“Mom says she felt you looking down on her,” Sara said with a forced smile. “It was the other day, when she was doing her running around. She said she felt you there. She never talks about you, I guess it still hurts after all this time for her. But you know Mom, she always gets quiet when stuff bothers her and never talks about it.”
Sara paused, tears welling up in her eyes as she struggled to continue. “I just...I wish I could feel what she did. I’m jealous, Dad, and I miss you so bad. And I wish I could make those responsible for you being gone pay.”
“That is not your burden.”
The voice behind her scared her half to death. Sara recognized it as the stranger that had been meeting her here off and on the last few months. Quickly she turned angrily to face him, but what she saw was even more shocking. Instead of the usual dark grey suit and long, black overcoat he usually wore, the man was adorned in some kind of body armour that glistened in the falling snow. The armour seemed to be a consistency of a liquid, black color of it like the surface of a lake at night.
“But it is something that is being dealt with none the less.” He continued.
“You know these meetings between my dad and me are private?” she asked scornfully, with her tears flowing from her eyes. “I honestly wish you would get the hint.”
Aen knew she was angry, he had witnessed the look in her eyes many times over her life. She had taken a stance of ownership as she stood protectively between him and the empty grave behind her. It took a great deal of effort to restrain from smiling—Sara always looked so cute when she was angry and he constantly laughed at her when she scowled so.
“I mean no insult by my visits, but my intrusions do have merit to them.” He replied holding his hand up and extended to calm her down. “It is you I seek, not him or a fight.”
Sara had long felt this man had been somewhat stalking her, but had never really let the thoughts linger to long as his visits, as he called them, had always been brief. Now, she began to wonder at what he truly was after.
“Why me? I mean, why do you always come here and only here?”
“Because of a promise I made, and no matter what happens in your life from here on out, I will always keep that promise.”
“Dad made you promise to watch over me?” the tears rushed from her now. Her cheeks were streaked with wet and frozen tears.
“In a way, but it was to make sure you got the answers you so desperately need to move on. But for now, the more you know puts you in more danger then you can imagine.”
“I don’t believe you!” she screamed at him. Years of frustration began to boil over. “And why do you always wear those damn glasses? What the fuck are you hiding?”
Aen knew it was time—not for her to know the whole truth, but to make her aware of what he was. Even now, he hesitated to show her because he truly didn’t know what he was himself. Too many unanswered questions floated around in his mind, and he could only imagine the pain in his daughter as she obviously had many more in hers. Slowly, he closed his eyes and removed his mirrored sunglasses before drawing a deep breath and opening them to look upon his child, his new eyes unfettered for the first time.
Sara gasped. What she was looking at was not possible! This man was not a man, or maybe he was but had some kind of disease that made his eyes burn like little black suns. It was now that she truly felt the power of his presence, the power that had always been present, but more subtle before. Her body instantly took a few steps back as fear took hold.
“What are you? Are you even human?”
The sight of his own daughter recoiling in horror from him was more difficult than all the pain bestowed upon him during the project which spawned him. In all the time he had thought about this moment—in fact, he had nearly obsessed over it—he never imagined her reacting quite like this.
“There is little of me that is...human, anymore. The human parts are pretty much cosmetic. I am the sum of two worlds and the first of my kind, from what I am told.”
“You’re saying you are an alien? Are you insane?” Now she was getting scared. It was one thing for the dude to have glowing eyes, but wild claims like this was crazy! Her eyes began to scan for ways to escape.
Aen sat on the bench next to where they were standing, an effort to make himself less intimidating along. He put the glasses back on. He patted on the seat, for her to join him, but Sara stood firm. It was always going to be a stretch to reveal himself, and the hardest one he knew was always going to be her.
“Insane? No, I am hardly insane. Hatred, revenge, a power I had never thought possible and that promise I made, I think have helped me avoid insanity. But I feel its clutches from time to time. But is it so hard to accept what I am? Is it not more insane to think that the Earth is all alone in the universe with her claims on life?”
“You sound like my dad. He was always looking up at the sky at night and stared out at the stars above. In fact, he used to say that he wondered if there...”
“Was someone or something out there looking at those same stars and thinking the exact same thing,” Aen cut her off and finished the quote.
“Who are you?” Sara said as her curiosity overrode fear and she sat on the furthest point of the bench from her companion. The tears had stopped falling, but her face was stained with mascara and streaks of frozen tears.
“I am Aen. An experiment gone horribly wrong, or unbelievably right. It all depends on those you ask. I have little in common with either race whose DNA was used to birth me, other than the obvious cosmetic features.”
“I got that, but who were you? I mean, before you became... this?”
And there it was, the question his heart screamed out to him to answer truthfully. The chance to reveal all to his daughter was here, but Aen had to hold back. Until he had finished punishing those who had done this to him, revealing any more to her was foolish and dangerous. All he would do is put them in danger, just to appease his heart’s longing. He had always hated secrets, and this one gnawed at his very soul.
“No one of consequence—I was just an ordinary man with an ordinary life. It was a rare genetic marker that made them find me and do this. Before that, I was no one.”
She felt the hesitation in his voice, her instincts as a reporter knew when someone was holding back on her. There was so much she wanted to know; so many questions she needed to ask. Her first thought was that the world needed to know of this, but that was quickly quietened by the fact that news like this would create a mass panic like never before. Her head swooned, she was overwhelmed—she sat just a few feet away from a real alien!
“Did it hurt? I mean, when they made you?”
“I died, Sara Foster. All of me that was human died so that what you see before you could rise. I have been told I have been born for a reason, but what that reason is remains a mystery to me.”
“Who told you this? The military, private medical doctors—who are helping you understand what you are? For that matter, who is arming you with all this?” she motioned to his armour.
Aen was beginning to realize that this conversation was pushing the danger limit and stood up to leave. There was no way to satiate her curiosity right now, save telling her everything— and that was something he was unable to do.
“For now, what I have told you is all I can. Know that you are not alone and there is someone watching out for you. Any more I tell you can bring nothing but pain and suffering upon you and your family which has suffered great enough loss for one lifetime. In time, I will tell you more, but for now I must bid you farewell.”
“Wait!” Sara called out after him. “I need to know one thing.”
“Go on.”
“Are you going to kill them, the ones that did this to you and that are responsible for my Dad being dead?”
“Yes.” Aen said with look of determination. “Every last one of them.”
<
br /> Sara watched him turn and walk down the path a few meters before disappearing in a blink of an eye. Instead of being startled, she remained focused on his last words and the fact he was ridding the world of the monsters that hurt her and her mother so.
“Good.” She said softly and in response, even though he had been gone for more than a few minutes now. It was an odd feeling, to wish people dead, but the thought of those assholes paying for this with their lives gave her some sense of closure.
Rocky Mountains, Utah –
Military Installation Code - Named White Rock
The air inside the mountain facility was cool and sterile, but Aen’s senses went into overload as the familiarity of it was shocking. He had vaulted himself across the country into the heart of the very place that birthed him; he was returning to the very place that fueled his nightmares. It was the early hours of the morning, probably one or two a.m., and there was no one in the labs at this hour, leaving him to finish what he needed to with minimal casualties.
Disabling the security systems had been easy—a small EMP released at the time of his arrival had cooked everything that was powered up. Aen now stood at the specimen doors, looking at all the sample DNA that had been drawn from him and stored here for future hybrid soldiers. This is what he came here for, to prevent any other innocents from being made into monsters.
His anger rose in him as he let loose a torrent of burning energy that flooded the storage compartment, leaving it nothing but slag. A wash of fine water mist began to rain down in response from the heat and flames and fire alarms rang out in the darkness. Smiling to himself, Aen thought of one more thing he had to accomplish before he left this house of horrors, and faded into the shadows before the first responders arrived.
Making his way down to the medical wing, Aen found the two remaining unfinished hybrid soldiers. Either they had run out of time to get them up and running in their haste to chase him down, or they had deemed them unusable due to their incomplete status. Neither of those things mattered to Aen as he set them both ablaze with searing heat and plasma that would leave nothing left to harvest or use against him. In mere moments, the entire wing burned brightly around him as the sprinkler system struggled to hold back the deluge of destruction he unleashed. Aen laughed—there was only a few of these zombies left to burn, to contain his legacy of blood. That and the knowledge that he had struck them at home would drive his enemies bat shit crazy with rage. He knew he had hit them where it hurt, but he was determined to slap them in the face tonight too.
—
General Patterson was still fuming about the break in—the question of how this thing bypassed their security was baffling. After updating Taylor’s team on the incident here and learning about the loss of four more of the assets, he was in no mood for company. So he walked quickly to his office and entered, his mind still mulling over the recent happenings. His hand reached for the switch and flicked the lights on, but nothing happened.
“Great, now I gotta deal with fucking maintenance now!” he grumbled, spinning on his heals to leave when the door slammed shut in front of him.
“Leaving so soon, General?” a voice said in the darkness.
Patterson strained to see in the darkness, but could see nothing! One of the blinds rustled briefly, then opened slightly and shed enough illumination for him to make out a tall, dark figure standing by the window. It was him!
“If you kill me son, it solves nothing.” The old man said with a sigh as he reached into his jacket and grabbed a cigar. “Don’t suppose you aliens smoke, do you?” he said, offering one to the stranger.
“If it was my intention to kill you….”
“I’d be dead without ever seeing you!” interrupted Patterson. “So why the fucking social visit?”
“I thought I would give you the chance to look your associate’s handiwork in the eye. Call it a meeting of the minds if you must,” he said with a devilish grin.
“And why me? Why simply talk to me instead of throwing me out the window?”
“That can still be an option if you want, but I thought I would let you know that you are safe from me. My quarrel is not with you.”
“Ah, the vengeance thing, fighting to make things right and avenge your former self, how fucking noble!” the General sneered.
Aen turned to face the old man; his eyes glowing brightly in the dark room. “Call it a purge of an unsavory element, but I won’t stop until I’m finished and there’s not a damn thing you can do to stop me!”
Feeling he might have poked the bear; so to speak, Patterson backed off with his accusatory tone. “So if you aren’t here to kill me and I have now seen you face to face, why are you still here?” he asked politely, offering a chair to the stranger.
“How much pull do you have with the powers that be, does your voice hold sway with anyone that matters?” Aen replied with a nod of refusal towards the hospitable gesture.
“Why?”
Aen knew he had the General’s curiosity peaked. The man would be a useful ally in the preparation for the coming storm that Caretaker was talking about. A friend in a high place was always valuable and necessary, no matter how large the urge was to crush him as an example to the others. But a man with connections was a man that needed to live.
“Because after I finish with Taylor and his merry men, there will be other business that brings us together again. But for now, just the realization that you will live to see another sunrise should make you appreciate everything else.”
“Is that some kind of threat?” Patterson hated being threatened, no matter how high the odds were against him he wasn’t about to back down.
Aen walked to a dark corner of the room and nearly disappeared. Only the glow from his eyes showed Patterson where he was now.
“It is a warning that there is more happening than your pursuit of me, and that our paths will cross sooner than later.”
Patterson saw his adversary blink once, then close his eyes for a second time before not opening again. He was gone, and the General was alone to contemplate the visit in its entireness. The creature had been dramatic for a reason, and had ended the conversation with a warning about a larger looming issue. The fact that this thing could know more than the entire intelligence community puzzled Patterson, never mind that it had the gall to hang around for confrontation after destroying the med labs and research department. But there was something more, something he couldn’t quite see yet, and Patterson was bound and determined to find out what it was.
Himalayan Mountains, Mount Kailash, Tibet
“Success!” The mechanical drone of the Caretaker’s voice echoed in the chamber and roused Aen from his brooding. For the last few hours he had sat contemplating what was next for him and where he stood in his old life. The facts were simple: Aaron Foster was dead. His family was not waiting for him to come back, not waiting for a phone call in the dead of night; they had moved on with their lives despite the fact that he could not. To Aen, this seemed to be the most frustrating thing.
Changing his mindset seemed to be an uphill battle, one that he constantly felt to be losing to no end. As well, his constant visits with Sara were doing the opposite of giving him closure. It was like opening an old wound over and over, just to remind himself of how much it hurt. All of this—being moody, moping about what he had lost, wanting his old life back—was pointless, as it wouldn’t change where he was. The hard part was to do it.
Inside, Aen was broken, and like a child who just had his sandcastle kicked over, he had no idea on how to start over. His whole life had changed drastically in a heartbeat, but he only managed to keep it together in times of need and action. In down-times like now, he really struggled with it. It was a haunting pain, one he doubted would ever leave him, but for now at least he had a distraction from the heartache.
“What do you have there?” he asked, eager to shake his mind
of the ghosts of his past.
“Ah, master Aen.” Caretaker replied. “Back from the depths of your soul, are you? I have finally made contact with the Amarra, if you must ask, and am now looking to link up to her using a minor subroutine that has a few ounces of power left in a small pocket of capacitors. I told you it was a longshot, but one worth taking nonetheless.”
“So now you have your foot in the door, now what?”
“Simple, I shunt some power through the capacitors to the locator beacon to triangulate her exact position, then use a bit more to briefly get an internal picture from the onboard surveillance systems and then we prepare ourselves.”
“Prepare for what?”
“So you can know the location of where we must go and visualize where we must appear. You will teleport us to the control room of the Amarra, so we can jumpstart her heart.”
Aen smiled, he had thought that he would one-up the construct with his thinking but it had beaten him to the punch. When he was told about the Amarra, this was the plan he had all along, or at least part of it. To be honest, making an interstellar phone call was the least of his priorities. Finding the arsenal of the Lyarran ship was more to his liking and using it to wipe Taylor and his men off the planet.
“So we were on the same page all along, then. Good, now get it done so I don’t have to be idle much longer. Sitting still hurts, and not in a way that my body can fix.”
“I need to complete a few more tricky calculations so it will take some time.” Caretaker replied as it returned back to the console. “I estimate a long wait of nearly ten minutes or so.”
Ten minutes! Aen nearly burst out laughing before realizing to an AI capable of immense calculations and thinking, ten minutes was ten lifetimes. So there would be something to occupy him soon, Aen was glad. Depression isn’t a good thing for a creature with his talents to have and with any more down time he figured that that’s exactly what would set in. He was indeed struggling to resist the cold, saddening comfort of sadness and loosing himself in the exploration of the ancient Lyarran ark would help loosen its grip on his soul.
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