James looked down, “I doubt it, the deaths here made him even more guilty about, well everything I guess. He did say he was a rebel against the Jupitains since before we even heard of them. Before we were even born, He thinks we can’t change anything.”
Mark didn’t say anything. After a short silence, he said, “We don’t need him, we’ll regroup with the fleet, and attack Karalus head on.”
“Yeah, us, the asteroid clearers attack with the fleet, maybe in our dreams, they’ll probably send us back to Earth for reassignment while they attack, not giving us any credit. That’s how it works isn’t it?” James asked.
“Are you fricking kidding me?! We’ve been through more action right now in a day, maybe less, than the highest-ranking assault troopers have ever been in their entire careers! There is no way I’m going back to Earth without being awarded a medal of honor or something! Not only did we discover that the Jupitains weren’t controlling themselves, but are instead being controlled by some blue maniac, we found a mothership! Inside of Jupiter! We’ve been to the edge of the Galaxy! We go home heroes, fighting for our world, or we don’t go home at all, we didn’t come this far to be janitors damn it!”
James smirked.
Mark leaped from the table, grunting while attempting to stand until he got up straight. He turned to James, “We’re taking that Jupitain warship and ending that scourge. Today!”
Mark must have been louder than he thought because he and James could hear Douglas laughing hysterically outside. He barged into the hut, and grabbed Mark by the collar of his shirt; laughter turned to rage.
“There is no end to their reign! Earth is doomed, the Kelisians are doomed! There is no fight, not one we can win!” Douglas shouted frantically.
James snapped at him, “What the hell is wrong with you!? If you really cared about saving lives, you would be on that warship with us right now! You don’t want to fight; you don’t want to save lives, you're just some coward, hiding till the Jupitains snuff you out!”
Douglas let go of Mark, and grabbed James’s neck, choking him with one hand, lifting him off the ground, “I’m no coward you son of a bitch!” He shouted, piercing James’s ears.
“Let him go!” Mark yelled. He tried to get Douglas off of James, but he was too strong.
“You have no idea what I’ve been through! The pure horror I’ve witnessed!”
James gasped for air, and cackled, “A true rebel- auugh… would never give up. Even when the odds…” He cackled again, “Were a hundred percent against them…”
Douglas let go of him, panting. James gasped for air, grabbing his neck.
“Oh my God man, are you ok?!” Mark rushed to him, keeping him upright.
Douglas didn’t look sorry at all; he was still fuming. Then, a fast beeping alarm started to sound, from Douglas’s hut.
“Frequencies…” He murmured. He sprinted towards his hut, Mark looking after him.
“Frequencies, what frequencies?!” Mark yelled after him.
Douglas opened his hut door. It slammed outwards, almost flying off its hinges. He tuned the modified radio for the channel — Jupitain frequencies. The voice of Karalus started playing.
“All E6 units, 2.7 through 2.9s, report to the Red zone immediately, sector B6Gemos, terminate all non-visored slaves, lock down all mines and bases. All warships group up in invasion formation. Target: Yellow star, medium class. Repeat, all forces group up in sector B6Gemos, lock down all other operations, Evacuate Non-Citadel class bases. Terminate all non-visored slaves. Objective ‘Overload,’ will be completed. Today.”
Douglas switched off the intercepted transmission; static echoed from it. “Objective Overload…” He whispered. He remembered hearing about it during the days of the rebellion. The primary objective of the Jupitains, to finish harvesting resources and completely wipe out all intelligent life.
He stood there, in silence, until he heard Mark say from outside, “What was that?”
Douglas turned around to face them, “Grab everything you can from the bunker. Everything.”
“Woah, woah,” James said, “Are you coming with us?”
Douglas didn’t respond. He kept walking towards the destroyed gate, to the bunker.
“If you are, why’d you change your mind?!” James called out after him.
Douglas stopped there and turned around slightly, “Because you were right kid, a true rebel’ll face insurmountable shit to fight for what they believe in, just took the threat of trillions dying to remind me of that,” He turned back around and kept walking, “Coming?!” He shouted.
“Trillions, where’d he hear that from?” James asked Mark.
They turned to the radio, “Wait… was he talking about Karalus? Karalus is gonna kill trillions?” James asked, dumbly, “Why… and how?”
“I don’t know, but it might be possible…” Mark replied, “We have no idea what he’s going to do with that mothership.”
“This guy hacked the Jupitain’s system, so what? He can’t kill trillions, that would take centuries… and there’s no way there’s advanced enough tech to do that…”
“Well, possible or not, Douglas is coming to Earth with us, and with him, we have a way better chance of saving the United Worlds,” Mark started jogging towards Douglas.
“Yeah, hooray Douglas, our hero… just tried to kill me thirty seconds ago,” James muttered.
Douglas, 1978, Deep Space
“Rise and shine buddy!” Said a taunting voice from outside of the cell.
Douglas woke up, slowly. He still had no idea where he was exactly. It was all a blur. He could see slightly, the metal bars, a jail cell. It led into a brightly lit hallway.
Another spaceship, thought Douglas. His escape pod had accelerated so fast that the speed had knocked him out. Now, he must have run into this ship, and who knew what the crew was like.
The cell door swung open, and an alien came to greet him. His skin was light yellow, and his eyes lit up bright white where his pupils were. He wore a beat up Yorisican military uniform; an old planet government from before the Jupitains, that had black fabric and a grey zipper through the middle of the shirt, the pants just looked like black jeans.
“Huh, you don’t come from around here do you?” He asked.
“No,” Douglas said, half conscious.
“Well, your obviously not with the Darklings,” He bent over and grabbed Douglas’s hand to help him up, “Sorry I had to keep you in the holding cell, we don’t get many visitors, I was afraid you were a spy.”
Douglas ignored him, “What are Darklings?” He asked, getting to the point.
“Experiment Six,” The alien said, like it was obvious, “One of the Cyrisian’s pet projects gone wrong… like, bad enough to wipe out entire worlds.”
“Wipe out?” Douglas asked.
“Yeah, they just fly to a planet, kill everything, an’ then go to the next, truly horrific,” The alien said.
“So- what’s stopping them?” Douglas asked while rubbing his head.
The alien grabbed Douglas’s shoulder, and gave him a broad, confident smile, “That’s where we come in.”
“We? There’s more here?” Douglas asked.
“Well, of course there are, come on, lemme introduce you to my crew,” The alien said, warmly.
The two of them walked up a short set of stairs into the cockpit of the ship. It was junky and poorly put together, random wires and circuits hanging from all over the place. Levers and buttons were on the dashboard, with a control panel to steer with. The crew was also unique themselves.
Sitting in a chair to the left was a robot. It didn’t notice them because it was too busy flying the ship. In the other chair was another alien, only it looked different from the Captain. His skin was dark orange, and he had a cracked orange gem sticking out of the right side of his forehead.
The dark orange alien looked at Douglas, skeptic, then at the Captain. “Rapf I thought you said we weren’t letting new crew aboar
d until we got out of this system, the Alliance’s rules strictly, and clearly…”
“I know the rules just as well as you Ullen, but this one is from a prim’ world from the looks of it, gear I snatched off him looked ancient. He’s no threat.”
“Eh, I dunno, looks kinda shifty to me. Where’d you find him anyway?”
“He was inside a burned out escape pod, wasn’t a Cyrisian one so I put it on board, found this guy, an’ put em in the holding cell.”
“An escape pod? How’d a prim’ get into an escape pod?”
“I was taken,” Douglas finally said. He paused for a second; his mind still foggy, “What’s a prim?”
“Primitive,” Ullen said, taking notice that Douglas could speak, “Taken huh, hmm, you must mean abducted, that’s the term we use. Well, some weirdo races like to use their superior tech on prim’ worlds to abduct the inhabitants, sell em’ on the black market as slaves, or for experiments. That market’s kind of plummeted since the Cyrisian’s monsters got loose; now the only markets are mining, slavery, and inevitably, death.”
“Death?” Douglas asked.
“Oh yeah, murdered, eradicated, killed, whatever you wanna call it. After yer’ world’s resources are depleted, they aim their Ion cannons an’ fire till’ the only thing left is ash, or sometimes if they don’t want to damage the planet they’ll just invade it and kill everybody themselves,” Rapf said.
“So, you said earlier that you were… trying to stop them?” Douglas asked.
“We’re trying to save the Galaxy before there’s no Galaxy left to save,” Rapf replied strongly.
“Our Galaxy has seen countless horrors before, dictators, tyrants, empires… Meta-Gene carriers have been especially ruthless, but there has never, been anything like this. They aren’t some power hungry empire trying to get beings to fall in line. They don’t accept surrender. They don’t care about territory. They’re simply, animals. They kill anything that moves, and right now, they’re trying to wipe out the entire Galaxy. Lucky though’ for the rest of the universe, as long as the Lore is still around the Darks can’t get out of the Milky Way, unlucky for us, we’re trapped in the cage with them.”
“Darks… those visor wearing things?” Douglas asked, “Can’t you just… shoot the visor?”
“You’d think it would be that easy wouldn’t you?” Rapf asked sarcastically, “Well you see, The Darks need a drop of Dark matter to be made, along with the programmed visor, and Dark matter can be harvested from either a rock, or gas planet’s core, or from the inner void of a black hole in mass quantity; although, black holes are a lot harder since you gotta use some type of Darsakian teleportation drill or whatever. Anyway, the Darks outnumber everyone in the Galaxy a hundred to one. Second, they have access to Cyrisian tech, which is some of the most advanced weaponry in the Galaxy; Nova-Class laser turrets, Ion cannons, Plasma Decinerators, Obliterator-Class hover tanks. It’s a miracle they don’t have Photon cannons, or else we would’ve all died a long time ago…”
“I’m gonna pretend like I know what you’re talking about,” Douglas said. “Months ago, maybe even years ago, I don’t know… I was fighting on Earth with what I thought was the most advanced technology… ever, and now you’re telling me that this whole time, there have been… Nova Turrets? And Plasma Decinerators?! What the hell is a Decinerator, or-or a freakin’ Hover tank?! The last time I checked tanks had tracks… and were on the ground!”
Douglas fell on his knees, gripping his military-grade cut hair with both hands, panicked, “It-It’s all coming back to me now… the crane, the giant crane… claw, the metal claw that grabbed me from the battlefield, and-and into that- thing! The table… the chamber, the straps… the needles. Oh God, oh God, not the needles!!!” He started crying on the floor, unable to stop. The United States military didn’t prepare him for this.
“Oh yeah, looks like you got the experimental kind of weirdo race, slavery’s a lot worse though, those people do some weird crap…” Ullen started.
“Take me home! Take me home, please!” Douglas yelled. The memories of the past few months were flooding into his mind like a river, “I-I want to be back home, w-with Cathy, my Mama, hell even Sergeant Major, I don’t care, just take me home!!”
“Son, you have no idea how selfish that just was,” Rapf said, anger in his voice, “I don’t think you understand what me and my comrade were telling you… only about five percent of the Galaxy hasn’t been taken by the Darks, which means that in due time your world, will be invaded, enslaved, and eventually… wiped out. Now I don’t know what you want to do, do you wanna go home to your mommy? Or fight in something that’s bigger than yourself, bigger than all of us? The choice, is yours.”
“Uh- Rapf, I don’t think we have enough fuel to consider bringing him home, wherever home is exactly…” Ullen said.
“Well then that leaves you with one option, be noble and brave, and join the crew in the fight against evil,” Rapf said, like he was a knight at the round table.
“So what are you? Some kind of resistance movement or something?” Douglas sniffed, getting back to his feet.
“Heh, you could say that. We, my friend, are the Rebellion.”
Douglas snickered, “Don’t rebellions have more than two people in them? And a weird, robot thing,” Douglas glanced at the grey, rusty robot.
“We will reach our destination in three seconds,” Said the automated voice of the grey, rusty robot.
“You’re about to see what our ‘resistance,’ really is,” Rapf smirked.
The ship’s super speed function powered down. The engine cooled, and sent steam out from its pumps; it was more rag-tag, primitive looking than what technology before the Jupitains looked like. The aura of energy around the ship faded, and the speed was decreased drastically once they reached the destination. It was a graveyard.
“No…” Rapf whispered.
Ullen was speechless.
“Damn...” Douglas murmured.
An entire fleet of warships, all having different looking shapes, and sizes, reduced to rubble. In the center of the mess, was what seemed to be a destroyed command center, that had a sphere bridge in the center, connected to an outer ring by a series of thick metal poles. The entire thing was painted white, except now for the blast marks that tore the whole thing into scrap. Debris floated everywhere, gliding into the void of space in every direction.
“They found us…” Rapf said with eerie disbelief, “T-they really did it…”
“Scanning… scanning,” Said the robot, “Multiple Cyrisian warships entering the AO, exercise extreme caution.”
“They must have kept scanners in the rubble to find any stragglers trying to regroup,” Ullen gulped, “Cause they know we’re here.”
Rapf was still trying to cope with the reality he was seeing, “Get us out of here… get us out of here now!”
“The engine is still cooling from that last Hypotonic, and our current amount of fuel won’t be able to take us far away enough to lose those Cyrisian-grade scanners!”
Rapf let out a loud, frustrated grunt, “Divert all power to the escape pod, shields, engine power, fuel, even the emergency Sonic-Cores, everything!!”
“Diverting all available power to escape pod,” The robot said. It pressed a series of buttons and flicked a few switches.
Ten Jupitain warships boosted into the battlefield, leaving I-Hypotonic warp, then they held their position, looking for the object that had triggered the alert.
“Ullen, listen to me, I want you and this prim’ to get as far away from here as possible, don’t look back. Remember these coordinates, 2913, 6771, 8578. That’s the location of the most secure rebel operation I can think of right now.”
“W-why would you want me to take that prim instead of you?!” Ullen asked with absolutely zero amounts of sympathy for Douglas.
“Hey!” Douglas said, although, he knew he had a point.
“My fighting days are done, I’m done. Been waging
this war long enough, you-you're young, still got some fight left in ya,” He looked over at Douglas, “And him, well I just have a good-feelin' about em.”
One of the Jupitain warships spotted them and shined a blindingly bright red beacon at their bridge.
“Run! Run now!!” Rapf shouted.
Douglas didn’t have to be told twice. Ullen got out of his chair, patted Rapf on the shoulder, sniffed, and followed Douglas into the small hull. The escape pod was hooked up to a series of wires that were feeding it power. Ullen ripped them out and opened the door of the pod with a grunt. Douglas followed him inside. It was cramped. Ullen reached out into the side compartment, and a keyboard snapped out of the wall, above Ullen’s lap. He typed in the coordinates, teary-eyed, and the ship started to move. The engines hummed to life, and the pod exited the hangar.
“Darsakian Holo Warp transportation sequence… active, beginning warp in ten seconds,” Said an automated voice.
“10,” The click of a giant Jupitain Ion cannon echoed through the void of space, charging the atoms. Preparing to fire.
“9.”
“8,” Click…
“7.”
“6,” Click…
“5,” The cannon was at maximum Ionic charge. The loading contraption released, and the weapon fired.
“4,” Booom! A blinding flash of red light shined through the viewports of the escape pod.
“3,” The entire rebel ship, and Rapf exploded, in a massive burst of energy and flame.
“2… 1,” A field of energy surrounded the escape pod, and in an instant, it teleported away from the battlefield.
“Oh my God,” Douglas said, “Those are the things you guys were talking about?”
Ullen didn’t say anything for a few seconds, he just stared into space, until Douglas grabbed his shoulder.
“Y…” He choked, “Yeah… those are them, kill everything,” His grief turned to anger mid-sentence, “They, are why we fight, why we will always fight, until either we free the Galaxy and win, or we die.”
“Count me in then,” Douglas said. He looked Ullen directly in the eyes, nothing but confidence in them.
United We Stand Page 26
