The Last Exodus

by Paul Tassi

  Lucas found Alpha doing some work at the holotable on the bridge. He was zooming through planets and star systems too quickly for Lucas to process. The speed of his gestures looked a touch panicked.

  “Everything alright?”

  Alpha looked up, startled. He quickly waved the images away and a host of Xalan symbols appeared.

  “Yes, yes, just working on some . . . calculations. What are you doing up here?”

  Lucas cocked his arm to hold up his watch.

  “Chair time.”

  He strolled over to his usual seat, but turned to Alpha.

  “Do you think you could put any other languages on here?” he asked, holding the Soran chip out.

  Alpha was bemused.

  “Other . . . languages? For what purpose?”

  “Yeah, Xalan for one. I know that I’m never going to speak it, but it might be nice to know what the hell everything says in this ship. The English translations are pretty rudimentary.”

  Alpha considered the request.

  “Alright. I will work on something.”

  “Oh also,” Lucas added, “a virtual Norwegian dictionary would be nice too.”

  “It is bizarre you would request to learn an extinct language,” Alpha said, confused.

  “Can you do it?”

  Alpha threw up his claw in surrender.

  “Very well.”

  He shut down the holotable completely.

  “I must retire, there is much work to do. Do not over-exert yourself with simulation.”

  Alpha started walking out the door. He spoke with his back still turned.

  “You will not be needing to fly a fighter any time soon.”

  Lucas swore he heard a mechanical chuckle as the scientist left the room.

  Alpha’s parting words got to him, and he spent most of the day diving headfirst into his Soran chip, determined to master the language faster than Asha. He wasn’t sure if she was continuing her sessions in her present state. The tutorial was growing more and more grammatically complex, as were the attached geometric words, but his fast-firing brain appeared to be keeping up. The program began glitching a bit when he ran into words that had no direct English translation. Many had to do with technology, and with no clear picture of the objects or concepts in question, it was a bit hard to process. The use of water as a power source was discussed, as was the element that was employed to make the kinds of cores they’d been accumulating on Earth, but it didn’t have a pronounceable name. The computer simply subbed in the term “null” for the synthetic element.

  From his readings about the Sorans, which Lucas brought up onscreen beside his lesson, null cores of all shapes and sizes powered every bit of their technology from household lighting to starships. The more powerful the core, the more transmuted water it needed and the more refined the null element had to be, an expensive process. A null core’s color indicated its power, and practically the entire rainbow spectrum was classified. Blue, which was what the Ark had used to get to Norway, was on the higher end, while white, their new power source taken from the mothership, wasn’t listed at all. The null core was the technological breakthrough that the Sorans were determined to keep from Xala initially, but now both sides employed the technology that was driving the war into an eternal stalemate. But the Xalans had eventually developed cores more powerful than the Sorans, which had allowed them to travel further out in the galaxy and discover other inhabited planets like Earth. The Sorans didn’t have a word for these types of super cores, and Lucas understood the significance of the glowing white object in their engine bay. It was a higher power variant, above anything the Sorans ever manufactured.

  Lucas’s head began to swim attempting to process all the technology that was millennia past anything he should be able to comprehend. The program was a language tutorial, not a science class, and even with neural stimulation he doubted he could even begin to process the concepts behind it all.

  Still, Lucas was learning a great deal, and his brain seemed to be less fatigued by the influx of information he was exposed to every day. It appeared the journey had allowed him to not only recuperate physically, but mentally as well. Out in the wild, he was lucky if he managed two hours of sleep without waking up in a panic after all the horrors he’d witnessed. Here however, he was sleeping fifteen uninterrupted hours at a time.

  After years of nothing but misery and despair, the ship felt like the closest thing Lucas had to a home since the war began. As his lesson ended, he wandered back to his quarters, saying complex phrases he was now able to put together.

  «This ship was our salvation.»

  «We were outnumbered a hundred to one in the battle.»

  «My planet is dead, and my people are all but extinct.»

  When he reached the water chamber, he collapsed onto his bed, his mind too full of Soran to effectively process any English books. He glanced at the monitor to find Asha already locked in her pod for the night, an hour earlier than usual. Thoughts of her fled from him as he drifted out of consciousness.

  No talking ships or celestial events appeared to him during his long slumber, and when he awoke, it was as if he had just deactivated the lights moments ago. He swiped through his watch to kill the alarm that sounded vaguely like an ethereal air raid siren. 1500 meant it was time to start the day, but apparently everyone didn’t agree with that. On the monitor, Noah was sleepily crawling out of his pod on cue, but Asha’s remained shut. Lucas was half annoyed at her sloth, half concerned with her well-being. Though he’d likely hear an earful from her, he went upstairs to catch her when she came out and attempt to talk her out of her new sleeping quarters.

  But when he reached the barracks, the pod remained shut. Even Noah was a bit unnerved, as he pressed up against the glass with his hands and tried to peer inside from the ground. Lucas didn’t know how to open the pod from the outside, but as he was flipping through the half-translated menus, he found something disturbing. A timer.

  53:08:16

  53:08:17

  53:08:18

  These were hours. She hadn’t left the pod in well over a Soran day.

  “Shit!” he cried out, startling Noah. Lucas hurdled over the storage cubes boxing the child in and raced down to the lab where Alpha was soldering a chip.

  “We have a problem,” Lucas said frantically.

  Alpha accompanied him back upstairs where he sifted through the readouts at the front of the pod. The timer reappeared, and Alpha quickly waved it aside as he found the control he was looking for. The manual override caused the door to raise, and a hiss of vaporized nutrients dissipated when the panel came up. Asha was slouched against the back wall as the halo lifted off her head. She was scrawny and pale, and her eyes remained shut. Lucas reached out to touch her arm. When she didn’t react, he shook her, calling her name.

  “Asha! Asha!” he shouted as he jostled her. “Is she alive?”

  “Yes,” Alpha said, checking the readouts. Her breathing was shallow but her chest was rising and falling ever so slightly.

  Lucas put his hand on her shoulder and shook once more.

  “Ash—”

  Suddenly her eyes snapped open with a look he’d seen too many times before. She lunged at him and he was propelled all the way to a pod on the opposite wall. His head cracked the translucent door and his vision exploded into a brilliant array of stars. Her fingers raced for his eyes and he barely had time to grab her wrist and wrench her arm away. Lucas’s other hand caught her throat instinctively, but he threw her backwards before he crushed her windpipe out of habit. Alpha caught her with his good claw and restrained her against the pod, his eight-foot frame towering over her. The fierceness in her eyes subsided, and she collapsed, sliding down the gelatinous surface behind her. Next to her was Noah, who was bawling at the turn of events. Lucas rubbed the back of his head and pulled his hand away to find it coated in blood.

  “What the hell, Asha?”

  She looked disoriented.

  “But y
ou were . . . I thought . . .”

  The thought was left unfinished.

  Alpha spoke next.

  “It is clear that prolonged [garbled] use has adverse affects on human biology. I am deactivating the system for both of your biological signatures.”

  Asha’s wild-eyed look returned.

  “No! You can’t!”

  Lucas threw his arms out in front of him.

  “What are you doing sleeping in these things anyway? You and I both know what they do. Why would you want to subject yourself to that?”

  Asha sat with her knees folded and her arms crossed and covered in goosebumps.

  “Because I want to see him,” she said coldly.

  “See who?”

  “Christian.”

  The photo. The young man with the bright eyes and wide smile. Her ring.

  “Impossible,” Alpha said sternly. “I need to run some tests. Accompany me to the lab.”

  “No!” she yelled, her raised voice causing both Noah and Alpha to jump. Her eyes weren’t wet, but her voice was cracking a bit.

  “I haven’t seen him yet. It’s been mostly . . . bad things. But I know I will. Next time. Just one more time. There are so many memories . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “You can’t do this, Asha,” Lucas said sternly.

  “These . . . memories you experience only serve to degrade your mental condition,” Alpha added.

  Lucas pressed her.

  “I thought you were stronger than this.”

  That got her to her feet, and up in his face. Lucas’s head was still throbbing as he braced himself for possible impact. Her green eyes burned with rage.

  But she turned and stormed out of the room, kicking a formerly welded storage cube out of the way as she went.

  15

  After debating what to do with Asha, Lucas and Alpha agreed that keeping her confined was the best solution until she would allow Alpha to run tests on her, or they could effectively force her into compliance. The full extent of the damage to her psyche was unknown, but after the encounter that day, it was clear she was highly unstable. When she fled back into the armory, Alpha locked the door behind her. An hour later when she tried to leave and found she couldn’t, she started yelling all sorts of vile threats and violently threw herself against the door. The problem was that the room they trapped her in happened to be filled with assorted amounts of weaponry, and extracting her was a risk neither of them wanted to take. Alpha set to work synthesizing a nonlethal toxin he would release into the room to knock her out, and afterward she could be analyzed at the lab. The hastily improvised compound would be ready by morning.

  Lucas had trouble sleeping that night, disheartened by what he’d seen that day. He had felt he was growing closer to Asha, but now that seemed impossible as her mind had been corrupted by her search of a lost loved one. To Lucas, it didn’t make her weak to search for Christian, even though that’s how she had appeared. It actually made her seem strong. Surely she had to endure night after night of unimaginable horror just for a chance of seeing him again. Lucas however had been terrified from the beginning to relive any moments from his former life, good or bad. The disturbing things he’d witnessed in the last few years were scarring to be sure, but seeing Sonya or Nathan again? Feeling like they were still alive the way he’d seen Adam? The thought was too much to bear and was a journey he had been too scared to attempt, even before the psychological effects were made evident.

  After a few hours of dreamlessness, Lucas awoke. The lights were still off in the water chamber and there was only the blue glow of the tanks. His eyes were out of focus, but as they adjusted, he felt a presence. Then he saw her.

  A silhouette stood at the foot of his mattress, and this was no dream. He heard a click and Asha raised her Magnum. He froze.

  “At last, you bastard.”

  Her voice was calm and cold.

  “You thought you could hide in Alaska? You didn’t think I’d find you here?”

  The blue light illuminated the metal of the gun. Lucas raised his hand.

  “What are you talking about? What are you doing?” he said slowly.

  “Don’t act like you don’t remember me. How could you forget what you did? Are you really that much of a monster? You betrayed him, killed him in cold blood when he trusted you.”

  Lucas’s heart was thundering in his chest.

  “Asha, I know you, but this isn’t Alaska, I didn’t kill Christian. I’m Lucas.”

  Her tone remained icy.

  “So you do remember me. And call yourself whatever you like; it makes no difference. Changing your name and denying your crime doesn’t erase what you did.”

  Lucas’s eyes darted around the dark room, trying to find a way out. Reason didn’t seem to be on the table, as Asha was clearly in an entirely different place. She stepped closer and raised the gun.

  “Asha, I’m—”

  With his right arm, he whipped up the floating monitor that showed the view of the barracks. The hologram illuminated her face and showed her vacant eyes in the darkness. She glanced at the sudden apparition and it was enough to give Lucas the split second diversion he needed. He propelled himself up off his mattress and tackled her. The Magnum went off, sending a deafening echo throughout the chamber, and the pair of them smashed into the wooden desk, knocking it and all its contents loudly to the floor.

  Lucas went for the gun in her left hand, but her knee found his mended ribs and the breath was knocked out of him. She whipped her right fist around, catching him in the throat, and breathing went from difficult to impossible. He rolled to his back, gasping for air, and she leapt onto his chest. Bringing the Magnum around to his face, he barely had the presence of mind to swat it sideways with his forearm before it fired again. The noise made his ears ring and he couldn’t hear the sounds of the ensuing scuffle.

  He launched his torso upward and managed to headbutt her cheekbone, which was all he could reach. It stunned her momentarily and he was able to shove her backward off of him as he scrambled to his feet. With her still on the ground, he swung a kick at her gut and heard the gun clatter to the floor. Wheezing, she searched the darkness for the weapon, but when Lucas came after her with another kick, she was ready. Asha grabbed his leg and twisted, and Lucas felt a surge of pain as something popped near his knee. She released her grip and then sprang to her feet, immediately whirling around to connect a roundhouse kick to Lucas’s jaw.

  Blackness was encroaching on his vision from the pain as he staggered away, and he focused his eyes in time to see her locate the Magnum on the ground. He stumbled forward, grabbing her wrist just as she pointed it toward him, and the gun fired again, this time blasting a hole in the water tank behind him, which began to bleed its precious contents out onto the floor.

  “Asha, please. I don’t want to . . .”

  She raked her nails across his neck with her free hand, and Lucas was forced to counter with a pair of body blows. He summoned one final burst of strength as he lifted her from her feet, spun her around and threw her into a nearby water tank, which shattered from the impact. Water exploded out into the metal corridor as untold gallons coated both of them before pouring through the grating below. Something underneath them was apparently generating a large amount of heat and the water vaporized instantly and steam shot up through the grating, blanketing the room. Asha lay unconscious and soaking wet on the floor of the tank. Lucas fell to his knees in exhaustion, innumerable parts of his body in agony as fresh blood sprang out of injuries the water had just washed.

  Suddenly the lights came on, and through the steam, a familiar-looking shape appeared at the end of the corridor. As Alpha saw what had transpired, Lucas watched him lose his usually calm and collected demeanor.

  “No, no, no! What have you done?” he exclaimed as loudly as his translator would let him. Lucas struggled to catch his breath.

  “She escaped . . . attacked . . . I had to . . .”

  But Alpha wasn’t liste
ning. He sprinted over to the wrecked tanks, one shattered and one losing water rapidly out of a large hole the Magnum had blown through it. It was already about two-thirds empty. Alpha raced behind it and came back with a long, wide hose. He sealed it around the hole, and dragged the other end around to one of the tanks that was empty, but intact. Water began to pour into it, but the vast majority of the second tank’s water had seeped into the grating. The other tank had lost the entirety of its contents mere seconds after Asha went through it. She remained motionless inside.

  With the second tank secure, Alpha walked over to the ailing Lucas, sitting among his drenched books that littered the floor.

  “How did . . . she get out?” Lucas asked as he shook from a sudden chill that ran through him.

  “I am uncertain,” Alpha said, still scanning the carnage around him.

  “She’s lost it. She thought she was in Alaska and that I was someone she was trying to kill back on Earth.”

  “We must go to the lab and attempt to make sense of this destruction,” Alpha said, exasperated.

  He walked over to Asha and pulled her out of the broken tank, avoiding any shards that might catch her. He slung her over his back the way he had when Lucas had knocked her out the first time in the desert, though considerably more of her blood was now streaming down his back.

  “Follow me.”

  Lucas dragged himself upstairs and filled his wounds with the gelatinous fluid Alpha had used to heal them before. The scientist tended to Asha on a nearby table. Her arms and legs were restrained with metal devices, and a hologram of her brain appeared floating above her physical skull. Alpha examined it carefully.