Hostile Genus: An Epic Military Sci-Fi Series (Invasive Species Book 2) Ben Stevens (best contemporary novels txt) 📖

perhaps her dirty work had been done for her, but not in the way she’d expected, wanted, or appreciated. If steps weren’t taken immediately, she and her men wouldn’t have a city to feed on and rule over, but worse still, and seeming more likely by the second, she and her men would follow Don Luis into a fiery grave.

Good thing we all happen to be carrying giant mirrors.

“The attack is coming from the stage lights! Use your shields to reflect the beams and shoot those pinche lights down!”

Sofia withdrew the pistola she carried, and thought with perverse pleasure that she would still be able to use it for its original purpose—to kill Lily Sapphire. She pulled the slide back, chambering a round, and called for Raphael to follow her in the attack.

They turned to the stage and began their charge, shields up and guns blazing.

“Come mierda y muere!” Sofia screamed at the top of her lungs. The counter-attack had begun.

Maya found Sofia before Don Luis did. She’d watched as the beam scorched Don Luis and watched as he’d deflected his death with his cane first, and the bodyguard second. She knew that he had ended up behind the meter-high concrete square with the tree growing out of the center and was deciding how best to proceed. Should she try and get Ratt’s attention, and if she did, would Ratt be too focused on Don Luis and his cover instead of moving the spotlights where they were needed to maximize vampire carnage? She decided she would keep an eye on the tree bed herself and warn Lucy to prepare for a counterattack.

The counterattack came, but not from Don Luis. Maya had already heard several loud booms echo through the night as Carbine’s railgun entered the fray and picked off fleeing vampires, their heads disappearing in red clouds.

But then she heard a closer, quieter crack. Not a distant, cannon-like sonic boom, but something more like a typical pre-Storm small-arms report.

First one, then two, then a volley. Several of the spotlights went out. One crashed to the stage, its mount to the catwalk railing broken clean in two.

Lucy also picked up on what was going on after nearly being hit by the falling spotlight.

Both women looked around in alarm, now fully comprehending that they were taking fire and quickly losing their “big gun.”

There, in the back of the plaza, where the open courtyard met the first block of adobe buildings and was bisected by a road, stood Sofia, flanked by loyal men holding polished metal riot shields and a solid platoon of human guards, as unafraid of the sunlight as the plants of the earth that fed on it.

“Lucy!” Maya blurted out and pointed an outstretched finger in their direction.

“I see them,” Lucy replied coolly and flipped off the stage, landing in a perfect crouch before taking off, sprinting toward the new threat, her bladed club already in motion to clear the way.

Ratt was taking heavy fire and attempted to defend himself by retaliating with the sun-spotlights, a reflexive gesture that was as ineffectual as hurling an insult at them.

When the spotlight in his hands exploded from a direct hit and another conventional bullet grazed his shoulder, causing him to half-spin and collapse against the railing of the catwalk behind him, he knew he was done for and made to retreat.

Clutching his bleeding right shoulder with his hand, Ratt shambled over to the scaffolding ladder that was clamped onto the catwalk and ran straight down to the back of the stage below. He climbed on, and as soon as his weight was fully off the grating and onto the ladder, he realized the shot he’d taken might be more than a graze.

His shoulder sizzled and pumped out a fresh squirt of blood. Its rapidly cooling warmth ran down around both sides of his shoulder and met up again below his armpit, creeping further down to his waist, soaking his shirt in the process.

His right arm failed him, and he dropped a rung, nearly falling completely off.

“Ungh!”

His left arm shot up and hooked through the space between two rungs of the simple metal ladder and he caught himself, his legs flailing. He bounced his shins off another rung somewhere below. Wincing, he gritted his teeth and hissed. The adrenaline rush that came from his near fall helped stave off the wave of creeping unconsciousness that was threatening to overtake him. The pain in his shoulder was excruciating.

He heard the gunfire continue as well as the zings of ricochets bouncing nearby. Even from his awkward position up on the ladder, he could see that only a handful of sun-spotlights remained intact. The portals that Maya had summoned remained open, of course, but with their housings destroyed, they remained stationary, while some had fallen to the stage as well, their destructive beams no more than immobile, though dangerous, columns of death that could be avoided with ease by the regrouping vampires.

We’re in trouble…

Maya saw it too. Even as Lucy waded into the crowd to take out Sofia and her human gunmen, she was met by the first wave of vampires who had either overcome their initial shock at the sprung trap or had realized the spotlights were no longer moving and now posed only a mild threat.

Lucy, while as talented at death as any grim reaper, was right back to where she had been out in the scrub against the savages. None of them were a match for her, even when the odds were thirty to one, but she couldn’t keep them down, and it was only a matter of time before the numbers simply became too many for her to contend with.

Already some were slipping past her, confident that she was occupied enough not to stop them, and they made their way toward the stage.

Maya’s eyes grew with fright as she realized that she and her guardians’ hand had been played; that their opponent had called their bluff.

She