Final Days: Escape

by Jasper T. Scott

  The reverend made a move to follow them. “You won’t shoot me,” she said, but she didn’t sound quite certain about that.

  The two aliens at the foot of the ramp gestured vehemently at her, and one of them said something in a watery voice. Andrew was still wearing the translator, and he heard its meaning clearly in his head: “Stop. Or I kill you.”

  “Maybe I won’t shoot you,” Andrew said. “But they will.”

  And then he turned and walked the rest of the way onto the ship.

  “Wait!” Morris cried. Her pleas continued until they reached the top, and then they turned to curses. “You’ll burn for this! All of you! You’re all going to hell!”

  Andrew bit his tongue until they were inside. A mewling howl reached his ears, reminding him of the dangers that Morris would have to face, and this time she’d be facing them alone. They were waved through an open airlock by one of the amphibians, who then turned to lead them down a long corridor on the other side. Morris’ cries and the howls of the tigerwolves faded from hearing, replaced by the groaning sound of the ramp lifting behind them. Soon after came the shivering roar of the vessel’s engines and a mild jolt as they lifted off.

  “Damn,” Roland breathed. “That was harder than it should have been.”

  “Because we’re not like her,” Kendra added. “If the tables had been turned, she wouldn’t have hesitated to leave us behind.”

  “No,” Andrew replied as they emerged in a vast chamber, where the colonists were being processed by Belidar’s people. “She wouldn’t have left us behind.”

  Kendra offered him a dubious look, but waited for him to finish.

  “She would have shot us,” he added.

  Roland gave a grim laugh. “True.”

  “At least she’s got a chance to live out the rest of her days,” Andrew went on. “We left plenty of supplies behind, and the Eden stations for shelter.”

  Kendra nodded. “Life in a prison of her own making.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Andrew

  The deck shook, and a muffled boom reached Andrew’s ears. The aliens all froze and stopped processing the colonists. Kendra looked around, searching for the source of the sound.

  “What was that?” Roland asked.

  “Nothing good,” Andrew replied.

  “Sounded like an explosion,” Kendra added.

  Another muffled boom broke the thickening silence and thumped through the air.

  This time one of the nearest aliens called out to the others. The translation shivered through the device on Andrew’s head: “We’re under attack!”

  “It’s Hound,” Andrew realized.

  “He’s dead!” Kendra added.

  “Maybe not all of him. Or at least, not his defenses.” Andrew cut a brisk line across the deck to reach the nearest alien, with Kendra hot on his heels. “I’d like to help,” he said.

  The alien stared at him with big green eyes. Transparent membranes swept sideways across them. “Follow me,” he said.

  Andrew nodded and started after the alien, aiming for a set of broad white doors on the far side of the chamber where the colonists had found themselves.

  “Where are you going?” Kendra whispered as she kept pace beside him.

  “To help them fight off whatever’s attacking us,” Andrew replied.

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “No idea. Probably by helping them man their guns.”

  “You don’t know how they work!”

  “Point and shoot. How hard can it be?” Andrew jerked his chin to the alien walking ahead of them. “Must be intuitive, if he’s willing to accept my help.”

  “Then I’m coming, too.”

  “Stay with Val.”

  “I’m not some damsel in distress. I can fight just as well as you can.”

  Andrew stopped her with a hard stare. “That’s true, but you’re the only one I trust to keep Val safe. We don’t know how this is going to go. What if they board our ship?”

  Worry crept into Kendra’s eyes, and she nodded. “I didn’t think about that. Be safe.”

  “I will,” Andrew replied. He hurried after the alien, leaving Kendra behind in the processing area. The gleaming white doors swept open, and Andrew walked through into a low-ceilinged corridor with flashing blue lights.

  A group of the amphibians were running up ahead, and the one leading Andrew broke into a loping jog. He had to run to keep up.

  “Where are we going?” he finally thought to ask.

  “To join the fight,” the alien replied, giving no more information than he had the last time.

  The ship shook with another muffled explosion, and Andrew followed his guide through the vessel’s winding corridors. Before long they came to one that appeared to be entirely encased in glass. Andrew hesitated before entering. The view beyond was of stars and space.

  Bright green slashes of light cut across the windows at sharp interlocking trajectories. Lasers. Streaking silver shapes darted about, the source of those shots. They looked vaguely like the ship he and Keller had stolen just a few hours ago. Andrew’s guide seemed to realize that he was no longer following, and he stopped at one of several dozen doors with glowing symbols on them. The entrances were staggered, and led off to either side at slight angles from the passage.

  “Come!” the alien beckoned.

  Andrew sprang forward, forcing himself to ignore the very real possibility of being sucked out into space if the fragile walls took a hit. As soon as he reached the alien, the slab beside it slid open, revealing a cramped, spherical chamber with a seat and various controls. It was like the cockpit of a starship. Or a gun turret, he realized.

  The alien fluttered long, webbed fingers in the direction of the seat. “See if you can hit one of our enemies.”

  Before Andrew could make a move, the ship took another hit, this time closer than before. The sound of the explosion roared and rolled on for several seconds. The lights in the corridor flickered, and with them, the seemingly transparent walls of the corridor winked off like the digital displays that they actually were. The lights and displays came back, and Andrew almost sighed with relief. They weren’t as exposed as he’d thought.

  He nodded to the alien. “Sure thing, buddy,” he said, and slapped the guy on the shoulder. “I’ll bag more than one.”

  An odd expression flickered across the amphibian’s face, but he said nothing. Andrew squeezed by him and took a seat in the chair. He was sealed in as colorful displays flickered to life, including one that covered the interior walls of the bathysphere-shaped chamber: a breathtaking view that made him feel like he was floating freely through the void. A pair of jutting gun barrels stuck out a few feet into his field of view, just above waist level.

  Andrew grabbed a control yoke with two handles on the side, and felt a stab of protest from his injured arm as he made a fist. He ignored it. The handles were slightly too big for his hands, but still comfortable enough to grasp. The controls were roughly analogous to those of an airplane: he could rotate the turret from side to side by swinging the yoke left or right. Pushing it up nosed down, and pulling it down nosed up. For a moment, he couldn’t tell if it was his chair that was shifting or the display, but not feeling any movement to accompany his operation of the controls, he realized it had to be the display that was moving.

  He accidentally depressed a button inside the left handle, and one of the two weapon barrels sent a dazzling blue sphere of energy streaking into the void. It narrowly missed the darting silver arrow of one of the attacking ships. Another two trailed behind that one in a loose V formation. Andrew rotated his guns to track the lead ship, and it became highlighted by a pair of bright sky-blue brackets. A glowing green targeting reticule sitting between the gun barrels helped him to aim, but those enemy ships were either too small or too far away to line them up properly. He drifted as close as possible, and a dinging sound began echoing from unseen speakers.

  The targeting reticule lit up wit
h a darker shade of green that pulsed and brightened with every passing second. Interpreting those as signs of some kind of weapons lock, Andrew depressed both triggers under his middle fingers. This time two glowing blue orbs shot out with a loud pulse of discharging energy, and an accompanying jolt that kicked against his palms.

  He wondered at that as a distant memory trickled in: him and Val watching Star Wars, and her telling him how unrealistic it was, because you can’t see or hear lasers in space. He assumed the Froggers had found a method to simulate that feedback. The projectiles shot into the void, arcing slowly after the ship he’d been aiming for, and then vanishing altogether.

  Andrew anticipated the enemy ship’s flight path, lining up for another shot. As he brought it around, he saw dozens more gun turrets alongside his, all built into short silver beams that rose from the dark hull of the ship like spikes on the back of a porcupine. He wondered why this ship had defenses, if Eden hadn’t. Hound had built them both. Did the Froggers have enemies? Or maybe these guns had been intended for asteroid mining.

  Those thoughts raced through Andrew’s head as he absently observed the turrets pulsing out steady streams of glowing blue projectiles, shooting at the odd two or three dozen enemy fighters busy swarming them. Bright green lasers retaliated from Hound’s fighter squadrons. Here and there, silvery missiles came spiraling in, and dark red lasers leaped from the turrets to shoot them down.

  Andrew watched the battle unfold, momentarily stunned by the flurry of activity. Two of the amphibians’ projectiles hit their targets and exploded, eliciting blinding flashes from the void. The fading light left a glittering haze of debris sailing on with the momentum of the now-vaporized enemy ships.

  “Nice shot,” Andrew muttered. Another hostile came darting across his field of view and he yanked the control yoke after it. This time he noticed the dinging sounds, and the blinking targeting reticule came in a progressively faster cadence the longer he left the enemy under his sights. After about three seconds, a steady tone erupted and the targeting reticule glowed turquoise. He pulled the triggers again and another two glowing blue spheres snapped out, kicking against his palms as they left the turret. This time they tracked perfectly and detonated with an audible explosion, blinding his eyes.

  Alien speech rippled into hearing. A fellow gunner? he wondered.

  The translation followed: “Not bad for a dust-dweller.”

  Dust-dweller, huh? Andrew thought with a smirk. He spent a moment scanning the controls for a way to reply, but gave up and focused on the task at hand instead. He kept trying to line up one of the remaining fighters for another shot, but they were coming in too fast and at the wrong angles to secure a lock. The other gunners eliminated them, some of them by using bright red lasers instead of the tracking blue projectiles. Andrew searched for a control to switch to lasers, but he couldn’t figure it out.

  The engagement ended before he could get another kill. Andrew peeled himself out of the sweat-soaked chair, only to find that he wasn’t sweating. His hair was dry. The chair itself was seeping moisture from the dimpled material—just one of many creature comforts this ship had to accommodate its amphibian crew. Andrew ran his hand along the material and found it sticky to the touch.

  “Yuck,” he muttered.

  The door to his turret slid open and one of the aliens appeared. It said something to him, and the translation followed: “It is time for you to rejoin the others.”

  Andrew was about to agree when he noticed that the field dressing over his chewed-up forearm was soaked with blood. He held up the arm and waved it around. “I need to get patched up first.”

  The alien warbled something. “Yes. I see. I will take you to join the others who are wounded. Your healer is attending to them now.”

  Andrew nodded agreeably and waited for the alien to lead him through the seemingly-transparent corridor. He assumed that by healer, it meant Dr. Hartford.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Kendra

  Kendra checked on the colonists, who were gathered in four storage rooms aboard their rescuer’s vessel. She rubbed her head, feeling the translator stuck there. Only a few of them wore the devices: she, Andrew, and Keller for the time being. They figured it would be simpler that way: keep control of the flow of information so they didn’t have another revolt on their hands. So far everyone seemed as positive as they could be, given their dire circumstances.

  Each storeroom was about twenty feet tall, with rows of their supplies lining the exterior walls. Two hundred sleeping bags were rolled out, and she smiled at the adaptability of their people. With Morris gone, along with her most trigger-happy cronies, everyone was able to relax momentarily.

  No one was armed. Belidar had seen to that. He’d even taken the guns from her and Andrew. Kendra couldn’t blame the man for being cautious, and the humans were technically their guests. Still, after everything they’d been through over the past few months, Kendra felt naked without her weapon, exposed and vulnerable.

  You have to trust someone, she told herself, smiling at the familiar faces waiting in the hold. The escape had shaken everyone up, but following a few quiet and calming hours of space travel with no signs of pursuit, they were more relaxed.

  “We’ll test the soil, but I’m confident we can grow some nutrient-rich vegetables with the stock we brought,” Carol, one of the botanists, said to some of the agricultural crew she’d worked with. Kendra nodded at them, and they continued discussing plans for crops with a higher yield than the ones Morris had had them working on.

  Across the room, Victor, a renowned architect, was speaking with a few colonists, showing images of his plans for improved residences on a tablet. They were already thinking about the future, one without limits, one with no oppression looming over them, and Kendra was energized by their excitement.

  “Kendra!” a small voice called, and she spotted Diane. The girl’s eyes were dark, puffy underneath. She thought of Morris feeding this sweet child drugs to control her, and it only reinforced why they’d left the woman behind. It was a decision she’d have no problem living with.

  “Diane.” She crouched, her knees cracking. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better. My head hurt for a bit, and I got sick earlier, but I’m okay. I’m sorry…” The little girl looked away, tears welling in her big eyes.

  “For what?”

  “I went with Mary… I mean, Shelley, instead of staying with you. I didn’t want to, but…”

  Kendra hugged her, gently stroking her hair. “It’s okay. We understand. Things are going to be different now, I promise.”

  “Good.”

  People were starting to drift off, over thirty in their sleeping bags already, and Kendra yawned as she stood. “You should get some sleep, honey.”

  Diane nodded. “Will you sleep beside me?”

  “Of course I will. I’ll be there soon.”

  Diane brightened and pointed at her spot on the floor.

  “Save three spots, okay?” Kendra asked, and Diane said she would.

  “Kendra, I would like to speak with you,” the voice in her head said. It was Belidar, and she spun, finding him leaning in the entrance, arms crossed, forty yards away.

  His thick lips moved soundlessly at her arrival, and he motioned for her to follow him. The ship was brighter here, outside the cargo hold, and she marveled at the technology. It was interesting how different their ship was from Eden, and she suspected Hound had customized them for each set of beings he’d collected. Belidar was straight-backed, his head glistening in the white light.

  “Tell me about your people,” she said, her words translating through the headset into his.

  “We’re called Brivuk, and we hail from a world named Shining Pearl Four.”

  “Shining Pearl Four?” Kendra echoed.

  “That is the literal meaning, but the word for our planet is—” Belidar broke off and touched a hand to the translator on his head; then he vocalized something that sounded like Hodi
la to Kendra’s ears. This time no translation followed.

  “Hodila Four,” Kendra repeated.

  Belidar’s neck fins fluttered. “That word has a similar sound. Does it have a meaning to you?”

  Kendra shook her head. Goosebumps rose on her arms, and she brushed at them with her palms. Despite the evidence in front of her, this still felt like a bad dream. She wondered if she’d been injured on the job. Maybe the raid on that human trafficking ring back on Earth hadn’t gone as she recalled, and she was in a hospital bed right now, dreaming this alternate reality. She pinched herself, smiling at the slight pain.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I wanted to see if this was real,” she muttered.

  “I assure you, Kendra, it is.”

  “Tell me what happened with Hound,” she said.

  “He wasn’t called that to us. He was Polarin, a wealthy and reclusive businessman. He held borders to the best ocean mining, and made tariffs and taxations on each ton of resources moved through it. When he claimed our water was being affected, and that we had five years to vacate the world, we didn’t believe him. Then we began to die.” Belidar ran a webbed hand over his face and continued down the corridor. Kendra peered to the left, where several rows of tanks lined a giant room. The Brivuk people filled hundreds of tanks, each taking up no more than a few square feet of real estate.

  “Were you on his early team?” she asked, thinking of Eric and Carrie. Thomas Hartford, too.

  “I was, which made it imperative that I helped us escape that world.” Belidar led her to the bridge, and she followed him on, past two guards carrying the destructive flute-like weapons. The bridge was remarkable. The ceiling domed high above, stretching into a point at the front of the vessel. The viewscreen was at least twenty feet high, and twice as wide, showcasing thousands of brilliant stars against a pitch-black backdrop.