“Two more incoming.” Seth warned.
Taeger lifted his head as the blur of motion moved toward them.
“Not fucking happening!” Greig roared, launching himself at the first creature as Seth held off the second with his weapon placed directly against the second attacker’s chest. He fired over and over, straight into the chest. The A’nua Na-KI screamed as the Lumerians swarmed, driving their rings into the adversaries’ bodies. The shoulder. The arm. The leg.
Taeger wanted to yell at them to stop. They were wasting the few weapons that could kill the bastards. The creatures, each stabbed with at least half a dozen of the white rings, made a sound that tore through Taeger’s head like an explosion. Scream of rage. Pure, killing rage.
His team was doomed. The other creatures would come. Already they struggled under two. More would surely end them.
The monsters moved like phantoms. Ghosts. Their bodies were as dark as their ship. The edges of their forms flickered, growing and expanding, appearing and disappearing as they phased in and out of this dimension.
They were only partially here, and they were killing everyone.
“Take them down and run for the ladder!” Taeger yelled. That wasn’t the plan. The plan was to take them all out, then rescue the boy. But they weren’t going to last here. He hoped there would be a more defensible position on the lower level.
With a loud cry, Elduin, the warrior closest to Seth, leaped straight for the enemy’s head, his arm raised to strike as he flew through the air. He struck true; the ring embedded in the center of the creature’s forehead. Elduin’s laugh turned to a gurgle as he fell, the Dark One’s claws protruding from his back where the monster stabbed him through the chest.
Seth drew his sword and sliced the tendons at the back of its legs as Greig leaped for its shoulder, shoving the creature off balance. With quick strokes, Grieg gutted the creature and removed its monstrous head.
“Now, Taeger!” Seth shouted.
Moving with every ounce of speed he possessed, Taeger drove the ring in his hand deep into the center of dark, black abdomen closest to him and nearly fell to the floor, dizzy, as a surge of power erupted from the ring, completing the circuit, locking the second Dark One’s body in place.
“Down!” Seth bellowed.
Taeger and Greig dropped split seconds before Seth’s longsword pierced the second attacker’s chest cavity, slicing up through bone and sinew until the creature dropped to the floor, destroyed for all time.
Standing, Taeger took in the damage. Two of his men down. Elduin with a hand through his chest and Lyari’s throat ripped nearly in half by one swipe of the Dark One’s claws. They had a quarter mile of empty space to cover, nowhere to hide, and no way off the ship unless they gained control of it.
“There are more in this section,” he reminded his men.
“Why aren’t they here?” Greig asked, wiping blood and grime from his face.
Taeger closed his eyes and gave himself to the old ways, taking knowledge from the web of energy that surrounded all living things. In other parts of the ship, more of the Dark Ones stirred, paying attention to what transpired here, but not disturbed enough to interfere. But the others coming? He shuddered as their appetite for horror and torment moved through his mind.
“They like to play with their food.”
“Damn them.” Seth kept his longsword in one hand, a curved ring in the other and looked at him. Nodded. Taeger looked at each of his men in turn. Good men. They nodded. Words were unnecessary. They were all in.
As one they turned and ran forward. Uncowed. Undeterred. Ready to fight. To die.
Boots pounding on the hard, black floor, they raced to the opposite end of the ship, passing countless doors, and behind each door forty or fifty souls locked in terror. There were thousands of intelligent, sentient beings on this ship alone.
Less than halfway to their destination, the attack came, two more of the Dark Ones leaping upon them from behind. Belsaran and Almar turned to face the attack, Almar bellowing over his shoulder to run. To go on. To save the boy.
With a curse, Taeger left them behind, knowing they were right. Belsaran and Almar were buying time, time to save Ion.
The ladder was steep, meant more for sliding than calculated movement. Taeger slid below, landing on his feet in a corridor identical to the one above. He moved aside for Seth and Greig to land and looked over the barren black floor, staring at door after door after door as far as he could see.
There were no lights. No outcroppings. Only their night vision sensors allowed them to see. The corridor was perfectly empty, with only faint markings on the floor where the prison blocks had been moved and loaded in turn, one after another.
They were in the deepest depths of hell with no way out.
But they wouldn’t lay down and die without a fight. It wasn’t in them.
They would survive and take the boy to safety. There was no other choice.
At last, he felt the boy’s presence. They opened the door to the cell and his shoulders sagged with relief as there was no blast of air, just a quiet
