by Erica Rue
“They can’t be invincible,” Brian said.
“They’re not,” Bel replied. She rubbed her temples, and Dione wondered if she had a headache. “The best way to kill them is to take them down, and sever their neural connections. Completely. If these are cut, they’re dead, but you have to sever every single link.” She turned to Dione. “That’s what happened on the Calypso, you didn’t cut through everything.”
Dione felt the guilt and shame well up inside of her as she recalled her hesitation in cutting the Ven’s neural connections. She thought she had killed it, but it had come back to life and nearly killed Bel. Dione was a firm believer in learning from mistakes. Her failures in the lab usually conveyed the most valuable information, but this was a situation where her mistake had left Bel at the mercy of a Ven. She realized she was staring at the spiral cut still healing on her friend’s cheek and looked away. Dione would not hesitate again. The Vens might be sentient creatures, but they were horrible and vicious. Why are they such violent hunters? Dione would probably never find out.
“How do you sever their neural connections?” Brian’s question pulled her out of her thoughts.
“Slide a blade under their hood and cut. It’s not easy, but it does the trick,” Bel said.
“I can show you,” Dione said. “There’s a dead Ven in the cargo bay of the Calypso, in a refrigerated container.” She shuddered at the thought of coming face to face with it again, even if it was dead.
“Good. We should leave as soon as possible. Neither of us can afford to delay for long.”
“Brian,” Lithia began, “I have to ask, since I’m coming with you. Aren’t you worried that Victoria will do something to you if you go back? She thinks you’re a traitor.”
“If I left them to the Vens, I would be. I don’t think they’ll kill me,” Brian said.
Lithia raised her eyebrows. “You don’t think?”
“Everyone respects Victoria, but they don’t all like her. She’s not the one who slips them a few extra rations when their kid is sick. I’ll be able to convince a few to listen. Remember, they saw the ships last night, too. We’ll be ready to fight.”
“Think about it. Your settlement is open and vulnerable. It’s in the middle of a field. The Aratians have significant natural defenses that protect them, but your people just have a wall,” Lithia said. Dione saw where she was going with this.
“We have the guns,” Brian replied. “You said enough bullets would kill them. We’ll just have to make sure it’s enough.”
“My settlement had guns, too,” Bel said softly. “The Vens still overwhelmed us.”
“Why not evacuate?” Dione asked. “Activate the Flyers and bring everyone here. Sam, can you accommodate six hundred people?” She knew the AI would be listening. Samantha, a research scientist known to the colonists as the Architect, had uploaded her consciousness to the Mountain Base’s mainframe to protect all the people of Kepos from outsiders.
“Yes, but not as a long-term solution. Space would be tight.”
“Then what’s the point?” Brian asked.
Dione hesitated. “With the Vens here, there has to be a way for your people and the Aratians to work together and defeat them. Maybe you could shelter at their colony and work together.”
Brian laughed bitterly. “They wouldn’t trade us food as we starved. You think they’ll help us against the Vens?”
“But the Vens are a threat to them, too. It only makes sense,” Zane said.
Brian seemed to consider it for a moment. “I don’t know what Victoria will decide to do. All I can do is go back to my settlement and warn my people. They need to know what they are facing.”
Before anyone could respond, Sam interrupted. “There’s another matter to consider. Because the dampening field is down, the Venatorian distress beacon is still transmitting. It needs to be disabled before more Vens pick up its signal.”
Dione had forgotten about the beacon. A Ven scout ship that had crashed here decades ago was transmitting a distress signal, calling any other Vens in the area to the hunt. Sam had managed to block the signal with a dampening field. When she and Lithia crashed on the planet a few days ago, that same field had also blocked their manumed communications. Zane, who had stayed on the space station to take care of Bel, neutralized the field so that he could communicate with them on the planet. They had all been unaware of Sam and the Ven distress signal at the time.
“I could try,” Zane said. “Is it close to Oberon?”
“It’s within two days’ journey of your professor’s last transmitted location,” Sam said.
Dione turned to Zane. “We could disable the beacon after we find the professor.”
“I’ve sent the location to your manumeds,” Sam said.
At that moment, a little girl no more than ten years old joined them in the common area. Dione gave her a distracted grin. Evy was a stowaway who had left her parents at the Vale Temple to come adventuring with the StellAcademy students. The fact that her parents were Aratian nobility didn’t matter to her. She just wanted to collect bugs and hang out with her new friend, Lithia.
“There’s one more thing,” Zane said, “that I think you all should know. I took a look at the matrix last night, and after the modifications we made, I’m fairly certain that we’ll never be able to reintegrate it into the Calypso.”
The room was still for several moments as the news sank in.
“So we’re stuck here,” Dione said.
“Yes,” he replied. “The professor might know some tricks—it’s his ship after all—but I don’t think it’s possible.”
Dione looked immediately to Lithia, who clenched her fists, but said nothing. Evy went up to her and gave her a hug. She only came up to Lithia’s waist, and Lithia patted the girl on her back.
“I heard you talking about the Vens,” the girl said.
“It’s okay, Evy, we’ll beat them.”
“I know.”
“Can you wait a little while to go home? This really is the safest place for you right now.”
Dione could see the tears welling up in Evy’s eyes, but she nodded. “Remember how I was telling you about my friend who liked bugs, too? Well, that’s Bel. You can stay here with her, and once she’s rested a little more, she’ll show you her bug collection.”
“I hope you like dragonflies,” Bel said.
Evy smiled, but it was a sad smile. Dione wondered about the girl’s cousin, Cora, the Aratian Regnator’s daughter. Cora was Lithia’s cousin, too, through their shared grandmother, Miranda Min—an unexpected revelation that Dione was still getting used to. Despite Cora’s attempt to steal the anti-parasitics Bel had so desperately needed, Dione hoped she was okay.
“Let’s not waste any more time. Show me the Ven, then you can go disable the signal. I need to get back to the Field Temple.” Brian went back to the kitchen to grab some more food.
“He’s grumpy this morning,” Lithia muttered to Dione.
“His settlement is about to get destroyed by a bunch of aliens. Can you blame him?” Dione whispered back.
Lithia shook her head all the same. “I’ll get the shuttle ready,” she said.
Dione stood to take Brian to the Ven and show him how she had finally killed it.
“Come on, Brian. This way.” she headed for the apartment door.
Now it was time to face the dead Ven. She felt sick just thinking about it.
3. DIONE
Dione opened the refrigerated container and gagged. Vens stank whether they were dead or alive, no matter the preservative measures taken. Brian stared at the corpse for a few moments, then covered his face so he could get in close to where it lay facedown in the container.
“I thought Vens were green,” he said.
“They are, but the ones that boarded our ship were blue. We think it’s a juvenile. See how its shoulders are tinted green?”
Brian nodded.
“Here,” Dione said, pointing to the small gap betwee
n the hood and the first pectoral plate. “That’s where I was able to get through.”
“Is that the only weak point?” he asked.
“Some plates are fused, and some aren’t. I don’t know if it’s consistent throughout the species or varies by individual which are and which aren’t, but I’d try this plate gap first.”
“So how do you get it down?”
“Aim for the feet?” Dione said, uncertain. “We had some stun gas that helped us knock them out. I failed to kill this last one, and it attacked Bel. Even injured, it was hard to take down. It was already limping when I had to face it, and I was able to use that to get it on the ground. Zane also came in, so it was distracted. There’s no way I could have taken on this Ven alone and survived if it hadn’t been badly injured.”
“So find a way to wound them, knock them down, then strike,” he said.
“That’s the best advice I have right now. And work in teams. The Vens rarely work alone.”
That was an aspect of their behavior that some observers had speculated about. There weren’t many survivors of Ven raids. Most of them were out of their minds with fear, or didn’t see much because they were hiding. A few survivors said they worked together, and the professor said that four were hunting him, the same number as had tried to board their ship.
There were a lot of unknowns, or as Bel believed, findings undisclosed to the public. Well, if there was a gap in public knowledge, Dione would record as many of her observations about the Vens as she could. When she made it back, she would share these revelations with anyone who wanted them. She could discover something that might save lives, and that meant she would have to survive this invasion.
Zane joined them. She saw him shudder as he looked at the Ven.
“Don’t let them bite you either,” he said to Brian.
“Why? Poison?” Brian said.
“Not exactly. They dose you with adrenaline and some other stuff and make you crazy. You’re more aggressive and stronger, but you lose track of who you are. It’s like a frenzy, and you’ll attack anyone,” Zane said.
“Why would they do that?”
“We’re not sure, but we think it’s either to increase the challenge or to set their opponent to make mistakes,” Dione said.
“Can we turn it over? I want to look at the front, too.”
“Yeah,” Zane said. “Bel actually sent me here to see if we could bring it back to one of the base’s labs.”
“Why? I don’t think we’ll ever get the smell out of the Calypso, and now she wants to stink up the base?” Dione said.
“She wants to dissect it,” Zane said.
Dione nodded in approval. There were records of dissections, but maybe Bel would discover something new. After all, this Ven was almost entirely blue, and that was undocumented. Maybe she could confirm their juvenile theory.
“All right,” Dione said. They easily wheeled the storage container into one of the labs in the base, and Brian figured out how to link it up to the base’s power supply. The last thing anyone wanted was for the decomposing Ven to warm up too much.
Brian headed for the stairs, but stopped abruptly and turned. “I almost forgot, I need to teach you Canto’s commands. If you’re going to save your professor and disable the beacon, I’ll need to give you info about the locations Canto knows, too.”
“Yeah, Zane, can we borrow your manumed for a few minutes? We can pick up mine on the way, but for now, we need a map,” Dione said.
“Sure,” Zane said, handing it over. “I’ll go tell Bel where the Ven is.” He headed off to the apartment where Bel had gone for a nap.
“When Lithia and I get to the Field Temple, I’ll send Canto to the smuggler’s den where you left your manumed and machete. Though I see you grabbed a replacement.” Brian motioned to the machete she had strapped over her shoulder.
She had never felt the need to carry a weapon before, but this planet, the Vens, and that strange angler worm that had nearly killed Lithia? It all had her on edge. She still didn’t trust her aim, so she’d probably see if Zane wanted the pistol that was also there.
“So, you’ve already learned some machi commands. Maximute commands are similar, but you have to be much more precise.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know, but that’s the way it works.”
He taught her the mounting sequence, as well as how to speed up, slow down, and turn. Even though the tunes were simple, his voice made them come alive when he sang.
The rendez-vous commands were much more difficult.
“First, you prime him with the home command,” Brian said. He sang a seven note arpeggio. That will send him back to the settlement. If you want a rendez-vous point, each one has a different note following it, and you hold it for a whole note. I’ve taught him five different locations near the settlement, including the smuggler’s den where we stayed.”
The one where you kissed me.
Dione needed to shake that memory. There were more important things to focus on. Besides, Brian had been distant all morning. Before, he had been welcoming and inquisitive, but now he seemed closed off, especially from her.
She wondered if he blamed her for the Vens, and for her hesitation before agreeing to hand over the charging matrix. She couldn’t blame him on either front.
Dione practiced the tones and took some notes. She even recorded Brian’s beautiful tenor singing a few of the harder sequences, but mostly she tried to map them onto children songs from home to help her remember, turning all of the words into the command she was trying to sing. The slow-down command was exactly like the first line of a simple children’s song.
Brian laughed as she sang, “Slow down slow, slow down slow,” to the command’s tune, and for a moment, she saw the light in his eyes that had been there before the Vens arrived.
She kept practicing with Brian until Sam interrupted them. Sam seemed to do that a lot. It was unnerving, knowing that their conversations weren’t really private, even if they were alone.
“Brian, it may interest you to know that the communication devices that Jameson hid away are here. Long-distance communication may prove useful in the coming days.”
Brian’s eyes it up. “Where?”
“As long as you leave half for the Aratians,” Sam said. “Everyone will need the ability to communicate. The Vens are a threat to everyone.”
“I guess you’re right,” Brian said. “Though if you’re hoping that Michael and Victoria will work together, I wouldn’t hold your breath.”
“People may surprise you,” Dione said. “I just hope it’s not too late at that point.”
Her fate hinged on their cooperation, too, and she hated how helpless she felt under the mercy of polarized leaders. If they refused to cooperate at least on some level, they would all die. Dione felt cold, but Brian didn’t seem fazed.
Soon, he was filling a bag with communicators. They were nothing like manumeds. They weren’t sophisticated, but they did look sturdy, like they could stand some abuse in the field. These must have belonged to the terraformers. Personal comms like manumeds really weren’t designed for extensive field work, though Dione’s was an athletic model designed for durability. It had been a present from her uncle, to replace the one she had destroyed digging through mud on a trip just a year ago.
Sam gave Brian some instructions, since his experience with communicators was limited to manumeds.
“Each one has an ID number, but you can program names to each one,” the AI said. “They’re all networked, so once someone programs their name in, that name will show up instead of the number.”
“Okay, can I reach Dione or Zane with these?”
“Yes, but you’ll have to add them separately,” Sam replied.
“Here,” Dione said. She took a communicator, programmed it with Brian’s name, then added all of their manumed designations. She laughed, realizing she had just given Brian her number.
“You can send voice and text messag
es, as well as share data. I’ve created a hub here where information can be stored and accessed, like a map of the area,” Sam said.
Brian seemed to like the potential of the communicators.
Zane’s manumed buzzed in Dione’s hand. It was Lithia. “Zane, I’m ready. Get Dione and Brian, and let’s go.”
“It’s me,” Dione replied. “We’ll get Zane.”
“All right. Light a fire, though. I just saw the images Sam got from the space station and things don’t look good.”
Fifteen minutes later, they were in the air.
4. LITHIA
Lithia was nervous. She had already dropped Dione and Zane off at the edge of the woods. It wouldn’t take long for them to reach the smugglers’ den according to Brian. As much as she worried about them, she feared more for her own safety.
Sam’s latest images showed the Ven landing site. It was far off across the plain, but the bird’s-eye view made it seem so close. There were hundreds of them; doing what, she didn’t know, but it couldn’t be good. Preparations of some kind?
“Brian, the hangar’s not open. Where do you want me to land?”
Brian didn’t even glance at the external camera feeds before answering. “The town square.”
“What?”
“The town square. In front of the Temple.”
“Why not that nice, grassy area over there by the wall?”
“I want everyone to see us and hear what we have to say.”
Lithia ground her teeth. “What if Victoria shoots us first?”
“She won’t,” Brian said.
“And you know this how exactly?”
“Because we’ve got something she wants.”
“Which is?”
“The key to the Flyers.”
“She might kill me out of spite. She won’t need both of us.”
“I just need enough time to convince her that we’re here to help. You can bet she saw those ships last night and knows that something bad is going to happen.”
Lithia was still uncertain, but she figured he was right about at least one thing. She would land somewhere with witnesses.
