The World Forgot

by Martin Leicht

  “Speaking of which,” I say, stooping down next to Bok Choy. “If you can move, now’d be the time to show us some of that genetically superior Jin’Kai stamina.”

  Wincing, Bok Choy allows Chloe to lift him off the floor. “Can do,” he says.

  We use the sound of gunfire and screaming as an indication of which directions not to travel as we make our way through the installation and back to the main ozone plant. Scoring from blaster fire marks the walls our entire way, and whatever security may have been in place before has been completely blown to hell. It seems Marsden wasn’t exaggerating about how much the Jin’Kai command would disapprove of his secret genetic tinkering. The ozone plant’s backup lights are flickering and fading, and it’s clear that whatever forces hit the station, they hit it hard and fast.

  We clomp along the high suspended catwalks until we reach a segment that’s completely collapsed in what appears to have been a very one-sided firefight.

  “Now what?” Ducky asks.

  “I could jump down,” Cole offers. “Catch you one at a time.”

  “It’s too high,” I tell him. “Even for you.” I look around, and then my eyes rest on perhaps the worst idea I have had in a long time. Which is really saying something.

  “The power’s down,” I say. “Machinery is offline. These compressors have conduits that lead straight to the loading bay in the hangar, right?”

  “You’re bat shit,” Chloe says. “You want to crawl through the compressors?”

  “You have a better idea?” I ask.

  “Isn’t any idea better than going through machinery that houses highly explosive and completely unbreathable gas?” she counters. “Like, literally any idea?”

  “The ozone in the conduits is in brick form,” I say. “We should be able to climb through without too much trouble.”

  “Assuming that the bricks are stable,” Chloe says. “The temperature is probably already rising with the power off. If the bricks break down, we blow up.”

  “That sounds bad,” Ducky puts in helpfully.

  “Look,” I argue, “our way is blocked, and there’s an army of two-and-a-half-meter-tall space monsters swarming everywhere, just waiting for another chance to cut us to bits. This is the fastest way out. And if the temperatures really are rising, then it’s in our best interest to get the flip out of here before the whole place explodes, don’t you think?”

  “I’m with Elvie.”

  And spank my tooshie and call me a cab, it’s none other than Britta who says it.

  “If Elvie says it’ll work,” she continues while I stare at her, mouth agape, “I believe it. She totally saved all of us on the Echidna. Well, most of us, anyway.”

  “Uh, thanks?” I say.

  Finding a panel weak enough to jimmy open without using one of the blasters takes a little while, but after we’ve pried it open with one of the Devastator swords, climbing inside is relatively easy. At least Marnie has the good sense to wake up in time for the trek. I was having visions of tugging her behind us by her shoelaces. To her credit, as soon as ­Marnie hears that we’ll all be crawling through a series of narrow ducts filled with highly unstable explosives, she simply nods and says, “Somethin’ fer the songs, yeah?”

  The metal ducts that house the conveyors are narrow, but I’m able to squeeze through by keeping my elbows tucked tightly under my chest.

  “Hey, Elvie,” Ducky calls from behind me. “Now I know what a TV dinner feels like.”

  “A what?” Marnie asks from behind Ducky.

  “Come to outer space,” I join in. “We’ll get together, have a few laughs.”

  Ducky starts chuckling, and I crack a smile myself.

  “What in the hell are you two talking about?” Chloe shouts. She’s taken the lead, followed immediately by Bok Choy and then myself.

  “Don’t worry about it,” comes Cole’s echoey voice. He’s holding up the rear, in an effort to herd all of the Brittas as quickly as possible. “You’ll get used to those two eventually. They have their own language.”

  The acrid ozone smell stings my nose, and I squeeze my eyes shut to push the tears away.

  “When we’re out of here, Chloe,” I grunt, squeezing around a difficult bend, “back on Earth, I’m going to have to educate you on the rich dramatic oeuvre of the genre-­redefining thespian Bruce Willis.”

  “If you exercised your tub of an ass as much as you talked, you wouldn’t be holding us up back here,” says a familiar catty voice. But I can’t tell if it belongs to one of the Brigade or to Original Britta.

  As we continue—and I do my best to block out the incessant jabbering of the Brittas quizzing Cole about his hair ­products—I begin to notice something wet beneath me.

  “What is this sticky stuff?” I ask. “It’s not ozone, is it?”

  “I thought if the bricks broke down, we’d go boom,” Ducky says.

  “Want to get the lead out in front there?” Cole calls. “I’m not super-excited about the ‘going boom’ part.”

  “Keep your pants on!” Chloe shouts back to her father. “Some of us are injured.”

  Ahead of me, Bok Choy says not a word. I can hear him grunting quietly as he moves.

  The wetness underneath me is starting to soak through my tunic now, and I’m getting a very bad feeling in my gut. Sure enough, as we pass over a grated portion of the duct, a dim light shimmers through, and I see that the viscous liquid running down my fingers is bright red. Instantly I feel nauseous.

  Bok Choy’s breathing is slow and labored. With some difficulty I manage to push my arm forward to grab his calf and give it a squeeze. Bok Choy simply pauses for a second. I can see his head dip slightly as a quiet sigh escapes him. He flexes his calf under my hand. I know immediately to stay quiet. Tears are welling in my eyes suddenly, and I realize that they’re not for Bok Choy, as sad as his condition makes me. They’re for the girl who’s in love with him, crawling just ahead of him, totally unaware that he is bleeding out. The girl, I realize with a mixture of guilt and fear, who is helping us all only so that I’ll help him.

  The last portion of our crawl through the chlorine-­smelling pipeline is a sharp vertical drop. Without any real room to maneuver otherwise, we’re forced to wiggle headfirst down the tube and slide the rest of the way. After Chloe and Bok Choy lower themselves, it’s my turn. I make my way to the edge and look down. Below I watch as Bok Choy lands on a gelatinous receptacle pad no doubt designed to absorb the impact of the ozone bricks sliding through. Chloe swims through the goo to cradle him, and I can tell from the way her face darkens that he’s doing even worse than I feared.

  “Shit,” I whisper, watching my daughter choke on her sobs.

  “What’s going on?” comes Ducky’s voice from behind me. “Don’t tell me you’re stuck. This is so not where I’m dying.”

  “I’m not stuck,” I tell him. I push myself forward and start working my way over the edge. The entire passage is slick with blood now, and I force back the bile that rises in my throat from the sticky-sweet smell. I’m doing my best to shimmy around the bend, my head and shoulders already over the edge and tilting downward, when my right arm slips and, thanks to a luck only I seem to possess, lodges itself at an incredibly painful angle beneath my chest.

  “Okay,” I tell Ducky. “Now I’m stuck.”

  Groans from the entire length of the duct.

  “What’s going on up there?” Chloe calls. “Hurry up! We’ve got to get to the ship!”

  “Just . . . hold . . . on,” I grunt, trying out various uncomfortable contortions to try to pull my arm free. But no luck. The worst part is that I can feel the pull of gravity on my body, and the sensation is giving me a Ducky-size case of vertigo. As the blood rushes more quickly to my head, I really begin to panic. Is this how I finally die, as a clog in a drain? Is this how we all die?

  Th
at’s when I hear Ducky thumping forward in the passage behind me. I feel pressure on my feet and soon realize that he’s nuzzling my boots with his head.

  “Duck?” I ask as I feel him parting my feet slightly with his noggin. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m sorry,” Ducky says, and I can tell he means it. But what in the world is he—

  “Ducky!” I scream, jolting up and hitting my head on the top of the duct. Ducky has slid my feet to the edges of the narrow tube and is currently crawling headfirst between my legs.

  “Sorry!” he says again. “I’m so sorry! Really! Sorry!”

  The repeated exclamations of apology do very little to allay the incredibly uncomfortable situation that we find ourselves in.

  “What are you doing?” I say again. Broken records, the two of us.

  “We’ve got to get you moving,” he says. “I can’t move my arms. This is the only way I can . . .”

  And then, with no further warning, my best friend in the whole world has the top of his head pressed squarely into my butt.

  “Sorry!”

  “It’s working!” I cry as I feel my body slide a few centimeters. “Keep it up, Duck!”

  “Donald!” Marnie calls from behind him. “Careful, love! I’m quite fond of that head of yers.”

  Two more bumps, and my elbows have cleared the edge, joining my head and shoulders in the very downward dog position. Gravity finally grabs hold of me, and now I slide slowly along until I’m completely upside down and falling toward the receptacle bin.

  I pop out like a gumball from a candy dispenser and come down with a squishy plop into the bin. Bok Choy and Chloe have climbed out already, but Chloe’s too busy comforting her friend to help me clear the edge as I slip and slide on the Jell-O-like padding.

  “He’s hurt,” Chloe says, rather needlessly, when I land beside them on solid ground.

  Bok Choy shakes his head. “There’ll be time to deal with it later,” he tells her. But the rag, sopping wet with blood, seems to imply otherwise.

  Ducky flops down into the gelatin bin behind us. He climbs out and lands next to me, his face all different kinds of red. “Again,” he mumbles. “Sorry.”

  The others follow, one by one, and we find ourselves in the loading bay for the factory’s private hangar, where the bricks are gathered, tagged, and loaded onto the ships that will deploy them into the atmosphere. Bok Choy gathers his strength and leads us, as quietly as you can move with a bunch of confused and genetically- and intellectually-challenged clones, up a large, wide flight of stairs to the control room between the loading bay and the hangar.

  The control room is long, probably twenty-plus meters across, with a transparent aluminum window panel looking out over the hangar. Cole edges up to the window and peeks down over the edge.

  “Well?” Marnie asks.

  “Shit,” he says.

  I creep up alongside him, hoping to embellish his commentary with a little more detail.

  “Shit,” I add helpfully.

  Below us the smoking wreckage of dozens of small ships litters the deck. At first I wonder if the Devastators targeted the hangar with some sort of ship-to-ship missile, but the damage is too specific, with ships lying in useless fiery heaps while the cargo loaders and flatbed trolleys remain untouched—­presumably because the Jin’Kai determined that it’s difficult to escape into outer space on a forklift.

  “Careful,” Marnie says from beside me. “They’re still wandering around down there.” I spot roughly a dozen Devastators on the floor. They’re all hovering around one ship, the sight of which fills me with excitement and dread both at once.

  “That’s our ship!” I cry.

  “You came here in that thing?” Britta asks. “How did you expect to fit us all into that little tin can?”

  “I didn’t,” I snap back. “If you want, we can leave you here.”

  Ducky’s comment is slightly more helpful. “It looks like they didn’t blow it up or anything.”

  “They’re probably right confused about why it’s there,” Marnie says. “It’s not Jin’Kai or human. They might be tryin’ to find out if there’s an Almiri presence aboard the station.”

  “Well, our ship’s in one piece, so that’s good,” Cole says. “But I hate to point out that it’s also crawling with those things.”

  “That’s not all,” Bok Choy says, grimacing. Chloe offers a concerned hand to steady him at the console, but he shakes her off. “They’ve attached something to the ship. Some sort of docking clamps. It’ll take me a while to disable them.”

  “You start fiddlin’ with those, and they’ll know we’re here,” Marnie says.

  “Not if we distract them,” I say. I flick on the console next to Bok Choy and bring up the inventory screen for the loading bay.

  “There’s more than two thousand ozone bricks sitting in here waiting for a stack and pack,” I say. I turn to Chloe. “You feel like setting off any more fireworks?”

  “You can’t detonate those bricks,” Ducky warns. “If we can’t get the ship to fly, you’ll block our only way out.”

  “If the ship doesn’t fly,” I point out, “then we’re all dead anyway.” I hold out my hand to Chloe, who smirks and drops a long, pointy blaster into my grip. “Bok Choy, you work on those clamps. Cole, you and the others take the Brittas—” At the sound of their name, all of their perky blond heads turn to me in unison. “Wait down in the access corridor until the coast is clear. Chloe, let’s go shoot this place to hell.”

  Chloe and I make our way back into the loading bay. A floor console stands near the front loading gate that connects the bay to the hangar. I activate it and initiate the loading sequence. Immediately, shielded panels begin sliding open on the three walls, frosty mist rolling out from the refrigerated storage compartments. Inside each compartment, rack after rack of dark purple bricks begins to automatically extend into the bay, where normally a loader would be waiting to install them on a deployment craft. The bricks themselves are actually quite pretty. They look like a cross between colored quartz and grape-flavored Popsicles.

  “Okay. We’re only going to get one chance at this,” I say.

  “Well, now’s not the time for cold feet,” Chloe says. She positions herself in front of the loading gate and cocks two big guns, one in each hand, like the little Rambolina I always dreamed of rearing. “Open sesame.”

  I tap in the commands, and the gate groans and creaks open, rusted metal screeching against rusted metal.

  “That got their attention!” comes Bok Choy’s voice over the comm in the control panel. “They’re sending two your way.”

  “Well, they’re going to love this, then,” Chloe replies. As soon as the gate is fully open, the two Devastators come into view and see her. Before they can react, she opens fire. “Die, you sap-suckers!” she cries, unleashing unholy hell on them with their own advanced firearms. The two giant creeps stagger backward under the barrage of fire. From behind them enraged voices fill the air.

  “Here they come!” Bok Choy warns.

  Chloe runs back inside the bay, sending random fire toward the gate, being careful not to shoot anywhere near the bricks. I hightail it back up the stairs toward the control room and crouch by the door. Chloe races my way.

  “Now!” she says.

  Not yet, I tell myself. I square up my gun and balance it on my knee.

  Once Chloe reaches me, she spins around, looking back down at the empty bay below us. “What are you waiting for?” she asks.

  “This,” I say.

  As the Devastators come barreling into the bay, I take aim and fire my weapon, straight past the aliens, at the stack of bricks at the opposite end of the room. The bricks explode one after another in a chain reaction, cascading around the room from one stack to the next. The concussive force knocks both me and Chloe to the ground, but
the Devastators on the floor are completely engulfed by the maelstrom, and they wail in pain. Still, blaster fire seeks us out as we scramble on our hands and knees back to the control room. The door slides shut behind us as soon as we’re inside.

  I’m pretty sure mani-pedis would’ve been a more stress-free form of mother-daughter bonding.

  Bok Choy is still working intently over the docking controls.

  “Are the others aboard?” I ask.

  “They’re at the ship,” he informs me. “They’re under fire from a few stray hostiles.”

  “What about the docking clamps?”

  “I need another minute.”

  “We don’t have a minute!” Chloe shouts.

  Bok Choy doesn’t look up from his work. “Just get to the ship,” he says. “Stick close to the left wall there. You’ll be able to flank them and create cover so the others can get aboard.”

  “What about you?” Chloe asks, her voice strained.

  Bok Choy pauses for the first time and looks up at her. “I’ll be with you soon,” he tells her, then immediately returns his focus to the control panel.

  “But . . . ,” she starts, but she can’t get any more words out. I grab her arm and tug her toward the exit.

  “Chloe, we have to help the others,” I say.

  Chloe reluctantly exits with me, but she keeps her gaze on Bok Choy as we move. He never looks up.

  I can hear the blaster fire as we move quickly along the left wall, weaving around the rubble that was once a small fleet of crappy fliers. As we zoom around a long block of loading equipment, I make out Cole and Marnie exchanging fire with the Devastators from behind the ship’s loading ramp, while the others use the ramp as cover. There are three baddies returning fire. Our vantage point creates a triangle among all three parties; we’re slightly behind the Devastators but still obscured by debris.

  Without a word between us, Chloe and I open fire. As soon as we do, the Devastators pivot and discover us, sending a return volley before retreating to cover. This gives Cole, Marnie, and the others a chance to scurry up the gangway into the ship. Once everyone else is aboard, Cole and Marnie emerge halfway back down the ramp and fire again at the Devastators’ position. Pinched between two sets of foes, the Devastators can’t line up any good shots, and Chloe and I are able to make a dash for the ship, the Devastators’ fire clearing wide of us and exploding harmlessly against the hull of a ruined ozone flier.