The Last Exodus

by Paul Tassi

  “How reassuring,” Asha said.

  Their trip back through the bowels of the ship was more relaxed, and Lucas’s thigh was incredibly grateful. He was still wheezing thanks to his ribs, but the slower pace made everything less painful. Their way back was even more brightly lit from Alpha’s supplementary white light source, though it was nice that it was no longer burning their retinas, as the polarized cylinder kept it a reasonable brightness.

  They backtracked through the ship, the mansion, and town until they once again came upon the grisly pile of bodies in the square. Blood trails on the ground indicated a few of the cannibals weren’t quite dead when the group left and had limped or crawled away. One of the trails ended with a lifeless man about thirty yards away, but a few continued down adjoining streets. Lucas scanned windows, but they were likely not in fighting shape, and hunting them down wouldn’t be worth the risk. To their left, the once burning church was now a smoldering ruin.

  Asha had stepped into the body pile and was picking through equipment and weapons. Alpha stopped and turned around.

  “There will be time for that later. We must get the core back to the ship while avoiding further ambush.”

  “Juuuust one for the road,” Asha said as she picked up a compact submachine gun and slung it over her shoulder. Lucas scooped up a few lingering shotgun shells resting in a pool of blood and continued onward.

  Nothing jumped out from the shadows on the way back through the destroyed shops, and their nerves had finally settled by the time they reached the mouth of the bay. Their ship loomed ahead of them, past the sea of wrecked boats in various stages of decay. Their craft was indeed quite large and would dwarf any man-made airplane, but it was miniscule compared to the mothership they’d just left. Though he didn’t understand the specifics of the device they now possessed, Lucas wondered if fitting the new core to their ship would be like putting a Ferrari engine in a Fiat. It might be a hell of an upgrade, but it could probably blow the entire thing up as well.

  As they drew closer to the craft, an unfamiliar shape lay against the disturbed earth where the landing gear had touched down. It appeared to be a body, and after a quick signal from Lucas to the rest of the party, he and Asha raised their weapons as the unarmed Alpha fell back behind them. The form was lifeless, however, and as they approached Lucas could see who it was.

  The old woman who had been pleading with them earlier at the church was now lying against the ship’s landing prong, and she appeared to be even more badly burned than she was previously.

  “Guess she wanted a ride out of here,” Asha said as she instinctively bent down to search the body for loot. But she immediately jumped back with a look of complete terror on her face, an expression Lucas had never seen her wear. He approached the body and saw what had shocked her so.

  An infant lay in the woman’s burnt arms. A live infant.

  Behind him, Alpha spoke.

  “Barna, barna,” he said slowly. “The children, the children.”

  8

  The three of them stood on the bridge of the ship staring at the child, which had been placed on the holotable. Its breath was shallow and it was skinny, obviously malnourished. Its left arm and shoulder were covered in burns that Alpha had treated with his pocket-sized healing device, which had also sewn up Lucas’s leg wound with a hissing gelatinous substance. A few dirty plastic bottles of milk lay strewn around it, taken from the dead woman’s pack. It was Asha who finally spoke.

  “Goddamn . . .”

  It was a mix of revulsion and reverence. Lucas kept silent, but he agreed with the sentiment. He hadn’t seen a child in years, except for his own in the picture in his boot. To be standing before one now was stranger than being on an alien starship. Finally, he spoke.

  “I knew they were setting up some sort of society down there, but I never imagined they’d take it this far. Did they really think they could start over?”

  “More like they didn’t know how to perform an abortion after knocking up one of their chained rape slaves,” Asha said with disgust. Lucas speculated that perhaps she had targeted that church on purpose. An act of mercy, in her eyes.

  Alpha was scanning the child with a small device, and read through the information that sprung up in front of him.

  “He is stable.”

  They hadn’t bothered to check if it was a boy or girl yet, and this was the first they’d heard of its gender. He had opened his blue eyes only briefly until he succumbed to whatever Alpha had given him, and currently lay asleep with wisps of singed blond hair on his head, his face smudged with dirt and smoke. He couldn’t have been more than six months old. Eight maybe? It had been a long while since Lucas’s own son had been that age, and he was never good with those sort of estimations.

  Asha asked the impolite question on everyone’s mind.

  “What do we do with him?”

  Lucas had killed many things over the past few years, human, animal, and creature, but there was something gnawing at him about this child. Could they leave it here? Throw it back into town to die of exposure or become some surviving cannibal’s mid-morning snack? The thought was gut-wrenching.

  “He has food,” Lucas said helpfully, motioning to the bottles on the table.

  “That will last a few days at the most. Have you never babysat before? Jesus.”

  Lucas didn’t reveal his past experience raising a child. Though to be fair, he hadn’t been around all that often.

  Alpha spoke after turning the thought over in his mind.

  “We have barely enough food to feed ourselves, much less a child. Such a specimen, however, would be fascinating to study as I know little about the early development of your localized species.”

  “It’s not a science project,” Lucas said, a bit annoyed.

  Alpha ignored him and continued, “Furthermore, it is a preferable companion to the remaining bloodthirsty citizens of your planet. You do not wish to further preserve what little is left of your kind?”

  Lucas was flustered.

  “Of course I do, but Asha’s right, how do we feed it?”

  Alpha paused, then checked a readout on his wrist hologram. It showed a spinning image of the mothership.

  “There may be a way.”

  Alpha outlined a plan that involved returning to the ship they’d just left. Apparently, when he plugged into its “mainframe” (his translator was garbled until it finally settled on that word), he saw that, among the upper levels of the ship that were online, an entire room full of rations was still being kept fresh. It wasn’t “food” in the traditional human sense, but rather “nutrients” was as best as Alpha could put it. The substance was made up of proteins and other essential vitamins that would sustain the life of his species. Usually they were fed to them in a gaseous form during their nightly rest inside the pods. This ship’s supply was dry, but the manifest revealed the mothership had a large supply under lock and key. Alpha didn’t know how the nutrients would react with human biology, but explained it was the only hope for all of them, the child included. He mused that the child could in fact survive and potentially even thrive on the gaseous diet. None of them raised the point of what they would do with the child besides feed it, but that was a concern for another time. The general consensus was, however, not to throw him out into the desert. Even with all the stone hearts in the room, forged out of years of misery, they couldn’t inflict such a horror on something so helpless.

  “If this thing cries all the time, it’s going out an airlock,” had been Asha’s final word on the subject, even though Lucas suspected she hadn’t meant it. In truth, the child hadn’t cried once since they’d brought it onboard. Lucas wondered what sort of traumas he’d endured in the village, and how long they’d stay with him as he grew. That was, provided he survive for any length of time under the watch of two mass murderers and a traitorous extraterrestrial.

  The plan was for Lucas and Asha to be dropped onto the roof of the mothership by Alpha, as trekking up t
hrough the bottom was impossible with those floors mostly destroyed. There would be no way down to the engine bay or any of the adjoining areas, which Alpha explained was why they hadn’t gone in that way in the first place.

  Alpha took the captain’s chair and raised the ship as Lucas and Asha made their way to the storage bay from which they would depart. The child was secured inside a scrap metal cylinder lined with whatever fabric they could spare, which included Asha’s old dress and the cloth in which the dead woman had wrapped him. Everything else had been too drenched in blood to be sanitary. The cylinder was secured to the floor with Alpha’s fusion tool, and he claimed he would create better accommodations for the child once he had finished installing the new core. He said that would be a time consuming process, as every calculation had to be perfect, or else they would be “torn asunder on the molecular level.” He was developing quite a flair for the dramatic.

  The storage bay was empty, save for a few metal crates that had been pried open and looted. As they soared over the village and approached the top of the mothership, Alpha spoke through the comm, his voice booming through the barren metal chamber.

  “When the floor opens, step into the light.”

  At that moment, the floor did indeed open, and about forty feet down was the top of the ship. A column of blue light shone around the opening.

  “You first,” Asha said, forever cautious.

  Lucas was hesitant, as an unimpeded fall would surely kill him, or at the very least snap his legs like twigs. But he was beginning to take Alpha’s word as gospel. It was strange to be able to trust someone again. He jumped.

  After a split second of terrifying freefall in which his stomach rose into his lungs, his descent slowed dramatically as the beam of light caught him. He’d never experienced true weightlessness, and wondered if this was always what it was like. He was perfectly comfortable, and barely had time to register the fact he was floating until his feet touched down on the ground.

  Satisfied Lucas had not ended up as a stain on the ship’s hull, Asha made her own leap of faith. Lucas stepped out of the light and watched her combat boots heading down the column. As her face came into view, she too seemed amazed by the process. She looked almost angelic as she descended, silhouetted against the blue light with the red crackling sky behind her. An angel of death perhaps, but ethereal nonetheless. She landed gracefully on the top of the ship.

  Above them, Alpha took the transport and steered it back toward the bay, its engines shining a bright blue as it retreated. Lucas took out a small cylindrical disc Alpha had given him and a holographic countdown timer appeared. He’d be back in a little over three hours.

  As the ship moved into the distance, they looked out over the town. It was an angle they hadn’t seen from the air, and the smoke was finally starting to clear from the burned buildings. Nearly all the remaining fires had died out. Lucas thought to try and look down on the mansion, but resisted getting too near the edge. The winds were gusting strongly a thousand feet up, and it was hard to keep his balance. Asha was staying low and having an easier time of it.

  A hologram in his hand pointed the way to an entry port on top of the ship. He tried yelling at Asha, but the wind was too loud for her to hear. She put her hand to her ear and shook her head mouthing “what?” He pointed up ahead of him and started walking that direction, taking each step with care. Asha understood where he was going and followed. When he arrived at the portal, he stuck the disc in the center like Alpha had instructed him. According to him, the device was multi-use. It would display maps and other data, but more importantly, Alpha had designed the device as an improvised hacking tool, a key that would open any door on the ship.

  It did its job quickly, and the controls turned green as the door slid open. Lucas peered inside with his rifle-mounted light, and saw the floor a short ways down. He sat on the edge of the door and lowered himself down slowly. There was no reason to further agitate his healing leg, and his ribs still made every breath hurt even though Alpha assured him they were on the mend.

  Lucas landed as softly as he could manage. Light filtered in through the hole above him. Though these levels once had power, they were fully offline now that Alpha had removed the central core. Reaching into his pack, Lucas pulled out the blue core that powered their own ship. Alpha said even a sliver of the more powerful white core’s energy would be more than enough to power their own craft, and the blue one would be necessary to “turn the lights back on.” It was amusing to watch him get the hang of common English phrases.

  Asha dropped down behind Lucas, landing on a tangle of cables spilling out of the wall and almost falling on her face. It was a somewhat less majestic descent than the one she’d made from the ship. Lucas held the core up like a lantern while consulting a three-dimensional map on the disc in his other hand. Despite Alpha’s proclamation that the ship was free of life, Asha had her Magnum drawn anyway, with the small flashlight fixed to its barrel.

  They crept through a winding corridor for a bit, Lucas keeping his eyes trained on the dot moving through the three-dimensional blueprint sprouting out of the device in his hand. The path soon dead ended at a massive door, a much larger version of the ones they had in their own ship. A small holographic interface appeared at Lucas’s eye level, and he held the disc inside of it. It took a few more minutes to sift through the symbols, but in the end, the door slid upwards with a groan. It clearly hadn’t been opened in ages.

  According to the map, this was the bridge. A long corridor stretched out before them, and with their dim lighting, Lucas couldn’t even see where it ended. Consoles lined the walls, but no lights flickered. He and Asha moved slowly toward the end of the room, her gun still trained on whatever ghosts may have been lurking in the tomb. The light revealed a number of skeletal creatures lining the ground, some with power armor, others without. One’s skull was fully lodged inside a shattered workstation. A fine film of dust coated everything, and particles danced in the air around them, disturbed by the unsealing of the door. As they approached the center of the room, Lucas saw a much larger version of the holotable they had in their own ship. It was what he was looking for, and on Alpha’s instructions, he searched its base for an opening. He found it around the back side of the console and slid the blue core inside.

  The bridge came alive in an instant. Screens and control clusters surged to life all around them, and at the front of the room, the main command center was now online. It was a wide, curved interface that looked to be manned by four or five officers at least. Above it was a massive viewscreen that was a jumble of alien information, though pieces of the screen were glitching and a few remained completely dark.

  The holotable now displayed a galaxy that Lucas recognized as the unmistakable spiral of the Milky Way. Of immediate interest was a series of annotations that marked it. Points were tagged along many of the arms on the right side. Though it was impossible to read the symbols, it was what they were describing that caught Lucas’s eye. Each point of interest showed a planet. They weren’t any Lucas had ever seen, and most were largely white, brown, and green with small pockets of blue that had to be water. One of the furthest out dots was Earth, which had more blue than all the other bodies, save one large sphere that had oceans even more vast than their own. Nearby the large planet was a distinctive red rock streaked with only minimal amounts of blue and green.

  “What is that?” Asha asked as she walked over, finally lowering her gun.

  “I think it’s our roadmap out of here.”

  He waved his fingers through one of the planets. What were all these places? Where were they? He tried to play with the foreign controls, but received no response or further information.

  Consulting the pocket map once again, they left the room through an adjacent door and headed down a ways toward their next objective. The nutrients were a few sections away, but it was now much easier to travel with the area powered up. The corridors they walked through were damaged, but hardly to the degree
the lower floors had been, crushed under a million tons of steel or . . . whatever the hell the thing was made of. He’d have to ask Alpha about that at some point.

  The broken English on the map readout informed them they were now approaching the Nutrient Surplus Area Room, ahead of them on their left. A long door was embedded in the wall, and Lucas had to search for some time to find the controls. Asha was already poking around the next corner, but returned to him when the door slid up into the ceiling.

  The room was a mess, with storage cubes scattered around everywhere, a few having burst open with tiny clear vials coating the floor. Lucas consulted his readout, which Alpha had programmed with a visual depiction of the nutrients, and saw that they were in fact the small cylinders littered all around them. An open crate, about three feet by three feet, revealed rows upon rows of the stacked containers. There had to be thousands in each crate.

  Asha looked at the holographic unit and realized they had found their prize as she picked one up off the floor. She held it between her thumb and forefinger and inspected it with care. The inside was cloudy, and the compound constantly swirled around like a white-ish fog.

  “How many of these do we need?”

  Lucas checked the readout.

  “Not sure, it says here ‘six units.’” Alpha was not yet fully versed in human systems of weights and measures.

  “Six crates?” Asha asked. She bent down and tried to pick it up. It lifted a few inches off the floor, impressive for a woman of her size, but came crashing back down, a centimeter away from crushing her fingers.

  “This might take a while.”

  It wasn’t until they’d lugged the fourth box back to the entrance that they discovered a device at the far end of the room meant for loading and unloading. It had a singular ball at the bottom, which seemed unlikely to support any weight, but when a cube was placed on top of it, the device balanced it easily. Some sort of internal gyroscope perhaps. Once loaded, the entire contraption could then be moved by the mere push of a finger. Lucas’s aching back, ribs, and leg made him wish they’d found it sooner.