Next, he saw the pinkish glow of their burning incense. Their chanting was so low in tone, so bass, that it felt like a vibration in the stones he tread upon rather than the voices of men. Nadja led the way. Both crept upon their bellies to a high bulge of cairn stones. Gruum smelled sweat, intox...
The place was newly built but seemed a thousand years old already. The Kindred builders had used the old scattered stones from centuries past, but it wasn’t just that. He guessed that one could not erase ages of history, all those ghostly memories, with a decade of rebuilding. &...
At first, he was not sure what had awakened him. Then he heard it again. A creaking, scraping sound. The sound of a boot being dragged slowly over the splintered deck boards. His hand slid immediately to the pommel of his knife. Hard fingers closed in a claw-like grip over his wrist. “Milord!” he...
Every house on the block looked more or less the same. They were all mid-1900s stucco boxes. There were rows of flip-up garage doors, blandly painted walls coated in spiderwebs, and yards full of weeds. Some yards had degenerated into pure crabgrass and dried-out trees. Others lawns had taken the...
I was in shock, but I watched Claver closely. “You’re in the shit now, McGill,” Claver chuckled, keeping the gun trained on me. “Just you and me, two rats swimming in the sewer together.” “I haven’t done anything wrong.” “Ha!...
Each glimmering hand of gauzy, insubstantial flesh gripped great spires of rock and dragged the titanic form upward. Now that the gates lay in ruins and the assault was underway, the elves turned their bombards, tilting them downward. None but two were in position to fire. They spoke, booming wit...
I muttered. Soon after that, I scrubbed off quickly and got out of the water. “Hurry up, people,” I told the rest. “We have work to do. Get cleaned up and get your suits back on. The enemy could arrive at any time.” They seem...
Captain Sarin had joined us with her carrier, and the fighters patrolled constantly. I was impressed by her carefully maintained vigilance. We watched the ring in the seabed that Marvin had somehow switched off. For the first day or so, we were nervous, waiting for something bad to happen. But no...
During that brief period we kept searching for that last ship, pinging and focusing our sensor arrays on small regions of local space, figuring that bastard had to be close. “We’re going to find him, sir,” Durris said, his head tilted oddly to one side. “I feel it. He’s ri...
“Now this is a ship!” he laughed. “I can’t believe how quickly these eight-armed robots have gotten things put right. Zye, your people are to be commended for their efficiency.” “Your compliment honors us both,” she said in a formal tone. Rumbold’s ...
As he walked the long, lonely halls, he wondered if the vast palace had ever been full of people. He’d never really thought of that before. To him, the palace had always been a huge, mostly empty space. Now, as he walked the echoing halls he noticed how many apartments he passed that had locked d...
But it wasn’t. Those seventy-odd missiles kept coming at us. I’d pretty much discounted them until they started slowing down and taking complex countermeasures. “Sir,” Newcome said, calling me from the bridge. “What is it, Ad...
I was used to spherical patterns, but this one had an irregular outline. It looked more like a tear in a piece of tar paper. Behind the tar paper was a light that rippled and resembled flame. Perhaps it was flame, but I couldn’t tell. A common property of rips between worlds was the distortion of...
It was a close thing. I was out of uniform, unarmed and too tall for their liking. “Halt!” boomed a voice. “Identify yourself!” They didn’t even wait for me to comply. Skittering and flailing, I threw myself down as a bolt sizzled in the air over my...
Defiant had been so battered that we’d taken most of the time just getting her underway. A small flotilla of support vessels escorted us. By the time we made it to the docks at Phobos, they were no longer serving as tugboats, but as ship escorts. Wh...
Next, he sought out Duchess Embrak. If the space forces failed, there must be a backup plan to stop the imminent invasion. The available ground forces on Ignis Glace were under the control of the nobility, and the Duchess was the closest thing they had to a Queen on this world.After making some d...
Lines of hard stone cut into his back. He felt blindly around his prone body, eyes still closed. He felt no decking. He was, as far as he could tell, lying upon a series of stone steps. He opened his eyes a fraction. He knew from experience that this new place was likely to be terrifying, and he ...
Although at first it seemed that it must be very near, he trudged on and on without end. Only very slowly did he approach it, as if it were at the end of a long, long tunnel through the night and trees. Jak grew heavier with each step. Now he no longer checked to see if his brother lived, for if ...
He slid a fraction, but immediately spread his arms and legs out, halting the motion. Carefully, he sat up upon the glass-slick, carven rocks. The nighttime world around him was cold, bitterly cold. In the sky overhead hung the roiling, flashing vortex. It was distant and quite impossible to reac...
I would build a fleet and save the Centaur civilians. Half-measures weren’t my usual style, but it had worked out for King Solomon, so why not me?Taking one of the Centaur factories down to the planet surface, I had it tucked under the dome for protection. Then I had the second factory in our pos...
Every mother wanted a child that exceeded her and thus exemplified her. Every father wanted a child that put the rest in their places. As tools to achieve these ends, the people of Mendelia invested their energies in genetic sculpting of their offspring. Their reasoning went something like this: ...
They simply weren’t there anymore after we were herded back into our group cell and allowed out again later. Our team, however, was permitted by our captors to stay together. “None of this makes any sense,” I told the others. “Why make us kill one another? If what they wan...