If I had any chance at all—and very likely I did not, but if I did—this was it. I had to make this work.
The beacon was a corroded metal cylinder about half a meter in length and half that size in diameter. Red lights still flashed in places along its surface, a good indication the battery inside hadn’t given out. I pulled myself into a seated position next to it, assayed it, and set to work.
I wasn’t quite the expert Inga had been at such things, but I did possess a few skills, plus her small set of tools. The casing was rusted but it came off with a little work. Then I directed my attention to the power source, followed by the broadcast unit. My first goal was to increase the signal strength. Sure, it would likely make the battery give out in days instead of weeks or months, but I wouldn’t still be alive here in weeks or months, so that hardly mattered. My second goal was to find a way to pulse the signal so I could send out some kind of rudimentary code. I wanted it to say more than just, “There’s a beacon over here.” I needed it to say, “Come here now! There’s a guy who seriously needs help!” Or sentiments to that effect.
After a couple of hours of work, I felt I’d achieved as much along those lines as I was capable of. I slid the casing back on and screwed it closed. My exertions had taken a toll on me. I sat back and shut my eyes and concentrated on breathing in and out, and all the while I dearly wished I hadn’t run out of the pills I’d found in the pack. Eventually I must have dozed off.
A noise overhead woke me.
A ship. A ship was approaching. I gazed upward, but it was too high up to make out what it was.
I glanced at the sun. It had moved only a short distance. I’d been asleep for an hour or two at most.
Well. That was quick.
Too quick, perhaps. I felt myself growing antsy.
Then another sound drew my attention back down, and I saw the white rabbit-creature standing there, staring at me.
“Hey,” I said. “Long time, no see.”
It continued to look at me. It had approached very close this time; it wasn’t nearly as timid as before. Maybe it trusted me now.
Shrugging, I reached into the pack and felt for another energy bar. Stripping the wrapper off entirely, I proffered it. The creature came at me so quickly I flinched, but it didn’t attack. It took the bar from my hand and devoured it. This time it didn’t run away.
At that point, I concluded I’d either made a close friend for life, or volunteered myself as the next meal, once the chocolate-and-nut bars ran out.
The roar returned, much louder this time, as the descending spacecraft dropped into view.
I looked up at it and felt my heart sink. I knew that ship. It was a 704 shuttle, streaked with red stripes and corrosion.
Chark.
Involuntarily, I groaned. I’d worked so hard, crawling all the way there, day after day, fighting through the injuries and the fever and the attack by the thing in the night that had wanted to gnaw on me. I’d stayed alive, I’d found the beacon, I’d managed to modify it into a distress signal.
And now, none of that mattered, because Randall Chark had returned, and I had nothing left in the tank, no fight left in my body. He, on the other hand, while certifiably insane, was in generally good health. And so, he was going to drag me all the way back over to the place where I’d spent the last few nightmarish days crawling away from, and he was going to throw me into that pit, a sacrifice to whatever alien monster lived down at the bottom of it.
And there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.
Long story short, that’s pretty much what happened. At least, up to a point.
The shuttle landed. Chark got out. He stood there in his black and brown synth suit, staring down at me, slowly shaking his head.
“Well now,” he said. “You’re a lot tougher an hombre than I gave you credit for.” He chuckled. “Good thing I hung around the system a little longer, taking care of some other business.” He cast a glance over at the beacon. “That was pretty clever, what you did with the signal. It might have even worked, if I hadn’t been around, and if this sector of space wasn’t pretty much empty.”
He strolled over to me. I tried to rise, but it wasn’t going to happen, and his kicking me in the broken ribs only made it less likely.
While my side and my brain were screaming at me, he must have reached down and gotten ahold of my jumpsuit collar, because the next thing I knew, I was sliding on my back toward his shuttle.
“I don’t have time to drag your sorry self back over there, so we’ll do it the quick way this time,” he said.
Into the shuttle I went; into a place I’d hoped never to see again. A few seconds later, he’d flown us back across the landscape it had taken me in my present state days to cross; back over to where I’d started my long crawl.
The shuttle touched down and the door slid open, and Chark dragged me out onto the ground, then over to the edge of the oval cave opening.
The roar from the pit was almost deafening. The orange light flared up from its depths. The smell took my breath away.
“I guess you did me a favor,” Chark was saying as he stepped back and surveyed the scene of the murder he was about to commit—or the sacrifice he was about to offer, depending on how one views such things. The black fire danced in his eyes again.
“How’s that?” I managed to ask.
“I’d written you off as dead, down there in the rocks somewhere,” he replied. “Dead and useless to me. But now you get to be one more credit in my favor with the big guy down there.”
The roaring sound from the pit was super-loud now. Louder than ever. Whatever was down there was clearly very hungry. The light flaring up from the pit grew bright red.
“Terrific,” I muttered. “Well, get it over with. Because I’m tired. Very, very tired.”
Without a word, Chark stepped forward and bent down to grasp me, to throw me over the edge.
And then a sound came to us from behind. Instantly, Chark whirled about, pistol drawn and ready.
I couldn’t see much, him being in the way, but I could see enough.
Another spacecraft was landing, just to the side of his.
Chark was up then, up and moving toward the newcomer. Likely he was assessing how he was going to play this. In retrospect, his best play might have been to go ahead and chuck me into the pit before the ship had landed and its occupants had gotten out. Then again, they might have been watching him the entire time. Instead, he advanced on the ship, and on the two figures who stepped out of it.
The ship, itself, was smooth, sleek, round, silver and white. It couldn’t have looked any more different from Chark’s 704. I’d never seen anything like it before in my life.
I realize, now, that it was then that the roaring sound from the pit next to me died down, along with the red-orange light. It was as if the alien at the bottom didn’t want these new arrivals to know about its presence.
A hatch slid soundlessly open on the side of the silver and white ship, and two tall, slender, ethereal figures glided out. They had pale white skin and large, dark eyes, and their fingers were extremely long; almost skeletal. They were clad in loosely-fitting, pale blue robes. They moved toward us with a kind of grace; aloof and regal, yet also cold and somehow very deadly.
They stopped a short distance from Chark and regarded him silently.
I lay there, groaning softly, waiting to see what would happen.
What happened was not what I had expected.
The little rabbit-creature with whom I’d shared a couple of meals darted out of the rocks and rushed up to the two aliens. One of them bent down, and it appeared they conversed quietly for a few moments. During that exchange, it dawned on me that they were of the same species, though perhaps of very different ages.
“This is none of your business,” Chark finally found the gumption to blurt out. He waved his stun pistol in their direction. “Clear out.”
One of the aliens drew something from its robes and waved it
at Chark. An instant later, his pistol glowed bright red. With a scream, he flung it to the ground. He stood there, angry and sulking, nursing his burned hand. For the moment, he made no attempt to move.
The little rabbit-creature whispered a few more words to the aliens. They looked from it to Chark, studying him coldly, calmly. Clinically.
Now Chark moved. Holding his injured hand, he started to edge his way toward his shuttle, likely thinking only of escape, of survival.
One of the aliens moved as well, and the movement was faster than my eyes could follow. Before Chark could react, it had him held firmly in its grasp, his arms pinned. Almost casually it lifted him up, as if he were a doll, and carried him into the silver ship.
The other alien glided over to me. It glanced down at the sad state of what remained of my body, then past me to the opening of the pit. It looked back at the rabbit-creature, which nodded in response.
The alien took a small, spherical object from its robes, clicked something on its side—an arming switch, perhaps—and tossed the object down into the pit.
The muffled explosion that followed shook the ground hard, and I had to hold on to keep from tumbling in. At that same moment the roar from the bottom of the pit returned, but this time it came across clearly as a shriek of pain, of fear. Of dying. The light flared bright orange for one, two long seconds, and then it faded, faded, and vanished.
“Nice work,” I tried to say, but my voice was nearly gone, and the words came out as an unintelligible croak.
The alien was looking down into the now-smoking crater of the pit, and as best as I could tell, it appeared satisfied. Then it turned its attention to me for a moment. I must have looked quite a sight. After regarding my broken form for a couple of seconds, it bent down and easily lifted me up. I nearly passed out from the pain, and I’m sure I uttered some colorful words the being hadn’t heard before, but it ignored my objections. In only a few steps it had me aboard the silver ship.
The alien took me into a small cabin and laid me down on a flat, smooth surface in what I dearly hoped was some kind of medical facility. It injected me with something, and moments later, the pain began to drift away. I don’t know what was in that shot, but it was good stuff, I’ll tell you that. Then the alien pulled a silvery blanket over me and left me there, and within a few minutes I’d drifted off to sleep.
It was a long, fuzzy sleep that must have lasted two weeks. And at the other end of it, I was a new man, my body almost entirely healed.
I woke up a few times along the journey, but the next time I was fully conscious, the two aliens and their little rabbit-like friend, or child, were dropping me off on a human colony world—one well inside the bounds of civilized space, far away from Eightball. From there I was able to catch a transport back to my Nearside. Back home.
Pulling together a new crew would take time and effort. I knew I’d get around to it sooner or later, though. A guy’s gotta eat, after all. But I didn’t find myself in a big hurry to do so just yet. My body might have been whole again, but I needed a little more time before I mentally felt up to poking around on strange, distant, alien worlds again.
But I can’t end my account of these events without telling you one other thing—something I saw and heard, there, on the table in that alien ship. The first time was at the start, just after they drugged me and before sweet healing oblivion claimed me. The second time was probably days later, as we traveled through deep space.
What I heard that first time was Chark. I heard his voice coming from the room next to mine, though his words started out slurred with pain and ended up entirely incoherent and unintelligible.
I heard him screaming. Over and over, screaming.
I couldn’t see him, but I could see part of the room where they held him. And there was blood on the walls.
From what I gathered, those two aliens didn’t like whatever lived at the bottom of that pit. Didn’t like it at all. They’d demonstrated that when they’d blown it up. But they also didn’t seem to like anyone who worked with the thing. Anyone who cooperated with it. And especially anyone who fed it.
The next time I partially awoke, a few days later, Chark was still screaming. Screaming right up until he couldn’t scream anymore. Right up until they tossed what remained of him out the airlock.
So, yeah, I owe those aliens a lot. Pretty much everything, in fact. They rescued me, carried me off that godforsaken miserable rock of a planet, punished my enemy and disposed of him, and gave me back my health. I owe them my life and my thanks.
But I hope to hell I never encounter them again.
* * * * *
Van Allen Plexico Bio
Van Allen Plexico has won Best Novel of the Year awards in all three genres in which he writes: Superhero fiction (the SENTINELS series), Military/Space Opera (the SHATTERING series), and period crime (VEGAS HEI$T). He has written and/or edited comics, books, and stories featuring Sherlock Holmes, Mars McCoy, Last of the Mohicans, Blackthorn, and Gideon Cain: Demon Hunter, and he created the two Assembled! books about Marvel’s AVENGERS. A college professor by day, he co-hosts the White Rocket Podcast, On Her Majesty’s Secret Podcast (James Bond discussion), and the hugely popular AU Wishbone (college football talk). Find all his work at www.plexico.net.
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The Repair Jobby Kevin Steverson
Chapter One
“Daughter of a…!” Sparks flew, and KahCrit Skrelton snatched his right manipulative arm back and threw the mini-welder across the rear of the heavy fusion tank. It bounced off a large boulder and almost hit Crit Ashaltic on his left pincer, but he moved just in time.
“It did the same thing when I tried, KahCrit,” the tank gunner said. He didn’t mention the tool that almost hit him.
They had worked on it all morning. The tank, a large beast of a machine, had gone into fusion shutdown after taking a round from an enemy tank in the engine compartment. They were lucky they weren’t all dead from the round; had it hit directly and actually penetrated the small fusion plant that provided power to the one-hundred-and-twenty-ton war machine, they would be scattered across this cursed planet’s surface like so many of the rest of their strike force.
They spliced some wires back together, but the reservoir that held the extra coolant for the fusion plant had cracked and leaked below the level that allowed the reactor to run. It was the extra coolant, not the coolant inside that kept the plant cool, but it was an integral part of the power plant. It initiated a shut down and could not be restarted until they sealed the crack and filled the reservoir up to the minimum level. Skrelton thought they had just enough left in the spare container the tank carried to top off during preventive maintenance.
“What good are the spare fluids when you can’t pour them into something that will hold them?” LakTa Lithowka asked Ta Brakaya, the assistant gunner. “It’s a stupid design; it’s spare coolant.”
The two of them stood in the hatches of the tank’s turret. Both had their helmets on and watched across the open valley to the ridge a mile away. Lithowka, the driver, looked through the scope of his pulse laser as he spoke.
He had both his smaller arms on the weapon and his larger arms, ending in large pincers, grasped the rail around the tank commander’s hatch to provide some stability should he have to fire the pulse laser. Even though it was mounted to the tank, it still kicked with a life of its own.
“Beats me. I’m just a Ta,” the assistant gunner said. He clutched his laser rifle in both his manipulative hands. The smaller arms ended in three digits and an opposable one. He was still visibly shaken from the last three days of battle—especially the tank round that had just missed him. It had come through the front of the tank at an angle, had gone through the crew compartment, and finally had stopped in the second layer of protective armor around the fusion plant.
He’d barely been out of training when he’d been assigned to the strike unit, and this was his first deployment. He had not been given a choice of units—he
hadn’t been given a choice of military jobs, for that matter. He’d been trained as a tanker, but at least he wasn’t in the infantry. They walked too much for his taste. He had no interest in wearing out his combat boots.
KahCrit Skrelton heard his troops talking on the tank, but he let it go. Tankers complained, even when they were back on their home planet with a cushy assignment—it was just the way they were. He remembered back when he was a Ta. He’d hated the service back then. Now, it was a part of who he was. He couldn’t see any other life than being a tanker in the service.
It seemed like ages ago when all the Army had to worry about was training and the occasional skirmish on a colonized world. Sometimes the colonists rose up and refused to accept the continued rule of the home world. The Kitrail Army was sent in to set them straight. The party in power ran everything. The Kitrail Government controlled most of the companies and corporations. They continued to push for colonization. More and more planets were needed to provide the resources to ensure all Kitrail on the home world and on several of the earliest colonies had what they needed and would not go without. The Government provided everything for them, so expansion was absolutely required.
In the last two cycles, they had run into an adversary. Several planets with new gates had been selected as new colony sites, but they had already been occupied by another race who was colonizing planets like they were. It didn’t matter; the orders were clear—take the planet and the system.
This was the third planet where the humans had been discovered as prior occupiers. It was a small colony, in the process of building its first city. There had been less than five thousand of them on the planet. Some of them had still been living in the huge colony ship that the humans landed in, since they had been on-planet for less than a quarter cycle. The same as the other worlds, the orders from Command had been to clear the planet of them.
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