Joe stared at her when she finished. She stared back but a tiny shiver crawled up her spine as she met his emotionless gaze. The unnatural stillness of the marines and their rare beauty raised the spectra of Yalo’s warning. Were they human at all?
* * * *
“They’re civilians, Joe.” Vin frowned at the cruiser half-buried in the sand one hundred yards from their camp.
“Did you see that little girl?” Roz also stared at the ship full of women.
Joe understood the overwhelmed feelings of his men. Five women, a child and an infant. None of them had ever seen a child so close let alone a baby.
“We should leave them here and go back to base,” Tar said. “Their emergency beacon should bring a rescue soon.”
“More likely it will bring pirates in this sector,” Vin said.
“They’ll freeze or starve before then,” Roz said. “Children need to eat regular meals.”
“What by Fash do you know about children?” Tar snapped.
“Enough,” Joe said quietly. The three marines stiffened to attention. “Why hasn’t someone come looking for them by now? Queen Callie Adell is someone important.”
They all stood quietly for a moment, comfortable with the silence of the desert and each other. Joe knew his men would do what he decided no matter their own feelings on it. Following orders was all they knew.
Joe gestured toward their wrecked ship sitting a half a mile from the women’s ship. “Do you forget why we’re here?”
“We haven’t forgotten, sir,” Vin answered.
“Then let’s take our lesson and be wary of these women and the trouble they carry with them. They may try to use us as others have. From what the lady guard said, they know who we are.”
“Are we going to help them, sir?” Tar’s question was respectful, but his negative opinion of the idea was in his tone.
“What was our duty, our purpose, before the powers corrupted it? How can we not help and know they’ll die or fall into the hands of thugs? What would members of the Rector Freemen do to that little girl?”
Joe looked at his men and received their nods. He’d expected them. If they didn’t help these women then the principles they’d sacrificed everything for had been little more than space dreams.
Beastmen of Ator
Alien Abduction
By
Kaitlyn O’Connor
Chapter One
“We will have Sooni now,” Dagon said with satisfaction, instantly capturing the attention of the other two males of his triad, Gilen and Joar.
Dagon was still seated at the controls of their flanx’s vessel. Gilen and Joar had left the seats they generally occupied to study over the booty from their raid.
It took them a couple of moments to mentally shift gears from reliving their triumph and examining their prizes with expansive pride and for that time they merely stared at Dagon blankly, their mouths slightly ajar. Finally, the dots connected in their minds and Gilen and Joar turned to stare at one another to gauge each other’s reactions.
“You think?” Gilen finally responded a little doubtfully, studying their take with an entirely different perspective.
He thought they had done well. Until Dagon had made that remark, he had, at any rate. It was their first raid, after all, and although they had trained as warriors for many years, practical application of their ancient traditions was rarely as successful when launched against their galactic neighbors as they had been in olden times when the neighbors were little more than a stone’s throw away. And chucking stone tipped spears for that matter! He felt that they had captured things of great value, but since they still hadn’t figured out what the things were, he thought it might be premature to assume they were valuable enough to bring them a bride of Sooni’s stature.
Maybe a bride of any stature at all!
Truthfully, he was more relieved, and elated, that they had succeeded in counting coup on the Basinini at all than thrilled with the tokens they had so hastily gathered—especially since they didn’t know what the spoils were.
Well—there were those things of an ornamental and utilitarian nature that seemed self explanatory—the objects of personal adornment and the household items. Those held very little value when all was said and done, however, beyond that of mementos to mark the success of their first coup. It was those things of a technological nature that would hold the greatest value—or at least had that potential.
He was still doubtful that Sooni’s flanx (extended family) would consider accepting them as her triad mates. Sooni was a high princess—daughter of the high princes’ triad, who were directly in line to rule over all of the tribes of Ator one day—and they were not even minor princes.
True, she hadn’t simply dismissed Dagon when he had downed a full skin of false courage in the form of fermented gigi berries at the gathering of tribes and approached her. Most of the young people had been indulging rather more than they should have, however, since it was their coming of age celebration and the eve of ‘trial by fire’ of the young warriors—many of whom would not return and well knew it! He thought it entirely possible that it was either a case of Princess Sooni being nearly as drunk as Dagon or she had simply taken pity and figured he would not remember once he had sobered—even if he made it back from their raid.
He certainly wasn’t convinced on so little evidence as the fact that Sooni hadn’t publicly humiliated Dagon for his audacity in thinking that she would actually welcome their suit and support them in spite of parental disapproval!
He glanced at Joar again, but he knew Joar wasn’t likely to contradict their alpha. Whatever Dagon said, Joar merely nodded agreement to. “I am as smitten with her as every other Furian of an age to barter for a mate,” he said finally, “but we do not have enough here to be considered seriously by her flanx. And even if they would, her fathers would refuse to consider us. Think what you are saying! They will rule Ator one day. They will want heirs of the royal line!”
Dagon reddened, primarily with anger. “We may not have been born in the royal line, but we counted coup against the Basinini! We have proven ourselves to be strong, clever warriors and that is as important to the line as the blood! That was not an easy thing to do with their superior technology! There were at least a half a dozen triads who did not succeed in their raids! And beyond that, we have taken bartering goods of great value! There will not be many who will bring back a higher bride price than we have!”
Gilen frowned at him. “If you know the value it is more than I do! I’ve not yet figured out what these things are! They may be completely useless to a Furian! Of no value beyond trinkets to prove we counted coup on the Basinini! Then where will we be? We will have made fools of ourselves trying to get the princess’ notice and I for one do not want that kind of notice!”
Dagon had already drawn breath to argue his point when the alarms on their craft began to blare. It took the three of them several moments to locate all of the buttons that controlled the various alarms—nearing Ator’s airspace, proximity alert, scan alert, boarding/collision alert.
They were already thoroughly rattled by the time they had silenced the damned racket and struggling to maintain composure to find the threat before it found them when they looked at the forward viewing screen. The sight that filled the screen made their blood run cold and so stunned them that, even as trained and now experienced warriors, they were shocked to frozen immobility and could do nothing for many moments but stare and try to absorb and understand what they were seeing.
Basinini ships filled the skies above Ator as far as they could see and even as their attention was caught by the sheer number of the ships that formed almost an unbroken cloud above Ator, those ships fired upon the world below. Their beloved Ator. Dagon was dumbfounded by the weapons themselves. Expecting explosive beams, the bolts shot from the ships that looked like nothing but spears—mighty spears, granted, and composed of some hardened metal, but still nothing but lances as far as he could se
e—made him feel perfectly blank.
They were throwing spears?
He followed those ‘spears’ as they broke through the atmosphere, trailing smoke and fire, expecting them to burn up at any moment and vanish. Instead, the ‘spears’ flew straight and true from the belly of the ships that had fired them to the ground below and, when they struck, Ator exploded. Soil and rocks, trees and other vegetation, the structures and cities that his people had built over countless generations crumbled and jumped upward as if a giant fist had hammered the ball of dirt and rock. The destruction was so massive, so all encompassing that his mind simply refused to grasp what he was staring at, what his eyes recorded to torture his mind forevermore.
Rage boiled upward to fill the vacuum, however. And the moment his rage exploded through his mind, he transformed, freed the beast he kept trapped inside—his patron beast, their clan’s totem, the gryphon. As part of his triad, both Gilen and Joar transformed, as well, even though neither had managed to shake their shock sufficiently to comprehend what they’d seen. But then the triads of Ator were connected in a way none of the many other species familiar with the Furians had ever truly understood.
They were bred as triads and born as triads. From conception to death they were as one entity—quite often of three separate minds, but more often than not working together as a unit rather than an individual. It gave them an advantage few species had. In general, the more intelligent, or at least civilized, a species, the more inclined they were toward individualism, the more difficulty they had thinking and acting as a whole and for the benefit of the whole. They had to learn to act as a team or unit to increase their strength and powers of observation.
The Furians had no such problem. It was instinctive to them to band together at any threat and act and this time was no different despite their shock. As one, they transformed themselves into their alter egos, their beast brothers.
The Basinini that had beamed aboard to retrieve their belongings met a trio of terrifying beasts that so shocked them with horror that they barely had time to scream before the beasts tore them limb from limb and left them twitching in puddles of blood and entrails and mangled muscle tissue to search for another target. That wasn’t difficult. The Basinini ships, having discharged their weapons, had begun to return to the mother ship.
The ability of the Furians to transport themselves from place to place was as natural as breathing or indeed moving any part of their anatomy in actions or gestures. They had only to think it to do it and when they spied the enemy crafts headed for the mother ship, they followed. Breaching the defenses of the Basinini like ghosts, they simply bypassed them as speeding atoms and regenerated once they’d landed. Half the Basinini on the bridge were dead before they knew they had been boarded.
Not that it would have helped them to have known. Like so many ‘superior’ races, the Basinini relied very heavily upon their technology to make up for any lacks they had physically. They were no match at all for the Furians when it came to hand-to-hand combat, wouldn’t have been even if the Furians hadn’t been in a towering rage and had been willing to allow them some concessions for being physically inferior.
And they weren’t simply outmatched physically. The Furians retaliated in far greater numbers than they’d anticipated. The Basinini had miscalculated the ability of the returning warriors to launch a counter attack—since they had no idea of the abilities of the beastmen of Ator and had been laboring under the false impression that they were known as ‘beastmen’ because they were barbaric. The destruction of Ator had been a calculated move, timed to demoralize the warriors and teach them a ‘lesson’ before they destroyed them, as well, for their audacity in raiding a Basinini stronghold.
They hadn’t anticipated any difficulty at all in carrying out their plans for retribution. After all, there wasn’t a species in the entire galaxy that was even on a par with the Basinini technologically, let alone superior. The Furians were so far down the evolutionary chain as to make it child’s play to annihilate them. Most, if not all, of the Furian’s technology had been filched from other species in the raids the barbarians carried out as part of their warriors’ coming of age ritual—and those others who’d supplied the Furians with technology weren’t even close to being a challenge for the Basinini.
The Basinini had made the most momentous mistake in the history of their species. They’d not only made enemies of the Furians, they’d tried to wipe them out and the Furians, they were soon to discover, could be just as ruthless as they were.
The Furians would not rest, would not stop until they had wiped out the race that had destroyed their world and done their utmost to wipe out the entire Furian Empire.
Dagon’s triad arrived on the bridge of the Basinini mother ship behind three others, but it only mattered because none of them had managed to satisfy their blood lust for the destroyers of their world by the time they’d waded through the Basinini that were present and annihilated them. Huffing for breath, more from rage than exertion, Dagon, Gilen, and Joar searched the bridge in vain for another victim to appease their hunger for revenge and came up empty. Fortunately, it occurred to them that the mother ship was vast and that they’d found it by following the warriors returning from unleashing their death bolts.
The triads spread out from the bridge and systematically searched out the Basinini and executed them. When they had turned the ship into a ghost ship, they searched for more. They knew there had to be more and nothing would appease them until they were absolutely certain that they had tracked down and annihilated every Basinini and wiped the race from existence.
* * * *
There was no sign of the Basinini ship they’d followed through the wormhole created by the Basinini ship’s hyper-jump once they emerged. Dagon knew that could mean that they’d emerged too quickly from the wormhole and the Basinini ship was light years away from their current position, but he’d honed his instincts for tracking them since the bastards had destroyed their home world and his gut was telling him they were right on the bastards’ tails. “Any sign of them?” He’d directed the question at Gilen, who was manning the navigation computers, but it was Joar who answered.
“This thingy we took from the last ship is indicating a ship about a quarter of a light year in that direction.”
Both Gilen and Dagon turned to look at him. Gilen returned his attention to the navigation screen almost immediately, however.
“Can you confirm it?” Dagon asked.
Gilen ignored the question while he studied the screen. In a few moments, though, he spotted the object making the blip on Joar’s thingy screen and a slow grin dawned. “Yeah. Pretty sure. That thingy must be like a homing beacon for the Basinini.”
Dagon smiled grimly in satisfaction. “It is a good thing that I grabbed it. I was beginning to think that we had succeeded in wiping out that useless race and would no longer have anything to do.”
“Aye,” Gilen agreed with a nod. “It has been nigh a stellar year since we found one.”
Dagon tensed and glanced at him sharply.
They had used Ator time for several years after its destruction and the death of almost everyone they knew. Slowly, it had dawned upon them that it was not only pointless to track time passing by a gauge that no longer existed—at least as a living planet—but it was painful, a hurtful reminder they did not need. In the beginning, he thought that pain had had purpose. It had kept them firmly on the path of retribution. But they had tracked and destroyed the bulk of the Basinini in the time since and now spent far more time looking for the bastards than fighting.
It left them more time to think than Dagon liked.
He had carefully and deliberately clouded his mind to the passing of time, ignored the things about his own body that told him he was aging in time with his home world even if it was no longer his home world. If the Basinini had not destroyed their world, he would have found a mate and had a family in this time.
Perhaps even Sooni, although he h
ad long since accepted that Gilen was right and that it had been nothing more than youthful folly to look so high.
He would still have liked to discover that for himself.
He thought he could have stomached having her walk off with some other warrior far better than the doubts. He knew he could have endured that better than knowing she had been buried alive in the rubble of what had once been the glory of the Furians of Ator.
They had not found her body. He had tried to look, they all had, hoping to find survivors, but the devastation was so extensive that there were not even landmarks left to guide them. It was as if Ator had swallowed them all.
He would not be a warrior now, he realized abruptly. Ator had been destroyed in the first year of his manhood. If it had not been, then he would have served his time as warrior for the people, or died, and would have been replaced by younger warriors. Had he lived, he would have turned his energies toward building prosperity and comfort for himself and his mate and his young.
Instead, he had spent the intervening years collecting ‘wealth’ that meant nothing when they had no one to trade with and he had built nothing but piles of bodies and huge pools of blood.
It wasn’t that he regretted the path they had taken. He did not see that they had had a choice. The souls of their people cried out for justice!
But what of the time when they had tracked the Basinini to extinction? What then? Would there be anything for them?
Gilen broke into his thoughts. “Shall we close on them and take them out?”
Dagon lifted his head to stare at Gilen, but it took several moments for the question to penetrate his self-absorption and make sense. He blinked. Getting up from his chair, he approached Gilen and leaned over his shoulder to study the screen. “What do you think they are doing here?” he asked after a long moment.
Gilen shrugged. “I do not recognize this place. I am fairly sure we have not been here before … which means that the Basinini have not.”
Dagon frowned as he absorbed that. Stroking his chin thoughtfully, he returned to his seat. “We have never found the home world of the Basinini,” he said after several moments.
The Men of Anderas I: Jardan, the King Page 28
