Prodigal (Maelstrom Chronicles) (34 page)

That wasn’t a fall any unenhanced human could handle.

Adam raced forward anyway, leaping rubble. The deep silence of his deafness swelled around him until it included his body. He could barely feel his feet hit the uneven ground. She reached the pinnacle and plummeted toward the earth.

“No!” He couldn’t hear himself shout, but his throat scratched on the raw pain. He leaped as high as he could, as if somehow he could erupt into flight. He didn’t.

But someone else could. A figure whooshed past him, diving precariously close to the leviathan, barely evading a tentacle. Wind buffeted Adam’s hair as the winged Shipborn arrowed across Claire’s path.

Just in time, the soldier intercepted her before she hit, wobbling under the weight of her body. A fall of that height could still have broken her neck. Was she…?

The soldier zoomed like a bullet toward a group of people farther down the trench created by Ship’s crash. He landed, Claire in his arms. He set her on the ground—on her own two feet.

Adam couldn’t see her face from this distance, but he knew she was looking at him. As were the other soldiers, on the ground, in the air, on the ridges.

Claire raised one arm, the other hanging limply beside her body. He raised one of his as well, turned on his heel, and strode toward the leviathan.

His gloves came off first. He dropped them on the ground. Then he ripped off the top of the tattered skin suit, where it hindered his movement. He barely felt the chill.

White bursts of lasers flared from every direction as the troops resumed their attack. Tentacles roped all over the beast, striking at flying Shipborn, at soldiers on the ridges, at anyone who came too close. Except him. It ignored him.

Adam clenched his fists, enduring the harsh sensation that spidered across his body the closer he got to the leviathan. It didn’t look like it had from space. On the ground, it was greyish, and semisolid. This end of it, where Ship’s docking bay had been, was practically translucent. Instead of a featureless black blob or a giant shade, its morphing body coated the wreckage of Ship like spray gel.

Why hadn’t it oozed into Ship’s interior? When shades infiltrated a structure, they filled up the whole thing.

Because the leviathan wasn’t a shade. If that meant he couldn’t hurt it, this was going to be a short fight.

Without giving himself a moment to contemplate his mortality or utter a witty catch phrase like a proper hero, he reached the leviathan and plunged his hands into the grey surface.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

It was like shoving his hands into icy, slimy Jell-O.

Pain seized his body like a lightning strike. Not lightning—a tentacle. A thin cord lashed his back, slicing through his undershirt.

Adam pressed into the moist, viscous surface and opened himself to the monster’s essence. It wasn’t pure, like the sentience he’d nearly stolen from Priiit. It wasn’t a personified stench, like the power he’d drained from the shades.

It was chaos. Chaos and loathing.

This creature, this sentient being, loathed. It was malevolence incarnate, an awareness far beyond anything human, and it loathed.

It was so much more than anything he’d encountered. If he consumed this evil, would he become evil, too? Tentatively, he tried to absorb some of its force the same way he had with the shades.

The leviathan resisted. It felt him, it knew what he was, and it attacked.

Tentacles whipped his backside, trying to pry him off. He threw his weight into passing through the scummy surface, but a tentacle wormed around his neck. Another around a leg.

They yanked back. He drove forward. Choking, he shoved deeper into the murk.

His boot found a toehold against a rock. He had leverage. For now. The tentacle on his neck, though, was going to be a problem. How long could he hold his breath?

Better hurry. He focused on the channel between his ability and the leviathan’s essence—it was a stream, and the leviathan had dammed it.

Mentally he wedged himself into the dam like he was trying to wedge himself into the leviathan’s body. Strain. Push. Shove. Inching deeper with his knees, with his arms, even with his head. He’d only had to touch the shades and Priiit to access their spirit. Why wasn’t it working?

His ears rang, though he hadn’t heard anything since Ship had screamed.

What was that sound? Was his hearing…?

No. It was suffocation. He really needed to breathe.

The heat of laser beams flamed his back as the Shipborn tried to fend off the tentacles attacking him. The murderous cable around his neck disappeared, and he gulped air.

But he’d forgotten he was half-buried in the muck. He inhaled heavy, glutinous leviathan, straight into his lungs. He froze and burned at the same time, from the inside out.

The dam between him and its essence burst. Then he couldn’t feel anything but the deluge of tainted energy throbbing through him.

…

He was alive! Alive. Somehow, Adam was alive.

For the moment.

The grey, mottled skin of the leviathan closed around him. From the looks of it, Adam had forced his way into it on purpose. Claire knew what he was trying to do, but it didn’t make it any easier to watch.

“Wrap my arm and let me go.” She dodged the medtech holding the silver applicator that may or may not knock her out. When Hurst had caught her in midair, her shoulder had been dislocated. The field medics couldn’t heal her quickly enough to regain full use of her arm.

Didn’t matter. They needed all the guns they could get. Last count, they were down from over two thousand to eleven hundred something. The rest of the fighters from the base had arrived half an hour ago, though reinforcements from the local militia and U.S. government were a no-show.

But Adam was one of the eleven hundred survivors. While he wasn’t the only thing Claire cared about, she was certainly willing to praise anyone’s God for keeping him alive.

Hurst landed with another injured Shipborn. This one got to keep his shoulders intact. “I can’t be present for every aerial jaunt you take, Sheriff Lawson. Leave the flying to those of us with wings.”

“Thanks for the save, but shut the hell up,” she snapped. “I won’t need you again.”

“What you need is to sit down. You can’t fight when you’re this injured.” Sarah, a streak of blood on her chin, shooed the medtechs away before Claire could hurt one of them.

Sarah had read her mind—she had been about to crunch a guy’s knee with her steel-toed boot. “I don’t need two hands. If I stay out of tentacle range, all I’m doing is shooting.”

“Except you won’t stay out of tentacle range.” The blond doctor fussed with the wrapping around Claire’s shoulder that pinned her arm to her side. Then she helped her into her jacket. Claire had her cut off the right sleeve so it wouldn’t flop in her way.

As Sarah ripped the material with her multipurp, Claire stared at the leviathan with revulsion, impatient to hit it again. With thin, sharp tentacles, the monster flailed the spot where Adam had burrowed, tearing its own body. It clearly didn’t want him there. That had to be good—for their side.

No matter what Sarah advised, Claire planned to do her part to keep the leviathan otherwise occupied.

The number of tentacles opposing their forces had dwindled since Adam entered the fray. Five whole minutes—long enough for her to get her dumb ass tossed in the air and her shoulder popped out of and back into joint. However, heavy bombardment from their people still woke a response from the beast, as did the proximity of soldiers. The leviathan knew when they were within range, and it sought them out with killing blows.

But the more it was dealing with them, the less it fucked with Adam.

Claire slid a tactanium vest over the jacket and draped it over the immobilized arm. “I’m going in. You can’t stop me.”

“Actually, I can,” Sarah responded with a grimace, helping Claire seal the vest, “but I won’t. If it were Niko, I’d go in, too.”

Sarah had that look that said she wanted to hug Claire, but she didn’t trust the sweet-faced blond not to dope her. Sarah relied on cunning rather than brawn to get her way. So Claire nodded her thanks—from a distance—and headed back into the war zone.

“How are you on our nightfall contingency?” Claire asked Niko over the command line as she strode across the churned up ground. The sun was setting to one side of the leviathan, in a dim, dusty explosion of pinks and reds. She’d lost the use of her good arm, but the beast was so massive, she didn’t need to aim. Her shoulder throbbed less with every step as the painkiller kicked in.

“Our pilots are welding the spotlights to the shuttles,” he answered. “Going up in about ten.”

“Gonna get cold, too. This is a decent-sized mountain range.” She raised her left arm, let her blaster band charge—the painkiller was doing its thing on her blisters, too—and walloped the leviathan close to where Adam was trapped.

To her surprise, the broad beam, usually reserved for begetter drones because it drained power so fast, scorched the slimy grey of the leviathan black.

The leviathan’s frantic clawing and whipping paused until the scorch mark healed. The black wound disappeared like magic, but the fact she’d been able to scorch it at all was huge progress.

This fucker was going to feel her wrath.

“It’s getting shaky,” she announced. Shadows around the battlefield deepened, increasing the chances she’d trip. “We’re leaving marks on it.”

She shot it again, taking great pleasure when it darkened the monster’s flesh like a burned marshmallow. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Adam was touching that monster, trying to drain it, and now it was weakening.

“You could be right. The scientists are reading a sudden fluctuation in its structure,” Niko responded. Lots of pauses. He was busy as fuck.

Claire gauged the dark forms of the soldiers nearby—out of tentacle range—and halted parallel to them. “Do the scientists think the fluctuations are Adam’s doing?”

Her guy, her friend, her lover—he was getting the job done in there.

“It would have to be,” Niko confirmed. “We’re not doing anything to the leviathan that wouldn’t have been done by our people before.”

“How about bombing it from the inside?” A team with a cannon rolled into position down the trench and began to strafe the leviathan. Above, soldiers dove and blasted, weaving around tentacles that spurted after them.

Niko paused again before responding. “I’m sure at least one of our Ships managed a self-destruct sequence. Regardless, we’re setting up a penetrating torpedo to test on the nose, away from the matrix.”

She shot again. Again. She striped the leviathan with Xs, enjoying the dark sizzle.

It was about to get dark. She hoped those shuttles and spotlights joined the battle soon, because being able to see the tentacles coming at you was pretty damned vital.

Adam wasn’t dead. He was alive.

Now she just needed to help him kill a leviathan that could heal itself from everything they were doing to it, while picking them off like flies.

What was happening to him inside there? By her count, it had been twenty minutes since he’d emerged from it and ten since he’d returned. The leviathan had thickened at the rear end. Its color darkened, not yet the black it had been, but no longer translucent. She could barely make out Adam’s blurry form inside the gelatinous wall. Since the monster was still flailing itself in that spot, she assumed he was doing…something.

Something it didn’t like.

That ominous rumble she’d noticed before the leviathan had shifted position the first time vibrated her eardrums. The monster trembled, ripples everywhere, as if raindrops were hitting it. It sparkled, too.

Uh-oh.

The leviathan surged forward like an avalanche. Dragging its bulk and any contents—like Ship and Adam—down the trench, it advanced. Slow but deadly, and straight toward her and everyone else, including Sarah and her injured soldiers.

“Move out, move out!” Niko shouted over the arrays. “Get out of its way!”

“Stupid fucking place to set up,” Claire cursed. She chugged back the way she’d come, with no idea how fast the leviathan could go. Would it stay on the ground? Would it take flight? The soldiers with the cannon fiddled with the gun, shoving the tripod into the dirt and setting it on auto-fire, before hightailing it toward the trench walls. The leviathan wasn’t heaving along at any great pace, but it was so huge, it didn’t have to. It was gaining on them. Soon the field hospital would be in tentacle range.

Or maybe it would crush them all.

The leviathan’s surface burbled everywhere, boiling. Did it need air bubbles to gain enough buoyancy to move? Was it inflating itself? Was it turning into a fucking bubble-wrap monster now?

The leviathan released a thunderous coughing sound. Some of the polyps exploded into separate pieces of black. Maybe. She was running backward, it was getting dark, she was pissing mad. She couldn’t be sure.

When she nearly toppled over a rock, she twisted her ass around and picked up the pace. Angeli swooped toward the wounded en masse. The carrion rot stench of entity filled her sinuses, something she hadn’t realized wasn’t present until now.

Her entity alert pinged. She was about to rip the array out of her head when a dark, winged figure whooshed past her.

It wasn’t a soldier.

A maroon figure skidded to the earth in front of her, and she barreled right into it.

Daemon.

They hit the ground. Her shoulder screamed with agony, and the daemon screamed in her face. Awesome. It clawed her vest, its arms scrabbling, uncoordinated. Its slitted, yellow eyes twitched but had no focus. It almost seemed like it didn’t know she was there.

Was it sick? Injured?

Who cared?

She blew its head off before it could bite her. Daemon ichor spattered her upper half.

The black substance burned the hell out of whatever it touched, but she didn’t have time to rub it off. The leviathan was coming. She clambered over the daemon’s twitching body and…

“It’s breaking apart!” someone shouted. Not over a comm line, a real shout. “The leviathan is breaking apart.”

Claire turned. A mass of shades gathered around the base of the bubbling leviathan. Daemons popped out of its surface, from the bubbles, as if being born. But instead of attacking, the daemons floundered unsteadily, birds that had no idea how to use their wings.

The leviathan ceased all forward progress. The shade pool continued to expand, filling the dirt valley from ridge to ridge, deadly for anyone in their path. Unlike the daemons, the shades zeroed in on the sentients in the vicinity and hissed with excitement.

They rushed forward—but as shades. Just shades. Shades she could kill.

The roar of shuttles soared over the wreck site. Huge spotlights blazed on, improving visibility. Claire dodged another aimless daemon with no interest in pursuing her and thanked the same God who’d kept Adam alive for befuddling the daemons.

A shuttle landed next to Sarah’s hospital to load up the remaining wounded.

Claire raised her blaster arm and shouted into the array, “All remaining ground troops in the trench, fire at will!”

She wasn’t the only one witnessing the leviathan’s disintegration. Other soldiers pounded into the enemy, some striking the leviathan, some the shades. The chemical scent of laser fire mingled with shade stench. She raked her beam across the front of the incoming shade pool, and their shrill death screams satisfied her soul.

The shade pool began to dissipate under this much firepower. But the leviathan kept shrinking—reverting into the shades and daemons that had merged to create it. This had to be Adam’s doing. It was nothing the scientists had projected might happen, just as Adam was nothing the scientist had dreamed was possible.

When the white ovoid of a begetter drone bulged out of the leviathan’s side, the leviathan’s shrinkage became more apparent. The top edge of Ship gleamed silver through the monster’s bulk.

The disintegration didn’t make the leviathan feeble, though.

The fucker quickly changed shape and size yet again. It slimed completely off of Ship’s framework, becoming compact. Mobile. Spotlights gleamed along its flickering blackness, revealing a long, agile shape like a lizard or a caterpillar. Countless tentacles beneath its reduced bulk scrambled along the ground with ease, while others, razor-thin and agile, struck at the sentients and airships harassing it.

Claire took off, not a moment too soon. A wire stung her calf as she ran, but she didn’t falter. Hot blood soaked her pants. Probably bad. But it would be worse if she stopped to check and got a tentacle to the neck.