“Do you think the data will be readable?” Tyler asked him.
“Those recorders are almost unbreakable.” Marquez shrugged. “I’m sure we’ll get something from it.”
“Hopefully Professor Petit finds it useful to further determine his theory regarding trans-space. It might even get us home quicker.”
Marquez nodded, though he didn’t look so sure. Doctor Tai walked up beside them and Tyler strolled farther ahead to let them have a conversation to themselves.
With the sun almost gone, the Marines switched the flashlights on at the ends of their rifles. Even with the old weapons on hand, the four beams still did a serviceable job at cutting through the darkness.
A sound echoed against the trunks of the great trees and everyone stopped. It was the same noise they’d heard when tracking the beacon. A loud rustling rebounded around them. Everyone stared at each other and the Marines waved their rifles around trying to find where the source of the din was.
But there was no trace of anything in the vicinity.
Then the drums started. It was at that point Tyler realized they weren’t dealing with animals. The noises were being made deliberately.
“We should get to higher ground,” Marquez said as he and Tai walked up beside Tyler.
They briskly proceeded up the hill, following the Marines who’d fanned out into a staggered formation.
Tyler’s blood pumped, and his chest pounded as they reached the top of the rise. The Marines continued searching around, but there didn’t appear to be anything ahead of them.
The drums endured.
“Where is that sound coming from?” Tyler focused into the distance. If he hadn’t felt uneasy before, he did now. It seemed like they were on the set of an old horror film.
“How far away are we from the ship?” Marquez asked.
“Five hundred meters at least,” Tyler read from his tracker.
The drums continued to get louder, resonating around them.
“We need to move quicker.” Marquez started running.
Higgs and Utkin took point while Burns and Dalton guarded the rear. Tyler, Marquez, and Tai kept their hands firmly on their sidearms as the beat got louder still.
The hairs on the back of Tyler’s neck rose. At the top of a familiar rise, the silhouette of the Maybelle appeared in the distance.
“Come on! Nearly there!” Marquez boomed at everyone.
As if on cue rain started tumbling down around them.
Down the hill and through the scrub beneath, they reached the pod. At the airlock, a large animal, like an elk with more pronounced and sharper horns, lay in a pool of its own blood. A wooden spear at least two meters long protruded from its abdomen.
The Marines waved their rifles over the pod where the red ooze had been splattered on the hull. The shock left everyone speechless.
Then the drums then stopped.
They all froze.
Tyler spun around.
Torches, lit with fire, dotted the night. Dozens of them. And holding those torches were the same aliens under the helmets from Orion V.
Seekers!
“Uh, guys…”
Everyone else turned. Private Dalton raised his rifle, and an arrow came from above through the darkness, impaling him straight through the head, killing him instantly.
“Keep your weapons down!” Marquez ordered.
Tyler peered up, discovering their stalkers in the trees as well. They were everywhere. “They don’t look like the Seekers we saw on Orion V.”
Tai nodded. “Spears, bows, and arrows. Their clothing…they almost look like cavemen.”
They wore little more than loincloths, and war paint covered their bodies.
“How could these people build spaceships and travel through interstellar space?”
“That’s hardly relevant right now,” Marquez said. “They’ve got a dozen arrows pointed at every one of us, and we’re on their home turf.” He stepped forward. “Follow my lead.”
With his sidearm in his hand, he slowly placed it on the ground in front of him and raised his hands in the air. Everyone else did the same. While Tyler didn’t think it a great idea to disarm, there seemed to be little choice. He didn’t want to end up like the dead Marine beside him.
“My name is Captain Marquez.”
One Seeker stepped forward. He was slightly taller than the others and had more elaborate war paint on his body. He seemed a hell of a lot meaner, too. His beady eyes studied the captain and then stared over to the rest of the group.
Marquez put out his hands with an open gesture. “We mean you no harm.”
In the blink of an eye, the Seeker swung his right fist, and Marquez went barreling to the ground. The other Seekers moved past him and took everyone else by force.
Tyler gazed at the unmoving body of Marquez as they roped his hands up behind his back.
Maybe those spiders weren’t so bad after all…
Thirty-Two
Seeker Vessel
Kione stirred in his cell and the alien being’s eyes popped open.
Jason Cassidy stood and peered through the pale-yellow translucent barrier from his own holding at his incarcerated partner. “Kione!”
On the deck of his spartan accommodation, Kione’s head slowly turned to the sound of Jason’s voice. With the long leverage of his limbs, he pulled himself up and touched his nose at the dried blood around his nostrils. “You…were on…Orion V?” he stammered, holding his skull as if a bell were ringing inside it.
Jason nodded. “That’s right.”
Kione leaned on the doorframe of the cell to keep himself from falling. “How did you find me?”
Ever since Jason had arrived and waited for Kione to wake, he’d tried to understand what lay opposite him. So unhuman. So alien. But from what he’d seen of Kione on Orion V, he had the same mannerisms any other human would, while speaking the English language.
It was quite a contradiction.
“When we got back to the Argo, we discovered a buildup of Iota particles. At its heart was a vortex which pulled us in and dragged us all the way to the Psi-Aion System, three hundred light-years away from Orion V.”
Kione’s focus narrowed. At that moment, Jason lost himself in the being’s eyes. It was almost hypnotic. Then, just as it began, it stopped.
That was weird.
“The Argo got caught in a trans-space corridor the Seekers had opened… That’s at least what Professor Petit theorized,” Kione said, almost robotically.
“How could you know that?” Jason furrowed his brow. “You weren’t there when he—”
“I’m sorry. I—”
“You were in my head.” That’s what that strange sensation was. “How—?”
Kione raised a hand. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to—”
“You’re telepathic?”
“No.” Kione paused and considered before continuing. “Well, I never used to be.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.” Kione winced in pain. “When the Seekers took me out of the cryogenic chamber and forced my contact with the sphere, something happened. It changed me. I’m not sure how, but it awakened something in me. I seem to be able to look at people and see the inside of them. Not what’s physically inside them. But their feelings and their memories.” His eyebrows raised. “You fear me?”
“Did you take that from my mind as well?”
A small smile formed on Kione’s face. “No, I was raised by humans. I’ve seen the reaction before many times.”
Jason wondered if it was an ancient prejudice that bubbled beneath the surface in all humans when they met something new or someone different. “It’s not fear,” he tried to explain. “It’s the unknown. If someone told me I’d be in this situation a few days ago, I wouldn’t have believed it. Since then, I’ve had to reevaluate everything I know about…well, everything. And to find out successive governments have covered this up for so long—”
“My
study of your history has many examples of governments covering up knowledge because they believe it to be in the public’s best interest.”
“When in reality it’s in the government’s best interest so they can maintain a status quo and their grip on power.” Jason shook his head. “Have you ever wanted to escape the Institute?”
“Would I have liked my freedom? Yes. But where would I have gone?”
Jason wondered if humanity was ready for Kione. Even if they weren’t, he shouldn’t have to sit in a lab. In reality it was a glorified prison. “Doctor Tyrell obviously wanted to reveal your identity.”
“I believe Doctor Tyrell became distrustful of the current administration in office and wanted the project out in the open. He was no rebel.” There was a fondness in his voice for the doctor. “His fears never came to fruition, and ultimately—”
“He may still be out there. All these years later, he’s never been found.”
“Perhaps.”
“And what about all of this?” Jason asked. “The sphere? The Seekers? What do they want with you?”
“And what have they done to Nash?”
The question caught Jason off guard. “Are you still reading my mind?”
“No. But I saw a lot in those few seconds earlier. You came investigating the dark side of the moon because of him. You didn’t come here with a grand plan to rescue me.”
“I didn’t—”
“Don’t apologize, I realize what his friendship means to you. I saw what happened that day on the Raptor and the guilt you’ve carried with you since.” He stopped, seemingly not wanting to embarrass Jason any further.
“Unfortunately, it’s a question I don’t have an answer to. Whenever I try to probe the mind of your friend or any of the other Seekers, I find them hard to penetrate. There’s a lot of conflict going on inside them. They may be blocking me. I’m not sure. You must understand I’m new at this.”
“As to what they want with me, you probably know by now that Professor Petit had theorized a certain DNA code held the key to opening the sphere. He was right. For a reason I can’t comprehend, I was that key. But there’s more to it than that. The Seekers are using me to ‘activate’ it.”
“Activate it?” Jason didn’t like the sound of that. “For what purpose?”
“When I’m in contact with it, I see images. Flashes of its memory.”
“It’s alive?”
Kione shook his head. “Not alive. At least not in the way we perceive life. But it holds stories.” He shrugged. “I can’t explain it any more than that.”
“What do you see?”
“Stars.” Kione’s voice lowered. “Dying stars.”
Jason definitely didn’t like the sound of that.
“In a blink of an eye, stars that were once ten times brighter than Sol’s go cold. The planets orbiting them become balls of ice. The voices of the people on them disappear as if they never existed.”
A lump formed in Jason’s throat. “So, it’s a weapon?”
Kione seemed unsure. “I think it’s a power source. A potent one.”
“In my experience, most power sources are eventually used as weapons. Uranium, fusion, tritonium, just to name a few.”
“Yes, and the power of the sphere is infinitely greater than anything mankind could ever fathom.”
Jason gestured to his surroundings. “Then if the sphere is the arrow, perhaps this ship they’re building is the bow?”
Kione nodded. “It seems likely.”
“And we’re trapped aboard it.” He paced in his cell and pondered. “The sphere is old. Very old. These flashes you’re seeing, can we assume these are memories the sphere has witnessed?”
Kione shrugged. “Potentially.”
“Frontier’s Reach.”
The alien appeared confused.
“Frontier’s Reach,” Jason continued, “has always been an aberration. Ever since our telescopes probed the region, it has appeared a void of dead stars, or stars so old they couldn’t support habitable worlds. It’s the main reason the commonwealth has had little interest in colonizing the area. What if Frontier’s Reach was once a battleground? And the sphere was once a weapon used in its annihilation?”
Kione considered the question, finally keeping himself upright without support. “If you’re right, it exemplifies its destructive power.”
“And who built it and wielded it?” Jason stared at him. “Your connection would seem to indicate that—”
“My people had something to do with it?”
Jason didn’t want it to sound like he was accusing him. “You’ve never known your people, so you can’t know what they’d have been capable of.”
“I suppose that’s right. And if this sphere is six million years old, my race may be long extinct.”
“Which questions your existence. One has to also wonder what the sphere was doing buried on Orion V.”
“All wars end,” Kione mused. “On your planet at their conclusion, the old-world nations would put their weapons into mothballs, just in case a new enemy arose.”
“Well, the Seekers now have this mothballed weapon. Who do they plan to use it on?”
“Everyone has enemies.”
Yes, they do.
Thirty-Three
Psi-Aion
A sizzling sensation burned around Susan Tai’s wrists as she attempted to break free of her ropes. The more she tried, the more the fibers seared her skin.
The walk from the Maybelle had been an arduous one. At the dead of night, the mysterious Seekers had marched her, Nicolas, Tyler, and the Marines through the dark forest at arrow point. And high above in the trees, the planet’s nocturnal wildlife peered down on them.
Susan stumbled, tripping on a loose tree root. The Seeker guarding her grabbed her before she fell and nudged her onward with the butt of his wooden spear. The man glared at her, his deep-brown eyes were filled with a deep hatred. A common expression shared by the other Seekers around him.
She glanced over at Nicolas and Tyler beside her. Nicolas had regained consciousness a little earlier, after being knocked out for his ‘we come in peace’ routine. He was still groggy but had recouped most of his senses.
Tyler Cassidy did his best to put on a brave face, but Susan knew better. She felt sorry for the young man. He was completely out of his element.
“How are you, Nicolas?” she asked.
He adjusted his jaw. “Like I’ve been hit by a sledgehammer.”
“It hasn’t bruised too much,” Susan lied.
“If we could just loosen these ropes,” Higgs said behind them.
“And go where, Corporal?” Nicolas said, being a realist. “Did you see our weapons?”
Susan glanced over at the remains of the rifles and their commbands in a woven sack, in hundreds of tiny pieces.
“Tasu masla caram!” The Seeker guarding Higgs pushed him to the ground and grabbed at his hands, noticing Higgs had tried to loosen his ropes.
“Okay! Okay!” The corporal surrendered.
With a single heave, the Seeker pulled him up and stared him down. After a forceful push, they were back on their way.
“Let’s keep calm.” Nicolas said to them. “We’re not going to get anywhere by provoking them.”
Everyone nodded, and Susan turned to Tyler. “What about you, Mister Cassidy?”
“I’m okay.”
“It can’t be too long before your crew wonder where we are.”
He nodded, though it didn’t assure him as much as she’d hoped.
After what seemed an eternity, being led through the darkness of the alien world, they reached an outcropping in the forest. Beyond it lay a towering cliff, at least a hundred meters high. Before it was a village with primitive wooden huts spread throughout. Smoke billowed from the center of the township, and the stench of cooked animal meat wafted in the air.
As they marched through the village, hundreds of the inhabitants stopped what they were doing and gawked at the
m as if they were new exhibits in a zoo. At the heart of the village, a large wooden stump from a fallen tree was the focal point. Surrounding it were unusual rocks and various animal bones.
Susan thought back to what Tyler had said earlier. How could these people build spaceships and travel through interstellar space? It was apparent they hadn’t even invented the wheel yet. And the Seekers themselves, they reminded her of long-extinct Neanderthals. Larger than the standard human and muscularly more superior but at a developmental level well below that of the modern man.
Her captor pushed Susan to her knees. The others joined her in front of the tree stump, while every Seeker in the village milled around them.
“What are they going to do with us?” Private Utkin asked.
The butt of a spear smashed into the back of his head and his face plowed into the mud. He dragged himself back to his knees, wincing while a mighty bruise revealed itself.
There was a quiet hush, and the Seekers parted. The Seeker responsible for knocking Nicolas out walked between them, along with another figure. He was much older, and wrapped in an animal skin, with a skull similar to that of a tiger with long, sharp fangs atop his head.
“Must be their leader?” Nicolas assumed. “Some kind of elder.”
The old man was helped up onto the stump. He stood high above his six captives and held his hands in the air. “Verash, tolar bolor temar daran Vokar!”
“Verash! Verash! Verash!” the other Seekers chanted, punching the air with their fists.
The elder’s stare silenced his people. “Verash, tolar daris fakir, moros!” He pulled out part of a smashed rifle and held it in front of Nicolas. “Terch?”
Susan turned to Nicolas. “What do you think he means?”
“Terch?” the elder said again, pacing along the stand and pointing at each of them.
“Perhaps he wants to know which one of us is the leader,” Tyler said. The cargo captain gallantly stood.
Nicolas pushed him back to his knees and stood himself. “I’m the leader.”
A gasp sounded amongst the villagers.
The elder kneeled the best he could, considering his advanced age. He grabbed Nicolas by the jaw and gazed into his eyes. “Terch?”
Frontier's Reach: A Space Opera Adventure (Frontiers Book 1) Page 16