The Remnant

by Paul B Spence

  Except for the dreams.

  The dreams that had become visions, and then reality.

  Somewhere in the labyrinthine corridors, there was a room he needed to find. She would be there, and he would find the answers to all of his questions. He prowled on, searching far and wide, going much faster than Tebrey's team, had he known it. He was driven, fueled by images of the glories and accolades that awaited him.

  Tebrey had been wrong about the doors. It didn't take a psion to open them. It just took a determined and focused will. Akira had been too distracted by his pain to focus on the door properly. Anderson had that will, and he was very determined and focused.

  "Well," Tebrey said dryly, "you've got the bodies you wanted."

  The bottom of the stairwell was carpeted with mummified human remains. The bodies looked as if they had been torn limb from limb by some animal. Parts of bodies were everywhere, and dried blood stained the walls and floor. It smelled vaguely of rancid meat and dust. The bodies had been here for a long time.

  Ana turned away and pressed close to Hunter. She couldn't stand to look at the bodies. She'd seen too much death in the last few days.

  "These are too recent," Akira announced. "I think, anyway. Look at the tools and equipment they have. Also, these are not Taelantae bodies. I would have expected any remains to be of that race."

  "How can you tell?" Tebrey asked. His curiosity was warring with his unease at being at the site of such a massacre. There was something very disturbing about the way these people had been killed. It reminded him of other deaths, caused by something dark and terrible, three years before. More and more, he was beginning to think that coming into the installation had been a bad idea.

  "Look at the bone structure, here and here," Akira said, gesturing. "And this equipment is straight out of the history books. Gear like this was common during the time of the Exodus. I'd say these bodies are eight to nine hundred years old."

  Tebrey thought about the muddy boot prints he'd seen, and the burns on the walls. "Can you tell what killed them?" he asked.

  "No," said Akira, shaking his head. "Maybe some kind of animal."

  "Yeah, maybe," Tebrey muttered. "I think we should go back, leave this place to the ghosts and try to reach the wagons."

  "You sound tense, Commander," Akira said. "These are just old bodies. Whatever happened to them, happened too long ago to be a problem for us. Besides, Pirro can't walk on that broken leg of his. We're stuck here. We may as well find out more about the installation."

  "Your machinery has to be close," Hanna said. "Let's go on and look at that, at least. I didn't walk all this way to see some old bodies."

  "Okay," Tebrey said, picking his way through the mummified remains. "Everyone stay to close to me. If anything weird happens, we leave. No discussion. No debate." He opened the door leading out of the stairwell.

  "Finally," Anderson muttered to himself. He knew he had found the correct room before the door even opened. As the light flickered on, he saw three large glass tanks, festooned with cables and tubes, clustered in the center of the room.

  The first tank had been smashed open at some time in the past. Shards of glass littered the floor, and there was a dark stain all around. He ignored it.

  The second tank was intact, but the machines that supplied it had failed long ago. The liquid in the tank was cloudy and filled with the soup of organic decay. Whoever had been there was long dead, and he wept for the loss of such a great being.

  The final tank's machines hummed softly to themselves. Anderson could see little lights winking on the consoles. The liquid in the tank was clear and tinged with a faint blue light. Floating in the tank was the most exquisitely beautiful woman he had ever seen. She was nude, with perfectly formed breasts and smooth skin. Her golden hair floated around her head like a halo. Her eyes were closed, but he knew they would be blue. She seemed asleep.

  Anderson knew that she had been asleep for a very long time.

  His heart raced as he stumbled forward. He studied the consoles, trying to determine the way to safely let her out of her confinement. He understood now that this must have been a medical facility. She and her companions had been placed here to keep them safe and help them heal, but something had happened, a war, and they were never rescued. Anderson was the last hope for her. He had to set her free before the machines failed.

  Aroused in ways he had never thought possible, his hands fumbled over the keys of the consoles. He would free her, and in her gratitude she would show him such ecstasy and delight. She would teach him of her people and all they had known. He would be a god among men.

  Behind him, in the tank, the perfect lips curved up in a cruel and hungry smile.

  Chapter Seventy

  Not all of the lights worked in the series of rooms beyond the stairs. Since leaving the stairwell, they had seen evidence of a running fight through the corridors. The walls were pocked in places with bullet holes. Brass casings from primitive projectile weapons gleamed in the faint light.

  Tebrey had looked for weapons or other bodies, but hadn't seen any so far. Whatever the people from the stairwell had been fighting either had taken the fallen bodies of its fellows, or hadn't been harmed by the weapons. He found neither idea reassuring.

  They finally came out into a huge room filled with the sound of thrumming machinery. Massive metal shapes loomed out of the near-darkness. The air held a faint smell of ozone. It immediately reminded him of his nightmare journey in the catacombs of Bellejor, and of what he thought the room under the palace dungeons must have been like, before it had been stripped.

  "We'd like to explore a little here, if that is okay, Commander," Akira said. Hanna nodded beside him. Tebrey could tell they were both still angry with him, and he didn't care.

  "All right, but stay close. Use your hand lamps. You don't want to fall down some hole, because we'd just have to leave you there. We don't have any rope." Tebrey gestured to Christopher. "Go with them, keep them out of trouble."

  "Sir," Christopher acknowledged. She didn't sound enthusiastic. She was holding her hand against the side of her head where she'd been hit. Tebrey suspected that her injury was worse than a mild concussion, but there was nothing he could do. If she was bleeding internally, she would either live or die.

  Tebrey watched them move off with trepidation. I probably shouldn't let them, he thought.

  We need to explore to understand this place, Hunter replied. Know thy enemy.

  Where did you pick that up? Tebrey thought, surprised.

  Hunter didn't reply, but Tebrey could sense his amusement. The large cat moved forward, paralleling the course of Christopher and the students. The machines were arranged in a huge grid pattern.

  Ana moved close to him and squeezed his hand. "This place scares me," she said softly.

  "Me, too," said Tebrey. "I don't like it here at all, but we do need to discover all we can about who built this place, and why."

  She nodded. "Do you really think this place was built by my people?"

  "I don't know," he replied. "But I think there is a good possibility that it was. All the evidence suggests that your people were here long before the other settlers showed up. No one knows how they got here from Earth, but it's undeniable that they did."

  "Earth?" she asked. She wasn't familiar with the word.

  "That's the world that our species evolved on." He paused, seeing the confusion on her face. He had forgotten that she wouldn't know about evolution or anything else. He was going to have to start educating her if they ever got out this nightmare.

  He was sure Mason and Bauval would help.

  "It's where humans, us, first came into being. Somehow your people got here from that world long before the development of the means to travel from world to world."

  "How is that possible?" Ana asked. "Would it not be simpler to believe that we had always been here, on this world?"

  "No. It's hard to explain. We know the Taelantae are from Earth. What we
don't know is how they got here. Either there was a very advanced civilization on Earth long ago, or aliens took your people and brought them here for some unknown reason."

  "You're going to have to tell me more of this sometime."

  "I will," he promised. "I'll get the others to help, too. Ask Mason about it when you get the chance. She can tell you more than I can."

  "Commander?" Christopher called. "I think you should see this!"

  Tebrey stepped around the machine between them and then stopped in shock. Next to a machine, on the other side, a figure knelt. It was as dried and desiccated as any of the bodies they had found, but there was something disturbing about this one. Its face was better preserved, and its expression was one of profound horror.

  "This one is much older," said Akira, moving for a closer look. "I can't tell what the cause of death is, however. There doesn't seem to be any obvious trauma."

  "I would say that it was a male Taelantae, age indeterminate, obviously from the older, pre-colonial period; look at his equipment. It looks like much of what was found at the beta dig site," Hanna said. "Whatever killed him, scared him badly."

  "Why is he on his knees?" Christopher asked. "Why not lying down or torn apart like the others?"

  "Maybe he dropped something," Ana suggested. "And died before he could get it."

  Tebrey studied her for moment. "Good idea," he said. He knelt carefully down beside the corpse and directed his light under the machine next to it. "There's something under here," he said. "I can see it gleaming. Someone hold the light."

  Christopher took the light from him and held it so he could see. He crawled under the machine and pulled out the metal object that had caught his attention. It was a rifle of an unknown configuration.

  "A rifle?" Akira said. "What kind of weapon is it, Commander?"

  Tebrey was silent as he stood up. The rifle glittered in the light of the hand lamps. It was made of a white metal, somewhat reminiscent of platinum. "I'm not sure what kind of rifle it is. I've ever seen anything like it," he said.

  "It is interesting," Hanna said. "What is it made of? Platinum?"

  "We found artifacts made of an incredibly hard platinum alloy at the digs," Akira said. "Is it just me, or is the end of it solid?"

  "What?" Tebrey exclaimed. He inspected the end of the rifle. The barrel came to a smooth, bulbous tip. There was no hole for energy or a projectile to pass out of it. There was no tarnish on the weapon. It looked like it had been recently polished.

  Tebrey decided to hold on to it. He removed the small metal boxes from the corpse, too. They looked like they could be energy cells for the rifle.

  "Do you think it could still be operational?" Hanna asked.

  Tebrey shrugged. "I'm not even sure how to go about finding out." He'd already tried the trigger, but nothing had happened.

  "Maybe it is like the doors," Ana suggested. "Try willing it to activate."

  Worth a try, Hunter thought.

  "Why not?" Tebrey thought about it activating and was rewarded when the end of the weapon began to glow faintly blue.

  "Awesome," Akira said softly. "Try the trigger now."

  Tebrey aimed the rifle at the wall and pulled the trigger. There was an uncanny draining feeling as the weapon fired, and he suddenly felt more tired. A bolt of blue fire blasted from the rifle and blew a nine-centimeter hole through the wall.

  "Well, I guess it works," Hanna said.

  They all laughed, a little nervously.

  "I wonder what else is still working down here," Tebrey thought aloud.

  "Shall we continue?" asked Akira. He wanted to play with the rifle. It was the first piece of portable technology that they'd discovered. He wanted to know how it worked – not that there was any chance the soldier was going let him look at it.

  Tebrey gave the student a careful scrutiny. His thoughts were only too clear, but he couldn't let him have the rifle. They might need it.

  They explored the rest of the vast room, but didn't find anything else that caught their attention. There were no other rooms leading from this one. There were no visible controls or small portable devices. It was decided, with reluctance on the part of Akira and Hanna, to return to the others and try a new direction of exploration the next day.

  Tebrey didn't notice that the third door was open until Christopher's startled exclamation. Then he stood and stared at it in horror. "I know we didn't leave that door open," he said.

  "It was the one we couldn't open," Christopher replied.

  "Commander! Dr. Anderson is gone." Hanna gestured to where the archaeologist had been. There were only the two sleeping students in the room, and they were starting to rouse.

  "I don't like this," Tebrey said. He walked over to the door and shined his light into the room beyond. It was a long room with two doors leading from it. One of them was open. He began cursing at length.

  "Did something come and take Dr. Anderson?" Hanna asked hysterically.

  "No," Tebrey replied. "I think he just wandered off to explore on his own. I never suspected that he would be able to open the doors. Damn it all to hell, the man should know better."

  "Are we going after him, sir?" Christopher asked. She dreaded the answer. She just wanted to lie down and sleep.

  "No." He raised his hand to forestall Hanna's objections. "He took the extra lamps with him. He'll be fine. If he wants to wander alone in this place, that's his problem. We'll go after him tomorrow."

  "But, Commander…," Hanna began.

  "No! We're not going to go looking for him right now. We're tired and hungry, and I'm not going to allow anyone to wander around half asleep. That could get us all killed."

  Hanna called out to Anderson for half an hour or so, but there was no response except echoes. She finally gave up and settled down with the others. She glared at Tebrey until she fell asleep.

  Tebrey lay awake with his back to the others. Ana's warm body was pressed close, and was a comfort, but he worried about Anderson. The man hadn't been acting like himself. Back on the Kirov – just before everything went to hell – the first sign of danger had been a man who'd begun to rant about needing to get outside. He'd eventually walked into the airlock and blown himself into hyperspace. They'd later suspected that was how whatever it was had gotten inside the ship.

  Anderson was acting the same way.

  What was he about to let in?

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Anderson had to resort to violence in the end, much to his distaste. He used the remaining hand lamp to short out the console controlling the stasis chamber, hoping that he was doing the right thing. He was rewarded a moment later when the lights in the room began to flash and the fluid drained from the tank in front of him.

  Her body glistened as the rivulets of fluid traced the exquisite curves of her perfect body. She was hairless except for that magnificent mane.

  He was trembling with desire.

  He felt young again. Like he had in his teens when all he could think of was getting the girls alone for a few minutes. In some ways she reminded him of a girl he'd once known when he was a graduate student. Now that he thought about it, she looked just like an idealized version of that girl from so long ago.

  His body convulsed with a blast of raw orgasmic feeling that cut off sharply. All he could think of after that was the pleasure he was going be feeling soon. She'd promised him delights he'd never even imagined. Pleasures he'd never had the nerve to demand from those inadequate girls of the past. He shuddered to think that he'd even compared the two of them.

  He cried out and shielded his face as the tank exploded, peppering him with glass. Bleeding from dozens of wounds, he turned to see the goddess in the tank. His body was responding to his arousal despite his injuries. In some ways, the pain only made his need more powerful.

  He cried out again as he saw what had truly been in the tank.

  Do you want me now? The thought burned its way into his mind from the thing that stepped out of the tank,
disregarding the broken glass.

  "Please!" he begged. "Don't."

  She – it – tore his clothes from his body. Tongues from a dozen mouths buried themselves in his wounds, and he became erect despite his fear and aversion. It laughed at his terror, slamming him back across the console and mounting him. He could feel dozens of sharp needle-like teeth penetrating his manhood as it pulled him inside itself.

  He screamed.

  Yes, my pet. Scream. Beg for death.

  But you promised…, was his last lucid thought.

  The tongues stabbed into him like phalli, not only his wounds but his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. It thrust itself into him even as he was forced to thrust himself into it, and he did scream. He screamed and screamed, and still it wouldn't let him die.

  And it mocked him with grunts and moans of pleasure. Or maybe it was pleasured by his agony. He was too far gone to notice. He came, forced to orgasms by overloaded nerves, like a hanged man. It drained him of everything: semen, blood, memory, life.

  Tebrey woke from a deep sleep and twitched in surprise and horror. He could still hear the echoing scream that had awakened him. The thing he had dreaded most had occurred; the dark feeling from the Kirov had returned.

  They were not alone in the complex anymore.

  "Everybody up!" Tebrey shouted. "Now!"

  "Sir! What is going on?" Christopher asked as Tebrey hauled people to their feet, slapping them to wake them up quickly.

  "We have to get out of here now!" I don't know how much time we have.

  I know, Hunter replied. I can feel it, too. What is it?

  I don't know. He could feel Anderson dying. I don't want to know.

  Tebrey helped Ana gather their supplies together and pack them. They were going to need them, if they lived long enough. "Stay close to Hunter, no matter what happens," he said quietly to her. He crushed her against him and kissed her, almost bruising her lips with his intensity. Hunter, you know what to do, he thought as he let he go of her.