The Choosing (The Pruxnae Book 1) (8 page)

Something hard
and heavy hit the door. Ziri watched, horrified, as the metal panel covering
the doorway groaned and buckled under the heavy battering coming from the other
side. Soon, it would crumple and she’d be at the mercy of whatever was on the
other side. Belnyin, Ryn had said in a voice so thin, the memory alone raised
goose bumps along her skin.

She scrambled
for the blaster, falling to the floor in a desperate search, and grasped it
just as the door cracked down the middle in a jagged rip. Metal
things
inserted themselves into the opening, pushing it apart one shallow hand’s
breadth at a time. A creature lurked on the other side, its figure gradually
revealed through the door’s ruins, a hideous creature with tiny eyes imbedded
in its pointy head, a round, lipless mouth, and stubby, trunk-like arms.

The stench hit
her then, raw and sharp, like fermented sewage mixed with rotting fish. She
gagged and threw her arm over her nose, blinking tears out of her eyes. It was
the worst thing she’d ever smelled by far, worse than the worms she and Ryn had
found in the water system, worse than a trapped garri’s acrid fear, far, far
worse than a sand leech with its gullet split wide open.

A handful of the
creature’s beady eyes shifted to her. The metal things wrenched open the door
and swarmed inward, waving around the creature as it stepped over the ruined
doorjamb toward her. The full horror of its figure hit her then, its hulking
size and brutal intent and overpowering stench, and she screamed and screamed,
calling for Ryn over the deafening roar issuing out of the creature’s
teeth-filled mouth.

The gun’s last
battery pack lost its charge in the middle of a Sweeper’s jump toward Ryn. In
the time since he’d taken out the first Sweeper, he’d made it almost to the
airlock, gunning down Sweeper after Sweeper on his way around the cargo bay.
Only three were left, but that was three more than he could handle without a
long-range weapon. Up close, the Sweepers were slow and easy to dart around.
Their metal-encased tentacles were not. Those things never gave up. Guided by
instinct more than anything, they’d prick Ryn to death with their sharpened
tips if they didn’t beat him senseless first.

He’d fallen
under their whipping sting often enough as a child to know how they worked.

The tentacles of
the Sweeper in mid-jump slashed through the air and stiffened, their flat
surfaces marginally slowing the Sweeper’s descent. Ryn waited until it was
almost on him, then jumped out of the way, rolling closer to the airlock as he
evaded the Sweeper’s heavy landing.

The
Yarinska
lurched forward, knocking the Sweepers off their feet. Ryn slid along the cargo
bay’s floor, his momentum carrying him by the airlock’s entrance. He twisted
around and reached for it, scrambling for a grip along the metal lip.

His hand latched
onto the doorframe, halting his slide, and his shoulder wrenched painfully in
its socket. He heaved himself toward it one-handed, not bothering to muffle the
sounds of his movement. The Sweepers knew where he was. Even the dark couldn’t
protect him now, wouldn’t inside the airlock under the soft light gleaming
overhead. He needed that light on, even if it exposed him to the Sweepers.

Their shuffling
steps closed in on him, slow and steady. They probably thought they had him
surrounded. Once a Sweeper cornered its prey, it took its time, relying on
brute strength and the vicious swipes of its tentacles to subdue any
resistance, a tactic that usually worked.

It might this
time, too, if he didn’t move his ass.

Ryn toggled the
view on his helmet from infrared to normal vision and hauled himself into the
airlock. The manual release was on the far side next to a small control panel
set into the wall beside the outer lock. Ryn punched an override code into the
panel, forcing the
Yarinska
’s outer lock shut, blocking any more
Sweepers from entering.

Metal tinged on
metal not five ceg behind him. Ryn ignored the Sweeper creeping steadily toward
him and punched his elbow into the glass case covering the manual release. A
roar echoed through the cargo bay. The Sweeper disappeared from Ryn’s
helmet-enhanced peripheral vision, dragged away from the airlock by one of the
other remaining two.

The Sweepers’
biggest weakness? They didn’t play well with anything, including each other.

He grabbed the
manual release lever and yanked upward on it, budging it less than a finger’s
width away from the wall.

Just his luck.
The kraden thing had probably rusted in place.

He heaved on it
again and managed to pop it one quarter of the way toward where it needed to
be. A fight broke out in the cargo bay. Scuffles and thuds mingled with
outraged roars. Ryn knelt, gripped the lever with both hands, and placed his
shoulder under them, then shoved up with the strength of his entire body. Bit
by bit, the lever shifted. The clamps holding the other ship in place clanged
and ground.

Almost there.

He gritted his
teeth and, muscles straining, forced the lever against the wall. The clamps
released with a loud snick, pushed apart by the manual release. Ryn sagged
against the wall, his breath panting in and out of his lungs in great, gasping
heaves.

The cargo bay
fell eerily silent.

Ryn sucked in a
final breath and held it, his ears tuned to the slightest noise. A metallic
ping
resonated through the stillness. Heavy feet shuffled outside the airlock,
followed by the thump and swoosh of an unwieldy weight being dragged. He eased
toward the cargo bay, tense and alert, and peered into the large room.

A tentacle
whooshed out and slammed into the doorway next to his head, rebounding off the
wall with a leaden clank. Ryn ducked and yanked his knife out of its sheath.
Sweat ran down his back, sticky and wet, dampening his shirt. It clung to him
as he stabbed around the edge of the door. The knife thudded into flesh and the
Sweeper lurking there shrieked its fury.

Tentacles swept
down and scraped over Ryn’s hand, scoring painful welts along his skin. He
grunted and jerked the knife back. It
shlurped
out of the Sweeper,
spilling bodily fluids along its receding path. Ryn crouched into the corner of
the airlock next to the door, head turned toward the opening. The oblong end of
one tentacle slithered into sight not far above his head. He flipped the knife
and jabbed the hilt’s flat base at the tentacle, hitting its end square on. The
metal encasement shattered, exposing the beige appendage it had protected. Ryn
flipped the knife again and stabbed the point into the uncovered flesh.

Outside, the
Sweeper thudded into the cargo bay’s floor emitting formless, high-pitched
groans.

Ryn grinned. Tentacles,
the name he’d coined for the Sweepers’ long sexual organs when he was a
frightened seven year old and had no idea they were the aliens’ equivalent of
penises.

He scrambled out
of the airlock, sprawled next to the fallen Sweeper, and slit into its spongy
midsection, digging through layers of fat and tissue to its eight-chambered
heart. He set the edge of his knife against the palpitating organ and sawed
through it, sometimes narrowly avoiding the tentacles flailing frantically
around the dying Sweeper, sometimes not. One persistent metal-coated organ slapped
across his back. He hissed and tightened his grip on the knife, refusing to
yield. The kraden organ was tough as a tanned hide. He gritted his teeth and
clenched the knife in both hands, yanking it up and down as tentacles whipped
around him and fluids spurted in arcs over his hands, covering him with the
Sweeper’s blood.

One tentacle slashed
sideways into Ryn’s ribs, slicing clear to the bone. He grunted and lost his
grip on the knife as it reared back for another strike. He scuttled backward,
one hand on the wound, the other fumbling for purchase along the floor, working
with his booted feet in a barely coordinated effort to put as much distance
between him and it as he could. The tentacle whistled down and clanked into the
floor, missing his right leg by a hair. With a final shove, Ryn scrambled out
of its reach, his eyes trained warily on the tentacles’ diminishing swishes.

This Sweeper was
down and near death, but there was still at least one more on the ship. Ryn
glanced around, searching for it in the cargo bay’s darkened space. With a muttered
curse, he toggled his helmet’s infrared sensors on and searched again.

Nothing moved in
the cargo bay. Heat signatures were scattered around the floor, slowly dimming
as the remains of the Sweepers he’d killed cooled.

Ryn scrambled to
his feet and staggered toward the entrance to the rest of the ship. He needed
another blaster. That was the best way to take down a Sweeper, or the best way
he had available. He wouldn’t survive another close encounter, not with the
wound over his ribs throbbing and blood dripping down his side.

Blackness
pricked at the edge of his vision and he swayed.

He couldn’t pass
out. Ziri needed him, sweet Ziri. He shook off the dizziness and forced his
feet to carry him into the main corridor. Something banged on the other side of
the ship and Ryn’s heart wadded into a dull knot in his chest. That had sounded
an awful lot like a Sweeper trying to pound its way into a locked room.

Adrenalin surged
through him. The pain receded from his side as he rushed through the ship,
stopping long enough to retrieve a blaster and an extra battery pack from a
hidden panel in the main corridor. The bangs continued, followed by the bending
and fracturing of thick metal, urging Ryn forward toward the front of the
Yarinska
.

He was twenty
ceg away from the conjunction of the main corridor with the bridge’s offshoot
hallway when a scream tore through the air.

“Ryn!” Ziri
cried, her voice nearly drowned out by the triumphant bellow of a male Sweeper
in the presence of a fertile female.

Ryn’s breath froze
in his lungs.
Ziri
. His heart lurched and thudded, and he leapt toward
the bridge, terrified he might already be too late.

* * *

Ziri fixed wide
eyes on the creature shuffling toward her. Those metal things waved around it,
clicking into each other with frightening regularity. The Belnyin reached back
and caught one in a three-fingered hand. It pressed something on the side and
the metal
shinked
back, revealing a fleshy knob at the end of a thick,
ropy limb.

Nausea roiled in
her stomach. The metal things were actually a part of the Belnyin, but why was
it showing her one?

The Belnyin
shuffled closer. Ziri scooted carefully under the control panel as far as she
could go and pointed the blaster at the creature. “I’ll shoot. I’m not kidding
either. Just get out of here and I’ll let you go, but if you come closer, I
swear by Onu’s beard, I’ll use this blaster on you.”

It lurched toward
her, startling her, and crouched on its knees in front of her. She bobbled the
blaster, righted her grip. The knobby appendage waved toward her and touched
the hem of her pants. She kicked out and the thing jerked back, narrowly
avoiding being hit. The Belnyin roared and grabbed her ankles, then yanked her
out from under the console. Her head whipped back and banged on the metal and
the blaster went flying. Pain radiated through her skull. She grabbed the back
of her head and hissed, cursing the Belnyin, Ryn’s ship, Ryn, and anything else
she could think of as the Belnyin dragged her steadily forward, its grip on her
unrelenting.

Something
prodded the juncture of her thighs.

Ziri tensed and
lifted her head. The knobby thing was poking at her womanhood through the pants
Ryn had loaned her. She jerked her gaze to the Belnyin. It was watching the
knobby thing prod between her legs, its glinting eyes unblinking above its
slack mouth.

Horror swept
over her, icy cold, splashing hard reality down around her. That thing was
trying to have sex with her. If she didn’t do something to stop it, it would
figure out how, and it probably wouldn’t stop with the one knobby thing it had
uncovered.

She bucked and
screamed, yanking her ankles in a futile attempt to shake the Belnyin’s firm
hold. The knobby thing reared away from her womanhood and the Belnyin roared.

She flinched
away from the noise. Onu’s breath, didn’t it have another volume?

It yanked her
forward again. She twisted in its grip, angling her head around in search of
the blaster, and finally spotted it on the other side of the chair, wedged
against the wall. The knobby thing slid under her shirt. It stroked her
stomach, as warm and smooth as human skin, and groped its way over her body in
random touches. Ziri gagged and rolled her hips, and the Belnyin, for whatever
reason, slackened its hold on her left leg. She pulled it free and kicked as
hard as she could, landing a solid strike on firm flesh, and wiggled her other
leg out of its grip, stretching one arm toward the blaster.

Bim, bim, bim
.

Ziri glanced
toward the rapid pings, one hand still patting the ground near the blaster. Waves
of red light raced over the Belnyin’s frozen form. Slowly, it tilted to the
side and splatted onto the floor. Behind it, a helmeted man aimed a blaster at
the creature.

Ryn
.

Ziri’s hand
landed on her blaster. She curled her fingers around it and scrambled toward
her savior. His arms dropped to his sides, his knees buckled, and down he went,
falling to the floor in a heap of limp limbs.

“Oh, no,” she
said. “No, no, no.”

She crawled to
Ryn around the felled Belnyin and ran frantic hands over him, grimacing at the
sticky fluid splattered in great gobs along his entire body. Her fingers
brushed over his ribs, and he groaned, rolling his head along the floor as his
breath hissed out of the mask covering his mouth. She looked closer and stifled
her own groan. He was hurt there, probably hurt in at least a handful of other
places. She wouldn’t be able to tell until she stripped him down and washed the
foul smelling Belnyin goo off of him.

“Ziri,” he
whispered.

Another jolt of
metal on metal reverberated through the ship and it jerked forward.

Ryn rolled onto
his side, moaned softly, and struggled onto his hands and knees. She grabbed
one of his arms and threw it over her shoulders, bracing herself under him,
taking his weight as they fumbled their way upright.

His hand pressed
down on her shoulder and he listed into her. Ziri stumbled under his solid bulk,
her heart leaden in her chest. No, she couldn’t let him fall. She needed him to
help her get them out of this mess, and he needed her to guide him.