Wren shouted into the com. “Noss, bring Eagle 4 around to temple pickup! Now! The back door!”
“Can you signal the Melinarians?” I rasped at her.
“All their channels are blocked.”
I shook my head in frustration.
Groups of rebels sprang from blackened shrines to trade fire with Mong’s defenders, with the rebels intent on storming the main temple to rescue Volia. Bombs dropped from above. The tops of pagodas disappeared. We crouched, hoping we could last without getting peppered full of holes until Noss could bring the ship around. So much for Mong’s halcyon, idyllic world.
So much for us too, if we didn’t get away from here fast.
Clutches of men fought guerrilla style, launching grenades and spraying fire, ducking, scrambling for new toeholds of cover. It was Resus all over again.
Fareon beams lashed out of the sky. A sleek ship with gleaming hull roared down from above.
My heart leaped. An Alpha 9 fast runner? Could it be? My old ship, Starrunner, back from the dead?
No, only a copy.
‘The next best thing,” Wren rasped.
I shook my head in bewilderment. No time to ponder. The ship landed a few hundred yards away, trim and grey with ox horn-shaped prow and rough diamond shape at stern.
It might as well have been a thousand yards away though. A squad of ground troops identified me among the company and moved in with guns booming.
A hoarse yell hovered on my lips. I turned kamikaze and leveled R4 mayhem into the figures that came charging us. I waited for oblivion to snatch me, riddled with fire and the force of energy pulses. But it did not. In a last defensive move, I fell flat on my stomach. Fire clipped the earth all around. I plugged round after round into the noise and confusion. Through the smoke, I saw Mong striding amid those running figures, a gigantic, barbaric, black-clad leather brute with furred cap. I knew the jig was up.
Gunfire grazed my side. Not possible to escape hits. I reached down, felt a wet stickiness at my ribs. The pain was minimal compared to the animal agony of Mong’s hangman’s torture. Still, I’d need regen soon. I saw a dream image of Blest hobbling behind me somewhere, catching some shrapnel fallout in the burst of fire power.
He and Wren jogged together, or rather tottered, lurching ahead to dig in defensive positions closer to the descending ship. They dove into low shrubbery. They would get eaten to bits in seconds if they didn’t find better cover. Volia and Zan, weaponless, hunched like whipped puppies behind them, white-faced, resigned to death while Starrunner’s engines blew dust and grass all over the place. Voj was down, riddled with bullets. Blest’s leg had caught a slug. We were not going to make it. Starrunner, resurrected, loomed a hundred feet away by my estimate, near some broken fountains and a sizzling stream. The ship lifted and tilted. Seeing our plight, Noss angled her in to shield us from the savage fire of Mong’s militia. I realized we had missed the narrow window of rescue by mere minutes, despite Noss’s clever maneuvering. Bigger ships loomed on our rear horizon; they came chugging toward us.
The alien bulb lay at my side, slipped from my waist belt. With my head tucked low, I launched it, mumbling a prayer that Mong and all his deranged brood would taste bitter death. The frightening thing left my fingers, lobbed like a grenade at the first group of running figures only a few dozen feet away. They lay into it with fire, thinking it some freak grenade come to shred them to bits.
A big mistake.
The bulb exploded in ruin and fragments of its coconut shell bubbled like lava. They turned away to shield their eyes from what they expected to be hideous shrapnel. But from within came unimaginable horror. A winged, misshapen creature, some demon spawn with six starfish arms equipped with sucker pods of sandy-brown color, emerged from the chaos. It was different from the other birthlings, nothing like the dragonfly killer or eel-lizard that had attacked and munched through the Skugs, or the black cricket horror that had burrowed into Mong’s gunman’s face.
What spawned the endless variation of this creature from its plain Jane bulb, none could ever know. This one was like some cross between a sea urchin and a bat, if such were possible.
Fully grown and buzzing with anger, it now dove like a demon possessed upon the hapless minions of Mong’s troop, slicing holes into them with its barbed-suckered appendages. It tore through a gaping man and came out his back, leaving a fist-size hole where his heart should have been.
“Holy fuck,” I gasped.
Mong shouted orders, barely ducking and dodging a lunge and slice and dice by the creature. “Stand down! Don’t fire at the thing! It’s one of those alien freaks. It’ll only kill us if we attack. Kill Rusco over there—kill all the fugitives.”
Mong lifted his augmented arm. Immediately I felt a sharp tingling surge course through my joints, rattling my nerves. I flopped about like a fish, but such was my hate for Mong and all his sadistic powers that I vaulted up, gun in hand, spraying fire, cursing him for the end of time. I directed every atom of my animosity and feverish hate
