Alien Penetration
Page 34
A wave of nausea went through him as he stared at it, trying to convince himself that the ship had simply settled amongst the coral when it had sank.
For many moments, he simply stared at it. Finally, reluctantly, he moved toward the formations to study them.
He swallowed a little sickly once he had.
They had to have been in stasis closer to a thousand years—at the very least—not hundreds, he realized. They’d expected the possibility that it might be several hundred, but nothing like this.
His thoughts went to the woman he’d captured, or more specifically to the breathing unit she’d been wearing. It had been clumsy to his way of thinking, but the technology of creating such a thing, so that air breathers could move beneath sea ….
He shook his head, wondering what other technology the humans had mastered while they had been sleeping.
Lifting his head, he stared toward the surface of the sea. None of them had been carrying weapons. Knowing the human propensity for violence, however, he returned to his stasis unit to retrieve his trident. He’d dropped his weapon when he’d gone after the woman.
A flicker of annoyance went through him.
He hadn’t simply ‘dropped’ it, he acknowledged reluctantly. He’d tossed it aside.
He still wasn’t entirely certain why.
He hadn’t needed it to subdue her, of course—there hadn’t been a moment of doubt that there would be any contest of strength or speed between them—but that was beside the point. A sentinel, captain of the guard or not, did not simply decide to disarm himself when faced with a potential threat. She could have been a decoy sent to lead him from his post—or into an ambush.
He’d tossed it aside because he’d seen she was terrified and he hadn’t wanted to frighten her more by waving the weapon in her face.
Mayhap the years in stasis had slowed his wits? Or scrambled them, he wondered in self-disgust?
He’d been born a soldier, had trained for it his entire life. He was still a man, but he had never been prone to allow a woman to distract him from his duty, however delightfully formed, however pretty.
And she was that.
He did not think he’d been thinking of any of that when he’d gone after her, though—not how appealing she was physically.
He’d been thinking about the look in her wide eyes.
He shook his head, trying to shake the thoughts as he propelled himself upwards, climbing steadily until he broke the surface. Images kept flickering through his mind, however.
She’d clung to him, he knew, from fear of drowning, sought the air she desperately needed, not offered her mouth to him. He knew that with the logical side of his mind, but the other part of himself, the side governed by instincts, persisted in interpreting those moments in an entirely different way.
She’d tasted—sweet. It wasn’t just surprise to discover that that had sent a jolt through him the first time he’d covered her mouth to give her air. He’d told himself it was, but he had never been one for self deception. He’d enjoyed the taste of her, the feel of her clinging tightly to him.
That was why he’d been in no great hurry to leave her with the others.
That was why he’d taken advantage of her panic and kissed her instead of letting her go at once when he’d reached the room where they’d gathered the other human intruders.
He could lie to himself till doomsday about the instant attraction he’d felt for her, but he knew better.
No one had been more vocal about their distaste for and distrust of the natives of this world than he. It was beyond ironic that the first female to stir him deeply since Kira hailed from that tribe of man.
And the worst of it was, he recognized it for what it was because he’d been there before.
Trouble, deep trouble.
It was not the sort of connection that one could slough off with a few frantic couplings. It went soul deep. It was a physical recognition of the compatibility of potential mates.
It was almost worse that she seemed to recognize it, as well.
She’d certainly responded as if she had.
It was just as well they’d be gone soon and he would have no chance to make a fool out of himself, otherwise he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to resist the pull.
The first lungful of air he sucked in as he broke the surface of the sea choked him, dragging his mind from the woman with a vengeance. His throat and lungs burned. He coughed for several minutes, expelling the water in painful gasps, wondering if it had just been so long he’d ‘forgotten’ how to breathe air instead of siphoning it from the water, or if there was something wrong with the air.
When the spasms finally passed, he filled his lungs more cautiously, tasting the air, testing it.
It tickled his lungs, and he had to struggle to tamp another fit of coughing.
It was the air, he decided. His memory wasn’t faulty. However long it had actually been, despite the fact that the last time he’d breathed air it had been tainted with the ash and smoke of his burning city, he remembered what it had been like before—clean and sweet.
He didn’t know what might have happened to the atmosphere, but something sure as hell had. Dismissing it when he’d mastered the urge to cough every time he breathed, he pushed himself high in the water and surveyed the surface. A small boat bobbed in the water a short distance away, and he swam toward it. Dipping beneath the surface when he reached it, he swam down a short space and then shot upward again with enough force to clear the water. Shifting forms as he lifted above the water, he landed with his feet braced slightly apart for balance on the rocking deck and looked around. The design of the boat didn’t impress him. It looked little different than the boats he’d seen humans build long ago. The only real difference he could see at a glance was that the materials used to make it were no longer natural, it was far less aesthetically pleasing, and looked less comfortable, as well.
Striding toward the ladder that led up to the command console, he examined everything carefully and was a little more impressed. They’d mastered long range communications utilizing airwaves, discovered more accurate navigational methods—electronic navigational means, at any rate.
When he’d finished examining the instruments and determined the propulsion method, he climbed down the ladder again and explored the remainder of the boat from bow to stern, searching for weapons and examining the personal items scattered about, and then climbed down the narrow ladder into the living area.
They didn’t live on the boat. That much was almost immediately evident. From the remains of the food they’d eaten and the little he discovered in the cabin, he was almost certain they’d only occupied the vessel a matter of hours.
Which meant the boat was capable of a good bit of speed. It also meant they hadn’t traveled far because he could see that, although the propulsion unit was capable of a good deal more speed than the forbearers of this type of vessel, it wasn’t that fast.
They’d established their colony as far from the native barbarians as they could get and still have fairly quick access to any raw materials they might need from the land.
From here, unless the continents had shifted drastically, they were hundreds of miles from land in any direction—a good deal more than from the known ‘civilized’ lands before the cataclysm.
He was certain the boat, regardless of its speed, didn’t have the capability for that range.
The humans had undoubtedly crossed the ocean at some point and settled far closer than they’d been before, on the lands surrounding Atlantis.
Even without the evidence he’d already uncovered to suggest a very great deal of time had passed since the disaster, the fact that the humans had spread from shore to shore—moved in to settle their area of the globe—indicated a huge population growth.
They’d advanced both socially and technologically. There was nothing here, however, to make him think they’d closed the technological gap enough to represent a real threat to his people.
>
The question was, how would they feel, now, about sharing their world with the colonists of Atlantis? Would they be more receptive to aliens living among them? Or more hostile?
He frowned thoughtfully as he considered it and finally decided it seemed highly unlikely that they could possibly be more hostile.