In A Universe Without Stars 1: Skyeater (32 page)

“Everyone
else is a pussy, I don’t know how Jahum picked them. How are we supposed to
have a new start with these cowards?” Wilker barks.

Noata
looks at him. “Enough of that. I figured out how many humans are left on the
Skyeater.”

“How
many?” Lance asks.

“
Around
fifty million.” Noata states.

“Fifty
million!? That’s insane!” Lance shouts.

“How
in the hell can that many people fit on that ship?” Serena asks.

“I’m
not sure if you got a good look at it, but it’s a
bloody
large craft. It would hit the UK before the rest of it has left America,”
Wilker says.

“Part
of it is already passing over the Atlantic. Based off my diagrams, they are
spread out at different parts of the ship,” Noata says.

He
pulls up a hologram of the Skyeater. Its top dome spins opposite of the bottom.
The domes are long enough to where there are periods were the Serephins on the
edges of the domes could see the ground or into space. The top dome breaks
through the atmosphere as it spins, its top half jutting through space.

“How
are we supposed to save that many people?” Lance asks.

“With
this,” Noata says as he pressed on the tablet.

Another
hologram pops up on the table. It shows a 3-D model of a bad ass looking ship.
The one that destroyed New York City.

“It’s
one of their new elite attack ships, the Starkiller, one of their most prized
and advanced possessions,” Noata says as he hits another button on the tablet.
Schematics about the ship shows up. It shows its max speed, its weapon
capabilities,
the
whole shebang.

“Wow,”
Serena mutters.

“It’s
the one that destroyed New York,” Lance says.

“It
has enough life support to support one hundred million Serephins to live off of
for hundreds of years. We can alter it to support humans. It also has better
teleportation technology than the Astrons. With this we can save our race, take
back the planet, and destroy their mother ship. Just stealing this will deal
them a hard blow.”

“How
can we pilot it, let alone how do you know all this?” Serena asks.

“How
do you think?” Wilker asks. “We have access to all the Astrons databases, with
this knowledge alone we can advance the human race
millions
of years. The Serephin technology is so similar to the point of being the same.
With their knowledge and our abilities it should be simple.”

“But
who will pilot it?” Lance says.

“I
will,” Noata says confidently.

Lance
thinks on it,
there's
only four of them,
against thousands. The others seem confident enough but it seems like suicide.
He looks at Serena, she looks back and gives him a head nod. It’s
their
only chance to save the human race.

“How
are we going to get there?” Lance asks.

“I
already taught the group to fly but—
“ she
says,
looking at Noata.

“But
we may not be able to pierce the hull.”

Everyone
sits in silence, Lance guesses they haven’t thought everything through.

There’s
a sudden silence in the room, everybody is staring at something. At the doorway
Jahum walks in. “I know what you all are planning on doing. I will help, but it
will be our final goodbye.”

…

Cole
stands in the loading bay, the bland walls dimming his spirit. The floor opens
up in front of him and reveals the clouds. They have a magenta radiance to
them, the Skyeaters presence piercing through them. He looks over the edge, he’s
ready.

Jahum
comes up behind him.

“You
have to pierce the hull hard enough to get through it and create four other
holes for the ones who agreed to go as well. You should be able to that without
effort.”

“Okay.”
He doesn’t care about the others, he has his own goals to fulfill. He stares
back out into the sky. Once he succeeds, if they fail, he can pick up where
they left off.

Only
four of them though?

“This
is goodbye, Cole…And good luck.”

Cole
looks back again.

Jahum
is already gone.

He
leaps out and flies straight down. He breaks through the air, just falling, not
needing to use his powers. He goes through the clouds and closes his eyes.

His
spheres appear around him.

He
feels whole again.

His
power runs through his veins like blood pumping to his heart. He breaks through
the clouds and opens his eyes.

Directly
under him is the Skyeater. It surmounts the horizon, stretching as far as the
eye can see. A red crystal Earth. Cole throws his arms out. Ten of his spheres
spin in groups of two. He swings down.

The
spheres rocket down. They rip through the crystal like termites through wood
and create five man sized holes. Cole goes through one of them, face unchanged,
he has no time to think. He flies effortlessly through. Wiring and machinery speed
past him.

He
burst out through the ground, dirt and concrete explode into the air as he goes
higher. He stops and descends down onto a building and rips through the
ceiling. He lands with a thump, he hopes nobody saw him, he flew to the nearest
building to catch his bearings. There’s a giant window in the room he’s in,
overlooking the city. He walks up to it and stares in awe.

Lance,
Serena, Wilker, and Noata fall through the sky. The Astrons’ ships flashes off
behind them, gone in an instant. Blackness is left where it once stood.

 They
go through the clouds, even though Lance knows how to fly, falling from this
height still daunts him. They break through the clouds.

The
Skyeater appears below him.

“Holy
crap,” Lance mutters under his breath. The wind is too loud to even hear his
own voice. Its freaking huge. He sees five holes, he maneuvers over one of
them. So do the others.

He
goes through.

His
eyes race as he flies through the small hole, the only reason he’s not hitting the
sides is because of how straight the path is.

He
burst through the ground at the same time as the others.  He flies toward
the other side of the Skyeater. The others follow him. He suddenly starts to
slow down as they get half way through the Skyeater’s sky. He looks at Noata,
he frantically waves his arms yelling at him, but Lance can’t hear him. He hits
the half way mark and then he drops to the other side.

“Shit!”

His
orientation is messed up. The ground quickly approaches. He stops only a few
feet from the ground.

He
lands on his feet in an alleyway.

“Dear
god-“He pants.

“Hey!”
Serena waves at him from a six story building.

He
leaps up and Serena grabs his hand and pulls him up. Noata and Wilker is on
there, too. Wilker
is
on one knee catching his
breath and Noata is on his ass.

“I
should’ve been expecting that,” Noata says.

“Thanks
for the warning, I’m sure the whole fleet saw us,” Wilker says getting up.

“I
think not,” Lance says looking up into the city. He’s never gotten a good look
off it, it’s mesmerizing and majestic. Wilker looks up as well, and his mouth
falls open.

“How
is such a thing even possible?” Serena asks, with her mouth so open a bird
could nest in it.

“There
are things that exist that you and I cannot even begin to comprehend,” Wilker
says.

Wilker
was wrong, he looks at the magnitude of everything,
they’re
only a small spec in the order of things.

“Crap!”
Noata belts. “We missed our window.”

“Missed
what window?” Lance asks him.

“You
see that shield up there,” Noata points up to the sky. A purplish blue force
field appears halfway between the city and suburban side. It wasn’t there a few
seconds ago.

“What
the hell is that?” Lance asks.

“Our
missed chance for the day. At night the force field is at its strongest and in
the day it’s at
its
weakest. It’s not usually there
but since the ships top half is out of the atmosphere they need it during the
night time to keep the ship stable, we can’t break through it now,” Noata says.

“But
how can their people cross when it’s there?” Serena asks.

“Their
ID’s create an opening for them,” Noata says. “There are simpler ways to cross
but not during the night. It’s only the evening but it gets stronger as the
night goes on.”

“So
I guess we wait, then.” Wilker says as he sits down against an air duct.

“Luckily
I brought some food from the ship.” Noata swings off his backpack and digs
through it.

“Wait
here? What if we’re seen?” Lance asks.

“Have
you seen the size of this place, we are nothing to them. Either we haven’t been
seen yet, or they don’t care enough to do anything about us,” Wilker states.

Lance
embraces Serena. To that, he can say nothing about. It’s going to be a long
wait.

Cole
continues to stares out the window of the office he’s in. The room is
completely empty, it’s office like carpet free of stains. It’s large enough to
hold an office meeting of Serephin size, the door is fifteen feet tall.

He
needs to save Thora, and he needs to do it now. But something in the back of his
head is telling him to wait. “No. I can’t wait,” he says to himself.

Yes,
you can.

If
you don’t something bad is going to happen.

To
wait or not, it plays in his head. He stares into the Skyeater’s star, he feels
like it’s the one saying that to him. He doesn’t know how long he can wait,
with Thora this close. He checks his watch, Thora’s signal beeps on. Hundreds
of dots appear around the ship, each dot changing its location second by
second.

He
guesses that means he’s going to wait, he hopes his intuition doesn’t fail him.
He sits in the middle of the room.

Tomorrow
is the day that this will all end, this war, the Eliite and he will finally get
to embrace Thora
again.

Thora
sits
on a plush chair
in
the cage with the others
humans. She stares out the glass facing the inside of the store. The others
just
stare
out the window that’s six feet
above them, gawking at their new world. But Thora doesn’t stare because she
knows it won’t change a damn thing.

The
cage is on the floor of the pet shop. There are various other aliens and
animals on the walls in cages. Some alone, some in groups, maybe the alone ones
are too violent to be put with their own kind. The five glass cages on the floor
have bipedal creatures in them. The one directly in front of her has a creature
that looks much like them but with blue skin.

She
gets up and presses against the glass, she can’t see their defining features
or
what makes them
so
different
from humans. It’s at this very moment that she remembers she’s completely
naked, breasts mushed against the glass. She yelps and jumps back. Nobody
noticed her or they just don’t care anymore.

She
hasn’t stared at anybody’s nakedness since she got here. She figures it’s
because they have other things on their mind.

Something
floats in front of her face, an extremely small metallic insect,
it’s
blue eyes are as piercing as a
laser
.
About the size of a fly on Earth. It buzzes and whizzes in her face.

“Oh.”

Is
it one of the insects from the other cages? She puts out her hand and it lands
on it. Maybe it it’s not all bad, there is still a lot she doesn’t know about
this world.

Its
eyes turn red and flies up and lands on her forehead. She doesn’t pull it off,
she was always good with insects and animals, much to the dismay of her parents
and Cole, as long as they’re harmless. It crawls toward her ear. She tries to
grab it but—

It
goes inside her ear, Thora screams and falls to the floor, screaming bloody
murder. Her hands clasp her head, fingers digging in her ear as she tries to
get it out. The cage reverberates with the screams of the others. Everybody
falls to the floor, twisting and twirling on the floor, their legs flailing.
Hundreds of the insects cover the cage. The others are covered head to toe with
the insects.

Hundreds
land on Thora as she convulses on the ground. Another one digs into her other
ear. It feels like it’s dredging into her brain.

“Get
out of my head!!”

Then
everything stops, her pain, the digging. Everything sounds so much clearer than
before as
if
she’s
just
had gobs of wax in her ears just pulled out. All the insects fly
away. She rubs her temples, it’s like it never happened.

The
pet shop worker stares down at her, crouching down over the cage. “An
unpleasant thing, those bugs. They search and prod one’s body to find the
communication core, which
is
—
“ She
taps on her wrist and a display pops up.

“Which
is your brain, in your
cranium
area, it seems.
We get so many creatures and
critters
through
here that we don’t have time to install things and find out what makes you,
you. So we have the bugs do it for us.” She looks around the cage, Thora is the
only one listening to her.

“With
this you can now understand every single language in the known universe, and
you can be tracked and you can be found. And if worse comes to worse it’s also
a kill switch.” She moves her hand and pats Thora who still lays on the ground,
she pats her as if she’s trying to calm a scared puppy. “So be a good little
human, alright? I’m expecting to sell the lot of you today.” She walks off as a
customer comes in.

Thora
sobs in her hands, the only thing worse than this is death. After a little
while, she gets back up to her feet and wipes herself off. She still shakes a
little.

Wiping
her face, she smudges blood on her hands. She never cleaned the blood off her
face, the blood from the man who got torn apart by a chainsaw right in front of
her.

She
doesn’t want to dirty the water they have. She bends over and picks up a
handful of the weird hay from the ground. With how wet her face is with tears
this should get most of it off. She wipes her face, removing most of the blood
from her faces.

But
not all.

She
thinks she’ll never get a warm bath again. 

She
sits back down on the plush chair, nobody talks to her. Over time they will get
used to their situation and adapt and open up. She’ll tell them what the
Serephin girl told her, only once they open up though. That’s what humans do,
adapt to survive. She stares at the glass, at the reflection in the glass. She
doesn’t has much else to do.

She
doesn’t know how much time has passed. Eliite come and go from the pet shop.
Looking at all the exquisite and exotic animals and pets. But most importantly the
newest arrivals, the ‘Humans’, in the glass cage in front of the shop, situated
in front of the giant glass window showing off their new prized processions to
the world. It’s the first shop on the Skyeater to have Humans, fresh from their
excursion to Earth.

Many
Serephins come and go looking at the humans. Whenever one looks down into the
cage, Thora makes a depressed undesirable face. Nobody wants a grumpy-looking
human, it doesn’t do well in dinner parties or wherever she thinks she’ll get
shown off. She doesn’t know if it worked but most of the Serephins just leave
after visiting the pet shop. Some muttering that they’ll get one when he or she
gets their next check or that they weren’t as ‘cute’ or ‘charming’ as they
thought.

Thora
smiles as she scares the last ones off. The cashier at the front pleads for
them to buy one. After they leave the cashier stares back at her, bored look on
her face.

“Too
intelligent for their own good,” The girl Serephin mutters, this is just a part
time job for her.

Thora
gets up from her red plush seat, she looks down at the seat. It molded to her
butt so well she can see the outlines of her intimate parts. And other things.

She
looks closer.

“
Ew
.”

She
hasn’t had a shower in days
, and she really didn't
clean herself properly after the conveyor incident.
She picks up some
hay off the ground and wipes the seat. She needs a shower fast.

She
looks around the cage, people are huddling in groups already. It’s not taking
that long for them to band together. People to her left are building beds and
areas out of the hay. Maybe she can ask to join one of them.

She
searches around for something to wash herself with. On the right there is a
pool of water, she’s not sure if it’s for drinking and washing but people are
already grabbing handfuls and washing themselves. The mother washings her child
with what looks like large clumps of hand soap. The Serephins had everything
planned for them already.

“Hey!”
She yells at the mother, she waves back. Thora walks toward her.

THUMP!
THUMP! Thora froze, it came from the store window. A little Serephin boy stares
at the window with what looks like his mother, he’s ten feet tall but only a
child by his features and Serephin standards. He taps again, finger pointing at
Thora.

The
mother walks in. Thora stares at her, panic in her eyes. The mother speaks to
the worker, she can’t hear her. The mother points at her.

“No,”
Thora says, stumbling back.

“No!”
She yells. She backed onto the glass. The worker walks up and wraps her hands
around her.

“No!
No! No!” Thora pleads. She punches and kicks the worker’s hands.

“Stop,”
the worker says simply.

A
shock rocks through Thora’s body, mind and soul. The bug. She falls limp as her
body is put into a box. She can barely hear what the worker said as she puts a
lid over her head.

“Now
now
, you be a nice little human okay.” The lid shuts
and Thora falls into darkness.

Thora
awakes, she lies against one of the walls of the box she’s in. Light peers out
of a row of holes that are at the top of the box. The top comes off, the mother
who bought her looks down. She’s in some kind of house.

The
mother picks her up and pulls her from the box. Thora doesn’t fight, she knows
enough not to. She’s placed in a glass encasing on the floor. The mother takes
the box and walks out the room. Thora wiggles her toes on the grass like
material that makes up the floor.

The
room is very much like Thora’s entertainment/guest room she had on Earth. There
is a couch in front of what looks like a giant television, a bookshelf built
into the wall to the right by the door and a computer on a desk to the right.
The floor is made out of a hardwood like material,
illuminated
by
the many windows that make up the front and
left walls.

Out
the window behind the television, it gives the best view of where she is. The
top of nice green hedge bushes marks the edges of the property, with the peaks
of the neighbor’s houses peeking over the edges. Modern houses, with odd
geographical shapes and angles, with windows built all over them. She can see
even farther and even sees some far more traditional houses, houses a lot like
the ones from Earth. Or at least America. A regular square or rectangle shape
with triangular rooftops. Thora guesses they take some of the culture of the
places they conquer
.

But
to this extent?

This
fast?

She
looks up, above and past the houses and to the other side. Hundreds of ships
fly in the sky in-between them clouding the view. But she gets a mostly clear look
of the other side. Skyscrapers and office buildings fill the other side,
pointing up like odd colored pillars in a sea of gray. It’s where the pet store
is and where she came from. She’s on the other side. Moved around like a cow.

The
Serephin boy appears in front of her. She leaps back with a yelp. He laughs.

“They
look so much just like us,” he says. His mother comes back in with another
large human sized box. She takes off the lid and pulls out a man. The same man
who talked to her when she first fell from the tube from the butcher line.

She
wasn’t the only one taken then. It doesn’t make her feel as much better. But to
be in this alone would be horrible. She would’ve probably
tried to
find a way to kill herself. But to have
someone with her she can talk to she feels a little relieved but not enough to
get rid of the emptiness she feels inside her at the moment. It doesn’t help
the hopelessness that they can’t do a damn thing.

The
mother places the man in the cage with her, he has a partly rosy smile. His
mannerism is saying it is ‘not’ as bad as he thought it was, so you shouldn’t
be as afraid either. Thora looks away from him and at the boy, or their new
master.

The
mother comes back into the room after disposing of the box. “It’s time to do
your homework,” she says starkly.

“I’ll
do it later,” he replies, staring a little too hard at Thora. Thora doesn’t get
the best vibe from him.

“Now,”
she says even more firmly from before. Thora does not want to get on her bad
side.

Great
she’s already adapting.

The
boy looks up, his face grotesque at not being able to play with his new pets.
“Okay!” he says with a little too much sass.

“I
just a got to do a few things,” he says. He bends over both of the humans in
the cage. “I’m going to deactivate the kill switch and the shocker. I find that
my pets aren’t that lively when I have it enabled. But if you misbehave then
I’ll turn it back on, okay?”

Thora
looks at the man only a couple of feet next to her. He looks back. They nod in
unison. He looks over their heads and deeper into the enclosure. Thora looks
back as well, she never noticed how diverse it actually was. The encasing takes
up half of the room, the back half is filled with extra thick and lush foliage.
Multiple types of trees, bushes and other vegetation, maple trees, pine trees
and multiple other alien trees. She thinks they have plants here from the
occupant’s planet. To make it fell like home. The vegetation is for the most
part green but its other parts are filled with vibrant colors, orange, reds,
pinks, blues, violets, it’s all a swirl of color to Thora’s eyes.

“Wow,”
she mutters, she’s never felt like she’s been this close to nature. Two water
ponds are on each side of the encasement. One for bathing, and one for
drinking, with a food composer machine next to it.  There is an object
near the trees, it looks just like a urinal except
it’s
way larger, Thora probably can fit her entire body in it. She’ll try that out
when the guy with her goes to sleep. She’s sure if she has to go she can wait
that long.

The
Serephin boy stands up. “Oh, yeah my name is Caer.”