by Loki Renard
Reaper
“I didn’t think they’d destroy Earth entirely!” Tarkan’s usually resonant voice reaches a pitch which would put earth glassware in danger of shattering - if there were any earth glass left - if it hadn’t just been replaced by a void in which a large flashing sign now orbits the Earth, rotating with mocking slowness.
“That’s right. You didn’t think. You were so jealous that you hadn’t mated with One, you decided to have her taken away from both of us. And in the process, you’ve destroyed any hope the human race ever had of restoring itself.”
“I didn’t obliterate Earth!”
BEEP BEEP BOOP, BOOP BEEP BOOP, BOOP BEEP BOOP
Our audio communicator begins to chime, heralding communication from the council. I swallow my anger and compose my features. I still have responsibilities, even if my small clutch is completely out of control.
The second I see who is on screen, I know that all is lost. It is none other than High Councillor Flurg himself. Flurg hasn’t been seen outside his pleasure palace for the last thousand years. There are conspiracy theories which say he died at least seven hundred of them ago. Apparently, he didn’t. Apparently, he got out of bed when he got the opportunity to destroy Earth.
Councillor Flurg is old. His ridges have eroded and become blunt, his fangs have fallen out. His claws are more like short nubs. To make up for it he wears a great bejeweled helmet replete with cosmic stones. I used to respect him. He is the dominant Scythkin in the council clutch, the alpha Scythkin brood. They make decisions for the thousands of broods spread across the universe. I knew that Tarkan and I were unlikely to ever rise to his rank, but I had hoped we would begin to gain influence over time. A seat on the council has always been my dream, overtly at least. Privately, I would like to slaughter every single one of the council and take their place with Tarkan as my second in command, but that’s the sort of aspiration one keeps to oneself unless one wants to be wiped out of existence.
Having seen the wanton destruction of one of the most important planets in the universe, I am no longer sure I want anything to do with the council, or perhaps even our species as a whole. I am disgusted to the core of my very being. I am furious to the point of feeling my body preparing for battle, my ridges releasing a biological oil which makes them so sharp they can slice through any armored flesh.
There was still life down there. These monsters have destroyed the last remnants of the human race with callous carelessness, and I have to pretend that I still respect them.
“Scythkin Reaper,” Councillor Flurg says. “You have done well. Very well. It could have been hundreds of years before we realized that humanity had finally straggled into non-existence. Nasty little things. Did you know they consumed one another’s semen for personal enjoyment?”
That’s how he confesses to destroying one of the oldest and most original habitats in the universe, with a throwaway comment about cum.
I did know that humans liked to consume semen from time to time. I had enjoyed that many times on previous visits to the planet. It is a pleasure no other Scythkin will ever experience again thanks to this bureaucrat who just annihilated thousands of years of sentient struggle with one order.
“Thank you,” I say, my teeth gritted. I cannot let on that we did anything other than follow protocol. I have to pretend that Tarkan acted on my orders, that I wanted to notify the council. I have to pretend that there isn’t a human tucked away in our shielded storage area where their scanning equipment is less likely to detect her.
“It couldn’t come at a better moment, with our larger broods starting to travel longer distances we need extra re-fueling stations. Earth’s location at the edge of our boarders is the perfect location. And the temporal eddies are exceptional.”
“So it’s going to be a gas station,” Tarkan mutters nearby. “They might sell chips.”
I shoot him a venomous look. I will deal with him later, and that reckoning will be violent and merciless. An entire planet gone because of him. This is a fuck up to end all fuck ups.
“You and your broodkin will receive a portion of the profits from the station, because your discovery made this possible. The heritage protections made this entire sector a complete backwater. Now we can start to develop it, from the Earth’s own moon…” He pauses and leans over as someone just barely in frame leans over and murmurs to him. “Perhaps not the moon. I’ve just been informed it flung itself into the sun seconds after the Earth was removed. But the rest of the solar system is intact. We will harvest most of Jupiter’s hydrogen and helium. Anyway, details. Thank you, small brood. The two of you have changed the future, and the past, of this entire sector. You’ve been paid several million credits already. Now, if you’d make your departure so construction can begin, that would be much appreciated.”
The communication is cut. I turn slowly, to face Tarkan. He still looks stricken with guilt, but it is too late for him to do anything. This betrayal is deeper and more destructive than any other.
“I’m going to make this right,” he says, sounding unconvinced himself.
“There’s no way to make it right, Tarkan. Earth is gone. It’s over.”
Chapter Twelve - Gas Pedal
Tarkan
“Planets don’t just disappear! It’s probably still there, just cloaked.” I’m panicking, hoping that what I just saw isn’t real. I thought I’d won once Scythkin command appeared on my screen and told me that they’d take care of the situation. I thought I’d be saved several months of generating human semen, and watching Reaper turn One into a brood matriarch.
“It’s gone,” Reaper says. “Scythkin command has been doing this for years now. They break down all the elements in a planet, sometimes down to the near atomic level, and they reallocate them using real time quantum algorithms.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means they’ve basically taken a cosmic hammer and smashed the Earth into trillions and trillions of pieces which are already spread across the universe.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
Reaper has been standing in the same place for hours, ever since Flurg congratulated us. He has ignored the orders to leave, which will no doubt raise brows, but I think he is trying to figure out a way to reverse what just happened. There is no way. Even I know that. We are capable of traveling through time, but always forward - never back. The time arrow only moves one way. If we tried to go back we would find ourselves more than atomized. We would cease to ever have existed at all.
“I’m going to check on One,” I say. It’s all I can do. The guilt and remorse are eating at the very core of my being, but who is going to feel sorry for me? I betrayed us. I betrayed Reaper, One, the world which used to hang below our feet.
I half expect Reaper to tell me not to go near her, but he waves me away. I have seen him angry before, but I have never seen him this calm. This quiet.
One is sitting cross legged on her bed in the cargo bay. She seems alert, as If she knows something is happening, but that’s probably simply because of the raised voices which no doubt travelled through the walls, even if she doesn’t understand them. She knows what anger is, and likely fear too.
She looks at me with her curious eyes, and I am struck by the perfect fragility of her beauty. We called her One because we thought she might be the last one. Now we know she is. And it is all my fault. I have orphaned her from her species.
I fall to my knees in front of her bed, bowed by the weight of what I have done. I thought I was going to be getting one over on Reaper, but they never cared about a backwater planet, or a native species. They have their own plans, and One is not part of them.
“I’m going to make this better,” I tell her.
She stares at me blankly. She doesn’t know that the Earth is gone. She doesn’t know that her entire species has been eradicated in one reckless act of bureaucracy. She’s so perfectly innocent. I want to preserve that innocence at all costs. It is the only thing l
eft to defend.
Standing up, I take a breath. I cannot afford to crumble under the weight of my crimes. I cannot wallow in self pity. She needs me. Reaper needs me. Forcing something approximating a human smile, pulling my fangs back so it doesn’t look like a death bite, I turn to leave her in her ignorant peace. We don’t ever have to tell her that the Earth is gone. She won’t know the difference from the distances we will take her in order to make her safe.
“You can’t make it better.”
I turn and look at her, certain I must have imagined her talking. She does not speak our language. She doesn’t have a sophisticated enough brain. She’s just a simple little human fuck toy, something to be protected and cherished and used.
“You know, those sounds you made almost seemed like language. You’re very cute.”
“I’m adorable,” she says.
I stare at her in disbelief. She’s not just speaking Scythkin, she’s speaking it absolutely fluently. I have been around many terrifying events in my life, but none of them sent these horrible chills all the way down my spinal column and made my defensive ridges spring forth in seconds.
Something is wrong. Something is very wrong.
One is sitting there, smiling sweetly. She never smiles. Her expressions are usually a mixture of lust and fear. Now her smile is broadening, getting wider and wider, splitting her sweet face - and I do mean splitting, right at the edges of her mouth, the skin around her lips coming apart at invisible seams. The longer I watch, the more grotesque the deformation of her body becomes. Her hair parts and the scalp skin beneath begins to stretch and then peel at the top of her head.
The thing inside One unfurls in gleaming black danger, revealing itself to be a female Scythkin wearing her skin like a suit.
I let out a curse in my native tongue, a word so offensive it is almost never said. A female Scythkin is far more dangerous than a male. I have no notion how she managed to fit herself inside One’s skin, she is more than three times the girl’s size. Her ovipositor unfurls last, a hard, armored, tubule which emerges like a tail between the back of her legs. It is used to lay eggs, but it is also capable of delivering paralytic stinging fluid which makes a male feel as though he is being burned from the inside out for months at a time.
On Earth, it was considered weak and pathetic for a male to do battle with a female. Among our species it is the opposite. There is nothing more fearsome or more dangerous than a female.
“What did you do with One?” I stammer the question.
I am convinced she has killed her and worn her skin like a suit, as we did in the old days. If One is gone, then this is truly a complete and total loss and I do not know if there is any point in our continuing. We may as well fly ourselves into the sun like the lonesome moon.
“Traitor!” She rasps the word at me. “You and your kin are liars and thieves, breakers of law, and you will pay the price.”
She must have been flash transported aboard our ship. That could mean One has been flash transported out. I hope so, very much. If they have hurt her, if they have killed her, my war with the Scythkin empire begins today and will not end until I do.
“Reaper!”
My shout to alert him is unnecessary. The door behind me is already opening. Reaper is there , but he is not alone. Two guards are with him. We are under arrest.
Hopelessly betrayed by our own foolishness and pride, Reaper and I stare at one another. We have not been good broodkin to one another these past weeks and months, maybe even years. We have allowed the oddness of our dual dynamic to come between us and turn us into what the humans used to describe as a bickering old couple. But we are no couple. We are two warriors who have conquered all odds time and time again.
They have sent three to take two.
They should have sent more.
Chapter Thirteen - Speak!
One
“Help me!
These are new beasts.
“Please! Help me!”
These are mean beasts.
I don't know how I came to be in this very strange place. One moment I was locked away in the little chamber where Boss and Bad kept me, the next I was here, in a room that smells like sterile death, and there were more of the same creatures standing around, putting their clawed hands on me, pushing me into a chair with straps around the legs and arms, pushing probes into my skin.
I am terrified to my very core, helpless and hurt, screaming out for the only males I know - but neither of them come, and these new beasts are not as nice as they are. They don’t try to calm me. They handle me roughly and without any care. I can feel in their touch that I am nothing more than a piece of animal meat to them.
They tighten the straps roughly, cutting into my skin, and then, when I cannot move at all and am restrained from head to toe, they push a sharp probe into my skull. It bores through the bone, until I feel it pop through with an audible sound which echoes inside my mind.
I let out a scream of terror, but not pain, because for some reason I suddenly can’t feel what is happening. Shock? Or maybe they’ve injected me with a substance that makes it impossible to feel. No. Wait… it’s shock. I can tell because the ache of bone is beginning to emanate from the bore site, making me whine and whimper and try to reach for the drill even though I cannot move my arms from their binding places.
“Silence, human.”
I understand them!
Amid the pain and fear comes the realization that their voices are not incoherent growls and clicks anymore, they are coherent sentences.
I stop my struggles and I stare, not knowing why they have done this to me, or who they are.
“Human,” the alien says. “You are the sole survivor of planet Earth, which has now been eliminated to make room for a Xyzhizyn.”
Apparently there are some words which cannot be translated from the alien tongue into my own, but I think I understand the gist of it. They have destroyed the world from which I came. Eliminated. To make room for. It sounds like the planet is gone. How can a planet be gone?
I’m not sure what they expect me to do with that information, especially as I am bound and probed right in my brain. The knowledge that everyone - no, if their phrasing means what I think it means, everything on Earth is gone, including the Earth itself, is too big to try to understand. How can everything I have ever known no longer exist?
I feel the impulse to cry, but my eyes are dry. They will not produce tears for these alien monsters. I stare and close my mouth, all my instincts telling me to stay still and silent.
One alien turns to the other. “It’s just staring blankly. Did you damage it?”
“I didn’t damage it at all. Humans are slow and stupid. It probably doesn’t understand.”
“Hit it.”
“We can’t hit it with a probe in its brain. We’d scramble it and then it would be completely useless.”
“Shock it, then.”
I don’t know what that means, but a moment later, I do. Pure energy runs through my body in a painful zap which makes every muscle in my body contract. I shriek with pain and beg them to stop.
“Speak, human! Tell us what happened to your planet!”
“I don’t know! You eliminated it!”
“Before we eliminated it,” the alien sighs, as if I am so stupid it can hardly stand it. “What happened to cause the humans to die? What happened to your cities and communities?”
“What did you do to that place that made good burgers?” Another alien chimes in.
“Oh, pizza! Remember pizza?”
They’re talking amongst themselves now, discussing foods I’ve never eaten, places I’ve never been. They know my world better than I do. Interrogating me won’t result in any useful information.
I have never known what happened. My mother told me that the world was once very different, that everywhere you looked there was a person, but I was not born in that world. I was born into a shattered society where survival was unlikely. I don’t know how
I made it this far, but I can tell that I will not make it much further. If the world is gone, then so am I. How can I exist without a world? A place to be from? What has become of my mother’s bones? And her mother’s bones? All the history of humanity has been erased from existence by these mad aliens. I want to weep, but still the tears hide from these monsters.
I yearn for the two who took me first, who showed me nothing but care, and who tried to communicate with me as best they could without nailing something into my skull and penetrating my brain.
The pain is radiating through my entire body, an agony which is not merely physical, but also mental and emotional. I didn’t realize it, but I became attached to the two monsters who found me. In a very short time, they have become family to me, and their absence is a pain all of its own.
I can feel something warm tracing down over my forehead. A drop of blood falls from my brow down onto my cheek and continues rolling down onto my naked body. Fear has paralyzed me just as completely as the bindings which still bite into my skin and hold me intractably in place even as I take panicked gulps of air.
“Was it a war? Was it a natural disaster? Was it…”
They are firing questions at me, and I don’t understand them. The words might be in my language, but they mean nothing to me. I am a girl born of dust and decay. All I know are the ruins of the world. Whatever came before it is long lost to me. My mother tried to tell me stories, but those stories have withered away over time, long periods of solitude driving me to the brink of madness.
Frustrated by my lack of response, they are talking among themselves again.
“Cut her head open, do a brain scan. Take slivers of it and decode the neurons until we understand everything she does.”
They want to take my mind from me and slice it into a thousand pieces. They want to take me apart, because I am not a living thing to them. I am not a person. I am meat to be dissected. I am something to be used. And there is no way to change that, not from my pathetic position bound here in all my human weakness.