The Acolytes of Crane (Theodore Crane, #1)(79)

If it weren’t for Ed, I might have slowly starved away in the rattletrap. With his incredible robotic strength, Ed forced the roof slightly higher, affording me a clear reach to my sword. I stretched my fingers, feeling the renewed circulation of blood within the ligaments of my biceps and shoulders. I massaged my shoulder, just so I could convince myself my blood pressure was returning to normal.

‘Just a little more, Ed!’ I yelled.

I grabbed my gun-blade Wrath, and flipped the switch to on, using Wrath to initiate destruction on the hull of the ship. Wrath was glorious at that moment. As I felt a swell of pride, I slashed away at the junk. The damage incurred was devastating to the vessel after I let loose the fury of Wrath.

I stood on top of the ship wreckage and reached inward to grab Ed to pull him out, but to my surprise, he levitated toward me. The metal compartment on his back was a type of jet pack. Yes, he was the bot that was just full of surprises.

‘Oh man,’ I said, shaking my head at our narrow escape. ‘We were dead—we were so dead, Ed.’ I grabbed my hair, attempting to set my thoughts straight. ‘Now I’m rhyming! Ed, you only have a limited supply of energy. We need to save it. I don’t want you to use your jet pack because I can carry us both with my lifters.’ He told me that he only needed to be plugged in for a second to reach maximum energy capacity. Wow!

Upon his side, Ed pulled out a phaser and started looking about with high alert. I let my sword’s phosphorus green blade glow in the shade under the canopy.

The jungle was thick and overwhelmingly lush. There were thousands of different species of plants surrounding us. We stared at the ecosystem—both stupefied with awe. If Ed could feel emotion, that is.

‘Don’t make any sudden move,’ a voice whispered from behind my ear. I felt a sharp point of a weapon teasing about on the skin on the back of my neck.

The honed object intensified the tension of my neck muscles. I would not look back, lest I provoke whatever was behind me.

‘You hear me robot? Don’t move! I will drive this spear into the spine of your master,’ the male voice said, restricting us to an awkward silence. “Just start walking forward and don’t look back, if I even see the whites of your eyes or a flap of your binoculars, robot, this boy will be a human shish kabob.’

We walked through a worn path suffocated by overhanging foliage. Claustrophobia—a fear that I was never acquainted with—swelled up inside me. Finally, after several minutes of hacking away at the frondescence, there was a clearing in front of us. After we broke through the last layer of the forest, we were at the edge of a cliff. I was afraid to look down.

‘Now, which one of you is in command? Don’t try anything either or you will regret it,’ the alien said. He poked at my neck with his spear from behind, daring me to fall into the canyon.

Ed was quiet, because I was in charge, and like a dork I said, ‘I am the Human Messiah.’

‘Ha, you look like a meal for the Morlorian, and your little robot looks like a good souvenir for the dark Elon King,’ he said, laughing for a moment. ‘Messiah! You could not snap a twig if you fell on it with a bucket of skeetle beetles in hand. Now, what is your business here?


‘We crashed. That is it—we have no mission,’ I said.

‘Then survival is your mission—hmm?’ He stroked his beard in wonder, ‘Ah, but you are a Messiah? You are lying! Tell me, what are you doing here? Or I will cut you up like a water flicket and caramelize you with today’s bonfire,’ the masculine alien said, touching the tip of his weapon against the bony ridge of my shoulder blade.

That did it. I wasn’t going to take any further intimidation from anyone.

With a swift, deft move, I unsheathed Wrath and spun to greet him with its scorching heat and razor-sharp blade. My sword trimmed his long brown beard in half with a singe of his shag. In my haste, I had lost my balance, and teetered at the edge of the cliff. It appeared I was about to fall to my death fifty thousand feet below.

Ed reached out to me, but failed.

‘Master!’ he cried out, with alarm.

A second later, my shoulder smashed into a hard surface, and my trusted gun-blade, Wrath, clanked right beside me. As Wrath was about to bounce off the edge of the newly discovered platform that saved me, I scrambled and grasped it, sighing with relief. Without that sword, I would have been a fart in the wind.

Now that I had a secure moment to scan my surroundings, I discovered that I had fallen onto a rickety structure supported by ropes, situated just below the edge of the cliff. It was similar to the design of a window washer’s platform.

‘What the heck…’ I said in shock.

The makeshift platform started creaking back up to safety. As my head rose above the cliff’s edge, I saw the stranger grunting to turn a structure attached to a tree trunk in front of him, a device that looked like a steering wheel attached to a pulley system. He was helping me.

After shakily crawling back up onto the ground, I took a close look at the Tritillia being that had threatened us previously. He appeared human-like enough. Atop his bald head, he wore a projection band that looked similar to my rolesk. He had a head that appeared proportionally large, as well as an enormously thick neck. His frizzled, unkempt beard showed the singed whiskers from its brush with my sword. His tan robe comfortably clothed him, all the way down to his ankles.

As I stared at him, he growled, ‘I will bring you to my home to gather your wits, but afterwards you are on your own. You are not a Messiah until you prove that you can survive on nothing but your own wits.’