Hotbloods 6: Allies

He nodded, his eyes going wide as he fired over my shoulder, taking out a creeping shifter with a pair of pistols in his fleshy hands. “I am now.”

I glanced around, assessing the situation. We had ships in the skies, but not all of them could get beneath the dome’s surface without overcrowding each other. Beyond the hazy shimmer of the invisibility dome, I could tell they were struggling to pick out the rebels by heat signature alone. It was an impossible task. No, if we were to stand any chance of giving them a clear line of sight toward the enemy, we needed to take out the dome itself.

Already, I was starting to see the fallen bodies of lycan and merevin agents, who’d been taken out by the snipers in the buildings nearby. Everything was in chaos, and it was only going to get worse once Stone’s abilities started to slip. He was being defended by a small team of Rexombra, who seemed more or less bulletproof to my human eyes, moving so fast they were little more than blurs. He was in safer hands with them than he was with us, but Stone couldn’t hold the shield and hold back the rebels forever.

“We need to hunt down Orion and Ezra,” I said, turning toward the bunker entrance. “Stone’s eye is holding for now, but the nudus are sapping him more with every minute that passes. We need to get to Orion and take him out before—”

Stone crumbled, hitting the deck with a hefty thud that ricocheted across the battlefield like the beat of a war drum. Above his fallen body, the whole shield disappeared in the blink of an eye, the glow of the nudus dimming around Stone’s arms.

“STONE!” I howled, sprinting for the shipping container and launching myself onto the surface of it, keeping low. Blood poured from his body, and his eyes were flickering weakly—he’d been shot. I tore off part of my uniform and wrapped it around the wound to staunch the flow of blood, but the fabric was already getting soaked.

Below me, two of the Rexombra tore off in the direction from which the gunshot had been fired, sprinting up the sides of a tower. They swung in on the unaware sniper, throwing him headfirst from his crow’s nest. That was one down, but there were still too many out there.

As an allied army, we’d managed to kill most of the enemies Stone had frozen, but now there was no way of slowing down the onslaught of those who remained. Soon, we’d be overwhelmed.

I didn’t understand how the entire nudus shield had fallen. Unless something had happened to the others.

“This is Commander Mahlo to Captain Idrax.” Her voice crackled urgently through the comms.

“Go ahead.”

“We’re experiencing mass failure of the shield. There is nothing we can do,” she explained. “All five forcefield points have been taken out. The shield is down. I repeat, the shield is down.”

“What’s happened to the shield-bearers?” I asked desperately.

“The shield is down. I repeat, the shield is down.”

“What’s happened to the shield-bearers?!” I screamed, but the reply was the same.

“The shield is down. I repeat, the shield is down.”

I whipped around as I felt arms encircle me, fearing that someone was trying to attack. With my fists up and ready to fight, I found Navan crouching beside me, his arms reaching out to hold me, while all-out war erupted around us. We’d lost our advantage, and now I was terrified that I’d lost my friends, too. If the five forcefield points had been “taken out,” then that could only mean one thing…

“How could this happen?” I whispered, my lungs tight with fear.

There was no way those five points could’ve been taken out all at once. Only the Universal Alliance had known the locations, and only we had known what purpose those locations served. There was only one way that this could’ve happened—someone on Earth, who was already here on the planet, had wanted the shields to break.

But who? That mystery was even more confusing. I instantly thought about the US president, but he’d sided with the rebels. He’d brokered a deal with Ezra, no doubt under Orion’s rule, so the last thing he would’ve wanted was to have the queens’ armies attacking the planet, threatening everyone below. None of this made any sense. If it wasn’t the US president, and it wasn’t the rebels, and it wasn’t Queen Gianne, then who the hell was it? Who’d snuck in under our noses and shattered our hopes?

A loud thrum juddered through my body, drawing my eyes back up toward a familiar blue sky. Descending toward my planet, a fleet swarmed. Red and black came first, plunging through the clouds, with the guns of silver and green following after, firing down upon them.

Queen Gianne was here, and she was headed straight for us.