Nathan Hystad - The Event

“They’re in there… well, one level up, actually. We tried to fight them off at the start, but they shot and killed a whole room. A thousand of us dead in an instant. We’ve kept our heads down ever since.” She could barely stand.

“How many of them are there?” I asked.

“I don’t know. There were at least ten that I saw. But this place is huge and we think all halls lead to the central control room. Three days in, a group tried to take over and break down the doors, but there was no way in. Most of the rooms filled with a gas early on. Some sort of sedative. It just knocked them out. They eventually just went back to wait for their deaths with the rest of us.” Her shoulders slumped forward, hair spilling over her pale face.

“I think we have a way in. What did they look like?” I asked on a hunch.

“Like you and me. Human.”

“How did you know we weren’t with them, then?” Magnus asked tensely.

“Because they all look like the same woman.”

“Hybrid clones, maybe? Makes sense. Why ship your purebreds off to die when you have already proven dispensable hybrids? The bastards.” At that moment, the guilt I had for destroying the last of the Kraski from the universe drifted away into the cosmos. “Stay back. We’re going to go in and take control of this place. Magnus, let’s double back to that stairwell and get moving. Remember how we got on the ship? I think that the technology allows us to pull through solids toward the power module of each ship. In this case, that should be through the doors upstairs.”

“I hear you loud and clear, Dean. Let’s move. Lady, you might want to find a room down the way. Can you try to gather everyone who’s well enough to fight and bring them up a flight in ten minutes? We may need the backup.” Magnus swung his gun into ready position.

The woman nodded lightly and took off down the hall. We turned to the stairwell and worked our way up a flight. Were they watching us with cameras? Did they know we were on our way to them? Maybe they were too smug and cocky to even be worried.

We exited through the sliding door out of the dimly lit stairwell, and into a hallway with softly flashing lights. It occurred to me that maybe something behind the doors at the end of the hall was pulling energy from the breaker or whatever they used on these things.

Magnus took the lead, and soon we were at the door, each standing at either side of the metal slab, guns raised. I took a moment to calm my breathing, which was getting labored as adrenaline surged through my body. I looked up to Magnus and gave him a smile that more likely looked like a grimace. The pin on my suit felt heavy this time as I readied to push it. Magnus raised three fingers and slowly lowered them one by one. At zero, we both pressed our buttons and were pulled by a soft green glow. Magnus was heading upwards, so I pushed him forward through the door; he grabbed me and dragged me through with him.

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?”