Skydark Spawn

“Hold it!” Grundwold said.

Fillinger paused at the door, and Grundwold took the rag he used to keep his blaster clean out of a jacket pocket. He wrapped the ends of the rag around each of his hands and pulled it taut between them. Then he pressed the rag between her lips until she opened her mouth and he could push it past her teeth. Finally he tied the rag around her neck, preventing her from uttering a sound.

“You say a word or try to make a sound, the head of the guard outside the door will be turned into wallpaper,” Grundwold said. “Understand?”

Mildred nodded.

“All right,” Grundwold said. “I think now she’s ready. Let’s get out of here. And keep it quiet.”

Together the sec chief and the sec man quickly ushered the prisoner out of the room and down the hallway. The guard was still there on his chair, his eyes never wavering from the door at the other end of the hallway.

As they reached the stairwell, the door was opened by an attentive sec man, and the three of them were able to pass through the doorway without a sound.

“Get her to the tower!” Grundwold ordered.

At once a pair of sec men escorted Mildred down the stairs and out of the hotel.

“Fillinger, go around to the other door and tell the men there to pull back.” Grundwold looked at his wrist chron. “I want everyone at the base of the tower in ten minutes.”

The sec men scattered without another word.

Grundwold lingered behind, making sure to give Fillinger enough time to go downstairs, through the lobby and back up to the second-floor landing to inform the others their mission had been successfully completed. When he was sure the sec men had pulled back from the door at the other end of the hall, Grundwold reached down and pulled the knife holding the door in front of him open.

The steel fire door swung closed…and locked, the sound of the locking mechanism echoing through a suddenly empty stairwell.

THE HUGE MUTIE CREATURE was on him. It looked very much like a lizard, but was as big as a horse. Its skin was made up of orange-and-green scales, and each of its forward arms ended with a set of three razor-sharp talons.

The Armorer had confronted the beast before and had lost. This time would be different. This time he was going to chill it, blasting it into a hundred different pieces.

The mutie beast neared, its three-inch fangs dripping gore left from its last meal. J.B. took several steps backward, giving him some time to draw his Smith & Wesson M-4000 scattergun. In a few moments there would be a hole in the creature’s chest big enough to drive a wag through, and the whole episode would be little more than a bloody memory.

J.B. leveled his blaster at the beast, squeezed the trigger and heard the terrifying sound of a metallic click of the hammer falling on an empty chamber.

The beast lunged—

And J.B. awoke from his dream before it tore his limbs from his body.

He sat on his chair, gasping for breath. His eyelids still seemed heavy, as if he had been awakened from another mat-trans jump, and hadn’t simply dozed off for a few minutes.

Had it been a few minutes?

J.B. glanced at his wrist chron. “Dark night!” he exclaimed. According to the chron, he’d been on watch for more than three hours. How could that have been? While there was no excuse for falling asleep while on watch, why hadn’t Mildred or one of the others relieved him?

He ran down the hall to his room to check on Mildred.

She was gone.

He went across the hall to check on Ryan and Krysty…and found a dead sec man from the farm in their room, his belly slashed open, most likely by Ryan’s panga.

Ryan and Krysty were gone, but Ryan’s Steyr SSG-70 longblaster was still tucked safely under the bed.

What in dark night had happened to them? J.B. wondered. What had happened to him that he could sleep through it all?

He ran out into the hallway, shouting. “Doc, Jak, Dean!”

In moments the three friends appeared in the hallway, blasters in hand.

“What is it?” Dean asked.

J.B. stood in the middle of the hallway with Ryan’s Steyr in his hand. “Ryan, Krysty and Mildred,” he said. “They’re gone.”

Chapter Nine

“I can see the head!” the healer cried, sweat dripping off his nose. He’d wanted to call in an assistant hours earlier, but Baron Reichel had forbidden it, not wanting any more people than were necessary to see his wife in such a compromised state.

Reichel ville, on the southern shores of Erie Lake, hadn’t been blessed with a newborn for many, many months. Things had been born, but they bore no resemblance to children. The baron could ill afford to let it be known that such monsters were born into his family. His bloodline was pure, and his heirs needed to be full norms. If his wife bore him a mutie, the fewer who knew about it the better.

Baron Reichel sat on a bench out in the hall just on the other side of the door to the healer’s room. He had been in the room for the longest time, but his constant concern over his wife’s agonized shrieks had prompted the healer to ask him to leave, allowing the healer to do his work without the interference and misguided concerns of an impassioned observer.

“You must push,” the healer said. “Push harder!”

“I can’t,” the woman gasped, nearing the point of exhaustion.

The healer believed her. In all his years he had never seen such a lengthy and painful birth. Everything about the delivery of this child was slow and complicated when in truth there were absolutely no signs warranting complications, or even pain for that matter. But here was the baron’s wife, in labor half the day and still hours to go before the child was born.

“You must try,” the healer urged, his voice showing far more compassion than normal. Usually he was very hard on women during birth, forcing them to work harder in order to end their ordeal more quickly. But Gayle Reichel had already suffered too much, for too long.