ALIEN ABDUCTION Kaitlyn O’Connor 2 Beastmen of Ator Alien Abduction By Kaitlyn O’Connor (C) Copyright by Kaitlyn O’Connor, Oct 2013 (C) Cover art by Jenny Dixon, February 2013 ISBN 978-1-60394-814-2 Smashwords Edition New Concepts Publishing Lake Park, GA 31636 www.newconceptspublishing.com This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence. Author note: Italicized text is used to denote conversations between the Furians using telepathy. Italicized text in quotes is used to denote the fact that the Furians are speaking their language and saying things the heroine doesn’t understand—so she can’t respond. This story is the first in a proposed series—pending reader approval and interest—so while it is a complete book with appropriate romance ending, not everything is neatly tied up. Chapter One “We will have Sooni now,” Dagon said with satisfaction, instantly capturing the attention of the other two males of his triad, Gilen and Joar. Dagon was still seated at the controls of their flanx’s vessel. Gilen and Joar had left the seats they generally occupied to study over the booty from their raid. It took them a couple of moments to mentally shift gears from reliving their triumph and examining their prizes with expansive pride and for that time they merely stared at Dagon blankly, their mouths slightly ajar. Finally, the dots connected in their minds and Gilen and Joar turned to stare at one another to gauge each other’s reactions. “You think?” Gilen finally responded a little doubtfully, studying their take with an entirely different perspective. He thought they had done well. Until Dagon had made that remark, he had, at any rate. It was their first raid, after all, and although they had trained as warriors for many years, practical application of their ancient traditions was rarely as successful when launched against their galactic neighbors as they had been in olden times when the neighbors were little more than a stone’s throw away. And chucking stone tipped spears for that matter! He felt that they had captured things of great value, but since they still hadn’t figured out what the things were, he ALIEN ABDUCTION Kaitlyn O’Connor 3 thought it might be premature to assume they were valuable enough to bring them a bride of Sooni’s stature. Maybe a bride of any stature at all! Truthfully, he was more relieved, and elated, that they had succeeded in counting coup on the Basinini at all than thrilled with the tokens they had so hastily gathered—especially since they didn’t know what the spoils were. Well—there were those things of an ornamental and utilitarian nature that seemed self explanatory—the objects of personal adornment and the household items. Those held very little value when all was said and done, however, beyond that of mementos to mark the success of their first coup. It was those things of a technological nature that would hold the greatest value —or at least had that potential. He was still doubtful that Sooni’s flanx (extended family) would consider accepting them as her triad mates. Sooni was a high princess—daughter of the high princes’ triad, who were directly in line to rule over all of the tribes of Ator one day—and they were not even minor princes. True, she hadn’t simply dismissed Dagon when he had downed a full skin of false courage in the form of fermented gigi berries at the gathering of tribes and approached her. Most of the young people had been indulging rather more than they should have, however, since it was their coming of age celebration and the eve of ‘trial by fire’ of the young warriors—many of whom would not return and well knew it! He thought it entirely possible that it was either a case of Princess Sooni being nearly as drunk as Dagon or she had simply taken pity and figured he would not remember once he had sobered—even if he made it back from their raid. He certainly wasn’t convinced on so little evidence as the fact that Sooni hadn’t publicly humiliated Dagon for his audacity in thinking that she would actually welcome their suit and support them in spite of parental disapproval! He glanced at Joar again, but he knew Joar wasn’t likely to contradict their alpha. Whatever Dagon said, Joar merely nodded agreement to. “I am as smitten with her as every other Furian of an age to barter for a mate,” he said finally, “but we do not have enough here to be considered seriously by her flanx. And even if they would, her fathers would refuse to consider us. Think what you are saying! They will rule Ator one day. They will want heirs of the royal line!” Dagon reddened, primarily with anger. “We may not have been born in the royal line, but we counted coup against the Basinini! We have proven ourselves to be strong, clever warriors and that is as important to the line as the blood! That was not an easy thing to do with their superior technology! There were at least a half a dozen triads who did not succeed in their raids! And beyond that, we have taken bartering goods of great value! There will not be many who will bring back a higher bride price than we have!” Gilen frowned at him. “If you know the value it is more than I do! I’ve not yet figured out what these things are! They may be completely useless to a Furian! Of no value beyond trinkets to prove we counted coup on the Basinini! Then where will we be? We will have made fools of ourselves trying to get the princess’ notice and I for one do not want that kind of notice!” Dagon had already drawn breath to argue his point when the alarms on their craft began to blare. It took the three of them several moments to locate all of the buttons that controlled the various alarms—nearing Ator’s airspace, proximity alert, scan alert, boarding/collision alert. They were already thoroughly rattled by the time they had silenced the damned racket and struggling to maintain composure to find the threat before it found them when they looked at the forward viewing screen. The sight that filled the screen made their blood run cold and so ALIEN ABDUCTION Kaitlyn O’Connor 4 stunned them that, even as trained and now experienced warriors, they were shocked to frozen immobility and could do nothing for many moments but stare and try to absorb and understand what they were seeing. Basinini ships filled the skies above Ator as far as they could see and even as their attention was caught by the sheer number of the ships that formed almost an unbroken cloud above Ator, those ships fired upon the world below. Their beloved Ator. Dagon was dumbfounded by the weapons themselves. Expecting explosive beams, the bolts shot from the ships that looked like nothing but spears—mighty spears, granted, and composed of some hardened metal, but still nothing but lances as far as he could see—made him feel perfectly blank. They were throwing spears? He followed those ‘spears’ as they broke through the atmosphere, trailing smoke and fire, expecting them to burn up at any moment and vanish. Instead, the ‘spears’ flew straight and true from the belly of the ships that had fired them to the ground below and, when they struck, Ator exploded. Soil and rocks, trees and other vegetation, the structures and cities that his people had built over countless generations crumbled and jumped upward as if a giant fist had hammered the ball of dirt and rock. The destruction was so massive, so all encompassing that his mind simply refused to grasp what he was staring at, what his eyes recorded to torture his mind forevermore. Rage boiled upward to fill the vacuum, however. And the moment his rage exploded through his mind, he transformed, freed the beast he kept trapped inside—his patron beast, their clan’s totem, the gryphon. As part of his triad, both Gilen and Joar transformed, as well, even though neither had managed to shake their shock sufficiently to comprehend what they’d seen. But then the triads of Ator were connected in a way none of the many other species familiar with the Furians had ever truly understood. They were bred as triads and born as triads. From conception to death they were as one entity —quite often of three separate minds, but more often than not working together as a unit rather than an individual. It gave them an advantage few species had. In general, the more intelligent, or at least civilized, a species, the more inclined they were toward individualism, the more difficulty they had thinking and acting as a whole and for the benefit of the whole. They had to learn to act as a team or unit to increase their strength and powers of observation. The Furians had no such problem. It was instinctive to them to band together at any threat and act and this time was no different despite their shock. As one, they transformed themselves into their alter egos, their beast brothers. The Basinini that had beamed aboard to retrieve their belongings met a trio of terrifying beasts that so shocked them with horror that they barely had time to scream before the beasts tore them limb from limb and left them twitching in puddles of blood and entrails and mangled muscle tissue to search for another target. That wasn’t difficult. The Basinini ships, having discharged their weapons, had begun to return to the mother ship. The ability of the Furians to transport themselves from place to place was as natural as breathing or indeed moving any part of their anatomy in actions or gestures. They had only to think it to do it and when they spied the enemy crafts headed for the mother ship, they followed. Breaching the defenses of the Basinini like ghosts, they simply bypassed them as speeding atoms and regenerated once they’d landed. Half the Basinini on the bridge were dead before they knew they had been boarded. Not that it would have helped them to have known. Like so many ‘superior’ races, the Basinini relied very heavily upon their technology to make up for any lacks they had physically. They were no match at all for the Furians when it came to hand-to-hand combat, wouldn’t have ALIEN ABDUCTION Kaitlyn O’Connor 5 been even if the Furians hadn’t been in a towering rage and had been willing to allow them some concessions for being physically inferior. And they weren’t simply outmatched physically. The Furians retaliated in far greater numbers than they’d anticipated. The Basinini had miscalculated the ability of the returning warriors to launch a counter attack—since they had no idea of the abilities of the beastmen of Ator and had been laboring under the false impression that they were known as ‘beastmen’ because they were barbaric. The destruction of Ator had been a calculated move, timed to demoralize the warriors and teach them a ‘lesson’ before they destroyed them, as well, for their audacity in raiding a Basinini stronghold. They hadn’t anticipated any difficulty at all in carrying out their plans for retribution. After all, there wasn’t a species in the entire galaxy that was even on a par with the Basinini technologically, let alone superior. The Furians were so far down the evolutionary chain as to make it child’s play to annihilate them. Most, if not all, of the Furian’s technology had been filched from other species in the raids the barbarians carried out as part of their warriors’ coming of age ritual—and those others who’d supplied the Furians with technology weren’t even close to being a challenge for the Basinini. The Basinini had made the most momentous mistake in the history of their species. They’d not only made enemies of the Furians, they’d tried to wipe them out and the Furians, they were soon to discover, could be just as ruthless as they were. The Furians would not rest, would not stop until they had wiped out the race that had destroyed their world and done their utmost to wipe out the entire Furian Empire. Dagon’s triad arrived on the bridge of the Basinini mother ship behind three others, but it only mattered because none of them had managed to satisfy their blood lust for the destroyers of their world by the time they’d waded through the Basinini that were present and annihilated them. Huffing for breath, more from rage than exertion, Dagon, Gilen, and Joar searched the bridge in vain for another victim to appease their hunger for revenge and came up empty. Fortunately, it occurred to them that the mother ship was vast and that they’d found it by following the warriors returning from unleashing their death bolts. The triads spread out from the bridge and systematically searched out the Basinini and executed them. When they had turned the ship into a ghost ship, they searched for more. They knew there had to be more and nothing would appease them until they were absolutely certain that they had tracked down and annihilated every Basinini and wiped the race from existence. * * * * There was no sign of the Basinini ship they’d followed through the wormhole created by the Basinini ship’s hyper-jump once they emerged. Dagon knew that could mean that they’d emerged too quickly from the wormhole and the Basinini ship was light years away from their current position, but he’d honed his instincts for tracking them since the bastards had destroyed their home world and his gut was telling him they were right on the bastards’ tails. “Any sign of them?” He’d directed the question at Gilen, who was manning the navigation computers, but it was Joar who answered. “This thingy we took from the last ship is indicating a ship about a quarter of a light year in that direction.” Both Gilen and Dagon turned to look at him. Gilen returned his attention to the navigation screen almost immediately, however. “Can you confirm it?” Dagon asked. ALIEN ABDUCTION Kaitlyn O’Connor 6 Gilen ignored the question while he studied the screen. In a few moments, though, he spotted the object making the blip on Joar’s thingy screen and a slow grin dawned. “Yeah. Pretty sure. That thingy must be like a homing beacon for the Basinini.” Dagon smiled grimly in satisfaction. “It is a good thing that I grabbed it. I was beginning to think that we had succeeded in wiping out that useless race and would no longer have anything to do.” “Aye,” Gilen agreed with a nod. “It has been nigh a stellar year since we found one.” Dagon tensed and glanced at him sharply. They had used Ator time for several years after its destruction and the death of almost everyone they knew. Slowly, it had dawned upon them that it was not only pointless to track time passing by a gauge that no longer existed—at least as a living planet—but it was painful, a hurtful reminder they did not need. In the beginning, he thought that pain had had purpose. It had kept them firmly on the path of retribution. But they had tracked and destroyed the bulk of the Basinini in the time since and now spent far more time looking for the bastards than fighting. It left them more time to think than Dagon liked. He had carefully and deliberately clouded his mind to the passing of time, ignored the things about his own body that told him he was aging in time with his home world even if it was no longer his home world. If the Basinini had not destroyed their world, he would have found a mate and had a family in this time. Perhaps even Sooni, although he had long since accepted that Gilen was right and that it had been nothing more than youthful folly to look so high. He would still have liked to discover that for himself. He thought he could have stomached having her walk off with some other warrior far better than the doubts. He knew he could have endured that better than knowing she had been buried alive in the rubble of what had once been the glory of the Furians of Ator. They had not found her body. He had tried to look, they all had, hoping to find survivors, but the devastation was so extensive that there were not even landmarks left to guide them. It was as if Ator had swallowed them all. He would not be a warrior now, he realized abruptly. Ator had been destroyed in the first year of his manhood. If it had not been, then he would have served his time as warrior for the people, or died, and would have been replaced by younger warriors. Had he lived, he would have turned his energies toward building prosperity and comfort for himself and his mate and his young. Instead, he had spent the intervening years collecting ‘wealth’ that meant nothing when they had no one to trade with and he had built nothing but piles of bodies and huge pools of blood. It wasn’t that he regretted the path they had taken. He did not see that they had had a choice. The souls of their people cried out for justice! But what of the time when they had tracked the Basinini to extinction? What then? Would there be anything for them? Gilen broke into his thoughts. “Shall we close on them and take them out?” Dagon lifted his head to stare at Gilen, but it took several moments for the question to penetrate his self-absorption and make sense. He blinked. Getting up from his chair, he approached Gilen and leaned over his shoulder to study the screen. “What do you think they are doing here?” he asked after a long moment. Gilen shrugged. “I do not recognize this place. I am fairly sure we have not been here before … which means that the Basinini have not.” ALIEN ABDUCTION Kaitlyn O’Connor 7 Dagon frowned as he absorbed that. Stroking his chin thoughtfully, he returned to his seat. “We have never found the home world of the Basinini,” he said after several moments. “They are wanderers,” Joar put in. “We have always thought so, but we cannot be sure.” Joar lifted his brows in surprise at that. “They have sprinkled small outposts throughout four different galaxies, but they seem to be nothing more than outposts and they are mostly aboard their ships.” Dagon thought about that. “Granted, we have never attacked that I have not been in the fighting rage, but I believe that I would have noticed if there had been young among them. Have either of you ever seen their young?” Gilen and Joar blinked and exchanged a blank look. Then Gilen frowned. “They are not a large species to begin with. We might have and not known it. I have never seen a female for that matter.” “Exactly!” Dagon said quickly. “The females and the young must be kept in a nest far, far away from the fighting to protect them. Mayhap we have the chance, now, to find this nest and eradicate the infestation of Basinini forever!” Gilen was not particularly comfortable with that and he could see that Joar was not either. If they had found the nest of younglings and females in those early years, he would not have thought twice about wiping them out as he had the Basinini who’d taken part in the destruction of Ator. An eye for an eye! And the Basinini had killed every man, woman, and child on Ator. They had not only destroyed their world and their people, they had destroyed the future of the Furians for there were no mates for the warriors who’d survived! They deserved a retaliation equal to their transgression! Or worse. Truthfully, he was fairly convinced that there was no male and female of the Basinini species. They were either all female or all both sexes. “You are saying that we should stay far enough away to keep from being detected and wait to see what they are up to here?” “Yes. I am saying just that.” * * * * Cara thought it was a dream. More specifically, it seemed like a nightmare, filling her with horror she couldn’t shake or awaken from. Her mind seesawed back and forth from the certainty that what she was experiencing was all being played out in her mind—not reality—and the certainty that she was lying to herself and it was all too real. The house shook, almost seemed to be breathing in and out, so that the walls, doors, and windows bulged inward and then outward. Blinding light flooded through every crevice, penetrating the minute cracks around molding and every joint of door and window and wall. She felt a presence, knew she wasn’t alone, but she couldn’t move. She screamed within her mind, over and over, trying to force herself to move, focusing on arms and legs, hands and feet, even toes and fingers. She felt the strain throughout her entire being and yet she couldn’t so much as twitch any part of her body. And then they were there, surrounding her on her bed, strange, frightening, alien creatures. They didn’t seem to be very tall and yet that didn’t really calm her, make her feel less frightened or less threatened. There was something about them that gave her the creeps that went beyond finding a group of strangers in her bedroom. As she studied them, it dawned on her what it was that seemed so creepy. ALIEN ABDUCTION Kaitlyn O’Connor 8 They reminded her of spiders. They had abnormally huge heads and eyes, freaky long arms and fingers and legs. They weren’t built like spiders per se. They were more humanoid than that, and yet the suggestion of spiders was undeniable and, she was certain, what she found most repellent about them—what made her want to run screaming from the room. She hated spiders! But she couldn’t run. Couldn’t move at all. She was frozen. Completely immobile. She couldn’t even blink. How had they simply appeared? Surrounding her? Did that mean it wasn’t real and she was merely imagining all of it? That it really was the dream/nightmare she’d thought to begin with? A sense of déjà vu abruptly swept over her. This had happened before or she’d dreamed it before. She was still struggling with that when she realized she wasn’t in her room anymore. The light had grown brighter and brighter and when it dimmed to a bearable level again, she saw that she was in a room that was more like an operating room than anything else. That realization set her heart to hammering even harder than before. She couldn’t catch her breath. She thought she might pass out. She hoped for it, longed for oblivion. Something touched her mind—not her head, her mind. Fear not. You will not be harmed. Liar! You’re a liar, she screamed back! It always hurts! Nothing can be done about the pain. We are not familiar enough with your physiology to prevent the pain, but it will not last and no permanent harm will be done. Your life is not in jeopardy. Liar! You fucking liar, Cara screamed in her mind. And she knew that that was the truth. They were advanced alien beings! How could they not know how to perform surgery without pain if humans knew how? And she wasn’t buying that bullshit about not being familiar with human physiology! If they didn’t know enough to perform surgery they sure as hell couldn’t assure her that they wouldn’t kill her! And if they did know enough to perform surgery then they would have to know enough to prevent pain. She thought the sick bastards liked inflicting it! Or they just considered humans so inferior that they didn’t consider it mattered what horrible things they did! They gave her a great deal of pain. Inwardly, she screamed and screamed and screamed. She couldn’t vocalize. Everything was paralyzed except for her ability to feel pain. She wanted to pass out and move beyond feeling. She prayed for death to take the pain away. They laid her open, took some sort of instrument and drew it down her abdomen and folded the skin back and removed something from her abdomen. She stared at the ‘thing’, trying to figure out what it was, trying to ignore the first thought that came to mind—that they were going to systematically dissect her while she was awake and aware of everything they were doing. She realized the thing they were holding was moving, though. She stared harder and realized it made her think of a live thing stuffed inside a bag. They removed the moving thing from the ‘bag’ and she saw that it was a fetus. For a split second her heart leapt. Then it hit her that she hadn’t had sexual relations with a man in nearly two years. That couldn’t possibly be her baby! ALIEN ABDUCTION Kaitlyn O’Connor 9 Unless …. They took ‘it’ apart while she watched in silent horror, left her lying on the table with her body opened up. And in spite of the fact that she knew the fetus was one of them, or maybe a hybrid using her ovum, she was torn between pity for it and anger and horror. She was aware of time passing only because she knew that the alien monsters must have taken a good bit of time dissecting the thing they’d undoubtedly placed in her abdomen and then removed. Her mind seemed to waver in and out of awareness. She couldn’t attain complete unconsciousness or total awareness. When they’d finished examining their experiment, they returned to her and tortured her with their probing until she was exhausted from the pain and screaming in her mind and finally achieved the oblivion she’d been praying for. Chapter Two Awareness returned slowly. Cara ached from what they’d done to her but the level of pain had dropped significantly enough that she was able to turn her mind to her surroundings. She still couldn’t move. She felt as if she was floating and wondered if it was because she was in space or because of the pod-like thing they’d put her in. The aliens hadn’t been floating, she realized after a while. They’d moved around the room, around the gurney they had her strapped to, as if they were on Earth. So … did they have that much control over gravity? Could they have gravity in part of their ship and then not have gravity in another part? Or was this contraption she was in like an … antigrav chamber? And why would they put her in an antigrav chamber assuming they could make one? She was from a planet with gravity. She managed to angle her eyes downward enough to see that her abdomen had been closed. It was barely even red from what they’d done! If she hadn’t known positively that they’d cut her open, she might have thought it was a dream! But had they put something else there before they closed her up? Did that have anything to do with this pod-like thing they’d stuck her in? Was it … like a prison cell? Or part of another experiment? Why wasn’t she at home in her bed again, she wondered, abruptly fearful of what else they might have in mind? Maybe something had happened to her mind and nothing she thought was happening was real? But if that was true, did it actually matter? Because it felt real and she was suffering from the realness of it or her imagination either way. She thought it was real. She had never believed in aliens. Why would she have hallucinations like this? Wasn’t it way more likely that somebody who actually believed in that sort of thing would have this particular kind of hallucination? Logically, she thought she was open minded enough to believe in the possibility of alien worlds where life thrived. She thought it seemed completely reasonable that there could be higher life forms and even intelligent and/or technologically advanced life forms. She found it hard to believe that aliens had located Earth and were using the inhabitants as guinea pigs, though. ALIEN ABDUCTION Kaitlyn O’Connor 10 Not that she thought it was impossible that there could be other life forms out there that were that much like humans—who would experiment on anything they could get their hands on! And she knew that broadcasts had been traveling through space since long before anyone had a clue that their broadcasts would—besides the actual attempts to communicate with alien species—and could have alerted them to the existence of humans. But she also had a fair grasp, she thought, on the distances that separated absolutely everything in space. Even if everything was true and there were all sorts of species in the universe, what were the chances they’d be able to figure out a way to get to Earth people? So did all that make it more likely that she was experiencing something horrible for real? Or less likely? She wouldn’t imagine it, she decided. She would almost have liked it better if she’d thought she was tied up in a nightmare that she was going to wake up from at any moment. Or that she was sick and something—maybe a movie or a book—had triggered these weird hallucinations. Or that she’d lost her mind. That threat wouldn’t be real. This one was. And she wasn’t going to escape them, she realized in dismay. Either they put her back where they’d found her once they were through playing with her, or she was stuck here. Period. Because her mind was the only thing that was working and it couldn’t do a thing to help her get free. She couldn’t even escape her mind! After struggling for a while to shut down, to sleep, or find unconsciousness in some other form and realizing she couldn’t even do that damned much, she tried to focus her mind away from the scary things that kept circulating. She’d heard stories, read them, about ‘weirdoes’ that thought they’d been abducted by aliens. It was really dismaying just how similar her situation was to those stories! So maybe they weren’t the weirdoes she’d thought they were? She dismissed those thoughts as being unimportant at the moment. What was important was trying to remember as much as she could about the stories. Actually, she thought the most important thing about the stories was that they came back and got the chance to tell everyone about the stories so that everybody could think they were kooks! She wondered how many had been abducted that hadn’t ‘shared’ because they didn’t want people thinking they were kooks. She also wondered how many, if any, had been abducted and not returned. Did that account for at least some of the disappearances reported every day? Because she knew that there were hundreds of people that went missing every year that were never seen or heard from again. Everyone assumed that they’d either met with foul play, or they’d deliberately disappeared, or maybe they’d had some kind of freak accident and died and hadn’t been found. What if at least a small percentage of those ‘missing’ were never seen or heard from again because they were taken away in an alien ship and ended up in an alien lab for alien experiments? Nobody was going to rescue her, she realized in dismay. No one knew where she was even if they’d had a means of rescuing her. If the aliens didn’t return her, she was just going to be one more person who vanished and was never seen or heard from again. * * * *