Marauder Ramses by Aya Morningstar Read Free Book Online

Venus, so the gravity is almost exactly the same.”
    “Done what?” I ask.
    “It’s better if you don’t know ahead of time,” he says.
    I feel his arms tighten around my waist. Way too tight, unless –
    Ramses leaps through the hole that had been the windshield, and my gut churns as we plummet toward the ground.
    The wind is rushing so loudly against my ears that I can’t hear myself screaming. The cold air hits my eyes as we fall, and the tears gush down my face.
    Ramses grips me tighter with one arm as he lets go with the other, pointing his armored hand straight down.
    I see it blast dozens of small liquefied strings from his hand that he shoots straight down below us. It’s dark, but even in the moonlight, I can see the grey-white fields fast approaching as we plummet to the ground. To our deaths, as far as I’m concerned.
    I keep waiting for his glove to pull off some kind of miracle, but as far as I can tell, we are less than moments from splattering into a cornfield.
    But then I feel the sensation of an elevator coming to a stop, except it’s just way harder and more sudden. My stomach shifts so that it’s churning in the other direction, and Ramses’s arm tenses against me. The ground is coming at us slower now, and I see the tendrils from his glove spreading all the way down into the cornfield.
    When we’re only a few dozen stories above the ground, our fall cuts to a slow drop. When the individual cornstalks become visible, we are barely falling – we’re nearly suspended in mid-air – and then we lower down gently into the middle of the field.
    The tendrils must have hardened and slowed our descent.
    “Holy shit!” I say, panting. My ears are smeared with frozen tears, and I’m dizzy from the near-death experience. I shove Ramses in his big, stupidly wide chest, but he is solid as a thick tree.
    “Sorry,” he says. “You’ve gotta’ agree it was best that I didn’t tell you beforehand.”
    “Idiot!” I say. But he’s right, I would have been even more scared if he’d have warned me.
    All of the tendrils pull back into his glove and re-solidify. He points his hand up into the air and fires.
    The purple beam blasts through the sky, but it stops suddenly rather than continuing on into infinity. A second passes, and then an orange fireball erupts above us. It keeps moving forward as it grows. It plummets to the ground like a comet, but Ramses pulls me by the hand and takes me away before I can even see it hit the field.
    “Come on,” he says. “We need to get out of here before more come after us.”
    More what, I wonder, but I don’t ask. I just want this all to be over, my cop instincts are numbed from the constant barrage of curve balls, but I know the moment I have a few seconds to sit and think, my brain will be alight with questions.
    We run together through stalks of corn, with Ramses’s huge body plowing through and cutting a path for me. We continue like this for two or three minutes, until he suddenly stops.
    “This is Peacekeeper 121,” Ramses says. “Activate emergency evac.”
    The corn a few meters in front of us begins to move away. A big hole begins forming just in front of us, and Ramses guides me by the hand toward the edge. We look down and see a ship that has been hidden underground; its nose is pointing straight up.
    A ramp starts to appear from the door of the ship, moving right up toward us. It touches the ground, bridging the gap, and Ramses guides me down the ramp. As soon as he nears the door, it pops open, and he nearly throws me inside.
    As soon as I’m in one of the passenger seats, he pulls thick straps across my body, tightens them, and buckles them into a latch.
    He does the same for himself, then shouts, “Go!”
    I feel a bone-rattling rumble shake my entire body, and then an incredible g-force pulls down on me. It feels as if I weigh three or four times my regular weight, like my body just wants to melt onto the ground to get even lower than it