“I won’t get in the way. Let me help,” Leonard said in a small desperate voice.
My communicator vibrated lightly, and I fished it out of my pocket. I knew what this call was about.
I pressed the accept icon. “Dean here.”
“Dean, I’m not going to get into it with you now, but don’t think this conversation is over. I hope you understand how angry I was to wake up with you gone and a note in the kitchen.” Mary’s voice was angry but low.
“I’m sorry. I had to go with my gut.”
“Make your gut go faster. We’re on Earth now, and it’s not good. Whatever they’re doing is messing with our atmosphere, and fast. If we don’t stop them, our people aren’t going to make it.” She sounded near-panicked.
“Dean, hurry the hell up. We’re going up as planned. This should be interesting.” Magnus had obviously grabbed the communicator. “Do what you have to do, Dean. Remember, this is about saving our people.”
I would do what I had to and patted my pocket where the small killing machine from the Deltra station sat, waiting to be used one more time. I couldn’t let this wide-eyed kid who looked up to me see what I was going to do with it, but I didn’t have time.
“Good luck. Mary, I love you, babe.”
“Holy crap. Was that…?” Leonard stared with his jaw dropped to his chest.
“Yes. Mary and Magnus. You really want to help? Promise me, whatever you see, that you won’t make a comic of what’s about to happen. If things go south, and they might, I have to do something I don’t want to.”
The kid nodded.
“Promise me!” I almost yelled the words.
“I…I promise,” he said hesitantly.
“Put this on,” I said, tossing him the backup cloaking outfit.
He put it over his EVA, breathing heavily as he did so. I caught him once to keep him from falling over as his boot got stuck in the pant leg. When it was done, he looked down and smiled at me. “What does it do?” he asked. Instead of answering him, I showed him, and clicked the hand control. To his eyes, most of me disappeared.
“Wow. That’s going to look great in the comics.”
“What did I just say?” I asked, regretting my decision to let him stay. “You stay here in the portal room, sit down, and stay cloaked. No one will know you’re here. I’ll be back for you.”
He suddenly looked terrified, as if being left alone here was far scarier than roaming a hostile alien planet. “Don’t make me stay. I’ve always been too afraid to do anything. I didn’t play sports because the other kids told me I was too slow or too fat. I’ve never asked a girl out, because I know they’ll just reject me. If there’s one thing the Event taught me, it’s that I need to live. Not just survive, but thrive. Let me help you. I need to help you. I want to help them.”
As I was about to tell him “no,” his words soaked into me. Standing there wasn’t a scared kid, but a man who was willing to risk his life to help people. “Fine, but don’t do anything stupid. Listen to anything I say and do it. And when things get tough, keep going. No matter what.” And don’t hold my actions against me, I added to myself.
He beamed for a second and then paled, finally realizing he got his way.
I pushed the pack at him and he grabbed it, slinging it over his shoulder with a grunt. The hover bike came with me, and we exited the doorless room, walking into a hall leading away from the portal. Already I could feel the heat of the planet, and my suit began to cool me. I saved the coordinates in my Relocator and kept moving.
After a half hour, we came to a dead end, where a pile of small rocks barred most of the way out. We set everything down and set to methodically moving them. After another half hour, we were breathing heavily and sweating in our suits, but we had an opening large enough to fit through with the hover scooter.
I crossed through first, my rifle ready to fire if needed. My cloaked head poked out, and I let a low whistle fly. We were on a mountain, water as far as the eye could see below, a dark red star casting a devilish glow over everything.
“Welcome to hell,” I said to myself.
TWENTY-THREE
“Maybe I should go back,” Leonard said as the view came into his sightlines.
“It’s too late for that. We have to get moving.” The range of mountains we were on rose up another hundred feet or so, and I made for the peak, careful of my footing on the rocky surface. For the time being, I left the scooter behind, knowing it would be more of a burden than a help. “Stay there,” I said back to Leonard, whose silence told me he was happy to do so.
The sun was still high in the sky, but the dim glow it cast was difficult for my eyes. I tripped on a few rocks on my way up, my path jagged as I made for the most acute inclines I could find. Still, I was near the top of the peak in only a few minutes. With a deep breath of my suit’s oxygen, I peered over the edge, praying I wouldn’t see more water. If we were on an island, my hopes of finishing my mission would be dashed.
Squinting to get a better look, I saw what I’d been wishing for: land. The mountain went down at a gradual decline toward a hard-looking surface below. Red topiary covered the distance: likely a forest on this strange world. Bright lights rose into the sky beyond, indicating a large city in the right direction.
“Leonard, I’ll be right there. We have a way down,” I relayed through the suit’s comm, and when I looked down at him, he waved, giving me a gloved thumbs-up. The task at hand truly scared me. I only had the centuries-old details from the portal file to go by, but according to it, their closest capital city was southwest of the portal. I could only cross my fingers that it was still there, and that what I was looking for would be present.
“What’s it look like?” Leonard asked as I neared him.
“Let’s just say the comic won’t be lacking for inspiration.” I turned the hover scooter on and guided it with my hands to the peak, my tag-along’s footing stumbling as we went. “You seem to be taking this well.”
He grunted as he lifted a leg over a large stone. “All my life I’ve been afraid to do anything surprising. I was picked last for every sport in physical education, I was made fun of for having my nose stuck in the newest Star Battle books, and because of it, I stuck to myself.”
We made it up top, and Leonard gasped as the Bhlat world’s view came into sight. “It’s beautiful,” he whispered. The red color palette over everything had felt malevolent initially, but the longer I looked at it, the more I just accepted it was the nature of the planet. Was it so different than where we came from?
“You’re right. It is,” I agreed. “What changed?” I prompted him. The more I kept him talking, the less he’d realize how dangerous our surroundings really were.
“You.”
“Me?”
“You more than the others. Magnus and Natalia were commandos. Tough as nails and went through some serious crap during their time as mercenaries. They were prepared for the Event as much as anyone could have been. Mary was Air Force, trained as well, smart and…” He paused, looking at me. “Beautiful. Not that that has anything to do with it.”
I held back a laugh, and now understood how Leonard had made the Mary version in his comics all the more voluptuous than any real woman.
“But you, Dean. Dean Parker, chartered accountant from a sleepy town in upstate New York. A guy who worked hard and watched the love of his life pass away so young. A man who liked to drink a pint and throw a baseball around with friends. You’re the everyman who came from obscurity and saved the world. And that’s why I want to be a better man.”
I stopped walking and looked Leonard in the eyes. Through the helmet’s visor and his glasses, his brown eyes had a red glow to them on this world, and they looked hard at me. I hadn’t given much thought to my own story over the last couple years. It seemed so irrelevant with everything going on, and I was a little shocked to learn that anyone actually knew me. He’d painted a fairly accurate picture.
“Thanks, Leonard. I
never thought of myself as anything special.”
“That’s what makes the best hero, don’t you see? I’m just happy to be here with you. Can you fill me in on the plan?”
“What do you know so far?” I asked as we started down the other side of the mountain.
He looked contemplative before speaking. “The Bhlat are really there, aren’t they?”
I nodded, the weight of my helmet exaggerating the gesture. “They are.”
“Son of a sailor. I didn’t believe Jeb when he told me the president went there and was missing.”
“My other friends are with her,” I said, trying to let him fill in the pieces.
“Slate, Nick, and Clare, right?” This kid knew his stuff.
“You seem to know a lot.”
“I have to pay attention to every little detail if I want my comics to be accurate.”
I thought back to a couple of crazy plots from the books and asked him about the one where Mary and I had to give our firstborn to an alien race’s king in exchange for our freedom.
“You were gone so long, I could only speculate on what was happening to you out there,” he said. “Pretty kickass, though, right?”
“I’ll be honest, I did enjoy reading them.”
“Seriously?” he asked, and I noted how much farther down the slope we were. Another half hour, and we’d be able to get on the scooter. My tired body was looking forward to the break.
“Only one thing,” I said.
“What?”
“You made my hair gray in the later issues. How old do you think I am?” I asked as a joke, but the truth was, I had been seeing some grays creeping into the sides of my hair, like unwanted visitors you knew would never leave once they showed up.
“You were gone for seven years. I expected you to have aged.” It was a valid point. “So the Bhlat are at Earth. How are we going to save the day?”
His optimism lifted me up. Such a simple question, but important to my current mindset. But his question was one-sided. It was as if he knew we were going to save the people of Earth; he just wanted to know how I was planning on doing it.
“We’re on their world. We need a bartering chip. There’s no way we can fight them without losing. We have to play our one hand, and that’s what we’re doing here. Playing our hand.” I didn’t go into further details, and Leonard seemed to accept that it was need-to-know, and he’d know when I needed him to.
“Then let’s do just that.”
My communicator vibrated, and I tapped it through to my suit’s earpiece. “Mary?”
“Dean, we’re almost to their ship. They seem to have bought our story. They asked about the one we call Dean, and we told them you were dead.”
Goosebumps lined my arms, like her saying that was a harbinger of things to come. “Be careful. Don’t let them take the communicator. We’re heading to the city now.”
“We?” she asked, worry and anger mixed together in her voice.
I forgot they wouldn’t have known I wasn’t alone. “The comic book kid, Leonard, conveniently learned we were on a mission and beat me to the secret portal. We need to lock that place down when we’re back.” When we’re back.
“Don’t let anything slow you down. Anything.” Mary had an edge to her voice, and I glanced at Leonard, who couldn’t hear our conversation.
“I won’t. Stay safe. It’ll be over soon, one way or another.”
“If this is it…”
“It won’t be,” I said, trying to keep the tremor from my voice.
“If it is, I want you to know how much you’ve meant to me. To be really loved and have a partner has meant the world to me.” She laugh-sobbed in my ear. “It’s meant many worlds to me. Just remember me, Dean Parker. Remember the spark we had so long ago on our trip to Peru and beyond.”
I held back tears, turning from Leonard so he couldn’t see my emotions threaten to overtake me.
“I won’t, babe. I never could. I’ll see you soon.”
“See you soon.” The connection went dead.
I shoved the pain in my gut down and kept moving.
Once the ground leveled out enough for me to trust using a hover scooter with the added weight of Leonard and our gear strapped to it, we hopped onto the vehicle. There was just enough room for us, me pushed too close to the front, and Leonard complaining half of him was hanging off the back of it.
Time wasn’t on my side as I hit the thruster, a little too heavily at first. Leonard’s arms wrapped tightly around me to keep him from flying off the end.
“Sorry,” I said into my mic, and eased up a bit. The lights of the city seemed distant as we moved from the hillside into the red-tinged forest. I had to slow to navigate the trees, and a couple times we could have walked faster as the copses got denser.
“It looks so much like home,” Leonard said. “Or Earth, at least,” he corrected himself. Earth was no longer this man’s home.
The bark on the tall thin trees was smooth and pale, the tops of them growing high in the sky, looking to reach the dark red sun beyond. They fought to rise above the canopy of their neighbors, to reach the heavens, and grow deep in the ground to reach maximum sustenance below.
As I gawked at my surroundings, I felt a connection to the world we’d entered uninvited. If you closed your eyes and felt around, you wouldn’t know you weren’t on Earth. I wondered what it smelled like outside. The HUD on my suit’s mask told me the air wasn’t toxic to us but would be thin and hard to breathe for long. That was better than instant death, should something unplanned occur.
The ground was covered in small plants: thin grass fighting for life down below a thick overhead covering of branches and red leaves. I felt like the grass. We had to fight to stay alive, but this grass had been doing it symbiotically for years among the trees. They hadn’t tried to snuff the life from the taller plants; instead, they accepted their role, and did that make them any less a part of their environment? I spotted a growth on a tree and wondered if it was invited or not. The whole ecosystem worked in harmony, a dance of life, and growth, and death.
Could we as intelligent lifeforms learn from their coexistence? Could humans be on the same side as the Deltra, the Shimmalians and the Bhlat? Would we ever find a way to cohabitate in the universe? Kareem’s dying words ran through my head, and I wondered what he saw in me. The big picture was one you needed a ten-thousand-foot view to see, and I was down in the trenches, seeing it all way too closely.
“Watch out, Dean!” Leonard’s voice carried into my earpiece, and he pulled tight on my abdomen. I narrowly avoided running into a large felled tree lying horizontally on the forest floor.
“Thanks. Sorry, I’m in my own head.”
The forest opened up the farther along we went, and before we knew it, we were nearing the edge of it. A narrow stream ran alongside it, steam lifting from the babbling waters. Something told me it was hostile, a dangerous liquid. There were few plants near it, and those that were close angled away from it, rather than toward it for nourishment.
“Hold on to your butt,” I said as I pushed the throttle forward. The scooter pushed faster, and we carried past the edge of the forest and over the small river. Once clear of the trees, the grass got thicker, still red in hue. It was like a field after a battle in the ancient days; the grass looked like it was covered in the blood of the slaughtered. I almost expected to see fallen soldiers, but it was quiet, not a tree or animal in sight.
Leonard reached over my shoulder and pointed forward. “Look.”
The city crept up on us, only a few miles away now. The buildings rose high into the midday sky, some above the rose-colored clouds. The skyscrapers reminded me of the abandoned city where Slate and I had met Suma those few months ago; only this city wouldn’t be abandoned. It was full of Bhlat, and at that moment, they were in possession of my loved ones, trying to take over Earth. The Kalentrek pressed against my chest as it sat tightly in my breast pocket. I wouldn’t risk taking it off my person. Th
e power it possessed was immense. The life it could snuff out in a heartbeat scared me.
What would Leonard think of me if I activated it among them? What would I think of me? I clenched my jaw, resolved to do whatever I needed to do to save my friends, but at what cost?
“Now would be a good time to tell me the plan,” Leonard said when the city limits looked two miles away. I spotted roadways, and ships were flying through the sky: some were small, like floating cars, while others were large vessels, criss-crossing through a three-dimensional rush hour.
“First step, hide the scooter.” I pulled over in a field lined with young trees. Crops grew from what seemed like fertile ground; loamy soil stuck to our boots as we got off the vehicle.
“Then what?”
“We activate our cloaks and walk to the palace.”
“What palace?”
“The one where our target’s located.”
The communicator buzzed again. This time, Magnus’ voice came into my ear. “Dean, we’re on their ship. This’ll be our last communication. Are you almost there?”
“We’re at the city. Give me a couple hours.”
I heard the hiss of an airlock, a string of Bhlat words, and the call cut off.
TWENTY-FOUR
I activated the translator so I could make out what any passing Bhlat were saying. I showed Leonard how to use it, and the first time he heard a Bhlat’s voice, he stopped in his tracks, unable to move. It was even harder to get him to keep going once he laid eyes on one of them.
We were on the outskirts of the city, but luckily for us, most of their transportation happened in the sky. Massive pedways connected the buildings, like in the dead city I’d visited, leaving only a few to roam the streets below. This was to our advantage. Though we were wearing cloaking uniforms, they weren’t infallible, and eventually, someone would notice us.
The Survivors Box Set Page 60