Abductees

by Alan Brickett

  Lekiso considered it useful that the Puzzle Box network didn’t go down into the mines. They could avoid any monitoring by the Domums. Light, it turned out, was easy enough too: their equipment could give off ambient light from the suits and project beams of light from their forearms.

  The five of them had their suits turned up, creating a nimbus around each of them that together created enough pure, warm white light to fill the tunnel for dozens of feet in both directions. They had found various debris and litter in the tunnels, but, so far, no one else and no Devourer.

  “Got anything?” Connor asked Meriam, who was ranging along just behind him.

  The tunnels were broad and high enough for three of them to go side by side. But Connor had followed Lekiso’s tactical advice and put Ormond in front on the lookout, while he clustered with Marc and Meriam in the middle and she brought up the rear.

  “I think so. My system is picking up traces of the Devourer matter, microscopic particles of it. Those data records you got from the Domums really helped refine the scans. I’ve had to drop it down to isolate only scans for the Devourer, though, so if anyone else is in here, we may get surprised.”

  “That’s alright, luv. We’ll keep a sharp eye out,” Ormond said over their private com.

  They were all talking on the channel because their voices echoed weirdly in the squared-out tunnel.

  “What have you got? Those records also said that the Devourer was a virus. If it’s floating around in here, I don’t want to be breathing it in.” Connor looked around as if he would see microscopic highlights of danger.

  “No, this is nothing like a virus. It’s like biological leftovers, cells that flaked off after dying, traces of skin or scales or whatever they are made of,” Meriam replied.

  “What, like their shit? Are we following a trail of their shit?” Ormond sounded disgusted.

  Meriam gave his back a smile.

  “No, nothing so wasteful. This is like what a human would leave behind after they sat in a chair or just brushed against a doorway. The process of elimination in humans is very wasteful, most of the time even unnecessary if we lived the way our ancestors did. How much we consume dictates how much we need to dispose of. If we consume more than we can use, the rest is wasted.”

  “The Devourer is much more highly evolved as a biological organism. It wastes nothing and can even pass nutrients and other biological matter between its various forms, according to the Domum data anyway.”

  “Oh, lovely, superior in every way, then?” Marc muttered.

  “Sort of, yes,” Meriam said softly.

  “Nice, well, when it can speak to us, I’ll ask it what it’s like to be a superior example of life, then, shall I?” Ormond joked.

  “Let’s focus, please,” Lekiso said. It got their attention. According to Marc’s scans, they were nearing a cross tunnel.

  “Which way do we go, Meriam?”

  “Take a left. I’m getting stronger readings down that way.”

  “Uh, we’ll be entering a maze of tunnels down that side, and it’s going deeper in too,” Marc let them know.

  “Will we be able to find our way back out?” Lekiso asked.

  “Uh, yeah, my system is tracking our progress. We can just follow the trail back out,” Marc replied.

  “Heh, computer bread crumbs,” Ormond whispered in their minds. They all ignored him.

  They took the next fifteen minutes and several turns into new tunnels before anyone wanted to say anything else.

  It was Connor who spoke first. “So, if we find the Devourer, what’s the plan of action?”

  Ormond replied, “If there’s more than one, then we need to isolate a single specimen for Marc to get into that sample case.”

  “Uh, me?” Marc’s mental voice was a little shrill at that prospect.

  “Yeah, bud, you. We’ll take care of shooting anything that moves. Meriam, can we stun one of these things?”

  “Sure. Their biology and nervous system will be affected by the stun shots. According to the data from Manor Alim in the Domum hospital.”

  “Okay then, so we stun the thing, or all of them if we find more, Marc grabs an unconscious one, and we burn the rest?”

  “Hey, that suits me, mate. These things are super hazardous,” Ormond said with a shudder.

  Lekiso spoke into the silence after that thought. “Dangerous according to the file. As long as they aren’t being controlled. Does anyone else wonder why they aren’t being controlled in the park? Or if they are, why the Devourer would want to risk being destroyed? It’s not as though the Domums are known for their leniency, after all.”

  “It’s a good question, but then, I don’t think the Domums are aware of the parasites down here,” Meriam said softly, her attention focused on her scans.

  “By now they should be. They caught all those criminals.” That was Connor.

  “I think that they don’t know what’s happening and that their hands are full with the refugees. So, whatever we find, we’ll report to them so they can take action. After we get what our abductors want.”

  “Fair enough.” Lekiso kept up a general scan around them, her equipment able to highlight the tunnels with various forms of technical output that she barely understood, but the results were still as empty as the last twenty minutes.

  At least the light enhancement works, and better than military gear on earth, here I have an overlay of any spectrum or enhancement I could need.

  “Hey, did all of you read that file on the Devourer?” Marc asked.

  “Come to think of it…” Connor trailed off.

  Marc shook his head in wonder. “While we were sleeping. They did it while we were asleep. Downloaded the information right into our brains.”

  “Mother friggin’...” Ormond stopped and turned around.

  “The hell they think they’re doin’? Messing with our brains is one thing when we are traveling between galaxies, but every time we go to sleep?”

  “Ah jeez, perhaps it’s a gentle reminder that we are at their mercy,” Connor said.

  Lekiso broke in: “I don’t think it’s nefarious or devious. It’s practical or logical. The better informed we are, the more informed our actions, the more efficient we will be.”

  They all looked at her.

  “What? So far, everything that has been done to us or provided for us has followed some kind of plan, and they have shown themselves to be very well prepared and equipped. Do you think anyone with that kind of skill would idly mess with our heads and give us information that is exactly related to what we are supposed to be doing?”

  She looked from one of them to the other while she spoke.

  “It’s all meant to help whatever bigger goal it is that’s going on here,” she finished.

  “Shit. She’s right, you know.” Ormond scowled.

  Connor voiced what they were all thinking: “I really don’t like being at their mercy.”

  “We have a choice?” Lekiso was saying when Marc broke in.

  “Uh, guys? Do you hear that?”

  In the sudden silence, they could all hear it: a thumping sound, as of something, or many things, big and bulky slapping against the rock.

  It was getting louder.

  “Which direction is it coming from?” Connor turned slowly around, his head cocked to the side, trying to hear.

  But the tunnel distorted sound like any rock corridor would, and it was tough to tell much about the sound except that it was getting louder.

  “Uh, my system says from behind us.” Marc looked back the way they had come.

  All four of them turned to face that direction as Connor ordered, “Lights!”

  Beams of light stabbed out from the equipment settled on their shoulders and from the various forearm pieces they still had. The tunnel behind them was suddenly awash with light.

  What it showed them, though, should have stayed hidden, to Lekiso’s thinking.

  Even as Ormond was providing the expletives, the
artificial knowledge was expanding in their brains to tell them precisely what it was.

  The biological term in this galaxy for the creature was a protosaur, in translation, at any rate. It was the missing link in early planetary ecology formation between the dinosaurs and the mammals.

  The alien had four legs, well, they were appendages that acted as both arms and legs, but currently, it was running on all four of them, so legs are what stuck for Lekiso. It was about thirty feet long from the base of the tail to the triangular head, which had two eyes with slit pupils.

  The tail was easily half the length of the body, but it was hard to tell with the way it swayed back and forth.

  The name for this creature was Antonasas, from its homeworld under the blue star Antonas.

  Lekiso let the rest of the information just filter past in a blur. Some deep animal instinct in her hindbrain was urging her to forget the rational thinking side and just run.

  The Antonasas weighed in at over three tons.

  In the low gravity, its momentum carried it forward through the tunnel while it used its flexible limbs to grab on and pull forward along the wall. The serpentine tail helped steer the hopping flight, while the hard spines of compacted fur around the alien’s neck stood out in prey-seeking bloodlust.

  “Take cover!” yelled Connor, breaking into Lekiso’s near-paralyzing train of thoughts.

  Ormond was on one knee, his rifle up against his shoulder and pointed towards the approaching Antonasas. Lekiso hopped over in a gliding arc to get to the opposite side of the passage, her rifle coming off her shoulder blade and into her hands, ready to aim down the sights.

  Meriam and Marc ducked down to one side, as close to the wall as they could get, while Connor dropped to his stomach on the tunnel floor, both hands holding his hand weapon out ahead of him.

  The three of them started to fire, green stun bolts whipping out at the massive figure of the alien coming at them at high speed.

  It was a hard target to miss.

  Covered in scales except at the joints, where thick spines stuck out in jagged bushes, and the monsters back carpeted in layers of grimy fur, the Antonasas filled the tunnel. But it was well shielded: a protective field flared up as the green stun rounds impacted an inch from the alien’s scales.

  They must have pumped over a hundred shots into it before the monstrous creature was on them.

  The protective field had steadily built in luminescence, and the color had flared from the pure white of the first reaction to their shots and into a deeply glowing yellow when it jumped right over their small grouping cluster.

  One of the Antonasas’s feet stabbed down to slam into Connor, who had just barely surrounded himself in the violet light indicating a protective field. The message about Gravitonics flashed up in Lekiso’s display, but she ignored it just as she had back in the refinery.

  How much do we absorb subconsciously from these displays?

  Got to focus!

  Connor should be alright, and like Ormond, she was trying to get her shots to penetrate the alien’s force field.

  When it went over her head, she saw among the spines and scales and weird mane of fur running down the spine that the Antonasas had equipment strapped in belts along its body. Also, four Lanillans were gripping on, two to a side, carried by the alien in its charge.

  The Antonasas sped on up the tunnel for a few dozen feet and then grabbed one wall with two sets of legs, the thick claws on its four-fingered feet digging deep into the rock.

  The creature must have had immense strength, because it arrested its momentum with just the two legs and pivoted on them, the other two legs twisting around its body to grab onto the floor, bringing the bulk of its scaly body around to face the humans again.

  Connor was prying himself out of the indent he had made in the rock floor of the tunnel when their translation software turned what the Antonasas growled and gurgled in its native tongue into English.

  “Get off!” it said.

  Lekiso thought that it was talking to the Lanillans, but she was still surprised that this thing was able to speak. The four Lanillans dropped from its sides and brought their rifles up, pointing them at the humans.

  Then Marc gave her more bad news.

  “Uh, guys, there are more coming up that tunnel!”

  Sure enough, the map on her display was now registering several more beings hurrying up the tunnel from what had been behind them. Meriam’s software must have switched over to collaborate since they were marked as yellow blips.

  Then the Antonasas spoke again, the gurgles and growls of its native speech echoing weirdly in the rock tunnel while their translators provided the crisp words it was speaking.

  “Surrender or fall to Engestine.”

  * *

  Pendonar was a well-off Lanillan within the Lopokin family.

  He had proven his worth and organized several of the best smuggling operations around the Puzzle Box. It was a far cry from when he had worked as an enforcer or thug, but then Wonovar had to go and lose the refinery, along with a generous portion of the Lopokin family henchmen.

  Then, when Engestine had requested that he be assigned Lanillans “smarter than the usual bottom feeders” from the heads of the Lopokin family, he was told to come here with the giant alien.

  To top that off, he was getting ordered around by the Antonasas, even so far as to have to hold on to the straps and stirrups of its equipment belt so that he could ride on ahead!

  If Lanillans grew hair, then his would be standing on end. Now here he was, side by side with one of the scariest beings to ever join the galactic citizenship, facing down five humans who had brought down Wonovar and his whole operation.

  From here, they didn’t seem all that impressive.

  The Humans were armed, sure, and those singlesuits showed off the two women delightfully. But unless the Lanillans were going to die from blood loss to the brain, he didn’t really see how the humans posed a threat.

  Especially not to Engestine.

  The Antonasas reared up after making its announcement.

  The humans had obviously understood it, so there was no need to translate. They seemed to be quite surprised; the expression was usually clear on most mammalian species. Engestine crossed its top two arms, gripped a heavy weapon in each four-fingered appendage, and pulled them crosswise from their holsters.

  It was an impressive sight—and Pendonar was standing to the side. He could only imagine being in front of the massive scaled alien and seeing it handle two-hundred-kilogram weapons as if they were children’s toys.

  I wonder if they can shit themselves?

  “Should I have to repeat myself?” it gurgled and rumbled out.

  The humans’ translation machines must have been advanced. Pendonar couldn’t see any device in their ears nor hear anything speaking out at them. No wonder the family was so interested: five examples of the species loaded with advanced technology, all alone on the Puzzle Box, ripe for the taking.

  “Listen, we don’t want any trouble. We are just searching these tunnels. If we have done something wrong, then we apologize, and we’ll move off again.” The human that spoke was the big, red-haired one.

  The translation he heard sounded out from the area the human occupied. Pendonar could also faintly hear various gurgles and grunts that would be the Antonasas translation emanating from the same point.

  Impressive technology indeed.

  If these were good examples, then Pendonar thought humans had quite a wide range in their species. The big man was almost as big as a large Domum, and that said something, but their smallest male was short, nearly as short as a Jascalian.

  The dark-skinned female, the honey-skinned one, and the pale-skinned male who had shaved his hair off, how different they all were. Sure, Lanillans had skin tone differences and those of the family nodules of bone in the skull, but such differences in height, how had they gotten chosen to travel among the stars together?

  Not that it
mattered.

  Soon, they would be slaves to the Lopokin family, and perhaps he would earn enough prestige from this assignment to get to watch the females in lecherous action. Pendonar’s thoughts were interrupted by the response from Engestine.

  It was chuckling, which came out as a sound that harrowed the bones and was so deep that he practically vibrated standing next to the Antonasas.

  It replied to the human, its tone filled with mirth, which was chilling, “You misunderstand. We are going to take you prisoner one way or another. My instructions are that we prefer you alive. But the Lopokin family would do just as well with the equipment taken from your cold and miserably mangled corpses as well.”

  In an instant, the humans attacked them.

  The shaved head of the man in the front relative to Pendonar flashed a slight green tint as he opened fire. The dark-skinned female who had been watching their backs also opened fire. Both of the rifles they used were impressive, issuing a stream of many bolts within the seconds it took the Lanillans to react.

  The Antonasas just laughed some more.

  Green bolts were fired at it and the four Lanillans it had carried in a good tactical sweep from right to left in the tunnel. If the five of them had not had protective gear on, it would have been over right there and then.

  As it was, Pendonar flinched under the hail of fire, his energy field springing up in a half-circle before him to absorb the bolts with its orange projection.

  The Lanillans boxed the humans in from behind had their members with protective fields in front; as it was, the spray of fire from the humans bypassed them and hit two of the Lanillans that weren’t fast enough to get behind the front ranks of cover.

  Their technology was not a protective field over the body like the Antonasas wore, and it responded a bit slower to sensing incoming fire.

  Not that it was a problem; there were still over a dozen of them standing there after the initial burst of fire. Engestine then pointed the working ends of its weapons up towards the ceiling and fired twice.