by Joshua James
“You guys really are some of the ugliest pieces of shit I’ve ever seen in my life.” Without skipping a beat, the detective stepped forward and squeezed the trigger of his flamethrower and held it down.
Ignoring the wave of heat that hit him square in the face, even causing burns to the exposed hand that held the flamethrower, Sydal watched, satisfied, as the Shapeless in the sewer tunnel burned. In a matter of thirty seconds or so, they were nothing more than flaming hunks of charred black.
It was a minor victory, but one Sydal desperately needed. He savored it for a moment before remembering that time was an issue. Matthew’s life might depend on how fast he moved, so he continued down the sewer tunnels, using his flamethrower to light the way.
When Sydal reached the place where the tunnel branched off, he was relieved to climb up out of the muck and into a small chamber clear of the sewage. There was an airtight bulkhead door that was labeled as the sewer entrance to the generator. He spun it open, and his eyes were assaulted by bright light.
Sydal stepped out into what looked like a hallway with a door on the other end. In between the bulkhead and the far door were a bunch of holes in the wall. The floor was grated. Hazmat suits hung on hooks on the far end near the second door.
Not five feet into walking down the hall, and Sydal was sprayed with water from all sides but below. Suddenly the grated floor made sense as the water, with soap already mixed in, washed the filth of the sewer off him. But the high-pressure hoses hurt, especially when they hit his injured thigh, almost bringing him down to one knee.
A little shocked and soaking wet, Sydal limped on. In another five or six feet, he was hit on almost all sides again by high-powered air jets, drying him off in a matter of seconds. They were so intense he couldn’t breathe as they hit his face. Lastly, not ten feet before the second door, the walls themselves turned red and he passed through some intense heat, the last stop in the sterilization process.
Sydal chose to skip the hazmat suit and opened the door at the end of the brightly-lit hallway. What he saw as soon as he opened it was a large, mostly empty room. Bent tubes lined the walls of the room, connected to each other, circling around until they reached the floor. Another pipe from the bottom of the spirals led to a huge cylinder-shaped machine in the middle that went all the way up to the ceiling.
Part of the cylindrical structure in the middle of the generator room was transparent. In that viewing window he could see globs of exotic matter swirling around each other. Three people were in the room, manning several stations.
“Hey! You’re not supposed to be here!” one man snapped. From the look of them, the uniforms they were wearing, it was clear that they were employed by Waterman-Lau.
“Don’t even think about it!” Sydal kept his flamethrower pointed at the Waterman-Lau employees as he saw one reaching for their sidearm.
“What are you doing here? Who are you?” asked another of the meek Waterman-Lau employees. They kept their hands up in the air, showing that they surrendered.
“Who’s in charge here?” answered Sydal with a question as he limped towards the Waterman-Lau staff.
“I am,” answered one of them.
“Good.” Sydal took out his pistol and shot the other two Waterman-Lau employees in the head. Then he turned his attention to the shaken senior staff member.
“Oh my God!” The remaining man was shaking, but Sydal felt nothing. As far as he was concerned, the cowering man before him was just as bad as the soldiers and the Shapeless, and he saw Waterman-Lau as just as responsible for what had happened and was happening on the moon.
“Transfer controls to my HUD,” ordered Sydal, his pistol pointed directly at the frightened man’s head.
“Transfer….Do you know how to control one of these? How dangerous they are?”
Sydal pressed the still-hot barrel of his pistol into the Waterman-Lau employee’s forehead. It sizzled as it burned the man’s skin.
“Okay, okay. I’ll transfer them now.” The man did as he was told.
“Now, which way to the UEF base?”
“The what?”
The man’s attempt at feigned ignorance was pathetic to Sydal. It practically enraged him. He slammed the man in the head with the pistol.
“There.” The man cowered, holding his head and pointing. “Through that door, down the tunnel about two hundred feet. There’ll be a ladder that leads up to a hatch.”
“Is there a code on that hatch?”
“Three, eight, Delta, Echo.”
“Thanks.”
The man pointed at the generator controls. “Whatever you do, please make sure the collider spins at a consistent level. Because if it doesn’t…”
“Boom, yeah, I get it.” Sydal said. “And now you do, too.”
He shot the man right in the middle of the Waterman-Lau logo on his chest. He stumbled backward, then collapsed.
Sydal looked down at the dead man. Some voice told him that he’d gone too far. That this had been wrong, or at least, not right.
Some part of his humanity was slipping, Sydal knew. He closed his eyes. He didn’t care anymore. He only cared about one thing.
This is it, Matthew. I’m coming for you. Please hang on tight. Daddy’s coming for you.
Epilogue
As he rode through the fold jump to his final destination, Lee closed his eyes and thought of home. He thought of the feeling of getting out the shower and climbing into a warm bed. He thought of the smell of his wife’s hair on the pillows. He thought of watching his son grow up into the man he was so proud of. He thought of the Earth.
Lee’s ship came out of the fold jump. Exiting was always more violent than entering. His body flew forward, only to be pulled back to his seat by the magnetic restraints. When he opened his eyes he saw an asteroid field, and in the middle of it a black ball, a small planet barely visible against the vast darkness of open space.
“Ship, plot a course through this asteroid field towards the unknown planet ahead.” Lee unstrapped himself from his seat and headed towards the back of his ship.
Getting the Herald Stone off Archeon had been the easy part. Now Lee had to do the hard part. He had to somehow attach or integrate the alien rock into the nuclear warhead-tipped missiles on board. Hopefully that would be enough to finish off the Shapeless and their home planet.
In no way a weapons expert, Lee pulled up digital schematics on the missile while climbing down into the tight confines of the bomb bay where the extremely destructive weapons were stored.
“Okay, now how the hell am I gonna do this?” Lee realized that this was going to be a lot harder than he’d expected. He hadn’t taken into account how he was going to work with the chunk of Herald Stone he’d retrieved from Archeon. It lay in between the two nukes.
Lee figured it would be safe to work with the alien rock. Any traces of the Shapeless that might’ve once been inside were gone, killed during the trip. At least he hoped that was the case; there was no telling for sure. But the Herald Stone wasn’t his main worry. His concern was not blowing himself up as he tried to learn how to take apart a nuclear weapon.
“Attention, user Lee Saito.” Lee’s ship’s operating system alerted him through his HUD. “Incoming vessel.”
Shit. I should’ve known these alien bastards wouldn’t just let me stroll up and drop off a couple of nukes.
Lee saw an incoming video call on his HUD. He was surprised to see who was calling.
“Admiral?” Lee answered the video call, further surprised to see his old friend’s face in the call window.
“Lee. Old friend. Can’t tell you how happy I am to see you. I thought you were dead,” said Chevenko.
“I did die. But I got better.”
Chevenko forced a laugh. “You always were a stubborn old son of a bitch. Guess death is going to have to wait to claim the likes of you.”
“For a little bit, yeah. What are you doing out here?” asked Lee. He climbed out of the bomb bay. Something
about his old friend’s arrival felt wrong. He couldn’t put his finger on why, but something definitely wasn’t right.
“I’ve come to help you,” said Chevenko.
Lee returned to the cockpit of his ship. “Help me? That’s...well, that’s great! But how did you know I was out here? How’d you know where I was?”
“We came here to take down the alien planet. Your son told us where it was.”
Lee felt a little chill run down his spine. He saw fighter ships being deployed from Chevenko’s dreadnaught.
In that moment it all dawned on him. How the Oblivion cultists had so easily penetrated the UEF base on Annapolis all those months ago. How the Shapeless had known where the Atlas was going to come out of the fold jump. How their existence could go unknown for so long when their first appearance had been on a UEF planet.
Lee looked at the asteroid field that stood between him and the Shapeless’ home planet. His grip tightened around the pilot’s sticks. The race was about to begin, and it was one he couldn’t lose.
Book 9: Last Stand
One
Outbreak
Ducar looked out on the city of Annapolis below while sitting on the edge of the open hovercopter that Oblivion had forcefully acquired two weeks earlier from a UEF depot out in the middle of nowhere. In the copter with him was a cadre of fellow cultists, zealots like himself. All were fully armed, all ready for the mayhem to come.
But Ducar and the other cultists weren’t alone in the hovercopter. Taking up the room that could’ve been reserved for more cultists were canisters filled with an oily black living substance. Freshly delivered from the moon, they were Shapeless, just waiting to be unleashed.
Ducar got an incoming video call: Anita Lau’s face appeared in the video call square in his HUD. “You’re running late.”
“We had a bit of a problem, back outside the base,” Ducar was referring to a city sentinel officer who’d just happened upon them when they were loading up the hovercopters. That cop was dead in a gutter.
“A problem?”
“Nothing I couldn’t or didn’t handle. Other than that, everything is moving forward as planned, ma’am.”
“Good. Good. Remember, every officer you can, I need you and your men to kill as many as possible.”
“We will. I promise. You can count on us.”
Anita Lau ended the call, and right on time. Ducar could see that they were getting close. His group’s target was the new officers’ building, moved after the Oblivion’s attack months earlier, now meant to be hidden in the middle of downtown Annapolis. The other dozen hovercopters in the air with him had their own objectives. Some targeted the city’s anti-air defenses. Others went after the docks scattered around the cityscape. All of them took advantage of the morning smog to stay hidden.
Ducar opened up a holographic picture of his lost love, Vesta. Everything he was about to do wasn’t for Anita Lau of Waterman-Lau. It wasn’t for the Saviors. It wasn’t even for himself. It was all going to be for revenge: revenge for the only woman, only person he’d ever truly cared about.
“Okay, let’s go. It’s zero hour.” Ducar ordered all the hovercopters to land and get to work. “Good luck, and I’ll see all of you in the Abyss.”
“In the Abyss,” repeated numerous other zealots, all in charge of their own copters.
Ducar’s hovercopter lowered through the smog and landed on top of the Royalty Towers, the new home of Annapolis’ and most of the UEF’s top military brass. He jumped out, along with six other heavily-armed zealots. They all put on their masks and checked their weapons as their ride flew away.
“Everyone grab a canister. Attach it to your packs, just like we trained for. Don’t release them until my order. Understood?” Ducar addressed his men. They all nodded. “We got those doors open yet?”
he asked one member of his team, who was using a stolen all-access key from the dead city sentinel to open all the apartment building’s doors at once.
“We’re in,” answered the more tech-savvy zealot.
“Good. Let’s bring these poor ignorant bastards salvation.”
Ducar led the way down off the roof and into the Royalty Towers proper. The opening of all the building’s doors had the intended effect. On the uppermost floor, the residents stuck their heads out to see what the hell was happening. They were met by Ducar and the zealots, who didn’t hesitate to open fire.
After shooting one poor woman in her head, Ducar entered the first apartment he came across. From its size, the décor, and the fact that it was on the top level of this exclusive building, he knew that whoever lived here must’ve been important. Sure enough, after seeing what was his wife get shot, a UEF general came out of his bedroom, pistol in hand, firing and cursing at the heavily-armored zealot.
Bullets hit, but were absorbed and bounced off Ducar’s high-density dragon-weave Kevlar armor, which covered almost his whole body. He callously shot the general in the chest, then walked over to him on the floor and fired again to make sure he was dead.
He heard kids crying from the other room. His work wasn’t done in this apartment.
Covered in blood, Ducar left the first apartment and reentered the hallway. He was numb to the cries for mercy, the gunshots and screaming. To him this wasn’t murder; this wasn’t a slaughter. To him this was a mercy, a release from a world of pain and suffering. To him it was also vengeance.
Ignoring the chaos around him, Ducar walked towards a door at the end of the hall. One of his fellow zealots was posted up by the doorway, looking to avoid semi-automatic gunfire coming from within the apartment. Ducar calmly approached, not taking any precautions against getting shot.
On the way, Ducar passed open doorways where true nightmares were taking place. The zealots had been chosen not only for the strength of their beliefs, but for their brutality in following through with them. Men, women, children, even pets: no one and nothing was spared as they went room to room, shooting anything that moved.
“This bastard’s dug in deep, sir!” yelled the zealot pinned down outside the open door.
“Not a problem.” Ducar dropped down to one knee. He reached to his back, where one of the canisters was attached to his backpack. After taking it off, he looked at it for a minute, transfixed by the beauty of what was inside. A button press and a turn of the lid later, and the canister opened up.
Ducar happily watched as the living black oil jumped out of the canister. It grew in size tenfold, until it was a little larger than an adult human. Tendrils, spikes, and blades waving around in all directions, its razor-sharp tooth-lined mouth let out a loud shriek before it rushed into the apartment.
It wasn’t until he heard screams of horror and pain that Ducar entered the apartment. For a moment he watched as the Shapeless he’d unleashed savagely ripped a general and his family to pieces. He moved on to the wall-sized windows in the family room.
Ducar was pleased with what he saw. There were fires, freshly lit, all over the Annapolis skyline. A couple of explosions marked the successful destruction of some planetary anti-air guns. Emergency sirens could be heard even through the thick glass. Panic, confusion, and fear; that was what he and the other zealots wanted to instill. It was the perfect canvas for the coming Shapeless to paint their perfect picture of death and peace.
“It’s beautiful, sir.” The zealot that had previously been pinned down outside the apartment stood next to Ducar, looking out the windows.
“It is.” Ducar loaded another magazine into his rifle. “Come, we have sixty-one more floors to go.”
Two
An Uneasy Alliance
“I’m not happy about this.” AIC Commodore Thorne—a proud man, and stubborn to boot—sat in Captain Rhule’s quarters, right across from the second-highest ranking AIC officer left after the battles on Europa and the destruction of Vassar-1.
“None of us are, Commodore, but this is the only way. You saw what those things can do. We can’t afford to keep fighting each oth
er when these alien things…” Rhule paused for a moment, giving Ben an opening.
“Shapeless,” added Ben.
“Yes, these Shapeless intend on wiping humankind out. And they’re clearly capable. I’ve already been in contact with Grand Admiral Lane of the UEF. He’s agreed that all available UEF assets not on Earth will be diverted back home to protect it. We’ll rendezvous with them.”
“And they just trusted you at your word?” questioned Thorne.
“We sent data on the whole encounter down there on Europa. We know they have their own sources, too. They didn’t need to trust me. They knew.”
Thorne took a moment to think, though there was only one possible conclusion to come to. “Okay. We have a truce for now.” He got up. His two bodyguards joined him at his side. “I need to tell our admirals and what’s left of our fleets. I promise I’ll make sure that they listen.”
Rhule shook Thorne’s hand. “I’m glad to hear it, and it’s going to be an honor to fight at your side. We have a base on Earth’s moon, and some docks with more ships. We’ll rendezvous with you and yours there, as soon as possible.”
“Sounds good, Commander. Best of luck.” With that, a very grumpy Thorne left Rhule’s office on the AIC Veruvian to return to his own ship.
“That went…well?” Ben had sat in on the whole uncomfortable meeting. Just an hour before, the UEF and AIC had been actively killing each other. Now the most bullish of those on either side had agreed to not only stand down, but to fight alongside their decades-long enemy. So that talk was a bit intense, emotionally charged just beneath the surface of military officers’ politeness.
