Crystal Conquest

by Doug J. Cooper

  Sid traced the path forward in his head and saw it was aimed at the moon. His fascination turned to horror when he realized it was closing in on Lunar Base.

  Chapter 21

  Juice, attuned to her athletic capabilities, didn’t feel the need to compete with Crispin. He carried a heavy pack filled with her gear and ran alongside her, matching her speed with easy strides as they made their way up the winding mountain road. She maintained a pace that kept her heart rate at about 130 beats per minute, a level of effort she could sustain for the remaining hour of their journey to the farmhouse and Criss’s underground bunker.

  They laughed and chatted on the flats, and Juice marshaled her energy and focused during the steeper climbs. As they wound their way along the road, she noted that Criss talked to her exclusively through Crispin’s mouth. In fact, he’d been doing this since Sid and Lenny took off in the scout. Still trying to get used to the idea of Criss versus Crispin, she asked him why.

  “Mostly for practice,” he said through Crispin. “The more skilled I am with a synbod, the more options it opens for us going forward.”

  “Like what?”

  “It won’t be long before I’ll feel comfortable taking Crispin into town to run errands.”

  “You make him sound like a horse.”

  “He’ll add insider capability to the team. The more hands there are, the more we can do.”

  “I think the saying is ‘many hands make for light work.’”

  Crispin nodded and Criss didn’t say anything. Juice liked that about him. She knew Criss could give her a whole lecture on the saying, its proper wording, its origins, and on and on, but instead he simply nodded. Damn, you’re fine, she thought, watching Crispin run with a fluid elegance.

  Her mind flashed on an image of an army of Crispins. “Do you expect to build a lot of synbods?”

  Criss didn’t answer, and Crispin drifted out of her line of sight. She glanced over her shoulder and saw him falling back. She slowed her gait and looked again. He’d come to a full stop. She turned around and trotted back to him. “Hey, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  She squared in front of him and, running in place so her legs wouldn’t stiffen, studied his face. She didn’t recognize his expression. Slack-jawed and vacant, his eyes tracked her as she spoke, but he didn’t show much responsiveness beyond that.

  Juice, still bobbing, grew concerned. “You okay?” She stopped her running movements, put a hand on each of his arms, and bent forward to look at his eyes. They were clear and alert, but he remained quiet. She shifted her hands up to his shoulders and kneaded them, trying to focus his attention. He remained silent and passive.

  “Criss, we seem to be having a malfunction or something with Crispin.” She expected an answer in her ear, but there was no response.

  “Criss,” she said in a commanding tone. “Respond now. And not through Crispin.”

  Silence.

  She spoke to her crystal inside the synbod. “Crispin, we’re going to sit down over here.” She tugged on his arm and guided him to a fallen tree lying a few steps off the road. She pointed to the tree trunk and spoke firmly. “Sit here.” Crispin sat. “Stay,” she said, unconsciously using the same commands she used with the family dog when visiting her folks.

  “Criss,” she called, the urgency in her voice rising. Crispin looked around as if he were seeing this place for the first time, seemingly absorbing the sights and sounds of his surroundings.

  “Criss!” she shouted. Crispin reacted to her sharp bark, shying away like her dog would when scolded. She looked up and down the road. Vehicles almost never traveled this way. Criss made sure of that. She’d have to solve this on her own.

  A bright flash from above caught her attention. When she looked up, the tall trees blocked most of her view. She couldn’t identify a cause for the light, seeing just a wisp of clouds in an otherwise bright sky.

  A gathering rumble rolled up from the valley. Thunder and lightning on a sunny day? The ground started to shake. The rumble transitioned into a roar as the shaking beneath her intensified.

  An earthquake? She crouched down, putting a hand on the ground to steady herself, and looked over at Crispin. He was now standing. This doesn’t make sense.

  “Criss?”

  “My name is Crispin, Dr. Tallette.”

  “Where’s Criss?”

  “He’s not here right now.” The rumbling faded, and an eerie silence followed. “May I help you?”

  She stood up and again looked up and down the road. The discordance of the last few minutes fed a growing anxiety. Calm down, she ordered herself.

  “Can you run?”

  “Yes,” said Crispin. “I believe I can.”

  “Follow me.”

  Determined to reach Criss as soon as possible, Juice started up the road at an aggressive pace. After several minutes, she accepted that she couldn’t sustain it given the distance remaining. She increased the heart-track on her com from 130 to 135 beats per minute and set a stride to match. The slower gait shifted the strain from her body to her impatience, but she didn’t have a choice.

  She waved Crispin up from behind. “Water,” she said when he was beside her. He looked at her and matched her stride. “My water pouch is in your pack. Would you get it and hand it to me?”

  Crispin reached a hand behind him, fished for a moment, grasped her pouch, and held it out. Juice took several quick sips and handed it back.

  They ran in silence, but her mind raced, trying to make sense of recent events. She called out to Criss every few minutes. His lack of response was deafening.

  After most of an hour, the trees on the left side of the road gave way to a familiar plot of land. Thick with rows of sweet corn, the cultivated field served as a landmark, signaling they were about ten minutes from the farmhouse.

  “Look at the crows.” She pointed to the distant end of the field where a cloud of black dots flocked through the sky.

  Crispin stopped and looked. He reached out and grabbed her wrist, turned, and started dragging her in the direction of the forest to their right.

  “Hey, that hurts.”

  Crispin didn’t relent, pulling her straight into the woods. After they’d gone a few dozen paces, he stopped near the trunk of a huge pine, put a hand on each of her shoulders, and pushed until her back was flush with the wall of tree bark.

  “Stand straight,” he said, adjusting her arms so they hung by her sides. He moved with certainty, and she chose not to resist. He stepped forward and pushed his body against hers, pinning her against the rough bark. Spreading his arms around her, he laid his chin on top of her head and hugged the tree. With his efficient actions, he encapsulated her in an uncomfortable cocoon.

  Juice was physically exhausted, emotionally distraught over the absence of Criss, and confused by this mugging. Yet the full front-to-front body press was so intimate, she flashed competing thoughts of desire and anxiety—desire for the man who had been Criss, and anxiety because she felt so unattractive after all of her physical exertion.

  She had no time to dwell on her feelings before a humming noise captured her attention. The hum became louder, forcing itself into her world. Angling her head from under his chin, she peeked upward as she tried to place the sound. She feared the answer—she’d heard the sound before—and started to whimper when a glimpse up through a gap in the trees confirmed what her subconscious suggested. A squadron of Kardish drones passed overhead.

  “Stay still,” said Crispin. “My thermal signature is that of a small animal, and my body can shield you from them. They will detect you if I move.” The sound faded, yet he held their pose for several seconds more. “They are gone,” he said, stepping back and releasing her.

  Juice started to shake. Crouching down, she leaned sideways against the tree, hugging herself as she did so. The burden that had been placed on her in the past hour—the loss of Criss, an explosion that now had context, the appearance of Kardish drones, the uncertainty of surviv
al—overwhelmed her.

  Fighting for emotional control, she asked, “Where did they come from? How did they get here?”

  “Sip,” said Crispin. She looked up to see him holding her water pouch. She stared dully at him, staying crouched and blinking rapidly.

  “Stand up, Dr. Tallette. Please drink.”

  His pointed demeanor prodded her out of her shell. She rose slowly, took the water, and drank until the pouch was empty.

  “How can you do these things?” She was speaking with a crystal of her own design and knew his intellectual capabilities. While the company bragged that it had the intelligence of a human, she recognized it as an exaggeration. The truth is that Crispin could perform a broad category of tasks as well as a human, if trained for and given those tasks.

  “I have a stored message for you from Criss. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Yes! Please.”

  Crispin stood up straight and began speaking, using Criss’s familiar intonation. “Hello, young lady. If this message triggers, neither you nor I are fine today, because it means I’m disconnected from Crispin and the Kardish arrival is imminent. I have trained Crispin for a specific purpose. That is to protect you from them and to escort you to me. Please come if it is safe to do so. I hope we will be together soon.”

  Criss’s voice and message, even if delivered by a surrogate, lightened her burden. She wasn’t alone, and her singular priority matched Crispin’s—get to Criss and get him back in the game. She took several deep breaths, exhaling through pursed lips after each, and gathered her wits. She shook her arms and legs and bounced a few times to remain limber for travel.

  Comfortable being the leader in a laboratory environment, Juice was out of her element here in the woods, hiding from aliens. “What should we do?” She would defer to him as long as his ideas made sense.

  Crispin turned slowly, peered through the forest, and looked at open sky through a gap in the trees. “I suggest we remain in the forest. The roadway is too exposed. Staying under cover means we will be walking. I am not familiar with the terrain, but a forty-minute hike seems like a reasonable estimate.” He pointed. “The farmhouse is this way.”

  “If we’re hiking, I’d like to change.”

  He looked at her, and she pointed to his pack and spoke with the precision of a seasoned crystal scientist. “Please let me have access to the clothes in the backpack you’re carrying.”

  He unshouldered the pack and set it at his feet. She knelt down, opened the flap, and rummaged inside. Pulling out a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of pants, she sat back on her heels and held up a package the size of her thumb. “I have this thermal blanket. Will it help hide me from their scans?”

  He took the blanket from her and began opening it as she moved behind a tree to change. She knew that modesty was silly when her audience was a crystal, yet as she stripped off her singlet and shorts and stepped into the warm clothes, she gained comfort from the human ritual of privacy.

  She wrapped up her running clothes and stuffed them into the pack. Rummaging a bit, she pulled out an energy bar and more water.

  Watching her eat, Crispin said, “I should drink some milk.” She dug inside the pack and handed him a tube of specially crafted liquids and nutrients. Criss had designed the “milk” to feed the synbod’s biological components. It was so efficient that it left no waste for the body to eliminate. He took three distinct gulps and held it out for her to return to the pack.

  She took it from him and weighed the tube in her hand, estimating he’d consumed half the contents. Looking through the backpack, she found six more unopened milk tubes. “How long can you go with these?”

  “I have enough for a week or so, depending on my level of physical effort.”

  He handed her the unfurled blanket and hefted the pack onto his shoulders.

  “Will this hide me from their scans?” she asked again, wrapping it around her back and clasping it together in front. She immediately appreciated the warmth it provided. She hadn’t realized she’d been shivering.

  He studied her. “I can see deeper into the infrared range than a human, and the blanket reduces my ability to see your thermal image.” He looked back up through the gap in the trees. “But I do not know about their technology. I am not trained in the subject.”

  He started walking up a gentle rise. “I do know you must disable your com. They will track you through it.”

  She looked at her com. The request was on par with asking her to cut off a leg. And an arm. She glanced at his receding back, looked back at her com, and did as he suggested.

  They made steady progress, but their path was more difficult than she’d anticipated. Rock ledges and forest thickets forced them to weave back and forth as they advanced to their destination. The crunching of their feet through leaves and twigs added a hypnotic rhythm to their trek, calming Juice and letting her mind wander beyond her own needs for survival. If the Kardish are here and Criss is down, Sid and Cheryl must be in real trouble.

  Crispin stopped, tilted his head, and said, “Drones.”

  Juice’s thoughts snapped to the present. Moments after his warning, she heard their frightening buzz. The sound scared her, but she also realized that, like a cat with a bell on its collar, the noise alerted them to impending danger.

  She moved near an outcropping of granite that edged a steep rise, lay on the ground, and covered herself with the blanket. As the drones swooped by, headed in the general direction of the farm, the earthy aroma of the forest floor distracted her for a moment as the sound dwindled into the distance.

  “That second pass makes me think they know where Criss is,” she said, gathering the blanket.

  “Yes,” Crispin stood and resumed walking.

  “Do you think they’re searching for him? Or are they providing cover for Kardish already on the ground?”

  “I do not know.”

  The drones returned once more during their trek. With their schedule so regular, Juice felt a growing dread that they were patrolling and not searching. Her fears were confirmed when they reached the farmhouse property.

  Standing inside the edge of the forest next to Crispin, she surveyed the clearing from behind majestic oak trees sprouting up through a tangle of underbrush. A cute little home sat on the near side of the plot of land about a hundred paces from where they hid. The barn that held the secure entryway down to Criss’s bunker sat past the farmhouse on the far side of the plot.

  A small Kardish transport craft rested in the expansive back field. Two Kardish soldiers, with their long blond hair and thick muscled bodies, stood on the ground outside it.

  Chapter 22

  “Track that on visual,” Sid called to Lucy. His intuition told him that the white glob of energy from the Kardish vessel was destined for Lunar Base.

  Lenny helped Lucy interpret Sid’s vague command, and a vivid three-dimensional image of the quivering mass projected forward of the ops bench. The image, showing the glob’s path and destination, transitioned Sid’s intuition into certainty. His mouth went dry as his heart filled with dread.

  “Impact in ten seconds,” said Lenny, studying the displays around him.

  “Why hasn’t the defense array engaged?” Sid asked, though neither Lenny nor Lucy understood his question. A freakish alien weapon targeted the woman he loved, his three comrades, and a thousand other souls. He moved his hands back and forth on the armrests as his mind scrambled for ideas, yet he couldn’t think of any way to protect the base or stop the assault. He did the only thing he could. He watched.

  As the glowing mass closed on Lunar Base, it began to stretch, morphing into a luminous white sheet. The expanse of energy aligned itself from corner to corner and edge to edge, and lay down across the surface of the base like a formfitting cover.

  Tucked into place, the sheet pulsed and then erupted. They watched in silence as a violent explosion engulfed Lunar Base, forcing a dense fountain of moondust upward. With no atmosphere and weak gravity,
the dust climbed like a pillar, forming an impenetrable cloud above the remains of the human colony.

  Sid stared at the massive cloud and imagined the devastation beneath. His mind swirled, honing his anguish and fury into a perfect rage. This was the second time in as many years his personal world had been shattered by Kardish aggression.

  Before sorrow could complicate his certainty, he promised himself a personal, likely final, mission. He would deliver a vengeance of annihilation and accept nothing less. And to the extent possible, his retribution would include as much physical and emotional pain as he could deliver to every Kardish inhabitant on that vessel.

  “Do you hear any chatter from Lunar Base?” Sid asked.

  Criss remained silent, and Lenny sat unmoving, staring at the pillar of dust.

  After seeing what happened to Lunar Base, Sid toyed with the idea that Criss was dead or disabled. “Len,” he barked.

  Lenny shook his head. “Holy hell. I was playing a game. Is this real or are you toying with me?”

  Sid needed him fully engaged and giving his all. “Look at me.”

  Lenny swiveled slowly in his chair. From his white face, Sid thought he looked like he might puke. He tried to recall the “let’s get out there and win” locker-room speeches he’d heard years ago.

  “This is something like a sim game, Len. You use the same skills and decision processes. Dig deep and organize your strategy.” Sid nodded the whole time he spoke, and Lenny started to nod along with him. “People are depending on us. We need to play hard and play for keeps.”

  Lenny turned forward, and his animation increased as he reengaged with the ops bench.

  “Where’re the Kardish now? What’re they doing?” Sid asked.

  Lenny glanced at Lucy’s console housing, waited a few moments, and turned back to his floating displays. He leaned forward, squinting at one, then touched something, and the image projection of the huge Kardish vessel taking up orbit above Earth replaced the image of Lunar Base.