CHAPTER ELEVEN
Memory
The object seemed to stretch for miles as it slowly drifted overhead, blocking out the two suns of this world as it moved closer and closer. Day turned to artificial night as the low hum that emanated from the thing grew more intense the closer it came. Suddenly, the ground began to rumble, sympathetic vibrations tied to the hum no doubt.
Details began to become visible as he focused on the monstrosity above his head. He could see bolts of energy arching across chasms between pulsating towers, each with what looked like hundreds of spikes protruding in all directions from them. Bubbles filled with cycling colors pockmarked the surface, emerging and fading back down to nothingness all along its surface like the bubbling of a carbonated beverage. He noticed portals along the edge, through which he could see movement, the source of which he couldn’t yet identify. All along the edges, below the portals, he could see a shimmering curtain of light, glowing in colors his mind could barely comprehend.
It was nothing but a large rectangle, which he immediately realized made its existence even more impossible: how could it possibly be aerodynamic? How could it possibly be in the air like that? Setting aside its massive size, even if there now existed some technology that could keep it in flight despite its obviously huge mass, which he knew there wasn’t, how could that shape ever work? It must be using some sort of anti-gravitic propulsion system, he realized. That fact meant that there was no way this thing was from his own world. His species was only just beginning to experiment with such technology. There was no way his people could have built such a thing.
He noticed the large, hulking pieces of metal extending from the surface of it. They were huge, as large as the land vehicles his people used to transport themselves to the surface of his world, and he couldn't even begin to count how many there were. Hundreds… no, thousands. At least. Each one seemed too big enough to dwarf any of his kind, and they stood an average of nine feet tall. The objects, he noticed, were capable of movement, as many of them were swiveling around a full 360 degrees, while others moved up and down, many moving both ways. Suddenly, he recognized their shape and instinctively knew their purpose.
They were some sort of canons.
At the same time, he came to this realization he heard the screech of the fighters approaching. The small, dart-shaped craft screamed into view, flying at incredible speeds. They were designed for fast attack, and they were so quick that seeing them with the naked eye wasn’t easy. If you happened to catch sight of one, it is hard to continue tracking them, unless they were at an extreme distance, which these were not or he would never have heard them.
Because the object, which he now instinctively knew was an alien spacecraft, was blocking the suns from where he stood, he found it easier than it otherwise would have been to catch glints of light off the smooth edges of the fighters as they approached. There were hundreds of the fighters he realized, more than he'd ever seen in flight at one time. He had seen combat before he retired to civilian life several times as a member of the planetary military of his people, and he had seen the fighters in action plenty of times. Two or three together at a time was normal. They were immensely devastating weapon delivery systems, capable of delivering massive destruction on ground forces and other aircraft and a few would get the job done for sure. They could fly in, irradiating the ground with high-intensity gamma beams, incinerating any organic matter unfortunate enough to be caught in the beams, and fly out of the combat zone before you even realized what was happening. Your first and only clue, more times than not, was the high-pitched squealing they emitted as they ionized the atmosphere around them.
The Cithurians had turned those weapons on each other many times throughout their history to great effect. They were a species which had become highly efficient in wiping each other out. After the last planet-wide war had destroyed so much and killed so many, almost three hundred years ago, they had become a much more cooperative species, at least to the extent that wars were far less frequent and much smaller in scale. That was mostly due to the simple fact that their weapons had become so advanced that no one nation could ever have an advantage over any other. Any of them could wipe out every other without much effort, and that fact had kept violence in check for over three centuries now and eventually lead to a grand unification and a singular world government and military, triggered by the discovery of those other species.
And these fighters were the apex of that advanced weapons technology.
He knew that in addition to the gamma ray beams directed to the ground, the fighters were also capable of firing air-to-air particle beams that could cut through enemy fighters or floating air bases with ease. They were a deadly creation, and just now he was feeling happy to know they were on the scene.
He just wished that he knew who they were fighting now. This ship was unlike anything he had ever seen before and appeared to be far more advanced than anything the other species in the system had ever fielded before.
He saw the first energy beam strike the alien ship, followed by hundreds, maybe even thousands of sister beams, hitting the ship simultaneously seemingly from all sides. From every direction, he saw glints of fighters and beams emerging from them, pulsating, and glowing a blinding white that forced him to shield his eyes. He also realized that they were firing gamma beams at the same time at the alien ship. That was something he didn’t even know the fighters were capable of - he thought they could only be directed at the ground! That much energy pouring into the alien ship, from that many fighters, and from so many directions, would surely make quick work of the invaders.
He was wrong.
As quickly as the energy pouring onto the ship began, those hulking canons that he observed earlier swiveled in all directions, firing bundles of green energy. They were balls of energy that looked like lightning bolts extending from them randomly. They pulsed and morphed as they streaked through the air, ionizing it as they moved, leaving a trail of charged particles in their wake. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before. The balls moved at impossible speeds, away from the ship and towards where he knew the fighters were. The fighters, fast as they were, at the same time were not particularly agile. They couldn’t be because at the speeds they traveled, small control movements could lead to large physical direction changes, and it was known to be incredibly easy to tear a fighter apart by moving too quickly. That’s why their pilots were so revered: any being who could demonstrate that level of skill as well as fearlessness was someone to be admired.
None of that admiration or speed mattered now though because the bundles of energy fired from the cannons moved so fast that they were on the fighters in no time. The explosions began and quickly filled the sky. The fighters quickly became visible, or more accurately, what was left of them, as they broke apart in the colossal explosions. He thought it might have been a beautiful sight had it not represented so much death and destruction. Pieces fell from the sky like a heavy summer’s rain. A hail of metal and fire seemed to form a virtual curtain around the ship.
Only then did it occur to him that it must have been nearly every fighter in existence thrown at this invader at one time. This truly was the last stand he had heard about, the last gasp of a dying race.
A sickening lump formed in his stomach as the realization of the extent of the death he was witnessing hit him. It doubled in size instantly when he realized there had been no visible damage caused to the alien ship by those unimaginably intense energy beams attacking its surface. It was as if the fighters had done nothing but squirted water at the massive thing!
The massive ship began to slow and quickly came to a complete stop, centered directly over the six million-man army that had been gathered by the unified military of his planet. Every battle-able Cithurian had been mobilized and gathered in this one spot in the desert. Not just soldiers but even civilians who were able-bodied, even many who were not able-bodied but wanted to fight anyway. None had been turned away, dire as their circumstances now appeared. They had brought their own weapons in many cases, and the military construction teams had worked overtime to produce as many weapons as possible.
Around this unprecedented force sat energy weapon artillery numbering in the tens of thousands, forming a ring around the soldiers. The professional soldiers, the bulk of the force, were each armed to the teeth with the most advanced weaponry his people could muster, including a battle armor system that was far beyond what he had used. It turned one man into a mechanized dealer of death, commanding the strength of twenty men and even featured a kinetic dampening energy shield system that reduced physical impacts of all sorts, making these soldiers tough bastards.
This new alien species, scientists had determined, didn’t come from their solar system. When the ship had first been discovered by their scientists at the edges of the solar system, most of the population rejoiced at the discovery. It was widely held by scientists that any alien species advanced enough to make the trip between star systems, something the Cithurians and the other species in this system were incapable of, would have grown beyond the violent impulses and destructive nature that his own species was still working to eradicate from themselves. How could it be otherwise? A species advanced enough for interstellar travel would have wiped themselves out long ago if they hadn’t gotten their more primitive instincts under control.
It was less than an hour after its arrival that they all learned, horrifically, that the premise the scientists had convinced most of the population of was in fact far from the truth. Within five minutes of entering the atmosphere, it had settled over the largest city on the planet and wiped it out of existence in less than two minutes. A clear description of the weaponry it employed was never forthcoming because no one that could have given such a description lived long enough to do so. It quickly moved on to the next city, then the next, and then the next, wiping each out with incredible efficiency. Nothing was left alive by the time it left, no building left standing, and no defenses thrown against it had the slightest effect. They had even tried antimatter bombs at one point, weapons that had only been used three times in their history, their effects so enormous and devastating that they were taboo even for the Cithurians.
Hostility appeared to be no stranger to a more advanced society than his own. And now, just a few days after their arrival, it seemed inevitable that his people would suffer extinction for their lack of understanding. If this last fighter attack couldn’t repel this enemy, then all hope would be lost. There was no other weapon in the arsenal that would have any more success.
So, there he stood, one of the millions of soldiers miraculously gathered in this one place. It was the only area on the planet that was large enough to accommodate them all, and they suspected the aliens would move to attack them as soon as they gathered, skipping the cities in between, and they had been right about that. Almost as soon as they began gathering here, the ship began to change course towards the desert. It moved slowly and deliberately, seemingly in no rush to enter this battle, which had given many of them some measure of hope.
They were, effectively, bait. If the fighters didn’t succeed then they would fight, however they could, but nobody really expected they could win if it came to that. The small handful of ground engagements the enemy had initiated had ended nearly as quickly as they began. This enemy was no less formidable in person as from their ship.
The artillery batteries began to fire now, pumping massively powerful energy beams into the ship. Fusion reactors powered these beams, bigger than a house each, equivalent to a few dozen fighters combined. Maybe they would have better luck than the fighters, he told himself. Although the number of fighters was greater than the number of artillery pieces, they had already proven ineffective, so there was no real reason to think the artillery would fare any better.
But they had to try.
He thought he might have seen some explosions on the hull of the ship now! The beams from the fighters did little but dissipate over its surface, like water striking a brick wall. The artillery beams, however, seemed to be causing some damage!
Unfortunately, even if they were, it was too little, too late. The canons began to swivel into position, their focusing shifting from the destroyed fighters to the ground forces and began taking out the artillery pieces quickly. Explosions were all around them, off in the distance were the fusion generators and emitter arrays were. The thought occurred to him that they were all most likely being irradiated with a lethal dose from the fusion reactor explosions, which made him chuckle a little bit!
That’s like worrying about your clothes getting wet when you’re drowning!
As quickly as the canons began, they ceased firing and went silent. Strangely, they didn’t move to target the ground troops. Instead, they swiveled upwards and began to recede into the ship. Why would they do that, he wondered? Do they have some other weapon specifically to destroy ground troops?
His answer revealed itself a short while later as glowing columns of light emerged from hundreds of points on the underside hull of the ship. They shimmered and danced like aurora in the sky as they reached from the ship down to the ground. As soon as they touched the ground, they engulfed the part of the of the troops they engulfed, and this repeated at hundreds of points throughout the unprecedented gathering of Cithurians. The fighters that the beams touched disintegrated instantly, leaving barren ground below them.
Empty, except for the ashes.
Almost as soon as the beams touched the ground, he saw them: black dots emerging from the ship, quickly coming down through the light columns. He couldn’t tell exactly what they were at first, but there were seemingly not that many of them. Ground troops, he wondered? No, it didn’t look like there was more than a few thousand. That wouldn’t make any sense - that wouldn’t nearly be enough against the millions of Cithurians arrayed against them.
A few Cithurian soldiers began to fire at the light columns. Their pulse rifles rounds seemed to bounce off the light columns with no effect. A few even threw plasmatic grenades at them, highly destructive explosive devices that could devastate any material known to science, but they just disintegrated on contact with the light columns, never even detonating.
As the black dots approached the ground, he began to be able to make them out and he knew they were, in fact, ground troops.
After what seemed like an eternity but in reality was only seconds, the aliens were on the ground. When all of them had touched down, the light columns receded upwards, leaving the aliens for the Cithurians to see for the first time.
They were large, but smaller than the Cithurians themselves by a few feet. They were clad head to toe in some sort of armor that shimmered with what looked like plasma energy all over, like the light columns that had brought them down to the ground. Each of their four arms held a weapon unlike anything he had ever seen. They too seemed to be covered with that plasma energy… or where they actually made of the energy? He couldn’t tell.
And he didn’t have long to ponder the question as the aliens, seemingly simultaneously across the entire miles-wide battlefield, opened fire in all directions.
Their weapons fired what looked like smaller versions of the energy balls the cannons on the ship fired and their effect was similarly devastating: any Cithurian they touched disintegrated instantly and completely in a puff of green smoke. The alien weapons fired at an incredible rate of speed, seemingly millions of energy balls were flying in all directions, and the number of Cithurians standing began to dwindle rapidly.
After a few seconds, his fellow Cithurian soldiers dropped to the ground and began trying to return fire, but their weapons were just as ineffective against the alien ground troops as they had been against the ship above them. The energy pulses fired by their rifles flowed across the aliens’ bodies with no discernible effect, other than to make their armor glow more vividly.
As with the exploding fighters, it would have been beautiful had it not represented the uncountable dead.
While most of the Cithurian soldiers held their ground to the bitter end, some, as happens in all hopeless battles, tried to run. They were cut down just as quickly and easily as those that fought back.
Eventually, it was his turn on the front lines. He had seen enough to know that his weapons would have no effect though, so he and a few of the soldiers nearest him began to charge the aliens. If their armor were designed to dissipate their energy weapons, maybe it wouldn’t be effective against the metallic multiblade weapons they also carried for hand-to-hand combat. If nothing else, the Cithurians would have the physical advantage over these invaders, being larger and seemingly more muscular. If enough of them changed at one time, there was a good chance at least one of them would make it through to at least try to kill an alien up close and personal.
That someone, it turned out, was him.
He reached the alien nearest him, from behind, and drew his multiblade. He raised it above his head and prepared to strike with all his strength. As his stroke began to fall the alien turned around, more rapidly than he ever would have guessed possible, and raised its armor-clad arm to block the blow.
The multiblade shattered on contact and the force of the blow was reflected by the alien’s armor back onto him, knocking him to the ground. The alien advanced and stood over him.
He knew now that his end was at hand, as was the end of his species. He was oddly calm though, the inevitability of it all washing over him. He glanced around and saw his fellow Cithurians falling like grass being mowed. Just a few thousand alien soldiers were now decimating millions of Cithurian soldiers, as far as the eye could see in any direction. There were few bodies, just a growing layer of ash on the ground as his fellow fighters fell at an astonishing rate.
This battle would probably be over in just a few hours, he thought. Though, he knew, it would be over much sooner for him.
The alien looked down at him but didn't move to attack. He could see its eyes through the helmet it wore. They were blood red and seemed to glow with malice and vicious intent. It tilted its head to the side slightly, as if it was making a final measure of the being that lay before it.
Why? Why have you done this?
He begged the invader for an answer. He didn’t for a second expect a reply to be forthcoming of course. There was no chance that the alien could comprehend his language, especially given the fact that they communicated telepathically. The Cithurian scientists had told them that even if they had the capability to decode their language, if they had access to it at all, the fact remained that all communication on Cithuria was telepathic. There was no communication leakage like there had been centuries earlier before the telepathic ability had emerged in their species. Back then, various forms of electromagnetic radiation had been used to communicate, and it was entirely possible an alien species could have detected that, the scientists said. If they were advanced enough they might have been able to decode our language, they also said, even though it was an exceptionally complex construct.
So, he knew there would be no answer forthcoming because there would have been no words to hear, and even if there had been any, what could it possibly say to explain the obliteration of an entire planet? What could it possibly say to justify wiping out the existence of a whole advanced species?
No, he knew there would be no answer to his telepathic query, no final understanding for him as he met his end.
And that’s why he was shocked beyond anything he had ever felt in his life when, just before the alien raised its arm and brought down a nasty-looking weapon with a cluster of rotating blades on it into his chest, a single word echoed through his mind in a voice that he immediately knew wasn’t his:
Destiny.
——————————
Melissa awoke in a cold sweat, her sheets utterly drenched, and began screaming and checking her body for damage.
It didn’t take her long to realize that there was no gaping hole in her chest where the alien blade had struck her, and she quickly realized that she hadn’t been disintegrated either.
It was just a horrible, shockingly realistic nightmare. That realization didn’t stop Melissa from beginning to sob uncontrollably.
Alex raced into the room, a handgun at the ready.
“Melissa! Melissa, are you okay?”
Alex scanned the room, fully expecting intruders, but none revealed themselves. The two windows in their bedroom were still shut, no hint of anger present.
“Baby, answer me, are you okay?”
He dropped the gun at the foot of the bed as he approached her side. He placed a hand on her shoulder, trying to calm her with his touch.
Her breathing began to slow as he sat beside her, arm draped over her shoulders. She was shivering, but Alex knew it wasn’t because of cold: the room was a perfectly comfortable 78 degrees, Melissa’s preferred temperature, he knew. She was calming down now, though slowly.
As they sat in the darkness on the bed in silence, she relived the emotions she had experienced in the dream in vivid detail. The hopelessness the Cithurian she had played the part of, the fear, the amazement at hearing that one word. The word that echoed in her conscious mind now, over and over again.
Destiny.
“Melissa, what do you mean, destiny?”
She turned to him, staring into his eyes, unsure of what was happening. It had taken a few more seconds before she realized what was going on.
“Destiny. Destiny…”
“Baby, you’re scaring me here, what’s going on? Who’s destiny?”
“Destiny. Dest-”
Melissa’s mouth slammed shut as if it was spring-loaded and silence filled the room.
Another few seconds that felt like an eternity to Melissa passed before she finally felt it, and a new look of terror etched itself across her distorted face.
“Melissa! What is it, what’s wrong? TALK TO ME!”
She began crying hysterically as she kicked the covers off her legs. Back and forth, like riding a bike, she struggled against the blanket. It wasn’t long before she finally got them from off her legs and as she did so, the sight that greeted her and Alex caused two strange reactions. In Alex, it caused horror.
In Melissa, it caused sudden calmness.
They both looked at the growth on her leg, the size of a soccer ball, and Melissa’s analytical mind kicked in. There wasn’t any pain, but the grossness of the thing, veins crisscrossing its surface, pulsating with sickening blood flow, was a horrific sight. The realization that this was a part of her body, and not just some residual visual from his nightmare, hit her like a ton of bricks.
Yet still, she was calm, as if this was the inevitable conclusion of that terrible nightmare, a thing that, while shocking to Alex, was like something that was supposed to be there.
“What the fuck is that? No, Melissa, don’t-”
She reached down with her hand and greeted the thing with a poke. It jiggled like fat, or a balloon filled with water.
She began to scream again as a jolt of pain resulting from her prodding of the thing shot throughout her body.
“Melissa!”
Alex cradled her head as mercifully began to lose consciousness.
“Oh my god! Melissa, hang in there baby, hang in there!”
He placed her gently down on the bed and reached onto the nightstand to grab her phone. She was fading fast, but as she did, her mouth began to move gain.
“Base command! This is Captain Wakeman, C63 dash 87 Zulu! I’ve got a medical emergency!”
Alex now lifted her dead weight off the bed as he screamed into the phone, crammed between his head and shoulder.
“I’m on my way with my wife, doctor Melissa Wakeman! She’s unconscious and has some sort of; I don’t know, a mass or something on her leg! Alert medical staff and get Major Alcheck in there! I don’t fucking care soldier, wake his ass up right now!”
The phone slipped from its precarious perch as he rushed, carefully, through the front door, racing to his car. As he did so, he began to realize that while Melissa appeared to be unconscious, she was none the less repeating a word, over and over, in a hushed tone he could barely hear.
“Destiny.”
“Destiny.”
“Destiny.”