I had to admit, it did look a little unsafe to just waltz in. Anything, at this point, could happen. I went in first and signaled Ed to trail behind me, as we followed a path leading straight to the electric and ventilation system.

“Check your com pad and try to see if you can find a signal,” I said, speaking to Ed, “That way, we can signal them to our position.”

“Okay,” Ed replied quickly and took out his com pad from his pocket. I could hear him type in something on his com pad as I crawled slowly, making my way towards the ducts.

“I got a signal,” he said, sounding excited. “They are saying something about a creature inside our school, wreaking havoc. All the guards within the vicinity are all headed towards it in order to buy time, to allow the students to escape safely. It looks like we are on our own for now.”

Hmm! A creature was in our school and all the guards were fighting it? I mean, just one guard would be enough to take out any creature, considering the weapons the guards carried. But to activate the school’s orbital gun, and have it fire more than once, meant something was terribly wrong. I had to get out there and see for myself what was truly going on, because I wasn’t buying all this talk for one second. It was probably just some cruel prank my classmates were playing on us. Finally, we reached the end of the tunnel and saw one of the duct fans still spinning. It was spinning too fast for us to just go right through it, so we had to find some way to jam it, but with what? I looked around and saw a loose cord. With my laser pliers, I cut it into two and jammed the other half into the fans. There was a terrible noise as the lights flickered on and off continuously.

“You Idiot!” Ed roared, with anger in his voice, “Tell me you didn’t just cut the power grid cord and jam it into the vent’s fan?”

Oh no! I think that was what happened since all the power went off and the cord glittered with electric sparks. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! What was I thinking when I did that? We heard another loud noise and the ground trembled beneath our feet. The building was beginning to give out as small cracks appeared everywhere. It was only a matter of time before the entire floor gave out, and the whole building collapsed to the ground. With the fan jammed, I went through one of its loophole and reached the other side. Ed followed behind me, and we both hurried towards the other side of the building, scanning for an exit without any sign of fire. By some miracle, we found an empty elevator shaft, leading all the way to the ground. We were very fortunate that the elevator had powered down when the electric grid cord had been cut by me, of course.

“Let’s go,” I said to Ed, as I jumped on one on the elevator electric cables.

With no current running through them, the cables were harmless and quite useful as a means to escape. We proceeded down by sliding below, using the smooth surface of the electric cables until we reached the bottom. Once there, I opened the escape vent, near the elevator, and used it to get outside. Phew! As we got outside, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing with my own two eyes. Half the school had been destroyed and the fight was still going on—somewhere behind our dorm building. Seriously, could one creature really be responsible for this much destruction? Honestly, who were they trying to fool? It looked like the after math of one big battle of plasma ballistics. The ground was filled with injured people as smoke was everywhere. Okay, maybe this wasn’t a prank after all. I watched as our dorm building fell right in front of me, like a tall, old tree. From the rubble, I noticed several guards firing their weapons at something. It was really big, blue, and didn’t seem to be affected by their weapons at all. The great creature ravaged through the soldiers like they were toys, destroying buildings in the process. I stood there, watching in silence, with my mouth wide open.

“What are you still doing here?” the faculty teacher, Miss Manrie, spoke to me, shaking me up. She was a slender, light tan, young woman—ten years my senior, with bright brown eyes that intimidated most of the students to their britches. “Get to your hover vehicle and flee now!”

She held my shoulder and shook me deeply, knocking some sense back into me. Her lips smirked with anger and a slight sense of fear. She looked back after hearing the creature roar and pushed me away. “Go now.”

“Okay, I am going,” I responded and slowly moved towards my mobile vehicle. I looked back at her and watched her still signal the other students away from falling buildings. “But what’s going on, Miss Manrie?”

“No time to explain,” she responded, harshly waving us both away. “You two, flee while you can!”

We listened and obeyed her instructions as we dropped the subject and dashed for our vehicles.

“Message me when you get to your house,” Ed said, sliding into his hover vehicle. “I am going to find my girlfriend, she is probably in her dorm.”

“Okay, Ed,” I said, sincerely, saying goodbye to my friend. “Be careful out there, and get out if it’s too dangerous.”

“Well, you know me,” Ed laughed and he flew off out of the parking lot, going towards the girls’ dormitory.

“That’s probably why I’m worried,” I whispered and turned on my vehicle, ready to leave.

I knew Ed, all too well, to know how reckless and irresponsible he could be at times. I really hoped he wouldn’t do anything stupid, because he was my friend and also my research project partner.

But still! Why was this all happening now? It just didn’t feel real or I was just refusing to acknowledge the facts in front of me. Before taking off in my vehicle, I looked back one time and noticed the giant blue monster looking back at me. It was so big and frightening; it sent a chill down my spine. I had never seen anything like it before—it wasn’t something normal. I felt like I was seeing something out of a horror movie. The ground collapsed as a huge explosion went off, trapping a lot of people underground. No! I didn’t believe this for a second, but this was happening. Where did the explosion come from and who caused it?

 

“No, this can’t be happening,” I screamed and suddenly opened my eyes.

I was sweating and still unable to move my body at all. It was just a dream and yet all of this had happened in my past. It was the first time I had encountered the terror beast and definitely not my last. Oh! The old man was still working on my armor suit, from the other room, as I lay there motionless. He glanced at me for a second, and didn’t say a thing for some unknown reason. All I saw him do was get back to typing some instructions into the central processor of the machine remodeling my armor. I found it surprising and yet amazing how well he was able to adapt and understand modern day technology, so easily. Just what was he? Possibly, an alien or some sort of genetically enhanced being. Could I really trust him?

Darn! I didn’t have a choice—seeing as that, he was the only being I could find at the moment, on this desolate planet. But, still, why was I having that dream now? There was something about that time I just couldn’t forget and I didn’t know what exactly. It felt like my dreams were reminding me of something important, something to do with that day I had forgotten. I took one big breath and got frustrated at the thought of not being able to wipe the sweat from my face. I was stuck in this position while my armor was being repaired. After a few minutes, I gave up trying to move my limbs and closed my eyes, hoping to get some real sleep. I could only hope that I would not start dreaming of my past again, because it was starting to get annoying and irritating.

4

Something sure smelled good, like roasted beef with extra sauce and garlic? Nope! I think that was just my burned skin I smelled. For some unknown reason, I smelled like tasty food. I opened my eyes slowly, like I had awakened from a long sleep. The light in the room was so bright; it hurt my eyes every time I blinked. I shielded my eyes completely, with my right arm, while getting up slowly. “This is amazing,” I gasped in surprise.

My movements had become almost fluid, like the armor had become an extension of my own body. Damaged and broken parts had been repaired and replaced with new alloy coverings. The armor was so compact and light, my limbs moved effortlessly like feathers. I slowly turned my head, tweaking my neck back and forth. My muscles cracked loudly like I had been motionless for a long time. I looked up and did not see the alien man in the other room.

He had gone off somewhere without me. I needed to find him because he had answers I desperately needed. I moved out of the compartment, unhurriedly, stretching my body. Something was still off—there was power still surging through my armor from the nuclear power core. I could feel it still flowing from the central power processor, running deep into every circuit of the suit. Oh well! As long as it was stable, there was nothing to worry about, for now.

To my surprise, repairs had begun on the interior of the ship. Large metal sheets of platinum had been molded onto the dented walls, sealing the air pressure back in. I yawned out wildly, as I admired the handy work of someone truly brilliant. But who could have done this? Was this the alien man? No, it was impossible for one man to do all this in such a short time.

Suddenly, I saw people inside the ship; however, this wasn’t the entire crew. They moved silently through the corridors, hurrying across the metal halls, very quickly. Their facial expression was alarming and they showed signs of life in their eyes. I looked at them for a second, wondering what was going on in their minds.

“Do you know where my father is?” a kid stopped and looked me directly in the eye.

My mouth opened, but no words came out. I bent down on one knee and thought carefully.

Honestly, I had no idea how to respond to the kid’s question at all. How would I answer?

I didn’t even know that a kid was part of the crew; he must have been a son of a crew member or someone who was smuggled onto our ship, when we were still back on earth. But if that was true, then where were they when we first arrived on this planet?

“I don’t know, but when I do, I will let you know. It will work out somehow.” I smiled with a nod and patted him on the head.

He smiled faintly, letting tears drip from his dark brown eyes. I got back on my feet and gradually walked away, leaving him to his thoughts.

My first objective was to find the alien man—every clue I had pointed directly towards him. He was hiding valuable information I desperately needed to acquire. He had fixed my armor, but to what extent? Was I going to die? I had to know something and he held all the playing cards in his hands.

But where could he be? I thought about it for a few seconds and the only thing that came to me was the main ship’s engine room. After all, this man wanted to leave this planet as soon as possible; so it would make sense that I would find him there. More people walked past me, ignoring me, as they hurried away to unknown compartments. I looked at them for a minute before walking away, to the engine compartment. Once I got there, I looked around the entire compartment and found him among a few remaining engineers that had survived the incident. By some miracle, he was blending in rather well. His skin had taken a dark tan almost like mine. The alien man had even cut and colored his hair to a brown dark color, even changing his eye color. I was taken back for a while. He had completely camouflaged himself like a chameleon. Just what was his end game? I walked cautiously and approached him without drawing any attention to myself.

“We need to talk,” I bent down and whispered close to his ear.

He looked up at me and frowned frantically, without ushering a word. The other men didn’t notice our suspicious gestures and continued to work on the engines. He dropped the electric faucet down and got up to follow me. I led him down towards the secret basement beneath engine 14. Cautiously, I looked both ways and listened quietly, to make sure we were alone.

“Woke up cranky, I see,” the old man snickered in a comment while working on a particle accelerator. “It’s amazing that you made it through that entire process in one piece. Maybe, it’s because your genes mutated, when you first fell into that hole, causing the activation of the massive neon alpha particles you stored in your body.”

What! I didn’t even have a clue about what he was talking about.

“What does that mean?” I asked him with a puzzled expression. “If what you say is true, then I am either very fortunate or very unlucky. Just tell me something, old man, what is happening to me?”

He glanced at me for a few seconds with curious eyes and then burst out loud in laughter, “I don’t really know honestly. You have somehow gained the ability to breathe the outside air like me without the need of an oxygen tank. Your cells and lungs are still for the most part normal. However, it appears you have an extra organ, connected to your heart—which might explain why you can breathe outside. I am sorry, Den, but the process is irreversible; the neon alpha particles bonded permanently with your central nervous system. I can’t say for sure what the long-term side effects will be; however, I will run a few more diagnostics before I can know for sure.”

Oh! It wasn’t as bad as I thought, but I imagined the worst was still to come in the following weeks. But how and why did I now possess an extra organ? Oh well! There was no sense in thinking more about it, since there was nothing I could do to remove it from my body; plus it had proved useful in keeping me alive through this whole ordeal.

Out of the blue, he looked shocked as he walked towards one of the engines. “This engine has been tempered with; someone on the inside did this.”

I walked towards him and observed where he was pointing at. He was absolutely right—there was something jammed inside the engine turbines, something very dense and strong. Who could have done this? A frightening thought suddenly dawned on me. “I’ll be back. I need to check something.”

I left him where he was standing and got up to the second level, to check the other engines. It was the same thing. All the engines had malfunctioned, due to inside interference. In theory, it explained why the ship had spiraled out of control. If something was jammed into the engines, then there was no way we could have regained control of ship. Honestly, not the answer I was expecting to find. I walked slowly to engine one and bent down to observe the metal thing jammed in the turbine. This was no ordinary metal, it was still pulsing with an unknown energy source. I gripped my hand on it and tried to pull it out. It was stuck hard and it looked like it had been placed there during descent onto the alien planet. Things were definitely not looking too good at the moment. I got up and went back to the alien man, beneath engine 14.

“Well, you were right, all the engines were sabotaged.”

“Do you know anyone in your crew who could have done this?”

“No, I don’t, but I think I will soon enough.”

He sighed slowly and began walking towards the metal stairs, in silence. He glanced back at the engine, with a face of frustration before continuing up. I couldn’t help, but wonder what he was thinking. He was hiding something and I needed to know what.

“Wait! I have to ask you something.”

“Can it wait? I have to get back to work.”

“No, it can’t, now listen carefully. You have something I want and I need it now.”

“And what is it?”

“Answers!”

He laughed and began to walk upstairs, ignoring me completely. I guess diplomacy wasn’t my area of expertise. I quickly took out my pistol and pointed it directly at him. The alien man stopped moving after hearing the safety go off. “You don’t want to do this, kid.”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“I see,” he turned his head and walked back towards me. “What do you want to know?”

“Who were those people who kidnapped my crew,” I growled at him, pointing the gun at his chest cautiously.

He didn’t answer. His eyes looked cold and dark like the deep abyss. I detected no ill intent towards me written on his face. There was something rather odd and strange about the way he was standing. I was no expert at body language, but I somehow knew to tread carefully around him.

“You will find out soon enough,” he replied to me with a cold smile. “The truth is a two way door. You can’t learn something without losing something.”

“Enough riddles,” I walked up to him and grabbed his neck with my free hand. “What are you hiding? This time, I won’t hesitate.”

“Your gun has no bullets,” he chuckled without the slightest sense of fear in his eyes.

What! I took my eyes off him, for a second, to check the weight of my gun. Before I knew it, he had slipped out of my arm and had me pinned against the wall. The strength and power in his grip was incredible. I could barely budge a muscle even though I was wearing the armor. I looked into his eyes and felt a tremendous blood lust; a killing intent perspired profoundly from his serious face. I felt a jolt of fear rush in me.

“You hesitated. Big rookie mistake! If I was your enemy, I could have killed you.”

Fear flushed all over my face. I felt like I was going to die at that point. His whole demeanor completely intimidated me beyond a doubt, but I still couldn’t give up, just yet. There were questions I needed answered. I freed my hands and began to pry open his grip. His left knee connected with my chest plate so hard it sent shocks into my body. I took a gasp of air as I dodged a right hook that came from nowhere. He was fast and terribly strong. I managed to free myself from him as I staggered on my legs for a bit. This man! Or this alien! Whatever he was, I couldn’t win, in a fair fight against him. My best chance lay in picking up my gun that had fallen to the floor.

“Do not take your eyes off me,” he commented, coming from my right blind spot.

My body contorted right automatically to counter his attack. However, my reaction time was a second too slow to evade him. His fist connected with my face, sending me staggering back against the wall. It felt like he had smashed my cheeks back into my skull. My hands found their way to my face, covering it completely from another attack. I felt a massive inflammation the likes of which I had never felt before. Oddly enough, he had put no weight in his last punch, which in turn is why I still had my head. Was he underestimating me? I couldn’t see him, but I felt his movements stop completely.

“Are you ready to yield, kid? You can’t win against me.”

“I am not a kid. You have something I want and I will do what I have to get it.”

“Are you sure? This is the thanks you give to someone who helped you?”

“Like I said before, desperate times!”

I got back on my feet and squinted heavily. His punch had left a nick of agonizing pain close to my nasal passage, causing tears to flow endlessly down my eyes. Blinded by tears, my eyes lost sight of him for a second. In a twist of fortune, I caught a glimpse of my pistol on the metal floor. It was a few feet from me, within jumping range. Quickly, I rolled down and reached for it. My hand gripped it tightly as I rolled up. If I could get one good shot, I would take it. I wasn’t trying to kill him, but slow him down. I swung my gun wildly into the air, once my vision had returned; however, he had gone.

“So, this was your plan?” the alien asked me, standing right in front me. The glimmer in his eyes looked menacing and irritating. I took a step back to gain some distance although that was a futile mistake. He caught my wrist and yanked away the gun from my hand. Just before it was out of my hand, the gun went off, hitting him in the arm.

I looked down on his arm and saw no blood, just as I had predicted. My intention, in the beginning, wasn’t to fight him, but learn about his anatomy. His physical body was almost human, although I was still speculating. During our physical conflict, I managed to feel his pulse along with a beating heart, which only left me even more confused about his physical identity.

“Yeah, that was,” I rattled, yanking my arm away from him.

As I had expected, his physical strength and speed increased under the influence of a different gravity. On this planet, the gravity was fifteen times stronger, but on the ship, it was fifteen times less—almost close to earth’s gravity. I moved my eyes away from him and stepped back. I had acquired enough information I wanted from him for now.

“Are you satisfied?” he asked, rubbing his wounded arm.

Amazingly, the arm did not look injured or anything. I glared at him and nodded quickly. Gentleness settled into his eyes as he walked away calmly upstairs. He stopped briefly and glanced back. Alarmingly, I moved back cautiously as possible.

“Your armor handled well. It seemed the modifications I did to it increased your speed and reaction time threefold. How do you feel?”

“Well, I could be better if I could take all of it off.”

“Like I said, kid, the armor was meant to be used for a one way mission with no point of return,” he said, while sighing in frustration. “With the current technology on this vessel, there is nothing I can do for you. Although, I did come up with the brilliant idea of remodeling and modifying it with the advanced software I could build at the moment’s spur.”

He turned around and began to walk carefully up the stairs, causing loud clanking sounds with his feet. I followed him upstairs, since I was curious about the new armor modifications. Within seconds, I had caught up with him and walked besides him, in a constant pace. Honestly, it was hard to believe a few moments ago we were at each other's throats. Oh well, that whole feud was over now for good, hopefully. The knowledge I had acquired from him told me a lot about my new enemies which was not a bad start for me.

“Just what did you do?”

“I took scraps of platinum and aluminum alloy and blended them down on an anatomic level to make out coverings for your arms and legs. Your chest coverings were damaged, causing exposed circuits to malfunction around the nuclear power core. I took the liberty of replacing the damaged power circuits and this you will like.”

He stopped suddenly and placed his hand on my chest cover piece. I looked down towards his hand, observing the chest cover carefully from an angular position. I was inclined to agree, there was something different about it. The covering looked completely singular compared to the rest of the suit.

“The chest piece took me forever to make,” he commented, smiling faintly, while looking outside through the ship’s fabric glass windows. “I made it with iridium, one of the rarest strongest metals in this galaxy. That should keep the nuclear power core stable and keep the explosion within a contained environment.”

“So, it still might explode?”

“Yeah and no, depends on what you do.”

I felt my hand slowly rise and touch the chest plate roughly. It was so smooth and yet solid strong, simply amazing. Although, I still preferred to have the armor completely off me, if possible. One thing kept bothering me above anything else, not knowing what his name was. I couldn’t keep calling him the “alien man” forever. Why didn’t he trust me?

Oh well, at the moment, his name didn’t matter. I ran my eyes through my armor carefully—studying all the modifications. It was true, my reaction and speed had improved drastically. Every muscle movement was fast and accurately honed. In fact, I had barely felt any pain when he struck my armor, during our little fight.

“I am curious about one thing,” I began and walked two steps towards him. “You didn’t help me out of the softness of your heart. I am not stupid, you are up to something. Just what is it that you want?”

The alien man shrugged as if startled; his body tensed firmly while motionlessly saying nothing. He kept staring deeply into the morning sky, in a dazed manner, with his arms folded. By then, I knew something was up. A really deep fate changing secret he kept within him. I wanted to reap it out of him, but that was easier said than done.

He suddenly laughed out like a fanatic and stared back at me. One look into his eyes had me scared a bit. His eyes were dim dark, and reflected little light within them. “Are you always this suspicious about everything? Well, to make things short, I built the modifications because I need you to take part in a special mission, to retrieve component parts. I could have asked someone else, but the only people here are mostly engineers, wives, and children of the crew, who were placed inside the ship’s panic room. There is a kingdom five hundred miles from here. I need you to find it and get some engine parts from one of the shipyard shops. Please try not to do anything reckless. Just get the parts and come back without drawing any attention to yourself.”

So that was the reason; now everything started to make sense. All the pieces of my distressing puzzle were starting to slowly come together.

“But why can’t you do it? You seem to know more about this behemoth planet, than I do?”

“I can’t, Den, as you can see, I am needed here to help fix this ship. You wanted answers, right? Now I am pointing you in the right direction, so go. You won’t find the truth here with me; you must go uncover it yourself.”

“Darn! You do have a point.”

There was more he wasn’t telling me, and it seemed he wasn’t going to tell me more than that. I backed away from the subject as I thought more carefully about what he said. Could it be true that there was actually a kingdom on this planet? But how was this all even possible? Who was it that was living here? Were they aliens or humans? So, a great deal of mysteries lay right in front of me, and I had no clue where to look first.

“One problem with that plan,” I said and walked closer to him slowly. “I don’t exactly, for say, fit in with the locals. I mean, seriously, it would be impossible to blend in on this planet, since I am human and I need to wear armor to move on this planet.”

“I already know that,” he cut me off quickly, before I could say more. “Don’t worry about it, I took the liberty of creating a new dye, using some of the chemical compounds I found on your ship. I mean, look at me, I tested it on myself and it worked. This dye should temporarily turn your skin grey for a day or so which solves one problem. The other problem about gravity is of no concern since the interior of the kingdom reduces the effect of gravity inside. So you see—everything is good.”

“Well uh!”

He left me speechless; it was like he knew what I was going to say before I could even say it. My jaw opened wide for a long second, although, no words came out. I placed my back against a wall, completely drowned in thoughts.

“Ugh! This was getting more complicated,” I sighed out loudly and took a few steps back.

“Just calm down, I know how dangerous this mission is, so I took the liberty of adding a few more outer modifications to your armor.”

“How will that help me, if the enemy is as strong as you? Yeah, I figured you are one of them or used to be one of them.”

“Very smart; I realized a while back that you fought me just to test out my abilities and skills against your armor. That being said, I already had accounted for that fact which is why I added new parts and increased the output threefold.”

Amazing, he had me figured out completely. His level of thinking was worlds apart from my own intellectual abilities. True, I had tricked him into sparring with me just to see how far apart our speed and power differences were. Sadly, it was just as I feared. Hand to hand combat was by no means an option, I had to rely on guns against these aliens and the terror beasts. I shrugged firmly and moved slightly, to the left, placing my left arm on my waist.

“Okay! So where are the modifications you were telling me about?”

I spoke to him as I massaged my stiff neck, with my right hand. I might as well go along with his plan. I figured it couldn’t hurt to snoop around this planet and gather intelligence.

“Excellent,” he commented with a great big smile and led me upstairs, to the other armory room, on the west side of the ship. “I worked on the equipment for two straight nights and came up with some great new ideas, and trust me, you will be impressed.”

With the way he phrased everything, I was excited to say the least; and at the same time, worried. I mean, I wasn’t sure if this equipment was going to work, considering I didn’t know anything about him. Was he truly trustworthy? For all I know, he could be leading me directly into a trap. I suddenly noticed the giant walls of the armory room as we closed in. My eyes widened with sheer excitement; I had never been up this far before. This armory was restricted, only for Special Forces and high ranking personnel. I stopped in my tracks for a second, wondering if I should go in or not. With my military ranking, I wasn’t allowed inside without permission from my superiors. However, circumstances were different and the captain was not here.

“Come on in,” he spoke and signaled me towards the giant door.

The door slid apart automatically as the lights inside all turned on automatically. There was a strong smell of melted metal, lingering in the air. I walked in slowly, observing the room in amazement. It was much bigger than I thought, probably four times bigger than the one downstairs. Level 3 and above weapons bedazzled the walls in an ordered manner, from lowest rank going up. Strangely, the ground did not make any noises in response to my footsteps. I bent down and looked at it curiously. Far beyond ordinary, this floor was made from a silent metal—a very powerful and rare metal, with an ability to absorb any form of energy, especially sound.

“Take a look at this,” he spoke from the other side of the room.

I got up and walked towards him in silence. I slid past broken glasses on the ground and hopped over a few fallen assault rifles. The whole armory was a mess, probably because of the crash.

I, unexpectedly, stopped and looked up at the walls. Honestly, I was not expecting to see such a sight. It was the work of a genius, simply astonishing. The modifications were beyond great, definitely not what I was expecting. I walked up towards them and raised my arm to take a closer look. My right hand straddled across the new arm bulky modifications intensely; most of them were enhancements that increased my strength as well as my flight capacity.

“It’s amazing,” I said, turning my head towards him. “I can’t believe you built this all by yourself.”

Hmm! I still couldn’t believe it at all. The thought of him being the greatest genius was maddening. But the facts, in front of me, did not lie. Just who was he?

“Care to give it a spin?” he asked me, as he unloaded the equipment from the shelves. “It’s really easy to use, plus I built you a modified AI system and a new microchip to allow you full access.”

“Yes, please,” I said, excited like a child receiving a birthday gift.

I guess this old guy wasn’t as useless as I thought at first. He had his moments when he shined. Quickly, I fitted the new modifications on, following his instructions and activated the suit’s new power grid and backup power generators. The armor modifications felt lighter, and felt comfortable in my thorax section. I stretched out my body while it was on, to test out its limit in terms of muscle movements. Everything was good to say the least, and the best part was it offered a variety of encrypted commands for more precise maneuvers. Without a moment’s thought, I headed out towards the exit, ready to take off into the skies, to try out my new equipment. As a safety precaution, I reloaded more rocket fuel packets to my flight system in case of emergency. You never know when a few terror beasts could pop up. After all, this was their home planet. The main processor took a few minutes to load the data from the microchip into my suit’s main hard drive, before allowing me full access to the weaponry and defense systems. Slowly, I learned manually how everything worked and which combinations were necessary in order to get it to become more effective. Once I began to hover from the ground, I sent one of the suit’s small drones out to get a survey of the area. The small machine flew into the air quickly, blinking at every 5 second intervals, flying straight away from me. I stared lazily up into the morning sky, hoping to find some other ray of color.

“Scanning coordinates entered,” I heard a very cold voice speak.

Whoa! I tugged my head briefly in a confused manner. Ghastly memories from academic school flowed back into me like a bad nightmare. My new AI sounded like one of my teachers from school, Miss Lina, the teacher who taught me Advanced Physics. At one point, in my life, I was frightened of taking her class since it was so hard—and all the other students who took it almost never passed. As it turned out, they were right; however, I did pass but just barely out of sympathy. All in all, I respected her as she taught me the true value in studying and determination, which were essential and necessary to passing all of my classes.

But to now hear my AI system speak in a voice similar to hers was just completely ridiculous, and just plain freaky. Darn! It was that alien man’s idea to do this to me, he knew about my past somehow using a device unknown to me. It was possible he had built something that could read memories. I mean, if he could build me this armor suit, what were the odds he couldn’t build something that could read memories? Well, whatever the case may be, I didn’t really care that much since I was getting a great chance to try out a modified legendary suit from the second Planetary War.

I looked down, but suddenly remembered a particularly important detail. It was directly on the back of my mind, although, I just couldn’t commit it to memory. Oh yeah! The crystal I found a few days ago? I remembered placing it in my left inner pocket, before boarding our main ship. I reached into my inner pockets and found nothing in there. I was sure I had not dropped it. It was that alien man, he must have taken it or was somehow involved in its disappearance. There was a surge of anger that slowly erupted within me. All that effort I had undergone to acquire it seemed in vain. I had to remember to ask him later about its whereabouts, just as soon as I was done with my test drive. I activated the flight system, through my com link, rupturing the wings to respond in a synchronized manner automatically. The thrusting wings caused my body to slowly ascend up into the air. I felt the outburst in the power output as I increased speed and trajectory. A blinking noise came online as my drone reemerged, descending into my vicinity. I stopped and paused in the air, watching the small drone return towards me. It slowly decreased velocity and found its layer within a secret compartment on my armor. Visual data popped up on my visor, displaying a serene map of the terrain all around me. The map covered about a distance of 20 miles in front of me. I angled my position firmly as I decided the location I would fly to first. There was a strong gust of wind that flew by me and back, with no precise direction. At this point, I started to wonder which direction the planet was orbiting. Was it clockwise or anticlockwise? Almost everything on this alien planet did not make any sense. On the other hand, it seemed to be morning for quite some time now. Very odd!

I shook my head while rechecking my suit’s system one last time, to make sure everything was okay. Although, I had done it before, it didn’t hurt to be sure. My suit’s defense and offense system responded well, showing no signs of glitches or malfunctions. I slowly soared up higher, while trying out new maneuvers, pressing my luck as hard as I could. I tilted my head back and rotated my body laterally, in a diagonal pose. All my muscles responded tightly to my command, surging me further into a dangerous descent. Beyond the scope, my optic scanners picked up signals of an unknown object, closing in towards our ship. I stopped and hovered, motionlessly, with a little anxiety in my heart. Was it an enemy or friend? I wasn’t expecting the aliens to return so soon, which rather put a tiny kink in our plan. My fist clenched as I took out an assault rifle and held it firmly, in my left arm. I was rather curious to see them first-hand, I could barely control myself. Slowly, I calculated the direction of their trajectory and plotted a course to intercept them. I increased the power output towards my flight system and blitzed it—towards the rendezvous point as fast as I could. The scanners went haywire, releasing high frequencies the alien ship was emitting.

“Hey, Ali,” I said, using my com link to communicate. “I am picking up an unknown object possibly a terror beast heading towards the ship; I am on course to intercept it, over and out.”

“Who is Ali?” He asked, responding quickly.

“It’s you, I mean, I can’t keep calling you an alien man forever, and you don’t want to tell me your name.”

“Ali! You know what—I like it,” he laughed silently. “However, don’t do anything reckless, the suit modifications are still prototypes and haven’t fully been tested yet.”

“I will try, but I won’t guarantee anything.”

“Don’t say that! Proceed with caution; your new enemies are no amateurs—they will kill you if you get in their way. Honestly, I don’t know if your long barrel revolvers will work with this prototype. If by some miracle they do, save them for emergency life threatening situations; but anything else, use your assault rifle and javelin bazooka missiles.”

Right! That didn't sound too bad, bearing in mind, how many instructions he had piled on me earlier, when I was putting on the armor modifications. I looked directly beneath me, studying the landscape carefully for any secure vantage points. A streak of blue color flowed directly into every life force on the planet. If someone had told me a planet like this existed, I would have been skeptic—nothing on this planet could be explained using a basic textbook; it logically defied all beliefs.

“Okay, I will,” I replied and turned off my com link connection to the ship, in order to remain undetected.

It would be bad if they intercepted the com link and learned both of our locations. If it was an enemy ship, I was going to follow it to its base and, hopefully, find the rest of my crew. After all, I had a bet to win. A lot of people were going to be disappointed when they saw me alive. I just wanted to see the priceless looks on their faces: definitely worth the risk. My scanners blinked loudly as I was getting closer towards the intercepting point. My heart paced quickly, anticipation brewing greatly inside. One problem, I still hadn’t fully tested out the suit, and I had no idea its handling capabilities in a real battle. Suddenly, the sound on my com link intensified as I got closer to the unknown signature. To be accurately truthful, I had never felt intense frequencies this high and powerful before. The source of this signal did not belong to any technology developed on earth which was expected. There was definitely another intelligent life force residing on this planet; that much I was sure of. I thought for a second about what Ali had said to me about a kingdom 500 miles from here. But who were these aliens?

“Only one way to find out,” I whispered to myself and shut my entire power system off, before landing on the ground.

My body slowly landed on the ground, in a quiet manner. I looked around, before jolting for a safe place to hide. If it was a terror beast, then there would be low frequency heat energy signatures, but the fact is, this object had a massive energy grid similar to that of the power fusion generator.

“Unadvisable to turn off all power to the suit,” my new AI spoke to me, attempting to reset the power grid.

What the! I couldn’t explain why this was happening and now of all times, just when we were in the travel route of an unknown friendly or foe. With my armor being black and shining brightly, in the middle of a blue forest, was not helpful at all. Impossibly, my AI had overwritten its control limiters, enabling it full access to my exoskeleton's mobility.

“Not now,” I commanded my AI system, in a harsh manner. “Stand down now or prepare to be shut down from the main grid.”

“That type of tone is irrelevant,” it responded rudely.

Why was this happening now? This had to be some sort of messed up joke. I had never heard of an AI system that talked back to its operator and could turn on a suit’s power grid. I was panicking and trying to stay calm at the same time, which clearly was not working in my favor. The scanners went off more intensely as I saw an unidentified ship, double the size of our hover ships, pass directly above me. It was mobile and so fast—it flew by me like a flash of lightning. Before I knew it, two small drones deployed from my armor suit and began attacking the ship with ferocious attacks. The ship made a hasty maneuver and began to turn back towards me suddenly.

“Of all the luck!”

My AI had taken over and was controlling the drones, coordinating their attacks on the unknown ship. I watched in shock, as I saw the ship slow down, coming in front of me. Gushing winds from its turbine-like thrusters blew against me greatly. My eyes opened widely out of shock and desperation. I tried to turn off my power grid and panicked, when I watched it slowly turn back on. It was rebooting at a speed far much more gradual than before.

“This is why I warned you not to turn off the power grid,” my AI went on in a harsh tone.

An AI with an attitude problem was the last thing I needed right now, besides my other menacing problems. I looked at the alien ship and slowly backed away, with my assault rifle in front of me, aimed directly at the ship. Oddly enough, this ship was a little different from the ones that had kidnapped my crew members. Definitely smaller and colored light bluish, which was dissimilar to the other two ships. I felt a brush of fear crawl up my spine coldly. If I didn’t do something fast, that ship was going to fry me instantly. I quickly rerouted all my reserve power to my backup power grid, and triangulated the time of impact it was going to take to evade an attack, using the light screen’s calculation unit. The ship stopped and hovered above me motionlessly, like it was observing and studying me. With my current fire power, I had no chance against this new enemy. I quickly turned around and made my way through the hard terrain, looking for solid cover. Jumping up, I skidded past a few rocks in the way, while slipping through dense fogs of blue trees. The alien ship followed me, from above, keeping a slight distance a few meters up. My strategy was to lure the ship to a terrain with hills and lots of hiding places, and then hitting it with everything I had. I looked back and smiled as I saw the alien ship follow behind me.

Not surprising, the small drones’ attacks were not inflicting any damage to the ship, at all. Out of nowhere, a loud whirling noise erupted from the ship, making me glance back quickly. Something was forming from its anterior end. Almost as if particles were being compressed into a single wavelength. I could feel the power screeching and hear the intense noise, as if it was close to my ears. The ship had a guided laser system which was bad for me. One hit from that and I would be a goner.

I blinked once and saw the ship fire the laser at me so fast I had no time to react. My eyes widened as I saw the laser draw closer to me. Before I knew it, my suit moved on its own, making me duck in time. I heard the laser collide with a tree, a few meters from me. There was a loud explosion that emerged, but luckily enough, I had moved a good bit far from it. The ship kept following me, ready to fire at me again.

“You are welcome,” my AI commented sarcastically to me.

Yeah! I wanted to say thank you to it; however, my ego was way too big to admit anything. I quickly dashed through the terrain, moving through rocks and trees, in a zigzag manner. Patiently, I waited for the right moment to make my counter attack—and right now, was not it.

“The backup system is now active.”

“Excellent!”

Everything was going according to plan. Swiftly, I spun my body back and moved behind the ship to begin my assault. I jumped into the air, and began to accelerate up above it with my assault rifle in front. With only three reserve magazines, I had to be careful not to waste the bullets. The ship made a quick turn and rotated back towards me. It was at that moment, I realized the ship had a 4D maneuvering system, allowing it to make what would be otherwise impossible turns. Rather a malicious ability to have, meaning I had to adjust my plans a bit.

I ascended 3000 feet into the sky and began attacking it with my assault rifle. The bullets bounced away from the ship like small, soft balls. I found no weak points on the outer structure of the ship. I tilted my back slowly as I descended far away from its firing range. Ultimately, this ship was like a machine version of a terror beast because of how tough the exterior was.

“Wait! That’s it.”

If this machine was built like a terror beast, then one of its weaknesses had to be inside it. I paused for second, doubting my chances of getting close enough. I still had my javelin bazooka, but I was saving it for a crucial time, when I became truly desperate.

“Find a point of weakness,” I commanded my AI while circling the ship at high speed.

“Did you say please?” it responded me quickly.

“Is this a joke?”

“No its not, you need to say please.”

I felt a surge of anger rise from within me. Thankfully, I suppressed it and thought rationally. Definitely did not have time for this, but I swallowed my pride.

Out of options I urgently responded, “Please, may you find a weakness on that ship?”

I had never ever in my life begged an AI unit for anything, so doing this, for the first time, just felt degrading. Just what kind of modifications had that old man done to my AI unit? It wasn’t that I wasn’t thankful, but it was just so annoying to have to talk to my AI like it wasn’t a program unit designed to follow my commands.

“There are no weakness points on this ship,” it said, showing me the main layout of the ship taken by one of the drones. “The ship’s structure is very rigid and very hard to penetrate; assault on any caliber beneath level 3 is useless.”

Maybe! I briefly placed my assault rifle back in its holster, on my back, and concentrated on the alien ship’s laser system. Although, the ship had a hard exterior, its laser beam system was complex and less guarded. Pausing in the air, barely blinking, I counted the intervals between each time it charged and fired the laser. Last time, it had taken approximately thirty seconds; definitely not enough time to get close and fire an accurate shot. I quickly unsheathed my javelin bazooka and placed it firmly on my shoulder. The scope adjusted aimlessly at the moving target, giving me no clear shot at it.

I slowly followed the ship with my scope, aiming to fire a proton missile at the ship’s weapon, when it is getting ready to fire at me, like I had done with the lizard. My heart raced as I knew one mistake could end it all. Weapons aside, I seemed to have the advantage since I had the high ground. The ship paused steadily, in the air, as a large flash of red light erupted from it. I ducked quickly by twisting my body to the left, taking advantage of the momentum built within my left wing. The laser narrowly missed me by a few inches as it sped up into the air. I tilted my head down and pointed my javelin bazooka one more time, hoping to get an accurate shot.

“Now what?”

The ship suddenly started to shake heavily releasing massive jolts of energy. Without warning, the alien ship split into four smaller mobile units and began to attack me separately.

“Not good at all,” I quickly turned around and began soaring out of the way, trying to get some distance between myself and them.

The small ships followed me instantly, keeping up with me, despite all my attempts to shake them off. To make it worse, they were firing smaller random flashes of red lasers in every direction. I was barely able to evade them all, as one of the lasers blasted my left wing thrusters. I twisted my body towards the right as hard as I could, to stabilize myself and took a deep descent dive towards the ground. Three of the ships followed me down without hesitation while one remained behind motionless. Rather strange and odd, the small alien vehicle just hovered there motionlessly for a while. Just what was it doing?

Slowly but surely, I decreased my speed while carefully observing the three small ships coming towards me. Their movements were well coordinated and so fluid, it was hard to believe any person or alien could move like that. Wait, it started making sense now. I looked at them quickly just to make sure. As it turns out, I was right. The reasons these ships were so coordinated was because they were controlled by drones. However, the fourth ship was a different case, definitely had no idea if it was an alien or drone. I faintly slanted my whole body as I leveled myself, while flying a few meters above ground. The small ships still continued to fire at me, forcing me to take excessive measures in order to evade them.

“Head for the trees and make your stand there,” my AI shouted at me quickly from the explosions.

“That could work.”

Odds seemed more favorable for me below than in the air. My body jolted, a massive amount of pain rattling throughout my body. I had been hit by something terribly powerful like a laser. I staggered towards the ground and landed hastily through the thick, tall grass. For a few seconds, my head hurt and throbbed badly. I heard a loud buzzing noise as the ship passed above me quickly. I opened my eyes slowly, panting in pain. A slight electric buzz sound erupted from both my flight wings. It seemed I had been grounded permanently. The wings had been damaged beyond minor repairs; I couldn’t hover anymore, let alone fly. I took a long, hard glimpse around the terrain, trying to make sense of my new location. There were large mounds of rocks and hills around me—absolutely perfect. I could use the surrounding to hide and attack at will. The ships turned around and rocketed back towards me for another attack. My scanners went wild as one of the ships lowered itself, speeding straight towards me. By the time I could react, the ship was right in front of me. I ducked down by pushing myself forward, watching the ship to slither above me. For a minute, I dared not blink or move at all. The whole situation was starting to get out of hand. Clearly not what I signed up for, when I decided to come to this stupid planet.

If this was my end, I certainly didn’t want it to come lying down. Every fiber in my body told me to get up and fight. But what exactly was I fighting for? Any action I took only caused more turmoil and confusion. I wanted all the fighting to stop for good. My reason for being on this planet was to end the reign of terror caused by the beasts. It was then—I realized what I had to do; I had no choice, but to fight. If I wanted change, I had to fight for it.

Raising my weapon, my feet apart, my breath shallow, I took aim, showing no fear or hesitation. But it was still too soon to fight them. I dashed through the grass quickly and stopped, once I was well hidden out of sight. The alien drone ships flew past me, firing mercilessly through the terrain. I shielded myself with my hands while studying their rhythm and timing. Everything around me was slowly collapsing onto the ground, but I did not falter. I firmly stood my ground and raised my javelin bazooka when the opportunity came. One of the ships had decided to come in close to the ground, in a straight line. Perfect, I quickly aimed and fired directly at its laser mount system. Sixteen missiles shot out and hit the ship simultaneously. An explosion erupted as the ship went down fast and quickly. I found myself instinctively dodging to the left from a flaming steering system.

“One down, three more to go!”

Massive red flames consumed the ship before another explosion started. Something else was fueling this fire and it was not oxygen. This red burning fire seemed rather dangerous, meaning I had to stay away from it. I slowly took some steps back, while looking up in the sky. The small ships had began to attack again with extraordinary precision. Realizing I was in the open, I turned around and ran quickly through the area not covered in fire. I felt one of the ship come straight behind me, slowly closing in. With no way to turn and fire, I continued to run, searching for something to use to my advantage. Luckily, I found a tree not damaged and ran towards it. Not surprised, the ship followed me which played well to my plan. Just as I skidded past it, I turned around and maneuvered my body to the lining of the trees as fast as I could. The second ship flew past me as I aimed and fired at point blank. I felt my body tingle slightly with pain as I watched another explosion happen, near the ship’s gyro system. Not exactly how I planned, but it was better than nothing. Amazingly, I was doing better than I planned. Loud winds blew past me, sending a small ray of red fire my way. The fire was intense and burned hotter than regular oxygen fueled fire.

“You are kidding, right?”

As I was getting ready to attack again, the other drone ship sped past me going somewhere. On no, it was heading in the direction of our main ship. However, the one hovering above me just stayed there without moving. I took a gamble and tried to aim for the fleeing mini ship, but it was then, the fourth one attacked me. I bit my lip in frustration and turned my attention towards the forth ship which was descending down slowly. There was someone piloting it inside. I could see the heat signatures through my scanners. I slowly raised my javelin bazooka at the ship and aimed carefully towards it. Talking with the unknown enemy seemed to be out of the option, as the only way I saw things was to stop force with force. My com link went haywire as I lost full communication. It was like something was jamming the frequencies. Good, I had enough missiles to counter and strike, but the only problem was that I had no idea what the forth ship was going to do. It hovered gradually for a while, without making any threats at me. I slowly moved back, scanning for higher ground I could use to counter the threat. Suddenly, it fired a giant, massive laser at me, catching me off guard. I staggered to the ground while barely getting out of the way. The force of the laser was so strong that it nearly took my head off. I had been careless in letting the enemy get the best of me. Without the spare of the moment, the ship attacked again. I quickly ran out of its path, evading my imminent doom. The whole terrain was destroyed in a matter of seconds.

“You dirty yowser!”

Anger surged inside me as I raised my weapon, aiming to fire at the ship. I released the safety lock and aimed quickly. My hands tingled strongly with an innate desire for vengeance. Eccentrically, I couldn’t pull the trigger at all, even when my mind told me to. What was wrong with me? This wasn’t supposed to happen. Everything felt wrapped and out of place. If it was an hour ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated to fire at my enemies, but something within me had changed. What was happening to me? Had my heart been slowly changing, ever since I fell down the pit—when Peter shot me? I think it had something to do with me meeting the old, alien man. Our encounter seemed to have opened my mind to all other possibilities. Nah, maybe it was this unhinging air that was trying to unnerve me and make me lose my most lethal edge. Whatever it was, I wanted it gone, since it was making my fighting spirit weak and a liability. The ground trembled heavily as I fell backwards with my hands behind me. Fortuitously, I landed on my arms and the impact was not strong enough to break them. Breathing heavily, I tried to grab what little sanity I had left from the unending madness and got back on my feet, in anticipation of another attack. To think this was how my life would end: what a joke.

“I can’t let it end like this.”

The ship started to move swiftly, drawing closer to me. I stood firmly, placing my hand on the switch trigger. My heart pulsed greatly; all I wanted to do was end it. I felt myself slip into a raging maniac like state that threatened to destroy everything around me. I wasn’t thinking straight, everything seemed just like a blur in time.

“Look out, you fool,” my AI screamed and I quickly came back to reality.

I looked up and saw a beam of energy coming straight towards me. My eyes could keep up, but my body was too slow to react. Swiftly, the armor moved by itself, slightly evading what could have been a fatal disaster. Up to that point, I had no idea what was happening or how my suit had moved by itself. I caught up to reality and turned my gaze towards the ship. The wavelength and intensity of this laser was great and powerful. One hit and I would be vaporized instantly. This type of spatial coherence was amazing; not only could it cut through matter—it could largely disperse through a whole area. Was something like that even possible? Rather remarkable technology and worlds apart from what we had on earth. Trying to make a laser beam cover a larger area without changing its narrow collimator and spectrum was still difficult. Certain variables had to be worked out; however, it seemed they had prevailed over them. Every fiber in me told me to get away from this place as soon as possible; although, that seemed unattainable at the moment.

Soft currents of flames flew past me from the ground—everything seemed ablaze. I took my eyes back towards the alien ship and sighed slowly. Somehow, my best chance lay in luring it into a narrow space and then hitting it with every missile I had. I searched around and saw a narrow path linked between the alien trees. Perfect, I turned around and dashed towards it as fast as I could. As planned, the ship followed behind, recharging its laser cannon. I jumped past a few rocks and side turned through a few trees, staying out of sight of another laser attack. Once I was within range, I turned around and switched my weapons. I began to fire all my proton bullets, aiming for the laser beam system cannon. My plan was to weaken the structure, just enough to weaken its compressing power. Another laser was shot at me and I dropped down, ducking with my hands on my head. I felt the immense power of the laser engulf my back with so much intensity and pressure. Ten seconds later, I got up in pain and raised my javelin bazooka, ready to fire. There was a thirty second interval between each laser beam. I was going to take advantage of it. My legs locked, and my tendons tightened heavily; I lowered my breath and pulled the trigger quickly and hard. A barrage of missiles shot out of my weapon so fast I hardly saw them.

The air went black as the missiles exploded on contact; the shockwave was so strong, it pushed me hard backwards. I had aimed for the laser system, planning to disable it—just enough to force the ship to retreat back to its base. But it seemed I might have gone a little bit overboard. A loud ash of gray smoke erupted everywhere, blurring my vision. I covered my visor for a bit and listened carefully. All was silent. Harshly, a violent explosion broke the silence, making the metal clank against the fire. Something flew past me, hastening in an unknown direction. In the moment, I realized it was the ship and I quickly took out my gun. Just to be certain, I placed a tracking bullet inside it, and shot it at the ship. The bullet stuck on the ship and began making small blinking noises.

“Well, that was fun!”

I didn’t bother following the ship, since I could track it with my com link system. Safe to say, this wasn’t exactly how I had imagined my suit test flight going. But it was finally over. At last, I could say the easiest part was over: now came the hard part. I wanted to quickly go after the drone ship which had escaped me. I postulated it was going to attack the ship, but I wasn’t worried since Ali was there, and he would keep everyone safe. With my wing system damaged, I couldn’t glide there, so, instead, I started walking back.

“What a stubborn boy,” my AI went on, in a rude tone. “At least you did one thing right.”

Darn it! I didn’t have time to be dealing with this right now especially from a robot. If I could choke an AI, I think I would have done it a while back, because this one was really getting on my nerves. Looking down, on my tracking scanner, I located the alien vehicle traveling gradually in the location west of me, far from the ship. I sighed deeply and began to limp my way back to the others.

“I am coming,” I whispered as I walked. “You can bet a nickel on that.”

But could I still do it? There was still doubt in my heart that throbbed greatly. Fear shook me deeply, as I tried to get a hold of what remained of my courage. I could feel every fiber of my muscles twitching with pain and all my joints too weak for movement. Could I make it to the others in time? I bit my lip and tried to swallow, but couldn’t as my mouth was dry. I had no memory of how far I had walked as my vision was blurry. It appeared as if something was wrong with my body; possibly, my shoulder wound had reopened and I might have lost a lot of blood during my fight with those alien vehicles.

“Found you,” a familiar voice echoed out towards me, before I collapsed to the ground from exhaustion. “It took a while to track your energy signal, but oh well, good news is that I found you still alive.”

I somehow lifted my head and saw the old man; he was looking at me with such piercing eyes. “Well, it seemed your armor wasn’t as powerful as you made it seem,” I commented, with a small grin.

“Probably,” he mumbled, while helping me stand, “but like I said before, it was a prototype—far from being complete.”

“There was a ship coming your way, we have to stop it.”

“I took care of it, so you don’t have to worry about it.”

“How did you do it?”

“Like I said, don’t worry about it. I destroyed the small drone ship.”

“Okay, if you say so; by the way, nice touch with the AI system. I really hated it.”

“Figured you would like it, your old AI had limited operation capabilities.”

“Yeah, it was built that way, because we can’t allow machines to have full control of all our suit systems.”

“Rather stupid if you ask me. There are tasks even you can’t perform in time.”

True! He did have an accurate point. There was a point when I saw the laser coming and could not react in time. However, thanks to the armor AI, I evaded the worst case scenario.

“Wait! What’s wrong with you?” he screamed, rushing towards me and grabbing my hands. “I think you are suffering from Neon Alpha poisoning.”

Suddenly, I felt fatigued and truly sick to my stomach. There was a pure raw taste of iron in my mouth as if blood was spewing from within me. Before I knew it, I closed my eyes and slowly fell into an unwanted sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5

 

“Den! Get up now!”

There was a voice calling out to me, but I didn’t recognize it. It was so cold and unfriendly and yet it sounded sort of familiar, like I had heard it somewhere. I opened my eyes and pierced into the unknown silence. There was nothing but darkness around me, even with my eyes wide open. Just who was calling up to me? I yearned to know who it was, and yet I also feared the unknown. I found myself saying, “Who is it?”

This oblivion of darkness was truly maddening to say the least. What kind of a dream was this? No, it was more of a nightmare than a dream.

“I am down here,” the voice growled, in a terrifying tone.

I slowly turned my gaze towards the ground in fear. I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I looked down. To my surprise, there was a small light of energy, near the bottom. It looked bright to me, well, compared to this infinite darkness. Without my approval, my body started to move directly towards it, like it was being drawn in by something. “Now what?”

I tried to regain my body movement, but nothing worked as I was drawn closer to the light. Once it was within my grasp, I felt fear beyond anything I had ever felt. Just what was I afraid of? What was this feeling that shook me deep down inside?

“I summoned you here to fulfill the deal you made with me a few centuries ago.”

What! I had no clue what it was talking about; I had not even been born that long ago! The light glowed even greater, forcing me to shield my eyes with my hands. “I have no clue what you are talking about, I don’t even know you. You must have the wrong person!”

“No, I don’t,” it screamed out to me. “You have the same genes as the man who sealed the deal with me, centuries ago. I am a symbiotic based life form and part of me was inscribed in your DNA when you were born.”

Creepy! So weird that I had stopped listening when it mentioned centuries. My body trembled boisterously with terror. But how would I tell it nicely that it had the wrong person? This dream or whatever was nothing short of outlandish. My hands ran through my thighs, looking for pockets; however, I found nothing in them. I had no guns, grenades, or javelin missiles to defend myself with against this unknown enemy.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. I can easily destroy your body so quickly you won’t even recognize what happened.”

“Whoa! Take it easy, I was just searching my pockets, okay? You don’t have to threaten me up to prove your point.”

The strange light got even brighter and bigger as it illuminated the darkness away. I shielded my eyes with my hands, closing them in the process. Just great! It went from being too dark, to being too bright. Why couldn’t I just get what I asked for sometimes?

“Remember, keep your end of the bargain,” it roared and just vanished, leaving me clueless in the dark.

“Wait, what bargain? What are you talking about?”

 

I suddenly opened my eyes and I was back in the real world or what I viewed as reality. Just what was up with that dream? My mind couldn’t make any sense of it? I felt itchy and very tired, for some reason. There was a sagacity of heavy sweat covering my eyes and forehead. Unfortunately, I found it hard to forget my dream. It looked so real and yet it was horribly frightening at the same time.

“You are one lucky guy,” someone spoke to me.

Whoa! I was startled, causing me to move back from the position I was lying in. Apparently, I was not the only person present in the compartment. I looked up and noticed two people in the room, a few meters away from me. One was a boy, and the other was a girl. They looked at least 18 years old or so. If I had to guess, I would say they were twins. The uncanny resemblance was just too hard not to notice.

“Not a lot of people have ever survived Neon Alpha poisoning,” the girl commented, with a faint smile. She folded her arms and leaned her slender back on the wall softly.

“Cool down, sis,” the boy chuckled, sitting on the chair, next to me. “This guy looks like he’s been through hell, so let’s just leave him alone.”

“Well, in case you haven’t noticed, we can’t; we are all stuck in this room together until our wounds heal, so shut up!” the girl screamed, clinching her fists.

“Oh really,” the boy roared, “Do you wanna start something sis cause I have all day, and I have been waiting 18 years for this moment?”

Oh no! What was happening right now? It seemed I was caught in the middle of a family feud. I had to get out of here, but my body was still too weak to move about. I tilted my head and moved a few inches to the left, trying to get a bit further away from them.

“But, I’m glad we are thinking along the same lines, brother,” the girl replied, cracking her knuckles and moving towards her brother.

This situation was getting out of hand. Just where was Ali when you needed him? The boy jumped up in the air with his fists in front, towards his sister. I could feel the killing intent in both of their eyes, as they came out lashing at each other. Their fists connected hard like they were two enemies, like they were complete strangers to each other. This was not really happening, was it? Slowly, I paced far away—to the back wall and positioned myself with my arms in front of me. This made me somewhat glad I didn’t have a twin sibling. It was hard to believe they were related at all. I heard the roaring slam of fists hitting tendons firmly. This ticked me off so I got up and moved myself into the middle of them.

“Stop fighting, please, you are brother and sister!”

They both stopped, the girl’s fist barely missing my forehead by a few centimeters.

“Whoa, we shouldn’t be fighting like this,” the girl commented first and let her hands drop down. “This isn’t right at all.”

“Yeah, you are right, sis, this isn’t the way,” the boy smiled, patting his swollen cheek. He looked badly hurt with a small sprinkle of blood coming from his nose. His eyes simmered with rage and bloodlust. “Hand to hand combat is for babies: I have something better in mind.”

Quickly, he commented and pulled up a small portable bazooka from his clothes. Whoa! Just where had he been hiding that weapon? Briefly thereafter, I removed myself from the middle and moved towards the door. I had no intention of getting caught in the middle of an all out battle.

“That’s right, brother,” the girl laughed, drawing out a proton laser long sword. “It is time we ended this fight for good.”

Oh no, the door wouldn’t open for some reason. My heart paced rapidly like it was going to burst out of my chest. I felt a huge weight of anxiety crush me bit by bit. Were they really serious? Great, just when I had awoken from a terrible nightmare, it seemed I was being thrown back into another one. I glanced back at them, positioning my back to the door. Unexpectedly, the door opened, causing me to almost fall back. Luckily, I was able to lock my left knee firmly, helping me stay on my feet.

“I see you have met your new traveling companions,” Ali walked in with trays of food. “The girl is Dalla and the boy is Rick. To make things short, they are your new traveling companions.”

“You are joking, right?” I shook my head carelessly.

There was absolutely no way I was going to allow this to happen. These maniacs were loose screws and it seemed they could go berserk at any minute. The last thing I wanted was to have those two idiots compromising the mission. “Not going to happen, Ali.”

I glared at him intensively, trying to show him how serious I was. For some reason, my knees kept giving out. I still hadn’t made a full recovery yet. I went and sat back down by my bed lightly. All my muscles ached and caused me excruciating pain.

“Come on, Den,” the old man put the food next to my bed and sat down. “By yourself, you can’t complete this assignment. Time is running out.”

I shook my head and closed my eyes for a few seconds, lost in thought. I hated to admit it, but he was probably right. Seemed the more I stayed on this planet, the more complicated things became. The walls echoed silently, while I considered my options. I looked through the window and saw a glimpse of the sun. Honestly, on this planet, it was hard to tell whether there was any sense of night and day. On an interesting side note, daylight seemed to last an eternity compared to night. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than being stuck here—let alone living here.

“What I want to do is still the same, I have also reason to believe that the rest of your crew is still there,” he continued, as he adjusted his weight by shifting his axis. “I recognized the symbols from the videos you recorded on your com link screen. I also know what is happening on earth, and if I’m right, I have a feeling that earth is doomed.”

Doomed! What was he talking about? I looked up and pierced into his eyes directly. He adjusted himself, balancing both feet on the floor, with one hand against the bed. He knew something and I was curious and scared. The twins set by the table, far in the corner, leaning against each other. What a bunch of bipolar fools.

“What is about to happen to earth now? What is going on?”

He didn’t answer at all. Instead, he sighed slowly and looked away. “If my theory is right, the kingdom of Raz finally perfected their inter-dimensional gate, giving them the ability to freely manipulate light space—this is not good.”

“Whoa! Wait a minute,” I stopped him, since what he said didn’t make sense. “What you are saying doesn’t make sense. How is this related to the terror beasts on earth?”

“Like I said, it’s just a theory, you’ll just have to wait and find out for yourself. Since you hid the truth from me about earth, I’m going to do the same to you, and let you find out for yourself?”

True enough, I hid the truth away from him, so it was only fair he would do the same thing to me. Although, keeping such a vital secret from me was rather annoying and downright frustrating.

“You leave tomorrow morning so get enough sleep, and get to know each other better,” he finished and got out of the room.

“Wait, when is morning?”

“In 7 hours from now.”

“See you boss,” the twins replied at the same time, which was almost freaky.

I looked back at them and shook my head sloppily. Their carefree attitude was nothing but ruse for their psychopathic tendencies. I had to get out of this room, the air and tension in the room was just too heavy.

I don’t know what was happening on earth, but whatever it was, it wasn’t good. It didn’t take a genius to figure that much out as time was running out. My body ached so much and my eyes were still a bit blurry.

“Sit down,” Dalla spoke with a stern face. “Your body is still too fragile and you need to recover.”

“For once, I agree with you, sister,” the boy commented. “No! No! I can’t agree with you, sister. So I’m gonna say the opposite: you can do it, Den.”

Oh great! It was starting all over again. I simply had no clue what was wrong with these siblings. Although, the food, on the bed, smelled really good. What to do? I really wanted to stay and eat, but at the same time, I didn’t want to stay in the same room with these maniacs. Seconds later, I left the room and the food, and went to the bathing compartments. For a long hour, I sat in the bath tub, armor and all, just thinking to myself. Everything was in complete chaos. To make things worse, I still had no clue what was happening on this planet. Nothing seemed as it appeared. I was desperate for answers and I knew where to start. I exited the bathing compartments, once I was clean and went around snooping. Suddenly, my eyes came across a lab even I couldn’t get to. It was so highly secure that no one, except for high ranking scientists could access it. Slowly, I tip toed my way to the door as curiosity had gotten the best of me. I took a deep breath and proceeded towards the nearest wall to the door. There were no guards or scientists in the vicinity, leaving the door completely unguarded. The sensory scanners didn’t go off like before, as the com link surveillance center was still static. I didn’t have to hack my way in to enter this time. It was always a mystery to me as to what was inside. Since I was still just a space biologist, I didn’t have enough clearance to get in. Nevertheless, today, I would get my chance. As I got close to the door, I heard a click and it opened suddenly.

“What’s going on?”

It wasn’t programmed to do that at all since it only opened with a password. However, I wasn’t complaining since I hoped that it would be easy to get in. For it to be this easy wasn’t exactly giving me the thrill I was looking for. Why was I thinking too much about it? The lab was dark and quiet, as if it had been vacant for a while. There were no signs of life anywhere, and without a helmet, I had to rely on my own eye sight. As I tried to search for a light, I heard a loud thump, coming from somewhere in the room. There was a small red light in the middle that kept blinking on and off silently. The hair on the back of my neck stood up still as a little bit of fear crept into me. Quickly, I began to look for the light access panel or something that could make the darkness go away. Honestly, this was getting annoying. The interior lights inside the lab seemed to be malfunctioning or something. I walked around, but could barely make up anything. My hands fell upon lab utensils as I brushed past them carefully. I felt a silent deepening resonance complement each of my movements. This darkness was rather gloomy and cold.

“Wait, my armor.”

There was a light screen system inscribed into every suit for situations like these. I looked all over my arms and legs and did not find it. My leg hit something solid and my gaze fell to the ground. I had no idea what it was or what my legs were standing on.

“If you wanted light you could have just asked,” a voice spoke, and suddenly the room was bright.

It was a man from another science department; he was wearing a white lab coat and held a tuna burger in one hand. His eyes fell on me with an intense gaze. I knew this man—I had seen him before during briefing, before our main ship left earth. His name was Dr. Ion Berge and he was the lead expert in space technology, but what was he doing here? He went on the expedition with us, and I remember the entire crew being captured. The man slowly walked into the room and leaned against the table, next to a set of ice breakers.

“Surprised to see me?” he continued as he ate his tuna burger with one hand, while grabbing onto a video file with another.

“Well, yes,” I commented with a surprised look.

“Although, I could say the same thing about you. I heard you were taken down and destroyed after you went berserk and injured one of your colleagues.”

Darn! That Peter must have spread those lies to everyone after he shot me into that hole.

“Don’t worry, my bet was on you and I knew you were alive somehow,” he chuckled as he finished eating his food.

“Thanks, I feel really better now.”

“Geez, I was just trying to be nice and lighten the tension. You don’t have to be all serious, you know?”

“I am sorry, been a stressful day. So what is this room for?”

It was really eccentric seeing all of the equipment and gadgets. Some of it had not yet even been introduced into the world. I was drawn towards everything inside by a strange mixture of excitement and curiosity. Dr. Berge smiled faintly and glided away from me swiftly. He tugged his arms in the air and waved out.

“This is the future of warfare. Everything you see here was meant to change feud for good.” Okay, he definitely caught my attention. Just what were they working on? I walked a few steps away and started looking around. I had never seen such well crafted equipment before. Dr. Berge vigilantly watched me, walking a good bit distance behind me. There was something important he wasn’t telling me. I figured it was useless to try and pry it away from him. After all, this was supposed to be to secret research staff.

“So, how did you survive and escape that situation?”

He looked away, when I asked while lowering his arms down. There was sadness written on his face. I couldn’t tell what was on his mind, but, I knew, it wasn’t good news.

“It’s rather complicated,” he said and walked out of the lab.

Honestly, why was everyone keeping secrets from me? It was hard enough to get them to speak, and when they did speak, it only left me confused. I took a small step back and walked to an atom microscope at the far right. I had something I still needed to find out while I still had time. Warily, I took the sample of the terror beast's blood that I had taken earlier and placed it onto the machine. I peered slowly onto the lenses, curious to the bone.

This blood, it wasn’t normal. I detected no clear color or structure in it which was odd, but to be expected. After all, these creatures were aliens. I ran some tests, analyzing the sample to find some unique traces; however, came out empty. Amazingly, the specimen blood was not only thick, it was lacking in essential components resembling vitamins and proteins. Even against super viruses and bacteria antigens, it still remained untainted. But what did this mean?

What did they eat? Why were they lacking in other pigmentation? Did they have any true weaknesses? My mind pondered at the new insightful knowledge, hoping to piece everything together. Nothing made sense at all.

I removed the blood carefully and placed it inside a vial to study later. My arms tingled, causing me to step away briefly. Something suddenly caught my attention and I looked straight ahead. There was a black armor suit hanging up in the left side of the lab.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” the alien man commented, standing next to me. “We finally finished the second prototype model of the End Boss system, based on the blue prints in the crystal core you had.”

What! Just what else were they doing while I was sleeping? I felt a terrible chilling feeling running deep into my veins. The moment he said “End Boss” everything went dark. Was he joking? I turned my head towards him filled with anger. My fists clenched as my breathing got heavier.

“Are you serious? This thing was responsible for wiping out several countries and you had the nerve to rebuild it? I mean this is ridiculous! You can’t expect me to put that on.”

“Like you said, desperate times call for desperate measures,” the old man chuckled and left the room. “Just get some rest and be ready to move out in a few hours. Time is critical now; everything you do impacts the future of earth.”

Great pressure, his words echoed in my head for a long time. What was he expecting me to do? No matter what, I would not rely on the power of the End Boss. Such power was not something easily controlled, it was too dangerous. If memory served me right, I had been told that this armor had been used in the Planetary Wars. It had been responsible for wiping out armies in mere seconds. I sighed out loudly at the irony of using this armor to save lives, when it had taken out countless lives in the past.

“Just what is going on here?” I mumbled, placing my head between my hands, before drifting off into nothing. A few hours later, my alarm went off, waking me up.

Nothing had changed. Outside, it still looked the same in my eyes. I was surprised. I mean no strange crazy dreams with terror beasts or people I once knew. It was safe to say, I had a good four hours of sleep. I could only hope I would have more of these wonderful peaceful nights or days. I rolled over, slowly placing my feet onto the floor. My eyes were still teary as I yawned out loud.

Someone walked into the room, forcing me to look up quickly. I recognized her instantly even though it was dark in the room. She walked slowly towards me and turned on the lights.

“Come on, Den,” Dalla screamed, waving her hand towards me. “We have to leave now, if we want to make good time.”

It was strange to see Dalla act normal. Well, that was when her brother wasn’t around. Leisurely, I stood up and stretched my neck and back. So the mission begins. Everything was falling into place. We were pawns playing for our lives in an unknown game. I really hated being in the dark when the situation was this dire. Dalla gazed at me for a second, with her arms folded, waiting impatiently. I could tell that she wanted me to hurry up, but she said nothing to impose her demand on me. I remembered something important and quickly rushed out of the room.

“You go on ahead, Dalla, there is one thing I still need to do.”

I slithered through the halls, headed for the armory room. My suit was still missing some crucial elements in its flight system. Also, much was still needed to be discussed about this mission. It would not be rational to jolt into enemy territory without proper intel or a brilliant strategy. Hours earlier, Ali had told me to come back later and pick up new modifications for my suit. As soon as I entered the armor, I saw him working on a proton assault rifle; his back was tilted slightly, causing him to appear shaped crookedly in my eyes.

“Just on time,” he commented, stopping what he was doing. He quickly walked right past me to the other side of the compartment. “I know how crucial time is, but I did everything I could to modify it with the short time that I have. I can’t explain everything to you now; however, in time you will understand on your own. I have to warn you, stay away from trouble at all cost—if you can avoid it.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“In simpler terms, don’t stir trouble with the locals, and whatever you do, stay far from the castle.”

“Relax, I won’t do anything reckless.”

“I hope so, for your sake.”

My mind wondered for a minute as to how this would play out. There was a lot more to this than he was letting me know. He glanced at me briefly, before going back to work. His body movements revealed no truth to me. I heard him unscrew a bolt from the rifle clip.

“So what’s the plan?”

“I have already told you what you need to know so get going.”

“No, you haven’t; I mean, do you expect us to just waltz in or sneak in through some unknown entrance into this kingdom?”

“Don’t worry about that, Dalla and Rick know the plan. I told them everything they need to know. So, please, enough with the questions.”

“Well, then I have one more” I asked him, getting a little bit depressed. “What about my crew? You seriously can’t expect”

“Relax, Den,” he stopped me in my tracks. “I took that issue into consideration and made a few more gadgets to your armor, if situations beyond your control arise.”

“Great, is it a new gun or some highly explosive javelin missile?” I asked, looking very excited to say the least.

The old man sighed very deeply and said, “If you let me finish explaining things to you, then you could be on your way sooner, don’t you think?”

Right, I closed my mouth for a little while, although I wasn’t sure how long I could keep quiet for.

“Take out your com link lenses,” he spoke while opening a new box that contained new com lenses. “I created new lenses based on the design you have.”

“Okay,” I said, taking out the lenses from my eyes.

It was easy putting them on and rather difficult taking them out. I slowly reached my hands cautiously to my eyes and removed the lenses from my cornea. I wrestled to take the first one out, while holding back the urge to scream out in pain. I heard Ali weld the titanium alloy into my armory thigh plates, from the corner of my left ear. It was rather gruesome to take them out with him working on my upgrades. After a long hard minute, I got both of them out and placed them both in my right arm. My eyes hurt and were irritated; it felt like I was seeing the world for the first time. I couldn’t believe how bad my eye sight had become without the com lenses. Everything was a giant foggy blur; I could barely see the room clearly.

“Here, take these,” he said and handed me the new com link lenses. “I upgraded this pair with a 400 mile range communication radius, sonar vision system, and infrared system.”

“Thanks, that should make things a little easier for me.”

As I put them on and activated them, I felt a single tinge, then suddenly, my entire vision was different and clearer. Wow, these new lenses didn’t itch or irritate my eyes at all. I squinted my eyes slowly, trying to test their level of firmness and time lag. I was rather impressed, they were far better than my old lenses.

“You can adjust and readjust your vision based on what you want to see,” he finished and began helping me put on the rest of my armor.

It took thirty minutes to put on everything and head to the loading bay. There was a cargo hover ship waiting for us, completely loaded with gear and weapons. However, I wasn’t sure why we were taking a cargo ship when a battle vehicle ship was faster. My eyes came across the two duo twins, who were busy loading food onto the vehicle. Dalla and her brother looked at me with a glance of irritation, while continuing with their work. I felt Ali approach me.

“Remember head east in that direction,” the old man pointed towards the direction opposite to the sun. “If you keep going this way, you will find a kingdom, just get the supplies I listed and come back.”

“Well, okay,” I faintly smiled.

Dalla, Rick, and I all got into the vehicle and closed it completely. A pressurized whiz of oxygen was released into the whole ship the moment the hatch was sealed. Dalla slipped past us, strolling to the main cockpit. She glanced back and waved us forward. Rick and I followed her into the main compartment and buckled ourselves down.

“Are you ready, guys?” Dalla spoke, adjusting the control to her personal desire.

“Hey, why are you driving?” Rick screamed out of nowhere. He unbuckled and moved roughly towards Dalla. “I want to drive too.”

“No, you can’t,” she replied and pushed him back a little. “I was here first, so go sit down and shut up.”

Crap, this was going to be a long trip. I don’t know how long I would be able to take all of this madness without breaking down. My fist clenched and teeth gritted, I had heard enough from these two idiots. I quickly unbuckled myself and moved swiftly behind both of them. Once within their blind spot, I stunned them both with my new shockers and heard two thumps as their bodies fell to the ground. I didn’t want to do it, but time was crucial for me. Besides, I had to test out my new system shockers on someone, and they seemed to fit the requirements—since they were getting on my nerves.

“You’ll be fine, give or take,” I whispered and took over the steering system.

The cargo ship roared out loudly and began to lift up into the air. Silently, all the controls came online, within a few seconds, at blinking intervals. I steadfastly clutched onto the steering wheel, veering the ship out of the docking bay.

“Remember, Den, the best victory in life is one you win without using violence,” Ali softly spoke through the com link.

“What do you mean?”

“In time, you will understand.”

“If you were not going to tell me what you meant, then you should probably not have said anything to me to begin with.”

“Oh yeah, I keep forgetting how clueless you are. Anyways, go towards the coordinates I gave you on your com map. Avoid conflict with the terror beasts at all cost. Good luck, Den.”

“Thanks, Ali, but it seems I will need more than luck this time,” I smirked to myself and cut the com link off.

I still had no clue what the real objective of this mission was. Only Dalla and Rick had been briefed; probably, shouldn’t have stunned them out. I looked down at them and shook my head.

“Switch me into the main system,” a familiar and yet annoying voice spoke.

I knew this voice all too know well. It was that stupid AI system Ali had installed for me. Times like these made me really miss my old AI system, since it never back talked me. However, this AI had saved me from dying horribly last time. Speaking of the past, I looked into my tracking system and noticed that the ship had stopped moving about 3 hours ago. Just what had occurred? I guess, I had done more damage to it than I anticipated.

I took my mind off the subject and glanced one last time at our main ship. This was probably going to be the last time I ever see it with my own eyes. My hands moved the steering wheel left, while I clamped both feet on the forward thrusters. I felt the ship start to accelerate, moving towards the west direction.

“Link me into the ship’s grid system,” my AI spoke through my com link, which I tried to ignore by turning it off, but that didn’t work. The control limiters on the artificial intelligence were far much sophisticated than I projected. Eventually, I gave up and placed my AI into the ship system. There was a slight buzz in the ship and everything went silent.

“Leave the steering and the weapon system to me,” it commented in a sincere way.

To my disbelief, I nodded and got up from my sit, frantically, leaving the cockpit. There was still much more I wanted to confirm about this ship. It was always good to know just what I was working with, in case I needed to improvise. Without warning, I found myself looking into a new compartment that was completely different from the rest of the ship. It was so white and utterly empty for such a large compartment. I walked right into it for a better observation. The floor was quiet, completely absorbing the noise my feet made. Just what was this room for? All of a sudden, I felt the room vibrate like the ship had bumped into something. The floor absorbed most of the vibration and noise, lessening the effects onto me. My arms caught a hold of the wall, allowing me to stay balanced. I quickly exited the room hastily, trying to make my way back to the cockpit.

“What’s going on?” I questioned my AI.

“Nothing, we hit some turbulence, but everything is under control,” it responded and fell into a nerve wrecking silence.

Before I could enter the cockpit, I paused briefly and thought for a second. Slightly tilted, I bent my back onto the wall and closed my eyes. My stomach felt tight and numb. I wasn’t exactly starving, but it couldn’t hurt to eat while I still had the chance. Besides, the last thing I wanted to do was talk to that annoying AI system. I turned around and went into the mess compartment. Once I got there, I opened the fridge and looked through the frozen food. Everything inside wasn’t exactly appetizing, but I wasn’t one to complain. After all, the arrival of the terror beasts made food far scarcer than it had been before. We were all struggling to stay alive, so whenever I found food, I was thankful. I quickly gobbled up some nutrient cubes while sitting down against the interior wall. The nutrient cubes left a nasty after taste in my mouth, which for a minute almost made me throw up. I got up slowly and left the compartment, once I was satisfied. Everything was quiet. All I could hear were the small buzz noise from the ship. I walked around and found another door, a few yards from the kitchen compartment. The door was a bit hard to open for some reason; it had no sensory scanners that would open whenever someone came near it. There was also no locks or password system latched onto it. Just how was I supposed to open this door? I tried to pry open the door, by pushing it with all my might, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Grant me access to this door?” I yelled to my AI since it was now linked to every part of the ship.

“I can’t,” it replied quickly, “this part of the ship is completely sealed off from my control.”

This only aroused my curiosity even further—I had to get this door open somehow. Just what was inside this room? Maybe Rick and Dalla knew. But I had knocked them out, so I couldn’t ask for their help. I gave up after a while and slammed the door with my fists, before leaving to see what else was inside this ship. I was sure there still was something else left to see on this ship of interest. To my surprise, I wasn’t wrong at all; there were still more compartments of interest worth exploring. Luckily, the remaining doors were not sealed shut like the previous door. I opened one of the doors easily and made my way inside. The floor was solid metal; it gave a loud frequency reaction against all my steps. This compartment was so dark inside, that I had to turn my night vision on, to get a glimpse of what was inside. I walked inside for a while, before I came across the switch. I turned it on and everything came to light. It was not what I was expecting nor disappointing. This was another armory room; however, smaller and compact. There were so many new gadgets and guns; I could barely keep my hands to myself. I quickly grabbed for the first weapon I could find, which was a neon sword, and begun to swing it around. The hilt was light and the blade whirled loudly. I placed the blade down and went around, observing the other gadgets.

I felt like I was celebrating my tenth birthday again, when I was opening every gift my relatives had given me. Oh how I missed those times a lot. What I wouldn’t give to celebrate those times again. Out of the blue, something caught my attention. I turned my attention to this small well crafted box, sitting in the corner with a sign that said “DANGER.” I thought about what it said for a moment and hesitated at first; however, I couldn’t resist opening it to see what was inside. Strangely enough, I was expecting to find something very dangerous and toxic, but what I found just disappointed me. Inside, there were small yellow pellets, the size of peas; they didn’t look that dangerous at all, considering the DANGER sign. They reminded me of tasty black peas, although they smelled like titanium. I wondered what they were for. My hands found themselves moving towards the pellets, being guided by my curiosity.

“Den, don’t you even think about it,” a voice growled at me so loud that it startled me. “Normally, I would let it slide, but you stunning me to the ground completely off guard is cold, dude.”

I recognized his rough voice and knew who it was. From the tone of his voice, I would say he was angry. I turned my attention towards him slowly—my heartbeat beating at a rapid speed. I saw the look on his face and backed away completely. He looked so hostile, I doubt I could just easily apologize to him and leave.

“I never really liked you, Den, you seemed like a stuck up brat,” he commented, clinching his fists and cracking his neck muscles. He moved towards me and stopped a few feet from me.

Did he really think he could take me on? He was unarmed and younger than me. To make things worse for him, his armor and weapon system were worlds apart from mine.

“I know what you are thinking, Den,” Rick snickered in a faint smile, “I don’t look that tough and I look unarmed. That being said, you are at a disadvantage.”

What did he mean? Was he bluffing me into a corner? There was a rifle, on my left, fully loaded with proton bullets. Rick looked at the gun before turning his attention towards me. I saw the look in his eyes and realized I was in trouble. This man was itching for blood—my blood to be precise. Realizing this, I made a dash for the gun, but stopped halfway, when I heard the click of a gun. I was a few seconds too late. Rick was holding a four gauge revolver, an old relic from the ancient wars. Just what did he think he could do with that? He had four bullets in it, which wasn’t enough to deal that much damage to my armor. I smirked as I straightened up. Rick fired without any warning, aiming for my left chest plate. I never saw the bullet, but I heard it hit my armor, abruptly.

“That didn’t hurt,” I commented, placing my hands on my chest plate in a defensive stance. “Okay, what I did was wrong and I am sorry. I just wanted to stop you two before you guys did something stupid.”

“Oh really?” he growled impatiently, while firing two more rounds at me.

I shielded myself by placing my arms in front of me. I heard the bullets deflect from my armor. There was a tingling sensation that followed that I couldn’t comprehend. My arms, something was wrong.

“Take a look at your hands, Den. I wasn’t just firing randomly at you,” Rick hissed at me.

What, just what was he saying? Slowing, I lifted my hands and felt a painful sensation; it felt like my arms had been crippled. My tendons and muscles felt locked. The more I tried to move, the more unbearable the pain became. What had Rick done to me? I looked up and saw him unload the empty shells out of his revolver. This was getting dangerous for me.

“I bet you can feel it now, can't you?” Rick said, loading more rounds into his revolver.

I was absolutely sure his bullets had not pierced me. There was more to his gun than what meet the eye. I thought it was strange for him to use an ancient gun against my type of armor. It seemed he had baited me into dropping my guard. I had been so overconfident; l let him lure me into his snare.

“What did you do to me?” I asked him furiously, struggling to regain control of my arms.

This was maddening to say the least—I was absolutely sure he hadn’t injured me at all. The armor had absorbed the force behind his bullet. I coiled back, locking my right knee in front.

“My revolver is over a thousand years old,” he spoke while pointing his gun at my head. “It has been passed from generation to generation, each making new modifications towards its firing power. Did you know.”

“Shut up, already,” I stopped him. “Just give me the shorter version of your story, the last thing I need is a history lecture from you.”

Rick got even more furious as I could see more wrinkles on his face. Is this what people called a real bind? Crap, I felt my back hit against something solid, and a noise, as if an object fell to the ground afterwards. It was the box with the pellets.

“Wait, Rick,” I warned him to stop attacking, but he wasn’t listening.

Using him to test my stun system was the worst thing I could have done. Rick dashed towards me, with his gun in his right hand, without firing a single shot. My guess, he was trying to shoot me at point blank range, which was not such a bad plan for him, that is. I just backed up with all my might and rolled out of his grasp, barely avoiding a bullet from his revolver. He twisted his body, with such precise maneuvers, and fired another shot, aiming for my leg. By some luck, I was able to avoid it by twisting my ankle to its limit and executing a small jump. It was now clear to me at this point that Rick didn’t want to kill me; however, cause me pain as a way to get back at me. I looked down, for some reason, and saw one of the pellets from the box on the ground.

“Oh crap, you idiot,” Rick screamed and stopped attacking me.

He put his gun back onto its hidden strap and dashed towards the small pellet. Something was wrong. The tone on his voice gave me a sense of fear.

“Open the hatchet, now,” he screamed at my AI while picking up the pellet that had fallen on the ground.

“What’s going on?” I yelled at Rick, seeking to get some answers.

He was barely listening as he had made his way towards the hatch door. I followed slowly behind him, curious to see what he was about to do next. He was acting strange, the last minute he was furious and shooting at me—and now, he was running away, holding a small pellet in his hand. Rick climbed up the hull and opened the emergency exit door. He proceeded to throw the pellet as hard and as far as he could, before closing the hatchet quickly. As I watched him do all this, I heard a huge strange explosion that rocked the entire ship. It felt like there was an earthquake all around us. The com link system went static and the ship began to spin out of control.

“Get down, you idiot,” Rick screamed at me from the floor. “All this is your doing, Den, remind me to shoot you when this is over.”

“Oh really,” I blasted him in my loudest voice, while falling on the ground. “All this happened because you shot my arms with your stupid looking piece of a trash gun.”

“Do you want to go again, Den, because I am ready to go?” Rick snarled while holding onto a part of the ship.

Just what was he going to do in such a predicament as this? He couldn’t even shoot me straight, considering how much spinning the ship was doing. The shaking stopped and the ship started to stabilize itself. Did that fallen pellet cause all of this? No, it couldn’t have done all that, could it? I mean, it was so small and looked harmless enough, but then again, I could be wrong.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you said something about this piece of trash gun,” Rick hissed, pointing his gun at me so quickly that I didn’t know what to do.

“Knock it off, Rick,” Dalla said as she entered the room. She looked at me irritated and punched the wall closest to her—probably, not too happy with me for stunning her, too. “As much as I would like to help you beat up Den, we have far much more troubling problems to deal with. That strange explosion knocked out our sensors and engines. We are practically sitting ducks out here in terror beasts’ territory.”

Okay, that definitely didn’t sound good at all from any perspective. I mean, what else could go wrong? Dalla took a few more steps towards us and picked up a few guns and a proton dagger, before heading out. She barely said anything to us as she left to go outside.

“Your sister looks pissed,” I snickered in a remark, trying to start up a conversation.

“Well, if you think she’s angry now, wait till she finds out that it was us that caused the explosion,” he mumbled as he placed his gun back inside.

As I thought about his words, a cold chill crawled up my spine, making me shiver. If Rick was like this when he got mad, I would hate to see what Dalla would do to me.

“It’s best not to think about it, trust me,” Rick whispered to me. “Whatever you do, act surprised and don’t say anything.”

Easy enough, even I could do that; although, I was very bad at keeping secrets especially as big as this one. At some point, Dalla would figure it out. I just hope I won’t anywhere near her at that particular moment.

“We’ll postpone our fight for now, so take this and you will be fine,” Rick said and injected me with a serum of some sort.

For some reason, I started to feel something in my arms which was good. The pain was still there, but at least movement in my arms was coming back slowly.

“Just what is in those bullets?”

I still couldn’t explain what had happened to me at all; those bullets shouldn’t have been able to piece my armor and even harm me, for that matter.

“It’s simple, really,” Rick replied, speaking in his confident voice. “Every bullet in this gun contains a dosage of neurotoxin venom that could take down even a wild tiger, given half an second or so. I didn’t need to piece hard through your armor for the poison to enter your body. There is tiny thread like needles in each bullet. You can’t see them, but they are powerful enough to pierce armor and enter your flesh. Den, you are lucky, had I shot you one more time, you’d be a goner.”

“In other words, you poisoned me,” I panted, stretching my stiff arms.

“Well, when you put it like that, then yes,” Rick walked away, following his sister.

Great, just perfect! Getting poisoned by neuron toxins was the last thing I wanted inside my body, since I was still in the midst of recovering from neon alpha poisoning, which in itself was fatally dangerous. My only hope was that my immune system was strong enough to hold off the toxin and the neon alpha poison, at the same time.

“Let’s go,” Rick said, coming back again to grab a few flash canisters and stacking them in his armor compartments. “The feeling in your arms should have come back by now.”

He was right, my arms had returned to somewhat normal. There was still pain; however, it was mostly numbness. As gentle as possible, I grabbed some weapons and headed towards the cockpit of the ship, to get my helmet. This current ordeal had cost us a few hours of travel, further delaying our mission. A lot of things were about to make a turn for the worse. That last explosion was strong enough to be detected from a 100 mile radius, which was the last thing we wanted. As soon as I had all my gear and armor on, I advanced outside to check out the scenario. It was a total wasteland, like a nuclear bomb had exploded somewhere close. The trees and grass were all gone, leaving nothing other than a pile of debris on the ground. My horizon was completely limited, the amount of radioactivity on my scanners were reading off the charts. I couldn’t believe that we had caused this much damage in just a few minutes. The old man had more than likely seen this, and I would imagine, he was very angry with us. I walked around the debris firmly holding onto my newly acquired proton assault rifle. Despite knowing how useless it was against a terror beast, holding it in my arms made me feel at ease.

“Darn, look at this, Rick,” Dalla commented, checking the engine. “The engines were overheated, too many pipe faucets burst. We won’t be able to go anywhere for a while.”

Rick strapped his gun in and walked towards his sister quickly, “Can you fix this?”

Dalla posed for a while, observing the simmering heat gushing out of the turbine shafts, “Yeah, maybe; nevertheless, it may take a while to seal the pipes and reboot the system. Just what happened here, Rick?”

Rick laughed out loudly, scratching his helmet like he had lice, “no idea, sis, I wish I knew too, but I have no clue.”

“Good one, Rick,” I whispered and gave him a quick thumps up.

Fortunately, I was able to lower my hand down before Dalla looked towards me. She glanced at me and turned around shaking her head, “I know you two are hiding something.”

“Nothing at all, sis, now let’s link our com link and set up parameter, Den,” Rick said as he moved away from his sister, while typing in something into his exoskeleton suit.

He released two drones from his armor and took out two revolvers. At first, I thought he only had one gun. However, I was wrong. Meaning, there were more things he was hiding and probably would not tell me. I looked at his other gun curiously. Did it fire paralyzing toxins, too? Oh well, I would find out soon when he used it. I dragged my feet through the rubble, dodging tree debris. Rick signaled me to follow him. I paced myself rapidly behind him, to the other side of the ship, to set up grid line sensors while Dalla stayed behind and fixed the engine. Rick took out some gear from his satchel and dug through the ground. He placed small C19 mines with proximity sensors and moved away slowly.

“Go cover, Dalla,” Rick jogged towards the ship’s panel ladders, aiming to go up.

“Yeah, sure,” I nodded and turned around.

I tramped around the ship and halted a few feet from her. I stood in front of her, with my gun in my hands, proceeding to kneel down on my left knee. I unrestricted the safety lock, while extending my gun in front of me. My breathing lowered as I anticipated the worst possible scenario playing out. The blue grass a mile in front of us looked really suspicious, like there was something inside of it. We were being surrounded by an unknown enemy. By my guess, I think it was a terror beast. The movements were too swift and fast to be anything else. Promptly, I released my scan drones from my armor and sent them towards the impending hot zone. From this height, I couldn’t see anything; I needed to find high ground and make my stand there. I looked around for a close place offering my needs—and found a small compartment, on top of the ship, with a great view of my surrounding.

“I’m going up there,” I informed Dalla as I began to climb the hull.

As soon as I got to the top, I placed my equipment down and lay on the ground, inaudibly. The reading I was getting from my drones was off the charts, compared to what I was expecting. Not only was there something in those grassy terrains, but actually, it was just more than a few dozen. Oh no, this was more trouble than we could handle. I watched Dalla work on the engines, while curling down, waiting until I was sure. Honestly, I hoped my scanners were deceiving me; however, I was wrong.

“We got serious trouble,” I said, pointing my rifle towards the grassy plain—fully alert.

We couldn’t possibly take on terror beasts, not with this kind of ammunition.

“Over there too?” Rick growled, sounding really frustrated with my words. “Dalla, you might want to hurry up with that engine problem, because we are not going to last more than ten minutes, at this rate.”

“Just hold them off as long as possible,” she responded in a shaky voice. “It takes time to reset the flux capacitor on this type of engine.”

Judging by their conversation, I could tell that we were in a life or death situation. I felt my stomach swirl with anxiety and my finger pressing hard on the trigger.

“Wait, Den,” Rick yelled to me from the com link line. “Conserve your ammunition and go into the ship. Switch with your AI and man the weapon system; I will cover you and Dalla.”

That could work. The ship’s weapon system offered four times the firing power, which was what we needed. I got up and picked up all my equipment quickly, before heading inside. Without hesitating, I rushed towards the ship’s cockpit and typed in a few instructions into the main system.

“What are you doing?” my AI asked me with a cold tone. “I told you already that you should leave all the ship’s main controls to me.”

“Desperate times,” I said and returned to my task.

I rerouted my AI as fast as I could and linked it off the weapon system as I took over. The ship’s defensive grid came online as the shields activated, maximizing the railing spring coils to full power. I felt the ship vibrate as I redirected the position of the ship’s orbital guns to the right and vertically down, towards the hot zone.

“Are you guys seeing this?” Rick spoke, linking the video surveillance from his com link with ours. “These terror beasts are much smaller than the ones we have seen on earth. I think these are infant terror beasts, if that is even possibly.”

He might be right. I zoomed in on them and faintly saw smaller figures leaping through the pasture. With the sun shining this bright, it was hard to tell to pinpoint exactly what they were and even hit them. Their numbers kept increasing with every passing minute, as the sensory scanners displayed more dots all around the ship. Suddenly, I heard the sound of the gun fire. Rick had fired his gun first. I noticed the small dots on my scanner start to move even faster towards us than before—this was it. I latched hard onto the triggers, firing the orbital guns all around, in a 180 degree motion, hoping to hit something. The dots on the scanners didn’t dwindle at all, but they were slowing down and backing out a little. Even with this amount of firing power, the odds were still bad. I growled out loud in frustration while still firing at the creatures. Was there something we could do to shift the odds in our favor?

Wait, the pellets, we still had those. If one of those could cause that much destruction, I would imagine more of them could destroy anything. No, Dalla would figure out that it was us who caused that strange explosion, and I would hate to know what she would do to us. So the pellets were definitely out of the question.

“Dalla, please hurry up,” Rick screamed out as he kept firing. “I’m running out of ammunition, I can’t keep this up forever, you know?”

“I’m trying,” Dalla replied quickly, at the top of her voice. “Maybe you should try resetting a flux capacitor while someone is yelling at you, and you will see how hard it is.”

“Well, if someone like you can do it, I think a monkey could, too,” Rick responded, sounding really ticked.

“Oh really, Rick, why don’t you come down here and say it to my face,” Dalla growled back.

This wasn’t what I hoped was going to happen and this was certainly not the best time for a sibling fight. The creatures were drawing closer and maneuvering so fast I couldn’t track them, let alone shoot them. To make things even more stressing, the shells were almost gone. I had fired more than half, barely hitting any of the small creatures.

“Maybe, I will and then I can shove one of the little guys down your throat.”

“I would like to see you try.”

Quickly, I shut down my com link line and began to concentrate my fire. I switched the output of the gun to rapid fire in short dispersal, like a shotgun, and began firing at the slow pace. I felt annoyed; nothing we did could stop them from advancing.

“All done,” Dalla commented, somehow using the com link line which I thought had been disconnected. “Help, I can’t move—I’m surrounded.”

Just great, she gave us good and bad news at the same time. I wanted to rush out and help her, but I couldn’t. The orbital guns were the only things keeping the creatures at bay. If I left this station, then no one was going to man the weapon system. The shields were barely holding off the small creatures that had gone through the outer defenses. I observed them attempt to get inside the ship. It was only a matter of minutes, maybe seconds.

“Switch me in,” my AI spoke in a cold tone. “Look, you are the only one who still has enough ammunition to go help Dalla and I can cover you, if you switch me into the weapons grid.”

I hated talking to my AI like it was just another person; although, it was right. I pondered for a while, thinking of the most logical situation to go about this matter. Dalla was surrounded and I was the only one who could help her. I took the best option and gave my AI full access of the whole ship. I realized, I would regret it later, but now was not the time. I got off the chair and took my equipment, sprinting out to Dalla. Moving quickly, I jolted so fast, out of the ship, that I found myself looking at a warzone without realizing it. There were tiny creatures, hitting on the shields, violently plotting to get in.

“Whatever you do, don’t let the shields down,” I ordered my AI in a rough tone, while looking at my guns one last time.

I felt scared, nevertheless courageous. A life hung in the balance and my actions, at that moment, would impact the future drastically. I moved away from the hatch, sealing it shut behind me. Suddenly, I noticed that one of the shields had fallen and a few of those creatures had penetrated the shields near Dalla. More were still trying to breach inside, as they outnumbered us heavily.

“I’m coming, Dalla, hang tight,” I said through the com link and turned on the electric stunner system to maximum power.

I felt a jolt of power, followed by a timed power usage clock on my visor. I had about 3 minutes to use it at full power. Feeling somewhat confident, I dashed towards her without fear, firing carelessly into the horde of creatures. I had never fully tested the modifications on a large crowd—but I trusted Ali and Dr. Berge. One of the small terror beasts jumped at me with its jaws open. It was so small, I could swash it with my feet, and yet so powerful, it could easily knock me down. With my body in motion, I twisted down, contemplating the speed of my momentum while shooting it with my gun. A few shots were barely able to penetrate its small skin, which was rather impressive considering how tiny they were. A few other small terror beasts jumped onto me, scratching my armor with their claws. I felt them one second and then swoosh. They looked stunned or dead for some reason. My mouth opened, in a stutter, but no words came out. Could it be? A rather disappointing find, but nonetheless important. It seemed the smaller versions of the terror beasts were intolerable to electricity. I bent down for a second, despite the dire situation, just to be sure. Yep, they looked pretty lifeless to me. Had I found the terror beasts’ one and only weakness? It was possible, although it was still just a speculation. Dalla grunted out loud, fighting off the large numbers of creatures all over her. It distracted me from my discovery, causing me to get up after her. I turned my gaze up in front, while dashing fast through the swarm. I saw Dalla hold them off with her gun; however, she was almost out of ammunition. A chunk of her armor had been torn off, and I could see part of her right hand showing from it. Sensing the situation, I began to fire a few rounds at the terror beasts munching at her oxygen tank. The small creatures fell, but they weren’t harmed at all by my bullets. I got close to Dalla and side winded my body opposite to her—placing my back against hers, as we fought off the creatures, back to back.

“Boy am I glad to see you,” she commented from the com link. “For a moment, I really thought I was goner. One of my oxygen tanks was damaged, and I only have enough oxygen for a few more minutes.”

“I have an idea,” I whispered to her with a nudge, giving her my extra clip of proton bullets. “Cover me for a few minutes, I need to do something fast.”

“Okay,” she said, reloading the magazine into her gun. “I don’t know what you are about to do, but this better be worth it.”

“Trust me, I think it will work.”

I fired a few more rounds at the small terror beasts, close to me, before ducking down to unveil my plan. Dalla fired her gun back and forth quickly, buying me a few seconds, which was more than enough. Quickly, I shut down my armor defense grids and rerouted all the power I had to my EMP system circuits. There was a slight interval delay followed by tiny clicks. I heard my backup power come online as the main power had been redirected to my electric weapon system. The suit jolted and vibrated in response to the power surging through it. I had a ten seconds to power up, which I needed for it to disperse out of me. Any longer than that and I would risk blowing up everything, including myself and Dalla.

“Get down, Dalla,” I yelled, quickly pushing her hard towards the ground.

In that moment, I released an electric pulse wave through my shoulder pores, in a 360 degree axis. I felt the massive power leave my suit with such a powerful force that it was almost hard to move. In the next couple of seconds, I saw nothing but blinding light—everything seemed like one giant haze. But was it over?

I heard the ship’s main shields suddenly turn off as the engines roared. Once the blinding light had faded, I opened my eyes slowly, glancing back at the ship, and then back at the small creatures coming towards us. Something was wrong and I had a feeling it was my AI. Just what was that stupid machine up to this time? This wasn’t part of the program I had told it to do. I helped Dalla back to her feet, both of us backing away with our guns blazing bullets. The ship was almost two meters above the ground and rising. A mixture of frustration and fear reached me, causing me to panic.

“What’s going on, Den?” Rick asked me from the other end, somewhere above the ship.

“I don’t know,” I replied, just as stunned as he was. “Dalla, duck now, I am going to fire another pulse wave!”

She heeded my warning, with a nod, and quickly stooped down on her left knee, and she covered her face with both hands briefly. The moment I realized she was out of the way, I fired my electric pulse burst, for the second time, on a grander scale, hoping to destroy the creatures within a 30 meter radius around us. My scanners shrieked out loud, alerting me that I had drained more than half the power of my battery pack. I closed my eyes the second time again from the blinding furious light, while keeping alert for the ship. I felt Dalla’s figure brush past me—she was moving towards the ship, hastily.

“So I was right,” after it was clear again, I saw a pile of stunned lifeless creatures on the ground. Their bodies simmering with smoke and nail almost turned to ash. I stepped on one of them, just to make sure it wasn’t fooling me. There was no motion; I detected no signs of life from it at all. “I didn’t know you could do that,” Dalla said in amazement.

“Save the admiration for later,” I replied back, looking at the cargo ship ascending slowly above us: “We are not out of the woods yet.”

Another horde of the small creatures appeared out of the forest, swarming towards us; numbering in the hundreds, at least by my speculation. They glided through the ground, effortlessly, approaching us with precise speed. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, we suddenly heard a menacing loud roar. It was a much larger terror beast, judging by the sound. My back withered out, causing me to spiral down. I had used too much energy without realizing it. Everything seemed to go awry for me at that time. I struggled up to my feet, while holding onto my gun tightly. I needed to keep it together, but that alone was hard to do. Looking around, it was then I truly realized what this territory was. Apparently, this was the terror beasts’ nesting area and we had invaded it. That explained why they kept attacking us relentlessly, attempting to force us out. Freaky vibrations rattled from the ground, getting stronger with each second. The terrain was becoming more dangerous for us, meaning it was time to leave. It was only a matter of time before we were surrounded and possibly killed.

“Can you fly?” I asked Dalla quickly without hesitation. “My suit doesn’t have enough juice anymore to fly up.”

She paused, for a second, checking her suit’s system and then replied, “I have enough power to fly for a short distance.”

Good, all we needed was just enough lift to get us close to the ship’s hull. The ship was about 15 meters up above us, lifting up even further. Rick was aboard it; however, not inside to stop the ship from going any further.

“Take my hand,” I extended my left arm towards her. “Try to fly towards the ship and I will cover you.”

She nodded through her helmet and grabbed my hand, preparing her system for lift off. With my other free hand, I fended off the small terror beasts, using my assault rifle. My gaze turned east and caught sight of at least four gigantic terror beasts. I felt nothing radiating from their eyes. The creatures stood firmly on top of a hill, looking down, directly towards us. One of them galloped towards us, with its jaws wide open. In a slight second, Dalla yanked me as she lifted up into the air. By the time one of the large terror beasts was within range, we were more than five meters in the air. It jumped up for a few seconds, but only caught wind. I gazed down and felt its eyes upon us with sheer anger. Dalla was slowing down, for some reason; she was losing leverage as we were descending little by little. Luckily, we were close to the ship, allowing us to latch onto the outer hull, just before her flight system gave out.

From this distance, the ground was starting to look like a dotted blur. It was filled with a massive number of small and large terror beasts. I was for sure terror beasts budded off each other, but now, I wasn’t. These recent new developments led me to believe they could also produce off springs, too. Dalla moved past me, climbing up the hull of the ship. She was heading up towards the latch door. Instinctively, I joined her, moving calmly as not to fall. The cargo ship whistled, moving west, towards our current objective. I saw the terror beasts follow us from the ground; however, unable to keep up with the speed of the ship.

“We dodged a bullet, didn’t we?” Dalla laughed as she opened the emergency hatch to get in.

“I didn’t think so,” I answered, following behind. “It’s way too soon to relax just yet.”

These creatures weren’t just going to give up and let us leave. If I was right, they were going to follow us anywhere on this planet to exact revenge. I mean, the look on their face said it all—perhaps there was more to these creatures than we already knew. In fact, nothing on this planet was what it seemed.

I entered the ship, last, and closed the emergency hatchet behind me. Dalla grazed away from me into another compartment, without saying a word. I left her, charting my way into the cockpit of the ship, very angry. That AI had tried to leave us behind, and I wasn’t going to let it slide, not even one bit.

“I’m glad to see you guys,” Rick surprised me, coming from another exit. He had taken off his head gear, looking completely wasted. He leaned against the wall, dropping his gun in a huge sigh, with his head tilted up.

I ignored him for a bit as I went straight to the monitor, “why did you disobey my direct order? I specifically told you not to lower the shields at any costs.”

“I followed the logical choice, based on my design and decided that moving the ship was in everyone’s best interest.”

No, that wasn’t logic at all; something was up and I wanted to know what. Because robots lacked emotions, it was the reason why we had stopped using them to fight the terror beasts. Plus, they were also expensive to manufacture and maintain. To make it worse, they left an even greater amount of destruction than the terror beasts.

“Cheer up, Den,” Dalla said, taking off her helmet and wiping off sweat from her forehead. Her tender slim cheeks resonated with glow of slight glitter. “It all worked out in the end, didn’t it?”

Maybe! But I just couldn’t let such actions slide by me again—so I did the unthinkable and disconnected my AI from the ship’s main grid, leaving the ship’s default system in control. I just couldn’t risk something like that happening again to us. I bent my back down and placed the AI module into my thick plate pocket.

“Remind me never to go on your bad side,” Dalla snickered in a smart comment. She gently tilted away from us and left the compartment, elegantly.

“How far do you think we traveled, so far?” Rick asked me, looking at the screen map.

“Probably less than 80 miles, at best; thanks to our incident we are definitely behind schedule,” I replied and took off my helmet.

I scratched my head for a bit, before sitting down, my eyes looking at the operations monitors frequently. On this planet, we couldn’t afford to relax or act reckless. It was a hostile alien planet and we barely knew what was going on. But, perhaps, Rick knew something.

“What did Ali tell you about this assignment?”I turned my head towards him.

“Who is Ali?” he asked, looking confused.

Right, he didn’t know about that. I was the only person who called him Ali. It was likely that he was using another persona name on the ship. Only I knew he was an alien and was probably best to keep it that way.

“I mean, the man who saw us off,” I responded, tilting back towards the monitor. “I forgot his name.”

“Oh, you mean Dr. Sagets?” Rick suddenly laughed, sitting down on the other operational seat next to me. “Well, nothing really, he told us to operate in stealth and try to get the job done without being seen. It was odd though, I got the feeling he was hiding something important about the mission. I really don’t trust him.”

“I see,” I sighed out loudly, placing my head between my hands. My only clue to the truth had turned out to be a dead-end. Just what was he hiding?

“Wait, Den, I just figured out something?” Rick said, shacking like he was scared. “If we only traveled for 80 miles at best and found this many terror beasts, then that must mean the others at the main ship are at risk as well. They can’t fight off a horde of those small and large creatures.”

I felt my fists clench tightly. He was absolutely right, although I didn’t want to admit it. It was absolutely possible that the creatures were already headed that way as we speak.

“What do you think we should do?” he asked me, while trying to sound tough.

I could feel the fear in his voice so clearly, but what could I possibly say to him that could comfort him? It seemed every possible answer I could possibly think of only boiled down to the worst case scenarios.

“We continue as planned,” I said slowly and closed my eyes, drifting off. “We will just have to believe Ali and the others will manage.”

6

 

“Wake up, Den,” someone shook me so hard it startled me.

“We got trouble.”

Just when I was starting to have good night’s rest, with no strange dreams, something had to get in my way. I yawned and opened my eyes slowly—only to see Dalla, and she was standing in front of me, with a gun in one hand and a dagger in the other. What was it now? I just wished for one day of peace and quiet, but apparently, even that was hard to come by. I got up slowly while yawning out even louder. There was a faint, lingering aftertaste in my mouth that didn’t seem to go away.

“One of those little terror beasts is on board the ship,” she whispered to me and handed me a proton burst handgun. “I don’t know where Rick is, he is not answering his com link.”

“Really,” I said, sounding surprised

This was indeed a sticky situation; those little buggers were trouble enough, but finding one in this ship was going to be more difficult than I thought. There were vents and tight corners for the creature to hide anywhere aboard the ship. Suddenly, the lights in the ship went off which freaked me out. Without hesitation, I put on my helmet and switched to night vision mode. The generator inside the ship came online as the ship stopped and just hovered in the air.

“What do you think caused that?” I whispered to Dalla quietly, looking around.

“Okay, that’s a stupid question,” she whispered back to me moving towards the door breathing slowly. “I already told you, a terror beast got inside our ship.”

We had a loud thump on the cockpit hatch door and we moved slightly back, with our guns up. Something was pressing smoothly against the door. Dalla paced towards the door and hit the automatic control switch on it. I heard the door start to open as my heart beat fast and adrenaline rushed through my body. It opened all the way, but there was nothing there; it was too dark to see. Out of the blue, I spotted something fast and small whish towards Dalla in barely a second.

“Get it off me,” she yelled, her hands struggling to pull away the little bugger off her.

I moved away from her and aimed at the little creature on her head. With the way she was moving back and forth, I couldn’t shoot without risking her life in the process. I ran towards her, instead, and began punching the little sucker as hard as I could with my left hand. All those boxing lessons I took for a week were paying off; although, I wasn’t sure if any of my punches were having any effect. Finally, the little guy let go off her helmet and jumped onto the controls. “I’m gonna blast you up,” Dalla screamed, raising her gun directly at it.

“Wait, Dalla, don’t shoot.”

Quickly, I stopped her by pushing her gun away, before she could fire it at the small terror beasts. One shot of her proton blaster and the controls would be destroyed, which wasn’t exactly what we wanted.

“I see you guys have met my new pet,” Rick said, walking towards the small terror beast. Surprisingly, it dashed towards him and landed on his head without killing him. Dalla and I looked at each other, confused to say the least. This wasn’t happening now, was it? I strolled towards him, just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things. It seems my eyes were not deceiving me, which I found rather disappointing. Apparently, I wasn’t seeing things at all.

“You can’t be serious are you, Rick?” Dalla hissed, literally taking the words out of my mouth. “That’s a freaking terror beast on your head and we need to destroy it.”

“Yeah, Rick,” I added, raising my stun blades up into the air. “Hold still for a little while and I will have that little sucker down soon.”

“No,” Rick screamed and moved out of the way so fast I could barely see him. “Huggers is not like the others, he is different and gentle. We can’t just kill him because he is an offspring of our enemy.”

“You named it Huggies? And how do you know it’s even a male? For all we know, it could be a female,” Dalla commented, sighing deeply.

“No, his name is Huggers and he is a male, end of story,” Rick screamed, holding the little terror beasts like it was a pet.

“That’s not the point here,” I intervened, getting between them, looking directly at the terror beast. “That thing in your hands is trouble and it needs to be destroyed now. If you want a pet, I promise to get you one as soon as we get back to earth. Now let me kill it.”

“Try it if you can,” Rick growled, pointing his other revolver on my forehead directly, with an insane look on his face.

Darn, I backed off slowly and peacefully. I couldn’t afford another hit from his weird guns. For all I knew, his other gun was even more deadly than the first one. “Suit yourself, but if that thing poses a threat to any of us, I’m going to shoot it without hesitation.”

Rick put his gun back into his armor and commented, “if that should happen, I will personally do it.”

Sure, that would save me a lot of trouble, but could he really do it? He looked like the type to emotionally cling onto people and objects, like his life depended on it.

“You have to forgive my brother,” Dalla whispered to me as soon as Rick left. “Our parents never allowed us to ever have pets or anything, just leave him like this for a while and I’m sure he will come to his senses soon.”

Maybe, if I knew one thing about attachment, it was that those who got too attached never let go of what is that they were fond of. I was an example of that because I kept chasing over a girl who left me four years ago to no end. I got too attached and part of me yearned to chase after her to the end of the world, literally speaking of course.

“What do you think happened to the ship’s alternate power?” Dalla asked, checking the controls.

Her words snapped me back to reality, instantly. It was indeed unusual for the lights to go out for this long.

“Probably, that little bug did this,” I whispered to her while signaling her to follow behind me as my back up to the control module compartment.

The whole ship seemed to be out of power, which was rather stranger, considering the fact that a nuclear fission battery powered the ship and those things could last for centuries.

“Look at this,” Dalla whispered and stopped completely. She bent down and showed me a circuit that had been fried. “I think we sustained a lot of damage from that blast earlier.”

“Perhaps, you are right,” I replied, shifting my weight back to my front foot.

I began to move again and Dalla followed behind me, with both our guns raised as we paced to the ship’s power room. One of the lights kept flickering on and off as if the ship was drastically losing more power.

“Maybe it’s time you put back your AI into the ship,” Dalla whispered so softly I barely heard it.

No, who knows what would happen if I did that? For all I know, it could destroy the ship. We got to the power room and noticed smoke coming outside. The whole compartment was dark as charcoal.

“This isn’t good,” I commented, running into the compartment, worried. “Why didn’t we notice this earlier? What should we do?”

I turned towards Dalla, who seemed to have quite a bit of knowledge on this type of stuff.

She looked at the circuits for a while, resting her chin on the palm of her left hand—her right arm tinkering with the wiring systems. I walked past her and observed the nuclear battery cables alongside the wall. One looked damaged but the rest seemed okay.

“I can’t fix this, not without risking the lives of everyone on board,” she said, typing some instructions into one of the circuit boards that was still intact. “The best I can do for now is shut down the power, and we can use the generators to land down somewhere for the day.”

What? That plan seemed dangerous. Wasn’t there any other way to fix it without landing on the ground? For all we know, there were even more terror beast on the ground lying and waiting for us.

“We can use the camouflage system on board to hide ourselves, so freeze out,” she smirked and left the compartment.

I watched her leave and nodded silently. Her plan could work; although, I doubted for a while if the ship had a stealth mode system applied into its mainframe. With one glimpse around the room, I exited the compartment and went back to the ship’s main room. Dalla was there already, typing in some encrypted commands into the main system. The process of shutting down the ship’s power system seemed rather aggravating, by the looks of it. I didn’t dare bother her while she was working. Instead, I leaned next to her and watched her silently. I popped my fingers, annoyingly, thinking how far off schedule we were. Nothing seemed to be going as planned.

“Find a location free of tree and debris, we are going to crash this baby down,” Dalla chuckled, buckling into one of the seats close to her. “I have shut down all of the ship’s main power and the generator will only last thirty seconds, so use the power wisely.”

What, was she kidding me right now? No one could pull off that miracle. I could barely even steer a ship that great. I looked at her, startled and confused, my heart beating very fast.

“Why me, Dalla? Why can’t you do it yourself?”

“Because my brother and I don’t have our licenses to operate ships yet, we are still minors.”

“Really, could have fooled me.”

I felt the ship suddenly start to lose altitude as it took a massive nose dive. My back tightened as I was pushed against the seat and dashboard. I quickly struggled up and held tightly onto the seat as hard as I could. “Oh great! Now what else could go wrong?”

Dalla and Rick were turning out to be a bigger eyesore than I anticipated. It seems that they were permitted to keep guns, but were not allowed to drive? This was some messed dilemma they had me under. I gazed fiercely through the front window and saw the ground getting closer. It was going to take some miracle to get us out of this situation. As fast as I could, I dragged myself in and clamped the seat belts on. There wasn’t much time, meaning every second counted.

I took over of the ship’s control dashboard and recalibrated them to my own personal standard settings. With both hands, I grabbed tightly onto the steering wheel and pulled it back hard, trying to level the ship. As expected, it was no easy task. It felt like I was trying to pull out a ton of armors. The backup generators gave a silent jolt and died out completely.

“This is it,” Dalla screamed, holding tightly onto her seat.

“Brace yourself,” I replied, turning the wheel a hard left.

The ship screeched, making a breech, slow plunge, but it was already too late. We struck the ground so fast, we barely knew it happened. There was a loud clutter of metal ripping for a really long minute, and then utter silence. I felt my head hit against the dashboard, it was painful. Fortunately, the rumbling vibration stopped, making the worst possible scenario more bearable. I pulled myself from the uncomfortable position and sat up straight, with my hands on my face.

“Is everyone okay?” a voice spoke, accompanied by some static noise.

It was Rick; he didn’t sound too good, judging from the tone of his voice. Bit by bit, I took off my helmet and inhaled large amounts of air. Dalla wasn’t moving, but I could see she was faintly breathing. She had a pulse and her vital organs seemed to be working normally. I stood up and observed the status of the ship. It seemed over, but we couldn’t take any chances yet.

“What happened, Den? I was sleeping, and then suddenly, I heard a loud thump and I was on the ground,” Rick said coming into the control room. “Is Dalla alright?”

Rick was limping and holding onto his right arm. I turned my head up and noticed something above his head. So the little bugger was still alive, even after all that?

“Yeah, your sister is alright, just not conscious,” I replied and signaled him to help me carry her to the other room.

Together, we carried Dalla into a vacant compartment; however, it was a much more difficult task, considering how heavy she was in her armor.

“I think my sister put on a lot of weight,” Rick laughed, trying to be funny.

“No, don’t say that,” I whispered, signaling to get him to shut up.

Who knows what would happen if she heard him say that. I definitely didn’t want to find out for myself. As slow and carefully as possible, we carried her to a bunk and laid her there, being silent as not to awaken her.

“What should we do now?” Rick asked, slowly sitting on the bed, next to his sister, filled with frustration.

The little terror beast came and sat on his lap like a small puppy. Honestly, the thought of shooting the little bugger with a horde of bullets did occur to me—it was almost too hard to resist.

“Well, can you fix a nuclear fusion engine?” I asked, tugging my shoulders down. I could feel this cramp slowly crippling down my spine.

“Nah! Probably not,” Rick chuckled, scratching his head gently, with his eyes closed. “I never had any interest in engines unlike my sister. Times like this, I wish she was awake.”

“You can say that again,” I agreed with him. “The best we can do now is salvage every important piece we can find and guard the ship until Dalla wakes up.”

Rick nodded and we both geared up our weapons and equipment, ready to go out. I looked one time at Dalla and smiled faintly. As long as she was alive, we would make it out of this mess somehow.

“Let’s leave her here.”

Before leaving the ship, we made some minor modifications and turned the ship to camouflage mode, in order to hide it from intruders. Although, the mess around the crash debris around us made it pretty hard to truly hide in plain sight. Rick and I made our way, stealthy, around the pile of burnt grass and trees, picking up what salvage parts we could take. The wind blowing gently against us was strictly riveting, as it kept getting in our way.

“Go this way and I will circle around,” I spoke with slight signals and quickly left.

There was a slight lingering sensation of tension rising in the air; I had experienced this type of nervousness at least four times in my life. I looked back and forth, while making my way down the side of the ship. Sadly to say, I didn’t find anything useful except debris and ashes from the crash. The wind blew up again, and this time, stronger than before; it was enough to make me shield my head for a few seconds. It stopped completely without warning, leaving me in a state of shock. What was up with this planet and freaky weathers? All of a sudden, I heard a rustle in the trees and I quickly raised my gun up, checking in all directions.

“I think, I hear something, Rick. I’m heading towards it now and don’t turn off your com link.”

There it was again—the rustle in the wind only got stronger as if something big was running fast through the grass. I looked everywhere as my heart pounded even faster, adrenaline rushing throughout my entire body.

“Rick, I think we got trouble,” I whispered through the com link, as I backed up slowly.

Whatever was around me, was definitely fast and very big judging by the noise, but there was no way we could have been followed, was there?

“Hang tight, Den, I will be there soon,” he said and the com link went static.

“Consider it done,” I laughed nervously.

“Don’t move,” a voice I had never heard before spoke to me, something pointed at my back.

Crap, I had been careless and now my enemy had got the best of me. Someone small was behind me—I could tell because of the shadow looming through me. I would guess a child. I tilted my back and lowered my stance ready to counterattack at the perfect chance.

“Who are you and what do you want?” I dropped my guns and raised my hands in the air.

“I said don’t move,” the person said and kicked me on the ground.

Whoever it was didn’t seem too friendly, considering their tone of voice. I panted for a little, while trying to get back on my feet. I was sure my enemy was a child. Meaning there was no way he or she could have knocked me to my feet, bearing in mind how heavy my armor was. Slowly, I turned my gaze and looked up to see who my enemy was. No way, it was just a little boy and he had no weapons, which was rather disappointing. He had gray skin and rather wild green hair; he looked human enough, but at the same time, he didn’t. I just couldn’t explain it, but there was something about him that reminded me of Ali.

“I told you not to move, didn’t I?” he growled at me, putting his foot on my chest and clenching his fists.

He looked like a miniature little dog, barking and growling at me. I didn’t need my guns to take him on. I mean, he was a youngster, after all, and by some miracle, he had managed to knock me down to the ground. Quickly, I pulled his leg and threw him to the ground as gently as I could, since he was still just a kid.

“Quit, kid, you can’t beat me,” I commented, standing up. “Now go back home and play with your toys.”

I flexed my neck and shoulders and skipped around on my feet, to get my blood pumping again. I was at least a meter taller than he was and yet it didn’t seem to faze him. His posture was smooth and calm, as if he had been in this type of situation a thousand times over.

“I warned you not to move, but you didn’t listen,” he hissed and dashed towards me.

Painfully to say, I didn’t see him coming until it was too late. All I felt was a slight, but powerful pressure in my abdomen. I don’t know what happened. But I was sent flying back a few yards in the opposite direction, as if I was hit by a truck. My stomach twisted terribly back, sending me lying back flat for a few seconds. I lifted my head and looked back at the kid. Impossible, this wasn’t happening to me now, was it?

“I’m here, Den, what’s the problem?” Rick yelled as he dashed towards me. He helped me get up slowly while holding his gun tightly. “What’s going on? Where is the enemy? How come you are on the ground in pain?”

“Yeah, long story, but we don’t have time to chat now,” I said and made a startling dash for my gun.

As predicted, we were no match for these aliens, in hand to hand combat. Just as the gun was within my grasp, I was hit by something strong in the chest so hard my legs locked. It was so painful I barely could breath for a few seconds. I dropped down to my knees and fell sideways, onto the ground.

“What is out there?” Rick yelled, shooting his guns everywhere at once, hoping to hit something. He was going to laugh if I told him it was a kid, nevertheless, a very skilled and dangerous one. Time was of the essence. I was in pain, but I got back up on my feet and quickly viewed my surrounding. The alien kid was hiding somewhere close. Our best chance of survival lay in mutual teamwork.

“Rick, come here,” I whispered, using my com link.

I had a plan, but it was going to be difficult to do unless we both worked together flawlessly. From what I could deduce, the kid wasn’t alone. He probably had a team with him, hiding somewhere in the thicket—and they were probably close, and were watching our every move. Rick moved swiftly and stopped once he was a few feet from me.

“Okay, I’m here,” Rick said, placing his back against mine. “Mind telling me what’s going on? Is it a terror beast or something else?”

“You wouldn’t believe if I told you. Give me some of the smoke canisters, if you have any?” I whispered to him, extending my left arm outwards.

While Rick was looking through his satchel pack, I massaged my chest softly. I could still feel the pain in my sternum and it ached terribly. It felt like I had been run over by a hover ship. Suddenly, Rick fell to the ground as something small swooshed past us like the wind. I raised my gun, but was unable to track it—it was just gone. That kid wasn’t human, if it was a kid to begin with. For all we know, it was a monster disguised as a child. Actually, I was beginning to think that everything on this planet just seemed out of place.

This planet was weird in that it didn’t rotate clockwise or anticlockwise, which explained why there was never any long nights on this side of the planet. Such a distortion in the planetary axis was impossible to comprehend. In fact, we had no idea this planet existed until we picked up that signal.

“What was that?” Rick coughed and got up.

He staggered back and balanced himself, by putting weight on his left foot. I moved in front of him, with my gun in front. There was no sign of anything out of the ordinary, no traces of threat or danger riding in the wind. Wait, the wind. I could track him or it through the movement of wind. Whenever he attacked, he moved against the wind, meaning I could follow his movements and attack at the perfect chance.

“Get ready, Rick,” I spoke, lowering my legs halfway to the ground. “He is coming again.”

“Who is coming, Den? What is going on?” Rick was confused.

I didn’t have the time to explain every detail to him. Besides, it also meant revealing the identity of Ali, who was hiding among the crew members at our main ship. There was a stir in the wind—a strong sense of imminent danger swiftly moving towards us through the ground. The looming shadow jolted past us again, hidden within the scent of the wind. Before we knew it, Rick and I were down again on the ground, groaning in agonizing pain. I was now sure the kid was moving with the wind. But logically, this was not possible. I mean, I knew DNA could mutate and take on a few characteristics, but this was just way too much to say the least. If by some coincidence, a race of humans lived on this planet, then that would explain the power and speed. I mean they had to have been here for at least a few centuries for this kind of evolution to take place.

“Throw your canisters to the ground,” I coughed, urging Rick.

He nodded without arguing and threw all of them, at once, onto the ground. I watched the canisters explode into the ground, sending a vapor of mist into the air. Everything was engulfed by the black smoke, completely blinding us to our surrounding. I coughed out loud and ached in pain. Honestly, it felt like one of my ribs had been broken, which was not bad, taking into consideration the alternative. Beyond this fog was a little alien monster with incredible speed and power and I really didn’t want to tangle with it. The wind kept whooshing around us without any accurate direction. I noticed something. Every time the wind passed by, the smoke cleared up little by little. It was just a matter of time before we were visible again.

“This isn’t good,” I chuckled out loud.

I tilted my back up, and sat on my legs for a second. My initial plan had failed, forcing me to improvise. Then a strange thought came to me; it was going to be tough to pull, but it was the only option.

“Rick, where is Huggers?” I whispered to him as silently as I could.

“Oh no, you don’t,” he raised his voice at me, which shook me a little. “You are not using Huggers as bait to lure whatever is out there.”

Why was Rick not seeing the bigger picture here? There was more at stake than nursing that little monster. I shook my head, trying to come up with a way to convince him to think otherwise.

“Rick, please! We are running out of time and this is the only option.”

“Think of something else because I won’t let you use Huggers as a distraction to escape, he is just a baby.”

Yeah right, that little baby was going to grow up one day and feed on us. I wanted to tell him that, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that those words would only provoke him. The last thing I wanted was to have Rick acting irrational.