Earth

Antarctica, Gary’s factory, Medical Ward

“It’s happenin’. Get outta my way doc,” Brody said as he heaved himself up from the bed. The bipedal shark lumbered toward the exit. Immonen stood in front of him and put his hand on Brody’s muscular forearm. The forearm was bigger around than Immonen’s waist, and he felt the muscles tense under the rough gray skin. Brody bared his multitude of fangs at him but Immonen didn’t flinch.

“You are still recovering. Your adaptive transformation skills were pushed to the limit by adjusting to the vacuum of space and taking multiple energy attacks and re-entry through the atmosphere. I’ve healed all your injuries and you’ve recovered significantly, but you were almost dead when you arrived. If you push yourself now, you could——at the very least——do permanent damage if not kill yourself,” Immonen said.

“Between my adaptive skills and your healing, no such thing as a permanent injury. And if I die, I die. They killed Coop. They might be killing others right now. Move it or I’ll bite that hand off.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I would, cause I know you can grow it back.”

“And you know I could produce enough melatonin in your system to knock you out before you had the chance.”

“Just get outta my way, Doc. Being in here is no good for either of us,” Brody said and shoved past Immonen. Immonen started to protest, but didn’t.

He had considered joining the military once, when he’d first graduated high school. The idea of going into war zones and healing injured soldiers and possibly civilians directly had held some definite appeal. But then he’d learned what triage meant: it didn’t mean healing, at least, not as he knew it. It meant healing the least injured first so they could go out and fight again, while the most injured and critical were left to die. No point in wasting time and resources on somebody who might die anyhow, or even if they did pull through, would be in no condition to fight afterward.

Now he found himself in a similar situation anyway. Brody wasn’t at full health. His adaptive abilities would be slower, less efficient, and leave larger windows of opportunity for injury. But he had a point: if all Brody did was wait in bed, it could mean the difference between victory or defeat. They needed every host they could get, and Immonen, not for the first time, cursed himself for taking non-combat skills. He knew he’d helped, he knew it was important, but now, he felt truly helpless.

The medical ward was empty, save for a few clicking medical droids. Immonen left and took the nearest grav-lift to the control room where he found Gary, General Johnson, and other military leaders from around the world. The huge room was a circular domed chamber several stories tall that had a few levels to it. Balconies circled the outer perimeter and a slowly rotating column of holographic screens. Sometimes a screen would detach from the informational column and float near one of the leaders who had summoned it to zoom in on some detail of a map or camera or drone feed.

The dome had armor plating covered on the inside by more holographic displays that showed the snowy antarctic sky beyond, and the horde of aliens descending. Red lights flashed throughout the control room as aliens continued to land just outside. Notifications that outer barriers and turrets had been destroyed popped up with alarming speed and regularity, along with charts showing power drain and perimeter breaches.

Gary looked up from a floating screen in front of him as Immonen approached and nodded.

“How’s Brody?” he asked.

“Stubborn and gone. Likely heading toward the nearest exit to go fight and likely get himself killed,” Immonen replied.

“Such is war,” General Johnson said. “Ugly, and I hate to say it, but we need him out there.”

“The primary artillery cannons have taken out about 25% of them so far,” Gary said. “We’re not doing bad, but we won’t beat them at this rate. They’re tough, and they’re taking the out our defenses faster than we can kill them. Then there’s this thing…”

Gary highlighted a screen and enlarged it enough in the main holographic column so several people could see it. It showed a serpentine alien with a death’s head face, a shield, a black staff, and a rock. It was soaring down to Earth at top speed, surrounded by bloody light.

“It’s frightening but it’s just another alien, isn’t it?” Immonen asked.

“I’ve found shots of this thing from the fight with Anya and Renn. It’s clearly the leader, or whatever equivalent the aliens have,” Gary said. Immonen took a deep breath when the older man mentioned Anya. He’d been trying not to think much about her after the last news of her had come in: Willis destroyed, millions of aliens dead, Anya and Renn MIA presumed dead. He tried not to think of how he liked seeing her smile, or the way her red hair fell away from her neck, or…or how much time he’d wasted.

He sighed and said, “Maybe it’s just lucky? All of these aliens were on the asteroid at the same time as well.”

“Yeah but I’ve seen this one take Mori cannon blasts to the face, deflect anti-matter bombs, and shrug off laser blasts and Galtero’s orbital lance. The only time I’ve seen it even partially injured was when Anya blasted it with something before Gaia’s Saber went kaboom. And that red light is, I think, what’s been causing our menu problems. Among other things. To say nothing of that rock in its hand. That thing has that weird color Brody and Galtero described. Probably the last bit it salvaged from Willis.”

“So we know who the boss is. Do you think——” Immonen started to say. That was when the serpentine alien landed outside and Mona, Samaira, and Chell began to fight it. Immonen raised his eyebrows as he beheld the undead army the British woman had summoned. “Are those dinosaurs?”

“They appear to be,” General Johnson said. Immonen tensed as the three female hosts battled the alien, and seemed to be gaining some ground on it, when it unleashed a beam of the alien color and hit Chell. Things happened quickly after that: Chell stumbled backwards, Samaira’s tiger was cut in two and killed at once, and Samaira launched into a full-on attack against the alien with Mona backing her up.

“Entry 15 has opened. Chell just came through!” Gary said.

“I’ll go check on her!” Immonen said and rushed to the nearest grav-lift. It sped him off to entry tunnel 15, and Immonen all but leaped out of it and sprinted toward Chell. The young Korean-American woman appeared physically unhurt. There was no blood or burns, no torn clothes, but her walk was uneven. Immonen’s leveled up body scan was now enough that he could get a basic picture of a patient’s health from dozens of feet away, and he detected zero abnormalities.

“Chell! Chell are you okay?” Immonen asked and then took her arm and began to escort her quickly away from entry 15. The armored doors had closed immediately behind Chell, and then five more armored barriers had closed on either side of it, but he did not want to linger. Exterminator bots had emerged from alcoves and aimed their weapons behind Immonen and Chell, trained on the door. There were bangs and roars from beyond the thick armor plating, but Immonen ignored them.

As soon as he touched Chell, he did a full, detailed scan of the woman. She was tired, had an elevated heart rate, was short of breath, and was exhibiting symptoms of a mild panic attack, but was otherwise fine.

“I forgot,” Chell muttered.

“What?” Immonen asked.

“I forgot it. All of it. How to be a psychic, how to…do everything I could do. I think I even…I lost half of my Medieval literature class from my sophomore year? What the hell?” Chell asked.

“It’s like what happened to Cooper,” Immonen said and cursed under his breath. He escorted her to the grav-lift and punched joined her.

As soon as they were in, something banged on the door outside and the armor plating, all twenty-to-thirty feet of it, dented inward.

“Hang on,” Immonen said and slapped a button for the medical ward on the side of the grav-lift’s control panel. The lift’s doors hissed shut as the armor plating melted into slag and red beams of light burst through along with blue bolts of aetheric magic.

“Gary, entry 15 is compromised and Chell has lost most of her menu skills and some mundane ones from what I’ve gathered,” Immonen said into the grav-lift’s communications panel.

“I know. Other entries are being breached too. The outer watch posts have already been overrun. I’m sealing off the control room so get here quick,” Gary replied and then the communicator clicked off.

Immonen steadied Chell as the grav-lift rushed along the tunnel. He could hear additional armored gates slamming shut behind them as they went. He scanned Chell’s mind as they went, but found it perfectly healthy, if unusually active and sending signals to produce adrenaline, which he calmed. Panicking wouldn’t help anybody right now.

“One second I was doing okay, I was fighting, and then…and then I just lost it,” Chell said.

“It’s okay,” Immonen said. He’d gotten used to lying over his years in the children’s cancer ward. Gentle platitudes that didn’t offer false hope, but obfuscated the harsher realities. The factory rumbled around him and he doubted any of this would be okay.

Still, he knew Gary had a self-destruct option that could take every single alien out if it came to that. At the very least, the aliens would lose their bulk of their attack force and that serpentine “leader” of theirs. Maybe it would be enough to save the planet. Maybe.

Immonen had never been terribly good at lying to himself, and he smirked.

————————————————————

Earth

Antarctica, just outside Gary’s Factory

Bernard rode atop an ice elemental he’d named Bobo. He looked roughly like a horned owl, but with white feathers, ice-blue eyes, and was larger than several elephants. Bobo released gusts of painfully frigid wind with every flap of his wings that he directed at the nearest aliens. It froze the weaker ones on contact, and shattered them shortly thereafter. The stronger aliens it only managed to slow, but that was enough for them to get impaled by frozen feathers or Kan’s blood spears or to be trampled by Pan’s golem army.

They had held the outpost as long as they could, eliminating any aliens that landed outside the factory’s defenses and attempted a ground approach. But it became obvious very quickly that there were just too many of the freaks, and that all of them were converging on the factory.

He, Kan, and Pan had abandoned the post and rushed for the factory. Bernard had exhausted himself summoning up a small army of the strongest elementals he could. In addition to Bobo, there was a giant lizard made of fire, a living storm cloud that formed itself into a vaguely moth-like shape and shot bolts of lightning at any hostile creatures, a metallic crab bigger than a house, and a coiling centipede a quarter-mile long that spat viscous acid and spawned thousands of tiny babies that exploded in noxious clouds of gas.

Pan’s army of golems had increased from thirty up to over one-hundred, the Pangolin in the lead, riding atop the largest golem like a tiny general. Any aliens that got close were enveloped in tombs of earth and crushed, or beset by dozens of furious golems and beaten to pulpy chunks of meat and bone and carapace within moments.

Kan also had the advantage of numbers, and had summoned a number of clones of himself, all made of blood. Barbed whips of liquid crimson lashed out and split aliens into thirds, fourths, fifths, then too many bloody chunks to count. Kan himself had sprouted a pair of bloody eagle’s wings, like some avenging archangel, and soared ahead.

Despite the dozens and hundreds of aliens they were killing, Bernard didn’t think it would be enough. His summonings had exhausted him totally, and if any one of his elementals went down, he’d be unable to summon another. Pan was riding his golem for a reason: the little guy looked like he needed a nap, and had mentioned that with the ice so far between him and the earth itself, it made recovering more difficult.

Kan seemed to be the only one among them who wasn’t on the verge of tipping over, but even he was looking a little slower. But it didn’t matter how tired they were, they had to keep going.

“Almost there Mr. Bernard!” Pan shouted up. Bernard looked ahead and saw a mass of aliens surging over automated defenses and demolishing the Exterminator squads Gary had just launched. An alarm sounded, and several explosions announced that the aliens had breached the factory.

“Go get ‘em boys!” Bernard shouted to the elementals below him and Bobo. The primeval creatures rushed forward with all of Pan’s golems and began laying into the aliens, allowing the Exterminators room to regroup and return fire, and the defense turrets to engage their automated repair protocols.

Pan made an uppercut gesture with one of his arms and a huge pillar of solid rock shot up through the ice and sent a mass of aliens soaring into the air. The turrets shot them out of the sky like clay pigeons, and Pan repeated this several more times as his golems beat the weaker aliens to death.

Kan was slicing through the creatures with ease, and draining any of them that had blood he could use with a sweep of his hands. Their blood gathered into tight ruby orbs and then exploded like bombs, taking out anything near them.

Bernard’s elementals targeted the stronger aliens, ganging up on them and ripping them apart, burning them from the inside out, or melting them into gooey puddles of skin and liquid bone. Bernard actually laughed out loud when he saw what appeared to be zombiefied dinosaurs join the fray and stomp or shred more of the aliens.

“Follow that one!” Somebody yelled from below. It was Mona, atop some sort of long-necked dinosaur. She pointed into the distance where a slithering figure wielded a staff emitting red light. A smaller, human figure bathed in glittering blue and silver light hurried after it, firing glowing arrows at it and dodging its attacks. “That thing is headed for the control center!”

“On it!” Bernard said and whistled at his elementals. They disengaged their targets and sped off into the distance after the serpentine alien. He sent his fire lizard and storm moth after it first, with orders to avoid hurting the woman, who he guessed was Samaira. As he flew closer on Bobo, he saw the snake alien had a human skull face, a shield, and something else in one of its four arms. It was the dull gray color of an old headstone, and its cobra hood spread wide and cast a deep shadow over Samaira as she fought it. It was accompanied by several other aliens, most larger than itself, but not as possessing of the same menacing aura.

Samaira leapt and flipped and dodged their attacks with grace and speed while making every one of her shots connect, but like every other host, she was slowing down. There were more aliens in the far distance, and Bernard could just make out the giant form of Galtero’s mecha and huge tornadoes created by Kemuel. They were busy enough, as were the people behind him. It would be just him and Samaira for now.

Bernard thought of Amahle, how they’d both been struck by menus while out on a date. He had proposed to her not moments before, and then they’d both been changed forever. He thought of her saying she’d protect him if he’d protect her. He hadn’t been there for her on the moon, but she would be over there with Galtero, Kemuel, and Jiro. If they lost the control center, then all the remaining defenses would either fail outright or become far less efficient.

Bernard laughed to himself. It was practically asking to be killed, thinking about his fiancee like this in the middle of a fight. He could only court death more by saying how close he was to retirement, or something like that.

“Well, fuck it, hey Bobo?” he asked and the owl screeched. “Yeah, I’m sick of these bastards too. No sense in being a bangbroek now!”

He dove down with Bobo and fired a volley of her icicles at the lesser aliens around the cobra leader. They howled in pain or gargled as they died. His other elementals closed the distance and fell upon them, leaving Samaira free to focus on the serpent. She glanced up and nodded at Bernard briefly as he soared around for another pass.

Samaira fired a powerful aetheric arrow at the serpent’s head and it deflected it with its shield. Bernard directed his acidic centipede to curl around the serpent, to entangle it and slow it down and try to melt its shield and staff. The serpent flailed at the centipede, ignored its acid as if it were nothing more than spring water, then blasted it to chunks with the red light of its staff. Bernard swore as he felt the loss of one of his elementals, but sent the others after it.

“It’s heading for the center of the factory where the control room is!” Bernard shouted down to Samaira.

“I know! I can’t stop it!” she shouted back and crafted a huge arrow from the aether. Concentric rings of glowing blue light surrounded the arrow from front to back, and Bernard had to shield his eyes as she fired it. The serpent raised its shield, and the arrow struck it full on, then fragmented into multiple, smaller arrows and scattered around the sides of the shield like a flock of birds soaring around a mountain. They struck the serpent and each exploded against its gray-scaled hide with tiny blue explosions that sent the scales scattering through the air and at last drew blood.

“Yes!” Bernard cheered. The serpent lashed out at Samaira with its staff and she dodged back just as it raised the item in its last hand: a rock with a strange color Bernard had never seen before. He didn’t know what it was for, but he knew it wasn’t good. He sent the metal elemental crab at the serpent and had it tackle the alien and gouge at it with its claws just as it fired a beam of otherworldly hues at Samaira. She dodged it, barely, mostly thanks to the beam’s small size, no larger than a pencil. The curious color shrank, losing both size and vibrance, becoming more monochromatic.

The serpent hissed, the sound full of fury and disbelief. It threw the stone aside as the alien color faded from it entirely and the stone turned to powder. It cleaved the metal elemental in two with one hand, splitting through its thick, defensive shell and spilling innards of liquid silver onto the snow. It spun and hit Samaira with its tail, just as she dodged and threw a translucent blue shield up in front of her. The tail only grazed her, but shattered the shield and sent her spinning back through the snow. She landed with a crack of her back and coughed up blood in the snow beside her.

“Shit!” Bernard said and landed beside her while he sent his other elementals to slow the serpent down. Samaira’s eyes were glazed over, eyelids lowering. Her waist was turned at a funny angle, and her chest was rising and falling with erratic gasps.

“Please don’t be dead, c’mon, I can’t take that damn thing on by myself,” Bernard said as he knelt beside her. He pulled a clear crystalline orb out of his jacket. A soft, sunny light was inside of it, glowing with a gentle radiance. It was a concentration of ki Amahle had given him. It was pure life energy, summoned from within herself. Bernard broke the thin crystal against Samaira’s chest and the sunny light went into her, then spread throughout.

Her breathing evened and her eyes fluttered open.

“Ugh…oh ow, ah!” she said as she tried to sit up.

“Stay down. This thing was enough to stabilize you but I don’t think you’re all together yet. That bastard probably snapped your back,” Bernard said.

“Thank you. I should be able to heal myself the rest of the way in a minute or two,” Samaira replied, then glanced up as a explosion shook the ground and cracked the ice for miles around. Chunks of thick armor plating scattered around them and Samaira raised a blue dome of protective energy around them as several slabs of plating crashed around them.

The serpent had smashed through the upper level of plating above the control center and was heading down.

“Slow that thing down! You won’t be alone, the others are coming,” Samaira said. Bernard nodded at her and hopped back on top of Bobo and soared after the serpent. It had blown a massive crater in the snow and ice and armor, hundreds of feet down, and was melting what appeared to be the last layer or protective shields. He sent every elemental into the hole after it, all of them attacking as one.

They lasted maybe a minute before the serpent cleaved the last one apart. It actually ate the stormcloud, swallowing its lightning and thunder down a throat that appeared to have the pull of a small black hole.

“Damn thing! Die already!” Bernard said. He dove down with Bobo, knowing this would probably be his end. He saw Galtero and Mona coming in from the distance, hoped they would be enough. He just had to give them another minute to arrive.

Another explosion caught Bobo’s wings and blew both of them back up out of the hole with a blast of wind and fire. The serpent had broken through.

———————————————————

Immonen was still examining Chell when the ceiling began to crack.

“What is that?” he asked, and then the holographic screens on the ceiling showed him: that serpentine alien was above them, using the red light of its staff to hammer the plating above. And it was making rapid and frightening progress.

“Everybody evacuate!” Gary shouted. “Head for the hangar and get into your planes. You’ll be escorted to a safe location by Exterminators and shield drones.”

“I’m staying,” General Johnson said as others began to flee the control center.

“Yeah, figured you would,” Gary replied.

“The injured are here. I am staying as well,” Immonen replied as he tried to get Chell out of the chamber. It shook again and Immonen glanced up to see bestial creatures of fire and lightning attacking the serpent. It dispatched them with ease, then raised its staff again.

“Get back!” Gary said as he ran to a wall nearby and pressed a button. Hulking robots, far more intimidating than the already imposing Exterminators emerged from the walls nearby, and multiple gun turrets appeared from the walls and ceiling. The central part of the roof caved in a moment later, and a hail of rock and metal plating, ice and snow, fell through along with a shaft of sunlight. The hulking yet sinuous form of the phaoronic cobra plunged in after, coiled around a giant snowy owl whose feathers appeared to be made of ice. A young man fell from its back and hit the floor with a sickening crunch, following by several smaller pieces of rocks landing on top of him.

Heedless of the danger, Immonen rushed toward the man, who he recognized as Bernard, and sensed that he was seconds from death as he approached the man. He was near the giant owl and the phaoronic cobra as well, and sensed the owl was quickly being crushed to death and that the cobra was impossibly vibrant, full of the strange unlife he had sensed in the other aliens he had come into contact with, but by several orders of magnitude more.

He ignored it and laid his hands on Bernard and instantly began to heal him as Gary’s ultra-Exterminators attacked the cobra along with the automated turrets and Gary himself opened fire with some kind of wrist cannon that emerged from his watch. General Johnson picked up a huge rifle one of the Exterminators had dropped and began firing as well.

Bernard gasped as Immonen finished repairing his crushed body, bringing him back from the edge of death. Bernard started to say something when Immonen shouted, “Just fight or run!”

The cobra towered over all of them, deflecting attacks with its shield and lashing out with tail and staff. The ultra-Exterminators took a few hits, but they fell all the same.

General Johnson ducked behind it as it destroyed the last ultra-Exterminator, and fired a beam of burning energy directly into a wound one of the other hosts must have caused earlier. The cobra hissed with pain and rage and spun around. It concentrated the baleful red light in its staff to a tight beam and then fired it at Johnson. The old Marine was blown into chunks of meat and ash in a second, dead before he knew it.

“No!” Immonen shouted again and drew the cobra’s hateful glare. It pointed its staff at him, then snarled as Gary fired a lance of condensed plasma at it. The plasma burned so hot that it ignited the feathers on the dead owl as it passed several feet overhead. The beam drilled through one of the serpent’s arms, the one wielding the shield, and sent the severed limb to the floor. It howled in agony as black blood spurted from its newly formed stump, then jabbed at Gary with the tip of its staff.

Gary let out a breathless grunt as the gleaming onyx tip of the staff shattered his forcefield like cheap glass and plunged into his gut and out the back of his spine. The cobra opened its mouth wide and lunged for Gary, ready to bite him in half.

Immonen leaped forward and slapped his hand on the tail of the cobra. He made its muscles spasm and tighten, essentially locking it in place. It was so big though, and its muscles were so strong that it was overcoming him. It snarled and reached out with its remaining free hand, its long, gray fingers inching toward Immonen. It would pluck his head right off his shoulders like a grape off the vine. Then it would eat Gary, kill Chell and Bernard, and destroy the control room and whatever remaining defenses it had to offer.

Immonen redoubled his efforts, feeling the strength drain from him as he did. He glared defiantly up at the cobra’s glowing crimson eyes, shouted at it wordlessly. His energy left him and he collapsed. The cobra reared up, lifting Gary with it as the old man was still impaled on its staff, alive and struggling, but bleeding out and closer to death by the second.

“Come then you monster,” Immonen said and reached out for it as it reached for him. He might be able to summon enough energy to cause its hand and maybe arm muscles to fully atrophy. It would kill him, but, well, worrying about that now seemed a moot point.

“Hey fuck face!” somebody shouted above. A column of glittering golden fire slammed through the shattered ceiling and into the rearing cobra like the finger of God. It screamed as its skin ignited and it lost another arm and half its tail. Its jaw and several of its fangs shattered, and it vomited a stream of black ichor from its mouth.

Several figures descended from the hole in the roof, over two dozen, all of them wearing glowing crowns of light, surrounded by flames that shone like the heart of the sun.

It was Anya.

All of them were Anya.