Blood Moon (24 page)

She turned to look at him. He looked
tired, too.

How odd that her figment had human
failings. If this really was a dream, would he get
tired?

She had a bad feeling that he wouldn’t
but decided that she just couldn’t handle any more mental
calisthenics at the moment. She was tired beyond belief and her
head was throbbing as if it might explode.

She dismissed it, tried not to put a
great deal of effort into thinking at all, instead merely watching
as they drew closer and closer to the strange city.

As they neared the shore and she could
see more clearly, an odd sense of disorientation swept over her.
The place … every building, was in a style strongly reminiscent of
ancient Greece … except these weren’t ruins. Some of the buildings
looked old, perhaps a bit time worn, but none were crumbling. Most
seemed to be single story buildings, with perhaps a handful rising
two or three stories. In the distance, in what looked to be the
center of the city, stood a cluster of buildings on a hill, or
rise. These came the closest to resembling the multistoried
buildings one would expect to see in a city of this size. In the
midst of them, a tower rose well above everything surrounding it,
almost like a lighthouse, or maybe an observation tower.

“It’s beautiful,” she
murmured.

The sense, almost of weightlessness the
buoyancy of the water, had given gave way to a feeling of
heaviness, cool air brushing her wet skin, bringing her to the
realization that they were emerging from the water. She frowned,
aware that she’d lost a sense of logic again. The guy carrying her
was half fish, a merman. How could he just stand up and walk out of
the water? She craned her head to see the merman’s tail and fin,
but, even as she watched, they disappeared.

He set her on her feet and she leaned
forward to peer at him in the dim light, watching in amazement as
his iridescent scales gave way to skin, his lower body dividing to
become two legs.

Well, two and a half.

He was stark naked.

Alexis straightened abruptly, blushing
as she met his grinning face.

“Down boy! I don’t care how glad he is
to see me, I’m not shaking hands!”

His expression became
quizzical.

“Never mind!” She turned away,
surveying the area, and realized they were standing on what
appeared to be a stone pier. Steps led upwards to a beautiful stone
house that looked very Mediterranean.

A wave of dizziness washed over her and
she swayed, grasping his arm for support. “Where are we?” she
demanded.

He scooped her into his arms and jogged
up the stone steps to a verandah. Without pausing, he opened the
door and stepped inside.

“My home.”

“I gathered that,” she said dryly as he
set her on her feet, steadying her by pulling her close against his
side. Finding her land legs at last, Alexis pulled away, looking
around the marble tiled foyer, her gaze skating over beautifully
carved tables, chests … vases made of gold … none in a style she
recognized. “But where is your home? And who are you? You never did
tell me your name.”

“I am known as Adonis,” he said, and
bowed in a quaint old world way that looked oddly gallant, given
the fact that he was naked.

Alexis suppressed an urge to
giggle—nerves or embarrassment, she wasn’t sure-- resolutely
refusing to look at anything below his neck. “I wouldn’t doubt it
in the least, but don’t let it go to your head. Pretty is as pretty
does,” she added primly. “And we are where?”

“Atalantium.”

The End

The Lawgivers:

Gabriel

By

Kaitlyn O’Connor

The lucky ones never knew what hit
them.

One minute they were going about the
business of living—the next, oblivion.

Already sinking slowly into decay from
much the same causes as the fall of Rome—greed, sloth, corruption,
and civil disorder—the days of the great human civilization of the
twenty-first century had been numbered even before Mother Nature
unleashed her wrath, but as she had many times before Mother Nature
proved mightier than all the power mankind could wield.
Civilization didn’t crumble slowly to dust. It was vaporized in a
nanosecond by the asteroid that whipped around the sun, evading the
near Earth object tracking system and blindsiding the planet with
virtually no warning.

For the survivors who clawed their way
out of the rubble and ash life was hellish and it only got
worse.

And then the angels fell to Earth and
brought the wrath of god to the remnants of the once mighty
civilization left to eke out an existence on the scarred
Earth.

They called themselves the
Lawgivers.

The humans called them winged demons
from hell.

Chapter One

Their stench led Gah-re-al to them. It
always did.

In general, they were nomadic. Roaming
in undisciplined bands, they raped the world that had already been
crippled by some cosmic cataclysm and then, when they had denuded
an area of food and fouled or depleted the water supply, they moved
on in search of more food and water. When they gathered, they often
lived in the ruins of the civilized beings that had come before
them and littered their ‘nests’ with the waste of their existence.
In the heat, the unburied dead, the rotting remains of the beasts
they occasionally caught and slew for food, and their own bodily
waste produced a stench that was nearly overpowering and drew
hordes of insects from miles around.

They were filthy, disease ridden
pests—violent barbarians that preyed upon one another—raping,
pillaging, and laying waste to a land already struggling to
recover.

Trying to bring law and order to the
savages, in Gah-re-al’s opinion, was a waste of time. He, and the
other lawgivers, had been trying to do so for almost a decade of
this world’s cycles, but for every warlord/merciless tyrant they
eliminated, it seemed two rose to take their place. They brought
order and meted out justice in one area and moved on and as soon as
they did, chaos erupted in their wake.

He wasn’t convinced by any means that
the new directive would work any better.

Rehabilitation, he thought with
derisive disgust.

That implied that they’d been
civilized before and he saw nothing about the species to convince
him that they ever had been.

Survival in extreme
situations had a way of peeling away civilized behavior, he knew.
He’d seen it himself firsthand, many times, in his career as a
soldier Elite—his first career, before he’d been reassigned as a
lawgiver. He supposed the scientists studying the civilization that
had once thrived here could be right. The barbarians that were
ravaging what remained of the world
could
be the remnants of that
civilization, but he found that hard to believe. He had yet to
stumble across any that were making any attempt to rebuild and that
was what civilized people did—they rebuilt.

At least, that was what his species
did.

Mentally, he shrugged. They were
aliens. Without more time and effort put forth to study them he
didn’t see how any conclusions could be drawn about
them.

Not by the scientists,
the
khabler
, who
spent their days digging in the ground and carefully piecing
together their puzzle from the things left behind. If they’d spent
nearly as much time observing the behavior of the aliens, he
doubted they would have reached the same conclusion.

He shook off his thoughts as he
reached a rise and the dung pile his nose had been leading him to
came into view. His lips curled faintly in disgust as he caught the
full brunt of the stench despite the fact that he’d become
accustomed to the smells.

He doubted the social workers that
were so happily plotting to ‘rehabilitate’ them would be nearly as
optimistic if they’d seen one of the ‘villages’ where the savages
squatted. In fact, he doubted they would realize that was what it
was. The first time he’d stumbled upon one he’d thought it was
nothing more than a refuse heap.

Narrowing his eyes against the setting
sun, Gah-re-al studied the village.

There was little activity, but he
spotted two guards posted at a makeshift gate and movement here and
there within the compound to convince him that the nearly
overpowering stench was from a fairly large number of savages that
had been squatting on the place for months if not years.

Doubtful that it was years, he amended
derisively. They hadn’t found any areas capable of sustaining even
a handful of people for more than a few months when they did
nothing but live off the land.

If they hadn’t brought years worth of
supplies when the first colonists had arrived to establish a base
on the new world, they would’ve been dead before the first supply
ship arrived. But then they’d been aware before they targeted it
for colonization that the planet had suffered an extinction event
that had wiped out at least 50% of all life and possibly
more.

Finding planets suitable for
colonization was no simple or easy task, regardless of their
technical capabilities. For the most part, if the planet was
reasonably stable and capable of sustaining life, it was already
occupied and quite often with intelligent beings at some stage of
development. If it was devoid of life, it usually couldn’t sustain
life. There were some worlds where conditions were such that they
could be terraformed and made habitable, but that was a damned
expensive enterprise and it was far easier to find worlds like this
one—which still required some terraforming but was basically
livable and could be made more comfortable with minimal
effort.

Of course the natives were rarely
happy to welcome them. As it was with most orphans, quelling
discontent had been his job from the time that he’d reached the
maturity to be released from the facility where he’d spent most of
his childhood. This one only differed in the sense that the species
native to this world were more of a problem than most. They bred
faster for one thing, increasing in numbers despite the harsh
environment faster than the conditions, and the predators of their
own kind, could kill them off. The only thing that slowed them down
at all was the fact that their gestation period was nearly a year,
but the females of breeding age generally managed to turn out a new
one yearly and having two at the time wasn’t particularly
rare—producing even three or four at the time wasn’t unheard of for
them.

For another, despite the
fact that they appeared to be a species just emerging, or close to
emerging, as a civilization they weren’t prone to viewing his
people, the
udai
,
with the awe, fear and respect they were accustomed to when they
encountered primitives.

If they were better organized and less
prone to prey on one another they could have been even more of a
problem—still could be if they were allowed to continue—so their
politicians believed. For his part, he was more inclined to think
they’d eventually wipe themselves out, not organize and put forth a
concerted effort to wipe out the intruders—them.

But then that scenario was
what the social workers and scientists feared.
They
considered the natives an
important species that should be preserved, that needed only
guidance and a helping hand to ‘recover’.

So while no one really
agreed on why it was important to ‘do something’ with the natives,
they all seemed to agree on one point, at least—they could no
longer be left to their own devices. In most cases where they
encountered intelligent but primitive species, interference was
never considered wise or desirable—at least not interference of the
sort the social workers had proposed—too much knowledge in the
hands of primitive, undisciplined minds inclined toward violence
was a dangerous thing. In this case, with this world, all bets
seemed to be off. Instead of sending out an army to quell them and
bring order as they generally did if they found some interference
necessary—to keep the natives from interfering with
their
plans—those in
power had put together a group of lawgivers to bring about
‘enlightenment’.

When that plan didn’t seem
to be working, they’d decided to change tactics. Clearly, it wasn’t
enough to eliminate the predators among the natives. They needed to
be
educated
out of
their unacceptable behavior according to the social
workers.

He’d believe
that
when he saw
it!

He frowned, narrowing his eyes as he
assessed the situation.

He was an
Elite.
Clearing out the
nest by wiping them out would be no problem even if he was right
and he’d stumbled upon a sizeable group. It would be risky, but he
had superior fighting skills and weapons far more powerful than
anything they had.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t allowed.
That wasn’t his orders or the prime directive.