United We Stand

by Christian Messe

  CHAPTER 10

  “They’re dead. Every last one of them gone, by my hand,” Karalus turned towards Imp, “Isn’t it funny, just hilarious that they went out all that way, for nothing?” Imp stayed quiet. “Hope can drive a being to do all sorts of desperate acts, just to fail, so simply.”

  “You’re insane,” Imp said quietly.

  Karalus looked at him, smiling. “I’m insane? You already said that, and it still seems a bit… unjust to me. I’m about to destroy the last remnant of the Kelisian empire, and you’re going to help me.”

  “I would never help you do anything.”

  “Oh I know you wouldn’t, but you don’t exactly have a choice,” Karalus chuckled.

  “What do you mean?”

  Karalus summoned for a Jupitain to come over. One that was nearby growled and walked in.

  “Your visor please.” The Jupitain looked down at him uncertainly. Karalus’s facial expression turned fierce, “Your visor.” The Jupitain pulled it off and sunk into a puddle of dark goo, the visor dropped into it. Karalus picked it up off the floor and smiled, “That wasn’t too hard was it?”

  “You kill your own side?” Imp asked.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time, besides they’re not even alive, just programmed by the visor itself to take a form and follow my command, and soon… you’ll mindlessly obey me too.”

  Imp tried to move his hands, but they were restrained. Karalus brushed the Dark matter off the visor with his hand and turned it around. Imp tried to move his head away from the visor, but it connected to his face. He heard a click, and then he opened his eyes. His surroundings were red. Everything, was red. He tried to think, think about himself but he couldn’t. Everything he thought about vanished, his mind was empty, but then a voice filled the void.

  “Imptanius, can you hear me?” Imp didn’t reply, “Can you hear me?”

  Imp looked up at him. “Yes, Alpha.” Alpha? That was wrong, he knew it was wrong, but his mind was getting clouded, he was unsure of what was right or wrong.

  Karalus smiled, “Are you ready to comply with my orders?”

  “Yes, Alpha.”

  “Good.” Karalus removed the restraints from Imp’s arms. “I have a mission for you Tanius.” Imp stood up, standing perfectly still, alert.

  “I know I’ve been talking about destroying the Kelisians, but in order to do that I need to cripple their detection systems, then I can begin,” Karalus pulled out a translator sphere, and a hologram of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter appeared, “I’ve destroyed the asteroid base by Jupiter, and the radar outpost on Titan, but there is another, miles away from the asteroid belt checkpoint. I would simply go around it but, they’re scanners are surprisingly powerful. Powerful enough to call in the entire United Worlds fleet before I’m ready.”

  He zoomed in on a United Worlds asteroid base. It was huge; two frigates were docked on the base’s spaceport. Heavy laser turrets were perched on almost every wall around the base. Missile launchers were hidden on small asteroids everywhere, and a giant radar dish was positioned on top of the central facility. It was a fortress.

  “I need you to destroy this,” Karalus said simply, “Not alone though; I’ll give you a stealth-ready transport ship, filled with sixty loyal Jupitains at my command. The ship is small enough to stay in stealth without being detected by sonar waves, but something really big, like say, a warship… no amount of stealth I can implement would keep that hidden from scanners.” Karalus snapped his fingers, and on cue a Jupitain came in, carrying a crate filled to the brim with bombs.

  “These are Black hole charges, over twenty times more powerful than a black hole grenade; they will automatically implode after a countdown when you press the center button on this control module,” Karalus handed him the small controller, “Once the countdown is complete, the bomb will unleash a ginormous black hole, that will only stop expanding after twenty seconds, by then the entire base, and miles of asteroids will no longer exist,” Karalus said. “Do you understand your mission? Set the bombs, activate them, and get out.”

  “Yes, Alpha,” Imp replied firmly.

  “That’s what I like to hear!” Karalus said enthusiastically, “Follow me. I want to show you your ship.”

  Karalus left the room, and Imp followed obediently. They walked down the dimly lit hallway, passing by multiple series of doors until they reached a large hangar. Inside was a Jupitain transport ship, it looked the same as all the other Jupitain fighters, but was bigger, and had much more artillery.

  “This, my Kelisian friend, is your ride, and it comes custom with new tech of my own design. You might have wondered how I slipped past the outer asteroid base in the first place without getting caught by the scanners, well; I have basically come up with a breakthrough.” Karalus walked over to the ship and put his hand on its hull.

  “I’ve waited years to attack again because I was planning, I knew invading Earth would get the Kelisians to reveal their technology to me, and it worked. I know everything about them, and they know nothing of what I can do with that information. So, after my invasion fleet was destroyed, I started to develop new inventions, weaponry that would give me an edge over my opponent, but mainly making sure the Lore couldn’t surprise me with an invasion.” Karalus looked at Imp. “I have created the Galaxy’s most advanced, ever cloaking device. Sure, there have been dozens of other types, developed through the ages, but… those have been lost to time, thanks to the E6s killing anything that moved before I took over.” Karalus paused,

  “I’ve had to search through the rubble of, impressively advanced civilizations, through mere fragments of schematics, to perfect this invention,” Karalus finished.

  Karalus called a few Jupitains to attention. “Their job is to come in behind you once you’ve boarded the base, they will create a distraction while the commanders have no idea your inside.” The Jupitains started to board their fighters; the sound of engines roaring to life filled the hangar.

  Karalus summoned for another Jupitain. It walked over, carrying a laser rifle. The Jupitain handed it to Imp.

  “Take the weapon, fight for my cause, then we’ll do something about that hideous uniform.”

  Imp walked towards his ship, followed by sixty Jupitains, each armed with laser rifles. They boarded the transport ship, and the engine started. The ship rose, hovered over the hangar floor, and then sped into space, followed by at least four dozen Jupitain fighters. When the ship was almost a thousand miles away from being detected by United Worlds scanners, it cloaked. The entire ship just seemed to fade away with the void. Imp could hear the humming of the cloaking device. It was attached to the engine, its rays bouncing off every part of the hull.

  Suddenly the lights in the ship turned green; they were approaching the base. Imp remembered the hologram image, the laser turrets lined along the walls, protecting a large tower, with a hangar at the bottom, and a command center at the very top, with a large glass window. The horde of Jupitains didn’t show any sign of fear, just a vicious need for blood.

  The hangar door was wide open; the commanders must’ve put too much faith in their turrets.

  A human worker in the command center sighed, “Sir we had an asteroid clearing ship leave the base thirty-six hours ago, and it was on schedule to arrive earlier today, it's way overdue.”

  “Add it to the list,” The Kelisian Commander ordered, grumpily. He turned back towards the window and looked at the empty void of space. “Did you check in with the outer base?”

  The worker checked the display pad, “That’s weird. We lost all connection to the base. It’s like its frequency was completely shut down… Titan’s radar mainframe is offline as well. Do you think it was Jupitains sir?”

  “Jupitains? Mmm, no I don’t think so, last time we had a run with any Jupitain warships, the Accolade squadron blew them back. We should expect some sort of build up near Callisto though,” The Commander said, boredly.

  A female worker called out fo
r the Commander, “Sir the engineers in hangar 01 are reporting a disturbance.”

  “Send down a patrol to investigate, and get a search crew ready to find our missing ship.” The Commander ordered.

  The Jupitain transport hovered smoothly into the hangar, still cloaked. Some of the human workers were getting uneasy by the faint sound of what seemed to be an engine. Then a worker walked right into the cloaked ship and fell to the ground.

  “What the hell are ya do’in Rian?” Another worker asked.

  “It wasn’t me!” He cried back, “Something hit me.” The Jupitain ship uncloaked, and the door opened. Jupitains ran out and started firing at anything moving.

  “What the…” The man was shot in the chest. One of the Jupitains roared, and charged two workers at once, bringing them both down. Another threw a black hole grenade into three people, and they were sucked into it.

  A patrol of four armed human soldiers came running into the hangar. The United Worlds soldiers wore high-tech, white assault gear. Their helmets looked like white, camouflage-less U.S Army helmets, with straps and mounted flashlights on the top right sides. They were armed with Devrin-9s, advanced, white, and sleek Kelisian made laser rifles that were based off the design of a C7A2.

  One of the Jupitains charged but was shot in the visor. Imp walked out of the ship and aimed his rifle. His visor had a targeting system inside of it, and he was able to point his gun quickly. He fired, bringing one of the men down.

  “Is that… a Martian?” One of the men asked, shocked for a second. Imp didn’t hesitate. He shot the other soldier in the stomach. When he didn’t go down, Imp shot him again in the chest. The other two soldiers left sprinted in opposite directions, trying to find cover. One of the Jupitains rammed a soldier into the wall, killing him. The last one hid behind a fighter jet, trembling. He took a deep breath and fired at the horde. Two Jupitains went down, but then Imp shot him in the head.

  Then Imp heard the sound of the Jupitain fighters. Forty-eight of them, flying in formation. The laser turrets started to fire, launching enormous amounts of energy into the fleet. The fighters began to rain down volleys of red lasers, and soon it was all out chaos. The base had no air support due to their hangar being overrun, but the turrets were putting up quite a fight.

  The blasts of energy destroyed the side of a fighter, which crashed into a nearby asteroid. Missile launching asteroids fired at the Jupitain fighters, destroying two more. Three of the fighters flew next to the wall of turrets and fired on them. One of the turrets blew up and threw wreckage into the base.

  Imp led the Jupitains into the main hallway, which was shaking from all the chaos outside. Another patrol of four soldiers came sprinting in to meet the Jupitains, but was eradicated by a black hole grenade. Imp and the horde of Jupitains reached the center room. It was filled with power compressors and an Ion Neutrolite Compressor-type energy generator in the center of the room. There was nobody inside.

  “This looks like the spot,” Imp said finally. The Jupitain that was holding the crate of bombs put it on the floor and opened it. The box made a clicking sound and opened. The Jupitains took the four bombs and attached them to each side of the room. The base shook from the force of an explosion outside. The Jupitains activated the countdowns and started to run back to the hangar.

  When Imp and his platoon of Jupitains arrived, ships were trying to flee the chaos.

  “We can’t have any survivors; the United Worlds can’t know that this was an organized attack,” Imp said. The Jupitains acknowledged and started shooting at crew members who were trying to escape. A fighter, one that resembled an F-14, but was all white, and much sleeker, with high tech looking engines, started to hover over the ground, and shoot nearby Jupitains.

  Imp threw a black hole grenade into the fighter’s exhaust, and the entire left wing was devoured into the unknown. The fighter stopped hovering and slammed into the ground.

  The pilot tried to open the glass seal, but one of the Jupitains shot her through the glass. Another ship that was trying to leave the base was shot in the engine by a Jupitain fighter behind it and collided with one of the base’s turrets. A frigate that was docked to the station was under heavy fire from Jupitain fighters. It was returning fire, but not enough.

  Suddenly, a plasma missile slammed into the frigate, and the shields to the ship instantly dissipated. Then, streams of lasers rained down onto the center of the ship’s hull, tearing it apart, and showing the interior of its hallways. Crew members were pulled out of the vessel by the vacuum of space. The docking port was destroyed, causing the other frigate to lose stability.

  The force of the explosion from the other frigate caused the massive ship to smash into the fortress. The sound of screeching metal was overwhelmingly loud, until the ship ran across a fuel tank, and created a devastating chain reaction to itself. The hull exploded, then the engines blew across the bridge, with the remaining pieces of the ship ramming into the base’s turrets.

  Imp and his squad of Jupitains made it back to the ship, and the autopilot set a course to Karalus’s warship. Another fighter jet that was trying to leave whipped past them, flying so close that it caused the inside of Imp’s ship to shake.

  “Destroy it!” Imp shouted. The Jupitain piloting the ship aimed the laser cannons and fired at one of the fighter’s wings. The red lasers smashed into their target, and the right wing was blown off, causing the fighter’s hull to start spinning uncontrollably. The engines failed, and the ship exploded, with Imp’s transport ship flying through the wreckage, spreading it. Then, the bomb set inside of the United Worlds base went off.

  A small dot, pitch black, appeared in the center of the fortress. It became larger and larger, sucking in ruins from the decimated United Worlds jets, and also Jupitain fighters. It devoured the entire base and was starting to swallow nearby asteroids, then, the giant ball of darkness stopped expanding, and shrunk into a small dot again. Everything was quiet, until a loud zooouuummm sound echoed through space.

  The dot imploded, then exploded, shooting back everything it had sucked in. The large pieces of leftover frigates were blown everywhere. Jupitain fighters were thrown into asteroids or each other. Everything that had gone into the black hole came out in pieces, zooming everywhere at an incredibly fast speed.

  Imp’s visor turned blue, and a familiar voice spoke out of it, “I must say I’m impressed, I didn’t think you’d do such a spectacular job, although the visor did make some minor improvements to your fighting style.”

  He paused, but then started to speak again, “What you just witnessed was a weapon of my own invention, a black hole, with a Dark matter modification. You see Imptanius when the black hole gets large enough to notice it’s modified Dark matter implant, it rejects it, and implodes, causing everything it engulfed to be shoved back into reality. If the bomb is enlarged enough, it can destroy an entire planet, maybe even a system, but if you put it in the right place, it will be more than devastating.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Claire slid her hand over the control pad, and a map of the system she was in appeared. She was actually trying to figure out how to activate the same type of super speed the Jupitain fighters used again, but had no luck. It just wouldn’t work a second time. When the Hypotonic boost had stopped, it just kept her adrift in space. She looked at the map, but the Solar System didn’t have a name, just a code. C07Scempirium. The translator sphere wasn’t helping much either. Claire tried to tell it to give her the location of her friends, but it needed some sort of Lifeform code, so it wouldn’t work.

  She slammed her fist on the pad, and it went black, then rebooted. Every planet on the pad was under Jupitain control, so there was nowhere to go; every Jupitain had Claire’s identity programmed in their visors.

  She didn’t know where to go, she was lost, in a Galaxy she thought was vacant of life besides her own system, until she recently figured out that a seemingly infinite enemy controlled it. Then things got worse. A Jupitain warship
that was slingshotting itself around a nearby planet was visible from Claire’s ship, but it didn’t fire, it just had its engines on full power, like it was trying to escape from something. The vessel got faster and faster, at least two miles away from Claire’s ship. Then she saw what was chasing it.

  A giant warship, double the size of the Jupitain one, was firing everything it had onto the Jupitain ship. It had an oval curve in the front, with two large engines in the back, propelling the ship towards its target. The color of the hull was gold like yellow, that glistened in the solar rays of the system’s star. The mystery warship made a crippling blow to the Jupitain ship. The entire back of the shark tooth-shaped engine exploded, and the stern of the ship was torn apart. Simultaneously, the ship’s systems started to shut down, and the blinding red lights began to go out.

  The ship leaned sideways, helpless now to the will of the planet’s gravity. Then, it was pulled into the atmosphere completely. The sound of the ship’s hull burning, with crackling metal, could be heard from miles away. Claire looked at the warship, dumbfounded. Then it saw her. She was inside of a Jupitain transport ship. Gold colored looking energy started to form inside of the ship’s turrets.

  “Aw shi…” They opened fire. Claire took the controls, and her ship spun around in random directions, mostly because she only had thirty minutes of pilot ‘training’ before this. The red energy in the transport ship’s engine burst and the hull shook from the force of the boost, causing Claire to fly out of her seat and hit the roof of the hull. She cursed, and pushed off with her legs, reaching for the pilot chair. She grabbed hold and thrusted herself back into her seat.

  Then the engine took a direct hit, and exploded, the force pushing Claire’s ship into the strong pull of the planet’s atmosphere. The ship started to burn up. Claire held on as tightly as she could to the control table, the Meta-Gene hand helped, immensely.

  When the clouds cleared, the huge Jupitain crash site was visible, pieces scattered in every direction. Claire knew there was no way to survive the crash inside of the ship she was in. She looked around desperately and got an idea. When the fighter was about ten seconds away from crashing, Claire turned her Meta-Core hand into a plasma cannon, and shot the already damaged back of the ship, destroying the engine, and creating a massive hole, sucking Claire out of the fighter. She was free falling, at least three thousand feet above the ground.