The Battle of the Void (The Ember War Saga Book 6) by Richard Fox Page B

weapons trained on one of the injured beasts.
    It looked like a saber-toothed tiger made out of white and orange glass. Streams of light raced over its surface, swirling around the ends of its missing front legs. It tried to crawl through hunks of broken glass, the remains of the rest of the beasts that attacked.
    “What the hell is it?” Cortaro asked. “Is it…alive?”
    “I can tell you,” Malal said. “May I?” he asked Hale.
    “Be my guest,” Hale said.
    Malal grabbed the beast at the base of its skull. Screams of fear filled the air as he lifted it into the air. His other hand wrapped around the neck. Stacey’s stomach went into knots as the thing seemed to beg for mercy as it shivered in Malal’s grip.
    Malal tore the head free from the rest of the body, and silence returned to the grove. Malal dug a finger into the exposed skull and removed a glowing cube. He wrapped his hand around the cube, fingers morphing into a solid mass.
    “This is unexpected,” he said.
    “Care to share the details?” Hale asked.
    Malal tossed the cube over his shoulder.
    “They are an echo. Android approximations from a dead world,” Malal said. “These things mimic the tusk-cats from the eastern hemisphere, not the planet’s sapient species that called itself the Jinn.”
    “What about the Jinn?” Stacey asked. “Are they here too?”
    “No,” Malal said. “The Jinn are gone. Extinct by my hand.”
     
    ****
     
    Hale and Cortaro walked close to each other, their eyes watching opposite flanks for the small column of Marines and armor as they made their way through the neatly spaced rows of the glowing trees. There hadn’t been another sign of the tusk-cats, or any other wildlife, since the last encounter.
    “I cross-leveled ammo,” Cortaro said. “We’re still green on battery life and supplies, but we have a couple more fights like that and we’re in trouble.”
    “We didn’t come here for a scrap, but we’re going to win every one we get into,” Hale said. “Malal says we’re not far from the lab with the codex. Let’s hope that’s the last stop we have to make in this damn fun house.”
    “Hope isn’t a method, sir.”
    “Yeah, yeah.” Hale walked faster and opened a private channel to Stacey. “Ibarra, fall back and talk to me.”
    Malal didn’t seem to notice as Stacey fell back to join Hale.
    “Help you?” she asked, still on their suit-to-suit channel.
    “Why is that thing helping us?”
    Stacey looked away. “The Qa’Resh made a bargain with him. I don’t know all the details, but he’ll help us complete the Crucible, give us a shot at winning the war.”
    “A ‘bargain’? In return for what? I saw what Malal did to the Shanishol on Anthalas. There were rivers of dead in that city, Stacey. He set himself up as some sort of prophet and lured thousands to their death. What kind of deal did they cut with him?” Hale asked.
    “Again, I don’t know all the details.” Her words were clipped, guarded.
    “He wanted us . When we had him on the Breitenfeld , he wanted to know how many humans were left so he could catch up with whoever left him behind…it’s the proccies, isn’t it? Did the Qa’Resh promise him a planet full of them once the war’s over?”
    “No!”
    “Thought you didn’t know the details,” Hale said.
    “The Qa’Resh aren’t like that. They helped us against the Toth, gave us the location of Terra Nova to help us survive when the council voted to abandon Earth to the Toth.” Her face fell as she realized what she’d just said.
    “What? The alliance voted to do what, exactly?”
    “This is between you and me. Bastion wanted to let the Toth take some of the proccie technology—and every other human being left on Earth—then repopulate our home with a more compliant human population, the kind that doesn’t violate resolutions to save the Dotok…or assassinate enemy leaders,” she said. “The Qa’Resh are hard for me to fully understand, but