Ten men, one alien, and one anxious Cassie gathered at the edge of the timber. Between oaks, creaking in the night’s breeze, they came to a stop and overlooked what would be the first target of their armed resistance. Nestled the valley below, a monolith of gray metals stood as tall as the mountains around it, like a half-finished skyscraper. Green light pulsed along thick power cables up and down the structure in methodical and precise patterns, bathing the woods and the hills in the light each time the energy flowed. A static humming emanated from the alien construction, seemingly vibrating the air and shaking Cassie to the bone. This was a mission she did not expect to walk away from.

Around the outer perimeter was a wall. Guard posts were placed at every corner and above the gate they watched. Silver suits gleamed in the moonlight whenever the soldiers shifted positions or began another patrol atop the wall. To her surprise, there did not appear to be any automated turrets or cameras on the exterior of the complex. Perhaps the Culicidae were over-confident in their superiority, or maybe the rebels from Grier were over-confident because they thought they could actually shut the terra-forming station down.

There, Bean said with the clicking of his mandibles. His gloved hand stretched into Cassie’s view from behind, pointing towards a portion of the wall that abutted the woods. They had planned this attack for months, sending scouts and scoping the place out for their best opportunities for success. If they were to pull this off, it would be all thanks to Bean and his knowledge of the plant.

Cassie reached down to her belt and grabbed the clicker that hung there. It was a small blue piece of plastic that they used to train dogs. Okay, Cassie said in morse code. Cowabunga.

Bean’s head tilted to the side. Cowabunga?

Cowabunga. Let’s do this.

The alien nodded. It was funny and somehow adorable that he had adopted many human mannerisms since they had began working together. Sometimes she could even get him to laugh—an initially disconcerting mixture of exoskeletal grinding and screeching—with a simple joke. He had become something of a partner. A friend.

A hushed voice spoke just to her left. “Turn in,” Sarge commanded. The other survivors did just that, creating a small circle inside the woods. Looking over all of them, he said, “This is it. Remember the plan. Protect Bean at all costs. Cassie. You really should give him a new name. Saying ‘Bean’ just doesn’t feel right for an operation like this.”

Cassie shrugged, her smile spreading contagiously to the others.

“All right, let’s go.”

As the group began to march, someone put a hand on Cassie’s shoulder and pulled her to a stop. It was Dan. “Towards the back, next to Bean,” he said. “I don’t want you up front, and I don’t want to fall behind.”

A groan slipped from her lips. “All right. If you say so. How’s your… ankle?”

He smirked, staggered forward, and lied. “It’s fine.”

Watching him struggling to walk through the shrubs was hard on Cassie. In some ways, she felt a little responsible for the loss of his foot. The new one, made of a shoe stapled onto a hunk of wood and leather his stub rested on, wasn’t very comfortable for him. Walking the rough terrain to the terra-forming station proved challenging for him, especially whenever they had to jump across a crick or go up or down a hill. But Dan had insisted on coming. He didn’t seem capable of letting Cassie go without him and there was no way Cassie was letting Bean go without her, so that was that.

In the dark, they wandered through the forest until the metal wall came back into view, peeking through the trees. The survivors of Greir slowed their pace to quiet the sound of their movement. Still, the bags on their backs and the dead Culicidae weapons strapped to them made noise when they jostled, twigs snapped and brush scraped against clothes, but they were quiet enough to reach the spot they were looking for undetected.

A small crick ran a dozen paces away from the western wall, along its whole length, and nearest the center of the station was a large pipe. Cassie could smell it before she saw it; a chunky soup of sludge slowly creeping out of the opening and plopping into the water below. She did not want to think about what it was as the first few people began clambering their way into the drainage system, but her mind couldn’t shake off the thought of Bean’s poo. There was a striking resemblance.

Breathing through her mouth, she grabbed the lip of the pipe and pulled herself into it. Flashlights turned on and following the others was noisy with the sloshing sounds of a dozen people. When the pipe came to a “T”, they turned left with Bean’s guidance. When Cassie asked him how he knew which way to go, he explained that all terra-forming stations were built the same and he had been staffed at this very one.

Soon, her socks were soaked with the stinking slime, and the walking seemed to go on forever. Just as she was about to voice her discomfort, she walked into Dan’s back by accident, nearly sending him toppling over in the stuff. Cassie shied under his gaze, but he didn’t reprimand her otherwise.

Bean clicked a message away, which Dan translated into: “He wants us to go into that opening up there.”

About ten feet in the air, the next pipe was much smaller than the one they currently stood in, but crystal clear water trickled out of it. More than anything, Cassie wanted to stand under it and get clean. The men, however, were quick to get on with their business by lending their hands as stepping stools and lifting people up to it one at a time. Cassie was the fourth to last to get vaulted up into the tube. It was so small she had to hunch over or get on all fours.

On the move again, the stream of cool and wonderfully scentless water led them into a cistern for storing clean water. The pool was perhaps four feet deep, and stretched out for thirty yards, where a single light shined above some steps leading to a silver door. Cassie stood and waited for a moment while the others used ropes to haul up the last two survivors. Wading through the waist high water sent goosebumps down her spine, but Cassie was grateful for the refreshing feeling it gave her.

When they were huddled beneath the light outside the door, everyone paused for a quick break and to discuss the plan going forward. Within ten minutes, it was time. From here on out, things required a much swifter speed, and they were very likely to be caught almost immediately. Drawing masks from their bags, the survivors of Grier donned them hastily. Cassie was shaking, as much from her cold drying clothes as her nerves. Their Culicidae companion, however, did the opposite, shedding all his clothes and revealing his bug-like features, except for the gas mask that hid his condition. Hopefully, the others of his species didn’t consider him naked and arrest him for indecent exposure. That would be the worst thing that could happen in a raid.

Bean moved quick in the toxic air, pressing a button next to the silver door and stepping through to lead their infiltration cautiously. The door whooshed open, and the internal air pressure of the station pushed out into the cistern in a strong gale. He shouldered his way in, and in a moment, he turned and motioned the others to follow him. When the door shut behind her, it was like she had stepped into a whole different world. The hallway Cassie entered was vibrantly bright, the air inside the terraforming station was thick and wet, clinging to her clothes with a discernible weight pressing on her shoulders. She had to pop her ears a few times. Breathing through the mask was hard, and she wondered how Bean had survived in Earth’s air for months.

At a jogging pace, they rounded the first turn, then another. The floors were a dull silver, the walls a pristine white, and the lights embedded in the ceiling a slight yellow tint. A window in the wall with bluish glass gave her a glimpse into what might have been a Culicidae infirmary, for laying on a bed was the unconscious form of an alien missing a leg. Hand tools, not looking too unlike a human doctor’s tools, lay on a small tray next to the wounded creature. Cassie watched its chest rise and fall as they passed, then ducked beneath the window when a door on the far side of the infirmary began to slide open. Holding her breath, she motioned to the others behind her to stay low and kept moving. When everyone was across the window, nothing happened. They hadn’t been spotted. Yet.

Bean seemed to pick up his pace even more, leading them down long corridors like they were rats inside a maze. At a light run, the gas mask strained her breathing, but she kept up, hoping that they would find the cheese they so desperately needed.

And they did. Stopping abruptly, Bean faced a doorway. Alien runes were engraved onto a red plaque above the door. He unslung the only charged Culicidae rifle they had and held it in his arms, then, motioning with an open palm, he instructed Cassie and the others to stand clear before he went into the room at a relaxed pace. The doorway closed shut and the longest minute of Cassie’s life began. With a swarm of angry bees in her stomach, she held her gun to her shoulder and anxiously waited. When the door finally slid open again, and Bean returned unharmed, his gun trailing a line of steam, she let out a sigh of relief. She hadn’t heard a thing.

Everyone rushed into the room faster than pigs to feed. With the door sealed behind them, she took in her new environment. It was a large room, but it felt much smaller than it was due to the incredible amount of stuff in it. An entire wall was lined with mechanical battle suits, the freshly polished silver glowing in the light. Nearly tripping over the carcass of a half-melted Culicidae along the way, she reached out and touched the cold and smooth surface of one.

Plug in, Bean chattered with his mandibles. He had removed his gas mask, and watching him speak was a strange new sight when normally Cassie only heard him. Certainly, seeing his crunchy outsides was something she still wasn’t used to. Impatient, the alien friend motioned to the suit she was standing by and grumbled a few times to get Cassie moving. Grabbing a nearby cable from the floor, she followed his instructions and found the place to plug into the suit’s back, just below the neck.

With busily clacking fingers, Bean worked away at a terminal. In his vague and hard to understand way, Bean explained that he had to pull data on Earth’s atmosphere and assign certain perimeters and programs onto the suit so that humans could wear it. Cassie beamed. Becoming Iron Man had never been a dream of hers before, but it was one she was now excited to fulfill.

Within a few minutes the suit was ready. Bean came to her side, unplugged the suit, and opened it by pushing on a complicated series of pressure points. It hissed and whirled as the back of the armor unfolded, revealing a strange green gel-coated inner layer that would help absorb impacts and shock. Sucking in a deep breath and holding it in her lungs, she ripped off her mask and discarded it on the floor before quickly stepping up into the thing and inserting her arms into the suit’s sleeves.

Almost immediately, the suit began to close in on her. She almost screamed. Metal shifted and repositioned itself. Plates began to overlap on the suit’s torso, shrinking its height by six inches. The gel inside began to grow somehow, propping her up higher inside the thing and tightening around her like it was a comfy body-sweater trying to hug her. All these changes made the suit a perfect fit for Cassie’s size. As the screen came to life before her eyes, the visor displaying a multitude of strange blue symbols that came and left at a dizzying speed, it began to respond to the pressure of her limbs. She raised a clunky mechanical hand in front of her face, waved to herself, and smiled. Air began to hiss inside the suit, and she finally released the breath she’d been holding. The suit was creating a habitat environment for her.

In about ten minutes, the process repeated a few more times until three other Grier survivors were donned in suits of their own. Bean instilled all of his knowledge of the terminal system to Dan until he could navigate the screen by memory and reprogram suits by himself. Dan, being the slowest and least combat capable person, had been chosen for that task before they had even began their infiltration. As he took the lead on that task, Bean showed Sarge how to properly attach their Culicidae weapons to a machine on the far side of the room and charge them with that rare alien energy, which was a far more simple job than Dan’s. After the second example, Sarge was left to his duty, and Cassie was handed a gun.

As Bean opened up a metal suit for himself, he turned to Cassie and chattered, Cowabunga?

Cassie laughed and nodded. Cowabunga it is. Let’s do this.

Bean climbed his way in, and when the shimmering silver metal surrounded him entirely, he retrieved his own firearm and held up four fingers to the others. They nodded and approached Cassie and Bean by the door. The hallway was still quiet and unoccupied. No alarm had been raised yet, a good sign that they might just be able to pull this off. The six of them found an elevator and piled in. Bean worked the controls, sending them downward, and when the gray doors slid open, Cassie beheld the most pitiful and horrible thing she had ever seen.

The room was large and square, with ceilings at least twenty feet up. Around the outer walls were control panels, and at each of the corners were windowed guardhouses with flat roofs that served as elevated guard posts. On top of each was a Culicidae, diligently watching over the pit in the middle of the room where more than two hundred people, humans, were dispersed about the communal prison.

Some sat around tables in the center, hunched over steaming bowls of a pale white liquid. Metal bars along the pit’s walls sectioned off individual cells, and from her height Cassie could see bunk beds and toilets inside the rooms. There was nothing else. No one reading books, no talking, and nothing pleasant about the place.

From the elevator, they split into two groups of three and went their separate ways. Cassie took the path around the pit to the left, keeping her gaze fixed on the alien standing guard ahead of her. The creature turned, noticing them approaching. Her grip on her gun tightened, but the Culicidae did not seem suspicious. Her and the two other survivors reached the squat guard station without a hitch.

When they reached it, they stood and waited until a silver helmet peered out through one of the windows. She had to restrain her human nature from waving at the guard or asking to be let in, to do so would destroy their disguise. Even the slightest motion, such as nodding, would make them suspicious. If the alien said anything, she didn’t hear it. The door whined and slid open. Cassie let out the air she’d been holding.

The guard’s station was small and cramped with even more terminals and spare equipment. Various tools sat scattered atop workbenches; welders, hammers, and other alien ones she didn’t know the purpose of. A set of concrete steps led to the platform above, and embedded into one wall was a disintegration rifle charging device, the exact same as the one Sarge had been using in the armory.

When they entered the room, the Culicidae on guard at a terminal chattered something. The three of them ignored whatever it was it said and continued with their plan. Cassie stayed behind, and the other two carried on, leaving her alone to handle this guard station. She walked to the back of the room, next to the energy charging station, and lightly leaned against the wall. From there, the steps half covered her, and she could see the entire room and the alien sitting in front of the terminal.

The creature chattered once more, and again, she could not respond. There was a pause, a clear moment where the guard was waiting for her to respond. The Culicidae spoke again, this time motioning to her and rising to his feet. It began to walk towards her, and quickly. It was clear her game of cold shoulder was either making it suspicious or angry. Cassie was hot. She could feel her sweat slicking the gel lining inside her suit, her hands cramping from holding onto her gun so tightly. She wanted to blast it while she could, but her mental counting hadn’t reached thirty yet. They had to be synchronized if they wanted to pull this off.

A dull fwoosh fwoosh fwoosh reached her ears from the stairs above. Something was wrong. Only eighteen seconds had passed. The alien paused, hearing it, too. Cassie snapped like a bowstring. Jolting, she flicked the barrel of her gun up, disabled its safety system, and pressed the fire button in one smooth motion. The guard screeched and began to charge her, trying to cross the distance between them before the gun gathered its energy and fired. It was too slow, the top half of it disintegrating in a blooming bubble of green light. The legs toppled over, and Cassie realized she was shaking.

The shot had disintegrated a sphere out of the room, melting glass, terminal, and tools easily. Keeping the gun to her shoulder, Cassie ran to the base of the stairs and began to climb. The heavy suit thudded against each step. She could hear people screaming in the pit below. Bolts of energy were flying from somewhere else, slamming into the wall above her. When the impacts seemed to stop, she rose a few more steps and peered out onto the platform to see nothing but the charred remains of half an alien. She climbed the rest of the way, and a silver suit atop a platform adjacent to her waved. Cassie laughed and waved back. It was Bean.

The coast was clear. The area secure with no casualties of their own. Quickly, Bean leapt down from his guard house and began to jog along the side of the pit. On the opposite side of the room from the elevator stood a single silver door. They convened there.

“One of them almost got me,” One of the men from Grier said, his voice amplified by his suit. “He knew something was up the moment I stepped inside and slammed the door shut behind me. Reached for the gun leaning against the table next to him fast. I had no time. Had to slam my fist against his visor. In this suit, the glass cracked like I broke a pencil. And God, did he screech. The air in here, it’s human air. I had him clawing at his own face, trying to plug the hole in his suit my fist had made. He was so loud the one above the platform started coming down. I grabbed his gun and started blasting. I’m lucky. I didn’t think I was going to make it, as unprepared as I was.”

The others consoled him, patted him on the shoulders. Cassie was glad he was able to pull through. They needed every one of their dozen men to get this done.

With no time to waste, they opened the door, which led to more concrete stairs, and descended to the pit’s entrance. By the time they stepped into the prison’s yard, not a single person was to be seen. Trash was scattered everywhere, chairs flipped over. The people were hiding inside their cells, underneath sheets and behind their beds. Cassie spotted a person occasionally, usually a man appearing defensive and stepping in front of his family, or a child that was simply curious and moving anxiously.

“Let’s go,” Cassie shouted. “We’re getting out of here.”

The people came alive, rushing out of the cells in throngs. Men, women, and children alike were cheering, crying, asking questions. Cassie couldn’t imagine how relieving it must have been to hear someone speaking English from inside a silver suit. The six of them worked to organize the people as quickly as possible, giving them directions and clear rules. When things were settled, they began their ascent up the stairs and towards the elevator to the surface. As they walked, splitting into two streams of people around the pit, the six of them who were in charge handed out the weapons of the Culicidae they had dispatched to those who seemed most capable with them. That gave them eight more guns, and those people were instructed to guard the rear of the group.

Cassie glanced back behind her when she reached the elevator. The long line of people wrapped around the entire perimeter of the pit. The massive crowd was still piling out of the stairway to the pit. She hadn’t fully realized just how cramped it must have been down there until now.

There’s too many of them, Cassie said with the dog-clicker at her waist.

Bean agreed. The lift was big but still too small to carry everyone up in a timely manner. Long stairs, Bean said, pointing to a door a dozen feet away. Emergency stairs. Open door makes alarm. Have to move fast.

She took a deep breath of dismay. They had made it this far without detection, and it felt wrong to throw it all away, but the gig was bound to be up sooner or later. Let’s just hope that the others are ready for us.

Two of the armored survivors breached the doorway first, filling the entire terraforming station with the blaring cheep of the alarm system. The expressions of the ex-cons changed immediately; hope to fear and worry in the blink of an eye. Cassie followed, and soon the padding and clunking of footsteps filled the stairway. Bean was not lying about it being a long walk, the climb to the surface level took nearly five minutes. When they reached the door at the top and ordered the unarmed to stand clear, a man blew the door open with a powerful kick.

Before she could comprehend what was happening, Cassie was out in the hallway. Her heart was pounding, sweat dribbling into her eyes. Green bolts of energy were tearing through the air in every direction, vaporizing arms, legs, heads, and concrete and metal. She took aim at a silver suit peering around a corridor and fired, disintegrating a chunk of the wall and the alien. They were moving again before the fight was over. They lost a man.

Bean led the charge through the corridors full of screeches and the warbling of alarms. There was no stopping, only running and ducking and shooting and cussing, the steady stream of terrified people following behind them. Their lives were in her hands, Cassie realized. She felt like she was going to throw up.

As they broke out into a wide room, the hangar where half a dozen black, angled Culicidae ships lay in waiting, the lower half of an armored survivor disappeared in a wash of green light. He went down screaming, straight onto his stomach, but did not give up. Raising his gun, he managed a few more shots before falling slump to the ground. Where he had missed, Cassie had landed shots, disintegrating two aliens who had been crouched behind a wall of metal containers.

Reinforcements appeared from a wide doorway, clicking their mandibles, pointing and shooting. Cassie dropped to her stomach, a volley of blasts whizzing over her. Someone behind her screamed for a fraction of second, then went quiet. Cut short. There were a dozen of them coming out of the hallway, spreading themselves across the far end of the hangar. Three times as many armed aliens as they had men. The unarmed people at the front of the crowd tried to stop, but the pushing of the people behind them forced them forward. More died, a handful with each bolt. They were sheep led to slaughter, and she was their shepard.

The thought got her blood boiling. She would not let them down. Turning her gaze back to the nearest Culicidae, she saw it notice her moving and raise its gun. Growling, she rolled with a shove, finding cover behind the landing gear of a ship. The pad on the base of the leg disintegrated, its molten stub came crashing down into the concrete, and the ship groaned as its uneven weight stressed its frame. Cassie closed her eyes, wincing, and the thud shook the entire hangar. She opened her eyes, relieved to see the black ship still hovering a foot above her. She swore she was going to be crushed, but the angle and length of the hull left a gap just large enough to spare her.

From her hide-away, she managed three shots before the aliens realized she survived. One of her bolts hit and sent a helmet flying with a head still inside it. They began to screech and chatter, a few moved out of her window of view to get behind her. In her prone position, they could easily get at her. She tried to spin herself around, but the suit was too bulky and caught against the damaged landing gear.

Then she heard a whirring sound. A blast of air like a hurricane scattered the concrete dust in front of her. A deep humming sound filled the hangar. She tried to see behind her. A ship had come alive; its thrusters and the power lines that ran between unfolded armor panels cast that sickly green light all around it. The Culicidae paused where they stood. Uncertain for too long, the turret attached to the underbody of the ship whirred as it spun in place, firing balls of energy like a machine gun. The hangar erupted into blinding flashes of connecting blasts, like someone had let off barrels of green fireworks.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Even in her suit, the air seemed to shudder as crates and ships began to explode. The bolts were so bright and so fast, Cassie could barely see the Culicidae’s silver suits before they vanished entirely.

A hand grabbed her by the arm and pulled hard. Cassie threw out the butt of her gun with a desperate cry, smacking it against an armored figure’s leg. The knee buckled and she pushed to get on top of the figure before it was too late, then paused. The suit that had grabbed her was holding its hands open in front of it, like it was surrendering. A gun rested by its feet, so she kept hers pointed at its head.

Cassie.

All at once, the energy and tension washed out of her like a dumped bucket. Damn, she was tired. It was Bean. She wasn’t about dead. At least not yet. Pulling him to his feet, the alien said something she couldn’t understand, but it became clear as he led her around the toppled ship. The people had already grasped the idea; a long line of them streamed out from the hallway and towards the back of several ships like one long, frantic worm.

They worked their way to the closest ship and pushed their way aboard a loading ramp. The inside of the ship was dark, and with all the people, far more cramped than the pit they had been imprisoned in before. It took some working, but Bean and Cassie managed to make their way through the doorway to the bridge.

There were four independent seats stationed around the cabin. A dizzying number of switches, buttons, and screens covered every spare inch of the windowed room. The unarmed people who lingered just inside were ordered out, for fear of them bumping something important and sending them spiraling from the sky. Two armored survivors were sitting, their guns across their laps, while one was standing front and center with the barrel of his gun pointed at the head of a Culicidae prisoner in the pilot’s seat. Cassie imagined the other ship next to this one was in the same situation.

The man with the gun turned to face her. He chuckled, and Cassie recognized the voice. It was Sarge. “About time you two showed up. This guy was getting antsy.” He motioned to his captive. “Now let’s get out of here before more show up. Get the last of the people in here and get those ramps up. I want to be airborne in sixty seconds. Got it?”

Cassie nodded. “Yes, sir!”

She did as she was told, pushing her way back out of the ship and urging people to make room for the people still waiting to come aboard by filling up the ship’s smaller armory, cabins, and engineering rooms. When the first ship seemed full to bursting from outside, she ordered the rest to pile into the second, which greedily ate them up without a hitch. It was a close fit, but the last of the hundred fifty plus people managed to find space. With Bean’s guidance, the loading ramps went up, and then the pitch of the engines. The ship wobbled a bit at first under the weight, but the pilot got the hang of it shortly.

Cassie joined Bean back in the cockpit. Her alien friend worked tirelessly at the controls, and translated Sarge’s instructions to their captive pilots on both ships at the same time. In moments, Cassie watched the scenery through the windows shift and turn. The burning ships that had seemed so large from the ground, seemed smaller as they began to follow the second ship out to the large open hangar doors. Before they exited entirely, Sarge gave one of the armored survivors a thumbs up.

The man nodded in his silver suit, spun around in his seat and took two controls in his hand. The screen before him came to life, a crystal clear image of the ground beneath and behind them. The tone of the ship’s engines deepened, and a dozen brilliant green bolts appeared on the screen in less than a second. The machines and equipment below exploded, coloring the hangar in fire and radiation as the ship left the hangar, gaining altitude.

The other ship joined the barrage, plinking away at the base of the uncompleted terra-forming station as they circled it. Together, the two ships pounded the foundation of the green tower for nearly five whole minutes, sending arcs of green lightning loose and giving birth to jets of red-hot flame that added to the dawn’s growing light. Eventually, the tower tipped and crashed through the outer wall.

Cassie smiled. The mountains, standing tall and proud before the backdrop of the orange horizon, whizzed by the windows one last time as the ship righted itself. Before them stretched the valley forest, with its hills and cricks and squirrels. There was cheering and whoops of joy coming from the people crowded in behind her. There was crying and hugging, but most importantly, there was hope.

Cassie added her voice to the chorus, and they turned towards Grier.