Valyien Boxed Set 3

by James David Victor

  Its head was small compared to the rest of its body, lighter in tone but still grayish like a cadaver, and elongated forward a little, reminding Eliard of a predator. Its mouth parts, however, were a flexing set of four mandibles, forming the four corners of a rectangle that opened and closed as it seemed to taste the strange airs in their direction.

  “Has it seen us?” Cassandra mouthed the words, her eyes wide with terror.

  Eliard was frozen, he didn’t have an answer, but stayed as still as he could and wished that he knew a way to stop his heart from beating and even his lungs from drawing a breath.

  On the thing’s head was a strange headdress made of more of the LED lights, holding folds of black cloth that hung down the sides of what might be the thing’s temples and ears. From this distance, the pirate couldn’t see the thing’s eyes with any great accuracy, but he imagined them to be beady and glittering with malice.

  Flash!

  Suddenly everything lit up as the apex of the ziggurat city—a place of closely built, black-metal towers—burst into staggering brilliance as another of the ‘stars’ were shot straight up into the heavens with a sound like the growl of thunder.

  Both Eliard and Cassandra gasped and fell back to the dirt, temporarily blinded and their eyes weeping with the near brilliance of it. After-images of crenelated buildings and harsh, white light burned in the captain’s retina as he rubbed at his face.

  When both he and Cassandra thought that they could finally see again with any accuracy—in reality, only a few heartbeats later, but it had felt like forever—they looked up to see a rising comet of burning energy, now the size of Eliard’s fist, far above them. It grew steadily smaller and smaller as it ascended just as all of its brethren had, and then the scattered flare as it passed through the distant blue meson field and carried along its way to the distant black hole.

  It’s like a power station, Eliard thought. This whole city is a massive power station.

  “El, look. It’s gone. The Valyien is gone…” Cassandra was saying, and when the pirate returned to the crack between the two boulders, he saw that she was right. There was the rounded shell of the transporter with its glowing undercarriage that illuminated the exact streets and buildings all around it, but of the Valyien, there was no sign.

  “It must have gone down one of the streets, or stepped back inside the transport,” Eliard said, although he was still spooked by its apparent ability to disappear.

  Not that we have much opportunity to worry about that now… He looked up at the ball of light, now nothing more than a moving star—the only pinprick of light in the heavens.

  “Be ready…” Eliard said, nodding ahead. “It won’t be long now…”

  Cassandra nodded that she understood. Any moment now, and it would look as though the entire universe was opening above their heads, and the glare would be blinding, but it would quickly dissolve into that long, shallow arc of dying light.

  It was their chance to move, the captain thought. Of course, he had no idea at all what effect that Hawking radiation or the light display would have on the city or the seeming guard towers of the Valyien. Maybe nothing. Maybe it would help the guard towers, and not blind them, but it was the only variable in an otherwise torturous situation. The pirate captain had to rely on his instincts.

  The light from the separated particles was dazzling and harsh. He would bet any creature that used eyeballs and eyelids would have to avert their gaze when it happened…

  Eliard hoped, anyway.

  Just when it would appear that the star of energy produced by the Valyien city had faded from visible sight, suddenly there was an almighty Flash! And the heavens lit up with glaring brightness. Eliard had been waiting for this moment and didn’t bother to look up or shield his eyes as he grabbed the agent’s wrist with his one remaining human hand. They sprinted out from the boulders, heading straight for the nearest avenue of dead rock into the city of Valyien, where it all began…

  The buildings are odd, the captain thought. Too odd. For one thing, they were clearly built for a larger biology than him and Cassandra. The doorways that they passed were all at least eight feet high, narrower at their top arch than the wider rhomboidal bottoms. Perhaps it was to negotiate the Valyien’s hindquarters, Eliard thought with a hint of unease.

  Nothing about the Valyien that he had seen or heard of so far made sense. How did these creatures become masters of warp technology? How did they manipulate their technology? How had they become the masters of the galaxy for so many thousands of years?

  Each building soared above them, easily six or eight meters high, and each one exact and formal. No curves, no rounded edges, even though they clearly had the industry to manufacture them. The pirate captain felt like he was an ant, running through the land of the gods.

  The materials of the buildings were also strange to Eliard’s eye. Not that he was an engineer or a technician by any stretch of the imagination, but growing up in the Imperial Coalition had accustomed his eyes to poly-steels and crystal-glass. These metals and black rock veined with silver was unlike any resource he had seen before, except in the sunken ziggurats.

  With a shiver of dread, he realized that the various sunken ziggurats that he had found himself in back in the ‘present’—as Eliard was thinking of the Imperial Coalition that he and Cassandra had stepped out from—had each been…occupied.

  By nightmare creatures just like the one that they had seen, and that had apparently disappeared before their very eyes.

  Tritho, Epsilon G3-ov, Esther… Eliard shivered as he crouched in front of Cassandra beside one of the perfectly rectangular buildings. With a start, he realized that even his home world of Branton must have had the alien claw-feet of the Valyien scuttling across its surface at some point in the distant pre-history of the Milky Way Galaxy. It had only been a small warp gate in comparison to the others he had seen, no strange black pillars like the others had, but still…

  The pirate Lord General of House Martin was glad that he would probably never sleep in his old suite of rooms ever again, as well as thankful that he had never known what dangers lurked beneath him throughout his childhood.

  “El?” whispered Cassandra, waking him from his reverie. Her face was pale and spooked, but it seemed that the worst of the warp pains had finally left them both. Now, the primary thing they had to deal with was terror and exhaustion.

  And the fact that they were infiltrating an enemy city and surrounded by creatures that could probably rip them limb from limb with apparent ease…

  Whub-whub-whub… Cassandra hadn’t just been trying to shake Eliard from his preoccupations, however, but indicating to him that something was coming.

  Crap, the pirate captain thought as a pinkish-crimson glow appeared at the mouth of one of the perfect crossroad junctions. It had to be one of their strange transport machines and even though they were small and crouched against the wall, Eliard knew that their organic shapes would stick out like a sore thumb in this perfectly austere landscape without litter or trees or any street furniture of any kind.

  “Where do we go?” Cassandra was already turning to see if they could make it to the end of the building and the next perfect crossroads junction in time.

  Whub-whub-whub-… The light was growing stronger, and Eliard saw movement.

  “The doorway, quick!” he hissed. They both dove for the tall rhomboidal door with its comparatively small arch, but it was deep enough for two humans to flatten themselves against—

  Zsss! With a smooth metallic hiss, the archway lit up with a dull pink-crimson line, and the blackened metal slid downwards, spilling the two humans into the Valyien structure in a tangle of limbs—

  “Ooof!”

  And straight into the path of the Valyien occupier inside.

  “Drekk!” Eliard rolled, just as Cassandra did the same in the opposite direction.

  Both humans had hit the floor with a painful thump, since it appeared made of nothing but solid rock, and
as they had turned, they had seen that the inside of the ‘dwelling’ was mostly open plan, with separate counters and booths that displayed a variety of pinkish-glowing dials and controls.

  And one very angry Valyien, standing in the middle of the room with its humanoid torso arms raised above its head, and the four-part mandibles of its face flared open in apparent fury.

  Eliard’s shoulder hit the side of the wall as he rolled, and he threw the Device up above his face, half-expecting to feel one of the jabbing talons of the tall creature pierce his skin.

  He felt the kick of bones and tendons displacing and a wave of nausea spread through him as the Device reacted to his alarm, the blue scales flaring and changing, sliding over each other and producing thin, jet-black spikes as it evolved to prepare itself for hand-to-hand combat.

  Where’s my blaster pistols! a random thought berated Eliard. He had lost them somewhere, either in warp or on the Branton-that-will-be.

  But no attack came.

  “Cass!” he called out. Had the thing not hit him because it was concentrating its attacks on Cassandra?

  “El, shut up!” he heard the House Archival agent hiss sternly as he lowered the Device arm from protecting his face…to see that Cass was crouched opposite him beside one of the counters, looking up at the stilled body of the Valyien.

  “What—”

  “I think that it’s in some kind of stasis. Or hibernation or something…” Cassandra said, slowly, carefully, unfolding her limbs to peer around the counter at the statuesque creature that dominated the room.

  “It’s asleep!?” Eliard looked at the creature, and the weird position it was standing in. “Like that!?”

  The Valyien stood with its four hind feet on the floor just as the first one that they had seen had, but its humanoid double-jointed human arms were raised above its head as if it were about to break into song. A scary, aggressive song, admittedly.

  This one had the black-cloth harness and humped garb scored with straps and discrete lights just as the other one had, but it had no chest bandolier-harness or headdress.

  Is it some kind of social structure thing? Eliard couldn’t help to wonder. He also couldn’t imagine that these creatures, with their austere and drab surroundings, paid much attention to fashion.

  At this close distance, the two humans could see that the Valyien did indeed have forward-pointing heads, and they also had two small, beady black eyes in the front—a predator’s eyes, the captain thought—of their pale, cadaverous face.

  This one had its mandibles flared out, revealing the yellowing spikes and, inside, a smaller maw of sharp teeth. Eliard thought that they didn’t particularly look like vegetarians, either…

  Its torso was a mottled blue-gray and white, turning darker as the flesh swept to the thing’s legs and hindquarters. Eliard saw a complicated array of muscles and tendons clearly visible in its chest, and then—

  Thub-ub. Something shivered the thing’s chest. In fact, two somethings shivered, a split-second apart from each other in a syncopated rhythm.

  “Please tell me that wasn’t its heart.”

  “Hearts, I think.” Cassandra had now stood up, but she didn’t approach the thing. The Valyien was clearly still alive in some fashion. Or at least its body was.

  “The eyes…” Eliard said, keeping his Device in front of him as he unfolded from his crouch and stood but also didn’t dare to take a step forward.

  Cassandra saw immediately what Eliard meant. The Valyien had no eyelids that she could make out. It was staring straight at them…but then, why didn’t make a move? Why didn’t their movement wake it?

  “And just who can sleep with their arms above their head?” Cassandra whispered.

  “Well, if we haven’t woken it yet, I doubt that we will by whispering…” Eliard said, taking a slow side step around the Valyien, following the wall to the nearest countertop, keeping the Device raised and pointed at the creature all the time as he spared a glance at what he found there.

  The entire room was built for the passage of a large quadruped creature. The counters were as high as Eliard’s sternum and built like wide booths or stalls that the Valyien could clearly walk into and work at.

  Eliard saw the counters were made of the strange steely gray-and-black metal that the race favored so much, but that it had depressed and exaggerated ‘buttons’ built into it, each with more of the strange, maddening, perfectly-etched glyphs. The captain started to raise his hand over them.

  “Don’t,” Cassandra hissed at him with such vehemence as to make him stop precisely what he was doing.

  “We don’t want to do anything to wake the stars-damned thing up now, do we?” she said sternly.

  “No, no, I guess not,” Eliard said, looking over to what Cassandra’s countertops apparently held.

  Plates and bowls of smoothed and carved black stone. They stood out in a city that was mostly precise and straight edged—and they were also, apparently, still in use.

  “Eurgh!” Cassandra hurriedly stepped back from where she had leaned over to inspect it, gagging as she covered her moth with her hand.

  “What is it?”

  “Food? I think?” She shook her head after taking several deep breaths. “But it looks horrible. Like offal. Meat. It’s got fungus growing on it!”

  Only then did Eliard realize that there was some slight aroma to the air, almost like a delicate perfume—sweet, overripe, but not meaty. It must be the strange atmosphere of this place, he thought, killing scents. Either that, or the stones and the metal all around them had strange properties that he couldn’t even hope to understand.

  “So…either the thing has been asleep for a really long time, or…” Eliard grimaced. He had been right earlier that the Valyien really weren’t vegetarians.

  Where do they keep their cattle? the thought bloomed in his mind, just as there was a sound from behind them.

  Zsss! Purple and crimson light flooded the room as the front and only door to the ‘house’ slid down into the floor once more, just as it had with them.

  Eliard dropped to his knees behind the counter he had been about to mess with and saw the flash of blonde hair as Cassandra did the same.

  Another Valyien stepped into the room and sniffed deeply at the air, as if it was searching for something. Or someone.

  10

  Meat and Greet

  Eliard crouched behind the strange countertop and held his breath. He could only be barely six or eight meters away from the thing… How could it not hear him! His heart was loud and thumping in his ears, and he was certain that this new Valyien would be able to hear that even if it couldn’t hear any other movement he made.

  Or smell, he thought. The thing had sniffed, and then had paused.

  Eliard felt the unbearable nearness of the creature like the fear that you got when you performed your very first spacewalk, protected by your encounter suit and visor helmet but still aware of the abominable void, just inches away from your flesh.

  But then there was a scraping sound, followed by a complicated skitter of claws as the Valyien moved a little way off—toward its frozen colleague. The sound of harsh, wet, and almost labored breathing as the thing moved, and the shuffle of cloth and the click of tools or straps.

  These things made a lot of noise, Eliard realized—thankful in part that they had such huge bodies and many compound legs as he let himself breathe out slowly, keeping his mouth open so that when he breathed in, it was just the faintest whisper of oxygen that passed into his lungs.

  More wet, sighing breathing that was almost a whistle, and the scrape of metal on metal.

  Millimeter by millimeter, Eliard edged his head around the side of the counter, peering up with just one eye strained to see what the thing was doing.

  And he wished that he hadn’t, a heartbeat later when he realized what it was.

  This new arrival wore the same headdress that the very first living Valyien Eliard and Cassandra had ever seen wore. It was also out
side, and had used the transporters, Eliard’s brain thought. Did that mean that there were two classes of these Valyien? Some that wore the headdresses and moved freely about the city in their glowing, floating transporters, and others that stayed in their houses—frozen?

  Given what little he understood of ancient Valyien history, Eliard knew that they had conquered and enslaved half of the galaxy with apparent ease before their war with the Q’Lot. And he knew that they had sought to take their slave races—the Duergar, mostly—with them when they had made the alchemical transformation into their own ab-dimension.

  If they were so warlike, and so tyrannical, he thought, then it probably stands to reason that they also were pretty awful to their own people as well. Every dictator had to start somewhere, after all…

  This new Valyien had pulled two contraptions from the saddle pouches on its back, and Eliard watched as it fiddled with its long, prehensile claws to fit them together. They appeared to be octagonal shapes, like stubby tubes, one of which was far wider and appeared to be some kind of base unit for the other.

  With a click and whirr, the headdress Valyien had figured it out with much labored, whistling breathing and then, with a heavy grunt, raised itself on its hindmost legs.

  Eliard had seen the carved reliefs of other Valyien inside of the Epsilon G3-ov ziggurat of this race standing just like this, but somehow seeing them in the flesh, he hadn’t thought that it was possible.

  There was the sound of loud, grinding pops of whatever internal skeleton the thing had, and the Valyien now stood another meter and a half taller than even the frozen one in front of it. Its forward ‘legs’ were now a second pair of arms with much larger talons than the ‘hands,’ but Eliard could see that they, too, had strange double-jointed elbow-knee joints, and that the claws, although bigger, were just as prehensile as the thing’s fingers.