Alien Skies Read online

  Alien Skies

  by

  Carmen Webster Buxton

  Cracked Mirror Press

  Rockville, MD

  Publishing Information

  Published by Cracked Mirror Press

  Rockville, MD

  Cover design by Danielle Fine

  ALIEN SKIES

  First edition

  ISBN: 978-0-9979898-9-2 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-7325317-0-3 (Kindle format)

  ISBN: 978-1-7325317-1-0 (ePub format)

  © 2019 Karen Wester Newton

  All rights reserved

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction and is entirely the creation of the author. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Other Cracked Mirror Press Books

  by Carmen Webster Buxton

  Alien Bonds

  Alien Vows

  The Sixth Discipline

  No Safe Haven

  Tribes

  Shades of Empire

  Where Magic Rules

  The Nostalgia Gambit

  King of Trees

  Saronna’s Gift

  Turnabout

  Dedication:

  For my son Wes, who has made his own life, but thankfully, not under alien skies

  A note to readers:

  There is a glossary of Wakanrean words at the back of the book. If you are reading this on a Kindle or Kindle app that supports the X-Ray feature, you can long press a Wakanrean word or character or place name to see the information on that word.

  Chapter One

  Kamuhi Hailoaka fastened the last clasp on his sensor-enabled training coverall, pulled on his boots, and looked down at his sleeping wife. New Iberia’s tiny moon wasn’t up, so there was no moonlight coming in the bedroom window. Still, the silver-white hair of his wife’s headcrest gleamed in the faint artificial light that came from the baseboards around the room. He had turned toward the bedroom door, when his wife’s voice made him start with surprise.

  “Were you going to leave without kissing me goodbye?”

  He turned back and smiled at her. “I thought you were asleep,” he said, bending over her to kiss her.

  She put one hand behind his head to keep the kiss longer than he had intended, and then released him with a sigh. “I hate it when your training exercises start at night.”

  “At least I should be back in time for breakfast this time.”

  She made a face. “But then you’ll need to sleep.”

  He reached down to stroke the soft, silky fur that covered her cheek. “Cheer up, Yulayan. Training won’t go on forever. In four months I’ll get a posting somewhere, and hopefully they’ll give me a job with regular hours.”

  She made a tisking noise. “Not soon enough.” She nestled down into the bedclothes. “Try not to wake Malia on your way out.”

  Kamuhi promised to be quiet.

  He was careful to step softly going past his daughter’s bedroom door. Malia had been a good sleeper when she was first born, but over the last few months, teething had made her restless at night.

  Kamuhi collected his pack from where he had left it and went out the front door.

  When he left the apartment building, there was a ground transport waiting in the dark street. It was too dark to see the emblem of the Third Confederation of Planets on the side of the transport, but Kamuhi knew it was there. He hoisted first his pack and then himself over the tailgate. The sergeant nodded as he clicked Kamuhi’s name on the roster. Three more people got on in the next few minutes. After the sergeant clicked off the last name, he pounded on the partition between himself and the driver. The transport pulled out, and they moved smoothly into the empty ground traffic lanes.

  Kamuhi stifled a yawn. It would be a long ride to the drop site, but he wasn’t supposed to sleep when he was on duty. He leaned back against the side of the transport and let his mind reach that state of concentration where he would become alert if anyone called his name, but otherwise he was unaware of his surroundings. He thought about his parents and his sisters back on Terra, and he wondered how they were doing. From there his mind wandered to Yulayan’s parents on Wakanreo, and whether they had had any more problems with the radicals who wanted Wakanreo to expel any non-Wakanreans. Yulayan worried about her Terran mother being a target for resentment if the radicals continued to stir things up.

  Kamuhi mused for a few minutes on the astronomically improbable coincidence that made Terrans and Wakanreans genetically compatible. It had certainly changed his life to discover it. Aside from having a half-Wakanrean wife, and a quarter-Wakanrean daughter, he had never even considered enlisting in the Third Confederation before he went to Wakanreo.

  He glanced around the transport. In some ways, enlisting had furthered his goal of studying other cultures. Before he had experienced boot camp, it hadn’t occurred to him that being part of an organization with military-style discipline would require him to adapt to a culture as distinct as the one he had studied on Wakanreo.

  From Wakanreo, his thoughts moved on to other planets with much less similar species, and the things that had affected their evolution. He recalled an article he had read detailing an anthropological study of the earliest Tryff civilizations; the authors had speculated on exactly when the ancestors of the Tryff species had lost the ability to fly. Weighing their speculations in his mind, he had just decided that there wasn’t enough data to come to any valid conclusion when the sergeant called his name.

  “Hailoaka!”

  “Yes, sir,” Kamuhi answered instantly, making a jump of many millennia and thousands of light years from Tryffon.

  “Get your gear ready. We’re dropping you first.”

  “Yes, sir.” Kamuhi had finally learned that every order had to be acknowledged, not just with a nod, but with a ‘yes, ma’am,’ or ‘yes, sir.’ It had been drilled into him during his second session of boot camp, along with other things.

  He pulled his pack onto his shoulders, adjusted the visor on his helmet for night vision, and perched at the open hatch of the transport. When the vehicle checked its speed, the sergeant signaled with his hand. Kamuhi jumped, hit the ground, and rolled. He came up in a crouch, glanced around quickly, and made for the nearest cover, a clump of vine-covered trees to his right. Behind him, the transport was swallowed up by the darkness.

  Kamuhi took a second to survey the scene. He had been in other training exercises here, so he was familiar with the rugged terrain on this part of New Iberia. The semi-arid region had sandy soil and sparse vegetation, with rocky hills scattered over a landscape that looked deceptively flat. The night vision visor gave everything a faintly blurred outline, but Kamuhi could see where he was going well enough to avoid the sharp rocks and pockets of stinkgrass. Still, the eerie quality of the night vision visor combined with the desolate setting made him feel as if he were dreaming. The rock formations ahead looked just a little like ghostly castles.

  Kamuhi worked his way through the landscape without encountering any other beings for almost two kilometers. His group of three was supposed to meet at a set location at a specified time, and then proceed together to their destination. The only map they had been shown had no topographical information, merely an outline of the test area. They had no landmarks to find their meeting point; they were relying solely on the coordinates displayed at the edge of their visors. Kamuhi was close to being in position when he heard a noise from a few meters away. It was a faint plopping sound, as if something had hit the ground.

  Kamuhi never knew why it was he looked up. There wasn’t anything about the sound to suggest that it had been caused by something dropping from a great distance. Perhaps it was because he had been thinking of the Tryffs and the possibility o
f a sapient winged species, or perhaps it was some instinct to always consider what might be above him, but Kamuhi did look up.

  The range of the night visor wasn’t great, perhaps fifty meters. The shape of the vessel was only faintly discernible, swhich meant it was at the extreme range of his visor. Since it seemed to be silently hovering, it must be a flyter, but it was veery large for a flyter. It occurred to Kamuhi that it could easily have heat-sensitive equipment aboard, so he immediately began to creep away, hoping that staying in motion would make him harder to detect.

  Kamuhi circled, trying to view the vessel better without getting too close to it, and still avoid the clumps of soggy, leafy stinkgrass. He came to a line of low, rocky hills. There were wide crevices where some ancient glacier had scoured the hill as it moved along, and Kamuhi used them to provide better cover as he moved closer to his group’s coordinates. Whenever possible, he stayed under the rocks themselves.

  Eventually he heard a faint rustling noise. A little to his left, and about four or five meters away, Kamuhi could see the almost imperceptible outline of a helmet like his own. A few feet from that he saw another helmet with two tall Shuratanian ears projecting from the top of it. Kamuhi waited silently for a few seconds and was rewarded by the sound of a whispered conversation.

  “Where the hell is Hailoaka?” he heard Ping Cheung say. Cheung was a Terran, a few years younger than himself. She had been assigned to Kamuhi’s group along with Ranghhour shu Yorhh, a Shuratanian. Ranghhour was older than Kamuhi by almost a decade, but he was still considered a youngster because his people were so long-lived.

  “He was dropped first,” Ranghhour whispered back. “Since he’s not here, maybe he got tagged?”

  Kamuhi debated. The two of them were huddled more or less in the open, but there was a low clump of trees and rocks between them and the flyter. He decided to ignore the chance that they had already been observed and signal them.

  The team hadn’t been given any kind of electronic equipment other than their helmets and location finders. Kamuhi was reluctant to use the com in the helmet since it could easily be monitored. The sight of the flyter had suggested to him that their ersatz enemy was probably much better equipped, and possibly better informed.

  There were some small pebbles under his feet. Kamuhi picked one up and took aim at Cheung’s helmet. Even crouched down, she was a considerably easier target than Ranghhour. Cheung was average height for a Terran woman, and the Shuratanian was several centimeters short of a meter and a half. Kamuhi let the pebble fly and was pleased to hear a ting as it hit the helmet.

  Cheung and Ranghhour hit the ground instantly. Kamuhi waited, and in a minute or so, he could hear faint movement from either side. He whistled very quietly, one short single note. A helmet popped up and Ranghhour’s whisper came from his right.

  “Hailoaka?”

  “Here,” Kamuhi said, just as quietly.

  The two of them quickly moved to where he waited among the boulders.

  Cheung was annoyed. “What are you doing back here, Hailoaka? You were supposed to be in position.”

  Kamuhi nodded toward the flyter. “I don’t know if you can see it, but there’s some kind of aircraft over there. It’s not that high up. I couldn’t see what it was exactly, and of course there’s no telling what kind of equipment they have. They may well be listening to us right now.”

  Cheung and Ranghhour both scanned the night sky intently.

  “I see it,” Cheung whispered excitedly.

  Ranghhour cursed quietly in his own language. Kamuhi was impressed with both the succinctness of the curse and the literary allusions.

  “We’ve been set up,” the little Shuratanian added in Standard.

  Kamuhi nodded. “They told us the first day. They’ll set us up to fail if they think we can learn from that experience.”

  Cheung seemed less inclined to take the situation philosophically. “What the hell do we do now?”

  “Well,” said Ranghhour, “the question is, are there ground troops, too, or strictly air?”

  “That’s one point,” Kamuhi said. “Let’s review our objective.”

  “We have to get to the checkpoint,” Cheung said, “as quickly as we can and as a group.”

  “Right,” agreed Kamuhi. “We don’t know how many of them there are, we don’t know whether they’re both ground-based and air-based or just air, and we don’t know their equipment. What do we know about them?”

  “They’ll try to stop us,” Ranghhour said.

  “Yes,” Kamuhi said. “And since that’s their objective, they have to know where the checkpoint is.”

  “Of course,” said Cheung.

  “Let’s think,” said Kamuhi. “They were almost right over our rendezvous position. Is it likely that was a coincidence?”

  Ranghhour shook his head. “I don’t believe in coincidences. Shuratanians are philosophically opposed to them.”

  Kamuhi nodded agreement. “All right then, if they have information on our rendezvous points, then it’s possible they also know where our drop points were, or at least, what direction we’d be coming from.”

  “That sounds feasible,” Cheung agreed.

  “The checkpoint is on the far northern edge of the test area,” Kamuhi went on. “At least one craft is between us and the checkpoint.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Ranghhour asked.

  “I say we go west and leave the test area. Then we go around the north side and enter it again, approaching the checkpoint from a direction they don’t expect.”

  “You’re nuts, Hailoaka,” Cheung said. “It’d take hours. We don’t have the time.”

  “If you remember,” Kamuhi said, “at the briefing, the Captain told us the exercise should take two to three hours, but no one gave us an actual time limit.”

  “We’re supposed to do it as quickly as we can,” Cheung said. “And besides, this is a night exercise, and it’ll be dawn in four hours.”

  “Aside from that,” Ranghhour said, “we’d have to leave the test area.”

  “When did anyone say we couldn’t?” Kamuhi asked. “The Captain pointed to the map and indicated the boundaries; she explained that the perimeter is monitored with electronic boundary markers; she described how it would show up on a monitor if anyone in a training coverall broke the boundary; and she said flat out that we absolutely had to keep the coveralls on or be disqualified. But she never came right out and said there was a rule against leaving the test area. I noticed it at the time.”

  Cheung shook her head. “I still don’t like it. It’d take too damn long.”

  “It has the best chance of achieving the objective of reaching the checkpoint,” Kamuhi argued. “Can you think of another way to avoid detection from the air except to be where they don’t expect us to be?”

  Ranghhour twitched his ears. “It’s true that we’ve been given very little to work with.”

  “Do either of you have another idea?” Kamuhi asked.

  Ranghhour shook his head. “I think your plan is our best chance. If we’re going to do it, we’d better get started.”

  “What do you think, Cheung?” Kamuhi asked the young Terran woman.

  She shrugged. “I think it’s crazy, but we’re in an impossible situation, so we may as well do something crazy as not.”

  Having made the decision, the three of them wasted no more time in debate. They moved back along the line of the hill as quickly as they could, following it as far as it provided any cover, and then they abandoned camouflage in favor of making the best time possible.

  Ranghhour was hard pressed to keep up with the two Terrans, but he didn’t complain. Cheung set the pace, as she was closer to him in height, and it was possible for Ranghhour to keep up with her stride.

  They reached the perimeter in excellent time. There was a faint hum as they broke the electronic boundary, but that was all. They didn’t pause but turned north and kept up a steady march.

  When they had come al
most half way around the perimeter, Kamuhi stopped to take a bearing.

  “The checkpoint should be about a kilometer that way,” he said.

  They stopped for just a minute so that Ranghhour could rest and, then they crossed the boundary back into the test area. Other than the same humming sound, there was no indication of any obstacle. From there, they kept to cover as best they could, and avoided moving in a straight line.

  The dawn was turning the western sky to lavender when they sighted the flag flying over the checkpoint. Three members of the observation team were standing near the flag. Even from a distance, they looked impatient. One of them was checking a wrist com.

  Kamuhi heard a very faint noise, like the whisper of the surf when you first come near the shore. He looked up and saw an aircraft on the far side of the checkpoint. It wasn’t a flyter; it looked more like a small military observation craft. If it hadn’t been getting light, he could never have seen it from this far away. Kamuhi pulled Cheung and Ranghhour back under the cover of some tall, spiky trees and pointed to the aircraft.

  Ranghhour cursed again. “What do we do now?”

  “Let’s wait a minute,” Kamuhi said. “Wait and see what it does.”

  It was light enough now that they could see the aircraft easily as it flew low over the ground, moving back and forth almost like a swimmer doing laps, except each time it moved a little bit farther away from the checkpoint.

  “They don’t know where we are,” Kamuhi said. “They must not have long distance scanning technology. And if there’s only one aircraft, they can’t cover the whole area well enough to be sure of catching us.”

  They waited until the craft was at the far end of its pattern, and then they began to work their way toward the checkpoint, keeping as low as possible and using every dip in the ground or other cover to hide their location. They were within a hundred meters when Kamuhi heard a loud hum and saw a flash of light only a few meters to his left. The sensors in his coverall tingled in response, and he realized that someone had dropped a shock bomb. The three of them broke into a run, zigzagging back and forth in an attempt to evade the bombs. Kamuhi and Cheung had each taken Ranghhour by the hand to help the little Shuratanian over a fallen log, when a loud retort sounded from quite close.