Page 73 of Alien Viking's Plunder

And still the aliens kept pushing them back, slowly and surely. The threat was clear — the moment the line of warriors failed, the skrymtir would overrun all of Hjalmarheim, killing and destroying as they went. Gornt plainly had no plan of ruling the island — he just wanted revenge.

His witchcraft was behind all of this.

“We may have to kill Gornt, Chief,” Heidran said into his thoughts. “To rid us of these things once and for all.”

“Gornt is inside the jarlagard,” Bragr said, pointing at the wooden hall behind the aliens. “We have to go through the skrymtir to get to him.”

“We shall fight on,” Heidran said. “And win on our own.”

Bragr knew what the shaman was thinking, because he was thinking it too: the Meistr, the master warrior that the Prophecy had said would help save the earldom, was not fighting in this battle. That was why it was such a hard struggle.

Something had to be done, but Bragr’s mind was empty and he had no ideas. He just had to go on.

“Warrrr!” he roared as he attacked another alien skrymt.

22

- Josie -

The distance to Aretha’s headset, and Aretha herself, was down to less than a thousand feet.

Josie set the flying sled down, not wanting to fly any closer because the red shortship would be easy to spot.

She was high in the mountains, with an incredible view of Hjalmarheim below. The green coastland stretched south until it vanished in distant mist. It looked idyllic and peaceful.

Up here the mountain was bare, with only a light covering of ice and a thin dusting of snow. Big, translucent stones stuck out of the rock at strange angles, shining blue and green in the light from Straum like immense sapphires and emeralds

Josie grabbed Tornado and walked on, not too fast, wanting to discover any enemies before they saw her. She had stopped talking to Aretha — it wouldn’t be good if Gornt heard her talking to someone. But they were closer now than they had been since they were on the longships in that dizzying River in space that had to be some kind of hyperspace, and that made her determined to succeed with the rescue.

Small rocks were dislodged by her feet and rolled down the steep slope. She was hoping that she wouldn’t lose her footing and slide down the hill herself, and that she wouldn’t release some kind of avalanche of rocks that would give her away.

She pushed a hank of hair out of her face. Up here there was always a wind from the ocean, cold and salty. The thought crossed her mind that if Aretha’s alien guards were sensitive to smell, like hunting dogs, then they might smell her before they saw her. But it was a risk she had to take.

The jewel-like stones around her became steadily bigger and bluer as she went along, and soon they were the size of buses, sticking out of the gray rock.

The display said fifty feet when she stopped behind a big stone and took off her headset, then slowly stuck the camera part out from behind the rock so it could get a look. She saw everything it saw in her display-in-image projected onto her retina.

There were aliens, yellow and gray. They were big and round, with huge mouths filled with long, thin, needle-like teeth. Their hands were long like a troll’s, but they ended in claws like knives. They had two legs each and a long, snake-like tail. They were moving slowly in a strange circle, and their movements were not stiff and awkward like the skrymtir Josie had seen before. They were actual monsters from out of a horror movie set in space. They looked almost alive, although there was something about them that told her they were not. She shuddered at the sight. She would hate to have to fight them.

Gornt’s longship was right nearby, standing upright on the snow.

Then she saw Aretha and her heart jumped. She was wearing a loose, gray dress held up with a belt. It wasn’t something she’d had onUnity, so the Vikings must have given it to her. She was standing still in front of a big cave opening. It wasn’t like any cave Josie had ever seen — this looked most of all like a giant geode, studded with countless turquoise stones that glowed in the sunlight. It would have been a stunningly beautiful wonder of nature if not for the aliens in front of it.

And there was Gornt. She recognized him from the battle in the River in space. He was tall, but not wide and strong like Bragr. He looked thin and old, but there was clearly strength in him still. Wearing a white robe over shiny armor, he had a long sword in his belt.

He was standing in the middle of the aliens as they shuffled in a circle around him. As each one came past him, he put one hand on its mid-section and raised the other to the sky. It held something that glittered. It was a silvery chain, the same that had hung between his horns before. From the chain hung a gemstone that was painful to look at. It looked like a piece of pure darkness.

Every time Gornt placed a hand on an alien skrymt, the darkness in his hand flashed in blinding blue, as if Straum itself shone through it.

Each alien touched like that froze, then either fell to the ground or walked on, raising its head as if energized and moving faster than before. It looked like Gornt was using the light from Straum to charge those of his skrymtir that could handle it, and the dark gem on the chain was a necessary part of it.

Josie watched it all, keeping the camera steady against the crystal. She focused on Aretha. Her friend didn’t look like she was injured, and she had crossed her arms over her chest in a defiant posture. Still she was too much of a scientist to look away from Gornt’s strange process.

There were about twenty alien monsters, and it took a few minutes for the former earl to ‘charge’ them all.

Then he grabbed Aretha’s upper arm, said something that Josie didn’t catch, and dragged her into the geode-slash-cave. Aretha struggled and resisted, but Gornt was strong and pushed her ahead of him. The aliens followed.

When they had gone into the cave, Josie quickly replayed the part where Gornt had spoken. She turned up the volume so she could hear it.

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