Beware of Light (Dark Stars Book 1) Read online

  Another lunged at him, and Blake blasted the repulsors at full burn for a fraction of a second to dodge to the left. He slashed to the left and decapitated the human-shaped beast.

  Not everybody fared that well.

  “Rose, the fuck? Get back!” Tara commanded.

  Her protégé Rose Parnell was a miniature tempest that always needed someone to rage against or something to prove. Blake saw the girl carve her way through one of the monsters and continue her charge deeper into the enemy formation. She used a short blade in her off-hand to parry the plasma torches while slicing with the other. Tara dashed to Rose, but she was blocked off by a dense net of monsters. Blake cursed, flipped stealth on, ordered four drones to clear a path, and charged in a repulsor dash with the remaining three.

  The world became washed out as the refractory fields made him disappear. Blake got hit only once, and being at least three times heavier and having better shielding payed off—the beast went splat against his barriers.

  He arrived by Rose’s side with two thirds of his shields depleted by the impacts and jamming. Half the girl’s face was one enormous blister. Blackened blood oozed from where her left eyebrow used to be, and her skintight suit had a palm-sized hole below the right breast. Silver ribs showed through it.

  Tara landed to his left a second later. “Parnell, back.”

  Thankfully, this jolted the blood-crazed idiot out of her rage. Rose blinked owlishly. Her right arm was still in one of the greenish things, and the corpse shriveled a little as her skin throbbed with red light. Blake could see the boils on her face blacken and flake off. A wave of putrid air hit his receptors.

  Tara’s kick went straight through Rose’s shields, hit her in the side with a crunch, and sent the girl flying across the combat lines and back into the rear. Rose hadn’t even turned her anchoring on.

  Blake ducked under a slash and opened the beast from shoulder to hip, sidestepped another lunge, grabbed the monster’s arm, and threw it at the ground head-first. Its neck broke with a satisfying crack. Blake’s shields got poked by a plasma torch. He grasped the attacker by the neck, and fired a plasma grenade point-blank before dashing back with repulsors. Only anchored boots remained of that one.

  Despite being cut off, he and Tara were managing. His shields were draining, one more robot was down, and Tara had several scorch marks. Her shields were more durable but less stable than his. Aileen was getting used to the enemies’ patterns of attack but not fast enough.

  Any second now the rest of his squad would break through and give him and his partner some breathing room.

  “Drummond, Linheld, scatter!”

  It was the lieutenant. Blake jumped back without thinking, blasting at Tara with his repulsors to make sure she would make it. The blue of her shielding flared, but she disengaged anchoring and slid back ten feet.

  If what they had been fighting for the past five minutes were distorted humans, then the thing that landed between them with a reverberating thwack was a murder train.

  Despite towering over him, it lashed at him like a snake that had been stepped on. Blake barely managed to throw a drone in its path to buy time to sidestep the strike. The machine exploded in a shower of metal and electronics as half a ton of flesh barreled into it. Anchoring failed, and the crumpled remains of the drone flew at Blake, making his shields crackle.

  The enemy stood to its full height then. Crimson lights throbbed in convoluted patterns over its body. It opened its mouth. A calm female voice came where he had been inspecting a guttural roar.

  “Do you recognize me, sister?” said the beast and swung a claymore at Tara one-handed.

  He didn’t know what possessed him to do what he did next. He would blame temporary madness.

  Blake repulsor-dashed toward Tara, just as she was about to be hit by the behemoth, and reallocated all of Aileen’s processing power to hacking his partner’s rooting system while disengaging his own. No magnetic anchoring meant he could squeeze in a little more speed and get to Tara in time before the slab of white-hot plasma reached her.

  He didn’t make it. The blade impacted him mere two feet before he reached Tara. The power behind the hit made Blake nearly break the sound barrier as he was sent flying—at least the shields protected him from being bisected. He thought he saw Tara get launched somewhere too. Despite wearing the suit, Blake felt pain in the lower part of his spine followed by the numbness of anesthetics and faint horror emanating from Aileen. AIs didn’t feel fear.

  “Blake, we are headed toward the city barriers. Just know: I have no regrets.”

  So that was what it was. A three-foot thick energy wall would turn them into a drizzle of pink metal showering the ground hundreds of feet below. It was getting difficult to think straight with drugs being pumped straight into his spine and brain. Blake closed his eyes and tried to make peace with the fact that the reason why he had come to Terra Nox—his wish—would remain unfulfilled. It didn’t work.

  He didn’t feel any more pain, and the blissful void that is said to await everyone after the end didn’t come. Blake willed his attention back to the suit’s sensory organs.

  They had somehow cleared the city shields and were now painting a purple arc against the night sky. Tiny dark-emerald trees sprouted from the ground below. Strange. Jungle canopy was about five hundred feet above the ground.

  Blake blinked. The trees got bigger. He noticed the roar of the wind in his ears.

  2

  The Human in Me

  Moira carefully rubbed her eyes. Her new fingers weren’t made for such delicate work. They were made for breaking necks.

  “The Council will hang you by your entrails!”

  The room was dark. The only light shone into the prisoner’s face and fed the shadows twisting in the corners. Moira and Lyndon stood on the edge of darkness and looked down at the man who had led the Council forces during battle. Cold light and black-blue shadows under his eyes made his face look like a bleached skull that somebody had tightened skin around. While he thrashed against the reinforced restraints and barked cliché threats, she wondered what his superiors had seen in the lieutenant to promote him to that rank. Unless it was because he was a member of the Nicastro Ascended family.

  “Stop shouting, Mister Nicastro. Nobody can hear you,” said Lyndon and flicked the prisoner on the forehead with a finger, making the head snap back from the impact. “Not terribly bright, are you? Your threats only make this easier.”

  “Lyndon, me and Mister Nicastro are talking, don’t interrupt,” she chided.

  “No gratitude, no appreciation,” said Lyndon with a smile. “To think I gave up my research into Old Earth to be treated like this.”

  She said, “Your specialization is dead. There are maybe two people in the whole galaxy who care, and you are one of them.”

  Lyndon snorted and rolled his shoulders. Muscles strained against the fabric of the baggy suit he always wore, but it held. He was the sort of languid predator she would ignore on the street and be apprehensive of anywhere private.

  Since a direct approach didn’t work, Moira decided to try something gentler.

  “Lieutenant Nicastro, don’t make this harder on your men than it needs to be. We know reinforcements are heading toward Seind. We know they are mostly Ascended of minor noble houses. Just tell us where they plan to deploy.”

  The man’s gaze ran along the drab walls of the interrogation room, and he didn’t meet her eyes. She had to give Nicastro some credit. He didn’t wince, and his expression betrayed no emotion when she offered him an out. Bravery was what stupidity looked like from the inside.

  She said, “You don’t even need to give us anything substantial—just answer a question. You and your men will be placed in the most comfortable section of Seind’s prison until we trade you to the Council.”

  The captured lieutenant seemed to consider their offer. Then he spat in Lyndon’s left eye.

  Lyndon took a handkerchief out of a chest pocket and star
ted wiping his face with deliberate circular motions. Moira laughed as Nicastro lunged forward and strained against his binds. If the lieutenant wanted to unnerve someone, he shouldn’t have picked a man who had lived for a thousand years in the Terra Nox jungle where an animal’s saliva could melt the skin right off your bones.

  “I take back what I said before, Nicastro,” Lyndon said tossing the handkerchief into a trash compactor bin in the corner. “You are not merely dumb. You are an imbecile. I hope your pain tolerance rates higher than your intellect, otherwise this won’t be entertaining at all.”

  Moira rubbed at her forehead. Just her luck that the only senior officer they took alive turned out to be suicidal.

  “I’ll leave you to it, Lyndon. Just make sure he doesn’t die.” Moira took a step toward the door but then delayed and turned to the chained captive. “Making your captors angry before you learn what they are capable of is stupid, lieutenant. Lyndon, forget about the one question—I want everything. The posts they had set up before our attack, remaining numbers in the city, and their fallback positions. Especially fallback positions.” She looked at the prisoner and decided to give him one more opportunity to avoid his fate. “Lieutenant, if you tell us where to find Tara Linheld, I give you my word you and your people won’t be hurt.”

  Nicastro snarled in contempt and chuckled. Lyndon grinned at the prisoner. All his teeth were canines.

  “It will be my pleasure to make this Council dog whimper, my lady,” Lyndon said.

  He took off the jacket and started unbuttoning the shirt. Nicastro looked on with a mocking smile, but soon his expression turned to one of disgust.

  “What the hell is that?”

  Lyndon’s entire torso was covered in dark-green scales, crawling on top of each other and fighting for every free speck of skin. Black liquid seeped from reddish cracks between the scales whenever he moved, only to be reabsorbed after trickling a few inches. As Lyndon closed his eyes and focused, onyx rivulets started streaming from his shoulders, down his arms, and to his fingertips. Shadows played across his hands, and nails were replaced with five-inch midnight-black claws. A troupe of red electric arcs began uncoiling down their length and collapsing into tiny fireworks of green sparks.

  “Failed Ascension.” Marcus turned the color of dead squid.

  Moira shook her head. “In Lyndon’s time there were no failures. The equipment was brand new, after all.” She couldn’t help a smug grin when she saw realization start to crawl its way up their victim’s spine.

  Lyndon’s jaw unhinged with a scragging pop, and his teeth elongated into three-inch alabaster fangs.

  “You should have given us what we wanted, Nicastro,” she said. “Call me when you are done, Lyndon. I’ll send the cleaners and a doctor to make this scum presentable again.”

  Because Lyndon’s maw wasn’t suited for human speech, he could only nod. Moira left and locked the two-inch titanium alloy door behind her. Muffled screams started. She kept walking.

  This wasn’t a movie or a game, so she doubted Nicastro would last long before he cracked. Filtering the truth from the lies told to stop the pain would be more difficult, but all they needed was one more independent source. There were still plenty of enemies in the city for that, both trapped under the rubble and simply unable to escape Seind because the Federation now controlled the City Hall and the DNA detectors at the border.

  The City Hall was a labyrinth. She walked black halls with high ceilings, following the path she remembered, but after ten minutes Moira had to admit she was lost. The building had been built during the Freedom Civil War, and the architects had been concerned with making administrative buildings easy to defend, which was why they were near impossible to navigate, and no two were alike. It was fitting, she supposed, that their first major victory in this rebellion would be capturing one of the remaining strongholds of the first Terra Nox civil war.

  After a while Moira gave up, activated her personal assistant, and checked the partial map they had made during the first couple hours of exploring the building. She’d been making circles fifty feet from the exit for the last ten minutes. Moira took two rights and walked out.

  Clouds of dust drifted in the wind. Where the golden spires of entertainment centers and shopping malls had stood, half-stripped metal skeletons remained. After an hour of fighting it had become clear that the Federation would take the city. Seeing this, remaining Council forces had turned the building shields off and used anti-air batteries to destroy supports of every structure they had a line of fire to, denying their enemies infrastructure even at the cost of burying their own citizens. City Hall was a former fortress, but civilian buildings were flimsy constructs that relied on gravity dampeners and couldn’t survive more than one artillery strike.

  The plaza in front of the City Hall was as large as the fortress itself. It was half full, and more people were coming. Families and friends huddled together for an illusion of safety, keeping their heads down, and only the brave glanced around.

  “What will happen to us?” asked a young man with bright-purple horns.

  “Hell if I know. Sod off,” said a ten-foot-tall soldier standing on the City Hall stairs.

  Moira heard a murmur wash over the crowd, growing stronger when it reached the bigger clumps. Only the ones who weren’t scared enough to barricade themselves at home came to the plaza, yet there was still more than ten thousand people against her two hundred soldiers. Crawlers didn’t count, and many of her men were busy securing the city elsewhere. If this got ugly and the media got their hands on the footage, it would be the opposite of what they wanted to gain by capturing Seind.

  Moira directed some of the nanomachines in her body to her vocal cords. If she didn’t want to turn a part of herself into sludge, she needed to be completely aware of what she was doing, which meant no blocking the searing pain. Thankfully, adjusting only the vocal cords was child’s play compared to other things she could do.

  “Please keep calm. My name is Moira Heatsworth, and I’m your new mayor.” Her amplified voice boomed over the open space like a divine revelation. “As soon as we take inventory of available supplies, we will start distributing them. It is not our intention to hurt civilians. When the city is secure, you will be able to leave or stay with us.”

  She liked to think her shouting down the crowd with the sheer power of her lungs made more of an impact than using the speakers, and it felt good to use her abilities for something besides killing. The plaza went quiet.

  Moira undid the changes to her body, suppressed the accompanying flinch of pain, and walked up to the soldier that had been doing a piss-poor job of pacifying the potential mob. She said, “Nigel? What are you doing here?”

  “Moira?” said her friend. He spoke in a bass that seemed to come from the sea depths, murky and reverberating. “Bloody hell, you are tiny.”

  The faux-marble steps were dwarfed by the enormity of Sergeant Nigel Tooke. The man looked like he had been subjected to an experiment that had bloated some of his muscles at the price of others—a typical Butcher appearance. His right arm was a dark-brown tree trunk, thirty inches in diameter; the other one was a twig that he could barely lift without the servos fastened around the joints. He was one of the luckier Butchers: his legs were almost the same size. Most of their kind couldn’t walk without an exoskeleton.

  Nigel stood—all ten feet of muscle—and looked her over with his one good eye from under a scarred brow.

  “Damn, Moira. I mean, I’ve heard, but damn.”

  She had to crank her neck up to look at his face. “For fuck’s sake, Nigel, I’m not a circus freak.”

  “Sorry, boss. It’s just that you’re so short—”

  “Do you think I like being seven-five?” She resisted the temptation to do an eye roll. She was an official now. “Even with how well my secondary Ascension went, it took a year of studying biology, programming, and all kinds of bullshit before I could transform—all to make nice with normal people and wal
k into Council buildings without breaking doorways.” She stared at her tiny right hand, not even big enough to crush an adult’s skull. “I’m still afraid to screw up and turn into a puddle of goo every time I do it.”

  Nigel shook his deformed head and did his best to keep his gaze on her face. Heatsworth had encouraged her to go through her secondary Ascension, and on bad days she wanted to beat the man raw. On good days she reveled in the power. As far as she knew, she was the only non-Freefolk Ascended with the kind of control over her body that allowed her to change shape at will. And nobody on the planet could do it and have the kind of strength she had.

  Nigel said, “Got it, boss, not another word.” He looked onto the plaza, where some other Butchers stood among the crowd, keeping peace. “When will my boys and girls get a proper place to rest? Or should I order them to—how do I put it—renovate some civilian apartments? Dawn is coming.”

  Moira shook her head and said, “I’ve had a couple engineers go over the city plans. As expected, only the City Hall and the police headquarters have spare structural integrity. Everything else would fall if you turned off the gravity dampeners and sneezed at it. Just move the barracks into the city.”

  “We won’t make it in time,” he said.

  “We won’t make it in time, mayor,” she corrected him. “Use my title once in a while. It won’t hurt you.”

  “Whatever you say, boss.” Nigel grinned. “But seriously, Moira, we will fry in an hour.”

  She looked around, searching for something that could hide twenty ten-foot-tall men and women. Her mind floated for a second before it came back to what they had been talking about a moment before.