Aaron, Melodee - As Darkness Falls [Flights of Fancy 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage and More)

by Melodee Aaron

  Parallel evolution wasn’t unheard of, and there were several theories that Rabine knew of to explain the phenomena, but something nagged at her. “Was that on Earth?”

  Crosley nodded. “Yes, it was, but it was many tens of millions of your years ago. Just as what you now call the dinosaurs were on the verge of an evolutionary breakthrough that would have catapulted them to intelligence, a tragedy befell them.”

  Cliff nodded his head. “The K-T extinction event.”

  “Yes and no. It wasn’t a single event, but rather several. For more than a hundred thousand years, the climate had cooled somewhat. At that time, a large asteroid hit the Earth, and the combination killed off nearly a third of the species on the planet. Then, for some reason, the Earth warmed up suddenly. More species vanished, but the final straw was the impact of a second, larger body on the Earth. When all was said and done, nearly ninety percent of all species had gone extinct.”

  The story fascinated her, but something still troubled Rabine. “Did you evolve on Earth?”

  Crosley shrugged. “We don’t know, but it seems doubtful. We share little DNA with humans.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He hesitated a moment, and glanced quickly at Leilend. “Because we tested humans and ourselves thousands of years ago.”

  Cliff’s eyes were wide, and his mouth hung open a little. He managed to ratchet his jaw shut. “Just how many thousands of years?”

  “Perhaps fifteen or so.”

  “You were on Earth fifteen thousand years ago?”

  “Yes, we left Earth about eight thousand years ago.”

  Rabine had to step in before Cliff fainted. “But you’ve been here at least seven thousand years.”

  “Yes, we have.” Crosley nodded. “The Old Ones brought us here after taking us from Earth.”

  “You and the Hargon.” Rabine considered. “Why did the Old Ones take you from Earth?”

  “Yes, that’s correct.” Crosley paused again. “You see, as you have surmised, the Ling and Hargon were once the same species. At some point in the distant past, we split into two different species. We were primitive at that time, little more than animals, and the creatures who became the Ling were predators, and we preyed upon the Hargon’s predecessors.” He shrugged. “The Old Ones may have taken us from Earth because they feared humanity would go extinct from our predation.”

  Cliff’s eyes narrowed. “Predators?”

  Crosley nodded again. “Yes, and we are still predators, but we no longer prey upon the Hargon. We stopped that soon after the Old Ones brought us here.”

  Cliff’s hand moved slowly toward the sidearm he wore. “Why? Did you stop because you wanted to stop, or because these Old Ones made you stop?”

  “Perhaps a little of both. The Old Ones made genetic changes to the Hargon to make them smarter, and they also showed us that we could feed on other animals here…” Crosley stared at Leilend for nearly a minute, and Rabine wondered if some sort of communication passed between the two Ling. “As we did on Earth. After the fall of the dinosaurs, the age of the mammals began. Slowly at first, mammals filled the niches in the ecology left open when the dinosaurs died off. One of those niches was to occupy the higher places on the food chain.”

  It hit Rabine like a ton of bricks. “You fed on humans?”

  “Yes, we did. We had fed on dinosaurs, too. They offered nutrition and challenges that your ancestors lacked, but when the big lizards were gone…” Crosley trailed off, staring at Cliff.

  Rabine followed Crosley’s gaze, and Cliff stood with his sidearm in his hand and he pointed it directly at Crosley. Cliff took her upper arm in his free hand. “We need to go. Now. The Captain has to know about this.”

  Crosley shook his head. “I won’t stop you from leaving or telling your people about this, but I will ask you to wait and hear the rest of the story. After that, I’ll do whatever you ask and think is best.”

  “No, you’ve said enough.” Cliff tugged at her arm. “Let’s go.”

  A soft buzzing seemed to surround them. The sound came from every direction at once, and Rabine looked around to find the source. A cluster of lights rose from the top of the water tank, and the only thing she could think of to describe them was a bunch of fireflies flocking like birds. As the lights swooped down from the tank and flew closer, the sound faded, getting softer as the source neared them.

  * * * *

  Cliff almost had Rabine out of what was a bad situation when it suddenly got a lot worse. Just before the odd buzzing noise began, he saw Crosley and Leilend exchange a quick glance, and now a herd of lightning bugs flew straight at them as the sound evaporated almost to silence. Obviously the Ling had called, somehow, for their friends to come to kill him and Rabine.

  But just who—or what—were their friends? Some memory gnawed at Cliff’s brain, some tidbit of information he’d seen or heard or read someplace that made all of this a little familiar, but he couldn’t put his finger on just what it was. All he knew was that Rabine was in danger, and he held a weapon in his hand. He already had the pistol pointed at Crosley and the safety was off.

  Cliff had decided to blow Crosley into Ling-fritters when Leilend spoke up. “Logan’s men followed you! Come with me while the others distract the guards!”

  A burst of machine gun fire erupted from around the corner of a nearby building, and the lightning bugs swarmed in that direction. A group of three Hargon soldiers ran around the water tank from the direction where Crosley and Leilend had come.

  Crosley reached out with surprising slowness and he snatched the weapon from Cliff’s grip before he could even react. Crosley then shoved Rabine and Cliff to the ground. “Stay there!”

  He thought he’d gotten used to the weird buzzing sound and the way it swept in volume from soft when the fireflies were near and louder when they were far away, but Cliff noticed a faint droning noise, barely audible. As he watched, Leilend’s body twinkled and sparkled, and it seemed to fade in and out of reality. Cliff looked at Crosley, and his body went through the same changes. The pair faded to little more than a cluster of lights flashing in rhythmic colors of red, blue, green, and yellow, and the lights lifted slowly from the ground. As they moved away, the racket of the sound got louder. The guards fired at the lights that only moments ago had been Crosley and Leilend, but Cliff saw no effect from the slugs.

  One of the soldiers ran to where Cliff and Rabine lay huddled on the pavement. “Don’t move!”

  Cliff watched as the lights settled to the hard tarmac of the pad that the water tank rested on, but he wasn’t sure if it was Crosley, Leilend, or both. Rabine was looking the other way as the other two guards ran to give backup to their comrade, so she didn’t see the lights changing.

  As he watched, the flashing and flickering of the fireflies took on a form, a hideous shape like those that haunt nightmares. Tall and skinny, little more than skin and bones, the color of a corpse drained of blood, the creatures that had been a gorgeous woman and handsome man stared back at him with eyes the color of arterial blood set in pitch. Huge teeth, white and sharp as daggers, filled even bigger mouths, stretching the pallid skin surrounding the opening into a permanent grin, but the grin wasn’t one of humor. Instead the rictus had a feel of death about it.

  Claws tipped the fingers of the monsters, and one of them reached out to strike at the nearest soldier. The man screamed, but the yell cut off suddenly when the creature finished its follow-through. The man’s spine hung wetly on the tips of the attacker’s talons. The other guards fired their weapons at the pair of ghouls, but again Cliff saw no effect.

  While the other creature trotted toward the terrified soldiers, the first one, the spine of the Hargon guard still dripping blood from where it hung impaled on its claws, turned to Rabine.

  “Go back to your people and do what you must.”

  It then turned and ran to join its mate as they tore the remaining soldiers to shreds. Cliff yanked Rabine to her feet and he pulle
d her to run as fast as they could away from the carnage.

  * * * *

  Alexa stared at them over the top of her glasses again. “Do you two have any clue how much trouble you’re in already?”

  Rabine nodded. “I guess we’re pretty well in Dutch.”

  “No, you’re in fucking deep shit.” Alexa took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She swallowed a deep drink from the ever-present glass of liquor. “And you’re making it worse by not telling Captain Ells and Captain Davis. Not necessarily in that order.”

  Cliff paced around Alexa’s room. “We need to get straight in our heads what we saw.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you saw, at least not yet. You know that neither the Hargon nor Ling are what they led us to believe they are. At least one of them is lying to us and at least one of them is some kind of killing machine. Maybe both.”

  Cliff shrugged. Rabine didn’t think she had any better handle on this than he did, but she at least had the benefit of using the scientific method to focus on the facts. She took a small sip of the Hargon drink. “What I saw violates almost every law of physics I’ve ever heard of. Converting from a physical being to what looks like pure energy and back again is theoretically impossible.”

  Alexa tapped the microscope sitting on the desk. “Maybe they have different theories.”

  Cliff stopped pacing and picked up Alexa’s data terminal. He typed at the screen for a moment. As he read the results from the ship’s computer, he frowned deeply.

  Rabine touched his arm. “What is it?”

  “One of my hobbies is reading about mythical creatures from Earth’s past. You know, vampires, werewolves, zombies, all of that.”

  Alexa snorted. “You’re not saying these are vampires, are you?”

  “No, not exactly. There are literally thousands of such legends from all over the world, and of course a lot of the stories and information were lost in the Doom Time, but cryptozoologists have always said that the stories are too consistent and pervasive to be explained by simple legends or stories to scare children.”

  Rabine wondered if he might have hit his head again. “That’s crazy.”

  “Not really. Creatures like we saw could form the basis for a lot of stories from vampires to werewolves and many more in between.” He smiled. “But the best fit I can think of is a berbalang.”

  Alexa almost snorted her drink out her nose. “A what?”

  “Berbalang. They’re legendary creatures from the Indonesian islands, mostly the Philippines. The ability to take human form, the sound that gets louder as they move away, the red eyes, and a bunch of other things we saw all fit to the legends.”

  Rabine shook her head. “That’s one example. How can something get louder as it moves farther away? It can’t happen!”

  “But it did happen. We both saw—well, heard it.”

  “Yeah.” Maybe her worldview had a few holes in it.

  “And then there’s that whole dream thing you had with Leilend. You said she told you that she called to you or something.”

  Alexa stopped with the glass halfway to her lips. “Dreams?”

  Rabine nodded. The memories of the encounter with Leilend flooded her mind, and an odd mix of desire, embarrassment, want, and guilt washed over her. She told Alexa of how Leilend came to her mind and called her to the garden.

  Alexa grabbed her data terminal from Cliff and punched at the keys with blinding speed. As she waited for the reply from the computers on Daedalus, she tapped nervously on the side of the box with her fingers. A slow smile came to the old woman’s face. “Maybe inert gases aren’t all that inert.”

  Rabine knew Alexa was smarter than she. Probably a lot smarter, but she didn’t follow at all. “What are you talking about?”

  “Remember when I said that the protein I found is based on a group zero element? I think it’s xenon and, under the right conditions, xenon-based molecules could do some pretty strange things.” She smiled. “Like allowing quantum state changes.”

  Cliff blinked. “Could one of you two help out a poor befuddled idiot here?”

  Rabine didn’t even have time to process Cliff’s comment. Her mind was busy running ahead, trying to synthesize the possible impacts of a biology based not on carbon, but on a noble gas instead.

  * * * *

  Elsa ran her hand through her hair. This couldn’t be happening. “What you’re telling me is that you violated orders and you want me to forget that because you found something?”

  Rochester swallowed hard. The man had a long history of being basically lazy, but he had enough sense to know that he could well be in the brig soon. “Yes and no, Ma’am. We did disobey the standing orders, but the risk seemed worth the possible benefits.”

  “That is, in a word, Lieutenant, bullshit.” Geniuses tended to do what they wanted, not what they were told, and that was the problem with commanding a ship full of the Empire’s best and brightest. Maybe the Emperor really didn’t like her, and commanding Daedalus was his way of punishing her.

  Salas nodded her head. “Captain, I’m not trying to minimize what we did, but what we found out is more important than an administrative matter.”

  “This is not a simple matter of administration, Mr. Salas. I will not have one of my senior officers taking field trips with a junior officer in direct violation of my orders. Do not presume to tell me what is important about running my ship.”

  “I’m sorry, Ma’am. Cliff and I are prepared to face the music, but I’d like to figure out what’s going on here before we get all wrapped up in a court-martial.”

  Elsa sighed to herself. There was the rub of the matter—the book called for her to arrest the two, toss them in the brig, and court-martial the pair as soon as possible, but following the book presented serious problems. The biggest problem was that she couldn’t afford to lose Salas or Rochester, especially in the face of what they had found on their outing. On the other hand, Elsa couldn’t afford to let them off scot-free.

  “All right, here’s what we’re going to do.” Elsa didn’t even look at Chris where he sat to her right at the Ready Room table. He was going to go nuts. “The two of you are under house arrest pending a formal investigation and hearing. You are to remain on full duty in the meantime. I want to talk to these two Ling and this Logan, since he seems to be in charge.”

  She risked a glance at Chris, and his mouth hung open as he stared at her with wide eyes.

  Chapter 7:

  The Sunset

  Alexa had figured out more about the physiology of the Ling and claimed that she understood the mechanism of the quantum state changes that allowed them to shift from one form to another. Rabine didn’t have a perfect grip on the process, but she had enough of the basics to believe that Alexa was right. When she and Alexa talked about the odd chemistry, Cliff would generally just get himself a drink.

  Convincing Crosley and Leilend to come to the ship had been easy, as Rabine expected it would be. The pair had a certain amount of fatalism in their personalities, and they agreed quickly, even though Captain Davis wanted Logan there as well. Logan wouldn’t be as easy to convince.

  Cliff walked beside Rabine, holding her hand as they made their way to Logan’s office. “I still don’t know what the Captain hopes to gain from this.”

  “You should know better than I do that the goal is to have the Hargon and Ling live in peace.”

  “Sure, but is it really our business?”

  “Maybe and maybe not. What if the Hargon learn to make their tools work, or the Old Ones come back to teach them, and then they come out into space? Both sides need to find peace before that happens.”

  Cliff was quiet for a few moments as he walked. “I guess you’re right, but it’s hard not to take sides.”

  “It is, but I wouldn’t know which side to take here.”

  “I think you’d side with the Ling.”

  Rabine had wondered about that, and maybe Cliff was right. Something happened between her and Le
ilend that night in the garden, but Rabine was hard put to say what. She’d almost admitted to herself that she was in love with Cliff, though she had managed to stop herself from saying as much to him, at least so far. She wasn’t certain how he would react to that, and she feared he might panic. At the same time, her mind often filled with fantasies centered on Crosley, and Cliff usually made an appearance in the dreams as well. In more than one such phantasm, Leilend had joined the trio.

  Before her fantasy could kick into high gear, Rabine and Cliff reached Logan’s office door, and she chased the images from her mind. Logan waited at his desk, and he looked up as they entered.

  “Please be seated.” After Rabine and Cliff took chairs across the desk from him, Logan smiled. He’d used that smile from the first day she’d met him, and Rabine always thought it looked friendly, but now she thought she could see something else concealed behind the gesture, something evil. “You said that you needed to talk with me about something important. I am understandably curious.”

  Cliff spoke before she formulated a way to diplomatically tell Logan what would happen. “I appreciate your curiosity and that you want to get to the point. Captain Davis wants to meet with you aboard Daedalus as soon as possible.”

  The smile wavered on Logan’s face, but only for an instant. “That’s more than a little unusual. Why should I go there to meet with her rather than her coming here?”

  “Because that’s the way things are going to happen. You’ll meet with Captain Davis on Daedalus either by coming with us or we’ll take you there.” Cliff shrugged. “Your choice.”

  The smile faded completely. “I think you’ll find that difficult.”

  “I don’t.” Cliff touched the communicator on his uniform.

  A slight buzzing sound accompanied a glittering in the air around Logan’s office as five Marines transported down from the ship. Sergeant Rawls motioned two of the warriors toward the door, and they took up positions with their weapons trained on the portal. Rawls and the others all aimed the heavy rifles they carried at Logan.