Sirens Call

by Siren's Call (lit)

  “Captain!”

  He felt Marsalir stiffen at his side, an almost palpable fear emanating from him. Gerry turned, resting his hand on his phaser, and watched them warily.

  There were three of them--tall men with loose robes in a stiff tapestried material caught by a thick sash around their middles. They were perhaps in their late fifties, their hair cropped close to their skulls, their eyes burning with disdain and--yes, rage. Four soldiers on the perimeter lay sprawled on their side. The Elders had pushed them aside with their minds, breaking through the ring of guards onto the launch pad. Gerry could see Soro pounding his fists on the air and realised that they had raised a protective shield about them--an impenetrable barrier.

  It was illegal. He knew they must be desperate if they had so blatantly broken that particular law on a UA Special Forces starship.

  “Where are you taking our servant?” It was the youngest Elder who spoke. His face was sunken to such a skeletal thinness that his eyes almost bulged from their protruding sockets.

  Gerry glanced at Marsalir. “Your ... servant is accompanying me on a rescue mission. I have been informed there is one person left on Zalaban. I plan to retrieve her.”

  The Elders looked at each other in alarm. The plumpest one snarled at Marsalir. “You have betrayed us, betrayed your people.”

  “My Lords, Alarija must be--”

  “Silence!” the eldest man roared. “You dare to speak her name among se’kaanae?”

  Se’kaanae. An odd choice of word, Gerry thought. It’s meaning lay between infidel and heretic.

  “There has been no betrayal,” Gerry said coldly. “He’s merely my guide.”

  “You lie.” The skeletal one glared at him. Then he pointed at Marsalir, who had visibly started to shake. “Whatever he has told you is a lie.”

  Gerry’s hand tightened on the handle of his phaser. A cold fury swept over him at their insubordination. Godammit, this was his ship!

  “Who’s the liar? Do you deny Alarija remains on Zalaban?”

  The plump Elder’s face turned puce. “You dare to speak her name?”

  “I dare to bring her back with me.”

  Marsalir took a step towards them, hands outstretched imploringly. “My Lords, we cannot leave her--”

  The skeletal Elder flung out his arm. As though he weighed no more than a matchstick, Marsalir’s body was thrown up in the air and hit the hull of the shuttle with a sickening crunch. He fell to the ground, his huge body crumpling.

  Gerry ran to him, knelt at his side. He had only to look at his unnaturally twisted neck to know that Marsalir was dead. Killed by his own people. On his ship.

  Still crouching, Gerry turned, pulling out his phaser and aiming it at them. Immediately the weapon flew from his grasp and clattered across the launch pad.

  The Elders faced him, their eyes blazing.

  Gerry rose to his feet, stood proudly as fury coursed through his body. “You have contravened the laws of the United Alliance. I can have you up for charges of murder. For mutiny. Both punishable by death.”

  He spoke coldly, fearless in his authority. “There are witnesses enough.” He swept his hand around the launch pad where three squads of soldiers and more than two dozen technicians observed them. “Surely you can’t mean to kill all of us?”

  For the first time, something like fear swept over their faces. The Elders turned to each other uncertainly, conversing quietly for a moment. When they were done, the plump one turned to him and said nervously, “We apologize. We have overstepped the mark.”

  Suddenly Gerry knew what he had to do. “You murder someone and think an apology will fix that atrocity?” He pressed home his advantage. “I demand a life for a life. It’s my right.”

  “No, you cannot--”

  “As captain of this starship, I claim Alarija’s life in exchange.”

  “No!” the Elders stared at him in horror.

  It was an ancient law. Before the Universal Alliance had established firm order in the galaxies, pirates and rogue mercenaries posed a problem to every trade ship, cruiser and colonial outpost on rim planets. Murder, sky-jackings, and kidnappings had been rampant. After a series of high profile kidnappings for ransom by pirates, negotiations had turned on a life-for-a-life--the release of the kidnap victim in exchange for the freedom of criminals in captivity. Later it was expanded to include all lives taken accidentally during close confrontations on spaceships. It had fallen into disuse as the UA exerted its control over most of the known galaxies, but as a law it was still the right of any spaceship captain to legitimately claim, with the Universal Alliance’s full backing.

  “You cannot claim for his life. He is our servant!” the skeletal Elder snarled.

  “As my guide, he was officially under my protection.” How he’d like to kick that guy in the teeth!

  As the Elder opened his mouth again to argue, the plump Elder held up his hand. “It is done. We concede to your right to claim Alarija.”

  Gerry smiled in grim satisfaction as the other two turned to him in confusion.

  “You can try to bring her back, Captain,” he said slowly, his eyes narrowed. “If you can.” He pointed to the viewscreen which showed the Loreto Asteroid growing larger. “You don’t have much time, and your responsibilities are here with your starship, is that not so?”

  “I’ll find her.” Gerry’s expression was hard.

  “Perhaps The Masters will have something to say about that. And I wouldn’t underestimate Alarija herself. She has been well taught.”

  The other two Elders nodded, their eyes suddenly gloating. Then all three turned on their heels and strode away from the launch pad.

  “Let them pass,” Gerry shouted as the guardsmen lifted their rifles. The soldiers parted to let them through and they disappeared into the depths of the Lucero.

  Sorovski ran to his side as soon as The Elders dissipated the barrier. “You’re not letting them go, are you? Gerry, don’t tell me you’re still going on this wild goose chase--”

  Gerry bent to pick up his phaser and holstered it. “Two days, Soro.” He turned and placed his hands on Sorovski’s shoulders, squeezing companionably. “Just give me two days, can you do that?”

  “Gerry.” Sorovski struggled with his agitation. “I don’t understand what the big deal is, that’s all. One person, Gerry. All this mess for one person.”

  “Two people.” Gerry watched as Marsalir’s twisted form was heaved onto a stretcher by the Med Corps.

  “But Ger,” Soro said impatiently, “Who’s this woman you’ve been arguing over?”

  Gerry turned away before he revealed the depth of his emotion. “Why don’t you ask her yourself when I bring her back?”

  And with that Sorovski had to be content.

  * * * *

  Alarija had come to the Goddess Chamber to pray. She knelt on the cushions arranged before the Goddess Stone and lowered her head. She entreated Tal’an to guide her. She murmured prayers of loyalty and constancy. She gave praise to her great beauty and knowledge. She begged for the lessening of the heat that burned through her body like restless flames, the power that surged like a broken cable without a socket to ground it. She implored her to give her strength to do her duty.

  The Goddess Stone shone brightly and coldly, unperturbed.

  The lapis-colored stone rested on a carved stone platform which sat on the rocky floor of one of the many underground caverns beneath the Communion Tower. Apart from the beauty of the glowing color, the rock was a shapeless lump. Legend had it that the Goddess herself, Tal’an, had been thrown out of Zenaku, the Hall of Gods, for challenging the power of Mia’ka, God of Gods. She had fallen from the sky on Zalaban, forever trapped in the Goddess Stone which they said was bright blue to reflect the color of her brilliant eyes.

  Only The Elders and she had ever entered this underground chamber. It was small and cramped, the ceiling low and the walls close. Of all the chambers off the Great Cavern, she never knew why it had be
en placed here. Except that the Goddess Stone glowed, and that glow bathed the whole cave in an eerie blue light.

  After countless hours of prayer, Alarija rose unsteadily to her numb feet. She approached the Goddess Stone and circled the stone platform. Touching it with cold fingers, she stared into its opaque surface.

  The Goddess Stone was unresponsive.

  “I wonder when you left, Tal’an? You could at least have said goodbye.”

  Rage burned through her--rage at having been abandoned, truly abandoned. Not just by the whole planet, but by the Goddess herself. In her anger, Alarija pushed at the stone platform with all her might until she felt it move. She pushed again--and the unthinkable happened. The platform toppled, and the Goddess Stone fell and smashed like glass on the rocky ground.

  Alarija sucked in her breath. She waited with pounding heart for the gods to strike her down for her blasphemy. When, after a long while, the world remained the same, she bent and picked up a thick triangular shard of glass from the Goddess Stone.

  No, not a stone. A manufactured lie. For on the bottom of the shard she could see faint markings that read ‘For scientific purposes only’.

  Hysterical laughter bubbled up inside her. “What were you, Goddess?” she asked the shard. “What scientific purpose did you serve?”

  With the shard clenched in her hand, she left the Goddess Chamber and went down the small winding passage into the Great Cavern. The ceiling was so unimaginably high it was like a black maw overhead. In the center of the cavern was a small lake formed by the dripping from miniscule cracks in the darkness above, letting in drips of the ocean.

  The center-piece of the Great Cavern was the long wall. Where once there had been rock, the whole wall had been cut out and thick glass put in its place. Beyond, the great ocean of Zalaban pressed at the glass. She could not imagine the technology that could have accomplished such a feat.

  The view out of the glass was of a hazy, swaying landscape of sea life: oranio fish with their bright stripes, zuckaloo with their vermillion shells and protruding legs, earth sharks and dashing shoals of tiny geegee.

  In the far distance, like a grey smudge, she could also make out the floating bulk of one of The Masters. Watching and waiting.

  Alarija tapped the heavy Goddess Stone shard in her hand consideringly and stepped close to the glass.

  She closed her eyes and gathered all her energy. She felt her body vibrating with power, like a burst of pleasure in her groin. She moaned as the energy rose through her body, her nipples peaking into hard pebbles of arousal.

  When she felt the power tingling in her hands, she opened her eyes.

  One of The Masters had swum closer, was observing her from a few hundred feet away. His long neck swayed, a blur through the thick glass. She heard the long, low mournful sound of his trumpeting call.

  “Let me be!” Alarija cried.

  And in a fury, she raised the sharp Goddess Stone shard above her head and drove it hard into the thick glass separating the ocean from the Great Cavern.

  Chapter Four

  Gerry set the shuttle on a landing platform near the Zalaban Palace, the white turreted castle he had seen through Marsalir’s memory. The air of Zalaban was clear and crisp, with a heavy salted scent that came from the vast ocean which surrounded the small promontory on which the turreted palace had been built.

  It was early morning, though the sky shone with the vermillion glow of the Loreto Asteroid hanging like another sun in the sky. The Sacred Eye. He could see how a primitive culture would think that, though how primitive Zalaban actually was he couldn’t guess. The Elders had seemed wily enough.

  He’d brought a bioSkan, and as he flicked it on to full power he saw a flurry of shapes on the screen. Large shapes that circled somewhere close. Gerry looked about and saw only the ocean, the waves rising high and smashing with force against the thick walls of the palace. Ocean life, he had to assume. Some sort of whale, judging by the size. He entered the data to narrow the scan to human life forms only. Immediately the bioSkan emitted a steady beep. Pleased, he followed the coordinates into the palace.

  After three hours, he was frustrated. Though the palace looked tiny on the outside, on the inside it was labyrinthine, long winding corridors leading nowhere, stairs leading up to dead-end walls, vast colonnaded halls encompassed by a hanging garden. The place was beautiful and eerie. He knew now what the end of a world looked like. The absolute silence was almost unbearable.

  The problem lay in the bioSkan, an almost obsolete model that was not sensitive enough for an accurate reading. He just knew Alarija was here somewhere. Many times he felt he was on top of the beep indicating her presence, and yet found himself on a tiny balcony overlooking the sea, or in the pantry off the kitchen with the smell of rotting meat from the food bins.

  He climbed four of the turrets before at last coming to a chamber he assumed was her room. A large round bed dominated the cool white floor, and the door to the terrace seemed familiar. He opened a door and came across a multitude of hanging gowns in silks, satins, and brocades, rich and luxurious. There was a heady, intoxicating scent to them.

  He lifted the brocaded edge of a gown and brought it to his face, sniffed it. Was this Alarija’s gown? Had she worn this? Gerry’s groin stirred, his arousal instantaneous as he imagined her curves, remembered the taste of her on his tongue. Then he abruptly dropped the dress and stepped away.

  He was like a man obsessed. The stalker of a woman he had never met. And yet she was more real to him than Lara, who was like the faint memory of a dream.

  Damn! He shook the guilt away. He’d mourned long and hard for Lara. He wouldn’t forget her.

  But there was someone else who needed him, someone else he could save, if the damn bioSkan would work just properly.

  * * * *

  Night had fallen like a rich dark blanket when he found the entrance to the caves.

  Gerry had returned to the audience hall for the third time. It was a large room with rich tapestries depicting sea life covering the stone walls. He’d made a systematic search of the small warren of rooms leading off it. One room was completely bare, nothing more than a cell, except for a set of wooden doors set in the ground.

  He thought nothing of it the first time, but on his second frustrated search, he tapped his foot on the doors. A hollow sound echoed about the room. He pulled the doors opened and stared down at the darkness beneath him, at the worn steps leading down. The smell of damp and chilling cold was powerful.

  He switched on his flashlight, hooked the steadily beeping bioSkan to his belt, and started down the glistening stone stairs.

  * * * *

  He’s here! Wake up!

  Alarija eyes snapped open. She was laying face-down on the sandy floor of the Great Cavern where she had fallen. She sat up, wondering at the voice. Was it a projection of The Masters or something else?

  If it meant anything, she was too tired to try to find out. She rose wearily to her feet and turned to the glass wall.

  Great cracks slashed across it, shooting from the Goddess Stone shard embedded in its center. But the glass held. Alarija didn’t know whether to be sorry or grateful.

  Her hands ached, and she looked down and saw they were covered in blood from the slash across the palm of her hand caused by her grip on the shard. Her clothes were spattered with it, soiled and ruined. Her face and hair felt gritty from the sand.

  Alarija turned to the center of the cavern, looked at the cool darkness of the lake. She could bathe, she thought as she stepped closer. The sheer coldness of the water would bring her wits back.

  For what she had done to the glass of the Great Cavern was nothing more than a sign of her madness. It would not happen again.

  She undid her jewelled belt, threw it to the floor, then shrugged off the gown and let it pool at her feet. Stepping over it, she walked naked to the edge of the water and waded into the freezing cold at its center.

  * * * *

  By h
is estimation it was almost dawn by the time Gerry found the Great Cavern.

  For a long time he’d been lost in the winding corridors of the caves. The bioSkan had died on him a long time ago, somehow unable to function so far below ground. Eventually he’d again found the stairs that had lead him down. He’d taken off his jacket and vest, then torn the vest and loosened a woollen thread and pulled until it began to unravel. He tied the loose thread around a stalagmite edging the side of the cave and started searching again, holding the unravelling vest in one hand and the flashlight in the other. This time he would be able to retrace his steps.

  Finally, one of the narrow rocky corridors had become sandy, widening to become the entrance to a great cavern. It was huge, studded with clumps of glistening stalagmites clinging to rocky outcrops on the sand-covered floor. Experimentally, he turned off his flashlight and found that the walls gave off a faint luminescent glow, enough for him to find his way.

  He skirted a large lake in the middle of the cavern, drawn to the far wall which appeared to have a green glow. The sea.

  Gerry stood in amazement before the glass wall separating the ocean from the cave. Jagged cracks zigzagged across it from an object deliberately embedded in the glass. He touched the jagged edge of the thick blue shard of piercing the glass. It was sticky. Blood. Alarija!

  He turned and looked at the floor, noticed the droplet of blood leading to an indentation on the sandy floor as though someone had been lying there. A pool of blood had formed at its side. And then there was a scuffing of sand, and footprints heading towards the center of the cave. He followed them.

  Gerry found her dress by the side of the cave lake. He bent and held it in his hand, buried his face in it to inhale the familiar scent. His heart was beating wildly as he looked about for her.

  Then he noticed the footprints leading to the edge of the water.

  Gerry dropped the dress and stared out into the darkness of the lake, listening for any sound that would indicate she was still alive and had not drowned.