Alien Citadel

by Douglas Hill

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The Wasteland people, fighting to save the Earth, are being driven into the fearsome radioactive Firesands by the relentless advance of the Slavers. As Finn, Baer and the other warriors gather for a last great struggle the arrival of an alien spaceship reveals a new threat, even more deadly than the robot-like aliens. Finn is captures and enslaved within the mighty walls of the alien Citadel, the Slavers' mountain fortress. Relying on nothing more than his uncanny wilderness instincts, he eventually escapes only to learn the devastating truth about the Slavers and their final plans for Earth and its people.

Release date: June 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

THE DISTANT CLOUDS rose high into the sky, dark smears against its pale springtime blue, stretching out across the land like vast, rolling walls. There were three of them, filling the sky to the north, the east and the west, three sides of an immense rectangle. And the clouds were moving, in a slow but relentless drift towards the south.

They were like the billowing clouds of smoke that accompany the raging advance of a forest fire. But on that land there were no forests to burn. The clouds were formed of dust, rising from the surface of a bleak and arid desert. It was a land of rock and sand and baked earth, broken hills and stony ridges, with only occasional patches of cactus or scrub brush clinging stubbornly to life.

And the clouds of dust were being thrown up from that forbidding terrain by hundreds upon hundreds of strange machines. They were like huge metal eggs, hovering a metre from the ground on swirling cushions of energy beneath their flattened undersides. The downblast from those machines, in their enormous three-sided formation, hurled the dust and sand skyward. And amid those clouds small bat-winged flying creatures, thousands of them, flapped and swooped – their glassy eyes studying every centimetre of the desert, on every side of the advancing machines.

Now and then, the dust-clouds would be streaked with red, when narrow rays of concentrated heat would leap out from the machines, to blast an outcropping of rock into fragments, or to char a stand of brush into blackened ash.

Those humans who had seen such machines called them whirlsleds. And humans also had a name for the eerie beings who drove the machines. They were beings from another world, who had come, centuries before, with their machines and weapons, to impose their rule upon the Earth. And humans, living in permanent fear of their mysterious and coldly cruel alien masters, had come to call them … the Slavers.

The enormous force of Slaver whirlsleds had come on to the desert – known as the Wasteland – early in the spring. Already their slow, methodical, three-sided sweep had passed over more than a third of the desert vastness. And where they had passed, with their blazing heat-weapons, the Wasteland had been truly laid to waste. Hardly a boulder remained intact, hardly a cactus still stood, behind that steady, destructive advance.

Even from a rocky hilltop thirty kilometres away, the towering, menacing clouds of dust were clearly visible. And from that hilltop they were being studied by the calm grey eyes of a young man of about twenty. He was lithe and muscular, with thick straw-coloured hair, and he wore a sleeveless jerkin, trousers and boots all made from soft hide. A heavy knife and a small leather pouch hung from his belt, and around his left wrist was wrapped a broad strip of darker leather.

His name was Finn Ferral, and less than a year before he had been a young village huntsman in the forests far to the east. But since then he had crossed half the continent on a dangerous, relentless search – a search that had at last come to an end among the wild, free people who roamed the Wasteland.

Next to him on that hilltop, also watching the distant, sky-darkening clouds, stood a being who was not human, yet who was Finn’s closest friend. His name was Baer, and he was one of a beast-like race called the Bloodkin, descended from humans by means of the cruel science of the alien Slavers. But Baer, more human than other Bloodkin, was a dedicated enemy of his own bestial kind, and their alien masters. No taller than Finn, Baer was immensely broad, his solid hugeness made more obvious because he wore only baggy trousers and heavy boots. Like all Bloodkin, his bulk of muscle was covered by a shaggy pelt of thick hair – and from behind one great shoulder jutted the hilt of a wickedly sharp machete, its sheath strapped to Baer’s back.

On the Wasteland during the previous autumn, Finn and Baer had been in the forefront of a terrible battle against a force of Slavers and Bloodkin, led by a malevolent being known as The Claw. The warriors of the Wasteland had won that battle – but now, with the spring, they were facing the deadly aftermath.

For that victory, along with the increasingly bold attacks by the warriors on any lone whirlsleds passing the Wasteland, had brought a response that was perhaps inevitable. The mighty force of Slaver whirlsleds had come on to the Wasteland, to scour and cleanse the entire length and breadth of that region, to rid it of the vermin that infested it.

The vermin that were human beings.

Finn swung his head slightly, sweeping his gaze along the full, frightening lengths of the three distant dust-clouds, east and north and west. “Seems to be more of them all the time,” he said calmly. “And more spywings.”

“It figures,” Baer replied, in a rich bass rumble. “Prob’ly they’re comin’ from bases all round the Wasteland, not just the Citadel.”

Finn nodded. The aliens’ base in the mountains to the west, the base known as the Citadel, was the largest Slaver centre in the country. But it was not likely that even the Citadel could provide so many hundreds of whirlsleds for this final, monstrous assault.

“They’re not moving any faster,” Finn went on. “And they’re still keeping their formation, those three straight lines.”

“That’s Slavers for you,” Baer growled. “No imagination – think in straight lines, move in straight lines.” He scratched at his vast beard, light-coloured like the rest of his pelt. “Anyways, they don’t needta hurry. They know we got only one way to go.”

Again Finn nodded, in bleak agreement. Earlier, when the Slaver forces had first begun their advance against the three sides of the Wasteland, parties of warriors had ridden out to see if the lines of whirlsleds could be breached, or bypassed. The warriors were skilled and experienced, able to move almost unseen through areas that would not seem to offer enough cover for a lizard. But they came up against those thousands of sharp-eyed spywings – and the hundreds of whirlsleds, using their lethal heat-weapons against anything that looked like it might be a hiding place for a human.

Not one of those warriors had returned.

So the remaining people of the Wasteland had begun – reluctantly, bitterly, despairingly – a retreat into the southern reaches of the desert, the only direction open to them. And always, small groups ranged forward, as scouts, to make sure that no dangers or ambushes stood in the way of the main body of fleeing people. Finn and Baer were on just such a scouting mission, now, many days after the retreat had begun.

They had paused briefly to rest their horses, and to survey the surrounding terrain from that hilltop. And inevitably, they had also looked back at the towering barrier of the dust clouds.

Finn’s vision rivalled that of a hunting hawk – just as in many other ways he was as much a wild creature as a man. But even his eyes could not discern the whirlsleds themselves, hidden within the distant clouds. Yet the clouds alone were menacing enough, in their immense breadth. At that distance they seemed to have nearly joined together at the ends, looking less like three separate sides of a rectangle, more like a gigantic, sweeping crescent or arc. It made Finn suddenly think of the blade of a sickle – a vast and deadly curve of metal, slicing slowly across the Wasteland towards a final harvest of death.

Despite the sun’s heat, he shivered slightly at that mental image. Then he firmly turned his back on the monstrous walls of dust, and looked southwards.

As Baer said, it was the only way that the Wasteland people could go. And the people had come to believe that they were being purposefully driven in that direction – like beasts being herded into a trap. For lying to the south was another desert region, far more terrible even than the harsh and barren Wasteland. It was a place created by ancient evil, a place of nightmare, unnatural terror, invisible and ever-present death. An area called the Firesands.

When the Wasteland people were driven at last, by the Slavers’ merciless advance, to the edge of that ghastly region, they knew that they would face the cruellest of choices. Whether to turn and try to fight the whirlsleds – and be slaughtered by the aliens’ superior weapons – or whether to continue their retreat, into the fearsome depths of the Firesands. One choice would bring certain, quick death; the other way would bring very probable, slow and terrible death.

Either way, the people knew, they were facing the end of their free, brave life on the Wasteland.

Again Finn shivered, as he thought those dire thoughts. But then he shook himself, and pointed with a steady hand to a group of low hills, a few kilometres south from where he and Baer stood.

“There’s supposed to be a water-hole in there,” he told Baer. “Let’s have a look at it while we’re here.”

“Suits me,” Baer rumbled. He shook the leather water-bottle tied to his belt. “We could do with a refill.”

They moved away down the hillside, towards their horses – sturdy desert mustangs, the sturdiest being the one that had to carry Baer’s great weight. Finn seemed scarcely to look at the ground, yet he moved by instinct in a total silence – seeming to drift forward without rattling a pebble, as a wolf or a cougar might have silently padded down from that hilltop. And even Baer, despite his bulk and heavy boots, had been with Finn long enough to have acquired some of those wilderness skills, so that he too crossed that stretch of rough terrain in near-silence.

They rode away, not hurrying, and always – again by inst. . .