Alien Victory

by Mark Zubro

  “You were stupid enough to fix my foot.”

  “It’s not back to normal,” Joe said. “The medical device can lessen the pain and bind up some tendons and skin, but you’re still crippled and unless you get to a major medical fix-it device, you’ll be crippled for life.”

  “I don’t care. I’m rich.”

  “Okay,” Mike said. “We can’t own it. You can’t get out of here without our help. Do you have a ship coming down to rescue you?”

  “I can have.”

  Joe said, “Double bullshit.”

  Mike hadn’t thought he could feel more tired and depressed, but he did.

  Joe stood nose to nose with Karsh and said, “You fucking asshole pig!”

  More grating laughter. “Cak thinks he’s going to live through this because he’s friends with me. Ha! He’ll be dead. And so will you all.” He pointed at Mike. “Maybe you will be the last gay man alive in the universe. Or this part of it. Who cares?”

  Joe took a step back. “You’re willing to murder all those people?”

  “Of course.”

  Mike’s fury grew. “You can die.”

  Krim spoke up. He was in tears. “You killed him! And you don’t care! And you’re just laughing at us! I’ve been laughed at my own life by assholes like you! Never again! Never again!”

  Krim rushed at Karsh. He plowed past Mike and Joe. Karsh, bigger than Krim, tried to stop him but when he put his weight on his left foot to balance himself, he tipped. Krim bashed into him, and Karsh went back first into the lake.

  Krim overbalanced himself, tripped over his own feet, and fell on top of Karsh.

  Karsh screamed and screamed.

  The boy wasn’t big, but his fall prevented Karsh from leaping back up to his feet. The entire back of his body was immersed in the liquid zukoh.

  The others rushed to pull Krim and Karsh out. Mike got hold of Krim and heaved him out. He saw that only the tips of Krim’s fingers and a bit of the palm on both hands got zukoh on it.

  Hok and Joe yanked Karsh out as best they could. Joe had the medical kit out and was ministering to Karsh, whose initial screams in seconds lowered to a moaning burble. They put him on his front as his entire rear was oozing blood and goo.

  Mike watched the back of the man’s head dissolve and the clothes on his body eat away from back to front. Joe had the medical device out, but it was no use. Soon Karsh’s back and butt were covered in smoldering shreds of flesh and clothes. In a few more seconds, he was dead.

  Krim fell to his knees. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to.” He stopped himself. “Yes I did. I’m glad he’s dead.” He began to cry.

  Joe set the medical device to working on Krim’s hands.

  Mike put an arm around Krim and said comforting, soothing words.

  Hok put a spare spacesuit over Karsh’s remains.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  They walked back to the tunnel entrance. They sat in the Leavers’ camp and had a conference.

  They called Brux. Mike said, “Cak is a spy.”

  “He was trying to wreck a few things. He was caught. He did not get lynched. Why I stopped the men, I don’t know.”

  Mike said, “Make sure he doesn’t have any communications equipment. Find a way to lock up the son of a bitch somewhere, somehow.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” Brux sounded pissed.

  Mike explained what they’d learned. He didn’t mention the zukoh yet. He didn’t know who else might be listening. Brux promised to take care of things in the colony. Brux added, “I’ve had teams digging in your direction. It’ll cut your journey back by a week.”

  Mike returned to Joe, Krim, Hok, Kench and the few Leavers who were still alive.

  “We can’t tell Bex and company about this, not yet,” Joe said. “Not until we can figure out what to do about or with it.”

  “I agree. They’ve got spies among us, and those spies will want to broadcast the news of the existence of this to every corner of the galaxy.”

  “Or at least to the ones they’re spying for.”

  “If we presume only one faction has a spy.”

  “This is getting too complicated and convoluted.”

  “I’ll say.”

  Mike and Joe lay together that night. Mike said, “Nothing is worth all this death and destruction.”

  Joe said, “Everything is fucked up. Is there a way to use this discovery to our advantage?”

  “If we can find a way, we will.”

  Mike took comfort in Joe’s arms that night, but he didn’t sleep much. The storms roared outside and his brain kept them company rushing between despair and hope and wanting to be home in his apartment on Earth.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  The next day they began the long trek back to the colony. Knowing where they were going and which pitfalls to avoid made the going faster.

  Brux and Rix met them at door at a new entrance high in the mountains. The remnant of the Leavers were rushed to medical care.

  When they were alone, Mike said to Brux, “Krim killed Karsh.”

  Brux said, “We’ll give him a medal.”

  Mike said, “He’ll need some tending to make sure he’s okay.”

  “I’ll help you guys monitor him.”

  Mike said, “Karsh was straight. He was a spy. He killed Bir with Cak’s help. Cak is gay. He’s a spy.”

  “So neither gay nor straight has a monopoly on being shit-for-brains assholes.”

  “Not today. Where’d you put Cak?”

  “Garbage level 72 from the second colony attempt.”

  “He can’t get out or communicate?”

  “He’s naked, but warm. He has energy balls to last until the next colony shows up here. What are we going to do with him?”

  Mike had thought about this. He said, “I’m stumped. He aided and abetted a killer. He’s a traitor.”

  “They execute traitors, don’t they?” Brux asked.

  “I’d like to fry his brain molecule by molecule with my communicator.”

  “You can do that?”

  “For him, I’d give it a try.” Mike sighed. “We never set up any kind of judicial system. I know I never thought about crimes, criminals, and what to do about them. Leave him where he is in the garbage. We’ll figure out what to do with him when there’s time.”

  Brux said, “There have been developments. We continue to get dribs and drabs of new colonists with almost every new supply ship.”

  “How many total?”

  “Nearly two hundred more.”

  “Any problems?”

  “Not so far.”

  Joe asked, “How are the crops?”

  “Okay, but you should go check for yourself.”

  Brux had all the administrative things Mike needed to do organized and set to deal with. First Mike met with all the new colonists. They’d heard of his defeats of Bex, of his defeat of the pirate ship on this planet, of his rescue of the Leavers. Many of them treated him with a kind of distant awe.

  Mike was mostly tired.

  He worked with Brux on all that had to be taken care of.

  In the early morning, Joe trudged into their cubicle.

  “How are the crops?” Mike asked.

  Joe eased himself down onto the shelf that was their bed.

  “We learned some things. We’ve got to build more dams up in the mountains diverting the water, if we can, before it reaches the plain. We need to build a reverse irrigation system. The storage basins that held worked perfectly. We will have a crop. Just not as big as we hoped.”

  Mike held him close.

  They fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  The next morning as they readied to leave their cubicle for the work of the day, Mike said to Joe, “We should go see Snek this morning. He’s the only one who’s had at least some scientific training. I’ve got some questions. We’ve got to find out if we can do anything with that zukoh shit up there in the mountains.
”

  “We didn’t leave anybody to guard it. What if somebody tries to take it?”

  “Nobody that’s here can. We don’t have the equipment.”

  “Somebody could land.”

  “They’d have to know it’s here and where to go to get it.”

  “What if there are spies who can still get word out?”

  “Then we’re kind of fucked.”

  “You’re going to trust Snek?”

  “I’ve talked to him more than some, less than others. I have no reason to trust him or distrust him. I could demand he give me a blow job and see how good he was, but I don’t think that’s an infallible test for seeing if someone is gay. A straight guy I knew in college gave me the best head until you came along.”

  “He was straight?”

  “He married a woman. Claimed I was the only guy he was ever with. He blew me right after his bachelor party the night before he got married. Great sex, but he was kind of a mess.”

  “I guess.”

  “The point being, we’ve got to know what to do with that shit, if there’s even anything to be done with it.”

  “We have to assume the word will get out.”

  “I suppose.”

  Mike and Joe found Snek in what they called their science lab. It had almost as many screens as the communications center. Mike noted that all the screens currently showed pictures of great swirls of stars in different galaxies around the universe. Mike found them beautiful. The walls of the ten-by-ten room glowed faintly as all did.

  Snek only worked there part time. He was also on the digging crews.

  The most ordinary high school on Earth would have had more equipment, although the technology Snek had in this lab was far more advanced.

  Snek was looking through the lens of what on Earth would have been the most powerful microscope. Here it was just ordinary equipment about an inch thick and five inches long and two wide.

  Snek looked up when Mike and Joe approached.

  “Ah,” Snek said. “Welcome back.”

  They talked briefly of their adventures and then they told him about the lake of liquid zukoh.

  When Mike and Joe finished, Snek said, “Wow. And double wow.”

  Mike said, “We wanted to know if we could maybe somehow wield it or use it.”

  “You want me to tell you we can use it as a weapon?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Not the most comforting answer.”

  Snek smiled. “I worked with creating a gun, a machine that would allow someone to shoot zukoh from one place to another. I never actually worked with the zukoh turning it into something that would go into a gun.”

  “Oh.”

  “But do not despair.”

  “Oh?”

  “See, I think you and the zukoh could develop a very special relationship. That Vov implant in your head brings the technology to a whole new level. It’s just no one is sure how to use it.”

  “Bex attacked me with it twice.”

  “And as far as I know, he used up supplies that took three years to develop. It was brand new technology. Bex had the wealth of the galaxy and labs and factories to build what he wanted. We have...” Snek glanced up around the room. “Well, less.”

  “How does someone even touch the stuff to use it?”

  “On Earth you have hydrochloric acid?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which can only be transported in special containers. It eats through everything else. Works the same here with this stuff. You notice the zukoh didn’t eat through the ground it was lying on.”

  “Right, otherwise it would have just eaten itself into the core of the planet.”

  “And maybe out the other side if it wanted to. No, the trick is, getting the stuff into a container and delivering it from point A to point B. Then getting it into a weapon that can fire it. It can be done, since we know Bex did it. I had no idea Bex had such a thing. Then they used some in one of the recent massacres.”

  “We know, but they ran out.”

  “It’s expensive and hard to control.”

  “Can we do it?”

  “I’ll work on it.”

  Mike said, “Explain to me again why the surveillance satellites and drones and early colonies didn’t find this.”

  Snek said, “Zukoh is an element. It exists inside some meteors and a few rare comets. It whizzes around the galaxy. Billions of years ago, collisions happened. Maybe it was shielded from all observation because of the other metal in the meteor that it was encased in. Most elements have been produced in supernova nucleosynthesis to seed the dust from which the Solar System formed. For example, because the Earth, like most if not all planets, was molten when it was just formed, almost all of the gold present in the Earth sank into the planetary core. Therefore most of the gold that is present today in the Earth’s crust and mantle is thought to have been delivered to Earth later, by asteroid impacts during the late heavy bombardment about 4 billion years ago.”

  Snek pointed to a series of pictures on the screens. “I downloaded the pictures you all took of that cavern. See the floor leading down to the cave?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The residue of your blast is that brownish stuff. You know how the cavern kind of glowed?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The white stuff gleaming through at various points is a mixture of diamonds and other ores that got super-heated in your blast. They also shielded what’s there. No one would have ever found this except by accident. I’ve heard that’s how most deposits are found.”

  Joe said, “So the power of the lightning and Mike’s implant followed a seam?”

  “Probably, and the zukoh that was there might have been part of it. Or not. I just don’t know. I was a good scientist. I am not a great scientist, and I am by no means a genius. Who knows how Vov came up with just that formula for your implant? Vov didn’t want to experiment on himself. Think. He wound up experimenting in the gay community. There was something about the physiology of gay people. DNA. Chromosomes. Genes. Something that worked with the technology he was creating, and the elements he was using. It’s why Vov didn’t use the implant on himself. Or if he did try it, maybe it didn’t work because he wasn’t gay.” He pointed at Mike. “My best guess, besides the brilliance of Vov and Hrrrm technology, there is something about your anatomy that triggers it.”

  “Because I’m gay, I’m all powerful?”

  “It’s one theory,” Snek said.

  Mike said, “Kas, the scientist, alluded to neurons in human brains and your technology.”

  “He didn’t tell you quite everything. See, if there is something unique about the human physiology when mixed with our technology that makes you more powerful, then we are not the most powerful.”

  “But people on Earth don’t have ships that can fly around the galaxy.”

  “But you might. And with someone like Vov at the helm, who knows what your people might have been or someday might be capable of.”

  “But Vov is dead.”

  “But his knowledge lives in you. You also represent possible allies. A possible end to civilization. No one knows. People don’t like living with uncertainty.”

  Mike said, “It’s all bullshit.”

  “I’d agree, except here you are, and you’re not dead.”

  “Why wouldn’t it work with gay people here?”

  “Because they’re from here and not there. You can figure that out yourself. You’re the alien.”

  “People keep telling me that.”

  Joe asked, “Why didn’t Vov give himself this? He’d have defeated me.”

  “You said yourself that he killed a lot of humans in his experimenting. I think you guys were lucky that it didn’t kill Mike. Vov didn’t mind risking the lives of a bunch of humans. Himself, not so much.”

  “Oh,” Joe said.

  “But there’s more,” the scientist continued. “Remember the implants are connected to t
he brain’s neurons. We think we’re pretty good at connecting things and enhancing them for knowledge. I don’t think Vov, even with the very same implant in your head in his head, could do what you’ve done. I think, although I cannot prove, it has to do with you being human and gay.”

  Mike said, “Like a miracle cure for a pinball wizard.”

  Joe and Snek said, “Huh?”

  Mike said, “Skip it.”

  Snek continued, “Vov was a weapons guy. Maybe he was tootling around the universe looking for different combinations of physiology, weapons, elements. Who knows how long he was really out there?”

  Joe said, “They sent me five, almost six years ago now.”

  “Did they tell you when he escaped?”

  “Just that he had a head start.”

  “My guess is they sent out a lot of people and probes in different directions. It’s a big damn universe. You happened to come upon him, so you and your husband’s world changed forever. And may change the course of the history of the universe. You said he had at least a year or two on Earth to design and make things. Who knows what he’d done and what he took with him? Who knows who he might have been in contact with here? Maybe he had allies. Maybe he was trying to develop a weapon.” He pointed at Mike. “Maybe you’re the weapon.”

  Joe said, “We just followed his schematics. We didn’t really build anything. He’d built it and perfected it.”

  Mike asked, “Wait a second, are you saying he was preparing to return here with an army of Earthlings, gay Earthlings, who can do what I do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How would he control us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How would he get us all here?”

  The scientist said, “I’m sorry. There are a million questions that I don’t have answers to. I don’t know if he was perfecting a device there to bring it here or was planning to use humans as a delivery system or even just conquer Earth, although I can’t imagine what for. I just don’t know. And if there was some power in the human brain that mixed with our technology.” Snek drew a deep breath. “Now that could cause some very unfortunate over-reactions.”