by A. J. Allan
“Thanks,” she said. “I needed someone to get my mind back straight.”
“Anything for you, girlfriend,” Lopez said, accentuating the last word and drawing a snort of a laugh.
Irons placed her head onto his chest. His heart remained steady, but he could only wonder what sort of emotion Irons had. Between her uncle, Jordan, his situation… it was a lot for one person to handle. And on top of that, she was a soldier and thus had numerous duties. No latrine duties yet, thank heavens, but then again, they’d only just left Montana this morning. This morning!
“You know, Lopez,” she said. Then she leaned in as closely as she could, so close that her lips practically kissed his ear. “It’s a shame you’re not my type. I’d be the one proposing to you.”
Lopez couldn’t help but laugh out loud. He hugged her even closer to his chest, as if he wanted to compress her between his arms. She hadn’t said anything that could raise suspicion if someone had overheard, and yet all the same, he knew exactly what she meant.
“Someday, if we get much longer leave,” Lopez said. “Maybe I’ll take—”
The music ended abruptly. It didn’t just get quiet and go silent—it went from a loud, ear-filling noise to the silence of space. A couple of soldiers on the drunken side shouted for the music, but Colonel Ali took the stage and immediately spoke.
“We have unidentified objects coming from Neptune, moving at 0.1 LS. All units, report to battle stations immediately. Prepare to go on my mark.”
15
Unidentified objects? A tenth the speed of light? Battle stations? Battle?!?!?
As soldiers, even on a few drinks, no one in the UGM panicked. Still, everyone moved with purpose and a hurry. Lopez and Irons immediately joined the line exiting the reception room and made haste for the lift to the lowest floor, where they would meet Lt. Andrews and get on board their vessel, the UGM Apocalypse, a ship that matched up somewhere between a frigate and a fighter originally designed for space battles but since re-purposed into a transportation vessel. With long wings to the side, bombs underneath, and five different guns, it made for the perfect setup for their squad.
Lt. Andrews piloted the ship. Irons co-piloted. Lopez handled the fore guns. Li and Jordan handled the port guns. And Kowalski and Lake handled the starboard guns.
Lopez found it to be the perfect setup. Li’s aimless thoughts during battle would get the exact kind of reception they deserved through Jordan, and Kowalski and Lake would turn into such frothing volcanoes, intent on beating the other for high scores, that it would ultimately serve them well in battle.
“Is this for real?” Irons mumbled as they reached the elevator, packed full with eighteen other soldiers, although Irons and Lopez knew full well that this was not a drill. They just didn’t know how it was real. The Churchill had drills of surprise attacks, but to interrupt a military ball, especially one in which General Watson attended, wouldn’t happen for just an exercise.
Plus, now, Lopez remembered all of the soldiers moving by with strict intent. Maybe they’d been monitoring the situation for quite some time. Maybe they only now announced it because…
They’re approaching the Titan settlement by Jupiter.
We’re about to find out really fast if this is friend or foe.
16
As soon as the elevator reached the bottom floor, with more space, the soldiers broke out into a sprint for their battle stations. Irons cursed, stuck in heels, and soon kicked her shoes off. It meant she’d be running on the cold floor, but with the adrenaline pumping and so many other things to pay attention to, it seemed highly unlikely she would even notice.
They found Bay 33, the home of the Apocalypse, and confirmed their identity with the door by pressing their hand. The door drew up, and Lopez and Irons ran in. Already, Lt. Andrews was inside the ship.
“About time you two got here,” he said, mumbling a few curses under his breath about how privates these days didn’t have the same intensity that he had. “Where are the rest?”
“Reporting, sir!” Kowalski shouted as he entered, no more than a few seconds behind.
“Lieutenant Andrews, sir,” Irons said. It’s serious now. No more Uncle. No more Buck. Strict battle speak. “What’s the sit rep?”
“Unidentified object moving 0.1 LS toward Earth, private. Unknown if it’s hostile.”
Lopez had many more questions but swallowed his tongue. He would not need to ask these questions if battle began. A full recap—
“We’ve known about this object for a couple of days now,” Lt. Andrews continued as he set up the ship for flight, running systems checks on everything from the hull’s durability to the elevation of the pilot’s seat. “It began approaching out of a wormhole about four LDs from Pluto and has advanced toward us ever since.”
No one else dared to ask more as Lt. Andrews continued his systems checks. Even if they needed to engage, they wouldn’t hear the news for another couple of minutes, and they could easily slide into battle positions within a matter of seconds. They remained at attention in the cockpit, prepared to jump off to their stations at any second.
“We don’t know much about it, it’s unlike any ship we’ve seen so far,” he said. “Any USVs we send up malfunction when we get within a certain range. But for what we do know, they don’t look like ships. They look more like coral reefs.”
“I’m sorry, sir?” Irons said, unable to contain herself.
“Did I stutter?” he said, still running his systems checks. “As I said, the object—the big one and about three smaller ones, I should say—they don’t look like ships like we have. We don’t see engines. We just see large masses of maroon-red coral ovals moving through space. We’ve tried communicating with them but have had no luck. We were hoping to have some sort of answer before they reached Titan, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.”
A beeping came from the comms. He pressed a button, and on the hologram, General Watson appeared.
“Soldiers. We have received no communication from the object as it approaches Titan. We have warned it and will fire our lasers within the next two minutes if it does not respond to our comms. If it fires back, we will send in our USVs first, but be prepared to engaged.”
The hologram ended. Lopez felt the adrenaline kick in. Finally. Finally. He might actually get to fight in a battle. He might actually get to see combat.
Fuck me. I might actually get to fight. I might actually die.
“Men, understand this,” Lt. Andrews said, suddenly far more chatty than usual. Lopez wondered why— “When we engage, we will do what we have always done during drills. There is nothing you see out there that you haven’t seen in the simulations.”
“And if there is, sir?” Irons said.
Andrews paused, turned, and wore a devilish grin.
“Then that’s where you make your pay, soldier.”
17
Irons shot a glance to Lopez. He tried to fake confidence by smiling at her, but it didn’t seem to assuage her fears.
Lopez glanced at the rest of the crew. Lake and Kowalski, perhaps unsurprisingly, had clenched teeth, narrowed stares, and heavier breathing. Jordan just stood at perfect attention, as if a robot. Li looked lackadaisical, but almost in a forced manner, as if he thought by remaining care free, the nerves of battle would not get to him.
“And now, soldiers,” Andrews said. “We are going to watch this unfold from our cockpit. May this be nothing more than high-stakes television and a hilarious story of overreaction in about a week’s time.”
He doesn’t want to go to battle. He doesn’t want to see war.
But… doesn’t mean he’s not confident if he has to.
I think.
The cockpit glass turned into a hi-definition display, which showed images from Titan as the coral approached. The three ships moved in circular fashion around the massive ship, giving the appearance of an atom on an interstellar level rather than a ship or coral.
“Strangest damn th
ing I’ve ever seen,” Lt. Andrews said. “But if we have to blow it to the sky, we’ll happily clean up space goo for a few months in return for some peace and quiet in the Solar System.”
Lopez nodded, even though his CO didn’t look at him. The unidentified ships got within firing range of Apocalypse Squad… then paused.
“Blast ‘em to hell,” Lt. Andrews said. “If they aren’t responding to us… at least fire ion cannons and immobilize them. Then we can board and search.”
Suddenly, from the ship, an impossibly large number of smaller objects—it looked like specks of pollen from the view inside the Apocalypse—dispatched from the main ship, firing down to Titan. The UGM didn’t waste any more time deliberating, firing at all of the smaller objects with the defense forces from Titan and the nearby ships, but the smaller pollen-looking objects were simply too numerous. For every one that a human vessel or machine destroyed, a dozen others slipped through the cracks, headed for the civilization on Titan.
“Fucking hell,” Lake said, her voice rising.
It became clear in a matter of seconds that these were not allies. These were hostiles.
And if the devastation they were landing on Titan was any indication, they were ugly, brutal, savage, and deadly hostiles.
18
“All fighters, prepare to engage on my mark,” General Watson said through the comms.
“Move!” Lt. Andrews said.
No one needed confirmation. Not after seeing explosions, black smoke, fires, and vessels collapsing in Titan’s atmosphere on the screen. The images made Lopez sick. How many people lived on Titan? About a billion? And how many would remain after that attack? Zero?
It looked like the ship had shed upon itself, dropping millions of little bombs that somehow packed a dangerous explosive in such a small space. How a ship had that much ammo… it wasn’t like the coral ship was that large, either. How the hell was it happening?
Lopez slid down a hatch just about five feet behind Andrews and Irons, dropping about six feet and fitting snugly into a mini-cockpit, where he had full control of the bombing and gunning from within.
“All right soldiers, welcome to battle,” Andrews said.
Strangely, his voice sounded… almost upbeat. Was this intentional? A psychological trick? Was he trying to make the men feel good before they fought?
“You think you know what will happen in your mind, but you probably don’t. The real shit’s different than that video game shit you do in VR. Let me make it clear. You’re going to be afraid. You’re going to feel fear. Good. Use it. A man who doesn’t feel fear is a man who’s going to die early because he doesn’t properly account for the risks and dangers in battle. You’re going to go into Condition Black. You’re not going to rise to the level of my words, you’re going to fall to the level of training. After those first couple of seconds of ‘oh shit,’ you’ll fight as you trained. So I hope you boys and girls actually paid attention to what I did. Fortunately, knowing you all, I know you didn’t just pay attention, you practiced when I wasn’t there. So I know you will kick some ass and take some… whatever the fuck this is, take their names. So, Apocalypse Squad, let’s show these motherfuckers both on the battlefront and back here what we’re made of. Show ‘em why we’re the best damn squad in the UGM!”
A couple of voices cheered and shouted in agreement. Lopez hollered “yeah!” but then went silent. His nerves had begun to feel heavier. He was still witnessing through his own screen the complete destruction of Titan. What he noticed, though, was that the bombs hadn’t detonated. They weren’t bombs. They were like termites or something of that nature, chewing through an entire civilization with no effort.
In fact, the space pollen returned to the ship shortly after, but not before veering off course in an impossible manner. These things had to be sentient. No rocket, no laser, no slug could move in such a way, not even guided or computerized ones.
This is not the neagala. This is not anything—
The screen went blurry and static noise filled the air.
“Is anyone else dealing with this shit?!?” the distant voice of Irons sounded.
“I can’t see or hear anything either, Lifts,” Lopez shouted.
“Fuck!”
But then it went black. A single line appeared on the screen. And then jibberish began. It sounded like a baritone voice combined with clicks. But the garbled lasted only moments. Humanity’s auto-translators soon got the message across.
“The time has come for humanity to suffer for its crimes against the natural order.”
19
The voice on the other end now sounded like an angry American man, but Lopez never had any illusion about whether this came from Earth or from elsewhere.
“For your entire existence, we have watched your species with great interest. You are a race that needs so little to sustain yourselves, and yet you consume so much. You are a species capable of living off of eating once per day, and yet instead the majority of your foul kind wastes resources. You are a species that can live off of very little space, and yet many of you live in areas in which hundreds of other humans could inhabit. But perhaps most foreboding of all, you search for new land and new worlds to colonize, determined to annihilate anything that gets in your way. We saw it over the scores of millennia of your existence, and we saw it with your conquering of TRAPPIST-1.”
“What the fuck?!?” Irons screamed, but the CO shut her up. No one else screamed. Lopez wished so badly he could see how the rest of the crew reacted to this. He had a bad feeling whatever this enemy was, it was not about to take prisoners and give them a fair trial.
“You wiped out the neagala, an ally of ours, viciously and without mercy. Why? So a few million humans could live on a world where an entire species had built a civilization that had existed as long as yours? Pathetic and evil. Your race, for too long, has exalted in bloodshed, carnage, and consumption. When you remained on Earth, this did not bother us, for your planet, though resourceful and beautiful, was tiny and insignificant. But now you have taken to space. You have taken to interplanetary travel. And you have proved, as you have so many times, that your fundamental nature has not changed.”
The screen shifted. No longer did a simple black screen appear with the voice waves. Now it showed a darkened face with yellow eyes. Lopez strained to see more features, but could only see the haunting yellow eyes, bereft of any other colors, slanted at the humans on screen. The eyes seemed to follow Lopez. It horrified the young private.
“It is time for your species to suffer the cost of your colonization. It is time for the eradication of man. The noctura—”
But finally, the UGM got control back of its comms systems.
“All fighters, prepare to engage in t-minus 30 seconds,” General Watson stated. “The enemy has wiped out all our defenses on Titan and will reach Earth in approximately ten minutes. You must ensure that the enemy does not reach Earth no matter what it takes.”
So it was. If Lt. Andrews decided that they had reached Operation Omega, then that’s what it would come down to. If he did that, maybe Lopez would finally announce himself before dying. But then again, the squad already knew everything. There wasn’t going to be any new secrets.
“T-minus ten, nine…”
Lopez’s hands gripped tightly around his guns. He thought of all of the target practice he’d done. He thought of all the drills he’d done. How he’d trained both in complete fatigue and nauseating heat. One could never prepare for enough possible conditions. We don’t rise to the level of our inspiration. We fall to the level of our training.
Good. I won’t fall far.
“Eight, seven…”
Lopez closed his eyes. He thought of his grandparents back in Los Angeles. The ones he had not yet visited since five years ago. He needed to see them. He would see them. Dammit. If he had to take over for Lt. Andrews and fly the Apocalypse himself, he would. No matter what, he would see them again.
And his parents. Da
mn. He’d get them out of Mass Media somehow. He knew the risks. Supposedly, those unhooked suffered serious trauma. That wouldn’t happen. He’d get them military medical help.
“Six, five…”
He thought about everyone on the ship with him. Kowalski. Li. Jordan. Lake. Irons. Andrews. Some, he only knew for a couple weeks. Some, he felt like he’d known over multiple lifetimes. Some he had or wanted to make love to. Others, he wanted to punch in the face at certain times, which he only felt bad about because he hadn’t actually done that yet—and CQC training didn’t count. But no matter what, the reason he felt so strongly about them was because they were his brothers and sisters.
Especially Irons. And now especially Lake.
“Four, three…”
We’re really going to battle. We might die. We’re definitely dying if it’s like Titan.
“Two…”
Lopez thought about what everyone said they would do right before battle, their rituals. Irons would think about all the boys who had wronged her, and imagine them as the enemy. Li would imagine enjoying a vacation without structure, and fight for that. Kowalski would scream—yep, there it is—at himself to get him psyched up. Lake would chant to herself “I will win, I will win, I will win” over and over. Lopez knew he couldn’t hear it, but he just wished Kowalski would shut up. Jordan never said what he would do.
Lopez imagined a world in which he helped win a war and, as a result, used his prominence and influence to get back the rights that had existed oh-so briefly in the early 21st century before numerous laws had snatched it back. He yearned, no, begged, for a day in which no one gave a shit if he was gay or bisexual or straight or transgender or some other orientation because it had no fucking correlation with his skill as a soldier. He could not do that now.