19 Chapter 19 Captured

"We are going to the Uz'En home world, hopefully to meet up with Olivia, and then we'll get back to work saving the rest of the Uz'En," Dustin said, guiding the ship out of the atmosphere of the fuel planet. He had left the nanobots to build a storehouse to stockpile minerals and fuel for future use.

After a moment of calibration, the ship jumped, leaving the planet behind, and appearing above the world he had moved here, for his people to live on. With a sigh of relief, Dustin spied his ship also approaching the planet.

"Dustin?" came Olivia's voice over the communications system.

"Hey, mind if we dock with you?" he asked, steering the ship towards them.

"We're kind of crowded. I have a group of people I just picked up from a mining planet."

"Why did you bring them back yourself instead of having the nanobots pod them back?"

"Not all of them are Uz'En," she said.

"Olivia, what the hell are you thinking? We only rescue Uz'En!" he growled in frustration.

"Dustin! Don't you raise your voice to her!" growled back Granny's voice.

"Granny? Is that you?" he asked, surprised and delighted.

"Who else would I be? Get your butt over here, so we can talk!"

Dustin was about to dock up to the airlock, sending nanobots to bridge the gap so Cybele could go across, when the computer spoke up.

"A ship has been detected warping into the system that matches the same signature as the ship that was disassembled on the last planet."

"Shit! How did they follow us?"

Dustin couldn't figure out how they found him, and with panic turned to look down at the planet below him. If he didn't handle this Xalkak threat, all of his people were in danger. He could just send the nanobots to devour the ship, or send it somewhere else, but something odd was happening, and he had to get to the bottom of it.

'PED, have the nanobots get Cybele onto the ship with Olivia, and have the hive mind keep the planet safe from all threats. I'm going to have to deal with these guys myself.'

(DUSTIN, I AM DETECTING A STRANGE CODE WITHIN MY OWN, THAT MAY EXPLAIN HOW THEY WERE ABLE TO TRACK US. I BELIEVE I MAY BE TO BLAME FOR THEM HAVING FOUND US.)

'I need my space worm form, capable of latching onto the side of their ship.'

(INITIATING EVOLUTION.)

Things happened quickly. The ship dissolved around them, taking Cybele to the airlock, against her obvious wishes, and a huge cloud of nanobots swarmed towards them. Dustin watched as he changed, as they formed a net of their own around the entire planet. Guided with the hive mind, he knew that they would be able to handle whatever came, but he needed to get to that ship and deal with this damn AI that was causing him so much grief.

Flying through their petty shields, he latched on to the side of the ship, feeling his body begin to tingle as the hive mind directed a barrage of energy that would damage the ship, but not him. That's when they decided to jump away.

Space worms are interesting creatures that never managed to make it near the planet Earth, for humans to find, because they preferred to stay near the center of the universe, where there was plenty of energy for them to feed on and survive easily. Their bodies are very flimsy when it came to physical interaction. And Dustin had just attacked himself to the side of a ship that was about to warp through space.

The best he could compare the experience to, was a bug clinging to the windshield of a racing car. The energy whipping against his body was excruciatingly painful, and he found himself blacking out.

As he woke again, he found himself laying on the ground of a planet that looked strangely familiar.

With a soft groan, he pulled himself up to his knees and looked around. Trees blocked his vision, every where he looked. His hands were back to normal, human hands. A black beetle with long fuzzy antennae crawled over his hand, and he jerked back, shaking his hand free of it.

Scrambling to his feet, he looked back and forth as panic overcame him.

"It's not possible. There's no way!"

He stepped away from the tree that was swarming with the black beetles, and away from the edge of the water. Ripples attested to the hidden dangers, waiting for him to slip in the mud.

Glancing behind him, he saw the figure of a large creature, with six legs approaching him slowly. A tuft of hair that stood up, stiff along its spine, seemed to vibrate in excitement as the fur that covered the beast, changed to camouflage it.

"This place died," he whispered, turning to flee.

Tree branches whipped across his face as he fled the snarl that was right behind him. There was no way this place could be real, he thought, as he dodged away from a tree that he knew had a monster under its roots with vines that could kill with a simple touch.

Giant bats flew overhead, crying in voices he could feel more than hear, and then they scattered as a giant flying rug appeared, with a deep rumble that vibrated in his chest.

Sweating profusely, Dustin dived past a tree, blocking the flying rug, and causing the beast to crash into it. Leaving the cries behind him, he continued on, until he heard something else approaching him. A large turtle, taller than he stood, it looked at him with a knowledge in its eyes of what was going on, but he couldn't trust anything here.

Turning away from it, before it tried to charge him, he jogged until he came to a clearing that he remembered well. Several trees had fallen, creating a cave under their trunks. Someone had dug out the underside, and packed the dirt around the tree trunks to form walls.

"This can not be real," he murmured to himself. "Someone is in my head!"

Screaming the trees and the clearing around him wavered, and he found himself staring out of a glass tank, at several people.

"The subject seems to be different from every subject of this race, we have encountered. If they have evolved into an advanced race, we must study them, in order to better eliminated them."

The voice was vibrating in his head. He went to cling to his head and found that he was still in his space worm form.

'PED?'

"Obsolete program is nonfunctional, and you are an inferior species that will be destroyed as soon as experimentation is complete."