Eric Olafson, First Journeys (Vol 2)
Copyright© 2018 by Vanessa Ravencroft
Chapter 27: Downstairs
In the complete darkness, something inside me made me close my eyes, just as I did riding on Tyr’s back. I could sense my surroundings. I felt every heartbeat of Plemo and I learned that Ellies had two hearts. I felt the stairs and the faint electric residue in the lamps.
With a metallic hum, the stairs transformed into a steep slide. Plemo had no warning and slid away before I could warn him. I managed to hold onto the hand rail and prevent the slide, but Plemo was sliding into a death trap. The fastest way down was sliding, but I wouldn’t slide unprepared. I drew the blaster, dropped onto my butt and let go.
I heard voices below, commanding voices. I raised the blaster. There at the bottom of the ramp were two figures, about 150 cm tall with large heads and armed. I sensed Plemo float in mid-air struggling against some unseen force, but with my new sense I saw the head of one figure, glowing. Psionics!
I didn’t hesitate, I fired right at the center of that perceived glow, and Plemo fell instantly. The other figure turned his head and something on his chin started to emit energies. Whatever the figure wanted to do, it was too late. My second beam sliced right through his head.
Plemo screamed, more out of anger than fear, “I’m going to get you!”
I yelled back, “It’s me Plemo, Eric! I killed whatever was holding you. I noticed a circuit board on the wall and pressed the contact. With a sharp clack the ramp went back into stair form and a second switch turned on the lights. Plemo ripped his blaster out of his holster and even though I had never seen an angry Elly before, I knew he was furious. Two dead beings, still armed with strange shaped blasters, lay on the floor, most of their heads were gone, burned to molecular ashes. “Plemo calm down, right now!” I said with a sharp tone. “Get up those stairs and wake the instructors. Tell them we need help.”
“But...”
“No arguments! Now go! I need to guard this panel so no one turns the stairs into a ramp again!”
“Yes Sir!”
He turned and stomped up the stairs. After I heard the metal door slam I went to my knees. I was in a short corridor, with some sort of conveyor belt on the left hand side. It wasn’t running. It disappeared after a few meters through a square opening with a slotted roll gate closing the opening. Next to it was a metal door. The door was rusty and had dirty glass panels in the upper half. I kicked the dead aliens’ weapons under the frame of the conveyor belt. I could stay here and wait for the professionals to arrive, which would have been the smart thing to do, but I resigned myself to the fact that I couldn’t go against my own nature.
There were friends in danger, that much was as clear as fresh-water ice. I had no idea who these white-skinned small men were in those stupid looking robes, but if there were two there might be more.
On my knees I crawled towards the door. If someone was behind it, they were warned something had gone wrong.
I pressed myself as much as possible against the wall and gave the door a push. Three bright beams perforated the lower part of the door at the same moment. If I had still been standing there, at least two would have hit me. A shower of metal sparks burned my back and I clenched my teeth to not make a sound. The door swung back in its frame, I heard steps from beyond the hinges coming closer. From the gap between the floor and the door I saw four Elly-like feet. Someone in the local language said, “Whoever it was, you got him. Our masters will be pleased!”
I was glad they had uploaded the local language into our brains an hour before we landed. I aimed the blaster’s muzzle at the gap in the door and the feet behind and fired describing a small arc while keeping the trigger pressed.
The beam dug a glowing, fan-shaped pattern into the concrete and a glowing flow of molten metal drooled onto the floor. Someone was screaming in agonizing pain.
I kicked the door open, rushed through, avoiding the semi-liquid concrete by a fraction, and jumped onto the conveyor belt, remembering the third beam. Two Yokuta with burned leg stumps lay on the floor, one in shock and the other still screaming. A third stood about five meters behind them. He held a weapon but didn’t react or shoot immediately. I aimed the blaster, holding it with both hands, and said, “Drop your blaster.”
It was as if he was fighting or resisting himself. He wanted to lower the blaster. I could see that, but against his will it raised. He was controlled by someone or something. I didn’t want to kill him. So I fired into the ceiling, showering him with sparks, hoping to distract him. His instincts were stronger then whatever controlled him and he raised his arms to protect his face. He was a Yokuta, at least double my mass and two heads taller, and I had no idea if they had any vulnerable spots, but I holstered the gun and attacked with a running tackle, hit him in the midriff with all the force I could muster. He was driven back but not as much as I had hoped. It felt as if I had run into one of those big sand-filled leather bags we used at fight school. I just knew I couldn’t have done that with a Yokuta at the top of his game. His left hand brushed my ear with a powerful haymaker and the burning pain felt as if he had taken my ear clean off. I retaliated with two left-right combinations aimed into the middle of his face where the trunk meets the eyes, and rammed my knee into what would be the stomach pit of a Human opponent. If he were to connect with another one of his punches I’d be done for. So much for my decision not to wait for back up.
He made a tooting sound as I hit him again, this time right on the trunk, and he stumbled back while I avoided another punch by a hair’s width. He was now trying to aim the weapon he still held. I either had to end it now or shoot him as well. I stomped my heavy boots on his open-toed sandal and that had the desired effect. He yelped and raised a leg and gave me a wide open target for an axe handle blow to his trunk! He fell backward, and I kicked the blaster out of his hand.
It took two more kicks against his head to make the Yokuta stop trying to get back up.
This seemed to be some sort of postal depot. The conveyor belt ran along a row of chairs, most likely occupied during normal operations to sort whatever was coming down the slide and along the conveyor belt. The stairs that converted to a ramp wasn’t a real trap but a slide for mail or packages and had some industrial or warehousing purpose.
Four pill-shaped capsules in the middle of the room looked out of place, they didn’t fit with the rest of the equipment. A little square box, strapped to the middle of each, had a readout displaying foreign glyphs in bright red that changed at a steady rate. While I wasn’t able to determine the exact purpose of these cylinders, I had no doubt the boxes were timers. Something bad would happen if the timers reached the end of their countdown, that was obvious. No one else was in the room. I didn’t see Deadan or the others, and thankfully no one hostile either.
Not knowing if I was dooming everybody, including me, I pulled my knife and cut the strap that held the first timer box to the large metal container. It came loose. Now what? I had a live bomb counting down in my hands! There were three more like it!
Over there, across the conveyor belt, a metal chute. There were chutes like this across all the sorting or work stations. I cut all the boxes off and threw them each in a different chute. I noticed the cold sweat on my forehead stinging my eyes. I heard some machinery starting up from the first chute and the conveyor belt started running.
The conveyor belt disappeared through another portal at the other end of the room and I simply hopped on and lay flat on it.
Just then there was a muffled explosion and the first chute emitted a flash cloud of fire and smoke, heartbeats later the other three did the same, leaving me deaf. The conveyor carried me to a hole in the wall and through it into the next area of this underground warehouse.
The first thing I saw was Deadan. I recognized him by his uniform. He was lying on the floor, not moving. Concentrating on Deaden, I overlooked the robot arm that grabbed me by the left shoulder in a painful crushing grip and was about to stuff me in some sort of machine. I fired the blaster against the robot arm’s base and it dropped me to the floor. My left arm was next to useless; the robot claw must have broken my shoulder, or at least dislocated it. I couldn’t say which but it hurt like hell, at least it was making me forget my still throbbing ears.
Before I rushed to Deadan, I took cover behind a large crate and looked around. The place was some sort of assembly plant, with machinery, conveyor belts and towering shelves. Millions of corners for someone to hide and take aim. The machine behind me was similar to the robot that I had seen in the Nilfeheim XChange warehouse. Back on Nilfeheim the stationary robot wrapped fish and Tyrannos. This machine packed anything that entered via the conveyor in a shrink-wrap plastic skin and placed it onto a pallet. An empty pallet sat at the end of the machine. I would have been in it if I hadn’t escaped.
I kept low and rushed over to Deadan who still wasn’t moving. I didn’t see any obvious reason why he wouldn’t move but he felt stiff and cold. I hoped, against my sad conclusion of his condition, that he was still alive and just knocked out.
The empty pallet had reached the end of the conveyor line and a robotic fork lift took it and placed it into a shelf, next to a pallet that had something on it that moved! Trying to stay as much as possible behind cover, I rushed to the shelf and found the Human cadet, Ninio and Potsema, tightly wrapped in plastic. Ninio was still moving! It took me no time to cut the plastic open. Ninio did nothing but breathe like I’ve never seen anyone or anything take in air.
Potsema was up and out next to me, seemingly unaffected. She simply squiggled me all over. “Eric! You saved us!”
“Potsema not now! Take care of Ninio!”
I checked on the Human cadet. He was dead, no question. I couldn’t feel any pulse and even after several minutes of intensive CPR I got no sign of life!
A heavy hand dropped on my shoulder. “Let him go, Cadet! He’s gone!’
I turned, ready to fight, but it wasn’t necessary. A Union Marine and one of our instructors were there.
Interlude 27: Siucra
Olnatar heard his Space Feeler Operator tell him they had located the fleet of small boats that had escaped from the doomed Ivanhoe. They hadn’t gotten too far, nearly or completely out of fuel or with burned out FTL drives, stranded in the middle of deep space. It would hardly take one ship to destroy them. but he had come that far with a thousand ships. The disgusting life forms must have their colony somewhere out here. They were moving towards the star- filled space of this sector of the galaxy.
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