Stalker

Tasser was the first to spring into action and draw his weapon.

I could only stare at the short curve of buildings. I couldn’t see any otter, but I could sense it. Tasser scanned the area too, and tilted its head at me after it saw nothing.

I asked Daniel.

If nothing else, it seemed we were putting my hypothesis about Daniel’s sensitivity to these powers to the test.

Keeping my eyes fixed on the direction I sensed the alien; I took a few steps perpendicular. I could sense it, if I changed my position I could check from a different angle and get a better read on how far away it actually was.

I could tell how far away this sense reached, though I wasn’t exactly sure how yet. But this otter was skirting the edge of my range. Which only made it that more maddening that I couldn’t catch a glimpse of it.

“Tasser,” I got his attention and beckoned him closer. The three alien musketeers exchanged glances. Come on. This wasn’t that hard. All three of them had fought through otters hours ago. Why weren’t they expecting this?

Daniel supplied,

I didn’t get the chance to hear his answer because Nemuleki went to start the alien station wagon we were using. Only instead of the vehicle whirring to life, it let out a shrill hiss before fizzling down to a weak click every few seconds.

It wasn’t hard to put two and two together. I sensed an otter nearby. Our ride was bricked.

Sabotage.

Nai elected to pull Tasser’s rifle from the rear of the vehicle from under a tarp and flicked a switch on it. It didn’t quite point the weapon directly at me, but it was ready to. I could just tell.

How ironic, just earlier I’d thought we were no longer hostile. Nai was really determined to be unfriendly.

Daniel cautioned me,

I was partial to ‘Nai-like’ for how much the alien powers unnerved me, but we could agree on terminology later.

Tasser and Nai seemed to agree that something was afoot, and Nemuleki was coming around. But even as I pointed directly at where I sensed the otter, they weren’t watching the point.

I stared at the tufts of pale-yellow grass that poked through the wisps of snow on the ground. I wracked my brain trying to figure out what I was missing. My sixth sense still kept me informed of Nai’s position as long as it was close enough. I could still tell roughly where Nai was behind me, ready to shoot me if I earned the bullet. The same sense told me there was another creature not twenty yards from me.

But my eyes told a different story. It was just sparse grass, snow, and the odd boulder buried halfway in the dirt and snow.

I thought at him.

Daniel said frankly.

It was suicide. The otter aliens were scary up close. They were dense and vicious animals. But Daniel was right. The longer we stayed here, the worse this got. We needed to find the otter and deal with it before more trouble came knocking.

I walked closer to the point I felt the bundle of energy in my mind. Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten.

As I drew closer, I was increasingly dumbfounded. There was nothing. It should have been here. The spot seemed intentional even. It was close to the cover of one of the buildings, but not so close the view of our vehicle would be obstructed.

The spot was perfect for watching or spying. Except no one was there!

There was just grass, rocks, and snow.

I walked as close as I dared and stared at the largest rock next to the red aluminum building. The rock would have been an exceptional campfire stool, just the right size. But nothing more than a rock. Yet my mind told me that there was another being literally in the rock.

Daniel stayed properly paranoid.

If that were true, it was a mistake to focus so wholly on it. But I couldn’t shake the overwhelming feeling that I sensed another mind right in front of me.

“There is no spoon…” I hissed to myself. It wasn’t that simple. I trusted my senses. It was why my time on the ship had been so disconcerting. I’d seen impossible things. I was in impossible company right now.

Impossible had become easier to wrap my head around.

But right now, it was impossible there wasn’t someone right in front of me.

I reached out my hand toward the rock, unable to fully process what lay before me. A large rock buried half into the mud with a dusting of—the snow!

As my hand drew within an inch of the rock, two series of realizations went off in my head. First, the bundle I sensed with my mind twitched the moment before my hand touched the rock. Second, I saw that the rock didn’t have snow curling a bare centimeter up the side where the wind would pile it up. My brain recognized the rock would only lack the snow on its side if it was recently placed, just a few minutes by the steady chilly breeze that cut through the valley.

But it was the twitch that made me move. Daniel had already suggested the rock had been deliberately placed recently, the snow just further supported that. But the twitch? It hadn’t been physical. The rock had remained stock still, but what I’d sensed had flickered in anticipation.

I flung my head and torso backward before I actually saw the otter move. If I’d waited to react normally, its knife would have cut into my throat.

The rock peeled apart like an eggshell puzzle, revealing a rocky exterior clinging to its body armoring the alien beneath. The rocky shell melted back into the otter’s light brown fur in a way that made my eyes hurt.

Cuttlefish.

The word ‘Cuttlefish’ went through my mind. Actually, it was Daniel thinking it as he winked out again, as we predicted. But I knew what he meant. The sea cephalopod back home camouflaged itself by changing the color, pattern, and even the texture of its skin.

This otter had done the same, only by creating rock-like-material around him with the powers it was capable of.

Nai fired the long rifle and a sound like a steel cable snapping rang out and echoed through the valley. It left a molten orange ring in the building’s wall where the shot penetrated without stopping in the slightest.

But the otter had already dived aside. It was unbelievably fast, almost nothing like the ones on the space station. It wasn’t going over flat land now. It bound over hills, leaping and jumping with all four limbs.

It dove behind another building and vanished from sight.

Tasser ran closer, keeping it pistol trained on where the cuttlefish-armor otter had vanished. At least they were aware now. Tasser helped me back to my feet and I dusted myself off.

“Vorak?” I asked, gesturing in the direction the otter had fled.

“Vorak.” Tasser confirmed apologetically.

Daniel said,

His idea made me feel silly, but I had to admit, back on Earth it would have been a great party trick. On Daniel’s suggestion, I wrapped my eyes with a gross rag from the car and pointed at Nai.

As I walked closer, not in a consistent line, I kept pointing at the blue alien.

When I finally got to the car and tugged the blindfold off, they got the message and gave that stare that I was getting tired of.

I tapped my head. “Nai.” I told them, pointing at her again. I tapped my head again, “Vorak.”

“I can sense them.” They still couldn’t understand me, but at least Nai didn’t seem like they would shoot me.

Daniel was gone. The timing of his disappearance irked me. I’d been sure his disappearances were in response to the creative abilities. But we’d stood within just a few feet of the camouflaged otter for almost a minute with no sign of him vanishing.

Only after the ‘Vorak’ revealed itself had Daniel flickered away.

Huh. I hadn’t even remembered doing it, but I’d started my mental stopwatch at roughly the same time he’d gone. Or maybe Daniel had thought to.

Regardless, Nai’s most recent display of teal plasma had banished Daniel for more than an hour. How did these circumstances measure up?

But there was no chance we were just standing around and waiting.

Nai traded firearms with Tasser and reexamined the map the two of them had laid over the, shorter than normal, car hood. We had no wheels, which meant we were on foot. I wasn’t looking forward to trying to hike anywhere in this gravity. Even if I was lighter on this planet, I doubted the decreased weight would make up for the energy it would take to stay coordinated.

I noticed Tasser didn’t look at the map. It was in the conversation, but it kept his eyes outward. Scanning the tree line.

Tasser was the alien I felt most comfortable with, and I was beginning to realize it wasn’t just because it had been the one to interact with me most. Whether by coincidence or similarity, Tasser and I were thinking about things the same way.

It had been the only alien to recognize I’d been reacting to a threat, and it was more concerned with the Vorak we knew to be nearby than it was with the map.

Daniel would have said that Tasser was delegating tasks. It would watch out for the enemy, ready to fire at a moment’s notice while the other two aliens figured out where to go from here.

But unless Tasser was ready to shoot every Vorak-sized rock in sight, there was no way Tasser would be able to find it.

Not without my help.

Right now, my alien radar was a sphere centered on me. It got increasingly fuzzy the closer to the edge too. Even just halfway out, I’d only been able to approximate the camouflaged Vorak’s position to a general area of several meters.

But… I had a way around that. When I’d first wrapped my head around the sense’s existence, I’d had to manually shape it into a sphere that covered the spaces above and below me. Nai had been moving in three dimensions, so I’d changed how the sensory area was shaped.

I could change it back.

It had first extended around me like a disc about the same height as me, and reaching a few dozen yards from me. My sphere was maybe half that radius. But in both those cases, I was deploying the sensory field ‘around’ me in some way.

It seemed intuitive that if I didn’t try to center it on me…

My sphere slipped a bit in my mind, and I got to perceive it in a slightly different way. I needed to be the source of it. It had to stay connected to me somehow. But symmetry was not required. I could feel it.

I gathered up the sense and packed it as closely together as I could in my mind. A beam. Or a cone. Whichever—the goal was distance. It reached… far. I couldn’t tell exactly where the outer limit lay, but it felt like close to a thousand feet. It might not reach in every direction, but I could aim my radar using this shape. I swept my invisible sensor beam over Nai a few times to test and each time the alien lit up my brain.

Nai went a little still after the second pass. Had it felt my sensor? I cautiously checked it a few more times, but other than a dour glance at me, Nai didn’t otherwise react. Was I willing to believe its reaction had been a fluke?

I wanted to know more, but the original purpose of the beam was more pressing. I joined Tasser watching our surroundings, sweeping my sensor beam across the landscape the highway cut through.

It was actually, to my frustration, even less precise than the spherical version despite it’s more focused direction. Even when it was pointed directly at Nai, the reaction I got was less intense, even ‘fuzzy’. Worse because the beam version didn’t relay distance to my brain nearly as well. Several times I felt something tinge the very edge of its detection area, seemingly a long way, only to swing the beam toward the source and realize the beam was catching traces of Nai a few paces away from me.

I got frustrated the longer I looked though. Not just because of the Vorak stalking us nearby, but because I had to trust the aliens to know what to do. While I didn’t mind Tasser, Nemuleki was noticeably more skittish, and Nai was only one bad moment away from outright hostile. They were making decisions about what to do about being stranded here, decisions that involved my fate, and I didn’t get a say because I was on the wrong side of the language barrier.

They might still have ignored anything I suggested even if I could speak their language. But this was worse.

Nemuleki made a token effort to fix the car, but quickly pulled a broken tube away from its connector by the wheels. The cut was clean. There were similar slices to tubes running out from what I assumed was the engine.

To my surprise, Tasser gestured for us to get back in the car anyway.

Nai took a few minutes messing with the severed wires and lines. Nemuleki waited in the driver’s section to pull a lever that seemed to start the vehicle’s engine. The sound was weaker and getting worse, not better.

Nai pulled a patch job, I realized. They had reconnected the cut sections by creating replacement material. It had been obvious from minute one that Nai was experienced in the creative powers, but the more I saw, the more ideas I started getting about what was possible.

With practice, I might end up a walking 3D printer. Was I supposed to feel good or bad about that?

That said, the Nai was shaking in its seat. I couldn’t bring myself to feel bad for them though. I doubted it would have felt bad if it had shot me a few minutes ago.

The car started and Nemuleki actually turned us around on the road and started us back the way we came.

We didn’t make it more than a mile or two, but it beat walking the distance. I kept my beam aimed out behind the car, sweeping it back and forth across the terrain ready to shout and point if I got any feedback from it.

But Nai hit their limit and shook their head violently. “Ala omi.”

Another hiss went out under the car and the engine immediately cut out. We coasted to a stop and all four of us were on foot from there. Nemuleki pulled the car off to the side of the road and hit something to engage the brake.

Each of us was taking something different. Tasser, Nemuleki, and Nai each donned their black ponchos again, Nai grabbed an additional garment that was too large to be a scarf, but not big enough to be a blanket and wrapped themselves up in it under the poncho. I grabbed my backpack stuffed with spare clothes, and other articles taken from my other abductees.

Tasser grabbed the long rifle and Nemuleki was left holding the map.

Tasser stayed closer to Nai than I was willing to. The blue alien did not look so good. But with the space Tasser freed up, I got a look over Nemuleki’s shoulder as we began walking. Nemuleki saw me looking at the map and held it so I could see better.

It pointed out a tiny curve of buildings near the southern part of the map, and gestured back toward where we’d stopped. I nodded to show I understood.

The abandoned village.

Nemuleki gestured the direction we were walking, and pointed to a much smaller dotted line that intersected the road a little bit up the road from said village.

Daniel guessed.

I’d already been a little on edge, scanning for the Vorak behind me, so I’d been a little ready for the surprise. But still, being startled in this situation was not fun.

He said.

Daniel clicked the abstract stopwatch in my head.

I admitted to him.

That was true. That timing would be impressively misleading otherwise.

I said, shelving the debate.

Daniel seemed to go quiet for a moment, but a moment later I felt him dragging together a large flat picture in my head.

What was he— Daniel said.

I’d glanced away from the map for a second to look at the terrain I was mentally scanning with my beam. Looking back at the map, I realized Daniel was reproducing it in my head.

That was brilliant! If Daniel could help me keep a perfectly accurate journal in my head, why not make a map too?

I reminded him.

The spot he indicated was tucked between the ridge we were climbing and the next. Since a road ran away from it…

Daniel made the sounds in my head like he was trying them out.

I sulked.

I ignored the swearing. I knew that, even if he was playing it cool, Daniel wasn’t in the easiest position to be in, and my understanding of him said he was probably beating himself up more than I was going to. At least we had self-flagellation in common.

he corrected himself,

I preened smugly.

Speaking of…

I was sweeping my beam across the mountain slope, well off the trail and into the woods. When the stalking otter came for us, I didn’t think it would bother following in our footsteps.

But our Stalker didn’t seem to be doing that, yet at least. I picked it up for a second or two, far beyond what I could see. I couldn’t keep a precise fix, but it seemed to be going up the mountain parallel to us. Our own winding trail made it even more difficult to gauge its distance, but it didn’t come closer or retreat.

I called out ‘Vorak’ and pantomimed that it was a ways away. Tasser directed more of their attention toward the direction I pointed, but since nothing appeared (and also maybe because I wasn’t prompting them to) no one freaked out.

The further up the mountain we went, though, the worse Nai got. Its body was shaking badly, and not only from the cold.

It had still been recovering from blasting the tunnel to oblivion when we stopped. But now that I really thought about it, the stop had not been very strenuous. It seemed likely that, if it needed to rest and recover from materializing that much power, a hike over a mountain was not what the doctor would order.

We slowed down for Nai. Also maybe for me—it was a little hard to tell what allowances the Casti were making for me. But the Stalker otter did just what Daniel predicted it might. I sensed it go further ahead before swinging across the slope and setting itself in our path.

This time, however, I was looking out for it.

The grey and pale orange forestry didn’t allow the snow to pile up as intensely as in the village, but once it stopped moving, I focused my beam as narrowly as I could on its hiding spot.

I knew the beam wasn’t visible, but it helped me guide my eyes. This time, I glimpsed it move.

The Stalker slunk up to a tree through its sight shadow to us. I couldn’t see its outline, but I did see what looked to be a lump of tree move.

Tasser saw it too. I’d pointed at the spot as soon as it had been visible.

The huge Casti eyes weren’t just for show, because Tasser raised and fired at the exact right spot without hesitating.

But as acute as Casti vision was, Vorak agility was more than a match. The moment Tasser raised the gun, the tree-textured lump moved more. It squirmed out of the way and dove away from the trail and into the still mountain woods.

Our trail wasn’t switching back anymore. It went right up to a rocky cliff maybe fifteen feet high. Nemuleki wasted no time in beginning to climb the steep wall. There were only a select few footholds, far enough apart that it was obvious only one person could go up at a time.

Nai went next while Tasser and I stayed vigil for our Stalker. It was not letting us get away this easily.

Daniel said, Daniel fizzled out again mid-sentence.

Where was it? I kept sweeping my beam down the slope away from the cliff. The sections of mountain to each side of the cliff looked too steep to be passable, so it couldn’t just climb up a different point and come at us from above.

Just when Tasser gestured for me to start climbing, a stone flew through the air and shattered against the wall. It had thrown a rock.

It was that way!

But when I projected my sensor beam that way, I found nothing.

Tasser shouted something up to Nemuleki and Nai, and they shuffled along the top of the cliff parallel to us. Staying in one spot was a bad idea. Our two alien allies above us might have been able to shoot down at it, but I wasn’t sure they could even get an angle with the cliff edge and the forestry in the way.

I just couldn’t count on Nemuleki and Nai. So I needed to figure out where it was. Why wasn’t I sensing it?

It couldn’t just be gone. Could it be aware somehow of my ability to sense it? The disadvantage of the beam’s range was that it couldn’t cover more than one direction. The beam was the mistake. It was already close enough: I needed the area of the sphere configuration.

I adjusted my sensory beam back to a sphere around me. As the sphere covered the mountainside around me, I felt the shape of the otter’s mind.

Directly to my right, down the slope, it was moving. When I turned my head to look for it, I still found nothing with my eyes. I knew better this time though. I put all my focus into where my brain sensed the Vorak.

I didn’t see it until it leaped.

I’d been trying to keep my eyes peeled for movement. But when it vaulted off a thick tree root it still caught me off guard. As it came through the air, I saw it was no longer camouflaged in artificial-stone. White wisps curled off its arms and back with the odd streak of rough grey and red streak in its fur.

The camouflage was perfect. With the wind blowing curls of snow powder across the slope of the mountain, even when it moved it remained camouflaged unless you managed to track it seamlessly. If it broke your line of sight for even a moment, it just seemed to vanish.

I didn’t have time to regret my mistake because it tackled right into me. I tangled my arms up with it and flailed as it dragged me down with a snarl. My heart raced and I followed the dumb primate instincts of my body and bashed my forehead into its face. It hurt and yowling rang out.

I caught one of its arms and tried to leverage myself free of its grasp. It was so strong! The otters on the station had been tough, like diminutive body-builders. This one was like a hydraulic machine. When I tried to pry its elbow open by dragging its hand, it didn’t budge even a centimeter.

It was like trying to lift a car by hand; you applied the force, and it just went nowhere.

Something warm brushed against my shoulder and a second later an ear-splitting snap peeled out through the woods—the metal warping sound of Tasser’s long rifle was followed by a furious screech from the Vorak.

The Vorak’s grip lessened, and it leapt off me and toward Tasser. I had drips of dark blood from where Tasser had managed to hit the mangy alien, but it was otherwise unhindered.

I jumped up, my brain operating in full panic. Tasser fired another round that the Vorak dove aside from. The shot bore clean through the tree, but it deflected off course away from the alien. My hand found a rock and I went into the throwing motion I’d practiced thousands of times.

I liked to imagine the scorching scream of a jet passing whenever something I threw left my hand, but right now my heart wasn’t in it. This wasn’t for fun.

I wanted to kill the Stalker. It wanted to kill us.

My rock caught it when it landed between leaps. Its head swung to the side where my throw had hit its neck, just below the jaw.

For a split second it stopped in its tracks, processing two different threats. Tasser with the long rifle, a surely lethal weapon if he could get a clean hit; and me, hurling rocks hard enough to knock it off balance.

It decided the risk was too much and dove back down the slope. It slid on its belly and shoulders as much as it went on its arms and legs. Was it making armor beneath it to withstand the terrain battering it as it essentially fell down the mountain?

With gravity speeding it up, it wove between trees and vanished before Tasser could readjust and get a proper shot on it.

It took me too many seconds to remold my sensory field back to its beam configuration. When I was finally ready to start pinging the woods again, I couldn’t get a fix, but it was still there. Just a few hundred feet away.

It wasn’t done. It was only biding its time.

“Move.” I told myself. “We need to move. Stay ahead of it.” The cold was beginning to get to me. We were so high up.

Tasser silently agreed with my decision, and we hustled away. We couldn’t go back to where Nemuleki and Nai had scaled up. If we were forced to go up one at a time, the Stalker Vorak would shred whichever of us stayed down.

Or worse, it would climb halfway up itself and quickly dispatch the climber by making them fall.

“Cayleb.” Tasser huffed. We broke out of the treeline and kept going where gravel and rough rock piles butted up to the short cliff face.

This was good. It didn’t have trees to dart between. The open space would let us see through its camouflage more easily.

“Cayleb!” Tasser shouted. I stopped to look at the alien and he put an arm in front of me to stop me going further.

What did it need?

Tasser pointed toward my warm left shoulder, and I saw a blood splotch widening under the hoodie I was wrapped up in.

I cussed to no one. It had gotten the knife into my shoulder when it tackled me. I hadn’t even felt it.

I thought,

This was bad. I was in no circumstance to treat a wound, and worse still my mental beam sensor was still intermittently picking up the Stalker just down the slope from us. It hadn’t climbed up, so it wasn’t going after Nai and Nemuleki. It had picked me and Tasser to be its first targets.