by A. J. Allan
But imagining himself winning a war, and doing that… and getting to see his family once more…
“One…”
I’m ready. Let’s go. Let’s go!
“All fighters, engage!”
“Whoo! Let’s kick some motherfucking alien ass!”
20
Ahead of Lopez, the bay doors opened to the blackness of space. For some reason, Lopez had expected the doors to open and for the enemy to be right there, like a boxer in the opposite corner of the ring, visible and hungry but also waiting for the battle to officially begin.
Instead, all he saw was a smattering of stars with no enemy in sight. Of course. Don’t be stupid. The enemy’s big but space is incomprehensibly big.
“Buckle up, privates,” Lt. Andrews said. “We’re about to hit five percent LS, and if you’re not strapped in, well, it’s gonna be an awkward funeral when they explain how you died.”
Lopez knew the drill. A single push of the button strapped him in, preparing him for the severe g’s that would strike as the ship launched.
“Taking off in five, four, three, two, one…”
Lopez’s mind had gone blank. Once he had shifted his mindset from preparing to engaged, his mind rarely became an active participant.
Suddenly it felt like a giant meteor had slammed into his chest. Even with the precautions, it still felt bone-crushing the way the ship lurched forward.
But it was over before it had even started. The enemy ship, with its three orbiting miniature ships, came into view. The larger of the ships was about a third the size of the Churchill—still a rather significant size. The smaller ships looked to be about five times the size of the Apocalypse, a manageable size.
“This is Colonel Ali of the Churchill,” Ali said from a ship also in battle formation. “All fighters, focus your attacks on the orbiting vessels. Take evasive maneuvers as necessary. Squads 1 through 10, focus on a frontal assault. Squads 11 through 20, circle around and hit the rear. Squads 21 through 25, go for left flank, and squads 26 through 30, go for right flank. Out.”
“Well boys and girls, you know what that means,” Lt. Andrews said. “Squad 7. We’re going to attack this motherfucker head on!”
The ships moved in a giant, three-dimensional v-shape, with Squad 7, Apocalypse, moving from beneath Squad 1, Ragnarok, and to its right. If all went well, it would strike the front of the ship approximately ten seconds after Squad 1’s initial attack.
“Closing within range, over,” Squad 1’s commander said.
Lopez had his eye on the target, nothing else mattering. An asteroid could have appeared directly to the side and he would not have noticed it. All that mattered was destroying this ship.
The ship that had obliterated society on Titan. That had destroyed all sorts of technology. That had ruined lives.
“Ready—FIRE!”
Squad 1 unleashed a torrent of lasers toward the ship. Lopez’s eyes widened as he waited for the explosions and the fires to come.
But nothing appeared.
“FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!”
Squad 1 unleashed even more weaponry, introducing a stronger laser, but it too just vanished.
“What the hell?!? Squad 2 through 5, fire—”
But then it happened in a blur that came so fast that Lopez barely had time to process it. The space pollen emerged from the giant ship once more, making its way for Ragnarok.
“Command, this is Squad 1! We’ve got smaller craft coming our way!”
The voice started authoritarian but slowly devolved into fear.
“They’re latching on sir! They’re eating the ship! They’re devouring the goddamn hull! Men! Grab small arms and prepare to eng—what the hell?!? The fu—”
But the voice instead turned to a horrifying wail. A terrifying growl came through the comms as more screams and cries came from the remains of Ragnarok. Lopez grimaced. He did not have time to mourn. Did not have time to register the screams. Did not—
More voices came over the comms. More screams. More ships taking damage from the space pollen. More aliens boarding the ships, tearing men apart.
“Jesus fucking Christ!”
“No! Noooooo!”
“Don’t, no, please, please, no—”
“Oh God, we’re fucked, we’re so—”
They all ended in the same chilling way. A human screaming or having their voice cut off mid-sentence, followed by a vicious victorious growl of an alien race that they had not yet identified.
“God fucking dammit! Break formation!”
Lt. Andrews’ voice came through loud and clear. He didn’t wait for permission from the colonel.
He couldn’t have. The colonel, on board Squad 5, had already perished.
21
“What the FUCK is going on?!?” Irons roared.
“Nothing we can’t handle!” Li yelled. “I swear! We can handle it! Haha!”
“Shut the fuck up Loose or I’ll break your back before these assholes do,” Irons shot back. “Sir, we have to get out of here, we can’t beat these guys, not with this ship!”
The CO had already done that to an extent. He’d broken out of the fighter formation and retreated, but he had brought the ship back around for a different type of pass.
“Lopez, do you copy!”
“Roger, what do you need sir?”
“Bomb the fucking shit out of that ship,” Lt. Andrews shouted, with such volume that Lopez heard it both from above him and through his comms system. “If we got ten bombs, I want you to drop eleven.”
“Acknowledged!”
“The rest of you, take out that goddamn space pollen!”
“Aye, sir!” Li shouted. “No more allergies for us.”
“Loose, I swear to fucking God—”
But Irons went silent as Lopez saw it. More of the space pollen coming their way.
“Drop!”
Lopez immediately dispatched all of his bombs at once. They had a clear target in the main ship, and the space pollen missed entirely. The gunners took out many of the pollen, but two landed on the ship.
“Fucking hell!” Lt. Andrews said. “Jordan! Irons! Get ready for battle combat. Whatever this pollen is, its acting as insertion for these aliens. Get ready to shoot ‘em—close range, I don’t want any blue on blue on my ship.”
Lopez gulped. The bombs exploded. No more space pollen came.
He had no use in his cockpit. He could hear the hull being breached, the sign of an enemy approaching.
“I’m coming up, sir!” Lopez shouted. “All bombs dispatched, no more space pollen approaching.”
The two pollen that had latched onto the Apocalypse had hit near the top of the ship and one on the right wing near the center of the ship, perilously close to the engines. If it burrowed up, it would hit the place where Jordan had just fired his ship’s guns. At least Jordan would have a clear shot, standing above.
Lopez grabbed an L-36, a high-powered laser rifle standard for soldiers in space, and stood back to back with Jordan, who watched the spot he had just come from. Irons stood at the edge of her seat, her gun cocked and ready to fire.
Then an unbearable shriek of metal splintering apart filled the air, and a loud thud came.
“Holy shit.”
The alien before them was the most undeniably ugly and horrifying thing they ever saw. It had a long tail with a strong whip on the end, a thick backside—it almost looked like a turtle’s shell before Lopez realized it was wings brought in—black, oily skin, claws for hands, sprinter’s legs, and a prolonged snout. It was the bastard child of the xenomorphs from Aliens and cockroaches.
“You—”
But before Lopez could get a word in, Irons lined up a single shot and blasted it straight in the face. The creature didn’t even get a squeal out before it collapsed to the ground. Behind him, Jordan fired two shots down. This time, the monster’s roar did come, but Jordan never had to back up. The creature flopped to the ground.
But something didn’t sit right wit
h Lopez. If these were like cockroaches…
He went over to the creature, with its face blown in and its still body, and lined up a shot on its soft underside. The creature twitched once more as its guts and organs spilled onto the ground, but now it was dead.
“These things aren’t going to die with a fucking head shot,” Lopez said. “Crush them.”
Jordan took note without another word, reached down with his gun and blasted the enemy to hell.
Unfortunately, in the process, he also blew a hole in the station, making it useless. An automatic airlock closed the opening to the guns, preventing more damage, but Apocalypse had lost a gunner.
“Damnit, Jordan!” Lt. Andrews shouted from up front. “This shit is—”
But his voice went silent when he saw the black-scaled, nearly ten-foot remains of the ugly alien lying on the ground.
“Fucking ugly,” he said. He didn’t say anything else to Jordan, but Jordan didn’t need verbal confirmation to know he had done the right thing. They’d take their chances with three turrets instead of four empty ones because the alien had devoured all of them.
“Did those bombs do anything, sir?” Lopez asked.
Lt. Andrews didn’t answer. Lopez had a sickening feeling about what that meant. No. No damage.
“Squad 7, come in! Squad 7!”
“Dammit!” Lt. Andrews yelled before picking up his comms. “This is Lt. Andrews, Commanding Officer of Squad 7, over.”
“Lt. Andrews, this is General Watson of Churchill. You are ordered to retreat immediately to Churchill. We are going to blow this enemy apart ourselves.”
Retreat. It sounded like such a dirty word. To Lopez, during training, it sounded like “I quit.” Humanity didn’t retreat. It just fought as much as it needed to until the enemy surrendered or was defeated.
But now, seeing the horrors of war—seeing the monster on the ground, the stuff of true nightmares; hearing the cries of men and the transformation of hardened battle soldiers turning into crying boys and girls—he saw retreat not as a coward’s move, but as an intelligent move. The goal was not just to win. The goal was to survive and then win. Lopez would never get to accomplish what he wanted to if he didn’t survive.
“Acknowledged, over,” Lt. Andrews said. He glanced back. “Jordan, head down with Lopez. You handle the bombing, Lopez, you get the guns. It’s a tight squeeze and we can’t do LS because Jordan will turn into human ketchup otherwise. So it’s going to get ugly.”
Lopez and Jordan dumped their guns and slid down the ladder. It wasn’t just crowded. They fit in there like Tetris puzzle pieces, with no room to spare.
And making matters worse, they could see the enemy craft moving in their direction without any damage.
22
“Prepare to engage!” Lt. Andrews said.
Lopez grabbed the guns, preparing to unleash all hell upon the ship below. But…
“Halt!” Lt. Andrews said.
“Sir!” Kowalski shouted.
“Hold your fire, Firestone, that’s an order,” Lt. Andrews demanded. “We haven’t so much as given it a paper cut with our weaponry, and it’s not attacking us.”
“And it’s going to get to Churchill, sir!”
A pause came. Lopez shuddered to think of what the CO was thinking about.
“That it will, private. And you know what? She can defend herself and attack this asshole far better than we can. I’m not going to waste all of your lives chasing this thing in the name of some silly notion of honor. Do I make myself clear?”
A long seething silence came on the comms. Kowalski and Lake probably hated their spots. But…
“Yes, sir. Acknowledged.”
“Good. Hold positions and I’ll get this bird back to base.”
But as they made their way back to base—an approximately 15-minute flight—two things became apparent, one good and one horrifying. One, the enemy had no interest in attacking them. At least for the moment, they would survive.
But the second was that it was moving faster by far than they were, and it would reach Churchill and, worse, Earth before it. Lopez could only hope that the ship had the capability of holding off the alien vessel, because almost all 30 squad ships got obliterated by it without so much as making a scratch.
“Mav, get up here,” Lt. Andrews said.
“Watch the guns?” Lopez asked Jordan, who nodded in acknowledgment. Lopez darted up the ladder and saw Irons and Andrews peering over the alien.
“Take a look. The metal beneath this sucker is slowly disintegrating,” Irons said. “It’s not just a monster. It’s acidic.”
“Is that—”
“Going to affect this ship?” Andrews said, finishing the question. “If we stay up here too long, yes. But too long is at least an hour. We’ll be back to base in less than ten minutes, and at that point we’ll either dock and recover with reinforcements to help us or we’ll be dead anyways.”
He said it with such nonchalance that Lopez could barely believe his CO saw death so casually.
Death. Like those who died. Their screams…
His mind drifted to the battle that had just happened. All of the men and women who had died, barely standing a chance. It could have just as easily been them. The only reason they preempted the aliens’ insertion was because they had heard what had happened on the comms. Had they gotten struck first, they’d all be dead.
So close to death. So terrifyingly close.
On the one hand, Lopez couldn’t believe he was alive, and for that, he couldn’t help but feel a bit of euphoria.
But on the other hand, survival had come not because of victory, but passivity and intentional ignorance on the enemy’s part. And when the enemy had engaged, it had wiped the floor.
How many of the fallen did Lopez know? How many were like him? Like Lake?
Hell, that didn’t even matter. Whatever they were, they were men and women, human beings. And now a god-like nightmare had come to annihilate them.
“Private Lopez,” Lt. Andrews said.
Lopez quickly stood and faced his commander.
“Are you OK?”
His voice carried the sort of recognition and understanding that he’d been there before. Lopez bit his lip, not wanting to sound weak, especially since the battle was only on pause, not over.
“Just a little shook, sir, but I’ll be fine.”
“I understand, son. This is what war is. It’s not games and hoo-rahs and shit talking. It’s blood, it’s death, it’s violence, it’s explosions, it’s carnage. Everyone feels something the first time. It may not be nerves or fear or sadness, but it’s something. You’ll get better with it as time goes by. Do you understand?”
Lopez had to be honest.
“I don’t, sir, but I want to think that’s OK. I think I’ll understand it as we move ahead.”
“That you will, Mav, that you will.”
But then Lt. Andrews looked down at the alien and his focus shifted back to the battle at hand.
“All right soldiers, here’s the situation. I don’t want us to attack the alien ship until it’s engaged with the Churchill. The only way I’m changing that decision is if we get a direct order to execute Operation Omega for this craft. I’m not wasting lives if I don’t have to. But. Once it’s engaged and once we fight, I want you to unleash the ugliest and the most brutal of hells that you can upon these assholes. But I want you to be smart about it. If we’re not doing any damage to the main ship, then don’t concentrate your firepower on the main ship. Focus it on one of the smaller ships. Focus it on one of those pollen particles that sends out alien boarding parties. You don’t have to attack the big bully to win the war. Let our big bully handle that. Am I understood?”
“Acknowledged, sir,” voices came in, some from the comms and some from nearby.
“Good. Battle stations!”
Lopez quickly ducked back down to his turret. He and Jordan once more had to maneuver in what could only be described as quarters de
signed for a person smaller than Lopez in the first place.
“Men, you’ll notice a timer showing up on your display,” Lt. Andrews said through the comms. Lopez noted it. It was counting down from 40 minutes. “When that timer is up, we anticipate the acid from the alien breaching a hull through this ship, and the last thing we need is a goddamn vacuum bringing this ship down. So if that timer goes down to five minutes and we aren’t returning to base, I want any one of you to chime in and let me know. I don’t care who it is as long as we don’t die. Don’t be stupid and try and get a last shot in. Understood?”
The soldiers affirmed their understanding.
“Good. Let’s provide the Churchill the backup it needs.”
23
The Churchill. One of about a dozen battleships and the one most often tasked with patrolling Earth. Only the three space dreadnaughts that humanity had built could outsize the Churchill—the Caesar, the Khan, and the Hammurabi. But those dreadnaughts operated in an unknown location, reserved only for extreme battles, and while this certainly merited the arrival of one such ship, it would take at least a few hours for the beast to arrive.
Assuming these guys haven’t also cut off communication with us. And that we can pull them away from the wealthy planets on TRAPPIST-1.
And that those planets still exist.
The Churchill, though, was no slouch. The ship had suffered some damage during the war with the neagala, but it had won all of its battles. No one saw any reason for this entanglement to end differently here.
But rational reason and gut thinking made Lopez fearful of what might come.
The Churchill had positioned itself to face the enemy head-on, an impressive maneuver at rapid speed for its size. Because of the speed discrepancy, the Apocalypse would not get into position for battle for at least another five minutes.
Then the space pollen leaked out. Lopez gulped. He wanted to say something, maybe something encouraging, but what the hell could he say?
“Big Mama gonna do some spring cleaning!” Li shouted on the radio.
And that’s why you don’t say anything, you just sound like a goddamn idiot if you do.