Alien Shores (A Fenris Novel, Book 2) Read Online Free Page B

Cyrus.
    Massaging his raw throat, coughing, Cyrus eased off the panel and sat down. That had been too close. What had he been thinking? It never paid to talk to the bastards. They always tried tricks. They had no sense of honor.
    His gaze wandered to the scanner. The incoming missile kept accelerating even as the Attack Talon decelerated. Valiant had a greater velocity than their needle-ship, even with them accelerating. How long would it be before their vessel was in laser range of the enemy?
    “It must be a nuclear-pumped missile that will fire X-rays,” Cyrus said.
    Skar still said nothing. It appeared he brooded.
    “Don’t worry about it,” Cyrus said. “You didn’t have a choice. They controlled your mind.”
    Skar’s head snapped up and his mouth twisted with distaste as if he had sucked on a lemon. “Don’t you understand? I despise my weakness. I acted contrary to my will. They controlled a Vomag soldier. I am a liability to you, to the cause.”
    “No you’re not.”
    “I almost killed you.”
    “How does your face feel where I hit it?”
    There was a red mark on the left side of the nose.
    “You used a clever trick,” Skar muttered. “I congratulate you.”
    “Look, I can teach you how to defend against mind control.”
    “I do not possess such abilities,” Skar said.
    “Right, you’re not a Special, you’re a . . .” Cyrus almost said “Normal.” But Skar wasn’t really normal. In a fight between them, Skar would win unless Cyrus could do something tricky. Maybe Argon could win a fight against Skar, but no regular human had a chance.
    Argon had been the chief monitor aboard Discovery . The man had the blood of the Highborn in him. Cyrus hoped Argon was still alive. Out of all the Normals he’d known, Argon had the best mind shield.
    “There’s a way to shield against mind control and reading,” Cyrus said. “Thinking about mathematical formulas, going over them again and again in your thoughts, is one of the best ways.”
    “That would shield me against them?” Skar asked, sounding dubious.
    “Not completely,” Cyrus admitted. “The math formulas make it harder. It’s like static or the hissing just now. The mind controller would have to work harder to pierce your running computations. Sometimes repeating an endless litany in your thoughts helps, too. If you’re really stubborn, that also helps.”
    “He dominated me so easily,” Skar said.
    “They hit us with something new, something more powerful than before. Personally, I think Chengal Ras brought along his best psi-master.” Cyrus nodded. “They must want me—want the two of us—really badly, more than I realized.”
    The comm signal beeped again.
    “No way,” Cyrus said. “They can’t believe we’re that stupid.”
    “We are cattle to the Kresh,” Skar said, glumly.
    “Yeah,” Cyrus said. “Tell me about it.”
    Their words dwindled, and they kept watching the scanner. Soon, the comm signal stopped. The missile didn’t, though—it kept coming for them.
    This is depressing, watching death accelerate for us .
    Cyrus got up, went to the head, came out, and sat down at his station. A baan was there, a metal-colored band. It sat next to what looked like amplifying discs, but was really a reader. Two long prongs curved up out of it with discs at the end for him to press the baan against once it encircled his forehead. He’d been doing just that for the past three weeks. He had one memory crystal. The Reacher had given it to him on High Station 3. The crystal held information about the Anointed One, about Klane as a baby when first inserted into Clan Tash-Toi.
    Big, muscular, reddish-skinned humans inhabited the stony highlands of Jassac. They were the Tash-Toi, and they lived like primitives, with clubs, spears, and a ruling hetman. The crystal had shown Cyrus the seeker, a shamanistic individual with obvious mind powers. Cyrus had reviewed the crystal repeatedly, studying in depth everything it had shown