by Paul Tassi
Wild West it was then. Lucas signaled to Asha, holding up three fingers. Then two. Then one.
They rounded the corner together, Lucas unloading both barrels of his shotgun into the two guards on the right, Asha putting two Magnum rounds in each of the others as they scrambled to raise their weapons. All four hit the ground at the same moment, and not one stirred afterward, though Lucas and Asha both stood ready just in case. When it was clear the battle was won, they turned to Alpha, who was breathing heavily and bleeding from slashes across his body. Lucas turned on his comm when he saw Alpha’s communication collar on a table a short distance away. It still worked at range. They heard his voice immediately.
“This was a most unwise decision.”
“Hi Alpha.”
“Why are you onboard?”
“I’d never been on an alien space station before,” Asha said sarcastically.
“You should be a light-year away. Did you not receive my messages?”
Lucas pried at the cuffs, but they wouldn’t budge.
“If you could read our minds, you would have known that we weren’t going to leave you here to be roasted by a nuke. How do we get you out of this thing?”
Alpha nodded in the direction of the crumpled pile of Xalan bodies.
“A chip.”
Lucas walked over and dug through the gore until he pulled out a device that made Alpha nod. He stuck it into a slot near the base of the contraption and the cuffs all sprung open at once. Alpha dropped to the floor and collapsed backward onto his knees. Lucas offered him a hand. Alpha grabbed it with his good claw and wearily rose to his feet. He scooped up his comm collar and mechanical hand, which sat on the nearby table. His next acquisition was an energy pistol pried from the hands of a dead guard.
“We must leave before reinforcements from the cruiser arrive. This station is sparsely manned, but the ship docked here will have a full battalion of troops.”
Lucas looked around the room.
“We crawled down here, but you won’t be able to fit through the way we came.”
Alpha waved his hand dismissively.
“It is of no importance. I will override the lift lockdown.”
Alpha marched across the room and Asha and Lucas followed. At the far end, a door remained closed, and Alpha tapped away at the holocontrols next to it.
“A simple encryption,” he said as the door flew open. A startled- looking pair of Xalan soldiers stood inside the elevator. Lucas raised his shotgun, but by the time his finger reached the trigger, Alpha had blown a hole through each of their heads with a pair of shots from his newly acquired pistol. He calmly entered the lift, stepping over their bodies. Lucas and Asha looked at each other and did the same.
The lift was almost as slow as the one on their ship. As they rose, Alpha plucked Lucas’s communicator from his shirt. He pulled up a multiple monitor view of the Ark, and the scene they saw was troubling. On every screen, Xalan soldiers swarmed throughout the ship, tearing it apart, hunting for Sorans.
“That’s a lot of them,” Asha said. “What exactly is the plan here?”
Lucas was wondering the same thing. Alpha cycled through a few different screens.
“Contingencies,” he said coolly.
Alpha pressed a button and the airlock door connecting the Ark to the station slid shut.
“What are you . . .” Lucas said slowly before Alpha’s next action revealed his intentions. He slid his claw to the right, and the monitors showed every door in the ship springing open. Including the external airlocks.
Soldiers flew across the monitors too quickly to see the looks of horror on their faces. The airlock cameras showed Xalans being pulled through the hallways and flung out into the vacuum of space. With the docking bay sealed, only the ship was venting, not the station, and the sole door still closed within the Ark was the armory, where Noah remained inside the wall. After thirty seconds or so, no more soldiers were visible as Alpha cycled through the monitors, and only bits of debris whirled through the screens toward the exits. Satisfied, he slid the switch back. All the doors closed, and the entryway to the docking bay reopened. Just in time for the elevator to reach its final destination.
The door opened, and no one was there to greet them, other than the piercing wail of the alarm. They sprinted down the hall and into the docking port, running across the pathway into the Ark. Once they were inside, Alpha shut the door behind them. His mechanical voice rang out through the hall.
“Bridge! Turret!” he commanded and Lucas and Asha sprinted to man their respective stations. Assuredly Alpha was heading down to the engine bay to prep the core.
Lucas reached the bridge and fumbled through the controls looking for the seldom used “disengage” command. He finally located it and the ship groaned as it detached itself from the station. Lucas brought the engines to life, and the ship banked hard to the right, veering away from the fuel depot. His monitor showed Alpha and Asha in their respective stations, both scrambling to get all their systems in order. Alpha shouted into the screen.
“Accelerate, quickly, before the fighters launch!”
Lucas had forgotten about their potential pursuers. The docked ship loomed in their rearview, but both it and the station were growing smaller in the distance.
“Approaching safe distance. Detonation in seven. Six. Five.”
Lucas dialed up the speed even further.
“Four. Three.”
His eyes were glued to the viewscreen.
“Two. One.”
He watched the station. Nothing.
“Alpha?”
He was staring intently at the station in his own monitor.
“There should be—”
Suddenly a flash of white light enveloped Lucas’s entire field of vision. There was no sound, but when his sight returned, amidst the red spots, Lucas saw distant pieces of debris spreading outward from where the station once hovered, and a readout explaining that the installation had ceased to exist.
“Touchdown,” Asha said through the monitor.
A faint glow was all that remained in the distance. The entire ship fell silent for a moment. Lucas looked down and saw they were already approaching twelve million miles an hour, but it felt like they were standing still. Alpha’s voice cut through the quiet.
“Core activating.”
On the viewscreen, there was a brief flash of an image that registered for less than a second. It was Omicron, his dark skin and bright eyes unmistakable. But in an instant, he was gone. The stars blurred and after a large moan and a worrying shudder, the view turned into the hazy tunnel of light that signified they’d arrived in their own custom-made wormhole. As Lucas waited for a minute, then two, then five, Omicron did not reappear and his readouts were blank. Eventually, Lucas felt his entire body relax for the first time in hours. He unplugged the neural cables from his temples and walked around his chair, stretching his arms out above his head. They’d done it again.
A few minutes later, Asha came walking through the CIC entryway holding a yawning Noah, recently recovered from his hiding place.
“Look who missed all the fun,” Lucas said, smiling as the pair approached.
“Yeah, good thing Alpha didn’t vent the armory, or he’d be floating in space along with all those creatures. And our weapons.”
“I had hoped you secured the child properly,” said Alpha, entering from a different hallway.
“We clearly thought of everything,” Lucas said, walking forward to meet the trio.
Alpha touched his recently sealed slash wounds and winced. Though they were healing, the cuts would remain tender for some time.
“I wanted to . . . thank you, for boarding the station to retrieve me.”
“Thank him,” Asha said. “I was ready to blow your gray hide to bits the way you were telling us to. But he had other ideas.”
Alpha turned to Lucas.
“I do not understand human honor codes, but I am in your debt.”
Lucas shook his head.
“We’ve all been in yours for some time. Without you, we’d be dead in Portland, dead in Norway, dead next to Mars, or dead orbiting a dwarf star.”
“We are not at our destination yet,” Alpha said, and cast a worried look toward the viewscreen.
Asha fumbled in her pack with one hand while holding onto Noah with the other. She produced an ornately designed crystal bottle filled with brown liquid. There was Norwegian writing on it, but Asha was waving it around too much for Lucas to read it.
“It’s brandy,” Asha said. “I looted it from the mansion back on Earth. Something that looks this fancy can’t be bad. I bet this bottle cost more than my first car.”
The crystal glinted from the light of the holocontrols around the CIC.
“This seems like as much of a special occasion as we’re going to get,” she continued.
Lucas smiled.
“Well, sounds good to me. Have any glasses with that or are we going to have to vaporize and inhale it?”
That got a chuckle out of both Asha and Alpha.
Suddenly, Lucas heard a scratching sound from across the room. The doorway darkened for a moment, then a creature stepped into the light. A soldier. He was dragging an injured leg, his power armor was splintered, and his veins were popping out all over his body from the depressurization of the ship. He raised his energy rifle with one shaking hand, pointing it at Asha’s back.
The scene was in slow motion for Lucas. He grabbed Asha by the shoulder with his left hand, throwing her and Noah behind him. She stumbled forward, crashing into Alpha as the bottle of brandy shattered on the floor. With his right hand, he raised the sawed-off shotgun. Before he could pull the trigger, there was a flash of light, and his midsection exploded.
20
He woke in a crater. The crater.
Lucas got to his feet slowly, struggling against the shifting sand, which poured off his clothing as he rose. It was night, but a brighter one than he could remember seeing in years. The menacing cloud cover was gone, revealing a full moon and a billion stars. With no artificial light sources polluting the sky, he could see straight into the heart of the Milky Way.
He looked around and found the familiar crater walls stretching out all around him. Ahead were the mangled remains of skyscraper metal, buried far deeper than the wreckage he’d previously seen. In the distance, he could see shadowy figures gliding across the crater floor but couldn’t make them out. Were they human? Creature? He was too far away to tell.
Trudging through the sands, he called out.
“Hello? Anyone? Who’s out there?”
No response from the shadows.
“Can you hear me?” he shouted. Only the howling wind answered him. Until . . .
“They cannot.”
Lucas jumped and turned to find the source of the voice. It was a woman, clad in white, with bright green eyes and flowing platinum hair. She was iridescent, radiating light out onto the floor of the crater. She stood on the ground but did not sink into the sand. Lucas spoke to her.
“Who are you?”
She smiled.
“You know me.”
Lucas searched his memory.
All my love.
“Natalie?”
The photo, brought to life. He wasn’t in a pod, that was for sure. A realization dawned on him.
“Am I dead?”
“That is not for me to say,” she answered calmly, staring out into the distance.
“Who are they?” Lucas asked, motioning to the shadows in the distance.
“They are the slaughtered. Your slaughtered.”
The shadows grew closer.
“They come to greet you.”
Lucas felt an intense pang of terror as the shadows continued to move toward him. Natalie stood calmly at his side, with a faint smile on her face.
He had no weapons, and as he turned to run, he found his feet rooted in the sand.
“What’s happening?” he said, panicked.
Natalie turned to him.
“Don’t be afraid.”
The shadows were now so close, Lucas began to recognize them.
A mechanic. A tattooed band member. A platoon of soldiers, all marching in formation. Natalie eyed the leader as he passed. Other men, women, and creatures streamed by, all of whom Lucas recognized. He hadn’t forgotten any of them. They walked past him and Natalie, empty eyes fixed straight ahead, ignoring his presence. The air was cold.
A collection of ragged cannibals trudged by him, and in the rear, a bearded giant loomed, taking one step for every two of theirs. Behind them was a troupe of creature soldiers, taking birdlike strides across the sand. Lucas still couldn’t move.
Finally the last creature shadow passed and Lucas pivoted to see the herd shuffle off into the darkness. Turning back again, he saw Natalie’s arm extended.
Following her gesture, Lucas saw two more shapes walking toward him. It was far away, but it was a woman holding the hand of a child. They were too far to be seen clearly. Sonya and Nathan? Asha and Noah?
A low rumble echoed from over the horizon. The ground shook. The shadows stood still.
“What is that?” Lucas asked, his voice a whisper.
“He comes,” answered Natalie.
The shadows turned to dust. Behind them, a colossal claw gripped the far crater wall. It must have been forty stories high.
A figure shot up into the sky, blacking out the moon and half the stars. A pair of blue rings shone brightly in the darkness. It was Omicron, ten thousand feet tall. He spoke in Soran, and the voice appeared to be coming from inside Lucas’s own head.
«Your journey ends.»
He raised his massive claw in to the air. Natalie took two steps forward, then turned around to face Lucas. She hovered a foot above the ground and bent down to kiss him on the forehead. A second later, Omicron’s claw came crashing down.
Lucas woke with a jolt on the laboratory table, gasping for air. The dream was over, but it took a few seconds for his mind to understand it. The lab was dim, but the minimal light still hurt his eyes. He looked down to find himself clad only in underwear. A long, curved scar made its way from his left hip to his collarbone with a few inflection points along the way. With bleary eyes he looked around the dark room, but neither Alpha nor Asha were anywhere to be found. But when Lucas saw what was next to him, he fell off of the table, pulling a mass of wires attached to his body with him.
It had to be another nightmare. He quickly ripped out each wire from his skin, ignoring the small bursts of pain that followed. Alarms began to sound on a nearby console, and Lucas grabbed it to help him get to his feet. As he did so, he rose up next to another makeshift table where a human body lay. It too was hooked up to machines, but was obviously dead. It was a young blond man who looked to be about twenty. He had a calm expression on his face for someone displayed so grotesquely. His entire torso was splayed open; his ribs were broken off and there was a huge gulf inside of him. Lucas saw a heart and the bottoms of lungs, but the rest was a mess of gore under what appeared to be a plastic shell.
Lucas stumbled backward, knocking over a different machine, and his stomach heaved. But no vomit came and he was met by crippling pain instead. He staggered across the room, a few wires still trailing behind him attached to his legs and back. He could barely walk, as if his brain didn’t even understand the concept. Lurching forward, he dove out into the hallway and through the open door across the way. A door that had forever been locked.
Lucas pulled himself to his feet again, surprised he hadn’t been jolted out of the nightmare by the surging pain through his midsection. And yet, the scene continued.
The room before him was awash in a harsh red light. On either side stood six tanks filled with fluid, and a human being was suspended in all but one of them. Lucas took one small step forward at a time as his jaw hung open.
Their bodies were wrapped ankle to neck in bandages laced with circuitry, and each had tubes c
oming out of multiple points on their bodies. There were five males and six females of varying skin tones and ages, though none looked older than forty. The youngest appeared to be a girl to his immediate left who couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Lucas leaned up against the control panel for her tank, using it to brace himself as pain surged through him. The display showed a globe of Earth, and the unmistakable landmass of China was glowing a bright red. Below it, a heart monitor beat slowly. She’s alive.
Lucas stumbled to the next tank. Inside it was a tall, dark-skinned man. On his globe, a country in Africa was highlighted. Zimbabwe maybe? His heart beat as well. Lucas looked to the other globes. A young woman from Brazil. A middle-aged man from Greece. The Philippines. Iran. Australia. Chile. France. Japan. Denmark. The lone empty tank showed the large shape of Russia in bright red.
Lucas fell to his knees, his head swimming and internal pain gripping him. Wake up. Wake up.
But the woman who entered the room wasn’t an angelic visage this time. It was Asha.
“Oh shit,” she said when she saw him. “Alpha!”
She raced over to Lucas and grabbed his jaw. She turned his head from side to side and saw a vacant look in his eyes. He felt like he was about to black out. He heard the familiar tapping of Alpha’s claws on the floor and a metallic voice spoke.
“We must return him to the laboratory.”
Asha hoisted up Lucas as best she could while Alpha took hold of his other arm and the pair dragged him into the lab where they rolled him back onto the table. All the lights came on and Lucas’s eyes starting tearing up from sensitivity before they rolled back into his head.
“He’s going!” Asha shouted.
Alpha grabbed a device and put it next to Lucas’s temple and his vision faded to blackness.
Once again, he opened his eyes, and this time found both Asha and Alpha next to him. Looking down, he saw many of the cables reattached to his body. He started to struggle, but Asha put her hand on his shoulder.