That got their attention. Marc, in particular, seemed surprised.
“Uh, when did you get all scientific on us?”
“Oh, well, I do have some background in biological sciences, and the memory implants mesh with the software and give me all those words about what they are doing. So, I just repeated it.” Meriam smiled winningly at Marc, sincerity shining out.
Ormond didn’t trust that expression at all, but he could appreciate her skill. Marc was completely enthralled. Connor gave a small cough, obviously affected but not as much as Marc. Lekiso just raised an eyebrow and made no comment.
“Let us know when you’ve found something.” Connor moved over to one side of the dome. His hair brushed the curve when he stopped, throwing violet highlights through it. It was a strange combination of colors.
“So, once we have a direction, what do we do about those guys outside?” he asked.
“Why do anything?” Ormond held a hand up when they all looked at him in surprise.
“Hear me out. We didn’t go all out on them because we didn’t want to kill any of ’em, right? And that protosaur alien is hefting some serious gear around. I don’t think we could just render it unconscious without some serious planning and coordination. With his buddies around, that’s not going to be easy.
Pity we can’t just kill the giant iguana. Wouldn’t want to break the Domum laws, some more.
“So, the way I see it, we either change tactics to go lethal, we avoid them and get them off our trail, or we go somewhere they won’t go.
“Not that I wouldn’t mind dealing with the problem permanently. I still think we should avoid creating trouble with the Domum authorities,” Lekiso said.
They could see she wasn’t happy with the option. Ormond wondered how much killing she had done in her life. She was younger than him, but if she’d been found at a young age in Africa, she might well have been a child soldier.
Connor nodded.
“Right, so that leaves us with the other two options. Marc, can you track them so that we can avoid them?”
“Uh, yeah, about that. I’ve been scanning around from under here, and they have been communicating with each other on microwave radio. Like their own version of cellphones.”
“Radio? Cellphones? Seriously?” Ormond’s surprise sounded out in his voice.
The idea that aliens with this amount of high technology would still use radio just seemed out of place.
“Uh, well, yeah, that’s why I didn’t check for it before. But they are. The Puzzle Box network allows communication among all the hard lines and connectivity in the buildings, but it’s also owned by the Domums. So, in a way, it makes sense. I mean, microwave radio or analog radio carries at the speed of light, and it has many frequencies and encryption methods. It’s like a Samsung with Apps, you get the device with many functions and the software to use them.”
“So, they probably use it to bypass the Domum watchers. It’s quite clever, really. Even on Earth, we’d have to scan frequencies and break the codes to hear what people were saying on the other side in a war. Thing is, our software was able to break their encryption pretty quickly once I found the frequency they were using. It helped a lot that they were sending from right outside our new pile of rock, of course.”
“Damn, so now you can monitor everything they’re saying?” Connor asked.
“Uh, yup. For now, they just want to wait us out. But the really good news is that their communications are omnidirectional and pass through a lot of rock.
“So, you can track them by their communications,” Ormond explained. “Well done, mate.”
“Uh, thanks.” The short man looked a little pleased with the compliment.
Ormond sent Marc a kind smile. “So that’s how we stay ahead of em. Now, to keep them busy, I suggest we keep doing what we were doing before. Find us a Devourer, or a dozen or so.”
“Care to explain that?” Lekiso was genuinely puzzled.
I guess you were still getting used to other tactical options, Ormond thought.
“These inhabitants of the Puzzle Box are shit scared of the Devourer, right? And their shields don’t cover their entire bodies, so they don’t want to risk even being touched by the critters. So, I say we find the biggest mess of em that we can and go right to them. These guys outside probably won’t even follow us in.”
“Oh right, that’s a good point.” Lekiso looked thoughtful.
“Uh, yeah, but how do we get out from under this pile of rock without being crushed?”
Lekiso idly answered Marc, still thinking about what Ormond had said.
“That won’t be hard. Between Ormond and me, we can just melt an exit out into the tunnels below or to the sides. Remember, we didn’t use our highest settings on the weapons, because it would have killed them. This tech of ours is a lot more powerful than they’ve seen yet.”
“Uh, oh, well, that’s a bit scary.”
* *
It had been almost half an hour, and Pendonar was getting nervous.
Engestine wasn’t known for its patience, and he could see the Antonasas getting restless.
The Lanillans had checked their injured and provided what meager treatment that they could. Then they’d piled them together with the ones stunned in that first barrage against the side of the tunnel a ways down from the rock pile covering the humans.
They had done a full equipment check. Engestine had worked on its own equipment, replacing some power cells and fiddling with various settings in preparation for if the humans were going to fight their way out.
When the rocks suddenly collapsed in upon themselves in a grinding and echo of tearing, it came as somewhat of a disappointment.
They all stared at the pile, waiting to see if anything else would happen. After a minute, the Antonasas said in its deep, rumbling voice, “Start digging.”
“Hunh?” was all Pendonar could come up with at that moment.
The Antonasas rounded on him and showed all of its teeth in an awesomely threatening gesture. The creatures were known to be able to happily ingest any living creature, and Lanillans weren’t exempt.
“Dig, yellow man thing. Their corpses will be under there, and with the slow fall, several may even be alive, enough to resuscitate. So, let us claim this prize for your masters.”
With that, the Antonasas gripped a large section of rock and heaved it out of the way. Even in low gravity, that was something—you had to overcome the mass and provide inertia, after all. Pendonar didn’t see any other options and set the other Lanillans to join him as he got started—on a much smaller set of rocks.
* *
“This should not be correct,” Obragon Vax said, chastising the officer who had brought him the figures for refugees in the park.
“Sir, I have checked the numbers three times to be sure and had another officer double check my calculations. Even with a large allowance for error, you can see that we are missing hundreds of refugees who cannot be accounted for. The usage of air and waste processing has also dropped, supporting our findings.”
“I apologize. I can see your workings here in the addendum. I am just surprised.” Obragon Vax gave the officer a nod.
It was all that was needed from a superior.
The officer accepted the nod and apology without comment, as was proper.
“You may go,” Obragon ordered.
“Yes, sir.” The officer saluted smartly, turned on his heel, and left Obragon’s office.
The Domum commander gave the results and calculations another thorough look, still unable to find any fault.
Which was a problem.
The findings indicated that hundreds of refugees sent to stay in the park were now missing. Under other circumstances, he would have assumed that they had ignored the rules and entered the tunnels to set up camps and homes of their own in relative privacy.
The response to that was clear and easily handled, although he didn’t really have the security to spare for such an ex
ercise. The more significant problem came in when he put the facts of search parties from the Lanillan criminal gangs successfully finding Devourer parasites in the old mines with the missing refugees.
Assuredly, they had likely gone into the tunnels, which meant it was very likely they had found the Devourer parasites there as well. The only conclusion was that there was an infestation growing in the tunnels. With that many refugees, a hive mind and many more forms of the Devourer were likely increasing even now.
In conclusion, the protocols would clearly indicate he had to prepare for the worst, which was very bad for everyone on the Puzzle Box.
If only the Domum navy had reacted swiftly to the refugees’ reports and dealt with the source attacking them, be they pirates or whatever else. If the flood of refugees had been stopped, they would have had far less of a problem.
A rogue Devourer nest, he could deal with, but the refugees were not only straining his resources; they were also a source of expansion for the Devourer.
Starvation protocol was not going to be effective, so he had to go on the offensive to deal with the threat.
Obragon Vax had hoped to leave battles with the Devourer behind with his time in the navy. Admittedly, it had been his early years, but he remembered them well. The big blue Domum sighed and then pressed the communication icon of his console.
An officer’s face appeared on his display in an instant.
“Yes, sir?”
Obragon Vax issued the orders he had hoped to never release again.
“Prepare additional security from every post. Pull in those off duty or on post duty shifts and have them gather in the command center barracks for full equipment loadout. Plasma and fire-based weaponry are primary options. Inform all on-duty security that they will have triple shifts. Issue them with the stimulant packs necessary for ongoing performance at peak levels.”
“I want a senior officer equipped and armored outside the Devourer hive ship as soon as possible, with technicians from Manor Uld and Alim to make a full investigation and attempt communication with the hive mind. I expect feedback within the hour.”
“Yes, sir.”
Obragon Vax blanked the display and sat back in his chair, swiveling to look over at the armor on the stand next to the door of his office.
* *
The stone tunnels with their mottled grey and brown patterns were very different from the metal walkways, steel-paneled walls, and high-technology aspects of the Puzzle Box.
But for Marc, it was all still different from the wood-walled and carpeted home he had spent most of his life in.
He hadn’t even spent that much time in the glass and concrete jungle of the city outside the door to his small home.
He could remember the time spent in parks back on Earth, picnics with his mother and perhaps some other family members, like aunts, uncles, and cousins. But they were from his childhood. Even in his teens, he’d been in high schools within the city limits, and then the university with its big stone buildings and small grassed areas.
Most of the time, he hadn’t been among the general population, preferring to stay indoors and study or work.
He would never have thought he would be hiking along miles of tunnels that had once been a mine, burrowed through solid rock and into an almost-formed planet. Floating along with several other similar space rocks of a malformed solar system connected with ideas he had only had from science fiction movies.
Never mind the fact they were hunting a biological organism that could only be related to the horrific enemies in computer games, gunned down as part of geek escapism. It didn’t help his anxiety that Meriam was sure they were getting closer to a whole group of them—and that the latest development was also bad news.
“Uh, guys, those Lanillans and that dinosaur crossbreed have found our escape hole,” he told the others.
“Thanks for the update. Let us know if they get closer, Marc.” Connor was just behind Ormond in the lead. They had all fallen back into the same pattern as before, with Lekiso bringing up the rear.
“Uh, sure. Will do,” he replied.
The rifles that Ormond and Lekiso had were quite powerful. They had made short work of melting a way through the solid rock into a side tunnel eighty feet away, and at an angle, to the one they’d been buried in.
They were versatile weapons: the neutron beam output function had dissolved the rock like a strong acid applied to layers of paper.
The heat and emissions were held back by the singlesuit protective fields, and although the oxygen had all burnt away, their suits also provided hours of breathable air under the outer protective layer.
Apparently, they could even go out into the vacuum of space like that, although Marc didn’t like the idea of having only a layer of energy currents between his vulnerable skin and the cold death of outer space.
It was an hour and fifteen minutes since they had been buried; the Lanillans and that Antonasas had dug quickly.
They were headed to a large cavern at the hub of a number of tunnels.
At one time, it had been a node for precious ore that had been mined out, several square miles of it, but it was now just open space from which dozens of other tunnels had been dug to reach other wealthy deposits.
Now, according to Meriam, the space was taken up by a host of Devourer biological signatures. The humans had also been detected or sniffed out, scented, or whatever the Devourer spawn did. Meriam and Marc had mapped the tunnels as far as they could and marked Devourer lifeforms moving parallel along other tunnels and dropping in behind them.
Ormond and Lekiso had given Connor some tactical advice, but otherwise, they were still going ahead.
They didn’t have any concern about using lethal force against the organisms, since the Domums seemed to be doing the same at any opportunity, so the risk was reduced compared to trying to fight off the gang members.
Marc was still really creeped out about being hunted through darkened tunnels. It was like a horror movie, and he really didn’t like being the star of the show.
Well, one of the stars.
Up ahead, Ormond held up a closed fist. Marc knew from movies with the military that this was a signal to halt, but Ormond also told them to wait up over the private channel.
“Lights out, everyone,” he also sent silently.
Marc followed the rest and instructed his systems to turn off the glowing light.
The tunnel went pitch black.
“Turn on your enhanced vision displays,” Ormond said.
It took Marc a bit of fumbling through the options before he found the icon, but once he selected it, he was provided with a computer rendering over his eyes of the surrounding tunnel. The display could be lit up with heat signatures, low-light profiles, the return from sonic echolocation, and all sorts of other non-visible emissions rendered as an overlay.
He selected a few, which painted garish coloring onto the floor and walls for him.
“Okay, try to stay quiet. They know we are here, but let’s try to be stealthy and see what this situation looks like.”
Ormond began to creep ahead, his body close to the ground in a crouch, which he easily sidled forward with.
Must be some kind of military training, Marc thought.
The other four followed as quietly as they could. Lekiso matched Ormond the best, while the others made like clumsy apes in imitation. They did manage to get up to the edge of the tunnel into the large chamber without too much noise. The low gravity helped since they didn’t have to put any weight down on loose rock or scree.
The sight that greeted them took a while to filter in.
The chamber was enormous; it was like looking into a Super Bowl stadium that stretched around on all sides and was much more prominent. It was full of creeping, walking, crawling, and overall moving organic life.
The Devourer didn’t just zombify a corpse—or living body, for that matter.
It converted it.
The humans had all seen the
takeover of the Lanillan corpse from earlier when the Devourer virus had been injected into it. But the eventual result was a complete transformation of the biology into what the Devourer needed.
It usually didn’t have any need to keep the original body.
In the large cavern, they could see several hundred examples of the fundamental transmutation that happened to a mammalian humanoid body. The flesh became gelatinous and oozed down into an organic form similar to a caterpillar’s, with thick legs of muscle and a morphic body that could easily twist in any direction and fit through many holes or tight spaces.
The bones of the humanoid form were extruded and molded into calcified limbs, claws, blades, and other appendages. The entire being became a multipurpose lifeform capable of shifting into a warrior state or a worker state at will.
Many of them would also be converted down into biological sludge, which then formed back up the evolutionary chain into the parasite-delivery centipedes that the humans had already encountered.
The center of the cavern floor, relative to the humans, was dominated by a spreading stain of fleshy tendrils running between various humps or nodules that looked a lot like nerve clusters. These were the brain growths of a Devourer Hivemind.
Operating beyond the basic instinct to grow and survive, and with the abundance of biological matter available from the hundreds of refugees already absorbed, the Devourer had propagated enough to form the brain.
Except it was nothing like a mammalian brain, which grouped into a single organ.
This one was like a computer network, redundancy built into the growth where it spread out and grew brain nerve clusters at almost every tunnel entrance and then connected them with the intestine-looking trails of fleshy tentacles along the rock floor.
It was apparent, as it had been to any force trying to subdue a Devourer nest, that attacking one nerve cluster would never be sufficient to kill it.
Abductees Page 28
