Valyien Boxed Set 3

by James David Victor

  Four arms. Just like the Q’Lot, an errant thought made the captain wonder.

  The headdress-Valyien stepped forward to grasp the frozen Valyien with its once-legs-now-midriff arms by the sides of the chest in a curiously grotesque embrace, while its more humanoid arms lifted the tubular device, and…

  Eliard’s eyes widened as he realized what the new Valyien was going to do, a moment before it did it. The creature held the contraption in both hands as it swept them down, plunging the thing into the grayish skin of the thing’s chest with a spurt of black ichor and the crunch of flesh.

  “Screch!” The frozen Valyien might have been unable to see or hear the two human interlopers, but having something plunged through its chest cavity was enough to wake it up, apparently. It spat and its mandibles suddenly flared wider as it tried to raise itself on its own hindmost legs like the one in front of it.

  But the headdress attacker had it held firmly with their front legs/bottom arms, and although the thing was struggling and writhing in agony, making more whistling and hissing noises in alarm, it could not break free.

  It couldn’t even lower its arms, Eliard saw, as it indeed tried, but there was a shimmer of air around its wrists like a heat haze or a mirage, spreading up to the ceiling. That was when Eliard finally noticed the metal rondels directly above the trapped Valyien, which must have been projecting some kind of localized gravity field.

  Is this a murder? Are we watching a crime? the pirate captain thought, breathing shallowly as his heart pounded. The wounded Valyien and its attacker were making so much noise, however, that it was impossible for anyone to not notice them.

  No. This looks more like a punishment… he thought, as the attacker held onto the trapped other while the device embedded in its chest started to shed light and whirr ominously.

  The contraption’s base unit had several rotating parts in attached octagonal disks, and dull green lights flared along its shell as it performed whatever horrid operation it was designed for.

  Dear Stars, Eliard swore as he saw the contraption start to extend backwards, revealing a clearer glass or plastic inner, filling up with some dark ichor.

  Blood. That thing is draining blood. The captain’s stomach turned over in disgust. This wasn’t a crime, it was more like a harvesting.

  There was a bit of movement from the other side of the room, and Eliard saw that the lighter bob of Cassandra’s head had appeared around the distant countertop, looking as appalled as he was at what she saw. She caught his eyes, then nodded to the open doorway, still filled with pinkish-crimson light.

  Through it, Eliard could see that the transport was still ‘parked,’ hovering outside with its ramp extended almost to the sill of the open door. He could see a little of the interior, lit with more ruddy-pink, orange, and green lights, and more countertop controls. Cassandra’s point appeared obvious.

  They should make a run for the transport, and use it to get out of here…

  As the struggling Valyien made more gurgling noises and its limbs started to shake and slacken in its attacker’s arms, the two humans raised from their crouches and started to move towards the door. Eliard’s legs flared with pain as blood flowed back into them. Maybe it was all of the warp jumps that he had performed recently, or maybe it was the weakening effect that the Device had on him, but whatever it was, he stumbled, and one boot scuffed on the floor as he caught at the countertop to avoid from falling—

  A hand slapped over one of the raised metal buttons, and all hell broke loose.

  As soon as the captain’s hand brushed across the countertop, a beam of red-pink light shot up from the table and something started happening to the opposing wall. Sections that Eliard had thought were black stone turned out to be black metal and slid back to reveal more steel devices, some of them long and thin and held by hooks, others octagonal and squat and sporting wires. Some kind of workshop or tool-store, perhaps.

  “Skragh!?” The headdress Valyien flinched, turning to snarl at the sudden distraction to its gruesome business and letting go of the dying Valyien to raise its arms towards the captain instead. Its victim gurgled and shook, with the blood-sucking contraption still pumping away in the center of its chest…

  “Drekk!” Eliard had a moment to say, just as something crashed over the back of the Valyien’s head.

  Cassandra had hefted one of the heavy stone bowls and thrown it at the creature about to disembowel Eliard, but aside from the grunt of pain, it appeared to do little as the Valyien whipped its torso around and one of its heavier midriff arms snapped out.

  The Valyien was large, and any normal human wouldn’t be able to reach Cassandra, but the thing’s reach and power were immense as the House Archival agent was buffeted back by the blow, her feet actually lifting off the floor as she slammed across the countertop of rotten meat.

  “Cass!” Eliard shouted in dismay, reacting instinctively to charge at the far bigger enemy.

  He threw the Device-arm out in a windmill punch, one that struck the thing across the shoulder and he heard the pleasing crunch of something and the guttural gasp of pain as the creature staggered back. Eliard had decapitated the ECN with this Device, and the Enhanced Cognitive Network had been a purpose-built metal mecha.

  But it had been a lot smaller than the Valyien, his brain reminded him as the creature rounded on him, throwing whirling strikes with its heavy midriff arms as its higher humanoid arms descended.

  “Drekk!” Eliard raised the Device just in time to batter away the falling fists, but the shock still felt like being hit by a falling meteorite as he was pushed back, skidding across the floor. His back thumped against the wall.

  “Skrak!” The thing wet-whistled and pounced forward, humanoid arms raised high in the air in another overhead smash that—for just a fraction of a second—made it look a little like its dying victim, only much, much more alive.

  Fa-THOOM! Eliard hadn’t even realized that the Device had changed until it activated right in front of him, scales swirling and clacking around each other as the tines opened to reveal the ‘maw’ of small scale-teeth where his fist should be. There was an explosion of white and purple light as the Device turned itself into an energy weapon, and the shot became a beam of light that punched a hole straight up, and through, the chest of the headdress Valyien.

  “Ayurkh!” The thing’s upper chest exploded with gray viscera and black ichor, spinning in the air as it tumbled to thump against the wall and roll to the floor beside Eliard.

  THOOM! Still panicking, Eliard shot it again for good measure, and this time, it didn’t even twitch or gurgle or move at all.

  Silence settled over the room, and the steam of laser fire rose lazily into the air for a long moment.

  “You about done over there?” groaned a voice, and Eliard saw Cassandra push herself up from the side of the counter she had fallen over, a disgusted look on her face. “I think some of that stuff got on me.” She shook one of her arms.

  “Better than becoming the next juice drink or whatever it is that they were doing…” Eliard heaved himself from the floor, keeping the Device in its energy-weapon configuration and pointed at the Valyien.

  “I think you can safely say that it’s dead, Eliard.” Cassandra limped a little out towards the door. “You blew a hole straight through it.”

  “Can’t be too careful.” Eliard looked darkly at both the form on the floor and the one still hanging by its wrists. The blood donor had apparently done its work now and was stilled, but Eliard saw no need to try to cut the monster down.

  “Come on, the Device wasn’t quiet, and I don’t know whether this thing was just stopping off to have a snack or was on a rota…” Cassandra moved towards the door, the captain behind her. “If we can operate their transporter things, we might be able to move about this crazy, horrible city without attracting too much attention.”

  Eliard nodded that he understood. The transports didn’t appear to have portholes or windows. None of these creatures
would be able to see in. Hopefully.

  “Do you think you can fly it?” Cassandra stepped up to the door and looked across to the still-open archway of the transport, with its banks and counters of pink and green lights and squiggles.

  Eliard gritted his teeth in a savage grin. “If it’s in the air, I can fly it,” he promised.

  11

  Ancient Allies

  As it turned out, Eliard was only partly correct. He might have been able to fly anything that flew, but things that hovered were another matter.

  KERUUNCH!

  “Spitting hell, El!” Cassandra bounced off one of the consoles, accidentally initiating the door control to once again illuminate with pinkish-red light and slide open. There was a horrible grating sound as the door ramp that descended juddered against the stone streets outside.

  “Dammit!” The agent quickly swiped her hand over the controls that she thought she had hit, and the ramp and door returned to its much safer, closed position.

  “If you can’t operate the doors, I don’t see why you’re having a go at me for my flying abilities!” El muttered angrily, once again attempting to wrestle the four octagonal rondel-shapes that sat center stage at what he thought must be the ‘prow’ of the vehicle. To be honest, it was hard to tell which end was the front, and it had taken him no small amount of time to figure that these large shapes were in fact the steering and thrust controls all in one.

  Almost ergonomic, really, he was forced to consider. No separate controls for engine thrust and directionality. Well, ergonomic if you had an available four arms to play with…

  “It would help if you could keep us going in a straight line!” Cassandra snapped back.

  So far, the transporter had managed to move in an almost-straight line down the avenue of streets, and Eliard was at last grateful for the fact that the interior layout of the Valyien city was so regular. They had only made two turns, trying to reach the wide avenue of the city where Cassandra had spotted the procession.

  “Which will probably all be over by now anyway…” Eliard muttered under his breath, but if he was trying to bait the House Archival agent behind him, he received no response at all.

  The interior of the transporter held little in the way of comfort, and instead there were banks of these metal control desks with lit-up octagonal shapes or bars, each with more of the strange sigils etched onto their surface. If Eliard had been worried that there were no portholes or windows—which he had been—then he needn’t have. As soon as they walked into the room, a glowing green technical visualization appeared over the rounded ‘walls’ in each of the cardinal directions, showing him a map of the city in that route.

  The transport is always at the center, Eliard had quickly surmised, unwittingly finding out a lot about the psychology of the drivers as he did so. And in that center, there was always the Valyien operator… Eliard shouldn’t be surprised at their arrogance.

  “It means that the whole universe always revolves around them,” he whispered as he once again moved his hands over the rondels, moving quickly to tap and caress the second set of four before moving back to the first ‘forward’ set to initiate a turn towards their destination.

  “It means that they can go anywhere…” Cassandra picked up on his trail of thought.

  “Huh?”

  “Think about it. We don’t know how far back we’ve gone into the Valyien timeline, but they seem to be very advanced already, right?” she explained. “And if this is how they think, what they believe, then it means that the whole universe is open for their exploration. Anywhere.”

  “Any when,” Eliard agreed. Somehow, the House Archival agent’s analysis didn’t fill him with confidence.

  They were getting closer, though, as the promenade in front of them appeared on the forward visualization as a large and slow ramp that swept downwards, out to the very outskirts of the city.

  “How do they know that they’re not running anyone over?” Eliard growled, annoyed that the map appeared to only be territorial, not a life or motion sensor.

  “Wait a minute, let me…” Cassie started swiping buttons in quick succession to see what they did.

  “Wait—” Eliard said, just as the lights inside the transporter blared bright, and then there was a high-pitched mechanical chime and behind them in the ‘main cabin,’ four pinprick beams of meson light skewered down from the roof to the floor, and then proceeded to spread until they had formed a large rectangular, solid meson-field box.

  “Sheesh, thank the stars neither of us was half standing in that…” Eliard said, his brow sweating as he said so. It was hot in here. The Valyien liked things warm, apparently.

  “It’s a cell.” He could hear Cassandra’s grimace without even looking at her. “This thing is, like, a security transport or something.”

  “But we never saw any other kind of transport when we were approaching the city from the outside, did we?” he called out. It was true. They had only seen these large shapes. Surely that meant that either the whole city was on some kind of police lockdown, which might explain the captured Valyien, destined to be bled dry by one of the headdress-wearing ones, or it meant that the Valyien society didn’t even have anything other than slaves and headdress soldiers…which also wouldn’t have surprised Eliard one little bit.

  The next attempt by Cassie, however, proved more fruitful, as the visualizations around them suddenly flared with pinkish dots of color.

  “Oh crap.” Eliard immediately lifted both hands off the octagonal rondel shapes, and the transport craft stopped precisely in mid-float.

  The pinkish dots up ahead were moving, huddling, breaking apart and recombining in that organic way that crowds did, the captain saw. And they were also only another turn in the streets away. They appeared to be lining the wider promenade, where another set of pinkish lights—this time each with tiny, bright yellow triangle markers floating over them—continued to move sedately past them.

  “We’re not too late,” Eliard said. “It must be some kind of ritual performance or something…”

  But a part of Eliard’s mind picked at the fact that each of the ‘ritual’ processors had those tiny yellow triangle markers. Like a targeting computer, he thought. Did that mean that the Valyien recognize these OTHER Valyien as an enemy of some kind?

  “I think I got a handle on the doors now…” Cassandra said optimistically, first managing to add another meson cell next to the one already behind them, and then finding the controls to open the ramp-door, which slid down with an easy mechanical hiss.

  Eliard would have preferred to be able to park the transport properly, or to hide it somewhere a little less obtrusive, but at the end of the day, he was a pirate and was more concerned with getting away from the scene of the crime than covering it up. With just one look at Cassandra and a nod, he took the lead out the door and down the ramp, keeping the Device—which was their only weapon—raised in front of them.

  The streets of the Valyien city were noisier then the stilled, exact silence of the first neighborhood that they had entered. But it was still by no means loud. If anything, both Eliard and Cassandra found it to be creepy.

  There was a distant sighing whisper coming from the promenade that reminded Eliard of hundreds of talons making small movements on the stone below, as well as the soft sigh of black cloth, nothing else. Whatever the Valyien were doing out there, they weren’t exactly cheering. Or even talking.

  “Come on, we can get a better look by cutting around...” Cassandra nodded, not towards the promenade but up one of the adjacent side streets where a small ramp led to the next terraced level above—just a few streets away from where the main promenade continued its upward sweep to the top of the ziggurat.

  Eliard and Cassandra ran, trying to keep their movements as slow and as smooth as they could as they turned up the ramp and got to the top before turning back to find that they could look down one of the streets to where the procession was still climbing up from beneath them.


  They were both out of breath, since this city was designed for far bigger beings than them.

  “What the…” Cassandra pulled up short suddenly at what she saw. “No. I don’t understand…”

  Eliard joined her but didn’t share her complete confusion at the sight. In fact, he thought that the agent’s alarm was probably due to the fact that she had spent so long around these beings, even making friends with some of them—if such a thing was even possible.

  Walking sedately up the ramp towards them was a large contingent of the Q’Lot, the ancient enemy of the Valyien as far as everyone knew. But here, in front of them, with the crowds of the still, silent Valyien lining the streets beside them, it appeared that they were being treated like returning gods.

  “They look the same as the others did...” Cassandra frowned. “As they do, I mean…”

  “As they will,” Eliard pointed out.

  The Q’Lot underneath them walked in a steady march, and they wore precisely the same white and silver, close-fitting suits that Eliard had seen the one Cassandra called the ‘Speaker’ wearing before. Only they were without the large blue bubble helmets that the Speaker had been forced to wear on the dry desert world of Esther.

  There is something eerily similar about the two races… Eliard narrowed his eyes as he mulled over what he was seeing before him. Neither appeared to like hot and dry conditions. They wanted warm and damp, like a sea.

  Both the Q’Lot and the Valyien had six limbs, which were broadly similar in function—two large humanoid ‘shoulder’ arms, and then two midriff limbs, which in the Valyien were heavy and clawed prehensile ‘legs’ that could also become arms, whilst in the Q’Lot were back-folding midriff arms like that of a praying mantis. And then, of course, two hindmost muscular legs that served the same purpose.