Surrogacy by Rob Horner

Author:Rob Horner [Horner, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

The kitchen was somewhere between what you’d find in a large house and a small restaurant. Small as in like a Ruby Tuesday, not like a New York hamburger joint. There were three stoves along one wall, three refrigerators and a couple of freezers along another, and every other available space was taken up by shelves of dry ingredients. The food was prepared on large counters in the center of the room, each with its own sink. And of course, there was the requisite dumb waiter in the west wall.

We exited the stairs in plain view of the three soldiers currently on cook duty. Or maybe they were cooks whose secondary job was soldiering.

With Fish and Danielle in the lead, they couldn’t see me at first. Probably a good thing. My notoriety among the Dra’Gal had already earned me an impromptu bath today. These guys had sidearms, though why they should be armed in a kitchen was beyond my ability to explain. Maybe they wanted to make sure the cow was dead before they started grilling steaks.

Little Jack and I came in hot behind Fish and the brunette, and it was clear that having her go first was just as bad as if I was in the front, though it made sense in a hive-mind way. She’d been responsible for holding a hundred of their fellow Dra’Gal trapped in their human bodies, so of course they knew her on sight, maybe better than they knew me. We just hadn’t thought of it.

So here we come, stepping around Fish and Danielle, and the three soldiers are already rushing forward, one reaching for his pistol while the other two just reached, ready to grab or throttle.

Little Jack ignored the rushers, side-stepping neatly to the left and firing one of those Ben-goo-blasts, striking the man who’d held back. The stuff that contained the essence of Ben’s power worked a bit like Danielle’s ability, preventing Manifestation. When Ben was alive, he could generate a field that bound a Dra’Gal’s feet to the ground, preventing movement. The ammunition containing his power worked similarly, but its effect was limited to where the liquid struck.

Thankfully, that included the soldier’s right arm, which froze in the act of drawing his sidearm from its holster.

It didn’t stop him from reflexively squeezing the trigger as his muscles clenched, firing a hollow point 9mm bullet into his own right thigh, which immediately began to squirt blood in an arcing stream.

“Turn it up, Danielle!” Fish said, urgency giving his voice an almost breathless quality. “They’ll have heard the shot.”

My part in this was easy.

As soon as I stepped around Danielle, the leading soldiers stopped their rush. Before they could set their feet and turn around, I was between them, grabbing one by the hand and lightly slapping the other across the face. Light flashed and both collapsed.

Then Ricardo was there, ignoring the blood pooling on the floor, hands out to help the third soldier.

“My power isn’t working!” he shouted.

“It’s because he’s Dra’Gal,” I said, moving up to the soldier’s other side.

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