Alien Games (The Human Chronicles Saga Book 17) Read online

  Below him, on the balcony at the guest quarters level, sat a silver-hulled vessel with three of the armor-clad aliens standing patrol. The ship would do nicely.

  Adam returned to the Lila’s chambers just as Trimen was regaining his senses.

  “Lila…where is she?”

  “They took her.”

  “Who took her?”

  “The Aris.” Adam entered the foyer outside Lila’s chambers with Trimen stumbling behind. He knew the other aliens were swarming the building, probably on the floor below looking for him. Next they would be coming to Lila’s chambers.

  “The Aris?” Trimen called out from behind him. “Referring to Zee’s Aris?”

  “That’s right. I spoke with Zee. She filled me in on the details. The Aris created Lila.”

  “I…how? That is incomprehensible.”

  “That’s what I thought too.”

  “They have arrived with an army,” said Trimen. “I received reports of attacks occurring throughout the system before joining you. Others are in the building,” Trimen reported.

  “Those aren’t Aris. I don’t know who they are.”

  “They are not with the Aris?”

  “I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. All I know is that the Aris have left and they have Lila.”

  Armor-clad aliens were at the shattered stairwell door by now, probing cautiously with the barrels of the energy rifles. Adam and Trimen fell against the wall next to the door. Two of the creatures exposed themselves; flash bolts ignited and the invaders fell, blocking the doorway.

  A torrent of blue-white streaks entered the foyer through the stairwell doorway, only to be silenced a moment later when a stern voice yelled out. It sounded like the angry voice of the alien Adam had smacked.

  At least he’s still alive. That says something for the durability of this particular breed of alien, Adam thought.

  “I have to get to the guest level,” he said to Trimen. “There’s a spaceship on the balcony. I need it to go after Lila.”

  Trimen scanned the foyer. The elevator doors were beyond the stairwell opening. They would be locked down by now, the result of emergency procedures. “There is a service shaft at the end of the corridor. It operates pneumatically, moving supplies in pods throughout the building. We might be able to climb down.”

  Without another word, the pair raced away from the stairwell. Aliens were once again trying to enter the foyer. Adam and Trimen sent a couple of random flash bolts at the door, and the aliens retreated.

  They turned a corner and came to a small alcove with a panel of clear glass set in the wall. An amber light glowed next to it, just above a control pad. Trimen fingered the keys and the light turned red. The glass panel opened.

  “All the access doors are open, from here to ground floor,” Trimen said.

  Adam poked his head inside the shaft. It was a round tube made of shiny and smooth metal. “What’s to keep us from falling all the way down?”

  “This.” Trimen had torn a section of thirty-foot long curtain from a nearby window. He tied one end to the legs of the built-in workstation and fed the silky material into the tube.

  “It’s not long enough,” Adam said. He could see the periodic access points for the different floors down the shaft, until it became just a dark point far below.

  “It will get us to the next level. Hopefully the invaders will not be present and we can take the stairs to the lower floor.”

  “Good thinking. I’ll take the lead.”

  Tucking the MK-17 into his waistband, Adam took hold of a ledge above the opening and hoisted himself up until his legs were dangling in the tube. Then taking the curtain firmly in his grip, he began sliding down its length.

  He looked down, knowing there was nothing to stop his fall for fifty stories. He quickened his descent.

  Above, he felt the tension on the curtain rope as Trimen added his weight to the length of cloth. That may not have been the best thing to do, not until Adam reached the floor below. A loud tearing sound confirmed his belief. He began to fall.

  Releasing the now-useless curtain, Adam extended his arms and legs, placing rubber soled shoes on one side of the shaft and his back against the other. It worked—somewhat. He was still sliding along the surface, but much slower. His back began to heat up from the friction against the wall.

  He slid past the access portal for the floor below Lila’s chambers. It came upon him so rapidly that he had no time to react. But now he knew what to expect.

  Then Trimen landed on his lap. He had been in freefall down the center the shaft.

  Adam groaned and pressed harder against the sides, having to support more weight than a moment before. His back felt on fire as the pair gained speed.

  Without warning, the wall of the shaft against Adam’s back disappeared. He fell backwards through access port, losing his grip on Trimen, and now hooked on the edge of the opening by his bent legs, hanging upside down. He felt a weight on his legs and a strong grip around his ankles. He straightened his legs, feeling desperate hands climbing up them. Trimen appeared at the opening until he gripped the outer wall of the portal and pulled, propelling himself out of the shaft. Adam fell head-first to the floor and rolled, finding the soft body of the alien next to him.

  They lay on the cold tile, panting for several seconds, catching their breath before Adam sprang to his feet with renewed urgency. He smiled at Trimen. “That worked—sort of. We should be on the guest level.”

  Adam raced out of the alcove and toward the balcony, leaving Trimen behind.

  “Wait for me!” he yelled after Adam.

  “You find Riyad and Sherri,” Adam called back. “Find out who these other aliens are. I’ll get Lila.”

  “How…against the Aris?”

  “I have an idea where they’re taking her.”

  The platform outside the building was contiguous, forming an observation deck that wrapped the structure. All the higher levels had such a feature, a place where guests and dignitaries could behold the glory of the expanding city of Vull. Night was approaching, and the building was already bathed in both internal and external light, making it visible throughout the city.

  The alien starship was still there, yet with only two guards visible. Adam pulled his MK-17 and sent a series of quick blasts into the aliens as he rushed toward the ship’s open hatch. The well-placed shots struck their unshielded heads, blasting each into unrecognizable masses of bloody flesh.

  Adam had no idea how many others were inside, and he didn’t care. Lila was bolting away somewhere in the heavens and he didn’t have time to waste.

  He entered through a small airlock open at the other side and met up with a central spine corridor that ran the length of the ship in each direction. He turned right, heading for the pilothouse.

  An alien appeared from a side compartment, unarmored and shocked to see Adam. It was the last thing he saw. Adam closed his eyes as he fired the MK, preventing a short-term bout of blindness from the intense flash. That wasn’t the case for the other alien in the corridor emerging from the pilothouse. Instinctively, he lifted his arms to his eyes as the light flooded the chamber. Adam’s next bolt burned a hole in the creature’s chest.

  That was it for Adam’s MK. The damn power pack of a ’17 only allowed for five shots at level-one. He’d set the weapon at max, not taking any chances against this unknown species of alien.

  He entered the pilothouse, and to his relief, it was empty.

  He scanned the side walls and found a control panel for the pressure door. He pressed it. With the room secure, he slipped into the pilot seat, snapping a safety harness around his waist. Nearly all starship control consoles had the same layout, a consequence of having been designed by Primes for Primes. Yet some used control keys while others had sticks. This one had keys, with strange symbols on each. That was a problem. He couldn’t read alien.

  Adam began to push buttons in what he hoped was some sort of logical progression. The larger keys did
produce a reaction. The ship began to hum as the generators wound up. That was a good sign. He pressed another button. This time a powerful flash bolt shot out from the bow, blasting out a twenty-foot wide section of the ornate stone railing lining the terrace, and sending chunks of debris raining all the way to the ground.

  One of the buttons activated a side screen, indicating the various openings to the ship in graphic detail. The main hatch was still open and a pulsing blue light framed the portal, warning the pilot that the ship was not secure for liftoff. Adam didn’t care. He was locked safely away in the pilothouse.

  The ship began to move, sliding sideways toward the edge of the balcony. Adam pressed buttons on the right side of the panel. This corrected the movement to the left, but it sent the spacecraft scraping along the side of the building to his right, creating another cascade of debris as doors and windows shattered. At least now he knew how to move the ship from left and right. Now how about up and down?

  The lower center buttons provided lift, causing the ship to shoot away from the building in a cloud of grayish smoke billowing from underneath. The shiny vessel reached the edge of the terrace—before smashing through another section of decorative railing and tumbling over the edge.

  Adam was thrown to one side, held in the seat only by his waist harness. He inhaled sharply as his stomach rose up in his throat. The gray cloud disappeared in the viewport, replaced by the blur of the building racing past. Adam figured he had about forty stories to learn how to fly the alien spacecraft.

  Automatic gyroscopes kicked in and the ship leveled out, but it was still falling.

  Adam began to press every button he could reach. At one point the ship lurched to a stop, nearly breaking his back in the process. But then another button sent the ship racing for the ground once again. Desperate to find the button he’d hit before, Adam performed a piano concerto on the keyboard with his panicked fingers.

  He finally hit something that made a difference.

  The view outside the ship became mired in a tornado of debris. It only lasted a second before the view cleared and stars greeted his welcoming eyes. He’d activated the gravity drive. Fortunately, the well had formed above the ship and not below….

  Adam retraced his keystrokes, and soon had a rudimentary understanding of the controls. They were logical, if he’d just had the time to think about it. The lower center buttons controlled the chemical drive, the upper buttons the gravity well. The outer row gave him pitch and yaw, while another set activated the various screens placed before his station.

  On one of the screens he saw the shrinking image of the planet Formil. He was in space, which was a start. Now he just needed to find where in space.

  He scanned the other screens. There was a proximity panel showing dozens of contacts painted in red. The rest of the screen was taken up by a haze of small blue contacts. These would be Expansion ships, numbering in the thousands, while red indicated the invaders—whoever they are. All the contacts were clustered in an area close to the planet.

  All except one.

  This rogue light was moving at incredible speed for the outer system. Adam shifted course, lining up on the departing Aris starship. He experimented with the buttons along the top of the panel, until he found a key he could press repeatedly, increasing the depth of the well. He was still inside a star system, so he had to be careful. The stronger the well, the more miscellaneous space junk would be drawn toward the singularity. Scooping up a generous portion of an asteroid belt would flood the well, causing an overload. He wouldn’t survive the resulting explosion.

  Fortunately, he was pretty familiar with the Formilian star system. He cranked the well up higher, knowing he was beyond the plane of the ubiquitous ring of unformed planetary debris most star systems contained, usually at the boundary between the rocky inner planets and the outer gas giants.

  He was gaining on the Aris starship.

  Of course, he had no idea what he’d do once he caught up to them. He considered his options. He could fire on the ship, knowing that Lila would survive any explosion. But then he’d have to locate her frozen body within the expanding sea of debris. And that was assuming he could destroy the glowing starship in the first place. The Aris had a million years of evolution over any of the current so-called superior races in the Milky Way. He may be in way over his head this time.

  But he was gaining. That was encouraging, and if he knew the controls better, he would have calculated an intercept time. Instead he had to eyeball it.

  That was until all the power in the starship cut out.

  The alien craft fell out of the gravity-well with a flash, as emergency lights snapped on, bathing the pilothouse in an eerie yellow glow, accentuated by starlight filtering in through the viewport. Adam pounded on the control panel, but to no avail. He was dead in the water…and the Aris were getting away.

  Something caught his eye through the viewport. A huge mass moved across the starfield, occasionally lite by a flare of reflection on a silver hull. It was a starship, but one larger than any he’d ever seen, except for a Klin Colony Ship. But this one wasn’t spherical. It was oblong, with the emphasis on long.

  Tiny flares erupted from a section along the hull, as a squad of mosquito-like ships formed up and came his way. Adam leaned back in the seat, enjoying the zero-gravity the ship was now experiencing with all its systems down. He released the safety harness and floated in the waterless sea.

  So much for peace and tranquility in the galaxy, he thought sardonically. We now have a new war with a new enemy, and without Lila around to lend us a hand.

  Chapter 4

  As quickly as the armor-clad aliens had arrived, they departed. Trimen and other Formilians fired at the departing figures, taking a few out before they boarded their ships and streaked off into space. The relatively few warships in the system gave chase, until recalled to help secure the planet against a possible secondary assault.

  Trimen found Sherri and Riyad in Lila’s chambers, looking for Adam.

  “He left to chase after the Aris,” Trimen informed them.

  “The Aris? You mean like Zee’s Aris?” Sherri asked.

  “That’s what I said. Yes, they still exist and have absconded with Lila.”

  The moment of stunned silence spoke volumes. “They took…Lila? How was that even possible?”

  “She was encased a blue halo. She could not move.”

  “The Aris are three billion years old,” Riyad pointed out. “To them, Lila’s probably as advanced as an amoeba.”

  “What does that make us?” Sherri asked. “And Adam raced off after them? What an idiot.”

  “She is his daughter,” Trimen pointed out.

  “I’m not criticizing his motivation, just his judgement. The Aris went through a lot of trouble to get her.”

  Riyad looked over to where the body of one of the light-brown aliens laid dead. “I would have thought the Aris would be a lot different than us.”

  “Those are not Aris,” Trimen said. “They are something else, not associated with them, according to Adam.”

  Sherri shook her head. “You mean two separate groups of aliens—forgive me, Trimen—attacked at the same time, and they don’t know each other?”

  “Apparently, again according to Adam. We shall learn more when the survivors are interrogated.”

  “I’d like to get in on some of that action,” Riyad said.

  “Where’s Adam now?” Sherri asked.

  “Unknown,” Trimen replied. “Come with me to Defense Command. Our journey of discovery is only just beginning.”

  ********

  Technicians highlighted the path Adam had taken from the government building. It ended a quarter of a light-year away, yet still within the range of hundreds of scanners operating in and around the Formilian star system.

  “How big was that thing?” Riyad asked.

  “Converted to Human measurements, three-miles-long by half-a-mile in diameter,” answered the alien tech. �
�There was only one of that size within the attacking fleet, yet another fifteen were half that size. The smaller attack vessels were discharged from the large one.”

  A Juirean Overlord was standing with the group. “A response force is assembling near LocVer. Ninety Juirean ships are included. I would expect the Humans to contribute as much, along with the other major species in the Expansion and beyond.”

  “Who’s in command?” Sherri asked.

  “We are,” stated Sando ra Todd firmly. “The attack occurred in Expansion space and against a member planet.”

  “Formil is not just a member of the Expansion,” Trimen pointed out. “We are the seat of government. Formilians should take the lead position.”

  “You have very little experience in space warfare. And with your abominable leader missing, there is no reason for the Juireans not to reassume control of the Expansion.”

  Several creatures spoke at once, turning from their screens to bark at one another.

  Riyad lifted a chair and slammed it on the floor. The loud crack got everyone’s attention. “Knock it off, all of you. This is bigger than any one race, or one empire.”

  The Juirean glared at him. The Overlord was one of the few higher-tier officers to survive the Human’s attack on the facilities atop the Kacoran Plain. Riyad had played a major role in that event, a fact the Juirean acknowledged through the hatred in his eyes.

  Riyad ignored him. “We have reports that the aliens—let’s call them invaders—took members of nearly race in attendance. It appeared to have been a coordinated operation. They had the capability to destroy the ships, yet destroyed none. All they took were people.”

  “Including the mutant,” the Juirean reiterated.

  Riyad hesitated revealing the fact that the Aris had taken Lila, and not the invaders. As far as he knew, the Juireans had no knowledge of the Aris. They were already feeling inferior enough after the spanking the Humans and Lila had laid on them. Knowing that another race of immortal super-beings was around would probably push them over the edge.

  “Yes, and that only serves to underscore the fact that the invaders are a major force to be reckoned with. They took individuals from both the Expansion and the Union, and everything in between.”