Andromeda Expedition

by Carlos Arroyo González

  “What are you getting at?”

  “I'm saying I'm not sure we can make a single parasite spacecraft disappear. That's what I'm saying.”

  Even more than Isaac's words, Fox was surprised not to feel that old blackness expanding in his chest, that unleashed fury that a few days ago would have led him to ask for explanations, perhaps while he helped him think by massaging his temples with his knuckles.

  “What now,” he said between gulps.

  Isaac approached a cabinet. The door was a little crooked. On it was a calendar from two years ago. Each month illustrated by a picture of the fruit of the season. Time had frozen in August: melon. Isaac opened the door, which creaked as if it had been stabbed. On a shelf rested something Fox recognized instantly. Something that after the Niobium Wars had been banned in all nations. A shiver ran down his spine.

  “Have we been all this time with that in there?”

  “Of course, what do you think, it just appeared there all of a sudden? Besides, where do you want me to put it?”

  Fox's mind found an escape route in the form of uncontrolled laughter. He felt something tugging at his skin on his side, but he ignored it.

  “I'll drink to that,” he said, lifting the cup, and drained the rest of the coffee in one gulp, feeling his esophagus burn.

  Isaac picked up a feather duster and wiped the dust off the ultraneutrine bomb. Fox witnessed the scene as if watching him water a plant. Isaac blew into a nook, ending the maintenance session.

  “As you well know, one of these things can take out a mountain range like a sand castle. I don't know exactly what the parasite spacecrafts are built of. But I'm sure that if anything can tear them apart, it's this thing.”

  “So what do we do, open the window and throw it at them?”

  “I think that's where we can benefit from the catalyst,” he adjusted his bathrobe belt and poured himself some coffee. “You see. I don't know the actual strength of the resistance that Old Europa and the quori will be able to put up. However, I sense that it's enough for the parasites to call in their heavyweight. These creatures function as one mind. If the queen comes to battle, we have a chance. She is like the central nervous system of the parasite mind. The switch.”

  “We use the catalyst to teleport the bomb to her spacecraft?”

  “The problem is, as you know, the ultraneutrine bomb has no timer.”

  “We create it with the neural catalyst.”

  “Too risky. One little glitch and BOOM,” he snapped his fingers. “The only way is for something to provoke the queen. Something to make her pounce on the bomb. Something that would make her lose whatever twisted mind those children of the underworld might have.”

  Klaus walked into the Braconte's lair. The only light came from the crimson glow of the sword.

  Martin S. Puncel, The Fairy Forest

  After Simmons' intervention the Alliance fleet had recomposed itself into a solid formation, with shields charged to maximum, and the parasite fleet had been seriously decimated. However, they continued to be outnumbered by at least five to one, and while they handled themselves much better strategically, the parasites were adept at swarming the enemy and boarding them, like locusts over a cornfield. Expectations remained of succumbing to that horde of horrors as ancient as the universe. At least their last hour had been delayed.

  The strategy of Amiens consisted in gathering in one point all its fleet, and uniting all the shields, holding like a porcupine entrenched behind its thorns. Meanwhile, the quori spacecrafts, more agile than the human ones, would offer additional fire and try to disperse the parasites with their maneuvers.

  Inspired by the death of Simmons, the Alliance fought fiercely, selling dearly every inch around that ball of destruction, that agent of death, the last guardian of Earth. Around them a black haze had formed, caused by the smoke from the explosions of the parasite spacecrafts that were being destroyed. It made it hard for them to see beyond three hundred feet, making it difficult to orient themselves by sight.

  Amiens looked at the radar and was shocked by what he saw. A spacecraft more than three hundred miles long was approaching their position.

  “The Queen,” he muttered to himself, though the entire fleet heard him.

  When the haze dissipated sufficiently after a fierce scuffle, they saw a formless mass, built over the millennia by placing the pieces of all its victims, a cyclopean mass as large as a satellite. Its chaotic lighting system showed the shadows of thousands of angles, undulations, columns that no longer supported anything, the remains of spacecrafts, galleries, protuberances, needles that threaded the void. The chaos of it all conveyed a certain harmony, as if those beings had followed some kind of obscure architectural pattern that only made sense to them.

  It stopped, and for a moment nothing moved except the black smoke that drifted away on its eternal journey through nothingness. It deployed an appendix like an articulated city. A blood-red light accumulated at the tip to form a gigantic ball, which finally fired at the allied resistance. The shield disintegrated with a photonic flicker. From the Queen's spaceship sprang thousands of boarding spacecrafts, which rushed against the sphere that still dared to resist.

  Amiens gave the order to hold at every door of every spacecraft, to sell dearly the skin of all the humans who watched the sky below with their hearts in their hands.

  The parasites stormed the Alliance spacecrafts, slaughtering everything in their path. The humans finished off as many parasites as they could, but their numbers were overwhelming, and all discipline proved futile.

  On the Caesar, flagspacecraft of the Old Europa fleet, Amiens and the old guard of the Niobium Wars, stood in the command room, barricaded behind a semicircle of filing cabinets and courage. All around them, the parasites were piling up to the point that all they could see in front of them was the black glow of the creatures' bodies. They no longer knew the living from the dead, so they administered their lasers without measure, with murderous generosity. A flash of light alerted Amiens. As he looked over his shoulder, through the pilot's panoramic window, he saw a spacecraft materialize that was so dilapidated it was hard to understand how it could stand in one piece.

  Isaac Norton's image appeared on every Alliance spacecraft's transmitter.

  “Sorry for the delay, gentlemen.”

  Amiens looked at the face of that Mysterious Universe freak, with some kind of rusty chamber pot on his head, and for a moment he forgot how to shoot.

  Isaac tried to concentrate on dissolving the cyclopean spacecraft of the termen queen. But the amount of energy needed to accomplish this was far beyond him. When he opened his eyes he saw nothing but a flicker around the spacecraft. Something like a badly tuned channel for a tenth of a second.

  One by one, the Alliance spacecrafts were falling into the clutches of the parasites. Isaac closed his eyes and concentrated again with what little strength he had left, feeling as if he was trying to lift a huge weight with his neurons. When he opened his eyes this time he didn't even see that flicker he noticed earlier.

  From the door, the melon in the calendar smiled at him with a sweet, juicy slice.

  Pulling out the bomb, he found that it weighed considerably less than he had expected.

  “You can still change your mind,” Isaac said.

  “I'm ready.”

  Isaac handed him the catalyst.

  When he opened his eyes, he was in the command room of the Queen's spacecraft. It was a creature about fifteen feet tall. A chitin body as black as nothingness. A glow of primordial evil oozing from every particle of its being. A deep unchanging hatred, the perpetual perfect hatred, a pathology of the universe, the Plague. Millions of years of blind involution into ever purer, ever more essential hatred, in a race toward that one evil particle from which it once sprang, crawling toward its perpetual endless mission. It peered at Fox through the holes where one would expect to find eyes, and at the sight of that metallic crown emitted a shriek of rancor as deep as the un
iverse. Then it lunged for its prey.

  General Amiens was offering the last resistance with his old guard, assaulted by the full fury of the parasites. He could not hold out much longer. It was then that the explosion took place. First a flash that turned everything into a white flash. Then a roar so powerful and deep that it felt more like a jolt to the whole body than a sound. When the flash dissolved, he saw around him the lifeless bodies of the parasites. They had been turned off as if someone had flipped a switch. Through the window, he saw the wreckage of the Queen's spacecraft scattered across the place it once occupied, expanding in all directions toward the far reaches of the universe.

  The truth lights our way.

  Barania's motto

  In the alley of Chinatown, the chestnut stall was torn down. Chestnuts scattered on the wet ground. The skimmer twisted over a pool of blood. The first rays of sunlight of a splendid February day illuminated the darkness of the alley and flashed on the blood. In front of the entrance to Stefano's Pizzeria were three parasite corpses. On the shutter was a graffiti mural and numerous dents, as if it had been riddled by a barrage of cannon fire. The shutter was lifted, slowly revealing Valentina Caruso's red uniform. She was still wearing her apron. Behind her appeared the three customers who had remained inside. The four of them looked at the corpses standing guard in front of the entrance. No one said anything. The three customers (a fat man with horn-rimmed glasses; a woman with long, curly, purple hair; and a guy wearing a T-shirt that read: "FREEDOM FOR PARASITES") left the pizzeria, dodging the bodies of the monsters, without taking their eyes off them at any moment, as if expecting that at any moment they could catch them with their sharp limbs, and left the alley, towards the radiant morning of Koi City.

  Valentina stretched her apron and went back inside, as if she was about to start a new day, as if none of this had happened.

  Before leaving, Mr. Yun threw a word of advice to Valentina, who mumbled a “thank you” and forced a smile. Yun left the pizzeria with a box of leftovers under his arm. He picked up his chestnut stand, straightened the skimmer, and set out to face another day at the helm of his business.

  News of President Simmons' involvement in the war, and not only that, but of his personal sacrifice to stop the parasite fleet, spread like a summer fire throughout WilkinsBank Eastcountry. Most of the Army's top brass joined the side of the Liberation Movement.

  In WilkinsBank Eastcountry, sanity was gradually restored. And a start was made on restoring the country's name. Barania also regained its flag, white crossed by five oblique blue stripes, and by unanimous vote, broken chains were added to the center.

  A law was passed that would ensure that what had happened would never be forgotten, so that nothing similar would ever have to happen again. And so that it would not remain just words and a dead letter, the first world alliance was finally formed. All nations contributed their eyes, ears and bullets to watch out for and deal with any other aberration that might emerge from some corner of space.

  Twenty years later, in Sacrifice Square, Emily Stockton was walking the gallery of the nation's heroes. She wore her Barania Aerospace Army civilian uniform. White pants, blue shirt with the army emblem on the chest.

  The statues cast elongated shadows on the cobblestone floor of the square. Over their shoulders, several swallows watched the sunset.

  Emily walked past the statues of Dereck Simmons, Isaac Norton and Douglas Jameson.

  She left the stuffed elephant at the foot of her father's statue. The late afternoon sun glinted off the darkness of its plastic eye.

  The statue of Captain Fox Stockton depicted him in his old army coat. On his head he wore the neural catalyst. They had sculpted it in such a way that it almost looked like a crown.

  I hope you enjoyed reading Andromeda Expedition. It would help me a lot if you could take a minute to write a short review on Amazon or Goodreads. Thank you so much! If you want to stay up to date about my upcoming works, you can subscribe on my website to receive email updates.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Carlos Arroyo González was born in Madrid in 1984 and has lived there ever since. He graduated in Psychology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He began his literary career writing horror and science fiction stories. He has been greatly influenced by authors such as J. G. Ballard, Stephen King, William Gibson and Herman Melville.