by Orion, W. J.
“Are there more forces that can join? That thing will require more power to defeat than just Dwen, despite Dwen’s ample skill in battle. Is Dwen aware of what’s ahead?”
“Security is aware and is siphoning heavier shock troops to respond, but the distance they must travel to reach the market is notable. Destroyed lifts and passages are slowing them down and there are crabs moving about causing destruction with no purpose other than to dilute our reaction to any single large threat. For now, Dwen has the aliens that just arrived. One of them does seem to be… exceptional.”
“Exceptional?” Benno asked. “How so?”
“Watch the video feed and see her yourself.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The Diplomat’s Ride
“You are a tremendous specimen,” Dwen said. “Your ability to transfer power with such ease and without injury is beyond the beyond.”
“Thanks,” Yasmine said. “Credit should go to Trader Joe, though; I’m just borrowing his abilities and making it up as I go.”
The group had taken cover inside the last row and stack of businesses before the grand market opened up under a football dome-sized area to the forest and pond ahead. The interior space they were moving through eclipsed anything on Earth in square footage by far and away. The scope of the Nexus was colossal. They crouched down behind the walls and flipped tables of some kind of restaurant, keeping their personal world small. Holographic displays nearby of steaming plates and bowls of food made Yasmine’s stomach rumble.
Whatever the aliens who eat here look like, their food looks legit.
“Nonsense,” Trader Joe said. “You are borrowing my abilities and doing things with them that we Beru’dawn either cannot do or cannot do easily. I said these humans would change the galaxy. I meant it.”
“Is what she’s doing hurting you?” her uncle asked Trader Joe from his kneeling position at a window. He fired off a short burst of bullets at something in the trees. “Yeah, take that.”
“Nothing beyond confusion and bewilderment,” he answered. “I am at a loss to explain what she can do without any practice. If she and I were given time to–“
An explosion rocked the restaurant wall facing the forest, sending one of the Galon guards and her uncle sprawling. The alien smashed its upper body into a counter and then a table before falling to the floor. Her uncle landed on a chair a human could’ve sat in, but he toppled over it at high speed and smashed his shoulder into the hard floor with a crunch they all heard. He cried out in pain as Dwen went to its colleague’s aid. Without a word, Knox and Bernie stepped up to the wall and shot multiple times each into the area of the forest they imagined the incoming blast originated. The smashing noise of weaponry bludgeoned Yasmine’s eardrums.
I’m gonna go deaf, holy crap. Maybe I should absorb the sonic energy? Can I do that? “Hold your fire,” she hollered as she crawled to her uncle.
“Oh man,” he said as he rolled onto his back. “Something’s cracked.” He grunted in pain and kept his left arm bent and stapled to his body armor on his chest. “Uh… a couple somethings.”
“Arm? Shoulder?” she asked, tenderly trying to give him help by touching him.
“Yes,” he grimaced. “I don’t think I can move much. I damn sure can’t shoot. Fuck!” he yelled, then paid the price for the holler in pain. “Ohhhh that’s a rib, too.”
“Do your kind use anything to alleviate severe pain?” Dwen asked as it shot the leg of its friend with an ampule of something. Dwen dropped it to the floor and the body of the smashed Galon relaxed. “Shigrub, danangarak.”
“What’d he say?” Yaz asked. “I didn’t get the translation on that last bit.”
“Like crabs, Galon don’t have genders and most don’t choose to identify one,” Trey said. “Dwen’s an ‘it.’ Or a ‘they.’ And something is happening. I am picking up a tremendous amount of electromagnetic noise. Drowning out your translator headset’s connection to the Nexus language database. I can translate a few languages.”
Beside her the magistrate of the court grumbled and grunted in frustration. He tried to say something to her in his deep, consonant-heavy voice, then to Michelle, then threw up his massive paws in frustration. He too was exiled linguistically.
“Pyrameer says this must be something the crabs are doing,” Trey said. “And he’s damn sure right about that. It has our experimental tech written all over it.” Trey lifted his chassis up and emitted a fat blast of laser energy out the broken window and into the forest. A small explosion erupted deep in the tree line. “Boom. Gotcha. No hiding from me today.”
Yasmine sighed and turned her attention back to her uncle, who was sweating rivers from his pain. “How can I help you? Do you have anything I can give you for pain? You were a firefighter, tell me what I can do.”
“Leg pocket has a bottle of painkillers. Gimme two with a swig of water and just go kick their ass. That’s the best medicine,” he grunted.
As she fished the pills out of the bottle Trey kept firing into the forest alongside Dwen and the other Galon. Bernie and Knox fired less often, having no visible targets they could see, but they still tried to apply pressure to the enemies trying to kill them. After a particularly heavy salvo of outgoing fire by Yaz’s friends, there was a lull.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Something… new out there,” Knox said. “And it ain’t no joke.”
Yasmine crawled over to the low wall beneath the shattered windows and lifted her head to the bottom lip of the frame. Several hundred yards stood between them and the tree edge. Ravaged by errant plasma fire and explosions, the stone courtyard, water fountain topped with a broken sculpture of what might’ve been a tree, wide flagstone paths, and grassy fields under the dome were all that separated them from a strange crab vehicle the size of a large pickup truck that floated in the center of the boulevard that cut through the trees.
Like a giant mutant squid floating in an ocean, waiting for something to wander near enough to be eaten, it waited. Purple-shelled limbs erupted from its back, side, and belly like spider legs, each with a menace-filled plasma cannon. At its fore it had a hard carapace for its pointed, elongated head. She allowed herself to steal Trader Joe’s senses, and Yaz flinched when she saw the waves of pulsating energy coming off of it.
Like ripples in the water, she watched as ring after ring of invisible, powerful energy vibrated off of it, expanded out to fill the market’s massive space. It exuded the strange power, and somehow the silent, still presence of the floating thing made her feel sick to her stomach. The thrum of its presence seemed like an invisible smirk in her imagination.
“It’s giving off some weird radiation,” she whispered, putting a hand over her belly where she felt the growing queasiness. “Wave after wave.”
Sensors erupted from under the tentacle chin of Trey’s chassis and he poked his head higher to stick them out of the window. She sensed energy emitting from his suit as he scanned the area.
“Electromagnetic radiation and a mischief signal. Jamming just about everything but crab gear. Broad spectrum stuff rotating through frequencies. Crazy advanced tech. Explains the loss of translation and why no one is coming to help. That thing is built to take out serious high tech enemies. Not backwater planets being harvested. Tier one advanced civilizations. Gotta be a big colony in there powering it, too. Five thousand, at least.”
“Bet they built it to take out the Nexus,” her uncle said from the floor, between sharp breaths. “No accident it’s here. What kind of guns does it have?”
Yasmine felt the shots building inside the distant guns a split second before they fired from the four cannons mounted on the arms of the… thing.
“Duck!” she hollered, and Yaz hit the floor face first.
She didn’t see the moment of the heavy energy weapons exploding in the air above her, but she felt the concussive force of the blast and felt the searing heat on her back. The rest of the windows in the café shattered
as sections of the ceiling gave way. Fires broke out, belching forth more heat and now smoke. She coughed.
“Four of those kind of guns,” she said towards her uncle. “Anyone hurt?” she asked. Ow, my back is sore. Damn it. Broken stuff everywhere. We did NOT bring enough Band-aids for this.
“I think I’m burnt more,” Bernie said as he brushed bits of busted wall off his chest. “But I’m a fully baked cookie anyway, so what does another scar matter.” He sat up and fired off a burst of shots from his rifle at the vehicle that blasted them. As he did that, Dwen and the other Galon got to their feet and started firing as well. Dwen rattled off a string of strange consonants and syllables, grunting in what sounded like anger.
“Dwen’s saying we’re screwed,” Trey translated before firing a lance of laser energy at the hull of the intruder chassis. “No communications, and we’re a shield short with too far to go. These walls won’t hold long enough for us to get reinforcements if we’re jammed up. Never mind the smoke.”
A shield short? She thought as she looked over to the resting, wounded Galon. I can wear that thing. Discharge it as we go. But that doesn’t solve how we take that floating squid-tank thing out.
“Trey, if we link minds through Trader Joe, can you communicate with that thing? The crabs inside it?”
“We can try. Why?”
“I want to negotiate. If that fails, I want to get the pilot so pissed at me he does something stupid and we can jump all over him. Maybe I can buy us a couple minutes at least. Before we start, can you tell Dwen to pull the shield off his wounded… friend and give it to me? I want to wear it.”
Trey turned to Dwen and, after a few seconds, vomited out a strange gargle of Galon sounds with his speaker. Dwen went to the shield unit and started to remove it.
“Trader Joe, wire me in.”
“As you wish,” he replied. In a second she felt the mental presence of Trader Joe in the room that was her mind. Then Trey’s cooler, fluid presence arrived. The presences mingled, and the sensation felt strong to her.
Try now, Trader Joe said.
A few seconds passed as Yasmine waited patiently for Trey to ping the crab with their neural network. Strong clarion bells of noise went out into the world, and Yasmine felt a tactile snap when the call was answered out in the void of the crab mental frequency.
Traitors to the Empire will die a fast and complete death, she heard a strange, shrill voice whisper. Your legacy is filth adrift in the current and will forever be forgotten, whoever you are.
I’m Yasmine. I’m one of the humans you missed back on Earth.
Oh… how curious. I wasn’t aware your kind had telepathic ability. Nonetheless, you will share the fate of the crab with you.
Are you open to negotiating peace? You don’t have to do this, you know. War, or a battle, that is. Let’s make a deal for peace before more people get killed. More anythings get killed. Surely there’s a middle ground where everyone gets to be happy.
To what end would peace serve the Empire? What would we gain? Nothing we wouldn’t gain by show of force through war. And after war, there will be no meddling forces to forge truces with or keep in line. No more ridiculous meetings with sweaty animals making trade deals or attempting to assure loyalties. After war, corpses are always loyal to the victors.
Yaz was speechless. Flashes of ruined cities, broken bones, and children without families flooded her mind. She thought of her dad. Her mom. Her uncle lying on the floor. She saw the bodies of the creatures they had passed, the crabs killed just now here in the Nexus. She had no counterargument. The crab spoke its evil, damned truth. You can’t negotiate with an enemy that is certain of its course and certain of its victory. You can’t reason with something that can’t care about anything but itself or those just like it.
You have no retort? Would you like to sue for peace? It hissed at her. Beg me for the single life you have? Try to delay the death that you’ll experience soon? Crawl along the bottom to worship my immortal species, praying to your god or gods that we will be merciful?
Yaz chuckled. For a second there, I forgot who you were. I forgot that your species tried to eradicate mine. I wanted to save the people around me. I wished I could prevent the innocents across all the worlds from getting dragged into what happened to where I come from. I wanted to end this war before it started. But I was wrong to think that.
You will be forgotten, along with your mistakes, like a hundred species that crossed our paths before you. You’ll leave no lasting mark on the galaxy, unlike the Empire.
I politely disagree, Yaz said to him. She shifted her mental focus out of the wide region that the enemy crab occupied and directed her next thoughts to Trader Joe’s presence. You said some of your people could occupy the minds of others, right?
Some can, I cannot, he answered.
But you can occupy a physical object? Animate it like your mannequin? How big, how small?
Any object large enough to contain my potential energy. Small as an egg, large as a starship.
I… have an idea, she said to him and Trey. She then shifted her connection back to the consciousness inside the evil machine now slithering through the air towards them at an ominous pace. If we blow up your fancy jalopy right now are you dead for good? No ships in orbit to continue your colony on, are there?
Our ship contains my reserve, but I am not worried. If a miracle happens, and you do manage to destroy me, there is nothing you can do to stop the war that is coming. My life ultimately means nothing when held against the success of the Empire.
The weapons on the floating predator began to power up.
Your death means something to me, buddy, Yasmine growled at him. And listen you overgrown sack of tentacle-turds, we’re gonna fry your new toy with you and your attitude inside it, then we’re going to blow up your ship. And you know what, if that’s all we accomplish, then so be it. I don’t have to beat you all at once, I just need to take you out one at a time. Right now, you’re in the batter’s box, so take your best swing and we’ll see what happens.
Heh, the crab laughed at her. Come, member of a race we destroyed easily. Show me why you think you’ll fare any different.
She slipped out of the mental union with the monster with haste and turned her attention to the other two she remained connected with.
We got thirty seconds to get this right and no second chance, so listen real good.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The Boogeyman and the Devil Walk into a Courtyard
I’m insane for thinking this will work, Yasmine thought as she strapped the Galon’s shield to her waist. On the Galon’s armor the shield emitter looked no bigger than a brooch. On her the device was as wide as her tummy and covered most of her stomach. She drew her pistol and checked the magazine. Full of Trader Joe’s specials.
“I am ready,” the alien in the mannequin said. He adjusted his fedora, his goggles, and his head to toe wrappings with anxious hands and took a step towards the side of the restaurant he could exit and still have cover.
“This is gonna work,” she assured him. “Trey, this is gonna work.”
The crab grumbled with his speaker as he trudged towards the same exit Trader Joe headed towards. The others sat or stood as able, watching them get ready to march out to the biggest fight of their lives.
“Link us up and head on out,” she said to the Beru’dawn. “And remember, you gotta fluster him. Put the fear of… I mean, you, I guess, in him.”
I will do my best. For the record, if I lose this mannequin, I will be very upset. I’ve grown attached to it, he said telepathically to them both, and stepped out into the street.
“We’ll get you a new one.”
Trey halted his chassis and turned to her. His glassy black sensor eyes almost pleaded with her to change her mind. The nest of tentacles hanging below the multi-legged chassis’ face twitched in anticipation and dread. She walked to him and put her hands on what served as his cheeks.
“We’
re going to take this guy. And we’re gonna take the next guy, and the one after that. You trusted me once to go into a tower and rescue you, so trust me this once more to rescue you again.”
“I wish I had your confidence,” he said. “This is… suicide.”
“Nonsense,” she said, pushing him to face away so she could climb up on his back. She adjusted her Halligan tool on her back as he spun. “This is a grand adventure in whooping ass.” She jumped up and sat astride him like he was a mutant tentacled frog-horse machine and thumped his back armor. “Now, prepare to go onward, my friend and trusty steed. We have shenanigans to partake in.”
“Soon as Trader Joe gives me the heads-up.”
“Everyone else ready? Nothing else in the forest gets involved without getting shot, right?” Yaz asked them.
“I’m shooting everything a hundred times at least,” her uncle said from the seat Bernie had put him in at the window. He had his machine gun on the broken window ledge and his busted arm against his chest. “I ain’t carrying these bullets back.”
Michelle held her pistol aimed out at his side, ready to reload his machine gun, and both Bernie and Knox had shooting positions near Dwen and the other active Galon. Pyrameer was scrambling to find a use in the background, but he wasn’t afraid–just trying to be a part of the fight.
“You’re my heroes,” she said as a tear slid out of her eyes to run down her cheek. “All of you. That I knew people like you, and I was able to fight with, and for, people like you… I’m lucky. We’re lucky.”
“Weird kind of luck,” Michelle said. “Your buddy Joe is starting a showdown out there.”
Yasmine turned her attention to the window and the confrontation that she needed to happen for her plan to work.
Fiberglass arms spread wide, Trader Joe walked into the open on the flagstone boulevard that ran through the market and into the plaza with the fountain. Beyond the broken stone of the tree statue the Perenall race had gifted to the Nexus, the hovering crab cephalopod-tank circled. Its four cannon-arms arrayed outward like segmented, multi-jointed spider legs. The barrels of the energy weapons practically dripped with venom. Waves of dark energy washed off the creature like shadows in the depths, making the floating monster appear as if it were emerging from a veil that obscured the light around it.