Denver took over from Layla and let her snooze. He scanned the landscape with his scope, looking out for any potential threat. Although they were elevated, and thus potentially exposed, most of the creatures on the planet seemed to stay on the ground, or under the land.
He’d seen only a couple of birdlike animals, their forms silhouetted against the flashes of war in the sky. That had only increased in activity, although thankfully further out so it sounded like distant thunder with the lightning flashes of destruction coming seconds before.
At one point he thought he had seen a small group of three bipedal creatures clambering over a distant formation of rocks and down to the shore of a lake, but as they approached the water, they didn’t stop but kept going until they were no longer visible. There was something peaceful and graceful about them, Denver thought, which made a nice change from what he had seen earlier with that black… thing devouring the clusp.
As he was thinking how oddly peaceful it was up on these rocks with Layla beside him and the stars clear between thin clouds—the dust of war—movement on the horizon caught his attention.
He zoomed the scope in and brightened the night vision until he saw a light glowing and becoming larger.
Was there noise too?
He turned up the volume on his external mics. Yes, it was the sound of a hover engine, and identical to the ones he had heard in the command center when the tredeyan forces were preparing for battle.
Tracking the movement for a full minute or more, the object had sharpened until he could clearly see that it was a catamaran and contained a single driver: the croatoan priest.
“Layla, we’ve got company,” he whispered over his intercom so as not to startle her.
“Eh?” she said, her voice drowsy and confused.
“The priest, she’s coming this way on one of their catamarans.”
Layla was fully alert then, sitting up from her slouched position and kneeling next to Denver. They both leaned up against a rock in front of them, where Denver had his elbows rested to support the rifle.
Layla brought hers around from her back and looked through the scope. “That’s definitely her,” she said. “I’d recognize that ugly face anywhere; even among croatoans, she’s an especially foul-looking specimen.”
Denver smirked and continued to watch the priest draw nearer in the dark. The movement scattered animals across the rocky and dusty surface. Larger forms that Denver couldn’t make out burrowed quickly beneath the ground.
The way the engine impacted the surface beneath told Denver it was more than likely the source of the tracks they were following: a single anti-g field was difficult to confuse with any other kind of track.
When the craft was less than a hundred meters away, Denver saw a number of straps flapping wildly on the netting between the catamaran’s hull sections. Attached to one of the straps was a small pouch that Denver recognized as belonging to Vingo.
“It was her,” Denver growled. “The beast took Dad and Vingo.”
Layla was mid-question when Denver’s finger pulled the trigger.
Denver fired once, sending a slug into the low windshield of the vehicle.
The priest jerked the controls and slid the catamaran to a stop. She looked up and around, presumably thinking she got shot from a scion ship in the air, but the battle had moved away.
“I’m going down. Cover me,” Denver said, vaulting over the rock in front of him and sliding down the slope of the mount until his feet struck the ground. He detected movement off to his right side from behind a copse of spiny gray bushes but ignored it and sprinted toward the catamaran.
Two gunshots fired out from behind him, then another two. He didn’t look around, knowing Layla was on the case, taking down whatever thought it had a chance of a snack.
“You’re clear,” Layla said. “I’m right behind you.”
The power-assisted suit helped Denver close the distance quickly. Within seconds he was jumping toward the catamaran, the rifle held out in front of him. As he sailed over the priest, he fired once, catching her in the gnarled shoulder. She cried out and collapsed with a twist into the front cockpit.
Denver landed on the rear bench seat with a heavy thump, but the suit cushioned the impact. He spun round and saw Layla closing in, her rifled trained on the priest as she sat up and mewled something unpleasant in her native language. Denver picked up his rifle and brought it over the priest’s head until the barrel was under her chin. He pulled back, choking her, pinning her in place.
Layla leaned in and angrily spoke in pidgin croatoan. Denver barely recognized the words, but the priest sure did; she spat at Layla and thrashed beneath Denver’s hold, but he just held firm and squeezed tighter until she could no longer talk.
“What did you say?” Denver asked.
“I told her we’re going to kill her if she doesn’t tell us what happened to Charlie. She told us to die in a particular way of her kind.”
“Shoot her in the leg and ask her again,” Denver said.
Without hesitation, Layla leaned the rifle over the low, now-broken windshield and fired once into the croatoan’s thick leg. The thing yowled and tried to grab Denver’s face with its stubby arms, but she couldn’t reach far enough back.
“Ask her again,” Denver said.
Layla did and got the same reaction as before.
Denver swore. This was wasting too much time. He was thinking about what to do when a stealthy shape slithered from the darkness behind Layla. He let go of the rifle around the priest’s throat, brought it up to his chest and fired a three-round burst as he screamed, “Layla, behind you!”
The priest took her chance and vaulted over the windshield, but the wounds to her shoulder and leg stopped her from clearing it. She clattered into Layla, knocking her to one side, and they both hit the dirt.
In a split second, the black membrane form, the same as the one he had seen before, enveloped the priest, muffling her screams.
Layla gasped as she scrambled away from it, kicking up dust and stones. Denver fired again into the writhing mass; the flash from the barrel lit it up, showing the shape of the priest stretching against the unnatural form.
Layla rose to her knees and they both fired into the mess, emptying their respective magazines. When the smoke settled, the form no longer moved.
Leaping off the catamaran, Denver pulled the blade from the socket on the side of the suit and buried it into the hide of the hideous black creature. Up close, it didn’t resemble a manta ray as much as he first thought.
The initial shape was all the two creatures had in common. This one had thousands of razor-like teeth, black and shadowy like its body. It flopped over, dead, its corpse cut into shreds by the rifle fire.
So too was the croatoan priest, and with her still form the chance for Denver to get the truth about his dad’s whereabouts bled out onto the alien planet’s dusty ground. Denver collapsed to his knees and roared as he pummeled his fist into the croatoan’s corpse.
DENVER HAD BARELY SPOKEN a word during the entire journey. Layla had figured out the basic controls of the catamaran, having recognized that it was actually croatoan technology and not tredeyan, and therefore somewhat similar to the craft they had brought to Earth. For another hour they had journeyed in the opposite direction to that of the priest, using the night-vision scopes on their rifles to stay on track.
It was undeniable that the catamaran was indeed the vehicle that created the marks on the ground that led away from the temple. Layla had also confirmed Denver’s suspicion—that the pouch was one that had belonged to Vingo.
And so they drove into the night, beneath the skies where even now the scion and tredeyan-croatoan craft fought in a ceaseless battle. The constant rumbles of gunfire and missile blasts had dulled to a permanent roar in Denver’s ears, even with the sound dampening of the suit’s microphones.