Alien Alliance Box Set

by Chris Turner

  * * *

  The ship’s atmosphere thickened; his head felt thick and dizzy. Peering between the bars at the grid-like walls beyond the hallway, he saw edges and angles blending together, like some crazy holograph, not quite sitting right in perspective. Contours were bent in four dimensions. The fourth dimension seemed to be his own perception, which was skewed as one who gazes through a fishbowl lens. The same phenomenon he had experienced while undergoing spaceflight simulation on Mission Training Base on Pegasus V near Aldebaran. And not far either, from being victim of a psychedelic trip. Yet he was growing lucid enough to make the proper observations, and feeling a glimmer of hope regarding escape.

  * * *

  Such was not to occur.

  Miko awoke hours (or days?) later, unable to identify the scope of his delirium, so much in withdrawal was he from separation from his VR cocoon on Sitty that he could barely stand. His belly growled with hunger. He only detected an oscillating reverberation thrumming about the hull and disturbing the ranks of the Zikri. The prisoner was dragged from his cage to the forward cargo bay where Sitty II stood berthed, forlorn and dismantled, beached like a fragile gull.

  The Zikri problem became clear to him: the creatures did not know how to navigate the NAVO craft. All their knowledge and expertise had turned up zilch in its deconstruction. He grinned, granted some small satisfaction. Gathering knowledge was the Zikri’s passion, and to decipher the craft’s mystery and navigational complexity became an all more pressing priority. Miko possessed the key to dismantling the NAVO’s secrets—and they meant to extract it. The link to pilot, co-pilot and machine was a fascinating piece of hardware, and a senior Zikri scientist was consigned to study the fabulous apparatus—a creature named ‘Audra’.

  Or so Miko called her. For no other reason than it was the name of a former old crow of a supervisor who used to browbeat him while she oversaw him on assignments. In an early part of life, Miko worked as a security guard transporting cargo off-world, and he hated every minute of it.

  The monster was graced with eight auxiliary tentacles, obscene, hefty things that sprouted from a grey body. They could extend far beyond her body’s normal reach and exhibit a remarkable strength. She was also more coated than the others with cilia wisps, thin and questing leech-feelers, which served as sensory apparatus that could send electric pulses on touch. It was this battleaxe of a guardian who forced Miko to complete her tasks on a whim. If he delayed, ghastly tentacles seized him, and directed him otherwise. As far as language was concerned, the Zikri communicated with him telepathically and he received commands in his head. The details were easy to decipher. The Zikri had made matters clear: they had no time for stubborn foolishness. Miko was to show them how the ship’s controls worked, and when prompted, point to any circuitry or dial that would help them understand the hardware better. In such way, he was forced to kowtow to the analyst’s whims—on peril of death.

  Whenever he thought to disobey, a spray of electric current passed from her cilia or tentacles through his nerves, causing him supreme pain. Miko was trapped in a game he could not win. Strapped into the pilot seat, he felt a nausea of helplessness overcome him, when Audra sat smugly in the co-pilot harness next to him.

  Did she not fear the results of her experiments?

  Miko gulped back his terror. When the power was activated, there was high risk of assimilation with two pilots stationed. Did she not grasp the danger?

  But how could she? Miko thought. His mind stumbled over the most absurd, worst-case scenario.

  Now Audra demanded a test ride in the vessel. Miko jerked back in horror. Was she daft? What did she know about the co-pilot hookup or about navigating the ship? Her seniors, aware of her impressive record in deconstruction, seemed ready to oblige her.

  The Orb’s hatch-port slid open; Sitty II burst out of the bay into near space. Miko swallowed his despair. The craft’s rear thrusters fired blue flame, her sleek hull free once again. The Zikri vessel followed behind at an intimate trailing distance.

  Miko felt a constricting sensation in the pit of his gut. He was cramped in a jerry-rigged cockpit with an alien presence—one which had stripped his motor functions to a minimal utility. Trapped him in a new-and-improved VR lock of her design.

  The alien vessel continued to watch from a purposeful distance. Reports and transmissions were beamed back to the mother ship, or so he guessed.

  Miko struggled for a means to take back his ship, but Audra was always there, more obsessed than ever. She watched him like a hawk and minimized the control he kept over the vessel. The restraints she had imposed on his limbs prevented him from incapacitating the ship or flying away to alert his own military.

  Past the half million mile mark from Numa, the co-pilot power was engaged.

  Miko felt a flood of unquenchable pain and grief.

  How? Why? The VR link with man and machine should never fire with both pilot and co-pilot secured!

  Audra jerked back in baffled anguish, her cilia wavering like dead stalks in the wind.

  The flood of energy was enormous, almost overwhelming. Miko suddenly knew. The alien’s tinkering had bypassed the safety override.

  She gave an abrupt, howling chitter. Both of them were knocked back, inundated with perilous ecstasy. Rapture upon rapture...communing with that sublime part of existence independent of body.

  Audra began to pulse with an understanding of Miko’s unsophisticated personality.

  Through the window of the empathic fusion enforced by Sitty’s computer, Miko could feel bursts of alien genetics splicing into his cells.

  Audra’s genetics.

  The flux edged him into an uncontrollable seizure. He choked on his tongue, gasped for air. He was seized again—with spasms—shooting up and down his back, forcing him to surrender in a most degrading way.

  The transformation went on in hyper-pulses, then it was almost complete.

  And unimaginable.

  A green plasmatic slime began to form around Miko’s nose and mouth, not unlike gills or valves concealed on certain octopi that haunt the underwater ocean trenches. Like a parasite, Audra began feeding off his human life force...

  Even then, she wanted more.

  Miko saw she was not immune to transformation herself. He saw her face, close up, as they were fused at the hip; it was more human-looking, with faint, pinhole, blue eyes and slightly rounder, rosier cheeks. Her constitution was the stronger, the more dominant, and so she suffered less transformation.

  The alien seemed to understand this, and her ultimate potential. It was a sensation unlike any other that the Zikri had ever experienced before and it affected her brain in a perverse way—amplifying the classical instinct of subjugation and domination. She could wield more power than any Zikri. With the power of the NAVO technology behind her, and the fusion with this foreign being, what could she not do?

  A triumphant chirrup escaped her polyp of mouth. She hungered to explore the limits of her melding, to take over the craft, throw off the yoke of her Zikri overseers, and overshadow Miko’s symbiotic body.

  Miko would have nothing of it. He fought with every inch of his life. An electrical surge pulsed through his body: Audra’s punishment. He reeled back, almost blacking out from the pain.

  Audra shivered with anticipation. She would commandeer his craft. How the Zikri would punish her after such a brash breach!

  Under the blue glow of the VR, Miko’s eye caught a glimpse of the loose flaps of alien flesh that were growing from his hip, fusing him to the alien. Those moments were the most soul-disturbing of his life. A macabre understanding of carnal knowledge passed between man and alien: a feeling so repugnant and intertwined it made Miko shiver with horror.

  He stabbed at the immuno-injector, hoping that the device, designed to irradiate gas, air, fluid, food, water, soil, nutrients in extreme cases of outer-world infection, would immobilize his enemy.

  It was impulsive, and unwise. Not only would it irradiate her body,
but his.

  Miko’s muscles knotted; he felt Audra’s electric punishment, his nerves stabbed with fire, as she linked into the VR and mentally willed the immuno-injector’s frequencies to cancel.

  Dire repercussions came at once. The link, having recorded Audra’s brain wave signature, started a new sequence. The computer was confusing the two, as it had with Miko and Bazon. It had sensed that Audra was Miko—and Miko was Audra, then began to synthesize a harvest of a life based on their composite.

  The result was ghastly.

  The two organisms coalesced into an abhorrent version of both. Brainlessly, the computer continued to feed the electromagnetic signature of both Miko and Audra to the composite-hybrid of Miko-Audra.

  Miko looked with horror at his body. Six-inch yellow stubs of tentacles had split through his uniform below his armpits.

  The alien-conglomerate part of him began to palpitate and glow. Audra’s fibril flanges danced to some faraway tune, like some deformed jellyfish caught in a rip tide, while Miko thrashed like a fish, sprouting new appendages and organs

  ...organs that did not have the right to exist. Audra’s upper torso began to form facial features—eyes, nose, ears of a man, like Miko’s.

  The two were fast becoming one.

  Miko felt a rigour as he had never before—limbs which were not his own, but tragic caricatures of those that once were—alien-like appendages, began to grow.

  The marauder Orb sky-rocketed into view on the starboard reach. The alien vessel crept closer, pursuing Sitty like a demon eye. The Orb was not without its horsepower, or weaponry. The members on her decks jigged about, squealing with strange, whale-like chittering sounds for which the Zikri were known, sounds that coursed with a basic understanding of Audra’s rebellious ambitions. The Zikri were not pleased.

  At one with her VR casing, Audra engaged the hyper-thrust. In seconds, the ship veered off at right angles to its original trajectory. With redoubled anger, the Orb raged behind, a sprawling mass of metal and machinery.

  The Zikri hunted Audra through the cold wastes of space. Vengeance was the ship’s collective thought and the aliens showed it by launching Uro-gas bombs off the starboard side by the hundreds.

  Audra sent Sitty dodging between the radionic-pulses, any of which could shear off her trillion-credit fuselage to nothingness. Nevertheless, the freakish Orb spun toward Sitty with a venomous wrath.

  Audra reached out to Miko’s mind and forced him to assist by whatever means possible, despite the state of his anguish and deformities, but Audra’s unclassifiable makeup confused the VR-link. The nexus wavered for an instant. Audra’s consciousness seemed to strain to connect again to the eerie technology, directing the vessel closer to an asteroid cluster whose gravitational pull was becoming noticeable. It was just enough of a tug to warp the effectiveness of the Orb’s missiles.

  A sudden burst of enemy fire ripped across the port bow. Sitty’s under carriage glowed incandescent for several seconds. She drew a temperature anomaly, which broached a near-fatal heat targeting by the Zikri craft. Audra discharged a photo-lumo bomb of her own, shearing a chunk off one of the large asteroids in the field. The chunk spun off from its source, smashing against the Zikri War-Orb’s weapon side.

  The pirate station faltered as fires and explosions ripped across her steel-spiked hull.

  Audra set out a scatter projection off port bay, cloaking Sitty from her fellow warship. This, through the use of a rogue technology she had ordered her technicians to install aboard Sitty, the hardware stolen from a warlord vessel Vascon whose secrets her race had pillaged years ago.

  Sitty lurched. Miko launched a deep-perturbation scan, hoping to knock out the enemy sensors and disrupt the power cells of her thrusters. Almost as if reading their minds, the Zikri craft launched an intercept beam. At once, Sitty felt the same fatal pull that Miko had first encountered on contact with the aliens. The ship’s perspective distorted; she was tractored to a near halt.

  Audra, sensing a futile fight, jammed the lumo-thrusters to the max. The ship lurched, struggling forth in fits and starts. Then at last it broke free from the tractor field and swung out of range. The Zikri’s first numbing intercept beam fell away like a shadow. Clearing the asteroid belt, Audra engaged the time drive. Sitty swept out on a broad arc, leaving the system and the Orb far behind.

  * * *

  A series of days passed, or what Miko thought was days. How to tell from the aching misery of assuming the form of a monster? Of feeling the amphibian deformity permeate every cell of his physical and mental being. How every hour of those days snailed by like years, plaguing his life with unimaginable rigour. A dire struggle ensued between human and alien, one that was fast becoming a lopsided fight to a unified end.

  Miko tried to veer out on an escape vector toward the NAVO base, but every time he tried, Audra’s telepathic power intruded upon his nerve centres. Pain, wracking pain was his reward. Constantly she dragged him back to a place of subservience; her will was focussed, so focussed—an incorrigible single-mindedness that rivalled a machine’s programming.

  Nor was Audra immune to Miko’s will to survive. The enhanced powers of his perception had increased his potential, and his threat. His feelings were not altogether unpleasant—borderline erotic, if one were to forget the quasi-humanness that had once been his.

  * * *

  The distances grew between Sitty and the Zikri Orb—billions of miles. After a time, they felt an ease of freedom from enemy targeting. Under Audra’s authority, they infiltrated a small NAVO space station in orbit off Besi 8. Using the ruse of sending out a distress signal and adding a phoney handicap to their ship, they made a standard approach to the docking port. With their superior fire power, they took the skeleton crew by surprise.

  Emerging from the VR lock, they stalked down the corridors as a single entity, past the anti-grav generators that kept them from floating off in weightlessness.

  They scavenged the docked vessels for backup and enhancement parts for their own craft. The technicians were easily overpowered. They forced them under threat of fire to replenish Sitty’s food-processor supplies and outfit the ship with certain ‘features’ which Audra had engineered. These included augmented stealth cloaking and longer range laser fire. In response to the fake signal, one of Miko’s own command-units came flying out from around the other side of the planet and appeared on the viewport. Despite Miko’s inclination for allegiance to NAVO authorities, he found himself wishing to evade communication. Why? It seemed too incredible to fathom, that Audra’s sinister influence had affected him so. Or was it his own repressed rebellious desires to defy his own commanders?

  Miko shuddered at the last thought. Almost without thinking, he discharged a half ton of compressed Mimeldion from Sitty’s under-bay, shrouding the vicinity of space with a radiowave-inhibiting cloud. The NAVO command-team was thwarted. Communication was lost and the craft couldn’t track them. Sitty escaped on lumo-power alone.

  The ploy was effortless; it spewed off Miko’s alien-infected mind with an unnerving ease, further bewildering him.

  Sitty accelerated into time drive. Hundreds of million miles later she halted the craft and let it drift in deep space like some forsaken derelict. Audra and Miko moved toward the horizon of becoming one, acclimatizing to each other, testing each other’s edges, capacities, weaknesses. Two in the form of one was not an easy or natural condition. It was a haunting contradiction—a derision of the laws of nature. Yet it was happening. Audra began to understand Miko’s pitiful individuality. She grappled with the juvenile tenacity of his personality to affirm his righteous identity. Likewise Miko struggled to fathom Audra’s insensate recklessness, her uncaring drive for independence and malice. He learned from the cold press of her alien thoughts that she was hatching a scheme to conquer the Zikri race and become their overlord. Next she would focus her attentions on the NAVO. Miko shuddered at these implications and his role in the ghastly plan. He felt chilled under its awful
weight—and at the same time, thrilled.

  All this madness occurred through the Sitty VR link. The NAVO engineers of all should never have created it. He cursed their demon technology. Nor would they have been less than pleased that it had fallen into the hands of an alien power or created such a marvellous monster, Miko thought sardonically.

  Some time later, a Delta probe mine of NAVO origin showed up as a flashing blip on the scattersplay projector. How could it have caught up with them so quickly? The weapon was travelling at phenomenal speed—supra light.

  Miko gave a gasp of dismay. The mine was installed specifically with Sitty’s signature. Only a matter of time before it latched onto them and blew them into incandescent dust.

  That his own people would try to kill him without an inquiry was something heinously unexpected. His enhanced senses flared as he sought for a way to neutralize the probe.

  Miko reflected: because they were stationary and within the weapon’s heat-seeking range, it could lock onto them, even if they jumped to time drive. Also, its velocity made it difficult, if not impossible to destroy. Astounded, despite being a tactical expert himself, he engaged the scrambler and masked Sitty’s energy projection, distorting her version of herself into an incandescent wave, a ruse which befuddled the probe for all of five seconds. Audra set up a tactical skew on the starboard vane and slewed the vessel in reverse direction. The probe swung by at a dizzying speed. Miko was jarred back in his harness. Hitting the heat-lock, he yowled. Missiles fired. The timing could not have been better. The probe, slowing down from light drive to backtrack, exploded into a million pieces, merging with the dust of stars.

  Miko laughed wile Audra hummed in her sinister, hee-hawing whine. The two renegades set course for Beta Alpha VI near Capeopella using a cloaking signature to mask the heat radiation that emanated from her fuselage.