TWENTY-SIX
We let go and rolled to the ground. Well, Magnus rolled and I kind of flopped, but I quickly recovered to my feet. They hadn’t been expecting us, so our fire took them a few of them down in a hurry. We didn’t have time to think or to feel bad about killing them anymore. We had to save everyone before they ran out of air or burned up in the sun. It was them or us. We kept firing in the open room, and soon there were at least a dozen of them on the ground. Magnus moved left and I went right, each of us attempting to clear a side of the engineering room. It was a large space with glowing pillars and metal everywhere. The floors were a metallic grate much like the rest of the container, and the pillars gave a lot of places for someone to hide.
Something moved ahead, and I paused, motioning to Magnus to stop too. He covered me, pointing his gun in the direction of the noise. I stepped lightly over to the pulsing power source and raised my gun. “Step out!” I yelled.
Before I could act, I heard a foot plant down on the metal flooring behind me. I cursed as I spun to see my wife pointing a gun at me. “It’s too late,” she said, her voice unmistakably Janine’s. “We have won, and your planet is ours. Why bother fighting us?”
We stood in a stalemate, pointing guns at each other. I’m sure my jaw was hanging open as my brain tried to understand what it was seeing. “Janine?” I asked quietly, knowing it wasn’t really her. I scanned the bodies on the floor, holes torn through them from our blasters. They were all her. Janine’s dead face looked at me from a few yards away.
“Thing is, we didn’t lose. The Kraski are dead. All of them.” I gauged her reaction and saw her eyes go wide.
“That’s impossible. They couldn’t have been defeated. That would mean…” Realization crossed over her face. “You brought it up to them? Then we were betra–” A beam cut her down before she could finish her thought, but from behind me, not from Magnus.
“I’m going to come out and lower my weapon. Don’t fire. I’m here to help you,” said another voice, identical to Janine’s.
“Be sure that you do.” Magnus appeared at my side, gun still raised.
She stepped out and, as promised, she lowered the large weapon to the floor, a heavy clink as the gun tapped the metal floor. She was wearing a black jumpsuit like all the others: a dozen Janines floating in space with me. Of all the crazy things I’d been through in the past week, this was quickly reaching the top of the list.
“You said you can help us? How?” I asked.
She smiled at me, tears forming at her eyes. It reminded me so much of my long-dead wife that I almost broke down right there. I stuffed the emotion down, thinking about the people we still had to save.
“Enough smiling! My people are going to die if you don’t hurry the hell up!” I yelled, heart racing.
Magnus set his hand on my shoulder.
“I’ve been waiting for a moment I could help but couldn’t find it. I’m the one who cut the engines in the first place so the hauler wouldn’t make it to the sun. I knew your wife, Dean. I’ve seen pictures of you. Tell me what happened, and then we can help your friends out here.” She looked straight into my eyes as she spoke. There was no looking down to the left, or nervous twitching. I wasn’t a cop, but I felt like I could trust what she was saying.
“Your creators, the Kraski, sent hybrids like yourself down to Earth a decade ago to infiltrate us, and convince us to turn that damned Shield off. Turns out their little slave race, the Deltra, were the ones who planted the thing there centuries ago, right when their planet was taken over,” I said, gauging her reaction. She twitched at the Deltra part, just enough for me to notice. “They spent the next few centuries trying to find a way to get the Kraski to come, so they could execute their plan. They became trusted enough, but somehow convinced the Kraski that they would also die by the Shield. No one could get close to it without rotting away, or at least that’s what the Kraski thought. I use the term thought because from what I understand, they’d packed up and abandoned wherever the hell they were from to take over our world and leave us for dead.”
She kept still and didn’t say anything, so I continued, my blood still pounding in my ears from all the built-up frustration of the whole scenario. “Thing is, the Deltra had plans of their own, and they stopped me on Earth to tell me they could help, and that the Kraski were bad news. We took the Shield up to the mother ship, landed, and turned the thing on, melting them all from the inside out.”
Janine’s double gasped at this, trembling slightly at first; then she crouched down, looking like she was going to be sick. “It’s true, then. They’re all gone?”
“Yeah, we killed them and flew here in Deltra and Kraski ships. Two more humans are outside now waiting on us. So what can you do to help us?” Magnus asked.
She rocked back and forth in her crouched position, but slowly stood up after a few moments. A wide smile crossed over her face and she waved us to follow her.
“Those arrogant bastards created life where it wasn’t meant to be created. Human-Kraski hybrids like me just weren’t meant to exist in the universe. Then they get us to risk our lives and die for their cause, telling us that they would live in harmony with the other half of our genetic makeup, the humans. Close to a hundred died while on Earth, some within minutes of setting foot on the planet. Each of us had a different tolerance for the Shield, and those that lasted the longest were cloned even more. Janine was one of the first to have the gene of survival, even though she died after a few years. Hence why you see so many of us fitting her description.” She was typing away at a central computer, sliding digital scales up until they turned from red to green.
I suddenly felt bad for killing them all when we entered this room. As if she read my mind, she said, “Not all of us had empathy for humans. Every one of these on the floor here were Kraski to the bone. They obeyed like the animals they were. I tried to reason with them, to tell them that what we were doing was wrong, but they wouldn’t listen. I was lucky they didn’t kill me.”
“What are you doing now?” Magnus asked.
“Turning the air back on, on all floors. We also have water and food stores. Not enough to keep everyone fed, but enough to distribute to those still alive out there. This was a one-way mission, so they didn’t give us a lot. But the Kraski had been planning on bringing their own people in these units… only that wasn’t to be.” I was still hesitant, but she wasn’t giving us a lot of reasons to not trust her at this point. And she was hinting at an even deeper conspiracy that I wasn’t ready for.
There was a pounding at the door, and I remembered asking that lady to bring people for backup. I ran over to the door and tried to open it. Nothing. “Is there a trick to this?” I yelled.
“Sorry, fingerprint recognition only.” She hurried over, and before she opened it, she extended her hand to me. It shook lightly as I clasped it. “I’m Mae. They gave us all human names.”
We shook, and I had to remind myself this wasn’t Janine, but a very convincing replica. “Dean, but I guess you knew that.”