LITMIR.BIZ

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silence around them, the damned silence smothering the platoon, ate at her. Smaragda upped the magnification on her helmet optics, scanning the road ahead. It had been midday when they’d stopped, clouds moving in. The day had been growing steadily grayer and dimmer, but now the light was fading even faster, when the sun should be highest in the sky.

      Her blood seemed to thicken in her veins as even the high-tech optics in her Praetorian helmet, the same advanced night-vision and telescopic lenses that Kane and Grant had as part of their Magistrate armor suits, showed nothing.

      “Captain?” A voice spoke up.

      “Movement?” Smaragda asked.

      “No. Just…smoke,” Tan said.

      Smaragda flipped up the visor on her helmet. There, invisible to the infrared scanners, was a roiling, spreading cloud that billowed out onto the road. She glanced through on infrared again. No one seemed to be inside the cloud, utilizing it as cover or concealment. Who knew if the smoke had some properties that could be filtering out even the body heat of her fellow Praetorians?

      “Should we open fire?” another soldier asked, nerves jangling in his voice.

      “On what?” Smaragda asked. “We might just end up cutting Niklo and the others apart.”

      “But they’re not on the infrared,” Tan noted.

      “Retreat,” Smaragda ordered.

      “Smoke’s closing in on the road behind us,” announced the Spartan at the back of their formation. “I’m going to…”

      “Stay put!” Smaragda commanded. “Don’t enter the smoke.”

      Every instinct told her to open fire into the infection of black ink spilling onto the road on either end, bracketing them in.

      Smaragda wouldn’t risk the lives of her men in a friendly fire incident.

      “GS 26, knock us a road through the trees, now!” Smaragda ordered.

      The suit in the center of the formation reacted quickly, plunging into the woods. Large, brassy arms wielding unimaginable strength pushed against trunks, shoving trees out of the ground, roots snapping. Branches shattered against the suit’s broad shoulders and Smaragda waved her men into the gap being created by the bulldozer-like robot. She stayed at the back of the group, watching as the walls of inky, foreboding smoke began to close in on where they used to be. It was as if the clouds were only following the road, forming perfect columns, not spreading out into the forest and upon the path that Skeleton 26 pushed through. Smaragda continued stepping backward, minding the exposed roots and splinters left in the robot’s wake.

      She kept the muzzle of her rifle aimed at the wall of darkness and turned sideways, skipping back after her men.

      “Niklo, I’ll be back,” she whispered. “If you’re alive.”

      Silently she repeated that thought. Leaving soldiers under her command behind, in a lurch, was as bad a defeat as seeing them fall in bloody heaps.

      “Everyone comes home.” Smaragda repeated the motto of the Praetorians. “Sooner or later, we’ll be back for you.”

      A scream split the air. She whirled and looked down the trough cut through the woods. Of the three Spartans in the unit, she could only see one, the other two having disappeared behind a wall of darkness that intercepted them. Of the fifteen soldiers she’d pushed into retreat in the wake of the Spartans, she saw only six, and they were in full retreat.

      The mighty robot’s shoulder guns opened up onto the shadowy smoke as it lunged for the brass giant. The flash and flicker of muzzle-blasts did little to dent or illuminate the choking, inky fog that seemed to grow tentacles with which to entrap the robot.

      Smaragda shouldered her rifle, but realized that opening fire into the fog would mean that she could be blindly gunning down fellow soldiers taken captive by the cloud. She wanted to yell for a cease-fire from the robot but, watching the giant fight for its life, she noted that tracer rounds struck the smoke, then bounced off the cloud.

      GS 26 lashed out with its battle-ax, the edges heated to steamy white by elements inside the gigantic weapon. The ax seemed to fare better, lopping off solid hunks of the darkness, but only if they were slender tendrils. Anything thicker than a human torso caught the ax, forcing the Spartan to struggle and wrench the blade free.

      Tendrils whipped out, snatching up another of her men.

      Smaragda lunged, drawing her falcata and slashing at the tentacle of living night. Blade met alien smoke and it was as if she tried to chop a tree branch. The solidness of the tendril of cloud rattled her arm, tendons popping as she put enough force into the swing for a follow-through.

      The soldier in the fog’s grasp turned ashen, eyes wide with horror. He breathed out, wisps of frosting moisture escaping from his lips.

      “Run!” he rasped. “Get away! Live to…”

      Another whip of darkness wrapped around the Praetorian’s head and, within moments, he was wrenched off of his feet and into the smoke as if he was never there.

      Lashing smoke fingered out toward her, but she swatted the pseudopods aside, scrambling into retreat.

      The Gear Skeleton still fighting the fog disappeared; one hand reached up, clawing at the air in the hope of grasping some anchor, but the robotic claw stilled and was sucked into the darkness.

      Smaragda turned and raced off a side trail between the trees. Whatever the smoke was, it seemed to have trouble flowing through and around the trunks of the forest. She swerved and wove, bounding over fallen logs and branches. She regretted lifting the visor so that she could see the midnight horror that expanded onto the road as leaves and fronds slapped and slashed at her face and eyes. She struck a tree trunk at full speed while half blinded by a leaf raking her naked eyeball.

      The impact jarred her, but she seized the trunk, using it to maintain her footing.

      She glanced back and saw that there were three tentacles winnowing their way around trunks, stretched out at far back as she could see through the trees. Smaragda raised her M-16 and opened fire. Rifle rounds shattered the eerie silence that had fallen in the wake of the last Spartan’s disappearance, but they did nothing to dispel the living darkness stretching and seething after her.

      Smaragda turned and ran again, having paused only to slide down her eye shield, leaving the advanced optics out of the way.

      Smaragda ran for as long and as hard as she could.

      Within an hour she was at the coast, on her knees, her chest burning, shoulders aching, trying to vomit but having nothing to spit up.

      Twenty-two people were now gone.

      She was the lone survivor.

      She pulled off her helmet and, for a moment, thought something else had come after her. A sheet of white spilled down over her eyes and she screamed in shock.

      Then she realized why she was so stunned.

      Before the smoke her hair had been as dark as a raven’s feathers.

      Now the tresses that she could see were as pale and wispy as silken icicles.

      Trembling, Smaragda looked around for the boat that had brought the expedition.

      “Live to tell what happened,” she said in a terrified murmur.

      “Live to tell what…happened…” she repeated.

      Tears drenched Smaragda’s cheeks as she struggled to her feet.

       Chapter 2

      Domi crouched deeply as she faced off with the man in black. Perfectly balanced in her hand was the handle of one of her favorite knives, its flats gleaming under the harsh

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