Its hand snapped around Erick’s neck, and his staff tumbled from his fingers. It all happened so quickly that he didn’t have time to react with his powers.
Terror lurched into Masika’s heart as she sprinted forward to help. She couldn’t fire, not with Erick half blocking her view. She jumped to the side and swung the butt of her rifle at the android’s head.
Its face spun toward her, silver eyes locking on her, and it lifted his free hand to block. But she was faster than it expected. Her rifle butt slammed into its face an instant before the hand knocked the rifle away.
The android hit the weapon so hard that Masika couldn’t hold on. It flew into the smoking hull. She barely noticed. She flung herself at the android, hurling punches and kicks. Whatever she had to do to get it to release Erick.
The android dropped him to focus on her.
She heard him wheeze and saw him roll away, his hands reaching for his abused throat. She kept punching and kicking, the android’s rock-like exterior bloodying her knuckles. It didn’t matter. She had to knock it out of the way somehow so Erick could get up and they could run away before everyone realized they were over here. Or was it too late for that?
The android finally realized she was faster than the average human. But it was faster still. It caught her fist mid-punch. And squeezed.
Pain blasted her, and she kicked it in the groin as she yanked her arm back. It had no feeling down there, and it didn’t let go.
The android reached for something with its free hand. An earstar. It was going to comm its human comrades.
Before it touched the device, it released Masika and was flung sideways, as if someone had struck it with a giant forceball racket. The android flew over the wreck and smashed into the stone wall on the opposite side. It hit head first with such force that its face caved in. The android pitched to the ground and did not rise.
Erick, his face red and bruises already rising on his throat, picked up his staff.
After you, my lady. He pointed at their thrust bikes. One had tipped over, but fortunately they did not appear damaged.
We better go together. She slipped her arm around his waist. He looked even more wobbly than she now, and he wrapped his arm around her waist too.
Masika glanced through the wrecked gate, expecting the armored men to come charging out, but a wall of flames blocked the view. It rose from the dirt all the way to the ceiling, and a moment of horror filled her. What had happened? Had the whole distillery blown up? She hadn’t heard—
It’s an illusion, Erick told her. But it won’t fool them for long. We need to get out of here.
You’re a wizard, Erick. Masika tightened her grip, and, both wounded, they hobbled for the bikes.
A level-eighty-three elemental wizard in Blades of Chaos, yes, I am. But I prefer being a fighter pilot in Striker Odyssey right now.
She snorted.
He gave her a sidelong look, his face caked with soot and swollen with bruises. I’m glad you’re not objecting to me supporting you anymore.
That’s because I’m supporting you.
Oh hells, I was afraid of that.
It seemed impossible after all this, but he grinned at her as they reached the bikes. They mounted and took off before more trouble could find them.
Masika had never thought she would so appreciate seeing the Snapper’s open cargo hatch, with the warm yellow light from the hold flowing out.
“Me too,” Erick murmured, limping along at her side.
Masika looked at him.
“Sorry.” He lifted his free hand, palm outward. “I got in the habit of invading your privacy while we were battling dastardly evildoers. I’ll stay out of your head. And show you some mind protection techniques if you want. Oh, and don’t forget to talk to Dr. Ogiwara.”
Masika hadn’t actually minded the fact that he’d apparently plucked some thoughts from her brain. Oh, she could see where it would get old, and she knew she’d been irritated when Thorian had done it to her before, but it had been convenient to share thoughts with Erick during battle. Much faster than speaking, and none of those men with their armor’s sensory enhancements, had been able to overhear them. When she’d leaned on Erick for support, it had even been comforting to feel him physically as well as… mentally, she supposed was the term. It had been as if she sensed his aura, and they’d had some spiritual connection.
They stopped at the base of the Snapper’s ramp, and he eyed her warily. She realized he didn’t know if she was angry with him for intruding. Even if she wasn’t, she wasn’t sure she should encourage it. Or encourage him. She wasn’t ready for deep mental or spiritual connections with other people. Though she supposed having someone who could sense her feelings and knew when she wanted to be touched and when she wanted someone to back off could be interesting. Assuming that person actually paid attention to the signals. He seemed like someone who would.
“Dastardly evildoers?” she asked, breaking the long silence, one which was clearly concerning him. “You don’t even know who they were or what they wanted.”
She realized her words were true, unless he had picked it up with his telepathy. He’d fought side by side to keep her from being captured when he could have hid in the corner of the distillery, and they would have likely left him alone.
“They wanted to kill me,” Erick said, “hence they were evil.”
“Ah, of course.”
“I’m cute. No good person would want to kill me.” He wriggled his eyebrows at her. They were barely visible beneath his shaggy bangs. He needed a haircut. And for someone to help him improve his wardrobe. Maybe she would offer to go shopping with him on some station with decent options.
“That is true.”
Masika stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek, then walked up the ramp. She could sense him staring—no, gaping—after her without even looking, and she smiled to herself.
He cleared his throat as she reached the top of the ramp. “Masika?”
She turned, a little warily, afraid he would ask her for a date. “Yes?”
“Uhm, if you do ever decide that you want to make a Striker Odyssey character, let me help you out, all right? I’ve got all sorts of stellar gear I could give you, and I’ve got a stats calculator that shows you how you’ll progress through the levels if you choose one path over another. Keeps you from making mistakes.”
“I’ll keep your offer in mind.”
Yes, he paid attention. Who would have thought it from someone barely out of the university who wore such goofy clothing? Would he agree to a shopping trip if she suggested it? He might prefer his vid game and engineering t-shirts, but maybe he’d just never had anyone offer to show him more stylish alternatives. She smiled again as she headed into the hold, resolving to find out one day.
~FIN~
Lindsay Buroker is author of the best-selling space opera series Fallen Empire, Sky Full of Stars, as well as the bestselling Emperor’s Edge Steampunk series. To see how this crew first formed, please check out The Rogue Prince, Book 1 in the Sky Full of Stars series.
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THE LAST ASTRONAUT
A GREAT DE-EVOLUTION SHORT
By Chris Dietzel
ABOUT THE LAST ASTRONAUT
As the human population fades away, one man decides to spend the rest of his life amongst the stars. He isn’t trying to escape the extinction. He’s trying to get away from a personal loss.
1
Space is not like what you might imagine it to be. At least, it’s not what I imagined. Before leaving Earth, I envisioned sailing across an ocean that was not only in front of me and behind me, to my left and to my right, but also above me and below me. All around. I imagined being able to feel the shuttle moving through space the way a boat makes its way through the ebb and flow of the seas.
It isn’t.
It’s more like being stuck inside a cramped one-room efficiency apartment and having a void of black for as far as you can see in every direction. Mind you, it’s a tiny apartment that you can never leave, let alone open a window to get fresh air, order your favorite Chinese take-out, or anything else.
Or, as one of the lead project managers in charge of the mission once said to me, “You’ll be tempted to think of it as a prison cell but it’s not because you want to be there.”
“That’s the only difference?” I had asked in my youthful naivety.
He had a casual smile. “Yep, that’s the only difference.”
I thought to say, “Oh well, you only live once.” Given the circumstances of my voyage and that of the human race, I decided it might not be in the best taste. Instead, I had merely shrugged.
Nothing the project manager said that day made me rethink what I was doing.
I was ten years old when my parents had “the talk” with me. I was twenty-two when Bob died. One year later, I went into space. Those three events, so drastically different from the trio of milestones in traditional lives—falling in love, getting married, having kids—are why I am and forever will be the last human to leave Earth.
“Your mother and I need to talk to you.”
Those were the words of my father as he stood in the doorway of my bedroom when I was ten. His face was void of cheer. My mother was standing diagonally behind him so his body and the doorway combined to keep her out of my line of sight. The exception was her head, which peered over my father’s shoulder.
The way he spoke, the way they both looked at me, I was sure I had done something wrong. My mind raced through the day’s events. I hadn’t broken anything and tried to hide it instead of bringing it to my parent’s attention. I hadn’t said a curse word. My fingernails were intact, something my mother inspected each day as I slowly got out of the habit of biting them. As far as I knew, I had done everything I should have.
Both of them stepped forward, into my room. My father’s eyes scanned the floor around my bed, and I suspected that whatever else they had to say he would also tell me to clean up the mess.
“Put your book down, dear,” my mother said.
The copy of Bridge to Terabithia that I’d been reading slipped from my fingers and landed without noise onto my comforter. If I wasn’t in trouble, and I didn’t think I was, I thought I might know what was going to come next. They were going to tell me about Santa Claus, which I already knew about. There was also a chance they might talk about something concerning birds and bees. Only a week earlier, Kurt Nelson’s older brother had smirked and told us we would find out all about them real soon. He had smiled like a complete weirdo and neither Kurt nor I wanted to humor him by asking what he was talking about.
It turned out “The Talk” had nothing to do with Christmas presents or little winged creatures or even sexual relations. It had to do with the end of the world, or, at least, the end of mankind.
My father put his arm around my mom’s shoulders and said, “We’ve been talking a lot about when to tell you certain things and we think you’re old enough now.”
When you’re a little kid, being told your old enough to do anything is a supreme compliment. Upon hearing my father’s words, I had actually been dumb enough to smile and sit up straight in bed, eager to hear what new responsibility I would have.
My mother moved forward, sat on the edge of my mattress, which was covered in sports-themed sheets and comforter, and put a hand on my knee.
“You know how you go to school and there are kids in the grades above you, but none in the grades below you?”
That was how “The Talk,” started. Not with, “Well, it wouldn’t be safe if a man were climbing down our chimney, would it?” or “I know you think they’re gross now, but one day you’re going to really like girls,” but with intonations that baby strollers and elementary schools were things of the past.
To be more clear, that was how I learned the human race was going to go extinct over the course of my lifetime.
I had a different kind of talk with the engineers and designers working on the mission. Rather, I sat in a conference room and listened to them discuss whether, as the last person going into space, I should orbit Earth, fly toward the sun, or head away from it and attempt to exit our solar system.
“Orbiting Earth is stupid, a total waste,” one of the older engineers said.
Many others in the room agreed with this, the sentiment being that if the human population was going to die out they should at least try and do something that had never been done before.
“We can send him directly into the sun,” a guy in a lab coat said as if I were a chimpanzee they could strap into a chair and who didn’t have any say in the matter. “Of course, he’ll burn up way before he gets there.”
The guy, who happened to be one of the propulsion experts, spoke of the possibility of my impending incineration not as a tragic event but as a waste of his time. The many nods of agreement that he got from his peers confirmed I was little more than their space monkey.
“That solves it,” the woman at the front of the room said. She was older than the others and the clear leader of the dozens of teams that worked in conjunction to make this mission a success. “We’ll send him toward Pluto and see how far he can get.”
None of them asked if that was okay with me. None of them asked if I had a preference. It was almost enough for me to want to stand from my chair and scratch my armpits while I hopped from one foot to the other.
2
Something no one thinks about when they go out into space: how fast the earth loses its significance. The most recent manned spacecraft to the moon were able to get there in five days. Yes, there were also slower vessels, like the European Space Agency’s SMART-1, which was based around fuel efficiency rather than speed. That craft took one month and two weeks to get to the moon. The vessel I was aboard, sometimes called Anderson’s Saga and sometimes the Legacy depending on who was referring to it, made the trip toward the outer reaches of the solar system at roughly the same speed as its recent counterparts. That meant that after five days of flying toward Mars I had roughly the same perspective of Earth as someone standing on the moon.
The sight was a shock.
Earth, the planet where single-celled organisms made way for complex creatures and eventually for humans, the planet that would remain, no matter how much scientists fantasized about colonizing other parts of the galaxy, the only real home humans would ever know, was no bigger than a basketball. Billions of lives. Thousands of years of recorded history. Millions of years of evolution. Countries and cities and towns. Combined, it all fit on one little sphere. Every place I had ever been to, every person and thing I had loved, was on that tiny ball that could rest in the palm of my hand.
Of course, by now, all of those places and people are most likely gone. And the only people I actually felt like I was leaving were my parents. Everyone else had their own problems.
It isn’t easy making and keeping friends as the human population is declining. What my parents told me during that talk when I was ten was that soon after I was born, a woman gave birth to a baby boy that was silent and motionless. Doctors determined the baby was healthy except for some developmental issue in his brain that kept his senses blocked from being able to hear, speak, smell, or otherwise participate in the world around him.
That same week, three other babies were born with the same condition. It would have been less troubling if they had all been born in the same hospital. At least then a pandemic could have possibly been contained. Instead, the babies were all born in different countries.
Over the course of the following week, hundreds of babies across various continents were born with the same affliction. Then thousands. By the end of that first year, nearly a quarter of all babies born would never cry, never talk, never reach for a hand, or be able to hug. After five years, a hundred percent of newborns were ‘blocked’ from th
e world around them. Quiet, still, inactive, they were the only future mankind would know, and because of that, because they couldn’t take care of themselves, let alone reproduce, there was no future at all. Not as far as the human race was concerned.
Scientists were able to determine the cause of the Blocks—a faulty protein that wouldn’t develop the way it once had. However, laboratory experiments and genetic testing were unable to fix the malfunction. The end of mankind was signaled and it wasn’t one of war or an asteroid or zombies. It was simply people growing old and, over the course of a lifetime, not having anyone to replace them.
That backdrop makes it pretty tough to have friends for very long. As the human population began to decline, families wanted to be around as many other people as possible. A kid would move into our neighborhood from somewhere up north. We’d hit it off and play games and ride our bikes everywhere, and then six months later he and his parents would move further south to continue the migrations toward the final colonies. Sometimes I had a friend for a month, sometimes for a year. Never for longer than two years, though.
“It was the same way for me,” my dad said one time when I was laying on my bed, trying not to cry after another friend left. “My father was in the military so we moved someplace new every two years. I never stayed in one place long enough to have a real best friend. But hey”—he smiled as if there was going to be news that a little kid might think could outweigh that tremendous negative—“it allowed me to make more friends. What I missed in quality I made up for in quantity.”
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