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While Kingsley and I hit the deck, Meredith, Velma, and Gemma return fire. The older Velma is matter-of-fact about it, showing little fear, hesitation, or emotional response at all. The younger Meredith screams like a pissed-off Valkyrie ready to avenge her entire wiped-out village… or a teenager who’s had her iPhone stolen. She’s nineteen, the youngest of the abductees to be destined for permanent captivity. Something tells me she’s kinda upset about being kidnapped as a lab rat with her whole life still ahead of her.
Gemma’s too hesitant. Her blast goes high, hitting the wall of the elevator. Velma shot the alien on the left right in the face, killing it instantly. Its whole oversized head exploded like a dynamited watermelon, spraying pastel blue goop all over the place. Meredith pumps six plasma bolts into the other one, starting at the stomach and working her way up. As Kingsley and I stand again, she continues shooting the corpse.
Titus and Bud exchange a glance.
Rich rests a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Therapy. Get some.”
Meredith snarls. “Thisistherapy.” She shoots the dead alien again.
“Can’t argue that.” Kingsley chuckles.
This hallway has six doors, three on either side, and ends at an open central area around a cylindrical structure housing the primary elevator. I keep my sword ready, one eye on the doors in case of ambush, and hurry after Kingsley. The big guy kicks the alien corpses out of the elevator. Bud and Rich grab the weapons, surprising me bynotmaking jokes about the shape. Bud starts directing everyone where to stand for the best defensive coverage. He sounds like he’s got some sort of military training.
Kingsley and I move into the elevator. It’s a huge cylinder about fifteen feet across. Mostly featureless except for a small mirrored spot on the wall by the large open archway. Thanks to Xaan’s little brain upload, I know it’s the controls… and like the humorously shaped plasma weapons, it simply reacts to the desire of the person—or alien—waving their hand at it. If I want to go down, it sends the elevator down. If I want to go up, which I do, it will go up.
At the exact instant I swipe my hand at the control, Meredith darts into the elevator, beating the ridiculously fast doors by a fraction of a second. The kid’s giving me this look like she’s not done with her Jane Rambo impression. Her oversized men’s flannel shirt and the cheerleader skirt I ditched really make her look like a side character in an offbeat comedy movie. Despite her ridiculous outfit, she looks ready to kill and perhaps ever so slightly psychotic.
“I want to help,” she says, somewhat sheepishly.
Grr. I don’t have the time—nor the mind control powers—to do anything about her now. Can’t kick her off the elevator since it’s already moving up. “Okay fine. But be careful, and please don’t talk about anything strange you might be about to witness.”
Her gung-ho, murderous expression turns to shocked confusion when Kingsley rears back and bursts into wolf form.
There’s no time to say more as the elevator’s double doors zip open. The big guy’s off like a hairy missile.
Meanwhile, looks like I was wrong on two counts. First, the aliens on the bridge aren’t shooting plasma bolts at us. They’re holding rectangular boxes, the same device the first alien I saw pointed at me. They resemble universal remote controls—only these spit thin lightning arcs. Second count of me being wrong: the bridge has no workstations. Just a countertop of sorts that rings the entire dome-shaped chamber.
The walls and ceiling are almost entirely transparent. A faint sheen of reflectivity is all that stops me from feeling like we’re standing outside, uncovered, atop an enormous hovering disc. No one with even a tiny fear of heights should be on this bridge while this thing is in flight. It would feel like surfing on a massive Frisbee.
If I had to guess, I’d say the aliens are afraid of shooting their plasma weapons up here because they would damage whatever material the dome is made out of. Putting holes in spaceships is generally considered a bad idea.
Kingsley pounces on the nearest bad guy, ripping him off his feet and throttling him side to side like a giant dog playing super rough with an alien-shaped chew toy. I almost feel bad for the Xiphos as my beau throws him across the bridge. The alien gives off this high-pitched scream like a chipmunk shot out of a leaf blower.
My turn.
I simultaneously open a mental channel to feed from their energy and amp myself up as much as I can in terms of speed and strength. These guys brains are so supercharged, I could drain them on full blast and they wouldn’t even yawn. Can’t knock them out or even make them drowsy, but it does give me near-limitless energy. Time seems to get mushy around me as my body and thoughts speed up. I am not, however, faster than electricity. The alien I go after shoots me in the chest with his zappy gun. To call the sensation unpleasant isn’t doing it justice. My boobs feel like a couple eggs microwaved to the point they’re about to explode.
Pain becomes wrath.
I’m so enraged by the sudden, severe agony, my downstroke with the ice blade cuts the Xiphos in half from forehead to crotch. Ooh, these guys are squishy. Pale blue blood splatters all over the dome wall behind him. The instant the lightning stops hitting me in the chest, the pain ceases as if it had never been. No lingering soreness at all.
Other Xiphos witnessing this start screaming and flailing their long arms. One goes for a plasma caster, which gets the alien nearest him grabbing for his arm as if to say ‘no, you fool, you’ll kill us all.’ I can’t help but feel like a bear who’s just been shot with a .22 and the hunters are realizing their guns aren’t up to the task. No idea what the lightning-zappy thing was supposed to do, but it clearly didn’t have the intended effect on me.
Kingsley zooms by as a flash of fur and teeth, taking another one out. They’re hitting him fairly easily with the lighting guns. He is, after all, a large target. If the devices hurt him, he’s not showing it. To be fair, I didn’t show it either… at least not as far as I can tell.
I race around counterclockwise, ducking more zaps and slashing at any alien in reach. They retaliate with a mixture of zappy boxes and large knives. For a few brief seconds, I feel like I really am in some kind of pirate movie, dueling the captain for control of the ship. Somewhere in the chaos, I offer them the chance to surrender, but they either don’t understand me or surrender isn’t in their vocabulary. Based on what Xaan said about them, my guess is they’d rather die than be taken prisoner. Yeah, I can kinda sympathize to a point. However, as humiliating as capture is, it still offers the chance for escape and revenge. Death is kinda permanent.
The strange buzzing ‘bwee’ noise of a plasma caster goes off twice, right before I realize I’m out of aliens to slice up. Kingsley’s turned the bridge into a charnel house. Blue goop drips off just about everything, even the top of the dome. Alien bits are strewn all over the place. He’s still wired up in combat mode, snarling, turning in place in search of something else to chew on.
Meredith stands two paces from the elevator, plasma weapon held out in both hands. Seems she took out the last two Xiphos, who’d been attempting to flee. She’s also not lowering the weapon.
“That’s all of them,” I say.
“What the heck just happened?” Meredith almost-but-not-quite aims the silver rod at Kingsley while giving me side eye.
“We took over the bridge from the bad guys.” I spin my sword over my hand and give it a sideways flick to sling blood off it.
Meredith swallows. “Umm. How did you move so fast? And why did he turn into a huge dog?”
