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

pressure to snag and tear open the skin. Her skin was organic and fed with artificial blood, but stretched over an armored exoskeleton, jaw included, that now showed through the pool of blood behind her flayed cheek meat.

“This is gonna be fun. Too bad you’re not here to see it, Sofi. See? I can play with my food too.”

Lucy couldn’t feel the cut or hear his taunts, but she knew a threat was there. Alone, with her consciousness floating in the void of true sensory deprivation, she calmly waited, as warriors oft do, for her emergency protocol to activate fully.

“Boss!” a voice shouted from the crowd. “King Fernando!”

“What?” He looked up from his new toy, a scowl of angry impatience smeared across his face.

“They are getting away!” the oaf said and pointed toward the stage. Don Luis turned fully, coming to his feet over the fallen Lucy, and beheld the one he knew as Lily Sapphire, with that nerdy boy of hers, lifting above the crowd on some kind of oversized surfboard. The golden bubble had vanished, and his wife-to-be turned traitor was indeed getting away. The look of impatience melted into disgust and hatred.

“Someone is always trying to ruin my fun,” Don Luis spat, frowning. He raised the pistol and aimed.

A bright red beam of superheated light exploded into the night. The beam ripped from its muzzle at near the speed of light and lanced Ratt’s hoverboard. One second, it was there, structurally sound, and the next, it seemed to come apart as if the very molecules that constituted it became suddenly and instantly magnetically opposed to each other. Maya cried out like a bird shot on the wing as a piece of flaming hoverboard burst forth and punctured her ankle. Ratt, too, was hit with shrapnel from the exploding board, but he was too exhausted to scream in pain; he simply cried and moaned, and then both of them were falling to the ground and the crowd below.

Belly-laughing, Don Luis watched them fall into the mess of people and again summoned his dark powers to project his voice out over the plaza. Silence followed his wolf roar. No one moved. His subjects, human and vampire alike, turned to look at him. Even though half his face and his hands were black and cracked from the damage of the surprise attack, they could see why he was their king. Power and defiance personified stood before them. In his charred hand, his prized pistol, a single shot from which would ignite and destroy any vampire as surely as sunlight. At his feet, the fallen enemy, she who had single-handedly slain at least three dozen of New Puebla’s best. He looked in the direction of those closest to where Lily and her boy had fallen.

“Bring them to me.”

Don Luis turned back to Lucy. Knowing that he had a better toy on the way, he decided to end this quickly.

“Now…” He let his voice linger in the air like the smell of the burning vampires scattered throughout the plaza. “How does one kill a cyborg, exactly?” he sneered in a mocking tone, knowing full well that her brain was all that remained of her organic organs. And with that, he squatted over her once more, bringing the tip of his pistol against her left temple. He grinned into her expressionless face and said, “Bitch.”

BOOM!

Maya screamed bloody murder and would have fallen to her knees were she not being held aloft by two of Fernando’s thugs.

But the shot hadn’t come from the laser gun.

Don Luis’s right arm separated from his torso in a fine mist of deep crimson, and the stone paver just upstream of Lucy’s head exploded.

High up on the mountain, Carbine grinned behind the cowl of his sniper hood.

20

Carbine’s grin disappeared as quickly as his railgun’s victims. There one second, gone the next. Through the sights of his rifle, he watched Don Luis Fernando’s arm fly off. He had been aiming for the torso and missed, but he would take this consolation prize; it had, after all, saved Lucy. Then, as he reached up to chamber another round, a round that was intended to finish the job—as much as was possible anyway, the vampires’ regeneration being a factor—he watched in stunned shock as Don Luis sprang forward off of Lucy, fast enough to become blurry, following the chrome laser pistol as it skipped across the pavers. The vampire king moved like a demon possessed, seemingly as much immune to pain as Lucy was, and displaying the same tightly tuned reflexes that she possessed as well.

By the time Carbine realized what was happening, it was too late. His heart thumped in his chest as he fumbled the bolt handle in an attempt to re-chamber his rifle. Don Luis ducked into a roll, grabbing up the pistol mid-roll with his left hand, and turned to face the sniper as he came up on one knee and squeezed off an impossible shot, drawing on his supernatural senses to perfectly re-trace the trajectory of the shot that had severed his arm.

A line of crimson light sliced through the night, tracing its way from Don Luis straight to and up the barrel of Carbine’s railgun, igniting the air in its wake. The high-powered rifle exploded in Carbine’s hands. He rolled backward from the explosion, pain racking his body. He hit a rock outcropping and tumbled down to the left and below his encampment.

His face broke the roll. He spat dry, dusty dirt out of his mouth, his saliva flecked with blood and mud, and then pushed himself up to his feet. Herculean levels of adrenaline surged through his body. Carbine surveyed the carnage. The railgun was no more, just a pile of scrap; his hands were charred, numb, and bruised bloody. Small dots of bright red seeped out his pores, forming constellations of crimson against the black, burnt, and mud-caked skin. He took a step forward and winced, stopping mid-stride. He quickly found it was