Alien Velocity (12 page)

The arm pulled him so hard he cracked his head on the wall. The next few seconds were out of his hands. Dazed, coughing his guts up, Charlie lay naked on the scorched sand, under umpteen arrangements of alien eyes. He tongued the capsule lodged in the corner of his mouth. Grains of sand crunched against his teeth while he swallowed. He winced when three of his fellow prisoners hoisted him up and carried him away from the noxious fumes.

What the hell could possibly happen next? He had a deadly explosive in his mouth, while the rocket explosion had won the day. How many others, in the history of the games, had come up with that solution? It didn’t matter. Eleven, twelve, thirteen…eighteen lives had been saved by the most mercurial means. Grit, improvisation, a touch of insanity? Blake had been right all along.

About the insanity part, that was.

* * *

As the unseen energy force lifted them all from the arena toward the shiny bare-ribbed rafters, the levitation sensation felt somewhere between a soft feather bed and outright paralysis. The yank from the canyon had been a sickening one. This hoist was smooth, soporific, yet caused him to retch nonetheless. Too many shocks, too much exertion in too short a time clamped his mind shut.

A washing-machine hum grew from the dome’s roof. Water pipes, gas, electricity, other energy utilities? He could only guess. Observation cabins sat like glass eyeballs above the transparent inner-tube walkway stretching all the way around the upper dome interior. Thousands of gesticulating tentacles and turtle faces on the walkway greeted Charlie’s ascent to a configuration of six silver rings, brilliantly lit, above.

Through the rings, his path followed a narrow tunnel network. It turned left here, right there, looped the loop, all in homogenized silver light. A pungent aniseed smell kept him alert. He guessed this maze was meant to disorient passengers so they wouldn’t know where they were being taken. Or maybe it was the overlords’ regular transport system, and it really was this convoluted. He felt that at any moment he would encounter something unprecedented. Then a deep, muffled whistle of air flowed through the tunnels, and the occasional sharp change of direction engaged him physically—clues that he hadn’t died.

A sublime black funnel opened beneath him. He held his breath, crossed his arms on his chest as though he were plunging into cold water but it was only air. The funnel closed behind him, leaving no light at all. Seconds later, the weightlessness ended abruptly when his butt and heels pressed against a solid surface and, in trying to sit upright, he wheeled to one side, his palms slapping down on cool metal. He pressed a hand to his bare chest. The runaway drums inside stemmed his breathing.

The voice in his ear made him leap to his knees. “Human from Earth, you have won a popular victory. Before the event, our audience deemed you the least likely to survive. They are now eager to see you again, as champion of the games in its forty-fourth round of this eleventh epoch. As per our custom, you are permitted three questions, after which we will ask you just one.”

Charlie spat into the darkness. “You son of a bitch! What have you done with the others?”

“We have retired them.”

He ground his teeth. Sly half-truths like that were about what he’d expected from this degenerate race.

“You’re a bunch of goddamn cannibals. What if I tell you to kiss my arse instead?”

“We would be obliged to disobey.”

“What’s the source of the incredible power running this place?” Charlie hoped the sudden change in tack might give his deliberate question an air of randomness.

After a long, suspicious pause, “It is the ancient geode in the great forum, from which we draw fresh matter and cross-dimensional energy. You will be permitted to see it, but never to approach it. There is nothing like it anywhere else in our universe.

“And now we must ask you a question.”

“Shoot.” Charlie had heard all he wanted to know. Sooner or later, they’d let him clap eyes on that which he must destroy—the mysterious power source—and, for whatever reason, they’d missed the black capsule that, if exposed, could wreak havoc in their safe little empire.

“Do you wish to return to the arena, or would you prefer to retire to the winners’ pantheon for permanent exhibition?”

“Gee whiz! Cannibals and their courtesies. I tell you what—let me explore the city first, then I’ll give you my answer. I’m just curious, that’s all. I need to see what you guys have built. You can keep me under armed guard if you want. Promise I won’t try to escape or anything.”

“That promise is irrelevant. You cannot escape.”

“Yeah? So where’s the harm then? The audience might get a kick out of it—letting the puny Earth man mingle with them. Come on, it’ll be fun. Then you can take me back to my hamster cage, put me in a goddamn zoo, whatever. What do you say? They really love me out there. It’d be a great PR stunt.”

Charlie held his stitched-on smile tight until his cheeks ached. His strategy didn’t feel particularly clever. It was scattershot at best but the only objective that mattered now was to get as close to the great forum as possible, wherever that might be, and deliver the package. He cupped a hand over his mouth and, pretending to cough, transferred the capsule into the grip of his fist. The silence gnawed deep inside, as though he was awaiting his pre-race interview before the Tonne. This was in the limelight, without the light. He felt as though the bastards were observing him surreptitiously from every angle by the most invasive scans, eyes and invisible probes a naked body had ever been subjected to.

“You are permitted to traverse the walkway overlooking the great forum. Nothing more. Then you will give us your answer.”

“You’re on.”

His smile dropped professionally but he raised a smirk inside. A chance. Had he found the one leafy spot betraying their invulnerability, the chink in their armour—hubris? So confident in their supreme security technology, they could never conceive of a threat from such a primitive creature as man. No system was flawless. Nothing could ever be guaranteed one hundred percent. Heisenberg probably hadn’t had a black pill in mind when he’d discovered his Uncertainty Principle—well, not a pill with this much kick, at any rate—but it was often the tiniest, craftiest of microbes that brought down a creature’s immune system. Charlie got up. “Whenever you’re ready.”

The lights flicked on, illuminating an empty white chamber about the size of a small church. A consignment of six brown-skinned creatures, exactly like the one he’d fought on the orange plateau when he’d protected Christina, waited to usher him through a shallow archway to a silver area beyond.

Too many shocks and surprises had hit him over the past week. He felt punch-drunk in the face of anything new. The slivery silver passageways, with their bizarre black wall-art resembling Japanese calligraphy, did not impress him, nor did the line of spectators observing him through teardrop windows all the way, a mile or so, to a milling, bustling metropolis bathed in a faint purple glow.

Now he was impressed.

This hub consisted of dozens of tiers, all overflowing with the brown-skinned creatures. He guessed it to be half a mile from floor to domed roof, and three times that from one side to the other, laterally. Whizzing around the balcony of each tier were dashes of purple light. Charlie could barely see them. They might have been a form of instant communication, like emails, or perhaps they were bio-electric Valentine’s proposals sent from body to body via this network.

The creatures themselves seemed to converse vocally only in soft squeals, which nonetheless created a cumulative cacophony. He likened it to a car tire screeching on asphalt, ad infinitum, dipping in pitch only occasionally. He tried to rub the tickle inside his ear but it was too deep. Heaving a sigh, he knew that if he stayed here much longer he would get a splitting headache.

There! He peered over the balcony. Brilliant white light blazed in the centre, on the city’s ground floor, in the shape of…he couldn’t say exactly. Whatever the object was, it appeared to have been mined, raw, from some sort of solid mass. Its diamond-like edges were rough-hewn. Luminous pipes drawing power from the thing webbed the surrounding area before disappearing underground. Light seemed to refract off an invisible surface shielding the object.

It was now or never.

Please work.

He left a trailing arm over the edge of the balcony while he turned to face his wardens. His hand holding the black capsule was now hidden from their view so, after positioning the explosive onto his thumb, he flicked it out with all the strength in his index finger.

Please work.

“Okay, I’ve seen enough. You can take me back to the arena—I’m ready for round two.”

Even with the invisible shield over the power source, he knew light was getting through. Therefore, even if the capsule landed on that shield, there would still be a reaction. There was a chance that shield was curved and the capsule would either bounce off it or roll onto the luminous pipes. He hoped for exactly that. An explosion there, on the pipes, might cause untold damage to the power infrastructure. It might even spread through them to every corner of the city or maybe it would just backtrack into the giant geode and obliterate that.

His palms sweated, his hands and knees trembled while the overlords led him back down the silver corridor. It was a heck of a gamble—so many variables but only one satisfactory outcome. The black kernel would have to explode with nuclear force.

Then there was the question of time. How much had he left before light sparked the bomb? Blake had told him it would take thirty minutes to detonate in average Baccarat sunlight but the light emitting from the geode was far more intense, perhaps five times as great. That would give him six minutes. Horror grasped at his heels and grew more persistent with every step. His chaperones’ pace seemed glacial.

“Get a freaking move on.” He had to check his outburst for fear they might cotton on to his sabotage.

No good. Their awkward steps were too slow and he didn’t have time to screw around. He bolted past them, ignoring commands in his ear like “Do not try to escape” and “The repercussions will be severe.”

“Kiss my arse, you squid shits.”

Ahead, the silver began to blacken in stages along the corridor, until he ran just a few strides from darkness. Was this some kind of security measure to stop him in his tracks? He leapt for the nearest teardrop window in the left-hand wall. Wriggling through, he cut his shoulder and bruised his hip. It was pitch black on the other side.

Charlie fended off what seemed like hundreds of fleshy tentacles in all directions. Hissing expletives, he hurled punches at anything and everything. He landed a great many. Shrieks and squeals sliced through the thunderous stampede. He kicked, punched and yanked tentacles, bit into vinegary flesh and even used one creature, whose neck he’d snapped, as a battering ram through the desperate crowd.

Soon he tripped over corpses trampled in the riot. The thunder grew fainter. He followed it to his left. Rats deserting a ship always found the way out and these were probably no different.

“Jesus. Where am I?”

He stumbled toward the thunder for many minutes, following the trail of crushed corpses underfoot. The corner of his mouth flicked into a brief smile. The sons of bitches were adept at watching, at orchestrating panic in others, but when the time had come for them to deal with that same fear, they’d failed utterly. Chicken-shits. He had to laugh. The most feared technological bullies in the cosmos had peed themselves at the arrival of a puny human in their midst. Overlords? Whatever.

He felt his way along a smooth curved wall until silver light again showed him the way. An abrupt right turn brought him out at an observation point overlooking the vast arena. He stepped back. He was in a transparent marble booth above the great walkway circumnavigating the dome—unoccupied. A black metal seat at the front and a hollow silver pipe leading down through the floor to his left were its only features. It measured about the same size as his picnic cell. Creeping to the front, he peered down to the spectacular arena floor. It was empty. The games had finished for the day.

“All right, what now?”

He turned to exit the booth, to try to find another passage, when a shockwave ripped him from his feet. It hurled him into the front window. The material shattered, leaving him dangling by his fingertips over a half-mile drop. The cuts all over his body didn’t register. He clenched into a single muscle and tore himself back up onto the floor of the booth. It now sloped about twenty degrees. Crouched on his hands and knees, he gathered breath.

Along the great rim, panels of the tubular walkway collapsed, pouring hundreds, thousands of brown-skinned creatures to their deaths. Observation booths fell after them like giant hail. Charlie shrank from a horrifying groan above, as though the dome itself were buckling. He fell sideways while running for the corridor. No sooner did he roll out of the booth than it plummeted from sight.

The first daylight javelined in through the roof while he made his way along a gridiron skywalk parallel to the dome’s circumference. He winced whenever his hands had to touch a surface. They were badly cut. His skin was punctured in places he daren’t dwell on. More citrus javelins pierced the dome, but he continued, slower now, where the skywalk was mangled, barely attached. One stray step, too much weight in the wrong spot, and he would join the tens of thousands of smashed overlords littering the arena floor.

Then it happened.

A lightning confluence of flying creatures poured in through the ventilated roof. Mesmerized, he lost his footing.

“No!”

He succeeded in hooking his right arm over a jutting metal girder. Hanging there, without the strength to climb back up, he watched the forest creatures swarm across the upper echelons, all the way around the dome.

They were neither fairies nor angels.

Retribution.

In venomous swoops, squadrons of these bioluminescent creatures zeroed in on any remaining brown-skinned foes, plucking them up and tossing them into the drop. Jets of flame punctured the dome wall beneath him. Their roars competed with hurtful squeals from the brown-skinned vanquished.