Valyien Boxed Set 3

by James David Victor

  They both had an off-white hue, which in the Valyien had become gray and mottled to a darker color, while in the Q’Lot had lightened to an almost white.

  Both, too, had the same beady black orbs of forward-facing eyes, as well as strange lower-face or mouth variants. The Valyien displayed their four-part mandibles, while the Q’Lot had their octopus-like tentacles. Both of their mouth parts seemed to constantly twitch and move as they walked, tasting the air or reacting to subconscious stimuli that neither alien race could control.

  “Cassie…” Eliard said under his breath. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

  “That depends on what you are seeing, El…” Her voice was tight with hurt and worry.

  The procession of Q’Lot below did not appear to be prisoners, and neither did they appear to be threatened at all by the crowds of assorted quadruped or raised in bipedal-mode Valyien. If anything, they appeared to look triumphant and congratulatory as they walked forward with great grace, fluttering their tentacles here and there about the crowd of enemy aliens, to be answered by a ripple of movement as the Valyien raised their heads and flared their mouth mandibles.

  It looked to be the sort of procession that you gave heroes, or truly honored guests, Eliard thought. Floating beside them were small octagonal ‘drones’ that emitted bright white radiance, falling on the upturned faces of the Valyien that waited there. These drones did not appear to be emitting any sort of gravity or meson field at all. They were just…decorative. These Q’Lot were clearly free to come and go as they wished.

  This must be from before their war, Eliard thought. I wonder what turned them from allies—closer than allies, dammit—to sworn enemies?

  Flash! The city around them lit up as another of the regular balls of energetic lights were fired into the heavens, there to pass through the distant meson field, and then strike the distant black hole to create the powerful Hawking radiation. It has to have something to do with that… Eliard thought.

  “They’re so alike.” Eliard nodded at the aliens below. “Well, not exactly alike, but…”

  “I know, I see that now…” Cassandra nodded. “It’s almost like they are two parts of the same species…”

  But they didn’t have much more time for speculation, as there was the sound of scuttling claws on stone coming towards them, and it seemed to be coming from everywhere.

  “Oh, crap…” Eliard grabbed Cassandra’s hand as four-legged shapes started to appear at the mouth of their street, clearly gathering to look at the procession as it crossed in front of them. Eliard saw their complicated legs and the cloth structures that they wore over their hindquarters. All the Valyien in front of them had the same headdresses as the one that they had killed, further reinforcing the pirate captain’s belief that there had to be some two-part society to the ancient Valyien.

  As yet, the Valyien ahead hadn’t seen them. They appeared agitated, their legs making small, near-constant movements as they jostled around each other.

  Slowly… Carefully… Eliard and Cassie eased backwards, moving as quickly as they dared while remaining silent. The Q’Lot beneath them were almost level with their position now, and the white radiance of their floating drone-lights could be seen hitting the cadaverous skin of the Valyien.

  Almost there… Eliard and Cassie pressed against one of the perfectly regular stone walls, right next to the corner that would obscure them and the approaching procession from view.

  “Skerrakha-khal…” The Valyien ahead appeared to ripple with excitement as the Q’Lot drew nearer. It was a perfect excuse for Eliard and Cassie to turn down the next street, keeping their enemy in sight until they knew that they were safely around the corner.

  Only they weren’t. Safe, that was.

  “Uh, Eliard?” the pirate captain heard Cassie say at his side as he turned back to look at her.

  And the approaching knot of Valyien bearing down on them.

  “Khol-fa!” The middle Valyien hissed in its guttural, wet sort of voice as Eliard pushed Cassie behind him and raised the Device…

  But the leading Valyien—the one that appeared the largest and most angered at its sudden discovery—was already charging towards them. And Eliard realized in that moment that quadrupeds can cover a lot of distance when they really want to.

  Fa-THOOOM! He fired a ball of white-purple plasma at the approaching pack of Valyien as they thundered down the street towards them. Somewhere, a rising wail could be heard, and it sounded to Eliard’s pirate ears like an alarm.

  With a grunt, the lead Valyien vaulted clear over the ball of meson as it burst apart in its fellows, landing heavily on the black stone street just a little way from Eliard.

  “Skraaal!” it snapped, spinning one of its more humanoid upper arms in a backhanded blow that hit Eliard like a bar of iron.

  “Ooof!” He barely had time to raise the Device to block, but the blow still sent him spinning into the wall beside him.

  “Ssss!” He could hear the screams of aliens and smell burning as his head swum. Had the Device caused enough damage for a distraction?

  “Rakka-lal!” A snarl bore down on him, and Eliard threw himself sideways as the large talons of one of the Valyien’s middle ‘legs’ kicked the wall where he had been.

  “El, run!” It was Cassie, and as he turned back to confront his enemy, he saw that Cassie had vaulted onto the back of the Valyien, clutching one of its humanoid arms as she tried to wrestle the thing away from Eliard. It was ridiculous, however. The human woman was a fraction of the size of the larger alien, and the only advantage she had was that it couldn’t twist enough to get a grip on her.

  But Eliard couldn’t let her sacrifice herself for him. Far too many of his friends had a habit of doing that. He jumped forward, using the Device—still in its energy weapon configuration—as a fist as he hit the thing’s ribcages. One of them, anyway.

  The Valyien recoiled from the blow, and Cassandra was still gripped onto one of its arms, but these creatures could move easily from quadruped to bipedal. Eliard was drawing the Device back for another blow when the creature kicked out once more with its middle leg-arms as it reared up, its body making grisly popping noises as it settled its weight on its second pelvis and legs.

  THUMP. It was like getting kicked by a horse—not that the noble son of House Martin had ever been kicked by a horse, but he was sure that this was what it felt like. He felt something crack in his chest a moment before hitting the far wall, his head rebounding on the black stone and seeing stars.

  “El!” he heard Cassie shout in alarm as he slid to the floor and struggled to open his dimming eyes. Not like this. Don’t go out like this…

  He saw that the large now-bipedal Valyien in front of him was now joined by another, not as large but just as menacing. As Eliard looked on in fear and tried to shout out something to warn her, this second Valyien casually plucked the House Archival agent from its comrade’s back and squeezed her in a bear hug against its chest. Cassie was trying to struggle and shout, but it was clearly too painful.

  Eliard forced his Device arm up, unsure of what he could shoot at—

  THUMP! Another Valyien that he hadn’t seen hit him around the side of the head, and then Eliard didn’t see anything at all…

  12

  Prisoners

  Flash!

  Captain Eliard Martin was shocked awake by a sudden brilliance of light as the night skies above them erupted.

  Only it isn’t night, is it? He remembered. It was just that this world didn’t have a sky, because the distant black hole that it was parked around had eaten it.

  He groaned, blinked, and was grateful for the fact that he could move, even if his head did feel like it had been hollowed out and rung like a bell.

  Oh yeah, one of those ugly things hit me… He was amazed that he was still alive. Why hadn’t they killed him then and there? He was still fuzzy and not thinking straight, clearly, but the next memory cut through everything like a knife.

&n
bsp; “Cassie!” He opened his eyes fully and saw that he was in a cell. And that he was alone. Just like all the other Valyien buildings that he had seen, this one was made of the same silver-sheened black stone with a gray metal floor. There was no acquiescence to comfort, and it was a perfect, exact cube with a glittering blue meson field that he could dimly see through occupying one entire wall.

  Where had the flashes come from? he wondered as he struggled to his feet, before he saw, far above him, that the room he was tapered into a chimney, which appeared open to the elements. I might be able to climb that, with the mutant help of the Device… was his next thought. And as soon as I’m out of here, I’ll find a way to locate Cassie, and…

  His gaze swept down to his arm, which should already be changing and morphing into what he needed to escape, but the Device remained stubbornly unresponsive. It sat on the end of his arm like a heavy weight, as if it had never been anything other than a strange shell-like growth.

  It looked different in the shimmering blue light of the meson field, and Eliard tried to work out if it was just the light or…

  No, it feels different too, he realized, raising the Device up to his face. It’s colors, which were usually varying shades of cerulean and midnight blue, each scale glossy to the eye, now appeared dulled and almost lifeless. As if the color had been drained out of it.

  Or it had died. The thought worried him. Impossible! Eliard felt a tremor of anxiety run up and down his body. It couldn’t have died. He was still alive, wasn’t he? And the Device was plugged in to his own biology, wasn’t it? He was melded with it in ways that he still didn’t understand. How could it have died or stopped working when the rest of him was okay?

  Surprisingly okay. In fact, Eliard moved his hand to his chest where he could feel a sensitive scrape near the center of his chest. He prodded it and winced, but it was the wince of a painful bruise, not broken ribs and ruptured lungs.

  And I was kicked by one of those ugly drekkers pretty much full force… Eliard recalled. He could remember feeling—and hearing, disgustingly enough—the bones in his chest crack.

  Not that this miraculous healing wasn’t particularly unusual in his own more modern times, the captain knew. There were any number of nano-drone treatments that could repair the body in minutes from almost any injury. But aside from that, ever since Eliard had been infected with the blue-scale virus that had melded the Q’Lot Device to his arm, it had seemed as though the virus inside his body was doing the best to act like nano-drones: healing and preserving his body no matter how many injuries he subjected it to.

  So, the blue-scale virus inside of me must still be working, otherwise I would most probably be dead… he thought. But then, that begged the question: why wasn’t the Device reacting as it always had, morphing to help him escape?

  “Szarkh-arakhol!” There was a wet, guttural sneer of noise from the other side of the meson field, and Eliard turned to see that dark shapes had appeared, indistinct at first but coming closer in sharper and sharper detail until their strange bodies were dressed in the brilliant white-blue light of the energy field between them.

  Eliard saw that it was a knot of Valyien, their four-part mandibles flaring and flexing as they leaned in to examine him.

  “Yeah, take a good look, because it’ll probably be the first and last human that you ever see…” he muttered, raising the Device in their direction.

  There. He felt something, a tiny tremor of movement inside the alien tendons of his arm, as if the Device was trying its best to wake up but couldn’t.

  “Ssss!” Two of the Valyien jerked back from the field, but the third one, the smaller one, remained impassive and stared intently at him.

  There was something about being confined that made Eliard’s skin crawl. It grated against everything that the scion of House Martin held dear. It wasn’t just being held in a box and unable to fly, to be free as he loved about flying, it was also being watched. It reminded him of all of his childhood and youthful years being prodded and poked and examined as a rising star of the noble houses. He had rejected that attention and their expectations just as widely then as he did now.

  “I won’t be your lab-rat. Come on and get it over and done with!” Eliard snarled at them, angry at the situation, angry at the Valyien, and above all, angry at himself for getting into this mess.

  I’ve failed. I’ve lost the future, he thought darkly, and he didn’t even know where Cassandra Milan was…or if she was even still alive.

  The watching Valyien moved its head slightly, as if it found this display of bravado from the much smaller human both amusing and interesting. It watched Eliard for a moment longer, then turned to say something to its colleagues in its whistling language.

  Fzzt! With a hiss of static electricity, the blue meson field dropped, eradicating any barriers between them. Eliard felt his heart pound and his legs tense as he got ready to move, to fight, even if it was futile—

  And then he saw why the smaller Valyien didn’t feel the need for the meson field. Behind him, there was another meson ‘box’ just like the one that Cassandra had accidentally activated inside the security transport, but this time, the House Archival agent was on the inside, curled up on the floor.

  “Cass!” Eliard took a few steps forward, but he pulled up short when the smaller Valyien raised its middle arms in warning. Its message was clear: any sudden move or attacks and something awful would happen to Eliard’s companion.

  Each of the three Valyien were standing bipedally, Eliard saw, and each one wore the same strange headdress that the pirate captain was now sure indicated their status. These ones, Eliard thought, must belong to an even more rarefied caste, as their headdresses were different from the others that he had seen. They were white and edged with silver.

  Just like the Q’Lot’s colors. Eliard’s eyes narrowed as he scanned them. None of the Valyien appeared to have any guns or weapons, but the smaller one did have in his humanoid hands two octagonal, disk-like objects.

  Oh no… It was the components of the blood-draining device that Eliard had seen one of their number plunge into the chest of another. Is that what my punishment is going to be? He tried to be brave, but he still found the idea terrifying.

  “You’re going to have to kill me before you get to use that thing, I promise.” Eliard slowly lowered the Device as if accepting defeat, but internally, he thought at it once more, and once again felt that slight pressure as strange mutant biology inside the thing tried to move and shove.

  But nothing more happened. Drekk!

  “How.” His thoughts of escape were suddenly shocked out of his mind as the smaller Valyien, which was still large enough to tower over him, spoke in Imperial Coalition English.

  “What!?” How can they speak our language? Eliar’d mind raced. To do that would mean that they must have met humans before, and wasn’t he a few millennia back in time before humanity had even made it out into the stars?

  “How are you here?” the Valyien asked, its mastery of the human language far from perfect and surrounded by wet, whistling sorts of noises, but it was still understandable.

  “I’m terrible, thanks. How are you?” Eliard snapped back.

  “No. How did you come to be here. Both of you.” The Valyien gestured toward Cassie with one of its middle claws, and Eliard didn’t know if it was merely indicating that it was including the pair of them, or it was suggesting that it might easily be able to cause harm to her if he carried on being facetious. Probably both, maybe.

  “You do not belong here,” the Valyien continued.

  “Well, it doesn’t take a machine intelligence to figure that one out. Congratulations.” The pirate captain tried to remember the training that he had been given at Trevalyn Academy about hostage situations and negotiations. What was an Imperial noble expected to do in such situations? Back then, the history of nobles being kidnapped by some gang of pirates or smugglers had been more common, and, for all of the terror of battle in deep space, a
nd the possibility of having a hole punched through your ship or finding yourself on the wrong end of an airlock, there had nevertheless always been a strange sort of truce between the non-aligned raiders and pirates and the noble houses.

  A sense of propriety, Eliard thought. You didn’t kill your hostage if you didn’t absolutely have to, and there was also an unwritten code that every noble maintained. You were supposed to tell them your name, rank, and noble house, and that would be enough to ensure that you were treated with some amount of respect. Usually.

  Eliard wondered if that approach would work here, too.

  “How dare you hold me and my friend against our will!” He put on his best imitation of his father, who had never been held hostage as far as Eliard knew—his father was too tough and too smart to ever fall into a situation like that—but whose tone of voice could strike fear into the hearts of lesser men.

  “I am Lord General Martin, of House Martin, and I demand to be treated with respect!”

  “Ssssss…” The speaking Valyien made a sighing, whistling noise that was so strange, it took the pirate a few moments to realize that the thing was laughing at him. If the Valyien ever laughed, he thought scornfully. Rage boiled inside of him, and he felt the Device on his arm once again try to morph and adapt, but it still remained stubbornly solid.

  “You are not from Ereka-3,” the Valyien said.

  “Huh?” Eliard frowned. Was that the name of this place? This hellish warp-world?

  “Ereka 3,” the Vayien stated once more. “Nearest star, Aldara. Local cloud, Varuul. Third arm, medium spiral galaxy.”

  “I have no idea what…” Eliard was halfway through saying before his words trailed off. He had been born and grown up on Branton, of course, which was the House Martin’s home world and where every Martin would return to give birth or to be buried.

  But that didn’t mean that he knew nothing about the wider Milky Way Galaxy that he shared with the other houses. Or that he knew nothing about Old Earth.