by Paul Tassi
He slumped down to the floor next to the woman’s pack he had brought in from the desert. If he was lucky, he’d find some rogue scraps of food. She hadn’t looked all that decrepit, so clearly she was eating something. He dumped out the contents of the bag and a host of objects fell out with a clamor that made the creature stop and look at him. He shook it and another grenade fell out and started rolling down the tilted floor.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit!” Lucas exclaimed as he lunged for it. How many of these things did she have? Thankfully the pin was still in place.
The biggest noisemaker was the cacophony from about thirty .45 shells hitting the floor. He took her Magnum from the back of his pants and opened it; five shots remained. He replaced a single bullet and kept digging. He turned up a hatchet with dried blood on it, a few books of matches, and a copy of Paradise Lost with the edges singed. He flipped through the pages until he found a bookmark near the end. A photo, creased and partially burned, but he could make out the woman wrapped in the arms of a man. It was readily apparent that before the war she had been stunning. The photo showed her in full makeup with her dark hair voluminous and curled at the ends. The image was the most breathtaking thing Lucas had seen since the million gallons of water sitting below him. The man behind her was young, with blue eyes and a wide smile. She grasped his wrist with her hand, and he could make out a large diamond ring on her finger. A fiancé? Husband? Even the she-devil, snarling with rage and loaded with weapons, had lost someone. Everyone had.
Lucas put the picture back and turned his attention to what appeared to be a silk dress folded around something. Not much occasion for such clothes these days, but he supposed it must have been in her honeypot wardrobe back when that was still a viable tactic. He picked it up and immediately felt something hard inside. Recognizing the shape, Lucas could hardly contain his excitement as he whipped the dress open. Cans flung out of it and clanged on the floor. Lucas scrambled to keep all of them from rolling away, but two escaped his grip and were sent tumbling down the slanted floor. The creature was on his back, fiddling with a new tool on the underside of the console. One came to rest on his hip, which caused him to look down in surprise. He flung out his arm to catch the other one rolling his way. Lucas looked over at him as he grabbed the other can and rose up from the floor.
He looked at Lucas, then back at the canned tuna fish in his hand. Tearing the top off hungrily, he threw it back like a shot into his open mouth. Looking supremely satisfied, he turned back to Lucas and flung the remaining can at him. Lucas caught it and opened it quickly. He scooped out the fish with his fingers, and licked the insides when he couldn’t scrape any more out of it. Looking down at the other cans he saw pears, peaches, olives, salmon, and more tuna. There were about a dozen cans in all, more than he’d seen in one place for months. As much as he despised the woman, he was now exceptionally thankful for her resourcefulness.
A can of tuna in forty-five seconds was not good enough rationing, and his stomach immediately began to regret his sudden indulgence. But he kept himself in check, and managed not to coat the floor with his recently consumed meal, unlike he’d done with the water. He folded the cans back up into the dress and began scooping the floor’s items into the pack.
All around him multicolored lights glowed softly. There was no telling what time it was in the buried craft, but Lucas’s body told him night had come hours ago. In a world where he routinely faced death and desolation, the day had gone above and beyond in every way, and so he drifted into unconsciousness, on the floor of an alien spacecraft.
4
Lucas stirred back into consciousness when he was lightly kicked by a clawed foot.
“Awake,” a mechanical, grizzled voice said.
He jolted up and instinctively reached for Natalie, slung around his back. Pointing it up at the creature who loomed above him, he did a mental double take.
“Did you just say something?”
The creature now had a sort of collar around his neck. It was metal with a bit that wrapped up and around his throat. A small blue hologram protruded slightly from the front of it.
“Yes.”
Lucas jumped to his feet, dropping the gun to his side.
“You did it. You fixed your translator.”
“I was able to repair the console to a degree where it allowed me to program my . . .”
The voice became a garbled mess of sounds.
“Your what?”
“You humans do not have a word for it. It takes certain psionic brainwaves and translates them into audible speech, though sometimes it cannot translate something for which your language does not have an equivalent term.”
The creature was indeed talking without moving his mouth and was only grunting occasionally. His new voice was metallic and deep, but not without inflection or even emotion. It was a welcome change from growling and pointing, and suddenly the creature was feeling less like a creature, and more like . . . a man? It was as if a gorilla suddenly opened his mouth and was telling you about his day.
“Well this makes things easier. But how have you been able to understand me this whole time?”
“I am able to process your language mentally, but my biology does not allow me to speak it, just as you could never vocalize my native tongue. I studied all the languages of your ‘Earth’ intensely in preparation for our mission here. It allowed us to learn of your culture before we arrived, and it was key for intercepting transmissions between your leaders. It would also have been useful for interrogation of prisoners, but that was never an authorized command, only extermination. Speaking the language was never a necessity, but this was a device I had been working on in my spare time, and I am glad to see it is functioning properly. Is my grasp of your language understandable?”
Lucas slowly nodded his head, which was internally spinning. This might be the first face to face conversation that had ever taken place between a creature and a human. There were so many questions, his brain felt like it was about to implode in on itself. He spat out the first one that came to mind.
“Why did you come here?”
The alien looked out the black viewscreen.
“Why we always come. To conquer. To pillage. To strip your planet bare to fuel our war.”
“Your war? The war against Earth?”
The alien paused.
“I did not say our war was with you.”
Lucas opened his mouth to further investigate, but was stopped short.
“I know you have many questions, and there will be time for answers, but we have a more pressing matter to attend to. We need to retrieve the [garbled] from the [garbled].”
“I didn’t catch most of that. What are you talking about?”
“First, we need the female.”
He turned to walk out the main door toward the prison wing.
“Wait, what am I supposed to call you?”
The creature turned.
“I am known as [garbled], but for simplicity’s sake, you may refer to me as ‘Alpha.’ And what are you called?”
“Lucas.”
Alpha nodded in acknowledgment.
“Come, there is much to do.”
“Whoa wait, that thing can talk now?”
The woman was awake and stunned at the new development.
“I could always speak, now you can simply understand me.”
Lucas kept Natalie trained on her. She seemed in better spirits now that the hole in her arm had been sealed. Her wrist was red from the cuff, but he imagined she was still quite some time away from chewing her own hand off. Alpha approached her slowly.
“Hey, back up, what are you doing?” Lucas exclaimed as he twitched nervously. “You’re not letting her go are you? She’s incredibly dangerous. Yesterday I was where you’re standing right now and she almost took my eye out.”
Alpha glanced back.
“You removed her weapons did you not?”
“Yeah but . . .”
“There is no
time to waste; she is essential to what we must do.”
The woman stopped squirming as Alpha examined her arm.
“Wait, what?”
“She is in fair health. However, she needs nourishment.”
He stood up and went over to the console outside the broken forcefield. The cuff slid off of her and her arm dropped limply to her side. She rubbed her wrist and slowly got to her feet. Lucas took a step back and pointed Natalie at her chest.
“Relax, I’m done fighting. Just get me some damn food. I know you found it in my bag. I killed eight people to amass that stash and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you two eat it all.”
She pointed at Alpha.
“I know what tuna fish smells like, asshole.”
Alpha was nonplussed.
“Come.”
The trio exited the room, Lucas letting the lady go first, not out of respect, but so she wouldn’t yank the revolver out of his belt and blow his brains all over the extraterrestrial hallway. She obliged and they turned toward the lift to the bridge.
As the door opened she saw her pack leaning against the holotable. She raced over and ripped it open. Lucas had a sudden thought and sprinted over to catch her. But by the time he got there, it wasn’t an axe or a grenade she pulled out, but the can of peaches. He stopped abruptly.
“What’s your problem?” she asked as she opened the can and threw a slice in her mouth. Lucas bent down and picked up the rest of the pack. He opened it, fished around, and pulled out the axe and grenades. He slid the former into his belt and the latter into his pockets.
“Keep ’em. But I want my gun back.”
Lucas laughed.
“Yeah, okay.”
Alpha was playing with some controls on the holotable. They were zooming around the globe, focusing in on various points that were all flashing red. Finally it came to rest on a green dot that wasn’t pulsating at all. It looked to be in . . .
“So what the hell is going on?” the woman cut in. He was really going to have to learn her name at some point.
Alpha looked up from the table and slowly walked around to their side.
“Your planet is dying. That much should be obvious to you by now. Scans indicate that there are still inhabitable regions to the north and far south of our present location, but within six months time, those will be desolate as well. Your atmosphere is corroding, your planet’s temperature is rising and it will be unable to sustain any life at all within a year’s time.”
Lucas leaned up against the table.
“Yeah, that’s what I figured.”
The woman was uncharacteristically silent. Lucas pressed.
“So what are you proposing?”
“With the acquisition of the [garbled]—With the acquisition of this functional energy source, the ship is now mostly operational. Some systems remained damaged, but the engines and life support are online. As is water filtration, which I fixed long ago, and inter-ship communications, which I brought online last night when I programmed this [garbled]. This translator.”
Alpha turned back to the holotable, which zoomed out from Earth to the solar system, and then further out to a star cluster.
“With current functionality, we only have enough power to get to these neighboring star systems, none of which are inhabited, and few possess planets that could even theoretically sustain life. This is a [garbled] class ship, and it’s lacking the [garbled] capabilities of a [garbled] class.”
“Your translator appears to be on the fritz there,” the woman chimed in.
“These words do not exist here. This ship is a smaller vessel not suited for long-range travel. A larger ship has these capabilities, but all of that class have been destroyed in our civilizations’ battle. Also, those ships have crews of thousands and would be impossible to fly without a hugely coordinated effort. From what I have seen, such a thing no longer exists.”
He swiped the hologram which turned into a three-dimensional model of the ship.
“This is a lower class of craft, but still requires a basic crew to function. Normally there would be at least twenty onboard operating the ship at all times, with a hundred soldiers for transport. My calculations put the absolute minimum number of bodies needed to operate the ship in its current state at three. I thought this a lost cause, as I have seen what the world has turned both my and your people into, and was planning on attempting to make the trip alone, with bypassed automated systems attempting to handle the load. I would have certainly failed.”
Different parts of the holographic ship lit up and were marked with symbols Lucas couldn’t decipher.
“I believe the two of you could perform the necessary functions to mobilize the ship and acquire the remaining part needed for long-range travel. That is why I kept her alive, and that is why I did not kill you when you slept.”
Lucas was stunned.
“You want us to fly this ship?”
The woman was equally skeptical.
“And to where? ‘Long-range travel’? What does that mean? Where are you trying to go?”
Alpha swirled the hologram around so it zoomed back in on the green dot.
“Our ultimate destination I will discuss later. We do not have time at the moment. The [garbled] we need is halfway around the world, and is quickly becoming incapacitated.”
Lucas was confused.
“The what? I can’t understand what you’re talking about. What is this thing?”
“It is a core for the larger vessels that allows them to travel long distances. Across star clusters, across the galaxy. It is not meant to be fitted to a vessel as small as this one, but I believe I can modify the ship so it will be able to house and use the core safely. That is part of what I have been working on in solitude all this time. All I need now is the core itself. I was unable to acquire one until I found a power source that would allow the ship to fly locally. I have now located the last remaining active core on Earth, but it will not remain operational for much longer, as it is degrading at an exponential rate. This is the need for urgency.”
“So where is it?” Lucas asked.
Alpha summoned the rotating globe once more and it zoomed to a point in Scandinavia.
“The device is located in a [garbled] class ship that was partially destroyed in the region you once knew as ‘Norway.’ Readings indicate that the area in which it is located, while devoid of water, still has habitable temperatures, and the vessel has at least 28 percent of its systems online, including the [garbled]. Including the object we require.”
The woman interjected.
“You want us to fly this thing to Norway? How exactly is that going to work? We’re buried in a mountain, and also, I can’t speak for him, but I’ve no idea what any symbol in this room says, nor how to use them to make this thing move.”
Lucas said nothing, but was thinking the same thing. He glanced around the room bristling with foreign devices and couldn’t begin to process how he would be able to meaningfully contribute to such a mission.
“It is difficult, but possible,” Alpha insisted. “We have [garbled]. We have thirty-four hours to reach the device before it degrades to the point of uselessness. In that time you will learn what you need to comprehend about this vessel to get our party there.”
Lucas was incredulous. “You’re telling me we can learn to operate this thing in a day and a half?”
“You will need to do so in twenty-nine hours to allow time for travel to the destination.”
The woman laughed.
“You mean to tell me you can’t zip this thing over there in five minutes? It still takes hours to get somewhere halfway around the planet? Does this thing run on biodiesel?”
Alpha’s mechanical tone shifted into something resembling annoyance.
“Our journey must be made at a far lower speed than usual and at a far lower altitude in order to avoid detection.”
“Detection by what?” Lucas asked.
Alpha hesitated, but continued.
“My brethren have left scout Sentinels behind in the outer atmosphere. They monitor the state of the corroding planet, scan for missed resources and would undoubtedly be alerted to our presence if we decided to fly at high speed across the world, as there are no other functional [garbled] ships left on Earth.”
“Why wouldn’t they help you?”
Alpha shifted his gaze outward and looked slightly . . . forlorn.
“My betrayal is not only known to the former crew of this ship. It is a permanent mark upon my being, and as I have been branded a traitor to my people, any communication I make is flagged as such, as is any vessel I may be operating, which will be viewed as an outlaw craft. Compounding this is the fact that if you two were detected onboard, the Sentinels would immediately obliterate the ship on sight.”
Alpha waved and the hologram broke into a series of diagrams and symbols. He turned to the pair of them.
“We must not delay any further. Will you join me on this endeavor? It may be the only hope for your preservation, and for the survival of your entire species.”
Lucas mulled over the question. His mind turned to his long journey through hell. He thought of the horrors that lurked outside the walls and a barren world where vats of water, cans of tuna fish, and casual conversation ceased to exist.
He considered his other option, death. It was a choice he had been about to embrace before this new mystery invigorated him. Though he had no knowledge of the endgame of this creature’s plan, there was something about it that awoke a spark within him. A curiosity, a purpose. One could argue death was a similarly interesting mystery, but it was one he could always solve later.
“Alright,” Lucas said.
Alpha nodded, and turned to the woman. “And you?”
Lucas imagined she was having similar thoughts to his own. She leaned back on the console with her hands in her pockets. Looking up at the ceiling, she blew out a large breath.
“Sure, why not?”
With the skeleton crew assembled, Alpha’s next objective was to divide up the responsibilities of the team. His assignments were surprisingly simplistic.
“You will fly,” he said, motioning to Lucas. “And you will shoot,” pointing his stump at the woman.