Alien in the Family

back.
    “Thanks,” he gasped. “What the hell are you doing?”
    “Kicking butt and taking names. You know, routine.” I slammed the staff into another Amazon’s stomach. It went through her. Jareen lopped her head off and finished off the third Amazon. I had to figure ACE was helping me, and I decided if there was ever a time to let the superconsciousness give you a major assist, it was now.
    Lenore and Gregory took off, running toward Uma. Alexander looked awful. “Chuckie, you have to get him out of the battle, and you have to stay with him and protect him.”
    “ What? ”
    I grabbed his lapel. “Think! No ruler on Alpha Four means complete destabilization of that solar system. Guess what planet will lose?”
    “Ours, got it.” He grabbed me and held me. “Be careful.”
    “I will. Get to some sort of defensible point. I’m sure we’re going to have more wounded. I’ll send them to you. Protect them—and yourself,” I felt compelled to add. I was noting a little too much willingness to take the bullets from Chuckie, and I liked that attitude from him only slightly more than I liked it from Martini.
    He nodded, grabbed Alexander, and went back to where I’d been with the Animal Planet folks. I had a bishop and a rook out, and from what I could tell, half of my pawns.
    “We need to clear out the extra pawns,” Jareen said.
    I had to agree. There were a lot of them. “I’m open to ideas.”
    She cocked her head at me. “Even if they’re crazy?”
    “I’m the queen of the crazy ideas, babe.”
    “Good. Stand back and be ready.” She stepped away from me then started twirling her battle staff over her head. “Do what I’m doing!”
    I did. It was like a funky baton. It was also speeding up. A lot. We spun for what seemed like forever but reality said was only about thirty seconds. I noted that the extra Amazons were bearing down on us. All of them.
    “Throw it toward them . . . now!” Jareen shouted.
    We both did. It was really impressive. The staffs spun like dervishes but with a clear intent to maim if not kill. At least, Jareen’s was. Mine was sort of flying straight but without a clear goal.
    “Aim it!” Jareen snapped. I looked over; she was moving her hands around as if she were doing some funky fake kung fu move. I did the same, and suddenly my staff was also actually doing its job.
    “Do I want to know how this is working?”
    “Tell you when we have the time. I can’t keep this up forever.”
    I had to figure that beings that could create spatiotemporal warps and move big ships on their own could also affect a couple of space-aged javelins. The battle staffs were slicing through Amazonian necks as if they were made of butter and the staffs were hot knives. I’d have been grossed out if I hadn’t known exactly what said Amazons were going to do to my people if we didn’t decapitate them.
    The staffs flew back to us; we spun them again, and did the whole weird thing again. And again. The Amazons tried to shift their locations, but the staffs went where we wanted them to. They were close to impossible to avoid in this manner, for which I was thankful—I didn’t credit myself with enough skill to thrust and parry effectively from a distance. I just kept on doing whatever Jareen was doing until we’d lowered the number of extra Amazons down to very, very few.
    Those few broke off and headed for other melees while our staffs sailed back to us again, nice as you please. “These are wicked cool boomerangs.”
    “Yes, but they only work like that for crowd control. We have to use them like true battle staffs now, we’ll be in too close.”
    Jareen and I headed for the dog pile that had Reader and Christopher in it. It was the next closest, and the rest of the Animal Planet folks had gone to support Lorraine and Claudia, except Neeraj, who was with Martini and Gower. The three of them weren’t making a dent in Kyrellis.
    Sadly, the group we went to wasn’t doing much better against Moira and her assistants. “Yo, freak chick! Why don’t you fight someone your own sex?”
    She spun toward me and smiled widely. “My mate says we should keep you.”
    “Good luck with that.” I ran toward her, flipped in midair and landed with my feet on her chest. She fell back, and I somersaulted over her to land on my feet. Yeah, ACE was definitely spotting me.
    This didn’t slow Moira down much, but it got her away from everyone else. I saw Jareen start kicking random Amazonian