The Fallen

Carly moved nervously in the group, unaware that she kept glancing over her shoulder into the dark depths of the cave as she stood at the edge of the band. Holman explained they were on point duty in the clearing. After the introductions they began to disband, each heading away to far edges of the clearing and disappearing into the rocks as they headed back to their lookout posts.

In the silence that followed Carly could hear the distant sound of rushing water from the foot of the gorge that made up one side of the clearing, close to the mouth of the cave. The air was fresh and dry and smelled sweeter than Carly could imagine after the foul stench of the alien installations, which she seemed to have gotten used to. A chill wind intermittently swept into the clearing, kicking up small dust devils and making Carly shiver slightly.

Holman turned away from the gorge and led Carly up the gentle slope of the clearing, heading between the encroaching stone hills on either side. At the far side of the clearing, which was much bigger than Carly had first realised, stood a rough clump of trees swaying their big alien leaves in the breeze. “Is that where you live?” Carly asked, motioning towards the trees.

“Yes and no. I live there sometimes, with the boys. Most of the people live underground. They come to the surface to pick fruits and cut the crops, and the boys hunt sometimes.”

“How many people live underground?”

“About three-hundred, all-in. There was a bigger underground city further south – Hissaan, not far from the plains, but the aliens burned it out seven local years back. Since then Sanctuary has been suffering – there just aren’t enough crops to feed everybody.” Holman spoke with fatigue and sadness in his voice.

“How many people were killed?”

“We think about four thousand.”

“Four thousand!? But that’s impossible! Where did all these people come from?”

“Well… Let’s go inside and get a fire going, and I’ll tell you while we wait for the boys to come back.”

Holman led Carly into the copse, which turned out to be a circle of trees surrounding a small empty village. Various stonewalled buildings stood firm on the hard ground, as old and set as the mountains behind them. Roofs thatched with long, thin rubbery leaves dried yellow and wooden doors and open window frames looked like the only things to have been maintained in recent years. Carly found herself wondering who had built the little houses, when mankind had only been in space within the past two centuries.

Holman led the way into the largest of the buildings in the middle of the village. It appeared to be a primitive feasting hall – a big rectangular ash-filled trough stood proud in the middle of the room, hewn from a slab of raw granite. A square of light shone through the rafters directly above – a smoke vent for the fire, presumably. Carly imagined it would get very smoky in the room without a proper chimney. Wooden tables and stools were arranged around the fire, at one end of the hall stood a thick workbench and at the other a pile of animal skins lay strewn across the bare floor. The still air smelled strongly of wood smoke and… Carly had to think, it had been a long time since she had recognised any smell other than the putrid decay of the aliens: cooked meat. Immediately she felt her mouth begin to water and her belly tightened, as if the ghost of her stomach was inside her, begging to be filled.

Holman began to throw black alien logs into a great central fire pit and set them alight by expertly twisting one piece of kindling against another with his hands. After a few moments he sat back on his heels to admire the quickly growing flames, then dropped himself down onto a wooden stool. He picked up a folded animal skin from the floor and put it over another stool, which he offered to Carly.

She sat down, grateful for the soft skin – although it didn’t entirely remove the sensation of something being thrust into her anus, it was far better than sitting on hard wood, Carly considered as she twisted herself to remove some of the pressure inside her. In her mind she cursed the thick pipe and whatever its purpose was; perhaps that could be safely removed, although she decided not to ask just yet.

“This must all seem pretty strange to you.” Holman said as he leaned back against the stone wall in the flickering darkness of the room. “Mankind has been exploring the stars for what, a-hundred-fifty years, now?”

“Something like that.” Carly replied, bending forwards uncomfortably as she tried to get used to her seat. She went through the same sensation each time she sat on something hard, and each time it took five or ten minutes for her body to stop reacting automatically to the intrusion.

“And these buildings, well, they look older than a few hundred years to me. But I’m no archaeologist. But these people here? They’re proof to a theory that most scientists are too afraid to believe.”

“What’s that?”

“Mankind has been to the stars before.” Holman drawled slowly, as if reluctantly giving Carly the time of day.

“What? When? I mean, that’s impossible… Isn’t it?”

“Many years ago. Tens of thousands of years ago, perhaps. We were here long before those alien bastards. Whether we got here ourselves, or were brought here by some other race as slaves, or companions, or pets or colleagues – we just don’t know. The scientists underground, they don’t know. But I tell you, all those thousands of years ago these natives had a powerful civilisation, very complicated, very advanced. They had a caste system – no, two different races – the Blues and the… Well, I call them the Whites. There’s no translation for the word the natives use.

“Blues?” Carly asked, intrigued. She had neglected to mention the Medea in her brief to Holman, and wondered now if she should tell him about the blue woman.

“Yeah. Blue people. Humans. They were the elite, and they ruled the society. And the, well as you can see these guys aren’t ‘white’ as such, but they ain’t black either. The Whites were the sub-class, the servants and the labourers. And believe it or not, they seemed to live pretty comfortably for a long, long time. And then, the Blues disappeared.”

“Disappeared? You mean vanished?”

“They went away. Nobody knows where, or why. The records are pretty non-existent, all we have are legends, and they don’t even say how long it took – could have been days or years, but pretty soon there were no Blues at all. No Blues, no clues, no remains. A few hundred years after that the Whites went underground, for no reason we can figure out.”

“The aliens arrived?” Carly offered, thinking aloud.

“Maybe someone arrived, but not these bastards. They’ve only been here two or three thousand years, local time. No, for some reason the Whites went underground, they lost a whole load of technology, took massive steps backwards in science and society. Maybe some violent race arrived and smashed the Blues, maybe some alien hosts uprooted and took the Blues as servants or colleagues and left the Whites behind, maybe the whole economy relied on other colonies that got sucked into a black hole…” Holman shrugged as if picking possibilities out of thin air. “Maybe the Whites just got pissed off at being the underclass and blew the hell out of the Blues, then turned on each other. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Carly sat back on her seat and nodded. She was no stranger to human conflict following her years in the army and the space corps. It seemed to her like a rather sound theory. “So what happened next?”

Holman shrugged. “We don’t really know. At some point, long after the disappearance of the Blues and the underground exodus, the society began to come back together, they started to pick up the pieces of ancient technology and they asked themselves, what does this do? It was like, what’s the word? Accelerando, I think. They knew so little but had so much laid out before them, ready for them to relearn what they knew before.

“They were just getting back into the electronic age when these bastards turned up and pushed them underground again. Lucky for these guys they still knew how to live underground, else they might have been wiped out completely. But the scientists kept on tinkering with the old technologies, and that’s how they’ve stayed alive, up until now. But the bastards are on the rampage, they want us gone, hell they just want war for the sake of it. They have trouble up here, their local beam technology doesn’t work too well in all this granite, and it tends to hide us from them too. But they’ll find us soon enough, and these ancient people will be gone forever.”

“Why do you think it will happen so soon?”

“The burning of Hissaan was the first step. They know we’re out here somewhere, and they’re looking but they’re not finding. Let’s face it, for an advanced race they’re incredibly stupid. Look at you – they can take apart one human being and reassemble her to be more powerful and efficient and completely under their control, and they can set you to work for the cost of food, shelter and a companion.” Carly felt her insides tighten. How much did Holman know about Lonnie? He knew a lot about how the aliens thought, and had seen other slaves in the past. Maybe there were hundreds of girls like Lonnie, scattered all over the planet, forced to love other women so that they would work another day and be content. “And yet it’s taken them seven years to track down a few hundred fugitives hiding in the hills.”

Carly said nothing. There were still a thousand questions buzzing through her mind, but not one of them wanted to be voiced to Holman. The fire crackled as Holman threw on another log, sending sparks and flickering shadows around the room. The sun had set behind the tall mountains; Carly had been too deep into Holman’s story to notice, and now she sat in the dull glow of the fire she was grateful for its warmth. The chill breeze was a cold draught inside the room, licking at her neck through the window every now and then.

“So that’s why your spy asked me for help?”

“Yeah, I guess. With him captured… I don’t know, none of our spies officially know the way back here – the routes are pre-programmed into our flyers by the guys downstairs, so even if they did break him… He couldn’t give us away, but at least they’d know we’re still out here somewhere. But what about you? You didn’t come here just to help us, did you?”

Holman looked Carly hard in the eye, studying her for a reaction. She held his stare for a moment but was unnerved; Holman was a superior officer, and despite his laid back attitude and unkempt appearance he still seemed to have some manner about his questioning that indicated a lot more was getting through to him than Carly was comfortable with. Perhaps he knew there was more to her story and wanted to know it all. She didn’t quite understand why she might not want to tell him – after all he was on her side, even if he couldn’t help, but something about her slavery felt… wrong. She had to admit, it would look to a superior officer that she had submitted to the enemy, or even worse, defected. Carly couldn’t overcome the feeling of great shame inside her; she turned her head to look at the ground. “I… I need some help for my companion.” She said nervously.

“Your companion? What’s happened to her?” Holman shifted to lean forwards, displaying great interest; Carly wondered if it was genuine, or some way of getting her to say more than she intended.

“She is being…” Carly began, and stopped, uncertain of how to continue. Should she tell Holman about the Medea? About her skin colour? About her fetish for sexually torturing girls and how that had led to Lonnie being taken as a concubine? A cheerful chattering distracted her attention and Holman stood, pulling open the double doors and standing back as the natives walked in, carrying a huge carcass slung from a long pole across their shoulders. The air was full of indecipherable cheering and smell of sweat as the men carried the dead beast to the worktop at the far end of the room, smiling and laughing with Holman as they passed him.

Holman stood and followed the group as they set the carcass down on the worktop and began to skin it eagerly. Carly remained on her seat, wondering whether she was expected to help with their work, and if she’d be able to help anyway with only three usable fingers on one bizarrely narrow arm. Roal, the wiry, wild-looking man, turned to look at her with his piercing eyes, grinning through pointed teeth at her as the leader Zuka quickly worked his knife around the carcass, peeling away the skin with skilful precision.

The naked beast lay on the bloody worktop as Zuka held aloft the skin, shouting something to the room. The men responded with a cheer before helping to hang the skin up near the fire where it began to steam, giving off a strong musky odour that permeated the room. As soon as the skin was hung the men began to tie the beast onto the pole again, wrapping its thick bloody limbs around the solid post. When it was secure they heaved it once again from the worktop, sending a sheet of thin watery blood cascading onto the floor as they lifted it over the fire.

The fire sizzled as blood dripped onto its searing embers and the men took seats around the edge of the room, breathing sighs of relaxation as they rested their bodies, their skin rosy red in the heat. Soon the beast’s back began to crinkle and bubble in the heat, spitting fat onto the flames to make them grow taller and the men shuffled closer and leant in to the heat, warming their hands in the blaze as they began to chatter and laugh quietly amongst themselves. Carly found herself sitting back from the fire as the smell of cooking meat began to quash the strong odour of drying hide and sweat. After a short while she swallowed uncomfortably as her mouth began to water. Roal grinned at her from across the room and took a breath to speak above the quiet chatter. “You like? We catch beast, have good eat. Good eat! You like.”

Kaze turned to Roal and shouted something at him, laughing deeply. Roal replied in an astonished tone, his wild eyes wide and his mouth an O of shock. Kaze and his brother Kake laughed again as Roal looked back at Carly. “No eat?” Carly shook her head sadly, but a slight smile played about her face – the men’s playfulness reminded her of how her comrades acted in the mess hall after a hard but successful exercise or mission. She gratefully allowed herself an internal laugh at the men, gibing one another in the way men did.

For a moment Roal looked nonplussed, then his expression changed to one of inner concentration. He licked his lips thoughtfully as a sentence visibly constructed itself in his head; the room had gone quiet save for the sound of spitting fat and licking flames. Eventually he opened his mouth to awkwardly pronounce the unfamiliar words: “That sucks.”

A chuckle began at the far end of the room, quickly engulfing them all in fits of laughter. Roal looked around the room with a huge toothy grin on his face, evidently pleased with himself. Carly began to realise just how much she had missed the interaction with other human beings; somehow just living with Lonnie had not been enough, although she had not realised it (or allowed herself to realise it) at the time. Now she knew that she was receiving the therapy she had needed for so long – the therapy of laughter, so spontaneous and unexpected that for a short moment it took away all her worries and gave her some respite against the loneliness and the humiliation of her slavery.

Soon memories of Lonnie began to filter back into Carly’s mind and she sobered herself, feeling guilty for allowing herself to enjoy a moment when her poor lover was being tormented and abused by the wicked blue woman in the palace, many miles away from her. She began to wonder what had happened to the girl she had left at the train station – had she been sent back to the Medea’s dungeons, or sent on somewhere else for a life as a companion, or something else that she could not even imagine? Carly felt another pang of guilt for leaving her there – she could have taken her to Sanctuary. But no, there was no time – she would not have known the route, and would have slowed her down long enough to be captured. And besides, there would have been no room for her on the autogyro. But just maybe she could have got her out, so that she could have enjoyed these moments in the company of other human beings, instead of facing a future of slavery and enforced lesbianism or a cold damp cell.

Kaze stood and headed to the door near Carly, inspecting her blankly as he passed. A wash of cold air blew around Carly’s body as he pushed the door open and she pulled herself closer to the fire, drawing her arms around herself. A moment later Kaze returned carrying two large ceramic demijohns with cork-stoppered tops. He pulled a stack of cups from the end of the workbench and began to fill them to the cheers of the men in the room, passing them around to the ruddy smiling faces.

He crossed the room to hand one to Carly with a grin; she paused before accepting it, glancing across at Holman. Surely she could not drink without a stomach? Holman winked at her. “Where do you think your saliva goes?”

Carly smiled and took the cup, nervously sniffing it’s contents. The strong aroma of a rich dark wine filled her head, almost immediately intoxicating. Kaze smiled at her. “Good wine.” He said with a grin. Smiling back, Carly raised the cup to her mouth, feeling its fat solidity against her lips as she tilted it upwards. The dark wine burned like whisky as it hit her tongue but slipped down her throat like silk, making her gasp but not choke. Kaze smiled again, wider this time. “Good wine.”

Carly felt her chest tighten almost as soon as Holman had closed the door on her. She had been given a soft fur to lie under in a small hut across the alley from the feasting hall. Kaze had lit a fire for her when he had fetched the wine and the room was pleasantly warm, although cool drafts disturbed her from time to time and sent woodsmoke curling around the hut.

In the silence Carly could hear her mechanical heart pounding and she realised she was slightly breathless. Perhaps it was the alcohol coursing through her veins – it had been a long time since she’d had anything to drink. But did it usually make her this horny?

Carly couldn’t be certain. Things were definitely stirring in her body as she curled up under the fur. She cursed under her breath, at once angry and upset that she couldn’t do anything to comfort her body’s desire. She shifted her hips and realised she was getting wet; damn, she thought to herself, it’s getting worse. Damn!

Carly’s head began to spin as she fought to control her anger and ignore her body, and suddenly she wished she hadn’t had so much to drink. It wasn’t possible for her to vomit, was it? She didn’t think so. But suddenly she thought she’d feel better if she could. Or maybe not; that wouldn’t stop her head spinning, or her chest aching, or her sex from burning deep inside its shield. A fat wave of nausea broke over her and she turned carefully, making herself comfortable on the hard ground.

Surprisingly, sleep came quickly and Carly found herself drifting away into a bizarre world of dizzy uncertainty, filled with a thousand cries that at first she didn’t understand. Later the screams began to come clear and she recognised them as the moans of human women in tortured chastity, crying out at her for help. One of the voices, she later realised just before she awoke, was hers.

Carly awoke groggily, snuggled under her soft animal fur. She shook her head to clear the cobwebs, quickly realising her mistake as a wave of dizziness washed around her skull like swirling water. The cold air smelled of stale smoke – the fire smouldered quietly in the grate, a pile of grey ash. As she shifted under her blanket she noticed how wet she was between her legs – a rush of arousal shot through her chest at the realisation and she spent a moment catching her breath, trying to clear her mind. She had noticed herself becoming a little aroused during the feast and had put it down to the alcohol – but she didn’t usually wake up feeling quite like this, especially when she was hung over. Silently cursing her sex shield she twisted, trying to remember what had happened at the feast.