by Ernest Filak
“Take it!” Theodore shouts and grabs his crate. “Run!”
I listen to his orders, get hold of the handles and chase after him. We run through one junction and then another. Everywhere there’s dust and smoke. We have a hard time finding our way.
“What is happening?” I shout.
But he can’t hear me in all this noise. In one of the passages I can see a Star Trooper, holding his arm. There’s blood all over his fingers. He waves us farther. It looks like it’s fine.
Choking and snorting we reach our Mech. Victor is on duty. The machine is used as an immobile firing post. We’ve attached the Mech to the ceiling, right next to a hatch leading to the unfortunate observation post. This is where the Devourers try to get to us. Fifty yards of strong rock have so far proved a problem impossible to overcome. The Mech is in a horizontal position, and to get to it you need to use a ladder.
“Careful!” Theodore pushes me aside.
In the floor there is a gaping hole, a result of the Devourers’ attack. Each shot we hear makes it even larger. This time the alien energy charges do not attack us from above. Our brethren in cognitive thinking have come up with something else.
Here, in a place so close to the surface, the trembling is especially clearly felt. We can see Victor’s frightened face looking our way. He is the other revolutionary who joined us together with Uncle.
“Stay there,” Theodore gives him a sign.
The face disappears. He’s a good boy.
We fill the two canons with ammo. The captain had promised that his people would change us soon. So far promises are the only thing we’ve heard. Star Troopers are not too enthusiastic about stepping in for the revolutionary forces, and Alexy doesn’t urge them.
“What is going on?” Captain Nemov jumps out of one of the passages.
Right behind him we can see Sergeant Gall and, of all people, our commandant. We don’t answer because there is nothing to report. The Aliens are have not fired a single shot yet. Victor, the guy operating the Mech, seeing the newly arrived soldiers slid out one arm and fired a vertical salvo from its .40 gun just to be on the safe side. The din was deafening. He immediately withdrew the arm in case the Devourers felt like responding. Nothing like this happened. The ground shook again, though, almost knocking us off our feet. I had to lean against the wall for support.
Nemov walked up to the edge of the well. He put his feet down carefully, feeling the hardness of the ground around it. Supported by the Sergeant, he looked out over the hole to see the destroyed observation post. I had to admit the guy had balls – he stood like that for almost twenty seconds.
“Sir?” Gall expressed some concern.
“Everything is clear,” the officer moved back to a safe distance. “There’s no way they can get though here. They managed to break through about ten yards but they won’t be able to go any farther.”
“Where are the tremors coming from then?” Pierunov asked.
“Are they trying to smoke us out?” the Sergeant was thinking aloud.
“Or bury us,” the Captain turned to the commander of the revolutionaries. “We have to check what is going on. Send a man to find out. According to our blueprints there is a retractable observation deck in the hill covering the entry to the hangar.
Out of the dark corridor we heard a coughing sound. A stunned Star Trooper was coming our way.
“There’s a collapse on the central line, Sir,” he reported to the officer. “The whole eastern wing has been cut off.”
“Let’s go,” the officer set off into the dark without much thinking.
The Star Troopers all disappeared into the tunnel like shadows. We were left alone with our young commander.
“You’ve heard what the Captain said,” the revolutionary pointed his finger at me. “Go and check what is going on.”
I didn’t protest. Theodore did it for me.
“Why do we always have to do all the dirty work? It’s time the Star Troopers also moved their asses.”
“Quiet!” the commandant didn’t like us questioning his decisions. “For refusing to carry out the orders you can face the revolutionary tribunal and be given the highest possible punishment.”
“Come on,” I stopped Theodore from doing something stupid. “An order is an order. I have to do it. By the way, dear Alexy, I wonder how the Revolutionary Committee is going to react to your uncritical cooperation with the former enemy.”
“What did you say?” Pierunov went mad.
“Careful, Commander,” Theodore warned him, pointing to the black hole of the well. “One inattentive move and you could fall in there. Nobody will ever figure out how such a tragedy could have happened.”
This remark was very well chosen given the fact that we were blocking his only way back into the safe part of the complex. There was a gaping hole behind him. A reasonable commander would know it wasn’t worth arguing anymore. He slowly walked past us, issuing his order in the meantime.
“Execute!”
We watched him leave.
“We’ve got one lousy commander,” I assessed his attitude.
“Young and stupid,” Theodore said. “He can’t stand up for himself. There are so few of us and half of the people are his family. Tell me, Pavel, who would you have chosen for the task if you were him? A stranger or one of your own?”
This was a rhetorical question, but I still answered it.
“One of my own, of course. Always one sponger for the chop, right?”
“He’s always been an asshole,” we heard Victor’s voice coming to us from under the ceiling. He witnessed the whole scene from up there.
“And you have nothing better to do, huh?” Theodore reproached him. “Eh, today’s youth.”
When we were far away from eavesdroppers, he asked.
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“What for? I’ll manage on my own. We can’t get into the canal together anyway. Go see your woman. Make sure she’s in one piece. And be thorough…”
“You pervert,” he flicked my ear. “Take care.”
So he went flying to his future wife. There was always hope that after all the passionate sex they would get down to some serious cooking. My fears for the taste of dinner somehow abated. Theodore is a really reasonable guy and there is reason to believe that he will toss a few handfuls of chili into whatever Sunshine is cooking.
The walls shook again. The Aliens resumed playing. There was no point is dawdling. I energetically set off to my next fucked up task. Fortunately the entrance to the passage I was in was far away, thanks to which the vibrations were losing strength with every yard I passed. After all, the base had been designed to withstand artillery fire from the orbit.
As I was walking, I activated the procedure of getting into my meditation. Every time I did it I found it much easier. Uncle insisted that he wasn’t going to tell me more about the further applications of this method. To his judgment too much progress achieved too quickly wouldn’t bring anything good in the end.
Flower beds appeared around my Refugium house with many decorative plants I had never seen before. Ingrid settled down for good. She introduced a few improvements of her own. I just couldn’t figure out why the hell she needed a marble fountain with a figure of a naked peeing man! I don’t even have to say who was an inspiration for this pseudo-artistic shit. Thing is I have never taken a leak in this position!
Of course I tried to get rid of this crap, but to no avail. In the fight between two minds I didn’t stand a chance against an AI. What remains is the comforting thought that once things get settled I will introduce my own order here. Fuck! I begin to sound like my old man when mother tried brainwashing him into things!
“Ingrid, where are you?”
I storm inside. All is quiet. She’s not here. Fortunately, I don’t have to run around the whole house. Apart from the kitchen and the living room where we run our experiments there isn’t much more. There is the bedroom with a huge canopy bed, which,
as it happens, wasn’t my idea either. I have to admit, though, that the sculptured scenes from the Kama Sutra featured on the bed columns are very tasteful. And they even come in useful sometimes.
“Ingrid!” I scrutinize the bed, toss the sheets. She’s not there.
I refuse to run around the whole island. After she had enriched the fauna with lions and leopards I don’t really feel like it. And it’s a waste of time. I decide to enter the living room and sit on the sofa. All I have to do is wait. Refugium log out!
In the meantime I get to the end of a runway. In one of the side walls I find a hermetically-locked door, behind which there is a small chamber with a ladder leading up the wall, looking exactly like the one in the destroyed observation post. Procrastinating doesn’t make any sense. I step onto the first rung when I feel her calling me.
Refugium log in.
A slender body of a woman emerges out of the black screen on the wall. I catch her before she slides down to the floor. How exhausted she is!
“We’ll have to talk,” I warn her. But my heart bleeds at the sight. I can’t be angry about trivialities now. Fuck the fountain. If she wants to she can have another one, or two.
“Where have you been? You disappear when I need you the most,” I lay her down on the sofa and put a cold cloth on her head. How hot she is!
She begins to come round and starts crying hysterically.
“What happened?”
“They’re all dying!” she screams.
“Who?” I ask surprised.
“Everybody! People die by the thousands in the whole Hadesian System.”
She grabs a glass of water and drinks it up ferociously. Half of the water gets spilled because her hands are shaking so much.
“What are you talking about?”
“Meditation works based on brain activity during the REM phase. I was bored without you so I wanted to experiment a bit,” she explains.
“Ingrid, I asked you not to mess with anything without me.”
“I know, but inside you I feel like a prisoner. I don’t have any contact with people.”
“Thanks,” I felt like a guy whose girlfriends tells him they are going through a rough patch in their relationship.
“Don’t get angry. This has nothing to go with us. You know I love you,” she assures me. “Thanks to this method I got a chance to discover something new.”
“And?”
“I can connect with other people when they are in a deep sleep. I didn’t do anything but observe them. All their desires, dreams and problems – it’s so fascinating.”
“So why are you so shaken up?”
“The number of people dreaming is falling drastically. Especially on the orbit. I got in touch with a little girl. She was so scared and so wanted her mum to hug her that I couldn’t help myself and I hugged her.”
“And was this the traumatic experience?”
“No,” she said.
We held our hands and looked each other in the eyes.
“She died,” she explained. “Devourers got her in her sleep.”
This must have been a terrible experience. Now I understood why she was in such a state. And again I was wrong.
“She left for a different, better world,” I said what I heard in childhood after my grandmother had died.
“Pavel, after her body died she still hung on to me so much. She didn’t want to be left alone.”
This confession really shook me up. I counted on Ingrid’s help and it turned out she needed me. I took her into my arms and carried to the bedroom. We lay in bed spooning. I hugged her and whispered comforting words into her ear.
Fortunately, at this stage in my training I was capable of remaining focused with my eyes open. Of course the images from Refugium lost their sharpness due to that, but I could still see them. The information received from my woman was important enough to come back as the main topic of our conversations. But for the time being I had other things on my mind.
I reached the top of the first steps. Next there was a short ascending corridor and another set of ladder rungs. In such a way I made another twenty yards and finally reached my destination. This observation post was temporary. If necessary it was protruded above ground level by means of electric engines. I didn’t even check if they had been supplied with power. Instead I reached out to a huge wheel of manual steering. I turned it around. A narrow tube of a connector pushed out the ground. To reach full success I had to turn the wheel for a full quarter of an hour. By the end I hated the Aliens with all my might. There wasn’t much of it left remaining.
I cleaned the lens of the periscope with my sleeve and looked into it. The first thing I saw was grass which covered almost the whole field of vision. Gusts of wind made it possible to see fragments of the landscape, so I patiently waited for the opportunity to see more. Finally, a stronger gust flattened the blades a bit.
The nearest hill where the observation post used to be disappeared altogether. There was no greenery and no soil. What remained of it was solid rock scratched everywhere with the blades of Alien scythes. The place was constantly being struck by blue lightning launched by a ship hanging on a low orbit.
In the place where I was standing I could feel slight tremors every moment the blue energy touched the planet. The rock had crumbled down in many places due to the constant siege. The area was becoming flatter as the solid rock material was being destroyed.
Around a dozen oblong shapes waited for the weapons to do their job before they would get inside the complex. This time I didn’t just see them as malicious machines created by incorporating organic parts. Somewhere inside lurked real evil that pushed to something more than dominating over another species.
I didn’t know what these creatures were, but if there was even a grain of truth in Ingrid’s tales, we were dealing with absolute evil here.
A blazing smudge crossed the sky. I gasped. I so wanted it to be a rocket fired by a human being that I almost believed it. The Aliens didn’t react. The fiery bullet fell apart into bits and burnt. Soon after I saw many similar ones in many different places.
No, this wasn’t gun fire. At least not in the traditional sense. It was the meteor shower pushed out into space by Hades. Last year I had the opportunity to see the phenomenon for the first time in my life. I hoped then that it would also be the last. Time for New Year’s wishes?
Fuck them, fuck the Devourers and all this shitty system. I’m going down back to my woman.
Chapter XII
HES Judgment.
The ship crossed the border of the Hadesian System fourteen days ago. It was now staying in the silent zone, unreachable by any particles. It had left behind enough of empty space behind its stern. It was drifting further into the void with its engines off. Many people on the ship were still working feverishly to repair the damage the HES Judgment had sustained. The fire of welders could be seen around the ring of the third artillery turret. It hadn’t been possible to save any of the artillery soldiers or other crew stationed in this part of the ship. Rescue teams were still looking for bodies. The total number of casualties amounted to over fifty, which was almost ten percent of the overall headcount.
Despite the heavy losses, the ship’s crew was in perfect order. Nobody was complaining, and if they were, they kept it within the closest circle of friends. After all the turmoil of the last weeks, the officers weren’t experiencing any problems with the crew. Everybody was doing their best. Some of them, despite their exhaustion, kept spinning visions of quick recovery and going back into battle. At least this is how they interpreted the fact that the ship remained relatively close to the system.
Most of the firing positions remained ominously empty. The second watch was on duty. Bosun Dubchek walked towards the lone figure of a midshipman and put a mug steaming with hot coffee in front of the man.
“There you go, Sir.”
“Thank you, Bosun,” the young officer couldn’t hide his astonishment.
Bosun Paul
Dubchek together with his friend from the machinery room, J.J. Buggy were well known for their resentment of officers, who, in their opinion, knew nothing about the job. Cooperation with the two men was fraught with tension, which Midshipman Henry Perry knew well from his own experience. They were especially hard on him, because he came from the Perrys. His family had been in service in the navy for generations. It was really difficult to get rid of the label of a mummy’s boy driven by family connections.
“What is this for?” he asked the bosun still standing next to him.
“Do I need a reason?”
“Quite recently somebody tossed a handful of pins into my boots. Wouldn’t you know anything about that?”
“Pins? What pig would do anything as stupid as that?”
The midshipman didn’t pursue the subject, although he had long figured out that the pin had been placed by the bosun himself, prodded by one of his buddies. The coffee was apparently supposed to be a symbol of reconciliation between them.
“Nothing happening?” the bosun asked.
The officer looked around. Computer screens filled all the wall space in the room. A terribly exhausted mate was snoozing in front of one of the monitors. The midshipman shook his arm gently. He didn’t scream or tell the man off.
“You’ll get your sleep in an hour,” he consoled the sailor. “Try to stay awake until the end of your watch.”
The man rubbed his bloodshot itching eyes and returned to reality. Perry focused on his coffee. He also felt fatigue but had to set an example to others. If he didn’t have to, he would have gladly dropped off himself.
“Everything’s ok,” he replied to the bosun. “We register every byte of information from Hades. It might come in useful.”
“I’m sure it will,” the bosun said. “I’ve looked through the records of Alien attacks.”
“I haven’t had the time,” Perry said. “I haven’t slept for thirty six hours.”
“I would like to congratulate you, Sir. Thanks to your last minute readjustment it was our salvo that hit that escort ship.”
