Genesis - One
(When Rian is first abducted by the Reidar)
Onboard the Battleship Lone Glider
Rian Sherron checked the numbers on the console’s crystal display against the same figures on the commpad he held. Who would have guessed he’d ever be thankful for the simplicity of checking munitions supplies? He was calling this a break after the week of grunge duty he’d pulled since being deployed on the medium-sized battleship Lone Glider, the vessel tasked with finding and quelling a contingent of independent rebel ships in one of the distant outer systems.
Yep, they were a trillion miles from any decent kind of civilization—definitely not the way he’d imagined spending his eighteenth birthday in a few short days. Not that he’d be having any official celebration. As far as his superior officers were concerned, he was turning twenty, not eighteen. He’d signed on to fight in the Assimilation Wars the day after his sixteenth birthday with a forged ident card that’d cost him all the money he’d been able to scrape together by selling a few things out of his family’s mansion he hadn’t thought his parents would miss. Only two people in the entire Inter-Planetary Coalition military knew his true age—Lieutenant Captain Zander Graydon and Captain Colter Routh—men who’d become like older brothers to him. And they’d ensured he’d gotten good and wasted for an early birthday celebration the night before shipping out on his latest deployment.
“Hey, Sherron, you done with those munitions yet? There’s a whole level of ground deployment equipment waiting to be checked and it’s got your name on it.”
He glanced over to where his unit commander had stopped in the hatchway.
“Sir, yes, sir. I’ll let you know when I’m finished here.”
His CO tapped a hand against the hatchway before disappearing from sight again.
Spending his days checking supplies wasn’t exactly glamorous, but he’d finally made the rank of Air Squadron Officer, which got him off ground assignments and on a ship. Yeah, there were way worse things he could have been doing and his last deployment, where he and a contingent of soldiers had gotten marooned—out of contact and with no supplies—on the war torn planet of Minnea for eight months had been a literal hell. He’d been lucky to survive—most of the men he and Zander, as his CO, had set out with had died. The two of them had barely survived. Honestly, if it hadn’t been for Zander, he probably would have given up and gotten himself killed long before they got rescued.
A shudder ripped down his spine, leaving a cold sweat and slightly queasy sensation in his stomach. The memories from Minnea were still too fresh, and he couldn’t deal with them right now. The military shrink he’d seen after he’d gotten back had cleared him for duty, but warned that the experience would haunt him for years, memories and dreams rising from his subconscious when he least expected it as his mind worked its way through the trauma—or some psycho-babble crap like that.
Maybe there were easier ways to make money to send home to his kid sister—still going to that damn fancy private school his parents had stopped being able to afford years ago—but as a pissed off sixteen year old, the military had seemed stupidly glamorous. Pay him to see the galaxy and walk around with a gun on his hip? Hell, yeah. But the reality had been piss-inducingly different.
He could have quit, but he’d never been that smart, so he’d taken the reality check that’d bitch slapped him in the face, gotten serious, and worked his ass off. Now, after everything he’d been through, it was like the military had leeched into his veins and he couldn’t ever see himself being able to go home and live like normal people.
Maybe he didn’t have enough life experience yet to make that call, but Minnea had changed him. No amount of scalding hot showers or mind-reconditioning was going to fix that.
He finished with the munitions checks—still at full capacity since they hadn’t come across any independent forces to use them on yet—and slid his commpad into one of the larger pockets on his ship-wear coveralls.
With a couple of quick taps, he exited the munitions management tab on the console and brought up a map of the Lone Glider to double check where the ground deployment equipment level was situated. He’d memorized the layout of the ship before he’d boarded, but just wanted to be sure. Nothing more embarrassing than needing to stop and ask directions from a superior officer.
Just as he exited the map and tapped the console back to standby, a now-familiar alarm erupted throughout the ship. He’d only heard it during drills, but this time wasn’t going to be a dry practice run—the enemy had engaged the ship.
“Battle stations, battle stations. All hands prepare for condition code alpha-delta-one. I repeat, prepare for condition code alpha-delta-one.” The announcement repeated as he hoofed it out of the munitions station and hit the passageway running, passing other soldiers sprinting for their stations.
Alpha-delta-one meant the enemy had taken them by surprise, was acting with extreme, unprovoked aggression and thus far, unidentified. It fit the profile of the independent guerrilla forces they’d been sent to find, but how had they taken the Lone Glider by surprise? The ship was fitted with all the latest tech to find vessels long before they were detected themselves.
Well, since he wasn’t stationed on the bridge, it wasn’t his problem. He reached the stairs and paused for two soldiers coming up, then set his hands on the rails and did a swing-jump kind of action to the lower deck instead of taking time to actually put his boots on the steps.
He reached the comm station and dropped his butt into a chair that otherwise remained vacant unless they were under attack. Around him, half a dozen other AS Officers were similarly taking their seats and jacking into the comm system. They were in charge of back-up monitoring all stations being utilized on the bridge. Of course, they couldn’t actually participate in anything happening up there, but occasionally small things got missed, or they might be tasked with minor repairs.
As he scrolled through the information to get his bearings, the crystal display flickered. The ship shuddered and the lights flashed out, plunging them into absolute, mind-bending darkness. There was nothing but black and utter silence. His breath slammed to a halt in his lungs, and he wrapped both hands around the edges of the console to anchor himself.
The lights came back on, flaring too-bright then dimmed to half strength.
“What the hell was that?” muttered the AS officer beside him. Mendoza? He couldn’t remember her first name.
His crystal display had some kind of lag, but the information coming across it made his blood turn to ice water.
“Shite, we’re screwed,” the AS officer on his other side, Sammie Rosin, said as intensive chatter filled the comms from the bridge.
“Shields down. Weapons fire incoming. Brace, brace, brace!” The intercom was filled with some kind of static, but the words were clear enough.
Rian pressed himself back into his seat, clamping his hands onto the handles next to his thighs, squeezing his eyes shut and not caring if the others thought he was a pussy. If he was about to get blown up or sucked into space, he sure as shite didn’t want to see it coming.
The ship started vibrating around him, a low buzzing gradually getting louder until he had to snap his eyes open. Around him, people had their hands clamped over their ears, falling to the deck either unconscious or obviously in pain. The noise was nearly making him go cross-eyed. Sammie listed sideways off his seat, hitting the deck heavy like he was already out of it before he’d gone down. Mendoza was screaming—not that he could hear it, just see the way her face contorted as blood started pouring out of her ears.
She scrambled off her seat like she was trying to get away from something. Tumbling into her console, she bounced off it and stumbled to her knees. He lurched forward and caught her when she started clawing at her eyes.
He yelled at her to stop, but couldn’t even hear his own voice inside his head. There was nothing but the buzzing vibration, increasing in strength and intensity. Mendoza went limp in his arms, and he let her slip to the deck. Scrunching his hands into his hair, he wanted to pull out every strand, as if maybe that would release the pressure in his head.
Not a single other soldier in the comm room was conscious any longer. Or maybe they were dead. He couldn’t tell, and with the noise quaking through his entire body, couldn’t process thought clear enough to check them.
He forced his legs to work and managed to half crawl, half stumble out into the passage. More prone soldiers. He checked the next hatchway down and found the same thing—no one except him had withstood whatever the hell this was.
Stop. It had to stop. It couldn’t go on forever. It was getting harder and harder to keep his body coordinated and moving when every atom within him was screaming for him to lay down and give in to the pain. But he wouldn’t—couldn’t. He had to get up to the bridge. What if no one was flying the ship anymore?
He made it to the stairs before his legs finally gave out. Something wet was dripping down his neck, and he swiped his fingers across it. Blood. Were his ears bleeding like Mendoza?
Goddamnit.
He was not going out like this. His arms pulled him up two steps before they gave out as well, leaving him collapsed rigidly against the biting grate metal.
As blackness started swimming in his vision, the noise and vibration cut out as suddenly as it’d started. A hard breath exploded out of his lungs, and his body went limp, muscles twitching like he’d been shocked with a thousand volts of electricity.
A boot hooked under his shoulder and roughly rolled him over. At first, he thought medics had come to assess him—maybe this had been the only level of the ship affected by whatever that had been—but as he forced his eyes to focus on the two figures above him, a new shock jolted his system.
They were wearing IPC military uniforms, but their faces looked wrong. Too flat over their foreheads and the bridges of their noses. Their irises were blood red, not black, and their skin caught the lights like there were scales mixed into what should have been normal skin. The pair exchanged words—not in English, he didn’t think, though his ears were still ringing. Maybe his eyes were just messed up. Maybe he was seeing and hearing things. But neither of the pair tried to help him. Instead, one of them pulled out a pair of cuffs and roughly tethered his wrists together, while the other one pulled out his pulse pistol.
“No, wait—” His words were slurred like he’d gone twenty rounds on a bottle of bourbon and lost, but he managed to get his arms working well enough to hold them up. Like what? He was going to defend himself or something?
Didn’t stop the asshole from pulsing him in a flash of bright energy that put his lights out in a nano-second flat.
***
The floor was freezing, like lying on a slab of ice, and he woke up shivering. Probably because he wasn’t wearing any frecking clothes. It took a long second to get his eyes to focus, and at first, he saw nothing but a white-blue blur.
Where the hell was he?
His head felt like it weighed a ton on his neck as he forced himself upright. When he did, the confusion got deeper. There were maybe sixty people—approximately half the crew of the Lone Glider—all lying naked and unconscious on the floor like he’d been. They were set out in perfect symmetrical order, all a few feet apart in six rows of ten. And they were all arranged in exactly the same position.
His freak-out factor was definitely starting to go off the charts, but he forced a calming breath into his lungs. No point in losing his head until after he got out of here; that way he might be less likely to end up dead. With unsteady movements, he started to stand, but only got halfway up before he came into contact with some kind of invisible energy field that knocked him right back onto his ass again. He slid sideways about a foot and the same thing happened to him.
“God frecking damn it.” His words seemed to get sucked away by the cold, too-bright light of the sterile room. Rubbing his shoulder that’d taken the brunt of the energy field, he made himself look past all the naked, still people to see if he could find any hatchways or clues to where the hell he was.
Nothing.
The walls all appeared uniform and unmarked, shimmering slightly from an ethereal light, the likes of which he’d never seen before. And, examining the floor a little more closely, it appeared to be some kind of ice-metium fusion of materials, if such a thing was possible. It was smooth, almost silky, and somehow not as hard as it maybe should have been, like it gave a little beneath his weight. He ran a finger over it and found it left a skittering trail of light in his wake, as if there was some kind of electrical current or sensors in the floor.
He sat there for he didn’t know how long, trying to identify as many people as he could, but it was hard without their uniforms displaying name patches and identifying stripes. He’d only been on the ship long enough to get to know a few people well enough to remember them by face alone. Mendoza—her first name was Lyla, he suddenly remembered—was one person over to his left, and Sammie Rosin was three people ahead of him. There’d been seven other AS officers in the comm room when they’d been hit—by some kind of cutting edge weapon, he guessed—and he’d only identified two others. He was pretty sure the remaining five weren’t here.
So if this was half the crew of the Lone Glider like he guessed, where was the other half? In another room similar to this one? And what the hell was this anyway, some kind of weird, high-tech prison camp? The only POW camps the independent forces had were shanties and huts inside razor wire fences, old-school style, on stronghold planets in the outer systems.
Nothing like this had ever been reported, and this kind of thing cost money, more money than the IF could scrape together in three decades. Which left him with the bad feeling that they hadn’t been captured by the enemy forces.
Except if they hadn’t been captured by the IF, then who the hell had nabbed them, and why? The last thing he remembered seeing before getting pulsed—the two soldiers who hadn’t looked quite human—returned to him like high-def replay. He had to have been imagining things, right? His brain having some kind of weird hallucinations, because it’d gotten buzzed like someone had given him a massage with live razor wire.
Like a switch had been flipped, everyone around suddenly woke up, going from asleep to awake in an instant—not like it’d taken him a minute or two to get with the program.
They were all weirdly calm as they sat up and looked around, not trying to stand or go anywhere like he had—as if they’d gotten a memo he’d missed and knew exactly what was going on.
No one was freaking out, and that was somehow worse than the screaming and crying he’d expected.
Pivoting, he looked over to where Mendoza sat with her arms around her knees, looking around as if she was curious, not afraid.
“Hey, Mendoza.” She didn’t react, even though he tried several times, until he finally switched over to “Lyla!”
She blinked and looked over at him. “Rian. What do you want?”
For a good damn second he was actually speechless.
“What do I want?” He gave a short, disbelieving laugh. “In case you haven’t noticed, we seem to be in some kind of situation here. Isn’t anything about this bothering you?”
She glanced around again then looked down at herself. “I’m not wearing any clothes. It’s cold in here. But I shouldn’t get up. I just have to sit here. That’s the best thing we can do. It’ll all be fine.”
Her voice had a strange pitch to it, the words were coming out with an odd monotone. Certainly, she didn’t sound like Lyla should have sounded.
He shifted closer to where he thought his energy barrier was while staying out of zapping range. “What made you say that?”
A touch of confusion entered her gaze and maybe a flicker of concern, but it was quickly extinguished. “I just know, that’s all. It’ll be fine.”
Ooooh-kay. Had she been brainwashed? She and the rest of the crew? So, how come he hadn’t been as well? Something flickered at the outer edges of his thoughts—the fact that he’d remained conscious a lot longer than anyone else when they’d been attacked.
“Lyla, everything is not fine. Nothing about this is fine. We have to get out of here.” He kept his words low, but made sure they carried to her.
The guy directly next to him shook his head. “We have to stay here. It’ll be fine.”
Christ. If one more person told him things would be fine, he was finally going to lose his shite.
Before he could think of another tactic to get through to Lyla or anyone else, there was a low swooshing noise, and a hatchway opened in the wall adjacent to him.
Two figures entered, both wearing white, kind of iridescent coveralls, but tighter. Maybe they were bodysuits. But the material almost looked as if it was made of liquid, only light and airy. At first he assumed they were human—because why would he think anything else?—but as they walked along the row of quietly sitting people and he got a clearer look at their faces, it hit him he hadn’t been hallucinating earlier.
They looked close enough to human that, at a glance, a person might not have noticed. But the differences were obvious enough when a guy wasn’t half out of his mind in pain any longer.
The pair noth held some kind of commpad or tablet each, except it was made of clear crystal with no ports or interfaces. They seemed to be conferring between themselves as they walked along his row, and maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised, but they stopped in front of him.
What in christ’s name were they?
He didn’t scare easily, not after Minnea, but the only answer he had was alien.
Impossible.
When the early technologists had left Earth and colonized space hundreds of years ago, the first thing they’d done was search for other intelligent life. They’d found remnants of long-extinct civilizations, but none surviving, not even in the far, most inhospitable reaches of the galaxy. They’d assumed humans were the sole survivors in an ancient universe and taken the galaxy for themselves.
Apparently they’d been wrong. Apparently aliens were alive and well, and his close-encounter was turning into every B-grade sci-fi horror movie he’d thought were too dumb to ever watch.
“You’re not like the others,” the guy on the left said. Assuming he was a guy. Maybe aliens didn’t assign gender. And yep, he’d just gone and lost his frecking mind, which was enough for a hysterical laugh to escape him.
“Yeah. I think you forgot to turn me into a droid.”
The alien who’d spoken didn’t seem impressed with that. “Our technology doesn’t work on you as effectively as the others. We want to know why.”
His heart kicked against the inside of his chest, but he swallowed the sensation down. “You know, there’s a few things I’d really like answers for as well.”
There was a low buzz, and the other alien reached down to grab his arm. A second before the creature laid hands on him, he sprang up, knocking the hand sideways and launching himself into head-butting the guy square in the face to put him down.
With the element of surprise still on his side, he spun and punched the one who’d talked to him in the midsection, then followed it up with a knee to his nose when the guy hunched forward. Shoving the alien out of his way, he sprinted the few short steps to Mendoza, who hadn’t reacted to the fight, just sat there staring up at him, maybe with a hint of exasperation, like she thought he was wasting his time. He reached for her, but got zapped before his arm extended halfway. So they’d only switched off his energy-force-field cage. Shite, he didn’t want to leave anyone behind, but he had to get out of here. Once he escaped and could contact the military for back up, he’d send half the IPC armada down on the aliens’ asses.
He scrambled for the hatchway he’d seen open earlier, but it was no longer there. The wall was frustratingly, confusingly blank. No seam, no controls. No nothing to indicate how to get out. Fear tried to rise up and choke him again, but he used his survival instincts to shove it back down.
Now that he was closer, the wall appeared to shift or flow like solid water. He slapped a hand to it and found it silky with a slight give, exactly as the floor had been.
“What the hell is this?” he muttered, running both hands over the surface, desperately searching for any clue how he could get through.
He glanced over his shoulder to see the two aliens picking themselves up off the floor slowly and calmly as if they knew he wasn’t going anywhere.
They even took a moment to tug their clothes straight and exchange a few quick words then made their way over to him at an unhurried walk. Frecking bastards. Like they were rubbing in the fact they could do whatever they wanted to him, whenever they liked.
He turned to face them, pushing his shoulders back and clenching his fists as they got closer. He sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere without a fight. What he’d given them a second ago was just a taste.
The one who’d tried to grab him pulled out a very human-looking pulse pistol, set to stun.
“Luckily, the technology of your own people seems to work on you quite well.”
The blast hit him in the middle of his chest, radiating out like tiny nicks from a miniature razor all over his body, interrupting the signals from his brain so he simply dropped to the floor. All over again, he was heading for lights out.
Whatever they did to him, he wouldn’t stop trying to escape. Somehow, one day, he was going to get free.
And then he’d see about getting his revenge.
Onboard the Battleship Lone Glider
Rian Sherron checked the numbers on the console’s crystal display against the same figures on the commpad he held. Who would have guessed he’d ever be thankful for the simplicity of checking munitions supplies? He was calling this a break after the week of grunge duty he’d pulled since being deployed on the medium-sized battleship Lone Glider, the vessel tasked with finding and quelling a contingent of independent rebel ships in one of the distant outer systems.
Yep, they were a trillion miles from any decent kind of civilization—definitely not the way he’d imagined spending his eighteenth birthday in a few short days. Not that he’d be having any official celebration. As far as his superior officers were concerned, he was turning twenty, not eighteen. He’d signed on to fight in the Assimilation Wars the day after his sixteenth birthday with a forged ident card that’d cost him all the money he’d been able to scrape together by selling a few things out of his family’s mansion he hadn’t thought his parents would miss. Only two people in the entire Inter-Planetary Coalition military knew his true age—Lieutenant Captain Zander Graydon and Captain Colter Routh—men who’d become like older brothers to him. And they’d ensured he’d gotten good and wasted for an early birthday celebration the night before shipping out on his latest deployment.
“Hey, Sherron, you done with those munitions yet? There’s a whole level of ground deployment equipment waiting to be checked and it’s got your name on it.”
He glanced over to where his unit commander had stopped in the hatchway.
“Sir, yes, sir. I’ll let you know when I’m finished here.”
His CO tapped a hand against the hatchway before disappearing from sight again.
Spending his days checking supplies wasn’t exactly glamorous, but he’d finally made the rank of Air Squadron Officer, which got him off ground assignments and on a ship. Yeah, there were way worse things he could have been doing and his last deployment, where he and a contingent of soldiers had gotten marooned—out of contact and with no supplies—on the war torn planet of Minnea for eight months had been a literal hell. He’d been lucky to survive—most of the men he and Zander, as his CO, had set out with had died. The two of them had barely survived. Honestly, if it hadn’t been for Zander, he probably would have given up and gotten himself killed long before they got rescued.
A shudder ripped down his spine, leaving a cold sweat and slightly queasy sensation in his stomach. The memories from Minnea were still too fresh, and he couldn’t deal with them right now. The military shrink he’d seen after he’d gotten back had cleared him for duty, but warned that the experience would haunt him for years, memories and dreams rising from his subconscious when he least expected it as his mind worked its way through the trauma—or some psycho-babble crap like that.
Maybe there were easier ways to make money to send home to his kid sister—still going to that damn fancy private school his parents had stopped being able to afford years ago—but as a pissed off sixteen year old, the military had seemed stupidly glamorous. Pay him to see the galaxy and walk around with a gun on his hip? Hell, yeah. But the reality had been piss-inducingly different.
He could have quit, but he’d never been that smart, so he’d taken the reality check that’d bitch slapped him in the face, gotten serious, and worked his ass off. Now, after everything he’d been through, it was like the military had leeched into his veins and he couldn’t ever see himself being able to go home and live like normal people.
Maybe he didn’t have enough life experience yet to make that call, but Minnea had changed him. No amount of scalding hot showers or mind-reconditioning was going to fix that.
He finished with the munitions checks—still at full capacity since they hadn’t come across any independent forces to use them on yet—and slid his commpad into one of the larger pockets on his ship-wear coveralls.
With a couple of quick taps, he exited the munitions management tab on the console and brought up a map of the Lone Glider to double check where the ground deployment equipment level was situated. He’d memorized the layout of the ship before he’d boarded, but just wanted to be sure. Nothing more embarrassing than needing to stop and ask directions from a superior officer.
Just as he exited the map and tapped the console back to standby, a now-familiar alarm erupted throughout the ship. He’d only heard it during drills, but this time wasn’t going to be a dry practice run—the enemy had engaged the ship.
“Battle stations, battle stations. All hands prepare for condition code alpha-delta-one. I repeat, prepare for condition code alpha-delta-one.” The announcement repeated as he hoofed it out of the munitions station and hit the passageway running, passing other soldiers sprinting for their stations.
Alpha-delta-one meant the enemy had taken them by surprise, was acting with extreme, unprovoked aggression and thus far, unidentified. It fit the profile of the independent guerrilla forces they’d been sent to find, but how had they taken the Lone Glider by surprise? The ship was fitted with all the latest tech to find vessels long before they were detected themselves.
Well, since he wasn’t stationed on the bridge, it wasn’t his problem. He reached the stairs and paused for two soldiers coming up, then set his hands on the rails and did a swing-jump kind of action to the lower deck instead of taking time to actually put his boots on the steps.
He reached the comm station and dropped his butt into a chair that otherwise remained vacant unless they were under attack. Around him, half a dozen other AS Officers were similarly taking their seats and jacking into the comm system. They were in charge of back-up monitoring all stations being utilized on the bridge. Of course, they couldn’t actually participate in anything happening up there, but occasionally small things got missed, or they might be tasked with minor repairs.
As he scrolled through the information to get his bearings, the crystal display flickered. The ship shuddered and the lights flashed out, plunging them into absolute, mind-bending darkness. There was nothing but black and utter silence. His breath slammed to a halt in his lungs, and he wrapped both hands around the edges of the console to anchor himself.
The lights came back on, flaring too-bright then dimmed to half strength.
“What the hell was that?” muttered the AS officer beside him. Mendoza? He couldn’t remember her first name.
His crystal display had some kind of lag, but the information coming across it made his blood turn to ice water.
“Shite, we’re screwed,” the AS officer on his other side, Sammie Rosin, said as intensive chatter filled the comms from the bridge.
“Shields down. Weapons fire incoming. Brace, brace, brace!” The intercom was filled with some kind of static, but the words were clear enough.
Rian pressed himself back into his seat, clamping his hands onto the handles next to his thighs, squeezing his eyes shut and not caring if the others thought he was a pussy. If he was about to get blown up or sucked into space, he sure as shite didn’t want to see it coming.
The ship started vibrating around him, a low buzzing gradually getting louder until he had to snap his eyes open. Around him, people had their hands clamped over their ears, falling to the deck either unconscious or obviously in pain. The noise was nearly making him go cross-eyed. Sammie listed sideways off his seat, hitting the deck heavy like he was already out of it before he’d gone down. Mendoza was screaming—not that he could hear it, just see the way her face contorted as blood started pouring out of her ears.
She scrambled off her seat like she was trying to get away from something. Tumbling into her console, she bounced off it and stumbled to her knees. He lurched forward and caught her when she started clawing at her eyes.
He yelled at her to stop, but couldn’t even hear his own voice inside his head. There was nothing but the buzzing vibration, increasing in strength and intensity. Mendoza went limp in his arms, and he let her slip to the deck. Scrunching his hands into his hair, he wanted to pull out every strand, as if maybe that would release the pressure in his head.
Not a single other soldier in the comm room was conscious any longer. Or maybe they were dead. He couldn’t tell, and with the noise quaking through his entire body, couldn’t process thought clear enough to check them.
He forced his legs to work and managed to half crawl, half stumble out into the passage. More prone soldiers. He checked the next hatchway down and found the same thing—no one except him had withstood whatever the hell this was.
Stop. It had to stop. It couldn’t go on forever. It was getting harder and harder to keep his body coordinated and moving when every atom within him was screaming for him to lay down and give in to the pain. But he wouldn’t—couldn’t. He had to get up to the bridge. What if no one was flying the ship anymore?
He made it to the stairs before his legs finally gave out. Something wet was dripping down his neck, and he swiped his fingers across it. Blood. Were his ears bleeding like Mendoza?
Goddamnit.
He was not going out like this. His arms pulled him up two steps before they gave out as well, leaving him collapsed rigidly against the biting grate metal.
As blackness started swimming in his vision, the noise and vibration cut out as suddenly as it’d started. A hard breath exploded out of his lungs, and his body went limp, muscles twitching like he’d been shocked with a thousand volts of electricity.
A boot hooked under his shoulder and roughly rolled him over. At first, he thought medics had come to assess him—maybe this had been the only level of the ship affected by whatever that had been—but as he forced his eyes to focus on the two figures above him, a new shock jolted his system.
They were wearing IPC military uniforms, but their faces looked wrong. Too flat over their foreheads and the bridges of their noses. Their irises were blood red, not black, and their skin caught the lights like there were scales mixed into what should have been normal skin. The pair exchanged words—not in English, he didn’t think, though his ears were still ringing. Maybe his eyes were just messed up. Maybe he was seeing and hearing things. But neither of the pair tried to help him. Instead, one of them pulled out a pair of cuffs and roughly tethered his wrists together, while the other one pulled out his pulse pistol.
“No, wait—” His words were slurred like he’d gone twenty rounds on a bottle of bourbon and lost, but he managed to get his arms working well enough to hold them up. Like what? He was going to defend himself or something?
Didn’t stop the asshole from pulsing him in a flash of bright energy that put his lights out in a nano-second flat.
***
The floor was freezing, like lying on a slab of ice, and he woke up shivering. Probably because he wasn’t wearing any frecking clothes. It took a long second to get his eyes to focus, and at first, he saw nothing but a white-blue blur.
Where the hell was he?
His head felt like it weighed a ton on his neck as he forced himself upright. When he did, the confusion got deeper. There were maybe sixty people—approximately half the crew of the Lone Glider—all lying naked and unconscious on the floor like he’d been. They were set out in perfect symmetrical order, all a few feet apart in six rows of ten. And they were all arranged in exactly the same position.
His freak-out factor was definitely starting to go off the charts, but he forced a calming breath into his lungs. No point in losing his head until after he got out of here; that way he might be less likely to end up dead. With unsteady movements, he started to stand, but only got halfway up before he came into contact with some kind of invisible energy field that knocked him right back onto his ass again. He slid sideways about a foot and the same thing happened to him.
“God frecking damn it.” His words seemed to get sucked away by the cold, too-bright light of the sterile room. Rubbing his shoulder that’d taken the brunt of the energy field, he made himself look past all the naked, still people to see if he could find any hatchways or clues to where the hell he was.
Nothing.
The walls all appeared uniform and unmarked, shimmering slightly from an ethereal light, the likes of which he’d never seen before. And, examining the floor a little more closely, it appeared to be some kind of ice-metium fusion of materials, if such a thing was possible. It was smooth, almost silky, and somehow not as hard as it maybe should have been, like it gave a little beneath his weight. He ran a finger over it and found it left a skittering trail of light in his wake, as if there was some kind of electrical current or sensors in the floor.
He sat there for he didn’t know how long, trying to identify as many people as he could, but it was hard without their uniforms displaying name patches and identifying stripes. He’d only been on the ship long enough to get to know a few people well enough to remember them by face alone. Mendoza—her first name was Lyla, he suddenly remembered—was one person over to his left, and Sammie Rosin was three people ahead of him. There’d been seven other AS officers in the comm room when they’d been hit—by some kind of cutting edge weapon, he guessed—and he’d only identified two others. He was pretty sure the remaining five weren’t here.
So if this was half the crew of the Lone Glider like he guessed, where was the other half? In another room similar to this one? And what the hell was this anyway, some kind of weird, high-tech prison camp? The only POW camps the independent forces had were shanties and huts inside razor wire fences, old-school style, on stronghold planets in the outer systems.
Nothing like this had ever been reported, and this kind of thing cost money, more money than the IF could scrape together in three decades. Which left him with the bad feeling that they hadn’t been captured by the enemy forces.
Except if they hadn’t been captured by the IF, then who the hell had nabbed them, and why? The last thing he remembered seeing before getting pulsed—the two soldiers who hadn’t looked quite human—returned to him like high-def replay. He had to have been imagining things, right? His brain having some kind of weird hallucinations, because it’d gotten buzzed like someone had given him a massage with live razor wire.
Like a switch had been flipped, everyone around suddenly woke up, going from asleep to awake in an instant—not like it’d taken him a minute or two to get with the program.
They were all weirdly calm as they sat up and looked around, not trying to stand or go anywhere like he had—as if they’d gotten a memo he’d missed and knew exactly what was going on.
No one was freaking out, and that was somehow worse than the screaming and crying he’d expected.
Pivoting, he looked over to where Mendoza sat with her arms around her knees, looking around as if she was curious, not afraid.
“Hey, Mendoza.” She didn’t react, even though he tried several times, until he finally switched over to “Lyla!”
She blinked and looked over at him. “Rian. What do you want?”
For a good damn second he was actually speechless.
“What do I want?” He gave a short, disbelieving laugh. “In case you haven’t noticed, we seem to be in some kind of situation here. Isn’t anything about this bothering you?”
She glanced around again then looked down at herself. “I’m not wearing any clothes. It’s cold in here. But I shouldn’t get up. I just have to sit here. That’s the best thing we can do. It’ll all be fine.”
Her voice had a strange pitch to it, the words were coming out with an odd monotone. Certainly, she didn’t sound like Lyla should have sounded.
He shifted closer to where he thought his energy barrier was while staying out of zapping range. “What made you say that?”
A touch of confusion entered her gaze and maybe a flicker of concern, but it was quickly extinguished. “I just know, that’s all. It’ll be fine.”
Ooooh-kay. Had she been brainwashed? She and the rest of the crew? So, how come he hadn’t been as well? Something flickered at the outer edges of his thoughts—the fact that he’d remained conscious a lot longer than anyone else when they’d been attacked.
“Lyla, everything is not fine. Nothing about this is fine. We have to get out of here.” He kept his words low, but made sure they carried to her.
The guy directly next to him shook his head. “We have to stay here. It’ll be fine.”
Christ. If one more person told him things would be fine, he was finally going to lose his shite.
Before he could think of another tactic to get through to Lyla or anyone else, there was a low swooshing noise, and a hatchway opened in the wall adjacent to him.
Two figures entered, both wearing white, kind of iridescent coveralls, but tighter. Maybe they were bodysuits. But the material almost looked as if it was made of liquid, only light and airy. At first he assumed they were human—because why would he think anything else?—but as they walked along the row of quietly sitting people and he got a clearer look at their faces, it hit him he hadn’t been hallucinating earlier.
They looked close enough to human that, at a glance, a person might not have noticed. But the differences were obvious enough when a guy wasn’t half out of his mind in pain any longer.
The pair noth held some kind of commpad or tablet each, except it was made of clear crystal with no ports or interfaces. They seemed to be conferring between themselves as they walked along his row, and maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised, but they stopped in front of him.
What in christ’s name were they?
He didn’t scare easily, not after Minnea, but the only answer he had was alien.
Impossible.
When the early technologists had left Earth and colonized space hundreds of years ago, the first thing they’d done was search for other intelligent life. They’d found remnants of long-extinct civilizations, but none surviving, not even in the far, most inhospitable reaches of the galaxy. They’d assumed humans were the sole survivors in an ancient universe and taken the galaxy for themselves.
Apparently they’d been wrong. Apparently aliens were alive and well, and his close-encounter was turning into every B-grade sci-fi horror movie he’d thought were too dumb to ever watch.
“You’re not like the others,” the guy on the left said. Assuming he was a guy. Maybe aliens didn’t assign gender. And yep, he’d just gone and lost his frecking mind, which was enough for a hysterical laugh to escape him.
“Yeah. I think you forgot to turn me into a droid.”
The alien who’d spoken didn’t seem impressed with that. “Our technology doesn’t work on you as effectively as the others. We want to know why.”
His heart kicked against the inside of his chest, but he swallowed the sensation down. “You know, there’s a few things I’d really like answers for as well.”
There was a low buzz, and the other alien reached down to grab his arm. A second before the creature laid hands on him, he sprang up, knocking the hand sideways and launching himself into head-butting the guy square in the face to put him down.
With the element of surprise still on his side, he spun and punched the one who’d talked to him in the midsection, then followed it up with a knee to his nose when the guy hunched forward. Shoving the alien out of his way, he sprinted the few short steps to Mendoza, who hadn’t reacted to the fight, just sat there staring up at him, maybe with a hint of exasperation, like she thought he was wasting his time. He reached for her, but got zapped before his arm extended halfway. So they’d only switched off his energy-force-field cage. Shite, he didn’t want to leave anyone behind, but he had to get out of here. Once he escaped and could contact the military for back up, he’d send half the IPC armada down on the aliens’ asses.
He scrambled for the hatchway he’d seen open earlier, but it was no longer there. The wall was frustratingly, confusingly blank. No seam, no controls. No nothing to indicate how to get out. Fear tried to rise up and choke him again, but he used his survival instincts to shove it back down.
Now that he was closer, the wall appeared to shift or flow like solid water. He slapped a hand to it and found it silky with a slight give, exactly as the floor had been.
“What the hell is this?” he muttered, running both hands over the surface, desperately searching for any clue how he could get through.
He glanced over his shoulder to see the two aliens picking themselves up off the floor slowly and calmly as if they knew he wasn’t going anywhere.
They even took a moment to tug their clothes straight and exchange a few quick words then made their way over to him at an unhurried walk. Frecking bastards. Like they were rubbing in the fact they could do whatever they wanted to him, whenever they liked.
He turned to face them, pushing his shoulders back and clenching his fists as they got closer. He sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere without a fight. What he’d given them a second ago was just a taste.
The one who’d tried to grab him pulled out a very human-looking pulse pistol, set to stun.
“Luckily, the technology of your own people seems to work on you quite well.”
The blast hit him in the middle of his chest, radiating out like tiny nicks from a miniature razor all over his body, interrupting the signals from his brain so he simply dropped to the floor. All over again, he was heading for lights out.
Whatever they did to him, he wouldn’t stop trying to escape. Somehow, one day, he was going to get free.
And then he’d see about getting his revenge.
