by Glen Zipper
I whipped my head toward the open entryway, afraid more Kastazi would respond to the students’ horrified screams. One step ahead of me, Bossa leapt down to the deck and secured the armory’s blast-warped doors as best he could.
“Him,” I said to Anatoly, pointing to the Rapax lying faceup on the floor. “Quickly.”
Anatoly grabbed the soldier’s feet and dragged him toward me. I jammed my boot up under his chin, pinning him to the floor.
“Show me his face.”
A whoosh of pressurized oxygen escaped as Anatoly removed the Rapax’s helmet.
With his bald, narrow, sloping head and thickly husked, oyster-gray skin, the Kastazi’s humanoid appearance was infused with all the same predatory efficiency as a great white shark. Even after so many years, their menacing appearance still managed to unsettle me.
“How many ships? How many infantry?” I demanded.
He offered no response, but his gleaming silver pupils darted back and forth, regarding me with a rabid intensity.
I squeezed my boot harder under his chin, choking off his airway.
“How many?”
Just as his lips parted to speak, a voice called out from his helmet. It repeated the same Kastazi refrain again and again.
Mar’eh Gral, bak. Mar’eh Gral, bak.
“What are they saying?”
“It’s his name,” Liko told me. “Mar’eh Gral. They’re asking him to report.”
I could hear the same queries broadcasting from inside the helmets of the other two soldiers. Each frantically barked responses back into their coms. A moment later their voices went quiet, abruptly replaced by an escalating, high-pitched frequency. I knew what was coming, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
The earsplitting noise crescendoed to a barely perceptible pop. An instant later the Rapax and his men synchronously stiffened and then fell limp.
“Widowmakers,” Anatoly confirmed, referring to the tiny charges embedded deep inside the brain of every Kastazi soldier. The remotely detonatable implants ensured they could never be taken prisoner.
My ears still ringing from the grenade’s bang, I fixated on the dead Rapax’s empty stare. Blood seeped into the whites of his eyes, encircling the dilated silver crescents peeking out from under his lazy, drooping eyelids.
“Don’t touch that!” Bix screamed at someone standing behind me.
Startled, I spun around to see Annalisa holding an Eradicator. The weapon recognized her human biosig and automatically began to squeal toward overload. She looked more confused than frightened as it detonated in her hands and sent its virulent energy surging through her body. In the span of little more than a heartbeat, she was gone.
Liko dropped to his knees, hovering over her smoldering biomass in a state of shock.
Julian yanked him right back to his feet. “We have to go!”
Overwhelmed by the nauseating smell of Annalisa’s melted flesh, I stood frozen.
Viv shook me. “John!”
Her voice was like a distant echo.
“John!” she shouted again. “Let’s go!”
I staggered back a step, a sudden dizziness washing over me.
“John?”
My head filled with intense pressure.
“Anatoly, help! Something’s wrong with him!”
White noise clogged my ears. Viv yelled something else, but I couldn’t hear her.
I held up my hand, urging her to stay back.
Then, just as quickly as the feeling came, it was gone—leaving in its wake a powerful presence. And it spoke to me.
John, come now.
The voice’s intrusion into my head was unsettling, but I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t afraid because of who it belonged to.
Fuller.
Anatoly took hold of my chin and loudly snapped his fingers in my face.
“Are you all right? Can you hear me?”
There’s very little time.
You know what to do.
Since Fuller was the architect of countless technologies that defied our understanding of nature, his figuring out how to broadcast right into my skull wasn’t so much difficult to accept. It was more difficult to explain. Nonetheless, I made an attempt.
“It’s Fuller,” I began. “He’s . . . talking to me.”
Noticing the concerned expressions staring back at me, I quickly abandoned any notion of explaining. We didn’t have the time.
“Forget it. I’m fine,” I said abruptly, pulling away from Anatoly’s hand. “The docking platform is only about two hundred meters from here. We need to get everyone to the California. Right now.”
Gentry looked at me like I was out of my mind. “We have no idea how many Kastazi infantry are between us and that platform!”
“Try, or wait to die,” I stoically replied. “Those are our options.”
Gentry craned his neck around the armory. “Do you all understand what he’s suggesting?”
No one answered, but their terrified expressions told me they understood.
“If we’re going to do this, we need to do it right,” Gentry said, reluctantly conceding we had no other choice. “Let’s get our people into skirmish formation.”
The others waited for me to move first.
“Go,” I ordered them. “Do what he says.”
“What about you?” Ohno asked.
“You’re going for Nick,” said Bix, his face growing pale with dread. “Aren’t you?”
“I have to. Without him, Fuller’s plan won’t work.”
Viv stepped beside me. “I’m coming with you.”
“No,” I insisted, steering her back toward the others.
“You need my help!” she protested, grabbing me by the wrist and stubbornly pushing back.
“So do they.”
Consulting the students’ desperate faces, Viv loosened her grip.
“Get them through. I’ll meet you at the ship. I promise.”
She looked at me, crestfallen, like I was saying goodbye.
Hurry.
You must hurry.
Bix nervously blinked his eyes. “And how are you going to get past the Kastazi?”
I picked up the Rapax’s empty helmet and held it in my hands. Its many pointed, sharp edges pricked at my fingertips.
“Ruse de guerre,” I answered. “They’ll never see me coming.”
It took a thousand meters or so before I felt comfortable inside the Rapax’s armor. A persistent electrical charge supported its heavy exoskeleton, assisting each of my steps toward an awkwardly light and powerful gait. A muddled array of readouts projected inside the helmet clouded my field of vision. I did my best to tune them out and concentrate on taking smooth, even strides.
Straight ahead.
I nearly stumbled as I approached a small unit of Kastazi soldiers, but none of them seemed to notice. They were too fixated on the Aeson they had pushed down onto his knees. He looked up at me as I passed, his eyes bulging with fear. I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t.
Don’t look back.
Behind me I heard the sound of Eradicator fire and the Aeson’s screams. The two horrible noises melded together and bounced from the corridor walls like a demonic howl. I cringed, half expecting a second blast to hit me in the back. It was another twenty paces before I exhaled.
Keep going.
With each additional turn I happened upon more remnants of the Resistance’s dead, and the revolting smell of death grew thicker and more pungent. I kept pushing forward, focusing on arbitrary spots in the distance to prevent my senses from ramping into overload.
Focus.
You’re getting closer.
Amid the carnage I had lost my bearings, but the voice continued to guide my path. Summoning me toward it.
Over the gangway.
Crossing over a long, metal-girded gangway, I could see the movement of Kastazi troops in the corridor just beneath me. Sparsely dispersed, they methodically prowled forward in the same direction. It wasn�
�t what I would have expected from a coordinated infiltration. Their numbers were too few. Their movements too passive.
Into the lift.
An open lift waited at the end of the gangway. I recognized it from before and stepped inside.
Level 3.
My helmet broadcasted constant Kastazi chatter into my ears as the lift shot up three levels. Almost all of it was gibberish to me. Except for one thing they kept repeating. Ampla’ras. I knew that word. It meant “reinforcements.”
The Kastazi’s call for support confirmed my suspicion that their incursion had been precipitously launched, presumably acting upon a sudden and unexpected piece of intelligence.
The lift doors opened to reveal a long, empty corridor, its lights flickering on and off.
Run.
I burst forward, each of my strides landing with a thud. A few hundred meters in, the lighting failed completely, automatically activating bright green–hued night vision inside my visor. I quickly adjusted to the artificial illumination and ran even faster.
Finally turning the corner to Fuller’s laboratory, I stopped dead in my tracks. Two Kastazi soldiers were standing guard outside its open doorway. My adrenaline peaked and sweat oozed from every pore in my body.
“Ahk bak al,” one of them called out to me, light emanating from the lab silhouetting his formidable stature.
I didn’t understand what he was saying.
Don’t stop.
I ignored him and proceeded forward.
Both Kastazi stepped in front of me, blocking my path.
“Ahk bak al,” the soldier repeated.
Don’t stop.
I tilted my head toward the red stripes on my shoulder, invoking my “superior rank.”
“Dach!” I barked, confident that was their word for move.
“Ahk bak al!” he demanded once again.
I wanted to turn and run the other way, but it was far too late for that.
Don’t stop.
“Ahk bak al,” I repeated, wrongly guessing it was some kind of salutation.
“Ertu!”
I knew ertu. It meant “human.”
The soldiers drew their Eradicators and straightened their arms to fire.
I stood frozen in terror, but a guttural voice boomed from Fuller’s laboratory before they could pull their triggers.
“Pral!” it shouted.
Pral meant “stop.”
A thickset Kastazi soldier lumbered through the laboratory’s doorway, each of his armor-clad thighs nearly as wide as a tree trunk. The three white stripes on each of his shoulders told me he was an Apexus, the rank of a Kastazi battalion commander. He wore neither a helmet nor gloves.
“Tak za ras,” he said.
His men detached my helmet and threw it to the ground.
I could see my reflection in the Apexus’s eyes. His silver pupils eerily distorted my image like a funhouse mirror.
“The son of the Butcher of Titan Moon,” he said in perfect English as he ran his hand back along his head. His fingers, wet with fresh blood, left dark-red stains inside the bald, wrinkly folds of his scalp. “Fortune has smiled upon me today.”
Following their commander back through the doorway, the soldiers ushered me inside with a few swift jabs to my ribs. The first thing I saw was Nicholas’s pale, lifeless body lying prone on the table. A thick umbilical wire connected him to a tall, black obelisk I hadn’t seen before. Fuller sat slumped in a chair beside it, his head slung low against his chest.
“He said you’d come for him,” the Apexus said, loitering between us, his swollen hand still dripping with Fuller’s blood.
The obelisk looked inert, but like a magnet, something about it beckoned me.
“And he said you’d bring me the key.”
“Key to what?” I hazily replied, forcing myself to break free from the enchanting power of the obelisk.
“To the source code of that abomination on the table,” he replied, perfunctorily gesturing toward Nick’s body.
I had no such key.
“I’m afraid the doctor lied to you,” I answered, settling back into my center.
The Apexus dismissively smirked at me. “He would not be so foolish.”
“You’re the fool if you thought torturing him would get you what you want.”
Angered, he stepped close and inspected the contours of my placid expression. His moist breath wafted against my nose, its sour odor burning my nostrils.
Vexed by my calm, he cocked his head to the side. “You are not afraid?”
“No,” I lied, mustering everything I had to maintain the illusion of fearlessness.
“You should be,” he hissed, leveling his Eradicator at my head. I could feel the weapon’s radiant energy pulsing against my skull. “Without the key, your life has no purpose.”
I ignored him, knowing that no matter what I said or did, he was still going to kill me.
“Speak!” he shouted, spraying me with a fine mist of his vile spit.
My mind ranged back to the Code of the Alliance Fighting Force. In combat, it was every soldier’s duty to evade capture, resist while a prisoner, or escape from the enemy. Resistance was the only option left at my disposal.
“My name is John Douglas Marshall,” I defiantly responded, “senior cadet aboard the UAS California. Service designation mark X1A26-Alpha.”
The Code required us to provide our name, rank, and SD mark, and nothing else. After that we were supposed to evade any and all questioning to the utmost of our ability.
“The key!”
I was absolutely terrified, and with each passing second it grew more and more difficult to hide.
I looked to Fuller. He was drifting in and out of consciousness, perhaps not even aware of my presence.
“My name is John Douglas Marshall, senior cadet aboard the UAS California. Service designation mark X1A26-Alpha.”
The Apexus pressed his Eradicator against my forehead. Its vibration rattled down into my teeth.
The Kastazi’s finger tensed against the trigger.
An overwhelming sadness began to swallow my fear. Not because I was going to die. Because I had failed.
“My name is John Douglas Marshall,” I repeated one last time before closing my eyes.
And then I waited.
When nothing came, I wondered if I was already dead. That perhaps fate had mercifully spared me from the pain.
“Very well,” the Apexus sighed.
Holstering his weapon, he stepped behind Fuller and snatched his head up by the hair. “If you don’t fear for yourself, perhaps you’ll fear for him.”
The doctor’s eyes rolled forward as the Apexus unsheathed a short, serrated dagger from his belt and slipped it under Fuller’s chin.
“Don’t,” Fuller pleaded, blood drooling over his lips.
“You can save him.”
I stood silent, knowing I could not.
His attention focused on me, the Apexus began to cut. I watched helplessly as blood spilled down Fuller’s neck.
“Stop!” the doctor shouted just before the blade sliced his jugular.
The Apexus paused. “You know how to end this, Doctor.”
Fuller meekly wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
“He doesn’t have the key,” he gurgled. “He is the key.”
I didn’t react. I recognized Fuller’s fantastical lie for what it was. A futile attempt to buy us more time.
“Explain,” the Apexus replied, bending his ear close to Fuller’s mouth.
Exhausted and broken, the doctor pressed his quivering hand against his open, seeping wound. “It’s inside him,” he weakly uttered. “A biometric interface. If he touches the Hybrid, its source code will export to the obelisk.”
The Apexus looked at me skeptically, searching my face for any hint of complicity with Fuller.
There was nothing for him to find. Fuller’s desperate rambling was nothing but nonsense.
“Bring him to the table,” he
ordered his men while impressively twirling his dagger back into its sheath.
The soldiers pushed me toward Nick. His pallid body lay rigidly on the cold slab.
“Go ahead, then,” the Apexus instructed me. “Touch him.”
It made no difference, but adhering to the Code, I refused.
With a perfunctory nod from their commander, the soldiers forced my hand down upon Nick’s chest. As soon as my fingers rested on his flesh, a sharp spike of pain rushed up through my arm. It felt like acid coursing through my veins.
The Apexus tapped his sharp, yellowed fingernails against the still-inert obelisk.
“More lies?”
“No more lies,” Fuller replied, flashing his blood-soaked teeth with a wide, wily smile.
Just then the obelisk came alive, strobing thousands of images. They were, inexplicably, my memories. My life, all at once flashing before my eyes.
The arrival of Kastazi Destroyers to Earth before the war.
My father and Commander Nixon wishing Viv and me goodbye before shipping off to join the fight.
Lying in a hospital bed, writhing in agony from my burns.
Charlie.
My mother’s murder.
Striker fire raining down upon Farragut.
The first time I met Bix.
The Crucible.
Our prelaunch fight with the students in the Camp Penbrook canteen.
My father sitting across from me, confessing his own fear.
Sigma 547-T’s pink ocean waves breaking against its beach’s blue silicon sand.
Gallipoli ravaged.
Settling into the captain’s chair for the first time.
The gaping hole in the California that sucked Safi into space.
Nick standing in his doorway without a scratch.
Viv’s gentle kiss.
The obelisk froze on that final memory, a cosmically cruel reminder of how much I had left unsaid. I should have told Viv how her kiss made me feel. That I didn’t want it to be the last time.
Filled with regret, my eyes fell down to Nick. It actually brought me solace to think that I’d soon be like him. At peace.
Then his eyes snapped open. Still flat on his back, he snatched the Apexus’s Eradicator and squeezed off three quick blasts with exacting precision. By the time I’d gained my wits, each of the Kastazi had collapsed to the floor, their skin and bones already catabolizing toward liquescence.