Alien Romance Box Set: Alien Former: Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Books 1-5)

by Ashley L. Hunt

  To my surprise, I didn't feel any resistance, and at first, I thought I had missed. Instead, as Volistad pulled me back to safety, I saw the vine whipping about, severed as neatly as if I had been trying to cut silk instead some kind of biomechanical cable. Thukkar dragged Nissi back up onto the bridge, and we all just stood there for a moment, panting, as the Stormwalker ripped the remnant of the vine away from her legs. As I watched, the wounds stopped bleeding, and a moment later, her flesh sealed itself neatly. "Damn," I said in Pan-American, "That's a neat trick."

  Though she didn’t understand my language, Nissi took my meaning, and she smiled her eyes slightly in response, hissing through clenched teeth. “Can we get off of this Palamun utrezbekan bridge?”

  I could guess the meaning of utrezbekan, so I didn't bother asking. Instead, I sheathed my sword, then turned and nodded to Volistad, and we continued on our way. We walked for several minutes, tense and waiting for another attack, but none came. I was relieved when the far side of the abyss came into view, and the bridge continued smoothly into another corridor. Volistad and I quickly crossed into the hall, then turned back to aid Thukkar and Nissi, who was now clutching the ranger's shoulder in a death-grip. He didn't seem to mind. "Excellent," I said, breathing out a short sigh of relief as Nissi crossed all the way into the corridor.

  Volistad and I exchanged terse nods, and I could feel the unspoken accord between us strengthen. “We make a good team,” he said in my language, smiling a little- like a human. I returned the smile as an Erinye would have done and opened my mouth to say something. But before the words could reach my lips, I heard a pair of whip-cracks from out in the darkness behind us. My legs burned as two more of the strange, metal vines wrapped themselves around both of my calves. I yelped and fell as they immediately jerked my legs out from under me and dragged me back toward the abyss.

  Volistad shouted in surprise and dove for me, seizing my arms. But we had been too thoroughly caught off guard, made careless by our own relief at reaching supposed safety. Before Volistad could try to brace himself and stop me from going over, I was yanked out and away from the bridge. The ranger didn’t let go, and together we plummeted down into darkness, screaming. More vines rose up in the darkness and seized me by the arms, yet another wrapping firmly about my waist. I heard Volistad struggling as he was entangled. He shouted my name in between furious snarls, and I tried to respond, but a vine wrapped itself around my throat, quickly cutting off my air. Thorns bit into my flesh, and I felt icy cold fear slide down into my spine. One false move and those thorns could open any of the big veins in my neck, and I doubted there would be any coming back from that.

  Ravanur! I screamed in my mind as my vision went dark. “What the fuck is this! Why can’t you stop your temple from killing us!? The vines were still dragging us down into darkness, but I felt my descent slowing. Whatever these things were, they didn’t intend for us to become smears at the bottom of this pit. Ravanur did not answer me. Either she was incapable of doing so here, or she didn’t deem it necessary. Probably the second one. She seemed like a “god helps those who help themselves” sort of deity. It figured.

  Abruptly, the vines released me, and before I could suck in a full breath of air, I plunged into a thick, rancid muck. It smelled like an unholy mixture of gasoline and bile, and I gagged as it filled my nose and seeped into my mouth. I thrashed and felt stone beneath my feet. Struggling to find my calm, I stood, spitting the foul goop out of my mouth and blowing hard to clear my protesting sinuses. I heard Volistad beside me in the darkness doing the same. I fumbled in my furs and was relieved to find my makeshift lantern was still there. I flicked it on and opened the shutters wide so that its glow spilled out all around me in a circle, illuminating both Volistad and me in its eerie glow.

  I heard Nissi’s voice echoing far, far above us, calling for Volistad. I shouted back up at her. “We’re okay! Go on without us! We’ll find a way back up!”

  Volistad shouted his agreement, and we waited as our words echoed up to our friends. There was a short silence and then Nissikul shouted back, "Fine! Stay alive!" Volistad chuckled at this. Evidently, it was a typical sort of response for her.

  “Well,” I said, then immediately spat again to try to clear the awful taste from my mouth. “What should we do?”

  “Find the source of those… rope-things,” Volistad said immediately. “I don’t see them anywhere, and that worries me.”

  I held my light high and scanned all around us. We were standing waist deep in the foul muck, which stretched as far as we could see. There didn't seem to be any supports for the bridge down here. It was probably just a single, smoothly shaped length of stone like everything else in this place. About twice my height up the wall dangled one of the strange metallic vines. It was inert and lifeless. It seemed to have grown straight out from the stone. I dug in my furs for a moment, withdrawing a scrap of metal left over from the construction of my makeshift lantern. With a quick flick of my arm, I hurled the scrap side-arm at the vine like a Frisbee. When the metal reached the level of the vine, it suddenly animated, curling like a whip and snapping the chunk of scrap out of the air with an echoing CRACK. There was a subdued splash as the metal plunked down into the mire. "Fuck," I cursed, then switched to Erin-Vulur for Volistad's sake. "They won't let us climb, so where do we go?"

  Volistad struggled over to me, his armor looking distinctly less impressive now that it was smeared with unknown muck. He stripped off his helm, revealing an expression of base fear that I wouldn’t have expected from him. His eyes were wide, and they flicked around at the darkness, looking for something and not finding it. “It smells like burug in here," he whispered. "I think… I think this might be where they spawn." As if on cue, something bumped against my foot, and I shrieked, trying to leap out of the mire, succeeding only in splashing foul gunk in all directions.

  Volistad, however, was ready to strike. He dropped his weight and plunged his arm into the liquid. He twitched and shook as he fought with something below the water, but in a few moments he rose, heaving a writhing, wriggling mass up out of the water and into the light of my lantern. It was a burug alright, but clearly juvenile, only reaching the size of a medium weight dog back on Earth. Its segmented armor was not quite solid just yet, and its many legs rattled against Volistad’s armored forearm with spasmodic ferocity. It kept trying to get its mandibles into his flesh, but the ranger’s grip was unbreakable. “You were right,” I said, some of Volistad’s apprehension slithering into my own mind.

  “Yes,” he replied grimly. “We can’t stay here. We’re lucky neither of us seems to be bleeding. One of these can’t kill us alone. But many?” He didn’t have to finish the thought. Instead, he turned and flung the larva he had caught far from us. It landed with a splash and disappeared.

  “So which way is the way out?” I was turned around, and everything around me seemed to be the same fathomless blackness over the same filmy swamp.

  The ranger frowned and closed his eyes, breathing deeply. He grimaced immediately. I sympathized. Though I couldn’t stop the smell from getting into my nose and mouth, I was trying very hard not to breathe too much. Volistad had just taken a big lungful of the foul stench. After a moment, he nodded his head in a direction. “That way. Fresher air.”

  I marveled at the strength of that sense. What would it be like to be able to smell as well as one could see? I raised my lantern high and set off in the direction Volistad had indicated, and soon my thoughts were fully devoted to trying to move quickly against the constant resistance of the bog. Every so often I felt a curious larval burug nudge up against me, and each time I kicked the offending thing away, hoping to teach the little monsters to keep their distance from me. But their little prods and bumps seemed to come more and more often as we proceeded, and before long, the water around us churned with hundreds of the damnable things. How long before one decided to try a nibble?

  After about a quarter hour, we reached a low, semicircular doorw
ay, too low to walk through upright. Perhaps it was a cycling system, meant to keep the swamp we were slogging through at some optimal consistency. Either way, it seemed to be our way out of here, so we crouched low and squeezed into the tunnel. It was cramped, and it was an effort just for me to keep my lantern above the filthy water. It had worked even after I had fallen into the pool, but I didn't trust the jury-rigged circuits to function properly if they were immersed. I had to keep my head tilted up and to the side to breathe, because the crouch I was forced into, pushed my head down close to the waterline. My heart was thunder in my ears, and all I could think about was the horde of ravening larvae piling into the tunnel behind us. Could we fight something like that? Surely not in this space.

  I could feel the little wriggling bodies bumping into me again, and I had to suppress the urge to scream. Unthinking, I swatted at a particularly inquisitive one with the back of my free hand, and it sunk tiny sharp mandibles into my flesh. I hissed and tried to draw back, but the little bastard had a firm grip on me. “Volistad! I’ve been bitten!”

  He whirled, quickly shoving me past him, a growl already gathering in the base of his throat. The waters before him were already churning as the larvae there sensed my blood. Furious, I slammed the little burug clinging to my arm into the wall until it let go of me and dropped senseless into the mire. I thought about the sword at my waist, immersed in the muck. I would have to clean it later. There was no use in drawing it; I would probably just cut myself or Volistad and make the whole situation worse. Instead, I put out my free hand and took hold of his sodden cloak, then turned continued forward down the tunnel, leading the ranger with me, backward. Behind me, past the reassuring form of Volistad, I could hear the larvae churning up into a frenzy. A strange, whistling cry went up from the roiling mass, taken up in wild, dissonant chorus a moment later. Volistad answered with a bestial roar that tore its way out of his chest and filled the tunnel with the sound of his battle-rage. I felt the ranger moving through my grip on his cloak, and I glanced over my shoulder to see him wielding an ax in each of his hands. He timed each of his swings to a step backward, and we moved on like that, me in the lead, Volistad slashing in great arcs and spattering the walls of the tunnel with black ichor.

  We moved that way for what seemed like an age. I could sense Volistad beginning to tire. He still swung in rhythm with his careful backward steps, but I could hear him panting. Fighting for even a minute was exhausting. I wondered how long we had been doing this. Five minutes? An hour? Ahead of me, the light of my lantern fell on a fine lattice of steel bars, and I cursed vehemently. Volistad grunted a question at me, and I seethed back, "Blocked! There are bars in the way!" Water was coming in through the bars, and it seemed cleaner than the muck we had been wading through. Water could get in, but the burug larvae couldn’t get out. And neither could we.

  Volistad cursed, redoubling his efforts against the ravening swarm, but he was already grunting in pain as bites got through and found the soft places between the crystalline plates of his armor. We didn’t have long. We would soon be overwhelmed, and I would soon get to live out my fantasy of being devoured by piranha in a dark alien sewer, so at least I had that plus. I cast about with the lantern for any sign of something I could use to bend the lattice, maybe force it aside so we could get past it, but nothing presented itself. Volistad roared again, but this time, the sound was filled more with desperation than rage. He wasn't swinging the axes anymore. The larvae were piling onto him, snapping at his unarmored face and bearing him over backwards into the water. I screamed and tried to drag him back upright, but the boiling swarm of hateful little bodies took me from my feet as well, and I plunged into the water in a cloud of wildly chomping mandibles. This was it. We were going to die in the darkness and it would all be for nothing. Maybe Ravanur could turn Nissikul into a god. She would be a better choice anyway; she knew this planet, knew the Erin-Vulur. She might not know Barbas, but she didn't have to know him to kill him. Why had the dead god of this place thought that I could do this?

  Pain blasted through me, suddenly, beginning at my closed fist and shooting out in a burning network through my entire nervous system. Someone was screaming, so loud, deafeningly loud, and for a moment I thought it was me. Then I realized that my jaws were clenched shut from the angry current searing through my bones, and the sound was coming from all around me. It came to me in an instant, as a spasm rippled its way up my spine and made my body into a bow. I was being electrocuted. Electrocuted!

  As suddenly as the pain had come, it ended, and I found myself floating on my back on the surface of the muck, bumping up against the steel lattice with the movement of the disturbed water. There were no burug clinging to me. Holy hell, there were no burug attacking me! A stone dropped into my stomach as I remembered. "Volistad!" I thrashed my way back towards where he had fallen, searching the water frantically. He was lying there, unconscious, and I was terrified to note that he was not breathing. I couldn't feel his pulse, but my hands were shaking, so I couldn't be sure. Was he dead? It didn't matter; I had to get him out of here. I got my shoulder under him, and half carried, half pushed him down the tunnel towards the grate. It was completely dark. My light had gone. Come to think of it, it had probably electrocuted us. "Fuck!"

  I stumbled in the dark and smacked my hand against the stone to steady myself. But I didn't touch rock. Instead, I slapped awkwardly at a solid bar of metal. I gripped it, then fumbled up the wall, not daring to hope. Sure enough, there was another. Above that? Solid metal. A hatch set into the ceiling of the tunnel. I pushed. It wasn't latched, apparently trusting to its own weight to keep juvenile burug out of whatever lay above. Straining, with my one free arm, I pushed the hatch up until it reached its tipping point and fell open with a crash. It was just as dark above me as it was in this passage, but I wasn’t staying where I was. Awkwardly, I stepped up onto the metal rung, manhandling Volistad up with me. He was very heavy, especially in his armor, but I couldn’t afford to stop. Already, I could hear movement in the water below us. Some of the larvae had not been killed, just stunned, and they were starting to come around. I doubted they would be happy when they fully woke up. So I struggled up the rungs, one at a time, until I could get my feet onto something like solid ground. I carefully felt out a safe place to set Volistad, then turned to the hatch and lifted the heavy metal portal so that it swung back down into place. I felt at it for a moment, and I was relieved to find a locking bar set into it. We were very lucky that hadn’t been in place before. Nonetheless, I slid the bar into place. We were safe from the larvae. All I had to do now was keep Volistad alive.

  I fumbled my way in the darkness back over to him. We weren’t in a very large space, little more than a wider tunnel than before, though this one went straight up. I could, with a little strain, stretch out and touch both walls. It would have to do. I stretched Volistad out on the ground, then settled my nerves and felt for his throat. My heart thundered in my own ears, making it hard to focus. What if Erinye physiology was different? What if he didn’t usually have a pulse there? What if- I hissed out another breath of relief. He was alive. His pulse was hard and strong, if a little slower than I had expected. Good. Now the breathing. I would need to get him out of his armor to do proper lifesaving techniques, but perhaps first… I leaned up off of him and then dropped my weight down hard just below his chest, aiming for where the diaphragm would be on a human. He surged up, suddenly, and I scrambled off of him, struggling to roll him onto his side as he spewed foul water. He heaved several times, vomiting and coughing water. I knelt beside him and patted his back awkwardly, knowing that the gesture probably meant little through a solid plate of armor.

  After a while, Volistad seemed to be breathing normally, and he pushed himself up into a sitting position beside me. “What happened?” His voice was little more than a croak, but he seemed fully back in control of his body. “We were-” He coughed and trailed off. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know the words in his languag
e. Instead, I just sat beside him. We sat there for a while in companionable silence, just breathing clean air and letting our heart rates fall back down to a more reasonable rate. After a while, Volistad murmured. “Thank you. You saved my life.”

  “Only after you saved mine,” I replied. “I could not have fought so many. They would have torn me to pieces.”

  Volistad was silent. I knew what he was thinking, that he had failed anyway. In his eyes, he hadn’t fought hard enough, hadn’t kept them at bay, and as a result, they had gotten past him and to me. I didn’t have the words to explain to him why he was wrong, so I just slapped him about the head. “Don’t be silly, Volistad,” I said. “Now let’s go. The way out is up.”

  I fumbled my way over to the spike ladder and put a foot up on the nearest metal bar, then hopped up and seized one a little way above my head. Volistad followed my lead, making much less noise in the dark. We climbed in silence in the crushing dark, our already tired muscles straining against the weight of our waterlogged clothes. After a long time, I felt my head bump gently against something solid. Nervously, I lifted one hand up to feel for another hatch. Sure enough, there was one just above me. Carefully, not wanting to fall off of the crude, narrow ladder-spikes, I lifted my hand and pressed it against the hatch, giving it an experimental push. It moved, just a little, but it was just as heavy as the one below us. I took a deep breath, climbed to press my shoulder against the metal portal, and heaved with my legs and back. The hatch lifted open, swinging away on its hinges. I didn't dare push hard enough to fling it open. Instead I flopped over the edge of the hole into the space above while keeping the hatch lifted with one hand. Volistad quickly came up and helped me hold it up while I got to my feet, wary of the edge of the shaft we had just climbed. I held the heavy door in place as he scrambled up in a clatter of weapons, and then, when he was clear, I let the hatch slam shut with a hollow BOOM that raised dust from the ground all around us.