Alien Alliance Box Set

by Chris Turner

Examining the pool from which he had crawled, he saw the pit was shallow, and had an unwholesome look to it. A rusty, metallic odour exuded from the water.

  He looked up; pale yellow light streamed from the gaping hole above. Several wark heads popped up around the opening, glaring down at him in frustration. Many sniffed with suspicion while others whined in their miserable way.

  He accepted that, for the moment, he was trapped.

  Around him the bunker’s walls rose sheer. No chance of scaling them. Would the warks jump down and attack him? They looked hungry enough. But the scent of the place made them skittish. He crouched, pipe gripped in hand. He watched the creatures with disgust. They pawed and whined at the loose soil and set leaves and humus spilling down into the pool.

  Miko vaguely wondered what Audra was up to.

  He staggered down a wide walkway, leading from the pool to the far wall. Shaking the cobwebs out of his head, he hoped there was a way out of this warren, a back exit, a tunnel, or corridor. The hairs on his neck stood on end. Part of him realized that the whole place felt altogether sinister.

  Miko limped deeper into the gloom. The oxygen level on this planet was low, traces of sulphur tainted the atmosphere and burned his lungs. Thankfully less so in this enclosed space, which had been sealed. This gave him some semblance of comfort; energy streamed back into his weakened body.

  But what was this place? Surely it could not have been created by the primitive colony of hominids he had passed by days ago? A hunter-gatherer society could hardly have engineered this. Perhaps it was the product of a previous alien race?

  A quiver of dread pricked his chest.

  What was that? Miko stopped short. The sound echoed from the wall to his left, like the scuttle of a spider.

  He stared into the darkness. How to get away from these terrors? Better yet, how to get off this wretched planet?

  His limbs ached, on his side from the burning wounds he had accumulated upon separating himself from Audra. It was a final attempt to survive the crash, an act of instinct, despite the searing pain of his sharp-edged tool. Gangrene would have set in days ago had he not succeeded in staving off infection with the small tube of bio-regen from his medpack. Then dousing the raw sores with plant resins and mosses he had gathered. It had been a risk, but either that or die.

  His eyes strained in the dimness. With hooked fingers he felt his way along the wall, cool to his touch. He rapped his knuckles on the square plates composing the walls and sensed a hollow lightness about them, if not resilience. His eyes had adjusted somewhat to the darkness. He moved toward what looked like a low, triangular doorway. Beyond it glowed a green phosphorous light. All the time, Miko felt his feet moving down, toward some subterranean level.

  He advanced with caution, thankful to be away from the gaping hole where the warks lurked. Perhaps there was a secret exit out of this chilling place?

  He stepped through the triangular opening. Lifting a leg over the lower lip, he discovered that the chamber within was smaller than the one from which he had come. He stumbled over something transparent, a broken canister or tube maybe five feet in length and caught the dry curse in his mouth as he fell headlong. A starfish-like creature lay sprawled in the moulder, his nose almost touching it. The exoskeleton had withered and was caked with dust. He pushed himself away from the grotesque sight as if it were some toxic entity. The glassy material it had been housed in was something akin to that or plastic, a bit of both. At one end, strange crystalline wirings hung, as if broken off from some connecting device. Was it from within this canister the thing had crawled? Miko shook his head. How had it escaped?

  The tube seemed to have rolled or been dragged from somewhere. But where? He scowled, blinking in the gloom. The disquieting glow grew brighter ahead.

  His frown deepened. Large basins were dug out in the hard-packed floor, dry now, but perhaps holding water at some time in the faraway past. Metal pillars equipped with curled hooks stretched up into the lofty dimness. Miko paused, collected his wits. A sixth sense shouted to him that terror crawled in the murk. Insect webs glistened in the nearby corners. Moving under the eerie light, he advanced with utmost caution. Such a place demanded suspicion.

  He rounded a great tank long drained of whatever contents it had once held. He saw the light was becoming brighter.

  The chamber within was illuminated by several dusky green glows.

  A dozen upright circular glass tubes, similar to the one he had tripped over, sat on exotic counters decorated with unrecognizable symbols: a warped net, complex schematics, beastly faces. The tubes were filled with luminous green liquid: the source of the eerie light.

  In the faint glow, Miko perceived inert monstrosities within, crusts or husks of them suspended in their liquid matrix. Some creatures were split open and their mouths hung agape, eyes gone, or whatever eyes there were stared sightlessly, or in terror.

  In one vessel, something floated that resembled a giant butterfly. Another looked like a miniaturized narwhal floating on its side in its sleeping death.

  A nameless fear fluttered in Miko’s chest. This place seemed ancient, cursed.

  The upright tubes looked very much like mini aquaria. The vessels appeared filled with their original fluid, hermetically sealed, he guessed.

  Could the creatures contained within still be alive? If it were an ancient laboratory with its millennia of dust and decay, it seemed improbable. But then again...

  Behind the vessels stood a wall panel set with a low counter. Dials and discs and imponderable script covered the wall’s surface. He believed it contained circuitry of some sort, altogether alien, but inoperative, and there was no sign of a power source.

  Miko studied the odd shapes of the trapped creatures in the tanks. These things appeared long dead, strange snail and shrimp-like hybrids, arthropods or crustaceans dredged from the caustic swamps of this primeval planet. Things among these he had studied lived in the benthic zones of Earth’s ancient oceans and deep lakes.

  Things graced with claws and snouts, barbed gills and hooked beaks.

  Shuddering, he moved toward the last exhibit closer to the far wall. The glass had cracked like the one before it and its liquid drained long ago. Nothing was left but the brown, desiccated husk of some horror. This last creature had an oblong shell and leftover crusts of spidery legs. Such an unsettling thing inspired little confidence. What a sinister menagerie! What beings would house such grisly specimens? For what purpose?

  Another empty pit, dry as a desert, lay in the chamber’s centre. It looked like a birthing bay. Long-handed scalpels and forceps hung on pillars next to it. Amongst other odd-shaped instruments, the tools were of unknown purpose: pins, wedges, barbed hooks, crude cutting tools, light of material, without rust, non-metallic.

  Miko glared about with bewilderment. Who had wielded such tools? He rubbed his temples. He took down the nearest scalpel and hefted it. A more effective weapon than this twisted pipe of his, what with its double-length blade and sharp edges. Certainly it was lighter, but could it hold up against an onslaught of the warks?

  A new movement brought him wheeling about. His heart leapt in his throat. A rat skulking in the dark? Some predator? He could hear the yipping sounds of the warks echoing dully from the corridor. His skin crawled. Their rage had reached an all time high. For this, he accelerated his inspection. He could see no exits in this chamber. Triangular doors stood barred on either side of the laboratory. To hack through them would require considerable effort, and proper tools.

  Moving deeper into the chamber, he felt his way along the far wall where two parallel triangular plates hung suspended at right angles to the wall. Each glowed a weird amber colour, hence the other source of light.

  The ground was littered with more miniature skeletons. His boots crunched on their crusty remains. In some, he recognized pincers versus hands. Flat-topped skulls and apish, elongated limbs. The victims seemed to be clustered around the mysterious apparatus before being cut down
by some dire peril.

  Miko reached over with care and was about to let his fingers trace slow circles over the plates, but he paused. The proximity to the metal, which wasn’t really metal from what he could tell, made his fingers tingle, even though they were two inches away. It was as if a small electric current ran through them.

  He pulled his hand back sharply. Cryptic squiggles, stars and dashes were engraved in the plate’s bronze-black face, though some of the forms tended toward the geometric. Whatever these things were, they pulsed with a weird energy.

  Something had gone horribly wrong here. He glanced down at the triangular-shaped skulls with eye sockets lower in the face than what they should have been.

  Whether this place was the product of the Zikri, from whom he was fleeing, or an indigenous group that had originated on this planet, was not clear.

  Nor did the technology match anything he remembered of the Zikri mothership when they had captured him and Sitty II. It seemed so long ago that he had been paired with the detestable Audra, the day they both had set out on that fateful test run aboard his own craft.

  Could the Zikri have manufactured the freakish creatures on Rogos?

  His mind brushed upon another mystery: was he in the future or the past? Ever since the light-drive on Sitty II had failed under gunfire from the pursuing Zikri craft, the constellations had looked different. Something was oddly displaced. Also, the debris from the explosion of the NAVO and Zikri craft had mysteriously vanished when he had come out of time-light slip. If he were in the future, this technology was perhaps ahead of its time, but barbarically primitive. His eyes pinched shut in exhaustion and he rubbed his temples. Either way, he was doomed.

  He pushed his head closer to the apparatus. The plates gave off a suspicious hum that grew louder in a beat frequency every ten seconds. A simple heater? Alien decor? He wiped the mirthless grin off his face. Odd that there appeared no battery or wires carrying any current of any kind to grant the plates life or luminosity.

  Miko pulled at his dirty beard. He looked about the litter of ancient bones and dusty skulls and wondered what had happened.

  He backed away from the plates. Returning to his examination of the lab, on impulse he tapped the scalpel’s blade against the glass that encased a particularly loathsome-looking creature—the narwhal.

  An oval eye flicked open.

  Miko jumped back in panic.

  The creature was alive in its pale liquid! Another eye winked open, glowing in nefarious challenge in the sombre light. Miko stared. The thing was three feet long, but oozed elemental evil. It had a black-green scaly tail and its snout was tapered, fitted with gills and a razor-sharp horn and disfigured nostrils. Most of its tusk had been shorn off and lay at the bottom of the tube.

  The cold, merciless eyes peered right through him, piercing like a blade—green eyes which spoke of intelligence and violent acts.

  Miko swallowed, hypnotized by the creature. The thing thrust its broken tusk against the glass, attempting to break free. The tube rocked back and forth and Miko stepped away, flinching. Perhaps this was why the masters of the laboratory kept skewering hooks on hand. If one of the more dangerous creatures were to break loose—

  Miko sensed a chilling presence suddenly at his back. He whirled around. A ghostly shape glided into the chamber. Loathing gripped him.

  Audra.

  The alien’s body was dripping and covered with yellow slime, evidently blood from the warks she had mutilated and assimilated. No doubt she was proud of her conquests.

  Miko backed away, bile creeping up his throat. He raised his scalpel, squelching the hideous disgust that rose up in him. One moment of inattentiveness would make him prisoner of the creature again, a fate which he would not allow.

  He snatched at the pipe tucked at his waist. He kept it raised at shoulder height. The scalpel he held at the ready in his other hand.

  Audra advanced.

  Miko licked his lips. He snatched glances left and right, contemplating his next move. He’d have to make a run for it, but where? She’d catch up with him. The yipping and excitement of the forest warks grew more intense from the open doorway. No escape there.

  The alien halted, the fleshy folds in her face crinkling in a sightless grin, as does a wolf that sniffs the air when it senses danger.

  She was no more than a half dozen paces from him when several feral shapes slinked into the chamber.

  Shit, what next? Miko’s mind screamed as the warks rushed forward.

  Seven were on them before he could even breathe, knocking him back. His body stumbled into one of the tubes, his arms flailing. The canister tottered and crashed into the narwhal’s tank, hitting the creature in the head. The canister cracked, spilling its contents. The brute dropped to the floor. Miko slashed with his scalpel, ripping the underbelly of the closest wark as snapping teeth came within hairbreadths of his neck. Another he kicked into the waterless pool. He almost tottered backward into the jaws of a horned stalker while the eel-like narwhal flapped at his feet, seeking to gore him.

  Miko took three steps away, struggling to reach the chamber’s far wall, hoping for an exit he had missed. He kicked and dodged the lethal thrusts of the narwhal’s shortened tusk.

  More warks surrounded him and he smote with both weapons. A horrible scream caught in his throat. Die, you miserable shit-weasels! Die!

  One got too close and the slithering narwhal swatted out its tail, and the wark dropped instantly and lay still. Poisoned? Electrified?

  Miko wielded the pipe and scalpel, like sword and mace, tearing away chunks of flesh from the warks gnashing their teeth at him and dodging their lunges. Miko glimpsed Audra in his periphery, forcing her foes to their knees. Smothering them in her slimy embrace, she scored them with her acrid secretions. He grimaced just as a wark was about to sink fangs into his leg. Audra drifted forth and engulfed the slavering beast in the grey mantle of her vile body.

  Pressed to the ground, the wark squealed and Miko only registered that Audra’s oily clutch was not on his own limbs. Too vividly he remembered being smothered in that sexual embrace out in space on Sitty II. Now the embrace was the poisonous and assimilating one that enveloped this thrashing wark-beast and had it squealing and lying still within seconds. Before the last shrill notes spilled from its jowl, her grey body enveloped its reddish brown hide, and chemical processes began their melting action. Miko smelled arsenic pervading the air, burnt flesh, the sizzling of scales, and the metallic stench of blood and fermented urine. In the blink of an eye, only a small ruin of smouldering flesh and bone remained where the wark had last been.

  Miko stumbled about, disoriented, his boots crunching on the remains of past victims. Audra glided in, trying to catch him in a tentacle and bear him away, but the narwhal was gaining horrifying mobility. Miko dodged the thing’s blunted tusk. Its glassy whale-like eyes fixed on Audra as it flapped along the ground, undulating like some ghastly snake or half insect, able to jump from the ground by flexing its muscles and springing up like a leech.

  The creature, faster than an eel, whipped around Audra’s gleaming torso.

  It penetrated a gill-like flap, a sexual organ, one that Miko could never forget after Audra had fused herself to him during those months in space.

  Audra let out a low chittering wail as the creature’s head burrowed in her body. She rolled back and forth, in an attempt to pry the predacious thing off her. But it clung leech-like to her midsection with its under-barbs, its tail twitching as it quested to plunge deeper.

  Audra twisted and writhed as warks drove in, slicing and impaling her with their horns. Even her outstanding abilities could not guard against the narwhal’s penetration. While the two rolled and flailed in obscene embrace, Audra snatched the offender with her grouper-like mouth. The narwhal flapped and tore at her, but she bore it to the ground and smothered the thing with her heavy, pulpy body. The thing stopped thrashing and bled white fluid. Even as its essence dripped from her torso, she swa
yed upright. The narwhal had damaged her, but Miko knew Audra could not be hurt by conventional means; never could such a thing as Audra die too swiftly. She was capable of absorbing punishment far beyond what another organism could, and still survive.

  She glided to a wall and leaned there, quivering. All but a few warks lay dead in warm, blood-dripping heaps. The few live ones feasted on their dead in their carnal fashion. Audra’s skin had turned a slightly yellowish hue. Gases seemed to have been trapped in her abdomen; her midsection bloated and oozed pus. Perhaps the creature had caused her internal injury with its invasive thrusts. Miko could only speculate.

  Audra gave a gurgle, then convulsed, releasing what seemed a high-pitched chitter of agony. Miko, dazed and somewhat empathetic to the creature he had been joined to for so long, could not help but feel the small hairs rise on the back of his neck. He had time to gasp out a choking breath then stagger away when one of the last warks came crashing into him.

  He fell back, missing the parallel plates by a hair’s width. Then he stumbled between them. Electricity seized him and shivered through his body. The room disappeared in a blaze of chilling light.

  Miko cried out a single elongated scream that no one could hear...

  His spirit was dangling in space, not his mind, not his body, but something else. His body had died back on Rogos in a parallel reality—in a limbo of nowhere-ness. The Miko that was Miko, now hung suspended light years above obscure stars and planets in the gulfs of space, travelling at immeasurable speed. His astral body was suspended in a matrix of improbability, going somewhere, nowhere, through worlds of past and future, he could not guess or imagine.

  Many colours passed before his astral senses—roses, greens, whites, yellow puffs of billowing gas. They were light years away and many thousand more across; worlds and stars spun in this universe, untold numbers. He passed the slip stream of consciousness, of imagination, through death, surrender, rebirth.

  Then it came to him—journeying on the astral plane. He had been thrust into a time pocket. Had he known that the parallel plates were the ancient race’s time travel device, an amalgamator, to cross the limitless bounds of space, he could have been more reassured. The realization that he was centuries in the future was certain.