Three

by Shoshi

slightly older than she is. They both carry strange, rifle-like weapons that fire long, sleek explosive shells—quite unlike anything you or I have ever seen in the endless wars we like to watch on our TV screens and game consoles. He shouts at her. “Go under, Feena! They’re too strong for us.” He heads for a small, dark opening in a wall of coral rock just beyond us, one of many such openings on the island.

  “I can’t,” she cries. “Uncle Jebba’s down.” She scurries across a palm-fringed clearing to an older man lying on the ground. He is horribly wounded. One leg has been blown off his body but is nowhere to be seen.

  “Feena,” he gasps. “Leave me. It’s over. Go under with Gailus. He will need you.” Another shell burst goes off in the clearing. They cringe instinctively. “Please, Feena.” She leans down and fervently kisses his face. “I will miss you,” he says.

  “I miss you right now, Uncle Jebba,” she whispers.

  “One last thing,” he says. “Remember me with this—and the others we’ve lost.” He takes a thin leather thong from around his neck and puts it around hers. From it dangles a tiny gnarly lump of gold in which an embedded emerald shimmers faintly. “It has a wish for you inside it,” he whispers. “Keep it safe.”

  “I promise,” she says. She runs back across the clearing just as another explosion goes off behind her. She is knocked to the ground. Looking back she sees her uncle is no longer there. She dodges into the cave opening her brother entered. Swooping downward along a misty, rocky passage through the coral she comes to a chamber in which her brother and others are crouched.

  “Where’s Jebba?” he asks, his face seamed with urgency. He is as smeared with the grime of battle as she is.

  She hesitates. “Vaporized,” she says softly. Everyone is silent. Jebba was highly respected and beloved.

  “It’s hopeless,” says Gailus. “They overwhelm us every time we try to fight back.”

  “All we can do is hide and wait,” says one of the others.

  “Wait for what?” asks another.

  Feena frowns and looks tensely from face to face. “Wait--and hope,” she says.

  Have you noticed something about Feena, her brother and her friends? They are young humans, still in their teens. Who are their enemies? `We haven’t met up with any of them yet. And why do these enemies want to kill them? It sounds like a war their foes have already won so why are they still trying to kill them?

  One of the others asks a question no one else wants to ask.

  “Was all of Jebba vaporized?” They look at Feena.

  She doesn’t want to answer, but she whispers: “No, he was missing his left leg.”

  “We need to find it,” says Gailus---before they do. You know what they’ll do if they find it first.” They all look stricken, but no one volunteers to find the leg. Then, Gailus says he will do it.

  “Be careful,” says his sister quietly. “They’re out there—searching for us, waiting for us.”

  “I will have a surprise for them,” he says, as he takes his rifle along with him. He edges up to the entrance of the cave, peers cautiously out towards the clearing and, seeing no one, slowly emerges. He can see where the blast that vaporized his uncle occurred from the large, black fire marks streaked on the ground. He methodically begins to scour through the underbrush for his uncle’s limb—so he can bury it. Suddenly, he hears movement---as though someone is rummaging in the shrubbery across from him. He carefully positions his weapon on his shoulder and waits for the searcher to appear. When he does so, he realizes it is one of the enemy attackers. His face is humanoid, impassive and seems unthreatening. Unlike the other soldiers he is unarmed, but Gailus knows he must take him out. He aims, fires, and the shell explodes. “Got him.” He says it soundlessly.

  He sees that more soldiers are crowding toward the area, attracted by the explosion. He must save himself so he races back to the cave opening and disappears into it. He has not found his uncle’s leg.

  It’s time for you to meet the humans’ enemy--but they are not what you might expect. Like the soldier Gailus shot, they all look like humans---though, in fact, they are not. A tall, imposing soldier in a close-fitting camouflage uniform kneels beside Uncle Jebba’s bloodied leg. His human face is without expression. His flame-colored crewcut is hairbrush-short.

  He seems to smile ever so slightly. “The Commander will be happy when we give him this,” he says to his adjutant, the dark, squat assistant standing beside him. “The humans rarely let us find body parts.” He looks around him as soldiers who look like him and are dressed like him fill the clearing. “We have won again,” he says to them. “We have no captives this time and just one kill--but we are unscathed. That will please him.” He looks again at the leg. “You may live again, Uncle Jebba.” Once more, the faint smile. “But you will not be the same.”

  How does he know that? How does he know he may live again? And how does he know his name? And another puzzler: why does he speak English in such an oddly monotonous way?

  The adjutant speaks: “We are not unscathed, Captain.” It is hard to tell his voice apart from the Captain’s. “They have erased one of us---the observer who accompanied us on this mission.”

  “The useless one,” says the Captain. He shows no emotion. “We have his body but not his head,” says the adjutant.

  “Now he is more useless than ever,” says the Captain. “Probably beyond repair. We will dispose of the body at sea so the humans are not able to retrieve it. This is in keeping with the commander’s orders.”

  From the entrance to the cave, Feena and Gailus watch the fleet of rocket digi-planes take off and return to BraZilia, the invaders’ home base in South America. “Back to normal for a while,” he says.

  “Why do they keep coming?” she asks. “They won long ago. What more can they want?” She answers her own question. “Maybe they just want to exterminate us completely.”

  “I doubt if they will ever exterminate us,” he says. “I think they enjoy hunting us. When we ruled Earth, we were the same. We killed off the wolves and the leopards and the bears—but spared just enough to fill our zoos and entertain our hunters.”

  What Feena refers to is the great war the humans lost when Earth was invaded by a tribe of beings from a planet in the faraway galaxy of Zyllaton. Earthlings thought it could never happen because they believed Earth and its life forms were surely unique. They felt no need to avoid the prying eyes of the universe. So they never tried to protect themselves from the far distant sensors of other civilizations. But remote minds even more sophisticated than human minds wanted to know if intelligent life existed elsewhere, especially life they could vanquish and dominate. Their long-range seeing discovered Earth, and they forthwith desired it. Next, they travelled across a thousand light-years, overwhelmed the Earthlings and thinned out what they saw as their unnecessary billions.

  The remaining humans retreated to hiding places like the uncountable islands of the South Pacific and their endless coral caves. The invaders’ commander, the one the visitors left behind to monitor the Earth and keep control, took a liking to an abandoned, fantasmal city concocted by the humans in the wilds of Brazil. He found its logic and ice-like architecture highly appealing. Also, its name, Brasilia. He made it his headquarters, and to emphasize the “Z” he renamed it BraZilia.

  As the black rockets slice through the warm skies off South America, a mysterious parcel drops from one of them down, down into the ocean beneath. A white plume of surf marks where it enters the water—and is gone.

  Now it’s time for you to meet the enemy commander. From now on we refer to him with a capital “C.” He is the humans’ chief enemy and also likes to be called the Supreme One. He awaits the Captain in his study. The space is not grand by classical imperial standards. Caesar would have demanded more ego ornamentation---a marble covey of pedestaled, thick-pectoraled heroes wi
th swords raised or forefingers pointing to victory. The walls are blanketed with a pinkish-yellow leather. It is oddly reminiscent of something. You may want to make a guess about that. There are also several hairy hangings of dark wolverine skins fiercely splayed on the walls—the Commander’s favorite Earthen animal, even though at this time, having been hunted out, there are none left on the planet.

  We cannot be sure of his age, but the commander is slab-bodied and powerful, is much shorter than his underling, the Captain, and appears to be somewhat more creature-like, you might say, than humanoid. He wears a simple gray tunic topped by a curious red skull cap. He sports a stringy goatee. He also has a constant frown that digs down deeply between his large, somewhat bulgent eyes. He erases it briefly to give a smiling greeting to the Captain.

  “Good to see you, Captain. Tell me how it went.”

  “We vaporized a human we think was one of their leaders. We did save his left leg.”

  “Really? Well done. We should be able to put that to good use. How many more of them are holed up out there, would you say?”

  “A few thousand at most.”

  “A sad shadow of what they were--but enough for some future target practice.” Another quick grin.

  The Captain seems to pause before adding one more piece of information. He is still