by Jack Castle
Mac knew the situation had just become much more dire. “What about Asha’s people, the Mukarians, or Queen Apsu? Have you tried them?” she asked.
“What’s the point? They still think of Khaos as their one true god.” Harry wasn’t being pessimistic, just realistic.
“So, you mean to tell me that we — you, me, Tae, Leo, and two nine-hundred-pound gorillas — not only have to defeat Khaos but also his army of Tripods and throngs of brainwashed followers?”
“Well, I’d say they’re more like fifteen hundred pounds, and I wouldn’t exactly call them gorillas, but yeah, that’s the general idea.”
Mac bobbed her head a couple times before answering. “Okay, I’m in.”
They stood there looking at each other for a moment. In another life, they could have been lovers who gazed at one another in the moonlight: Mac, with the wind blowing through her hair, and Harry, leaning on the smooth railing with a lopsided smile on his face and an adoring look in his eyes. They could have been just as easily standing on the deck of a cruise ship, sailing across the Pacific. What was that saying? Two ships passing in the night?
Mac yearned for Harry’s arms to be around her once more, and she moved closer to him. They were within inches of each other when …
“Hey, Mac!” Leo yelled from below.
Mac looked down from the roof and saw Leo standing outside the hovel that contained the campfire. He hadn’t seen them yet, and he was cupping his hand, getting ready to call out in the darkness once more.
“Up here, Leo!” she shouted.
Surprised to see her up on the roof with Harry, Leo did a double take before shouting, “You and Harry might want to come down and take a look at this.”
“Be right down,” Mac replied. She raised her eyebrows in resignation at Harry, and both of them moved toward the stairwell.
Their ships had passed.
#
Mac and Harry walked inside the hovel and over to the campfire where Tae and Leo sat. Their shadows danced on the walls in the firelight.
They heard loud slurping and chewing from the broken corner of the building. Hu-Nan was eating, as usual. His bloody meal looked similar to a gazelle-like creature she had seen earlier. The big Awumpai’s back was to them, and he constantly checked over his shoulder to guard his kill. At least he didn’t finish off the last of the rations, Mac thought as she took a seat beside Tae.
Much to her disappointment, the two men had not prepared anything in the way of a meal. “Okay, you two want to tell me what it is you were doing that’s so important your commanding officer has to go without dinner?” she asked, trying to keep it light.
Leo, not missing a beat, pulled out a can of rations from the Avenger plane packs and tossed it to her. “Show her,” he said to Tae.
Tae opened his laptop, which he had been carrying in his backpack since they had arrived on the planet, and laid it on a large, flat rock near the fire. “Okay, we know the aliens are aware of the wormhole,” he said.
“Atum-Khaos,” Leo said, correcting him.
Tae sighed. “We’ve been through this already. They’re just aliens.”
“What difference does it make?” Mac interjected. “Either way, he and his armies are going to travel through the wormhole in a fleet of warships and enslave the entire solar system on the other side.”
Tae paused for a moment to allow this to sink in. “Well, the way I see it, we have two choices. We either a) destroy the wormhole, or b) destroy Khaos. Since we can’t reach the wormhole…” The engineer tapped a few keys on his computer pad, and a holographic image of the palace appeared over his laptop.
“Hey, that’s pretty neat!” Harry said and gingerly touched the hologram. It surprised Mac that after all he’d seen, he could still be impressed by a simple hologram schematic.
Tae continued, “Okay, three anti-gravity generators are the only things holding up the floating palace. The generators are these three basins here.” He pointed to each of them with a laser pen. As he did so, each one lit up and flashed red.
“When did you do all this?” Leo asked.
“Well, while you were busy flirting with that water nymph and getting drunk on nectar, I got a tour of the palace that included the engineering sections. I scanned it with my computer as we walked.”
“Good work, Tae,” Mac said, patting him on the back. She was reminded just how good an engineer Tae really was. Although she had been surrounded by the best of the best for the last several years, she had resigned herself to being little more than a ‘glorified truck driver’ during her shuttle runs to Europa and back. She had forgotten that she and the other astronauts were some of the best that humanity had to offer. This realization not only rekindled her hope but also gave her courage.
“Hey, I was not flirting with any water nymph,” Leo said defensively. He looked at Mac, worried she might tell Emma.
Tae was about to continue with his presentation, but he stopped and looked squarely at Leo. “You were flirting.”
Mac stifled a laugh as Leo shrugged his shoulders then rolled his eyes skyward. Even in their dire situation, it was nice to see Tae come out from behind the books and stretch his wings.
“Now, as I was saying, if we can disable the generators while the palace is in flight, it should fall.”
“How are we going to do that?” Mac asked.
“Well, naturally, the generators are shielded, but if we can disrupt the main power systems here,” Tae pointed to a spot at the center of the palace’s platform basin, “that should turn off the shielding long enough to give us time to blow up the generators. But it’s going to have to be some pretty heavy-duty explosives. Those generators aren’t small.”
“The Avengers’ torpedo bombs are still attached,” Harry said. “They should be big enough.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Tae said eagerly.
“Now, will that shut power down all over the palace?” Harry asked.
“No, that’s what the main power generator deep inside the palace basin is for. I never got a good look at it, but I do know that it’s heavily guarded. But the main power supply for the shield generators, which protect the antigravity generators, is hardly guarded at all.”
“Yeah, but we only got two planes,” Leo said to Tae, “and you said there were three generators.”
“We only need two.”
“What?” Mac asked.
Tae explained, “If we take out two generators, it will keep them from achieving orbit. If we take out the third generator, the palace will fall like a stone.”
Leo shook his head. “Wait a minute. Are you guys even listening to yourselves? We barely got out of there alive. I mean, I’m all for saving Earth and everything, but c’mon! Get real! We’re just four guys with a couple of antique planes. Who are we kidding?”
“C’mon, Leo. This is a good plan. It just needs some fine tuning,” Mac said soothingly.
“I’ll say it does,” Leo said. “I’m no coward. I just don’t see how getting ourselves killed is going to help anyone back home.”
Mac looked at him. This was it. Leo was going to have to decide whether to cowboy up or turn tail and run. “Look, I’m not going to order you to do this, but if we don’t stop Khaos, a lot of people on Earth, including Emma, are going to die.”
Tae was the first to commit. “Hey, I’m in. We’ve got too much to lose if we don’t try.” He turned toward Harry. “Besides, Harry saved my life. The least I can do is trust him now.”
Leo shook his head again and said, “This is crazy.” But, after sighing heavily, he agreed. “All right, I’m in.”
Harry clapped Leo’s shoulder with one hand and Tae’s with the other. “Okay, let’s do it.”
Pointing at Tae’s schematic again, he asked, “Tae, if Fu-Mar can sneak you back into the palace, do you think you can disrupt the anti-gr
avity generators’ power supply?”
Tae bit down on his lower lip. He wasn’t the type to answer before he was one-hundred percent sure. “I can, but it sure would help to have Leo along in case I have trouble figuring it out.”
“Hey, you’re the engineer,” Leo said. Mac could see he was still not totally on board with the risky plan.
“Need I remind you that you’re the one who opened the wormhole in the first place?” Tae shot back.
Leo shrank at this and quickly responded, “Okay, okay, fine. I’ll go with you.”
“Once Tae and Leo disengage the power supply feeding the shield generators,” Harry said, “Mac and I will be able to torpedo two of the antigravity generators.”
“And bingo!” Mac said. “The palace falls out of the sky, or at the very least, we keep it from entering the wormhole.”
“How soon do you want Leo and me to infiltrate the palace?” Tae asked, there was an edge of excitement in his voice.
“Couple hours, tops. According to what Enoch told me, tomorrow is the last day of tribute,” Harry said. “After that, you can bet that Khaos is going to pack his bags and head for Earth.”
“Okay. I think I can be ready to leave within the hour.”
“Better take Hu-Nan for back-up,” Harry added.
Leo looked back at the oversized Awumpai. “Uh, he doesn’t exactly blend in.”
“Don’t worry. He’s a lot stealthier than he looks,” Harry replied, but just then, Hu-Nan erupted with one of his infamously loud farts. Hu-Nan looked at them apologetically with a dopey grin on his face.
Tae was in the middle of packing up his things when he stopped suddenly and took a few tentative sniffs; Hu-Nan’s gas had wafted in his direction. “Oh gosh, gross. Do you guys smell that?”
Mac was trying to open a can of rations. “What?” she asked irritably, wondering what Tae was going on about.
Tae held his nose. “Are you telling me you don’t smell that?”
Mac sniffed and gagged. She covered her mouth with the back of her wrist. “Oh my,” she said. Tears welled in her eyes, and bile rose into her mouth.
Harry scolded the big Awumpai, but Mac couldn’t help it; she just had to laugh. Harry chased the big Awumpai out of the hovel, which made her laugh even harder. Seeing her lose it, Leo and Harry soon started laughing, too.
“That’s not funny,” Tae said. “I’m serious. He shouldn’t be doing that near an open flame.”
#
Later that evening, Harry walked up to one of the TBM Avengers hidden amongst the city’s ruined walls.
He saw Leo sitting in the open cockpit, trying to turn the engine over with little success. Judging by the heavy sputtering and black soot chugging out of the exhaust, the boy had probably flooded the engine.
It would be dawn in a few hours, but the group was leaving within the hour. Harry told himself that he was just checking on the lad, but part of him wanted to make sure that the young lieutenant wasn’t having second thoughts and wouldn’t decide to crank up the Avenger and fly away. Harry didn’t want to believe it, but it was obvious that the young man still wasn’t entirely on board with the seemingly hopeless plan of attack. He considered calling Leo down for a moment, but when the engine cranked heavily again without success, he climbed onto the wing.
“Sounds like its flooded. Best let her settle for a while.” Harry knelt down next to the cockpit.
Despite Harry’s advice, Leo defiantly tried the engine one more time. It bucked, chugged for a few seconds, and then both men got a heavy dose of a black cloud laden with gasoline fumes before it died once more.
“Geez, I can’t even start the engine, and we’re supposed to take on Khaos,” Leo said. He removed the flight gloves he had been wearing and threw them on the dash.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.” Harry said while wiping soot from his face with a grease-stained rag he kept in his back pocket.
“Yeah?” Leo said, his voice cracking, “What makes you so sure, Harry? What makes you so sure that we won’t just get ourselves killed?”
Harry handed him the rag. “Hey, haven’t you read the Bible? As long as God is with us, how can anyone stand against us?”
Leo snorted. “God is with us? Ha, that’s a laugh.” He wiped his face with the rag. “I hate to be the one to tell you this, Harry, but I think we’ve pretty much confirmed that these so-called ‘gods’ are nothing more than an advanced race of extraterrestrials. They’re probably the same ones who mixed their DNA with prehistoric monkeys to create mankind for their own selfish purposes.” There, he said it. He didn’t like doing it, but he had to make Harry see reason. There was no God.
“Son,” Harry said and then paused.
Oh, boy, here it comes, Leo thought. The old timer’s gonna impart some wisdom, and he probably doesn’t even know about Darwin’s theory. But Harry surprised him.
“Son, let me tell you something. When your doubts are the greatest, that’s when you have to have faith in God the most.”
“Faith?” Leo asked incredulously, “How can you still believe in God after everything we’ve seen? We’ve got proof that these aliens, fallen angels, whatever, have been visiting Earth since the days before the flood. Given everything we’ve seen, how can you still believe in God?”
Deep in thought, Harry rubbed his scalp for a second. “Well, let me ask you this: if these advanced extraterrestrial beings created mankind, who created them?”
Leo started to answer but realized that he didn’t have an answer. Scientific journals and excavations of the ruins on Earth, Mars, and Europa had never provided evidence of who created the creators. The only thing that Leo recalled was the first sentence of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.”
Harry remembered the SongBird Goddess’s warning about sharing the secret of life and knew he had to choose his words carefully. “Look,” he said, “there’s nothing wrong with being afraid. During the war, when I was flying missions over the Pacific, I was scared silly lots of times.”
Leo snorted. “C’mon, Harry, you were afraid?”
“You’d better believe it. But in every man’s life there comes a time when he realizes that there are things out there that are more important than himself. So, back then, we acknowledged our fear and then did what had to be done the best way we knew how. It wasn’t always easy and sometimes it was downright terrifying, but we got the job done. And you know what? You will, too.”
Harry was fully aware that no amount of scientific data would ever convince Leo of the existence of the one true God — it was a personal journey for everyone — but he saw that he was getting through to the boy. “Now try it. Turn it over.”
“What? Oh.” Leo flicked the ignition switch. The plane’s engine began to turn over. It sputtered a few times, so Harry reached into the cockpit and adjusted the choke to give it a little less fuel. The engine kicked over and roared to life, much the way Leo’s courage was starting to.
“Better let it idle for a bit,” Harry said. “Do you think you and Tae can be ready to go within the hour?”
“Huh? Oh sure,” Leo replied. He was slightly dazed and dumbstruck from their conversation, but Harry saw a spark in the boy’s eyes. Leo had just begun his journey.
“Good.” Harry jumped down from the wing and left Leo alone with his thoughts.
Chapter 28
Leo and Tae’s Impossible Mission
“I thought you said you knew where this place was?”
Leo and Tae skidded across the palace’s heavily polished floors and hid in the shadows of an expansive, but abandoned, hallway.
“I do, I do, but this place is huge. Just give me a second,” Tae said. He consulted his hologram schematic once more.
Leo was not happy about this plan, not happy at all. But even he had to admit that so far things had gone p
retty well. With the hover chariot, Fu-Mar’s and Hu-Nan’s uncanny stealth techniques, and Tae’s familiarity with the layout, they had easily penetrated the palace. The oversized Awumpai had effortlessly dispatched what little resistance they had encountered. Naturally, the red-haired Awumpai had taken a little piece of each foe as a ‘snack’. Leo noted that the Awumpai seemed particularly partial to the Mook servants.
Leo theorized that they had encountered so little opposition because the majority of the guards were either dealing with the thousands of worshipers paying tribute to Khaos or out searching for the humans in the forests. Khaos must have thought that only idiots would launch a counterattack on the palace — idiots like him, Tae, and the Awumpai.
“Okay, got it. The main generator is this way.” Tae checked to see that the coast was clear and darted quietly down the hallway.
He’s actually enjoying himself, Leo thought as he followed.
#
The main power supply for the anti-gravity generators consisted of an hourglass shaped power core surrounded by machinery that was as alien as it was complex.
Fu-Mar and Hu-Nan had made short work of the two Tripod sentries guarding the room and the Mook and hybrid technicians manning it. At present, Hu-Nan was eating one of the Mooks outside in the hallway, and Fu-Mar guarded the room’s only entrance.
Leo was wondering if the big Awumpai ever stopped eating when he spied Tae, who stood in front of the massive power generator and peered inside an open panel.
Leo moved next to him. “Okay, we’re here. Now what?” he said.
Tae was biting his lower lip again, which was never a good sign. “Well, it is pretty intricate.”
“Well, do you know, or don’t you?” Leo asked.
Tae turned toward him. “Look, this isn’t one of your movies. I can’t just magically understand alien technology that’s far more advanced than anything I’ve ever seen or even heard about.”
