Terra: Magitech Legacy Book 7 by Chris Fox

Author:Chris Fox [Fox, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chris Fox Writes LLC
Published: 2023-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

11

Miri and I arrived in aft six to find absolute carnage. The walls were slick with perverse graffiti, written in blood, and the bodies of cadets littered the floor, each killed in a brutal fashion. Some had fallen to spells. Most had died to blunt trauma. Close kills. There were no claw marks or anything else to suggest this was anything other than a back-alley kill back in the slums of Kemet.

“Commander, this is Jerek,” I muttered into the comm. “There’s definitely something going on down here. Cadets have been slaughtered.”

I knelt next to the closest body, and an awful realization stole over me as I caught sight of the one next to it. “It looks like they killed each other. More details when I have them.”

I straightened and moved to the graffiti to see if I could make sense of it. I didn’t recognize the language straightaway, but the letters were written in the common galactic alphabet, and I could phonetically sound out the single word. I opened my mouth to do so, and blinding pain shot from temple to temple. I slumped to my knees and found myself blinking away spots like I’d accidentally stared into the sun.

By the time I’d risen and recovered, it looked like Miri had also moved to inspect the writing. She ran a gloved hand through the blood, then turned slowly to face me. Her eyes had gone scarlet, the same shade as the blood, and there was nothing human there.

If she’d been herself, I’d have died in that instant. She could have gotten the drop on me with her pistol, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could have done. The madness, if that’s what it was, pressed her to sprint at me instead, and as she crossed the four steps between us, growling as she ran, I wrenched Dez from my holster and delivered a trio of close-range dream bolts.

Once, twice, three times into the chest. By the third, just before she reached me, her eyes fluttered shut, and she tumbled into my arms, fast asleep, thank god. I eased her to the deck in a place that hadn’t been soiled with blood, then took a moment to inspect my surroundings and make sure no one was sneaking up on us.

I was starting to get the picture of what had happened here, and it reminded me a bit of the spites and angers we’d dealt with on the Inuran trade moon when I’d first met Miri. Whatever the spell’s origin, it seemed to overwhelm conscious thought and force them to attack each other.

A quick inspection of a few of the corpses showed that most had blood on their hands, except for a pair that appeared to have been surprised. They’d likely died before the blood touched them. Was that the common factor? Did the blood infect them? That was possible magically even through gloves.

I glanced at the graffiti once more, the same word written by dozens of different hands, at different angles and sizes.

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