He cursed as he saw a leech rise over the dead bodies of its comrades and prepare to blow the transport away. Before it could fire, Talon soared through the air and landed on top of the leech. A giant gun appeared in his hands, which he immediately discharged into the electronic beast.
The leech fell, lifeless, on top of the ever-growing pile of slaughtered machines. Talon looked invincible as he shot through the air to intercept another leech, knocking energy blasts aside with his force-field armor. Another shuttle appeared where the last had arrived. The huge transport opened its doors, and more humans flooded inside.
It was by far the largest item he’d ever seen pressed. Carlee had been so nervous to press in even small items, and the antigravity vehicle Carlee had pressed for them in Fifth Springs wasn’t half the size of this transport. That feat had sent the vagrants fleeing, but Jane didn’t even get to her feet.
A ball of energy ten feet wide hit Talon in the back while he was in the middle of sending a small leech flying through the air with his mace. His arms went limp as the energy diverted away from Jane. His force-field armor flickered as he tumbled out of sight.
Jane snapped her head around to where Talon had been. The serene expression on her face changed for the first time that Jeff had ever seen. Her head drifted slowly until she met Jeff’s eyes.
She lifted her hood and let her long blond hair flutter in the wind created by the transport lifting off the ground. The turrets downed the leech that had hit Talon, but their firing rate dipped to slow motion. Nothing seemed important but Jane. The complexity in her eyes captivated him. She had always been so distant, but now she was acutely present, and Jeff didn’t feel fit to be the object of her focus.
“Go,” she mouthed to him as the sky turned dark above the small arena of shattered leeches. The handful of humans left around her fell to their knees as if to pray.
“Go,” she said again, and the momentary trance that had held him was broken. One of Petra’s city-crushing tentacles floated above them. Energy pulsed through the thick cord of Apostolic metal and death at the same pace as his racing heart.
Jane smiled at him, and Jeff turned to run, forcing his way through the dead leeches faster than before. Metal scraped against his uniform, tearing at it. He scraped his face and his hands, but he pushed through the mess of leech remains. He could hear Petra’s arm falling on them as he fought his way to the open battlefield.
He dove out of the pile of vagrant-killed leeches just as Petra smashed it. He scrambled forward, away from the deafening noise and destruction. A wave of dust passed over him as the tentacle crushed everything beneath it. Jeff crawled forward on his hands and knees until the dust cleared and he could go no farther.
As far as he could see, mounds of twisted metal and burning crops sprawled in front of him. The fighting was concentrated in patches now, where the survivors of the two armies were beating one another furiously to death. Exhaustion rested on his shoulders while he looked over it all. Jane had led them into the heart of this conflict, and now she was gone as well. Petra’s tentacle lifted from the ground and whipped through the air, plowing through aerial battles before it smashed into Horus’s backside. Their fight was far away, but the Apostles towered above the rest of the destruction, locked in battle.
More than half of Petra’s limbs were destroyed, but Horus looked to be barely holding off the inevitable. Jeff slipped a smile as Petra’s arms wrapped around Horus, encircling it in a tight grip that the Apostle that had slaughtered his family struggled to free itself from.
Jeff ignored the leeches flying by him as he looked on, eagerly awaiting Horus’s death. It didn’t scream in pain like a human would have; instead, Horus looked all too calm for its situation.
The sparse clouds above the Apostles parted, and a brilliantly white Apostle dropped from the sky. Its force-field wings deactivated, and it dropped like a meteor, plummeting directly toward Petra’s head. Jeff watched in disbelief as the white Apostle activated a pair of gigantic force-field swords and pointed them below its feet.
“No!” Jeff screamed.
The white Apostle that had been at Fifth Springs and had pursued the vagrants ever since pulled its swords free from Petra’s reeling head and gracefully swooped down and severed the arms holding Horus in place.
“No . . .” He lost his will to scream. Horus freed its damaged body from Petra’s tentacles, and together with the white Apostle, they overwhelmed what was left of Petra.
Instinctively, Jeff moved his metal hand and snatched one of those small floating cubes out of the air and crushed it. He turned around in time to see a wheel-shaped leech rolling toward him. He knew he couldn’t fight it with his arm, and outrunning it wasn’t likely, but he prepared himself to flee anyway.
A blur smashed into the leech, reducing it to metal shards. A human in a set of thick metal armor landed on the ground where the wheel of death had been. Pieces of the flight suit stuck out where necessary, and a pair of guns was attached to the human’s back; otherwise, the armor obscured the rest of his savior’s identity.
“What was your plan, there, Handsome?”
“You’re alive!”
“You really think I’d let an Apostle kill me?” She didn’t wait for his answer before her armored suit fired to life. She grabbed Jeff with one arm, and they shot into the air, twisting around to dodge some energy blasts.
For miles around below them, all they saw was pure devastation. The scrunched pile of leeches where Jane had saved so many and paid for it with her life shrunk out of view as they soared into the air. Surprisingly, the extreme force of the acceleration didn’t bother him; the rest of the battlefield was too mind-boggling for him to feel sick. Thousands of leeches were still locked in combat, but the only thing Jeff could focus on was the sight of Horus standing on top of Petra’s dead body, roaring triumphantly into the sky.
23 SIDE EFFECTS
“IT WAS STUPID,” JEFF CONCLUDED. He broke a stick in half and tossed it into the fire that was reflecting into the stream by their camp—if it could even be called a camp. It was just the two of them, eating some supplies that Stefani had pressed in a few hours ago.
She had refused to press him a flight suit of his own, so he had held on to her as they flew farther away from the battle that had left Petra dead and the vagrants without their leader. Jeff told her about the rendezvous points, but Stefani insisted that if Jane was dead, then their group was finished.
“No, it was pathetic,” Stefani said. “No, it was worse than that. It was a class A attempt to remove yourself from what’s left of the gene pool. Actually, even that doesn’t seem to do it justice—”
“I get it.”
“I’m not sure you do. If Carlee had been foolish enough to follow after you, and you had gotten her killed, I would have put you down myself. What you did was dangerous—and not in a hot way. In a worthless way. Like handing a baby a gun or smoking in a pool of oil.”
“I thought I could help some people. I didn’t want to be a coward . . . and Horus killed my family. It killed everything that I knew! It pretty much killed me. In the moment, I felt like if there were even a one-in-a-million chance that I could tip the scales in Petra’s favor, it would have been worth it.”
“And?”
“And I was wrong.”
“And?”
“I’m an embarrassment to my ancestors and the gene pool at large.”
“Good. That’s the first step, acknowledgment.”