Ten? That certainly wasn’t the army we had expected.
But I recognized the military person who had spoken first, an older man with goldenish skin and grey eyes, and the suited woman with blazing red hair and a piercing, black gaze. The rest all seemed to be security folk who were armed to the absolute teeth with guns I didn’t recognize.
“Ah, greetings,” the woman said with a nod. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”
“Is it?” Gonzales asked from behind me, causing me to jump. I had been so concentrated on the ships descending that I hadn’t even noticed that she had arrived.
“Enough,” Mimi whispered before addressing the woman. She offered her hand in a shake, which the woman took. “Thank you for coming.”
“Of course. I realize that you all are going out on quite the limb by inviting us here, but I assure you we are here to make amends, not sow more discord.” The woman put on a winning smile, and I was beginning to see why she had been elected by her district. “I’m Councilwoman Eva Delicato. You can call me Eva for short. I have a list here of all the supplies we brought.”
One of the guards handed her a datalog that she immediately passed to Mimi. I looked over her shoulder and my eyes bulged at the detail.
Five fully functioning, tested warships.
Four hundred fighters of most current, fully tested models.
One hundred long distance munitions
Six hundred standard combat munitions
Explosives
Fifty Engineers
Fifty accredited pilots
Ten strategists.
Five sub-commanders
Nutritional supplies for a year
Two Earth Gov members
“Thank you,” Mimi murmured, looking it over. There was a further breakdown as she clicked on one of the tabs, and it started listing the exact specs of one of the many guns they had brought. She tucked it under her arm, and I had to resist the urge to whistle. “This is assuring.”
“We want you to know how serious we are about this,” Eva continued. “There will be more coming, of course, but these are what we could amass immediately.” She looked around. “I take it the, uh, other third of our unholy trio have yet to arrive?”
“We thought it better that we stagger your entrances,” Mimi said. “Allows us to adapt and allocate more efficiently.”
“Yes, that makes sense. So tell us where you’ll have us, and we’ll get to it. I’m sure your mimics need some practice flying in our fighters. I believe in your report you said you had a few?”
“Very few,” Mimi said, gesturing for the woman to follow her. I could tell we were heading for what had once been the makeshift school that we had built but now was just the rubbly center of our barely rebuilt town. “And of a significantly older model.”
“Yes, I believe you seized a research station and took theirs?”
“That would be correct.”
“At least it was nonviolent,” the military man said, his first words since he had stepped foot on the planet. I got the idea that he was observing his surroundings, observing us, and seeing just how much of a threat we were.
We strolled to the burnt-out remnants of our school and if there was any doubt in these people’s minds that we were telling the truth about the ransacking of our home, it visibly faded from their eyes as they took in all the damage.
Granted, their shock at the decimation around us fled from their face as they spotted a group of small mimics scuttling towards some of the foot storage at the very edge of our commune. Although they had seen plenty of footage of Mimi and our exploits, it was probably still jarring to just see a herd of aliens roaming about. It was one thing to know that shapeshifters existed, it was another to see several of them rushing along the ground, onyx, spikey skin glistening in the sun.
“Those are your versions of babies, yes?” the military man asked.
Mimi regarded him, and I could tell that she was doing that analyzing thing she did whenever she was learning something very quickly. What kind of information was she gleaning from him? I wasn’t sure, but I would have to ask her later.
“We are still learning about our people. When the Harvester ship crashed here and subsequently wiped out all of the adults, they also erased much of our history. Technically, we don’t know how we reproduce or most of our life cycle.”
“What?” Eva asked, shooting us a skeptical look. “You lot have been up to quite a lot. Are you telling me no little ones have accidentally popped up since then?”
Mimi shook her head. “No. Many of us have reached sentient status, but there have been no births. Or egg laying. Or osmosis. Or any of the many reproductive processes that happen on your planet and others. There’s just us.”
“Huh. That’s a bit interesting, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps. But that is a mystery we can address once the Harvesters are defeated. Now, shall we discuss the allocation of everything you have brought as well as strategies?”
“By all means,” Eva said. “As soon as we give the order, our men will begin disembarking with all of the supplies.”
It was a bit strange to stand there and discuss such important military details and the gravity of the situation. I felt like these situations normally took place in a ship’s meeting room, or our own main house when that had been a thing. Instead, we were just standing in a loose circle surrounded by the rubble of what once was.
Well, it wasn’t like we could build a meeting room now. Considering everything that was going on, that was the last thing on our minds.
There was so much to do and so very little time.
5
Long-Term Confession
Wind whipped past my hair with a weird sense of déjà vu as two more massive ships descended through the cloud cover. It had been three days since Earth Gov had arrived, and they were still settling in.
The strategists had been the first to assemble, gathering in the ruins of our main house and immediately discussing the best things to do to whittle down the numbers of Harvester ships coming to take us down. I didn’t contribute much to those conversations, but they discussed everything from minefields to a forcefield to a line of floating cannons. All complicated and all with so many ways to go wrong, most of the technical talk went way over my head.
The engineers were doing what they could to repair our main base, cannons, and shielding. While they waited for newer orders from the strategists, the soldiers and military personnel took inventory of the defenses and capabilities we already had.
I also noted that there were some staff that hadn’t been listed on the datalog handed to Mimi. There were at least fifty maintenance workers across the ships and it seemed as many mechanics. That would certainly do us good since the engineers were much too busy working on reestablishing our defenses rather than repairing or upkeeping the many ships.
Certainly concerning if the military folks decided to band together and overthrow us, but I was beginning to think they wouldn’t.
Not that I trusted them. Oh, not at all. After I getting burned once, I rarely ever forget. But even though they had an impressive amount of supplies, they didn’t really have enough to contain all of the mimics at once. They wouldn’t have the drop on us or the power level that the Harvesters had.
But still, I was glad that the revolutionists were finally arriving. These people I could trust, even if I didn’t completely remember them. But there was one person in particular I was looking forward to seeing...
The ship landed, and its ramp slammed down, causing an unreasonable cloud of dust to rise up. Clearly, they hadn’t taken the time to recalibrate the opening mechanisms in their time on Earth. Technically, they needed to be evaluated every month they were exposed to natural forces such as wind, rain, and salt, and not the vacuum of space. They really should have—
Something smacked my thigh, hard. “Ay there, my boy! You look like you’re thinking deep thoughts!”
I looked down to see Aja staring at me, a b
road grin across her face.
“Just about general maintenance.”
“Hah! That’s my lad!” She clapped my thigh again. “Good to know that even with all of this going on that you still have your head right on your shoulders. Let me guess… It’s that they ain’t been upkeeping with the peripherals of the ship, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “The ramp. It’s making the wrong sounds.”
“Right, right, we were in a bit of a swampy area back at home. About the only place their sensors couldn’t find their own ship.”
“What? I thought you made a parts scrubber. That’s the whole way we were even able to land on Earth. That’s why we saved you from the gangsters you wound up with.”
“Speaking of which,” Gonzales said, bounding up. “How are you doing with that whole gambling thing?”
“Ay, you’re much too young and I’m far too old for you to try to mother me.”
Gonzales shuddered. “Ew. Don’t say the m-word around me.”
“Hah! A girl after my own heart.”
“That I am,” Gonzales said, patting her back a few times. “And because of that, you’ll do me a favor and give me some time alone with our boy here, right?”
Aja looked up to her suspiciously. “Uh, forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t he with the more alieny one—”
“Not like that, Aja.”
“But I’m sure I’ve seen ya moonin’—”
“Hey, Aja!” Ciangi cried, also bounding up. “You haven’t met the baby yet! You should come with me!”
“Ew, baby? Why would I want to see that?”
But Ciangi had a firm grip on the woman and was already leading her away, their heights nearly the same. I thought I saw her look back and wink at Gonzales.
“What do you need?” I asked, looking to the weapons engineer.
“Not here,” Gonzales said, wrapping her arm through mine. “How about we take a walk? Maybe to where the animals used to be?”
“You sure?” I asked. Almost all of them had escaped in the massive amount of damage that had befallen our little commune. They were just an empty example of one of the many ways our preparations had all been for nothing.
But we wouldn’t let that happen again. This wasn’t just defending our turf, this was wiping out a menace that had been committing genocide, medical torture, and slavery for eons. This was making a declarative statement that not only were we a people, but we were a force to be reckoned with.
Or we would all die.
While I was musing on the cyclical nature of our issues, we ended up reaching the abandoned animal enclosures. I looked around, surprised at how much time I had lost. I hadn’t done that in a long while. Perhaps it was the stress?
“So…” Gonzales said, unlooping her arm from mine.
“So,” I repeated, then waited for her to continue. I had no idea what she could want that she would need to speak to me specifically about. I wasn’t one of the lead engineers like Ciangi or Bahn. I wasn’t our leader like Mimi. I didn’t even handle the hand-to-hand fighting like Eske. I was the spare. I helped everyone but ran nothing.
I would think that maybe she just wanted to talk about things like we used to, confide our worries to each other or share jokes, but we hadn’t done that for quite a while. Although things had certainly gotten better since her disappearance, they certainly weren’t to the way they were before… Well, before I had ruined everything without quite understanding how.
She laughed. “Hah! Classic Higgens.”
But I kept quiet, sensing that part of her was just looking for a way to weasel out of whatever it was that she had brought me here for. I may have had a pretty hard time understanding most humans, but I was beginning to understand my friends.
It had taken me long enough.
She laughed a bit more, then that faded to uncomfortability and she just stood there for a bit, walking back and forth.
I watched her walk to and fro, looking the most insecure that I had ever seen her. Even when she was scared out of her mind, even when she was being tortured by Lazer, there had been this spirit of assurance to her. A sort of certainty that I always admired but didn’t think I could ever have myself.
It was strange, watching her walk back and forth was a lot like watching a mirror when I was in one of my moods. I knew I often needed time to calm down and get my mind right, so I just let her stalk about until finally she looked at me with an expression that was half-wry, half-pained. How did she do that? Emotions were often so difficult to communicate and there she was with two of them on at the same time.
“Did you ever know that I was in love with you?”
Wait.
What?
I stared at her, knowing my eyes were huge and unblinking, causing her to let out a much drier chuckle.
“I thought as much.” She let out a sigh and plopped onto a pile of broken barrier posts. “You never had a clue.”
“But you didn’t—” I sputtered, feeling like someone had just put an ionic wand into my brain. “You never— When did you—” Nothing seemed to make it out intact as my mind spun in about a million different directions.
Gonzales was in love with me?
That was impossible. She was a beautiful, impossibly strong, impossibly smart weapons engineer who I had personally seen shoot down many a hopeful suitor back on the mining ship. She was the woman that looked terror in the face and told it to take a hike, then stole its gun and rewired all of it to her own liking. She was lightning in human form and one of my only friends.
“Easy there, bucko. Don’t hyperventilate. I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’ve had to deal with someone having a crush on you.” She glanced to me and seemed to think differently after seeing my expression. “Oh. Or is it?”
I nodded, and she shook her head, laughing once more and still just as acerbic. “Oy. Trust me to fall in love with possibly the only guy I knew who would never get it.” She squinted at me, as if thinking, but my mind was still trying to fit puzzle pieces together that just didn’t seem to be possible.
“I didn’t mean to, ya know. When I first met you, I thought you were one of those weird, creepy guys who didn’t know how to act in front of women but would secretly go home and plot how to dismember them.” That shook me out of my feedback loop of thought and I shot her a mildly offended expression. Did I really come off that way?
“Sorry,” Gonzales murmured, blushing a bit. “But after coming up where I did and then going through everything I needed to become a weapons engineer, I’d learned it was better to think the worst of people and have them correct you over time rather than give someone your trust who doesn’t deserve it.
“Besides, I definitely learned that you weren’t like that at all. You were sweet. And funny. You were awkward, of course, and sometimes you didn’t get my jokes, but I could overlook that.
“And then, of all the people in the known universe, you were the one to make first contact. When I found that out, and when I saw that you stood up to our butt of a captain, I realized there might be a bit more to you than meets the eye. I remember standing there with the coin twins, deciding what we were going to do, and I realized that you just might be a real friend. Something I’d only had three of in my whole life up until that point.”
Now I was the one pacing, listening to her spin her story with a nostalgic, wistful sort of tone. The rational part of my mind was telling me that her explaining what happened was probably cathartic for her. Maybe it was giving her a resolution that she had been seeking for a while. But it was actively shifting my entire world view, making me look back at my old memories in a new light. How much else had I missed? Had I led her on? Had I been cruel?
Now that I thought about it, everyone else seemed to have known. Suddenly all the strange things that people had been saying to me made sense, and I didn’t like that at all.
“You took me on adventures that finally made me feel something. All my life, I’d had this craving to do great things, impo
rtant things, and I had never measured up. But with you, we did everything from discover other planet systems, to new life, to help Mimi discover her entire people.
“But that whole time, you never once became conceited, or even seemed to realize just how amazing everything you did was. Sure, you changed a bit, you grew, but you were always the kind, caring guy who just wanted everyone to be safe and happy.
“And that was right about when I realized that I may have had feelings for you, and that you were definitely starry-eyed for an alien and only her. I didn’t know if it was because the two of you got each other in a way I never would, or if it was because she could be whatever you wanted her to be, or if she just had the luck of realizing exactly what a catch you were before I did, but for whatever reason, I tried to shove those feelings down, down, down until not even my dreams could pull them up.”
The hints of pain in her voice made me look at her and finally stop pacing. “I’m sorry,” I murmured. Ugh, how could I have been such a fool?
“You have nothing to be sorry for. You didn’t do anything wrong. That would have made the whole thing easier.” She leaned her chin in her hand and looked me over. “Even when we were on Earth, completely separated from Mimi, I could tell how unhappy you were. And honestly, that stung me. So, I traveled more than you guys, signed onto more gigs, until eventually I caught onto some things I shouldn’t have and we all know how that story goes.”
Ah yes, she was taken by the coup three months before us. It still made my stomach twist to think about everything that she had endured at their hands. At Lazer’s hands.
“I only held on all that time because of sheer stubbornness. I wasn’t going to let some ass with a weird fixation on me destroy all the surviving I had done up to that point. But towards the end, it was hard. I wondered why you guys hadn’t come for me. I feared that you’d forgotten me.”
I felt a pang of guilt at that. We had gone a terribly long time without figuring out what was going on and that she had been taken. In fact, if we hadn’t been taken ourselves, I wondered if we ever would have noticed. The thought was crushing and certainly didn’t make me feel like someone deserving of love and affection.
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