Invaders_The Antaran

by Vaughn Heppner

  “It’s just a knife,” I said.

  He shook his head slowly and licked his chops nervously. “I do not like it,” he informed me.

  “Want me to draw it so you can inspect it better?”

  He studied me. I don’t think the giant canine trusted me, as this fellow obviously had good senses.

  He seemed to come to a conclusion and reached for the knife again. Once more, he balked, hesitating. This time, he took a step back, another and finally raised his beam carbine at me.

  “Unlatch,” he said. “Put on deck.”

  I shrugged and began to unbuckle the belt. Once ready, I lifted the belt and metallic sheath and stepped toward him as if to give him the otherworldly weapon.

  He stumbled away from me while shaking his head. “No, no, keep away.”

  I moved the sheathed knife upside down, and it did what I wanted it to do. The knife slid from the metallic scabbard and clunked to the floor.

  The knife just lay there, the otherworldly blade shimmering in an odd way. I swear I could hear a whiny sound, a screeching even. It set my teeth on edge.

  It did worse to the Tosks. They whimpered, dropped their carbines and clamped their furry hands over their ears. Some of them began to howl like hounds. Those lifted their snouts in the air and howled louder, beginning to quiver.

  I glanced at Jenna. She stared at the knife in dread, having gone paler than I’ve ever seen a person. She trembled and hugged herself, beginning to moan.

  I frowned. The knife clearly affected them much worse than it did me. I did not care for the implications. Was I no longer truly human? I couldn’t accept that.

  In any case, I picked up the knife and debated the correct course. I was thinking about raising the knife and making them all surrender. I would be their god-king, as it were.

  All that changed as I gripped the weapon. This was the first time I’d done so while the blade was free from the scabbard. Instead of lifting the knife on high like a totem, I held it close to me, ready to strike. That wasn’t all; an oily feeling swept over me. I shivered at that. It was a sick sensation. I detested it. The knife seemed heavy in my hand. I swear it quivered on its own accord and the pitch, the whine from earlier, rose. It almost felt as if the knife whispered creepy, devilish words to me.

  I felt bloodlust wash over me. One moment I considered how to capture the Tosks, the next I advanced upon the chieftain. I was hardly even aware of doing it. The whine in my ears, in my soul, maybe, intensified.

  Before I knew what I was doing, I’d stabbed the chieftain in the heart. The results stunned me. The blade went into his chest with considerable ease. Smoke billowed from it. The Tosk howled like a demented madman, and he began to shrivel. It was an awful phenomenon. It seemed as if he were collapsing in upon himself the longer the blade was in him.

  I yanked. The knife didn’t come out as easily as it had entered. It almost seemed as if the blade was hooked to his flesh. The blade fought me as if it didn’t want to leave the Tosk until it had consumed him.

  “No!” I shouted, pulling hard, stumbling as the knife came out suddenly.

  What remained of the Tosk, like a withered mummy creature, simply collapsed in a boneless heap.

  The horror of the effect should have stopped me. Instead, an obscene strength flooded into me. I felt soiled and invigorated at the same time. I realized that the life force of the Tosk was powering me.

  I laughed. I hardly recognized the sound as my own. Feeling powerful, I turned on the next Tosk. The creature seemed to know what was going to happen to him. He tried to pick up his dropped carbine. Maybe he was too afraid. Maybe something else was at work. All I know was that I butchered him, gaining power and feeling hideous at the same instant.

  I slaughtered all five of the Tosks in the floater as though they were sheep. It was not a fight. The more I slew, the more giant-like I felt.

  Finally, as the last Tosk collapsed onto the deck, I turned toward Jenna. She seemed like a small pale thing that deserved to die.

  She opened her mouth and shouted. It sounded like she spoke a man’s name. As I stepped toward her with the knife—why didn’t I see any blood on the blade?—surely the knife didn’t drink it. In any case, as I stepped toward Jenna, to kill the poor fool, I realized that she was shouting my name.

  Why would the sacrifice I was about to butcher do that? Why—

  I halted, feeling as if my chest would burst because my heart pounded so hard. I could not kill Jenna. She was a friend.

  It felt then as if the knife crooned promises of what we could do on this weak Earth. I could rule as a god if I desired. This was my hour. This was the—

  “No!” I shouted, horrified at what I was thinking. With all my might, with every ounce of desire to be my own man and not some thing’s slave, I pried my fingers from the handle. For just a second, it seemed as if the handle was glued to my palm and refused to leave. That had to be a hallucination. That was unnatural.

  With a tearing-cloth sound, the knife dropped from my open palm and clunked onto the floor as if it weighed three hundred pounds.

  I staggered back from it, blinking in shock. Some of my sanity returned. It didn’t help that at this point, the Tosk corpses burst into flames. What was worse, Jenna’s eyes rolled up inside her head and she collapsed onto the floor in a deathlike heap.

  -45-

  The next few minutes I acted on autopilot. I’d been in the floaters enough that I’d seen the Tosks and Beran operate them. I knew the basic things.

  I opened the hatch so the Antarctic wind howled inside the vessel. It blew at the fires of the burning Tosks, which served to harden my resolve.

  Grabbing two beam carbines, I shoved the burning Tosk masses out of the hatch to tumble down the ramp. It was hot, sweaty labor. It allowed me to see the work of my hand when it had joined with the dreadful knife. I ended up singeing my hands and parka so they stank, but finally, I closed the hatch. I almost sank down in exhaustion.

  Instead, I went to Jenna. She was breathing shallowly and was still pale and twitchy. She was unconscious, but she was making little mewling sounds.

  I wasn’t sure what to do.

  “Rax,” I asked.

  I heard garbled words from the crystal, gibberish. Okay. It seemed that Rax was out for a while. Whatever that blade did when exposed to the air affected him as well as the rest of us.

  “Jenna,” I whispered.

  She mewled and shivered more, but she didn’t come out of it. I shook her. That did nothing. I shook harder. She whimpered and cringed, but still did not come to.

  I stood up, backing away from her.

  This was worse than I’d expected. Well, the truth was that I hadn’t really expected much when drawing the blade. I guess I hadn’t really considered Sand’s words. I quickly slid the sheath to where the knife lay on the floor and slid it over the blade, using a booted toe to guide the knife home.

  This was a devil knife, a demon blade. I don’t mean it had come from Hell or been forged by demons, not in a Biblical sense, but by creatures that we humans would have probably thought of as demons. They were extraterrestrials—

  I never wanted to draw it again. In fact, for a second, I debated taking the floater to Utah and trying to get back into Sand’s underworld. I’d return the devilish blade to him.

  I sighed, nixing the idea. I had the knife. I’d lost my Guard ship, and I was near the terrible Polarion Portal. If I’d needed any spur or proof for believing Sand’s allegations about the danger of the former Polarions coming through, this knife was it.

  “Logan, old buddy,” I told myself. “It’s time to earn your keep.”

  I buckled on the damned belt, keeping the knife with me. Sand had warned me that prolonged exposure would destroy people. I believed him.

  First, I checked the floater, including looking into both turret compartments and out through their windows. The ice-particle storm still raged. The stars still shimmered above it. I felt like a lost soul in a lost
land. I guess I might have been both.

  The floater was empty except for Jenna, Rax and me.

  Finally, I went to the piloting station and began to do what I’d seen the Tosk pilots do plenty of times. The controls proved pathetically easy to use. I manipulated them, causing the floater to vibrate and lift off the snowy surface.

  “Can you do this?” I asked myself quietly. “I guess we’re going to find out, son.”

  I studied the piloting screen and took the floater over the giant hole. I probably should have tested it a different way, but I was in a hurry.

  The thing dropped like a rock, heading for the bottom who knew how far away.

  The rock-like fall lifted me off the floor in a speeding-elevator fashion. Only my reflexes saved me, as I grabbed a stanchion to keep from floating too far from the controls.

  “Logan,” Rax said in a sluggish voice. “We are in danger.”

  I could see that. By arm strength alone, I forced my feet onto the floor and manipulated the controls. Power roared into the hover element.

  A lurch against my feet told me I’d stopped the rock-like descent. Jenna thudded onto the floor from where she’d been floating. I hoped she hadn’t broken anything. The knock stopped her moaning and I thought I heard her smack her lips together. Maybe she was waking up.

  “That is better,” Rax informed me.

  I studied the piloting screen, made a smoother controlled drop and—

  The piloting screen wavered. Abruptly, Beran’s long face appeared on the screen, smirking at me.

  “Logan, Logan, Logan,” the Antaran said. “This is a surprise.”

  “Ain’t it just,” I said. “How’s it hanging?”

  Beran exposed his teeth. That meant he was in high good humor. “I have no idea how you dispatched my Tosks, but I shall not underestimate you again.”

  “I’m here to help you, Lord.”

  “Of course you are,” he said. “And so is this.”

  “What?” I asked.

  The floater shuddered, shuddered again.

  “Logan,” Rax said. “We are under attack. A beam is about to smash through the bottom of the floater.”

  -46-

  Jenna, still unconscious, slid across the floor as I maneuvered the floater. We smashed against an icy side of the shaft, causing the craft to shake. I juked the other way, smashing against the ice again on the other side. Rax gave rapid-fire instructions, telling me when the green beam was striking our bottom and when it wasn’t.

  “You should go up,” Rax said at one point.

  I gritted my teeth in determination, applying everything I’d learned while piloting the Guard ship. There was no way I was heading up. The two-minute warning had gone off, as it were. The game was almost over. Either I stopped Beran now, or he would likely open the portal. There was no second try. He was winning and the clock was ticking against humanity.

  “How much farther?” I shouted.

  “The distance is unknown,” Rax said.

  “Give me an estimate.”

  “More,” Rax said.

  The beam struck again as sweat dripped from my face. I felt ill. I wondered if that was the knife’s doing. I’m not sure why it came to me then, but I had the feeling that, if I actually held the knife, then whatever it radiated at the others wouldn’t hurt me. I had a moment’s belief that the knife was intelligent in some alien fashion. I wondered if it was radiating willpower against me even now in order to beat down my resolve to not hold it.

  That had to be crazy thinking. I must have been more exhausted than I’d realized to even consider such a thing.

  “Beran,” I shouted at the screen. “Can you hear me?”

  “Not for much longer, Logan,” the Antaran said. “You are doing an artful job dodging the beam, but soon that will no longer matter. I would like to tell you that you were a worthy adversary, but I would be lying.”

  “Beran—Lord Beran—you have to listen to me,” I said.

  “You have no hold over me that I must do anything you say.”

  “Okay…” I said, moving the floater sideways, causing another crashing sound from outside, shaking the craft so I almost lost my footing. “You don’t have to, you’re right. But I found something about the Polarions that might interest you.”

  “Yes?” he asked.

  “They’ve mutated, and they’ve gone insane on the other side of the dimensional rift, turning into devilish monsters that will kill everything over here.”

  “You could not possibly have discovered such a thing.”

  “I spoke to Sand.”

  “That makes no sense,” Beran said. “Are you drugged or simply delusional?”

  “Sand is the name of a construct like a robot. He knows about the conditions on the other side of the reality rift.”

  “Logan,” Rax warned, “the beam is burning through.”

  I swore under my breath as I concentrated on the controls. This time the outer blow to the floater knocked me off my feet. I sprang back up, manipulated the controls and dodged another beaming.

  “The mutated things over there could easily defeat all the former Polarions united,” I said. “You’re no match for them, Beran. You’re going to get us all killed by opening a portal to a grimly alien dimension.”

  “I seriously doubt that,” he said.

  “Lord Beran,” I said, knowing I had to go for broke, “I know what I’m talking about. How do you think I slew your Tosks? They’d captured me. But the alien weapon I possess destroyed the Tosk’s ability to resist. Don’t you think you should at least inspect the alien weapon before you throw away your life by opening the portal?”

  Beran stared at me from the screen. As he did, I put all the sincerity I could muster onto my face.

  “No,” he said.

  Desperation caused me to draw the knife and wave it at him on the screen. “Look at this, you fool! Does this seem normal?”

  The Antaran studied the blade.

  “The beam cannon has ceased firing at the floater,” Rax informed me.

  “That does indeed look like a Polarion artifact,” Beran said slowly. “I would like to inspect it. Where did you find it, Logan?”

  “I stole it from Sand.”

  “Who is this Sand again?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Sand is another Polarion artifact. His creator fashioned the underworld. Sand told me about the portal. The machine—the Great Machine—was designed to block the portal. Sand and the Great Machine block the way from the alien dimension to Earth, in order to avert galactic disaster.”

  “You will land soon, Logan. I have a Tosk escort waiting. They will bring you to me. If what you say is true…I will waive your death sentence and allow you and your woman to live.”

  I nodded because I didn’t trust myself to speak. I didn’t trust myself to make any plans lest I give them away in some fashion. Besides, for all I knew, this was a trick.

  Then I couldn’t help myself, and said, “I have a question.”

  Beran looked down his narrow nose at me. “Ask it,” he said.

  “How did you make this huge…shaft?”

  “A space beam formed it less than an hour ago,” Beran said.

  “The wink,” I told Rax.

  “I had already surmised as much,” the crystal told me. “We are fast approaching the bottom, Logan. I suggest you slow down for landing.”

  “Do you sense Tosks?” I asked.

  “There are several heavy beam cannons set up, aimed at the floater,” Rax said. “Any misstep will surely result in our destruction.”

  “Bring the Rax System crystal with you,” Beran said over the screen.

  “Yes, Lord,” I said.

  At that point, Beran cut the comm connection. The regular outer cameras flickered on. I’d thought to see bluish ice around us, but we must have passed the ice some time ago. I saw rock. The space beam must have drilled through it. Maybe that’s why I’d seen multiple winks. Each drilling beam had
been for a different type of target: ice, dirt and finally rock.

  Manipulating the controls, I slowed our descent. The floater engine wailed, and electrical-smelling smoke drifted through the chamber. The repeated strikes against the ice walls must have been too much for the machine.

  “Just a little longer,” I coaxed the vessel.

  Then I saw the bottom on the screen. I saw the waiting Tosks and three tripod-mounted cannons aimed at us.

  As we floated down the last few meters, I saw other floaters to the sides and the beginnings of several long underground tunnels.

  “Now what happens?” Rax said. “Do we surrender to the Tosks?”

  The floater settled on bottom rock. We’d made it. I glanced at Jenna. She was still unconscious. Good. I didn’t want her in the way, and I didn’t want her to die in case I failed.

  “Logan?” Rax asked. “Do you have a plan?”

  I headed for the hatch as I heard the ramp thud into place outside.

  “I do, Guard Advisor,” I told Rax, as I showed him the otherworldly blade.

  -47-

  With the knife held before me, I walked down the ramp. I’d intended to walk meekly, as if offering the knife to the Tosks. Instead, as I descended the ramp, my chest and the tilt of my chin rose. I felt like a conqueror before his prey.

  The Tosks had started by raising their beam carbines. The weapons had tracked me at first. The farther I walked down the ramp, the less certain the giant werewolf-like creatures seemed. Finally, all the carbines pointed at the rocky floor.

  The floor was smooth, with headlights from the nearby floaters providing the bright illumination.

  “I am the One,” I said in a voice I hardly recognized. “You are the Many. Now, before I slay the lot of you, set down your weapons and lay on your stomachs.”

  It was a silly speech. I could hardly believe I’d uttered it. Yet, to my astonishment, the beastly aliens set down their beam carbines and one by one got down on their bellies. As I began to walk among them, they covered their heads and each began to tremble.