B00BKLL1XI EBOK (11 page)

Ace carefully examined the output and diagnostic data from the planet killers. He smiled, leaned back and snapped his fingers with a strange, metallic click.

“Looks like everything is up to speed,” he said.

“So where are we going first?” asked Christine.

“We’re going to have some dinner of course,” replied Ace. “It’ll take a little while to resupply the fleet. Food, fuel, ammo, tune-ups, check-ups... Machine work basically.”

“Are they coming back from other skirmishes?” asked Christine.

“No,” replied Dot. “Patrol missions, exploration, things like that. You never know when you run across some homicidal alien race out there in deep space.”

“... and so Dot shoots them first and asks questions later,” added Ace with a wink. “If there’s anyone left to answer them. The itchiest trigger finger in the whole armada, I swear.”

Dot gave Ace a token glare and scowl. Ace looked at Steve and Christine, pointing to Dot with fake caution.

“Christine, I’m telling you, she’s dangerous,” he whispered.

Finally, for the first time since they stepped on board, Steve and Christine started smiling. Steve waved a finger in the air and stepped between Ace and Dot.

“If you need a referee...” he offered.

“Don’t worry Steve, I can handle him,” replied Dot. “He thinks he’s all that with his poisonous fangs and sharp claws and so on and so forth. But we all know that all I really need to do to make him howl is sleep in another ship.”

Christine laughed. Steve frowned. Ace sunk.

“A thousand years and they still have all the power,” sighed Ace. “You say one little thing wrong and you’re screwed.”

“Not screwed,” corrected Dot.

“Right,” winced Ace. “Bad choice of words.”

Steve was about to open his mouth when Christine cut him off.

“Steve, no male solidarity in a co-ed team,” she warned.

Steve closed his mouth and sat down in his chair, muttering and shaking his head. He sighed and said,

“I’m not going to win so I’m not even going to start.”

“Ok everybody good cliché fight, now who’s hungry?” asked Ace after a short pause.

“I am,” replied Dot.

“We are,” seconded Christine.

“Well let’s land on the moon and get some steak, shall we?” said Ace entering a command with the keyboard on his arm rest.

“Steak? You guys have steaks?” asked Steve.

“Yeah, that’s what I want to know too,” joined in Dot. “How is it that we’re suddenly getting fresh protein?”

“Oh just something extra that Nelson negotiated for us...”

The Nation’s destroyers were far too big and heavy to land on any planet or moon. Built entirely in space and equipped with engines only able to propel them well outside of a dense atmosphere, they were generally left circling in orbits on autopilots while its pilots would take small, sleek transport pods to the worlds below them. Leaving their massive craft circling the moon in the hangar of an orbiting space city, Ace, Dot, and their human guests descended to a spaceports below and gently touched down on a runway on the outskirts of a small, glowing city. Helpful robots steered it into a vast hangar lined with dozens and dozens of identical military transports.

As they ventured outside the hangar, Christine and Steve took a look at the sky. Looming in the heavens was a stormy, blue gas giant with thin, icy rings. The Nation’s fleet was virtually invisible. Only a few red lights created by the planet killers were noticeable. The dust cloud around the solar system projected a ghostly web of dark blue wisps between the stars.

A few minutes later, they were darting across the barren surface of the moon in another small, flying craft, this one designed solely to fly the cyborgs between different outposts on the same world. Dot skillfully avoided the jagged rocks protruding from the surface at random as she headed for the glowing city. Just like the space city that was in orbit around Earth, this base was composed of bizarre buildings that seemed to be growing out of the moon’s desolate rocks in wild shapes.

The buildings, as Ace explained, looked like they were growing out of the landscape because they were actually grown, put together from materials found in the rocks and fused molecule by molecule by an army of nanobots. A fully completed city could be grown in just a few weeks. It was the most efficient way to build anything in space because hauling around raw materials for construction wasted a lot of time and energy.

Arriving into the glowing, buzzing city, Dot turned the pod and headed towards a dome with windows that provided a panoramic view of the starry sky and the immense gas giant. She landed in a parking lot just outside of the dome. From this parking spot they could see that inside, the dome was buzzing with activity.

“Is that some kind of a restaurant?” asked Christine.

“Sure is,” replied Dot.

“Best place to eat in the Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy,” winked Ace. He thought for a second and added, “Actually, it’s the only place to eat in the Sagittarius Arm of the galaxy. But trust me, it’s good.”

Steve and Christine unsurely exited the pod. Unlike the bridge of the destroyer and the runway outside, the gravity in the city was just right for them. The reactors that powered the city channeled a stream of gravitons throughout the outpost’s power lines, creating a stable gravitational field. When they entered the dome with Ace and Dot, they unwittingly witnessed a very rare event.

Dozens of Children and a few Shadow Demons like Ace enjoyed something they weren’t able to enjoy for over a thousand years. They were eating fresh food grown on Earth and flown in within 72 hours by a special refrigerated transport.

In his dark chamber, the Reaper was looking at an ancient object covered by a thick greenish-brown patina. It was a small cube lined with hieroglyphs, switches, dials and oddly shaped gears. The cube quietly whirred faster and faster as it counted down to something. Finally, it clicked and the hieroglyphs across its surface flashed with a green aura. All of the switches, dials and gears aligned in the same direction and stopped. The entire cube pulsed with a faint radiance until the bizarre mechanisms restarted themselves and the device returned to its normal operation.

The Reaper sighed. His clock just counted exactly 1,117,656 years in human terms since the day the Dark Gods took over as the rulers of the galaxy. He still remembered the City of Ghosts, the citadel of their predecessors and how a shape shifting alien ran from spire to spire and weaved through grand temples to avoid the spiny, amorphous drones of the giant killer worms.

It had been protecting a primeval relic left behind for future species to discover when the time was right. Because of where this relic was placed within the City, the drones of the Dark Gods marching through the ancient citadel inevitably found it and its guardian. After the first few moments of the encounter everything happened so fast. Instincts kicked in. Blood, limbs and broken implants sprayed across the streets. Surprise. Fear. Panic. The tall, jagged spires and dark, abandoned chambers streaking by in the twilight.

The agile shape shifter strangled or impaled its pursuers. It was strong. Wrapping itself around its targets, it cracked armor and crushed vital organs. When it drove its spines deep into a writhing victim, it pierced flesh and synthetics with equal ease. The drones fired their pulse weapons and laser beams with wild abandon, but couldn’t impart more than a superficial scratch on the shape shifter. It skillfully leaped from spire to spire in a fluid curve. But eventually, the determined drones corralled the escaping alien.

With the drones flexing their spines and circling around the shape shifter, the trapped alien changed into its most fearsome forms, unveiling its fangs, claws and razor sharp spikes. It opened its mouth wide enough so swallow three of its opponents at once. It growled and mock charged the drones but they continued their slow, ominous march. As they aligned for the kill, preparing to rush the shape shifter until they could finally tear it to shreds, a thunderous low pitched bellow from the depths of The City immediately halted them.

It was like no sound the shape shifter had ever heard before. The bellow was short, fierce and demanding. Unlike a simple vocalization of an enormous beast, it was a word. Stop. A Dark God commanded its drones to back down and wait. The drones, obeying their master fell back though they still faced the shape shifter with their weapons and spines at the ready.

Heavy footsteps that sent ominous tremors through the ground drew closer and closer. A sleek, giant shape drifted in the gloom of the City. Two monstrous red eyes came into focus as the shape shifter assumed a defensive stance. One of the galaxy’s new overlords towered overhead. But it wasn’t here to finish off the alien. It wanted to ask a few questions. It wanted to know about the Cube. The giant monster was a lot smarter than the last Sentry thought...

[ chapter _ 010 ]

Ace sniffed his steak with a dreamy expression on his face. He took a bite and carefully chewed the thick, juicy cut of meat.

“You know,” finally said Ace, “I almost forgot what a nice, juicy cut of meat actually tastes like. A thousand years of eating alien protein and genetically engineered tissue... It’s just not right.”

Christine and Steve were also enjoying their dinner which, just as Ace promised, was exquisitely prepared and served in stellar themed forms. Perfect hemispheres of rice became stars, steaks were cut into the shape of a spiral galaxy with side dishes and garnishes piled on the center of the construction to create the galactic bulge. Inside the restaurant it was warm and the air felt fresh, just like in Ace’s destroyer thanks to specialized bacterial colonies in the air ducts.

“Genetically engineered meat tissue?” asked Steve. “How does it taste?”

“About as good as it sounds,” frowned Ace.

“What is it made of? Just meat tissue?”

“Yes. We just take preserved DNA of livestock and create the muscle tissue in an incubator. It tastes all right and it does have tons of animal protein but...”

“It’s just not the same?”

“Exactly. It’s just not the same. It doesn’t have that flavor.”

“And what about alien meat?”

“Depends on the aliens. The creatures that live on Theta 88G are pretty tasty if you cook them just right.”

“How do they taste?” wondered Christine.

“Like chicken,” deadpanned Ace.

Steve snorted from trying to laugh under his breath. A hint of a smile crossed Christine’s lips.

“Do you farm animals for food?” asked Steve.

“Sometimes,” replied Dot. “But we’re not good farmers. We tend to roam around too much for that.”

“But how can you eat alien meat? What about pathogens?”

“We’re immune to them. As long as the aliens have protein and phosphorus, we can eat them.”

“Say, why do you guys eat?” asked Christine.

“It’s either that or get our nutrients from pills and injections. Our organs can’t run on electricity,” replied Ace. “We figured that eating would be a lot more enjoyable than needles and capsules.”

“And how does the food taste to you? Is it different from how it tasted to you when you were human?”

“I’m still human,” corrected Ace.

“Oh, I’m sorry... I’m just... I didn’t want to offend.”

“It’s ok, I understand. To answer your question, my taste buds work just like yours, but I can also tell you the chemical makeup of what’s in my mouth. If somebody tried to slip some arsenic or worse into my food, I’ll detect it and won’t absorb it into my bloodstream. And I can tell what’s safe to eat.”

Steve raised his brow.

“A little lab in your mouth,” he chuckled. “The Dark Gods sound pretty thorough.”

“When they start something, they never do it halfway,” Ace nodded in agreement.

And so the crew ate and bonded in a restaurant thousands of light years away from Earth; two cyborgs who finally had a taste of fresh food after a thousand years spent many quadrillions of miles away from Earth and two humans trying to understand their place in the bizarre world of these alien humans.

Back on Earth, Councilor Newman was fuming in his office. With a savage expression on his face, he slammed an empty glass with ice and a faint trace of whiskey on his table. The ice threatened to jump out of the glass before gravity pulled it back to the bottom where the cubes hit with a loud clank. Newman hit a button on his intercom.

“Get Gene in here,” he barked into the receiver.

A few minutes later a thin, athletic, middle aged man in a formal, exceptionally well-tailored suit and a crisp, chrome colored shirt with a stiffened collar walked into Newman’s office. He was a consultant for many politicians in his long career and he helped Newman climb to the top with a promise to return to tradition and family across the globe. Suffice it to say that the minute Newman was elected, it was the last time anyone heard about tradition and family from him.

Gene Harding knew that campaign promises were all a farce. He knew it so well because he was the one who came up with them. Late at night he toiled on the perfect speech with focus groups, polls and media talking points. Next day, he would hand the candidate a sheet of thin plastic with the perfect speech and the perfect platform which would either be forgotten the second the candidate got elected or just dropped in a few years as no longer relevant.

Oh, and one more curious fact about Gene. He despised Newman just like he despised all front-men and women who wasted his work on appeasing the public. He had a major distaste the public as well. The average Joe and Jane turned his stomach sour. To him they existed only to pull the lever and get him one more big paycheck, wasting their predictable lives in cookie-cutter suburbia on their little homes, lawns and gardens while people like him were trying to remake the world.

“Gene, we have a problem,” scowled Newman.

“Really?” Gene asked with a hollow smile.