Charlie was gone—along with Vingo and the priest.
Chapter 13
CHARLIE STRUGGLED in his suit but couldn’t move an inch. He gazed up at the clear orange-tinted sky. A tredeyan and scion fighter roared overhead, engaged in a dogfight of rapid low-level twists and turns.
The scion craft fired what appeared to be a heat-seeking missile. Its vapor trail looped around and it struck the underside of its target. The tredeyan fighter’s red engines cut. It veered into the side of a sunlit mountain and exploded in a ball of flames.
Blue scion engines dominated higher in the sky and streaked across Charlie’s restricted view in an arrow formation. From the brief snapshots of fighting since leaving the caverns, the tredeyans seemed to be losing their planet.
Vingo lay motionless next to him, on the back of a hover catamaran.
Both were strapped to a mesh deck between the two dull metal supports with thick red cable. They were piloted away from the forest, just above rocky ground, bumping through the turbulent air. Charlie thought back to how he ended up here, working out where the priest might have gone wrong, giving him a way out.
The croatoan had snuck up on him while he was watching the door for any scion or other threats. She had attached some kind of device to his arm-pad, which paralyzed the suit’s system. Charlie only managed a quick gasp before Denver’s and Layla’s voices cut from the intercom. The digits in his visor flickered and his suit froze rigid. Thankfully air still flowed into the helmet, telling him she clearly wanted him alive—for whatever reason that might be.
With Charlie paralyzed, she had ripped off Vingo’s helmet tube and gassed him from a small silver canister. He couldn’t put up much of a fight, immediately passing out, crumpling into an unconscious, or perhaps dead, heap.
He could still see the croatoan priest’s foul spit covering his visor, a simple gesture of her disdain and hatred for him.
The way Charlie ended up in this situation made him fear the worst. Perhaps the priest was a spy from the croatoan council, and he would face their justice.
He clenched his teeth and tried to raise his arms. The once comforting feeling of the internal inflated shell sapped his energy as he fought to find something, anything that would get him moving again.
Denver and Layla provided the only crumb of comfort. He knew they wouldn’t rest until finding out his fate. But as the catamaran covered more distance away from the temple at a fast smooth whine, the chances seemed less likely.
After what he had assumed was a good hour or so of travel, the craft slowed and tilted to the right. It swept around the edge of a vertical cliff face and passed over pumice-littered black volcanic sand. A light blue croatoan shuttle, with only a hint of its former cobalt exterior, sat at the bottom of a crevice. Its side ramp extended out, but he couldn’t see any aliens around.
Sunlight turned to darkness as they entered the mouth of a large cave and the catamaran bumped to the ground, skidding to a stop on the soft sandy surface. Waves crashed against a shoreline to his right.
Metal gates screeched open and the croatoan clicked a few times. A tredeyan replied and footsteps closed in. Charlie could only see the ceiling and Vingo, still unconscious or dead.
Two tredeyans, without helmets, climbed onto the back of the craft and stood over him. They were both dressed in faded purple robes with black belts fastened around the waist. One slipped a knife out of his belt and worked on the cables strapped around Charlie’s suit. The other leaned toward him, positioning his semitranslucent face six inches from his helmet. His breath condensed on the exterior of the visor, joining the dried smears of the priest’s saliva.
After freeing the cables, they rolled him off the side. He bumped visor-first to the ground. The landing felt heavy, but the internal shell protected him from an impact injury.
They raised both of his legs and dragged him across the sand for several meters, scraping onto solid rock. The feeling of uselessness grated on him, building into an impotent fury. He tried to calm himself, keep his breathing ordered and his mind alert. That he was still alive told him he would be presented with a chance at some point.
A number of hands grabbed the side of his suit and flipped him onto his back. Two solid metal poles rose immediately to his right. One of the tredeyans wiped Charlie’s visor, peering in at him with no emotion present.
They lifted him to a standing position and he tilted back a few inches. He guessed they had him on something similar to a luggage trolley. The tredeyan gripped both poles on either side of him with its greasy-looking hands. The croatoan priest and another scruffily dressed tredeyan pushed Vingo off the side of the catamaran and pulled him out of view.
The trolley wheels squeaked and juddered along uneven stone as they headed toward a dull gray metal barrier deeper inside the cave. A solid door screamed on its hinges and swung open, revealing a slim seven-foot-tall alien in angular dark green body armor. It waved the tredeyans along with its leathery mitten. Charlie hadn’t seen the square helmet with a midnight blue visor before.
Spotlights beamed down from the top of the roughly carved tunnel. He squinted against their glare and tried to recognize the route they were taking. If he did manage to escape, and it seemed unlikely, he didn’t want to run into a clusp down a dark passage. The tredeyan guard behind the metal door would be enough to cope with.
Vingo’s trolley wheeled past him. The priest grunted and shoved, picking up speed down a slight incline. The ceiling opened up to a large cavern and the area filled with wails, cries, and mixed alien chatter.
Two clusps guarded either side of the entrance. Both jumped forward and chains around their necks twanged rigid. The one on the left lashed out a tentacle that flicked the edge of Charlie’s chest plate. The tredeyan shouted at them and they both retreated to a pile of unrecognizable organic matter.
Dark gray metal bars ran around the edge of the wide space divided into forty cells. Only half were occupied, mostly with naked tredeyans. Some sat on the spartan stone with their heads down, seemingly resigned to their fate. Others pushed their faces between the bars and shouted at a group of blue-robed tredeyans who surrounded a wooden table in the middle of the cavern. A hunter-sized croatoan in graphite armor stood amongst them and turned to glare at Charlie.
A tredeyan from the central group approached and held a raspy conversation with Charlie’s chaperone. It fingered a tablet, peered around the cavern and pointed to a cell at the far end.
Charlie was wheeled past the group and the central table. They drank transparent beakers of root wine and pointed to different locations on a holographic cube. It wasn’t just a map of Tredeya. The croatoan ran his gloved finger between two planets.
A bar dropped from the HUD filter measurement. The tredeyan tipped Charlie out of his trolley and his suit crashed against the back of the cell wall. The priest dumped Vingo in the sitting position, slammed the cell door shut and peered at Charlie through the bars.
She returned to the table, and another croatoan handed her two full sacks.
“Vingo,” Charlie said, keeping his voice low.
His helmet twitched.
“Vingo. Wake up.”
A small cream-colored alien with deep blue eyes, dressed in sackcloth, waddled across and croaked something through the bars of the adjacent cell. It poked its three spindly fingers through toward Charlie.
Footsteps slapped across the cavern. A croatoan from the central table must have seen it. The little alien shot back into the opposite corner of its cell. The croatoan ripped open the door and thrust its heavy boot into the smaller alien’s chest. It dropped to the dirt and whined.