“How are we going to get there?” Lance asks.
“I already taught the group to fly but—“ she says, looking at Noata.
“But we may not be able to pierce the hull.”
Everyone sits in silence, Lance guesses they haven’t thought everything through.
There’s a sudden silence in the room, everybody is staring at something. At the doorway Jahum walks in. “I know what you all are planning on doing. I will help, but it will be our final goodbye.”
…
Cole stands in the loading bay, the bland walls dimming his spirit. The floor opens up in front of him and reveals the clouds. They have a magenta radiance to them, the Skyeaters presence piercing through them. He looks over the edge, he’s ready.
Jahum comes up behind him.
“You have to pierce the hull hard enough to get through it and create four other holes for the ones who agreed to go as well. You should be able to that without effort.”
“Okay.” He doesn’t care about the others, he has his own goals to fulfill. He stares back out into the sky. Once he succeeds, if they fail, he can pick up where they left off.
Only four of them though?
“This is goodbye, Cole…And good luck.”
Cole looks back again.
Jahum is already gone.
He leaps out and flies straight down. He breaks through the air, just falling, not needing to use his powers. He goes through the clouds and closes his eyes.
His spheres appear around him.
He feels whole again.
His power runs through his veins like blood pumping to his heart. He breaks through the clouds and opens his eyes.
Directly under him is the Skyeater. It surmounts the horizon, stretching as far as the eye can see. A red crystal Earth. Cole throws his arms out. Ten of his spheres spin in groups of two. He swings down.
The spheres rocket down. They rip through the crystal like termites through wood and create five man sized holes. Cole goes through one of them, face unchanged, he has no time to think. He flies effortlessly through. Wiring and machinery speed past him.
He burst out through the ground, dirt and concrete explode into the air as he goes higher. He stops and descends down onto a building and rips through the ceiling. He lands with a thump, he hopes nobody saw him, he flew to the nearest building to catch his bearings. There’s a giant window in the room he’s in, overlooking the city. He walks up to it and stares in awe.
Lance, Serena, Wilker, and Noata fall through the sky. The Astrons’ ships flashes off behind them, gone in an instant. Blackness is left where it once stood.
They go through the clouds, even though Lance knows how to fly, falling from this height still daunts him. They break through the clouds.
The Skyeater appears below him.
“Holy crap,” Lance mutters under his breath. The wind is too loud to even hear his own voice. Its freaking huge. He sees five holes, he maneuvers over one of them. So do the others.
He goes through.
His eyes race as he flies through the small hole, the only reason he’s not hitting the sides is because of how straight the path is.
He burst through the ground at the same time as the others. He flies toward the other side of the Skyeater. The others follow him. He suddenly starts to slow down as they get half way through the Skyeater’s sky. He looks at Noata, he frantically waves his arms yelling at him, but Lance can’t hear him. He hits the half way mark and then he drops to the other side.
“Shit!”
His orientation is messed up. The ground quickly approaches. He stops only a few feet from the ground.
He lands on his feet in an alleyway.
“Dear god-“He pants.
“Hey!” Serena waves at him from a six story building.
He leaps up and Serena grabs his hand and pulls him up. Noata and Wilker is on there, too. Wilker is on one knee catching his breath and Noata is on his ass.
“I should’ve been expecting that,” Noata says.
“Thanks for the warning, I’m sure the whole fleet saw us,” Wilker says getting up.
“I think not,” Lance says looking up into the city. He’s never gotten a good look off it, it’s mesmerizing and majestic. Wilker looks up as well, and his mouth falls open.
“How is such a thing even possible?” Serena asks, with her mouth so open a bird could nest in it.
“There are things that exist that you and I cannot even begin to comprehend,” Wilker says.
Wilker was wrong, he looks at the magnitude of everything, they’re only a small spec in the order of things.
“Crap!” Noata belts. “We missed our window.”
“Missed what window?” Lance asks him.
“You see that shield up there,” Noata points up to the sky. A purplish blue force field appears halfway between the city and suburban side. It wasn’t there a few seconds ago.
“What the hell is that?” Lance asks.
“Our missed chance for the day. At night the force field is at its strongest and in the day it’s at its weakest. It’s not usually there but since the ships top half is out of the atmosphere they need it during the night time to keep the ship stable, we can’t break through it now,” Noata says.
“But how can their people cross when it’s there?” Serena asks.
“Their ID’s create an opening for them,” Noata says. “There are simpler ways to cross but not during the night. It’s only the evening but it gets stronger as the night goes on.”
“So I guess we wait, then.” Wilker says as he sits down against an air duct.
“Luckily I brought some food from the ship.” Noata swings off his backpack and digs through it.
“Wait here? What if we’re seen?” Lance asks.
“Have you seen the size of this place, we are nothing to them. Either we haven’t been seen yet, or they don’t care enough to do anything about us,” Wilker states.
Lance embraces Serena. To that, he can say nothing about. It’s going to be a long wait.
Cole continues to stares out the window of the office he’s in. The room is completely empty, it’s office like carpet free of stains. It’s large enough to hold an office meeting of Serephin size, the door is fifteen feet tall.
He needs to save Thora, and he needs to do it now. But something in the back of his head is telling him to wait. “No. I can’t wait,” he says to himself.
Yes, you can.
If you don’t something bad is going to happen.
To wait or not, it plays in his head. He stares into the Skyeater’s star, he feels like it’s the one saying that to him. He doesn’t know how long he can wait, with Thora this close. He checks his watch, Thora’s signal beeps on. Hundreds of dots appear around the ship, each dot changing its location second by second.
He guesses that means he’s going to wait, he hopes his intuition doesn’t fail him. He sits in the middle of the room.
Tomorrow is the day that this will all end, this war, the Eliite and he will finally get to embrace Thora again.
19 – The Absence of Contrast
Thora sits on a plush chair in the cage with the others humans. She stares out the glass facing the inside of the store. The others just stare out the window that’s six feet above them, gawking at their new world. But Thora doesn’t stare because she knows it won’t change a damn thing.
The cage is on the floor of the pet shop. There are various other aliens and animals on the walls in cages. Some alone, some in groups, maybe the alone ones are too violent to be put with their own kind. The five glass cages on the floor have bipedal creatures in them. The one directly in front of her has a creature that looks much like them but with blue skin.
She gets up and presses against the glass, she can’t see their defining features or what makes them so different from humans. It’s at this very moment that she remembers she’s completely naked, breasts mushed against the glass. She yelps and jumps back. Nobody noticed her or they just don�
��t care anymore.
She hasn’t stared at anybody’s nakedness since she got here. She figures it’s because they have other things on their mind.
Something floats in front of her face, an extremely small metallic insect, it’s blue eyes are as piercing as a laser. About the size of a fly on Earth. It buzzes and whizzes in her face.
“Oh.”
Is it one of the insects from the other cages? She puts out her hand and it lands on it. Maybe it it’s not all bad, there is still a lot she doesn’t know about this world.
Its eyes turn red and flies up and lands on her forehead. She doesn’t pull it off, she was always good with insects and animals, much to the dismay of her parents and Cole, as long as they’re harmless. It crawls toward her ear. She tries to grab it but—
It goes inside her ear, Thora screams and falls to the floor, screaming bloody murder. Her hands clasp her head, fingers digging in her ear as she tries to get it out. The cage reverberates with the screams of the others. Everybody falls to the floor, twisting and twirling on the floor, their legs flailing. Hundreds of the insects cover the cage. The others are covered head to toe with the insects.
Hundreds land on Thora as she convulses on the ground. Another one digs into her other ear. It feels like it’s dredging into her brain.
“Get out of my head!!”
Then everything stops, her pain, the digging. Everything sounds so much clearer than before as if she’s just had gobs of wax in her ears just pulled out. All the insects fly away. She rubs her temples, it’s like it never happened.
The pet shop worker stares down at her, crouching down over the cage. “An unpleasant thing, those bugs. They search and prod one’s body to find the communication core, which is—“ She taps on her wrist and a display pops up.
“Which is your brain, in your cranium area, it seems. We get so many creatures and critters through here that we don’t have time to install things and find out what makes you, you. So we have the bugs do it for us.” She looks around the cage, Thora is the only one listening to her.
“With this you can now understand every single language in the known universe, and you can be tracked and you can be found. And if worse comes to worse it’s also a kill switch.” She moves her hand and pats Thora who still lays on the ground, she pats her as if she’s trying to calm a scared puppy. “So be a good little human, alright? I’m expecting to sell the lot of you today.” She walks off as a customer comes in.
Thora sobs in her hands, the only thing worse than this is death. After a little while, she gets back up to her feet and wipes herself off. She still shakes a little.
Wiping her face, she smudges blood on her hands. She never cleaned the blood off her face, the blood from the man who got torn apart by a chainsaw right in front of her.
She doesn’t want to dirty the water they have. She bends over and picks up a handful of the weird hay from the ground. With how wet her face is with tears this should get most of it off. She wipes her face, removing most of the blood from her faces.
But not all.
She thinks she’ll never get a warm bath again.
She sits back down on the plush chair, nobody talks to her. Over time they will get used to their situation and adapt and open up. She’ll tell them what the Serephin girl told her, only once they open up though. That’s what humans do, adapt to survive. She stares at the glass, at the reflection in the glass. She doesn’t has much else to do.
She doesn’t know how much time has passed. Eliite come and go from the pet shop. Looking at all the exquisite and exotic animals and pets. But most importantly the newest arrivals, the ‘Humans’, in the glass cage in front of the shop, situated in front of the giant glass window showing off their new prized processions to the world. It’s the first shop on the Skyeater to have Humans, fresh from their excursion to Earth.
Many Serephins come and go looking at the humans. Whenever one looks down into the cage, Thora makes a depressed undesirable face. Nobody wants a grumpy-looking human, it doesn’t do well in dinner parties or wherever she thinks she’ll get shown off. She doesn’t know if it worked but most of the Serephins just leave after visiting the pet shop. Some muttering that they’ll get one when he or she gets their next check or that they weren’t as ‘cute’ or ‘charming’ as they thought.
Thora smiles as she scares the last ones off. The cashier at the front pleads for them to buy one. After they leave the cashier stares back at her, bored look on her face.
“Too intelligent for their own good,” The girl Serephin mutters, this is just a part time job for her.
Thora gets up from her red plush seat, she looks down at the seat. It molded to her butt so well she can see the outlines of her intimate parts. And other things.
She looks closer.
“Ew.”
She hasn’t had a shower in days, and she really didn't clean herself properly after the conveyor incident. She picks up some hay off the ground and wipes the seat. She needs a shower fast.
She looks around the cage, people are huddling in groups already. It’s not taking that long for them to band together. People to her left are building beds and areas out of the hay. Maybe she can ask to join one of them.
She searches around for something to wash herself with. On the right there is a pool of water, she’s not sure if it’s for drinking and washing but people are already grabbing handfuls and washing themselves. The mother washings her child with what looks like large clumps of hand soap. The Serephins had everything planned for them already.
“Hey!” She yells at the mother, she waves back. Thora walks toward her.
THUMP! THUMP! Thora froze, it came from the store window. A little Serephin boy stares at the window with what looks like his mother, he’s ten feet tall but only a child by his features and Serephin standards. He taps again, finger pointing at Thora.
The mother walks in. Thora stares at her, panic in her eyes. The mother speaks to the worker, she can’t hear her. The mother points at her.
“No,” Thora says, stumbling back.
“No!” She yells. She backed onto the glass. The worker walks up and wraps her hands around her.
“No! No! No!” Thora pleads. She punches and kicks the worker’s hands.
“Stop,” the worker says simply.
A shock rocks through Thora’s body, mind and soul. The bug. She falls limp as her body is put into a box. She can barely hear what the worker said as she puts a lid over her head.
“Now now, you be a nice little human okay.” The lid shuts and Thora falls into darkness.
Thora awakes, she lies against one of the walls of the box she’s in. Light peers out of a row of holes that are at the top of the box. The top comes off, the mother who bought her looks down. She’s in some kind of house.
The mother picks her up and pulls her from the box. Thora doesn’t fight, she knows enough not to. She’s placed in a glass encasing on the floor. The mother takes the box and walks out the room. Thora wiggles her toes on the grass like material that makes up the floor.
The room is very much like Thora’s entertainment/guest room she had on Earth. There is a couch in front of what looks like a giant television, a bookshelf built into the wall to the right by the door and a computer on a desk to the right. The floor is made out of a hardwood like material, illuminated by the many windows that make up the front and left walls.
Out the window behind the television, it gives the best view of where she is. The top of nice green hedge bushes marks the edges of the property, with the peaks of the neighbor’s houses peeking over the edges. Modern houses, with odd geographical shapes and angles, with windows built all over them. She can see even farther and even sees some far more traditional houses, houses a lot like the ones from Earth. Or at least America. A regular square or rectangle shape with triangular rooftops. Thora guesses they take some of the culture of the places they conquer.
But to this extent?
This fast?
She looks
up, above and past the houses and to the other side. Hundreds of ships fly in the sky in-between them clouding the view. But she gets a mostly clear look of the other side. Skyscrapers and office buildings fill the other side, pointing up like odd colored pillars in a sea of gray. It’s where the pet store is and where she came from. She’s on the other side. Moved around like a cow.
The Serephin boy appears in front of her. She leaps back with a yelp. He laughs.
“They look so much just like us,” he says. His mother comes back in with another large human sized box. She takes off the lid and pulls out a man. The same man who talked to her when she first fell from the tube from the butcher line.
She wasn’t the only one taken then. It doesn’t make her feel as much better. But to be in this alone would be horrible. She would’ve probably tried to find a way to kill herself. But to have someone with her she can talk to she feels a little relieved but not enough to get rid of the emptiness she feels inside her at the moment. It doesn’t help the hopelessness that they can’t do a damn thing.
The mother places the man in the cage with her, he has a partly rosy smile. His mannerism is saying it is ‘not’ as bad as he thought it was, so you shouldn’t be as afraid either. Thora looks away from him and at the boy, or their new master.
The mother comes back into the room after disposing of the box. “It’s time to do your homework,” she says starkly.
“I’ll do it later,” he replies, staring a little too hard at Thora. Thora doesn’t get the best vibe from him.
“Now,” she says even more firmly from before. Thora does not want to get on her bad side.
Great she’s already adapting.
The boy looks up, his face grotesque at not being able to play with his new pets. “Okay!” he says with a little too much sass.
“I just a got to do a few things,” he says. He bends over both of the humans in the cage. “I’m going to deactivate the kill switch and the shocker. I find that my pets aren’t that lively when I have it enabled. But if you misbehave then I’ll turn it back on, okay?”
In A Universe Without Stars 1: Skyeater Page 27