Chapter 7: P.O.W

He awoke in a cell, a four-foot cube of packed dirt, the only entrance sealed with some kind of resin door that formed an irregular mesh. They were prison bars of a kind, designed to keep him in but to let those outside see into his cage. His head throbbed, and he cradled it in his hands, noticing that his scalp had been shaved clean. He touched his fingers tentatively against his face, feeling knitting scar tissue and a sizable swelling just above his nose and between his eyes. It felt like somebody had cut a jawbreaker in half and had slipped it beneath his skin. It was hard to tell if it was filled with fluid or if it was a solid mass.

What had they done to him, and why?

He couldn’t smell anything, his nose was clogged with dried blood, and his sense of taste was dulled. There was a hint of copper in the back of his throat, but beyond that, nothing. At least he could see and hear. His eyes felt bruised, but they were in full working order as he looked about his cell.

Packed dirt walls, packed dirt floor, packed dirt ceiling. He must be underground, somewhere in the network of tunnels that lay beneath Jarilo’s surface. Even if he was able to get past the resin bars, he would no doubt find himself lost in a maze with no way of orienting himself.

He stood gingerly, he still felt woozy, the lingering effects of the anesthetic no doubt. It was a miracle that he wasn’t dead. It took a trained anaesthetist to administer the drug safely, even when they knew the correct dosage for the species in advance. It wasn’t something that you could just eyeball. Still, anesthetic suggested empathy, at least of a kind. Why would the Betelgeusians take steps to minimize his suffering? He had been strapped to the table, they hadn’t done it in order to subdue him...

He stumbled over to the resin door, wrapping his fingers around the bars and attempting to see into the dirt hallway outside. Although they were underground, it wasn’t completely dark. What appeared to be luminescent pustules clung to the ceiling in clusters like moss, providing enough light to see by. They didn’t seem to be electric, or even technological in nature at all. Could they be biological? Producing light through some internal means?

He opened his mouth to speak, to call out to his captors, but no sound came. His throat burned and his mouth was still somewhat numb, he might not be able to use them for a while. He hammered his fist against the bars. They felt like plastic, their appearance was crude and yet their construction was remarkably sturdy. He wouldn’t be able to break them. He took the bars in his hands and shook them, seeing if he could dislodge the door’s hinges from the dirt wall, but their construction defied logic, and they didn’t budge.

He stepped back, frustrated, glancing around the room. The walls were only made of dirt, perhaps he could tunnel his way out? He knelt in the corner and attempted to dig his fingers into the soil. It was hard, coated with some kind of clear resin. He wouldn’t be able to get out this way either. He was totally trapped, and why would it be otherwise?

He sat, defeated, touching his fingers against the lump on his face again. God, it felt unnatural, like it wasn’t supposed to be there. He wanted to take a knife and cut it out. He wasn’t worried about the scars, the medics could smooth those out in the time it took to get a haircut. But there was a foreign object embedded in his face, and he was acutely aware of it.

Suddenly he felt as if he was being watched. He glanced at the door, seeing a Bug standing just beyond it. It was one of the new variety, about four feet tall and built like a linebacker, its almost vestigial secondary arms hanging by its sides. Walker stood, staring it down.

It was holding something in one of its larger arms and Walker recognized it as his pack, his eyes widening. He hadn’t realized how ravenous he was, and there were MREs in there, his canteen too. The Bug placed a chitinous hand on the door and pulled it open, there didn’t seem to be a lock or a switch. It waited in the threshold for a moment, as if expecting him to flee, then tossed his pack inside.

It closed the door again as he walked over to the bag, rummaging through it and withdrawing one of the plastic packets marked meal ready to eat. He tore it open, his stomach rumbling, then realized that he should probably pace himself. He didn’t know how long he would be trapped down here and it was unlikely that he could eat whatever it was that the Bugs fed on. He should ration this food, stretch it out and make it last as long as he possibly could.

Did anybody know that he had been captured? MIA where Bugs were concerned universally meant dead. They didn’t take prisoners, or at least they hadn’t until now. Would the UNN forces on Jarilo be looking for him? Had Kaz survived? Would she go for help, or was she trapped in some nearby cell too? Walker didn’t hold out much hope of rescue, they would have no reason to assume that he was alive. Perhaps the Bugs had taken many prisoners, using them as guinea pigs in weapons research, and nobody had ever found out about it?

He ripped open the wrapper of an oat bar, finding that he couldn’t smell it, and took a bite. He chewed, unable to taste, and then swallowed. It caught in his throat, his muscles still numb and unresponsive, Walker coughing as his body violently rejected it. He sputtered and choked, fumbling for his canteen and taking a long draw. The cool liquid was soothing, and he could swallow that. Might be a better idea to wait a day or two more before he tried to eat again, give his body time to heal.

Had they been so foolish as to leave him a weapon or his comms gear?

He searched through the bag, but found nothing of use besides the MREs. They had taken everything else of value. He sat, leaning against one of the walls, going over the options in his head. The best thing to do now was to sleep, accelerate his healing. They had left him his fatigues, and so he removed his jacket, rolling it up into a pillow and placing it on the floor. He lay down, careful with his head. It was still ringing as if someone had stuck it with a hammer.

He would rest, heal up. Once he got his strength back, he would find a way out of here ... or die trying.

The next day Walker awoke to a new sensation. He opened his eyes and sat up straight, running his hands across his face. The scars were gone, he could feel no trace of them. His nose was unclogged, his tongue spry in his mouth, and the numbness that had so impeded his ability to speak and swallow was now absent. His shaved hair had even grown back to its original length. The lump between his eyes was still present, but it was no longer sore and tender.

Had he healed overnight? He was a human, not a Borealan, it should have taken him days to recover from such an invasive surgery. And yet here he was. Had the Bugs somehow accelerated his healing process?

There was something else too, a new ... smell? No, a taste. Some combination of both? It was as if he could both smell and taste the world around him. He could see through the walls in a manner of speaking, sense what was going on beyond them. The world was awash with this new awareness. It was complex, however, he couldn’t make sense of it. It was like trying to read the text of a language that he didn’t speak. It was so strong, almost overwhelming.

It didn’t take a doctor to see what they had done to him. The Bugs had grafted some kind of new sensory organ into his body, but how was that possible? Human medicine was still tackling the problems of organ rejection between patients, and yet these aliens had successfully implanted an entirely foreign sensory organ, tapping it into his nervous system to boot. Far from butchery or experimentation, his surgery must have been deft and intricate indeed, but why had they done this?

His questions would not be answered, he must find out for himself.

He felt stronger today, and he was certain that he would be able to eat. He retrieved the oat bar from his pack that he had opened the previous day, bringing it towards his mouth.

He stopped, overwhelmed for a moment by the rush of information, difficult for his brain to process. He smelled ... or tasted every dried fruit, their flavors exploding in his head like fireworks. He sensed the honey and the oils, smelled the oats and grains, tasted blueberry and raspberry. What part of his brain was processing this new data? The olfactory bulb? The gustatory cortex? Had they operated on his brain and rewired it? What else might they have tampered with?

He took a bite, rolling it around on his tongue, his sense of taste distinct from this new one. He needed a name for it. Smaste would do, at least until he had the time to think of something better. He chuckled to himself as he took another bite, his stomach rumbling audibly. Nothing like a meal to raise one’s spirits.

He sensed something, pausing his chewing as he sniffed the air. Something was coming.

He stood as a Bug appeared in front of his cell door, watching him with its striking, blue eyes. It was the same one as before, short and stocky, with mismatched arms and an iridescent shell in shades of blue and green. Walker saw it in a whole new light now, his smaste painting a picture in his mind, like a kind of synesthesia. His brain obviously lacked the specialized lobes that would have better interpreted these senses, and so they translated as colors and smells, not seen with the eyes but rather felt. If you were to imagine the colors of a rainbow in your mind or recall the taste of your favorite food, you might not actually experience them, but memory and imagination could approximate the sensations.

There was a color about the Bug, yellow, and Walker could have sworn that he felt a twinge of uncertainty or fear. A second-hand emotion, broadcast by the creature like a facial expression that was communicated through scent. It was nervous, afraid of him perhaps as it hovered outside the door. It opened his cell, waiting, the impression of color in Walker’s mind shifting further towards the green spectrum. It was expectant, it wanted him to leave his cage and step out into the tunnel.

Walker took a step forward, the creature backing away as its mood shifted towards yellow again, it was as scared of him as he was of it. He slowly stepped out of his cell and into the corridor beyond, a long tunnel that extended perhaps ten meters to the left and right before curving out of view, gloomy save for the odd bio-electric lighting that clung to the ceiling. He took in a breath of the warm, humid air, his senses scrambling to process the new information. He could sense the passage of other Bugs as if they had left footprints in the dirt, a trail of scents of such complexity that he could distinguish between individuals and the time that had elapsed since their passing. Half a dozen Betelgeusians had trodden here and left their signatures behind. More than that, there was a map, strong scents that drew his attention down different paths like the painted lines on the floor of the Pinwheel that would direct pedestrians to the station’s different quarters.

He cradled his head in his hands. The sensations too much to process, he felt like somebody who had been blind all of their life and was now seeing for the first time.

The Bug stood beside him, its aura green, waiting for him to make a move. It was not attacking, it did not seem to be aggressive in any way, its behavior defied logic. Walker had fought the Bugs for almost two decades, and he had never known them to respond with anything other than overt hostility to beings who were not of their race.

It released a scent into the air and Walker felt a strong compulsion to follow it. The feeling wasn’t conveyed through any complex means but rather through an urge akin to the desire to sneeze or yawn. He could deny the impulse if he wanted to, but what other options did he have? The Bug began to walk away, leaving an invisible trail behind it that lingered in the air, and so Walker followed.

It all made sense to him at that moment, it was like someone had switched on a light bulb in his head. Pheromones. The Bugs communicated using pheromones rather than speech, that was why Borealans were so adept at tracking them and how Kaz had been able to follow their scent trails with her keen nose. She could smell them, but she couldn’t read them as he now could. The scents contained a wealth of information that his new organ must be attuned to. The Bugs wanted to communicate with him. The surgery had given him a rudimentary pheromone sensing organ, a sixth sense that they had wired into his existing senses as best they could. Like a frugal computer technician, his surgeon had patched into the already existing systems of his brain, piggybacking on them to take advantage of their processing power. He could not see the world as the Bugs did, that might be impossible for him, but he was getting a rudimentary translation as his brain struggled to parse these new signals.

He followed the Bug for what must have been half a mile through a winding maze of tunnels that left him disoriented and lost. There were so many branching pathways and corridors, some verging left and right, others slanting up or down. He had to stop thinking with his eyes and start seeing the world with his nose. The passages had their own scents, a pheromone trail that acted like a subway map. Each tunnel had its own distinct smell, its own color in his mind, and while he could not yet read the language that they were written in he knew that the information was there.

His stumpy guide was following one such path, leading him to some unknown destination. Some nightmare laboratory where he would be subjected to further surgeries and experiments perhaps? Were they going to somehow turn him into a Bug? That might make a good horror movie, but it wasn’t very likely. He wasn’t being restrained, and he considered just running away, there was no way that this Bug would be able to catch him on its little legs. Where would he go, however? He didn’t know which color, which smell marked the way to the surface. Perhaps he would be able to learn in time and use that information to make his escape.

Walker smelled something in the distance, a great number of Bugs and what might have been disturbed soil. The scent got closer and closer as they followed the branching tunnels, the pheromones of what had to be two dozen individuals bombarding him, their emotional states mingling and difficult to distinguish.

He followed the Bug around one final corner, and he found himself in a half-finished tunnel, the hollowed-out dirt ending abruptly some distance away. There were perhaps thirty Bugs milling about, the same kind as his captor, short and stocky with mismatched arms. The hues of their iridescent shells varied wildly, from azure blue to amber and gold, even reds and purples. Their horns were just as varied, some twisted and branching like those of a stag, others were prominent and flared like a beetle. They were digging, using the spade-like hands on their upper arms to burrow into the soil, a few of them hauling the mounds of fresh dirt off down the tunnel and out of sight.

It was remarkably primitive, Walker saw no sign of construction equipment or heavy machinery. The Bugs were capable of interstellar travel and yet they had not invented a backhoe? That said, the little aliens were remarkably adept at their jobs, their limbs seemed to have been either evolved or engineered for the very purpose of excavation. Walker had been deployed on Kruger III during the war to wrest control of that system from the Betelgeusians. He had dug trenches alongside in his men in that muddy hellscape, and it was immediately apparent that these Bugs could accomplish the same amount of work in a fraction of the time.

When they had finished excavating a section of tunnel, they smoothed it out, packing the dirt as tightly as they could. Then their complex mandibles opened, revealing pink flesh beneath the hard shell. A long, sinuous tongue shot forth from an opening that could scarcely be called a mouth and was barely larger than the appendage, some kind of thick saliva oozing forth into their cupped hands. They rubbed it on the walls, the drool seeming to harden on contact and seal in the soil beneath.

They stopped what they were doing for a brief moment, seeming to smell Walker, turning to stare at him as their mandibles clicked and flexed like fingers. They quickly resumed their work, leaving Walker to wonder why the hell he had been brought here.

He felt a hand on the small of his back, his guide urging him forwards, releasing a new scent. It smelled acidic, like lemons and citrus fruits, giving him the impression of lime green in his mind’s eye. It wanted him to do something, it was expectant.

“You want me to dig?” Walker asked.

The Bugs stopped again, turning to stare at him, their long tongues shooting forth as if to taste the air. They made no sound besides the creaking of their armored limbs and the clicking of their mouthparts. It was not complex enough to be a language, did they have none? The UNN had no record of verbal communication from the Bugs, but it was hard to imagine how a species that lacked one could evolve to sapience. Sure, they had their pheromones, but you couldn’t record information in the long-term using scents. They would fade over time. How did they do math? How did they enter information into their computers without the written word?