The Timelost (preview)

by Chris Turner

  THE TIMELOST

  Chris Turner

  Copyright 2018 Chris Turner

  Cover design: Chris Turner

  Published by Innersky Books

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

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  I

  Miko halted at the edge of the clearing, his legs burning with exhaustion. His breath came out in ragged gasps, warm steam forming in the sticky wetness that was home to the tall tropical trees.

  The pilot’s dark hair had grown long and matted and trailed down his shoulders. His cheeks were hollowed-out pits, and his once-strong body was bruised and lacerated, thinned by privation. But he had not lost the will to live, and his grey eyes kindled with determination. He clutched the metal pipe he had used as a club to smash the skulls of the predators of this alien world. Nothing more than a piece of twisted wreckage from the ruined spacecraft he’d piloted, but it had helped to stave off the monsters so he could work his way through the dense forest.

  Through bloodshot eyes, he caught a glimpse of something glinting ahead. Across the clearing, perhaps fifty yards away, plates of metal peeked out from an obtrusive mound running the length of the glade. Long and high-curved like a bow, it was hung heavy with a covering of overgrowth. If he could climb the structure and get beyond it, he might be able to elude the hyena-size warks that pursued him. In his weakened condition, a pack like this could take him down and rip him to shreds. Not an hour ago he’d seen them turn on one of their own in a vicious horn and fang-rending clash.

  He had to move. Shaking the haze out of his head, he staggered into the clearing, breath rasping like a wounded wolf. Only the reduced gravity, two-thirds of his home world near Tau Ceti, helped him keep ahead of the predators. Daylight was fading fast; another reason for urgency since his night vision was poor. Closing in on the mound, he saw it was a bunker of some sort with patches of silver metal gleaming under the sprawl of foliage.

  At least he thought it was a bunker. A drainage ditch circled it, heavily overgrown with weeds. There also seemed to be metal spikes protruding from its surface, at the base and near its summit. Antennae? An ancient warship, crash-landed like his? A communications station? No, not likely. He was about to surmise further, but snorts and growls echoed from the bush, followed by the thudding of a dozen cloven feet.

  Miko swung around in terror as a fleet shape, a thick-scaled forerunner burst from the pack, charging him. At the last second, he stepped aside and smashed down his club, caving in the thing’s rhino-like skull. Its body thudded to the turf like a stone, shuddering out its last breath.

  He spun the blood-stained weapon with desperation, menacing others which loped closer, slavering, snarling. They sprang back from his thrusts, a mixture of yelps and gutturals in their wattled throats. Instinctively, they were driven to kill.

  Akin to some abominable jackal and armadillo mix, these creatures had reddish spotted hides, small upturned snouts and coyote-like jowls. Their hind legs were shorter than their forelegs, investing them with a primeval look, with backs down-sloped on an angle. Curled fangs dripped saliva.

  In one quick motion he tucked the steel club in his waist belt and clawed his way up the bunker, snatching at the encroaching fronds. The purple and green foliage clinging to the surface ripped under his fingers as he clawed his way up. Digging heels into vine and stalk, he lost his grip and began to slide back down toward his pursuers. The creatures jumped at him. He felt a hooked tooth sink into his ankle and he screeched in pain.

  With a vicious jerk he snatched his club and using his greater strength in the lower gravity, cracked the thing’s head open, freeing himself from its grip. He forced himself to scrabble higher, fingernails bloodied, and he burst over the mound, heart hammering. He lay on his back, gasping for air, the sulphur-tinged atmosphere of Rogos far too thin for such exertion. He withdrew the twisted bar at his waist, ready to use it as a mallet if any of the beasts got up this far.

  He rolled onto his stomach and peered down warily through the fronds. A pack of warks barked and whined and jumped while others sank teeth into the corpse. He saw vines and plants had crawled more thickly over the bunker’s summit. Evidently their birth and death cycle had created a rank humus for new growths. Dragging his heel across the soil, he saw underneath a hard, resilient material.

  Three of the hyena-like creatures set their opalescent eyes glaring up at him. With a shudder, Miko recalled the past two weeks had given him much experience with these remorseless brutes. The days had passed like a bad dream.

  Another shape emerged between the crooked trees with their spindly yellow leaves.

  Miko’s jaw dropped. Squinting in wonder, he was gripped with an emotion which began as incomprehension and grew to revulsion.

  Audra floated out, like a vengeful swamp demon—a grotesque Zikri, an alien race of conquerors and space pirates. A race that captured NAVO ships and put their crews to death, or worse. She contemplated the scene with the clinical dispassion of her kind. The shapeless face showed vague smudges which marked mouth, nose and ears and formed the chilling mask that Miko had come to know so well over the past months.

  The creature, standing several heads higher than the warks on two webbed feet and a stub of a tail, lay wrapped in a preternatural menace. She loomed at the edge of the glade, a silent, grey-slabbed mass of flesh with numerous quivering tentacles and slitted gills. But it was clear from her fearless stance that her boneless mass contained a wealth of muscle underneath that fleshy exterior, and guarded powers undreamed of.

  How had she flushed him out of the bush so soon? A shiver ran through Miko’s gaunt frame. The warks suddenly became aware of their additional prey. They turned twitching snouts, snarled and bared teeth. Audra stood her ground, impassive as a sentinel, an impressive foe.

  How the creature had hijacked his vessel, Miko was loath to recall. The thing had been eager to tap into New Avionics Vanguard Order’s state of the art technology; she had been ruthless in this regard. All those months on board his ship Sitty II remained a soul-shattering blur to him, joined hideously to the creature in a freakish accident when an experimental pilot-co-pilot mechanism had symbiotically spliced the two together. He had hacked away the flabs of flesh binding them but—

  Miko stared spellbound; his thoughts spun in a timeless loop. The rank, peaty smell drifting from the forest was starting to sicken him. The whine of insects crowded in on his ears. As he watched the creature glide effortlessly toward the snarling beasts below him, he felt the lumps on his ribs and underneath his armpits. The thought that tentacles used to be there, sprouted and now fallen off, made him reel with loathing. Still, he retained deformities: facial distortions, gills under the ears. He could feel them with his partially webbed fingers. The last two weeks had seen a consistent reversal of the effects of alien fusion. But only because he had cut himself free from Audra.

  The creature advanced slowly, appearing as if she glided on air over the yellowing turf. Her egg-shaped body caught the dimming copper light that filtered dully from the sky. More warks were streaming out of the crazy twists of bush. Their assaults, while in vain, Miko knew, would be met with fury.

  Miko ducked back, swallowing the hard lump in his throat. Howls of pure agony reached his ears as the warks melted like wax on contact with Audra’s flabby hide. Sucker pads on her underbelly worked to consume their flesh as chemical processes did their corrosive work. Their yipping anguish rang long in his memory as he scrambled to the very top of the summit while Audra wreaked her havoc.

 
He pushed through the stunted plants down the other side of the bunker, club gripped in a sweaty fist, his skin catching on the scratchy fronds. His muddy rag of a uniform was blood-caked, mostly dry now, but some fresh blood from his ankle trickled, courtesy of the recent fight with the warks. Even if he slid down the other side with the aim to lose those fiends in a scramble to the dense trees, the creatures that survived Audra’s onslaught, and others, would figure out a way to circumnavigate the bunker. Curse all these alien predators! If he could only—

  Screeeaaach! It all happened so fast, quicker than his mind could register: he fell twenty feet to splash into a pool of cool liquid. The metal had given way underneath him, swallowed him up like a sinkhole.

  He shook the water from his arms, curses spilling from his lips.

  The interior of the bunker was dim, lit only by small sky holes above his head and the main hole down which he had plummeted.

  He checked himself for injuries. No broken bones; his back had been slammed hard, but a few more aches at this point could add nothing to the hurts he had already accrued. The pool’s brackish water had cleansed the caked blood and grime on his skin. He gritted his teeth and squared up his resolve. He re-bandaged his wounds as best he could. As it was, his tattered, sopping uniform could barely cover the wounds hidden underneath.

  The musty air stank with a faint odour of decay. Something else too he could not define, a chemical odour.

  Miko felt the dull pounding of his heart; he listened to the muted thuds of the many wark snouts battering against the bunker, also the screams of others. He had no sense of the size of this place; his eyes were still adjusting to the gloom.

  Examining the pool from which he had crawled, he saw the pit was shallow, and had an unwholesome look to it. A rusty, metallic odour exuded from the water.

  He looked up; pale yellow light streamed from the gaping hole above. Several wark heads popped up around the opening, glaring down at him in frustration. Many sniffed with suspicion while others whined in their miserable way.

  He accepted that, for the moment, he was trapped.

  Around him the bunker’s walls rose sheer. No chance of scaling them. Would the warks jump down and attack him? They looked hungry enough. But the scent of the place made them skittish. He crouched warily, pipe gripped in hand. He watched the creatures with sour rancour. They pawed and whined at the loose soil and set leaves and humus spilling down into the pool.

  Miko vaguely wondered what Audra was up to.

  He staggered down a wide walkway, leading from the pool to the far wall. Shaking the cobwebs out of his head, he hoped beyond hope there was a way out of this warren, a back exit, a tunnel, or corridor. The hairs on his neck stood on end. Part of him realized that the whole place felt all too sinister.

  Miko limped deeper into the gloom. The oxygen level on this planet was abysmally low, traces of sulphur tainted the atmosphere and burned his lungs. Thankfully less so in this enclosed space, which had mostly been sealed. This gave him some semblance of comfort; energy streamed back into his weakened body.

  But what was this place? Surely it could not have been created by the primitive colony of hominids he had passed by days ago? A hunter-gatherer society could hardly have engineered this. Perhaps it was the product of a previous alien race?

  A quiver of dread pricked his chest.

  What was that? Miko stopped short. The sound echoed from the wall to his left, like the scuttle of a spider.

  He stared into the darkness. How to get away from these terrors? Better yet, how to get off this wretched planet?

  His limbs ached, especially his side from the burning wounds he had accumulated upon separating himself from Audra. It was a final attempt to survive the crash, an act of instinct, despite the searing pain of his sharp-edged tool. Gangrene would have set in days ago had he not succeeded in staving off infection with the small tube of bio-regen from his medpack, and dousing the raw sores with plant resins and mosses he had gathered. It had been a risk, but either that or die.

  His eyes strained in the dimness. With hooked fingers he felt his way along the wall, cool to his touch. He rapped knuckles on the square plates composing the walls and sensed a hollow lightness about them, if not resilience. His eyes had adjusted somewhat to the darkness, and he moved toward what looked like a low, triangular doorway. Beyond it glowed a green phosphorous light. All the time, Miko felt his feet moving down, toward some subterranean level.

  He advanced cautiously, thankful to be away from the gaping hole where the warks lurked. Perhaps there was a secret exit out of this chilling place?

  He stepped through the triangular opening, lifting a leg over the lower lip, discerning that the chamber within was smaller than the one from which he had come. He stumbled over something transparent, a broken canister or tube maybe five feet in length. He caught the dry curse in his mouth as he fell headlong. A starfish-like creature lay sprawled in the moulder, his nose almost touching it. The exoskeleton had withered and was caked with dust. He pushed himself away from the grotesque sight as if it were some toxic entity. The glassy material it had been housed in was something akin to that or plastic, a bit of both, but neither. At one end, strange crystalline wirings hung, as if broken off from some connecting device. Was it from within this canister the thing had crawled? Miko shook his head. How had it escaped?

  The tube seemed to have rolled or been dragged from somewhere. But where? He scowled, blinking his eyes in the gloom. The disquieting glow grew brighter ahead.

  His frown deepened. He exhaled, his breath wheezing a rattling sigh. Large basins were dug out in the hard-packed floor, dry now, but perhaps holding water at some time in the faraway past. Metal pillars equipped with curled hooks stretched up into the lofty dimness. Miko paused, collected his wits. A sixth sense shouted to him that terror crawled in the murk. Insect webs glistened in the nearby corners. Moving under the eerie light, he advanced with utmost caution. Such a place demanded suspicion.

  He rounded a great tank long drained of whatever contents it had once held. He saw the light was becoming brighter.

  The chamber within was faintly illuminated by several dusky green glows.

  A dozen upright circular glass tubes, similar to the one he had tripped over, sat on exotic counters decorated with unrecognizable symbols: a warped net, complex schematics, beastly faces. The tubes were filled with luminous green liquid, hence the source of the eerie light.

  In the faint glow, Miko perceived inert monstrosities within, crusts or husks of them suspended in their liquid matrix. Some creatures were split open and their mouths hung agape, eyes gone, or whatever eyes there were stared sightlessly, or in terror.

  In one vessel, something floated that resembled a giant butterfly. Another looked like a miniaturized narwhal floating on its side in its sleeping death.

  A nameless fear surged within Miko’s breast. This place seemed ancient and cursed.

  The upright tubes looked very much like mini aquaria. The vessels were still filled with their original fluid, hermetically sealed, he guessed.

  Could the creatures contained within still be alive? If it were an ancient laboratory with its millennia of dust and decay, it seemed improbable. But then again…

  Behind the vessels stood a wall panel set with a low counter. Dials and discs and imponderable script covered the wall’s surface. He believed it contained circuitry of some sort, altogether alien, but seemingly inoperative, and there was no sign of a power source.

  Miko studied the odd shapes of the trapped creatures in the tanks. He concluded that these things were long dead, strange snail and shrimp-like hybrids, arthropods or crustaceans dredged from the caustic swamps of this feral, primeval planet. Things among these he had studied lived in the benthic zones of Earth’s ancient oceans and deep lakes.

  Things graced with claws and snouts, barbed gills and hooked beaks.

  Shuddering, he moved toward the last exhibit closer to the far wall. The glass had cracked like the
one before it and its liquid drained long ago. Nothing was left but the brown, desiccated husk of some horror. This last creature had an oblong shell and leftover crusts of spidery legs. Such an unsettling thing did not inspire much confidence. What a sinister menagerie! What beings would house such grisly specimens? For what purpose?

  Another empty pit, dry as a desert, lay in the chamber’s centre like a birthing bay. Long-handed scalpels and forceps hung on pillars next to it. Amongst other odd-shaped instruments, the tools were of unknown purpose: pins, wedges, barbed hooks, crude cutting tools, light of material, without rust, non-metallic.

  Miko glared about with bewilderment. Who had wielded such tools? He rubbed his temples. He took down the nearest scalpel and hefted it. A more effective weapon than this twisted pipe of his, what with its double-length blade and sharp edges—certainly it was lighter, but could it hold up against an onslaught of the warks?

  A new movement. It brought him wheeling about, his heart leaping in his throat. A rat skulking in the dark? Some predator? He could hear the yipping sounds of the warks echoing dully from the corridor. His skin crawled. Their disgruntlement had reached an all time high. For this reason, he accelerated his inspection. He could see no exits in this chamber. Triangular doors stood barred on either side of the laboratory. To hack through them would require considerable effort—and proper tools.

  Moving deeper into the chamber, he felt his way along the far wall where two parallel triangular plates hung suspended at right angles to the wall. They were positioned on spikes which projected from each of the triangles’ corners; each glowed a weird amber colour, hence the other source of light.

  The ground was littered with more miniature skeletons, and his boots crunched on their crusty remains. In some, he recognized pincers versus hands. Flat-topped skulls and apish, elongated limbs. The victims seemed to be clustered around the mysterious apparatus before being cut down by some dire peril.