Freezing rain lashed down at Arthur, sending chill runnels over his fighting men where they huddled in a gully. Forked lightning crackled around them, charging the air with a stink of destruction. He eased higher to see through this unnatural deluge and choked back a string of foul oaths at the sight of a Nestine skyship positioned over trapped victims in the distance.
Well-oiled leather clothing hung heavy from hours of pounding rain that ran off his hybrid skin. A faint tingle made him duck for cover seconds before another bolt zapped to ground, feet from his former position. Thunder hammered his eardrums, leaving him shaken by the violence of its detonation. Not one man broke for cover. Pride flushed through him at their discipline and courage. A storm like this one came as a shock to even the Terran Outcasts in his unit, conditioned as they were to foul weather. As for his Submariners, unused to electrical storms, he could imagine the calming mantras they used to hold position.
Water forced in between his neck and the collar of his tunic, making a cold pocket of wetness. His flesh moved in automatic response to pry open gill flaps under his ears. All Arthur's senses came on full alert. That shouldn’t happen.
He tasted salt on his lips. Seawater scooped up to form an artificial storm directed as a weapon? What a brilliant strategy. Arthur envisioned precisely where he wanted to return the compliment.
Caught between both races as a fulcrum, he had elected to wear Brethren clothing as a counter to his Submariner skin. Without the Brethren leathers, no pocket of water could have given forewarning. His hated mixed ancestry proved its worth this time. A double-edged sword; he stood between human Brethren and mutant Submariners as a living shield.
Responsibility for his unit weighed like a rock on his soul. They crouched in misery, waiting for the end of a timeless storm. Copper-haired Kai, his younger brother, with their mother's deep violet eyes, resembled her second mate. Arthur, by contrast, wore the features and the rich, dark hair of her first. He recalled Submariner faces of his men, just a little different from a Terran's, with their aquatic mutation and psi factor that he shared. The Brethren, those Terrans cast out from surface habitation by birth or circumstance, were shock-troopers of the unit, now he had to make a hard choice. When he looked down at his brother crouching in the rocks, Kai's expression told him all he wished to know.
Kai's mouth turned up into the slow smile of Brethren. Calm acceptance radiated from his brother's casual stance and the cold, flat stare that made others think Outcasts could see through rock. Arthur didn't need Kai to voice the grim odds against surviving through the night. He had the others to consider, all comrades gleaned from amongst the ranks of Brethren and Submariners. All dead men, soon.
A violent rumble shocked though his body. He ducked for cover as lightning struck. Thunder hit him like a stun blast again, leaving him shaken and partly deafened. He had to admire this battle tactic. Defense against weather control orchestrated from an off world location represented an impossible scenario for Submariners. The Nestines held the winning hand…For the present.
The ringing in his ears eased into a hiss while he searched his memory for every detail that brief glance over the terrain afforded him. Outcasts belonging to Rowan's rival faction hid amongst boulders approximately a thousand paces from this location, pinned down by the skyship. Arthur reckoned about three of them still survived, caught without Submariner firepower apparently. His face settled into grim lines.
Yesterday evening, Kai reported sensing an event horizon, another candidate about to be made into an Outcast. Arthur needed recruits just as much as Rowan did. He experienced a bitter sense of irony that his orders had led them into this death trap.
An animal scream of pain sounded from the direction of the trapped victims. He looked over the rim, blinking against shafts of moisture. A green ray shone earthward from the skyship. Flashes of white flickered within, followed by howls of someone dying in slow agony in that light. The terrorized scream from the moor ended in a howl of unspeakable animal anguish that brought a flood of bile into Arthur's mouth. This was the fifth poor bastard losing his nerve to run into death. Blind with terror, stumbling over rocks in panic, caught in a holding beam and carved up into gobbets of meat for the Nestines in the hovering sky ship.
The burden of leadership hung like a leaden noose around Arthur's neck. Even Kai thought the Nestines just killed their victims. He could not, and would not now, tell these people the truth. Emrys, his long departed mentor, judged aright in this case. The knowledge of such horror must remain his silent load. Of all here, only Kai possessed strength enough to fight with his eyes wide open. Arthur refused to share and thus destroy Kai's peace of mind.
Something wasn’t right about the way they fell into this trap. Rowan's men were beyond help, and then the sky ship would come for his storm-trapped group. No Outcast wore his original slave bracelet; all had Submariner supplied replicas, so the Nestines weren’t using those to track them. Something else was the lure. Something gave the director of the storm a homing beacon to trap them.
"Hey, the odds." Kai didn't finish the sentence. Arthur guessed the remainder, grateful for his brother's fey ability to see threat in possible alternative timelines.
" ...are altering in our favor," finished Arthur. His mind slipped back to a training session with Emrys in the cave of his dreams. Sometimes sacrifices, however horrific their fate, must be offered. Three hundred paces to their right lay a deep river. Each Terran in his party carried a standard issue stasis device. Counting himself, that meant three Submariners to ferry five Terrans to the depths and safety.
