Daniel Arenson - The Heirs of Earth (Children of Earthrise Book 1)

Aboard the Jerusalem , the communicator crackled.

Duncan turned toward Emet, frowning. "They're calling us, lad. Don't answer."

But Emet needed to see them, to hear them, to stare into his enemy's eyes. He hit a button, accepting the call.

His monitor crackled to life, revealing the striker's bridge.

It was like gazing into hell.

On the inside, the striker mimicked a desert. Rocks and boulders surrounded sandy pits that spurted fire. The scorpions had evolved on a nightmarish world full of volcanoes, canyons, and endless dunes, and their starships brought that world with them. A hundred scorpions filled the bridge. They clung to the walls, perched on boulders, and hissed on the ceiling. A handful huddled on the floor, tearing into a shrieking alien mammal.

There were control panels, but unlike anything human. Huge gears hung on the walls, and scorpions grabbed them, turned them, piloting their machine. Other scorpions tugged pulleys and chains. Some moved levers topped with human skulls.

A boulder jutted up in the center of the bridge, taller than a man. Upon it rose a throne upholstered with human skins stitched together, eyeless faces still grimacing upon them. Other human skins lay draped around the boulder, lurid rugs, some with boneless hands still attached. Emet knew that scorpions flayed humans, stole their skins to coat their dens, but he had never seen the atrocity. His stomach churned.

But more than the hundreds of scorpions, the massive gears, or the flayed skins, it was the figure on the throne that shocked Emet.

She was a woman.

A human woman.

She reclined on her throne, smiling crookedly, one leg tossed across an armrest. Her skin was unnaturally pale, as white as milk. Her hair was long, smooth, and glimmering blue, shaved down to stubble along one side of her head. On that side, cybernetic implants were bolted into her, flashing with blue lights. They reminded Emet of spark plugs. The woman wore an outfit formed of black webs, and steel claws tipped her boots. In one hand she held a blade shaped like a scorpion's stinger.

Is she truly human? Emet thought. Some kind of cyborg or android? What the hell is she doing on a scorpion dreadnought?

"Greetings, pest!" said the woman with blue hair, staring into Emet's eyes through the monitor. "I wanted to look at you. To see the pest whose skin will drape my new throne."

Around the woman, the hundreds of scorpions cackled, shrieked, and raised their claws. Several bowed before her. Others reared, climbing the sides of her throne. The woman placed a hand on one scorpion's head and stroked it. She gave Emet a lopsided smile and raised an eyebrow.

"I'm not very impressed," she said.

Emet clenched his fists. He took a step closer to the monitor. "Who are you?"

"The one who will break you," the woman said. "The one who will flay you. The one who will savor your screams as you slowly die, skinless at my feet. Remember my face, Emet Ben-Ari. You will be the last human to gaze upon it."

The transmission died.

The dreadnought spun around, then burst into warp speed, vanishing back into Hierarchy territory. With a thousand blasts of light, the other strikers followed. But Emet knew they would return. He knew many battles awaited.

Duncan barked a laugh. "The cowards flee! They dare not invade Concord space."

"Not yet," Emet said, voice grim. "We won this round. But we lost many warriors. Too many."

The grief nearly crushed him. Across their empire, the Skra-Shen commanded countless strikers. They had billions of warrior scorpions. Barely any humans remained in the galaxy. Most were refugees, exiles, cowering and weak. Only a handful were fighters. Each of their lives was precious, irreplaceable.

Had they truly won this round?

"Come, Duncan," Emet said. "There are refugees who are ill, who are perhaps dying. We're going to bring them aboard. They'll need you."

Duncan suddenly looked a decade older than his sixty years. But he straightened his back and raised his bearded chin. He was one man—a vet by training. He had hundreds of refugees who needed care. And Emet knew that he would go day and night without rest to tend to them.

"Aye, lad." Duncan nodded. "I'll treat each one as if they were my own blood."

"Thank you, Duncan," Emet said. "We did well here today. This is a victory."

They worked for hours, using their shuttles to transport refugees from the Rawdigger freighters into the Inheritor ships. They had lost two hundred refugees in the battle, but they had saved four hundred—smuggled out from Hierarchy space, pale, starving, weeping.

Emet stood in the shuttle bay, welcoming a hundred refugees into the Jerusalem , as many as the old frigate would take.

The refugees limped, shuffled, and crawled aboard. Mothers clung to starving babies, their breasts wilted. Young men stared with sunken eyes, their ribs visible in their thin chests. A naked old man approached Emet. It was hard to believe he was still alive; he looked like a skeleton draped in skin. He dropped to his knees before Emet, hugged his legs, and wept.

"Thank you," the old man said. "Thank you, lion of Earth. Thank you."

Other Inheritors joined Emet in the airlock. They all wore the group's uniform: brown trousers and blue jackets. They helped the survivors toward the hold, where Duncan was moving between them. Across the rest of the fleet, other airlocks were open, and shuttles were ferrying refugees into other ships.

When finally the refugees were all aboard the Inheritor fleet, the Rawdigger freighters turned to leave. Back in Hierarchy space, the alien starships halted. Looking through a viewport, Emet saw the Rawdiggers themselves emerge from their ships. The arachnid aliens floated through space in metallic suits. They ignored their own dead, which still floated among the debris of the battle. Instead, they began meticulously collecting the scattered diamonds.

This is what makes humanity special, Emet thought, watching the Rawdiggers work. We care for one another more than for wealth. Aliens think that makes us weak. But it makes us strong.

As the Inheritor fleet flew deeper into Concord territory, Emet walked among the refugees. He poured water into thirsty mouths, stitched wounds, comforted children. Two refugees died before help could reach them, finally succumbing to weariness or starvation.

A young starfighter pilot approached Emet.

"What happened to them?" the pilot said. "They look like ghosts."

One survivor rose to her feet. She was a dour woman with sunken cheeks, wispy black hair, and large black eyes. She held an emaciated baby.

"The scorpions destroyed our villages," the woman said, gazing into Emet's eyes. "Burned them to the ground. They murdered those who tried to fight. We saw them round up humans, shove them into cargo ships, and take them off into the distance."

Another survivor—the same old man who had hugged Emet's legs—approached too. "They harvest us for skin," he said. "The scorpions. They use it for their nests. They take us to places we call gulocks —great prisons on rocky worlds. Torture us. Flay us alive." He fell to his knees again, weeping.

"We fled them," said the dark-eyed woman. "We joined an underground resistance. Other survivors too. Rawdiggers helped us at first. For a long time we were on our own, wandering across rocky worlds, finding what transport we could. Many of us starved. On one world, the scorpions caught my group. Only I escaped." She tightened her lips and held her baby close. "I found another group. We traveled the underground railroad between the wormholes until we met more Rawdiggers. By then, so many of us had fallen—to starvation, to disease, to scorpion claws. My husband. My sisters. My eldest son."