by Adam Matlow
Marcus yelped and held out a blood-soaked hand in surrender.
“He’s not one of my people,” said Vana, “he’s different from me and different from you. He’s from another planet.”
Marcus’s head was spinning from the combination of what he was hearing and loss of blood. He steadied himself against the wall, leaving a bloody handprint. His leg throbbed in pain, and he grunted, and his breathing became laboured.
Charlie touched Vana’s arm. “His leg’s in a bad way,” she said quietly. “He’s lost a lot of blood. We need to get him out of here - sooner rather than later.”
“There’s something we can try.”
Vana pressed her hand against a smooth section of the wall and a palm-sized compartment appeared. She reached in and pulled out a device. It was circular, flat and fit in the palm of her hand, with a loop that she pushed her finger through, holding it in place. She moved across to Marcus and put her hand firmly on the bullet wound. Marcus winced in pain.
“This is a medical device. But it wasn’t designed to be used on humans. I don’t know if this will work. It could make things worse.”
Marcus grimaced through half-closed eyes. “So, what you’re saying is that I have three options. One, do nothing and probably bleed to death. Two, you use that device, it doesn’t work and I bleed to death; or three, use that thing, it works and I get to live. But because it’s an alien device - I may grow an extra head or something.”
“I really don’t thin--” started Vana, but Marcus waved his hand, cutting her off.
“Since my other two options involve dying - I think I’ll risk the extra head thing. Just means I’ll be twice as handsome as before.”
“Hah,” snorted Charlie. “Can you use that thing on him quick? I don’t think I can take any more of his terrible jokes.”
The device started to glow a soft yellow colour and hummed quietly. The pain lessened and a gentle pulse of heat radiated out from the source of the wound. After a few moments, the bleeding stopped and the devices humming changed to a higher pitch.
Vana removed the device from Marcus’s leg. “It’s finished,” she said, “It’s done the best it can, but it won’t be fully healed.” She next applied it on his shoulder and he groaned in ecstasy as the pain diminished.
After healing his shoulder, she put the device into her pocket. “You’ll have to take it easy on that leg for a while. Your shoulder too.”
The effects of the healing device wore off after a few minutes. The pain in his leg was almost completely gone, replaced by a dull ache and his shoulder felt almost normal. Marcus wiped the dried blood away from the gash in his trousers. The wound underneath had almost vanished.
“Doc would love to get his hands on that,” said Marcus. “Imagine all the good we could do with a few devices like that, “
“I’m afraid it won’t be of much use to you anymore,” said Vana. “The power cell is drained, and with the ship in such a bad state, I doubt I could recharge it.”
Marcus sighed. “Well, since I’m probably no longer dying, perhaps you can explain exactly what is going on here?”
Vana walked to the middle of the room and reached out her hand once again, and touched the centre of one of the walls. A large doorway opened, leading to what Marcus presumed was the cockpit. There were several chairs here, next to consoles and other odd-looking devices.
“We can go in there,” said Vana, “Marcus you should sit, rest your leg.”
“Way ahead of you,” he said as he hobbled through the doorway and sat in the first available seat.” He sighed with relief. “This place is far more comfortable. We should have come in here first.”
Charlie walked in and took a seat opposite him, whilst Vana took a seat at the front centre.
“I think it’s time you heard everything,” she said Vana.
Chapter Eight
“So, you’re an-- an alien?” asked Marcus. The words didn’t seem real to him and he found them difficult to say.
“Yes. My species is called J’Darra.”
“And you crashed here, and now Davon is after you for some reason and… nope, none of this is making any sense to me.”
“Davon knows who I am,” said Vana. “Who I really am. That’s why he’s after me.”
“How the hell could he know that? He’s never met you before, right?”
“He knows because… he’s not from around here either. He’s an alien. Not like me, not like you. He’s from a species called the Krall.
Marcus threw back his head and laughed. “You’re telling me that Davon is an alien? All this time? You know what, I believe you. I do. There’s always something been off with that guy. Jeeze, that’s crazy.”
“He doesn’t look like an alien,” said Charlie.
Vana flicked a strand of hair from her face. “Don’t always believe your eyes. He’s disguised his true form.”
Marcus’s mind raced. Things started to make more sense. She was captured by the meteor impact site. Davon knew she was there and sent Amara to go get her. Vana’s features, previously dismissed as simple mutations from the radiation, were because she wasn’t Human. The fact that she didn’t speak for hours after he rescued her. The last thought stuck in his mind.
“Wait a minute. If you’re an alien, where did you learn to speak our language?”
Vana slumped back against the wall and let out a deep breath. “I learned from you Marcus. You were quite talkative on the drive back to New Hope. It really is quite a relief to be able to tell you all this.”
Marcus cocked his head and raised an eyebrow quizzically. “You learned our language in a couple of hours from just listening to me ranting on? Impossible.”
“For you perhaps,” she smiled. “Not for me. We’re … talented in that way.”
“Okay, start from the beginning and let’s get the whole story,” said Marcus.
“Well, I suppose it all started several thousand years ago, as you measure a year anyway. My people, the J’Darra were just starting to explore space. Our scientists and engineers managed to create an engine that would allow faster than light travel, and that unshackled us. Set us free amongst the starts. In a generation we had colonised dozens of planets and explored many more. And that’s when we found it.
“A huge space station abandoned and in orbit around an uninhabited planet. Our best estimates put it at over a million years old. It floated, powered down; dead. Teams were sent to establish its purpose and then… well, that’s when things start to get a bit, fuzzy.
“Evidently, the teams aboard the station found some way of re-activating it and when they did, they also awoke its guardians.”
“Let me guess,” said Marcus. “Those Krall things?”
“Exactly, and it seems they were quite unhappy with us being there. They said our presence there was defiling the place. They called it Sentinel and they violently drove my people from it.
“They managed to escape and retreat to a nearby colony. Shortly after that is when things started to go bad. The station – Sentinel – started to project some kind of energy field around itself. It spread for light-years in all directions, engulfing all our fledgeling colonies and our home world.
It was then that my people realised that our faster-than-light drives, or FTL, aboard our ships no longer functioned. Sentinel it seemed, was built to prevent anyone but those they permitted, from using FTL technology. They had effectively stranded us. Our smaller colonies, cut off from supplies perished in a few years. Any that survived that soon found themselves under attack from the Krall. They still retained FTL capability and were unaffected by the energy field.
“And that is how my people were brought to the brink of extinction. You can’t fight an enemy that can appear and disappear at will. They could move entire armies across thousands of lightyears in a few seconds, ambush our forces and jump away before we could muster a response.”
“There is only one place with any J’Darra left and we cower beneath the surface,
too frightened to come out and into the light. And that brings us to you. Why is Davon here? I don’t know but I do know that the Krall have targeted any worlds who have or are close to developing faster than light travel. Your people must have been getting close and the Krall tried to eliminate you.”
Marcus’s jaw dropped open and he shook his head. “The Krall, they… the asteroid that hit us all those years ago… that was them?”
Vana nodded. “An efficient way to destroy a civilisation. You see, the Sentinel can open portals in space allowing instantaneous travel between two points. They don’t need to send ships or armies to attack planets. In your case they simply used Sentinel to place a huge lump of rock in an orbit that would collide with your world. But you survived.”
Marcus recalled the stories he had been told about the day the asteroid came - a hundred years ago.
“Nukes,” he said. “Nuclear weapons. We were quite fond of them back then I seem to recall. When the asteroid was discovered we launched those weapons at it in desperation. We shattered it, creating the rings you see above our world now, but also raining down vast quantities of radioactive rock. The jury is still out on if we managed to save the Earth or not.”
Charlie swung her feet up onto a nearby console and leant back in her seat. “So, you’re here, Davon’s here, the only question is why?”
“I don’t know why Davon is here. But I can tell you that my ultimate goal is the destruction of the Sentinel and to stop the Krall attacks across the galaxy.”
“That sounds like a pretty tall order, especially on your own.”
“The others, my people, forbid me to come here. I told them of my plans and they refused to allow me to try. In the end, I had to steal this ship to get here.”
“Okay, so I’m not the world’s leading authority on this FTL drive thing, but even I know that space is humongous. How did you get here without using it? Surely it would take hundreds or thousands of years?”
Vana smiled. “Very astute Marcus. You’re correct. But remember I said that the Krall can still use their FTL drives? My ship has been modified to be able to ride on the wake of the Krall’s FTL and to be almost invisible to sensors.
“I programmed the ship's computer to search for and utilise any FTL corridors from passing Krall ships. Since this could take many years, I entered one of the ships stasis pods to wait it out. The hope was that one of them would lead me to the Sentinel, so I could sneak aboard. The computer must have followed a ship coming to Earth, but when we arrived something happened, serious enough to knock my ship from orbit. The stasis pods double as escape pods, and so when my ship was in danger it jettisoned me. I awoke in my pod, near where you first found me, Marcus.”
“You must have collided with some of the debris in orbit,” said Marcus. I saw the meteor come down. Bits of it split off and crashed where I found you, and I’m guessing the ship and the rest of the meteor came down here.” Marcus scratched his chin. “No wonder Doc’s instruments went crazy when the meteor passed over. He was probably detecting your ship flying overhead.”
“I’m glad he did,” said Vana. “If you hadn’t intervened when Amara tried to take me, well… I would be in the hands of Davon now. As soon as I heard his name… I knew. While we know little about how the Krall are structured, one name cropped up time and again. Davon. He seems to be the one in charge. I don’t know if it was bad luck or fate that brought me here.”
Charlie swung her feet down from the console and leant forward in her chair. “You said we,” she said. “when we arrived here. I thought you said you came on your own.”
“I did, didn’t I. Well, I suppose it’s time to introduce you to someone else.” Vana reached below her seat and pressed her hand to the floor. A small section of it raised up, revealing a storage area containing several devices. Vana reached in and picked one out. She held it for the others to see. It sat neatly in her palm. It looked to Marcus like a small thin piece of opaque glass. Almost like a lens. It was attached to a thin silver chain, large enough to be worn around the neck.”
“Oh,” said Marcus, underwhelmed. “A pendant?”
“Marcus, Charlie say hello to Jax.”
Marcus looked around the cramped cabin. “Who’s Jax?
An image sprang from the palm of Vana’s hand. Projected from the device she was holding. Lines of text in an alien language scrolled past so fast they blurred together in a greenish hue. From the confusion, a pattern started to emerge. It almost looked like a face but composed entirely of lines of text.
It spoke in a clear sharp voice.
“Hello Vana. I am gratified to see you are unharmed. After we lost contact during the crash I feared the worst.”
“Whoah! What is that?” said Marcus as he stared at the floating disembodied head being projected in front of him.
Vana held out her hand towards Marcus. “Jax, this is my friend Marcus. He rescued me from Davon when I first arrived here. Without him, I’d be a prisoner now, or worse. And this is Charlie. She helped hide me from Davon’s forces and assisted in our escape. Without her, we wouldn’t be here now.”
“Stop, your making me blush,” said Charlie sarcastically.
“Jax, introduce yourself and explain what you can do,” said Vana.
The image turned slowly until it was facing Marcus.
“Hello, my name is Jax. I am a ninth-generation advanced constructed intelligence - or CI. My primary purpose is to assist Vana in any way possible with the destruction of the Sentinel. I have been programmed with extensive cryptographic and heuristic functions. I function as an interface to this ship - and are capable of interfacing with almost any other computer system I come into contact with.”
“You’re not a real person then?” asked Charlie.
“Define real,” replied Jax almost instantly. “My neural networks are as complex, if not more so, than your own. Does the fact I am not flesh and blood mean I am not real?”
“What does that even mean?” snorted Charlie.
“It means he’s smarter than you,” said Marcus. “And probably me as well.”.
“Most likely,” said Jax, without even a hint of condescension in his voice. The image span around to face Vana again. “My diagnostics of this ship show it to be non-functional for the most part. Our original plans for accessing the Sentinel are no longer feasible. We must develop a new strategy.”
“I was hoping that you would have some ideas about that,” she said.
“I will begin working on alternate scenarios now.” The image of Jax faded away and Vana closed her hand over the device. She put the chain over her head and wore it, Jax dangling below her throat.
“In the meantime, we should start thinking about how we’re going to get out of here. Marcus, could you come and give me a hand with something?”
Vana led him through to the rear of the ship, past several cylindrical devices, each about six feet tall. There was a gap where one was missing.
“The stasis units,” said Vana. “Like I said, they also double as escape pods. That’s going to be our way out.”
“You want me to get inside one of those… things?”
“I can assure you they’re perfectly safe.”
A chill ran over Marcus and his hands became clammy. Why did they have to make them look like coffins? He shook his head. “But we’re already on the ground. How are they going to help?” he asked.
“They work just as well on the surface as they do in space,” replied Vana. She tinkered with a panel on the back wall of the room they had entered. “They can be ejected in space, in which case they work as you might expect. Or they can be jettison from a crashed ship to return someone into orbit. For example, if there was a ship waiting to collect them. We’re going to do something in-between. Launch the pods, but instead of going to orbit, we’ll land somewhere else.”
“They're a few tropical islands I wouldn’t mind visiting,” smirked Marcus. “But I suppose that’s out of the question.”
�
��I’m afraid so,” she pulled a cover from a panel on the wall and rested it on the floor. Marcus leant over to see inside. Two containers, each glowing a soft green colour, pulsated gently. Vana removed one of them with her bare hands and offered it to Marcus.
He turned his head and stared at it from the corner of his eyes. “What is it?” he asked.
“It’s an energy storage device. I want to take this one with me. The other, well…” She reached her hand inside and removed the remaining device, turned it over so it was inverted, and pushed it back into the slot. She tapped a control panel nearby three times. The device changed from a green to a deep purple colour. Its intensity pulsed.
“What did you do?” asked Marcus
“I initiated the ships self-destruct. We can’t risk Davon getting inside this ship. If he were to learn the location of the rest of my people... I can’t let that happen.”
Marcus laughed nervously. “How long do we have exactly, before… boom?”
“A little over an hour, we should get moving, the explosion will be quite large.”
“You see, this is the sort of thing we should talk about first.”
They returned to the cockpit, where Charlie sat smiling at them. “What were you two up to back there?”
“Oh nothing,” said Marcus nonchalantly. “Vana’s set this thing to blow up in an hour and I have this green… ball, thing. Some big battery or something.” He held it up to show Charlie.
“Blow up? The I vote for getting the hell out of here.”
“We need to put at least five kilometres between us and the ship,” said Vana. “Everything within that radius will be vaporised.”
“Holy crap,” said Marcus. “What about the people outside?”
“What about them,” said Vana shortly. “They were trying to kill us a few minutes ago.”
“If we want to make a clean getaway, we need those guys outside to back off. Telling them this thing is gonna blow might do that.”
Charlie shook her head. “As much as I’d like to watch these guys burn, Marcus has a point.’
Vana nodded and activated a console beside her, then directed Marcus to a glowing green icon.
