Alien Alliance Box Set

by Chris Turner

  Miko was confident that their stealth and ingenuity would discourage any NAVO intercept vessels, or Zikri surprise attacks. Whatever the outcome, the Zikri or the pretentious NAVO’s probes sent after them could be dealt with, Miko thought.

  So the play continued. Days slipped into months. Cat and mouse games continued, and then, finally there came a lull.

  Miko abandoned his desire to escape Audra. It seemed the more he tried, the more he was bound to suffer. Like Pavlov’s dog, he learned. Attempts at taking Audra unawares or sabotaging the ship or alerting the NAVO forces to their position had all been fruitless, and had been rewarded pain.

  He put his energies into exploring the uncharted areas of space and of mapping worlds, all in the hopes of finding some resource, or mechanism by which he could escape his thraldom to Audra. Audra became more obsessed with besieging space stations and exploiting their secrets. Her master plan of overthrowing the Zikri was still ripe on her mind. It weighed with a heaviness that chilled Miko.

  Sitty II, the onboard mind-machine merger, was an advanced piece of technology that the NAVO Military desperately wanted back. But how long could they continue this freebooting was a question to be pondered. The vessel continued to plunge the thickly-twined rogues throughout the galaxy; the combination, a harrowing mix of outlaw and fiend.

  Miko laughed, shuddering at his new sense of wild freakishness. He stroked the growing gills on his throat with his webbed digits in somewhat offhand acknowledgement. He considered his adopted manner with a detachment most unlike him. It was out of touch with his former character. Rebelliousness and hate had transformed him into a cold and brooding creature: Audra and her dominance had warped him.

  * * *

  The rogue ship passed on through the outer gulfs. The twain crossed uncharted territories, catapulting through interstellar dust never before breached. The two achieved a new level of symbiosis, a perversion of nature that was at once fantastic and appalling.

  A strong sexuality existed in their close-coupled arrangement. It transcended all forms of contacts and superfluous joinings. Even their own bodies, now caricatures of what they had been before, were of fantastic origin: intertwined weaves of pulses and signals that had made them so mixed of biology and spirit that neither knew really what they were. The pact consisted of a crossing of species, a freakish melding that pushed past the threshold of invasion.

  The trinity was what it was—man, machine, and ‘Audra’. United into some unfathomable whole, the two knew separation was unlikely, if not impossible. They had passed a critical point; perhaps an inevitable milestone in this birthing of a bizarre life form. Was it a necessary evolution of technology to produce the obscenity of which he found himself part?

  The metamorphosis had left Miko disfigured. He burned with intensity, convinced only that the universe had its grossly unfair way of manifesting new ‘things’ at the expense of the old.

  Somewhere, in the aftermath of all this madness, he thought there would be some sane resolution.

  He was wrong.

  II

  An unknown time passed. Six months? A year? It was all a blur in Miko’s mind. He was resigned to his new role as alien renegade. The time for raiding had come again. The two needed replacement crystals for the time drive, and also raw organic ingredients to feed the food processors which would assimilate the materials and pipe a ready-made mash of nourishing paste through the tubes and into the VR chassis.

  Audra choose a small Zikri outpost on a moon far out in orbit around the amber disc of the planet Rogos as their next prey. Approaching the station on an unobtrusive vector, they sat nestled confidently in their NAVO craft. Now they intimately shared the same liquid matrix socket. In fake tow came Sitty, led by a small Zikri craft that they had commandeered. A ploy, of Audra’s making. It was a similar, smaller-sized spiked orb as the mother ship, taken some months ago in a faraway sector. The empty craft, cleansed of corpses, they directed remotely from within Sitty.

  The two swung closer, a team of ghoulish raiders. They crafted an innocent descent, then forwarded soothing replies to the outpost’s command bridge whose communication babble poured from the VR audio link.

  The outpost was like no NAVO station. It was built of low-lying geometric structures on a small desolate moon, barren and without life. The dry, rugged surface had an unwholesome quality to it, this slowly rotating mountain of rock. The station, constructed of those fabulous cubic shapes and polyhedron that Miko had caught glimpses of aboard the Zikri Orb, was steepled with a thousand frightful spikes jagging out from her surface. Why had the Zikri picked this wasteland as an outpost? A fuel servicing station? A supply depot? There was no activity here, or incoming ships, or movement in the immediate vicinity. The low gravity made it a poor choice for mining, thought Miko. Though there was evidence of drilling within a mile’s radius of the station, he saw no vehicles, only a dozen large tanks or drums set upright in curious clusters. Expansion? Accessories to the outbuildings? A mystery of its own...excepting the possibility of other more insidious operations occurring on Rogos. Yet the desolate outpost suited the rebels’ purposes quite well...

  The blue-orange gases of the Mangela nebula drifted light years distant, a majestic backdrop to this lonely setting.

  The outpost hatch was about to open, then something strange occurred. As in all unexpected events, a flash of terror gripped Miko. Four bright flashes appeared on Sitty’s left flank.

  A warning flashed in his brain. Warships, of Zikri origin!

  Behind them had materialized four ominous orbs. The ships were fresh out of time drive: huge vessels, armed to the teeth with laser-cannon, tracking antennae and radiation nets.

  Audra loosed a sharp chitter. Truly the creature hadn’t expected such a confrontation, but it was obvious that the excess raids at the hands of the rebels had made the enemy drunk with vengeance. A think tank of tacticians had likely devised some trap for them, and they had unwittingly sprung it...

  On reflex, Audra jettisoned the decoy craft. Miko jammed Sitty’s thrust to full, just before the first destructive rays of the war orbs slashed crimson paths across their starboard viewport.

  The blast knocked Sitty’s central power out of kilter. The craft was sent spinning away like some kite lost in the wind.

  Three of the Zikri war orbs rushed to intercept. They surrounded the wounded craft, weapons trained and honing in for the kill.

  Audra chittered out a command. Miko shuddered at the thought of the cold-blooded Zikri getting hold of them and torturing them on some bloodstained operating table. He flash-backed to an episode of the past where a young soldier named Kraig had contracted a virulent disease, infected by some alien life form on a routine mission to an unexplored planet. The amputations of arm and leg had not been pleasant...

  Audra’s excited chitter rang in the VR socket. Miko was jarred back to reality. She had no intention of letting the Zikri catch her or take the ship. Secretly she had hidden a detonator device aboard the decoy vessel; now she sought to trigger it.

  At a same instant, a small flotilla of NAVO craft appeared on the horizon, slipping out of time drive like a pack of fleas. Several smaller attack ships—‘sentinels’ as Miko knew them—came hurtling out of the mother craft, eager to engage the Zikri.

  The Zikri sat stunned. The four Orbs jerked to action, overcoming their surprise at the sudden appearance of the NAVO ships. They withdrew as one from their tight ring around the disabled Sitty, then put the full force of their attention on the unwelcome NAVO.

  Grim minutes reigned. Ships burned, bombs streaked, fires seared, death and mayhem filled the bleak moon’s skyline. From afar, the battle appeared as a bumblebee swarm, disordered and chaotic. The Zikri dropped their uro-bombs from the torque cannon mounted on their spikes while the NAVO sentinels unleashed blue ruin in the form of zicon lasers and lumo-bombs.

  Two of the Zikri mother ships glowed like fire; then they vibrated dangerously, prey to lethal NAVO sentinel spray. Sev
eral tri-wing sentinels went up in flames. The NAVO flagship was getting bombarded with debris and bomb shatter. Her hull showed breaches in many places. Now her conning towers were crushed and cut away from her and the transmission dishes were ripped off like ripe corn under the bombs of the Zikri.

  Miko tore his gaze from the gruesome scene. He concentrated on correcting his course, to a place far away from Rogos. He must get power back to the main console! He thrust away with auxiliary power from their exposed position with whatever weak force the ship had left.

  Sitty limped along, widening the gap from Rogos at a frustrating, slow pace. It was well below light speed, but try as he might, Sitty’s time drive refused to function. He suppressed a curse.

  A blinding flash arced from a Zikri Orb. Sitty’s viewport showed a wall of fire, lighting the viewport. Two sentinels collided with each other and burst into searing flame. Pieces of red-hot wreckage slewed past Sitty and skidded off her titanium hull with a dull clangour.

  Miko’s heart skipped a beat. A piece of hot metal in the wrong place would breach the hull.

  Another of the Zikri Orbs started to vibrate with wholesome force then imploded into a pool of darkness and was no more.

  Out of the terror zone, Sitty drifted, significantly crippled. But off her port bow, a stealth NAVO ship appeared, a quadri-winged sprinter advancing with long-range laser guns. Somehow it had escaped the roil of battle, and came at them at malevolent speed, weapons locked.

  Miko mouthed a curse. No shrewd manoeuvring could outwit the dragnet. He cried out a half chittering grunt, riddled with defeat, while a dozen NAVO craft, the last remaining, set up a radiation net that blocked escape from three sides. Facing their only escape flank was a grim phalanx of NAVO sentinels, armed, with enough firepower to destroy two moons. Cold remuneration was in order.

  Audra gave a wild squeal of exultation. Why? Miko was perplexed. Could she not see they were doomed?

  With an almost wily smirk on her eerie face, she released the detonation timer on the Zikri decoy vessel.

  Almost at once, Miko, by happenstance, felt the surge of gamma power returning to the main boosters. He jarred the main power to life. Sitty II thrust out on an escape vector toward far Cassiopeia.

  Like hundreds of times before, Miko witnessed the wonder and power of the light-speed time drive. From the craft’s nose flared a cone of luminosity stretching to near infinity. Majestically it appeared before them, of a thousand unnameable colours, like a tornado funnel out of a twisted storm. It was some wormhole to nowhere. One small adjustment, a hair’s width out of place, and the tunnel could lead them as far as the Altair wastes.

  Sitty disappeared in a wormhole of time drive fantasy. The effect was indescribable, a scintillating kaleidoscope of light and colour. From the previous blast, the Zikri decoy ship had exploded in red ruin behind them and everything within a fifty cubic mile radius become an instant cinder, including most of the NAVO craft.

  Audra’s forethought of installing the detonator had been a wise decision, however ruthless, thought Miko...

  Miko and Audra laughed in unison—How could the NAVO and Zikri fools not see the mirror of their own doom?

  The joint enemy would be more than upset when they saw how their attacks had failed. At least, whatever bands of them were left.

  Only milliseconds before entering the time cone, the NAVO sentinel that had been closing the gap had followed at a somewhat near lethal vector. It had caught the tail end of Sitty’s funnel with some luck and now followed at supra-light speed. It was within striking distance, and the pilot, without a moment’s thought, blasted a crippling ray into Sitty’s stern.

  Sitty rocked wildly. The time drive edged toward the threshold of instability. The guidance system could fail, thought Miko, and send them all into a nether dimension.

  The Trynium in her computers died. The ship plummeted three thousand feet, jarred out of the cone, bypassing the time-light continuum, threatening to dematerialize them all. The sentinel followed, sucked along by relativistic inertia. By some freak chance, they escaped oblivion, a dark death lost in the time stream forever—but now they were knocked back into reality.

  But what reality? To Miko’s horror, he saw Rogos’s disc bulging some ninety thousand miles below like some amber goblin. How could that be? They should be light years away! They had not even gained a few thousand miles on their supra light journey. It made no sense.

  Miko uttered a strangled cry. They were right back where they had started. They would be sitting ducks to NAVO fire.

  But where were the NAVO?

  For a split second he had caught a glimpse of the last fateful explosions and the webs of twisted metal that spun to haunt those precincts of space.

  All vanished and there remained only black space.

  Miko sat in his harness dumbfounded. No outpost, no ships, no fires, no wreckage. All the fires had been quenched. The Zikri were gone, all except the NAVO sentinel that had fired on them, which revolved in a slow eccentric loop out to port, now a powerless husk. Only Rogos’s dusk-amber light burned below. What had happened? Where had everything gone?

  Miko’s mind flickered—on something extraordinary.

  They must have been jarred out of time. He recalled that the acceleration had not resolved itself when the NAVO ship had blasted them from the back. What did it mean? Likely they accelerated through the tunnel, and thus accelerated through time. But where were they now? Some distance in the future...or the past.

  Miko swallowed the lump in his throat. How far, he could not say, or in what direction they had gone, future or past. He could only guess it might be as easily a few days or few years as much as a few million. No wreckage, no moon, no outpost? That could mean anything or nothing. The moon that housed the Zikri base could have passed some length in its orbit on to the other side of the planet.

  Miko’s amphibian-like features curled in a puzzled frown. The fact that the sensors showed no radiation from the explosion, brought a feeling of dread to his stomach.

  His mind travelled back to the lectures he had sat through about time travel and the essence of ship drive physics. One rolled painfully in his mind: Through creating a tunnel or vortex of the appropriate force and dimension, a time dilation can occur. A space stretch, allowing any vessel or being in that space to make the gigantic leaps across the gulfs of space. The non-relavistic technology operates on a basic principle of ‘radiosis’: manifesting an intense radionic pulse beamed through a hypercompressed Alopathon crystal. If the frequency of the beam is allowed to reach the terahertz range, the vibrating crystal undergoes a radical shift and modifies the space around it at the molecular level, thus warping space and time. To channel such power means to create a condition for supra light speeds. In the same way, as in the phenomenon of time dilation, a voyage taking millions of years might take only a few hours, or a few days. The frequency of such waves, however, must be inordinately high, and unwavering.

  It was beyond Miko’s ken...

  He snapped out of his reverie, disturbed by Audra’s shrieks and the jerking prod of her tentacles. Everything was gone, except the crippled NAVO craft...what did it mean?

  The tug of Rogos became real. Sitty II now became a target of the planet’s gravity. The ship’s thrust, which was minimal at best, could not counteract the descent. The main power was kaput, barely able to supply a few mitons of time drive thrust. Miko saw, they were being dragged toward the ancient planet.

  He had the satisfaction of witnessing the NAVO craft that had instigated this foul-up roll in its death throes. It drifted like a wounded gull toward the ancient planet. He considered blasting it to cinders with whatever power remained in Sitty’s weapon cells, but no such power was on reserve, not to mention that it all seemed wrong. Perhaps the ship, should it regain control, could be his last chance for escaping Audra. Was it a foolish hope?

  Audra. How the name evoked a dark pall in his heart. Death or capture by his own people. Which was better? Did
he really want to escape Audra? The idea appalled him as much as excited him. He thrust his thoughts back to the dilemma at hand.

  The planet loomed larger than expected through the viewport. How fast they were descending he did not know, for the gauges were mostly unresponsive. Miko only knew that the ship was spinning in a slow loop, caught in Rogos’s gravitation, much like the nearby NAVO craft. Through the small oval of glass, he caught glimpses of the dull amber world lying below. Rogos! An ominous shadow and reminder that it would become their grave.

  Miko could only guide the sub lumo-thrust manually to somewhat slow their descent. The loss of central power had knocked out the escape pod. Sitty II was however equipped with mechanisms for freefall. Vane brakes and air chutes would open automatically at appropriate times. But would that be enough? There were always inordinate risks when entering an atmosphere to crash-land. He could not say the same for the NAVO vessel drifting not a few miles away, smoking and reeling in a tight death pull like a chewed up carcass. The sentinel had not fared as well being knocked out of the time cone.

  Miko stabbed out a webbed finger onto his color-coded holo-screen. Up came a likeness of the planet Rogos, the image flickering on reserve power. A brief pictorial description of the planet’s history played back through the holo-screen. There was not much to see or hear. In the Almanac of Planets was written a brief excerpt on the planet’s origin, and the existence of a very primitive life on its surface.

  Miko grunted miserably. He dimmed the screen. Entry into the atmosphere was coming quickly. A deafening roar permeated the hull. The titanium outerbody could withstand the heat, but the fall would be devastating. He diverted more power to the rear stabilizers to reverse the thrust at or near the moment of impact, but not enough. Audra sat impassively, a fleshy gnomish figure, watching the unfolding disaster with a clinical disinterest.