Aurona, page 46
A twig snapped in the woods.
Elena cocked an ear. “Adam!” she hissed. “Did you hear that?”
A finger to his lips, he quickly retraced his steps back to the sled, slipped into his seat in a smooth, deliberate motion, and threw up the shields. With Elena pressed tightly against him, they watched through the shimmering curtain. It didn’t take long to spot a fleeting, sinuous movement. She whispered the single, dreaded word.
“Razah!!”
The great beast was slinking stealthily through the underbrush, his steps short and quick. He paused, bobbing his head up and down, intently focusing on something. They looked in the direction of his gaze and quickly spotted his prey.
Elena let out a gasp.”Oh, no! It’s-it’s….”
“Good grief, I see him!” Adam whispered, groping for his Stifler.
Barely fifty feet away, Jon’s disembodied shadow was stumbling aimlessly through the thorny scrub palmettos. Todd looked beaten, dazed, and forlorn: easy prey. Crouching low and slinking noiselessly, the beast was now well within stun distance. Catlike, he set his claws into the dirt for the final dash, the tip of his long tail twitching in anticipation. Suddenly, in a most uncatlike manner, he poised his big head at an odd angle and aimed his frontal lobes for the blast that would send the child down.
Adam gritted his teeth. “No!” Propelled by impulse and adrenaline, he threw off the shields and leaped to his feet. “Hey, stupid! It’s me you want!” he shouted. “I’m over here!” Setting his Stifler to ‘kill,’ he vaulted out of his seat and began to walk slowly toward the startled yellow eyes.
Elena sprang to her feet. The whole scene had quickly turned into a nightmare and events were spinning way out of control. “Adam!” she screamed. “Are you crazy??”
With a loud thump and crash, Todd tripped on a root and fell, crying out loudly in pain. As Adam turned his head for a split second, his sweaty palms felt the heavy Stifler slip. Suddenly he found himself grabbing at the air as it dropped, bounced off a root, and rolled somewhere into the underbrush. “Oh, no!” Adam’s eyes widened in shock. The tables had abruptly turned and fear struck deeply with its icy sword.
Fear: the great beast’s primal instincts sensed his age-old ally permeating the air; this tall one had succumbed to it and frozen in his tracks. An easy target. He spun toward Adam and aimed his bulbous forehead for a massive, pent-up neuron blast.
“Adam!” Elena screamed. “Run! The sled! The shields!”
Regaining his senses, he spun on his heels. “Get ready!! I’m gonna ju….”
With a guttural sound, his words were cut off at the throat. A visible, moving wave slammed into him from behind with tremendous force and threw his lanky body through the air to land facedown on the ground, inches from his goal. The blue lights of the sled’s internal laser guidance flickered, played over his body, then shut off with a muffled click.
Enraged, Elena began to scream at the top of her lungs, throwing backpacks, shoes, anything that wasn’t tied down. Hurtling through the air, a heavy specimen cage suddenly found its mark. The Razah bellowed loudly in pain, lashing at the air with his claws. Spinning toward her, he lowered his head to build up another massive neuron charge that would put this bothersome one away for good.
“Tola? Anybody?” she yelled, desperately scanning the rainforest for a sign of her friends. “Where are you??”
A small shout of acknowledgement came from the woods. Todd was limping toward her, his plump body covered with gashes, his slanted almond eyes streaked with tears. Her eyes quickly focused on his hand: dragging it awkwardly by the barrel, he was pulling a long Stifler behind him! She thought fast: if she threw up the shields to save herself, Todd would be stunned and she’d lose both him and Adam in the process. She had to take this last-ditch, calculated risk.
Keeping an eye on the Razah, she smiled reassuringly at the confused boy. Folding her hands together, she pointed a finger at the beast.
“Pow! Zing!!” she mimicked the sound of a Stifler.
The Razah was now thoroughly enraged. These loud creatures were annoying, far more annoying than his usual fare of quiet, passive jungle creatures. His neuron charge was ready. Lashing his tail, he angled his head for the easy stun.
A light suddenly dawned on Todd’s round face. With a determined look, he turned the heavy gun around, aimed at the Razah, and squeezed the trigger. In rapid succession, two very different blasts cleaved the air and found their marks: As the Stifler’s blazing arc of lightning slammed into the Razah’s body and threw him off-balance, the beast released a hasty, badly aimed mind-stun. Winged, Elena fell unconscious into the sled.
It was over: shouting in anguish and milliseconds too late, Tola and his Bandor party sped into the clearing with their weapons drawn.
The cloaked starship skimmed over the treetops like a shimmering ghost. Down in a cavernous central hold, shouts of anger and defiance rang loudly. Locked up and held captive, about a hundred of the helpless crew were watching a monitor over their heads. As their beloved, smoking Prima slipped into the distance, the view turned into rolling jungle and then to flat, gray static. They turned to each other, their eyes wide and their jaws dropping in disbelief.
The mood was quite different up in the control room, almost a party atmosphere. Thirty odd-looking strangers were milling around Dexor and his two companions, gibbering in an unknown tongue as they squabbled over the starship’s controls.
Trennic scowled, whispering. “Boy, they sure are ugly!”
Dexor’s cold blue eyes shot him a look of alarm. “Quiet, you fool!” he hissed. “We don’t know who we’re dealing with!”
The man looked around. “Where’d these dudes come from, out of the woodwork?”
“You could say that,” Dexor replied. “They’re Bitron outlaws, all of ‘em. The same race Kron lived with but renegades, like us. By the way, they’re also plasmorphic.”
“Plas-what-ic?”
Dexor leaned into him and twisted his arm painfully. “Like this, knucklehead: plastic! They’ve got changeable bodies! They can disguise themselves!”
Grimacing and rubbing his sore arm, Trennic studied the aliens in a new light. “You mean they’ve been here all the time, but d-disguised as….”
“You got it,” Nastix cut in. “I saw one of ‘em changing shape when he jumped off his SpeedSled. First he was a Bandor, then … Poof! Ugly dude!”
“Lemme fill you in,” Dexor snarled. “These aren’t your run-of-the-mill outlaws. I overheard they’ve been banned from their planet for life! Sound familiar?”
The two elbowed each other in the ribs. “Sure does,” Trennic nodded. “Those fake ID’s cost a fortune, but they worked! Hey, that dumb bat-geek fell for ‘em!”
Dexor lowered his voice to a barely audible whisper. “These ugly, scarred dudes have been waiting here on Aurona over seven hundred years for….” He jerked his thumb toward the commander’s seat. “Their, ah, number one honcho over there.”
As they turned to look, the hooded figure spun on his seat and glared directly at them, his lips curled into a snarl, the shadowed pig-eyes full of hate. Slowly, deliberately, he stood up, lowered his hood, and slithered toward them. With a shrug, the dark cloak slipped from his body, the stilettos glinting and hilts rattling.
The three drew in a collective breath. For the first time, they could plainly see his features: an impossibly wide gash ran across the top of his head, another deep scar connected a corner of his mouth to a mutilated ear and he was nearly bald, whitish tufts of hair scattered randomly over a deeply furrowed dome.
The Scarred One paused, raised his hairy, beetled brows, and struck an odd, almost awkward pose. The room fell silent. His features started to shift and bump around, as if someone were under his skin trying to get out. He was transforming. By the time he’d taken three steps his deep scars had smoothed out, two more steps and his pig-eyes protruded and became almost like glass. A final step closed the gap and he stood face to face with Dexor.
“So,” he hissed, “we meet again … as strangers!”
Gagging, Dexor shrank away form the putrid, rotten breath. The voice was still the same, with its snarling, grating whine.
“Of course, you should know by now that you’ve only been puppets in the big picture, a means to an end, all four of you…. Oops, sorry. One down, three to go.”
Dexor flinched. This was now a life-or-death situation. His mind raced back to all the tactics he’d used before. The defiant stance never worked, nor the capable, independent leader-type. It narrowed quickly to boot-licker. He brightened, taking on a sadistically optimistic cheeriness. “Hey!” He smiled. “Did ya see the way your guys mowed ‘em down? Blood was everywhere! Man! With these presto-chango disguises we can write our own ticket and rule!”
“We…. We?” The Bitron laughed uproariously, maniacally. Calming himself, he slowly shook his head. “No go, Dexo. Not this time…. However!” He poked a single, crooked finger in the air. “There still may be a few, shall we say, ‘management’ positions open?” He raised a thin brow testily. “That’s before we possibly say goodbye. That is, the long goodbye.”
Trennic and Nastix eyed the exits, ready to bolt.
The Bitron caught on. “Of course, my allies will make sure that you don’t change your minds.” A few heads turned in their direction, nodding. “So go ahead! I know you’re angry, but take out your aggression on your own kind! Focus it! ‘Manage’ them!” He thought a minute, pursing his thin lips. “But of course we don’t want to shoot too many; we need all the workers we can get. There’s a lot of heavy lifting and digging ahead. We, ah, may end up having to ask you to do it!”
He walked slowly back to his seat, pondering, his eyes masklike and expressionless. He spun around. “Let’s just say this for now: the better you are at controlling them, the better your chances for your own survival…. Got it?”
Dexor’s mouth had turned into a tight, hard line. “Got it,” he muttered.
As the last clinging curtains of pain parted, Elena opened her eyes. Several people were milling around the clearing, busily carting the Razah’s rigid carcass away and pulling Jon’s SpeedSled upright. She looked around in a daze, trying to remember what happened.
Sitting on a nearby SpeedSled, Joelle was consoling a terrified, whimpering Todd in her lap. She turned to Elena, relieved that she was finally awake. “Hey! Glad you’re back with us, hon.” She pulled the heavily bandaged boy to her chest, calming him down. “He’s got nobody now and I’ve made up my mind: I want to adopt him.”
Elena’s eyes focused over Joelle’s shoulder into the distance. “Is that a stretcher? Who’s being loaded onto…. No!” Her memory suddenly rushed back. “Adam!!” She squeezed her eyes shut, her head and spinal cord throbbing in painful spasms.
Tola leaned toward her. “I’m sorry to say this, Elena, but it doesn’t look good,” he whispered, biting his lip. “He’s beginning to, ah, draw up into a fetal position.”
“What? That indicates very serious brain damage!”
He grimaced. “One of the Bandor guards mentioned that nobody could survive a major stun like that at such close range. Adam-Adam’s heartbeat is … well, that’s fading, too.” The little round man bowed his head. “God help us.”
Peter shuffled toward them, averting his eyes. “We saw it happen with our scope vision, Elena. There was nothing we could do. We were too far away.”
Rico joined him. “There were no more SpeedSleds! We were running as fast as we could away from Prima! Some of us of could see the whole thing happening through that holocamera.” He jerked his thumb toward a sphere hovering inconspicuously in the branches. “We felt helpless! We saw Adam fall and then you….”
Tola interrupted. “You guys sent a camera to ‘SEEK’ Jon?”
“Yes,” he said. “It didn’t take long to find him,” he sighed, glancing at the blood-smeared barge. “Jon and his little brother fought well. They were part of the defensive ranks.”
Elena opened one eye. “Defensive ranks?” Alarmed, she pulled herself upright, her pile of wet compresses falling to the ground. “Defensive ranks? What’s going on here? Peter? Rico? The truth, now!”
Rico lowered his head. “Our saucer’s gone, Elena. The very heart of Prima has been ripped out of its socket! I’m afraid to say that a lot of the crew have been taken hostage and, ah, some very good people have been … killed.”
She fell back, stunned: this was far worse than she could have imagined!
Joelle tapped an earbud and shifted a pale-looking Todd in her arms. “Hey, I just got a call from Prima. Gotta get back there real quick.”
Tola shrugged. “You’re right. Go ahead, the four of you. Hop onto Adam’s barge with him before it leaves. The rest of us’ll follow.” He patted Todd’s arm, smiling reassuringly. The pale boy looked like he needed blood and some pretty serious stitches to pull him together. He turned back to Elena. “Now, as for you….”
She was sitting up on the edge of her stretcher. “I’m going too,” she stated, matter-of-factly. “My place is with my husband.”
He threw up his hands. “So! As I was saying, why don’t we all go! What are we waiting for?”
Although Prima’s waterfront was darkened with soot, its soaring shapes were dotted with strange, windblown puffs of white. Aeronautas had arrived, hundreds of them, poking among the rubble for anything edible. The blood-spattered walls were especially interesting. Their moist trunks uncoiled to taste the unfamiliar, rich, dried protein.
As the minutes ticked away, Adam’s condition worsened alarmingly. Duron hovered closely at his side, his long fingers fluttering helplessly in the air, hissing commands to the elders in short, clipped phrases. It was obvious to everyone that the old Bandor loved his delightful young protégé; in a very short time this young human had become like a son, like his own flesh and blood.
Elena groaned, burying her face in her blanket. Within the space of an hour, everything had been turned completely upside down: the entire mission had gone from the loftiest pinnacles of security and success, then dashed to bloody despair on the ground. Several open graves lined the waterfront, ready for their young occupants. She turned away, touching Adam’s face softly. As death began its relentless claim, his paralyzed fingers were growing steadily colder. She grasped his stiff hands, crying.
The elders quickly withdrew into a tight circle, pulling Duron with them. Although Prima’s rubbery walls muffled the sound of their loud, sibilant language, in the midst, the anguished timbre of Duron’s voice could easily be picked out.
“No! There is not enough time! He….”
Someone reached under his chin and tapped off his translator button. Although the English was cut short, his grief-stricken Bandorese lingered loudly in the air.
The confused, haggard remnant of the crew lay down their shovels, shook the dirt off their clothes, and walked out onto the pier. They cast furtive looks at their leader, appalled at his appearance: a humming respirator was crammed down his distended throat and his oddly contorted body seemed to be frozen in rigor mortis.
Elena suddenly felt violated by their prying eyes. “Please,” she sobbed, covering him protectively with her blanket. “Please go away!! I understand how you feel, but there’s nothing you can do!” As they backed away confused, she flicked her tangled hair away from her face and tried to regain her composure. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I-I’ve heard rumors that Kron was hurt during the break-in. Does anyone know how he is?”
Tola answered. “Truthfully, he’s, ah, really bad.” He clenched his fists. “Joelle’s with him right now, giving him a transfusion in Adam’s quarters. Peter’s the donor.”
“Oh, no! What happened?”
“A bullet got him, next to his heart. A bullet, Elena! We’re talking about semiautomatic weapons here, not electronic Stiflers! He was checking out a disturbance in your quarters when they cut him down. He had no time to react.”
“In our room? We had nothing of value in there, except the keys … to….” She squeezed her eyes shut, a groan escaping from her lips.
Tola shook his head. “The starship was only a means to their end, Elena. They’re after gold. Gold! Can you imagine?”
The circle of elders parted and Duron stepped out. His stride was quick, his voice steady, and his manner efficient. “Elena, you are to come with us,” he ordered, quietly. “There is only one hope left for Adam and we have decided to pursue it. As there is insufficient time to unlock, power up, and dispatch another starship from our deep underground vaults, we are taking some SpeedSleds over that nearby ridge to the ocean’s shore. There, transportation awaits to take us to … the island.”
She gathered her blankets in haste. “Anything, Duron, anything. Take us anywhere. Do whatever it takes to save his life. We’re in your hands, now.”
The waves were rolling onto the shore with the sound of hollow thunder. The sea had a heavy chop and a stiff breeze was blowing in the morning’s chill storm. Elena squinted into the biting wind. A great bubble of seawater was rising from the ocean’s surface. Barely visible inside was a small, rectangular black box.
The elders stood shivering on the shore, rough blankets draped over their spotless ceremonial robes. Moving hastily, they unrolled a large, ten-foot metallic disc on the sand. As one, they picked up Adam’s stretcher, positioned it carefully over the disc, and lowered it into the center. Gathering robes and blankets, they clustered tightly around it. As Elena joined them, she looked over her shoulder and stole another look at the enormous bubble.
“So how do we get inside that thing without getting wet?”
Duron pulled at her sleeve. “Patience, child. Sit down. We will be inside in moments.” Turning, he motioned solemnly to the others. “Ready?”
As their palms turned silently upward, a snap, an electrical buzz, and the smell of ozone permeated her senses. A bright seam of light started to zip itself together around the perimeter of the disc and travel upward, drawing in long streams of the ever-present flecks of glittering gold foil from the air. A shield! In seconds, the gleaming golden shell shut with a loud retort above their heads. Rising swiftly from the waves, the bubble came ashore and settled over them, engulfing the brilliant orb. As one, the elders leaned their bodies toward the sea. Elena quickly followed suit. The bubble rose into the air, transformed into a horizontal teardrop, and swiveled toward the distant horizon.
