Prodigal (Maelstrom Chronicles) (29 page)

She quickly confirmed with the array—she could see the snow. White, uncovered snow. An end of the blackness. An end of this section of the horde.

“Is that what I think it is?” She zipped the on-the-scene data to Ship.

“The far edge of this entity patch,” Ship confirmed. “Adam appears to have absorbed approximately fifty-four percent of this incursion.”

“Wonder how much he can hold?” she replied. “What kind of data is he relaying?”

“He is not responding to hails,” Ship said. “He is no longer communicating or voluntarily supplying me with a live feed.”

“That’s not good.” A trio of daemons swooped out of the night sky, straight toward the Jeeps. Everyone directed their weaponry at them, knocking one into the shades and setting one on fire.

The third daemon dodged the blasts and landed on the hood of a Jeep. Quick as a blink, it was over the windshield and slashing at the occupants with its four clawed hands.

“Get over there,” she ordered Will, heart thumping. “Take that fucker out.”

If they lost the rifleman and crew, they may as well head for Chanute. They couldn’t hold off the daemons and shades with two laser rifles and six people.

Will vaulted out of their vehicle and fired at the other with unerring aim—while running. Claire scanned the air around Adam, hoping the triad of daemons wasn’t a prelude to a sneak attack.

“Watch the sky,” she warned the other soldier. “Train your sensor array behind us.”

Claire’s fears were well founded. Another trio of daemons plummeted directly overhead, but her sensors blared in time.

In time for her, anyway.

She jumped and yelled for the gunner to follow, but he stayed where he was, rifle pointed at the sky. The daemons arrowed straight down as if they intended to splatter into the ground headfirst.

She caught one daemon in the back with a blast, tumbling it through the air, while the gunner pegged another with the rifle on the tripod. But the third daemon crashed directly into the Jeep.

It exploded on impact.

Claire gritted her teeth, frustrated the soldier hadn’t done as he was told. Goddammit. There was no way he’d survived that, but that didn’t mean the daemon would be burned alive. She peered through the orange heat, looking for daemons to emerge.

On cue, one strode out of the flames, its peculiar, bow-legged gait menacing. If she could kill it before it reached her, that would be preferable. She blasted the daemon, snarling right back at it.

It kept lumbering forward as it fought the lethal shove of her laser. Her arm began to heat unbearably. Just when she thought she was going to have to switch to the handheld, her beam tunneled through the monster’s torso, and it went down.

However, one of its companions wasn’t badly injured. With a harsh screech, it galloped toward her across the uneven ground, its hind talons kicking up chunks of snow and mud.

When she assaulted it with her band and handheld at the same time, it dodged. That beam sizzled into the night, and the daemon made it halfway to her before she could focus her weapons on it again.

But then her blaster band sputtered.

And went out.

“Shit!” Claire flicked her arm, hard, shaking off the pain. The shake awakened her multipurp band, sending a full-sized sword into her palm.

She fucking hated hand-to-hand. She was a gun person, all the way.

But a daemon was hard to stop with a handheld. She darted forward, meeting it with a sword to the neck.

The blade stuck, nearly jerking her arm out of its socket. The daemon swung at her with two of its four arms. The black claws swished by her head, too close, and severed her array.

Claire shouted in its face. When it screeched back, she jammed her handheld in the monster’s gnashing mouth, wedging it sideways. Acidic saliva sizzled on her glove. She pulled the trigger, hoping she could get clear in time, and set the gun to self-destruct.

The daemon screamed as it tried to dig the weapon out, but its talon cut its face.

She dove for the ground and rolled with only seconds to spare. She barely escaped the small, intense explosion. Claire’s body hurtled forward, and something rigid thunked into her back. Debris?

Indeed. The daemon’s head tumbled past her feet.

Well, one more down, and she needed that sword back. It was the only weapon she had left.

“I’m down to a multipurp,” she said over her array before she remembered it, too, was dead.

A soldier from one of the other Jeeps raced up to her. “I saw what happened. Are you hurt?”

She catalogued her aches and pains. Graze to the arm. Daemon saliva burning her hand. She ripped off that glove and shoved her fingers in the snow. “Nothing serious. Give me your array and your handheld.”

He obliged as quickly as possible, because more daemons were coming.

They weren’t going to be able to guard Adam. Sure, he was destroying the horde, but too slowly. They needed to regroup and tackle the shades after they’d handled the daemons, but how could they notify Adam of the switch?

She yanked the dead array out of her head. Blood trickling down her cheek, she inserted the new one. The Shipborn were funny with their hygiene worries—cleaning everything before they inserted it—but Terrans knew there wasn’t always time for that.

“Now we’re blood related,” she joked to the guy, wiping her cheek on the shoulder of her Kevlar. Hell, after tonight, she’d end up with everyone’s blood in her body.

As soon as the implant synced with her endo-organics, she conveyed a message to Adam. “Retreat. Retreat. Adam, retreat to a tower. Retreat. There are too many daemons. Retreat.”

No answer. He remained in the sea of shades, body stiff, hands plunged beneath the black surface.

“Fuck.” They couldn’t lose him. She couldn’t lose him. How much longer could they protect him?

“Shade update,” she demanded from Ship. “What’s his absorption rate?”

“This is not your array,” Ship commented. “Is the original owner of this array alive?”

“He’s fine,” she barked. “Now answer my question.”

A daemon streaked through the air, headed for Adam. She and her partner blazed it, followed by a third beam—Will. He’d carried a wounded soldier to the gates and returned to the battle.

Ship responded. “His absorption rate has slowed. He has ingested 78% of the horde. This horde should be neutralized in roughly twenty minutes.”

Claire kicked the multipurp sword free of what was left of the detonated daemon, letting the snow cool it enough for her to grab. “For sure?”

“Only if he can continue to absorb at this rate,” Ship amended. “We have no way of knowing at what point he will be full. Cullin hypothesizes there is no top limit, like with entities, but I disagree. Human bodies have physical constraints, unlike shades, and—”

“Don’t bug me with the science right now, Ship. We can’t last twenty more minutes with this many daemons.” And they couldn’t fall back and leave Adam unguarded. She called him through the array, over and over. “Adam, report.”

“The daemons are stopping,” Dix announced, array crackling. One of the men at a floodlight confirmed. “They’re flying away and…uh-oh.”

The daemons herded in the air above the walls, circling each other, before swarming toward the horde all at the same time, a flock of migrating monsters.

“Do you see—?”

“Don’t say it,” Claire warned Will. “Everyone, on the gates, on the ground, do whatever you can to stop that swarm. And somebody bring me a fucking blaster band.”

All the soldiers in the spearhead directed their lasers at the incoming daemons. They didn’t have anywhere near enough firepower. Daemons streamed from different parts of Chanute, daemons with ragged wings, daemons with wounds, daemons in all conditions.

Well, this disproved the Shipborn’s belief that the daemons didn’t really communicate.

“Cullin says this should not be possible,” Ship said.

“Cullin needs to shut the fuck up because he isn’t here to see this.” She aimed carefully for wings, the most easily wounded part on a daemon. Grounded daemons were less of a threat. Her lousy-ass handheld wasn’t powerful enough to waste trying to melt their heads.

The daemons screeched defiance. They winged straight for the center of the horde, where Adam was slowly absorbing the shades.

“Actually,” Ship said, “about Cullin’s location. There has been an incident.”

From above, Claire heard a whining drone that sounded like…

A Shipborn shuttle raced across the terrain, barreling straight through the gathering of daemons. Monsters tumbled through the air. Several retaliated, landing on the shuttle, tearing at it with powerful arms and claws.

The shuttle’s laser cannon swiveled out of the top of the small vehicle. The scientists’ shuttle. Who the hell was flying that thing? If it was Tracy, Claire was going to kick her sister’s ass, right after she high-fived her for saving the day.

The large cannon fired bright, hot bolts of lightning at the daemons, hammering them aside. It dove across the horde like a hawk, keeping the beasts off Adam. All Claire and her people had to do was pick off daemons as they lurched through the air and smashed into the ground.

But even with aerial support, the swarm proved to be too much. One of them got through their combined defenses and swooped at Adam, grabbing him by the shoulders.

The bright yellow slicker ripped off. Adam stumbled and fell beneath the shades. Even though she knew he’d be all right, Claire shouted with rage and started running for the horde.

“Get back, Claire,” Dix said through the array, panting. “I’m on the tower, and I’ve got the binocs. He’s fine, he’s fine.”

“He is unconscious but alive,” Ship confirmed. “I will attempt to wake him by stimulating his neural cortex through a specific pattern of sounds. It is possible that—”

“Science!” Claire shouted. Now that Adam was down, the shades streamed in vicious fingers toward the sentients. She flamed them with a sweeping motion from her handheld.

When the silver aircraft zoomed back into sight, it was laboring. Daemons crawled all over it like fleas, thrashing at the metallic surface.

A touch of dawn gleamed grey on the horizon, emphasizing the smoke pouring from the shuttle’s rear, where the engines were.

“Pilot!” Claire shouted into the array. “Fly clear, fly clear!”

No answer. The shuttle canted crazily and spiraled down. Straight down.

Straight into what was left of the horde.

Most of the daemons sprang free of it, backflapping awkwardly. Any who dipped into the shades didn’t emerge.

“Ship, I’m transmitting all this…are you getting it?” Claire asked, shooting at a vein of shades that veered too close to the Jeep.

“I am,” Ship affirmed. “But there is something you should know. It is not science. May I tell you?”

“What?”

Niko’s raspy voice broke over Ship’s measured tones. “Claire, you’ve got to rescue the pilot. I’m sending troops. I’m sending…I’m sending everyone.”

“Don’t do that. We can handle this. We’ll wait it out on the towers.”

“No, you don’t understand.” His voice cracked—something she hadn’t heard since the first time he’d held Frances in his arms. “Get in there however you can. Sacrifice whoever you need to. Our scientists are inside.”

The scientists were Shipborn.

If the shades got inside that vessel and the scientists didn’t activate their emergency protocol in time, everyone on the planet was dead.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Absorbing shades consumed every iota of Adam’s being. He had to force himself to dissolve them, one after another after another, and he still wasn’t sure where they were going.

Into him? Into thin air? Back where they came from?

He’d been afraid to check how many were left. Their vile energy swelled inside him, a bubble of filth that could pop at any moment. Every inch of his skin itched and stung as if coated in jellyfish.

A sudden commotion yanked him out of his dogged trance. The ground shuddered. Metallic heat splashed his skin, so unlike the chill stench of the shades. He shook out his hands and scanned the area for the source of the disturbance. A hulk of silver rose out of the shades like a tactanium hill, its engines smoking from the crash.

Floodlights from Chanute bathed it in light.

A Shipborn shuttle? Here?

The screams and cries of daemons and people penetrated his shade-induced stupor.

“Adam, if you can hear me, get the shades away from that shuttle. Adam, if you can hear me—”

“I hear you,” he finally responded, the effort laborious. He’d almost forgotten how to form words, how to be human.

The shades swirled around him, reaching above his hips. When he wasn’t deleting them, they ignored him, as if he were a pillar of nothing. As if he were one of them.

His stomach tried to turn over, but he forced it down. No time for that.

Who was in the shuttle? A daemon landed on it, flailing at the cannon. It tore the armament off of the roof. The shades creeping up the sides soon drove the daemon away. It leaped into flight, cawing in irritation like a giant, malicious crow.

The way the shades churned around the shuttle meant at least one sentient was alive inside. Adam could almost taste the eagerness and hunger. It pinched his soul and drove him forward, toward the spacecraft.

Hunger. Assuage the hunger.

He took several running steps and vaulted into the air. He landed on the roof hard and unexpectedly, taking a knee. He hadn’t been prepared for that much height and distance. It rattled him—and the hunger receded.

“Holy fuck,” Claire muttered over the array. “Got some strength back, huh? Adam, Shipborn inside. You’re the only one who can stop this, baby. Our people can’t get there. No wings.”

The daemons had done a number on the shuttle. Poisonous steam rose from the back end, and tiny rifts dappled the exterior—claw marks. He found the hatch and tugged.

Sealed. The craft would hold off the shades, but not long enough. There was always an opening small enough for shades, and it wasn’t necessarily on the roof.

He pounded on the hard surface. “Helllooooo?”

Nothing. He yelled through the public band on the array. “Gotta get you out of here, folks.”

The dented hatch creaked open, stopping halfway. A brown face with fresh bruises on the jaw peered carefully out.

“Hurst?” Adam said, aghast.

“I seem to have crashed the shuttle in the middle of the horde,” Hurst announced. “Are we close to Chanute? Is it safe to self-destruct?”

Adam’s array buzzed with static before Ship chimed in. “Please inform Hurst the detonation of five Shipborn fail-safes inside a shuttle would create an explosion that would destroy half of the city. And inform him he must put his array back on.”

Adam relayed the information. Hurst grimaced. “But then they’ll yell at me.”

“I think they’re going to anyway.”

“Priiit’s unconscious,” Cullin shouted from somewhere behind Hurst. Laser blasts echoed inside the cabin, harsh and dangerous. Not smart to fire inside a tactanium vessel—unless your life depended on it. “Alsing, have your people kill the shades. And fast. We have a breach somewhere, and they’re oozing in.”

Raniya, below, boosted Hurst up the ladder. “This is a death trap. Out, man.”

“Wing packs?” Adam suggested. Wing packs were limited to active military and special forces, but every Shipborn on Terra practically counted as active military at this point. “Fly out of here.” He fired on some shades slipping over the edge of the roof.

Hurst reached for Raniya and pulled her up with one arm—his silver one. “I can install a wing pack. We should be able to avoid immolation. Cullin, send one up.”

“I’m one step ahead of you.” Raniya handed him one of the Shipborn modules designed to implant themselves into the back and spine, wings folded compactly. Adam continued to guard against shades and daemons while the scientists prepared. “Cullin and Lionel are bringing Priiit so we can hoist her out.”

“This is going to hurt.” Hurst stripped off his white coat, his tactanium vest, and his starched dress shirt, shivering. “I suppose awakening the leviathan would hurt worse.”

He latched the endo-organic end of the wing pack to his spine and stifled a curse.

Raniya added her laser to Adam’s, blazing shades off the edges of the shuttle. While shooting them was slower than eating them—or whatever it was he did—if he stuck his hand in the shades to absorb them, he’d lose his focus and be of less service.

And possibly, he’d be dangerous. He couldn’t ignore the whisper of hunger and need. It gnawed at his mind, like an aching tooth he couldn’t stop wiggling with his tongue.

“I’m ready,” Hurst announced in a less smooth tone than Adam was used to hearing from him. While they waited for Cullin and Lionel to drag Priiit’s large body to the hatch, Hurst helped kill shades, only he didn’t use a blaster band.

He used his silver arm. The beam, intense and hot, emerged from his palm and seared the shades as powerfully as a laser rifle.

“Don’t tell anyone you saw me do this,” he grumbled. Raniya thrust a tactanium vest around his bare torso, adjusting it for the wings. The silver gleamed against his brown skin and muscles. “Of course, I suppose Ship’s recording our derring-do for posterity.”

“Adam, grab Priiit,” Cullin instructed from below. “She’s heavy.”

He reached down to grasp the masssian’s limp tentacle, but as soon as he touched her, the hunger surged inside him like a volcanic eruption.

He wanted to absorb her. She’d wash away the foul taste of the shades, the miasma, the evil. Her essence was pure and shining and—

Priiit uttered a pained groan, and Adam stopped himself, horrified. Shit! Breathing an apology, he hoisted the large masssian as easily as Hurst had pulled Raniya up.

Raniya noticed his strength, eyes narrowed, but didn’t comment. She was too busy trying to keep the roof shade-free. Hurst stepped away from the hatch to shoot a daemon circling them. His tactanium arm blasted off its head with one direct hit. The body splatted on the nose of the shuttle, spraying ichor on the emissary.

“My pants,” Hurst moaned as the black acid ate holes through his white attire.

None of the scientists wore arrays—presumably so Ship and Niko couldn’t stop their insanely stupid decision to fly into battle. Hurst’s force field sprang on, a pale glow around his half-naked body. Razor-sharp battle tips emerged from the broad white wings, and he took to the air to defend his fellow Shipborn.

“We can’t hold them off inside the shuttle much longer!” Cullin yelled from below. More laser fire—and even more dangerous ricochet. “They’ve found another breach in the hull. Dammit, get us out of here.”

“Nobody’s stopping you,” Raniya yelled back. “Come on.”

Adam swept shades off the shuttle’s perimeter as Hurst and Claire’s people fended off daemons. Lionel dragged himself out of the hatch. Blood crusted a wound on his temple, and his eyes were only partly focused.

Raniya reached a hand down for Cullin, but he wasn’t there.

“Cullin?” she snapped. “Now is not the time to go back for equipment.”

Hurst swooped over the shuttle and grabbed Lionel, flying the injured guy to something more akin to safety. Adam tried to stand guard over Priiit and shoot shades at the same time, but the masssian’s large body and twitching tentacles kept tripping him. She moaned softly and came awake.

“What isss happening?” she mumbled.

“Get up, Priiit,” Adam urged her. “We’re surrounded by shades.”

Not that he wished death on her, but she had to be conscious to activate her emergency protocol, destroying her DNA before the shades could identify her. Right now, she wasn’t alert enough.

“Adam, watch your six,” Claire shouted through the array, looking out for him from afar.

He whirled and found the shades close—too close. He plunged into the cluster that had topped the shuttle. Gritting his teeth, he drew them into himself, trying to maintain his attention on the scientists, too.

Raniya disappeared below, calling for Cullin. Priiit regained enough awareness to shoot the entities seeping toward her. She wore two bands, but her aim wasn’t the greatest. Many of her shots flew uselessly into the horde instead of keeping shades off the shuttle.

Dammit. Adam finished off his cluster and bounced back to Priiit, hovering nearby as she gathered her wits. If Cullin and Raniya would hurry up, they could still come out of this in one piece, nobody’s DNA burned to a crisp.

“Send Hurst back for Priiit,” he told Claire and Ship. “She can’t defend herself, and I don’t know if she’s alert enough to…do what she’d need to do.” Her tentacles waved, lasers wild. Adam had to dance out of their way. “Hurry.”

A sharp scent that had nothing to do with shades or daemons blasted through his sinuses, an invigorating, lemony odor. Priiit tried to rise, wobbling like a newborn calf, and he realized the smell was coming from her.

He assumed she was trying to help, trying to energize everyone. At last, she staggered erect, tentacles trembling. She placed most of them on the shuttle to keep herself upright, which meant she couldn’t use her blaster bands. Hurst approached from Chanute, flying swiftly, but daemons attacked him before he arrived.

Voices came from the shuttle below—Raniya and Cullin, arguing. Alive. Firing their blasters, holding off the shades. Pink and lavender striated the horizon as dawn bathed the carnage in soft light, like hope.

Adam allowed himself to breathe between flares of his band. The efforts of the people of Chanute were paying off, and the shades surrounding the shuttle had thinned to streamers and clumps.

Clumps were still deadly.

Adam wasn’t fast enough—nobody in the universe was fast enough—to save Priiit from staggering off the side of the shuttle and into the remaining horde.

He nosedived after her, too late. She slipped through his grasp to the ground. In his sensor array, he heard every voice, every person who could see what happening, cry out in fear.

Maybe she would…

Maybe he could…

He rolled the rest of the way off the shuttle and hit the ground, waist deep in black oil, but her body was beneath the surface. Somewhere. No sudden flares of immolation and self-sacrifice, no bodies tripping his feet. He ducked under, near the place her body should be, but he found only nauseating darkness and cold ground.

Adam screamed with rage and failure and stabbed his hands into the shades, determined to eliminate them. If he absorbed them all, could he stop the inevitable before it started?

He ripped off his coat and vest, baring as much of his skin as he could in the hope he could kill them faster. The shades streamed into him as if magnetized. The rush of their death almost buoyed him into the air, and his vision blanked out completely.

But as he connected with the enemy, as he absorbed their essence, he could feel that he was too late.

The leviathan stirred, coming awake. It was the shades’ hunger, a thousandfold. It was a daemon’s hate, times a million.

It was everything horrible about the entities and more massive than he could comprehend.

And it was coming. From far away, but it knew there was a Ship, now, and it was coming. Not only had he failed to save the world—this time, he’d destroyed it.

Gasping, he broke the surface of the shades. Atop the shuttle, Raniya and Cullin stared, horrified. Cullin’s arm hung limply at his side, but the other was tight around the female scientist.

In a single bound, Adam reached the top of the shuttle. “I’m…I’m sorry.”

“Adam. Adam!” Claire, urgent, begged him through the array. “What happened? The daemons are retreating. The shades. What’s going on?”

“I couldn’t save Priiit.” He transmitted this publicly, letting anyone with an array nearby know. He wouldn’t hide from this blame, not for a minute. If they executed him, it would give them some small joy before they died, too. Because of him. “The leviathan is coming.”

“Fuck,” Cullin cursed and pulled Raniya into an embrace that turned into a kiss. A desperate, pining kiss so intense Adam didn’t realize Hurst had landed on the shuttle until the man seized his arm.

“We don’t know what happens when a leviathan wakes,” Hurst said in a low voice. “We know it will go after Ship, but we don’t know what happens to the planet. Buck up, man. We have plans for this. New plans. There’s still a chance for us.”

“We begin evacuation immediately,” Ship said over the public channel. “I will land within fifteen minutes to allow my citizens to debark. Then I will lure the leviathan into the sun. We calculate it will be more effective in destroying the leviathan than setting off a broad-spectrum bomb like the type that collapses a nexus. It has been an honor to serve each and every one of you.”

Ship paused before continuing. “No, you will not, Nikolas. You’ll go to ground with your wife and child. Yes, I do have the authority. See?” Another pause. Adam suspected Ship was so disturbed it didn’t realize its private conversation with its Shiplink was being broadcast. “Sarah, please sedate your husband. I love you all, inasmuch as I can love, and this is the one thing I can attempt for you. Preservation of the Shipborn. It is code, and it will be.”

Then communications went dead.

Adam glanced around. There was no longer any need to rescue the scientists or the town. The shades flowed from the battlefield like a flood on rewind, much faster than they’d attacked. Soon the landscape around Chanute was devoid of entities, but not bodies.

Claire shouted at him from the ground beside the shuttle. “Adam, come down.”