Alien Arsenal

by Jeffery H. Haskell

  I slow way down to follow the twisting and turning path of the cave for over a thousand feet before it opens into a massive, well-lit cavern. Lux’s ship is parked in the middle. On the far side is a bank of monitors, chairs and other technology I don’t recognize. To the far left is a side cavern with a bright yellow light coming out of the dump truck-sized entrance.

  The team is out of the ship, unloading the gear we brought, mostly survival stuff, just in case we were here for a while. I didn’t want us to starve to death. Fleet is over with Lux at the monitors speaking with her. Tessa and Monica have broken out the coffee maker and Luke stands at the foot of the ship, hands on hips and a frown on his thin lips.

  I land beside him with a thud. The helmet automatically retracts leaving me in the armor but my head clear. Lockheed does a fly by and I mentally send him orders to recon the ravine outside in stealth mode. He beeps once before his micro-Emdrive whines sending him back the way we came.

  “Why the frown, handsome? We did well back there. They think we’re dead and we aren’t, I call that a win.”

  He scoops me up, pulling my body to his and tenderly kisses me, engulfing my lips and running his hands over my back. I don’t think we’ve ever kissed like this before. With me standing, that is. At least, not with me standing and able to feel his arms around me. I slip mine under his and hold him close. The sensation of his body next to mine is new and exciting in a way I couldn’t imagine.

  After what feels like forever we pull apart. He smiles as I pant from the excitement. “Wow,” I say between breaths.

  “Wow yourself. I’m glad you’re okay. I know you're tough but still…”

  “Ahh. You care about me.” I run a hand along his biceps following the crease of his muscles to his broad shoulders. I’m warm all over and it shows on my face.

  “You know I do,” he says, planting another soft kiss on my lips. “Listen,” he holds me out at arm’s length, “there’s bad news. The ship is busted.”

  “Oh,” I sigh. Of course. I really want to go back to the kissing but first things first. “Can we fix it?”

  He shrugs. “Lux is looking at her computers now to see if she can. She says they have an automated factory under here that may be able to. But first, let me show you something.”

  He slides his hand down my arm until it intertwines with mine leading me toward the cavern with the bright yellow light. The entrance is circular and leads to a hallway twenty feet long. The other side is where the bright light is coming from. Once we’re through I gasp.

  The cavern is huge. Thousands of feet long. The hallway ends on a balcony overlooking a hole that goes on and on. I can see almost to my limit. I imagine if I put my helmet on the optics could go even farther. The walls of the cave are lined with bright yellow lights that give off both warmth and light. In between them stacked in rows of hundreds and columns of thousands are humanoid shaped pods, almost like coffins. The exterior is translucent, each pod contains a Luxillian hovering in stasis absorbing the light.

  “They’re kind of pretty, in an artistic sense,” Luke says, surprising me.

  “Sort of the opposite of the Th’un, huh?” I ask. He nods.

  “Fleet had a million questions as to why Augustina looks like a human. She told him something about reading the light of our souls?”

  I nod with a chuckle. “Yeah, Lux looked like this when we met on her ship. She shifted shortly after, then again when she met Kate and one last time when she saw Tony. I have to say, I wouldn’t mind the ability to shapeshift into an ultra hottie.”

  “I like you exactly the way you are, beautiful, smart, and yeah honey, sexy.”

  “Good answer,” I murmur as I pull him into a kiss.

  I don’t know how long we spend there, making out in the ‘sunroom’ but a voice breaks our fun.

  “Ahem,” Tessa says with a grin. I rest my head on Luke’s chest to hide my furious blush. I didn’t mean to get so involved. I guess being off-planet on a grand sci-fi adventure has left me a little excitable.

  “Lux has some news for us,” she says jerking a thumb over her shoulder. “But I can rustle you up a cot if you want and tell her it can wait.”

  I turn my face to the side as my cheeks run hot.

  “Thanks, Tessa,” Luke says in his ‘all business’ bass. “We’ll be right there.”

  She chuckles again and gives us both barrels of her finger guns with a ‘ka-pow’ to boot. “Take your time.” She turns and walks away laughing. That girl is going to be the death of me.

  “We should go,” I tell him, turning away before he can see how red my cheeks are.

  “As you wish.”

  The team is huddled around Lux’s chair as she pulls up the blueprints for the ship. Red marks outline the damaged areas and flash words in her language I don’t understand.

  “Epic,” I whisper to him, “you’re recording all of this, right?”

  Affirmative, flashes across my field of vision. Having the ability to interact with him via my optic nerve is ten ways of cool.

  “The hit took out the main life support. We can’t go back into space until the automated factory can fabricate and install a new one,” Lux tells us.

  I look around for anyone else. “Why not just have your technicians do their best to repair it, so we can get into space?”

  She glances at Luke, then me. “Amelia. I’m the only one awake. You saw the cave, yes?”

  I nod.

  “They are the last of my people, one point two million souls out of billions. It’s all we could save. We don’t have the resources to wake up anyone else it is why they created me, as a guardian for them. I already took a huge risk in coming to find you. I can’t wake anyone up… because I can’t put them back to sleep. The factory has to do the work.”

  I glance back the way we came and then to Lux. Billions? What do I say to that?

  “I’m sorry Augustina, I didn’t know.”

  She smiles, but with sadness in her eyes, and the smile isn’t a happy one. “My people are not warriors. Poets, artists, scientists, but fighting wasn’t something we were ever good at. Even when we fought ourselves. It’s why when the computer intercepted the warrant for you I took the chance to come find you. I figured if your society could generate a woman who could fight off the Th’un, maybe you could help us.”

  “And here we are. That still leaves us the problem of getting to Tahunnan,” the unfamiliar word twists in my mouth. “How long until your factory can repair the ship?”

  “The computer says three weeks.”

  Three weeks? I’ve tried hard not to think about what Kate is going through for the last seven days. I can’t leave her in the hands of those monsters for another three weeks. Who knows if she’ll even be alive at that point?

  “I can’t wait that long. I say we keep with our plan. I’ll fly out, find us a ship in close orbit, steal it. Then, come back and grab Luke. In the meantime you four make plans for taking out one of those city refineries. Even if Luke and I fail, then at the very least you will have done some damage here.”

  Augustina opens her mouth to speak but then stops herself in a very human gesture. Tony pats her back. “Don’t worry, Lux, we got this,” he says in his unique accent.

  Lux pulls up images of the ships and details but before I can really look into them Luke tugs on my hand, pulling me aside.

  “I really don’t want you going off into space alone,” he says as he pulls me into a hug. I rest my face against his chest and bask in his warmth, letting the sound of his heart envelope me.

  “It’s hard to believe only a year has gone by,” I whisper to him.

  “Not even, really. You haven’t changed though. Still charging where angels fear to tread,” he says to the top of my head.

  “Hardly,” I reply. So much has changed since I joined the team. My parents are back, Cat-7 is gone, Luke and I are in a serious relationship. I almost feel like a completely different person.

  We hold each other for
a long time, neither of us speaking. If not for Epic’s occasional updates in my field of vision letting me know when ships pass overhead, I’d stay longer.

  “Got to go,” I murmur.

  “Be careful,” he says. Luke runs his hands up my shoulders to my neck and finally my chin, pushing my head and bending down to plant a soft kiss on my lips.

  I shoot out of the cave at five hundred miles an hour. I’m hoping my speed and stealth systems will keep them from zeroing in on me. Epic throws a holographic trail up for me to follow. The wind blows against me as I whip back and forth through the canyons. G’s pile on as I pull hard burns making turns the old armor would have never made.

  I let out a whoop as we exit over an ocean of green water mere inches above the yellow caps cresting below. With the suit directly interfacing with my nervous system I almost feel naked as I blast through the sea spray. Almost.

  “We far enough away, Epic?”

  Affirmative.

  “Okay, let’s find us something big enough to have a quantum drive but small enough I can take the crew.”

  Scanning.

  In the meantime I pull up hard and kick in the Emdrive. They punch me like a mule eliciting a grunt as I blow past Mach five and burn through the sky into the upper atmosphere.

  I’m amazed at how much Luxilla reminds me of Earth. Clouds, mountains, green fauna. There are a few minor differences, like the sea color, but mostly it could be home. If home were in the middle of a savage strip mining operation.

  “Arsenal to Lux, are you clear?”

  It takes a second for our comms to sync. I left a small repeater outside the cave for orbit to ground communications. I don’t know what the Lux use for this kind of thing, but I have a state-of-the-art radio. The encrypted RF transmitter burst fires a signal that leapfrogs every third frequency a thousand times a second. Not only that, but the message itself has 1024-bit encryption encoded along with a quantum key making sure that just the two pieces of equipment that have the same quantum key can talk to each other.

  Luke’s radio-distorted voice comes back to me. “She says we’re all clear. No Th’un moving in. She can’t see you on her screens, which I guess is good for you.”

  I grin. The stealth tech on this suit is miles ahead of the MKIII and that suit had the best I could do… at the time. “Good to know. I’ll contact you again when I’ve secured a ship. Arsenal out.”

  The line clicks dead just as I burst through the Ionosphere. I will never, ever, get tired of flying into space. The rush of wind goes silent and an odd sensation of falling but not falling fills me. I kill my thrust for a second and let myself float. Life support winds up, warming me up and letting me breathe. A number of systems flash along my HUD letting me know they are spaceworthy.

  A sliver of fear flashes through me. I hadn’t actually tested these systems in space yet… if any of them were going to fail, this is a spectacularly bad time to find out.

  Amelia? Your heart rate is increasing. Are you okay?

  “You tell me, is everything a hundred percent?”

  All systems are operating within expected parameters.

  I close my eyes for a second and gulp. I let out a breath counting down from five to steady my heart. No matter how many times I do this craziness, every once in a while it catches up with me. I’m flying, I’m in space, I’m wielding a sword fighting aliens… it’s an awful lot for a girl in a wheelchair. I let the breath out between clenched teeth and my heart settles.

  “I’m… I’m good.”

  Excellent. I have located a suitable ship and tagged her as Sierra One-Alpha on your HUD. I am classifying her as a destroyer. However, she is much smaller than the ones that attacked Earth. I suspect she has a smaller crew and isn’t outfitted for war. Would you like to proceed?

  “Of course! How far away?”

  The HUD lights up and I see Epic ping her hull for me. A path overlays the blackness of space showing me where to go. Navigating in space, even in near orbit, is hard. There are no landmarks, no up or down, nothing for me to follow. If it weren’t for Epic I’d be able to find my way back to Luxilla and that would be about it. Trying to navigate anywhere else by eyeball would be a slow, agonizing trip to starvation town.

  Plotted. Would you like me to take the wheel?

  “Do it.”

  The Emdrive kicks in giving me a sense of motion and gravity as we accelerate. Without friction, the planet's gravity pulls at us, we zoom past twenty thousand miles per hour in a few seconds.

  “ETA?”

  Twelve minutes to turn over.

  “How’s the progress on cracking their programming language?”

  Using the algorithm your mother created I have had some success. It is a complex language, but ultimately it is about learning their variations of ‘if’, and, ‘when’ I believe we’ll have it soon.

  Epic guides the suit through a long burn. The ship we’re targeting pops up on my HUD after a few minutes and I can see its cylindrical shape and the blue exhaust emitting from the reaction drive at the aft end. As we close on the ship my HUD magnifies giving me an even better look. Like the ones on Earth, it has a mottled brown exterior with blisters covering it at irregular intervals. It’s wider at the aft end and the nose is the narrowest part of the ship.

  “Epic? This isn’t a warship?”

  Negative. Based on her flight patterns she is visiting orbital installations. I put the probability of her being a resupply vessel at eighty-seven percent.

  “She sure seems like she has a lot of weapons…”

  I think the Th’un, in general, build ships with a lot of weapons. It fits their ‘warfare first’ mentality.

  The suit flips over and I grunt as acceleration turns to deceleration. I try to clear my mind and work out the nerves in my gut. I’m entirely justified in what I’m about to do, but that doesn’t make it any easier. It’s not like they’ll surrender just because I showed up.

  That thought jars me. What am I going to do when I get to their world? Luke made it pretty clear any half decent military has a chain of command. Even if I were to kill the leader, the next guy in charge would just take over. How do I stop an entire race from committing genocidal warfare against the whole galaxy?

  Focus, Amelia. Priorities. Rescue Kate, then figure out how to stop them.

  Proximity alarms flash letting me know I’m close to the ship. The Emdrives pulse, slowing me down in increments. The awesome thing about space is, if the ship isn’t under fire, her course is predictable. I hit the hull with a thump flexing my knees slightly and enjoying the sensation running up my legs. It’s so weird feeling them with the armor on. In the previous versions there was no feedback, the nerves were bypassed by the synthsuit in a one-way system. My brain sent out commands and the synthsuit bypassed my spine and commanded the nerves to obey. Now, though, with the new suit it is like wearing my nervous system on my skin. The pathways are for sending and receiving. I can feel my toes, ankles, knees… if I weren’t in the middle of a crisis I’d spend a few weeks in the suit just luxuriating in the sensation…

  “Epic, do you think it would be possible to mold the armor in such a way that I could ‘wear’ it less visibly but still retain the ability to walk?”

  Anything is possible, as I think you have proven time and time again. As long as the armor follows your nervous system I think it should work. Theoretically…

  I do some quick math in my head. One square inch of armor, when mixed with the computronium and the polymolecular chips, is capable of a throughput of about twelve gigabits a second, or roughly twenty percent faster than a typical human nervous system. No wonder I’m so swift when completely plugged in! The average half-second delay between thought, action, and reaction, is nonexistent! If I left the armor wrapped around my waist like boyshorts, with a thin strip running down either side of my legs…

  “Holy crap, Epic. I think I just engineered a fix to my spinal injury!”

  You may be the prodigious engineer of
your time. I will not know, though, until years after you have passed.

  “Ha-ha, okay, time to focus. Let’s get inside this tin can. Show me a path.”

  The HUD lights up and a yellow line proceeds aft. My feet reconfigure into wider boots so I can quickly traverse the outer hull. With the molecules changing polarity on the fly to attract to the ones in the ship’s outer hull. This gives me the effect of having magnetic boots.

  We are looking for a control panel. As you know they use the Animetal to simulate airlocks and doors. They are not quite as creative as you.

  “Which still blows me away. They have all this tech, yet they do so little with it.”

  Most humans carry around more computing power in their pocket than NASA used to land on the moon, and they use it to send pictures of their food to complete strangers.

  “Point taken. Is that it?”

  The control panel is barely noticeable. A darker brown stain on a brown hull. I kneel next to it as Epic scans the section. The light on the HUD flashes green. I place my hand on the panel and our computers talk for a moment. I jump in my suit when the hull underneath me opens like an angry maw ready to swallow me. There’s no gravity, though, so I float silently for a second before maneuvering into the hole with the thrusters on my back.

  The airlock closes up behind me as I settle onto the deck. Epic indicates where to place my palm to interface. The computers talk again and the internal airlock beeps open.

  “You learning their language?”

  Every interaction brings us that much closer. These simple doors are essentially ‘open/close’ only. The equivalent of a head nod.

  “Okay, open up.”

  The internal doors melt away revealing a circular hallway inside. Harsh red lighting hurts my eyes and I feel a headache coming on. I close my eyes for a second and focus on shifting my faceplate’s molecules to filter out red light. Once I’m done I open my eyes. Everything has a yellow tinge to it but no more red light and the headache I felt starting vanishes.