Aurona, page 41
There was an impossibly long, silent moment.
Tola finally spoke up. “Ah, nice threads,” he ventured, lamely.
Elena had been studying his face. “Adam, you okay? And where have you been, flying around the sun? Your face is all swollen!”
A sharp pain stabbed at the base of Adam’s skull, followed by a wave of nausea. He groped for balance, disoriented and confused.
“Yo!” Kron quickly offered him his chair. “Can you, ah, sit, sir?”
The wave passed. Grunting and twisting he sat, thought a minute, then released his wrist straps and flexed his webbed hands. “I-I feel like a beached whale.”
“Better than you look,” Elena quipped. An underlying quaver crept into her tone. “A-Adam, please listen. There’s something really wrong with your face. Y-you’ve got weird red streaks under your hair, your lips are blue, and your eyes are all bloodshot.”
“Well,” he reasoned, “the Rasheen seems to be working more quickly than they expected! That is, I meant to say a whole lot faster….”
“You didn’t!!”
“Yup. Nasty stuff. Down the hatch!”
Tola shook his head uncertainly. “We-we all thought you were a goner when you dropped from the sky like a bullet. What happened?”
He lifted his throbbing head. “Well, the column of light was fading quickly so I had to, ah, hurry. Truthfully, I thought I’d be flying back here in the dark and end up ramming into the tower. Thanks for crankin’ up your headlights!”
Elena sighed, rolling her eyes. “Adam, please. You had us all scared to death!”
He slipped his icy hands around hers. “Yup. I’m back and I’ve got a very, very tall tale to tell! Come closer all of you. You’re my trusted inner circle.”
As the small group clustered tightly around him and listened intently, a spark of wonder kindled in their eyes and swiftly grew in intensity. Elena started to tremble. “You actually did it? A full dose? And now your brain is changing?”
“Yup. Oh, and the elders suggested that you five might make excellent first candidates. You know, to open up your minds and voluntarily share your thoughts?”
They pulled back, suddenly feeling vulnerable.
“Hey, don’t worry: you can turn off your thoughts, too. Among other things, there’s a defense mechanism you can learn called ‘mind-shields.’”
They rolled their eyes at each other, thought a minute, and then shrugged.
“Okay. That’s settled.” He stood up decisively, clipped his forearms back onto the leading edge of his wings, and grabbed the booms. “Enough of this chit-chat,” he grinned. “I’ve got things to do and places to go. We’ll flesh all this out in more detail later, when we can talk more privately.” With a rustle of fabric, he waddled his way toward the railing. “Hey, Kron, would you pull that chair over here?”
Elena gasped. “Adam! You can’t be thinking what I think you’re thinking!”
“Bingo!” He mounted the rail and teetered on the brink. “What’s the diff, hon?” he shrugged, a mischievous gleam in his eye. “Two miles or three hundred feet?”
Tola glanced over his shoulder. “Pay no attention to him,” he hissed in a loud stage whisper. “Why’d anyone want to listen to some nut in a Day-Glo jumpsuit, anyway? They’re all the same!”
Adam laughed, peering over the edge. Far below, one of the crew had just noticed him. “There he is!” The voice wafted upward. “Turn up the spots!”
As the lights hit him full force, his suit blazed to life in a vibrant splash of color. Once more, he was the center of attention and made the most of the occasion. Theatrically snapping out his booms, he raised the broad wings over his head with a flourish. “Here goes,” he quipped, tensing to jump, “one small step for man, one giant leap for….”
Elena groaned. “Adam, please!”
The simple WingSuit had almost turned into an extension of his body, an expression of pure instinctual joy. He cranked up his antigrav, leaped out into the air, and floated lightly away from the tower.
Two men nervously climbed out on top of the starship’s slippery dome. One of them braced his feet unsteadily, dialed up the suction of his footgrippers, and pressed a NightScope to his eyes. An ominous, vertical wall of clouds was approaching in the distance. “Man! It looks like a bad one!” He studied the black clouds a moment, shaking his head in disbelief, then lowered his scope a bit to focus on the top of the tower. “Huh? What in heck’s goin’ on over there? Hey, man, check this out!” He knelt to scoot the instrument down his companion. “Incoming!”
The scope clattered on the polished surface and bumped into Nastix’s back.
“Hey, what gives?” the man grumbled.
“Shut up and look!” Trennic hissed. “You’re not gonna believe it!”
Nastix anchored his footgrippers firmly. As he lifted the beeping lenses to his eyes, two circles of blue light softly clicked on within the rims. Faster than he could blink, laser and sonar beams factored in the optical formula for the curvature of his corneas. With a faint whirring and clicking noise, the unforgettable view autofocused.
“Yike!” A giant foot kicked toward him in shocking clarity, starkly lit up from below. He quickly zoomed out. “Whaaat? Orange spandex? Where’d he dig up that rig?”
“I’m tellin’ ya,” Trennic repeated, “he’s lost it! The geek’s showin’ off to his airhead friends!”
Suddenly, there was a derisive snort behind them. “Well, looky there!” Dexor clambered out of the open hatch, a NightScope in his hand. “I see a party goin’ on! Looks like our resident lunatic’s come out tonight, modeling her latest designer bat-suit!”
There was a muffled chorus of hoots. “Don’ worry boss, the bat-freak’s right at home,” Nastix sniped, “buzzin’ around his belfry!”
“What can I say,” Dexor agreed. “They’re all freaks! Every last brainwashed one of ‘em! Just look at ‘em!”
There was a long silence as the three watched the colorful spectacle. Suddenly, there was a deafening crash as another hatch slammed open right at their feet.
“Nuttin’ boss!!” Senn bellowed into the darkness. “Da room’s whistle clean!”
As the two attempted to recover their balance, Dexor gritted his teeth and bent over stiffly to glare at him, the veins in his neck standing out like ropes. “S-s-s-stifle yourself, you boob!” he hissed. “You’ll wake the dead! And whaddaya mean, ‘empty’? The keys have to be there!”
“Ah-ah, he musta’ took ‘em, boss!” the man stammered. “R-right? They were in da blue uniform, right? He wuz wearin’ it when he disappeared … right?”
Dexor’s ill-composed tone began to crack. “Think, mono-brow! Use that pea brain and be imaginative for once! Think, like me! The suit’s gone, so what would I do?”
The beefy man bit his lip. “Ah, I dunno.”
There was a measured pause. “Precisely,” Dexor sighed. “Well, let’s see. First of all, it’s pretty obvious that everyone’s quite, ah, distracted right now, right?
Senn looked. They were. His ridged forehead furrowed deeper in concentration. Dexor waited for a sign, a spark, his patience nearly gone. He turned to the three. “Stay with me now, guys: this is critical, very critical!”
Nastix glanced at him questioningly. “Why, boss?”
“Tonight’s the night!” Dexor hissed. “Our stowaway’s out! His pod is open!”
Stunned, the three drew in their breath sharply. Nastix broke into a fit of coughing. “Ah, what time did he…?”
“This morning.” Dexor interjected, putting on a scowl to mask his nervousness. “I was down there checking as usual when his light popped on. It read, ‘Three hours to opening.’ I grabbed all the notes and recordings we’ve been collecting and piled them in front of the pod. He’ll read them of course, lose his temper, and then start looking for us!” He bent back to Senn. “So, this is it, big guy, the bottom line: we’ll have to walk into that warehouse tonight with something tangible to offer, a plan in the works, something to show we been doin’ our part! We really, really need those keys….”
“I-I know, boss,” a nervous Senn cut in, nodding vehemently. “We gotta get da keys! We gotta show him sompin’!”
“Hallelujah!! It breathes!” Dexor threw up his hands. “Now watch my lips: go steal a SpeedSled.”
“Steal a SpeedSled,” he parroted.
“Go up to the top of the Motherlode and check it out. Most likely he left his uniform, and therefore his keys up there?” he prompted. “On top of … the…?”
A light came on, a dim bulb, but a light. “The tree! On top’a the tree!!”
Dexor’s jaw clamped in frustration. “And use your cloaking device!”
Tucking in his chin, Senn stole a nervous glance at his boss and backed down the ladder. “G-g-got it! The cloakin,’ ah, ah … cloakin’ what?”
“Devissss-s-se!!” Dexor struggled to pull his clenched teeth apart, furiously rubbing his jaw muscle out of spasm. “And no lights, pinhead,” he snarled, “they might see you! Remember to use your heat sensor for traces of….”
“Hey, take a look at that!!” Nastix shouted.
Dexor spun on his heel, teetering precariously on the edge of his open hatch. It seemed to be a night made for interruptions. Somehow, quite by itself, his jaw locked up. “How many timessss to I have to ssssay it? Sssstifle yourselvesss!”
His eyes wide, Nastix mutely nodded into the distance. They looked.
Far away, faintly backlit by the waning column of light, an oddly glowing silhouette was hurtling directly toward Adam. Like a cruise missile, its smooth flying form seemed to offer no resistance to the air.
Totally unaware, Adam turned up his antigrav to the max and shot upward. His timing couldn’t have been better. Precisely where he’d been, the odd shape streaked under his feet, a blur of a glowing ultraviolet and indigo hurtling through the night. He felt the turbulence rocking him. “Hey, what was that?” Distracted, he glanced down, and then back up over his head. “And where are the stars? They were there a minute ago!”
His answer arrived with a chill slap in the face. Like a bullet through a marshmallow, his body punched through a low-flying rain cloud, drenching his skin. “A c-cloud?” he sputtered, shaking away ribbons of streaming moisture. “But-but the sky was clear a second ago!” He stopped at the zenith of his climb, floating at three thousand feet, motionless, weightless, breathless and dizzy.
“Aadam!”
He cocked his head to the side. Was that the crew shouting? He shivered and sneezed several times in succession. It was freezing at this altitude in his WingSuit’s clinging, soaked fabric.
“Aaaadam!!”
He glanced around, startled. The searchlights found him and homed in; crossing their beams, they lit up his WingSuit like an orange Day Glo beacon.
“Aaaaadammm!!”
Something shot by his face, banking in a steep turn. “Yow!” He tried to follow the movement. “What’s that thing?” he gasped. “A shuttlecock from hell??”
As a searchlight zeroed in on the new arrival, he could see it clearly. It had an odd, almost comical silhouette, bulbous on one end and tattered on the other. “Creepy,” he intoned, his teeth chattering. It was barely fifty yards away and closing fast. Something like lightning was sparking out of the bulbous end and pulses of ultraviolet were flashing down the sides. Fear suddenly coursed through his veins. He plotted desperately, trying to focus, trying to gauge the distance and tensing to dive. “Oh, no! Too late! No time! No….”
The missile flared to a stop inches from his nose. Eyeball to eyeball, they stared at each other a long, tenuous moment. With a nervous cough, a young Bandor uncoupled a wrist clamp and raised a single, trembling finger. Adam winced and ducked away, then looked sheepish. The stranger was merely tapping his translator button.
“Adam, I came to warn you!”
“Ah, w-warn me?” he chattered. “W-what do you….”
His chilling message cut him off. “A great storm is on the way!”
“Huh? There’s been no storms on Aurona for years!”
The Bandor’s eyes grew wide. “Believe me, it is coming! This one will arrive in minutes! You must alert your crew at once!”
Adam peered into the darkness past the youth’s taut, indigo-colored wings. A strange whirring sound was coming from the distance, like a thousand angry bees. The youth heard them too and spun around. If possible, his mushroom-colored face blanched even more pale under his dark helmet.
“There they are! We-we must dive immediately! The-the danger comes not from the storm itself, but what it carries in the winds ahead of it!”
Abruptly, a chopping sound beat the air. Adam jerked his head up in time to catch a glimpse of what looked like a whirling, upside-down cone thundering by a hundred feet over their heads. “What in God’s name is that?” he pointed.
The youth quavered, speechless with horror. The distant hum was swelling into a mighty roar as more of the twirling cone shapes rode the wind toward them. The young Bandor had turned rigid with shock, his slit mouth gaping.
“What are those things?” Adam shouted. “Tell me!”
Silence. The youth’s dark eyes were fixed on the gathering hoards with a blank, glazed expression. Adam looked down. The tower was a long way off. In a last-ditched effort, he abruptly changed his tactics. Concentrating hard, his mind translated the most elaborate, intricately shaped runes he could conjure up, and then formed them into a forceful wave.
“Last one down to the tower is a rotten egg!”
The youth’s eyes snapped toward him. Adam’s totally unexpected, yet more intimate mode of communication jolted him out of his paralyzed state.
“Rotten egg?” he beamed back. “A spoiling embryo, Adam? Yes, Movon was right; you people use the strangest idioms.”
Adam rolled his eyes, grabbed the youth by his arm, and pointed downward emphatically. “Move it or lose it!” he shouted.
“What?”
“Dive, dive!!!”
Reversing their antigrav to a power-assisted pull, they tucked in their chins and somersaulted forward. The dancing spots attempted to follow the two brightly colored meteors as they streaked toward the top of the tower.
“Okay, that’s it! There they go!!”
Falling over each other in haste, the four mutineers dove into the starship’s open hatches and clanged loudly down a set of narrow metal steps. At the base of the holosphere, they burst out into the main hallway in a mad rush, with Senn splitting off toward an airlock to get a SpeedSled while the others piled into an open elevator.
The door slid shut and a bright overhead diffuser snapped on. His fists clenching, Dexor spun toward Trennic. “This had better be worth it, scumbag! How many Spyders did you plant on top of the tower anyway? Two? Three? And the codes, the codes! Did you write ‘em all down like I asked?”
A shaking, rumpled list appeared, yanked unceremoniously out of a pocket. “Here ya go, boss,” Trennic wheezed, “I parked twelve of ‘em along the edge of the rail! Good, huh?” His eyes had a round, eager-to-please look.
There was no time to answer appropriately. A faint synthe-voice cut in to announce their location. “Level R,” it lulled. “Center Storeroom.”
The elevator door slid open silently. A stooped, hooded figure stood with his back to them, brooding over a jumbled pile of e-helmets, his fingers drumming impatiently on top of an empty crate. Hearing the barely audible pop and squish of their footgrippers on the metal floor, he spun around in a snarling flourish. “Yaahhhhhhh!”
They stopped in a collection of squeaks, riveted in their tracks. The Scarred One’s bloodshot eyes were wild and dribbles of froth were clinging to the corners of his mouth.
“What took you so long to open my pod?” he spit. “Me, down here, alone, a prisoner, while you flit around free as a bird? You forgot me! Meeeee!” He stomped his tooled leather boots hollowly in the cavernous hold. “I’m the originator! I’m the mentor! How dare you leave me down here?” he thundered.
Dexor croaked out a reply. “Ah, we got here a month ahead of schedule. Your pod wasn’t connected to the mainframe because the plug was busted and the, ah, timing was off….” His voice was drowned out by the ventilation system as it came on with a roar. The crumpled paper fluttered in his hand. He made an effort, too late, to slip it behind his back.
The shadowed pig-eyes narrowed. “Give that to me at once!”
Quaking, Trennic and Nastix tried to hide behind each other’s backs. This mysterious, mutilated being they’d been waiting for was definitely deranged; an unspeakable, pent-up fury was raging inside. The tense mood suddenly worsened. Without warning, a pair of small stilettos silently, mysteriously appeared from somewhere within voluminous folds of the black cloak. The Scarred One brandished them carelessly, seemingly oblivious to the numerous small cuts all over his hands.
“So the plug was busted, huh?” he sniped. “And you couldn’t fix it? Nitwits!” He looked around the room. “And where’s that other nitwit? The fat idiot? He’d better not be spilling the beans about us, had he? Well, had he?”
“H-he’s, ah, g-gone,” Dexor stammered.
“Wha-a-a-a-t???”
As the hold rang ominously, Dexor’s face flushed crimson. “Ah, a-actually, I sent him out on a little reconnaissance mission. Senn’s looking for Adam’s uniform. You know, his captain’s uniform? The blue one? He, Adam that is, he’s not wearing it now, mind you. He’s, ah, trying on something else with, um, a little different flavor. As soon as Senn finds them, the keys, that is, he’ll bring them….”
Flames erupted. “What are you babbling about?” The darkly stained lips were frothing copiously around their edges. “Just shoot them!” he spat. “Didn’t I tell you to just kill them? Get all the idiotic trash out of the way, take the keys, grab the discs, and leave! Simple? Well, simple? We should have loaded this starship to the hilt with gold by now!”
“But Senn might have the keys, even as we speak!”
The dark figure twirled around with lightning speed. “Don’t mess with me, Dexor,” he hissed, juggling the flashing pair of stilettos in a hypnotizing rhythm. “I happen to know the exact location of every major artery under your thin skin.”
