Crusade by Taylor Anderson

Author:Taylor Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

When she was finished, Gray nodded. It was about what he expected. It was also very detailed and disturbing. Since Lemurians had virtually no concept of modesty, no detail was left to his imagination and since, conversely, Blas-Ma-Ar (he’d taken to thinking of her as Blossom) had experienced the assault much like any teenage human girl might, with the same outrage, terror, and even guilt, Gray found himself controlling his killing rage with difficulty. He looked at Franklen and was surprised to see him dozing. Oh, well. He looked back at the “girl.” No, “girl” wasn’t right even before tonight. She was a proven warrior who’d fought for her people. More than Al Franklen ever really had.

“You understand why we have to keep this between ourselves for now?” he asked gently and she nodded. “People will know, and it won’t happen again. But word will spread slowly and it will add power to the words. That’s why we have to do things like this sometimes.”

“Captain no have power for this?”

Gray shook his head. “No, sweetie. The captain has too much power for this right now. His anger would overcome everything else, and then others would get mad, and others, until everything was just about this. We might even forget to fight the Grik. You don’t want that.”

“No,” she whispered softly. “I don’t want anything like that. I want to be a Marine.” She paused, looking at Franklen, who had awakened and was looking back. “And I want to eat his eyes.”

Donaghey glanced at his watch. “Whatever we do, and whatever she eats, we better get on with it. Sooner or later some officer is going to figure out there’s a hell of a lot of Indians running around without any chiefs to tell ’em what to do.”

“Right,” agreed Gray. “Call ’em in and we’ll sort this out.”

Except for Russ Chapelle and the Lemurian Marines, everyone else managed to squeeze in the tent. They made solicitous comments as they passed by “Blossom,” but had only hard stares for their former shipmate.

“We ain’t gonna have no jury,” Gray said. “The ‘accused’ was caught in the act, admitted what he done, and invited Mr. Steele to ‘get some’ himself. No one has since heard him deny he raped and brutalized one of our young female allies. He is guilty, so I won’t even call for a vote. The only thing we have left to decide is punishment.”

Steele sighed. “We’re kind of in the same boat there. There’s only one punishment for what he did, and he probably would’ve done worse before he was finished.”

“I never figured chiefs had so much power,” Laney whispered. “This ain’t in the book!”

“No, it ain’t,” Gray growled. “There’re lots of things that ain’t in the book. This world we’ve wound up in, for one. But chiefs have always ‘handled’ things.” Gray looked at Donaghey. “And this ain’t the first time we handled somethin’ like this. Sometimes problems just have to go away and Franklen’s turned himself into one of those problems tonight.

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