Untitled Short

by

D.F. Monk

The assault corvette broke through the cloud cover, an avenging angel constructed of gleaming metal and neon light, ready to bring final judgment to those below. The ship's weapons quickly and systematically dismantled the last of the legitimate defenses in the city that had already been bombed mercilessly from orbit.

Captain Lenya Tsereteli watched from the deck of the corvette as a flight of bombers, broad wings outstretched, streaked past them. On the ground below, the shadows of the bombers seemed to drag blossoming explosions of cerulean flames behind them. Ahead of them, a rag-tag column of alien tanks, metal plated caterpillars bristling with thin anti-aircraft turrets, melted from the beam cannons mounted on the front of the Captain's ship. She marveled at the ease and confidence with which her crew now used these exotic weapons.

Interstellar spaceships with superluminal drives, agile giant exoskeletons that could transform to accommodate combat in the sky or on land, forcefields that could deflect aggressive energy beams as hot as the sun -- thirty years ago such things would have still seemed fantastic to a species that had just established a permanent settlement on Mars. Walking on the red planet, with Earth in the sky behind, was now no longer just the stuff of speculation and fiction. How magical the thought of that had seemed to young Lenya, who even as a child wished to join the international effort to become one of those daring few claiming citizenship among the stars.

Transfixed by it all as she was, she bore witness when the fabric of mankind's understanding unwound. Glued to her television screen, she watched as that supply flight to the red planet malfunctioned. It looked as if it was going to be the first great tragedy of the program. But as one of the engines exploded, throwing the rocket wildly out of control and off-course, even her own aggressive youthful imagination could not anticipate it crashing into an invisible alien craft that had been silently lurking nearby.

The accidental sacrifice of those brave cosmonauts heralded the change of everything.

The alien vessel survived, damaged but able to force a landing. An aggressive perimeter was set. Exotic weaponry destroyed the unmanned drones that dared to venture close enough for visual confirmations. The world held its collective breath as one of the ship's crew, blue-skinned but otherwise very human looking, transmitted a single video message to the world.

"Stay your distance. Je'Vel Dominar!" The first part was already translated into as many languages as needed. The second half was undecipherable, and remained a mystery.

When it was discovered that the downed ship was transmitting a signal into deep space, the world's military leaders decided it was better to risk an assault to capture the vessel than to allow the signal to continue. The action was a success, but just a handful of wounded remaining aliens inflicted a staggering number of casualties against the joint forces. The crew member who had delivered the warning hours earlier turned out to be the Sergeant of the vessel, turning his own weapon against himself rather than allowing himself to be captured. The last words on his lips were as cryptic as the first time he uttered them.

"Je'Vel Dominar."  

Captain Tsereteli mused on how often they would hear that phrase in the coming days as her ship glided softly to a stop. It landed in front of the complex and extravagant building military intelligence had defined as the central command complex on this particular homeworld, the final such building after so many others on multiple other planets. Compared to the others, this one was larger, grander than the rest, a golden building now overlooking a garden of ruin below it.

Her marines were on the ground before the gangplank fully extended, fanning out to take down any enemy resistance that might linger in the corners or shadows of the complex. Although the armor had been retro-engineered to fully support human beings, it still gave them an alien mien compared to the unarmored environmental uniform she and the rest of the deck crew wore. As she strode down to join them, she heard their combat chatter in her earpiece as they efficiently secured her path towards the interior of the building.

In the courtyard she paused. Cast in a semi transparent material, a heavy spiral, tilted at an angle towards the city, slowly rotated around a giant sword that pierced it through the middle, point buried in the ground below. The material in the spiral glimmered and sparkled, an extraordinary representation of the Milky Way Galaxy. Even though this was the symbol of the enemy alliance, Lenya found herself impressed, both by the installation and the bed of exotic flowers surrounding the base of the art itself.

Somewhere on the outer edge of the spiral was Earth, an almost insignificant world that had dared to be defiant. Now, years later, leaving a wake of dead bodies behind them, humanity had arrived here, in the heart of the enemies' empire. The thoughts of those left behind loomed over her like a shadow, but she shook it off.

Moving forward, not bothering to go around the piece, she crushed the brightly colored flowers under her boots as she crossed underneath the swirl. On the other side, she met the Sergeant of the marines. He removed the helmet to his powered armor, which did little to soften the ferocity of the suit, but it did manage to reveal the humanity underneath, however somberly presented.

"My people are performing a room to room sweep. We should have the enemy leaders under arrest very shortly," he said.

"Well done Sergeant Kone," the Captain replied as the Sergeant fell in step with her towards the main door, where two marines flanked the entrance. "Tell me this... personally... when the enemy fleet first showed up at Earth... when we elected opposition over extinction... Did you ever think we'd make it this far?"

The Sergeant took a while to answer, almost long enough for them to reach the threshold of the Capital building itself. She paused and looked at him, his normally taciturn face uncharacteristically vulnerable. 

"No, Captain. I must say I did not. I was a boy then, with no dreams to become a soldier. I enlisted because I truly felt this was our only choice, though it was a decision not made without some regret." Lenya Tsereteli nodded in agreement with Adisa Kone. The two shared a relatively quiet moment, each lost in their own thoughts. Then, reassuming their less relaxed roles of Captain and Sergeant, they crossed through the doorway for the business beyond.

Lenya's father was a staunch nationalist and argued frequently against the international team of scientists and military personnel that were given access to the downed alien ship. He claimed that the Americans would eventually steal it all and use it to take over the world. He was not alone in the opinion, but those fears were drowned out by the overwhelming concerns of a world that now feared invasion from the stars. None of them knew how long they would have before the call sent skyward by the fallen crew would be answered.

It took months for them to repair the damage to the vessel by scavenging materials from the inside to effect crude repairs on the outside, all the while studying and salvaging every scrap of technology they hoped to comprehend. Surprisingly, they comprehended a great deal in a short length of time, finding that much of it worked very intuitively, even if the principles behind it were still hard to fathom. It was assumed that the blue skinned humanoids, which someone had finally named the Dominar, must have developed tools with comparable mechanical operation given their physical similarity to humanity.

Lenya remembered her older brother had disobeyed their father and left home to be part of the United Earth Defense Force, a name and an ideal against an unknown foe. He looked so proud in his uniform, so calm and resolute despite their father's ravings and their mother's weeping. Lenya still had a picture of him from that day, that moment frozen in her possession just as vividly as it remained in her mind, not knowing then that it would be the last time she would ever see him.

When the aliens returned, not even a month later and with several ships this time, they demanded the surrender their ship and the fallen bodies of their comrades or all of mankind would face the consequences. They destroyed every satellite in orbit as some sort of example, a show of strength, leaving Earth all but blind from the ground.

The aliens got their ship back. The retrofitted alien vessel, now manned by the UEDF, met them in orbit, attacking the invading ships from behind in a surprise maneuver. The day was won, but most of the brave souls aboard that vessel had not survived,  including Lenya's brother. As the last of the enemy's ships fell burning to Earth, we were warned:

"To the last of us... Je'Vel Dominar!"

Inside the Capital building, Captain Tsereteli found herself skirting the corpses of fallen defenders. Unlike the outlying worlds, here the corpses were less segregated. She saw the rich diversity of life that they had encountered in battle after battle over the long years of the conflict. They were all so much like humanity in shape, but for different color skin or hair or slight variations of inhuman features around the face or limbs. She saw many of those here, quiet in death, a morbid tableau painted on a backdrop of brightly colored vital fluids.

The green skinned ones with the bug-like eyes had been the first of them she had been in dogfights with as a recent graduate of the UEDF academy, years after her brother's death, in the cockpit of her own combat ship. It was after her graduation that she finally realized her dream of walking on Mars, though not as a colonist. Mars had been retooled as a fleet staging ground, a defiant symbol against the Dominar. She remembered watching the busy activity on the surface of the red planet from the observation deck as she left planet on board her stationed ship. The Bellerophon was the pride of the new 2nd Fleet and Lenya was on board as it began its inaugural run around the solar system, shaking out the navigation and weapons systems. 

In those first frantic years, the joint efforts of the UEDF and civilian scientists had learned so much, salvaging everything for new technology, a hybrid of the alien equipment and human ingenuity. The lone, repurposed alien ship would soon be joined by a man-made fleet, freshly engineered from the ground up. Confidence and planetary pride were at an all-time high when those new ships launched.  They were only two days into their run when the transmission came from the Dominar fleet as it appeared suddenly over Mars. 

"For the sins of your species... Je'Vel Dominar!" 

Mars itself was the first casualty of their planet killer weapons. The planet simply crumbled, like it had been just a ball of dirt loosely packed together. The new Naval Headquarters and its entire retinue of staff were also killed. It was only a turn of luck that the Earth was on the far side of the sun and the two UEDF fleets were able to intercept the Dominar before they reached it. The battle was as conclusive as it was brutal. Only two ships remained at the end: the Bellerophon, damaged but still space-worthy, and the command ship of the Dominar, which had been captured through a daring, desperate assault by some UEDF marines.

The green skinned aliens, with their haunting, bulbous bug-like eyes, had either perished in the conflict or had committed ritualistic suicide. Not a single captive was taken, though Earth had gained a significant advantage: the undamaged star maps and the superluminal drive aboard the commandeered command ship. 

As Lenya stepped over one of the bodies, she remembered how disturbing the sight of it had been when she was younger. Those first few times had given her bad dreams for weeks. Now, though, she slept just fine. Her mind had gone numb to the sight of yet another dead alien.

"Over here, Captain," Sergeant Kone said, motioning down a long hall. At the end of it, his armored troopers waited patiently to breach a final door. The Sergeant motioned to the Sergeant and directed Lenya behind one of the thick columns along the sides of the corridor. From the safety of cover, they watched the shaped charges blow the door inward and the heavily armored men, in technological carapaces of their own, stormed into the open portal.  After a brief exchange of weapons, the notification came over her earpiece that it was now safe to enter.

Taking point in front of Lenya, Sergeant Kone stepped through the still smoking portal and into the room beyond. 

"Is this really it?" Captain Tsereteli asked herself, years of conflict now ready to be finished in just a few short moments. It seemed almost impossible given what they had been through. After capturing the command ship they would dub the Chimera, the UEDF had made a series of daring gambles, beginning with the assault and capture of a Dominar Shipyard, in order to replenish and expand their own fleet. The Bellerophon ran a long series of guerrilla raids against other discovered military locations, in order to keep the Dominar occupied and misdirected. Although less than half the original crew survived, the tactic was successful and the 3rd and 4th UEDF Naval Fleets were able to be constructed quickly with the aid of the advanced Dominar technology.

After her amazing performance as a pilot, Lenya was given a promotion and command of the Beowulf, the flagship of the 4th Fleet. These new ships, under the direction of battle-hardened officers, spearheaded a UEDF operation of more conventional assaults, with the intent to strike at the heart of the Dominar's territory and stop them decisively. 

That felt like a lifetime ago, and Lenya felt like a different woman now. For so long, they had fought these aliens, cosmetically different, but all humanoid in their appearance. The only thing they all had in common was their suicidal tenacity for victory at all cost, all the while chanting their indecipherable battle cry: "Je'Vel Dominar!" 

To think that this planet was their final destination, the end of a blood-soaked warpath that had led them across the stars and so far from home. Lenya thought of her brother and the idealism he carried with him upon enlisting. She tried to hold onto that memory all this time, using it as an example of what she should be striving for. She fought honorably and commanded in the same fashion, to the best of her ability, trying to be an inspiring figure for her crew.  But here, at the end of it all... such idealism felt like a charade. She just wanted them all dead, every last, stinking one of them... so she could just go home.

"Captain... you need to see this..." Lenya tried to place the tone of Sergeant Kone's quiet request. Reverence? Relief? Perhaps even Fear? 

She stepped up to and through the threshold of the ruined door. The troopers surrounded several of the aliens, each a different color, dressed in more formal attire. Captain Tsereteli assumed them to be the representatives of their respective races, whatever their names may be. They had never identified themselves individually and were only known as the Dominar, so they had never been called anything else, at least officially.

It was not this small collection that made her take pause, however, nor was it the remaining guards, dead or dying around them: it was the chamber itself.

The room was large and circular, several hundred feet in diameter. The center of the room was occupied by a ring-shaped table with the middle cut out. A holographic projection of the Dominar symbol rotated slowly in that space, a digital recreation of the physical art outside the building.

But starting at the edge of the door and surrounding every wall, were other holographic representations, more like the art Lenya had seen on Earth, paintings of some sort, but paintings with motion, a slowly evolving picture, each slightly different but with a similar theme.

Lenya recognized the reflective black bug-like eyes of the green skinned aliens first, now looking more natural on a kneeling creature that looked like an oversized insect. The picture changed slowly and another hand descended from above, gently taking the clawed hand of the alien and urging it to rise, as if helping it to its feet. As the alien stood, it changed, its features subtly blending from its alien insect visage into the form of the green skinned aliens Lenya had become accustomed to fighting these many years. Now fully upright and fully transformed, it looked up to the face belonging to the hand that had helped it rise, a face that looked fully human.

Captain Tsereteli looked at the next picture and the one after that, each one telling a similar story, aliens transformed by the hand of a human. It was never the same human, though. Some shown were men, others were women, some with dark skin, others light, different hair in different styles, but they were always human, so clearly and distinctly human.

"I... I don't understand," she heard herself say out loud.

"They conquered us...," came a voice, alien in tone, but in a language they could understand. Sergeant Kone roughly hauled the speaker to her feet. Her skin looked like that of an exotic snake, bright yellow in color. Her eyes were also reptilian in appearance, though they had a brightness and complexity to them that seemed familiar to someone in a position of authority. "They conquered all of us."

"They changed you?" Lenya asked, pointing to the representation of a blonde haired gentleman standing over a red-skinned alien.

"Experimented, changed, enslaved," she said. "Every where they found intelligent life that they could 'improve', they would do so. Those they could not conform, they annihilated, whole planets if need be. They claimed this would be better for us all. They took our identity and our culture and attempted to replace it with theirs. They did so for generations, requiring us to repay their 'kindness' with our freedoms."

"Have we been fighting the wrong foe?" Lenya asked herself, immediately wondering if there was some other group pulling the strings all this time.

"Where are they now?" Lenya asked. "Do they still...?"

"Gone," the alien replied, quickly, "As we knew them then, they are gone."

"And you inherited their empire?"

"Inherited?" asked the yellow-skinned female. "You think they gave it to us?"

"No," she continued, her tone colder, "we took it from them. Bound but unbroken, we kept in secret many things, each of us our own traditions and, most importantly, our desire to regain that which had been taken from us."

"We waited for them to become complacent," another alien added, an orange skinned female with feline features.

"They thought our service was submission," she said, "but it was not."

"We found strength in each other," spoke up yet another alien, a bald, slate grey skinned male, his voice heavy with anger.

"And when they thought they had conquered all, ravaged every civilization, destroyed all that dared oppose them, conformed all those that remained to their standard of beauty," the yellow alien continued, her eyes now alight with passion, "they finally dropped their guard. It was then, when they thought their work was finally done that we brought them low. We stood up as one and cast them down."

"You killed them all?" the Captain asked.

"We should have," growled a blue-skinned alien.

"But we did not," the yellow-skinned female confessed. "So many of them died in the uprising, our anger having been suppressed for so long. After it all, though, once we had contained the survivors, we debated their final fate. Though many called for their death, the vote passed instead to let them live. Though we felt like they deserved death, we vowed never to become them, to resort to those methods. So we imprisoned those very few that remained."

"Imprisoned them like they enslaved you?" Lenya asked.

"Not like that," the alien replied, "Never like that. Though we did use their technology against them, changing their brains as they changed ours, attempting to wipe out all memories of their past. Naked and naive we left them alone on planets far removed from here, thinking that they could do us no further harm."

"It was a convincing confinement, one that we tailored to include evidence to suggest that the prisoners had naturally evolved there, just in case there was a need to more fully accept their reality," she explained. "Unfortunately, it proved to be largely unnecessary.  Most of these prison colonies did not survive."

"But their legacy survived," Lenya postulated. "Driving you to pick up where they left off."

"Are you listening?" the speaker questioned angrily, a string of untranslatable alien curses following it. "We were not like them!"

"Crippling prisoners and leaving them to die does not sound particularly merciful," Sergeant Kone interjected.

"They killed each other," She said somberly. "At some point or another, they destroyed themselves. All of the colonies, that is, except one. We hoped that it would prove to be the exception, that those survivors would redeem the sins of their ancestors."

"We were daft to believe you could change," the blue-skinned alien confessed.

"Wait... You?" Lenya asked. "You mean humanity?"

"Are you trying to suggest that we...?" Sergeant Kone interjected, "Because that's absurd!"

"What was absurd was our belief that we were making a difference, thinking that by letting you live you would choose a better life for yourselves. It was foolish for us to merely watch, as it happened all over again, time and again succumbing to your bloodlust.

"And with no small amount of hubris, after subjugating and ruining the planet we had given out of mercy, you looked skyward once again, knowing somewhere, deep in your bones, that your destiny to conquer everything could not be suppressed," the serpentine female alien said.

"That first ship... it wasn't a scout," Lenya uttered. "It was a warden."

"It recorded your progress, adding it to our archive here," the orange skinned female said.

"After the accident, realizing our mistake, we wanted to simply leave that planet, to leave you far behind... but you attacked us! After we were hurt and trapped and calling to be rescued, you attacked us! Even after we asked you to leave us alone!" the reptilian female exclaimed, obviously distressed. Lenya watched her eyes begin to water as one of the troopers laid a restraining hand on her, preventing her from moving closer. 

"We should have known then that it was too late, but we still argued amongst ourselves. Unlike what you would have done, we attempted to give you the benefit of the doubt. But when we dared to argue from a position of strength, asking for the remains of our fallen..." she began.

"We attacked you again," finished Lenya. As the cold realization began to sink in, she dared to ask: "Why didn't you just talk with us? Explain what had happened?"

"Explain to you? You mean come meekly before you and ask for forgiveness?" the slate-gray alien asked, his tone sarcastic.

"No. It was too late. Even though the outcome led us here, war was the only option. We were never as good at it as you, we had not practiced war in several millennia, but we thought perhaps with numbers on our side like before..." the yellow-skinned speaker explained, shaking her head. "It seems that numbers were simply not enough this time, even though we would rather expend every last one of us... to face our own extinction rather than let ourselves be once more in your 'debt'.

"Never. Never again," she said, her eyes streaming tears, her voice constricted. "Je'Vel Dominar."

"Je'Vel Dominar!" cried the aliens in unison, both fearful and defiant in equal measure.

Lenya realized then, the meaning of those words was not important. It was not a warcry, it never had been. It was a warning, one to keep them from forgetting a shared past and a common enemy. It was a reminder of what had been taken from them in such a way that it could never be fully returned.

"We are what they say," Lenya said quietly to herself, her heart heavy with the weight of what she had witnessed here, a truth so simple she could not refute it. "We are the enemy."

"This building was chosen by us for a reason," the orange skinned female offered. "It holds the collected records of the Dominar Empire, from ancient times, and all of our cumulative suffering. Review it yourselves. Let the litany of these tragedies be revealed to you as they are known to us. Perhaps once it is revealed..." The rest of the sentence was abandoned, the message of hope left unspoken. Lenya did not notice which because she was preoccupied with her own thoughts.

"Captain?" Sergeant Kone drew close, trying to catch Lenya's attention.

"Knowing this... All of this..." Lenya said, her voice shaking. "Could change everything." The Sergeant nodded in agreement. Raising her head, she exchanged a look with him and he nodded slightly. He also understood.

"Don't worry," Lenya said, looking at the female alien that had been brave enough to speak for them. Her eyes were still wet with tears, her face knotted in fear and confusion.

"Don't worry. We won't make those mistakes again," Lenya said. Then she smiled weakly, giving a measure of comfort to her prisoner.

With a few well-placed shots, Sergeant Kone and his squad quickly executed the prisoners.

Turning on her heels, Captain Tsereteli strode confidently towards the front door, Kone and his marines moving to escort her. She was already tapping on her earpiece to raise the crew of her starship.

"Mission down here is complete, Beowulf. We will be leaving planetside momentarily," she reported.

"Acknowledged, Captain," came a voice from the other end. "Should we notify the 6th Fleet to prepare for salvage operations?"

"Negative," Lenya replied. "The enemy is dead, but what they left behind is too dangerous to leave intact. Once my ship is at a safe distance, enact Mars Protocol. Kill the planet."

"Aye aye," came the reply before the Captain killed the channel with another touch to her earpiece.

"I don't know if we are that much different," Lenya said to the Sergeant, "but the truth is that the Dominar died here. We'll let humanity be held accountable for its own crimes."

Safely aboard the assault corvette, the Captain signaled all remaining air forces to be recalled. As the other craft broke into space, the chrome and neon angel lifted gently off of the surface and slipped quietly into the sky. Just before it passed out of the atmosphere, Captain Tsereteli watched as the bombs launched from her orbiting fleet broke through the solemn cloud cover, man-made fireballs bearing the final truth to the dead world below.