Alpha 9

by Rebecca Bosevski

“What do you mean she is the key?”

  Alpha glared at him.

  “Bravo, I need access to their computers,” Alpha said, nodding towards the end of the corridor where it branched out to either side.

  Alpha chanced a look behind him. The Annoronians were still armed, but they didn’t have their guns pointed at them anymore. They were following close enough behind them to have probably heard everything they had said.

  “The only computers I have seen are back there,” Bravo Two pointed to where they had come from. “The ship is mostly living quarters and weapons storage,” Bravo Two said, turning and beginning the walk back to the monitor.

  “What do you mean she is the key?” Kilo asked again, but they ignored him.

  “What kind of weapons?” Alpha was excited at the prospect of an advanced weaponry that could help his team.

  “What is the key?” Kilo asked again, grabbing Alpha’s shoulder and turning him to face him.

  “Shh,” Alpha chastised. “Bravo Two is special, her DNA is the key.”

  Kilo looked from Alpha to Bravo, both holding the same half smile wide eyed expression. “So they know, and Doctor M doesn’t, right?” Kilo went on happy to have their attention for once.

  They nodded in unison.

  “Okay, so you were saying about weapons?”

  Alpha and Bravo rolled their eyes and walked along the corridor again. The metal under their feet giving off a slight hum with each heavy step they took.

  “What weapons do they have?” Alpha whispered into Bravo’s ear as he walked by her side.

  “I have no idea, but Doctor M told the ones that went with her to load up what advanced weapons they could before they headed out. I can’t imagine their advanced ones are slingshots and pebbles.”

  “If only,” Alpha laughed by her cheek and his warm breath tickled her neck and made the hair on her arms stand up.

  When they reached the group of Annoronians that had been trailing them, they parted to clear a way for them to pass. Alpha didn’t like the way they all kept eyes on Bravo Two. The male at the front of the group. He had black hair and pale white skin, not as tall as Alpha, but not shorter by much. He had a badge on his sleeve the others did not, a gold square with some unusual symbol engraved into it.

  “Here,” Bravo said as they reached the monitor they had seen before. “It is set up much like our own systems, the language is completely different though, so you will have to feel your way around. Or you can ask Morris to show you, he showed me how to bring up the off-world feed.”

  “Morris?” Alpha questioned, already knowing which one that was going to be. Yep, the one with the badge stepped forwards.

  “I am Morris, what are you looking for?” he said in an unusual accent, not quite Australian, but close enough to pass an untrained ear.

  “I am not sure this is right,” Alpha said, touching the keys with the tips of his fingers. The Annoronians around him raised their guns again and Morris stepped up beside him.

  “Easy,” Morris said to the Alien guard behind them. “I do not believe he means us harm.”

  “He killed seven of us less than five minutes ago, we can’t trust him,” an Annoronian with bright blonde hair said as she pointed her gun directly at Alpha’s chest.

  “Lower your weapon. That is an order,” Morris said through pursed lips. She huffed and lowered her gun, the others followed a second behind.

  “What don’t you understand?” Bravo Two asked, reaching out to touch Alpha’s hand. But he pulled away before she could.

  “The Doctor, the real Doctor,” he said, looking more at Morris than anyone else. “She made sure I had the codes to get us out, so why wouldn’t she show me what we were really waking up to? Why stay behind when the rest of the world had moved on to their new home. Your home. What made her stay?”

  “Why did you wake up?” Morris questioned, turning he puffed up his chest and stood shoulders back, almost making him level with Alpha. “How have none come before you in all this time?”

  “The Trials,” Kilo said looking from Alpha to Bravo.

  “What trials?”

  “The lab had tests to weed out the weak,” Alpha offered. “If others had been created, none of them passed to make their way out. Not until now. Not until us.” Alpha pressed a few keys on the elaborate keyboard.

  Unlike a basic sixty to eighty keys, this deck held easily one hundred. Some of them looked familiar, like arrows and selection buttons. He had watched Bravo bring up the image of the other world and was confident he locked that sequence into memory. He altered a few keys from what she had done and the images on the screen went fuzzy.

  “What are you looking for?” Morris asked, touching few keys and bringing up random security images from around the ship.

  “I want to bring up your ship’s lab areas,” Alpha said, watching Morris as he pressed each of the keys and the screen locked on a four-image split of laboratory spaces. Each image flicked between different camera angles of their respective rooms.

  “I don’t know what you expect to see,” Morris said, gesturing to the screens in front of them. The other Annoronians moved closer too, curious as to what would unfold. “Those areas have been locked down since we landed. They only used them for storage before we set up the labs down below.”

  Alpha didn’t respond. He stood blankly staring at the interchanging images, his eyes searching for something.

  “What are you looking for?!” Morris yelled, slapping his hand down on the side of the console and causing the images to go a little fuzzy for a second.

  Alpha didn’t move. His eyes darted between the images. “There!” Alpha said, pressing two of the buttons in front of him to freeze the images. “She doesn’t want our lab to make more of them,” Alpha said as he pressed more keys. “This room there,” Alpha said, pointing to a fuzzy small square on the bottom left of the main monitor. “How do I enlarge that to full screen?” he asked Morris without looking at him.

  Morris stepped up and pressed a few keys, Alpha locked them into memory.

  “What are those?” Bravo Two asked as she took in the image of the room filled with tubes. Alpha pressed a few keys and the image changed, the first row of tubes gleamed at them surrounded by a mist of what had to be coolant.

  “It’s just a lab where we store the clone samples and grow them to maturity. We don’t have many pure samples left,” one of the Annoronians said, his ascent another weird combination of Australian and Alien.

  Alpha turned. “No, these are not Annoronian.”

  “What?” Bravo asked, leaning closer to the monitor.

  “They all look like her. Like Doctor M.”

  “No, it can’t be. Why would she make more of herself?” Morris asked, leaning in to see the pods more clearly.

  “I thought I saw something strange in those images outside of the Opera House.” Alpha pressed a few more keys and the monitor switched to the scene of bodies they had witnessed before. He used a small toggle on the side of the console to pan over the corpses then froze frame and zoomed in. The Alien ship might have had advanced systems, but Alpha was a quick study.

  The Annoronians surrounding him lowered their guns and stepped towards the screen, all of them crowding in to try to correct what they thought they were seeing.

  The bloody and broken bodies laid out before the Opera House didn’t lie on grass. The green they had seen earlier was the blood of the Annoronians mixed with the blood and bodies of the human rebels sent to secure the lab.

  “You might be their best hope at survival, Bravo Two,” Alpha said considering her eyes and feeling that same dizzying effect. “But if we don’t get our lab back, Doctor M will have her doppelgänger army by her side in a matter of days.”

  “I don’t understand,” Kilo said looking to Bravo Two. “Why wouldn’t she just grow them here, why does she need our lab?”

  “Do you know how they made us?” Bravo Two asked Kilo.

  “We are enhanced human duplicates
.”

  “Yes, but how did they enhance our DNA exactly?”

  Kilo frowned, obviously searching his memory for the information he wouldn’t find.

  “I don’t know.”

  “With theirs,” Alpha said pointing to the Annoroninans gathered around the screen.

  “What?”

  “It is true,” Bravo Two said moving to stand beside Alpha Nine.

  Kilo's gaze moved between them all as he tried to comprehend the information.

  “Okay, but even if we are a mix, how can you help them? It is not like you are going to just willingly start popping out Bravo Two hybrid babies, is it?”

  Alpha Nine shot a look at Morris, his eyes remained fixed on Bravo Two.

  “Not exactly. I am also immune to the toxin that prevents conception, so with my help, they might be able to find a cure, or use our labs facilities to continue to create hybrids. We have hundreds of unallocated embryos and zygotes; they could create hybrid duplicates immune from the toxin and then those would be able to repopulate the Earth.”

  “This is crazy,” Kilo said, running his hand through his red hair. It spiked up like flames atop his head. “Why don’t they just force you to help, drain you then, create a cure that way?”

  “They need more than a cure; they need our help.”

  “Then I guess we better hurry.”

  “We have time. She will need time to grow the duplicates,” Morris said, touching the screen with the tips of his fingers.

  “No,” Alpha corrected. “In our lab we can reach maturity in a day.”

  “Then we better hurry,” another Annoronian said, a female with bright red hair that rivalled Kilo’s.

  Kilo moved to stand between Alpha and the red head.

  “Will you still be this accommodating when the big bad Doctor M is dead? Or will a battle for this world again ensue once we dispatch her?” Kilo asked her.

  She stopped and holstered her gun at her side.

  “There are but three main ships like this left of our kind,” she began, gesturing with her arms to the space around them.

  “The other two are settled in other parts of your world, already beginning a new life in harmony with the humans left behind.”

  “How do we know that once we dispatch Doctor M that you won’t speed off to retake your world then?” Bravo asked, then dropped her head remembering the images she had shown Alpha, the people happy, enjoying the prosperity of the world they stole from the Annoronians.

  “You don’t,” the redhead said, flatly. “But if we really wanted that we would still be with Doctor M, she wants to go home, that has to be why she is building an army. We don’t want to fight anymore, they have our world, we will keep theirs. Don’t you see? we stand as much to lose as you do in this, so better to be working together don’t you think?” She held out her hand in the middle of them and left it floating there waiting. “So, what do you say?”

  Alpha caught on first and placed his hand over hers in the middle, “I am in.”

  The rest of them followed in turn, Kilo the last to place his hand in. “This could go very wrong,” he said to Alpha hovering his hand over the stack.

  “I know,” Alpha replied, tilting his head towards the pile of hands between them.

  Kilo took a breath then dropped his hand to the top of the pile. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

  They all dropped their hands from the collective grasp and stood in silence for a second. Alpha walked to take a stand between Kilo and Bravo Two.

  “Now we are in agreeance, first thing is first. You acquire weapons, and we will go and collect our freed women. If we are going into battle, we need all the hands we can get.”

  “The women!” Kilo yelled, turning to grab Alpha by his shoulders. “The traps, we have to stop them, they could be killed.”

  “They are with Sky and the others, they should be fine, but go quickly anyway,” Alpha said, nodding towards the blue tube. “Get to them before they get to the park. We will meet you at the hospital with the weapons.”

  Kilo dashed into the tube, and the light instantly dematerialised him, sending him back to the Station below.

  “Right. Weapons. Morris lead the way,” Alpha demanded. Morris paused for a second then walked towards the corridor without a word.

  “He doesn’t like taking orders,” Bravo whispered into Alpha’s ear.

  “Morris,” Alpha called. Morris stopped but didn’t turn around. “If we are going to defeat her, we must work together. Can you show us your weapons… please?” Alpha asked, trying his best not to sound condescending.

  Morris turned his head slightly towards them. “This way,” he said, before continuing down the corridor.

  The lights running beneath them threw unusual shadows on the curved walls. Alpha almost ran up the back of Morris having been fixated on Bravo’s shadow and the way it wafted smoothly along the curve as she walked.

  “What we have left is in here,” Morris said, placing his hand over a rectangle panel on the wall to his left. The door dematerialised to reveal three rows of black metal shelves, almost all of them empty.

  “This, is it?” Alpha asked, stepping into the room and picking up the tiny gun on the nearest shelf. “Where did it all go? You came for war, where is the rest?”

  “The more powerful tokens would have been taken by Doctor M. We lost most of it during the battle, our ships were infiltrated and pillaged by your kind before they turned them on our kind and fled to overtake our world.” Morris pulled a small box from the shelf below where Alpha had grabbed the tiny gun. “These are the charges; you load it like this.” Morris held out his hand for Alpha to hand over the gun.

  Alpha and Bravo watched as Morris clicked a small pin on the side of the gun. A thin piece on the side of the weapon popped open, he slid the charge inside and pushed it closed. The gun lit up immediately with veins of pale blue light.

  “Can you turn that off?” Alpha asked, picking up another of the small guns and following what he had seen Morris do to arm it. “The light is too obvious, no way could we sneak up on Doctor M if our weapons illuminate our position.”

  “Press here,” Morris said, tilting his gun to show Alpha and Bravo the small blue dot on the top of the gun. “This disables the light and this,” he said, pointing to the red button on the side. “Removes the lock. You can’t fire the weapon without pressing this button.”

  “What does it shoot?” Bravo Two asked, holding out her hand to take the weapon from Morris.

  He handed it over without pause. “It shoots out a paralysing beam that freezes most victims in place for about ten seconds.”

  “Good to know,” Alpha said, pressing the button on the gun in his hand to turn off the light and holding it up to check the sight.

  Morris stiffened.

  “Settle, I meant what I said, we are going to need to work together,” Alpha lowered the gun and slid it under the belt at his back. “So what else do you have?”

  Morris led them through the bare shelves as they collected the few items remaining. “Doctor M will have deatomisers, pulsars and the last of our bombs. If she isn’t into the lab already she will be soon,” Morris said, passing Bravo Two a shimmery blue blade which she sheathed in her boot.

  “Deatomisors and pulsars?” Alpha asked, taking more weapons and ammo from the shelves and loading them into a bag they had grabbed from the wall. “What do they do?”

  “The deatomisers are kind of like your hand grenades, but instead of pieces of the victims being blown up within a ten-meter radius, they dematerialise completely, leaving no body parts or blood, or even damage to the surrounding area.”

  Alpha looked confused.

  “It only works on living things, so any equipment, weapons, even clothing remains behind,” Morris clarified. “There would not have been many left, maybe half a dozen. We used up most of our supply during the battle.”

  “And pulsars?” Bravo Two asked, picking up another blade and sliding into her
other boot.

  “Pulsars are like these,” Morris said, holding up the gun slung over his back. “But bigger and more powerful. These will shoot out a nine hundred and fifty milliwatt beam, punching a hole about six centremeters through skin. The pulsars shoot out ten times that. To put it simply, it could take your head clean off.”

  “So how many of these do you think Doctor M has?”

  “We lost most during the battle, like I said, and some would have little charge left, so probably only about ten or so.”

  “So she can’t recharge them?” Bravo asked, helping to fill the bag with the little boxes and blades.

  “Your world lacks the required radiation to fuel both our ships and our weapons.”

  “Is that why your ship is on top of the Station, you are using our power to operate the labs?” Alpha asked, remembering the way the tentacles of the ship hugged the Station.

  “We spent a year getting our most valuable systems to run off your basic electrical power systems. Doctor M thinks your lab is run off one of our power cores, traded during the negotiations with your people. I doubt we would have handed one over, and without the proper radiation, our ships will never leave this planet. So, seeing as I doubt your kind are going to be popping on home any time soon with a spare central core, we are stuck here.”

  Bravo Two raised her brow at the obvious dig but said nothing. They continued to load the bags with the weapons they could and when the shelves were completely empty they made their way back to the blue tube.

  ***

  Armond sat on a high branch of the tree waiting and watching. Bea told him to keep an eye out for the duplicates she had sent towards Central Station but also for any Annoronians that could derail her plan to secure the Opera House facility. He was easily concealed amongst the branches and had a clear view in both directions of the street.

  Movement on a high building across the way caught his eye and he drew his bow. It wasn’t the highest of weapons tech, but he was a pretty good shot, and liked the sport of it. He steadied his hand on the branch in front of him and scanned for the movement that drew his eye.

  She walked the edge of a tall building beside the park. At first he thought she was human, a rebel maybe. But then she turned and her pale skin gleamed in the light. He pulled back the bow and waited to fire his shot.