Shockwaves bucked our craft as we punched ever higher. My fighter shook with rising intensity, battling the waves and the g-forces trying to tear it apart.
Irina's pod shivered and spun, then fell away.
My mind swirled with sudden grief. Going back for her would be certain death.
But I was seized by the impulse to try.
The last time she'd truly seemed to love me had been almost a century ago. Since then, she'd used and abused me, betrayed and undermined me, fought and killed me again and again. How could I still feel any love for her?
Or was that what love was about? Pain, upheaval, destruction, the end of the world?
I cut the fighter's acceleration and scanned the skies below me. I made ready to dive down and retrieve her...or accompany her into annihilation.
My scanners were all static. That meant at least one of the warships' fusion drives had ruptured. The Indian Ocean had become ground zero of a nuclear detonation.
But I had to go back for her.
Steeling myself, I toggled controls, ready to swing the fighter around. Ready for anything.
And that was when her glittering crystalline pod came streaking up past me like a shooting star in reverse.
*****
When we'd reached a safe altitude, we stopped climbing. We hung in the stratosphere and looked down at the distant ocean, watching the devastation as it spread.
The battle itself had been cloaked from human technology, unseen by the world, but its effects would be felt by millions. When the warships sank and the fusion drives erupted, the ocean floor heaved from the force of the blast. A monstrous quake wrenched the crust of the Earth, slamming out colossal waves in all directions.
As we watched like satellites from far above, a monumental tsunami crashed down over islands and coastlines, obliterating anything in its path. Snuffing out hundreds of thousands of lives in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, India.
We opened a radio channel between our craft, but neither of us said a word for a long time. We just watched as destruction swept that part of the world, destruction that we had helped bring about.
"I only wanted to help," said Irina. "I thought I was doing the right thing."
I didn't say a word. Far below, another tsunami was surging up from the sea, lashing toward shores that had already been laid waste by the first brutal onslaught.
"I wanted to free our people," said Irina. "I wanted to end the oppression of communist totalitarianism."
Still, I said nothing. I wondered how the people in the path of the cataclysm felt, gazing up in horror at the sky-high mountain of water hurtling toward them. Would they care which ideology had done the most to set that mountain in motion? Would any of them agree that the sacrifice would be worth it?
"I'm finished," said Irina. "All my efforts have brought nothing but death and disaster wherever I've gone." She sighed. "No more."
Yet another tsunami cut loose in the Indian Ocean. More people died screaming thousands of feet below us.
"Maybe I should just let myself fall," said Irina. "Drop down in the middle of that nightmare and die. I deserve it."
Finally, I spoke. "Shut up, Irina."
I saw her gape at me from her crystalline escape pod. All six of her multifaceted eyes--two silver, four gold--fixed on me in shocked amazement.
"I've been thinking," I told her. "And I've realized something. I couldn't see it before, because I loved you, but now I see it."
"Because you don't love me anymore?" said Irina.
The sun shone through her green and purple clusters of crystals, glittering within the intricate web of facets. Her fiery parasites zipped around her like schools of flaming fish, weaving in and out of her vent slits.
The sunlight and firelight danced when she moved, and I felt again the way I'd felt so long ago, watching her during the pre-mission briefings in the auditorium on our homeworld. For better and worse, it had been the one constant in my life.
Even now, after everything. Even now.
"I will always love you," I told her.
She gave me a look I couldn't fathom. "What did you realize?"
"You need me. You always have," I said. "And the galaxy needs a new Lenin."
*****
Five years later, I'm on the terrace of a villa in the heart of the Colombian jungle, sitting across from a fellow extraterrestrial who looks like Senator Joseph McCarthy. He's killed twelve of my men, whose bodies still smolder in the hot sun around us, and now he wants to know where Irina is.
The truth, which I'm not about to tell him, is that I don't know exactly where she is at this moment...but I do know she's on her way.
I down another swig of vodka and look at McCarthy through the cut crystal bottle. He's still so blind, so backward, so limited by his all-consuming sociopolitical ideology. I feel like I'm watching a primitive lifeform as it struggles in the mud, wholly unable to comprehend the full potential of the complex landscape around it.
"Where is she, Lenin?" McCarthy's voice is a snarl. "Where's your commie she-devil mistress?"
"She's not a communist anymore," I tell him. "And she's not my mistress. Keep up, Joe."
With an angry roar, McCarthy flips over the glass table, which shatters on the cobblestone terrace. I barely manage to save the vodka bottle, which I was just about to set down on the table's blue-tinted surface.
"No more beating around the bush!" McCarthy springs from his rattan chair and swats the bottle from my grip. It smashes to bits against a wrought iron light post. "You'll beg to tell me by the time I'm done with you!"
I smile as McCarthy lunges forward and wraps his thick hands around my throat. "Wait! I'm prepared to make you an offer!"
He lets up the pressure but doesn't let go. "That was fast." He shrugs. "I would've guessed you had more tolerance for torture, you pinko bastard."
"Join us." I lock eyes with McCarthy, trying to draw him in with sheer force of will. "Forget capitalism. Forget communism. Forget all that."
"A new sales pitch." McCarthy sneers. "How original."
"Help us end the wars on Earth and the war in space," I tell him. "Help us move beyond the hidebound systems of the past. Help us spread a revolutionary new philosophy conceived by a radical new Lenin."
"Would this new Lenin happen to be you, comrade?" says McCarthy.
When I look over his shoulder, I smile. "And her." My makeshift heart beats faster. She has arrived not a moment too soon, machete in hand.
The love of my life. My guiding light in smooth times and rough. My true partner now, reborn after the battle of the Indian Ocean tsunami, committed to a life of change from a new point of view.
McCarthy starts to turn. Irina draws back and swings the machete, lopping off his head with the graceful elegance of a ballerina.
I leap from my chair and sweep her into my arms. The machete clatters to the cobblestones as we kiss. As the two halves of the new Lenin bind themselves one to the other once more.
This is the formula that eluded her for so long, the one that was staring her in the face from the start. Again and again, she turned me away, when what she should have done was embrace me. Accept me as an equal and consult me for balance. Go forth driven by love instead of self-righteousness.
Now see what revolution has hatched from this union. We bear a new gospel born not of conflict, but compassion: harmony among peoples by way of shapeshifting. Empathic metamorphosis. Truly love your neighbor as yourself by becoming your neighbor. Literally walk a mile in his shoes...and feet, and body, and life.
Yes, human beings can learn this, and we've been teaching it for the past five years. Using shapeshifting as a bridge to understanding instead of a weapon. It's really gone viral, and the movement's about to reach critical mass. Next stop, we take the show back home and end the galactic civil war.
All because of one simple secret it took us a century to figure out.
"Welcome home, darling." Smiling, I touch the side of her face. I run my f
ingers through her soft red hair.
"I love you." Irina says it with tears in her eyes.
The secret is this: We are nothing without each other.
About the Author
Robert Jeschonek is an award-winning author whose fiction, comics, essays, articles, nonfiction, and poetry have been published around the world. His work has appeared in publications including Galaxy’s Edge, Escape Pod, Fiction River, Postscripts, and StarShip Sofa. He has written official Star Trek and Doctor Who fiction, as well as comics for DC Comics and others. Robert has won an International Book Award, a Scribe Award for Best Original Novel from the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, and grand prize in Pocket Books' nationwide Strange New Worlds contest. Visit him online at www.thefictioneer.com. You can also find him on Facebook and follow him as @TheFictioneer on Twitter.
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Chapter 1
Corporal Solomon Scott held his gray-plated Mark VI Battlenaut armor perfectly still in the thick white mist. Around him lay the broken armor of two opponents, dead pilots who'd fought to the last for the cause of the Rightful rebels. Scott had killed them both just moments ago in a firefight that had left his own armor damaged.
Unfortunately, the larger battle going on around him was nowhere near finished. According to comm traffic and the telemetry displayed on the visor of his helmet, dozens of Battlenauts were still smashing the hell out of each other in all directions. The battle for the Commonwealth outpost on planetoid Chelong III was still raging, the outcome up in the air.
But the big picture wasn't the main thing on Scott's mind at the moment. He was more concerned about where the next attack on his own armor would come from and how he'd survive it with a breach in his belly plating.
Tapping buttons on the left armrest keypad, he switched views on the visor, superimposing the telemetry data over feeds from the onboard cameras. As far as he could tell, there was nothing nearby...but the mists of Chelong swirled with crystalline particles that played tricks on sensors as well as eyes.
As he stared at the feed from his aft cameras, the smell of sweat and metal in the cockpit grew sharper, and the hairs on his neck stood up straight. He thought he glimpsed a flicker of movement and gripped the stick tight, ready to fire his rear-mounted guns.
But nothing bounded out of the mist back there, and he didn't shoot. No problem; he was good at keeping a cool head.
Not that anything else in the cockpit of his Mark VI was cool at that point. One of the topside cooling vents had taken a hit, and the whole rig was overheating like crazy. Sweat ran down his sides and soaked every part of him. At least the padded halo mount inside his helmet kept the sweat from running into his eyes and burning the crap out of them.
He was flipping between camera views again when Captain Rollins got on the horn. "Echo Charlie Bravo!" The man's gravelly voice burst from the comm speaker. "Stop standing around, Scott! Dewar and Shen need backup! I just flashed you the stats!"
As promised, Dewar and Shen's telemetry appeared on the visor. They were thirty meters to the right, both taking heavy hits...but from what? It didn't look like there was anyone else in their immediate vicinity. Was the mist screwing with their sensors?
Damnit, Scott," snapped Rollins. "Get your ass moving!"
Suddenly, something caught his eye on the feed from the rightside camera. He played the armrest keypad, clearing the telemetry data from the visor screen and punching the rightside feed to maximum magnification. "Stand by, sir." He saw nothing...nothing...
Then something. A glint, a spark, a flicker in the fog.
"The hell with stand by!" Rollins' voice became a roar. "Shen just went down!"
Scott brought the telemetry back up and saw Shen's specs crashing hard. She was alive, but her armor was fried.
And whatever had fried it was out there somewhere in a rightside direction, exactly where Scott had seen the glint.
Rollins was still roaring over the comm, but Scott blocked him out. His neck hairs were still up, his gut was twisting; telemetry said nothing was out there, but his instincts told him otherwise.
Jaws clenched, he ran spectral overlays on the feed, scanning the full range of infrared and ultraviolet frequencies. Still nothing.
He cut his audio mic so he could talk to himself. "Come on, you piece of oosh. I know you're out there."
Scott threw all five feeds on-visor at once--rightside, leftside, frontside, backside, topside--and hit them all with the spectral overlays. Still, he saw no telltale signs of an enemy Battlenaut in any direction.
His instincts were usually good, but maybe they were off this one time. He'd been in battle before; even without actual fog, things could get confusing in the thick of it.
Just then, something Rollins was shouting broke through. "Dewar is down! Get over there now, you son of a..."
Grabbing the stick, Scott brought his Battlenaut back to life. He was just about to turn it toward Shen and Dewar when he spotted a blip on the radar. It only lasted a split-second, but it was enough to jolt him into action.
The monitors tracking his vital signs pinged faster across the board. The radar blip had appeared not to the right of him, but the left.
Whatever was coming, whatever had taken out Shen and Dewar, it had managed to circle around him.
Instead of turning right, Scott swung his Battlenaut left. At the same time, he played the armrest keypad, jumping all weapons out of standby mode.
That was when he saw the Red Battlenaut for the first time.
It burst out of the mist with guns blazing, marching straight toward him. It was bigger than his own Battlenaut armor--twelve meters tall compared to ten for the Mark VI--with skin that gleamed bright red from tip to toe. And there wasn't a mark on it that Scott could see.
Without thought or hesitation, Scott opened fire with his main guns. At the same time, he threw a half-dozen missiles at the Red. He needed to hit it hard and fast, not give it a chance to get at his damaged belly plating.
Slugs from the Red's guns peppered the Mark VI, pocking the shielding over the cockpit. His own missiles hit the Red's chest in a cluster, exploding with shuddering force.
But they didn't slow it down or leave a scratch.
"What the flux?" Scott opened up with his lasers and sonics at the same time, focusing on what he hoped was a weak spot--the backward-flexing knee joint of one leg. The armor narrowed there and lacked any visible shield plating.
Unfortunately, that didn't mean it was any weaker. The searing crimson beam from Scott's laser tagged the joint, accompanied by waves of oscillating vibratory force...but the Red didn't slow down a bit.
Scott clenched his teeth and stepped his Battlenaut back, then leaped forward, propelling his armor's shoulder toward the Red.
He was met by a shower of heavy slugs thudding into his plating, but they didn't stop him. His Mark VI covered the distance in seconds and slammed into the Red with its full weight and momentum.
Collision alarms wailed, and damage reports flashed on his visor. His
vital signs spiked, and his head swam from the powerful impact. It had been a hell of a hit.
And apparently, it hadn't done any damage. The Red stood firmly in place; according to Scott's sensors, its armor hadn't buckled or ruptured in the slightest.
But that wasn't the worst of it. As Scott tried to push his Battlenaut back, he quickly realized it was stuck. He couldn't break away from the Red.
*****
What happens next? Find out in Battlenaut Crucible, now on sale for your favorite e-reading device or app!
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