Alien Alliance Box Set

by Chris Turner

  Yul recognized that level of tenacity...it could be the difference between life and death. The pod’s navigation system seemed much simpler to operate than the aphid fighter’s with its reduced number of controls. Fortunate for them, otherwise they would have been ripped apart.

  Cloye released what reverse impulse power remained before impact, halting the pod’s descent as much as possible.

  Their breaths caught in their throats. The drab features of the landscape flashed by at alarming speed. Yul’s jaw sagged, Hresh’s eyes pinched shut.

  The ship tore in on a shallow angle, the pod’s tail glancing off a patch of sandy landscape, dragging like an anchor. The nose kicked upward. While the hull bucked and rocked, skimming many times on the soft, sandy surface, it finally came to a skidding halt before two rounded boulders.

  Silence. The rush of air, escaping gas from somewhere within. The drip of liquids, internal fluids. A fine dust billowed around the windows.

  Yul struggled to rise from his seat. Groggily, he loosened the straps. He kicked off the light aluminium panel that had fallen from above. No broken bones. He staggered to his feet and loosed Cloye from her straps. She seemed dazed but was breathing normally. He pushed debris and air bag parts out of her way while Hresh murmured at her side deliriously.

  As Yul helped her up, he wondered if he were in some fantastic dream. Miraculously, the ship’s functions seemed intact. Lights still powered the console and the cabin air seemed breathable. But no hull breaches, audible or visible. And yet the hiss of air implied the cabin’s life support system had been compromised.

  Yul stumbled over to gaze out of the viewport. The pod had flipped partially on its side and all he could see through the filmy glass was a greyish brown featureless plain and some daylight.

  “Good work, Cloye,” he croaked. “You saved our asses.”

  “But for how long?” She coughed into her helmet.

  Bloody hell, she looked rough. Sweating like a pig, with dark circles under her eyes. “We need to get out of here, investigate our surroundings.”

  “Ship’s functions are minimal,” she said. “Not enough juice to lift us. Too much exterior damage.” Cloye coughed again.

  “Why not stay here?” Hresh suggested. “We have air.” He crinkled his nose at the bleak glimpse through the dust-caked glass.

  “Ship’s sensors show life at twenty miles distance,” mused Cloye. “Wait. Some closer, three miles.”

  The ship’s sensors beeped. Cloye frowned, her eyes blazing.

  A cause for concern? Yul did not know.

  “There are life readings?” he asked, tossing Cloye her weapon.

  Hresh grunted sceptically. “Or as easily, death. One of the locust or squid colonies. I don’t doubt this world is a home planet.”

  Yul ignored him. He reached for the air lock ring which was tilted up at 45 degrees at shoulder level. Fortunately, the depressurization chamber was above them, rather than under. When the ship had come to a rocking halt, it had settled one side up, otherwise they would be in a bad way right now.

  One by one, they climbed up into the air lock chamber and Yul locked the seal behind them and forced open the outer hatch. He slid down the shiny, grey fuselage. Cloye and Hresh were right behind him. An arid landscape spread before him. Scattered rocks dotted the plain and what looked like mesas not far away. A crater lurked in the distance like a blasted off mountain top about eight miles off. The sun’s pale white light gleamed on the southern horizon. Mid morning or late afternoon? Yul was undecided. Air was thin here, less than 50% human-breathable oxygen content. A slight breeze wisped from the northwest. He guessed it had warmed here recently, for his suit’s climate sensors reported the subzero temperatures now hovered just under zero. He knelt and grabbed a handful of the sand at his feet, letting it trail through his fingers. A fine, colourless loess. The softness of it had saved their lives.

  “I don’t like this place,” muttered Hresh, casting anxious glances around the inhospitable terrain.

  “I’m guessing it doesn’t like you either,” remarked Cloye.

  Yul examined the boulders pressed to the ship’s starboard reach where one of the pod’s wings lay sheared. The long shadows draped over the hull’s stern like phantom fingers. Goliaths—probably eroded long ago, carried by melting glaciers during a distant ice age, thought Yul. The ghostly landscape left a hollow pit in his stomach and a chalky feeling in his mouth.

  “I’m figuring the lifeforms the sensors picked up are in that hollow over there,” pointed out Cloye. “About three to four miles away. Guess we could hike over and investigate.”

  Yul registered a slight breeze on his suit monitor. Wind had picked up from the northwest. His suit air was at 72%.

  “Well, we’ll all die here without food, shelter and oxygen. We seem to have no choice. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Soft grey shadows fell over the dusty soil. Everything was too quiet, not even a breath of wind now stirred or whistled around the few peglike rock forms they passed. Their footfalls fell in dull thuds across an endless plain.

  The dusty crater loomed ahead, a dipping blemish amongst a vaster expanse of others like itself. As they approached, Yul halted, knelt, scrutinized what looked like tracks, three-toed reptilian ones, neither Zikri nor locust, but perhaps a mix of both. The creature’s stride was short, whatever it was. Sometimes it appeared to crawl, obliterating its own tracks.

  Yul frowned. Possibly more than one organism. The trail wound off toward the flat-topped mountain much closer now. He did not get a good feeling about that place, nor the one they were heading toward. His metal fist closed tighter on his blaster.

  They loped more easily in the lighter gravity than walking in full G. But it was dangerous too. One slip and one could smash his faceplate on a rock.

  They approached the lip of the crater and Yul slowed, reflecting on the macabre events of the recent past. The destruction of Hresh’s research installation had probably set back cybernetics decades, but better than letting those damn butterflies rove free about the galaxy. A part of him knew that the plant pods were never meant to leave Xeses.

  If he had been granted knowledge of the past, he would be appalled at the reality that Xeses and worlds like Sigren with their territorial puffballs were only one of the thousands of worlds that the ‘Masters’ had seeded aeons ago...The Masters, long vanished from the stars, that mysterious race which had created the Mentera and the Zikri in their fiendish vats in bygone days. They seeded lifeforms on worlds in the Dim Zone and beyond: the puffballs of Sigren, the Xesian plant-pod butterflies, and a thousand other species hidden away on remote worlds, far from human eyes. Even they could not have envisaged the strange, exotic and brutal universe they had spawned out of sheer, idle curiosity—or in an attempt to answer the question, what if...?

  Yul felt the changing ground crumble underfoot as he stepped closer. Below spread a gentle sloping hollow of grey sand sprinkled with brown boulders and flat grey rock. The crater was roughly circular, and the lip continued on to the other side where it rose in rockier formation, about a half mile away. A small meteorite had struck here. Yul reasoned, perhaps hundreds, if not thousands of years ago.

  Cloye snorted at the visible lack of any lifeforms and bent sideways to make her way down. But Yul held back. Three-toed creatures lurked about, or had been here, for many clawed prints lay etched upon the crumbling slopes and in the dusty soil on the plain. “Cloye, hold up,” he warned her.

  She turned him a cheeky grin. “There’s nothing here, Yul. The sensors must be whacked or something. Either that or the lifeforms are farther on, perhaps on the outer edge by those rock formations. Let’s get a move on. We don’t know how much daylight is left on this weird planet.”

  Yul said nothing. While he couldn’t disagree with her assumption, he was not all for running recklessly into danger. Cloye was a magnet for trouble. Even as he formulated the thought, a wild shape hopped out at Cloye, from behind a flat r
ock. His warning came too late. She whirled, whipped out her blaster, but the thing was almost on her. A weird half-bug, half-octopus creature, human-size.

  It grazed her hip with a set of rippling appendages, raising a chitinous snout and gargling out an otherworldly cry. Not a familiar animal cry or even an insectoid chitter. Yul aimed his blaster low as he scrambled down to help her, awaiting his opportunity to blast the creature without killing her. Hresh stared on, frozen-faced.

  Regaining her balance, Cloye blasted the thing as it squirmed back on all four motilators, tentacles rippling like an octopus’s. It fell, writhing in a smoking heap, charred beyond recognition.

  Yul caught up and knelt beside her, gasping. “You okay?”

  She nodded, recoiling at the alien monstrosity smoking a few feet from her. She kicked at it, and while they darted wary glances about, she whispered, “More of them about? Some guard?” She wrinkled her nose.

  “Others might be around,” he acknowledged. He looked about with uneasy suspicion but could see no sign. “What is this weird place? Doesn’t look like a colony.”

  Hresh bounced over and half-slid to a halt to study the crisped body with curious horror. “It’s alien, but nothing like I’ve seen before. Can’t say whether it’s Zikri or Mentera.”

  “It’s both, is my guess,” Cloye said, unable to mask the disgust in her voice.

  A glint of light caught Yul’s eye. It was several paces away toward the edge of the crater. “Over there,” he motioned.

  Hresh and Cloye’s eyes narrowed, their bodies tensed. Hresh stepped back, swallowing a gulp of air.

  Yul went to investigate. As he came closer to where he spied the gleam, he paused. The shiny reflection appeared to be a pool of dark water. Three other pools were nearby, no less black or limpid. A body of a spaceman lay beside the first one, his suit torn apart and the man frozen. A dull glaze of horror gripped the man’s ashen face. Ice crystals clung to a thin mustache.

  Yul turned in sorrow to the foremost pool. A human figure lay trapped beneath a filmy surface, like a glass medium. The murky material showed brownish water below. Yul stepped back a pace. He tried to make sense of the scene. The figure seemed aware of the movement above him and feebly raised an arm, beckoning with a finger. Yul did a double take, blinking in confusion. Through the gloom of the water he saw that the figure wore a space suit, like his dead peer. But the face—it was so white and withered—

  Yul stared on grimly. “We have to get him out of there.”

  Hresh came panting beside him. “Wait, Yul, we don’t know what’s down there.”

  Cloye pushed between the two. “Back off, Hresh! Are you going to leave the poor sod there?”

  “I’m not saying—”

  “Move back!” Yul shouldered Hresh out of the way. Cloye, clicking her tongue, hopped away to grab some rocks to crack the glassy surface entombing the victim.

  When she returned, she pushed a large stone into Yul’s gloved hand. Yul knelt, arching high a downward strike, shattering what appeared to be some synthetic material.

  The thin layer had spider-veined like a split egg and Yul peeled away the pieces. The water rippled below. The spaceman weakly struggled out of the water and Yul and Cloye grabbed him and hauled him to the chalky soil while Hresh hitched in closer to gawk.

  Almost instantly, a multi-legged thing jumped out of the water, a knee-high crab-like squid. It hooked onto Hresh’s leg and cut a hole into his suit with its proboscis. The thin cold atmosphere of the planet whooshed into his suit.

  Hresh screamed, backpedalling, kicking to get the shelled mutant off him, as it struggled to burrow into his suit to get to his flesh.

  Yul fired at it, sizzling its coral-like carapace. The creature gave a whistling screech and scuttled away toward the boulders. Cloye aimed a series of blasts which nipped at its legs, crablike and spindly and grazed off its gleaming white shell. The creature strayed off its course—tracing slow circles now as it scuttled to find a hidey hole, out of range.

  Hresh was howling a high-pitched wail, slapping hands over the tattered liner at his knee. Yul swore. He fiddled with his emergency pack, trying to tear off a great length of adhesive from the suit repair roll to slap the polyethylene over Hresh’s rip. Covering the fluttering fabric, he heard air begin to return to Hresh’s suit. But not fast enough. The man’s face was contorted, blueish.

  “What the fuck was that?” Cloye cried.

  “I d-don’t know,” gasped Hresh, his teeth chattering. “I’m not waiting around to find out.” His breath fogged his faceplate.

  “What about this guy?”

  “What about him?” Hresh wheezed. “The man can’t be saved. Some primitive colony, as I said.” His eyes rolled as if even in his delirium he were analyzing a weird science experiment. “That thing was more crab-squid than insect.”

  “Whatever,” grunted Cloye. “What about our pale-faced diver?”

  Yul turned his attention back to the convulsing man. With speed, he twisted off the cracked helmet. “Help me pry his jaws open. Quick! I don’t want the man choking on his own tongue.”

  Water had gushed into the victim’s suit. What had put him there? Yul reeled at the possibilities. How was he alive? Like those freaks on the Orb? The man would freeze, if the temperature got lower. He guessed it would within the hour, as the sun sank. Luckily the man’s suit seemed intact, except for the filmy faceplate which remained spidered with cracks and sported a large hole in the centre. The man’s dead comrade near the other pool was not so lucky.

  The suited man went into deeper convulsions, choking out mouthfuls of foul water. Yul pushed palms on the victim’s chest, applying CPR, giving him a chance at life. The man began to gulp the thin air, his chest heaving.

  Yul cursed, fumbling for the extra outtake valve on his own suit, forced open the frozen lips, shoving the valve into the man’s mouth. He adjusted it to allow a graduated stream of oxygen to flow out. The man’s eyes dilated, rolled in wild abandon. His face was utterly drained of colour, pure white with an even whiter sucker mark arching from cheek to cheek. It was the same colour as the crab-like thing that had raced off to the rocks. Yul shuddered. The man’s nose looked flattened, as well as his left ear mangled, as if something had half chewed it off—no doubt that crab thing that had scuttled away.

  The figure began to shiver uncontrollably.

  “Quick,” snarled Yul, “the man’s freezing on contact with the air and going into shock. We’ve got to drain his suit, otherwise he’ll die of exposure.”

  Why the water didn’t freeze earlier Yul could not guess, but with the Mentera and Zikri around anything was possible. He’d seen enough weirdness to last a lifetime. The locust tanks, Hresh’s horrors... He didn’t doubt these pools were something of the same breed.

  Yul barked an order to Hresh and Hresh switched his own extra regulator with Yul’s. Yul and Cloye lifted the shivering man by the heels and let the water drain past his neck.

  They set him down and Yul motioned a hand to Cloye. She hopped over and twisted the helmet off the dead astronaut, which seemed intact. She gave it to Yul, who screwed it onto the gasping man’s suit. Yul flicked the regulators at the back. A green light came to life. There came the familiar whish of oxygen in the pipes and a slight bulge to the suit. The man roused. He blinked his eyes in rapid succession.

  “Who are you?” whispered Yul. He brought his ear close to the man’s receiver.

  The man’s pale tongue slipped between parted lips and he hissed. “I’m F-Fenli. F-First officer...of the Jakru invasion. Reporting for duty, sir!” He managed the last words with a crooked grin, then he quickly passed out.

  Chapter 10

  Back in the abandoned lab room, Krin managed to chew through his tentacle where the human had looped and tied it around the bar. He slumped with a thud onto the wreckage and bloody ruin of his comrade’s body.

  Bral gazed out from sightless eyes. His polyp of a mouth gaped open, dripping pungent black fluid,
now pooling at Krin’s side. How lucky the warrior was to have met his death in combat, as it should be for a warrior of his caste, thought Krin. Death soon would be his release as well. His hours were numbered.

  For his main motilator had been mutilated beyond repair and he was barely able to drag himself out of the lab along the mirror-smooth corridor. The sucker pads on his working appendage allowed that agonizing locomotion at least. The rest of his body was smashed in multiple places. Four tentacles trailed behind, crushed or severed beyond repair. Before his primary motilator had been rendered useless, he had caught a glimpse of metal peeking up from under the skin of the terrible fingers of the devil that had ripped a chunk of his flesh out. The human must have been one of those machine men, like the one he had torn to pieces on Mathias’s ship. But what did that matter? Now he was dying, bleeding out, and he had lost the most important fight of his life.

  Krin’s breath rasped out of his chest in slobbery gasps. He coughed out a gob of black blood onto his mask, which dangled askew, not quite covering his nasal orifices, almost retching as he dragged himself with torment down the corridors.

  The human had fought well, like the dervish he was to the end, and had won. A salute to him. As a warrior, Krin could not feel bitter toward him, only applaud him, and honour the creature in his own death in accordance with the warrior code that he served. He was prepared to die peacefully and alone on this alien world. A death he could have met earlier. Many times he had escaped doom, but not this time.

  Krin’s polyp of a mouth curled into an ironic grimace. He had saved the human Mathias by plunging him into a tank. What irony that the human with that pup’s grin was still somewhere on his ship, had been granted near immortality, one who would stare glaze-eyed out of his glass prison forever. The human would bear the ravages of time until the elements corroded his container and spilled his innards out in death. No one would venture to this world now. Most of the Zikri here were dead, as were the crafty locusts, and their ships destroyed or flown away.