The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Y

14

One week earlier:

The lady sat in a room so yellow that, at the corners where floor met wall and wall met ceiling, the edges melded seamlessly, and it was as if she, her chair, and the figure kneeling before her were suspended over a deep golden abyss. Before her, on a screen that actually was suspended in mid-air, a small wooden ship sailed through the morning sky. Slowly, a wicked smiled formed on her perfect features.

The lady’s slave moaned softly between her legs.

“Did you say something?” She flicked the control wand held in one hand at him.

The bald, naked man crouched in front paused in his abject tonguing action. The blinking red interface links to either side of his forehead went out. The look of fervent lust and devotion on his face vanished.

“I hate you!” he hissed, with such venom the lady should have died on the spot.

“How sweet,” the woman said. She was vividly blond. Extraordinarily blond. She lifted a foot and rested it on the man’s shoulder. Like him, she was unclothed. Unlike him, she was quite relaxed in her nudity, reclined in her formfitting, plushplastic chair. She flicked the wand again.

“Mistress,” the man breathed ardently, eyes once more soft and dutiful. His implants blinked. He bent and put his mouth to the lady’s flawless thighs, resuming his adoring licking and kissing.

The woman reached down and stroked his denuded scalp.

“Your friends are nearly arrived,” she said. She shrugged toward the hovering monitor. “Aren’t you glad, Commander Aosha?”

The man looked up long enough to look the lady in the eyes. “Yes, mistress. Thank you, mistress.” He returned once more to his task. Chuckling quietly, the woman deactivated his active control again.

Marine Commander Gila Aosha choked. He tried to spit, but enough programming remained in him to prevent this offense. “Why don’t you just kill me and have done with it!” he screamed.

“Because that would be a waste, a beautiful boy like you.” With a motion she reactivated his implants.

Immediately, Aosha lowered his head. “I love you, mistress,” he said, his voice the soul of submission.

Slowly, deliberately, he crawled between her legs. He put his mouth to the lady’s pussy and inserted his tongue, simpering in pleasure as he began to delicately eat her out. The former Betan marine officer stroked himself between his own legs at the same time, desperately trying to achieve the climax the implants prevented him from achieving on his own. She had kept him from cumming for weeks.

The lady manipulated the wand. The picture on the floating screen zoomed in to reveal a pair of humans standing on the hovership’s bridge, one male, one female, both shivering in blankets. The lady didn’t see the third human, but she knew with a greater than 99% accuracy that he was behind in the sheltered stern. She used the wand. The picture expanded out, then refocused on the eight larger hoverships in pursuit of the first. They were crewed by Yn.

Again, with a high percentage of reliability, the vividly blond lady could predict who was on board, what their intentions were, and how great their likelihood of success in the endeavor was. They were high.

In fact, if she and the commander didn’t intervene, Garrant and her remaining crew would certainly be captured and brought back west. Would that be so bad? The lady reviewed her calculations in her head. Her thoughts moved at chemiprocessor speed. There was a better than 27.5% chance that the Sooshrese would keep the trio of humans human, as trophies to humiliate the Rexus of Tolaam. And although the chances were slim, there was a distinct possibility that the Imperatrix would later want the humans in trade, were they to remain human and available. Such availability, therefore, would introduce an unnecessary complication to her negotiations. Better to eliminate the humans’ appeal now.

Besides, stepping in would be . . . entertaining. Playfully, she slapped at the back of her slave’s head.

“Mistress,” Aosha groaned ecstatically, squirming between her legs. “Oh, harder, mistress! Please, harder, mistress!” She gave him another spank. “Ooh, thank you, mistress! More, please! More!”

She fingered the wand. Bleep!

“Gods! stop it, please!” the Marine cried out. “Let . . me . . GO!!” He fought as hard as he was allowed to by his implants, which in essence amounted to no fight at all. Even as he resisted, Aosha continued to lick out his mistress. He yanked at his member. He couldn’t help it. He was desperate.

Bleep!

“Oh, thank you, mistress! I love you, mistress!”

Bleep!

“Bitch! Dark Solarian witch!”

Bleep!

“Oh, mistress! Mistress!!” Aosha screamed in submission, and as he pulled futilely at his member, the lady allowed herself a quick climax, gasping in faint satisfaction.

A little later, she stood and had the slave clean her with his mouth. “Hands and knees,” she ordered after he was done. She posed in front of him and turned off the implants.

He shuddered in shame.

“Gather your equipment,” she said. “We’re going on a little excursion.”

* * *

Serry missed her Centauri Space Force uniform. It wasn’t so much the way the uniform looked that she missed, although it did look stylish, a metallic blue coverall with red Expeditionary Force trimmings. The Defense Force had yellow trims, the Patrol Force orange. No, what Serry missed were the uniform’s added features: the smart chemiweaving that adjusted the fit to each individual; the anti-perspiration coating that also conveniently dealt with body odor; the built-in communication system, not that that would be of much use on Y. Her old uniform had even been stain resistant. Most of all, though, she missed the temperature regulator, which trapped or blew air through minute pocket layers in the seams, cooling the wearer down if things got too hot, and, more importantly from her perspective, heating the wearer up if things got just a little too chill.

The wind howled. Serry shivered. Her teeth chattered. Damn, it’s cold, she thought.

Sud had found some blankets while rummaging around below deck, and though it disgusted Serry to have to put on animal furs—the hairs were velvet soft and a rather odd purple shade, hinting at more genetic manipulation—she hadn’t hesitated when the crewman handed her one. She pulled the heavy material across her shoulders, grateful for its warmth. At the same time, she looked down at the hovership’s steering controls, now, also thanks to Sud, so comfortably before her. There was nothing to indicate their air speed, but they were moving at a pretty good clip.

“How far back are they now?” she called out. Crewman Sud was at the stern. He had the best eyes.

“Maybe five kilometers,” he replied. “Maybe less, and they’re gaining, ma’am!” When he’d first seen them a couple of hours ago, Sud had guesstimated their distance at better than thirty. Serry had increased their speed as much as she could, until the deck began vibrating precariously beneath them, but still their pursuers were gaining. At the rate they were going, within another hour, the Yn ships would be on top of them.

Ahead across the flat white ice, an impossibly tall black tower remained their destination and sole hope.

“We won’t make it,” Eben said quietly, standing beside Serry. Serry didn’t say anything, but she nodded. She was trying to think of a plan. Nothing was coming yet, just more reliance on luck.

Sud had proven really useful over the last day and a half while they soared above Y’s Great Glacier. Not only had he found them all blankets, the able crewman had put together a sturdy box from some extra wood he found. Serry was standing on it while manipulating the hovership’s Yn-sized controls.

The most important thing, though, was that at daybreak, Sud was the one who had seen the tower.

Finding the Brahma base had proven more problematical than Serry had hoped. She knew only approximately where the base was—in the middle of the glacier—but when one was talking about an ice pack that big, and you had no satellite direction system, well, saying one was headed toward the middle of a glacier was one thing and actually doing it quite another. Worse yet, once over the ice pack, the terrain had become virtually unremarkable: no distinguishing features whatsoever, just ice, ice, and more ice as far as the eye could see. Serry had headed east and taken the small craft up as high as she could, hoping to spot something, anything, but the long Yn day had ended with them finding only more ice.

The night had proven equally disappointing. They had kept going, however, Serry navigating what she hoped was a wide circular pattern to increase their chances, and early that morning Sud had excitedly claimed to have seen something.

“What?” Eben asked. He had looked in the same direction as Sud but said he saw nothing.

“I don’t know, sir, but it’s big, whatever it is.” He had looked desperately at his commanding officer. “Please, ma’am. I know I saw something.” Having nothing to lose, and trusting to the same fortunate that had benefited them earlier, Serry had turned the ship toward Sud’s “big thing,” and about twenty minutes later her hopes were rewarded.

“I see it, Serry,” Eben had said, shaking his head, “but Sud’s wrong. It’s a mountain. It’s huge.”

“That seems to be a common theme on this planet,” Serry had replied, increasing their speed. “And seeing that it’s the only thing we’ve seen so far . . .” She hadn’t needed to finish the sentence. As they got closer to the big black object, the whatever-it-was began to take on more definition, more regularity. Simultaneously, though, just how fantastically large it was became increasingly apparent.

“It’s, ah, a little further away than I thought,” Sud said eventually.

“How far?” Eben had said the words with a kind of stunned acceptance.

“Maybe, two hundred, two hundred and fifty kilometers, sir.” He sounded a little stunned himself.

If we can see it from two hundred and fifty kilometers away, Serry thought, it’s at least a couple of kilometers tall. Maybe it is a mountain. It had to be the Brahma base. Their luck had held. But it came with a price. It was after they changed course that Sud first saw their pursuers behind them.

Serry leaned on the speed-control toggle. The rotors beneath the deck slightly increased in speed, but the rocking of the deck worsened. Eben gripped the railing beside his commanding officer tightly.

“We have the rifle,” he said. “We have almost no ammunition, but we have the rifle we took. And I still have this.” He held up the Yn dagger Serry had given him. “Sud and I can make a fight of it.”

“I’m not ready to give up just yet,” Serry said, and he looked at her askance. “Ha ha,” he said. She was holding the controls, balancing speed versus stability on a razor’s edge. “Think happy thoughts.”

“You’re still a crazy pilot, you know.” Serry only nodded.

Fifteen minutes later, still maybe fifty kilometers away from the tower, they started to make out details. It was that big. “What in the name of my God is it?” Eben asked. It was immense. Eben had called it a mountain, and it surely was. It was as if somebody had taken Mt. Zubaidah and diced it into a set of cubes. Sud had come into the forward alcove with them. “I think it’s a space fountain, sir.”

“A what?”

“A space fountain, sir,” Sud said. “Like the pre-Expansionist terraformers used to build, when they began early terraforming on Titan and Mars.” He shrugged at his two superiors. “I’m a student of the Hereditarians,” he explained. “History is sacred.” He crossed himself.

The Brahma base—it had to be the Brahma base—closer up proved to be not one structure but five: four mountain-sized basalt cubes, like a child’s toy blocks magnified a million times, surrounding a central pylon three times their already fantastic extent. They were clearly made of the same crystalline stone as the city of Tolaam. The air above the pylon shimmered, like a mirage does in the desert.

And the shimmer had no end. It just went up and up and up, as far as the eye could see.

“It’s like the base of a shield tower,” Serry said finally. Proxima Five, the sole inhabited planet of Proxima Centauri back in the Three Systems, used a series of very tall carbon chemitube towers called “shield towers” to help establish its artificial magnetic field. These towers reached into the upper atmosphere, and together with a series of geostationary satellites they formed the invisible web of energy that protected life on the planet from the violent flare star. Similar structures had been used to make the Jovian worlds in Sol system habitable. “But if there’s a cable, we’re still too far away to see it.”

“I don’t think there is one, ma’am,” Sud said. “A space fountain uses electromagnetism to push things into space. I’d bet anything there’s a station of some kind on the other end of that haze, held up either by the force of the field itself or a series of metal pellets riding the energy stream back and forth.” He shook his head. “The early terraformers used brute force methods of building atmospheres, drawing ionized gases up or down with machines like this one.”

“There’s nothing like one of those in the Three Systems,” Eben said. “Nothing can be built that size and stand up under its own weight. I don’t care if the gravity on Y is lower. Nothing that size is stable.”

He said this while staring at the structure, obviously standing and stable.

“If it really is a space fountain,” their Hereditarian-trained crewman said, “it will use the electromagnetic field it generates to help hold it up. But you’re right. There’s nothing like it among the Centauri worlds. The Expansionists used different technologies.”

“So why build one here?” Sud only shook his head. A minute later, though, he pointed. “There’s another ship! Coming from the fountain!” Serry strained her eyes. Sud’s vision really was good. He was right. There was a flying boat coming to meet them. Serry could just barely make it out against the immense blackness before her, the sheer white to either side. She blinked back involuntary tears.

“Can we make it, ma’am?” Maybe, Serry thought. She pressed the speed toggle as far as it would go.

Their own flying boat began to shake so bad, the vibration doubled their vision. “Weeee cannn’t hoooold thiiiis speeeeed for looooong!” Serry screamed, holding on. “Graaab sooomethiiing!!”

They skimmed above the ice like a bullet fired from a Yn rifle. The already immense Brahma structure got only larger. More geometric shapes became apparent as they got closer, but each of these was building-size unto itself. The air whipped them round their shaking hovership. It made its own weather system, the Brahma base, and the winds made controlling the ship even more difficult. Finally, Serry had to throttle back or they would tip over and crash. And still they were tens of kilometers away.

Something started clanging badly underneath them, and the boat shuddered. For a second, they fell rapidly, and then the rotors caught again, and they stabilized. “That’s another shuttle you’ve ruined,” Eben said, arching his eyebrows at his commanding officer. Serry stuck her tongue out at him.

Gallows humor in the face of probable capture. Serry was determined not to give up again. She would not go willingly into another Yn prison. She began thinking very seriously about crashing deliberately.

The flying ship continued to grind and buckle beneath her manipulations. I may not need to crash us after all, she thought. I’m doing fine as I am accidentally. They slowed past what she wanted.

“We’re slowing,” Eben said, a little obviously. “Yes, I noticed,” Serry said, ironically. Sud was silent.

The flying boat came to a complete halt in the middle of the air.

Serry cursed and tried the engines but to no avail. They weren’t going up, they certainly weren’t falling, but they had very definitely stopped. They were still about fifty meters above the ice, maybe thirty kilometers from the base. The structure utterly filled the horizon to the east. It had to be at least ten kilometers tall, maybe fifteen. It was impossible to accurately judge the size of something so big.

Nobody said anything for a few minutes. Eventually, Serry told Eben to take the rifle.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. They looked around. It was going to be close, whether the sole ship in front would reach them first or the six or seven ships behind. Sud looked over the ship’s side at the ice.

“That’s going to be a brutal fall,” he said reflectively. He began praying to his Forerunners.

The tense atmosphere increased. Sud began looking closely at the single incoming ship. “I see two people on board,” he said at last. “And they’re human! They’re wearing filter masks!”

Serry ran up next to him, followed quickly by Eben. “Are you sure?” she asked. The crewman nodded up and down so hard his neck creaked. He was sure. Absolutely sure.

At last, the smaller skyboat came alongside their own, and they saw it was true. A yellow and black flag, square, with the division between colors diagonal along the middle, fluttered at its stern. Almost immediately, without waiting for an invitation, the two figures onboard jumped across. Serry felt suddenly awkward in their presence; she was practically naked, barefoot, clad only in animal furs, and still stained in gummy, pink Yn blood because she had found neither the water nor the time to wash.

The two people before her were handsome, clean, and fully clothed. She blushed.

The woman was the really attractive one. Clad in heels and a dark jumpsuit, she was tall, blond, and statuesque. She was stunningly beautiful, flawless, in fact; but her face projected cold and haughtiness. When she looked at Serry and the others, the commander could sense the derision. I know her, she thought. Now that they were closer, Serry recognized the woman. She was the wife of the Beta Assembly’s ambassador on the Independence. She was an aristocrat, the Lady . . the Lady Alyce, Serry snapped her fingers. The Lady Alyce zee Elshwa. Serry had seen her at the pre-flight functions she had had to attend as a senior officer of the starship. The Lady Alyce had been a passenger and kept in suspended animation until the last few weeks. Serry had never run into her onboard.

Of all the people the commander might have expected to survive the Independence disaster, she would have been at the bottom of the list, right alongside with her doughy husband. Her companion, now, on the other hand, was right at the top, and that might have explained things.

“Marine Commander,” Serry said, straightening. “It’s good to see you, sir.” Eben and Sud too had recognized the senior officer and assumed a more military bearing.

Marine Commander Gila Aosha, the third highest-ranking officer onboard the Independence: he had been in charge of the ship’s contingent of Royal Marines. He was in full battle uniform, tough synleather and combat boots, and armed: he cradled a Marine-issue heavy laser rifle in his arms; a blaster pistol and shockbaton were in well-worn holsters on his belt; and his back and arms were strewn with automated, adjustable targeting and deploying devices, from a chemiprocessor-controlled, micromissile launching platform on his left shoulder to a microwave heat inducer mini-dish on his right, the latter rotating constantly yet noiselessly at everything in the Marine Commander’s helmet sight. Ground combat had been rare during the Occupation—most of the important battles with the Solarians had taken place outside of an atmosphere—but when they occurred, the weapons employed by each side had guaranteed almost total mutual obliteration of the enemy. The Sovereign’s Marines were tough; they had to be in order to survive, and Serry felt better seeing that the highest-ranking, most experienced Marine in the entire star system was next to her. At least, she felt better for a moment.

Aosha did not acknowledge his name and rank. “Commander?” Eben asked. So he had noticed it too.

He didn’t look at them. His eyes actually looked a little dazed behind his combat visor, what little Serry could see of them, and kept glancing over at his blond companion, as if drawn to her magnetically.

When the Lady Alyce approached him, he cringed. No Sovereign Marine ever cringed. His hands shook. Serry thought he looked drunk.

“Commander!” Crewman Sud yelled out, and to Serry, that was the final indicator something was very wrong. Aosha did not so much as turn his head in Sud’s direction. Sud was addressing her, but Serry knew that for certain only because she had been looking at him when Sud yelled. Sud was behind the marine, and Aosha should have at least turned his head. He didn’t. He didn’t react in the slightest.

Serry turned to face the direction Sud was pointing. The first of the Yn hoverships was approaching fast. It would be on them inside of a minute. She turned and looked at the marine’s laser rifle. If Aosha didn’t do something—if he really was drunk—she meant to take it from him and use it herself.

Strangely enough, it was the blonde who spoke, almost as if reading Serry’s mind. “Let them approach.” Her voice was cultured and rich. Her hair was tied up in a ribbon behind her. She was unarmed. “I want to fight.”

“Excuse me?” Serry said. She had no intention of letting the Yn ships get that close. They didn’t need to, not with the weapons the Marine Commander was sporting. Eben may have been thinking along the same lines as she. He came up behind the blonde, and only then did Aosha react. Overreact.

“Get away from her!” he screamed. His voice was entirely hysterical. He lifted the rifle and pointed it at Eben’s gut, freezing them all in place. “You can’t have her! She’s mine!”

God, Serry thought. She turned and faced the approaching skyship again.

She could see the Yn soldiers onboard. She could see their primitive projectile weapons aiming. They would be in weapons range in seconds.

Only the Lady Alyce went unfazed. Calmly, her every step and motion so perfectly graceful and sure they looked like they had been choreographed days before, she walked past Serry to the boat’s controls, stepped up onto the little box at the foot of the stand as if she had expected it to be there, and adjusted the controls, firmly and without hesitation. Whatever she did with the broken system worked.

The skyboat started to descend.

“Lock and put the rifle down, Gila,” she told the Marine Commander. “Stand over there. I don’t want them tempted to shoot you from afar.”

“What’s going on?” Serry asked. “What are you doing?” Neither person answered her.

Aosha put the laser on the deck of the skyboat and stepped away from it. Both Eben and Sud started for it, but the blond aristocrat shook her head.

“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” she said. Serry told them to stop.

The boat lowered, leaving the smaller ship floating above. They settled on the packed ice in the shadow of the monstrous Brahma structure. Within seconds the first Yn hovership was atop them. Serry was closest to Aosha and the rifle. She glanced down again and sighed. The rifle’s ready light shown red, not green. Even if she had let Eben grab it, all he would be able to do with it was use it like a club.

Serry involuntarily winced hearing the sound of Yn projectile weapons firing. Chips of wood and ice flew to either side of the small group. Warning shots. The shadow of the larger vessel hung over them.

Ropes bundled down, and a moment later a group of humongous red Yn warriors in gray landed heavily on the ship’s deck. From the corner of her eye, Serry saw the Lady Alyce smile wickedly. Things had happened so quickly, events had changed so radically, Serry felt a little stunned. They had been captured again, by the Yn. The tension she felt was only partially related, though.

For the first time, she wasn’t worried about the Yn. Something bad was about to happen. She could feel it. Naturally, the Yn directed their attention at the men onboard, ignoring the two women. That was a mistake, though in the retrospect it really didn’t matter much. Even if they had given the Lady Alyce their full attention, they still wouldn’t have had a chance.

There were now five of them. An equal number of Yn had landed. Three headed toward the Marine Commander, for even without his rifle he was the only one still clearly armed. The other two went for Eben and Sud, roughly pushing them against a wooden bulkhead. Serry didn’t know what she was going to do, but she had started moving toward the back of the warrior facing Eben, probably to hit the red giant from behind, ineffectually, most likely, and that’s when with inhuman speed the Lady Alyce attacked. The blond aristocrat raced past her, approached that same Yn warrior, jumped high, really high into the air, and kicked the Yn in the throat. The move, as before, looked prepared in advance: she actually used one leg to brace herself against the Yn’s chest, her whole body twisted and turned almost horizontal in the air, and then her other foot just swept in and connected sharply, decisively.

The Yn may as well have been standing motionless. He uttered a quick gurgling sound, dropped his projectile rifle, and reached with both hands toward his neck, where already bright pink blood shown.

The blond woman landed perfectly on both feet, as graceful as a post-ballet dancer. She was grinning.

The Yn she had attacked bent over deeply, blood spilling through his clenched fingers, his eyes open wide and not understanding. Lady Alyce came in and chopped him twice in the back of the neck with two quick motions. Serry heard bone crunch. The Yn kept right on going with his bow. He slammed headfirst straight into the wooden deck and collapsed, obviously dead. The only reason Serry managed to see it all was because she had already been going in that direction. She was facing the action. The attack, in other words, had happened with breathtaking speed.

The second Yn, the one facing Sud, had by that time only turned his head to see what was occurring.

Alyce plucked the rifle from the warrior’s arms as easily as if he had intended to hand it to her. The weapon was oversized even for her, but she didn’t use it as a slug-thrower. Instead, holding onto one end, the aristocrat swung the rifle up and around, like the club Serry had imagined, and smacked the Yn she had taken it from in the side of his head. The end snapped in two, such was the force of the blow.

The second Yn fell next to his comrade. It was debatable whether or not he had even seen what was happening to him. She made it look easy. Alyce’s escort, Aosha, fought no less effectively, though.

The three Yn crowding in on him were momentarily distracted by the calamity that had befallen their friends. Quick as a flash, though not quite as quick as Alyce had moved, Aosha drew his shockbaton and stabbed out with it, jabbing the closest warrior in his solar plexus. A shockbaton lived up to its name; it delivered a powerful but usually non-lethal jolt. The Yn struck let out a yell and bent over.

Aosha stepped in and kicked upwards with one leatherclad knee. The two body parts, knee and the warrior’s chin, made hard contact. At the same time, Aosha jabbed a second time with the shockbaton into the side of the man’s head, and he fell over backwards, sprawled out on the deck. The other two warriors lifted their rifles, but they were too close to fire. Aosha waded in between them, poking and jabbing, kicking and hitting with precise martial maneuvers. He inserted his foot between one Yn man’s legs and struck heavily at his hamstring, neatly knocking him into his comrade like an expertly chopped tree. Aosha grabbed the other man’s outstretched arm and pulled, using the other fellow’s body as a fulcrum. That warrior went over too, on top of his buddy. Still holding onto the arm, Aosha inserted the shockbaton into the man’s armpit, and the great Yn warrior screamed in agony. The marine then dropped his elbow hard into the man’s face, just as he opened his mouth to yell, and smashed his jaw.

A quick kick to the head was all that needed to finish him.

Eben was running for one of the fallen Yn rifles. Serry heard gunshots and ducked into the control alcove. She didn’t see Sud. The third Yn Aosha was fighting was entangled with his unconscious buddy. By the time he got to his knees, the smaller, more lithe Marine Commander was hitting him: face, shoulder, face again, other shoulder, and then a strong jab upwards with both hands held together, hitting the man’s chin and continuing on. Then, without letting go of his fingers, Aosha brought his clenched fists back down onto the warrior’s head. The Yn’s eyes rolled upwards, and he was out.

“Now,” the Lady Alyce said briskly. Aosha, breathing heavily, nodded.

As gunshots rained down, the Marine Commander lifted his left shoulder. Suddenly, pinging softly, a stream of micromissiles launched from the outstretched pad and raced toward the skyboat above, each bullet-sized dart leaving its own smoky contrail behind. Within an extremely short time, the rifle fire stuttered, then completely stopped. Serry knew why. Each micromissile was equipped with sensors and a fine motor control. They were “smart.” Each was designed to target a vital organ, and no matter how genetically modified they might have been, the Yn were at the core still built like human beings.

Heart . . brain . . base of the spine . . those were the primary targets typically programmed in. Aosha’s launching pad had shot perhaps a hundred of the little devils; Serry guessed there were perhaps only fifteen or twenty big devils aboard the larger skyship, at most. By the time Eben picked up the long Yn rifle, the fight was over.

Skyships, rifles, and other things aside, the Yn fought like primitives. Against modern weaponry, they died like them, too.

Aosha didn’t wait even the few seconds it took for his micromissile barrage to work. He scooted across the deck, picked up his laser rifle, coded it back on, and aimed at the closest of the next incoming skyships, still some distance away. He fired. Simultaneously, the dish on his right shoulder pointed in the same direction. Whether it was due to the invisible cutterbeam slicing through the air like a kilometer-long scalpel or the equally invisible microwave burst from the inducer, the target skyship simply fell apart in midair. Its pieces fell to the icy ground burning.

The other six hoverships were as easily eliminated.

Before she could say anything, Serry observed Alyce walk over. Before she could stop her, the woman reached down and sickeningly twisted the neck of each of the downed combatants. God, Serry thought again. “Who are you?” she asked, horrified.

The aristocrat didn’t answer. She stood and nodded at Aosha. The marine coded his rifle, whipped it around, professionally slung it over his shoulder, and used his shockbaton on Eben and Sud as they were coming near. Two fast jabs in the abdomens, and both men were down and not moving.

Serry didn’t yell out. She wasn’t even all that surprised. She just attacked, desperately swinging for the blond woman, who didn’t even bother to dodge. Serry’s fist connected with Alyce’s face with no effect whatsoever.

The aristocrat slapped Serry open-palmed, and an instant later everything went black.

. . . to be continued