by Orion, W. J.
“Bastards,” her uncle grunted. “They’re hitting Shant for sure.”
“What do we do?”
“If we drive straight there, we’re gonna roll into them, and we’re not ready for a fair fight against a few crabs. If they have a crab tank, we’re done for.”
“Right, so….?”
“You said Trey has a set of armor he can use? To help level the playing field? He willing to fight for us?” Caleb asked, his manic driving still in full effect.
She dared death and let go of her grip on the handle and tool. Yasmine hefted Trey’s container up until it sat in her lap. His hundreds of tiny squids swam in concert, dancing about as she looked at him.
“If we bring you to that culvert, can you power up that… what’d you call it? A chassis?”
Again, he used his body to spell out a word.
YES
“If we do that, will you come to Shant and help us fight off these crabs?”
YES
“Can we defeat them? Will you fighting with us be enough?”
Trey’s little squids formed three periods and a question mark. As she looked at the uncertainty in his message, the three squids released tiny flashes of sequential blue light leading to the question mark. He didn’t know. The lights ticked like an old neon sign for a few seconds, then Trey’s bodies reformed into the amorphous school that was normal.
“Is it worth it? Is this a suicide mission?”
MAYBE
She sighed and looked at Caleb. He hadn’t slowed down and the vehicles following them at the breakneck speed kept up. They seemed so… strong. A big convoy of heavily armed men and women seemed powerful, and yet here they were, petrified of a fight against a few crabs.
ONE CHOICE
YAZ
“Yeah?”
A few letters at a time, the alien in her lap spelled out a series of sentences.
FOR 2 LONG MY KIND HAVE ROBBED AND KILLED OTHER SPECIES
THOSE SYMPATHETIC 2 THE VICTIMS WE’VE CREATED HAVE NOT FOUGHT BACK
ALL WE HAVE DONE IS GIVE WATER AND FOOD
DROPS IN A DESERT
IT IS NOT ENOUGH ANYMORE
A FLOOD IS NEEDED
JUST AS YOUR PEOPLE TOOK THEIR STAND 13 YEARS AGO…
TODAY I TAKE MINE
LIVE OR DIE
I WILL ALLOW NO MORE VICTIMS IF I CAN
I WILL HELP FREE THE OPPRESSED
BRING ME TO THE CHASSIS
“Did you read any of that?” Yasmine asked Caleb.
“I did. De Opresso Liber. Brave little squids,” her uncle said.
ty
I LEARNED FROM YAZ
“You’re welcome,” he said to Trey. “There’s a lot we can learn from her.”
“Trey, where will you come back if these squids are destroyed? Where is the rest of you? Where can we meet up with you?”
333
ALL HERE
“Wait, what?”
TREY = 333
I AM ALL HERE. IF I DIE, I DIE. NO 2ND CHANCES
“So that’s why you called yourself Trey. Wait… do you mean that if you die in this fight you’re gone for good? No second chance remainder of bodies in orbit for you to continue on? Are you serious?”
YES.
JUST LIKE U.
“Amen, little brother,” Caleb said. “No second chances. Welcome to team One Chance.”
After the single blast they witnessed, the crab vessel snaked its way through the sky until it was perhaps a mile from Shant. Like a monster it coiled its tentacles below it and landed on a gentle hilltop. It menaced the nearby settlement as the Monolith convoy blasted through the wasteland to the drainage culvert below the road.
They passed underneath the blasted ruins of the elevated highways, and the destroyed factories and warehouses until Yasmine realized they were close.
“Slow down. Head over there,” she said, gesturing towards the guard rail she knew was near the tunnel beneath the road. “Park right here. We’ll walk the rest of it. Might be trapped.”
“Smart,” her uncle said. He slowed the truck (and convoy behind him) then parked in the center of the road. “We have to move fast if we’re going to get to Shant in time to help. Lead the way, I’ll follow.”
Yaz was already out the door. She’d stuffed Trey into her backpack again and had her halligan in hand. The pistol (magazine filled with the bullets Trader Joe gave to her) was tucked in her pants pocket where she could draw it somewhat easily. She strode at almost a jog towards the side of the road with her uncle on her heels, but stopped when a familiar voice called out.
“Wait for me,” she said.
“Absolutely,” Yasmine said to Knox as she ran up to them. She carried her familiar pump shotgun across her punctured bulletproof vest, and wore the same eager grin Yasmine liked.
“I need to see this,” she said. “Where’s the alien?”
“Backpack,” Yaz answered. “The pipe is big enough for us to walk bent over in. Let me lead. Keep your eyes peeled. Lots of unfriendly things out here.”
Caleb and Knox nodded in agreement, and Yaz went over the guardrail. She made her way down to the rocky drainage culvert and towards the ruined steel mesh. As she approached in the heat of the late day she watched as several tiny meeks—lizards—darted inside.
“I hate lizards,” Knox said.
“Why? They’re delicious,” Yaz teased. Knox faked a dry heave.
Yasmine slipped through the gap in the wire and pulled out her mom’s phone. She tapped the flashlight on and illuminated the darkness ahead. Relieved, she saw the same T intersection. No enemy crabs, no rogue scavengers. To the right would be the crab chassis Trey needed.
Yasmine scampered forward, stepping on crunchy insect meeks as she went in the unsure rubble of the tunnel. She reached the turn and slowed. Her heart sped up.
She stepped around the corner as her uncle and Knox crunched and stumbled behind her. The alien, hulking white shell of a vehicle sat there, impotent and abandoned.
She shrugged off her backpack, dropped the halligan tool and her mom’s phone on the tunnel’s floor and opened the bag. She lifted Trey’s heavy container out and sat him down in the debris. Inside, his multitude of bodies swam in an excited swarm.
“What do I need to do?”
CHASSIS PECTORAL HATCH OPEN?
“There’s a hatch open on the belly.”
LIFT ME UP IN THAT HATCH
THEN STEP BACK
Yasmine dragged the heavy water-filled container underneath the inert alien machine. She crawled the same as when she’d been in the tunnel before, though it was easier; her back didn’t hurt from the injury she’d suffered at the school.
The injury she’d suffered at the hands—tentacles—of the monster that threatened Shant. Threatened Kim, and Owen, and Liam and Brent.
She rolled onto her back, holding Trey’s container so it rested on her chest when she finished.
“Holy mother of God,” her uncle said from nearby. “That’s a hen’s tooth right there. A four-leaf clover. I never thought I’d see one of these up close. At least not and live to talk about it. This is a weird one. Never seen anything like it. Sleeker.”
PROTOTYPE
“He says it’s a prototype,” Yasmine said with a grunt as she lifted Trey up into the recess above the hatch.
“Of course. Makes total sense. Crabs trying to make better crab weapons to kill us off with.”
SURVEY
“Trey says it’s for surveying.”
SCIENCE
“I don’t think he cares, Trey,” Yasmine said. “Besides, once you get this powered up, it’ll be for war. It does have weapons, right?”
The light in Trey’s container that emanated from him faded at her words. After a muted second, his bodies discharged more energy and flared back to life.
PEACE
“First thing’s first,” Yasmine said, and lifted his heavy cockpit until she felt it click into place. Through the translucent bottom of
his tank, she saw all of his 333 squid bodies illuminate brighter and brighter until she had to look away. Eyes averted, she rolled away.
As she got to her feet, Knox and her uncle backed away down the other direction, towards where the medicine had been stashed. She followed suit.
Beneath the crab chassis they heard a mechanical thunk as the hatch scissored shut.
It remained still. They waited.
“Trey?” Yasmine asked the inert suit of armor.
“Maybe he’s not powerful enough anymore,” Caleb offered. “It’s not like I had any crab food to give him. Hell, this was a waste of time.”
They waited another minute and nothing happened.
“We need to move,” Knox pleaded. “Those crabs have to be at the gates of Shant by now. People are gonna-“
“I’ll get the hatch open,” she interrupted. Yasmine stepped towards Trey’s multi-legged armor but stopped when it shuddered.
The white carapace raised and lowered on its six legs, testing the joints and weight of itself with practiced care. After a few seconds of that, the mass of biomechanical tentacles hanging from the chin of the creature came alive, flexing and wagging—slow at first, testing, then faster and further, bending and curling like the prehensile limbs they were. They stretched like a child waking up.
Then the cluster of glass eyes and sensors fired up with a flare of soft blue luminescence. Caleb and Knox flinched, raising their weapons out of instinct. Like Trey’s own energy the eyes were cool, and calm. They rotated in sockets, looking at the three humans in the tunnels with it, as well as its body. The creature inside the armor didn’t radiate menace to Yasmine, like the one in the school had.
A laser—a weak one, for marking, or sensing—shot a tiny beam from Trey’s face against the wall. It rapidly spelled out a message. Rather than Trey’s awkward squid-spelling, this was elaborate, fine in form and easily readable.
I’M READY. ASSUMING I CAN RIDE IN THE BACK OF THE BARON’S TRUCK.
“You’re gonna help us kill crabs?”
I’M GONNA HELP SAVE HUMAN LIVES. IF I HAVE TO KILL CRABS TO DO THAT, THEN SO BE IT. WON’T BE THE FIRST TIME, AND WITH ANY GOOD FORTUNE, IT WON’T BE THE LAST EITHER.
“Well you can drive the truck if that’s the case. Yasmine, lead us to the promised land, where it smells of gunpowder and where all the trees are burning,” her uncle said.
Yasmine sighed, gathered herself, and led her friends and family out of the tunnel towards their vehicles.
A fight awaited, and she was already late.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The Opening Salvos of War
“How many guns do we have?” Brent asked the gathering of Shant citizens in the subbasement of his apartment building. In the candlelight he could see a dozen, maybe two dozen huddled under pipes and crouched behind sandbags. They cried, clutched at each other, and prayed. This would be their Alamo.
“Couple hunting rifles, a shotgun, some pistols,” Dr. Sonneborn said as he racked the bolt on a rifle with a worn wooden stock. “We haven’t found any since the last time we counted them.”
“You’re fighting Doc?” Brent asked him as he slapped a magazine in his semi-automatic rifle and racked the bolt. “Do no harm?”
“The Hippocratic Oath doesn’t apply to invading extraterrestrials, Brent,” the doctor said back to him. “Just get me to some high ground and let me shoot its eyes out.”
“That’s never worked before.”
“You’ve never tried it with my laser guided doctor precision.”
“You’re a dentist,” Brent corrected.
“Still a doctor. A doctor you trust with the health of your children, I might add,” Sonneborn said and laughed. The sound of the two men’s exchange lightened the spirits in the dreary, frightened room a tiny bit. Some of the crying abated.
“Doesn’t matter. We’re not leaving this basement.”
“Damn right you’re not,” Kim said. “Seven guns isn’t enough to kill one of those aliens, and who knows how many of them are up there right now?” She pointed at the ceiling, and settlement above. “Hide, protect the children. We’ve lost enough people just getting into the shelter. We can’t afford to lose anyone else.”
“And pray the Baron meant it when he said his people hunted crabs.”
“Do you think they’re coming?” one of the younger Shant citizens asked from nearby.
“I think we’d best start praying for them,” Brent said and took cover behind a wall of sandbags near his wife and children. He aimed his weapon at the steel door that protected them from the surface, and the terrors that stalked the streets of Shant.
Something heavy pounded the ground just a few feet above their heads.
The image of a dusty white crab riding in the bed of a now-dusty cherry red, jacked up pickup truck was one the people of Earth had never seen before. These two species—foes since their first meeting—finding common ground—however tenuous—was one that inspired hope in the people of the rampaging convoy of Monoliths.
Trey’s forward arms grasped at the black steel pipes and the halogen lights on the pickup bed. He hunched down to place his face near the open glass window to the pickup’s passenger cabin. Yasmine sat in the passenger seat and the Baron drove like a crazy person.
Trey used his mapping laser to write flickering messages on the dashboard.
There will be three more if he brought his assault team.
“We’ve only fought three once. Never four. When we attacked you and your friends,” Caleb said. “Sorry about that.”
I understand. Apology accepted.
“Is there a trick, or strategy we can use?” Yasmine asked him. “Is there a vulnerability we can exploit?”
What worked for you in the school?
Yasmine debated the merits of her memory and shrugged. “I ran away. Ducked, made it to the stairs and ran up as fast as I could. I was more mobile, I guess. Agile up close. It couldn’t pursue fast enough and I was able to get the loose stairs to fall. Maybe we can climb up? Are they bad at climbing?”
Opposite. The chassis system climbs well in your low gravity.
“So help us, Trey,” Caleb said as they took a sharp turn around several piled up, destroyed vehicles.
We are submariners in these suits. Fish in tanks, as my new friend the Baron says. We are limited to what the suit allows us to do on land.
“Okay,” Yaz said.
In open water, we have eyes to see, rudimentary sonar, touch, taste, smell, and can sense electromagnetic fields.
Inside the chassis we sense only what the suit passes along.
“I get it,” Yasmine said.
“What?” her uncle asked.
“Hinder the suit and we blind them. Somehow destroy their ability to see or sense us, right, Trey?”
Yes. My suit can interfere with their communications, so they’ll be unable to coordinate or use their non-visual sensing systems. They’ll be reliant on their forward facing eyes only. Unless we turn, we cannot sense well to our rear.
“But you guys bottle up in a fair fight. That front sensor array just above your tentacles closes,” Caleb said. “Seen it a dozen times. Makes our guns useless.”
Because we can switch to electromagnetic senses. If I can get to high ground, I will stop that and attack from above. They will have to fight open-faced. Vulnerable.
“Do we have any way to blind them or gum up their sensors? Cans of paint are long since dried out,” he said.
“We do,” Yasmine said, her memory serving her. “If we can get to the clinic, there’s a case of old spray paint that I think will work. We found it in the stash Trey led me to…”
As your people say, Bingo.
“We’re gonna get close enough to spray them in the face with spray paint? That’s our plan?” her uncle said, laughing. “Tough luck finding volunteers for that suicide mission.”
“I’ll do it,” Yasmine said. “I’m fast enough. If you distract them, I’ll blind th
em.”
“What? No. Uh-uh,” her uncle said.
“I do what others can’t,” she said. “I go where others won’t. That’s how I’ve stayed alive this long. That’s how I’ve helped other people.”
“This is too dangerous,” he said.
“Maybe for me alone. But this time, I have family with me.” She looked at her uncle, then at Trey in his vehicle over her shoulder.
Caleb tried to disagree, but couldn’t.
Motivational, isn’t she?
“You can say that again.”
Motivational, isn’t she?
The Monoliths coordinated a simple plan over the radio as they drove towards the eastern gate of Shant. The truck bounced up and down on the road that hadn’t been maintained in over a decade.
Brace yourself. Cover your ears.
Trey raised up in his chassis and leaned forward over the cab of the Baron’s big red truck. The tip of his tentacle energy weapon flared up bright blue, then set free a blinding, deafening bolt at the still-shut metal blockade.
The blast scored a hole the size of a sewer lid straight through the welded monstrosity that the people of Shant labored for a year to make. The two doors swung inward from the force of the energy hitting it, and as the red truck passed through the opening, Yasmine saw the cherry-hot drops of melted metal hitting the sandy ground. They sizzled, and caught dry debris on fire.
“Holy guacamole,” Caleb said. “I can’t get over that.”
Mining laser, basically, Trey wrote on the dashboard with a notably less powerful beam of light. Takes a long time to charge, but annihilates anything I hit with it.
“Roger that,” Caleb said as they bombed down the street past the house with the porch Shant had given the Monoliths.
“Take a right at the next stop sign,” Yasmine instructed. “Clinic is at the end of the street, opposite the old park.”
“I’m gonna smash the front door in and back out. Then we go in together.”