The Last Exodus

by Paul Tassi

  “It appears I have misjudged your taste in allies, traitor.”

  The voice was deep and dark, speaking in perfect English. It was coming from inside Lucas’s own head.

  “They will have to be studied and dissected instead of destroyed. This species subset is the most violent we have encountered to date. And these two, to fight on your behalf with such devotion and ferocity? Fascinating.”

  Lucas couldn’t help but look around, even though the voice was within him. Asha looked similarly unnerved, while Alpha stood coolly at the base of the holotable. It was clear he was hearing the voice as well, as he spoke back to it.

  “Telepathy, Commander? I did not know you were one of the Chosen.”

  There was a laugh that made Lucas’s skin crawl inside his armor.

  “A recent mutation. Though I fear one that pales in comparison to the abilities of the newer Shadows. I am an old man, after all.”

  Alpha slowly circled around the table to the front of the room.

  “Too old it seems. You have miscalculated this fight. Your troops lie in pieces or now orbit this planet.”

  There was a snort.

  “My mistake was trusting others to do a task I should have completed myself. In fact, I was just preparing to come aboard. I am grateful you have saved me the trouble with your misguided escape attempt.”

  “This was no escape,” Alpha growled.

  “No, I suppose it was not.”

  The large door at the end of the room slid open. Standing in the middle was Omicron, clad in armor to the neck. He was taller than most Xalans, and thinner too. His dark skin and blue eyes were visible, which indicated he felt he had no need for a helmet. His plating was even slimmer than that of the soldiers they had seen, and was contoured exceptionally close to his body. Organic claws poked out of the tips of his gloves and the bottoms of his boots. He had no visible weapons either in hand or on his hip. He didn’t move from the doorframe, and his electric blue eyes glanced across the room to each of them. Lucas and Asha had their guns raised, Alpha had apparently scavenged an energy pistol from inside his downed mech and it was also pointed at the unarmed Omicron.

  The only sound in the room was the faint whirring of machinery. Pools of black blood were starting to dry around the Xalan bodies that littered the CIC. Omicron stood motionless, his gaze now directed toward the ground. As he slowly raised his chin, the voice returned.

  “Well Earth-warriors, what are you waiting for?”

  Asha didn’t need to be asked twice. She fired off a pair of shots from her Magnum, and Lucas and Alpha followed her lead a split second later, emptying their own weapons at him. But it was already too late. As soon as the first crack of a gunshot could be heard, Omicron was already four feet to the right. Lucas fired a stream of rounds toward him, but the creature kept dashing sideways and ran up a nearby console. In the split-second it took Lucas to understand his next move, Omicron was already ten feet in the air above him.

  His feet hit Lucas’s chest before he could re-aim Natalie. He was pinned to the ground in an instant, and heard a loud crack come from his torso where his armor splintered. Before the pain even registered in his mind, Omicron had leapt off him and landed next to Alpha. In one claw swipe, he disarmed the scientist and kicked him in the chest so he flew backward into the downed mech.

  In the mere seconds this took, Asha had enough time to draw her sword. As Omicron leapt toward her, she slashed through the air and he had to twist himself to avoid being cut. When he landed, she swung with a flurry of strikes, hitting nothing but air as he dodged and weaved around the blade. It seemed impossible for a creature so large and so old to be this agile. “Inhumanly fast” was not the correct term, but Lucas had never seen another creature move like that.

  Finally Asha swung the blade around in one giant arc and, when she froze, Lucas thought he had caught it in his hand. His claw was raised in the air above his head, the sword suspended motionless with it. But as he struggled to his feet, Lucas saw that there were six inches of air in between the blade and his armored claw.

  Impossible.

  A look of terror crept across Asha’s face as she realized the true power of the creature before her. She didn’t have the sense to react when he plowed a clawed fist into her midsection, sending her rocketing back into the far wall. Lucas finally got his finger to Natalie’s trigger and sent another stream of plasma his way. Sensing it before it even arrived, Omicron did an arching backflip that put him once again adjacent to Alpha, who was attempting to recover from the earlier blow. Omicron didn’t give him a chance, and ravaged him with a series of claw strikes before flinging him toward the doorway where he slid to a stop, a trail of black blood smeared on the ground behind him.

  Omicron turned his attention toward Lucas, who fumbled with the “carnage” setting until it finally snapped into place. As the creature sprinted toward him, Lucas unleashed a blast. But Omicron twisted out of the way in a split second and the burst ripped apart a nearby console instead. And then he was upon him.

  Lucas couldn’t shield himself from the barrage of blows and slashes he was enduring at a lightning pace. Pieces of his armor flew off in chunks to the ground, and his alloy knife bounced away behind him. After raining down the barrage of strikes, Omicron kicked Lucas’s legs out from under him, then landed a forward shoulder thrust that sent him flying into a control cluster. Lucas’s back arched from the impact, and his vision was mostly white from the searing pain that surged through his entire body. Blood was spilling out of his armor out onto the floor; his organic undersuit couldn’t mend fast enough to seal all his fresh wounds. The console he’d crashed into was sparking and smoking while he tried to pry himself out of it. Once he did, he immediately collapsed to the floor.

  Omicron walked toward him, but had to dodge reflexively as a fission bullet whizzed past his head and took a chunk out of the back wall. Asha was back on her feet. Omicron ripped a nearby piece of machinery that was as tall as he was out of the floor. The lights and displays flickered then went dark when the cables attaching it to the ground were snapped off one by one. He took it in his arms, spun it around once, and flung it at Asha. She tried to leap out of the way, but Lucas saw the edge of it hit her hip, which sent her flying. She tumbled to the ground and didn’t stir once she stopped. Alpha remained motionless as blood filled the cracks of the metal floor beneath him. Blood in his own eyes, Lucas felt around on the ground for Natalie, but the gun was nowhere to be found.

  Omicron surveyed the destruction he’d caused, and turned his attention to the mech. He slowly climbed on top of it and checked a readout on the forearm of his armor, which didn’t have a scratch on it after the recent battle.

  Lucas watched in horror as he realized what the readout said.

  “There is another,” spoke Omicron’s cold voice in his head.

  He pried open the rear armored hatch with his claws and stood up when he saw its contents. He turned toward them.

  “You would bring a child here? Perhaps you are more savage than us.”

  Lucas finally found a familiar stock with a familiar etching in the back. He pulled Natalie into his arms and used the battered rifle for support so he could bring himself to his knees. Omicron turned back to the open hatch. Lucas could hear Noah crying from across the room.

  “This one is so early in its development cycle. The scientists will love it. They might even keep it alive.”

  Omicron shifted his cold gaze back to them. He paused before speaking again.

  “But alas, I am not one to cater to the sciences. Perhaps this mission was impossible to complete. Perhaps the subjects were all too weak, and were slaughtered before they could be captured for study.”

  His voice was dripping with venom inside Lucas’s head.

  “Yes, I believe that is what my report will say.”

  Suddenly, a black blade flew across the room, launched by an injured Asha, hobbling on one leg at the far side of the chamber. Lucas felt a microsecond of
elation, one that quickly evaporated as the blade fell short of its target, embedding itself in the mech a foot below Omicron. He hadn’t even flinched, as he must have predicted its path.

  “Your accuracy is unfortunate,” he scoffed.

  Asha was breathing heavily, and spoke through clenched teeth.

  “Is it?”

  She pressed a button on her cuff, and the blade erupted with blue electricity. It coursed through the mech and up into Omicron’s suit. He was caught unaware by the weapon’s secondary function and seized up in agony as the voltage surged through him, rooting him to the mech.

  Lucas didn’t hesitate as he brought Natalie around, the barrel already extending. It took him a quarter second to line up the shot, and he exhaled as he pulled the trigger.

  The round flew through the room at hypersonic speeds and ripped through Omicron’s throat as he remained fixed to the top of the mech, unable to leap out of the way. The electricity left him, and he crumbled to the ground in a heap, his body smoking and black blood splashed all around him.

  Still on his knees, Lucas struggled to his feet. He limped toward the body and saw that Alpha had pulled himself off the floor as well. He was covered in his own blood, but was able to walk. Asha followed, heavily favoring one leg, her armor in tatters.

  They reached Omicron’s body at the base of the mech, and they could see his chest still rising and falling. His throat was open, and making unpleasant noises as blood poured out of it, but he was alive. Furthermore, his injury didn’t impede his ability to communicate without words.

  “You are as much a fool as your father,” he spat out, his voice noticeably weaker inside Lucas’s head. “He would have us destroyed. As would you.”

  Alpha reached down to the ground where his energy pistol lay. Standing back up, he aimed it at Omicron’s head, which continued to project his thoughts.

  “You may kill me, but I will join my true Xalan brothers. Those who have fallen for millennia fighting this war for the good of our people. I will be in a place you will never go.”

  “Nor would I want to, should I find you and your brethren there.”

  Omicron coughed as more blood poured out of him. His voice became quieter.

  “You will understand why we did it. We needed to be a proud people if we were to thrive. We could not allow the masses to know the truth.”

  “What truth?” Alpha asked, his pistol shaking.

  “With my dying breath, I will not betray the oath I swore.”

  His piercing blue eyes stared directly into Alpha’s.

  “May you suffer as your father did. As your brothers did. As your—”

  A smoldering hole in his forehead prevented further elaboration. Alpha dropped the pistol as their minds went silent and Omicron was still at last.

  24

  “Goddamnit.”

  Lucas doubled over, fully aware of his injuries now that the fighting had subsided. His armor was decimated, shredded to ribbons from Omicron’s razor claws. His organic suit was attempting to seal the many slashes across his body, but blood was spilling out onto the floor regardless. He stumbled over to the rear of the mech and looked down to find a teary-eyed Noah. The gelatinous insulation had kept him safe from the electrical surge generated by the sword. Asha pulled her blade out of the mech, and slowly fixed it to her back once more. Her face was badly bruised, her lip cut and bleeding, and she limped a few feet away to pick up her fallen Magnum.

  Alpha had gotten the worst of it. Outside the mech, he had no armor. He was painted in his own blood, but was trying to seal his wounds with cauterizing gel. He winced as it hissed, and some of the gashes were too large to close immediately. His only saving grace was the fair amount of natural armored plating Xalans had across their chest, abdomen, and back. But even those areas were obviously injured.

  He tossed away the empty gel gun and shambled over to the large central holotable.

  “It must be here,” Alpha said, his mechanical voice strained and his breathing labored.

  “What must?” Lucas asked, but was ignored as Alpha ripped through the display at a lightning pace.

  Asha sat down against the mech next to the still-warm body of Omicron, which was oozing black blood onto the ground. His blue eyes were still open, staring straight above him in a haunting manner.

  “Not so tough now, are you?” she spat at him, as she leaned her head back to rest it against the mech.

  Lucas was still trying to process what had just taken place. Omicron fought unlike anything he’d ever seen, a frenzied demon, a whirlwind of pure carnage. Alpha had warned them of his prowess, but it was now abundantly clear the Shadows were exceptionally dangerous weapons. Omicron was unarmed, and nearly killed them when a legion of elite soldiers could not. He stopped Asha’s blade in midair using . . . what, his mind? Even with all they’d seen, such power was beyond anything Lucas could comprehend.

  Lucas undid Noah’s restraints and took him into his arms. The child whined as he carried him away from the scorched mech, and he didn’t dare set him down on the floor, where black and red blood mingled. He walked over to Alpha who was still racing through the readouts of the holotable, typing furiously into a circular virtual keyboard.

  “What are you doing?” Lucas asked once more. Alpha’s eyes raced at lightspeed across the stream of symbols.

  “I am inside the ship’s mainframe and am attempting to form a bridge into the Commander’s personal files. They are heavily encrypted, but I believe I have developed the correct override algorithm.”

  Symbols poured down vertically in the floating display, constantly shifting and swirling. One stopped moving, then two and eventually a string of thirty of them became locked into place, and Alpha breathed a sigh of relief. The screen changed to show a list of data packets, which Alpha quickly scrolled through. Almost immediately, a certain cluster caught his eye.

  “Messages for me, from my father,” he said breathlessly. “Sent over the course of Earth campaign.”

  “You never got them?” Asha said, lifting herself off the ground and hobbling toward the table.

  “I never received any correspondence from my clan for the duration of the assignment. They must have been intercepted.” He peered curiously at one particular file.

  “One message is further secured at a level beyond the others.”

  Lucas recognized the Xalan symbol for “treason.” Alpha began working on the virtual encryption using gestures that Lucas probably couldn’t emulate with his own five-fingered hands. Noah squirmed in his arms and flung them out toward Asha. Lucas passed him over and saw he was now quite dirty, having been propped up against the bloody, ashen armor. But he had survived without so much as a paper cut; Alpha’s mech had done its promised duty of protection. Noah set to work attempting to grab Asha’s ponytail as she wiped away fresh blood from her chin with her free hand.

  The symbols in the display turned green; Alpha’s hacking was a success. The room lit up as a giant hologram was projected out of the table above them. It was a Xalan, one with many lines on his face, but familiar gold rings in his eyes.

  Alpha pulled the chip from his translator collar, and placed it onto the holotable. The floating figure began growling, but his words were broadcast in English.

  “Greetings, my son.”

  Alpha stood in reverence of his deceased father, towering larger than life above him.

  “I do not wish to endanger your life with this message, more so than I already have by causing your exile to the Earth campaign. But this information must be disseminated to as many members of our clan as possible to ensure that the public may someday learn of it. I fear I have already given myself away, and my own destruction is imminent because of what I have discovered. My only hope is that, if I am killed, one of you may find a way to make the truth known to our people. The truth about the intertwined histories of Sora and Xala.”

  Lucas was enraptured by the broadcast, as were Alpha and Asha. The pain of his wounds was melting a
way as he focused solely on the giant hologram.

  “As you know, our clan’s field of research has exclusively focused on technology, mechanical, electrical, physical, and otherwise. We have been forbidden from doing genetic research for millennia, those duties assigned to the covert operations scientific enclave responsible for the horrific Shadows, along with other nefarious biological modifications to our people. I have never had an interest in such deplorable practices, but when a prototype armor set required access to the subject’s genetic makeup to compensate for inborn faults, I was forced to break protocol and delve into the DNA of our species. These operations were done in secret, and for weeks, I found nothing unusual, and the project progressed smoothly.”

  Alpha slowly walked around the table, still craning his neck to see his father who seemed to follow him as he moved.

  “But in the final stages of the process, I uncovered something deep within the genetic code. Something that was impossible, some sort of contaminant within the sample. I found Soran DNA.”

  Lucas’s eyes widened and Alpha let out something resembling a snarling cough.

  “I tested sample after sample, but always the same indicators were there. Soran genes. Mere traces, but they were consistently present. I told no one of the discovery, and set aside my work to further understand what I had found. I spent a month attempting to infiltrate the genetics core, the most secure server on the planet, accessed only by the Shadowmakers themselves. The encryption was a masterwork that took ages to decipher, but once cracked, I was able to access the entire alcove of data undetected.”

  The hologram flickered briefly, but continued.

  “What I discovered was more astonishing than any explanation I could have imagined. A common celestial ancestor would have been fascinating enough, but what I found was a secret that had been kept for thousands of years.”

  The video changed from the portrait of Alpha’s father and showed a great shining city in front of a crystal blue bay. A voiceover continued.