Galactic Thunder

by Cameron Cooper

  I reached for Vara. Nothing. “Out of range?” I suggested.

  “Let’s hope so. I don’t remember anything after that cable thing of theirs grabbed my ankle. All my nerves lit up like fireworks and I couldn’t think beyond it.”

  “That’s what I remember. I should have anticipated that they’d have personal versions of the snake thing that tried to grab Fiori.”

  “None of us thought of it, Danny. It’s technology we’ve never seen before.” His tone was chiding.

  My thoughts were coming together with more clarity now. I was clearly recovering. I didn’t rush to speak.

  Dalton said, after a while, “The snake things they wear…they’re designed to subdue others. Then there are these shells, just waiting for occupants—look at all the empties over there. I think part of their culture is built around this.”

  “This?”

  “Restraining others. Capturing them…and not killing them.”

  “Slaves,” I whispered, the sourness back in my mouth.

  “Yeah,” Dalton said heavily. “That’s what the speaking dude said. ‘Humans, ours’.”

  “Their possessions, by right.” I grimaced. “That explains why they snatched the crew of the Ige Ibas instead of just killing them outright. And it’s probably what happened to the other ships that Lyth tracked. The people Juliyana is looking for.”

  “But they’re not here,” Dalton pointed out. “And if this is the first time the blue sods have come across humans, how come they have human-style shells just ready to drop us into?”

  “Maybe they’ve been…I don’t know…harvesting humans for a while? It’s been twenty-five years since the Shutdown and even when the Empire was still operating, news from way out here on the fringes was pretty slow getting back to the population centers. And if these fuckers were scraping ships of every last human on them, then no word was sent about them at all. Look at the trouble Lyth had even finding a hint of their activities out here.”

  “So what now?” Dalton said. “I can’t budge this bar across my chest. It’s in exactly the wrong position to get my hands on it, too.”

  The placement of the bar showed more intimate knowledge of human anatomy. I tucked that fact away for consideration, later. “Let’s wait awhile,” I said. “If you’ve been awake for a while and I just came around, then it’s possible that if the others are here with us, they’ll come around soon, too.”

  We waited in the dark. I tried shifting around in the shell, but it was so close fitting there was no room to do much but wriggle. I couldn’t twist, the bar stopped me. I couldn’t raise my arms, or reach out with my hands, for the same reason.

  And I didn’t feel much like moving, anyway, because the damned headache didn’t seem to want to leave. My entire head throbbed and fizzed. If it was a migraine, it was a new species. I’d never felt anything like it.

  “Do you have a headache?” I asked Dalton.

  “A bugger of one, yeah. Feels like something tried to strip all the synapses out of my skull with a laser edge.”

  It was an apt description.

  A while later, I heard a soft moan. Feminine.

  “Fiori?” I called. “Juliyana?”

  A cough and sonorous breathing. “Calpurnia,” she croaked. “What am I in?”

  We told her what we knew and by the time we were finished, we heard the sound of others stirring. Moans and groans and soft curses as they figured out their situation.

  “Keep your voices down,” I warned everyone. “It doesn’t feel like this ship is in motion. We might be able to find a way off it and back to the Lythion.”

  “If we can get out of these damned cage things,” Kristiana muttered.

  “If I can reach my neck, I can activate a beacon,” Lyth said. “Lyssa will be able to trace it.”

  “Not that it will do much but tell her where we are, and I think she has probably figured that out,” I said. “She can’t attack this ship, even if she knows where it is.”

  “My head feels like it will explode if I move too much,” Marlow complained.

  “It would have been nice of them to include bio-plumbing in these things while they were designing them,” Dalton added.

  “And food outlets,” Yoan said. “I’m starving.”

  “You’re always starving,” Sauli pointed out. “What’s our next step, Colonel?”

  “Simple,” I replied. “We get out of here, back to the Lythion and back to civilization, where we raise the biggest, loudest noise possible and make sure everyone knows about these assholes.”

  “Getting out of here might be a problem,” Jai said, his tone urbane. He didn’t sound the slightest bit stressed.

  “I think I might be able to,” Calpurnia said. Her voice was rough, as if she was exerting herself.

  Well, if anyone could break out of the damn things, she might.

  “Try real hard,” Dalton urged her.

  “Maybe the lack of plumbing and food isn’t a design flaw,” Fiori said, her tone thoughtful, while Calpurnia made low, hard sounds of strain, then paused to pant a bit, before trying again.

  “I can’t see how they could choose to exclude food and plumbing,” Jai said, his tone just as thought-filled. “They’ve obviously gone to a lot of trouble to develop tech that can overcome us, and a way to transport us. Their business wouldn’t sustain itself if we were dead on arrival.”

  Lyth said, “We don’t know how efficient their faster-than-light system is. Maybe it only takes a few minutes for them to reach destinations that take us hours and days.”

  “Or maybe it does take days, but they figure we wouldn’t need either food or plumbing,” Fiori said, her tone firm.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked her curiously.

  “I think these are some sort of cryogenic capsules.”

  Everyone but Calpurnia was silent while we absorbed that and turned it over in our minds.

  “The problem with prisoners,” Jai said, “is that they persist in trying to escape. And they need food, water and shelter. If these beings have learned how to circumvent the problems of cryogenics, then it would provide them with a solution to all those problems.”

  “There’s no light in here, either,” Dalton said.

  “Exactly,” Jai replied.

  “What does that mean, no light?” Yoan asked.

  “No light means no monitoring,” Sauli said. “They don’t feel they have to keep an eye on us.”

  “Oh…man,” Yoan breathed, sounding distressed.

  “Which makes the cryogenic theory a strong one,” Kristiana said. “Is all their damned tech built around keeping us contained?”

  “I suspect a lot of it is,” Jai said.

  “It’s barbaric.”

  “So is war,” Marlow replied, his tone serene.

  “If they’re set up to keep us out of it, then why are we all conscious?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Jai replied. “But let’s take advantage of it. Calpurnia, how are you coming along?”

  She gave a great, heaving growl and I could see in my mind the tendons in her neck working as she fought to remove the bar across her shell. She could only use upper-body strength, something women were deficient in compared to men.

  “Nearly,” Calpurnia said, between pants. “I felt it move.”

  We listened to her straining against the bar.

  This time, I heard the bar give a soft squeal.

  “You’re doing it!” Yoan cried.

  We all called out encouragement as Calpurnia threw herself against the bar once more. The squeal grew louder and became a metallic groan. The bar gave way with a crack that made me jump.

  Calpurnia staggered out of her shell and up against the other side of the narrow room and stood breathing hard. She was a mere silhouette in the dim light, the golden white streaks in her hair the most distinct part of her.

  Jai spoke calmly. “As soon as you’re ready, Calpurnia, help Marlow break out of his shell.”

  Mar
low was likely the strongest of us non-enhanced humans in the room. Between him and Calpurnia, they ripped the bar off his shell in a few minutes. Then they both turned to Dalton and freed him, then Lyth. Barely twenty minutes later, we were all free, and moving around the flat, cold floor, stretching and getting life back into our bodies, while Jai urged us to keep the noise down.

  Dalton and Lyth headed straight for the exit. The hatch was of similar height to human doors, but just as wide as it was high. It was split in the middle. A double door, with no hinges I could see.

  The two of them peered at the control panel beside the door, prodding carefully.

  I examined the room itself. It was my first alien room, yet it had familiar elements. Walls, floor, ceiling. The ceiling wasn’t much higher than the pods we had been in, and was pocked with square panels. Lights, perhaps. There were other vents and protrusions that made me uneasy. A quick way to subdue a mass riot was to pour in sleepy gas. It would make sense to have outlets mounted permanently in the ceiling of a room full of prisoners.

  It was a narrow room, with only the two meters of floor between the rows of pods lining each long wall. The pods extended from one end to the other and the room was a lot longer than it was wide. The line of pods on the side of the room opposite where I had been put was interrupted by the door. One short end wall was completely featureless and when I laid my hand against it, it felt like nothing familiar. Room temperature, not rough, not smooth. Not warm like carbonsteel, and the wrong color, too. Carbonsteel extruded walls were all uniformly charcoal black. Even in this dim light I could tell that the walls were a light color, possibly white.

  I moved down the room to the other end, weaving between everyone. The other end had the only object besides the pods.

  The wall at this end was different. When I put my hand against it, it felt cold and smooth. There wasn’t enough light to judge for sure, but I thought it might even be translucent. An observation window?

  But there was a shelf beneath it. I ran my hands over the shelf and discerned the domed shape of it. The surface wasn’t horizontal. It wouldn’t hold a damn thing on that curve. The curve dipped at the back, too, instead of running straight into the wall. Underneath, the surface was flat, but sloping, although the bottom of it was mounted to the wall.

  I stood up and rested my hand on the curved upper surface of the thing. Something stirred in the back of my brain, nudging me. So I ran my hands over it once more, trying to figure out what my subconscious was trying to tell me. There were two indentations, one on either side of the dome. I ran my fingertips over them, then pressed experimentally.

  Nothing.

  Juliyana gripped my arm. “They think they can open the door,” she said softly.

  I moved over to the door. Lyth was digging at the edge of the panel with a small, blunt probe.

  “Where did you get that?” I demanded.

  “They didn’t empty our pockets out,” Lyth said and shrugged.

  “More proof that they think we are unconscious,” Jai murmured.

  “Or that they don’t know what pockets are,” I shot back. “They did take our shrivers away.”

  Two things happened at the same time. The square panels in the ceiling flickered then burst into radiant, blindingly bright light. And the door split open and each side slid apart to reveal a blue asshole, carrying one of their long weapons.

  —33—

  No one shouted, for which I was deeply thankful.

  The alien brought his weapon around to aim at us. At the same time, Dalton and Lyth lunged forward and gripped the thing’s arms and hauled it into the room.

  As soon as the alien was inside, the doors began to slide shut.

  Marlow threw himself forward and got between the closing doors, a hand on each.

  “Short the panel!” he urged, keeping his voice down. His shoulders flexed heavily as he fought to keep the doors apart. Then he cursed and shifted his hands on the edges, for the doors had two independent layers, and the outer layer was sliding past the ends of his fingers. He got the heel of each hand settled against both layers, and strained to keep them all apart.

  Lyth and Dalton wrestled the alien to the ground, while Juliyana wrenched the weapon from him.

  Calpurnia stepped over the struggling pile of bodies, picked up the probe that Lyth had been using and rammed the sharper end—which wasn’t all that sharp—into the door’s control panel. It cracked and splintered and the probe drove deeper.

  Sparks flitted and fizzed brightly. They used electricity, then—or something with the same general properties.

  Marlow gave a sigh and let go of the doors and straightened, massaging his palms.

  A whining cough sounded behind me and I whirled. Juliyana had the alien weapon in her hands, pointing at the struggling creature in Dalton’s and Lyth’s grasps. It fired a charge…bolt…a miniature version of the ball of whatever it was that the mothership fired. The ball slammed into the creature’s neck. Perhaps the armor wasn’t as strong there, or perhaps their weapons really were that lethal. The ball went straight through the armor.

  The creature flopped and grew still. Lyth and Dalton rolled away, both breathing hard.

  I whirled to confront Juliyana, my fury building. “Why did you do that?”

  She lowered the weapon. “It will give the alert if we leave it alive.”

  “We could have neutralized it!”

  “You can’t even open the doors, here,” she shot back. “And I’m not on a rescue mission.”

  Jai gripped my shoulder. “We have a weapon. Leave the rest for later, Danny.”

  I nodded. It was good advice. I pummeled my fury into a corner and told it to stay. “What else does it have on it?”

  Fiori was already searching the thing. “Get the helmet off,” she said shortly. The medic was in charge.

  “I’m standing at an open door,” Marlow reminded us. “Make it fast.”

  “I think this might be a flashlight of some kind,” Yoan said, turning a black stick over and over in his hands, pressing everything on the exterior that looked interesting. His expression reminded me strongly of his father, who wore the same intrigued, absorbed look when he puzzled over a piece of machinery, trying to figure out how to make it work.

  Bright light flared from the end of it, dazzling everyone standing in the way.

  Yoan prodded again and the light switched off. “Yep,” he said happily.

  Dalton positioned himself behind the head of the alien body, put both boots against the thing’s shoulders, and found a grip at the bottom edge of the thing’s helmet and hauled.

  The helmet resisted for a moment, then popped off like a bottle cap.

  I think we all gasped, each and every one of us, for the head beneath the helmet was human.

  —34—

  “My brain just turned inside out,” Sauli said, staring at the human corpse between us. “They’re…us?” It was a man in the suit, his face bloody, his sightless eyes a pale brown and very normal. He even had a scruff of a beard growing in. His skin was dark, but no darker than the range of skin colors I’d ever seen.

  “Door, people!” Marlow hissed. “We can’t stay here.”

  “They’re not us,” Jai said decisively, staring at the body. “Their technology, their ships…they could not have developed a completely different form of technology with no one in the Empire noticing.”

  “Why couldn’t they?” Marlow demanded. “We did exactly that in Sarov.”

  “That was one tiny piece of tech,” Jai argued. “This is a whole culture built around technology we’ve never seen before. I don’t know who these people are, but they are not from any world or location known to us. For now, we have to treat them as the aliens we thought them to be. Up, up, everyone. Marlow is right. We can’t linger here.”

  I got to my feet. “We find a shuttle, or an exit that Lyssa can connect to, and we get the fuck off this ship.”

  “There might be others,” Dalton pointed out, as
Fiori opened her mouth to protest.

  I didn’t have time to argue with him. “Juliyana, you have the weapon. You’re on point.”

  She nodded and moved out of the room, the weapon lifted and her fingers resting on a plate mounted on the side of it. I presumed that was the trigger device.

  I followed her out and glanced at the double layers of doors, my worm brain tapping at me once more. But I didn’t have time to deep-think my way to whatever I was trying to tell myself.

  The corridor outside the room we’d been in was nearly as wide across as the room itself, and just as white and bright as the room was now the lights had been turned on.

  There was a stub of corridor to the left, and a solid wall at the end of it. Ours was apparently the last room along this corridor.

  Juliyana was facing to the right, watching down the length of the corridor and waiting for us to step out and form up behind her before moving off. Whatever her problems were these days, she remained an excellent soldier. All the adventuring had sharpened her instincts for the work.

  I moved up behind her and peered down the corridor. It was lined with doors just like the one I had stepped through. There were dozens of them, until the corridor turned a corner and disappeared. My heart sank.

  “More holding cells?” Marlow breathed, right behind me.

  “Seems so,” I murmured back. I looked over my shoulder to check that everyone was bunched up behind us. Sauli stood examining the door controls on this side of the door.

  “Sauli!” I hissed.

  He held up a hand, not looking at me. Then he reached out and hesitantly touched the panel. Then a second touch, elsewhere on the pad.

  The doors slid shut, the inner ones beating the layer on this side by a fraction of a second.

  Sauli grinned, looking pleased. “A closed door won’t raise any alarms,” he murmured, joining us.

  “What did you do?” Jai asked, his tone still curious. He didn’t seem to be stressed at all about our current situation.

  “When I touched the panel, colored squares lit up. The red one closed the door.” Sauli shrugged.

  “Maybe it will work on the other doors?” Dalton said to me, coming up to my other side.