The Lion Score, a science fiction short story, on Mercenary Armor, Tiberius Down 200

 The Lion Score

By Jacob Malewitz

Patlabor A Second Northstar, 500 short stories, 2mill

Mercenary Faction, 2mill

Mercenary En Guarde, 10 10 10

Wordpress, 2

Civilization Empires, 500, 2 meal

What does man do when war is all around him, but the tragedy is he can do nothing?

As Captain Eliot looked, he saw the expanse of the galaxy within reach. It wasn’t so. It couldn’t be so. Mankind acted, he acted. Mankind made war, he made war. But all this destruction! It destroyed a man before he died, made him live a nightmare. For the true nightmares are those tales which, when begun, don’t allow you to close your eyes. 

What was destroyed? Only places … lives. Working on the mad ways of the beasts, Captain Eliot looked down at the wasteland that once was the Terran League. How? In all this destruction, all this end game, all that mattered to him, for those few fleeting moments sitting at the bridge, was pushing the right button. Want has no place on a bridge. Captain Eliot looked back to the destruction. They had been warned, humanity, to stop, that the beasts would come. There were signs. You heard the screams over the messaging networks; it appeared that was their way of communicating. What was, what was the true nightmare, turned out to be seeing the monster of children’s dreams come live. Only the future could hold so much.

You never saw them—the nightmares—before they were upon you. First, you saw a shadow. Second, you see a movement. And then you die. It didn’t happen that way at first; these beasts seemed to adapt. Lost in a haze, he hit the button, realizing his desire for a good cup of coffee and some music loud enough to drown out the world.

“Captain?”

His eyes opened. “Yes?”

“You ready?” The question and answer game continued. Eliot sensed in these men, the crew of The Lion Score, something different—perhaps a desire for survival. He had sat on this bridge for what seemed like a millennia; it was, in fact, a century. 

“Are they still coming?” He said, looking down at the wrist watch, the last of his physical riches, because the rest were burned up. Except his colt. And his trust double barrel shotgun. A hunter. What he liked about this watch showed what he liked about his crew: they were always working. 

“They are coming, sir.” He had almost forgotten her name, that of this new civilian military. They called her Second Archon Kristie and the one beneath her third; it wasn’t fitting for Captain Eliot, nor was being called a Sky Leader important.

“I can sense it.”

“Shall we open fire?”

“Has it worked yet?”

“The war continues, Sky—Captain.”

“How close are we?

“The wormhole,” she hit a button and it appeared on screen. “There are too many,” she said, realizing the force that a wormhole attracted. Everyone wanted out of this galaxy. There was a tough choice ahead, along the way to something new and less evil, including who to feed and how much to feed, who to rest and who to work a triple shift. 

“These ships,” he said, putting his hand to his head. “They all have the fleet’s idea.”

“Sir, the wormhole expanding with them.”

“Why?”

“If we had a special scientist, maybe.”

“I see. Continue course. I want those sons of bitches off all our backs.”

“We won’t find ourselves in the same place. This wormhole is different, I think.”

“Speak freely, Archon.”

She grinned at the captain’s use of the new military code. “It’s expanding, therefore the continuum will push them to different parts.”

Suddenly a ringing started throughout the ship. The Second Archon put up the rear of the ship, and of course there were a few beast ships. Except they weren’t quite ships; they were living vessels acting for death.

“The beast with no name.”

She looked back at Eliot, who seemed interested more in their looks than anything. 

“Captain? I believe they’ve boarded us, but we can hit the wormhole in 30.”

“Do it.” He put his hand on the old colt one, which his ancestry had used on Old Earth, the home of the Terran League. The shapeless beasts … Who were they in front of  a six shooter? “You may be fast,” he whispered, “but this is even faster.” He rolled the bullet around in his hand, looking up just as the wormhole took them in.

Something is wrong. Something always was wrong.

The fall of the galaxy was close. The first stage had been the fall of man and man-like species. The fall of other worlds would follow, yet there were other even darker places. Humanity was dangerous, sure, but there were other species who could kill twenty armed humans with one sole fighter. It happened. They first showed up, with their spiked bodies and quick shadows, only weeks ago earth time. With them came nothing but blackness, the only light you could see was the death of a star. Efficient killers, each of the beasts could take out small colonies. Old Earth, however, was a different story. If the men on colonies like Mars were tough to kill, the men on earth were even tougher. They died by the millions, but they just kept fighting. That’s the sort of stuff which, it seemed, Captain Eliot was. He understood the significance of his name: the old Eliot name was home to  more than generals and efficient warriors. A man, long ago, wrote of a wasteland. Yet even this Eliot could never have imaged the end of mankind. This short tale, however, doesn’t begin or end, in a sense, but does go toward the middle of the survivors. These men and women fought … died.

###

Eliot looked down the barrel of a shotgun, aimed right toward an old fashioned killer. It wouldn’t take you down with a laser pistol or with some nerve agent, nor would it kill you by starving you or playing with your head. In some ways, it did play with your head, but the beast with no name killed with talons and blades shoved into its body. It was built to destroy.

Looking down the barrel, he saw nothing but blackness, the perfect spot for the shadows to hide. “There have been stories,” he said, pointing the barrel toward a small piece of light, “where men make choices,” and he fired. It ricocheted off the metal, causing something to scream, something to bleed. His eyes opened up. “Kill!” One of his men said, raising his arms into the air. “He killed that mother—“ and though it bled, it was still very much alive. The head came off clean. Eliot pulled back, sending off one more shot. For a moment, he thought he saw the beast, a glimpse of the thing ending mankind’s journey forward. For a moment, he saw … something.

“Pull back, slowly,” he said into his com. “Very slowly.” It made some kind of noise, this beast, and it made his skin tingle. He heard the echo through the ship. A warning. When it wants more, it takes more.

“Sir,” the Second Archon said, putting her arm there. “We can handle this.” 

“That’s what they all said.”

“Who?”

“The others. The ones who we left to die on Mars, and on the moons of Jupiter, or back on the simple backwater planet of Story 1, deep in the Sphere Confederation. They always thought they could handle one. It lays more, see, I can tell it really,” he stopped. He sensed pieces of this throughout his life. Madness. It came and went; he kept madness secret. 

“Ok. Give me one more minute.”

“Your place is on the bridge.”

“We are dieing down here.”

He saw the movement, anticipated the reaction of turning on a metal curve, and just a blink away from him, for the moment, he saw the eyes. That’s where he aimed. The shot went right through something dark, which bled yellow, which died just the same as a lion or a hyena. You had to hunt them to beat them. 

The pieces of its head fell to the floor, then vanished. Eliot had yet to see the entire body. “Those eyes,” he said, putting his shotgun on the ground. 

“Sir, you just killed—“

“I know what I did!” He walked away.

Hours passed as he walked back and forth along the deck, waiting for something else to show up. He made damn sure no one else took this security duty. It’s eyes … made him remember bad things. A man a century in a half old had many memories. He remembered the springs over the New Mars SETI buildings; he recalled learning in class that murder was wrong, learning sometimes there was no choice; he remembered the first time a computer talked back to him.

Just up a few feet was a small monitor. They had developed these “gadgets,” as he liked to call them, on Mars. For some reason it was easier to build computers there. “Computers with brains,” he said, “not much bigger than yours, really.”

“Talking to the beast won’t show it to you.”

“Shutup computer.”

“I am a synthetic being, Sky—“

“Just shut the hell up!” He stopped. “I’m sorry.”

“Apologies unnecessary. What happened?” 

“I forgot you were out.”

“I was.”

“Screwing another PC.”

“Ha … ha. They gave me a better understanding of your lingo, said it would “'improve performance.'”

“That’s just what you need.”

“Stop.”

He looked back. “They bleed.” They do, the AI said. “So we can kill them.” We can, it replied. “But you already knew that … right?” There was no answer as he walked back to the bridge.

“Sir, we are alone.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what else?”

“We are in unknown .. space. The beasts haven’t followed.”

“Don’t be so sure, Archon.”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked down, pointing to the planet just beneath them. “How close did we come?”

“To jumping into it? It doesn’t work that—“

“No, that wasn’t what I meant. I will tell you later.”

“So we have no ships,” he said to himself. A small crew barely capable of stopping one beast. They come, we die. They don’t, maybe we don’t die.

“I … commander, I am getting a star signal. It shot out of the moon.”

“Feed it through.”

“It’s not a language.”

“It has to be.”

“It’s numbers.”

“I see. Numbers.”

“They are sending out a three digit number.”

“Are you sure?”

“No.”

“Tell me when you are; I need a coffee.”

“No whiskey, captain.”

“Shutup computer.”

Walking down, he had a choice between a small coffee and a smaller coffee. He argued with the resident culinary chef, who seemed disturbed by a captain wasting water, ignoring ration. We will find more water, the captain said. Are you sure? Was the reply. Yes, I am damn sure.

The coffee came out, hot, burning his tongue. He pulled up a star chart, tapping into Charles, the name they called the computer AI. “Captain?”

“Charles.”

“I think I deciphered it.”

“Why wasn’t I told?”

“Because I wanted you to know before I told the Second Archon.”

He said continue, and the computer did. It seemed to be a language written in numbers, the common first contact with advanced species. The pages began with the number six, rotating the numbers, but there was always three sixes for every message, which contained a random scattering of twenty to thirty digits, each on their own line. Charles thought The Lion Score was in danger.

“Why?”

“They made a choice to die.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. This number, of course, signifies the number of the beast in your mythology.”

“Did you just call the Bible mythology?” He laughed. “Continue.”

“The numbers point to the homeworld of the beasts.”

“Far?”

“Here. In this system.”

She looked quite like a Captain waiting for a few grey hairs before turning into one. Eliot liked his second in command; she seemed sure of herself, more so than even Charles. In this meeting room, alone, where they formed theories, and asked questions you wouldn’t ask to other members of the crew. This small command had few officers, and she was all that really mattered. The crew liked him, hated her; it worked perfectly. The AI Charles had reluctantly told her just after him, because he made it plain, “She’s with us or we die.” He said “us” the the AI without thinking, wondering why he almost called it a person. 

Sitting down, he found the strategy session slow.

“They are within hours distance of us, captain.”

“So we have a chance to cut off its head.”

“Are you saying—“

“It won’t stop them? Of course it won’t. But I want some damn revenge.”

“We have thirty on this ship—“

“And a few nuclear warheads, capable of breaking through and laying waste to a whole planet.”

He looked down, his hand clutched. A small bit of blood had trailed off on him, forming a stain on his shirt cuff; blood from the beast with no name.

“One cannot hope to see death for when he does …” She stopped, looking right into Eliot’s eyes. “This is a dangerous card game.”

“I think we pissed them off somehow; first I want to know why.”

“They are killers!” She said, surprising him. “They are trying to end us!” The hand pounded the table, she stood, following the small sun’s light over to the picture of Richard The Lionheart on the wall. “I am sorry.”

“I like emotions in a girl,” as he said this, he stood too and went over the picture. “Do you know he didn’t even speak their language? Richard the Lionheart was French; a French Knight who took Christianity back to Jerusalem.”

“For a short time.”

“Saladin played him.”

“Are we being played, captain? Who would leave such a message? Why would a wormhole lead us right back to their home? There are too many variables.”

“We blow it and ask questions later. True, it could be our last battle.”

“It’s our duty to survive,” she said, her hands shaking. She grabbed one and held it. “And to kill.” 

The hours spent flying toward the beast homeworld was eventful. A crewmen thought he saw a beast, causing an alarm through the ship. Then, when they went to the nuclear warheads, they found only one, not knowing where the other two were. When the ship’s engine was cut out, Captain Eliot had it. He threw one of the computer consoles against the wall and began swearing at Charles in multiple languages. 

He cooled. 

There was no monster, they found one warhead, Charles apologized for not being a perfect computer.

“Where the flying fuck is the other warhead? You just don’t lose shit like that.”

“Your vernacular changes with each point of anger,” Charles noted.

“Shut the—“

“Captain.”

He put his hand to his forehead, noting plenty of anger induced sweat had formed. “I am not going easy on this. We need every nuke. I want to blast them all to hell.”

“We are getting a message, sir.” He stopped. The command deck never looked so empty. They were all combing the entire ship looking for the nuke, keeping their eyes open in case one of the beasts had come.

“Tell me more.”

“It’s warhead codes.”

“How the hell can they just send to us whenever they want? There is nothing out here. There are no ships—“

“It’s from within the ship. I think you should see the message.”

“Just tell me.”

“I really think you should.”

“So do I,” Charles said.

They said the beasts came small; they didn’t come like the legions of Rome or the scourge of the Mongols. Instead they came as assassins, picking off people, using planned attacks to gut the heart of society.

There were stories, of before, of a forgotten tribe of mankind which had fought them. Some said there was a 13th tribe of Israel; others said the forgotten Dorians of Greece were the ones; whatever the story, it was just that—only stories. They told of a race of beings walking among man, an old story truly, but one with power. No one believed. Then they did. The first wave was only assassins, but the next waves came with living ships that fed off the dust of destruction, the breaking up of worlds. They transported doomsday to the Terran League, of a kind no poet could quite capture, no painter could quite frame. The fall of the galaxy was almost over.

“Our beast has a name! Ha!” He screamed into the com. Below the bridge, which was a ramshackle sleeping quarters for officers, shots were fired.

“Terrorists, Second Archon?”

“It has to be.”

“Who would want to serve something that kills them? I am going down there.”

“Captain!”

“Shut the hell up, Charles. If my men our dieing down there—“ The sound of the door opening cut him off, and the sound of  a beast charging in echoed across the entire bridge. “If it’s blood you want,” and as it shot from spot to spot, taking out computer and slashing, Eliot saw the Second Archon Kristie charge it, firing with a laser pistol. He tried to stand, tried to get up and fight, but the decades were wearing on him. It took her scream to make him rise, her blood to buy him precious seconds. “I don’t know, anymore.” And he fired a shot. It was too late. Her blood ran. He wept as he saw what it had made of her. He turned to the heavy breathing of death, the colt in his right hand, his other hand behind its back. A smile traced itself across his face. “I die, you go with me.”

But the beast was gone within a second. Two soldiers burst through the door, their pulse rifles aimed within. He pointed back. He went to Kristie. “Damnit!” He hit his com wiping Kristie’s blood off his hands.

“Can you send it now?”

“Yes, captain.”

“Shutup, Charles. Just do it.”

The nukes went out of the ship, straight on course for planet. I don’t believe, thought Eliot,  but I do. I make choices that kill.

“How much time, Charles?”

“Thirty seconds, captain.”

His com buzzed, and he found out the sole mad terrorist had been captured. He looked away when the nukes hit the planet. “Maybe you weren’t so safe after all,” he said to no one. The walk down to the brig was riddled with bodies, the wounded and the doctors trying to help.  He stopped for one, a man who had his head taken off, a bloodied soldier standing over him, staring, his eyes filled with tears. Stopping wasn’t an option.

The terrorist looked like something had been attached to his head. “I am the leader! Ha!”

“Is he mad?” Eliot asked his storm trooper chief.

“More than mad, sir. He knows vital information on our ship.”

“Destiny holds no place for a man named Eliot.” 

Eliot punched him square in the face. “Where is the nuke? Trust me, answering now will bring  you a lot less pain.”

“Oh, that easy. It’s in engineering. Just a decoy. Wanted you to know one thing, is all, I wanted you to know that man falls when night falls, from now on. Watch the numbers.”

“What do you mean by numbers?”

“Captain?” He looked back to his com for a second, and when he looked back, the shadow was the last thing he saw. Firing woke him up, shots all around him not ringing true, not hitting their mark. Screaming. His eyes opened into to see the slashed remains of five officers.

“Charles?” There was no answer. There was nothing. He stood. The boats of time had no place for him; he had done his one just deed. The choice was ahead, but the beast had made a choice too. It let him live. “The numbers … numbers.” He grabbed his head, feeling many small cuts on his face, the pain reminding him he still lived.

The small ship had lost it’s entire crew. There was one man on the ship who survived, who didn’t know why. Or maybe he did. Maybe I do, he thought, maybe I do.

He went past a series of bodies fitting of the nightmare found in “Paradise Lost” or maybe an end game quite like T.S. Eliot and his “Wasteland.” There were no kings and queens left. A fitting for a picture of hell. “What do we do when there is no hell or heaven,” he asked, pulling up his star charts. “You make one last choice.” He went to the Second Archon’s station, pulling up a picture of the planet. The blackness of it worked well with his ideas on the true hell. “You make one last choice,” he said, smiling. He hid his madness from others, but not from himself. “Taking you,” when the beast shadow fell over him, the button appeared inoperable. “Shit, Charles!” And he ducked, noting how this beast decided living was important too. “It knows,” he whispered, “You know and your afraid. Come on now—If you wanted me dead I would be. Something tells me—“

“Captain.”

“Charles, thank god.”

When the beast came at him, it did so slowly, seeming to have found the fear it created within man, spreading. They say when you’re around something evil long enough, you change. When you’re around something good long enough …

Eliot smashed the button  ten times. “Charles!”

“Captain.”

“Charles, do it! Send in the nukes. If we die.”

“Captain.”

“Charles? What the hell is wrong with you.”

“Captain.”

His eyes grimaced, the wound on his wrist caused the blood flow to come out. The beast made a noise. “Is that your laughter. You think this is funny! Well so do I?” He out the door, not to be followed. True, the bridge was lost, all the crew was dead, and a tragedy was in place. It didn’t matter to Captain Eliot; he knew one thing the beast didn’t. He kept hearing Charles over the intercom, speaking the same word, captain, every ten or twenty seconds. “I don’t know if you’re speech is impaired, but  I need a favor Charles.”

“Captain.”

“You have to send the nukes before it kills me, and I have to see.”

“Captain.”

“Damnit, Charles!”

He ran to engineering, down the short hallways, a few turns, toward engineering. A ship like The Lion Score didn’t have separate rooms for engineering and weapons; everything had been downsized in the new Terran League military.

He put in the launch codes, arming the nukes. The trajectory punched in, he heard the sound of an alarm coming on. Something bad happened, but it didn’t matter. He pushed the button, and as he did, the lights went off through the ship. “I guess so,” he said, not trying to make sense. He pulled out his colt, looking through the darkness. His eyes adapted, showing him more and more.

“I was a super soldier project,” he said, “and that’s where I learned to tie my shoe laces. I worked at a department store, and that’s where I learned to chew bubble gum.” A glimmer of light in the darkness; a shot in the dark; a screaming beast. “And in the mobile infantry, I learned to kick ass.”

Watching the destruction of a planet didn’t do it for Eliot. Everything disappeared. His ship was dead in the darkness. But that’s quite all right, he said, nodding. For I killed more of them than anyone has yet done. It’s the way. It’s the way. He closed his eyes for the briefest of moments, and when he opened them the lights were back on, and a small being was  on the deck—a hologram surrounded by numbers. It looked much like a human, except for the eyes and sharp teeth. It actually possessed quite human hair, even a small bald spot. It’s eyes were fixed on him. It showed a picture, of a planet of blue turning into a planet of black; it looked, to Eliot, much like the planet he had nuked. 

“A hominid.” It showed him numbers, and he realized this creature may have been something, once, long ago. The beings who created it perhaps. The beings who warned of it, pointing the right beings in the direction of this homeworld. They forgot the point of the galaxy. The true nightmare was not when you forgot about time and space. It’s when time and space closes its eyes on you, forgetting.