by R H Nolan
“Not only that, but your ships let off a huge dose of your energy, all right. We call it radiation. But it didn’t make us evolve. It killed over half of the population. Of the ones that didn’t die, millions were… mutated, I guess. I don’t even know if the Sandwalkers are technically human anymore. The rest of us… well, we survived. But the radiation hasn’t left, and anyone without a synced implant is pretty much as good as dead.” Max absently ran a finger over his temple, where he felt a lump the size of a tiny seed just below his skin. “The implants mostly keep us safe, but we still haven’t figured out a way to keep the radiation from taking out a few limbs here and there.”
That last part he’d meant as a joke, although it was sort of a dark one.
Zryk obviously didn’t get it.
“I do not understand. Our energy is meant only for improvement.”
“I’m guessing that’s only if you can control who gets how much of it.”
“Max, I must offer my deepest apologies for what has happened to your planet and your people.”
That had never been something Max ever expected to hear from anyone. He blinked at Zryk, then looked down at the Qirinian carapaces strewn about the chamber floor.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “Me too.”
Zryk followed his gaze to his dead crew members, and the chamber fell completely silent for a few moments. Then the Bug danced its fingers over the console again.
“I can still offer you what we always intended. Evolution is still possible, Max. The energy chamber can provide a higher level of what you experienced and… the word is bio-engineer, I believe. A certain amount of energetic bio-engineering will provide you with abilities far beyond what humans have reached on their own. Beyond what they might have reached, had we not intervened.”
“What would happen to me?” Max asked.
“You would gain abilities that no other human on Earth has.”
“Like what?”
The alien shrugged. Max was struck by the similarity at first—and then realized that the alien had probably picked up the gesture from him.
“I do not know. Perhaps the ability to control electromagnetic waves? To move objects without touching them? Telekinesis is the word in your language, I believe.”
Max’s eyes bugged out of his head. “You mean… super powers?”
“If that is the correct designation, then yes: super powers.”
“What would mine be?”
“That I cannot know for certain. Every human’s capacity for evolution is slightly different, so I cannot predict what yours might be. But it would be something far beyond your current capabilities.”
Max felt surprised—both that such a thing was possible, and that Zryk was offering to give it to him. The Bug really must have felt awful for what had happened, even though the war and everything afterward was apparently just a huge mistake on both sides. Max might have felt pretty responsible too, if he was the last human left alive on a planet that humans had all but killed.
Then he grew suspicious. “I wouldn’t grow an extra head or anything, would I?”
“No. The energy would not alter your physical form in any way. It would only act on the untapped potential of your genetic code that has not yet expressed itself.”
“So… you want to give me all this just to say you’re sorry?”
“Sorry. Yes, I am sorry. But I offer you this in exchange for your assistance.”
“In getting you the parts you need for your ship…” Max murmured as he remembered what the alien wanted.
“Yes.”
That made a lot more sense.
From daily survival in the Wastelands, Max knew that no one gave away something of tremendous value just out of the goodness of their heart.
The fact that the alien was bartering with him actually put him more at ease about the entire arrangement.
Well… a little, anyway.
Zryk sensed his hesitation.
“The procedure is precise and calculated. It will not feel different for you than healing your bone. Perhaps a little more intense, but in no way painful, and it will not be dangerous.” Zryk spread his front hands in a gesture of offering. “Why not, yes?”
Max scratched his head. “Uh… I don’t know.”
Admittedly, the thought of having superhuman powers sent a wave of excitement through him. But he knew what the Bugs’ power source did. He lived through it every day. He saw what it had done to his brother’s legs and his mother’s hand.
And despite how confident the alien was, how did he know for sure that it wouldn’t hurt him? What if Max sprouted a third arm, or a second head?
What if it killed him?
Then who would be left to take care of Kier and Mom?
Also, in the back of Max’s mind, a little voice kept saying that having awesome powers no one else in the world would ever have could only bring more trouble to him and his family than it was worth. His skates had gotten him a lot of attention from the Bloodletters. What would the attention be like if he had an ability ten times more useful than his skates?
And he kept returning to the possibility of that second head… or third arm… or death.
There were a lot of possible ways for this to go wrong. And even if it went right, it could still bring him a lot of trouble and misery.
The energy chamber had healed his arm and brought all his Health up to 100%, yes… but maybe he should just walk away now while he was still ahead.
“I will also create himirini for you,” Zryk added. “The… armor to compliment the new abilities you would receive. All this would make it quite easy for you to find the items I require for my ship, I believe.”
With a sigh, Max shook his head. “I think I’ll have to pass.”
It hurt to say it. He would have loved to take Zryk’s deal, but he’d convinced himself this was the right decision. Too much was on the line, and way too much could go wrong.
His mother and his brother depended on him. If something happened to Max, they were as good as dead.
“Pass?” the alien asked, confused.
Max offered a weak smile. “It means no, thanks.”
“You do not wish to help me, is that it?”
“No, it’s not that.”
“Then what is the reason? Do you believe the procedure to be unsafe? I can assure you—”
“I said no thank you,” Max spoke up, this time more forcefully.
Zryk’s whole body drooped. “I… I do not understand, but I will comply with your wishes. However, should you decide otherwise in the future, I would be very amused to make this exchange.”
Amused? The Bug had probably meant ‘happy’ or something like it, but Max didn’t have it in him to correct the alien.
“I have a small request, though,” Zryk added.
“What?”
“Might I have some of the plant life you carry?” Zryk pointed to Max’s pockets still bulging with all the fruit and vegetables he’d gathered from the city garden. “I wish to study them.”
Max looked down at his pants and jacket. He’d totally forgotten about the food, and now he felt bad because he didn’t want to part with any of it. Kier and Mom needed it.
Still, Zryk had healed an injury that would have taken weeks to heal. Max might have been out of commission for who knows how long. He certainly couldn’t have chanced sneaking back into Neo Angeles with a broken wrist—if the guards chased him, he would die for sure.
Giving Zryk some of the fruits and vegetables was the least he could do.
He picked one of each of the fruits out of his pockets. They were bruised and battered from his various falls—in fact, the pear and orange were almost reduced to mush—but he supposed they were still intact enough for the alien to study.
“That’s an apple, that’s a pear, that’s a cucumber, and that’s an orange,” he said as he placed the items one by one into Zryk’s huge, outstretched hand. “Sorry they’re a little messy… they got squished when I fell.
”
“‘Squished’— does this mean compacted and partially ruptured?”
“Yeah… more or less.” Max looked up at the alien. “Thank you for healing me.”
The Bug laid the food down on the console in front of him. “It was my honor, Max.”
“Thanks… so, what now?”
“You are free to go. I will remain here.”
Nodding, Max turned away from the Bug to head out of the incredible alien starship. Then he remembered the major issue in his way and turned back.
“Uh, Zryk? I would leave, but I only found your ship because I was trying to find a way out of the other one, the human starship right above yours. I kind of… fell into it.” He winced, feeling a lot more foolish now that he’d said it out loud.
Zryk hissed again, which was probably another laugh. “That was designed well for us both.”
Max frowned. “What?”
“You fell and I awoke. We aided each other.”
For an alien who had spent so much time studying humans, the Bug hadn’t quite gotten all of their language down yet.
“Oh… right…”
Max still didn’t understand how that helped him leave the ship and get back to the surface.
Zryk turned back to his console and typed for several seconds. Max started to wonder if he had to flat-out ask the Bug for help getting back to the surface, but then the mechanical male voice filled the chamber again.
“This ship has a… port, yes? For moving through solid surfaces. You might say it dissipates an obstacle.”
“Like it disintegrates something?” Max asked.
“Yes. It is still functioning. I will take you there and to the surface again, though the computer must remain. I cannot communicate with you once we leave this chamber. So I will say thank you, Max, and I hope to meet you again soon.”
“Thanks. Uh… good luck.”
He wasn’t quite sure what else to say, because he was pretty certain he wouldn’t be coming back.
“Good luck… this means that probabilities work to one’s advantage, and give one a favorable outcome, yes?”
“Right.”
“Then good luck to you as well, Max.”
Zryk turned from the computer and motioned for Max to follow him through the ship.
7
Zryk moved quickly for how hulking he was and how much of his ten-foot height was abdomen and thorax and overhanging rear arms. Max had to walk quickly to keep up with him.
As they went, Max tried to map out the route they took through the Qirinian starship, but it was difficult—the rest of the ship looked exactly the same as the chamber in which he’d found Zryk, all organic surfaces and bulging, biomechanical structures. The vessel was massive, and Max started to wonder when they’d ever start making their way up to the surface—or if it was even possible.
Finally, Zryk stopped at what looked very much like an escape pod, based on what he’d seen in Earth’s destroyed ships. The Bug punched a few buttons on a console, and the glistening metal coils comprising the ship’s walls withdrew so that an opening appeared into one of the pods. He gestured for Max to enter first, then stepped in behind him. Zryk had to duck a little under the doorway, and Max wondered if this particular Qirinian might have been taller than most of the others. There really wasn’t a way to tell anymore, was there?
Zryk worked at the commands in the pod for a few more seconds, then a massive shudder ran through the pod, making it jerk in place. Max sucked in a breath and steadied himself against the pod wall. For the first time, he felt the odd makeup of this alien ship beneath his fingertips. It wasn’t slimy like it looked but hard and firm and cool.
Strange, then, that it could reform itself almost at will, like how the walls had opened into the escape pod.
The pod jerked again and started to oscillate, like a power core fueling up to launch some spacefaring vessel off the planet entirely. Max had a sudden vision of this pod taking off from the ship below what had to be thousands of feet of desert sand, erupting pretty much immediately and wiping both him and Zryk off this planet and out of existence.
A sharp series of hisses came from the alien, which Max had decided to peg as the Bug’s laughter.
“Are you sure this thing works?” Max asked, hating how timid he sounded.
Zryk nodded.
The lights flashed on in the pod, and Zryk gestured behind Max with another dip of his head. When Max turned around, he saw what was probably a viewscreen, but it was all black. Probably because they were buried under so much sand.
Before Max could ask what he was supposed to see, a bright light flared in the viewscreen. It settled into a column of light, and then the vast amounts of sand around them just … disappeared.
“What the…” Max gaped at the viewscreen, realizing that the sand was being moved away to form a tunnel just ahead of them. Their path wasn’t cleared aside or blasted away; it just vanished from view and left a few feet of open space instead. The pod jerked one more time, then they were moving forward through the tunnel.
The light erupting from the pod forged a path in front of them. Max could always see the wall of sand just ahead of them, but it cleared away almost as if the pod itself used the same repulsor technology as Max’s skates. Only it moved the sand … somewhere else instead.
He turned back to face Zryk, who just watched the viewscreen and didn’t make a sound.
“How does it do…”
Then Max caught sight of another light shining through the window of the pod’s entrance door. The Bug stepped aside when Max staggered toward the door. The pod didn’t take a sharp angle upward, but he could definitely feel it now. When he got to the window, he had to stand on his tiptoes just to peer over the bottom edge. He didn’t even care. The sight there knocked every other thought from his head.
The tunnel stretched all the way back to the buried Qirinian ship, but it wasn’t built of sand anymore. Max didn’t know what he’d expected—probably for the tunnel to have collapsed behind them, because there wouldn’t be anything to hold it open once they passed. Only that expectation had been completely wrong. The tunnel he looked through now, lit by the exterior lights at the back of the pod, wasn’t made of sand. It looked exactly like the rest of Zryk’s ship—coiling rows of hardened, organic-looking ridges he now knew weren’t metallic but much more like a shell. Like Zryk’s exoskeleton. He didn’t see sand anywhere, which had to mean this tunnel was being created as they moved through it within the pod.
“How does that work?” he asked, turning with wide eyes toward Zryk again.
The Qirinian merely lifted his front hands and clicked a few times, reminding Max that they couldn’t hold a conversation anymore without the computer in the stasis chamber.
“Right,” Max said. “Well, it’s awesome.”
He couldn’t really say much more than that. Whether or not Zryk understood him completely, the Bug still bowed his head and took a wider stance on the floor before they tipped into a much steeper incline.
After just a few more minutes, the pod leveled out again and stopped moving. Max watched the rest of the sand in front of them disappear on the viewscreen, which filled with blazing sunlight. Blinking, he turned back toward Zryk and offered an indecisive smile.
“Thanks you,” he said, not even thinking before extending his hand.
The bug eyed him for a moment, then reached out and pressed Max’s hand between both of the alien’s hard, oddly humanoid hands. Max snorted but decided to just leave it at that. Another door slid open at the front of the pod; Max hadn’t expected the viewscreen to be part of a door, but he wasn’t going to waste time trying to figure out how he’d gotten back to the surface. All that mattered was that he’d gotten here, with the Bugs’ inexplicable technology, and that he could not get back to his family.
Max stepped through the door and had to climb up onto the top of the pod so he could try to pull himself the last few feet out of the sandy tunnel. It was still sand in
front of him, though he gave himself a moment to turn around and see the Qirinian shell-like walls of the tunnel above and behind the pod. He wished he had the time to figure out how that worked, but his mom and Kevin were waiting for him—and the food he’d stolen from the city.
When he’d scrambled to the surface of the desert and turned around, Zryk still watched him through the pod’s open door.
“Uh… good luck,” Max said.
What more was there to say in goodbye? He didn’t plan on coming back to the Bug ship, or getting superhuman powers. Or helping Zryk with his hunt for Qirinian supplies to repair that ship. Unless the alien planned on paying Max with food, which didn’t seem likely, he couldn’t see a practical reason for coming back.
Zryk spread his arms and bowed his head again, then lifted a finger to point at Max. Whatever that meant.
The pod’s front door slid back into place, and then the small alien vessel reversed back down the tunnel toward the body of the ship. It looked like it moved a lot faster now, though Max guessed that was because the tunnel had already been made. Then it was gone, and Max stood alone in the desert again—on top of what might now be the most valuable thing in the Wastelands. And he was the only one who knew about it.
With a deep breath, Max turned around to figure out just exactly where he was. The Quirinian ship was not only deep underground, but the tunnel Zryk had created was at an angle. So Max had to be pretty far from where he’d fallen into the crashed Earth ship.