The Last Exodus

by Paul Tassi

  The pod’s door slid up and open, and he stepped down into the corridor. He was shaken from his vision, but physically was feeling noticeably better. How long had he been in there?

  Across from him, the door to another pod opened to reveal Asha. It seemed Alpha had talked her into a nap after all. She looked disoriented as the halo rose up from her head, but she soon regained her bearings as she stepped out. Lucas saw she looked noticeably disturbed as well.

  “Did you see anything?” he pressed, but she cut him off quickly.

  “No. I was out like a light.”

  But he knew she must have been plagued by a similar phenomenon as he. Alpha’s voice ended any chance of further questioning.

  “Crew to command.”

  Asha walked quickly out into the hallway, avoiding Lucas’s gaze.

  When they reached the CIC, Alpha asked them about their slumber.

  “Are you feeling more rested?” he inquired, though his only real concern was likely for the integrity of the mission.

  Lucas shifted.

  “Yeah, but there were . . .”

  Asha cut in.

  “What the hell is that thing?”

  Alpha looked confused. Well, as confused as a creature can look.

  “What did you experience?”

  “Memories, and not good ones,” Lucas offered.

  “Strange,” Alpha said. “The [garbled] is programmed for almost complete neural shutdown during rest. There must have been an unforeseen complication with your . . . biology. I will have to investigate further at a later date.”

  “Please do,” Asha said, as she stood with her arms crossed, clenching her fingers to her skin, which was rife with goosebumps. She looked uncharacteristically unnerved, which made Lucas curious about what she had seen.

  Alpha continued, tapping a mechanical cuff on his bad arm, which Lucas was surprised to see now had a robotic hand attached with six spindly fingers sprouting out of it. A small hologram shone out of his wrist.

  “In any case, your biological signatures indicate the last five hours spent at rest have increased your neural functioning by 60 percent. I’ve finished the last of the preliminary engine work during that period and we must now depart.”

  Lucas began to sweat, something he hadn’t done in a long while due to the complete lack of water in his system. But now with moisture back in his skin, the old indicator of nerves had returned. Hologram training was one thing, but could he actually fly this ship halfway around the world?

  “Report to stations,” Alpha said with unusual command presence. “We will have visual and audio contact with each other at all times.”

  Then, as if he sensed Lucas’s tension, he caught his eye and continued.

  “Your training will be sufficient.”

  Not exactly an inspired motivational speech, but Lucas felt comforted Alpha trusted him to some small degree. He nodded and walked toward the central captain’s chair as Alpha and Asha disappeared down their respective hallways.

  This time when he sat down, only the cables that attached to his head reappeared. He assumed the rest were for the simulation only. Holograms sprouted up all over his field of vision and around each of his arms. Overwhelmed for a moment, he reached into his mind for the information he knew was there. He found it almost instantly, and began running through the preflight checklist he had learned as his first lesson in training. Unlike his virtual ship however, this one was still damaged, and from the translated readouts he saw it was functioning at only 73 percent capacity. How that would affect his ability to operate it, he had no idea.

  Two floating windows appeared in his field of vision. One was a fixed shot of Alpha in the engine bay; the other showed Asha sitting in the turret down below. Alpha looked into the camera. Or was it a camera?

  “Visual contact confirmed. Confirm audio.”

  “Um, audio confirmed,” Lucas spat out hastily.

  “Confirmed,” said Asha.

  “Lucas,” Alpha said, which was the first time he’d uttered his name aloud. “This takeoff will differ from your simulation.”

  Fantastic, Lucas thought.

  “What do I do?”

  “Divert all available power to the underside engines. We will need every bit of it to free ourselves from the crater wall.”

  “Alright,” Lucas said. His mind raced and he managed to remember the location of the engine control grid he had been playing with earlier. He brought up a floating blueprint of the ship and tapped each of the bottom engines. Bringing his hands together, all available power was thrust into them. He clenched his fist.

  The ship roared to life and the lights in the entire CIC went dark. There was only a hint of light on the faces of Alpha and Asha in the monitors now. It seemed he really did mean all available power.

  “And now rise,” Alpha said coolly through the screen.

  Lucas turned his fist upward and slowly raised it. The ship shook violently, far more than it ever had in the simulation, and Lucas would have been thrown from his chair had he not been strapped in. He saw Alpha buckle in the monitor. It kept shaking for five, then ten seconds, then Lucas finally felt a sense of elevation. They were moving. Alpha scrambled to secure the engines as alarms were going off all over the bay. Asha clenched her hands wrapped in the gun controls, unaware of what they might find once they surfaced.

  A few seconds later, ash started streaming down the black viewscreen, which began to get increasingly lighter. Then, in an instant, they burst through the top of the crater wall with a massive groan that Lucas was worried had torn the ship apart, but as they rose, everything felt as it had when he successfully took off in the simulation.

  “We are free,” Alpha said on the comm. “Keep elevation under [garbled] and speed under [garbled] at all times.”

  “Please repeat,” Lucas said, stunned he had been able to successfully surface the craft.

  “Elevation under 3,254 feet and speed under 1,238 miles per hour,” corrected Alpha, as his translator converted to the appropriate units.

  The lights in the ship came back on, and Lucas looked out the viewscreen, which now had a full view of the surrounding area. The crater that once was Portland was vast, and as he looked west, even at elevation he couldn’t see any ocean, only an endless beach littered with the skeletons of innumerable ships, planes, and presumably, people. The crater, conversely, had almost nothing in it, just a few husks of the bottom floors of skyscrapers that Lucas had seen from the ground. Somewhere down there had been his wife and son, before god knows what wiped them from the Earth.

  The craft dipped slightly and it made Lucas’s stomach churn. As the ship stabilized, Lucas realized that his heart was thundering in his chest, and fatigue, hunger, all of it, had faded away. He was fully aware he was at the helm of an alien spacecraft. It felt like a dream, but then again so had the entire last few years. His awe was interrupted by Alpha, who was waving various screens about on the monitor.

  “Here are the coordinates of our destination. Enter them into the console.”

  A longitude and latitude appeared in front of Lucas, and he wiped it over into a spinning globe. It zoomed in on the green point and the ship lurched forward, pinning Lucas back in his seat for a moment. He had to quickly dial the speed down to match Alpha’s specifications, and soon, despite traveling at 1,200 miles an hour, Lucas felt like he was sitting comfortably in an airplane. An impossible, interstellar airplane.

  He put the ship on autopilot with elevation and speed locked, and a countdown timer appeared to his left. Three hours and thirteen minutes until they reached . . . what was this place called? “Kvaløya” it seemed, and it was far enough north that it was equivalent with parts of upper Russia, Canada, and Greenland. Lucas sifted through the menus to try and find out the temperature there, but gave up as not enough of those commands had been translated into English. He was also a bit unnerved by all the glowing red dots surrounding the green one on the map. He wondered if this thing could detect remaining
life anywhere on Earth if they were reading signatures from that far away.

  “Are we there yet?” said Asha sarcastically on the comm.

  “Three hours,” Lucas said.

  “Stay alert,” Alpha added.

  Lucas wiped away most of his controls with a flick of his hand and turned his attention to the vista through his viewscreen. They were speeding over what was left of the United States, which was, in effect, nothing. Forests of charred trees had given way to fields of ash. Every so often they’d fly by a tattered town, ravaged by looting, but there were dozens of giant craters that marked where larger cities had once been. They were low enough to still be under the endless suffocating cloud cover, so there was no chance to see the sun. Lucas thought about raising the ship just to take a peek, but knew Alpha would probably lock him up in the brig rather than risk detection by the Sentinels. And rightly so. He peered into the clouds and wondered how far out they were, and how wide-reaching their equipment was. He supposed they were a problem for another time.

  It was only a few minutes later when they reached the Rockies. They were mostly free of major devastation from the war due to a lack of tactical significance, but they were missing the signature snow cover that normally adorned their peaks. Snow. The concept was almost humorous now.

  Soon they were in southern Canada, following the curve of the Earth to their final destination. The country had normally been spared in times of conflict throughout history, but when the creatures realized the United States had hidden nuclear silos scattered throughout their northern neighbor, Canada suffered the full wrath of the onslaught. Additionally, wildfires, acid rain, and widespread panic cared naught about borders, and so the lands looked as ravaged as any Lucas had seen further south. Eventually they flew over what appeared to be a small metropolis, less ruined than most he’d seen. The display hadn’t bothered to translate the names of such minor cities into English. Tapping through the holocontrols, he still couldn’t figure out how to scan for nearby life, but he supposed it didn’t matter; if anyone was holed up there, the rising temperatures would cook them in a month or two.

  He thought about what it might take to try and save other survivors before they left the planet for good, should they not all die in this upcoming endeavor. But as the types of people left alive at this point were like him or Asha or worse, he couldn’t imagine filling a ship with such personalities. Violence would undoubtedly erupt as there still was barely any food, and even the last heralds of the human race would likely ensure their own destruction. No, it was better with only two, he thought, though he wasn’t entirely convinced one wouldn’t kill the other in due time.

  Lucas wondered about their final destination. A place to start over? Such a thought was likely overly optimistic, as wherever Alpha had come from brought a promise of endless war and bloodshed. A sentence Alpha had spoken previously came back to him.

  “I did not say our war was with you.”

  Though the ship was on autopilot, Lucas kept his hands wrapped in the controls and stared intently out the viewscreen for the next two hours. When he finally managed to see the Atlantic Ocean, which began about two hundred miles east of where it was supposed to, it was a murky reddish brown, and didn’t look like it could sustain anything remotely resembling life. As they reached Iceland on the virtual globe, Alpha spoke through the monitor.

  “Slow to 239 miles per hour.”

  Lucas was jolted out of his thoughts and dialed the speed down to Alpha’s suggested level, wondering why they were decelerating if time was so precious. Alpha answered his question.

  “We must now investigate the crash site so that we may formulate an entry path.”

  “Meaning finding out what exactly those red dots are, and how we’re going to kill them?” Asha chimed in.

  “That seems likely,” Alpha agreed. “Lucas, release a [garbled]. Release a probe.”

  Lucas scanned through the navigation system. The cables attached to his temples allowed him to find the launch program immediately, despite only using it once briefly during a fifth-level training simulation. A virtual image of the probe appeared before him. It was a small mechanical sphere with tiny jets on all sides of it. He’d seen more than a few of these whizzing around the city during the height of the brief war, never knowing their purpose. Pulling up the coordinates, he flung them into the virtual probe, then hit the holographic “Go” button, which he assumed was a rough translation that probably should have read “Launch.”

  But go it did, and from the viewscreen, he saw it shoot out of the underside of the ship and off into the horizon. The readout hovering in front of him indicated the probe was traveling at a blistering 4,313 miles per hour.

  “When the [garbled] approaches the destination, I will control it from here,” Alpha said as he pulled up a holographic screen on the wrist of his six-fingered metal hand. It showed a landscape moving incredibly quickly, and Lucas assumed it was the view from the probe. Alpha made a motion with his claw and that theory was confirmed as the display suddenly engulfed his entire viewscreen and, from the looks of it, Asha’s as well.

  The probe blew past what remained of Iceland and soared over the dark ocean at an incredibly low altitude that wasn’t displaying on the readout. A few minutes later it hit the shores of northern Norway and slowed dramatically to a few hundred miles an hour.

  The probe’s positional locater moved slowly toward the green dot on the globe and increased its elevation. Alpha had now taken manual control and was steering it through several mountain passes, which, much like the Rockies, were desolate and bare rather than covered with their usual blanket of snow. He weaved in and out of them, often veering dangerously close to the slopes, but always correcting at the last moment. The probe then turned and went straight up the side of a large mountain and shot out over the top of its peak. Then they saw it.

  He had only seen them far up in the sky, with the last one he spotted jetting away into the upper atmosphere when he was somewhere in Mississippi. But here a mothership had fallen to Earth and had cut what used to be a charming little fishing village in half. A small town was spread out before them, encased in the valley with the massive downed craft slumbering behind it. Sporadically, blue lights would flicker in the upper regions of the ship, while the floors below remained black. There was smoldering debris littered throughout the town and visible damage all over the hull. Lucas wondered what might have brought it down for good. Not a nuke, as there would be a lot less of it left and they wouldn’t be able to land if that was the case. A coordinated, massive fighter strike perhaps? It would have taken a whole fleet of planes shooting in all the right places to take something like this out. Did Norway even have an air force?

  The probe dipped down the backside of the mountain it had just climbed, and as it drew closer to the village, Lucas realized that the smoke coming from the ground was actually . . . campfires?

  “What the hell is this?” Asha said slowly on the comm.

  Alpha stopped the probe completely, and after a few twirls the video feed zoomed in ten times, fifty, then two hundred.

  The village was alive. Lucas couldn’t contain his astonishment as his jaw hung loose. As the probe zoomed closer, he could see people walking on the ground. Some toted weapons, others lumber or rocks. A few had slabs of meat. There were dozens, maybe a hundred. The life detection system had not prepared them for this. They had found an actual society, a miracle in the current state of the world. But as the view drew closer, Lucas began to wonder what sort of society they had found.

  The probe panned down to the bay and showed a long convex wall made up of all sorts of wood and twisted metal. It was hard to see exactly what it was composed of, but further magnification implied felled trees, stone, and scrap metal. Makeshift guard towers lined the top of it, and men with long rifles overlooked the empty bay full of shattered docks and the carcasses of dozens of former fishing vessels.

  The camera panned further up to inspect the village itself. Thou
gh the ship’s crash had leveled many buildings, a large number still stood, their solid stone craftsmanship holding resolute. There was an ornate church, a clock tower attached to a building that was likely some kind of city hall, and rows of tightly packed houses. It was unclear how much of the village had been swallowed by the ship. Lucas imagined that years ago, this would have been a picturesque destination, flanked by snow-capped mountains and crystal clear water. But as the probe turned its eye toward the town square, it became clear this wasn’t paradise, nor was it some hidden utopia in a dying world.

  In the cobblestone square stood Y-shaped pieces of metal and wood shoved into the ground. Strapped to each of them was a nude man, each in a different stage of emaciation. Some appeared dead or unconscious, but a few stirred. Lucas counted eighteen of them, with ten or so more empty Y-crosses scattered around near them. Nearby, a human body roasted on a spit. They were cannibals, but from the looks of the town, organized ones.

  Two of the men walked over to a prisoner tied up on a stake and one of them promptly slit his throat with a knife. They cut him down and dragged his convulsing body to the other fire, which had no meal roasting on it yet. But it seemed it was about to.

  The cannibals’ exact level of brutality was not of primary concern, and so Alpha panned the probe up the sloped ground to where the alien craft met the Earth. One section of the ship seemed of particular interest to Alpha. In front of it stood a large mansion—almost a castle.