by Azalea Ellis
Zed lowered his gun and turned to me. “Are there any more, hiding?”
I pointed the last three men out with a mini-map Window, and Jacky and Zed left to deal with them.
Sam seemed completely unconcerned that he came close to being shot. He strolled leisurely to each of the men he’d incapacitated, and killed them. He turned to me, then, and I shuddered as my gaze met his. Whatever that blackness was, it wasn’t quite human. He smiled, tilting his head a little to the side. “Would you like some apathy? I can give it to you. It might slow you down a little bit, but you won’t hurt anymore.”
I swallowed. When I spoke, my voice didn’t crack. “No, thank you.”
Sam shrugged, then turned away.
I resisted the urge to let out a sigh of relief, and looked around. The military had known what the arrays were, it seems. Not so surprising, seeing as my team had used them twice, and Earth had been invaded through one. Still, I should have thought of that. If things had gone differently… I looked down to Blaine’s body and shuddered. “We need to move. The people on the other side of this array know exactly where we are right now, and might decide to come after us.” I walked out of the stone circle and dug my claws into the seam of the nearest fabric tent, slicing until the whole pseudo-wall came down.
Jacky and Zed returned from killing the other soldiers, which had been accompanied by a few gunshot sounds from him and some screams of rage from her. When had it become normal for me to send my brother out to kill? I shook my head to clear it. There would be time to think on things like that later. For now, I had to make sure the rest of us stayed alive.
Kris still hadn’t stopped wailing. “His body is empty! Th—there’s no soul in it. It’s empty!”
Jacky hurried over, wrapping her arms around Kris and pulling the girl away.
I threw the canvas on top of Blaine’s body. “Help me,” I said to Torliam.
Together, we rolled him up in it, and carried his body to the back of one of the military cargo pods, stashing it inside an empty crate.
Gregor was entirely still, wide-eyed and silent as he stared at the pool of blood on the ground.
I moved to him and scooped him up, holding him close to my chest and tucking his face into the crook of my shoulder. I didn’t know what to say, so I rubbed his back in little circular motions, instead. That was supposed to be soothing, right?
I met Jacky’s eyes over the top of his head, then jerked my head toward the cargo pod. She clambered in with Kris, who was still crying but seemed to have exhausted herself. I tucked Gregor in next to her, squeezing his clammy hands. “I’ll be right back.”
Sam was rummaging around in one of the dead soldier’s pockets. He stood, holding up a key fob. “I can’t heal a dead person, but I can drive.” With my approval, he moved to the driver’s seat and started up the cargo pod.
“Adam, take a moment to disable the pod’s GPS before we go,” I said.
The bags under Adam’s eyes looked heavy enough to drag his head down, but he nodded to me, ink construct’s legs moving sluggishly toward the pod’s cab.
The rest of us loaded up the most useful-looking of the military supplies, especially foodstuffs, and then climbed in ourselves. We didn’t bother bringing the guns, since they were coded to the soldiers’ DNA. It’s not like we needed them, anyway.
Sam drove us away from the little clearing, following the shoddy dirt road the military personnel must have created to get to the array. We left their bodies where they’d fallen.
I wished, idly, that they were still alive to guard the array. Maybe they would have slowed down anyone else who tried to come through after us.
Jacky’s voice was low. “Who did it?” She had wrapped a big blanket around herself and the kids, and they were huddled into her.
Chanelle looked to me, waiting for my response. Tear tracks streaked her cheeks. How long had she been lucid? I hadn’t been paying attention. Sometimes, she faded into the background, so often lost in a fugue that I’d stopped expecting her to be normal, even as she was getting better.
“The person who attacked just popped into existence,” I said. “I think Ichi may have teleported them there. Maybe it was even Ichi himself. I couldn’t tell.”
Torliam rubbed his hand over his face, his beard making scratchy sounds from the friction. “Was he aiming for you?”
I swallowed. Blaine had been right beside me. “He could have been.” Or maybe he’d chosen Blaine on purpose, since he wasn’t part of the Seal of Nine. I didn’t say that out loud, conscious of the children.
“I…am sorry, Eve,” Torliam said. He reached over and rubbed a spot of blood off my arm.
Adam let out a bitter laugh. “This is a complete shit-storm.”
Self-consciously, I rubbed at my face, where Blaine’s splattered blood had dried. Adam was right. Blaine was the kids’ only remaining family, and a huge asset to the team, with the combination of his stunning intellect and monetary resources. I’d considered him a friend. And now that was gone.
I looked over to Zed, who was meticulously cleaning one of his guns.
Blaine was the only one of us who could make more nutrient paste for Zed’s nanites.
There was only one other place to get them. “Sam,” I said, raising my voice a little to be sure he’d hear me from the front of the pod. “Set a course for NIX.”
I’d expected some surprise, maybe even some disagreement from the others, but didn’t get either. I didn’t know if that was a product of their trust in me, or due to simple exhaustion. At that moment, I couldn’t find it in myself to care.
I fell asleep in the back of the jostling military cargo pod and dreamt uneasily, till the feel of the pod slowing to a stop woke me up.
Sam’s eyes were back to normal, but his hands were trembling and he looked almost as pale as Adam had. He stumbled into the back of the pod and laid down, passing out almost immediately. At least he hadn’t fallen asleep while driving.
The rest of us piled out of the pod, unloading some of the military meals and scarfing them down despite the lack of flavor.
Chanelle sat beside me at the base of a large tree. Her tears for Blaine had dried, and now she kept a tremulous smile on her face.
Birch came over and sniffed at our meals, then flattened his ears in disgust and pranced away into the trees, presumably to catch something more appetizing.
She laughed at the twitch of short little tail, then smiled to herself as she popped the piece of hard candy that had come with one of the meals into her mouth. She offered another to me.
I took it, and thanked her. She looked so much like China, when she smiled. When she wasn’t staring into space with empty eyes.
“I like being awake,” she said in a soft voice. “Lucid, I mean.” She ran her fingers through her shoulder-length hair, wincing at some tangles. “When I’m in the fugues, it’s like life just passes me by. I wake up, and things have changed, and even though I struggle to stay aware, I can’t, and the world goes on around me. At least it’s getting better.”
“Soon, it’ll be back to normal all the time.”
She sucked on her candy. “Maybe. But…even if it isn’t, that’s okay. I’m glad to be alive, to have this little moment of happiness. I’m not going to let any of these little joys slip away, while I still have the ability to enjoy them.”
I frowned. “Chanelle, we are going to save you.”
She smiled wryly. “I know you’ll try. And yeah, I want you to succeed. But if you don’t, I don’t want to look back on any of the moments where I could have been fully alive and realize I wasted them.”
I was trying to think of a response when she pointed into the forest and laughed.
Birch sauntered out from between the trees. In his mouth, he held a squirrel, which he proceeded to drop proudly into my lap.
My hand snapped forward and wrapped around its neck before it could move, and I lifted it. “Did you hunt this down for me?” I said.
Birch meowed out a scra
tchy sound I took for agreement.
Chanelle held her hands over her mouth to stifle her laughter.
The squirrel had a broken hind leg and a few puncture wounds from Birch’s teeth, but was mostly intact. It hung from my hand limply, maybe playing dead, since I didn’t think its spine was broken, and I could feel its heart beating a staccato against my palm.
My eyes caught on the honeycomb-scaling of my new skin, and I paused, thinking back to my conversation with Adam. Maybe, if I practiced enough, I could help him. I could get something right for once. “Thanks,” I said. “You’re a great hunter, providing for the team like this.”
Birch let out a cross between a purr and a yowl, and stared at me eagerly.
I raised my eyebrow. Was he waiting to watch me eat it? I closed my eyes, pushing my awareness past the barrier of the squirrel’s fur and skin, and into its body. I examined the broken leg carefully, and worked out how it might be fixed in my mind.
Then, I reached inside myself for just a smidgeon of Chaos, and coaxed it out. I turned it into black flames in my hand, imagining the bones of the leg shifting and fusing back together. How had I done it before?
Chaos flared, then rushed into the squirrel, which jerked and writhed in my hand. The black flames consumed and used the fuel to remake, but I could tell immediately something was wrong.
The creature began screaming, a high-pitched, half-choked sound. Its leg bones were fused together, but they were bare of any skin, muscle, or flesh, and they’d grown grotesquely thick in comparison to the rest of the creature’s body—half of which was disintegrated—with lumps of bone growing out of its remaining flesh.
Its cries grew weaker, and I hurried to grab it in my hands again, twisting and neatly snapping its neck. Nothing deserved to die under that kind of torture, better to end its misery quickly.
Birch stared at the squirrel with wide eyes, then looked up to me, and then back to the squirrel.
He looked to Chanelle, and she shook her head mutely, as if denying any association to me.
“Err, sorry. I thought maybe I could practice using Chaos to heal its leg.” I set the squirrel down.
Birch backed away, then flattened his ears to his head and trotted away, yowling loudly. He jumped atop Adam’s shoulder, digging his claws in and rustling his wings. He touched the side of my teammate’s face with his nose, and Adam’s eyes widened as the growing tailos pushed images into his mind.
Adam looked over at me, then at the deformed once-was-a-squirrel lying at my feet. “Seriously, Eve?”
I groaned, tilting my head back. “It was an accident!”
Chanelle burst out laughing, doubled over and pounding her fists on the ground as she struggled to breathe past her mirth.
Jacky took the wheel when we continued on, since Sam was still asleep. Beside her, Adam fiddled with the pod’s media controls till he found news of the invasion.
Most of the AM and FM signals were looping the same automated message.
“The following message is transmitted at the request of the Department of Defense. At approximately 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time, numerous unidentified objects were detected in the skies over Antarctica, traveling north. These objects are presumed to be a form of controlled aircraft and have shown themselves to have hostile intent. Citizens are encouraged to monitor local media outlets, as more updates will follow as information becomes available. Please review your local emergency action plans and shelter locations, and stay inside your homes if possible. In the event evacuation of any area is necessary, you will be informed immediately. Please adhere to the orders of your local enforcers.”
Adam nodded. “On Earth, it’s only been a little over half a day since they arrived. I wonder if any of the other media outlets have updated information.” The pod had access to some basic satellite broadcasts. Although Adam figured out how to access the satellite news channels, the only thing we could find was rampant—and sometimes panicked—speculation, and endless repetitions of the information we already knew. A couple military planes had been shot down in Antarctica, but beyond that, no new information.
I turned to ask Torliam if he knew anything about his mother’s preferred style of invasion, what targets the Estreyans would go after first, and their policy on civilians and surrender, but he was asleep. The skin over his cheekbones seemed drawn, and he had deep shadows under his eyes, so I left him be. He needed rest, too.
Gregor and Kris had curled up in the corner in a pile of blankets. Her cheeks were wet with tears. Maybe that was a good thing. Gregor hadn’t cried, and had barely spoken since earlier that morning. I didn’t know what the normal response to seeing your uncle and guardian gruesomely murdered was, but I knew it would have damaged something important inside them. Their lives had changed, irrevocably.
My eyes burned, and I blinked to keep myself from crying. The world was a cruel place. NIX had power, and they used it to create Players and the Game. Queen Mardinest had power, and… I shook my head, swallowing hard. She hadn’t needed to kill Blaine. She hadn’t needed to do any of it. It was like the world was bent on destroying everything good.
Forum Page 1
Welcome to the Earth Defense Force message boards.
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You are viewing thread: “Alien Invasion—This is not a Hoax!”
ORIGINAL POSTER “ANTIGONE” SAYS:
People, it's on the news, it's been acknowledged by the EDF, and we've got video documentation. This is real. Aliens have invaded Earth, and they are hostile. You can watch the videos here, and here. I’ll add more as I’m made aware of them.
For those of us who’ve been saying the aliens were out there all along, we’ve finally got proof. Personally, I wish I’d been wrong. You can see an image of one of their ships here. If not for the windows cut into the side, it looks like a spiky stingray. It seems like the aliens are an aquatic species of some sort, judging by the construction of their ships.
We don’t know what they want, and they seem to be ignoring attempts at communication. They’ve already shot down two human ships, but so far, I don’t think we even know if they understand that we’re trying to talk to them. I can only hope that there can be some peaceful resolution among our two races, because even if they are fish people, they’re obviously more advanced than we are and highly dangerous.
Stay safe, people, and update this thread with more information as you receive it. I’ll add any relevant information to the original post.
POSTER “SCI-FI JACK” SAYS:
I bet they’re here to annex our oceans. Earth is over 70% water. It probably looks like a paradise to them.
POSTER “POOP HAPPENS” SAYS:
We’ll blow those fish-freaks out of the sky. I’ve never much liked sushi, but I think I could grow a hankering for it if they don’t realize what’s good for them and go back where they came from.
POSTER “ALIEN77” SAYS:
You’re just another one of the sheep, Antigone. They’re not aliens. If you look past the surface lies, you’ll find out that they didn’t come from outer space at all. They’ve been here all along, in our oceans, probably somewhere in the Mariana Trench. The government has been lying to us all along.
POSTER “SCARED-IN-NEVADA” SAYS:
Why do you think they’re attacking?
POSTER “ALIEN77” SAYS:
Scared-In-Nevada, obviously, they’re attacking because we’ve been polluting and poisoning the oceans. They’re fed up and they’re going to wipe us out like the infestation of the Earth that humanity is.
POSTER “NOT-A-CONSPIRACY-THEOREST” SAYS:
Hahahahaha! Finally, I can say I told you so. I’ve been saying it all along, and everyone just kept saying I was crazy. The aliens are watching us. They’re here! I was taken up in one of their ships back in ’89, and they told me they’d be back once the microwave radiation in the atmosphere got heavy enough to support their needs. Now they’re here, and they’ve brought their friends.
POSTER “PEPPER-POPPER” SAYS:
Oh my god. Is this real? I can’t even think straight. Please, tell me this is some elaborate hoax.
POSTER “ENFORCER DAWSON” SAYS:
Not-A-Conspiracy-Theorest, didn’t you tell people they sucked you up in a flying saucer and took you to their home planet, which is Mars? Kinda strange, seeing as someone probably would have noticed a whole race of people flying around inside ships shaped like giant sea creatures on a planet you can literally see through a telescope.
As for the real news, holy shit. I didn’t realize those were ships at first. I thought we were being invaded by giant flying monsters.
They’re calling us all in, and we’ve been approved to work unlimited overtime. If the world doesn’t end, I’m finally going to have the money to take my wife on that vacation to the Bahamas.
I would advise people to stay in their homes if at all possible. There’s going to be looters, and it might not be safe on the streets depending on where you live. If things get back, we will be opening up the emergency shelters for affected areas.
Having said that, please don’t panic. We don’t know what’s going to happen yet. We could still resolve this smoothly.
POSTER “POOP HAPPENS” SAYS:
Enforcer Dawson, there’s no way we’ll be resolving this peacefully. We’re people. They’re fish. They attacked us already.
Chapter 10