by R H Nolan
The horrific shriek slammed into Max like a supersonic sandstorm. His skin felt like it was getting peeled off.
Lyra went flying ten feet backwards through the air.
And then it was over.
Max put his hand to his face, touched it, and pulled back his fingers.
There was some blood, but nothing to suggest any horrific damage.
Then he realized that he had put his hand to his face.
His arm hurt like hell, but he could move it, unlike before. Lyra must have fixed it, at least partly.
Max’s ears were ringing, though. He could barely hear anything over the high-pitched whine in his head.
He could see, though.
He saw Saris lying on the ground, his chest blackened and smoking.
He saw the remaining soldiers holding their arms up in the air and dropping to their knees as Herk flew back and forth in front of them, green flames flaring. Trox stood behind the soldiers with a rifle aimed at their backs. Both guys were shouting something Max couldn’t make out.
Max turned around to see Lyra lying on the ground. Ayla was with her, cradling her head in her lap. Lyra’s nose was bleeding, but she appeared to be conscious.
Ayla’s face was streaked with tears.
“Is she okay?” Max yelled at the top of his lungs. He could barely hear his own voice because of the ringing in his ears. It sounded muffled, like it was buried under layers and layers of blankets.
Ayla looked up at him, smiled tearfully and nodded—
Then she froze, a look of horror on her face as her eyes focused past Max.
Even with that horrible ringing in his ears, her scream was so loud and so high-pitched that Max could still hear it.
“NO!”
With a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach, Max turned around.
Saris was on his back, propped up on one elbow.
His face was basically a charred skull, there was a smoking crater in his chest, and his stats said 4%—but he was still alive.
And his hand was pointed right at Max.
Max hadn’t disintegrated any more sand after the last attack.
He was out of energy. Defenseless.
Just as Max was about to try to jump and dodge, a machete flew from the dead body of a Bloodletter and whipped through the air as though guided by an invisible hand.
The machete slammed into the human side of Saris’s head and pierced deep inside his skull.
The Governor froze.
The stats above his head plummeted to zero.
His human eye rolled back up into the socket, his arm dropped, and his head collapsed back onto the sand.
He was finally dead.
Max looked around to see Ayla with her robotic arm extended in the air.
She had saved Max with her telekinesis.
There was both hatred and grief on Ayla’s face as she stared at her uncle’s body… and then she burst into tears.
Max staggered over to her, dropped to his knees, and held her in his arms.
“Thank you,” he whispered as he held her. “Thank you.”
She just held onto him and cried.
30
The Battle of the Wastelands, as it came to be known in the days and weeks ahead, changed everything.
Lyra healed all of Max’s broken bones and returned Ayla, Trox, and Herk to high levels of Health. Then she healed any seriously wounded guards.
After that, the five friends bound all the prisoners’ hands behind their backs and marched them to the city as Max and the others rode skiffs.
When Max and his friends returned to Neo Angeles, they were met with a hero’s welcome. Turns out the citizens hated Saris’s militaristic regime, but no one had ever spoken up. They were terrified they would die in freak ‘accidents,’ like what had happened to Ayla’s parents and so many others who had protested the Governor’s iron-fisted rule.
And if any naysayers had doubts about the former Governor’s crimes, the corpses down in Sub-Level Five quickly cured them of their delusions.
With Saris dead and the Guard dismantled, the citizens quickly came together to shape the future of the city in a more humane way.
A hastily assembled Council voted unanimously to allow Peacewinds into the city as refugees. They were given housing, food, clothes, and medical treatment. In the coming months, all the Peacewinds’ old metal limbs would be replaced with gleaming, state-of-the-art prosthetics, and the children would be enrolled in school.
Every male in the Bloodletter and the Chaotix tribes had died in the Battle of the Wastelands. Only the women and children remained. They were offered residence in the city on a provisional basis, so long as they abided by the laws of Neo Angeles.
The Bloodletter women all agreed immediately.
Every single Chaotik female refused, choosing instead to remain in the desert.
Max brought his mother and Kier into the city the very next morning after the battle. Max couldn’t help but think of it as a homecoming as they freely roamed the streets of Neo Angeles with all the other Peacewinds.
The awe and gratitude in his mom’s eyes made him wish his dad had been there to see her. Max had forgotten what she looked like when she was happy. He promised himself he would never again.
Max and his family were given an apartment on the third level overlooking the city. For the first time in ten years, Max had a solid floor and actual walls around him, and a ceiling that didn’t let in sand and wind through the cracks. And though they had windows, they could block out the sun whenever they wanted.
There were three bedrooms with a soft bed in each—though for the first few nights, Max, Kier, and his mother all slept on the floor in the living room. It felt odd to go from their old shack to such luxury. Max knew they would get used to it eventually. For now, it was enough to know they were safe, and to have more food in one day than they had normally eaten in a week.
And every time Max ate an orange, he thought of Oryk.
The one problem was that the newly formed Council wanted to know where the alien ship was.
Saris had gathered location data from his attempted drone infiltration into the ship, but it was all encrypted. He had been so paranoid that someone else might steal the information, he had made sure no one else could access it.
Part of Saris’s army had gathered near the portal to Zryk’s ship in order to ambush Max and his friends—but again, Saris had only told them the general location. Not to mention that Zryk had retracted the pod and sealed the tunnel as soon he detected their presence, so no one had visibly seen it.
No one but Saris knew that the ship was thousands of feet below the surface of the desert… and Saris was dead.
But every guard who had survived the battle in the canyon had heard Saris speak openly about the Bug ship when he was taunting Max. As soon as they were jailed in Neo Angeles pending review of their actions, the guards began griping about how Max and his friends were traitors to the human race.
Max had never admitted that he had encountered a living Bug, and the guards grudgingly admitted that. But Max had never contradicted Saris about the ship, and that was enough to prove its existence to most of the Council members.
The Council wanted to know where the ship was. Max refused to tell them, and so did Ayla, Trox, Herk, and Lyra.
All five of them knew that the temptation of power might corrupt the city officials. Until they were sure that there were no would-be Sarises waiting in the wings to grab power and use it to dominate the city—and until they were sure that Zryk would be safe from human fear, hatred, and prejudice—they refused to give up the whereabouts of the ship.
The Council fought their stonewalling over the weeks to come, but gradually gave in. After all, Max and his friends were the five heroes of the Battle of the Wastelands, and had risked their lives to end Saris’s despotic regime. If they couldn’t be trusted, who could?
And so the location of Zryk’s ship stayed a secret… for the time being.
Max’s
years in the Wastelands dealing with the Bloodletters had disabused him of any fanciful notions about human nature. He knew the Council’s goodwill would eventually run out, and that people would start demanding to know where the ship was, and that someone would rise up to try to seize the alien technology for their own purposes.
But he and his friends would deal with that when it happened.
The afternoon after he got his family settled, Max went back to the room where Saris had tortured him. Ayla, Trox, Herk, and Lyra went along with him.
Herk looked around the room and whistled. “Wow… we did some real damage, and we didn’t even know squat about our powers.”
“Why’d we come back here?” Trox asked.
“For these,” Max said.
He knelt down and picked up the ruins of his skates. They had been destroyed in the fight, and were now little more than scrap metal and dangling wires.
He took them anyway.
Maybe one day, he would learn how to rebuild them.
Even if he didn’t, they were still the only thing he had left from his dad, and they reminded Max of him.
That was enough.
The morning after Max’s first night in his family’s new apartment, there was a knock at the door. When he opened it, there stood Ayla, Trox, Lyra, and Herk.
“How’s the hero of the Battle of the Wastelands?” Trox joked.
Max snorted. “I don’t know, how are you?”
“Not bad, not bad,” Trox said with a grin.
Ayla smiled at Max. “You look nice.”
Trox sniffed. “Smell a lot better, too.”
Max ran his fingers through his hair. “First bath I’ve had in… oh, ten years. You wouldn’t believe what the water looked like afterwards.”
“Ew,” Lyra said, wrinkling her nose in distaste.
“Can’t get used to these clothes, though,” Max said, pulling at his new shirt and pants. “They feel too…”
“Clean?” Herk suggested with a smile.
“I was going to say ‘tight,’ but yeah, ‘clean’ feels a little weird, too.”
“Is this your mom and brother?” Ayla asked.
“Oh, yeah—I totally forgot to introduce you guys…”
After Max introduced everyone and pleasantries were exchanged, Ayla said, “Can we borrow Max for a while?”
“Of course,” Max’s mom said with a smile. “Any idea when you’ll be back?”
Max grinned. “Before it rains.”
Both his mother and brother burst out laughing.
For the first time in as long as he could remember, his mom didn’t tell Max to be careful. All she said was, “Have fun.”
An hour later all five friends stood in the stasis chamber of Zryk’s starship. Though they’d been in touch with the alien via their implants, it was the first time they’d seen him in days.
“I must congratulate you, you did very well in the battle against Saris.”
“Thanks to you,” Max said. “If you hadn’t helped us coordinate that final attack, we would have lost for sure.”
“We do not know that for sure,” Zryk said modestly. “Although my calculations showed a 98.37% chance of your defeat.”
“Knowing what I do about my Accuracy stats now, I’d say we would’ve lost,” Max said with a half-smile. “So thank you.”
“Yes, thank you, Zryk,” Ayla said.
All the others said their ‘thank yous,’ too.
“You are very welcome,” the alien said. “And now, Max, I have something for you.”
“More himirini armor?”
“Something similar. Wait approximately 32 Earth seconds while I retrieve it.”
Trox spoke up. “Zryk, you can just say ‘Hang on a second’ instead of being so precise.”
The Bug stared at him. “How can I grasp something immaterial, such as time? Plus it would take far longer than a single Earth second. In fact, including our conversation, it will now take upwards of 53 seconds—”
Trox sighed. “Never mind, just go get it.”
As Zryk walked across the room, Max looked around and noticed that his friends were grinning at each other like idiots.
“What’s going on?” he asked warily.
“Nothing,” Lyra said, but her smile only got bigger.
“You’ll see,” Herk said with a self-satisfied look.
“Wait—you guys know something I don’t!”
“We know a lot of somethings you don’t,” Trox joked.
“What’s—”
“Shhh,” Ayla whispered as she slipped her hand into Max’s and gave a gentle squeeze. “Don’t ruin the surprise.”
“What surprise?”
She leaned over and kissed him quickly on the lips. “Didn’t you hear me say ‘Shhh’?”
“…okay,” Max murmured with a goofy grin.
Trox snorted. “Way to distract him.”
“You know,” Max pointed out to Ayla, “you said we could do a lot more of that once we—”
“I have returned,” Zryk announced, and held out something on the palm of one of his giant hands. “Here are your objects.”
Max turned to look at what the alien was holding. He had expected another piece of himirini for his growing armor set, and what Zryk was holding could have probably been considered a piece of armor. They certainly had the same organic-looking construction that made up the Bug ship.
But they came with an extra bit of sentiment that stunned Max into silence.
“Repulsor skates, I believe you call them,” Zryk said. “Boots, really, with repulsor technology built into the soles.”
Max reached out to take the skates with trembling hands. “How… how did you know?”
“We might have mentioned that you nearly lost your mind when you lost the other ones,” Trox said with a grin.
“So Zryk offered to make you some more,” Lyra added.
Max frowned. “Wait—you guys came back to the ship and talked to Zryk without me?”
“Implants,” Herk said, tapping his temple with a grimace. “I’m not saying I’m cool with hearing somebody else’s voice in my head, but it does come in handy sometimes.”
“Especially in battles,” Ayla added.
Everyone chuckled, and Max thought he heard a small, light hiss escaping from the Qirinian.
“I am aware this gift of mine will never replace the one your father gave you, Max,” Zryk said gently. “I hope in time, however, that you may come to treasure these as well.”
Clearing his throat, Max had to look away from everyone for a second and pull himself together.
“I…” He forced a cough, hoping his voice wouldn’t break, and tried again. “Thanks, Zryk. Gifts, uh… they mean a lot to humans.”
“They mean a great deal to Qirinians as well.”
Max glanced over at Ayla. She smiled at him, her bright blue eyes full of joy.
“I must say something to all of you,” Zryk continued. “I was incorrect in my judgment of your character. Each of you acquitted yourselves admirably.”
“That sounds like a compliment,” Herk said.
The Qirinian clasped his hands together and bobbed his head.
“It is. But I still need your help. All of you. I know that our agreement was hasty, and that it was initially about granting you powers in exchange for the protection of my ship… but there is something else I hope you will help me with.
“My people never meant to hurt Earth. We were refugees from another war… but much time has passed, and that war is most probably over. If I can, I wish to rebuild my ship and return to my home… or at least see if there is another Qirinian still alive out in the vast reaches of space. It matters a great deal to me to know I am not the last of my kind.
“I know that we did not discuss this before your battle with Saris, but… will you help me, friends of Max?”
“Absolutely,” Lyra said.
“I’m in,” Herk agreed.
“Me too,” Trox said.
>
Ayla leaned her head against Max’s shoulder and sighed contentedly. “Definitely.”
Zryk turned his head. “Max?”
Max smiled. “Let’s get started.”
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