Abductees

by Alan Brickett

  “Marc?” he asked on the com even as he focused his thoughts to shape another wall like he had created before.

  “Marc! Without you, the refugees will be killed by the hundreds, the thousands! They don’t stand a chance!” Connor projected the wall out and shoved it down into the ground ahead of the Devourer burrowers, just a little bit past himself but deep into the ground of the park.

  The lead burrower slammed headlong into the barrier, causing the ground under his feet to lurch and split.

  “I’m not good at fighting, Connor. I can’t just jump into a battle!” Marc wailed.

  “Yes, you can bud. You’re protected. Use the Gravitonics the way SAI described. You already have, after all. Just come down here and buy some time until I finish these other two burrowers.”

  Just as Connor finished sending the message, one of those very burrowers came up under his feet, its mouth gaping around the churning rock and soil.

  It was enormous, big enough to swallow a whole lot of ground and Connor in one gulp.

  Automated log update.

  Confirmation of Tempest interest in the Devourer species.

  Findings based on the details of the infiltration into the Devourer vessel, analysis of the device technology used in analysis of the Devourer hive mind, and appearance of the Tempest slave race.

  Further analysis will be recorded in file 501-A for future review.

  Primary mission objectives updated with relevant information.

  Subjects are engaged in various forms of conflict or situational stress, excluding subject Marc Umber.

  Parameters indicate that subject Marc Umber should be at the point of change or digression.

  Factors at this stage could impact the outcome either way. Probabilities and matching variables at the time index just before the decision will be stored in file 279-B for future analysis by mathematicians.

  Interaction and monitoring continues.

  * *

  The room had changed back to the grey walls, seamless and wrapping around where Marc floated in the middle.

  Hovering in the space around him, he had the different feeds from the four others, various cameras, sensors, and monitors from the Puzzle Box situated in the park, and a host of other information.

  Proverbially, everything they would need was right at his fingertips.

  “Uh, they’re all in trouble. They need me to help them get out of it, not go and get myself into trouble,” Marc said.

  SAI replied from all around Marc, its voice reassuring, “Yes you can, Marc.”

  “But you need me here!” Marc was distraught; tears were rolling down his face as he glanced from one readout to the next.

  Meriam was about to engage in a fight with a very dangerous creature. Lekiso and Ormond were weaponless and outnumbered. Connor had just been swallowed by the burrowing Devourer form.

  He started shaking.

  “No, I do not. But the refugees need you there.”

  The tactical map of the park came up into center view.

  The location Connor had vacated was highlighted. Marc could see the blips that designated Devourer forms making for the now-vulnerable left flank of the refugee crowd.

  “Uh, but, but the Devourer burrowers, they’ll also get to the crowd with Connor…with Connor…” He had been friendly right from the start. And he hadn’t been weird with Marc either, the really big man and his mop of red hair.

  He had accepted Marc for who he was; Marc could tell.

  Connor had been a good man, and probably the first genuine friend Marc had had in years.

  “Hey, bud.”

  At first, Marc thought that SAI was talking, but then it came again.

  “Hey there, bud, you with me?”

  “Uh, what? Connor?” Marc was looking around the various displays as if he would see Connor there.

  The tracks of tears down his cheeks gave his pale face a wan look.

  “Yeah, bud, I’m here.”

  “I thought you were dead!”

  “Heh, no. The singlesuit gives me oxygen enough to survive. I just had to make a harder cocoon so that I wasn’t all bent over inside this thing.”

  “Uh, you’re inside it!” Marc couldn’t believe it.

  His fingers played over the access controls, his eyes designated the sensor functions he needed, and he looked deeper, inside the Devourer burrower. Sure enough, he picked up Connor’s life sign and singlesuit intact and wrapped inside a gravitonic shell. His vision blurred again.

  “Hey, Marc?”

  “Yes, Connor?”

  “Do us a favor and go deal with those Devourers before they get to the refugees, will you? I’m going to give this thing some indigestion, and I’ll join you.”

  “Uh, sure thing, Connor.”

  * *

  They had done well, all things considered.

  Obragon Vax was watching his own tactical display, a hologram on a raised table the officers had brought in. The humans had been most impressive, holding back the Devourer forms for as long as they had; even the ones on the ship had been making good progress until their communications had blacked out a few seconds ago.

  It had surprised all of his officers when the burrowing Devourer had lurched up in the middle of the park, taking the large human with it and then digging back underground.

  If there were more of those things, it was still irrelevant; one was enough to get in right under the refugees and cause merry havoc.

  Even if it didn’t, it could probably get out into the Enone Hub.

  The human had abandoned the left flank to stop them.

  His failed attempt notwithstanding, the horde on that side of the battle was fast approaching the refugees. It was over for the park, and likely the hub as well if they couldn’t regain control.

  Commander Obragon Vax looked up from the table to the two officers he had called over for orders.

  “Start the retreat process. Engage our backup plan pattern three. Have the passage to the hub closed off and prepare to eject the park. Notify all of our officers here to prepare for hard vacuum.”

  They both saluted with a “Yes, sir” and went in different directions to issue the orders.

  Obragon Vax turned from the table and went over to the railing to look out over the park. The Domums in full battle gear could easily survive the coming decompression and make it back to habitable areas of the Puzzle Box.

  There were a few who were there as administrators who would die when they blew the dome on the park, but he had little choice left.

  They had to sterilize the park and blow up the Devourer ship. The humans had tried, he and his officers had tried, but they hadn’t been enough.

  That was when he saw the glimmer of violet light out on the left flank; among the dust churned up in the park, he almost missed it. Quickly, the commander with the mustache stepped over to one of the officers monitoring the scanners.

  “There. Focus the scans on that spot there, in the park on the left.”

  “What is it, sir?”

  As the image resolved Obragon Vax allowed himself a grim smile.

  “Officer, that may well be hope.”

  * *

  In another forty seconds, the Devourer forms would reach the refugees, where they would infect as many as possible.

  The growth of the virus, injected with organelles of protein and nutrients, would fuel a rapid change in the hosts.

  Within ten minutes, the first infected would recognize enough neural formation to be controlled by the hive mind and turn into the attack themselves.

  Twenty minutes after the initial incursion among the refugees, there would be hundreds of new Devourer forms. Thousands more would be changing as their biology was hijacked from the inside and all individuality was lost.

  Effectively, on contact with the parasitic virus, the host would be dead; they just wouldn’t understand that for a few seconds from contact.

  A half hour later, and the entire crowd would be infected and moving to t
he puppet strings of the hive mind in the mines. By then, it would already be spreading into the Enone Hub and infecting even more people.

  The numbers and implications were running through Marc’s head when he appeared a hundred feet ahead of the running horde.

  Popping into existence, he hadn’t had the time to get into a full set of armor like the others, he’d even left the sidearm behind, back on the ship. Standing on the grass equivalent of the park, he painted a sparse and short figure in the silvery singlesuit.

  The ferocious and single-minded Devourer forms rapidly closing the distance were undoubtedly not intimidated in the slightest.

  At seventy-five feet, Marc was already gathering his thoughts and focusing on the Gravitonics as SAI had described, the thinking pattern meshing with implanted memories seamlessly. He recalled what he had done before, thinking back to merge the feeling with what he wanted to do now.

  At fifty feet, he could feel the force building up around him, strangely flowing from the substance of the universe all around him, quickly building to an invisible pressure that he could only just contain.

  At thirty feet, he muttered, “I may not have the fighting experience of my companions, you grotesque lot. But it may be something of a surprise to learn that I do have some useful skills. You see, I have played a lot of video games!”

  With that as his battle cry, he somehow shaped and released the force he was holding.

  A glittering violet outline appeared in a massive block in front of him and lurched forwards, picking up speed. The oncoming Devourer forms slammed into the moving wall of force as if an invisible bulldozer blade nine hundred feet wide and forty feet high was sloughing into them.

  The projected force didn’t shudder or jolt or give any indication of the impact of the forms it reduced to a messy pulp as it continued. The gravitonic construct was harder than any material known to the Galactic Citizenship, a sheer surface without any flaw.

  And it was moving faster as it went while Marc posed with his hands towards the back of the wall as if he were pushing it physically as well as mentally.

  There was no force or power the Devourer could have called on to stop the relentless mass. Those forms that were able to slow down and not rush headlong into it were still unable to get out of the way.

  They were plastered into it by the force of its motion, claws, and talons scrabbling in the park ground to try and find purchase and push back.

  Marc watched as they grouped up against the moving wall, some of them climbing over the others to find the top. Over a hundred of them were by now pressed against it, and they pushed back, with more of the creatures now stopping ahead of its terrible momentum.

  Marc closed his eyes and released the thoughts keeping the wall together at the front, and the wall exploded forwards.

  Contained gravitic mass surged out, flinging the forms clumped up against it out and through the amassed Devourer forms.

  The hundreds of Devourer clumped together became a silent eruption of hard flesh and bone that tore into the rest. The dull thud of displaced air swirled dust and other park detritus to all sides, blowing past Marc, who had a satisfied smile on his face.

  Marc then teleported the five hundred feet between him and the trailing edge of the expanding wave of force.

  Five hundred feet of distance was gained with that one effect; he was quite impressed with himself. The momentum had burned off, Devourer forms tumbling to the ground, some rolling, others digging in, building furrows in the ground to stop their mad tumbles.

  He’d gotten a lot of them with that, and all the ones in the front.

  Now Marc looked out over the rest of the approaching horde, with more streaming in from the tunnels beyond. His display popped up a tactical map with indicators showing the Devourer biological signatures amassing again for another charge.

  Not if I can help it, he thought.

  Marc drew on the Gravitonics again, imagining it was like folding up a torrent of water that was continually streaming past in another dimension.

  He created large droplets of the water, many of them right above the area two hundred feet ahead of where he stood. The Devourer forms were already on their feet and running at him again.

  Then he dropped the bubbles. Scintillations of violet light shone out at many points above the Devourer line. Some surrounded the force he had brought into this physical world; others blew off in waves.

  The effect wasn’t consistent, but it certainly made for impressive special effects.

  The force expanded in a sub-second, like an umbrella opening down towards the ground.

  Devourers caught under the astounding force Marc unleashed were reduced to a pulp of flesh and bone, crushed into the grass, soil, gravity plates, and metal underground of the park itself.

  Shallow craters drove themselves into the park floor, flattening Devourers in their dozens. None of them could withstand the force, and the ground, when compacted enough, proved harder than they could instantaneously dig through either.

  Marc drew on the Gravitonics again to create more of his force umbrellas, readying them for the next Devourer charge.

  At this point, nothing was going to get past him to kill those refugees, not today.

  * *

  Connor could see the convulsing muscles just an inch from his face, tinged violet by the shell he had created.

  He hadn’t been kidding when he’d told Marc that he was almost broken when the Devourer burrower had swallowed him. The thing’s mouth had opened in four segments and then closed over him in an overlapping arrangement.

  The damn thing seemed to twist its head and body to drill through the ground, various mouth segments opening slightly to suck in the loosened rock, which was swallowed. The convulsions of the throat rippled down the inside of the thing like a worm, steadily moving the debris out the other end.

  Although Connor’s gravitonic shield had protected him from the strenuous constriction of the throat, and the internal spines that pushed inwards to move everything through, the twists in the creature’s body when it moved were meant for something a lot more flexible than him—if he wanted to keep his bones in their current shape anyway.

  So, he had erected the shell around himself, like an elliptical cocoon, and its glowing walls had made him into a giant pill inside the burrower.

  That was when it had stopped trying to get him out. The outer throat would constrict spasmodically, but the burrower had been turning at the time that Connor protected himself.

  Now it was stuck, unable to twist and burrow any further, and with Connor stuck in the bend of its body, it couldn’t get him out either.

  Aside from the grisly sight of the wet flesh and spines from the inside, and the scans showing him precisely where he was in the creature, Connor was alright with it. He wasn’t dead, and he wasn’t being digested.

  Both good points.

  Now all he needed to do was get out of this thing and the several metric tons of rock it had burrowed under.

  And he had to stop the third Devourer burrower, which even now had felt its way along the wall he had made into the ground and was going under it. Deeper was good because it was slower, for now, but it was going to come up the other side and get to the refugees in short order.

  Connor had been thinking, though, and he had a plan—if he could pull it off. It was probably going to be big, though. He concentrated hard.

  Gathering the gravitonic energy, he built it up all around him in overlapping waves, more and more of it, as much as he could focus on without letting it slip. Small bleed-offs erupted during his gathering.

  Like bubbles of force, they went along the route of least resistance, expanding as they went down the burrower’s body. Each one would explode with a dull thump, giving the burrower lurching pushes.

  Once Connor couldn’t hold his focus anymore, he let it go. He only held on to two thoughts: that the force should hold him up against the blow and that all the rest of the force should spike upwards.<
br />
  The entire park gave a tremble; that much force in such an enclosed space was like the epicenter of a minor earthquake for the planetoid. Most of the energy did go up, and some of it traveled back along the burrower’s tunnel, ripping underground and up at the same time.

  The ground cracked and burst, and a great geyser of rock, silt, and stone ruptured upwards into the open air above the park.

  More cracks spread along the burrower’s tunnel, the force expending itself long before it got back to the mining tunnels but still shoving a strong wind ahead of itself to blow across the trembling, oozing mass of the hive mind buried inside.

  The rupture point split up out of the ground as if some sort of miniature volcano had suddenly formed, the sides splitting and cracking, rock rolling down them with other gooey substances that had been the body of the Devourer burrower.

  Safe inside the new tunnel, looking up at the fabricated lights above him hanging over the park, Connor stood, secure in his shell. The burrower had been reduced to mush. The creature’s body had been sturdy, enough to chew through and digest sheer rock, but not tough enough to withstand that kind of force from the inside.

  It had been squashed so badly against the inside of its own tunnel that it now resembled so much runny goo.

  The shell blinked away, and Connor jumped. Assisted by Gravitonics, he naturally applied a bit of extra force to lift himself up and out of the hole. Higher than the rim of the eruption, he went, higher still to get a good angle so he could see down into the park.

  His map display overlaid his vision, showing him the other burrower just about at the barrier by the Domums and going under.

  He didn’t have a lot of time, so he did what came instinctively. He brought his right hand up next to his head, and as his rising ascent slowed, a jagged bolt of violet lighting formed above his hand. It froze into place as a long javelin, which his hand closed on, the grip sure.

  Then, at the apex of his height, he threw the javelin of solid gravity right at the spot where the Devourer burrower was moving under the park ground.