Jack Strong: Dark Matter

by Heys Wolfenden

  “Xylem, is that you?”

  “Yesss,” he hissed, the ferocity and strength stripped from his voice. He sounded feeble now, like a worm.

  “But I saw you die earlier… out there,” he said, remembering the gout of blood as it burst from his neck. “In the arena.”

  “That’sss right, I did.” More coughing. Retching now.

  “But then how did you survive?” asked Grunt. “Who revived you?”

  “The overlordsss. They make usss fight for our freedom. If we die they bring usss back. To give usss another chanccce.”

  “Another chance of what? What do you think happens to you when you win?”

  “A ssspaccceship and free passsssage out of the sssolar sssyssstem. We get to go… home.”

  “Home? What are you talking about? You have no home. The Scourge destroyed it months ago. You’re homeless, like me.”

  “It wasss?” said Xylem, raising his claws to his head. “Ssso long now. Jussst need to win, to break the chainsss. Freedom…”

  “Xylem, do you not realise what happens to you after you win?”

  LEAVE HIM ALONE. STAY EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE. RAISE YOUR HANDS. TURN AROUND.

  The voice sounded like an avalanche, like thunder.

  Grunt did exactly as he was told. Before him stood the eight figures he had observed before, faces obscured by their helmets. Their capes fluttered in the wind like demented kites. They seemed even taller than before, like a breed of super giants. He looked-up into their stern, expressionless visages and thought of the Xenti warrior he had seen earlier. He was going to be eaten, devoured.

  HOW DID YOU ESCAPE? The leader demanded. I THOUGHT NO ONE ELSE MADE IT OUT FROM ERADIOR. THE EVACUATION WAS RUSHED.

  “Evacuation? Eradior? What are you talking about?”

  I’M TALKING ABOUT OUR HOME. WE HAD TO LEAVE IN A HURRY.

  “Home?” asked Grunt.

  YES, replied the figure, putting his spade-like hands to his helmet. Giant, sausage-sized fingers stabbed at the buttons around its base. There was a flash of blue light, followed by a violent eruption of air. Then suddenly the helmet was rising, rising, rising.

  “It can’t be,” said Grunt, staring into the man’s bright orange eyes. They looked like miniature suns. “I’m the only one, the last.”

  “Not anymore,” said the man, his voice a little quieter, like an echo. “Though they tried.”

  “They?”

  “The Xenti,” said the man, glaring at Xylem. “They’re responsible for all of this. We came in peace and in response they followed us back to our world and hijacked the climate.”

  “Was it an ice world?” said Grunt, remembering his dream.

  “Colder than space… or so it seemed to us who lived through it. Billions died.”

  “I don’t know… I have these memories, well they are more like dreams, terrible, terrible dreams. Of an endless landscape of snow and ice.”

  “That’s it, Eradior. Or what became of it, before the Xenti butchered it and filled it with their malcontent, their taint. It used to be a green land of rivers and seas and the most beautiful mountains, but now it’s just a snowball, a wasteland, a graveyard for a race’s frozen ashes.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “We have proof,” said the man, a tiny monitor flicking up onto his right wrist. “This was recorded by one of our weather satellites shortly before the attack.”

  “Show me,” said Grunt.

  Grunt watched the miniature TV screen as a huge Xenti battleship appeared above a green and blue web of a world. The next instant a torpedo-like device was fired at the planet, hitting it just south of the equator.

  Grunt expected a mushroom cloud to form or else a gigantic hole to be gouged out of the planet, but there was only the faintest of flashes and then the missile or whatever it was vanished.

  “That weapon,” continued the man, “changed our entire eco-system overnight.”

  “But how?”

  “It changed the way particles in the air reflected the sunlight, making them refract more into space, meaning less sunlight reached the surface, cooling the whole planet. We never even had polar caps before, and yet in a single week almost a quarter of the planet was one big ice sheet. The rest of the planet disappeared under the ice not long after that. And all because of them,” said the man, glaring at Xylem and the other Xenti. “Barely a few thousand of us got off the planet before the last of the land was inundated. If it wasn’t for this spaceship…”

  “Wait. What spaceship?”

  “The one you’re in. That’s what the sanctuary is, a home away from home amidst the stars. Our last chance at recovering our species and finding a new place to live. We were surveying this planet when we found the remains of the Xenti civilisation. The survivors tell of some kind of cataclysm that destroyed their planet and the creature that birthed them. The galaxy it seems is not without a sense of irony.”

  “Is this true?” Grunt asked Xylem.

  “I…”

  “Well, is it?” shouted Grunt, anger rising in his chest.

  “Yesss!”

  Grunt was like a hurricane or a volcano or both. In one second, he had wrenched open the bars of Xylem’s cell, caving in the skull of one Xenti, crushing the larynx of another. More followed. It felt good to destroy, to annihilate, to cause pain. And they deserved it. Every bit of it. He ripped an arm off, then a leg; he punched, kicked, grasped and choked. Blood sprayed everywhere. He could hear screaming, crying, bones breaking, snapping, splintering, flesh being pounded. Then he saw Xylem cowering in the corner, hiding like a rat. Like a rat that had stolen his home, his family, everything he knew, everything he could have been. He picked him up and slammed him against a wall. Something cracked. He did it again. Crack.

  Crack. Crack. Crack.

  Good, more Xenti blood, he wanted to bathe in it, drown in it. Killing them all wouldn’t be enough. He had to dominate them totally and utterly. He was going to enjoy this. He was going to enjoy this a lot.

  Xylem screamed.

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Parting Words

  “I’m sorry for killing your father.”

  Padget snapped awake and checked his body for wounds that weren’t there.

  “No, you’re not hurt,” said Egbert, leering over him. “At least not yet.”

  “Why did you do it?” asked Padget, his eyes catching his father’s sliced-up corpse at the other end of the room. It looked like a pool of vomit had been mixed up with a hundred tins of chopped tomatoes.

  “It was a necessary act. Most things are.”

  “But why? He… he trusted you.”

  “And he paid for that with his life, if not his treasury. But it had to be done. For our spacies.”

  “Our what?”

  “Our spacies. We are an intergalactic race. Our operations spread across fourteen separate solar systems, twenty seven moons, and a host of asteroids, cometary fragments and space bazars, though you wouldn’t know it from the lack of us. The word species refers to those peoples who remain rooted to their home planets, like prisoners in a cell. It was old and decadent, like our father.”

  “But…”

  “Do you know how many of us there are?”

  “No.”

  “Barely a thousand. All the rest have been sent over the border, beyond the dark wall. The gears of industry need greasing after all; they call them skavs.”

  “You mean… we’re them? But Kat…”

  “Well some of us are, there’s other tribes there too, less than animals mostly. With your spaceship we could destroy them, kill them, eradicate…”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Of course. And I won’t stop there either. After that I will expunge the other Direktors, liquidate them. It’s their fault we are in this mess in the first place. If the Xenti or the Asvari were to attack now we wouldn’t stand a chance, our numbers are too thin.”

  “But our soldier-bots…”

  “Have barely advanced i
n millennia. We’ve become decadent, lazy, led by our father and others like him. It’s time for a new age, it’s time for well… me. With your spaceship, I’ll bring our people home, re-populate the planet, then the moons, asteroids, the stars. No one will be able to stop us. We’ll be invincible, strong. Not like your weak and pathetic father. He had you drugged you know.”

  “What?”

  “Why else were you so compliant?”

  “I… I don’t know.”

  “No, I suppose you don’t,” said Egbert, sneering broadly. “Those were your father’s short-sighted methods, they are the work of a rat, a snake. And look where they got him? Eviscerated by laser fire and dumped in a bin. He wasn’t what you think, you know. Look outside the window.”

  Padget did as he was told. He could do little else. He limped over to the hole in the wall, glass on the floor, wind whipping him in his face.

  “Look down,” said Egbert.

  Padget looked into the gardens. There was a man there, amidst the rainbow-coloured flowers. He looked to be about forty years old and dressed in fine silk gowns. He was grey-haired and a little portly, but in terms of weight nothing like his father. He was faced by a line of soldier-bots.

  “That’s your father’s lover,” said Egbert, coming up next to Padget.

  “What?”

  “Kept it a secret from everybody, or so he thought. Thought he was above the law too. He thought wrong. So did he,” said Egbert, glancing down at the silk-wearing man. He seemed to be shouting something, but he was too far away for his words to carry. Was he crying?

  The air suddenly resounded to the sound of thunder, as a dozen laser rifles exploded into life. The man disappeared in a green mist. When Padget looked next only a large puddle remained. Food for the flowers. He wanted to be sick.

  “Join me.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve seen what the galaxy is like, what’s out there; we could learn from you. Together we could get rich, control entire planets, perhaps even the galaxy. No one could stop us. We would be invincible.”

  “But…”

  Padget’s mind did a somersault. He was rich, or as close to it as he’d ever been before. He could get his future back, be somebody. His father was dead. Good. He hated him. He was always pushing him around and bullying him; with this he could get his revenge, build an ore mine over his big, fat grave. He thought of Kat. Where was she? When had he last heard from her? He didn’t know. His mind was so fuzzy, the drugs his father had given him… Was she even still alive? And Jack, Vyleria? They were all slipping through his fingers like grains of sand. He had to see them again, they were his shipmates, but more than that they were his friends, his family. Live together or die alone.

  “I can’t do it,” he said, more bravely than he felt. “It’s not right, I’m better than that, we all are.”

  “Fine. Share their fate,” said Egbert.

  “What?”

  Padget saw the glimmering metal too late, its jagged edge thrusting back and forth into his gut like a glitter shark, stabbing, cutting, sawing. Pain jagged up and down his body like piranhas at feeding time.

  His last sight was of a stagnant green pool coagulating at his feet, his head crashing against the floor soon after.

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Teeth

  The dagger paused a millimeter above the Extractor’s forehead.

  Kat could hear what sounded like the wind wailing around the corridor outside.

  That’s no wind…

  She looked back down at the extractor. He was still sleeping. The girl too. How could men like him sleep at all?

  She heard the noise again, louder this time, harsher, more forced, shriller.

  Before she knew what she was doing she was opening the door to the corridor and stepping outside.

  It was empty, cold and dark. Just like she remembered it. She shivered violently.

  She checked the corridor for guards. There were none. She hurried towards the noise, the screams louder now, more desperate. She had to do something. She couldn’t let another girl fall into the hands of the Extractor and others like him. The things they did…

  The screams were coming from behind a cast iron door. Moisture ran down its surface in great, slimy runnels. It was cold to the touch. There was a small, rectangular piece of glass towards the top of the door. She stood on her tiptoes and looked through it.

  In the centre of the room was a long metal bench, with thin spindly arms. Strapped to it was a teenage girl, not much older than fourteen. She was completely naked.

  Anger flared like a volcano.

  She took out her pistol and blasted a hole through the door, yanking it open.

  The girl and the sub-extractor looked up in surprise. Only the girl lived another heartbeat, the sub-extractor’s brains coating the wall behind him.

  She was walking towards the girl when a high-pitched whine started to blare out of the walls.

  Hearing the alarm, she spun towards the smoking door, pistol primed for carnage. She couldn’t get caught again, not now, not here. From somewhere far-off she could hear dogs barking, followed by a flurry of yelling voices.

  “Please,” called out a voice behind her. It sounded weak, fragile, like a ghost. “Take me with you. I can’t… I can’t stand this place. I’ve got to get out of here.”

  Kat’s mind whirled like a hurricane. What to do? Where to go? So little time.

  She was half way towards the young girl, when the door behind her burst open, a pack of sabre dogs clawing across the slippery floor.

  Kat aimed her pistol and fired. The closest sabre-dog evaporated in a red mulch, brains and blood spraying in every direction.

  The girl yelled out in terror as one of the dogs launched itself at her, only for it to fall inches short, the hole in its ribcage as big as a dinner plate.

  Kat was about to shoot the other one when a green pulse of light burst through the wall, slamming into her chest with all the force of a meteor. She was flung against the back wall, tiles cracking instantly, before dropping to the floor, her jaw snapping on impact.

  She would have yelled out and cried in pain, but a sabre-dog stopped her, its six inch teeth wrapped tight around her head. Something crunched, then she blacked out.

  “We meet again, Kat. How I’ve missed your company.”

  Kat snapped awake, the Extractor’s voice cutting through her pain, her delirium.

  She tried to speak, only for her face to explode with fire.

  “I’m so glad that you’re back,” continued the Extractor, his smile as sickly as cancer. “Things just haven’t been the same without you. Not quite the same… atmosphere.”

  He began to stroke her leg, then her thigh. She noticed that she was completely naked. She grimaced. More pain.

  “You thought it was bad last time,” he said, grin as wide as a delta in flood. “I hadn’t even gotten started.” More hands. Nails this time.

  “You don’t scare me!” Kat shouted, gritting her teeth, pain ricocheting through her face like a bullet. “I can take anything you give to me. I’m not afraid of you anymore.”

  “We’ll see about that,” he said, grin as wide as a continent, hands rubbing her legs, her thighs. “This is after all what you’ve always wanted.”

  Kat closed her eyes. She would go away like she used to do before, back to that secret place, where only she could go, so she wouldn’t remember, wouldn’t recall. Her shoulder suddenly flashed with pain, with fire. She opened her eyes. The Extractor was on top of her, his green, moldy teeth embedded in her skin. Blood trickled from the wound in great red droplets.

  She screamed.

  Chapter Thirty-Four: The Brightest Sun

  Pain ricocheted around Vyleria’s body like a flurry of bullets.

  She writhed on the ground, screaming and bleeding, five Asvari stood over her, the butts of their laser rifles stabbing and jabbing.

  Pain.

  It was all she could feel, all she’d ever felt since they’d
disabled her ability to switch off her central pain nerve. They were torturing her, humiliating her. Breaking her down, tearing her apart piece by piece.

  All they wanted was one measly word, but she wouldn’t give it to them, couldn’t. It meant slavery, servitude, an abolishment of self, of her very nature.

  Still they sauntered over her, blows thudding into her ribs, shoulders, thighs and chest.

  Her nose exploded, then her upper lip, both eyes already swollen.

  How long could she last?

  SAY IT!

  “No!”

  SAY IT!

  “I… I can’t.”

  SAY IT!

  “Please.”

  The blows and beatings continued to flow, constant, inexorable, like a tide. Pain now the brightest sun. She wanted to scream out. She couldn’t take it anymore. She had to give in, she had to surrender. I’m sorry Jorge.

  Chapter Thirty-Five: The Battle of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

  “This feels weird,” said Jack, looking down at a fire-strewn North America.

  “You can say that again,” said Gaz. “There used to be a time when I couldn’t share a classroom with you, never mind the insides of a flying saucer. Are you flying this thing, or am I?”

  “We all are,” said Jorge. He could’ve been right next to him or else a million miles away. Everything felt hemmed in and stretched out at the same time.

  “It’s almost like you’re in my mind somehow,” said Jack. “A sort of collective intelligence.”

  “That’s what they taught us at Area 52,” said Gaz. “During induction. Didn’t think it would feel this weird though, I feel like I’ve discombobulated. Are you sure we’ll be okay?”

  “Doesn’t matter now,” said Jack, seeing another mushroom cloud erupt in the skies above Manhattan. “We have to try. I didn’t burst into the international space station and steal one of the Asvari’s flying saucers to turn back now.”