Weapons of War Read Free Page B

were they going to get out of this alive?

  FIVE

    Tea'va dur Orin'ek stood in the antechamber to the court of the Domo'dahm. His mottled face was wearing what he intended as a scowl but was distorted by the overall structure of his flesh and bone into something closer to a smile. It was an unfortunate side effect of the cloning process that had made him, and of the in-between state of the bek'hai and human genetic splicing. He was ugly as both a pur'dahm and a human, trapped in a phase of change that had left him alienated from the other dahm, while at the same time revered by the scientists that had created him.  
    Beauty was in the eye of the beholder, and to them, he was the future.
    The Domo'dahm's antechamber was a dark place, lit only by a thin line of luminescent moss that had been compounded and packed into narrow channels along the surface of the lek'shah; the material that was used in nearly all of the bek'hai construction. Super strong, impervious to nearly everything, it was the only reason they had survived for as long as they did. From what Tea'va had learned, when their homeworld had started to die, it was the lek'shah that had saved them.
    That was all history. Ancient history. For hundreds of cycles they suffered under the weight of their failures, each rotation of time leading them closer to the final destiny.
    And then they had found this Earth. A planet rich in resources, including an intelligent life form that had not only overcome its failures, but that held the key to saving them as well. It had taken the prior Domo'dahm little time to decided that the planet would be theirs and that these so-called humans would be both savior and slave.
    So it had been for fifty of the planet's cycles. They had first conquered the humans and then begun to use them, harvesting the strong to assist in their splicing experiments, using the middling as labor while they replenished their strength, and breaking down the weak for sustenance. Of course, some of them had evaded their grasp. They were intelligent life forms after all, able to think and reason and learn. It didn't matter if some escaped. It didn't matter if they tried to resettle their planet, to learn to live alongside their masters. And the bek'hai were the masters. They both knew it.  
    Most of them, anyway.
    A hatch slid open. A female lor'hai in the traditional white robes of the sur'Domo'dahm, the servants of the Domo'dahm, stepped through it to meet him. Unlike many of the clones within the capital, she wasn't a copy of the un'hai. She was one of the Mothers, a larger-framed model that was being produced for their higher levels of fertility and genetic compatibility. The idea of the clone type was lost on Tea'va. Some of the dahm, like Tuhrik, had been adamant that the key to their survival was to re-learn to reproduce in the fashion of the humans, a method they had abandoned long ago. He could still remember Tuhrik's impassioned plea for Tea'va to open his mind to the idea. He was one of the few pur'dahm who had fully functional genitals, and who had the potential to impregnate a Mother.  
    The idea of it disgusted him, and as a pur'dahm he couldn't be forced. Turhik had gone so far as to attempt to lure him to first experiment with his si'dahm, Ehri, a clone of the un'hai. Rorn'el had always been infatuated with the human who had sourced Ehri's genetics, and some of the other pur'dahm had found the si'dahm particularly intriguing. He wasn't one of them. The bek'hai had abandoned sexual reproduction for a reason.  
    "Domo'dahm Rorn'el is prepared for you," the Mother said, smiling widely at him. Her face was soft and gentle. He saw nothing appealing in it.
    Tea'va followed behind her, into the court. It was a large, open room, though the lek'shah here was molded thickly to protect their leader, hanging from the ceiling in wide spines and covering the floor in intricately carved plates. There were a few other pur'dahm already present, those that had