Berserker god

CHAPTER ONE

Suvi

Marta, Min-Ji, and I were in one of the caves of the new planet when the ship’s alarm system began to blare.

“Another one?” Marta said, frowning and pushing up her safety glasses until they formed a headband for her kinky, dark curls. “We already had one this morning.”

After what had happened to Torrance and the other soldiers on the last planet, we’d started ru

And if we weren’t fast enough...

We’d get left behind.

Just like Torrance was.

That was three weeks ago. Three weeks since we last saw our friend in the ice and snow of the alien world we were all taken to against our will. Three weeks since the sky cracked open like it was made of earth instead of air. Three weeks since we retreated to this new planet, leaving her to die in the snow.

“Let’s go,” Min-Ji said, standing and brushing blue dust from the seat of her grey uniform’s pants. Unlike that last planet we were hauled off to, this one wasn’t plunged into the depths of snowy winter. The air here was dry and warm, no winter coats or snowpants required.

The lack of puffy clothing and snow made our steps quick as we trekked back out of the cave. We left all our stuff behind, as instructed for these drills, abandoning our tools and the little glowing samples of odd, bark-like fungi that grew in the caves of this world.

As we got closer to the cave’s opening, the alarms blared louder and louder. But it wasn’t just the bleating of the sirens that split the sky. That chaotic rhythm was underpi

Engines.

“Not a fucking drill!” Min-Ji shouted, breaking into a run at the mouth of the cave. Marta followed suit, grey boots flying over the hard, cracked ground, kicking up cerulean dust. Heart in my throat, I sprinted behind them.

Paska. Shit.

As a kid and young teen in Finland, I’d skated my ass off on the ice rink. But I hadn’t been a hockey player for years, and my cardio wasn’t what it once had been. The result was that the distance between my two friends – long-legged Marta and phenomenally fit ex-boxer Min-Ji – and me grew wider and wider with every step we all took through the dusty valley between alien cave systems.

This area of the planet was essentially all caves and the space between them. There was one supremely large, wide valley, and the other valleys split off from it like tributaries of a river, with bulging blue caves lining them instead of shorelines. At the end of this extra-huge valley was the ship. I saw it gleaming ahead of Marta and Min-Ji and at the very same moment saw the reason for the alarms.

The air up above was hardening, just like it had over the last planet. The gold-choked alien sky of sunset became dense. Opaque. Solid. Matte and dark and not at all reflective.

It was only Min-Ji’s screaming that made me realize I’d slowed way down, distracted by the cosmic fucking horror of the sky turning into stone. Sweat drenched the back of my grey tank top and beaded between my breasts. My breath burned in my lungs as I stared upward, suddenly unable to take another step.

When the hard stone substance in the sky cracked, it felt like something inside me cracked, too. Like bone was broken. My body split from skull to spine. Min-Ji screamed again, and I was pretty sure she said my name, but I couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t tear my eyes from the darkness of the chasm in the stone.

And the glittering behemoth that clawed its way out of it before diving straight down at the ground like a human might dive into deep water.

The force of that winged thing hitting the ground was catastrophic. A crater exploded between the others near the ship and me. The force threw me backwards to the ground, knocked every shivering breath from my body. Gasping, choking on the sudden, disorienting emptiness of my lungs, I fought to sit up, crawling backwards, further away from the cavernous hole ahead of me in the valley.

And further away from the ship.

I couldn’t see Min-Ji or Marta now. Couldn’t even see the ship. The planet-quaking power that had just pounded into the ground ahead set loose a torrent of rock. High caves and stone formations cracked and collapsed beyond the crater, creating a massive wall of blue and grey rubble that bisected the valley. Some of the falling stone poured into the crater, and I watched, wild with panic, hoping all the rockfall would subdue the alien thing at the bottom long enough for me to get to the ship before it left.

I should have known that was a stupid fucking hope. I should have known that I would not have been so lucky.

Because the thing emerged, dusty but unscathed, flinging boulders from its body as it climbed the way a human might shake off snowflakes.

It reached the top of the crater and stood to its full and dizzying height. It’s got to be at least two... two and a half metres tall... It was huge and terrible and all fucking wrong, some disturbed mash-up of dragon and man. A two-legged, two-armed, two-winged beast with emerald scales and a tangled tumble of black hair. I could tell right away that this was not the same creature who’d come from the sky on the other planet. I’d glimpsed that one too, and it had had entirely different colouring. Stony greyish hide, silver-white hair, and black wings dotted with glowing lights.

This one had similar lights, though. It took a second for me to register the glow beneath the dust. But now that the sun was setting, shadows deepening and stretching, the lights on its body grew brighter in the ruined valley. Shining gold veined between the scales and all over its wings, glimmering like little flames.

The little lights illuminated its thick neck, its reptilian snout, and what looked like the sunken, ruined place an eye should have been

But it still had one eye. An eye bright with fathomless alien rage.

An eye fixed solely, squarely, upon me.