She wore full combat gear, too. So did Calpurnia, who appeared right behind her.
“Twenty-five meters,” Lyssa warned. “They have what I presume are grappling hooks extending from the front of their craft. They are bigger versions of the line and head that tried to take Fiori.”
Fiori shivered.
“The chances are, they don’t have a molecular barrier,” Jai said. “They’ll have to bring their ship into contact with ours to board.”
The nanobots had all disappeared, leaving printers and concierge panels lying tilted at weird angles on the floor. Duffel bags and packs and personal possessions were strewn across the floor. The parawolves nosed at each one, sniffed and nudged them, then moved onto the next item.
“Can you sweep up everything and hide it, Lyssa?” I called. “Anything they see in here will tell them about us. I want to present them as blank a canvas as possible.”
“We should obscure the view to the bridge, too,” Dalton said.
“Got it.” Lyssa’s tone was remote.
Around us, nanobot puddles appeared and formed into platforms on wheels, that whizzed around the floor, extending claws to pick up everything scattered about and put it on the tray. The rolling trays hurried to the back of the ship and through a small hatch in the engineering bulkhead.
Where the ramp up to the bridge ended, a grey curtain of nanobots quickly built up from the floor, rising to the ceiling. The wall solidified. The bridge was blocked off.
“Ten meters. And…pausing,” Lyssa informed us.
My heart shuddered and hurried. I glanced at the portside hatch, which was the twin of the one which was open to the other two ships. I imagined the big, hooked nose ship hanging spitting distance from the other side of the door.
The single view I’d got of the alien inside his canopied fighter kept replaying in my head. The long snout with the circles of teeth at the end, and the red flesh around them. The enormous eyes.
Their implacable drive.
I was breathing too fast. I tried to slow it down.
“They’re extending what looks like a tunnel,” Lyssa said.
“A physical version of our molecular barriers,” Jai said, sounding curious.
The ship gave a little shiver.
“It has attached to me, right over the hatch.” Even Lyssa sounded subdued. “Filling with air. It seems to be a similar carbon-nitrogen-oxygen mix to ours.”
We could hear sounds on the other side of the fuselage, now. Scratching. Metallic clangs.
The parawolves were alerted and trotted over to us to face the hatch. Vara tilted her head, whining. I thrust my fingers into her scruff and tried to assure her, but my own near-panic would counter my soothing. “Quickly,” I said, coming to a fast decision and striding toward the back of the ship. “We put the wolves out of sight,” I added. “They won’t know what they are, and I don’t want them to know the wolves can fight. I want them as backup. Lyssa, open the access room. They can hide there.”
Lyth, Jai, Dalton and Sauli lead their parawolves over. We pushed them into the room, and I sent reassuring thoughts to Vara as I moved back to where everyone else milled, looking worried.
“They’re demanding I open the hatch,” Lyssa said.
Fiori drew in a loud, shuddering breath.
“Then I guess you’d better open the hatch,” I told her, taking up my position once more.
We all faced the port side hatch and waited for it to open.
—31—
As the hatch gave the preparatory clunking and hissing sounds it made just before it opened, Dalton’s hand settled on my shoulder from behind and squeezed.
And Jai stepped up beside me. He gave me a brief, strained smile.
“Guess you get a ringside seat after all, huh?” I murmured and faced the door once more.
It swung open.
I saw six of the blue people standing on a temporary, lightweight platform that extended from their ship. There might have been more behind them, but I couldn’t see past them, for they stood shoulder to shoulder. Their tunnel tech included a faux gravity, or they wore the equivalent of magnetic boots, and the platform was a type of metal.
I got a general impression of dark skin that gleamed a deep blue—I had not imagined that, then. I had reviewed my memory of the brief glimpse I’d got of the pilot of the fighter so often that I had begun to wonder if I had edited the memory and inserted the blue glow, along with the red mouth at the end of the snout and the concentric circles of teeth.
I could only absorb a vague impression of the rest of their bodies because my attention was yanked to their faces.
I hadn’t got the faces wrong at all. They were of the same midnight blue as the rest of the bodies, with the massive eyes and the elongated snout. The teeth were exactly as I remembered them. The red flesh around the teeth—gums, I supposed—was vivid, making me think of infected flesh.
I shuddered.
They raised what were clearly weapons, aiming them at us and I saw that they had jointed fingers, just like us, but much thicker. Their weapons didn’t have triggers, though. I couldn’t discern how they fired them. Not yet.
Sauli raised his hands. Sluggishly, reluctantly, I followed his example.
“Fuck me. It’s armor,” Dalton breathed, his hands raised, too.
I yanked my attention back to the bodies of the aliens as they stepped over the sill of the exit hatch and onto the floor of the ship. Forward-jointed knees at approximately the same place as ours. A foot that looked large and cumbersome but functioned just as ours did.
I examined what I had assumed was a carapace, looking at the joints, looking for seams, for signs of manufacturing. Assembly.
The joints were not joints at all, but merely places where one plate of armor ended close to the next, or actually overlapped it.
They were wearing all-over armor that also functioned, I guessed, as space suits. They would hardly design such armor and then put an environment suit over the top of it.
I couldn’t help but bring my attention back to their faces, reassessing. If they used the armor to protect them in deep space—which they must do, for they had flooded the tunnel behind them with air we could breathe, so they could therefore not survive in space without air—then the face I found so hideous was merely a helmet and not their true features. Were they an approximation, though? The overly large eyes might be twin windows that functioned as the clear dome on our average suit did.
They moved closer, the weapons trained on us, and halted.
I swallowed, my heart slamming against my chest. Would they even understand what the raised hands meant? Perhaps it might be a sign of aggression in their culture. But they weren’t firing at us. So maybe putting ones’ hands up was a universal gesture.
Ten of them, all told. A range of heights, all close to human average.
One of the shorter ones stepped forward and spoke in a rasping, broken language.
They had language, then. They didn’t communicate via telepathy or something esoteric like that.
Clearly, they were telling us something.
“Lyth, do you have any idea what they’re saying? At all?”
“Not a clue,” Lyth whispered back. “I’d need to listen to them speaking for hours before I could start to guess at the meaning of individual words. If they even use words.”
“My guess is ‘you’re our prisoners, don’t move or we fire’,” Marlow said.
“Sounds about right to me,” Dalton said, his voice low.
Another of the things stepped out from the line of them, which had fanned out around us, enclosing us in a pincer movement that made me want to break out in hives. It was tough to just stand there and let them surround us like that. Sweat prickled in my armpits and my heart would not quit banging. Coppery spit flooded my mouth.
The second one to break rank swung its repulsive helmet, clearly examining us. “You.” The weapon it carried swiveled to aim at Marlow. “Lead?”
; “Fuck, they speak Common?” Sauli said.
“They think you’re the leader because you’re the tallest,” Jai murmured to Marlow.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Marlow told the speaker, smiling and showing all his teeth.
The speaker scanned us all again. “Who? Lead?”
Jai patted my shoulder. “This is essentially a military operation. Knock yourself out, Colonel.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly. I stepped forward a half step. “Me. I’m the leader.”
The speaker moved closer and I had to fight to not lean away from it and keep my feet planted where they were. As soon as it stopped before me, I said, “How do you know our language?”
It didn’t answer for a long moment. Probably putting together what Common it did know, building a coherent answer. Either that or deciding whether to cut off the head of our group and leave us leaderless. But if they really thought that shooting the leader would demoralize us or leave us flailing, they had a lot to learn about humans. These humans, at least.
“Others. Teach. Learn. Speak.” The speaker said the words slowly, and the pronunciation sucked, but I got it.
The humans they’d already abducted had taught them enough Common to communicate.
I nodded. “Dam wall now, Lyssa,” I said in a conversational tone. “Everyone, flat, roll, envelope.” I said it as fast as I could, then dropped and rolled myself, moving swiftly away from the blue guys.
The two open hatches slammed shut and hissed, as Lyssa sucked the air out of the middle of them, creating a vacuum seal that was unbreakable, and activated the Faraday cage that covered the entire ship, a second skin coated with matt black so the Lythion was difficult to see in deep space, leaving only a negative area where it blocked the stars behind it.
The blue ones shouted at each other, as we all rolled out of the way of their line of fire. I heard Dalton shouting instructions at Fiori. Sauli hauling Yoan out of the way.
Nanobots flooded the floor and instantly built up into a high wall surrounding the aliens. They fired rapidly, but the construction nanobots held against the charged particles their weapons fired. Where they broke apart, new nanobots swarmed to repair the damage.
“Cage in place,” Lyssa said calmly, as the aliens continued to fire at the wall surrounding them. “Their communications with the mother ships have been cut.”
“Wait,” I said, listening to the crackle of fire and violence.
We waited, all of us breathing hard, our heads bent as we listened to the noise on the other side of the wall.
When it ended, I said, “Window, Lyssa.”
A rectangular section of the wall melted away in front of me. I brought my shriver up, aiming through the window. “Are the mother ships firing on us, Lyssa?”
“No.”
Hostages were enough to hold their fire. Good to know.
The tall speaker came over to the window. “We kill ship. Free us.”
“We negotiate first,” I told it.
“Neg…” It paused. “No. Not.”
“It means it doesn’t know that word,” Lyth breathed next to me. “It isn’t refusing.”
Know, not.
“Deal. I want. You want. Agree. Get it?” I said.
The creature turned back to the others. Their rasping chatter ran fast for a few seconds, then it turned back.
“You want?” it said.
We were negotiating, then.
Jai, out of sight of the window, gave a gusty sigh. “They can be reasoned with.” He bowed his head in relief.
“The humans you took from the ship. We want them back,” I said.
“Humans…ship. Back.” It repeated me quietly, sorting out meanings. Putting concepts together. Then it lifted its ugly snout, pointed it at me. “Ship?” Its tone inflected upwards. It was clearly a question.
Which ship?
“They’re not going to grasp the name of ships,” Lyth muttered.
“Lyssa, emit a screen over this window and display an image of the Ige Ibas.”
The window misted over and Lyssa put up an image of the ship, then shifted through various views of the ship taken from the footage we’d captured.
The speaker’s snout stayed aimed at the screen. It was watching. Over its shoulder, I could see the others were examining the screen, too.
“Now, images of the crew,” I told Lyssa. “Those you have, at least.”
“Especially Mace,” Dalton said urgently.
Lyssa put up an image of Mace and left it there.
The speaker turned back to the others. They grouped together and spoke swiftly.
“Are you seeing linguistic patterns at all?” I asked Lyth.
He glanced at me and nodded. “It will be decipherable, eventually.”
The speaker came back to us. “Humans. Ours. You go. We go. End.”
“No!” Dalton shouted, hammering his fist against the nanobot wall. “Lyssa, give me a fucking door! Now!”
“No!” I shouted, as the door formed obediently.
But Dalton shot through, staggering into the circle of aliens. He put up his hands as he moved to the speaker. He lowered one long enough to tap his chest. “Me. For him.” He pointed at the image of Mace still hanging over the window.
I closed my eyes.
“Me for him,” Dalton repeated, his volume increasing.
The speaker considered Dalton for a good long moment. Then it croaked a single word. “Yes.” It slapped the armor over where a human hip would be. An elongated diamond of the armor popped out and shot toward Dalton, trailing a slender line.
At the same time, all the aliens in the rotunda slapped their hips and similar lines with things on the end snaked across the circle and through the door that Lyssa had made for Dalton.
Alarm crashed through me. “Kill the diamonds!” I screamed as I spun to face them as they wove through the air, seeking us out.
I fired and hit one squarely. It paused, then came on. I fired again and again, and it only slowed the thing down. “Lyssa! Loose the parawolves!”
There were too many lines, too many heads. I couldn’t fire at them all, all the time.
One whipped around my arm and squeezed. Pain exploded in my arm and my head. My limbs all stiffened. I couldn’t move them. I could feel myself falling as my vision faded but didn’t notice the impact with the floor. The pain running through my nerves smothered the smaller pain of falling. I heard the wolves snarling and the fast rasp of the aliens shouting at each other.
I could hear my friends, my family, crying out in pain, too.
And I heard the alien weapons firing.
—32—
The headache that greeted me as I roused was beyond the level of any I’d ever suffered in the past. I felt nauseous just trying to think. I tried to smother the groan which escaped me to avoid alerting anyone I’d come around. I kept my eyes closed.
I recalled what had happened. The shouting. The snake things. The panic in Vara’s emotions as I lay on the floor of the Lythion, not moving.
Especially, I remember the pain, which was the same class as the headache I had now, a silvered, biting-on-foil flaring of my nerves. My whole body felt numb, which made it difficult to figure out how badly hurt I was.
“Danny.” Dalton’s voice. “You’re okay. Talk to me.”
I opened my eyes, relief touching me, and looked around.
I was standing upright, although I wasn’t putting any effort into it. I was inside a form-fitting cage. Box. Shell. Whatever it was, it was holding me upright. A band of the same material ran across the front of the box at chest height and another at thigh height.
The room beyond was nearly completely dark. On the other side of the room, perhaps two meters away, a row of tiny lights flashed at shoulder height. I blinked, trying to make sense of that, and gradually made out the vaguely human outline, next to a set of the lights. Then another, with its own lights.
More shells, I realized. I peered closely at them, trying to dis
cern details in the dim light. They were empty.
“Dalton?” My voice was scratchy.
“Here.” To my left. I turned my head and tried to lean out to see him, but the shell was at a slight decline, and I was too weak yet to fight the slope. I fell back. “I can’t see you.”
“I think you’re a couple of boxes down from me,” Dalton said.
“Are you the only one, besides me?” I had to ask, but I dreaded the answer, and my heart gave an extra heavy thump.
“I don’t know,” he said. “If any of the others are here, they’re not awake yet.”
“How did you know I was?”
“I heard you groan.”
“And that told you it was me?”
“I’d know your voice anywhere.” He sounded amused. “Even when you’re grunting.”
I wanted to be irritated about that, but there were higher priorities besides my bruised feminine ego. I turned my head around, trying to examine as much as I could see from this awkward angle. And I tried to move my arms and feet. They cooperated sluggishly.
“Can you move?” I asked Dalton.
“Couldn’t at first, but I can wave my arms a bit now. The bar over the top is in just the wrong place, though. I can get my hand out only a dozen centimeters or so.”
I thought about that. “Wave your hand. I want to see if I can see it.” I poured all my energy into leaning forward as far as the bar would let me and peering to my left.
“Waving,” Dalton said.
Nothing. I fell back, panting. “We’ll just have to wait a bit,” I decided. “If the others are in here with us, we should hear them wake soon, too.” If they weren’t dead. Perhaps we were supposed to be dead, too, and these were the alien’s version of coffins. But why not just leave our bodies where they’d felled them?
I had a thousand questions, and few information sources.
“Do you see the shells on the other side of the room?” I asked.
“Yeah. Human-sized. The aliens wouldn’t fit into them.”
“Not in their armor, but who knows what is underneath. This is their ship, then.”
“I figured,” Dalton said. “I can’t feel Darb,” he added, with a worried note.
Galactic Thunder Page 17
