by N. W. Harris
“Yeah, but who are you?” Steve asked with suspicion. “You said you’re not from Earth. Why should we trust you?”
“We were Anunnaki as well,” Lily replied, disdain clear in her voice. “We rebelled against our people hundreds of years ago, because we believed it was wrong to infringe on the rights of other intelligent species in the universe. We fought our government and lost.” Her lips compressed, and her eyes grew wide. “But we are here now to take another stand, to stop them from taking Earth.”
“What’ll they do when they get here?” Shane asked, anxiety and confusion knotting his stomach. His head did indeed feel like it might explode. “How can we stop them?”
“They need soldiers and slaves,” she replied curtly. “They’ll take the remaining teenagers and children on this planet and pit them against each other in a global war to find the best warriors amongst you. They’ll record and publicize the battles on their home planet for entertainment. Then they’ll reap the survivors.” The contempt in her voice increased with each word. “Because of their imperialistic behavior, the Anunnaki have made a lot of enemies throughout the galaxy, and they’ve been at war for thousands of years. You are the secret weapon they plan to use to turn the war in their favor. They exterminated all the adults first, because older humans don’t make ideal slaves—they’re not as malleable and don’t receive the mental reconditioning as well as younger humans.”
“How will they enslave us?” Tracy asked angrily. “They’ll have to kill me before I do what they say, and I’m guessing there are a lot more people like me.”
Shane nodded to show he agreed with Tracy and noticed his friends doing the same.
“Which is one of the reasons we truly believe you have a chance,” Lily replied, admiration flashing across her expression as she looked up and down the table at each of them.
“Unfortunately, when they created humans, they inserted an obedience gene into your DNA. The limbic manipulator already activated the gene—it won’t be long before the remaining humans will do whatever they’re told. Their memories will be modified, and they’ll believe they owe their allegiance to the enemy. They will fight for the Anunnaki with as much devotion as if they were fighting to protect their homeland. This aspect of their reconditioning will make them extremely formidable soldiers and loyal servants. You see? Humans were designed to be the perfect slaves.”
“So you’re saying this gene is already active in us?” Jules asked.
“Yes, but we have a way of suppressing it.”
Recalling the fight with Steve in Atlanta, Shane wondered how the gene was affecting them now. He remembered being confident that killing Tracy and then Steve was the right thing to do, and he wouldn’t have stopped trying to end them if Tracy hadn’t disconnected the battery. There hadn’t been a doubt in his mind that they were meant to die.
Was his desire to trust Lily now because of the gene’s influence? He worried about how they could be enslaved and still believe they had their freedom. Such a master could make them do horrible things with conviction and a smile.
“That sounds foolish,” Jules countered. “If they can wipe memories and control us through our DNA, why would they kill off the adults? Wouldn’t they want to keep some of them alive? Especially those that were already trained as soldiers, like in the army and stuff?”
“Yes, that would make more sense,” Lily replied. “But over the last two hundred thousand years, mutations have led to a flaw in the slave gene. About ten percent of the children and teenagers will suffer a dangerous form of mental psychosis, usually leading to sociopathic behavior. The older the humans are, the higher this percentage. In adults twenty years and older, the psychotic response is upwards of ninety-five percent.
“So you see, if the Anunnaki didn’t arrange for all the adults to be killed, then they would have likely turned on each other and on you when the gene was activated. The adults would have killed off the rest of the crop. You are likely already familiar with this psychosis—many of the serial killers who have gained repute for their crimes suffered from a rare auto-activation of their slave gene. Some, such as Adolf Hitler, were even able to recruit other humans to help them commit their crimes on a much larger scale.”
“But can’t you talk to them?” Laura chimed in, sounding desperate. “There must be a way to stop them peacefully.”
“No—they will not negotiate,” Lily replied coldly. “As I said, the Anunnaki created humans. They believe they own you—that they have a right to enslave you.”
“But if your people couldn’t stop them,” Shane said, trying not to succumb to the feeling of impending doom, “what makes you think we can?”
“Honestly, Shane?” Lily leaned back and gave him a stern look. “I think you have about a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding, to use a human cliché. But that doesn’t mean you should just lie down and die, does it? After all, you’re supposed to be dead now. By our calculations, the limbic manipulator might have killed everyone fifteen and older before its battery ran out.”
No one responded. Shane bit the inside of his lip, frustrated with what Lily was telling them. His friends’ heads drooped, like the Anunnaki already had them in chains.
These kids had survived the impossible; they’d fought through an army of thugs and shut down the limbic manipulator. But that wasn’t an advanced alien race they were up against.
“Well, I reckon we’ve been through the wringer these last two days, and we survived.” He spoke to his friends as much as to Lily, the quarterback in him taking charge. “Our odds of success had to be less than zero, but we shut down that stupid weapon, and here we are. We sure as hell aren’t gonna give up now. Are we?”
Steve looked at Shane first, and the rest followed. They appeared less defeated, shaking their heads and agreeing they would never quit.
“I didn’t expect you would,” Lily said admiringly. “We’ve been living amongst humans for seventy years, and if we’ve learned anything about your species, it’s that you don’t give up without a fight.”
“How did you get here?” Steve shifted the subject. “Why do y’all look so much alike?”
“You’ve heard of the Roswell, New Mexico crash?”
“Yeah. We live in the woods, but we ain’t stupid.” Steve chuckled, turning red under her gaze.
“Well, it wasn’t little green men they pulled from that spacecraft,” she replied. “My co-pilot and I were in a fighter ship, trying to overthrow the supremacist government in charge of our home world. The Anunnaki army used a rather nasty implosion weapon to destroy the rebellion. It created a temporary wormhole, and my spacecraft was pulled in and spit out near earth.” A sad frown crossed her face. She glanced down, the weight of the memory seeming to crush her. “There were only two of us onboard. As far as we can tell, no one else survived.”
She looked up again and added, “Your government was kind enough to take us in, provided we share some technology with them and keep our existence a secret from the general population.”
“Such as the limbic manipulator weapon?” Tracy challenged without a hint of reservation in her voice. Shane appreciated her assertiveness. He didn’t trust the alien yet, and he wanted her to know they weren’t to be pushed around.
“We brought you into the computer age. The silicon chip, cell phone, internet—all us. As I said before, we had nothing to do with the limbic manipulator. We had lots of advanced technology to share in exchange for being provided a place to live, but we made your government agree to let us introduce it to them slowly.”
“What about all your brothers and sisters out there? How’d they get here?”
“Clones.” Lily picked up her coffee cup. “It’s how we’ve procreated for a long time. Our Anunnaki ancestors played with our DNA a little too much, trying to prolong life, increase beauty, intelligence, and create perfect children. The same sort of stuff your scientists were starting to tinker with. They rendered my people sterile, and so we have to make our babie
s in a lab. Your government was kind enough to permit us to create more of our own, and we shared some of our cloning technology with them.”
“Dolly the sheep?” Laura asked.
“Exactly,” Lily smiled. “We’ve been able to create a couple of phenotypes, but we have a limited gene pool to work from, so a lot of us do look very similar.”
“So against all odds, we have to fight these Anunnaki,” Shane said. “Won’t they be attacking with spaceships and weapons far more advanced than we have?”
“No.” She sipped her coffee and set the cup down. “It will be a bit easier than that, though still a daunting mission. As far as we know, the Anunnaki haven’t realized we escaped during the rebellion. They’ll come here expecting no resistance, and they’ll bring humans into their ships to arm and program them for the cleansing war. You will be amongst the kids who initially enter the recruit ships, and you will attack them from the inside.”
“Like the Trojan Horse,” Steve mused, rubbing his chin. He straightened in his seat, pushing his chest out and resting his big forearms on the table. “I got no problem kicking the crap out of these An-hacky.”
“An-un-naki,” Lily corrected. “Don’t underestimate them.”
She pivoted her chair to the right and pressed a button on a remote control. The TV on the other end of the long conference table lit up, and images of a battle flashed onto the screen.
“I don’t want to make you feel hopeless—we do believe you have a chance. But you must understand your enemy to be effective. These videos were taken by my ship’s onboard camera.” Her voice cracked. “After all these years, it’s still hard to watch.” She blinked quickly several times, seeming to struggle to restrain her emotions. “My people are the ones organized on the ground below.”
The screen was filled with an army, charging silently up a gentle slope. Leaving shadowy trails in a calf-deep sea of lush, green grass, the soldiers all wore shiny, red armor from head to toe. It first struck Shane as medieval. But they didn’t move slowly, like knights wearing heavy plates of steel over shirts of chainmail. They were swift, the armor appearing not to hinder them, or perhaps even enhancing their movement.
Coming within ten yards of the rebels’ crimson helmets, the ship shifted upward, aiming its camera at a jagged wall of gleaming, white skyscrapers that formed an abrupt end to the verdant plain.
“The only way to get past the city’s defenses was on foot. When they designed it, they never expected an attack to come from the ground,” Lily said with melancholy. “They weren’t supposed to know we were coming until it was too late. Somehow, the enemy discovered our plan to take the capitol. They were ready and waiting for us.”
The tallest of the buildings reached up through gray clouds, pillars holding the angry sky aloft. Kelly let out a nervous sigh, and her hand slipped into his. He squeezed it, beginning to realize everything he and his friends had survived and accomplished to this point was nothing compared to what lay ahead.
Although their tops were crowned with thunderheads, the lower parts of the cylindrical buildings reflected the sun, which Shane guessed set in a clear sky behind Lily’s ship.
“I was supposed to stay back,” she explained somberly. “To provide air support until they were in.”
A dark line drawn across the foundations of the city grew thicker. The camera zoomed closer, revealing thousands of soldiers, covered in the same angular red armor as the rebels. Unlike the rebels, many were unprotected from the neck up.
“They could have just killed us all right away. But first, they marched on us with no helmets, so we could look our executioners in the eyes,” Lily explained as the camera panned over the angry faces. “It was the worst kind of war—families divided, brothers and sisters on opposite sides.”
The ones without helmets looked similar to Lily and her counterparts, all with tan skin and dark hair. The Anunnaki raced down the hill toward the rebels, shouting and waving their weapons.
“An army straight out of Hell,” Tracy whispered.
When they were a football field’s length away, they stopped. The camera on Lily’s spacecraft scanned left and right, up and down the enemy’s ranks. In the center, a soldier was pushed ahead of the rest by two of his comrades. One of them kicked him in the back of his legs, and the other pushed him so he fell to his knees. His comrade stepped beside him, raising his glowing weapon, which appeared to be some kind of a plasma sword.
Clasping his brethren’s hair with his free hand, the soldier dropped the curved blade and swept it horizontally to slice through his neck. He lifted the head into the air, blood dripping onto his armor. Horrified gasps erupted from Shane and his friends. The body swayed for an instant, and then fell forward into the grass.
“He was one of our spies,” Lily said softly. “He infiltrated their army and made it to a lofty rank before they discovered him.”
The soldier swung his arm in a circle and threw the dripping head high into the air. It landed amongst the red-clad soldiers beneath Lily’s ship, and the Anunnaki charged.
Lily’s people resisted, firing laser guns with plasma-bladed bayonets, but he could tell by how disorganized they were that the Anunnaki had effectively reversed the element of surprise on the rebels. The Anunnaki broke their line, attacking with such violence that it appeared each of the warriors had a personal vendetta. They shot and stabbed the rebels, even after they had to be dead, and then stomped on the bodies to get to their next victim.
Blasts of green energy emitted from somewhere near the camera, decimating a cluster of soldiers.
“That blast came from your ship. Did they retaliate?” Tracy asked, sounding more analytical than excited.
“Yes—watch.”
Lily got off a couple of more shots before an aircraft, the size of a passenger jet and shaped like a cigar with no wings, came barreling at her from the city ahead. The image jerked left and right as she evaded blasts from the ship, and then it leveled off.
“They stopped attacking. That’s when I knew we were doomed.”
A massive, golden ship, shaped like an Egyptian pyramid, settled on the hillside behind the red army. Firing their weapons to keep the rebels at bay, the Anunnaki retreated into an opening in one of its reflective, slanted faces. The surviving rebels stood stunned, their weapons drooping as if they couldn’t understand what they’d done to cause the sudden retreat. Once all the Anunnaki were loaded, the gold ship lifted into the sky. The camera on Lily’s spacecraft followed it, blasts of green energy directed at the vessel coming from her cannons.
When the big ship’s pointed apex impaled the clouds, it emitted a beam of bright white energy from its square, black bottom, directing the blast down amongst the scattering rebels.
“We didn’t consider the ship to be a threat, didn’t expect them to use the weapon so close to the capitol. They were willing to risk everything to destroy us.”
The craft lifted higher, and the ground collapsed inward where the beam impacted the battlefield.
“They created a temporary gravity well amidst our soldiers.” Lily’s voice cracked. “We didn’t have a chance.”
“A black hole?” Laura asked with terrified awe.
“Something like that,” Lily replied.
Her craft moved closer to the beam and then spun away. The camera captured a double sunset, one yellow sun slightly above the horizon and the other orange one half below. The camera rotated down and back, filming the rebels as they fell and clawed at the green plain, trying to resist being sucked toward the beam. When they got close to it, their armor imploded, their bodies crushed and violently ripped apart before vanishing into the light.
“I tried to fly away, but it pulled me in.”
There was no sound, but Shane imagined the engines on Lily’s ship were screaming against the irresistible draw of gravity. The light picked up by the camera grew brighter and brighter until the TV screen was white. Then it went dark for a few seconds, and the image changed. An image of N
orth America from space appeared on the screen, and the image began to rotate, slowly at first and then faster until it was a blur.
“We were pulled into some sort of wormhole created by the implosion. The mouth of the wormhole must’ve been high enough above the plain that it only captured our ship, protecting us from the most destructive gravitational forces generated by the weapon. While everyone on the ground was being crushed, we passed through unscathed. We came out over New Mexico, our engines shut off by the space-time distortion,” Lily said. Flames engulfed the image as the ship passed through the atmosphere. When the fire retreated, the tan, spinning desert rushed up to meet the camera, and then the screen went blank. Lily turned the TV off and looked at Shane and his friends, her eyes moist.
“It didn’t seem like you had a chance,” Jules said distantly. “I don’t see how we can possibly fight them.”
“They knew we were going to attack.” She regained her composure. “Their spies must’ve infiltrated us.”
“Looked like they really hated your people,” Tracy mused, staring at the dark screen.
“We resisted the idea that Anunnaki are the supreme beings in the universe. We believed all sentient beings should be treated with respect and allowed their freedom,” she explained. “We destroyed numerous factories and training facilities that were preparing for attacks against planets like your own. The Anunnaki government called us traitors and wanted us all dead.”
“What makes you think we’ll do any better?” Shane had heard enough. He wanted to know what their chances were. The rebels had advanced weapons and an understanding of their enemy he and his friends couldn’t gain in a lifetime. He didn’t feel overly confident at the moment.
“Although you are not as technologically advanced, humans are a lot tougher than the Anunnaki, as is your design. Your people have been fighting constantly for thousands of years—it’s in your DNA,” she replied. “Humans have created heroes and gods in myth, attributing great strength to them and telling stories of how they overcame impossible obstacles. In Anunnaki lore, humans fill the roles of our children’s heroes. We have always admired your strength and willingness to fight when the odds are against you. In combining the primitive, though physically powerful, phenotype of the Neanderthals with the intellect of the Anunnaki, my people created the perfect warriors.”
