The Deadliest Alien Artifacts (Story Collection) Read online

  VI

  Back on the GX1

  The spectacular energy explosions and exhaustion of its energy had damaged far more than the alien had thought, and it could barely think and use its powers.

  When they had taken it in the energy bubble to the immense GX1 it had gasped in horror, at what it was up against, and that it might be the end.

  Yet it had even felt enjoyment at such a creation, and that it could exist, and that it had been seeing powers that its mighty race had never witnessed, and it had realized that it had a proper goal now, and that was to take control of it, and it was about to achieve its goal of getting aboard.

  Once inside the GX1 it had been delighted, and thought of nothing else than escaping and what it would do, and this time it intended not to underestimate the humans, no matter what.

  It had studied their minds and thoughts, and ways that they worked together, and had been surprised at many things. Their abilities could go far, and they continued doing things further than anything it had encountered, even though they made many mistakes, and usually went further with things that were useless and unneeded, and it realized that its race would have used them to investigate all the things that they had never bothered with.

  It had recalled that a long time ago that it had encountered two of them, and had ignored them, but had been amazed by their technology, and it had even sensed that they had come from beyond the universe.

  Its proper examination of their computers and records had been the greatest advancement that it had received, and it would have been far more if it had not been in the state that it had been in.

  It had explored information about the energy field and its energy levels with astonishment, and had wondered why its race had never gone to the lengths they had to build it, and realized that they had ignored it as it had not been needed, and that they had had better alternatives, but they had ignored how powerful it could become, and could be used for things that their alternatives could not be used for.

  Its examination of the occupants had been too swift and uncontrolled, and it had failed to realize many things that it should have known.

  Their worlds were different and so populated that it had not been able to grasp how they worked, and how they never had problems, and it had examined their minds, and had started to realize the truth, and that they enjoyed it and thought of it as a common state, and that they would have thought of their worlds as being empty.

  While it had continued its explorations another part of it had started work on creating a plan to escape, and it had examined their minds, thoughts, communications, behavior, and it had started to realize a way, and a way to avoid discovery and reveal itself.

  It had formed a copy of a man and had altered his features, in which it would use, if it ever wished to copy one.

  After examinations of it, it had learned many more things, and it decided to leave the investigation until its powers were returned.

  It also found information on the entity in the void with surprise, and all the trouble that they had gone to destroy it, and it had been fascinated. At first it thought it had been a white entity that it had made a mistake with when it had been younger, and which had imprisoned it on the world, which it believed its race could handle, and that it had surprised it, when its powers had been weak. But after more searching it had believed that it could have been one of its own race, and that it had altered greatly, but after further examinations it found that it had been something else, and it decided to investigate it further when it escaped from the energy bubble, and had its powers.

  Another problem that it had discovered had been that the humans could recognize a stranger easily, and that if it copied one of them it would have to be more careful than it had thought.

  Once when it had examined their minds further it had found a way to alter their memories so that they would recognize it as a normal human, and not as a stranger, and it could alter their records about it, and it had seen where the other alien had gone wrong, and had thought of ways to avoid its mistakes, and it had realized that its powers would be weak and limited against them, with there being so many of them.

  Through all that had happened it had managed to explore the strange life forms and their existence, and had been delighted to make it aboard, and it had believed that it could hide somewhere, away from them, if it could not beat them, and it only needed to get on one of their worlds, where it could start to reproduce other members of its species and take control of their worlds, and build its new empire.

  Chapter 2

  The Deadliest Treasure

  (From the novel The Alien Artifact 4)

  The sounds had initially been astonishing! Now they had gone beyond, and were mind-bending! They came screaming up through the shaft with a dangerous fury that stunned Pendleton, and no matter how he tried to shake it off and contemplate identities his thoughts never altered or formed stable recognitions.

  Clouds of powdered dirt and stone swirled about through beams of lights from the above lights as he released some more rope, edging him downwards, seeking to get hold of the treasure.

  The Second World War was still going, but just about over, and Pendleton realized that he had avoided being killed after all, and wondered if he was going to be killed here instead, and was unsure what was worse.

  He groaned and dangled about on his rope, and grabbed hold of part of a castle boulder, while glimpsing parts of the shaft above, wondering if he could have wangled his way out of it. But it was not really them and he really wanted to do it, and he wanted to explore the castle shaft. He had always wanted to explore and discover something new of value and greatness, and perhaps even be remembered in history.

  What interested and terrified them was why the treasure was hidden in such a place with such occurrences!

  What was it they were dealing with anyway? Why was it there in such a far out place? Was the stuff protected by something?

  Something of unfathomable unidentifiable supernatural nature sounded as though it were under the castle, in some form of magnetic field or energy field, trapped or trying to free itself from something, ultimately escaping to another location of liberty, and he tried imagining some form of spirit trapped there every night for hundreds of years, perhaps in an ancient dungeon. Yet again even that could not explain it, or anything!

  “Have you found if it’s down there?” Henrik shouted down, in a combination of extreme annoyance and confusion, with a way that gave Pendleton the impression that the two archaeologists up above might be on the edge of considering doing something extreme, and beyond their normal. Though Norgrove, the other archaeologist, gave him the impression that he had waited all his life to be here!

  He again started to realize the implications of the find and that they would have to check what was there, no matter what.

  He quickly shouted up: “You investigated all these walls?”

  “Yes!” Norgrove replied. “We used all the best equipment.”

  “We’re the only ones here and that know about it?” he replied, still trying to find out more about what was happening, and they were allowing him to know. Basically it was just them three there at the great old immense haunted castle, buried away in the wood, at the location that they had traced the treasure to.

  Yet they could have left the task until the morning but they could not wait. They had waited too long and had gone too far to get their hands on it, and he just wanted to get it.

  What the hell difference did it make if it was morning or night? It was dark there in the tunnel at both times!

  He wondered why the lights were above, and why he never had one, and shouted up, “Are you two coming down here or what?”

  The two archeologists shifted into the shaft and made their way down, with the lights, and he observed them, and realized why they had not given him a light, and that he was like a worm on a fishing line, and there to check what the score was. The two also had trouble climbing in and down, and were overweight and bul
ky, and he was better at climbing than they were. They would have a hard time getting back up again! And he even wondered if they would camp the night at the bottom or something, if they were too tired and sleepy, which made him gasp again when he thought about it, and he lodged his boot into a gap between two of the boulders, to rest his tired body.

  “What did they find out?” he muttered, mainly to himself, and wondered what he was missing again.

  “There are other small shafts running through here ...” Henrik called down, dangling overhead, who had stopped to examine a small hole in the shaft, he had missed in the darkness there.

  “Ventilation shafts that connect together,” Norgrove continued. “They must run through most of the building.”

  “I agree! I’m sure they are for an ancient ventilation ...” Henrik continued, sticking his head up close, and shining his light in the hole and looking along it.

  “What else could it be?” Pendleton asked.

  “They could have been used to build it ...” Henrik replied, moving away, looking for something else.

  Pendleton wondered how high up they were, as the height of the castle was immense, and they had been on the top floor, and they never knew how far underground it went, and the blackness there looked like an abyss.

  The height of the castle was incredible, as well as the length being massive with rooms and corridors going out everywhere, especially with there being no proper lighting, and he had not thought such a construction was possible at the date that they had given. It was also unbelievable that somebody had managed to ship the thing over to America, and when it must have happened, in such large sections and fit them together.

  How could people spend so much on such things and leave them derelict, out in such desolate woods? Why had it not even been put out in the open for everyone to see?

  Pendleton gasped as he recalled the legends and what had already happened, and wondered if this would be his death, in a death or glory situation.

  For a moment he wondered if it had actually come from Transylvania and had vampires, and realized that if it were at least he would be still around as a vampire. At times he had thought it had similarities to castles over there.

  “So are we going down ...?” Henrik asked firmly, watching Pendleton’s peculiar expressions in his light, from overhead.

  “You could send down a camera with a light attached?” Norgrove moaned sarcastically, and Pendleton started to move off from the wall where he was resting against, and prepared himself, and took glances at what was below as he started going down, but even with the lights being closer it never revealed anything new.

  The rope suddenly started swaying and vibrating furiously, giving the impression that Henrik was frantically doing something against Pendleton’s rope, and he glanced up and realized Henrik was climbing up for some reason, and he gasped when he realized Norgrove’s face was frantic and that the two were actually desperately trying to escape from there, almost slipping trying to climb up, which amused him for a moment, bewildered at their sudden change of attitude.

  As he tried to see what was going on he noticed that light across his front was not coming downwards from them but shining upwards from something below, and his eyes fixed onto a strange orb of light floating upwards.

  “Get me out of here!” Henrik hollered, making Pendleton shudder and try to escape for his life.

  Pendleton even thought of removing his harness and plunging down, and perhaps allowing him to have the fate of dying on the ground below, and having a normal human death.

  With a loud thud Norgrove came crashing down to his original position after slipping, and clouds of gray dust flew up and blinded Pendleton as it went into his face and lungs, and he went crashing into the wall.

  He groaned and dangled about on the rope, glimpsing parts of the shaft around him, mentally exhausted, needing sleep, allowing himself just to go into sleep state, wondering if he could somehow wangle his way out of it. But it was not a matter of persuading himself of anything, it was really happening, and he wished what was going to happen would just happen.

  If he had only known all those years ago what would end up happing, he would have forced himself to forget about such ventures.

  Sounds were now screaming out at him and he realized how loud they had become, from the abyss below, as if a gateway into hell were there, with him suspended over it on a thin rope, spinning endlessly, waiting to descend into its hideous reaches.

  How had they managed to talk him into this? One minute they had been chasing treasure and the next a castle mysteriously appears into it, and he had been dumped with their theories, and then with the shaft.

  He jerked, startled, hearing a sort of scream, almost human but somehow different, as though out of a distant strange place, and he visualized it out in space, in blackness.

  There were traces of rotted vegetation floating in the light coming down from overhead, as they still continued to climb out.

  Some of the blocks of stone about him resembled the stones in Egyptian pyramids. They were strange things to use to build, but they were hard to penetrate, and needed in a good castle.

  He realized sounds were now not emerging from under him but coming were from somewhere above, and then they started emerging about him and he listened intensely with confusion.

  Sounds manifested everywhere as though invisible creatures were surrounding them, and strange glowing and swirling forces formed and went about them and telepathic figures like spirits with shrouds swirled about it, wailing and screaming, and he partially entered a dream state, and as it increased he believed he was holding onto reality.

  A bright explosion of colors exploded out making him come to, and realized the thing below him had reached him and he opened his eyes wide and examined his surroundings and saw that he was no longer in the shaft, and dazed and confusedly he examined his surroundings and an immense whirlpool of shifting outlines magically shifted by, and he studied everything and realized that he had no body or proper presence and was some form of energy formation shifting around with other similar formations, and that he was swirling out into a vortex of reshaping energy patterns that replaced reality, with transforming elements altering to something that he could not recognize.

  If he had died and gone into the afterlife why was it so strange? Why it was there mesmerized him! Was he classified as being anything? Where was it? Reality was no more than magically spinning patterns and he wondered how worse the situation could get, realizing that he could be trapped there for all eternity!

  II

  The Transcendent Voyager

  For billions of years the transcendent voyager had existed never wholly knowing what had created it or where it had originated, carrying out its mission of searching through time and space in its universe for abnormalities, unknown civilizations and species, and transcendent entities with colossal powers and capabilities and to destroy them if they were dangerous to reality and what its programming considered dangerous.

  It had been designed and given technology beyond anything else that it had encountered and had the abilities to search its universe in a degree and with abilities that would not have been believed to exist by the most advanced transcendences and civilizations, and would have been thought of as magical powers, and it had the ability to search its universe throughout time.

  Its form had been an invisible complex mass of energy, stored in many dimensions, that had been built to last forever, and it directly entered stars to energize itself and store its vast powers for extensive amounts of time.

  Its stores of information had been vast and it had the ability to collect as much information on what it had been programmed for eternally and improve its defenses and other abilities, and it had become the ultimate weapon of destruction against the destruction of its universe.

  It had stored the technology and abilities of zillions of species and had the ability to recognize and handle what it had been searching for within a range of its universe.
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  At one point it had unintentionally left the universe and had entered an outer universe that it had not known the existence of, where colossal amounts of universes had existed, and on its entrance there its programming had accepted it as the real universe and that it had to accept it as the universe that it had to carry out its mission in.

  At first it had been unable to enter the universes and properly detect anything in them and it used all its information and studied how it had entered the outer universe and found a way to enter them and locate particular things in them, but infinite amounts of things of unknown origins existed in them.

  In supernatural universes it had learned to open and use gateways that shifted it accurately to destinations. It discovered far more than it had ever realized could exist and it gave itself colossal magical abilities and energies and it had analyzed everything in a greater degree.

  On its first entrances to the universes it had been left staggered when it had encountered something of unknown origins that had drained its energy from it!

  Something had virtually absorbed all its power instantly on its entrance of the Earth’s atmosphere, only leaving it with some of its energy in other dimensions, which it had not considered possible as it had not been possible in its own universe, and it could not get proper amounts of power in other dimensions and had to fight to survive and had continuously tried to alter and adapt to something that it could survive as, and it had to create dormant states and ways of collecting energy from small sources and storing it until it had enough to reactivate itself, and work on finding a source powerful enough for it to use to leave there.

  Even though it had not done much in its damaged condition, with its vast abilities virtually unusable, it had been able to explore things through supernatural gateways into universes, going out into the strangest places, and it had even considered if there had been others such as it in the endless universes and if they had created it, and if it could contact them to help it, and it had gained abilities to explore inconceivable dimensions and powers in the universes, far beyond its original knowledge and powers.