AND THE SKY TURNED LIQUID

A PROMPT STORY

“The sky turned liquid,” he said. “I swear. I don’t know how they did it, but it wiped out everything it touched. We escaped, but just barely. That’s where I lost my arm,” he added, lifting the prosthetic up and showing it to us.

Mom wasn’t as impressed with it as I was. He either chose not to have the arm layered with synth, or lost it bit by bit over the years, but I could see small pnuematics, slim cylinders and pistons, with gears and wheels and thin brass lines pumping oil—some as thin and delicate as tueller’s hair—and looked up at the scars that criss-crossed his chest.

“We almost done here, Doc? I got a battle to fight, remember? You’re just supposed to stop the bleeding,” he added, and I looked up at my mother, the specs pulled down in front of her eyes as she stitched the man’s arm.

“I don’t care about your battle, Colonel. If I don’t get this wound cleaned and sealed, you won’t be going anywhere. Pass me that will you, hon?” she said to me, pointing to the vibroblade.

“This your nurse?” the Colonel asked, looking down at me and smiling. He gave me a wink and I looked at the ground, not knowing what to do. He laughed. “I like her,” he said with a nod. “Reminds me of my own daughter. She was about the same age when the bastards lit the skies up.”

“She died?” I asked.

He nodded, not saying anything, and I saw my mother looking at me over the specs she was wearing. I tried to avoid her, but there was nowhere for me to hide.

“Don’t worry. That’s not going to happen here. I won’t let it.”

“I don’t see how you can stop it,” I said. Even when I said it, I knew I shouldn’t have. The last thing he needed to hear was me saying that I didn’t think we were going to survive. I didn’t see how we could, though. The Amoraxians had been dropping a steady bombardment of Scislar bombs for three days. It was only a matter of time, I’d heard Rula saying earlier. He seemed to cower in the shadows whenever a concussive blast rattled the compound. We were all wondering how long the shield generators would hold out.

“Look, kid,” the Colonel said, looking down at me. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, okay? I like you. I like your mom too, but that might be a different like,” he laughed, making Mom’s lips curl with the hint of a smile. “I’ll let you in on a secret. Can I do that? It’s a secret, so you can’t be telling anyone. Can I count on you not to tell anyone?”

I looked up at Mom before I looked him in the eye, and nodded. I tried to look serious. I even set my jaw tight, narrowed my eyes so he could see that I meant it.

“That’s good,” he said. “I can see you mean it. But we got help coming in. We just have to hold out for another day, two at the most, and the Star Command will be here. You ever seen a Star Command Battle Cruiser? They carry twenty thousand troops. They have armaments. Zip-ships. Ever seen one of those?”

I shook my head.

“Zed-11-P’s,” he said. “Small, fast, almost impossible to catch. They can outfly and out-manoeuvre anything the Ammos have. Battle Cruisers have a compliment of three hundred Zips. They can fly in zero-grav, or take five G’s of pressure.”

“What about the shield?” I asked.

“What about it?” he asked, wincing when Mom pulled on the stitch. “You about done there, Doc?”

“I think you asked me that already,” Mom said with a smile. She picked up a length of synth-patch, wrapping it around his bicep and adjusted it so that it covered the length of the wound. Then she asked me to hand her the canister of Amnol  and she pressed the nozzle. The spray sealed the patch, stretching with the movements of his arm.

“That it?”

“That’s it,” she said, and he jumped off the gurney. He picked his shirt up, carefully sliding his prosthetic arm through the sleeve, and then picked up his chest armour. It was stained with blaster shots that spider webbed across his chest.

“Look, Doc, I don’t want to sound ungrateful, or anything like that, so maybe when this is all over, we can maybe go out for a drink somewhere.”

“A drink?” Mom laughed. She crossed her arms and leaned back against the gurney. She was smiling. “You’re quite a piece of work, Colonel.”

“Can’t blame a man for trying.”

“No. I don’t suppose you can.”

“I got a question for you,” he said, strapping his holster on and checking that his blaster was charged and primed. He looked at her.

“Another date?” Mom asked.

“We haven’t even gone on our first one yet, but sure. No, what I wanted to ask you was if you knew your way around the complex?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“Well, it seems there’s supposed to be something in the basement of this place, but no one knows how to get to it. Everyone who knew about, well, I guess they didn’t make it,” he added, looking at me.

Mom nodded slowly.

“I know it.”

“You do?”

“The Immersion Blaster. They built it three hundred years ago when they first settled this place after the Separatist Coalition left Alpha Centauri, Primal Eight.”

“Yeah, Primate,” he smiled.

“You want to use it?”

“I want to try.”

“You just said anyone who knows anything about it is dead.”

“I didn’t exactly use those words,” he said, looking at me.

“Don’t fret yourself over her. Wren’s seen more than her share of dead and dying soldiers since this war started.”

“How old are you, Kid?”

“Seven, according to the Cycles. Fifteen by the Old Standard,” I said. The Old Standard was how they counted time when the first Colony Ships set out from wherever it was we left from. Whatever information we had about the Mother World had pretty well faded into myth. The Cycles were in regard to how long it took Prius and her four moons to circle the sun. 790 Standard Days.

“You know about the Old Standard? Did they teach you that?”

“My dad did,” I said.

“Where’s he? I mean, is there a Mr. Doc around here somewhere?”

“He died,” I said.

“Oh, sorry to hear that, Kid.”

“It was a long time ago,” Mom said.

“Well, if you know of anyone who knows how to get into the subsections down below, let me know.”

“I know how to get into them,” I said.

“You do?”

“Dad used to take me down there.”

“Why would he be going down there? That’s a restricted zone,” the Colonel said, looking at Mom.

“That’s where he worked,” Mom said.

“Then why would he take her down there?”

“I’m a doctor. Sometimes, I’d get calls in the middle of the night. He couldn’t very well leave her here by herself. Not after that thing…So he’d take her with him.”    

“What thing?” I asked.

“You don’t need to know.”

“That’s what Dad always said.”

“And he was right,” she said.

“Do you know what the ‘thing’ is?” I asked the Colonel, and he nodded. “Okay. This is what we’re going to do. I need to get down there. I need to access the Immersion Blaster. If I can set it up and send a blast up at the Ammos, we might be able to disable their ship and buy us some time.”

“What kind of time?” Mom asked.

“Maybe time enough to evacuate?”

“And leave the cover of the shield?” I asked.

“If the Immersion Blast doesn’t work, the Shield won’t do us any good. We have to drop the Shield to fire the Blaster. It takes thirty seconds to power the Shield back up. If we don’t damage whatever it is they have up there, they’ll hit us with their Sislars, and that’ll be it for us.”

“You mean the sky will turn liquid?” I asked.

“Something like that,” the Colonel said.

“Can’t we just wait them out?” Mom asked.

“I don’t like to wait for promises made in desperation. They might not make it. They could get ambushed on the way here. If we have Intel, you can be damn sure they do. They could be waiting for them behind one of the moons. We don’t know how many ships they have up there.”

“Then how can you drop the shields in the first place? It’s suicide.”

“It’s suicide if we wait. They expect us to hold out, but we can’t. We don’t have enough weaponry. The turbo blasters don’t have the range. The pulsars were almost out of charge last time I looked. Probably out by now. Once the Ammos figure that out, they’ll send an advanced recon down to assess what we have, and then we’ll be looking at a full blown invasion.”

“I’ll take you,” I said. “I just have to get a few things first,” I said, and ran out of the room before Mom could say anything to stop me.

*

I slipped the lanyard Dad wore anytime we went downstairs. It opened the doors, and controlled the lights. It would get us through the doors, after that, I didn’t know what to expect. The Colonel followed me through long narrow halls. I could hear his heavy boots echoing through the corridors.

I saw the familiar doorway and pressed the fob against the sensor. The door slipped open and I grinned to myself, happy that it worked. The door closed behind us with a whisper and I pressed the fob against the sensor on the inside, sliding it down and nodded to myself as the lights strobed on, running down the length of the hallway.

“How are you going to turn the Shield off from in here?” I asked.

“I have a comm,” he smiled. “You might think we’re primitive, but we’re actually pretty high tech.”

“Is it going to work down here?”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“We’re underground.”

“So?”

“So, it might not work.”

“No one likes a pessimist, Kid.”

“I don’t mean to be. But they used something else down here…when they wanted to talk to someone up top. That’s what they called it. Up top.”

“It’s like a comm, but different,” I said.

“The same, but different? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Maybe you can figure it out?” I said, and pressed the fob up against the sensor on the outside of a large vaulted door. It slid open with an effort, almost groaning with the effort, and I looked at the Colonel who was watching the door with pursed lips.

He waited long enough for the opening to widen, and then slipped through the doors. I followed behind him.

“Do you know how it works?” I asked him.

He shook his head.

“You don’t?”

He looked at the machine, walking around it; inspecting it, I suppose. He looked at the console, turned a few switches on, pushed buttons and knobs, then looked at me and called me over with a quick wave of his hand. He reached out and picked up the fob, looking at it. Then he lifted it over my head and pressed it against a sensor. There was a quick jerk, and then the floor started to raise up. I looked up at the ceiling, watching it open like a shuttered lens.

I could see the bright blue pulse of the turbo blasters. They had the Shields set to pulse. It strobed like a flashing light, and every time it did, the turbo blaster sent another shot.

“What was the thing?” I asked.

“What thing?” the Colonel asked, keying the comm on his collar.

“What my mom said about why my dad had to take me with him?”

“The Ammos. It was before the war. They sent recons down, and one of them got past the Shield somehow. Killed fourteen Colonists before we found it and neutralized it.”

“It killed my dad, I think,” I said.

He looked at me, not saying a word, and just nodded.

His comm squawked and he looked up as the Immersion Blaster reached its full length. It was a long cylinder, and its surface caught the flashes of the turbo blasters. I heard him speaking into the comm, but couldn’t hear the answer. He was punching numbers into the console.

“I don’t know what this thing is supposed to do, so maybe you might want to find someplace safe to stand?”

“What about you?”

“Someone has to fire it.”

There was a flash of light, and a beam that went up straight through the Shield. It was quiet, like what you would expect if you turned on a light switch. We both watched the beam, and almost as soon as he released the shot we saw a bright flash fill the sky. There were small streaks of light looking like meteorites bursting against the atmosphere, and I could hear a low buzz and the Shield Generators began to power up.

I climbed up the steps to where the Colonel was, and looked out at the complex below. There were wounded soldiers with plasma burns from the shots that breached the Shield as it strobed. I could see Mom tending to them.

“Mom!” I called down to her, and she looked up at me as I waved. And then I saw the smile fall from her face as she looked at the hills behind us. I turned to look, but the Colonel had already seen it.

A seething mass of five legged creatures, with stinging tails ten feet long, crested the rise and made its way toward us. It broke into three sections and seemed to multiply the nearer it got to us.

I looked up at the Shield. It wasn’t at full power yet.

“If one of those things hits the Shield, we’re done for.”

“Then why are you smiling?” I asked.

“Because this is something I can sink my teeth into.” He jumped off the platform and ran across the complex, screaming.

“ON ME!”