Alien Avatar: An Alien Sci-Fi Romance (21 page)

              The fighting was over quickly. The Halians had proven to be the more disciplined fighting force, and when Rakkan turned and all hell broke loose, they were the first to the guns. It had helped that Naeesha was so quick to incapacitate their commander and to disable their black up plan. With no leader and no plan to fall back on, the two dozen Watcher fighters fell into disarray and were easily defeated.

Their commander was the last soldier to fall. Marko had lost track of hm and Naeesha during the fight, and it wasn’t until the last Watcher soldier dropped that he saw them struggling in hand to hand combat.

Naeesha had barely untangled herself from the dead man when she got up and shuffled over, shouting for somebody to break her chains. One of the Halian warriors shot them off and handed her a weapon. Marko joined at her side.

“You’re in charge,” he shouted over the piercing wail of plasma fire that still sailed out of the hallway.

“What?”

“Rakkan told me to put you in charge if things went south,” he said, struggling to be heard over the fighting. A rumble went through the floor and a chunk of ceiling fell to the ground a few feet away, exploding in a cloud of dust and mortar. “I’d say things have gone pretty fucking south.”

“Alright,” Naeesha said, shaking her head in disapproval. “Get the civilians into the corners. I want every warrior with a weapon to get into cover behind anything big enough to stop a rifle bolt.”

As the words came out of her mouth, the tribe began to mobilize. They left their things lying where they stood and moved to the relative safety of the recessed corners of the room in an orderly panic.

Naeesha and he set up behind a piece of digging equipment that was close to the center of the room.

“Do you know anything else about the Watcher plan?” he asked.

“I don’t think they’ve got one, not anymore.”

The sounds of heavy plasma fire and distant explosions still shook the giant portal room. Marko shuddered to think of Rakkan, out of his mind, tearing apart anything dumb or slow enough to get in his way. All that he could hope was that he’d chase the Watchers out of the tunnel compound and far enough into the woods that the tribe would have a chance to escape.

Escape where, he didn’t know. But they sure as hell couldn’t wait around here.

“What do you want to do next?” he asked.

Naeesha was peering over the top of the giant bucket on the front of the digging machine, watching the tunnel. The fighting had moved back to the staircase at least. There was no sign of combat coming from the bottom floor of the compound anymore.

“We should move up gradually, once we’re sure that the coast is clear. When Rakkan clears the tunnel, we’ll move out and move whatever direction he’s not going.”

“And then?”

“Who the fuck knows.”

Marko left to go spread the word about the plan. He was officially the only person left in the tribe who could translate from Halian to Alderoccan, which was a slight drawback considering the fact that their leader now spoke a different language than the rest of the tribe. He could feel the fear and uncertainty in the group. They were strong, doing everything that they could to contain the fear and keep it from getting out of control. Considering the situation that they were in, Marko had to say that they were doing a damn good job.

Once he’d gotten word around, he returned to Naeesa, who had her head craned towards the tunnel with a worried look on her face.

“What is it?” he asked.

She held up a finger to request his silence. He listened too. Plasma fire and explosions were still rattling the compound.

“They were almost gone a minute ago,” Naeesha said.

“Maybe they pulled back to regroup.”

A louder explosion rocked the floor. She was right. The sounds of fighting were getting louder. Two minutes later, there was no doubting it. They could hear shouting now, and footsteps. A little more than a dozen Watcher troops appeared at the far end of the hallway, facing back and issuing heavy fire.

“Drop them now!” Naeesha shouted.

Marko relayed the order. They were leading Rakkan back into the tribe. One final attempt to destroy the Halians.

There was a flurry of plasma fire and a cloud of rubble blocked their view into the hallway. There were no more sounds of combat, and Marko strained his ears, listening for a sign. He could hear Rakkan shuffling in the distance. Every step he took caused the ground to rattle ever so faintly. He listened closely, trying to decide which directions the footsteps were headed.

The smoke in the hallway billowed and swirled as an enormous figure moved through it.

For the second time in his life, Marko was facing down a Halian wild one. He didn’t expect that he would lucky enough to survive the experience a second time. Nobody wasted their time or energy trying to fire on Rakkan. The civilians huddled in their corners, and the warriors remained in cover, far more calm than they had any right to be.

Rakkan strode ever closer. His body was bulging and disfigured. He was hunched over into his knuckles, his elbows bowed out like an enormous ape. Although he was slow, he moved with graceful precision and unnatural fluidity. His third eye burned fiery orange. The rage and hatred that Marko had felt when the Watchers killed Kiran was present now, stronger than ever. It crushed his soul, leaving him in the deepest darkness he could ever imagine.

He turned to look at the warriors, their faces like stone. They struggled to contain the contagious rage that pulsed from Rakkan’s twisted form. Things were even worse among the rest of the tribe.

“Naeesha… what the fuck do we do?”

“That trick in the tunnels, what we did to the husks.”

“Yea?”

“Would it work on Rakkan?”

“I… I don’t know.”

It had never occurred to Marko to ask.

“Can you think of anything else to try?”

Naeesha shook her head. He couldn’t think of anything either. It was certainly worth a shot.

“Can you translate for me?” she asked.

Marko nodded, and listened for her next instruction. Naeesha climbed on top of the drilling equipment and stood in the center of the room where all could see her, including Rakkan. His glowing third eye locked onto her and he staggered forward, hardly moving at a walking pace.

“Friends, family. I need your ears and your hearts.”

Marko climbed beside her, shouting so that everyone could hear her words.

“It has been the greatest joy of my life to share the last few days with you, and I had hoped that perhaps I might be able to spend a little longer. Unfortunately, our time looks like it’s running out.”

Marko couldn’t help but wonder where she was going. He could feel the room growing increasingly somber.

“Before he turned, Rakkan asked me to take care of you all. I wish I could have done better. But as long as we’re still here, I think there’s one last thing that we can all do for each other.”

Marko watched her intently as she spoke. She turned and caught his eye as she finished, and he repeated her words in Halian. She reached down and took his hand, holding it tight.

“I believed that this tribe could do anything,
anything
, as long as we were all together. I still believe that. Because I’ve seen the love and compassion that you all carry, and I know how powerful it is.”

She paused long enough for Marko to repeat her words.

“If these are our last minutes, let’s live them the best way we know how. With song. With laughter. With dancing. With love.”

Before Marko could even finish the translation, one of the Halians split off from the corner of the room and picked up an instrument case. A small group on the other side of the room began to dance, tense and akward at first, but quickly finding their spirit.

“Instead of fearing what’s to come,” Naeesha said, “let’s celebrate everything that we have. All the joy and all the wonder. The rain and the moon and the stars. The birds in the sky and the fish in the rivers. Love. Hope. And most of all,” she said, squeezing Marko’s hand and raising it over her head. “Each other.”

He could feel the surge of emotion sweep over the room even before she’d finished speaking. He shouted her words over a merry din of music and laughter, and the feeling of love and togetherness blossomed even greater. The tribe no longer huddled in the corners. The skipped and played and danced, even as Rakkan’s hulking form crossed the room, still headed for Naeesha.

“We celebrate for ourselves. We celebrate for our loved ones. We celebrate for those that we lost, and for those that have lost their way.” Naeesha climbed down from the digging machine and walked towards Rakkan, who showed no signs of improvement. “For those that we lost in the mountains,” she cheered. “For those that we lost in the tunnels. For Jintak… For Kiran…”

Tears streamed down her face as she drew closer and closer to the wild one. Rakkan reached out one of his enormous hands as she walked within arms reach. Marko cringed in anticipation of the awful violence that he expected to follow. Naeesha reached out her own hand, and rested her palm on one of Rakkan’s extended fingertips.

He froze.

“For Rakkan,” she whispered.

The members of the tribe saw her standing there, and arms reach away from certain death, with no fear in her heart. They were drawn towards her. A crowd formed around Naeesha and Rakkan. Marko stood on the machinery, watching from above, too numb to move.

He watched through tears as the crowd closed in and reached out their hands, laying them on Rakkan’s monstrous body. He stood up on his back two feet, towering above everyone else in the room, and looked around. His eye still glowed with righteous hatred, but the feeling in his heart was greatly diminished. It faded, faster and faster, and it seemed like Rakkan too began to shrink.

A moment later, he was hardly any bigger than ever. The light in his third eye flickered and faded. The crowd backed away, forming a closed circle around him.

And inside, sat Rakkan, sobbing.

Naeesha had a plan.

It wasn’t a good plan, but it might have been the best one she’d ever had. Wild ones could be turned after all. Maybe not all of them, and maybe they couldn’t all be saved like Rakkan had, but now there was proof that it was possible.

The proof was sitting in front of her, grieving like she’d never seen anybody grieve before. The tribe closed back in around him, welcoming his return, forgiving his departure, and showing him their love.

Naeesha worked her way out of the crowd and found Marko.

“We need to get everyone to the surface. Fighters first. The Watcher have troop transports, a lot of them. We need to borrow them.”

Marko didn’t ask any questions, he just started rounding up the warriors and their weapons and went to the hall to wait. She gave him directions to the landing pad and sent them on their way.

She went to Rakkan, and as soon as he was back on his feet, called on him to lead his people.

“Tell them to take only what they need,” she said. “We’re traveling light.”

Rakkan looked down at her, tears still in his eyes. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“To the capital.”

***

              Watcher troop transports are designed to carry up to two hundred soldiers and to load and unload them in as little as ten seconds. They couldn’t have been more perfect for what she needed them for.

The military had been kind enough to leave nearly a dozen of the ships behind. Naeesha didn’t know if she’d have a chance to use all the seats, but she didn’t see any reason to leave them behind.

She had Rakkan lead the people onto the ships while she showed some of the warriors how to fly the ships. She wasn’t sure that the telepathic controls would work on a Halian, but she was pleased to find that the ship’s computers understood commands no matter what language you gave them in.

In less than an hour, they were in the air, flying fast and low over the treetops. It was a four hour flight back to the capital, and Naeesha used every minute of it to try and figure out what the situation there was.

The first sign that things were looking bad was the lack of radio chatter. She tuned in to dozens of frequencies that should have been full of day-to-day operations, the basic information that keeps the military running. They were all quiet.

Only the emergency signal was active. It warned all Watchers to evacuate the city, and gave a list of coordinates to avoid at all costs. She smiled, and ordered her ship to head to the first of the coordinates on the list.

As they flew over the last of the wilderness and into the river floodplains, she saw absolute chaos beneath the ship. Watchers fleeing en masse, utter panic running through the churning crowds. As the ships passed over the crowds, she could see the people below settle under the calming effects of the Halians above. She wondered if they knew why they’d felt such a sudden rush of serenity.

She watched her viewscreen intently, looking for some sign of a wild one. As she scanned the screen, she saw two of her ships break formation and fly out over the floodplain. Just as she was about to radio in and ask what the hell the pilots were doing, she saw the tell-tale colorful tents of a Halian tribe. They’d taken shelter in a small valley, and it looked like they’d done alright.

Both ships rejoined the fleet after a few minutes, and the pilots reported that the’d picked up over three hundred more Halians. Naeesha smiled. Every little bit would help.

Marko radioed from one of the other ships.

“I’ve got a lock on one,” he said. Naeesha didn’t need to ask what he was talking about.

“We’re following you,” she said.

The ships veered hard right and flew along over the top of the wall around the southernmost side of the city. On top of the wall was a wild one, tearing out bricks the size of shuttles and hurling them hundreds of feet into the city.

“Keep moving, watch out for those rocks,” she warned. “Bring us in close, let’s try to get some people onto the wall.”

All seven of the occupied ships went in closer to the hulking monstrosity on the city walls. Two of the ships landed on either side of it, offloading their cargo of Halians before taking off to make room for the other ships.

They needed to get as close as possible. The Halian’s emotional aura was more effective at close ranges, and they needed this to work, for everyone’s sake. Naeesha’s ship stayed up in the air. She would have liked to be down on the wall, but she would just be taking up space down there. Instead, she watched through the viewscreen as the Halians crept along the wall towards the enraged wild one.

It didn’t pay them any mind, at first. It was perfectly content to rip up the wall and throw the remains into the capital. When the first of the Halians got within reach of its arms, it spun around startled. For a second, Naeesha thought it was going to swat the Halians off the wall, but then it sat down, its arms limp at its sides. The Halians surrounded it, and the wild one disappeared into the crowd.

Three minutes later, the fleet moved onto the second location carrying one more soul than they had when they approached the wall.

***

They found and rescued sixteen wild ones like that. Not every operation went as smoothly as the first. They lost four brave souls, all told. Three of them to Watcher fire, and one to a wild one that accidentally fell into their crowd.

All four were heros, as was every single member of the tribe that stood up and saved the capitol that day, creating a permanent reminder for the people of Alderoc that love is stronger than hate.

Flying through the city was one of the hardest things Naeesha had ever done. Fires had gutted entire neighborhoods. A wild one had brought down a skyscraper by ripping apart the foundation one pillar at a time. Not all the Watchers or humans had been able to evacuate in time.

She knew it would take them ages to rebuild. She only hoped that they would realize how lucky they were to have a chance.

As for the cleanup itself, Naeesha had no plans to stick around. A few of the Halians did. They saw an opportunity to spread their teachings in the destroyed city. Naeesha feared that they would be attacked by people who blamed them for the destruction in the city, but she knew that fear wouldn’t stop those that chose to stay behind.

Most of the tribe, however, chose the same path as Naeesha. They took the transports and flew them out far away from the capital to a place where they would be left in peace.