by R.E. Rowe
Chapter 9
Jayden and Parker walked through a second set of doors into a large, octagonal-shaped room lined with marble walls that rose up three stories. A smooth, silver dome in a spiral design shimmered brightly over their heads, but it was the flaming torches on the walls that caught Jayden’s attention.
The door slammed shut behind them and the floor jerked upward.
Jayden quickly realized they were in a room-sized elevator. He exchanged glances with Parker.
By the expression on Parker’s face, he could tell they were both thinking the same thing. Their situation was still going from bad to worse.
When the floor rattled to a stop, two retractable doors opened at one end of the room. Jayden scrutinized what resembled another blurry, funhouse mirror stretched into a silver ribbon. When the shape abruptly morphed into a tall, thin creature in a black uniform resembling Nuk'ana, Jayden's heart climbed into his throat and his legs went rubbery.
The creature’s creepy reptilian eyes matched the leader’s eyes, but as it stood near the entrance gesturing for them to follow, its mushy, wet dog smell confirmed this creature was no hologram.
Jayden joined a single file line that had formed, and Parker marched behind him.
The alien shouted in a combination of gibberish and hisses. Jayden had no clue what the alien was saying, but it had his attention. As he reached the strange-looking being, it handed him two earplugs. Jayden squeezed both of them. They looked and felt like the soft earplugs his mom used to block out his dad’s snoring. He pushed one in each ear.
The plugs felt as though they’d come alive, automatically implanting deeper into his ear canals.
Jayden winced. “So gross,” he whispered. But as weird as they felt to him, the translators didn’t hurt at all.
The alien’s nonsense noises suddenly changed to English. “Let’s go, boys. This way. Move along,” the creature said.
Jayden stared at the alien. It was like watching a foreign karate movie where the words weren’t in sync with the actor’s lips at first. But before long, the creature’s lips somehow synched up. Cool trick, he thought.
Jayden and Parker’s line of teens followed behind another tall creature dude with a limp. The creature was en route to a large, open hallway with white metallic walls, at least twice as tall as Jayden.
When they marched to the end of the hallway and stepped through the entrance, the room opened up into a massive space four times the size of a typical classroom. Jayden could see himself in mirrors that lined the walls and covered the ceiling twenty feet above his head. He seriously felt trapped in a twisted funhouse.
Against the far wall, four amber-eyed creatures stood behind empty leather chairs. Each one wore a solid black uniform and a black hat with SECC printed in white, and gripped an electric hair clipper with three webbed fingers. At the end of each finger, Jayden noticed a dagger-like fingernail that could inflict serious pain.
The four aliens grinned and turned on their buzzing hair clippers at the same time. “Line up in front of a chair, Earth children!” one yelled over the drone of the clippers.
Oh, man, Jayden thought. Not the hair. He touched his shoulder-length, sandy-blonde strands. Parker looked at him and shrugged.
The aliens pushed the boys into four lines, each one starting in front of a chair. Jayden was first up in his line, and Parker stood behind him.
“Welcome to Space Command Basic Training, Earth babies,” a shape-shifting alien called from the far side of the room. “You will be prepped and fitted in our standard blacks. Then training will begin. First child in each line, take a seat.”
Jayden didn’t move and neither did the other recruits.
The creature hissed. “Sit on your brains!”
Jayden figured he meant butt though he wasn’t about to correct the overzealous alien. He dropped into the seat facing Parker, who gave him a cheesy grin and a reluctant thumb’s up.
Jayden gagged when he took a whiff of the alien’s body odor. It reeked. Sort of like leather polish with a drop or two of clorine. The alien immediately pushed the vibrating buzzers across Jayden’s head. Thick locks fell to the floor. Jayden jerked forward, but the creature shoved him back into his seat and snarled. It dug its claws into his shoulders. He got the message.
The alien was not only shaving his head bald, the creature was doing it like his dad’s gardener mowed the lawn every Saturday afternoon: one row at a time. He felt a sudden stick like a bee sting in his left arm.
The boys in leather chairs next to him groaned in harmony.
“Ah, you Earthlings disappoint me!” a limping alien shouted over the clatter of the clippers. “The last group didn’t even flinch. You are being given a mega-injection containing antivirus nanobots to protect you from every virus known to exist in the Milky Way and at least three other galaxies. The Ga acquired it special, just for you babies with no immunity!”
All the barber aliens laughed. They repeated the words “Earth babies” and made strange hissing sounds and barks. Except for their reptilian eyes and nose slits, they resembled human men with scaley white skin speaking in hisses and purrs.
Jayden could tell from Parker’s face that his haircut was going to make him very homely indeed. He tried not to look, but couldn’t help himself. His nervousness turned to shock when he gazed into the mirrors.
The barber stopped halfway through the buzz cut, freeing long strands of his blonde Surfer Boy hair from the clipper blades, and then tossing them to the floor. The alien hissed like a deranged cat and patted Jayden’s half-bald head. As if to make a point, the barber pulled on the hair Jayden had left and snarled, exposing its white pointy teeth like a Rottweiler.
Jayden sat in the leather seat, dumbfounded, as Parker gaped at him in horror.
Another being bellowed something from across the room, and the clipper-guy started up again. Floating locks of Jayden’s hair drifted to the floor.
As soon as the barber finished, Jayden was pulled out of his seat and pushed into an adjacent room with three other newly bald boys.
An older Earth boy of about seventeen in a black uniform, with short black hair and a huge nose, told them to strip down to their skivvies. The older teen fitted Jayden for a black uniform with the number 5052 on the right breast pocket and a blue emblem of the solar system on the left.
Jayden wanted to ask him questions, but his voice seemed to have frozen somewhere behind his tongue. The best he could do was to turn his body so the older kid couldn’t see the hidden t-shirt pocket behind him with the tablet in it. He handed Jayden a snug, military-style cotton black cap with a white “SECC” printed on it, and then said, “Keep it off your head until you’re told to put it on.”
The teen pushed Jayden through another door that led into a basketball-court-sized auditorium that was set up with rows of black folding chairs. About a hundred kids in black uniforms and shaved heads sat silently in the chairs. Boy recruits sat on one side of a wide aisle, in a cluster of about a hundred and fifty chairs, facing the same number of girls on the other side of the aisle. Everyone wore black uniforms and held black SECC hats in their laps.
Across the aisle, Jayden noticed buzz haircuts on the girls too. They wore the same black uniform. So not cool, he thought. Finding Nora just got harder.
Jayden scanned the perimeter, searching for an exit. Colorful flags surrounded the room, and two large black flags draped down from the ceiling near the front of the room. One displayed an image of the Milky Way Galaxy. The other showed a galaxy he didn’t recognize.
The familiar elderly African-American woman pushed Jayden toward a row of chairs and pointed to an empty one. “Over there, young man,” she said softly. “Take a seat.” She leaned in close. “Do what they say, okay, honey? It’s your best chance to stay alive.”
Jayden searched harder for the exit, as his legs flexed. He was prepared to bolt until he remembered the barbecue stench and sat down.
Soon, at least three hundred oth
er teens about Jayden’s age were assembled in the large auditorium. More alien creatures in black uniforms lined the perimeter of the room. When their jaws weren’t stretched, they all appeared to Jayden as if they’d come straight from a bankers’ convention. But the expression on their faces belonged on an FBI Most Wanted poster.
Jayden searched for Parker. Panic filled him, and he knew he was on the verge of freaking out.
Then he heard Parker’s stupid raspberry birdcall sound. Jayden jerked his head to the right, and their eyes met. Parker sat in a chair ten kids to Jayden’s right, luckily in the same row as Jayden.
Parker winked.
“Thank goodness,” Jayden whispered, trying to act calm. He knew they needed to stay together. “Swap with me,” he whispered to the recruit next to him.
The boy stared at Jayden without saying a word, so Jayden moved anyway. None of the boys made a sound as he slid down to the floor and did a quick chair swap. None of the creatures noticed either.
Jayden hurriedly climbed into the chair next to Parker. Made it, he thought, but they still hadn’t found Nora, which had become more difficult than anything he could imagine.
Three shifting images dressed in black uniforms moved overhead on a floating platform and morphed into aliens. Jayden gasped along with everyone else in the room. He recognized Nuk’ana standing in the middle with his long smoking stick.
Aliens were freaking everywhere!
The platform lowered from the ceiling until it hovered one story above his head in the middle of the huge auditorium. Nuk’ana removed his glasses. He paced the platform, puffing away on a smoking stick.
Standing at attention on the left side of the platform, Jayden saw a being half as tall as Nuk’ana, resembling a pasty white, hairless wolf with a long snout and pointed ears. Large, dark red eyes on the creature’s pasty white temples bulged like a lizard’s, but focused like those of an eagle. The alien’s sparse, spiked white hair made it look like an intergalactic punk rock star. Jayden thought the alien had to be male compared to the shorter creature on the leader’s right.
Red lips dominated the shorter creature’s dark pink face. Instead of spiky hair, this alien’s hair was candy-apple red, teased into submission, and apparently drenched with gooey hair spray. A whip-like tongue snapped out of its mouth, and then zipped back behind closed lips.
Nuk’ana cleared his throat. “Greetings, Space Fighters. Thank you for volunteering.” He laughed in a deep baritone. “Welcome to our intergalactic war.”
Jayden wanted to correct the weird-looking creature dude, but the Creep incident motivated him to keep his mouth shut. No one around him said a word either.
Nuk’ana paced and puffed. “You probably wonder why I have called you this name, ‘Space Fighters.’ Yes?”
The room remained silent.
“We are at war. Not the kind of war you’ve seen on your televisions during the six o’clock news, or on your movie screens as you stuff your cheeks with pop-jolly and wormy candy . . .”
Pop-jolly? Wormy candy? Jayden almost laughed out loud until it caught in his throat when a gross thought crossed his mind. What if they used real worms? So not cool!
“No, space fighters, we are fighting a real life war against a horrific alien race, a race who takes sport in eating your eyes and drinking your blood. In the same way you eat your pop-jolly and sip carbonated drinks at entertainment events.”
The recruits around Jayden and Parker gasped.
Nuk’ana waved his arm to the left, then the right. “This is Colonel Jazu, and Colonel Shazu. They are, as you baby Earthlings say, family. We Zepar call such relations ‘entanglements.’ My left and my right. You probably have guessed. We are not from your Earth.”
Jayden rolled his eyes at Parker and mouthed, “No kidding.”
Nuk’ana nodded to the short male alien standing next to him. “They are both from the planet known as Jepsilon3, orbiting one of the stars comprising what your people call Orion’s Belt.”
Colonel Jazu jumped in and started talking a hundred miles an hour without taking a breath. His voice was high pitched. “Earth was conquered five of your years ago by the Zepar, led by the one, the only, the magnificent, Leader Nuk’ana . . .” He blinked rapidly, fanning long eyelashes.
Parker elbowed Jayden. “Earth was conquered?” he whispered.
Jayden remained silent, but his dangling jaw could have easily attracted insectos voladores.
“Up until that glorious time,” Jazu continued, “your planet remained isolated from the trillions of living worlds within the Milky Way galactic kinship . . .”
Trillions?
“The Ga oversee intergalactic trade routes. They protected your blue marble planet as their property.” The almost hairless wolf paused and wiggled his pointed ears. It looked like he snickered, but it sounded to Jayden as though the wolf creature was blowing spit bubbles. “Fearing the Ga, other intelligent civilizations, like my people, the Zepar, stayed away from Earth . . .”
Nuk’ana made a circling motion with his finger to the colonel.
The colonel continued. “The trade war existed between Andromeda Prime and Milky Way Central for two millennia in Earth-sol years. It ended when supreme emperor of Andromeda and Nuk’ana reached agreement. But a different participant on the intergalactic stage started a new intergalactic war . . .”
War? Jayden wondered. How could no one on Earth know about it?
“The Zepar occupation of Earth was deemed essential to provide new soldiers to fight the aggressive enemy invading Milky Way Galaxy.” Jazu finally took a breath. “Known as the Atilla.”
Jayden remembered the name Atilla. They were the ones mentioned in the documents Nora found at the observatory.
The female alien named Shazu began speaking with a lisp that made a zzz sound. Occasionally, she sounded as if she were bringing up a lugee. “The enemyz a galactic powerhouse. These invaderz originate from Galaxy IC 1101, one billion light years away from your world. Galaxy IC 1101 iz a massive Abell 2029 galaxy cluster sixty times larger than our Milky Way Galaxy.” She made a long collecting-spit sound.
Ew, disgustingly nasty. He cringed with the entire room of recruits as her dark pink face tightened, exposing a large, V-shaped vein on her forehead. She puckered her red lips as if she were blowing a kiss, then her face relaxed. She continued. “Billions of Atilla invaders attacked Andromeda, then only recently arrived at the outermost spiral arm of the Milky Way. Regions of both galaxyz are now under control of the Atilla. They terraform habitable worlds and moons to suit them. Trillions upon trillions of living life forms have been exterminated in the process . . .”
Jayden felt his face burning. He was way past overload. Aliens? Real aliens?
“As of this briefing,” Colonel Jazu said, his pasty white skin erupting in red blotches as his voice rose, “the Atilla are invading at an exponential rate. Earthlings like you are to be trained and sent to the front lines as reinforcements. But Earth’s general public shall never be informed about life beyond Earth. Your world order would quickly collapse as we’ve seen on other planets. But never forget, Leader Nuk’ana’s Zepar army controls your world’s generals and political leaders.”
Nuk’ana jumped in. “Your parents will believe you are in a third-world country somewhere on Earth developing software, cleaning a latrine, or monitoring pollution counts.”
Jayden sat as though frozen to his chair, wanting to scratch his shaved head. I’d much rather be cleaning toilets in a third-world country.
“Besides a small number of Earth’s leaders and those working for the SECC, no one on Earth knows your planet has been taken over.” The creature began to laugh again, and then stopped and nodded at Shazu.
Shazu’s ears wiggled as she continued. “The invaderz Galaxy IC1101 iz beyond our ability to reach. There are roughly 400 billion starz in our Milky Way Galaxy . . .” Her lisp grew intense. “Approximately one trillion starz populate the Andromeda Galaxy. You do the mat
h, or at leazt az much calculation az your primitive Earthling brains can manage. Compare theez numberz with number of starz in IC1101 and understand why you are here. The IC1101 Galaxy haz over 100 trillion starz.”
Jayden glanced at Parker, who was still scanning the crowd for Nora. Jayden realized finding her in a room full of shaved-headed kids would be next to impossible.
The three bossy alien holograms overhead flickered and buzzed.
“The huge army of aliens from IC1101 invaded both the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies,” said Nuk’ana. “Do not forget. The Atilla threaten your families too.” He stretched his face into a grin that crinkled up his tiny nose and narrowed his amber eyes. “My choice would be to vaporize all of you into oblivion and take your planet’s resources . . .” He licked his lips. “But we need you sniveling little Earth beasts with your soft bellies as fighters in the war.” He nodded at Shazu and patted her gently on the back.
Jayden wasn’t impressed with Nuk’ana’s motivational style. One minute he wanted to zap everyone to smithereens, and the next he sounded like a mad scientist who needed interns.
“Qualified Earth officers will supervize your training,” Shazu said, puckering her lips as if she wanted to kiss someone. She made the disgusting lugee sound again, and this time launched a glob of turquoise phlegm from her red lips. The entire first row ducked for cover, but the flying phlegm flickered, and then vanished.
Thank God for hologram lugees!
“Do not think you will ever see a Ga in person. You will not. They remain busy operating the Golden Way routez.”
Jazu grinned, licking his lips. Disgusting blue drool dripped down his pasty white chin. Jayden figured manners weren’t a priority for aliens.
“The Ga are interested in managing trade routes,” Jazu said. “Training baby Earthlings is our job.”
“For the next six weeks you Earth babies will be trained in three parts,” Nuk’ana said. “The first is a general briefing of the battlefield, the second is flight school, and the third is hand-to-hand. Yes, combat. It is true. Millions of fighters are engaged in hand-to-hand combat on one thousand different worlds, across two galaxies. The bad news for you soft bellies is simply this: the life expectancy of a fighter in this war is, at best, ninety seconds.” He flicked his narrow tongue. “Yes, that means most of you will become stardust in under two minutes.”
Mmmm, not the best odds, Jayden mused. Nuk’ana and his two sidekicks’ shoulders bounced up and down. Go on, he thought, laugh it up, ugly aliens. He so wanted to run, but there was no place to go.
A few kids sobbed. Jayden and Parker looked at each other. Jayden mouthed, “We’re in trouble.” Parker mouthed in return, “No duh.”
“We adapt what iz learned to lengthen your livez in battle. Do pay cloze attention during your training,” Shazu said. “You may be the one who figurez out how to live more zan two minutez.”
More rumbling spread across the sea of recruits in the auditorium. A boy jumped up from the seat at the end of a row. “Take me home!” he wailed, then bolted toward one of the doors and was hit with a spotlight.
Uh oh, Jayden thought. Zapping time. The elderly woman ran to the boy and covered him with her arms. The light disappeared as they walked to a side exit. Lucky kid.
Nuk’ana’s sharp jawline extended, and then contracted. The alien glared at the woman who’d saved the boy. She lowered her head and disappeared through a doorway.
Jayden eyed the doorway. If only they could find a way to get behind the scenes, he thought, they might have a fighting chance.
“For those of you Earthling babies who would rather go home to your miserable lives on your miserable stinking planet, well, think again,” thundered Nuk’ana. “Not that you could find your way home anyway.” He glanced at Jazu and Shazu and started to laugh, and then abruptly broke off and made the disgusting gurgle before continuing. “Anyone trying to defect or go back to Earth will be killed, yes? We will have no yellow-belly, pop-jolly, wormy-candy, jelly-worm space turds in Space Command’s galactic forces.”
Jayden frowned at Parker. “Space turds?”
All three aliens suddenly glared at Jayden. Parker shrugged. Jayden swallowed hard and sat up straight.
Jazu eyed him as he continued. “We have joined forces with the people of the Andromeda Galaxy. This multi-galaxy space fighting force is known simply as Space Command. It too is led by our great leader, Nuk’ana.” Jazu bowed toward Nuk’ana who nodded in return, and then turned back to the crowd. “You are now soldiers in Leader Nuk’ana’s great Zepar army. Is that understood?”
The three aliens glared over the sea of upturned faces as if they were able to focus on each kid individually.
“Do you understand, yes?” Nuk’ana shouted.
A few kids murmured, “Yes, Leader.”
“What?” Nuk’ana yelled.
“Yes, Leader!” the auditorium bellowed as one voice. Jayden joined in, so did Parker.
“Again!” shouted Shazu, her purple forehead vein pulsing as though it might explode.
“Yes, Leader!” the room roared louder.
Jazu’s pasty white skin turned blotchier. His dark red eyes briefly changed to white. “Again!”
“Yes, Leader!” Jayden and Parker yelled.
Nuk’ana smiled. “Good.”
Jayden struggled to make sense out of the “space turds” Nuk’ana and his cronies had just spewed out about a space war, but his brain had slipped a gear.
“There are a billion trillion other pebbles like Earth in our Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies,” Parker muttered. “So Earth is nothing special?”
“Drake was right,” Jayden whispered, thinking about his favorite t-shirt with Drake’s equation to calculate alien civilizations printed on it.
Nuk’ana smirked. “Are you curious what you are up against?”
No one in the room made a sound.
“Take a look,” the alien added as he pointed.
The lights suddenly went out, the auditorium pitch black. Two holograms of mean-looking metallic spacecraft appeared.
“Those are the Atilla ships, Earthling babies,” boomed Nuk’ana.
The flickering images showed two fighter ships in a battle against twenty or so smaller spacecraft. Jayden realized they were exactly like the ones that had picked them up at the observatory.
The scene looked to Jayden like a swarm of gnats on a summer night. The spacecraft attacked each other in a circular, spinning square dance. Nuk’ana was right—it took fewer than two minutes before the mean-looking fighters blasted all of Space Command’s UFO ships into bits.
“Yes, that is correct,” Nuk’ana, said. “The Atilla spacecraft are the only ones that remain. They have a shield and weapon combination we are still trying to reverse engineer. Currently, in a flying battle, our space fighters do not last long.”
Jayden and Parker groaned.
“Pay attention to your training,” Jazu added. “Be innovative. We know this is difficult for you soft bellies, but there are a million trillion home planets and moons across two galaxies depending on you to outthink, outfight, and eliminate our enemy, the Atilla.”
Oh, no pressure then, Jayden thought, just another season of Survivor Universe.
Shazu spoke again, her giant vein throbbing with each z she uttered. “You’ll be organized in groupz of five. You will train together, live together, and fight together. Your purpoze from this day forward, iz to be each other’z right and left, learn how to fight, do your bezt.”
“Get to know your squad mates,” Jazu added. “Your lives and your families’ lives depend on it.”
“Remember,” Nuk’ana added, his image flickering. “Your purpose from this point forward is to destroy Atilla before they destroy you. Understood, yes?”
“Yes, Leader!” a front row recruit shouted before anyone else could.
“What?” Nuk’ana boomed.
Jayden and Parker yelled with the crowd. “Yes, Leader!”
Jayden felt the room vibrate.
“Stay where you are until you are grouped into teams,” Nuk’ana said. His thin, pale lips stretched into a creepy grin, and his amber reptilian eyes glowed bright. “Welcome to Space Command. Good luck, Space Warriors.” He laughed deep in his belly, and then abruptly halted. “Try hard, Earth babies.”
In a flash of red, all three holograms disappeared right before Jayden’s eyes. For a brief moment, he felt patriotic until he remembered why they were there in the first place.
Nora.
Parker leaned over and whispered, “I saw Cleo when I first walked into the auditorium. She saw me too. But they’re keeping the boys separate from the girls. One of Nuk’ana’s Zepar aliens pushed me to my seat before I could talk to her.”
Jayden gazed across the sea of kids dressed in black and thought about the new mission: survival.