The Fallen

Carly began to think of the refugees and wondered how their attack was progressing. She hoped the weapons had reached them without detection – any alien interference in the delivery and the assault force would be more or less unarmed, which may or may not prove to be a problem depending on how well defended the starport was. Without the security grid in operation the automated gun turrets would be out of order, and of course the trains would be moving unchecked. Unless an alien of any particular intelligence and rank thought to order an inspection of all shipments, or perhaps noticed a trainload of weaponry heading off unscheduled.

The mottled ground sped past under the locomotive’s afternoon shadow as it headed back across the wide plains towards Transport Depot 579, although its pre-programmed course would signal the points to change before then to divert the train towards the great industrial province beneath the mountains that Sanctuary resided in, to the starport that Holman and Besaron and the rest of Sanctuary should by now have captured. Carly found herself gazing out of the window as her aching body rested; she could feel herself shutting down after the tension of the mission, naturally preparing herself to sleep. Perhaps her nutrient pack was running low, perhaps she had exhausted its supply with nervous tension alone, perhaps she was about to burn out and die in the locomotive that was taking her on her final journey home.

Images played in Carly’s mind like a roll of film, little snippets of the Sanctuary refugees in the starport opening the doors of the hissing locomotive to find Carly and Lonnie dead in each others arms. For a moment she could see the look on Holman’s face, and on Tahlia’s, and on Zuka’s and his band of hunters; then the tired spell passed across her mind and she found herself waking up again, perhaps convincing herself that she wasn’t ready to give up yet. She shifted on the seat and hugged Lonnie hard, wondering for a moment if she could be persuaded to find her voice again.

Carly decided to leave Lonnie to rest. She wondered what the poor girl had been through since her escape: she had found her lover in a clinically clean metallic cell in the upper dungeon. The white corridors that led Carly there put her in mind of a medical research centre, bright and sterile and empty. Row after row of metal-walled, metal-floored cells led from the branching corridors, but Carly mentally followed the directions she had hacked from the security computer until she found Lonnie, curled up in a corner, crying into her fists.

Carly knew what had been happening as soon as she entered the cell. The smell of feminine sex was strong in the air; Lonnie sat in a small puddle of her own fluid that looked as if it had been flowing like a waterfall down her thighs and buttocks. Evidently the destruction of the security computer had broken the connection to the devices that gave them pleasure, which was probably not the release Lonnie would have hoped for but at least she could rest without constant torment being thrust upon her.

Lonnie shivered again and Carly gave her another hug. A tear ran down her cheek and Carly felt a lump forming in her throat as she looked at her lover’s face. Poor, poor girl, she found herself saying in her mind – what ever did you do to deserve a life like this? You did nothing but be so pretty. She leant over Lonnie until her mouth was next to her lover’s ear and whispered “I love you,” before planting a gentle kiss on her cheek, and in her mind she was saying, is there anything I can ever say or do to repair the damage now?

Across the plains the great power station rolled into view, its tall chimneystacks like thin black trunks standing straight up from the concrete block beneath. Carly studied it as it lolled slowly past, its colours faded with distance. As she watched the afternoon light seemed to glow yellow, subtly becoming brighter so slowly that at first Carly didn’t notice it. Her attention was finally caught by a fiercely bright point of yellow light streaking down from the heavens so fast that it left a flaming tail behind it, followed by a thick brown smoke trail.

Instinctively Carly shut her eyes and pulled Lonnie into the floor of the locomotive as blinding light seared through the windows and the floor juddered as if in a violent quake. Two more flaming stars fell from the sky as Carly braced herself for the shock wave: about ten seconds after the first flare had become a bright explosion in the distance the sound of the explosion reached the locomotive.

Carly felt the engine lift and tilt, her ears totally closed to all sound. She began to slide and then fall as the cabin turned onto its side, landing heavily on her back with Lonnie on top of her, curled into a tight ball with her fists in her face. Two more shock waves from the later impacts passed over the locomotive, shaking it violently up and down until Carly was uncertain whether the shock wave was still passing or the loco was sliding down the embankment on its side, or both.

Eventually the stillness returned and Carly relaxed her grip, carefully lifted Lonnie from her and tiptoed to the rear door to investigate their situation. The air outside was filled entirely with thick dust kicked up from the dry ground – the train had indeed been lifted from its rails and slid down the bank and was totally immobile in the dirt, resting almost upside down at the base of the verge. Carly lifted Lonnie onto her back, groaning with the effort of her aching muscles, and climbed out of the engine.

Laying Lonnie down on the dirt, Carly scampered up the bank to take a look. After the emptiness of the initial shock she felt the emotions beginning to pour into her soul – she wasn’t sure whether she should be pleased or distressed. She had seen those bright pinpoints of light before, during the Cuban crisis before she had transferred to the Space Corps: they were Comet XB4s, stratospheric missiles carrying explosive warheads, launched from orbit onto targets at ground level. Carly knew the aliens had electronic counter-measures that could detonate the XB4s before they reached their target, but they must be controlled by the security grid, which she herself had shut down.

Which meant, of course, that there was still a Space Corps cruiser in orbit. Perhaps Carly’s ship was still there, searching for survivors; perhaps a whole fleet waited above, waiting for an opportunity to launch an attack on the surface, probably now aware that each wave of infantry they sent only made the enemy stronger. But it also meant that the entire province was now without power. And Carly was without a train to her ship home.

The autogyro flew steadily onwards over the scorched ground. Lonnie was still curled up against Carly, having barely moved since they set off from the little bridge where the craft had been hidden. Like all Sanctuary craft it had the route home mapped into its flight system and would take the girls back to the deserted hidden city high up in the mountains.

Carly coughed a few times as they passed through the smoke cloud above the broken shell of the power station, sitting in the middle of a black charred circle that stretched for several miles in each direction. The vast chimneys had scattered like bowling pins; some had cracked on impact with the ground and but some remained intact, so that they formed long bridges up to the broken roof of the great building.

How long would it take to get back to Sanctuary? Carly found herself wondering if she would get to the starport before the refugees took off, but she realised it may already be too late. Besaron and his advisors might not choose to stay and wait for Carly, not after the attacks from above had begun, presumably all over the planet or at least wherever an orbiting cruiser happened to be waiting. How far did the great broken power station beam its power when it was operational? Was the starport fed by another power plant? Had that plant too been bombed from above? Had the starport been bombed? Carly felt her body tensing and began to feel dizzy with worry; she realised she was doing no good by panicking about the situation and took a deep breath of smoky air, coughed again and reclined in the little seat.

The air turned cold as the gyro flew onwards, over the base of the low mountains on a direct course to Sanctuary. The rolling granite gave way to yet more plains, carpeted entirely by a jumbled industrial sprawl; her outward route to the palace had taken her across the arms of the mountains, safe from detection among the granite. For the journey back to Sanctuary the autogyro took the direct route; from the lack of smoke and lights below Carly decided the industrial province must be powerless and therefore the gyro had deemed it safe to fly over.

Eventually the mountains curved back around to intersect the autogyro’s path and Carly began to pick out landmarks familiar from her outward journey. Many of the buildings below had been smashed from above, and great clouds of dust and smoke still hung in the air above the ruins like a fleet of ethereal balloons hovering above the province. Out in the distance, held in a small rocky basin cradled by a curving peninsula stretching out from the mountain range hung a thick black cloud, dark and ominous. Carly recognised the basin – from such distance a little white sphere must be the abandoned silo that the Second Team had infiltrated to order their weapons, and the great broken black shell behind it was the starport.

A lump quickly formed in Carly’s throat as she realised what had happened. It should have been so obvious, maybe she just hadn’t been thinking: the starport would be a primary target for any orbiting cruiser.

Carly let the autogyro carry on up into the mountains towards Sanctuary, feeling a kind of numb emptiness that she could not identify. She should be angry, she thought, or sad, or afraid. But she felt nothing at all. There were still a number of unanswered questions, of course, but she couldn’t bring herself to face them. She needed to rest. She needed to sleep before she could properly think. Things might not work out so bad – maybe Besaron and his citizens got a craft airborne before the orbiting ships bombed the starport. Maybe they were docking with the cruiser right now, telling them all about the mission, about the Lieutenant who might be still alive on the surface, waiting for rescue. But it was too much for Carly to think about on the harsh, buzzing little plane. She needed to rest.

Carly stepped off of the craft almost as soon as it had settled onto the ground. Painfully she carried Lonnie across the clearing to the little thatched houses behind the copse, pushing open the door to the small building she had spent her first night at Sanctuary in, only a few days previously. The village was deathly silent and abandoned and the hut was dark inside; the sun had disappeared behind the mountains and it was becoming difficult to see.

Carly placed Lonnie gently on the animal skin, folding part of the pelt under her head to make a comfortable pillow. The village had been left exactly as Carly had first found it, the few inhabited huts still stocked with skins and logs to burn. The natives hadn’t thought it necessary to tidy the village before they left.

The evening air was turning chilly as Carly stacked some small logs onto the fire and swept up some kindling from underneath the log pile. She took her time lighting the fire, using her soldering tool to set alight the small twigs; her laser would have been really useful here, but it was gone – presumably still amongst the wreckage under the repair bay she had escaped from. It seemed so long ago, and yet was only a few days. It could easily have been months.

When the fire had taken hold in some of the larger logs Carly decided she had best refill hers and Lonnie’s nutrient packs; she had no idea when Lonnie’s was last replaced but her own had not been changed all day. It would definitely be running low by now. She reached out to Lonnie’s prone form, delicately running her finger alone the hard flank of her nutrient hatch to pop it open like Holman had shown her. Lonnie’s canister slid silently out of her side and Carly unclipped it and backed out of the door, gazing sadly at her silent lover curled up on the pelt.

She hurried to the stores to drain the canisters and leave them for washing in the morning. She was too tired now to worry about such chores; it would have to wait. Quickly she topped up an empty canister and clipped it into herself, slid shut her hatch and turned to leave the stores.

“So that’s how you live.” A rich, silky voice stopped her in her tracks. From behind the shadows next to the door emerged an elegant woman, tall and blue.

“No…” Carly heard herself say under her breath, dropping the refilled canister that she held for Lonnie so that it crashed to the floor, yet she remained rooted to the spot.

“Oh, so surprised?” The Medea said as she stepped forwards, reaching out with long slender fingers to caress Carly’s cheek. Her head turned instinctively away and her face grimaced at the touch, but still she was unable to move. “I thought you might try something when I sent you away, so I had you tracked. You led me to Sanctuary, Engineer.” She hissed, her voice full of depth and menace.

“No…” Carly said again, feeling tears begin to fall down her cheeks. What had she done?

“Yes. This would have been my conquest, and you would have been my prize. You and your Companion.”

“No…”

“No indeed. You had to blow it all up!” The Medea snapped, painfully grabbing hold of Carly’s hair and pulled their faces close to one another. Her expression suddenly changed from one of anger to one of lust, deep and soft and inviting like a velvet cloud. “All of this world could have been yours, Engineer. Yours and mine.”

“Never.” Carly said. She had found her voice again, her inner self burning with anger. “I would have been a slave forever.”

“And you think I am free? Even I had my superiors.” The Medea let go of Carly’s head to stand upright, blocking the path between Carly and the door. “But together, united as sisters, we could have taken over – we could have ruled this world.”

“I would never join you.”

“Oh, come now, Engineer. We’re not so different, you and I.”

“I’m NOTHING like you!” Carly spat, shaking with rage. “You’re a witch! An evil witch!”

“You think so? We’ve walked the same path, Engineer, but it’s the slavery that turns us this way. Sooner or later we all suffer the same fate. You, and I, The Fallen, and the Taken.” And as she spoke, the Medea pulled open her white sash and let it drop to the floor, baring her blue skin to the cool air of the stores.

Carly felt a huge wave of fear suddenly rise inside her, but it was quashed as she took in the Medea’s naked body. Round navy blue aureole stood out from her firm youthful orbs, ringed by another line of dark skin, as if something had once been bonded there and had left a scar on its removal. A similar line curved over her hairless mound, a lighter blue than the rest of her body. Puffy blue lips stood proud between her thighs, bordered by two metal pipes protruding from just above her pelvic bone, at the same place where the fat upper retainers of Carly’s sex shield disappeared into her abdomen through blisters of red skin. The pipes curved down between her legs and disappeared, twitching rhythmically as if carrying a pumped fluid. And on her side, anodised blue to match her skin colour but still visibly metallic, lay a contoured hatch covering what could only have been a recharge canister buried inside her belly.

Slowly, automatically, almost beyond even her own control Carly felt her right hand twitch so that her pliers extended from her toolbox. The Medea didn’t move as the tool swung across Carly’s belly and twisted open the safety catch on her shotgun, and neither did she move when Carly lifted the barrel and pointed it straight into the blue woman’s face, the fingers of her left hand twitching as tears scrolled down her cheeks.

Still the Medea did not move, she just stared firmly back down the barrel, straight into Carly’s eyes. “You would kill a fellow slave? Then you are already becoming like me.”

Epilogue

There seemed no point in going down to the starport. It would have taken a day to walk there, and a day to get back, and besides she could see the black circle of land in the sheltered basin if she climbed the hill opposite Sanctuary’s entrance cave and stared hard enough across the plains. There was no life there – no more industrial smoke, no moving trains, no alien soldiers marching up the gorge to the mountains. The aliens were dead.

The destruction of the power plants had disabled all of the newer variants of the alien’s hybrid designs and they had dropped dead wherever they stood. The Medea had explained (or divulged, or maybe threatened) that there may be some older designs still around, and several thousand slaves, human or otherwise, but they would be dead within a day without nutrient packs to sustain their internal reactors and their bodies. And so the battle had been won.

But at what cost, Carly asked herself. Had the natives gotten off the surface, or had they been blown up by Comet fire? Killed by their own kind in the biggest friendly fire incident Carly had ever known in her lifetime? Carly could not tell – not without going down to the starport to examine the wreckage for bodies. No, better to stay in the village in relative safety – after all, there were sure to be more of those beasts that Zuka and his band had feasted upon on her first night at Sanctuary, and they didn’t look like herbivores.

Of course, if the refugees had not made it off the surface, the orbiting ships would not know Carly was alive and waiting for rescue. There was no communication equipment in the surface village, Sanctuary was locked beneath hundreds of metres of rock, and Carly did not have the key. Anything that might have survived in the alien industry on the plains would need a lot of power to run, the sort of power Carly could not create from her internal reactor; it would be suicidal to attempt to repair a full-size alien reactor without any schematics, even if she could find one worthy of repair.

So Carly had resigned herself to her fate – waiting in the quaint thatched village with her two companions, Lonnie – who had not said a word and cowered in fear each time she saw the Medea, and the evil witch herself, who seemed quite content to stay in the village where she had access to Sanctuary’s nutritious juice. It was that very juice that kept the three of them alive day by day. Of course the groves that would need tending in the coming months, to harvest the fruit and juice it so that they may live another day, or month, or year – however long it took to be rescued. That very juice that with each passing moment was making Carly’s body feel more and more fevered, more heated, more flustered. The thing inside her sex was dead without power, and nothing she could do would ever relieve the seething nexus of wet heat, never end tormented yearning behind the solid shield between her legs.

Lonnie must be feeling it too, Carly considered, although she barely moved – she just lay on her pelt, curled up on her side with her fists between her legs. And the Medea would feel it, of course, but her sex was not locked away like that of her slaves. That blue witch still held some power over them – her rank still showed – as she had demonstrated while Carly had curled up next to Lonnie and tried to sleep the previous evening, playing with her deep blue clit until an over-exaggerated screaming orgasm echoed around the deserted village.

And so she resigned herself to her fate, in the little huts that hid among the trees high above the remains of the alien civilisation, waiting for her rescue, whenever it may come. There was plenty to be done in the mean time – the groves to harvest, firewood to collect, water for washing and gravel and stones for repairs to the houses. The thatch over the storage hut would need relaying before the next winter, which the Medea had said would be cold, and year after year after that the other buildings would need work. But the crops had once supported thousands, and now there were three – three women who could easily live a lifetime on the last precious plantation, as well they might have to, if rescue never came.