Apex 3: Shaylo Attacks (11 page)

Deceit

Admiral
Liktar returned in is shuttle to the orbiting ship.

His second in command was somber. “Did he take it?”

“Yes.”

His second in command sneered and banged his tentacle off of the command console angrily. “If command would have just given me more time, I know I could’ve synthesized an antidote.”

“Liktar sighed. “You don’t know that for sure.”

“If I would have, we could’ve ended this the right way.”

“Command is a nest of cowards. They’ve always been that way. Their decision to administer the poison didn’t come as a surprise to me.”

“We just killed our savior,
Admiral. He didn’t deserve that.”

The
Admiral stared off into the distance. “It was the right decision. If he could do what he did to the Grey planet, he could do the same thing to us.”

“He had no reason to attack us.”

“I know but he had to die just in case.”

“Well then we’d better stick around long enough to make sure he’s dead because if he survives, we just gave him an excuse to come after us.”

Poisoned

Jack’s stomach clenched. He sat upright and his eyes shot open. Something was wrong. The antidote didn’t feel like it was reversing the effects of the enhancer. It felt like it was killing him.

He
had to do something to alleviate the pain. He focused on his own body. He couldn’t tell if he was concentrating in the right place but he had to act fast. He teleported the contents of his stomach away from his body. They splashed on the floor at the foot of the bed.

Then he concentrated on the rest, still working its way into his bloodstream. It appeared at the foot of his bed too. It was a light pink because he couldn’t separate it entirely from his blood cells.

His stomach started to feel better almost instantly.

Had that alien just tried to poison him? But why?

And then he understood the sadness he’d felt from the creature the moment he’d drank the liquid. It had exuded invisible regret and shame. Jack hadn’t been able to decipher it at the time but now he understood.

His immediate reaction was to pinpoint the
Admiral and kill him for his deceit. But if he did that, he could never stop. Others might come for him. Could he eliminate them all the way he had the Greys?

The thought made him want to puke and
scream at the same time. Why was he tasked with making such decisions? Were they even decisions he should be trusted to make?

The benevolent aliens were so afraid of him that they’d tried to kill him.
He deserved answers.

He dwelled on the sadness that he’d picked up from
Admiral Liktar. The sadness grew in his minds eye until he could almost taste it. But in concentrating on the sadness, he was able to pinpoint the source. The Admiral was stationed close by, in Earth orbit. He focused and teleported the Admiral back to his bedroom.

Alien Abduction

The alien fell into the wall as it fought to right itself to its brand new surroundings.

It stared at Jack in disbelief and said, “This isn’t possible.”

Jack
lied. “I cannot be killed.”

The alien propped its body up on four tentacles and stared off into oblivion as its mind raced. “Kill me. Let my people live. They don’t all deserve to die because of my deception.”

Jack laughed out loud. “I thought you said we were friends. Why would I ever kill my friend?”

Just then, Sally walked into the room
and yelped, “What the hell is that thing?”

Jack
smiled and in a calm voice he said, “This is our savior. He’s the one who sent us the metal spheres that gave us our abilities.”

Sally scowled at the alien creature
as her brain tried to come to terms with what it was seeing. Eventually she sidled over to Jack and said to it, “Thank you, I guess…”

Jack
said, “Don’t thank him too soon. He just tried to kill me.”

Sally snarled and took an angry step towards the creature. “You did what?”

Liktar backed away, frightened. “We fear you. We couldn’t allow a threat like yours to exist.”

Jack
beckoned Sally back by his side and said to Liktar, “Go back home and tell your people what happened here. Tell them if they ever come anywhere near the Earth again, I’ll teleport every atom of your planet into the heart of a black hole.” He wouldn’t, of course. It was just a threat.

Liktar
paused. Finally he said, “That will only instill them with even more fear. It’ll spur them to further action.”

“Then tell them I’m dead. Tell them the threat died with me.”

“But it hasn’t.”

Jack
took a deep breath. “I was never a threat to your people in the first place. Tell them I’m dead. Can you do that?”

“I can
’t. My people will know that you’re still alive even if I lie.”

Jack shook his head. He was trying to work with Liktar but the alien wasn’t going to give him an inch.
“Well now I deem you and your people as a threat to my planet so I can’t allow you to kill me. What if you decided to attack the Earth?”

“We wouldn’t.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“
Then we’re at a stalemate.”

Jack
mulled over his options and found he had few available. Sure he could eliminate the threat but that would mean committing genocide once again and he refused to stoop to that level ever again, no matter what the alternative might be. He want even sure if his psyche could withstand it again.

Liktar
said agitatedly, “I can’t return without accomplishing my mission. I can’t allow the threat to remain. I wish it could be any other way but you’ve left me no choice.” He reached behind his back and pulled out a circular device with a handle on the back. He aimed it their way and pressed a button before they could react.

The device was an energy weapon that discharged a
brightly lit wave into them, knocking them both down and crushing Jack’s bedroom furniture like it had been hit by a truck.

Sally jumped
back to her feet, unharmed, and erected a force field that sliced through Liktar at an angle. Several tentacles fell off as he struggled to press one of the gems that adorned his weird body. Finally he pressed it and said with a panic stricken voice, “Attack my location with everything you’ve got. The human knows we tried to kill him.” Then, as his voice trailed off, the upper half of his body slid to the floor.

His eye blinked once and then he stirred no more.

Jack stood up and said, “What the hell is wrong with these people? They saved us and now they’re trying to kill us.”

Sally backed away from the growing puddle of pink slime that was coming from the dead alien.
“Whatever he was, you scare the crap out of his people. Did I just start another interplanetary war by killing him?”

“I don’t think so. I think my very existence did that.”

A New Alien Threat

Just then, a loud boom came from outside the bedroom window. Jack acted on impulse, teleporting himself and Sally outside the house in time to see a huge alien ship breaking through the cloud layer, firing shots down at his house, missing it by mere feet. Each blast created a crater large enough to hide a car inside. The grasses around the perimeter of each crater smoldered. The lawn looked like a no mans land already.

It was
Liktar’s ship. His people were coming to save or avenge their Admiral with animalistic ferocity but Jack couldn’t let them destroy his house because his mom was still inside.

At the rate it was descending and based on the immense size of the ship, Jack couldn’t imagine it could pull out of its dive, which meant that it was a kamikaze mission, with his house and the people he loved right in its path.

He focused on the approaching ship and teleported the entire left side away. Several aliens tumbled out of the gaping hole to their deaths but the ship kept firing at them and heading their way.

Sally’s eyes bulged
and her hands shook as she erected the largest force field she’d ever created. It sliced through the ship like a hot knife through butter. The back half came away from the front neatly, separating and tumbling through the air. The ship was now immobilized but it was still heading right for them, on a collision course. It was going to crash into them like a missile, only much larger.

Jack
was just about to try and teleport it elsewhere when it erupted into a massive fireball, blowing itself to tiny molten bits. The shrapnel rained down on them harmlessly, but it set his house on fire on contact.

Sally patted the smoldering fires on her clothes out while Jack
teleported the water from the bird bath in his front yard onto the flames spreading across the roof. But there wasn’t enough water to do the job. There were too many fires eating away at the roof for him to douse them all so he teleported inside his house. He found his mom rushing around frantically trying to find him. He grabbed her and teleported them both outside to relative safety.

The house was already engulfed in flames by the time he rejoined Sally.

She was staring up into the sky, transfixed.

Jack
looked up and he immediately saw what had her so mesmerized.

A vast blue cloud hung over them, nearly blotting out the sun. It
looked exactly like the same alien enhancer that had given them their abilities. Liktar’s ship must have been synthesizing it because there was a ton of the stuff.

A mighty wind kicked up and
whipped the cloud around, spreading it far and wide.

Sally chuckled. “
That’s going to be a game changer.”

Jack
smiled as he watched the blue contagion float around but he was uneasy. The mist would create many more just like them. He didn’t know how to feel about that.

Super Earth

The alien President got a sinking feeling in her gut when she saw what the super humans did to Liktar’s ship. Since she was the one to order Liktar to poison the powerful young human, her people believed that she was responsible for alerting him to their presence. The consensus among her people was that if he destroyed their world now, it would be because she had provoked his ire. She had little choice but to lead the invasion herself. That young Earthling was a hazard who needed to be eliminated at all costs.

President Blimtot demanded, “I want up to date intel on the Earthlings. What can we expect from them when we
strike?

One of her advisors rushed into the command hub and said agitatedly, “Mrs. President, we have a situation.”

“Spit it out.”

“We’re receiving reports that the contagion
stored aboard Admiral Liktar’s ship was disbursed when the humans destroyed it. It spread in the Earth’s atmosphere.”

“What does that have to do with the invasion?”

“It means it needs to be cancelled.”

“Why?”

“Because now there are thousands of super humans.”

The End

M
ore by Adam Moon:

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