Authors: Greg Fish
Steve and Christine swept in from the side, trying to outflank the pursuing alien squadron. They were met with lazy particle fire as the main battle cruisers dialed in for a clean shot at the commanders’ ships. As the chase continued, the ships sailed well out of Epsilon 88G’s solar system, accelerating to superluminal speeds and leaving the careful shots fired by the Dark Gods far behind.
A few hours later, Dot, Nelson, Leo and the humans arrived at a well-guarded outpost recently secured by the Nation. They warped into focus in high orbit above a rust colored world with vast yellow oceans of sand where a small city of temple and claw shaped spires was assembled just a few weeks ago. Immediately, they headed for a massive base being built in a crater of this world’s huge, dark gray moon.
Shaped like a spider’s web, it emanated from a confluence of claw like spires around a sizable dome. This base was designed to launch interstellar missiles laden with IGFs deep into enemy territory. Heavily armed and protected by powerful shields, it was the perfect sanctuary for commanders on the run from kamikaze alien hostiles.
“Are they still on our tail?” asked Nelson as his ship scanned the planet’s orbit.
Just as he heard a ping confirming a hostile presence behind him, powerful bursts of laser and particle fire rocked his destroyer. With a terrifying determination, the Dark Gods followed them into another system with guns blazing. The chase continued well into the range of the moon base’s weapons which picked off battle cruiser after battle cruiser with quick, precise shots.
Ably evading the death beams coming from the moon base’s cannons, gunships continued to swirl around the commanders’ destroyers, trying to fire a bolt at the speeding craft. The destroyers fired back with lasers and missiles which reduced the alien ships to clouds of scrap metal. Steve, Christine, Dot, and Nelson were now in the clear, having dealt with all of their pursuing aliens. But Leo wasn’t so lucky.
Since he was behind and swarmed with too many enemy craft to handle, he was still in trouble. Looking for a good way to shake them off, he careened towards the moon base, hoping the tactical missiles and supercharged lasers of the base would provide the much needed assist. He was right, the cannons and missiles from the lunar base did their job in ridding him of his pursuers, but not before the shields of his destroyer failed and five gunships tore his engines open with raw bolts of energy.
Losing control of the craft, Leo tried to eject. The system didn’t respond. Something malfunctioned in the primary escape mechanism and locked his bridge pod in place. He tried again. Nothing happened as the nanobots refused to let his bridge pod go. Trillions of them were fused together in the explosions that disabled the engines. Praying for the third time to be the charm, he pressed the ejection button again.
Something whirred around him as the bridge pod came free, but it was too late. When Leo’s destroyer entered orbit, it flew at almost a tenth of the speed of light and his velocity stayed nearly constant after the Dark Gods’ gunships hacked open his engines. He simply could not afford not to eject at his first attempt. Now he was way too close to the base and going way too fast to escape the imminent collision and survive in the blast.
As it made contact with the lunar base nose first, the doomed destroyer’s mangled backend stood as high in the sky as any spire on Earth. It began to split open, its innards bathed by an aurora generated by the failing reactors. Plowing deep into the surface with its crushed nose, it raised waves of rock, sand and dust for miles. As its reactors failed and the white hot aurora within it became blinding, the destroyer exploded, consuming almost a third of the base in a fireball while pelting the rest of the construction with sand shot out at over a thousand miles per hour.
When the blast cleared, it revealed a new crater and fused bits of wreckage strewn for miles or embedded deep into some of the base’s damaged structures. Looking at the carnage, Dot, Nelson, Steve and Christine grimly summed up the aftermath of the battle. While the city on Epsilon 88G was in ruins, the Nation’s leader was now a prisoner of war and their expert on blockades and friend died in a fiery blast after being shot down by suicidal alien warships. The world they came to conquer was still an enemy position. This was not a successful assault.
[ chapter _ 036 ]
Ace woke up in a dark, eerie chamber which would be pitch black to a normal human, but his eyes could make out twisting layers of a stone-like, dark material with chrome accents around its rough edges. As these spirals curved across the cylindrical chamber they closed, effectively sealing him off from anything beyond the doors. A tingle ran across his runes. He wasn’t alone.
He tried moving his arm but it wouldn’t budge, locked to a giant piston-like construction on which his body rested. In fact, all four of his limbs were fused to the structure behind him with thick bands of carbon nanotube reinforced alloy. Summoning all of his strength, he tried to break the locks.
The massive locks groaned under the strain as more than enough pressure to shatter concrete pressed against their weakest points, but they didn’t give. Muttering a curse under his breath, Ace let his body drop back on the structure that kept him a prisoner. Laying at a 45 degree angle, he understood that this restraint system doubled as a very good interrogation table or even a dissection platform.
“Don’t strain yourself now,” smirked Mai, stepping out from the shadows. “They need you in perfect working order and you are never going to break those locks.”
“Oh...” frowned Ace. “It’s you.”
“Well you’re not going to catch yourself now, are you?”
“So Mai, how much are they paying you for this?”
“You’re going to try and make me a better offer?”
“Good God no. I’m just wondering what it takes to turn a power hungry ex-Commander with sociopathic tendencies into a loyal slave for an alien empire for my own future reference.”
“It takes one very arrogant group of rulers.”
“So you’re pissed at me and you’re going to sell out the majority of your own species to a maniacal alien empire?”
“Well if you put it that way... Yeah, I suppose so.”
“You know what I’m going to say next, right?”
“That I’m nuts?”
“Oh no Mai. You passed ‘nuts’ about a hundred years ago. Now you’re approaching bat shit crazy as in mental asylum material. Wait a sec, let me correct that. You’re careening towards bat shit crazy at an alarming speed.”
“Says the guy who scouted 12 year olds for breeding programs.”
“Oh... I got it. Somebody’s a tad jealous.”
“Just try to tell me that’s not what you did. Just try it.”
“You know that’s not what happened. I also seem to remember a certain wife of mine saying ‘Yes, we have to incorporate the modern human genome into out genetic pool.’ I also seem to remember that I was married to you at the time.”
“And you fired me a week later so you could look for some little human girl to replace me.”
“Um no. I fired you because you were going nuts with power.”
“How? How was I going nuts with power?”
Ace shook his head, muttering inaudible curses in several human and alien languages.
“Who suggested we conquer Earth?” he finally asked.
“And what were you doing on Earth just now?” came the reply.
“Building a partnership.”
“Ok, so you’re going to exploit them before conquering them.”
Ace howled with frustration.
“Oh my freaking God...” he groaned. “You are so far out of it. I highly recommend that you come back to the same galaxy where the rest of your species live. Or at the very least, the same universe. It would do wonders for that twisted, one-tracked mind of yours.”
“I know you just completed phase two and I happen to know that certain Earthlings may become new Children soon. You’re stretching out the inevitable, letting the humans decide amongst themselves and while you were doing that, you were nudging the Dark Gods, almost daring them to go to war with us. You blackmailed them into treaties and concessions and then, when they were already pissed off beyond all reasonable limits, you go to Earth.
“What were you thinking? If you wanted to go to war that badly, why did you get us into this mess about a billion soldiers short? I was trying to save the Nation from your arrogant, stupid policy fuck ups. And what did you do? You got rid of me so you could keep fucking around with the fate of the galaxy. So who’s mad with power here? I think that frankly, all the power went to your head, not mine. I didn’t sell out the Nation. I’m trying to save it from whatever the Dark Ones want to do to it. And I’m trying to save the Earth. You are out of control and somebody has to stop you. It may as well be me.”
Ace leaned back with a sigh.
“You know,” he said, “it’s odd, but right now I’m thinking about grad school. Now that was the life. We just worried about exams, ate pizza, and imagined what we’d be after we got our degrees. When did we meet again? Was it your senior year in undergrad?”
“Yeah. I think so. It’s a little fuzzy now.”
“Oh and remember when we were having sex in a lab after hours and we got caught by the janitor? He just kept staring at us until you saw him and started yelling ‘oh shit!’ and trying to get off me?”
Mai couldn’t resist a chuckle.
“That was a fun night,” she mused. “He just shook his head and started talking about how scientists are freaks doing indecent things instead of doing something useful for once.”
“It’s a good thing we didn’t invite him to that party the week after that,” smirked Ace. “See that’s why it was the good life. Instead of being chained in the bowels of an alien ship, we were being tied to each other by bondage aficionados. We didn’t have to make decisions about the fate of our species. And we didn’t have to fight.”
“Unfortunately times change.”
“Listen Mai... I... I know I wasn’t entirely honest with you.”
“No, really?” her tone dripped with so much sarcasm, one expected to hear bitter drops splashing on the floor. “There was something you didn’t mention for the sake of government secrecy? Get out of here...”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. I’m secretive. But I didn’t want to tell you for your own good. This whole thing, the war, the plan for Earth, the shady things going on in the City of Ghosts and the Shape Shifters... It’s not about us. It’s much, much bigger than us.”
“So you’re telling me we’re pawns in some bigger game.”
“Well maybe not pawns. Probably more like rooks or bishops.”
“And the humans are the pawns?”
“Yes, and not just the humans.”
“Just spit it out already.”
“This war and everything leading up to this war was arranged a very long time ago. You were still in cryogenic deep freeze when the final plans were being put together. Ask yourself, do you really think that I would be stupid enough to start an all-out war with a Sentry?”
“Yes.”
Ace ignored the barb and continued.
“I would probably find a way to limit their resources and starve them out of the galaxy. But it’s not my decision. I mean why do they want me alive? Did you think about that? What could I possibly give them that they already don’t have? Do you think they want to torture me? You know damn well they don’t give a flying monkey’s left testicle about torturing a prisoner. You killed for them just like I used to. If they wanted me dead, they would’ve killed me by now or gave you the order to finish me off. But they didn’t, did they?”
“No.”
“And you weren’t really trying to kill me on Earth, were you?”
“No. I just had to knock you out. They wanted you alive.”
“And did you think why? It’s because they want to know who it is that’s really pulling the strings. And that’s something I could shed some light on. That’s why they really want me and that’s why I had no choice but to push you out of the way when you were rushing the plans we had to follow.”
“Do the other Commanders know about this?”
“Alice. Eric. Sergio. They were involved too.”
“So you’re lying to the whole human race?”
“I’m not saying I’m proud of it. I’m just trying to survive and if I can, save a billion people while I’m at it. That’s why we’re on Earth now, to make sure it doesn’t become a combat zone and without our presence, it would be.”
Mai was silent for a minute. She paced back and forth, her hands rubbing her temples. Finally she sighed and shook her head.
“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me anything else, huh?” she asked.
“I’m sorry. I can’t. If you don’t already know, I would just make your life a lot more dangerous and help the Dark Gods. Unless I spill what I know, they won’t kill me and they know they can’t torture me or threaten me. If I don’t say it, all of us stay alive.”
“Care to give me a hint?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t. Just remember this. Sentries do their most important work through proxies.”
Mai jumped up on the locks restraining his legs and propped herself up with her outstretched arms. She looked into his face just a few inches away, like he looked at her on Earth just before his toxic fangs sunk into the base of her neck.
“I’m sorry Ace,” she said. “But right now, I don’t have any other choice. When you lie to someone for more than a thousand years, it’s very hard for her to believe you anymore. Even if you tell the truth.”
She jumped down to the bottom of the cylindrical chamber. With one final glance, she turned around and slowly walked out as a thick door split open to let her through. As she walked away, an army of robots burst into the chamber and headed for Ace.
The robots were about four feet tall and shaped like spheres with six sharp, spiny legs arranged in perfect symmetry. They moved like spiders, crawling across any available surface, red tribal markings of the Dark Gods glowing all across their jet black hulls.
“I really need a formal divorce,” Ace said to the robots. “Do any of you guys know a good lawyer?”