Blackout

by Edward W. Robertson

  Kkad tried a forward assault, but lost two soldiers right out of the gate. His people ducked behind cover. Sprite took careful aim beneath a desk and squeezed the buttons of his gun. Across from him, a Dovon fell, clutching its abdomen.

  Sprite pumped his fist and rolled behind cover next to Ness. "You see that?"

  "Nice shot," Ness said. "Now do it thirty times more."

  "I know it was nice. But did you see them? How they reacted?"

  "What d'you mean? They didn't do anything."

  Sprite bobbed his chin. "Exactly, man. They're totally ignoring the two of us."

  "Probably scared shitless of the Vigil. Or they think that if they can take down Toru, we'll break."

  "Dude, Earthlings have been shutting them down for six years. I can't believe they're still dissing us!"

  "Doubt it's personal."

  Ness took a look at the state of the battle. The rebel defenders were shifting to the left, withdrawing slowly and maneuvering to higher terraces, looking to get around Toru's flank. If they could get behind Toru's forces, the rebels down below could come up and pincer them.

  As a result of these maneuvers, the enemy's right flank was nearly empty. The few Dovon who remained there all bore the concentric circles of bridge conscripts.

  "You're right," Ness said. "They just made a big mistake. Time to show them what humans can do."

  * * *

  Walt gritted his teeth. Bait had a laser aimed right at his chest. His own weapon lay on the floor four feet away.

  The alien gestured and displayed his tablet. "YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD DESTROY THE SHIP. VERY RUDE. SUCH A THING WOULD MAKE ME LOOK VERY BAD"

  "Your mom took care of that one when you were born," Walt muttered.

  Bait withdrew a notebook and a pen from a pouch in his bandolier and dropped them to the ground. As Walt moved to pick them up, Bait's gun tracked his every movement.

  "You lied to me," Walt wrote. "This wasn't about overthrowing a rebel and restoring peace. It was about taking the ship for yourself."

  "YOU SEE VERY CLEARLY FOR ONE WHO IS SO BLIND"

  "Let me guess. If I killed the commander, that would let you blame humanity for the attack. Proving that we need to be finished off after all."

  "THE BEAUTY WAS THAT EVEN IF IT FAILED HUMANS WOULD BE HATED FOR IT. NOW WHO IS CLEVER?"

  Walt flipped the small page and started on a fresh one. "You should be very proud of what you've done here. First you killed billions of people who never did anything to you, and then when we kicked your asses anyway, you hijacked somebody else's ship to try again. Maybe you guys should take it and get out of here before another ship shows up and destroys you."

  Bait clicked his claws together. "I AM SURE YOU WOULD LIKE THAT. WE WORKED HARD FOR THIS PLANET. I THINK THAT IT IS TIME FOR US TO ENJOY OUR NEW HOME"

  "Good luck with that. There are still thousands of people in the world. And every single one of them will fight you for it."

  "THEN THEY NEED TO FIGHT FAST. WITHIN A NINE-DAY, ALL OF THIS WORLD WILL BE DEAD"

  "How do you figure?"

  Bait's expression went smirky. On his tablet, he wrote, "LIFE IS FLAWED. AS FRAGILE AS AN INSECT'S TOY. WITH THE VIRUS, WE TRIED TO SAVE WHAT WAS NOT HUMAN. NOW? WE WILL ERASE ALL AND START OVER WITH LIFE OF OUR OWN"

  Walt's cheek twitched. "You're going to kill everything?"

  "REGRETTABLE. YET THE ONLY WAY TO BE RID OF ALL HUMANS FOREVER"

  "I was going to ask what's next between us," he said out loud. "But you just answered that question."

  He threw the notepad at Bait's face, the pages fluttering wildly. As Walt launched himself forward, Bait swatted at the pad, lurching backward. A laser burned past Walt's canvas-wrapped chest. He grabbed the alien's gun-claw and stabbed its wrist with the pen. The point jabbed through the chitin with a spurt of yellow blood. Walt cranked the pen to the side, cracking Bait's skin. The pen snapped in half. Bait dropped the laser.

  Walt bent to grab it, but tentacles seized his arms, holding him upright. As one limb wormed toward the gun, Walt booted the laser away. Claws snapped at his body, biting small holes in his hide. One lashed at his face and he bit down, crunching it with a pop of briny blood. Bait yanked back the crushed remains. Walt spat the fragments at the Swimmer's face.

  Bait stuck a leg behind Walt's, shoving him to the ground and crouching on top of him. A spiked foot pressed into his hip, breaking the skin. Claws tore at him relentlessly. Bait reached for the handle of a knife sheathed in his bandoliers. Walt snaked out his hand and grabbed the knife first. It was four inches long, its blade pearlescent and white, as if carved from a seashell.

  He whited out from pain. Dimly, he felt Bait crushing down on him, a tentacle wrapping around his throat, claws snapping at his ribs. Walt ripped the knife through something that felt as though it must be tougher than leather, but the shell blade barely hesitated.

  A hot river poured over his face and bare chest. Strings of knobby organs struck his cheeks, the taste salty and bitter. Bait squirmed, stumbling to get away, then collapsed on top of Walt. Walt continued to cut until the knife passed through the end of Bait's long body.

  The alien shuddered and went still. Walt lay beneath him, panting, drenched in viscera, body alight with the pain of two dozen claw wounds. He pushed the corpse aside and got to his knees. He found Bait's laser, then his own. He turned out the bandoliers, wrapping them tight around his numerous cuts. None were that bad by themselves, but they were all dribbling. The spear wound in his ribs had reopened, too, leaking slowly.

  As he rummaged through the last bandolier, a small disk fell to the ground. Another clicker. This one bore three gold dots arranged in an equilateral triangle.

  He dragged Bait's carcass around the back of one of the boxy white machines in the storage room, then covered the blood and guts with a sheet of canvas. He pressed his ear to the door. Hearing nothing, he opened it with the first clicker he'd stolen. Laser in hand, he crossed the hallway and returned to the reinforced Core doors.

  He got out the new disk, aimed it at the door, and clicked. With an airy sigh, the entrance to the Core slid open.

  27

  With the runways cleared, Raina's warriors jogged up the steps to the terminal, filtering inside. During the ensuing attack, she hung back, resting after the destruction of the tank. Her people could handle this assault on their own—and she had the feeling she would need to save her strength.

  "Half-hearted" would have been too generous a description of the Swimmers' resistance. The battle was over within minutes. She walked among the bodies, the way lit by a minimal number of lanterns. The smell of burning lamp oil was far better than that of the brains and intestines of the aliens.

  Mauser detached from a group of warriors, saluting her. "This terminal's clear. All the way to security."

  "What about the others?" she said.

  "The scouts have seen a few of the crabs scuttling around. Deserters, most likely. There's little to gain by pursuing them."

  "Yet we will."

  Mauser brushed his hair from his eyes. "We blew up the jets. We've killed nearly every soldier they had stationed here. I feel as though we're getting a serious case of mission creep."

  Raina gazed into the dark passage leading to the center of the airport. Her warriors had struck down every enemy within it, yet she had the sensation that the darkness was staring back.

  "They walled this place up to keep our eyes out of it," she said. "They're trying to hide something. I will find it—and destroy it."

  "Far be it for me to contradict your instincts. They've always steered us across the strange tides of the last few years. But I want you to realize that, if their jets launch while we're in there, there's no way we'll get out in time."

  "You're right."

  "I know. And yet I have the strangest suspicion it doesn't matter."

  "Withdraw most of the warriors beyond the runways. Go with them. Leave thirty with me."

  He cocked an eyebrow, t
hen nodded and hurried to work, as if afraid she would change her mind. As orders rebounded through the terminal and troops stirred to heed them, she closed her eyes, feeling for the depths of the building. She thought she heard someone call her name, but when she opened her eyes, there was no one nearby.

  Bryson selected a team of thirty. Tristan was among them, as was Lowell, which surprised Raina. He'd been willing enough to take part in planning, but had shown less hunger for the battles that erupted from those plans. Perhaps he also felt the terminal's summons.

  "Eyes open," Raina told the volunteers. "Not just for the enemy. For anything out of place."

  "What are we looking for?" Tristan said.

  "I'll know when I see it."

  She moved forward, scouts walking ahead along the edges of the walls. The Swimmers had made their stand halfway down the gates. As the warriors came closer to the old security checkpoint, the bodies grew fewer.

  Stairs led down to ticketing. Trails of yellow blood ran down them, gleaming in the dull light of the lanterns. Raina descended, swords in hand. Plastic posts scattered the tiles in front of the ticket counters. Baggage was torn open everywhere, looted years ago, toiletries stolen, clothes left to rot. Solid lines had been tracked through the dirt. Like the tread of tires. Or the sweep of tentacles.

  The tracks led to the next terminal. Raina took the stairs up. An organic stench wafted down the steps, smelling of the pilings beneath a dock, along with a faint tang of chicken coops. The gates were silent. Empty. Moonlight fell softly through the wide windows, but ahead, the passage was as dark as a cave.

  Thirty feet away, large lumps rested on the tile. Motionless. Swimmers.

  Raina stopped and beckoned Bryson to her. "Was there fighting here?"

  "Sure looks like," he said. "But this wasn't us."

  She approached the nearest body, kneeling over it. Its torso was stricken with burns. So were the other bodies around it. Most of the wounds were cauterized, but where there was blood, it wasn't always dry.

  "They did this to themselves." She rubbed yellow blood from her fingers. "This same night."

  Bryson stared into the darkness. "Because they knew we were coming? Bickering about whether to run or fight? Or was this suicide?"

  "I know a Swimmer," Tristan put in. "I've fought them dozens of times. And not once have I ever seen them kill themselves."

  "This was a fight," Raina said. She felt it in her bones. "This is why they had so few to resist us. They were already killing each other."

  Unnerved, but refusing to let it show on her face, she stood and walked forward. Her mind told her that lasers might fly from ahead at any moment, yet her gut insisted they would not. As she passed into the cave-like terminal, she saw why it was so dark: the windows were blacked out with the organic orange matter the Swimmers used to grow their boxes and buildings.

  Most of the alien structures she'd seen were as orderly as the curve of a nautilus' shell. By contrast, this matter was irregular, hanging in globular clusters. Cancerous. Some stretches were orange, but others were brown, tinged green at the edges. Others were as black as tar. The stink intensified. Like when she'd lived with her adoptive mom and dad on the shore and she would bring home shells that looked dead and set them on the dresser, only for her to catch a whiff of rot two days later and find brown fluid leaking onto the dresser's top.

  The next gate was plastered with more of the same. While the previous gate had been largely empty, this one was littered with pieces of bodies. Limbs were arranged in tidy piles like campfire kindling. Heads dangled from wires spiked to the ceiling. Torsos, dumb and useless, were discarded beneath rows of chairs.

  Lowell brought forth a lantern, shining it over the lumpy, slimy walls. Wherever there was a smooth patch of matter, it had been painted with sigils. They were foreign, incomprehensible, yet Raina could tell the alien runes were drawn shakily and crudely. As if the bearer of the brush were exhausted. Or the opposite—so infused with passion and mania that they couldn't hold their grip steady while they worked.

  "Tristan," Raina said. "In your time with the Swimmers, have you ever seen anything like this?"

  "No." Tristan's throat was froggy. She cleared it loudly, glancing deeper into the darkness before returning her gaze to the writing. "Normally, they revere each other. But look around. There's body parts everywhere. It's like they went crazy."

  Raina grunted and turned to Lowell. "Aren't you the expert on such matters?"

  He drew back his head in mild surprise. "I didn't have much dealing with the aliens. That was Anson's gig."

  "I don't mean you're an expert on the aliens. I mean you're an expert on the corruption of the soul."

  "Not sure about that. Or that our souls have anything in common with theirs." He stepped closer to the walls, hoisting his lantern. The matter over the windows was almost entirely black. "Tristan's right. I look at this, and all I see is madness."

  Raina examined the walls a moment longer. They were right. It was lunacy. No one could decipher it but the minds that had created it.

  She could feel, now, that they were close. Not close like the heat of an oven in the kitchen, but like the smell of it from a room away. She left the gate and walked on, one sword held before her, the other cocked above her head. The lanterns shined on a wall ahead. The end of the terminal.

  She stopped, listening for the rustle of anything lurking in the shadows, then stepped forward. The windows were sealed with black gunk. The seats had been ripped out from the gate and piled along the side wall, reaching halfway to the ceiling. In the opened space, bodies rested in a neat circle. Eighteen in total. Their throats had been cut, thick yellow liquid drying around them. Each held a pearly white knife in one of their limbs.

  "Secure the doors," Raina said, motioning to the exits which would once have fed passengers into planes. Teams of warriors jogged to each, shining lamps beyond each door.

  She circled the bodies. The blood hadn't begun to congeal. She crouched, touching their skin. Warm. Their wounds no longer trickled blood, though. They'd died recently. Perhaps no more than minutes ago.

  She moved on, inspecting each alien for more signs of what had happened. As she reached to touch one that had no obvious wounds, it jerked away. Raina jumped back.

  It opened its eyes and lifted its head.

  "Holy fuck," Bryson choked. "That one's alive."

  Warriors aimed rifles and their looted lasers. Raina kept her swords gripped by her side. The creature stared at her. Often, their bulbous eyes looked humorous, as if the wrath in them had swollen them to hideous size. Yet this one's eyes looked shrunken. Haunted. It held a shiny silver canister. This was the size of a large thermos. One tentacle was coiled around the canister's base, the other around its lid.

  Tristan's throat worked. "Kill it."

  "Hold your fire." Raina's voice was soft as a breeze, yet her warriors stood down. She could feel an energy in the air, beating steadily, the heart of a whale in the depths, or the machine in the basement that powered the building. "There's something here we don't understand."

  "You can say that again," Bryson said. "Like how about anything?"

  She held out her palm, silencing him. She took a step toward the alien. It tightened its top tentacle around the metal container. Its eyes seemed bottomless, as weary as Raina had felt as she'd starved in the city while fleeing the fires. Yet there was nothing they could say to each other. Not with words. So why did it watch her so?

  "You want me to make the choice for you," she whispered. "To give you a reason to do what you're too terrified to do—or to listen to the heart that won't let you do it."

  She put one sword away, then the other. The alien blinked. Its eyes watered. It uncurled its tentacle from the canister lid. With the other limb, it extended the object to her.

  She reached forth. As her hands touched the smooth, warm metal, a shock ran up her arms. She fumbled it. The alien's eyes gleamed with the brightness of the moon and the sadness of the s
tars. Raina crouched, catching the canister before it hit the floor.

  She rose, breathing out in a harsh rasp. She didn't know what she held—but she knew it was what she had come for.

  * * *

  Walt entered the Core.

  Inside the foyer, two Swimmers argued with each other, gesturing so violently it looked like they were practicing their karate forms. Walt shot them both down, settling the dispute.

  He moved to the entrance to the yawning inner chamber, ignoring the hypnotically tumbling fire trapped at the room's center, scanning the workstations for aliens. The room was at least fifty yards in diameter and thirty feet high, yet it was incredibly empty and sparse, almost as though it was less of a place where work got done and more of a cathedral to the heart of the ship.

  Two Swimmers sat next to each other at their computers a quarter of the way across the room. They could have seen him fine, if they turned their heads, but they seemed quite engrossed by the symbols appearing on their screens. A third worker sat closer to Walt in the opposite direction, but its back was turned to him.

  He strode toward the pair. Once he was within thirty feet of them, one turned toward him, confusion lighting its oversized eyes. He shot it in the middle of its skull. It jolted back, spasming over its computer. The second jumped to its feet, flinging a round touch pad at him. He side-stepped it and put a beam into the alien's chest. After administering a second shot to each of their heads, he turned back for the third worker, who was still gesturing heedlessly over its computer.

  The third engineer glanced over its shoulder while he was still fifty feet away. Walt's first shot missed. The Swimmer stood, going for its tablet, but dropped it, the hard plastic clattering against the floor. Before it could retrieve the device, Walt blasted it in the chest, then in the head.

  The room was silent except for the discordant song of the Core. The air smelled like over-grilled fish tails. He made a full sweep of the room, ensuring nobody was lurking in the nooks around the circumference, then headed back to the main doors. He attempted to weld these shut with his laser, but did no more damage than when he'd tried to cut his way in, i.e. nothing. The doors opened by sliding into the walls, meaning he couldn't bar them with furniture.