Alien Touch Read online

  Alaric’s pulse leapt painfully. He grabbed Luki’s shoulders and shook him. “Luki!”

  The empty, unfocused look left Luki’s eyes and he stared hard at Alaric. “What happened?” he managed after a long moment, scrubbing his hands over his face when Alaric released him.

  Instead of answering, Alaric moved to Serge, settled a hand on his arm and gave him a shake. “There is water in the basin in the corner. It will help.”

  Serge and Luki leapt at the offering, struggling with one another to get to the water and splashing as much on themselves and the floor as the managed to swallow.

  “We were caught,” Alaric said as that memory abruptly surfaced. “We did not count coup. We were captured.”

  That was so totally unbelievable Serge and Luki broke off their fight over the water and turned to gape at Alaric. Then, as if they needed confirmation, both of them began to look around the tiny cell they’d been confined in.

  “He’s right,” Luki muttered in a voice filled with shock.

  “They’re dead. They’re all dead,” Serge whispered.

  Luki and Alaric stared at him in shock, but neither of them asked the question that had instantly arisen in their minds.

  Because they knew.

  And still, they struggled to reject the unacceptable. “They can’t be,” Luki said.

  “Everyone? It’s not possible.”

  “I heard the screams,” Serge argued. He struggled for a moment and then seemed to shrink with defeat. “And now we will die also, because they have locked us here until they can execute us.”

  Alaric had heard them, too. He had blanked it from his mind, but it was there, those horrible death cries. For a moment, his emotions seesawed between horror, rejection, grief, and anger. Slowly, anger began to build, to force out all of the other emotions.

  He shook his head. “I will not wait here for death so that I can join them. The gods have spared us so that we can avenge the lost souls.”

  Serge and Luki stared at him, slowly attaining the same level of rage and determination as it sank in that everything they had ever known, everyone they had ever cared for, had been taken from them.

  And then they shifted and passed through the stone.

  And they waged war against those who had held them while the last of the people of Ator died without succor.

  And then they set out to find the destroyers.

  * * * *

  Amber wasn’t going down without a fight. Even as hope dimmed, she continued to try everything that came to mind that she thought might result in breaking free of whatever it was that was towing her craft.

  Finally, she could stand the suspense no longer and she released her safety harness, got out of her seat, and moved from one observation window to the next until she spotted something that froze the blood in her veins.

  It was huge. It was something that shouldn’t have been there but was.

  It looked like a black hole—sucking all of the light from the stars that should have been there.

  And it filled her view—as far as she could see in any direction.

  Chapter Two

  It was unrecognizable as the home they had known their entire lives. Their whole civilization lay in ruins. Not one landmark remained to show them the way to the homes they had known, to help them find those they had loved and lost.

  They searched anyway.

  They had known all was lost, that everyone on the home world had died because they were all linked and they had heard the death cries, the fear, the pain.

  But they simply could not accept it.

  And so they had cruised low over the devastated landscape for a time and when they had finally had to accept that there were no landmarks left to guide them, they had landed in the wasteland that had once been a city, near a coastline that looked as pock marked and unfamiliar as all of the others and they had wandered like the lost souls they were, searching.

  In time, they had come to understand and accept that there was nothing they could do to help. There was no one left—save for the other warriors who had gone out to raid as they had—no one left at home.

  No home.

  And once understanding had been unavoidable and acceptance had followed, then anger had risen again and they’d felt the burning need to avenge.

  For the handful of trinkets they had taken to prove their manhood, their skills at warfare, the Basinini had taken all.

  It was up to them—the handful of warriors that were all that was left of the Furians of Ator—to return the favor.

  It became the fever in their blood that sustained them—the hunt, the battle, the vengeance when they lay waste to another ship, another stronghold, another Basinini city.

  In time, the fever cooled and it was only habit that kept them going, hunting, always looking for the Basinini until it grew harder and harder to find those who were left, until they sat idle for months on end and sometimes years.

  They’d found a new world.

  Because they could not bear to return to the old one, the ghost world, with its memories.

  From time to time, they met up with some of the remaining clans, but it was difficult for them to even take joy from that when they were all, once upon a time, members of a great, extended family, or flanx.

  There are no rituals to perform so no reason to gather. There are no longer young beastmen to make coup against ‘enemies’ of the tribes of Ator, no bartering for brides—no brides to barter for.

  The Phoenix clan hadn’t seen so much as a skimmer with Basinini in more than a year—Ator time—when they spotted a modest sized cruiser leaving a nearby solar system.

  “Basinini!” Serge yelped abruptly when he caught a faint ‘whiff’ of Basinini brain activity.

  “Basinini ship!” Luki bellowed almost on top of him, staring hard at the gadget that tracked moving things.

  Alaric, who’d been listlessly studying one of the gadgets they’d ‘captured’ in their last raid, flung it down and surged to his feet, abruptly electrified. “Where?”

  “There!” Serge and Luki both said at the same time, pointing in two different directions.

  Alaric gaped at them and then glared. “Both …? Two groups?” he amended, excitement threading his voice.

  Serge and Luki exchanged a questioning look.

  Serge shrugged. “I first noticed them there.”

  “This thingy says they’re going that way!” Luki responded impatiently.

  Discomfort flickered through Alaric. He had heard nothing. He had gone to great pains to hear nothing.

  Because there was nothing to hear but Luki and Serge and the two of them had annoyed him until he’d felt like he might explode and harm them if he had to referee one more squabble.

  Clearly Luki had ‘heard’ nothing either or he would’ve said something. Obviously, he’d been focused on the alien thingy and blocked out all else, although Alaric was damned if he could understand the fascination when it was nothing more than an arm swinging round and round most of the time, showing the occasional blip of a flying rock in space.

  Dismissing that after a moment, Alaric considered the seemingly conflicting information. “Damn it! They must have a base on one of the planets—which means a nest of the bastards. But they’re headed somewhere and it could be to another base.”

  “Let us give chase,” Luki said impatiently. “They will get away!”

  “There could be far more where these came from,” Serge pointed out.

  “And there might be none,” Alaric said dryly. “If we ignore the certainty we have we may end up with nothing but disappointment. I say we make note of this system and give chase. When we catch them, we will deal with them. But first we need to be sure they are not headed to a base where there are even more of the bastards in hiding.”

  They instantly leapt to the challenge of chasing down the Basinini craft, but they were almost too late. The ship was moving fast and there had be
en a great distance between them to overcome to start with.

  In point of fact, they did lose them. It was temporary, but they found it deeply disturbing and enraging.

  The craft disappeared into a wormhole before they could reach it and was out the other side before they narrowed the distance. By the time they emerged, it had vanished from their alien technological thingy with the blip screen.

  They had only their minds to reach out and search and the Basinini knew or suspected this particular trait and had gone to great lengths to try to shield their minds when there were Furians anywhere about.

  Unfortunately for them, they had not mastered it. Mayhap made it was a little harder ….

  “There!” Serge exclaimed excitedly. “I felt a flicker of thought ….” He frowned. “And … something weird. What is that?”

  Alaric strained to reach out as Serge had, but his focus had turned to shit. Despite every effort to fight it, idleness had a way of dulling him to his surroundings and dragging him deeper and deeper into his own thoughts.

  And those were unpleasant, to say the least.

  But they had had very little to do in a very long time, had been drifting through space in what he’d begun to see as a fruitless venture.

  They had slain every Basinini they came across, hunted them to the ends of the universe and back again, and it had done nothing to alleviate his grief or the bewildering sense of having become a lost soul. He had no anchor, nothing, he finally realized, to look forward to.

  He had no family, no home, no people, other than his triad.

  And he was heartily sick to death of seeing nothing but their faces, had begun to think some very dark thoughts.

  He’d just given up on picking up whatever it was that Serge had spoken of when he caught a flicker of something himself.

  Luki was frowning fiercely. “I have it! I have no idea what the fuck …?”

  “Fear and distress,” Alaric said grimly. “They have captured … something. We must hurry before they begin to pick it apart.”

  “I see the scout ship we followed here,” Serge announced. “It is heading directly toward that small world …. And there is a base! We are in luck!”

  Alaric and Luki fought for a place at the window to stare out at the base and assess the size of their prize.

  They saw then what it was that the Basinini had captured—something that was like nothing they’d ever seen before.

  “That is a weird thing,” Serge said. “What do you suppose it is?”

  Alaric was staring at the thing, too, as it disappeared inside the hanger of the alien base. “Ours.”

  * * * *

  While she stared bug-eyed, trying to pierce the darkness and make out any details there might be that would explain the thing—what it was and where it had come from—Amber saw a horizontal sliver of light appear. The light grew wider as her capsule was drawn slowly, inexorably toward the yawning ‘mouth’.

  Amber stared, transfixed with horror for an endless time before her mind finally clicked over to survival mode. She raced from the observation window then, leapt into her seat, and began to frantically fasten her safety harness.

  She was bathed in the sweat of fear and labor by the time she’d managed it and huffing for breath till she was fogging the face shield of her visor.

  Not that she could actually see anything anyway.

  The blinding light emerging from the opening cargo door of the … alien thing in front of her had made it nearly impossible to see anything when she’d been looking straight at it with her own eyes. The cameras caught less beyond the glare.

  It took no great leap of imagination, though, to realize she was being drawn into a hanger by some means she didn’t completely understand. It might have helped if she did, but she doubted it. She’d tried everything she could think of to break the hold it had on her vessel and there’d been no effect that she could determine.

  She certainly wasn’t free and she couldn’t convince herself she’d even come close.

  That being the case, and despite her gut reaction, she realized it would be worse than useless to try again.

  She was still being pulled and that meant still in the grips of the thing that had caught her. The end result of trying again, uselessly, would only be that much less fuel to use for an attempted escape that might have some chance of working.

  With great reluctance, she removed her hand from the control and fisted it on her lap, trying to shake something useful from her shocked, sluggishly performing mind. Beyond the chant running in a loop through her brain, though—Chinese? Russian?—there were only flickers of things quickly lost—fragmented thoughts and images as her brain tried unsuccessfully to process.

  She felt the capsule settle solidly, heard the mechanical tow disengage.

  The light was snuffed as abruptly as it had appeared.

  It took all she could do to prevent herself from instantly firing the engine in an attempt to launch the capsule and escape.

  Visions filled her mind of the capsule slamming into the wall or ceiling—bursting through to crash on the surface of the moon.

  Or just slamming into an obstacle it couldn’t breach and then hitting the deck below again and exploding into tiny bits.

  The interior lights of her vehicle had come on when the lights went out beyond it.

  It was comforting, but as it dawned on her the illumination made it possible to see inside even while she couldn’t see anything herself, she shut them off.

  While her mind was racing in what, at first, seemed like nothing but useless circles, a fact emerged that further confused her.

  She’d heard and felt a thud when the capsule settled.

  So she was either losing her mind or there was gravity—too much for the moon.

  She grappled with that for several moments before she decided she was wasting time she couldn’t afford trying to figure out something she couldn’t.

  She had to be either on the moon or on something vast that was hovering above the moon’s surface. And that meant there was not an appreciable amount of gravity—couldn’t be.

  Maybe she’d had a psychotic break? Lost days, weeks, years?

  She couldn’t accept that as an explanation.

  Nothing made sense, but that just didn’t fit at all.

  Well—none of it really, but it was possible, she knew, that her perceptions of what she’d seen had been distorted by the darkness, her fear, limited vision, the glass—and possibly a number of other factors she couldn’t think of at the moment. And that meant it was possible that she was actually in some kind of facility that had been built by some nation from Earth.

  She hadn’t passed into radio blackout more than a few moments, she didn’t believe, before the capsule had been snagged, but she’d been travelling at a speed that could have put her a hundred miles or more across the line. She just wasn’t in any state at the moment to do the calculations mentally.

  Nevertheless, it wasn’t impossible that she could make it back to the light and radio reception on foot.

  Maybe highly unlikely, but she thought it might be possible if she had plenty of air in her tanks when she escaped.

  Should she attempt escape, though?

  Technically, she thought she was in a situation where she was captured by the enemy and was required to attempt to escape.

  She thought they probably wanted the technology a lot more than they wanted her.

  And that probably meant she was a liability to them, not an asset.

  They had deniability as long as she didn’t show up.

  Her heartbeat revved at that thought, but she realized her reasoning was sound and not the product of hysteria.

  They might want to question her to see what else they could discover, but she really didn’t have a lot of value.

  She didn’t actually understand why they’d left her and the capsule sitting in the dark and that worried her, a lot.

 
She would’ve thought a team would appear the moment the hanger door closed.

  Were they just waiting for her to come out so that they didn’t have to damage the capsule to remove her?

  Did that really make any sense?

  She couldn’t decide.

  It might have been helpful to know who she was dealing with, but she knew very little about the Russians or the Chinese except that their culture/mindset was different than Americans.

  Of course, they were still human and a lot of the same motivations applied.

  Something must have happened, she finally decided, to divert them from immediately investigating their prize. Nothing else fit.

  Nothing she could think of made any sense except that possibility.

  But maybe since they’d had to open the doors wide and leave them that way for a fairly lengthy period, it was taking a long time to equalize now? Restore the air pressure?

  That seemed so likely that she managed to relax fractionally, decided she had a little time to gather her wits and think what to do, figure out what her best chance was.

  Unfortunately, if she was right about the pressure, then she couldn’t leave the capsule either until it equalized and by that time she might lose the window of opportunity for escape.

  The only option, she realized with a mixture of resolution, terror, and doubt, was to attempt the moon walk. By now they would know she had disappeared. They couldn’t come after her to rescue her, or even look for her, unfortunately, because they only had the backup capsule for their own return trip to Earth. But if she could escape and walk to an area where she could call for help, they might be able to meet her with the buggy.

  It certainly had the range for a pickup.

  There was the question of whether they would have time to get to her before she was recaptured.

  Or ran out of air.

  But she couldn’t think of any other possibilities.

  She could stay put and hope they would negotiate for her release—a scenario she didn’t place a lot of faith in.

  Or she could try to run.