The Complete Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  The blade raked across Vaish’s turned back in a bizarre fashion, almost as if it were only cutting at points and passing through others entirely without resistance. So he wasn’t as solid as he looked yet. But something still seared, and Vaish didn’t look happy about it.

  The gunfire had faltered as Jarek and the raknoth charged. Now that the soldiers understood the plan, though, it picked back up quickly enough as they adapted to the development and took more careful aim to hit the catcher and not their allies, who danced in and out of the catcher’s field, keeping the disgruntled Kul busy.

  With Vaish distracted, Rachel shifted her focus from preventing his escape to cranking their makeshift freezer into overdrive.

  Channeling more heat out of the area was the first and most obvious thought, but not the most useful. Their allies’ bullets were already sapping plenty of heat from the area, though many of them seemed to be running low on ammo at this point. What she needed to do was make their shots count.

  Thermodynamics was the enemy here.

  The thought was murky from conception as she reached out to the area around the combatants. If she could somehow bubble off that short section of hallway—somehow stymie the natural flow of heat along its gradient from high to low…

  The microscopic picture of what that might look like made her head spin, so she closed her eyes, holding the macroscopic idea firmly in mind, willing it to be true. Then she opened herself to the energy.

  It wasn’t perfect. She wasn’t even sure it was good.

  The gentle breeze in her hair and the growing bitter cold on her face and hands attested that her thermal seal was far from leak-proof. And every one of the considerable number of bullets punching into the area poked at her mental construct like tiny holes in a large balloon she was trying to inflate.

  But it was working.

  The cold around Vaish, Jarek, and the raknoth was profound in her extended senses. So much so that she worried about her allies freezing. But they’d have to manage.

  She had her own problems.

  Whatever she was doing was burning through energy at an alarming rate. And the drain seemed to be worsening by the second.

  She was marginally aware of hard floor hitting her knees as she dropped. But that was okay. It was working.

  The last two raknoth had darted in to join the attack on Vaish. Gunfire still barked from both ends of the hallway, but it was dwindling, several soldiers having spent the entirety of their munitions.

  Ahead, Vaish’s airy protests had gone silent, though the sounds of fighting persisted.

  Rachel cracked her eyes open for a disoriented glance. Jarek and the raknoth circled Vaish, their clothes and armor coated by frost that must’ve condensed and froze over as the temperature had plummeted. They fought well together, the raknoth ripping with tooth and claw, Jarek striking with the Whacker.

  Rachel winced at the brilliant flare of azure heat that exploded from the heart of the cold in her extended senses as he took a hard swing, but it was well worth it.

  Vaish staggered to the floor, clutching at his front with slender, misshapen arms that looked like they’d solidified into their current forms before the Kul had intended them to.

  Something primal awoke in her at the sight of the Kul falling to his knees, or whatever he had beneath those dark folds. Previously, Vaish had seemed to be made of pure, swirling darkness, but now it fell around his hunched form more like a cloak.

  Some ludicrous part of her almost felt bad for the creature as it tilted back to regard the eagerly circling raknoth with an air of macabre recognition. The rest just wanted the bastard to pay for everything he’d done—to Earth and to countless planets before that.

  Something else was poking at her strained attention now, though.

  A voice, crackling from the hallway speakers. Dola’s.

  “—advised, an additional rakul ship has been spotted approaching.”

  Her stomach fell.

  “Repeat, we are at full emergency alert,” Dola continued. “All hands to your stations immediately. This is—”

  The speaker cut off with a rustle and a sharp click. The kind that made it sound like something in the system had failed.

  That boded about as well as the news that more rakul were about to touch down.

  Her focus on the thermal bubble was slipping, but it barely seemed to matter now. Only three or four soldiers still had the ammo to be firing. And together, the raknoth were wrestling Vaish under control, descending on the Kul with remorseless fury.

  Since her disheveled awakening, she hadn’t had time to properly think about what was happening. Mostly, she’d been hoping this was simply the rakul probing their defenses. Or maybe even two over-eager Kuls making like Gada and moving ahead before their brethren were prepared. But no.

  This was it. The rakul were converging.

  The full assault was here.

  “The Enochians!” she cried, not really sure who the words were even intended for.

  “Go!” Jarek and Drogan both shouted at the same time, neither looking back as they helped secure Vaish’s struggling form.

  “We’ll be right behind you,” Jarek added over the diminishing gunfire as he raised his sword for a swing.

  She hesitated for a second, then clambered to her shaky feet and set off at a wobbly run. Azure light flashed after her. Down the hallway. Through the smashed-in door to the tunnels.

  She ran as hard as she could.

  Perhaps within a few days, Alton had said.

  A few days. Perhaps.

  And that had barely been twelve hours ago.

  It didn’t matter now. This was either going to work or it wasn’t.

  Rachel shouldn’t have been surprised to find an armory’s-worth of Enochian artillery shoved in her face the moment she crossed the threshold of their barracks, but it startled her plenty anyway.

  “It’s me!” she cried, holding her hands up. “Jesus.”

  “Sorry,” Johnny mumbled, lowering his rifle as Phineas wordlessly pushed past her to check the hallway outside.

  “What’s happening out there?” Franco asked, lowering his own rifle and looking back at Elise with pained worry carved into his face.

  “Two of them got inside somehow,” Rachel said, hurrying between Haldin’s and Elise’s cots and plopping to the floor. “A teleporter and a… wraith-thingy.”

  “Shit,” Johnny said. Then, with a little shrug, “Hey, at least it’s not Dola’s puppets uprising, though, right? I thought for sure… Uh, I think I’ll go watch the hallway with Phineas. Yep. That’s, uh…”

  Rachel turned to find Johnny sweeping out of the room, Franco staring at his retreating back with a level of intensity she’d never seen from the man. And that was saying something.

  “I have to try to pull them out,” Rachel said when Franco turned back to her. “I don’t think they’re ready, but it might be now or never.”

  Franco watched her for a long second, radiating that grim intensity. Then he gave a curt nod and posted himself at the door with his rifle.

  Rachel said a silent prayer to no one in particular and grabbed the Enochians’ hard, blocky hands.

  “Guys? Knock-knock. We’ve got a serious problem here.”

  There was nothing, not even a faint stir of a conscious presence beneath the deep, heavy vastness of the two things that only barely felt alive to her senses. They were down deep. Deeper than they had been yesterday when she’d come to contact them.

  “Alton? Lietha? Anyone? Come on guys. If anyone can hear me in there, now’s the fucking time!”

  Nothing.

  Growing anxious, she shifted gears and threw her mind like a javelin into the seemingly bottomless void that was Haldin and Alton’s shared space. There was some resistance, but not much.

  It didn’t matter. Whatever it was she pressed her mind into, there didn’t seem to be anyone home, like she’d broken into a small house only to somehow find a vast, empty desert inside. Haldin and Al
ton had to be in there somewhere, but even if she’d had ample time to root around—which she most certainly did not—she had no idea how long it would’ve taken to find them.

  “Please,” she sent out, letting her anxious urgency and some vague mental pictures of what was happening in The Complex drift out into the empty space with her words. “We’re out of time. The rakul are here. You have to wake up.”

  For a long while, there was nothing. She repeated her pleas, calling their names until she was sure it was all futile.

  Then, the faintest stir of a distant presence.

  Alton.

  It was barely more than a hint, but she was sure she’d felt it.

  “Alton! Fraga and Vaish made it inside. The others are coming. It’s time to fight.”

  Something. Like a distant call, too far out to hear.

  Then, clearer but still somehow distant despite the fact that she was holding Haldin and Alton’s hand, “—can’t hope…”

  Alton’s voice sounded weak.

  “Alton? You can’t hope what? What do you need me to do?”

  “—st tell… others… sync—synchronize before…”

  She was reaching for the flicker of Alton’s presence, trying to stabilize their bond, when he simply winked out of her senses. Not gone, she thought, but once again too deeply immersed in whatever they were doing in there for her to reach him.

  Rachel cursed and withdrew back to her own body, turning her options over.

  It wouldn’t have hurt if Alton could’ve made one damn bit of sense with the precious few words he’d managed. Tell others. Which others? And tell them what? Had he meant that he needed to tell the others about the rakul? Or that she should?

  And what had he meant by synchronize?

  Did that mean he and Haldin were almost ready to wake up and try this dangerous new body of theirs together?

  Yep. One damn bit of sense would’ve been real nice.

  Still, the fact that she’d gotten anything out of Alton at all was a decent sign. She was just going to have to operate on the assumption that he’d heard her warning and was doing everything he could in there to get them ready.

  “Come on,” she whispered to no one in particular. “We can do this.”

  As far as she knew, two of the twelve rakul were already dead. Assuming nothing had gone critically wrong out there, they were in the process of driving two more out of The Complex. If the Enochians and their raknoth partners could just pull out of this thing…

  Maybe—just maybe—there could be hope after all.

  Even so, they didn’t have time for this.

  “Anything?” Franco asked from his post at the door.

  “Maybe,” she said, turning to face him. “I’m not positive. I think Alton at least knows that the—”

  Haldin’s hand jerked in hers an instant before Franco’s eyes went wide. Elise jerked a second later.

  “What’s happening?” Franco asked, rushing over to set his rifle against the wall and sink down beside Elise.

  “I don’t know.” Rachel reached out with her senses and felt a confused jumble of activity raging just beneath the surface of each hybrid pair.

  “Guys?” she tried. “What’s happening?

  If there was a deliberate answer, it was too convoluted and distorted for her to make sense of. They felt frantic and… was that fear?

  “I don’t know,” she said to Franco’s pleading gaze. “I can’t tell what’s happening in there.”

  Elise jerked again, a full body affair, and Haldin kicked the way people sometimes did when falling asleep.

  “Are they…?” Franco muttered, seemingly to himself.

  Rachel wasn’t sure how she would’ve answered anyway. She couldn’t tell if they were waking up or seizing or—

  Together, Haldin and Elise both gave their most violent jerk yet and then fell limply back to their cots, unmoving.

  “What?” Franco hissed.

  Rachel looked back and forth between the two. Reached out with her senses.

  They weren’t breathing.

  “No,” Franco murmured. “No, no, no…”

  Rachel scrambled to Haldin’s side and pressed a hand to his chest. Felt the hard alien skin of his neck for any sign.

  Nothing.

  “No,” she breathed.

  “Elise?” Franco’s voice was thick, wavering. “Sweetie? Please, please… Rachel!”

  His desperate cry only ratcheted the building panic in her chest that much higher. They couldn’t. They couldn’t have just blinked out like that. Not after everything.

  “Wake up,” she sent. She pounded on Haldin’s chest before she knew what she was doing. “Wake UP, damn you! Wake up!”

  “Rachel.” Franco’s voice cracked like a whip.

  Had she yelled that out loud? She’d definitely been cocking back to hit his chest harder.

  She lowered her fist and turned.

  “What do we do?” Franco asked, his eyes desperate but his tone level, demanding she get her shit together and help him figure this out.

  She looked down at Haldin. Utterly still. No heartbeat. No breathing.

  “Call for help,” she started weakly, “or… the raknoth… maybe Drogan could—”

  Something cracked overhead, and the room was plunged into darkness. Electric panic seized her. She reached down to feel Haldin’s still body. Reached blindly back in Franco’s direction. Remembered her comm light and reached for it with a curse.

  “Shit!” Johnny’s voice called from just outside the doorway. “What the—”

  Alarms yipped and red lights flicked to life on either side of the room, revealing Franco fumbling for his own comm and Johnny’s armed form in the doorway, gaping in horror at Haldin and Elise.

  “—peat,” crackled a speaker in the corner, “The Complex’s defenses have been de—”

  The lights and the speaker all cut out with another sharp click

  “What’s happening?” Johnny whispered, sounding more afraid than she’d ever thought to hear him sound.

  Rachel couldn’t find the words. Couldn’t breathe.

  For a long moment, there was nothing but darkness, the sound of Johnny’s panting at the doorway, and the hide of Haldin’s neck against her fingertips, cool and lifeless.

  A distant roar in the tunnels outside, bestial and terrifying.

  “Prepare yourself, Rachel Cross,” came Drogan’s voice from somewhere toward the front entrance.

  “The rakul come.”

  30

  Jarek looked up at Drogan’s puffed cheeks and the expectant angle of his reptilian brows and sighed. Then he shifted on his knees, and the sharp lance of pain in his thigh smacked him with an equally sharp reminder as to why he had to go through with this in the first place.

  So he tilted his head back, started to open his mouth wide… and paused.

  “No one ever hears about this, Stumpy. Ever.”

  “Rrr eehhnng rrra hhggh,” Drogan growled through what sounded like an entire mouthful of spit.

  “Yeah, I love you too, buddy. But still.”

  Drogan waved impatiently. And for good reason, too.

  They needed to move.

  Kul’Vaish lay in dismantled—and thankfully corporeal—pieces behind them, but there wasn’t time to celebrate. Not when Fraga was still at large, apparently along with an unknown number of Vermaga’s unwilling puppets.

  It was only in the silent moments following Vaish’s death that Drogan had sniffed out the presence of one of the Kul’s little wormies nearby. When the raknoth had all focused together, they’d realized it was more than just the one.

  The rest of the raknoth and humans had already moved out to sweep The Complex for the intruders. Jarek and Drogan needed to go help secure the front entrance and deal with Fraga. It was just that moving wasn’t so pleasant right now after having taken a spindly Kul arm straight through the thigh.

  So Jarek tilted back, opened wide like a baby bird waiting for its worms,
and accepted a disturbingly large globule of saliva from Drogan’s mouth.

  He might’ve preferred regurgitated worms. The fluid was warm and viscous, with an overpowering wave of bitterness and a light, sickly twinge of acidity. He tried to pretend it was just another shot of the good stuff and downed it as such.

  It didn’t go down nearly as well.

  He wiped furiously at his mouth, coughing and sputtering.

  Drogan wiped his own mouth, looking slightly amused by Jarek’s reaction. “I said you are behaving like a child.”

  “Yeah, thanks for the clarification.” Jarek spat on the floor. “Jesus Christ, I need some mouth wash. Or some whiskey. Or…”

  Something trilled through him, starting in his head and rushing down through his chest and limbs. A tidal wave of pure, tingling weapons-grade energy.

  “Holy fuck, Stumpy.” He hopped to his feet with barely more than a twinge from his leg. “What did you give me, raknoth crack?”

  He was talking too fast. Couldn’t stop fidgeting. Had to move.

  “Something akin to it, yes,” Drogan said. “Along with a strong dose of heal—”

  “Healing stuff! Shit yeah! Got it! I feel like a fucking—gah!” In a surge of relentless energy, Jarek turned and punched a hole through the adjacent wall.

  He looked back at Drogan, momentarily sobered by his own rash display of poor self-control. “Well, that was unnecessary.”

  Drogan cocked his head. “Perhaps I overestimated with the stimulants. Regardless, we should get moving.”

  Overestimated? That didn’t seem cool, but hey, who cared?

  Jarek was bouncing on his feet, and Drogan had just used the word moving. Moving was good.

  Jesus. Was this how dogs felt before walks?

  Whatever. At least Drogan was in a hurry too.

  They bounded down the hallways, out of the building, and through the tall tunnels outside.

  By the time they were drawing close to the front entrance, the initial high was resolving back down from the level of tweaking balls to that of being merely hyper-caffeinated. The ache was creeping back into his leg, but it wasn’t terrible. Not yet, at least.

  “How are we looking down there, Mr. Robot?” Jarek asked as the compression provided by Fela’s internal membrane reoriented around the wound site—presumably by Al’s doing.