The creature bellowed and all eight arms flailed, but it didn’t fall. The lightning hit and the creature’s body absorbed it.
Bits of electricity whirled around its arms before disappearing.
Still impossible to understand, the giant’s mouth opened and shrieked, but that wasn’t the attack. The attack came in the form of lightning thrown from its hands. Continue reading Before Midnight: Part 11
I stumbled sideways, realizing that Haley crouched underneath the soldier’s punch.
She didn’t stay there. Even as I realized what was happening, she was already punching back—and upward.
Hitting him in the middle of his diaphragm, she’d have killed a normal person with her strength and winded even some of the tougher supers. Continue reading Before Midnight: Part 10
Rachel gave a quick grin, “I hope you’re not blaming it on me, but that’s about right. I still can’t navigate hyperspace on my own. The Cosmic Ghosts dropped me off over Earth and disappeared. I floated down from orbit on my own and as I floated down, I felt something. It wasn’t a hum. It felt more like gathering energy. Then I felt a pulse. That’s when the hum started.”
I looked at her, “I missed the pulse—actually, I missed everything but the hum.” Continue reading Before Midnight: Part 4
More deep ripping noises came from all around us. I didn’t see anything falling yet, but I didn’t care to try my luck.
Kayla’s voice came over the League comm channel, “Ronin and the Mystic both say go. Go!” Continue reading Courtesy: Part 63
I can’t read them very well, Daniel thought at us, but for lack of a better analogy, I think it’s the heart, the center of the organism’s circulation. I wish we had a biologist because then I could ask better questions, but I know that as long as we get Alex there, it’ll die.
Noticing, no doubt, that we hadn’t started tearing Amy limb from limb, the humonsters shouted as one, “Kill her now!”
As the noise overwhelmed the sound of the buzzer again, I had to fight the urge to charge Amy, hearing Julie’s command in my head again. Continue reading Courtesy: Part 51
It would have been over right there if it had never occurred to us that someday we might be exposed to a Dominator and be without a buzzer.
The bad news, of course, was that we hadn’t had access to Kals or anyone with Dominator training. We did have Julie, but unlike the Dominators in the Human Ascendancy or serving the Nine, she hadn’t been taught from childhood. She’d picked up what she could by experimentation and what the teachers in the Stapledon program knew the Dominators could do.
Still, it was something—enough to practice with. Continue reading Courtesy: Part 50
Arete shook his head, “You’re bluffing. There’s no way this Xiniti could pass that on to the rest. There’s no Xiniti Mars base and even if there were there’s no way they’d find out for hours.”
I don’t know how often you encounter people whose understanding of the world is so far from yours that you absolutely despair of bridging the gap, but I hope it’s never for anything important.
In that moment though, I barely knew where to start. I tried, “Look, there is a Xiniti base at the LaGrange point near Mars. It takes the speed of light more than three minutes to get there. If you’re communicating back and forth to a Mars rover it might take 15 to 45 minutes to communicate back and forth, but that’s partly just technology and it’s not technology we’re using. Continue reading Courtesy: Part 49
I looked him in the eye (to the degree that I could through a helmet) and said, “We’re all going to die and you with us. If you get out, that means the whole planet goes. Whether people I care about die because of the Nine or because the Xiniti make the sun go nova, they’re dead. So congratulations, you’ve made this whole situation so bad that you have no hold on us because we don’t have anything to lose.”
In the moment, I meant it, but I knew that if we got reports of our parents dying at the hands of the Nine and we survived, it wouldn’t feel like a victory. Continue reading Courtesy: Part 48
Cassie piped up before anyone else, “How do we trust you? You were literally trying to kill some of us less than a minute ago. Sure, you stopped, but what are we supposed to do with that? Right now you need us, but maybe in the future you decide that you don’t. What’s going to stop you from absorbing the whole world then?”
The boy frowned, “The Xiniti will burn this world. Isn’t that correct?”
“Right,” Cassie pointed at the mounds, “but we see what you’re up to. You’re making replacements for us.” Continue reading Courtesy: Part 45
Logically, I should have told him to shoot it. The longer we took with this, the more time the greater horde had to reach us. Plus, it was most likely an avatar for a larger entity that was willing to sacrifice human life without a thought.
Why didn’t I? First of all, Alex didn’t take orders from anybody. Second, we didn’t know where the core of the entity was and a conversation could give us time to find it that combat wouldn’t. Beyond that, would the Fungus Collective simply hand us the core of its mental processes? Unlikely. If I had to guess, I’d guess that the kid was intended to be a distraction for us.
Also, there was the possibility, however small, that we were actually looking at a kid. Continue reading Courtesy: Part 44