Alien Alliance Box Set

by Chris Turner

With eyes bulging from their sockets, Miko twisted about in horror, struggling to get away from that mad carnage. There came sounds of ingestion, horrible crunching sounds that followed with much gurgling and mastication.

  Of the shadow Miko saw naught. The presence seemed to have no tangible form or substance, outside of a cold damp presence—something like a damp wind from the sea. But how could something like that eat something that large?

  The winged thing’s calls faded to nothing. Then came thick silence.

  A silence was so deep that Miko felt the very planet had halted.

  A brooding pall followed. Miko could feel it, palpable as a panther’s stealthy pursuit, terrible under the dim shadow of the penumbra-born twilight.

  The presence seemed to retreat, as if satisfied. The pall suddenly lifted. The dim amber twilight light shone over the hollow again. To where the creature went Miko knew not, but the horn-like sound faded to dim echoes. And then nothing...

  Momentarily Miko blinked back his confusion. He seemed free of the spell, but he refused to believe his motor functions would function for any time too long.

  As quick as a serpent, he dashed on, racing in stumbles and starts through the sylvan gloom. He felt a pounding in his ears, a deep, hollow despair. Would he ever see the end of this nightmarish journey? The thought of the time cone and his impossible marooning flashed through his mind. Was there any rescue? He could be years, decades in this place, stuck in some future, or past. The perplexing acts exhibited toward Audra gave him no solace. They frightened and disquieted him.

  Gritting his teeth, Miko knew he must put as much distance between himself and the Zikri and this shadow thing. Though he barely understood what motives drove it, or had driven him to act as he did back there when it had entrapped poor Audra. Where was she now? He stopped as he registered what he had just said. Poor Audra? He shook his head in sad bafflement. He could not get his mind off her.

  Nevertheless, under no circumstance must he sleep.

  * * *

  Miles later, the beleaguered pilot came to a cleared area at whose dank outer end he stumbled across a pathway. Or was it a roadway? Yes, he detected the faint footprints of some bipeds or other etched in the thick reddish-coloured mud.

  No sign of Audra. Miko followed the trail with mixed emotions. He seemed to have lost Audra and was intent on keeping it that way. But again, misgiving hit him; the sad hollow feeling of loss. He urged his feet onto greater speed, even though they were numb with fatigue and his heart beat with a terrible ache for the alien.

  Miko was wary of wandering beasts. He had become habituated to their rhythms; it was an awareness that had saved him many times from certain demise.

  The sound of voices came to his ears—but of no language he had ever heard before.

  Cautiously he stole out on the brow of a small hill. A blaze of peach sunlight shone where the trees broke. The effect was illusory; his eyes almost hurt from the contrast. Down in a valley he spied many constructions: rude cottages crafted of some unknown material, low towers, lookouts, fenced pits, dwellings of some sort.

  Here was some breed of Neanderthals, Miko decided, or anthropoids, tending fields and working with instruments. They were more simian than human, he discovered, with overlarge heads, skullish faces and long arms and teeth, but they wore no familiar hides or skirts of woven reeds, only unusual scarves which covered loins and necks.

  He could vaguely detect some manner of womankind tending the land with young ones in tow. Spears and metal pikes and coils of barbed wire were spread liberally on the odd dwellings and the ground. Doubtless to deter the horrors of the forest. Outside the palisade, a group of hunters seemed to be carving up the carcass of one of the enormous, two-headed winged things that had fallen out of the sky. An atmosphere of ritual seemed to surround these beings.

  Miko flattened himself to the ground. He gave a bewildered grunt. Edging himself back into the vine tangle, he lay there for some time. Had the humanoids seen him? He hoped not. His breath came out in ragged gasps. His hands shook. The stress and privation of the past days had started to take its toll. He forced himself to hold his breath and imagined a peaceful place, as his instructor on Mission Base had trained him. Feeling calmer now, he snuck another peek at the colony and saw another group of their kind toiling with some kind of tools and primitive machines. Wagons or war machines of some sort? The vehicles were being hoisted on drays which were rolled away by ropes and chains tugged by teams of the strongest members. Bizarre. Yet they would need such machines, thought Miko. To survive on this harsh world was an effort of will. Only too vividly did he feel his own resources waning, as if he himself were in a drug-induced dream. If only the pain were not so real...

  The astonishing fact of these beings’ possession of metal and warcraft suggested two things: that they were not of an equivalent class of evolution as the early hominids of Earth, and that they were resourceful enough to survive the dangers of the planet by building advanced survival mechanisms. But had another race landed and gifted them with their technology? If so, where were these beings? Such questions lingered in Miko’s brain.

  Spellbound he watched as they went on with their daily work. He lay in the grass almost numb, hearing raucous voices muster commands in their barbarous language. Many of the strange orders were carried out by pliant clan members. Pens of animals sat crowded around the perimeter of the settlement behind the palisades, whose corners were reinforced with low wooden watchtowers. While warriors stalked the grounds, caged beasts hooted and hissed beyond the bars...beasts akin to the horned marsupials that he had come to know so well.

  Miko gave a dispirited groan. A food source? For the purposes of domestication? A feral army? He peered, grimacing in a feverish daze at the horde. On the other side of the valley small trails wound up into the hazy jungly tangle.

  A brittle amber glow crept its way over the faraway hill. Morning? Afternoon? Evening? All were much the same.

  Miko rubbed his aching temples. A sense of defeat flooded him. How his eyes smarted as if they had been bathed in sulphur pools! His tongue stuck in a parched mouth. When had he last drunk a sip of water? He remembered snatching some berries and bitter nuts from a shrub before the aardvarks had attacked, but since then, no water. There seemed little chance that these hardened denizens of the eerie towers and the war wagons would prove a source of aid at this late hour.

  Miko felt no need to reaffirm the truth. Behind him came the ominous drones of mournful abandon which seemed to follow him everywhere. In fact, it seemed to be drawing nearer.

  From below came movement: Miko spied pockets of warriors scrambling for weapons and taking to the towers. Women and children sought the piked shelters.

  Miko let out a sobbing cry. Heaving himself to his feet, he threw himself deeper in the tangle. He did not go far before he fell back again.

  A creepy twelve-legged spider had scuttled across his lap, with an eye cluster studying him severely.

  He recoiled. What more could plague him?

  Off across the hill he half ran, half limped. He summoned every inch of resolve to get away from that abysmal place. He followed the inside fringe of the forest, a sad broken man, pursuing what little shreds of sanity were left, in a direction he thought east. Did it matter? He was only eager to bypass the sinister commune.

  New activity issued from below. Miko spied the warriors in the lookouts arming slingshots and primitive arbalests, preparing to do battle with one of the armadillo winged things which came swooping out of the sky. How was it that the shadow didn’t devour the valley dwellers? Did the open basin of the valley protect them?

  He ducked back into the forest. His thoughts drifted. Was he destined to wander this sorrowful land for all time with Audra at his heels?

  Sadly it seemed true. Maybe a fitting end? He was a grotesque freak, like the thousand other creatures that roamed this world, not knowing if the next hour would be their last.

  The foreign air was weakening him. Depr
edation of oxygen was making his lungs ache; the nausea from the atmosphere’s sulphurous taint threatened to cripple him.

  The hours passed and as he flexed his fists and felt the blood flowing in his veins, he could feel the human side of him returning. It was a wonderful feeling! Perhaps, beyond hope of hope, the process of retrociniation would reverse itself. At all costs he must not let it disappear.

  The survivor in him dared to think there was hope. It was all too fantastic to believe, this freakish odyssey that he had survived thus far.

  A grim determination stirred Miko. It crested his soul like a wave on a stormy ocean. Under the alien glare of Rogos’s sun, he felt a transformation, a resolve welling deep within his breast, of hope and courage, from the very spirit of the cave dweller to the time of modern humankind, tapping instincts of ancient forebears who had struggled against all odds to survive against the primordial mastodons, the fierce saber-toothed tigers and the other horrors that had prowled the worlds since the dawn of time.

  He would find a way to return to his human form.

  He would survive...

  THE TIMELOST

  BOOK IV

  I

  Miko halted at the edge of the clearing, his legs burning with exhaustion. His breath came out in ragged gasps, warm steam forming in the sticky wetness that was home to the tall tropical trees.

  The pilot’s dark hair had grown long and matted and trailed down his shoulders. His cheeks were hollowed-out pits; his once-strong body was bruised and lacerated, thinned by privation. But he had not lost the will to live. Grey eyes kindling with determination, he clutched the metal pipe he had used as a club to smash the skulls of the predators of this alien world. Nothing more than a piece of twisted wreckage from the ruined spacecraft he’d piloted, but it had helped to stave off the monsters so he could work his way through the dense forest.

  Through bloodshot eyes, he caught a glimpse of something glinting ahead. Across the clearing, perhaps fifty yards away, plates of metal peeked out from an obtrusive mound running the length of the glade. Long and high-curved like a bow, it was hung with a heavy covering of overgrowth. If he could climb the structure and get beyond it, he might be able to elude the hyena-size warks that pursued him. In his weakened state, a pack like this could take him down and rip him to shreds. Not an hour ago he’d seen them turn on one of their own in a vicious horn and fang-rending clash.

  He had to move. Shaking the haze out of his head, he staggered into the clearing, breath rasping like a wounded wolf. Only the reduced gravity, two-thirds of his home world near Tau Ceti, helped him keep ahead of the predators. Daylight was fast fading; another reason for urgency since his night vision was poor. Closing in on the mound, he saw it was a bunker of some sort with patches of silver metal gleaming under the sprawl of foliage.

  At least he thought it was a bunker. A drainage ditch circled it, heavily overgrown with weeds. There seemed also to be metal spikes protruding from its surface, at the base and near its summit. Antennae? An ancient warship, crash-landed like his? A communications station? No, not likely. He was about to speculate further, but snorts and growls echoed from the bush, followed by the thudding of a dozen cloven feet.

  Miko swung around in terror as a fleet shape, a thick-scaled forerunner burst from the pack, charging him. At the last second, he stepped aside and smashed his club down, caving in the thing’s rhino-like skull. Its body thudded to the turf like a stone, shuddering out its last breath.

  He spun the blood-stained weapon with desperation, menacing others which loped closer, slavering, snarling. They sprang back from his thrusts, a mixture of yelps and gutturals in their wattled throats. Instinctively, they were driven to kill.

  Akin to some abominable jackal and armadillo mix, these creatures had reddish spotted hides, small upturned snouts and coyote-like jowls. Their hind legs were shorter than their forelegs, investing them with a primeval look, with backs down-sloped on an angle. Curled fangs dripped saliva.

  In one quick motion he tucked the steel club in his waist belt and clawed his way up the bunker, snatching at the encroaching fronds. The purple and green foliage clung to the surface and ripped under his fingers as he clawed his way up. Digging heels into vine and stalk, he lost his grip and began to slide back down toward the warks. The creatures jumped at him. He felt a hooked tooth sink into his ankle and he screeched in anguish.

  With a vicious jerk he snatched his club. Using his greater strength in the lower gravity, he cracked the thing’s head open, freeing himself from its grip. He forced himself to scrabble higher, fingernails bloodied, and he burst over the mound, heart hammering. He lay on his back, gasping for air, the sulphur-tinged atmosphere of Rogos far too thin for such exertion. He withdrew the twisted bar at his waist, ready to use it as a mallet if any of the beasts got up this far.

  He rolled onto his stomach and peered down through the fronds. A pack of warks barked and whined and jumped while others sank teeth into the corpse. He saw vines and plants had crawled more thickly over the bunker’s summit. Evidently their birth and death cycle had created a rank humus for new growths. Dragging his heel across the soil, he saw underneath a hard, resilient material.

  Three of the hyena-like creatures set their opalescent eyes glaring up at him. Miko recalled the past two weeks had given him much experience with these brutes. The days had passed like a bad dream.

  Another shape emerged between the crooked trees with their spindly yellow leaves.

  Miko’s jaw dropped. He was gripped with an emotion which began as incomprehension then grew to revulsion.

  Audra floated out, like a vengeful swamp demon—a grotesque Zikri, an alien race of conquerors and space pirates. A race that captured NAVO ships and put their crews to death, or worse. She contemplated the scene with the clinical dispassion of her kind. The shapeless face showed vague smudges which marked mouth, nose and ears and formed the chilling mask that Miko had come to know so well over the past months.

  The creature lay wrapped in a preternatural menace, standing several heads higher than the warks on two webbed feet and a stub of a tail. She loomed at the edge of the glade, a silent, grey-slabbed mass of flesh with numerous quivering tentacles and slitted gills. But it was clear from her fearless stance that her boneless mass contained a wealth of muscle underneath that fleshy exterior, and guarded powers undreamed of.

  How had she flushed him out of the bush so soon? A shiver ran through Miko’s gaunt frame. The warks suddenly became aware of their new prey and they turned twitching snouts and bared teeth to her. Audra stood her ground, impassive as a sentinel, an impressive foe.

  How the creature had hijacked his ship, Miko was loath to recall. The thing had been keen to tap into New Avionics Vanguard Order’s state of the art technology; she had been ruthless in this regard. All those months on board his vessel Sitty II remained a soul-shattering blur to him, joined hideously to the creature in a freakish accident when an experimental pilot-co-pilot mechanism had spliced the two together. He had hacked away the flabs of flesh binding them but—

  Miko stared spellbound. The rank, peaty smell drifting from the forest was starting to sicken him. The whine of insects crowded in on his ears. As he watched the creature glide effortlessly toward the snarling beasts below him, he felt the lumps on his ribs and underneath his armpits. The thought that tentacles used to be there, sprouted and now fallen off, made him reel with loathing. Still, he retained deformities: facial distortions, gills under the ears. He could feel them with his partially webbed fingers. The last two weeks had seen a consistent reversal of the effects of alien fusion. But only because he had cut himself free from Audra.

  The creature advanced with stealth, appearing as if she glided on air over the yellowing turf. Her egg-shaped body caught the dimming copper light that filtered dully from the sky. More warks were streaming out of the crazy twists of bush. Their assaults, while in vain would be met with fury.

  Miko ducked back, swallowing the hard lump in his th
roat. Howls of pure agony reached his ears as the warks melted like wax on contact with Audra’s flabby hide. Sucker pads on her underbelly worked to consume their flesh as chemical processes did their corrosive work. Their yipping rang long in his memory as he scrambled to the very top of the summit while Audra wreaked her havoc.

  He pushed through the stunted plants down the other side of the bunker, club gripped in a sweaty fist, his skin catching on the scratchy fronds. His muddy rag of a uniform was blood-caked, mostly dry now, but some fresh blood from his ankle trickled, courtesy of the recent fight with the warks. Even if he slid down the other side with the aim to lose those fiends in a scramble to the dense trees, the creatures that survived Audra’s onslaught, and others, would figure out a way to circumnavigate the bunker. Curse all these alien predators! If he could only—

  Screeeaaach! It all happened so fast, quicker than his mind could compute: he fell twenty feet to splash into a pool of cool liquid. The metal had given way underneath him, swallowed him up like a sinkhole.

  He shook the water from his arms, curses spilling from his lips.

  The interior of the bunker was dim, lit only by small sky holes above.

  He checked himself for injuries. No broken bones. His back had been slammed hard, but a few more aches at this point could add nothing to the hurts he had already accrued. The pool’s brackish water had cleansed the caked blood and grime on his skin. He gritted his teeth and squared his resolve. He re-bandaged his wounds as best he could. As it was, his tattered uniform could barely cover the wounds hidden underneath.

  The musty air stank with a faint odour of decay. Something else too he could not define, a chemical odour.

  Miko felt the dull pounding of his heart; he listened to the muted thuds of the many wark snouts battering against the bunker, also the screams of others. He had no sense of the size of this place; his eyes were still adjusting to the gloom.