Apex 3: Shaylo Attacks by Adam Moon Read Free Book Online

left him to dress.

Abandoned and Alone
     
    The female Grey captain tried to hail Shaylo’s ship one last time. She wasn’t surprised when he continued to ignore her. He hadn’t even tried to respond to any of the prior hails.
    She’d lost everything. She was the one to order her people to surrender during the assault that had failed so miserably and now her men were all dead because of her ill-advised orders. Her one last shot at redemption was to liberate her brethren and now that wasn’t even an option now that the humans had ordered their deaths.
    She took some solace in the fact that even though the super humans had beaten her and the entire first invasion, there was no way they’d survive an attack from General Shaylo. It was theoretically impossible to beat such staggering odds, even for the enhanced humans.
    She dropped from the sky and took a seat on a boulder, far from watchful human eyes.
    She would be executed when Shaylo got a hold of her, and she deserved her fate, but that didn’t mean she was looking forward to it. She decided right then that she’d take the coward’s way out. Even execution showed some measure of pride. Her decision was akin to admitting she’d given up. She would kill herself.
    She took off her mechanized armor and allowed the Earth breeze to wash over her. The earth was one of the more hospitable planets for her kind and she’d taken a perverse liking to it.
    She flexed her fingers and then concentrated on making her internal organs fail, one at a time. When her vision spun before her, she knew she was closing in on death.
    Her last thought before embracing the void was this: I wish I could’ve killed more humans.

Tour of the Universe
     
    Jack met his mom, Sally, Hank, and Watson in the base cafeteria. He grabbed a coffee and a bagel before sitting down to join them.
    His mom patted his leg and Sally smiled across the table at him wryly.
    Hank busied himself eating bacon and eggs like no one in the room even existed. But for all Jack knew, that was how he always acted.
    Watson informed Jack that the second wave hadn’t shown itself yet.
    Jack said, “That’s good. I don’t know if I’m ready for another fight just yet.”
    Hank ’s head shot up and he said through a mouthful of bacon, “You were great back there in Nevada. I had no idea you could do stuff like that.”
    Jack smiled, afraid to acknowledge the reference because he didn’t want his mom to know what he’d done. Hank stared at him a beat too long and then got back to his meal.
    The exchange was uncomfortable.
    Jack focused on his empathic ability. He wanted to know what was going through Hank’s head. If he was jealous, did that mean he was a threat? He had too much to worry about without having to second guess Hank’s motives. He could know where the guy stood and then deal with it.
    He felt the ability rise, and emotions swirled through him, but each one was hard to extrapolate from the whole. He felt sadness, ambivalence, joy, unease, relief, and regret, all at the same time, and he couldn’t tell which emotion belonged to which person at the table.
    It was then that the ability took over with a surge that nearly made Jack scream out of fright. It swelled and grew, completely out of his control. He didn’t feel each of the emotions any more strongly; he just felt more of them. It was like he was casting his net farther and wider. He was picking emotions up from other troops stationed around the base. And then he felt every person from Cheyenne. The net cast wider, bringing him even more emotions. Soon there were too many to individually feel. They all swirled together into a huge ball of indiscernible feeling.
    He stood up and stumbled backwards, gasping for breath. An arm went around his waist to steady him and hold him up.
    His empathic net grew exponentially. He felt like he could tap into the human collective consciousness. But that’s when things went haywire. His ability exploded, unbound by