THE BORDER RUNNERS
I: VICIOUS CIRCLE
THE OTHER WORLD
IN THE DEPTHS OF DOOMED RESEARCH VESSEL
DEEP SPACE, UNKNOWN GALACTIC GROUP
The graviton anomaly was a huge disc, with three giant diamond spikes radiating from its top and bottom surfaces. The ship was an unknown planet's experimental supership; a scientific space vessel whose identity was unknown up till now. The immense ship, THE KRAGZZON (BULLION, transliterated) belonged to the empire of the ferocious alien, humanoid soldiers inside; presently fighting a hideous galactic monster from the void of interstellar space...
The Adonis of a space soldier, a renegade warrior aboard the ship by an accident of fate, cried out in pain as something heavy slammed into his stomach.
He was fully fifteen feet, two and a half inches tall; lanky, bulging-muscled and wearing a bipedal, lizard-form suit with green, alien eyes -- populated by specks of blue in them within the slitted greenish inky blackness of the pupil and irises. His military rank was Air Marshall, his flamboyant name was Segan Sangonuga Marduk. Two whip-tail-like, very restless and sensitive organs on the suit's opposing hips whipped about around him. His yellow-brown face could clearly be seen behind the transparent face-plate of his fantastic micronuclear power-armor suit. The strong jawline, the clear green-purple irises, the full, sensuous red lips, the arrogant, straight nose with slightly flared nostrils, the close-cropped blue beard were trademarks of his strong lineage and personality.
His battle suit was not the standard Moorian issue, but a one-piece heavy-nano body armor with a mass of unknown runes designed into the upper, close-fitting torso section; with four prominent, shimmering white-bluish crystal--hemispheres that were arranged in a spaced, rectangular, pattern extending from the broad chest to the stomach.
He felt himself being flung backwards as the momentum of the ship-car carried him for a moment, then cast him aside.
The white-blue crystal balls of his power-armor crackled out a brush discharge of static web-lightning, which seemed to produce a mini burst of antigravitic field. His momentum was slowed down considerably in midair, suspended for a moment, as some unknown program in the hallway cameras made the surveillance system take a snapshop of him floating backwards in the air...
And then his body thudded down, at a much reduced speed, onto the composite metal deck floor.
The driver of the little conveyance did not bother to stop and check to see if he was dead. Only Segan's heavy head-gear saved him from serious injury as his head cracked into the metal hull plates that formed the side walls of the corridor. His eyes dulled momentarily, and he was staring dazedly at the glowing crystal balls that reached from the surface matrix of his armor-suit -- in through the electronic and mechanoid cortex of the torso bodyplex -- to touch the Exgal nanoskin-suit; effectively fusing with the zillions of microcircuits that crisscrossed the internal structure and energy sources of the still largely unknown capabilities of the skin armor... His boots were the standard plasti-steel suit-pack system-boots equipped with jet-lift mini-thrusters.
A flowing, luxuriant sheen of a yellow cloak with the lightning-zipped, red O with four horns -- (¤) -- emblem of his family crest emblazoned in the middle of the plastisteel fiber-cloth -- was bunched up at the small of his back during his fall. His helmet's multi-sensor tendrils was as abundant as his own hair (The more sensor leads, the greater the warrior -- telling almost sportingly of the importance of the wearer as a soldier of the Moorian Space Forces). They were all colored the same shade -- a yellowish gold -- springing from slots in his ear region; just beneath the bird-wings-shaped, back-thrusting, gray-feathered ridged metal form of the helmet's super-lightning force-field generators. The total effect made him look what he actually was -- a truly vital soldier.
As he felt himself crumple limply to the floor, he felt the pain again -- probably triggered by his collision -- but this time even more crushing; a raging pain inside his guts and all along his backbone. Cold sweat bathed his body inside the suit. He cursed himself and all of his predecessors for the carelessness, the monstrous fate and ill-luck in the crazy twists of events that led to his losing his regeneration-booster fluid, in that jump across the terrifying gorge in the prison planet...His head fuzzed and dizziness swamped him as the memories threatened to flood his head.
"How am I going to get out of this mess?," he muttered to himself. He could feel the fever, faint at first like the murmur of a tiny gas flame; then blazing hot and getting stronger by the second. His entire body shook violently as the plague virus he had contracted on his last mission on the Prison Planet, took him by storm.
Part of his body wanted to stand up and complete the mission, while the other part just wanted to continue sitting on the floor while waiting for the fever to burn itself out.
Segan didn't know how long he sat there but in the end the first part, the positive branch of his body, won the struggle and he tottered to his feet, picked up his massive gun and slung it -- with some effort -- on one shoulder by its strap. The next thing, the voice at the back of his mind whispered.
The next thing!...His brain refused to function. "Dear Lock!," he gasped. What did I want to do?, his dazed mind howled...He stumbled onwards, wondering what it was it he had forgotten. Still he went forward, his vision rolling; the ceiling exchanging places with the floor with subtle suddenness; his body fighting his every move, slowing him down.
Follow your instinct, a tiny voice behind his brain whispered.
Instinct, he thought. Follow... instinct... instinct...
In front of the huge monitor screens of the Bullion's main laboratory, three white lights appeared on the floor. The lights became three spotlights with towering bands of multi-colored beams strobing above them. A humming filled the air, then three figures began to take shape within the roiling, shimmering, incandescence of lights. Three figures quickly solidified inside the matrix of what was apparently the static fields of transporter beams... The creatures stepped forward from their transporting medium.
They stood, silent and imposing. There was just one word fitting to describe these denizens of space.
Menace.
They were huge: more than twenty feet tall, four feet broad; humanoid, toad-faced, with two pairs of tendrils on their shoulder regions. Their big head-gears were a bright reddish color; the faces behind the light bluish face-plates were gray and coarse like parchment; the noses thin, beaky and double pair nostrilled. The lips were even thinner, almost nonexistent. But it was the eyes, fascinating and terrifying, that would strike terror to the onlooker. Hypnotic eyes. They were big, yellow balls and the irises were purple mixed with green. Flames of anger and contempt seemed to burn in those frightening, devilishly intelligent eyes. At the base of the big helmets, meeting the sternum, were four black protuberances shaped like octopuses -- two on each sides of the thick necks.
They wore stiff, leather-like gray body armor to complete their spacesuits. Across the length of the suits a soft brightness billowed and died out; grew, waved and swirled lightly from head to feet and back again...It was the famous aura of the infamous soldier-Krathians.
One of them took another step towards the Bullion's scientific team; who stood around, too numbed by the strange events to even move.
"We are the Krathians, Lords of the Neomeric system, of the Black Nebula constellation; guardians of the central core of this galaxy; arch-police of the entire known universe as a whole, and your lords by extension. Consider yourselves under restraint... What is that?!..." the reverberating boom of the giant alien broke off and he took a step backwards.
"Your ship's power output is faltering. There must be a rapid drain in power somewhere...Do you have a shielded beta-prime-gamma radiation source on board? Tell us!," the leader Krathian commanded.
"Step back this moment and return where you came from," a voice barked. Three ship's security personnel in dress uniforms came into the hall, all of them heavily armed and wearing gas masks --
The three Moorians were typical of their race, as if they had all been cloned from one parent mold. They all had bright blue eyes with deep-seated gray irises well adapted for night vision. Their hair, a bristly mass of near-erect, soft spikes, were apparently plaited to converge from left and right and forming two curving, brow-hugging horns. The Moorians were reddish-brown skinned people. Their uniform torso protectors were composed of overlapping chains of scaly, armadillo-like scale-plates that always morphed with the surroundings; making the Moorians near invisible to heat tracers, and utterly invisible -- in the right conditions -- to unaided eyes.
Their leader stepped slightly ahead of the other two.
"We have orders to exterminate you," he said. "We are now doing you the favor of living."
A deep chuckle came from one of the Krathians behind their own leader. The leader Krathian smiled serenely and said:
