THE TITAN EXPERIMENT

CHAPTER 24 - Assembly of Key Assets (Phoenix)

The sense of smell returned to Phoenix with a vengeance, a sharp odor searing his sinuses like he had inhaled a ton of wasabi from a sushi joint. His nostrils and throat burned, which aroused more of his senses. His head felt detached from his body, floating in zero gravity. And his skull tingled, and a dull pain throbbed behind his eyes like a growing pressure that wanted to escape. Even more disturbing, he couldn't see because a black void surrounded him, an impenetrable darkness. He wasn't wearing a spacesuit, at least not that he could tell, and his face didn't feel like it was about to freeze and crack like a block of ice in the vacuum of space. There were no stars. No planets. Only his conscious mind, and that pain in his head that wanted to vent through his eyeballs.

As time crept by, the blood in the tiny vessels in his face rushed toward his scalp. Was he upside down? His shoulders and arms came into play, hanging and jostling in the air. His legs and feet dangled too. It was like someone had draped his body over a moving concrete wall or barricade, which made little sense. Somewhere below him, an object or objects clopped along, rising and falling, pounding into a loose and gritty material, reminding him of a mixture of gravel and sand.

Wait. Those sensations could only happen in gravity, not in a vacuum. Where in the universe am I?

Phoenix opened his eyes.

Dark, intersecting lines crossed his vision for a millisecond before he winced and closed them.

Disoriented, he didn't know which way was up or down, or sideways.

In that moment, the mounting pressure forced its way out through the slits in his eyelids, but that minor relief helped little at all, and it didn't give him a frame of reference to calculate his whereabouts. The throbbing intensified, building into a sharp stabbing pain that spider webbed out across his forehead. He tried to shake it away, but the vibrations rattled his brain. The entire head in an oblivion was irritating and disorienting.

His cheek bounced off something as hard as a rock. Phoenix opened his eyes again. His head had collided with the back of one of those dark-clad soldiers, his body carried over a shoulder like a sack of dog food. His gaze shuddered and shifted, revealing a foot trail of sand, small rocks, sparse grass and weeds. The man's shoulder blade pressed into Phoenix's chest like a piece of steel. Nothing about this guy was soft.

Phoenix's chin struck the man's hardened back muscle. "Could you ease up a bit, buddy?"

"Commander Drake is conscious," a voice said with deep resonation. "What should we do?"

The question came from one of the other soldiers, the one carrying Ariel's curved form slumped over a shoulder, a hand on her backside. Hiked up high on her thighs, her skirt revealed a pair of slender legs. Normally, the sight of a pleasant set of female legs would stir up a wave of inordinate desire inside Phoenix. But the sight provoked another reaction... a rumbling caldron of nausea in the pit of his stomach. As great as Ariel's legs were, the view only made him think of Nova's missing limb.

Phoenix turned away and cast his gaze to the ground.

"Our orders are to stow them on the plane and stand guard during the flight," the dark figure replied, the one carrying Phoenix. "It doesn't matter if the subjects are awake. That does not violate our orders."

With the pain in his head subsiding as they continued on, Phoenix focused on the uneasiness in his stomach. And staring down at the ground was not helping. He raised his chin up as much as he could from the guy's shoulder blade and craned his neck for a view of the retreating scenery behind him. In the dark, a bank of exterior lights illuminated an air traffic control tower and a pair of one-story structures with flat roofs. So, they were at a secluded airfield, headed who knows where. The destination didn't matter because Phoenix knew they were going wherever the soldiers went. Why they were abducting them was the most important question? He didn't bother asking because he knew they wouldn't answer him, but at least he could take solace that they were still alive.