by T. R. Harris
Just in time, the targeting computer locked onto his attacker, and Kaylor depressed the trigger. A ball of blue lightening flashed out of the barrel, striking the creature directly in the chest. The alien was thrown back against the control console, screaming in pain—but it didn’t go down. Instead, the insane beast swatted at its chest and at the already-blistering skin and burned hair. The creature was stunned, but only momentarily.
Kaylor was shocked that the creature was still alive, but his shock soon turned to terror as his assailant pushed off from the console and leapt in the air toward—
Just then, Kaylor’s stomach rose up in his mouth and he nearly vomited, as the gravity wells for the ship dissolved, leaving Kaylor—and his attacker—weightless and disoriented.
The charging creature was caught unprepared. The sudden loss of gravity caused it to remain airborne in its flight—and it soared directly over Kaylor; even as it passed overhead, the beast still tried to reach down and grab him. But it missed by a hair, and with its head turned back toward Kaylor, the creature slammed into the opposite wall with a dull thud, striking a sharp protrusion on the bulkhead. Instantly, the wild beast went limp, as small droplets of blood began to fill the air around the drifting body.
Kaylor lay on the deck, bruised, battered and in shock, the medicine from the suit fighting a losing battle against the pain of his shattered arm. In the zero gravity, he began to drift upward slightly, until the magnets in his boots activated and he found himself in an upright position.
He became aware of the screaming in his helmet. It was Jym.
“I’m…I’m all right,” he said unsurely.
“The BOMB, Kaylor! Hurry!”
The bomb? THE BOMB!
Regaining his senses, Kaylor ignored the pain in his broken arm the best he could and dove for the computer core opening. The timer was down to 94-93-92. Looking around, Kaylor found the gripper tool now floating near the top of the opening. Grabbing it with his good right hand, he quickly positioned it onto the circuit board and pulled.
The board did not move. It would not come out!
“Try again!” Jym screamed.
With only one good arm, Kaylor did his best to reposition the gripper more to the center of the board and pulled again. This time it popped out. Kaylor quickly turned the board around, letting it cycle through the zero-gravity before grabbing the gripper once again with his good hand, Three times in rapid succession Kaylor tried unsuccessfully to place the board back into the slot, then on the fourth try, success.
Instantly, the counter—which by now was down to 16—began to click upwards. 17-18-19.
Kaylor was in too much pain to celebrate his victory. His ribs burned, his broken arm screamed with pain and his right shoulder throbbed in time with his rapidly beating heart.
“Are we going to live?” asked Jym’s equally exhausted voice.
“For a little while longer, I’m afraid..
A few moments later it was time to get back to work. Extracting himself from the recess opening, Kaylor spotted the still unconscious creature drifting near the ceiling to his right. The blood bubbles hadn’t grown more numerous, so the wound must have sealed itself, and from the slow, rhythmic movements of the creature’s chest, Kaylor could tell it was still alive.
Making a decision he hoped he wouldn’t live to regret, Kaylor pulled a connecting cord from his suit and fastened one end of it to a corner latch on the computer core. Then reaching up with his right arm, he grasped a bare foot of the creature, and began to move toward the exit, trailing the core and the creature behind him like a pair of bizarre, mismatched balloons.
“Set the grapples, Jym,” he commanded. “I’m on my way back.”
Chapter 3
Within the hour, Kaylor and Jym were back in a well, half a million kilometers away from the location of the attack and with the large derelict ship in tow. Kaylor found Jym in the aft cargo hold, cinching down the last of five cargo straps around the still-unconscious creature, now firmly secured to one of the work benches in the room. Jym wasn’t taking any chances; he’d seen what this thing could do.
Kaylor wore a blue cast encasing his broken left arm and had placed a torso brace around his bruised ribs for support and comfort. The pain medication was helping, but still his arm throbbed. In any event, he didn’t question Jym’s caution.
Finally Jym asked the question: “What are we going to do with it?”
Kaylor had thought about this. “I believe it’s a male of the species, and he may come in handy,” he began. “This creature obviously was cargo aboard the ship. He could be a witness to what happened, verifying that pirates attacked the ship, and not us.”
“Why did he attack you? We were not the ones who attacked the ship.”
Kaylor let out a snort. “Well, only my ass was sticking out of the opening in the equipment bank. He probably thought I was one of the pirates.”
“Then we’ll have to convince him that we’re not.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem, if this thing is intelligent enough to have a spoken language and if he doesn’t go berserk when he wakes up. I don’t know how civilized this thing is, but he acted like a wild animal when he attacked me.”
“You should consider yourself lucky that you’re not dead. Take a look at this.” Jym led him over to a computer screen set in the wall above a small work desk. Punching a few keys, he pulled up an image that Kaylor recognized as a transparency scan.
“Before I bandaged the head wound, I took a scan of the skull to see how deep the puncture was. Look at this…” Jym pointed at the image, to a section indicating the thickness of the skull. “The bone structure is extremely dense and thick. The wound is shallow, but the trauma caused a slight swelling in the brain, right here. It will go down, and there shouldn’t be any permanent damage.”
“So? Good for him.”
Jym glared at Kaylor, annoyed. Then he switched images. “Since the skull structure was so thick, I also did a full body scan, and here, look at the bones in the arm.” On the screen was a cross section of what appeared to be an almost solid structure.
“That’s a bone? It looks like some sort of metal rod.”
“No, it’s bone all right.” Jym answered. “But just look how thick it is, easily twice as thick as yours or mine. No wonder your arm snapped like a twig when this thing hit you. And look at the muscle density. I’d hate to go up against this thing—ever—even in full body armor.”
Kaylor studied the scan closer. He knew something about anatomy, since operating as an independent mule-driver on the fringe of civilization often meant having to fend for oneself for medical aid. He also knew from these scans that only the most primitive creatures had skeletal structures like this, an animal closer to the lower side of the evolutionary scale. Yes, Kaylor had been incredibly lucky. And now he had brought this thing aboard his ship…
“Put a monitor on him. We need to be very careful when he wakes up.”
********
Jym and Kaylor were in the common area of the ship; Kaylor resting on a couch, his injured arm resting on his chest, and in the other he held a ’stick, with its burning end quickly filling the room with a pungent cloud of dense, white smoke.
Jym was seated at the central table, gnawing on a piece of green filiean bark. He enjoyed its sweetness and texture, savoring each strand peeled from the bark as if it was a sexual experience. Even his eyes were glassy, but that may have had more to do with the smokestick in the room than anything else.
It had been over three hours since the meeting in the cargo hold, and during that time Kaylor had taken a shuttle pod over to the big ship and brought back a nav computer unit, a set of calibration tools and a few other smaller treasures he could easily stow in the pod. And now they were discussing their game plan for the upcoming salvage claim.
Between ripping bites of the bark, Jym was complaining. “I’m just saying: Reg 4 will hang us if we’re caught.”
Kaylor took another long
drag off the ’stick and then blew the smoke into the air with a flourish. “I know what Reg 4 says, Jym. If anyone asks, we’ll just say the pirates must have taken the equipment before we got there. I just want to make sure we’ll get something for all our effort, even if the salvage isn’t granted.”
Reg 4 was the law governing interstellar salvage procedures, and what they were referring to was the restriction that stated no items could be removed from a derelict until the salvage was registered and the proper chain of ownership investigated. Otherwise, it was simply piracy. By removing the computer core, along with the other items Kaylor had stored in the pod, they were technically just as guilty of a crime as were the pirates.
“I’ve checked the charts,” Kaylor was saying. “We’ll pass within a million kilometers of an asteroid belt once we get in the Nimorian system. I’ll send the pod down to one of the bigger ones. They’ll never find anything aboard the ship.”
Jym knew Kaylor would be careful; he just liked to complain. All they had to do now was keep the creature in the cargo hold from seeing any of the booty and they would be home free.
Almost on cue, Jym glanced over at the screen on the wall above Kaylor where the monitor in the cargo hold was displayed, and noticed the creature begin to stir on the workbench. He was waking up….
Chapter 4
The first thing he noticed was the smell. It was a sickly cross between rotting garbage and bad breath, and it almost made him gag. But as a dull consciousness returned, Adam fought with all his instincts to remember his survival training. First, he tried to remain still, learning all he could about his surroundings from the smell and sounds around him.
Yes, the smell was strange—like nothing he’d ever encountered—but the sounds he heard were non-threatening, just the soft whirr of a ventilation system and nothing else.
Then carefully, Adam opened his eyes, just a little, just enough to get a quick sense of where he was. He was in a large room with crates stacked against the far wall and three rows of light fixtures set into the ceiling. He was laying on some sort of hard surface, facing upwards. He didn’t sense anyone else in the room.
Next, his training told him to assess his physical condition. He knew his head was injured, not only from the dull throbbing of his left temple, but the fact that he could now recall flying through the air and striking a hard metal wall with more force than he could imagine. Then he became aware of the burning sensation in his chest, and remembered a blue bolt of lightning flaring out at him—
The bastard shot me!
Trying to piece together the fragments of his dream/memory, Adam was at a loss to explain the sensation of flying he had experienced as he jumped at the thing in the blue tunic—and just kept going. He remembered all sense of balance leaving him and –it was all too confusing.
Anger swelled up inside him. Adam had no idea what was real or imagined, as the memories exploded in his head, filled with images of the Afghan mountains, of a burning white light, and of a soft bed with warm liquid flowing down his arm….
********
He awoke to find himself in a canister of some kind, and he pushed open the clear plastic dome and sat up. He was in a large, curving room with dozens of long canisters just like the one he was in, each with a clear, dome-shaped cover. From where he sat, Adam could see into six of the other canisters and each held another person; four men and two women, all naked, all asleep with needles and tubes in their arms.
He looked down at his arm. The needles had come out, and a warm, clear liquid was flowing from the tubes. He climbed out of the canister, his bare feet finding a cold metal surface; he stumbled, but caught himself against the side of the canister. His legs were weak, but he managed to regain his balance quickly.
And then came the most bizarre part of his dream/memory. To his left, he heard a high-pitched, screeching sound, and when he turned to investigate, he found himself staring down at an image he recognized from just about every science fiction movie he’d ever seen. It was about four feet tall, with a long gray head and large black eyes as big as pears. The thing was dressed in a one-piece gray jumpsuit—and it was yelling at him!
The tiny creature was upset, gesturing with its impossibly-thin arms, in an obvious fit of temper. Adam had seen enough. Grabbing a sheet from the canister, he turned on his heel and ran off in the opposite direction from the gray creature, wrapping the sheet around himself as he went. He was dizzy and confused, not knowing if this was a hallucination or reality. So he ran, past rows and rows of identical canisters, each containing a tranquil, sleeping person.
There was a doorway to his right, and he bolted through it into a wide, curving corridor. Turning left, he sprinted down the hallway until he saw a single door set in the wall to his right. Approaching it, he could not find a knob, so he placed his hand in a small depression about halfway down the door, and the panel slid silently into the wall on its own.
Adam slipped inside. It was a small utility room, with a single recessed light in the ceiling. Shelves lined three of the walls, all filled with boxes of various sizes. He closed the door and immediately the light went out.
He didn’t panic. The darkness was his friend, giving him comfort from his nightmare. He crouched down and tried to calm his breathing in an effort to hear if anyone—or any-thing—was following him. But all was quiet.
He must have remained in the room for what seemed like twenty minutes or more, and then just as he was building up the courage to look outside, all hell broke loose.
He was in some kind of earthquake. The floor heaved up, and then dropped out from under him. He fell hard on his shoulder, as the whole room seemed to buck from left to right. Boxes from the shelves rained down upon him and he covered his head with his arms before crawling onto the lower shelf for cover.
And then it was over.
All was quiet again — for a moment.
Next, he heard – and felt – an explosion reverberate throughout the entire building, followed quickly by the sounds of running in the corridor, along with electric popping sounds and high-pitched screams of agony.
Staying perfectly quiet, Adam dared not venture a look into the corridor. The popping sounds soon ended, but he could still hear movement outside in the hallway. He was in total darkness, yet mentally he prepared himself for the moment the light would pop on and the door would open….
But it never came. Instead, about ten minutes later, there came more sounds from the hallway. This time there were voices, and frantic ones at that. He didn’t recognize the language, but after half a dozen missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, not recognizing a language wasn’t all that unusual. Besides, what about the tiny gray creature….
People were calling out to others, and there was the sound of running on the metal floor, all in the direction to Adam’s right. Then silence once again descended on the scene.
When all was quiet for another ten minutes or so, Adam slipped out of his hiding place in the shelving unit and felt his way in the darkness to the opposite wall where the door was set. Feeling the surface of the door, he found the recessed area again and the door slid open, light flooding in, temporarily blinding him. Cautiously, he stepped out into the corridor, listening intently for any signs of danger.
He knew that people had run down the corridor to his right, so he turned left. After about twenty meters, he came upon a bundle of sickeningly-burning flesh that had once been one of the gray creatures from before. He had seen some grisly things in war before, but he never got used to the acrid odor of burning flesh and hair. It was obvious a battle had taken place inside the building, and here he was, unarmed and naked except for a sheet wrapped around his waist.
Just then he heard a noise, as if a heavy metal box had hit the floor. He moved toward the sound, which seemed to come from the top of a wide stairway on his left. Climbing the stairs silently in his bare feet, Adam found himself in a narrow, circular room with what looked like a series of computer consoles to his right and to his left
—it was the rear end of someone sticking out of an opening in a rack of equipment modules!
Approaching quietly, Adam wasn’t about to let this—whatever it was—fry him like it had the little gray things….
Chapter 5
Kaylor and Jym watched the monitor as the creature shook his head, then noticing the straps holding him down to the table, began jerking and twisting, doing his best to break free. Then frustrated, a sound came through the speakers, loud and primal, as the creature let out a scream: “Let me go, you motherfuckers!”
Moments later, Kaylor and Jym entered the cargo hold, Kaylor armed with his MK-17 bolt launcher. This time he made sure to set it at level one. It would reduce the charge to only five bolts, but he was sure it could now stop the creature, should the need arise again.
The creature’s piercing blue eyes flared as he watched the two of them enter the room, his mouth displaying double rows of long, white teeth. Definitely a meat eater, Kaylor concluded, which sent a shiver down his spine.
Approaching the bench, Kaylor rested his good hand on the butt of the launcher and tapped it gently with his fingers. The creature noticed the movement and seemed to acknowledge the fact that Kaylor had a weapon. Not so dumb after all, are you?
“Who—what are you?” The creature asked in a deep, strong voice. There didn’t seem to be any fear in the question.
“I’m Kaylor, and this is Jym. And what is your name?”
The creature cocked his head slightly. “I don’t understand. Are you speaking Farsi?”
This was strange. Kaylor and Jym exchanged a look, before Jym moved closer to the bench and reached out his hand toward the creature’s head.
“Stay away from me, you stinking freak!”
Ignoring the protests, Jym pulled back the ear of the creature and felt the skin. Nothing—no trace at all. This thing truly was primitive.
