“The village of Hahz is with you,” Bort said. “We want to fight. We’re ready to do this.”
Kren was taken aback. He’d questioned several of them carefully, hoping to find those who might be willing to help him save Jeannie from the Assembly. He’d hoped for a team of at least two dozen. Yet all the fighting men of Hahz were prepared to sacrifice themselves for a little Earthling. Or perhaps it was that though Jeannie was an alien, she was also a female. The women were to be protected at all costs. The loss of one was a price too steep to pay.
Maybe it was because they’d had enough of the Monsuda after millennia of being their prey. Though few men of Hahz had been taken into the hive in living memory, each and every one of the lost left a gaping hole in the community. No name was forgotten, and no face’s memory was blurred by the passage of time.
Maybe it was all of these things. No matter the reason, Kren’s people had had enough. Jeannie’s abduction had been the last straw. He saw that. He also knew the odds of them going into the unknown tunnels of the hive and coming out again were against them.
He didn’t need to remind them of that fact. The resolute expressions of his fellow Risnarish showed they were ready to fight to the death to finish the Monsudan threat.
It took him out of his desperate mindset, transforming him into the leader he was. If he was to lead the men of the village into battle against thousands of drones, he was responsible for them. He had to do his best to keep his forces alive despite the slim chance of doing so.
He remembered something that would help those terrible odds. Something that might turn the tide for the fighters of Hahz.
He strode to the middle of the room. “Everyone, particularly squad captains, pay attention to this. Load it into your CPPs so you have some idea of where you are within the hive.”
He called up the diagram Jeannie had drawn from her sketchy memory of the hive. Kren went over it with his men, detailing all she’d shared with him of the hellish environs of the enemy.
He ended with, “We’ll concentrate our first efforts on the chamber Jeannie thought the Monsuda get their power from. If we can cut their power, or at least a portion of it, it might make all the difference.”
“Especially since so many of the tunnels are still unknown,” Bort said.
“It’s more information than we had before. There is a lot we don’t know of this hive,” Kren agreed. He looked at the dome full of men. “This fight is going to be dangerous, so it’s a volunteer mission only. No one has to go.”
Arga scowled. “Shut up and lead on, would you? They invited us to tear them apart, and by the All-Spirit, that’s what we’re going to do.”
“Then arm up and let’s go.”
The weapons distribution went fast. Each man understood his task and place, having trained for village defense since childhood. Kren was touched to see every man of fighting age he knew ready to go in. He breathed a prayer of thanksgiving that Mekay and Gurnal were too old to take part. At least he wouldn’t have to worry over his guardians.
Chal and Pon protested being left behind, as did several others, but Kren needed to keep the temple with its women under guard.
“Call us if the drones make another attempt on the village while we’re gone,” he instructed them. “I’ll send the rest back to defend Hahz.”
He didn’t add that he wouldn’t return. He was going after Jeannie no matter what.
He was heading out the door where the captains were issuing their last instructions to the squads when Chal called out, “Incoming message.” He gasped. “It’s from Elder Notlin. The Head of the Assembly herself!”
Kren didn’t pause. “Answer that we have already gone.”
He ran outside. Moments later, the air was thick with dartwings, dashing through the air and over the woods. Risnarish were heading into full battle against the Monsuda for the first time in living memory.
Chapter Nineteen
Jeannie could still hear Kren’s desperate, distant scream. That final cry, so much like the one she wanted to echo but could not, was the last thing she had of him.
The first sight that greeted her as she emerged from the short-distance portal was a large chamber. A Monsudan hive chamber. Dozens of drones were trooping out of it, heading for places unknown. They held scattershot firearms.
One of the drones that had captured her had said something about there being too much opposition. Had the Monsuda planned a full invasion of Hahz? Had the gathering of the Risnarish warriors kept the drones’ mission to retrieving her alone?
Now that she was back in the hive, memories of it and its labs began to return. The drones had frozen her within a capture field. They’d used it to pull her unresisting from the enforcement dome into one of the hive’s many chambers. Like so many other chambers she’d seen during her escape, this one’s purpose eluded her. The metallic walls were covered in panels with strange hieroglyphic writing and buttons that did who-knew-what. Otherwise, it was a sterile, lifeless environment.
One of the drones that had grabbed her from Hahz left the room behind the others without a word. The other one stood as still as she did, a few feet away, staring at nothing with its fathomless black eyes. Unlike her, it stood on the dull gray floor. She hovered a few inches off the ground. Mute and unable to move, she couldn’t scream at the drone guarding her, or sob over the grief of being re-captured.
It was clear that the seizure had been carefully orchestrated from the start. All the strikes against the barrier had been in hopes that the Risnarish would respond the way they had. The Monsuda had wanted at least one of the drones to be apprehended so it would be able to open a short-distance portal. All it had needed was for Jeannie to be in the vicinity and the Risnarish around her to be distracted enough so that they wouldn’t be able to keep her from being grabbed. The massive attack on Hahz had diverted the village’s attention all right, leading the drones to accomplish their primary task. It was a miracle that they hadn’t managed to mount the full assault they’d hoped for as well.
She couldn’t blame Kren for what had happened. He’d promised to keep her safe, but no one could have predicted this. He’d done his best, and Jeannie felt gratitude he’d cared. Now that she’d never see him again, she’d have forgiven him almost anything.
After silent minutes slid past with agonizing slowness, the second drone—or one identical to it—returned. It brought a large metallic platform that floated without visible means of support. Jeannie would have shuddered if she could. Horrific things had happened to her before while she lay on such stretchers.
The returning drone looked at the sentry and spoke. As during the other times Jeannie had been within the hive, its language was foreign, but she heard the words in English in her head.
“She is to go straight to the suspension chamber.”
The seemingly lifeless drone moved, walking next to its fellow and ushering the stretcher close to Jeannie. She drifted from being vertical to a horizontal position and settled on the stretcher’s surface. A dreadful pressure replaced the weightless feeling she’d had, pinning her down. She could move only her head. She might be able to speak now that the capture field no longer restricted her throat. But why say anything?
Her heart pounded with wild terror. The familiar helplessness, unable to do anything but wait for the coming gruesome agony.
There was no point in gazing at her surroundings. Looking around would only show her featureless corridors and chambers like the one she’d been brought to. Worst still, she would see the labs again, those infernal rooms of torture.
The drones walked alongside her stretcher as she was taken from the room and into the corridor. Jeannie did not speak to them. She did not beg to be released. She did not attempt to reason with them or any of those that walked past as they made their way down the long metallic tunnel. The drones were machines, programmed to do their masters’ b
idding. They could not be bargained with.
A Monsudan stalked past as she was floated to wherever they’d decided to put her. A few terrified tears spilled from her eyes. It loomed overhead for the brief instant it was next to her, at least eight feet tall, not counting the antennae waving about on its balloon-shaped head. Its eyes were as black and unfeeling as the drones, eyes that showed no hint of emotion. Its first pair of arms were those of a praying mantis, the second pair bristling with quill hairs. For Jeannie, who’d hated bugs to begin with, it was a creature straight from a nightmare.
The awful sight made her turn her head away. She ended up gazing into the doorways she passed on the right. She was in the lab section now, a sight fraught with more trauma than the monstrous Monsuda. She looked into a room where a naked Earth man lay on a stretcher like hers, his head near the wall that the slab plugged into. His gaunt, stubbled face was creased as he sobbed helplessly. A drone stood next to him. It moved one of the many tools that suspended from robotic arms attached to the ceiling. The drill it operated switched on, its eye-watering hum a prelude to horrific pain. Jeannie passed the doorway before she could see it bore into the man’s forehead. She still heard his screams.
His screams, and those of others. Jeannie kept her eyes closed after that, but the sounds of people suffering through Monsudan experiments couldn’t be blocked out. Soon her voice would add to the hellish symphony. The first sob escaped her throat.
The sounds began to fade. As they grew more distant, she dared to open her eyes again. The corridor they traveled was empty of anyone else. Except for the tapping of their light feet, the drones were silent. Her heartbeat sounded thunderous in the wake of all the now distant shrieks.
Jeannie glanced around. She gaped as she slid by a larger chamber and peered inside the room. Its only flat surface was that of the floor. From there, the sides sloped up, making the room a large circle up to the ceiling. In the middle of this arched space looped a metal rim. It looked like a fancy hoop earring, covered in glowing panels and alien cyphers. It lined the surface of floor, wall, and ceiling. Between Jeannie and the “hoop” was what any Earthling child would identify as a flying saucer.
Another missing memory clicked into place. The room was the portal bay. The hoop was the portal gate. The Monsuda had not created the portal itself, but they used the gate to open and close access to it. The “flying saucer” was a transportation pod, capable of withstanding the destructive forces of the portal’s passage and flying short distances within a planet’s atmosphere.
Because they routinely covered up their subjects’ memories of being abducted and experimented on, the drones never hesitated to answer the questions Jeannie had asked throughout the years. Distracting herself from the horrific experiments she endured had led her to ask many things. Living beings and the small drones themselves could not survive the violent channel that connected Earth to Risnar. The specimen-collection saucer and other craft used by Monsudan scouts and explorers had been built to manage the short passage.
Jeannie’s glance fell on the pedestal control panel used by the drones to open and close the portal gate. That was the way to the place she no longer thought of as home. Leaving Kren and Risnar filled Jeannie with sorrow, but if she could manage it, it was her best chance of escaping the Monsuda. With the tracking device gone, she might be able to elude her tormentors at last. All she needed was a chance to escape and for the portal to be unattended, unlike the last time she’d gotten away.
There had been some sort of confusion around the portal when she’d broken free weeks before. That part was still hazy in Jeannie’s mind, but she knew something had kept her from trying to get home that way.
Her stretcher slid past the chamber, taking it from her sight. Memory continued to evade her, so she focused her attention on where she was being floated to. She wanted to be able to retrace the route should she be so lucky as to escape a second time.
She needn’t have been worried. The drones guided her to the next doorway. She entered a chamber she’d never seen before. One glance, assured her it was the worst room she’d ever been in.
On her left was the typical laboratory setup with the docking slot ready to accept the head-end of a floating stretcher. The usual array of tools used to cut, bore, drill, and then heal the human body hung from octopus-like arms attached to the ceiling, along with a bright array of lights. Jeannie knew the horrors coming as her attendants guided her stretcher to its space. She looked to the other side of the room, trying to deny what was about to happen. She moaned in fear. She thought her heart might stop.
The chamber was the biggest she’d seen in the hive, bigger than even the portal room. It was filled with row upon row of capsules, extending into the distant reaches of the chamber.
There were two sections of these capsules. One section was made up of clear glass rectangles lying on their long sides. Within them were animals. Some were Risnarish beasts. A black-furred Bonch cowered among them, its muzzled face sad as it cringed. She saw Earth animals too. A tiger crouched in its container behind the Bonch, its face wrinkled in a fierce snarl. There must have been hundreds, perhaps thousands of animals in the room. All of them had been caught in a moment of movement, taxidermy creatures posed for the best possible effect.
Jeannie’s gaze did not linger for long on the menagerie. Her attention was drawn to the smaller section, full of sarcophagus-shaped metal cases. The humanoid body shape could not be missed, and the “head” of each of these capsules had a clear bubble of a window allowing for her to see within. Each bubble held a face. A few were Risnarish, but most were Earthlings.
“What is all that?” she demanded as the drones locked her into place.
“Suspended animation capsules for permanent specimens,” came the emotionless reply.
Jeannie’s heart went into overdrive. The drone Kren had captured had promised she would never go home. It had said she would be experimented on until she died.
One of her attendants went to a control panel set in the wall next to where her stretcher plugged in. It tapped a few of the mysterious buttons there. Then it and the other drone stood still and waited.
A low hum grew from beyond the capsules Jeannie could see. It got louder as something moved her way, then appeared between the rows of frozen people, floating as her stretcher did, moving toward her.
A sarcophagus capsule for her.
Panic made her fight the capture field pinning her to the stretcher. It held fast, not allowing her to move an inch. Only her head whipped back and forth as she struggled.
They were going to lock her in this hell forever. Use her for the most extreme of their experiments until they killed her. A scream welled up in her throat as the capsule arrived, floating just behind the drone that had summoned it. Her tormentor reached up for one of the tools hanging over Jeannie’s head.
“Preparing subject for hibernation.”
Her mouth yawned open, ready to shriek. A harsh buzzing filled the air instead. The drones froze.
The sound did not come from Jeannie. It filled the air from some other place, a harsh, ratcheting hum.
One drone’s voice spoke over the awful sound. “Invasion. We are called.”
The other answered. “Suspend duty until we return.”
Just like that, they left the chamber. Jeannie was alone among the frozen denizens of two worlds, granted a temporary reprieve from unthinkable fate.
Hope sent tentative tendrils through her. The drone had said invasion. Could she dare hope Kren had come for her? Surely not alone, though! But even if he’d brought his whole squad, they’d be outnumbered. The village men had gathered to fight the drones at the barrier, but Jeannie couldn’t believe they’d all come for her.
No, the outpouring of support Hahz had given her would have only extended to a safe protest. She doubted they’d all risen up against the hive, not without the Assembly’s appr
oval. The leaders of Risnar would not condone such a swift, unplanned action. Not over one Earthling.
Had Kren come on his own? Would he end up in here with her, suffering a fate worse than death?
“No,” she moaned, fighting to escape. “No, Kren, please don’t.”
The bright surgical lights overhead dimmed. The hum of the floating suspension capsule faded. It dropped to the ground with a crash that made Jeannie’s ears cry a pained protest. All the sounds of machinery halted, sounds Jeannie hadn’t noticed until they were gone.
Even knowing the impossibility of the situation couldn’t keep Jeannie’s heart from leaping with a burst of elation. “The power room. He got to the power room!”
* * *
Kren stood guard at the door to what Jeannie had identified as the hive’s power base. Arga, Nex, and Bort happily demolished the stacks of machinery and panels in the wall. As lights in the corridor flickered and dimmed and the machinery went quiet, Kren silently congratulated the woman he loved for being right.
After centuries of the Risnarish avoiding confrontation, the Monsuda and their drones had never suspected the warriors of Hahz would come after them in full force. The few guards at the hive’s entrance had been unequal to the attack of so many howling, striped men. There had been a barrier in place, one much like what protected Hahz, but it was not permeable to certain life signatures. Instead, the Monsuda used physical controls to switch it on and off, and all of the drones had possessed those tools. It had been a simple matter to key the barrier off once they’d been overcome.
Kren basked in savage satisfaction over the complacency of their enemy. All the years of shunning offensive conflict with the Monsuda had given them a sense of safety that was now biting them in their collective ass.
When they’d gotten inside, Kren had chosen to test his boom cannon on the hive’s top level. He wanted to be sure it wouldn’t damage the walls of the hive. Saving Jeannie would be a moot point if the rescue party buried itself under piles of debris. He took out several waves of drone attacks without harming the structural integrity of the Monsudan lair. As long as their ammunition held out, the Risnarish could blast at will.
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