by C. F. Harris
Alien’s Captive
C.F. Harris
Contents
1. Kir
2. Kir
3. Dalia
4. Dalia
5. Kir
6. Dalia
7. Dalia
8. Kir
9. Dalia
10. Kir
11. Dalia
12. Kir
13. Dalia
14. Kir
15. Dalia
16. Kir
17. Kir
18. Dalia
19. Kir
20. Dalia
21. Kir
22. Dalia
23. Dalia
24. Kir
25. Dalia
More from C.F. Harris
Alien’s Captive
C.F. Harris
Copyright 2019 C.F. Harris
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Individuals pictured on the cover are models and used for illustrative purposes only.
First digital edition electronically published by C.F. Harris, June 2019
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1
Kir
I ducked just as the plasma blast ripped through the air where my head would’ve been. Talk about good timing. Dirt pressed into the wound on my shoulder as I rolled into a crater left behind by another shot the Klikav fired at me.
I frowned as I looked down at my own weapon. No power left in the thing. I’d told the damned weapons master there was no point in giving us these things if he couldn’t give us enough of a charge to be effective in battle.
Though I guess from their point of view none of us were supposed to last long enough to run out of even the meager charge they were willing to give us.
Another blast landed too close for comfort, only there was something that sounded different about that blast. I peered over the edge of my crater and saw a tiny glowing blue orb.
It would’ve been beautiful if it wasn’t carrying a fucking neural interrupter. On the bright side it wouldn’t matter if I was peering over the relative safety of my crater or hunkered down in the thing when one of those went off.
I gritted my teeth as the thing detonated.
Everything went blank. I stared up at the sky but my eyes saw nothing. Darkness surrounded me as my body betrayed me and started to jerk and spasm.
Then I was no longer on the planet surface. I wasn’t in the middle of a pitched battle with the Kliks for control of a hunk of dirt on the outskirts of our territory that probably wouldn’t matter in the long run.
After all, this hunk of dirt was on the outskirts of territory that had once been the center of the Torvask Dominance. Not that we dominated much more than our core systems these days.
Something broke through the darkness. I thought it was the uneasy feeling of breaking through the neural disruption. It was never pleasant. I’d known men who died choking on their own bile because they landed the wrong way.
Light hit me, but it wasn’t the painful light of an uncaring reality coming back to hit me with everything it had. No, this was an almost pleasant light.
I wondered if this was what death felt like.
“Kir…”
That voice. I’d heard it before. Always there in my dreams lately. Like an angel reaching out across the void of space to caress my mind. I felt at peace hearing that voice. Felt as though all was right in the universe.
Even if I was deep in the shit. Deeper than I’d ever been before.
“Silly little soldier,” the angel said.
I smiled despite myself. The voice always made me smile. I wanted to stay here with her forever.
If this was death then it was a death I could live with. I know that made no sense, but nothing that had happened in this war made any sense.
The light hit me again and the voice was gone. This time the light was painful. This time it pierced my eyes and threatened to overwhelm me as unpleasant sounds and smells returned just ahead of my sight recovering.
Oh yeah. I was back in the throes of the neural disruptor. I guess I wasn’t dead. Which was a fucking shame.
The light hit me with all the force of a Klik energy weapon. Only it wasn’t a Klik energy weapon. It was just the bastard of a blue star that made this dustball of a world halfway habitable.
Habitable in the sense that we could sort of breathe the atmosphere for an hour or so before burning set in, and it wasn’t too col if we were bundled up just right. Habitable in the sense that it was the perfect place to send a penal battalion to die for the glory of the Dominance.
Assholes.
The twitching subsided as I woke up far slower than I would’ve preferred when there were plasma blasts ripping through the air. I looked around. Tried to get my bearings.
Right. I was buried in a crater on some shithole on a world I didn’t care about fighting for a people who didn’t give two shits about me.
Well then. That made me angry. Unfortunately for the Kliks, the only thing around to take that anger out on was their carapaced assholes.
Not that they probably even had assholes. I’d never been close enough to find out.
My energy rifle was useless. The thing didn’t have a charge. The solar collectors they sent us didn’t work on this world. The damned blue star burned at the wrong wavelength and no one had bothered to recalibrate them before sending us out here to die.
I peered over the edge of my hole and didn’t like what I saw. The Kliks were doing their little armored skittering walk across the planet surface firing off blasts every time someone was stupid enough to stick their head up out of the many craters that dotted the landscape.
I looked up. One of their warships hovered over us. I wasn’t sure what the hell they were doing up there. They could blast our position and be done with us. They could’ve nuked us from orbit just to be sure. They could’ve used gravity to throw some rocks at us from space if they didn’t want to irradiate this world but still wanted a nice mushroom cloud where their enemies had been.
But instead they were down here fighting us. That made no sense, and the Kliks not making sense usually only didn’t make sense right up to the moment that what they were doing started making terrible sense.
As though in answer to that thought I heard screaming a little ways away. I glanced over in time to see a Klik pull one of my fellow penal battalion soldiers, no idea what his name was, out of a similar hole. A stunner hit him and he went limp. The Klik soldier retreated, dragging the man behind him.
Damn. They were taking prisoners. See above about their plans only making sense when you realized how much worse it was going to make things.
Well I wasn’t going to let them do that to me. Who knew what fresh hell they’d create for me if they managed to take me prisoner?
I’d like to think it couldn’t be worse than what I’d already suffered, but the Kliks were supposed to be masters at making thinking beings miserable in new and fascinating ways you couldn’t imagine until it was happening.
At least I could take some of those skittering crustacean bastards with me. I rolled out of my crater and charged at the Klik heading for me with a stunner of its own.
I immediately regretted that decision. The thing towered over me. Not that the Kliks were that much bigger than us. They just looked that way with the way their legs spidered out under them.
I smiled. We had ways of taking care of those legs though.
“Kir…”
The voice drifted through my mind again. Where was that voice coming from? Who was it? How did she know my name?
I gritted my teeth. My strange imaginary woman wasn’t going to do a damned thing for me here in the mid
dle of a fight.
I pulled out my blade. The thing was surprisingly effective in single combat with the Kliks. Not as effective as a nice pulse rifle directed at the ass end of the things where they kept their brains, but a Klik without legs was about as effective as a Klik without brains.
The only problem was surviving all the many ways they could kill you at range long enough to relieve them of those legs. This was going to be interesting, but I figured at the very least death was preferable to whatever the hell the Kliks were planning on doing to me in captivity.
“Let’s dance, you skittering fucker,” I growled as I lunged towards my likely death.
2
Kir
I didn’t stop my run, which surprised the thing. That surprise probably saved me.
I swiped at the thing’s leg as I ran past at full speed, screaming the entire time, and heard a clink behind me. The Klik’s leg disappeared with a spray of the goo they used for blood, but I wasn’t worried about that.
No, I was worried about the sphere that landed right behind me. A sphere that glowed with a sinister blue color before going off.
The Klik who’d so recently lost a leg went down right along with me. I could smile at that even if I couldn’t actually smile because my mind was in the process of shutting down. Their armor protected them from their neural disruptors, but only if their armor was all in one piece.
I’d taken care of that. The legs were the weak point, for all that getting to that segmented leg armor to do some damage was normally nearly impossible.
The thing might have plenty of legs left to stand on, but that didn’t matter if there was any hole big enough for the signal from the disrupter to get through. Of course what I hadn’t thought about was that meant all the bulk of the Klik and its damned power armor was going down somewhere.
And as I hit the ground that considerable bulk looked like it was coming down on me. Son of a bitch.
The thing toppled on top of me, its powered armor adding to its weight. The things always looked surprisingly light thanks to all the legs they used to walk around, but they weren’t light when they landed on top of you wearing a full set of their armor.
The last thing I thought before everything went black around me again was this was the perfect ending to my time on this shithole of a world. Crushed by a Klik I couldn’t even kill. Just fucking wonderful.
That voice was there with me floating in the void that came with finding myself on the business end of the ass end of a Klik power suit landing on me.
The voice was a soothing balm wrapping around my body. A comfort from a time before the war. A time before I was captured and thrown into a penal battalion by some damned officer who couldn’t see that people with my skills were necessary in this war.
A time before my people decided the best thing I could do to serve them was go and die for them as a delaying measure to keep the Kliks occupied while the Torvask command flailed and tried to find some way to hold the invaders off.
Funny. People kept dying and yet the powers that be couldn’t figure out a way to stop the Kliks. Eventually there’d be no one left to die for the glory of the Dominance.
I guess it was my turn now.
Something appeared in front of me in the darkness. A figure that looked almost Torvask. Almost, but not quite.
The skin was wrong. It was an odd pinkish color that had nothing on the traditional green you expected on a person. She had five fingers instead of the four the creator intended.
And there weren’t any ridges on her nose. Her hair was long like mine, though, which was odd. It looked oddly masculine, not the short hair that was appropriate for a woman, but somehow it worked on her.
She also wore a uniform of some sort. Was this my space angel? The voice that sang to me when I went to sleep at night? Comforted me? Kept me sane in a galaxy gone mad?
I could hardly believe it, and yet here she was floating before me.
“Am I dead?” I asked. “Are you an angel?”
She looked confused as she looked me up and down, and I had the distinct feeling that I was being appraised by one of the drill instructors who’d taught me the business of killing Kliks back when I was added to this penal battalion.
“What are you doing down there soldier?” she barked. I sat up straighter even though I wasn’t sure how I was sitting up in the middle of a void like this. “You aren’t down yet! Now get up and show these bastards what you’re made of!”
The light split her down the middle. The void shattered into a thousand pieces all around me.
Wonderful. I was heading back to reality. Reality wasn’t my favorite place to be these days. It hadn’t been my favorite place since being assigned to the penal battalion.
Not that I had much choice.
The only choice I’d had since my ship was boarded by some fussy bastards who thought hassling legitimate traders in grey market goods was an effective contribution to the war effort was whether or not I wanted to shoot at the Kliks or curl up and die like so many others.
My eyes opened and I stared up at a Klik. Only it wasn’t any sort of Klik I’d seen before. Everything was wrong. The armor wasn’t in place, for one.
No, there were just a couple of eyestalks staring down at me. It took me a moment to realize what I was looking at.
A Klik without his body armor. Without that damnable stuff that made them so difficult to kill.
I instinctively lunged to strangle the thing. Not that it would’ve done any good to try and strangle the thing. After all, it’s not like those eyestalks were attached to their brain or anything. The worst I could do was cut off circulation to those eyes long enough that it might go temporarily blind or something.
No, the only real way to take them out was to give them a swift and hard kick in the ass where they held their brains. Preferably that kick should be delivered with a plasma rifle.
The other problem was it appeared they’d taken the time to tie me down before they woke me up. I looked down and saw my wrists straining against nothing.
Wonderful. They were using a forcefield to hold me down. Just what I needed on top of everything else.
The creature eyed me and made a few interesting clicking noises that passed for their language. Then it let out a couple of screeches. I could understand what it was saying perfectly, something about me being a perfect specimen, but I had no intention of letting on that I understood the thing.
“Fuck you,” I said in my language.
Another creature stepped over and looked down at me. This one didn’t have any armor on either. It ran its claws over me and little tentacle things came out of the claw that allowed for the more precise manipulation of the world an intelligent species needed. Let me tell you that was not a pleasant having an oversized alien crab creature feeling me up.
I looked around at my surroundings. At least I could move my neck enough to see around me, even if that was the only thing I could move.
Things didn’t look good. I’d been trapped in one hell of a spot. It looked like an examination room of some sort, and I was the only one in here. I wondered what’d happened to the other poor bastards in the penal battalion who’d been hiding in their own craters.
Were they dead? Or was I just the last unfortunate to get the alien abduction treatment from these bastards?
More clicking, and then a voice spoke in something that sounded very much like Torvask. There was no mistaking those sounds, even if the voice did sound off.
“Yes, you’ll do nicely won’t you?” the voice said.
I looked at the second creature that’d come over to inspect me. The one that was feeling around me in ways usually reserved for the kind of alien-on-alien VR modules I’d never been into, thank you very much.
“You speak our language?”
“Of course,” it said. “I find it useful to speak the language of all the creatures I research. We could use a translator, of course, but I find you often lose something when you use the tran
slator.”
“What are you doing with me?”
“Oh you’re going to have the greatest fun here,” the Klik said. “We’re going to run some experiments on you, and I promise you’ll enjoy them.”
There was something that sounded almost like amusement in the creature’s voice, though I didn’t see anything amusing about the prospect of being used as a lab animal.
Damn it. Every time I thought things couldn’t possibly get worse the universe went and showed me how wrong I could be.
3
Dalia
“Scout Captain’s log, supplemental.”
I leaned back from the control console and tried to gather my thoughts. This was another bust. My third scout of the Vega system and there were still no hostiles.
“The picket sensors around the edge of the system picked up something entering the system at sublight speeds close to one of the old abandoned jump points, but I’ve found nothing so far. No fleet craft are scheduled to be out here, none would be using the ancient jump network, and standard communication sent via comm relays that won’t reveal my position didn’t raise any civilians. It’s possible pirates are operating, but doubtful in this system. It’s a promising lead but no luck yet. Will update when there’s more to report.”
Of course there was always the chance the picket sensors picked up a piece of ice falling in towards Vega and not a massive Klik battle cruiser. They’d made sillier mistakes.