Abductees

by Alan Brickett

  This time, Ormond kicked the door open.

  He lifted his rifle to point at the ceiling so Lekiso could enter the room, and then he followed in behind her. She swept her rifle sights along the right, seeing the same floor, the same Devourer organisms.

  The only difference was in the spacing around the floor. Lekiso checked up and then around and back down.

  Nothing.

  “Clear,” she said over the private comm.

  Two seconds since breach, and in silence too; she was proud of herself.

  “Clear. But I think I found our doodad,” Ormond replied over the com.

  She stepped up to him and took a quick look over his shoulder.

  Sure enough, there was a setup of equipment next to one of the Devourer brain nodes. Long metal spikes had been driven into the flesh. These had wires on the end leading into a standing console of equipment that had other wires leading off.

  Some went into the nearest wall, likely for power.

  Others were in spikes in other nodes nearby.

  She turned to keep scanning the room for anything hostile while Ormond said on the com, “Hey, Marc, you seeing this, mate?”

  “Uh, yeah, whatever it is, it’s using a lot of power. And with the configuration, it’s probably the thing blocking off the Devourer mind. Those cables going to the wall are probably the power supply, and the network feeds that allow it to generate that jamming signal.”

  Ormond hefted his rifle to point at the device. “Right, so wham bam, and we’re done here, then?”

  “No, wait!” Marc exclaimed.

  “Ouch. Watch it, mate.”

  “Uh, sorry, but you can’t just destroy it. We need it for analysis, and besides, if you just blow the thing, it might have failsafes that will destroy the ship or even damage the Devourer mind,” Marc said in a more even tone, but he was trying to get Ormond to take him seriously.

  “Right you are, mate. Right you are. Okay, let me get connected to this thing. Watch my back, boss lady.”

  Lekiso smiled at the comfortable familiarity and kept her back to him while he went over to the device.

  She kept within three feet of him so that he was appropriately covered. Behind her, he put his hand down on the machine’s surface, and several filaments crept out from his forearm and began to seep into the equipment.

  It was like watching water trickling down and disappearing into the metal surface.

  “Uh, oh dear,” Marc muttered.

  “What you got, mate?” Ormond asked when Marc didn’t continue.

  “Uh, well, first thing is this thing is trapped. It’s tapped into the ship systems and self-destruct. SAI is handling the routines from keeping it unaware of our intrusion and blowing everything up. If you had shot it, the system keeping the self-destruct on the edge of going off would have failed, and you would have gone boom.”

  “Thanks for the sound effects, mate. Can you stop it, or should we consider teleporting out of here with this mind thing?”

  “I’m afraid that you would be unable to teleport with enough mass to be useful, Ormond,” SAI said with an even tone over the channel.

  “But we will be able to circumvent the device. Please just keep yourself connected while we do so.””

  “Sure, don’t move, or we go boom. Got it.” Ormond smiled a bit at that. “I’m surprised that there wasn’t anyone else in here, though. A trap is clever and all, but if it’s important, why not guard it?”

  “Perhaps whoever is doing this wouldn’t want to be caught in the blast?” Lekiso answered.

  “Yeah, okay, except why go to all this effort, then? Surely, they wanted something, or they could have just killed it.”

  “Unless they wanted to keep up the impression that the Devourer was alive and running its little troops,” Lekiso said carefully.

  “Perhaps it was their plan to sow terror and fear using the Devourer as a scapegoat. Then, when the Domums investigate, boom, no evidence?”

  “Good thinking. We’ll need to sweep the ship to check for an escape shuttle or something if they were on board monitoring anything.”

  “Uh, guys,” Marc interrupted. “This device has been accumulating and sending off a lot of data. It isn’t just keeping the Devourer mind immobile; it’s been studying it.”

  “Oh crap, looks like SAI may be right after all. The Tempest wants to know about this thing quite badly.”

  “And this would have been their time to do it, speaking in terms of the timeline described by SAI.”

  Something flickered at the corner of Lekiso’s eye, and she turned to face it while Marc and Ormond jostled theories back and forth.

  Nothing there?

  She was sure she had seen something, but the place was as empty as they had found it.

  Perhaps it was just some ooze or one of those gill flap things moving on the Devourer, she thought.

  Suddenly, her rifle was knocked with prodigious strength out of her hands by something that blurred weirdly in her vision. Acting on instinct, she braced herself just before her singlesuit force field flared around her abdomen, where something else struck her and sent her flying across the room in the other direction.

  Ormond whirled around, but he was limited by his hand stuck to the device, the filaments still working their way inside. He brought his rifle up with one hand just before a wrinkle in the air slapped it aside.

  Then the creature appeared as if the room unfolded and it came out of nowhere.

  On four legs, the thing stood with its body at the height of Ormond’s head. Its outer exoskeleton was some kind of hard dark-orange chitin. It had a long tail at the back of its body, at the end of which sat a massive pincer. The reach of the tail extended over the body and just short of six feet further ahead of where it stood facing Ormond.

  As if the HR Geiger monster wasn’t enough, it was also armored in metal and plastic segments, pieces that fit together over the body and in chunks over the legs.

  Several pieces were articulated up the back of the tail and over the body to partially cover the pincers as well. On top of the broad back, or top, of the thing, two slits appeared, and the nozzles of long and dangerous-looking weapons popped up, aimed right at Ormond.

  Lekiso was clambering to her feet to react when three more of the things unfolded from invisibility around the room to surround her.

  * *

  Dust blew all around her in small flurries.

  The air of the park was beginning to move, picking up speed as convection currents formed from the heated air down the middle of the line where the Domums were burning away the Devourer attack.

  Meriam was also causing a fair amount of that motion herself, her hand weapon in more of its original triangular shape facing forward from where her hand gripped the long handle, its yellow-coated plasma rounds issued in a steady stream.

  The powering mechanism for her weapon was being supplemented by a flexible attachment to her right forearm.

  The Devourer had sent long, almost-feline forms to sweep her aside and steal into the refugee crowd, probably in the hopes of taking more of them to be turned into yet more Devourer forms. But since she didn’t have to worry about anything else close to her, Meriam was letting loose with wild abandon.

  Her visual display assisted her targeting, and her armor could provide quick changes of aim through small bursts from the motion-controlling cells. So, if she could think it, she could target and shoot it.

  Lekiso and Ormond would probably find the whole idea restrictive to their natural behavior from years of training and practice.

  But for her, it supplemented what her father had taught.

  Three more Devourer forms were disintegrated by expanding globes of plasma, the heat from the expulsion driving a temporary wind that cleared her viewpoint back at the tunnels. Her software highlighted movement and any solid detection profile for oncoming Devourer forms.

  She didn’t need it.

  There were dozens, maybe even over a hundred, running
on two and four legs her way. Over by the Domum front line, they had started to get more serious in their attack. Whatever makeshift weapons the Devourer forms had designed were being employed now.

  Bolts of ionized energy and the hard shells from ballistic weapons were being fired into the Domum ranks.

  So far, their shields and discipline were holding.

  They just needed Ormond and Lekiso to wake up the hive mind.

  In theory.

  According to SAI, she used one of the most basic capabilities of Gravitonics very well: physical enhancement. She focused her thoughts briefly and drew on the experience of being better, faster, stronger than she had before when she thought it was the equipment doing it.

  Violet sparks ran down her body, limning her again in a field of force that she could direct to her will. It was a bizarre sensation, like a liquid rolling over her body that could explode with power where she needed it.

  She bent her knees, braced herself, and then jumped, a fair amount of the force flowing around her. The dust swirled away in a shockwave from beneath her, sending Meriam rocketing up towards the park ceiling, angled towards the approaching Devourer forms.

  From the higher angle, she looked down and selected her targets. The hand weapon fired fifteen bolts a second, each one, within the millisecond it took to leave the barrel, was angled to hit different targets all along the front line.

  The expanding plasma spheres bloomed like opening flowers below her as she reached the top of her arc, three seconds and over forty-five shots and still going.

  Where she didn’t hit a Devourer form, she did set a globe of plasma in one’s path. Other shots went back to finish off a Devourer form with fast-enough reflexes to have avoided complete annihilation from the first attack.

  On the way down, she fell quickly, laying out to her right to destroy as many Devourer forms on that side as she could before she landed.

  She barely felt the landing. Her legs bent, and part of the force surrounding her went into absorbing the impact. Meriam straightened amidst a flowering of light that scintillated across her chest where the bone blade of a Devourer form swept across her singlesuit protective fields.

  It became ashes in a firestorm a moment later when she destroyed it.

  Tactically, she had wiped out the approaching front of the Devourer forms and then the right-hand flank so that on landing, she could attract the left flank to attack her, closing them back upon themselves and halting the rapid advance.

  So far, it was working. A Devourer form that was too close to her left, away from her weapon, was kicked, and the added force from Gravitonics sent it spinning into several others amidst spraying gore.

  That’s the problem with all those aggressive spines and bone blades grown into bodies meant for combat, she thought.

  As soon as one of them lost its footing, it could be dangerous for everything else around it. A hive mind would keep them apart quite simply, but Meriam intended to rigorously disrupt that order of things.

  Firing plasma rounds into the oncoming horde, she moved towards them, lashing out with her free arm or with astoundingly powerful kicks as the left flank came in upon her. She was the center of a storm of destruction, able to skirt the edges of her own fire, to take daring chances darting between two Devourer forms as needed with her protective field and armaments.

  The occasional draw on Gravitonics gave her more force to work with, and she applied it to crippling blows.

  Devourer forms hit by her hands or feet were not knocked down but were blasted into pieces or sent flying in among their own kind in a separating mass of jagged ends.

  The singlesuit provided stimulants to increase her reaction time. The software was instinctual, aiding her aim and her understanding of what was around her so she could plan her next strikes with superhuman effectiveness.

  It was then that she noticed her software had detected a different lifeform approaching quickly from the right flank. It was identified as an Antonasas, and the biological readouts confirmed it was the same one that had attacked them in the tunnels.

  “Hey, Marc?” she called over the com channel.

  “Uh, yeah, we see it. We tracked it a few seconds before you did. Then we backtracked our scans. Seems it docked a shuttle, forcefully, through the park dome on that side. Then it headed right for you. I’m pretty sure you’re its target.”

  “Oh great.” Meriam snap kicked a Devourer form, folding it in half amid a crunching and squelching.

  “Meriam, the Antonasas is a hazardous life form, and it is equipped for battle. It will not be an easy opponent like the comparatively unarmed Devourer forms you now face.”

  SAI sounded as calm as ever. “And to face it within that group of Devourer forms may be tactically unsound.”

  Meriam kept her weapon on auto-fire and turned in a slow circle, immolating everything her bolts struck, sending blue flame spiraling up around her.

  “Yeah? And leave this lot a clear path to the refugees too. I’m not going to do that.”

  “But you can just teleport away and back again. You can be anywhere you need to be!” Marc sounded concerned, which was sweet.

  “Yeah, but you know what, Marc?”

  “Uh, what?”

  “I say to hell with it. Let’s slay a dragon.”

  * *

  Connor was engaged with the Devourer forms on his side of the park in much the same way that Meriam was fighting hers.

  The sheer firepower that the technology they had been equipped with was capable of impressed and scared him.

  That mankind had made advances to this degree could only be offset by the fact that they hadn’t wiped themselves out.

  Granted, SAI hadn’t finished giving them much human history, or future as the case may be. But the idea that enough humans survived to be part of the galaxy and fight off the Tempest was reassuring.

  SAI had commented that the equipment they had was limited to operating in much the same way as the local timeline and in this galaxy to avoid pollution of the time stream in any way.

  Blasting his way through a group of Devourer humanoid forms whose bone blades turned to blackened carbon and fell around him, Connor reflected that perhaps this was an indication of what the Galactic Citizenship had as well.

  If that was the case, if they could defeat a civilization at this level of advancement, then the Tempest was even more terrifying.

  Connor’s fighting strategy was to make himself the center of the attack by moving in among the Devourer forms and firing outwards, his system scanning for any Devourer forms trying to make a break for it so he could target it.

  In any normal situation, it would have been a suicidal frontal assault the likes of which berserkers and fearless warriors were known to pull off. It suited him perfectly, though; with his gravitonic shields up all around his body, he was untouchable.

  That wasn’t entirely accurate; he wasn’t going to get hurt.

  Many bone blades, teeth, claws, and other appendages had tried to hurt him, but none of them could penetrate the field. He’d learned to increase his weight as some of the more prominent Devourer forms hit him, though; some of them were very strong and had knocked him around like a toy.

  When he got overwhelmed, which frequently happened with this many of them around him, then he just shot out at them on full auto at point-blank range. The plasma fire burned up against his protective field, harmless to him but leaving a burning space around him that the forms could then fill for the next round.

  For all of the cunning and intelligence in a Devourer hive mind, at least, according to the Domum data files, this one wasn’t being very original.

  “Marc, has the Devourer made any changes to its tactics since we started?”

  “Uh, no, not that I can tell,” came the reply.

  “Damn, that doesn’t seem right. I know it’s trapped in the park, but it should have other ways to look for a way out. I mean, this thing can survive in space. It adapts.”

 
“Uh, yeah, but the Domum have the Puzzle Box maintenance bots and outer defenses focused on any breach. If it goes out into space, it’ll be vaporized. It hasn’t even tried.”

  “Okay sure, but what about in here? Surely, it can think of other options? I know I would.”

  “Uh, let me do a full scan, see if I can pick anything up. I’ll start by the entrance, see if anything is… Uh oh.”

  “Marc? What is it?”

  “Uh, Connor, check this out.” Marc sent a rendering to Connor’s display.

  The violet border contrasted with the blue flames of the plasma he was firing while the conversation continued.

  “Okay, what am I looking at?”

  “Uh, there are three creatures with the Devourer biological signature tunneling through the rock under the park. They are headed straight for the entrance.”

  “Oh shit.” Connor gave his surroundings a quick look.

  “They could come up under the refugees or break straight out into the Enone Hub. Marc, you need to do something!”

  “Uh, what? Why? That’s what you guys are for, isn’t it?”

  “Come on, Marc, you can’t stay in the nice cozy chair forever. Either you can stop those things, or I have to. If I go, I need you to come down here and cover this flank. I’ve dealt with a lot of them. You should be able to handle it.”

  “Uh, shit, they are half a mile from the Domum ranks, coming in from the side.”

  “Is Meriam busy?”

  “Uh, yeah, she got that Antonasas.”

  “She what? Never mind. I’m going. Marc, get down here and help.” With that, Connor popped the location marker for the tunneling Devourer forms onto his vision.

  He looked over the park, saw the location, and then teleported.

  The sudden lack of noise and motion was momentarily disorienting.

  He was standing out in the open with various massed Devourer groups sprinting past about a hundred feet away and towards the Domums, who were still holding out with massed firepower.

  Connor looked down to overlay the scans with the surface, and a graphical rendering showed him the Devourer burrowers coming up under his feet and headed towards the refugees.