Page 74 of Alien Peacock
The flying Eoan lands and tries to grab me. I whack him on the side, but it doesn’t knock him down. He takes hold of both my arms, despite me fighting as hard as I can.
His eyes suddenly roll back in his head and he drops to the ground, letting go of me.
The huge, gray suit of armor is hovering behind him.
“Sorry, my love,” an electronic voice says. “I should have told you I would help.” The visor slides up, and Arelion looks down on me. “But I think this will work out.”
Buroteo’s aliens are shooting now, with ray guns and bullet guns. Some of the shots ping off Arelion’s armor.
“Don’t hit the female!” Buroteo screeches. “Only Arelion!”
The shooting stops while the aliens run closer to get a better aim.
“Can you get her out?” I ask and point at Tara.
Arelion grabs two bars with his armor-suited hands. With a hiss of hydraulics from the suit, he pulls them apart and then rips them off the cage.
Tara climbs out. “Do we have a ship?”
“Mine is broken,” Arelion says and nods to the wall, then takes a few shots at the aliens.
“Mine is not,” I quickly state. “In the hangar!”
But the aliens are converging on us very fast. There has to be a hundred of them, and now they’re aiming better. Arelion is taking so many hits he lowers the visor again.
He grabs me and pulls me behind him. “Stay there.”
Tara clings to me. “Shouldn’t we be running?”
I knock on his metal back. “Arelion, we have to go!”
“I was promised a show,” Arelion rumbles through the speakers in his suit. “Ah. There it is.”
A small, trash can-like cylinder is rolling to the middle of the floor.
I recognize it. “Cerak. But what can he do— oh!”
As I watch, the cylinder turns itself inside-out and ends up as a gleaming metal sea with dozens of spikes sticking out of it, like a nightmarish sea urchin. It hovers in mid-air, then calmly turns and orients itself before it suddenly erupts with bright white beams.
The aliens scream and howl as they fall, one after the other.
“That’s enough of the show,” Arelion decides. He grabs Tara and me, then jumps off and slowly descends on the ground. “This thing isn’t designed for passengers.”
The aliens that guarded the exit have wisely fled from the sea urchin of death. Tara and I run through it with Arelion behind us, shielding us from the few remaining aliens.
“This station is owned by the Bululg,” Tara tells me as we run. “They use it for their slavery auctions. We have to blow it up!”
“Can we get away first?” I ask, looking behind us. The light show is over, and nobody’s coming after us.
Arelion stops and dumps his armor to the floor with loud clanks. “Too heavy and hot to wear if we’re not being shot at. Is the saucer in the hangar?”
“That’s where I left it,” I tell him. “But I’m not sure it’s there now.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll see,” I say tightly. “If it’s not, there are other ships we can use.”
Some Fresks come lumbering towards us. Arelion takes down two of them with his ray gun, and the others duck behind some crates. When they duck back up, one of them meets the tip of my stick as I fling it in a wide arc. The rest come out and try to run, but now I’m in a fighting mood. I throw the stick through their legs, tripping up two of them.