Alien Shadows

by Daniel Arenson

  Giga approached him and spoke for the first time. "What do we do now, sir?"

  Riff turned toward the android. He held her hands, looked over her shoulder, and met Steel's eyes. The knight held his gaze.

  "The ghosts grabbed one of us," Riff said softly. "By god, I say we grab one of them."

  * * * * *

  Riff stood in the laboratory, a pale chamber with a tiled floor and harsh neon lights. The tables had been pushed aside. The windows' blinds were open, exposing rocky plains and black sky. The stars shone, and the galaxy's spiral arm spread like a trail of milk. Yurei still lay below the horizon.

  "How are we doing, Gig?" he asked.

  The android placed down her last metal rod, forming a square around Riff. "Final rod in place, sir. We're ready to go."

  Riff nodded and looked around him. Several of the rods had been raised, reminding Riff of poles that formed lines in banks or theaters. Only in this case, it was not velvet ropes that connected the posts. Once turned on, an electromagnetic field would flare between them, strong enough to power a small town.

  Giga glanced out the window. "It's almost time, sir."

  Riff nodded. Remember the tesseract, stupid. He swallowed a lump in his throat. What had Nova meant?

  Tesseract, tesseract, he thought. He knew that word. He conjured to mind a trip to a sideshow long ago, a hologram of an impossible cube. What did that have to do with ghosts? He didn't know.

  All he knew was that the ghosts came from Yurei, the black hole. Until now, every time the ghosts had struck, they had struck under Yurei's watchful gaze. That black hole was releasing them like a hive releasing hornets. Riff would bet his life on it.

  Perhaps I am.

  Riff wished the others were with him. But Piston and Twig were working on the wreckage of the Dragon Huntress. Steel was guarding the observatory's airlock, and Romy was patrolling the corridors; Riff couldn't abandon the scientists, wanted to make sure at least two Alien Hunters were always on the beat. With Nova gone, that left just him and Giga here . . . hunting a ghost.

  He stared out the window again, waiting for it—the black eye.

  "It's a funny thing, fear," Riff said. "It must seem so strange to you, Giga. How humans are afraid of the dark. Of shadows stirring. Of the unknown. How we leak cold sweat, shiver, how our heart rate increases. How we act like fools. An evolutionary tool, meant to keep us out of the dark forests where tigers lurked." He laughed—a bitter, hollow sound. "Wasn't enough to keep us out of the true darkness, though. The darkness of space. And there are far worse things than tigers lurking in these shadows."

  Giga looked at him. "I'm scared too, sir."

  "I didn't know androids felt fear."

  "We do." Her voice was barely a whisper. "I don't fear the darkness; it's only the lack of photon radiation within a slice of a spectrum. I don't fear the unknown; what I don't know inspires only curiosity. But . . . I fear loss. I fear losing my friends. The people I love." She lowered her head. Her chin-length, black hair rustled. "I'm so afraid for Nova. And I'm so afraid that the same can happen to you, to Steel, to everyone else." She looked at him again. "Is that wrong, sir? Is that not what fear is?"

  "I think, Giga, that's exactly it."

  She looked out the window. She shivered. "It's here."

  Riff followed her gaze, and his innards clenched. A shadow was rising above the horizon, hiding the stars, bloating, emerging like a creature from a midnight swamp. Perhaps it was a creature. Yurei, vengeful Queen of Darkness, was awakening.

  Starfire . . . we have her, Starfire . . . would you like to hear her scream?

  He forced his gaze away before the rest of the black hole could emerge. Even this single motion, the flick of his eyes, blasted pain through his skull.

  He gave Giga the signal. She nodded and left the chamber, staring from the doorway. In her hand she held the remote control.

  Riff stood within the square of posts, staring away from the window, but he could feel the black hole behind him, staring at him, a presence in this chamber. Cruel. Evil. The same entity he had felt in the nightmarish landscape, or perhaps the landscape itself, an entire conscious world.

  "I'm here," he said softly. "The one who saw your true form."

  You saw nothing, one of three. A hum rose in the chamber, becoming a cackle. Desks rattled. Shadows swirled. If you truly saw our faces, you would collapse screaming, your puny mind broken.

  "I don't know," Riff said. "I once walked into the bathroom without knocking and saw Piston naked. I don't think anything can scare me now."

  Humor . . . a human failing. Soon your jokes will end, one of three. Soon all you will do is weep and beg and scream.

  Riff lifted his plasma gun. He loaded a charge, letting the gun hum, click, and glow.

  "Come then," he said. "Let's go another round."

  With a screech, the shadows swarmed.

  Riff spun around, gritting his teeth, to see the creatures descend from the shadowy corners. Their eyes blazed. Their mouths opened, revealing black fangs. Their claws reached out.

  "Come at me!" Riff opened his arms wide. "Here I am!"

  With the power of a storm, the creatures slammed into him.

  Claws slashed at him. Eyes bored into him. The shadows engulfed him, tugging at him, pulling him toward the waiting black land.

  "Now, Giga!" he shouted.

  The rods around Riff crackled to life.

  The ghosts screamed.

  The magnets yanked Riff's gun from his hand, and his wristwatch tore off and flew. The electromagnetic field filled the space between the rods, forming an invisible cage.

  The ghosts wailed and tried to flee. They flew toward the fields, shattering, breaking apart, screaming. One creature rose toward the ceiling, only to be knocked back down, slam against the floor, and disintegrate. They swelled, shrunk, twisted around.

  "You like that, don't you?" Riff said. "You—"

  He screamed as one of the creatures crashed into him, slamming him against the floor. More of the beasts piled up, scratching, biting.

  Riff swung his electromagnetic rod, slamming the metal into them. The creatures changed form, contracting to avoid the blows. He hit one, heard it scream. He knocked another creature back and crawled, trying to escape the square of rods.

  He made it past the border.

  Claws grabbed his leg and tugged him back.

  "Giga!" Riff shouted. "Giga, help me out of here!"

  The android peered from behind the door. "I can't, sir! I'm a robot. This powerful an electromagnetic field would erase my memory banks." She cringed. "Oops! I just forgot the lower bound on the complexity of fast Fourier transform algorithms to convert a finite list of equally spaced samples of a function into the list of coefficients of a finite combination of complex sinusoids. Damn." She vanished behind the doorway again.

  The ghosts tugged Riff back into the ring, lifted him into the air, and slammed him down. His shoulder hit the floor—hard. More ghosts piled up atop him, yanking at his hair, pounding his flesh like butchers tenderizing meat. Riff felt like a scrawny accountant who'd wandered into a wrestling ring to face a heavyweight tag team.

  Brilliant plan, he thought. Trapping myself with alien ghosts. Brilliant.

  The creatures grabbed him again, maws opening to bite.

  Riff thrust up his rod.

  The magnetic field repulsed one ghost, and Riff swung the rod again, slamming it against another. With his other hand, he fired his plasma gun. The blaze stormed across one creature, shattering it into a thousand shards that vanished like fleeing birds.

  "Don't kill them, sir!" Giga cried. "We need them."

  He groaned. More of the ghosts still fluttered around him, banging against the invisible walls of the cage. Riff tried to leave the trap—all he had to do was step between the poles!—but the ghosts kept swarming around him, spinning in a maelstrom.

  Riff cursed, kicked, and knocked down one of the pegs.

  The field broke. Gh
osts began to flee like smoke from an opened oven.

  Riff scurried with them. He scampered along the floor, exiting the broken cage. The creatures fluttered all around, knocking into him, fleeing toward the shadowy corners, the ceiling, the laboratory desks, and the corridor. Riff grimaced, struggling to push through them, feeling like a man shoving through waves of tar.

  He grabbed the fallen rod. He howled with effort. It felt like trying to lift a fallen tree. Standing outside the cage, he pressed against the ground, grinded his teeth, and managed to lift the pulsing rod back into place.

  Silence fell.

  The creatures vanished.

  Riff fell to the floor, battered and bleeding.

  He looked around him, panting. Whatever ghosts had escaped the trap had also fled the lab. Desks, lamps, and computers lay smashed on the floor. Claw marks covered the walls. Black stains lay everywhere. After the roar of the battle, Riff's ears rang.

  Slowly, clutching his weapons, Riff turned his head toward the trap.

  Within the square of pulsing rods, fluttering back and forth between the invisible shields, was a ghost.

  A savage smile tugged Riff's lips. "Got one."

  CHAPTER NINE:

  GHOST IN THE MACHINE

  "Damn it, Twig, the quarter screws! Quarter!"

  Piston growled and shook his fist at her. The gruffle stood on a ladder, clad in a space suit, a helmet the size of a pumpkin encasing his massive head.

  "You said five-eights!" Twig cried back from her perch on the ship's wing.

  The gruffle groaned. "Why would I want a five-eights screw to patch up the thruster engine coils? Think, you clod! Now go get them."

  The Dragon Huntress still lay upon the rocky surface of Kaperosa, one wing shattered, the engines smashed, the nose crushed, the hull punched full of holes. Scaffolding covered the wreckage, and toolboxes lay everywhere. The stars shone above, and blessedly, the black hole now lurked below the horizon. A hundred meters away, the observatory lights beckoned through the domes and windows. There was real food in there, hot coffee and tea, companionship, warmth. But so long as the Dragon Huntress lay in ruins, that place—so near yet so far—was forbidden to Twig. On captain's orders, she was stuck out here, working on the wreckage with nothing but that infuriating old gruffle for company.

  "Now, you clod!" Piston rumbled, clinging to the ladder with one hand.

  Twig grinded her teeth, anger rising in her. She was tired of that grumpy gruffle bossing her around. She wanted to kick her toolbox off the wing, storm back into the observatory, and watch a few episodes of Space Galaxy to cool down—and let Piston fix the damn spaceship on his own.

  She sighed. But Riff had ordered her and the gruffle to remain out here, on the cold surface of Kaperosa, until the Dragon Huntress was spaceworthy again. And so Twig remained, nerves fraying, living off tablets and juice boxes and a healthy dose of gruffle curses.

  "Here's your damn quarter screws!" She grabbed a handful of them from a box, scampered across the wing, and all but tossed them at Piston. "Happy?"

  "No!" Piston's helmet fogged up. "Of course I'm not happy. We've been out here for three days with no rest, and there's nobody but a clod to help me, and—" He frowned at the thruster coils. "Well, I'll be damned. Needs five-eights screws after all."

  Twig groaned. "Great, Piston. Genius engineer you are."

  He blustered. "Exactly! I'm the engineer, not the mechanic. You're the mechanic, you clod, and you should know these things."

  "I do know them!" she shouted. "That's why I gave you the right screws in the first place, you . . . you . . . you burly, bearded, bubble-brained . . . barnacle!"

  Very slowly, Piston climbed from the ladder onto the wing. The gruffle stood a foot shorter than most humans, but he towered over Twig, a diminutive halfling, and weighed several times as much. Inside his helmet, his beard wrapped around his face like a pale python constricting its prey. His eyes burned with fury.

  "Take that back," he said.

  Twig might have been a fraction of his size, but she crossed her arms and glared up at him. "No! I'm sick of your name-calling, of your grumbles, of your mistakes. Yes, Piston! You make mistakes too. Now you will start behaving yourself, or—"

  Piston roared and leaped toward her. Twig squealed and jumped back. She tilted, fell off the wing, and crashed down onto the rocky surface. Piston tilted on the wing too. Twig scampered aside a second before the gruffle slammed onto the ground, cracking rocks.

  For a long moment, they lay still, moaning. The wrecked starship loomed above them, blocking the stars.

  "You all right, Piston?" Twig finally said, voice hoarse.

  He groaned. "I think I fell on your wrench." He reached under his backside and pulled out the dented tool. "I broke it."

  Twig took her beloved wrench from him. The steel was now curved like a boomerang. "Only a gruffle can dent solid metal." She sighed. "I'm sorry, Piston." She rose to her feet and reached down a hand.

  He grabbed her palm and nearly yanked her down as he stood up. "It's I who am sorry, little one." Tears filled his eyes, and his helmet fogged up. "I'm just a grumpy old gruffle, too old for this nonsense. You're the best damn mechanic I know, you clod. And my best friend. It's just . . . just this damn place." Piston shook his fist at nothing in particular. "This whole damn planet, the observatory, the smashed ship, and that black hole that's just waiting to rise. And those ghosts, Twig. Those bastard ghosts what's been snatching up people. I suppose . . . I'm scared."

  "Me too." She shuddered. "Fighting skelkrins and robots was one thing. But how can we fight ghosts, an enemy we don't understand, an enemy from another world?"

  Piston tightened his lips. "We'll leave that to the Big Folks to figure out. Riff and Steel are going to figure out how to fight 'em. They're the warriors of the group. We're the little crafty ones. Our job is to be here, fixing this hunk of junk starship." He returned to his ladder. "Twig, there's a loose connection on the inner side of the engines. Would you climb into the engine room and see if you can weld it together?"

  She nodded. "Will do. Let's fix this damn dragon, evacuate everyone, and then blast this whole planet to bits."

  She climbed the dented staircase into the airlock and the Dragon Huntress's innards. Vacuum still filled the broken ship, and Twig kept her space suit and helmet on, and her jet pack hung across her back. The main deck, once a cozy living area, lay in ruins. The goldfish, the dart board, the cushions, the board games—all had blasted out of the starship when the ghosts had hijacked it. The chamber seemed so sad to Twig now, all its good memories like ghosts themselves, mere echoes in her mind.

  Curbing her tears, Twig opened the hatch on the floor and climbed down into her own domain, the realm that had been her kingdom for over a year now—the Dragon Huntress's engine room.

  Yet here too she found a different place.

  The towering hyperspace engines, once gleaming turbines of polished steel, now lay tilted and cracked. One thruster turbine now lay on the floor like a broken drum. Cables had torn off the wall, sticking out like weeds from a ruined castle. The heart of the Dragon Huntress was broken, and it felt to Twig like seeing the injuries of a loved one.

  This ship is one of us, Twig thought, running her palm across a cracked cooling pipe. The eighth Alien Hunter.

  "I'm going to fix you, Huntress," she whispered. "I promise."

  A hand grazed her shoulder.

  "Piston?" Twig spun around, frowning. But she saw nothing. Only the dangling cables, the shadows, the cracked engines.

  A ghost, she thought, tensing.

  Then she barked a laugh. She was just on edge. Just nervous, imagining things.

  "Twig, you found the loose connection?" rose Piston's voice from outside.

  Twig nodded and turned toward the back of the room. She had a task to do. She had taken another step when something grabbed her arm from behind.

  She spun around again. She raised her dented, electric wrench. It was shaped l
ike a boomerang now, since Piston had fallen onto it. When she tossed it into the shadows, the wrench flew in an arc, sprayed out sparks, then boomeranged back into her grasp.

  A shadow scurried and vanished into the darkness. A toolbox fell over. A lightbulb swung, then exploded. Nearly all light vanished from the engine room.

  "Who . . . who's there?" Twig whispered. Her knees knocked. "Romy, is that you? This isn't funny."

  Something scuttled in the darkness. Red eyes opened to slits.

  "Romy!" Twig said, voice shaking. "Stop that."

  She pressed a button on her wrench, and electricity crackled between the prongs. She began to tiptoe toward the shadows. She could hear the creature now—its hissing breath. She could smell its stench—a stench of rotten meat. Jaws opened in the darkness, revealing gleaming fangs.

  Twig ran toward the airlock.

  The shadow pounced.

  Heavy blackness slammed into Twig, engulfing her, smothering her scream. Those red eyes burned, and a nightmarish land unfolded around her, a realm of endless sky and a dark, mocking queen.

  CHAPTER TEN:

  DARK WORLD

  When Nova woke up, she looked around her and didn't understand what she saw.

  Years ago, she had seen a story on the news about a blind old man who ran a soup kitchen. Had never seen a damn thing. Finally his community had gathered together, raised money, and paid for prosthetic eyeballs. When the old man had opened his new eyes, had seen the world for the first time, he had been utterly confused. Colors, shapes, movements—it was all totally new, totally incomprehensible.

  Right now, wherever she was, Nova felt the same. It was as if a new sense, a new part of her brain, had turned on for the first time.

  She seemed to be trapped inside a cage, but she could not grasp how the bars were arranged. They flared out at odd angles, and when Nova tried to grab them, she kept missing. It seemed like the cage was reflected in mirrors, repeating itself and twisting in on itself. Nova had once owned a book of drawings by MC Escher, a human artist who had designed impossible structures. This cage, she thought, would confound even him.