Culture Shock: A First Contact Mystery Thriller (The Gunn Files Book 1)

by M. G. Herron

  The sight twisted my throat. I brought my gun up and trained it on Elekatch but didn’t fire because Dyna was between us—not in my line of sight, but too close for comfort. She backed up until she was next to me, and as she did, Kilos nimbly vaulted to the other side of the rooftop and came down nearby to join us.

  The three of us faced Elekatch across the roof. Kilos was breathing hard. The glowing object lay between us and our deadly quarry. Whatever was giving off that neon-bright light, it seemed to be the focus of Elekatch’s attention—and Dyna’s.

  Dyna and Elekatch stared each other down, each of them concentrating hard. My extended arms, holding the Kimber outstretched, began to tremble. It was a heavy gun, made heavier the longer I held it.

  And then I felt the sharp prodding at my temple.

  “Get out of my head!” I shouted, gritting my teeth. I pulled the trigger of my Kimber, twice. Elekatch rolled forward, still expanding and contracting as the bullets flew wide. But the prodding receded.

  “You have been teaching him,” Elekatch hissed.

  “He’s a quick learner,” Dyna said.

  “And still weak. Do not trust them, bounty hunter,” Elekatch said, turning to me. “They will use and discard you like an old skin.”

  “Looks like you know all about that,” I replied. I hoped it sounded belligerent, but to my own ears my voice seemed terrified.

  “The Federation will oppress your people like they did mine,” he continued. “We are more alike than you realize.”

  My brows knit down in confusion. All of a sudden, the gun in my hand felt as heavy as a kettlebell. Its barrel angled down. I took a deep breath and lifted it up again with great effort, both of my arms shaking like a leaf in the wind.

  “Everything he says is a lie, Gunn,” Dyna said.

  “Fight back,” growled Kilos. “He’s a sociopathic manipulator.”

  “Quiet,” I snapped, “All of you. Stop telling me what to think.”

  Elekatch closed the remaining distance in a single bound, leaping over the glowing object. Tentacles lashed out. This time, I was ready. I kept my aim fixed at center mass, took a deep breath, and on the exhalation, fired in his direction.

  Red mist sprayed into the air. Elekatch screamed and curled up one of his tentacles. Dyna thrust her hands forward and an invisible wall of force slammed into the creature, compressing his body and driving him back several feet.

  At the same time, Kilos sprinted across the roof at blinding speed and snatched up the glowing neon object that had been hidden behind the HVAC equipment. I could now see it was a sphere about the size of a softball, so bright it caused red spots to crowd my vision when I looked at it in his hands.

  “This beacon is nearly charged, Dyna,” Kilos said.

  “Give it to me,” she shouted.

  Dyna produced what looked like metal cuffs from a pocket and bent them into the shape of an infinity symbol. Kilos threw the bright ball at her. She caught it and wrapped the metal cuffs around the sphere like you might put chains on a tire in winter.

  Holding it in both hands, Dyna closed her eyes, and the red tips of her hair flared brighter than a road flare. A white knot of energy writhed in the center of the sphere, tangled up with the turquoise light like two storms clashing. Dyna’s clothing whipped against her body as waves of hot wind billowed out from the object in her hands.

  Whatever noise of pain and exertion Dyna began to make at that moment was drowned out by a hissing scream from Elekatch. The shell of Kovak’s body was torn off and discarded by two lashes of his flexible limbs. Now it was just the alien’s dark form, like some kind of extraterrestrial octopus, who came cartwheeling end over end to meet us. At its center, a gaping maw flapped and howled.

  I sighted down the barrel. Elekatch hit the deck and jogged left. Kilos jumped out in front of me to meet him. I forced my finger off the trigger just in time.

  Elekatch’s tentacles didn’t appear to be as much of a threat to Kilos as they had been to me. The albino spun in close and wrapped several of the flailing appendages around his muscled arms, which strained and bulged, the tendons popping out of his biceps. Leaning in, he dragged the creature to the ground. Now that he was outside of the skinsuit, he was nearly three times the size. Kilos held two or three thick tentacles in each arm as Elekatch twisted.

  “Now, Gunn!” Kilos grunted. “Take the shot!”

  I glanced at Dyna, who still had her eyes closed, preoccupied with the sphere as she attempted to contain it, or whatever she was doing. The knots of brightness on her head pulsed in a counterpoint rhythm to the orb.

  The hissing escalated as Elekatch struggled. I could see his pink underbelly beneath the flaps of blackened skin that were stretched like webbing at the base of the bulging head. His underside looked soft. A bullet or two placed carefully there could do some real damage. But what if I missed and hit Kilos? I could kill him.

  I blinked once, twice, as a deep sense of lethargy washed over me. My hand fell to my side.

  The sphere in Dyna’s hands suddenly dimmed. The waves of heated air ceased as the metal cuffs tightened and bit into the sphere’s outer coating. It looked like a snow globe containing a tiny replica of a hurricane whirling inside.

  Dyna’s eyes shot open. “Gunn!” she screamed. “Focus. You can do this.”

  I fought against the drowsiness. Then a knife plunged into my forehead—or at least that’s what it felt like. I bent over and clutched my hair against the sudden agony.

  “Dyna,” Kilos called, as if from a great distance. “A little help!”

  A horrible wrenching sound split the air. From where Kilos and Elekatch were entangled, a gout of blood sprayed up—Elekatch had twisted so hard with his tentacles that Kilos’s left leg had torn off just below the knee. The albino collapsed, crimson blood spreading into a puddle beneath him.

  I couldn’t tell if it felt good or bad to discover that Kilos’s blood was red, too. I couldn’t tell much of anything at that moment.

  Running forward, Dyna shoved two hands out at Elekatch. Another unseen wall of force pushed the Pharsei backward. Now freed from Kilos’s grasp, however, Elekatch’s tentacles could once again do damage. One appendage shot out, broke through the wall of force with a pop, and snatched the caged sphere from Dyna’s hands. Elekatch let his momentum carry him off the rooftop, taking the sphere with him.

  The stabbing pain in my head vanished as suddenly as it had come. Dyna looked pissed, but she let Elekatch take the beacon, and didn’t give pursuit.

  “Come on!” I yelled. “What are you waiting for? He’s getting away!”

  Ignoring me, Dyna knelt at Kilos’s side and took his hand in her own, her eyes sweeping over his severed leg, which was still pulsing blood.

  I ran to the edge of the roof and watched the Pharsei run, or twirl, whatever he was doing. Folding the orb inside his body with a tentacle, Elekatch hit the ground and took several bounding strides across the grounds, kicking off a solar panel. He dragged the husk of Kovak’s body behind him as he scampered up and over the barbed-wire fence at the edge of the power plant.

  “You had the shot!” Kilos growled. “Why didn’t you take it?”

  I gritted my teeth and shook my head slowly as I turned back to them.

  “Easy,” Dyna said. “He doesn’t have your training.”

  “Some bounty hunter you are.” Kilos spat in my direction but given that he was lying prone and shifting with obvious pain, it landed just a few feet from his face.

  I swallowed a knot of nausea as I looked at the bloody stump that used to be his leg.

  “He’ll be fine,” Dyna said. “We just have to be patient.”

  As much as I wanted to get the hell out of dodge, Kilos was too big for me to carry downstairs and back to the truck. And even if we did manage it together, he’d bleed out long before then.

  “We need to get him to a hospital,” I said.

  “Wait,” Dyna responded, the timbre of her voice steady.

&n
bsp; I had no choice but to obey. Over the next two minutes, Kilos’s leg regrew, tendons and muscles lengthening out and then weaving together, skin knitting down from his thigh over the knee and then forming a calf. After the skin reappeared, thin follicles of white-blond hair sprouted out.

  “What in the world,” I said under my breath.

  I reached down to help him up, but he slapped my hand away. Pushing himself to his feet, Kilos shoved past me, mumbling offworld expletives under his breath.

  16

  By the time we got back to my truck, Dyna was doubled over in pain, shivering like she was freezing to death. More than once, we had to stop on the stairs while she held her head in her hands. I’d also developed a headache from the effort of resisting Elekatch’s psychic assault, but mine was minor compared to what she seemed to be going through.

  Fortunately, we made it down the stairs and out of the building without further conflict. The monitors at the foot of each generator were showing an orderly display now that Elekatch had released his hold on the place, and a few lights had come back on—those that hadn’t blown up. The power plant workers were still in their corner office trying to salvage things, too distracted to notice us.

  Must have been nice to be completely oblivious to the fact that an alien—three, actually—were just fighting on their rooftop. It finally hit me, in that moment, that regardless of how things with Elekatch went, my life would never be the same. From this day forward, I knew we weren’t alone in the universe. Where others saw the bizarre and unknowable, I would be a living witness to an alternate explanation. I would never again be able to take any news at face value. Was this how Marsha Marshall saw the world?

  “Are you okay?” I asked Dyna.

  “I’m fine,” she said, between breaths. “Drive.”

  I let Kilos climb in the back, then helped Dyna into the front seat of my truck.

  “Pass me that blanket,” I said to Kilos, extending a hand into the back seat. He handed me a flannel blanket I kept there for emergencies. I shoved it at Dyna a little harder than I intended—nerves, I guess—then started the engine. She leaned against the door, wrapping herself with the blanket, shivering despite the heat. Her normally lustrous, tawny skin looked waxy under the sweep of the yellow lamps as we drove through the open gate. The guard was still unconscious inside.

  The soft whine of police sirens rose from somewhere in the distance. When we merged onto the highway, two police cruisers exited on the other side. The rest of the drive passed without incident. Dyna shivered. The red highlights in her hair occasionally flickered to a pale yellow, and then died out like little lightbulbs with broken filaments. Kilos glared at me from the back seat, his yellow eyes fixated on me as if it was my fault she had been hurt.

  “Sorry,” I finally said. “About what happened back there. It was like someone else was controlling my hands.”

  “You couldn’t hit the broadside of a Torlik battle cruiser if it fell on you,” Kilos said.

  I scowled. “Screw you, fluffy. Elekatch was messing with my thoughts! Not every day you meet a psycho telepathic octopus who’s trying to kill you.”

  Kilos scoffed and shook his head, muttering angrily.

  “Do you recall your first encounter with telepathic suggestion, Kilos?” Dyna asked in a low voice.

  Surprised, perhaps, to see that Dyna still clung to consciousness, we both shut our mouths and looked at her.

  “You were terrified,” she went on. “How long did you last? A record-breaking eight seconds? You shouted ‘Yes, ma’am!’ and jumped right off the bridge. When the simulation ended, I saw that you had pissed your pants from fright. But you were no more able to resist giving in to my suggestions than Gunn was to resist the thoughts of a rabid Pharsei.”

  A deep blush crawled up the pale man’s cheeks. He looked out the window and clenched his jaw, saying nothing.

  “I trained you, Kilos. You never would have stood a chance against a Pharsei on your first day, either. Give the human a break. Besides, none of us knew that Elekatch would be so close to activating a Tetrad beacon. We are lucky that I managed to get the interference cage on it. The defenses installed on the beacon were… formidable. Now, please, stop arguing and let me rest.”

  Back at my office, I swiped the pile of papers off my desk and into a drawer. Kilos came up the stairs behind me holding Dyna in his arms. She had fallen asleep and neither of us had the heart to wake her.

  I gestured at the empty desktop. “Lay her down here.”

  “You need a bigger office,” he complained.

  “Wow,” I drawled. “I never thought of that. What a brilliant idea, Garfield.”

  “Stop calling me stupid names, Earthling.”

  “Make me. And for the record, Earthling is not an insult.” I couldn’t help goading him. Was that petty? Maybe.

  Kilos glared, but nonetheless gently set Dyna upon the surface of battered and stained mahogany without making any more fuss. Okay, fine, the desk was from IKEA and it was probably cardboard, but it has served its purpose with dignity. I used one chair to prop up her feet, which hung off the desk by six inches. Kilos hovered nearby, obviously concerned for her well-being, and clearly annoyed by my presence.

  “There’s more to Elekatch’s story than you two have led me to believe,” I said. “It’s time you spilled the beans on the rest. Especially now that we’re using my office for shelter.”

  Kilos stepped toward me. I stood my ground, sure that he wouldn’t disobey a direct order from his commander again, even though she was injured and couldn’t do much, physically, to stop him. That didn’t prevent my hands from shaking as adrenaline pumped through my veins.

  “Gunn is right, Kilos,” Dyna said, her voice hoarse and tired. “He’s faced the Pharsei twice now and lived to tell both tales. As long as he is fighting alongside us, he deserves to know what he’s up against.”

  “Start with why you all but collapsed after putting that chain on the glowy-ball-thing.”

  Dyna laughed, and then coughed. Once she got the coughing under control, she said, “That ‘glowy-ball-thing’ is a Tetrad beacon, Gunn. It has multiple layers of defenses that needed to be overwhelmed or deactivated before I could get the interference cage on it and activated. I couldn’t risk the Pharsei escaping with it fully charged.”

  “If we’d captured him,” Kilos said, “we would have completed our mission and recovered the beacon at the same time.”

  “What did I teach you about wishful thinking?” Dyna said. “We cannot change the past.”

  Kilos cast his eyes down.

  Captured, huh? I guess I didn’t consider that when I promised the Gatekeeper his souvenir. This might be harder than I thought.

  “Who’s the Tetrad? What’s this beacon thing do?”

  Dyna sighed and laid back, panting. Even normal conversation made her breathless. “You tell him, Kilos.”

  Kilos clenched his teeth. I crossed my arms and stared at him, waiting for him to take a swing at me.

  He finally sighed dramatically, shook his dreadlocks back behind his shoulders, and said, “The Tetrad are a separatist group. Over a century ago, they orchestrated a revolution that erupted simultaneously on four different planets. The Federation squashed the revolt in a few short, violent years of fighting, but we have never been able to stamp out the flames of independence entirely. Since the war ended, the Tetrad have been working in secret, trying everything from suicide bombings to direct assaults, in recent years.”

  “So, what do they want with us?” I asked. “With Earth?”

  “To spread their hateful ideology outside of Federation influence.”

  “Ah, I see. They haven’t tagged Earth yet. That’s why you’re so worried. You want me to be your canary in the coal mine.”

  Kilos shook his head but didn’t voice an objection. Dyna said nothing. That was enough to indicate to me how close I’d come to the truth.

  “Okay,” I said. “How about the beacon?”


  Kilos sneered. “Do you not have beacons on Earth?”

  “I want to know what your beacon does.”

  “It transmits coordinates. Allows people to communicate with each other.”

  I stared. “So… it’s an intergalactic walkie talkie?”

  Kilos rolled his eyes so hard I thought he’d knock himself out.

  Dyna chuckled, which sent her into another fit of coughing. “More or less,” she finally whispered, her voice hoarse.

  “So… what’s the big deal?”

  “Well, for starters,” Kilos said, “interplanetary communication requires quantum entanglement technology. Level One comms tech must be registered with the Federation. And even registered beacons are not allowed anywhere on silent planets.”

  “Ah, more rules. Nothing like the morass of centralized government to bog things down.”

  “Our codes,” Kilos snarled, “were designed to protect innocent people. How would you like an army of rabid Pharsei roaming your little blue world?”

  “What does Elekatch want with a beacon here so badly?”

  “We can’t say for certain,” Kilos said. “The Tetrad was definitely involved in his escape, and they must have supplied the starcraft that brought him here, so we suspect they have some kind of plan for Earth.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. Not one bit.

  I raised my eyebrows. “The Gatekeeper won’t like that at all.”

  Dyna propped herself up on her elbows. “How do you know about the Gatekeeper?”

  Crap. I glanced between their piercing stares. “Vinny told me about him.”

  Dyna narrowed her eyes.

  “I guess this is a good time to tell you I found someone who could convert your space money into Earth cash for my payment.”

  “That was not very smart,” Dyna pointed out. She sighed and laid back down on the desktop.

  “I needed a guarantee,” I said. ”Besides, I was just trying to help. Don’t you think we’ve got bigger fish to fry?”

  “Why are we frying fish?” Kilos asked.