“Had any troubles dismantling Borch?” I asked.
Teresa and Philip glanced down at the table at the same time. I could see that they were still thinking about their lost comrade. I knew that it was still fresh and he was barley cold in the ground so to speak, but we had much bigger things to worry about. If we as a race were going to be able to defeat these things, then we had to get back to Earth in one piece. And that would prove very difficult with the Ursine fleet flying ten thousand miles behind us. I was pretty sure that they’d had some way of communicating with Borch and Ern before their kill and capture respectively. So I was in a rush to get our plan into action, before the fleet had a chance of smelling us out and shooting us down.
“Borch is gone. Took ten minutes to turn him into ash,” Dale said.
“Ten minutes? That’s quite a long time. How come he took so long to burn up?” I asked.
The atmosphere around the table was solemn. Even Jess and Dale were acting a little sheepish, which was making me slightly angry. I mean come on! They hardly knew the guy. Cheer up, we made it! Well, kind of! But we got rid of our problem on the ship. At least one of them. There was still the matter of the nuclear bomb on board, but we’d get to that soon. Time was still on our side. But I wanted to get to the bottom of the riddle we’d been left with.
“Yeah, Borch’s skin was a little tough. The Ursines seem to have a protective layer that shields them from extreme heat. Obviously the kiln sorted him out in the end, but we had to crank that bastard up to full wattage,” Dale said.
The table fell silent for a few seconds as we digested the thought of poor old Borch burning in the furnace, not that any of us really felt sorry for him. But it was an eerie image, the idea of such a big beast of a creature being turned into nothing but bone ash.
“What about Roderick?” I asked.
Jess grimaced. I caught her looking at Philip and then at Teresa. She then looked at me. Her eyes seemed to be moist, like she’d been crying or was about to burst into tears. I had the sudden urge to get up from the table and hug her. And after I’d be done hugging her, I’d hug the other three. I felt a great deal of regret over how this whole thing went down. In my head, I’d imagined us being a little more elegant in how we’d beat Borch and Ern into submission. I certainly didn’t imagine such a bloodbath. Looking down at my hands, I could still see flecks of Borch’s purple blood. A few hours ago, those flecks had been gallons. Gallons of the stuff on my hands, my clothes and even some in my mouth. I’d quickly given myself a sink wash after interrogating Ern. I’d kept my bloody appearance to anger Ern, and It’d helped tremendously. But then again, I was no closer to knowing the truth of the matter. And to make matters worse, we were all stuck with a riddle to solve.
“Roderick burned up just fine. We’ve kept both of their ashes in the hull, in three blue barrels. Two have Borch in, and one has Roderick. Roderick only filled up a quarter of the barrel though. I didn’t know what you wanted to do with the ashes after. Maybe Earth would want to spread Rodericks. God knows what they’d want with Borchs though,” Jess said.
“Okay, suits me just fine. I’d rather keep the ashes in barrels then jettison them into space,” I said.
“What about the fleet, what are we going to do about them?” Jess asked.
Teresa and Philip hadn’t uttered a single word since I’d sat down at the table. By then I was transfixed by the both of them, staring directly at them, trying to gain some sort of understanding of the pain that they were going through.
“What?” I said, suddenly snapping out of my long and tedious thought process. I was tired beyond belief, and the idea of having Ern in the Prism room all by himself was giving me the willies. I’d have to get back there soon. Either to extract some information from the creature, or kill it. Probably both. In that order. Obviously.
“What are we going to do about those damn ships crawling up our ass? Sooner or later they’ll grow suspicious. I’m pretty sure that Ern or Borch would have had some way of communicating with the fleet behind us. I know if it was the other way around, and the humans had stuck two of their own on a ship with a bunch of aliens while the rest of us hung back, we’d have had some way of communicating with them. It’s basic military procedure, and seeing that these things mimic us so well, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that I’m right, and they did have some sort of coms link with the ship,” Dale said.
I nodded my head, placed my hands on the table and sighed. A lot of big decisions had to be made, and the burden was falling firmly on my shoulders by the looks of it.
“Dale, you go check the Ursines’ room. They were bunking together. I haven’t been in it, but I know it’s on floor two, corridor eight. Scout the place, turn it inside out if you have to. If they have been communicating with the fleet, then whatever they were using will still be there. And if it is, I can make Ern use it to check in with them every once in a while,” I said.
Jess scowled at me. By the looks of it, she wasn’t too enthusiastic about my plan thus far.
“You’re planning on keeping him around?” she asked.
I nodded.
“For now. He’s leverage. We need him. If they have been communicating, then we’re going to need him to simmer things down with the warships behind us. The less they are privy to the fact that we are in complete control of the ship, the better our chances of surviving this thing.”
Jess stood up. Her chair squeaked as she shoved it back under the table. It was one of those old world chairs, a lot different from the floating ones the Ursines had back on their planet. As far as I could recall, that was the only piece of original tech I’d seen these things using. Everything else was a carbon copy of our stuff. They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but that saying goes straight out of the window when you have a bunch of heavily armed warships tailing you on a mission to blow up your home world.
I guess that’s where imitation ends, and decimation begins.
“Look, if you want to waste time trying to figure out so-called riddles and finding alleged forms of alien communication, then be my guest. But if we are still pondering our next move in an hour’s time, I’ll be heading straight to the Prism and torturing the Ursine till he squeaks,” Jess said, leaving the mess hall in a huff.
As she walked away, I could hear her feet scuffing against the ground. I watched as she left and found myself admiring her for a second or two. She was certainly taking charge of this situation, much like she did with the one back on the Ursine planet. And as much as I disliked her actions, they seemed to have saved our skins on a few occasions, so I was hesitant to deny her request to torture Ern. She had a knack for knowing what to do when it came to getting out of sticky situations. So if she managed to free us from this one, I’d be grateful.
But then again, I wasn’t really too fond of the idea of torturing an alien just to get information from him. It’s not like we had all the tools in the world at our disposal. Whatever we learned from him wasn’t going to be much help. We were stuck in a tin can going twice the speed of light on a bearing toward our home planet. Tools were very limited indeed.
“You heard her, so I guess we should get our butts moving. Dale, while you’re rummaging around for any alien tech being used to communicate with the fleet, I’ll do some diagnostics on the ship’s computers. I’ll look for tracers and any strange algorithms. Possibly delve into the mainframe and work out the tech behind that organic motor they have installed down there in the engine room.”
Dale nodded his head, stood to attention like a soldier and marched out of the mess hall, leaving only myself and the two young Spaniards.
“As for you two, either of you know Morse code?”
The girl’s eyes lit up. She smiled. I wasn’t expecting it. Not when she’d spent a good chunk of the meeting at the mess hall with tears in her eyes. The contrast of looks on her face was dramatic. The glint in her eye returned and the innocent look she sported before the incident with Roderick
returned. I assumed that she had some good news to tell me.
“Actually, I do!” she said, hardly believing the glee that she was feeling. I noticed how for a second or two, she’d looked guilty, as if she was aware that she was smiling only a few hours after her comrade had died. But the smile returned, and I assumed that she remembered that she was finishing what he’d started. After all, he’d been the one to mention the Morse code to me in the first place.
“Okay, good. Both you and Philip can join me. We’ll try and figure out this message. See if the old man was right about Earth knowing that we’re on our way.”
***
“What’s it saying?” I asked as I stood over Teresa’s shoulder and watched her listening to the Morse code. The headset I’d used before was now broken, because I’d ripped the mic out to stab Borch to death with. So we were using a spare. It hadn’t been used in a very long time, and was prone to being on the quiet side of the sound spectrum.
“I don’t know, I can’t really hear a thing with you blabbing in my ear every two seconds,” Teresa said suddenly.
I looked at her and then at Philip who was grinning at me. At least he’d found her shouting at me amusing, because god knows I didn’t.
“Sorry, I’ll let you listen in peace,” I said, turning around and walking toward the command chair behind the line on the floor. I sat down and waited. Apparently, the Morse code coming from Earth was quite complex. The signal we were picking up was strong, which was strange seeing how far away we were from our solar system. But it was coming through nice and clear. The problem was that the message itself was long. Really long. And by the time Teresa was sure that she’d heard all of it at least three times, I’d nearly dozed off in my chair.
“Captain,” I heard somebody say as I opened my eyes and shot out of my chair.
“Was just resting my eyes,” I said, blinking a few times as I tried to see properly. Thankfully, after a few seconds my eyes honed in on Teresa. She was standing on the deck in the middle of the bridge next to the coms unit. In her left hand was a piece of paper. Both sides were scribbled on and she was waving the paper at me. At first I wasn’t sure what she was implying but after my faculties had cleared and my sleepiness subsided, I made my way toward her. As I approached, I nearly tripped over the step leading up to the deck, but thankfully I saved myself the embarrassment and only stubbed my toe. I held in a curse word and went up the steps, slightly hobbling as I reached the deck.
“Here’s what I think it says, but I can’t be a hundred percent sure that everything is correct. Morse code can be a tricky thing,” she said, handing me the piece of paper. I raised the paper toward my face and squinted my eyes.
“You have supremely small handwriting,” I said as I tried to make sense of the scribbles on the page. Suddenly, the paper was yanked out of my hand. The sudden movement made my eyes go blurry for a few seconds.
“I’ll read it then,” she said.
“Okay, fine. But let me sit back down. Looks like you wrote an essay there,” I said, turning around and making my way back to my chair. I sat down and sighed. It was good to sit down on a comfy chair. Ever since we’d gotten off that rock the Ursines call home, I’d been enjoying the simple luxuries in life. Sitting down being one of them. A bed being the other. And beer, let’s not forget beer. But there would be no beer whilst I listened to Teresa read out her findings. I’d have to settle for a can of soda. I kept a few cans of the stuff under my command station. I bent inwards in my chair and reached for a can. My fingers stretched as they searched for the cold metal cylinder object, and after a few tense seconds, I found what I was looking for. I yanked the can from under the command station and sat back in my chair, popping open the cap and taking a gulp.
“You comfy?” Teresa asked from the deck. She had a look on her face. I ignored it and nodded my head.
“As comfy as a dead man can be,” I said, half joking, half crapping my pants over the mess we were all in. It was slowly dawning on me that I wasn’t cut out for all of this fear, death and despair. It was starting to catch up with me. And I feared that it wouldn’t be long until I snapped. My problem was that I didn’t sign up for this. I didn’t agree to be banished from Earth and I certainly didn’t agree to being in charge of a ship armed with an extinction level nuke on board. But hey, beggars can’t be choosers.
“Okay,” Teresa said, taking a deep breath and exhaling loudly. She looked like she was suffering from a bit of stage fright. Which was absurd, seeing that this wasn’t a recital and I wasn’t in the least bit interested in how she performed. All I wanted from her was the facts. What was the Morse code saying, and was Roderick right? Did they know we were coming?
“Deep breaths,” I said, smiling at her. I was trying to make her feel a little more at ease. But I think I came across sarcastic. She frowned at me and then darted her eyes to the paper in her hands.
“The Morse code basically says this: Attention, banished in space, we know who you are and we know why you have been banished. You have been led to believe that Earth doesn’t want you anymore. That we don’t need you anymore. But that is wrong. Earth needs you now more than ever. A great threat lies in our future. A threat that threatens to destroy Earth. So we had to act. We had to get somebody on the inside. You are that somebody. You all are that somebody. Together, you shall hear this message. We believe that you will understand the reasoning behind what we have done. And why we have done it. So it is up to you to to decipher our reasoning and come to terms with it. We know that not all of you will make it, but for those of you who do, a great future lies ahead. A future where humanity has conquered the stars and won the hearts and minds of the galaxy.”
I stared at Teresa. She stared at me. I blinked, my eyelids felt sticky as I tried to understand exactly what she was saying. But I was stumped. Real stumped.
“Is that it? That’s what took you so long? A message to the banished?” I said, getting off my chair and walking toward her. I jogged up the stairs and grabbed the paper from her hands. I read it and then reread it. The first side had the message on it, and the second side had what looked like a legend for Morse code. She’d written the alphabet single file down the margin and put the corresponding dashes and dots for that letter.
“That’s it?” I said, looking up at her with expectant eyes. But she retained her composure and stared back. I could see that she was upset. Like I thought she’d done a bad job or something. But that wasn’t the case at all. I was annoyed. Annoyed that the message basically said nothing. Just a load of rubbish about so-called banished people and the great fight that lay ahead. It didn’t give any instructions, nor did it divulge anything of any importance. After hearing it, I was left just as puzzled.
“I guess a longer message would have proven harder to understand. It would take days and days to come to grips with the many thousands and thousands of characters that would make up such a message,” Teresa said, still looking at me. But I’d scrunched the paper up and threw it on the floor. Teresa and Philip looked on in shock. She tried to bend down and grab the discarded sheet of paper but Philip stopped her with a grab of the shoulder. She craned her neck at him and then looked up at me. Her eyes were moist. She looked as if she was going to burst into tears. But I had no sympathy for her. I was angry. Angry that we’d wasted our time on that damn Morse code.
“Don’t be so upset,” I said, kneeling down to meet her at eye level. “Earth doesn’t give a shit about us. The Morse code is a load of crap. The message on it is a load of crap and we’re still on our own, tens of millions of miles away from home,” I said, resting my hand on her cheek. She jerked away from me and stood up.
“You give up too easily!” she yelled, turning toward Philip.
“Oh, I give up too easy? Is that it?” I said, grabbing her and swinging her around. She nearly fell but I caught hold of her and kept hold of her as I spoke.
“My crew has been decimated. My people have abandoned me and you say I give up too easily
? The reason we are still alive is because of me. I, along with my crew, took Borch and Ern out. Without us doing that, you’d still be a prisoner onboard the ship. And so would we. But we’re not! We’re free to roam the ship and do as we please. But we’re not really free, are we?”
She shook her head, tears rolling down her cheeks. I still held onto her. Not hard, but more like an embrace. She rocked back and forth as she sobbed.
“We have to figure out a way to get to Earth before the ships behind us,” I said, letting her go. Teresa wiped the tears from her face. I could see that she was embarrassed of letting her emotions fall through the cracks. But she wasn’t the only one. I immediately realized that I’d also let my emotions get the better of me. So as if on cue, I lowered my voice and put a damper on its tone.
“But we will find a way. Because that’s what we do. That’s what humans do,” I said, trying to break my coldness with a smile.
“But what about Earth?” Philip said.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“They have a lot to answer for, there’s no denying that. Truth is, we don’t actually know what the hell is going on. So until we do, we should refrain from wasting our energies on this so called conspiracy that Roderick brought to my attention and focus them on the Ursine ships behind us.”
Philip nodded.
“And Ern,” he said.
I smiled. But then my smile faded as I realized something. I’d been on the bridge for at least an hour, and I hadn’t heard a peep from Dale or Jess. Dale had been tasked with raiding Borch and Ern’s room in the hopes of finding something to communicate with the fleet behind us. And Jess, well, she’d been tasked with…
“Shit, Ern!” I cursed, quickly turning around and running down the deck steps toward the bridge door. The door swished open. Before I could pick up my pace, I came to a skidding halt. Standing in front of me was Dale. He looked downcast and was covered in purple goo. I frowned. My head rushed with many a thought. But then it clicked. Dale opened his mouth.
Stasis (Alpha Ship One Book 1) Page 17
