The Cosmic Bullet: The Enigma Series, Part One

by Andrew C Broderick

  “Inaka wills it so,” Quuru whispered.

  “Yes. All honor to his name.”

  “We’re truly on our own, now. For us, and the others, we must adapt and survive.”

  ****

  Quuru and Ineete rolled across the stubbly grass, through a world that neither knew nor cared about them. They reached another rickety five-bar gate and scaled it.

  Quuru stopped in the next field and raised a tentacle seven feet into the air. Crickets chirped quietly on the edge of the blast zone their ship had destroyed.

  “Anything worthwhile?” Ineete asked.

  “Looks like another dwelling if we keep going this way.”

  “Good. Hopefully there are no more than two of the bipedal beings there.”

  “We might encounter the ones that fled this way.”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  Quuru shrank back to his usual size and they rolled forward, leaving trails of flattened corn behind them like the tracks of a giant tractor.

  Something rustled the corn off to their right. They froze, and the rustling grew nearer. Quuru slowly extended a tentacle upwards to try to get a look, but all he could see was the blanket of moonlit corn stalk tops.

  “Pre-emptive strike?” Ineete hissed.

  “No. Just wait.”

  The sound stopped for a long moment, and then began again, much closer this time.

  “This is the most afraid I’ve been since we got here,” Quuru confessed, barely audible.

  “Shh. Just stay still.”

  A pair of yellow eyes looked straight at them between the corn stalks, framed by whiskers and pointy ears. Quuru flared up. The last they saw was a bushy tail disappearing in the direction from which the creature had come.

  “That was close,” Quuru said. “We must move quickly in case it comes back with more of its kind.”

  Two wide tracks streaked across the field in their wake, with a waist-high moss-covered stone wall to their left. They soon approached the far corner of the field where two walls met at an acute angle, and Ineete looked up over the wall. “The dwelling is right there.” They slid up and over, onto grass clipped short by sheep. Some farm animals stirred from their slumber in the distance, instantly aware of the intruders.

  “There’s light inside,” Ineete said, looking up at the windows a stone’s throw away. “Plus, I can hear them talking.”

  “Their pitch is very low and sonorous. I expect they communicate much more slowly than we do, though some of it could be non-verbal too.”

  “Let’s look inside.”

  The pair rolled cautiously across the grass, which eventually turned to gravel. An already-agitated dog inside barked loudly and aggressively at the sound of their approach. “Another of those fierce quadrupeds.”

  “Let’s hope this one stays inside.”

  Quuru and Ineete remained perfectly still, giving the night back to the crickets as they remained in the dull glow of a kerosene lamp shining through the windows. The stifling air was completely still, so their scent didn’t drift to the mongrel inside. Eventually, the mastiff mix ceased its barking and Quuru reached out and touched Ineete so they could communicate completely silently, through their auras.

  “I’m going to look inside,” he said. He gingerly raised a thin stalk above the outside window sill. Inside, he could make out four figures, a younger couple and an older couple, all dressed plainly and seated around a wooden table and communicating in low, indecipherable tones. He relayed this to Ineete.

  “Now what?” she said.

  “I guess we hide until we can find two of them alone.”

  No sooner had Quuru lowered his stalk than they heard chairs scraping on floorboards and shuffling feet. They felt each other’s auras pulse in alarm as the front door creaked open. Footsteps clomped on the porch around the corner, down the three steps, and onto the gravel.

  “Slow-moving bipeds. We can take them if we have to,” Ineete said.

  “It’s that other thing I’m more worried about.” As though answering him, they heard the skitter of paws on the porch and then skidding along gravel.

  “If it finds us it’ll alert the bipeds.”

  As the low, slow voices of the humans sounded out, they heard the rapid sniffing of the dog’s nose in the weeds next to the house. A few seconds later, they were looking straight into its large eyes.

  The hound stopped dead on seeing the completely alien beings, and began to sound a loud warning to its owners. Quuru reached its neck before it could react. It slumped to the ground, rattling the gravel, completely dead. Quuru’s aura pulsed brightly as he absorbed its life force.

  “Why didn’t you inhabit it?” Ineete asked urgently.

  “It’s not physically capable enough. We need the bipeds.”

  “Then we’ve got to get rid of the evidence immediately.”

  Quuru, still touching the carcass, grabbed it by the neck and pulled its bulk towards them as the humans chattered on. Once it was only a few feet away, he wrapped its body with a second, much thicker stalk, and picked it up. He assumed a walking motion, as he could no longer roll, and crunched his way around to the left side of the house, away from the porch.

  Ineete waited, rooted in blind fear, caught between the people on one side and Quuru disposing of the dog on the other. He returned a few moments later. “That’ll work for now. We just have to hope they don’t find it.”

  “What are we going to do now?”

  “We can’t be afraid of them. Worst-case scenario, they all come around the corner and see us. We can easily take them down. I don’t think they have any implanted telecommunications to alert others.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  The pair waited, perfectly still as the people around the corner looked up into the sky and pointed and then looked over to the east at their landing site and talked some more.

  The minutes dragged slowly by. Eventually Quuru and Ineete heard the clump of shoes on the wooden porch steps and deck, and then the creak of the door.

  “They’re back inside,” Ineete said. “I’d better take a look to make sure.” She extended a stalk ten feet or so to the corner, and retracted it hurriedly.

  “There’s still two there,” she said excitedly. “And only two. This may be our chance.”

  Quuru rolled slowly to the corner and looked around.

  “There is one taller, and one shorter. I’m not sure if the height indicates gender. The shorter one speaks in a slightly higher tone, so maybe it’s female.”

  Ineete was now also peering around the corner. “We have to try and take them both at the same time. I’ll go around the structure so we can take them from both sides at once.”

  “No, don’t do that. You don’t know what you might run into back there. We’ll just have to move as fast as we can.”

  “We’d better get on with it or we’ll lose our chance.”

  They morphed into snakes and darted around the corner. The man and woman both turned around at the sound behind them. The woman managed to let out half a scream before Ineete touched her throat. She collapsed to the ground moments before the man crumpled into a heap beside her. Quuru and Ineete glowed brightly. The limp humans they were touching absorbed their auras, spreading slowly down from their necks, until they resembled dim light bulbs.

  The man and woman opened their eyes and looked at each other. An unspoken bolt of invisible lightning passed between them. Being suddenly dropped into the human experience, a bigger universe opened up inside Quuru and Ineete than the one they had traveled across. Ineete opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out.

  Quuru and Ineete’s old bodies now resembled limp refuse. Clattering steps sounded before the door was flung open. “What the hell’s going on?” The man before them held a rifle. “What are those things?” he said, looking at the pair’s discarded shells.

  “Oh, um, I don’t know,” the young man said. “They just appeared here.”

  “But why do you
look like you’re glowing? And what are you doing on the ground?”

  “Glowing?” he said, playing dumb, while lifting his head and looking down at his long, thin frame, covered by plain pants and a smock. Quuru managed to suppress his new host’s aura, and it faded. “I’m not glowing.”

  “Me neither,” the girl said, playing along as she faded back into the darkness.

  “It’s got to be more of this damned sky nonsense!” the man on the porch said. He raised the stock of the gun to his shoulder and pointed it at the white blobs on the ground.

  Ineete took Quuru’s hand, allowing them instant, silent communication. We can’t leave any evidence behind. But, this man’s seen our old selves. Do we terminate him?

  We can get rid of our old shells by burying them. We just have to get rid of the man and woman temporarily. Can you take his life force for a while, and we can give it back later?

  I don’t think so. Taking his life force would be a one-way trip only; he’d be dead. I’d rather avoid killing people.

  A distraction then? You project some plasma into the air and I’ll see if I can lure them away.

  Quuru sat up and spoke with his human host’s voice. “What’s that over there?”

  “Where?”

  A glowing sphere the size of a bowling ball appeared in the air forty yards away. Its surface was covered with unhurriedly wavering, luminous strands.

  “What the hell is that? Gloria? Look at this! It’s more nonsense from the sky!”

  The oldest woman’s face appeared at the door, and her mouth fell open. “Oh, my God! Do you think it’s a ghost?”

  “I dunno, but it’s going to be one pretty soon.”

  “Bill, no!” she screeched as he raised the gun and fired it at the orb. The bullet passed right through, a thick cloud of gunsmoke hanging over the porch as the sound echoed into the night. He calmly walked down the porch steps and headed towards the sphere, raising his rifle to fire again as the woman tugged at his arm. “Let it go! You don’t know what it is or what it could do to us!”

  “I’ve had enough of these supernatural goings-on. It’s not happening on my lands. We’ve got to send these apparitions back to wherever they came from!”

  “You can’t do that with a gun! We’ve got to get the Reverend down here and get this whole place exorcised.”

  Ineete, move our old selves, Quuru said through touch.

  Ineete got to her feet, got both arms underneath the white flabby sack, and strained with effort as she tried to lift it. “It’s too bloody heavy!” she grumbled.

  “Keep trying!”

  “I’ll go and get some ’oly water,” the woman said. “Wait, we don’t have ’oly water. But we do have that silver cross from my aunt. I’ll go and find it.” At that, she turned and re-entered the house.

  Cracks echoed through the night as the man shot twice straight through the glowing orb. He clambered down the steps and ambled toward the illusion, his aim never wavering. It was almost pitch black apart from the soft glow cast by the apparition and the moonlight slicing intermittent between cloud cover.

  The lady soon re-emerged, bearing a metal bucket that slopped water onto the dry boards, and a six-inch-high ornate silver cross. “It’s not ’oly water but it’ll have to do.” She scurried down the steps, almost tripping in her haste, then turned to face the sphere and paused, suddenly not so sure of herself. She held up the cross. “In Jesus’ name, get back! Leave our property and go back to the depths of Hell, or wherever you came from!”

  Ineete, move the damn bodies! I can’t keep projecting much longer, Quuru said.

  I can’t! she said, struggling and straining. “They’re too damn heavy.”

  Dammit! We need some way to distract these bipeds. I don’t want to kill them, but they can’t be allowed to keep our bodies or mention their existence. I’ve got an idea…

  Hit them over the head?

  Exactly! There’s a shovel around the back of the house.

  Ineete ran, her flat shoes kicking up the dirt, and her plain, pleated dress swished about her. She soon returned with the heavy, wood-handled implement.

  “Do it now!” Quuru hissed, the shape of the new body’s mouth still unfamiliar.

  “I’m frightened…”

  “Just do it! Get the man first, before he turns the gun on us.”

  Ineete pushed past the babbling woman, the shovel raised high. “Albert! Watch out!” cried the human woman.

  Before Albert could turn around there was a loud clang as the flat of the shovel’s blade made contact, and he crumpled to the ground, the gun landing beside him.

  Ineete, backlit by the orb, wheeled on the woman.

  “Rachel! No!” The woman screamed, before she too was felled with a swift blow to the head. The bucket of water sloshed as it fell, and seeped into the parched earth as the orb disappeared.

  Quuru panted, sinking to the ground. “Good. I couldn’t keep that going much longer.”

  “There’s no time to waste,” Ineete, now Rachel, said. “We’ve got to bury our old selves before these two wake up.”

  “No time to waste,” Quuru grunted. He got up and spread his arms under one of the flabby carcasses like a human forklift and, grunting with exertion, managed to lift it.

  “Over here! In the ditch!” Rachel said. Sweating more with every step in the balmy night air, Quuru shifted the heavy load into the near-total darkness, twenty yards from the house. There was a squelch as he let it fall at the edge of the ditch. He then stood, half bent, hands on his knees, panting, as he looked up at Rachel. “I’m spent. You work on digging the holes”

  “A’right, fine. I’m used to ’ard work.”

  Once at the burial site, Rachel pushed the blade into the ground, stepped on its back edge with all her weight, and levered a clod of earth up from the ground. Her breathing grew heavy with effort, but she didn’t complain as the hole gradually grew wider and deeper. After a few minutes’ rest, Quuru transported the other body and flopped it down beside the first.

  “Shall I take a turn?” he said after a time.

  “Be my guest,” Rachel said, handing him the shovel. She straightened and stretched the small of her back. Then she looked up to the horizon. “Sun’ll be up soon.”

  Dawn’s first glow cast the merest haze of light on the bizarre scene. “Our first sunrise on a new planet and ’ere we are buryin’ bodies!”

  “We better get on wiv it before they wake up.”

  ****

  It was morning. Around them now were three-story Victorian brick townhouses, each complemented by a neat lawn. Horses and carriages clip-clopped along the road in both directions. Men and women, mostly well-dressed, cast disdainful looks at the pair in their poor working garb.

  “So I’m Charles, to your Rachel,” Quuru said.

  “Yes. And, while being pretty far down in the social hierarchy as farmhands, we at least picked the right species to inhabit.”

  “And what a strange world this is! Cows, horses, pigs, chickens, cats, dogs… I think the thing we met on the field last night was a fox.”

  “And what a strange inner world! I’m feeling so many different things: fear, excitement, sadness, exhaustion. And a whole host of other unmentionable things,” Charles said, as they tramped along the road into the town of Woking. “By sheer dumb luck, we’re only twenty-three miles from the economic capital of the planet. It’s almost like this was meant to be somehow.”

  “What a lovely young face for such old clothes,” a passing man said admiringly to Rachel.

  “Why thank you, Sir,” she replied. Then she turned to Charles. “Old git!”

  “I’m exhausted and hungry,” Charles said.

  “Me too, and the grand total of all our cash comes to forty-eight pence. We’ll have to make it stretch, so I suggest we buy a loaf of bread and split it for breakfast.”

  “Good idea. And then we’ll head to the station and find out what time the train leaves for London. I’m convinced tha
t the next step in implementing the plan lies there.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Present day

  The Sigma was like a tiny, white speck of life amid a vast, black void. The Enigma, 100 miles away, resembled a large, cold, abandoned submarine.

  “Okay, we’re here. Is that good enough for you?” Holly grumbled.

  Drew didn’t reply, but merely kept scanning the display, wide-eyed. It now showed a picture so sharp that anything more than a few millimeters across on the Enigma could have been detected—except it had no detail at all. The gently curved surface faded in a smooth gradient from silver to black at the back end of the enormous vessel, pointing away from the sun. “Now we’re close enough to do laser spectrometry,” Drew said eagerly.

  “No. We’re under instructions to do passive observations only. No laser contact on this mission.”

  Drew and Achilles shot each other a look, and then Drew turned his eyes to Chris. “Come on, we’re sitting on the biggest pot of scientific gold in history. I want her to ping it with a laser beam for a few seconds. That’ll give us an invaluable amount of data to work from. Not only the chemistry of the surface, but we can check for internal vibrations via oscillation of the reflected light.”

  “I hear you, but orders are orders. We’re not to interfere with it in any way.”

  “America wasn’t founded by pussies,” Achilles boomed. “It was founded by people willing to take risks. People are remembered for the rules they break, more than those they keep.”

  Holly watched their interaction with a look that said, Am I really hearing this?

  “Come on, Chris,” Drew said. “You’ve played the good boy all your life.”

  “You don’t know thing one about my life!” Chris snapped.

  “But I know people, Chris, and I know your type. You always kept your nose clean. Went to Sunday school? Your homework done? Kept your room tidy and never missed school? Yeah, I’ve run across plenty of you. You going to keep letting someone else tell you how to live your life?”

  “They’re not just someone else; they’re our superiors,” Chris protested.