The Expansion Box Set, page 28
part #1 of The Expansion Series
“Kuldar,” the alien hissed uncertainly. It seemed to lack the same kind of vocal chords that the visiting humans possessed. It breathed out, making its mouth and lips frame the same shape that Specter’s had made. Specter alone had removed his helmet, as he alone among them could still access the necessary HUD features through his ocular implants.
“Specter,” Specter said slowly, carefully pronouncing the two syllables as he pointed to himself.
“Spec-terr?” the alien hissed, waving a bony hand to incorporate the other three.
“Humans,” Brandt said on impulse.
She hesitated briefly before accessing the release feature on her suit. The sudden action made the alien jump in fright slightly as the suit sprang open in sections to let her step forward unprotected. She held up a hand to try and soothe the alien, but it recovered quickly and reached out to touch its fingertips to hers. She tried not to recoil as the cool, soft, leathery skin touched her own.
“We are humans,” she said slowly and softly, “from Earth.”
The alien seemed to think about it, cocking its head slightly as it looked at her. She found herself tugged by an emotion of curiosity, infecting her with a need to know more about this alien, just as it seemed to need the same from her.
“Hyoo-munss,” it hissed, curling a thin lip in a smile. It radiated a sense of being pleased with itself. It pointed to its bony chest again and spoke again. “Kul-dar. Spec-terr,” it hissed and pointed at the sitting human-cyborg.
The alien turned to Brandt and gestured at her, tapping a thin finger in the center of her chest with eyes full of question. Brandt fought the urge to step away, to move the hand away from her breasts, and even though she didn’t move, the alien froze as though it sensed her discomfort. It did a strange thing, touching the fingertips of one hand to its forehead and closing its eyes as it gave a small bow, somehow conveying an apology directly into her feelings.
“Brandt,” she said, touching her chest slightly higher up than the alien had been aiming for.
The alien smiled at her—the thin lips over the small mouth twitched and curled as though it was copying her own gesture.
“Asha,” it said, placing a fingertip to its own breast and approximating a smile.
“Nice to meet you, Asha,” Brandt said. “Do you need our help?”
Asha looked confused, glancing to Specter who watched for a sign that he was able to help. He turned to the plinth, kneeling down on long, thin legs and swiping away the little digital Ichi as fingers danced through the air and brought up a new hologram.
They leaned in closer, seeing a type of ship, but not by any design specifications they had ever seen.
The ship looked almost insectoid, with six articulated landing struts ending in spikes. The rear section of the ship was bulbous and seemed to be entirely engine. Protrusions from the small forward section bore the ominous look of heavy guns.
“What is that, Asha?” Brandt said. Acting on a hunch, she pointed at the holographic image and filled her thoughts and emotions with curiosity.
“Va’alen,” he hissed. The word and his tone made them all feel a sense of dread and fear.
Brandt physically shuddered at the emotion that Asha projected. “Va’alen? They’re another race? Aliens?”
“Va’alen,” Asha repeated, giving them a secondary wave of fear and grief of loss.
If Brandt had to guess, she would assume that the Va’alen, whoever or whatever they were, had persecuted this race and this world. The ship certainly looked war-like.
Asha started speaking in his own language again, rattling clicks and rolling croaks filling the air. Brandt snatched the wrist device off her suit, scanning the occasional words of translation popping up on screen as the software worked hard to learn a new language in minutes.
War ... Invaded ... Destroyed technology ... Prisoners ... Patrol … Twin suns.
Adding in the massive amounts of assumed detail, Brandt got the picture.
The Kuldar, Asha’s people, were trapped on this planet. They lived under fear of discovery or invasion by the Va’alen, who patrolled the system and had something to do with the binary star system a few light years away.
This is heavy, she told herself. Get a grip…
“Show me the Va’alen,” she said, pointing at the ship and trying to mime expanding the display. The large heads of the Kuldar seemed to hold a brain capable of more than their own, including the ability to communicate emotion. She was testing whether they had the ability to read emotion too. She thought about the ship she saw slowly rotating on the plinth, concentrating on her curiosity about the occupants.
Asha understood, swiping at the display and bringing up another holographic image that made all of them feel suddenly cold and afraid. Brandt doubted it was all from Asha projecting his own feelings.
The figure displayed stood beside a representation of a Kuldar for reference. It was a whole head taller, making the new figure almost two heads above a human. It was humanoid, with a secondary set of long upper limbs that ended in extended, curved claws. The claws looked deadly to anything not enclosed in armor.
Asha clicked a long rattle of his own words and Brandt looked down at her comm device’s screen after tearing her eyes away from the beast on the holo-display. Va’alen… male … warrior caste … kill.
Brandt, as much as she tried to hide her feelings, had no desire whatsoever to meet one of them.
“Commander, come in,” a voice emanated from the speaker in her comm device, snapping her back to the present and reminding her that Torres had been monitoring through her suit. He must have linked through Eze’s suit after that. She smiled an apology at Asha who seemed to understand as she stepped back inside the armor and stayed still as it closed around her limbs and torso.
“Brandt,” Torres said, “this isn’t exactly what I had in mind for a first contact scenario…”
She glanced at the HUD icons, confirming that the link between the captain and her was a secure one.
“Me neither, sir,” she said softly, trying to catch her breath after being in the lower oxygen environment. “What do we do?”
“Sit tight for now. Try and run the linguistic program with your new friend to build a language base for the translation software.”
“Roger that, Captain,” she replied. The connection was cut, no doubt for Torres to place a call home. They should know the team had inadvertently landed in the middle of an alien warzone.
“Ja— Specter, could you run a linguistic profile program with Asha?”
Specter nodded, ignoring her second slip-up. He detached the device from his own forearm to turn it around and show it to Asha.
The process for analyzing and translating a new language was an easy one. With any language on Earth it would only take about twenty minutes to learn an entirely new dialect and be able to translate that through a suit’s software. The problem with using it on an alien planet was that every image it showed Asha was something new that he hadn’t seen before: car, boat, cat, child, skyscraper. Each of these things was as weird and wonderful to him as the dark moss and stubby, black-leafed trees of his world were to them. His eyes widened at each unfamiliar image. The program ran for five minutes and had only picked up a few terms from him before Brandt shut it off.
“We’ll need to find another way,” she said.
“The file sent from Earth has downloaded now,” Eze said. “Try now.”
Specter tapped at the comm device and turned it back around to face Asha. The alien radiated delight at seeing his own language projected to him, then that elation suddenly stopped. He rattled off a rapid sequence of clicks at them, conveying a fearful anger as he spoke.
Where? … my people … ancient time … legend.
“A ship crashed on our planet many years ago,” Brandt said. “We think it must have come from here, from your people…”
Asha glanced at the comm device. It was working in both directions and translating some of Brandt’s words into the hieroglyphs that he could read.
He spoke again, very few of his words translated to English, but he radiated the mixed feelings of fear, excitement and confusion. Brandt was saved from having to explain any more by the comm channel erupting into life.
“Contact, fast-moving,” the comm officer onboard the Ichi barked. “Heading directly for the landing site. Scratch that, two fast-movers, you have two vessels incoming. LZ acknowledge.”
Brandt heard the cool tones of Zero acknowledge the warning. He would have the few soldiers left under his command taking up defensive positions in readiness.
“Eze, stay here and guard Asha,” she ordered. “Butler, external security and get your head on a swivel. Ja– Specter, on me.”
Asha grew nervous as he heard the panic in the voices and felt the emotions of the humans. The female who seemed to be in charge said something that he didn’t understand, but he felt that he should stay there and also that he should be afraid. He swiped at the plinth, bringing up a planetary image and highlighted the two red blips racing fast around the halo of habitable ground. They were flying directly toward where the humans had left their small ship. Those two blips were expanded by a command from his fingertips, enlarging to become the recognizable shapes of two small Va’alen patrol vessels.
The words of his wife, his queen, returned to him then with chilling intensity.
And if that message brings the Va’alen down on us, then there will be a reckoning for you.
34
Proxima b Orbit
“Sir, you seeing these contacts?” the tactical officer asked Torres.
“Unfortunately, I am,” he said. He had just seen the same type of ship on the display via Eze’s suit. He hit the comm, calling Brandt. “Commander?”
“Here, sir.” Her voice was strained as she ran hard across the soft, wet surface of the planet to reach the landing zone before the ships did. She knew they wouldn’t make it; the trajectory displayed on her HUD showed their arrival time, and it was a full minute behind that of the two new ships.
“What are our chances that these new guys are willing to talk?” he asked.
“Between slim and none,” she quipped back. “Any chance you can drop us a mech?”
Torres chewed at his lip as he considered the possibility of readying one of the two mechanized rigs they had onboard and getting it to the surface within a few minutes. Even as he thought, he knew it was pointless. There was no way to get them there without taking the Ichi in to land and endangering the entire mission.
“Sorry, Commander,” he said. He hoped that her request wasn’t the basis of an entire defensive plan.
“I know, sir,” she said. “We have to deal with this—” She paused, an idea rapidly jumping into her head. “Sir, can the software patch for the turret controls be uploaded to the Tanto? Like, RFN?”
Torres looked at his tactical officer who nodded and began tapping at his screen.
“On it,” Torres told Brandt. “I’ll stay on the channel but leave you to do your thing.”
“Roger that, sir.” She thought of a million different things as she ran. A new icon flashed up on the top bar of her HUD for her authority to accept a remote software patch upload. She accepted it and called out to the LZ. “Zero, come in.”
“Here. How long are we going to be on our own before you arrive?”
“A minute. Maybe two.”
“Understood.”
Zero turned to see two of the armored soldiers under his command already taking cover and readying spare magazines for their small carbines. Marcus, a big guy who looked every part the long-haul sailor, had wanted to take a squad support weapon but Zero had agreed with Brandt: going for a friendly first contact drop carrying an artillery piece didn’t give off the right signals. He wished that the big guy had got his own way right now. He couldn’t stop replaying the feed in his head about the Va’alen and their reputation for being big, aggressive assholes who liked to fill their spare time with long walks in the country and genocide.
Chopra, a close friend of Marcus but not half as big, nestled herself behind a wedge of low, smooth rocks the color of granite.
That’s great, he thought to himself, but what if they land behind you and come from the other direction?
Any plan of action was better than inaction. Zero turned to the other two people at his LZ and was dismayed to see exactly that: inaction.
“Rogers!” he snapped at the pilot. “Get your ass strapped in and have this baby turning ready!”
“Sure you don’t need the extra firepower?” Rogers patted the pistol on his thigh.
“You’re likely to shoot yourself or me, fly-boy. Move your ass!”
Rogers fled up the ramp, and Byrne was left standing alone at the base of it. He was unsure what was expected of him and hoped he would receive a similar ass-chewing so that at least he knew what to do.
“If you wouldn’t mind taking some cover and getting your weapon ready?” Zero enquired sarcastically. “You know, before the massive aliens turn up to rip your spine out and wear it like frikkin’ jewelry?”
Byrne spun on the spot three times, finally seeing a depression of low ground and throwing himself into it. Zero alone stood out in the open, but he took the new marksman rifle off his back and checked that the magazine and the supercharger module were in place. He chambered a round and looked at the sky ready to face down with whatever landed.
Unclipping the mobile cover from the small of his back, he sighed to himself. “Bring it on.”
“Comm: get me Earth on subspace now,” Torres snapped. He didn’t have time to move to the briefing room or his private cabins to place the call. The screen sprang to life and the surprised look on the female commander’s face told him how unorthodox his transmission was.
“No time, Commander,” he snapped. “I know you don’t want to tell me if and when we are expecting additional fleet resources in this system, but we could do with them immediately.” She opened her mouth to respond, but Torres wasn’t finished and wasn’t in the mood for a conversation. “We have made first contact with a friendly and intelligent alien race, but we now have a contact with another alien race and our intel shows them to be far from friendly. We do not know their weapon or combat capabilities, but we are about to find out the hard way very soon. If you have help available,” he finished loudly, “then please… send it now.”
“Zero, Grip. ETA ninety seconds. Copy?”
The radio blared in his ear, but Zero didn’t hear the words. Instead he watched as what looked like two fat bees came into focus, flying in perfect synchronicity as they weaved toward the LZ, switching in and out of one another’s path.
“Stand by,” he said in a hoarse voice. “We got incoming.”
The two ships were both about the same size as the Tanto in the main body, but seemed taller and larger by their insectoid legs of landing gear that bored deep holes into the soft moss as they settled down to land. Even their ships seemed to lean down and intimidate as the engines whined down to near silence. The forward sections of the ships were reflective and black with a honeycomb pattern, much like the insect eyes they reminded him of. Gun barrels protruded from the fuselage, and he swallowed hard as a hissing noise came from the nearest ship. The forward section lifted up and over, terribly, slowly, to reveal a hideous sight. Zero watched, holding his breath.
The thing stood, rising from its chair before stepping out into thin air ahead of Zero to land heavily ten paces in front of them. It crouched slightly on landing, but then stood to its full height and stretched out its spine to show its huge size.
Standing over eight feet tall on thick, gnarled and knotted muscular legs, it stretched all four of its arms out wide and rotated its head to look at Zero, who suddenly felt so small and not at all dangerous.
Not head, Zero thought as he tried to find some way to describe what he was seeing. That isn’t a head, it’s more like a helmet or something.
There was no mouth, no discernable features of the thing and no obvious articulation between body and head like the humans’ fragile-looking necks. To turn and look sideways, which it did when the almost identical but slightly smaller creature dropped from the front section of the other ship, the thing had to turn its whole upper body, all four arms moving with it.
The two aliens seemed to make visual contact with each other, then both turned back to look at him.
“Err, hi?” Zero said.
The aliens made no response.
“We are from Earth,” Zero said, his words loud and spoken slowly. His tone tried to sound friendly, but the grip on his rifle stayed firm.
Still they made no move to show that they had heard or understood him.
“Umm, Commander?” Zero said quietly into his comm. “You, uh…” He chuckled nervously. “You far away?”
The two aliens snapped their focus up and away from him to face the treeline behind. Their two right hands reached behind them and came back with fat, bulbous pods that were unmistakably weapons from the way they were held, implying an obviously dangerous business end.
The first noises the new creatures had made rumbled out, low and powerful, and both scattered left and right for the cover of their ships’ landing struts in another coordinated move. Zero instinctively dove for the small cover provided by the Tanto.
“Don’t fire! Don’t fire!” Brandt shouted. She stepped into the clearing that was their LZ and held her hands out to show open palms. “Let’s just…” She swallowed, seeing the sheer size and menacing figure of a Va’alen up close for the first time. “Let’s just be nice…”
She stepped forward, arms still held out to show that she meant no harm. She hoped that the aliens could tell she meant no harm and saw the one that had been towering over Zero fix on her directly.
It seemed to be looking at her. She couldn’t say for sure if it was, because the face was featureless and shiny, but she got the distinct impression that she was now its main focus.
