Beyond the End of the World, Lokians 1

Chapter 26

Chapter Twenty Six

The alien's interior was surprisingly barren. Apart from the rich, brown walls and bony framework, the ship looked like a ship. Swain and the Thewls had worked diligently to forge a familiar atmosphere. It lacked niceties, though. There were no crew quarters, no mess hall, no tech lab, or bridge.

The reasoning wasn't just a concern over time or resources, but the fact that there was no guarantee the ship was coming back. For all intents and purposes, O'Hara's men were on a suicide run. As they stood inside a partitioned storage room spanning the length of a football field, dual-system lockouts engaged in the event of a hull breach. Hisses followed by clanks rang ominously. The captain's mind played on the image of a coffin sealed shut.

"Hm," he groaned.

"What is it," Day asked.

"Nothing...it's just so...."

"Ascetic," Adams asked.

"Sure...anyway, Day, would you take the helm?"

"Copy." Once settled, she broke the silence. "I found data archives with some details about their world."

"Thank you, Day. Now, if you don't mind," O'Hara interjected.

She sighed at his dismissive attitude, but removed her headgear to listen. The captain stood before everyone with his hands at parade rest. His eyes hardened before he spoke.

"First and foremost, I'm honored to be accompanied by this brave crew. You've all gone above and beyond what's asked of you. The truth is....

"Well...the truth is that we're going into subspace to travel to the Lokian home world. Our mission is to find the queen and destroy her. You know we started this mission on an alien craft without comprehending the horrors that lied in wait, and oddly enough, we're ending the mission in a very similar fashion.

"Sadly, there are friends who should be here, but they've given everything for the cause. Martinez, Zakowski, Imes, Becker, and several Thewls...countless lives gone in the blink of an eye; for them, we must put this mission—the fate of our world—before ourselves, and know, not fear, that we may fall as well, but not until we've succeeded. Failure now is bigger than the end of the world...it's beyond the end of the world...it's the end of all intelligent life in this galaxy...."

Furrowed brows, stoic faces, and deep breaths resonated. Adams and Franklin traded glances. DeReaux smiled. O'Hara smiled, too. He took one good, hard look at the crew.

"Phoenix Crew, can I get a hoorah?" the captain screamed.

The crew resounded with a booming hoorah in return.

"I said, what's that? Can I get a hoorah?" Again, the crew fired back, hoorah! O'Hara's smiled melted away then. "Alright, as far as the plan goes," he started, but gave one of Lay's patented, long inhalations. "We kept the original Lokian programming embedded in our own runtimes in order to hide that we're using a rogue ship. Hopefully, this lets us blend in.

"Remember, we are one ship amidst billions of enemies. Any foul up, and we're dead. Day, bring up the screen."

On the bridge's wall, a screen glowed. They turned to find it displaying a 3-D layout of the Lokian home world as provided by data within local servers.

"Lokians don't dock the way we do. They organize like pieces of a program. Data is shared via their satellite uplink," Day explained.

The image spun, revealing an odd mass. The labeling indicated where vessels docked and registered. The captain weighed the possibilities as he observed the image. Something clicked in his brain; they were not only a hive, they were a digital hive—a physical operating system.