Alien Avatar: An Alien Sci-Fi Romance (3 page)

An awful noise erupted over the background. It was like the dampened ring of something big and metal being hit by something big and hard. Marko turned around to see Naeesha drop to the ground. He ran across the room, sliding to his knees at her side. Blood was trickling from her ears and her eyes flicked around, pupils wide and unfocused.

Whatever hit the door wasn’t giving up. There was thud after thud, it was almost deafening. He dragged Naeesha back away from the door and looked up at it. Dust and crumbling cement rained down from the ceiling, but the door was holding tight.

The scientists started panicking. Marko radioed for help and checked on Naeesha. She was concussed and going fast into shock. She was babbling, trying to tell him something but the words were coming out in a loud, jumbled mess. One of the scientists, a short, pudgy human with a patchy beard, knelt down on the other side of her.

“I’m a physician, he said. “I’ll have a look at her.”

Marko didn’t want to leave Naeesha, not like this, but first and foremost he had to secure the area. The door looked solid enough. Right now, their biggest problem was the herd of skittish scientists who looked like they might stampede through the hall towards the surface at any moment. He didn’t want to think about what would happen when they ran headlong into the squad of jittery rookie soldiers coming the other way.

“Everybody quiet!” he shouted. Whatever was outside of the doors was still banging on them, and people were still chattering in hushed, hurried tones, but a small peace came over the room. He keyed his comm device so that his commanding officer could hear the instructions he was giving the crowd of scientists.

“Leave what you’re working on, form a single file line, and proceed calmly down the hall. Stay to the right, stay quiet, and wait for further instruction.”

The crowd began to coalesce, but not into an ordered line. There was pushing, shoving, the sort of skittishness that Marko had been afraid of all along. He started pulling people out of the blob and pushing them into a line near the hallway. The knot of lab coats slowly began to unwind, and after a few moments, there was a reasonably straight line of people headed out of the room. Marko stopped the doctor and had him stay. With the medic’s approval, they moved Naeesha further down the hall, away from the incessant echoing of
whatever
.

“What do you think it is?” the doctor asked.

“No idea.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Wait for backup.”

Right on time, the noise of hurried talking faded into the thud of heavy boots on concrete.

“Report!” shouted Bura as she came near.

“Something big is hitting the left door. Started about two minutes ago. Naeesha is down with a concussion. She’s in shock.”

Bura looked over the wounded soldier, sized Marko up, and turned around to address the rest of the unit.

“Alright!” she shouted. “Proceed to the right side of the room and set up a firing line. We’re going to take care of this problem right now.”

Then she turned to Marko.

“The researchers are back in their ship. I want you to take Operator Naeesha and get her back to the shuttle autoclinic.”

Marko didn’t waste any time. He sat Naeesha up, pulled her arm around his shoulders, and hefted her onto his back. He walked as quickly as he could down the long, dark hallway. The lanterns cast eerie shadows on the bare walls, and up ahead, brilliant daylight called him forward. He tried to ignore the sounds coming from behind him. Pounding footsteps. Shouted orders, and the awful banging.

He carried Naeesha into the ship and lay her down on the autoclinic table. The machines would take over from here, diagnosing and repairing anything that they could, administering medication, and counseling her through her treatment when she came to.

As for Marko, he didn’t have any orders, so he decided to make some of his own. He pulled a plasma repeater from the ship’s armory. The weapon was classified as an “anti-material” rifle, which meant that it was more suited towards blowing apart ships and shuttles than organic targets. It was the heaviest weapon that he knew how to use, and didn’t seem terribly out of line for whatever was waiting down in the darkness.

He heaved the gun onto his shoulder and started towards the staircase. As soon as he hit the bottom, he heard the telltale sign of a blast door grinding open. There was a brief silence. Then gunfire. Then the screams.

              Naeesha woke to heavy-weapon fire. It was faint and distant but there was no mistaking the kachunk kachunk sound, or the smell of ionized air.

She was on an autoclinic table. The chamber flashed back to her. She didn’t remember what had happened. Just that she’d been knocked out. The autoclinic’s robotic arms moved out of the way as she sat up and ripped out her IV. The room spun a little as she swung her legs off the table and stood up.
Tried
to stand up, anyway. After a little swerving and staggering, she got to her feet and started towards the egress ramp. The kachunk of the machine gun kept pounding the air. She could feel it in her chest. Whatever was down there, it was too big for guns. Thankfully, they’d brought along just the thing.

After a quick stop at the armory, she was staggering down towards the compound entrance. The gunfire grew louder and louder and it was clear that there was only weapon sounding off. She looked down at her comm and saw that all but one of the unit’s status indicators was offline. That could only have meant one thing, and she prayed that she was wrong as she carefully descended the steps into the darkened tunnel.

Up ahead, a small figure darkened the hall. It was silhouetted by an unbroken stream of high energy plasma, blinding green streaks of air that had been reduced to subatomic particles. Every single plasma round was more than capable of ripping straight through the hull of a light shuttle, but the soldier seemed to think that there was still a good reason to keep shooting.

Past the soldier, she could see… something. There was movement in the darkness. Slow. Deliberate. Pressing closer and closer. It grew brighter as it approached the soldier and one of the chemical lamps, but Naeesha couldn’t make out anything specific. Just something big.

Then, a lightning fast blur of motion. The shooting stopped, the soldier sailed backwards through the air. It was Marko.

Naeesha shouldered the weapon she’d taken from the ship, sighted the shifting monstrosity, and fired. There was a blinding flash, a cloud of debris, and a rush of superheated air that carried an awful stench.

She didn’t wait for the dust to settle.

Dropping the weapon from her shoulder, she grabbed Marko and pulled him up over her shoulders.
Fuck he was heavy
. The sounds of collapsing tunnel followed her through the hall, but there was more than that. Movement.
Was the thing still alive?
Impossible.

It didn’t matter. A blow like that meant that Marko was hurt bad, and that every second counted. Naeesha was still shaky, and her feet dragged behind her as she pushed towards the light, the awful sound of stone scraping against stone coming louder and closer with each step. She broke into a run, her legs burning under the weight of two people and all their gear. Sunlight blinded her as she reached the steps and took them two at a time. The ship was close, but whatever was behind her had almost closed the gap between them. She made it to the ramp of the ship and climbed aboard, ordering it to lift off. The sound of the footsteps behind her changed as the monster moved from concrete to vegetation.

The ship picked up. Naeesha teetered towards the table, trying to keep her balance as the ship rocked gently into the air. A crash and a sudden jolt knocked her to her feet. Marko fell to the ground and the ship spun sharply, throwing him across the metal floor towards the open ramp door. Naeesha gave the telepathic command to the ship to close it, and only just in time. The ship recovered from its spin and continued to rise.

She retrieved Marko from the back of the ship and lay him down on the autoclinic table. He was in bad shape. Broken ribs, a shattered arm, a collapsed lung, and a fractured skull. That was just the first page of the report that the computer generated for her. It gave him a “favorable” prognosis.

Confident that she’d done all she could for him, Naeesha went about completing her mission as best she could. She ordered the ship to circle the compound. Whatever was down there, she wanted a good look at it. While her education on Alderoc’s animal life had been incomplete, to say the least, there was nothing that could have stood up to the assault that she and Marko had put it through.

The viewscreen showed nothing. A pile of rubble around the compound entrance. A path of uprooted vegetation. A few glistening black streaks that she figured belonged inside the shuttle or the creature.

Whatever the creature was, whatever had just killed her entire unit, it was gone. She scanned the surrounding forest with every sensor on the ship, but found nothing. She didn’t know what it was. She didn’t know where it came from. She didn’t even know what it looked like.

All she knew was that it was loose.

PRESENT DAY

Marko picked up the pace as he worked his way down the rocky slope. It had taken two days longer than he’d planned to find a pass through the mountains, and he was going to have to move fast if he wanted to keep on schedule. And for everybody’s sake, it was best that he did.

It wasn’t that anyone would be safer by moving closer to the Alderoccan capital, it was just that the danger there was less immediate. Even though they would still be more than a hundred and fifty miles from the capital, the Alderoccans would not take kindly to the Halians moving camp.

He knew that this would be perceived as a threat. Knew that the people who had given him orders for twenty five years would be sending more men like him to neutralize this newest “aggression”.

Ever since that first moment that the Halian and Alderoccan people came together,
everything
had been an aggression. The irony was that since then, there was no real threat. Just the echoes and after images of the day that the Wild found Alderoc.

He’d done his part in keeping the cycle of hate and fear and violence going. He’d done as much as anyone to push it to the breaking point. But now he was trying to do something about it. He could only hope that it wasn’t too late. The pieces were set. The game had started. And if people didn’t play very carefully, there would be no winners.

Of course, trying to explain that under constant attack had proven terribly difficult. Just, as he imagined, it had been for the people back at camp when he’d been the one with the gun.

Chunks of loose rock and melting ice skittered down the face of the mountain as he slid along, marking his trail as he went.

A few days from now, nearly two thousand people would be following his footsteps. Many of them would be young or old or sick. All of them would have every one of their possessions on their backs. As of this moment, they would be walking across the planet with no destination.

That was Marko’s job. He was the only one who knew this land. The only one that had been this close to the capital. Fifteen years ago, he’d worked out of a small air station somewhere near the Anoanda River It should still be here, abandoned and ready to take new occupants. He could see the river now, glittering in the morning sun as it snaked through the sparse forest below.

He stopped on a ledge that jutted from the side of the mountain and looked out over the vast forest stretching before him. His hope was to see a clearing or a plain, somewhere that could serve as a new home for the people behind him.

Home. He still used that word like it meant something. It hadn’t when he was a young boy in the capital. He was always moving, even back then. His family trying to stay one step ahead of the loan sharks or the tax collectors. Then there was the fall. Everyone had left their home. When they finally returned, he’d never really settled back in. He joined the military. Met Naeesha, and couldn’t stand to part with her. And since she was always moving, he was too. By the time she hit retirement, he’d hoped she would settle down a little. Hoped maybe that he could join her.

Look at how that turned out.

He wondered where she was now. Wondered if she was still alive. Wondered what had been so damned important about her that he’d wasted twenty-five years fighting innocent people, just to stay close to her.

Not wasted. His time with her had been a treasure, and he cherished every minute of it. Maybe it hadn’t turned out the way he’d wanted, but he even if he
could
go back, he wouldn’t change a damn thing.

Something in the distance caught his eye.

A pillar of smoke, maybe. It was far off. Just past the horizon. Just a grey smudge in the sky. It was bad news. Nobody should have been this far out. Maybe, he wondered, things had changed. He’d only been gone for three years, but maybe something had happened in that time. There had always been hermits in these woods, perhaps something had given them cause to push further out.

What else could it have been?
Some young-blood, looking for adventure? Trying to find themself? He’d thought about doing that himself, when he was younger. Thought about turning his back to the capital and stepping out into the wilderness, trying to make a life for himself.

If he knew then what he knew now, he wouldn’t have spent one second entertaining those ridiculous fantasies. And if he crossed paths with whoever, or whatever was out here, he’d tell them the same. Not that it mattered.

The Wild was coming. Nobody was going to be safe for long.