by Marc Landau
My stomach grumbled and mouth watered at the thought of the cobbler. I remembered I couldn’t remember the last time we’d eaten. I wanted to stuff my face until my stomach stretched to its limit, then take one of my famous power naps, and wake up rejuvenated with an answer to the problem of the Krin. My brain said: Don't do that. Don’t waste a single second. Get back to Prime before they destroy it all.
That’s when I thought of Mom. She was probably sitting in her favorite chair with one of her cats on her belly, watching a CSI vid and sipping decaf, oblivious to the fact there was an advancing army of evil aliens coming to wipe her off the planet.
My stomach gurgled again. I needed to eat. It was time for a crappy nutri-bar, or I was going to pass out. I asked the ship to have a mini-bot bring a few to the command room so Kat and I could dine while we worked out our next step.
I didn’t want to ask the walrus. I could tell from the state of it that it needed time to decompress and reset. Whatever had been going on inside its metal skeleton had taken a toll. It was just standing there, shell-shocked and exhausted from the programming battle it had been subjected to. I couldn’t imagine what had gone on inside, but I was sure the bot had used all of its resources to keep the alien at bay. It hadn’t worked, but it had probably limited the alien's abilities and helped us out when we needed it most.
A mini-bot scooted in with a small pallet of disgusting pseudo-meal ration energy bars. They were truly gross. Like eating a chunk of chalk-flavored clay. But it had all the nutrients soldiers needed to keep fighting, and after I forced a few swallows, I felt better. I hadn’t even realized how weak I was until there were nutrients back in my body.
I handed Kat her choice of bars. They had delicious-sounding flavors like boysenberry-choco-nut, strawberry smoothie, and triple chocolate. But they were all literally the same bars. The only thing that differentiated them was the bland packaging with different names.
Of course, she took the boysenberry choco-nut. Who wouldn’t? It sounded great. But she was in for a huge flavor disappointment.
It crossed my mind as I handed her the nutri-bar that a ten-foot long worm was going to shoot out of her mouth and snatch the bar and my arm along with it, but luckily, nothing happened. She just took it and said, “Thanks.”
Maybe the fact she’d already eaten a third of the Outpost’s rations had satiated the worms. That, or now that she and the Ultra had gotten to know one another better, they had a clearer line of communication.
“Hey Ultra, can you not shoot ten-foot snaggle-toothed worms from my mouth anymore?”
“Sure thing.”
“Great, thanks.”
“No prob.”
Kat took a ravenous bite. She was obviously looking forward to boysenberry-choco-nut goodness but when she realized what was actually in her mouth, she looked at me with horror and spat out hunks of nutri-clay.
“That is so gross. I can’t even eat it.”
It was horrible, but she had eaten it. The worms ate a whole bunch of it without a complaint but it wasn’t the time to remind her of that.
“You should try to have a little. We need the calories,” I said.
She grunted her dissatisfaction but knew I was right. So she forced herself to take a few more bites and swallow the chalky wretchedness. We both chewed, smiling awkwardly at one another. Yum.
“It’s almost as bad as the pasta on Fulburt,” I said.
“I’d totally forgotten about that.”
“Our romantic third date where we both spent the night dry-heaving and sweating with some unknown food-born virus.”
“So romantic,” Kat smiled as she uncomfortably forced more nutri-ration bar down her gullet.
“You look like when we had to give Poka those huge antibiotic pills. Want me to rub your throat to help it go down?”
“Shut up. This is much worse than those pills.”
I choked on a piece of clay-bar and nodded my head in agreement.
We finished our romantic dinner on the bridge, with corpses and remnants of warships floating by, then we got back to work on our brilliant plan to stop the Krin from destroying Prime. Hopefully I could come up with something less stupid than what I did down on the planet.
First things first. We needed the walrus back at full capacity, or as close to it as possible after all it had been through.The bot was hobbled. It needed to re-jigger or clean its code or something. I don't know. I’m not a robot engineer.
“Hey, bot, why don’t you go to your pod and clean your code for a while?” I was basically telling it to do the equivalent of taking a nap. Hey, it usually worked for me.
If I needed to, I’d hit the switch on the back of its neck and do a hard reboot. But after everything the poor walrus had been through, I wanted to avoid any further shock to its system. It likely needed some serious chill time. As much as a part of me would’ve been relieved to be rid of it, I was glad it had decided to stay. It had chosen humans over aliens. Take that, brethren. You shatheads.
The walrus beeped listlessly and hovered like a drunk out of the command room, back to its rejuvenation station-pod thingy.
“Poor bot,” Kat said.
“Yeah. It’s been through the wringer. I can’t imagine how horrible it must be to have one of those aliens squirming around inside.”
“Uh, yeah, you think?”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean the Ultra. The Ultra seems pretty cool. Not like that fraking Farmy guy.”
“I guess the Ultra’s not so bad, when you put it that way.”
“Chalk one up for the Ultra.”
“What were you going to do once you got us back to the ship?” Kat asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You were holding me hostage, and you got us off the planet and back to the ship. But then what were you going to do?”
“Uh. Tell them to teleport us here. Just like we did.”
“I did that.”
“But I was going to.”
“Sure you were.”
“I was…maybe.”
“Okay. Well, what’s your brilliant plan now?”
“Uh. Not sure. I was hoping to get you to brainstorm with the Ultra. Ask it for some actual verifiable help.”
“You were?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“Okay, let’s try it.”
There was nothing to lose. Except everything.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A QUICK REVIEW
I was back where I’d started. Except my dead ex-girlfriend was here, along with a tagalong alien called the Ultra. The robot had been possessed by an alien called the brethren and was borderline catatonic. Also, another alien species called the Krin had wiped out Prime’s military and was trying to kidnap the Ultra from the brethren by holding Earth hostage to get her. I mean it. Oh, and I had two dogs now. Two Pokas. The original and a clone replica. Oh yeah. The Ultra’s superpowers were totally unpredictable and activated by extreme emotions. That’s a lot of fun.
Two days ago I was sitting alone with the bot and the dog, playing virt games and staring into the void of space as a glorified night watchman. Oh, the good old days…that were two days ago.
Maybe the Ultra could also bend time and space? I could ask it to send me back to two days ago, so I could drift into another region of the galaxy and never bring that jeweled cocoon onboard.
I hated to admit it, but even if I could go back in time I wouldn’t. I had Kat back and we were doing something meaningful. Literally trying to save the universe. Sure, we may have also been the cause of it being destroyed, but there wasn’t much to do about that other than stop it from happening.
There was a reason the Ultra had found Kat, and then me. And a reason why we were here, trying to stop the Krin. It was just beyond my understandingthat we were the only ones who could stop the Krin and save the Ultra. Maybe there was a power even more powerful than the Ultra pulling all the strings. Ugh. Universes, I prayed not. I couldn’t handle anything more powerfu
l than the Ultra, Krin and brethren.
Not to mention, the Ultra obviously had some scheme of its own going on. It had brought us here and was jamming the ship’s comms, so we couldn’t even warn Earth if we wanted to. Why would it do that?
“Kat. Can you ask again if we can call Prime and warn them, please? Say it’s very very important and to please, please let us.”
“It can hear you.”
“So what does it say?”
Kat closed her eyes and listened to her feelings again. “Nope.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. It just says no.”
“Hellvian! You’re both so stubborn.”
“Wil, Calm down. It doesn’t matter, anyway. I’m sure Prime knows something’s wrong. There’s nothing we can do.”
She was right. The fleet must have sent back a report of the siege. Their protocol systems would’ve automatically recorded and sent a data stream back to military command, so they knew what they were in for. But it still pissed me off that the Ultra had its own side gig going on. Either help us or get out.
Maybe it was helping by jamming the comms. Ugh. It was too much to know the mind of an all-powerful alien and an ex-girlfriend!
Unless it was the Krin who jammed the comms, the little voice reminded me.
Right. I’d just have to hope the message got home and Prime was preparing everything in their arsenal. Not that it would do much good. Whoever it was, we couldn’t talk to Earth. So frak you, Ultra.
Did it not want us knowing something? Had the Krin already gotten there and destroyed the planet? Was it too late? No. That didn’t make sense. If the Krin was holding Prime hostage, you didn’t kill the hostage before you make the transfer.
None of this made sense. Why wasn’t the Ultra telling us what the frak was going on?That’s when an even worse thought invaded my mind. Were the Krin and Ultra working together?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
A large black cube covered in spikes appeared on the command screens. There was only one thing it could be.
“That’s a Krin ship,” Kat said.
Dang, these things were sneaky ninjas. It just appeared out of nowhere. Nice cloaking, Krin. I gotta give it you. None of our systems, even the Ultra, knew you were just sitting out there since we got back to watching and plotting. Or did the Ultra know and not tell us?
Why did they appear now?
Before I could try to figure out the answer, thousands of spikes ejected from the cube and hurled towards the ship.
I turned to ask Kat if the Ultra would fraking help out but she was suddenly in front of me facing the attackers. I turned to the screens and watched the spikes hone in on her exact location. She was attracting the spikes, acting like the bullseye on a target. Thousands of them moving at warp speed like a full battalion of archers had just let loose their arrows.
“Kat. What the frak are you doing?”
She spread her arms wide and the spears came in full force through the hull of the shop. She accepted them all. Thousands of black spears striking her in unison. Turning her into a human pin cushion. An Ultra human pin cushion.
My heart stopped as I watched the spears plunge through her flesh, tearing into her. It only started beating again as I saw them slowly dissolve and melt away into nothingness. I kept forgetting the Ultra was indestructible. But was Kat? How much more could the human part of her endure?
She’d survived the vacuum of space and now thousands of alien spikes, but I feared that the more the Ultra became human, the more Kat was in danger. It also made me wonder why Farmy was so worried when I threatened to choke Kat to death. If thousands of Krin spears couldn’t harm her what chance did my forearm have?
More questions I had no time to answer because at that instant the cube fired a million more projectiles.
She let them riddle her body, puncturing her flesh like a voodoo doll, and again made them dissolve into black jello.
As worried as I was for her I couldn’t help but watch in awe as the cube again fired another million projectiles. And again she turned them into black alien goop.
How long was this cycle going to go on?
That’s when an actual, real-life Krin materialized in the command room. Frak. Did every alien except humans have the ability to teleport?
I know I was about to die… again, but teleportation is just so cool.
Even with all our advanced tech, nanos, and bots, we still hadn’t grasped the secret of teleportation. One second you’re here, the next you’re there. Poof. Like a magician or a genie, disappearing and reappearing in another place. We’d been trying for hundreds of years to crack the code, but there was something about moving so many molecules between space and time that always made it impossible to reconstitute the object perfectly.
It was called the Brundlefly conundrum, and no one had solved it yet. In case you haven’t seen the vid, Brundle is a scientist who tries to teleport, but a fly gets stuck in the pod when he does and he becomes part human, part fly. And the fly becomes part fly, part human. It’s sad and gross and turned out to be true.
The other idea for teleportation were small, personalized wormholes. Some tech gurus tried to miniaturize wormholes and make them easy to step through. Just carry one around in your wallet, and when you want to go somewhere, you pop it open and step through. It sounded great and they raised tons of creds, but it turned out to be a scam. Wormholes are harder to corral than a horde of cats.
The Ultra, and the Krin, had figured it out. They’d solved either the Brundlefly conundrum or the wormhole containment problem. Or maybe it was something else altogether. I’d have to ask, so I could share the tech with Prime. If we survived, which we probably wouldn’t.
There’s a killer Krin warrior about to kill you. Stop obsessing about teleportation, the little voice said.
“Right. Sorry. It’s just so cool.”
You know what’s cool? Not dying.
The voice was right as usual. Even though this felt like being inside a virt game, it was real and I could actually die. Unlike games where you reset and have infinite lives, I only had one short, puny human life of about two hundred and fifty years. Unless, of course, the Ultra could also raise the dead. Which wouldn’t surprise me.
For all I knew, the Ultra could resurrect me over and over again, just like in a virt game. That sounded absolutely horrible. Like a real-life version of hellvian. Not fun at all. In a game, you don’t feel pain. And you don’t die screaming in actual agony.
The Krin were impressive with their cloaks and portals. They might even be better at it than the Ultra and the brethren. They did tell us the Krin were the universe’s master thieves, so it made sense.
If they were so good at space jumping, they could already be back at Prime. One quick leap through space, and poof, they’re floating at Earth’s perimeter. Why hadn’t they just done that? Shat, they probably had. I would’ve asked the Ultra but she was busy absorbing billions of spikes while a soldier-assassin snuck onboard the ship.
As impressed as I was by their teleportation and spike shooting cube, the thing in front of me took my breath away. It was easily eight feet tall and covered in battle armor and it looked like it had wings. Dark, armored butterfly wings that reminded me of the Angel of Death.
Why did they need wings?
Because it’s a dragon?. the little voice replied.
Wait a second. Was this where our conception of dragons came from? Did the Krin come to Earth and get fat and hoard treasure and flame-broil medieval humans? Was I going to be a dragon-slayer?
Stop asking so many questions. A dragon is about to kill you.
It turned out they weren’t wings. They were arms. Or feet. Or fins. And of course, they were as sharp as Carruson razor blades—able to slice through Harkan diamonds like melted butter.
Great. Now I had to battle an eight-foot tall Krin warrior. I had zero chance in hand-to-hand combat. I wished I had my ray pistol, even though it wouldn’t do much good a
gainst the heavy armor. That thing was ready for battle. There was nothing soft and gushy on it. Every inch was covered in a slick black, metallic substance that reminded me of dragon scales. It might be harder to kill a Krin than a dragon.
A weird noise came out of it that sounded like radio static. I think it was trying to talk to me, but obviously I don’t speak static, so had no idea what it was saying. Probably something like, “Hey, man, just give up. I mean, look at you. All doughy and fleshy. And I’m a dragon ninja. What chance do you really have?”
All true, but I couldn’t just give up, could I? Not after all the shat we’d been through. Maybe I could run and hide like a baby Trell.
Thats’s a great idea. Run and hide! The voice urged.
But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t leave Kat. The Krin had been clever, distracting her so this dragon thing could sneak up and snatch her from behind. They probably suspected I was here but didn’t care. Like the brethren, I was nothing to them.
It pissed me off these aliens kept thinking of humans as too insignificant to even be bothered with. I was tired of being thought of as plankton. Even if I was a plankton, I was one really pissed-off plankton who was gonna kick some dragon ninja Krin balls.
Sure, I was going to die, but like the ancient Vikings used to say—I don’t know what they actually said, but something about battle being a great way to die, and then you go party in Valhalla.
I prepared for my hopeless attempt to defeat the dragon in hand-to-hand combat but before screaming my Viking battle cry, the command room doors slid open and the bot hovered in with my baseball bat in its hand appendage. It tossed it to me with a beep and a wink, as if I now had the power to deal an eight foot tall dragon-alien a death blow. I needed the sword of Zanzax not a Little League baseball bat.
It was a good bat though. I’d hit three triples, two singles and one home run with it. Man, that home run felt amazing even though it did no good. Our team was down eleven points. We still lost, but dak, it felt like I’d accomplished something.