The Crimson Deathbringer

by Sean Robins

“Not better,” said Kurt.

  I suggested Operation Royalty, which got me questioning looks from most people and knowing smiles from the rest. I wasn’t in the mood to explain, so I simply said, “Google it.” After a couple of minutes, everyone admitted it was very fitting.

  Operation Royalty it was.

  I finally got it out of Kurt how Allen sent us SH-1’s map. I laughed so hard I nearly pulled a stomach muscle, despite Kurt’s indignant stare. The image of Allen, who was always so menacing and intimidating, doing that, and right in the middle of a gunfight with the Xortaags, was just too much.

  “Do you think he tried to swallow the USB drive first?” asked Venom.

  I laughed harder. Allen was so lucky he was dead; otherwise, I’d have ragged on him mercilessly for the rest of his life.

  “You’ll probably still get the chance to do that if Operation Royalty doesn’t go as planned,” said Venom.

  I didn’t get a chance to answer him. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on my ass grabbing my painful nose, with Kurt walking away, his hands clenched into fists, his face the red.

  Half an hour after the meeting, Tarq sent me a message and asked to see me in his office. I went there and sat on a chair in front of his desk. He said, “I am sure you have a thousand questions about us, and I guess you might have noticed I used MICI to block your curiosity.”

  “Dah,” I said.

  “I am a shadow-master,” he said. “That’s what you might call a master spy. Because of my profession, I have always been overly secretive. However, I have just realized something important.”

  I didn’t say anything, just looked at him and waited.

  “We are friends, and there should be no secret between friends. With this verbal command, I remove your block. The only taboo topics are our appearance and my daughter. Go ahead, ask all your questions.”

  His face was flushed, and his eyelids were twitching. It was obviously a difficult and emotional decision for him. Revealing the secrets he preferred to keep from an alien must’ve been traumatizing. I was impressed by the trust he was showing me. Friends, indeed.

  “Great! Thank you so much for trusting me,” I said. “First question: Are you and Barook a couple?”

  Winterfell - September 29, 2048

  Kurt approached Keiko, who was sitting on the grass in a small park in a corner of Winterfell, meditating, and sat down next to her.

  “What’s up?” asked Keiko, still looking straight ahead.

  Kurt told her about Elizabeth’s anniversary present for Jim and added, “The fact that Elizabeth managed to save Jim literally from beyond the grave made me think about us.”

  “What do you mean ‘us?’” asked Keiko, her face impossible to read.

  “You know. About our relationship,” answered Kurt, feeling a bit uneasy.

  “We don’t have a relationship,” replied Keiko coldly. “We had a one-night stand. That’s it.”

  Kurt looked away, blood rushing to his cheeks. He hesitated for a second, then started to get up and leave, but Keiko grabbed his arm. “I’m just messing with you. Of course, there’s an ‘us.’ There’s been one since the day I came to Winterfell for the first time, you blind idiot.”

  Breathing a sigh of relief, Kurt sat back down. Keiko continued, “Did the night we spent together seem like a one-night stand to you?”

  “I honestly have no idea because I’ve never had one,” answered Kurt.

  Keiko sounded surprised. “Never ever?”

  “I was with my high school sweetheart most of my adult life,” answered Kurt, “and I’ve been single since she died.”

  “You’ve been only with one woman all your life?” asked Keiko.

  She sounded so astonished that Kurt couldn’t help asking, “Why’re you so shocked? How many lovers have you had?”

  “I was in a kamikaze unit,” said Keiko. “We were the live-fast-and-die-young types, and it isn’t as if we had to worry about an old man sitting on the clouds and keeping an eye on what we were doing with our sex organs. Plus, the air force is full of good-looking, fit young men and, eh, women.”

  “Way too much information, especially that last bit,” said Kurt. “I wish I hadn’t asked.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I haven’t been with another man since I came to Winterfell, only you,” said Keiko. “Anyway, what did you want to talk about?”

  Kurt wanted to ask if not being with “another man” meant she’d been with other woman but decided he didn’t want to know. “I came to say you’re right,” he said, “and after Operation Royalty, I want to invite you to dinner one evening.”

  Keiko flashed a rare smile. “I’d like that.” After a pause, she added, “Kurt, there’s something I’ve wanted to tell you for a very long time.”

  Kurt leaned closer, thinking she was about to say something romantic. “What’s that?”

  Keiko pretended she was pulling a goatee she didn’t have. “‘I pick the mantle of defending humanity against aliens, and seven hundred million people end up dead.’ You are a real drama queen, aren’t you?”

  The crimson Deathbringer appeared right on top of me, laser cannons blazing. My Viper exploded.

  “Restart simulation,” I said.

  Maada’s ship was on my six. My Viper exploded.

  “Restart simulation,” I growled through clenched teeth.

  The enemy ship came down from below. I didn’t even see it. My Viper exploded.

  I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples, disgusted with myself. There had to be a way to make this happen.

  Keiko had fed our recordings of Maada’s ambush to our battle simulators and had them programmed for new dogfight scenarios. I’d devoted all my waking hours to practicing, but it was no use.

  I called Keiko, “Any luck?”

  “I got shot down fifty-eight times today,” she said.

  “Huh! I was shot down only fifty-two times. In your face!” I said triumphantly.

  “I can’t feel my arms anymore. Gonna call it a night.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I said. “I must go meet an old friend.”

  I knocked on Kurt’s door, and when he opened it, I showed him the box of Paulaners I was carrying. “I’ve come bearing gifts,” I said.

  Kurt looked at me and said, “What’s happened to your hair?”

  I ran my hand through my short hair, which I had cut military style. “I figured this is more professional. You know, it makes me more leader-like.”

  Kurt chuckled. “Good call if you’re trying to change the movie star image you were complaining about. And what are these?” He lightly touched the black circles under my eyes.

  “I’m not getting much sleep recently,” I said. “Have been practicing non-stop.”

  We sank into his sofa, clanked our bottles and started chatting. With Operation Royalty less than forty-eight hours away, I couldn’t help wondering if this would be the last time we’d drink together. A pang of loss startled me. I wanted to grab him and run for the hills—as if that would help—but I didn’t show it. I figured we all were having these feelings.

  He told me what was going on between Keiko and him. I approved. “Liz thought the two of you were made for each other.” It didn’t hurt as much to say her name now. It hurt, but in a way that was almost beautiful. She seemed close to me, not as a ghost; just a presence. A warmth.

  Kurt sipped his beer. “You realize this is exactly what you and I did on the Christmas Eve when I came to hide in your place? We talked about my love life back then too. The only difference is . . .” he looked guilty and left his sentence unfinished.

  “The only difference is Liz was alive,” I said with a steady voice. “So was Allen. Yeah, I remember. I’ll always remember.” We were both quiet for a moment, then moved on, letting the dead fade back into memory.

  “Ready for the big day?” asked Kurt.

  “Yep. I even have a kill list and a detailed step-by-step plan on how to do away with everyone in it. Look.” I to
ok out a piece of paper from my pocket and handed it to Kurt. There was only one name on the “list”: Maada. Under his name, I’d written “Step One: find him; Step Two, kill his alien ass.”

  After my third beer, I asked him, “When we were teenagers, chasing girls, did you ever think we’d end up on the front lines of saving humanity?”

  “First of all, we weren’t chasing girls, you were. I was with Janet,” he said. “Secondly, yes I did. I always thought my father and I would do something great. And thirdly, we are saving the universe. If we fail, who is going to stop the Xortaags?”

  “The Akakies? Maybe Tarq can prank the Xortaags to death.”

  Kurt laughed. “Speaking of Janet, I’m going to tell you a secret I’ve never told you: When she and I started dating, she hated your guts.”

  I was horrified. Janet was the sweetest girl you can imagine, and she hated me? “How come?”

  “Apparently it had something to do with you sleeping with all her friends in high school and dumping them the next day.”

  I crossed my arms. “I was a teenager.”

  “By that criteria, you stayed a teenager until you met Liz.”

  “It’s not my fault women kept throwing themselves at me.”

  Kurt laughed. “You’ll never change, will you? You’re planning to be annoyingly cocky until you die?”

  “I’m not cocky,” I said. “I’m confident, and with good reason. I’m sexy, and I know it.”

  Kurt laughed even harder.

  We drank, teased each other, and remembered the good times, trying to forget what lay ahead.

  Chapter Fourteen

  SH-1 - October 5, 2048, 20.00 EST

  Under cover of night, twenty black-clad frogmen silently swam out of the river passing through SH-1, hid behind a half-constructed building and started taking off their diving suits.

  Putting on his armor and combat helmet, Kurt saw a ring flashing on Oksana’s left hand and asked, “What’s this?”

  Oksana, busy with her own armor, answered, “Matias proposed last night.”

  Sergei smiled widely. “Big boy came through.”

  “I guess congratulations are in order, but nobody bothered to tell me?” said Kurt.

  Oksana squinted her eyes. “You’ve been burying yourself in the Command Center for a week now.”

  Kurt touched his earpiece and said, “We’re here.”

  Tarq answered, “Coast is clear. Proceed according to plan.”

  “Are the search parties getting closer to Winterfell?” asked Kurt.

  “One is fifty kilometers away and is coming straight towards us. Please hurry up.”

  Kurt checked his assault rifle, gestured to his team to follow him and walked into a street on his right. Behind him, Oksana told Sergei, “You go first. I don’t want to watch him playing with his goatee all the time. It makes me nervous.”

  Kurt’s team moved in total silence. This part of the city was still under construction. Human workers worked here in two ten-hour shifts, and it was empty during the remaining four hours. A few buildings here and there looked ready for residents to move in, but most were half-built. There were no human soldiers in the city; they were stationed either around the city or in the fleet base. There were a few small Xortaag security teams patrolling the city, but with Tarq’s guidance—he could observe what was going on using the Akaki’s invisible spy ship in orbit—it was easy to avoid them. It was a cloudy and moonless night, which made things easier.

  After half an hour, the Commandos entered an empty twenty-story building. The elevator was not installed. They used the stairs to make their way to the roof. There, they met another team that had been sent via a different route as backup, just in case Kurt’s team ran into trouble on their way to the target.

  “You’re up,” Kurt told Oksana.

  Oksana opened the bag she was carrying and took out something that looked like a small, folded satellite dish. She unfolded it and put it on the roof’s ledge facing outward. Working with her PDD, she said, “It’ll take a couple of minutes.”

  The device, another gadget out of Tarq’s bag of magic, was called a force field penetrator. It could open a small hole in a force-field. The catch was it had a maximum five-mile range, and it had to be at the line of sight with the target.

  Which was exactly where Kurt’s team was right now.

  “I’m ready,” whispered Oksana, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her gloved hand.

  “Why’re you whispering?” whispered Sergei.

  Kurt, Sergei, and six other Commandos stood in one line, facing the target, and prepared their shoulder-fired missile launchers. Tarq had estimated two missiles would be enough to destroy the target, and four would be overkill. Inside the confines of the force field, the explosions would be devastating. Kurt had decided to leave nothing to chance and shoot eight missiles.

  Here we go, thought Kurt, checking his watch.

  For a second, Kurt pondered the enormity of that moment. Everything depended on what happened next. If the force field penetrator didn’t work, or if the MFM controls weren’t here, Operation Royalty was dead before it started, and with it, their last chance of saving humanity. The fate of the universe depended on the trigger he was about to pull. That thought made him breathe faster and brought a tight-lipped smile to his face. His neck and shoulder muscles tensed.

  I should be freaking out right about now. What’s wrong with me? he thought, using Jim’s true and tested method of using humor to fight anxiety.

  At exactly 0300 local time, Kurt said, “On three. One, two, three,” and Oksana touched her PDD. Through his command launch unit, Kurt saw a light blue circle appear mid-air nearly five miles away. The force field, just like the one in Winterfell, was invisible, and it mirrored its surrounding area for perfect camouflage. Kurt targeted the blue circle, said, “Missile one away,” and pulled the trigger. Next to him, Sergei counted to three, said, “Missile two away,” and shot his own missile. The other Commandos followed suit.

  Through his CLU, Kurt watched the missiles disappear into the blue circle. The only visible effect was fire and smoke emitted from the circle, and some debris was thrown out. The force field itself didn’t collapse, which confirmed Tarq’s theory that it had a second power source outside the field itself. This worked just fine for Kurt because the missiles were a lot more effective inside a confined area.

  After the last missile disappeared into the circle, Oksana touched her PDD once more, and it disappeared.

  Buzzing with anticipation, Kurt asked Tarq, “Did it work?”

  Tarq’s answer came a few seconds later. “We are in.”

  Kurt clenched his right hand above his head, happiness swelling inside his chest. The hard part of their operation was still ahead, but now humanity was freed from the Xortaags’ mind control machine, and they had ten billion new allies, including the two hundred thousand heavily armed soldiers surrounding SH-1. Oksana and Sergei caught him in a group hug, and there were high-fives, fist-bumps, and more hugs all around.

  Kurt gave his team a minute to savor their victory. “Let’s go. We aren’t out of the woods yet.”

  The only thing worse than going into a battle that, if lost, would get you, your friends, your family and all of humanity killed was waiting for the said battle to freaking start.

  Experience had taught me when the actual fighting started, adrenalin would be pumped into my bloodstream, and I simply wouldn’t have the time to worry or get scared. But before that, I’d obsess over every single detail, wondering what I might’ve missed or what could go wrong. What made my situation worse was the fact that there was nothing I could do about our plans. Our whole strategy was based on destroying the Xortaags’ fleet on the ground. If that failed (and as the famous adage went, no plan survived the first contact with the enemy), Maada had around twenty-two thousand space fighters against our seven, which meant swift death for every single one of us. There was no way we could overcome those odds.


  And with the Xortaag transportation ships only two short weeks away, we’d never get another shot at defeating them if we failed tonight.

  Venom was busy predicting all sorts of nightmarish outcomes, driving me crazy, as usual.

  I opened a channel to my fleet. “Guys, we are fencing in. You all know this already but allow me to say it out loud. If the Xortaag fleet gets off the ground, we are the only thing standing between them and the destruction of our planet. We are the last line of defense. Today we aren’t fighting for ourselves, or even our families and friends. Today we fight for all humanity. If we fail, our species is finished. Think about it when you fly to battle.”

  I paused a second, my mouth set in a hard line, then added, “What we do now echoes in eternity.”

  The last time I plagiarized a great leader I ended up getting almost everyone under my command killed. Feeling the veins pulse in my temple, I fervently hoped to do better this time.

  One of the fighter pilots, a twenty-four-year-old rookie on his first mission whose name was Peter McKinley, answered, “We won’t let you down, boss.”

  Playing with the wedding ring hanging from my neck, I thought, I’m not worried about that, rookie. My main concern right now is I might let you down.

  We flew closer to the enemy fleet base, waiting for the battle that would determine the fate of our species.

  SH-1 - 20.30 EST

  Ten miles south of the Xortaag city and behind a ridge that hid him and the force under his command from the city guards, Matias was waiting for Operation Royalty to start. In the turret of an enormous seventy-ton Leopard 3 tank.

  The Leopards were multilayer armored tanks, armed with a 140 mm gun, three machine guns, and two grenade launchers. They were thirty-five feet long, fifteen feet wide and twelve feet high. The Commandos had gotten them from military bases in Holland and Germany. They’d entered the bases disguised as Xortaags and ridden away with the tanks.