I didn’t shed tears, but if I weren’t having to again slaughter humonsters, I could have. I punched a humonster that jumped down from the top of a mound toward Alex in the face, splattering it across the side of the mound it jumped from. We might finally be done with this. Alex stumbled toward the glowing mound, shaking his head, his footing becoming more sure with each step. He only had to make it twenty feet, but I’d seen how unpredictable twenty feet could be.  Still, he had Kals and whatever Bloodmaiden was in control for help. It needed to be enough. Besides, except for the one I jus ..read more

That knowledge gave me the confidence to let “Amy” and Kals protect Alex while I did my best to protect Daniel and the various Jennys. Her ability to duplicate herself made it worse when every copy represented a tunnel into her brain. I fired off a series of armor piercing bots. They weren’t as effective as killbots, but they were simpler and faster to produce. Plus, they didn’t have monomolecular blades constantly sucking energy until they dulled. For fighting animate fungus creatures, they were arguably better. Where the killbots cut cleanly through, the armor piercing bots splattered innard ..read more

As I settled into “Artificer consciousness,” I realized that my view of the world had shifted subtly. While it wasn’t true, it was as if the world now had extra colors except not quite. If someone had telepathically looked through my eyes, it would have looked no different, but I knew somehow that I was sensing through something else. Through that sense or senses, I could feel that Amy’s body contained more beings than it should. I could almost make out faces and bodies. With Daniel, despite his temporary coma, I could feel a core of power. With Alex, I could sense how far his field of health ..read more

At that moment, I heard a noise or more accurately many small taps and thumps. A quick look around me explained it. The humonsters were back. They’d scrambled over the mounds on either side and came down in front of us, behind us, and to the sides of us lying on top of the mounds. I’d last seen roughly 25 of them scrambling for cover among the mounds, but here there were 50, maybe more. They opened their mouths and shouted, “Don’t move!” Thanks to my HUD, I could see that the volume was more than twice what they’d done earlier. It rolled over the sound of my buzzer like it didn’t exist. I coul ..read more

The humonsters ran after us, ignoring Cassie and they didn’t just run. They leapt. They tumbled. The talons that grew out of their hands and feet clacked against the floor. They weren’t slow. Only the fact that Alex, Jenny, Kals, and Katuk had started first kept them from being caught—that and Katuk’s shooting ability. Without looking, he pointed the gun under his forearm backward and fired, scattering blasts of white light behind him. The first two caught humonsters full on, severing the right arm from one and the entire lower half of the other. By the time the second one got hit, the humonst ..read more

I can’t read them very well, Daniel thought at us, but for lack of a better analogy, I think it’s the heart, the center of the organism’s circulation. I wish we had a biologist because then I could ask better questions, but I know that as long as we get Alex there, it’ll die. Noticing, no doubt, that we hadn’t started tearing Amy limb from limb, the humonsters shouted as one, “Kill her now!” As the noise overwhelmed the sound of the buzzer again, I had to fight the urge to charge Amy, hearing Julie’s command in my head again.  Everyone else had to be feeling the same and that might have b ..read more

It would have been over right there if it had never occurred to us that someday we might be exposed to a Dominator and be without a buzzer. The bad news, of course, was that we hadn’t had access to Kals or anyone with Dominator training. We did have Julie, but unlike the Dominators in the Human Ascendancy or serving the Nine, she hadn’t been taught from childhood. She’d picked up what she could by experimentation and what the teachers in the  Stapledon program knew the Dominators could do. Still, it was something—enough to practice with. All Arete’s minions had said was, “Serve me.” The g ..read more

Arete shook his head, “You’re bluffing. There’s no way this Xiniti could pass that on to the rest. There’s no Xiniti Mars base and even if there were there’s no way they’d find out for hours.” I don’t know how often you encounter people whose understanding of the world is so far from yours that you absolutely despair of bridging the gap, but I hope it’s never for anything important. In that moment though, I barely knew where to start. I tried, “Look, there is a Xiniti base at the LaGrange point near Mars. It takes the speed of light more than three minutes to get there. If you’re communicating ..read more

I looked him in the eye (to the degree that I could through a helmet) and said, “We’re all going to die and you with us. If you get out, that means the whole planet goes. Whether people I care about die because of the Nine or because the Xiniti make the sun go nova, they’re dead. So congratulations, you’ve made this whole situation so bad that you have no hold on us because we don’t have anything to lose.” In the moment, I meant it, but I knew that if we got reports of our parents dying at the hands of the Nine and we survived, it wouldn’t feel like a victory. Arete’s lip curled and his voice ..read more

Views from the bots outside showed that the hordes of mushroom creatures had charged City Hall. The Duke smiled, the points of his teeth showing as he raised his sword and began cutting down the attackers even as his horse kicked and crushed them. His army followed him in, trolls, goblins, elves, and strange faerie monsters killing with ecstatic grins on their faces. The Duke’s army only fully covered City Hall, though, and the Fungus Collective had more creatures to work with. They entered the far side of the parking garage near City Hall and poured down the ramps as a group. Near the front w ..read more