by L. Danvers
The thought of Quinn trapped inside a capsule even a moment longer made Cal want to scream. All she wanted was to get her sister back. She wanted to apologize to her. She wanted to hug her and tell her how much she’d missed her. She pulled her locket out from underneath her uniform collar and ran her fingers over the bumps made by the diamonds encrusting it.
Each minute that passed felt like an eternity. Something had to be decided, she thought. But at the same time, Cal’s gut instinct said Pierce would disregard Caelifera’s threat. Not because he didn’t believe it to be credible, but because he wasn’t about to turn around and hand hundreds of innocent U.S. citizens over to the enemy. The American people wouldn’t stand for it—most of them, at least.
The crew pulled the news up on the holographic projector. A ceasefire had been called among the warring nations. They recognized the threat to the human race was one that needed to be taken seriously and would require international cooperation to combat.
At that moment, world leaders were meeting to discuss a course of action. The news covered small groups of protesters who believed Pierce should hand over the victims in order to protect the rest of the human race, but these people were in the minority. Most people being interviewed were of the opinion that these victims were worth fighting for. They believed America and the rest of the world needed to take a stand. The human race was not going to sit by and allow itself to fall prey to an alien species.
Hours went by, and there was no word from Pierce. The crew agreed that his lack of a response was his response. America was not going to bow down to Caelifera’s demands.
“Bad things are going to happen,” Aes said, his teeth chattering as he spoke.
As signaled by the rumbling of their stomachs, hunger set in. The six members of the crew hadn’t eaten since before arriving at Duratus. So they shared a meal together in the dining hall, though inhaled was a better way to describe it. Flynn couldn’t stop yawning, and Britt was so tired that despite how unsettled she was, her foot was no longer tapping. When they finished their meal, they agreed they needed rest. Commander Ahmadi, Sam, Flynn, Cal and Britt made their way to their respective living quarters, while Aes offered to keep an eye on things in the main cabin and promised to notify them if anything were to happen.
Cal was asleep in minutes. It was a hard, deep sleep. She was sprawled across her bed, drool trailing from the corner of her mouth onto her pillow.
Hours later, her ears were met with the sounds of screams. She raised her head, wiping her sticky chin with the back of her hand, and looked around. Was it a dream? Her heavy eyes closed, but she heard it again. She sat up, and as she did so, the time on her wristband caught her eye. The deadline Caelifera had given them had passed.
The screams grew louder. Cal shook her head to snap herself out of the sleepy daze. She recognized the voice, or one of the voices, at least. It belonged to Aes. The screams were coming from the main cabin.
Cal leapt out of bed and ran down the curved hall as fast as her legs would carry her. She ran through the gold screen projection and found Britt rearing her arm back and taking a swing at Aes. Cal couldn’t understand what was happening. Her eyes had to be deceiving her.
Britt looked wild. Possessed. Evil.
There was a harshness in her eyes Cal hadn’t seen before. Something wasn’t right.
Her ebony skin had a reddish tone to it, and veins were protruding from her neck and face. Thinking she was having a terrible nightmare, Cal rubbed her eyes, and one of her computerized lenses slid out. She was disoriented by differences in what she saw through each of her eyes. She plucked out the other lens, blinked a few times and saw that Britt looked far less terrifying—less monstrous and more like herself, though she was committing an unthinkable act.
It didn’t make any sense. Britt adored Aes. She would never try to hurt him.
“Stop! Britt, what do you think you’re doing?”
She didn’t answer. She hadn’t even noticed Cal was there. She hadn’t seen her. Hadn’t heard her. She swung at Aes again.
Aes was cowering on the floor. Shaking. He closed his eyes and covered his head with his hands. He braced for death. Britt pulled the pulse-r from her utility belt.
Cal screamed for her to stop, but Britt didn’t hear her.
Something was wrong. Britt wasn’t in her right mind. She didn’t even like using weapons. Her shooting Aes didn’t make any sense.
Cal flew across the room, trying to reach Britt before she could pull the trigger.
She wasn’t fast enough.
Aes let out a terrified, pain-filled screech as a gold ray of light pulsed into his leg. A thick blue liquid oozed out of it. Black markings, singe marks, encircled the wound.
Cal didn’t have time to help Aes. She had to stop Britt first.
She lunged at her friend, knocking Britt to the ground. Britt’s pulse-r slid across the smooth floor of the main cabin and clanked against the storage cabinet.
Cal sat on top of Britt and pushed her shoulders against the floor. Even though the reddish tint and veins were gone, something wasn’t right. She didn’t look like herself. Something in her eyes was different. She was like an empty shell. Her body was moving independent of her mind.
Britt fought and wrestled with Cal. She knocked Cal to her back and pinned her, sending Cal’s head slamming against the hard floor. Her head surged with pain, but she fought through it. Cal wrapped her left foot around Britt’s ankle and knocked it out from under her as she flipped Britt over.
“I’m sorry to have to do this,” Cal said. She punched her friend in the jaw.
Britt was hurt, but not enough. Cal slammed the side of Britt’s head against the floor. Blood dripped from Britt’s nose, forming a small puddle under her cheek. Cal checked her pulse. She breathed a sigh of relief. Britt was alive.
There was something peculiar, though. Something she’d been too busy fighting to see before. Britt’s xfone was wrapped around her ear. Who had she been talking to?
Aes’s whimpers disrupted her thoughts, and Cal ran to his side. His bony fingers were covered in the thick blue liquid.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I have no idea!” Aes cried. “We were talking, and she received a call. When she answered, she froze. Something in her switched, and she attacked me.”
The gold screen projection flickered in the corner of her eye. She whipped her head around. Flynn’s focus locked in on Britt lying on the floor, bleeding. He turned his attention to Cal and Aes, and he rushed to help.
“Britt, too?” he asked.
“What do you mean by that?” Cal said.
There was a gash on Flynn’s forehead. His brown hair was even more disheveled than usual. He had scratch marks across his neck. “Is she dead?” he asked.
“No.”
“Good. We need to move her.” He saw Aes’s oozing leg. “Then we’ll tend to you.”
Without saying another word, Flynn stood, picked up Britt’s limp body and tossed her over his right shoulder.
“Follow me,” he said.
He carried her down the hall to her living quarters, her arms flopping against his back with each step. He set her down on the bed and used a sheet to tie her to the bed frame.
“What happened to the others?” Cal asked, leaning against the wall.
“The same thing that happened to Britt, I presume.”
“I want to see them.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Who did that to you?” Cal asked, pointing to the scratch marks.
“Commander Ahmadi.”
Her eyebrows rose. “And you fought him—and won?”
“It was luck. He’s in his room.”
“And Sam?”
Upon hearing Sam’s name, Flynn broke eye contact with her. He looked at the floor. Then at the ceiling. There was something he wasn’t telling her. There was only one reason she could think of for Flynn not wanting to tell her.
“You killed him.” S
he surprised herself with the calmness with which she said those words. Sure, she had been angry with Sam. Furious, even. But she didn’t want him dead.
“He didn’t give me much of a choice. It was him or me. I chose him. I’m sorry, Cal.”
“I see.” She swallowed the news. She felt guilty for not being more upset, but she’d seen what happened to Britt. The wildness within her. She knew if Sam had the same look in his eyes, that same force driving him, Flynn had no choice but to defend himself. If it had to have been Flynn’s life or Sam’s, she was glad it was Sam’s. “I can’t say that I blame you. What happened?”
Flynn shifted his weight. “I heard you sprinting down the hall. I heard the screams. I stepped out of my room to see what was going on, and out of nowhere Sam charged at me. He reached for his gun as he ran toward me. He had this crazy look about him. I tried reasoning with him, but it was like he couldn’t hear me. I assumed he was betraying us, so I shot him.” Flynn paused. “Then Commander Ahmadi stormed out of his room and came at me, too. I knew something wasn’t right. It was conceivable for Sam to turn on us, but not him. Commander Ahmadi wouldn’t do that if he were in his right mind. By some miracle I was able to disarm him before he had a chance to shoot me. He threw me to the ground and tried to run after his pulse-r, but I grabbed hold of his foot, and he fell to the ground. He ended up on top of me. He tried to strangle me. I broke free, grabbed the lamp from my nightstand and heaved it at him. He was out cold. I took his pulse-r and tied him up in his room.”
“And Sam?”
“I moved his body to his room. We’ll teleport him to the mansion later. We’ll have them see to it that his family is notified and give him a proper burial.”
She worried she was a horrible person. Were her grudges that strong she couldn’t even mourn for someone who was dead? She’d held resentment toward her sister in her heart for decades, and until recently she’d thought she’d lost the chance to make amends. And now Sam was dead. Dead. And they wouldn’t get the chance to work things out. She knew she couldn’t have been able to be with him again. She didn’t trust him, and she had no reason to. Even so, part of forgiving was letting go of the resentment and everything that came with it. She squeezed her eyes shut, and in her mind she pictured Sam with his perfect brown hair and perfect brown eyes and crooked nose and half-smile, and she thought the words I forgive you. She kept squeezing her eyes until her lashes felt wet. There was a release, a burden lifted from her heart, though it kept pounding. Remembering Flynn was beside her, she opened her eyes and said, “So what do we do now?”
“I don’t know.” Flynn sighed, adjusting his glasses. “I guess first we need to tend to Aes.”
The three of them walked to the medical bay, Aes whimpering and wincing with each step. First aid wasn’t one of Cal’s or Flynn’s strengths, but they didn’t want to tell Aes that. He was shaken up enough. So Cal did her best to act calm and pretend like she knew what she was doing.
She cleaned his wound. As she was wiping the blue goo from his leg, she wondered if treating an alien worked the same as treating a human. She hoped so.
“This will sting a little,” she told Aes as she pricked his flesh with a threaded needle. His skin was cold and wet, like that of a reptile.
He handled it better than any of them expected, a couple shrill screams escaping his lips. Cal stitched together his loose flaps of creamy skin to the best of her ability. It wasn’t perfect. Britt could have done it much better. But Britt wasn’t here. At least, not the Britt that Cal knew and loved.
Once finished, they made their way to the main cabin. They needed to talk to Agent Taylor and fill her in, but Flynn couldn’t get in touch with her. That was strange. She always made herself available.
Flynn used his wristband to try calling a few of their trainers—Agent Scott, Agent Cortez and Agent Hendrix. None of them answered. He tried every agent he could think of. He couldn’t reach any of them.
“This is getting weird,” Cal said. “Something’s wrong with the phone system.”
They tried pulling up the news on the holographic projector, but there was nothing but static on each station.
Cal tried calling her old news station. Someone there would be able to tell her what was going on. As much as it pained her to make the call, she dialed her former boss using her wristband, but Claire Katz didn’t answer. Neither did the silver fox Gregory Gilden nor the 10:00 anchor Bonnie Bernhardt. So she tried calling the newsroom’s number instead. Someone had to be in the building.
“Hello?” a familiar timid voice cracked on the other end of the line.
“Sue, its Cal.”
“Oh, thank God,” the intern said. “Cal, I don’t know what’s going on. Everyone’s lost their minds. It’s like they’ve turned into zombies.”
“The whole newsroom?”
“The whole newsroom. Everyone except me.”
“Why do you think that is, Sue?”
“I think it’s because I don’t have an xfone or the optical injections. We were in the morning meeting and everyone got a call at the exact same time. When they answered, they changed. Their faces went blank. Their eyes... they don’t look normal.”
Cal, Flynn and Aes exchanged knowing glances at one another. This had to be Caelifera’s doing.
“Where are you?” Cal asked.
“Hiding in Katz’s office,” Sue said. “Cal, what am I going to do?”
Cal didn’t know what to tell her. She took a second to think things through. Think, think. Caelifera had hacked into peoples’ xfones and optical computerized injections and was... doing what? Manipulating the signal? Hypnotizing them? Making them see and hear what she wanted them to so they would turn against each other? That was the most probable answer. Okay, so how could she dehypnotize them?
They needed to find a way to block the transmission. And they needed a way to defeat Caelifera. Even if they did stop the transmission, she would find another way to destroy humanity, and Cal guessed her next plan would be much more violent.
An idea fell into her head. “Sue, that graduate student friend of yours you told me about... What was his name?”
“Harold. What does this have to do with anything?”
“Does Harold have an xfone?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Good,” Cal said. “I need you to do something for me, Sue. Remember that weapon you told me Harold was working on? The radiation bomb?”
“I don’t like where this is going.”
“I need you to find Harold, and I need you to get that weapon to me. Can you do that for me, Sue?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think of your family, your friends and your coworkers. They’re going to destroy each other if we don’t act. This was Caelifera’s doing. She’s sitting back while she lets us humans pluck each other off. So I need you to try, Sue. Call Harold, get to a telepad and meet up with him. Call me when the weapon is ready.”
“But I don’t know if it’ll even work.”
“We’re going to find out.”
“Alright,” Sue said. “I’ll do it.”
“Thank you. Goodbye, Sue.”
“Goodbye.”
Flynn placed his hands on his hips. He looked to Aes, then to Cal. “You look like you’ve got a plan.”
“Do you have any better ideas?”
“No. Care to share yours?”
“We have to stop Caelifera, right?”
“Yes,” Flynn and Aes said in unison.
“The three of us aren’t going to be able to do that ourselves. Because it’s not just a matter of taking her out. I assume she has guards, soldiers... who knows what else?” she said. Aes nodded. “So we need access to a powerful weapon. That’s where Sue comes in. Meanwhile, we need to find a way to disrupt the transmission Caelifera’s sending. That’s the only way we can save Commander Ahmadi and Britt, as well as the rest of the world. Flynn, do you think you can hack into whatever system Caelifera is running?”
“Because what’s coming next will be worse. And we need to be ready.”
Flynn went to the control panel. He furrowed his brow as he typed. Minutes went by, but they felt like hours. Cal imagined a clock ticking inside her head.
“Any luck?” she said with a hint of frustration.
“Working on it,” Flynn huffed.
Another hour or so went by. Cal and Aes looked over Flynn’s shoulder the entire time. Neither one of them had any idea what they were looking at. It made them feel better to stand there, though. Flynn shot her an occasional glare, annoyed that she was chewing her thumbnail so close to his ear. She worried he couldn’t figure out how to hack in.
Flynn became so irritated he slammed his fist against the control panel so hard the entire panel rattled. “I can’t do it,” he said. “See this? The transmission is coming from what I assume is Caelifera’s spacecraft. I can’t hack into it. I’d have to be on her ship myself to have any hope of accessing it.”
“That is it!” Aes yelled.
“What’s it?” Flynn asked.
“The ship! I can get you on her warship. She has a telepad like yours.”
“What?” Cal snapped. “You’re telling us this now?”
Aes hunched over and took a step back, trembling.
“Cal, please,” Flynn said.
“I’m sorry.”
“It is alright,” Aes said, shaking. “I should have thought to tell you earlier. The telepad, as you call it, is part of Caelifera’s negotiations. She supplies planets with different types of technology, like teleportation, to sweeten the deal. That is how the specimen get transported. They are sent to her warship. Once a week I pick up the humans and take them to Duratus.”
“Do you know the coordinates for the warship’s telepad?” Cal asked.
“I do.”
Cal marched out of the main cabin and headed toward her living quarters with Flynn and Aes trailing behind her. She swung open her bedroom door and opened the closet. She sifted through the uniforms.
There it was.
“Remember this?” she asked as she held up Agent Hendrix’s prized invention.