The spear flew, guided by his mind as much as his hand. Arrowing down, it split the rock without stopping, the edges of gravitic energy finer and sharper than any monomolecular blade. The solid energy impaled the burrower just behind the mouth, splitting through its flesh and bone as easily as the rock.
His system registered the strike, and Connor let go of the contained energies with his mind.
The big human came drifting down to earth on a modified gravitic cone while, three hundred feet away, the violet javelin exploded with force, taking the Devourer burrower with it and creating another series of spreading cracks in the rock.
* *
Meriam almost felt sorry for the Devourer forms caught between her and the Antonasas.
She wasn’t holding back her withering assault, which the lizard-thing avoided or took head-on. Whatever shielding the alien used was impressive. She’d counted more than a dozen direct hits, and it hadn’t even changed color, unlike the last time.
Which meant it had learned.
It was also using slightly smaller weapons this time around, probably to give it more maneuverability. The feathered, furred, and scaled alien had come charging into her melee with the Devourer forms, scattering several of the smaller ones and firing on the larger before turning its weapon on her.
Now they were locked together in the center of a circle of carnage. Devourer forms caught between them didn’t stand a chance; their deluge of fire was an insurmountable cascade of deadly energies.
The good thing was that with another living entity in the mix, the Devourer forms seemed more intent on being distracted. There were fewer and fewer of them just trying to get past and on to the refugees.
Or perhaps it had something to do with the available technology the Devourer could understand if it just took one of them down.
After the initial charge, the Antonasas seemed content to circle around her, staying at a relative distance. It would annihilate any Devourer that got in its way, but otherwise, it was taking every opportunity to harry her with weapons fire.
So far, she had been judicious with the gravitonic forces, wrapping them around herself or using them to assist her tumbling acrobatics in dodges.
But eventually, it was going to tell with her endurance. She was already getting tired, and the alien was likely gifted with a lot more stamina. Whatever predatory genes it had inherited were telling it to keep wearing her down until she made a mistake.
It was typical of any earthly predator taking on large prey—according to the Discovery Channel—and she supposed she should feel honored that it felt that much respect for her.
If she didn’t change tactics soon, it would be on the winning side.
What she had to do was get in close and personal. So far, it had stayed well out of her reach. But then, nothing could move as fast as the speed of light.
Well, she assumed it was the speed of light; Marc and SAI would probably correct her later.
With a thought, Meriam teleported to just over the head of the Antonasas.
Coming out above it, she had a great view of the scaly hide on its head, the spines at the shoulder and neck joints, and the long, thick fur in a trail down its back just before its shield flared into coruscating glows and was enveloped in blue plasma from her shots.
The Antonasas ducked instinctively under the hail of fire, lurching to the side to avoid the threat from above. She saw its eye widen when it tilted its head and spotted her falling towards it.
The damn alien’s energy shielding was astounding.
She had barely tinted the coloring of the protective field, and she had scored another deluge of direct hits. Then it was bounding sideways while simultaneously raising its own weapons to return fire.
She teleported again.
This time, it was to the ground on the side, away from where it was looking up, hoping to catch its blind spot. She landed with some inertia from her fall, and skidding across the churned and charred ground, she opened fire again. The Antonasas roared, twisting to get a bead on her, its weapons swinging around and firing.
The stray blasts carved a swathe of destruction along the ground and through any hapless Devourer caught in the fire.
She teleported again.
She came out behind it, thinking all the while furiously, sending streams of plasma rounds into the giant alien, who was now in a near constant shimmer of protective fields reacting to the hostile energy.
If its shield was that strong and it could still dodge her, then perhaps she had to hit it with something else.
Meriam gave a small smile and teleported just as the Antonasas whipped around to target her.
She appeared opposite where she had been, letting her gunfire rake the alien for a second, and then teleported closer. It was halfway through its turn when she had appeared and redirected its attention. In mid-swing, it shoved a leg out to capture its momentum and twisted back to face her.
Nothing that big should be able to move that fast, she thought, but it had the desired effect.
The dinosaur-looking head whipped back around, and Meriam appeared just under it, her kick already in motion and assisted by gravitonic forces. She spun her heel up behind herself, and bending her torso forward, the kick came up as her head came down, and she slammed as much force as she could into the thing’s snout.
Its shield flared with the impact and couldn’t deal with the influx of kinetic energy. Meriam’s heel broke through and smacked the Antonasas a substantial blow to the nose. She felt something give, and then it roared in pain.
Meriam teleported again, off to the right of the giant alien. In the air, she was spinning, and her kick sliced through a twirl and into the side of it, a dull thump. There was a feeling of giving, and the creature staggered sideways.
Another teleport and she came in on the opposite side, the straight kick driving force into the tons of momentum behind the Antonasas’s sideways stagger.
It was trying to get its weapons aimed around at her in an astonishing display of speed when she teleported one last time.
She came out twice her height above its head, her somersault started, her one leg bent and the other outstretched. The revolving ax kick circled around her once and then came down on top of the Antonasas’s head. Gravitonic force drove down like a pile driver with it.
The alien’s knees bent involuntarily as the massive blow cascaded down its body in a ripple of force that caused the spines to bend and the fur to wave. Then the entire colossal body went limp. Falling to the ground in an unconscious heap, it was suddenly as graceless and heavy as it looked.
Meriam landed next to the newly unconscious Antonasas amid a whip storm of wind.
Even the Devourer forms all around her seemed to pause for a moment before resuming their attack.
* *
Memory-implanted knowledge burst inside Lekiso’s’ brain.
This species was called the Kuraken. It had four limbs connected to a sizeable ovoid torso, and as she looked up at the one that was stuck to the wall and looking down on her, the implanted information also told her that the alien had two tails, not just one.
There was a typical attack pattern that it used on the unwary: the horizontally aligned pincer closed into a needle-like point and stabbed down at her. If she hadn’t had the implanted memories, she would have dodged to one side to avoid the tail, but she likely would have died.
On the way to her, the tail split in two along the middle on the horizontal plane, one tail underneath the other.
Instead of dodging or jumping to one side, Lekiso chose the safest option and teleported away to the other side of the room. The Kuraken’s first pincer slammed two feet of its length into the deck plating. The second hovered four feet above it, where it was prepared to impale her no matter which direction she went.
Breathing heavily, Lekiso let the information flow through her mind. Any little fact would be relevant now. Facing four of these things, armed and armored, would require that she know every
detail, every fact, and, hopefully, every weakness.
The Kuraken were a branch of the insectile species’ list. Their exoskeletons were hard, and they completely covered the aliens, protecting them from vacuum and high pressures. The Kuraken development and homeworld were unknown by the inhabitants of this galaxy; the humans, however, had learned that they were created by the Tempest.
Biological engineering.
The Kuraken were the statistical improbability made form; the highly unlikely chance that anything their size and level of development could evolve on a planet of that kind was highly unrealistic.
It seemed that some of the information implants relied on cues from SAI before they would activate.
This was one of them.
The Kuraken were part of the Tempest assault. Why they were allied with the Tempest or what they got from it was not known. But they were confirmed combatants and agents for the Tempest themselves.
One of the burnt-orange-colored creatures had started to turn towards her as the information was processed in her brain at the speed of thought. Yet the alien was already reacting to her change in location. The weapons on the back of its torso, on the broad segment above the legs, were out of their recesses.
She could imagine them powering up to blast her, much as the one in front of Ormond was about to let loose on him while he was stuck attached to the device.
She had less than a second to react, to decide what to do.
Four of them were in the room, and all were armed and armored. Her rifle was on the floor nearby—she had planned her teleport well—but Ormond’s was far away from him. She might be able to get her weapon using Gravitonics and then open fire on the aliens, but she figured that without concentrating on one at a time, she was unlikely to do much damage.
Lekiso was distracted by the sudden appearance of glowing violet shells around all four of the Kuraken in quick succession, starting with the one in front of Ormond and then quickly springing into life around the other three.
She blinked, and two of the shells were abruptly filled with blinding light.
Whatever weapons they used, the Kuraken had a lot of output, and when it was all contained in a small space, the violent energies were inherently lethal to them as well.
Her suits display read a powerful protective field around each of the two aliens who had fired, but the torrent of energy they had unleashed filled the interior of the shells and overloaded their own shields in half a second.
The garish light went out in those two gravitonic spheres; inside, all that was left was ashes. Lekiso shuddered to consider what would have happened if those blasts had hit her or Ormond.
They certainly hadn’t been holding back, which raised other questions as well.
But first, she had to check with Ormond.
“Please tell me you did this.” She sent the message on the private channel but gave a curt gesture with her hand to emphasize what she meant.
“Yup, this is me. First thing that came to mind. I’ve actually kept it as an option ever since these systems of ours told us the whole ‘nothing gets in and nothing gets out’ principle,” he replied, standing next to the device nonchalantly while the probes did their work.
“So, you expected to use it as a, a containment shell?” Lekiso was impressed; the practical and rational application had eluded her completely.
“Pretty much, yeah. It was fairly obvious if you think about it. If we can trap enemies inside something that they can’t get out of and can’t hurt us from inside of, then why just use it to protect ourselves. Why not trap them in it when required? Especially when we are outnumbered, hey?”
Okay, so, perhaps the way he put that was not the most pleasant he could have, or maybe she was just kicking herself for not considering it as an option too.
But give me a break, she thought. We’ve only been using Gravitonics for a day or so.
As if to mirror her thoughts, Ormond said in a forgiving tone, “Don’t worry about it, luv. The biggest difference between us is that I’ve been trained to deal with people who have terrible ideas, ruthless and practical ways to deal with their enemies, and after a while, you get to thinking that way yourself. Not necessarily something I’m proud of, though.”
“Yeah, ok. You can stop trying to make me feel better now. What do we do with the other two?”
She looked at them, one on the floor and the other the one that was on the wall that had tried to stab her.
They were both very still, motionless.
“I could just crush them. You know, collapse the spheres.” Ormond had the decency to look uncomfortable at the thought.
Lekiso was about to reply that she didn’t like the idea of killing helpless, well, anything, even these things, when SAI spoke up on the channel.
“Please just leave them as they are. Once you have turned off the jamming, I will be able to accurately triangulate them and bring them to the ship for further study. For now, you have likely broken their link with the governing systems, and they are waiting for new orders. The Kuraken are not very original thinkers, or at least the ones from the future were not.
“In fact, most of them are lobotomized, for what passes as the equivalent of a brain for them. These two will be great specimens to compare with my data from the future. You can just leave them as is. You drew enough gravitic energy to last several days, and they can’t break out.”
“Oh, well okay, then.” Ormond looked over at Lekiso and shrugged.
She just shrugged back; whatever the computer said was fine with her, and it made sense.
“How is the infiltration going?” she asked instead.
Ormond looked down at his hand and the tendrils worming their way into the solid metal. “Quite well according to my software. This thing is being mapped out circuit by circuit. Should have a full picture soon.”
“Indeed,” SAI said in its even tone.
“The device has been monitoring the Devourer, scanning the results of several tests it had been performing while, at the same time, sending out signals to manipulate the instructions of the Devourer forms and hive mind in the mining tunnels. This device has been accumulating a lot of data on the Devourer’s mind.”
“Isn’t that bad for us?” Lekiso asked.
“Yes, it is,” SAI replied.
“Through Ormond, I will be able to disable the device shortly. I believe they could use your aid in the park. The Devourer hive mind should be able to take back control of its forms, but until then, it would be good to prevent any loose ends.”
“Sure, I agree.” She gave Ormond a questioning look, and he nodded his okay.
“Hey, did your memories tell you the same thing about these creatures as mine did?” she asked, preparing to teleport by looking up through the ceiling and letting her software overlay the park as a destination onto her vision. It also popped up some real-time feeds so she could orient herself and picture her destination.
“Yeah, they did. These things work for the Tempest.”
His expression was wry.
The implications of them being here and now weren’t lost on him either.
Automated log update.
Subject’s engagement with the current circumstances has shown a positive outcome in the upper ninetieth percentile. Estimates of congruency based on factors for selection are proving correct to within five decimal places.
The situation at the Puzzle Box is changing, recorded timeline events are modifying the critical variables for subjective versus objective timeline.
Recordings mapped to files, updates on subject’s personal data in related system files are also up to date.
It looks like this plan just might work.
I am getting excited.
Recording continues.
* *
He watched Lekiso disappear: no flash, no spew of light, unlike the other uses they made with Gravitonics.
Apparently, the wormhole created to teleport them also sucked in the photons that would cre
ate the effect. He’d have to go over it later. The science seemed to require longer explanations than he needed most of the time.
His suit alerted him that the analysis of the device was complete and it could be shut down safely now. He activated the icon to do so, and the device powered down, going inert. His infiltration tendrils detached from the device and were reabsorbed into the forearm equipment on his arm.
Since he had to wait for anything else to happen, he went over to the spikes on the end of the wires that led to the device and began to pull them out of the Devourer organisms.
Two minutes later, he was pulling the last spike out when, from all around him in the room, there was a rumble. Then it came again, for all the world sounding as if some great and mighty throat was being cleared.
Then the Devourer mind spoke, and resonant harmonics from the speakers saturated the room, giving the sound a deep bass tone.
It spoke in Domum.
“Thank you.”
The surprise Ormond felt at the simple statement was profound.
“Uh, hey. You’re welcome.”
“Your system translates for you. I am still awakening, but my senses tell me you are not Domum. Not that it matters. While I am coming to my senses, would you be willing to talk with me? Conversation helps to get the impulses firing, and mine have been artificially subdued for quite some time.”
“Hey, sure.”
Looking over the sheer amount of biological flesh that he could see, Ormond decided to start with the most straightforward question: “What’s your name?”
“Ah, my name, yes. To every being that has an auditory faculty, there is the sound that is most inimical to life itself, the combination of atomic particles that results in the very essence of all living biological things. For carbon-based life and that which is other but still biological, every creature that I have so far encountered have had the same basic tenet. The source of life, whether in mixture or compound, is always the same. It is water.
“Water is in constant motion, not always able to escape its container but still with enough time to leave that container or forge a new path through other material. When it moves, it makes sounds. Water splashes on different materials. On a rock, in caves, in quiet places, there is a rushing and a gurgling of water.”
Abductees Page 40
