Aurona, page 50
Peter’s eyes widened. “Whoa! Gross, man!” he gagged. Pale as a ghost, he backed toward the curved wall, his hands feeling behind him for the open doorway.
Kron’s organs floated in three dimensions inside the rectangle, gleaming wet, pulsing and stripped of flesh. The connecting veins and arteries rhythmically pushed their respective cargoes of bluish or reddish blood in sync with his heart, just visible under the ghostly edge of a translucent sternum.
Peter had finally found the door. “Pardon me, excuse me, excuse me, everyone, I….” Gagging, he flew into the hallway.
Elena was totally overwhelmed. She lifted a finger in the air and then let her hand drop back to her side. “That is … that’s just… amazing. Wow. I wish we had this instrument back at Biozyne.”
As the circle of bald heads nodded profoundly, the lead physician explained. “This is only the beginning, Elena. VitaView’s main screen represents the overall picture. We can now isolate any organ and inspect it separately as well. Watch!” With a click, Kron’s heart appeared, floating in space. It was robust, pumping powerfully.
Adam stepped forward, leaning first to one side and then the other. “Well, I’ll be,” he muttered, tongue-in-cheek. “They missed, Kron!”
The doctor slit-smiled, his finger poised over another button. “But not by much, Adam. Here is the metallic invader, in relation to his heart!” A gleaming cone appeared, mere millimeters to the right. The bullet!
Duron leaned into the circle with concern in his dark eyes. “Quickly, Ranod! Pulmonary and then circulatory. Fenet needs to assess the damage.” He turned to the group and introduced the two as Ranod tapped the controls. “Fenet is our circulatory expert and Ranod our VitaView specialist. The best we have.”
A fantastic web of blood vessels now surrounded the pumping heart and gleaming bullet. Like a star’s exploding gaseous jet, a trail of plasmatic ooze clearly traced its path of entry, clouding the gel-like open spaces between. Obviously, several veins and one minor artery had been severed along the way.
As Peter poked his head in the door, his timing couldn’t have been worse: a bloody, gory view now filled the screen. Choking, his cheeks puffing out, he spun on his heel and ran down the hallway. Todd hid behind Joelle, trying to block his ears from the awful retching sounds.
Fenet wasted no time. “I am ready. Prepare yourself, Kron; here is the anesthetic.” As soon as he touched a probe gently against Kron’s forehead, his eyes clouded and went blank. The Bandor was inside Kron’s chest immediately, snaking a rubbery grasper along the cloudy path. In moments the bullet was out. He followed up immediately with a multi-tipped, nanorobotic manipulator arm, snipping, sucking, suturing and patching his way backward. He was indeed skilled at his profession; his slender fingers were a blur, the nanorobotic arm but a sensitive extension of his fingertips. The path of destruction slowly closed as the arm worked backward and then it, too, was out. He glued the surface of the wound together with a clear, flesh-colored dressing, then picked up a plain-looking applicator bottle and daubed it with the tip.
Adam rubbed his eyes. “What the…?” Incredibly, the puncture wound had already taken on a pinkish color, shading toward flesh tones around its perimeter. “It-it’s already healing? No way! What’s in that bottle anyway?”
Fenet tossed it to him. “Growth accelerator, Adam. Hyper Stemcells from living cultures of nuclei gathered inside Kron’s own body. They were cloned in rapid acceleration in mini laboratory conditions right inside that bottle. Of course, the Rasheen was the stimulant.”
Open-mouthed, Adam held the bottle up to the light, studying it. “No kidding!”
Hesitantly, Peter poked his head in the doorway. “You guys done yet?” He was shoved aside by an anxious-looking Todd towing a confused Joelle into the room.
Peter paused at the foot of the operating table. “Hey! W-where’s the hole?”
They all gawked, their eyes popping. Kron’s chest was smooth, unblemished!
It was incredibly hot in the depths of the equatorial rainforest, even in the shadow of the great saucer. Out here in the old-growth section, they’d found an incredibly rich vein: the gold was indeed thickest in the depths of the jungle, lying in long, filamentous ropes. Slightly below treetop level, the stolen starship was hovering over a circle of activity in its shadow. Cloaked in secrecy and under ever-watchful eyes, every port was open and bristling with cluttered arrays of sensors. Swiveling back and forth, the machines tracked the hostages as they made their way slowly through the soil, digging roots and flinging them onto utility barges, sweat pouring from their bodies. As man suddenly staggered and fell into the mud with heat prostration, someone bent to help.
“Back off!!” The butt of a rifle slammed down onto a log beside his hand, and the man jerked it away in alarm. “Leave him alone, scum! He’ll come around!” Dexor picked up a gleaming section of roots, his mouth twisted in a cruel grimace. “And I won’t be easy on you the next time,” he snarled, “I’ll just shoot! Hear me….” As a scream came from the perimeter of slate blue uniforms, he turned his head distractedly. “Oh, what now, another poison thorn?”
A sea of arms was pointing into the jungle. “Razah!” someone shouted.
Dexor threw up his hands in exasperation. “Oh, for … Trennic, Nastix! Go pop him! Target practice!”
A fusillade of bullets rained into the trees and the Razah dropped, riddled with holes. He spun around and shook his fist at the crew. “Whaddaya gawkin’ at? Keep workin’!” He bellowed. “You, over there! Pull that smelter closer to that pile of roots!”
As ten men leaned their backs into a plaited golden rope, the belching machine moved a few yards. Dexor rubbed his hands together in satisfaction. “Now throw ‘em in, all of ‘em!” Bluish smoke wafted upward through the canopy, and in a few minutes the root’s gleaming, fibrous netting melted in pops and whistles of steam. Out of the bottom of the glowing furnace, rivers of gold trickled into ceramic trays confiscated from the quarantine rooms. “That’s right, keep it all moving!”
The crew was working in tight, fearful, sweating shifts. The close quarters combined with the trapped heat from the smelter were almost unbearable. Two women backed away from the others, untangling roots. Taking a chance, Shana whispered into her friend’s ear. Her eyes darted around fearfully as she dropped another armload into the furnace. “Where are they? Why isn’t anyone coming?”
Kalar wiped the sweat from her brow, leaving a long, black smudge. “I don’t know,” she breathed. “They turned off our PILs when they took our wrist communicators. Why’d they make us dump everything out there in the desert?”
“Whaddaya think? More room for this stupid gold!”
“And what’re they gonna do with us? I mean when they’re, ah, done with us?”
“I don’t know; probably the same thing as the Razah.”
“Shoot us? Why?”
“For sport, of course. They’re twisted!”
With a loud clang, a bullet ricocheted off the smelter and plowed into the ground between them. Their faces drained of color. “You!” One of the odd-looking strangers screamed over their heads. “One more peep and you’re Razah meat!”
Suddenly, as if to back up his tirade, a brilliant arc of electricity lit the air between them and sliced off a lock of Shana’s hair. An unfamiliar, crazed-sounding figure screeched above them, brandishing a Stifler. “No interference will be tolerated! No whispering, no plans of escape! Until this ship is full, full, full, you will work, work, work! Only then I will decide what to do with you!”
Nastix turned and exchanged wide-eyed glances with his pals. This threat was obviously directed at them, too: It was becoming all too clear that this crazed Bitron had an agenda all his own. They groaned in frustration. The Scarred One had not been easy to deal with, especially in the last few days leading up to the coup. His mercurial temper had shown a new edge, and if possible, a widening crack of insanity was pulling him toward a dark, distant place. Those little pink pills, the ones he seemed to be eating like candy, should have given them a clue; it seemed the more he wolfed down, the more his mutilated hands shook.
Standing off to the side, Dexor fumed and cursed quietly to Nastix and Trennic. “Gaah! First, we let this jerk weasel his way into our plans with all his grandiose promises, and then he went berserk and started to bully us with threats of blackmail and exposure!”
“Yeah,” Trennic agreed, vehemently. “We were duped!”
Dexor’s lip curled. “And now he’s pulled his ugly crowd of cronies out of nowhere! Without him, it would’ve been so … simple!” Disgusted, he fumbled for his last clip of ammo. He’d noticed that everyone’s stash was getting precariously low, the Stifler rechargers were nowhere to be found, and there were still several more days of this hide-and-seek ahead before they could fill the ship and leave the planet.
“Hey,” he shrugged, “ten percent of this stupendous take ain’t chicken feed.”
As Kron swung his legs over the edge of the table in the recovery room, Adam looked up in alarm. “Hey, you,” he chuckled. “Lie back down. Fenet said no exertion!”
“Yeah, Kron!” Peter added. “You may look healed on the outside, but your inside’s still all mooshed up!”
Slowly, determinedly, Kron stood and shuffled over to join them at the big viewing screen. “So hold me up, okay?” he whispered. “I gotta see, too!”
Adam draped Kron’s arm over his shoulder. “Are you okay, buddy?”
“Mostly,” he replied, smiling. “So, ah, where are we, anyway?”
“Underground,” Tola shrugged. “We came in here through a big cave in the mountains. They had one of those gold force fields about a hundred yards inside the entrance. It opened and we passed through, and then the tunnel angled straight down. I mean, way down … in fact, we’re still going down! It’s a vertical shaft, kinda scary.”
They stared at the big screen. Brightly lit with wide, horizontal bands of living phosphorescence, a seemingly endless tube swept up and over them in a colorful, hypnotizing pulse.
Tola shook his head. “Too much excitement, guys. I-I’m getting too old for this.”
“Are any other ships with us?” Kron questioned.
Adam answered. “Yeah, four. We’re leading the procession.”
“But w-why so many?”
“Armed escorts,” he shrugged. “Hey! All of Aurona’s top leaders are in here!”
“Oh, right. Um, was there anyone else hurt besides me, sir?”
“Yes, unfortunately.” Adam grimaced. “Several, ah, several died, too.”
Tola turned to him, scowling. “I have the official guesstimate, sir, if you want to call it that. As far as I can figure, out of the original three hundred and fifty-one people, nine have died, if you include Senn. On this ship, I’ve counted two hundred and forty-two including you and your wife Elena. That leaves about a hundred that were taken hostage as far as we know….”
Peter interrupted. “S’cuse me, guys! I think we’re here…. Look!”
They had indeed stopped, and the viewing screen showed them joining ranks with hundreds of identical copies of their starships. They slipped into place along a vast, vertical wall, a tight, even pattern of saucers as far as the eye could see, parked and floating perpetually in space. Shuttlecraft emerged from cargo airlocks to whisk the armed Bandor guards and the remnant of the crew toward what looked like a hermetically sealed cliff building.
With a rustle of stiff fabric, some tall, white-robed Bandors swished purposely into the room. Movon stepped forward and flicked off the screen. “Time to go, gentlemen,” he slit-smiled. “And Kron, you must remain quiet for now. I know that you long to be with your comrades but your internal sutures are fresh and unfortunately fragile. The microthreads that Fenet’s nanorobotic arm deployed were soaked in a strong growth stimulant, but you only look like you are healed.”
Kron sighed in resignation. “Gotcha.”
Night had fallen. The hostages lay exhausted on the cool floor of one of the last empty quarantine rooms. Their captors had grown impatient with the incredibly slow progress and had decided to abandon the smelter: melting the gold roots into ingots was taking far too much time. Unfortunately, that meant the roots themselves had to be stuffed into every available space, so dirt was now smeared over nearly every floor of the starship and clods of weeds and mud were everywhere. In spite of further threats no one had yet been killed, but tomorrow might be a different story. Their quarantine room was completely sealed; all the latches had been fused into a twisted mass from the combined blasts of several Stiflers. They were alive, but despairing of the future and too afraid to sleep.
After about twenty minutes of numbed silence, they realized they were indeed alone for the night. One of the men staggered to his feet to open some drawers in a counter. “Boy, what I’d give for some water right now. A dry crust … anything!”
Another one answered. “Yeah! What could they be thinking? If they feed us, we’ll have enough strength to dig all the gold they’d ever need.”
Shana lifted her head from her knees. “Well, they do throw us a few scraps. And thank God they make us work in shifts or we’d be dead.”
In stark contrast, a great feast was in progress up in the mess hall: The cafeteria tables were sagging with the weight of food of every description. Shouting raucously, the revelers were passing around plate after plate of the best fare from the cryotanks. As the plasmorphs chewed eagerly, their eyes glazed over in rapture.
“Wow!” one of them shouted. “What is this? You call it beef? It comes from an animal called a-a cow? We’ve never tasted anything like this on Aurona!” He passed a broiled rib eye to the scarred one, sitting at the head of the table. A pair of shaking hands eagerly reached out for it.
Dexor smiled to himself. Yes, he’d guessed right. The demented plasmorph was indeed bordering on a psychotic state. That lithium bicarbonate he’d been swallowing by the handful didn’t seem to be working anymore. The fits of mania were nearly uncontrollable and the longer states of depression were becoming self-destructive. This fantastic Earth food seemed to fill the bill for now, calming his tormented mind and soothing the devils within. He leaned back, sipping his wine, biding his time.
Five miles beneath Aurona’s surface, Duron and the elders had assembled in an improvised situation room. “Welcome, friends, old and new. Our team must now find answers. We cannot waste another moment.” He nodded toward Adam.
Elena leaned wearily against her husband’s shoulder. Although Adam was exhausted as he spoke, his young eyes glowed with a strange new awareness. He cautioned them that although they’d be safe under Duron’s care, there was indeed no way to find the hostages with the stolen starship’s superb cloaking capabilities. After a short pause, he revealed his immediate plans: he urgently needed to pursue a forgotten but vital power source in order to help them.
Kron lifted a finger, thought a moment, and then let his hand fall weakly back into his lap. “Adam’s right, you know. We gotta seek answers wherever and whenever we find them. What else can we do right now?” He turned to Adam. “Go for it, man.”
Joelle gathered a squirming Todd in her arms and turned to Adam. “Ah, you look good, sir, I mean considering what you’ve just gone through. We’re so glad you made it!”
Adam raised his voice wearily. “Well, I’m glad I’m alive, for everyone’s sake … especially Elena’s. Now that we’re up to speed with each other, let’s turn this meeting over to the Elders. I’m sure they have some clues to head us in the right direction.”
Duron nodded and turned to his second in command. “Movon, if you will?”
Placing his palms on the surface of the featureless conference table, Movon closed his eyes in deep concentration. A hush fell on the large gathering as a hologram slowly formed in the center. Silently, majestically, it floated up to eye level.
Aurona! A breathtaking, translucent schematic shell of the planet revolved in the center of the room. Hundreds of neon-red lines were snaking through the depths and skirting the core. The speed tube’s intricate patterns and threadlike, multiforked branches and intersections looked like a tangled spider’s web.
The schematic began to change. As the red lines faded, a fine gridwork of green lit up, representing the land’s surface. Placed precisely on the fifty-mile intersections, pinpoints of electric blue were glowing. Motherlodes! Slowly spreading underground, tan-colored openings represented the Bandor cities as vast, horizontal excavations, then in the ocean’s depth, Meseo’s cluster of ultraviolet spheres coalesced on a seafloor ridge. Finally, with a faint hum, wormholes of fluorescent orange tunneled down vertically under strategic mountain ranges to end in large, spherical chambers.
“Whoa,” Adam breathed, “Duron, you don’t need to explain a thing; this map is incredibly clear and self-evident. The big questions are, I believe, also self-evident and clearly on everyone’s mind in this room: number one, are the crew’s PIL signals audible, and number two, can Dexor and his gang be stopped?”
The old one sighed. “Unfortunately, Adam, the PIL frequencies are silent: The crew’s wrist programmers have been confiscated by the Bitrons. You may not know this, but your starship’s shields are far more powerful than you could ever imagine: they generate a large sphere and even penetrate underground. Yes, they completely envelop your crew, in effect making them invisible to our telepathic abilities.”
“What? You can’t pick up their mind signals?”
“No. I am sorry, Adam. We could have easily located them by now.”
He exhaled a long breath. “I see. So things look hopeless at the moment, right?”
“Yes,” he nodded. “Nothing can penetrate your ship’s defensive shields. But we are working diligently; we are acting. There is a faint possibility that with all this heavy digging, the planetary system of linked, underground roots will register a feedback or disturbance into the Motherlode’s gridwork. A bright blue ripple should radiate outward and pinpoint their location on the schematic’s green gridwork.”
