“Shit!” I uttered as I rolled to the side. Paige had been doing good work while I remembered how I’d gotten there, so I was able to dodge without any nausea from my concussed head. I sprang to my feet before the ogre could extricate his blunt instrument from the hole it had torn in the floor. I could hear the bartender cursing at the damn changeling tearing up his place.
In its 406 annums, the FCS Nebula had never come into contact with aliens. Instead, some of us became them. About a hundred annums out from Sol, our forefathers had encountered a device of some sort floating in interstellar space. No one remembered exactly what it was or what it looked like, except maybe some of the elder Feyn, but everyone knew what happened when our idiot ancestors took it onboard. A plague was released, a mutagenic retrovirus that altered the infected’s DNA. It became a ship-wide pandemic and before it was stamped out, nearly half the population had been changed into something no longer human. The three separate, and entirely new, species were collectively referred to as changelings.
The hulking, ugly changeling in front of me finally managed to yank free his bludgeon, spinning to send the chunk of steel’s momentum toward my head. I ducked it easily, muttering to myself as I did. The barely uttered phrase sent a wash of heat over my right hand, invisible except for the rapidly rippling air around it. I tried to focus the heat, force it into a knife-like blowtorch about my fingers, but the power—both physical and will—was just not there. I must have taken a hell of a blow to the head. C’mon Paige, I’m workin’ here! I thought, frantically.
You’re in a bar fight, Link. I’m working to keep you alive, she groused.