by P. K. Lentz
They started off separately, running.
“Itzcal!” Trisma hissed, wary of shouting. He had jumped a low wall and was making good time, but he was unaugmented; Trisma would quickly overtake him.
Instead, she stopped cold when Itzcal fell down screaming. An instant later she understood why. A long metal shaft of some kind had skewered his thigh.
A spear.
Thrashing in the dust with the bolt running all the way through him, he cried in agony.
“Trisma, get back here!” Phoris called from the Panther.
He hadn’t needed to. She wouldn’t risk her own life for that of Itzcal, a stranger who had foolishly put himself at risk.
Backpedaling a few steps, she spun to race to the Panther.
Pain exploded on her right side and she stumbled forward, twisting oddly before failing to hit the ground.
She too had been struck by a bolt. Grazing her abdomen, it had passed through her armor and then penetrated the ground, pinning her to the spot where she had stood, now knelt.
With free right hand around the bar, Trisma prevented herself from sliding further down it. She jerked its point out of the ground, but it remained stuck through the hole in her armor, and perhaps a bit of her.
Holding the shaft and looking around, she saw movement in all directions.
Oddly shaped beings with too many limbs and smooth carapaces. Tabitans. She knew they could fold their bodies almost flat, and seeing the mottled red-brown of the shells become blue in her sight, she learned something new: their shells could change color.
Some of the rocks they had flown over may not have been rocks after all. Tabitans could hide in plain sight, although it seemed, as at least a dozen advanced on her, that most had emerged from the concealment of one or more covered holes in the ground.
Kahrak had been bait in a trap.
During the precious seconds in which Trisma took all this in, she aimed and fired her vazer at the swarming aliens. How much harm it did, she couldn’t tell, and her next shot was fired point blank at the spot on her armor that held the long bolt in place. With a burst of pain, the metal shaft came loose, and she ran.
Ahead she saw Idam heave the husk of Kahrak into the open hatch past a watching Xoc and Nicte. Phoris stood just outside, on the ground. He aimed past Trisma with his slug-thrower and loosed two bursts, but when Idam turned around, unburdened of the corpse, to join the fight, Phoris stopped shooting to grab their only pilot and urge him back inside.
“The Panther’s guns!” Trisma called. At the same moment, she realized that a solid mass of Tabitans coming from her right were likely to cut off her approach to the ship. She swerved, no longer running directly toward safety, firing at them.
If any fell, another appeared immediately from behind to replace it.
An augmented human was fast by her own standards, but Tabitans on their four double-hinged legs were faster. A bunch of them—part of the same group or a new one, she couldn’t know—made to cut her off again. She halted and pivoted, firing at the aliens who separated her from the safety of the Panther.
“Shoot, priest!” she screamed. Even though her path was blocked, she ran toward the ship. There was no choice.
She watched as Phoris climbed up into the ship’s open hatch. Turning back, he aimed his weapon and let off a few short bursts before stopping.
Trisma opened a direct comm to Idam, who she hoped by now was at the controls.
“The Panther guns!” she said.
“I haven’t trained...” came the response in her ear, over a strange, warbling drone the Tabitans were raising. “I think it’d kill you.”
Even as he said this, a bright light lanced out from a node on the Panther’s hull. A white blast erupted, far from Trisma but within the rear ranks of her pursuers. Its heat stung her face and the light blinded her for an instant.
She ran into a wall of Tabitans. Their hard hands, which were more like pincers, arrested her movement and dug into her skin. They seized her arm, but she kept firing until pain in her hand forced her to release her grip on the vazer.
“Phoris!” she screamed.
The priest’s slug-thrower stayed quiet as he sighted down the barrel with a conflicted look upon his scarred face.
“Kill them!”
Then Trisma could no longer see the Panther but only the sea in which she drowned, a sea of hard-shelled limbs and terrifying, beaked alien faces.
“Phoris,” she begged, knowing she could still be heard by comm. “Please, Phoris, shoot... shoot them. Do something! Phoris!”
The hard, sharp hands had firm hold of her. She struggled, but it only brought pain. Her hands found nothing to claw or cling to. The Tabitans were moving her, dragging her, and she was helpless to stop it.
Faintly, over the unearthly warble, she heard the whine of Panther engines.
Her captive body twisted and moved sharply downward. A gap opened briefly in the swarming mass of her captors and she saw an irregular ring of light surrounded by darkness. Contained in the ring was a patch of yellowish clouds, and across it, engines aglow, flew the Panther.
As it soared off into the sky, Trisma’s hope of salvation plunged into dark depths.
That was exactly where the Tabitans were taking her, too—down. Underground. The ring of light slammed shut, and there was only darkness.
* * *
At some point, being dragged along through the dark, Trisma struck her head on something, and consciousness faded.
She awakened abruptly, all at once and with nightmarish memories intact. She shot to her feet only to hit her head again on a low ceiling and crumple back onto a floor which felt filthy. The darkness surrounding her was not total but had a reddish cast. She had learned the hard way that the space was barely three feet high, just enough to crouch in. The air here was much cooler than on the surface of Tabit-1.
Her questing hand found a metal grate encrusted with what felt like many years of grime, filth and rust in some combination. It was from between the thick bars of this grate that the dim reddish light reached her eyes.
The place was not quiet. She heard many overlapping sounds. The nearest and loudest was that of her own shallow, rapid breathing. The next nearest was a voice, almost certainly human, whispering unfamiliar syllables. Trisma crawled on her knees through the dim red light, over the crusty floor, toward the source.
In doing so, she gleaned the length and breadth of the space. Not even a room, it was more like an ancient iron box barely big enough for two people to lay down in. Five of its dark surfaces were solid, while the sixth was the heavy grate.
A cage.
The human whisperer was Itzcal, who sat curled in a corner away from the gate speaking what were surely prayers to the gods of his people.
“Snake-man!” Trisma hissed at him. When he looked at her, his dark eyes were wide and glassy.
The look made it instantly apparent that he would be of no help. He had gone to that place in his mind where men went when they saw their fates as certain. He would not fight.
“What have you seen?” she demanded quietly but forcefully. “Why are we here?”
Itzcal’s one-word answer was given in his native tongue.
“Nexus,” Trisma pressed. “Think. Use Nexus.”
Instead he just aimed a finger at the grate from which the red light issued.
Leaving him, since it made more sense to assess the danger first-hand anyway, Trisma crawled over to the bars and peered through.
Their cage was high up, and the cavernous space upon which she looked down appeared still, until one stared for several moments. Then one saw that the place was filled with Tabitans. Their collective movement, in the dim red glow cast by unknown sources, was like that of black ants infesting a dark-feathered carcass—not easily noticed at a glance. The aliens’ hard skins reflected the red glow, or given what she had witnessed above, maybe even took on the light’s color.
The gentle drone of their speech, if speech it w
as, comprised one of the sounds she could hear in between her shallow, gasping breaths. The other component of the alien din reaching their high-up cell was a rhythmic scraping that might have been music, even if no human would ever describe it as such.
Constrained to the view afforded by the bars, Trisma couldn’t see the full extent of the vast chamber, but it gave an impression that matched the last conscious memories of her capture. This vast hollow lay underground.
The portion of the room visible to her was dominated by a ramp leading up to a platform on which sat something that her human mind interpreted as an altar. It consisted of two thick, flat, rectangular slabs of stone—or metal, it was hard to tell—arranged in tiers, one atop the other. Cables ran up from it to somewhere out of sight in the dark ceiling.
The structure was the site of some activity meaningless to an outsider. Meaningless, but no less cause for the dread that took root in Trisma’s stomach on glimpsing it.
“Itzcal, did you see something? What do you know? Speak! Use Nexus.”
The tattooed, terrified Kaan only muttered in his native tongue.
“Tell me!”
His prayers ceased. His empty, fright-filled eyed found Trisma’s in the red glow, and finally he responded.
“Our blood... feeds their gods.”
Then he resumed his whispers, retreating once more into himself.
Trisma fell against the cold, corroded bars. The dread in her gut had its cause. It had known before she had. “We are sacrifices?” she breathed.
She too had reverted to her native Scythian, and thus spoke only to herself or her gods.
“No...”
She battled the same paralyzing dread to which Itzcal had succumbed. Many captives of the Dawn back on Earth had succumbed to it, knowing that they were to be food for Aresh.
By squeezing a metal bar of the grate, Trisma steadied a trembling hand.
“No... we will not be.” Again she used the tongue of her homeland, for it was not her broken cellmate whom she addressed. “I will not be a sacrifice. I will get away from here.”
She tested the grate by pushing and pulling and shaking it. Thoroughly solid under its crust of corrosion, chunks of which came off in her hands, it refused to budge. Nor could she locate any type of hinge or lock. Bracing and kicking out against the bars with both feet was logically the next effort, but it might attract the attention of their captors. So instead she first set to crawling the cell’s perimeter, pushing her fingers into every filthy corner, looking for any opening.
When that endeavor ended without fruit, she put her thoughts to work on the problem. But her thoughts only spun in panicked circles.
Meanwhile, the activity below seemed to increase. The scraping ‘music’ grew more frenetic, the warbling louder.
Trism sat curled in the corner opposite Itzcal, staving off a fresh round of paralysis, when the Tabitans came. Enough of them swept suddenly into view from the right that their forms filled every gap in the grate, blotting out the red light and sending the cell into darkness.
The grate was drawn aside, accompanied by a heavy, grinding sound. A large gap opened at the edge farthest from Trisma, directly in front of Itzcal, who dove and scrambled to remove himself from that side.
Long alien limbs pushed in through the opening and seized his legs, dragging the Kaan back. Itzcal screamed and shouted in his snake-tongue, clawing the encrusted floor and reaching an arm out to Trisma, who didn’t clasp it but only tried to press herself deeper into the corner, while readying her own defense for when sharp fingers came next for her.
Itzcal’s grip on the bars as he passed them delayed his removal from the cell for but a second. Even if his spirit had accepted doom, his body refused to.
But his path was inexorable.
When Itzcal was taken, it was to Trisma’s overwhelming relief that the grate slammed back into place. Itzcal’s struggling form vanished among the Tabitans, who receded the way they had come. Itzcal’s screams receded with them, merging into the din from below.
Trisma had no wish to witness the Sleeper’s fate—but she did. When the space in front of the bars was clear again, and remained so for a few dozen panting, labored breaths, she dragged herself to the grate and looked out.
In spite of the distance and poor lighting, it was simple to pick out the point at the bottom edge of her range of vision where Itzcal was carried out. The troop of aliens who had taken him swept like a strong current through the sea of other Tabitans whose warbling rose in lockstep with the harsh, maddening music.
Their path was just as obvious, the altar. As the procession reached the ramp, many of its members fell back, allowing just four Tabitans to bear up Itzcal’s struggling form. At the top, they spent some time wrestling the human into the gap between the two thick stone or metal slabs.
Long before they succeeded in applying ropes to screaming Itzcal’s limbs, the ends of which were held taut beyond the slab’s edge by the four Tabitans, Trisma understood. She knew what was to be Itzcal’s manner of death. It had been Kahrak’s. And was to be hers.
A brightly colored Tabitan came into view from behind the altar. The music and warbling ceased. A lone Tabitan voice rose in its hideous warble. The brightly colored one. A high priest.
Trisma shut her eyes. She inhaled deeply through her nose of the dank, chill air, and she prayed. But not to Tabiti or even Tagimasad.
“Arixa,” she whispered. “You cannot come to save me. But be with me. I must leave this place. I will not feed their god!”
The terrible scraping noise and the chanting of the masses resumed. Trisma forced her eyes open. She watched as the alien priest gestured, and the top slab of the altar began slowly to descend. Under it, Itzcal writhed helplessly in his restraining ropes, his small voice hoarse from screaming.
The gap was not large. Within a few heartbeats, the slab pressed upon Itzcal’s body. His cries of terror became ones of agony as the pressure must have grown and grown on his head and chest until at last, in an instant, skull and ribs cracked, silencing him.
Yet the stone ground on until no visible space separated the two slabs. Were the altar not dark and distant, one surely could see the Kaan’s blood trickle from the crack in which his flattened corpse resided.
An involuntary moan escaped Trisma’s lips. Then she licked them, shut her eyes, clenched trembling hands into fists and prayed rapidly in hushed tones.
“Arixa, be with me. Guide me. Deliver me from this place. Take away my fear. Fear brings death. I will defeat fear. I will defeat this enemy. I will leave this place. I will live!”
She drew deep breaths, asserting fresh control over quivering flesh. She opened her eyes and tightly gripped the bars. Moving them by force was a hopeless cause, yet she had hope.
She would find a way.
“Arixa, I will not fail,” she whispered, to none who could hear. “This is not my end. This is not my end. This is not my end.”
END OF BOOK THREE
SCYTHIAN DAWN will continue soon in (a still untitled) BOOK 4!
You can check here for updates.
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Who would have thought when she mutinied more than a book ago that you’d be afraid for Trisma’s life? At least, I hope you don’t want to see her crushed! If you need cliffhanger therapy, feel free to contact me and ask for spoilers. I understand! I may also eventually post a preview chapter or two at the link above to set minds at ease.
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THANK YOU for reading! If you enjoyed, please leave a quick review on the product page. It truly helps! -PK
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