Terminal Bounty: A Military Sci-Fi Series (Space Hunter War Book 6) by Rick Partlow & Pacey Holden

Author:Rick Partlow & Pacey Holden [Partlow, Rick & Holden, Pacey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2023-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

The first time I saw a Tahni on the battlefield, I was convinced they were monsters.

Oh, the naïveté.

Someone rightly asked over the com, “What the hell is that?”

The thing that came scrambling out of that pod was the definition of a monster. It was a cross between a scorpion and something from the seventh circle of hell. The black, chitinous surface of the creature almost absorbed the light around it.

And it was huge. Bigger than a Drop Trooper when they’re fully armored up in their Vigilante suits.

At first glance my mind told me it was an oversized insect, but I quickly dismissed that notion when I saw it move. It wasn’t skittering around—if something that large can be said to skitter—there was a sense of purpose to its moving… an otherworldly sentience to it that froze the blood in my veins.

The body was segmented, each section covered in a thick, hardened surface that could only be armor, though it didn’t look like metal. Biological armor of chitinous plates curved over the body and covered its joints. Several joints that enabled rapid movement of multiple appendages that my eyes struggled to follow. The thing moved on two sets of legs, the rear larger and stacked with taut muscle compared to the front. Above the forward set of legs, the body curved upward in an almost centaur-like segmentation, with a pair of manipulating limbs at the shoulders that ended in blade-like claws. The head was flattened, almost wedge-shaped. If there were eyes or ears, they were concealed deep within the armored shell. Below the jaw, mandibles that ended in hooked, claw-like points gnashed together, producing a series of clicks in repeated syncopation.

It was alien. Monstrous. At a glance, my gut told me this thing was evil. Every fiber of my being screamed out to kill it, because something that looked that sinister and moved with such malevolent intent was clearly a violation of nature. Like my intuition about the seed pod itself, this spawn that crawled out of it was not of this world—or of this galaxy. This monster existed for a single purpose.

Wanton destruction of any living thing in its path.

The organic structure of the creature—a blurring of the lines between humanoid and scorpion—could have been ruled out as some freak accident of biological evolution, but the massive energy weapon mounted onto the armor of its left shoulder could not.

The position of the weapon was no accident either. It was within reach of the smaller arm beneath it. That was the deciding factor for me. The advanced weaponry integrated into its armored body was no effect of natural evolution, and weapons were tools of war. I could only draw one conclusion.

The monster before me was a predator in an environment stocked with fresh prey.

The Cultists near the cargo hauler tried first, opening up with their pulse carbines and their KE guns.

Laser pulses lanced into the insectile beast. I knew better than to hold out for hope, but the horror that

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