Do Not Go Quietly

by Jason Sizemore

  “No, you don’t. You already invented stuff. You invented Super Drone.”

  I felt his shoulder move against my elbow. “But …” he drew it out and I knew this was going to be something I didn’t like. “Your dad isn’t an alien.”

  “Dude. He is. That’s what they call people who can’t get citizenship.”

  “No, I mean, it’s like … no one thinks he’s not human.”

  That pissed me off because, yeah, some people did think that. I got up and looked across at Waffle House. It was lit up bright and empty. “I think those kids have gone.”

  “I like your dad,” Chester said, by way of apology. “My dad … I mean …”

  I didn’t want to talk anymore. I crouched by the roadside, ready to run. “Let’s go. We have to make sure Super Drone is safe.”

  “It’s too dark now,” Chester said.

  “No, it ain’t. Come on.”

  A semi engine braked over our heads as we ran across the street. Everything is louder at night, even though there’s more noise, with crickets going. Freeway headlights sent sweeping search-beams through the weeds and bushes. It was like spies were after us, and I was glad because it was an adventure and I could forget about being pissed. We crouched low every time a light passed over us and grinned like our faces would split.

  We got Super Drone out and laid it in the glittering glass of the back parking lot. The pavement was like a night sky, only sharper.

  When they started spinning, the fans were invisible in the dark. The LEDs glowed in different colors, randomly reflecting on bits of foil and plastic. It was like an old movie spaceship. It rose majestically into the air, wobbling but gaining altitude.

  “We gotta test how much weight it can take,” I said. “Weigh ourselves and then stuff bags with rocks to the same weight.”

  “Let’s try something smaller first,” Chester said. “Like one of our bikes.”

  “I am not risking my bike.”

  Our heads were tilted straight back, watching Super Drone, dreaming these big science dreams, when some redneck coal roller buzzed the berm of the onramp and air-horned us.

  Super Drone flipped sideways in the air and came crashing down. The fans were still going and sent it scampering across the pavement into the back of the Waffle House.

  One of the drones, one of the smaller ones, fell off.

  We were both swearing and crying, and I was shaking as we gathered up our wounded baby and turned the drones off. I said, “Damn it, how far north do we gotta be?”

  “Mars?” Chester was crying hard, face squished up, on his knees. He looked up at the sky like he was asking it for something. His lips moved, even.

  I wanted to comfort him, but that might cross a girl-boy line. I stood there, watching until his sobs slowed down. I thought about how he was always asking about aliens, and about that magic battery goo, and about how, sometimes, when you want to talk about something very important, you gotta get the other person to talk about it first. “Is your dad really from Toledo?”

  He gave me such a look, like I’d stabbed him through the heart.

  I shrugged to make it feel less important. “Come on, what we really need is a new base of operations.”

  He looked confused, but he let me lead him down the street, the two of us carrying Super Drone between us like an injured friend. I coulda said, “Let’s take it to my dad,” but I was enjoying being mysterious. There was this moment, when we got to my street, and Chester realized what I had in mind, and let me know with this shift in his shoulders that he was proud of me, and those kind of moments are worth engineering.

  Dad wanted to be a scientist. There’d been a student visa, a shot at it that fell through. He never told me the details, like it was too painful.

  He opened the garage like he was expecting us. His questions were all technical. “Is that a live wire? What does this one connect to?” It was great to watch him moving around Super Drone with his voltmeter and safety goggles. Once he was sure it was all safe, he let us use his soldering iron (while he hovered all parent-worried and pretended he wasn’t).

  I looked across at Chester, squinting in concentration at two wires. I asked, “Where do you want to go? It ain’t Six Flags.”

  “No,” he said. His lips rolled inward, and he added, “Not Toledo, either.”

  “Someplace they won’t call you an alien,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. He looked at me like he didn’t quite believe I understood.

  “I’d be friends with an alien,” I said. Chester didn’t say anything, and I was afraid what I’d said was stupid. Then he wiped his eye with the back of his hand.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”

  “That’s enough,” Dad said. “Enough soldering. You’re already past your bedtime. Let’s see if this will fly, eh?”

  Super Drone rose against the stars, glittering and flashing defiance against the night.

  I felt like something had broken loose inside me, and I hugged my dad, and my half-alien friend, and felt like we were finally North of something.

  #greenlivesmatter

  by Joshua Gage

  paper cut

  the flesh-colored bandage

  bright against her scales

  summer vacation

  her tentacle lotion

  in the ethnic aisle

  first day of school

  one textbook chapter

  on green history

  keg stand

  a fratboy in greenface

  holds her ankles

  autumn evening

  trick-or-treaters

  with fake tentacles

  stale coffee

  her coworker asks

  if she’s green all over

  routine traffic stop

  the chill of the car hood

  beneath her green cheek

  "excessive force" acquittal

  outside, protester tentacles

  squirm in handcuffs

  Originally published in Star*Line issue 39.2, Spring 2016.

  Sympathizer

  by Karin Lowachee

  The alien’s blood looked like molten gold in the low light. It had been shot by one of her soljets, but not by her order. She herself had almost been shot, or it was made to look like that, and she wanted to believe that her own jets would have missed on purpose. Her medic Markalan pressed gloved hands to the alien’s stomach wound, but the gold seeped past his fingers and began to run down the alien’s side. She didn’t know if that was indeed the alien’s stomach and neither did her medic.

  “This might not work,” he said. “We don’t have a detailed scan of their physiology, much less their cellular structure.”

  Even after two years they knew so little. “Find a way,” she said.

  The line of seven aliens watched them like stone statuary carved of ancient Earth alabaster, though a couple were the color of burnished bronze and they stood motionless and black-eyed like deep-sea creatures. If they regarded the humans in judgment or with some imminent urge to attack, they did not show it. They didn’t have guns, at least not on hand, but they had blades and the blades hung along the walls of the base control room like black punctuations, curved and sharp. She had gathered over the months that the alabaster aliens with the intricate silver tattoos on their faces were the warriors, and the bronze-skinned ones were the scientists. It was a scientist bleeding out beneath Markalan’s hands.

  Her squad of four jets stood by the doors and two of them faced out for incoming and two faced in to watch the aliens. The rest of the platoon were outside by the airlock and they could all hear the rifle fire in staccato cadence peppering the steel. This room in the base was much like a human configuration with some semblance of comps and controls and the industrial gray of steel alloy and plastics, but on the walls by the weapons were curious red markings that resembled ancient wards of witchery, if only for their inscrutable and intricate design, and in the corners burned cones of sweet acrid incense, some appa
rent mix of magic and technology that defied any rally to battle-minded reason.

  The blood spread along the floor and with it rose a scent she had never encountered before, but it was something akin to old forests she had camped in when she was a girl. They had removed their helmets. The air was clean. They were two years in orbit around this moon already, burning through resources, and were pumped full of drugs enough to stop disease, yet she was still nervous to breathe the alien air and be close to the aliens, even if the alternative was suffocation.

  “I think it stopped,” her medic said, and she looked down at Markalan with his bloodied hands and his dark eyes raw and wide like they had been gazing too long into some scene of harrowing. The silence of the aliens unnerved him, unnerved them all.

  The rifle fire stopped outside. Her comm clicked and the lieutenant’s voice came through to her ears.

  “The captain’s requested parlay.”

  She looked down at the injured alien, then looked at the others lined up around Markalan and the warriors were staring at her as though scrutinizing a glyph newly uncovered on a Paleolithic plinth that would somehow explain a truth of their beginnings. She turned and looked at her squad by the door.

  “Do we believe it?” Markalan said, his hands still pressed to the alien’s side as if the healant he’d sprayed there was going to disintegrate any second. It might have, if it couldn’t bond to the alien’s cells. It might be poisoning the alien.

  She went to the base doors and told her squad, “Open it.”

  To cross the expanse between the alien base and the ship took a little less than an hour on foot. Moon rock, gray and inert with striations of silver and black, created jagged silhouettes, and her weighted bootsteps stirred the ashen dust minutely, as though she was the lone survivor of an apocalyptic event. On the spinal horizon sat the uneven silhouette of the destroyed mine like the skeletal remains of a beached creature left too long in the sun. She drew steady silent breaths and the scent of her own skin and sweat returned to her. Through the HUD on her helmet the dropship hunkered ahead like a beast of the netherworld, armored and anticipating some hour in which it could feed. The smaller rider squatted next to it, all the lights in darkened disuse. They’d abandoned it a week ago to operate from the base, knowing the Plymouth would send a dropship and they would have no defense from the rider. She had not intended to abandon the rider, but the captain had sent word to kill the aliens from the time it took for them to walk from the rider to the base, and she did not order her platoon to do it. After that there was only one alternative and the Plymouth had fired from orbit and destroyed the alien mining tower and four dozen aliens with it, and soon enough the dropship had come, and her jets had come out and they were firing on each other. They fired on each other for two days, but luckily the main base had held and she had anticipated the ground attack and laid mines around the perimeter.

  She switched to a narrow channel and addressed her right-most escort, a private she knew by name.

  “What happened in the negotiations?” she asked the boy.

  “Dunno.” He sounded reluctant to speak and his hands gripped his rifle. She couldn’t see his eyes inside his helmet. “Cap’n’s just pissed.”

  “This is a wrong action.”

  The boy said nothing.

  “He’s effectively declared war on a sentient alien species. Do you want to take this back to EarthHub?”

  The boy said nothing.

  He wasn’t the one she needed to talk to, but she gleaned some tenor of the troops’ opinions from that silence. In the dropship she looked at the faces of the squad and they would not meet her eyes. The firing amongst them at the base had gone a couple days because nobody wanted to kill one another. When they were moving the alien scientists from one of the research domes to the primary complex, it had been shot. She was running right beside the alien and had not been shot. Then the jets from the ship blew the research dome. So she thought about that all the way back to orbit and the Plymouth.

  The same private and another private who she also knew by name escorted her to the captain’s conference room and left her in there. She didn’t have weapons because they had taken them from her outside the base. She sat at the long glossed table, looking at her reflection in it as if through a membranous alternate dimension, and in a few minutes the captain entered and the hatch shut behind him from the jet outside, sounding like a guillotine. He sat in his chair and it was all the way on the opposite end of the table, and he began to slowly swivel the thick, black chair back and forth with one hand on the table top where it was shiniest, fingers lightly drumming the surface. He had a streak of silver hair that started over the right side of his forehead and sometimes in command staff meetings he would lean his head on his hand and his fingers would twist that streak around, but now his hands remained otherwise occupied and his right eye under that silver streak looked paler than his left.

  “Commander Gray, what am I going to do with you?”

  She said nothing.

  “It was a simple order.”

  “Of murder.”

  He waved his hand like he was brushing away an insect from the air. “Trying to communicate with them is pointless. The Hub doesn’t have the resources to let us sit around, no matter how many forays we do in this region.”

  “Then let’s leave.”

  His eyes narrowed and the swiveling stopped. He leaned forward with both arms on the table and entwined his fingers together and stared down the black surface at her with the direct and distressed countenance of a kindling god looking upon his creation of which he held little hope.

  “Surely a woman of your rank understands the way our universe works.”

  He was a man whose tone seemed naturally to possess some form of condescension just because he was handpicked by politicians and brass to head this expedition.

  “What do you think happens from here,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “So you think it’s up to me?”

  “You’re the captain.”

  “I am. But you’re my jet commander and you won’t command your jets. So you forced me to command your jets, and I know they’re displeased with me and this is because you gave them a contradictory order. So you tell me, what do you think happens from here?”

  “You ask me to order them to vacate the base and fire on the aliens.”

  “We’re long past that.”

  She said nothing.

  “You will make a decision whether you want to be with your jets on that moon or remain with your jets on ship.”

  “Then what?”

  “Who can tell? Maybe the aliens attack your jets on the moon, something Markalan and the rest of them did not expect because the aliens had lured your platoon into the base to act as a shield. The Plymouth would have no choice but to retaliate from orbit again.”

  It was a grim joke on jetdeck that the captain walked around with his uniform trousers a size too small so he could feel that he had bigger balls than he did. She watched his eyes, the paler and the darker. “Is that what you told Hub Command about why you blew the aliens’ mining tower? And all of those striviirc-na underground?”

  “You’ve wasted both time and ordnance here. So where will you go?”

  “I guess I’m going back to the moon, but can I talk to my chief at least?”

  “What do you have to say to him? You couldn’t even give a simple order to your platoon on the surface.”

  “You won’t grant me a last word, sir? To get my affairs in order?”

  He looked like he was thinking it over. “I never figured you for a martyr.”

  “I’m no martyr, I just have limits.”

  “Over a bunch of strits?”

  “Murder’s murder, sir.”

  “Is it because you can’t leave him? Your bleeding-heart medic?”

  “I’d like to speak to my chief.”

  He sniffed and leaned up again like a great bird puffing its feathers, and h
e passed a hand over the lower part of his face and stood to come down the length of the table so he could sit beside her, where she did not move and held no weapons. He wasn’t incapable either, and he laid his hand flat on the table in front of her. “Enas, are you really willing to die for these strits?”

  It was not the name the aliens called themselves, but human ears and mouths had difficulty with the pronunciation they had been told so this had become their name. The way in which the captain said it made it sound more like a curse word.

  “I’m not willing to do shit, but I’ll do what I have to.”

  Two of her own jets, who had been standing outside the room, took her to the brig and put her in, and one of them mumbled, “We’re sorry, Commander,” before locking her up and leaving the lights on as they left. The hatch made a clang and she looked at the empty monitoring station, then up at the high ceiling with its exposed pipes and around the barred cell. She knew there were optics in here and another adjacent room in which to listen and watch the feed, but she went to the single bunk in the cell and sat and waited. The Plymouth was an expeditionary ship with a military provenance, and on the bulkheads was the evidence of past battles long recorded and forgotten in the logs, other disobedient crew or incarcerated pirates and smugglers moved from one location to the next in the shuffling of fates orchestrated by those with more might, and she counted the scoring along the cold transsteel with the tips of her fingers and wondered at the lives of labor incurred in the construction of it.

  Three hours went by according to her tags, and then more, so she lay down on the bunk and slept. Sometime later the hatch opened and she awoke and sat up then stood and went to the cage bars as her chief came in and his face was grim like he was compelled to be a witness to a gruesome execution. He wore his sidearm and he glanced at the empty monitoring station before stopping a meter from the bars.