Cagor was just debating whether he should take a stand and tell Nan’Solga to deal with stowing the man back in the pantry when the ship suddenly called out to them in alarm—a buzzing telepathic pulse that was impossible to miss.
Cagor exchanged a tense glance with his companions and reached with his mind for the ship’s instruments.
“No,” Al’Krastor said quietly beside him. “It cannot be.”
Cagor sensed it a second later: an incoming ship, not unlike their own.
Terror clutched at his senses. Across from him, Solga’s eyes flared bright crimson with panic.
“It’s…”
Solga didn’t need to complete the thought. They all knew.
Somehow, by the worst odds of the universe, the Masters had found them.
Krastor looked at them, the stark paleness of his eyes betraying his despondence. “Let me do the talk—”
A section of the hull exploded inward with a wrenching crash. Sudden and furious winds tugged at them as the ship’s air rushed to make its feeble donation to the Void. Cagor and his companions dug into walls and consoles with sharp claws. The old man they’d fed on found no such purchase and was rocketed rapidly into the void with the escaping air.
The hull was reacting now, folding over to seal the breach. It wasn’t quick enough.
The Master who’d no doubt opened the breach to begin with pulled himself through the hole and landed on his feet with a heavy thunk as the hull sealed above him.
Cagor had never seen this particular rakul in person, but he recognized the hulking, bipedal mass of muscles and sharp edges from the memories his kin had shared with him.
“Kul’Gada,” Al’ Krastor said, dropping to his knees and bowing his head in deference. “Master. We bow before you and praise your—”
Kul’Gada’s thick tail flicked into the wall with a bang, denting the wall and silencing Krastor. The Kul regarded them in silence, eyes burning with crimson fire more intense than any Cagor had ever seen.
Seconds ticked by. Cagor and his companions waited, eyes to the floor, too terrified to move.
“Traitors.” Kul’Gada’s voice poured into Cagor’s mind like a choir of rasping whispers with the weight of an ocean behind them.
It made Cagor cringe. Cringing turned to trembling as Kul’Gada splayed the fingers of one hand and his digits smoothly elongated into foot-long appendages that were more blade than claw.
Al’Krastor half rose from his cowering bow. “Master! We—”
Kul’Gada stepped forward and hacked Al’Krastor’s head into multiple pieces with one sweep of his bladed hand.
Nan’Solga, to his credit, elected to go down fighting once their imminent doom was confirmed. The raknoth roared and lunged for the rakul. Kul’Gada caught Solga’s head in his open palm and slammed the raknoth to the deck hard enough to shatter his skull.
Kul’Gada straightened and stepped on Solga’s broken skull for good measure. It crushed under his weight with a sickly crunch.
Cagor watched, slack-jawed and utterly beyond action as he tried to find the will to move, to fight—to do anything but cower silently, frozen in place.
Then Kul’Gada’s mind fell on his with all the inexorable mass and pull of a black hole, and Cagor was truly and completely powerless to so much as blink as the Kul drank in his every memory and thought of Earth—cursed Earth, with its cursed blood and impetuous humans and its doom, past, present, and future.
“You were wise to flee,” Kul’Gada’s raspy multi-voice finally whispered in his mind what felt like years later. “Your brethren will beg me for such mercifully quick deaths before I am through with them.”
For a thousand years, Nan’Cagor had toiled and trained and vied for position among his peers. He’d listened to his elders’ lectures about the intergalactic supremacy of their strength as a species, about how he and his ilk should be grateful to count themselves among the raknoth and how they should always bear the name with pride. For the most part, he’d listened. He’d believed. But now, a thousand years later, there was no pride to be found—no dignity in the shriek that escaped his throat as Kul’Gada grabbed his skull and squeezed.
1
Of all the items on the long list of things Rachel Cross had never expected to see in her life, it had never even occurred to her to add a raknoth drinking—or, technically, preparing to drink—tea, and especially not one doing it with all the poise and delicacy of a Victorian monarch at that. Yet here she was, and there sat the blood-sucking aristocrat in all his pompous glory.
In the interest of not looking at him one second longer, Rachel instead glanced around the spacious room for the thousandth time, seeing but not really observing the collection of fine ceramics and luxuriously dark, shiny wood furniture that graced the space with its oh-so-eloquent presence. She suppressed an exasperated huff (only for the hundredth time) and settled for squeezing her staff and clenching her toes until her feet cramped.
The collection probably would have gone for an arm and both legs back when people had cared about such things, back before they’d had to shift their focus to more pressing concerns like whether they’d be able to grow enough food for the winter and whether they’d be able to escape the notice of marauders while they did it.
But fancy, gaudy, stupid, unnecessary trinkets weren’t the reason she was about to blow a gasket.
The impetus of that impending calamity was the imperious little brat who sat in front of them, taking his sweet, deliberate time in fixing his tea—the making of which was apparently of life-and-death necessity before he could be bothered to properly hear them out. Or maybe he was just fucking with them. Who drank tea these days anyway?
The raknoth, apparently. Or at least this one.
She never would have expected to use either of the phrases, “little brat” or “fixing his tea,” in reference to a raknoth, and yet here she was, about to burst a blood vessel, and there he was, stirring that steaming cup ever so gingerly with his ridiculous little spoon.
Last time she’d ever agree to play nice.
She glanced over at Lea and decided that if the beautiful Resistance fighter could keep her composure through this nonsense, she could at least give Nan’Ashida one more minute before she put him through one of his rustic adobe walls.
Whether he knew it or not, the little prick spoke up just in time.
“Tell me, Krogoth,” Ashida said to the raknoth sitting across the table from him. God, even his voice was annoying. “Have you ever been on a safari?”
“Never,” Krogoth said.
“A shame.” Ashida raised the tea cup to his lips with three fingers and took a delicate sip, then he let out a contented sigh.
And now she’d seen everything.
“I’ve always found them to be invigorating,” Ashida continued. “The perfect glimpse into the true way of the world—predator and prey, hunter and hunted. Survival”—he pointedly shifted his gaze to her and Lea before looking back at Krogoth—“of the fittest.”
Rachel rolled her eyes so hard the muscles at the tops of her eyeballs threatened to cramp. “Cool story, dude.” Lea tensed at the sound of her words, but Rachel pressed on. “It’s a shame some scaly green assholes had to go and blow the world to shit. Probably wasn’t so invigorating out there during the dark days. Probably still isn’t.”
A crimson glow awakened in Ashida’s eyes, and a look of distaste warped his features as he regarded her.
Given his clear raknoth superiority complex, she was kind of surprised she could read Ashida’s expression at all. Many of the raknoth, like Zar’Krogoth with his rust-red hide, elected to retain their reptilian appearances—what Jarek referred to as “going full raknoth”—around the clock. Having dealt with more than enough raknoth in just the past couple of weeks to keep her sated for life, she was getting a bit better at reading the expressions of their scaly snouts and smooth, angled eyebrows, but there was still a lot of guesswork involved.
With Ashida opt
ing to maintain the appearance of the human host whose driver’s seat he’d laid permanent claim to, though, his disgust was clear. He had the dark skin of a native Kenyan, which only made the creepy crimson glow of his eyes stand out that much more. He could have hidden the ominous luminance, she knew. That was how the raknoth had managed to take their planet and pull the strings that had ended up wiping out nearly ninety percent of the world’s population fifteen years ago. They hadn’t needed to break a sweat or raise a finger—save for the one that had pressed the nuke button.
She kept that thought firmly in mind as she held Nan’Ashida’s gaze, hoping he’d choke on his stupid tea.
“How can you think to work with these pathetic creatures, brother?” Ashida asked Krogoth. “The lion would not think for a moment to lower itself to the company of the hare. It is unnatural. And unnecessary. This lot”—he flicked a hand toward Rachel and Lea, somehow conveying disgust with the motion—“will be centuries in their graves before we’d ever have any reason to expect the harvesters would come here. And if that should ever come to pass”—he gave a haughty laugh—“I don’t see how our food could hope to stand beside us on the battlefield.”
He went to take another sip of tea and froze, which seemed a little ironic, because that was exactly what his cup of tea had done: frozen solid. At Rachel’s will, of course.
She harmlessly dispersed the heat she’d drawn from the tea and met Ashida’s confused look with a wide grin. “Not bad for a pathetic little hare, huh, asshole?”
Krogoth looked between the frosty cup and Rachel and said nothing. But was that amusement on his features?
“How dare you?” Ashida said once he’d gotten over his indignant rage enough to speak.
Rachel focused on the cup and channeled the smidgen of energy it took to send the tea cup and its solid contents sailing across the room. It smashed against the wall with one big satisfying crash and fell to the floor with a series of smaller ones.
Ashida was on his feet in an instant. Rachel tapped into the batteries she kept clipped on her belt as a soldier might keep spare magazines. It took considerably more telekinetic horsepower to drive the raknoth back into his seat than it had to hurl a little teacup, but it was worth it.
And they’d been worried she wouldn’t be a good diplomat.
The dark wooden chair under Ashida gave an indignant groan as he slammed into it. Ashida gave his own threatening growl. Then, after a moment of struggling, he bellowed, “Release me!”
Rachel looked at Lea, trying to keep the considerable exertion off of her face. “You think a lion’s ever said something like that to a hare?”
Ashida might have been a pompous bastard, but he was also a raknoth, and they weren’t so easily matched for physical strength, even by an arcanist like herself. She doubted she could have kept him contained for more than a minute if he really cut loose.
Luckily, Krogoth helped her maintain the integrity of her little show, whether deliberately or not. “The point is well made,” he said, raising a hand for her to stop. “Enough.”
She gladly released her telekinetic hold on Ashida. Channeling fatigue swept in. She leaned casually against the wall to keep her knees from shaking and kept her eyes on Ashida. Raknoth weren’t exactly legendary for their self-restraint and levelheadedness.
In testament to the fact, Ashida bounded to his feet and batted his chair aside, toppling the rich wood violently enough that it cracked when it hit the ground.
Krogoth had risen to his feet as well, keeping easy pace with Ashida.
Rachel probably would have considered a bath in battery acid before she’d trust Krogoth with her life, but she wasn’t going to complain about him throwing in a hand to protect it either.
Fortunately, his aid wasn’t necessary. Ashida only stood there, shoulders heaving in the aftermath of his sudden outburst.
Finally, after a long silence, he looked at the cracked chair on the floor. “Look what you have made me do,” he said quietly.
Rachel managed to keep her voice level. “We have more important things to worry about than nice furniture and tea time, Ashida. The rakul are coming, whether you wanna believe it or not.”
“Bah,” Ashida said.
“You and your men could be what turns the tide when the fighting starts,” Lea said, probably trying to appeal to his obviously considerable ego. “The army you command is formidable. If you’d be willing to glyph your men against telepathic influence—”
Ashida gave a harsh bark of laughter. “If I did that, my men would no longer be my men, little girl.” He looked at Krogoth, his face showing the first signs of hesitation Rachel had seen. “You truly believe this madness, brother?”
Krogoth gave a slow nod. “I saw the messengers flee for the Masters myself. Harvest will fall.”
“Bah.” Ashida considered Rachel. “If that is truly the case, why not simply offer up the humans when they arrive, as we were always intended to do?”
Rachel held her tongue so Krogoth could explain it without all of the expletives and insults she’d be compelled to include.
“You know why,” Krogoth said. “The day we decided to cut off contact with the Masters was the day we signed our inevitable death warrants. It was always a question of when. Even if they would forgive us, they certainly wouldn’t think to spare the humans just because we’ve grown to require their lifeblood. There is no moving on to the next planet. If the humans perish, so too will we.”
“Perhaps the Masters could—”
“The Masters will gladly cut us to ribbons and display our true corpses for all to see. We have already undermined their authority. They will have already returned to Rakzaied to replace our numbers.”
“But—”
“As far as the Kul are concerned,” Krogoth said, “we are already dead. They simply come to complete the formality.”
Rachel thought she could see the moment the weight of Krogoth’s words shimmied past Ashida’s denial and settled firmly down on his chest.
“I will have to consider,” Ashida began, but Krogoth was already turning for the door, beckoning Rachel and Lea to join him.
“Do as you wish, Nan,” Krogoth said. He spoke quietly, not pausing or turning back. Ashida would hear nonetheless. “But do not make the mistake of believing that you will be any less doomed than us for your hesitance to raise arms against the Masters.”
If Ashida had a comeback, he didn’t manage to spit it out before they left.
Outside, they tromped silently through the complex. It was decadent to the max, all rustic, cream-colored walls and impractical red-tiled roofs. The courtyard sported a running fountain, and on the balcony above it, two girls were sunbathing, of all things. Like Rachel, they looked to be in their mid-twenties. Unlike Rachel, their skin glowed bronze, and their curves were voluptuous beneath the skimpy bikinis that left so little to the imagination.
Bikinis. Sunbathing.
Now she really had seen everything.
She exchanged a look with Lea. Unlike Rachel’s fair skin, Lea’s was a lovely chestnut brown, but it certainly hadn’t gotten that way from tanning, and Rachel was reasonably sure neither one of them had ever thought to wear a bikini in the past fifteen years, if ever. The thought of walking around so exposed made her skin crawl.
Maybe no one had explained to the girls on the balcony what manner of monsters roamed the lands these days.
There were the raknoth, of course. But then there were the marauders too, those wayward souls who’d fled their humanity when the bombs had fallen fifteen years ago and had yet to return to it. People wanted to hate the raknoth, but it was hard to ignore just how many humans had taken a leaf out of their book when the shit had hit and treated their fellow humans as resources to be taken advantage of.
Hell, maybe it had always been that way. Maybe people had just gotten a little bolder once there were no real organized governments to make them pay for it.
God, she was starting to think like Jarek.<
br />
She wondered if they should try to get the girls out of there, but they looked happy enough. She didn’t see any obvious bite marks on them, and they even waved down to her and Lea as they passed the fountain.
Hell, maybe they had better lives than she did.
Or maybe Nan’Ashida had telepathically raped their minds into dumb servitude and ordered them onto the balcony just to complete the decor he’d so obviously imagined in fine detail.
The thought made her want to hit something.
She still couldn’t quite believe she or anyone else in the Resistance had agreed to the tenuous (and tenuous was probably even too sturdy a word) alliance with the raknoth—the very same assholes who’d destroyed their planet. The same wretched bastards who’d been responsible for the deaths of her family.
She’d be lying if she said it hadn’t been keeping her up at night, but so had the visions Haldin had shown her of the rakul. It wasn’t quite fair to say it was any fault of Haldin and his friends, but it sure would have been nice if the Enochians had brought anything other than disastrously bad news with them on their galactic trip to Earth.
For now, shirking imminent death had taken the reins, no matter how deplorable the thought of working with the raknoth was.
That said, she’d be damned if she wasn’t going to stick Alton Parker in a corner and get some answers the first chance she got. As far as she knew, Alton was the only surviving raknoth who knew the details of what had happened to her mom and her family, and he’d been a little too conveniently indisposed and removed on their world-wide alliance recruitment tour these past weeks. Soon, though, she’d get him alone. One way or another.
The Complete Harvesters Series Page 53