by Paul Tassi
All Lucas could think of was Earth during the brief war with the Xalans. He’d seen horrifying scenes like this for weeks as he scrambled from hole to hole, trying to survive through staying hidden. He watched the Xalans slaughter hundreds, thousands, as he ran. And hid. And ran. And hid.
It can’t happen again, he thought. Not here. I won’t let it.
He didn’t have to hide anymore, he realized, snapping out of a thousand flashbacks playing simultaneously in his mind. He was sitting there, frozen, when he finally had the ability to fight back.
“Actually, give me that,” Lucas said, taking the comm from the bewildered Lulta, who had just given his troop estimate to Torwind.
“Torwind, tell the tank to fire two shots at these coordinates,” he said.
Lucas eyed the two hovercraft, studying their current trajectory and their position on the road. He calculated how far away the Soran hovertank was to the south, and how fast an armor-piercing round would arc through the sky at the properly aligned angle. He took into account the eight seconds it would take for Torwind to believe him and follow his instructions.
“What the hell are you talking about?” came Torwind’s predictable reply.
“Shot one at 1.904/3.332, shot two at 1.905/3.321. Do it now.”
Silence.
“Now,” Lucas repeated, his tone carrying a weight Torwind respected.
“Alright, firing.”
“Now bring the unit around and hit them from the back, I’m going in here.”
“You’re wha—”
But Torwind was interrupted by the firing of the tank. Two blasts. Eight seconds later, exactly.
Lucas looked toward the faint booms that had come through the jungle behind them, and back to the three soldiers who were staring at him, transfixed. He scratched his blackened arm.
“In about four seconds, start shooting any Xalan you see.”
“What is—” Lulta began.
“Three.”
“You’re crazy, Earthb—” Raa’li said.
“Two.”
“Yessir,” Wisher said, readying her rifle without question.
“One.”
The hovercraft drifted into the path Lucas predicted just as two rounds rained down from the sky, smashing through their armored roofs and detonating inside. The screams this time were Xalan.
“Fire.”
Lying on their stomachs on the wet forest floor, the scouting party unloaded on the scrambling Xalans who didn’t understand why their supporting armor had just spontaneously combusted. Many had been knocked to the ground. Many never got up again, smoke rising from holes in their heads.
Lucas fired into the fray, but shooting with his left, he found it hard to precisely hit sprinting targets, even with all his newfound abilities. He had one Xalan in his sights, his right arm ablaze with bright flame.
Stop, he thought, and his mind went cold. The Xalan came to an abrupt halt, standing idly even as his arm burned. Lucas finally hit his shot, and the creature dropped where he stood.
Lucas tried to focus, spitting out more mental commands at the remaining Xalans. But the winds had changed and they were blinded with smoke from the wrecked vehicles. Ash was sucked into his lungs, and Lucas and the other soldiers started hacking and coughing uncontrollably.
Die, Lucas thought, and through the smoke could dimly see two Xalans tear their own throats out with their claws. But his eyes burned and the other creatures went on shooting at civilians, full of fresh rage. The smoke cleared a moment and Lucas saw a contingent of armored Xalans pointing toward their vantage point off the road.
“Shit, they’re coming,” Raa’li said, bolting up to retreat. Lucas saw the plasma round heading directly for his chest, and yanked the man downward so fast he heard bones crack. Raa’li cried out in pain, but the plasma round had grazed the top of his helmet instead of plowing straight through his chest. He winced, but looked at Lucas appreciatively.
“Stay here,” Lucas said, turning to Wisher who was the only one of the three who appeared to trust him completely. “Cover me.”
“Absolutely,” she said with a weak smile. “I’ll tell my kids ’bout this sum’day.”
Lucas was already gone, sprinting through the brush at full speed. He twisted out of the way of the plasma being unloaded at him and smashed into the collection of Xalans who had discovered their position. They were flung into the air from the impact, and Lucas broke the necks of two of them before they hit the ground. He wheeled around his rifle to put down one who was trying to get to his feet, and then spun to kick an energy weapon into debris as it was being raised toward his midsection. The remaining Xalans noticed his presence and turned their attention from the screaming Sorans to him. They raised their rifles, but two went down from headshots fired from the scout team in the brush. Even at a distance through the smoke, Lucas swore he could see Wisher wink.
Lucas turned to unleash a thunderous punch into a Xalan who was running at him with a long, thin blade. The blow took the creature’s jaw clean off, and Lucas grabbed the short sword before it touched the dirt. He flung it behind him into the neck of another Xalan who had just reached his feet.
More of the creatures turned his way. They raised their weapons.
Miss, he thought.
Every one of their shots was wide by five feet, and a few of them dropped from the scout team’s sniper fire. Lucas casually raised his own rifle and leveled the rest with ease.
Lucas smiled.
Careful, said a voice in his head, but he shrugged it off.
It was funny though, in a way. They were all just so slow. Two more Xalans charged toward him as the entire unit was now letting the Sorans flee to try and take him down. He flung his rifle onto his back, dodged their shots, and ripped through their armor and flesh with his bare hands. The Xalans behind them looked horrified, right before a thunderous explosion liquefied half of them and maimed the rest. Lucas turned around and saw the smoking barrel of the hovertank up the road, Torwind and his unit sprinting full-tilt at the remaining Xalans.
Lucas turned back to the stragglers who hadn’t been killed by the blast and dispatched them before the SDI reinforcements could even get shots off.
Lucas chuckled.
So slow, he thought. He’d killed Shadows, what could these ants possibly hope to do to him?
And they were all dead now. There was no one even left to kill. Except—
The smoke cleared and Lucas saw the tall Xalan again, armor covered in patterned paint and blood, bits of brain tissue still sticking to his boot from where he’d smashed in the woman’s head. He’d caught a string of shrapnel across the right half of his body, but he strode toward Lucas with purpose, raising an enormous energy rifle with glowing coils threaded up the sides.
Lucas raised his blackened arm, the skin now dark well above his elbow.
Stop.
The numbing feeling in his brain returned. It was almost becoming pleasant now, not painful. Refreshing.
The Xalan complied, face changing from angry scowl to a blank stare.
Kneel.
The leader dropped to the ground on backward bending knee joints. Losing his grip on his weapon, it tumbled onto the dirt road.
Bow.
The Xalan stared absently ahead, and lowered his face and claws to the ground.
Lucas laughed to himself.
No, out loud.
Quite loudly.
Crawl.
The Xalan inched forward along the road, clawing chunks of earth out of the ground as he slowly crawled toward Lucas, his nose barely inches from the dirt.
Lucas couldn’t stop laughing, he was almost doubled over.
What are you doing? came the voice again, but he could barely hear it, and paid it no mind.
The Xalan finally reached him, and Lucas didn’t hesitate, stomping down on the creature’s downturned head, exploding it into pulp.
More laughter. He couldn’t stop.
Look around you! boome
d the voice in his head, so loud now it actually hurt. The voice was his own; it was the laughter that didn’t feel like him at all. He blinked, and his eyes cleared.
In front of him was a large group of the surviving Sorans. They were looking at him with wide eyes, horrified, mouths agape. Lucas turned around and saw Torwind and the SDI soldiers whispering to each other, looking at him with a mix of disgust, awe, and terror.
Lucas turned to the jungle and saw Wisher standing there, her hand on her mouth, tears in her eyes. She wiped them away as soon as he caught her gaze, but the fear in her face couldn’t be masked.
Torwind approached him, clutching a pistol with white knuckles, but he kept it aimed at the ground as he walked, stepping over Xalan corpses on the way to reach him.
Lucas wasn’t laughing anymore. He stepped backward, removing his foot from the headless body of the Xalan leader.
“What are you, boy?” Torwind asked, his narrow eyes growing narrower. “Because you’re sure as shit not Soran, or human.”
“I—I am,” Lucas stammered, but the words came out as if he was trying to convince himself.
Torwind lowered his voice.
“Look, everyone here is grateful for … whatever the hell you just did here, but you should go. Get your ship, and get wherever it is you’re going. You’re a hair away from losing it, from the looks of it, and you can’t be around my unit or these people when you do.”
Lucas looked around at all the silent stares. The injured were moaning, and slowly the crowd was dispersing to attend to them. But still, many couldn’t look away from him. Lucas stooped down and pulled a ragged cloak out from the storage hatch of a half-wrecked ground vehicle. He flipped the hood up so it covered most of his face. Torwind saw only two bright blue flints burning in the dark shadow across his face.
“Thank you,” Lucas whispered, “for everything.”
Torwind put a hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t lose your way, son,” he said, and Lucas knew he wasn’t talking about getting to the port. With that, he turned and fled into the forest.
Just hold it together, he thought as he raced over downed trees and shallow bogs. This will all be over soon.
He felt the odd urge to laugh again, but swallowed it. It sat in his gut and prodded him like a knife.
The sky lit up just as the sun went down.
Lucas was still bounding through the forest toward what he prayed was the direction of the port when the great reclamation battle began. The trees began to thin out and he saw a host of colorful lights join the winking stars in the heavens. The aerial war was being waged hundreds of thousands of miles away, in complete darkness and silence. The bloom of an erupting dreadnought seemed like a distant candle being snuffed out of existence. In the small flashes of light, millions were dying. Lucas wanted nothing more than to leap up, grab one of the passing Xalan fighters out of the sky, and ride it into battle. The last few Xalan reinforcements racing overhead with black hulls and blue engines would likely find nothing but debris when they arrived. But whose debris? Asha was incredible, and everything to him, but did she have this in her? Could she command a fleet of this magnitude? At least she had Alpha. Between the two of them, Lucas believed there wasn’t much they couldn’t do. With no way to help on the ground, he would heed Asha’s advice to try and meet his sons once they pushed through to Colony One.
When Lucas finally reached the sprawling port, it was packed tightly with Sorans, all watching the dancing lights in the sky with reverence and terror. There were armored guards posted at the mouth of the mammoth wall barring entry into the docking area, and a line of civilians holding their last worldly possessions waited to get in. Lucas kept to the forest and scaled the fifty-foot wall with ease, leaping down on the other side before a patrolling guard could spot him.
Inside the compound it was complete chaos. There were so many people jammed into the docking platforms it was hard to move. The smell of sweat and blood and filth was overpowering, and even if most were silently watching the stars, the air was still noisy with the crying of children and grown men alike. Lucas watched Xalan ships soar overhead. He realized that if any of them deviated from their orders to meet the Sorans out in space, a single bomb could kill the eighty thousand or so civilians bunched up within the walls in an instant. It made it all the more urgent to find a departing ship and get the hell out of Kun-lai.
Lucas pushed past the crowd with his hood still masking his face. It was dark, and it was unlikely anyone would either recognize him or see the black veins snaking their way to the edges of his jawline and the ice-blue eyes that now plagued him. He suddenly realized he’d left his rifle back on the road, but there was no use for it here anyway.
He made his way to a terminal and brought up the data cluster list of the remaining ships at port. His fingers flew through the holograms as the crowd gasped at a particularly bright flash of lavender light in the sky. In an instant, Lucas had every ship’s manifest memorized, and quickly calculated that the remaining craft could carry at most fifteen thousand more souls. There were at least five times that many in the loading area, with double that waiting outside. Lucas found the fastest ship left and hacked into its navigation system to shift its course to run as close to the coastline as possible, three thousand miles north. From there it was a short jog to Colony One, nestled in the mountains that walled off the forest from the sea. Lucas searched for an airship, but there were none in the facility. The boat would have to do.
Lucas danced through the crowd like a shadow, only slowing when approaching a line of guards preventing the Sorans from entering the ships themselves. Behind this line was the vessel he was searching for, a freighter called the KLS Stormcrasher that had only been built six months ago, according to its spec data. The guards were only letting passengers in one at a time after scanning their ID chips. Lucas waited for the next artificial supernova in the sky and slipped past the guard line superhumanly fast, diving into the water without so much as a splash. The approved Sorans moved up the docking ramp to his right, but Lucas quickly plunged deep into the freezing black water and swam alongside the starboard side of the ship. He surfaced a few minutes later, not remotely out of breath, and scaled the side of the craft like a spider, hoisting himself up over the railing behind a cargo crate. His hood clung to him like a wet rag, but he left it on and made his way toward the bridge. It was lit, and he could see the officers inside from the deck of the ship, which was crowded with shivering civilians sitting on moldy blankets, watching the largest battle in their civilization’s history like it was a holiday fireworks show.
Lucas looked back toward the crowd where Sorans were still trickling through the guards to board the boat.
There’s no time, Lucas thought, trying to ignore the monstrously cruel thing he was about to do.
Lucas watched the officers scurry on the bridge a hundred feet above him. He closed his eyes, and felt their little points of light.
“Leave,” he said.
They stopped moving, then started again all at once. Lucas was too far away to see their faces, but he was used to the vacant stare by now. It was haunting. He noticed that he barely felt any cold in his mind that time.
The massive engines of the freighter shook the entire vessel and there was a small cheer from those on deck as the ship slid away from the dock. But it was drowned out by the collection of screams coming from the port as the refugees broke through the guard line in an attempt to catch the boat, which still had room for a few thousand more passengers. Hundreds of Sorans were pushed into the water, with a few jumping in to swim toward the boat. They swarmed the loading ramp like termites, and a few of the most desperate and athletic leapt onto the ship as it departed. Many were less fortunate, and once the ship separated from the dock, those leaping bounced awkwardly off the hull or fell straight into the dark waves below. Seeing the ship was gone, the Sorans split and started flooding toward the few remaining craft still taking on passengers.
The s
hip slowly picked up speed as it made its way into the open ocean. The Sorans onboard started to make their way below deck as Lucas imagined no one wanted to be caught topside when the ship starting hammering its way through eighty-foot waves at nine hundred miles an hour. Lucas had learned a lot in the six seconds he’d searched through the port’s database.
Lucas was about to head into an open hatch on the deck when something caught his eye in the air. It wasn’t the battle, though that still raged far away overhead. It was a formation of three Xalan cruisers that had altered course. Instead of heading out of the atmosphere, they were slowly lumbering around to face the surface. To face them.
Are they targeting the ship? Lucas thought, but then saw which direction they were pointing. Toward the port itself.
While his own ship was bouncing over the waves, leaving the thousands on the shore behind, it was too much for Lucas to bear.
“No,” he said aloud, but there was no one on the deck to hear him.
“No!” he shouted as the weapon bays of the ships started lighting up with the now panicked mass of bodies trapped between the sea and the walls. Lucas heard distant screams carrying over the water, even as waves crashed around him. It was a civilian installation. They had no defensive capabilities. The guards who were starting to shoot at the looming ships might as well have been throwing rocks.
No, he thought, raising his arms above his head toward the ships. The cold was back. He pushed through it to find the tiny pricks of light in the sky—the captains, the navigators, the engine crew. As he brain iced over, sending chills rebounding through his bones, he thought only one word.
Fall.
The three hulking ships didn’t fire at the sea of Sorans on the ground. Instead they slowly tilted forward on their noses, like an elephant attempting to stand on its trunk. When all of them were nearly perfectly perpendicular to the ground, the lights of their engines flickered and died. The great jagged pieces of metal slowly plunged down into the water like great black birds diving for fish. But as they disappeared under the water and the ocean swelled around them, they didn’t resurface. Lucas felt the impact as they struck the ocean floor.