Space Cadets (11 page)

History

Captain Wilkomen was reluctant to allow the folks from the alien ship to board the Conquistador and the people from the alien ship were reluctant to open dialogue on unfamiliar turf but Rick basically bullied everyone into agreeing to those terms.

We took two ambassadors with us back to the escape shuttle bay on the Conquistador and then shut the doors to lock out the void. Luckily, their armored suits had breathing apparatus or else they might’ve died during the spacewalk.

Wilkomen met us with an armed escort. I guess I don’t blame him for that.

I was a little pissed when he told us to retrieve the mech skins that belonged to Danny and Becky.

He said, “They are worth a fortune and they can be refurbished.”

I get where he was coming from, I just thought it was insensitive. I also think he still distrusts these people from the alien warship so he probably wants to make sure they don’t get their hands on our technology.

Rick and I went back and retrieved the dead A.C.E. units. When we returned, the captain had convened to his living quarters with the guests.

Rick shoved the guard at his door out of the way when the guy tried to refuse us entry and we went inside to listen to what the long lost humans had to say.

We took up posts at either side of the door when the captain didn’t order us out of his room.

The captain called the guy David and the girl Sarah. David and Sarah looked almost human, altered by selective breeding and environmental differences. They were taller than us and more spindly. But they were human; that was certain.

They both had their facial armor off now. They had fine hair on top of their heads but they had no eyebrows or lashes. David looked like he’d just shaved but he probably had no hair follicles on his chin.

Sarah said, “They bred us and conducted sadistic experiments. We don’t have a written history but we have word of mouth accounts of their brutality. They were testing our physical and mental limits but they were also amusing themselves at our expense. Then about fifty years ago we rose up and slaughtered them. Neither I nor David was born yet but our parents told us all about it. They said the uprising started slowly but as word spread, humans turned on their slave masters. The massacre was so vicious that the Bleeders fled their own planet. It’s been our planet ever since. We’ve been calling it Nova instead of Bleeder.”

The captain was stumped. This wasn’t what he’d expected at all. “So where did the Bleeders escape to?”

David shook his head. “We have no idea which planet they ran off to or even if they’re still alive. But we keep some of their warships posted out here to make sure they never get into this star system ever again.”

The captain said, “You’re not very good with the weapons systems, are you?”

“No. It’s not easy to interface with their technology. We’ve unlocked a couple of things but most of it eludes us. We were hoping our presence alone would be enough to deter their return.”

I shook my head and took a step into the center of the room. “The Bleeders are still alive. We captured one of their ships. They were so frightened of us that they committed suicide.”

David stiffened. He said, “I was worried they’d survived. I kind of hoped space would suffocate them before they found a viable planet to colonize.”

“There’s more,” I said. “When we captured them, they were coming from this star system.”

“That’s not possible. We didn’t see any alien ships.”

“It was small. Maybe too small to detect.”

“Why was it flying away from here then?”

I didn’t know the answer to that but I hazarded a guess anyway. “Maybe because its mission was over,” I said. “It had a weapons hold but by the time we captured it, the hold was empty.”

“We haven’t had any weapons detonate or deploy on Nova though.”

“That’s good. Maybe they didn’t even use them on your planet. But if they did, maybe there’s still time to find them.”

David lifted his palm to his face and said into it, “Alert ground control about a possible breach. A Bleeder ship was discovered coming from Nova and it seems it might have deployed some type of weapon.”

Rick added, “Our tech geeks can send your people readouts of the types of electrical and chemical signatures to look for.”

Ground control said, “I’ve alerted the authorities.” Then he said candidly, “What are our ancestors like then?”

David looked around the room and said, “I don’t have the proper vocabulary to describe what they’ve achieved in such a short amount of time. You’d have to see for yourself.”

“Take some pictures for us.”

“Only if they say it’s ok.”

An alarm sounded which meant someone had arrived in the skin bay. The captain ignored it so the arrival must have been expected.

When a modified A.C.E. unit walked into the room, I could tell it was Peggy, Rick’s fellow warrior and savior of the Conquistador, just by the markings on the skin.

It was overkill now though. Apparently the aliens were weak cowards, already toppled by our cousins long ago.

Weapons of Global Destruction

With the help of the tech guys, the Novans were able to find several weapons of global destruction buried equidistant from each other across the surface of the planet.

It took a full week to find them all, during which we were allowed, even encouraged, to move our warships into orbit around Nova. Everyone was treating this like a family reunion.

No one knew why the weapons hadn’t detonated already. One of the tech guys said, “Maybe they malfunctioned or maybe the aliens had to get far enough away before they detonated them to avoid the shockwave?”

We had no idea so we accepted his explanation easily, if only to move past it and on to bigger things.

Nova

Nova orbited a star close in size, age and brightness to our sun. The planet was about ten percent smaller than Earth with an atmosphere that was comparable but hardly ideal. But the human inhabitants had taken to it and adapted over the six or eight generations they’d been there.

The couple million people that had been abducted had grown to over a hundred million in the two hundred years since.

The truth is that we felt bad for them. If we’d known any of them had survived, maybe we would have searched out the Bleeders more vigorously? But they seemed pretty happy, all things considered.

The Novan council shuttled up to meet us in person. There were four members, with four remaining behind, just in case.

We could only guess what
just in case
really meant. Did it mean, just in case this was a trap and we killed them? Did it mean, just in case we abducted them? But it wasn’t unreasonable for them to be suspicious of us. We were guests here; they got to call the shots in this neighborhood.

David and Sarah went back to their own ship after we’d grilled them about the entire history of their people. I’m pretty sure they were sick to death of answering our stupid questions.

The captain and his first mate were even granted access to the surface but they declined the invitation.

The Novans had tried their best to acclimate to the alien tech but it was pretty obvious they hadn’t quite figured it out yet. Their suits were too big and clumsy.

Their ships jittered around sometimes out of control. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Mech Madness

The delay in action gave me a chance to talk to Rick a little more about our predicament. We were both dead, and I for one was not handling it very well.

He tried his best to console me. He reminded me of those four thousand poor unfortunate souls stuck in their mechs because the cryo-freeze facility their bodies were housed in was attacked by terrorists. He said they were lucky they were uploaded in skins or they wouldn’t be alive today, since their fleshy bodies rotted away.

But that just served to remind me that my body was probably in the early stages of decomposition already. That’s an image not easily shrugged off.

He added, “Just make sure to maintain perspective, ok? Those four thousand mechs went crazy over the years but that’s because they fed off of each other’s misery. Stay positive and you just might keep your sanity.”

I didn’t know they’d gone mad but I guess that explained why I’d never heard of their exploits; they were being kept away from all the action because they were unstable.

Rick said, “If you ever run across the warship
Dreadnought
, just keep your distance from the mechs. That’s where all four thousand are stationed. It doesn’t even have a human crew or a captain. It used to but they all resigned because the mechs drove them nuts.”

I wish Rick hadn’t consoled me. Now I had even more worries running through my mind. Like how long would it take for me to lose my humanity? How long until I lost my mind? And even worse, what would happen to me when mechs were no longer needed? It seemed like the war with the Bleeders was approaching quickly, so what happened when it was over? Too many questions and not enough answers is what drove the four thousand mechs nuts on the Dreadnought, I just know it.

Boom Ship

The weapons of global destruction were impossible to safely reverse engineer which meant they couldn’t be disarmed. One by one, they were launched into orbit and put inside a little spherical Bleeder craft just like the one we had captured a month ago.

The Novan council decided that we should tow the alien ship behind us until we reached the new Bleeder colony and then use the weapons on the Bleeders. They thought that would be tough justice.

Relations were already smooth enough that our side didn’t bristle at being told what to do. That was the good news. The bad news was that the Novans had no idea where the Bleeder planet was.

We nicknamed the alien ship carrying the weapons,
Boom.

The Novans insisted that the Boom ship be allowed to travel to the outskirts of their star system, for safety’s sake.

That made sense so we agreed.

All in all, we got along like long lost cousins, which is exactly what we were.

Dreadnought

Everything went to shit as soon as the Dreadnought showed up beside us in orbit.

At first no one knew what to make of it. It took Captain Wilkomen a full minute to even recall where he knew the ship from. When the realization hit him, his face fell and went ashen.

The Dreadnought didn’t try and open a line of communication with us. And they didn’t wait around for long.

Almost immediately, they broke orbit and headed right for Nova. We tried to stop them but they ignored us. They must have known already that the planet was friendly but they didn’t care.

We fired on them but their ship held up.

Only then did we notice that the alien ships orbiting Nova with us were being taken apart from the inside. The humungous Bleeder ship that led us here exploded, breaking clean in half. Novans drifted out of the gaping holes on each side, dead or dying very quickly. And then mechs (our mechs) appeared in the openings and launched themselves towards the planet. They looked dirty and rusted out, even from so far away. They belonged to the four thousand who’d lost their marbles.

I watched as the Dreadnought nose dived into the atmosphere. It would burn up but the occupants didn’t give a fuck. We saw them exit the warship right before it disappeared from view beneath the clouds.

Four thousand space Marine mechs jumped ship. The sight of that will haunt my dreams forever. I’ve never seen anything so formidable and menacing in my entire life.

I couldn’t even guess what they were up to, but after twenty minutes of stunned silence, we found out. They were killing off the population en masse.

A council member hailed us from the surface and asked why we were attacking them. We insisted it had nothing to do with us, but the council member didn’t buy it.

The four member council onboard the Conquistador with us watched in stunned silence in the command room.  They looked at us like we had something to do with it, even though they must’ve known we didn’t. Then they fled for their shuttle as though we might stop them.

This was very bad news for us.

The captain sent word to the President about our situation and then we waited for instructions. A decision like defending an alien planet from our own soldiers was way above the captain’s pay grade.

But no matter what was decided, this was not going to end well.

Too Late

It took almost two God Damn hours to hear back from the President. By the time he told us to intervene on the Novans behalf, it was already too late.

As soon as the captain was done talking to the President, we got hailed from the Novan surface. The captain brought the hail up on the screen and when we saw a mangled, defiled A.C.E. unit staring back at us, we knew we were way too late to assist the Novans.

The mech said, “This is our planet now. Here, we can forget all about our past lives and create an existence that makes sense to us. If you attack us or come down here, we will destroy you all.”

Captain Wilkomen asked, “Will you allow the survivors to go into exile?”

“There are no survivors.”

The captain disgustedly severed the link and as soon as the mech’s face disappeared from the screen, he ordered, “Drop the biggest EMP we have. In fact, drop them all.” Then he ordered the other two warships to do the same.

We waited as the EMP’s dropped beneath the cloud cover. When we were not immediately attacked, we knew the EMP’s had done their job. The four thousand insane mechs had been taken off-line; in effect they’d been killed.

It had all happened so suddenly. It was anticlimactic.

Rick whispered to me, “That’s why it’s important to shield your components.”

I nodded even though I was barely listening to him.

We had just orbited a planet while its inhabitants had been rendered extinct. We were complicit in the mass extinction in that we had created the very things that caused it.

Then we actively killed off the next generation of inhabitants, the mechs, before they’d even named the planet.

The whole affair was idiotic, uncalled for and horrifying.

One of the ensigns started to cry and Peggy walked away in disgust.

We didn’t have much time to dwell on it though. We received word that the Boom ship with the weapons of global destruction had disappeared.