Clones vs. Aliens

by M. E. Castle

  Amanda instantly tackled one of the three Mechastaceans manning the controls. FP jumped out of Fisher’s arms. Fisher and Alex ran for another. Fisher’s fight or flight kicked into full gear as the pirate swung a long claw buzzing with an electric charge at his head, and he ducked and rolled away. The brothers shifted positions. Fisher felt the rush of air as a metal talon slashed right past his face. Veronica leapt into the fight, wielding a pry bar she had grabbed from the gear bag. As Alex and Fisher kept the Mechastacean occupied, she delivered a heavy strike to its left-side weak point. It staggered as the power flow to that side diminished, but still managed a counter-swing with a whirring claw. Fisher pulled Veronica to the ground to get her out of its path.

  “Fisher!” Alex shouted. Fisher tossed his brother the pry bar, which Alex caught neatly in one hand. Alex wound up and delivered a strong blow to the power junction below its head. It lurched backward, then toppled over, releasing a shower of sparks.

  FP hopped onto it and gave it a few hoofs to the head for good measure.

  Fisher turned, panting for breath, his arm muscles burning. He found the two other pirates sparking on the floor, Amanda dusting off her hands. In the blue glow that filled the room, she looked rather like an alien conqueror herself.

  “You guys all right?” CURTIS said over the radio.

  “Fine, CURTIS,” Fisher said, sucking in a deep breath.

  “Swell!” the AI said. “I’m patching Agent Mason through to you.”

  “What’s your progress, team?” Mason’s voice said a little fuzzily.

  “In the belly of the beast, sir,” said Fisher, taking Veronica’s hand to reassure her, and himself. “CURTIS is navigating us through the ship. I think we’re getting close.”

  “That’s good,” Mason said, “because things are getting antsy down here. The fact that the Mechastaceans aren’t responding is putting a lot of countries in the mood to strike first, and strike hard.”

  “How hard?” Alex said.

  “Nuclear hard,” Mason said. Fisher and Alex looked at one another, eyes wide. “There’s mounting pressure to throw everything we have at them. If they’re too close to the Earth when a barrage like that hits …”

  “The magnetosphere won’t stop all the radiation,” Fisher said quietly. “And any ships that get knocked out will fall to Earth as meteors.” He took a deep breath. “Okay, the clock just got shorter. We’ll check in again when we can. Out.” There was a click as the connection with Mason ended. “CURTIS?”

  “Right with ya,” CURTIS said. “Look for a red panel on the wall. It should have up and down arrows, like an elevator. You want to go down as far as you can.”

  “Found it,” Veronica said. The red panel had faint white triangles pointing up and down, and she pressed the down arrow. A door opened next to the panel. Inside the door there was nothing but green light. Veronica hesitated.

  “This isn’t bad,” Fisher said earnestly, taking Veronica’s hand. “Alex and I took one yesterday. Shall we?”

  They stepped into the green light together. Once again, they were immediately weightless. Fisher let FP flap around them gleefully as all together they drifted downward. They passed through the largest open space any of them had ever seen. Fisher nearly hyperventilated at the sensation of hurtling through vast emptiness. In spite of the physical comfort of gently drifting down, the sight made him extremely dizzy.

  Other, parallel transport beams filled the colossal chamber. Thousands of them. Some of them held traveling Mechastaceans, others had cargo.

  “Fisher,” Alex said, “somebody’s gonna see us.”

  “Not to worry,” said Fisher, reaching into his backpack. He removed the latest in his long series of disguises, crate-in-a-box. A name that, while not very creative, was certainly better than its prototype name, “box-within-a-larger-box.”

  The dark plastic cube fit in his palm. He tapped the top twice, and it opened. Then the flat pieces that had opened unfolded again, doubling in size. The little device repeated the process until it became a seven-foot cube with one open side. They huddled together. Fisher raised the weightless crate over their heads, then pulled it down over them.

  “Now we’re just another cargo load,” he said. The inside of the box was lit up green from the beam beneath them.

  Something was coming up toward them. Or more accurately, they were moving down toward it. At first it was a dark smudge, then it resolved into an opening just wide enough to accommodate the beam.

  “Heads up,” Amanda said a minute later. “About to go into somewhere.”

  Fisher pulled the crate off of them and collapsed it again as they passed into a tunnel. Their feet touched ground at last, and the beam switched off. They were in a rectangular room with flat, featureless walls.

  “CURTIS, where are we?” Fisher said.

  “You’re on the right level, kid,” CURTIS said. “Main engineering, I think. The maps I’ve found are a little unclear, but there should be … oh, uh, hang on. Something’s happening.”

  Fisher looked from one wall to another. Something happening was almost never good news.

  “What?” Alex said, fear creeping into his voice, “What does that mean?”

  Suddenly, the walls fell away. Like flats in a movie set, they simply dropped. The room they were actually in was immense, and it was full of Mechastaceans. Behind the wall of steel bodies was a pedestal with a series of cables snaking from it. On top of the pedestal was an object about the size of a basketball that looked like a cross between a brain and a cactus.

  Fisher felt a surge of excitement, followed immediately by the heavy pull of despair. So the Gemini were right. There was an organic core. But there were at least fifty heavily armed space pirates between them and it.

  “Welcome, humans,” said one of the pirates, stepping forward. Its metal shell was red and gold, and silver stars decorated its upper segments. “You arrived even more quickly than we expected.”

  The pirates took a step in. The four circled up, backs together. FP snarled in his odd pig fashion. Amanda growled low in her throat.

  “Fisher?” Mason’s voice crackled in his ear. “What’s going on? Anyone read me?”

  “This was a trap all along,” Veronica whispered.

  “Yes,” the leader said. “It was natural to expect you to make an attempt against our flagship’s core, knowing that you were in contact with the Gemini, who might disclose to you our only true weakness.”

  The pirates inched forward again.

  “Amanda,” Alex said, pulling her into him, preferring a last embrace to an impossible fight. Veronica put her arms on Fisher’s shoulders and leaned into him.

  “No, no, no …” Mason’s voice said with desperate breathlessness across the tens of thousands of miles separating them. “I—I’m sorry, everyone.”

  All hope was lost. Fisher had only one remaining weapon at his disposal—one final hope. One last prayer.

  Three.

  “No, I’m sorry,” Fisher said firmly. He pulled the chain holding the remote from his neck. “I really hate to do this.”

  Before anyone could blink, one of the pirates spat out a pencil-thin particle beam that turned the remote to a cloud of atoms.

  “Fool,” the leader said. “Haven’t you realized yet that you, with your biological reaction times, can’t possibly hope to defeat us?”

  Tears welled up in Veronica’s eyes. Even Alex looked stricken.

  Fisher hung his head, closing his eyes. He let out a long sigh. Then he started to laugh—a thin, whispery chuckle that made even Amanda turn and look at him with something like fear in her eyes.

  The approaching Mechastaceans hesitated as their leader raised a hand.

  “This is your kind’s sound for amusement, I believe,” it said. “What is amusing you?”

  Fisher raised his head, and smiled coldly back at the pirate.

  “The transmitter you just destroyed was a dead man switch,” he said. “I reprogrammed it to
send out a constant signal. Our weapon is deployed when the signal stops.”

  No sooner had he finished speaking than the floor began to shake. Lights began to flash above their heads—a soundless alarm, Fisher figured—and a holographic display popped into place against one wall, showing the exact location and method of the ship’s breach.

  Three was rampaging along a hallway the size of a city street, cutting down everything he saw with a pair of blazing beam weapons. Wielding weapons that spat blinding blasts and practically dancing as he dodged, ducked, and leapt over returning fire, Three was carving a path through the ship. Fisher couldn’t have brought along a better backup plan if he’d bottled an avalanche. It was inspiring, reinvigorating, and absolutely terrifying.

  Three turned and blazed a broad path along a series of storage tanks and what looked like power relays along one side of the hall.

  A second, much larger explosion rocked the deck, and several of the pirates fell down. The others were thrown into disarray. An alarm screamed overhead, making Fisher’s ears ring, and blue lights blazed in the walls. More than half of the pirates paused and tilted their heads, light sequences blinking on their fronts. They must’ve been receiving a signal. Apparently that signal was an urgent request to assist with the havoc Three was wreaking elsewhere, because they immediately turned and dashed from the room. Fisher turned to look at Alex, then Amanda, then Veronica. As one, they nodded.

  Fisher ducked, scooped up FP, and hurled him high into the air, pointing at the core. Now it was their job to make sure FP made it there.

  Alex popped a pair of small orbs from one sleeve and nodded to Fisher. Alex raised his arm in a long backward windup like a softball pitcher. As two pirates charged, Alex hurled the orbs underhand. They hit the pirates and popped, releasing twin electrical bursts that blinked like tiny clouds of lightning. The pirates crumpled, systems shorting out, reduced to heaps of inanimate metal.

  Amanda grabbed the nearest pirate by its long, segmented tail, set her legs wide, and with a massive heave, threw it into two of its companions. Fisher reached into the bag and tossed Veronica a foot-long tube that immediately extended into a five-foot staff with electric prods at both ends. He took out another for himself, and they charged into the fray.

  Their odds were terrible. But with all humanity at stake, there was nothing to do but fight, and hope that probability was looking the other way.

  Sometimes, people just tune out your words. But nobody can tune out your actions.

  —Amanda Cantrell, Personal Notes

  Fisher let fury drive him forward. The Mechastaceans had tricked him into handing them the key to the Earth’s demise, and he was going to pay them back in full, or die trying. He swung left as Veronica swung right. He ducked under an attacking claw as she swung her staff up to meet it.

  FP glided through the air, and they charged after him, knocking down every Mechastacean that tried to intercept his flight. Amanda dove straight at the closest pirate to her, punching and kicking it until it was in fully five pieces. Two more aliens came at her from both sides, and she drove an elbow straight into one’s face before flipping onto the other’s back and cracking it almost in half. Alex had drawn a pair of stun batons from his belt and was covering her advance, sweeping up anyone she missed. One Mechastacean nearly struck Amanda down, but Alex executed a flurry of rapid jabs that sent electricity surging through its metal body and left it fluttering on its side.

  FP reached the core and grabbed it in his strong jaws. The ship immediately responded to the core’s theft. Lights blinked and Fisher felt the deck shifting alarmingly under his feet, as if it had been turned to Jell-O.

  “Kiddos!” CURTIS shouted in Fisher’s ear at maximum volume to be heard over the din of the fight. Fisher plunged his staff straight up into a pirate’s camera eye as CURTIS continued, and the Mechastacean flailed blindly, knocking over one of its comrades. “Don’t know what’s goin’ on down there, but Three is making a mess of the place, and the central computer is going haywire. There’s an escape pod near you. I can—oh, hang on …”

  “Fisher!” Mason shouted. “Whatever you did, keep it up! The fleet is falling into disarray!”

  “Easier said than done,” Fisher said, gritting his teeth. FP was gliding back toward him, holding the core between his teeth. Fisher and his friends had done a lot of damage, but they were badly outnumbered, and the Mechastaceans were closing in.

  FP dropped at Fisher’s feet, sliding the last few inches. The greenish, grayish folds of the core glinted up at him. Without debating, Fisher pushed FP to the side with his foot and raised his staff high in the air. The Mechastaceans wanted to turn Earth into a concrete-coated nightmare machine while what few humans survived huddled for shelter among the burnt-out wreckage of their civilization. Fisher gritted his teeth and brought the staff down, crushing the core like a cantaloupe with an audible splat. A sickly yellow fluid jetted out, just missing FP. Fisher had to contain the adrenaline surge and the strong desire to let out a barbaric shout of victory.

  “Control, this is Perseus,” he said after taking a breath. “Primary objective complete.”

  The Mechastaceans dropped back for a moment. Amanda turned around, gasping for breath, and still managed to give Fisher a high five that nearly dislocated his shoulder. Alex and Veronica hugged him. In the fractional pause, Fisher looked up at the holographic display.

  Three was in a huge space full of conduits and rotating chambers. It looked like it might be a major power generator, or one of the engines. He was covered in machine oil. Half of his clothes had been burned off but he looked unharmed underneath. Scraps of wire and metal hung off him as he tore the room apart piece by piece.

  “CURTIS,” Fisher said as the Mechastaceans started to come for them again. “You were saying something about an escape pod?”

  “Green floor hatch!” CURTIS said. “Look for the green floor hatch!”

  Fisher spun around, and spotted the hatch just behind him. More Mechastaceans were swarming the scene, doubly infuriated now that their precious ship’s core had been destroyed.

  “Whatever you’re gonna do, do it NOW!” Amanda screamed as she heaved a pirate aside.

  “Okay!” Fisher said. “Follow me!”

  There was a large button under a clear cover next to the hatch. Fisher crouched, moved the cover aside, and slammed the button. The hatch popped open with a hiss.

  Fisher helped Veronica into the escape hatch first, then Alex. Alex reached into a belt pouch and handed him a fistful of steel spheres as he went in, winking.

  “Amanda!” Fisher said, clenching his hand and feeling all of the orbs activate. “Get in, now!”

  Amanda delivered a final right cross, sending a pirate smoking to the floor, turned and dove headfirst into the hatch. Two dozen Mechastaceans advanced on Fisher with murder in their camera eyes.

  “Even if you win this battle,” one of them screeched over the din, “there are more of us, and they will finish what we began.”

  “There may be more of you,” Fisher said, “but I promise you, there won’t be enough.”

  He scattered the EMP orbs on the floor in front of him, and hopped into the pod, leaving behind the high whine of machinery short-circuiting.

  The four kids and the pig huddled together in the tiny space, shaking, still full of adrenaline.

  “This is control,” Mason said. They could hear cheers in the background. “The fleet is in complete disorder. Ships are veering wildly off course. We’re successfully driving them back into space.” There was a pause, and Fisher could hear him smile. “You did it, kids. Now just get home.”

  “Did you hear that? We did it,” Veronica whispered, leaning into Fisher. He put his arms around her, nodding, too full of emotions to even speak. They’d defeated the Mechastaceans, but they still had to make sure the Gemini held up their end of the bargain. And what would they do about Three? Recapturing him would prove even harder than fighting the space pirates had been.
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  But as the escape pod lifted off, Fisher allowed himself a brief moment of rejoicing.

  “That we did,” Alex said with a smile as large as Ganymede. Amanda ruffled his hair.

  “Hey!” CURTIS radioed. “I see ya! Hold on!”

  CURTIS wasn’t as deft a pilot as Alex, but he was able to guide the Perseus up to the escape pod, open the Gemini ship’s main hatch, and scoop the pod into its small bay. Amanda kicked the pod’s door off and they ran to the bridge full tilt.

  “Mason!” Fisher said as they buckled themselves in. “We’re back aboard the Perseus.”

  “Glad to hear it!” Mason said. “Is Three secure?”

  “Not exactly,” Fisher said.

  Amanda shook her head. “We can’t go back for him.”

  Alex said, “We have to go back for him.”

  Fisher paused, debating. “CURTIS,” he said. “If you’re still connected to the flagship’s network, could you try to determine his loc …” He trailed off as a series of explosions ripped across the big ship’s surface, blowing who knew how many tons of debris out into space. A second group of explosions followed, then a third.

  “We need to go,” said Amanda. “Like, right now.”

  “Right you are,” CURTIS said. “My connection to the flagship’s computer is down. Pretty sure the whole thing is down, in fact.”

  “Alex!” Mason’s voiced boomed over the comm. “It’s too late. You gotta MOVE!”

  Alex was already working the controls. He pushed the ship in reverse as fast as it could go. Fisher’s restraints bit into his shoulders painfully, and suddenly they were shooting once again into the stars. When they were far enough away to see the whole ship, the really big explosions started. The blasts cut across the entire vessel, side to side, up and down. At last, it came apart in thousands of pieces, and Alex turned off the screen to keep the flash from blinding them. When he turned the screen back on, only a debris field remained.