The Last Exodus

by Paul Tassi

  Asha bent down to pick him up, and he threw his arms around her neck. But she was still scowling as she turned to Lucas.

  “Where’s Alpha?”

  They found him on the bridge, sifting through a giant grid of symbols projecting from the central holotable. Asha marched up to him and set Noah squarely in the middle of the display.

  “What happened?” she asked sternly. “Why did we all wake up in those nightmare boxes?”

  Clearly her vision was far more jarring Lucas’s his had been.

  “I am pleased to see you are refreshed after your slumber,” Alpha said, a baby now obstructing his view of the symbols.

  “Our slumber?” Lucas asked. “How long were we in there?”

  “A mere three days.”

  Three days? It had seemed like only a matter of minutes.

  “I placed you in the [garbled] after our escape attempt. The intensity of the actions you performed caused your bodies to shut down when they were disconnected from the ship. The controls were not designed with your neurological systems in mind, and you lost consciousness immediately afterward following the prolonged combat experience.”

  “And what about him?” Asha said, motioning to Noah who was gazing up at the moving symbols all around him with a smile. It was the first one they’d seen him wear.

  “The child insisted on constantly crying once you both were away. I do not know how to raise your young. Rest, medicine, and nutrients should have satiated him. The same is true for the both of you.”

  Nutrients, that’s what the gas was in Noah’s pod. And they’d been absorbing them as well. Lucas’s stomach felt empty, but he wasn’t hungry and despite some lightheadedness, he felt more energetic. He also noticed his leg and ribs barely hurt anymore. And Noah had been crying? That was a first.

  “Why didn’t we have to rest after the aerial village raid?” Lucas asked.

  “That was a far simpler task. Escaping Earth and engaging the Sentinels required complexities far beyond that of the first assault, and your brains had to be stimulated to the point of collapse in order to be able to maintain focus.”

  Lucas remembered how his mind had raced to keep track of the controls, readouts, and array of monitors during the engagement. Asha likely had as much on her plate as she tried to shoot down dozens of fighters while traveling at a few million miles per hour.

  “You regained consciousness in the [garbled] a day ago, but I kept you suspended for a while longer to ensure your full recovery. I would have thought you would be grateful.”

  “Those things . . .” Asha said. “They’re not meant for us.”

  “More hallucinations?” Alpha asked, bemused.

  “That’s not what they are,” Asha said coldly.

  Lucas changed the subject.

  “What happened to Omicron? What was that light?”

  “The coordinates I gave you were the precise location of his ship’s central power node. The missile barrage caught his defenses unaware, and hopefully disabled it for a period that will allow us to reach our destination without capture.”

  “How did you know exactly where their power source was? I couldn’t even see a ship there at all.”

  “My father designed that vessel, and its cloaking system. It was built as a unique craft for the High Commander and presented to him as a reward for winning the siege of [garbled]. It is one of the most advanced units in the entire fleet, and we were fortunate to catch it off guard in the manner we did.”

  Noah was now swatting at the holographic symbols on the table excitedly. It was the most engaged he’d ever been with anything. It appeared the pod agreed with him, if not with them.

  “He came all the way here to get you himself? And why didn’t they just blow us up instead of hiding?”

  “I have perhaps underestimated the significance of whatever my father did that brought about the destruction of my clan. The fact that we are alive implies they need to capture, not kill me. At least temporarily. Why, I do not know.”

  “I bet he’d tell you,” Asha said. “If he wants to speak with you so badly.”

  “Perhaps, but I fear after I was informed and forced to aid them in some way, I would be executed or enslaved. And it is obvious you three would be expendable even if I was needed alive.”

  “We’re an endangered species. Doesn’t that count for anything?” Lucas said, half joking.

  “It does not.”

  Alpha seemed to only have a sense of humor when it suited him.

  “And where exactly are we?” Asha asked. The viewscreen was full of data and readouts, not stars or the celestial fabric of space.

  Alpha swirled a switch next to the squirming Noah who reached out and tried to grab at his claw. The viewscreen’s display was wiped, and a soft glow of blue, purple, white, and green light shone in front of them.

  “You activated the core,” Lucas said, though he’d already guessed it.

  “I did, and yet we live.”

  There were no shapes to be found in the ether, just hazy patches of light. It reminded Lucas of the one time he’d caught a glimpse of the aurora borealis on a flight across Canada. Alpha swiped the controls again. The data reappeared and the hypnotizing display of colors vanished.

  “And what about Omicron?” Lucas asked.

  “It will take him some time to repair his ship. He will likely have to call for maintenance assistance and a new core which will set him back even further behind us. Though that does not mean he cannot catch us once we are out of [garbled].”

  “Out of what?”

  “You do not have a word for this state. How to describe it? The in-between. Space between space. We are on a path that transcends space-time, allowing us to travel great distances in a short span.”

  “And how much time is that exactly?” Asha asked.

  Alpha paused for a minute to think. He brought up some data on the monitor, much to Noah’s delight.

  “In relative Earth-time, five months.”

  “Five months? We’re stuck in this coffee can for five months?”

  “Would you prefer five hundred thousand years?” Alpha replied with an audible snort. “Dilation shrinks the perceived time of the journey, but it will feel like a hundred and fifty-eight days to you.”

  Lucas realized now was the time to ask the question that had been dodged for a week now.

  “Alpha, for the love of god, where are we going?”

  13

  After a long pause, Alpha spoke.

  “We are defecting.”

  Noah was crawling dangerously close to the edge of the holotable. Lucas scooped him up before he got any further.

  “Defecting? To where? To who?” Asha asked.

  Alpha hesitated again.

  “You may not be able to process this information. It is something we still do not fully understand.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Lucas. Noah squirmed in his arms trying to get back to the table.

  “I suppose it would be best to show you. To explain I must integrate the [garbled] language into my translator.”

  Alpha adjusted a few symbols on the tiny hologram protruding from his collar and then sifted through a few readouts on the table. Suddenly, a three-dimensional picture of a woman’s head appeared. She was silver haired with fair skin and blue eyes and looked to be about sixty.

  Lucas and Asha were confused.

  “Who is this?” Lucas asked.

  “Talis Vale, ruler of Sora.”

  “Sora?”

  “Sora.”

  Alpha brought up a hologram of a large green and blue planet with unrecognizable continents surrounded by vast oceans.

  Lucas understood.

  “No . . .”

  It was impossible.

  “They’re . . . human?”

  Asha looked astonished as the stern-faced woman rotated slowly in front of them.

  “‘Soran’ is what they call themselves, but yes. Your genetic makeup and biology is almost identic
al to theirs.”

  Alpha brought up a hologram of a cross section of two human males, though one was presumably Soran. Lucas scanned both but could see almost no difference between them. He only counted one kidney on the Soran, and two fewer ribs, but no other marked dissimilarities jumped out at him. Incredible.

  “How is this possible?”

  The hologram of the woman reappeared.

  “A common ancestor presumably, though we have not been able to trace the exact location or nature of their origin.”

  Next to the woman, a smaller depiction of her planet spun in a slow rotation.

  “This is who you’re fighting your war against? More humans?” Lucas asked.

  “Sorans, but yes. And it is a war that has plagued us for a long time. Too long.”

  He brought up another holographic sphere, this one was a dark red planet with only hints of blue and green. Lucas recognized it from the bridge of mothership.

  “This is the planet the Sorans call ‘Xala.’ To us, it is [garbled]. It is my home.”

  Lucas couldn’t tell if it was disgust or reverence that was in Alpha’s black-and-gold eyes.

  “The two planets are a mere ten trillion miles away, using your own system of measures. The proximity has allowed the war to be fierce and constant, but never truly winnable by either side. The conflict has raged for many millennia now, and is only growing more intense with the passage of time.”

  Asha finally spoke for the first time, having absorbed all the recent incredible information.

  “Why are you at war?”

  “At first it was to survive, but now, it seems the greatest motivator is purely revenge.”

  “Revenge? For what?”

  “It is a story that’s been passed down for generations. Many ages ago, the Sorans found our civilization soon after intergalactic travel across space-time was discovered. We welcomed their arrival and embraced their wondrous technology, which was ages ahead of our own. They called the planet ‘Xala’ and us ‘Xalans.’ In their tongue, the words mean ‘strange’ and ‘stranger,’ while ‘Sora’ means ‘home.’”

  Images were playing on the larger viewscreen now. It was a video of Sorans landing in a large spacecraft. They were dressed in bulky metal suits that covered every inch of their body, including their faces. They were greeted by Xalans, or creatures, as Lucas knew them.

  “But as the decades went by, it became clear that our planet was more valuable than we were. Posing as friends, they siphoned off all our resources, including our most precious one: water.”

  A rich, lush planet onscreen slowly decayed into the red rock that was Xala.

  “After a hundred years of being trampled, we decided to fight back. Our revolution was bloody and swift, and though we suffered huge losses, we eventually drove them from our planet. But the damage was done. Xala barely had enough resources to carry on, and the dwindling population had to make do.”

  The screen showed a wretched bunch of Xalans in a dilapidated city full of strange-looking buildings. The screen then jumped to scientists working in haphazardly constructed labs.

  “It should have driven us to ruin, but it drove us to ingenuity instead.”

  “Wait,” Asha interrupted. “Why did they need to take your resources and all your water? They’ve got oceans full.”

  “Yes, that is true, and more than you could know. Here is the actual scale of these planetary bodies.”

  He flipped a holoswitch back at the table and three planets appeared. Xala was small, a tightly packed ball of red. Next to it was Earth, a little larger, implying the dark planet was a touch smaller than Mars. But Sora? It was massive, a half dozen times the size of Earth at least, and looked to be comparable to a body like Neptune.

  “Sora is resource rich, and they did not take our water. They destroyed it, along with negating the formation of the nearly all the clouds that would produce more.”

  “Why?”

  “To prevent us from reaching their level of scientific progress. To avoid us becoming a threat by unlocking the mystery of cross-system and intergalactic travel.”

  “What do you mean? What mystery?”

  “Water. There is a reason finding the resource in large quantities across the universe is so exceedingly rare. Combined with a certain synthetic element, which your race had not yet discovered, it is a power source far more incredible than any you could ever imagine and has the ability to open a rift in space-time when utilized properly.”

  “Water? This ship, and all your ships, are powered by water?” Asha scoffed. Lucas thought of the tanks below in his makeshift quarters.

  “I know of your planet’s scientific history. You were likely a long ways off from discovering the process for yourselves, if you did not destroy each other first.”

  “No, you did that for us,” said Asha coldly.

  Alpha ignored her.

  “I do not expect you to believe what I am saying, or understand how the process works, but I assure you, it does.”

  Water. The idea was preposterous, but suddenly something became clear.

  “Our oceans. That’s why you came here. That’s why you invaded us. You needed our water to help fight your war.”

  Alpha nodded.

  “Eventually, despite a lack of resources, our scientists discovered the process to create the cores needed for long-range travel. When the Sorans learned we had invented the technology, they returned to attempt to wipe us out entirely. But we were ready.”

  The screen showed an enormous space battle with types of ships Lucas had never seen before firing at each other.

  “We held against the onslaught, but knew we could never best them completely with our homeworld’s now limited resources.”

  Alpha paused, and then brought up the bust of a Xalan on the holotable.

  “My clan was gifted with intellect, and generations ago, my ancestors were responsible for the research that eventually allowed us to travel further and further out into space. Technology that the Sorans did not even possess. We were able to find other habitable planets with resources near our region of the galaxy. Not many, but enough to help fuel us in our ongoing struggle.”

  A litany of worlds were flung up next to Sora, Xala, and Earth on the holotable. A few had large areas of blue, but were quite a bit smaller than any of the others. The ones that were close to Earth’s size had far less water, and were almost entirely brown with only select patches of blue.

  “When we arrived, we were amazed.”

  He brought up another video feed on the main viewscreen.

  “More Sorans.”

  The archival footage showed a group of dark-skinned tribal humans clutching elaborately carved spears and wearing armor made of bark.

  “It was not until we annihilated them that we knew they were not tied to Sora at all. The same species simply existed on planets across the sector. We lay siege to all of them, and not one put up a fight. How could they?”

  The viewscreen showed an astonishing sight. Playing were five separate videos of battles that showed Xalan ships and soldiers raining fire on human civilizations. A planet spun in the corner of each feed, named by unidentifiable symbols. One showed the tribesman throwing spears at drone fighters, another was a medieval-looking castle under attack by spaceships. To the right, a large stone palace was crumbling as foot soldiers brandished swords and shields against hordes of creatures approaching in power armor. Next to that was an army of infantrymen wearing ornate metal armor, marching in formation while firing odd-looking mechanical guns and hoisting flags full of bizarre designs. The last viewscreen simply showed nude humans with matted, stringy hair waving wood clubs and flinging rocks at Xalan ships flying far overhead. The entire display was surreal.

  “Their civilizations were infantile. Despite their biological similarity to Sorans, they possessed not a fraction of their technology. It was not a war, but a slaughter. Each new planet we discovered managed to fuel our conflict for another era. And then, there was ‘Ea
rth.’”

  A familiar-looking globe appeared on the viewscreen as the battle scenes faded.

  “Earth looked the way Xala once did, according to record. It had far more water than any habitable planet we had discovered and raided previously. It could have been the key to our ultimate victory, rather than the disaster it was.”

  The viewscreen showed a shot of the original creature ship hovering above New York.

  “We underestimated your civilization’s technological progress. Though your space travel capabilities were pitiful, we did not anticipate your ability to destroy. Imagine, a civilization that would willingly keep weapons that could annihilate itself a thousand times over. Incredible.”

  The screen flickered with battle scenes from the assault on Earth. Mushroom clouds erupted across the landscape as Xalan ships disintegrated.

  “We sent reinforcements, but not enough, and not as quickly as we should have. Once we understood the full capability of your ‘nuclear’ weapons, and how they interacted with our own antimatter bombs, your planet was poisoned by the ensuing fallout.”

  “The clouds,” Lucas said. “The water.”

  “All rendered useless in the aftermath of the war. Not only did we sustain heavy military losses, but we only managed to extract limited resources before they were corrupted completely. I do not know how the botched campaign was received back home, but I would imagine it has been a significant setback for the war effort.”

  “Just a minute,” Asha said, her arms folded in front of her. “If you were discovering all these habitable planets, why didn’t you just relocate there after mopping up the local wildlife? Why continue the war?”

  Alpha brought up the five other planets beside Earth once more.

  “This has been the subject of debate for many years now. We do in fact have colonies on many of these worlds, as they’ve helped to alleviate the issue of our rapid population growth. But the ruling council decrees that the war must continue until Sora is ours. The Sorans must not be forgiven for what they did to us, and their rich planet is the crown jewel of the galaxy, which they do not deserve.”