Chris Randolph - Stars Rain Down

As they traveled, he was taken aback by how quickly nature had reclaimed her world. Jack had always heard that the Earth abides, but the swiftness of it disturbed him. The ashen cities were already grown over with fresh vegetation, and only the twisted metal spires hinted that anything had been there at all. Human civilization had been erased and forgotten. It left him feeling like civilization hadn’t been an integral part of the world, but had rather existed in spite of it. Mankind had been bailing water from a leaky ship, and in the absence of his attention, the tides rose up and swept it all away.

Jack and his companions stopped every few hours so the flyer could rest and graze. It wasn’t like the larger cuttlefish in this regard, which were self-sufficient and capable of space travel. This flyer was a commuter, and the city was its natural habitat. It was less than ideal outside of the city, and its reliance on external energy made it essentially useless after nightfall.

By the end of the first day, they reached the shores of the Red Sea where they camped for the night. Although Jack logically understood that the others could kill him at any time, the danger felt doubled once the sun went down. It bothered him so much that he hardly slept.

When morning came, they returned to the air and quickly crossed the sea, and Jack was once again in the Mideast. Another seven hours after that, they arrived at the former site of Al Saif on the shores of the Dead Sea, and Jack confirmed what Kai had told him. Nothing remained of the base but a trash heap, the enemy having overrun the resistance more than a month before.

After an exhaustive search, Jack found himself wandering the ruins, and he paced for a long time while imagining how the battle went down, piecing together what he could from the debris. The airstrip had been torn to shreds, and various parts of the temporary buildings littered the ground, but he didn’t see vehicle wreckage anywhere.

“Satisfied?” Kai asked.

“Not quite the right word, but yeah…”

He tried to reconcile what he remembered of the base’s layout with the destruction all around him, in hopes of discovering a hidden weapons cache somewhere. It was a more difficult task than he might have gussed.

Kai had a frustrated look on his face. He was restless, but he held his tongue.

“I bet you’re wondering what we’re doing here,” Jack said.

“The question crossed my mind.”

“Trying to figure out if you’re telling the truth about… well, anything. Seems you are.”

“The world is full of surprises, no?”

Jack smiled in spite of himself. “Now, there’s good news and bad news in this slag pile. The good news is that the resistance saw the attack coming, and evacuated before you all got here.”

“How can you tell?”

“Trucks, planes. This place was rotten with ‘em, but there’s no sign of any here. The only explanation is that they got the hell out of dodge before the fireworks started.”

“Where’d they get the information”

“Ancient Chinese secret. I’ll never tell.”

“Fair answer. And the bad news?”

“Since they had time to pack up and leave, I’m betting they took most of their supplies with ‘em. I was hoping to pick up a little extra firepower, but there’s nothing but rubbish here.”

Kai looked at him like he was absolutely mad. “Maybe I wasn’t clear, Jack. There’s a legion marching toward the Ark right now. Armor, siege weapons and more than a million ground troops. We can’t fight them on our own.”

“I know,” Jack said, “but I like to keep my options open. You can solve a lot of problems with a honking big pile of explosives.”

Looking at the remains of Al Saif didn’t exactly fill him with confidence. It looked like a hurricane had hit the base. An angry hurricane that was on fire, and full of lawnmower blades.

Off on the other side of the ruins, the rhino waved and shouted something. His deep voice carried a surprising distance over open ground. Kai cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted something back in a language Jack was beginning to recognize if not understand.

“What’d he say?”

“He asked if you were done moping around yet.”

“And?”

“I told him you’d be done soon. Don’t make a liar of me, Jack.”

He wasn’t sure whether to laugh or be angry at that. “We’ll hit the road in a bit. Riddle me this though, Mr. Space Ninja… what the hell am I supposed to do?”

“If I knew that, I’d have done it already. Don’t worry. You’re a resourceful guy. You’ll think of something.”

Jack shook his head. “You either have too much faith, or a really strange sense of humor.”

The alien picked up a piece of ruined metal and spun it around in his hand, trying to determine its original purpose. After a moment of fruitless head scratching, he cocked his arm back and threw it far into the distance.

It occurred to Jack that the hunk of metal must have weighed more than twenty kilos, yet Kai handled it like a baseball.

“They could have at least left me a bottle of hooch,” Jack said after a while.

“Hooch?”

“Booze. Alcohol. Fermentation of fruit or grain, ingested to produce intoxication.”

“You had me at alcohol.”

“Ah.”

Jack took one last look at the wreckage all around, shook his head and said, “That’s enough. Let’s get out of here.” Then he turned and started off toward the flyer.

Kai followed. “Where to?”

“I want to see this alien legion. You know where they’ll be?”

“Give or take. About two days ride at our current rate.”

“Would they pay any attention to one of their own flyers buzzing them?”

“Probably not, as long as you don’t act too suspicious.”

“Good. I’m gonna prep the flyer. Go get the others.”

“Will do,” Kai said, and then he got a funny look on his face. “By the way… ummm… what’s a ninja?”

Jack laughed. “They were assassins who excelled at sneaking into enemy castles and eliminating targets unseen. The movies got carried away, and portrayed them as unstoppable killing machines with mystical abilities. It’s kind of silly.”

“I learn something new every day,” Kai said with a smile. Then he turned and ran off at a speed that’d make an Italian sports car blush. It took Jack the entire walk back to the flyer to convince himself what he saw was real, and not just some fanciful hallucination.

Jack and his four alien companions traveled north, from the dusty beige of the Mideast to the green hills and roiling mountains of Eastern Turkey. Jack had never seen the Turkish landscape before, and the mountains there spiked out of the ground defiantly as if the Earth itself were invading the sky. The intensity of the steep mountains and gorges took his breath away, and he badly wanted to stop and explore.

There wasn’t any time for that, though, and they flew on. Turkey gave way to green Georgia, followed by the Caucasus Mountains, a line of snow capped peaks which stood in a row like jagged teeth. On the other side, they found themselves in the remains of Russia, whose abandoned farmland stretched out in all directions like a patchwork quilt, so large that Jack thought he’d never see the end of it.

The colder climate and high altitudes slowed their progress, but they finally caught up with the Oikeyan legion after nearly three days of travel. The legion wasn’t difficult to find, like a insanely large herd of buffalo lumbering across the land, stretching more than fifty kilometers from beginning to end. It was populated by strange creatures, some as large as container ships, and attended by swarms of flyers darting from one part of the pack to the next, like flocks of birds before a storm. The multitude of stomping feet kicked up a dust cloud that billowed out toward the horizon and covered the ground in a dense and impenetrable haze.