Page 47 of Beauty and the Alien Beast
The dark shape came to a stop and hovered there, its fans rustling the foliage near it.
Come on. Don’t notice us. Justmove on.
The scanner beam flashed over us again, and my stomach plummeted with fear.
No, no, don’t. Just leave us alone.
Teken pointed his stolen energy rifle at the shadow, while I pointed my pistol. Both of us were stiff with tension. His lower arms stayed around me. When the beam touched me, he tensed as if he wanted to block it from my skin like the hailstones.
Long heartbeats passed… and then the scanner swept over us a third time, and I heard that same faint beep.
Oh fuck.
I felt Teken’s muscles tighten, and then the figure on the hoverbike started to shout something.
We both fired at once. The shots hit the bike broadside. Its rider toppled off with a scream, and it burst into flames and dropped out of sight, trailing sparks and smoke. I heard the terrible hum of electricity arcing and then a heavywhoomphas the whole thing went up.
Teken shouted something and then dragged me backward into the forest. I got my feet under me and ran with him as he bounded into the depths. He helped me along, sometimes carrying me over tree roots or fallen logs too high for me to jump.
When my lungs started burning and my legs ached, I heard the noise of the hoverbikes growing louder and louder. I forced myself to keep moving. The catchers were converging on us. They couldn’t go fast or enter the canopy in most spots. That meant their scanners wouldn’t work once they lost sight of us. But I could hear them overhead, getting closer.
I could see another bower ahead, this one with much older trees and draped heavily with vines. I put on a burst of speed, but suddenly, inexplicably, Teken shouted something in his own language and stopped dead.
The hover engines seemed to be all around us, coming closer and closer.
“Teken!” I hissed at him, wondering what he saw ahead that had made him stop.
Suddenly, Teken scooped me up again and threw himself to the side, rolling with me beneath the arch of a gigantic tree root. I froze, and a dark shape flashed down from a gap in the trees, its engines whining. It went right past where we had been running and onward into the vine-draped area beyond.
My eyes widened as I realized why Teken had stopped so abruptly. I stared ahead and saw the man dragged off his hoverbike by dozens of leafy tentacles. The man let out a shriek, and the hoverbike shot on by itself, slamming into a tree and bounding off it to dig a trench in the dirt just beyond.
“A deathtrap.” I gasped. And we’d almost run right into it.
Behind us, we heard the sudden sound of energy rifle fire and then the heavy thud of an explosion. I looked back and saw a chunk of jungle disappear into burning shreds. Then two hoverbikes dropped into the gap.
Teken turned back to the tentacle-filled grotto and fired two shots into its midst. The tentacles all retracted, a few twitching and burning while their owners shrieked thinly. Then he did another crazy thing; he ran straight into their center.
Before I knew it, I was being carried fireman-style through a path full of monsters, while the remaining tentacles darted after us eagerly. Bikes raced toward us as if they couldn’t see the danger. I started firing my pistol at the groping green tendrils.
My eyes squinted painfully against the glare as I shot at everything that moved, the pistol starting to warm up uncomfortably after the seventh shot. I kept going as Teken ran, sometimes firing his rifle ahead of us to try to clear a path.
We ran past the man being ripped apart by vines and his burning hoverbike. I heard the screams of the two hoverbike pilots plowing into the mess behind us and being grabbed as well. I caught the heavy thuds of their bikes crashing. We ran toward the far edge of the deadly grotto, both of us grunting in pain from every shot as our weapons heated in our hands.
Terrified, I clung to Teken as he got us out of the grotto and into the thin sunlight beyond. He put me down, and we ran together, headed across a stand of saplings to the far ridge on the other side. I kept the pistol handy, grateful at least that I had a chance to let it cool before I fired it again.
We were halfway through the saplings when an energy bolt was fired practically at my feet. Teken skidded to a stop with me, and we fired in that direction. A hoverbike’s engine faltered, and I heard someone curse and then a heavy thud.
We kept running. My lungs could barely catch sips of air now. My thighs felt weighted by lead, and my body throbbed and ached with the effort of moving. But as the banshee hum of the hoverbikes descended toward us through the trees, I knew we had run out of hiding places.
Teken stopped again, drawing his other pistol. He exchanged a hard glance with me, and I nodded. There was no more running. Now we fought, or we would not survive.
Perhaps taught a lesson by their companions’ fates, the rest of the cyborg’s team used rappelling gear to drop from the canopy. Unfortunately for them, that made them pretty good targets as they descended toward the ground.
I noticed that the energy beams they were firing at us had changed color. They were now an electric purple and dimmer. They didn’t seem to damage anything or even kick up dirt as they hit the ground. But I didn’t know what their beams would do to Teken or me.
I shot to kill at the dozen or so men diving toward us, and they fired that purplish energy back—warning shots. The catchers seemed to have changed strategy, and they wanted us alive. But we didn’t care. We continued to shoot to kill, and that we did when four went down lifeless and others were wounded. There was a loud sound. Then I saw a huge familiar figure join them—the cyborg.
He stared down at me through the red lenses of that otherwise featureless mask, aiming his rifle carefully. Not waiting for him to get off a shot, I fired wildly at him, my gun burning my hand so badly that I dropped it. Fortunately, Teken saw him, too, and opened on him, hitting the cyborg in two of his arms as the mechanical-faced mercenary bounded off the trees to dodge shots. As the cyborg swung past, he aimed at me again, and my whole world went purple.
