Ayla

by Bill Bowler

Part 2 and Part 3
appear in this issue.

conclusion

With the enforcers behind us, we could not turn back. We had no choice but to go forward or perish. Yet Ayla’s hope washed over me and through me. We hurried down the far slope, into the shadows, into the gray mist, towards the frozen dark, towards the side of our planet that forever faced away from our sun and out towards the cold dark unknown infinity of space-time.

No one I knew had ever voluntarily left the light side for these unknown regions. Only the drivers of the transports that carried the inferiors to the retraining facilities and the facility guards, who rotated in and out of that branch of service, were known to have gone to the darkness and come back. And, though rumors swirled, none of those few who returned ever spoke of their experience there. Even had they overcome their revulsion at the memory, they were sworn to secrecy upon pain of death by executive order of Nobgop himself.

As Ayla and I crept through the mist, across, into Gray Zone, as the light dimmed and the warmth faded, I filled with fear and apprehension. My former cadet bravado was gone. It was painfully obvious now that I was not Enforcer material. My father’s inferior lineage, my behavior and actions since first encountering Ayla, all led to the inescapable conclusion that some part of my substance had mutated at birth and that, in fact, I was not pure at all, never had been, and did not belong to the superior elite. I was one of the others, the despicable, inferior throwbacks, plagued with defects and impurity.

I filled with despair, and it was then I sensed them, not far, an enforcement tracking squad moving quickly in a small vehicle, scanning for our position.

Ayla’s aura was unchanged. There was no trace of fear in her, only pity and hope. I wondered if it was courage or ignorance?

We hurried on, deeper into the Gray Zone, the enforcers following our general direction but without a fix on our precise position. With no nourishment and deprived of light, Ayla and I grew weaker and our pace slackened. I sensed the enforcers closing in.

As the mist thickened to fog, the sun disappeared; grey turned to black, and a great storm gathered and filled the sky. The winds began to howl, whipping sand into our eyes and covering us with a blinding dust, as frozen particles rained down and pelted us without mercy. On the horizon, flashes of electrical energy struck the ground, cracking open deep fissures in the brittle crust beneath the swirling sand. A deep rumble echoed across the plain.

“HALT!” came the command. “YOU’RE UNDER ARREST!”

I looked back through the swirling sand and saw an enforcement tracking vehicle come over the crest of a dune. I lost all hope and collapsed into the dust. Ayla tried to pull me forward,

“Don’t give up. Gaag! We need each other!”

The wind roared and the black sky ripped open with another blinding crash of light. A tremendous bolt of electricity struck the high ridge where the vehicle stood, split the crust, and cracked open a deep crevice. With a groan, the sands shifted; the front of the dune fell away into a bottomless fissure, and an impassable gulf opened between them and us. Two enforcers lay charred and lifeless in the sand at the brink of the abyss. The vehicle pulled back and fired in our direction, but we were out of range.

With our last strength, Ayla and I turned our backs and moved on. Soon we left the trackers behind and could sense their presence no longer. We dragged ourselves through the sand, over dune after dune, through the thickening gray, and finally, the winds died down, the rumbling ceased, the air grew cold, the ground froze, and we crossed into complete darkness.

I wiped the sand from my eyestalks, but my eyes were useless now. The gloom was impenetrable. Only the reflection of my thought transmissions pinging off of boulders and dunes gave me any sense of my surroundings.

Without light or food, shivering in the darkness, alone, our chances of survival seemed remote. We pushed on, into the unknown, fleeing certain death behind, but seeking what?

I am ashamed to admit that my strength failed faster than Ayla’s. More proof of my inferior defective structure, no doubt. Soon, it was Ayla who supported and protected me, and not the other way around. What a ludicrous reversal! The entire matrix of my worldview crumbled into the frozen dust of the dark side. There was only emptiness and defeat and futility and... Ayla.

As I lay exhausted and freezing in the darkness at the bottom of a steep rise, a wall filled my mind. Ayla had crawled to the top of the dune and was transmitting back down to me the image of the wall, and I felt the presence of life behind it.

“It must be a throwback retraining facility,” I transmitted up to Ayla.

“No,” she replied. “It’s a nest of aliens.”

I hadn’t known that aliens were building nests in the dark sectors. I dragged myself to the crest of the ridge. The nest was a walled and gated military base, guarded by armed aliens. Shuttlecraft from a mothership were ferrying troops and materiel down to the surface.

As Ayla and I lay in the darkness, looking down at the bustling activity inside the alien base, a beam of light suddenly shone on us. From behind the light, we sensed the awful alien gurgling sound waves and then the click of the translator,

“What are you two bags doing here?”

Two aliens, encased in artificial shells with respiration tanks, had leveled metallic tubes at us.

“Come with us,” came the command. Ayla clung to me but one of them grabbed her, pulled her off, and kicked her with a heavy boot. She lay still on the frozen ground. The two aliens then turned to me,

“This one’s in bad shape. Ugly, ain’t they?”

With my last strength, I swung my scorcher out and pulled the trigger on wide beam.

To the wailing of an alarm siren, Ayla and I struggled over the rocks and dunes, away from the alien base, deeper into the frozen wasteland. The clouded curtain that marked the Gray Zone was no longer visible on the horizon behind us. All light and warmth were gone. We hid and moved away even from the gray, further into the darkness towards the unknown.

In the bottom of a ravine, at the foot of a steep cliff, we came upon the abandoned ruins of a nest or camp, the sad remains of a collection of empty domes, large and small, connected by paths and tunnels and enclosed by a worn and broken down wall. At the entrance, massive ruined gates emblazoned with faded red spheres, hung open, the locks broken.

“I wonder what happened here?” Ayla’s question filled my mind and I felt her sadness. I had no answer, but some pallor, some residue of dread hung in the atmosphere of the place, a remnant of pain and fear.

There was no sign of life inside, just abandoned chambers and equipment. We searched through the ruins, thinking perhaps to find food or take temporary shelter, and came to what looked like a hospital ward with the number 9 displayed on the entrance. Inside were racks of surgical instruments, a row of operating tables, and, along the wall, cages. Mutilated corpses were still strapped on some of the tables and lay strewn about on the floors behind the locked cage doors.

I was confused but Ayla was aghast. The intensity of feeling she was emanating overwhelmed my receptors. It was pity that had reached the point of pain, pity that had become almost unbearable.

“Well, we haven’t had visitors in quite some time.”

I spun around towards the source of the transmission. A grizzly, ragged, deteriorated guard with a faint red sphere tattoo on his thorax loomed in the entrance portal to the medical lab.

“I thought Nobgop had forgotten about us by now,” the guard went on, eyeing the tattoo on my thorax and my Enforcement scorcher. Keeping four eyestalks on me, he turned the other four toward Ayla, who stood trembling. “But maybe you’re not here on Control Group business after all. Maybe you’re hoping Nobgop loses track of you, too?”

I put an arm down to steady myself and felt the stiff and broken cilia of a mutilated body strapped to a table beside me. Its abdomen had been cut open lengthwise and its internal organs were hanging out of the huge gash. Its hardened stalks and open eyes were frozen in the agony and terror it had felt at the moment of death.

“We had to saw a few logs here,” the guard explained. “Plan 9, you know. The Science Wing needed to know more about vermin metabolism. Had to cut open a few dirt bags. What a mess! Protoplasm spraying all over the place. The things wouldn’t lie still. Had to strap them in good. But you should have heard them squeal when the medical teams started cutting.”

Ayla’s aura was throbbing. She seemed in a trance. She was emanating waves of feeling that washed over the guard. He stopped transmitting.

“Ehh...,” he hesitated. “What was I saying?”

Ayla transmitted to me in a low frequency, “Please take me away from here.”

We backed slowly out of the operating room. The guard made no move to stop us. We moved quickly up the tunnel to the main path and back out the front gates. As we emerged from the abandoned facility, we received a transmission from the top of the bluff,

“Do you need help?”

I looked up to see a throwback descending the slope towards us. His proboscis was severely deformed, twisted and bent and shrunken somehow. His appearance was appalling. He must have suffered much insult and ridicule among us for such an obvious deformity. But he seemed to pay it no mind and approached us boldly,

“Are you lost?”

I made a weak attempt to hide my aura and resist, but Ayla opened up to him. I felt his friendship.

“My name is Magbar. Come with me.”

Magbar turned and began to climb back up the slope. With nowhere else to turn, we followed him. He sensed our exhaustion and led us slowly across a jagged plateau and then down into a ravine. In the narrow bottom, we came to a small cave whose entrance was hidden by an outcrop of stone and a pile of boulders from a past avalanche. The small entrance led through a short tunnel and opened into a vast cavern.

In the darkness, I sensed hundreds of auras in the tunnels and caves branching from the cavern in a natural network concealed in the steep walls of the crevice.

“We are refugees,” transmitted Magbar, “from the training camps.”

They took us in as if we were members of the family. They fed us, sheltered us, and we stayed and rested among the throwbacks.

Magbar had rigged up a crude makeshift receiver and, as Ayla and I regained our strength, we anxiously followed the course of events on the warm side.

First came news the alien Ambassador had been recalled to Earth; then the announcement a new Special Envoy had arrived with a military fleet that had taken up orbit around our planet.

Then came the events that shocked us all. Alien forces stormed the Control Group Central Chambers, forcibly removed Nobgop from power, killing him in the process — accidentally, according to reports — and replacing him with a throwback collaborator.

The new leader’s first decree was the repeal of Plan 9, effective immediately, and the declaration of equality of all population strains, regardless of defect or lineage.

Reaction to the news at our hidden nest was sharply divided. Some hailed the aliens as saviors and made ready to return at once to the warm side, to their former nests, to resume their rightful place in society. Others, more cynical and hardened, laughed bitterly and called the believers fools. Magbar urged caution. Old ways die hard and we’d been lied to before. But more than half the refugees set off at once towards the Grey Zone, towards home.

Except for Nobgop, no changes were made in the Control Group. Superior, pure individuals remained in charge of all of the various departments and in command of the Enforcement Division. None of the scientists who had been involved with Plan 9 vivisection were arrested or charged. In fact, they were taken to the main alien base for debriefing, along with all of their records, which were impounded by the aliens.

The treaty that had been signed “in perpetuity,” and then modified, was replaced by yet a new agreement with a new set of terms and conditions. Vast areas of the warm side were reserved exclusively for alien use. Former residents within these areas were ordered to report, register, and live in “local population sectors” set up near the Gray Zone border.

The areas designated for alien use continued to expand with new waves of aliens arriving in ship after ship. The local population sectors continued to shrink and their location was gradually shifted off the warm side altogether and into the dark region beyond the Gray Zone.

Reports of alien immigration in the hundreds of thousands were broadcast. The time came when the resettlement of the local population and the expansion of the alien controlled areas reached the dark valley where our nest was hidden. We emerged from stasis early one Thunbork to the sound of weapons fire from the cave entrance and the cries of the wounded.

A squad of heavily armed superior enforcement agents and alien military advisors stormed the entrance portal and began rounding up the escapees and shooting them. Magbar burst into our chamber,

“They’re here, Gaag! They’re here!”

A former Control Group Enforcer, now working for the aliens, broke through our chamber portal behind Magbar and opened fire as I emerged from my stasis pod. Magbar took a direct hit and dropped on the spot, blackened and lifeless. The second shot struck me. I was thrown aside, in searing pain, leaking fluid. To my horror, I saw that one arm and part of my left side had been blown away. Losing consciousness, I groped blindly for my scorcher but the Enforcer swept it aside with his proboscis, struck me with the butt his weapon, and I fell back to the floor in a pool of my own protoplasm.

“We know what to do with bags like you,” the Enforcer’s hate filled the chamber. “We’re not going to pollute pure sectors with infections like you again.”

He struck me again, across the face, breaking my eyestalks, and leveled the business end of his scorcher in my direction.

A wave of agony washed over me. But not my own. Then a burst of burning heat filled the room and the Enforcer vaporized before my eyes as his weapon dropped to floor. Ayla stood in the entranceway. She had picked up my scorcher when the Enforcer had swept it aside, and fired at full power.

With a shriek of hopeless despair, Ayla collapsed to the floor...