by C. W Tickner
Kane lobbed a grenade, but it bounced once and then rolled off the table missing its target. The explosion rocked the ground, throwing all their shots off.
Harl expected the Aylen’s other hand to thump down and crush them beneath its palm. He bellowed incoherently, letting the sound magnify his fears into a war cry as they closed the gap. He was ready to roll aside from the Aylen’s fists if they slammed down, but he kept his sword up in the hope of skewering the Aylen’s hand if it came too close.
The Aylen stepped back from the edge of the table and, as Damen threw one rifle down and knelt to fire the other, Harl skidded to a halt. The Aylen’s pounded its fist down against the table and the force of the blow vibrated through the metal, knocking them all off their feet.
Harl bounced hard on the surface and rolled to the edge. The drop twisted into view as he tumbled over the side of the table and grabbed hold with one hand, his fingers clawing at the edge for purchase as his legs kicked thin air. He willed himself to hold on, but the weight of the armour was tugging him down. He stared at the impossibly high drop as his sword spiralled down towards the floor far below.
Someone called his name from above, but it was too late. His fingers slipped and he tumbled away into the abyss.
Chapter 16
I have left all my possessions in the cargo bay because I’ve been given a passenger seat in the cockpit to record humanity’s first descent to another planet. If I didn’t know the truth, I would say we were over Earth. The planet’s resemblance to home is uncanny.
Countdown to drop. 5-4-3-2-1.
Darkness enclosed Harl. Not the black emptiness of death but a physical feeling. It wrapped around him, cocooning his body, engulfing him. He knew that he had stopped falling, but there hadn’t been an impact. He was just alone in the darkness with nothing but the drumbeat of his own heart for company.
Was this death? If so it would be horrid way to spend eternity. He became more aware of what was around him, but without the light he couldn’t identify anything. It was all cramped and enclosed, coarse, warm. He beat against the soft walls and felt them give, then spring back. Sweat beaded his entire body as fear gripped him and he clawed at his container.
When the hollow space he was trapped in pulsed and squeezed around him, he screamed. It was a hand. He’d been caught by the Aylen mid-fall and was now a prisoner in its closed fist. He didn’t want to die crushed in its grip.
Panicking, he attempted to bite the hand. It was a stupid thing to do. There was no way he could hurt an Aylen with his teeth, but he wasn’t thinking. And what would happen even if his bite pried the giant fist open? It meant falling to his death. Stupid, stupid, but he just kept biting at the hand, his desperation tearing any sense of sanity from his mind.
Then suddenly the Aylen’s hand shifted. Harl was flipped around and bumped against the sides of the fleshy chamber. He felt like a die rattling around in its fist, ready to be tossed down on to the gaming table. Light poured in from a widening gap in the fist as it uncoiled. Dana, Damen and Kane were standing near the table’s edge, their weapons on the ground in front of them. Had the Aylen threatened them with Harl’s death and forced them to surrender?
Harl stumbled off the hand as it lowered to the table, then turned and craned his neck back to look up at the Aylen face.
‘Are you hurt?’ Damen asked from behind him.
‘No,’ Harl said, stunned by the look of curiosity in the Aylen’s beady yellow eyes as they roamed over him.
He almost toppled backwards as the giant stood abruptly. It’s head nearly brushed against the ceiling far above. The Aylen’s huge bulk revolved in front of him as it turned, making him feel nauseous. He took a step back in reflex as the Aylen’s oversized legs carried out through a nearby door, giving him a full view of the immense room they were in.
The smooth deep blue walls were plastered with complex posters showing diagrams and blueprints drawn to an Aylen scale. The tables and work benches opposite them looked as if Damen had used them for target practise in a tank. Strange instruments had been crushed and scattered amid tangles of wrist thick wires. Books lay on the distant floor beneath, splayed apart, pages torn and tattered. Every computer screen around the room had been smashed until the inner circuits were exposed. Two doors led off from the room, not including the one to the alley outside.
‘This was drawn by humans,’ Kane said, looking down at the gigantic piece of paper he was standing on.
Harl stepped away from the edge to join Kane. The black and white drawings were like the blueprints plastered across the walls, but up close it was obvious how much detail had gone into the artful plans. Humans had added their own micro details and sketches to what Harl guessed had been initially drawn by the Aylen. Could they have been made by the Alphas working with the Aylen?
He had no more time to wonder as the Aylen came back holding a black box. It placed the box down in front of the four of them and opened the rectangle like a clam to reveal a lower and upper section. Inside the upper section was what Harl thought of as an overly thick spear hung on hooks, and a clear piece of glass, two metres across and half again in height. Beside the glass strip was a series of complex wires that linked the device to two buttons set one above the other. The bottom button was the size of his hand, but the one above it was as big as Damen’s chest.
The lower section was what fascinated him. It stood at knee height and, other than a stepping stone that led across to the button, it could only be described as a giant, levelled sand pit.
The four of them shuffled closer.
‘What is it?’ Harl asked, thinking Kane might have an answer like usual.
‘No idea,’ Kane said, leaning over to run his hands through the sand. His fingers left trail behind. He jumped back as a buzz sounded and a metal bar swept across the sand pit from one side to the other, smoothing the sand underneath before swinging back.
A bass grunt rumbled like thunder above them and they all jumped. The Aylen had either spoken or cleared its throat, Harl couldn’t tell which, but it was smiling as it leaned over the open box. Its hand rose above the table edge and they all back-peddled as the fingers angled around and unclipped the giant spear.
Was this some kind of death ritual? Would the Aylen spear them, one by one, to leave them to dripping blood onto the sand as their lives drained away? Harl didn’t want to wait to find out.
‘Run!’ he yelled and they fled. Harl’s feet slipped on the smooth tabletop and he stumbled to his knees terrified that the spear would split his shoulder blades at any moment.
‘Wait!’ a hollow buzzing voice said. It sound like one of Kane’s radios.
‘Please do not run,’ it buzzed again. ‘I will not hurt you.’
Harl froze, as did the others. He looked around slowly and knew that none of them had spoken.
The Aylen loomed over the box, the spear clasped in its hand with the tip poised over the sand pit. Red symbols lit the glass panel on the lid section of the box with two different sets of patterns. The first was unreadable, completely alien to Harl; the other simply read, please do not run.
Harl walked to the case, trying to ignore the feeling of doom hovering above him as the Aylen stared down, the spear still swaying over the box. Patterns matching the alien ones on the screen were scored into the sand. Harl stared at them until they were wiped away by the metal bar.
‘He wrote in the sand,’ he said, a queasy feeling in his stomach. He looked back up at the Aylen and then Harl’s eyes shot wide open in shock. He knelt and wrote the word hello in the sand.
A line of red light beamed up and down the sand, crinkling as it touched the word. The glass panel lit up and familiar letters read hello beside a second set of unknown symbols. The radio voice fizzled loudly as it read out a sentence in what must have been Aylen. The Aylen grinned and as it raised its other hand, the inclined its head and folded the two outermost fingers in a strange gesture of what might have been a greeting.
‘Fasci
nating,’ Kane said. ‘It’s a translator.’
‘Here,’ Damen said, stepping into the sand so that he could tug a hollow tube the size of a dagger from hooks beneath the panel. The red line scanned the footprints and then and jarring buzz sounded from the speaker. Damen leapt aside and stumbled back on to the platform as the metal wiper swept the surface smooth again.
‘I don’t think it understands you,’ Kane said, smiling.
Damen was midway through handing the tube to Kane, but glared at him and then shoved the tube at Harl instead. Kane’s grin became a frown.
‘Can’t have it thinking we’re all pompous know it alls,’ Damen said.
‘The things we could ask it,’ Kane said, ignoring him and staring around at the diagrams that plastered the walls. He looked back longingly at the flat sand, his hand twitching for the pointer. ‘So much to learn, try-’
Harl stepped forward and knelt, breaking Kane’s thought. There was only question he wanted to ask a god. He leant over the box and scrawled the thin metal pole through the sand.
It was scanned and the panel lit up with writing as the translator relayed the question vocally to the Aylen.
Kane read it aloud from the screen. ‘Why do you enslave humans?’
The Aylen looked down and Harl stared up in defiance. He didn’t care if it killed him. It had been the most prominent question of his entire life since his parents had been lifted. It had led him to new worlds and he’d killed enemies and watched friends die along the way. And all the time he kept trying to solve the enigma of the human and Aylen relationship.
The Aylen’s yellow pupils bore into Harl, making no effort to answer. Harl clenched his fist. Was it too cowardly to admit the truth or just too stupid to understand the importance?
A hand rested on his shoulder.
‘Give it time,’ Damen said.
The Aylen lowered the giant spear and drew a few basic runes in the sand.
Harl read the three simple words before the voice had finished coming from the speaker. They made his stomach churn and his hated for the creature above him twisted into a pure venomous loathing.
Pleasure, Profit, Energy.
Chapter 17
Now we’re outside the mother ship, I can clearly see something artificial at the polar cap. As we near the atmosphere, I can make out structures on the surface. If they can be seen from space, then they must truly be enormous. Why weren’t we told about this?
Kane took the pipe from Harl and scrawled “energy?” in the sand.
‘Good question,’ Damen said.
Harl could understand the profit part. He’d seen it when he had escape from the shop. And, in some sickening way, he could see why it would give pleasure, but energy made no sense.
A memory tugged at him. It seemed an age ago now, but his time in the tank ruled by The One sprang to mind. The One had sat on a throne powered by the same spheres he’d seen used to buy humans. Was there a connection between the two?
The Aylen scanned the other desks and tables in the room, then spun the box around, almost knocking Kane and Harl over. His fingers peeled back a flexible panel at the rear of the translator and, with a popping sound, drew out a brilliant half metre sphere. The translator bleeped and whirred as though shutting off. The Aylen placed it on the table and rolled the glistening orb towards Kane.
Kane looked ready to leap out of the way, but Harl braced himself and put his hands out to fend off the sphere as Damen and Dana closed in. The four of them managed to slow the rolling sphere to a stop.
‘It’s hot,’ Kane said, pulling his hand back to rub his fingers.
Harl stared down at the ball. Colours swirled inside, pulsating gold tendrils that wrapped around a blood red cloud and weaved through the mist in constant motion. Dana crouched and peered into the orb, her eyes tracking the swirls and tentacles of light. She was mesmerised by it.
The Aylen reached over and plucked the sphere from the floor, then clipped it back inside the box and sealed the cover shut. It ran the spear through the sand in a long line of curving symbols just as if it was a pen.
‘All living creatures and plants can be processed into energy. We harvest that energy to power our lives. Humans are rich in energy, more potent than any other life form.’
Kane asked the question burning in Harl’s mind.
‘Processed?’
The Aylen pen swept through the grains to form an unfinished circle. ‘Killed.’
They all stepped back in unison. Harl tensed. If the Aylen was going to process them for energy then he’d try to inflict as much pain as he could before it crushed them. The others lifted their weapons, clearly having same thoughts.
The Aylen lifted its pen in a very deliberate and slow motion towards the sand and began to write.
‘I do not kill,’ the droning voice said from the speaker, ‘I look after my own. They were precious to me. Family heirlooms.’
‘It has humans here,’ Kane said, looking around as though one would leap into view and introduce himself.
‘Heirlooms?’ Harl said, but Damen beat him to it. He snatched the pen from Kane and trailed ‘family heirlooms?’ in halted writing across the grainy surface.
‘I have cared for them for three generations.’
‘I want to meet them,’ Harl wrote using the tip of his sword. If he could meet these humans, he might understand their relationship with this-. He suddenly realised that he didn’t know whether the Aylen had a name. ‘What is your name?’
‘Vorock,’ the Aylen wrote, ‘I would like that, but they were taken just before you arrived.’ A look of profound sadness crept into the Aylen’s yellow eyes. There were no tears but Harl could feel its pain inside him as though the Aylen was able to project the emotion. A low noise, like a faint and distant moan, came from the Aylen. It was almost below the range of Harl’s hearing and stopped when the Aylen raised his head.
‘Why were they taken?’ Harl asked.
‘I owed a debt I could not pay,’ Vorock said through the machine. ‘That is why I was on the floor. They attacked me and took them.
‘What will happen to them?’
‘They will be processed into charges and used to power machines.’
‘Fascinating,’ Kane said. ‘If I’m not mistaken, they use energy as currency and create that currency by gathering it from organics.’
‘Which means?’ Damen asked.
Kane rolled his eyes. ‘It means humans are very valuable.’ He scratched his chin in thought. ‘But that depends on how they are kept.’
‘How so?’ Harl asked.
‘There would be two ways to keep money,’ Kane said, pacing in front of the box. ‘Either processed into charge spheres or in its raw form. Us.
‘Us?’ Damen asked
‘Live humans,’ Kane said. ‘Of course, there would be a monetary value attached to every living thing. I wonder if…’
He scratched a trail of words into the sand. Do charges lose their power?
‘Yes,’ Vorock wrote. ‘It takes a long time to deplete one if it’s not plugged into anything, but yes.’
‘I assume,’ Kane said, ‘that the charges run out long before humans die, so that makes living humans a better way to keep and store energy.’
As Kane explained, Vorock had been writing in the sand.
‘Will you help me to find my humans?’
It was a strange request. Surely the Aylen could find them more easily?. Plus they needed to find Troy and Tess. Harl just hoped that they had been taken to the same place. He would do everything that he could to bring them back, but if they had been separated, it would make the task almost impossible. But how long would it take? Time was slipping away from him and he pictured Sonora clutching Elo as the two of them died from thirst up on Orbital. He had to hurry.
He ran his fingers through the sand.
‘We have a problem you must help us with first,’ he said, ‘and in exchange we’ll help you to find them.’ Even as he wrote the words h
e was unsure how Vorock treated his people. It was all too much of a gamble. What if Vorock was no better than the others?
‘Tell me,’ the Aylen said, leaning in closer to the box.
‘We came from a larger ship in orbit above the planet,’ Harl wrote, ‘but it is running out of water. That is why we came down.’
Harl explained how they could fix the vessel, fill the ship with water, and fly back up. Then, when they returned, they would help Vorock locate the stolen humans.
The Aylen swiped a simple line in the sand. ‘Yes,’ the box droned.
Kane stepped forward, snatched Dana’s staff, and scratched, ‘Explain the conversion process. How long does it take?’
Dana hissed, but Kane seemed oblivious as he listened to the reply.
‘It depends on the type of organic and the company’s efficiency in this region.’
‘Company?’ Kane asked.
‘Sadly, there’s a monopoly over the energy on our planet. The corporation Harvest Ten has a processing plant nearby.. Unfortunately, it is very efficient.’
‘How long will our friends have?’
‘Maybe two days, possibly less.’
Harl stood next to Kane and wrote his own question, while Kane stayed silent, counting on his fingers, as he ticked something off on a mental list.
‘The stripes we saw from above, what are they?’
‘Death strips,’ the Aylen wrote. ‘Harvest Ten has been mining organics in those areas for a long time. After they have processed the land the planet refuses to regrow.’ The Aylen shook his head before he wrote, ‘It will be the death of us if it continues.’
‘Is that what happened outside?’ Harl asked, thinking of the machine that had ravaged the land.
‘They will have harvested my land to repay the debt,’ Vorock said. ‘It is usually done on a larger scale, though.’