A few seconds later we had traveled thousands of miles and I put us exactly above the third Gleezhian vessel, matching their speed, but still miles apart. In that same instant we stopped our pacing and Coreg fired the freezer charge. I could see on the screen that he had hit the mark. Our other ships, too, had accurately fired. All of the Gleezhian spacecrafts appeared on the screen with glowing red auras.
“I’ll take over the docking,” Coreg said. We crossed the distance and latched onto the third ship. I assumed the other Klaqin ships had done the same. Coreg engaged the artificial gravity and the soldiers unbuckled themselves from their seats.
I had questions I kept to myself. This was not the time to ask if our bio-metals were compatible with theirs since obviously connecting and making some manner of airlock work had already happened. Coreg was up out of his seat and stepping fast past the soldiers to reach the connecting tube.
He pulled out an arc-gun and slithered through feet first firing something that rang out more like music than blasts. The soldiers went next and I, weaponless, followed them. Maybe I was supposed to stay with the ship, but nobody had said anything and if Selina was on board this Gleezhian ship I wanted to be there for her.
My boots hit the spongy floor of the enemy’s craft and I caught my breath. The stink of their fear was strong and thick. Coreg and the soldiers were already binding the hands and feet of three Gleezhians. These guys were much less the monsters my dad had described in countless bedtime stories and more like sad chimps pretending to be human.
Their eyes were glazed over—Coreg must have stunned them with his arc-gun. I didn’t know it could do that. Their clothing was baggy and the colors were mismatched, but I was distracted by their tightly bound hands. The soldiers had their two captives on their stomachs and the twelve fingers that wiggled behind their backs were just plain creepy. Coreg’s man had begun to come out of his stupor and was protesting in a stream of crazy syllables. Coreg rolled him over onto his face and put a boot on his back. The hairy dude quieted.
Coreg spoke then in the same crazy talk, obviously Gleezhian, and the man spat out one short word.
“She’s not on this ship,” Coreg said to me, “but we’ll search it anyway.”
One of our soldiers watched the prisoners while the other began at the front of the ship and Coreg started at the back. I didn’t know how to search until I watched Coreg use his whole body to press against the walls. He was able to mesh his hands into the walls where there were already raised grooves. Invisible doors opened and I rushed to look inside with him. Each cubicle was either empty or filled with supplies, but no kidnapped Earthling.
She had to be on one of the other ships. I was the first one back up through the tube. I was confident I knew how to work the comm system with the helmet, but I couldn’t think of the correct Klaqin words to ask if she’d been found.
“Put the helmet down,” Coreg ordered. He wasn’t all the way up through the tube. He pulled himself upright and reached down for the feet of our first prisoner. “Help me.”
Together we pulled up and laid out the three Gleezhians and then one of our soldiers stayed behind to pilot the captured ship. I wondered how he’d know the controls, but that wasn’t my concern. Then I realized we’d probably stay connected for the return trip.
Coreg got on the comm and spoke with each of the other ships. All crews were captured, all ships searched, but no Selina.
♫ ♫ ♫
I STOMACHED THE debriefing for all of ten seconds before I considered pacing as Coreg and several others answered the First Commander’s questions. They endured a scolding lecture from their leader. I stood stiff and still and waited, totally too anxious about Selina and not even trying to understand the Klaqin ranting. These aliens hadn’t figured out what to do next. So I paced to hurry things up. I don’t think anyone noticed, except maybe Coreg. I wanted to get back to searching for Selina.
The Commander waved us away and everyone turned sharply on their heels and headed in multiple directions. We were in the farthest hangar with dozens of people swarming over the captured Gleezhian ships. The prisoners huddled in a corner, guarded by long-faced men who aimed a different style weapon at them, one I hadn’t seen before.
I had a guard again, too. Coreg spoke roughly to him and he tagged along behind us as we headed to what I thought of as the boys’ castle.
“Did he call off the search? What about Selina? I didn’t quite understand it all.”
“Because you paced.”
“Oh, you noticed.”
Coreg made his disgust obvious with a look I bet he learned on Earth. In fact, it reminded me of how I must have looked at him when he was trying to hit on Selina. He’d picked up the right shade of loathing all right.
“Come on, Coreg, we have to do something. They’ve taken her somewhere. We must have chased down decoy ships.” We jogged between hangars. I sensed he was trying to ditch me, then realized he was the one pacing now.
We took the stairs down into the underground perilously fast, my guard stumbling after us on the uneven steps. We rode a small transport to the main building. It was quick, though for some reason neither of us could pace.
As we were about to enter the room with the language cabs I asked, “What are we doing here?”
“You need another lesson.”
“This is a waste of time. I can help in the search. Come on.”
“This will not be a language lesson. The First Commander has ordered you to view the political record.”
Okay, that stopped me in my tracks. “What? What for?”
He didn’t answer. He went to a shelf and scanned numerous red boxes until he pulled one down and shoved it into the backside of the nearest cab.
“You are smart, Alex. You want to find your … your friend. You will want to know all the possibilities. This will help. The First Commander believes you may have insight into certain things.” He clucked his tongue and opened the door to the cab. “Get in.”
I had more than a few cuss words on the tip of my tongue. Yeah, right, we were supposed to stop in the middle of things and have a social studies class while Selina was being held probably on the other side of the universe and who knew what horrible things were being done to her. I stared Coreg down.
“If you know certain things about us it may help us determine where she is.” He said, not reacting to my glare. “We need a new perspective. Get in.”
I clenched and unclenched my fists, glanced at my guard whose folded arms and wide-legged stance threatened imminent involvement on his part, and inch by inch I surrendered to this stupid idea. But I wanted to hit something. Coreg, mostly. I would have enjoyed cramming his teeth down his throat. The teeth in question gleamed briefly. I settled for punching the wall of the learning cab.
♫ ♫ ♫
SELINA WAS CLOSE to freaking out. She alternated between time-bending and letting time pass naturally. Her captors did not seem bothered by her ability, but continued to administer treatment and monitor her. She’d heard creepy stories of UFO abductions and seen a few movies on that theme. They were scary enough to make her hope she’d never find herself tied up and dissected by black-eyed, dome-headed aliens.
But these aliens, whether disguised Klaqins or real Gleezhians missing their sixth fingers, acted tender and considerate. There were no ten-inch needles or terrifying probes. No bright lights. No praying mantis heads. No deep, vibrating hums.
But the calm attention was no less threatening. Three of them had their hands on her arms, her knees, and her forehead. Another was dabbing something soothing on a cut on her elbow. A fifth one—where had he come from?—held a wand over her chest and watched an image of her beating heart on the copper wall screen.
Selina closed her eyes and tried to think of what Alex would do if he were here. He’d have song lyrics ready to recite, maybe even sing, though he’d gotten shy lately about singing around her. He stood behind her in choir and sang loudly enough then, interspersing the wo
rds with whispered comments that made her laugh.
If these beings weren’t going to answer her questions, perhaps she could communicate through song—it worked for Alex. She started slowly, humming three notes.
♫ ♫ ♫
MY EXPERIENCE IN the cab confused me at first. The screens played images of events like newscasts and interviews, but the narration was off by a mile as Klaqin words were spoken, followed by a frozen picture and a disjointed English translation. I struggled to make sense of both the Klaqin and the English. In my frustration I paced and for some odd reason the two languages registered into one cohesive and comprehensible story:
The planet’s population had been decimated since my father left and not only from the Gleezhian attacks. There had been a civil war, fought not with weapons, but with laws. It had happened twenty orbits around their sun—twenty Klaqin years—ago. The result, though less bloody than the ongoing intergalactic war, resulted in the imprisonment of key government officials, and the executions of hundreds of First and Second Commanders and citizen sympathizers. Thousands more men and women were banished. So much for unity and peace. It seemed a pretty stupid thing to have happen in the middle of an alien assault.
The banished Klaqins now inhabited the darkening edges of Klaqin where the snowscape buried everything. They made a treaty with the Gleezhians and, according to the information provided by a Commander Dace—a familiar name—they were working with the enemy. His report included an analysis of the fact that the Gleezhians were poised to win the war, invade Klaqin, and take over unless a way was found to completely destroy them on their own planet. It was Dace’s belief that a combination of time-pacing and time-bending skills were needed to take the battles to the planet Gleezhe. That’s when the references to Earth startled me.
Dace had petitioned all of the remaining First Commanders and had been denied permission to send ships to Earth to search out a time-bender. The grounds for the denial cited insufficient verification and the conclusion, based on the translated radio waves collected by means I didn’t understand, was that any contact with Earth would invariably result in negative consequences. That conclusion centered on reports that Earth sentries had destroyed every Gleezhian ship that came close.
Huh. I’d just learned about Earth sentries barely two days ago and was blown away by the knowledge that Selina’s own father worked as one. Who knew?
I wanted to pause the stream of intelligence the cab was throwing at me, but I didn’t know how. I stopped pacing instead and I missed a few minutes of information while I considered Coreg and Marcum. They had sneaked past the sentries and had flown to Earth. I guess that was pretty brave of them. And then there was Selina’s dad … maybe he wanted to reconnect with his relatives. Strange. And stranger still, Marcum was willing to give up his mission and not come home to Klaqin. Something bothered me about that. If these guys` wanted my perspective on everything, maybe I’d mention that. After all, I’d been suspicious about Marcum from the moment Selina told me she’d invited him in from the snowstorm. So glad I didn’t have to deal with him anymore.
My attention reverted to the screens and I paced again. The Klaqin and English words blended again into the next part of the story:
There had been a succession of raids on the farms and the training facilities and of course the weapons factories. Raids by the banished Klaqins, not the Gleezhians. Interesting. Then the information backtracked. If I understood correctly, in the years—make that double-moon cycles—before my father was born there had been an overpopulation problem, solved through what they called pre-birth harvesting. Apparently they controlled—or designed each generation—through gene manipulation, insuring that males were born with certain attributes such as fearlessness, enhanced coordination, or increased mental capacities. The female population decreased. I guess that explained why there were so few girls anywhere. Back to the present: the raids were attributed to a segment of the banished Klaqins who were supposed to have been denied any gene therapy, but were nevertheless quite intelligent, fearless, and hostile. They had kidnapped females, defended their outposts with stolen weaponry, and were suspected of flying missions in actual Gleezhian crafts or ones camouflaged to appear so.
Aha, now we were getting somewhere. I paced harder hoping to get to the end of this history and current events lesson more quickly. When the information concluded I noticed a space under the screen with an indentation for a thumb ring. I remembered thinking Coreg pressed his fist there in the language cab, but it must have been his thumb ring. I pushed mine into the dimple and the screen went black and the door popped open.
Both the guard and Coreg stood right where they’d been.
“Dudes, didn’t you have anything better to do than play statue?”
Coreg frowned. At least I thought it was a frown. “You are done?”
“I’ve seen enough. It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? There’s some double-crossing going on. Some alliances are tenuous. If this were a game of chess, well, never mind. Your banished Klaqins have Selina in one of their settlements.”
“Banished Klaqins?” Coreg’s eyes, those amber irises gleaming, reflected doubt and maybe a little anger. “All Klaqins work together to fight against the Gleezhians and restore our economy, our world, and our truth.”
Oh, boy, that sure sounded like propaganda. And he’d said it in Klaqin so I wasn’t positive about the word ‘restore.’ It might have been ‘increase.’
“Whatever.” I felt some lyrics creeping into my mind. Suicidal ones. Not pleasant.
The guard nudged me and the three of us headed out. I presumed we were going to visit that First Commander to give him my perspective.
CHAPTER 8
♫ … wildest dreams … ♫
SELINA CHANGED FROM soft humming to singing the words to her choir’s theme song. Since it was in Latin she was pretty sure that no matter how advanced these beings were, chances were they’d think it was gibberish. No matter.
She stopped mid phrase when the one with the wand put his hand over her mouth. He spoke then. In slow deliberate Klaqin he told her not to speak, to remain still, and to relax. At least she assumed he meant relax. The last word he used was not one she’d learned in her brief language study. How could she relax? She was millions, maybe billions of miles from home, separated from Alex, the one human she completely trusted, and now lying on a hard examining table with five pairs of hands all up in her business. She lay shaking and waiting for the wrenching despair that clenched her stomach to dissolve.
The one who spoke squirted something in her face and she did relax, starting with her nose. The smell from the spray, similar to roses, overpowered that sense. Her eyes grew too heavy to keep open. Her lips could not form a single protesting syllable. Her arms and legs lost the feeling of being held down. A buzzer wailed and she forced her eyelids open and witnessed the moment the ship lost its artificial gravity as her captors floated upwards around her. She could only assume her body rose off the table too.
By her captors’ louder words and clucks she guessed they hadn’t expected to go weightless, but it made no difference to her; she floated in rosy serenity. She closed her eyes again and experienced unruffled nothingness. The buzzer sounded a second time, but muted to the point of being more like a memory.
She could not open her eyes, form a word, lift a hand, or wiggle a toe. She could, however, still smell the scent that had been sprayed in her face.
♫ ♫ ♫
WHATEVER THOSE FRUITS and vegetables were that I ate earlier, they did a job on my insides. My stomach burned and I was tempted to ask for medical treatment. The awful sensation lasted the entire walk from the training center, through the tunnels, and up to the military capital building which housed the offices of the highest level commanders.
Coreg briefed me on procedure, but I think he was trying to make it sound like I shouldn’t be surprised if he groveled while I got special treatment. It was interesting to note that he felt it necessary to exp
lain that though he was a Fifth Commander, he held a position higher than ninety percent of the population. Yeah, right. Like I was going to believe that. I’d already figured out that Fifth Commanders were on the bottom rung of the military and that his mission to Earth wasn’t sanctioned or approved by anyone. I hoped I’d be present when they punished him for going AWOL.
The first room we entered was five sided, hive-like, and, according to Coreg, capable of launching separately in case of a Gleezhian attack. I didn’t see any spaceship controls, but the walls shined with copper panels that could have hidden anything.
The First Commander that had been on our transport ship entered and Coreg and my guard did a harmonic duet of a greeting. Tenor and baritone if my ears were working right—unlike my stomach which began to rumble like a broken garage door.
I mumbled “Excuse me.” Too bad I forgot the Klaqin for that. Coreg said something, hopefully he translated my apology, and then he and the First Commander moved off to speak in undertones and secrets. Great, Coreg undoubtedly would get credit for the conclusions I outlined to him on the walk here. I studied the Commander’s body language. He was a tall dude, pink skinned with shiny red hair tied at his neck with a silver knot. He had those same puffy cheeks as Cotay, but not all the chin flab. His ears were absurdly small for such a large, hulking man. He alternately closed his eyes and furrowed his brow in concentration as Coreg whispered to him.
They came back and the First Commander stepped close to me and put his right hand across onto my right shoulder and spoke, all the while gripping my shoulder bone with hot pressing fingers. His eyes were blue and definitely piercing.
I got the general gist of it. I believed he said I was welcome, he was sorry for not protecting me, and that he knew my father once. I listened with half an ear to the translation that Coreg contributed, expecting my understanding to be confirmed.
The Time Pacer: An Alien Teen Fantasy Adventure (The Time Bender Book 2) Page 7