CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Awakening
Who the fuck is playing that God damned drum so loud?
Just as that thought was racing through Alex’s mind, causing pain as it moved around his neural pathways, his left eye squinted shut and then began to open, slowly. The light flooded in as if a dam had ruptured. He was drowning in light, and Major Alcheck noticed the grimace that resulted.
“Alex, just take your time. Doctor! He’s coming to!”
Ugh, just stop the drumming already!
Alex made another subconscious attempt to open his eye, and this time he managed to keep it open, even if as just a small slit. It was at this point that he realized that it was not, in fact, a drum being played but was, in fact, his head pounding.
He began to make out a few blurry shapes around him as his eye opened further. Before long, his right eye decided to join the party and started slowly opening as well. The pain of the light was excruciating and only seemed to be making the pounding in his head worse.
Alex’s eyes snapped shut as he saw a discharge of energy all around him. He quickly realized that it wasn’t real though. It was a memory of what had happened to him. It was a memory that the creature had attacked him with some kind energy discharge. Just the memory of the pain it had inflicted was enough to make Alex wish he wasn’t regaining consciousness now at all. That was one memory he’d rather be zapped out of his brain entirely.
He willed his eyes open again, and this time the process went a little smoother. He saw a figure he recognized standing over him: Major Alcheck. He also saw some other figures milling about the room he was in, one moving towards him. Alcheck noticed Alex beginning to try and look around, to move his head.
“Alex, try not to move. You’ve been through something that really should have killed you. I guess you’re even tougher than I already knew you are.”
Alex quickly agreed, more because his body told him he had no real choice in the matter than specifically wanting to, and allowed his head to sink back into the pillow it was resting on. As he did, he heard a voice that he didn’t recognize.
“Ah, the patient returns to the land of the living! Happy to have you back, Captain!”
He moved his eyes around towards the source of the voice, and he recognized a doctor’s gown and a male face, but one he couldn’t identify.
“Alex, I’m doctor Woodrow. I’ve been taking care of you since you’ve been out. We’re glad to have you back with us!”
“D-doctor… W-woodrow? How… how long?” Alex struggled to stammer out the only question to which he wanted an immediate answer.
“Well,” began Doctor Woodrow, glancing at Major Alcheck, “it’s been a little while. How are you feeling?”
“Head… pounding.”
“That’s to be expected given your, uh, experience, but we can help with that. We’ve got some new options now that you’ve regained consciousness. Nurse, dexamethasone please.”
Alex worried the medication would knock him out again so he quickly, and more forcefully, willed himself to speak.
“How long… was I out?”
Doctor Woodrow looked at Major Alcheck again and nodded at him. This was the cue Alcheck had been waiting for. He leaned in to speak. Alex noticed out of the corner of his eye and gingerly turned to face him.
“Alex, you’ve been out for just a few hours short of two weeks.”
Alex’s now fully opened eyes expanded rapidly in size as his own voice screamed inside his mind.
Two WEEKS?!
“What? It… it couldn’t be… two weeks?!”
The shock of the statement was the best tonic Alex could have hoped for. The fog of his previous unconsciousness all but dissipated quickly now. His head still felt like a marching band had taken up permanent residence in there, but he was starting to push the pain aside.
“During our battle with the creature, you were knocked out. Doctor Woodrow was concerned about brain damage due to the combination of the energy discharge and your impact with the wall, so he put you in a medically-induced coma until the swelling in your brain went down enough for it to be safe for you to wake up. It took a week for that to happen, and we’ve been waiting nearly another week for you to wake up after taking you off the drugs. We… I… was starting to worry you might never wake up.”
Alex could hear an unusual level of emotion in Alcheck’s voice. It wasn’t like him to show this much caring for someone under his command, even someone that was a friend besides being a subordinate. It wasn’t that he ever didn’t care, Alex knew well that he did, it’s just that he was practiced at not showing it. Not this time though.
Alex forced a smile.
“Well, sir, I’m back. I could do with an aspirin though.” Alex looked over at Doctor Woodrow now as he wore an expression that said: “make with the drugs, doc!”
The meaning was apparently not lost on Woodrow.
“We’re administering you some dexamethasone now Alex. It’s a strong sedative/inflammation reducer. I know it seems like you’ve had plenty of sleep, but this will make you get a little more. You should wake up in just a few hours feeling pretty good though.”
“Wait! Before you give me that stuff- Major, what happened to the creature?”
Major Alcheck’s expression changed from one of happiness (as much as he ever wore an expression of happiness anyway) to one of seriousness - his natural expression, Alex knew.
“A few seconds after it hit you, it went invisible again, and we lost it. It didn’t continue to attack, it just disappeared. We’ve been trying to track it any way we can ever since but we’ve had no success. We think the damage you managed to do to it was enough for it to not want to continue the fight. I believe that it left the base to nurse its wounds and that’s the assumption I’ve been operating on ever since. Then again, it could be standing in this room right now, and we wouldn’t know until it decided to attack us again. We’ve had little luck coming up with a way to detect it until it wants to be detected. But, the fact that there hasn’t been an attack since that day makes me think you hurt it pretty bad and it’s not up to another fight just yet, even with all its advantages. Hell, you may have given it some doubt as to whether it actually does have any advantages, but somehow I doubt we’re that lucky.”
Alex’s mind began frantically racing with various possibilities, different tactical scenarios and options to track the creature. He wanted to jump out of bed and get right to work, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen now given that his head felt like it was about to explode.
“What about the X-100? Is it secure?”
“We’ve had it moved to a secret location in Canada. It’s possible the creature was there, watching, and knows where it is, but given my assumption about its wounds, I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t know where the damned creature is right now, but my gut says it doesn’t know where the X-100 is either, so that’s a small ray of sunshine on a cloudy day.”
The nurse finally began pushing the dexamethasone into Alex’s IV tube, and its effects began almost instantly. Alex’s eyes began to close. He tried to fight at first… he wanted to talk to Alcheck more and figure out what their next step would be… but that wasn’t going to happen now though, he quickly realized.
He stopped fighting and allowed his eyes to shut, and as he did, he realized that his head was still screaming at him. The pain was excruciating. He could endure a lot, but this was almost too much. Just as consciousness began to slip away, he wondered why it was still hurting so much anyway? Surely after two weeks, it shouldn’t be this bad, should it?
He began trying to mouth that very question to doctor Woodrow, but it was too late. He fell back into the cold dark of unconsciousness, surrounding him like a soothing bath.
——————————
Before he knew it, he was awake again. But, something wasn’t right. Something was, in fact, very, very wrong.
The first thing Alex noticed was that he was fully and completely awake and aware of his surroundings. It was instantaneous, unlike when he woke up last time, that slow march from unconscious to conscious. The second thing he noticed was that the pain in his head was gone! This at least made him happy; everything else be damned.
The third thing he noticed though was something that he could never have comprehended before the X-100 test flight, something his mind would never have accepted. Even now, even with that experience, his mind was revolting against the reality his eyes were perceiving.
He was floating in space, above a planet he didn’t recognize.
He felt a momentary panic as he wondered why he wasn’t dead. Shouldn’t he have exploded or something? Isn’t that what happened when a person is exposed to the vacuum of space? Or was it frozen to death maybe? Certainly he’d suffocate, right? He wasn’t an astrophysicist or an astronaut, so he wasn’t certain of the exact mechanism or death, but he had seen enough movies to know he should be dead right now one way or another. It didn’t matter how or if he ought to be dead though because he was unequivocally alive and, seemingly, no worse for wear. He was just floating there, in space, naked.
No space suit, no clothes at all in fact. Alex couldn’t resist the male urge to ensure his genitals were intact, and yes, they were. All the parts were where they were supposed to be, apparently not in any more danger than any other part of him.
Alex looked around, trying to ascertain where he was. The planet below his feet was massive. It filled almost his entire field of view, but it wasn’t as large as Jupiter had been. It wasn’t Earth; he knew that: the colors were all wrong. It had some hints of blue, green and white like Earth did, but it was a strange tint of red, almost orange, for the most part. Was it Mars maybe? No, not Mars: he could make out what looked like artificial structures on the land masses and oceans. He knew enough to know that Mars didn’t have either.
The realization struck him like the proverbial ton of bricks: this was an alien world, inhabited by honest-to-goodness aliens! Maybe it was the home world of the creature? But if so, how could did he get here?
“This has got to be a dream, or a side-effect of the dexa-whatever the hell Doctor Woodrow had said that stuff was.”
And there it was, yet another clue that it was a dream: he could hear himself speak! He knew enough about space to know that sounds don’t carry in space. He was a fan of the movie Alien, and that fact was its tagline! A strange way to obtain knowledge, a movie tagline, but it worked for him in this instance.
If it was a dream though, it was vivid beyond anything he’d ever experience before. His mind told him this was reality, regardless of the impossibility of it.
He decided to see if he could turn. He knew he shouldn’t be able to: without the ability to exert some sort of force against something he couldn’t hope to move.
“Wait, how do I know that?”
As he pondered this, how he seemed to have some basic physics knowledge that he wasn’t aware that he had, he was shocked to realize that he was now in fact turning! The shock wore off quickly though as he remembered this had to be a dream, despite how real it felt. In a dream, he’d be able to do something he couldn’t do in the real world so that probably explained it.
He spun, ever so slowly, and he began to catch movement in his peripheral vision. He tried to turn his head to see it, but he was unable to do so. It was almost like his head was locked in place, looking forward only. He’d have to wait for his body to rotate fully before he’d see what was moving straight-on.
Before long, the movement began to come into focus. Spaceships. Dozens. No, hundreds. Maybe even thousands of ships. And not human ships, that much was obvious.
They were like nothing he’d ever seen before except maybe in some sci-fi movies, certainly not like anything he knew humans had produced. These were most definitely alien ships. They were cubes, surrounded by rings. Between the cube and the rings were a glistening curtain of light that continually danced, changing colors, lightning bolts shooting back and forth at random points and times. The rings appeared to rotate counterclockwise- no, clockwise. No, they were actually split in half, one half rotating one way and one half turning the other. They appeared not to be physically touching either- they had the same sort of energy discharges between them as between the rings and the cube.
The cubes had small protrusions on all sides that looked like metallic trees. As the ships approached, Alex suspected the trees were weapons systems. They had that menacing look, like gun batteries of battleships: you just somehow knew they were meant for destructive business.
These must have been the capital ships, the big guns of this fleet. Between them flew smaller ships, triangular in shape. The surface of these ships seemed to change rapidly, smaller triangles morphing out of the surface and then contracting again. These ships were darting about, seemingly not in any sort of formation or flying any kind of designated patterns. They must be fast attack craft, Alex thought, like fighter jets. But if that were true…
Alex turned back around to face the planet. This time he was able to spin around almost instantly thanks to convenient dream-world physics, and as he did, an armada of ships distinctly different from the other fleet approached him rapidly. Some were already on top of him, flying over his head, under his feet, through him! These ships were more recognizable to him, almost looking like space shuttles, albeit advanced space shuttles. He recognized some sort of gun batteries on them, and what looked like missiles underneath. These ships could almost have been made by humanity, maybe in a few hundred years anyway.
As the ships flew all around him, he instantly turned around now and saw the first skirmishes of the battle. The ships that had come from the planet attacked first. Energy beams struck the ships of the invading fleet, but they seemed to do little more than bounce off or be absorbed, he wasn’t sure. Then, a few ships launched missiles. These weapons were faster than anything he’d ever seen, and they were driven by some form of propulsion he didn’t recognize, but it definitely wasn’t chemical in nature. They were surrounded by a cloud of glowing purple energy, shimmering and shifting as they moved towards the invading ships. These weren’t energy weapons he knew; these were kinetic weapons. Maybe they would have an effect where the beam weapons had failed?
It didn’t take long to realize that wouldn’t be the case.
The missiles struck their targets, or maybe impacted some sort of energy shields; he couldn’t tell for sure. Either way though, they did no more damage than the energy beams had done. It didn’t take him long to recognize the pattern.
“They have energy shields like the creature, but a lot bigger” Alex muttered to himself.
After the first volley, the invading ships began their offensive run.
First, the smaller fighter ships began moving towards their attackers. They organized into a diamond formation, but then they continued to close in on one another. Before long, they were touching one another, but it was clear to Alex that this was not a collision situation, this was very much intentional. The triangles that formed and collapsed on their surfaces began to link up and form solid bonds. In almost no time, the diamond formation of at least a few dozen smaller ships now created a giant, single solid ship. This ship moved with the agility of the individual ships, and they began to drive through the defending ships, imposing their will on anything that came into contact with. It was effectively a kamikaze tactic: the giant ad-hoc ship was clearing a path, destroying all the enemy ships in its path. It moved shockingly fast and was incredibly agile - the defending ships were simply not able to get out of the way.
The giant ship began to deform and break apart into individual ships again as larger ships flew over Alex’ head from the planet. These were much larger versions of the ships that had just been mostly wiped out. These must be the capital ships of the inhabitants of this world. These ships, while physically similar to the smaller ships, had arrays of large guns along its top ridge and its wings. Each of them began moving and pointing at the large capital ships of the invading fleet. The weapons began to glow an eerie green color from inside randomly. Without warning, balls of energy flew out of them at fantastic speeds. They looked light green balls of lightning confined in the shape of a sphere.
“These must be plasma energy weapons.”
The words startled him.
“Wait, how do I know what a plasma weapon is?”
He realized he was aware of what plasma was, something he didn’t think he did before. In his minds’ eye, mathematical equations appeared, formulas that described the plasma balls.
“What the hell?”
A look of confusion spread out across his face.
Before he could ponder it further though, brilliant explosions began to take form, impacts of the plasma balls on the enemy ships. They appeared to break like waves over the ships, washing over them like water washing over a rock formation on a shoreline. The green glow brightened, then dimmed, and he saw what appeared to be some damage to the capital ships! Maybe these guys stood a chance after all!
The damage, however, didn’t seem to stop the ships. Their own guns now swung towards the remaining defending ships. Four of the invaders’ capital ships began firing in unison, their weapons producing steady streams of red energy, sweeping across the field of defending ships from the planet below. The ungodly beams of energy began carving up anything they touched.
The defending ships were sliced into pieces with no more effort than a hot knife through butter. The smaller ships, those few that remained, were being destroyed by the rapidly expanding debris field from the capital ships breaking apart. Explosions in the sliced off pieces began, probably from matter meeting antimatter, Alex somehow knew. This only accelerated the destruction of the remaining ships.
In what seemed like only a matter of a few minutes, the battle, such as it was, had ended. Every last ship that had come from the planet was destroyed now, bits and pieces floating through space, energy discharges randomly firing off of them as machinery and circuitry let out their final death calls.
The enemy ships… every single one of them having survived the defenders’ onslaught… advanced through the debris field, small impacts occurring without consequence on what Alex could now see were clearly energy shields around them. The capital ships began to spread out, taking up positions around the planet equidistant from one another. The smaller attack craft now started shifting form to a much greater degree than they had before. They began stretching out to an inconceivable degree and started creating connections between the capital ships. A web of ships now wrapped around the planet with the capital ships at intersection points.
Their movement all came to a stop.
“What the hell are they doing?”
It was then that he realized that it was silent around him. This shouldn’t be a surprise he knew, this being space and all, where there was supposed to be no sound to begin with. But, it was then that he realized he had heard all the sounds of the battle before. Further evidence that this was a dream, he thought.
But, now, he started to wonder if it wasn’t something else. It couldn’t be reality, he knew that, but it was far too vivid to be a dream. He also knew things that he couldn’t possibly know. Surely, you can’t have a dream that includes knowledge you simply don’t have in the first place, right?
The capital ship nodes of the web around the planet began to pulsate, accompanied by a dull hum sound piercing the silence around him. He more felt the hum than heard it, the same for the electrical discharges he was now becoming aware of. The discharges were like those produced by a Jacob’s Ladder. Electricity was breaking down air, and the collapse of the vacuum it caused was producing, just like lightning on Earth.
“Now how the hell do I know THAT?!”
Plasma energy balls began flowing from the capital ships, through the vessels forming the webbing, bouncing around like marbles in a pinball machine. The entire web was coming to life with energy flows, discharges and colors he couldn’t identify. It was incredibly beautiful, even as he somehow knew it was all a harbinger of terrible death and destruction.
It wasn’t long before that suspicion was confirmed.
Alex expected to see some sort of attack on the planet… maybe energy beams, or plasma balls, something similar to what he had seen during the battle. And indeed, electrical discharges were emanating from the capital ships towards the planet. But, they looked severely underpowered. They looked like little more than lightning bolts. Surely those weren’t enough to do any real damage to a planet, were they?
It was then that Alex noticed something that he knew was impossible, something that simply couldn’t be. Even if he was 100% sure this was a dream, it was something he wouldn’t have accepted even then.
The planet itself appeared to be shrinking!
At first, he thought it must be just some sort of optical illusion caused by all the energy discharges, but before long the planet had shrunk so much that it was no longer a possibility that it wasn’t happening. The planet was, in fact, shrinking!
What were they doing to this world? How were they doing it?! His mind raced, and before long he came to the only logical conclusion: self-replicating nanotechnology was being used to consume the planet, and simultaneously they were pushing closer and closer together, a clump of nanoparticles forming a mass of increasing density. There could be only one possible end goal of such a thing: creation of an artificial singularity that would consume the entire planet, removing its matter from existence as far as this universe was concerned.
“Ok, this is crazy, there’s no way I could know that!”
The planet continued to shrink, and as it did so, cracks in the land formations appeared, massive gashes that Alex knew had to be hundreds of miles across. Out of many of them, molten rock began to spew, but then quickly congealed as it too contracted. The atmosphere was now being pushed down onto the surface, and the weight and density of it was beginning to deform some of the oceans. The artificial structures he could still make out were almost unrecognizable masses of destroyed raw materials now.
It was as if some great force was squeezing a rubber ball filled with lava until it began to crack, allowing the lava to burst forth.
The planet shrunk, smaller and smaller, the shrinkage accelerating. What had started out larger than the Earth was now smaller than Earth’s moon. A few seconds more and it was just maybe a hundred or two miles across. Then a few dozen.
Then, it was so small that Alex could barely make it out anymore. It had ceased being a planet some seconds ago. Now, it was just a mass of molten material, glowing brightly and getting brighter. Suddenly, it ignited in a burst of nuclear fusion. Just as quickly, it appeared to temporarily get bigger in what Alex suspected was essentially a supernova explosion. But, that didn’t last long as the contraction continued, the nanotech apparently containing the massive explosion. It was getting dimmer now as atoms were pressed together. It was the equivalent of a neutron star now he thought, but the contraction didn’t end there.
Without warning, it blinked out of existence. That’s when Alex realized what the invading ships had done: they had created a black hole out of this planet!
The technology required for such a feat was unimaginable, yet he had just witnessed it in action.
Who were their beings that possessed such immense, incredible power?
The invading capital ships began to move away in all directions. The little ships followed, and the entire fleet began moving off, their terrible task done.
Alex was alone, orbiting nothing. Not a single ship from the planet survived, no proof that whatever species had fought so valiantly to save themselves had ever even existed. The stars on the opposite side of where the planet had been were occluded from his view now by the black hole; he saw blackness in front of him, stars only visible on the periphery. The loneliness stabbed at his very soul as he began to weep for a people he would never know, now forever inhabitants of the void before him, a dark monument to a destructive force like none he could have ever imagined.
——————————
Alex awoke in a cold sweat and sat up in bed like a bolt, tearing tubes and sensor cables from the machines that monitored him. Alarms began sounding as medical technicians raced in to “save” him.
“Alex!” Doctor Woodrow came running in, “Are you alright?”
Alex was breathing heavy as the realization of what he had just seen washed over him. In the cold light of reality, he knew what it was and knew what it meant.
He willed himself to calm down. He got his breathing under control as nurses re-connected cables and reset warning alarms. Doctor Woodrow stood next to him, grabbed Alex’ wrist to check his pulse.
“Alex? Can you hear me?”
Alex finally caught his breath at the moment Major Alcheck entered the room.
“Major… we’ve got to talk.”