Jack She burst into full-body flames, arms slashing outward at him. He dive-rolled as a blast struck the ground behind where he had just stood. The grass vaporized and the soil glowed white hot where it hit. He rolled onto his knee, firing. Bursts of flame met his bullets, which failed to find their target. But at least, having to …

. He concentrated harder on the thing that bothered him about the girl– a different aura, flavor, taste, color, he didn’t know what to call it. Something about her had a very different character than Rogan’s or Nam’s energy sources. The glow within her skull seemed to be more a part of her than something she carried. But the thing …

. The young woman at the top of the hill didn’t move. She simply watched them while leaning against a massive white oak that must have been several hundred years old. Caucasian, light brown hair, tall, twenty year old or younger and quite attractive, despite an air of gang-member hardness. She had worn her bedraggled outfit a very long time.  …

. They reached the bottom of a long slope and skirted the remains of a shattered bridge, moving upstream a short distance to find a place where they could ford the brook flowing through there. On the other side, they returned to the path. After the silence had extended several minutes, as the trail rose again the summit, an intensely …

. Her senior warrior sister sat before at the table in front of them, working her mysterious arts in silence. Although Ele Amis was indeed a senior warrioress of her tribe, she did not wear the T’hana, having put it aside for the Sen, a wide wrapping somewhat like a ‘tubetop’ around her breasts, and Prina, a garment somewhat like …

Jack Rogan’s voice sharpened. “Truth? The beast had friends?” “Well…” she frowned as if making a decision, then quirked an eyebrow. “It may be the same ghost out there now that bothered Mord yesterday. The thing that followed us during the day felt different than the war beast that attacked us. It moved too quickly to be a land dweller …

Jack Her next words seemed to answer his thoughts, as if he had spoken them to her. “Our scientists have had several millennia more time than yours, and have long abandoned such primitive ideas. They accept that the mind lays outside the physical. Do you remember what I told you earlier? The part of you, of anything alive, which lays …

Jack Lunch turned out to be more of the same filled cereal bars they had eaten for lunch yesterday, but served cold this time. The salty, pemmican-like filling that had oozed when warm now proved challenging to chew, and Jack had to take frequent swigs of water to get it all down. “Right. Time to work on this,” Nam declared …

Joanna “The intruders simply killed it and left,” Tirith’s hunting partner fretted in English. To Gireid, leaving a body on the battlefield if it were at all possible to retrieve it for burial was a grave sin. “The opponents were three humans alone, with only the equipment such a group could carry,” she answered in Bruxilan, so Tirith would understand …

Joanna After the pilot retracted the windscreens, the Tasuithan flyer bore a vague resemblance to a WWII Higgins boat, an effect mostly created by the assault ramp at the bow. Because they skimmed the dense forest canopy, it became easy to imagine the Gireidil soldiers around her as Allied troops in an old war movie, speeding across choppy waves toward …