by Orion, W. J.
“However long it takes,” Yasmine said.
“Truth. Now, when I’m gone, I’m nominating my man Mikey here to take over. I’m suggesting maybe y’all form up some kind of democratic system, and count votes, too. I don’t care how you do it, or what you do, but you take care of each other until we get back. I helped make something beautiful here, and I expect to come back to it or something damn like it.”
People responded positively to the Baron’s suggestion of Mike as leader. No one argued with it, at least.
“And I’m taking four vehicles, probably not bringing them back with a full tank, either, if at all.”
“You should go on foot,” someone in the back of the room said. He wore a suit—like one she saw her dad wear in a wedding picture from before the war. This man’s suit had frayed seams and looked discolored, but the garb gave him some semblance of authority. That failing, he looked respectable, at least. “If you’re not acting as Baron, then you have no authority to acquisition our vehicles.”
“You know what that’s the sound of?” the Baron said, his wide jaw line hardening, “Greed. That’s the sound of someone who can’t see beyond the end of their own nose. Someone who wasn’t paying attention when we had to work together to stay alive. Someone who isn’t thinking about the water that might come back, and only thinking about the cars that are leaving.”
“Four vehicles is a substantial loss to the Monolith assets,” Suit continued. “We have to think of how we’ll survive your absence.”
“He brought us here,” Mikey said, standing up to his full, towering height. “He led us in a war to make a safe place for us to live, and now he’s telling us he has another war to fight. Say what you will, but if he says he needs four trucks, we give him four trucks. Nothing else is more important than the trust we have for each other, and the trust we’ve given him.”
Suit sighed, frustrated at the idea that his logic was being ignored. He sat down.
“Thanks, Mikey. I’m gonna miss you while I’m gone,” Caleb said to his friend.
“Have the Baroness take a picture of the two of us with her phone. That’ll help your sadness when you go into space like Luke Skywalker.”
“More of a Han Solo, thank you very much.”
“Jar Jar, one hundred percent,” Yasmine said.
Chapter Seven
People Willing to Pick Up a Wrench
The night after the Baron convened his leadership royalty, he knighted several more deserving Monolith squires in the markets so all could see. Most notably was Squire Todd, the young man Yasmine saved in the convoy ambush. He had to be helped to his knees and helped back up again (on account of his still-healing gunshot wounds), but the look of pride drew over the look of pain on his face as the Baron tapped each shoulder, then his forehead, with an old, worn sword he’d recovered from a local museum.
The Monoliths assembled a small celebration—large by comparison to Yasmine’s largely solitary life—and there was eating and drinking on a scale she’d never seen before. Everyone had meat, even if it was only a bite or two, and all had fresh vegetables grown in the Tower’s gardens. Many indulged in salvaged, pre-war alcohol, and a few risked drinking some of the recently made stuff, which her uncle affectionately called “rotgut.”
She had none. Alcohol made her feel ill and dulled the wits she needed to stay alive in the wastes.
Instead, she wandered through the crowd and dealt with the endless number of requests for the video she’d shown Owen the day prior: the footage of the final confrontation and victory over the crab in Shant.
I think people are more interested in watching this video than they are in celebrating the fact that we might be getting our water back, she thought as she played the video for the fifteenth time to a handful of thrilled and fixated Monoliths. Each time they congratulated her on a multitude of facets regarding her personality, ingenuity, and success; her bravery, her skill in war, her diplomacy, her resourcefulness, her kindness, her foresight, and many words she’d never considering attaching to herself. She blushed fiercely and had to excuse herself from the shindig before her anxiety overwhelmed her.
She slinked away from the market level, where the party raged into the evening and night, and down into the garage where the four trucks that her uncle had requested were being prepared. Even at this late hour, low-ranking Monoliths—kids, it seemed—were loading up the pickup beds with metal boxes of ammunition, extra blankets, fuel cans, rope, flares, and more. She watched with eyes almost shut as welders affixed strong armor to the red pickup truck her uncle drove.
The red truck had been in perfect, pre-war condition since she met her uncle, but now… its pristine paint job was dashed on the rocks of post-apocalyptic sensibility: armor had been welded onto the doors, grill, and hood; additional plates had been placed around the bed of the truck to make the space where Trey would sit more protected. The armor was low enough for Trey to fire his mining laser if they were attacked.
“That makes me feel good,” she whispered to herself.
“What does?” Trey’s mechanical voice replied from halfway across the lower level garage.
She watched as he walked his large armored chassis across to her. Strange that the sight of him in his crab vehicle doesn’t make me twitch with fear anymore. Am I numb to the dangers of what he represents? Or maybe I just trust him? Also… his suit seems in far better shape than it was earlier. No more holes, and the scorch marks are just gray smudges now. Crab tech is… amazing.
“What makes you feel good?” he repeated.
“That armor on the pickup’s bed. That’s for you. My uncle must’ve requested it to protect you. Give you some extra cover.”
Trey lifted his chassis up and aimed all of his facial sensors at the truck. He rested back down and nodded. “Majority trash haul sphincter farfalle cheese noodles.”
“Um… what?”
“I intended to say that it was ‘mighty nice of him,’ but as you heard, the voice translation isn’t always accurate. My bad,” Trey said, adding a tinny laugh.
“That going to happen a lot?”
“Probably. The neural mapping required to adopt English will take a week or two at least. Has to be done live so the program learns context. Once the suit’s matrix understands my cognitive structure as it relates to speaking, everything should settle in. Until then… I could say almost anything. Old languages I can do during downtime.”
“Great. That’ll be a lot of fun when we’re in the middle of being attacked and you give me the recipe for pound cake.”
“I do wonder if I’d like pound cake. Well, I do wonder if I’d like any human food at all. I haven’t had any. I refuse to eat the food of my race’s conquests unless it’s given to me, which… never happens.”
“I’ll give you something, soon enough. Farfalle noodles, maybe. What do crabs eat, anyway? I haven’t seen you eat anything since we loaded your tank into the belly of that machine you’re in.”
“In our natural habitat, sans civilization, my species eats televisions. I mean, we’re carnivores. Apex predators due to our intelligence, same as humans. Our oceans used to be teeming with all manner of fish and wildlife, not too unlike your oceans here used to be. We would hunt tiny fish, and creatures similar to shrimp. After our advancements, we cultivated foods with domestication, as you had, and now, in our portable tank environments, we eat a highly concentrated form of… fish paste, I guess you’d say.”
“Where do you keep this paste? You haven’t gotten anything new since you went into that suit. I thought you were low on food?”
“I was. My tank had a few day’s supply left when you arrived at the tower here, but inside each chassis is an emergency supply. A chassis this size normally houses a colony of perhaps five hundred entities, and has enough food for the equivalent of six months for that number. I could last a year on what I have inside this chassis.”
“Doesn’t it get old? Eating the same thing over and over?”
; “We don’t have taste buds like you do, so eating isn’t recreation for us. If we can eat it… it’s pleasurable enough,” he said.
Man you sound sad. Wait… he can last a year? “You took the name Trey because there were 333 of you, right?”
“Yeah. I like the name too. I’ll keep it for use with speaking races. Especially now that I have my yelling machine. I mean… audio speaker.”
“That math doesn’t add up,” she said as another round of fiery welding began. “That many of you would only last like… nine months on that quantity of rations. Give or take.”
“That would be correct,” he said, again sounding sad. “If there were still 333 of me inside this chassis.”
“Some of you… passed away?” Holy crap… that’s sad. That’s frigging terrible.
“Yes. In the battle I suffered many losses. One hundred and eleven, to be precise.”
“That’s,” she said, doing the math in her head, “two hundred twenty-two?” Should we call him Triple Deuce now? Deuces Wild?
“I am proud to say that I have brought my strength back up by another eight tiny souls,” Trey said, proud. His suit flared up a bit as well, as if he were a human puffing out his chest.
“You can give birth?”
“Well… yeah. I am composed of male and female bodies, entwined as one conscious collective. Some of me is always ‘getting busy,’ to use a human phrase.”
“Like… right now, as we speak…?”
“Let’s not make this any more awkward than it needs to be. Portobello mushrooms and parmesan.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I think you’re race traitor,” a voice called out from behind them.
Yasmine sighed, and turned to face the speaker. Two teenaged Monoliths stood a few yards behind them: one male, one female. They were dirty, covered in grease and sweat. They shared slight facial features, and likely at least one parent. The boy dangled a wrench in his fist and stared at Trey in his chassis with malice in his eyes. Trey postured his suit up slightly, and Yaz knew he readied himself to protect her.
Ah, crap.
“Making friends with crabs,” the boy said. “Ain’t right. I can’t believe the Baron trusts you.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Yaz said. “Really.” Please, please don’t let this turn into a fight. Trey will break these two in half by accident and it’ll be so much worse if that happens.
The girl scowled at her. “Yeah, it’s not good to see someone you look up to suddenly turn on you and start trusting a stranger over his own people. And then what… he comes out of nowhere with a frigging crab, and then comes back with not only a crab, but that weird dude over there, who’s supposedly a different kind of alien,” the girl said, wiping away some sweat from her face and leaving a streak of dark grease behind. “You showed up and totally ruined what we had going on here at the Tower.”
“I’m sure it seems that way,” Yaz said. “I followed my heart. I tried to do the right thing. I tried to help people. Turns out one of the people I tried to help was Trey here. I don’t regret that. He’s a good friend now and he helped Shant—where I’m from—and he’s going to help us try and get our water back. I promise you, not all crabs are bad. And Trader Joe over there, he’s the same as Trey. He’s trying to help. It’s high time we all stopped doing things the way we’ve been doing them and try something new. We can’t tread water on a dry Earth.”
The dirty, sweaty teenagers stood still, looking back and forth from Trey, to Yasmine, then over to Trader Joe. The welding in the background continued. They shifted on their feet, then after a few more seconds they looked away or to the floor.
Gotcha. Broke that resolve. Trey, you stay quiet. “Look,” she continued, ”Trey is like a Monolith, trying to fix up what’s broken. Trying to bring some semblance of law and order to the lands his race has destroyed. Trying to make a difference. He’s the crab version of you and whether or not you like that is irrelevant. It’s the truth. It’s a fact. Now I picked my side, and it wasn’t the human side, or the crab side. I chose the side that’s trying to fix this planet, and save lives. And guess what? There are humans, and crabs, and whatever Trader Joe is on that side. I hope you choose the same side because we need people willing to pick up a wrench and fight for it. Trey, I’d like to go hang out with Trader Joe. Come with?”
“Gorgonzola cheese,” he said, then slumped a bit in defeat.
Yasmine laughed, and the two of them left the confused teens behind. The brother and sister would have to sort out their feelings without them.
Chapter Eight
Meanwhile, in the Depths of Space
Three species of aliens unknown to humanity came together over a thousand years prior in service to the galaxy. To connect their races, as well as the dozens of worlds in the galaxy with intelligent, spacefaring life, they built The Nexus. When man was inventing gunpowder in China, the Triumvirate was putting the finishing touches on the galaxy’s new Main Street.
A feat of engineering unparalleled in the history of any race that has encountered it, the space station known as the Nexus took two hundred years and three hundred thousand souls to engineer and build. They constructed the station in a binary system and depleted the energy of the older white dwarf star to power it. The Nexus’s steel, crystal, and composite structure was greater in mass and size than most moons.
Orbiting the Nexus was a manufactured moon, and inside that moon’s orbit were twelve rings, each the better part of a mile across. Each of the twelve rings were slaved to a distant, relatively fixed point in space, and allowed for instantaneous teleportation of any vessel flying through the ring or through the fixed entry points. Ship size was limited, of course, but for any ship smaller than the generic capital-class moniker, using a Nexus wormhole was the only way to reach the edges of the system and the peoples there within months, rather than lifetimes. The Nexus connected almost all the major inhabited worlds of the galaxy with journeys of less than a year.
The crab command frigate pierced through the portal without warning, triggering the Nexus flight control’s high alert. The bizarre aliens manning the station’s nerve center responded with calm, controlled discipline as the potentially hostile guests arrived.
Of the three races of the originating Triumvirate, the Irib’dirari were suited best for managing the space around the Nexus. As one of the three races behind the station’s construction, on it they had seniority amongst all species. As a race born into the thin upper atmosphere of a gas giant, they were unique in their physiology; thin as cellophane, and lighter, each of their orb-shaped species was covered with tens of thousands of tiny cilia, each under complete muscular control. They were perfect for interfacing with the myriad controls of the port’s command facility. Each weightless, ghost-translucent Irib’dirari floated from touch screen to touch screen, from floor to ceiling, and all the walls between, allowing their cloud of wispy hair-like cilia to drift, activating controls as needed in all directions at once.
“The crab command ship Ravager has returned,” one of the Irib’dirari said into the Nexus’s internal communication network. Its forest of feelers waved and shook with each syllable. “Prepare their dock and habitat. Transmit coordinates and flight instructions to them.”
The dozen orbs of floating eyes and feelers drifted to the panels and caressed them, triggering a thousand automated systems to ready a distant landing facility for the enormous crab ship that resembled a massive aquatic squid. The ship’s pilot colony manipulated the massive aft tentacles and the thrusters at their tips to control its slow movement. By the time the ship disappeared over the station’s horizon, the Irib’dirari had the water flowing at the crab’s access port and had spurred a veritable army of workers into action to prepare entire aquatic neighborhoods of the floating citadel for the squid colonies about to disembark.
The three-pronged hatch to the station’s command room withdrew open, and an armored figure strode in on three legs. The radiall
y symmetrical master of Nexus security moved into the middle of the room in its race’s typically spiral fashion, allowing each arm, leg, and facet of its face to observe, assess, and sense each part of the room. The Galon species were gifted when it came to engineering, vigilance, and protection. They too were one of the Triumvirate.
Its pyramidal, three-sided head scraped the screen-covered ceiling and would’ve rivaled the height of an Earth giraffe, though its black composite armor made it look more like a very strange pyramid had a love child with a Christmas tree star adorned with military body armor. Were a human to see it, the human might laugh.
“Are they here for hostility?” Dwen asked the room in the celestial audible tongue. The Galon’s voice rumbled and cascaded out of all three of its mouths, reaching every corner of the space.
“They have not hailed us,” Benno, the leader of the Irib command group, replied in the airy, ethereal voice his race was gifted with. The two races couldn’t have sounded much more different. “And their weapon’s energy signatures do not appear to be aggressive.”
“That’s not an answer, you evasive Irib. Monsters,” Dwen growled. “I wish they gave us a meaty reason to fight them again. I will attend to their greeting. Lock down that side of the station and pause all wormhole travel until they are docked as well.”
“Standard procedures,” the ghostly Benno whispered.
Dwen stood still in the center of the brightly lit room that was filled with movement and what might’ve been seen as chaos, were Dwen not fully aware of how the Irib’dirari managed the flow of information, and decisions on the station. It grumbled again.
“I hate them,” it said.
“As do I,” Benno replied, floating near to Dwen and frilling up its thousands of tiny appendages to show its frustration. “But we are still unable to stand up to them again.”
