Centauri Ch. 02

I hope you enjoy Chapter 2, as more of Darius' memory returns. The plot is thickening in this Chapter, so please be sure to read Chapter 1 to know what is happening! ~Amoronaut

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His brain hurt, as if someone were trying to squeeze his frontal lobe into a glass jar. Just moments ago, a small piece of circuitry about the size of his fingernail had been surgically removed from a few millimeters underneath his scalp. It was a neural memory inhibitor, which had been blocking his memories for the past eight years. Forgotten images were beginning to percolate into his awareness like water dripping from a clogged hose. He could feel the build up of neural pressure in the back of his head, as if there were too many memories trying to flow into his awareness all at once; far better that they did not, as he surely would have blacked out.

As the memories entered his awareness, they were random and out of chronological order. Darius could hardly make sense of them. In many of the images he was on board a starship, the vessel used by the Bureau's covert operations team to spy on the Coulari; a team called Capsilon X. Darius had been the commander of team and of the starship, which he now remembered had been called the Thames.

Different images reminded him of a planet, in an environment he'd never seen before. A vast landscape devoid of any trees or tall vegetation, with ground covered in a bright green-orange moss stretching as far as the eye could see. A large alien planet loomed in the sky over head -- he must have been on a moon.

Aliens stood around him, wearing dark armored tech-suits and holding assault rifles. They were reptilian, with heads like to ancient extinct Earth dinosaurs. Bright blue light came from their narrow eye slits, and cybernetic implants sprouted from their exposed necks and faces. Metal plated tails with grotesque looking spikes of bone sprouted from the back of their tech-suits. These were the Coulari, he remembered; a fierce and terrifying race.

As Darius was coping with the influx of memories, Michelle sat next to him on the sofa and watched him silently. She could tell he was disoriented.

"You'll be fine in a few more moments." she reassured him, placing her hand on his shoulder, "The first waves are always the most uncomfortable."

Darius lingered in disorientation for a few more moments before the flow of images finally slowed, and eventually stopped. He felt as if he had woken up from a long and intense dream, only being able to recall scattered bits and pieces. Confusion and frustration mounted quickly, but on one memory stood out in his mind clearer than the rest - the vision of him with Michelle in his cabin on the ship, lying next to her in his bed.

The memory was crystal, and felt like it happened only yesterday. Her caressing touch, her supple breasts, her orgasmic moans, were all so vivid in his mind. They had been lovers, even though it was entirely against Bureau protocol for two squad members to be involved romantically. He could not recall how they became involved, but his feelings for her were suddenly ripe.

Darius looked at her intently as he thought about the memory. She was incredibly beautiful, with rich blonde hair pulled tightly into a knot behind her head. Her face was smooth and relaxed, with sharp green eyes. Her white blouse clung gracefully to her body, and was cut just low enough to reveal the flesh of her breasts. How could he possibly have forgotten this woman? He felt a sudden urge to embrace her that he couldn't resist.

Spontaneously, Darius reached out his strong arms out and pulled her body tight against his own. She didn't resist, and let him hold her.

Their lips met passionately; a kiss by two lovers who had been separated from each other for far too long. She grabbed a thick tuft of his hair as she leaned into the sensual kiss. How greatly she had missed his strong and skilled hands! Michelle prided herself on her ability to resist most men, but it felt good to fully relinquish herself to his generous embrace. He placed his right hand on the back of her neck, and held her head as he kissed her soft lips. She put a leg over his and pushed her breasts against his chest. The heat of that libidinous moment felt amazing for both of them. In that instant, Michelle became confident that he would remember everything.

They continued to kiss her for several minutes, moist tongues and lips locked in an amorous interplay, bodies rubbing heavily against one another. Finally the moment ended, and Darius adjusted her so she was sitting on his lap, her warm hips resting on his thighs, and their eyes met. Her arms lay draped across his masculine shoulders and she gave him a loving look.

He was dashingly handsome, with dark hair and chocolate eyes. His face was shaven, with a slight bit of stubble. She remembered him more with a beard, but he remained very attractive as he was now. His features seemed to give him an air of lofty courage and wisdom. She smiled at him slightly, and bit her lip. She had to admit, it had been a long time since she had felt these feelings. Her emerald eyes were fierce and steady as she looked at him, ready for what was coming next.

Darius finally spoke, "I remember us, Michelle. Or at least, the feelings have returned," he said to her, "But the memories are short, I can only recall a face here or a voice there. I can't remember how I ended up in the places I'm seeing in my thoughts," he shook his head in frustration. "It doesn't make any sense."

"That's to be expected, dear," she said, caressing his face gently. "You are not going to be able to make sense out of eight years of memories in a few minutes, or even a few days. It will take a while Darius. But the important part is that you are remembering."

Her voice trailed off as she paused. She looked at him gravely. "Others have not had such luck.

"Others? Do you mean other members of Capsilon X?" he asked.

Her expression turned sour. "Not of the team as you knew it. Anders, Glass, and Cooke died shortly after the start of the mission, murdered by the Coulari after they were experimented on and tortured. Hodgson went missing after the first encounter, captured and never heard from again. We have no way of knowing if he is dead or alive. You and me are the only members of the original team remaining. Another team was formed to continue the mission, and we were able to successfully extract some of them from the Coulari and remove their memory inhibitors."

She stopped in order to gauge his response. Darius was staring distantly at the carpet as she spoke.

The memories that had returned to him were slowly crystallizing in his mind. He remembered the team now. There had been six of them all together; Anders, Glass, Cooke, Hodgson, himself, and Michelle. They were all young, barely past teenagers, ready to take on whatever blind mission was thrown at them. They had been hand picked by the Bureau for the extremely risky and most likely one-way mission of infiltrating the mysterious Coulari, who had been blamed for the numerous disappearances of Centauri Prime citizens and starships. Each time a "disappearance" or "abduction" occurred, a Coulari ship would materialize seemingly out of nowhere, and remove people from starships with some kind of subspace teleporter; sometimes they would take an entire ship. Nobody knew where the abductees were teleported to, only that they vanished without explanation and were never seen again.

So the Bureau devised a plan.

They would send out a team of six people, implanted with neural inhibitors designed to control their memory so that when the team was captured, they would have no recollection that they were actually undercover agents on an espionage mission. To the Coulari, and even to the team members themselves, they would appear to be ordinary humans on an exploratory asteroid mining mission.

Their starship, the Thames, was crafted to look like a typical mining vessel, but in reality carried highly developed sensing equipment that would gather intelligence on the Coulari and send it to the Bureau back on Centauri Prime. In addition to blocking access to their memory, the neural implants in the crew were connected to the Thames' through a quantum-linked communicator. Whatever the crew saw, the Thames also saw and broadcasted back to the Bureau.

In this manner, they would be able to monitor everything the crew was experiencing, all while keeping them oblivious to the true nature of their mission.

"So what about you? How was your neural implant removed?" asked Darius.

"It was my boss, Strafe, He extracted me from the Coulari about 6 months after our abduction seven years ago. As you know, his actions are independent of the Bureau."

"Strafe...right, I should have guessed. He always has been able to beat the Bureau at its own game."

He paused for a moment, taking in this new information.

All of this had occurred seven years ago, and clearly a great deal had happened since then. She was working for Strafe now, whose agenda was still unknown to Darius. He was sure Strafe must have collected a significant amount of information on the Coulari by now if he had been gathering up former Bureau personnel from the Capsilon X mission.

But why had it taken him this long to try to get to Darius, who hadn't been with the Bureau for six years? Surely if he was able to snatch Michelle from the hands of the Coulari then he would also be capable of subverting Darius without catching the Bureau's attention.

"And what about me?" he asked. "I've been on Centauri Prime for the past six years. Strafe could have approached me whenever he wanted. Why wait until now?"

"Because you haven't been on Centauri Prime for the past six years, at least not continuously. The Bureau has still been using you for espionage missions against the Coulari. You don't remember any of it because of the neural inhibitor, but you have a special relationship with the Coulari, Darius. You are the only person that they have ever let return to Centauri Prime of their own accord. They return you, and then without any warning they take you back. It has been going on for six years. You have been taken and returned at least a dozen times. We don't know exactly why, but clearly, you are some sort of use to them." She trailed off, and became lost in thought.

Countless times she had thought of coming to him to make some vain kind of attempt in reminding him of the love they used to share. Her memories, of course, had returned to her after Strafe had rescued her over six years ago. But she knew it would be hopeless to come to Darius as long as the memory inhibitor was in place; he wouldn't remember anything about her. Plus, she couldn't let the Bureau know she was still alive. As far as they were concerned, she was just another casualty of the Capsilon X mission; another missing crew member. If she tried to approach Darius before the time was right, they would find her out, and everything she and Strafe had been working for would be in jeopardy. So she had tracked him from afar, waiting for the opportune time to step in and intervene. Finally, today, that time had come.

Darius' grim face appeared dubious; it was difficult to believe what she had told him. He had a special relationship with the Coulari? It made no sense to him. But now that the neural inhibitor had been removed, soon he would be able to access all that had been denied to him over these long years..

"This is heavy, Michelle," he said after a long breath and exhale. "Very heavy."

He continued to hold her on his lap; it felt good to have her close - felt comfortable.

He moistened his lips, and said thoughtfully, "This is like waking up from a crazy dream, only to find out you are in an even crazier dream. And you...what the heck have you been doing these past six years? Surely you've found comfort with another man. I wouldn't expect you to hold out for me." There was sincerity in his deep voice.

She frowned slightly at his question and looked away. "Well, yes, but not like the way you put it. There have been other men, of course...I'm only human. Six years is a long time, one needs release. But there hasn't been anyone else that has touched me the same way you have, Darius. I've been waiting for this to happen for a long time."

She touched his chest and his torso with her hand, looking at him with a sense of longing. He knew that she meant every word.

"I have to admit, I was deeply worried that you wouldn't remember, or that the feelings would not return. You have no idea what it means to me that it has come back to you so easily," she said.

He touched her side softly. "It is a hard sensation to describe. As soon as you walked through my door tonight, it was like I knew something deep down, even though I had no recollection of our past relationship. And then when you pulled that damn tiny computer from my head and the memories started coming back, it was like we had only separated yesterday. I don't know how I managed for six years."

He laughed slightly and smiled at her.

"Well, I would have waited longer."

Without warning, a wave of euphoria washed over Darius' vision. His eyelids sagged heavily, and he lost all support in his neck. He slumped to the side as his apartment and Michelle faded out of his vision.

A light reappeared in his consciousness, and he lifted his head to look at his new surroundings.

The first thing his eyes took in was the brilliant night sky over his head. Countless millions of twinkling stars were strewn across a palette of deep red and blue hues. The veil of night was not black in this region of space, but glowed softly with the luminescent gases from long dead stars. A large peach colored planet hung above the horizon, forming a partial crescent that was bright enough to illuminate the ground beneath him.

He recognized it as the planet he had seen in one of the memories that had returned to him; it was the moon again, with the green-orange moss spreading out in all directions, fluorescing gently in the planet-light. Was this a Coulari world?

He lay on the ground, his back up against a large boulder. He was holding a gun, an assault rifle, and wearing a dark tech-suit of armor. A bright white energy seemed to flow through the circuitry of the suit. Darius knew by intuition that it was augmenting his bio-functions. The atmosphere on the moon felt thin, as if his skin were pushing out on itself slightly. Certainly there was not enough oxygen to support his normal respiration; the suit must have been oxygenating his blood directly.

As he became more aware of his surroundings, he noticed someone was sitting next to him. He turned to look, and saw that it was Michelle. She also wore a tech-suit, with its pearly white light providing a gentle luminance about her, and held an assault rifle at the ready in her hands. They were taking cover behind a moss covered boulder.

"This is bad," she said to him. Her voice seemed shallow in the tenuous atmosphere. "We can't stay here much longer. They are going to flank us. We need to find better cover."

"Yea, you're right," he responded, and gestured in the direction they were now facing. "What about that complex we saw over the hill to the south. Should we make for it?"

"We certainly don't stand a chance here, do we? I say we do it."

A deep blast suddenly went off a few hundred feet from them, sending subtle tremors through the ground and into their legs. Bright golden showers of sparks erupted over head as artillery shells burst in the atmosphere in tumultuous bangs. Opposing forces were preparing to penetrate their position, and they knew they could not remain exposed as they were for much longer.

Darius looked to his left and then to his right. A lone Coulari soldier remained with them, also crouched behind a boulder some forty feet to the east. It knelt low to the ground on one reptilian knee, holding its rifle in its clawed hands and peering around the boulder with its raptor-like head and blue glowing eyes. Its spiked tail curled high over its head and swished through the air in steady rhythm. The Coulari soldier also seemed eager to be moving.

Darius looked at Michelle and nodded, "Alright. Let's stay low and make a run for it. They will see us for sure...it's a risk. When we make it over the crest of the hill, we can sprint the rest of the way to the facility."

"There's no guarantee we will be able to get inside when we make it there," Michelle reminded him.

"We'll just have to figure that out when we get there."

Darius reached down and grabbed a nearby rock. Turning the opposite direction, he hurled it toward the Coulari soldier behind the boulder on their left. To his frustration, the rock sailed over the reptile's head and continued for another hundred feet before finally falling to the ground.

"Fuck!" he swore. "Curse this bloody moon and its low gravity!"

Grabbing another rock, he threw again, this time with half the strength. The rock landed a few feet before the soldier and skipped into its leg. His attention caught, the soldier beamed its blue eyes toward them, and lowered its tail slightly in curiosity.

Darius made a signal with his arm toward the hill in front of them. Understanding, the soldier slicked its forked tongue in and out of its mouth quickly, and nodded.

He held up his hand with three fingers spread out as much as he could manage, hoping the soldier would understand. Motioning towards the hill, he began a silent countdown with his hand, and when he put down his last finger, he grabbed Michelle by the arm and together they ran in a low crouch toward the top of the hill.

The trio ran for a mere five seconds before flashes of energy started to whiz around them, leaving black scorch marks in the moss at their feet. They didn't dare slow their pace, for their lives hung by a hair. As they neared the crest of the hill, blasts of white energy seemed to be hitting the ground on all sides of them.

This is it, Darius thought, it's all going to come to an end right here on this god forsaken moon.

Suddenly there was a sharp screech to their left, and they saw that their Coulari companion had taken a blast to the leg. Down to the moss the reptile fell, clutching at its lower appendage. Not more than two seconds after it had fallen did three more energy blasts come barraging in, one hitting it in the shoulder and two in the chest. Its last dying movements were to try to aim its rifle to return fire, but a final blast took it in the head, and it was gone forever.

Michelle and Darius looked on in panic, but they could not hesitate even for a moment. A few more hurried steps brought them to the top of the hill, and they both dived beneath the crest as weapon fire sailed over their heads.

Together they rolled out of control down the hillside. Their momentum did not seem to slow, for each time they hit a bump they were carried several inches into the air. After a few seconds of this wild, out-of-control tumble, they came to a stop, tightly grasping each other's arms. They looked up, and saw their destination a few hundred feet ahead. Darius knew that they were the last of the battle line, and that nothing stood between them and the enemy aside from the meager hilltop they had just put between them.

Without hesitation, they both rose to their feet and sprinted full out to the structure before them.

In a rush, they ran right into the front entryway, desperately hoping they would be able to get inside. The door was made out of a polished grey metal. Darius rapped on it hard with his fist. Michelle noticed a small illuminated console to the right of the door, and quickly tried to decipher it. As she touched it, the panel went from white to red, clearly denying her access.