by Marc Landau
Not surrendering would save time, energy and maybe lives. That was if we could defeat the Krin. Which we probably couldn’t. I’d barely survived one Krin, and that was with the help of the bot and two Pokas. There could be hundreds of thousands of them in the main armada.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The military wasn’t in a listening mood. I didn’t even have time to tell them about the one weakness the Krin had, robo-shocks. They were just going to blow up the ship, take Kat-Ultra and do their thing. Hierarchies suck.
“We won’t surrender, but your buddy better protect us from the plasma blasts that are going to hit the ship in…”
“You have ten seconds to power down, or you will be destroyed.” The Command voice piped in through the ship’s speakers. “Five seconds.”
Kat closed her eyes and focused.
“One second.”
The entire fleet powered up and fired. I closed my eyes, because I guess that’s just what I do now every time I’m about to almost die.
The blasts fired in unison. Their most powerful weapons, all trained on the ship and firing at the same time. I peeked to see if we were dead yet, and as usual, we weren’t. The green and red beams came directly at us, then suddenly shot off into other directions at crazy angles. One moment a thick pulsar burst was thundering at us, the next instant it turned ninety degrees and shot off harmlessly into space.
“It’s a force field,” Kat said. “It’s less stressful than trying to redirect each individual blast.”
Conservation of energy. It made sense. Why bother redirecting or dissolving individual missiles, when you can throw up an impenetrable force field?
I wasn’t sure she had the strength to hold them off for long, but when I checked, she was pretty relaxed. So much so, she looked like she might nod off. I thought she was still weak and about to pass out. Then the force field would evaporate and that would be the end of the ship. But instead of passing out she started casually biting her nails.
“Easier than the Krin, I guess,” I said.
She smiled. “You have no idea.”
Good news, Kat wasn’t being drained. Bad news, our weapons basically sucked and the Krin would break through our best defenses in less than a few minutes.
The fleet bombarded us with more missiles, more drone bombs, but nothing had an effect. It was like a vert-game army shooting thousands of flaming arrows at a dragon, all of them bouncing off harmlessly, not one piercing its scales. That’s when the dragon gets mad, takes a deep breath, and roasts the army.
“Hey, Kat. Make sure the Ultra doesn’t think it’s being attacked. I don’t want it to retaliate and accidentally destroy our entire army.”
“But it is under attack.”
I watched more missiles harmlessly bounce off the shield into space, exploding into mist.
“But is it really?”
“I get your point. Don’t worry. I think it knows not to hurt anyone.”
“You think? Or you’re sure?”
She hesitated. “I’m sure,” she said, but I could tell she was lying so I wouldn’t worry.
Eventually the fleet figured out that it couldn’t harm us, so it finally stopped wasting ammunition on us. The fireworks show was over.
I heard a weird noise coming from Kat’s belly. It was rumbling like an incoming storm. Wow! How hungry must she be? She must need food to rejuvenate. She’d battled the Krin and now the Earth fleet, and only had a quick space nap. She was probably running low on batteries. If we had any chance of stopping the Krin, she would need to be fully charged. I was surprised she wasn’t just sucking the energy from the ships outside, or from the Earth, the way she did when I first brought the cocoon onboard.
“I don’t need to do that. I can also just eat food now.”
There she goes, reading my mind again. Annoying, but I was happy to get the answer. It confirmed that the longer they were conjoined, the more the Ultra was adapting to its human-alien hybrid form. It could eat food OR suck all the energy from the Earth. Great. More ways to suck up all the world’s resources.
“We’d better get you some food, then. Hey, bot, can you…”
Kat held up her hand, stopping me in my tracks.
“What?” I asked.
“We’re gonna need a lot more food than we have onboard. A lot more food.”
“This is all we have. I don’t think the Prime fleet is going to just deliver us a million pizzas.”
Kat smiled. “I think they will.”
She turned to the main comm board. “Ship, open communications.”
“Confirmed.”
She cleared her throat and gave me the “keep quiet” signal with her finger, then spoke in a deep, thunderous voice. “Earth Forces. You have seen my power. Send a cargo load of rations, or be destroyed.” Her hand went over her mouth to hold back a laugh and she whispered, “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t do that.”
Funny Ultra. Real funny.
Then the comms jammed again. The Ultra was slick. What choice did the Prime fleet have? For all they knew, we had destroyed half their fleet back at the Outpost. We hadn’t done anything yet, but had easily swatted away all their most powerful weapons. They had to assume we could wreak serious havoc on their fleet, not to mention Prime itself.
They had no leverage and no clue we were bluffing. At least I hoped we were bluffing. They only had one choice. To do as we said and hope we didn’t wipe them out. They probably figured sending us rations would at least buy them time to figure out how to penetrate our defenses.
Maybe they’d sneak some plasma bombs or soldiers onto the provision hauler. It would be useless and stupid to try, but it was the military, so what else is new? Gotta give them credit. They never stop trying, even in the face of certain doom. I wish I was more like them sometimes.
A few minutes later, a giant provision hauler floated toward us and docked at the unloading pod. I mentioned to Kat they might try to use it as a bomb, or load it with soldiers, or poison the rations. She closed her eyes and checked.
“All taken care of,” she replied.
“What’s taken care of?”
“They put a ten-ton red pulsar device onboard to detonate when we unloaded. I deactivated it.”
How did she suddenly know so much about our military’s weapons and how was she able to explain it without saying it was just a feeling? Ugh. Communicating with the Ultra was more frustrating than communicating with Kat. The two together were too much. And none of that included the fact that she’d just disarmed a bomb big enough to take out a city with the blink of an eye. I wasn't even going to ask how.
“Hey, bot. Can you unload, please?”
The bot beeped in frustration, because of course such menial tasks were below it. But it did as requested and went grumbling to the cargo pod with a bunch of mini-bots following behind. I bet those mini-bots were getting an earful about how unappreciated the walrus was.
Instead of making them bring all that food to the kitchen pod, we decided to cut the bot a break and go to the cargo pod for Kat’s rejuvenation meal to ready herself for battle with the Krin army.
Chapter Thirty-Three
There was enough for us to feed the entire fleet. There had to be enough food for at least two thousand soldiers. I had no idea how Kat was going to eat it all, but I was on the lookout for giant worms shooting out of her mouth.
The walrus set up one of the storage bins as a makeshift table with a few boxes for stools. I guess it was its way of saying “Thank you” for not making it haul all this food up to the command room. It had even emptied a couple of small containers and filled them with kibble for the Pokas.
We chewed our not-good but not-horrible rations in silence whiletaking a breath before the next phase. No one wanted to fight, but we were going to have to. We needed a few minutes of normalcy. It was good to eat together and I was relieved Kat was using her mouth and not her tentacles. Me, Kat, and the Pokas. It reminded me of being back home. Except for the additiona
l clone-Poka and the robot. If we made it out of this alive maybe I’d invite the walrus over for a can of oil, or whatever it ate.
Kat took a break and turned to me. “Hey. Sorry about not teleporting us. It would have been faster and less of a strain on you and the Pokas, but I was too tired.”
“No problem. You needed the rest after fighting that Krin ship. You got us here before the Krin. That’s all that matters.” I took another bite of the rations. They were better than the nutri-bars, but not by much. If this was going to yet again be my last meal, I wanted a fresh cup of coffee.
“How come we beat them here, anyway? If you both can teleport and we didn’t even do that, how’d we get back before them?”
“You wouldn’t understand. I don’t even understand.”
“Can you try?”
Her face went tight, and she dropped the rations down on the crate. “Can’t you just accept that we got here first? What does it matter?”
My face fell. “Sorry.”
She saw what she’d done, and her expression softened. “I’m sorry. I’m just hungry. And still tired. I didn’t mean to snap.”
“It’s okay.” And it was. I wanted to know, but I didn’t need to.
“We teleport differently. The brethren can jump farther than the Krin. They have to make a lot more jumps to get to the same place. They’re not that advanced. It’s pretty slow, actually. I didn’t even need to make the ship go as fast as it could to get here before them.”
Pretty slow? Not that advanced? I was sorry I asked. I was about to ask if she knew when they’d arrive, but she interjected before I could get the words out of my mouth.
“They’ll be here soon.”
I didn't even care anymore if she was reading my mind. And I wasn’t going to bother asking how she knew when they’d get here. At this point I trusted her feelings.
“We’d better finish up,” she said.
“It’s okay. I’m done."
That’s when her mouth opened up to the size of a small wormhole, and she engulfed the remaining rations from the cargo pod floor. She didn’t even unwrap the giant boxes. She just swallowed them whole, wrappings and all. Then she let out a belch that rocked the entire ship, shaking the metal down to the screws. Definitely an Ultra burp. I wondered if that was how the Ultra was going to destroy the Krin.
We prepped the walrus, the mini-bots, and the two Pokas’ collars with electric-shock emitting blasts to scramble the Krin’s armor in case more got onboard. The bot and the mini-bots also got spears we fashioned out of piping. So now we had a small army. Funny how low-tech it was. We were going to battle against an advanced alien species with little more than spears. Just like the ancient days.
The walrus was our general. The mini-bots its soldiers. Their mission was to shock and stab any Krin that got onboard. The Pokas would most likely slam into them, knock them down, and scramble their armor so we could stab them. No way I was fitting Poka out with a pipe spear. She would definitely stab us all trying to kiss our faces.
I finished adjusting Poka-clone's collar with the intermittent shocker. “Okay, that’s good. We’re ready as we’re going to be.”
She licked my face, “thank you.”
The bot hovered over with a mug of coffee and handed it to me. After the shock of the walrus actually doing something nice wore off I thanked it.
“I have to ask. Why’d you do it?”
“Beep. Because there is a ninety-nine point seven percent probability you will die in the battle.”
I shouldn’t have asked.
Chapter Thirty-Four
“They’re here,” Kat said, pointing to the command room’s main screen. A circular black wave shimmered through space, like a rock rippling after hitting water. Moments later the Krin armada appeared through the portal.
Earth’s fleet turned their attention away from our pesky little Outpost ship and focused on the thousands of spiked cubes in front of them. I tried to call out to them, tell them not to engage, but the Ultra or Prime fleet had jammed the comms. Frak!
I stood watching with my jaw on the floor as the Krin ships came through. My poor jaw was going to need plastic-surgical-nanos after all the things I’d seen.
Once the army was through, the portal stayed open. Kat was right—they did teleport differently from the Ultra. The Ultra just blinked and poof, we were there. The Krin created a hole in the universe and kept it open.
“It’s so primitive, isn’t it? Leaving the door open like that.” Kat said.
“Uh, yeah. Real primitive.”
Kat clapped her hands together intensely. “Here we go.”
“Can you ask the Ultra to open the comms, so we can at least warn the Prime fleet not to engage?”
Kat closed her eyes for a second, then opened them again. “Go ahead. But they won’t listen.”
“Thanks, Ultra.” It was right but I still had to try. I pressed a few buttons and warned the fleet to stay back. Told them we would handle the situation. Yes, our standard Outpost ship with zero weapons except for a ray pistol was going to fend off the Krin army. Why not? And of course they didn’t listen. I wouldn’t have either.
I asked them to tell my Mom I loved her, in case we didn’t make it, which we most likely wouldn’t. We were facing an advanced army capable of hijacking the Ultra. Even if they were primitive compared to the brethren, they obviously had enough tech weaponry to put up a serious fight against the Ultra.
“What now? Is it like when we fought the other ship? You fight the porcupine death cubes while we fend off any Krin that pop onboard and try to steal you?”
Kat looked at me with her “This is serious” expression and said, “Not quite.”
She reached out and took my hand. “The Ultra wants you to help.”
It wants me to help? I am helping. What the frak does it want me to do?
“It wants you to let it help you,” Kat said reading my mind for the umpteenth time.
“Let it help me? What the frak does that mean?”
Kat extended her hand.
It made me understand better what the brethren meant when they told us the Ultra was a focal point for their people, connecting them and harnessing their energy. If the Ultra was inviting me, it was adapting to humans and doing the same thing. It wanted to channel more than just Kat.
I took her hand and held it tight, and more images and sound flooded my mind.
Focus, I heard a voice say, only this time it wasn’t the little voice in my head. It was the deep, resonant timbre of the Ultra.
So I focused.
A familiar image began to coalesce in my mind. Soon it was a super-res image, so real I could touch it with my hands. It was the perfect picture of the one thing I loved almost as much as Kat. A level-nineteen Clavian Star Destroyer. The most powerful, fastest, coolest space-vehicle designed. Ever. Except it didn’t exist. Well, it existed, but only in the game-stream. Until now.
I felt the ship changing beneath my feet. Its metal stretching, groaning as it bent into new positions. The room around me bulging, shifting, and morphing. All the systems melting and re-forming into something new, something amazing. Like on the planet, the Ultra was transforming the ship into a paradise, but this time it wasn’t Kat’s dream home. It was my fantasy warship.
Yet again, my jaw hung to the floor. Note to self: Make an appointment with the nano-surgeon to fix my jaw.
I was no longer sitting in the crappy repurposed command seat the military had no use for, so they gave it to the Outpost. I was sitting in the multi-system command chair, the captain of a Clavian Star Destroyer.
We were about to die and the Earth was going to be decimated by the Krin, but there was a mile-wide smile on my face. I couldn’t believe I was going to get to command a Clavian Star Destroyer.
I probably shouldn’t have reveled quite so much in my childlike glee. This was real, after all, not a game. Billions of lives were at stake. I couldn’t just press reset and start the game over if I died, or
if the Earth exploded. This shat was the real deal.
The Ultra wasn’t going to just snap its fingers and make the Krin army disappear. Would it? Maybe it could make them disappear with a wave of its hand but was testing me again. But I didn’t really believe that. It needed rest, recovery, and nutrients to power up again. Also that would be a really shat-ass thing to do.
The Krin were no slouches. The Ultra might be able to wipe out the Prime fleet with a snap of its fingers, or take out one spiked cube, but not the entire Krin army. If it had enough power it wouldn’t need my space-fighting skills. Granted, they weren’t real skills. They were virt-based, but hopefully the learning would cross over.
“Wow,” Kat said. “Impressive. Can you actually drive this thing?”
“Let’s hope so.”
“You’ll do great. You picked the perfect ship. You must have spent hundreds of hours on the game-stream with it.”
“Thousands, probably.”
“Yeah, I remember how annoying it was trying to get you off that game. I thought you were just being lame, but it turns out you were practicing for this.” She put a hand on my shoulder. “There’s no one I’d rather be second in command to.”
“Thanks.” I pressed a bunch of buttons and set the armory and engines for battle configuration. “Okay, let’s do this.”
Kat wasn’t going to be the one fighting the Krin. Well, she was, since the Ultra and the warship and Kat and me were all interconnected now. But it wasn’t going to be like the fight with the lone Krin ship. This time Kat was going to be the one fending off soldiers with the Pokas and the bot and its army of mini-bots. I was going to be the one blowing these frakers out of the sky.
Kat grabbed a pair of metal pipe spears and stood at the ready next to the walrus. What a rag-tag army we had.
“Proceed,” the walrus said, then raised its arm appendage and saluted me. Wow! An actual sign of respect from the robot. It must really think we’re all going to die.”
