by Zara Zenia
The new Shocktrooper captain was to my right. He gave me a bizarre sideways glance.
“An afterlife?”
“If there is one,” I said.
“Do you think there is one?” he asked.
In the moment I didn’t know. As a child, I had assumed there was. That’s what everyone said. You were to return to stardust upon death and live amidst the ether, shining down to the planets to inspire people.
“Everyone arrives at the stars,” a nanny had once told me. “You can’t live forever.”
That was a long time ago now and the words rung in my head. Yet somehow they seemed so true.
“Sir? We don’t have much time left. Would it be ok if I ask you a question?”
I looked over to the captain.
“Fire away.”
“Are you sure about this?” he asked.
In some ways, it was the most innocent of questions. Something you would ask somebody in everyday life. Are you sure you want to eat that? Are you sure you don’t want to go to bed? Are you sure you want to go out in the storm? But there was nothing ordinary or every-day about the captain’s questions. He was asking me if I was sure I wanted to end all of our lives in a suicide mission.
“I’m sure,” I said as I stared straight ahead. “I’ve never been more sure about anything in my life.”
A tear slinked out the side of his eye but I didn’t feel bad, just determined. It was a matter of weighing what was most important. If the sixty soldiers in these ships died it would save the entire planet of Ura-Than, and ensure that my wife and child survived. Someday Urie Junior would run the world, one day when he would be old enough to understand what happened to his father…
“Is Oban joining us on this mission?” the captain asked.
“No… He is in charge of the palace until Samantha and Urie are brought home.”
“I wish he was here.”
“Why is that?”
“Because it was him who fine-tuned all of the plans. If anything, I think he would enjoy seeing it through.”
I thought of lowly, old Oban up here in the sky with a weapon by his side as he readied himself to fight to the death. If it wasn’t for the severity of the moment, I would have found the thought amusing.
“Yeah… he would have enjoyed it. He was always the first to conjure up the best war tactics but was never much of a fighter. I think he only stepped onto a battlefield once, in his younger days.”
“He is the brains, we are the brawn,” the captain smiled. “Or at least we are for a little while longer.”
“Only a little while,” I said as I pushed my hand inside my pocket.
I felt the soft fabric within and imagined the little, folded square of blue material I had stowed away with me. Unclipping my safety belt, I stood up and walked up to the front window. We were traveling so fast it was though the outside world wasn’t real, it was though the stars were just a video playing on repeat inside a large screen. I turned around to make sure no one was looking at me. Everyone, it would seem, was so worried about their own mortality that they paid little attention to what I was doing. I pulled the baby blanket out from my pocket and held it to my face. Little Urie’s scent was still on it but it was fading, with the smell of Samantha’s perfume only lingering in a few of the folded corners.
“This is for you, my little hero. My life… I am sacrificing… just for you.”
I kissed the blanket and folded it back up, sliding it back into my pocket. As I moved to take my seat, I saw the Shocktrooper captain watching me. He waved a hand dismissively.
“Don’t worry about looking emotional. Times like this would make the hardest, most battle weary men sentimental, especially for a little newborn boy.”
“Thank you for understanding,” I said as I patted him on the back. “Are you leaving anyone behind?”
“A wife and three girls.”
I wasn’t expecting that answer. I gasped and without knowing what else to do, I hugged him tight.
“We are all losing everything today. All of us…”
“It is worth it,” the captain blinked away his tears. “It is worth it for the continuation of the species, for the survival of Ura-Than and to see the look on those X’Sorian bastards’ faces when we plunge our swords into their guts.”
“Take down as many as you can. If we’re going to die, then we have to make sure we take as many of them out with us!”
He nodded and shook my hand.
“I will see it as a personal honor to kill as many as I can.”
We shared a laugh. It was quite possibly our last. As we let our hands falls apart, a shape dominated our view out the window, round, and red. It was the home of the X’Sorians and there were only fleeting moments until we would be stepping out onto enemy soil.
“Okay!”
I stood up.
“Everybody listen. We don’t have long so the few seconds we have left need to count. As you are all aware, this is a suicide mission. Once we step out of this ship there is no going back. But all our lives will not be lost without good reason. If this mission is successful, we will destroy the X’Sorian capital ship.”
“Is that even possible?” a small, quivering voice came from the back of the ship.
“It has to be… It is the center of their existence, the seat of their parliament. Destroy it and all X’Sorian attacks will cease.”
There was a tense feeling on board. I could almost smell the unease from the soldiers.
“We will do this!” I encouraged them. “It’s what we were born to do!”
The ship began to shudder as it descended. The red planet was approaching fast. I could see the craters in the dirt, the cities of civilians, the shining roof of the capital ship. Looking out the side windows I saw the four other ships of brave Ura-Than soldiers. My heart gave out a beat for them.
“Stand up!”
Everyone unbuckled themselves from their seats. They shouldered their guns and we all gathered around the door, waiting to jump at the exact moment the ship made contact with the ground. I tried to clasp my hands around my rifle but they were shaking too much.
“Calm…,” I whispered to myself. “The end is coming.”
Chapter 18
Samantha
The room was red, everything I touched was red, the entire planet was red. I was so hungry and my stomach rumbled constantly, gurgling and spitting up acid as it contracted in a barrage of cramps. I was so famished I felt as though my stomach was pressing up against my back, a hollow sack lined with bile.
I ran my tongue over my parched lips. It made a papery noise like an animal scurrying over sandpaper. I didn’t need to see my face to know my eyes were sunken and blackened and that my cheekbones were protruding with their jagged edges. Yet despite my weight dropping, the restraints around my wrists were still tight, felt as though they were somehow becoming tighter. With great effort, I turned my head to the side to look at my arms that were suspended by my ears. Large, purple rings circled my wrists and they were so thin they looked as though they belonged to a famished child. I tried to swallow, made a futile attempt at moistening my mouth but nothing happened except for the lump in my throat becoming somehow more solid. I tried to keep my head up, tried to focus on a spot in front of me to settle my mind but it was impossible. I closed my eyes and drifted off.
The door slammed open making me jump. I shivered as the tall, blue being stepped into the room and stood over me, his body hanging over my head like an ancient tree. I shook in his presence, trembled as my captor crouched down so his face was level with mine.
“Tell me,” he said with his voice raspy and insidious. “How much do you miss your son?”
“Where is he?” I spoke with a new found strength. “My little Urie. Please tell me he’s ok!”
The blue warlord laughed and stood up.
“You will find out soon.”
“He’s alive, though, isn’t he? Just tell me he’s alright! I can’t stand not being w
ith him.”
The warlord said nothing, just looked down at me as though I was filth.
“You are a dirty, savage human,” he kicked me in the shin.
I yelped and tried to shuffle away from him but the chains holding me to the wall held me in place.
“Why are you doing this?”
He laughed and kicked me again, his boot hitting my legs so hard I was sure he had fractured a bone. I listened for the cracking sound, but it never came.
“I’m doing this because you are scum, because you are inferior and because you swam around that palace as though you are a queen.”
“I am the queen,” I said. “After all the leader is my husband.”
“He is weak!”
He stamped his foot, making me jump.
“I told him at the war council that he was an imbecile! Told him that he shouldn’t pick a human as a mate. There are so many good, Ura-Than women who would marry him in a heartbeat, who would dedicate their lives to being a good pure breed Ura-Than queen but you…” he shook his head. “You are vermin to us.”
I didn’t know what to say. Since I was captured I had heard just about every derogatory term and insult aimed at the human race but none of it made sense.
“If I am vermin then how come I was bought for a fortune? How come your planet’s premium slave master traveled all the way to Earth just to capture me?”
The warlord leaned against the wall for a moment and looked up at the ceiling in thought. He didn’t have an answer.
“People are stupid,” he finally said. “And besides, just because you are an expensive sex slave, a whore… doesn’t mean that you are fit to marry our leader and then to have his child? You have some nerve, some audacity to think you could do such a thing.”
“Urie Junior… he is everything to me. Please just tell me where he is. Tell me he is safe.”
His red eyes bore into mine, the eyes of a traitor.
“If you’re lucky, he might still be alive.”
His words hit me like a spear through my chest.
“But he’s innocent! He’s done nothing wrong. Kill me if you must but don’t hurt my boy!”
“He’s done nothing wrong?”
The warlord laughed and spat at my feet.
“He is a half-breed, a mongrel! He’s worse than you are. He’s a complete monster. If you’re lucky his death will be swift.”
He turned to walk away.
“Please!” I called after him. “Don’t hurt him.”
He lingered in the doorway for a moment, his long, bony fingers tapping against the wall. I wondered how a person could be filled with such hate, how someone could be so cruel to a mother and child.
“Tell me before you leave. You have sold out your entire planet to the X’Sorians, potentially destroyed an entire race of people just because of your own prejudice, because you are unwilling to accept that someone can fall in love with a person who doesn’t look like you, or your leader. Tell me, are you happy with yourself?”
He looked at me over his shoulder and grimaced. Then stormed out and slammed the door.
My insides ached but not just with hunger, but with the intense yearning to see my baby. I would break my arms if I had to, would severe my hands at the wrist to free myself and chew through the floorboards. Anything to see him again, anything to save his life. I thought of him out there with the traitor. Would he be feeding him? Were there other people to care for him? No matter how many times I tried to focus on positive outcomes, my mind kept going to the darkest places. I imagined little Urie out there being tortured or starved. I worried that he was already dead, his tiny lifeless corpse lying discarded somewhere amongst the underground network of dungeons.
It was so quiet down here, so silent that at times I was sure I could hear my own heart beating, could hear the sound of the blood as it pumped through my ears. I could hear bugs and alien animals chewing inside the walls, I could hear my own thoughts as though it was a real voice telling what to think.
I pulled at my restraints once more knowing it would not free me. It hurt so much, a shooting pain dashed up my arm. With nothing left to do but cry, I leaned back and closed my eyes, my face becoming wet with tears. I listened to the drops hit the ground. Looking down I saw their little salty stains, drying fast in this hot hell hole.
With no knowledge of where or what this planet was, I only knew that it was a ghastly red planet where only the Devil could reside. The little I saw of it from beneath my blindfold was arid and dusty, crimson and dark as though it was cursed to reside in perpetual night time. Happiness came here to die, along with peace, fun, and love.
The home of the X'Sorians... No wonder they were such an evil race. I imagined their leader to be a mirror image of Urie. Instead of living in an immaculate white palace he would control his reign of terror from a black pit in the ground that was carved out of onyx and smelled like burning sulfur.
He would be down there, slithering through his rooms as he thought up his Machiavellian plans of galactic devastation. I pondered on what his face would look like. I imagined it black and rotting like his soul. I conjured up a vision of him devouring children just for fun, of raping entire planets of women just to make him feel important. I thought of him in his plague filled, soiled cavern, laughing at all the destruction he caused. And I wondered if he had a mother. Everybody did. What did his think of him? Maybe she was worse than he was. Maybe she taught him everything he needed to know.
I shivered and pulled against the frigid chains on my arms. I had been pulled and held in the same position for days now but the pain, once agonizing and unbearable, was now replaced with a buzzing numbness.
I knew I was dying but it no longer hurt or scared me. It just felt like a floating sensation, a constant feeling of pins and needles. It was as though my mind wasn't connected to my body. Often, as I drifted in and out of consciousness, it would seem as though I was looking down at myself, inspecting my soon to be corpse. The only thing that kept me alive was thinking about little Urie. I had to get out of here, some way, somehow and see him again. If he was still alive for me to see...
In a moment of desperation, I latched my teeth around the chains and started to pull. I yanked so hard that I thought my mouth would snap. A piece of tooth went flying across the floor, bouncing across the ground like a pearl. It hurt like hell and made me cry out in shock but although it did nothing to the restraints, the pain brought me back into the moment and I was now more alert than I had been in hours.
"Fuck!"
I grimaced as a trickle of blood dribbled down my chin.
"Jesus... Hurts like a bitch!"
Footsteps sounded. They were bounding down the hall, approaching the door. There was the rattling of keys, the click of the lock.
"What is all this noise?" the traitor bellowed.
He walked over to me and looked down at my bloody mouth, saw the pieces of tooth beside me.
"You are truly an idiot," he sneered with a smug grin spreading his cheeks. "Did you really think you could eat your way out of trouble."
He shook his head and held a hand to his temple.
"You humans are too stupid for words, such barbarians. You genuinely thought you could chew your way out of here, gnaw through the chains like some sort of wild creature."
He chuckled and slapped his thighs.
"Moron! You're a vile, pathetic idiot."
He laughed even harder but I was enjoying it, his insults only making me angrier, more alive, more determined to escape.
"What else have you got?" I asked.
"Eh?"
He looked puzzled, cocked his head to the side and narrowed his eyes.
"I said, what else have you got? I'm getting the distinct impression that you're exhausting your vocabulary. You're starting to repeat yourself. You've called me an idiot four times since I got here. Do you not know any other words?"
He began to salivate, spit trickling across his lips like an angry, rabid dog. His hand
s began to shake, his face swelling with blood as his cheeks puffed out and became shiny and pink.
"So?"
I tilted my head to the side to mimic him. I could see the rage in his eyes. It amused me and felt tremendous to have the upper hand for once.
"So you don't have anything else to say. You don't know any bigger words... Maybe it's actually you that is the idiot. Is that it?"
His foot began to tap up and down.
"How dare you?" he seethed.
He lashed out and slapped me hard across the face. The blood on my lip splattered across the wall.
"Bitch! You absolute wretch! You think you can talk to me like that? You think you can belittle me?"
He paced up and down angrily, shaking and wringing his hands as though he physically restraining himself from throttling me.
"I could kill you! Right here, right now, I could strangle you with my bare hands and no one would know and no one would care... Except for that little brat of yours out there. The one that won't shut up!"
"So he's alive?"
I was ecstatic with my eyes wide and wild as I leaped forward. He looked down at me and winced as he obviously regretted what he said.
"He's alive," he nodded. "For now..."
"But he is alive! I knew you wouldn't kill a harmless baby, even if he was a 'mongrel' as you called him."
He glared at me. I was playing him and he knew it. I continued, enjoying the sensation of tormenting him with his own words.
"You know, you're not the beast I thought you were. I thought you were a callous warlord, a man capable of killing with your bare hands but here you are, letting me insult and dishonor you and you can't, or won't, do a thing. You think you're so vicious, but you're not even able to kill a defenseless child."
I spat at him. A glob of saliva landed on his chest and began its slow descent down the front of his body.
He began to shake all over as though he was about to erupt. He thrust a hand into his pocket. He was reaching for his weapon, or so I thought. When he pulled out his hand all I saw was a handkerchief in between his fingers, crumpled and innocent. He wiped at his chest and chewed down on his lower lip. Dark circles had formed below his eyes. He was stressed now, losing his cool.