by Joshua James
“I kind of, sort of might have been a bit angry after he broke up with me.”
“What’d you do?” Clarissa knew her friend well enough to know it couldn’t have been anything good.
“I might have drained his bank account, digitally erased his identity, and stolen his car, and sold it at the port before leaving the planet.”
“Jesus, Sarah.”
“LeFay. It’s LeFay. I haven’t been Sarah in a long time now.”
“No wonder he locked us in this incinerator.”
“Only for a little while. Give me five more minutes and I’ll have us out of here.”
“To go where? We’re in a UEF base. It’s not like they’re just going to let us walk out the front door.”
“Anywhere is better than here—” LeFay stopped because, through the viewing window, she saw Werner, Ada, Tomas, and the doc approaching. “We got company again.”
Clarissa sat up. “Be nice. Maybe he’ll forget your fuckery and let us out.”
“I hope he never forgets.” LeFay had to get the last word.
Werner stood at the door, staring through the window at LeFay’s face. “I have to tell you, Private, I’m a little hesitant to let them out.”
LeFay shot him a shit-eating grin.
“I know, but trust me, we need them,” Ada said. “LeFay, she’s like a one-woman army all in herself, and Clarissa is the best pilot and one of the best fighters I’ve ever seen. They’ll both be valuable and it’s a waste not to use them.”
“I trust you,” Werner said. Then he pointed at LeFay. “But not her.”
“We’ll keep an eye on her. I promise.”
“That’s not enough.” Werner walked over to the incinerator door. The two guards that stood their post outside of it folded over and stood behind him, rifles pointed forward. He took something out of his pocket as the doors slowly opened up. It looked like half of a ring.
“I knew you couldn’t resist me, Darren,” said LeFay, still smiling, arms open for a hug.
Werner responded by taking the half ring and putting it around one side of her neck. He pressed a button on it and the other half came swiping out, completing a collar around her neck. Then he took a couple of steps back.
“It’s a restrictor ring. You won’t be able to wirelessly communicate with any device, computer, anything.”
Anger flashed for a moment in LeFay’s face; then her features quieted and she shrugged like she’d expected it. “If you feel like this is what you have to do, then I guess—ow!” She’d tried to tug at it, but immediately got shocked.
“It’s not coming off,” Werner said.
After that there was no hiding her displeasure. “This is bullshit!” LeFay yanked at the collar and almost fell down from the electric shock.
“Either you wear the collar or you stay in the incinerator. Your choice.”
“That works,” answered Ada for LeFay. “Thank you, Captain. Now, where do you want us?”
Seven
The Abyss
Ben sat on a cot in the cell on the Veruvian he shared with his father’s stasis pod. He needed to figure a way out of this. He also needed to find a way to convince Rhule that they needed his help.
It was times like these that he regretted ever leaving the military. Sure, he had more freedom, and didn’t have to worry about following orders or being sent out to war. But since he’d left, his life had been on the line plenty of times and he’d found himself in a jail cell on several different occasions. Now he was in one, looking at the body of his father.
The stasis pod floated a couple of feet off the floor. The top was clear thick plastic, pressurized so that no germs could get in or out of it. There was a padded bed big enough to fit a man up to six feet eight inches tall and four hundred pounds. Lee Saito had plenty of room. Any occupant was put into a state of stasis or hypersleep, normally reserved for long periods of space travel. In Lee’s case it kept his vitals stabilized, as the wounds he suffered way back on Sanctuary Station-33, still hadn’t healed. The Shapeless had only plugged them, not healed them.
Ben leaned over and put one hand on top of the plastic covering of his father’s stasis pod.
“Are you still you?” he whispered.
As he looked at his dad’s sleeping face through the different stats and vitals holographically projected on the cover, Ben wondered if Lee was dreaming. He wondered if his father, whenever he woke up, would be the man he remembered, or just a hollow thing.
Lee Saito was on a beach. He recognized this beach, and the small island that jutted out from the waves about a half a mile out into the chilly Pacific Ocean. His own father once took him to it when he was really young. It was one of his first memories. It was Shingo Beach, just outside Hamamatsu, Japan.
Lee felt and tasted the salty winds as they rolled off the ocean. He closed his eyes and took it in. It was so peaceful. Peace was something he hadn’t known in such a long time.
Under his hands, Lee didn’t feel the light coarse sand of Shingo Beach. He felt something hard, jagged, and even sharp. Upon looking down, he saw that he sat on a beach of human bones that stretched as far as he could see.
Lee wondered if he was still on the Shapeless’ ship with a tendril attached to his forehead, being manipulated by the Pale Man. It sure seemed like it. Everything felt more like a memory than a dream to him, but things were clearly off.
When he looked out into the water, the island that jutted out of the waves was replaced with the carcass of Lee’s baby, the UEF Atlas. He saw shapes peeking out of the ocean. They were human heads.
One by one, people from Lee’s past slowly rose up out of the ocean, floating just inches above the wave crests. He recognized some. There was Jake Rollins, his friend and second in command. He saw Private. Baez, eyes a cloudy blue, bereft of life. He saw his former pilot, Admiral Chevenko’s daughter. He saw the countless dead, people he’d lost under his command, cold water dripping off their bodies.
Lee stood up. It was a little hard at first, without sure footing underneath him, but he managed. He walked over to the water’s edge.
There weren’t current-beaten and smoothed rocks and pebbles at the water’s edge. Instead, there were bullets. Bullets that shined, despite the sun being hidden behind clouds.
“You don’t have to be here.” Lee heard a voice. It echoed through the sky as if it came from God himself.
“Where else would I be?” asked Lee.
“Back in the real world, in the fight,” answered the voice. Only this time it didn’t come from the sky, but from behind the former captain.
Lee turned to see a small humanoid figure. Its skin was grey, hairless except for a couple of tufts on its chest. Though humanlike, there were a couple of things that made it clear it was alien. Its eyes were almond-shaped, and glowed yellow. Both of its legs were bent in the opposite direction at the knee, like a bird. And both of its arms ended in four-fingered hands, with webbing in between.
“I know you. How do I know you?” asked Lee. It was true. He felt the overwhelming sense that this being, this alien, was no stranger. “Are you one of them, a Shapeless thing?”
“Yes and no. I once was, when I was with you. But not anymore; he freed me, freed us,” answered the alien.
“Who?”
“Your son.”
“My…?” Lee had to take a second. At first he didn’t remember that he had a son, a wife. It was as if blanks on a page were filled in, bringing him closer to being himself again.
“Ben. He saved you as he saved me.”
“If he saved us, how are we here?”
“Where’s here? Have you asked yourself that?”
“I’m not…I don’t know. It’s the Shapeless; they made me relive my memories. That’s not what this is?”
The alien shook his head. “No, it’s not. Come, walk with me.” It held out its hand for Lee to take. He was hesitant. “Sorry. Perhaps a form that you’d find more comforting? Forgive me if I’m wrong, Lee Sait
o.”
Lee watched as the grey-skinned alien turned into the spitting image of his wife Beverly. She held out her hand for him to take. He did.
“You say you’re not the Shapeless, but you shapeshift like them,” pointed out Lee as he and Beverly began walking down the beach, hand in hand.
“I’m not. They took this from me, from us, from my people.” Beverly waved her arms around, indicating she was referring to the whole scene around them. “In return, I took their gift of changing their form. Another thing we owe your son.”
“If you aren’t Shapeless…” Lee looked down at his feet. The jagged bone had cut his bare feet up something fierce. But he didn’t feel any of it, and the blood didn’t bother him. “If you aren’t Shapeless, what are you? What do I call you?”
“We...your language doesn’t exactly have a word for what I am. In fact, language is still new to me.”
“Then how’d you get along, build a civilization?”
“There are other ways of communicating. Take us, for example. I don’t know if you noticed, Lee Saito, that neither of our lips have moved. I am literally reaching into your mind, accessing the speech section of your mind. I’m not even sure what I’m saying; I’m just conveying the ideas I have in my head, and it’s being automatically translated through our melding,” explained Beverly.
“Melding?”
“It’s what the Shapeless took from us. An ability shared by all my people, before they were annihilated.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“About mind melding?”
“No, about your people.” Lee looked over at Beverly, surprised that she could make that mistake.
“Oh, right, of course. Sorry. Sometimes I forget to be sad. It was so long ago.”
“How’d it happen? How’d they wipe your kind out?”
“Simple, really; the same way it’s happening with yours. First there was a comet. Then out of that came a black oil. It had a mind of its own. Anything that came in contact with it became consumed by it. Either they died or their beings were completely taken over.
“At first no one really knew what happened. It hit someplace remote. Slowly they began to take over. Especially since they copied our mind melding, making it even harder to detect them.” Beverly didn’t seem particularly upset, either in tone of voice or on her face.
“You’re the only one left?”
“I’m the only one I know of that’s been freed.”
“And you say Ben did that? My Ben?”
“It’s the Herald Stone; he touched us with it. It’s made of the same thing as the comet. Once they are separated from it after landing on a planet, its very touch becomes deadly to them. They also use it to fuel their structures, vehicles, anything non-organic that they copy.”
“Where can we get more? How do we stop them?”
“I’m not entirely sure, Lee Saito. But I know how you can find out.” Beverly stopped. Lee kept walking, but was stopped by the alien in the form of his dead wife, grabbing his hand.
“How?”
Beverly smiled and closed her eyes. Suddenly the beach and ocean in front of Lee disappeared. Water flowed off the end like a waterfall. He looked over the edge and saw nothing but open, cold, star-spotted space.
“By entering the Abyss, the Void. At least, that’s what the followers of the Shapeless call it.”
“I thought that was just death.”
“Yes and no. Death is just a transition to something more, to another life. Go ahead, jump.” Beverly held out her arm, inviting Lee to jump off the sandy cliff into the Abyss.
“You jump. I’m not jumping.”
“All of this is only as real as you believe it to be. You won’t die, as long as you believe you won’t. So jump with a strong mind, a strong heart, and find how to end this.” Beverly changed back to the original alien form.
Lee was hesitant. He looked over the edge again and tried to come to terms with what he was about to do. It felt like a crazy thing to do. After all he’d been through, though, jumping into the Abyss at the behest of a glowing yellow-eyed psychic alien with mind-melding powers seemed quaint.
“Why the hell don’t you jump first?”
The alien smiled. “I already did. That’s why I’m here.”
Lee stared at him stupidly. “You already…?”
“This is under your control,” the alien said, sticking a bony finger in his chest. “That is the mistake they made that you need to make them regret. Your willpower, Lee Saito. You will stop them once and for all.” The alien smiled confidently. “They chose the wrong soldier.”
Lee stood at the edge, facing the alien. He didn’t exactly share the alien’s confidence, but he returned the smile, and it felt good. Maybe the alien was right. It was the first time he’d smiled in God knew how long.
“You’re goddamn right they did,” Lee said. Then he closed his eyes and fell backwards off the cliff.
Lee fell for what seemed like a good fifteen minutes before his body stopped. It floated in space, not touched by the cold or the pressures of the great beyond. In fact, quite the opposite: he was warm, felt like he was being hugged.
At first it appeared that Lee was just in empty space, that there was nothing there but infinity. As he gained his bearings, though, Lee started to think about where he wanted to go, what he wanted to see. With his mind, he called out into the darkness for anyone who knew anything about when the Shapeless first encountered human beings. Where did the comet hit? What planet?
A planet appeared out of nowhere, just in the distance from Lee. At first he didn’t recognize it. If humanity’s expansion into space had taught the former captain anything, it was that the universe is home to a hell of a lot of planets. Most weren’t Goldilocks rocks, but even those that weren’t were aggressively terraformed if they harbored valuable minerals and resources. The reddish-orange tint of the planet in the distance told him that it was most likely one of those.
Suddenly Lee flew towards the planet at high speeds. Or perhaps it was the opposite; it was hard to tell in this place. Before he knew it, he was standing on the surface of an alien planet, his feet still bare, reddish-orange dusty dirt between his toes.
Lee looked around. At first all he saw was a beautiful but lifeless desertscape. Only rocky outcrops disturbed the vast flatness. Then he saw a mining facility with several little settler buildings nearby that he figured housed quarters for workers and their families.
As he walked towards the mining facilities, Lee wondered why the Abyss had brought him here. And if it was where those killed and/or absorbed by the Shapeless were sent, where were all the others? Why did it feel so barren?
Urged by an unseen force, Lee looked up into the sky. He saw something screaming through the sky, still aflame from its entry into the atmosphere. It was a shooting, no, a falling star. That was what he was looking for. His willpower fueled him to chase it.
Lee’s body suddenly flew forward at impossible speeds. Naturally he was a bit scared when he saw that he was flying forward straight towards the mining facility. But instead of colliding with it, he flew straight through. His body was without mass, without a solid state in those moments.
When Lee’s body stopped flying forward, he saw the falling star hit the dry lifeless dunes. A big cloud of reddish-orange sand and dust kicked up along with the fires from the explosive landing. It was surreal seeing and hearing sand turn to glass in midair.
Lee admired the beauty of the natural-made glass sculpture as he approached it. In the middle of this shining, fragile crater was a still-smoking black rock: obsidian. This was it. The former captain knew this was the Herald Stone that his alien friend had talked of.
“What is that?” Lee turned and saw a woman sitting in her rover, driver’s side door open. She stepped out in her full spacesuit to get a closer look.
“Looks like some sort of comet. Is this what comets look like?” A man got out of the other side of the rover.
“Not sure
, but it’s a big bastard, isn’t it?” The woman stepped on the glass that broke underfoot. She withdrew her foot and looked at the Herald Stone. It was indeed big, about the size of a car.
Lee noticed, but the poor hapless settlers didn’t, when the black oil-like ooze started to silently pour out of the porous Herald Stone. He didn’t want to watch anymore. He knew what came next. But before he departed the desert planet, he needed to know where and what this planet was.
“Archeon.” Lee heard a familiar voice. On instinct, he looked up at the top of a rock outcropping. Standing there was Jake Rollins, armed with a friendly smile. In the blink of his eye, Lee was standing next to him, looking down on the Herald Stone and the settlers being overcome by the oily black liquid.
“Jake,” greeted Lee.
“Captain,” greeted Rollins. “I’m surprised to see you here. Especially since you’re not dead.”
“Not yet.”
Rollins nodded his head. “Not yet.”
“This is you, right? The real you, not…you’re not that alien again, are you?”
“I’m the only me I know.”
“Yeah, but…?”
“It’s part of me. The rest is rotting somewhere out there in space. Like the others.” Rollins looked a lot like how Lee remembered, only better. For starters, he had both his hands, and there wasn’t a sign of struggle or strife or fighting on his body or uniform. He was pristine.
“This place. You said it’s called Archeon?”
“It is, or was. This mining facility, these people, they’re all gone.”
“Where is Archeon? I’ve never heard of it.”
“For good reason,” explained Rollins. “It’s a remote planet, out on the edge of AIC space. It’s not strategically important, so I’m not surprised it was never on your radar.”
“But it is strategically important. Not against the AIC; that fight doesn’t matter anymore. It’s important to our fight against the Shapeless. If they’re vulnerable to the Herald Stone, that’s the biggest one I ever saw. We need it.”
