide, and its loosely cylindrical form rippled with fluid, bulbar shapes, as if the hull had been cast over top of an array of bubbles of varying sizes. What that hull was made of, he couldn’t say, but it shimmered oddly from dark black to light purple at different spots and shifted fluidly as the ship glided smoothly forward.
“I don’t believe that ship is of this planet, sir,” Al said as the craft came to a resting hover overhead.
“No kidding.”
The three raknoth ahead were statuesque, staring up at the ship with their fiery red orbs. Rachel, too, was looking in the general direction of the ship with a distant blank look, like she was otherwise engaged.
Silent tension hung in the air for several seconds, and then, without so much as a honk, the strange ship turned and shot off to the northwest with impressive speed.
>
Everyone seemed to snap back into their right minds as it went. Jarek tensed, waiting for the fighting to resume and cursing himself for not taking his shot when he’d had the opening.
Instead of charging them, though, Rusty turned toward his ships. He didn’t say a word, but enemy soldiers began funneling hurriedly back into the transports as if he’d roared the order.
Creepy.
“You too,” Rusty said to Mosen and the other two raknoth, who were apparently his underlings. Mosen opened his mouth to say something, but Rusty silenced him with a crimson power glare.
Mosen looked at Jarek and behind him to Alaric with a snarl, then he fell in line behind his retreating raknoth allies.
Rusty watched them go before turning that fiery glare on Jarek.
Jarek had seen some scary looks in his day, but this one had to take the cake. Where Toady and Slender Face were mid-shift—hided but still human-ish in appearance—Rusty was in full-on raknoth mode: his smooth skin completely replaced by scaly hide and his human features dramatically shifted toward something more beastly and reptilian. He stood with all the confidence and authority of a fearsome warrior. The rust red color, like old, dried blood on his hide, only added to the effect.
“Next time we meet,” he said, his voice low and strong, “I will take pleasure in ending you.”
Jarek swallowed, glad for the cover of his faceplate, as the raknoth turned and strode to the smallest of the three ships.
He half considered going after him for a moment, trying to end the raknoth now that his allies were all loaded up. No. Better not to press their luck.
Whatever the hell had just happened between the raknoth and that strange ship, it looked like Rusty and his forces were willing to forget about Unity to go after the thing, and he wasn’t about to give them reason to do otherwise.
Rusty hopped up to an open hatch, and all three of the ships promptly lifted up and rocketed off after the strange ship. Okay, hell, might as well just say it: after the alien ship.
They watched them go in silence, tension thick in the air as they waited to be sure the enemy forces wouldn’t decide to swoop back and resume the assault.
The ships finally disappeared over the far tree line, and they all let out a collective breath.
“Okay,” Lea said, eyes wide. “What the hell was that?”
“Well,” Jarek said, “I don’t know if it quite fit the giant flying dildo mold, but I’m pretty sure that was the ship we’re looking for.”
“Your friends from the woods?” Alaric asked, his voice strained.
“I have a feeling, yeah.” Jarek moved to check on Alaric’s wound, but the old fighter pushed him away and muttered something about it just being a graze.
Rachel was still staring after the long-gone ship with an utterly vacant expression.
“Hey.” Jarek laid a hand on her shoulder. “What’s up? We have wounded that need help.”
At his touch, she snapped back with a sharp breath and turned a disoriented look over toward Myers and his men.
They started for the Unity fighters side by side, Lea and Alaric trailing along behind them. More people were showing up at the quad now, some only poking their heads out of nearby buildings, others rushing to Myers and the others to offer them aid.
“So much for Alton and Haldin staying put,” Jarek said quietly to Rachel as they walked. “Guess we’re back at knocking on doors to ask awkward questions if we want to find them again.”
“Maybe not.” Rachel gave one last disheveled glance in the direction the ship had disappeared before meeting his eyes with a grave look. “I know where they’re going.”
10
As heavy as the fighting had been, only four of Unity’s people were dead.
It probably said something about Rachel’s current mental state that the word only appeared anywhere in the proximity of the thought that four of her fellow community members had been killed in a pointless attack.
Maybe too much fighting and bloodshed in the past week had left her raw to it. Maybe she was half-comforted by dark thoughts of how much worse it could have been. Maybe—and if she was being honest, this one was probably the winner—she was just too stunned to process much of anything after what she’d just learned: the part that she’d left off when she’d told Jarek she knew where Haldin and Alton were going.
The part where Haldin had reached down telepathically from the hovering alien ship to tell her they knew what had happened to her mother and her family—and, more importantly, why it had happened.
It was a lot to process.
She looked around the quad in a daze, taking in the aftermath of their brief but furious battle. On top of Unity’s four dead, several enemy troops had fallen as well. Plenty more from both sides were wounded, either directly from the engagement or because they were caught in the crossfire by freak misses and ricochets as the conflict unfolded. She stared at the swirling mass of noise and rushing bodies, thinking that she should do something to help, but no matter how hard she thought it, nothing seemed to happen.
At some point, John found her. She recognized him by the bone-crushing hug he wrapped her in. He exchanged a few words with Jarek. She was pretty sure she pitched in a few words as well, but when John left to help their people a minute later, she couldn’t have said what they’d talked about.
She found her feet carrying her away from the chaos to a quiet corner. Jarek came to settle down next to her, followed shortly by Lea and Alaric, who was pressing a small cloth to the graze wound on his left arm. Lea was chock full of nervous energy in the wake of the battle. Thankfully, Jarek was willing to field her outpouring of questions. So Rachel sat there, only distantly listening as he recounted their meeting with Haldin the arcanist and Alton the raknoth.
The pair had been enough of an enigma on their own. Add in the stuff about the human-raknoth blood tie, Alton’s decidedly ominous reaction to the mention of the rakul, and, most importantly, the question of how the hell her mom was connected to any of this, and it was too much to process in the aftermath of the battle.
Sometime later, when the wounded had been triaged and carted away and most of Unity had shifted their attention to talking about what the hell had just happened, John and Myers came to find them.
At John’s suggestion, they left the quad and moved to one of the conference rooms in the town hall to talk. Shocked and/or tired and beaten as they were, no one saw fit to say much on the way over.
“Okay,” John finally said when they were all sitting in the rich conference room around the long, glossy table. “Who were they, and why were they here?”
“Pretty sure they belonged to the Overlord,” Jarek said. “Big scary raknoth who owns what’s left of New York Cit—”
“I’ve heard of him,” John said.
“Right. Well, I thought they were here for us at first, but it seems like they were looking for the same ship we were.”
“That ship they all flew after?” John asked. “That… oh hell, that alien ship?”
Jarek nodded. “That’s the one.”
They all considered that in silence. Rachel had been thinking the same thing. She wanted to think the idea of an alien ship was ludicrous, but given the scaly green blood-sucking monsters who could shirk off bullets like flies, was anything really ludicrous anymore? If the raknoth really were from out of town, they had to have gotten here somehow, right?
Everyone else seemed to be reaching similar conclusions.
John leaned heavily back in his chair and blew out a long breath toward the ceiling. “I shudder to think what that thing was doing around here.”
“They were looking for someone,” Rachel said. “I’m not sure who, but…”
Haldin’s last words rushed through her mind. “We can tell you what happened to your mom. Tomorrow. Her old lab. Stay safe, Rachel.”
And then they’d rocketed off without a backward glance.
Was it her they’d been looking for?
Tha
t idea sounded more deluded than alien ships and bulletproof space vampires. But why would they know about her mom?
John was watching her with deeply knitted brows. “They? You saw the ship’s owners? You talked to them?”
She gave a weary nod and shot Jarek a look. He took her silent meaning and launched into the story of their meeting with Haldin and Alton, this time glossing over the detail of the rakul. By the end, John was leaning in with his elbows on the able, mouth half open and face half buried between his steepled fingers. Myers looked highly skeptical, and Lea and Alaric simply tired.
“How did a raknoth get inside Unity without us noticing?” Myers asked.
“Shit,” Jarek said, “the raknoth masqueraded high enough up the totem pole to get access to nuclear launch codes before the Catastrophe, I don’t think you should take it too hard if they snuck past your checkpoint. And as nice as your perimeter fence is, it’d have to be about five times higher and a thousand times stronger to have a chance at keeping one of those red-eyed bastards out.”
Myers and John traded a disconcerted look. Rachel’s insides squirmed right along with theirs. She had some inkling of what the raknoth could do—enough to know how woefully screwed Unity would be if it came to repelling a full on raknoth invasion on their own. No matter what they did, how hard they tried, there were forces out there that could simply roll over them like bugs underfoot.
It wasn’t fair. But that was probably why Michael had run off to join the Resistance and fight the bastards in the first place, wasn’t it?
“I don’t know how this would have ended up if you all hadn’t been here,” Myers said. “Hell, I don’t even know if any of this would have happened at all. But I still feel like I owe you some thanks for having our backs today.”
“Ah, it’s no problem, guy.” Jarek extended a fist across the table. “Put it here.”
Myers eyed the fist dubiously then finally reached out to touch his own fist to it. Jarek retracted his fist and did a subdued victory pump.
The Complete Harvesters Series Page 32