Read Online Mech 3: The Empress by B. V. Larson - Free Book Online Page B

frustration, tugging at the stuck sword.
    His straining grunts turned to howls of pain as Aldo danced around him and slapped the Lieutenant in the posterior with the flat of his sword. There was a vivid blaze of light, as his sword imparted many volts of energy. The Lieutenant’s legs gave out beneath him, but he still hung from his stuck weapon.
    “First touch!” the Captain announced immediately. “The contest has ended, Aldo is the winner.”
    The crowd laughed and sighed with relief. The duel had ended with embarrassment, but no bloodshed.
    Aldo sought Joelle among the many faces. She beamed at him encouragingly. He immediately wondered if he might manage to bed her after all. Noticing his gaze, she stepped forward to greet him.
    “You should just have switched it off, man,” the Captain said irritably to the Lieutenant, who had finally plucked the sword from the ceiling. “Now, we’ll have to patch it.”
    The Lieutenant crawled, his legs inoperable. Aldo turned away, directing his attentions toward Joelle again. He carefully gauged her expression, weighing the opportunity and his odds of success. Tonight, over a glass of fine wine…at that moment, he would make his move. That would be the proper time to rekindle their past mutual interest. Had he not done as she’d requested? Now, she might well see him as a tough man who could be guided to gentleness by the right woman. Such fantasies had gotten Aldo far with women who’d fostered them in the past.
    It was Joelle’s expression that warned Aldo, even before the gasps of the onlookers, who were all excitedly talking amongst themselves. Her face changed from that of warmth, with a pleasant greeting on the tip of her tongue, to surprise and dismay. Her eyes strayed behind Aldo.
    Aldo did not even bother to turn around. He simply swept behind himself with his blade, which he’d shut off a moment before.
    There was a sensation of heavy resistance, then nothing. A grim wet slap sounded immediately afterward. He turned to see what he’d wrought and his lips curled away from his teeth at the sight.
    The Lieutenant now lay stretched upon the decking, decapitated. Unable to do more than creep forward after taking a numbing shock to the buttocks, the Lieutenant had lifted his sword to thrust it into Aldo’s rump. Aldo’s blind slash had ended these dark ambitions.
    The Lieutenant’s fallen sword still sizzled and sparked. The blade’s tip sent streams of brightly hued plasma arcing down to the metal deck plates in intermittent pulses.
    There was a moment of shocked silence in the mess hall. This soon passed and was replaced by screams, gasps and cries of recrimination erupted around the room. Aldo’s lips twisted in annoyance. He looked for Joelle, but unsurprisingly, she had fled the room in horror.
    Aldo sheathed his blade after wiping away dripping fluids, and grunted unhappily. He shook his head slowly as he eyed the mess lying upon the deck. He had only done what was necessary, but he knew there would be no fine wine shared with Joelle tonight. This backstabbing Lieutenant had seen to that, even if it had cost him his life.

 
    Four
     
    Upon finally entering the sanctuary the skalds had arranged for themselves aboard Gladius , Garth left behind the terror of the alien monsters—but he felt far from safe. These people were controlled by the Tulk, a race of aliens that were as erudite as the Skaintz were visceral. But they were still strange and dangerous.
    Tulk riders lived inside the skulls of their hosts. Parasitic beings, they rarely dealt with the outside world, and one of their greatest fears was that of being exposed to that exterior environment. Physically, they were little more than a pound or so of spiny jelly, but they were quite capable of invading a host and dominating it at will. They did not ‘take the reins’ of their mounts often, preferring to live a dreaming life inside the skull of the host, contemplating deep philosophical concepts.