The Fallen

Carly dived off of the platform and onto the track, her heart in her mouth as she pounded along the gravel and leapt over thick metal rails. Daring a quick look back she saw the soldiers standing where she had left the platform, momentarily confused as they tried to think of a route that did not involve the railway, where they were forbidden to trespass.

Leaping into the narrow tunnels that led to relays under the platforms, Carly found herself making one constant inward breath, unable to force air back out of her lungs. Warm, moist air blew across her flanks and she realised that a series of gills had opened down her lower ribs, pumping air from her lungs out through her back.

Charged with energy Carly found herself bounding out of the tunnel on the next platform and jumping the metre-high ledge up onto the concrete, away from the danger of the rails. Quickly she ascended the overhead gantry and took off towards platform 96, revelling in the sudden freedom, the smoky wind pulling her hair out behind her in long wisps.

Clanking vibrations on the gantry indicated the soldiers were not far behind and probably gaining rapidly. Too exhilarated and afraid to look around, Carly kept powering onwards, skipping down the stairway onto the empty platform 96 far sooner than she had expected to be able to reach it. She dived across the platform, jumping down onto the rails and bounding over the gravel until she reached the long section of suspended railway held between two fat pendulums like a giant magic carpet fairground ride. Between the sleepers dropped empty black space, so deep that there was no sound from the falling stones that Carly kicked off as she jumped across the small gap and ran a striding tip-toe over the narrow sleepers, five or six at a time until she reached the centre of the suspended rail section between the thick shoulders of the two stilled pendulums, next to the control relays for the repair bay descent motors.

Turning to look back Carly saw the soldiers descending the stairs onto the platform and pounding up the concrete towards her, still too far away to use their weapons. The control chip still rested between the inert claws of Carly’s now immobile pliers; reaching out with her right arm she jammed the control chip between the exposed relay contacts. Carly jerked her arm away as a sharp flash of searing cold pain burned up her arm to her shoulder and chest, making her lungs cramp and threatening to overwhelm her consciousness.

Carly blinked away the clouds in her eyes as the relay spat fat blue sparks across the fused chip and onto the rails and the repair bay pendulum motors began to whir. The soldiers skidded to a halt a few metres down the platform and aimed their weapons as the suspended rail section began to roll forwards on its pendulum shoulders. By hotwiring the motors Carly had not signalled the locks holding the forward tilting section of the suspended rail to open, and the rails crumpled and buckled against the hard cliffside of the repair bay chasm with a thunderous clattering that knocked the soldiers off their feet.

Dropping to her knees and gripping the fat sleepers, Carly felt her insides rise upwards as the rail section accelerated around and down with the turning of the pendulums, accelerating faster and faster towards the repair bay far below. The rails completed their first quarter moment and began to swing back as they entered the final sine of their descent, dropping towards the floor of the repair bay.

Carly glanced behind her as the rails hurtled towards their docking point, vastly out of control; Carly now realised her error in bypassing all safeguards when she hotwired the motor relay. The rear wall of the repair bay loomed out of the blackness like a tidal wave as the musty, oily air whipped at her hair. Aware that there was nothing she could do but ride out the crash, Carly shut her eyes and prepared to let her body become as limp as possible, as her military training had instructed her in event of a drop-ship crash-landing.

A thunderous impact crunch caused Carly’s ear defenders to clamp down all sound, leaving her thrown around like a leaf in almost total silence. She left the rail gantry in a snap of sudden sparking pain, launched upwards and outwards by some incalculable co-efficiency of her momentum. Silently the twisting, buckling rails disappeared above her as she dropped into the gravel-floored inspection bay beneath the main repair bay.

Silent clouds of dust and gravel shot up around Carly’s body as she hit the oily floor, skidding and rolling over and over into the wave of stones that she pushed up in front of her. Twisting and rolling in flashes of grazing pain, Carly was aware of ground-shaking thumps all around her, in front, behind and to either side – great concrete sleepers and sections of buckled rail and thick metal supports hammered into the ground all around her, launching their own pillars of gravel into the air.

Gradually Carly came to a halt in the bank of gravel she had pushed up, her skin ablaze with pain, patches of pink and red and black and grey where oil and dust had stuck to her bleeding grazes. Rails, girders and sleepers rained down around her, showering her with yet more dust and gravel, until all became silent and she sat alone, whimpering with the constant blaze of her bleeding skin.

Carly inspected her body – all exposed areas pink or red or weeping blood from grazes. Her laser had been torn away, leaving only a bizarrely narrow forearm and her three good fingers. No bones appeared broken; she decided she had had a lucky escape. Slowly she tried to rise to her feet, working with all her bravery to keep her moans down. Tiptoeing carefully across the gravel she made her way to the narrow stairs and began to climb them stiffly, wincing with every step up to the repair bay.

Suddenly she was worried that the escape vehicle may have been damaged in the crash, or not there at all. Clattering through the wreckage as quietly as she could, Carly dragged her battered body into the repair bay, searching for the vehicle. The repair bay had been out of use for some considerable time and all tools and machines were covered with a thick layer of heavy black dust. Carly clambered over shattered sleepers to the very rear of the bay where a clean machine gleamed in the dark half-light, beckoning her towards it. Pulling aside a length of twisted rail Carly inspected the machine – a tiny super light glider, with solar panels atop its delicate wings and a retractable propeller at each wingtip – an autogyro of sorts.

Carly climbed aboard the plane and inspected its primitive controls – a simple on/off switch on the dash panel, a control stick, various power levers. Carly was aware that she didn’t know how to fly an aeroplane at all, let alone this strange lightweight craft – but she had come too far to give up, and besides had nowhere else to go. Carly flicked the switch on; almost immediately a light illuminated briefly on the console and the propellers began spinning silently, rotating upwards to lift the little plane from the ground in a cloud of dust.

The plane began to take its own course, hovering slowly over the wreckage and into the open expanse of the repair bay. Fearing the presence of her alien masters overhead, Carly was glad when the plane descended into the inspection bay area below. It hovered to the opposite end of the bay and into a dark, round tunnel that Carly had not noticed on her somewhat quicker more painful journey into the inspection bay.

The air in the tunnel was musty and stale and thick with undisturbed dust. Carly felt the plane begin to speed up but could see nothing in the darkness, gripping firmly onto the seat underneath her as the plane steered itself delicately through the black tunnel.

Fairly soon the plane began to ascend, rising up a curve in the tunnel until the faintest hints of light played around in the distance. The light grew to highlight the passage, becoming a bright round patch of distant sky. Quickly the plane shot out of the tunnel, a round hole in a tall cliff, across a great chasm far below and into the open air.

The propellers rotated on the wings to face forwards and began to spin faster, vibrating the little frame of the machine so hard that Carly had to shift on the seat, driven to distraction by the sensations transmitted into her body by the fat pipe in her anus. Accelerating hard the plane descended deep into the chasm and began to follow the raging brown-and-white frothy waters of a fast-flowing polluted river upstream, towards distant mountains formed from raw granite, tall and grey above the land below.

For hour after hour the plane flew onwards, its constant buzzing numbing Carly’s body until she felt completely drained of all energy, falling back into the hard seat and drifting away to the buffeting of the wind. When the plane finally emerged from a steep, narrow canyon high in the mountains, Carly was sound asleep – her eyes closed to the harsh beauty of the granite cliffs, high above the polluted land of the alien’s industry behind her, kicking up a thick brown smog to dim the rearward view.

Carly awoke groggily as the plane settled onto the ground in a flat clearing, in a deep depression between three bare granite hills. A small wood surrounded the clearing, slender alien trees with long thin leaves waving in the cold, gentle breeze. The hills made up three sides of the square depression, the fourth side rolling out onto an escarpment that dropped steeply away to a deep valley below, echoing with the sounds of raging white water.

Carly tried to stand but her legs gave out underneath her and she fell to the dusty floor, struggling to breathe. The air became full of the sound of voices and running feet before several pairs of human legs appeared in front of Carly’s eyes. Suddenly aware that she had found Sanctuary, Carly tried to stand up, but before she could even move her arms she felt her consciousness fading from her, leaving spots in front of her eyes that grew to cloud her entire vision. Gradually all sound stilled and Carly lay prone, battered, naked and unconscious, face-down on the hard ground.

Sanctuary

Carly awoke groggily to the sound of quiet, indecipherable voices. Slowly the recollections of the previous day came back to her and her heart began to beat in anticipation, remembering the cluster of human feet she had seen around her as she lost consciousness.

Cold air swept across her skin, reminding her she was still naked, apart from the hard implants that dug into her uncomfortably from whatever solid surface she was lying on. It felt like bare stone, smooth and warm against her back. Her wrists and ankles were bound to the stone, preventing her from moving.

Blinking, Carly opened her eyes and looked around. She appeared to be lying in a dark cave lit only by flaming torches; the air smelled of stone dust and some organic smoke, presumably the alien sap burning in the lamps. Carly tilted her head to look down her body towards the quiet voices: a group of men huddled in the far corner of the cave, heatedly discussing something in hushed tones. One of the men looked over at her and silenced his companions with a hand signal, then strode briskly towards her.

The man stopped over her, looking down with a steely glare. He was tall and broad-shouldered, his bare V-shaped chest as defined as any of the marines in her squad, yet he appeared more supple – a naturally powerful man, fit from birth. He wore only a pair of short trousers that looked like they had been stitched out of animal skin and a leather strap across his shoulder holding a small knife. Some larger weapon appeared to hang from the strap across the man’s back, with only a wooden handle in view over his shoulder. Long black locks curled away from the man’s head and down his chest, highlighting his feral appearance.

Carly opened her mouth to speak, realising her throat was painfully dry. “Am I in Sanctuary?”

“Yes.” He replied in a strange accent, his voice deep and harsh. “How did you find our vehicle?”

“I found one of your… Spies. He told me to come here, he said you need help.” Carly replied, suddenly afraid of the man. He turned so that his face was lit by natural white light and whistled loudly, startling Carly. Then he began to pace towards the light, leaving Carly alone again.

A moment later another man returned, an older man perhaps in his fifties – a craggy face, lined and covered with grey stubble. His overgrown grey crew-cut and dirty khakis gave him a military appearance and Carly suddenly felt relieved, wondering if she had stumbled upon an army outpost, or an army team had stumbled upon Sanctuary.

“Hi there.” He said gruffly as he sat down on a rough wooden bench beside the bed. “I’m afraid we’re gonna have to keep you tied down there until we’re sure you’re all you look. In the mean-time, how ‘bout you tell me everything from the start?”

Carly nodded; she gulped and cast her mind back to her early days in the cell, undergoing her training, and wondered just how much of her humiliating torture she could omit without sounding false. Taking a deep breath, she started her story from the moment her pod left the battleship.

The man listened intently as Carly went through her story, about the drop from the battleship, her capture and recovery, the parts of her training that she dared to tell him, and her life since as a slave to the aliens. She found herself carefully wording her story to omit all references to Lonnie or her new companion – whatever fate had befallen the poor girl left on the platform. Carly even renamed the Medea to ‘a general’, and wondered why she felt it so necessary to want to hide things like that.

The man introduced himself as Commander Holman, senior officer on one of the colonies that had been hit first by the aliens, and had been brought to their world as a prisoner. He had seized an opportunity to escape and had been hiding out in the hills near an alien starport until some travelling members of Sanctuary found him, half-dead from starvation and exposure.

“So, that’s my story.” He finished, leaning back and stretching. “I bet you’ll be wondering why you feel so tired?”

“Yeah.” Carly sighed, smiling slightly as she tried to stretch on the hard bed. “Kinda faint and dizzy, too.”

“Lack of nutrition. You ever wondered why you sleep so well at night?” He offered.

“Umm…” Carly began, suddenly embarrassed – she had assumed she slept well because of the intense pleasure she was usually rewarded with before bedding down with Lonnie, and the hard work of the day.

“You’re given a nutrient can each night and morning, right? Yeah, we know more about your type that you think.”

“How?” Carly asked.

“Autopsies, on others who’ve made it this far.” Carly felt herself tense up at Holman’s words. Autopsies? Was she going to die? “At night you’re given a low-yield can, low on energy, it makes you sleep well. In the morning you get a high-yield can, so you can work hard all day. I bet they gave you a lower yield for the train journey, else you’d have been buzzing all the way. But your little escape, that burned you out. You’re lucky you even got this far.”

“So, am I going to die?” Carly asked quietly, afraid that she would be unable to replenish her emptied energy stocks away from her alien prison.

“No. We’ve collected a few spare cans from others before you, we refill them with a fruit juice from our groves. It’s a very good match, stocked with most of the things you need, and plenty of carbohydrate to fuel your heart.”

“Fuel my heart?” Carly enquired curiously.

“It’s an electric pump, false like your leg and all the other special things inside you; they run totally independent of the control chip so they keep on running if you go out of range or destroy the chip. There’s a tiny reactor in your belly that converts carbohydrate into electricity, very efficient, very neat. Given enough juice, you could outstrip most of the boys here, and they’re fit.”

“I didn’t know that…” Carly said distantly. She already knew that she was missing a lot of internal organs – her entire digestive system, for a start, probably her ovaries and womb, and those modified lungs; she wondered what else the aliens had done to her body to make it fit for their purposes.

“I bet there’s a lot you don’t know. Like I said, most of the components in your body get their power from a carbohydrate reactor inside you. You can keep on living as long as you’ve got juice in the can. The aliens could have shut you down via the control chip, but now that’s gone they can’t access any of your internal systems.

“The external things though, like your… Whatever that is on your arm, that probably takes too much power to run off juice, so it gets its power from what we call a ‘local beam’. It’s how the majority of the alien hardware runs – from trains to computers to soldiers – energy is beamed from around the infrastructure right into the hardware, totally invisible, totally wireless. Very efficient for a race that keeps most of its technology mobile and lightweight.”

“What does that mean?” Carly asked, fascinated at how much Holman knew.

“Take their foot soldiers, for example – made from human parts, outfitted with permanent armour and weapons, controlled by dumb minds – all the power for their weaponry comes from one central source, which means one small soldier can carry a huge gun. They can send a whole battalion out to fight without worrying so much about supplies.”

“So why don’t they beam power to me?”

“They have their reasons, no doubt. Independence, perhaps? All soldiers are dumb – they don’t really think for themselves because they’re drones for a central mind. But you’re an independent unit, you use your own brain. It’s your independent thought that makes you good at what you do, that’s why they made you a slave, not a drone. That’s why they use carrot and stick to keep you working as hard as you can.”

“Umm…” Suddenly Carly felt a wall of embarrassment build up inside her like a fire in her chest; her face burned red as she wondered if Holman knew about her rewarded pleasure.

“Yeah, we know about that too. We know that you’ve probably got a companion, right? Another slave whose purpose is to keep you company? Yeah, they know that’s what keeps you sane. And… Before you ask, we can’t remove that shield either. Those clever bastards re-route two major arteries through hollow vessels inside it, any attempt to cut it off and you’ll bleed to death in minutes.”

“There’s no way to get it off?” Carly asked, deliberately shunting her embarrassment to one side as she considered the situation.

“On Earth, maybe. But not here. We just don’t have the tools.”

Carly became quiet again, embarrassment continuing to creep back into her mind. She tried to think of something to say, and in spite of all the things she knew she had yet to learn about Sanctuary and its inhabitants, she could not find anything to ask.

Eventually Holman broke the silence. “Come on, I’ll let ya up, an’ introduce you to the boys.”

Carly was given a quick introduction to the other men, who had been standing at the entrance to the caves, talking in hushed tones. Some appeared very nervous about talking to her; after all, she considered, to them she must look like the enemy.

They all looked very similar – tall and strong and yet lithe; they had an animal look that said they could pounce like tigers, or run like cheetahs. They nearly all had bare brown skin, hairless apart from dark locks on their heads, and hard thin faces, accentuating their animal appearance. Few of them spoke her language; those who did spoke slowly with strong accents and were difficult to understand.

Zuka was the leader of the band, the tall man who had spoken to her when she first awoke; he was the easiest of the ferals to understand. Char was the second in command, shorter and stockier, a brick of a man. Kake and Kaze were two brothers, very much alike in appearance and actions, and a thin wiry man with lighter skin and grey hair was Roal; he appeared to be the wildcard of the group, his piercing blue eyes staring out from under his wrinkled brow with a wild gleam, his sinewy legs constantly moving as if itching for action.