Hope

by Tia Wylder

  That was when it all broke loose.

  Right in the middle of a song, the holographic display rudely cut out. There was a nanosecond of stunned surprise, followed by kids leaning forward in their seats or leaping out of them and looking around, upset and annoyed, complaining loudly and trying to figure out what the problem was. Tia, completely flustered and utterly confused—to say nothing of embarrassed in front of her peers, looked for her father, whom she last saw hanging back behind at the end of the pavilion behind the group. He was nowhere to be found. Bewildered, dismayed, and worried, she called out, “Daddy?”

  The next thing they knew, the Colonial alarm system went off, sounding even more raucous than their interrupted concert. The sound cut through the assembled young people like a knife of electricity. Some jumped, others yelped—and all of them turned in the direction of another sound coming out of the darkness.

  It was the noise of whirring aircycle engines, the kind of flying motorbikes used by Colonial Security. Into the lights illuminating the pavilion came a figure on an aircycle—but this was no Security Officer. He was like nothing that any of them had ever seen. He wore some strange garment that covered him from head to feet, marked with odd patterns all over, and stained up and down with something the looked like a mix of mud and pond scum. The figure on the flying bike was shooting right at them, and Tia and her friends all scrambled and dove and ducked to get out of the way. The stranger would have flown right through the pavilion if three other aircycles had not come charging in from the opposite direction, cutting off his path. Riding these bikes were actual Colonial Security members, and from the look of them, they were ready for business. The oddly garbed stranger swerved over the seats, with kids screaming and shouting at the sight of him, and tried to speed off in another direction, but from the direction from which he came, three other officers on flying bikes came speeding in, and from two other directions still more arrived, hemming him in. By this time Tia and all of her friends were either hugging each other on the pavilion floor or crouching between the seats, and the entire scene was filled with the din of shouts and whirring engines.

  Tia, in the midst of the upheaval, knelt down at the end of one row of seats, peering up at the stranger and around at the uniformed personnel closing in on him, then back at where her father had been and where he still had not returned. And again she cried, “Daddy!”

  Other Security personnel, on foot, came running in, ordering Tia and the other young people to vacate the pavilion. They moved quickly, conducting the Chief’s daughter and her guests away from where they had been partying only moments ago. They led the kids out onto the grass about ten meters away and told them to stay down. The terrified youths did as they were told, but kept their eyes on the pavilion as the stranger and the uniformed personnel surrounding him hovered there in a stand-off. For a moment, nothing happened, and Tia and the others wondered why. Then, the officers surrounding their quarry began to back off until they reached positions just outside of the pavilion. The stranger, hovering over the seats and the stage, began to rear up on his stolen bike as if on horseback, and gave the distinct impression that he was ready to leap up and over his pursuers…

  …until, as one, each of the officers’ bikes shot forth a small, shiny object, aimed into the area of the party. Tia heard someone—it must have been one of the uniformed personnel on foot—shout, “GET DOWN!” The young people all made themselves flat against the grass and instinctively covered their ears, barely muffling the hellish sound of the upheaval happening ten meters away.

  The minutes that followed were a throbbing, pulsing blur. The sound of the explosion rang in Tia’s ears. She felt dizzy and shocked. With an officer’s help, she managed to rise wobbling to her feet. She checked around to see if any of her friends were hurt. Thankfully none of them were, but there was plenty of moaning and crying all around her. People were gasping and choking and hugging each other, and Tia hugged the ones nearest to her and cried with them. In the midst of everything, Tia tried to make sense of everything that had just happened. Who was this man in the strange body suit? What was he doing there? Why was Colonial Security chasing him and why did they see the need to use enough concussion grenades to demolish a multi-story building to bring him down? He could not possibly be alive after all that. Why did it take that much power to stop him? What would he have done if they could not?

  She squinted in the direction of the rubble and debris-filled crater where her birthday party had been. Mighty plumes of dust rose from it like the vast columns of smoke from an incendiary bomb. The bike-riding officers had extended cables and hooks into the shattered and pulverized ruin of the pavilion and grabbed onto something, and were now dragging it clear. Tia braced herself and thought she should look away from what they were certainly going to produce from the wreckage of that awful violence. To be sure they were going to bring forth the mangled remains of the stranger.

  Except that what they dragged onto the grass did not look at all mangled.

  The bike-riding officers produced torchlights and shone them onto the prone figure. The stranger’s body was in one piece, his alien-looking garment stained and scuffed but completely undamaged. Not a bone of the body underneath that arcane-looking covering seemed to be broken. Tia blinked incredulously. What had started out shocking and terrifying had turned to something impossible.

  The personnel on foot ordered the kids to stay back, and the personnel on floating bikes formed themselves into a cordon around the area where the stranger lay while those on foot went to examine their fallen quarry. In spite of orders, the kids, Tia foremost among them, moved in as close as they could to get as good a look as they could.

  They heard the Security people saying things to each other and saying other things that must have been communications with other authorites—including, Tia was sure, her father, who had gone off somewhere before all this happened. She guessed his disappearance from the party must have had something to do with all this. Tia quietly watched, scarcely aware of her friends nearby, as the officers worked at the body in the grass and somehow managed to get the headpiece off of it. Now they would all see who it was who had crashed Tia’s celebration.

  Even at a few meters’ distance, Tia could tell that the face lying in the grass was male, young, and incomparably handsome. It was, even from this far off, the most beautiful male face she had ever seen. And there was something more about it. There was a nobility about his features—nothing savage, nothing brutal. He looked almost like a prince out of an ancient storybook. Somehow, in spite of all the carnage and terror that this mystery man had brought into what was meant to be the most joyous night of Tia’s young life, he looked nothing at all like a monster or a menace—in fact, exactly the opposite.

  Which begged the question even more: Who was he?

  Chapter Three

  The young man’s face filled the monitor in the Colonial Administration briefing room. At the end of the table nearest the monitor sat Liana Allen, the Executive Aide of the colony, a young woman with shiny black hair much like Tia’s, pulled back into a single braid. Merrill Swift, the head of the colony, sat at the far end of the table, and between him and Liana were the Administrative heads of the Colonial districts, as well as Nigel Patel, the Physician General, head of the Colonial Medical Corps. Merrill had taken a liking to Liana because she reminded him of Tia’s mother, who’d died some years ago from an outbreak of an exotic fever while exploring new planets.

  “Everyone,” said Merrill, “this young man is the subject of this briefing. Last night, during my daughter’s birthday party, Liana and I were called away when this young man appeared—simply appeared, without a spaceship—in the Transit Bay. And that’s when our troubles started.”

  Referring to the face on the monitor, Liana said, “His name is Lieutenant Jay Goodwill. His background checks out; he’s a member of Stellarforce, though some of his records are redacted, and others are classified. He was in some sort of traumatic panic when he
arrived, similar to a violent psychotic break brought on by a triggered memory. It’s subsided now. He’s lucid, and he’s cooperating.”

  The Physician General, a man of partially Indian descent with gray hair, added, “We compare his condition on arrival to the kind of post-traumatic stress that soldiers used to experience in the pre-Spacer wars on Earth.”

  Merrill addressed Dr. Patel: “And he still has no memory of what brought him here? Or how his unusual suit, which had a Stellarforce insignia on it, came to be covered with that…slimy substance?”

  “No,” replied the Doctor. “He’s suffering from retrograde amnesia about everything preceding his appearance in the Transit Bay.”

  “Liana, play that back, would you?” asked Merrill.

  “To recap,” said Liana, “he appeared in the Transit Bay with no advance hailing. He accessed the system with official Stellarforce codes that the system couldn't override or block.” She pressed a surface on the conference table, and the image on the monitor changed to a recorded view of the orbital Transit Bay. The Bay consisted of a low orbital platform attached to a series of metallic and luminous rings, a conduit for incoming and outgoing spacecraft, probes, and drones. There were several of them arrayed about the planet and coordinated with each other and from the ground. As the group in the briefing room watched the playback, there was a flash of light within the rings, and when it subsided, a small object floated there. The view zoomed in to reveal that it was a male human figure—the same one who had crashed Tia’s party.

  Liana went on, “The Transit Bay drones took the body to Quarantine when they found that it was covered with an unknown substance. This was also when we found the Stellarforce insignia on the suit—under the material covering it.” She touched the surface on the table again, and the screen showed the figure lying on a table in a glassed-in enclosure where three members of Colonial Security in full-body hazard suits examined it with instruments. The garb of the mysterious figure was the most sleekly sophisticated spacesuit—or was it a suit of armor?—they had ever seen, and moreover a suit of a completely unfamiliar design. The suit was ribbed and piped in a way that looked organic and electronic at the same time. It reminded them at once of an array of circuits and a nervous system. But even that was not the most curious thing about it. The suit seemed to be covered with something, an unfamiliar substance that Merrill and Liana could tell even from here was not at all pleasant. It was viscous and slimy, all green and gray and brown, and seemed almost like unprocessed waste matter.

  “Doctor,” asked Merrill, “what did you make of that…substance covering the spacesuit?”

  Dr. Patel answered, “The gelatinous material was organic but inert. We suspect it wasn’t always inert. Before Lt. Goodwill somehow appeared without a spacecraft in the Transit Bay, we think the substance was alive and active. Perhaps it couldn’t withstand the hyperjump the way the suit seems to have allowed the Lieutenant to do. Whatever the case, the material contained DNA. We ran the sequence and found no match to any known life form, sentient or otherwise. It’s definitely alien, definitely unknown. And judging by the context of this event, there’s every reason to think that the source of this material was not friendly.”

  With a hard frown and a shake of his head, Merrill said grimly, “Hostile aliens we’ve never met before. Out here on the Frontier. We knew there was a chance of this, but space has been quiet, and colonization has been uneventful for so long… Damn.”

  Liana chimed in, “You’re now about to see why Dr. Patel diagnosed his condition the way he did, the post-traumatic stress. Watch.”

  On the screen, the figure on the table suddenly lurched and bolted upright. Those gathered in the briefing room watched him leap from the table, hold up his hands, and issue a bolt of light that knocked one Security team member against a wall and left him crumpled on the floor. When the remaining officers fired on him, their beams splashed off the stranger’s suit like water—or, more accurately, sparkled against the suit and then disappeared into it as if absorbed by a sponge. Moving as fast as a striking snake, the mystery man took down the other two Security personnel the same as the first one, then wheeled about and faced the hatch to the quarantine room—and pointed both of his arms directly at it. From the body-suited man’s arms erupted a blinding, screaming discharge of energy that bombarded the hatch and blew it wide open. A second later, he leaped through the sparks and smokes that remained in place of the hatch and was gone.

  “From there,” continued Liana, “Lt. Goodwill made his way to the Transit Bay Shuttle Deck.” Another touch of the surface on the table changed the tableau on the monitor again. “Here, he engaged more Security personnel—and took them all down.” On the screen, the man in the suit ran, leaped, ducked, and rolled down the main passage of the deck, dodging the beams of Security personnel who had poured into the place. The Security officers were perched atop and between ships and on and around fixtures in the deck, firing away at a target that proved either impossible to hit or impossible to stop when it was hit. Wherever a beam struck him, the strange suit covering the mystery man simply drank the energy as it did in the quarantine chamber. More often the fire of the Colonial personnel missed him completely and flared and sparked off pavements, walls, and the sides of parked crafts. Finally, the intruder stopped at one ship and paused in front of its hatch.

  At once the Colonial forces came rushing in at him, weapons aimed. The mystery figure stood his ground and put his hand on the hatch of the ship where he had stopped. Incredibly, at his touch, the exterior and interior lights of the ship came on, signaling that the ship was powering up. The Security people rained fire at man and ship alike. Every beam fired from a Security member’s weapon struck only the space surrounding their target and his intended escape vessel and disappeared into a rippling of light as if the air were a pond and the beams were pebbles dropped into it. Not one beam connected.

  The Security forces aimed and prepared to fire again, but their quarry did nothing but hold up the hand that was not touching the ship. The hand issued another, greater, rippling of light that spread out across the Shuttle Deck. Wherever the shimmering ripples swept a Security member, that person was sent flying, weapon and all, from wherever he or she was standing or perched, until everyone lay sprawled on the pavement or crumpled or draped over a fixture or a ship, and a dreadful stillness settled over the Deck.

  The mystery man lowered his one hand and turned back to the hatch of the ship, and the hatch came open. The figure climbed into the ship, and the ship at once took off towards the port of the Shuttle Deck letting out into open space.

  As the monitor showed the shuttle moving out from the Transit Bay and towards the arc of the planet, Liana said, “There was a Security aircycle aboard the shuttle. Once Lt. Goodwill reached the planet, he landed the shuttle and headed out on the cycle—directly towards the pavilion in Swansdown Park where Administrator Swift’s daughter’s birthday party was taking place. The rest of the story, you know.”

  As the recording ended, Merrill once again addressed the physician. “Doctor, to repeat your analysis of the contamination hazard, you’re certain that there’s no danger from Lt. Goodwill bringing the unknown substance onto the surface of the planet?”

  Patel responded, “We’ve done a thorough decontamination on the shuttle. We’ve sealed off the area of the pavilion in Swansdown Park, and we’re doing a decontamination on that as well. Since the material was inert, we believe the risk is minimal. The alien DNA wasn’t viral in nature and wasn’t replicating. No one is being allowed into the park for the time being, but we think there’ll be no danger.”

  “Well, that’s something,” Merrill sighed. “That only leaves our ‘guest.’ He’s not presenting any further hostile behavior, but…”

  “But he’s in a very restless state,” said the doctor. “Per your instructions we’ve given him gymnasium privileges. And he’s being watched carefully by Security and Medical personnel.”

  Merrill said, “
Liana, display the spacesuit he was wearing, if that’s what it was. Let’s have a look at it.”

  Liana brought up Security footage of the Lieutenant’s empty garb, spread out on a laboratory table with the “slime” cleaned from it. She said, “The suit is made of a membrane composed of unfamiliar carbon compounds that are able to assimilate, store, and process energy, and contains a neural-net technology that creates a seamless interface between the suit and the brain and nervous system of the wearer.”

  Patel added, “My examination of Lt. Goodwill himself turned up some other interesting things. His cognitive processes, senses, and reflexes have all been enhanced, possibly to make him compatible with the suit. It’s likely we hadn’t seen everything he’s capable of doing, in or out of what he was wearing when he arrived.”

  “All of which seems to make him some sort of enhanced soldier,” said Merrill. “A soldier enhanced by Stellarforce technology more advanced than anything that anyone has ever heard of—in other words, secret technology. The question is, was that technology created to combat this alien force which no one has ever heard of either? I’ve put out an inquiry to Interstellar Command and the Terran Union and put a Top Priority on it. I hope the general directive to support and protect all Colonies gets us some answers. Or let me rephrase, it had better get us some answers, or I’ll take this to every channel I have access to as the head of this colony. Any outside force striking at the Union will come through us, so Earth knows what’s at stake here. And I’ll make sure they’re reminded, regardless. That will be all for now, everyone. I’ll keep you apprised.”