Read Stones: Theory (Stones #4) for Free Online Page B

On the way, he presses the spot on his sternum that activates the skin armor. In a few seconds, it flows over his body, turning him blue.
    Bolts of lightning sizzle through the air, raining down around him onto random pieces of camp equipment scattered around the forest.
    Yarah, I need your help
, Matt thinks
.
    “I’m here.” The little girl’s voice is just a whisper in Matt’s brain. “Almost to the caves.”
    Are there any crew members in the ships? Can you tell?
    “It’s hard without my Stone. Just a minute. Let me try to find their minds.”
    A sudden burst of heat spreads out above him. Looking up, he is squarely under the belly of a transport. The trees almost open up as a long tube of fire descends. Engulfed in the flames, he drops to the ground as the pain spreads evenly over his skin, momentarily crippling him.
    A scream rips through his mind.
    Yarah?
    “Sorry.” Her voice breaks into a sob. “I felt it too. Are you OK?”
    It’s just a sensation. No damage.
    As the pain recedes, Matt stands. His clothes hang in shreds on his body. Reaching down, he picks the Stone up off the forest floor.
    “I can sense thinking in the ships,” Yarah says. “I heard what they’re doing. Something about switching from targeting metal to bio-sensors.” Her voice grows frantic. “They’re moving over the Children.”
    “OK,” Matt says. “So the ships have a human crew. I’m not going to blow them up and commit murder. There has to be another way.”
    He stops ten meters from the group of old and young, milling around in the trees, overtaken by utter confusion and bewilderment. The shadow of a transport hangs in the sky directly above. The other transport begins to slip into position alongside it, like two whales swimming together.
    A young man breaks from the crowd and runs downhill past a fallen log and between two upright tree trunks. As he stumbles, an arc of blue lightning shoots down from the sky and pierces his back. His arms fly above his head, and he twists to one side. A red line streaks the front of his T-shirt before it rips open in a crimson explosion.
    “They’ve already counted the bodies, all two hundred of them. They’re going to kill them all.” Yarah screams into Matt’s mind. “You have to do something. Now!”
    Gripping the Stone in his hand, Matt looks up at the ships floating above the trees. Nothing about their outward appearance has changed, but in the space of a few seconds they’ve taken on the aspect of ravenous sharks, hovering over their prey, pausing just before the kill.
    Damn you, Ryzaard.
    Raising his Stone, Matt points it skyward. As it glows white as the sun, a jagged beam of blue energy leaps out and up. Just before it reaches the ships, it forks into two and makes contact with each transport. Radiating out from the points of impact, organic veins of blue energy crawl across the surface of each ship, like a sudden growth of kudzu vines. The stench of ozone pierces the air, accompanied by the sizzle-pop of dancing arcs of energy between the ships.
    The outer hulls of the transports glow light purple. A quiet hum emanates from deep inside their metal skins.
    And then it stops.
    The Children stare up in expectation.
    A single halo of light engulfs the ships. It closes in on them, and then bursts out in a blinding ring.
    Only Matt is able to keep his eyes open. As he looks up, the ships dissolve away. Steel, glass and silicon, anything without DNA in its chemical makeup, disintegrates into black sand and drops through the forest canopy to the ground.
    Twenty soldiers plummet into the trees below, without weapons and naked except for a few rags of cotton fiber still clinging to their bodies.
    The Children stare in amazement at the men lying on the ground among them, or hanging from trees, most of them dazed and confused, many moaning from broken bones.
    Some of the young men among the Children reach for clubs or knives.
    “Do not harm them.” Matt walks down the hill.