Alien Shores (A Fenris Novel, Book 2) Read online

  A loud ripping sounded. Klane vanished from the ledge on the other side of the chasm. With a roar of displaced air, Klane appeared before the strange pipes deep in the caves under the mountain. Blood gushed from his nostrils, flowing onto his lips. He coughed, and he spat blood as something tore inside him.

  With a groan Klane toppled onto his side. He lay there, gasping and bleeding. His brain throbbed and he twitched. Agony exploded in his stomach.

  The singing gods were angry with him. He felt them coming. He—

  Klane surged to his feet. In the pitch-blackness of the caves, he blundered away from the metal pipes. He crashed against stone, against boulders. He kept trying to flee as he tried to dampen the threatening panic. Slamming full against a wall, he hit his bloody nose. With a groan, he crouched, holding his nose, enduring the pain until it subsided.

  The singing gods were searching for him. He could hear them in his mind.

  Klane crawled on his hands and knees. He fled from them, and in time the mental sound of their approach faded. He had escaped them for the moment.

  At that point, Klane reached the end of his endurance. Flopping onto his stomach, he closed his eyes. He ached and hurt all over. He had pushed himself further than he would have ever believed possible. Now he needed to rest. Curling into a fetal ball, with the junction-stone still clenched in his hand, Klane fell into a deep slumber. The singing gods were hunting him, and they might find him fast asleep. Maybe he should set up protective magic . . .

  He tried to come back to awareness, but failed as he continued sleeping as one dead.

  2

  There was nothing fair in the Fenris System, nothing easy and nothing nice.

  Cyrus Gant hated everything about Fenris, but that didn’t mean he was going to quit. He was from Level 40 Milan, a former Latin King, and an artist with the vibrio-knife. He also happened to be a Special, and Earth’s only hope of receiving the dreadful news of these freakish aliens.

  He was in a needle-ship and now gave the scanner the finger. An Attack Talon braked hard, spewing a long exhaust tail. From the angle of its approach, the Kresh military vessel must have originated from High Station 3. That gave it a high probability that the Attack Talon hunted them.

  Cyrus glanced at Skar 192, their needle-ship’s pilot. Skar was a gene-warped soldier for the Kresh, or he had been until he’d secretly joined the Resisters. The soldier was short, broad-shouldered, with dangling arms like an ape, and had incredible vitality and strength. For the past three weeks the two of them had shared the tiny vessel, journeying through the void of lonely space.

  Over the years, Resisters on High Station 3 had secretly constructed the needle-ship out of stealth material for such a time as this. The spacecraft had a toilet and a narrow main chamber. It flew via magnetic propulsion, making it incredibly slow, useful only for traveling in a planet’s outer gravity well.

  “Do they see us?” Cyrus asked.

  “I am unsure,” Skar said in his clipped manner.

  Cyrus loathed the tight ball that was his gut. He had helped bring Teleship Discovery across two hundred and thirty light years from Earth’s solar system. Humanity had found how to use discontinuity windows, or DW, man-made rips in space joining two distant points. A DW joined two points up to 8.3 light years apart. Usually it was less. Still, a Teleship jumped the distance in a moment. The process needed advanced AI systems and Specials: psionic individuals with telepathic, telekinetic, and other mental abilities. As of last count, Sol had a little fewer than one hundred and fifty such individuals, out of billions.

  Until now, the Fenris System aliens, the Kresh, had lacked Teleships and discontinuity window tech. It had become more than likely they could reverse engineer Earth’s captured Teleship. With their vast number of psi-masters, the Kresh could and likely would launch a large scale attack on Sol. Earth had one hundredth the number of psionics as the aliens. This disparity would put humanity at a grave disadvantage if it came to an interstellar war. An alien surprise attack might be devastating.

  “This is terrible,” Cyrus said.

  “The Attack Talon does complicate our situation,” Skar agreed.

  Cyrus squinted at the scanner. He was a lean young man with muscles like strings of steel. As Specials went, his abilities were minor. He had learned a mind-null trick three weeks ago while escaping from High Station 3, one that let him hide from psi-able searchers. The null might come in handy today, provided the Kresh didn’t just laser them out of existence.

  Do they see us? Are they hunting for our ship?

  After weeks of inaction, of studying the memory crystal and doing a thousand isometric exercises to keep in shape, Cyrus wasn’t ready to enter combat again.

  Their needle-ship crawled toward Jassac. The moon was a reddish ball, looking much like Mars, only bigger. Jassac was a satellite of Pulsar, a Jupiter-like gas giant. High Station 3 also orbited Pulsar, but over several million kilometers away. The station was a Kresh habitat, a vast, cylindrical installation. The rest of Discovery’s crew and colonists were still prisoners there, those who had survived the battle against other Attack Talons when the Teleship had first arrived in the system.

  Cyrus had few illusions about freeing his friends from the Kresh. If he could, he would, certainly. At the moment, he doubted he would survive the next few hours. If he did survive, he had a completely different goal in mind.

  Cyrus snorted with disbelief. His goal was insane, really, far-fetched and surreal. An earlier human colonizing ship had arrived at Fenris approximately one hundred and fifty years ago, having departed Earth about four hundred years ago. As far as Cyrus knew, Earth had no record of the journey. Those ancient mariners had crossed the many light years using Bussard ramjet technology. The Kresh had captured the ship and scooped out every female ovary for the eggs, starting the gruesome practice of gene warping and breeding humans to suit various alien needs.

  Gene warping was primarily used to create the Vomags, soldiers like Skar, or the genetically altered Bo Taw like the Reacher, who had given Cyrus the “keys” to this needle-ship. Millions of soldiers like Skar fought on the second and third planets of the Fenris System. Those two were Earth-like planets. The soldiers went into the tunnels of the Chirr, intelligent insects at war with the Kresh. The Bo Taw were psi-masters, tall, arrogant humanoids with psionic abilities who had been conditioned to love the Kresh. A few psi-masters had secretly resisted the aliens. A few of those had been clairvoyants, having precognitive visions or dreams. A key vision was that of someone called the Anointed One. That hero was supposed to free humanity from the Kresh.

  To Cyrus it all seemed like holo-vid dramas come to life. Maybe the idea was inborn to the human spirit. Cyrus hoped the vision was true. Otherwise, humanity was screwed and the universe really was a dark, dark place.

  A beep sounded from Skar’s panel, and a red light began to wink. With a deadpan stare, Skar glanced up at Cyrus. “Doesn’t that indicate enemy radar lock-on?” Cyrus asked.

  “Yes, it—” Those were Skar’s last words. His eyes glazed over and he became abnormally rigid.

  “Psi-masters,” Cyrus hissed. A second later he felt an oily sensation. It came from a gene-warped Kresh tool reaching across space using mental power. The humanoid slave did the aliens’ bidding.

  Cyrus concentrated his thoughts, and he strove for a tranquil feeling. He had practiced this “going null” many times during the three-week journey. He had been certain he knew how to achieve the state he needed. Now he wasn’t sure. It was possible he’d been fooling himself. That was an easy thing to do for a Special. Solipsism was an occupational hazard for his kind.

  “Breathe,” he whispered.

  Cyrus’s eyelids fluttered. He breathed in and out, and he relaxed his shoulders. The oily sensation increased and seemed to press down against his skull as if it were in a vise. The psi-master almost had achieved firm contact
with him. Cyrus might be able to shield himself from the enemy in the regular psi manner, at least stopping the Bo Taw from taking control of him, but the attacker would know that an Earth Special was here on this ship. In other words, the Kresh would have found him. He needed to use the null.

  You’re a block of ice. You’re like glass.

  The oily sensation reached toward his mind like a drill, and Cyrus wanted to spit. Then the feeling was gone. Just like that, snap of the fingers. He’d done it. He had gone null and disappeared from the other’s mental sight.

  Cyrus kept himself from gloating in any manner. He had to keep up the effect and remain hidden.

  You are ice. You are glass. You reflect like a polished surface.

  Skar woodenly moved his neck as if he were a puppet. He brought his head about toward Cyrus.

  He’s going to look at me. Right! The psi-master is going to use Skar’s eyes to see if anyone else is in here. This psi-master must have gone against other nulls before.

  There came a moment’s indecision. Cyrus wasn’t sure how to play this. Deciding, he grabbed Skar’s nearest forearm. The flesh was like iron. He clutched his friend’s limb and mentally wrapped the null around the soldier.

  Skar blinked, unfroze from psionic control, and looked up at Cyrus.

  “Psi-master,” Cyrus whispered. “He’s from the Attack Talon.”

  “They know it’s us?”

  “I guess so,” Cyrus said.

  Skar contemplated for all of three seconds. On the fourth, his fingers blurred across the panel.

  “Strap in,” Skar said.

  Cyrus dropped onto the seat beside Skar’s piloting chair. He buckled in, listening to the clicks, and fended off another mind search.

  I know how to do this. I’m a null. How about that?

  The magnetic propulsion came online, pushing the craft. Cyrus’s head snapped back, and he almost lost hold of the null. The little needle-ship leapt toward Jassac. The maneuver ruined their last several days of slow but steady deceleration.

  “What’s the plan?” Cyrus asked.

  “We must reach the planet before they reach us.”

  “Moon,” Cyrus said. “It’s a moon.”

  “Yes,” Skar said. “We must reach the moon and land. That is the first priority.”

  In the clairvoyant dreamworld of the Resisters—the rebellious humanoid slaves of the Kresh—a fantasy had emerged, perhaps a prophecy: the Anointed One would save them. How he would do this, no one had any idea.

  First, however, someone had to find the Anointed One. That person was the Tracker. The Reacher on High Station 3—the chief Resister there—had informed him a little over three weeks ago that Cyrus himself was the Tracker. It was Cyrus’s duty, his prophetic purpose, to find the man who would destroy the Kresh.

  The Anointed One had a name: Klane. He was believed to be a Stone Age primitive—a test-subject human for the Kresh—living free in the barren highlands of Jassac. Apparently, the aliens wanted to see how untainted people reacted to certain stimuli, so they had created a game preserve on one of the planetoids they were busy terraforming.

  The whole thing was confusing, totally strange to Cyrus. Even after three weeks, it was difficult to wrap his mind around the entire idea of this star system with its competing alien races and gene-warped humans.

  “Can you shear off their radar lock?” Skar asked.

  “Are you serious? You mean with my psi-ability?”

  With a stubby finger, Skar indicated the blinking red light showing the radar fix.

  “Are they in range to fire at us?” Cyrus asked.

  “We have inferior tech,” Skar said.

  Cyrus rubbed his forehead. While in their power several weeks ago, an alien machine had force-fed him their language. The process had killed others of Discovery’s crew, but Cyrus had survived. So, he could understand Skar’s words. Unfortunately, he didn’t always comprehend the idioms . . . like now, for instance.

  “What do you mean, we have inferior tech?” Cyrus asked.

  “My indicators aren’t precise,” Skar said. “I’m uncertain concerning their present distance and velocity.”

  “You don’t know if they’re in range to hit us with their lasers?”

  “Correct,” Skar said.

  “Give me your best guess then.”

  Skar manipulated the panel, and he spoke slowly. “They appear to be out of laser range.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Agreed,” said Skar. He bent over the scanner, intently studying it.

  “Is there a problem?” Cyrus asked.

  Skar gestured at the scanner.

  Cyrus squinted at it. Okay. That didn’t look good. A dot detached from the braking Attack Talon. The dot moved quite a bit faster than the Kresh military vessel.

  “Is it a missile?” Cyrus asked.

  “I give that a high probability,” Skar said.

  “Is it a proximity missile or a nuclear-pumped X-ray type?”

  “I cannot tell.”

  Cyrus watched the monitoring device. The Attack Talon was teardrop shaped and at the edge of the scanner’s range. The needle-ship was hardly bigger than the dot and almost touched the huge mass of Jassac.

  “How much time until we reach the moon?” Cyrus asked.

  Skar tapped the controls, reading alien symbols. “We should reach the atmosphere in another two hours.”

  “How about if we don’t bother braking first?” Cyrus asked.

  Skar’s head twitched. “I have computed for a meteoric landing.”

  “Uh . . .” Cyrus had to decipher mentally for the idiom again. “Oh, okay, you mean we’re going to slash into the atmosphere as we descend at high speed?”

  “That is a possibility,” Skar said.

  “What is? Why don’t you make sense for once?”

  “One possibility is that we will slash into the atmosphere like a meteor,” Skar said. “The other is that we will skip like a stone off water and head back out into space.”

  This isn’t good at all. Cyrus scratched his left cheek. The situation had turned ugly fast. Maybe Skar was right with his decision. It was time to gamble with their lives because capture likely ended everything. In other words, it would be better to burn up in the atmosphere than to let the Kresh grab them. The aliens had things like agonizers and mind extractors.

  Cyrus suppressed a shudder and squinted at the dot on the scanner, at the missile already gaining on the needle-ship. “I’d have figured they would want to capture us. The way they’re doing it now—”

  The comm unit squawked, signaling a caller. Were psi-masters somehow reading his thoughts?

  Skar’s left index finger hovered over a receive switch on the screen. “What should I do?” he asked.

  Cyrus had been through this before on Teleship Discovery. The aliens had hailed them, and when the captain had opened channels, he had made it a thousand times easier for the enemy psi-masters to mind attack Discovery’s crew. Somehow, the comm signals helped the telepaths. The psi-masters liked to freeze people, as they had just done to Skar a moment ago, or put them to sleep. What should he do? What was the best decision?

  Cyrus hated indecision. It was death during a knife fight. He knew how to play it then with the flash of vibrating steel. Now . . . if he answered, it might amplify another psi-assault. If he ignored them, the missile would keep gaining on the ship.

  “What should I do?” Skar asked.

  “Can you answer without putting them on the screen?”

  “Of course,” Skar said.

  Cyrus bit his lower lip. Capture was the worst scenario. Dying came in as a bad second. If he died, Earth would never learn about the Kresh. Earth had to learn or . . . what? If the Kresh got the jump on the solar system, that might mean the end of free humanity.

&n
bsp; “Let’s roll the dice,” Cyrus said.

  Skar gave him a look of incomprehension.

  “It’s not so fun when the shoe is on the other foot, is it?” Cyrus asked.

  “I do not understand you,” Skar said. “What should I do concerning the comm hail?”

  “Answer it,” Cyrus said. “Let’s see what they want.”

  Skar tapped “Receive,” but the comm unit simply hissed with noise. The soldier hunched over the panel, adjusting the controls.

  Cyrus tried to relax. He had to keep rolling his shoulders as he waited for another psi-attack. The null was a superb tactic, especially for someone of his limited abilities. If he’d been Venice or Jasper—

  The hissing quit and a man’s voice came online. “You must immediately cease acceleration and await a boarding party.”

  Skar stiffened.

  How did they get to him so fast? I didn’t even feel the psi-attack this time. What happened?

  “You have launched a missile at our vessel,” Skar said, hotly. “That is an aggressive enemy action. Detonate the missile and give us a reason why we should comply with your demand.”

  Oh. Skar isn’t being controlled, he’s just angry.

  “You fool,” the man said. “I belong to Attack Talon Valiant, the personal vessel of Chengal Ras the 109th. You are his property and engaged in unlawful space travel. That is against the Protocols of Ten Fourteen.”

  “Who are you?” Skar said.

  “That is immaterial,” the man said. “Will you comply with the lawful order or must you force the Revered One’s Talon?”

  “Let me ingest your words,” Skar said. His hand hovered over the cutoff switch.

  Cyrus had been waiting for something psionic to happen. When it did, it almost caught him by surprise. Instead of a second’s advance warning, an avalanche of thought hit like tons of mental boulders. It was loud to his mind, disorienting and confusing. The null began to slip away from him.

  Skar went rigid. Then his head whipped around and his eyes bulged outward.

  “You,” Skar said, in a higher-pitched voice than normal. The features of his bullet-shaped head seemed to melt and distort. Then his lips drew back, revealing his teeth. He attempted to lunge upward and attack Cyrus, but the buckles and straps of his piloting chair restrained him.