The Alien Who Fell excerpt

Chapter 1

Thaddeus relaxed in his form-fitting seat while the Quo-hoi’s navigation system made minor course adjustments, taking the landing craft into a long, flat descent toward an uneventful touchdown. His skin tingled with excitement. In a few hours, he would step onto alien soil for the first time. The seemingly endless training in local geography, biology, customs, and languages had finally paid off.

Below him, the planet below went from impenetrable blackness to light-speckled as the Quo-hoi moved over land. He’d been on training runs to the small stations his people kept at various points in the system, but this was different. On the large, curved view screen that was the wall above the console in front of him, the horizon banked with a minor course correction. There was no feeling of motion inside the Quo-hoi.

Around Thaddeus, the calm, slowly shifting mottled blue of the interior surfaces changed pattern and sped up. The Quo-hoi was worried about something. He inhaled slowly, purposefully trying to control his breathing. He glanced to where the Quo-hoi’s Companion knelt next to him, clamped securely in its place, its metallic arms folded across its torso.

“What’s wrong?”

The Companion’s gender neutral voice echoed off the Quo-hoi’s smooth interior. “The magnetic field generator has failed.”

A major component of the propulsion system, the field generator supplied power to the unit responsible for the intense gravity field that bent light and other energy waves around the exterior of the Quo-hoi, making it undetectable. Failure of this system meant the Quo-hoi was visible and therefore, vulnerable.

“Please,” the Companion said, “navigate while I attempt to correct the problem.”

Panels morphed into controls under Thaddeus’s hands. His fingers slid into the indentations, and his palms settled onto the smooth curved surfaces while the Companion concentrated on the malfunction.

A voice came over the communications center. “Unidentified vehicle. You are entering US airspace. Identify yourself or change course immediately.”

“Should we abort? Transition to higher dimensional space?”

“The malfunction also prevents us from entering higher-dimensional space and without the field generator, we are still vulnerable to their directed-energy weapons. I almost have the malfunction corrected. Another few seconds should do it.”

Seconds stretched into a nerve-straining minute, then another. Around them, the Quo-hoi shuddered. Colors shifted and turned pale. Faint pink streams flashed over the surfaces. The view screen flashed and changed perspective to show an object approaching rapidly from beneath. Superheated gasses flowed from behind the object, propelling it at supersonic speeds.

“What’s that?” he asked, moving the Quo-hoi out of its path, only to watch it adjust its trajectory in response. He recalled something about objects like this, but he hoped he was wrong.

The Companion responded without looking up. “A missile. Estimated impact in three seconds.”

“Impact?” His head whipped in the Companion’s direction. His recollection had been correct, and this thing had been sent by a backward, paranoid people to destroy them. “No.”

He adjusted their path again and stared in open-mouthed shock as the missile changed course again, gained on them, closed, and exploded. A bone-jarring shudder ripped through the Quo-hoi, dumping Thaddeus sprawling onto the deck. Deep reds and browns slashed the walls, floor, and ceiling. Starbursts of white and pink exploded in chaotic flashes. He sat, spellbound. Tears welled in his eyes at the Quo-hoi’s pain.

“No,” he whispered, reality slowly soaking through his disbelief. He scrambled to his feet.

“We are severely damaged.” The Companion’s voice remained impersonal, as it always would.

“How severely?”

“The core containment field is failing. We cannot maintain altitude. Estimate crash in four minutes. Self-destruct is engaged.”

He stared down at the Companion, stunned. “No.”

“I can reroute power from life-support and hold off the failure for an extra minute or two, but the crash is inevitable. You should leave now.”

The floor tried to pull away from his form-fitting foot covers as the Quo-hoi dropped in free fall. The sensation of falling twisted his stomach. They were descending rapidly—too rapidly. Still clamped securely in place, the Companion’s metallic surfaces reflected the panicked swirl of color around them, adding to the surrealistic effect.
Thaddeus climbed into his seat and returned to the flight controls while the ship’s Companion worked on the engine.

“What’s our current altitude?” His nose wrinkled at the bitter tang of damaged electrical components.

“Twenty kilometers, local measurement.”

His breath caught in his throat. On the monitor, a mass of lights glowed below from the planet’s surface. They were over a populated area. A crash and auto-destruction there would mean major loss of life. He couldn’t allow it. He turned back to the console. “We need a desolate area.” His hands trembled at the controls and the Quo-hoi shuddered its response. Under normal circumstances, the Quo-hoi would have responded smoothly, even to his unskilled efforts. He threw power at the drive system, gaining a little attitude, and searched the view screen in front of him for a deserted area ahead. Vibration from the straining engine passed through the bulkheads and deck into his feet and fingers.

“Status still deteriorating,” the Companion said while it continued to manipulate engine settings.

“There.” Thaddeus pointed to a dark section of the surface below and ahead.

“I have the coordinates locked and I’ve done all I can with the field containment. You should jump now while you still can.”

Thaddeus moved to a storage compartment in one of the bulkheads. The door slid away at his approach. “You’re staying?”

“My place is with the Quo-hoi.”

“They’ll send their… flying things.” Thaddeus searched for the right word as he pulled the shiny, silver pressure suit over his deep ultramarine blue, elastic flight coverall.

“Aircraft. They’re called aircraft. Yes, they will.” The Companion throttled up the engine again to correct their descent angle. Another groan vibrated through the ship, followed by the screech of twisting metal.

“They’ll try to confiscate the Quo-hoi.” Thaddeus sealed his pressure suit.

“The auto-destruct will thwart their efforts. It will be more important for you to avoid capture until you can be rescued.”

“Unless I’m killed.” Perspiration dotted Thaddeus’s forehead.

“Hope for the best,” the Companion responded.

Thaddeus was suited up and holding his helmet. Over the weeks he’d spent on the ride in, he and the Companion had become friends as well as colleagues. He’d enjoyed their discussions, finding its comments about the differences between Thaddeus’s people and the Terrans insightful. “Companion…”

“Goodbye, Thaddeus,” it said, still focused on the Quo-hoi.

He finished his suit adjustments and donned his auto-sealing helmet and gloves. A moment before he stepped to the escape hatch, a high-pitched wail worked its way up from the bowels of the Quo-hoi until the entire vessel vibrated. With his helmet’s visor down and sealed, the sound was reduced but not completely dampened. He closed his eyes in sympathy and stroked his fingers across the bulkhead. A tear trickled down one cheek.

The escape portal loomed ahead. Thaddeus’s breath came in ragged gasps—no one had ever jumped from this altitude using suit repulsers, but there was no choice. He polarized his suit’s surface, causing its hard exoskeleton to form, activated his suit communicator, and stepped into the thin red oval of light outlining the exit. Thaddeus glanced at his left forearm where his emergency beacon should have been attached. It was gone. He stared at the empty socket, paralyzed. Around him, everything faded.

An opening in the Quo-hoi’s skin formed, seeming to liquify and melt toward the edges.

“My beacon.” Thaddeus spun. “Wait!” Before he could step away from the opening, roaring wind rushing past the open aperture reached in and lifted him off the deck. The surge of escaping air blew him outside—whirling him sickeningly into free fall. The Quo-hoi sped away, disappearing into the darkness.

It was every Gatherer’s worst nightmare. He tumbled through kilometers of atmosphere while his crippled, dying ship carrying his emergency beacon was about to become a miniature sun. Below him lay a planet full of hostile, primitive aliens.

The suit’s stabilizers booted up and the horizon stopped tumbling. He looked around. The curvature of the planet was still visible from this height. The suit’s helmet insulated him from the deafening scream as he tore through the air. In the upper left corner of his visor, seconds rolled by while in the upper right, his altitude steadily decreased. His eyes returned to his left forearm. It had to be there. He ran the gloved fingers of his other hand over the spot. It was still gone.

Fifteen seconds after he became a castaway, his suit’s repulsers switched on to slow his descent. A huge, barren desert loomed below. In one direction, a mountain range rose and an expansive, flat plain stretched to the horizon in the other. A large body of salt water lay beyond his boots. Thaddeus had never seen a mountain or a large body of water up close before. As he fell, he wondered almost dispassionately whether he would live to see either.

At four minutes, a flash reflected off the mountains as the Quo-hoi vaporized. His heart sank. As soon as the missile had impacted, The Quo-hoi had sent out an automatic distress call. When its transponder went silent, its destruction registered immediately. Even allowing for the proximity of other ships in orbit or close by in this part of the system, it might be days before he could be rescued. Days on his own—if he survived the landing and wasn’t captured and killed by the locals.

As his velocity decreased, he tried to recall everything he knew about the indigenous species. He would do his best to evade them while awaiting rescue, but he might accidentally come into contact with one or two. He hoped he’d managed to pick up enough of the more common languages to be understood. The grunts and hisses the Terrans used made so little sense he was sure he’d missed important points. The story he’d been given of being a foreign scientist doing fieldwork was believable enough and explained his accent, but his carefully forged identification had just vaporized.

His attention returned to the ground below. “The suit repulsers are holding up well,” he said into the suit recorder. The Quo-hoi carried the new design suit, and while it hadn’t been tried under circumstances this extreme. He was pleased with its performance so far. If it continued like this, he would touch down, light as a dust mote, and find a hiding place to wait.

“A series of dwellings is to my right.” He would land behind the last one in the row. There were almost no lights on in any of them. He could walk away, unnoticed, into the desert, and reconfigure his suit communications to—

The power indicators in his helmet flickered. The face shield display went dark. He went weightless again. The indicators lit up and the repulsers came back on. His breath came in rapid gasps. Just a few more seconds… at rooftop level of the surrounding structures, the indicators flickered and quit again, taking all the accompanying systems with them this time. The ground rushed up toward his boots. The electrostatic plating in his suit died, taking the last of his protection with it.

He braced himself. This was going to hurt.

Pain flared in his right leg. He crumpled onto his right side. New pain pierced his chest and punched the breath from him. Lights flashed inside his eyes. He groaned, the sound bouncing around inside his helmet, echoing in his own ears.