by Scott Moon
“Only one,” Kin said. “How many do you know?”
Dog snort-laughed and signaled Dwarf and Jojo to move. “Caga, Muzd, and Solaa. Solaa is your Reaper Queen.”
Kin laughed. “Not my queen.”
“Oh, I think she'd like you.” Dog pointed to his half-chewed ear. “She's a big fan of catch and release. She's got my blood link three times over. Doesn't come for me, though. What the fuck does that mean?”
Kin gave him a knowing look. “It's only a matter of time.”
Dog glanced at his feet, then checked his weapon out of habit. “Yeah, that ain't no shit.”
Grim as his conversation with Dog had been, Kin found the routine of squad movement comforting. For the first time in years, he wasn't leading, wasn't in charge. Maybe he was a captive held with the poison Jojo had put in his blood, but that wasn't anything new. Droon had done the same thing. The Reaper women in the birthing pit had done worse.
His hands trembled. Fluid oozed from his nose and the corners of his eyes. He fell to his knees.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Dog asked as he hurried to where Kin had fallen. He peeled Kin's eyelids, gazed for about three seconds at what he saw, and stepped back.
Kin saw only a blur of colors that looked like a whimsical water painting of the Fleet trooper.
“Jojo,” Dog shouted. “Get up here. Kin is having a reaction.”
Dwarf climbed down a trail, rushed to Dog, and seized him by the arm. “Are you trying to get us killed? Keep your voice down.”
Dog waved one hand at Kin.
“Holy shit,” Dwarf said.
Jojo padded to Kin's side and knelt. He removed a med kit from his gear and shined lights into Kin's eyes, ears, and throat.
“Well?” Dog asked.
Jojo removed his helmet and rubbed his forehead.
“The vampire serum is a virus. Doesn't make us vampires, but allows us to use any fluid found on Hellsbreach for hydration. I wish you two didn't call it vampire serum.”
“What does that have to do with Kin?” Dog asked.
“He is already infected with something,” Jojo said. “That's my best guess.”
“Is he going to die?” Dwarf asked.
Kin coughed. “It almost sounds like you're worried about me.”
“I'm not. I'm worried about finding the ship.” Dwarf shouldered his rifle. “I'm going up the trail to see how many Reapers heard you fucking around and are on the way to slaughter us.”
“Good luck,” Kin said.
“Can you walk?” Dog asked.
The world swam for what seemed like an hour. Kin retched on the red dirt. “No.”
Kin sat with his elbows on his knees, staring between his feet as he tried not to vomit. Embarrassment aside, losing his lunch in an environment this harsh could be as fatal as getting shot in the face. He'd been on dryer planets, places that required the full environmental protection of an FSPAA unit to survive. He wasn't going to escape Dog and his friends, or fight Reapers, until he satisfied the basic nutritional requirements for life. Hydration trumped all other concerns.
Jojo took his blood pressure and checked his heart rate. He gave him a sugary drink and told him to sip slowly.
Kin nodded, noticing a tattoo on Jojo's wrist for the first time. It hadn't been there when they came to Hellsbreach during the planetary assault.
But Kin had seen one like it.
On Lieutenant Raker.
He spent several minutes trying to find an orange viper on Dog, but the man was too far away and covered his arms in long sleeves, his hands in gloves. Kin wasn't suspicious of Dog's attire. He wore a similar shirt from the way station to fend off the sun.
“Why are you staring at Dog like that?” Jojo asked.
Kin shook his head. “I didn't realize I was staring.”
“Why were you doing it, then?”
Kin stalled as long as he could. “I'm just thinking it's suspicious that none of you are getting sick.”
“Hmm. I have administered this serum to a lot of men and women,” Jojo said. “You are the only one with an adverse reaction. Tell me why.”
Kin stared straight into the man's gray eyes, silently swearing he would never turn his back on this man, never trust him, never forget the man was part of Lieutenant Raker's mad cabal.
“I told you I was imprisoned in a Reaper birthing pit. They claimed to be healing me. Now it seems they left their little friends in my blood,” Kin said. He didn't add that he thought Droon either pulled or modified the contagions from him. And he didn't add that Orlan had suffered similar side effects from his imprisonment on Hellsbreach.
Orlan was dead, and Jojo didn't need to know Kin had been permanently changed during captivity. A smile crossed his lips as he considered sharing the Mazz Emperor’s claims verbatim and all of Admiral Shield’s bullshit.
“I don’t trust a man who laughs without sharing the joke,” Jojo said.
“A Reaper, a Dwarf, and an Earth Fleet spy walk into a bar,” Kin said.
Unamused, Jojo stood and walked away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The Rage
WHY do Reapers squat? Rebecca saw with her eyes and wondered with her mind. She felt pain with everything else. The FSPAA-IIA heads-up-display inside of her helmet indicated that every moment of her experience was being recorded. A Reaper of incredible size rested on his haunches and patted the red sand with taloned fingers and leathery palms. For some reason, this Reaper was more distinctly male than any she had seen.
“Rebecca Lacroix, a lieutenant of the hated Earth Fleet. Slave of faceless government entities who refuse to fight their own wars. Suppressors of many races. Destroyers of worlds. Plotters of espionage. Enemies of everything not man,” the big Reaper said.
“You don’t talk like a Reaper,” Rebecca said.
“I am not. I am the Rage.”
“Wow,” Rebecca said as she moved her fingers inside of the FSPAA-IIA gauntlets. It was a habit of driving a Mech unit, but possible in most other armor as well. She wanted to know if she was paralyzed or her unit was paralyzed. To her immense relief and fatigue — oddly enough — her twiddling fingers told her that both she and her armor were good to go.
“Do not try to be sneaky, human. You can move. Look to your right for the scattered bodies of Reapers and you will know the place you landed on is Hellsbreach,” the Rage said. “I came right behind you.”
“Back up and…wait…what? Shut the fuck up. You just said Hellsbreach.”
The giant, burning-eyed Reaper who called himself the Rage laughed.
It was a small laugh — something a boy or girl would make after a fantastic game of make believe was concluded to everyone’s satisfaction. Rebecca experienced a twinge of her own youth, not so childish as what she had just observed, but something akin to her idealistic pre-enlistment days. The hideous monster was hurting inside, damaged beyond saving, and probably insane. “We are on Hellsbreach,” she said.
“I was to serve the Omega on the throne of this galaxy and beyond. Now I am stuck here with you.”
“At least you don’t talk like Droon. That son-of-a-bitch drives me crazy,” Rebecca said as she sat up. Her body ached from repeated impact to the armor that was beyond the ability of the unit’s kinetic dampers to absorb. Extreme overexertion completed the lactic acid cocktail that tortured every muscle fiber from the arches of her feet to the back of her neck. She worked her jaw, rubbing several contact points inside of the helmet and confusing the living hell out of the FSPAA-IIA computer.
The Slomn-Reaper jumped to his feet, manhood swinging through the air. “I will kill Droon for you. He is nothing compared to the Rage.”
“I think I even over-exerted my face,” Rebecca said. On her feet now, she turned toward the cavorting monster. “Stop jumping around. I have questions.”
The Rage rushed forward and squatted again. In this position, he was nearly as tall as she was, even in the armor.
She shook her head
to clear her thoughts. Hydration and meds should have fixed her up by now if the unit wasn’t short on both. “Why are you such a boy? Don’t most Reapers keep that tucked in?”
The Slomn-Reaper looked down, laughed, and hopped up and down without fully standing. “The Rage is not a boy or a girl. Or the Rage is but doesn’t know.” The manhood became girlhood, then changed back.
“You’re a shapeshifter,” Rebecca said.
The creature tilted its head sideways as though about to divulge a juvenile secret. “I am. I am the Rage. I am the sword and hammer and nuclear bomb of the shapeshifters. Humans will fear me. Reapers will serve me. The Slomn will give me their secrets.”
Rebecca staggered toward the top of a sand dune and looked around. There was nothing but red fuck-me-I-am-lost in every direction. The orange sky mocked her attempts to obtain a compass heading because she didn’t know any of the cardinal points for reference. Magnetic north held steady as a politician for minutes or hours at a time. She wanted to pound her face in frustration and cry at the same time.
The Rage followed her. She put one hand on her hip and the other on the back of her neck in a pose that pretended she wasn’t encased in armor. The computer was trying to tell her something important about radiation, which was confused with a warning not to burrow beneath the sand. Like that is on the top of my list.
“I will kill Droon for Rebecca,” the Rage said.
“Listen, before we go another step, I want you to put clothes on or something. Or just pick a gender and stick to it. I am tired of looking at your sexual organs.”
“Which is best?”
She stared at him. “Depends. At this point, I think all men are a bunch of assholes, but I’m not really a girl’s girl either. Just wear pants.” She laughed until she heard the melody of hysteria.
The Rage grew a sleeveless tunic of spiked flesh and writhing tentacles.
Rebecca suppressed the need to vomit. “Why don’t you take the form of a tall, dark, and handsome millionaire who wants to take me away from all this?”
The Rage growled, and she realized the creature wasn’t all fun and games. This was the thing that neither Kin nor Droon could kill. It didn’t like being equated with an Iron Box pleasure slave.
“I can only shift my appearance so much because I took this form permanently,” the Rage said.
“Why?” Rebecca could barely hear the word as she asked and thought she might cry if she could.
“To be stronger. A shapeshifter can be very strong if he or she commits to a single form. Many, many Reapers were once my people. Some even remember their life before the change.”
“That wasn’t what I meant, but I am glad you told me.”
The Rage frowned, which caused his lower teeth to cover a large portion of his face. “I did it for the Omega.”
“The Omega is your friend?”
The monster squatted even lower than a normal Reaper until he seemed to have fallen while remaining on his feet, knees jutting above his form and feet spread just wide enough to allow the contortion. He sobbed with increasing intensity.
“I’m sorry, Rage.”
The monster leapt up and shoved Rebecca, causing her to fly backward ten meters. “I don’t like that name! I don’t like you!”
Rebecca jerked her feet underneath her body as quickly as she could make the FSPAA-IIA gears turn and still wasn’t upright when the Rage hit her again.
“Stop!” she screamed. “Just stop fucking pushing me. I can call you whatever you want. How about George or Stephen or Randal!” The last word made her sick as she suffered a flash memory of Randal Dogface dying in the Ror-Rea.
“I do not like any of those names,” the Rage said. “I will kill everyone. Even the Omega!”
“Fine,” she said. “Just kill me last.”
“Okay.”
Holy shit.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Runaway William
“HELP me, William,” Rickson said.
The Reaper stopped and looked back. “How did you know it was me?”
“I saw you duck under a sword swing. A real Reaper would have lunged at the Winger’s throat and either died or bit his head clean off. And Ogre isn’t growling at you.”
The William-Reaper looked around, then walked to where Rickson was playing dead beside Ogre. The movement was convincing. Fear burned to life in Rickson’s heart, but only for a moment.
“I think I may have to become a Reaper for good. It is the only way to survive this place,” William said.
“We are on Hellsbreach,” Rickson said. The statement was something he did not want to face — truth he couldn’t accept without giving up. With evidence all around him, he could barely control his breathing or stay focused on what he needed to do to stay alive.
The Reaper-boy nodded.
“Have you seen Clavender?” Rickson felt the beating of his heart slow toward something like normal, although his shoulders tensed and there was a cramp threatening to go nuclear in his left calf muscle.
“No. She may have died. When everything happened, I saw her wings turning black and the Omega fled with his best warriors.”
Rickson risked sitting up — dared the cramp to rip open his lower leg as he moved. Ogre put his bloody head in his lap, exposing several cuts along the top of his neck. “He’s a worse monster than Droon. I don’t trust him,” Rickson said as he remembered the disturbing scene with William, Iso, and the Omega what seemed ages ago.
William laughed miserably. “The Omega isn’t a monster. He is the Mazz Emperor and the leader of all shapeshifters. The purpose of his existence is to end human domination, even if it means destroying the galaxy to do it.”
“Go back to the part where he isn’t a monster,” Rickson said.
The Reaper-boy made an angry sound, snorted, and looked like he might be a real Reaper for a moment. “Do you want humans to be slaves like the shapeshifters have been for thousands of years?”
“Hell no,” Rickson said. “I never knew a shapeshifter before you. Don’t pile the unfairness of the universe on me. I grew up on Crashdown, which wasn’t exactly a good time.”
William shook his head violently, then stood to survey their surroundings. The wind of Hellsbreach blew red dust through the air, partially obscuring rocks and mountains at the edge of the desert. “The Reapers that followed Droon are looking for him, I think. Some of them ran off into the wild as soon as they could stand up from what Clavender did. The others act like they are tracking something.”
On the sand, a small beetle ripped the guts out of a larger beetle and swam in the gore as sand covered the micro-scene.
“Why do you think they are looking for Droon and not something else?” Rickson asked.
“I made an assumption,” he said. “If they are looking for the Rage, then they are as good as dead.”
“William, I’m so glad you’re here. I thought I would die alone in this place and now I get to learn everything a friend would have told me before we wound up in this mess.” He thought of the burning Reaper that had attacked Rebecca before everything changed.
The head of a snake came out of the red sand, swallowed both beetles, the living and the dead, and dove underground in the same motion. A gust of wind erased evidence of their existence. Rickson pulled his eyes back to the conversation that was deciding whether he would live or die on this planet.
William sat next to him, still in the shape of a Reaper but not looking like one because the monsters did not sit, they squatted. “The Rage is a weapon the Omega created to fight against the weapons of Earth Fleet and the Mazz Imperials. Your people have Reapers and the Mazz had the Slomn before the Battle of the Bleeding Grounds ended them. The Rage was meant to fight both. Now that there are only Reapers, he can’t be stopped.”
“Kin will stop him,” Rickson said.
“No. Your friend is just an insurance policy at this point. His genetics are linked to the Reapers. If he dies here, there will be a plague that wil
l cause them to die out. That was why they left him on Hellsbreach the first time. Everyone has been looking for him since the campaign failed.”
“How do you know all this?” Rickson asked.
Ogre raised his head and smelled the wind.
“I was supposed to be the next Omega, I think. But I’m half human and I don’t want the job. Have you ever seen one of us in our true form?”
Rickson thought about Susso and her ebony skin and piercing eyes.
“We — they, actually — look more wolf-like than human. Like hunters on two legs, not that much different from the Reapers in some ways. But that is only for a pure shapeshifter. They would never let me be the Omega, no matter how good I am at mimicking things.”
“Hey, William, I’m really thirsty,” Rickson said, wondering if he could suck the juice out of the next Hellsbreach beetle he saw — or the snake.
The boy looked at him. “I can bring you water and rations. Unless the Rage comes this way, then I will run like hell.”
“You’re the next Omega or whatever. Just tell it what to do,” Rickson said.
“That is why I need to run.” He stood. “The Omega has control of the Mazz Imperial Army. If Clavender stayed behind and he captures her, then Earth Fleet is done, especially since the best units were destroyed when she cast the Reapers back to Hellsbreach. With Kin here, the circle is closed. Once he dies, the Omega will have no one to oppose him.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Rickson said.
“You will be better off here,” William said. “I will come back. Try not to be seen.”
“Why are you running away, William?”
William raised one hand to shade his eyes and searched the desert. Lowering his hand, he looked at Rickson. “I am tired of being used.”
CHAPTER FORTY
Escape
KIN struggled to his feet, turning his back on Jojo and Dog, the sense of belonging gone. For a few precious hours, he had lost himself in the routine of squad movement, allowed himself to be led, and busied his mind with tactical details large and small.