DarkWind: 2nd Book, WindDemon Trilogy (2 page)

“Eight minutes to target, Dr. Kelly,” Dixon said formally.

“Get your asses to Transport,” Wellmeyer ordered his away team. “And don’t dawdle down there. We have to be in Sector Four by twenty-one hundred tomorrow with that shipment of antibiotic!”

Caitlin shook her head and walked to the elevator, went inside and waited until the two men joined her. When the titanium doors slid shut, she turned to Loure, her face perfectly solemn. “In case we encounter eggs or pods of any kind while down there, don’t go poking at ‘em, okay?”

“No, Ma’am,” Loure replied, shaking his head. “I will not.”

“And keep your big mouth shut,” added Dixon. “Can’t get in if your mouth is shut.”

“Avoid vines as well,” Caitlin put in.

“And siren calls that might make you want to wander off in search of strange kitty,” Dixon added, wagging his brows lewdly at Loure.

“Kitty?” Caitlin echoed, knowing full well what Dixon meant.

Dixon shrugged. “Never know about alien critters, Doc.” He swiveled his head toward her and locked gazes. “Their anatomies may be different from ours.”

“Understood,” she replied.

The elevator settled at the Transport deck and she preceded the men from the cage. She nodded politely at the Chief Engineer, Thom Christopher, and then took her place in the Transport modules, Dixon and Loure flanking her on the pedestal.

“Ready, Doc?” asked Christopher.

“As I’m gonna be. What are you registering down there, now, Pete?”

“Two diminishing life forms.”

“Humanoid?”

Christopher shook his head. “Can’t tell.”

“Pod people,” Loure said softly. “I knew it.”

“Just our luck,” Dixon sighed. He rubbed his stomach and belched.

“Engage,” Caitlin ordered, her lips twitching but her eyes wary.

Chief Christopher watched as the away team faded from his view, their molecules flung toward the barren planetoid where no life had been reported before.

Barren, Caitlin thought, wasn’t a sufficient word to describe the gray plateau on which she and her away team formed. The sky was a darker gray; the vast wisps of fog that defined the interior of the Sinisters obscuring what light could pass from the distant sun. Massive, jagged rock formations jutted upward like hands reaching toward the gods; the rocks gave off a faint milky glow that suggested veins of embedded quartz. A wind skirled over the vast plain below them where only a few mounds of tumbled scree littered the miles upon miles of wasteland.

“A real hospitable place, huh?” said Dixon.

“Hope you brought your vid-cam, Linwood,” Loure responded. “This would make a nice postcard.”

“Yeah,” Caitlin agreed. “A postcard from hell.”

She saw nothing to indicate a landing site or-for that matter-a crash site. Behind them was a sheer cliff of wind-beaten stone and off to one side was a succession of what could pass for steps leading down to the plateau.

“Just where in the blazes are we supposed to be going?” She reached up to touch the small Com-Link unit attached to her jumpsuit. “Matheny?” she said, irritation clear in her tone. “Where are our patients?”

“Below you, Doc,” Matheny reported. “Chief couldn’t get you inside the plateau. Some kind of interference.”

“Okay.” Caitlin headed for the weather-carved steps. The steps didn’t look treacherous, but she cautioned her men just in case.

He was barely
conscious, his life force almost drained, but he picked up the scent of a female. His nostrils quivered and his fingers flexed. The heart inside him struggled to keep beating; to force life through his veins. He tried desperately to lift his head, but could not. He was too injured, too weak, and with the last ounce of his remaining strength called out to her.

First Officer
Dixon plowed into Caitlin’s back as she stopped on the last step before reaching the black sand floor of the wasteland. He saw her look around, her forehead creased. “What’s up?” he asked.

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what, ma’am?”

Caitlin shook her head. “Imagining things, I guess. Must have been the wind.” She moved off the last step and grimaced as her boots sank ankle-high in the powered sand.

“Volcanic ash,” Loure told them.

“Oh, this is just getting better and better.” Dixon pointed off to their left. “There is a cave entrance over yonder.”

Caitlin turned to look in that direction. There was indeed a gaping hole that was more than likely a cave entrance. Being claustrophobic, she wasn’t all that keen on venturing inside, but considering the fact that no ship, no building, no nothing was out here in this windy desolation, it looked as though the cave was their destination. She touched her mini Com-Link again.

“How far inside the plateau, Matheny?”

“Nine hundred yards, Ma’am,” the science tech reported.

Caitlin winced. “Swell.” She hissed turned to Loure. “Did you bring a lamp?”

“Yes, I did,” Loure, replied, his face solemn. He and Dixon both had known Caitlin a long time and knew her fear of enclosed places. “Want us to go in alone?”

She grunted. “No. I gotta get over it sooner or later.”

“It can just as well be later,” Dixon said gently.

“I can do this,” Caitlin snapped and struck out for the cave entrance.

His breathing
changed when the female scent became stronger. In his mind, he could see her, but her form was unfamiliar: delicate and dark, smaller than he. But she was a female and it was a female he needed. He tried to call out to her again, but found he had expended what little energy he had left. If she were to find him, it would have to be from the mental call he had been generating for weeks now in the hope he would be heard.

Loure led the
way into the cave. The interior was stygian dark so he turned on the mercury light. He glanced at Caitlin and noticed she was trembling and her face was glistening with sweat. If there were anything either he or Dixon could do to help her, they would have. As it was, the big man was suffering right along with her although the cave held no special horrors for him.

“What kind of atmosphere does it look like we have in here, Matheny?” Caitlin asked her Com-Link. She was trying to hold on to her nerve, forcing herself deeper inside the maw of the cave.

“Breathable oxygen. A little thin, but sufficient,” the science tech told her from the Orion.  “No sign of contaminants.”

“It smells,” Dixon observed.

“Corruption,” Caitlin told him, putting a hand to her mouth. “Rotting bodies.”

“Ah, yes,” Loure grunted. “I had forgotten what that unique odor was.” Both he and Dixon had been newbies in the med corps during the last Middle Eastern conflict. They had seen many dead bodies in that war.

“Where’s the smell coming from?” Dixon asked, swallowing against the nausea creeping up his throat.

“Over there.” Caitlin pointed to a sweeping archway of stone.

Loure swung his lamp that way. There were two women lying face down on the cave floor. Clothed in deep green robes, they gripped some kind of staff-like weapon in their hands. Obviously they had been guarding the entrance when they died.

“Run a diagnostic,” Caitlin told Dixon.

Dixon walked to the bodies, grimacing at the intense odor. He thumped the scanner, tried again then looked around. “It’s not registering.”

“Matheny?” Caitlin called up to the Orion.

“Aye, Ma’am?”

“Do you have a fix on the bodies we’re viewing?” She turned so her Com-Link could pan the corpses.

“Aye,” was the reply, then a short silence until the tech had his sensors locked on the bodies.

“Cause of death?” Caitlin asked, impatiently.

She could almost hear Matheny’s mental shrug. “Poisoning of some kind.”

“Race?” she queried. “They’re humanoid females, but extremely large specimens.”

“Don’t have a clue what race they are, Ma’am,” Matheny reported. “Not in our data banks.”

“Oh, hell,” Caitlin sighed. “I was afraid he’d say that.”

“I see light,” Dixon said.

“You see life?” Wellmeyer barked and the surgically implanted receivers behind the left ears of the away team vibrated painfully, causing each of them to put a hand up to cover that ear.

“Light,” Caitlin corrected, annoyed with the interruption. “He sees light!”

“You’d better hurry or there won’t be any life,” Wellmeyer reminded them, equally loud. “The readings are dismally low.”

“Don’t shout when you are speaking to us, Sir,” Caitlin snapped. “We can hear you perfectly well!”

“Then hurry up!” Wellmeyer groused.

“Butt wipe,” Caitlin murmured under her breath and motioned for the men to advance. 

The away team moved further back inside the cave toward a faint source of light about a hundred yards away.

Her scent was
stronger now: a hint of lavender; a touch of citrus. He inhaled as best he could for the pain was terrible and the very movement of his chest nearly caused him to blackout again. Ashamed, he heard himself whimper with the agony exploding inside him and strove with iron-hard control to keep awake.

“Just a moment longer, Khiershon,” he told himself. “Just hold on a moment longer. She will hear you. She will come for you.”

There were nine
female bodies lying side by side-hands clasped-at the entrance to a large, circular chamber. Their faces were bloated and blotched with a crimson rash that had spread down their necks. Their lips were blue; their eyes wide and staring. Ranged in a semi-circle, the women were clad in identical black robes with bright blue sashes.

“These women are giants!” Dixon whispered. “Look at their hands! Them hands are bigger than yours, Loure.”

“Big mamas, huh?” Loure knelt by the closest woman and ran a diagnostic. He looked up, surprise on his beefy face. “Conium maculatum poisoning.”

“Speak Alliance, will you?” Dixon grumbled.

“Hemlock,” Caitlin translated. “They ingested hemlock.”

“From the looks of these gals, they are some kind of religious order. Maybe they use in it their rituals.”

“Rituals,” Caitlin repeated. “You think they were performing a ceremony?”

“Maybe they’re celebrating National Socrates Day,” Dixon observed. He pointed to a large goblet sitting atop a flat stone that could have been used as an altar of some kind. “I bet if you run a scan, you’ll find hemlock in there.”

Loure moved over to the goblet, passed the scanner over it and nodded. “That’s exactly what it is and in high concentrations at that.”

“We got two alive somewhere in here,” Dixon said. “We’d better be finding them fast then.”

Caitlin nodded and they moved into the circular chamber. She opened and closed her left fist to keep from screaming as the walls around her began to close in. She was having difficulty drawing air into her lungs and could hear her heart pounding dangerously fast in her ears.

It was becoming
harder and harder to breathe. The pain had all but taken control of what mind he had left. He could hear her voice now: it was soft yet strangely hollow. And she was not that far away. His mind shut down for a second or two and he panicked, thinking she would never find him if he lost consciousness again. He had to stay alive just a bit longer.

“Here I am,” he whispered, his cracked lips bleeding. “Find me.”

“Here’s one more
,” Dixon said and knelt down. “She must be a guard, too. She’s got the same kind of staff we found with the two other women.”

“Matheny? How much farther?” Caitlin asked, wiping a hand over her sweaty face. They had found eleven bodies yet there was still a reading telling them there were two faint blips of life somewhere inside the cave.

“Looks like about twenty feet, Ma’am,” Matheny responded from the Orion.

Caitlin looking about them. “Which way? A dozen passageways lead off this central chamber!”

“The scanner can’t be any more specific, Ma’am, I’m sorry. We are getting some odd interference up here, Dr. Kelly.”

Caitlin let out a discouraged breath. They were four corridors straight ahead.

“
I am here, Lady
.”

As soon as the words registered, Caitlin turned, facing aft. “Back there,” she said. “He’s back there.”

“He?” Loure questioned, exchanging a look with Dixon.

But Caitlin was already moving down one of the dark stone corridors, Loure’s light casting a wavering glow on the sharp walls as he bumbled along in her wake.

They found a twelfth woman sitting on the ground, her head against a closed iron doorway built into the rock wall. In the woman’s lap was a long rod with a bulbous projection at one end that flared out like the points of a star. She watched them coming toward her with a look of incredulous dismay. “How did you get in here?” she said.