The Crimson Deathbringer

by Sean Robins

  Kurt cocked the hammer, pointed the gun at Zheng’s head and said, “You killed my parents. I told you you’d pay for this.”

  Zheng, trembling with fear, hid his head behind his hands, sobbing uncontrollably.

  “Do you want a fresh pair of pants before I pull the trigger?” asked Kurt.

  Kiev - October 14, 2048

  Oksana was sitting in a small, one-bedroom apartment when the door opened, an old man walked in and shouted in Ukrainian, “Maria, are you home? Did you watch the news? We’ve been living under an alien occupation these last few months!” Then he saw Oksana, his jaw dropped, and he stopped dead in his tracks.

  Oksana raised the gun in her hand so that the old man could see it and said in the same language, “Hi, Uncle Alex.”

  The old man, Alex, stared at Oksana. With a trembling voice, he said, “Where’s my wife?”

  Oksana nodded towards the bedroom. “In there, unconscious. I’m not a monster, but I can’t say the same about you.”

  Alex, beginning to shake, said, “I had to do it. I have a gambling problem, and I owed thousands of dollars to the mafia. They threatened to kill my wife and children. This was the only way to save my family.”

  Oksana pointed the gun at him. “Still, you have to answer for my sister.”

  The old man fell to his knees and started begging. “Please! Have mercy!”

  Oksana said, “There will be killing till the score is paid,” and double-tapped him through his heart.

  Two weeks after Operation Royalty, I was sitting in my Viper cockpit, with all my four thousand pilots behind me, when a single Xortaag scout ship appeared in orbit.

  The scout ship crew received a message from their friends on Earth. “Welcome to Earth. We have been eagerly waiting for your arrival. Everything is ready as planned. The fleet can proceed.”

  The message was coming through Xortaag channels and had their codes. Little did they know it was sent by the captured Xortaags turned by MICI.

  I watched the exchange intently, hoping the scout ship crew didn’t decide to scan earth, and they did not. Why would they? In their entire history, there had never been a single planet freed after occupation.

  The Xortaag transport ships made the final jump after they received the all-clear signal from the scout ship. They ran straight into a salvo of our Phoenixes—eight thousand of them, to be exact. The missiles were useless against Deathbringers, but the huge and cumbersome transport ships were a different story, with ten thousand Deathbringers tucked safely in their hangars. The salvo was followed by three more, Sparrows this time, and we flew in right after them, cannons blazing, making sure not a single transport ship survived the attack.

  There were twenty million Xortaags on that convoy.

  We killed every single one of them.

  I knew I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. By my count, if we killed another six hundred and eighty-two million of them, we’d be even-steven.

  Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

  There was a public ceremony to commemorate the brave men and women who gave their lives defending Earth against the Xortaags.

  A huge monument was erected, in the form of several men and women wearing various uniforms and flight suits. In front of the monument was a pedestal where we wrote the name of the nearly six thousand Winterfell-ers who’d lost their lives, to be inscribed in stone later on.

  I wrote Elizabeth’s name.

  Kurt wrote Keiko’s name. Allen’s was written by Lilly.

  Oksana wrote “Anastasiya.”

  Theresa and Samantha wrote Matias’s name, and Dr. Bob wrote Sergei’s.

  Three months later, a delegation of the Akakies’ high-ranking officials traveled to Earth to sign an alliance treaty.

  As the first official human-Akaki meeting, it was a historic occasion. They were supposed to meet Earth’s newly elected government officials in the government’s headquarters in New York. There was no real reason for Kurt, Oksana and me to be there, but we were not going to miss this, and as Earth’s mightiest heroes, we had every right to be there. Plus, Tarq said my presence would give more credibility to our government’s representatives because as the only person who’d gone toe-to-toe with Maada, in a damaged space fighter no less, and survived, I’d become an urban legend among his people and a lot of other species across the universe.

  “My team shoots the missiles that brought the Xortaags to their knees, and Jim gets to become a legend?” said Kurt.

  I mimicked Allen. “Commandos are pussies. A real man tests his mettle against the universe’s most badass conqueror.”

  The three of us looked dashing in our full-dress uniforms. We sat next to each other behind a huge desk along with the Earth officials, waiting for the Akakies to arrive. Tarq and Barook were there too. At their request, there were no reporters present, and the meeting was neither recorded nor televised.

  “Do you really have to use so much cologne?” Oksana asked Kurt.

  Tarq kept biting his fingers, which told me something was wrong. “What’s up?” I asked him.

  “You remember I told you my people had a super strong sexual appetite?” he said. “I am not sure how they will react when they meet your people. You guys are ravishing, but I think I mentioned that already.”

  Was he serious or it was just another example of the Akakies’ weird sense of humor? I hoped he was just trying to scare me. Then, for the first time it occurred to me, Is Tarq even a ‘he’?

  The doors opened, the Akaki delegation entered, and we finally realized why Tarq was hiding behind a hologram all this time.

  Tarq was right about one thing: The Akakies indeed came in various shapes, colors, and sizes. They were also insectoid. And not just any insectoid, the type you might hallucinate about after using LSD. They were so hideous that we’d probably run to the Xortaags asking for help if we met them in their true form first.

  Allen must be rolling in his grave right about now.

  The Akakies reminded me of praying mantises. They were relatively short, had three fingers and an opposing thumb on each hand, four freakishly big eyes, and a lipless mouth with several rows of tiny sharp-looking teeth. They didn’t have fingernails, their arms could bend backward, and they had four legs. I wondered how Tarq and Barook managed to hide those behind a hologram. They probably taped each pair together or something.

  The Earth officials were all seasoned politicians, too experienced to show their shock. Tarq introduced them to the Akakies, everyone sat down around a table, and the first human-alien official meeting in history started.

  Despite their alien forms, some of the Akakies were openly drooling over Oksana. One, however, didn’t pay any attention to our beauty queen and instead winked at me. I silently prayed to God this was a female, and she was only teasing.

  Tarq and Barook sat with their own people on the other side of the table. Tarq was grinning from ear to ear. This was the crown jewel of his efforts. But he looked so happy that Kurt and I immediately guessed something was up. We exchanged a look and said, “Oh-oh!” at the same time.

  An earsplitting siren wailed through the room.

  Tarq jumped out of his seat, shouting, “It is a Xortaag attack! Their fleet has just appeared in orbit! Everyone! Run for your life!”

  Chaos ensued. The Akakies, who were probably in on it, started shouting and running in every direction. Our government officials’ bodyguards rushed in, weapons drawn, and tried to guide them to safety.

  I opened my mouth to warn people, but in all the commotion it would have been a wasted effort. I shrugged and sat back in my seat. A little bit of fun never hurt anyone. And our officials would have to deal with the Akakies for the foreseeable future. They might as well learn why they were called “the galaxy’s pranksters” the hard way.

  The hopefully female Akaki was running towards me. I thought about hiding under the desk, but that was unlikely to deter her/him/it, so instead, I drew my sidearm and kept it on my lap. That gave
the creature pause. The Akaki gave me a hurt look and left me alone. Captain Kirk didn’t have the monopoly on breaking alien beauties’ hearts.

  Tarq waved at Kurt, Oksana and me, and with obvious pride said, “What was that famous saying? If you failed once, try, try again?”

  Epilogue

  Mushgaana calmly went to his office which was adjacent to the theater, opened a hidden panel and pushed a button.

  Somewhere deep in the Amazon, an automated machine that nobody but Mushgaana himself knew about came to life. It threw a small cylinder into space. The cylinder had a small, portable SFD with enough power to make just one jump. Once sufficiently away from Earth, the SFD sent the cylinder as close as possible to the Xortaags’ territory, where it activated a beacon and waited to be picked up by the Xortaags’ fleet.

  THE END

  About the Author

  “Who am I? I am Spiderman.”

  Well, not really, but this should tell you all you need to know about me and my writing style.

  I’m a huge Marvel (plus Game of Thrones, Star Trek AND Star Wars) fan, which shows since my novel is loaded with pop culture references. If you are a sci-fi fan (I assume that you are, otherwise what are you doing here?), you will enjoy them tremendously. I even went full Deadpool in my first draft and broke the fourth wall multiple times, until my editor told it was distracting and kept taking her out of the moment. Shame. Those fourth-wall breaks were hilarious. Still, I can guarantee a few laugh-out-loud moments. Case in point: The “good” aliens in my novel are a race of pranksters, whose main goal in life is pulling other people’s legs (They have four legs, hence the slight change in the idiom). My favorite author is Jim Butcher (The Dresden Files), which is probably how I ended up writing in a first-person POV with the same light-hearted, funny tone as he does. The fact that my MC’s name is Jim is purely coincidental though.

  I am a university/college level English teacher, and including Canada, I have lived and worked in five different countries. I have met people from all around the world. Plus, my parents are from a different background, and so is my wife. As a result, diversity has become a major theme in my novel. My characters look like the bridge crew from Star Trek. One of my female characters even impersonated Uhura once, albeit posthumously.

  I hope you enjoy reading The Crimson Deathbringer as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  Author’s Note

  Writing a novel is hard.

  Don’t “Dah!” me. Think about it for a second. The amount of time that goes into research, planning and outlining the novel, preparing the characters’ sheet, writing, re-writing, re-re-writing, editing and proofreading is ginormous, and if you have a day job (I am an English teacher), finding enough time to do all that on top of all your other responsibilities is almost impossible. During the nine months it took me to write The Crimson Deathbringer, I stopped all my hobbies (I didn’t even watch movies) and most of my social activities. I even stopped going to the gym, and I ended up with a belly by the time the book was finished. Now I understand why George R. R. Martin looks the way he does.

  What prompted me to take on this Herculean task then, you ask?

  I have got purely obsessional OCD. What this means is a thought enters my mind—usually something negative—and doesn’t leave. I end up having to think about it 5000 times a day, and once this starts, my life is ruined for a week, two weeks, a month, or six months. I’d tried a lot of different ways to get rid of this problem: therapy, medication, meditation . . . Nothing ever worked, until I read an article that said the people who had this problem had an overly active imagination, and it would help if they channeled it into something productive, like writing.

  I’d always wanted to be a writer. This is literally a childhood dream, one of those you give up when you grow up. I had the story of The Crimson Deathbringer in my mind for years (even started writing it and stopped a few times). When I read that article, I was going through a tough time in my marriage (fighting with your wife is no fun, even for sane people), and my mind had gone into its life-destroying over-drive, so I told myself, “Well, you’ve tried everything else, let’s give this a shot.”

  And then a miracle happened.

  My mind put the same energy it used to put into producing BS and making my life miserable into coming up with stories. Ideas would come to me fast and furious, and I had to stop whatever I was doing several times a day to write them down. I’ve been OCD-free since then (I know, I sound like a recovering alcoholic). When TCD (cool, eh?) was finished, it took my out-of-control brain half a day to plan my second novel, which is about a nerdy scientist and a sexy female mercenary who use a time machine to defeat an alien invasion.

  I have a confession to make: I’ve fallen in love with TCD’s characters. Jim, with his infuriating ability to take nothing seriously, Liz, despite her occasional goody-two-shoes tendencies, Tarq and his non-stop pranks, and Kurt, who is just awesome. If you end up liking them half as much as I do, then my job here is done, until I start writing the sequel.

  Book Review Request

  What Did You Think of The Crimson Deathbringer?

  First of all, thank you for purchasing TCD. I know you could have picked any number of books to read, but you picked this book, and for that, I am extremely grateful.

  I hope that it added at value and quality to your everyday life, or at least made you laugh, which to be honest was my main goal to begin with. If so, it would be really nice if you could share this book with your friends and family by posting to Facebook and Twitter.

  If you enjoyed this book, I’d like to hear from you and hope that you could take some time to post a review on Amazon. Your feedback and support will help this author to greatly improve his writing craft for future projects and make this book even better. Moreover, it will increase sales, which allows me to write a sequel. Wouldn’t it be nice to meet Jim, Kurt, Tarq, Oksana, and Maada (yeah, that guy) again?

  You can follow this link to Mybook.to/crimsondeath now. Thank you in advance.