Sci-Fi

Darik`a stood before the command viewport of Peace and Order, gazing out across the Stamotian nebulae and admiring their beauty. There was no way they wouldn't be; the finest artists amongst his people had painstakingly designed them to be as such, and then scattered the stellar gases in such a way that the rays of the system's sun caught them just right, brilliantly coloring them.

Darik`a opened and closed the protective membranes over his eyes several times, the universal sign amongst Ren of withheld distress.

The tendrils lining his spine relaxed against his back, indicating to any observers that he was at ease. Within, however, Darik`a was a torrent of thought and emotion.

For the first time in eons, his people would be going to war.

Massive warships were being recalled from the farthest reaches of the galaxy to the throne-planet Va-Nar, homeworld of the Ren. Already, the press corporations of a thousand solar systems were deeming the massive military build up "The Rearmament".

It had been ages since the overlords of the galaxy, the noble Ren, had felt themselves unsafe. Even so, their military forces were well-armed, well-trained, and well-deployed throughout the galaxy.

Lyle Sanders was not a drug addict forced into the habit because he lived in a bad neighborhood, or because he was depressed, or because it was the only way he could make money. There was just nothing else to fuckin' do on the Fuchsia Dream.

The attendant gig wasn't so bad, really. Punching ticket after ticket, serving watered-down drinks to whiny children, then sitting back and waiting for something to do – anything, man. Anything.

Sure, the other flight attendants knew. Shit, he knew they knew, but as long as he didn't fuck up and didn't do anything wrong, who cared? It wasn't like most of them weren't shooting up themselves.

That was a course he plotted for himself, though. There was really no room to move up in Consolidated Intergalactic Transport services, but at least he had some job security. And a girlfriend, even if only in name. You certainly wouldn't prove yourself a good psychologist by pointing out that theirs was hardly a relationship – they were both addicts, who happened to have both reached the peak of their substance-induced sex drives one day and ended up fucking in one of the unoccupied bathrooms.

Lorraine really wasn't much to look at. Haggard, you could say. Didn't really take good care of her long brown hair or pale skin, didn't take too much pride in her appearance. Low self-esteem was probably what put her in the needle's frigid embrace.

Emptily she repeated to herself that she was her own woman, that this whole drug thing was just temporary, to relieve the boredom of serving on the crappiest space liner in the galaxy. Just as empty were her self-assurances that Lyle was in love with her, though she couldn't have known.

He was a convincing liar.

An exhilarated cough and a smile of self-satisfaction heralded the arrival of something new but familiar into Lyle's bloodstream, the same batch of ice he'd been shooting up with since they'd last made port. He flexed and contracted his hand, his godlike strength coming back to him.

A silent nod of acknowledgement from him, a loosening of the belt, and the suppression of a heartfelt whoop later, Lyle was on his feet and out the door, prowling the corridors of the Fuchsia Dream. Hunching forward slightly, the Beast formerly known as Lyle eyed passersby beneath a furrowed brow, drawing more than a few frightened stares.

Hours later, Lyle sat in the infirmary. White-hot tendrils of agony shot through the veins in his arm as the drugs administered by the nurse immediately brought him down from his high. If leather straps hadn't bound his arms to the table, he would have reached out and killed her.

A mountainous figure of a man filled the doorway; the Captain. Loping strides conveyed Cap'n Theodos to Lyle's side, disappointment infecting those deep green eyes as they gazed into him. Lyle turned away; thinking that he'd somehow let the Captain down was more painful than having to face the man's rage.

"You're lucky," Captain Theodos said quietly. "You could have died. Or been permanently incapacitated. Or, worse, offended one of the passengers, in which case I'd have been forced to let you go."

The Captain's masked compliment caught in Lyle's throat, keeping him from speaking. Not that he could have said anything of substance, anyway.

"You do good work, son," Theodos continued "That's the only reason I'm not letting you go. I see that you've got a life ahead of you…and I'd be real sad if that life involved whatever it is that we just had to bring you down from."

A curt nod was all Lyle could manage. Hell, what did you say to something like that? Nothing that wouldn't end up in Lyle looking dumber than he already did, and that definitely wasn't what he wanted.

Sensing that the restrained attendant before him was at a loss for words, Captain Theodos placed a hand on Lyle's shoulder.

"You'll do fine, my boy," he said before turning on his heel and striding from the infirmary, leaving Lyle to his thoughts. He shut his eyes tight and laid back, contemplating the rather one-sided exchange that had just taken place.

When Lyle again opened his eyes, they met Lorraine's. She was straddling him, but being careful to let most of her weight rest on the bed; he presumed that he'd fallen unconscious, and Lorraine had come to take him back to his quarters.

"Smooth work there, slick, getting caught by the Captain and all. Vomiting on his shoes was a particularly nice touch," she rasped, a bit of a mischievous grin crossing her lips as she imparted this knowledge to Lyle.

He groaned, now realizing how he'd been caught…and why. A faint memory of the stench of vomit brought him back to the instant when his lunch had decided that it matched the Captain's boots better than his stomach.

Lorraine started to unbutton her shirt, looking down as she did so.

"What in the hell are you doing?" Lyle asked, his first words in nearly half a day.

Lorraine shrugged. "I want some. And you're not going anywhere – Captain's orders. Confined to quarters for the next three days. Since Security decided to raid both of our bunks, we've been relieved of our stashes. Nothing else to do."

Lyle smirked, and then shrugged. Getting it when he didn't expect was better than not getting it at all. They filled Lyle's cramped quarters with screams and moans for the next few hours.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Nor`od`un spread his mouth-tendrils in the Ren approximation of a smile. "Slipstream capacitors operating at optimal efficiency, Captain," his engineering subordinate reported.

"Keep me posted," he replied, allowing the needless gesture to fade from his visage. The Ren were supposed to have become a race entirely devoted to the efficient conveyance of ideas, having shunned the theatrical and unnecessary practice of facial expression several ages ago.

Artistic expression, poetic license, even the teachings of literature were simply abandoned, not even acknowledged by the Ren people as a whole, deemed unnecessary and archaic. Automated databanks containing all of the objective knowledge possessed by the Ren were all the reading that their posterity needed, in their estimation.

- - - - -

Lyle felt the crunch of alien tissues beneath his booted feet as the bastard's head exploded against the wall with a sickening spray of blood and what he assumed was brain matter. The alien soldier – who bore marks of such high visibility that Lyle assumed he was a commander – slumped to the ground, its neck still squirting blood at a regular rhythm.

A second later, Lyle was himself on the ground, on his back, though he did have all of his tissues intact. He drew the rifle from under his back, cursing it for not being softer, and looked back and forth down the hall, drawing himself up into a crouch.

"Bastards shoulda never come on my ship," he said, using the back of his hand to wipe flecks of blood from his cheek.

Distressed shouting drew Lyle's gaze in the general direction of engineering, though he couldn't yet spot the source; the fact that he recognized the shouting as human further garnered his interest, though he progressed slowly, using the rifle as though it were an extension of his jaw, sweeping back and forth and listening for anything that might give his foes away.

Daring to expose himself, he rolled across a perpendicular corridor down which he guessed was whoever was shouting. Lyle strained his ears, but could only catch snippets…

"Take that, ye crummy bastard, and one for yer motha, too, aye…" followed by the sickening crunch of something hard tearing through bone, sinew, and flesh. Lyle could only hope that it was alien. The shouting ceased. He broke into a run, fearing that whatever survivor he had heard was wounded or killed, and only hoping that he could reach them in time.

At the far end, he could see only a crouching figure, and another with an enormous chunk of its head taken out, blood pooling around its head. Taking the crouching figure square in his sights, Lyle crouched and spoke normally; "Who's that?"

A smile spread across the lips of the figure, and Lyle instantly recognized it as human. Hearing the accented voice this close only cemented his recognition; "Not gonna shoot me, are ye, laddeh?"

"Ah, shit, Wallace, what…what did you do it?"

The ship's cook – Joel Wallace – rose to his feet, ignoring Lyle's question, though the blood-stained wrench in his right hand left little need for question. A small shudder worked its way up Lyle's back, but he said nothing. Wallace had been with the crew for years, and while he'd always been rowdy and boisterous, Lyle never could have imagined him capable of such a blatantly violent act.

The man was probably unstable.

Without a word, Lyle unstrapped the alien's harness from its chitinous shoulders and tossed it to Wallace, who wore it across his chest like a bandolier, alien weapons clattering against one another as he shifted it. As he did so, Wallace stepped into the dim light given off by one of the hall lamps, and Lyle could see that the man's overalls were tarred in alien gore; he wondered how many of them the Scotsman had felled.

Lyle closed his eyes, and saw Lorraine's death again. Shit, I'm tired.

"Y'all right there, laddeh?" Wallace asked, idly fiddling with one of the larger blades strapped to his stolen bandolier.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Alarms blared, and panic ensued. What the hell is the purpose of alarms, anyway? Lyle mused. Not like people can really go anywhere. It'll just make them stick their stupid heads out, and expose them to even more danger. The ship's paltry security teams assembled, armed, and then spread out again to cover all of the airlocks as instructed by the captain, whose complete lack of tactical sense bordered on disgusting.

If it were up to Lyle, he'd lock all of the unarmed civilians in engineering, give them a couple guards, decompress the rest of the ship except for one airlock so that he'd know where the aliens were certain to come from, and then hunker down and prepare. That way, there'd be no idiot civvies in the way when the shooting started.

No one asked Lyle, though.

In fact, he'd been essentially told he was on his own, and so he'd acted accordingly, procuring weapons from an abandoned security locker, and stripping off unnecessary elements of his attire. Lyle had never before fired a rifle, but he figured that if everything went well, he wouldn't have to. He wasn't an optimist, though.