by Letts,Jason
“I’ve run some calculations,” Lopez said a short time later. “Taking into account the small size of the planet and its short atmosphere, it’ll take approximately six hours to pump enough oxygen into the air to make another reaction lethal for the entire population, either through combustion or suffocation.”
Loris looked over the chart and nodded.
“Good. That means by this time tomorrow we could all be walking around here without helmets. In the meantime, let’s make sure no one gets close to the Balboa. I’m headed back to the Magellan. We’ve got fallen officers who deserve a proper final sendoff in space and an armada to worry about. They’re the last thing that could get in the way.”
With no one else in the area, the crew of the Cortes made short work of transferring the deceased and getting them up to the Magellan, leaving Panic and Lopez behind to continue monitoring the Balboa’s oxygen-production operations. Upon arriving, Loris was treated to a disconcerting site along the space docks, several Detonan fighters that had been salvaged from floating aimlessly through space. A thousand more were orbiting the planet alongside the Magellan. If he didn’t know better, he would’ve thought the station had been taken over.
The docking bay had been transformed into a programming lab while they’d been gone, with consoles rigged up and cables running straight through the airlocks into the enemy vessels. Yamaguchi, Aylward, Lala, Quade, and Firth were all there overseeing the effort. The looks on their faces gave Loris hope that a solution to the reprogramming had been found.
“Are we ready to take them down?” he asked, excited to secure the last leg in their total victory.
“Not quite,” Yamaguchi said, casting a wrathful glare in the direction of the Chief of Technological Research, Trynton Quade.
“What’s the problem? The armada is minutes away from arriving and I figured you’d all be in a panic if there hadn’t been any progress.”
“There has been some. They’ve tried everything from loading our programs onto their systems to hardwiring our consoles directly into their fighters. The results thus far have been…less than inspiring,” Yamaguchi said.
“You try completely supplanting alien technology in an hour!” Quade hollered from across the bay. Yamaguchi shook his head.
“Still, what we have accomplished is better than nothing. We’ve identified the relay network that the fighters use to import and carry out commands. The problem is that the system manually resets after just a single action, and the reboot time looks to be twenty minutes.”
Loris stared blankly at him, wondering how this was better than nothing.
“What you’re saying is that the army of enemy ships we’ve assembled can only perform one action every twenty minutes? As in, fire one shot and watch a third of an hour tick by before it can do anything else?”
“That’s correct. We’ve done it once already to gather a large portion of the drifting drones and are almost ready to execute another command.”
Loris continued to peer at him until his wrath boiled over.
“And what makes you think that’s fine? We could be completely decimated by the time they could make a second move?” he shouted so loud that it got the attention of nearly everyone in the room. Yamaguchi was unmoved.
“To be perfectly honest, I’ve been anticipating this point of failure from the beginning. It was only a matter of time before we were outmatched. We’ve been soldiering on through a hopeless situation that long ago became evident was a suicide mission, and I knew that either human limitations or bad judgment would mark the end. Now the course of action I recommend is to deploy the reactor and carry out the last stage of our desperate and foolhardy attempt to get revenge on the perpetrators of Earth’s destruction.”
Loris was beside himself at what he was hearing. He looked around frantically to see if anyone else was as disgusted as he was by this revolting display. But no one batted an eye. Most of them hadn’t been out there fighting. They hadn’t been on the ground and seen the key to an incredible achievement first hand.
“Well, we’re not going to do that. The crew of the Balboa did not give their lives for us to abandon hope and allow ourselves to be annihilated! If no one else is still willing to fight, I’ll do it alone, and then when I come back, you’ll be transferred to the janitorial department where you can use your utter resignation to keep the floors mopped!”
“Forgive me, but I have no expectation that anything of the sort will come to pass,” Yamaguchi said. Shrugging, he walked away toward the docking bay’s exit.
Incensed, Loris only needed one thing from one person. He stalked across the room to Trynton Quade, a stringy guy with tufts of hair peeking out over his collar and sleeves.
“What do you need?” he asked, perhaps more inclined to help after Yamaguchi had been chewed out.
“All I want you to do is have them follow me out there. Every last one of them. And if you’re able to connect with more, send those too, as soon as you can.”
Quade nodded and Loris returned to the Cortes. Its crew and the captains of the other vessels were much more supportive than Yamaguchi had been, or perhaps they realized that anything was better than death without even putting up a fight. But Loris remained optimistic because of something the boy told him about the Detonans.
It was a short flight to confront the armada, so short that from the position of the Cortes, they would’ve been able to fire on the Magellan, but the few remaining ships in the fleet were joined by a wall of drones spanning in every direction.
The armada came to a halt in the face of this opposition, and a standoff ensued. The Detonans still had more ships and more firepower, but they didn’t know that the Magellan’s fleet was depleted of ammunition, understaffed even in some cases, and that the flanking drones were nothing more than scarecrows.
“Don’t move a muscle,” Loris said into the com. “They hate surprises. The last thing they could’ve expected is that they’d return home to find their own defensive measures standing against them.”
But when the boy described their distaste for the unexpected, he hadn’t mentioned what form it took or how they reacted. The last thing Loris wanted to do was provoke a fight they were sure to lose, so they sat there for one, two, three hours. By that time the number of drones floating around had doubled. It was possible they were flustered to the point of paralysis, or perhaps they were contemplating a plan of attack. Worse, Loris wondered if they could somehow repossess their fighters.
After another hour passed and the waiting began to fatigue him, he saw that he was being hailed by the enemy. When he brought up the feed on the monitor, he had no way of knowing if this was the same creature he’d spoken to before, but it sure looked awfully similar.
“If you’re calling to offer terms of surrender, I’ll tell you at the outset that we won’t accept them,” Loris said. The creature sneered.
“You have no concept of what you do,” it said, as translated by the ship’s InferRead system. Loris got up from his seat and held his elbow as he stroked his jaw.
“Actually, we know exactly what we’re doing. We’ve defeated you. Your people are dying as we speak and your planet is becoming completely inhospitable to you. It is only a matter of time until none of you are left. You will suffer an excruciating death for the crimes you’ve committed, and then we will be left in peace here. What you are looking at is our new home. Yours.”
The Detonan fidgeted anxiously for several minutes, during which time others in the background came and went like loping boogeymen. After blinking spastically several times, it gurgled a few more words to the recorder.
“The human experiment will conclude like previously determined. Your species has a destiny of extinction and this task of which we will now relish. Anticipate a demise of the irrational and stubborn fools.”
The channel closed, leaving Loris to wonder what was going to happen next. Its threatening language would’ve suggested that they were ready to launch an imminent attack,
but instead the standoff continued unabated. With so many more drones, even sending them on one-command kamikaze missions could’ve brought some measure of success.
Loris again spoke into the com to the other pilots.
“Their instincts of self-preservation are kicking in. It looks to them that to fight would be to die, and they’re leaning in favor of cutting their losses. That’s the difference between us and them. They’ve never before faced adversity enough to give them a sense of common cause.”
The clock continued to tick until something flashed on the console, causing Loris to leave the cockpit and head to the rear window where he could see the planet. Its dull red color suddenly flared up into a bright and shimmering glow, as if it were the sun at sunset, before that luster faded again. Though the color of the planet returned to what it was before, nothing on the surface would ever be the same again.
When he returned to the cockpit, the armada was already backing away slowly. Then they went into full retreat, apparently convinced that defeat was at hand and nothing was left for them here. Loris had always imagined this moment would send him leaping into the air with glee, but he was so exhausted that sliding down in his chair with a sense of satisfaction seemed preferable at the moment. Some were cheering on the com, and he knew that there’d be a chance to join them soon enough. The fight was over, and they had won.
“You must be feeling pretty good about yourself,” Brina said. She was walking alongside Loris in the open and breathable air on Detonus, watching how the water vapor had condensed into rivulets and streams that were turning into pools and lakes.
“Yes, being alive isn’t so bad. I think I’ll stick with it,” he said. They sloshed through water that was a few millimeters thick, side-by-side, so close that their hips occasionally touched.
“I can’t believe you figured it out without the help of the boy,” she said. “He still hasn’t woken up, and I’m not sure he ever will.”
“It was dumb luck and desperation. Besides, I don’t think I deserve more credit than anybody else. It took so much from each and every one of us to pull this off. Now we can send something back to Nova to let them know that the danger has passed.”
Brina’s hand brushed along his shoulder before lightly turning him toward her. She threw her arms around his neck and laughed.
“So unnecessarily modest,” she said, her brown eyes large enough to get lost in. “I hope you won’t mind if I give you some of the credit.”
Loris couldn’t help but crack a grin.
“I’ll take it, but I better not let it go to my head. As long as those creatures and their warships are still out there in the galaxy, we won’t ever be truly safe.”
The End
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jason Letts is also the author of the Powerless Series, Cumerian Unraveling Trilogy, and Inevitable Trilogy. In addition to to being a writer, he’s a new father who enjoys spending time playing, reading, and hiking with his son.
I hope you enjoyed reading Earthless! I’m not sure there’s a better way to explain it than that I wrote this story because it’s the kind of story I’d want to read. If you found something in it that resonated with you, I’d encourage you to please leave a review on the product page of the website you found it. Reviews are crucial to making the difference between life and death for a story, and your opinion could be valuable to other potential readers just like you. You’re also invited to eshare your reaction with me at [email protected].
Earthless: The Survivors Series © 2016 by Jason Letts
All rights reserved: no part of this book may be reproduced by any means without written permission from the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.