by Nicholas Lassiter
90517.1500
Concurrent with Rude Awakening
-=Location: Unknown=-
90517.1500
Concurrent with Rude Awakening
-=Location: Unknown=-
“Computer lights,” Nick Lassiter’s words were slurred, and his vision only a blur of a single white light somewhere far across the room. There was no response, so he tried again, louder.
“Computer, lights!”
Still, darkness. He began to wonder exactly how many he’d had last night, realizing he couldn’t remember a damn thing after being on the bridge earlier in the day. He groaned, and his head pounded.
*Damn, I was supposed to meet with the Captain,* he thought. Lassiter tried to force himself to sit up, but realized he could not. Not because he was too drunk, but because he was being restrained at the arms and legs. A surge of panic-fueled adrenalin began to clear his head. He took a deep breath and realized suddenly that something smelled absolutely horrible.
So awful that he had to suppress the urge to gag.
No sooner had he begun to cope with the stench, his ears were assaulted by a horrible screeching.
The voice came from an unknown location, as it seemed to reverberate throughout the room. A room, Nick realized, as his vision focused, which was not on board the Zenith. It was hot and incredibly humid here. A haze almost seemed to fill the room, and the restraints on his body were clammy to the touch. He could barely make out the walls around him from that single light, but they appeared gray and empty. No sign of a door, artwork, computer panel, window, or anything else one would expect to adorn a wall on a starship.
He could have turned to attempt to see what was behind him, making the screeching noise, but the sickening sound of that voice and stench surrounding him made him terrified of what he might see.
“Where am I?” He asked, between short breaths through his mouth. He dared not breath through his nose, as that only worsened the effects of the smell.
There was more screeching; horrific sounding. Nick tried desperately to wriggle free of this restraints just so he could cover his ears.
There was the unmistakable sound of a metallic weapon being drawn from a holster, followed by slow and heavy footfalls echoing throughout the room. A large, serrated blade appeared above his head, reflecting the light from across the room into his eyes.
The blade concerned him far less then what was holding it. A thin scaly green arm with at least a dozen long fingers, if you could call them that, that slid up and down the handle of the blade in a serpentine fashion. One of them brushed against the shoulder of his uniform, leaving a streak of some sort of ooze, and little doubt as to what smelled so horrible.
He ceased his struggles, realizing the blade was likely an attempt to communicate, where the screeching had failed.
“Okay,” Nick said. The blade disappeared from his vision, and the alien retreated back to the far side of the room from which it had come. “I can’t understand you, Universal Translator isn’t working.”
He heard an unseen door open and close, and there was more screeching and clicking noises as two of the aliens spoke. Then silence, as they, unbeknown to Lassiter, communicated telepathically.
*We can’t understand him either,* The first alien reported.
*We must know the location of the telepaths’ planets. They are a threat to us until their species are terminated.*
*We could perform a memory extraction.*
*It is too late. We have already detected another ship of his kind that has come in search of the first. If our portal is discovered, the telepaths can be used against us.*
“Their galaxy is millions of light-years away. They do not have the technology to be a threat.*
*We did not believe the Xellon were a threat either, and they used their powers to nearly destroy us all ten thousand years ago. We will never be taken for fools again, and we will not stop exterminating the telepaths, as we did the Xellon, until we are the only ones remaining.*
The first alien nodded. Whenever one of his own species dared for a moment to question their quest to reach across the Universe through their portals, it took only a mention of the name Xellon to remind them why they did what they did.
The Xellon had come for their resource rich world ten thousand years ago. They came as friends, mingling with the Domox on their world, quietly inserting themselves in larger and larger numbers into heavily populated areas. Little did the Domox know that the Xellon had the ability to read their minds, but shut out the Domox from reading theirs if they wished.
When the time came, the Xellon turned quickly, and began their genocide. The Domox were hopeless against an enemy that could read their thoughts and know their every move before they even had a chance to make it.
A handful of Domox managed to escape their dead world on a Xellon ship they had captured. They resettled on another world, and spent the next two thousand years repopulating their species, and telling of the horrors of the Xellon. Revenge was preached as their only religion.
When the time came, and their numbers were strong enough, they returned to Domox, prepared this time. The war was long, drawn out, and intentionally bloody. With two thousand years of accumulated hatred fueling their attack, the Domox had no intentional of granting the Xellon people a swift and painless defeat.
Their quest for vengeance did not stop there however. Hate was all the Domox knew, and after the war it was decided that no species would ever be given the chance to repeat what the Xellon had done. They spread out across their own galaxy, showing no interest in non-telepathic species, but exterminating all life on any planet that fostered a telepathic culture.
In the last five thousand years, they had used their “portal,” a massive device located at the core of a star for power, to strike out across the Universe in search of other telepathic races. Their first scans of the Milky Way had netted them the Zenith and her crew.
“Where are my crewmates?” Nick asked. Surely the Captain was exhausting all possible resources to locate him, and if he was not, them Gemini was, and whoever these smelly slimy freaks were, they would get a Lassiter sized beat-down they would not soon forget.
He heard the door open and close, as one of the aliens left. The second one began screeching again and Nick could hear it draw closer to the table. He glanced up and in the dim light saw only a darkened face, and dozens of long needle like interlaced teeth that reflected the light in the room.
He now wished had had not looked at his captor. His heart rate sped up as he snapped his eyes shut.
“Look, what do you want? I don’t care what it is, I just want to get out of here.”
The alien let loose an ear splitting sound. Lassiter shook in terror, and gagged at the stench of the alien’s breath.
“So this is how I’m going to die,” Nick said out loud, not caring that the alien could not understand him. “Not exactly how I planned it.”
There was a clank beside him, as the alien dropped a bowl of some sort of food on the floor. The clank was followed by a click, and the restraints holding Nick in place were released. The alien left his side, and Nick heard the door open and close as it left the room.
He sat up from the bed, and grabbed the bowl off the floor. The food didn’t smell any better than the thing that had left it, and Nick was not quite that desperate yet. He looked around for some means of escape or something that could be used as a weapon.
One thing was for sure, if he was going to die they were going to have to shoot him, because he had no intention of waiting around to see how something with that many teeth would choose to kill him.
******************************
Commander Nicholas Lassiter
Captured
Far side of the Universe
Commander Nicholas Lassiter
Captured
Far side of the Universe