Riane stared at the wolf, shocked. He’d never said anything like that in all the years she’d known him. Even when she’d screwed up as a child, he’d never attacked her self-confidence. In fact, the only time Frieka had ever really chewed her out was for doubting her own abilities.
He’d even given her Femmat commander a royal verbal reaming when Riane had resigned the service. That girl is every bit the warrior her father is, the wolf had snarled at the astonished woman, who looked as if no one had ever dared question her before. If there’s a problem, it’s in your lack of leadership skills.
“Riane . . .” It was her father’s voice, choked, gasping in pain and anguish. “Mother Goddess, child, what have you done?”
She turned, numb as a sleepwalker. Baran stood in the Outpost corridor staring at them in horror.
Riane lifted a shaking hand in pleading. “I’m sorry, Father! I didn’t mean . . .”
“You’ve always been a disappointment,” Baran rasped, moving like a robot to tower over her. “But I had hoped for better than this. I never really believed you’d fail us so utterly. I trusted you not to get him killed. My dearest friend . . .”
Riane looked from her father’s devastated face to Nick’s death-glazed green eyes. Why can’t I remember how they died? If I got them killed, why can’t I remember what I did?
Realization slashed through the stew of guilt and dazed grief. My father would never call me a failure, even if I had gotten Frieka killed. He has always believed in me.
Like Nick. Nick, with his steadfast faith. A powerful and intelligent man who had no need to believe in her. Yet he did. And loved her.
He wouldn’t have believed in a failure.
Riane stared up at the image of her father. And an image was all it was. This isn’t real. It’s a cyber attack. Just like the illusions I saw tormenting the Chief and Galar. “Get the fuck out of my head.”
She raised her hands, and green light poured from her fingers with a thunderous boom, blasting the false Baran. He roared, a sound of anger more than pain, melting into a stinking black sludge that tried to ooze away like some kind of primitive amoeba. Seven Hells, it’s a mass of nanobots!
This was no mere virus, no Trojan. Someone had infected her with nanobots, like the one her vision had revealed spying on her from her braid.
Fury rose through her stunned guilt and grief, washing away her sense of helplessness. Riane called more power, burning the sludge out of her mind with Nick’s Stone.
Her vision flashed a blinding green. When it cleared, she was hanging in the air, something hot and choking wrapped around her throat. She was surrounded by Xerans armed with quantum swords. There had to be a hundred of them at least.
What was worse, they had hostages. A bunch of twenty-first-century civilians stood among them, looking frightened.
No, not civilians, she realized, recognizing some of the faces from their arrival in the RV park. It was the Sela.
Nick stared at her across the crowd, his face pale and grim. A priest held a quantum sword centimeters from his throat. The energy blade chimed like a bell.
What the hell was holding her up in the air? She jerked her head around and met the Victor’s mad black gaze.
Oh, Mother Goddess, Riane thought. We’re screwed.
“I’m getting bored,” the Victor said, glowing golden fingers tightening around Riane’s throat. She gagged, her face darkening.
The chiming of the priests’ swords picked up a menacing, urgent note that rang around the clearing. Huddling together like frightened children, the Sela looked around at them nervously.
Fuck, Nick thought. I’ve just run out of time. Whatever I’m going to do, I’ve got to do it now.
Riane had said it before, when he’d been panicking over the thought of trying to alter her brain: They said the Guardian lives inside of you, right? I’ve noticed that whenever you’re pissed off or worried about saving my ass, that’s when you cut loose.
Well, yeah. Because I’m pissed off or worried about you.
No, because you quit thinking so damned much, and you give the Guardian room to work.
Nick needed the Guardian now, in all its savagery and power. He remembered his battle with it, the size, the ferocity. And he remembered his own joy in the combat, in conquest, and in the taste of blood.
He’d felt that before.
It was the darkness in himself he’d always feared and worked to control. That’s him, Nick realized. That’s the part of me that’s him.
“You’ve just run out of time,” the Victor snapped, and gestured to the Xeran standing next to him. “Gyor, kill that Sela.”
The warrior pivoted, lifting his blade over the head of a hugely pregnant little blonde whose eyes widened in terror. Vanja, Nick realized. It was the Sela pregnant with her friend’s spirit.
Nick acted between one desperate heartbeat and the next. He reached down, down to that dark part of himself that craved battle and blood and the death of those who hurt him. The part he’d worked so hard to hide, even from himself.
And he let it roar, detonating in an explosion of rage and power, ripping cells wide in a furious blast of booming green light.
He howled.
The Xeran who’d been about to swing on Vanja instead whirled toward him, startled at the explosion of energy.
A huge clawed paw lashed out, slamming against the priest’s helmet. He smashed backward into several of his fellows, fell to the ground, and did not get up.
“Now,” the Guardian growled, “I will let thy blood.” He spoke in the Xeran priest tongue, a language Nick had never spoken.
But then, he was no longer Nick.
At first Riane thought Nick had Jumped, between the explosion of light and the thundering sonic boom of displacing air. But then the light had faded, and something huge stood where he’d been.
A Sela. It looked like the primitive version he’d fought, except it was at least twice as big, and it glowed a molten green. Its roar made the bones of her chest vibrate. Even the Xerans froze in terrified amazement.
That was a fatal mistake. The towering Sela leaped among the priests with a tiger’s deadly grace. Warriors screamed like children.
The next slice of huge claws ripped through one Xeran’s armor as if it were rice paper. Blood sprayed as the warrior howled and toppled, curling in agony around his torn belly.
Quantum swords chimed and flashed. Riane gasped, knowing those blades could slice right through combat armor.
They glanced off the Guardian’s glowing hide as if it was harder than a starship’s hull. The creature whirled and bit a priest’s helmeted head right off his shoulders. The decapitated head went rolling as the Guardian leaped on a new target.
The Sela were screaming in high, helpless squeals.
“I think,” the Victor said in her ear, “I’ve seen enough.”
The world pinwheeled around Riane as He tossed her aside like a discarded doll. She hit the ground rolling. For a stunned moment, she simply lay there, unable to believe what she’d seen.
Get up, dammit. Banishing her astonished paralysis, she rolled to her feet, looking around desperately.
The Victor charged across the clearing toward the Guardian, massive arms outspread. The big Sela’s roar of challenge made her blood run cold.
But Riane had problems of her own. One of the priests leaped at her with a bellow of rage, blade lifted, apparently intending to take his fear and fury out on her.
Luckily, when she saw Nick transform, she’d gone to riaat. Now Riane danced back and whipped into a kick, slamming the heel of her foot into the side of the warrior’s head. Apparently expecting a helpless target, he lost his grip on his sword. She snatched it out of the air, braced, and used it to behead him in one ruthless sweep.
From the corner of one eye, Riane spotted another figure racing toward her. She wheeled, blade lifted to strike, only to arrest the stroke in mid-motion when she realized it was Charlotte.
“We’ve
got to get the Sela out of here,” the woman panted. “All this death—they can’t take it. And if these priests quit trying to take down Nick and turn on them . . .”
Riane grimaced, knowing exactly what she meant. The Sela were mentally linked. When one died, the rest went into a howling grief that inflicted a ferocious psychic feedback on any unprotected human mind. The Xerans had invented a way to block the effect through their helmets, but Riane and Charlotte were unprotected.
Riane had taken the full brunt of one such psychic feedback attack a couple of weeks ago. She’d only been able to recover by ordering her comp to cut off all emotion so she could fight. But Charlotte didn’t have a comp.
“The ship,” Riane said. “Let’s get them into one of the RVs. Is there a way to lock the Xerans out?”
Charlotte nodded. “Yeah, I can close the ship’s dimensional bubble off once we’ve got them inside. Good idea.”
“You get them moving. I’ll cover your retreat.” She frowned across the clearing. The Guardian blazed like a green star, surrounded by a cautious ring of Xeran warriors. He lunged toward one of them, a huge paw blurring. His target screamed in agony.
Spotting an opening, the Victor surged forward, striking out with clawed hands. The Guardian whirled and reared to meet Him. The two huge figures grappled as the watching warriors roared, surging around them with waving swords.
“Fuck,” Riane breathed. No matter what he looked like now, Nick was in there somewhere. And he was badly outnumbered. She had to help him, but there was virtually nothing she could do alone.
Unless . . . She remembered how Nick had sent a vision three hundred years into the future to save her when she was a child. If she could do the same . . .
Drawing a deep breath, Riane reached for the Power of the Stone. It felt as if she plunged into a storm of violent emotion, of rage, savagery, and bloodlust.
Mother Goddess, is that Nick? Despite her dismay, she drove her will into that roiling cauldron of energy. If she could only reach Jessica with a vision . . .
The power did not respond.
Jess strode down the corridor beside Dona and Frieka as the three headed for the infirmary.
“I can’t believe that little weasel has been slinking around the Outpost for two weeks now, leaving a slime trail of Xeran nanobots on everybody he touched,” Dona growled.
“Which is why we could never clear the Trojan out of the Outpost mainframe.” Frieka flicked an ear in disgust. “Each time we got rid of it, the nanobots would reinfect the system and keep us from sensing that Corydon was a lying sack of shit.”
“And the same thing happened to Galar and the others?” Jess asked, still trying understand the idea of computer viruses that attacked humans.
“Right.” Dona gave her an approving nod. “Even though Chogan supposedly deactivated their comps, the nanobots could still use the agents’ neuronetworks as a pathway to induce whatever delusions they chose.”
“Will Chogan be able to get rid of the nanobots now?”
“Yeah, once we clean the infection out of the mainframe, which in turn must have infected her medical comps. Otherwise, she’d have detected the nanobots at once. It’s a pretty exotic attack, but not unknown.”
“Well, that’s good,” Jess said in relief. “Now if we can just find Riane . . .”
“We’ll find her,” Frieka growled. “All we have to do is get the system back online.”
• 33 •
He knew nothing except the crunch of bone in his ears and the sweet taste of alien blood on his tongue. Their swords glanced off his armored hide like stalks of red-wheat parting around a harvester’s legs. He danced among them to the music of their screams.
Only the false god was a proper opponent, though He had grown cautious after feeling the bite of the Guardian’s teeth and claws.
But the Guardian had grown cautious of Him, too. Those great horns were far more than ornament. That was as it should be. There was no sport in hunting prey that could not make one bleed in turn.
As the people said, “One only lives on the edge of death.”
An enemy priest glanced toward the children being herded away into the ship. The Guardian lunged, hooked the alien with his claws, and flipped him to land twenty lengths away. His shriek cut off in a juicy crunch.
There. None of the aliens would dare look at anything but the Guardian now. His children could complete their escape in peace.
The sooner the better. They no longer heard the music in the screams of the enemy, and their pain made his soul ache.
A dangerous distraction.
The false god lunged at the Guardian, striking out with claws as sharp as his own, slicing through the shield of his energies to the vulnerable flesh at his core. Nick writhed in his emerald cocoon. The Guardian diverted power to heal himself and sank his teeth into the false god’s belly. He grimaced at the taste. Not flesh, but a stinking mass of tiny, oily nanobots that writhed away from his teeth like maggots.
But still the god bellowed, in outrage as much as pain.
Despite the taste, the Guardian smiled and took another bite . . .
Nick looked through a sea of green, flying. It was as though he wore the Sela like a suit of armor made of energy.
Or it wore him.
Each time one of the Xerans fell to his claws, he felt a savage joy, primal and alien. Even the pain of his own wounds was a dark pleasure, and his body’s fear carried an exhilarating jolt.
But some of his wounds weren’t healing.
Most disturbing of all was the sense of other thoughts just below the surface of his mind, in a language he could almost understand. Dark thoughts, ancient and terrible. And very alien.
The Xerans, he thought, have fucked with the wrong Sela.
The Victor snarled in frustrated rage. Dozens of His priests lay dead, and the Demon had inflicted great wounds in His own glowing golden flesh. Yet nothing they did even slowed the creature down.
And it was the T’Lir that made it all possible.
To the Victor’s senses, the creature was a swirl of Coswold-Barre energies—a blinding green warp in the fabric of space time.
A god in truth.
The Victor wanted to howl with frustration. That a primitive half-breed should command such power was an offense against Him. He wanted to kill the Demon for that sacrilege alone.
And yet the beast refused to acknowledge His superiority, refused to hand the T’Lir over to Him, though it was obviously His by right.
If anyone should command such power, it was the Victor.
Curse him! The Victor snarled. He would rip the T’Lir from the Demon’s bleeding corpse if it was the last thing He did. He struck out. To His satisfaction, He felt His claws rip through those energies to find vulnerable human flesh.
Ha! I made you bleed that time!
He slashed again, but this time, the Demon twisted aside, avoiding the stroke. A massive paw swiped, sending another priest staggering away, screaming.
Luckily His men were too disciplined—and fearful of Him—to flee. Still, these were His elite forces. He’d spent decades training them, indoctrinating them, teaching them to fear and worship Him. The loss of so many experienced priests would cripple His command structure.
Yet in His rage, He found He didn’t care. All that mattered was the T’Lir. Once He had its power, the rest would not matter.
Riane stood outside the largest of the RVs guarding the Sela as they scrambled to safety. They were concealed from the central clearing by another of the Sela’s vehicles, so the Xerans had failed to notice their prey escaping inside.
Which was no surprise, considering the way Nick was ripping into them. He’d even inflicted wounds on the Victor. Bites and claw marks marred the so-called god’s glowing skin as blackened shadows, like sunspots on a star.
Unfortunately, none of them had even slowed the bastard down. He just kept going after Nick, ripping into that glowing Sela skin.
Which raised the sickeni
ng question of what those claws were doing to Nick’s merely human body.
Mother Goddess, Riane hated standing here just watching. Unfortunately, she knew better than to try to wade in. If she’d had her armor, she would have been tempted, but without it, she was nothing more than a potential hostage.
And Frieka raised me better than that, thank you.
A strong hand clamped down on her shoulder. Riane whirled, fist raised, only to stop short when she realized it was Charlotte. The woman was pale as a ghost. “We’ve got to stop him, Riane!”
“Who, Nick?” She glanced back over her shoulder at the glowing figure.
“Yes, Nick!” Charlotte snapped. “He’s killing them! Well, actually they’re already dead, but if he doesn’t stop now, they’re not coming back!” She shoved past and started toward the brawl.
“Wait!” Riane grabbed for her arm. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“He’s draining the T’Lir!”
Riane’s jaw dropped. “What? How is that even possible?”
“The T’Lir’s power comes from the life force of those held within it. Normally, they recharge over time, but this form he’s taken is pulling too much energy. Vanja says if he keeps it up, he’ll begin draining the spirits past the point they can recover.”
“Which means what?” Riane demanded, very much afraid she knew.
“They won’t come back!”
Shit! Nick’s mother was in there. Riane whirled and drew on the power of the T’lir for a mental bellow.
Nick! You’ve got to stop! You’re killing the T’Lir!
He and the Victor came together with a thundering boom and crackle of clashing energy. Sparks rained around them, green and golden. Xeran priests ducked away from flying clawed arms and feet.
Riane, straining to reach Nick’s mind, sensed only a savage pleasure in the sensation of fangs sinking into flesh.
“He’s not listening,” Charlotte said grimly. “I can’t get through to him either.”
Guardian Page 22