Free The Cresperian Alliance by Stephanie Osborn Page A

hesitation, Wersky slung his gun over his shoulder and anchored the rope as most of the members of the Faith UW team hustled the two rescued Crispies toward the coast and the waiting sub. Sira called something down to the third Crispy, and she stepped back, rubbing her raw palms. Bangler grabbed the rope, looped it once around his left leg, and leaped into the pit, crudely but rapidly rappelling downward.
    At the bottom, he gestured to his back. “Do you speak English?” he asked urgently.
    "English, some,” she said in a decidedly aristocratic British tone. “They not talk us much. Order me to fix this, heal that, make this stronger. Anatomical terms I know well. Other things, not so much. I named Piki. What you want?"
    "Okay, Piki, get on my back and hang on!"
    Piki nodded and clambered onto Bangler's back, wrapping her arms around his neck and her legs about his waist, careful not to put her raw, rather bloody palms on anything.
    "WERSKY! PULL!” Bangler bellowed, bracing his feet on the wall of the pit and leaning back.
    Suddenly the pair surged toward the surface, the big Pole anchoring a good half a dozen men and women as they hauled fiercely on the rope. Bangler fairly ran up the wall of the pit.
    "HURRY!” Sira cried, and Bangler heard a scream, abruptly terminated, from near the house. “They're coming!"
    Bangler topped the edge of the pit with so much momentum that he landed on the ground standing up, the Crispy still clinging tightly to his back. The rope team staggered backward as the opposing force was released. They dropped the rope, and in one motion, Wersky swung the machine gun around his body and opened it up, adding its firepower to Sira's disintegrator as British soldiers emerged from various doors. Piki scrambled off Bangler's back.
    A burst of gunfire from below angled upward, missing them all. The next round was angled lower, and Bangler jumped in front of Piki, then gasped in pain as a round caught him in the vest, and another found his upper arm.
    "GO!” Tomlinson yelled, dropping the rope and glancing at his chronometer. “Three minutes! Bangler, activate your invisibility!"
    One last burst of disintegrator took out a corner of the building as well as several persons inside while Bang initiated his invisibility device. Wersky and the other heavily armed extraction team members covered Bangler, Tomlinson, Sira, and the new Crispy as they retreated across the farm house's small herb garden toward the rough valley and the submarine waiting in the fjord below. Sira led the way, avoiding traps and snares, and the others fell in line.
    Just before they crested the descent to the fjord at the edge of the lawn, the Crispy Piki, having observed everything, declared, “STOP."
    Bangler, and everyone else, instinctively screeched to a stop.
    "Sira. Tchchlk."
    Without question, Sira removed the disintegrator from her hand and tossed it to Piki, who donned it.
    Before anyone else could say anything, the Crispy pointed her hand at the house. A man, barely discernible in the dark, stood in front of it gesticulating violently in the pouring rain. A string of filthy curses floated toward them on the misty wind. In the darkness and confusion, Bangler just managed to recognize the man from their briefing materials: it was the British Prime Minister.
    Suddenly he—and a substantial portion of the house behind him—disappeared. Two elegantly shod feet, the bloody stumps of ankles protruding above them, were all that were left standing where he had been.
    Piki removed the disintegrator, wiped it clean of her own blood, and tossed it back to Sira. The female Crispy commanded, “GO."
    They all started running again, as the female noted, voice thick with something like emotion, “He bad man. After I start to change—hope it helps me get away soon, get helps—he hurt me between my legs, and beat me. Make Piki scream."
    "Oh, dear God,” Bangler huffed, struggling against the pain in his chest and arm. “Tell me