Alien Alliance Box Set

by Chris Turner

  “Save it for later…” He pulled her back toward the ship.

  She drew back grudgingly, spraying a final round for good measure.

  Hresh had stayed aboard to watch the ship. Now through the glass, he gaped as the two ducked into the cargo hold and the outer hatch drew down behind them. The chamber depressurized. Cloye and Yul stumbled blindly out of the air lock and down the narrow corridor toward the bridge. Hresh tagged at their heels, wringing his wrists. Miko’s ship had long departed.

  * * *

  Back in the shadows, Audra glared. She nursed her heavy, rubbery chest wounds. They would heal, as they always did. Even with missing tentacle parts, she knew her vitality would take care of the rest. They would regenerate, as would the chunks of flesh off her hide and haunch. She was beyond gangrene and infection. Such was her iron constitution.

  A long time after, she stared at the retreating ships, besieged with rage, frustration, and pride. The latter was spurred by her lover’s ingenuity in escaping an impossible scenario. She had to compliment him. It had been an all too chaotic escape. Miko was fast improving his game. Last time he had almost gotten himself shredded at her violent ministrations. Perhaps he had learned to control these freakish lapses into non-existence.

  She glided over to his vacated Mentera suit and kicked at the empty, shredded husk. He still could be lurking about these tunnels as a bodiless entity. But likely not. The human would connive to get on the ship that the locust had piloted away. She should have crushed that meddling bug when she had a chance.

  She twitched. Her head swam with bitterness. Never helpful in these moments of hindsight.

  Expelling a gust of cold air, she glided jerkily up the tunnel. She’d been here before at a similar place of deadlock. Immune to the harsh environment and the airless loneliness of this planet, a familiar spite swept through her tingling limbs and dissipated to the familiar tune of ‘I told you so’. There would be other places, other times. How much longer could Miko escape her clutches?

  Her limbs quavered. Down the empty tunnel she glided, toward the smoking carcass of Miko’s earlier ship where his friends had been gunned down by the Mentera. After much wandering she found it. It was some tunnels away. Slaughtered Mentera lay piled in ghastly heaps. She’d bide her time. Waiting in ambush hiding would suffice. When the Mentera showed up to claim their dead, they’d be in for a grisly surprise…

  Chapter 14

  Miko glided wraith-like onto the bridge where Usk sat at the helm, guiding the ship down the tunnel with a labored breath. His one claw was badly torn. Star sat hunched beside him, head slumped, her back to the wall by the weapons console. The holo view showed darkened corridors with rough-hewn walls, with the ship passing the occasional cross corridor. Despite his handicap, Usk navigated the lightfighter safely down the gloomy ways. After a time he halted the stolen craft. With insect mouth agape, he rustled through the ship’s med kit and wrapped up his claw in a coarse weave of gauze. Then he shuffled on insect hind legs to the nearby Mentera feeding tank. He paused as if toying with the idea of hooking up the intravenous cable to his abdomen. He abandoned the idea and instead snatched up a cup to the side, eyeing the blaster that floated in the air, blinking in a cunning way. The locust lifted the tank’s lid, pulled out a brimming cupful of green water and hurled it where Miko clutched the weapon.

  The air around Miko sparked and hissed as he buzzed back to visibility. He reeled, clutching at his temple. “Ow! Don’t do that, Usk! It’s hellish enough coming back into this wretched body.” His head felt like a throbbing lead weight. Cold sweats and chills fled up his limbs.

  Usk snarled out in bug-speak. Neither Miko nor Star understood a word. The locust dipped another vesselful into the open top and brought it over to the flashing console with him, intending to immerse his stump such that he could regenerate the pincer. That might take some time. Shaking the webs out of his head, Miko stumbled over to Star, who was recovering from her shock with painful slowness. The woman looked totally defeated. “You okay, Star?”

  She stared glaze-eyed past him to the locust-feeding tank. Her eyes registered dim comprehension. She shivered. She still wore her chest-shredded suit. While Usk struggled one-pincered at the controls, as he guided the craft along the narrow tunnels away from the battle grounds, Star stirred, registering Miko for the first time. Her hair, flaxen and damp with sweat, was plastered to her brow. Beads of it funneled down her face. Signs of trauma lurked in those clouded eyes. She looked ten years older, her cheeks hollow, the color of funereal ash. To say the woman was in shock was an understatement. Miko scowled, ashamed that he had put her through this hell. He came over to crouch beside her quivering frame and as gently as possible put his arms around her shoulders, hoping to restore her to some semblance of her former self.

  She looked at him, trembling. “Miko…I can hardly believe it’s you. Maybe we’re all dead here and this is some kind of sick joke.”

  “No joke, Star. I’m afraid we’re all alive here.”

  She rose to a feeble crouch, groaning. “That squid thing…the one that wanted you,” she quavered, “it attacked us in cold blood…it could have…would have killed me.”

  Miko looked away, his lips pursed. He jerked up and over to the ship’s nav, where Usk was busy piloting the ship down a tunnel. Miko flipped on the universal translator, a black-red button above the anti-grav generator. He knew where it was from experience. The unit glowed an operating yellow.

  He stared at the Mentera, as if seeing him for the first time. “Good to see you, Usk. That claw looks bad. Hope the witch water works. What happened after I left you at the tanks?”

  Usk turned to peer up at him with his sad, timeless expression, insectoid and alien. His mouth opened to disgorge guttural syllables. “The Zikri took me from the tank. Tortured me in some chamber. They chased Star, prepared to torture her too. Your hunter female squid was there. We fought our Zikri jailers. She broke free, killed the overseer. I escaped.”

  Miko shuddered. “That doesn’t surprise me. Nothing can stop Audra.”

  Star came over to gape at Miko. “Audra? Is that what you call that abomination? What does the squid have on you? How is it you are always blinking in and out like some strobe? Are you a mutant?”

  Miko dipped his head in wincing shame. “You could call it that.” He swung his gaze away. After tapping some dials, he donned a headset and adjusted the receiver. The incoming signal on the com was flashing. Usk, for obvious reasons, had muted it.

  The light had been flashing for some minutes now, likely queries from locust mission control. Nothing good.

  Miko set the frequency to the same on his suit’s com, a three-way channel, not trusting the open ship frequencies and hoped they were not out of range. “Fenli? You there?”

  After a time, a hoarse voice came over the com. “Good to hear your voice, friend. I’m about eight tunnels over. Sorry I couldn’t help you out. Had my hands busy.”

  “Cut the chatter,” a familiar voice intruded. Miko recognized the gruff, no-nonsense tone of Yul. “We have to think of some strategy out of here. Nice work, Miko, disappearing back there. That Zikri freak would have killed you in my estimation. I won’t even ask how you made it into that ship.”

  “Plenty more chances to die, Yul.”

  Yul grunted. “Where the hell are you, Fenli? Our holo tracker isn’t reading you. Only Miko’s lightfighter.”

  “This onboard cloaker is a wonder. Saved my ass a few times. Guess your ships don’t have one. This must be an experimental model, some special task force ship.”

  “Lucky you,” said Yul. “Your status? Clean?”

  “Some smoke and trailing metal, but I’ll survive. No bogies that I can see. Ready to bird-dog out of here.”

  “That’s our biggest problem: getting out of here.”

  “Why’s that? Ever hear of impulse power?”

  “Impulse isn’t getting us far. We can’t warp out while we’re within Kraetoria’s grav field.
The bugs’ve got a fleet up there. Thousands of ships I’ll wager that’ll figure us out in a fly the moment we show our noses. Unless we can convince them we’re not an enemy…”

  “We can’t stay down here and get pegged off,” objected Cloye. “We’re lucky to have survived this long. We’ve got to get the hell out of here!”

  Hresh grunted his endorsement.

  “All nice on paper, but many things can go wrong the moment we show ourselves outside this mountain ridge.”

  “Times ticking,” Fenli grumbled.

  “Impulsive moves will kill us all, so cool your jets, Fenli,” said Yul. “Miko, report your status. Your friends okay?”

  “Yeah. Two crew members here, Star and Usk. We’re shaken but otherwise intact.”

  Yul clipped out a rumbling query. “Who exactly are your crew—this Star and Usk? They have any combat skills?”

  Miko paused. “Star’s a street hustler, not savvy with ship tech. Usk, he’s…a Mentera, so has some piloting and military training.”

  A pregnant pause lingered over the com. “Come again? Mentera?”

  “A rebel. Prisoner of theirs from long back. I rescued him from a tank—since then he’s been an ally.”

  “Are you mad? You’re playing with fire, spaceboy. All the Mentera are feral bloodsuckers. They’ll clip your jugular, stick you in a tank and suck you dry.”

  “Yeah, how many more of these weird friends you have?” mumbled Cloye.

  “If you’re counting me among those ‘weird friends’, Cloye,” hissed Fenli, “you and I are going to have a conversation.”

  Hresh interjected. “Let’s get serious. We have a major risk here. He’s a Mentera.”

  “Usk’s more loyal than any crew member I know,” affirmed Miko.

  “Okay, Miko, your call.” Yul sighed. “Looking as if we need every available helping hand…and to use brute force to get out of this mess. If we try to impulse to planet farside, we’ll have a hundred lightfighters on our tail.”

  “Wait,” interrupted Miko. “We can’t just blast out of here and let those aliens take over innocent worlds. We’ve got to try and stop them.”

  “Right, spaceboy,” jeered Yul. “Three rogue ships against a fleet of thousands? Think again.”

  “We can think of something.”

  “Like what? Fly in, shout loud enough and order them to call off their invasion?”

  Miko went beet red in the face. “That’s not exactly what I meant, Yul.”

  Hresh coughed, his hoarse, raspy breath catching at the edge of the static. “Unless—”

  “What?”

  “We can use your Mentera. You say he’s a dependable ally? Can you communicate?”

  “We have a limited communication, using the shipboard translator.”

  “Good. Get the bug to radio in to fleet command. Tell them our scouts lost the human captives to a ship crash. Tell them we’re going to join the fleet as planned and await further orders.”

  Cloye squawked, “You crazy? We’re not going to go up there into the spider’s nest.”

  “No way around it, Cloye. Unless we sit here and die.”

  “What happens when they try to contact the dead officers that Fenli nuked down there?”

  “We’ll deal with that when the time comes,” Yul muttered. “Hresh’s right. We’ve got a small window of opportunity here to fool them and blast out of Dodge. The old ‘hide in the open’ trick.”

  “Yes, it could work,” mused Miko. He consulted Usk, who looked at him with intent eyes. Star gazed on, her mind still in a daze.

  While Cloye continued to curse and grumble, Yul hissed at her to settle down.

  Hresh’s voice hissed over the com. “Have your bug make it sound plausible, Miko, or we’ll have a swarm of hornets on our asses.”

  Miko licked his lips. He’d have to switch to open channel and take his chances. From the ship com came a garbled spatter of bug speak. Likely mission control. Miko grabbed the receiver, passed it to Usk while Star stood by, tugging at the shredded folds in her suit. “Radio in, Usk,” rasped Miko. “Tell them the intruders were gunned down. Dead. There are no survivors.”

  The universal translator spat the words into Usk’s earpiece while the com continued to stream new orders from mission control. Obviously they were expecting a reply. Usk’s antenna twitched. He uttered some words in response.

  A tense silence passed. Another blast of alien talk rattled the airwaves and Usk’s antenna dipped in a gesture of anxiety.

  Miko whispered into the translator clipped to Usk’s antenna. “Tell them the others went down, Usk. We’re the only survivors.”

  Usk chittered more words into the com.

  Another long and nail-biting pause. “Affirmative Mentera KU6j. Update will be reported to Commander Kruk. Respond.”

  Miko covered the mouthpiece and spoke to the others. “Progress!”

  “Let’s hope they buy it,” Yul growled.

  Usk’s antenna perked up once again. The universal translator relayed the message in a broken, robotic tone. “Report to main fleet, squadron Meijk-JytO—” the rest was gibberish, even the translator couldn’t copy “—Full investigation of hostiles will proceed as soon as resources are made available…The assault on ‘Quenrix’ takes priority.”

  “Quenrix? That’s a frontier world on the fringe of The Dim Zone,” Hresh mused.

  “They’re telling us to join the fleet,” Miko whispered.

  “Good.” Yul exhaled relief.

  “What do you mean, ‘good’?” bawled Fenli.

  “Means we can go up there, spy on their operations and hopefully do something to sabotage their efforts.”

  Fenli threw up his hands. “Are you people insane? You can’t win against these locusts. They’re insidious. Ruthless killers. They’ll throw you in a tank and let you sit there for a hundred years.”

  Yul spat, “If we don’t fight them, Fenli, we’re all going to die. Besides we need to find a clear avenue to get our ships out of here. Otherwise we’re screwed. Only so many planets we can hide on before both bugs and squids take over this whole galaxy.”

  Fenli fumed over the com.

  “He’s right, Fenli,” said Miko.

  “Don’t tell me what’s right, Miko,” raged Fenli. His staccato curse was harsh on the ear. “Wasn’t you lying in a frozen pool on an alien world left to die—freezer food for those crab-locust-squid whatever-the-fuck primitives.”

  Miko grunted. “I’ve had my share of them too and dunked in tanks. Don’t think that I’m that oblivious to what it’s like.”

  “Sorry, Miko. I forget that. Just a little frayed around the edges.”

  “I get it.”

  “Still, the instant this plan goes south, I’m impulsing the hell out of here. Blasting my way to freedom or death.”

  “Fine, do what you want, Fenli,” said Yul. “But in the meantime we have to act as one, be a team and follow through. You go skylarking out of here after we’ve given them a sob story about the rebels dying, it’ll raise suspicion.”

  “Yeah, sure. Then let’s go join the fleet, flyboy, and kick some ass.”

  “Move out,” said Yul with a hint of annoyance.

  So it was decided. Fenli worked his way toward them, tracking them on holo radar. Miko’s and Yul’s ships threaded their way along the tunnels at quarter speed, with Fenli tagging behind. No Mentera patrols were to be seen. The tomblike spaces were deserted enough. Likely all available locust power’d gone up to join the fleet.

  The tunnel widened. A grainy yellow light shone with a trace of maroon up ahead. Dusk was drawing near and now an exit into the dry desert wastes beyond.

  Yul exhaled a breathy sigh. In a show of confidence, he gunned the engines, blasting out of the cavern. Miko and Fenli dogged at his tail. Miko caught a last backward glimpse of the cave-like orifice shaped like a giant grouper’s mouth as they banked out. The ships moved across the desolate landscape as one. The horn-studded ridge stayed to their le
ft, showing bone-pit valleys and skull-haunted bluffs.

  Miko spied traces of ruins down there, likely former crude stone dwellings of the hybrid locust and squid mutants that once populated this arid world in plentiful numbers. He was not sad to leave behind such a hellhole: the dreaded cliffs, the plains, and the endless dust craters that kept their dark secrets.

  Flashes of the nail-edge space chase that had led to their being stranded in the underground labyrinth shot in and out of Miko’s mind. The harrowing escape into the secret bunker of the Masters then the ill-fated refuge in the ancient battle hall. Miko could not help but shudder at memory of Laren, their crew-member, seized by some monstrous squid that lashed out a tentacle from its oversized holding tank. A grisly demise, if ever there was one.

  He gripped the controls while Usk labored at his side. Both sat ready to resort to fight or flight tactics should hostile activity swarm upon them. Star stared, as if only half taking in their perilous situation.

  All parties of the three-ship convoy held their positions with a grimness reflected by their clipped whispers through the com. Their main advantage was the simplicity of their plan. Just a routine patrol returning from a failed mission to trap the human intruders, now ready to report to fleet command for the upcoming invasion of Quenrix at the cusp of The Dim Zone.

  Into the dusky tracts of space the trio followed the brightening beacons that led to the ever growing mass of the space fleet orbiting at 300 miles above Kraetoria. A cluster of ships more massive than any had suspected.

  Miko gaped. He felt his heart tumble. This armada numbered in the thousands. Three thousand? Four? Still more were amassing by the minute, as they came out of hyperdrive from various bases throughout The Dim Zone. Their jagged, eerie, green and orange-spangled light streams trailed behind.

  Such a variety of ships! Aphid fighters, mantis craft, Zikri war Orbs, large and small, flagships, drone scout ships, assault craft, all spiked like undersea mines and equipped with deadly uro bombs. Mentera LU-destroyers sat at a distance with their weaves of com towers, cargo ports and launch pads, complex structures at the very least. Then there drifted the Mentera slaver ships with holds a half mile long, shaped like zeppelins, huge to the overwhelmed eye, capable of holding thousands of tanks and prisoners.