Chapter 24
Outside the Elvedor, she tugged on the black gloves that Led had ordered for her along with a black, armored catsuit. Then the helmet, which on her touch had popped up feline ears. She smirked at that and gave Led an eyeroll.
“To strike terror into your enemies,” he told her, motioning her forward.
At least he too wore body armor under his muted red mollok coat, along with numerous holsters for his weapons.
Smorg and Jocelyn hadn’t been told about the dangers and were meeting her and Led at the very top, at the offices of Bob Stardrake. The skies above were quiet minus all flying traffic.
“Too quiet,” Led said, as he slid into the waiting armored fleetjer.
A cross between a car, a mini-tank, and a superhero accessory, this four-doored scarified-pink and black fleetjer could outdistance and outgun most opposition and do it in style.
There were harpoons too. Big plus.
The city regulations on Skrull were clearly weighted toward the use of large and unusual ordinance within city limits.
Thorn slipped into the opposite passenger door. Whatever Led thought was coming for them, this should be adequate. Two of his tentacles had to be curled out though the window due to lack of room, but he’d sleeved them in black armor and given them guns to hold.
“Go.” Led commanded the driver – a dalk with a penchant for knives.
The fleetjer shot forward.
Then the situation began to go...awry.
She wasn’t sure of every detail, for small objects inside the vehicle began to float off the floor and circle her. Her vehement cursing of how this couldn’t possibly be a cycle did zero good.
Led had turned his head to look, which informed her he’d noticed. Things grew hazy as the knowledge of where every sexually mature male, female, and in-between sex within a huge radius, burst into her consciousness.
She held it down, held it all back by curling over her stomach and breathing tightly.
The vehicle zoomed onward, bouncing, slewing. Ricochets of something like bullets hit the outside. The driver began to sweat as her influence rose and rose.
Her skin wasn’t touched but she saw the flirtations of the objects as they whirled. Fluff and seatbelt ends, pens and bullet casings.
OMG the roar, and the smell of sex.
The scent of everything intensified, assaulting her nose as the projectiles assaulted them, and Led yelled instructions.
The fleetjer tilted, and the engine sounds stopped, metal crunching and spinning down, ticking over, though the screams of people continued.
The driver was dead, she saw, as she was hauled from the fleetjer by a tentacle.
“Run, Thorn. We have to go building by building.”
He’d been hit somewhere. The mollok body wept blood from wounds on his chest and tentacles.
She rocked in place, able to control the siren call for this moment. “Led?”
“I’m okay. We run. Not far to go.”
But down this street of howling winds and flying debris, through the storm, she saw the white road winding up the mountain. It was precisely a long way, and there was a battle going on all the way up that winding path. Lasers flared, plas-cannon zigzagged their beams. A crazy sword bearing warrior swept an arc of dead before him until something cut him down.
“The way is paved with the dead,” she muttered.
“Yeah. Dumbass sidekicks, but not us.” He towed her toward a building entrance while firing from several weapons at once, in different directions, leaving the wrecked and crumpled fleetjer behind.
A spray of blue-lit projectiles buzzed away, swatting down a trio of armored males ahead. “We’ll get another vehicle and drive up...” He blew away a few more opposition, dropped a pistol, snagged a new gun from his chest arsenal, turned it on with a hum and click of button.
If only she wasn’t feeling so ill. And this storm... Thorn squinted. This storm was her doing.
“My psionics are going wild. I can feel it in here.” She clutched her stomach then her head. “Both. Led you should leave me. I feel unsafe.”
For once he paused. “Fuck. What Fiana said, I hope she was wrong.”
They’d reached the building’s doors which hung open. Fragments of glassomer made jewelry of the pavement. Five or six males poured out the entrance brandishing guns, firing. Others began firing from above. Though the first pattered against her and Led’s armor it was only a matter of milli-spokseconds before something vital was...
Something broke inside her.
She regained consciousness, crumpled and curled on the ground, with Led plucking at her arm. This time it was he with the bloodied eyeballs, not her.
“If they’re after what’s in your head,” she whispered as he carried her somewhere, “why did they shoot you there?” She stroked trembling fingers down his face.
“Not them. You, Thorn. I think you’re hitting the extinction event. I’m going to give you the last of the agruth, dear girl, and I pray for your sake, mine, and whoever it is you can reach with this effect of yours, that it works well.”
He kicked in the door of an office then laid her on a couch in a corner.
“Here.” In his shaking palm sat a ball, roiling with purples and reds. “Swallow it.”
She took it in finger and thumb, and the memories swept in.
She saw how it had been – the blow-out of psychic energy rolling from her, picking off the susceptible – and that was almost everything in the path of this powerful, scouring, wave of testicular-focused onslaught.
She knew when it swept over each male, registered how each of them screamed as their genitals exploded. Thorn grimaced. Not pretty. Death had come soon after, though she wasn’t sure why they died. Shock perhaps?
The wave had faded long before it left the zone of battle, but another was building inside her, and it felt far stronger, more powerful, likely to raze a bigger area.
She heaved in one breath, then opened her mouth, and swallowed the strange pill.
The flowering of whatever chemicals the pill released was near instantaneous and made the walls around her shudder. Or perhaps that was merely an imagined effect.
She licked her lips and rose onto one arm. The couch cushions gave way under her hand. Led stepped back as if wondering what she’d unleash.
“Thorn?”
“I’m...better.”
She found another memory surfacing – the power gifted to her the last time she’d swallowed this pill. On Lura. How she’d manipulated the molloks.
This time...
She rose from the couch, and Led trailed in her wake until he caught up, grappling her with tentacles about her wrist and neck.
This time she could do so much more.
“Not so fast. There might be snipers. I don’t think they value you.”
She turned to him. “I’m not wounded. You are.” The blood dribbling down his chest made her frown and draw a trembling breath. “Watch this.” She shrugged off the tentacles and stepped outside onto the pavement, aware that Led had also emerged, guns raised.
Extinction level, he’d said, told by her mother no doubt. As long as she could hold herself together until the end, this was going to be easy. An easy massacre.
She rolled her shoulders then tilted her head, sniffing out all the hidden ones, behind windows, beneath overturned vehicles, on knee or two feet, or lying down, some with para-max grenades held in outstretched hands ready to throw. Weapons whined as the power surged within them, and then...
Then she took the first step on the journey up the winding road.
It was a little like dancing, maybe, she thought as she flung a wave to the left, then another to the right.
Swirl to the left, dance to the right.
Males screamed and fell, fell and screamed. Genitals were suffering as she strode and advanced, with Led picking off the few she missed.
The casualties mounted.
When they reached the bottom of the road, there were few ahead as they’d seen the destruction wrought and were cowering, climbing up the cliffs or down them to escape.
She and Led kept going, on foot as the road was littered with bodies and burning vehicles.
“You’ve done it,” Led said in awe. “With a swipe of your hand. And a very messy explosion of what I’m guessing were testicle-equivalent organs.”
“Yes.” Her voice had cracked at the end of that word. “And if I don’t get help soon, worse will come.” She could feel it scratching at her insides, at her temples, wanting out.
“Getting help. Soon. I’ll get them to put you into stasis while they figure out what to do. I have recorded your request for siren genetics.”
She nodded grimly.
He commandeered a vehicle near the top since the road was clear above. They hurtled up the road to slew to a stop in a screech and burn of tires, next to the immense glassomer doors of the Stardrake Private Genetic Hospital.
Everything sparkled.
Two staff were walking out smiling, pushing a wheelchair with the doors hissing open to let them out, as if this were a normal day. Talk about well-trained. Smoke from the burning vehicles drifted across. The fighting hadn’t quite reached here but they must surely fucking know? Behind them were Smorg and Jocelyn, clomping across the polished atrium floor. Following Smorg and Jocelyn were three molloks, stern expression, check, sweeping coats, check. Sexy if terribly narrow in their vision of fashion.
Above, a shuttle descended from the low clouds. The s’kar markings filled her with joy as a message scrolled across her retina.
*Thought you could use some help, Thorn. We are late it seems. They wouldn’t allow us to land.*
Baldor. She smiled.
*Better late than never.*
Led had noticed them also but he turned to her and bent over her, and in those final moments she realized he meant to kiss her.
It wasn’t to be.
Fellen Zed appeared behind Led. Her all-caps message would’ve hit Led’s retina at about the time her expression also warned him.
He turned, rolling across her vision, tentacles flaring, drawing his guns, raising them in tentacle and hand.
The blast of Fellen Zed’s weapon was that of something powerful. A hand cannon, of a sort.
Her mind and eyes had time to see the needle blueness blossoming, coming for her.
Too late. Too late.
And Led stepped in front of her. The shot rocked back his head, spraying blood and no doubt worse that she could not bear to contemplate.
Fellen had aimed at her, because she was the threat?
The thrassian looked shocked and disappointed for all of a miniscule sliver of time. Then Smorg threw the wheelchair at him. Jocelyn speared him with a rod plucked from gods knew where, and an anti-ship laser blatted down from the shuttle and turned him into ashes, dust, and pulverized thrassian.
Her?
She collapsed to her knees sobbing over this man she’d said maybe to, when he’d deserved so much more.
They pulled her away, dragged her off him, really.
When she, stony-faced, explained in a monotone the direness of her circumstances, they offered her stasis while the surgeon decided on her case. She couldn’t care less at that point whether they decided never to wake her again, and she agreed.
More details were extracted from her before stasis was induced.
With Led’s blood still spattered on her hands, she told them everything they asked her.
Her mother would pay if they asked her for their fees.
She wished to have the conflicting s’kar genes altered to become siren or as fully so as much as was practical.
Sleep would be blessed, especially dreamless sleep.
They might wake her, one day.
But her heart was dead. Truly dead.