For a moment I was disoriented. I stopped, blinking in the swirling dust while explosions thudded around me and the energy screen crackled and hissed like a badly tuned video.
There! I recognized the scientists’ compound. Its buildings still stood, although the electrical fence around it seemed to be turned off. The Skorpis must be feeding all the base’s power into the energy shield, I thought. Once that shield is overloaded and shorts out, the attackers can blast the whole area with nukes.
But what good would that do? I asked myself as I dashed past the dead fence and into the largest building in the compound. The fleet’s been sent here to rescue me and my troop, not annihilate us.
Or so I thought.
I had no idea of how to find their shelter. Must be a doorway or a hatch somewhere, but I could see none in the dim twilight caused by the dust sifting through the air outside. Another explosion shook the building so hard I nearly was knocked to my knees.
“Where’s the shelter?” I bellowed as loudly as I could. “It’s me, Orion!”
Almost immediately a section of the floor cracked open. “Down here,” a voice shouted back. “Quick!”
I dashed for the trapdoor and yanked it wide enough to squeeze through just as a greenish light filled the room and I felt a dizzying, nauseating sense of vertigo that made my head swim.
Then everything went utterly black.
Chapter 15
When I came to my senses once more I was hanging in midair almost three meters above the team of human scientists, who stood craning their necks upward toward me.
I landed in their midst with a painful thump, knocking several of them to the metal plates of the flooring. I rolled over and sat up. Looking around, I saw it was obvious that we were no longer in the Skorpis base.
“What happened?” asked one of the scientists.
“Where are we?”
“Transceiver beam,” answered Delos. He was sitting beside me, rubbing the small of his back with both hands. He was one of the men I had bowled over when I fell.
“We’re aboard one of the fleet vessels, then,” I said.
“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”
Indeed it did. We were in a metal chamber, bare except for a slit of an observation window set high in one wall and a tightly closed hatch opposite it. I could feel the humming vibration of a starship’s engines through the deck plates.
Transceiver beam, I thought. The attacking fleet must have saturated the Skorpis defensive shield at last and then squirted the beam down to snatch us. The beam scanned our molecular patterns, annihilated us, then reproduced us here on the ship exactly as we were on the planet. That was why I materialized nearly three meters above the others; they had been in the shelter and I was at the lip of their trapdoor when the beam found us.
The transceiver beam had killed us, all of us, then rebuilt us here aboard the starship. No one willingly allows himself to be transported by a matter transceiver.
But we were not asked.
“We’re prisoners, then,” said Randa.
“Maybe not,” I said. “They may not understand who you are.”
“Welcome to the
I got to my feet and helped Delos and the others to theirs. The hatch swung open and a pair of reptilians entered the chamber, scaly green and lightly built, so alike I could not tell the difference between them.
“You will come with us,” said one of them through the translator it carried on a thin chain around its neck.
The scientists were put into a fairly spacious compartment lined with bunks, like a barracks. I saw toilet facilities at the far end of the chamber.
“Which of you is the one called Orion?” asked one of the twins.
“I am,” I answered.
“You will see the captain on the bridge.” So I followed the green little reptilians—after they had carefully closed and locked the hatch to the scientists’ barracks.
The bridge was compact and quiet. The reptilians do not make noise the way we mammalians do. I found it almost eerie the way every station was manned with reptiles of various size and hue, yet hardly a sound issued from any of them. There was no air of tension on the bridge. Only two of the lizards had their cyborg connectors plugged into the ship’s sensors. The battle seemed to be finished.
The Tsihn captain was almost my size. It sat in its command chair and looked me over the way a snake studies its prey. Its scales were mottled green and yellow with some gray spots here and there. Much of its upper torso was covered with insignias and markings of rank. Its snout was wide and filled with tiny needle-like teeth.
“You have no uniform?”
I realized I was still in my threadbare shorts. Before I could reply, it said, “We will provide you with a proper uniform.”
“Thank you,” I said.
It seemed decidedly unhappy. “I have lost many capable Tsihn to rescue you and the other humans.”
“You arrived too late,” I said. “The men and women of my assault team have been frozen by the Skorpis.”
The reptile’s tongue darted out from between those teeth, flicked back and forth for an instant, then retreated.
“So your team goes into the Skorpis bellies.”
“You can still pick them up, if you haven’t destroyed their base altogether.”
“Not destroyed,” it said. “My orders were to locate you and bring you and the other humans to my ship. This I did. I bombarded the Skorpis base, overloaded their shield, and snatched you from them. It cost me a dozen Tsihn killed, many more wounded.”
“But my troopers are still down there on the planet, frozen!”
“No concern. I have obeyed my orders. You are the one I was commanded to rescue. And those with you.”
“But those are not my troops.” I tried to make it understand. “My troops are still with the Skorpis.”
“Yes, frozen, I know.” The tongue flicked out again; then it asked, “So who are the humans with you?”
“Scientists,” I said.
“I was told you would be with an assault team, not a pack of scientists.”
I hesitated. If I revealed to the reptilian that these humans were enemies, what would it do?
It saw through my silence. “Scientists of the Hegemony, is that it?”
“They were studying the planet, trying to make contact with intelligent creatures in the sea. They are not soldiers,” I said.
“But they serve the enemy.”
“The Skorpis were there to protect them.”
The captain hissed in a way that almost sounded like laughter. “Some protectors! We snatched them right from between their claws!”
“But my troop is still there,” I repeated. “They’re the ones you were supposed to rescue. You must go back—”
“Go back!” it snapped. “By now the Hegemony has a whole battle fleet swarming around Lunga. I have only four ships, two of them badly damaged by the Skorpis ground defenses. My mission was to sneak in and rescue you, not to take on a Hegemony battle fleet. We don’t go back. We run away as fast as we can.”
“But my troopers—”
