by Jody Wallace
“Report,” Claire demanded over her array. “Was that your doing, Niko?”
Dazed soldiers climbed to their feet around her, some wounded, some stunned. The damage had been concentrated on one side of the trough, and the forces on the other were already resuming battle formation.
Back into the breach. Back to tangle with the leviathan’s lightning-quick tentacles, which could be as thin as a snake or as thick as a sequoia.
Its tentacles became anything, any shape it wanted, but it was solid—the worst of shades and daemons combined. It consumed, and it attacked. Thank God it didn’t seem to be that mobile on the ground. Perhaps the only thing it could do was fly.
Niko’s crackly voice finally responded to Claire’s repeated demands for an update. “Concussive bomb, minor payload. We didn’t set it.”
Claire remained with the masssian until they evaluated the changed terrain. The blast, Niko said, had come from inside Ship—inside, where Adam might be.
Did that mean Adam had set it, or that it had killed him? Already the leviathan was starting to seep into the cavity that had blown itself into existence. A fresh tentacle shot toward the left ridge, and laser beams blasted it from all directions.
“We’re hurting it,” Cullin announced over the main command line. He, Raniya, and the scientists were set up out of tentacle range to analyze the intel and recommend improvements in their assault pattern. “It has more solidity but less bulk. It isn’t the same as it was.”
The masssian Claire had protected dragged itself erect and leaned against the charging station. A soft blue tentacle brushed Claire’s arm. “Claire Lawssson. Movement inssside Ship in the injured area.”
“What?” Claire focused her eyes and picked out something near the bottom that wasn’t sparks, smoke, and collapsing ceilings. A piece of debris popped straight out of the wreckage. It was like something was behind the rubbish, trying to get out.
“If that bomb ripped off one of the tentacles and it’s coming after us like a fucking severed hand, I’m going to be seriously pissed,” she declared over the command line. “Movement in the bottom center quadrant. Anybody else see that?”
“I’m picking it up,” Niko confirmed.
“My team is relocating closer to the wounded,” Sarah announced through the array. Medics started clambering down a ridge. On her order, soldiers with wing packs converged, landing near injured comrades and transporting them to safety. “We can confirm the injury and fatality tally soon. We’ll stay out of tentacle range.”
“Let’s find out what’s moving around in there,” Claire announced. First, though, she’d need to stop the leviathan from closing up on it.
Doubling up her beams, she sizzled the edges of the leviathan where they were trying to encase the gaping hole in Ship. Unlike before, when she was shooting tentacles or the vast bulk of the monster, the edges—perhaps because they were thin—shuddered when she hit.
Others noticed and began laying down fire in the same area.
The closer she walked, the more she could see the leviathan twitch. As if in response, another piece of wreckage from the spot where there might be a severed tentacle flew forward and skidded across the dirt.
She contemplated shooting it. “Do we have an update on the bottom quadrant yet? Is it a piece of tentacle?”
“Not registering anything but entity, ser,” a voice responded.
Claire inched forward, shooting. Five steps. Ten. Should she stop? The blisters on her arms burned like fire. Most of the ground troops halted, checking one another, remaining in a rough line.
A tentacle lashed toward them and smacked a Shipborn soldier to Claire’s right. Not enough time to drain him, but he arced high in the air, shouting with fear.
“Shit,” Claire said. “Fall back.”
Before the soldier kissed the ground, an aerial combatant lunged across the sky and caught him. Silver glinted on the soldier’s wings and arm in the dusty light—was that Hurst? He spiraled toward the location Sarah and her medics were setting up farther down the crude channel.
The ground troops scuttled back twenty feet.
On impulse, Claire redirected her bands to the uncovered, broken section of Ship. Satisfying eruptions of light and sparks flared as she dragged the beams from side to side. The leviathan lashed at several soldiers on the ground, including Claire, but missed.
The leviathan began to glitter along Ship’s backside. It…burbled. Waves undulated beneath its surface. A deep rumble filled the air before another tentacle tested the distance between the leviathan and its tormentors.
Closer. Shit. It had shifted positions. That was new. The leviathan really must not want them destroying the innards of Ship. It hastened to cover the area, wrapping tentacles over it in a giant lattice.
“Niko, have the scientists check the rear, see what’s going on. Something’s up. The leviathan wiggled or some shit, and if it becomes mobile, Sarah and the wounded are down here. Ground team six, seven, eight, aim toward that breach,” she ordered.
Raniya’s voice broke over the comm line. “Don’t shoot there. You’re too close to the matrix. We don’t want that exploding.”
“This section of Ship is near the matrix?” Claire couldn’t tell what area of the vessel it was. It just looked like a cross section of twisted metal and destruction to her.
Raniya spoke again, more animated. “The longer the leviathan has been on the ground, the more dense its structure has become. If it’s protecting the matrix, it may not be finished consuming Ship. Our sensors only read entity, but Ship could still be alive.”
“After this long? There’s no way.” But Claire whipped up her fist to halt the nearby teams, and they ceased fire.
In the brief lull, the edges of the leviathan thinned so much as it attempted to wrap the exposed section of Ship that the back end of the monster became translucent. The lattice of tentacles widened. The area at the bottom where Claire had seen motion ruptured outward.
A figure staggered through the debris of Ship. A humanoid figure in a tattered Shipborn suit used for space walks.
It wrenched off the busted helmet, chest heaving. Golden hair glinted on his head.
Her heart stopped. She couldn’t breathe. But she could yell, by God. “Adam!”
The leviathan had almost closed the final gap, and Adam was going to be imprisoned inside it.
Without thought, Claire sprinted across the uneven ground—straight into a tentacle that flung her into the sky.
…
Claire’s body launched into the air as if shot from a cannon. She was the first thing Adam had seen when he stumbled out of the wreckage—and in seconds, she was going to die.
He’d never make it to her in time. Her body twisted in midair, still rising—she was conscious, trying to position herself to take the fall.
That wasn’t a fall any unenhanced human could handle.
Adam raced forward anyway, leaping rubble. The deep silence of his deafness swelled around him until it included his body. He could barely feel his feet hit the uneven ground. She reached the pinnacle and plummeted toward the earth.
“No!” He couldn’t hear himself shout, but his throat scratched on the raw pain. He leaped as high as he could, as if somehow he could erupt into flight. He didn’t.
But someone else could. A figure whooshed past him, diving precariously close to the leviathan, barely evading a tentacle. Wind buffeted Adam’s hair as the winged Shipborn arrowed across Claire’s path.
Just in time, the soldier intercepted her before she hit, wobbling under the weight of her body. A fall of that height could still have broken her neck. Was she…?
The soldier zoomed like a bullet toward a group of people farther down the trench created by Ship’s crash. He landed, Claire in his arms. He set her on the ground—on her own two feet.
Adam couldn’t see her face from this distance, but he knew she was looking at him. As were the other soldiers, on the ground, in the air, on the ridges.
Claire raised one arm, the other hanging limply beside her body. He raised one of his as well, turned on his heel, and strode toward the leviathan.
His gloves came off first. He dropped them on the ground. Then he ripped off the top of the tattered skin suit, where it hindered his movement. He barely felt the chill.
White bursts of lasers flared from every direction as the troops resumed their attack. Tentacles roped all over the beast, striking at flying Shipborn, at soldiers on the ridges, at anyone who came too close. Except him. It ignored him.
Adam clenched his fists, enduring the harsh sensation that spidered across his body the closer he got to the leviathan. It didn’t look like it had from space. On the ground, it was greyish, and semisolid. This end of it, where Ship’s docking bay had been, was practically translucent. Instead of a featureless black blob or a giant shade, its morphing body coated the wreckage of Ship like spray gel.
Why hadn’t it oozed into Ship’s interior? When shades infiltrated a structure, they filled up the whole thing.
Because the leviathan wasn’t a shade. If that meant he couldn’t hurt it, this was going to be a short fight.
Without giving himself a moment to contemplate his mortality or utter a witty catch phrase like a proper hero, he reached the leviathan and plunged his hands into the grey surface.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
It was like shoving his hands into icy, slimy Jell-O.
Pain seized his body like a lightning strike. Not lightning—a tentacle. A thin cord lashed his back, slicing through his undershirt.
Adam pressed into the moist, viscous surface and opened himself to the monster’s essence. It wasn’t pure, like the sentience he’d nearly stolen from Priiit. It wasn’t a personified stench, like the power he’d drained from the shades.
It was chaos. Chaos and loathing.
This creature, this sentient being, loathed. It was malevolence incarnate, an awareness far beyond anything human, and it loathed.
It was so much more than anything he’d encountered. If he consumed this evil, would he become evil, too? Tentatively, he tried to absorb some of its force the same way he had with the shades.
The leviathan resisted. It felt him, it knew what he was, and it attacked.
Tentacles whipped his backside, trying to pry him off. He threw his weight into passing through the scummy surface, but a tentacle wormed around his neck. Another around a leg.
They yanked back. He drove forward. Choking, he shoved deeper into the murk.
His boot found a toehold against a rock. He had leverage. For now. The tentacle on his neck, though, was going to be a problem. How long could he hold his breath?
Better hurry. He focused on the channel between his ability and the leviathan’s essence—it was a stream, and the leviathan had dammed it.
Mentally he wedged himself into the dam like he was trying to wedge himself into the leviathan’s body. Strain. Push. Shove. Inching deeper with his knees, with his arms, even with his head. He’d only had to touch the shades and Priiit to access their spirit. Why wasn’t it working?
His ears rang, though he hadn’t heard anything since Ship had screamed.
What was that sound? Was his hearing…?
No. It was suffocation. He really needed to breathe.
The heat of laser beams flamed his back as the Shipborn tried to fend off the tentacles attacking him. The murderous cable around his neck disappeared, and he gulped air.
But he’d forgotten he was half-buried in the muck. He inhaled heavy, glutinous leviathan, straight into his lungs. He froze and burned at the same time, from the inside out.
The dam between him and its essence burst. Then he couldn’t feel anything but the deluge of tainted energy throbbing through him.
…
He was alive! Alive. Somehow, Adam was alive.
For the moment.
The grey, mottled skin of the leviathan closed around him. From the looks of it, Adam had forced his way into it on purpose. Claire knew what he was trying to do, but it didn’t make it any easier to watch.
“Wrap my arm and let me go.” She dodged the medtech holding the silver applicator that may or may not knock her out. When Hurst had caught her in midair, her shoulder had been dislocated. The field medics couldn’t heal her quickly enough to regain full use of her arm.
Didn’t matter. They needed all the guns they could get. Last count, they were down from over two thousand to eleven hundred something. The rest of the fighters from the base had arrived half an hour ago, though reinforcements from the local militia and U.S. government were a no-show.
But Adam was one of the eleven hundred survivors. While he wasn’t the only thing Claire cared about, she was certainly willing to praise anyone’s God for keeping him alive.
Hurst landed with another injured Shipborn. This one got to keep his shoulders intact. “I can’t be present for every aerial jaunt you take, Sheriff Lawson. Leave the flying to those of us with wings.”
“Thanks for the save, but shut the hell up,” she snapped. “I won’t need you again.”
“What you need is to sit down. You can’t fight when you’re this injured.” Sarah, a streak of blood on her chin, shooed the medtechs away before Claire could hurt one of them.
Sarah had read her mind—she had been about to crunch a guy’s knee with her steel-toed boot. “I don’t need two hands. If I stay out of tentacle range, all I’m doing is shooting.”
“Except you won’t stay out of tentacle range.” The blond doctor fussed with the wrapping around Claire’s shoulder that pinned her arm to her side. Then she helped her into her jacket. Claire had her cut off the right sleeve so it wouldn’t flop in her way.
As Sarah ripped the material with her multipurp, Claire stared at the leviathan with revulsion, impatient to hit it again. With thin, sharp tentacles, the monster flailed the spot where Adam had burrowed, tearing its own body. It clearly didn’t want him there. That had to be good—for their side.
No matter what Sarah advised, Claire planned to do her part to keep the leviathan otherwise occupied.
The number of tentacles opposing their forces had dwindled since Adam entered the fray. Five whole minutes—long enough for her to get her dumb ass tossed in the air and her shoulder popped out of and back into joint. However, heavy bombardment from their people still woke a response from the beast, as did the proximity of soldiers. The leviathan knew when they were within range, and it sought them out with killing blows.
But the more it was dealing with them, the less it fucked with Adam.
Claire slid a tactanium vest over the jacket and draped it over the immobilized arm. “I’m going in. You can’t stop me.”
“Actually, I can,” Sarah responded with a grimace, helping Claire seal the vest, “but I won’t. If it were Niko, I’d go in, too.”
Sarah had that look that said she wanted to hug Claire, but she didn’t trust the sweet-faced blond not to dope her. Sarah relied on cunning rather than brawn to get her way. So Claire nodded her thanks—from a distance—and headed back into the war zone.
“How are you on our nightfall contingency?” Claire asked Niko over the command line as she strode across the churned up ground. The sun was setting to one side of the leviathan, in a dim, dusty explosion of pinks and reds. She’d lost the use of her good arm, but the beast was so massive, she didn’t need to aim. Her shoulder throbbed less with every step as the painkiller kicked in.
“Our pilots are welding the spotlights to the shuttles,” he answered. “Going up in about ten.”
“Gonna get cold, too. This is a decent-sized mountain range.” She raised her left arm, let her blaster band charge—the painkiller was doing its thing on her blisters, too—and walloped the leviathan close to where Adam was trapped.
To her surprise, the broad beam, usually reserved for begetter drones because it drained power so fast, scorched the slimy grey of the leviathan black.
The leviathan’s frantic clawing and
whipping paused until the scorch mark healed. The black wound disappeared like magic, but the fact she’d been able to scorch it at all was huge progress.
This fucker was going to feel her wrath.
“It’s getting shaky,” she announced. Shadows around the battlefield deepened, increasing the chances she’d trip. “We’re leaving marks on it.”
She shot it again, taking great pleasure when it darkened the monster’s flesh like a burned marshmallow. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Adam was touching that monster, trying to drain it, and now it was weakening.
“You could be right. The scientists are reading a sudden fluctuation in its structure,” Niko responded. Lots of pauses. He was busy as fuck.
Claire gauged the dark forms of the soldiers nearby—out of tentacle range—and halted parallel to them. “Do the scientists think the fluctuations are Adam’s doing?”
Her guy, her friend, her lover—he was getting the job done in there.
“It would have to be,” Niko confirmed. “We’re not doing anything to the leviathan that wouldn’t have been done by our people before.”
“How about bombing it from the inside?” A team with a cannon rolled into position down the trench and began to strafe the leviathan. Above, soldiers dove and blasted, weaving around tentacles that spurted after them.
Niko paused again before responding. “I’m sure at least one of our Ships managed a self-destruct sequence. Regardless, we’re setting up a penetrating torpedo to test on the nose, away from the matrix.”
She shot again. Again. She striped the leviathan with Xs, enjoying the dark sizzle.
It was about to get dark. She hoped those shuttles and spotlights joined the battle soon, because being able to see the tentacles coming at you was pretty damned vital.
Adam wasn’t dead. He was alive.
Now she just needed to help him kill a leviathan that could heal itself from everything they were doing to it, while picking them off like flies.