Mimic: The Space Shifter Chronicles Boxed Set

1

Digging Up the Future

“Higgens! Clean up on the base deck!”

I jolted forward, nearly shocked out of my skin by the ship’s intercom. A sizzle from below my hands pulled me the other way, and I realized my little gizmo-project had set itself alight with my gap in attention.

“Dammit.” I groaned, grabbing my well-used extinguisher and blasting the creation until it stopped popping and cracking.

“Higgens! Do you read?”

“Yeah! I read! What’s the mess?” I asked.

“Why do you need to know? Just get down there!”

I gave myself a few seconds while I mentally retorted with the sarcastic comeback I wanted to say, before saying what I knew I should say. “I need to know what equipment to bring, unless you want me to haul down about a ton of different bits n’ bobs. Is it a fuel spill? Post-fire recovery? Crew got sick? Injured? Bio-hazard…”

“Alright! Alright! There was a slight rupture in the base of one of the drills and a mess of grit and debris got in.”

“Righto. Space contamination and debris clearing it is.”

“Whatever. Just get down there. We’re supposed to start drilling again in a couple of hours and I’m not missing out on any bonuses because of this.”

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

If this were any other job, I would not tolerate that kind of condescension. But this was the opportunity of a lifetime, and I wasn’t about to risk being kicked off at the next station because I ticked off one of the engineers that ran this place. The pay was triple anything I’d ever been paid before and I got to travel to remote parts of the galaxy where I would never have a chance to go otherwise. As an added bonus, the crew didn’t seem to care if I picked up interesting things that came through the junk stream, which I was turning into my own little creations that I could sell at our next stop.

I hummed to myself as I gathered up my things and headed down. The best thing about my new gig was that we were working on a massive, government-contracted mining vessel with a skeleton crew. I could go days without seeing another human being and it did wonders for the anxiety that always pooled in my stomach when I was forced into professional, polite conversations.

It took about ten minutes to get down into the maintenance underbelly that housed the base of the drills, and the subsequent tubes where all their churned-up debris was funneled through to the sorter. Sure enough, one of the tubes had ruptured, spraying a wall with grit, goop, and who knew what else.

One of the sensors on my cart beeped yellow so I glanced at the display.

“Space radiation levels slightly elevated,” I said to myself. “Might as well play it safe.”

Digging through my supplies, I found my anti-rad field and placed it onto my chest. Once it adhered to my jumpsuit, it was just a press of the button and then I was safe from any of those cancerous sorts of mutations that liked to happen when space messed with one’s insides.

“Let’s get this party started then,” I mused, turning on my music in the earpiece implanted just under my ear. Standard fare for all government and government-contracted employees.

A lot of people didn’t like cleaning, or repairing, but I did. It was like one of my virtual games, but with real world consequences. I set about patching the tube first. I could flush it once it was repaired and clean the rest of the room while that was going on.

It was a fairly long, drawn-out process, and by the time it was all finished, I was covered in dirt and sweat. I took a last look around the metal-covered room, which now had a great sparkle to it if I did say so myself, and gave a nod of satisfaction before trundling back to my room.

“Tube repaired and flushed, and the cleanup is finished. I’m on my way to dump the debris and muck now.”

“Took you long enough. You’d think you wouldn’t mind putting a rush on it considering how much we’re paying you.”

“Apologies, sir. I just like to be thorough and leave it better than when I arrived.”

“Yeah, whatever. Just be quicker on the next one.”

Maybe if you took care of your ship more, there wouldn’t be so many ‘next ones.’

I shook that thought out of my head. I didn’t have time to be negative. It was a waste of both energy and brainpower. I turned my music up and continued to the disposal room, daydreaming of my next little project.

It was easy to slip into a daydream, and I was only half paying attention as I pushed my cart through the ship. Making sure to put on my thick protective gloves, I reached into the waste chamber and started picking out bits to toss in.

A sheet of buckled metal, some jelly-like liquid, it was all very ho-hum until I felt something pinch my arm.

“Ow!” I jerked and looked into my cart, expecting to see a sharp piece of shrapnel or bit of warped equipment. Instead, I saw something hanging onto my wrist.

I screamed, reaching an octave I didn’t know I was capable of. I reared back, whipping my hand about like a complete maniac. There might have been sensible words coming out of my mouth, but I had no idea what they were. I just knew I needed whatever the heck was touching me to let go!

And boy, did it let go. Like a little, shiny, black missile, the thing went sailing into the far wall where it smacked into the aged, metal surface then slid down to the chemical-disposal shelf.

I finally stopped screaming and somehow had the wherewithal to grab a piece of junk that could work as a weapon. I brought it up, totally ready to go toe-to-toe with the strange thing that attacked me.

Except…it wasn’t attacking me. If anything, it was cowering, hurt and shivering on the shelf. Despite everything my brain was warning me, I slowly lowered the pipe in my hand. “I’m sorry, you scared me. You alright there, little guy?”

The thing stopped shaking and turned to look at me. Or at least that was what I assumed it was doing. It didn’t have any eyes that I could discern, and yet I had the distinct impression that it was indeed seeing me.

It was a strange critter, all angles and harsh, onyx spikes. It didn’t seem to have legs so much as it would grow random bits to move itself about, then they would shrink back into itself.

I lowered my arms completely and took a cautious step toward it. “Hey, I’m all about nonviolence, so if you’re not going to eat my brains, I don’t see why I can’t help you out.”

The little thing let out a trill and it was possibly the most adorable sound I had ever heard. I instantly thought of a basket full of puppies. Its color rolled from black to grey to a dark green, and it cautiously scuttled forward to the edge of the shelf.

It was the moment of truth. I reached out, trying to quell the anxiety pooling in my stomach, and held out my hand right in front of the little alien. It stood there for several long, painful seconds before taking a cautious step forward onto my hand. When I continued to cooperate, it gingerly climbed closer and closer, until it was perched on my shoulder.

“Well,” I murmured to myself, my head trying to wrap about everything that had just happened. “I guess I always wanted a pet.”

2

Shifting Paradigm

I stared at the little creature intently, noting its movements and habits. As soon as I had arrived in my room, it had scurried off my shoulder and under my standard-issue cot. And then into my shoes. And then out of my shoes and into my own personal scrap bin. I had never thought that I would have to alien-proof my quarters, but I was beginning to think it might be necessary.

“Higgens!” Dang it, I had still forgotten to turn my comm down. It was obnoxiously loud in my tiny space and my new guest let out a squeal of panic. “Gonzales has some expired blaster cores that need to be disposed of. We just found the case that was lost on the load up. Some idiot labeled it as stims! Can you believe that?”

I quickly lowered the volume and replied, “Have them meet me at the lift on their floor. I’ll make sure to have the proper containment unit.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll deliver the message. Be there in ten.”

At first, it had been strange to me that I only corresponded with the head of crew, Francis Giomatti. Now, I was grateful for it. The thought of having all twenty members of the crew bothering me with every little thing that went wrong—and probably wasn’t even in my job description—made my stomach twist.

“Alright, so, I gotta go, but I’ll be right back in less than half an ho—” I trailed off as I realized I couldn’t see my new alien friend anywhere. “Um, hello? Little fella?” I walked toward my worktable, looking everywhere for the obsidian guy.

Worry started to prick at me but that quickly disappeared when I realized something had changed on my desk.

“Since when do I have two water bottles?” I murmured to myself, reaching for one.

Only that same water bottle exploded into a dark goop in my hand, then it solidified into the alien.

I screamed again—I really needed to stop doing that before I blew a vocal cord—but this time, I managed not to throw my friend into a wall. “D-d-did you just…?”

The thing wiggled, sticking two of its spikes up like little waving arms and turning a gradient of grey and deep blue.

“Y-you can shapeshift?” I said breathlessly, my mind thoroughly rocked. “You’re like uh…uh, mimic!”

It trilled, then crawled up my hand once more to sit on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, lad, but you’ve got to stay here.”

I went to pick him up, but he scurried into my open collar and curled up along the neckline of my work tank underneath. “You know what, that’ll work. If you can hear me, just stay in there.”

It trilled again and I grabbed my power source containment case then headed out. I had to admit, my heart had never pounded so hard on my way to a simple energy-disposal pickup, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want my crewmates to know that I had picked up a bit of a straggler. I knew the regulations well enough, and that would mean the spacing of an unknown danger. I didn’t want my new sidekick to be hurtled out into the void of space when we were just getting to know each other.

There was also that thing about it being a species I had never heard of and just learning that it could shapeshift. Which I was pretty sure was impossible.

The lift doors opened and my heart spiked when I saw Gonzales standing there, half a dozen blaster coils in her hands. She was an impossibly tall woman and had these dark eyes that just seemed to look through everything. From what little I knew, she was a mix of Mexican and Polynesian, which apparently explained her impressive height of six-foot-six. Granted, I knew almost nothing about Earth culture, considering I had been born on a colony and lived on ships and stations my entire life.

“Oh, hello there!” she said, professionally pleasant.

“Hi! I hear you have some cores for me?”

“Indeed, I do!” she said, beaming and handing them over. I went about putting them into the case, only to feel my little hitchhiker pull against my shirt. Quickly, I pressed it flat with my hand and let out a pathetic cough to cover the noise.

“You okay there?”

“Fine! Everything is fine!” I chirped, hastily finishing up with the cores and holding the case flat to my chest. “I’ll make sure these are taken care of!”

With that, I turned right on my heel and rushed back into the elevator. My mimic friend was going crazy, tickling at my collar and trying to crawl directly out of the front of my shirt.

“Relax, buddy. We just gotta get to my room.”

It didn’t listen. Granted, it probably didn’t understand me. It wasn’t like everyone in space automatically spoke English. By the time I reached my room, I was a bit of a mess, and I set the container down and finally freed the mimic from within my shirt.

“Geez, little dude, what is your problem?”

It practically erupted from me and ran over to the case, which it jumped up and down on several times.

“What? You want to see the cores? I guess if you’re that enthusiastic about it.” Leave it to me to travel all of space to find some sort of strange, shapeshifting alien who was some sort of blaster core aficionado. With a shrug, I opened up the slotted, anti-rad case.

Everything seemed to happen at once. The mimic jumped down it, spreading itself flat in a matter of seconds. It glowed vibrantly for a moment, before suddenly expanding into a bubbling, boiling heap.

Once more I found myself leaping back in horror. Had I just killed my friend? What if it was the last of its species? Was I a murderer?!

I didn’t get a direct answer, but the bubbling stopped, and my friend reassembled itself, chirping quite happily.

….and about a foot bigger than it was before.

“Oh my…” I murmured, once again finding myself in utter shock by this strange creature. “You just…” I took a breath. “You just ate my blaster cores!”

It chirped again, grey and light pink rippling through its body. It had just gone from palm-sized to small dog in seconds, but it seemed nonplussed by the transition.

“Well, I guess that’s one way to dispose of them safely.”

I sat down on my cot, the whole day catching up to me. In just a few hours I had made a new friend that just so happened to be an unidentified species, found out it could shapeshift, and devoured things that had nuclear energy in them which would then result in a rapid growth spurt.

The mimic… Actually, that wasn’t a half-bad name for it. Mimic.

Anyway, Mimic didn’t seem to pick up on my anxiety and nestled up to my side, trilling with a spacy, fragmented sound that reminded me so much of a cat’s purr. And I couldn’t help but think that if our first day was this hectic, day two was going to be one heck of a wringer.

3

All You Can Eat Buffet

I woke up expecting to have company in my bed in the form of a little shapeshifting alien, but instead came to with an odd gap between my arms. I sat up like a shot, my eyes scanning my room for my new friend.

When I didn’t see him anywhere, I started to panic. That lasted for about a minute before I reminded myself that Mimic could shapeshift and looking for it in its black and spiky form was probably a waste of time.

“Hello?” I called instead.

There was a chirp beside my bed and a pillow that had dropped to the floor surged and buckled, warping inward on itself until my friend was sitting there.

“Hiding as a pillow, were you?” I asked matter-of-factly. As much as I was tempted to baby-talk the cute little thing, how could I be certain that it wasn’t intelligent? Sure, it didn’t look like it, or act like it, but I preferred not to assume. Plus, if anyone overheard me, I could always pretend that I was talking to myself. Harder to do if I was using all that goo-goo-gaa-gaa talk my mother favored when speaking to anyone—or anything—under two feet tall.

It trilled at me once more before scuttling to my junk bin. In less than a blink, it jumped up onto my desk and then dove straight in.

“Hey!” I yelped, stumbling out of bed and rushing to the bin. “I don’t have any energy cores in there, but I would really appreciate it if you didn’t jostle things around. I spent a lot of time collecting those pieces.”

Two black spikes poked up, waiting there for a moment as if it was debating, before it clambered out. I could have been mistaken, but it seemed like it had grown a slight bit overnight. It was still small dog-sized, but a very fluffy small dog.

It chirped at me again as it stepped onto my desk. I assumed it was looking up at me, although that was hard to tell since it had no face. “What’s up friend? Do you need something?”

It didn’t react, because of course it didn’t understand me, but I had been hoping that it might.

“Alright, well, I have to make my rounds to the recyclers and make sure everything’s in tip-top shape. You stay here, okay?”

Again, it didn’t move, so I shrugged and started to gather up my things. Like usual, I assembled my cart, but added my welder to my belt, along with several other miscellaneous things. After all, one never could be too prepared, right?

When I was finally ready, I headed to my door, only to have Mimic follow me.

“No,” I said, holding up my hand. “You have to stay here.” It took a few steps back then settled down into what I assumed was a sitting position. “Alright, very good. I’ll be back in a jiffy, I promise.”

I stepped out and quickly closed the door in front of me, heaving a sigh of relief that it hadn’t tried to squirrel out.

I turned to go, pushing my cart in front of me, only to hear some sort of scuffling behind me. Looking back to my door, I saw a thin, burnt piece of metal sliding out from the minute gap at the bottom. I watched, a little amazed and a little horrified, as the long strip worked itself through until it was all the way out in the hall. From there, it popped right back into my shapeshifting friend.

“You can’t be out here!” I hissed, looking around to make sure we weren’t in view of one of the ship’s many monitors. Thankfully, as a mining ship, there weren’t a lot of security precautions along the crew quarters, and even less so on my lower floor.

It made a sound at me then clambered into my cart before shifting into my compressor rifle.

I debated for the briefest of seconds about fighting with it, but I was quickly beginning to realize that restricting where a shapeshifter could and could not go was a lost cause. “Alright then. I guess we’re making the rounds together.”

An agreeable hiccup came from my bag so I shrugged and hit the start button for the hover mechanism. Without any further ado, we were on our way.

My first task was checking the environment filters. I’d never had a problem with them so far, knock on organic matter, and I was hoping to keep it that way.

I was on edge the entire time, sure that the miners were going to come flocking down in droves to arrest me for contaminating the ship with an unapproved lifeform. I knew that I really should report it. After all, a creature with the ability to change its shape on a whim would be a huge deal to the scientific community.

Humans had been expanding their colonies for over a century, and while we had found signs of life in the form of long extinct bacteria, all in all, we were still very much alone in the universe, as far as we knew.

I also supposed I should be more freaked out about the revelation that there was other life out there, but I had always assumed there would be. I just never thought I would be the one to discover it.

“Higgens!” I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“Yes?” I squeaked, hitting the button on my comm-watch.

“Ciangi just reported that there’s a weak spot on the venting in the engine output system. Said she’d like you to reinforce and patch it, just to be safe.”

“Sure, I’ll get right on that.” I clicked off then looked to the camouflaged alien on my cart. “We’re going up to where there’s going to be more crew, so promise me you’ll behave?”

It said nothing, which I supposed was a good thing, and I headed for the elevator.

Normally, there wouldn’t be many people skulking around the engine output system, but Ciangi and Bahn, both galactic engine experts, liked to do an inspection every single morning. That meant they were always finding things to improve, but I would gladly take some busywork over critical engine failure any day.

They were an interesting pair. From what I had gathered, they became friends in college where they began working on a new propulsion system for space travel. Apparently, whatever they did was some impressive stuff, because they were snatched up, as a pair, by the largest research conglomerate in existence.

They had worked together ever since, sometimes mockingly being dubbed the ‘coin twins.’ I hadn’t understood that particular moniker at first, but it had been Ciangi herself that explained it. She was short and blond, with curls as tight as a screw that made a halo about her head, and stacked every way from Sunday. Meanwhile, Bahn was golden-brown with pin-straight, black hair that he kept pulled back into a ponytail, an almost skeletal build, and a hyper-critical gaze that could melt the toughest of alloys. Two different sides of the same coin. I still didn’t quite understand, but at least I knew.

I never would have put that together myself, but I guessed I was just terrible at observing things about people. Their faces all tended to blend together, so I mostly went by the sound of their voice. Those were as varied as the stars in the sky, and I always appreciated that.

We entered the doors quietly, my every nerve on edge, and Ciangi was standing just inside.

“Hey there, Higgens. You made it up here fast.”

“Oh you know, just trying to be efficient.”

“You alright there? You’re sweating.”

Crap, I was terrible at masking how I felt. I was… I was… What was this called? Some sort of ancient Earth term, right? Ah, yes. Telegraphing. “Uh, I was doing some early morning cardio. You know, keepin’ in shape and all that.”

She shrugged. “I’ve never been much for working out. Bahn is over at the vent in question, taking some readings. Just under the coolant generators.”

“Gotcha.” I gave her a nod and kept on pushing my cart. Normally, I liked hanging around Bahn and Ciangi; they treated me much nicer than most people. Usually, staff liked to act like I was either not there at all or some sort of inconvenience. But normally I wasn’t smuggling a new alien life around a government-contracted mining vessel.

I found Bahn right where Ciangi said he would be—they always had the uncanny ability to do that—and gave a little wave.

“Hey, I hear you’ve got something that needs some reinforcin’?”

The engineer looked at me before he pointed upward. Always a man of few words, that Bahn.

“Righto. I’ll hop on that.”

Of course, I didn’t literally hop on it, but I did put a good bit of hustle into my step. The longer I was down here, the greater the chance that something could go wrong.

I would say it took me about ten minutes to do as I was asked, using both my welder and a little insta-hard sealant that I always kept stocked on my belt. The stuff was fantastic. It could even repair a cracked hull for a short time, given a large enough supply.

I returned to my cart, whistling a bit as I slung my bag into it, only to cut off the tune abruptly.

Where had the other bag—aka Mimic—gone?

“Uh, hey, Bahn, you got anything else you need done?”

“No. That should be good.”

“Um, I’m just gonna take a look around.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“No such thing as being too careful! I’ll be back in a jiffy!” I rushed away, my heart going a mile a minute. Why hadn’t I put a leash on Mimic, or something? Not that a leash would work against a shapeshifter, but I supposed it was the thought that counts.

“Mimic,” I hissed, ducking under some tubing. “Mimic!”

I heard a chittering and looked up to see a flash of black spike retreating over one of the refinery tanks. “Dammit, how did you get all the way up there?”

I looked around to see how I would shimmy up. I spotted a ladder leading up to the mid-level catwalks and rushed toward it, climbing as quickly as I could in my jumpsuit. Once I was up on the landing, I could see Mimic making a beeline for the radiation dampener.

“Oh no…” If anything happened to the radiation dampener, it could cause a radiation leak, and a radiation leak could cause a whole lot of radiation sickness. “That’s bad.”

I ran down the catwalk, hoping I wasn’t making too much noise. I caught up with it and jumped over to the gangway that lead to the radiation dampener. There was a walkway to take, but it was far too slow.

I stuck the landing then looked around, but the little critter was fast. I couldn’t spot it anywhere! Panic was setting in, making my forehead break out in a cold sweat. Had I just doomed the entire ship by releasing some sort of malevolent alien creature in the bowels of our ship? How could I be so stupid?

I heard a crumpling sound and dashed toward it, praying as I ran. I arrived at the edge of the dampener just in time to see a long, thin piece of cording force its way into one of the welding divots.

“No!” I groaned, rushing forward and trying to catch the tail-end. But it was too late, the last of it slipped in and I could only watch as Mimic popped into its natural form and trundled toward the radiation core.

My stomach dropped out of my feet and I pressed myself to the dampener. I felt like I was watching my death happen in slow motion… Probably because I was watching my death happen in slow motion. How was this gonna go? Was it going to blow up the entire ship in revenge for destroying its home? Squeeze its way through the other side of the radiation core and into the actual lightyear drive, sending us hurtling out of control through the subspace streams? The possibilities were practically countless, each one more gruesome than the last.

Mimic reached the center of the blinding, shielded mass and my eyes flicked to the readout panel. But instead of seeing an energy spike, or some other form of alert, I saw the radiation output go down.

I blinked, rubbed my eyes, then looked again. Sure enough, the meter was going lower and lower and lower. Which was great. Ships had long since moved away from their nuclear-powered engines, moving onto anti-matter propulsion. However, the process most often used generated massive amounts of radiation. Naturally, something needed to be done about all that hazardous material being generated, hence the radiation core that gathered the harmful rays and stored them for use as discharges and weapon blasts. Overloading the core was always an issue, leading to emergency dumping procedures, so the quickly dropping reading was a good thing.

Granted, we didn’t want it to get too low. Having no nuclear energy meant no backup weapons system and wasn’t exactly the best setup for traveling through uncharted space. I watched as the reading dove and dove until finally it was about to drop to dangerous levels.

“Hey, Mimic,” I called, knocking in the dampener. “You need to stop now.” I pressed my face against the barrier, trying to see what was happening within the semi-translucent material. I couldn’t be sure, but I was fairly certain it stopped.

It made a happy chittering sound and began walking back toward me. As it approached, I realized that my little companion was not so little anymore. The closer it got, the bigger and bigger it grew, until it was now in the large dog/tiny pony territory.

“Oh geez, Mimic.” I groaned. “Why do I get the feeling that this is a very bad thing?”

“What’s going on here?”

I whipped around, letting out another startled screech, to see Ciangi standing at the foot of the ladder, eyeing me curiously. “W-what do you m-mean?” I sputtered.

“I got an alert of low radiation. You notice anything?”

I looked behind me and instead of seeing my ever-growing friend, there wasn’t anything at all. “Uh…no. I spied the reading on my walk around and thought it was super odd, but I don’t really know what that means.”

“Normally it means a radiation leak.” She held up some sort of device that made several beeping sounds before a steady ring. “But I’m not detecting anything. Huh.” She hit a button on her own comm. “Bahn, have you been testing your radiation scrubber?”

“No. I’m still in prototype phase.”

“Huh.” The blond woman pulled at one of her curls, her eyes narrowing as she regarded the entire setup. “Do you mind clearing out? This is important and I want to run some tests.”

“Uh, y-yeah. Sure. I will clear out and go about my maintenance duties, like a good worker is supposed to. That’s me.”

“…okay?”

I rushed back to my cart, feeling like the world was crashing around me. Somehow, someway, I had to find a way to find a shapeshifting alien who was loose on the ship without alerting anyone else in the entire crew.

This day was not going how I had envisioned it at all.

4

Friends in Unusual Places

I spent hours scouring the ship for any sign of Mimic. The hardest part was pretending that I was cleaning the entire time so I wouldn’t arouse suspicion. I was sure at any moment the alarms would sound and the ship would be on high alert.

When I finally returned to my room, close to ten hours later, I was exhausted both physically and emotionally. I was sure that I had doomed the entire crew to their untimely deaths, and I was composing my confession over and over in my head. I could only hope that they would have mercy on me because I was just a stupid janitor when I was court-martialed. Could a civilian be court-martialed? I wasn’t really sure.

I slid my ID to open my door, only to have something massive and black rush at me. Once more I yelped and jumped backward before my brain was able to recognize my missing companion.

“Mimic!” I cried, recovering enough to shove it back into my room and slam the door behind us. “Do you know how long I’ve been searching for you?”

It trilled and shook what I thought might be its backside at me. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was wagging its tail at me. Except for that part where it didn’t have a tail. It trilled at me again then jumped up and down several times before nudging at my thighs. It was insane how much bigger it was now that it had eaten again, which made me wonder what else it would need to chow down on and exactly how big it was going to get.

I collapsed on my bed, letting out a long sigh. What was I going to do?

Mimic seemed to pick up on my frustration and jumped onto my bed next to me. It weighed quite a bit more than last time, causing me to bounce up several inches. I flailed a bit, and I felt a spike slice across my hand.

“Ow!” I hissed, pulling my hand to me. I saw there was a slight, almost papercut-like slice on the back of my hand. “Whoops,” I remarked, wiping it on my jumpsuit.

Mimic let out a panicked warble and froze, multiple spikes shooting out from its surface.

“Whoa, calm down there, fella,” I urged before laughing slightly. “I’m fine. I promise.” For being a faceless, featureless, multi-angled creature, it sure was cute.

I settled myself and Mimic scooted onto my lap, almost purring. The sound relaxed me and I soon found my eyelids growing heavy. It was so funny that after all the stress throughout the day, and utter certainty that I had just ruined my life, it melted away in the presence of my new friend. I guess that was what I had been missing for so long.

Logically, I knew it was a bit strange for me to be so attached to something I had only known for about two days, but I couldn’t help it. I felt like the alien was depending on me, and it was really nice to matter.

As if reading my mind, it let out a warbling coo and retracted all of its spiky limbs. I smiled, and rested my face against its hard, cool skin. Curled together, we drifted off to sleep.

I slept better than I had in ages, and when I finally drifted to consciousness, I felt great. I was still curled on my side, and I felt the warmth of Mimic pressed against me.

I stretched, then curled my arms back around the alien. Except…it was much softer and squishier than Mimic was supposed to be.

“Did you shift into a pillow again?” I mumbled, rubbing the crust from my eyes before opening them.

It took me a minute for my vision to clear as I sat up, and I yawned egregiously loud. I heard a trill and went to pat the angled, multi-faceted back of my friend.

But instead of solid surface, I felt soft, smooth skin.

“What the hell?!”

I finally came to fully and looked down beside me to see there wasn’t an inky shapeshifter. Instead there was a fully grown, fully nude woman.

I screamed again. I probably should have stopped doing that. I sat there, frozen for a moment, before hurriedly slapping a hand over my eyes. “Sorry!”

I heard another trill and felt something move toward me. Peeking between my fingers, I saw the woman had sat up as well, and her face was just an inch or so away from mine.

I snapped my fingers back in place. Sure, I enjoyed watching naked people on the net every now and then, but this seemed very intrusive.

I felt very warm, smooth hands gently grab my wrists and pull them away. I dropped them and came face to face with the unknown woman.

She was small, but there was a decided squareness to her features. Her hair was white and short, while her eyes were depthless black. Her face drew even closer, and when she was less than a breath away, she let out a low trill.

“Mimic?” I gasped, completely shocked.

She made the same noise again and I felt a strange mix of excitement and horror. “You shifted into a human? You can do that?”

She didn’t answer, instead rolling off the bed and standing. I slammed my hands over my eyes again, only to hear her rummage around. I heard things clattering to the floor, and then fabric rustling and then a zipper being closed. I risked another look to see that she had dressed herself in one of my jumpsuits. It was much too big on her, but I couldn’t care less.

“How did you…” I murmured. “You…you knew to get dressed.”

Such a simple gesture, and yet it meant so much. Yes, Mimic was a shapeshifter with some sort of consciousness, but I had assumed it was animalistic in nature. Like a dog, or horse. However, the fact that she knew that she needed to wear clothing as I did, and had watched me enough to know where I kept my clothes and how to put them on, meant that she most likely was a fully realized, self-aware entity.

“You’re sentient!” I blurted, the words barely getting out of my mouth.

She tilted her head, her mouth moving as if she was speaking, but no sound came out. I supposed I couldn’t be surprised about that, considering it was ridiculous to expect her to know English.

“This is crazy! Do you know what this means?” More mouth moving, but no sound. “I mean, you probably do. Man, I wish we could talk to each other. Are you a genius? Are you smart enough to make me seem like an ant? Are you like a child? A very primitive form? Who knows! Not me, that’s for sure.”

I felt my excitement bubbling up, tripling down on itself so hard that I had to start pacing. I was prattling on, not even sure if I was speaking words anymore, but when I turned, Mimic was no longer standing in the center of my room.

Instead, she was sitting at my desk, messing about with my datalog and my net interface. “Whoa, what are you doing there?” I took a step toward her carefully. I did need to acknowledge the fact that I could potentially be enabling a bloodthirsty creature that needed knowledge to wipe out my own kind. But…that just didn’t seem like something Mimic would do. She could have killed me a dozen times over now. Heck, she probably could have blown up the whole ship. But she hadn’t, and that meant I needed to trust her.

“You want to learn something?” I asked.

She stared at me blankly and it was quite unnerving. Slowly, I did an exaggerated blink, and she copied me.

“Good, remember to do that every so often,” I added, sidling up next to her. Bending down, I poked at the net portal and called up the video conglomerate that I favored. “How about a linguistics tutorial?”

I handed my datalog to her and she clutched it greedily, pulling it to her face. Her dark eyes gobbled up what the screen was saying and I had the distinct feeling that I was watching something brilliant happen.

Now that she was distracted and I had calmed down, I had a chance to look at her. Really look at her. And I found I was utterly enraptured.

Although her face was inherently angular, leaning toward unnatural, there was a symmetrical kind of beauty to it. Her eyes darted all around my datalog as she observed, and her full lips mouthed gibberish.

I was watching, lost in thought, when suddenly the same face I was admiring grew slack, then began to shift and mold itself. I leaned back in simultaneous horror and fascination as the girl disappeared and an exact copy of the video teacher was sitting in my room.

“Dude,” I breathed. What else could I say?

That seemed to catch her attention, and she set the datalog down. “D…ud,” she repeated.

My eyes went wide. “You catch on fast. You’ve been in this form for less than a few hours.”

“Catch,” she parroted again before picking up the datalog and returning to the video.

“That’s great! At this rate, you’re gonna pick up Common Northern Hemisphere in a day or two!”

“Higgens!”

“Crap!” I yelped, jumping up. Mimic didn’t budge, however, completely enraptured with the video series. “Yes?” I asked, hitting the comm after I had a moment to breathe.

“We’re about to hit a new comet stream we need to sort. I want you to double-check the drill bits to make sure everything’s ready to go.”

“Yessir. I’ll get on that in a jiffy.”

“Whatever. Just have it done before eleven clicks.”

“Right.”

I looked up from my comm to see Mimic was still staring at her screen. “I have to go now, but I’ll be back in a bit. You just stay here, okay?”

She didn’t say anything, so I figured that was my cue to go. Assembling my cart again, I went out into the hall then shut the door behind me. I waited a few moments, just to see if she was going to follow me, but nothing happened.

Well, that had worked out much better than I ever could have hoped.

Cautiously optimistic, I made my way to the lift and back to the place where this had all started. I couldn’t help but wonder if we were about to repeat history and I was going to meet a new best friend.

I smiled to myself, before a depressing sort of realization befell me. Mimic had only gotten into the ship because we had destroyed her home. Literally drilled it into tiny pieces and then sorted it into different channels to be stored, used or discarded. Had any of her friends survived? Had they been flung into space to drift forever? Shredded into microscopic and very dead pieces? The thought was terrifying and made me look at the situation in a whole new light.

Was my shapeshifting friend a refugee from a massacre my people had caused? Had we committed genocide on her people? These were questions that I didn’t like thinking about, but I had to.

Smile now fully shifted to a frown, I reached my destination and got busy running all the tests I needed to. Structural analysis, double-checking the previous patch I had made the first time the tube blew, space radiation and electromagnetic readings, the works really.

It took me a solid hour to finish, and when I finally did, I was excited to go back to my room and see what exactly Mimic had learned. Hitting my comm, I steadied my voice. “Finished here. Everything is good to go.”

“Great. We’re due to start mining tomorrow.”

“Cool.” I went to click off before thinking better of it. “Uh, hey. Have we scanned these asteroids for any signs of life?”

“Signs of life? Are you kidding me?”

“Y-yeah. What if there’s some sort of harmful bacteria or mutated fungus we’re bringing in? Doesn’t it seem like we should be carefully testing each of these celestial bodies before crushing them up and reducing them to their raw materials?”

“That just might be the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard, Higgens, and I’ve been a government-contracted employee for ten years. From the moment we mine a single thing, it never integrates with the interior of our ship. We suck it up into those hermetically sealed tubes, then send it to the sorter, and so on and so on. All of it is entirely contained.”

“Except for when there’s accidents.” I countered. “Like the last time I was here.”

“Yeah, occasionally things go south. But you’re fine, right? If there ever is an emergency like that—which there never will be because we’re in space—we’ll deal with it.” A frustrated sound boomed through the technology. “Gods, Higgens, I don’t have time for this. Waste any more time and I’ll dock it out of your pay.”

The comm clicked off and I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. What a twat.

Abruptly, I was very done with humans in general. Packing up my cart, I headed back to my room. I was so fired up over how my boss had spoken to me that I almost forgot that I had left a sentient alien that could take on any form in my bedroom.

That certainly put some pep in my step, and I rushed the remaining way to my room.

I slid my card in the door and punched in my code. It seemed to take ages for the pneumatic doors to slide open and I quickly shimmied inside.

I was greeted by an empty room and terror seized me. Then, as the doors slid closed, something emerged from my scrap-box. I almost screamed again but managed to catch myself just as the formless blob solidified into Mimic’s human form.

“Oh my God,” I gasped, clutching at my chest. “You gotta be more careful or I’m going to die of an apoplexy.”

“Die, verb form of the noun Death, meaning the action or act of dying or being killed; the end of the life of a person or organism,” she said, voice strangely musical with intonations in all the wrong areas. “Apoplexy: unconsciousness or incapacity resulting from a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke.”

My jaw would have dropped if I wasn’t so thoroughly amused by the incredibly serious expression on her face as she rattled off definitions. “Yes, those are all correct. Did you learn those on the net today?”

“Learn, to gain or acquire knowledge of or skill in by study, experience or being taught.”

“Yup, that’s right too. But you know there’s more to a conversation than definitions.”

“Definition: a statement of the exact meaning of a word, es—”

“Right. I got it. We’ll work on that.”

I walked over to my bed and managed to plop down, gesturing for her to sit in the chair. She looked from me, to the chair, then back before tilting her head. Right, she probably wouldn’t understand almost any physical prompts or slang.

All my doubts about her potentially not being sentient were pretty much out the window. In just a few hours, she had taught herself how to read and obviously had been very busy digesting the entire contents of some dictionary or another. Actually, in our current situation, I was definitely the dumbass. I couldn’t help but wonder if the little being had been trying to talk to me since I had found it, or if shapeshifting a human’s brain was what gave it its intellect. Perhaps that was a little self-centered to think, but this was the first alien known to man. I had no idea what made her tick, tock or shift.

“So, let’s start with the basics. What is your name?”

“Name?” she repeated. “A word or set of words by which—”

“No,” I said quickly, cutting her off. “No more of those straight definitions. If I wanted to read a dictionary, I would. I mean…” I tried to think of the best way to phrase it. “Who are you?”

For the first time, her face took on an expression that wasn’t a mirror of my own. “Who…am I?”

“Yes! Do you have a name? What do your friends or family call you?”

“Friends…” she repeated slowly. I waited patiently. The poor alien had obviously spent so much of the afternoon submerging herself in learning that I didn’t mind being put on pause while she searched for an answer. “Family…” More pause, and her eyes slid over the room as if they were searching for something to help her communicate what she wanted to say. “…are dead.”

That wasn’t where I was hoping the conversation was going.

“This…beast killed them.”

Now it was my turn to parrot things back. “Beast? Y-you mean the ship?”

“Ship: a vessel larger than a boat for transporting people or goods by sea. This is…a vessel? Not a beast that has eaten both you and I?”

Oh no. I could understand exactly how she had come to that conclusion, but I was about to give her a rude awakening. “No. It’s a mechanical ship, and we travel through space and mine valuable minerals from asteroids, comets, and small moons.”

“Mine: used to refer to a thing or things belonging to or associated with the speaker.”

“No, not that one.”

“Mine: an excavation in the earth for extracting coal and other minerals.” Her eyes went wide as she finished her statement. “But I saw its teeth!”

“No, you saw the drill bit as it churned up the asteroid that you were living on.”

Silence again, and she almost seemed frozen in place while her brain churned. “You killed my family?”

Crap. Here was the moment I was dreading. “I didn’t personally, no. And the crew didn’t mean to! There’s not supposed to be life in space, so they didn’t think they were hurting anyone. Or anything.”

“S-space?”

“Yeah, you know that thing outside of your asteroid?”

“As…teroid?”

I was surprised that she didn’t go into another long string of definitions. “Yeah, your home. That’s what we call it.”

“I… I see.” She went quiet again, but I didn’t rush the conversation. I was guessing her day had just gone from full of excitement and potential to decidedly awful. “So I am…alone?”

“Well, I’m here for you.”

“But my home…it is no more?”

“…no,” I finished lamely.

“So, all this work I have done to find a form and speak to you, learning your language and speech, just to find out I will never be able to return home again?”

Geez, she was learning fast. And this was not something they taught me how to deal with in custodial and maintenance training. “I’m so, so sorry. But there has to be other asteroids with aliens like you, right? I can help you find them!”

A soft, barely-there smile turned up the corner of her mouth. Had she learned that online or was that an instinctive reaction? Either way, it made me feel better to see a glimmer of hope in her countenance. “You would…help me?”

“Of course! It’s the least I could do.”

“But why? Your ship killed us all.”

“Oh, whoa, nonono. This isn’t my ship,” I objected hastily. “I’m just a glorified janitor with a handful of repair responsibilities. Mostly, I handle a lot of disposal and cleanup.”

“Janitor: a person employed as a caretaker of a building; a custodian. I do not understand. What is an employee?”

“Someone who works for another person for money.”

“What is money?”

Goodness, was this what it was like being a new parent? I was already feeling exhausted and we’d been talking for less than ten minutes. “In my culture, people don’t exchange items for other items anymore. Instead, we work for promissory notes that we can then trade in for the things we need.”

“That…doesn’t make sense.”

“I suppose to you, it wouldn’t. Asteroid life is probably a lot different from Earth’s.”

“Earth? Is that your home?”

“Yes.”

“And it is mined as well for the resources?”

“Yeah, actually. Only the richest of the rich live there now on carefully maintained oases. The rest of us live on colonies of varying levels of squalor or space-bound vessels doing work for the government.”

“I see,” she murmured slowly. “I believe I read about this. It is called distribution of wealth, yes?”

“Yeah, actually! Very good.”

“I couldn’t comprehend it as I was reading. It seemed so strange that some of you would be allowed to have whatever they needed to survive while others could not have enough. But now that I know your people do not even care for its own, it is easy to understand how they could so readily destroy others.”

I shifted uncomfortably. “I’d like to contest that opinion, but given our history, I can’t really. But I am serious that I want to help. I feel absolutely terrible for what happened to you, and it’s my responsibility to get you back to your people safely.”

“How can we do that?”

“I, uh… I’m not exactly sure. I’ll have to ask around without arousing suspicion.”

“And you can do that?”

I shrugged, giving her my best ‘I-can-do-it’ grin that I could muster. “I guess we won’t know until I try.”

“I see. Thank you…” She paused again, her face going blank. “You asked me a question when you first entered the room. I did not understand it, but now I do, and I will ask it of you. What are you called?”

“Oh! You can call me Higgens! And what about you? Do you have a name?” That was a stupid question! This girl was a sentient being who had a family and home, and definite concept of what life and death was. Of course she had a name.

“Yes,” she answered with a nod. “It is—” A sound came out of her mouth that was nowhere near human. It was somewhere between one of her adorable trills that she had made when I first found her, a bleat, and a high-pitched static that made me want to kick myself in the teeth if I were that flexible.

“I uh, I don’t think I can pronounce that.”

She nodded. “Yes, human noise-fronds are much different from my own species. But you have been using a specific chirp at me since we met. I suppose that will do as well as any other.”

“What, you mean Mimic?”

“Mimic: A person skilled in imitating the voice, mannerism or movements of others in an entertaining way.” Now her face split into a beautiful, genuine grin. “You find me entertaining?”

“Y-yeah, of course. You’re a fun little bean.”

“Bean? That is a—”

“Nickname!” I quickly interrupted. “And that’s exactly what you need. Your name is Mimic, but how about I call you…Mimi. It’s a bit more personal.”

“Myself-myself. Mimi. Yes, it is always good for a shapeshifter to remind themselves that no matter their form, they are always themselves. Thank you, Higgens, you are truly a good…” She paused, no doubt searching for the correct word again. “…alien friend.”

“We’re called humans, actually.”

“Ah, yes. I remember that. Human.” She offered her hand and another beaming smile. “I saw this on the net of which you speak. This is how two allies agree upon a course of action, correct?”

“Correct,” I answered with a smile. “Here’s to getting you home.”

5

Scan This

I groaned as my alarm went off. Despite having a full night’s sleep, my dreams had been a wild ride, leaving me feeling exhausted before the day even started. Sitting up, I rubbed my eyes to see a large, black puddle on my floor.

“Mimi?” I questioned.

The onyx pool began to bubble, then solidified until her female form was laying on the ground, looking perfectly groomed, rested, and ready to go.

“Greetings, Higgens. Are you ready to begin the operation to return me to my home?”

“Yes, indeed,” I said, forcing myself to my feet. It also probably didn’t help that I had slept in my uniform. Perhaps a hot shower would do me some good.

But that could wait until after I made all of this right. We had hurt someone, whether intentionally or not, and I needed to make up for it.

“Alright, can you tell me what today’s part of the plan is?” I quizzed her.

“Yes. I will stay here and learn more of your culture while you go and question members of the crew on how one might be able to find my kin.”

“Very good, and what are we not going to do?”

Her eyes flicked to me from where she had seated herself at my desk. “I am unsure, but I believe this is an example of something called ‘patronizing.’ I am not an idiot, Higgens. I know that revealing myself to the species who destroyed my home without a second thought and has no prior track record with dealing with alien life—as well as a terrible history of how they treat their own people—is a terrible idea.”

“Oh. Right, sorry. I just worry, ya know. Especially with the whole dampening chamber thing you pulled.”

“I was starving, and knew I needed enough energy to be able to expand my form into one similar to your species. Communication was worth the risk.”

“Of course. And obviously it worked out for you. I’m going to go ahead and step out before I put my foot any further in my mouth.”

“Is that something humans can do?” Her hands went to her hips. “These seem much too solidly connected for that.”

“It’s an expression. Why don’t you look up what those are? Alright, awesome, I’ll see you later now. Bye!”

I rushed out, cheeks flushing a bit pink. Gosh, I was awkward with conversation. It figured that Mimi was going to learn her first impressions of human interaction from someone who barely understood it. I hope I didn’t socially cripple her for life.

Then again, if I was returning her to her own people, that wouldn’t matter much. It would have been nice to daydream about how whatever I taught her would affect her species’ view of us, but I didn’t have the time. I was on a mission, after all.

I could hear the telltale hum of the drills through the wall. It was the sound of active mining, which meant that the coin twins weren’t going to be in the engine bay. Instead, they would most likely be at the bridge or the engineering center where they would monitor the ship’s readings.

I headed to the lift, rehearsing lines in my head. I had to play this smooth. Anything too weird and I might arouse suspicion.

Too bad acting subtly was not one of my strong suits.

I chewed on my lip as I left the elevator and walked out into the engineering center. I had to hope they would be there because there was no chance I was going up onto the bridge. The only times I went there were once a month or so when some sort of mess needed to be cleaned.

“Oh, Higgens, what brings you here?” Gonzales said, standing up from the console they had been leaning on.

“Uh, nothing,” I blurted nervously. “I just wanted to talk. I get lonely from time to time, ya know.”

“Really, you’re capable of human emotion?” she joked…maybe. “What a surprise.”

“Be nice to him.” I looked over to see Ciangi come around from a machine, her datalog in hand as she recorded the dozens of readings around her. “He’s the one that makes sure we’re not submerged in three tons of organic waste.”

“Come on, I know the cook has been charged with a hundred counts of attempted poisoning, but I didn’t think it was that bad.”

“You’re hilarious,” the blond retorted. “I am always amazed at how often you manage to squeeze jokes about fecal matter into grown up conversation.”

The darker-skinned woman shrugged. “It’s a talent, I guess.”

“That is not the word I would use to describe it, but alright.” Her gaze moved to me with an expression that was part amused and part condescending. “Can I help you, Higgens?”

“Uh yeah. I just, uh, had a bit of a question that I wanted to pick your brains with.”

“Sounds better than staring at these readings. You know, sometimes I swear I can hear my brain rotting from disuse.”

I smiled. “Perhaps all the toilet humor is its way of cleansing itself.”

Gonzales laughed and it was a long, happy sound. “Maybe! All that shit’s gotta get out somehow. So anyways, what’s your question?”

“Well, I couldn’t help but have a thought after one of the tubes blew last time. I was running standard cleaning procedure with my organic scrubber and micro-organism cleanser and I began to wonder why. There’s not supposed to be anything alive in space, right? The radiation itself would kill pretty much anything that could have possibly existed on it.”

“Yes, that’s the prevailing theory.”

“Yeah, but what if there was something alive on there, something strong enough to survive space radiation, and it managed to get onto our ship in another accident?” I licked my lips nervously. “Shouldn’t we be testing everything we drill for any signs of life before we go tearing it up again?”

“Didn’t I hear you arguing with Giomatti over this?”

“Uh…maybe?”

“Really? What’s with the sudden obsession with the possibilities of life in the cold, dark, unforgiving void of space?”

I laughed nervously, rubbing the back of my head. “I guess one too many horror-flicks on the net. But still, it’s not a bad idea, right? We’re exploring sectors where no one has ever been! We crush rocks and moons that have never come in contact with the human race before! What if we’re destroying a microscopic species that could end up being a cure for some insane disease, or the answer to genetically modifying our crops in our colonies to survive in harsher climates? The payout would have to be ridiculous. I’m just trying to think of our future!”

“What, do you mean you don’t want to be a janitorial engineer forever?”

I gave Gonzales a look. “Look, all I want is you science-y folks to tell me if it’s a worthwhile idea or not.”

Ciangi was the one who answered first. “Technically, it is a valid point. Although we are completely separated from the materials we bring on, we do run the risk that someway, somehow, something living could get into our stores and possibly have devastating effects were there to be some sort of leak to occur—such as the one you cleaned up. But the chances of that are astronomical and testing each and every ounce of material that we bring on would be incredibly expensive.”

“Really? We couldn’t make some sort of scanner or something and periodically send it through the tubes?”

Both of the engineer’s eyes widened. “Actually…” the blond murmured. “That’s not an entirely terrible idea. Impossible to implement at this point, but a patent of that…”

“Don’t even think about it.”

This time, I managed not to jump or squeak as Bahn slid out from one of the consoles, ionic welder in hand. You think I would have realized that where one coin twin was, the other was sure to follow.

…or be hiding there the entire time for a lovely little scare. Perfect.

“What, I wasn’t thinking anything!” Ciangi exclaimed innocently.

“You’re telling me you weren’t just contemplating buying off Higgens for a small sum then developing his idea yourself to massive amounts of profit?”

The smaller woman blushed, her round cheeks puffing out. “Okay, maybe. But can you blame me?” Her bright eyes looked back at me a bit guiltily. “I would have given you, like, a hundred thousand credits. I’m not a complete jerk.”

“I-it’s fine,” I stammered. “So there’s basically nothing to be done about it?”

“Not as of right now.”

“Alright, well, here’s to hoping that we don’t get overrun by space zombies.”

“You read way too many retro-horror comics, you know that?”

“In your opinion,” I countered somewhat sourly. Now that there was no way to scan the rocks coming in through the tubes, I wasn’t quite sure what step to take next.

“Hey, coin twins!” a voice boomed over their comms loud enough for me to hear it. “I just got a reading for a massive deposit of Eurodyne on a nearby asteroid cluster! Pull back the drills and get ready to relocate a half-click over.”

The comm clicked off and the room shared a collective eye-roll. “Does he have a volume that isn’t full blast and grating?” Gonzales grumbled.

But I was caught up in what he had said rather than how he had said it. “How did he know that?”

Ciangi raised her eyebrow. “Do you not know how our actual scanning system works?”

“We have a scanning system?” I asked sheepishly.

“Yeah, how else do you think we decide which systems to mine?”

“Um…whatever’s in our path?”

Gonzales laughed outright and Bahn cleared his throat, finally standing from where he had been lying under the console. “No. We do have a scanner in the bridge. Headquarters sends us a message of whatever ore or material they want us to focus on next, then Giomatti places a sample of whatever they want in our scanner. From there, it detects any large deposits of said whatever and we go there.”

“Oh…” I murmured, the wheels in my head slowly turning. “So, whatever you put in there, it’ll tell you if there’s anything like it nearby?”

“Yes, that about sums it up.”

“So, if you put like…human flesh into it, it would tell you if there were any other humans around?”

“Haha, no. I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that. But it would tell you where deposits were of all the different materials that are in human tissue. So iron, calcium, carbon, depending on what kind of sample you’re using. If you wanted to specifically find only humans, I suppose you could narrow the scanner to search for exact percentages of certain elements in relation to each other, but that would be incredibly tedious to plot out all those algorithms. That would take weeks to figure out.”

“Really? Why’s that? It seems like the kind of thing that you could plug and chug with some buttons.”

Now it was Ciangi who gave a short laugh. “Not even close. You would have to not only create an algorithm for every single element in the sample, but an algorithm for every element in relation to every other element.”

“That’s…confusing.”

“You’re not kidding.”

I set my mouth in a firm line. It might be impossible, but I was pretty sure I knew what we had to do to get Mimi back to her people. “Since we’re getting ready to go to a new area, I’m going to go do a checklist run to make sure everything’s still alright. I’ll catch y’all later.”

“Later, Higgens.” Gonzales said with a little salute. “This was fun. You should come hang with us normal folk every now and then.”

“Haha, yeah, totally,” I agreed nervously before backing through the door and walking quickly to the elevator. As the doors slid closed, I tried to order my thoughts so I could communicate to Mimi effectively.

The lift doors opened and I quickly shuffled out. As fast as I could, I opened my door, slid in, then watched it shut behind me.

“I need files of your staff.”

I yelped, breaking my streak of not sounding like a complete and total coward. I just hated loud noises, was that so wrong?! “What?”

“Your staff records,” Mimi continued. She wasn’t wearing the jumpsuit I had given her anymore, instead was dressed head to toe in an outfit entirely compiled of black fabric. It was definitely some sort of covert ops get up, but I couldn’t help but wonder if she was able to shift clothing, or that was just an extension of her skin. Either way, it was mildly unsettling. “I need them.”

“Why?”

“If I want to take anyone’s form, I need to know everything I can about them. Medical records, physiological records, personality profiles.” She gestured to the datalog in her lap. “I have been reading since you left and have learned much.”

“Um…what exactly were you reading?”

“Everything,” she replied flatly. “I’ve never had such a wealth of knowledge at my fingertips. Anything you could possibly want to know is contained within the thing you call the net.”

“Yeah, I guess it’s easy to take it for granted. I’ll, uh, see if I can get you those files, but I’ll be honest that I have absolutely no idea how.”

“They are not publicly available?”

“Far from it.” I gave a little bit of a shrug, feeling just a wee bit useless. “That’s actually some pretty confidential stuff. You usually have to have a much higher rank than I do for that kind of clearance.”

She nodded. “Understood. I remember seeing something about being able to infiltrate networks that do not belong to you. Perhaps I shall research that.”

“Yeah, perhaps.”

“But you have returned from your mission, I assume that you have an update?”

“Oh! Right. Apparently, we can’t scan what’s coming in to see if it’s got lifeforms like you. But what we can do is load a sample of you into the scanners we do have and it’ll show us any similar groupings within a few clicks.”

“That is wonderful!” she exclaimed, clapping gleefully. Or at least I assumed she was clapping. In reality, she was just slapping her thighs in rapid succession. It was somewhat tantalizing to watch, but also felt slightly pervy. I quickly looked to the ceiling as another question came to mind.

“So, uh, do you have a reason why you picked that form?”

“Yes. After I fed from what I learned was your radiation dampener, I took the liberty of traveling through much of the venting of your ship. I ended up in what I believe is your ‘med bay’ where your medic was working on something. I watched her for several hours to try to understand her mannerisms and physique. I was hopelessly confused until she cut herself on something she was working on. As she left her station to take care of it, I used the opportunity to absorb her biological matter.”

“Absorb…her…matter?”

She nodded dutifully. “This ability you call ‘shifting’ is a natural defense mechanism for my people against the often-changing radiation levels and environmental conditions of space. Taking on your form was proving to be endlessly complicated, so I needed a bit of a… How do you say it? Boost, I suppose.”

“I see. I guess that makes sense. I remember reading once that humans were very squishy machines being propelled through the world by thousands of small explosions.”

“That seems like a fairly apt assessment.” She ran a hand through her hair, and although the action didn’t seem natural, it was still quite endearing.

It was strange, the dichotomy of Mimi’s existence before me. Clearly, she was massively intelligent, almost impossibly so, but there were so many things she didn’t understand at all. Like war, or human greed, or what a high-five was. She had lost all of her family in the gnashing teeth of our drills, but she hadn’t spared them much more than a frown. Did her people even cry? Did they ‘die’ as we did? It was all so complicated. I didn’t know what was a matter of course for her and what was completely alien.

“So, about that whole scanner thing,” I said, getting back on track. “It turns out we’re going to need a sample of your true form, and a whole lot of math.”

“Math, how so?”

“Well, in order to find more of you and not just random deposits of whatever it is you’re made of, we need to figure out the percentages of all the elements in you and write a whole bunch of algorithms for it.”

“I see,” she murmured. “Actually, I do not see at all. I will have to do quite a bit of research to comprehend what you mean.”

“Right, well, we can’t research on an empty stomach. Why don’t I go grab us some food?”

“I do not have a stomach,” She replied. “But if you need to sustain yourself, please do so. You are my only friend now, Higgens, and I wish you to be healthy.”

“Thanks, that, uh, that means a lot.”

“It is but the truth. I know you could have destroyed me when we first met. I was wounded and starving. And yet you didn’t. I will forever be grateful for that.”

“It’s nothing, really. I hope the same would be done for me.”

The conversation fell into a natural lull and I stood to go grab some more rations. We certainly had a lot to do, but for some reason, I felt confident. For the first time in my life, I was doing something truly important.

I just didn’t want to mess it up.

6

Pillow Talk

Several days passed and they were surreal ones at that. I spent almost all of my time in my room with Mimi, who spent almost every moment studiously researching things across the net.

She read at a speed that I wouldn’t have believed was possible if I hadn’t seen it myself. She would pull up an article then scroll down to the bottom before I could even blink, then move right onto the next subject. And I might have thought she wasn’t actually retaining any of the information, but she would shoot new theorems and equations at me periodically as she learned.

However, the one thing I’d noticed by the second day was that she had issues understanding almost anything about culture, money or material possessions. She was constantly asking me to clarify little things here and there, and honestly, it made me feel a bit better.

Was that shallow of me? To need to be wanted by the poor, helpless alien that I was supposed to be saving? Did I have a hero complex and just never realized it? It was hard to say. I just knew that when I looked at her furrowed brow as she absorbed whatever it was she needed to know, I wanted her to be happy. She had earned at least that much.

“What is lovemaking?”

I nearly choked on my water, startled by the sudden transition. The last thing I knew, she was studying physics. How had this even come up?

Well, I respected her enough to give her an answer, even if it made me a bit uncomfortable. “Uh, geez. You see, when two people of consenting ages like each other very, very much, they sometimes engage in various activities meant to give each other pleasure.”

“Pleasure? Wait, yes. I read about this. Certain actions release dopamine or other mood-boosting drugs into your brain which results in a slight euphoria. That sounds nice.”

“It, uh, can be. Yeah.”

“Then we should do that sometime.”

More water came spewing out of my nose. I really should have just set my cup down. “Uh, I, uh… I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

She turned to me, finally setting the datalog down for the first time in over a day. “Why is that?”

“Well, for a lot of people, lovemaking is supposed to be for someone special.”

“But you are special to me. You are my only friend.”

“Hah, uh, you have a point there.” I scrambled to think of something. It would be so easy to take advantage of her naiveté, but I couldn’t think of anything more unappetizing. “But you also have to be careful because sometimes it can make a baby.” I didn’t know if our systems were compatible enough to do that, but it certainly wasn’t worth the risk.

“Wait. I thought the word for your reproductive process was ‘sex’.”

“Uh, yeah. Well, it is. Sex and lovemaking are the same thing.”

Her eyebrows did that furrowing thing they did when she was confused. “Your means of creating progeny is the same as your way of bonding with friends?”

“Yes.”

“That does not seem correct.”

I shrugged. “It is what it is.”

“No wonder you humans are so volatile. I can’t imagine the kind of chemical soup caused by affection being mixed with the primitive need to survive that is in all of us.”

“You’re saying your people don’t make love or reproduce?”

“Of course we do, but they’re completely separate acts. Giving birth, as you call it, requires finding and digesting massive amounts of energy. Making love is two of us devolving into our most basic form then merging together into one entity for a short while. Some say it is the most…intimate of connection possible.”

“Some say? So you haven’t done it yourself?”

“No. And have you?”

“Yes,” I answered after a brief pause. I figured I might as well be honest. “A while ago, when I was younger. She was my first girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend. This is a word for partner?”

“Yes.”

“I see. And you cared for this woman very much?”

“Yes. I did.”

“And what happened?”

Geez, I did not predict that this conversation was going to be headed down bitter nostalgia lane. “Oh you know, it was pretty stereotypical. She was ambitious and went to a great college to study marine extinction, and I went to a vocational colony school for facilities work. We tried to make it work, but eventually we just had to…let go.”

“And this is something humans do? Let go of each other over great distances?”

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Honestly, the physical distance doesn’t matter nearly as much as the distance between futures. She outgrew me, plain and simple. Her star was shining brightly, and my star… Well, it was burnt out before I was born.”

She was frowning now. “I see.” Without another word, she turned back to the desk, datalog in hand. I didn’t know what she meant by that, but I didn’t want to ask. In fact, I needed a bit of time to myself to deal with the unpleasant feelings I thought I had long since locked down.

“Hey, I’ll be back in a bit. You be good, alright?”

“Absolutely. I haven’t yet learned how to be bad.”

I smiled wanly then let myself out.

The ship was oddly quiet as I spent a couple of hours just walking around. Although the peace was nice, it didn’t set well with me. I couldn’t help but feel like something was off.

After the unsettling sensation didn’t abate, I shrugged and headed back to my room. I was sure that Mimi would have come up with some new brilliant plan to use the scanner and was looking forward to it—even if I would only understand about half the words she said. In less than a week, her grasp on the English language far exceeded mine.

But, as I climbed up a ladder onto my floor, I noticed my door was already wide open.

“No!” I cried, rushing forward.

Heart in my throat, I saw that my room had been ransacked, my scrap bin dumped over, and everything upturned. Now that I was closer, I could see that blaster fire marked the wall.

No! No, no, no! How had they found her?!

I bolted to the elevator, sliding my card in the reader, but it flashed red.

“Higgens!”

My comm crackled to life and for the first time, I was absolutely livid.

“What?!” I snapped.

“Oh, so the gutter-worm grew a spine finally.” Frances’s voice was even more condescending than usual, and it made we want to dropkick him and all his descendants. “You’ve been acting so dodgy lately that I thought a visit down to your quarters was necessary. Imagine how perplexed we were to find you in your room when your comm and card-reader were clearly two floors lower?”

“What did you do to her?”

“Oh, a her, is it?” He laughed and the sound set my teeth on edge. “I have to admit, Higgens, I didn’t know you had it in you. Who’da thought that out of all the people in the universe, it was you who would make first contact. What a disappointment, right?”

I slammed my fist against the elevator, taking my rage out on the door that was barring me from helping my friend.

“Let her go! We destroyed her home. She just wants to get back to her people.”

“I don’t care if she wants to be a freaking unicorn. Do you have any idea the type of credits we will get? What kind of advancement we’ll have as a species with this kind of morphing technology? I could retire tomorrow!”

“Don’t do this! She’s a sentient being, not some shiny rock you can buy and sell like a diamond.”

“Please. She makes diamonds look like chump change. Don’t worry, Higgens. I’m not a cruel man. You’re not in danger, you’re just confined to your floor. I’ll make sure you get a bit of a finder’s fee. I’m just generous like that.”

My comm clicked off and I let out the longest stream of curses I had ever uttered. How could this have happened? I had been so careful!

I sank to the ground, head in my hands. This was the one thing I had ever had to do that mattered, and I had messed it up. I was the exact failure I had always known I was. That everyone always said I was.

I was nothing.

“No,” I growled.

This wasn’t going to be it. I wasn’t going to just leave Mimi in the clutches of a jerk who didn’t even see her as a living being. I was going to rescue her and get her off this ship if it was the last thing I did.

Newly strengthened, I ran back to my room. I gathered all the supplies I needed and strapped them to my body. Once I was sure I had everything, I went back to the same ladder I had shimmied up just moments before.

If I remembered correctly, there was a vent that had been welded shut just after I came on board. With the right solvent, I could get right through the blocked-off entrance and make my way to the upper levels.

But first, I had to make sure they couldn’t find me. For the first time since I had arrived, I set my card and my comm on my desk.

Frances wanted to dance? Well, I could dance. And I always stepped on toes when I did.

7

Imitation is the Finest Form of Flattery

I thought I had known fear when those whirling teeth had bitten into my home. But that terror was nothing compared to the body-paralyzing fear I felt now.

They had me in some sort of hermetically-sealed room, without a crack or single pore I could shift and force myself through. They were going to take me to their home, just as I had feared ever since I learned the truth of my situation.

I had read much in my studies, and too often the cruelty of man was proven again and again. They killed each other with abandon, from hacking off limbs, to burning at the stake, to suffocation with noxious gases. If they had such disregard for each other, how could they ever care for one such as I?

Life was so different in this form. So, complicated and layered. Things that had never mattered before now were incredibly important. I had urges and instincts I never understood. Perhaps that was the price one paid for morphing into such a different, sentient lifeform.

I could hear my friend yelling at the man who shot me through his wrist speaker. He was angry. I had never heard him speak so lividly. Was…was he that way for me?

No.

He couldn’t be.

We had just met. I was a strange alien who didn’t understand anything about his culture. Who asked him questions about love that made him uncomfortable, and spent hours sitting silently while I tried to find some way home.

“Cheer up there, buttercup. You’re going to be an absolute rockstar back home.”

“Buttercup,” I repeated. It soothed me to rattle off the words I knew. They were completely alien to me, and yet I knew what they were. It was always a strange sensation, and one I never grew tired of. “A herbaceous plant with bright yellow, cup-shaped flowers, common in grassland and as a garde—”

The older man slammed his hand against the barrier. “Enough of that! You’re there to look cute, not rattle off like a computer.” He smiled at me but the expression was so unlike Higgens. How was that possible? Was that a human thing? “Come on now, why don’t you do your thing.”

“Do…my thing?”

“Yeah. Make your form go all watery then be someone.” His eyes widened and he looked quite excited. “Why not take a crack as me?”

“You…you want me to take your form?”

“Yeah. That’d be grand.”

“I need your DNA.”

“What?”

“Humans are incredibly complex creatures. I cannot just shift into you on sight. I either need to read your full medical workup, or have a touch of DNA.”

“You think I am some sort of idiot?” He snarled, face going red. I hadn’t known that humans could change color to convey emotion. How…unattractive.

“I do not know enough about you to come to any sort of conclusion about your intelligence.”

He snarled and said several words that I did not understand the meaning of. Maybe something about fecal matter and structures used to hold back water?

However, I was distracted in the middle of his rant by one of the panels on the wall wiggling slightly. My mind automatically went through all the possible options it could be and whether it would be dangerous to me or not.

Then, the small square of metal came loose, only to be caught just before it hit the floor by Higgens!

He had come for me!

His kind eyes moved from me to the man who was trapping me. He needed to close his distance.

Right! A distraction.

“Wait!” I blurted, holding both hands up in what I hoped was a normal-human gesture. “Let me show you what forms I can take!”

That seemed to cool the man and his pallor began to return to normal. “By all means, entertain me.”

I closed my eyes to concentrate. I had no idea how humans managed to focus with their color-intensive vision. Instead of finding things by heat emissions or vibration, they seemed highly dependent on their strange, mirrored view of the world.

It took several moments, but I felt my body relax, melting into a listless sort of slumber as I melted down to the floor. I was sure it looked horrifying to them, but it was completely painless. Even a bit of a relief to not have to hold a form so alien to my own.

But I couldn’t stay that way for long. I called up the image of Higgens in my head. The strong set of his jaw. The kind way his hazel eyes would regard me. The way his thin, long fingers would work at one task or another.

I felt the change sweep over me and then it was done. When I opened my eyes again, I was looking at my captor on a much more eye-to-eye level.

“I’ll be. That’s uncanny, I tell you. Who else can you…”

He never finished that sentence, because Higgens came up behind him, bringing a metal rod down on the older man’s head. I let out a shocked shout, but my rescuer pressed his fingers to his lip. What was that supposed to mean?

Oh! Probably to be quiet.

I complied and Higgens crossed over to some sort of panel. He pressed a few buttons and the shielding that was holding me in a small square pen dropped.

Not for the first time since I arrived, I was flooded with emotions. These systems that were still so new to me overwhelmed the logic of my mind, and the next thing I knew, I was rushing forward to throw my arms around Higgens.

Something was leaking from my eyes, but I didn’t care.

He had come for me.

My friend had come for me.

What more could I ask?

8

Unlikely Allies

I stood there, frozen to the spot as Mimi pressed my own body to me. It would have been a whole lot more awkward if I couldn’t feel the gratitude rolling off my friend in waves.

“Where’d you learn to do this?” I asked, returning her hug with all the comfort I had within me.

“On the net.” Slowly, she shifted back into the form I knew. We shared a tender smile and I gently raised a hand to wipe her tears away.

She leaned her face into my palm, and I had never been so tempted to kiss someone in my entire life.

And then the alarms went off.

“What is that?” she cried, clapping her hands over her ears.

“Crap! They must have been linked to Giomatti’s vital signs. Come on, we gotta go!”

I grabbed her wrist and took off, sprinting out of the door before it was sealed in lockdown. If the ship was remotely set up according to protocol, I had three minutes to get us off the ship and to safety.

“Where are we going?” I heard Mimi cry as I dragged her along. I was pretty sure that she had never run in this form, so I was sure she wasn’t having the best time, but I couldn’t let her slow down.

“There are escape shuttles for the crew in case of emergency. If I can get one, we can get out of here before he wakes up or anyone else tries to take you back.”

“What of the others who were with him? They also had the blasters, as I believe you call him.”

“That was probably his security, Masis and Umbusala. We definitely do not want to run into them.”

“But if these alarms are going off, aren’t the escape routes the first thing they will check?”

“Let’s hope not.”

We sprinted all out, my heart beating out of my chest all the way down the hall. We turned this way, then that, bursting through doors. Not for the first time, I found myself grateful we ran on a skeleton crew.

And then it was there. The door leading to the hangar bay. Of course, it was on the same level of the bridge, considering essential personnel were that much less expendable than us peons.

“There it is! That’s the door!”

I could see that the panel was still lit up blue, which meant it was still accessible. We had seconds, at most.

Rushing through it, I slammed in the code. As soon as the slightest crack opened, I forced my way through, yanking Mimi with me.

Only to come face to face with Gonzales’s gun.

“So, this is why you were asking all those questions,” she murmured, eyeing the shifter behind me.

“You have to understand.” I said, completely breathless as I held up my hands in a symbol of surrender. “She just wants to go home. She doesn’t deserve to be locked up in some lab on Earth, light years away from anyone like her.”

The woman stood there, impassive. “And you really think you can do this on your own?”

“He is not alone!” Mimi said resolutely. “He has me.”

“And you got yourself captured.” With a roll of her eyes, the engineer dropped her gun and offered her hand. “Come on. You’re going to need me if you want to get one of these hunk of junks outta here.”

“Wait, you’re helping me?”

“Of course. You found alien life. If you think I’m going to be on the wrong side of history for that, you’re dead wrong. Now come on, we’ve been prepping for this ever since your girlie got captured a couple of hours ago.”

“We?” I echoed.

She didn’t answer and I followed her up the gangway of a ship. It was all a little surreal as we rushed toward the cockpit, the door closing behind us.

We were getting away!

We were escaping!

As elated as I was, I stopped short when I realized we were not alone in the cockpit. Ciangi and Bahn were already strapped into the copilot and navigator seats.

“You guys are coming too?” I asked, voice cracking.

“Yeah,” Ciangi said. “I gotta pick your head more about that scanner idea. Can’t do that if you’re dead.”

“And if you think I’m passing up on the opportunity to study a willing subject that also just so happens to be a shapeshifter,” Bahn added, “you’re more insane than the Earth government is going to try to make you seem in their smear campaign.”

“Enough explanations,” Gonzales said, jumping into the pilot’s seat. “Everyone strap in, I’m about to punch us through the hangar hatch.”

I paused. “Um, aren’t you supposed to open it?”

“Yeah, normally. But normally we aren’t on lockdown.”

“Right. Well, go ahead then.”

“Thanks for the permission. I don’t know what I would have done without it. Hold on, everyone. Either we’re gonna break through or blow up in a fiery ball of death.”

Ciangi let out a light laugh. “Sounds like college all over again.”

I clenched the seat as the engines of the escape vessel kicked into gear, but I felt small, cool fingers brush at my wrist. Looking down, I realized that Mimi was trying to hold my hand.

I let go of the armrest of my chair and wrapped my fingers through hers. Our gazes locked, and I watched her face as we hurtled forward.

Time seemed to suspend itself for a moment, her hair floating around her head lazily, her eyes regarding me with an admiration that no one had ever had for me before. In that moment, I knew I cared for her in a way that I had never quite felt for anyone else in my short life.

“Brace yourself for impact!”

Alarms were going off everywhere and the ship’s systems were delivering repeat warnings that a crash was imminent. The cacophony was intense, but nothing could disrupt the connection between us.

And then we hit the hangar wall.

My whole body jolted and it felt like my skeleton left my body. My teeth rattled, my head ached, and my stomach did about a million jerks that made me want to lose my lunch. Sparks flew. The other engineers screamed. The ship’s computer was going crazy.

Then, just as suddenly as the wild ride had happened, we broke through. The dark, endless void of space stretched out beyond our forward-facing cockpit window.

No one said anything for a moment, then a loud whoop came from Gonzales. “That’s right! We made it, baby!”

Buckles came undone, and the next thing I knew, Mimi was in my lap, arms wrapped around me as she hugged me with all her might. Which was nothing to sneeze at, I might add.

“Don’t worry, Mimi. We’re going to get you home,” I whispered to her.

She pulled away from me. “It will be a long journey. And dangerous. Your people will come after you, you know.”

“Then let them.” I said, feeling more confidence than I had in my entire life. “With all of us here, there’s no way they can stop us.”

And I meant it.

This was just the beginning of the journey, but I was in it for the long haul.

Like they used to say on Earth, for better or for worse, I was sticking by her side.

Mimic and the Journey Home

I

Through the Wormhole

1

Space Age Slip N’ Slide

I leaned back in my seat, my heart beating to its own personal fiesta while the rest of my body was on cruise control. The whole situation was surreal. In a very short couple of hours, I had gone from a janitor and maintenance worker on a government-contracted mining vessel in deep space to a fugitive on the run with an undiscovered life form that had the ability to shapeshift.

“Ay, you guys remembering to breathe back there?”

My gaze turned to Gonzales, who had turned the pilot seat around after putting us into autopilot. Or at least I hoped she put us on autopilot. Otherwise, our escape would be a short one.

“I do not necessarily need to breathe,” Mimic said flatly.

“I’m fine,” I answered just as shortly. “Just catching up with everything that’s happened.”

“Right? It’s been a bit of a rush, hasn’t it?” Gonzales said.

Alerts suddenly sounded and I looked to the flashing lights. “What does all that mean?”

“Nothing good,” Gonzales answered tensely, whipping around to grip the controls with pale knuckles.

Ciangi cleared her throat and her bright eyes flicked back to Mimic and I. “Now, I could be wrong, but that sound usually means that we’re being targeting by another vessel.”

“I’m guessing you don’t mean targeted with hugs and good times.” I said sarcastically.

“No…not quite.”

“Great.”

There was a ripple in one of the displays and then a brilliant beam of green cut through the utter darkness of space. Our little stolen vessel tilted to the side, away from the onslaught, but not before it scorched our underbelly.

Alarms went off in earnest, and what little calm was in our merry band of misfits fled immediately. Bahn unbuckled himself and ran over to the meager weapons array and Ciangi turned herself to the controls that handled…I didn’t know what. But it was something important, I was sure.

“They’re rounding for another fire!” she said, reading off a display that I couldn’t make heads or tails of.

“They’re certainly choosing a strange movement pattern,” Ciangi said. “They definitely could have blown us out of existence three times over.”

“That’s because they don’t want to blow us up. They want Mimi,” I said, using the nickname I had given her.

“That is unfortunate,” the alien said dryly. “I do not want to be wanted by them.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll make sure they never lay a hand on you again.” I assured, patting her shoulder.

“It is not their hands I am worried about. I have read much during my time in your quarters. I have learned what terrible, malicious things your species has done to those that are different, in the name of science or progress. You’ve killed your own planet, and now you trawl through space looking for new worlds to destroy.”

“Wow, harsh,” Gonzales grumbled instead of the several expletives it looked like she wanted to say as the ship dodged yet another blast.

“Apologies. I know that you, the individuals, had no hand in it, but you, the human race, most certainly did. Your language doesn’t seem to have much of a way to easily say which one I mean without some sort of drawn-out explanation.”

“That’s Common Tongue for you,” Gonzales said. “There’s twenty words for what you’d never care to say and only one word to mean twenty different, important things.”

“Could we put the linguistic discussion on hold until after we survive this, if we survive this?” I begged.

“Oh right. That’s probably a good idea.”

“They’re closing in! I think they’re going to try to drill us!” Ciangi suddenly announced.

“Are you kidding me? That’s clearly a fourth date activity. They haven’t taken me to dinner yet.”

“Gonzales, is now really the time?” Ciangi complained.

“Why not? If we’re going to die, I want my last words to be a hilarious pun.”

“They’re firing again,” Bahn shouted over the two. “Stop bickering and start with the evasive maneuvers!”

“Nah, I thought I would just keep flying in a straight line,” Gonzales snapped back, jerking the ship downward then into a tight spiral. My stomach churned and I was definitely feeling an uncomfortable mixture of being overwhelmed and terrified. I didn’t know how to fly a ship. I didn’t know how to handle the weapons array. I didn’t even know how to decode the different readings on the dozen or so sensors that Ciangi was staring at.

I was useless, and the only thing I could do was hold onto Mimic’s hand and pray we got through the attack.

But how could we? We were outgunned, out-engined, out-everythinged. There was only one way the battle was ending, and that was with us dead and Mimic in captivity, destined to be poked, prodded and experimented on for the rest of her life—however long that might be.

“Wait!” Ciangi called.

“Not exactly the type of situation where I can do anything remotely similar to waiting.” Gonzalez retorted.

“There’s another asteroid belt up ahead, about three times more dense than the one we dug Mimic out of,” Ciangi continued, undeterred. “We can definitely lose them in there.”

“Won’t they just go around and wait for us to go through the other side?” I asked quietly, wincing away as blinding green shot across in front of us, resulting in a wild buck from the ship. “We can’t just sit in there forever. Eventually, they’ll have backup here.”

“That’s true if we were going to stay in the field. But on the other side, there’s a wormhole. One that previous research vessels have studied enough to know that it’s stable, even if they’re not sure where it leads.”

“Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?” Gonzalez asked incredulously.

“Impossible,” Bahn said.

“What is impossible?” I asked, feeling completely out of the loop in the daring rescue that I had started.

“She wants us to go through the wormhole. A wormhole, mind you, that no one has ever gone through before,” Gonzales said, jerking the controls again, slamming us against our restraints. “Heck, not even a machine has made it through to the other side yet.”

“Do you know another way to make sure we don’t have our butts handed to us on a deeply fried platter?”

“Is that a custom among your people?” Mimic asked. “I do not recall reading that.”

“It’s a saying,” I clarified.

“Ah, I see. More Common Tongue play on words. One day I will catch on.”

“Yes, you will,” I assured her. “But only if we survive this. So, I say if this wormhole is our only hope—even if it’s a super shaky one—I say we grab it with both hands and get us out of here.”

“Fine!” Gonzales snapped. “But everyone better hold onto their giblets, because I’m about to try to navigate an asteroid belt without a kinetic sensor.”

“Wait, this ship doesn’t have a kinetic sensor?” I cried.

“It’s a simple transport vessel. Of course it doesn’t have a kinetic sensor.”

“What is a kinetic sensor?” Mimic asked, head turned towards me curiously. To give her credit, she seemed completely calm about the situation, which was more than I could say about myself. “And why are we saying it so much?”

“It’s a mechanism that’s used for space navigation that involves sailing through large amounts of debris or other possible collisions. Very useful for a mining vessel to have.”

“But not so much for a tiny transport ship,” Ciangi added.

“Don’t worry,” Gonzales said, somewhere between sarcasm and blind optimism. “I’ve got this in the bag.”

“What bag?”

“I just— You know what? Never mind. Just hold on!”

I complied, and just in time. Gonzales swooped upwards in a tight circle, giving me a brief feeling of weightlessness, before she slammed downward and to the side.

Large rocks appeared across the windshield, dotting space like little brown flecks that were rapidly becoming larger. I couldn’t even count half of them before we were past them, more green bolts shooting past us as we delved into the thick of it.

My thoughts couldn’t quite process all the dips, dives, turns and tumbles Gonzales took us through in our wild escape. I didn’t even know how she was managing. Occasionally, we scraped against the side of one of the floating space rocks, causing us to ricochet this way and that, but no one said anything when we did. We were all waiting with bated breath, seeing if we would survive this absolutely impossible situation.

My fingers wrapped through Mimi’s as we hurtled forward. The blasts of the mining ship grew less wide and searing as we gained distance, and as the seconds passed, a tiny sliver of hope began to form in me. Maybe we would make it. Maybe we weren’t about to be forcibly boarded and executed in the name of science.

“There it is!” Ciangi yelled, breaking the tense silence. “One click on your two o’clock! Punch it!”

I looked in the direction of her shaking finger, trying to see what she was pointing out. If I squinted, I could almost make out an area of space that seemed to warp and buckle under its own weight, as if the very fabric of reality itself was being ironed into neat little pleats.

“Here goes nothing!”

Gonzales did indeed ‘punch it’ and we went hurtling forward through the lip of the void.

For a moment, it seemed as if the entire universe halted, just hanging in the balance like someone had pressed pause on a net-flick. And then, just as suddenly as it had halted, everything sprang back into motion.

Stars, planets, and bursts of colors spun by us as we sped through the cosmos. It was almost as if we were caught in some sort of interdimensional slipstream as we rushed through the folds of the wormhole.

I looked over to Mimic, and her features seemed to blur and extend in an impossible fashion behind her, like I was seeing several dozen images all stacked on top of each other. Although maybe that was just from the violent rattling of my head from the ship withstanding the force from traveling to…wherever it was we were traveling to.

“I think I see the ending!” Gonzalez announced.

It took all of my effort to turn my head forward and look back out the nav-window. Sure enough, I could see the kaleidoscopic myriad of colors cut off, leaving the cold, dark voice of space beyond the circle. I never thought I would be so happy to see that particular darkness, and yet I was immensely relieved.

“Now, let’s see if we can survive exiting through the event horizon.”

Okay, maybe not immensely relieved.

The rattling grew worse as we approached the circle that was our ticket back to reality. Maybe my brain was going to end up as pea soup before we made it to safety.

Teeth clenched together, knuckles white as I gripped the armrest of my chair, and heart safely lodged in my throat, I held on for dear life as we hurtled forward. I couldn’t tell how much of our speed was Gonzales pouring all she could into the engines, and how much was the wormhole forcibly vomiting us forward.

Then, just when I was sure I was going to lose it, we shot out of the other end and into space. A cheer erupted from the others, but I could only breathe raggedly as exhaustion overtook me.

“I can’t believe that worked,” Gonzales said, sagging in her seat like someone had let all the air out of her.

“If you did not believe that it would work, then why did you say that you had it in this bag of which you speak?” Mimic asked.

“False bravado,” the engineer/pilot answered honestly, not bothering to lift her head from where it was resting on her arms. “I’m full of it.”

“Amongst other things.” Ciangi remarked, patting the darker woman on her back. “You did good, especially for a weapons engineer.”

“What do you mean especially for a weapons engineer?” Gonzalez demanded.

“I mean, we all know the scope for that field of research is much narrower than most of mechanical or nuclear engineering.”

“Just when I think you might have pulled that stick out of your—”

I sighed and looked to Bahn. I didn’t have the energy for their semi-playful, semi-spiteful banter. “So, where are we?” I asked him, finally unbuckling myself. I could feel bruises starting to form on my shoulders where the straps had been and knew I would certainly regret those marks the next day.

Bahn didn’t answer, instead crossing over to regard the screens of the nav-station that Ciangi had abandoned to bicker with Gonzales. I watched as he looked from one to the other, and then the other, until he finished examining all of them and returned right back to the first screen.

“Well?” I asked anxiously.

“We are not anywhere.”

“What do you mean, we’re not anywhere?” Gonzales said, breaking away from her conversation with the other engineer to crane her neck in our direction. “I see stars. I see moons. We’ve gotta be somewhere.”

“Well, if you’re going to argue semantics, then yes, we’re somewhere. The issue is, this somewhere is not anywhere on our maps.”

“What? That’s impossible!” Ciangi protested.

“And so is sailing through the eye of an unexplored, unregulated wormhole in a transport vessel, and yet here we are,” Bahn offered.

“So, what?” Ciangi asked. “We’re just lost in sp—”

“Don’t finish that,” I said, cutting her off. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. Maybe we’re just in a really obscure system that’s buried in the database.”

“Perhaps. Let me search now.” Bahn quickly punched in a code and started what I recognized was a coordinate search. I had seen one run before back during my very first job when a virus had infected the autopilot and caused the ship to fly to a paradise-resort planet without the proper authorization. We had thought that we were lost at first then too, but had quickly discovered the error.

Maybe this situation would be solved just as easily.

Several more moments passed before Bahn finally sighed and sat down.

“Nothing,” he said, gesturing at the array in disappointment. “Not a single map, constellation match or even similar system. Wherever we are, no one has ever been here before.”

“So, you’re saying that we somehow shot to a part of space that is completely undiscovered?” I asked.

“Looks like it,” Bahn confirmed my fears.

I sat back into my chair, my legs growing weak in awe. Although humans had only had long distance space travel for a little over a hundred years, our telescopes, satellites and drones had been busy mapping the known universe for nearly five hundred. We had charted out lightyear after lightyear of space, even ones we wouldn’t explore for another hundred years.

And yet…here we were. Someplace we couldn’t possibly be.

“Higgens?” Mimic asked quietly, her small, delicate fingers resting on my arm once more.

“Yeah?”

She looked to me with a worried, and slightly guilty, gaze. “I think I’m hungry.”

Oh dear.

2

Some Semblance of a Plan

“First things first,” I stated. “We need to wait here until the coast is clear, and slip right back through the wormhole so we can get Mimi some food.”

“What were you feeding her when she was in your care?” Gonzales asked. “You were hiding her on the ship for a while, right?”

“Just a couple of weeks from start to finish,” I answered

“And what did she eat then?”

“I am sitting right here,” Mimic interrupted. “You can direct your questions about my care toward me.”

“Alright then. Alien, what did you eat?”

“Mimic,” she corrected. “And several different things, ranging from several recycled blaster cores to the nuclear energy created by your system.”

“Wait, you were that weird energy dip?” Ciangi asked, suddenly more interested.

“Yes. What I was able to absorb there allowed me the energy to take on a form similar to yours.”

“Similar to?” Ciangi raised an eyebrow. “You look pretty human to me.”

“There are a few unfortunate flaws in your anatomy that I edited out. Namely the redundant organs and excretory system.”

“Oh, uh, that’s good to know. I guess,” Gonzales interjected. “So, um, I’m sure we could find some sort of energy for you to—”

“Apologies, but that is not what I require now. Those meals were to expand my mass to the point where I could shift into the larger form I wanted. Now I need actual sustenance. The minerals and other compounds that allow me to be, well, me.”

“And what exactly are those?” Gonzalez asked.

“I do not know what you call them. Merely that they were plentiful in my home. Perhaps if you had some scrap left from what you destroyed, that could sustain me until we’re able to return home.”

“Unfortunately, anything we smashed up was sucked into the tubes and into the processers or recyclers,” Gonzalez lamented.

“So, what you’re saying,” I said slowly, realization dawning on me slowly, “is that there’s nothing for Mimi to eat until we get her home.”

“Um, yeah. I’m afraid so.”

“Might I point out,” Bahn interjected, “that if she starves to death, it would make our entire risking of our lives rescue mission an exercise in futility.”

“We’re not going to let you die,” I assured Mimic, holding her hands once more. “We’ll get you back home in a few hours and find a nice, uh, comet for you to munch on.”

“There might just be one hang-up in that plan,” Bahn said.

I couldn’t help but sigh in aggravation. My nerves were stretched thin as it was and I certainly wasn’t feeling up to more friendly back and forth. “What is it?”

“It seems going through a wormhole was pretty hard on our engine,” he said. “As in…we might have burnt out the crystals that give it power.”

“Then use the reserve fuel.”

“Burned through that too.”

“Nuclear energy?”

“This is a simple transport craft,” Bahn said. “There’s no nuclear back up or dampener. Right now, we’re stuck on impulse and that’s not going to get us home any time in the next billion years or allow us to survive the shake-up of going into the wormhole.”

“You have got to be kidding me,” I groaned, head in my hands. “So we’re stuck out here?”

“Stuck? I wouldn’t say stuck,” Ciangi said confidently. “You’ve got three of the brightest engineers in our generation. I’m sure we can whip something up?”

“With what materials?” Bahn questioned. It wasn’t an aggressive objection, but a practical one. “We have only the basics here, and they won’t be enough.”

“The scanner works, right? Let’s check the celestial objects around us to see if they’ve got anything we can synthesize into the crystals that we need.”

I let out a breath, feeling the panic that was tight in my chest begin to relax slightly. We had a plan. That was good. If we had a plan, that meant we had hope and that we were moving forward.

“I’ll go through the rest of the ship and see what I can scrounge up.” My hand went to my belt. “Thankfully, I brought several of my tools along when I went to rescue Mimic, so I’ll make any repairs if I come across something that needs repairin’.”

“I will accompany you,” Mimic said, standing as well.

“Alright, everyone break to your respective tasks at hand and we will meet up later at the food processor.” Gonzalez paused and squinted at the console. “Uh, this ship has a food processor, right?”

“Yes, they’re standard issue,” Bahn assured her.

“Whew. Good. I’d hate to have to end up eating each other for sustenance,” Gonzales laughed

“You wouldn’t do that,” Ciangi countered with a snort.

“Oh yeah?” Gonzales said with a wry smirk. “Glad you’re so sure because I’m not. You coin twins have some lovely legs there.”

Now that was a hair past awkward, even for me. “Alright, Mimi and I are gonna go now. Later.”

“Later.”

I rushed out, even though my knees were still shaking a bit from the adrenaline dropoff, and didn’t stop until we were well away from the cabin.

I leaned against the wall, breathing hard and letting myself collapse into a pile on the floor.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah…” I answered after a couple of very deep breaths. “It’s just all catching up to me at once.”

“That was a very stressful string of events, wasn’t it?” Mimic said, patting my head in a borderline mechanical way. I appreciated the gesture, however. I knew she was still learning much about intrapersonal interaction. “But come, let us take care of the task at hand.”

I allowed her to pull me up, which she did with surprising ease, and then we were off again.

Sure, the situation wasn’t the best, but I needed to have faith in my new friends who had been willing to risk their lives to save us. They hadn’t failed us then and they certainly wouldn’t fail us now.

I would just have to do my best by them.

I guessed that about three more hours passed before the five of us joined each other at the food processor, each punching in different codes for the meal we wanted. Except for Mimi, of course, who just looked at our plates with a vague sort of disinterest.

The ship turned out to be even smaller than I had expected. Containing only two floors and no elevator, it was definitely meant for small crews on short trips. All of the sleeping quarters were bunk style, arranged on either side of the engine room with the communal bathroom at the very back. The top floor, where the cabin was, also had the cafeteria, the weapons room, and a mini-medbay.

“So, what’s the verdict?” Gonzales asked

“It’s not just the engine crystals that were burnt out, but somehow we overloaded the safety failsafe and fried about a quarter of the capacitors,” Bahn reported. “I found enough materials to make a sort of bypass around the fried ones, but nothing for the crystals themselves.”

“I mean, we expected that,” Gonzales said, biting into her burger with relish. “But good work on the capacitors. Ciangi? I’m guessing you two spent most of the past three hours together?”

“Actually, I was checking the circuitry and outputs. I think if we cut life support to all but the most necessary rooms when we make the jump, it will give us just enough leeway so we don’t fry ourselves into crispy little bits. I’ve got to do some rewiring and preprogramming to make sure that doesn’t put the ship into lockdown, but I could do it in the next day or so.”

“Fantastic. And you, Higgens?”

“I found a few buckled parts of the hull and managed to reinforce them. Thankfully, there wasn’t much damage to the infrastructure. I took the time to refill all of the coolant vats that deal with fire damage and set the shielding mechanism to recharge for the next few hours.”

“Alright, great. Great. We’re all on the right track.” Gonzalez took another bite then swallowed, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “So, the scanners are still going, but preliminary results are pretty encouraging. A moon about an hour or two away from here has a fairly large deposit of one of the compounds we need to synthesize the crystals.”

“What about lifeforms?” I asked, hopefully.

“I dunno, man. I can only do one thing at a time on this janky ol’ pile of scrap.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t insult our only chance at surviving the wormhole jump back home.”

“Why?” Gonzales asked. “You think the ship is going to hear me and get all offended?”

“Who knows?” I said. “We have a shapeshifting alien in our crew and hyperjumped to an unknown part of space. It’s probably best not to jinx ourselves any further.”

“Guess I can’t argue with that logic.” Another bite, another swallow, and then she was turning back to the machine and punching in another code. For a moment, I was distracted from the stressful situation at hand to be impressed by her voracious appetite. “Gimme another two hours or so on the scanners and we’ll plot a course to all the stops we need to make. I recommend everyone getting what rest they can. It’s going to be a very long couple of days. You gonna make it, Shifty?”

“It’s Mimic.”

“Right. I’ll take that as a yes.” She nodded before digging into her next burger. “Good meeting, team. I say we finish up here and then we’ll meet at the cabin later.”

I finally took a bite of the thick pasta I had requested. Thankfully, it was still warm and delicious, a tiny slice of comfort.

And I needed all the comfort I could get.

3

Touchdown

I wish I could say that I had slept well and had restored my energy. Instead, I lay in one of the stolen bunks and stared at the ceiling, Mimi curled into my side with her eyes closed.

I couldn’t tell at the time if she was sleeping or not, but when my datalog beeped that it was time to get up, she had risen instantly and had started walking. Perhaps she had only been laying down with me for my own comfort. I was sure that she could tell how stressed I was, and it was sweet that she wanted to help, but as the five of us stood in the bridge, I felt all that anxiety sweeping back to me.

Could we go back to when I was the know-nothing maintenance guy who just patched pipes? My life was much simpler then. Dirtier. But simpler.

“So, what’s the verdict?” Ciangi asked, leaning over the console to stare at the screens.

“A collection of two moons and one planet have all the compounds we need,” Gonzales said. “It will take us a solid day to swing by all of them. If you figure an average of four hours per mission, then a day to get back, then another day to piece everything together, we’ll be out of here in a jiffy. Can you last that long, Shif— I mean, Mary?”

“It’s Mimic.”

“Right. I knew that. But can you?”

“I will have to, will I not? There is not much of an option besides that.”

“Unless any of these planets have something that you might be able to use as sustenance?” I offered hopefully.

“Most likely not, but if you have a handheld scanner, I can punch in the atomic structures I need it to look for,” Mimic said matter-of-factly.

“I’m sure I can dig one of those out of the medbay. If not, Bahn could probably whip one up for you.”

I looked to him with an eyebrow raised and he shrugged. “When I have anxiety attacks, I like to disassemble instruments and put them back together. Sometimes I combine them. A standard communication pod and a datalog with a molecular node make an excellent scanner.”

“Good to know,” I said, trying not to sound sarcastic because I certainly wasn’t. “You’ll have to show me sometime.”

“Yes. It would be a handy skill for a worker such as yourself to have.”

“Speaking of which,” Ciangi interjected. “I need some extra hands to begin arranging the medbay how I need it for our little construction venture, so you and Mimic are with me.”

“Can do.” I replied, happy to have something to do.

“The first moon is that same one I mentioned earlier,” Gonzales said. “I already plotted a course before we started talking. Make sure to shower, eat, and do whatever it is you need to be refreshed, because we’re all going to have to be on guard. With no prior knowledge of this planet, its flora or its fauna, we need to be prepared for everything.”

“Righto.” Ciangi stretched and let out an egregious yawn. “Well, I’m going to take a shower before this all goes to hell in a hand basket in some way that we haven’t anticipated. Anyone want to join me?”

My eyes went wide, and Mimic just shook her head in a bored manner while the other two laughed.

“Guys, there are like seven stalls in there. I didn’t mean with me.” Her playful wink suggested otherwise.

“We know you didn’t. But that didn’t stop it from being hilarious anyway. Come on, I could use a good wash-up too and I don’t know where they’ve crammed the towels on this tub,” Gonzales said with a laugh.

“Towels?” Ciangi echoed as they walked off. “What kind of ancient setup do you think they have here? They have an air-whicker just like a standard vessel.”

“Huh, color me surprised.”

Mimic and I watched them go, then Bahn excused himself quietly. I didn’t know what he was up to, but I didn’t feel the need to question him either. I was still a bit intimidated by the taller of the coin twins, even if he had been consistently polite.

“Higgens?”

“Huh?” I jolted as Mimic’s cool hand rested against my arm. “Oh, sorry. What’s up?”

“I will be honest that I am…worried about what could happen on these missions we are about to embark on.”

“Yeah, they sound like they could be pretty dangerous.”

She nodded. “I was hoping you wouldn’t mind helping me with something.”

“Of course not. What d’you need?”

“I… I hope you do not perceive this as defeatist, but I feel like I must be practical and admit that there is a chance one, or all, of us could end up not coming back. I would like to make some recordings, and file samples, of myself so that—should I meet my end on these planets—I will not be forgotten.”

“Oh geez, Mimi.” I pulled her into a hug, and I felt her form ripple slightly. A few moments later, I felt several of her black and spikey limbs form around me. It was a bit of déjà vu, but it was nice to see her original form again. “That’s the absolute least I can do. Come on, I think we can find everything we need in the medbay.”

Her form reassembled itself into her human-esque shape and she nodded. Together, we walked off.

It felt good that she trusted me on something so obviously important to her. After all the important engineering chatter from the brain-trio, I was feeling next to useless.

But it didn’t matter to Mimic that I wasn’t brilliant, or that I understood physics on a ninth-grade level. What mattered to her was that I was her friend, and she knew I would go to the end of the universe and back to make sure that she was safe.

And hopefully that would be a literal journey, very, very soon.

“Is your helmet secure?” Gonzales asked.

“Yes.”

“How about your gloves?”

“Yes.”

“Is your suit-environment pressurized?”

“Yup.”

“What about—”

“I got it!” I interrupted gently. “It’s okay, Gonzales. I know how to put on an envirosuit.”

“Okay. I know. It’s just… This is my first actual ground mission. I’m a little nervous.”

“Wait, really? This is your first?”

“Yeah,” Ciangi answered, struggling with the seal on her boot. “It’s all of our first times.”

“How is that possible?”

Bahn shrugged as he approached. “We’re engineers. Our jobs require us to stay in the ship usually. You’re maintenance. Why do you have envirosuit experience?”

“What do you think I wear when I’m cleaning bio-hazards or any sort of space-rift? I’ve even had to clean drill-bit sludge off while tethered to the ship.”

“You clean—” Gonzalez blinked at me incredulously. “—outside of the ship?!”

“Not very often, thankfully. But yes.”

She let out a long breath. “I did not know that. You do not get paid nearly enough.”

I snorted. “You got that right.”

Prepare for orbital entry in one minute.

“That’s our cue.” Gonzales said. “Everyone buckle up.”

“Yeah, because safety harnesses are going to be so useful when we burn to a crisp upon reentry,” Bahn replied dryly.

I couldn’t hold back a smirk. “Do you think we all use sarcasm as a way not to say something that could be misconstrued as incorrect due to a lack of knowledge?”

“Hey, who gave you permission to moonlight as my therapist?”

Ciangi let out a long sigh as she buckled herself into a chair. “I remember therapy. I miss it. Remind me to go back if we ever make it to Earth as non-fugitives”

“Maybe I’ll try it, if we get back,” Bahn said. “But first, we need to find these compounds. Everyone fully harnessed and ready for orbit?”

“Yessiree.”

Ten seconds until reentry.

“I would like to note that this is the tiniest ship that I have ever entered a planet on, so if I piss myself in terror, I don’t want to hear about it,” Gonzales said dryly.

It took all of my strength not to laugh outright. It seemed, after so much time holding them in such high esteem, it made me feel a bit better to have them be so nervous about what was just a matter of course for me. I guess it made sense that, despite all their knowledge and expertise, they probably had very few assignments that ever had anything to do with envirosuits or dangerous maneuvers on small vessels.

I just hoped they held it together for when we were planet-side.

Commencing orbital reentry.

The voice of the helm clicked off and then the ship began to rattle.

Strangely enough, it wasn’t as bad as the wormhole. In fact, it was almost downright pleasant.

I could feel the ship’s auto-nav trying to fight the urge to skip across the atmosphere like a stone, and see the nose of our little vessel turn scarlet red with flames and heat, but other than that…it was relatively peaceful.

I heard a very small whimper from Gonzales, and I glanced to her white knuckles gripping her armrest like a lifeline. It seemed maybe my co-conspirators were not having as easy a time as I was, but they would be fine.

Or at least I hoped so.

The helm was prattling on some countdown about our descent, but I didn’t pay much heed. Instead, I watched the surface of the moon as it slowly became more and more detailed. It looked a lot like a forest, albeit a forest filled with wildly colored foliage and flora like I had never seen before.

The rattling slowed and the others let out a collective breath. I tried to see if I could spot any wildlife as we settled at the base of a mountain, but as far as I could tell, there wasn’t anything around. No birds taking flight as we settled down onto several trees, no frightened roars from beasts whose home had been destroyed.

Just…quiet.

The landing gear came down and we finally settled against the ground. There was a moment of silence, before Gonzales let out a whoop.

“We made it!” she said, leaning over to high-five Ciangi.

I did allow myself to smile at their earnestness as we all unbuckled and headed toward the exit, where our supplies were already strapped and waiting for us. “I knew we would,” I said honestly.

“Glad there was one of us.” She took a long breath to compose herself then squared her shoulders. “Are we all ready for our first off-world mission?”

“Technically, being sucked into your ship after you murdered my entire family was my first off-world mission,” Mimic mused, the very corner of her lip raising in a smirk.

I could tell that Gonzales was struggling not to roll her eyes. “I suppose that’s true. Is everyone ready for what is most of our first off-world missions?”

“I am.” Ciangi replied.

“Guess so.” Bahn confirmed.

I nodded toward what seemed to be our de facto leader. “Let’s do this.”

“Let’s.”

She hit the button to release the airlock, and the door slowly began to open. According to our readings, the atmosphere was similar enough not to mean sudden death if there was a puncture in our envirosuits, but there was enough of a difference to lead to nausea, shortness of breath, and other uncomfortable complications—something we wanted to avoid if at all possible.

The door finished rising and the ramp started to extend. With another look at each other, we ventured into the outside world.

4

The Great Unknown

It was bright. So very bright.

I squinted against the harsh sun as we walked down the ramp, my eyes struggling to adjust to the blinding rays.

“Geez, why don’t these envirosuits have sunglasses?” Bahn complained.

I reached over and pressed one of the buttons on his chest. Almost immediately, his helmet began to darken with a UV filtering tint.

“Whoa, we can do that?” Gonzales asked.

“Only you and Bahn. Ciangi and I have slightly older models.”

“Bummer,” the blonde remarked before looking to Mimic. “Are you sure you don’t need one?”

“I am fine, I assure you.”

“Alright, good. If you say so, I guess. You did live on an asteroid with no atmosphere for…how long have you been alive?”

Mimic shrugged. “That is unknown. My kind does not keep track of time in the same way you do.”

“As in your kind doesn’t keep track of time at all?”

“Yes.”

I turned away to glance out at the landscape. It certainly was breathtaking, with over-saturated blues, pinks, and yellows surrounding us. “Where did our sensors say they wanted us to go?”

Gonzales consulted her datalog before pointing to a narrow grove between thin, twisting trees. “That way.”

We headed in that direction, taking on the standard formation I had been taught in my orientation when I was brought onboard my first government vessel. I was surprised that the engineers hadn’t had the same basic training, but I guess whoever had set orientation up had decided it wouldn’t be necessary to their jobs.

An oversight, in my opinion. But what did I know? I was just a janitor who had managed to find an alien lifeform and then commit high treason.

“Does anyone else find it eerily quiet around here?” Ciangi asked.

“That usually means one of two things,” I murmured quietly. “Either there is no flora roaming around here, or—”

“Or what?”

“Or we’re in a predator’s territory and all the prey animals know not to go near it.”

“Right. Well, let’s hope it’s number one then.”

“It’s never number one,” Bahn whispered. “Be on your guard.”

And so, we crept forward, coming ever closer to the coordinates on Gonzales’s array. My senses were on high alert, my eyes scanning the foliage around me in sweeping arcs.

I wished I had time to appreciate the beauty of it all, but I couldn’t risk being caught unaware. I needed to focus, to make sure that nothing got the drop on us. To—

“We’re here.”

“What?”

I looked to Gonzales, who was standing in the middle of the clearing we had reached. “We’re here. These are the coordinates.”

“Then what are we looking for?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “It wasn’t like the sensors came with a sketch of the exact materials we were looking for. Just that they were here.”

“I guess we’ll have to use our handheld to scan everything one by one until we find what plant or rock we need.”

“Fantastic. That sounds like a great use of our time.” Gonzales sighed and pulled out one of the scanners Bahn had fabricated for us. “But it’s not like I have a better idea, so hold on. And watch out for carnivorous plants. I’m still not settled about this whole silent thing. Mimic, you focus on trying to find yourself something to eat.”

“Will do, human friend.”

“It’s Gonzales.”

“I doubt I will remember that, but thank you.”

I swallowed a snort of laughter and went about scanning the nearest plants. There were violently purple flowers with orange speckles along the hand-sized petals, the twisting, winding roots of the trees towering above us. Rocks that were a sparkling blue or a light, shimmering gray.

We spent what felt like ages quietly roaming around the clearing, scanning one by one by one. It was tedious, it hurt my lower back, and I couldn’t help but feel that there was danger just lurking over my shoulder.

“I think I might have found it!”

We all stood and looked to Bahn, who was standing over a fuchsia plant with strange looking pods dotting it. Almost like one mind, we rushed over to his side and read the output of his scanner.

“That looks like it to me,” Gonzales said with a smile. “Let’s all take a sample just to make sure.”

We did, and after a few minutes, telltale beeps sounded from our devices.

“This is it! Everyone load up as much as you can into your enviro-packs, and we’ll get this to quarantine to make sure it’s safe. Any luck on your end, Mimic?”

My shifter friend held up a singular pebble no bigger than an ancient earth quarter. “This has a few trace elements of the compounds I need. It is better than nothing.”

“Here,” I said, extending my hand to her. “I’ll make sure it gets into the enviro-pack for you.”

“Thank you, that is much appreciated.”

We shared a smile then I tucked it away. We couldn’t risk it getting lost. Even if it was the equivalent of a single bite of food, I couldn’t stand the thought of her losing it.

“Alright, let’s get out of here before our luck runs out.”

“Hear, hear,” I agreed, turning back toward the direction we came from.

We got a total of about six steps before I heard a low, ominous growling.

“Did anybody else—”

“Yeah,” Ciangi whispered tersely as we froze in place. “We all heard it.”

“So, what’s the plan here?” I whispered. “Make a break for it, walk calmly and hope it leaves us alone, or fight it with our blasters?”

“Considering only two of us have blasters,” Gonzales said. “I don’t think that’s the best idea.”

Surprisingly, it was Mimi’s calm voice that answered.

“The four of you will make a break toward the ship. I will follow close behind.”

“What, are you serious—”

“Now!”

Her harsh order jolted us into action and we raced forward.

It was difficult to run in an envirosuit, the thick material making undue friction between my thighs and under my arms. But none of us were letting that stop us, and we raced as hard as we could toward the ship.

That ominous growl turned into an outright roar, and I heard something erupt from the trees behind us. Despite knowing better, I glanced over my shoulder to see what was chasing us, and immediately wished I hadn’t.

It was a creature, alright. One with a strange mix of fur and gelatinous-looking skin. It had six legs that it ran on, catching up to us way too quickly for any of us to get away, and spiked tentacles whipping around on its back. When it opened its mouth to roar again, I saw several rows of sharp, jagged teeth that looked like they still had bits of flesh tucked between their serrated edges.

I kept running, but I felt utterly mesmerized by the sight of it as it crouched, then sprang forward. It sailed through the air toward us, its shadow sweeping across our running figures, and that was when I knew this was the end for us.

But before it could land on us and eviscerate our comparatively tiny bodies, something slammed into its side.

The two creatures went tumbling into the foliage, breaking branches and trees alike until they skidded to a stop.

As much as I wanted to look at the strange beast that had saved our life, we couldn’t stop running.

“Was that…Mimic?” Bahn asked breathlessly as we raced toward the ship.

“I think so?” I answered. “Otherwise, the timing is awfully convenient.”

“Well, remind me to thank her if she gets back on the ship.”

“When,” I said firmly. “When she gets back on the ship.”

“Right, right. Of course, that’s what I meant.”

I probably would have argued further, but the ramp we had descended came into view, sunlight glinting off the metal surface. I risked another glance behind to see the great monsters still going at it, snarling and slashing and biting.

I could only make out flashes of whatever Mimic was. She had oily-green skin that glimmered rainbow when the light hit it just right. Instead of front arms, or legs, her front limbs just had scythe-like claws.

All in all, it was a pretty terrifying spectacle and I could only hope that we all survived it.

We reached the ramp and everyone sprinted up it, racing to get to our seats in the cabin and start up the ship. I, however, stopped at the top of the slope and looked back.

“Mimi!” I called.

I wasn’t sure what I expected. I just wanted her to know that we were safe and she needn’t risk her life anymore. I didn’t even know if she would hear me over the clamor of the battle she was embroiled in.

The oily monster’s head craned toward me, and its two scythe-appendages slammed into the front of the furred creature, sending it flying backward. Turning tail, she ran toward me, form shrinking and morphing as she went.

I felt the rumble of the engines come to life below me, but it wasn’t enough to distract me from the bizarre and horrifying transformation of the beast to Mimic’s much more human form.

Its arms went first, shrinking from deadly weapons into pale, borderline scrawny limbs. Then the head shrunk, growing hair as it went.

By the time she reached me, she was almost human. Her skin was still largely the wrong color, and she had four eyes instead of two, but it was enough for me.

“She’s safe!” I cried, pulling her in and slamming the console that retracted the ramp and closed the hatch. “Punch the engines!”

“Gotcha,” Gonzalez said. “I’d recommend holding onto something.”

I didn’t take the warning lightly and hauled Mimic back toward our seats. I had just about enough time to strap her in before the first engine kick rattled us and I felt my balance quickly shifting.

There was no way I would have time to get to my own seat in time. My eyes flitted around, trying to find some sort of solution. But instead of straps, or seats, or buckles, I felt several tentacles wrap around me.

My first response was to jerk away in fear, but I felt Mimic rest her head against my chest.

“I have you, friend. Do not worry.”

I wanted to tell her that even if she did suddenly have twelve arms, it probably wasn’t going to be enough to hold onto me during an atmospheric exit, but there didn’t seem to be much of a point. So instead, I wrapped my arms around her too and held on for dear life.

The ship bucked and kicked as we skipped across the forest floor, trying to gain momentum. While I was no engineer, I knew enough about ships to know that general transport vessels were not meant for atmospheric entry and escape in a short period. And yet that was exactly what we were doing.

It was déjà vu all over again as my head fought to whip this way and that. I tucked my chin down to my chest and tried to focus on not biting my cheeks or tongue into oblivion. I had never been one for the taste of blood and I certainly wasn’t going to start enjoying it now.

“Gonzales, are you trying to take us on a tour of the landscape or are we going to actually get altitude at some point?” Ciangi asked, stress apparent in her voice.

“Do you wanna drive this thing?” she snapped. “Because I assure you, it is not as easy as it looks!”

Ciangi opened her mouth like she had a reply, but then suddenly we were jettisoning over the side of a cliff and all that made it out was a shaky scream.

Our nose began to tip forward and for a split-second, I was sure we were about to fall to our deaths. But then, something shifted, and all the air below us seemed to balance out the ship. Then, against all odds, we were ascending. In a wide angle at first, then slowing rising more and more steeply until we were practically vertical.

Atmospheric exit in ten seconds.

I assumed this was normally when Gonzales would have some sort of snarky quip for the computer, but the gravitational force of it all was keeping all our jaws locked tight.

More rattling, more shaking, and yet Mimic held onto me tightly. My back popped several times, and my feet lifted from the ground, but she never wavered for a second.

And then, out of nowhere, we settled and my teeth stopped vibrating out of my skull. I blinked blearily, and Mimic slowly disentangled herself from me, panting slightly.

“That was difficult,” she murmured breathlessly.

“I bet. But thank you.”

“Any time,” she said, shooting me a weak smile. “But now I am very hungry.”

“Sorry about that.” I felt guilty. How much energy had she expended in saving our sorry hides?

“Wow,” Gonzales said, unbuckling herself and slowly getting to her feet before discarding her envirosuit. “I’m beginning to think that I might be pretty amazing.”

“You know what?” Ciangi said, following her example. “I’m inclined to agree.”

The dark-skinned woman gave the blonde a wink before getting right back to business.

“Alright, you two go work on the wormhole jumper while Higgens and I try to set up a workspace for you.”

“Me?” I asked, suddenly paying acute attention to the conversation.

“You see anyone else around here who can be an ionic-wrench monkey?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Then come on, buddy boy. I’ve got the autopilot set for our next location and we don’t have a second to waste.”

She threw an arm around me and led me out. I took one last glance over my shoulder at Mimic, but she just waved weakly from her chair. She was trusting all of us to save her life, and that quelled whatever trepidation was in my middle.

After all, we had one material down, but there were three more to go.

5

Old Dog, New Tricks

“Pass me the spectral reader.”

I looked at the vast array of tools in front of me then identified the right one and handed it to Gonzales from where she was under one of the medbay consoles.

A day had passed since we had scrambled onto the ship in our frantic escape, and the coin twins were still busy fabricating the contraption we needed to jump through the wormhole again. Meanwhile, Gonzales and myself bounced between setting up other equipment for them and repairing damages to the engines and crystal modules as Bahn pointed them out.

At first, I had thought I would be completely useless, merely a mobile shelf for the brain-trust, but Gonzales seemed determined to have me be useful. We had spent the first hour with her simply explaining the name of tools and then quizzing me on them. From then, whenever she asked me to hand her one, she would either explain its purpose and why she was using it or ask me what it was used for if it was something she had already explained to me.

I was aware I was being educated, but it seemed natural and purposeful, which suited my mind just right. I knew she used the ionic welder to seal tears within any sort of metal component. The silicon injector was used for covering gaps in wiring or fixing tears in protective casing and buttons. The ionic wrench was used to magnetically remove sealed bolts or other fasteners with a chromium component. The list went on and on and on.

It reminded me of all the training I had to do when I was first interested in facilities. I had enjoyed it then, and it was all coming back to me.

Maybe I wasn’t as dense as I had been led to believe.

Perhaps that was a little audacious to think after just under twenty-four hours of assisting the obviously gifted Gonzales, but she never spoke to me as if I was an idiot or wasting her time. It made me feel good. Less like a useless janitor being hounded by someone over the comm at all hours, more like a future engineer.

“Thanks. Next, I’ll take the—”

Attention: Orbit at destination will be reached in one hour.

“Looks like that’s our cue,” she said, sliding out from underneath and flashing me a bright smile. “You ready for another outing?”

“Not particularly,” I answered honestly, thinking back to that furred monster and shuddering.

“Aw, relax!” she said, clapping my shoulder. “I’m sure this one will go much better. Now let’s hop into our envirosuits and see what this chunk of the universe has waiting for us!”

It did not go better.

Granted, it didn’t seem to go worse either, but our second outing was definitely just as stressful.

But this time, instead of giant alien monsters looking to make a snack of us, there were tiny little goo monsters that dissolved inorganic things on contact. We found that out because one landed on Bahn’s scanner and it quickly melted in his hand.

From that point, there had been more running and screaming, frantically scanning the area for the minerals we needed, followed by a mad dash back to the ship. Mimic handled herself beautifully considering we found nothing for her to eat. I was beginning to worry. Her once adorably full, pixie-like face was growing gaunt, and I often caught bits of her warping and fading in the corner of my vision.

But she never complained. Not once. Not even when we visited the third planet that happened to be completely covered in something similar to water and we were almost swallowed by a giant beast. Not even when I rolled over at night and saw her reverted to her black form, only considerably smaller and shaking from hunger.

Her bravery, her refusal to show weakness, made me that much more resolved to get us home and get whatever it was she considered food in her belly. She deserved the best, and that determination helped me through our fourth and final destination, which happened to pass without incident.

We had boarded the ship more than a little perplexed at how easy the mission had been. After too many hair-raising adventures, we were used to a little more adversity.

However, we didn’t let that surprise faze us for long, and quickly got busy with the final preparations for our jump.

Except…that wasn’t working out so well either.

“Gosh diggity darn it!” Ciangi snapped as something crackled and she yanked her hand back from a port she was trying to repair.

“Really?” Gonzales said, tossing the blonde engineer a med-kit. “That’s your idea of a curse?”

“Well, pardon me for not wanting to use foul language. There are young minds present.”

“What? Like who?”

“Mimic is only a few weeks old at this point,” Bahn said quietly. “You wouldn’t swear around a baby, would you?”

“I especially swear around babies,” Gonzales assured them. “They don’t understand and they have an affinity for puking on my clothes.”

“If it makes you feel better,” Mimic said from the corner of the room where she was curled in a pop-out chair. “I’ve read much worse on what you call the ‘net’.”

“See? I’m not corrupting any innocents here.”

“Well, in any case,” Ciangi said, returning to her work. “I’ll stick to my creative expletives, thank you very much.

“You’re welcome.”

“Whatever.” She rolled her eyes but continued to concentrate on her work. “Give me that mini-field generator please.” I passed her the tool she needed then returned to my station where I could run to any of the three in just a few short steps.

“Crap!” This time it was Bahn who was reeling back from his post, a small, blue fire bursting into being on the crystal adaptor he was working on.

I was over in less than a blink, whipping out my pocket extinguisher and spraying the blaze until it was no more. After that, my coolant cleaner quickly dissolved the thick white foam that the extinguisher produced. Once I was sure everything was copasetic and not combusting, I returned to my post.

“This isn’t working,” the taller of the coin twins said, pulling at his long ponytail. “We shouldn’t be getting this many overloads just doing simple respecs. We haven’t even gotten to a propulsion test yet. Or the dampeners!”

“Do you have a suggestion?” Gonzales asked, for once not snarky as she stood as well, wiping engineering lubricant from her hands. “Because my specialty is so far away from this, it might as well be on the other side of that wormhole. The only thing I’m good for right now is following directions.”

“By all means, this should be working,” Ciangi said, setting down her tools as well. “I just can’t figure out why we’re getting so many sparks. I feel like once we build the dampening system, it will fix this issue, but we can’t build a dampening system if we can’t even get the adaptors to work.”

The three of them stood there, contemplating, while I looked between them, uncertain if they were serious. After a few stressful seconds, I cleared my throat tentatively.

“What’s up, Higgens?” Gonzales asked, eyes looking to me curiously.

“Uh, if I’m understanding you all correctly, the only issue is that the current power level is too much for the repairs to handle until the whole system is in place?”

“That’s the current theory, yeah.” I looked around one more time, sure they were playing some kind of trick on me. “What is it? You’ve got a funny expression on your face. Well, funnier than usual.”

“Gonzales, be nice.” Ciangi scolded.

“What? He knows I’m just playing around. We got that repartee, ya know.”

“It’s just, I, uh… If that’s the issue, why don’t we just, uh…shut off the power?”

“Shut off the power? But without that, there won’t be any life support, or gravity field, or anything really.”

“So?” I shrugged. “I know I’ve read about engineers working in space before. This would essentially be the same thing, wouldn’t it? An artificial vacuum is still a vacuum.”

The three were silent for a long moment, exchanging glances that I couldn’t interpret.

“I believe I have also read about such things,” Mimic added softly. Soft was about the only volume level she could generate anymore. “It is how space stations tend to outer damage of ships, if I am not mistaken.”

“Yeah, and it also happens to be incredibly dangerous and require two years of schooling and an internship…in addition to what we went through as mechanical engineers.”

“Then again,” Gonzales said, eyeing me with a smirk. “It’s definitely a valid option. And perhaps the best one we’ve had about the problem.”

“We’ve only been discussing the problem for three minutes,” Ciangi. “Perhaps we should spend a bit more time researching before jumping to the most dangerous conclusion?”

“Discussing it out loud,” Gonzales corrected. “But you know it’s been in the back of your mind ever since we started synthesizing the crystals we need.”

“That isn’t necessarily true.”

Gonzales raised an eyebrow and crossed to my side.

After just a few beats, Ciangi sighed. “Alright. So maybe it was a couple of hours after the first time my hair caught fire. But still, I’m not sure that this is the best course of action.”

“That’s alright,” I said, holding my hands up in a sign of peace. “We’re civilized people here. How about we compromise? Take a few hours, maybe even sleep on it. If you can think of a better idea, let’s do that first. But if you can’t…”

“Then it’s time to make an artificial vacuum!” Gonzales said, probably a bit too cheerfully.

Bahn nodded, coming up beside his shorter counterpart. “That sounds like a fair compromise to me.”

“Good. Then let’s all take a break for now.” I held out my hand to Mimic, who slowly shuffled over with me. “Of course, if any of you decide on something before tonight, feel free to speed along the process. We don’t have much time.”

“Of course. Stay by the comms, everyone. Hopefully, this will be our last night floating in this nowhere land.”

“Be safe, everyone.”

And with that, we all went our separate ways, busy with our own thoughts. Mimic and I headed back to our room, where she lay down with a rasping gasp.

“I’m worried about you,” I murmured, sitting in the chair across from her bunk.

“I am fine.”

“I know that you’re not.”

“I know as well, but I have read that a specific response is not what is expected upon such an inquiry, but rather a general assurance of positivity.”

“I guess usually, yeah, but I mean it. I’m worried about you. I see the pain you’re in.”

“Unfortunate. I was trying not to telegraph it.”

“You don’t have to hide it, though. That probably takes even more energy. You don’t have to pretend to be fine.”

“I… I will try to keep that in mind.”

“Good. You should get some rest while you can.”

“And what of you?”

I smiled and pulled out my datalog. “I have some research to do.”

6

Creating a Void

“Higgens!”

I groaned, unwilling to open my eyes or lift my head.

“Higgens! I don’t know what you’re doing in there, but I’m about to break the door down myself if you don’t get up and let me in!”

That sounded serious.

Groggily, I lifted my head and tried to take inventory of my surrounding. I was still in the bunk that Mimic and I had claimed for ourselves, where apparently, I had fallen asleep sitting up and slumped forward against the wall. My shapeshifting companion had once again reverted to her black and spikey self, taking up one of the bunks in its entirely.

She needed all the rest she could get, so I knew I needed to get to the door before whoever was banging on the other side woke her. Since when had I locked it anyway? I didn’t remember doing so.

“I’m coming!” I hissed, fighting my way to my feet. My head spun for a moment, but I managed to recover and make it to the door before anyone could do any kicking in. I blinked in confusion as I saw the engineering trio on the other side, looking bright-eyed and in agreement.

“What’s going on?” I asked quietly.

“We’ve made up our minds a little early, and there’s no time to waste.” Gonzales grabbed my wrist and pulled me out into the hall. “So, rise and shine, sleepyhead, it’s time for your very first try at engineering in a vacuum!”

I tried to verbalize objections, but my brain wasn’t quite keeping up with the situation. I had never been much of a morning person, and I was even less of a four-in-the-morning type of person.

“But if we’re killing the power and life support to the whole ship, don’t we need to wake up Mimic?”

“There’s plenty of preparation and suiting up that has to take place beforehand, so we thought it best if she rested while she could,” Gonzales assured me. “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of her once it’s time.”

“Okay, that’s good. But can we stop for some coffee along the way?”

‘Really? I never thought of you as much of a java drinker.”

“I’m not. Sleep is always superior, but when it’s in short supply, I’ll take caffeine as a substitute.”

“Gotcha. Well, I think we can arrange that.”

They changed our course toward the cafeteria, and a few minutes later, I had a steaming cappuccino right in front of me.

The hot drink did indeed help, soothing over my frayed nerves and overworked synapses. I felt myself start to feel less dead and ready to do the impossible.

Well, impossible for me. Apparently not so much for my engineering friends. And yet, they felt that they needed me, so there was that.

I didn’t have much time to contemplate whether I was overestimating my worth or not, because soon they were hauling me toward the engine room. From there my day devolved into a frenzy of sealing leaks, setting up oxygen tanks and emergency suit repair kits. From there it was making sure that our envirosuits had every possible nick or tear patched up and reinforced.

By the time we were ready for the big shutdown, it was somewhere around ten o’clock and I was excited and nervous and all sorts of conflicting feelings combined into one little body.

Or maybe that was the caffeine. I had never been allowed to have it when I was younger and now I remembered why. It made me…twitchy. Like all of my nerves were standing on end and my fingertips were about a half inch longer than they should be.

“You wanna go get your BFF, or shall I?”

I looked up from the gap I was sealing to see Gonzales standing over me with another coffee in hand. “You sure?”

“Yup. Grab both your suits and haul your hindquarters down to her. Once she’s in here, we’ll do the final seal and then turn off the engines and have a go at this very dangerous plan of yours.”

“I don’t know about it being my plan.”

“Hey, take credit for your accomplishments,” she said, helping me up and handing me the warm drink. “This is a good idea, friend. And one we probably wouldn’t have thought of on our own. Sometimes you need to think outside the box and that’s exactly what you did.”

“You really think so?”

“Of course. I never say what I don’t think. That’s why I have eleven write-ups on my record and get paid ten thousand credits less than the coin twins.”

“That seems excessive.”

“And so is my attitude, apparently.” She patted my back while simultaneously shoving me out of the room. “Now go get sleeping beauty and make sure she’s suited up before she withers away. I’ve always wanted to save a damsel in distress, and this is the closest chance I’m ever going to get.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” I murmured before turning and going to do as she said.

“Are we ready?” I asked, probably for the fifteenth time as the five of us stood in a semi-circle, the engine controls in front of us.

“I mean, as ready as we could ever be. You’ve got the most out-of-ship experience of any of us,” Gonzales said.

“Yeah, don’t remind me of that. I’ve been on a handful of hull cleanups and that’s it. I haven’t even repaired a rupture from the outside.”

“Shush, positivity only please.”

“Actually, we want to retain a neutral state as much as possible, lest we spark some sort of reaction in our vacuum,” Bahn laughed.

Gonzales sighed. “Your puns are as amazing as ever, Bahn. At least if we all die in a horrible explosion, I will never have to hear one again.”

“Just for that, I’m specifically going to haunt you.”

“Does it work that way? If we’re both dead, you can’t, like, attach your spirit to mine, can you?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to many dead people.”

“Guys, back on topic.” I took another deep breath. “Ready?”

“Ready. Kill the power, Higgens.”

I reached over to the side of the console that was my responsibility and turned several dials to the settings Ciangi had made sure were drilled in my head. The rest of the team did so as well, with only Mimic not participating.

No, she was strapped down in a corner with several fire extinguishers beside her in case of an emergency. I hoped that she didn’t feel left out, but she was so weak, and so tired, we thought it was the best way to keep her both occupied and safe.

I felt my weight start to shift almost immediately. It wasn’t full-on, gravity-less floating, but there was a certain feeling of constantly tipping forward. I also heard the fire doors closing all around us, sealing off the engine room from the rest of the ship.

And finally, there was the steady hiss of air as Bahn set the environmental controls to flush the atmosphere of the room.

We stood there for several moments, waiting for everything to be just right before we moved into action.

Once our feet started to lift from the ground, Ciangi hit a button on the large countdown holoscreen we had set up on one of the datalogs, and we got to work.

First was pressing the code into our envirosuit’s number-pad on the arm which would engage the magnetic function of our boots. Once we were all safely adhered to the floor, we went about doing our parts.

For once, I didn’t let my anxiety or self-doubt distract me. I had a job to do and I was not going to be swayed.

“Welder.”

I crossed to one of the tool stations we had set up, grabbing the tool and getting it to Gonzales as quickly as I could. She took it and started setting one of the capacitors, the tip glowing ionic-blue.

“I need a sprocket clamp.” This time it was Bahn.

I bounded over to the table once again and fetched that tool too.

“Welder done.”

Back to Gonzales to grab the tool and put it on the table for the next person who needed it.

The next five hours dissolved into a sort of dance as I moved between the three. I had to be careful not to bump into anything or get them the wrong tools, lest someone make a mistake that ended with the death of everyone.

There wasn’t any talk beyond the orders for tools and various swears as close calls or drops happened. It was tense, it was nerve-wracking, and I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

I nearly jumped out of my skin when Bahn uttered an actual sentence. “Did you finish the dampener installation over there?”

“Just completing it now,” Ciangi answered, standing up from where she had been crouching.

“Gonzales, how are those sprockets coming along?” Bahn asked.

“On the last one now.”

The tallest of the engineers took a deep breath, then nodded. “I…I think we’ve done it.”

“What? Really? You finished installing all the new crystals and making sure the system hasn’t rejected them?”

“So far, all of my tests are coming back successful. The only thing left to do is power up the system and see if it works.”

‘Really?” I asked worriedly. “Just power on the system? Isn’t there a safe way to go about this that doesn’t involve all of us exploding?”

“Sure, but usually it requires remote activation while we stand on the deck of a comfy space station,” Bahn said. “You see any of those around here?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

“Right. So, this is a kind of do-or-die thing, but I’m putting my money on the do part.”

“That’s an easy bet to make,” Ciangi cracked. “If you lose, no one can collect the bet from you.”

“And that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it?”

“Alright then,” I said, cutting into what I sensed was another round of banter. “Let’s bring the systems online.”

“Right-o.”

The four of us lined up in the same order that we had started this whole project with, each pressing the dials, punching in the codes, or raising the levels of whatever it was our responsibility to do. I watched the others out of the corner of my eye and I had to admit that I had never felt so much like part of a team. They really had needed me for their plan to work. Well, my plan, apparently.

But still, even with those pleasant feelings and affirmations flowing through me, I couldn’t help but feel like we were counting down to our possible demise as soon as a single spark of energy shot through our jury-rigged system.

What happened before played in reverse, with our weight returning to us in waves, air hissing back into the room, and then the fire walls slowly sliding up until the engine room was back to its proper state.

“Should we be raising those so soon?” I asked. “Seems a bit self-assured, don’t you think?”

“Can’t help it,” Gonzales assured me. “In order to bring this room back to its status quo, we have to pull them up. They’ll come back down if they need to, but there’s not going to be any reason to. Right, guys?”

“If you say so,” Ciangi answered with a shrug. “I prefer not to jinx things, so I will just say that our preparations should be adequate.”

“That’s a fantastic assurance,” I remarked before crossing over to Mimic’s chair and unbuckling her. “You ready to go home?”

“Yes, very much so,” she said, voice low and warbling, as if she was a sim that’s memory crystal had been corrupted.

“Then let’s get to the bridge,” Gonzales said, coming up on the opposite side and draping one of Mimic’s arms over her shoulders. “We’ve got a wormhole to jump.”

We made our way down the hall and sat ourselves right back into our flight formation. Mimi and I in the back, Gonzales at the helm, Ciangi on the scanners and Bahn on the navigation array. We were silent yet again as we prepared to put our work to the test, and I gripped Mimic’s hand tightly.

“Here goes nothing,” Gonzales muttered, punching in the engine codes and gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles.

Like usual, there was a moment of quiet while we waited for the mechanical parts of the ship to catch up. That second seemed to stretch on forever, containing both our salvation or our deaths at the head of a pin.

And then…the engines hummed to life and we were gliding forward, whipping through space like we hadn’t just been floating listlessly for over a week.

“Woohoo!” Gonzales yelled, kicking her feet against the underside of the console. “We did it!”

“I wouldn’t celebrate just yet,” Bahn countered. “We still have to make it through the wormhole itself.”

“Don’t worry about it,” the weapons engineer said with a manic grin. “I’ve got a good feeling about this. But just in case, everyone should hold on real tight.”

I didn’t need a second warning, bracing my feet and clasping the armrest with my free hand as we burst through the horizon of the fold in space.

Just like before, we were enveloped in an acid-induced collection of colors and lights, all winding around us like a child’s finger-painting that radiated with neon and some other nuclear material. The swirling brightness of it all hurt my eyes, and I turned my head away only to see Mimi struggling in her chair.

Her face was shifting and warping before my eyes, bones rearranging themselves around her face in real time. It was certainly startling, but most of all, it was worrying. Was she okay? I couldn’t read her expression through the quickly changing landscape of her face and she wasn’t making any sound to indicate whether she was in pain or not.

I tried to open my mouth to call to her, but I couldn’t get my jaw muscles to cooperate. There was too much force exerting itself on my face. I could feel my skin pulling back and my eyelids struggling to even blink.

My whole world was reduced to trying to keep my skull from batting back and forth on my headrest, and my neck was screaming in protest. It did not appreciate the sudden and intense workout, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

And then it stopped.

There was no warning, no automated voice from the computer to tell us that we were about to have a reprieve, just one moment we were in the most realistic rollercoaster sim of our lives, and then we were being shot into the unnatural calm of space.

That lasted all of ten seconds before we had to dodge an asteroid.

Gonzales set out a string of curses that I hadn’t ever imagined before, gripping the controls of the ship and piloting us through the suddenly very crowded sector of space we had shot into.

We probably should have remembered how close our little wrinkle in the fabric of reality was to a potentially lethal asteroid field, but we all make mistakes from time to time.

Hopefully this one wouldn’t kill us.

Compared to the violent, nerve-wracking experience that was wormhole jumping without the appropriate tethering technology, the field passed quickly and easily, only one managing to lightly score one of our sides. Gonzales killed the power when we were on the other side and let out a long breath.

“That was fun,” she said, shooting a shaky smile to the rest of us.

“Yes, it was,” I replied. “Now let’s go get Mimic something to eat.”

7

Bon Appetite, it’s Dinner and a Show

It didn’t take us long to get back to a bit of space that had chunks of what had once been Mimic’s home floating through it. Seeing the bits and bobs of people-sized chunks of rock reminded me just how much we had chewed up and processed what might have been a flourishing civilization. Sure, they were primitive in the fact that they didn’t seem to have a concept of time, or aging, or technology, or tools, but they definitely knew they were alive, and they had a community enough for Mimic to say we had killed her family.

They were a people and we had basically drilled them to bits for our own greed.

“Get me to the airlock,” Mimic whimpered, her voice a lilting sigh.

I obeyed instantly, unbuckling her from the safety restraints and helping her to her feet. I could feel her shaking through my grip as I guided her to the airlock at the back of the ship. By the time we reached it, she was practically vibrating in my arms, not unlike our ship going through the wormhole.

“Stand back,” she murmured, trying to press me to the wall. “I’ll be all right.”

I wanted to tell her that I could protect her, but I needed to trust that she knew how to take care of herself. I stepped to the side, wrapping my arm through one of the safety straps attached to the wall.

With a strength I could never fathom, Mimi slowly peeled her envirosuit off, placing it in one of the lockers before walking to the edge of the lock. With a pale, trembling hand, she pressed the button that opened the seal and she was yanked into space.

I had to bite back a shout of worry. She knew what she was doing. She knew what she was doing.

But as much as I repeated that mantra to myself, the five or so seconds it took the cabin to completely depressurize had me riddled with worry about whether she was safe or not. As soon as the insistent yanking ceased and I was returned to my feet once more, I walked to the edge of the lock and peered out.

She was in one piece, thank goodness, albeit not a human piece. I watched her, black, spikey and shifting, jump from rock to rock, boring into the celestial objects and taking out whatever nourishment she needed.

I could almost see her regaining strength with every passing moment. Her angles grew more angular, her edges sharper, her inky, depthless blackness more and more black. And suddenly, all the pain, all the fear, all the running for our lives was worth it.

Mimic was safe. She had food. We could continue on our journey to find the rest of her peop—

“Uh, Higgens, where’s Mimi?” Gonzalez said, appearing suddenly.

“Out in space, feeding. Why?”

“Get her back on the ship right now.”

“What? Why? She’s hardly had enough time to feed.”

“Yeah, I get that might be the case, but guess what’s big and bad and just showed up on our scanner’s screen?”

“Giomatti?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Are you serious? So he just kept the whole crew floating in space for a whole week without calling in backup?”

“Well…now that I look at the readings, according to this solar calendar, we’ve been gone a day and a half.”

“What? How’s that possible?”

“I dunno. Folds in space, time is relative, the unexpected repercussions of untethered wormhole travel, you tell me. Point being, we lucked out that he hasn’t had enough time for backup to get here, but we’re going to be decidedly unlucky if he catches us with our airlock open and Mimic out playing with the rocks.”

“Right. I’ll try to get her attention.”

“Good. And I would hurry.”

I knew that calling out to her wouldn’t do any good. It wasn’t like sound traveled through space very well and my older series of envirosuit didn’t exactly have a speaker system built into it.

So, I tried waving emphatically, moving my arms about my head like a maniac. When that didn’t work, I decided to take a leap of faith, as it were.

It was impossible to take a running jump with the magnetic boots, but I did my best. With all the effort I could muster, I launched myself into space.

“Mimi!”

My shapeshifter of a friend jerked up, and I swore she was looking at me. The next thing I knew, she was bounding across the rocks until I was caught between her tines, then I was quickly shuttled right back to the airlock.

Mimic shifted back into the form that I had come to know, but much brighter-eyed and blushing. She slammed the button to close the door and re-initiated the pressurization of the cabin.

“What’s going on?” she snapped as soon as there was enough atmosphere in the room to carry her voice to me.

“Giomatti’s here,” I answered, finally taking off my envirosuit’s helmet. “But I think I might have a bit of a plan.” I looked down at my hands where I was holding the cherry-red piece of equipment. “I probably shouldn’t have taken this off.”

I had never really understood the phrase ‘sweating bullets’ before. They were solid, metal projectiles used on ancient Earth to maim and murder. That didn’t seem to have anything to do with sweating.

However, as I looked at all the displays, buttons, bits and bobs in front of me, I suddenly realized exactly what it meant. I was definitely in a cold sweat, my heart pounding a mile a minute while I rehearsed the steps of my plan again and again in my head.

It was crazy. Impossible, really. Yet I believed in it, and that was why I was sitting in the bridge of our little stolen ship, waiting for the message that I knew Giomatti couldn’t resist sending.

It came as soon as he was within range, his face showing up as the holo-display activated. It wasn’t pleasant seeing his visage again, even if it was slightly purpled from when I had given him what he had coming. His brows were furrowed with the rage that he was so comfortable with and I could practically feel his spittle as the holographic versions of it tried to spray into the room.

“Well, well, well, and you thought you were so clever that you could just steal government property and get away through one of the most dangerous sectors of space without any damage.”

He was speaking, of course, about the readings his ship was getting about ours. Environmental power was at a minimum, only thrusters were engaged and there were no real engine capabilities. Granted, he didn’t know that all of that was intentional, but I wanted to keep it that way.

“What’s that? Too much of a coward to show your face. I suppose that’s the best I can expect from a janitor and three idiots who somehow went through finer education without learning what the word treachery means.”

I responded quickly, pressing a couple of buttons and punching in an input code. Looking down at one of my screens, I could see the image that we were relaying to them. Gonzales was sitting in the pilot’s chair, as usual, and everyone else was seated toward the back.

“We surrender,” Gonzales said, sounding utterly defeated. “We’re out of food, we’re out of supplies, we’re out of power. You get it? You win. Now come board us and take your prisoner. We just ask that our trials be quick.”

“And what’s to prevent me from blasting you to bits the moment you’re in custody?”

“Look, we can blow up the ship now and take your precious, shapeshifting paycheck down with us. Or, you can be a decent human being for once and take us into custody so you can go down in history books as the amazing man who discovered new life. We’ll even back you up with some story about how you found her and we were jealous of your payday or something. You’ll be so much more credible with some good ole bad guys in your story.”

“Fine. Prepare for boarding.”

I cut off our video feed and got up, quickly running back to the airlock. Slamming the button, I let it suck me out into space just like it had done to Mimic an hour earlier.

I floated listlessly for a moment, and it was peaceful in the utter quiet of the void, but then I realized I had a job to do and I engaged the thruster pack Bahn had Ciangi rig for me, flying toward the largest asteroid.

I killed my speed once I reached the shelter and was instantly greeted by my four companions.

“Good job,” Ciangi whispered through our comms. “Still don’t know why you insisted on being the one to stay behind and play the video, but not bad.”

“Because,” I answered slowly, peeking out from behind the other side of the rock, “if something were to go awry, you three could still get Mimic to her people. I’m expendable.”

“I don’t really agree with that,” Bahn said. “But I sense that this is not the time to address that. According to my sensors, the ship is approaching.”

“Alright, engage thrusters but make sure to keep your speed natural. We want to guide this rock to where we need it, not obviously scoot it into their sensor range.”

We all shared a nod, then we were moving forward.

My heart was pounding in my ears as we pushed, our thrusters propelling us forward. It was slow, but it was a natural movement, and one we needed for cover to get close enough to Giomatti’s ship. If we tried to fly for it outright, we would be picked off one by one with blaster bolts. Ergo, our rocky disguise.

I watched as Giomatti’s ship approached ours, locking on with a short-range tractor beam and sending out several ships not too different from our own stolen one. They converged on it, then I saw little dots beginning to do their own spacewalk to try and board our vessel.

“Alright, kick it into overdrive now. I’m sure they’re distracted.”

We all punched our thrusters to full speed and rocketed forward. We said nothing as we quickly approached Giomatti’s ship until we were finally close enough to ditch our cover.

“Now!” I ordered.

As one, we all pushed ourselves upward, and for a moment, we were completely unattached to anything, just free-floating through space with only our momentum to propel us.

But then we collided with the side of the ship, and I gripped one of the handholds before pulling myself to a maintenance hatch. With bated breath, I punched a code into the door. If Giomatti was smart, he would have deactivated each and every code I had been given for taking care of the ship.

But, as the door beeped then popped open, I realized that Giomatti wasn’t very smart at all.

“Everyone in,” I ordered. “We’re almost to the end of all this.”

“From your word to God’s ear,” Gonzales murmured, diving in and catching the ladder into a pressurizing room.

Once we were all inside, I closed the hatch, which allowed us to bring the atmosphere back into the room.

“So, everyone ready for their next parts?”

Ciangi nodded emphatically, her curls bouncing around her head now that she was freed from her envirosuit helmet. “Bahn and I will go set up the countdown, you and Mimic handle the broadcast and Giomatti. Gonzales will arrange the escape pod.”

“You know when you say it like that, it sounds so easy,” the weapons engineer said with a smirk. “But in case I never see any of you again, it’s been great.” She gave a little bow then shimmied down the opening in the floor that led to what had once been my floor. The coin twins gave Mimic and I a reassuring pat before exiting as well.

“You ready?” I asked.

“Yes. I’m quite anxious to get this over with before it backfires.”

“What, you don’t think my plan will work?”

“No, I have the greatest of faith in you,” Mimic assured me. “I just do not trust our luck.”

“I dunno, we made it to the end of the universe and back without too much trouble. I would say our luck is pretty amazing.”

“Yes, but perhaps we have used up too much of it.” She shucked the last of her envirosuit to the side. “Come. We have a genius plan to enact.”

I allowed myself a dry laugh before following her out. Together, we found the right maintenance tunnel and crawled in. Speed was of the essence. If my estimate was right, the crew that had been sent to board us was reaching the entrance hatch of the ship. From there, it would take them about a minute to walk to the bridge, and then five maximum to cut through the thick, fireproof doors that were currently enclosing the room that we were supposed to be in.

If our plan didn’t finish before then, the jig was up.

Which was troubling considering everything hinged on Giomatti assuming we were never going to be a problem again and hadn’t bothered to seal off the same hatch that let me sneak onto the bridge when I had rescued Mimic the first time.

I didn’t try to think about it as we crawled along. He was an arrogant man and had seen us escape into certain death. There was no way he would have the foresight to take precautions to make sure that we couldn’t pull the same move twice.

We reached the junction in question and sure enough, there was nothing there.

“You were right,” Mimic said, “he didn’t fix it.”

“Hold on,” I warned. “This could be a trap.”

“It could. But we won’t know until we try.”

“Fair enough.”

And so, we kept crawling forward, going as quietly as possible until we were just on the other side of the hatch. I could hear him talking emphatically about what he was going to do to us, which meant he probably wasn’t alone.

“Let me handle this,” Mimic said, squeezing past me to press herself against the panel. “You might want to scoot back a bit.”

I did, and she began to shift almost immediately. Her form began to melt, expanding in the very narrow maintenance tunnel until there barely was enough room for me.

Then she struck with full force, bursting from the door with a virulence that I couldn’t hope to match. I heard blaster fire, screams, and a shout for the alarms, and then sudden quiet.

“You can come out now. It’s safe.”

Carefully, I crawled out of the tunnel and took inventory of the bridge. There were three men, including Giomatti, all unconscious and looking quite battered.

“They are alive,” Mimic said calmly, crossing to the console.

“That’s good to know.”

“Can you hold Giomatti up for me? It will be easier with such a close example.”

I did as she asked, supporting the short, portly man. In a gross display of moving flesh, Mimic’s features began to rearrange until she was an exact replica of what had to be the most unpleasant boss I had ever had.

“Make sure you’re out of view,” she said in a perfect match of Giomatti’s voice. “Hopefully, Cindy and Ben will sound the alarm at any moment.”

“Who the hell are they?”

She looked at me blankly, which was a disturbing look coming from my ex-boss’s face. “You have been on a ship with them over a week. They are the siblings that do not share features.”

“Oh, you mean the coin twins?”

“Ah yes, I believe that is what you call them.”

Before I could go into a long explanation about given names, figurative twins, or anything else, an ear-splitting alarm cut through the air. I resisted the urge to clap my hands over my ears and dragged Giomatti’s body out of the way of the holo-reader while Mimi walked over to stand in front of it.

With the ease of someone who had been doing it for years, she activated the machine and soon was projecting Giomatti’s face through the entire ship.

“Attention crew, I have received an alert from the engine room that our ship has been compromised from previous interference by the traitors. We’re going to have to evacuate to the ships currently apprehending them. Everyone get to the escape pods; the readings are giving us less than three minutes.”

Just as I predicted, pandemonium erupted on the ship. Mimic didn’t seem to pay it much attention, however, and was already shifting to a new, beefier form.

“I’ll take these guys to an escape pod,” she said, piling them onto what had previously been a meal cart. “You get the ship ready.” She paused at the door and sent me a smile. “And be safe, of course.”

“I’ll try my best.”

She disappeared through the door and I ran to the console. We were down to the last few minutes we had before our cover was blown. Once more, I was sweating those proverbial bullets as my stomach went through multiple aerial maneuvers.

“How’s it going up there?” I nearly jumped out of my skin as Ciangi’s voice crackled through our personal coms. “I’m guessing you heard we did our part.”

“Mimic is taking a trip to the escape pods. She’ll tell us when the last one has exited and we’ll make our jump.”

“You know we only have about a minute, at most, before they get into our old bridge and know that something’s up.”

“I’m aware.”

Then, thankfully, Mimic’s voice came over the comm. “It is done. I just sent them off to our old ship’s coordinates.

“Then what are you waiting for? Punch it, broom-boy.”

“Brooms haven’t been used in general maintenance work in several centuries,” I corrected, pressing the buttons like I had been taught, engaging the engines and gripping the flight controls. “I’ll give you a whole history on it when this is all over. But for now…” I slammed on the accelerator controls and we shot forward at an impossible speed. “I would recommend holding on.”

I couldn’t resist a whoop as we leapt forward into space. We had done it! Against all odds, we had hijacked one of the biggest mining vessels in the galaxy and were now rocketing through space.

I kept all of my concentration on flying until a gentle hand patted my shoulder. I jumped, before realizing it was Gonzales coming to take over.

“You were amazing,” she said, sliding into my seat as soon as I stood.

“Thanks.” I looked to the door to see Mimic standing there, back in her typical human form. “We did it,” I said quietly, almost unbelieving as I saw her looking both refreshed and triumphant.

“You did it,” she said, walking forward to take my hand. “I thought finding other sentient life was amazing, but it turns out that pales in comparison to finding you. You have done so many impossible, amazing things.” We both turned to look out of the nav-window, eyeing the beauty and terror that was space. “And you will continue to do even more amazing things.” She squeezed my hand. “If anyone will get me home, it’s you.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“Of course. I believe in you, Higgens. And that’s what friends are for.”

II

The Journey Home

8

Waking Up Lonely

I woke up in my own bed in what felt like the first time in forever.

In reality, it had been just under a week, but what a terribly long and draining week it had been. Between jumping through wormholes, planet hopping and the like, I was sure that I would never see my little home away from home again.

And yet…here I was.

I looked to my empty bed then the empty floor, sighing when I realized that Mimic was nowhere to be seen.

She must be out eating again.

Ever since they were sure that we were in the clear, she had been exiting the ship every few hours to gorge herself on whatever it was she actually ate.

I couldn’t blame her, though. After what we had been through, it was completely apparent that she had been at starvation’s doorstep. If I was her, I would do much of the same.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel a bit nervous that she was out of sight. Getting dressed, I headed out of my room and went straight to the lift.

The ride was silent, but when the doors opened, Gonzales was standing there, dressed in civvies.

“Hey there, Higgy! I was just coming to get you.”

I blinked at her, not nearly awake enough for this strange change-up. With all the upheaval in my life, I liked a little order, and seeing her out of the mandatory uniform of the mining shaft was making me uncomfortable.

“What?” She asked. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

“Uh, I, uh… What are you wearing? It’s different?”

She tilted her head back and laughed. “That’s right, you’ve never seen me in my civvies.” She spun in a circle, showing off her tank top and athletic pants. “I figured there are no more regulations, so I’m not going to be in that stiff, rough jumpsuit unless I’m doing some sort of actual physical work.”

“Oh, that makes sense.”

“Yeah! That’s my point exactly. It just makes sense. Why don’t you dress in your civvies too?”

I blinked at her, my brain trying to catch up with everything that was happening. I guessed I really had been much more wiped out from our cross-universe trek than I had thought and it was taking me a bit to shake off the last dregs of grogginess. “My civvies?”

“Um, is there an echo in here? But yeah, I feel like I only ever see you in your jumpsuit or envirosuit. Now’s your chance to relax, man.”

“I, uh, I don’t have any civvies.”

Now it was her turn for her eyes to go wide. “You don’t have any civvies?”

I shook my head. “Just my pajamas, and I’d rather not run around in those. That would definitely confuse my brain.”

“Dude, I do not believe that. I’ve seen you in a tank top before!”

“Well, yeah,” I answered, unzipping the top of my suit a bit. “I wear them under here with my boxers. Sometimes I like to pull the top half of the jumpsuit down and tie the arms around my waist. But mostly, I like the feel of it being all the way up.”

She looked like she was having trouble comprehending what I was saying. “You…like the feeling of the jumpsuit?”

“Yeah,” I said, not sure if I should tell her anymore, afraid of her judgment. She looked at me like she was waiting for me to finish my sentence so I did. “It’s very secure. And if I get anxious, I can just rub my fingers along the different textures of it and it really helps ground me.”

“I see.” She continued to stare at me for a couple more moments before nodding. “People like what they like, I guess, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Anyway, the whole reason I’m down here is I thought you might want to see what your girl is doing. It’s pretty darn adorable.”

“She’s not my girl,” I protested. “But where?”

“Really? You guys act like it. And she’s in space, of course, but the best place to see is the officer rec-room. Come on.”

She grabbed my wrist and I let her tote me off. “We don’t act like anything other than friends. I never understood why people always have to turn everything into a romance like it’s the only important type of relationship there is.”

“Whoa, okay there, Socrates. Didn’t mean to imply that regular ol’ friendship was lacking. After all, we’re friends, right?”

I smiled softly. “I’d like to think so.”

“Rock on.”

She finished leading me off to the rec-room and then stopped in front of a long line of windows. Sure enough, Mimic was outside, happily hopping from comet to comet. And, considering that these were full, un-mined comets that were nearly the size of an entire town, that was no small feat. I suppose it helped that she was back in her original black and spikey form.

I never thought I would come to identify a featureless, undulating, angular mass as adorable, but there was no other way to classify how its little limbs wiggled and danced while it rolled and ran along the hole-riddled surface of these celestial floating masses. She was full and she was happy, which filled me with a resolute sort of satisfaction while she played.

We watched for much longer than we should have, and eventually, I wondered if we were being vaguely voyeuristic. But in the end, I figured it was more like we were proud older siblings watching our little sister have fun after fighting through some tough stuff. Yeah, that was a much better way to put it.

“Higgens?”

I tore my eyes away from the window to see Gonzales looking at me quite seriously. So much for my theory that we had both been raptly watching Mimic.

“What’s up?”

“Have you ever thought about pursuing engineering seriously?”

I scoffed, her suggestion coming completely out of left field. “Why would I have done that? Even if I could afford it and wasn’t currently a traitor to our race, I would never make it through the program.”

“What? Why do you say that?”

Why was she making me say all this? It should be obvious! “Um, because I’m too stupid. I barely got through the maintenance vocational school, and that’s supposed to be where losers go when they don’t want to be a complete drain on society!”

“Whoa,” the engineer said, holding up both of her palms in what looked like genuine surprise. “I don’t know who drilled that self-hatred into you, but in no way are maintenance workers inferior or stupid. They’re a vital part of the ship. Besides, you’re not dumb! Not that that would affect your value as a person anyway, but I just want you to know you’re not.

Gonzales smiled. “When we were stranded in that other dimension, you picked up the job of wrench monkey faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. And you came in with several ideas right in the clutch. I don’t even think we’d be here if it wasn’t for you.”

“Well, yeah, in several different ways.”

She playfully punched me in the arm. “That’s not what I mean. You know that.”

I shrugged. “I just… I guess… I don’t think I did anything that special.”

She made a clicking sound with her tongue. “Here you are, willing to go to the end of the universe for a friend, but can’t even give yourself a single compliment. You’re a strange one, Higgens.”

“I know, everyone tells me that. It’s one of the reasons Giomatti said he hated me so much.”

“Giomatti was a miserable jerk. You’re fine, Higgens. And nice to boot.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Well, I say that you should look into pursuing an engineering vocation. I think you have a knack for it.”

“I’ll…keep that in mind.”

“Why do I get the feeling that you’re just saying that to be polite and get me off your back?”

“Probably because I am.”

She sighed, but it was tinged in a small bit of laughter. “Fine, be stubborn then. Oh, by the way, did you want to see the progress the twins have been making on the scanner?”

“Of course! And should we still be calling them the twins? They’re not technically related.”

“You picked up on that, huh?” She laughed again as we strolled off toward the engineering bay that the two had taken over. I had gotten the distinct impression that they had mostly been confined to the readout or engine rooms while they were working, so they were relishing having command of all the build-space in the ship. “I think a long time ago, they might have liked it to stop,” she said, referring to Ciangi and Bahn, “but now it’s become part of their identity. They’re another couple where it’s hard to tell if it’s friendship or romance. Sometimes I waffle between being sure of both in a single day.”

“You have an unhealthy preoccupation with pairing up your friends, you know that?”

“Hey, what can I say, I’ve been single for four years and I like to think I see love in the strangest of places.”

I glanced over at Gonzales once more, vastly confused by that statement. From what I could tell, she was a brave, fearless, intelligent, beautiful woman with a banging paycheck. People should have been lining up across the cosmos for her. “How is that possible?”

“How’s what possible?”

“That you’ve been single for so long if you don’t want to be.”

She shrugged. “You know how it is, a lot of people want their honey to be on the same planet as them. They want nightly snuggles, and a girl with long flowing hair who doesn’t beat the crap out of punching bags when she’s angry.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Is it? I can see the need to not want your lover lightyears away, facing unknown dangers and possibly never returning.”

I shrugged. “I guess so. I just wasn’t aware love was so conditional.”

“Everyone has a right to be picky with what relationships they choose to settle into.”

“I guess.” Finally, we reached the engineering room and all the complicated talk of romantic entanglements fell away.

“Hey, guys!” Gonzales said, practically vaulting into the room. “How are my favorite twins?”

Only Ciangi was visible at first, dressed in what looked like a soft summer dress that might have once been a pale lilac but was so spattered with different engineering liquids that it was now somewhere around gray. Her thick blonde curls were pulled into what looked like attempts at pigtails, but looked more like tightly coiled buns.

“We’ve got a good plan in place. I think it’s promising. Right, Bahn?”

In a weird sense of déjà vu, the taller of the twins rolled out from under a console. Did he just like to live under technical spaces or did I just have uncanny timing?

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. But I am…hopeful.”

“Wanna let us in on what has you both thinking positively?” Gonzales asked.

“We just think we’re going to be able to rewire this to some spare crystals we synthesized to boost the power enough to search for Mimic’s genetic makeup. We’ve taken several samples from her which are currently being deconstructed by the analyzer, and Bahn set up a program that should be able to auto-generate much of the algorithms needed for the scanner.”

“That’s fantastic!” I exclaimed. “So once this is all done, you’ll be able to scan whole chunks of space for anything like Mimi?”

“That’s the plan.”

I smiled and nodded, feeling like we were finally progressing. “Awesome. Anything that I can help with?”

“Yes, actually,” Bahn said. “There are about seven hundred and twenty different wires we need to either remove, repurpose, or reroute, so I was wondering if you wanted a bit of a crash course.”

My eyes went wide and I couldn’t help but notice the satisfied smirk on Gonzales’s face. “S-sure. If you think I’d be useful.”

“You’re always useful, Higgens. Now grab a data log, you’re gonna want to write some of this down.”

9

Progress is Progress

I had read plenty of novels on the net in my time and I was always aware of the trope of the narration summarizing highly technical or monotonous endeavors as to not bore the readers. As I cut wire after wire, then dutifully did the readings that the twins needed after every move, I found myself wishing that someone would do that to my own life.

At first, I had been so nervous, terrified of doing something wrong. But after the initial dozen or so cuts, it went right into the mundane.

Mimic sat by dutifully, however, asking questions and listening whenever I grew too bored, and then Ciangi and Bahn both would stop by occasionally to make sure I was on track and didn’t need any help. Our days blended into a bit of a routine, and not an unpleasant one at that, which left me looking less at the calendar and more toward space.

I supposed I should have kept an eye on the alerts just in case Giomatti managed to catch up with us, but that was near impossible. Even if he had somehow convinced his crew to take off after us, they didn’t have the supplies or the means to do anything to the massive mining ship. It wasn’t like they had the advantage of surprise or a shapeshifter like my group had, not to mention that the engineers had taken the time to boost the defenses of the mining ship when they weren’t busy working on the scanner.

“What are you thinking about?” Mimic asked.

I finished cutting the wire I had between my fingers before I looked at her. She was wearing a large, baggy shirt courtesy of Bahn, and tight, synthetic leggings from Gonzales’s collection with the ankles rolled up. I kind of missed her in my oversized jumpsuit, but it seemed I was the only one who liked the thick, durable fabric.

“Nothing important,” I said, handing her the wire then taking the power-cap she handed to me.

“I think everything you worry about is important.”

“That’s because you’re still very new to this whole bipedal, human-esque thing. Everything is fascinating to you. Even things that are not.”

“Perhaps. Or maybe you all have just become too numb to the wonder of…well, everything.”

I laughed lightly. “I guess there’s no way we’ll ever know.”

“Perhaps not,” she murmured. “But I would still like to know your thoughts.”

“Just thinking about Giomatti and how mad he must be.”

She smiled at that, her small face taking on a mischievous expression. “Certainly very angry. He was not a nice man.”

“No, he was not.”

“Higgens?”

“Mimi?” I replied, raising my eyebrow at her.

“We have been friends a good while now, yes? And have survived many things together.”

“Yes, I would say that’s accurate.”

“Then you would answer a question honestly, even if it was uncomfortable?”

“Mimi, what are you getting at?”

“I just…” For the first time in a long while, she seemed at a loss for words. “I’ve read many amazing things on the net interface your kind created. But I have also read many terrible things. Things I still do not want to believe. Wars, and explosions, and murder of millions. I thought perhaps those were just rare tragedies that were not to be expected.

“But then, that man, Giomatti,” Mimic continued. “He was cruel. He wanted to ruin me for profit. He felt absolutely no remorse for the death of my family. He didn’t even seem to realize we were a people, even if we were so different from his own kind.”

I looked to her earnestly, giving her my full attention. I still didn’t know where she was going with this, but I wanted to listen. It sounded like it was important to her, whatever she was formulating. “I think you’re right.”

“Thank you. But that affirmation is not what I need. I know Giomatti is a selfish man. A myopic one, even. And I know you are a good man. Incredible, even. You were willing to give up everything to help me, a stranger, what might have even looked like a monster to you when we first found each other.” I blushed a bit at the praise, but she continued. “But what I need to know is if most humans are like you, or are most humans like him?”

Oh.

Oh.

That was a question indeed, and one that I hadn’t been anticipating. “I… That’s really hard to say. I’ve been told my whole life about how I’m weird, but I don’t know if that’s what makes me kind, or if it’s something else.”

“I understand if you cannot answer with resolute conviction, but I want to know your opinion. I have always valued it and always will, even when I didn’t know enough of your language to communicate that to you.”

“Right. Well, uh, I guess I would say that the majority of people are average. Not necessarily good, not necessarily bad. Just people, doing their best to get by and that’s it. They have the capacity to do great things, but most likely they will not. And then, a much smaller fraction is like Giomatti. They tend to cling to power and do terrible, horrible things in the name of progressing their own means. Then, there’s people like me. We’re not particularly special either, but when we see someone hurt, or when we know that someone needs help, we do everything in our power to aid them. It’s like a scale, where the three of us all balance each other out.”

“So, you’re saying for every Higgens, there’s a Giomatti.”

“I guess so.”

“That’s…terrifying.”

I paused, surprised by her reaction, but then I thought it through. It was pretty daunting to think that for every single selfless, helpful person in the world that there was a person waiting in the wings to take advantage. But then again, for every person who would hurt another for gain, there was someone who wouldn’t stand for injustice right behind them. It was like a cosmic scale of checks and balances.

“I guess it all depends on how you look at it.”

“Or who you choose to surround yourself with,” she countered. “I think I just happen to have lucked out to have run into four very good people.”

I blushed again. “Well, good is subjective, but thank you.”

“Of course, Higgens. You are my friend. I have read that lavishing compliments about positive traits is productive to keeping friends both happy and healthy.”

“Well, it’s safe to say that being your friend makes me very happy.”

“Excellent. Now for the next wire, are you removing it, splicing it, or repurposing?”

“Splicing.”

She nodded and reached to the tray next to her, handing me an ionic welder and then a simple pair of wire-snippers. “Splice away, then.”

“Do you think we did it?” Ciangi asked nervously.

“How would I know?” I asked. “You guys are the experts. Do you think we did it?”

“I don’t want to jinx us.”

“Human friends, it has been just over a month since our escape from Giomatti. I think perhaps the best way to find out if we have indeed done it is to power up the scanner and see if it works.”

The four of us looked at Mimic, who was standing to the side and watching us intently. I had to hand it to her, she certainly was keeping her calm for someone who might or might not be on the edge of being reunited with her people.

“Right. Starting it up. That would be a good way to get this going.” Ciangi took a deep breath. “Bahn, do you have the algorithms loaded?”

“I do.”

“Gonzales, you said the initial power tests went well?”

“Check, my friend.”

“Higgens, you loaded all of the samples into the analyzer?”

“Just like you showed me.”

Ciangi nodded, her small mouth pursing as she went through another mental checklist. It was funny how she had seemed to have taken over as the de facto leader of their little scanner project, as Gonzales had taken over during the planet-hopping section of our journey.

“Okay. Got it. I…I think we’re ready. Bahn, add the power.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The taller of the coin twins reached over to the console and punched in four simple digits that would reveal if all the work we had put in was fruitful or a complete waste of time.

The room filled with whirring and popping as our machine came to life. We all held our collective breaths as we waited to see if it would all end in a fiery explosion.

But it didn’t.

Things lit up and the scanner menu booted just fine on the console, with the loading bar proceeding right on task. It was a tense five minutes, but then, finally, the computer let out a ding.

Calculations Completed.

Then, in a glorious moment of relief, a map of the system we were in projected itself into the center of the room.

Possible matches found within one thousand clicks. Estimated arrival time: nine hours.

“Oh my gosh!” Ciangi cried. “We did it! We actually did it!”

“We…” Mimic’s voice cracked a bit. “We found my people?”

All of our smiles were ridiculously large as I pulled my friend into a hug. “Yeah, Mimi. We did. You ready to go home?”

She let out a long, shuddering sigh and I was pretty sure it was the first time I had seen her show such emotional vulnerability. Or perhaps she was just learning to show her emotions as we did. “Yes, more than anything else.”

“Then let’s take you home, friend.”

10

Over-hyping the Finale

I had a strange combination of emotions as we flew in a beeline right toward the scanner’s destination. A bit of it was a surreal level of accomplishment. After everything that we had been through, some dumb janitor who was born on a backwater colony had managed to not only discover our first definitive proof of alien life, but to reunite her with her people after wrongfully destroying her home.

But at the same time… I was realizing that we were about to drop my best friend on a planet that might not support human life. After all, we weren’t nearly close enough to get an actual reading on its atmosphere. I couldn’t go home either, so was I just going to be stuck in an orbit life, only to occasionally drop down to visit Mimic planet-side with all of her shifter friends? Would she even want to be friends when she was with her people again?

The knot in my stomach only grew as we navigated closer, with more and more worrisome thoughts cropping up. Such as, what was I going to do with my life, would there be room for us on Mimic’s new planet, and what would we do if the scanner turned out to be incorrect and we had to recalibrate?

When it was time to sleep that night, Mimic and I both curled up in my bed, me cocooned in blankets and her just lying there, completely motionless as she always was when she rested. She was looking a little softer these days, less whittled down by the unforgiving clutches of starvation. I found myself staring at her, taking in each and every feature. It was probably a silly thing to do considering her face could change into whatever she wanted at any time, but it didn’t matter. Mimic had changed my life. In no small way either. And now that we could possibly be parting ways, I found myself worrying that I would never see that face again.

But still… I was supposed to be happy for her, right? And I guessed I was, but that happiness was having a hard time keeping up with all the worry and fears. I had spent so much of my life being friendless, and now that I had stalwart companions, I didn’t want to let a single one of them go.

Oh well. It wasn’t like I was going to come to any sort of definitive conclusion before our sleep cycle. We would be arriving at the planet in another four hours, and then the short-range, planetary scanner would find us a landing spot and any preliminary information about the environment that we might need to know.

Once we woke up, it would be the grand finale of our little journey.

…but what if I didn’t want it to end?

“Everyone ready?” Gonzales asked, her fingers hovering over the controls of the landing ship. It was just different enough from the other vessel we had been stranded on for a week for everything to be uncomfortable, like someone had come into my room and moved everything an inch to the left.

“Ready,” Mimic said, practically bouncing in her seat. At least she was happy, and her obvious excitement made me smile as well.

“Alright, shape-shifty-Mcgee, let’s go say hi to your people.”

The engines hummed and then we were gently flying out of the hangar bay. It was certainly much different than our last frantic escape from the ship, but my heart wasn’t beating any less hard. What was waiting for us on this strange new planet?

I supposed I was going to find out very soon.

For the first time since we had met, our flight was neither hurried, tense, or fraught with danger. We descended through the atmosphere without trouble and landed right where the nav had set out for us.

Once the ship was settled, Gonzales hit the proper sequence for a landing rest and then we were all suiting up for our exit.

“I am confused,” Mimic said as the rest of us donned our envirosuits. “I thought the atmosphere was quite livable for humans. Why are you putting on such protections?”

“The atmosphere is livable, but the foliage or fauna could be less than pleasant. You remember that nasty creature you fought off during our first visit? Who says there aren’t bigger ones here?”

“I doubt there are. My people deal with predators…remarkably well.”

“Really?” I asked. “I was under the impression that your people were entirely peaceful.”

“We prefer it that way, but when life does not give us a choice, we will defend ourselves. It’s always a last measure, of course. Mostly, we’re happy if we can just eat. Before I met you, eating was ninety percent of my daily function. The other ten percent was thinking about eating.”

“I can identify with that,” Gonzales said. “Last night, I had this amazing dream about tostones made from Earth-grown plantains. That’s pretty much all I’ve been able to think about today. Oh, and uh, getting you back to your people, of course.”

We all laughed at that before Mimic gave a dutiful nod.

“Yes. It is time. Come, my friends, let’s take this final step of our journey together.”

In a bittersweet gesture, we all joined hands. Standing in a line, the five of us waited for the hangar door to slide open then the ramp to descend before walking forward into the light.

The planet was beautiful, that was for sure. Much different from the comet home we had originally pulverized. It reminded me of pictures I had seen of Earth, lush and green and full of all sorts of animal sounds. Far different from the colony I had been raised on.

“Wow,” Mimic murmured. “This is nothing like my last home.”

“I guess your people have gotten a bit of an upgrade,” Ciangi offered cheerfully.

“Maybe one day, thousands of years ago, one of our space colonies was knocked out of orbit and landed here. My people do not have any form of inter-celestial object communications, so we would have never known. Never…cared, really.”

That last part seemed to bother her, but I wasn’t about to let her put a damper on what should be one of the happiest moments of her life in recent memory. “Hey, none of that now. You’ve found your people. This is a happy day.”

“Right. Supposing I actually find them.”

We looked around, unsure of which direction to go. “Well, east or west then?”

Mimic craned her neck, her eyes flashing several different colors. I guessed that maybe she was changing their structure to view the world in different ways, but she didn’t explain one way or the other before taking off to the east.

We followed her without question, all eyes busy surveying the area while our handheld scanners were set to find deposits of minerals that Mimic could eat. We figured that if her people were anywhere, it would be near food.

We trudged on for hours, saying nothing, seeing everything. The plants were truly beautiful, and my scanner beeped occasionally about edible ones. At least if we were stranded here in permanent exile, we would have plenty of different options for building our own sustainable farm.

I could see it now. The four of us settling into everyday life as we invented different things to make our own mini-colony, visiting Mimic and her shapeshifting relatives at least once a week while we ate totally non-compatible dinners. It was a nice vision, and I couldn’t help but find myself wishing that was exactly how all of this would pan out.

“There!” Mimic cried suddenly, tearing me from my reverie.

I blinked and turned my head to see that she was suddenly dashing off, disappearing between thick, flowered vines. The four of us exchanged looks before tearing after her.

I had no idea where we were going, or what she had seen, but I trusted her, so I sprinted along blindly, envirosuit squeaking as I did.

But then, as suddenly as our chase had started, it ground to a halt and I barely had time to kill my speed to avoid crashing into a suddenly very still Mimic.

“What’s going on?” I asked her.

But her eyes were affixed on something ahead of her. Squinting, I looked into the distance to see some sort of black cliff, shimmering in the light. It was only after several steps that I realized it wasn’t the rock itself that was ebony, but rather the light glinting off of hundreds of thousands of little mimic bodies.

“My gods,” Bahn breathed. “It’s them.”

Mimic let out a screech that sounded like it might have been something in her own language, and ran forward again, arms outstretched. She shifted as she went, until she was once more the large dog-sized version of her dark, miasmic, spikey self.

She reached the base of the mountain in just a few short seconds, us following behind her with massive grins. I could hear her excited chirping even from where I was, while she danced in a small circle. Her joy was obvious, even in such an alien form, and it was entirely infectious.

Except…none of the mini-mimics reacted.

As the four of us humans drew closer, I realized just how small they were. Even smaller than Mimic when I had first met her. They just continued on, marching in a very dedicated line toward something that we couldn’t see.

Joy quickly turned to worry, then to heartbreak as Mimic’s cheerful cries slowly lowered in tone until they were nothing but a shaking warble. I wanted to intervene, but I also knew it wasn’t my place until I was invited.

After several tortuous moments, Mimic slowly shifted back into her human form. “They…they won’t answer me,” she murmured, eyes red with withheld tears. Since when had she learned to cry? What a horrible lesson to have to learn.

“It’s okay,” Ciangi soothed, coming up alongside the alien woman and gently rubbing her arm. “Maybe you guys speak a different language? You said they could have crashed thousands of years ago, right?”

“Yes, but it is like they don’t even see me. They should have some sort of reaction. Even when I couldn’t understand a word of what Higgens was saying, I still knew that he was some sort of strange and terrifying living creature!”

“You thought I was terrifying?”

“Of course. You were a massive giant inside of an even bigger giant that destroyed my home.”

“Fair enough.”

“Maybe it’s not intentional?” Ciangi offered, still trying to be supportive.

“Why don’t we do a cognitive test then?” Gonzales said, picking up a stone before aiming carefully. With a flick of her wrist, she sent it sailing toward a chunk of the mini-mimics a few feet up the mountain.

The rock crashed into them, sending a few scattering, but mostly they just went around it or over it, never questioning what had sent the missile in the first place.

“Yeah, either they’re not capable of recognizing stimulus or they are actively deciding to ignore everything. I’m not sure which is worse.”

“I don’t understand,” Mimic whispered, her voice cracking. “Why are they doing this?”

We didn’t have an answer, but seeing her like this was awful. I walked forward and pulled her into a sturdy hug, wishing her all the happiness that she’d had just moments earlier. “I don’t know, sweetie. But I’m sure this is just a temporary thing. We’ll get you both on the same page, I promise.”

“Perhaps the best solution is to see what they’re all so mindlessly progressing toward,” Bahn said, looking in the direction the little shapeshifters were dutifully marching. “Perhaps they have evolved some sort of hive mentality and our answers will lie at the epicenter of all of this.”

“That’s definitely a theory,” Gonzales said, nodding hopefully. “I like it.”

Mimic nodded, wiping her face before pulling herself from my arms. “Thank you. That sounds like the best idea considering the situation. Let’s go.”

And so, we were marching again.

It was slightly disturbing to walk straight through the mini-mimics, but they paid us absolutely no heed. We could nudge them aside with our shoes, even give them a little air with a gentle scoop with the toe of our boots, and they would pay us absolutely no mind. As soon as they were back on their feet, they would continue their persistent trek upward.

None of us said anything, but perhaps that was because none of us knew what to say. What was there that we could say? After so much work, all the danger we had survived and impossible odds that we had beaten, we had finally found Mimic’s people, only to have it be the most disappointing turn of events since I had learned that Colony Claus wasn’t a real person and didn’t deliver presents to all the good little girls and boys at the solar eclipse.

The sun had sunk far into the sky by the time we reached a large, craggy opening of a cave that all the mimics were pouring into.

“Is it just me or does this seem straight out of a horror sim?” Gonzales asked, dubiously eyeing the dark entrance.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this exact scene,” I answered, raising my arm to press in the code for my head-light to illuminate.

The roughly hewn stone seemed to go down quite a far way, but there, just at the edge of my vision, I saw the walls smooth out and fade into something that looked almost jade in nature.

“Come on, guys,” I said, stepping forward cautiously. “This way.”

“Are you sure?” Ciangi asked, her face pale and her cheeks quite flushed.

But Mimic was already striding forward, her lips tight in a grim line. We didn’t need much other discussion beyond that and went right along after her.

Sure enough, while the cave was completely primitive for the first stretch, less than five minutes later, we passed into something that was anything but.

“What is this?” Gonzales asked, running her hand along the metal-like surface of the walls.

“If I didn’t know better,” Bahn mused, “I would say it looked like the interior hull of a ship.”

“But this isn’t a ship, Bahn. It’s a mountain.”

“Yes,” he answered with a cool shrug. “But was it always?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like. While I agree the idea is improbable, it’s nowhere near impossible. And, as science dictates, once the obvious has been eliminated, the improbable is what to explore next.”

“You know, he has a point,” I said sheepishly, unsure if I should be cutting into all this scientific thought. “Mimi said that what might have happened is one of their comets was knocked into this planet’s gravitational pull and that’s how there are mimics here. What if something knocked into that comet and that’s what caused the sudden change? And, what if that something was a ship?”

“It’s all possible,” Mimic said. “But we won’t know until we go farther.”

“So let’s go farther,” I said with a resolute nod.

The mood grew even more tense as we crept forward. We didn’t want to make too much noise, so that led to another eerie silence as our footsteps echoed through the long, high-tech corridor.

I couldn’t say how long we marched, but time seemed to stretch on forever. We didn’t halt, however, until we suddenly reached a large chamber that was illuminated with a bright, blue light.

We all dropped and crouched instinctively. For being a bunch of eggheads with no military experience, we had some pretty good instincts. Or maybe that was from surviving so many near-misses when we were hopping through the far-side of the galaxy we had accidentally wormholed ourselves to.

The mimics all continued their march past us, continuing up a ramp and finally to what looked like a massive vat not unlike our own mineral containers back on the mining ship. We watched, a bit mesmerized, as one by one they climbed to the top, walked onto a gangway over the vat, and then regurgitated some sort of liquid paste into the container.

“Ew! What the heck!” Gonzales hissed.

“It’s the half-digested form of the minerals we eat,” Mimic explained. “I can smell it from here.”

“And why are they doing that?”

“Normally it is either to offer nourishment to another who is too weak to take in their own food, or to feed younglings. I am guessing it’s neither in this situation.”

Bahn held out his scanner, aiming the reader at the vat. “I think—now, I could be wrong—but this all seems like they’re fueling something.”

“That’s good, right?” Ciangi asked. “Some sort of group effort toward a goal implies sentience.”

“I don’t know…” Mimic admitted, her voice tense. “This is so unlike anything my people would do. I’m afraid I don’t understand. I know evolution is often dictated by environment, but this…this does not seem right.”

Then, as if in response to her comment, a blaring sound ripped through the corridor. All of the aliens froze, including Mimic, shuddering in their spots for the duration of the noise.

I myself had to clap my hands over my ears, the deep, bone shaking siren making my teeth chatter and my head throb. When it finally stopped, I had double vision and had to shake my head vigorously to clear it.

“What was that?” Ciangi asked.

“It was a call,” Mimic answered, eyes locked on something we couldn’t see. “This way.”

Before any of us could object, she was striding forward into the open chamber.

“Mimi! What are you doing?”

“Finding out what’s going on and putting a stop to it.”

Oh. Well, I guessed that answered that.

Unsure of quite what to do, the four of us followed after Mimi, our footsteps much less sure than hers. She strode forward like she knew exactly where she was going, which was as worrying as it was disconcerting.

She didn’t slow even as we exited the chamber, or as we went through another room with another vat that mimics were dumping small, green stones into. And then through more halls and rooms until, finally, she crouched down once more.

“Quiet,” she ordered, finger to her lips.

I didn’t need to be told twice and neither did anybody else on the team. For the second time in a short while, we were creeping forward into the unknown.

My thighs began to ache in earnest, but I couldn’t stand, afraid of giving away our position. All of us sensed that something significant was about to happen, but we weren’t sure if it was good or bad. Any whispered questions to Mimic were only responded to with short shushes. I didn’t know where Mimic had learned that habit either but I wasn’t super thrilled with it.

The hall widened abruptly and we all dodged behind ornate pillars at either side of the opening. Peering past the edge, we saw what basically looked like the shiniest, most holographic bridge I had ever seen.

It was arranged in a circle, what looked like array after array that had once been filled with useful data but were now dark with disuse. A fine layer of dust covered everything, except for a lone figure in the center.

There were no words for what I saw there, and Ciangi let out a short gasp before Bahn covered her mouth.

In the center of the bridge, sitting in a chair that was easily twice my height, was a massive living creature. Somewhat gelatinous in nature, it had rolls and rolls of flesh that dribbled over each other. Its skin was a rotten, sulfurous yellow and the stench rolling from it was just as thick.

I wanted to gag, but I dared not make a noise. Was this the creature who was responsible for the strange antics of the mimics?

It raised a long, claw-tipped hand that glistened with some sort of viscous slime and called up what looked like a strange holo-display. Slowly, laboriously, it pressed in several sequences. When it finished, it let out a wheezing grunt and there was a moment of silence.

Then the horn sounded again.

My hands went over my ears once more and we all struggled not to make noise. Well, except for Mimic of course. She turned to look to us, a rage-filled expression on her face.

“We need to get out of here,” she hissed through the cacophonous alarm. “Now.”

“Why?” Ciangi whispered. “What’s going on?”

“Feeding time,” Mimic answered.

“Alright, I don’t need a tutorial on why I don’t want to be around for that,” I murmured. “Let’s go.”

We edged backward, keeping to the sides of the halls. As we went, the horde of mini-mimics we had left behind came skittering along, carrying a huge canister of I-don’t-know-what on top of them as if they were a rolling platform. We didn’t whisper a single word until we were out of the cave.

“Whoa,” Gonzales said, looking down at the mountain.

I followed her gaze to see that what once had been a surging mass of black skittering creatures was now just plain rock. It was quite jarring and it just made the scale of the number of mini-mimics sink in in a way that it probably wouldn’t have otherwise.

“Wait here,” Mimic said, her face grim.

“What do you mean, wait here?!” I objected. I didn’t like the tone in her voice or the expression on her face.

“Give me five minutes. I need to get something. Oh, and I need your helmet.”

If this were any other circumstance, I might have argued with her on it. Demanded an explanation to make sure she wasn’t doing something ludicrous. But even I knew that now wasn’t the time. There was something in her eyes that said there was no questioning her.

So, I didn’t. I handed her my helmet and she walked back into the cave without another word.

“Well…now what?” Gonzales asked.

“If we’re going to just stand here,” Ciangi said, “I’m going to take some readings.”

“Good idea,” Bahn agreed. “Maybe even deploy some mobile units if you’ve got them.”

The blond let out an un-adorable smirk. “As if I’d ever go planet-side without them.”’

“I dunno,” Gonzales countered, hands on her hips. “I seem to remember an entire story arc where Bahn had to build some handhelds for you.”

“That doesn’t count. I wasn’t probably equipped for all that.”

“You don’t get to just decide what counts and what doesn’t.”

“Says who?”

“Says—”

The engineer was cut off as Mimic stepped back onto the landing. “I have returned.”

“Indeed you have.” Bahn said, eyeing her carefully. “And you are not alone.”

“No,” she said, eyes hardening. I looked at my helmet in her hands. It had been bent entirely out of shape until it was almost like a sphere and something was moving frantically inside of it. “Not anymore.”

11

Memories in Gridlock

“So…this is what you looked like?” Gonzales said. “When Higgens first found you?”

“Actually,” I interjected, “it was more of her finding me.”

Mimic paid no attention to either of us, staring intently at the mini-mimic she had brought onto the ship. Bahn had it contained in a small field not unlike the containment unit Giomatti had tried to keep her in. I was a bit worried about bringing it onto the ship, but I knew that I needed to trust her. Mimic had put her stock in me for so long, this was the least I could do.

“I need you to put on the ship’s shields,” Mimic said finally.

“Wait, what now?” Ciangi asked. “We’re on the ground. And there’s no one attacking us. And an energy spike like that will definitely alert that alien, goopy thing we saw that we’re here.”

“I need the shields on now,” she repeated, her tone much more tense than before. “I need to talk to it and I can’t since it’s already receiving a signal.”

“Wait, signal? What signal?”

“It’s something I’ve been hearing since I was in that cave. At first, I thought it was the children using a language I didn’t understand. But now I know exactly what it is.”

But Gonzales wasn’t having any of it. “Wait, children? And you know what what is? When did you lose your ability to speak normally?”

“Shields. Now.”

It wasn’t a request and I didn’t think I had ever heard her use that tone of voice before. “Hey, let’s just do what Mimic asks. She’ll explain when she’s ready.”

Gonzales shrugged but thankfully didn’t seem to be in an argumentative mood. “Fine. I just like to know why I’m doing things. That’s why I’m an engineer.” She crossed over to the console and pulled up what I recognized as the security command board. A few seconds later, I could feel the hum of the engines change and the pitch shifted ever so slightly. “The shields are up.”

I opened my mouth to give Mimic the go-ahead, but she was already nearly doubled over, her face almost pressed against the containment field. She was murmuring something, but her voice was so low and her words were so fast that I didn’t have a hope of understanding it.

“I know that we’ve seen quite a bit in our short time together,” Bahn said, carefully grabbing his data pad from a console and typing something in. “But this strikes me as decidedly odd.”

“Yeah, I’m creeped out a little,” Ciangi admitted.

Then, as if Mimic had been studying comedic timing, her human face melted away, leaving only the black, shiny surface that comprised her true form. Little tendrils spiked out of the darkness, almost like a cross between audio waves and tentacles.

“Okay, change that to creeped out a lot. Is that necessary?”

“I’m sure whatever Mimic is doing needs to be done,” I said, not entirely sure at all.

“What about a tentacle face is necessary in this situation?” Gonzales asked, although she looked more amused than horrified.

“I don’t know, I’m not the shapeshifter. We’ll have to ask her when she’s done… doing whatever it is she’s doing.”

“I’m talking to it.” That was distinctly Mimic’s voice, but there were no lips on her onyx face. No tongue. No eyes. Only the polygonal obsidian and angular tendrils.

“Um, how are you talking to us?”

“Through my mouth, as is customary to your species.”

“Um…where is your mouth?”

“I’m a shapeshifter. It’s wherever I want it to be. I need you all to be quiet, you’re scaring the baby.”

“The bab— Oh. Right. Shhh.”

We fell into a very tense silence for several moments before Mimic finally began to speak to us again, although I still had no idea where her voice was coming from and I tried not to think about it.

“That creature, the alien we saw, he is part of the reason my people were in space to begin with.”

“Come again?” Gonzales said.

“He crashed here, millennia ago, knocking several mountains greater than the one we were on into the atmosphere. A few of my people were on those chunks and I suppose you could say the rest is history.”

“So what, you guys just drifted through space until you were caught in the gravitational pull of that asteroid belt?”

“Yes, it would seem so.”

“And that little baby shifter told you all that?” Gonzales asked.

“Of course not. It has no idea what gravitational pull is. I was merely pulling context from its mind.” She stood, but she kept her fingers splayed out to either side of the containment field, as if still connected to the mini-mimic. “My people have a sort of…communal memory. Some things must be learned, but some things are engrained into our DNA. I can tap into these memories, while this youngling is too premature to do so.”

“But if you have communal memory, why didn’t your people know this?” Bahn asked.

“Perhaps they did once, but through the centuries, it proved to be irrelevant to our evolution and was phased out.”

“Wish I could phase out some of my memories,” Gonzales muttered. I sent her a look begging her to lay off the quips for now. She rolled her eyes, but then nodded.

“So, these mimics kept the memories because they were still relevant to them,” I said, trying to piece everything together. “Which makes sense considering that the alien is still here.”

“And using them,” Mimic continued. “It is…grossly uncomfortable how similar the creature’s story is to our own. After it crash landed on this planet, the crew tried desperately to get themselves back home. But between the predators and weather and entirely incompatible atmosphere, they all died out. Except for one.

“It knew that it would never survive as it was, so it began to make…alterations to its body.”

“Alterations?” Ciangi asked. “Alterations like what?”

“I… The little one doesn’t know how to describe it, nor can I decipher it from their fragmented memories.” She tilted her head as if listening harder, and it was uncanny considering she was still completely faceless. “But I do know the alien was a…engineer, of sorts. It fused parts of itself into the ship, changing, improving, re-forging, until it was able to eke out some sort of existence. But there was still the matter of the great beasts that wandered this planet, and how to fix its ship since it no longer was a mobile creature as it had been before.”

“What predators?” Bahn asked. “All I could find on the scanners were lifeforms smaller than your standard human hand.”

“Exactly. From what I could tell, the alien captured one of this guy’s little ancestors and experimented on it. It was able to figure out the subharmonic frequency at which we communicate and exploit that. It developed a system where it could issue commands, commands that normally adults would issue and juveniles would follow until they were able to understand their own genetic memory and mimic ability.”

“And what did the adults do?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

A dark expression crossed her face. “They died. The first order the alien gave was for the juveniles to kill all of the adults. The adults didn’t try to resist, and were wiped out within a few weeks.”

“Oh my gosh, Mimi. I’m…I’m so sorry.”

She shook her head. “It…it’s fine. These are just memories; they cannot hurt me. They can’t…” She trailed off, her voice growing weaker until her words weren’t audible at all. Her human face slid into place and when it did, I could see fresh tear tracks down her cheeks. “I can see their pain. They could have easily beaten their children, but they couldn’t bring themselves to do it. They knew they would be murdered but they wouldn’t raise a hand against those they loved.”

I didn’t even have to think about it, I automatically stepped forward and gently pulled her into a hug. She clung to me, burying her head into my shoulder with very quiet sobs.

“The alien enslaved them. All of them. He murdered their parents so he would be the only voice for all their lives.”

“I really, really am taking this emotional moment seriously,” Ciangi said, sounding sheepish but curious. “But if they were juveniles centuries ago, wouldn’t they eventually grow up and stage some sort of rebellion?”

“Much like feral human children who have been denied the proper contact to become functioning adults, these children have all been suppressed. Both mentally and physically. They’re all starving, and their command of our language is…rudimentary at best. The alien uses them to collect the materials it needs to repair the ship and feed it. It is hard to say where one task ends and the other begins, but it’s an endless march.”

“So how do we free them?” I asked.

Mimic pulled away, looking at me with watery eyes. “You want to free them?”

“Of course. These are your people. We’re not just going to take off and try to find somewhere nicer to live when your entire race is being used as some sort of brainwashed slave labor.”

“But you could die.”

“Yeah, I suppose. But by this point, I feel like we could’ve died on about half of our endeavors.”

“You’re not wrong there,” Gonzales chimed in. “Besides, I think if there’s one thing I’ve learned from ol’ Higgens here, it’s that he never passes up the chance to be a hero.”

“What?” I objected. “That’s not true.”

This time, it was everyone in the group except Mimic who gave me a look.

“Higgens, you are possibly the only person I’ve ever met who would find alien life that looks more like a spikey pincushion than an actual living thing and immediately care for it instead of informing the rest of the world that you just found proof of new life.”

“What? Come on, you guys wouldn’t have done the same?”

“I definitely would not have,” Bahn answered quickly. “My first instinct would have been to contain it, study it, and present it to the scientific community.”

“You know that ‘it’ you’re talking about is Mimi, right? Your friend?”

“But she wasn’t any of our friends then. And while I definitely would have tested for sentience, to me, science would have come first.” Bahn’s face was serious but not unkind as he continued. “You’re the only person on the ship that she could have met and had her story come out as it did. You’re one in a million, just like her.”

“I think we’re getting a little sidetracked here,” Gonzales said, coming up from behind us and clapping me on the back. I was grateful for the reprieve. I didn’t like thinking of myself as some reckless hero. I was just a janitor, after all.

…a janitor that made friends with aliens, hopped to the opposite side of the universe, planned mutinies, and now wanted to start a full-on rebellion. Oh, and was developing a knack for engineering grunt work.

“The point is,” the weapons engineer continued, “Higgens won’t let us leave with your people enslaved, so instead of hemming and hawing about what we’re going to do and how great our friend is, why don’t we jump to the part where we start planning what we’re going to do.”

The coin twins exchanged looks with each other for a long moment before their gazes finally moved to me. Mimic wasn’t paying attention to any of us. She removed herself from my arms and was staring at the mini-mimic again.

“Alright,” Ciangi said finally. “We’re in.”

“I knew it,” Gonzales said, holding up her hand in a high five. However, neither of the twins returned it. “Okay, we’ll just save that for later.”

I crossed my own arms and steeled myself for what might come. “So,” I said after a deep breath. “Who has the first idea to kick off this rebellion?”

12

The Plan in Action

I licked my lips as I looked nervously up at the same mountain we had clambered up before. The mini-mimics were moving again, on their relentless march for more supplies. I could tell it pained Mimic to look at them, now that she knew the true scope of their enslavement, and she kept her gaze to the horizon when not looking at one of us directly.

“Is everyone clear on the plan?” I asked, my hand resting on the hermetically sealed satchel I had hanging over my torso.

“Um, yeah,” Gonzales said, raising one of her eyebrows at me. “We’ve gone over it about a dozen times with a fine-tooth comb over the past three days. Why are you just bringing this up now?”

“Be nice, he’s just nervous,” Ciangi chided.

“Why would I be nervous?” I asked sarcastically. “It’s not like we’re planning to overthrow an alien that’s managed to survive in this world for centuries and enslave or kill off the entire population with essentially a horde of babies.”

“Whoa, relax there with the big picture stuff,” Gonzales continued. “For now, we just get to the feeding canisters and work our way from there.”

“Right.” I took a deep breath to center myself.

“Be cautious,” Mimic warned. “I think that it might suspect it is no longer alone, and our journey into its ship will not be as easy as it was previously.”

“Now that part you probably should have mentioned during the whole fine-tooth combing the plan part,” Gonzales pointed out. “What if it already has a trap waiting for us on the way up? Or right inside the gate?”

“What can I say?” Mimic answered with a shrug. “It’s my first revolution.”

“I think we can safely say it’s all our first revolution.”

Once more, the twins exchanged a very certain look. One that didn’t slip by me. But if they didn’t have faith in Mimic, they needed to at least have faith in me.

“Come on,” I said, walking forward. “We should get this done before nightfall.”

“Why, is there some sort of timer?” Ciangi asked.

“No, but if something goes wrong and we have to escape quickly, would you prefer to do that during the daylight or in the dark?”

“Good point. Let’s get a move on, shall we?”

There was a chorus of quiet agreement all around, and then we were heading up the mountain.

The mini-mimics acted much as they had before, all of them hurriedly scuttling to complete their tasks as fast as they could just so they could do it again. They hastily dodged out of our feet’s way as we walked, but that was the only sign they gave to acknowledge our existence.

It was hard for me not to get stuck in a loop of sadness and incredulousness as I watched them move. There was a whole civilization of Mimics in front of me, but they had been stunted, starved, and abused until they were nothing more than child slaves. What kind of creature could have done this? After leaving Giomatti behind, I didn’t expect to find a sentient life more selfish than him, and yet here we were.

No one said much else as we made the hike. I sensed that we were all lost in our own thoughts, imagining the ramifications of what we were doing and what would happen if we failed.

Normally, I didn’t think of myself as a very violent person. I had never purposefully hurt someone in my life, as long as one didn’t count the time I knocked Giomatti out to save Mimic, and before today, I didn’t think I ever would.

But now, after learning what had befallen Mimic’s people hundreds of years ago, I found myself angry enough to actually want to hurt the creature. I wanted it to be scared. I wanted it to wonder if it was going to die. And then I wanted it to feel the same torture it had put thousands of innocent lives through.

The intensity of my desire surprised me. Was…was I a bad guy? I didn’t think of myself as such, but what else could be the truth? I was willfully imagining murder over and over again. Not justice, not just stopping the alien, but straight up murder. I couldn’t be a good person and think such things…right?

I didn’t know. And in a way, it didn’t matter. The only thing I was concerned about was freeing Mimic’s people so she wouldn’t be alone any longer.

Even if victory meant her leaving our group forever.

I shoved that thought down with all the others. It would only distract me, and the last thing I needed during our grand revolution was to be distracted. Besides, we had reached the lip of the cave.

Gonzales shivered. “Is anyone else getting the heebie-jeebies something fierce?”

“Count me in that number,” Ciangi said, crossing her arms.

“I am not fond of the atmosphere either,” Bahn added at the end.

“Now that we know the history in these halls, I don’t think we’re ever going to like this place,” I said. “But this is just the start of the plan, so we probably should worry less about goose bumps and more about the real danger up ahead.”

“Oh, I don’t need a reminder of exactly how dangerous it’s going to be for all of us,” Gonzales said. “That’s the one thing I am acutely aware of.”

“Enough speaking,” Mimic said, cutting between all of us to continue into the tunnel. “We must be quick, before it can mount a full assault on us.”

“You think it would do that?” Ciangi asked. “Just for the four of us? Especially considering we’re lifeforms it’s never met yet. I mean, for all it knows, we could help it get off the planet.”

“This creature uses children as its soldiers and forced them to kill their own parents,” I reminded her. “I doubt benevolence or patience are part of its decision-making paradigm.”

“Fair point. Let’s get going then.”

The five of us crept along, making no noise other than our soft footfalls and harsh breaths. With painstaking care, we inched our way until the stone became that smooth, otherworldly metal, and until otherworldly metal began to open up into the same chambers we had seen before.

And just like before, the large vat sat upright, mini-mimics scrambling up the ramp only to vomit out all the minerals they were carrying at the top, then hopping off only to slam into the ground below, shake themselves a bit, then skitter to wherever else it wanted them to go.

“Everyone got their anti-grav boots on?” I hissed as we ducked behind a pillar. “It’s an awful long fall down from the top.”

“If we didn’t, would there be any fixing that at this point?” Ciangi asked. “Unless we’re all gonna turn around and go back to the ship for a little oopsies, forgotsies.”

“Less sarcasm, more seriousness,” I said flatly. On a good day, humor was hit or miss for me, and this certainly was not a good day. I was tense and full of emotions that I had never felt before.

“I don’t think that was sarcasm as much as it was my naturally smart mouth, but point taken. Yes, I have my grav-boots.”

“As do I,” Gonzales said.

“Me too,” Bahn added.

Gonzales turned to Mimic. “What about you, friend?”

“I do not need your boots.”

“Oh right. You’re a shapeshifter so I suppose you could just imagine yourself with some wings and be just fine, right?”

“I could. Except I’m not going with you.”

“Wait, what?” I asked, almost shocked enough to shout. ‘Almost’ being the key word of course.

“Why did the four of you think that you had all of the supplies? I have my own part of the plan. One apart from all of you.”

“Why didn’t you bring that up before?” Gonzales spat. “We spent hours and hours going over this, coming up with the best possible way to take down this alien guy with the supplies that we have!”

“Just tru—”

“Trust you! I know! That’s the one thing you did say,” Gonzales complained. “Over and over and over again! If I had a credit for every time that phrase came out of your mouth, I would have enough to send back to Earth, buy my own warship, and fly it back here.”

“Save your energy. There is still much that can go wrong.” Mimi’s eyes flicked to me, more serious than I had ever seen them before. All the warmth, all the happy inquisitiveness, I was used to seeing in her gaze was gone. There was only a cold determination. I wondered if my own expression was similar.

Something had changed in us in this presentation of our latest enemy. Before, our adventures had certainly been dangerous, but never really very life-threatening to anyone else. This, however, was quite different.

“Be safe,” I murmured, reaching out to touch her shoulder for what could possibly be the last time.

“Are we ever?” she asked with a half-smile before walking forward.

She shrank as she went, her skin receding until she was exactly like all the mini-mimics around her. I watched her hop forward, then she blended into the thousands of other shapeshifters rushing across the ground.

“I…I’m not sure how I feel about this,” Gonzales murmured, looking into the room with her brow furrowed in worry.

“We need to tr—”

“Oh my flip, we have to trust her. I get it. Did I not just have a rant about that exact phrase?”

“Easy,” Ciangi said. “We’re all tense, but you should really save that fire for the mission at hand.”

“Well, speaking of the mission, are we ready?” Bahn stepped in trying to be the peacemaker.

My hand automatically went to the bag still at my side, resting on the fastenings that kept it hermetically sealed. “I am.”

“Alright then, we already agreed on the teams, so let’s go poison this guy before he figures out we’re here.”

“Right.” I took a deep breath, then quickly jogged forward.

I tried to move as quickly as possible, but there was only so fast I could go without stepping on the mini-mimics. And even if they might have survived being crushed under my boot, I had no desire to bring any of them pain. They had been hurt enough as it was.

Gonzales was right behind me, and we rushed up the ramp leading to the top of the vat. It was almost impossibly slick, and there were several times we slipped and fell hard on our envirosuited knees.

By the time we reached the top, both of my knees were sore and possibly bleeding inside my suit, but I didn’t care. We were finally there. Looking down, it was hard not to get a bit of vertigo from how high up we were. I didn’t know if the vat was a single meal or enough for a week, but it was intimidating either way.

I couldn’t imagine an existence for hundreds of years just serving a malevolent being. Just day in, day out, the same thankless task, never growing. Never learning. Never experiencing all the things that were important in life.

It made me mad. No, mad wasn’t enough of a word to describe it. It made me furious. More than I had ever been or ever thought possible. And that rage spurred me on. I opened the bag at my side and handed a container to Gonzales before grabbing one myself. Popping off the top, I readied to dump it into the bubbling vat below us.

“I hope you suffer,” I said heatedly, tipping it forward. Just as I did, a terrible, grating horn filled the air, an under-layer of beeping tones to it. I paused for just a moment, startled, but that was a moment too long. With a pneumatic hiss, the top of the vat sealed shut with some sort of circle of metal.

“No!” I cried, my stomach dropping.

“Uh-oh,” Gonzales murmured, for the lack of a better word. “That is very much not good.”

“Hey,” Ciangi cried from the other vat on the other side of the chamber. “Our vat just sealed.”

“Ours too,” Gonzales replied.

“Well, what now?”

Before any of us could think of an answer, another tone sounded again. But this one was different from the previous one, rising in pitch, before dropping. I didn’t need a translator to tell me it was some sort of direct order, but I desperately wished I did have such a device so I could know exactly what it was ordering.

However, I wasn’t in the dark for long. After the alarm ended, there was a split-second of silence as suspense hung heavy in the air. But then the mimics around us surged forward, spikes growing on their back as they charged straight toward us.

“Time to go!” I cried, jumping over the edge of the ramp.

Gonzales followed me and we hurtled toward the ground. Reaching for my wrist-gear, I activated my grav-boots and slowed our descent enough so when we did hit the ground, it wasn’t bone-cracking.

But it certainly wasn’t comfortable either. I hit hard, toppling forward and knocking the breath out of myself. Ciangi, Bahn, and Gonzales didn’t seem to fare much better.

We didn’t have time to recover, however, as the mimics were raining down on top of us, clearly ready to kill.

“Run!” I cried, fighting to my feet and dashing back toward the exit we had come from.

“What about Mimic?” Gonzales asked frantically.

“We’ll be no good to her dead! Besides, she’s safe. We need to regroup and come up with a new plan.”

“Uh, might have a problem with that,” Ciangi warned.

I was going to ask her why, but a movement caught my gaze. Looking back the way we came, I saw a roiling wave of mimics coming toward us. Nearly seven feet high and chittering murder, it was like watching a wall of death hurtling our direction.

“Can’t go that way,” I half-gasped.

“Gee, ya don’t think?!”

I ignored Gonzales’s smart remark and craned my neck around. There had to be somewhere we could go.

There, I spotted it in the corner of my vision. A single door leading to a dark hallway. There was no telling what was beyond it, but it couldn’t be any worse.

I hoped.

“This way!” I shouted, sprinting forward.

I dashed off and the others followed me, all of us running for our lives. The mimics followed us, converging together like a giant beast made out of hundreds of smaller, intricate parts.

“Uh, that thing is definitely gaining on us.”

“I am aware.” I huffed. “Bahn, you see anything on that scanner of yours? Change in airway pattern, another hall?”

“I, uh—”

“Come on, less stammering, Coin Twin,” Gonzales urged. “We’re on a very tight deadline here. Emphasis on the dead part.”

I risked a look back to see Bahn typing furiously into the scanner he had built into his wrist gear. “Yes! Ahead and to the right. There’s a large room, we can probably duck in there!”

“And what’s to stop these maniac mimics from ducking in there with us?” Ciangi asked.

“I have an idea,” I said.

“Oh yeah? Is it as good as our last idea?”

I didn’t answer, as we had reached the door. Without missing a beat, I threw myself sideways into the barrier.

I slammed into it with all of my force and that just barely managed to budge it open wide enough for the others to slip in. I could hear the murderous wave of mimics coming, so I scrambled in after them.

“Help me close it!” I cried, standing up and pushing against the massive partition.

The others ran to help me, and together, we managed to close it. We had mere seconds before the mimics came around the bend, and I didn’t know if they could tell where we had gone or not. So, I grabbed one of the spare canisters in my bag and shoved the thick cylinder through the door’s handles.

“That should hold them for a minute.” I gasped.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Ciangi murmured. “But there’s another door on the other side.”

“Crap!” I rushed over and practically tackled that door as well. I was going to have a very sore shoulder tomorrow. If I survived, that was.

Just like before, my three friends joined me until we were able to close that one too, but this time, it was Ciangi who shoved the container through the handles.

“There.” She breathed heavily. “That should hold for at least a couple of minutes.”

“Let’s hope.” I looked around, taking everything in. “Where do you think we are?”

“If I had to guess,” Bahn murmured, walking past us to look at the desolate, cobwebbed surroundings. Good to know that spiders were universal, leaving their tickling, messy webs everywhere. “This was some sort of cafeteria. Where the lower of the crew must have come and gotten their sustenance.” He whistled as he looked around at the large but dilapidated architecture around us. “These aliens, they certainly weren’t small. I’m guessing that specimen we caught a peek at earlier had added some modifications to alter its physical appearance, but its size was not one of the things it tampered with.”

“Fascinating,” Gonzales said. “But not entirely useful.”

“Actually, I think it is,” I muttered, my brain buzzing with the edge of a thought. “We studied this in one of my maintenance courses. Ships are usually laid out in an ergonomic way, with certain key points being in the center of the ship where all the crew can reach it in about the same amount of time. These places are usually the cafeteria, the bridge, and the med bay. Sometimes personnel quarters sub-out the eating area, but that’s less usual.”

“So, if we’re standing in the cafeteria, chances are that either the bridge or the medbay is below us. I’m willing to bet on the bridge, which is where we first saw the creature. I can’t be sure, but I think when we came here, there was a slight decline down the hall leading to it. And as we ran, I think there was an incline to the hall we were sprinting through.”

“Well, that would explain why my calves are screaming,” Ciangi said. “I mean, I know I’m not in the best of shape, but usually it takes a little more running than that to get shin-splints.”

“Shin-splints are going to be the least of your worries,” Gonzales said, her eyes closed while her brows knitted themselves together.

“Why? What’s going on?”

“I hear the wave coming back toward us.”

“That’s unfor—”

“In stereo.” She opened her eyes and sighed. “They know we’re here. They’re rushing toward the door right now.”

“That is some exceptionally good hearing,” Bahn said, turning to face the door to the left.

“It’s a gift and a curse,” she answered, facing the right. “I just want you guys to know, it’s been nice being a crew with you. Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll be reincarnated as something with a whole lot less responsibility.”

“That’d be nice.”

But I wasn’t interested in the moment of camaraderie. My mind was spinning, as it had never done before.

“I need one of your guns,” I said, holding my hand out.

“Really? Wanna go down blasting?” she said, tossing one to him with a grin. “Never thought guns were your thing.”

“They’re not,” I answered shortly. “Stand back, everyone.” Although they had no idea what I had in mind, they didn’t argue, just scattered. Trying not to tremble, I popped open the rear-cap of the gun and set all the settings to their highest while setting the shielding to its lowest. It didn’t take long for the thing to rumble, and I quickly set it on the floor before dashing away.

The explosion that resulted was…spectacular, to say the least. Ash, metal, and other debris went everywhere, but most importantly, we were all safe.

“Into the hole!” I cried, running forward to the still-red edges.

“My gosh, you really are a genius!” Gonzalez cried, following after me.

About halfway to the newly made gap in the floor, the doors suddenly burst open and two mimic waves surged in from either side.

“Great,” I muttered, my stomach dropping. “A race.”

And what a race it was. The four of us put our everything into our sprint, diving for the hole with no concern for what might be below. As we fell, through wires and bent supports and busted tech, I spun to look upward.

The two waves crashed into each other with a massive amount of force, sending the minis flying everywhere. Unfortunately, many of them came falling right down into the hole with us.

The grav-boots helped to right me, and this time, I landed a little better. Looking forward, then back, I saw another set of those ridiculously oversized doors that was cracked open just enough to get by.

“That way!” I cried, pulling Gonzales and Ciangi to their feet. Bahn landed a beat later, lurching after us with surprising quickness for being what Gonzales would classify as an ‘uber nerd.’

Once more, we were all running, but the end was in sight. We were going to make it out of this. We were going to—

“Hey, Higgens, doesn’t this look familiar?”

But I was already sidling through, pulling the others after me. Once they were all on my side, we shoved the door closed with a resounding thump.

Relief washed over me and I turned, only to have that very same relief turn to ice in my veins.

We were in the bridge and the alien was staring right at us.

“Oh shi—”

Something lashed out of its body, gelatinous and reviling, slamming all of us into the far wall. The air was knocked out of me once more as we hit, and we slid to the ground in a heap.

“This…this was not a good plan,” Gonzales groaned as we disentangled ourselves.

As if it understood us, it stood, its entire body shaking and rearranging as if it was made of gelatin and silicone. It made me want to puke, but I was too scared to do so. But instead of striking us again, that same arm reached for the door and opened it, letting the wave of mini-mimics in.

The arm shrank back into its body and another extended from its back, only to grab the console it liked to punch its orders into. Once more, several notes sounded, and the mimics all stopped in a line.

We stood there, in a tense standoff. If one could call certain defeat a standoff. We were going to die here. We didn’t have near enough weaponry to take the creature down, and as far as I could tell, it had integrated several parts of the ship into its body. If we wanted to kill it, we would have to destroy every last bit of it. And frankly, that was impossible.

The alien knew it too. I could see it across its melting, folding, rearranging, blobby face. It reached for me, long, insidious claws growing out of its arm as it extended. This was the end.

Except, it suddenly wasn’t.

There was a flash of heat and light in front of me and we were all thrown backward. When my head was cleared, I saw a blackened scorch on the ground where we had been standing.

The alien was screaming, whirling in a circle as it tried to put out the parts of it that were on fire. It would have been amusing to watch, if it weren’t so terrifying.

To my surprise, it was Ciangi who stood first, her arm bloodied. It was only after I realized her handheld scanner was missing that I put the pieces together. She must have overloaded it, just like I had Gonzales’s blaster.

She saved my life.

But it was only a stop-gap. The alien had stopped screaming, and instead returned to its chair. Grabbing the hanging console once more, it punched in another command.

I figured out what it said quickly, as the mimics suddenly jumped into action. But instead of running, they slowly advanced, like an executioner’s march.

We backed up, but there was only so far we could go. Eventually, our backs hit the wall and there was nothing we could do to escape what was about to happen.

“Is this where I start shooting?” Gonzales asked, her voice still as brave and strong as ever.

I planned to tell her no, that there was no point in killing a dozen or so innocent children only to have the others rip us to shreds, but then I saw a lone mimic break away from the formation. Like a small shadow, it flitted toward the alien.

And the console.

Suddenly, everything made sense. But I also knew that, with the way the alien was sitting now, that little mimic would be spotted instantly.

“Yes!” I yelled suddenly.

She shot me a shaky grin, trying to be her normal, headstrong self. “Finally.”

“But shoot the alien.”

“What? Are you sure? I don’t think my blaster is going to penetrate its skin if a straight-up overload blast didn’t do anything besides make it a bit toasty.”

“Oh, it’s definitely not going to hurt him,” I said, sending her my own smile. “But it sure is going to piss him off.”

She gave me an odd look, but I just nodded at her. Thankfully, she seemed to believe that I knew what I was doing, and unloaded into the alien until her gun overheated.

And boy, did it work. The alien shrieked, not in pain, but in pure rage as she peppered it. I saw wide circles of red appear on its skin, only to disappear back to normal flesh. Well, normal for the creature. It stood, advancing on us for a little one-on-one revenge.

It only made it a couple of steps before that tiny mimic I saw scaled its chair and launched itself to the console. In a ripple of color, the mini expanded until there was none other than Mimic perched atop the large computer.

“This is for my people,” she hissed, before punching in a code.

The alien whirled, dozens of arms shooting out of its body to stop her, but the tones were already sounding. Once more, there was a strange sort of stillness when they ended, but then the mimics all turned as one and converged on the alien.

Its ending…wasn’t pretty. It tried to run, but the mimics descended on it with a ferocity that made all other acts of violence I had ever witnessed pale in comparison. I saw the others look away from the carnage, but I forced myself to watch it out. It felt like the right thing to do.

If I was going to plot out a murder of an enemy, I owed them watching the consequences of my handiwork so it would never have to happen again.

When it was all over, my eyes flashed to Mimic’s. She was still perched atop the console, her face flushed and her eyes bright with unshed tears.

“You did it,” I murmured, voice barely able to make it out of my tightening throat.

“So we did.”

13

Nice Place for an Epilogue

I stared over the horizon as the sun set, sending dazzling rays of light across the entire landscape. Mimic stood before me, her feet planted firmly on the ground and mine on the metal ramp of our ship.

“I don’t have to leave,” I murmured, voice quiet once again. “I could stay here, with you.”

But she shook her head slowly.

It had been a week since our defeat of her enemy, and we had spent much of the time helping the mimics. There had been a mass panic after the voice in their head was suddenly cut off, and many began doing things that could end up hurting them.

Now, however, things were calmed, and I was supposed to board my ship and go home.

“I need you to be my ambassador to Earth,” she murmured sadly. We were all sad. After going through so much together, we didn’t want to split up. But we had to. “You know that while I was in the ship, I managed to uncover years of messages back to that alien’s people. They’re coming for us, and we need Earth’s help to survive.”

“Yeah, but I mean, do we really trust a group of bureaucrats? What if they try to pull some sort of shady deal? Or they use the sample you’re sending us off with but never offer help in return?”

But Mimic was all soft smiles. “I have learned that, while you are the greatest companions I could ever ask for, I cannot expect the same of all of your people. Especially those in power. So I included a holo-recording stating, should they choose a nefarious path, that both me and my army of shapeshifters would descend on them with little mercy.”

“Really?” Ciangi asked with a smirk. “You and the babies that are still figuring out how to eat on their own?”

“They don’t need to know that. As Higgens once taught me, less is more,” she said, winking at me.

“Alright, well, it’s been good knowing you, I guess.” Gonzales extended her hand and Mimic took it, shaking as friends. “Be safe, okay?”

“I will try my best.”

Ciangi and Bahn both said their good-byes as well, leaving just Mimic and me.

I didn’t want to go. After so long of never belonging on the colony, and then never belonging on the ships I worked, I had come to appreciate having a friend who understood me. I got her in a way I never got other people. And she got me.

And now we had to say good-bye.

“I don’t like this,” I said finally, trying to keep my face straight.

“I know,” she murmured. “But it is a temporary measure. There is no one I trust more than you to make sure your government handles my gifts appropriately. Besides, this is only temporary. Once an alliance is formed, you are more than welcome to visit us here. That is, if you can afford to take a break from all your adoring fans after being the first person to discover non-human life.”

“Psh, I’m sure there won’t be any of those.”

“You forget, I have read almost all of you humans’ history. You are going to be a bit of a…what do you call it? Rack heart? Roll hard?”

“Rock star,” I finished, a halfhearted smile around my lips.

“Yes, that. A rock star.” Suddenly, she was pulling me into a hug, her warm body pressing into mine. I returned the gesture just as ardently, as if I held her hard enough that we wouldn’t have to part.

But eventually, we did.

“Be safe, Higgens. I will count the days until we meet again.”

“Me too.”

I wanted to say more. I wanted to say everything. But I knew that if I did, I would never leave. And right now, me on Earth was what Mimic needed. What kind of friend would I be if I put my needs above hers?

So with a final squeeze of her hand, I turned my back and walked up the ramp. I heard it retract and the hatch slide closed, but I dared not look behind. If I did, I was afraid I would dive right off the ship and back onto the planet.

As much as I wanted to, that wasn’t the path for me right now. That chapter of my life had closed, and it was about to move on to another one. Hopefully, if I was very, very lucky, our stories would find each other again.

Mimic and the Fight for Freedom

1

Say What Now?

“But how could you possibly know that the creature you found was safe?”

I did everything I could to repress a sigh as I heard a question that I had heard at least a trillion times in the past year. I looked into the recording lens of the holo-projector and pasted on my best polite smile.

“Well, that’s the thing, I couldn’t.”

“Then how do you justify endangering the life of everyone on your ship? Obviously, we are all incredibly grateful it turned out as it did, but if your Mimic—as you call her—had been vengeful or violent, it could have been a very different story.”

It was funny, in a way. Every single interviewer that tried to be cutting edge, and ask the ‘hard-hitting questions,’ always invariably fell back on bringing up all the terrible things that could have happened and how I had endangered the ship. Maybe they thought it would make me crack. Maybe they thought it would make great click-bait to increase their views. I didn’t know, but I was so tired of it.

“It could have been. For all I knew, she was a ravenous monster who wanted to feed on my flesh. But that didn’t matter.”

The hologram of the interviewer tipped their head. “I’m not quite sure what you mean.”

“Of course not. But that’s because you’re looking at this like a human. It’s easy to think that I endangered a ship for a cute, little spikey animal, but that’s only if you forget that we’re the ones who destroyed Mimi’s home. We’re the ones who killed her family and everything she knew. We basically kicked down the door of her house and took an ionic saw to the interior. If she was a dangerous creature, she still deserved shelter. Since our ship took it from her, it made sense to make it her own.

I continued, sure of my response. “Yes, it could have gone horribly wrong. Yes, we all could have died. But we didn’t survive because of luck, or chance. We survived because Mimic is far more gracious and forgiving than any person I’ve ever met.”

“That is an…interesting spot. So, you’re saying space explorers deserve what they get?”

Wow, this interviewer was really going for it. Perhaps I would have been impressed if I hadn’t heard the same thing in Nouveau France, or again in the South-West of the Asian Alliance.

“Of course not. However, what I’m saying is that when humans don’t mitigate risk, don’t make sure that there’s no chance that we’re destroying sentient life, there can be great and terrible consequences. The ship we were on should have tested every chain we crossed, but we didn’t, and I’m sure we’re not the only ones. Who knows how many first contacts we’ve passed up because we’re so certain of our claim on everything in this universe.”

“And what a note to end on. Thank you, Mister Higgens. Although I hear we may be calling you Doctor Higgens in the future?”

That I did blush at. “Oh, not for quite a while. I’m only halfway through my bachelor’s, but a master’s looks promising, and I have been blessed by many engineering colleges with open invitations to check out their programs.”

“How thrilling. You truly are a model for every colonist, orphan, or layman out there. Even the lowest among us can achieve great things.”

I kept my face straight, but I could feel the expression in my eyes sour slightly. “Funny, I never thought of myself as a low person just because I wasn’t born a rich Earther like you.”

The interviewer’s hologram reflected their shock, their perfectly lipsticked mouth dropping open almost unflatteringly.

Almost.

I stood, and the holo-recorder rose with me. “Thank you so much for the chance to speak on your show. The experience has been lovely, but I have so much homework to do.”

“Of course,” they said, giving me a professional nod. It was clear that they wanted to keep going, and that they even probably had another three to four minutes slated for me to talk, but I was done. It had taken me the entire year of constant interviewing to stop being the awkward mess I usually was in such situations, and if I stayed any longer, I might revert. “Thank you for your time. We’d love to have you again.”

“You have a great night,” I answered before reaching over and shutting off the projector.

I sighed yet again and rubbed my temples. At first, interviews had been a terrifying part of my package. They made my stomach heave, my forehead sweat, and my heart thunder in my chest. I always mixed up my words, stuttered, and generally made a fool of myself.

But the public had loved it. They ate me up with a spoon more than they did the Coin Twins or Gonzales. In the beginning, I had thought it was maybe because I was a symbol of hope. A sign that no matter who you were or where you were from, that doing the right thing was incredibly important. But after a few months, I realized that wasn’t it at all.

I was inspiration porn for some, for those who were rich and benefiting from the terrible imbalance in our society who wanted to assuage themselves of their guilt by using me as some pinnacle of what was possible. Any poor, impoverished or otherwise struggling person who ever complained would have me shoved in their face like I disproved their suffering. As if every poor, under-educated, awkward person on the spectrum could accidentally run into the first proof of other life that just so happened to change the world.

And then for others, I was a laughingstock. They made jokes about my intellect, my choices, my tendency to stutter. They called me moronic and made memes about it on the net. Nothing was safe from them, from my dislike of looking interviewers straight on, to how I talked about Mimic with the utmost respect, to how I often let Gonzales and Ciangi talk for me because honestly formulating words in such a serious setting was so exhausting. They even made fun of my body, possibly the least interesting thing about me. My hair was too long, or I wasn’t fit enough, or I was far too wimpy. I tried to ignore this side as best I could, but their voices were so similar to the bullies that had kept me down during much of my young life, it was hard to lock them out.

The rubbing at my temples was getting me nowhere, so I settled for a stretch and a quick trip to my personal fabricator. As much as I complained, I supposed I should be grateful for the suddenly amazing life I had now.

Well…seemingly amazing.

First of all, I had a mansion. Yeah, an actual mansion. It was bigger than perhaps the entire apartment cluster my parents had had on the Mars colony, and so beautiful I wanted to share it with everyone. Unfortunately for me, everyone was pretty much just Gonzales, Ciangi, and Bahn. Despite traveling all over the world for a year, and becoming Mimic’s voice at the diplomatic delegations our world’s governments held every month, I still hadn’t made any friends. I was hoping when the furor died down, and the medical and scientific advancements became a once in a while thing instead of every day, I might be able to go out into the world and find some more amazing people out there. But until then, I guessed I would have to focus on my studies.

Or maybe I would just run away to Mimic’s planet and live happily ever after.

I practically snorted to myself as I thought that. For someone who had never been very attached to someone for their entire life, I certainly was needy for my alien friend’s attention. It had been a year since I had seen her, and she was so busy with rebuilding her civilization, that she only had time to send me a holo about once a month—if that. I was incredibly grateful for every one of them, but I found myself wanting more.

I missed the curve of her smile when I said something she thought was funny. I wished the way her long, grey-white hair would sometimes get in her face so instead of putting it in a ponytail, she would shift it smaller. I missed how she would sometimes revert to her black and spikey form when she was tired and settle onto my bed like the good old days.

I missed her.

A third sigh escaped my lips as I punched in a code and waited for my steak to construct itself. I had everything I had ever wanted. Fame, riches, some respect, all the money I could want, an education, a nice house, and tons of gadgets. And yet, it wasn’t enough. Would I ever be happy?

I didn’t know. The only thing I was sure of was that some piece of me was definitely missing.

2

Slice of Life

I walked to my workstation, steak in one hand and a beer in the other. I had never been one for alcohol on the ship, but now I found that once in a great while when I was feeling down wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Plus, the flavors on Earth were much better than any of the colony swill that my teenage compatriots had gone wild for.

I flopped down in my chair, looking at all my homework splayed out across the ergonomic desk. Thanks to the help of my engineering friends and everything they had taught me on our adventures, I had breezed through the prelim courses for my degree. Apparently, I was actually pretty intelligent; I just learned differently than most people. If I had known that when I was younger, maybe I wouldn’t have believed I could never survive college. But then I wouldn’t have met Mimic, and I wouldn’t give that up for anything in the world.

I still had a long way to go, of course. According to my professors and tutors, I had about a year for my bachelor’s and two for my master’s. Still, it would be worth it. Too often on our trip, I had been at a disadvantage because of lack of knowledge. If it wasn’t for Gonzalez and the coin twins, I never would have survived, and Mimic’s people would most likely still be under the influence of that disgusting alien.

That was depressing to think about, so I switched my attention to my food and my homework. Normally, I liked the digital packets I was given, but I just wasn’t in the mood to stare at my academic datalogs. Funny enough, I’d never been able to fill up the massive internal memory of the little devices in my entire previous life. But since becoming both a student and diplomat, I’d completely filled four of the devices with important information on different subjects. There was just so much info to be had. Was this what Mimic had felt like when she had first gone onto the net? If so, I admired her even more for how effortlessly she had absorbed it all.

Would she be proud of me when I saw her again? I had been keeping my schooling a secret and also as a failsafe in case I turned out to be completely inept. I didn’t want to tell her I was getting a degree and then fail miserably, so I figured I would wait until I had everything all tied up before informing her of my accomplishments. I hoped I was able to see her again soon, though. Waiting until I was completely graduated seemed an impossible time to be without my best friend.

I felt myself getting antsy and I knew that learning was not going to get done in the moment. Booting up my personal holo-interface, I checked to see if either of the Coin Twins or Gonzales was on our personal chat.

Gonzales’s icon was dark, as it had been for several days, but I saw both Bahn and Ciangi online. I pinged them for a voice chat, and thankfully, they both answered after only a couple of rings.

“Hey, how are you?” Ciangi said, her voice slightly raspy as if she had been sleeping. “I saw that interview. I had hoped there might be a new question in the bunch, but apparently, I have too much faith in humanity.”

I chuckled at that. Since arriving on Earth, Ciangi’s already dry humor had become that much more arid. “I know what you mean. But I’m surprised you guys are both on. Is Harunya not there?”

“She is, she’s just sleeping. She had a rough day at the labs.”

“Aw, I’m sorry to hear that.”

Harunya was a brilliant biochemist and possibly one of the top five most beautiful people I had ever met. She had been at one of the grand galas held by some education institution or another that had invited us, and she had hit it off right away with the Coin Twins. A few weeks and many theorems later, she was dating…actually, I still wasn’t sure who was dating who. Perhaps Bahn, perhaps Ciangi, or perhaps both. Since I couldn’t tell from just observing them, I figured I didn’t need to ask and was just grateful that they both seemed very happy to have her in their lives.

I also couldn’t deny that I was a wee bit jealous of them. Try as I might, I couldn’t connect with anyone like they seemed to connect with Harunya. Sometimes, I felt like I couldn’t even connect with them. I felt like an outsider, and I couldn’t be sure if I was just isolating myself or if there was something intrinsically wrong with me that made me unable to maintain any sort of meaningful relationships with people. Would the Coin Twins and Gonzales even be my friends if we hadn’t been forced into so many life and death situations together? Probably not. Which only made me feel that much more alone.

“It’s nothing that will bother her long-term. She just had cross-contamination on some of her samples and is bummed she has to re-set up her entire experiment and control group again.”

“Ugh, yeah. That is a bummer.”

“Yup. But anyway, why did you call? Is something up? Another patent hopeful call for your approval on another terrible advancement?”

I couldn’t help but laugh again at the terrible truth. Since scientists had gotten their hands on the samples Mimic had sent, our technology and medical field both suddenly surged forward like a ship at warp speed. In just a year, we nearly had completely functional cloaking technology, cured cancer and a litany of other diseases, as well as many other things that I still didn’t quite understand. Every day, there was usually a new advancement that owed its possibility to Mimic’s shifting molecular makeup or the alien technology she had sent home with us—as well as the readings she had stolen from the ship.

Yes, we had entered a whole new age of science and technology. I just hoped that it would trickle down to the little guy.

“No, I just wanted to talk,” I answered, just remembering that she had asked a question before my musings. “I feel like we haven’t just chatted in a while.”

“I know what you mean,” Bahn, who had previously been so silent, said. “We’ve been working with a team to try to create self-healing engine parts, but we keep running into dead ends.”

“Really? That sounds interesting.” Although I was still quite in the beginning of my schooling, even I could prattle off a dozen or so reasons why that would be absolutely amazing.

“Yeah. I got the idea after watching the mini-mimics regrow lost or damaged limbs. However, we don’t want to make the engines out of organic tissue, but that’s where our data keeps leading us.”

“Organic tissue sounds…very easy to mess up. Or damage. Or for it to grow wrong.”

“Yeah,” Ciangi agreed, chiming back in. “Or even get a virus. Except in a much more literal sense than a digital one.”

“Well, I—” I was cut off as a loud groaning/sighing sound came from Bahn’s line.

“Sorry, I yawned,” he explained sheepishly.

Instantly, guilt cut through me. “Am I keeping you up?”

“No, I couldn’t fall asleep anyway. I’ve been making myself tea while we’ve been chatting and I think it finally kicked in.”

“I was actually dozing at my desk,” Ciangi answered with a chuckle. “So, if anything, I’m grateful that you woke me up so I would go to my actual bed.”

I wanted to chat longer. To talk about our hopes and dreams and how crazy the world had become. But most of all, I didn’t want to be alone.

“Alright, well, I better let you eggheads get some sleep. I know you wake up at six a.m. to get your day rolling.”

“Watch who you’re calling egghead, you egghead-in-training,” the blonde woman shot back before yawning herself. “Oh man. I’m hitting the hay. Talk to you guys later.”

“I will turn in as well. Feel free to call us tomorrow after eight,” Bahn said sleepily. “You be safe now, Higgens.”

“I always am,” I answered before closing out of the voice chat.

Once, that might have been a lie. For a short while, I had lived the life worthy of an action star on those net flicks I used to love to watch so much. But now, now my life was calm, peaceful, and full of everything I could ever want.

I just wished I still wanted everything I had.

3

Total Shut Out

I fidgeted with the collar of my outfit, the crisp fabric irritating the bottom of my chin. I didn’t want to wear the stupid things, but Ciangi had chosen our uniform-esque outfits as our way of appearing as a united front dedicated to Mimic’s interests.

It helped, or at least I thought it did. Wearing them did make me feel less isolated in my idiocy, like the random charity case that has been allowed into the playpen with the big kids.

Ciangi caught my hand and smoothed my hair back, looking up at me with a sweet grin. “Stop worrying. You look fine.”

“I don’t think his unease is due to any dissatisfaction with his physical appearance,” Bahn said, tugging at the end of his long, dark braid, “but rather nerves about the meeting to come.”

“Aw, come on, Higgy,” she said, gently cuffing my elbow. “This is like the seventh one. Aren’t you used to them by now?”

“I don’t know if I can ever get used to them,” I admitted, pulling at the end of my sleeves. “They make me on edge.”

“Well, don’t worry about it,” Ciangi assured. “It’s just going to be a discussion on what wave of support we’re going to send Mimic.”

“Wait, we’re still on that?” Bahn asked. “I thought that was what the first meeting was about.”

“And the second,” Ciangi answered. “And the fifth. Do you two even pay attention to these?”

Bahn and I shrugged. “I was distracted by the third and fourth meeting where we discussed a new wave of weaponry they were considering. We barely convinced them that the new type of nuclear fission they were proposing was too dangerous to risk,” the taller of the twins said.

Ciangi sighed. “Yeah. Gonzales was killer on those. I wish she was still around now.”

“Hey, does anyone know where she even is right now? I haven’t heard from her in a…week, I think?”

“I’m pretty sure that she is on some sort of secret weapon project related to those meetings we had.”

“Does anyone know when she’ll be back?”

Ciangi shrugged. “She talks to you way more than the two of us. Besides, you know how she gets when she’s on the verge of a breakthrough.”

I nodded and felt my stomach twist a little. I had caught my friend at the tail-end of a couple of her research benders and it was…intense, to say the least. It seemed the weapons engineer researched just as hard as she played. It made me wonder how she got stuck on a mining ship in the middle of nowhere rather than some lofty military position. Not that I wasn’t grateful…but still. It was a curious set of circumstances.

I heard footsteps down the hall and turned to see the military and political folk marching forward. Well, some of them marched. Some oozed along like they were exactly as shady as colony folk insisted they were. I was trying hard not to see them all as a line of Giomattis, but it was definitely a challenge.

The three of us bowed or shook hands with each of them as they passed, depending on the preference of the person, until we were the only ones standing in the hall. Ciangi shot me a knowing look before we all filed in.

It wasn’t a large group, or even a large meeting room, by any means. There were maybe eleven of them total, and that was including the two aides that were always either perpetually taking notes or fetching drinks.

The holo-projector was booting up as we took our seats, several images forming then melting above the table. I recognized the logo of the company that was contracted with the military, then a map of our solar system, before finally the default symbol that was supposed to represent any projects related to Mimic.

“Thank you for joining us, Doctor Bahn, Doctor Ciangi, Mister Higgens. Did you receive the agenda for this briefing?” It was General Masevkov who spoke. As far as I could tell, he was the leader of their group. I had looked up a bit of his history and so much of it was scrubbed from every database that all I knew was his birthday was in September and he had been born on Earth. He was an older man, with salt and pepper hair and a clean-shaven face. He was what I supposed some people might call a Silver Fox, but I mostly found him intimidating.

He was flanked by General Santos and Dr. Bar-Lev. Santos was a rounded, wrinkly, jolly-looking man, but when he spoke, he was really anything but, while Bar-Lev preferred to stay silent until he was called upon.

Thankfully, no one was a screaming, argumentative jerk, but that didn’t stop some of our meetings from growing a bit tense. While I never got the feeling that any of these men were outright evil, I didn’t always sense they really cared about Mimic like we did.

Then again, I didn’t know if it was possible for anyone to care like we did. They hadn’t hopped over the edge of the universe with her. Or almost died together a handful of times. Maybe it was ridiculous of me to expect them to have the same emotional bond that we did.

But still… I couldn’t help but be suspicious. It was just part of my nature now.

“Yes, sir,” Ciangi answered quickly, smiling brightly at him. “We’re discussing the allocation of ship and personnel to assist the leader of the Mimic species for the imminent threat to her people and our alliance.”

“Yes, that.”

“I believe there were reservations about the second fleet, the one containing the collecting vessel and the warhead carrier,” Ciangi continued like she was meant for this. And who knew, maybe she was. If it weren’t for the Siren call of engineering, maybe she would be a great politician.

“Yes. The concern is that we are allocating too many of our newly procured resources that have not had time to be properly stress-tested.”

“So, you’d rather send nothing at all?” Ciangi said, almost too sweetly. I would have smiled if it was remotely appropriate given the situation. The tiny blonde had a way of saying things politely and with a smile, but it was still very obvious that she was asking what the heck they were thinking. “I know I’m just a scientist, but I can’t help but think that this is not a very grateful way to treat the people responsible for shooting us into the next technological age.”

“We’re not talking about sending them nothing. There is just a sizable concern about sending promised help to our only otherworldly ally only to have it not be a help at all. Also, you’re asking an awful lot of men to give up possibly a year of their life or more, or even die hundreds of thousands of light years away from their home.”

“Isn’t that what you ask us already?” Bahn asked. “Or did I remember our years doing dangerous mining in deep space wrong?”

The generals and other political people bristled at that. Ciangi grimaced for a split-second, but managed to pull back on her ever-polite grin.

But an idea came to mind, so I took a deep breath and tried to steady my voice. “Actually, since—”

“Yes, there are many people such as yourselves who volunteered themselves for civilian jobs in space, but it is another entirely to order nearly a city’s worth of people into a war. We haven’t had a war in over a hundred years. Surely, you understand.”

I tried again. “You don’t need—”

“Also, there’s the issue of enabling our ally too much,” another spoke up. “I know that you have the utmost trust for your friend, but we do not know her. Also, we do not know how well she will lead her people. Once they reach maturity, will they accept her governance or will they stage a coup? With no track record to speak of, we run the risk of creating a powerful enemy who will later come to haunt us.”

“I could be wrong, but I thought that was one of the risks that comes with having an ally,” Ciangi countered. “No one can tell the future, so you must mitigate the risks of course, but not adequately helping our only line of defense against an incoming force is far riskier than possibly aiding an ally a little too much.”

“We have to disagree.”

“Actually, I—”

“I know it can be difficult to hear, considering how close you are to the alien, but we must be practical—”

“We don’t have to send that many men!” I nearly shouted, finally reaching my limit of being talked over.

All eyes flicked to me and I felt myself shrink a bit, but I had to push through. It helped that I was more than irritated. Usually, I didn’t mind much when I was talked over, but this situation was too important and affected those I loved a little too much for me to just sit quietly.

“What was that, Mister Higgens?”

“You don’t need to send a city full of men.”

The room grew quiet and Ciangi looked to me, her gaze clearly asking if I needed assistance, but I shook my head.

“Could you explain yourself a little more clearly, Mister Higgens?”

I swallowed and did my best to sound as official and assured as they did. “Well, when we return to Mimic’s planet, most of the children will be grown. We’ll give them all datalogs and some training, and they’ll be passable enough soldiers in a couple of weeks. Really, you only need the bare bones of crews for every ship, maybe five people max, and the rest is left to autopilot guided by a single ship.”

“You expect us to trust our most valuable weapons and spacecraft entirely in the hands of an alien species?”

“Well, not entirely. Just mostly.” I shrugged. “Besides, we would be there.” That caused another bout of silence, and the generals’ faces hardened. Well, they could look down on me all they wanted. They could consider me some sort of janitor that had been charity cased into high society. It didn’t matter.

“We will take that into consideration.”

“Actually,” Ciangi said, plastering that same smile across her face. “I would like to extrapolate exactly how much staff we would need, since that seems to be the main objection.” Somehow, it grew even more sickly sweet and she almost batted her eyes at them. “Would that not assuage a significant portion of your concerns?”

There was a reluctant sort of agreement and both Ciangi and Bahn started peppering them with different estimates that they quickly projected using the holo-projector above the table and the datalog interface. It started to go above my head, so I sat back and just listened.

When I had a moment out of the spotlight, I thought about how the generals had reacted to my proposal. It was now clearer than ever that they didn’t respect me. That they didn’t value my opinion even a single modicum.

Well, that was fine. I didn’t care if they thought I was stupid. They were going to have to deal with me no matter what. Mimic had ensured that I was invariably tied to her destiny, and I was eternally grateful. It was very clear that her manic perusal of the net had taught her how easily humans like to discredit those they thought were less than them.

By the time it ended an hour or two later, I hadn’t said anything else and Ciangi’s voice had long since grown raspy. When we were dismissed, I wasn’t quite sure what had happened, but I knew the Coin Twins would catch me up later.

We filed up in near silence, not even the high-level military folk saying much. An official escort greeted us at the hover-lift and then guided us out of the remainder of the building.

It was only during these moments that I remembered the facility we were in was some super-secret, high-level, off the map sort of structure. It wasn’t a place that any usual citizen would ever get to see, let alone be in, and yet here we were.

Once we reached the front entrance, we piled into the hovercraft waiting for us, and our driver took us to the government-protected lot we had left our own vehicles in.

“So,” I said, looking to the twins who were both staring out of opposite windows. “Want to go catch dinner or something? Talk things over? Or we could go to my place. I’ve got a full fridge.”

“Sorry,” Ciangi said, shaking her head and returning her attention to me. “We’re supposed to meet up with Harunya and her parents. They just returned from where they teach on Colony Theta. You can come, of course!”

I thought about going to some restaurant that I didn’t know with people I didn’t know. As much as I liked Harunya, I didn’t relish the thought of meeting anyone’s parents. “Ah, no. Thank you, though. We couldn’t even discuss Mimic in that environment anyway”

Bahn finally looked to me, and I couldn’t read the expression on his face. “You know that you don’t have to only talk to us about Mimic, right? We’re still your friends outside of work.”

“Of course, I know that! It’s just on my mind, ya know? I don’t think I could enjoy the meal with it weighing so heavily on me.”

He nodded almost gravely. “I understand. There had been times a hypothesis or idea has plagued me so thoroughly I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.”

“Yeah, well, that was your ADHD talking,” Ciangi quipped.

“Says the woman who once got stuck in a concentration loop for three days and passed out from dehydration.”

“Hey, college was a weird time. You know that.”

I smiled at their banter, but before I could inquire further about their post-secondary experience, we pulled up to the lot.

“Well, message us later and we’ll set something up where we can talk about whatever’s on our minds.”

“I’d like that,” I said as I opened the door and stepped out. “Have a good dinner, you guys.”

“You too.”

With that, I turned and headed out, the twins walking in the other direction.

A few minutes later, I found my hovercar. It was something that would have been impossible for me to have on the colony, as most of the roads and infrastructure there was designed around vehicles that touched the earth. Electric blue and decked out with all the frills and gadgets that I had daydreamed about when I was young, it was one of the first things I had purchased for myself after my wealth.

Of course, then I had to go through the process of getting my license and actually learning to drive it. That had taken considerably longer than purchasing the vehicle.

I slid in and pressed my thumb to the print-reader and then let the scanner do its thing to my eye. A few moments later, the engine revved and my vehicle lifted from the earth.

I looked over the gentle, beautiful curve of the dash. The glow of the notifications and the smooth interfaces. It really was everything that young Higgens would have drooled over. But as I ran my fingers over the wheel, taking in the texture of the material there, I realized that it didn’t make me any happier.

Actually, that wasn’t fair to the car. It wasn’t like it made me unhappy. I liked having money. I liked never being hungry or worrying about paying bills and knowing that if I saw something, I could buy it.

I guess the issue was that I didn’t like any of that stuff as much as I liked being around my friend—the best friend I had ever had.

I couldn’t be sure, but that might be what was called irony.

4

Danger Alert

I pulled to a stop in front of the gate to my estate. Leaning out of the window, I scanned my finger and eye again, said the code phrase, and then waited for the shielding to drop. Once the coast was clear, I drove up the drive that was far longer than it would ever need to be, then homed my hovercraft in the garage I had specifically for all my vehicles.

I chuckled at myself for a moment. I had bought three different modes of travel in the past year and I hardly used any of them. I was beginning to think maybe I should sell them and then donate the proceeds to the scholarship fund a lawyer had helped me set up.

I nodded to myself, feeling a bit better as I marched up the corridor that led to my main estate. If there was one thing that could get my mind off Mimic, it was improving the world in an actually viable way. I had two different scholarships running, along with a charity, and I was thinking of adding a hospital to the mix.

The educational funds had been on my mind from the start. One was a merit-based scholarship for lower class colony residents to have full rides at an Earth college of their choosing as well as a guaranteed job in their field. The second was for neutral atypical applicants that maybe didn’t have the best scholastic transcript, but still had a drive for secondary education. I was proud of what I had done, but there was still so much I could do.

The charity was something that the lawyer had actually thought of. For all the stereotypes I had heard about that profession, she certainly seemed just as enthusiastic about my philanthropic efforts as I was. It was a multi-pronged non-profit. Part of it was dedicated to getting adequate and up-to-date medical supplies to even outer rim colonies, and the other was providing cross-colony transport for those who might not be able to afford things normally. Often, I had found the most frustrating thing about my young life on the colony was feeling trapped there. I could never save up enough to go to one of the inner colonies, let alone Earth. In the end, if I wanted to find new opportunities, I had no choice but to take on high-risk, deep space jobs.

I didn’t want anyone to ever be forced into a life like I was. While there was nothing wrong with the maintenance work I did, there was something wrong with feeling like I never had any other options.

I reached my door and punched in the code that opened the control panel where I slid my ID card and scanned my thumb. From there, I stepped into a small room that hummed with energy.

Greetings.

Once, the high computer voice had been unsettling to me. It was far friendlier than the voice used on the ships we had used during our adventure, and sometimes I felt like it was programmed to be flirty. When I had tried the masculine version of the default settings, it had been so macho and gravelly that I had just stuck with the cloying female voice. If Mimic were here, she would have made a comment about the discrepancy, but since she wasn’t, I just had to imagine her response instead.

Identity confirmed. Good evening, Master Higgens.

The doors in front of me slid open and I was finally allowed into my own home. When I had first bought the place, I had thought the security was a bit overkill, but since having a few experiences with rabid fans and xenophobic folk, I was now grateful for the extra protection.

I shuffled into my kitchen, unbuttoning my crisp delegate jacket and shucking it onto the floor. I was just about to punch something into the fabricator when I noted something from my main workstation.

There was a tiny green light steadily flickering at the bottom of the holo-projector. A message!

Only four people ever messaged me on my personal device, and I was desperate to speak to any of them. Forgetting about my food, I sprinted over and booted up the system.

The second it took to get running seemed to be an eternity unto itself, and when the logo finally finished forming, I hastily pressed the button on the interface that would allow me to open my messages.

The machine beeped again, and the message began playing almost immediately. My heart skipped a beat as none other than Mimic appeared in the holo-field. She looked tired, so very tired, and it seemed she had forgotten to put a nose on, but I was still elated.

“Higgens, I know it has been so long since we have talked, but that is because things have been moving quickly here. I am sending this to you because my messages to your superiors have gone ignored.”

I was holding my breath, but what else could I do? It had been at least two months since she had last sent me a holo and while it was so nice to see her face again, I didn’t enjoy seeing her look distressed.

“The alien’s people have arrived at the edge of our detectable space, much sooner than we ever expected. Although I have made progress, we are nowhere near capable of mounting a defense yet. Please, I need your help. I need supplies, weapons, ships, you name it. Nothing that was outlined in the treaty has been delivered. I do not know what is happening. I can only pray that this message doesn’t reach you too late.”

I saw a pained expression filter across her face that made me feel almost guilty. Maybe I should have reached out to her, but I had always thought she was too busy with creating an entire society to want to talk to me.

“Please, Higgens, be safe. I have a terrible feeling that I do not quite understand. I wish you were here; I feel as if that would make everything so much easier. Hurry, my friend, and I will see you soon.”

The holo disappeared and I was left alone in my study room.

Suddenly, energy coursed through me like it hadn’t in months. Mimic needed me!

I knew I should have been terrified, maybe even shocked, that our calculations had been off, but I couldn’t help but be happy that I was going to return to her again. The world and extending universe made so much more sense when I was with her, and could anyone blame me for wanting to help protect the very people that I had inadvertently discovered?

I thought very briefly about recording a holo and sending it back to Mimic, but I realized by the time it reached her, I would already be nearly to her and there was no guarantee she would get it anyway. Especially since her messages to my superiors had been lost somewhere in the subspace radiation.

Instead I sent out a voice chat request to the Coin Twins and Gonzales. My lips dipped downward in a frown when my datalog indicated the weapons engineer was still offline, but Bahn answered almost immediately.

“Hello?” I asked, tempted to bring up the video function of the application but deciding against it.

“Hello, Higgens. How are you this evening?”

“Oh, Harunya. Why do you have Bahn’s datalog?”

“I believe the twins told you of our dinner together with my parents?”

I screwed my eyes shut and groaned. I had totally forgotten! “Right, right, I’m so sorry. But something incredibly important has come up. Can you get them for me?”

“Of course, that is why I answered. You are painfully polite, Mister Higgens, so when I saw that you were trying to contact Bahn, there was no way I could ignore it.”

“Thank you. You have no idea how much this means.”

“No, but I look forward to hearing about it in your next bestselling biography.” There was a slight pause where I thought that perhaps she was summoning one of the Coin Twins, but instead, her voice dropped low. “I have to be honest,” she murmured, her voice barely above a whisper. “I’ve never felt what I feel now. As foolish as it might be, I think this is love.”

“Um, that’s great, bu—”

She kept going, and suddenly, I understood why she had brought it up. “Look, whatever adventure you’re about to whisk them away on, please promise me you’ll keep them safe. They can’t live without each other, and I’m beginning to think I can’t live without them. Do you promise?”

Although emotions had never been my strong point, I knew exactly what she meant and exactly what she was feeling. “I promise,” I answered.

“Thank you.” I heard her set the datalog down, then call for the twins. A few moments later, their voices were coming over the line.

“Hey, what’s going on?”

“Mimic sent me a distress signal. Apparently, the aliens have appeared at the edge of our system. She’s been trying to notify our gov, but her messages haven’t been getting through.”

“What, are you kidding me?” That was Ciangi, who came in loud and clear.

“This would be a terrible thing to joke about. I’m completely serious.”

“So, what do we do then?”

“Exactly what she’s asking of us,” I said. “We need to call another meeting and inform the generals of what we know.”

“What about Gonzales?”

“What about her? I can’t reach her and as far as you guys know, she’s down one of her rabbit holes and elbow-deep in new weapon experimentation.”

“Of course, I knew that. I just… It feels weird not to have her with us for something this big. What, are we going to leave her behind?”

“Never!” I answered quickly. “I’m sure once we get the project approved, one of the higher-ups with the appropriate security clearance will get her the information.”

“Right, that makes sense. We’ll meet up at your place then all go over together. Goodness knows those upper echelon folks will not appreciate being called back where they just left.”

“I don’t care,” I said intensely. “If Mimic needs help, then we are getting her help.”

“And that attitude is why you’re the most popular out of any of us.”

“What?” I objected. “No, I’m not.”

“Higgens, I realize you like to live under a rock as much as you can, but you have an action figure.”

“I…what?” I shook my head. “We’re getting sidetracked. Apologize to Harunya for me and of course, thank her parents for their graciousness. Be here in a half-hour.”

“But we’re—”

I clicked off the conversation, not letting them object. I knew they were probably more than half an hour out in the city, but the deadline would certainly make them hurry.

In the meantime, I needed to gather my things. It seemed like my trip to see Mimic was coming much earlier than I had expected.

What a great surprise wrapped in such terrible packaging.

5

Bound in Red Tape

I paced in the same room that we had just vacated hours earlier. It was taking forever for the generals to reconvene and I wanted to strangle someone with my impatience.

It wasn’t like me to be so fired up and aggressive, but it also wasn’t like Mimic to send such a heartfelt plea for help. She needed me. She needed us. And there was no way I was going to let her down.

“Relax, Higgens. You’re going to wear a trench in the floor,” Ciangi laughed.

“I can’t help it,” I said, continuing to pace and twist my hands around each other in a specific pattern. “It helps me think and calm down.”

“Oh, sorry. I forgot.”

“It’s fine,” I said, turning on my heel and walking away until I reached the end of my path, and then I returned to her. “I’m just going over in my head of what to say. They’re gonna give us some pushback, but in the end, they’ll know that this is the right thing to do.”

“I’m glad you have faith,” Bahn muttered, rearranging the several datalogs he had in front of him. “Because I find mine wavering.”

“Really?” I asked, pausing for just a moment. “Why?”

“Because I find it—” He paused, and I belatedly realized that it was because one of the assistants had entered the room, soon followed by one of the generals that I didn’t quite know the name of, and then two other political figures. I sensed that the conversation between myself and my friends was over, so I sat and patiently waited for the rest of them to arrive.

Of course, it was Masevkov and Santos who strolled in last, looking like they were the ones inconvenienced instead of us, who had been waiting for them over two hours.

“What is all of this about?” Masevkov asked, voice even growlier than usual.

“What this is about,” I said before Ciangi could step in, “is the survival of both our species and the Mimics. Thank you for joining us. If you’d have a seat, we can get started on saving life as we know it.”

The general looked somewhere between surprised and affronted, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to care. I didn’t have time to be diplomatic, to dance around the red tape like a trained artist. Mimic needed our help and she needed it now.

“Those aliens that are coming to avenge their fallen brother have reached the edges of the sensor grid Mimic created. We still have some time, but not nearly as much as we had estimated. We need to gather whatever we have and send it within the next forty-eight hours. No more planning. No more debating. No more amassing the perfect fleet. Whatever we have approved, we send. Period.”

I finally stopped pacing and stood at the center of our trio, gazing at those gathered in front of me with resolution. I may have not been a diplomat, or military strategist or otherwise genius, but I knew how to throw myself into the action better than any other janitor-turned-engineer hopeful I knew.

“We are well aware that some of the things outlined in our treaty are not possible with this accelerated timeline,” Bahn continued. “Seeing as the threat is not acting according to our timeline, we think it more than reasonable to drop what is not possible and simply stick with what is possible.”

Ciangi stepped in, picking up on his next sentence as if she had been in his head. And who knew, maybe she was. The Coin Twins had a connection that seemed to defy the very science that they loved so much. “Which means all the ships you have assembled and what weapons are loaded onto them, and a skeleton crew of volunteers to fly them. Should we not have enough volunteers, we can program an autopilot program into any smaller ships that are undermanned.”

When she finished, I certainly expected some objections, and especially questions of how we could be sure, or even how we had come by this information. But instead, there was only silence.

It was exceedingly difficult, but I maintained eye contact the entire time, not wavering, not flinching. I felt like I was in some sort of standoff, and whoever blinked first lost.

Finally, it was Santos who spoke.

“Or, we could send nothing at all.”

I stared at him, completely gobsmacked. “I’m sorry, what?” was all I could think of saying.

“Our treaty with the leader of the Mimics clearly outlined when they could expect our aid and what we would provide. There were no clauses about providing things ahead of time should the foes of hers arrive early. We will not accelerate our output, nor will we provide a partial fulfillment of our terms. We will provide exactly what we promised, when we promised it.”

Anger, white hot and roiling, surged through me with no quarter. I felt my face grow hot and my stomach squeeze itself into a tight little ball. “But without our aid, you’re basically ensuring the destruction of her entire species!”

“If that is what should transpire, then one might consider it the natural order of things,” Masevkov added.

I slammed my fists on the table. “Then what was this all for? Tell me, were you planning on betraying Mimic the whole time, or are you all just opportunistic sharks who smell the blood in the water?!”

“Calm yourself, Mister Higgens.”

“I will not be calm! How do you all live with yourselves at night? You’re willing to sit here and twiddle your thumbs while a nation of children is slaughtered just for wanting something so simple as their freedom! We killed all of Mimic’s people on her home planet. These children are the last bastions of a rich and powerful civilization that has helped launch us into a new age of discovery! This is our chance to make up for all the wrong we’ve done.”

“We are not saviors of the universe. Just because we discovered life doesn’t mean that it is our job to be its guardian,” Santos bellowed.

“I discovered new life, not you! All you guys did was sit here as a bunch of bloated parasites and feed off the work of their people!”

Santos’s face grew red and he looked to one of his aides. They quickly ducked out of the room, and when they returned a second later, there were three guard-soldiers behind them. “We will adhere to the treaty. You are relieved of your duty until we have further need of you. Please return your security ID badge.”

I stood there for a moment, trembling. I hadn’t felt so blindsided since Giomatti had first kidnapped Mimic. Sure, I had always anticipated some wiggling and whining from the bureaucrats in front of me, but I had never thought they were capable of outright betrayal.

When I said and did nothing, the guards took a menacing step toward me. I felt both Ciangi and Bahn tense. Clearly, if I was down for a fight then they were too. But I shook my head, and ripped my ID from my pocket.

“I would tell you where to shove this,” I hissed, trying my best not to let my voice shake. “But you’d probably need an instruction manual written in triplicate to figure it out and frankly, you’re not worth the time.”

I threw my badge onto the table and marched out the door. I could hear the Twins do the same behind me, and we exited in solidarity.

No one said a word, including the escort that met us at the elevator. We rode it down in silence, walked through the front entrance in silence, exited the doors in silence, and rode back to the lot in silence. It wasn’t until we were all in my car and pulling away that anyone spoke at all.

It was Ciangi who broke the quiet, with a long line of swears that might have actually singed our eardrums. She continued for a great while, lasting long past our exit from the lot and almost the entire way to my house. When she finally finished, silence reigned once more.

I heard a faint beeping from the backseat and looked over my shoulder to see Bahn carefully scanning the car on his handheld. It seemed that he still loved his portable baby even after all this time. It reminded me of the good old days and I allowed myself a small smile as the scanner finished up its job.

“Your car’s safe,” he said, tucking the handheld back into his omni-present satchel.

“Really?” I asked. “Not a single bug? I’m disappointed.”

“They probably think we’re just a bunch of nerds who will roll over if they flex their muscles a little.” She paused for a second, her bright eyes shuttling between Bahn and I. “We’re, uh, not going to roll over, right?”

“Of course not,” I answered, putting steel into my voice. “In fact, we’re going to steal a ship. Specifically, the biggest one that I saw on the requisition list.”

“Oh,” she murmured, voice quiet. “Is that all?”

I shrugged, pulling up to my gate once more. “The night is young. We’ll see what else we can plan.”

6

Grand Theft Spaceship

I crawled over the crest of a hill, pulling myself along the thick roots of the trees that stuck out of the near vertical slope. I remembered when I was a child, I would daydream about one day seeing an actual forest instead of the carefully cultivated groves of trees we had in our colony greenhouse. I had fantasized about climbing into the branches, building a ramshackle treehouse, and other generally silly things that involved ending up covered in dirt and moss.

However, none of those imaginings involved clambering up a near-mountain in a thick scape of pines while trying to break into a government hangar that held the treaty-promised ships and equipment.

Life was funny that way.

Ciangi and Bahn reached the top shortly after me. It seemed that they had been working on their physicality during their year on Earth. I guessed they figured on our next escapade, they didn’t want to be the slowest ones in the group again.

“Not bad,” I murmured quietly once they were both on their feet beside me.

“It was nothing,” Ciangi panted, wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. “It was just like college.”

“That was nothing like college.” Bahn said flatly, his thin chest heaving a bit.

“Anyway, are you two ready for the next leg?”

“Just give me a minute.” Ciangi said, holding up a hand. “Are we all clear on the plan?”

“I mean, we discussed it about three times on the way over here, but we can go over it again if it makes you feel better.”

“No, no…that’s alright. Just make sure your shield-scrambler is up. And did I mention that these are still in experimental phase?”

“Yes. Like I said, three different times. Are you nervous? You seem nervous.”

“Why are you talking like you’re Gonzales?” she countered, sticking out her tongue like the grown woman that she was.

I shrugged. “I dunno. I guess it just doesn’t feel right without someone in the group aggressively using sarcasm mixed with practical logic.”

“You know, if you weren’t so in love with Mimic, I would almost think you liked our gun-happy friend.”

Normally I would have blushed at that, and sputtered something about platonic feelings for everyone, but I didn’t have the time.

“Let’s go,” I said, sliding down the hill.

It was a much longer journey on foot, but it’s not like we had much of a choice. I was more than certain that the bigwigs had already put a watch on both my house and my car. If they saw me pulling out of my drive, there would have been a detail and a satellite tracking me within seconds.

So naturally, we had left several lights on at the house and set the projector to play silhouettes of us across the windows every so often before taking off on foot.

Getting past the outer layer of security had been the easiest. There was an invisible sensor wall that would trip if anyone crossed it and notify security that someone had trampled into their territory and at what speed they had trespassed. All it took was a quick jump with propulsion boots and we were over that barrier without a sweat.

After that had been an actual shield that Ciangi had partially disabled with a quick power surge to the nearest output post. It also served the added perk of drawing a contingent of repairmen and soldiers to the spot, which would draw them away from the next layer we had to peel back.

Next, we had a physical wall to clamber, then inner gates that required a badge to buzz through.

We were taking a bit of a gamble on that part. The three of us had surmised that since the generals had our badges, they most likely wouldn’t be in any sort of hurry to deactivate our clearance. Most likely they would barely remember to hand it off to one of their assistants at some ridiculously hour late before they went to bed, and that assistant couldn’t get it to anyone that mattered before morning.

So, we had printed out copies of our badges based on a picture we had taken together. It was hopefully the last thing the bureaucrats would suspect.

However, if they had deactivated our clearance, we would be completely SOL and forced to default to our backup plan.

I didn’t like our backup plan. It involved a whole lot of explosions and possible innocent casualties. But if it came to that, I would follow through. I had to get to Mimic, no matter what.

Suddenly I found myself wishing that I had sent her a holo. Even if she wouldn’t get it for several weeks, at least she would know that I had never abandoned her.

It didn’t take long for us to reach the wall, a looming barricade of stone and metal that spouted up from the forest, cutting between the trees like a great knife. I could feel my teeth buzz with the energy field surrounding it, and I looked to Ciangi expectantly.

“This is where we turn on our shield-scrambler, right?”

“What happened to ‘we’ve gone over this three times’?”

“Just being thorough.”

“Uh-huh. Well, yes. This is where we start to use them. And we’ll know if they’re not working if—”

“One of us suddenly falls over dead or guards literally rain down from the heavens on us?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, here goes nothing.” I was playing it much less carefully than I would normally, but I couldn’t be overly-cautious considering what was on the line. I crouched and powered on my propulsion boots, then shot myself up and over the grand structure.

I didn’t quite clear it and landed near the top with a thump. I caught the edge with my hands, none too worried as I pulled myself the rest of the way up.

I stood atop the structure for a moment, admiring the view until Bahn and Ciangi joined me. Once we were together again, I double-checked to see that no one was below us then jumped down to the other side.

The boots did their job and slowed our momentum, allowing me to land softly enough not to break any bones. However, it certainly wasn’t soft by any definition of the word and both of my knees popped in protest.

“Ow,” Ciangi groaned as they hit earth beside me with muffled thumps. “Remind me to recalibrate these later,” she said.

“If we get a later,” Bahn murmured. “We still have one more hurdle to pass just to get in.”

“True enough.”

Together we walked forward, shedding our dark outerwear and stuffing it into the compression half of my backpack so we looked less like thieves from some show on the net and more like peons hastily shuffling to complete their work before their shift ended. I clipped my badge to my pocket as we walked, and it helped me from catching the eyes of any random personnel that passed. The last thing I wanted to do was shoot one of them an accidentally guilty look and have them report us before we could get to where we needed to go.

I reached the final door that would let us inside the hangar we needed. Just like all the other ones, it had three scanners necessary to open it up—badge, finger, and eye

In a way, Earth’s massive reliance on automation was a godsend. If there was an in-person guard set to block the entrance, we might not have been able to con our way in. Or maybe we could. Either way, I was much happier fooling a predictable machine instead of a living, breathing, unpredictable human.

My hand trembled slightly as I slid the card through the slot. The door gave a beep, and then a panel slid out for me to press my thumb against. I almost didn’t dare to breathe as I pressed my thumb to it, but that beeped too and then last but not least, the eye scanner came out.

The seconds seemed to drag on forever until finally, that was an affirmative sound as well and the door slid open.

I heaved a sigh of relief and gave my companions a little wave before stepping through. The door closed quickly behind me, and I stood back to wait for each of them to go through the same process I had.

I couldn’t help but worry, my maintenance side quickly rattling off all the things that could go wrong and possible fixes for those eventualities.

Our entrance could cause the head of security to be paged, and before we knew it, a contingent of guards would be swarming us. Or, by sheer chance, whoever’s job it was to deactivate our clearance could do so any moment and one of us could end up locked out while the others were trapped inside. Perhaps even one of the generals would cross by and recognize us.

The possibilities went on and on until the door finally slid open and Ciangi emerged, looking relieved.

Just like before, it quickly shut behind her and then it was just Bahn.

The blond half of the twins and I didn’t say anything as we waited. As it was a government building, we were fairly certain that there were probably listening devices everywhere until we got into the sealed areas of the hangar. It was torture, just standing there in the quiet as we waited for something to go wrong, but a few seconds later, the entrance swung open once again and it was Bahn stepping through.

He nodded to us, an obvious look of relief across his face. I held up my hand for a high-five, and he slapped it with more enthusiasm than I had seen in him in quite a while.

We moved on down the hall after that, beelining for the hangar. We were practically there, and I could feel adrenaline pumping up in earnest.

Honestly, I wasn’t that worried about stealing the ship. Since it was so new, there were going to be almost zero security protocol fitted to the vehicle. No, the difficult part would be getting it past Earth’s outer defenses. Defense satellites, the space military posts, not to mention the outer stations that would all want to stop us from getting past their sphere of influence. It was going to be incredibly difficult, but we were game.

We had to be.

The final door to the actual hangar we wanted was just a simple, garage-like door held closed with an ionic lock. A quick placement of a mini-electrical discharger later, the lock popped open and we rolled the partition up and out of our way.

“Whoa,” Ciangi breathed, looking out at the vast allocation of government space.

“Whoa.” I couldn’t help but agree.

Stretching out before us was row after row after row of mint condition ships. I saw everything from tiny, single-pilot fighters, to a five-crew scouting ship, all the way up to a singular magnificent, gargantuan battle cruiser that would make even the most high-budget of net shows wet their pants.

“And to think they wanted to hold all of this back,” Bahn mused, anger dripping over his words like syrup drizzle.

“Honestly, I don’t know if they were ever planning on giving any of this up.”

“I’m beginning to think that they weren’t at all,” Ciangi said as we walked forward. “So, which ship are we talking, now that we are falling back into our old habits?”

“What ship do you think?” I asked, grinning wryly while walking straight toward the warship.

“Higgens, no! We can’t.”

“Higgens, yes,” I shot right back. “We definitely can.”

I could already see us riding up to Mimic’s planet in the cruiser’s full glory. The relief that she would feel would be massive and I would get the chance to be a hero again.

Maybe that was why I was so dissatisfied with my day-to-day existence. I had gotten used to every one of my actions being monumentally important and somehow managing to save the day with my friends that now, nothing really seemed to be a challenge anymore.

Well, stealing one of the newest, biggest, and brightest spacecraft from the government of Earth was plenty of challenge.

“This is crazy,” Bahn said, although he didn’t slow his step at all as we jogged toward our destination. I was tempted to sprint, but we didn’t want to move too quickly and fry out our shield-scramblers, which were the only things keeping us from setting off every alarm in the place.

“Does anyone else get the feeling that this is entirely too easy?”

I had finally reached the lowered walkway of the ship and I hesitated just a moment. “Not really, why—”

Suddenly someone, no…something punched me, and I went flying. I collapsed to the ground a few feet away, vaguely aware that Ciangi was screaming in alarm and all of my limbs seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.

I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t gather my wits enough to do so. I did, however, manage to tilt my head enough to see what looked like a syringe sticking out of the left side of my chest.

“Ow,” I groaned before my head fell back.

Less than a second later, I felt both Bahn and Ciangi clatter to the floor a few feet away. I didn’t need to look around to guess that they had been tagged too. Footsteps sounded down the ramp, one right after another, until three soldiers were looking down at me curiously.

“Why did you shoot them?” one asked the other, although their voice rang hollowly in my ears. As if someone had put some sort of ancient auto-tune on their words.

“They were running for the ship. There’s no reason authorized personnel would do that.”

“I hope you’re right. Let’s get them to the infirmary to sleep off those darts.”

I tried to object, or to come up with some sort of con worthy of the situation, but my mouth wouldn’t move. The world grew dark at the edges and I spun away until finally, sleep claimed me just like any other.

7

It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better

I didn’t want to wake up.

That was the very first thing I was aware of as I hovered on the edge of my subconscious. Sleep was safe, and easy, and most of all, it felt good. The more awake I became, the more I was aware that something awful was awaiting me.

But eventually, I wouldn’t resist consciousness any longer. I rose up to the real world and opened my eyes to near blinding levels of illumination.

I tried to sit up with a jerk, but instead, my body moved in slow motion. When I finally did get upright, my head swam with some serious double vision.

I closed my eyes and took a long, deep breath. My fingers came up to massage my temples, and once I stopped feeling like I was caught in a whirlpool, I tried looking around again.

I was in a small, bare, and brightly lit room. I saw a waste disposal device in the corner and a simple roll-up mattress in the other, and nothing else. Turning about, there was none other than a line of yellowish shielding for the fourth wall.

I was in a cell.

Bigger than the one Mimic had once been held in, but a cell nonetheless.

I stood there, in complete and utter shock. Slowly, the events that led up to that moment played out in my mind. There must have been guards on the ship. Of course! Why had I thought that they would be left unprotected? This wasn’t a mining ship with the bare essentials to function. This was an Earth Gov military building. Or at least it was… I wasn’t exactly sure where we had been taken to.

“What’s a pretty boy like you doing in a place like this?”

My eyes jerked in the direction of the voice, into a cell across the hall, where none other than Gonzales stared at him.

“Oh my gosh,” I gasped, rushing to the edge of my prison. “What are you doing here?!”

She stood and walked right up to the glowing barrier of her room as well. She looked tired, more tired than I had ever seen her, with deep purple circles under her eyes and I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like she had a split on her bottom lip.

“Same thing as you, I imagine,” she said, grinning broadly. “Getting betrayed.”

“I, wha…what happened?”

“You always did have a way with words, didn’t you?” she joked, winking broadly at me. It was then I noticed a strange discoloration around her eye. Had she been in a fight? Had someone struck her?! “I was on contract, working out the kinks in those weapons we had that whole hoity toity meeting about, when I happened to overhear a couple of the honchos talking.”

“Really? You just happened to overhear?”

She rolled her eyes, but her mischievous grin didn’t dim. “Alright, so I may or may not have been satisfied with the answers I was getting from my liaison and I may or may not have broken into their place to get some answers when good ol’ General Santos—who is married by the way—and my liaison burst in and started…dancing. Horizontally.”

My eyes went wide at the revelation, but I didn’t quite understand. “What does that have to do with you ending up in prison?”

“Pillow talk, actually. It’ll do you in every time. Santos revealed that they didn’t intend on ever honoring the treaty and that they were using our team as an excuse to amass enough supplies for some sort of global cue. Can you believe that? We’re trying to save the galaxy and they’re busy with some planetary power play!

“Needless to say, I had to get to you guys and warn you, but unfortunately I got a little…intercepted on my way out of the building.” She smiled sheepishly and sent me a shrug. “I’ve been stuck here ever since.”

As happy as I was to see one of my best friends, my stomach sank at the thought. She had been so alone and had no one there to help her. “How long ago was that?”

“Uh, I don’t really know. There’s not a reliable way to keep time here, and I think they do it on purpose. But the last date I remembered was the twenty-seventh.”

“The…the twenty-seventh, are you absolutely sure?”

She squinted at me and now I was absolutely sure her eye was barely healed from a good punch. “Yeah, why?”

“Gonzales, it’s the twenty-first today.”

“Holy halibut,” she breathed, taking a step back. “And none of you thought to look for me?! I was gone almost a month.”

“I…I got a message from you. It said you were working on a super high-level project and would be out of touch for a bit.”

I heard the voice of Ciangi, but I couldn’t quite see her. By following Gonzales’s gaze, I surmised that she was in a cell next to me.

“Ah, it makes sense they would cover their tracks.” Gonzales sighed. “They were probably going to fake my death or something after a while and hope that you didn’t ask questions.”

“You think they would have done that?” I heard Ciangi ask weakly.

“Hon, this is politics with rich people. I think they’d do anything to get what they want.” She sighed and sat down. “Hey, Higgens, do you see Bahn in the cell next to me?”

I glanced over, where I thought I saw a figure sprawled out on the floor in the very back of the room. Heaven forbid that they could have set us down on the mattresses. “I think so. But he’s still out.”

“Eh, the boy never could hold his liquor. I’m not surprised sedatives are just as effective on him.”

“How do you know they used sedatives on us?”

“Because y’all came in completely unconscious. It would have been funny if it wasn’t awful.”

“Ah, right. That would make sense.” I tried to push through my guilt, but I felt utterly terrible at the thought that she had been stuck in this tiny box for nearly a month, fearing the worst. “I’m sorry, I really am.”

She waved her hand. “What were you gonna do? They played us all real good.” She rubbed her face and when she looked to me again, her smile was definitely wavering. “So, how’d you lovely folks end up here? I’m guessing not by eavesdropping on some post-adulterous shenanigans.”

“Mimic sent me a message.”

“Oh, dude, really, she did?!”

I nodded. “The alien’s friends arrived at the edge of the sensor’s readings. They’re moving much faster and much closer than we thought. We have maybe a month or two now instead of a year or two.”

Gonzales’s face went ashen. “You have to be kidding me.”

I shook my head, mood sinking even further. “I’m afraid not. We went to warn the generals and they said that they wouldn’t fulfill the treaty any earlier than what was dictated in our exact missive.”

“Wow… I just…even when you know that they’re terrible people, it really just takes the legs out from under you. They really don’t care what happens to the first alien species we’ve ever been in contact with.”

“They really don’t,” I murmured.

“Gonzales,” Ciangi whispered, voice so quiet and shaking that it wasn’t audible. “Please tell me that you have some sort of plan to get out of here, something you couldn’t do with just you but will work now that the four of us are all together again?”

Gonzales dropped her head and shrugged. “Sorry, friendo. I’ve been over my cell a dozen times over. We’re locked in here until someone decides to let us out. And I have a feeling that won’t be until we’re useful to the very people who put us here.”

“Well, what about food? Or exercise? Or bathing?”

“Food comes once a day. Exercise is whatever you can think of to do in your seven-by-seven space and once in a while, they’ll toss sani-packs in here for us so we don’t get a raging infection.” She trailed off and I thought she was done, but after a moment, she kept going. “Uh, Ciangi?”

“Yeah?”

“Try to keep your face to the wall, and curl up small, if you can. At least around feeding time.”

“Why?”

“It, uh, it just might work a bit better that way.”

I wanted to ask more, I wanted to try to plot out our miraculous escape. I wanted to do so many things, but I was completely and entirely stuck.

Gonzales yawned and leaned back. “I hope you guys don’t mind, but I’ve been up for what feels like forever, waiting for you guys to wake up. I think it’s time I had a nap. Try not to throw yourselves at the walls. All you’ll end up with is a busted shoulder.”

She crawled forward on her hands and knees until she was on her thin mattress, then practically collapsed. For a moment, I thought she might just be fooling around, but then I heard her deep and heavy breathing even from across the hall.

“What now?” Ciangi breathed, her voice barely getting around the wall between us.

“Now we collect data,” I said, determination going through me like a fire. “And then we use that to make a plan. And then our plan will get us out.”

“I…I think I’m scared, Higgens.”

My chest squeezed painfully at that. No matter how one phrased it, my rushing forward had gotten my friends into possibly the worst situation they had ever been in.

And I swore that I would get them out of it, if it was the last thing I did.

Bahn did wake up eventually, and I quickly explained to him what the situation was. The optimistic, hopeful side of my mind hoped that somehow, they might have left some of his many gadgets on him, considering he liked to hide them in plain sight, but the enterprising engineer searched and found not a single one.

I didn’t let that discourage me too much and began to try to formulate ideas in my head. They weren’t very good ideas considering I didn’t really have enough data to go off of yet, but they were the foundation which I told myself I could build off of later.

Hours passed and I couldn’t sleep, so my thoughts were all I had to keep me company. Entirely too much time went by while Mimic was waiting for us. Would she think we abandoned her? That we had just abandoned her to her fate? I hoped not. I didn’t want to think about her having to experience that feeling in the pit of her stomach. It was terrible and heart-wrenching, and I was sure she had far too much on her plate to have to deal with that too.

Our first round of food came before my first sleep. A single guard came in, rolling a cart with four trays. I plopped myself right in the center of my cell and watched, content to learn everything I could before trying something rash that would end up with us having even tighter security.

He approached Bahn’s cell first. Putting his cart to the side, he grabbed one of the trays and walked toward the barrier. I watched intently, waiting for the shield to drop, but instead, the guard pushed the tray through.

My breath hitched with excitement while Bahn tentatively stepped forward to take it. Once both of his hands were on it, the guard stepped away. Bahn pulled the tray to himself then crossed to the back of his cell and began to eat.

The rest of the interaction went quickly, and I tried not to wiggle with excitement as it came my turn. Sure enough, I got a tray just like everyone else, and it slid through the barrier without a single bit of resistance.

Fascinating. It must have been some sort of shield-resistant material. I was sure that could be of some use.

“Gonzales—” I started as soon as the guard was gone and the door slid shut behind him.

“They come and collect the trays in an hour,” she said without me even asking my question. “So, if you want to eat, you better do it now. And if you try to break that tray, they will cuff you until they find every piece. Even if they have to do a full body cavity check.”

I didn’t want to ask her how she knew that, and I certainly wasn’t going to question her expertise, so I shut my mouth and nodded. So, I couldn’t collect any pieces now, but I could hold onto the information for later.

“Ciangi, when you’re done, make sure you push your tray out of the shield as soon as possible.”

“Again, why do you keep telling me these strange things?”

“Just trust me, okay?”

“…alright.”

The conversation died at that and soon we were stuffing our faces. I was much hungrier than I should have been, which made me wonder exactly how much time had passed while we were unconscious. Part of me felt like it couldn’t be long, but another part of me knew that it must have been enough for them to drag us to the infirmary, identify us, strip us of all our belongings, and then transport us to wherever we were.

Unless there wasn’t any transporting at all. I supposed it was possible that we were below the hangar somewhere, locked in some super-duper, high-level clearance prison.

If only I had been more careful! I had been relying on luck for far too long and clearly, it had finally run out. Now, no one would be saved, and the Earth was possibly about to throw itself into its first major war in ages. All because of me.

My sour thoughts continued, and I found myself caught in a wheel of self-pity until the door opened again. True to Gonzales’s word, a guard came to collect the trays. I quickly slid mine across the floor, where it crossed through the shield with no problem, while Gonzales and Ciangi had both already left theirs in the hall.

The guard collected them without a word and then disappeared again, leaving us to plan and rest. It was in silence that my first full day in captivity passed.

8

Bully

I hated to admit it, but days began to pass into a clear routine. I would wake up and the four of us would discuss any thoughts that came to us until we fell asleep several hours later. Well, Ciangi, Bahn, and I would chat. Gonzales would listen idly but didn’t contribute. I knew that her month here no doubt wore at her, and that she had probably been through at least a dozen or so plans herself, but I couldn’t just give up.

We were her cavalry, after all. Even if how we ended up trapped with her was accidental.

It wasn’t until what I guessed was the third day when something happened to knock me out of the ritual I wasn’t aware that I had settled into. Gonzales was right, the longer we were here, the more the days and details started to blend together into an endless rush.

The door slid open and loud footsteps sounded. I looked to the entrance to see a guard I didn’t recognize enter with a handful of what I guessed were the sani-packs that Gonzales had mentioned. He was a touch shorter than me, but one of those incredibly jacked individuals that obviously was trying to make up for his lack of vertical growth with horizontal gains. His face was your standard, tough guy fair, and his thick, blond beard was meticulously trimmed. I didn’t like him from the moment I saw him, but I figured our interactions would be too small to matter.

I could not be more wrong.

“What’s this?” he said, deep voice booming throughout the space. I instantly thought of all the bullies who had mocked me on the colony. They all had a certain way of carrying themselves and speaking. Like they were constantly performing and trying to impress someone I couldn’t see. “We’ve got a whole crowd in here. No one told me you were having a party!”

None of us said anything, we were far too alert for that. Maybe it was a terror that all of us nerds shared, or just the vibes he was putting off.

He continued his approach but didn’t stop walking until he was past us and to a command console on the far side of the hall. He pressed a series of buttons, and a small square opened in the center of our shields. Barely enough for a hand to fit through, but enough for him to toss through a couple of the packs.

When we all had them, I thought that would be it, but he paused at Gonzales’s cell, turning the items over in his hand.

“What’s this, big mouth? No taunts?”

I watched, the hairs rising at the back of my neck. Everything was telling me that his tone was dangerous.

Gonzales didn’t say anything, but that only seemed to interest the guard even more. “You’re not ignoring me in there, are you, big mouth? You know how I hate that.”

I crossed to the edge of my cell, my stomach twisting. The tension was cranking up steadily by the minute, and my eyes locked onto Gonzales. She was sitting against the back wall of her room, a blank look on her face.

“No, sir,” she said finally, her gaze completely avoiding me.

“That’s better. I have your sani-packs here.” He held them up and shook them. “Now what do you say?”

“Thank you, sir.”

“What was that? I couldn’t hear you.”

“Thank you, sir!”

“Much better.” He laughed and tossed them in. I heaved a sigh of relief, glad the situation was over as the guard walked off.

Except he didn’t leave. Instead, he walked right back to the console at the end of the hall and dropped her shielding entirely.

Gonzales was on her feet in an instant, and for the first time since we had arrived, I saw her without a double shield of demi-transparent light between us. Suddenly, I could make out dozens of bruises along her arms and neck, some faded and some fresh. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to vomit or throw myself against the shield, but I very abruptly knew exactly what all of Gonzales’s warnings meant.

The guard sauntered back, a superior, obnoxious grin on his face. My skin crawled at the sheer smugness rolling off him in waves. He stood at the opening of her cell, hands on his hips and his back to me.

“Well, aren’t you going to wash up, inmate?”

“Waiting until I go to sleep later. Nothing like hitting the hay all refreshed.”

“And have one of you eggheads use the wrapper to somehow fabricate some amazing escape? I don’t think so. Go ahead now, so I can collect your trash.”

“You’re not collecting anyone else’s trash,” she murmured, almost so low that I couldn’t hear it.

“Are you back talking me, prisoner?”

“…no.”

I knew it was important to stay quiet, to not make any waves. And I also knew that I could do nothing from my cell. But I couldn’t just sit silently and watch the uncomfortable exchange.

“Hey, it takes a very little man to torment someone who can’t even fight back,” I cried, affixing my best glare at his back.

He turned to me almost in slow motion, the air crackling around him. But my stomach didn’t drop and I didn’t feel fear. If anything, I just grew angrier.

“Relax, Higgens, I got this.”

He spun back to the woman so fast, I didn’t know how he avoided whiplash. “Oh, you got me, huh? Like I’m just another dumb guard you can wrap around your finger,” he countered, voice low and threatening.

“That’s not what I meant,” she replied. “I was just saying—”

His arm lashed out almost too quickly for me to even see, and the next thing I knew, Gonzales stumbled back, her cheek a vibrant and irritated red.

That set me off, and I slammed into the barrier, as if I could break it down by sheer force of will. “Leave her alone!” I screamed, orders to stop coming from Bahn and Ciangi as well.

“Look, I’m sorry.” Gonzales tried to speak over us. “I’ll clean up. We’re cool, okay?”

“Cool? Yeah, we’re cool. So very cool.” On his last word, he struck out again and Gonzales’s head bounced off the solid wall of her cell.

I was practically losing my mind. I was so close to her, just a few feet away, but I was powerless. Every time I slammed into the shield, it just threw me backward, the sleeve of my shirt smoking slightly.

“What, you have to pick on women who are smaller than you?” I cried, stopping my mad assault on the barrier to bang my fist against the energy field. If only I could catch his attention, maybe I could give Gonzales enough of a break to run. “Did your mother kick you as a baby or something?! Daddy not love you?”

Instead of turning to me, or even looking in my direction, he just gripped Gonzales by her hair and twisted her head so that she was facing him. “You hear those rude things they’re saying? Your friends aren’t very nice.” I could only hear Gonzales groan tightly as he squeezed her head. “Almost makes me think you told them all sorts of nasty things about me. We both know how much you like to blabber.”

I wouldn’t blame the weapons engineer if she capitulated to him, if she whined and wheezed and said whatever he wanted her to. In fact, I almost wished she would, so that he would grow bored with her and leave her alone. But of course, the woman was far too proud for that.

“Can you blame me for word getting around?” she countered, her words muffled from all the pressure his hand was exerting onto her face. “Just like your stench, your reputation proceeds you.”

“There’s my girl,” he said before letting go of her face. For the smallest of moments, I thought that maybe it was over, and he would let her be. He took a single step away and my eyes locked with him. I hoped he could feel all the rage and hatred I felt for him, but instead of looking intimidated in any way, he just smirked.

I opened my mouth to spit an insult when he suddenly whirled, and his fist connected with Gonzales’s middle. She retched, tumbling to her knees, and I slammed into the barrier again, shouting nonsensible threats.

I didn’t stop, or calm down, even as the man walked back to the console at the end of the hall. He pressed something and Gonzales’s shield-wall popped back into being, but it seemed the man wasn’t done yet.

He did something else and several small openings appeared in the ceiling above my head, each barely big enough to stick a finger in. I looked up, my curiosity interrupting my rage for just a moment, and barely had time to close my eyes before a vicious stream of water shot out of the little circle.

It was painfully cold, and the spray bit at my skin like thousands of burrowing bugs. Just when I tried to move out of the way, more openings appeared in the walls and shot water crossways.

“How do you like our riot control?” the guard asked. I could tell by Ciangi and Bahn’s cries that he was giving them the same treatment. But thankfully, he seemed to be giving Gonzales a slight modicum of mercy. “It’s supposed to be the top of the line, but we haven’t really had anyone to test it on. Maybe if you all were a bit politer, I wouldn’t have a reason to use it.”

I tried to say something, but my jaws were chattering from the sheer temperature drop. I was going numb very quickly, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Gonzales had been subjected to this in the many days she had spent alone.

“You know what, I haven’t had a chance to test out this button yet. Let’s see what that does, shall we?”

I knew the moment he pressed it because the floor pulsed, and then the next thing I knew, I was flat on my back and seizing violently.

It felt like every muscle in my body had been drawn as tight as possible and my teeth were clenching so hard that I might burst. It took several seconds for my brain to catch up and realize that there were electrical impulses going through the floor every ten seconds or so.

“Whoops, probably shouldn’t have used that one with the water, but live and learn.” I couldn’t say how long the man let it go on, but my whole mind and body started to shut down from the torture. I wondered if maybe the psychopath of a guard was going to let us die like this, when I heard a small voice from Gonzales’s cell.

“I finished washing up,” she murmured. “Thank you for taking care of me, Lazer.”

Suddenly the electricity stopped, and I gasped, my lungs able to expand to capacity for the first time in minutes.

It took quite a bit of willpower to roll over and look to Gonzales’s cell. She was standing toward the edge, looking battered but more determined than ever. She was pressing the empty packets to the shield and waiting patiently.

Sure enough, the guard—Lazer, apparently—crossed over to her. He looked from her face, to the packets, to her face again before smiling. “Good girl.”

With that, he punched a code in on the panel next to the shield, which caused a small opening to appear, just big enough for her to slide her trash through. She did so silently, and then he assuredly walked toward the exit.

Silence reigned over us for several moments. I laid on the floor, gasping, heaving, and trying to get my breathing back to normal. My eyes locked with Gonzales across the hall, who was standing just at her shield, trembling.

“Are…are you alright?” I managed to rasp between split lips.

She nodded, and I could see her trying to arrange her face into some sort of acceptable emotion. “I’m fine,” she answered after a few moments. “Or I will be. Are you guys okay?”

“Forget about us,” Ciangi said from her cell. “What about you? Who was that man? And why does he want to hurt you so bad?”

Gonzales shrugged, pacing to the back of her cell. “That’s Lazer, as I’m sure you put together. You know how it is. When I first came here, I fought as hard as I could to get out. And when I couldn’t get out, I settled on tormenting everyone I could. I have a knack for getting under people’s skin, as you know, and a big, strong man with a power complex was the easiest target out of all of them.” She paused for a moment and sighed. “Unfortunately, he decided not to be the bigger man. The risk you run with a silver tongue, I guess.”

“Gonzales…” I didn’t know what to say. The thought that she had been beaten in this prison for days on end while I had been complaining about living in the lap of luxury made me sick. “This isn’t right.”

She shrugged. “I’ve been in worse situations, believe it or not. He’s not the first man I’ve met who likes to beat on smaller women, and he won’t be the last. I’m a big girl, and I’ll get through this like I get through everything else.”

“Smaller women…” I could almost hear Ciangi’s thoughts as she spoke. “Is that why you told me to stay toward the back of my cell?”

“Yeah And you did a terrible job of that, FYI.”

“You were being beaten! What did you expect me to do?”

“I dunno, listen to your survival instinct and not draw attention to yourself?”

I could sense that the tension and trauma was whipping up an unnecessary fight between us. “Gonzales, you know that we can’t stand by and let you get hurt any more than you could stand and watch us get hurt.”

“Ugh. We’re all too noble for our own goods.” I sensed that this might have been a moment where we once would have all laughed, but the most I could manage was a half-sigh. But Gonzales kept going, resorting to her tried and true defense of dry humor. “Hey, at least we all are gonna get a nice wash from these sani-packs, right?”

“Actually,” I said, holding up the drenched packets that were now a mix of deep brown and black after being electrocuted. “Not so much.”

“Oh…” She sounded a bit guilty, but Bahn could only sputter in amusement before breaking out into a full on manic laugh. I was tempted to join him, but I couldn’t quite bring up the energy, so I only managed a desperate giggle. It wasn’t long before we all joined in, sharing a sad, desperate moment together.

When it finally faded, I drew in another breath. “I’m going to get us out of here, you know. All of us.”

Gonzales’s tone grew melancholy as she replied, “If you say so.”

9

The Dregs of Monotony

Days passed. Or at least I thought they were days. It was hard to tell with no window, no sun, and no clocks. Our only way to tell the time was by the guards who brought us food or sani-packs, but I doubted they followed a specific schedule.

Lazer didn’t show up every day, or even every other day, but he haunted us at the edges of our minds, not allowing us to ever grow complacent.

He mostly liked to focus on Gonzales. It seemed nothing she did could ever placate him. If she was silent, he would accuse her of ignoring him. If she talked, he would find a way to twist her words into some sort of insult. We would yell, insult, and throw ourselves at the shields holding us back to no avail. None of us could distract him from torturing her.

He never did enough to kill her, or even permanently harm her. But he did hurt her. Whether it was smacking, punching or kicking, he was ruthless. His favorite thing to do seemed to be to pull her this way and that by her hair, and every time his fingers wound in her dark tresses, I felt like I might be capable of murder.

Of course, the weapons engineer tried to pass it off, but I could tell that it was wearing at her. I didn’t know why she felt the need to be so strong all the time, but I sensed she had her own reasons. I didn’t push her, but I wished she trusted me enough to let her guard down. It wasn’t healthy to constantly try to stay so in control all the time.

Granted, the instances that she slipped into silence allowed me to plot. Not that my plotting got me anywhere considering we were locked up tighter than Alcatraz, but it made me feel somewhat accomplished.

And when my brain finally grew tired from all the plotting and planning, I wondered if anyone would notice our disappearance, or if the treacherous generals already had a cover story. It wasn’t like I had anyone who would miss me, or notify the police. All the people in the world I talked to were gathered around me.

Perhaps that was pathetic. I wasn’t really sure what was a ‘normal’ amount of people to be friendly with, but I got the feeling that three was a bit on the low side.

Then again, how many people could say that they were friends with a shapeshifting alien? Certainly, that had to count for something.

Although such thoughts comforted me, they did little to help the situation. And while our imprisonment was borderline tolerable most of the time, Lazer’s occasional appearances hung over our heads, not to mention the fact that Mimic’s people were facing their inevitable destruction and I was powerless to help them.

I hated being powerless. I had gotten so used to taking matters into my own hands that it went against my grain to just sit around and rot.

Heavy footsteps interrupted my repetitive thoughts, and I looked to the door. I was hoping that it was the tall, skinny guard who often was on sani-pack duty, or even the short, portly guard who handled the food the most. But no, it was none other than Lazer. Of course.

His chest was puffed out even more than usual and his perfectly coiffed hair was slicked back. His tattoo was showing under his open collar, shifting under his skin and changing colors in a specific pattern that was all the rage about ten years ago. If being smarmy didn’t get Gonzales in trouble, I would have mocked his ridiculous peacocking.

Then again, if Lazer was here, Gonzales was already in trouble.

None of us moved, or even looked at him. We stayed quiet, although the air soon became charged with our tension. I found myself imagining all the different ways I would give him his just desserts, surprising myself at my own vehemence, until he stopped once more at Gonzales’s cell.

“Rise and shine, big mouth!” the guard chorused, his voice almost sing-song. I felt all of my muscles tense as she stood and slowly shuffled forward, clearly waiting for something to go terribly wrong. “It’s your big day!” Lazer continued as she reached the shield.

“My…day?” she murmured, clearly just as confused and apprehensive as I was.

“Come now, big mouth! Did you forget?” He laughed and put his hands on his hips like some sort of ancient sitcom. “You scientists, always so absorbed in the lab! Well, don’t worry, as soon as I found out, I knew we couldn’t let such a momentous occasion just slip by.”

Gonzales’s normally golden skin lost all of its color and she could only stare at the guard with wide eyes. “What…occasion?”

“Don’t worry. I’m not letting this slip by while you’re so…occupied. Wait here.” He took a step away only to stop and then turn back to her. “Oh, and close your eyes. Wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise, right?”

“Right,” she murmured, doing as he asked. The bully of a man laughed before whipping around to face the rest of us. “Any of you say a word, and I’ll make you regret it.”

We didn’t make a single sound and he practically skipped off, as much as an overly-muscled, hyper-masculine Neanderthal could skip. Only a couple of minutes passed before he returned, rolling a cart in front of him. I had to blink several times to make sure I was seeing what I was seeing.

But sure enough, no matter how many times I batted my eyes, the scene before me remained unchanged. Sitting in the center of the cart was none other than a traditional birthday cake, complete with white frosting and a good chunk of burning candles.

Reaching down, the man pulled a collapsible chair from the bottom and set it just so in front of the cart before pressing the ‘deploy’ button. Once everything was all set, he crossed back to the console at the end of the hall that controlled our shields and dropped Gonzales’s.

“Are your eyes closed?” he called, quickly walking back to her.

Although I had always been suspicious, I was now absolutely certain the man was an absolute psychopath. How else could one explain his melodrama and sheer delight in torturing Gonzales? He had this obsessive need to break her down that I just didn’t understand.

“Yes,” she answered quietly.

“Alright, good. Give me your hand.”

The rest of us held our breaths, watching without a word as he slowly, carefully, even gingerly led her to the chair. Once she sat down, he hurried around to the other side of the table and clapped his hands.

“Alright, open your eyes!”

She obeyed, as she always did, and the look on her face was sheer confusion. I couldn’t blame her. I was still bordering somewhere between disbelief and incredulousness, and I’d had a whole minute to stare at the scene Lazer had set up for her.

“Happy Birthday!” the man cawed, making some gesture with his hands that I guessed was supposed to be some sort of celebration.

“Happy… Birthday?” she managed to repeat, her eyes going wider than seemed humanly possible and her eyes shuttling from him to the cake as her mind desperately tried to piece together the absurdity of the scene. “It’s my birthday?”

“It is! Congratulations, you’ve hit the big two-seven.”

“But…” She was still struggling to speak, as if her thoughts were refusing to churn out comprehensible speech. “If it’s my birthday, then I’ve been here—”

“Two and a half months!” Lazer said. “And what a two and a half months it’s been! I feel like we’ve really grown closer in this time, haven’t we, big mouth?”

“I, uh, we—”

She was interrupted by the man’s manic laughter. “If only you could see your face right now!” He cockled like an actual rooster. “If you’re wondering what flavor it is, it’s your favorite.”

“How…” She paused to take a deep breath and center herself. I wanted more than anything to burst through the wall and stop this mockery of celebration, but I held myself steady. “How did you know?” she asked.

“I have my ways. Now, eat up!” Her hands jerked up in compliance, but she hesitated for just a split-second. “What’s wrong? Do you not like it?”

“No, it’s just, uh…there isn’t any cutlery.”

“Will you look at that! I can’t believe I forgot!” He laughed again, every punctuation of the sound growing more and more insane. “Looks like you’ll just have to eat it like a barbarian. Go ahead, dig in.”

She looked dubiously at him once more before bringing her hand up once more, reaching toward the cake and tentatively breaking off a small piece of it. Lazer watched with unchecked glee, his grin so wolfish that I wondered if he poisoned it. But what could she do? What could any of us do?

I swore to myself that I would never be so powerless again. I couldn’t stand to just sit by and watch my friends be mistreated.

“How does it taste?” Gonzales could only nod and give him a thumbs up, her mouth full of icing and cake. “You like it! Well then, stop picking at it like you’re on a diet. Go ahead, dig in!” He crossed around behind her, leaning down to grab her hand and shove it into the cake. “There you go. Grab a nice hunk.” Once he was satisfied, he pulled her arm back, then forced her hand up to her mouth. “Isn’t it delicious?” he cooed, not letting go until she ate the entire crumbling, icing-drenched hunk.

There was only so much I could stand. My hands were shaking, and I jumped to my feet, mouth opening and closing like I wanted to say something, but I knew anything that came out of my mouth would just make it worse for Gonzales.

But Lazer noticed me and shot me a wide, aching smile. “Aw, you want some too?” he asked, voice cloyingly friendly. “If Gonzales isn’t too hungry, maybe you can get a slice. What do you think, big mouth? Are you very, very hungry?”

She opened her mouth to respond, but before she could utter a single syllable, one of his hands went to the back of her head and slammed her face-first into the cake.

“Sorry, aspie, but looks like someone is a greedy little piggy.” He continued to shove her face around in the cake, sending remnants of it this way and that. It was worse than any horror flick I had ever seen, and I threw myself at the barrier once more.

It didn’t matter how many times I tried and failed, something in my mind wouldn’t let me sit still and watch the psychopath torture my friend. Cake went this way and that, while Gonzales’s hands beat against the table, trying to push herself up but to no avail.

“Stop it!” I screamed, my voice breaking and scorching my throat raw, but I didn’t care. “Let her go!”

“Coward!” I heard Ciangi shriek beside me. Her little fists made almost no sound against the shields holding us in, but I knew she was struggling just as much as I was. From what I could see, Bahn was also running to the back of his cell, so he could charge at the forcefield holding him captive, only to be flung back on contact, his clothes smoking.

“Geez, big mouth. Your friends are so upset that you’re not sharing with them. How could you be so selfish? Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of good guy? Savior of the universe and discoverer of new life or something?”

He paused for just a moment, allowing the weapons engineer to turn her face to the side and heave in big gulps of air. She murmured something, but none of us heard, and Lazer didn’t seem to either.

“What was that?” he asked, leaning down so his ear was closer to her cake-covered lips.

“That—” She gasped. “—was Higgens.” It was like a flash. One moment she was lying there, gasping and seeming to hold back tears, the next, she whipped her head to the side and Lazer was screaming.

He tried to pull back, but something was holding him close to her. His fists lashed out at her, but she caught them in her hands. Our screams faded as we watched, both shocked and puzzled by what was happening in front of us.

Lazer’s own cries increased in volume, curses punctuating every other word, until he eventually stumbled back, holding the side of his head. I could see blood going down his collar, but I couldn’t tell from where. The only thing I could make out was him howling a single phrase over and over again.

“My ear!”

Gonzales stood and spit something out of her mouth that I couldn’t recognize. She didn’t hesitate for even a moment, and dashed to the console at the end of the hall.

Despite all the confusion and the terror, I felt triumph swell in my chest. She was going to do it! She was going to make it!

It was like time slowed down and everything was moving in slow motion, but just when she was about to reach it, alarms went off and the console started to slide into the ground.

“No!” I heard her cry, leaping toward it. But she was too far. By the time she landed, she slid over nothing but bare floor. “No, no, no!”

“Gonzales!” I shouted, trying to catch her attention before she could fall into panic. “The door! It’s still open! Go!”

She looked at us, blood down her chin and neck. “I can’t leave you,” she whispered, barely loud enough for me to hear.

“You have to! Go! Get a message to Mimic!”

She nodded, something passing between us that couldn’t quite be put into words, and she bolted back toward the end of the hall. Past our cells, past Lazer who was still rolling around in pain, and into the doorway.

And then, she was out and beyond my sight. I couldn’t believe it, and didn’t even dare to celebrate.

“Did…did she make it?” Ciangi whispered.

I didn’t get a chance to answer. We heard shouts, and then shots being fired, then nothing. My breath stopped, and I could only wait.

It didn’t take long for several guards to come in, two of which were dragging Gonzales, who had several tranquilizer darts sticking out of her chest and torso. They threw her into her cell while others came to pick Lazer up and pull him out. As they got him to his feet, I finally was able to see that he was missing more than half of one of his ears. Nothing lethal, but certainly terrifying looking.

None of the guards said anything, or even tried to hurt Gonzales for her assault of their coworker. The console slid back up from the floor, and they called her shield back before exiting with their wounded friend.

The three of us stood there, in shock from everything that had unfolded. I tried to wrap my mind around the flood of information that had just swamped me, but it seemed so surreal. If it wasn’t for Gonzales, crumpled and battered in her cell, and the small chunk of Lazer’s discarded flesh, I might have thought it was a fever-dream brought on by insanity.

There didn’t seem to be anything I could say that fit the situation, so I slid to my feet and watched Gonzales breathe steadily. The only thing I knew for certain was that I absolutely needed to get us out of here.

10

Surprise

We didn’t get food for quite a while. I couldn’t say how it was in length of days, but I knew it was far past the schedule that my body had become accustomed to. Gonzales awoke somewhere past what I guessed was twenty-four hours but didn’t say much. She wiped her face as best she could, but there was still cake all over her collar and front. I didn’t want to think of how the stale frosting must itch and scratch at her skin, or how constantly smelling the sweet confection had to be a permanent reminder of the horror she had experienced.

The minutes didn’t pass quickly either, but rather trickled by, almost excruciatingly so. With every breath that passed, I wondered if Lazer would return, intent on revenge, and I was sure my friends were thinking the same. I wondered if the other guards would come and punish us, or if they would decide that we were more trouble than we were worth.

However, the door didn’t open, and no one came to beat any of us into a pulp. As the days passed, we stopped speaking to each other, conserving our saliva as best we could. Humans were only able to live without water for three days, and although each of us had a singular ration of water that had been given to us that morning, even drawing it out could only sustain us for so long.

After long enough, I began to wonder if they were just going to let us all starve in our little boxes, but before we grew too desperate, the door finally opened.

It was Lazer who stepped through first, and my heart dropped. It seemed that they had been able to regrow his stolen ear, but bruising still mottled his skin on that half of his face. His expression was one of stone, and I knew without a doubt that one or all of us was going to die.

He said nothing, simply marching forward into the hall. But then, someone entered behind him, a guard that I didn’t recognize at all who was pushing the food cart as usual. Did…did they give him a chaperone to deal with us?

The bully still said nothing as they reached my cell first. Instead, he wordlessly picked up a tray and handed it to me while the other one crossed behind him until he was out of my view.

I took the tray tentatively, expecting him to flip it into my face, or drop it at the last second. But instead, he let it go and I was able to take it into the back of my cell, fearing the worst.

“Huh, so this is their holding area?” the other guard asked from somewhere I couldn’t see.

“Yup.”

“And why are these folks being held? Assassins? Spies? Traitors?”

“Something like that,” Lazer answered, moving on to Ciangi.

“Ah, that’s cool.” There was a pause before the stranger spoke again. “And what’s this thingie for? Looks super official.”

“That’s the control panel. It’s the only place we can fully drop the shields.”

“Oh, seriously? How do we do that?”

Lazer sounded like he was answering out of habit rather than actually hearing what the man was asking. “You slide your badge then press the button by each cell listing. Then you punch in the daily password and then they drop.” There was a beat of silence, and suddenly the bulky man whipped around. “Wait, what are you doing?!”

I rushed to the front of my cell, ready to press myself to the barrier so I could see what was happening beyond my cell’s view, but the shield dropped, almost making me stumble forward.

“You idiot!” Lazer cried, drawing my attention to where he was trying to lunge at the other guard. The man simply ducked and vaulted over Lazer’s head before landing neatly behind him.

“No, not an idiot,” he said, his voice raising and his form beginning to ripple and warp. His hair transitioned from a tawny brown to a beautiful white, and his eyes turned lilac. Within seconds, it wasn’t some strange guard standing with their back to us, but none other than Mimic herself. “Just a shapeshifter.”

“Mimic!” I cried, my heart leaping into my throat.

She turned and shot me a wink, only to have Lazer lunge at her. I shouted a warning, but the alien didn’t need it. She calmly dropped into a crouch, reached up, and physically threw the man down the hall. He landed, hard, and slid even further, coming to a halt with a groan.

“Oh my gosh,” Ciangi cried, rushing forward to give the alien woman a hug as she stood. “It’s you. It’s really you!”

“Yes, last time I checked,” she said, smiling softly.

I too found myself rushing forward and throwing my arms around them both. My emotions were bucking wildly, and I didn’t know if I wanted to laugh, or cry, or jump up and down and scream until my voice was hoarse. But I could figure that out later. The most important thing was that Mimic was here.

“But how is this possible?” I murmured, letting go just long enough to step back and look at her face once more. “How are you here?”

She was just as I remembered, kind eyes in a pointed face, with hair past her shoulders and a look of curiosity always present in her features. I realized that she would never age considering this body was not her true form, but I felt like I could see some of the stress wearing at her visage, etching lines into her skin to never be forgotten.

“When you didn’t respond to my messages, I knew that something had to be wrong. Even under the most extreme of circumstances, I knew that all of you wouldn’t be ignoring me under your own volition.”

“That explains why you came,” Bahn said, stepped out of his cell with a look of wonder. “But not how. Your planet is very far away, to put it lightly.”

“We have made quite a lot of advances since you were last on our planet. I used what knowledge I gained from your datalog to create a rudimentary, one-person ship to come here.”

“Wait,” I said, eyes going wider. “You made a ship? Just like that?”

“Well, I started it several months ago as a resource for the coming battle. But the sudden silence caused me to speed up the production. But, as it is a one-person ship, it is not appropriate for our escape.”

I grimaced. “Oh, what are we going to do about that?”

“I had hoped you might have some ideas for that. I spent all of my time and planning on finding you. I’ve been on your planet for weeks and I feel as if I have been running around in circles. Your planet is baffling.”

Bahn looked from me to Mimic. “We, uh, we did have a plan before we got here. Would it be that insane to try again?”

“We certainly would have the element of surprise if we act quickly.” Ciangi added. “I’m assuming that you took precautions to make sure the alarm won’t sound the moment we leave here?”

Mimic nodded. “I have learned much about what you call security measurements. I ensured that we have a clear path out of this building.”

“Actually,” I interrupted. “What exactly is this building?”

“What do you mean?”

“We were kind of unconscious when they brought us here. We have no idea even what country we’re in.”

“Ah. In that case, I feel much more accomplished that I found you.” She smiled, the corners of her eyes crinkling in a quiet laugh, and I felt my mood lift with her. It was as if I had a thorn in my hand for the past year and someone had finally removed it. I felt relief, and satisfaction, and happiness all wrapped into each other. I wasn’t even concerned that we still had a daring escape to get through.

“You are under a large, um, what is your human word for it? A place that holds many physical valuables from your ancient times?”

“A museum?” Ciangi supplied.

“No, I do not think that is it. Um, perhaps it is called, oh goodness, I know this word. A fortune holder?”

My mind spun through about a dozen definitions. “Do you mean a treasury?”

“Ah yes! That! You are under a treasury. The most heavily guarded treasury I have ever seen.”

“Mimic, isn’t this the only treasury you have ever seen?”

“Ah. Yes, I suppose. But anyway, you said you once had a plan, Coin Twin?”

“Yeah. Granted, I’m sure we’ll have to make some changes to it considering how long we have been down here, but the building blocks are all still there. I doubt they will have improved security since they probably think we were a one-off fluke.”

“Then let us go,” Mimic said, nodding resolutely. “Time is of the essence. I am sure my brothers and sisters have no doubt wound themselves into a tizzy.”

“Your brother and sist— Oh, right. The mini-Mimics. Yeah, let’s go.”

A roar sounded behind us, and I turned to see that Lazer had risen to his feet and was barreling toward us.

He didn’t quite make it, however, as a dark shape slammed into his side. He flew into what had just been my cell, and I heard him collide with a wall.

The sound of fists hitting flesh and bone filled the hall and we all ran over to see Gonzales sitting on top of the man’s chest, beating the man who had tortured her for so long.

Once again, none of us said anything. I was sure we had all daydreamed many times of putting the sadist in his place, but it was another thing entirely to see Gonzales dole out her revenge. I could hear her ragged breathing from where I was, and even from behind her, I could tell that she was crying. She yelled no insults and spat no curses. She was silent other than the small sobs escaping her lips.

Eventually, Lazer shuddered and then went still. For a moment, I thought that he was dead, but I saw his chest rise and fall sluggishly as Gonzales stood.

“Your gun,” she said finally, extending her hand but not looking at any of us.

“I’m sorry, what?” I sputtered, my eyes focusing on the blood coating her knuckles.

“Mimic, there’s a blaster on your guard uniform. Give it to me.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Ciangi murmured.

We weren’t judging her, or telling her what she could or could not do, but I couldn’t blame the blond Coin Twin for wanting to make sure if her best friend was really ready to take a life.

“Yes,” was the succinct answer.

Mimic, who obviously didn’t quite understand what was happening, removed her gun from her belt and handed it over.

Gonzales took the blaster then turned once more to her previous tormenter. She stalked over to him, steps as silent as death itself. When she reached his prone form, she grabbed him by his hair and pulled him up.

His head stood at a strange angle, his long, carefully coiffed hair leaving some distance between her hand and his scalp. Without so much as a pause, she brought up the blaster and fired.

I flinched, squeezing my eyes shut as the smell of burning filled the room. I heard Lazer’s body fall back to the ground and opened my eyes. I expected a grisly scene, one that would stay with me forever and haunt my dreams. But instead, the guard was still in one piece and very much alive.

“What…what happened?” I murmured before looking to Gonzales, who was still facing away from us. It was right about then that I noticed the thick chunk of hair in her hand. Looking back to Lazer, I saw the blaster had burned an ugly looking trough through his normally impeccably styled hair. There was even a bit of a burn in a stripe along the top of his scalp, which I was pretty sure meant that no hair would ever grow there again.

Gonzales bent down, leaning over the man so she could hiss into his ear. “You took something away from me, so I took something away from you.” Her voice was as I had never heard it before. Low, calm, but as dangerous as the deep seas of Earth. “Now, every time you look in the mirror, you’ll know that you were bested by me. I hope you learn from this, you abusive prick, but I doubt you have the brain power left for it in that ever so thick scalp of yours.”

With that, she stood and threw his singed hair onto him before turning to us. “So, I think someone said something about escaping?”

11

The Most Welcome Case of Deja Vu

It was strange to admit it, but it was almost fun to run with Mimic again. It reminded me of older, simpler times when our only opponent was a greedy ship captain or an enslaving alien. It seemed that going up against an entire military was much more complicated.

But nevertheless, we were escaping yet again.

We bolted out of the door first and into a surprisingly long corridor. I had expected more guards, but Mimic informed us that most of them worked in the upper levels, protecting the physical valuables of human history.

“How exactly are we getting through the upper levels?”

“I can shapeshift,” Mimic offered hopefully.

“Uh yeah,” Ciangi said, trying to hold back her sarcastic tone and failing miserably. “Believe it or not, I figured that out by now. Too bad the rest of us can’t shapeshift.”

“And we’re far too dirty to blend in,” Bahn added much more helpfully than his smaller twin. “Even if we could incapacitate enough guards and steal their uniforms, we would still stick out like sore thumbs.”

“Yeah, we definitely look like we belong in the trash,” Gonzales said, almost sounding like her old self.

Almost.

“Wait,” I breathed, my mind rushing in that way it liked to do right when I was about to suggest something ridiculous. “I think I have an idea.”

“Is this in the same vein as ‘we should steal a ship’ because right now we’re rocking a two out of three average on that actually working.”

“No, actually. We’re trash!”

“Um, what?”

I realized that I wasn’t explaining myself well and shook my head. “I mean, does this facility have specific protocol for waste disposal? I’m sure we could somehow smuggle ourselves into the trash and get out of here that way. Especially if Mimic is our cover as a worker.”

Everyone else’s face started to brighten, telling me that I hadn’t thought of the stupidest plan ever. It seemed even a year away from the action hadn’t totally ruined my clutch bizarre suggestions.

“Actually, I think that might work,” Ciangi said. “Mimic, did you learn anything about the sanitation system of this building?”

“Yes, actually. All trash is deposited through a shoot that then goes into a sorter. It’s picked through by employees before being put through another shoot that leads into the recyclers outside. They’re turned on at the beginning and end of the day, so should we go now, we should be fine.”

“What about the workers down there?” Gonzales asked through her split lips.

“That’s easy,” Mimic answered. “I will go down as an actual item of your Earth trash, scout the area, then signal back up to you if the coast is clear.”

“How will we know what the signal is?”

With that, Mimic smiled and the whole room seemed to grow a little less dark and foreign. “Trust me, you will know.” It seemed a shame when her face grew serious once more. “But first, we must make it to the chute. It’s one floor above us, and by the lavatories, if I recall correctly. We shall have to be careful, as I have observed that you humans do not seem to relieve yourselves on a regular schedule.”

“You knew us for months and you just recently figured out that we don’t poop according to the clock?” Gonzales asked, snickering lightly. It was strange to hear the weapons engineer laugh again, but I certainly wasn’t complaining about the sound.

“I suppose I never paid attention to it much before,” Mimic answered honestly. “However, my lack of attention to your bowel movements is neither here nor there as we should probably hurry before their lunch break. Then I do know that the floor above usually floods with those on their midday respite.”

“Wait, it’s that early?” Ciangi asked. “Man, my sense of time is all messed up.”

“Being cut off from natural light for so long is bound to do that to anyone,” Bahn supplied, rubbing his sharp chin. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re all struggling with some serious vitamin D and B12 deficiencies.”

“Really, you don’t think they would account for that in our diets?”

“Guys,” I said gently, clearing my throat. “I think we’re getting off-track again.”

The two blushed and looked to me like they forgot I was there. It was pretty clear to me that we were all a little goofy from the adrenaline rush borne from our escape, as well as months of captivity. Hopefully that wouldn’t make our efforts to get out of the building a total waste.

There was only one way to find out, I supposed.

“Lead the way,” I murmured to Mimic. She smiled softly at me again, then opened the door and strode down the hall, her form shifting once more into the male guard.

“It’s too bad we can’t all fit on the food cart,” Gonzales mused as we watched Mimic saunter down like she belonged. “How great would that be?”

“Could you imagine?” Ciangi laughed quietly. “The four most wanted humans on the Earth being shuttled out of here by the alien we made first contact with? Priceless.”

I would have laughed if it were any other situation, but I forced myself to watch Mimic as she scouted ahead. She turned around a corner and disappeared for a second, causing my blood to rush and my face to sweat, but after a few seconds, she appeared again and gestured to us that the coast was clear.

We bolted to her as quietly as we could, careening around the corner to end up in yet another hall. Mimic went ahead of us again, leading us to a heavy door at the end. With a practiced ease that made me wonder exactly how much time she had spent scoping this place out, she whipped out her badge, slid it through the card-reader, and swiped her finger across the sensor.

The door let out a subtle beep and I heard the lock click. Without hesitation, she threw it open and we were all rushing up the stairs contained within.

I was breathless and achy by the time we reached the top. It seemed, although I had certainly pushed myself to exercise in my cell, that being confined to a single room had left me much weaker than I had been previously. Thankfully, I still had the adrenaline going from just being granted freedom, but I had the feeling that as soon as we got to safety, I would be collapsing into a Higgens-shaped puddle.

Of course, Mimic reached the door first and slid through, closing it behind us and leaving us to wait. I knew that stairs were an antiquity only used in case of emergency, but that didn’t stop me from worrying that anyone could come down them at any moment and catch us cornered against the door. Sure, Mimic would probably hear us and come to save the day, but it didn’t stop me from fearing what could happen in those precious seconds before she arrived. I had seen much of human cruelty in the past few months, and I didn’t think I would be able to trust anyone beyond my circle for a very long time.

Thankfully, no one arrived before Mimic returned, opening the door and motioning for us to follow along once more.

We did so, and this time, none of us held back as we sprinted across the hall. Even from where we were, I could see the silvery-metallic opening of the chute kitty-cornered to the bathrooms. It was there that we would have to be vulnerable again as Mimic would have to slide down the thing and tell us if the coast was clear.

“If you hear anything, duck into the bathrooms,” the shapeshifter said. “You can hide in the privacy pods should you need.”

“Honestly, at this point, I’m surprised you know what those are,” Gonzales said, crossing her arms and shooting the shapeshifter a wry grin. It was only then, in the LED lighting of the hall, that Mimic seemed to see the engineer’s appearance and took a double-take.

“What’s wrong with your face?” she asked without any guile or hesitation.

Gonzales’s expression grew shadowy and I rushed to interrupt. “We’ll explain later. For now, you have a chute to slide down.”

“That I do,” she said with a shrug. “See you in a moment.”

With that, she climbed in, the only thing keeping her from disappearing was her grip on the edge. She sent us one last grin before her human form began to melt and she turned into a long bit of metal, sliding down into the darkness beyond our vision.

“I’ll go stand guard at the intersecting hall,” Gonzales said. “I’ll call if anyone’s close.”

“Wouldn’t they hear that then?”

She groaned, pinching the bridge of her bruised nose. “Ugh. I’ve got rusty at all this sneaking stuff. I guess I’ll like… I dunno, break into a dead sprint toward you guys.”

“Sounds good to me. I’ll somersault into the bathroom like it’s my job.”

“Good.” She jogged toward the intersection in question, and I waited for Mimic to give us the all-clear.

It was just as terrifying as the stairs, if not more so. I imagined the bathrooms were used much more frequently than the steps, and it was only a matter of minutes until someone needed to come relieve themselves.

My chest hurt, and my heart thundered away in its anxiety. Man, I didn’t know if it was the year of press touring or the months of prison, but I had certainly turned into a stress-ridden, paranoid man. Hopefully that would ease now that I was leaping feet first into the fray, but only time would tell.

I was so locked in my thoughts, I didn’t see a shape slithering up the chute toward me until it was nearly on top of me. I saw two brightly glowing, serpentine eyes staring at me and almost screamed before cutting myself off. The eyes blinked rapidly, and only after several solid seconds did I realize it was Morse code.

ALL CLEAR

“We got the signal,” I said, looking back to the others and waving for Gonzales to join us again. Once I was sure she saw, I looked back to the chute. “And, Mimic, please never use whatever this form is again. It’s absolutely terrifying.”

I couldn’t see any of the other features in the darkness of the shoot, but the corners of the glowing eyes crinkled as if the creature was smiling before it slithered back down the chute.

“I’m going to see that in my nightmares,” I murmured before clambering into the slide feet-first and pushing myself down.

I picked up pace very quickly, the seat of my pants growing warm as I gained speed. The chute was much longer than I thought it would be, going past floor after floor after floor, until I was sure we were much farther down than the cells where we had been held for so long.

But after long enough, I saw a glimmer of light at my feet, rapidly approaching until I was dropping down into the open air.

My stomach felt like it shot out of my throat as I hovered there for a moment, nothing below me except a great fall, and it took everything in my mind not to scream like a little baby. And then I was tumbling down, to what I was sure was my death, until I landed on something soft and forgiving.

“Quick, out of the way before the next comes!”

I recognized Mimic’s voice giving the order and quickly rolled off whatever it was that had cradled my fall. Sure enough, Bahn came hurtling down and landed just seconds after me. I got to my feet and managed to warn him before Ciangi came down.

Since my feet were on solid ground, I got the chance to see what had saved me. It looked like Mimic had put a container filled with different foam cushions for shipping delicate items under the chute. I hadn’t even thought about us having a comfortable landing, so I was more than impressed that she remembered how squishy our bodies could be when it came to high-impact falls.

Soon Gonzales arrived as well, rounding up our group. We looked to each other, and I could feel the disbelief rolling off all of us.

“Is anyone else surprised that we’re still alive?” Bahn asked, tightening his greasy ponytail. Even sani-packs couldn’t properly clean long hair, and I certainly felt for the taller of the Coin Twins. I was sure when we got out of here, his first wish would be for a long, hot shower.

“Not I,” Mimic said. “You have never failed before, and I knew you wouldn’t now. Come, the chute leading to the recyclers outside is this way. It is a much shorter fall, but the landing will not be nearly as nice.”

“Noted,” I said, following along after the shapeshifter.

Her positivity was practically infectious, and despite the seriousness of the situation, I found myself getting further and further from the desperation that had plagued me for so many days. We were so close to freedom, which meant we were so close to returning to Mimic’s planet and leaving the trash pile that was Earth far, far in the distance.

I had learned a lot on the planet, and made some memories that would affect my life forever, but I would not miss it. I had found my happiness, and it was hurtling through space with my friends, facing down impossible odds. It was being at Mimic’s side and fighting for what was right.

We reached the last chute and just like before, Mimic went down first. This time, we didn’t wait for some sort of signal and followed a few seconds after her.

Just like she said, the landing was much harder. There was still plenty of packing foam, but it was mixed with boxes, metal scrap, and other refuse. Thankfully none of us ended up impaled by anything, but then we did have to comically try to wade through the shifting wastes until finally we were completely free.

I gasped, drawing in huge drafts of fresh air. It was wonderful in every way, shape, and form. The sun shone down on my face, the breeze caressed my skin, and the grass tickled through the holes in my cloth shoes. Looking around at my friends, I saw that they were equally enraptured.

For the first time in months, we were in natural lighting and I saw just how horrible we looked. Even putting aside Gonzales’s layers of bruising, both of the Coin Twins’ faces were drawn and gaunt, with deep purple circles under their eyes. All of their pallors were a bit yellow, and the whites of their eyes were more of a bloodshot red. Our nails were all much longer than they should be, but also cracked and brittle with plenty of cracked skin around the beds.

To be honest, we looked like forsaken revenants out of some of the flash-comics I used to read on the net. If I didn’t know better, I would definitely think we were all members of the undead.

“I am realizing that there is something very significant about this moment,” Mimic said gently, her hand alighting on my shoulder. “But we do not have time. We must get to cover and figure out the rest of our plans.”

I pulled myself from my observations and enchantment with being outside, turning to the alien and sending her the most honest grin I could. “You’re right, Mimic,” I murmured, still stricken by the fact that she was there at all. “Lead us home.”

12

Grand Theft Spaceship Part Deux

Our hover vehicle rumbled as it approached the front gates of the same complex that had led to our imprisonment. I wasn’t going to pretend that I wasn’t terrified out of my mind, but it wasn’t like a way around the situation.

After escaping the museum, we had gone to the shady hotel room that Mimic had been staying at in the slums of the city. She explained to us that the electronic density there made it harder to be tracked, bugged or overheard, so that was why she had made her base there.

Our first night, the four of us had stuffed our face on cheap and greasy food that was available for drone delivery, then slept for what felt like an age. I still wasn’t quite sure how the four of us managed to fit on a queen bed, and yet somehow, we did. Our forms were all pressed against each other, but somehow the contact was comforting instead of uncomfortable. I guessed that after so much time without human touch, we were more than a little touch-starved. Or maybe it was just PTSD setting in and needing some form of comfort from people we trusted. Either way, we were out cold for well into the next day.

We had awoken to a newly cleaned room and a full spread of food waiting for us. It was only then that I remembered that Mimic required far less sleep than we did. I couldn’t be more impressed with how kind and thoughtful she was that, after a whole year away from any humans at all, she still remembered much of our favorite breakfast foods.

I didn’t have much time to expound on her thoughtfulness, however, as we had plunged into planning immediately after that. Of course, we had all known we wouldn’t get away with the same plan we had previously, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t use the general outline, just with a few…tweaks.

After a whole lot of brainstorming, planning, and debating, that tweak turned out to be having Mimic disguise herself as General Santos and steal his protected hovercraft so that she could pick us up and smuggle us in.

Surprisingly enough, the first part of our plan went off without a hitch, and Mimic had the vehicle in her possession before we had even woken up on the third day. But now that we were crouched under the seats of the car, praying that the shielding inside the vehicle protected us from scanners, I was beginning to wonder if our plan was nearly as brilliant as I had thought it was.

We came to a stop and the window rolled down. I wished I could peek above the seats and see what was happening, but doing so could blow our cover and that was about the last thing I wanted to do.

“General Santos, sir,” a voice said. “We didn’t expect you here today.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s the point of a surprise walkthrough, isn’t it?” Mimic responded so perfectly in the man’s voice that it was a wonder she had only seen him on holos and listened to our descriptions of him.

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. Badge, thumbs please.”

Mimic did as he asked, and I found myself holding my breath again. For all of our traversing across the universe and other shenanigans that we had gotten into, I didn’t know if her mimic ability would be able to fool Earth-level technology when it came to security. But the moment of truth passed without the alarm being sounded, and I heard the guard speak again.

“Thank you again, sir. Enjoy your walkthrough.”

Mimic made a sound that could barely be categorized as an acknowledgement, and then we were lumbering forward again.

I couldn’t believe it! That had worked! Maybe our luck was finally coming back to us.

The minutes passed, and I felt us taking several turns as Mimic drove along the path we had mapped out for her previously. After a few minutes, she had us in the back lot that was adjacent to the same building holding the very ship we wanted.

She exited the vehicle and shut the door behind her. It didn’t take long for me to no longer hear her footsteps as she traveled away from us, and it seemed an eternity until she returned.

“Coast is clear,” she murmured.

We all piled out of the car, grateful for the cover of night. I didn’t know how long it would be before General Santos noticed that one of his more armored hovercraft was missing, but I guessed we had a few more hours considering Gonzales’s ex-liaison was visiting him again.

We crossed the flat expanse as quickly as we could while still walking naturally. In her time on Earth, Mimic had assembled quite the collection of uniforms for her different forms, and she had supplied us with a mixture of military, mechanical, and scientist outfits. Hopefully at a glance, we looked like the general and a high-level crew doing a quick overview of the place to make sure that everything was still in order. As long as someone didn’t look for too long, we would be just fine.

Why did I get the feeling that it wouldn’t work out that way?

I pushed that thought aside and focused. We were almost to the same door that had caused us quite the delay in the past. This time, it was Mimic who went first, sliding her card, scanning her fingerprint, and then her retina. But the main difference was, when she went through the door, she suddenly shifted into a great beast and ripped half of it off while it was open.

The partition still swung closed, which stopped it from tripping the alarm. However, a door didn’t do much good when there was a gap big enough for people to squeeze through, and that was exactly what the four of us did.

“Hurry,” Mimic said as soon as she returned to her Santos form. “I heard several heartbeats in the next room.”

I took a deep breath and nodded. It was the final chunk of our plan for getting the ship and I was reminded that even if we did successfully get on board, we still had to get out.

That thought just made me that much more anxious, so I shoved it down to be dealt with later. For now, I just needed to make sure we actually got onto the ship without being peppered with sedatives.

Just like before, we reached the garage-like door that separated us from our goal. I saw that they had replaced the lock, but Mimic wrapped her fingers around it and popped it off like it was nothing. It was easy to forget how strong she was considering her nonviolent nature, but perhaps a deadly mistake for an enemy to make.

“Keep your faces down and try to look bored,” she said before marching forward like she owned the place. Perhaps I should have been so concerned with how easily she mimicked the vile man, but I was impressed instead. Clearly, she had learned quite a bit about the mannerisms of different people while we were parted.

“Present yourselves!” she bellowed, beelining straight for the biggest ship just like we had all those weeks ago. We heard scattered footsteps and a few concerned shouts, before five men armed with both blasters and tranq-guns ran out.

“General Santos!” one of them sputtered. “We did not expect you, sir!”

“That’s the point of a surprise walkaround, is it not?” She strode forward, hands clenched behind her back and shaking her head like she disapproved of something. “This is the ship those rebels tried to take, correct?”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“And have you taken the necessary precautions to make sure that they didn’t otherwise manage to sabotage it before you detained them?”

“Yes, sir! Of course, sir!”

Boy, there was a whole bunch of shouting going on. I didn’t know if that was a military thing or if the men were just nervous, but either way, it took quite a bit of willpower not to roll my eyes.

“I’d like to see for myself. You and your men clear off the ship.”

“But, sir—”

“The only time I ever want to hear ‘but’ in my presence is if you’re describing the perfect woman from the back. And get me all of your inspection reports from every single day since those rebels dared step foot here.”

“Yes, sir!”

The men all half marched, half ran off, eager to get out of the authoritative man’s way. I couldn’t really blame them. I knew it was Mimic and even I was intimidated.

General Santos stood there, waiting until they completely disappeared down the hall before striding forward. Just like we planned, the four of us followed her until we were all safely on the ship.

“Bahn, scan the level for any more soldiers.”

The tallest of us murmured an agreeable sound and pulled out the ramshackle scanner that he had managed to build in Mimic’s hotel room. We waited breathlessly until the thing finally let out an affirmative beep.

“All clear.”

“Thank goodness,” Mimic breathed, losing her unflattering form to return to her standard female one. “I do not know much of you humans, but I know I did not like the type of man I just was.”

“Yeah, not exactly a winner,” Gonzales agreed, moving past us and speed-walking straight for the bridge. “Come on, we still have to get out of this place and those soldiers are going to be back at any moment.”

“Good point,” I agreed, hurrying after her.

We passed so many halls and rooms that I was sure I could wander around for a month and still not explore all of the ship. I couldn’t help but wonder what all of the space was for, but I quickly tucked all that line of questioning away as we finally reached the central hub of the cruiser.

“My goodness,” Ciangi breathed, looking around in wonder.

I agreed with her totally. The entire room was glistening, sparkling, and completely up to date. We never had anything so crisp and chrome on the colony, and I doubted we ever would. All of the seats were lushly cushioned, and there wasn’t a single crack in the laminate over any of the navigation panels. If there ever was a perfect mechanical creation, we were probably standing on it.

“Oh, come to me, baby!” Gonzales cried, nearly vaulting into the pilot’s seat. “I advise everyone to buckle up. If only because this is the only ship I’ve ever been on where every chair still has all its seatbelts.”

“How long do we have from the start of the engines to lift off?” I asked. “If there’s going to be a long delay, we’re going to need a distraction.”

“Long delay?” the woman shot back, sending me a cheeky grin. “Oh, honey, this is the latest and greatest in Mimic-inspired technology. Just hold on and get ready for the kick.”

“And where exactly is that kick going to take us?” Ciangi argued. “We’re in the building and it’s not like the shields are going to like taking a direct hit of these titanium-enhanced walls and ceiling.”

“That is your job, my favorite shotgun. You’re going to blast the walls with the ion-cannons until there aren’t any walls anymore.”

“But doing so will probably collapse the roof, maybe even cause a fire. There’s a pretty good chance that we will destroy all of the ships here.”

“Good,” Gonzales answered, her grin growing predatory. “If those jerks aren’t going to give up the ships for the treaty, then they aren’t going to get to use them for themselves either. Enough talking now, get the cannons ready and everyone else hold on.”

Not for the first time in my life, I found myself running to a chair and quickly buckling both Mimic and myself in. I knew that the shapeshifter was more than capable of securing her own restraints, but I did it out of such habit that it wasn’t until after the buckle clicked in the latch that I realized what I had done.

“Sorry,” I murmured, securing myself.

But she just smiled up at me again. I didn’t think I had ever seen her grin so much at me, and I didn’t think I would ever grow tired of it. “Don’t worry,” she said idly. “I don’t mind.”

“Good.” Words just didn’t seem to do it in this situation, even though there was so much that I wanted to say. So instead, I just offered her my hand. Within seconds, her fingers laced through mine and she squeezed gently. Together, we looked to Gonzales and Ciangi as they prepped their necessary systems, content in just each other’s company.

“Weapons ready in three, two, one!”

I felt the ship hum below me and then suddenly the front visor view glowed a blinding blue. The next thing I knew, the wall in front of us was exploding outward in a hail of rubble and debris.

“Here we go!” Gonzales cried.

She wasn’t kidding. One moment we were sitting at rest, a mild rumble to the ship as it awoke from its slumber, the next we were hurtling forward so fast that I was pretty sure my soul was left behind—along with all of my other internal organs.

Gravity fought to hold us as we surged out of the hole we had created, rocketing up to the sky. We kept gaining momentum as we shot through the atmosphere. I could feel the ship rumbling and see the front of it growing red from the extreme friction and duress we were putting it under. For the tiniest seconds, I was almost afraid that the ship was going to be a failure and we were going to shake to pieces without ever leaving Earth, but then the tension on us broke and we hurtled into the dark, cold void of space.

Silence fell over us for a moment as we zoomed through the vast expanse. Perhaps even a couple of seconds passed before Bahn finally let out a whoop, clapping from his seat.

“We made it!” he cried. “Three out of four isn’t a bad ratio at all.”

But Gonzales didn’t seem to share in his mirth at all.

“I wouldn’t cheer yet,” she said, her expression hardening. “We still have to get through Earth’s outer ring defenses. And if I know anything about weapons, which I totally do, they’re going to have their moon’s nuclear cannon trailed on us any s—”

Warning. Ship has been targeted by weapons system. A nearby base is sending a signal to stand down or be destroyed.

“—econd,” Gonzales finished. “Hold onto your hats, everybody. It’s about to get very bumpy in here.” With that, she tightened her grips on the controls and leaned forward. It was right at that moment I knew without a doubt that we were in for the flight of our lives.

13

Dodgeball, Extreme Cruiser Edition

I held on for dear life as the ship spun and bucked every which way.

“Let’s see how quick I can make this big lady twist!” Gonzales cawed, practically throwing the steering gauge to the side and sending us spiraling. My stomach heaved, but I managed to keep myself from gagging as we zigged and zagged, bucked and reared and otherwise avoided the oncoming fire.

I could see the scanners on both Gonzales and Ciangi’s consoles as we hurtled through space, avoiding missile after missile.

For all of a single breath, it seemed far too easy, but then dozens of large blips started to approach us from ahead.

“What are those?” I asked, trying not to sound utterly panicked and not doing too well with that.

“Oh, nothing too important,” Gonzales shot back, her voice sharper than a desert planet. “Just fighters from our military outpost on Mars.”

“Why do we have a military outpost on Mars?” I countered. “That’s supposed to be a peaceful, agricultural colony!”

“Yeah, well, things have changed since you were in middle school and taught about all our different outposts. Mars is now used as a military post to house all five hundred of our space-worthy fighters on the off-chance we do have some sort of planetary invasion. And right now, four hundred and twenty of them are deployed straightforward.”

I heard Bahn swallow hard even from where he was sitting. “Oh, is that all?” he muttered.

“Don’t worry, though,” Gonzales continued, her face brighter than an LED candle. As terrifying as the situation was, it was good to see her getting closer and closer to her former self. I had a feeling that there would be far-reaching consequences of the horrors she had endured, but it gave me hope to see that she was recovering as well as one could expect. “All I have to do is get to the Saturn Hyperjump and we can shoot to the last colony. All they have there is a rickety old cruiser that’s been hanging in space for an entire generation. They won’t have a single thing that can hit us.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, the ship suddenly jerked to the side, moving so quickly and fast that my neck twinged in protest. Suddenly, alarms were going off and the computer was quickly listing on different stats that I could only understand about half.

“We can only maybe take one more direct hit like that,” Ciangi said. “The shields haven’t had enough time to generate to full capacity, so we’re basically just an armored boat out here.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Bahn said, unbuckling his restraints and struggling to the doors. “If I can get to engineering before we’re blown to smithereens.”

“Be careful!” Ciangi cried, sending him a pleading look. “Harunya will kill me if I let anything happen to you.”

“Don’t worry,” he answered with a wink. “I’m an expert, remember.”

With that, he ducked out and once more, I was a spectator in my own flight for my life.

It was almost funny. After so much studying, so much self-improvement, there was still nothing I could do in the situation. I hoped that would change once we arrived on Mimic’s planet.

If we arrived on Mimic’s planet.

“We’re almost there!” Gonzales cried, yanking the gear this way and that while punching different codes into the console with her other hand. “Just gotta keep dodging. Ciangi, I need you to lay a suppressive fire to keep them from crowding in front of us.”

“But what if we hit someone?” the woman countered. “Those are just soldiers doing their job out there. I don’t want to blast any of them into space!”

Gonzales drew an impatient breath, but ended up nodding in agreement, much to my surprise. “Fine. If you wanna be all moralistic about it, I’m sure there are some sort of incapacitating volts instead. Can you figure out how to scroll through the weapons database?”

“Yeah, I got it. But I can’t help but wonder why you, the weapons engineer that helped design this, isn’t on the actual weapons systems in this mad escape for our lives.”

“Ah, well that’s easy,” the dark-haired woman shot back. “I’m the best pilot we have.”

“Oh really?” Ciangi said, selecting something I couldn’t see on her console and then grasping the firing controls once again. “I don’t recall anyone but you ever saying that.”

“It’s not my fault you have terrible memory.”

“There!” I interrupted, pointing to a small grey circle in the front portal. “We’re almost there!”

“See?” Gonzales said, sending a cheeky smile to Ciangi. “I always get us to our goal.”

“Yeah, yeah. Imputing coordinates for Mimic’s planet now.”

The ship continued to roll this way and that, and I watched as smaller fighters tried to intercept us. Ciangi did an insanely good job of shooting them with some sort of purple, crackling ray that made them stop in their stacks and float away, leaving me to wonder if she had been practicing since the last time we had to flee for our lives.

But even with Gonzales’s mad dodging and Ciangi’s uncanny aim, we were still occasionally taking hits. The computer reminded us how close we were to destruction with each blow, and it was the most macabre countdown of my short life.

“I, uh, suppose this is the time to admit I’m not sure we’re going to make it,” Gonzales murmured after we took a particularly egregious missile to the back portion of the ship. “Which seems like a bit of a waste considering all the effort it took us to get to this point.”

Ciangi slammed her fist onto the comm button in response, leaning over to yell into it. “Bahn, you better have something good down in there, or we’re going to die apart and you always promised me we would go together.”

“Do not worry,” his cool voice came over the speaker. “A promise is a promise.”

Before she could ask him to clarify, I heard the mild hum of the ship pick up into a full-on rumble and then we were shooting forward even faster than before.

“Holy halibut!” Gonzales cried, quickly adjusting the gears as she drew out each and every syllable. “How fast are we going?”

“Very,” Bahn’s voice answered over the comms.

“How scientific,” I muttered, my skin pulling back from my face from our sheer velocity.

“Forget scientific, this is downright awesome!” Gonzales whooped.

She leaned into the controls and the small circle in the distance rapidly grew larger and larger until it was practically on top of us.

“Coordinates are in!” Ciangi shouted.

“Perfect. Initiating hyperjump. Everybody say bye-bye Earth.”

“Bye-bye,” Bahn said through the speaker.

I held my breath as the rumbling of our ship turned into a full roar and we passed the horizon of the Hyper-ring. I wasn’t sure how that sort of technology worked beyond the fact that it got someone from point A to point B rapidly, so I could only marvel as the circle crackled with energy around us.

We almost seemed to stand still for a moment, and then suddenly we were snapped forward like someone had put us in an ancient slingshot. Space hurtled by so fast that it almost turned into a rushing, kaleidoscope of colors, swirling in a never-ending rush of a psychedelic rainbow.

But then it was over almost as soon as it had started, and we were spat out just before Earth’s farthest colony.

None of us whispered a single word, and the roar of the engines returned to its too-quiet hum. The last colony did nothing to stop us, the derelict cruiser not even budging. Like something out of a grand flick, we sailed out into the uninhabited parts of space without so much as a single bit of blaster fire.

I wasn’t sure how long we sat there, shocked by our own survival, but Bahn had enough time to leave engineering and return to us, his face showing the same shock I was feeling inside myself.

Surprisingly enough, it was Mimic who spoke first, her low, sweet voice a welcome change. “I suppose this should be less surprising since it’s the third time we’ve done this, but I was certain we were not going to make it this time.”

Gonzales let out a shaky laugh while she programmed the autopilot. “What, do you mean you didn’t trust me?”

“Of course I trust you,” Mimic answered with a brilliant smile. “It was the mechanics who built this vessel that I wasn’t sure of.”

“Well, I can’t blame you for that,” she said, laughing weakly.

I unbuckled myself and stood, hand still wrapped in Mimic’s, who quickly stood with me. I could now see on Ciangi’s console how many days we had left before we reached Mimic’s planet, and for the first time, I wasn’t scared, terrified or uncertain. We were back together again, the eggheads and the alien, and there was nothing we couldn’t do.

“So, who’s ready to defeat an entire army?” I asked, sending my friends the cheekiest grin I could muster.

“I am,” Ciangi said, standing as well and coming over to hug her taller twin.

“As am I,” Bahn answered, nodding resolutely to me.

“Count me in,” Gonzales said, also joining us. Her eyes flicked to me, and I felt that same strange intensity that I had once before in our cells. “I’ve got a whole lot of aggression to work off.”

“I am eternally grateful to all of you,” Mimic whispered. I could hear the sincerity in her voice and it bolstered me even more.

Yes, we had done the impossible and escaped Earth, but I knew the struggle was far from over. In fact, the story of the mimic and the space engineers was just beginning.

Mimic Raises an Army

1

The Past Can Haunt You

“Stop! I said stop!”

A haunting scream pulled me from my sleep, and I bolted upright so fast that my head spun. Rubbing my temples, I tried to get my bearings on my unusual surroundings.

Oh right, we were on the ship that we had stolen from Earth Gov. I still couldn’t believe that had happened, but the rumbling of the metal around me confirmed it.

I felt a slight movement beside me, and saw that Mimic had been lying next to me, sleek and shiny in her spikey, natural form just like the old times when we had first met. It was funny, I knew she technically didn’t need to rest the same way I did, but I appreciated her company nonetheless.

“STOP!” The scream sounded again, desperate and wretched, echoing through the empty halls like the wail of an ancient banshee. Finally, my brain sprung to life and the entire situation clicked.

“Gonzales!” I cried, stumbling out of bed.

I bolted toward the door, Mimic rousing and following without question. Thankfully, we all had chosen to sleep somewhat near each other, and I only had to go to the next officer’s cabin about halfway down the corridor to get to the weapons engineer’s room.

I burst in just as the coin twins were rounding the corner. Sure enough, Gonzales was tossing and turning on her bed, and I could smell both the sweat and fear in the air.

“What is happening?” Mimic asked, having returned to her human form.

“Night terror,” I answered, rushing to Gonzales’s side.

“Or PTSD,” Ciangi said as she joined me. “Don’t try to wake her. She could have her eyes open and talk to you, but still be in the episode. Also, she might lash out. Just try to make sure she doesn’t hit her head on anything.”

“I know.” Carefully, I pulled back the covers and slid a hand behind her twisting waist. I pulled her up gently, her fist pummeling me as I did, but I held her long enough for Ciangi to slide behind her.

“Boy, she really knows how to land a punch,” I gasped after a blow hit me square in my ribs.

“Oh, I don’t think she ever mentioned it, but Gonzales is super into kickboxing.” The blonde finally finished getting settled, and put a pillow against her stomach before tenderly pulling the other woman back down. Once the two women were flush, Ciangi carefully wrapped her arms around her friend and whispered quiet encouragements.

I followed suit, my hands encircling one of the wildly-flailing fists. At first, Gonzales tried to resist, but I just waited patiently until the arm went somewhat slack. Once I was sure it probably wasn’t going to beat me into a pulp, I released one of my hands and gently stroked at the skin of her arm as comfortingly as I could. Eventually, the fist relaxed and her fingers unclenched, allowing me to gently massage her palm.

“You seem to have experience with this,” Bahn remarked quietly from behind me.

“There was an accident at the colony when I was little. Explosion,” I murmured, never taking my eyes away from Gonzales’s pained face. “People survived, but were trapped with the mangled remains of the dead for several days until we could extract them. There was no water, food, and hardly any oxygen. Almost all of them had some sort of PTSD from it, so all of us learned how to take care of each other.”

“At least you all were there for each other,” Ciangi supplied helpfully.

“Our colony was small, and back then, on the very outskirts of civilization. We only had each other.”

“Like us,” Mimic said, almost too quietly to even hear.

But I did catch it, and I nodded. “Yeah, a lot like us.”

We went quiet for a while, the only sound in the room being the occasional thrash or yell from Gonzales. I liked to think that she could sense us there, trying to comfort her as best we could, and to make sure she was safe.

“I do not remember her doing this before,” Mimic whispered after a considerable time had passed. I appreciated that. Although she had no idea what was really going on, she understood that calm and quiet were required. “Did something happen?”

I let out a harsh breath since a snort might have startled Gonzales. “Yeah. You could say that.”

“I see.” I risked a glance over my shoulder to see my friend studying us quizzically, as if trying to put together an incredibly complex puzzle. “I feel like this is something I should never ask of, unless Gonzales tells me personally. Is that correct?”

I nodded. “Yeah, very good. It seems you haven’t forgotten how us humans work since we left.”

“No, not at all,” Her expression clouded slightly. “But after what has happened on Earth, I am beginning to fear that I understand how your kind operates too well.”

I almost wanted to object, to say that she had just seen the bad that humanity had to offer, but with each tremble of Gonzales’s sweat-drenched form, I couldn’t help but agree with her sentiment.

Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that I never belonged with my own kind. As of late, they were decidedly awful, and I believed that we could be better than that.

Two long hours, Gonzales was stuck in the throes of her nightmares. Except they weren’t really nightmares. The way it had been explained to me when I was younger was that the dreams that happened in one of these fits were hyper-realistic, so much so that it could be dangerous to lie beside someone who was suffering from one. I didn’t even want to imagine what Gonzales was seeing behind her closed lids, but I wished more than anything that I could end it.

When it did finally end, it was like someone had thrown a switch. One moment she was drawn as tight as an ancient Earth bow, whimpering words I couldn’t understand, the next she went as limp as a hot space ration and nearly sank into the bed. Ciangi and I exchanged surprised glances, but waited for her to open her eyes a few minutes later before saying anything.

“Um…hello?” she asked, her normally rich skin now drawn and pale. “What are all of you doing here? Slumber party I didn’t know about?”

“You were having a night terror.”

She sighed and reached a shaky hand up to wipe her drenched forehead. “Is that what that was?”

“Yeah,” I answered softly before looking to Bahn. “Can you go grab her a drink from the fabricator?”

He nodded and crossed to the living room area of the officer’s quarters. Ciangi wiggled out from behind the woman and sat down next to her.

“You had me worried there for a minute.”

“I worried myself,” she answered honestly. “Hey, so I’m, like, uncomfortably soaked right now. Would you mind grabbing me a spare jumpsuit from the supply area?”

“Sure. Be back in a bit.”

The blonde woman gave me a nod then slid off the bed, disappearing out the still open door. Bahn returned a moment later, handing Gonzales a cup of cold liquid and a piece of bread.

She took them gratefully, but was smart enough not to swallow them down too quickly for her system to handle. It was as she nibbled at the bread that I found her eyes on me.

“You must think I’m weak,” she blurted, seeming to surprise herself as much as me.

My eyes went wide, and I could only stare at her in puzzlement. “Why on Earth would I think that?”

“We’re not on Earth anymore,” she mumbled, her eyes flicking away. “And because I let something as simple as a bad dream get everyone all riled up.”

“It wasn’t a dream,” I countered, feeling strangely defensive. “And you’re not weak. Sometimes the mind copes with trauma in really terrible ways. You’re still in recovery, so don’t feel bad about needing time to heal.”

“I…I’m glad you think so.” She sighed. “I feel like an idiot. You guys managed to not get captured until almost a month after me. If I hadn’t been so careless, I would have been able to get to you in time and warn you, instead of wasting all those weeks in our cells.”

“You were wise to the treachery a month before us. If anything, you were too smart for your own good.”

“Thank you. For saying that.” She laughed weakly and took a long sip of water. “I think I’m more tired than when I laid down.”

I reached over to ruffle her hair, which was damp and sticking to her scalp. “Just speaking the truth. If we were all more like you, maybe we wouldn’t have been duped so easily.”

“Nah. The universe just wouldn’t be right if there wasn’t a Higgens in it. One of me is plenty.”

I smiled at that, but when I went to pull my hand away from her head, she gripped it for a moment. Our fingers interlaced, and she leaned forward to rest against me.

“When we were captured…is what happened in there going to follow me forever?” she whispered, her weight warm and damp against me.

“In some ways, yeah. In some ways, no,” I answered honestly. I valued her far too much to try to sugarcoat things in any way. “But you’ll always have us around to help with it.”

“You know, I think you’re the only person I’ve ever believed means that when they say it.”

“And I always will.”

2

Five’s a Party, Six is a Surprise

Time passed surprisingly calmly considering that we were yet again fugitives on the run with a stolen vessel. I had often heard the phrase that history was doomed to repeat itself, but I had never seen it enacted in such alarming clarity.

And yet, I was pretty happy about everything. I was once more hurtling through space with my friends, readying ourselves for yet another adventure.

Okay, maybe adventure wasn’t the best way to put it. We were rushing to Mimic’s home to help prep her people for war. A war which was going to be against the same species that had enslaved her people for hundreds of years and kept them stunted. Eternal child soldiers and slaves, with no mind of their own and no sense of will.

I shuddered at the thought, wondering what the heck we were supposed to be able to do with a planet full of babies against a technologically advanced species that obviously didn’t have a problem with conquering natives and exploiting their biology.

“A credit for your thoughts?” Ciangi asked, pointing to the spot on the board where she wanted her holo-piece to move to.

I shook my head and returned to the game at hand. Of course, the woman was absolutely creaming me, but it was nice for us to have some one on one time. I couldn’t remember the last time that Ciangi and I had talked alone that wasn’t related to some sort of life-or-death situation. Considering she was one of my only four friends in life, I definitely wanted to rectify that.

“Just thinking about the juxtaposition between us sitting here, playing a board game, while we are on our way to wage a planetary scale war.”

“Oh, ‘juxtaposition.’ Is that from your word-a-day calendar?”

“No,” I objected automatically, before flushing. “…maybe.”

“You don’t have to be embarrassed about learning. In fact, you should be the opposite. A lot of people get to a certain point in life and they just figure, ‘this is it’ and settle. They stop progressing, stop fighting, and that’s when they start to rot.

“But you, you’ll never rot. You’re always hungry for more. Some people would argue that means that you’re never content, but being content is poison. One that seeps into your bones and taints everything until, the next thing you know, you’re too weak to ever escape it.”

The corner of my mouth went up. “That’s some pretty dramatic prose for a word-a-day calendar.”

She laughed at that, shaking her head and making her curls bounce around her head like golden springs. “What can I say? The most recent turn of events has me feeling a little dramatic. You know, abandoning everything we had on Earth, traveling to our certain deaths and all.”

“I don’t know about certain…”

She reached over to pat my cheek. “And don’t you ever lose that optimism, Higgens. Someone around here has to see the bright side.”

Some might have considered that patronizing, but I just chuckled slightly. “I’ll do my best,” I answered before moving my own piece forward.

Ciangi drew in a regretful sort of breath, then pushed her emperor-token forward to take the game. I sighed, and pushed myself away from the table.

“I was never very good at Conquer anyway.”

“Eh, I didn’t think you did that bad. Up for a fifth round?”

“Ha, no, I don’t think so. I’m going to go check on Bahn and Gonzales. Last I knew, they were taking inventory in the weapons room.”

“I think so. Knowing those two, they’ll be working all night. We’ve got another four days of our flight, but by the way they act, you’d think it was tomorrow.”

“I’m pretty sure that being busy helps Gonzales with…things.”

“Ah, that makes sense. And what is your Mimic up to?”

“She’s not my Mimic,” I shot back. “And I think she’s gathering different things for her to, uh, ‘eat’.”

Ciangi nodded at that. “I remember her…eclectic diet. Sent us across several planets once. Well, go, check on all of our friends like the good mother that you are.”

I opened my mouth to argue, before I realized that the term was fairly apt considering the way that I worried after all of them. Shaking my head, I excused myself and headed out.

The peace we had on the ship was decidedly strange considering the hell that we had lived through. There was no guard to torment us, no bars keeping us trapped, no endless parade of questions wondering where Mimic was and if she would think we had betrayed her. I should have been grateful for it, but—if anything—it made me restless.

“Oh hey, what brings you in here?”

I looked to Gonzales, who had spotted me before I even entered the room. Unusual, as she normally would be too absorbed in her work to notice if a tornado itself was outside her door.

“Just checking in,” I answered, sticking my hands in my pocket so I wouldn’t touch anything I wasn’t supposed to. Although I had made a lot of progress toward my engineering degree, I was nowhere near the level of being able to mess with the dangerous chemicals and components that Gonzales and Bahn were. “How’s inventory and upgrading going?”

“Pretty good,” she answered, sending me a bright smile. “Not enough for an entire planet, but enough to give us at least a little bit of hope.”

“Hope is good.”

“Wh—”

Bahn’s question was cut off by a blaring alarm, nearly jolting me out of my skin. I stared at the two for a moment, the pair just as surprised as I was, before collecting myself enough to go over to one of the security displays on the side of the room.

“What does this mean?” I asked, pointing to the blips and lines of code that I didn’t understand.

Gonzales came up beside me, worrying her lip between her teeth. “It means we have an intruder.”

“An intruder?” Bahn asked. “What do you mean an intruder?”

“What about that needs explaining?” she snapped. “Grab some weapons, boys. I don’t know what kind of stowaway we have, but let’s not take our chances, shall we?”

I stared at the solid door in front of us, marveling at its construction. I doubted that even all of our blasters firing at full power could melt even a single hole in it. The metal was sturdy, impossibly so, and I couldn’t see a way around it.

“You’re sure the intruder is in here?” I asked, nodding to the door.

“Yeah, that’s why this area is in lockdown,” Ciangi answered, the only one of us humans without a gun in hand. It seemed that, even after everything we had been through, she still didn’t like any sort of gun. “Whoever managed to get in here is just on the other side of this door.”

“I’m going to punch in the override now, but get ready. We don’t know what they’re capable of.”

“Ready,” I answered, bracing myself and pulling my weapon up.

“Ready,” Bahn agreed.

“Ciangi?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

Gonzales stepped forward and to the side, pulling out a panel from the wall and revealing an interface. Quickly, she punched several things in before the blaring finally stopped and the door slowly slid open.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting on the other side. Perhaps some sort of trained super soldier? An assassin that they had somehow known to send after us who had managed to get onto the ship before we lifted off? Either way, it certainly wasn’t a tall, lanky woman with dark, dark skin in a maintenance uniform.

“Um, hi,” she murmured, looking at us with wide eyes from behind her safety goggles. “I, uh, take it from the sounds of the engine that we’re not on Earth anymore?”

“No,” I answered, slowly lowering my gun. “No, we are not.”

3

Good Things Come in Tall Packages

“So, remind me one more time, how did you get in here?” Gonzales asked, circling around the seated woman once again.

After our rather surprising introduction, we had led our ‘guest’ to one of the officers’ lounges and set her down. We arranged ourselves in front of her, no doubt all of us wondering just how she came to be involved in our little slice of rebellion.

Except for Mimic, of course. She didn’t quite understand why the woman alarmed us so much considering that she too had snuck her way onto our original ship, but I promised to explain later.

“I told you, I was working as part of the cleanup crew down in the supply storage areas after all of the movers tracked in a lot of dirt and other wastes.”

“And then you…what? Just decided to lay down and take a nap?”

“Well, kinda. But it sounds terrible when you put it that way.” She took inventory of our disbelieving looks and sighed. “Look, I was coming off a double and I knew I didn’t have it in me to go through the decontamination and security protocols, so I figured I would just slide into one of the hidey holes I was aware of, take a nap, and then leave when the morning shift clocked in. Of course, as you can probably surmise, I ended up asleep a whole lot longer than just a nap.”

She had a strange sort of accent, one I couldn’t place. It was deep, with a rise and fall to it that seemed quite melodic. I remembered reading once that some places on Earth still spoke differently than the common accent, but I had never listened to it in person.

“You slept for three days?” Gonzales asked, arms crossed and expression dubious.

“That is unlikely,” Mimic said. “Although you humans do require an odd amount of unconscious time, it is usually no more than nine hours, unless sick, injured or influenced by drugs.” She turned her head to the dark-skinned woman. “Are you any of those things?”

“No, not quite.” The stranger adjusted her goggles, then her fingers wound into her hair, tugging at the long, black locks falling over her shoulders and chest. “I woke up and immediately panicked. I thought that the soldiers were taking it on some sort of test run and I absolutely do not have the clearance to be on this thing while it was moving. So, I figured I would just hide, wait until we landed, and then sneak out with the new maintenance crew that came on.”

“Except this wasn’t a test flight.”

“No, I realized that after about eight hours or so. Thankfully, I was able to make it to our maintenance station and hang there with some food and water while I collected myself. I figured that somehow the ship had been stolen by pirates, and my best bet was to hide until I could safely slip out wherever we landed. I’m not the worst colony navigator, so I was pretty sure I could get home alright.”

“If you’ve been hiding in the ship this whole time, how did you manage to avoid setting off any alarms?”

“Oh, that part’s easy. I just stuck to the areas where I knew they weren’t set up yet. The only reason I set off the one you all heard was because I got storage room 2-G and 2-J mixed up.” She took a long breath and smiled shakily at us. “So, what is it then? Y’all pirates?”

“Pirates?” I snorted outright. “No, not quite.”

“Then what?” she asked. “You haven’t killed me outright, and by the looks on your faces when you opened the door, I can guess that you were just as scared as I was, so you’re not some sort of military coup. If you were, I would be dead by now.”

“I guess you could say we’re a kind of…anti-coup.” She cocked her head to the side, clearly not understanding, so I decided to explain further. “My name is Higgens. This is Gonzales, Ciangi, Bahn, and Mimic.”

“Wait… Higgens, why does that sound familiar?”

“Because he’s Earth’s most eligible underdog bachelor,” Gonzales muttered.

I looked up, shocked. “Wait, what? I didn’t know about that part.”

“Oh! You’re the guy that discovered first contact! And you—” She pointed to Mimic. “You’re the alien!”

“Technically, you all were the aliens when you invaded my home. But yes.” Mimic gave a little bow. “I am the alien.”

“Oh my gosh,” the woman breathed. “I can’t believe it’s you! I, uh, wow. You’re skinnier in real life, you know that?” she said, motioning to me.

I cleared my throat uncomfortably. “Uh, you’re not the first person to tell me that.”

“Wow. This is just…unbelievable. I never, uh, wait, I should introduce myself first. My name is Eskedare Getachew, or Eske for short. I’m a level-three maintenance worker assigned to this ship, but I don’t have clearance for any exterior repair or cleaning.”

She gave a little salute, but it knocked into her goggles, which she then had to adjust again. I wasn’t sure why she was wearing them considering she wasn’t doing any actual work, but it didn’t seem like the appropriate time to ask about it.

“But…why are you all here?” she asked, her expression clearly curious again.

I had to admit, I was a little surprised at her quick acceptance of who we were. I guessed being ‘famous’ had its perks.

“Well, our gov had a deal with Mimic here to help her with some aliens that were trying to kill her and her people. A certain group decided to renege, imprison us, then try to use all of these supplies built to help her for their own little coup to take over Earth Gov. Naturally, we had to steal the ship.”

She tsk-ed her tongue. “Ain’t that just like politicians. But still, if this is for the preservation of Miss Mimic’s species, I’m more than happy to chip in where I can. It’s because of you that my brother is alive, so I figure I owe you.”

Mimic looked confused. “I’m sorry, I don’t follow?”

“Those samples of your cell structure that you donated to us,” Eske continued chipperly. “Because of them, the doctors treating my brother’s disease were able to make a breakthrough. For the first time in his life, he gets to run and play just like everybody else.

“So the way I figure it,” Eske continued, “the least I could do is help you get what is legally yours anyway.”

“Well, then thank you, Miss Eskedare Getachew. I appreciate your support.”

“Please, Eske.” She stood, which made Gonzales flinch, but the rest of us managed not to react violently. “So, what all do you guys need cleaned around here?”

4

The Last Moments of Peace

To her credit, Eske did exactly as she promised. Sure, we didn’t really need someone to look after us or repair minor damage, considering the ship was so new, but she did her best. She would hand Gonzales tools when she needed them, bring Bahn first aid supplies when he inevitably shocked himself on his latest tinkering project, and even helped both Ciangi and Mimic put their hair into a couple of complicated hairstyles that kept it out of their faces.

She reminded me so much of myself that it was uncanny, borderline uncomfortable. She was obviously nervous around us, but so eager to please that sometimes talking to her felt like an obligation. I didn’t mind it too much however, and the rest of the group seemed to be quite amused by her demeanor.

Although, it was strange to no longer be the tallest one in the group. Eske had to be six foot, and—unlike me—she had a sort of royal air about her. Perhaps it was her high cheekbones, or her broad nose. Maybe it was how her thick, well-kept locks formed a crown around her head every time she put them up while she was working. I couldn’t really put my finger on it, but there was definitely something royal about her.

Not that she acted like it. Like myself, she seemed less concerned with her appearance and more with being the best maintenance worker that she could be. Not that there was anything wrong with caring about looks, I just identified with being endlessly confounded by whatever the latest trend was.

“So, anything I can help you and your partner with today?” Eske asked, announcing her presence as she entered the lounge.

I looked up from the datalog I was perusing, trying in vain to connect to my scholastic account back home. Unsurprisingly, I was locked out. So much for improving myself before we threw ourselves into the heat of battle.

“My partner?” I asked curiously, pushing my aggression about the login situation to the back of my mind where I could deal with it later.

“Yeah, you know. Miss Mimic. It must be nice to be back with your love again.”

I felt my cheeks turn crimson, and for some reason, my reply made me jump to my feet. “Who said anybody is my love?” I sputtered, sounding like a total fool.

Eske’s eyes went wide, which was only exaggerated by the safety goggles that she still hadn’t removed, even two days later. “Oh geez! I’m sorry! I just assumed with the way you guys look at each other, and since you were her first human contact and saved her from so much, that there was something there.”

“Well, there is something there. But it’s friendship. And trust. She’s the most loyal person I’ve ever met in my entire life.”

She seemed even more perplexed and I had no idea how to rectify the situation. “…but you…uh, don’t love her?”

“No!” But that sounded so harsh leaving my lips that I automatically recanted. “I mean, I d-don’t think so. Or well, that is to say, I—”

She held up her hands, thankfully cutting off the string of words that were just trailing out of my mouth with no real reason. “It’s fine. Emotions are weird, and squiggly, and relationships are that much worse. You can trust her, and I guess that’s all that matters.”

I heaved a sigh of relief that that was over and nodded emphatically. “Yes. I can trust her. And that’s more than I can say for a lot of humans I’ve met.”

“You’re telling me! I can’t believe after that whole Gio…Gigi..Gee—”

“Giomatti,” I offered.

“Yes! That. After the whole Giomatti thing, I can’t believe that you turned around to end up saddled to some Earth scumbags. It just goes to show that money and power can really go to people’s heads.”

“It really can.”

She was quiet for a split-second, and I went to walk past her, eager to be away from the awkward conversation before it could grow even more awkward. But Eske began to walk beside me as I traveled down the hall, and I wasn’t sure if it would be terribly rude to ask her to give me some alone time to think. It looked like Mimic wasn’t the only one who needed to brush up on their human interaction protocol.

“So, you were a maintenance worker once, right?” she asked, uncertainty hanging at the edge of her words as if she was afraid she would offend me. “Like me?”

“Yes, I was.”

“And now you’re—”

“An unemployed student who’s also a fugitive. Not sure that that’s an improvement.”

“What do you mean? You’re famous back on Earth! They’re even making a flick about you.”

“What? Since when?”

She laughed before realizing that I was completely serious. “What? You don’t know?”

I shook my head. “I guess I leave most of that stuff to the agent I hired to handle all PR and other media stuff. Those kind of things just exhaust me and make me feel anxious.”

“Well, I suppose I could understand that.”

Footsteps echoed in front of us and then Gonzales was rounding the corner. She looked from Eske to me then raised a thick eyebrow. “Careful, Miss Eske. Don’t go falling for Mister Heartbreaker here.”

“Who, me?” I asked, swiveling my head to make sure that she wasn’t talking to anyone else.

“Who else would I be talking about?”

“I just… I’m gonna go to my room now. Eske, maybe you can help Gonzales out with something.”

“Of course! I’d be happy to. Whatever you need.”

I walked off quickly, escaping the increasingly uncomfortable conversation for a little peace and quiet.

I heaved a sigh of relief as I entered my room and sat down on the bed. Looking back to my datalog, I decided to bring up some books on war strategy. At least I could do something productive since I wasn’t going to be completing more of my engineering degree any time soon.

“Are you busy?”

I looked up from the holoscreen, a few hours having passed, and I was feeling a lot less overstimulated. “Mimic! No, I’m fine. What’s up?”

“I just wanted to sit with you. I feel like after not seeing you for a year, we have been too busy running to really enjoy each other’s company, like the good old times, as a human might say.”

“Most of our good old times were spent running for our life from one catastrophe to another.”

“Fair enough,” she said, joining me on the bed as she sat cross-legged. “And yet those times felt so much less complicated.”

“Probably because they were. The most we had to worry about was what was happening on our ship. Now we’ve got an entire planet and all of your people hanging in the balance.”

“It is intimidating, isn’t it?” She sighed and laid down, resting her head in my lap.

“Yeah. But hey, tell me about your planet. What have I missed? The last time I got an update from you was about three months ago, and even then, it was pretty general.”

“Well, the younglings are growing up. It is quite difficult, and some are progressing much faster than others, but several can take human form.”

“Seriously?” I asked in surprise. That was a long way off from when she had to teach them how to eat properly. “That’s amazing.”

“Yes, in many ways. But also imagine it as being on a planet populated only by what you call teenagers, children, and toddlers. Often, it is more exhausting than not, and I wonder if I’m raising them wrong. I never thought about being a parental unit, and yet now I’m a guardian to an entire planet. I don’t know what deity thought me the right person to handle this, but I’m beginning to wonder if they were evil, or outright insane.”

“Hey, if anybody could do it, it’s you.”

She smiled weakly, reaching up to flick the tip of my nose. “You are saying that because you are my friend and you have to be supportive.”

“Uh, excuse me, miss, but when have I ever lied to you?”

“True, true.” Her hand dropped, and she sighed. “Sometimes I just think of rounding up everyone I can on my planet and finding a new home to go to. We could all take on human form in time, and blend into your people. Hiding in plain sight, as you would say.”

I knew she was musing rather than planning, but I responded anyway. “Then why don’t you?”

“Because we deserve so much more than that. If we hide, we will have no culture, no people, no history. We will be doppelgangers and pretenders, when we could be our own thriving society. Besides, what lurks in shadow will eventually be exposed, no matter how careful we were. It would only be a matter of time before we were found out, and I shudder to think of what your kind would do to us once they knew we were walking among them… No offense.”

“None taken.” I stroked her hair, running my fingers through the white tresses. “Hey, Mimi, can I ask you a question?”

“Yes, always.”

“Why did you choose this form?”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t technically have any gender, or anything like a human body. What made you choose to be this exact body?”

“Oh, well, I knew that I wanted to communicate with you, and that I needed to make sure you weren’t scared of me. After perusing online for long enough, I found enough information that told me what would make me nonthreatening to you.

“Females—and most other XX chromosome combinations—are generally the smaller biological sex, so I chose that. Also, I learned that you were male, and figured I wouldn’t want to appear as another male to infringe on your territory.

“I made my eyes large, and evenly spaced in my head, my nose is short and rounded, and my lips indicate I have higher levels of estrogen. My body type was a mix of many different women I observed who were considered sexy. However, I stayed away from the exceptionally curvaceous ones, as I didn’t want you to focus on my reproductivity, but instead feel a more sort of…paternal protection of me, I suppose.

“And the white hair? Well, that was because I liked it. It was either that or red, but I was having difficulty replicating the MC1R gene, so I went with white.”

“Huh. When you say it like that, it makes it sound so clinical.”

“Well, because it was, at first. Sure, you were nice to me, and fed me, but I didn’t know how you would react to me becoming like you, and I needed to become like you to communicate what I needed.

“But now, I quite like this form. It’s sorta my home away from home, I would say. An outfit that I like to slip into to hang out with my friends.”

“Well, good. I’m glad to know you’re not keeping it around just to get me to protect you.” As I looked down into her eyes, I couldn’t deny the thrumming of my heart. I could feel our connections still running strong and true between us, but I couldn’t help but wonder just how much was friendship, and how much was…something else.

“Not at all. I know you would do that no matter what form I take.”

“That’s right.” I set my datalog to the side and leaned back against the wall. “I’m afraid you’re stuck with me as long as this heart is still beating.”

“Good. Let’s hope that it keeps going for a very, very long time.”

5

The Home Tour

“Beginning landing sequence in three…two…one!”

I gripped the armrests of my seat, waiting for the jerking of the landing gear coming down and the throttling of the engine. But it never came. Instead, the computer announced its entire procedure until we were safely on the ground with hardly even a jostle.

“Whoa,” I murmured as the ship came to a stop and the engines slowly wound down. “They really did upgrade the technology in our big ships.”

“I am glad that your people found use with the information I gave them. However, I am less than pleased with who they put in charge of it,” Mimic said, her voice laced with concern.

“You and me both,” Gonzales growled, unbuckling herself. “So, ready to take us to your people?”

Mimic freed herself as well, and nodded. “Just keep in mind that there is only so much they could have learned in just one year. Be patient with them, please.”

“Geez, Mimic, you make it sound like we’ll face a swarth of toddlers as soon as we step foot on your planet.”

“Well, something like that.”

“Hey, as long as they aren’t pooping or puking on me, I’m good,” Gonzales said, walking toward the main hatch of the ship. She stopped suddenly, and gave the alien a look over her shoulder. “They’re, uh, not going to do that, right?”

“No. Even my youngest of charges knows how to hold their bowels. If only because our species doesn’t have bowels such as you do.”

“Alright, good. Otherwise, I would have put on a hazmat suit.”

“No need.” Mimic drew in a deep breath before straightening her shoulders and marching forward. “This way. The coordinates I put in were for our capital, of sorts, so we will not have far of a walk at all.”

“Well, that’s convenient,” Eske remarked.

We filed out, the sunlight bright enough to blind us a bit at first, but we adjusted after just a few moments. I had a bit of déjà vu as I was surrounded once more by quiet forest.

Except…it wasn’t as quiet as it had been the last time. I could hear a few warbling calls and, dare I say, chirps.

“I thought all of the animals were dead on this planet,” I said, looking to Mimic.

“Most are. However, I found that the alien had many in captivity in its ship that it bred for food. It turns out the minerals it had my people harvest were purely for fixing its ship, specifically its fuel system.”

“Huh, they really did mess up this planet to get everything they needed, didn’t they?”

“They did indeed, but we are recovering. Come, this way.”

She strode quickly, but confidently, off into a slightly worn path in the grass. I found myself craning my head this way and that, trying to take in everything around us. It seemed the same as last time, yet so much different. Like I could feel that great change had happened, even if my eyes couldn’t observe it.

Just like Mimic said, it didn’t take long for us to reach their ‘capital.’ Despite her calling it that, I was surprised to see a fairly flourishing township. The buildings were all shaped differently, and there didn’t seem to be any set proportions between the structures, but it was fairly solid and looked stable.

“Wow,” Ciangi said, taking it all in. “Not bad, Mimic. Not bad at all.”

“You built this all in a year?” Eske asked, eyes wide. I was beginning to wonder if they were just going to be stuck that way for the remainder of our time together.

“It is hard to believe,” Bahn added. “And yet it is here.”

“You are all very generous in your compliments,” Mimic answered with a small laugh. “Come, my accommodations are this way.”

We followed her through makeshift streets, which looked to be made of stones that had been smoothed on top and placed into the earth with only mud to seal them. As we grew closer, I began to see more and more citizens about. Some were walking around as dog-sized, spikey things that reminded me of when Mimic had first been fed. Some were strange creatures that I had never seen before, with multiple tentacles, or jaws, or even wings.

And some were even human, although most of them were a bit higgledy-piggledy on their features, occasionally missing an eye or having one too many noses. They also seemed to have an issue with getting hair right. It made me marvel at how quickly Mimic had picked it up when we first met.

A shadow loomed over us and I looked up to see something very familiar, tugging at the back of my head with a persistent sort of recognition.

“This is my home,” Mimic said, nearly pulling me from my anxious thoughts as I tried to place it. “I’m sure most of you will find it rings a bell.”

That was when it hit me! It was the main character’s house in one of my favorite sims that Mimic and I used to watch together. My cheeks warmed, and I was flattered that she remembered. She had really meant it when she once said she wanted me to have someplace I felt comfortable when I visited her.

She was too pure, really. I didn’t know what I had ever done to earn a friend such as her, but I was determined to save her people to make sure she could continue to be my friend for a very, very long time.

Mimic stepped forward and opened the door for us, and I briefly realized they had no need for locks or keys on their planet. That would never fly on Earth or any colony. I hoped that her people would be able to hold onto their trust, and our presence didn’t somehow corrupt them.

But before any of us could enter, several shapes darted out. I couldn’t keep track of them all, but I could make out a winged thing hiding on the underside of the balcony, another pressed to the wall, and several more spinning out beside us.

“Children, children!” Mimic cried, making shooing motions toward them. “What did I tell you about crowding our visitors? You’ll have much more time to observe them.”

The group resisted, trying to dodge around her, and I couldn’t help but laugh slightly. She really did seem like a schoolmarm dealing with an especially rowdy group of pupils.

But Gonzales seemed to be loving it.

“Hey, you guys understand common?” she asked, kneeling down to look one in the face. It trembled before her, giving her an innocent look with its six eyes. “My name’s Gonzales. We’re gonna be spending an awful lot of time together, so we might as well get introductions over with now.”

It let out a warble, before a long, orangey tentacle lifted from behind its back, extending to touch the weapons engineer’s face. To her credit, she didn’t flinch, just giggled slightly at the touch.

“It’s furry,” she mused. “I did not expect that.”

“This is Myxis,” Mimic said, picking him up and placing him on her hip. “This is their favorite form so far, so they insist on spending all of their time in it.”

“Is that so?” Gonzales asked, standing and holding her arms out like she wanted to take him next. Mimic looked at her uncertainly before relenting, and she handed the baby mimic over.

Surprisingly, Myxis didn’t seem to mind. Instead, he twittered and cooed and all in all, seemed to enjoy Gonzales’s attention.

“Huh,” Bahn remarked. “I never figured you for the caretaker type.”

“Yeah, well, I guess a whole bunch of things have changed for me lately,” she answered blithely before walking through the open door.

Mimic shrugged, then gestured for all of us to go in after her. We complied, and soon we were inside.

The sound of more skittering feet told me that there were even more eyes watching us. I didn’t mind, however, as I figured we must be quite alien to them. Those who had developed enough to understand who we were stared at the saviors of their people. Those who hadn’t progressed that much only knew that we looked like their leader, but smelled and acted entirely different. All in all, I got the feeling that we would get a lot of stares.

“Let me show you to your rooms,” Mimic said, heading toward the staircase at the back of the room. “Unfortunately, there are more of you here than I planned, so we might need to shuffle things around a bit.”

“Oh,” Eske muttered sheepishly. “Is that my fault?”

“Yes. However, I am glad you are here. We will need all of the help we can get, and if you are half of the maintenance worker that Higgens was, I’m sure you’ll be vital.”

Eske saluted enthusiastically, drawing herself up to her full height. “Yes, ma’am! I will do my best.”

We reached the top of the stairs and Mimic opened the first door. Peeking inside, I saw a pair of roughly hewn twin beds inside, with what looked like mattresses of woven reeds on the frame.

“I apologize, as we are still struggling with textile creation, but I figured that we could fetch blankets and more modern mattresses from your ship.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Ciangi said. “We’ve slept in worse. And I’m assuming that this is our room?”

“Yes, I assumed the coin twins would not want to be separated.”

“You assumed right. We’ll head back to the ship and grab some basic supplies to get cozy. We’re going to be here a while.”

The two headed back down the stairs and then we were moving on to the next door. This one had a single bed, but an entire structure against one wall that I guessed was a rudimentary weapons rack.

“And this must be my room,” Gonzales said, sidling past us to look in. “Yes, that will do nicely. I guess I’ll follow the twins to grab some mattresses, clothing, and all that.”

Then she left too, and we were onto the next room.

It was fairly standard, but with a large bed and what I recognized as a recreation of the tinkering station in my room back on our first ship together. Once more, I felt incredibly flattered that she had gone so above and beyond, but that faded quickly as I remembered that we had a slight number problem.

“Oh, uh, I can sleep on the floor, I’m sure.” Eske said, stepping back and wringing her hands nervously.

“Nonsense,” Mimic said resolutely. “I have other accommodations that will suit Higgens. You are my guest, and you will take this room.”

“Oh…okay, if you insist. I just wouldn’t want to displace anybody, ya know?”

“Don’t worry,” I said, patting her shoulder. “You’re not.”

She brightened up considerably and clapped her hands again. “Excellent! I will go and grab supplies as well.”

That left just Mimic and me. I looked to her, unsure of exactly how she was planning on housing me, but trusting her nonetheless. She hadn’t let me down so far, and I doubted she would on something as simple as a room.

“I guess you’re with me then,” she said with a shrug, leading me to the very end of the hall where there were two doors left. “The one to the right is what you call the restroom. We made it to the specifications we read in the manuals you left with us, so I hope they are in working order. Naturally, my people don’t really need them.”

“A life without having a reliance on toilets sounds like a good one.”

“…if you say so. Now, to the left is my, I suppose now our, room.”

She opened the door and I stepped in, not quite sure what to expect.

“I apologize for the lack of bed. I’ll set a couple of my helpers to make a frame today while we’re arranging things and formulating our best plan of attack. After we grab a mattress from the ship, of course.”

That was right, Mimic didn’t need to sleep like we did, so it would make sense that she wouldn’t waste time and resources on something like a bed.

But what I did notice in lieu of a mattress was a pile of material on the floor. Looking it over, I realized it was Mimic’s jumper that we had left her in, an envirosuit, and a blanket from the old ship. They were huddled into a pile in the center of the room and looked strangely out of place.

“Do you want me to pick these up?” I asked uncertainly.

Mimic looked to where I was pointing to, and if she was capable of blushing, I was sure she would have then. “Oh, no, it’s fine for now.” Her eyes wouldn’t quite meet mine and I didn’t think I had ever seen her so flustered. “That’s where I like to rest, when I need a break from everything going on around me. It…it smells like all of you. It helps me feel less alone.”

What else could I do when my friend said something like that? I crossed the distance between us and pulled her into a hug. “Well, you don’t have to be alone anymore. We’re going to beat these guys that are coming, and then we’ll deal with Earth’s little problem.”

“And then you’ll go home.”

“Are you kidding me?” I shot back. “We tried the whole diplomat thing and it didn’t work. As far as I’m concerned, you’re stuck with me for a good, long while. You know, provided we don’t all die a terrible death.”

“Yes, that is a rather important variable.”

We shared a quiet laugh, then separated. “Alright,” I said, “let’s go grab the mattress and some other things so we can get this resistance started.”

“Yes,” she replied with a soft smile. “Let’s.”

6

Close Only Counts in Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

“So why is your hair like this?”

I looked up from the box of weapons I was hauling to see a young man hanging from a tree branch. Well, he was mostly a young man. He also had a third arm and a tail, as well as only one eye in the center of his forehead, but hey, I understood that our form was particularly hard to take on and then maintain.

“Like what?” I asked.

“So different from fur. It’s stringy, and so long! But hers is so bounce-bounce, and then hers is thicker, like rope. You’re all human, but you’re all different.”

Before I could answer, Eske was replying, a broad grin across her striking features. “You know those critters running around with the four legs, the big ol’ ears, and the long tails?”

“You mean the Baylsx?”

“Um, yes. That. They’re all a bunch of different colors, and some have long fur and some have short fur, right?”

“Yeah!”

“Well, we’re just like that. We’re all humans, but we’re all a little different.”

“Oh. That makes sense.” The boy seemed to concentrate hard, and in a rather grotesque rippling of his face, took on a second eye and long, carefully coiffed locks like Eske. “How do I look?”

“Not bad, little one.” She reached up to pat his rounded cheek. “But I like your regular form alright too.”

He let out a noise that I couldn’t quite make out, then fell to the ground with a splat. However, his form changed as he did, and he landed as a mid-sized, black and spiky mass.

“There you are!” Eske said. “Now that’s a handsome fellow.”

It let out a chittering sound, and then four large spikes grew from its back. It squawked several times before I realized what it wanted.

“You wanna help us carry a crate? How polite.” I nodded to Ciangi and she gratefully set the box she was lugging on his back.

“Whew,” Ciangi panted. “Thanks. Even with the hover-dollies, we still are looking at manually hauling a lot of these things. I don’t know if you all were aware of this, but I’m not much of one for physical labor.”

“No, really?” Gonzales said with mock astonishment. “I would have never known.”

“To be fair,” Bahn said calmly, “none of us are particularly physically adept.”

“Speak for yourself,” Eske said, grinning brightly as she carried a crate in each arm. “Higgens and I have that constant maintenance physique. Nothing will beef you up more than constantly cleaning and patching up other people’s messes!”

“She has a point,” I said, continuing on with my own crate. As much as I would have liked to double-haul like Eske, I had spent too long on Earth with nothing to do but attend my classes and various interviews. I wasn’t quite what you’d call flabby, but I had certainly lost a lot of my physique. “But let’s get going. We have a whole lot more to do if we’re going to get these people ready for war.”

We dug in and pushed forward, making our way to the training ground that Mimic had fashioned.

I had to admit, she had really outdone herself. There was a weapons warehouse that had multiple areas lifted off the ground to avoid water damage to our supplies, and plenty of insulation from the environment. There was also a wide, roped-off yard that was cleared of any dark blue grass or weeds. I guessed that it was a sort of fighting practice area, judging by what was clearly a shooting range on the other side.

But as we spent our afternoon hauling box, after box, after box, I began to realize something.

There was no way what we had brought would be enough. Sure, we did ten full trips on the hover lifts, flat floating beds that followed along behind us while carrying about twenty crates, and we manually moved about twenty or so on our own. While that sounded like a lot, we were going up against an incredibly advanced alien species coming to get vengeance for the death of their brethren. We needed every mimic that could fight to fight, which meant they needed to be armed.

“Hey, I have a thought,” Eske said on our last trip, Mimic and another pair of mimics having joined us to drag along even more supplies.

“What’s that?” I asked, setting down my crate on a shelf inside the warehouse and trying not to breathe hard.

“These are all weapons to use if they come down onto the ground to fight us.”

“Yeah.”

“But what if they…don’t?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they’re really advanced, right? And we don’t know how far they’ve come since the technology on the ship that crashed here all those years ago. So what if they have some sort of powerful weapon that they can fire from space and eliminate us all?”

My stomach dropped and I stared at her with wide eyes. “I, well, that would have to be a really big laser.”

“But, like, it could be a thing, right? We have no way of knowing. And if it is, then isn’t all of this kinda moot anyway?”

“Not quite,” Mimic said, reverting to her human form and setting her crates onto a platform next to some others that were similarly colored. “Since we are done with the relocation of our supplies, I will show you. I hope you all don’t mind a bit of a hike.”

“Honestly,” Ciangi panted, “I would normally ask for a bit of a break, but I don’t think we have time for one.”

“Correct. This way.”

So without any other complaints, we trudged along after her, all of our arms sore and our backs not faring much better. The only one who didn’t seem utterly exhausted was Eske, who was still turning her head this way and that in wild-eyed wonder.

Huh. When had I lost that?

I remember once being chronically amazed by everything that happened around me. From Mimic, to running from giant monsters, to seeing Mimic’s people on their home planet for the first time. But now, I mostly took everything in stride.

It was almost…refreshing, to see her so enraptured by everything surrounding us. It reminded me of how incredibly lucky I was. If I hadn’t been in the right place, at the right time, I would still be listening to Giomatti’s abuse while I tried to keep that rickety old mining ship in top condition.

I broke from my musings when I began to recognize where we were. It had changed slightly, with more vibrant vegetation along the path, and signs of actual animal life, but I would never forget the path. Sure enough, I looked up and saw none other than the dilapidated, crashed ship sticking out of the small mountain.

“Wow,” Eske breathed, her voice barely above a whisper. “It’s exactly like you said it was.”

“Not really,” Gonzales said, rubbing her chin as she looked it over. “You’ve been scrapping things from it, haven’t you?”

Mimic nodded. “Not to mention the food stores that we were able to recover from its fuel synthesis machine. Enough to last us another couple of years, should we live that long.”

“And what about after that?”

“After that, provided that we no longer have to worry about planetary scale war, we will have to mine for what we need. Possible, just not when we need to defend our existence from an extraterrestrial onslaught.”

“Boy, you’ve really been working on those complex sentences, haven’t you?” Ciangi remarked lightly.

“Yes, I have. Thank you for noticing.” With that, she strode forward, leading us up toward the ship.

It was a bizarre exercise in nostalgia as we soon reached the entrance of the tunnel, and then continued down into the belly of the ship. Just like Mimic had said, the area where the mini-mimics had once dumped all of their harvested minerals was completely disassembled, leaving only an empty room that had once been so terrifying.

From there, we went down another corridor that we hadn’t traversed before, until we came out in a massive, technology-laden room that I guessed might have once been this ship’s version of an engine room.

But it wasn’t an engine in the center. No, not at all.

Instead, it was a mass of wires, coils, metal chunks, and goodness knows what else. I could almost feel the polarity changing around it, and the hum in the air made my teeth buzz slightly.

“Is…is this a shield generator?” Bahn asked, walking forward like he had just seen the most beautiful person in existence. “Tell me that you didn’t jimmy rig a shield for this entire planet.”

“I do not know who Jimmy is, but he did not have anything to do with our repairs,” Mimic said, joining the excited engineer. “Of course, the ship already had its own shielding system in place for radiation, fights, and what have you. We just made some…additions based on the manuals you left me to be able to expand this to most of the planet.”

“But, the amount of power necessary to do that—”

“Is extraordinary, yes. Thankfully, since this ship doesn’t need to fly, or even maintain a life support system, we were able to reroute all power of the core to operating this. We estimate we’ll get maybe two, three days of shielding before the system burns out. Naturally, we are working to increase that number, but progress is slow as we can’t risk ruining what we’ve already worked so hard to create.”

“I’ve found it,” Bahn said with a deliberate nod.

“Found what?”

“The thing I’m going to do to help you. I don’t know much about battle, or fighting, or anything like that really. But I know machines, and how to improve them.” He pulled his hair from his ponytail, then rearranged it into a tight bun atop his head. “Have Ciangi run and get my toolkit from our room. I’m going to really get to know this thing.”

“Well, alright,” I said, chuckling slightly. “Try to remember to come back to eat sometime.”

“What? Oh, yes. Of course.” He was already beginning to circle the machine, his mind racing off a million miles away.

“So, should they try to fight this fight from space alone, they will not be able to,” Mimic said, turning back to us and leading the remaining members of our party out. “Although I am not opposed to fighting the first part of this war in space. I have several of my brethren who I believe will be capable of flying any of the ships that you have brought.”

We walked down the mountain, and I found my worry coming back to me. “About that…”

Mimic stiffened as she strode ahead of me. “I may not be human, but I know that I do not like that tone.”

“Yeah, well, the ship wasn’t exactly fully loaded when we took it. Unfortunately, I think there are only about six or so single-man fighters on there, enough for us, but not for the other mimics that you trust.”

“That is…unfortunate.”

“It’s too bad that there aren’t any ships around here,” Eske remarked idly. “You guys seem to have a knack for hoisting them, so I’m sure you could just roll in and out with what you need.”

Her words stirred something within me, a faint sort of memory from the colony, specifically from after the explosion.

“Wait,” I said, stopping in my tracks. “I…I think I have an idea.”

“I hope it’s a good one,” Gonzales said, coming up beside me and throwing her arm over my shoulders. “Because I’m not feeling so great about our situation.”

“There’s a colony not too far from here. It’s a day and a half at max speed, maybe two. It’s been mostly abandoned for the better part of a decade, but still has a science team there to study the soil.”

“Okay,” Gonzales humored me slowly. “And how is that relevant to this situation?”

“Easy. We go to their colony, take over the communication array, and then send an SOS that we’re under attack from a single ship. From there, we’ll steal the ships that respond to the call, and bring them back here just in time for the coming battle.”

“Oh, is that all?” Ciangi said with only a slight amount of sarcasm in her tone. “Just take over a colony and steal a bunch of ships? Why not?”

“Actually, I think that would work,” Mimic said, her expression brightening. “However, I do not think we can do it with just the six of us. And that’s if we pull Bahn away from his work on our shielding—which is something that I am loathe to do at this point.”

“Alright then,” I said, determination rushing through me like it hadn’t in so long. “Looks like we’re going to need to make a team of mimics to train specifically for this mission. Consider them your special ops of sorts.”

“Ho boy,” Gonzales breathed, removing her arm from me to stride forward. “Just one more thing we gotta do before this big fight goes down. You sure we can properly teach a group of essentially teenagers how to raid a colony?”

“Why not?” I asked with a shrug. “No one taught us how to steal our first ship.”

Ciangi laughed at that, picking up the pace to move forward once again. “Good point. Let’s hope we can get lightning to strike twice then.”

7

Teaching New Dogs New Tricks

“Watch out!”

I ducked to the side automatically, narrowly missing a bed-sized mass of obsidian spikes as it sailed past where I had just been standing. The form slammed into the ground, sending dirt flying everywhere, and I shielded my eyes from the onslaught.

Once the noise died down, I looked to the now considerably smaller body on the ground. “You okay?” I asked.

“Sorry!” a strange voice called from across the yard. I followed the sound to see a mimic that had taken an incredibly jacked form that looked like it belonged to a super soldier rather than a young alien. “Still getting used to these joints.”

“It’s alright, Astaroth,” Mimic said, coming up behind him. “That was very good. Now you just need to focus on aim, and control.”

“Astaroth?” I asked. “Like the demon?”

Mimic shrugged, no doubt a gesture she had learned from Gonzales. “He liked one of the books you left behind on demonology, so the name stuck.”

“Huh,” I said. “Interesting.”

“Thanks,” the mimic said, sending me a grin that was lacking quite a few teeth. Right, I imagined they didn’t have many accurate representations of the interior of a human mouth.

“Actually,” Eske said, coming up alongside the two of them. “You’re working against your body and making it harder for yourself. Here, lemme show you.”

Without any warning, she gripped the man around his arm, stepped in front of him, and bent forward, forcing him over her back in a single smooth motion.

He collided with the ground, unable to stop himself, and I let out a whistle.

“How did you know to do that?” I asked, leaving the mimic still laying on the ground, wheezing, to join them.

“Riiight, I never mentioned that. I got through college on a fighting scholarship. I was supposed to make it professionally, but I took a really bad blow to the head and damaged my optic nerve. I went through a lot of therapy and surgeries to keep my vision, but it’s still not good enough to pass requirements to get into the league.”

Eske adjusted her goggles as she explained, and it clicked as to why she always wore them. I had never thought that they might be for vision correction. I remember reading once about how ancient society often had to rely on spectacles for improving their vision if their eyesight wasn’t 20/20, but those had been phased out long ago. I had assumed that they were for vanity purposes, and I was very happy that I had never said anything about it.

“But yeah, if you guys want a little tutelage in the ways of martial arts, I’m more than happy to lend a hand, or a couple.” Eske stood straight and you could see the pride in her eyes.

“Yeah, that would be fantastic!” What a stroke of luck. I couldn’t believe that Eske had just fallen into our laps. It was almost like fate had a vested interest in our success, and it filled me with a lot more confidence than I had had just earlier that day.

“Alright, Astaroth, you go with Eske then. And, Mimic, grab anyone else who you think would be more toward the physical side of things.”

“They don’t just have to be brutes like ol’ Ashy here. Small folk who are fast or wiry are prime candidates too.”

“Good to know,” Mimic said with a nod. “I will do so. And I take it you will continue to help with Gonzales’s weapon training?”

“If by helping, you mean learning alongside the mimics, then yes. You are correct.”

“Right, well, you should get back to learning then,” she said with a wink. Not exactly the best time for one, but I had to give her credit for trying. For not being around any humans for a year, she certainly had progressed a long way.

I gave her a cheesy little salute and ran back to Gonzales, who of course was overseeing the shooting range. There were several mimics in mostly human form, give or take a digit or two, all armed with blasters and firing at the targets we had set up.

Thankfully, the shooting range was pointed toward a treeless quarry, because they were terrible. And not even holding-a-gun-for-the-first-time terrible, but rather possessing-eyes-for-the-first-time terrible.

“Come on, Higgens,” Gonzales said, tossing me a weapon. “Time to throw your hat into the ring again.”

I dropped the gun at first, then juggled it a couple times before it finally fell into the grass and I had to pick it up carefully. It felt oddly heavy in my hands. It had really been forever since I last held one, and I couldn’t recall even firing it when I did have one.

“Step on up and show your game.”

“You know, being a weapons engineer doesn’t necessarily mean you are equipped to teach others how to handle a firefight.”

Gonzales laughed. “True, normally, but I am not normal. I like to play with the same guns I tend to and upgrade. So trust me, I won’t let you shoot your own head off. Not unless you piss me off, of course.”

“I’ll try my hardest then.”

Heart thumping, I stepped up to the empty station and lifted the gun. I could feel it whirring to life in my hand, the button to fire just below my fingers.

“Now, what you need to do is aim, breathe in, then exhale. At the end of your exhale, before you draw in air again, adjust your aim a little more, and then fire.”

“You make it sound so easy,” I sighed.

“It is, at least when you’re not pointing it at a living, breathing human being. This is just a target. You can’t hurt it. You can’t kill it. So, all you have to worry about is missing.”

I paused. “But if I do well at this, then I’ll have to eventually fire on a living, breathing being, right?”

“It’s easier if you don’t think about that yet. It’ll just complicate things when you’re too far from that level.”

“But I’ll have to think about it when they get here, no matter what level I’m at.”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Geez, Higgens. I love ya, but you always overthink everything.”

“What can I say? It’s kept me alive so far.”

“True enough, but maybe it’s time to evolve.”

She stepped over to me and gently gripped my arm, bringing it up. “Here, grip it with both hands. There ya go.”

Then she moved behind me and I found myself in a position I never thought I would be. I had seen it a dozen times over in various sims and flicks, but usually it was the young, beautiful ingenue who was the one being taught while the big, strong man put his arms around her to teach her how to shoot an ancient game of pool, or old-fashioned cooking.

“Alright, breathe in. Aim.” Somehow, I managed to get over my shock enough to follow her directions, and I did as she said. “Breathe out. Adjust your aim. Now shoot.”

I squeezed the button at the apex of the handle, and it discharged a bolt of energy that shot out almost too fast for me to see. Within the blink of an eye, it was slamming into the edge of the target.

“Not bad. Just a foot or so downward and you would have had a bulls eye.”

“Yeah, well, something tells me that foot won’t be easy to get rid of.”

“Well, practice makes perfect.” She stepped out from behind me, and gave me a curious look. “Why are you bright red?”

“No reason,” I said quickly.

“Whatever. Just try again.”

I did, focusing as hard as I could. It was difficult to slow my heart and quiet my thoughts, but I felt like I managed. But when I fired again, I missed the target entirely.

“Keep trying,” Gonzales said, clapping me on the back. “The better you get at this, the better you get at aiming the firing rig on the fighters.”

“Really?”

“No, not really. But they have all sorts of aim assist, so that should help.”

“I hope so.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not like they’ll be the first ships you’ll fly.”

“Actually, it kinda will be.”

Her mouth flew open. “What?! I thought basic training for any sort of space-farer involves mandatory escape pod and single flying prep.”

“Yeah, it turns out that our company cut a few corners. Surprising, right?”

“Oh, man. Yeah. I’m glad you told me this now. Just more for us to practice, right?”

“Right.”

She caught my somewhat defeated tone and gave me an easygoing sort of nudge. She sure was being very touchy-feely lately. I wondered if that was because we were growing closer, or because of everything she had gone through on Earth. Either way, I wasn’t totally opposed to it.

“Now you keep shooting. I’ve got to handle these little ones.”

“You do that.”

I watched her go, my mind spinning in a dozen different directions. Each time we seemed to take a step forward, eight other things were tacked on to our to-do list. And as positive as we all were, I was acutely aware that time was running out.

It was the countdown to war, and I could only hope that we came out alright on the other side.

It turned out that Mimic wasn’t the only mimic that could learn at an exceptional speed. Perhaps it was just a perk of their species, being born to imitate others, but I certainly wasn’t complaining.

It seemed being around us also allowed the younger mimics to take on our forms more accurately, and after a couple days, everyone had the right number of eyes, limbs, and fingers. Surprisingly, none of them looked like us, however. I didn’t know if Mimic had taught them that it might be disrespectful to take on our faces without our permission, but it was certainly interesting all the different body types and features they took on.

Astaroth kept his hulking form, but his eyes eventually changed to being slightly almond-shaped, and his skin darkened to a shade similar to Gonzales’s. Another mimic, named Pyjik, took on a female body with short, black hair and skin so pale that she beat out even Ciangi for porcelain coloring. She was slender, and agile, spending most of her time learning hand-to-hand with Eske.

Then there was Meridyna. She also took on a feminine form, but one that was covered in layers of both fat and muscle. She looked like one of those women who could fill out any dress with no problem, but also crush your head between her thighs. Unlike the others, she still had a third eye that she never lost. Considering how well she imitated the rest of a person’s body, I guessed that she kept it on purpose and chose not to comment on it.

Then there was the last of the second-in-command group, Urdet. Their form was neither masculine, nor feminine, just somewhere in between. They kept their head bald, but their eyes were a ridiculously bright blue with thick lashes. Unlike the rest, they spent most of their time by Mimic’s side, learning, planning, and plotting. I got the feeling that they were almost like an advisor to her. Someone who she could bounce ideas off of and brainstorm with. Good. She needed someone like that.

Of course, there were even more mimics, literally thousands more, but it didn’t take a chart to figure out the group’s hierarchy. Mimic was their leader, and those four were her right-hand men. After them came about ten or so assistant-helpers who were okay at the whole human form thing, and then the general masses.

I could stay on the planet for months, just getting to know all of them, and I still probably wouldn’t have time. And that wasn’t taking into consideration those that were still the same size as when I left; some of the mini-mimics were taking longer to adapt to freedom than others of their species.

Somehow, within a single week, we had the four most advanced mimics ready to accompany us on our mission, plus two more below them. I almost couldn’t believe it as we readied ourselves to go. Everything was happening so fast, it felt like we were rushing straight toward disaster. But at the same time, nothing was happening quickly enough.

“Be safe, all of you,” Bahn said, hugging Ciangi especially tightly. For the first time since I had ever known them, the two were separating. Initially, I had suggested that Ciangi also stay behind, but the blonde had surprised me by refusing. She was right in the fact that we did need everyone we could spare, but still, it had been unexpected.

“I will, I will. Now don’t make me regret this.” She pushed away from him and reached up on her tiptoes to pat his bun a couple of times. “You do your best with that shield thingie. I’ll make sure to program all of the ships we steal so they won’t lock up.”

“Right. As only you could do.”

“Exactly.”

“Alright, alright, you two, break it up,” Gonzales said, crossing between the two. “You can kiss and make up when we get back. Let’s go.”

Ciangi stepped away only for Astaroth to sweep up after her and seize both of them into a hug. “This is the tradition of your people, yes?”

“Yeah, sure,” Ciangi wheezed in his big-armed embrace. “But usually you have to ask first.”

“Of course! That makes sense.” He set them down. “I would like to express friendliness in the physical encircling of our arms. May I?”

She let out a long sigh and for a minute, I was absolutely sure that she would refuse. “Sure,” she said finally, after Bahn shrugged. “And it’s called a hug.”

“Fantastic! Let us hug!”

And then they were being picked up again, squeezed thoroughly, and set back down.

Astaroth went right on down the line, asking each of us if he could hug us. I was tempted to explain that he didn’t need to embrace us since he was going on the mission with us, but it seemed far too complicated, so I just rolled with it.

Little did I know that allowing him to hug us apparently made everyone else want one too, and we spent fifteen minutes alone having Pyjik, Meridyna, and the other two mimic underlings follow suit.

Urdet was the only one who abstained, seeming to like keeping their distance. I wasn’t insulted, of course, and honestly, I was beginning to feel a little overwhelmed by all the surprise contact.

But eventually, we finished the impromptu hug-fest and were shuffling onto our ship. The six mimics looked around with awe written across their faces. Although they had spent so much time in the alien’s spacecraft, it was obvious that it was nothing like ours.

We escorted them to the bridge, and I showed them how to buckle themselves in while Gonzales settled into the pilot’s seat, Ciangi into the weapons array, and then finally me on navigation. Not that I had any idea what to do, but the mimics took up all of the non-essential personnel seats, so I found myself stuck someplace actually important.

Mimic, of course, sat with her charges. It felt weird to be separated from her for one of these trips, but I had to accept that she had responsibilities other than being my friend. Responsibilities that involved taking care of an entire planet.

“Everyone ready?” Gonzales asked, kicking the engines into gear.

“Yes!” the mimics chorused as one, which was fairly creepy.

“Good. Preparing for liftoff.”

And with a simple flick of a button, we were flying off into the next grand adventure.

8

Walking the Walk

“So, what is this?” Pyjik asked, coming up behind me so quietly that I almost jumped out of my skin.

“Oh geez, it’s, uh, the fabricator. You punch foods into this and it puts out things to eat.”

“Foods?” she asked. “But what it’s making doesn’t look like anything edible.”

“Well, what’s food for us is not really like food for you.” I looked around for Mimic, hoping she could handle what was definitely the most curious of the mimics, but she was nowhere to be seen.

“What is it like then?”

“Like this,” I said, taking my plate off the fabricator and showing it to her.

“And that is what all food looks like?”

“No, not all. There’s, like, an unlimited amount of different combinations.”

“Really?” She gave me a skeptical look. “That doesn’t sound real.”

I shrugged. “Believe it or not. Either way, I’d like to eat now.”

“Oh, okay.”

She stepped aside, allowing me to cross to one of the tables of the cafeteria. I sat down, ready to lift part of my salad to my mouth, when she sat down beside me and stared without blinking.

“Hey,” I said, a bit unnerved. “Did Mimic ever tell you about closing your eyes every once in a while?”

“Yes, apologies!” She slowly batted her eyes, and it was one of the most uncomfortable looking displays I had ever witnessed. “She also mentioned something about breathing? Apparently, repeated filtering of oxygen-heavy gas mixes is important to your survival.”

“Yes, very much so. And that’s one of the reasons that you guys are so valuable to this. You all can survive space, while we can’t. Not without envirosuits, that is.”

I lifted my fork to my mouth once again, but then she was asking another question.

“What’s an envirosuit?”

I wanted to be angry, but how could I? She was basically a kid in a grown woman’s body, and learning about a whole other society. How could I blame her for being a little curious before a mission that was absolutely going to put her life on the line?

“It’s like the clothes we’re all wearing, but made of super strong, flexible material. We step into it, and then hook it up to a machine that makes sure it’s pressurized and filled with that oxygen-heavy gas mix so we can survive, and it seals us off from the very dangerous space.”

“But it’s just fabric. Even when it’s super strong, it can rip, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what happens then?”

“Usually, we die.”

Her eyes went wide, and she leaned back. “Really?”

“Really?”

“Then going out into space is crazy! Surely you never do it.”

“Actually, we venture into the great beyond more often than you might expect.”

“Huh, Mimic did say that you all were insane. I guess I never realized just how much so. She also said that your lives were very, very short and your bodies were incredibly fragile.”

“I mean, I wouldn’t say incredibly.” I went to finally take a bite and I almost made it to my mouth this time.

“Why wouldn’t you say incredibly?”

I sighed and was just about to shove the entire mass into my mouth, when the comm buzzed from the corner of the room.

“Hey, guys, we’re approaching the safe zone for their sensors. Everybody get ready for a spacewalk.”

With a last reluctant glance at my food, I slid it away and stood. “Come on, Pyjik, let’s go suit up.”

“Really? After everything you told me, you’re still willing to go out there?”

“Yup.”

“Wow,” she said, shaking her head. “Just wow.”

“You have a lot to learn about us humans,” I answered, laughing slightly. “We’re pretty reckless, or crazy, depending on how you frame it.”

“I’m leaning toward crazy, for certain. I don’t understand why Mimic is so fond of you. A single spike in the wrong place and you all could disappear forever. It’s terrifying.”

“You know, we do much better with our own mortality when someone isn’t telling us how easily we can die.”

“Right! Of course. That makes sense. Apologies.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Finally, we reached the lift we needed to take to the room where we would gear up, and the mimic chilled on her endless barrage of questions. The thought that Mimic had been dealing with this for more than a year made me respect her and her saintly patience that much more.

“Hey there,” Gonzales said, throwing me a suit as soon as I entered the spacewalk bay. “What took you so long?”

“I was trying to grab some food,” I answered, leaving out the part about how I had been verbally accosted by the eager mimic beside me.

“Really? Before a spacewalk?”

“I didn’t think we were there already. It’s only been about—”

“Thirty-six hours,” Mimic answered, as efficient as ever. She had rounded up the rest of her charges and had them dressed in the standard uniform underwear that had been packed to excess in one of the supply rooms. At first, I was surprised by the nudity, before realizing that they weren’t going to keep their human form while we were in the void.

“You guys all have something to change into when we get there?” I asked. I felt like this was an important part of the mission that we should have talked about before, but maybe they did when I wasn’t around. As much as I liked to think of myself as being important to Mimic, I wasn’t exactly key to most of this plan. Which felt decidedly strange, but I wasn’t letting it get to my ego.

Mostly, at least.

“We’ll be carrying them, actually,” Ciangi said. “Strapped to our backs along with our weapons. The mimics will get us in, and then we’ll find a safe place to land and disseminate the supplies.”

“You make it sound so simple,” I chuckled.

“Do I?” Ciangi asked. “Well, it certainly isn’t. We need to make sure that we land on the blind side of their sensors, and since we won’t have a tether to the main ship, a single misstep could send us hurtling off into space.”

“Of course. No pressure then.”

“None at all.”

Urdet tipped their head to the side. “You are saying something that does not make sense with your previous statement.”

“It’s called sarcasm,” Mimic said gently. “We talked about it a couple of times.”

“Ah, yes. I still don’t think I understand the purpose.”

“It’s like a joke,” she continued to explain just as calmly. “It doesn’t necessarily need a purpose, but is a means to communicate humor and personality.”

“Ah. Yes. How…interesting.”

We finished suiting up without any more interruptions, and I couldn’t help but muse at how different the mimics were. Sure, they all had that same insatiable sort of curiosity, but they all went about it differently. Pyjik was endlessly effervescent in her requests, wide-eyed and enthralled with the world. Astaroth only asked them when they were necessary to his current function and would listen with an intense look. Urdet was quick to point out when things didn’t make sense to them, and Meridyna just preferred to stand with a puzzled expression on her face until someone guessed what was perplexing her.

It really was like Mimic suddenly had a gaggle of little siblings that all insisted on coming along with her. I didn’t think I could handle it nearly as well as she did.

“Alright, everybody ready?”

“Ready,” was the unanimous response.

“Good,” Gonzales said through the comms. “Let’s go for a walk.”

We made our way to the airlock, and my heart was in my throat once again. Not only had it been forever since I had been outside of a ship in just an envirosuit, but Pyjik’s words were echoing through my head. Sure, this wasn’t the only crazy thing I had done, but it was certainly up there.

Not that I could object or opt out or any other form of declining the mission. If I wanted Mimic and her people to live to see another day, then I had to do this. We needed the ships, and our meager defense couldn’t lose even one willing warrior.

Gonzales shut the door behind us, and the airlock began to slowly depressurize. With one last glance toward us, she opened the control box and put in for the outer door to drop.

It did, slowly, like it was reading the tension in my gut, and then we were facing the vast, cold void of space.

“Engage your nav-boots.”

We all pressed the button in our wrist-controls and soon the thrusters in our boots came to life, lifting us off the floor. The mimics around us all drifted out of their human form and reverted to their natural shiny, black selves.

Of course, Mimic stayed beside me, and once she was in her space-worthy body, she hooked a couple of spikes through the straps connected to my suit. I could tell that she was being very careful not to pierce my protective layer in any way, but I trusted her implicitly.

Gonzales headed out first, Urdet connected to her straps. Then Ciangi and Meridyna, then Eske with Pyjik, and me bringing up the rear. The other couple of juvenile mimics were staying on the ship, the weapons engineer having taught them how to handle the ship in the case of an emergency evacuation. Or even if our plan was successful. After all, we would all be flying ships and unable to return to the battle cruiser without some lengthy and dangerous docking that we just weren’t willing to risk. I hoped that her lessons proved to be effective, because there was no telling how our plan was going to go.

Space was just as vast and empty as I remembered it, lingering like a nightmare at the edge of my peripheral vision. Smelling vaguely of steak, it burned at my nostrils even through all the filters of my envirosuit. Had it really been over a year since I was out in the great expanse last? I guessed so…

“We’re about to reach the edge of their sensors. Aim your boots for seven o’clock, ‘cause we’re about to take a trip through their blind side.”

“You would think that a blind side is something we would have learned to eliminate by now,” Ciangi groused, struggling to get her short legs to change her angle appropriately.

I reached out and grabbed her ankle, adjusting her to a better trajectory.

“Thanks,” she said with a sheepish grin.

“No problem. I—”

“Mine!”

Suddenly, Gonzales was spinning off to the side, and I barely caught a glimpse of shiny chrome in front of me before Mimic used some sort of force to push us downward. Everything spun for a moment, and I was sure that I was going to die, but I managed to get my thrusters under me and slow our momentum.

“Is everyone alright?” I asked through the comms.

“They have mines?” Eske gasped raggedly. “I know that I am new to this, but I thought that might be something we would have in our intel! Doesn’t that seem like something that should have been in our intel?!”

“We had no way of knowing,” Gonzales answered, her voice quite tense. “We’re just going to have to go carefully and keep an eye out for any explosive devices. If you do see one, remember not to overreact. A little too much thrust and you can spiral off into the deep so far even your nav-boots won’t be able to save you.”

Eske’s face twisted with worry. “That is…not a comforting thought.”

“Space isn’t comforting. Get used to it.”

Normally, I would have objected to the harsh tone in her voice, but I knew that Gonzales had changed from the woman I used to know. Our time in captivity had changed her, and I needed to accept that she was going to have a very long healing process.

“I’ll go first,” I said, adjusting my aim again and going back to our goal. “I’m the most expendable of all of us.”

“Um, that may be true in a purely logical sense, but you are carrying the entire leader of the mimic people on your back.”

“Oh…right.”

“I’ll go,” Eske said. “All I have to offer is hand-to-hand combat and a knack for great maintenance skills.”

“I, uh, I’m not sure that’s the best idea,” I countered. “Didn’t you say you had an injury that has damaged your vision to this day?”

“Yeah, but that’s what the goggles are for.”

Gonzales sighed. “You guys do know that we have a limited amount of oxygen in these suits, even with the carbon dioxide recyclers?”

“Yeah, but—”

I was interrupted as a body moved past us. I realized it was Ciangi. Well, that was certainly unexpected. Although the blonde woman was endlessly loyal, she had never exactly been one to jump right in the way of danger before.

I guessed we were all evolving.

Of course, with her sudden progression, the rest of us weren’t going to sit around and continue debating. We followed her, spreading out enough so that if someone needed to move quickly, we could.

We had gotten barely a minute closer to our landing zone when Ciangi shot upward, barely remembering to kill her speed before going too far. I didn’t have time to go after her, and found myself spinning to the right as another mine drifted toward me and missed me by a mere foot.

“We’re lucky these things aren’t magnetic, I suppose,” Eske said from somewhere behind me. I didn’t dare to look just in case a mine managed to sneak up on me.

“Actually…” I dreaded the tone in Gonzales’s voice as she continued. “I think that might not be the case.”

“What are you—”

But then I saw it, in the distance—a wave of ten or so mines coming straight toward us. They were colored differently than the others, and there was no denying that their destination was entirely intentional.

“Oh crap,” Ciangi gasped. “What do we do?”

“There should be a shield around the actual station itself,” Gonzales answered, her voice like steel. “If we get in there, I’m assuming the mines can’t enter.”

“Why would you assume that?” Eske asked.

“Because the station is magnetic, and hasn’t been blown to bits by the mines. They must have some sort of protective field and we need to get inside of it.”

“So, all we have to do is dodge a group of magnetic explosives?”

“Yeah, that’s about it.”

“Oh good,” I said with a sigh. “I was afraid that it was going to be complicated.”

She spared a dry laugh, but that was it. “Everyone spread out. We launch on the count of three.”

“Got it,” Eske answered, the edge clearly evident in her voice.

“One.”

I tensed, and felt a comforting ripple go through Mimic. I was sure that she was probably chirping encouragements, but I couldn’t hear them through the void of space plus my suit.

“Two.” I saw Eske and Ciangi drift above and below me so that we almost made a star-like formation.

“Three!”

And then we were all rushing forward, caution thrown to the wind as we went hurtling for a head-on collision with the mines.

We would have to make sure our timing was right. Wait too long, and we risked crashing into one of them and meeting a fiery demise. Dodge to the side too quickly, and we would lose our advantage, meaning the mines would have enough time to redirect and take us out anyway.

Fantastic. What about this situation had I missed exactly?

I didn’t have time to think about that, however, because we were almost there.

“Get ready!” Gonzales cried over the comms.

Oh, I was ready. As ready as I ever would be to play a game of chicken with an explosive the size of a small hovercraft.

The mines were almost to us, and I swore that I could see my reflection on their overly shiny sides. I wanted to veer off, to get out of the line of fire, but I held fast until Gonzales gave the signal. I didn’t know when she had become our tactical leader, but I certainly wasn’t complaining.

“Now!”

We all shot in different directions, some of us over, some of us under, some of us diagonally across. And once we were behind the line of oncoming mines, we hit our thrusters for all we had.

I could feel my suit wheeze and protest as we launched forward, but I didn’t let up. Sure enough, the mines had trouble killing their momentum or turning, and we were able to gain some distance on them.

Well…almost all of them. The two on either end managed to compensate in time, one trailing me and one hurtling behind Eske.

“What do I do?” her panicked voice asked, although her long, lanky body remained ramrod straight as her boots rocketed her toward our safe spot on the blind underside of the station.

My mind hurtled through a dozen different options in what seemed like a nanosecond, and then my mouth was moving. “Cross paths with me?”

“What!?”

“Cross paths with me. With any luck, they’ll slam into each other.”

“And without luck?”

“Well, it’s been nice to know you.”

“That is not comforting at all!”

“No time for comfort. Now cross!”

She did as I ordered, and then we were hurtling on diagonals toward each other. It wasn’t until we were racing that I realized there was the ever-so-slight risk that we could collide even before the mines hit us, but I chose not to verbalize that as we rushed through space.

Thankfully, we didn’t crash into each other, but managed to zoom past within a couple of inches. Once more, I found myself face to face with a mine, and I rocketed upward as fast as I could.

They did indeed crash into each other, and after a moment of crumpling metal and reverberations, I thought that they might not actually go off.

I was mistaken.

The resulting explosion was like nothing I had ever seen. One moment, the two metal goliaths were trying to push through each other, and the next, fire and shrapnel were billowing out like the most violent version of a cloud there could be.

I tried to rush out of the way, but there was only so far and so fast that the thrusters could take me. The edge of the blast caught me, then engulfed me, sending me flying off and making the thermos-gauge on my envirosuit beep like mad.

For a minute, everything was senseless as I tumbled head over heels through the abyss. Honestly, I was pretty sure I should have been roasted to a crisp, but something was keeping me from turning into a Higgens version of popcorn chicken.

I knew that I wouldn’t lose momentum in the vacuum of space, or at least not for a long while, so I needed to do something ASAP. Using all of the meager abdominal muscles I had left over from my maintenance life, I shifted my feet to turn around, taking myself in sort of a slow half-circle back into the flames.

I was either going to get on course or get incinerated. I just had to hope that by the time I made it around, the ravenous maw of the void would dissipate the inferno. I couldn’t tell, as the visor of my envirosuit was completely covered in soot and debris, while all of my sensors were going crazy.

“Higgens! Are you alright?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, panting as I finished my curve and headed back toward the direction I came. At least, I thought it was the direction I came. It was hard to tell given that I couldn’t really see. “Am I?”

“Well, right now you’re encased in a giant black ball that I’m guessing is Mimic, so I’m gonna guess maybe?”

Oh. Maybe that was why my visor was so dark. It wasn’t soot. It was Mimic. She must have shifted her body shape to protect me from the blaze. Huh, she really was something, wasn’t she?

I reached out into the darkness, and sure enough, my hand hit a hard surface just a few inches from my skin. I gave it a couple of thankful pats, and then space slowly started to reveal itself to me once more as she reverted to her normal form on my back.

“I owe you one,” I said, knowing that she couldn’t hear me.

“You guys can pick up your awkward flirtations later,” Ciangi buzzed through the comm. “You need to get inside the safe zone before the other mines catch up to you!”

Of course. It was never just one crisis, was it?

I risked a single glance over my shoulder and saw that what mines had survived the explosion were indeed rounding on me. I set my thrusters to high once more and blasted toward my friends.

It was not a…comfortable experience. I couldn’t look behind me to see if the mines were gaining on me, otherwise I would completely throw off the trajectory of my nav-boots. And I couldn’t ask my friends for a report, as I could hardly move my jaw with how fast we were going. I was worried my envirosuit wasn’t going to make it, but it wasn’t like I had much of a choice.

“Come on!” I heard Eske cry, waving frantically. “You’re almost in. Don’t let up!”

I wanted to retort that I was well aware that wasn’t an option, but since I couldn’t, I just thought it bitterly.

My ears started to ring, and I could feel myself grow lightheaded, but I kept on until I shot past my friends and into safety.

I completely killed the speed of my nav-boots, relying on only basic thrust power, and slowly began to lose speed. But it certainly wasn’t enough, and I saw the underside of the station rapidly approaching.

“Crap,” I muttered.

“Oh man, brace for impact, Higgens! I’m going to try to get to you!”

“No, don’t!” I called back. “You speed up that much and you won’t be able to kill your speed either.”

It was right around then that I heard a loud bellow from my back. Not quite human, but its intentions were perfectly clear. I felt Mimic move, and shift, but I couldn’t turn to see what she was doing.

Then, suddenly, I felt my body jerk and my speed slowed enough for me to pull my knees to my chest and counter my forward movement with several spikes of energy from my nav-boots. I couldn’t believe it was working, but little by little, I ended up at a safe speed and was able to gently set my feet down on the underside of the station.

I heaved a sigh of relief and the cacophony of discordant sounds within my suit began to settle down as my friends approached me. Within just a few minutes, we were all assembled and staring at each other, perhaps a bit shocked that we had survived.

“Well…” I murmured after a long break. “That was fun.”

“Sure, it was,” Eske answered, clearly just as shaken as I was despite the fact that she hadn’t been the one enveloped in an explosion. “But, uh, I would like to ask that we don’t do anything like that again.”

Gonzales let out a slight chuckle. “You know, considering what we get into, I can’t rightly promise that.”

9

Somewhat Hostile Take Over

“Do you have the stuff?” I asked, regaining my composure enough to remember the next step of the mission.

“No,” Ciangi answered and I could almost hear her roll her eyes. “I totally forgot and left them on the ship. I guess we’ve got to go back!”

“Very cute,” Gonzales said in a way that clearly said she thought it wasn’t cute at all. “Can you pull out the mini-shield generator and the splicer, or do you wanna continue with the sarcasm when we’ve already burned through, oh, I would say about half of our oxygen?”

“Right. Good point.” She knelt down and the mimic on her back clambered off, skittering around the rest of us. I guess Meridyna had enjoyed the whole nearly-dying adventure, judging by her rippling form and spikes waving this way and that. At least one of us had had a good time. “I think I’m just off. It feels weird to not have Bahn here.”

“I can imagine,” Eske said. “I’ve never seen one of you without the other, even on the net.”

“Yeah, we’ve basically been inseparable since college. We turned down a lot of jobs that weren’t willing to pay both of our salaries or let us work on the same project. That’s how we ended up on a mining vessel when we really were always lab-heads. In retrospect, I guess our pickiness was a good thing.”

“Huh, it certainly is weird to think about the paths that brought us here, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yeah, a real chin-scratcher,” Gonzales interrupted. “Field, now please.”

“Right, right, I got it.” Ciangi finished pulling the small, metal cylinders from her pack and placed them on the surface of the station. I could hear them hiss as they attached, then their tops deployed a series of emitters. After a brief buzz and then a crackle, they did indeed manage to generate a very small atmosphere field.

“There,” Ciangi murmured. “Now we don’t have to worry about our entrance causing the interior to violently depressurize.”

Gonzales nodded. “Good. Now, if you don’t mind, hand me the ionic welder.”

“If you insist. But wouldn’t Higgens have more experience with that sort of thing, you know, being a maintenance worker and all?”

“Probably,” Gonzales admitted, taking the instrument and lighting it up. “But I think I just need to break in somewhere.”

I didn’t need to argue with that reasoning. “By all means, weld away.”

“Thank you, I will.”

Ciangi stepped away, giving Gonzales room to kneel down and press the torch to the metal. Sparks flew up, illuminating our forms and the rest of the mimics as they proceeded to clamber down from all of us.

Except for Mimic, of course. She stayed tightly curled against my back, all of her spikes pointed outward. I appreciated the contact, to be honest. Although I put on a brave face, my knees were still a bit weak and my heart was still pounding from how close to death I had been. Sure, we’d had tough scrapes before, but nothing like what I had just survived.

The time that it took for Gonzales to finish allowed me to get over most of the shock, and I bent to help her pry the square hatch open with some of our magnetic clamps. Within a few seconds, we moved it to the side and were looking down into a dark, unoccupied room of the station.

“We did it,” Eske breathed. “We actually did it.”

Gonzales shut off the welder and waited for it to cool before answering. “You’d think that the disbelief you’re feeling right now would fade after you do enough impossible things, but nope… I would say that it’s still there.”

“Yup, still there for me,” I agreed.

“Me too.”

I was just about to ask who should go in first when Mimic finally detached from me and skittered right in, dropping into the darkness below. I sent a surprised look to my female companions and gave them a shrug, which they returned in kind.

“Might as well follow,” I said before doing just that.

It was a longer drop than I thought it would be, and I landed hard. I was thankful I had my nav-boots, otherwise I might have sprained or broken an ankle right then and there.

“Hey, Mimic?” I hissed, ducking down in case we weren’t as alone as I had thought.

“I’m right here. Turn on your suit light. It seems to have gone out during the explosion.”

“Oh, right.”

I did as she said and, sure enough, the room illuminated partially. It was a storage area, just as we had hoped, but there was so much dust covering everything that it looked like no one had been there in years.

“Dude,” Ciangi said, landing beside me. “What’s up with this place? Did they turn off the environment filters or something?”

“They must have,” Gonzales said once she touched down. “Otherwise there wouldn’t be nearly so much schmutz all over everything.”

“Schmutz?” That was Urdet, of course. Looking at the mimics, I saw that they all had taken their human forms again. “What is this?”

“It’s slang for dirt,” Mimic answered before holding her hand out to us. “Maintenance jumpers please.”

We all knelt down to pull them and the rest of the supplies from our packs. It took a couple of minutes to explain to the younglings how to put them on, and I realized that they had never experienced zippers before.

Sure, they all had some semblance of clothing back on their planet. A mix of pelts from animals and fabric salvaged from goodness knows where. I had the feeling that Mimic only clothed them for our sensibilities, as the mimics were always nude in their natural forms. Made me wonder just how silly our need to cover ourselves twenty-four seven was. Not that I was going to toss my skivvies to the wind, but it was something to think about.

“Alright, weapons all tucked away?” Gonzales asked.

“Yup.”

“Roger.”

“Who is Roge—” Urdet started to ask.

“Colloquialism,” Mimic murmured. “Less questions for now.”

“Of course,” he replied.

“Good. Now, Ciangi, please tell me that you’ve been running a scan on whatever that thing was Bahn gave you.”

“Do you mean…the scanner?”

Gonzales clicked her tongue and I saw her eyes narrow as she removed the helmet of her envirosuit. “I know it’s base functionality is a scanner, Blondie. But considering it’s Bahn’s creation, it probably can cure cancer and flip your pancakes too. So, I wouldn’t put it past him to give it some sort of silly, multi-syllable name that everyone will eventually shorten into an acronym because humans are inherently lazy. Now, are you scanning on the thing or not?”

“Touchy, touchy,” Ciangi said, smiling and not taking Gonzales’s jibes personally. “And yeah, I’m scanning alright. Should be done by the time we all get de-suited.”

I took that as my cue to get out of my space outfit then carefully pack it into its protective bag within my pack. Perhaps it seemed a little redundant to have a bag within a bag, but I didn’t want it to somehow get accidentally punctured while I was toting it around. That would be a surprise that I certainly would not appreciate.

The faintest of beeps told us that the machine was done just as I started to stand. Before I could comment on the good timing, Ciangi was rattling off the readings.

“There only appear to be seven lifeforms on this entire station. Two are resting in crew quarters, one is in what I assume is the cafeteria, three are in what looks like a research area, and one is in the lavatory.”

“Alright, that’s not bad. Should we split up? I feel like going after them all one by one could be too risky, and we can’t have them calling a ship-wide alert before we’re ready.”

“Don’t you mean a station-wide alert?” Urdet corrected flatly.

I only gave them a patient look before my gaze returned to Gonzales and Mimic, waiting for them to answer my query.

“I think…split up,” the weapons engineer answered slowly.

“I agree,” Mimic said with a nod. “Too large of a group is difficult enough to travel with quietly, and we risk one of them noticing what is going on and alerting the others, making our task that much more difficult.”

Ciangi was the last to speak up. “As crazy as it sounds, I think I’m on board with this splitting up idea. And once we do contain a worker, we can each have a mimic with us imitate them. I think that’s our best bet.”

“Then it’s decided.” I nodded, feeling determination rise within me again. “Mimic, you and I will go for the group of three in the research lab. That will be the most difficult. Ciangi, Meridyna, and Pyjik, you go in the lavatory. Gonzales and Urdet, you go to the two in the crew quarters, then Eske and Astaroth, you get the one in the cafeteria. Remember, we want them unconscious, not hurt.”

“Righto.”

“Heard!”

“Yeah, yeah. We’re all aware of the plan.” Gonzales’s tone was gruff, but before any of us could rebut with our usual sarcasm, she strode forward and threw her arms around me in a hug. “You be careful now, okay?”

“I don’t understand,” Urdet said, clearly forgetting Mimic’s request for quiet. “Why is she attacking him?”

I suddenly remembered how Urdet didn’t join in the last time the mimics started a hug-fest. This must have been why. “It’s not an attack,” I answered, letting the woman hold me as long as she wanted. “Remember? This is called a hug. And it’s a way to show comfort, or camaraderie, or things like that.”

“It’s just nice,” Gonzales said, parting from me before turning to the others. “Alright, everybody, bring it on in.”

Urdet looked at the others uncertainly, but Ciangi, Eske, and Mimic didn’t hesitate. Soon, there was a full-on group hug going on that seemed oddly discordant with our mission, but I didn’t mind. The world was a cruel place, so I wasn’t about to object to a sliver of happiness in all of it.

After a few minutes, we were finally ready to move on and split along our various paths. We clung to the walls, each of us going slowly so we remained quiet. If this was an up-to-date facility, we wouldn’t stand a chance to sneak around. But thankfully, no one really expected some sort of infiltration of such an outer rim research station, so their security system wasn’t exactly up to code.

Mimic and I pressed on, putting more and more distance between us and the rest of the crew. Part of me wanted to look back and worry over them, but I knew we had to keep our attention on our own mission.

We crept through the ship on the path that our wrist scanners showed us. We needed to hit the elevator first, take that up, then sneak through two hallways before we would finally reach the research center. What we would do then…well, I wasn’t privy to that information.

I held my breath the entire time, and it wasn’t until my head was swimming when we reached the lift that I realized I probably shouldn’t do that. I focused on my breathing for several achingly long moments and by the time the slow lift arrived, I was fine.

“Just like old times,” Mimic said, giving me a wan smile.

“Well, not just like them, but there is a certain quality of déjà vu.”

She held out her hand, and I wrapped my fingers through hers.

It was funny, so much of my life had been spent without a good friend. Without somebody I could trust and look to when I needed support. Someone who I knew would always be there for me and I would always be there for them, not out of any sense of obligation, but just because we cared about each other so thoroughly.

Now that I had someone like that, I didn’t think I could go back to my solitary existence of tinkering projects, cleaning, and watching flicks on the net. Even if it meant putting my life at risk, even if it meant dying, I wouldn’t ever let go of what we had.

We reached the last of the hallways we would have to navigate, and once more, we reverted to our sneaky progression. I wasn’t exactly sure how silent we actually were, but it certainly helped me feel stealthier.

It wasn’t until we were almost to the research center that I realized I had no idea how we were going to take on a group of three people—of unknown skill—without any of them having the chance to hit the alarms. The sleeper-grenades we had with us would work in smaller scenarios, but it didn’t seem likely that the gas in them would be able to take out an entire trio before someone alerted the rest of the station, and then the situation would be out of our hands.

At first, I hadn’t understood what the big deal would be if someone raised the alarm. That was what we were going to do ourselves, weren’t we?

But then Gonzales explained that if those stationed on the vessel hit the wrong code, they could stop any ships from coming at all, which would ruin our entire plan. So, while it wasn’t a one hundred percent, automatic mission ruin, it wasn’t something any of us wanted to risk.

“How are we going to take care of these guys?” I whispered to Mimic.

“I figure we make a bit of a noise, just enough to catch their attention, and they’ll send someone to investigate. We hit them with a sleeper salve, then I’ll take their form and go in. From there, I should be able to incapacitate them.”

“You make it sound so easy,” I said with a slight laugh.

“Hopefully, it will be.”

It was so nice to hear Mimic’s voice, even if it was in a stressful situation. “What kind of noise should we make?”

“Nothing too unusual, then they might send several of them out. Maybe just a very particularly metallic clank?”

I shrugged. “Sure. I’m not exactly an expert on the perfect sort of distraction noise.”

“Neither am I.”

We were close enough to the entrance that we had to cease talking, and our communication was reduced to gestures. Mimic pulled out an injector from my pack that was already loaded with the sleeper salve, tucking it into one of the pockets of her jumpsuit before creeping forward. She made it almost to the door before she looked back and gave me a nod.

I took that as my cue and clanked my scanner against the wall before dragging it slowly. It made a slight sound, noticeable but not exactly threatening.

But it seemed to be enough. I heard the low rumble of speech, then the hydraulics of the door as they began to hiss open. Quickly, I ducked into a gap behind a doorframe, but I did see Mimic change into a bench just before I was out of sight.

I wanted to watch the events as they unfolded, but I couldn’t risk being seen. So, I waited patiently, listening as the scene played out.

Footsteps echoed through the hall, coming closer and closer to me. I could hear whoever it was breathing and for a moment I was sure that they were going to find me, but then there was a quick hiss and a pop, a muffled gasp, then silence.

“You can come out,” Mimic said, peeking her head around the frame to where I was. “Everything went according to plan.”

“We’re lucky then,” I said, stepping out into the hall to see a man crumpled on the ground. “That could have gone about a million different ways with none of them being good.”

“True, but we should be grateful for the little things. Now come, help me undress him.”

“Excuse me?” I asked, giving her a double-take.

“I may not be human, but I am fairly sure that they might notice their companion had a sudden wardrobe change mere minutes after leaving?”

“Oh, right. Of course. That makes sense,” I said, rushing to help her.

We needed to hurry because every second that we lingered was another second where someone could suddenly walk in and see what we were doing. And frankly, I didn’t really want to explain why we were pulling the green jumpsuit off a fully-grown man that we had knocked out.

But we managed to get it off and then it was Mimic’s turn to peel out of her jumpsuit. I turned around automatically, even though I realized it was a bit of a non-issue considering she was wearing clothes under it. It just seemed to be the polite thing to do.

After all, I would be lying if I said that Mimic wasn’t beautiful. She had specifically made her form to be appealing to me. But as of late, I seemed more hyper-aware of her attractiveness, as if it was a constant hum always playing in the background. Nothing as important as her kindness, or fearlessness, but noticeable nonetheless.

And the same thing that made me notice her attractiveness also made it seem all the more inappropriate to watch her disrobe. It was one thing to lay beside each other at night, fully clothed and with a blanket between us, but another entirely to watch her peel her clothes off so that she could slip into a disguise.

“How do I look?”

The voice that addressed me was not the one I was used to, and I turned in concern. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I still was to see a duplicate of the man on the floor, smiling at me with far too large teeth.

I jumped back, but managed to stop myself from crying out just in time.

“You did a good job,” I whispered when I calmed down enough to know that my voice would come out at the proper volume. “Creepy, but a good job.”

“It is a bit strange to see me as another human, isn’t it? I haven’t taken this kind of form since…Giomatti, I think.”

“Yup. I’m pretty sure you’re right.”

“Strange, that almost feels like another lifetime ago, and that I was a different person.”

“I think we all are,” I said.

She nodded. “Fair enough. Now, for the hard part.”

“Hasn’t everything up to this point been the hard part?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Now for the harder part.” She took a deep breath which looked entirely odd in the body that wasn’t hers. “Wish me luck.”

“Luck.”

And then she was walking back in the direction the man had came from until she disappeared from my view entirely.

I heard muffled voices once again, and they sounded slightly puzzled, and then a single shout. I tensed, sure things were about to go down, but just like before, it grew incredibly quiet until the door hissed open once more.

“We’re good,” Mimic said, peeking her head out in her original form.

“Huh, that was surprisingly easy,” I said, entering the room and looking around.

“Speak for yourself,” she said with a soft punch to my arm. “For a moment, I was sure one of them was going to get away.” She pointed to a hatch that was open in the floor. “I don’t know where that leads, but I’m willing to bet that it’s winding and easy to lose a person in.”

“I don’t doubt you.” I walked over to it and closed the hatch, locking the mechanism that held it in place. Once I was sure that was set, I stood and looked over her handiwork. Sure enough, there were two workers laying unconscious on the floor. They didn’t look bruised or otherwise battered, so I assumed that she had pulled some extra sleeper salvo from my pack when I wasn’t paying attention.

“What about the others?” I asked.

“Well, we can’t ping them, or else we might give away their location.”

“No, but now that we are safe, we can turn our comms back on and let them ping us when they’ve finished their work.”

Mimic nodded before going into the hall, returning a few seconds later with the first man over her shoulder. “Good idea. And in the meantime, will you help me bind these folks? I’m fairly certain Ciangi packed cuffs in each of your supply bags.”

“Yeah, she did.”

We busied ourselves with making sure the three of them were secure. We didn’t speak much, but that was because we didn’t need to. Sure, we had been successful so far, but there was no telling what would happen with part two of our little party.

It wasn’t more than a few minutes later when our comms buzzed. “Ayooo, guess who got their target!”

“Good job, Eske!”

“What’s the word on what we’re supposed to do next?” she asked.

“We can’t make any moves until everyone chimes in that they’re done, so just sit tight and put the restriction cuffs on the guy. Once we get the all clear, we’ll take them all to the quarters where we can eventually do a lockdown that will keep them contained while we work the rest of our plan.”

“Uh, okie. I’ll find the thingies and wait.”

“Good idea. See ya in a bit.”

Her comm clicked off and then all we could do was be patient.

Thankfully, it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes before Ciangi and Gonzales both called in, stating they had completed their own little spy missions. Once it was confirmed and all of our comms were back on, we agreed to meet in the living quarters.

Finally, I was able to heave a sigh of relief. Part one of our plan was finally over, and had been entirely successful.

Now, on to part two.

10

S.O.S. (Steal Our Ship)

“Come on! What do you want from us?!”

I winced as one of the captive crew screamed at me, almost making me flinch and drop the water I had brought them.

“Nothing, really,” I said for what had to have been the tenth time. “Look, I know it’s confusing and all, but we only really need you to sit tight and not hurt yourselves. We’re gonna be here for a week and a half, maybe two, and then we’ll be out of your hair and you’ll never have to deal with us ever again.”

“What? That doesn’t even make sense!”

“I’m sure it doesn’t, to you.” I took a deep breath to steady myself. “Now, in a few minutes, we’re gonna undo your bonds one by one so you can walk about, eat, and sleep comfortably. You can try to escape, but that would complicate things a lot more than they need to be. We honestly aren’t going to hurt any of you, unless you force ou—”

“Wait, I know you!” another woman interjected. She was tall, and thin, with ashen hair and eyes that seemed too wide for her face. “You’re that first contact fellow.”

I didn’t know if them being aware of my identity was bad or not, so I found myself trying to sputter out some type of lie. Too bad I was absolutely terrible at lying.

“Uh, no. That guy’s on Earth. Why would I be here?”

“You’re totally him! What’s his name? Uh… Hog? Hagger?”

Clearly, I was not fooling anyone. “It’s Higgens.”

“Yeah, that’s right! Higgens! What are you doing all the way out here? And why have you pirated our station? That’s a felony, you gotta know that.”

“It’s, uh, complicated. And I don’t want to tell you because that might implicate you in all of this. Just know that I’m helping my alien friend, and we really need your station for just a bit. So, if you all don’t mind sitting back and just letting us do our thing, everyone can leave this happy.”

“I don’t believe you,” the original, yelling woman screamed yet again. I was beginning to think that her volume was stuck at full blast after the trauma of being drugged. “Whatever you’re up to, I won’t let you get away with it!”

“Uh, yeah. Okay. Whatever you say. I’m just gonna leave this water here, and then in a few minutes, we’ll call you into the hall one at a time and take off the cuffs. So, uh, see you all later.”

I finished setting the pitcher down and rushed out, feeling a strange mix of embarrassment and relief. But once I was out in the hall, my work wasn’t done, and I rushed to the communication room of the station.

Even with my scanner, I made a few wrong turns and had to double-back on myself. But I arrived at my destination before anyone could complain to me over the comms, and barreled in with a half-grin on my face.

“Sorry that took a minute. Some of our guests are a little angrier than the others.”

“That’s too bad,” Gonzales said. “But Mimic was able to get all the footage she needed.”

“That I was,” Mimic said. “Children, come here.”

The rest of the mimics huddled around her as she played the footage recorded from my wrist-controls. They each pointed to a crew member, then watched them intently. And when the recording ended, they had all taken the forms of whomever they had picked.

“I think we’re good,” Mimic said, turning to face us with the body of the screaming woman. I guessed she was the highest-ranking worker on the shift, so it made sense that the ‘highest-ranking’ shapeshifter would take her form, but I wasn’t exactly happy about it.

“Actually, I think there’s one more thing we’re missing.”

Ciangi stepped forward with a cup of what I was pretty sure was dust and ash. Where she had gotten it, I didn’t know.

“Time to rough yourselves up. All of y’all are looking a little pretty for a distress message.”

“Ah, good point.”

For once, I was glad not to be the center of the action as the mimics all began to rough up their hair and rub dirt across both their jumpsuits and faces. A couple even tore some rips in the fabric, and their skin rippled below then opened like a wound.

“Aw, that is totally gross,” Gonzales said after Astaroth forced a large gash appear on his arm. “But also very convincing. Good job.”

“Thank you.”

“Alright, now I think we’re ready. The rest of you need to get to the blind spot of the camera.”

I gave a little mini-salute. “Aye-aye, Captain.”

The others rolled their eyes, but I was already moving to the one spot by the door where the message cameras wouldn’t catch sight of us. Once we were all squeezed in, Mimic straightened and activated the communications relay.

“Attention, Earth Gov, this is emergency zeta-three! We have been hit by an unprecedented asteroid wave that seems to have been caught in a gravitational tug-of-war by the planets on either side of us. We are repairing damages as best we can, but it won’t be long until we run out of supplies. We have a week, maybe two tops, before this station will become irreparable and we will have to abandon ship. We ask that you send one repair ship and a handful of fighters to take out the worst of the belt. Obviously, we won’t need one of your cruisers, but our station defenses just aren’t enough at this point.

“We will continue to update on our survival situation. Our estimates show that it will take one to two days for this to reach you, and a week minimum for even your quickest of ships to arrive. Please, we can only ask that you respond to this as the utmost of emergencies. Faithfully, Senior Officer Collins, out.”

Then she was turning off the comm and sinking into her seat.

“Being a shapeshifter, one might think that being duplicitous would come much more naturally to me.”

“You did great,” I said, walking forward to offer a hug. She went to take it, but I was unfortunately intercepted by Pyjik and Meridyna. It seemed that we would need to have a lesson on when was appropriate for a group hug, and when wasn’t.

Mimic, however, just smiled and watched her charges as they squeezed me.

“Well,” Gonzales said, cutting between me and the little ones. “We sent out the message. Now we can only hope that they respond.”

I sighed as I settled down into my bed in the secondary living quarters. We had uncuffed and fed our prisoners, who seemed to be acclimating to the situation pretty well, and were now just stuck waiting to get a message back from Earth Gov.

My stomach was churning over and over as I imagined the thousands of different scenarios that could go down.

One, Earth Gov could decide to entirely blow the station off. It wouldn’t be the first time that they hadn’t fulfilled their part of a bargain, and I found it safer to expect them to abandon anyone who trusted in them.

Or they could send some massive fighter with a hundred employees that wouldn’t do us any good at all. While we had managed to take over the station, there had only been seven workers for us to deal with. And even Giomatti’s ship had heavily relied on us using trickery to get the entire crew off of the vessel. While we definitely had an edge to our side by having a group of shapeshifters, expecting them to take on a crew that big wasn’t just impractical, it was suicide.

Or they could send a bunch of fighters that would look for an asteroid field and then completely turn around when they didn’t find one on their sensors.

I was sure there were even more that I didn’t think of, but just those few options were enough.

A knock sounded on my door, interrupting my thoughts. I looked up to see Gonzales standing in the entryway. The rest of the group either eating, showering or just unwinding before the next big upswing in action came.

“Hey, can we talk?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, sitting up and scooting back on the bed so she had room. “Have a seat.”

She hesitated for a moment, as if she wasn’t sure, but then walked over and settled down.

“What’s bothering you?” I asked.

“I, uh, nothing specifically. I just…” She leaned forward and suddenly her golden-brown eyes were incredibly close to me. I had never taken a moment to look at them so in focus, and I realized that she had flecks of both black and green in her irises. Strange that I had never noticed that before. “You love her, don’t you?”

I could feel my face lose its color and I swallowed hard. “Love who?” I squeaked.

“Come on, don’t play that game. I know you’re different from other people, Higgens, and that maybe you don’t feel or interpret things the same way as everybody else, but you love that alien, don’t you?”

I opened my mouth then closed it, then opened it again. How was I supposed to answer this?

Yes, I cared for Mimic with each and every fiber of my being. She was as important as the light, or the air. I wanted to be her friend always, and see her succeed and be happy.

Did…did that mean love? I didn’t know. For so long the thought that I could even have friends was impossible. Was there something more meant for me? Did I even want something more? I wasn’t sure.

But if I was being honest with myself, I didn’t recoil at the idea. I liked holding Mimic’s hand. And I liked going to bed with her at my side and waking up with her still there. I loved the way she never relented. And how she forgave so many people who didn’t deserve it.

“I…I think I might,” I answered finally.

Gonzales sighed and sank back. “I thought so.” She didn’t seem angry, just disappointed, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why. “Well, I wish you guys the best. I’m pretty sure she sees the sun itself every time you look at her.”

“I… Wha—” But Gonzales was already standing up, and I thought I might see tears in those beautiful eyes of hers.

“I should get some sleep now. You know, before the night terrors kick in. I don’t want any company, so if you hear me screaming, just let it go. I always wake up eventually.” She turned to go, although I didn’t know where to considering that I was in the secondary dorms for the crew and our prisoners were in the primary. She paused just before she was completely out the door. “You’re a really good man, Higgens, I hope you know that. And you deserve every bit of happiness you can get.”

“I—”

“Good night, furiendo.”

And then she was gone, leaving me staring after her like something incredibly important had just happened but I had missed some sort of vital context.

Settling back, I pondered over her expressions, wondering if I had somehow hurt her. But eventually, my thoughts couldn’t help but turn to Mimic, and the internal revelation I’d had about her.

So…I might be in love. But what did that mean? And how was I supposed to tell?

I didn’t know. It wasn’t like anyone had ever explained it to me. In fact, most of the people I had the misfortunate of interacting with regularly had been more than happy to tell me that no one would ever love me and that I should never reproduce. I had never even considered myself capable of love.

But now… Now, I wasn’t so sure.

I guess I could worry about it if we got back to Mimic’s home all in one piece.

I snorted inwardly at that. Depending on what happened, I could arrive back on her planet whole only to end up heartbroken.

…maybe I should just get some sleep while I could.

11

Grand Theft Spaceship

In the end, we waited two weeks for them to arrive. It took a day and a half for them to send a message that they were sending five fighters and one repair ship. We had cheered quite a bit at that particular revelation, and our spirits had lifted considerably.

But then there was the issue of making sure that we had everything set up for when they did arrive.

The first thing was convincing the crew to tell us how to access their remote access to their mines. It took some considerable finessing, and an eventual show and tell from the mimics with just enough information to let them know it was serious, but their leader relented and soon we were setting up the hunks of explosive metal in an appropriate formation.

Sure, they weren’t exactly comets, but they would come up as enough of a blip on the fighters’ sensors that they wouldn’t question our story right off the bat.

Then there was setting one big trap in the hangar bay to make sure that we were ready when the fighters did eventually land. That in and of itself was a whole ordeal, and I wasn’t sure whether the mimics were a help or not considering how many questions they asked seemingly nonstop.

I had thought it many times, but I was only reminded more and more of how Mimic had the patience of a saint. I mean, yeah, she had put up with me for quite a while, but fielding constant inquiries from her charges had to be exhausting, and she had been dealing with it far longer than I had.

But eventually, the day came. We were in the middle of eating—having already served the prisoners—when an incoming hail beeped several times over the station comms. We all jumped to our feet and rushed back to the communications relay. The mimics all took on the form of the crew member that they were assigned and arranged themselves within the view of the relay camera. After giving us a nod, Mimic hit a button on the communication relay and they were connecting with the hail from the oncoming ships.

“Thank goodness you’re here,” Mimic breathed, sounding so much unlike herself that it was startling. “We were beginning to think that you’d forgotten about us.”

“Negative,” the voice on the other end responded. I couldn’t see them, considering that we were behind the screen, but they certainly sounded like an intense, military type. “We are here and ready to help as best we can.”

“You’re amazing. Really. Completely and totally amazing.”

“No problem, ma’am. It’s our duty. Since you lot are the experts in this area, we were hoping that you could advise us on how best to aid you.”

“Of course, of course. I’ll open our hangar bay and clear you all for landing. Again, thank you so much.”

“Not a problem, believe us.”

“Great. I’ll send over the coordinates now.”

Then she turned off the comm and we all heaved a sigh of relief.

“We did it,” Eske breathed. “Not to be repetitive, but I really can’t believe it.”

“Hold your horses on that celebration just yet,” Gonzales said, running a hand through her hair. “We’ve still got to actually take their ships.”

“But that should be easy, right? I mean, we have about a dozen sleeper traps set up in that room. There’s no way they can avoid it.”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all of our insane shenanigans,” Ciangi said, “it’s that there’s always a way for things to not go according to plan, and you’ve got to be ready to deal with that.” She gave me a wink then returned her attention back to the others. “So, let’s go see how this all can go wrong, okay?”

There wasn’t any objection, and we all headed toward the hangar bay. It wasn’t exactly a quick trip, involving several floors on the lift and a couple of halls, but we reached our pile of stuff just as the depressurization light flashed on above the hangar bay doors.

I caught myself holding my breath once more and reminded myself to inhale and exhale on a more regular basis as we gathered our stuff. Anything left behind wasn’t going to be retrieved, and we couldn’t spare a single supply.

“Wait, why are there two duffle bags that weren’t here before?” I asked curiously, wondering if—with all the tension—I had just been especially unobservant.

“Because I may or may not have raided anything that might help us with our little war without hurting the crew here,” Ciangi answered. “I had to do something since Bahn wasn’t here to take up all my time.”

“Good job!” Gonzales cheered, offering her hand up for a high-five. I had a slight moment of jealousy, but quickly knocked it down. Ever since that night in my room, the weapons engineer had been mostly avoiding me. I gave her what space I could, but I couldn’t help but wonder what was bothering her.

Ciangi smiled for a second, but then her face fell. “Do you think he’s alright?”

“Oh, for sure,” Eske said, clapping the smallest of the women on the back. “And if you think about it, he’s having a way better time than you.”

She smiled and looked to the hangar bay. “I hope so. But let’s get these ships so we can find out for sure.”

“You won’t have much longer to wait,” Mimic murmured, her face practically pressed to the viewing window. “They’re landing.”

We all tensed at that and readied ourselves around the door.

“You have the sleeper charges, Ciangi?”

“Oh no, I totally—”

“Forgot them at home, I know, I know.” I said. “I’ll take that as a yes?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Get ready.”

“Just give me the word.”

I nodded and joined Mimic. Sure enough, we could see that the ships were already all in the hangar, landing in different parts of the large room.

To be honest, I was impressed that there was enough room for all of them. While the hangar bay was large, it wasn’t nearly the biggest I had been in. We were lucky. If some of them had had to wait outside, our plan would never have worked.

That was one thing we needed to improve on in the future. Far too many of our plans relied on blind luck, and sooner or later, it was going to run out.

“Alright, time for me to try this acting thing that I’m supposed to be so good at,” Mimic said. “Hopefully, I won’t have to say a single word. As soon as they’re in range, make sure to release the gas.”

“Are you sure it won’t hurt you?” I asked for probably the dozenth time.

But Mimic just flashed me a tired grin. “I don’t have to breathe, remember?”

“Yeah, I know, it’s just…”

She patted my face comfortingly. “You worry.”

“You gonna go in there or just make kissy faces all day?” Gonzales asked, interrupting the moment.

“Right. Of course.” Mimic pulled her hand away from my face and I instantly noticed my skin grow colder. With another quick nod, she opened the hangar door and walked in like she belonged.

She made sure to lock the door behind her, then waved enthusiastically at the soldiers disembarking from their vessels. I was relieved to see that there were only ten of them, one pilot for each fighter, and the rest from the repair ship. I had been worried about two seaters or even a sub-crew cramming themselves into the larger ship, but thankfully, that was not the case.

Mimic looked like she was saying something to the men walking toward her, but I couldn’t hear it. I could only watch as they drew closer, and closer, and closer until they were finally within our perimeter of sleep grenades.

It took everything within me to wait until the last one stepped into the boundary, but I did. I had to make sure that this part of our plan went flawlessly, otherwise it was Mimic who would be in the most danger.

“Now!”

True to Ciangi’s word, she was listening. She hit the detonator less than a moment later. The hangar bay filled with thick gas, and for several seconds, we couldn’t see a thing.

I heard a cry from inside, and all of my instincts told me to charge forward, but I couldn’t. Not if I wanted to stay conscious for a while. While I didn’t have any sort of personal experience with sleeper gas, I had seen it work very well on the crew that we had trapped in the first wave of our plan and I didn’t need to test it myself.

Besides, if I ended up asleep for hours, that meant we would have to leave a ship behind, and that would be one less ship for our coming battle.

So, I waited. And waited. I waited until it felt like every one of my nerves was standing on end and my teeth were clenched tightly.

“Gonzales, Ciangi, do either of you know how to interact with the interface enough to pump new air into the hangar bay?”

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

“Yes! I feel like something’s wrong!”

“Well, you’ve never really been wrong before.” I expected maybe a little bit more of an argument, but Gonzales strode right up to the many-buttoned panel beside the door, her hand hovering over the center part. I was acutely aware that for the slightest of seconds, her finger was resting over the depressurize button, which would send whoever was in there flying out into space.

But then it moved almost too quickly to know that there had ever been a pause at all, and I could hear fresh air being rushed into the room by life support. Within seconds, the gas cleared and I saw a pile of men on the floor.

Thank goodness.

But wait, where was Mimic?

It was only then that I noticed there were only eight men breathing sluggishly on the ground.

Oh no.

“Where’s Mimic?!” I cried, slamming the controls to open the door and running in.

I didn’t get an answer in a verbal sense. Instead, the reply came as a crushing force that knocked me backward and into the wall. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe, and the whole world was just the burning pain in my side. I collapsed to the ground, and when my head finally cleared enough to look down, I saw a wound already cauterizing itself on my side.

“Ow,” I wheezed.

“Higgens!”

Suddenly, one of the boxes not far from me wasn’t a box anymore, and Mimic launched herself toward whoever had shot me with their blaster. She connected with a soldier just in her peripheral vision, taking him to the ground, only to have the one remaining man stand up and take aim at her.

I wanted to do something, I really did, but I could hardly get to my feet. There was no way I could cross the room in time to stop him, so I did the only thing I could.

“Mimic!”

She turned to look at me, and I weakly pointed in the direction of the oncoming attack. But I was too slow, and I could practically feel the man as he squeezed the trigger.

But then something too bright to look at was flying through the air, and before I could quite piece together what was going on, an ionic welder on full blast slammed into the aiming soldier.

He let out a cry as his clothing quickly ignited and he dropped to the ground, rolling around to put it out. That gave Mimic enough time to finish knocking out the man she was tussling with, then run over to incapacitate the other.

The whole event couldn’t have taken longer than thirty seconds, but those were thirty seconds that I certainly never wanted to live through again. Mimic ran toward me, a look of pure horror across her features.

“Higgens! Higgens, are you alright?!”

I wheezed a bit of a chuckle and offered my hands so that she could pull me up. “I’m hurt, but it’s nothing serious.” She managed to get me to my feet and I threw my arms around her shoulders for support. “It’s already cauterizing, but I think I’m going to have a wicked scar.”

“Good. I hear your people love scars.”

“Some do.”

“You’re welcome,” Gonzales said, crossing the room quickly to grab her welder and shut it off. “And let’s hurry up. It’s only a matter of time until these guys wake up, and I have ten more minutes left on the lockdown before the crew is all released.”

“I think I’ll need a little help to my ship.”

“No problem,” Mimic said, pulling me toward the closest craft. “It’s the least I could do.”

I wanted to tell her that she had passed ‘least she could do’ long ago, but I decided to conserve my energy.

We had done it, we had secured the ships, but now we just had to live through the entire war we had stolen them for.

12

The Flight Back Home is Always Shorter

“Is everyone seeing my interface on their nav-screens?” Ciangi’s voice came through the comm of our ship.

“Um, which one is the nav-screen again?”

“Should be the largest of the interfaces to your right. About three o’clock.”

“Ah. Yeah. I think so. Is it the floating image of a fist with its middle finger raised?”

“You got it.”

“I see it as well,” Mimic chimed in.

There was a chorus of agreement from everyone else, but of course, Urdet had to have the last word. “I do not understand. This is an offensive gesture, is it not? Why would you show us this after such a harrowing experience?”

“Wait, I know this!” Pyjik interrupted before the rest of us could speak. “It’s more humor!”

“I see. How…strange.”

“Oh, honey,” Ciangi cooed. “This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

“I do not understand. What do large bodies of ice have to do with anything?”

But Ciangi chose to fly right past that, which was good since by my estimates, we only had seven minutes before the crew was released and we had no guarantee that they wouldn’t try to stop us. “Preparing for lift off. I hope everyone has their harnesses in place. Oh, and, Gonzales, make sure you hail our main ship and the little mimics that it’s time to stop hiding and fly back home. Mission success.”

“I hope they’ll believe it more than I do right now.”

“You and me both,” the blonde agreed.

And then, we were taking off.

It seemed so strange to be in a one-man craft and yet having somebody else flying my ship. I supposed this was what Ciangi had kept herself so busy on during the four days it took us to reach the station, and then all the time we had spent waiting for backup. Programming an algorithm to remotely fly five fighters and a repair ship couldn’t have been an easy task. Thankfully, since we were in smaller ships, we would be able to reach Mimic’s home planet much sooner than the massive cruiser we had arrived in.

Still, we weren’t in for an easy ride. Two and a half to three days in a small fighter was cramped. While there were rations, recycled air, and even a way to eliminate waste, it was undoubtedly cramped.

But at least we had each other.

In fact, that was about all we had at the moment.

But I didn’t mind. It gave me time to think. Ever since I had met Mimic, my life had turned into a constant gamble of the worst odds you could probably come across. And yet, we kept winning. I didn’t know if it was determination, luck, or we had some sort of patron god smiling over us, but either way, I was incredibly grateful.

And that gratefulness made me think about everything that Gonzales had said to me, and the thoughts that had rushed through my mind.

When Mimic was in the hangar, and I could feel that she was in danger, I had wanted nothing more than to help her. And when I was shot, I had been relieved that it was me and not her. Surely, that was not a normal reaction. While I would put my life on the line for any one of my friends, it was different…wasn’t it?

I didn’t know. And more than ever, I wished that there was a manual for this sort of thing. But who was I to complain? Mimic was the one who had to navigate all the foibles of interacting with humans with less than two years of exposure. I had many more than that, so why was I so clueless?

It wasn’t until the last day of our journey that I realized maybe it was because I was trying to figure out all of it on my own. Almost all of my personal revelations had happened because of Mimic, so why wasn’t I consulting her on this?

I quickly direct-commed her ship, not wanting the rest of our little gang to hear me make an absolute fool of myself.

“Hey, Mimic,” I said somewhat breathlessly, sure that I was about to be the world’s biggest idiot.

“How are you? Is your wound alright? Do you need medical assistance?”

Her instant worry made me smile somewhat. It was nice to know that no matter what, I always had someone who would care about me.

“I’m fine, I promise. There are med-packs in here and I’ve been taking pain medicine as needed.” Of course, I wasn’t going to tell her that I felt weak and that even with the meds, my side throbbed relentlessly. Although it was agonizing, I knew the pain would eventually pass. I just had to survive to the other side, and I was quickly learning that I certainly had a knack for that.

“Oh, good. You were quite reckless back there, Higgens. You could have been killed.”

“And so could you.”

“Technically, we don’t know that,” Mimic said. “As far as I have researched, one of my kind has never been hit by one of your Earth blasters. For all we know, I could be immune.”

“Considering that it fires a bolt of pure energy, I doubt that.”

“That is fair.” She chuckled a moment before she continued. Goodness, I loved that laugh. It made everything in the world seem a bit brighter. “Was there something you wanted?”

“Yes, I, uh, I…” I found myself losing momentum, but I had to push myself through it. “Do you believe in love?”

“Love?”

“Yeah, ya know. Love?”

“I do not understand. Love is a human emotion; how can one believe it or not? That is like not believing in anger, or happiness.”

“Uh, that’s not quite what I mean.” I took a deep breath, trying to figure out how to best word it. “I guess what I’m trying to ask you is, uh, do you think you are capable of love.”

“Of course.” I was surprised that she answered so quickly. “I love you, after all.” My heart hitched at that, but then she kept talking. “And I love Gonzales. And Bahn. And Ciangi. And all of my brothers and sisters. I am connected to all of you and them in ways I never thought were possible.”

I had imagined this conversation many times since that night on the station, but in none of my fantasies had Mimic had such a hard time understanding what I was trying to say.

“Yeah, I think we all feel that love for each other, but that’s not what I’m talking about either.”

“Oh? I do not understand then. What do you mean?”

“I mean, uh, you know in those flicks I watch, how there’s two people who end up loving each other differently than they feel for everyone else. And it doesn’t diminish the love they have for all their friends and family. It’s just…different.”

“Ahhh,” she said, like I had suddenly started making all the sense in the world. “You mean romance.”

“Yeah, I guess I do. Do you think you could feel romantic love for someone? Ever? Or is that not a thing for mimics?”

She was quiet a long moment. And then another moment longer. And one more. My heart began to squeeze while my stomach did flips within itself. Why was I so hung up on her answer? I knew that we cared for each other very much and would go to the ends of the universe for each other. Why complicate it?

“Perhaps,” Mimic answered finally. “It is not a foreign concept to our people, just quite rare. If I were to have found—or find, rather—someone I could feel that way toward, I think it would be devastating if they were not to feel the same toward me.”

“Yeah…devastating,” I echoed, my mind whirling as I tried to decipher exactly what that meant.

“Why do you ask? Feeling strangely philosophical now that you’ve been trapped in one spot for too long?”

I laughed and took the easy escape. “Yup, that must be it.” I let it drop and took a deep breath. “I think I’m going to take a nap while I can,” I said shakily. “Goodness knows that once we hit planet-side, there won’t be a single chance to rest.”

“You are certainly correct.”

I went to turn off my comm, but Mimic began to speak just before I disconnected.

“Higgens!”

“Yes?” I asked, surprised at the urgency in her tone that clearly came across the comm.

“I’m…I’m very glad you found me. If I was given the chance to go back and change time, I wouldn’t.”

A pleasant sort of warmth filled me, and I smiled at my console. “Me too, Mimic. Me too.”

“Good. I just wanted to make sure you knew that. Good night, Higgens.”

“Good night, Mimic.”

With that, I turned the comm off and sat back in my chair, holding my wound while I thought. Sure, while Mimic hadn’t said she loved me or could love me outright, she had certainly given me something to ponder on.

But first, some rest.

13

Making the Leap

That night, my dreams were filled with Mimic. Some scenes were memories replaying themselves like a flick, some of them were entirely fabrications of my subconscious. They ranged from happy, to terrifying, to full of melancholy, but no matter what, they starred my best shapeshifter friend.

When I finally awoke, I had a clarity of mind I felt like I hadn’t had in ages. Sure, I still felt weak and feverish from my wound, but all of the questions that had been plaguing me for so long seemed to have settled.

I had made first contact. I had traveled to an unknown galaxy only to return and steal a ship from the same jerk who had killed all of Mimic’s people. I had done impossible things, and none of them could have been accomplished without Mimic. I was who I was today because of her, and it was time that I stopped being afraid of it.

The epiphany filled me with a steely sort of resolve, and suddenly, I couldn’t wait to land. I knew what I had to do, and I wanted to get it done before I chickened out.

I kept my comm off, afraid to say something that would ruin it all, and just sat patiently. Which was considerably difficult considering we had several hours left even after I woke up.

But eventually, Mimic’s planet loomed in the distance, and Ciangi’s voice crackled over the speakers of our ships.

“Alright, prepare for landing.”

I gripped the armrests on either side of me, my heartbeat picking up. I could feel the sweat coming on and I tried to calm myself down. The last thing I wanted was to end up moist and clammy when we touched down.

Which we did, and that seemed to go much faster than our liftoff had. I didn’t know if it was my nerves, or if I blacked out for a moment, but it seemed like one second we were just entering orbit, and the next, we were setting down just outside of Mimic’s capital like we had just flown through butter rather than the incredible turbulence that normally came from breaking a planet’s atmosphere.

As much as I normally would have sat back and admired the technology that Earth had at their disposal, I didn’t have time. I was on a mission.

I struggled out of my seat, and I might have stumbled all the way down to the ground had Gonzales not been there to catch me.

“Whoa, easy there, tiger. You in a hurry for something?”

“Yes,” I answered simply before getting to my feet and walking straight toward Mimic.

She must have heard me as I approached, because she turned to me slightly. I didn’t know what it was, but just seeing her again filled me with a sort of happiness that couldn’t quite be put into words. Once more, I held out my arms to her for a hug, and she quickly walked into my embrace.

I held her tightly, like if I let go that I would lose her again and it would take more than a year for us to find each other. I couldn’t say how long I held her, my heart beating frantically in my chest, but after a long while, I pulled away just far enough to look down at her face.

Her beautiful, kind face.

It could have been ageless, expressionless, flawless, but she chose not to make it so. I saw worry lines in her forehead and at the top of her nose. Slight bags hung under her cheeks, purple-black from her exhaustion and stress. Laugh lines that I would treasure for eternity separated her cheeks from her lips, and her smile was just as bright, even if so much had happened to weigh down the expression.

And the next thing I knew, I leaned down and pressed my lips against hers.

It was gentle at first, almost inquisitive. I was afraid that I was crossing some sort of terrible line, or that I had completely misinterpreted everything Mimic had said.

But then, she melted into my touch and wrapped her arms around my waist.

In that moment, it was like the entire universe changed with just a simple action. There would, for the rest of my life, be a before the kiss, and an after.

My head swam, my heart swirled, and my face grew hot. A million thoughts flew through my head before being shoved out by peace. And quiet. And safety.

I was protected here, with Mimic’s mouth pressed against mine, and no one could ever take away the solace I felt in that moment.

When I pulled away, Mimic’s face was bright red and her eyes were half-lidded.

“Does this mean you love me?” she murmured breathlessly.

“Yes,” I answered, finally willing to admit the truth aloud.

“Good,” she said. “Because I think I love you too.”

I thought I’d known happiness before, but nothing compared to the feeling that flooded me at those words. I let out a weak sort of laugh and tipped my forehead to rest against hers. I could have stayed in that moment forever, if only ju—

“Mimic! Mimic!”

Both of our heads jerked in the direction of one of the young mimics that she had left in charge of the preparation and training. It was clear by both their tone and the strained expression on their half-formed face that whatever they were running for was most urgent.

They practically collided with their leader, and she caught them deftly, taking a step away from me to do so.

“What is wrong, child? Are you alright?”

They shook their head emphatically and all of those butterflies that had just been flying in my stomach sank rather rapidly.

“All of our satellites farther than three clicks away have gone dead,” they gasped. “The enemy will be here within days. We have less than a week!”

The look on Mimic’s face grew grim and she reached out to me, never letting go of the small Mimic as she rose.

“Very well then,” she murmured before raising her voice to address the rest of us. “It seems that our unwelcome guests have nearly arrived.” Goodness, I would never understand how she kept so calm. “The battle is close. Prepare yourselves.”

And with that, she walked back toward her village, and I had no choice but to follow her. It figured, I had just had the happiest moment of my life interrupted by the greatest threat to us all.

I never had been very good at timing. Hopefully, if we survived this guerrilla war we were about to try, I would get better at in in the future. Only time would tell, I supposed.

Time, and a whole lot of luck.

Mimic Goes to War

1

Hedging the Storm

I looked out the window of Mimic’s room—now mine too, I guessed—and watched the insane hustle on the ground below me. Mimic hadn’t come back to sleep last night, which made sense given that she didn’t technically need to sleep like we humans did, and she couldn’t waste time just relaxing alongside me for hours.

With war looming on the horizon, there was precious little time for anything but frantic preparation. All the mimics developed enough to understand spent every waking moment gathering supplies, building defenses, and training their little spikey butts off.

Of course, given this furor of activity, Mimic and I hadn’t exactly had time to talk things out since our kiss. Had I messed everything up? Had I misinterpreted the feelings she had for me? Or even my own?

I didn’t think so, but I had been wrong plenty of times before in my life and it wasn’t like there was a manual that went along with it. ‘How to Understand Your Feelings Toward the Genderless Alien that you Discovered.’ If there was, I would have read it from cover to cover and upside-down and backward. Anything to make sense of the confusing emotions and thoughts whipping through me.

Oh well. It wasn’t like I should worry. It wasn’t like Mimic and I could have any sort of future together if I was solidly dead after the aliens invaded and won the war on the mimic planet. So, I supposed I should stop staring melancholily out the window and actually get to work.

I left the house and made my way to the training area. Everyone else’s doors were open, which meant they had most likely woken up at the crack of dawn and were doing actually useful things. I really was slacking, but of all the members on my team, I felt the most useless.

Eske was even more amazing at hand-to-hand than she said, and was able to use the mimics’ shapeshifting ability to enhance the drills she taught them. Gonzales was teaching both marksmanship and modifying every weapon she could get her hands on as fast as she could. In fact, she rarely did anything else. She didn’t speak to us, and she rarely ate. I had the feeling that something was bothering her, deeply in fact, but every time I approached her in the day and a half since we landed, she asked for privacy and I respected that.

Bahn and Ciangi were all over the place. Between repairing the ships and creating a useful AI that could help in battle for all of us inexperienced pilots, upgrading other systems, and improving the shielding that Bahn had stayed behind to work on, they had their hands full.

But me? What could I do? They had plenty of little mimics now to hand them tools and do their grunt work, and all of the current tasks were far beyond my knowledge. So here I was, on the precipice of a great war, and all I felt like I could do was just watch while everyone around me fought with everything they had to make sure we were ready for what was to come.

I reached the bottom of the stairs to see Bahn and Ciangi sitting together at the rough-hewn table and chairs dominating the lower floor. They had a mass of wires and tools in front of them, but I couldn’t fathom what they possibly could be doing.

“Oh hey, Higgens. There you are!” Bahn said, grinning broadly.

Ever since we arrived yesterday, just after dawn, Bahn had been elated to see all of us. It was like the impending doom didn’t even phase him now that we were all together in one place. Him and Ciangi were glued at the hip even more than usual, to the point where it almost felt wrong to ever interrupt their alone time as they busily worked on their projects.

“Yup. Here I am,” I answered, pasting a smile on my face as well.

“I think Mimic wanted to talk to us. Wanna walk with us to the training area?” Ciangi asked.

“Yeah, sure. Let me just grab my pack.”

“No problem.”

They waited until I was done and we all headed out together. Despite the bright expression on the taller coin twin’s face, tension was thick in the air. It weighed down my body and almost made it hard to breathe, like the air itself was more liquid than gas. Maybe it was all in my head, but a quick glance at Ciangi told me she was feeling the same.

We reached the training grounds and it was even more populated than when we had left. It seemed that the mimics were beginning to develop at an exponential rate, with more of them to hold human or even greater forms every hour. Of course, that also meant that there were more students to teach, but the older mimics were helping with disseminating whatever Eske or Gonzales taught them.

It was actually kind of amazing how they were already developing a sense of community. The mimics had spent at least a hundred years, maybe more, as mindless slaves of someone who starved them to keep them stunted. They had known nothing but the alien voice in their heads ordering them to meet its every need.

And now they were thriving. They had personalities and desires, and they were discovering things like art. I was pretty sure I had even heard one humming! It was like watching the birth of a species on fast forward, and if there wasn’t a cataclysmic fight looming on the horizon, I would have taken a lot more time to observe the phenomenon.

“Hey there, guys!” Eske called, breaking away from the mimic she was helping then jogging over. She was covered in a shiny layer of sweat, but instead of looking gross, or unkempt, it kind of just made her look more dangerous and capable of crushing a person’s head between her muscled thighs. “I think Mimic wanted to talk to all of us.”

“Yeah, we know,” Ciangi said. “We’ve got the same comms in our scanners that you do.”

“Oh, right. Of course.” She let out a laugh and pulled her goggles from where they clicked in behind her ears, wiping sweat from the lenses. “Forgive me. I didn’t eat breakfast and I’ve been staging mock combat all morning. My brain’s a little foggy.”

“It’s alright,” I said. “Let’s grab Gonzales, then go find Mimic. You know where she is, right?”

The tall woman pointed off into the woods far at the opposite edge of the training area. “I think she wandered off there with some building supplies.”

“Awesome.” I started to take a step toward the marksman half the field away when Eske caught my arm. “What’s up?” I asked, giving her a curious look.

“Oh, uh. Maybe you should let me go get Gonzales while you guys go ahead.”

“Why?”

“Do you really not—” She turned her head and put her goggles back into place, so she could observe me. “Huh, yeah. I guess you wouldn’t. Well, she’s been through some stuff and I think she just needs a little time to recover and figure out how she feels. You know, it happens sometimes.”

“Yeah, she’s been through a lot. But I’ve always been able to help her before. Maybe if we just talked…”

But Eske’s grip on my arm remained tight. “Just trust me on this, friend. Give her space.”

I wanted to argue, but one look at all my friends’ faces told me that I needed to listen. I was tempted to ask them what they all knew that I didn’t, but perhaps if I didn’t know—and Gonzales had yet to tell me—the weapons engineer might not want me in the loop. And, as much as it twisted my insides, I needed to respect her wishes.

I just hoped that she would be okay.

“Alright, fair enough. You go grab her and catch up to us by the tree line.”

“Roger-roger. Catch you in a flash.”

She sprinted off, her long legs taking her over large stretches of land. Ciangi whistled appreciatively at the athleticism, and then we were heading off toward the woods.

“Hey, Bahn, if we survive all this, we should start working out.”

“That’s what you said after we defeated the first alien.”

“Yeah, well, I got sidetracked. It wasn’t like we didn’t have a ton on our plate, you know, revealing that we had discovered new life and all that.”

“And don’t forget getting betrayed and locked in prison for months,” I added.

“I don’t think that’s something any of us could ever forget,” she shot right back, grimacing. I couldn’t help but mirror her perspective.

Sure, I liked to joke about terrible things to make myself feel better about them, but it seemed that we hadn’t reached that point yet. Who knew, maybe we wouldn’t survive long enough to be over it.

That was a terrible thought. I needed to stop being so pessimistic.

We reached the woods, Eske and Gonzales reaching us a bit later. The weapons engineer was wearing a strained expression while the maintenance woman just looked a bit worried.

“Should we call Mimic over the comms and tell her we’re all here?”

Our scanners all crackled at once. “I can hear you. Keep walking east. You’ll find me by a river.”

“Anyone else creeped out by that, or just me?” Ciangi asked.

“Only a little,” Eske murmured. “I guess her senses are more developed than ours?”

“I think she can shapeshift to enhance them. The more she learns about human anatomy, the more she can manipulate it,” I answered.

“That’s…an awful lot of possibilities you’re opening up there. So, basically, she could do almost anything once she understands a living creature’s structure?”

“I don’t know about anything,” I said with a shrug. “But certainly a whole lot.”

Eske let out a long breath. “Huh. Now I feel a whole lot less worried about this war coming.”

“I wouldn’t be,” Bahn said. “It’s unlikely that this is going to be a ground fight. With the technology we found on that old, crashed ship, they’ll try to stay attacking us from space.”

“But if we could force their hand so they have to come to us on the ground, then things will be looking up,” Ciangi finished for her twin.

“Well, we stole all of those ships. Hopefully, that won’t be for nothing and we’ll be able to get these invading folks to leave their mothership.”

I felt like Eske might have kept talking if we hadn’t stepped into a small clearing where we found Mimic standing by the running waterway, building something that looked like a…an animal pen? That was curious. Last I knew, she had never been much into animal husbandry.

“You wanted to speak to us?” I asked, sending her an uncertain smile.

Mimic let down the post she was placing and turned to us, her face flushing slightly red. I didn’t know when she had learned to blush as we humans did, but it made me feel a bit proud that I could bring out such a reaction in her.

“Yes. I…I have a theory.”

“Oh? Care to enlighten us?”

“Perhaps. But first, Bahn, can you walk us through all of the improvements you’ve made since we’ve been gone? I know you gave us a loose update, but I want a thorough walkthrough.”

“I mean, sure, but the ship is on the completely opposite side of your capital. It would have been better to meet at your place and go from there.” Ciangi elbowed him and he just shrugged. “What? This is just a bit inefficient.”

“I don’t mean a literal walkthrough,” Mimic said, picking the post back up and placing it into a hole she must have dug before we arrived. “Use your words.”

“Oh. Right. I suppose that is a thing I can do.” He cleared his throat, the intense expression across his face making it look as if he was building a mental checklist.

“So, as I said before, I did manage to increase the power supply to the shield generator while reducing its power needs. There was an entire backup system of engines that were only partially damaged that I was able to work into the circuit. I would say, after running a whole bunch of tests on it, it should last as long as a year. Probably.”

“A year?”

“Should?”

“Probably?”

Ciangi, Eske and I looked to each other, clearly the three of us having found different parts of that sentence to latch onto.

“Yes. It’s hard to say for certain, of course. It’s not like I often have the chance to build something meant to protect an entire city. But the best that I can tell, yes, around a year.”

“That…that changes things,” Mimic murmured. “I didn’t realize when you said you improved it, that you improved it that much.”

“Well, it wasn’t like there was a lot of time. Almost as soon as you all landed, you went straight into ordering everyone what to do and sending the younglings to get food.”

“Yes, I suppose we did.” Mimic’s fingers rubbed her temples, such a decidedly human trait that I wondered which of us she had picked it up from.

“But this means, should we manage a surprise assault via space, we might be able to drive them to attack us on the ground,” I said hopefully.

“Yes, possibly. But we must also consider that they will just try to wait out our shield.”

“So…you’re talking about a siege then?”

“Yes. Which is even worse than I had surmised.” She let out a long sigh again, and I could see the tension of her position weighing on her. Poor girl. She had just learned about the entire world outside of her asteroid less than two years ago, and now she seemed to have the responsibility of saving it. “Food, we’ll have plenty of, but I had a thought, and that was when my theory was that we would only have a week or two of power.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Let’s say we do survive, and drive these invaders away. What of our planet? Of the wildlife we saved from the menagerie within the ship? What if we win only to have a planet full of destruction and fire wrought from space?”

“Oh…” I hadn’t thought of that. But it was true that we had no idea what these aliens would do. What if they did blast the entire crust of the planet? There was so much we would need. A constant water source for one. And enough materials for repairs. And an escape system if the planet grew too inhospitable after a hostile assault.

“Exactly,” Mimic murmured. “So, although it seems impossible and silly to worry about such a little thing, I was wondering if we would be able to round up as many creatures as possible and house them within the boundary of the shielding.

“Uh, I understand where you’re coming from, but I honestly do not know if we’re gonna have the time,” Ciangi admitted. “Bahn and I are still working on the ships and a lot of other things.”

“And I’m not even halfway through your weapons. There’s a lot of repairs and upgrades to be made if we’re looking at a man-to-man fight down here.”

“I, um, guess I could teach faster? Your younglings do learn very quickly, and there are more of them each day.”

“I can do it,” I said. Everyone looked at me, a bit surprised, but I kept on. “I’m next to useless right now. I can’t really help much with the fighting, I’m not good enough at engineering yet, and I don’t know weapons. I’ve hardly ever even fired a weapon.

I gave a small smile. “But rounding up some animals and maybe some very particular flora? That I can do. Give me a list, and maybe a couple of mimics to help me, and I’ll make sure at least some of the creatures survive.”

“Thank you,” Mimic said with a relieved smile. “It’s not the most glamourous work, but I think that preparing for the aftermath of our possible victory will also help morale.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.”

She nodded and returned to the pen she was creating. “I will finish this, then you and some younglings will need to make other sorts of cages. I will provide you a list of creatures, where to find them, and other relevant information after a bit. For now, I recommend packing a day or so worth of provisions. You don’t want to be caught out in the wilds without supplies.”

I nodded. “Yeah, yeah, of course.”

“Is that all you needed us for?” I asked.

“For the moment, I believe so. Unless there are any more urgent updates.”

“Um, I’m working on sort of a long-range communication system, so we can communicate from planet-side to the fighter ships, but it’s not going as smoothly as we had hoped.”

“Thank you, Ciangi. That does sound quite useful. Please, continue to work on that between your upgrades to our ships.”

The smaller of the coin twins gave a little salute, then turned to walk back. I lingered for a minute, tempted to take a step toward Mimic for reasons that I couldn’t fathom yet. But seeing her working so hard, concentration clearly written across her face, I thought better of it and turned to go.

I could speak to her later, in private.

Assuming we got a later.

2

Zoology on the Fly

“Ow!” I hissed, yanking my hand back as I was pricked by the sharp needle in my other hand for possibly the tenth time since I had started.

“Need help?” a small, reedy voice asked from beside me. I looked over to see one of the mimics beside me rapidly putting together several cages with their four arms. They were kinda human looking, but also kinda not, and I couldn’t tell whether the deviations in their design were intentional or just happy errors.

“No, I got it,” I said, returning my attention to my project. It was strange to just be sitting down, making traps and cages, but that was my part in the war so I was going to do my best at it.

Sure, it stung my pride a wee bit that I wasn’t on one of the more important projects, but hey, it wasn’t that bad being the one in charge of securing hope for the future. I just needed to look at it the right way and not let my pride get in the way.

Hah, pride. Who would have thought? It was strange to think that a little over a year ago, I had been an insecure, quiet, and lonely person who thought the hull of a ship was all there was for me. I couldn’t afford a concept like pride, and I let my boss bully me this way and that like I deserved it.

So much had changed. I had grown, and learned, and found out more of who I really was than I had during all the rest of my life. Who would have ever thought that I would be participating in a war such as this, let alone as one of five sub-leaders?

“Sure no help?”

I looked back to the mini-mimic beside me to see they had already finished their previous cage and was working on yet another one.

“You know what, I guess I do.” It stung a bit to be outclassed by a literal child, but at least it gave me a chance to finish packing up all the supplies we would need.

Heading over to our makeshift warehouse, I grabbed rope, bait, torches, flint, and some fruits and other edibles. Since the mimics didn’t eat anything remotely digestible by us, there wasn’t exactly a wide breadth of food, but there was still our fabricator on the ship to make sure we got the proper amount of nutrients. We just had to make sure we returned there every few days.

Once I was properly loaded up, I headed back to the edge of the woods to see the five mimics assigned to my little mission finishing up the last of the cages and traps. We only had about a day and a half to complete our job, and while I didn’t know how many animals we would be able to round up in such a short time, I was going to try my hardest.

“Alright, so are all of you clear on the plan?” I asked, walking to the center of the little group.

“I carry,” one said, its voice low and sounding more like rocks scraping against each other than the vibrations from actual vocal cords. Which, for all I knew, was exactly the case.

“And I track. Sister gave scents to follow. You have list, and lead.”

A deafening bleat came from one of the two non-humanoid helpers, its strange jaw seeming to practically unhinge. I was getting used to the sheer body-horror of hanging out with a bunch of juvenile mimics, but I still often had to avoid staring directly at some of their more mangled forms.

“They say they help catch.”

“Sounds like we’re all on the same page. Um, Vik, was it? Would you like to…uh, grow for me?”

The rock-voiced mimic nodded, and its form began to ripple upwards like it was clay, and someone had inverted the world’s gravity. I tried not to let my stomach flip as I watched its features sink back into its flesh like pudding until finally a large, wide creature not too different from a hippo appeared.

If a hippo had dark, almost indigo skin and a tail as long as its body. Oh, and giant tusks about a foot longer than my arm.

“Alright, friends, let’s load up.”

There was a general chittering of agreement, and then we were loading up our cages, traps, and other accoutrements.

“Higgens, wait!”

I looked up from the pack I was about to throw on Vik’s back, surprised to see Eske running toward us.

“Hey, did you need something?”

“Uh, yeah. I’m coming with you.”

I gave her an odd look. “But aren’t you needed on the training grounds?”

“Actually, Gonzales is really focusing on weapons training and the twinsies are going to pick their pilots and help train them. We figured you could use a little extra muscle on this in case things get, ya know, dicey.”

“Huh. And here I thought I had the easiest job out of all of you.”

“Are you kidding me?” she said, snorting loudly. “You have to go out into the wild and capture creatures that very much don’t want to come with you and could even possibly kill you. Well, kill us now, but you get the point.”

“Huh, I guess I didn’t think of it that way.”

“Yeah, because you always downplay everything you do. I could tell from the moment I saw your first interview. Now there’s a humble guy. But we don’t much have time for that particular virtue, so why don’t we just cut to the part where we get up and go?”

“Fair enough. You bring a weapon and supplies?”

She nodded and pointed to the pack on her back. “Right here.”

“Alright then.” I turned and looked to the other six juvie mimics that were building some of the bigger pens and corrals. I guessed it gave them something to do while the more developed mimics prepared themselves for the fighting part of war. Survival really was a group effort. “Let’s finish packing up and we’ll be on our way.”

She nodded and eagerly helped us with the rest of what we needed to do to get started. Unlike me, she didn’t seem to have any sort of existential crisis about whether it was important or not. Maybe there was a lot besides physical combat I could learn from her.

After all, for needing to rely on goggles to see with any sort of clarity, and being ripped from her life without so much as a notice only to be involved in a war with an invasive species, she was pretty chill about everything. I didn’t think I had ever heard her complain beyond her surprise at the insane things that we did.

“So, which one of you was the tracker again?”

“Me! Niely!” The four-armed one skittered up, its form melting into another as soon as the words were out of its mouth. This time, I had the good sense to look away as it went through its transformation, giving me a new appreciation for the artful way Mimic often changed her body.

Then, finally, we were on our way.

I looked to the list on the datalog that Mimic had given me. “How about we try the…the…Glyrkk?” I said, stumbling over the sounds.

Niely nodded its new, round head at me emphatically, and I reached for the corresponding sample in the bag Mimic had provided. I handed it over, then watched as the little mimic went crazy—waffling, sniffling, and rubbing its nose all over the little capsule.

After a solid minute of gross sinus noises, it finally jumped up and rushed off in a direction through the thick, brilliantly-colored woods.

“I guess that’s our cue,” I said, following.

I heard everyone fall in line behind me and we set off on the most thrown together, least prepared zoological expedition I had ever heard of.

But hey, what could go wrong?

3

Conservation is Hard

“So, when did you know that you had fallen in love with an alien?”

I nearly choked on my water as I helped myself to my thermos. Once recovered, I gave Eske an incredulous look. “Um, what?”

“I said, when did you know you had fallen in love with an alien?”

“I, uh, I…” I didn’t know how to answer that. I was still figuring it out, but I figured that saying as much would make my kiss, and my feelings, sound insincere. I didn’t want to sound insincere. “We should probably stay quiet, so we don’t disturb the creatures we’re trying to find.”

“Oh, you’re right, you’re right.”

She managed to be quiet for maybe five minutes as we cut through the thick, vibrant foliage before I heard her speak again.

“I thought I could see it on one of your interviews. They were asking so many questions about Mimic, but they kept referring to her as ‘the lifeform.’ You would correct them every time. There was this fierce, I dunno, I’m not the best with defining these things, but I would say…protection in your eyes. And once that section ended, you seemed so sad. Like you wanted to talk about her forever.

“I figured you guys either had the best, deepest friendship a person could ever ask for, or you were in love. Not that one is more important than the other, because they’re both pretty rad, but…there’s a difference, ya know?”

“Yeah, I’m beginning to find that out.”

“Just beginning to…?” I heard her shake her head but did my best not to make eye contact. I didn’t want to see what was across her face, which would undoubtedly make me think that much more about the situation when I was just trying to concentrate on my one job of saving some alien animals. “Man, I know I’m not always the best with a lot of concepts, or people in general, but you really take the cake. You ever get diagnosed with anything?”

I shrugged. “It didn’t really matter on colony life, so I never went to see any sort of specialist. I always was just me. Higgens. The weird boy who didn’t talk a lot, or ever let his parents cut his hair, and just kinda stared a lot.”

“Huh. I got ya. I had all sorts of problems when I was younger. My mom finally got me to one of them universal doctors and they said I had some anxiety and social stuff all goin’ on. Got me some medicine, and a few visits with a counselor to teach me some coping skills, and the next thing you know, I was getting along much better.”

“Hmm,” I said, listening with only about half my brain.

It was interesting to listen to Eske about a part of her life that I had never heard before, but my mind was stuck on Mimic and my feelings for her again.

I felt like a broken audio-file, just going over and over and over the same thoughts without any resolution or rest. It was starting to get on my nerves, which was less than conducive to everything I was trying to get done.

A squeal sounded from up ahead, and if that wasn’t an affirmative on a sighting, I didn’t know what was. I rushed forward just in time to see Niely disappear through a log, in hot pursuit of something I couldn’t spot.

But I followed along, my heart in my throat. I had thought that maybe we would just find the creature’s nesting area and then set some traps, but it appeared that we were going for a more aggressive approach. I had never wrangled an animal before, but I guessed there was a first time for everything.

The rest of the party cut through the foliage, trying to keep up with the two of us as best they could. Of course, Eske caught up with me relatively quickly, her long legs pushing her past me like it was a pleasant stroll.

Soon, she too disappeared ahead of me, leaving me to only follow blindly. Less than a minute later, I heard something that sounded like a large body diving through the bracken and then a shout of triumph.

“I need a cage!”

I skidded to a stop and signaled for Vik to do so as well, yanking one of the smaller cages from its side and rushing in the direction I’d heard Eske’s voice.

Rushing through the plants, I heard a high-pitched keening echoing through the trees followed by frantic coos from Eske that everything was going to be alright and she was just trying to protect it.

After what seemed like forever of me trying to find them in the forest, I finally spotted a flash of wild color. Sprinting toward it, I found Eske on her back, her muscled arms wrapped around the colorful, flailing body of an avian-looking creature while Neily ran in circles around them, chirping and kicking his chubby hind legs.

“I got the cage!” I called, popping open the door.

“Well, then come over here and use it, geez!”

Oh, right. I should probably do that.

I rushed to her side, trying to angle it so the opening would come down right on top of the kicking bird-like creature. But every time I thought I had it, Eske would roll out of the way and I would have to readjust.

“Could you stay still?”

“Nah, I thought I would just roll around by my own health. I’m trying to keep still, but this chickee is a strong little bugger.”

“You’ve been hanging around Ciangi too much,” I shot back. But I lifted the cage above my head nevertheless, and once I saw an opening, I slammed it down with all the speed I could muster.

I felt the cage connect with Eske and she let out an oomph, but managed to retract her hands in time for me to slap the lid of the cage shut. Standing up, I held the still-shaking, cawing Glyrikk in its new, but temporary, home.

“There!” I said, with no undue amount of triumph. “Now how about we get you on Vik’s back?”

I held down a hand for Eske to help her up, but kept my eyes on the frantic creature I was helping.

It was indeed very bird-like, but instead of a beak, it had a mouth not too different from a serpent, lined with rows and rows of needle teeth. It had brilliant feathers of blue, orange, and yellow, but very soft fur at the base of all of the plumes.

“Hey there,” I murmured, whistling low and soft. The tune seemed to catch the creature’s attention, and it cocked its head to the side to observe me with its four, slit-pupiled eyes. “There ya go. We’re not bad people. We’re not trying to hurt you.” I looked to Eske. “Do you mind doing a scan?”

“Oh, sure.”

She quickly lifted her wrist and after a few seconds of whirring, the machine beeped.

“Looks like this is a fertile breeder. We just need either the fertile male or fertile… I don’t know what this word is, but it’s the other type of thingie that can make the breeder pregnant.”

“Gotcha. One of the three-sexed ones. Those are complicated.”

“Not compared to the five-sexed one I saw on the list that apparently also has dominant and submissive social structures thrown in.”

“You saw that, huh?”

“I—”

The maintenance woman stopped short as we heard something crashing through the trees. Eyes going wide, I put the first of our findings on Vik’s back and reached for the weapons we had brought along.

“Anyone know what—”

I never quite got my words out. Suddenly, a form crashed through the trees into our little gathering, all fur and slashing claws.

Something tackled me, and I realized it was Eske pushing the both of us out of the way of the snarling beast.

“Bylpar!” one of the mimics shrieked.

“Bylpar?” I gasped as we crashed into the ground and ate dirt. “That’s one on our list?”

“Wait, what?” Eske shouted. “We’re supposed to bring back that?!”

We fought to our feet just in time to dodge out of the way yet again as the large creature whirled on us.

It was like someone had crossed a lion and a bear, but dyed it black and orange. Its teeth were easily the length of my arm and its head nearly the size of my upper body, while its tail looked like it could wrap around even Vik once or twice.

It turned again, roaring a sound that felt like it could make my eardrums pop, and I was absolutely sure that would be the end of us.

But the rest of the mimics were suddenly rushing forward, all of their forms shifting as they carried ropes to completely encircle the thrashing beast.

I grabbed Eske’s arm and pulled her toward the edge of the melee, searching through our supplies for the tranq-injector. I had known the journey could be dangerous, so of course I had brought it, but I suddenly found myself wishing I had been a bit more prepared to use it.

I finally found the thing and raced back to the fight. My little mimic friends were flying this way and that, but never let go of the tethers they were trying to get around the Bylpar. Although I was by no means a marksman, I took the best aim I could with my tranq-injector, then pushed my finger against the sensor.

Only for the bolt to go wide and lodge itself into a tree. Oh well. At least it didn’t hit one of the mimics.

Not allowing time to doubt myself, I aimed again and fired.

I didn’t know if it was the sound of my breathing, or if the creature just felt my eyes on it, but it whipped back to me, sending the smaller mimics scrambling again. It lunged toward me, murder clear in its eyes, and I rolled backward, sure that it was going to reach out and slice me into tiny Higgens pieces.

But instead, it seemed to stumble at the last moment and hit the ground hard, sliding to a stop just before a particularly thick tree.

None of us moved for a second, sure that it would rear up and be twice as angry. But instead, a low, rumbling sound issued from its chest, followed by something akin to a whistle.

“Is…is it snoring?” I asked a bit incredulously.

Eske laughed. “Well, there ya go. It seems those sleeper darts work pretty well.”

“Thank goodness. Otherwise, that might not have worked out half as well.”

I felt a slight pressure on my leg and looked down to see the mimics pushing past me, binding the creature in a way where it would be safe. It was fascinating to watch them go, and I took a step back to give them room.

“So, what’s that?” Eske asked. “Two down?”

“Eight to go,” I answered with a long breath.

“I hope all of them aren’t this exciting.”

I laughed lightly, and clipped my tranq-gun to my thigh. “Knowing our luck, each one will be more thrilling than the last.”

4

New Plans, New Prep

Thankfully, while none of it was easy, none of the rest of our expedition quite compared to the beginning. We couldn’t get all of the creatures listed before our day and a half passed, but we managed a good third of it, with a majority of the breeding pairs in our possession.

By the time we returned to the edge of the capital where Mimic had been constructing pens, Vik was loaded down with all sorts of creatures, some docile and some not, and all of them very much eager to stretch their various limbs.

The little mimics had been busy while we were gone, managing to construct enough enclosures to house the eighteen animals that we had captured. There was even a couple of food piles ready and waiting.

Of course, then came the matter of actually getting the animals off Vik’s back and into their appropriate new homes. But just as Eske and I braced ourselves for all the shenanigans that were sure to come from such an endeavor, mini-mimics swarmed their larger sibling and started getting to work, leaving Eske and I with nothing to do but meet back up with the rest of our friends.

“I dunno, I almost feel guilty making them do all this themselves,” Eske murmured, joining me at the edge of the water, the only place where we wouldn’t get in the way of the rushing mimics.

“I know what you mean,” I said with a shrug. “But what could we possibly do? It seems like these little guys got it handled.”

“Yeah, I guess they do.” She nodded affirmatively, seemingly more to herself than me, before placing her hands on her hips. “You ready to go join up with the others and give our mission debriefing?”

“Mission debriefing? You make it sound so fancy. But sure, let’s head home.”

“Home, huh? Is that how you think of it?”

I blushed slightly as we strolled along through the woods. “I guess I’ve felt like I belong here more than I ever have anywhere else.”

“You know that’s pretty terrible considering we’ve been on this planet less than a week and we’re facing the possibility of total annihilation, right?”

“I am aware.”

“Well, as long as you’re aware of it, I guess.”

She shook her head, but thankfully, we had reached the training area, which was more crowded than ever.

“Geez, has it only been one day? Because I see at least twenty more kinda-human bodies out there.”

“A day and a half,” I corrected. “Technically, two full days since we decided to do this expedition at all.”

“Point still stands, these mimics are really growing.”

“Goes to show what wonders having access to the appropriate amount of food plus free thought can do to a stunted population.”

We strode around and across, reaching the middle where, sure enough, Gonzales was shouting instructions at a large group of mimics. I thought I spotted Astaroth and Pyjik at the other end, helping more of the younger mimics, but I couldn’t say for sure.

“Hey, you’re back,” Gonzales said, although she didn’t turn away from her pupils. “I was certain you’d be dead as soon as night passed, and you didn’t come back.”

“We were supposed to stay out overnight,” Eske corrected, sounding a little irritated. “You knew that.”

“Yeah…but I also knew how often things tend to go wrong, so I half-expected you to come limping back just as the sun set.”

“Wow, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“You’re welcome.” Gonzalez turned and flashed us a flat look.

She turned back to face her students and shouted six more drills before walking to actually join us. “We should go meet up with the boss lady and the others then, shouldn’t we?”

I couldn’t quite figure out her behavior or strange tone, so I let it go. “Yeah, that sound like a good idea.”

“I think Mimic’s at the ships with the twins. Let’s go.”

“Shouldn’t we just call them on the comms?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Comms are down right now. Side effect of the twins’ experiments with making a system that can communicate to the ships. Should be up by late tonight or tomorrow, but you know how these things are.”

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

Eske said nothing, and I had the feeling that Gonzales had irritated the maintenance woman with her earlier comments. I didn’t know quite what to say either, so I chose to keep quiet while we strolled back to our stolen ships.

Man, what was with Gonzales? I knew she had been through a lot, but her changes didn’t really seem to have to do with the trauma she had survived during our imprisonment.…or maybe they were. It was hard to say. I certainly wasn’t enough of an expert on human psychology to know.

The weight of the unspoken words pressed down on me, though, and I felt discomfort grow in my middle. I missed talking to her, and the wisecracking quips she would belt out in rapid succession.

I missed my friend.

We had almost reached the ships when finally, Gonzales spoke again.

“I am starting to feel better,” she said simply, without facing either of us. And neither Eske nor I needed to ask what she meant by that.

“Oh, good,” I answered honestly. “I’m glad.”

And that was that. She didn’t say any more, and we didn’t ask, but it did help me feel a little less hopeless about the entire situation.

Then, we finally were at the ships and Bahn spotted us almost immediately.

“Hey! They’re back!”

In a surprising show of athleticism, he nearly vaulted from the cockpit of the ship that he was working on. The next thing I knew, he was bounding toward us and throwing his arms around me in a hug. While Bahn had never been cold, he had never quite been so physically affectionate either.

“I was worried, you know. Bad things seem to happen when we split up, so I’d prefer we don’t do that anymore. At least not for more than a few hours.”

Ciangi clicked her tongue as she approached us. “You should have been here; he’s been bungling experiment after experiment because he’s so worried.”

“Can you blame me?” Bahn shot back, releasing me just to pull Eske and Gonzales into a hug. “Splitting up has, in no particular order, brought us face to face with a military faction that wants to overthrow our government, gotten us imprisoned, and…did whatever it was you guys did on your journey to get all the animals.”

“Hah, I guess that’s true. Well, we’re here. How goes your repairs?”

“Still working on our communication array. I probably just need another day for that.”

“Good,” Mimic murmured, coming along behind them. “Because we have two days, maybe three max, before they’re here.”

“Three?” I asked. “Do we have enough set up?”

“No, not nearly,” Mimic said with a sigh. “Food is almost to the appropriate levels, but water is at only about half of what we’ll need if they try to poison the natural rivers. And if this goes to ground, then we don’t have nearly enough defenses. Not to mention that Gonzales is still upgrading and improving weapons, and most of my siblings are still only in the beginning phases of self-defense.”

My stomach twisted painfully. I had hoped that when we returned, we would have tons of good news and just be ready to roll right into our final stage of preparation. But there was still so much to do, it seemed impossible to ever be able to complete enough of our work to stand a chance.

“A lot of your little ones are taking care of the animals. Once that is done, perhaps we can start to try to build some barricades along the outside of the capital? Maybe some walls, and battlements, or something?”

“Yeah, but can we do that in just two days?” Gonzales asked.

“Possibly?” Mimic said, running a hand through her hair. “If I was able to get all of the younglings on it, there’s a chance we could get at least a bit of protection up.”

“Actually,” Bahn said, “there are a lot of different parts of the crashed ship you could cannibalize to help with the defenses.”

“You’re right. Good idea. Can you get the comm relay back so that I can send a message to my sub-leaders?” Mimic asked.

“Uh, sure. Gimme about an hour or so.” He stretched and pulled a ration bar from his pocket, and I was reminded of how hungry I was. “Anything else ya need?”

“That should be all for the moment. For now, I will just go to them directly.” Mimic looked in my direction, giving me a firm nod before her human form melted away and she shifted into the body of a great bird. With a couple flaps of her wings, she was off, leaving me to wonder at the curious welcome.

I knew that she had a lot on her plate, but I couldn’t help but think about her reaction. She hadn’t congratulated us, or even thanked us. That seemed entirely unlike her. It was probably the stress…but I couldn’t help but feel like maybe she was becoming overwhelmed by all of the planning and mounting stress.

Maybe, if we had time, I could talk to her about it. For now, it looked like I had a new job: creating barricades to survive the coming war. No pressure, right?

It looked like I needed to do some research. Pulling my datalog from my pack, I searched through the database to see if there was anything already saved to the device. Goodness knew there was no way I was going to be able to access the net so far from Earth or any government-financed ships.

Thankfully, I saw a whole folder on war, covering from ancient times to modern day. I was sure that I would find something useful, and began reading immediately. With any luck, I would do Mimic proud and give us a fighting chance to survive if this went to ground.

It turned out that building battlements wasn’t that hard, especially with a horde of mimics to help that seemed able to break down materials with their own saliva. They would bring me supplies in waves, and I would just mark out where I needed them, show them a diagram, and they would hop to it.

Obviously, none of them could actually communicate with me, but Mimic had assigned one of her junior officers to help me and she translated any queries they had that she couldn’t answer herself.

I hadn’t quite caught her name, but she had the form of a small woman with blueish-pale skin and nearly colorless, reddish hair. Her features were nondescript and watered down, as if someone had sculpted them out of clay and then erased half of their work. I guessed that she was still learning how to hold human form, but it was a bit unnerving, so I tried not to look at her directly.

I was sure that it would have been much harder if the little ones weren’t doing about ninety percent of the physical labor, but I still was pretty busy catching things, helping right things, and even occasionally stopping the erected partitions from falling over before they were fully secure.

By the end of the day, I was thoroughly exhausted and aching. We went on and on well after dark-fall, and I guessed that there were only a handful of hours before sunrise. I stumbled through the door of Mimic’s place and found it lightless and quiet, everyone else having gone to bed.

I made my way to the kinda-bathroom Mimic had designed for us and filled the sink with water from a pitcher on a stool, then washed my face and pits. From there, I grabbed a jagged piece of cloth hanging over a bar on the wall and wiped myself down.

By the time all of that was done, I was even more exhausted than I thought possible, and I felt like I would collapse before I reached my mattress.

Somehow, I did make it, and I was surprised to see Mimic laying there, her hands folded neatly on her middle.

“Hey there,” I murmured, setting myself down next to her.

“Hello,” she said just as quietly.

“I’m a bit shocked that you’re not out all night like usual.”

“I…I needed a break,” she whispered. “I don’t have time for one, but I needed one nonetheless.”

“Hey, you’ve been going and going and going,” I said. “Even you need a chance to breathe.”

“I can breathe after all of this is said and done.” She rolled over to face me, and I saw weariness etched across her features. “I have to protect my people.”

I reached out and pulled her to my chest, willing my warmth into her. “I know, I know. But you can’t protect them if you don’t take care of yourself.”

She sighed and buried her face against me. “Not too long ago, my entire life was just finding food and chittering with my family on the asteroid. We didn’t know or care about anything beyond our little rock, and we didn’t have a concept of the future. It was just…the present and that was it.

“I get that now it’s because we all had so little nutrients on that rock, but at the time, I didn’t know and that seemed like enough of an existence. But now…now I have the weight of all of our futures on me, and I wonder if I was the one who was meant to survive your ship at all.” She drew in a shuddering breath and I felt a little bit of damp against my shirt. Was…was she crying?!

“There were others on that asteroid, smarter, stronger, better than me. If they had been the ones to live, this whole war probably could have been avoided outright.”

“You can’t think that,” I said, pushing her hair back. “You were the one to survive because you were meant to. No one else was meant to walk this path but you. And if you wanna argue about people not deserving things, how about we talk about a freakin’ janitor making first contact?”

She sighed lightly, and I thought I felt her tears ebb. “You may have a point, I suppose.”

“Exactly. So, no more of this self-deprecation, and more self-celebration.”

“Sure, but you first.”

I chuckled slightly. “Alright, you and me both may have a habit of chronically downplaying and doubting ourselves. In fact, Eske lectured me on it recently.”

“Did she? She certainly seems to have deciphered the dynamics of the group rather quickly. I suppose we’re lucky that it was her, out of anyone, that just happened to fall asleep in the ship.”

“Huh, yeah. I just keep worrying that one day that luck will run out.”

We fell quiet after that, and I just listened to my heart beat against her head. She still hadn’t quite figured out that particular human trait, but I didn’t mind.

“Higgens?”

“Yes?” I answered.

“What are we doing?”

“Well, right now, we’re lying down.”

She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. We kissed. We have…feelings for each other. What does that mean? What do we do?”

“Oh, um…” Here it was, the question that I had been asking myself over and over and over again. And now I needed to answer it, but I was no closer to the resolution than I was before. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Nope. I don’t. But we’ve figured everything else out on our own, so we might as well do the same for this.”

“I… Just… This seems different. I’ve tried looking up romance in the files we have and the reports I found were…conflicting, at best. Some describe it as purely a hormonal reaction, but I feel these same things when I am in my own body and don’t have any of the same hormones that I have in this form. Some describe it as this physical interaction with interlocking parts, but I—”

“Yeah, you can ignore those. The, uh, physical part isn’t always necessary. Sometimes it is important, but never mandatory.”

“I see. And what you say makes sense, but what doesn’t is the dozens and dozens of different definitions these things have. I just don’t understand what the protocol is, or what we’re supposed to do.”

I shook my head slightly. “Who would have thought that the little spikey thing that I found in the hold of a mining ship would turn out to be such an overthinker.”

“Perhaps I wouldn’t have to overthink if our paths weren’t so complicated.”

“Fair.” I pulled her tighter to my chest, knowing that I couldn’t really hurt her. “Complicated or not, I’m happy as long as you’re here, and I’ll fight as hard as I can to make sure we’re never separated again.”

“If I didn’t know better, I would say that you’re making a promise.”

I pressed a singular, soft kiss against her forehead. “I am. I may not get how this interspecies thing is supposed to work, or what these feelings mean we’re supposed to do, but what I do know is that I’m never leaving you again. No matter what these aliens bring, you’ve got me.”

“And you have me,” she said with a long, contented sigh. “You should probably get some sleep.”

“Sure, but only if you promise to be here in the morning,” I countered.

“I really should get to work…”

I set my chin on her head, letting out a very un-masculine whine. “Please? We have so few nights left together.”

“That’s awfully pessimistic of you.”

I shrugged. “You know that’s a possibility. A strong possibility.”

“And you’re still here. You could just hop into your spaceship and fly away.”

“That would defeat the purpose of me stealing them for you, wouldn’t it?”

“That is very true.”

I felt her relax in her arms and her skin grow warm and steely. I didn’t have to open my eyes to know that she was melting into her original form. I didn’t mind at all, of course. Mimic was Mimic, no matter what form she took.

And like that, we fell asleep in each other’s arms.

5

Touch the Sky

I looked nervously at the controls below me. I could hear Bahn and Ciangi arguing over the comms and it was enough to tie me down to reality before my mind went off into a terrible scenario of horrible space crashes or spiraling through the atmosphere in a fire tornado.

After a whole lot of explanation and showing us what was what, it was finally time for some pilot training. We were all going to have assistance from the various software that Bahn and Ciangi had integrated, but there was still plenty that we would have to do on our own.

“Is everyone ready?” Ciangi asked through the speaker.

“Yeah,” Gonzales’s voice answered her. “Just wondering how you ended up with the good luck of staying on the ground while all of us are risking our lives in space.”

“Hey, someone’s gotta stay on the ground and run this thing,” Ciangi said with almost sing-songy sweetness. “And last time I checked, that weapons engineering degree didn’t exactly come with a programming aspect, so…”

“Yeah, yeah. I get it. Just know that if I end up getting blown up in the great void, you better be the one throwing me one heck of a funeral.”

“You’re dead, how would you know if I did that or not?”

“I am confused. Is this considered normal conversation between students and teachers?”

Urdet broke the mood, of course, and Ciangi cleared her throat. “More humor, my very, very dry friend. Anyways, if you all will look to your panel, you will see the ignition switch. Please press that while turning the engine readout to five.”

I took a deep breath and did as she instructed, feeling the rumble of the fighter below me. We hadn’t lifted off yet, but my heart was already pounding with anticipation. I had never flown myself and now I was training to fight a war. Great. Talk about jumping in feet-first.

“Alright, I’m going to engage your vehicles to get you into space. Be prepared for a whole lot of g-force coming at you real fast.”

Sure enough, we all started to lift off. Although I was protected by some serious hardware, I could still hear the massive thunder of our fighters all taking off at once. Funny how those sounds didn’t really travel in space.

And by funny, I meant absolutely terrifying.

I had never really been a nervous flyer before, but I had never been expected to fight an entire space battle with an unknown alien species that had a definite technological edge on us. So, in other words, I was pretty much screwed.

But I wasn’t backing down.

We shot up through the sky, my skin pulling back from my face. The entire vehicle rattled way harder than I remembered it doing during our landing, and I was beginning to wonder if Ciangi and Bahn’s ‘upgrades’ were really going to be a good thing after all.

I heard the cries of several of the mimics coming through the comms, some elated, some terrified, and some just confused, but the clamor calmed down as we finally breached the atmosphere and launched ourselves into space.

The rattling and shaking ceased and once more, I was surrounded by pure darkness, with Mimic’s planet down below us. It was the same view we’d had when we first returned from stealing the fighters, but for some reason, it seemed different.

“Alright, I’m continuing your autopilot to get you all a good distance away from each other, so we don’t have any whoopsie daisies. Just sit tight.”

“How does one sit tigh—”

“Colloquialism, Urdet,” Mimic said quickly. “Colloquialism.”

“Ah, of course.”

We all drifted apart from each other and I looked out my window to see if I could catch a glance of Mimic, Bahn, Eske or Gonzales. We had all been spaced fairly far away from each other, so the younger mimics could look to us for guidance and morale. And, try as I might, I wasn’t able to spot anyone through the glace of their nav-window.

After a few minutes, our ships stopped moving and the hum of the engines quieted just slightly.

“I’ve turned the autopilot off now. You’re all in control of your own vessels. Now, I do have some failsafes built in, so hopefully, you all won’t crash into each other in a fiery blaze brought on by a lack of dexterity, but still try to keep your distance from each other, okay?”

“Yeah, not filling me with the most confidence here,” I said, gripping the controls.

“Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll all be fine.”

“Easy for you to say, you’re down on the planet.”

“Anyways, if everyone wants to take a hold of their nav-controls, take yourself into a dip downward.”

I did so, and I underestimated just how much kick the engines would have. One moment, I was sitting there, and the next, I was hurtling downwards fast enough to make my cheeks pull back and my eyes dry almost instantly.

“Whoa, pull up there, Higgens, Astaroth, and, um, Viggo! You’re all going way too hard on the throttle there. Ease it back. And, er… Madsley, I believe, you’ve careened too far left. Adjust your course.”

I let go of the controls for a moment and my ship stopped its suicide plummet. The mild break gave me a second to breathe, and I tried again.

This time, I didn’t sink like a stone and instead glided downward like a knife through butter.

“There you guys go. Very good. Now I want you to pull up in an arc.”

This time, I didn’t just yank it in a direction, but instead urged the controls in a gentle, swooping motion. Sure enough, I completed the maneuver rather smoothly, if I did say so myself.

“Huh, you know pilots go to school for a couple of years. It’s kinda amazing that we’re even able to do this at all, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Well, Bahn and I programmed a sort of smoothing algorithm into all of your navs. It tempers your more extreme motions and helps with linear movements.”

“Ah. So, I probably shouldn’t let this go to my head then.”

“Nope, probably not. Um, Bahn, you did more of a ninety-degree turn rather than a swoop. Can you try again for me?”

“Of course.”

A few more seconds passed, and then we heard Ciangi again. “Alright, and now you guys are going to pull off some rolls. This is difficult because it is an intense pull on your wheel, but it is measured and consistent. You do this to get out of the direct line of fire if you have a ship following you.”

“And by ship, you mean another small fighter, like us? We wouldn’t necessarily be able to dodge the blast of a full battleship like the one that crashed into the mountain?” Eske asked, and I could just envision her adjusting her goggles as she did so.

“Well, we don’t know if they’re going to have single-man fighters or small-team fighters. If they do, you all have the immediate order to return to the shielding of the capital. We don’t have enough of you, and there’s just not enough time to train you properly for a proper space firefight. Your job is to distract a full battleship and nothing else. You all got that?”

“Oh…” Eske muttered. “I didn’t know that?”

“Yeah, I mean, you guys are smart, and I have no doubt that you’d all make excellent pilots, but you’re only getting a day, maybe two, to learn how to utilize the equipment you’ve been given. There’s only so much that you can do.” The blonde took a deep breath that I could hear even over the comm. “Now, who’s onto the next phase of your little lesson? Only six more hours to go!”

There was a communal groan, but then, she was already moving on.

I got the lessons fairly well, with only a few fumbles here and there, and I began to wonder if I might maybe stand a chance at this space fight thing with all of the coin twins’ buffs.

But, as accomplished as I felt, I was still exhausted when Ciangi finally initiated the sequence to have us land. It was only slightly less stressful than our takeoff, and when the hatch finally opened and I clambered to the ground, my legs felt like jelly.

“Well,” Eske said, coming up behind me. “That was eventful.”

“It certainly was,” Mimic agreed. “By the way, I had a thought.”

“What was that?” I asked, turning to shoot her a smile.

“This could very well be our last night together. I thought that perhaps we should commemorate the event with a nice meal in each other’s company?”

“Are you suggesting a type of last supper?” Gonzales asked, raising her brow.

“I prefer to think of it more as a supper that could possibly be our last but may also be the start of a new chapter in our history.”

“That’s a little wordy,” Gonzales countered. “So, let’s just go with last supper.”

“If that is what you wish.”

“Are you sure we can spend that sort of time?” I asked with concern. Sure, it sounded like a nice way to bond with my friends, considering we had been so split up and busy over the past week or so after our arrival, but we were down to a single day, or day and a half, before our alien not-so-friends came rolling in with vengeance in their eyes. Assuming they had eyes, that was. Spending several hours together just eating and talking sounded like several hours we could better spend prepping ourselves.

“Aren’t you the one that told me we should cherish these times while we have them because we don’t know if we have tomorrow?” Mimic shot right back, her eyes crinkling at the corners.

“Not in those exact words,” I responded stubbornly, although I knew I had already lost. “But it sounds familiar.”

“I think Ciangi would love that,” Bahn said, coming up alongside us. “She said that she’s been feeling a bit isolated from the group as it is.”

“Then it’s settled,” Mimic said. “We all will return to our respective duties until sundown. And then, we will dine with each other. Higgens.” Her eyes flicked to me. “Will you be able to comprise a meal from the fabricator on your ship? I will cover for you on your duties with the barricades.”

“Sure,” I said, trying not to chide myself on the fact that I was so easily replaced. I’d already lectured myself on that yesterday and I didn’t really need to go over it again.

“Very well then. I will see all of you tonight.” With that, Mimic gave us a little nod, then marched past us, no doubt to head toward the section of the barricades I had left the junior mimics working on last. That seemed to be the signal for everyone to get to it, and we all split up to our respective duties.

Well, if my job was to program a feast into our fabricator, then I was going to program a feast that they would remember for the rest of their lives.

Which could actually be not that long anyways.

6

An Honor and a Pleasure Serving Together

Night fell much more quickly than it had any reason to. But that was how time seemed to go nowadays. Always rushing for a point that would utterly change the rest of all our histories. But, even with the hours slipping away, I managed to program an entire feast and transport it to Mimic’s house.

Of course, I had a bunch of smaller mimics to help me out, a group of them following me curiously as they tried to figure out what I was doing and what I was holding. It was funny to see them sniff, crawl around, and ultimately carry some of the dishes. It seemed that while Mimic had taught them plenty about our culture, she hadn’t quite gotten to our many different ways to sustain ourselves.

I was the first one there, of course, and I set everything up in a way I hoped everyone would love. I had made old-fashioned pizza, a roasted turkey with stuffing, a full green salad with fresh chicken and other veggies, a rack of ribs, steak, a full platter of fresh fruit, and a bunch of fancy cheeses.

It was amazing the types of molecular recipes the fabricator had on the up-to-date, new and improved battleship we had stolen. Much more than we could ever hope for on the old mining ship, or any of the other vessels we had stolen. I guessed there were perks to having tons of government money, and one of them was getting a super high-powered food-maker.

Surprisingly, it was Eske who came in first, covered in sweat and with dirt all across her upper body.

“Oh, my goodness, it smells amazing in here!”

“Thanks. But what happened to you?”

“What do you mean? Oh, this?” She laughed and dusted herself off a bit. “One of the middle ones gave me quite a good toss a bit ago. Happened to hit a mud patch, of course, so here we are.”

“Well, why don’t you wash up and by the time you’re done, hopefully everyone will be here.”

“Right. Good plan. Do we still have any jumpsuits?”

“Yeah, there’s a stack right by the door to the bathroom in one of the crates.”

“Awesome, thanks.”

Ciangi and Bahn were up next, carrying a huge mass of wiring and other tools between them.

“Hey! No work at the table!”

“We know,” Ciangi shot back, sticking her tongue out at me. “This is for after, since this might be our last night.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Um…a bomb.”

“A bomb?”

“Yeah, we figured that we could possibly need some small smart bombs for, you know, reasons.”

“I don’t know if Mimic would like that. Bombs are just as likely to kill us as any invaders.”

“That is correct,” Bahn said quietly. “But it is also just as beneficial to have a backup plan.”

I sighed and shook my head. “Just put it in your room. Hopefully, you won’t blow us all to pieces before we actually get to the battle.”

“Sir, yes, sir!” the blond chirped with a mock salute.

I sighed, rubbing my temples. Those two were certainly something, even after all this time. But before I could really expound on that idea, Gonzales was strolling in, dark circles under her eyes and an expression on that said she could really use a good meal.

“Hey,” she said, sidling into one of the makeshift chairs with an aching sigh.

“Hey,” I answered back, not quite sure what I should say and what I shouldn’t. We hadn’t had a good conversation since we were on the ship we had hijacked, and I couldn’t help but feel partially responsible for her discomfort, even if I didn’t know exactly how I had caused it.

“Man, this looks awesome.”

“Thanks,” I said, shooting her a cautious smile. “I do say I might have out done myself.”

“Well, the fabricator outdid itself, but you did a pretty good job of programming it.” Her eyes roved the table that I had laid out before brightening suddenly. “Oh! Is that steak?!”

She reached out and I had to bat her hand away. “Hey, wait for everyone else.”

“Fine.” She sat back and crossed her arms. “Am I the only one here?”

“No, you’re actually the second to last,” I replied. “Eske is washing herself up and the twins are upstairs with some gadgetry.”

“Ah, of course they are. And why is Eske washing up? Is she sweatier than usual?”

“Apparently, she took a faceplant in the dirt today, courtesy of one of her trainees. Got all sorts of mucked up.”

“Hah, of course she did. Wish I was there to see it.”

“I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunities to watch Eske get thrown in one way or another, considering her hobby is literally fighting people.”

“Will there be?” Gonzales asked, her dark eyes growing serious.

“…that’s what I hope.”

The tiniest of smiles crossed her features. “Hope. What a strange idea. I think I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like.”

I could only stand so much of my friend looking melancholy and miserable, so I sat next to her and looked her in the eye. “What’s going on, Gonzales?”

“What do you mean?” she replied flatly.

“You know exactly what I mean,” I said without faltering. “You’ve been hurting ever since we came back, and isolating yourself from all of us. It’s fine if you need space, but I can clearly see that you’re hurting.”

“I…” She sighed. “It’s nothing. Honestly. I’m just going through some emotional stuff and its silly. I’m sure I’ll be over it soon.”

“You don’t have to do this alone, you know. You have all of us.”

“I know, I know. And I know that you would do pretty much anything for me. But that actually kind of makes it worse. It’s just something that I have to go through alone.”

“If you say so, but please, know I’m always here.”

“I do.” To my surprise, she reached out and put her hand over mine. “But you’re in love with Mimic, and she’s in love with you, and that is that.”

But what could that have to do with anyth—

Oh.

Oh.

I got it. With sudden, glaring clarity, I got it. My face paled and I felt my palms get clammy as I realized that the reason Gonzales was upset was because she had feelings for me.

…wow. I was an idiot.

How could I have missed it? How could I have been so dumb?! Now that I knew, it was obvious. Everything that she had said abruptly fell into place and I opened my mouth, not knowing what to say but feeling like I had to say something.

“Sorry for my late arrival, one of the barricades was giving us considerable trouble.”

Of course, that was when Mimic would walk in. Gonzales jerked her hand away. Just like that, the moment between us was over and everyone was converging in one spot.

“Dude, this looks totally fantastic,” Eske said, practically jumping into a seat. “I couldn’t really see it with my goggles so dirtied up, but this is the best fabricator-fare I’ve seen since I worked on a high-level diplomat’s ship.”

“Thank you, thank you,” I said with a mock bow as the coin twins rushed to sit next to each other. “Since everyone’s here, let’s dig in!”

“Wait, what about drinks?” Eske asked, looking around as if she was missing something.

“That is a surprise.” I said, crossing over to the large vat of cool spring water that was kept at the back of the house. Reaching in, I pulled out two bottles of sparkling cider I had found in the captain’s quarters of the battleship. When I brought it back in, a cheer echoed from around the table and our feast truly began.

Everyone dug in, even Mimic taking part in the meal even though she technically didn’t need our food, and soon our mouths were full and our teeth were busy chewing.

Of course, that didn’t mean we stopped talking. No, the jokes, puns, and teasing didn’t stop, and several times, I found myself laughing around mouthfuls of food.

“Do you remember the time you first met Higgens?” Eske said, leaning over the table with a large chicken drumstick in her hand. “Did you have a feeling about him, that he was going to be such an integral part of your lives? Or was it just like any other day?”

“You wanna know the truth?” Gonzales said.

“Yeah, of course.”

“He was weird. Like, really weird. I went to introduce myself to him, because you know, I’m friendly like that, and a bunch of water just came rushing out of his mouth. He wiped his face and then tried to shake my hand with his wet palm.”

I blushed vermillion at the memory and looked down at my full plate of food. “I had been drinking from my canteen when you surprised me. I tried to play it cool, but I, uh, didn’t.”

“Yeah, you most certainly didn’t.”

That started another round of laughter that went on for far too long for me to be comfortable, so I desperately tried to change the topic.

“So, Bahn, Ciangi, what did you think when you first met Gonzales?”

“Um, not much really,” Ciangi said with a shrug. “We didn’t really talk to each other much until that really bad bout of pneumonia broke out on the ship. We all got placed next to each other in the infirmary and I guess you can say that the rest is history.”

“Pneumonia? I guessed I missed that.”

“It was all over about a week before you joined us. Actually, that might have been the entire reason we needed you. Our maintenance person had some serious complications and got a blood infection, so we had to drop him off at a medical station.”

“Huh,” I murmured. “That feels like it should be strange.”

Bahn shrugged noncommittedly. “Maybe it is. Maybe we were all destined to meet for this very planet and this very fight. Or maybe it was all coincidence. Either way, I’m glad that it happened, and I am now here, with all of you.”

He raised his glass, beaming at us. I didn’t think I had ever seen him smile so many times in such a short period, but it seemed the crisis was really bringing him out of his shell. A strange reaction to have, but I wasn’t complaining. “To us, and our friendship, and the journeys it has taken us on!”

“Hear, hear!” the rest of us said, raising our own glasses in a toast.

“I don’t understand,” Mimic said with an amused smile. “What is happening?”

“It’s a sort of celebration thing,” I explained, raising her hand with my free arm. “It’s called a toast, actually, and you clink glasses together after someone makes a speech or says something nice.”

“I see,” she said, clinking her glass against all of ours. “Hear, hear, indeed.”

More pleasant conversation ensued, and the minutes quickly passed until finally almost all of the food was either gone or too cold to be appetizing, and we were all just lounging around with very full stomachs.

But naturally, it couldn’t just stay calm and laid back for long. No, with the knack that only Eske had, she looked to Mimic and asked a question that was far too loaded to be answered easily.

“So, what did you think when you first met Higgens? You were a little, tiny thing, right? Was he some big, scary dude? Did you think he was going to eat you or something?”

Mimic said nothing for a moment, many emotions seeming to cross over her face, before she set down her drink and smiled slightly.

“The very first time I saw him, I was terrified out of my mind. He was some long, giant creature that I had never seen before.

“But almost immediately, I just got this sense that I didn’t need to be afraid of him. It’s hard to say exactly how or why I thought back then, my mind was so stunted from feeding only on the asteroid for goodness knows how many years.

“And then, the more we interacted, the more I knew that he was someone I would always be able to trust. That he would never want to hurt me, and would always try to do his best by me. And when I snuck into the engine room and absorbed all that extra nuclear energy that you all were just wasting, and he tried to protect me from you even though he had no idea what I was doing, I knew that he would be the closest thing to a friend I could ever hope for.”

“Wow,” Eske said with a whistle. “I wish I had a friendship origin story like that.”

“Eske,” I reminded gently, my cheeks coloring from Mimic’s words. “You literally only know all of us because you happened to fall asleep on a ship you were assigned to that we stole. If that’s not an insane friendship origin, I don’t know what is.”

“Hah, you have me there. And believe it or not, I’m eternally grateful that I did. Yes, I miss my mom and my brother, but they would be proud of what I’m doing here. And I sincerely hope that one day, when I return to them, I can tell them all of the amazing adventures that you guys have taken me on.”

“That’s an idea I can get behind,” I said, lifting my glass with the last bit of drink left in it. “To family, and to tomorrow.”

We all clinked our glasses again and finished off our carbonated drinks. After that, we lasted maybe a half an hour or so before the food sleepiness, or the ‘itis’ as a friend had once called it, settled in. With lots of hugs, high-fives, and good feelings all around, we returned to our rooms, happy and content, and perhaps for a moment forgetting just what loomed on the horizon. Mimic and I collapsed to my mattress, happy and giggling, curled into each other like our last lifelines in the world. And perhaps we were.

“I love you,” Mimic whispered, her voice almost impossible to hear.

“And I love you,” I responded, confidently for once.

Tangled up with each other, she let me pepper her face with little kisses, before we both drifted to sleep.

7

Arrival

For once, my dreams weren’t terrifying, or weighed down by the reality of our situation. They were light and full of color and the promise of things to come, which made the sharp yelling of Urdet that much harsher in my ear as he burst into our room.

“Our sensors are going off! They’ll be here within the hour!”

That got me up and I scrambled to my feet nearly as quickly as Mimic did.

“Set off the alarms, get all of our pilots to their ships, and make sure the children are herded into the tunnels below the capitol. It’s time.”

“Yes, sister!” And that was all he needed before dashing out.

I barely had time to get to our door before Gonzales, Eske, and the coin twins were dashing into the hall.

“Did I just hear what I thought I heard?” the weapons engineer asked, her eyes wide. “They’re here?”

“They are!” I said, running past her. “We need to get to the ships, ASAP.”

“You don’t need to tell me twice!”

Soon, we were all dashing toward where Ciangi had landed the fighters. Ciangi, of course, veered off at the last minute, her path being the communication array that she and Bahn had built to help with our piloting of the ships.

But what I didn’t expect was for Gonzales to suddenly turn to the left when we were almost to our rides.

“Hey, what are you doing?!” I called.

“Going onto the main battleship!” she answered.

“But what about your ship that you practiced in?”

“It’s in the hangar actually. Trust me, I have a plan!”

I wanted to argue further, and ask exactly what plan she was talking about, but she was already out of range and I needed to get into my ship. I guessed I just had to trust her. That was about the only thing we had over the aliens.

Unless they too were a merry band of misfits thrust together by impossible odds, but I doubted it.

I opened the hatch, slid in, and got my harness on just as Ciangi’s breathless voice came over the comms.

“Hey, how many of you are there now? I only show three engines on.”

“I just got in,” I answered honestly, heart in my throat. “Turning it on now.”

“Good. Does anyone else have a headcount?”

“We’re just waiting on four more,” Bahn answered, also sounding breathless. Maybe he was still clambering into his cockpit? It was hard to say; his ship was so far on the other side of our formation.

“Alright, I’m going to just fire up all of the ships and wait until I get an affirmative from all of them.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Although the pause was giving me enough time to breathe, it only made my heart hammer that much harder. Every second felt like an eon, and now that the moment had come, I was sure that we were utterly unprepared for it.

I only had seven hours of pilot training combined with what little experience I had in college. And yet I was about to engage in a cat and mouse game with a powerful alien race.

Geez, I hoped my sweaty palms wouldn’t interfere too much with my using the controls or otherwise, I was going to be in a really bad spot.

“Alright! I’ve got a checkin from every ship. Initiating takeoff now, prepare for g-force, just like before.”

I didn’t say anything. None of us did. I could only grit my teeth and wait as the ship thrummed to life, and we began the countdown to war.

This time, instead of terrifying me, the rumble of my little ship gave me hope. Like David and Goliath, we were the simple stones in the slingshot. Hopefully, we would be just as useful in taking down the giant.

It didn’t take long for us to arc up into the atmosphere, and this time, we were much more certain as we took to space. I could see the approaching vessel on our nav display and it was truly massive. Bigger than any ship Earth could ever hope to create, and then some.

We could only hope that Bahn’s estimates held true, and Mimic’s planet wouldn’t be obliterated by some space-beam.

“Positioning you all behind the moon now. From there, you guys are going to be mostly on your own. Our algorithm should smooth out jerky motions and help with different tactical moves, but your little tutorial session will have to do the rest. If you need me urgently, press the call button at the bottom of your dash. But if all of you press it at once, there’s only so much I can do, so use it sparingly.”

“Yeah, yeah, we get it,” Gonzales said. “Now hide the little babes with me behind the moon. Mama’s got something cooking.”

“I object to that metaphor, but okay. I’ll be setting all of your shields to low and engines to impulse while you’re there. The last thing we want is to tip off the alien to our presence before we can get the drop on them.”

“Heard,” I said, eyes flicking to all of the small ships around me. Wondering how many of us would ever touch the ground again. “We’ll keep it as quiet as we can on our side.”

“Good.”

The comm cut off and she maneuvered us into position. Then the waiting game began.

It was an incredibly unpleasant mix of boredom and absolute anxiety. Every second, I was sure that the alien ship would suddenly pull into view, but then that second passed, and the giant vessel had only moved the most painstaking, tiny blip on our nav display. I guessed that being so large meant that it couldn’t zip about like our little ships. Which made sense, considering our whole plan involved us maneuvering around them like a swarm of pestering bugs.

Sweat beaded on my brow, and my own breath rasped in my ears. If I didn’t know it was impossible, I would have thought my heart was beating four times louder than usual. It was too much adrenaline and not enough output. Against all logic, I found myself hoping that the aliens would hurry up and show so I could figure out if we all lived to see another day or not.

Then, just when I was sure I was going to have an attack of apoplexy from the anticipation, the very tip of the ship came into view from around the moon. It was different from the vessel that had crashed on Mimic’s planet all those years ago. More pointed, instead of round, it had one central body, and then two smaller parts extending to the side, almost like a triangle, but with a pretty irregular border.

“Hold steady,” Ciangi whispered over the comms, as if they would be able to hear her if she spoke too loud.

More and more ship came into view, and every time I thought it must finally be done, there was still more spacecraft to be revealed. The thing was bigger than any city I had ever seen, and I had just spent a year on Earth.

After what seemed like an eternity, it finally came to a stop over the planet. It loomed there, our own personal harbinger of doom, and sat there for a moment.

“What is it doing?” I heard one of the mimics ask, I wasn’t sure which.

“Preparing to destroy a completely unarmed civilization,” Mimic answered calmly. “Or at least, that’s what they think.”

Sure enough, I saw movement below them, just barely visible from our position behind the moon. I watched breathlessly as what looked like the biggest, most high-tech cannon slowly lowered itself from between parting plates.

“Now?” Bahn asked, sounding just as anxious as I felt.

“Not yet,” Ciangi replied shortly.

The cannon lowered even further, and in an almost comical surprise—if anything about this situation could be funny—the parts extended outward, like someone had deployed an umbrella, then shot forward, until the cannon was suddenly twice as long and glowing green.

“Now!” Ciangi cried.

Our engines all blazed to life and then we were shooting forward.

This was it, our big Hail Mary, our one-in-a-million shot, our little guys versus the big guys surprise attack. I could only do my best and hope that we all made it to see another day.

After all, I finally had something to live for.

8

Space Fight

I could feel my face pull back from my skull as my ship rushed forward, and I did my best to hold onto the controls. I was very quickly beginning to realize how incredibly stupid it was to hope that a single day’s lesson would be enough, but I guessed I was just going to have to roll with it and adapt.

The coin twins’ algorithm certainly helped, and by the time I reached the grand ship, I was maybe, sorta, kinda getting the hang of flying.

“Alright, someone get me a clean visual of that cannon so that I can program the coordinates into your weapons systems!” Ciangi cried, letting out a whoop. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought she was enjoying this.

“And what happens if we can’t do that?” I heard Eske ask. Not nervously, surprisingly, but incredibly matter-of-factly considering we were all in the middle of our first galactic firefight.

“Then you’re all firing manually, and real life doesn’t have friendly fire turned off, so you can see why that might be a doubly bad idea.”

“Right. Visual it is.”

We all moved forward, and I expected the ship to round on us, or vaporize all of us with a defensive ray we didn’t see. But it didn’t even react.

I supposed that was what we had been banking on. We were too small to be of much concern to them, and they couldn’t react quickly enough to our movements. We were the flies that would fly into the chinks in their armor.

Hopefully, we wouldn’t get swatted.

The closer I flew to the vessel, the more I realized that my view from the moon had not done it justice. The thing loomed like its own celestial body, filling up my entire field of view. Holding my breath, I ducked under it and the cannon was fully revealed.

“I got it! I’ve got the visual. Programming the location into your weapons systems now!”

We flew past it without doing anything the first time, then we all scattered in different directions as we turned around to pass again. The previously grayish glow was now a full-on shining light, and I could practically feel the void of space began to fill with a discharge of energy.

“Hey, I don’t think we’ve got a ton of time up here. That thing is about to fire.”

“Don’t worry,” Ciangi answered coolly, and I could hear furious typing in the background. “We have the shield up for a reason. It’s supposed to last a year against general fire. It can take a hit or two from that cannon… I just need to— I got it!” She let out a shriek that almost overloaded my earpiece. “Coordinates locked in, everyone open fire!”

Like a group of pilots that actually knew what they were doing, we converged on the weapon. Just like in our one practice, we waited until we were within range before letting loose with our firepower.

At first, it seemed like nothing was happening, that we were just hopelessly peppering the gargantuan gun and all of this was a futile distraction, but after the second past, I noticed the green light begin to flicker.

“We’re doing it, guys!” I cried.

“Don’t be too certain yet,” I heard Bahn murmur. “That cannon is bigger than anything I calculated. Let’s not let it—”

Before he could even finish the thought, the flickering emerald light flashed out in a blinding wave. I instinctively covered my eyes before remembering I needed to keep my hands on the controls, and I flailed to get them back in place before I spun off in some unintended direction.

The light cleared, and when I could see again, my breath died right in my lungs. For a single moment, there was no sound, no movement, just the illuminated cylinder in front of us.

The cannon was firing.

It almost would have been pretty if it wasn’t a means of wanton destruction. Instead of releasing a bomb, as I had expected, or a massive burst beam, it held a steady stream of virulent energy.

We all watched, stunned, as the beam just kept going and going. It was as if we were locked within a verdant spell, frozen in the raw power and fury just beyond the noses of our ships.

A booming sound and a panicked cry came over the comms, knocking me out of my reverie. It was Ciangi, who did not sound happy.

“Somebody please tell me that they are not firing a continuous beam at us.”

“I would,” I answered, my mouth dry and my tongue heavy between my teeth. “But then I would be lying.”

She let out a string of curses so impressive that I was surprised our comms didn’t combust. “Bahn, I know you had some lofty estimates, but that was allowing the engine setup we have here at least a minute between rounds to volley and recalibrate.”

“I’m well aware,” he answered dryly. “Continuous fire did not seem within the realm of possibilities. The risk of overheating, malfunction, and energy drain seemed far too great for such an advanced society to risk.”

“Well, they’re risking it, and we’re already starting to overheat down here. I don’t want to think what would happen if our setup stalls out for even a minute, so the quicker you guys blast that out of the sky, the better.”

“You do not need to tell me twice,” Mimic said, her ship rocketing forward.

That seemed to be the catalyst that shot us all into action. We swarmed as one, firing on the cannon with everything we had.

For a moment, all of space was alight with contrasting green and red. We peppered the cannon with everything, all our might, wheeling around as soon as we were past it to fire again.

Again, there was those few moments where I was sure that we weren’t doing anything at all, but on the third or fourth pass, the beam began to flicker once more.

“I’m getting a drop in the energy readings!” Ciangi sounded once again through our comms. “Keep going!”

So we did. I could feel the pride and triumph swell in my chest each time we pinwheeled and fired again. The flickering was increasing, and the illumination around us began to fade.

Then, with almost no warning, the cannon detached and started to fall toward the planet.

It had only been five minutes max since we had started our assault, yet it was over. We all cheered, in various languages, and I couldn’t help but be amazed at what we had done.

But apparently, Ciangi wasn’t content to sit back and celebrate. “Gonzales, we have separation! Go, go, go!”

It was only then that I realized that our weapons engineer had been entirely absent from the fray. I looked to the moon, perplexed, just in time to see her come shooting toward us much too fast to be safe.

But she didn’t slow. Instead, she turned the entire ship to the side. For a moment, I had no idea what she was doing, but then the hangar bay doors opened and she slowed down just enough to catch the falling cannon in the middle of its descent.

Gonzales let out a loud whoop. “I’ve got the payload! Getting ready for landing.”

“Not so fast,” Ciangi countered, and her tone was grim enough to let me know that our rejoicing had been a bit premature. “I’m getting readings from the mothership?”

“What kind of readings?” Mimic asked.

“Lots of ‘em. Lots and lots and lots of ‘em. You all need to get out of there, now! Gonzales, provide cover for the smaller ships!”

“Yes, ma’am! Tactical retreat it is. Get out of here, guys.”

“What about you?” I asked.

I could almost hear her wry smile through the comm. “Don’t worry. I’ll hold off the newcomers and dodge any alt-fire this big baddie may dish out. You just get planet-side.”

Something about leaving a friend behind didn’t sit right with me, and I opened my mouth to object. But before I could think of what I actually wanted to say, nearly three dozen large fighters came zooming around the edge of the massive ship and opened fire on us.

“Get out of here! Now!”

I hit the controls so hard that I knew I was going to have bruises from my restraints in the morning. Abruptly, what had been dark, quiet space was embroiled in a deluge of rapid-fire, green beams of energy.

“Queueing up evasive maneuvers now, all of you hold on!”

I didn’t reply to Ciangi, because there wasn’t much to say. All my focus went into flying downwards while trying to dodge the incoming hits that flashed across my nav screens.

But Gonzales, however, seemed to have plenty to say. “You want to play hard? Fine, we’ll play hard. Let’s see where exactly those open plates lead up to, shall we?”

I couldn’t risk craning my neck to see what was going on behind me, so I had to content myself with the readings on my display. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what the two large blips were that shot out from our battle cruiser to make its way up into where the cannon had been.

The resulting explosion was pretty amazing, and the resulting debris storm swallowed a good chunk of the oncoming fighters. But before we could issue a single cheer, another cloud of them came from the other side of the ship.

What was left of the original group surrounded Gonzales, firing on her shields with everything they had. She did an excellent job of returning fire with the seven or so artillery cannons on the flanks of her ship, but she was thoroughly occupied.

It looked like that cover thing wasn’t going to happen after all.

Once more, we were enveloped in a haze of radioactive green. Shots flew past me like hail, and I did my best to avoid what I could, but my shielding took way more hits than I would like to admit.

We were so close to planet-side. If we could just get into the atmosphere, the beam guns of our enemy fighters wouldn’t work, and we would be safe for all of a minute. I didn’t quite understand the explanation, but Ciangi had said it was something about the high-energy output of the lasers that would cause spontaneous combustion when introduced to the various compounds in the atmosphere…or something like that. I still had a lot to learn. Assuming I lived long enough to learn anything.

“Sister, I’m taking hits! I can’t get out of their line of sight!” one of the mimics yelled.

“Fildsik! Hold on.”

This time, I did look over my shoulder, and I saw that two ships had managed to flank one of our own while another came up behind them. That was…not good.

Before I could think of a single solution, or rescue, another one of our ships peeled away from our rapidly fleeing formation and rounded on the horde chasing after us.

Mimic.

“My shields are at zero! One more hit and I’ll—”

The mimic never got their last word out. One moment, their ship was there, showering sparks as the enemy completely unloaded on them. The next, there was an explosion of metal pieces and fire.

“No!” Mimic cried, the anguish in her voice apparent through the comms. “Fildsik, hold on!”

“Mimic, what are you going to do?”

She didn’t answer. Instead, only a shout of her absolute fury sounded through my headset as she rushed the group of three.

She managed to get the jump on them, and in the blink of an eye, one was gone. But that left her with two, as well as the rest behind them, and I could see even from where she was that she was losing her human form, expanding to fill her entire cabin with her black spikiness.

Oh.

I knew exactly what she was trying to do, and it was absolutely suicidal. Like hell I was going to let her do it on her own.

Gripping my controls, I raced forward. I knew better than to try to stop her, so the only thing I could do was help her. I focused on the leader of the little formation, swooping in and laying down covering fire, just as the canopy of Mimic’s ship lifted and all of the pressurized cabin air rushed off into the vacuum of space.

She was crazy, that was for sure. And I said as much as I barrel-rolled between two of the oncoming ships before turning and laying down more suppressive fire.

“Mimic, Higgens! What are you doing?!” Boy, Ciangi wasn’t happy with us. Not that I blamed her. If I was in her position, I would be furious. And terrified. “I know you guys are new to this space fighting thing, but that is not a retreat!”

“Mimic’s not going to leave one of her own to die in space, and I’m not going to leave her.”

“This is idiocy! It’s war, Higgens. People die. And if the two of you don’t get your butts down here, you’ll die, and all these little fledglings will be without their leader.”

“Then you better think of some way to make sure we don’t die, because she’s expanding out of her cabin now.”

“Expan— Huh— What now?”

“Oh, you know,” I answered nonchalantly while I pinwheeled again, firing even more rounds. I didn’t know when Ciangi had taken the target lock off my weapons system, but I was certainly grateful. “Increasing her mass and stretching it out so she can reach into space and get the other mimic that was jettisoned upon their ship’s explosion.”

“Oh, is that all!?”

“Relax, Ciangi,” Gonzales’s voice cut in and I felt my ship vibrate as she shot over me. “I’ll make sure the two heroes get home safe.”

“Yeah, of course you will. Just make sure you get here too. That cannon is how we’re going to make them sorry they ever chose to avenge their jerk of a friend.”

“Yeah, yeah. Higgens, keep laying down walls of fire. I’m going to play a little game of roundup. Mimi, if you can hear me, get your little sibling into your ship ASAP, because we’ve got maybe three minutes before we’re outnumbered.”

“How do you know that?”

“My ship’s sensors are better than yours. I can see about fifty new heat signatures flaring to life.”

“Oh.”

“‘Oh’ is right. Now, as soon as your lover is all safe, I need you guys to book it out of here. No more heroics. Well, at least not until we land.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“You always do.” Despite the compliment, there was a tinge of sadness to her tone, and then her line went quiet. I could barely see what she was doing over the intense wall of red fire I was laying down, but occasionally, I would catch a glimpse of her firing away at the second chunk of ships, or suddenly changing directions and catching a couple in the fiery output of her engines. It was brilliant, it truly was, and I guessed that the weapons expert had been uncharacteristically humble about her piloting experience during our adventures.

“Come on, Mimic,” I groaned, looking out my window at her. She was still stretching out, for a tiny, black mass that I could hardly make out against the deep void of space. Of course, she couldn’t hear me, but that didn’t make my plea any less urgent.

I should have known better than to take my eyes off the fight for so long. I heard the sharp whine of an alarm, then suddenly my entire fighter jerked to the side.

My whole world was suddenly flashing red lights and smoke, with a dozen or so warnings firing along my dash. I had taken a hit, and a critical one at that. Another one and, well, I wouldn’t have a whole lot to worry about.

“Higgens!” Ciangi’s voice cut through the chaos loud and clear. “I’m getting all sorts of alerts. Please tell me that I’m having a system malfunction.”

“No,” I said, breathing slowly as I righted my ship and went back to laying down line after line of fire to keep the approaching ships at bay from Mimic’s sitting fighter. “You are not.”

“Crap. Get out of there now! We can’t afford to lose you and you’re hemorrhaging fuel like nobody’s business.”

“No.”

“No?! What do you mean, no?”

“If I leave, Mimic is a sitting duck. Gonzales can only do so much. I stay here until she is back in her fighter and ready to go.”

“That’s it. I’m overriding your controls.”

“Wait, what? You can’t!” Cold terror ran through me. I couldn’t leave Mimic behind! She carried the entire world on her shoulders, literally, and all of her little brothers and sisters depended on her for everything. She needed someone who would look out for her.

“Ciangi! Stop!” To my surprise, it was Gonzales’s cool voice that cut through the ringing alarms. “He’s made his decision and you need to respect that, no matter how boneheaded it—”

“Higgens, dive!”

I didn’t even take a second to see what the blonde was warning me about. Instead, I just slammed my controls down and plummeted out of the way of a particularly large beam.

“Whoa!” I cried. “Do they have some sort of secondary fire?”

“No, that would be the new wave of ships. If Mimic doesn’t get in soon…”

She trailed off and I rounded back to fire at the ships now converging on the shapeshifter’s open ship. I felt like the whole battle was rocketing between slapdash firefighting and inter-group arguing, making it hard to concentrate. And I needed to concentrate now more than ever.

Three alerts sounded to my right, and I flew backward in a wide circle, managing to spin so I met them head-on. But before I should move my hand over to my firing array, my weapons all discharged in a glorious blaze.

“What was that?” I asked, eyes wide.

“Me,” Ciangi answered. “If you have to be a moron hero, then you can be the heroic pilot and I’ll just shoot people.”

“Sounds good to me.”

With weapons off my mind, I threw all my focus into making sure I didn’t get shot again. It actually worked pretty well, with me lilting to one side or the other, dipping downwards or spiraling upwards just enough to not get blasted out of space. Of course, I knew that the coin twins’ algorithm was doing plenty of the work, but I could take a little credit for the impressive dodging.

I should have known better than to get too cocky. For a moment, it was easy to forget that there was a massive spaceship above us and fifty more ships rocketing our way. That the odds were stacked against us and most likely all of our attempts were futile. But then, all of that came flooding back in an instant.

I shot at one of the fighters, hitting a vital point in its side. The combustion was nearly immediate, and it went spinning off to the side.

On a collision course for Mimic.

“No!”

She had finally reached her sibling, and was slowly pulling it back into her ship, but she wouldn’t have enough time. The spinning, flaming ship would make direct contact with her vessel, and I didn’t need a full engineering degree to know that it would send both her and her sibling spiraling off into space in a fiery inferno.

“Mimic!” I yanked at the controls, surging toward her location. I heard angry queries from both Gonzales and Ciangi, but I paid them no mind. I knew what I had to do.

Ciangi opened fire on the tumbling vessel, but it wasn’t enough. The hunk of metal seemed dead set on colliding with my friend. I couldn’t allow that.

“Higgens, you are not doing what I think you’re doing, are you?” Ciangi’s voice was small, and I could hear her hovering over the system that could take control over my ship.

“Like you said, this world needs its leader, and I’ve got to make sure she gets home safe.”

“Higgens, please don’t.” It was a request. Not an order. Not a demand. All of it took place in only a few seconds, but I couldn’t help but smile softly.

“It’s been fun, guys. I couldn’t have met a better group of people.”

“Wait,” Gonzales’s voice cut in. “I was firing a volley of explosive rounds. What’s going on? Why are you on a collision cour— Higgens! Don’t you dare!”

I didn’t answer, but there wasn’t any time. Ciangi did her best, pouring all of my systems’ extra power into the forward guns, and while they did rip off chunks of the craft, it was still on course. And Mimic, completely oblivious to what was going on around her—or at least I assumed so—was only halfway into her craft.

But that was alright. I had made up my mind and I was content. Taking a deep breath, I thought back to all the amazing experiences I’d had since that fateful night on the mining ship.

Meeting Mimic. Feeding her for the first time. Her sneaking into the engine room. Stealing a ship with the help of Ciangi and the coin twins. Ending up on the other side of the universe, then coming back and stealing the whole mining vessel.

We had a good run. I pictured Mimic’s face, smiling and red-cheeked after our kiss. She truly was beautiful, no matter what form she took.

“I love you,” I whispered, not caring if she couldn’t quite hear me.

And then my ship collided with the burning enemy vessel and my whole world was on fire.

9

The Story’s Not Over

Space was much quieter than I expected. After watching so many horror sims, and then training videos to get my outer-ship maintenance certification, I had expected it to be like the cold, gnashing mouth of some endlessly hungry monster.

Instead, it was almost…peaceful.

I could sense that it was cold, much colder than I could possibly survive, but it hardly registered as I was thrown into space along with my pilot-seat. I saw things around me fade as my vision iced over. The brilliant red of Gonzales’s battle cruiser, the hyper-green of the enemy ships, the almost purple velvet of deep space. It all stretched out as time slowed down, and I felt myself sink into the cold, dark recesses of my mind.

But something stopped me. I was floating, the last bit of my hold on reality slipped away, and then I hit something hard.

I couldn’t see, I could hardly move, but I did feel a hard cocoon around me, and suddenly, I was less cold. A lot less cold.

But with the lack of cold came a rush of feeling, and I was suddenly very aware of how much pain I was in. I couldn’t see a thing, but I didn’t need vision to know that I was most definitely injured.

I tried to cry out, but there was still no air. Now that I wasn’t peacefully drifting off as a human popsicle, my body began to seize for oxygen, and my lungs felt like they were just as on fire as my craft had been.

I was going to die, and it wasn’t going to be the pretty, heroic exit that I had imagined. I was going to choke and gasp and cough while the blood vessels in my face burst and the—

Suddenly, the darkness broke, and oxygen flooded into me. My lungs made a sort of sucking sound, and the next thing I knew, I was puking.

“—getting you out of there!”

“No argument.”

I could hear voices, but I couldn’t place them. It was like my brain was about ten seconds behind the rest of the world and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.

The blackness was gone, but I still couldn’t quite see. It was like everything had a thick, gauzy film over it, and moving my eyes hurt worse than anything else. I was aware that several parts of my body were throbbing in protest, but none of that seemed to matter more than my eyes.

“He’s not responsive. Is there any sort of first aid supplies in this thing?”

“Oh, good to have you back, Mimic. Maybe next time, you can come up with a plan instead of ejecting yourself into space and almost getting Higgens killed.”

“Noted, Gonzales. I’ll make sure to think with a clearer head the next time we’re embroiled in a massive space battle. The important thing is I have both of them and you have the cannon that you decided to tell none of us about.”

I could hear the clear irritation in Ciangi’s voice as she buzzed through the comm. “You two can snipe at each other after you land. You’ve got about sixty ships on your tail and there’s only so much dodging I can do.”

“We’ll make it,” Gonzales said with a grunt. “I’m too stubborn to die up here before I get to use the biggest gun I’ve ever seen.”

“Of course you are,” Ciangi said. “Now, Mimic, you mentioned first aid?”

The voices continued, and I felt multiple pairs of hands on me. I heard wrapping crinkling, and then something sharp poked at my neck.

Warm tingling spread through me, then I felt a spike in my heartrate. I gasped, just in time for something sticky and gelatin-like to be wiped across my face. I tried to shut my eyes against it.

“Shhh,” Mimic calmly urged. “It’s a medical gel with a steroid that should help your eyes. You’re gonna need to be able to fight at least a little when we get to the ground. Until I can get you someplace safe.”

Finally, I seemed to understand that I wasn’t dead, and a million questions came along with it.

“I… I’m alive?” I rasped.

“For the moment,” Mimic answered, her voice tense. “The long-term truth of that statement will rely on whether or not we’re shot out of the sky.”

“Wouldn’t that be ironic?” A chittering keen sounded next to my ear and I jerked to the side.

“Whoa, hold still there. Ciangi may be piloting us, but I do not need you wiggling around.”

“You saved me,” I whispered hoarsely.

“You saved me,” Mimic replied softly, her hand ruffling through my hair. “It seemed only right that I return the favor.”

“Good point.” A sharp stinging lanced behind my eyes and I couldn’t help but curl into Mimi, hissing slightly.

“Hold on, the directions say you need at least ten minutes to heal superficial abrasions and cuts. Your corneas were probably scratched as they froze out in space,” she murmured, patting me with at least six hands. Maybe it was a good thing that I couldn’t see. “We’re almost to the ground. I’ll get you somewhere safe before we’re in another firefight.”

“No, I want to be a part of the fight. I want to see this through to the end.”

“You will. Ciangi, Bahn, and Gonzales will all need someone to watch their backs while they install our stolen cannon. Hopefully, you’ll be a fair shot by then.”

“Except he never was a fair shot to begin with.” I was surprised to hear Eske’s voice over the comms. “When you land, leave him with me. The two of us will make sure the others have a guard, and you can lead your people as only you can.”

I felt Mimic nod, and felt a strange sort of peace, considering we were still running from a horde of advanced fighters.

“Entering atmosphere in five seconds. Brace yourself, I’m not slowing you down.”

“Thanks, Ciangi.”

“You can thank me when you touch down. Hold on.”

I felt Mimic’s six hands and arms cradle me, cramped as we were in the tiny cabin of what was meant to be a single-man fighter that now had three of us crowded into it. I got the feeling that the mini-mimic had taken a much smaller form, because there was no way a trio of humans could fit into the scrunched space.

Ciangi hadn’t been kidding about the rough ride. We slammed into the atmosphere so hard that shocks went up my spine. Once more, I heard my breath wheezing in my throat as our ship rattled like a rock in a turbine. My head felt like it was reverberated at a speed that could take it from my neck, but for the first time since we had started this fight, we weren’t surrounded by a green haze of enemy fire.

That calm lasted only a few minutes, because then we were landing in a spray of dirt and grass. For a split-second, the three of us sat there in disbelief, but then Mimic was wiping the gel off my face so I could see again.

The world was just as hazy as it had been when I first was pulled into her ship, but it slowly clarified as she climbed down the wing of the fighter and set me on solid ground. I certainly wasn’t at a hundred percent, but instead of being completely blind, it was more like I had stared at the sun for too long and was suffering the consequences.

I kinda, sorta saw a tall figure bounding toward us, and I recognized Eske’s voice as she began to talk.

“You two are in so much trouble if we survive all this,” she said with what I guessed was a cheeky grin. “Come on, Higgens. I’ll take you to the crashed ship.”

“But the barricades!” I objected. I didn’t just risk my life to save Mimic only to abandon her to fight on the opposite side of the battlefield. But it was her hand on my arm that calmed me.

“I know it runs a bit contradictory to what we just did out there, but we both have different places in this battle. Protect your friends, and I will protect my people as only I can.”

Our comms buzzed yet again. “Whatever you’re gonna do, you’re gonna wanna do it now. Looks like enemy ships are incoming!”

I looked up to the sky as Eske wrapped a strong, elegant arm around my waist. Yup, there were definitely ships coming down, and I was sure more would follow. We had certainly gotten ourselves into a mess, hadn’t we?

Well, with any luck, I was sure it was about to get so much messier.

10

The Fight Takes to Ground

“You don’t have to carry me, ya know,” I reminded Eske as she hauled me into the lower entrance to the crashed ship that the mimics had mined out while we were away stealing ships. “I can see just fine now.”

“Until one of the Twins gets a look at you, I’m not really about trusting the patch job of an alien who’s never so much as had a splinter.”

“Fair enough.”

But the woman’s tone darkened as she continued to drag me through halls. “You know, what you did out there was insane. Amazing, stupid, and insane.”

“Yeah, war makes you do things like that, I guess.”

“Oh, so we’re going to pretend that it was because of this big fight and not because apparently the two of you lose your minds around each other now that everything’s out of the bag?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Heh, of course you don’t.”

We reached a thick, metal door and she punched a code in. The portal quickly slid to the side with a hiss, and I instantly recognized the engine room that Bahn had showed us what felt like forever ago.

My eyes may have still been healing, but they didn’t miss the blonde, bouncing curls marching toward me. Before I could open my mouth to say much of anything, her hand lanced out and struck me across the cheek.

“You. Are. An. Idiot!” Ciangi cried, face red and frustrated tears in the corners of her eyes.

“Ow,” I murmured, a bit surprised. The blow hadn’t really hurt that much, but the sting had certainly been a surprise.

“Don’t you ever do something like that again!” She was still yelling, and she held a single pointed, shaking finger up toward my face. “No self-sacrificing and making me watch! In this family, we fight to the end! The very end! You got that?!”

“I got it.”

Her level of emotion surprised me. Sure, I had seen Ciangi lose her temper over many different things, from failed projects to human incompetence. I had never seen her trembling and looking somewhere between a full temper tantrum and an emotional meltdown. I guess I had underestimated what our friendship meant to her. What my friendships meant to all of them.

I was going to have a lot of making up to do if we survived all this.

“Good. Now get your butt to that chair over there while I try to do as much rapid first aid as I can.”

“Uh, is that advisable?” I asked.

“No, but nothing about this situation is, and I need you to be able to hold a gun and watch our backs while we work.”

“Did someone say gun?” I looked to the door as I breathlessly shuffled to the chair I had been ordered into. Gonzales and Bahn were there, grim looks on their faces. “Because I just dropped down a cannon on top of this place and we need to make an opening in the ceiling so we can bring the wiring down into the setup you have here.”

Ciangi barely spared them a glace as she continued to work on me. Bandages here, injections there, medical gel elsewhere. I felt myself growing better by the minute, even if it was in a completely artificial way. “Um, the chances of us being able to power both the shield and the cannon are next to impossible. And I don’t even want to think of the nuclear discharge of running that thing.”

“Well, considering that we’ve blasted their cannon off, I don’t think we really need the shield anymore, do we? Very soon, every soldier on that ship is going to be landing here to hand our butts to us,” Gonzales said with a bat of her eye. I never knew that a wink could be sarcastic, but apparently, I was learning all sorts of things lately.

“Fair enough. Bahn, grab the welding array and there should be a mechanic’s platformer around here. Get that to the room and you can probably make a hole large enough to bring the wires down into our setup, and use some magnets to hold that giant thing in place.” Ciangi clicked her tongue as she continued to work on me. “We’ve got minutes at best, so once the hordes start landing, we better hope the mimics hold them off.”

“We have to trust them,” I cut in, maybe more in self-assurance than anything else.

But Ciangi just patted my cheek. “Oh, honey, it’s not about trust. It’s just about how capable these alien fellows are of wiping us out in a ground fight.” The large collection of holo-interfaces to our side blared, and she dropped the first aid kit. “That’s gonna have to be enough, friend. Got a job to do and all that.”

I nodded. “Do what you need.”

She ran from my side to her simple hover-chair in front of the displays. Her fingers danced across the light display, and I saw little symbols that looked like our ships all light up.

“Why are you booting those up again?” I asked, rolling a bandage over what appeared to be a burn on my leg. I was sure that was going to hurt later, but I was too hopped up on way too many stims now to even feel it.

“Unfortunately, we never got any time to set up ground artillery, so these ships will just have to be that.”

“You’re turning on ships and making them stand on end just to use their guns?” I asked, somewhat incredulously.

“Yeah, what of it?”

“Nothing.” I shook my head. “You’re just amazing, you know that?”

“I do. Maybe someday they’ll write a history book about it. But for now, I need you to grab one of the big guns I hauled here—although I’m rethinking what exactly qualifies as a big gun now considering the nearly building-sized cannon on our roof—and get into the hall. I’m sure the aliens know that this area is drawing a lot of power and will no doubt make this the center of their campaign.”

“You think so?”

“Oh yeah, I know so. Judging by what data Mimic was able to mine in the year that we were gone, their favorite tactic is to surround the enemy, then slowly close in while a hyper-contingent lands in high-profile areas and wrecks anything that might give the enemy an advantage.”

“Fantastic.”

“You’re telling me. Now go. You and Eske are our last line of defense, so don’t let anybody in here.” More alarms went off and several of her displays went red. “The first wave is landing, and I’m getting readings of more ships coming down. You guys need to get that laser installed before we get overrun!”

“Easier said than done,” Gonzales called from the roof as I headed toward the gun pile. She was standing on one of the hovering platforms that I had seen the engineers use a couple of times back on Earth, so I couldn’t see her, but I didn’t need eye contact to pick up on her tension.

I couldn’t blame her. The three of them suddenly had the whole battle riding on their ability to rapid-integrate stolen technology. I didn’t know how long they had been planning this little bonus mission, but it was clear they had never really expected it to work.

I grabbed the biggest gun I could reasonably support with two hands and a belt of what looked like pulsar grenades and headed to the door. I took one last look at the trio, then stepped through, watching as the door closed behind me and locked.

“Things are getting real, aren’t they?” Eske asked.

I turned to see that she and the mimics had already built a pretty impressive barricade plus plenty of firing cover while I had been talking/tended to. She certainly didn’t waste any time.

“Are you implying that they weren’t real until right up to this point?”

“True.” She snorted and shook her head. “Who’d of thought, with all the people scattered across this system, that it would be two maintenance workers protecting what just might be our only hope at winning all of this and saving both this planet and Earth?”

“Geez, when you say it like that, I almost feel important.”

“Almost,” she said with a broad wink. “Wouldn’t want you to get a big head and ruin that nice demeanor you’ve got going there.”

“Yeah, that’d be a real shame, wouldn’t it?” We shared another quiet laugh, and I found myself wishing that I’d had more time to get to know the visually-impaired woman. She was kind, and she was interesting, and I felt like there was so much more of her to know.

“You know, I’ve never been so glad I fell asleep on the job. It’s been good knowing you, Higgens.”

“And it’ll be good to know you tomorrow.”

“How hopeful of you.”

“I try.”

I wasn’t sure where our conversation would go from there, or even if either of us had anything more to say, but several booming noises sounded outside.

“I think our guests just landed,” Eske murmured.

The few mimics around us chittered and keened, taking on multiple forms that I didn’t really have names for. All I knew was there were claws and teeth and a whole lot of jagged limbs going on.

“You ready for this?” I asked, taking a couple of calming breaths. Had I really been floating in space less than ten minutes earlier? It didn’t seem like it. The short battle we had been in felt like full-on hours had passed, when in reality, I doubted if it had been even half of one. Time was just funny like that, I guessed.

But for the second time in a very short period, I found myself anxiously awaiting an enemy that I couldn’t quite see yet. I could hear our ships firing like mad outside, as well as shrieks and explosions that I could only hope they weren’t the mimics being slaughtered en masse.

But then the footsteps sounded. They were loud, shaking the hallway, and in a precise rhythm. There had to be at least fifty soldiers marching toward us, judging by all the footfalls, and I wondered just what these guys looked like. Their last friend had been far too altered by its experimentation and ship integration, and they did have several hundred more years of natural, genetic evolution on their side.

“At least the opening of this place is a bit narrow. They can probably only come in five by five.”

“Let’s hope.”

Right as I said that, something metallic tink-ed against our barrier and rolled along the floor. My eyes followed the movement, and a cold sweat broke out over me as I saw what I was pretty sure was our enemy’s version of a grenade.

“Get down!” I cried, launching myself forward.

But one of the mimics was quicker. A dark green tentacle whipped out, grabbing the ovular explosive, and it chucked the bomb right back out of the entrance it came.

Just in time too, apparently. The resulting explosion made my teeth rattle and my head throb. The feeling barely had time to clear before the marching started again, and the first of the aliens came into view.

They were certainly less…gelatinous than the first of their kind we had met. In fact, their solid forms seemed quite muscular, with a leathery, pebbled skin in various shades of green, brown, and blues. They weren’t quite reptilian, weren’t quite avian, weren’t quite anything. They were something wholly different, and bipedal, with massive arms holding equally massive guns.

I leveled my own weapon, staring down one of the line, and fired. The bolt hit them in the shoulder, sending them stumbling back, but they recovered and continued to march forward with the rest of the line.

They didn’t try to find cover. They didn’t scramble out of the way. They didn’t even raise their guns yet. Which meant they were more than willing to sacrifice themselves to overwhelm the enemy.

I was faced with a sudden realization that I just had never comprehended before. I was going to have to kill someone. Many someones.

Sure, I had blown at least a couple of them out of the sky, but that had been different, detached. I hadn’t been able to see any of them in their ships. Hadn’t been able to see the brilliant colors of their eyes, or the deep inhales that filled their broad, muscle-bound chests. Did these aliens have families? Hopes and dreams? Did they want to be here? Or were they so hyped up on their own government’s propaganda that we were the bad guys? Had they been forced to come here? Was the alien military mostly comprised of the poor and minorities with the promise that risking their life was the only viable career they could have?

Too many questions, too much gray area. In the breath of just a second, I finally understood why war was so terrible, so scary. It had been told to me my whole life, but it took an actual battle to get it.

I leveled my weapon at the same alien again, then let several bolts fly.

They went down, a blackish-green liquid dribbling from the burning wounds I caused, and the rest of them marched on. Impassive. Relentless. I knew I couldn’t let them get close, or they would easily overpower us with sheer numbers, let alone their impressive firepower and muscle. The only reason they weren’t charging us already was probably because they had no idea how many of us there were.

Or even what we were. Sure, they had seen Mimic’s insane display in space, but that didn’t mean they understood it. They didn’t know that they had just declared a smackdown on a planet full of shapeshifters who were still raw with fury from centuries of enslavement and stunted growth.

“Open fire,” I hissed.

And we did.

Eske and I rained down shot after shot, and the mimics all surged forward to the edge of our makeshift barricade, tentacles, arms tipped in claws, and jaws lashing out. The line halted for just a moment, the group clearly surprised by the sheer range of weaponry facing them, and their weapons came up.

“Be careful!” I called. “They’re returning fire!”

I aimed at the same spot I had previously, hitting the alien that had been behind the first one I took out. It stumbled as well, but not before discharging its weapon.

The bolt hit somewhere behind my head, but I felt it as if it had been right next to me. My body reverberated, and I pressed myself against my cover as I felt wave after wave of heat over me. Sparing a single glance upward, I saw a molten, gaping hole in the wall a few feet to my left.

Right. I needed to make absolutely sure I didn’t get hit. It wouldn’t be like being shot with one of our weapons, where survival entirely depended on where I was wounded. It was clear that any successful shot by the enemy’s guns would be un-survivable.

In a move with chilling nonchalance, they leveled their guns on us as one, and I saw more green glows as they prepared fire.

Crap.

I ducked behind my cover, and the entire hall lit up in our firefight. I waited for the volley to end, then shot back up and delivered as many rounds as I could before the pulse-generator in my gun overheated and needed a second to cool.

Peeking over the top, I saw that the mimics—now that Eske and I had stopped firing—were attacking in full. Tentacles ripped off pieces of armor and tried to yank away guns. Spikes on lanky limbs buried in exposed flesh wherever they could. Quills and teeth flew in primitive barbs that seemed to be pretty good at actually distracting the oncoming waves.

But there were so many in the hall now. The original ten or so was at least forty, and they were marching ever forward. Over the bodies of their dead, over teeth and tines, over everything.

Killing them one by one wasn’t going to be enough. If I wanted to protect the people I loved, I had to grievously wound as many of them as possible.

My hand went to my grenade belt and I grabbed one of them. Pressing the ignition button, I waited three out of the five seconds I had before throwing it with all my might.

“Fire in the hole!”

All of us, mimics included, ducked behind our haphazard barricade. I clapped my hands over my ears just as I heard the grenade hit ground, and less than a breath later, another explosion rocked the hall.

“I’m guessing that it’s not pretty out there,” Ciangi’s voice cut over my comm, barely audible with everything going on.

“That would be accurate,” I said, popping up to see what kind of damage I had wrought.

The line was still marching onwards, with more from behind coming up to fill the gaps, but it looked like I had taken out at least ten of them.

It wasn’t going to be enough.

They leveled their guns again and I barely had time to duck before they let out a volley. I was all set to stand and return fire, only to have another wave of green slam into the walls, ceiling, and everything around us.

“The second line is firing while the first line ducks!” Eske called from where she was pressed to the floor. I saw some sort of strange information and aiming mechanism flashing across her goggles, and I quickly figured it must have been some sort of upgrade Ciangi had given her. Cool, but not exactly something I could allow myself to be distracted by.

“We’ll have to break their rhythm then,” I called. “Follow my lead.”

“Yes, sir!”

I pulled two grenades, pressing both of their ignition buttons. I lobbed one without looking, and I heard the firing stop just long enough for someone to grab it and start to throw it away.

I jumped up, gun at the ready, and opened fire on the alien who had it in their hands. They dropped it as they tried to roll out of our barrage, and I took the chance to toss the second one at the opposite side of the hall.

Once more, the explosion felt entirely unhealthy. A wave of fire rushed past me, but I couldn’t quite duck before some of my clothing was thoroughly singed.

I landed on the floor with a thump, rolling around a bit for good measure.

“That was impressive,” Eske breathed. “It’s almost like we know what we’re doing.”

“Improvisation can be a miraculous thing.”

“I would say so.” She let out a shaky breath, and it was only then that I noticed she had a pretty big gash across her forehead that was bleeding over her face. It must have been just shrapnel that got her, but it didn’t make me any less concerned. “But I’m worried it’s still not enough. There are so many.”

She was right. We were holding them off for now, but mostly because they were playing little leagues with us, just testing the waters and seeing what we were made of. I knew that they had to have more of those grenades, and it would only be a matter of time before they used them. In fact, I was pretty sure that the only thing holding them back was the mimics and the undoubtedly confusing data the aliens were getting from them.

I was sure ‘shapeshifters’ were the last thing on their minds, so the strange amalgamation of different species they were seeing in such a confined space no doubt went against everything they prepared for. But eventually, they would get over the novelty of our little friends, and then we would be SOL.

“How’s that cannon integration coming?” I asked over the comm in my scanner.

“It’s…coming. I think,” Ciangi answered belatedly.

“You think?”

“Yeah. I mean, probably. I’m kind of busy with a lot of stuff on my own screen. We’ve got about two hundred ground troops landed now and more on the way.”

“Yikes.”

“Yeah, yikes is about right.”

“Well, we’ve got about fifty of them right here in this hall, and that’s not counting the dead. I’ve already used three grenades and I don’t know how much longer we’re going to be able to hold them off.”

“Right, yeah, of course. With just two gunmen and five mini-shifters, we should probably be grateful you lasted this long.”

“Um…thanks? I think?”

“You’re welcome. Try to hold them off for a couple more minutes, I think I have something that can help.”

“A couple of minutes. Right. I’ll try my best.”

Gonzales’s voice cut over the lines before I could disconnect and get to firing again. “Honestly, we’ve got at least five minutes of work on our end, and that’s if everything goes absolutely right, which, you know, it won’t. So yeah. Don’t die out there.”

“We’ll try,” Eske answered before standing and laying down a volley of fire once more.

I took a hint from the aliens and stood a hair after her, making sure there was no break in our onslaught. Or at least, there wasn’t until they interrupted us with their own greater barrage and we had to duck behind our smoking cover.

Honestly, I had never been so eternally grateful that the original alien’s vessel had been so sturdy. Although certain sections of the wall and ceiling around us were melting, the scraps that were protecting me from being a Higgens-kabob were pulled from somewhere heartier. The bulkhead, perhaps? If they had been just regular metal, or even something from our own ships, I was sure that they would have been shredded like paper long ago.

But even the most solid of barriers could only withstand so much onslaught, and I could smell the acrid vapor as the opposite side of my cover began to melt. I knew from maintenance work that it was an exponential type of reaction. The hotter the outside became, the more easily heat would permeate the structure and weaken it.

Meaning I probably didn’t have five minutes.

I would just have to hope whatever Ciangi was trying to plan would buy us the extra time we needed, otherwise we were going to have to use the door itself as cover, and I didn’t see that going anywhere good.

As if she had heard my thoughts, the blonde woman’s voice came over the comm. “Alright, I’ve got help on the way. But you’re all going to want to duck, and stay as low to the floor as possible.”

“Why’s that?”

“Oh, you’ll see in about ten seconds.”

I would have told her that it wasn’t the time for being cagey, but then I heard the telltale thrum of one of our fighter’s engines growing quite close. Wait, she couldn’t be…could she?

The noise grew deafening and small debris started blowing up the hall. Oh yeah, she was.

I ducked down just as the small fighter lit up the hall, hitting the soldiers from behind in a spray of red. Some of them tried to run forward, tried to get out of the way, but there was no escape.

Even from where I was pressed against the floor, I could feel the massive heat and electricity in the air. It made my hair stand on end and my heart hammer in my throat.

It lasted a couple of seconds, maybe ten at most, and then the fighter flew off and we were left with a resounding silence.

11

Final Stand

I cracked open a single eye and found that I wasn’t swallowed in yet another fireball. Peeking upwards, I saw a hall filled with smoke, only a few standing silhouettes against the haze.

“Rush the line!” I cried, vaulting over my still quite hot cover and dashing forward. Eske followed right behind me and the mimics, oh boy, did the mimics make a terrifying force as they exploded forward.

Bodies expanded and rippled in some places, popping out limbs, claws and teeth like some kind of genetic soup, then shrank and buckled in others. The mass of our five shifting friends reached the alien survivors first, and both Eske and I had to skid to a stop as they completely blindsided the few that survived.

“Remind me to never get on their bad side,” Eske murmured, looking queasy. I couldn’t blame her. Despite all the adventures we had been on, I still wasn’t much for blood or carnage.

“You should go check on the eggheads. I’ll make sure there aren’t any stragglers.”

“You know they’re going to send more, right?”

The tall woman sent me a sort of slipshod smile. “We’ll deal with those when they come. You better hurry while you can.”

I nodded and dashed off, keeping my gun close just in case. It was scary how quickly you could get used to having a weapon at your side, and I hoped that this violence wasn’t an indicator of what was coming in the rest of my life.

“What’s the word in here?” I asked, dashing into the engine room.

“We’ve got it!” Gonzales cried from above, clambering down. “But now we’ve got to charge the thing.”

“Yeah,” Bahn said, following her more carefully. “And once that ship reads the energy spike, they’re going to send their whole armada.”

“About that,” Ciangi said, her tone steely. “They just released a hundred more ships.”

“Well, that’s not good,” Gonzales growled.

“And they’re beginning a landing sequence.”

“…oh.”

“Wait,” I interjected, heart picking up pace yet again. At this rate, even if I survived the war, I was going to die at an early age due to apoplexy. “You mean that massive mothership is coming down here?”

“Yup.”

“We can’t let that happen!”

“Nope,” Ciangi continued, strangely calm. I was guessing that all the insane twists and revelations had gotten her to her limit and she was numb by this point. “It wouldn’t matter how much preparation we’ve done, they’d be able to crush us all just by setting down on top of us.”

“What do we do?” Gonzales asked. “I got the weapon integrated into our system, kinda, but I don’t have time to rewire its power requisites. It needs what it needs, so the only way to charge it faster is to give it more power.”

“And although the engines are powerful,” Bahn added, “if I accelerate their output enough to increase the rate of charge, the amount of nuclear runoff would be far greater than what our dampeners and storage ports could absorb.”

“Wait, did you say nuclear energy?” I asked, the tiniest of ideas flickering to life in the back of my mind.

“Yes,” Bahn answered, raising his brow at my tone. “It seems that they used some sort of energy source that might have been crystal-based on their own end, but we don’t have that kind of technology.”

“Charge the cannon at the higher speed.”

“But the—”

“I know!” I interrupted. “But trust me, I know how to handle it.” I dashed back into the hall, leaving no room for argument, and bolted toward the closest mimic.

I couldn’t tell who they were or how old they might be, but that didn’t matter. I caught one of them by the arm, barely managing to pull it from the thrall of battle as they continued to fight with the ten or so aliens that survived.

“I need you to get Mimic,” I said. “I need her here as quickly as possible.”

It chirped something at me and the air made a sucking sound as the mimic’s body quickly shrank down to what looked like an alien bunny. Without missing a beat, it dashed beyond the fight and out of the hall before I could even blink.

“Higgens, watch out!”

I heard Eske’s cry and barely managed to jump to the side as a green bolt lanced into the wall where I had just been. I jerked up my gun to return fire, only to have the alien be physically lifted from his feet by a rush of tentacles, and bashed repeatedly against both the ceiling and floor.

The sounds made my stomach churn, but a hand on my shoulder distracted me from the nausea. I felt it pulling me backward, toward the cover, and I scuttled with it until both Eske and I were once again where it was relatively safe.

“You want to tell me what you were doing out there?”

“Making sure that Mimic got a very important message.”

“Is the mysterious half-answer just kind a thing in your group, or is this a human thing that I somehow never picked up on?”

I cracked a smile at that, then peeked over the edge of our cover to deliver a few shots to an alien that was going toe-to-toe with the alien creature quite well. “I’m not sure who started it, but I definitely think it’s an us thing.”

“Well, a little bit of constructive criticism, sto— Grenade!”

I heard the distinctive sound of something small and metal hit the floor, then the mimics all vaulted back to the protection of our cover. Some of them didn’t even touch ground before the massive explosion rocked the entire hall.

I heard the cracking before I felt it. One moment, I was tucked tightly behind my cover, and the next, it was fracturing into pieces and I was flung into the wall. My hand slammed into a molten patch of metal, and I dropped my gun with a scream.

“Higgens! Are you alright?” Eske cried, dashing over to me.

I slid to the floor in a heap and tried to give her a thumbs up, but the skin of my hand was already swelling and blistering. “To be honest, I’ve been better.”

“This isn’t good. We need to—”

There was a blinding flash of green and then suddenly Eske wasn’t there anymore. I screamed, looking around wildly for her.

She couldn’t be dead! Not after everything we’d been through!

A groan sounded from just a bit away from me, and I saw her crumpled body. Fearing the worst, I rushed to her and saw a large chunk missing from her side.

“At…at least there’s no blood,” she wheezed, looking up at me through her shattered visor. “Perks of cauterizing energy beams, I guess.”

“Come on, I’m getting you inside.”

“But we have to watch the hall!”

“The mimics can do it. You’ll be no use to anyone dead.”

“Ironic, coming from you,” she wheezed but offered her arm to me nonetheless.

I hauled her to her feet, draping her arm over my shoulders. Limping along, I got her to the door and managed to punch in the code then have it slam behind me.

“Oh, you do not look good,” Gonzales said as soon as we were in.

“Don’t feel so good either,” Eske wheezed as I got her over to where I had been just a bit earlier to get Ciangi’s first aid.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news here,” the blonde said, “but that ship is going to breach atmosphere in just a few minutes and they’re releasing bigger, multi-man ships to our location and to surround our city.”

“I already have the cannon charging at fifty percent higher input than we should,” Bahn snapped, sweat apparent on his brow. “And we’ve got two minutes max before the nuclear waste overwhelms our systems and we all turn into a cancerous sludge. I hope that plan of yours works, Higgens.”

“It will,” I answered, grabbing some injectors from the first aid kit and trying to figure out which would help Eske. “Because it has before.”

“Before?” the taller of the twins asked, cocking his head to the side. “What are you—” Then his eyes widened, and realization hit him. “The engine room, back on the mining ship.”

“You got it,” I said with a nod, never pulling my eyes away from Eske. We were so close to winning this; I wasn’t about to let her succumb to a silly side wound.

“I feel like I’m missing a very vital piece of information,” Eske rasped as she winced away from the injector.

“You—”

“Thirty seconds now until we have reached the nuclear-critical point,” Bahn reminded.

“And two minutes until atmospheric entry by the mothership.”

“It’ll be fine. I promise,” I said, eyes flicking to the door. “Have faith.”

“Faith in what, though?” Gonzales countered.

Before I could answer, a resounding shriek cut through the door. For a tiniest of moments, we all stilled as thunderous footsteps rammed down the hall, and then something erupted into our room, blasting the door off its hinges.

“Mimi!” I cried, jumping up. “There’s an overflow of nuclear runoff. I hope you’re hungry!”

The massive blue creature before me nodded, and their form rapidly crumbled and rebuilt itself as it launched over the jury-rigged engines and rushed the nuclear runoff measures.

“Ten seconds until overload.”

By the time she reached it, she was black, spikey, and the size of a small car. Without a second’s hesitance, she found the emergency release grate and surged up into it.

“Nuclear discharge levels are going down!” Bahn yelled, holding his hand up for Gonzales to high-five. But the woman’s eyes were on the screen in front of Ciangi. “Almost a minute until those guys break atmosphere.”

“Cranking the charge speed up to two hundred percent. I hope Mimic is ready for the biggest feast of her life.”

“I…I don’t know if that’s safe.” I countered, looking to where Mimic had disappeared into the runoff equipment.

“Not like we have much of a choice,” Gonzales countered. “You’re just gonna have to—”

Before she could finish the sentence, we heard more chittering and the pitter-patter of pointed footsteps. I turned to the door just in time to see a horde of mimics surging in, all of them making a beeline after Mimic.

“Oh God,” I breathed, looking at the rapidly moving procession in wonder. “They’re all going to eat.”

Sure enough, one by one, they launched themselves after their leader, disappearing faster than I thought possible.

“Change it to four hundred!” I cried, jumping to my feet.

Bahn nodded, and I saw him punch codes into the datalog in his hands. Gonzales picked up one of the guns and stalked to the door, laying down fire at something I couldn’t see. And Ciangi, well, her eyes were still glued to her holoscreens.

“Thirty seconds until they enter the atmosphere!” she cried.

“The cannon is charged! Firing now!”

Everything seemed to happen at once. The entire building shook, and we were all knocked off our feet. Ciangi’s screens all flashed brilliant green, and once more, dozens of alarms were going off at once. An explosion sounded outside of the door, and Gonzales was thrown all the way back to Eske, her front smoking, while nearly a dozen aliens poured in.

Time seemed to suspend itself for a moment, as if everything in existence had come to a stand-still. But then, the screens all cleared and what sounded like the loudest peal of thunder cracked in the sky above us.

“We have a direct hit!” Ciangi cried. “With just a little repositioning of the magnets, I should be able to cut the ship in two!”

“Too bad we’ve got company,” I shot back, grabbing both my gun and Eske to pull them both back to cover.

“Wait, what—” She turned just in time for one of the aliens to charge her, and she barely jumped out of the way. Both Gonzales and I fired, the weapons engineer apparently having recovered somewhere behind me, and that one went down, but that left us with the other eleven or so converging on us.

I was sure this was the end. We were bringing down their mothership, but there were still too many killers on the ground. But before a single one of them could lower their guns, a dark force shot over from the other side of the room, expanding rapidly until the aliens were completely blocked from our view.

“Oh…my…God,” I breathed.

There were no words for what I was seeing. A spikey, obsidian form stood in front of us, one that almost would have been familiar if its legs weren’t longer than my entire body and the top of its barbed back didn’t hit the ceiling. It was Mimi, alright, there was no doubt. But instead of her normal, completely noir skin, I saw green-blue rivulets of pure energy rushing through the cracks in her now-massive surface.

The aliens didn’t have a chance. She set on them like a force of nature, flinging some while stomping others. It was clear that they were in a bit of shock at the sudden transformation, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel pity for them.

It was all over within a second, and I could only stare in wonder at the giant creature who was also my best friend.

“The mothership is pulling away! It’s retreating!” Somehow, during the fray, Ciangi had posted herself right back in her seat and was looking at her screen once more. “The crafts on the ground are leaving too!” She let out a sound that was somewhere between a cry and a laugh. “We did it, you guys! We won!”

We stood there a moment, shell-shocked by the idea, but true to her word, there was no more sounds of gunfire, no more cries of battle. In fact, there was a real, true calm over the building for the first time since the first alarm had sounded.

Slowly, the gargantuan form in front of us shrunk and receded, until only Mimic was standing there.

“We did it,” I breathed, extending my arms to her.

“We did,” she answered, rushing to me and pressing her head against my chest. “It’s finally over.”

It was. We had all lived to see another day.

And what a day it was going to be.

12

Recovery

War is a lot like a hurricane. Ruthless in its destruction, often devastating, and going hand in hand with a lot of cleanup. Even as the days passed after our battle, little aftershocks would occasionally rock us to our cores, leaving us feeling like we were right back in the fray.

And none of us came out unscathed. In that last hit Gonzales had taken, she’d gotten a ton of shrapnel to one side of her body. While the automated systems in the battlecruiser’s medbay took care of most of it, she permanently lost her right eye. She seemed to be adapting well enough, but it was clear she had a very long road to recovery.

Eske didn’t fare much better. Her open wound had been taken care of by making a skin-graft combining her DNA and a mimic sample, but her goggles had been damaged beyond repair. Sure, the coin twins could make her a new pair, but that was pretty low on the list of priorities.

Bahn and Ciangi were relatively fine, with only minor burns and nicks from the aftermath, and Mimic was…different. She was still herself, still kind and a great leader, but I could tell that she was brimming with the new energy and abilities that came from the massive amount of nuclear runoff she had eaten.

There were also an insane number of mimics that could now take human shape, and were just as advanced as Mimic had been before she took her nuclear bath. It was strange, having the number of friendly faces to learn suddenly triple, but I wasn’t complaining.

As for me, well, I lost a grand total of two fingers on my burned hand. Maybe they would had been salvageable if I hadn’t kept using them to fire and drag Eske around, but to me, it was the tiniest of sacrifices I could have made.

We survived. All of us.

It seemed an impossibility. You couldn’t have a war without casualties, and yet here we were. Sure, plenty of us had been irreparably hurt, irreparably changed, but we were alive, and we had hope for the future.

We had defeated an enemy with more resources than we could ever have. We had escaped the grasp of corrupt Earth Gov Officials. Everything that had been thrown at us, we destroyed.

But still, there was so much left to do.

We all knew that Earth Gov could assemble more ships and try to come and take back what we stole. We also knew the aliens could return in even bigger forces. But now, we had time to prepare. There would be no more slapdash Hail Marys. Goodness knows we relied on them far too often.

And that was what left me standing at the foot of the battlecruiser’s ramp, looking up at Gonzales’s bandaged face.

“Are you sure you’re ready to go?” I asked, shifting from foot to foot.

“Hey, someone’s gotta get our family and resources. Besides, I’ll be back in a month or two, depending on just how stealthy I gotta be.”

“Or you could just not go at all.”

She gave me a look with her good eye, and it was just as withering surrounded by bruises and scabs. “You know I need to. We need more supplies. Eske needs to get her family out of harm’s way. The coin twins miss their girlfriend-lady-pers…whatever she is. I also need to get the word out of what the coup is trying to do.”

“But it seems wrong for you to go alone.”

She patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry about me. A little space will do me good. Besides, you have plenty to do around here.”

She gestured to the others standing just behind me—Eske, Mimic, and the Twins. Even some of the mimics that weren’t going with her showed up to give her a sendoff.

“Y’all better hold this place down while I’m off, you hear?”

“We will,” I said with a dry, scratchy throat. I offered her a hug, and she gladly took it before parting.

Mimic was next, and although they shared a handshake instead of an embrace, there was no lack of respect there. “You have done so much for my people. Return to us with the proper equipment, and I will make sure you get a new eye to replace what you lost.”

“I’m sure you will, Mimic. You’re a woman of your word.” She gripped the shapeshifter’s hand tighter and pulled her forward a bit. “So promise me that you’ll take care of him.”

Mimic nodded, a soft smile spreading across her face. “I will.”

“Good.” Gonzales took a step back and gave a cheeky little wave. “I’d do the whole personal good-bye things with all of y’all, but that sounds boring and I gotta go. So I’ll see ya on the flip side, nerds.”

There was a chorus of good-byes and waves, then the ramp was rising, then the ship was lifting off, and then she was gone.

“You’re worried about her,” Mimic said, stepping up to me and wrapping an arm around my waist.

“Yeah. The last time we were separated for a long period, it didn’t go so well.”

“Do not worry. She is strong, and smart. She will do what is best for all of us.”

“I know.” I sighed and looked back to the city just over the hill. There was still debris everywhere, and many of the buildings had been partially destroyed. We had such a long to-do list, I probably wouldn’t even have time to take a breather before Gonzales was back with supplies, friends, and information.

“It’s a lot, isn’t it?” Ciangi asked, coming up alongside us, her hand wrapped in Bahn’s.

“It is,” I answered, looking over the horizon. “But nothing crazier than what we’ve already done.”

“No, certainly not,” Eske agreed with a slight nod.

Mimic squeezed my waist slightly, then slowly walked us forward. “It will be a long road, but we’ve come this far together, so the rest of the road can’t be all bad.” She stood on tiptoes to press a gentle kiss to my cheek, and I smiled.

“No, not bad at all.”

Mimic Betrayed

1

From the Ground Up

I woke up slowly, my dreams trying to keep ahold of me. I could hear the keening of the byabos outside, which meant that it was long past dawn.

I let my eyes open slowly and wasn’t surprised to feel the bed empty next to me. Even after six months of rebuilding, Mimi rarely rested for more than a few hours at a time. Often, she would stay with me while I fell asleep, either in my arms as a human, or by my back in her spikey, true form, only to get up once I was truly out and go about her duties.

I’d tried lecturing her several times on giving herself a break, but she would just smile and assure me that she’d try to do better, even though we both knew she wouldn’t.

In her defense, there was still so much to do. After the mimics’ Hail Mary of absorbing massive amounts of nuclear waste, we had ended up with nearly a thousand suddenly-adult Mimics who went through the most turbo-charged puberty anyone could imagine. As if that wasn’t enough, there were even more that were in a sort of adolescent stage, not too different from Mimi when she was beginning to understand me but not able to take another organic’s form.

Out of nowhere, we went from dealing with maybe a hundred or so mimics that were capable of speech and more complicated shifting to ten times that. We needed more food, more shelter, and most importantly, more education.

Technically, Mimi had only moved beyond her child form a little over a year ago now. I knew that she was still learning things about herself and her people. It helped that she was a next-level genius who sometimes even made the coin twins feel unintelligent, but even with all that going for her, there was so much she didn’t know, and the new mimics had so many questions.

Speaking of which, I needed to get down to the lecture circle in town to see if I was needed for anything.

I exited my room, heading to the bathroom to start my morning routine. With the synthesizers of our stolen ship online, and a whole lot of pilfered parts from the alien fighters that had been shot down, we had a working sewage and water system to about a quarter of the structures we’d built. Maybe it was silly to be so proud of such a meager accomplishment compared to all that we still had to do, but I couldn’t help myself.

I finished up in the bathroom and headed downstairs to our kitchen. It was still fairly primitive, with a machine that used a heating coil to cook food that was raw, and a cold-storage unit instead of an on-premise food synthesizer, but it got the job done. If I wanted something special, I could always make the trek to our stolen warship. The supplies on that ship were meant to support nearly two thousand workers for four-year missions, so we were going to be just fine for a while.

“Hey there, sleepyhead. It’s unusual to see you up so late.”

I looked down the stairs to see Eske sitting at the table in the central room, a large bowl of fufu, with what smelled like peanut sauce, in front of her. Either she had snuck some seeds from Earth into the communal garden or had taken a trip to the ship while I was sleeping.

“What time is it?”

“Just a little past ten. Not a big deal, but I know how much you like your routine.”

She wasn’t wrong. Ever since doomsday stopped being right over our heads like a malevolent storm cloud, I’d started developing a structure for my day. I found that, with so much else going on, it helped me keep calm against the flood of stimulation always flowing past me.

“Huh, guess I was tired.”

“I’m not surprised, considering we tilled an entirely new section of the city for planting yesterday.” She finished up her food and sat back, sighing contentedly. “I’m gonna see who I can round up in a couple of hours for a hand-to-hand lesson. What are you up to?”

“I was about to head to the circle and see if anyone wanted to sit down for a lesson on Earth culture and how to interact with humans.”

She nodded. “I see that. But are you preparing for the hope that one day we’ll be at peace with our home planet, or preparing for war with them?”

“I’d prefer the former, to be honest, but I wouldn’t put the latter past them. I’d like to think that we slowed them down by all the trouble we’ve caused, but not by much. That coup is coming and none of the messages that we’ve sent to Earth Gov to warn them of the usurpers have gone through.” I sighed. “I just hope Gonzales is doing well. Have we heard from her?”

It was subtle, but the corners of Eske’s lips went down slightly. “No. Not since she said she couldn’t find any of my family.”

Ouch. In my just-waking-up mind, I had forgotten that Eske’s family was missing. Gonzales had returned once since she left, bringing the coin twins’ girlfriend—I still had no idea who was dating who in their tightknit triad—and her family, plus a few other contacts. None of Gonzales’s own, I noticed, but even I knew better than to ask.

She had left immediately, not even spending the night, citing that she hadn’t been able to get a hold of Eske’s family and was going to do some on the ground investigation.

I missed her. Our family was growing, and Mimi’s people were thriving, but it wasn’t the same without our wisecracking weapons expert. I had figured out after she and I had finally talked that she had feelings for me, though I couldn’t say how deep they ran. I didn’t know if maybe it was something more. Maybe she was afraid of being…replaced.

Although she and I weren’t close before my first contact with Mimi, she had been one of the only people that I had talked to on a regular basis. She had been nice when most people weren’t, and she knew my name. I really valued her, and I wanted us to be close friends again… I just didn’t know how to fix it.

After six more months rebuilding her people’s lives, Mimi and I had grown even closer. We were each other’s confidants and havens. I didn’t know what I would do without her.

Granted, without her, I’d still be a nobody on a ship with an abusive boss, but that was neither here nor there. I had mostly gotten over discrediting myself and telling myself that I was just some useless janitor, but I still had flareups every now and then. Thankfully, I rarely had time to indulge in those thoughts, but such was the life of a…whatever the heck I was.

I went to the fridge and grabbed a couple of the compressed protein bars that Eske liked to make in bulk for the week and headed out. Mimi’s house was no longer the central location of the commune, which had expanded to encompass all of the battlefield and slightly into the forest. Apparently more than a few mimics liked to live in the trees and had built some pretty elaborate treehouses for themselves. While those weren’t decked out with all the electrical and plumbing that the main buildings were, they didn’t seem to mind. I supposed everything was an upgrade to perpetual slavery and forced eternal mindlessness by an amorphous alien.

I walked past all the buildings, some of them built European style, some of them mimicking Japanese structures, some Greek, and even some that were completely their own. The coin twins and I had made sure that the mimics had access to all sorts of architectural information, and it was interesting to see who made what due to their personal aesthetic. And to discover who even had personal aesthetics.

That was a whole matter all its own. The mimics were just beginning to find out who they were and what they liked, which resulted in a whole lot of experimentation. Although I was bad with names, I recalled there was Mig, who preferred to have one giant eye in the center of her forehead rather than two, and Goshi, who ran around as a multicolored horse that occasionally spoke Common. Thankfully, they were the most out-there, considering that mimics could literally take on multiple forms and manipulate them how they pleased the more experienced they got, but it took some getting used to.

I reached the circle, which was more toward the center of town but slightly away from the buildings. It was a large area of compacted dirt, with dozens of roughly-made benches. There were a handful of tables scattered about, but not enough for everyone to use them.

We were in the process of building a school, but it wasn’t as high on the docket as an infirmary, nursery or the like. Although none of us were really clear on how the mimic reproduction thing worked, there were enough fully-grown adults running around now, so that meant babies were pretty much an eventuality.

Ugh. I wasn’t completely thrilled about adding more to our number considering that we were still figuring so many things out, but we wanted to be prepared. Granted, our nursery was mostly outfitted with ways to document what happened and take samples considering that none of us knew beans about their reproduction and it wasn’t like there were any textbooks on the subject.

“Hey, guys,” I said to the group sitting there. While there was plenty of work for the mimics to do, all of us had set the rule that each of them needed at least four hours a day where they weren’t trying to help with construction or any other project. It seemed that some of their habits died hard, and relentlessly toiling down to the bone was one of them.

“Hullo, Leader Higgens,” they chorused. Well, most of them chorused. Even after six months, human speech wasn’t easy for all of them. After observing the growth of hundreds of mimics, we had all definitely learned that their transitions came at different paces.

“Hello,” I answered back, gently correcting their speech. The ‘Leader Higgens’ thing wasn’t my idea, but it was what they had taken to calling all of us humans, Mimi, and some of her lieutenants. “You guys in the mood to learn today?”

They nodded eagerly, filing onto the benches. There was only about twenty of them, but that was more than enough.

“So, what do you want to learn about today? There’s basic math, some Earth history, more Earth customs, language… You all tell me.”

There was a general murmuring amongst the students. Considering there was more than ten of them, it was doubtful that at least one of them hadn’t attended one of my previous talks, but usually the group was very good at agreeing.

“How about math?” one of them said after the group seemed to come to a consensus.

“Math it is,” I said, pulling the holo-projector from the cabinet we kept at the edge of the circle. Once that was all set up, I got to work. It may not have been as cool as the weapons system the twins were making, or the martial arts that Eske taught, or the everything that Mimi did, but considering we were building an entire civilization from the ground up, even the smaller things mattered.

2

Progress is a Journey

I finished the lesson and the group of mimics wandered their separate ways, some of them going to get food while others were just making space for the next group. That was one thing I would miss if the population got bigger. Currently, there was an intense sense of community in our little corner of the universe, with everyone working together to support each other and thrive. As with all civilizations, the bigger we got, the more that would go away.

“Hey there, Leader Higgens! I figured I’d see you here!”

I turned from putting away the projector, making sure it was neat for the next person who used it—which was probably going to be me—to see Mari standing a few feet away from me.

Mari was an…interesting mimic to say the least. One of the little ones that had suddenly become an adult after the absorption of the gun’s runoff, she had styled herself off of one of the sparkling, super cutesy girls from the comic holos that Eske was so partial to.

She had large, bubblegum pink hair that she wore in pigtails, and a heart-shaped face with a light dusting of freckles. Her eyes were large and sparkling blue, surrounded by long lashes and complemented by her button nose.

The mimic chose a form that was as short as Ciangi, and styled to be youthful in appearance, making her look like a perpetual child.

It was quite the confusing conundrum, because in a literal sense, she was a child, only having been an adult for six months, but in another sense, she wasn’t a child at all. She had been alive for about a thousand years, had consumed enough energy to be fully mature, and seemed like she might be able to give Mimi a run for her money on sheer intellect. It was difficult to wrap my head around, so in general, I tried to avoid her.

Which was difficult because she had taken to following either Mimi or I whenever she could.

“Hey, Mari,” I said, smiling. “What are you up to?”

“I was with Leader Mimi while she was looking over the defense grid with Leaders Ciangi and Bahn, but she said she’d like to see you, so she asked me to come fetch you.”

“Why not just use our comms?” I asked. Bahn had gone through a lot of trouble of making rudimentary, handheld scanners for everyone to use. They all connected to the same grid, allowing communication throughout our entire little city, and thankfully, the new mimics seemed to know not to use it unless they needed it. I suppose it helped that we had three different channels.

“She did. She said you weren’t answering.”

I looked down to my wrist, concerned that something had malfunctioned in my much more complicated scanner, only for me to see my arm was blank.

“Huh, I must have forgotten it back at home.”

“I figured as much!” Mari said, batting her eyes at me. “So, I stopped by there first and grabbed it.”

“You went into my room?” I asked cautiously. Maybe it was because of what happened on the ship when Mimi was first discovered by Giomatti, but I was very uncomfortable with someone entering my quarters without permission.

“Technically, they are Leader Mimi’s vents just as much as yours,” she answered matter-of-factly. “But no, I found it in the kitchen.”

“Ah, I must have left it there when I was getting food.” She reached into her bag and pulled out my scanner, gently tossing it over to me. “Thank you, by the way,” I said

“No problems, Leader Higgens! Whatever I can do to help!”

Wow. She was really happy all the time. I had the feeling that she could give Eske a run for her money on impressive optimism.

“It is appreciated.” I said, sliding the mechanism on and booting it up. I had gone without it on Earth, but ever since Bahn had recreated one for me styled after the kind we had used when first confronting the alien that used to enslave Mimi’s people, I wore it every day. It was very unusual for me to forget it, but I guessed my mind had been particularly occupied this morning.

Once it was going, I hit the channel that just us ‘leaders’ used. “Hey, Mimi,” I said, pressing the button to communicate. “You called?”

“Oh, hello there,” she answered, sounding pleasantly surprised. “I was worried.”

“Sorry about that. I must have been distracted this morning, I accidentally left it behind.”

“I am relieved! If you could, would you meet me at the defense hub?”

“Sure, I’ll be there in a jiffy.”

“See you soon. Give Mari my thanks. I assume she is the one that found you.”

“You are correct,” I said with a small laugh. “I’ll see you soon.”

I ended the connection and looked to the angelic little mimic waiting for me. “Mimi says thank you.”

“I heard,” she said, holding out her hand. “Let’s go.”

I looked to her offered palm, feeling far more awkward than I should for something so simple. “If it’s alright with you, I’d rather not.”

“Oh, right,” she said, nodding knowingly. “I remember being told you don’t like being touched except by a few people.”

“That is correct,” I said, heading past her. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course not! I’ve been reading up about human psychology, and it’s interesting how neuro-divergent your species is! Mimics more or less all seem to work pretty similarly, but humans…not so much.”

“Don’t be so sure of that,” I said, smirking slightly. “Your species is still figuring itself out after years of slavery and forced starvation.”

“True.” She skipped along beside me, easily keeping pace. She looked like one of those poster children for an ad campaign and it was a bit…disconcerting.

Thankfully, we reached the defense hub—which was just the fancy name we now gave the crashed alien ship—without any sort of incidents or emergencies. Not that we had a lot of those, but every now and then, there was a fire or some sort of structure collapse. Mari never stopped skipping, her high-pitched, childlike voice chattering away without respite.

Thankfully, she knew to stop the hopping around when we finally reached the massive ship, lest we startle one of the twins or their acolytes as they worked on something important.

While I was still continuing to help them with basic engineering tasks, much of my education had been put on hold so I could teach the mimics that were interested in that field of science. Once they passed my level of understanding, which generally only took them about a month, they moved on to learning from and helping the twins directly.

Sometimes I was a little jealous that they were able to learn so fast, absorbing pages and pages of information in just a couple of hours, but I tried to fight it. After all, I wasn’t the one who had been a slave anywhere from a century to a millennium, so my pride could take a backseat on this.

“Hey there!” Ciangi said, looking up as soon as I was in. “Long time no see.”

“Only because you never leave the lab here,” I shot back, laughing as I approached her.

“Aw, come on,” she retorted. “I get out of here…sometimes.”

“I can attest that is definitely not the case,” Harunya said, coming up from behind Ciangi and handing her a steaming mug of something. “The last time you came home to your room was two weeks ago.”

“Two weeks ago? Really?” The blonde sipped her tea slowly. “Huh, I must smell then.”

Harunya ruffled her hand through the smaller of the Coin Twin’s hair. “That I can also confirm. Tonight, you will shower.”

“Yeah, yeah, if I get up the security grid to where it needs to be.”

“No. No ifs.”

“Uh-huh, whatever you say.” She gave Mari and I a wink over her mug that Harunya couldn’t see. “So, how are the twins?”

For a moment, I was confused, but then the tall, golden-skinned woman rubbed her rounded belly and I remembered that she was pregnant. It didn’t seem like a thing I would forget, but considering she was only just beginning to show, I was pretty sure that it just hadn’t clicked in my mind yet.

“Fine, as far as the scanner in the medical bay says.”

“Good to know.” The blonde’s attention turned back to us. “Anyways, I know you’re here for Mimi, so you should head out. She’s by the gun bay with Bahn.”

“Alright then. You two be good now.”

“Never have and won’t start now.”

We shared a short laugh and I headed into the area where the new generation of mimics had burst into adulthood. We’d made a ton of modifications and had improved both the integration of the massive, stolen cannon as well as its runoff. While we did have an entire species of mimics to absorb any nuclear overloads, we still weren’t really sure of the health ramifications of such rapid forced growth. Sure, Mimi and the others were doing fine so far, but Mimi wasn’t even two years into being her fully grown self.

“Hey there,” I said, seeing her halfway in one of the maintenance hatches of the console.

She quickly pushed herself out and looked at me with a brilliant smile. “Hey there, glad to see you in one piece.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, we don’t really live like that anymore. No rapid hunts for food, or running for our lives, or any of that normal fun stuff we used to do.”

“You never know,” she taunted, coming forward and giving me a hug. “And we’re all aware that it’s only a matter of time before Earth decides to deal with us.”

“Huh, you really know how to make a guy feel secure,” I joked, returning her hug. I could feel much of my tension easing at her touch. Not that I was super wound up, but teaching always took a bit of a toll on me.

“We’re a new civilization that’s already made enemies with two separate, technologically advanced worlds. We don’t get to feel secure.” She seemed to think better of her words as she stepped back. “But, even if we don’t feel secure, that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun. So…”

“Yes?” I supplied when she trailed off.

“So, I want to go on a date.”

“A date?” I echoed like a silly parrot.

“Yes, a date. I read about it on the net that dates are special events that two people in a relationship do together, whether that relationship is platonic or romantic. Most popular are seeing special holos together, meals out in nature, and sleepovers. I thought, as a celebration of our six-month anniversary of peace, I believe they’re called, we might do one such activity.”

I smiled outright at that, quite amused. It wasn’t often I got to see the fearless Mimi look nervous or uncertain. “You already spend the night every night.”

She pushed her lips up in a pout that was just downright adorable. “You know what I mean.”

I laughed lightly. “Of course, I’d love to go on a date with you, and happy six-month anniversary.” I felt a small rush of nerves. “I, um, didn’t get you anything. I’m sorry.” Geez, I was terrible at this. I never even thought about an anniversary being a thing. Considering our time with each other had been full of imprisonment, war, and a whole lot of running for our lives, I didn’t know how long we had kinda been a thing or not.

“When did you want to do this?”

“Well,” she said, taking my hand. “How about now?”

“Now?” I asked. “As in right now? Today?”

“Yes. Now as in today. As in right now. I hid all of the food at Pyjik’s place. I was able to get your favorites from the synthesizer menu on your ship and I woke up early today to make sure I could get them all done before Bahn showed me his progress here.”

“Wow. You really are something, you know that?” I said, pulling her into a hug again.

“Can I come?” Mari asked, nearly inserting herself between the two of us and looking up with bright, sparkling eyes.

“Actually,” Bahn said, saving the day before either of us had to break her poor little heart. “I think it’s gonna be a bit lonely here. Would you mind hanging out with me while I run some tests on the defense grid?”

“Okay…” she said with a bit of a sigh.

“Speaking of the grid…” I said, turning to the taller of the twins. His long, long black hair had grown even more, nearly reaching his behind. It made my own ponytail look miniscule in comparison. I supposed I could cut my hair, but I never really learned how, and I felt like I was cooler with long hair anyways. Whenever I was stressed, it gave me something to tug at, and the texture was a nice distraction against my fingertips when I was feeling overwhelmed. “How is that going?”

“No!” Mimi said, forceful enough for us to know that she meant business but not so much that she startled any of us. “Date. Now.”

“Alright, alright,” I said, raising my hands in surrender. “I’ll swing by tomorrow for an update.”

“Make sure you do,” Bahn said with a laugh. “We’ve really made some great progress here.”

“I’m sure you have,” I said with a nod, but then Mimi had my hand and was pulling me out of the ship.

I didn’t resist, of course, following along more than a little amused. I couldn’t remember the last time I had seen her so excited about something so benign. Usually her shoulders were heavy with all the responsibility that came with leading an entire civilization. Her world had long since become about worrying over supplies, structure, and progress. I liked seeing her having a little frivolous fun.

We reached Pyjik’s house without being stopped a dozen times, which was probably a first for us. The main lieutenants from the first war had all created houses in separate sectors of our little community, that way someone was always close by if help was needed.

It was funny how different each of their places were. As different as the mimics themselves.

Pyjik’s was a fairly standard log cabin, where she lived with three or so juvenile mimics. Astaroth, who lived all the way in the forest sector, had a massive treehouse that spanned at least seven different towering arbors, which nearly a dozen adult and juvenile mimics went in and out of.

Meridyna had a large, American-styled house in the southern tier. As far as I knew, only non-shifting mimics stayed with her. There weren’t nearly as many of them as there were before the war, so I was pretty sure she cared for all of them, feeding them daily and ensuring they had a more natural growth pattern.

Lastly was Urdet. He didn’t have a home as far as I knew, at least not in the traditional sense. He was in charge of constructing the mimics’ library, which was a combination of both physical and digital records. He spent all of his days and nights there, building new floors, creating new servers, organizing data into the appropriate categories, and creating interfaces for future mimics to learn from.

While projects like that probably didn’t seem nearly as cool as a defense grid, or combat, it was one of my favorites. Access to information and history was truly the sign of a civilization. While we were a small one, we were definitely on our way.

As soon as we approached the door, Pyjik was waiting there, a literal picnic basket, like the kind from ancient Earth sims, in her wiry hands.

“I believe this is for you!” she announced, smiling brightly at us.

“That it is!” Mimi said, taking it in her free hand. “Thank you for guarding it!”

“No problem! It’s the most excitement I’ve had since the great battle.” She sighed and leaned against her door. “Never thought I would miss a war, but I just don’t feel that useful anymore. Are you sure there aren’t any space stations I can invade? Ships to steal?”

“We’ll talk about you accompanying Gonzales on her next mission at another time. I have the rest of the afternoon off.”

“Wow, really? I think that’s a first in like…forever.”

“Exactly, so I’d like not to have it interrupted. You be safe now.”

“Yes, Leader Mimi.”

And with that, we were heading off to the forest again.

I let Mimi drag me along, just enjoying her company. It was rare that I got to see her when the sun was up, and I found the sight of her with the natural light reflecting off her pale face and white hair that much more captivating.

We passed by trees, then the clearing, until we finally reached the area where we had built our emergency animal holding pens. Like everything else, we had expanded and improved on that too. We now had a sizable area with all sorts of holding pens, with an appropriate number of creatures in each.

Part of it was for research, so that we could better understand the unique life in her little slice of the universe. Part of it was for conservation, just in case more aliens came to attack. After all, they had limped off with their tail between their legs, but they knew where we were and what we were capable of. We all kind of knew that there was always the chance of them returning with greater numbers, but there was nothing we could do but prepare our defenses and try to make sure we weren’t so helter-skelter if they did come back.

Then again, we all knew that humans were much more likely to be the issue. Sooner or later, Earth was going to get even for how we had ‘wronged’ it.

Finally, we reached a smooth area on the other side of the pens and Mimi pulled a blanket from her basket. Laying it out, she flopped down and patted the ground next to her. “So, you ready for our date?”

“You know what?” I said, sitting beside her. “I am.”

3

Don’t Take Time for Granted

“So, what inspired you to choose a picnic, out of all things?” I asked as Mimi pulled snack after snack out of her little basket.

“You like food, and I like you. From what I know about your species, the logic follows.”

“That it does,” I said, laughing lightly as she handed me a sandwich. While it certainly wasn’t some sort of top-of-the-line, gourmet sandwich, I enjoyed every bite of it because it was made by the woman I loved.

My stomach did a little mini-flip, not exactly the best movement considering that I was actively eating, and I did my best to calm it down. I guess even after six months, my body still reacted at the thought that Mimi and I shared a connection that was different than what we felt for anybody else.

“This is nice,” I said, laying back once I finished my sandwich.

“It is, isn’t it?” Mimi asked, resting her head against my chest. “I can see why Ciangi is always yelling at me to slow down for a moment.”

“Me too.”

“…I can hear your heartbeat,” she murmured, nuzzling into my shirt.

“Does that bother you?”

“No. I like it. It lets me know that you’re alive.”

“Yeah, I suppose it’d be pretty stressful if I wasn’t.”

“You have no idea,” she said softly.

I let myself drift off for a moment, but I could sense that something was amiss. “You okay?”

“Just thinking.”

“What about? You’ve got your upset face on.”

She sat up, her brows furrowing. “Do I?”

“Well, not really before, but most definitely now.”

She grimaced and let out a long sigh. “I was thinking…sad thoughts.”

“Like what?”

“Like…the fact that, as far as I can tell, my species doesn’t suffer from the cellular degradation that yours does on a regular basis.”

“Yeah, you guys do seem to have stacked the deck on genetics.”

My attempt at a mild joke didn’t seem to please her. “Surely you understand what that means, right?”

I felt like normally I would, but with the way she was looking at me, my whole mind went blank. “Uh…should I?”

“Yes. You are going to grow old, Higgens, and I am not. While my kind can die, it’s either due to starvation or damage, via violence or accident. Even if our lives go perfectly, we have a maximum of maybe eighty years together, then you’ll be gone, and I’ll be all alone.” She looked at me with such large, sorrowful eyes that I felt my heart squeeze. “You’ve been with me for my entire life where I truly had consciousness, and imagining an eternity without you is…is… Well, it’s awful. How can I be happy knowing that’s what’s in store for us if we get a happy ending?”

I stared at her for several moments, completely sideswiped. Sure, I had faced my own death a lot with varying levels of bravery, but I had never thought of what it might do to others. Was that selfish of me?

“I guess I never thought of that,” I murmured, feeling vastly inadequate for this conversation.

“It’s fine. I suppose that is not your worry to have.” She sighed, and the sound just about broke my heart. So often she was strong and fearless, it was easy to forget that she was just figuring stuff out along the way just like the rest of us. “I’m sorry if I ruined our meal.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” I said, reaching over and rubbing her shoulders. “These are things I need to hear. If it’s bothering you, it bothers me. But I don’t know if there’s anything we can do about it in this situation.”

“I know…” she murmured, reaching up to hold one of my hands. “Perhaps I am putting the wagon before the animal. We have a lot of pending doom to get through for both of us to get to eighty.”

I snickered lightly. “Do you perhaps mean, ‘put the cart before the horse’?”

She tilted her head curiously. “What’s a horse?”

“Nothing important,” I said, smiling and pulling her close enough to kiss the top of her head. “Let’s just get through this next year, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, heaving a bit of a sigh. “I suppose that is better for my mental health.”

“Probably for all of ours. What we need to do is just take everything one day at a time and keep building up our little corner of the galaxy.”

I pulled her close to my side and we sat like that for several minutes, just holding each other, listening to the avian creatures singing and trilling, along with the rest of the wild sounds. Originally, those cries had been both foreign and terrifying, but I had long since grown used to them and found a certain sort of comfort in their alienness.

“Higgens?”

“Yes?”

“I remember reading something else about human courtship traditions. I’d like to try it.”

“Really?” I asked. “What d’you wanna do?”

“Well… I’d like you to dance with me.”

I sat there a moment, trying to think if she would understand the meaning of ‘two left feet,’ but how could I chicken out when Mimi asked for so little?

“I can do that,” I said, standing up and offering her my hand.

Her face illuminated, all the stress and worry from our last conversation fading in light of my answer. She allowed me to help her up, then I pulled up one of the few songs I had saved to my wrist scanner for when I was working. I picked a slow one, with a gentle beat, that was more soothing than boogying.

Trying not to hold my breath, I wrapped one of my arms around her waist and then placed her hand on my shoulder. Even after all of our time together, my heart was picking up speed and I could feel my face flushing. I got our other arms into the position that I had seen on about a thousand different sims, then slowly moved a foot forward.

Naturally, Mimi seemed to pick up on my moves quickly, as she did with everything else, and soon we were gliding around our little picnic.

Well, gliding was probably a generous term, but we were doing alright for a couple of newbies who had never cut a rug before. I didn’t want to brag and say it came naturally, because I was about as athletically inclined as a swamp rat, but there was always something easy about being with Mimi. Even with fingers missing from my hand, and my six-month-old burn scars still pinkish in color, I felt like a debonair gentleman come to call on her. It was hard to remember that there had ever been a time in my life without her; that’s how much we seemed to fit together like peas in a pod.

The world, and all of our troubles, drifted away on the notes from my scanner, transporting us to someplace where there were no wars, no coups, nothing but us and all the possibilities we had stretching out before us.

What I wouldn’t have given to stay in that hazy fantasy, just living, breathing, being. But like everything else in our lives, it only lasted long enough for us to miss it as it broke.

“Leader Higgens! Leader Mimi!”

We paused mid-step, the trance between us breaking, and I looked to the pen area to see Mari running toward us, waving her arms.

“Leader Higgens! Leader Mimi!”

“Yes, we’re here,” I said, reluctantly letting Mimi go. “Do you need something?”

She reached us and nodded emphatically. She didn’t need to catch her breath like a human did, so her words just came spilling out.

“An Earth ship has appeared on the radar!”

“Wait, what?” Mimi dropped my hands and started toward Mari. It was only just then that I realized the small, adorable mimic had chosen a name that was almost identical to her leader. …was that on purpose? Also, geez, I really let stuff fly over my head sometimes.

“It’s not a war vessel, just a simple envoy ship. Max crew of twelve at the most. It’s still too far for us to get a good scan, but we don’t detect any sort of nuclear payload!”

Mimi looked at me with a slightly guilty expression. “It never ends, does it?”

“Looks like it,” I said, grabbing her hand and running back to the defense hub.

4

A Doubtful Ceasefire

I arrived at the lab huffing and puffing, although Mari and Mimi were perfectly fine. When we burst into the main cannon-room, Ciangi, Bahn, Harunya, and Eske were already there, looking up at the radar-holo with a range of intense expressions.

I wasn’t sure why we still called it radar considering that type of technology was long outdated, and our sensors used electro-something-or-other, but that was neither here nor there. What was here was a ship from Earth.

“Have they made any aggressive moves?” Mimi asked, sliding into place beside Ciangi.

“No, but they’ve stopped moving just on the edge of our cannon range.”

“Huh.”

“What do you think they want?” I asked, my heart in my throat.

“Unfortunately, I got my master’s in medicine, not fortune telling,” Harunya murmured, her eyes locked on the holo.

“I don’t know if this is the appropriate time for sarcasm…” Eske said, worrying at her lip with her teeth.

“It’s always the time for sarcasm,” Ciangi retorted. “Especially in times of stress, and having an Earth spaceship hanging just out of our orbit is making me very stressed.”

“What’s our protocol?” Mimi asked, reining the conversation in. “We haven’t come up with a standard procedure because we thought we had at least a year until they even started to amass forces to come here.”

“Well…” I said slowly. “They’re not attacking us. They’re not scanning us. What if we just…wait?”

Bahn shook his head. “I don’t know if that’s a great idea. What if they’re setting up to do something catastrophic?”

“Could they do that without it setting off our sensors?”

“Unlikely, but not impossible.”

“I just think going on the offensive and blasting them out of the sky would be inherently wrong. What if it’s a truce?” I argued.

“You really think that they’re going to try to set up a truce?”

“They’re hailing us now!” Ciangi said. “They say they want a truce.”

“…you did that on purpose,” Bahn accused.

“Nah, look at the comm feed. They’re talking peace and they’re talking loud.”

“Huh,” I muttered, rubbing my chin. “I don’t know if I like that I was right. This does seem somewhat trappish.”

“Then let’s treat it like a trap,” Mimi said. “We’ll go in our warship, weapons primed, and have their peace talks, but if they try anything unscrupulous, we make them regret ever coming to my home.”

There was a murmur of agreement and she stated, “Don’t activate the planet shielding. Let’s keep that in our back pocket for now since they’re not on the assault.”

That was right. Earth didn’t know that we had such advanced shield technology. Thanks to everyone’s hard work, we had managed to expand the shield for many miles. That way, heaven forbid should some sort of total-planet assault happen, we would have enough flora and fauna available to repopulate. Assuming we survived, of course. But that was what I generally assumed nowadays. We had a pretty good track record, after all.

Minus the whole Gonzales losing an eye, Eske losing her goggles for three months, and my missing fingers.

“Who’s all going to go then?” Ciangi asked, reaching behind her to hold Harunya’s hand.

“Obviously, I am out,” the doctor said. “I don’t want to risk leaving orbit and reentry now that I’m nearing the halfway point of my pregnancy.”

“Fair enough,” Bahn said. “But I think we should otherwise all go. Show them a united front.”

“But what if it is a trap and they do somehow manage to trick us?”

“Then we have Gonzales, whenever she returns, as well as all of the lieutenants,” Mimi said, rubbing her chin. She had picked that habit up from Bahn, I had noticed, and it was quite cute on her. “I agree with making a statement. If Earth wants to try to start something, they’re going to have to say it to us as a united front.”

“Alright then,” I said, taking a deep breath to catch up with everything that had happened. “Is this where we get prepped and suit up?”

“Yes,” Mimi said, scattering us all with a nod. “Let’s do that now. I want us all on the ship in fifteen minutes.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice!” Eske said, taking off as only Eske could.

Mimi and I exchanged a look. I could feel that we were on the cusp of something important, but I hoped that it was as good as how it was presenting itself.

I guessed we would have to wait and see. I’d tell myself to cross my fingers, but I could only do that on one hand now.

“You’d think for these being military-grade flexi-armor, it’d be a little more comfortable,” Ciangi groused as Mimi sat at the controls, starting up the warship. Even after all this time, it was strange to see someone other than Gonzales there, and I wished she was back. I felt like what little friendship we had was slipping away, and that thought made me sick to my stomach.

“It’s armor,” Eske said, already buckled in. “That’s basically the opposite of comfort. Just be grateful that these are designed to dispel blaster force and other light-spectrum-based assaults.”

“But not kinetic assaults.” Ciangi continued to pout. “So, if someone has a sword, we’re SOL.”

“Yeah, but who do you know that actually brings a sword to battle nowadays?”

“Um, I’m pretty sure a good chunk of the mimics when the fight came down to the ground. Although some of them were swords made out of their bodies.”

“Fair enough. But I don’t think Earth Gov or the coup people are gonna be goin’ old school on us. If anything, they’ll have a bunch of newer, fancier gadgets that they invented just to destroy us.”

“You always look on the bright side, don’t you?” I asked, buckling myself in.

But Eske just shrugged and flashed me a bright smile. “I am being positive. I worked for these guys long enough to know that their scientists were basically running off caffeine and euphoria for the past year since Miss Mimi dropped the biggest advancement since the wheel right in their lap. It’s kinda amazing what creative minds can do when given the proper tools.”

“Let’s just hope those tools don’t end up being used on us.”

“Taking off now,” Mimi said, interrupting the conversation. “Please buckle yourselves in. Ciangi, can you let the other ship know that we are approaching for a parley. Inform them that we are fully armed and ready to engage should they force our hand, but we would prefer for things to remain peaceable.”

“Yes, ma’am. Gimme thirty seconds.”

“Good. Taking off now.”

It had been so long since I had been in the ship that I actually jumped in my restraints. Thankfully, nobody seemed to notice, and soon we were taking off into the air. The rumble of the engines that had once been so familiar to me was now foreboding, like they were taking me back to a life that I had left behind.

As much as I sometimes complained about day-to-day routine being boring compared to our high-flying days when we had first escaped Giomatti, I was quickly realizing that I didn’t want to get back into the action. I liked knowing I would see tomorrow. I liked that there was no one chasing or trying to kill me.

Why did I have the feeling that was going away?

Suddenly, there was a booming sound and I nearly jumped out of my skin. “What the heck was that?”

Mimi sat bolt upright in her chair, her gaze unfocused as she listened intently. I couldn’t be certain, but I thought I saw her ears growing outwards slightly, something I had learned she liked to do when she was trying to pick up more info.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” she snapped suddenly, striding past us. “Someone take the helm!”

“Uh, I guess that’s me,” I said, unbuckling and sliding into the chair she’d vacated. While I was definitely wondering what had set her off, I was much more interested in making sure that we got out of orbit safely.

I went through the steps that I had learned in our six months of peace. It turned out that if you could fly a fighter in the middle of a giant space battle, you could pretty much fly anything. Granted, I still wasn’t an ace pilot or anything, but I could get any of our ships into space.

We went through the familiar rattling, reverberating, and otherwise havin’ a real party, then we shot into space. Once I plotted a course for an appropriate distance from the Earth ship, I unbuckled and decided to check on what Mimi was doing.

I didn’t get very far. I was maybe just to Eske’s seat when Mimi came stalking in, her hand firmly gripping Mari’s collar.

“You are not supposed to be here,” she snapped, looking quite perturbed at the smaller shapeshifter.

“Sooorrrry!” Mari whined, looking quite contrite. “I just wanted to come along! This could be history and I didn’t want to miss it like I missed so much else!”

“That does not matter. You could have been hurt or put our entire mission in jeopardy!”

“Mimi,” I said softly, approaching the two of them. “Can you really blame her?”

I didn’t want to say it out loud, but it was clear that Mari worshipped the ground that Mimi walked on. She’d even named herself after her fearless leader. A possible treaty between the mimics and Earth could be happening. I wouldn’t want to miss that either.

“I… I guess I understand.” She looked back to her underling with a firm but loving expression on her face. “But you and I are going to have a serious talk about protocol when we get back, and there are going to be consequences.”

“I understand…” the younger mimic murmured, looking at the ground.

“Good. Now go sit down and stay there. Do not say anything, alright?”

“Yes, ma’am.” A broad grin spread across her face and she scampered into a chair near Eske.

“We’re in range to directly hail via holo-chat,” Ciangi said.

Mimi took a deep breath, then went to stand at the helm where the holo-projector would scan her in order for her to appear on the other ship and vice versa. “Go ahead and hail them.”

Ciangi did so, and there were a few moments of tense silence as we all waited, the pressure of the moment and what it meant quite apparent.

Finally, there was a reply back, and it played over the comm system.

“We are ready to receive your communication.”

That was it. Succinct. Forthright. My mind turned it over, trying to hear if there was any malice within the words, but there just wasn’t enough there for me to guess. Not that I was very good at discerning emotions anyways.

Mimi gave a nod to Ciangi, and there was a slight buzz. She was broadcasting. A few moments later, we received theirs, and a holographic form came into being in front of the helm.

It was of a military person, that much was for certain, and judging by everything they had pinned to their chest and shoulders, they were quite a big deal. Their face was stern, hard-lined, and decidedly unhappy. It certainly helped that they were flanked by two fully armed soldiers, guns clearly evident.

“What is your purpose in coming here?” Mimi asked flatly. I had to admire her on how much she had learned about human tone and how to control it, because at this point, I was pretty sure that she was better at it than me.

“I presume that you are the leader of the discovered lifeforms,” the stern-faced one said, their tone just as grating as I guessed it would be. “The first contact called Mimic?”

“That I am. And who do I have the…” She paused. “…pleasure of speaking to?”

“Commander Jensen Diylok. I have been sent to see if, after our somewhat shaky start, there is a chance we could overcome our slights and try again.”

“Shaky start?” Mimi echoed. “You mean as in going back on our treaty, stealing the technology I gifted you, and illegally imprisoning my allies who also happen to be your citizens?”

“We apologize for the actions of a few renegades that helped contribute to you stealing Earth Gov property, causing excessive damage, endangering the welfare of our planet, other acts of treason, and kidnapping a citizen.”

“Kidnapping a citizen?” What the heck did they mean by that? We hadn’t kidnapped anyone.

“The worker that you abducted from our facility who was working on the ship.”

“Oh! That’s me!” Eske said, standing up and stepping into the holo-projector reading field. “I’m not kidnapped! I’m very happy with this arrangement and how it turned out.”

Mimi shook her head slightly and gestured for Eske to sit down. “They don’t care if you’re willing or not. They’re leveraging your presence to have more negotiating power.” The custodian sat down, and Mimi’s voice hardened as she looked back to the hologram in front of us. “And that’s what this is, right? A negotiation?”

“It could be. That mostly depends on you.”

“I disagree. I think this largely rests in your hands.” My eyes flicked from her to the holo-commander and back again. “Before we discuss anything remotely resembling peace, or a treaty, I want to know why you’re here.”

“I think the reason we’re here has already been discussed—”

“No. You say you’re here for a treaty, but why. Earth Gov, and even the coup taking place, would never give up their grudge against us unless there was a greater threat. I believe there’s an old human adage, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’

So, what I want to know is, what’s brought you here? What are you so afraid of?”

The commander’s expression soured, but he surprised me by answering. I supposed I didn’t have the best impression of a lot of Earth’s high-ranking military members. “Earth recognizes that the acts of a few interlopers have lost us an alliance that could benefit us quite greatly. So, we would prefer to extend the olive branch before we need something, rather than waiting until the last moment.”

“I see. And what are you hoping you might get out of such an alliance? More technology? More samples of my DNA? I may not know much about humans, but I do know that your governments are rarely willing to give more than they get.”

“Perhaps this conversation would be more productive if we did not assume each other’s motivations.”

“I’m not assuming,” Mimi countered, her voice like steel. “I’m asking you directly. Although I understand the human tendency to beat around the bush, I believe the term goes, I personally do not couch my words.”

“I can see that. We are interested in benefiting both our cultures in any way that we might need.”

The two continued to talk back and forth but I was distracted from the stressful conversation by Mari’s shuffling next to me.

“What are you doing?” I whispered, not wanting to interrupt the obviously very important conversation happening in front of us.

“Just a little uncomfortable,” she said, wiggling further and pulling her bag into her lap. “I still haven’t really gotten the hang of sitting down. It bends the spine funny.”

I chuckled very lightly at that, again trying not to get picked up by the holo-scanner. “I don’t think your outfit is helping. That’s new, right?”

She smiled at me, her cherubic cheeks making her eyes close. “I made it out of some of the rubber insulation in the recreational deck. Did you know that they used a special type of rubber that was synthesized with an artificial polymer to make it that much more resistant to electricity and other isolatable forces?” I just blinked at her, surprised by the info dump. “Isn’t it cute?”

“You’ve learned how to make garments already?” That was something most of the mimics struggled with, and I knew several of them just shifted their bodies to have the illusion of a bodysuit or unitard on.

“Of course,” she answered blithely. “I had to make sure I was prepared for this moment. It would be silly to spend four months in planning just to be tripped up by a little outfit mishap.”

“Planning? What do you mean?” Was this some sort of mimic thing that I didn’t understand?

But she just reached into her bag and pulled out a tube-like thing with a couple wires sticking out of it. “You’re fun, Higgens. Out of anyone, I think I’ll miss you the most.”

“Wait, what—” Instead of answering my question, she just pressed a button and dropped the thing to the floor. I tried to catch it, but I was hardly even out of my seat when it felt like my whole body caught fire.

I tried to scream as I toppled to the ground, but I couldn’t get the muscles of my throat to work. I couldn’t even breathe. My whole entire body was tensed so hard that I was sure I was going to implode on myself in a crumpled ball.

I had experienced something like this before, but not nearly as excruciating. I was being electrocuted, and judging by the screams all around me, I wasn’t the only one.

The pain continued, building and building and building on itself until I was completely overtaken by it. My bleary eyes, locked into position and unable to blink, watched as Mari calmly walked over all of us to the helm.

She said something, I couldn’t hear what, and then the entire world slipped away from me.

5

De Ja Oh No

I wish I could say I woke up peacefully, that birds were chirping or that I came to with Mimi beside me, but that was not the case. My head was pounding, and my mouth felt like it had been stuffed with cotton then filled with blood. I was pretty sure I had bitten my tongue.

I groaned and looked around, my entire body aching. We were in a ship, that was for certain, but it didn’t look like our own.

I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t roll myself over. Pulling at my arms, I realized that they were in cuffs, as were my feet.

That definitely wasn’t good.

I gave myself a couple of minutes for my mind to settle, although my adrenaline was pumping, and I could feel my heartbeat accelerating. I needed to calm down and examine the situation if I wanted to be of any use.

But I couldn’t help it, my mind was flashing back to the time I had already spent imprisoned on Earth. The terror, having to sit back and watch Gonzales be terrorized, the electrocution. Occasionally I still had nightmares about it and to be pushed into the same situation again was making my body go into crisis.

I focused on my breathing. In and out. In and out. As the minutes passed, I became aware of other inhales rasping around me. I wasn’t alone, but I couldn’t tell yet if that was good enough.

Finally, I was in control enough to fully open my eyes and rock myself onto my back. From there, I was able to sit up and look around fully.

Ciangi, Bahn, and Eske were all in the room with me, similarly thrown face-down on the floor and bound by their wrists and ankles. From my position, I could see that the restraints were thick and lit up with nodules in several places. They looked more heavy duty than anything I had ever seen before, which made me wonder how dangerous they thought we were.

That thought made my stomach churn as I realized exactly what had happened. Not only were we in the custody of Earth again, but we had been betrayed by one of our own.

Crap.

I couldn’t believe it. Mari was but a child, and sweet as pie, if not a little clingy. Why would she do this to us?

I wanted to believe that it was a mistake, that she was somehow tricked, but I couldn’t see how. The self-satisfaction I had seen on her face before she fried us was one hundred percent deliberate. She had been planning this for months and we had walked right into her trap.

There was a whimper beside me and I looked to see Eske waking up. They had taken the goggles that the coin twins had made for her, and I felt my temper flare. Imprisoning us was one thing, but blinding someone for no reason was another.

“Hello?” She sounded terrified, her voice cracking, and I crept closer to her.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Oh, Higgens!” She tried to turn her face to look at me, and I saw her eyes trying to focus on me, but one of them was wandering off in its own direction. “I… I think I see you. Where are we?”

“I think we’re in some kind of brig, but I can’t tell for sure. If you roll onto your back, you can kinda use your momentum to sit up.”

“Ugh, give me a minute. I don’t think I’ve been in this much pain since I lost an MMA match to a state champion back in high school.”

“No problem. Take your time.”

I sat back, waiting, as she went through her own little breathing exercises. Even with her face partially pressed against the ground, I could see the pain written across her features. There was a small trickle of congealed blood down her lower lip, which I could tell was quite swollen. Geez, they had really done a number on us, hadn’t they?

After five minutes or so, she went through pretty much the same process I had to get up, and then we were sitting face to face.

“This isn’t good,” she said hoarsely.

“That’s one way to say it.” I tried to make light of the situation, to find a glimmer of hope. “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to scratch my nose so much in my entire life.”

“Oh, I can help with that. Gimme a sec.” Eske started to wiggle, rolling her shoulders several times until, in one smooth motion, she swung them up over her head, popping them out of joint only to end up settling back in and leaving her hands in front of her.

“How did you do that?” I asked, staring at her with wide eyes. You’d think after all the things I had seen, and all of the crazy experiences we had, that something so simple wouldn’t have surprised me, and yet it did.

“Do what?”

My eyes flicked to her hands, sitting in front of her like everything was normal, and she just laughed.

“Oh, I’m a little bit hyper-flexible. It’s partially what made me so good at a lot of the martial arts I liked.”

“A little hyper-flexible?” I retorted. “That was borderline terrifying.”

“Was it? Huh. That’s interesting. Anyways, I believe someone had an itchy nose?” She reached out and before I could tell her that I was joking, she was reaching for the general area of my face. After a few fumbling seconds, I realized that she couldn’t really see my face, so I gently moved my head in the direction of her fingers. Once she felt my touch, she scratched gently. “There we are. So, what now?”

“Should we go about waking the others, or wait for them to get up on their own?”

Eske rubbed her chin, her eyes still hazy and unfocused. “Honestly, I think it would be better if they were up. I can’t really see, and you have no hands. I think we can use all the help we can get, considering the situation.”

“Fair enough.” I looked around, trying to see if there was anything that I could use as a handhold, but we were pretty much in an empty containment room. I was surprised that they even put four of us in there.

Shifting, I managed to get to my knees and sort of shuffle forward until I was by Ciangi. I went to sit, wobbling and almost falling on my face, but thankfully Eske caught me and helped me onto my butt without hurting myself further.

“Hey, guys,” I murmured quietly, trying to wake them up as gently as possible. “Are you okay?”

Eske, with her hands in front of her, reached forward to stroke Ciangi’s curly hair. I noticed that her normally well-taken care of mane was slick with both oil and sweat. I knew it took a while to get that way, so how long had we been unconscious?

I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t think there was any way to find out at the moment, so I just settled for concentrating on waking up the engineer.

It took a while, with both Eske and I comforting her and talking softly, but eventually, her eyes flittered open.

Well, one did. The other was swollen shut with a black and blue bruise around it. She must have hit her face on something during her convulsions. Judging by the coloring and spread of it, it was definitely several hours old, but not multiple days. Well, that was the mildest of reliefs.

“Ow…” was all she groaned at first before her eyes closed again. For a moment, I felt panicked, but I heard her breathing steadily through her chapped lips. She was conscious, just recovering like we had. With a nod to Eske, we moved on to Bahn.

He was in slightly better shape than his other half, but there was blood around his mouth as well. Apparently, we had all taken enough of a shock to clamp down that hard on our tender mouth bits.

“Hey, Bahn, time to wake up.”

No response at first of course. But we were patient and kept at it until finally both of the twins were beginning to stir.

“What happened?” Ciangi groaned, managing to roll partially onto her side.

“We got shocked,” Eske answered quickly.

“Yeah, I put that together. What I meant was, why the heck were we shocked?”

“I don’t know,” Eske said as she helped Bahn to sit up.

“I do.” I looked at my friends uncertainly, as if I wasn’t sure whether I should deliver another blow to their morale, but I wasn’t much for keeping secrets and they deserved to know. “Mari betrayed us.”

“What? Little Mari who follows you and Mimi around like you’re gods?”

“Yeah, that little Mari. She said she had been planning this for four months and then threw some sort of electrical bomb onto the ground.”

“How did she not get shocked by it?” Bahn asked. “I seem to recall that she was fine, but I can’t tell. My memory is quite…hazy.”

“She had made her outfit from rubber insulation in the rec hall.”

“Wow,” Ciangi muttered. “So, she really did plan this. I… I honestly don’t know what to say about that.”

“I do,” I said, lips forming a frown. “Where’s Mimi?”

The others looked around like they hadn’t noticed, all with varying expressions of worry on their faces.

“That’s not good,” Ciangi said, eyebrows knitted together.

“No, it’s not,” I agreed. “And I’d like to know how to find her.”

“I have the feeling that she’s most likely in some sort of container similar to what Giomatti once tried to hold her in, except perhaps modified to fit her current power levels,” Bahn thought aloud, rubbing at his temples as he did.

“Do you think that the humans have technology capable of that?” I asked, turning the idea over in my head. “Mimi has gotten a lot stronger than our Giomatti days.”

“Yes,” Bahn said, “but if Mari was in touch with them then they probably have more recent reports of her actual power level.”

I took a deep breath. “That’s discouraging.”

There was a murmur of agreement amongst us and the conversation stilled. We sat there, in silence, before the door slid open.

I was unsurprised to see the commander, still flanked by soldiers. “You are the one they call Higgens?” he said, addressing me.

“You tricked us,” I said, lips pulled back with a snarl. It wasn’t like me to be so aggressive, but they had managed to push just about all of my buttons.

“We needed to contain you and bring you in. You and your fold are a looming threat to humanity that would have been dealt with eventually. We just lucked out that one of your own recognized the danger that you were and turned you in.”

“You’re not actually Earth Gov,” I said as realization dawned on me. “You’re part of the coup. Geez, how many of you guys are corrupt?”

“Is it corrupt to want to throw off the shackles of a power system that is failing so many of its citizens?”

“When you’re doing it by breaking treaties, stealing technology, and locking up innocent people, I’d give a resounding yeah.”

“None of you are innocent. You’re all traitors to your kind that have abandoned the world that needed you so much.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ciangi cut in. “Bloviate all you want, buddy, you’re a pawn just as much as we are. What we wanna know is where Mimi is and what you’re planning to do with us.”

“She is contained. As for the purpose of your presence here, that is not for you to know. Be satisfied that your value has temporarily suspended your punishment for betraying Earth Gov. But press us, and you may outlive your usefulness sooner than calculated.”

With that, he turned on his boot and headed out, leaving me to wonder what this whole show was about anyways. It was only after he was gone that the soldiers dropped four ration packets in front of us and a single canteen of what I assumed was water.

Well, at least they weren’t trying to starve us.

Without a word and with their packages set down, the soldiers headed out and closed the door behind them, leaving us alone.

Eske was kind enough to open each of the packets for us and hold them up to our mouths. How we would have eaten without her, I didn’t know, but maybe it was another method of torture to put food in front of us that we couldn’t reach.

The joke was on them, though. Just like Eske working around the cuffs, we would find a way around our imprisonment. We’d never been beaten before, so we certainly weren’t going to start now.

…I hoped.

6

Zero Star Accommodations

Time moved painfully slowly within the ship. There was no way to tell when it was night or when it was day, or even if any hours were passing at all. We had each other, and that helped, but the thought of what was coming and what could be happening with Mimi made every second painful in its passing.

It took two weeks to get back to Earth at the highest of speeds without a break, and I wasn’t sure we could last that long. Sure, while they brought us food and water occasionally, they made us wait a painfully long time before letting any of us relieve ourselves. Even then, they took us out of the room one at a time, taking us to the lavatory but never allowing us to shut the door or uncuffing our feet.

At least none of them were being directly violent with us like the guard that had tortured Gonzales, but they weren’t exactly nice either. If any of us took too long, they’d often shove us forward, and if we rationed our water too efficiently, they would take the still partially-full container and dump it out in front of us.

It was awful, more mentally than physically. All of us were growing more and more irritable, and the term ‘short fuse’ came to mind. The same day in and day out was definitely getting to all of us.

The door opened, much sooner than it normally would, and we all sat up to see several soldiers at the door, all of them armed again.

“Come with us,” one of them said. They were pretty much impossible to tell apart, all being male with the same military-grade haircut and square jaws. Or maybe I had just spent too much time around the mimics and had forgotten how to distinguish human features as well as I might once have.

“Which one of us?” I asked, since the rest of us were all just blinking at him with wide eyes. Apparently, our time in captivity had not exactly been kind to any of our social skills.

“All of you. And if you try anything, we will open fire.”

“Why? Where are you taking us? Are we at Earth?”

Before I could even blink, one of them slammed the butt of their gun into my side and I went toppling over. The rest of our little quartet surged onto their knees, ready to defend me, but the soldiers swarmed us and got us to our feet. They unlocked the shackles around our ankles, but left our hands bound, making me wonder what we could possibly be doing.

By the time I caught my breath, we were marching through the door. We passed the bathroom without a second’s hesitation, and suddenly, we were in a part of the spaceship we had never been before.

None of us said anything, but I got the feeling it was because we were all frantically taking in everything we could, hoping that there would be some sign of how we could escape or even finding Mimi.

The halls were much less winding than a lot of other ships I had been in, even our warship, which made me wonder if Earth Gov had improved its designs or if we were just in a particularly efficient model.

Not too much later, we were shoved into a large, empty room. I couldn’t quite place what the purpose of it was. There were drains in the floor and handles against the wall, with strong lights all above. There was a spout at one end of the room, a considerable distance away from us, and the one door, but that was it.

“What’s the point of all this?” Ciangi asked, holding Eske’s hand since the athlete was still without her goggles. “Wanted to take us on the least scenic tour known to man?”

The soldiers didn’t say anything, but rather stepped out of the doorway so that the commander could take their place.

“You’re all filthy. No soldier should have to be stuck on a transport with any of you, considering how foul you smell.”

“Gee, its almost like when you make people wear the same clothes for days on end without cleaning themselves they start to get a little rank.” Ciangi’s already short patience had grown even smaller during our captivity, but I couldn’t help but agree with her assessment.

“Noted. Prepare for decontamination.”

“Decon—”

The door closed before I could finish my word and then we were alone. For a moment, everything was quiet. Then the spout at the end of the room opened and pushed forward, increasing in width until it was about as wide as a hand.

“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Bahn managed to get out before we were all blasted with a large, freezing cold jet of water.

Once more, I couldn’t breathe. My whole body locked up from the cold. The water hurt, like someone spraying sandpaper all over us and rubbing our skin raw.

The spray moved down my body, knocking me to my knees. The others weren’t doing much better, and we ended up huddled together on the floor to try to protect each other from the blast.

I had no idea how long it went on, my mind a haze of pain, but eventually, the water cut off and we were left panting and shivering on the floor.

“Apply the cleanser.”

I didn’t need to ask to know that I wouldn’t like that, so I pressed my face to my shoulder as several panels in the ceilings opened to reveal sprinklers that sprayed down something both foamy and floral-smelling.

At least that part didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t that great either. I was never much one for the scent of lavender or any strong smells really, and I knew that the layer of suds would eventually have to be washed off.

“I’m going to need all of you to stand up and make sure the cleanser is worked into all of your clothing and body.”

“Why on Earth should we cooperate with you?”

“Because if you don’t,” the commander’s voice said over the com, “we can’t be assured that you were properly decontaminated. Which means we’ll just have to cycle this process again and again and again until we are satisfied that you are thoroughly cleansed.”

“Well, that’s a reasonable enough argument,” I said with a sigh, struggling to my feet. “But you wanna explain how we’re going to do that with all of our hands behind our back?”

“Fair enough.”

There was a slight buzz and then I felt a sort of magnetic pulse rush through the room. A second later, all our shackles fell, and for the first time in days, we were unchained.

I rubbed at the tender skin of my wrist, hardly believing that my restraints were gone. The flesh that was under the bonds was definitely not happy, with some of it being rubbed raw while other parts were bruised and rashy. I had a feeling that it would take some good antibiotics to heal, but the commander probably wasn’t interested in giving any to us.

They gave us maybe a minute to lather up before I heard the spout fire up again. I barely had enough time to put my hands over my eyes and turn my back before we were blasted with the stinging spray.

It hurt just as much as last time, but it was far less shocking. In a way, it almost felt nice to be clean, but I could think of a whole lot more relaxing way to scrub up.

The spray lasted longer than last time, scouring us until there wasn’t a sud on any of our bodies, and then it finally shut off. The four of us stood there, shivering, until more vents opened in the ceiling and warm air started blowing down onto us. It almost made me laugh, the absurdity of it all. It was one thing to torture us with cold blasts of water and stinging spray, but it was another entirely to blow dry us after the ordeal.

But that was exactly what they did, and about five minutes later, we were all fluffy-haired and mostly dry.

“Put your restraints back on, inmates,” the commander’s voice came over the comms. He sounded almost amused. He probably enjoyed making a fool of us from his perspective.

We did as he asked, but the advantage of us doing it was that we all put the cuffs on in front of our body. They lit up as soon as they touched our skin, then tightened around our wrists until they were almost too tight.

Almost.

Then the door opened and a soldier stepped in, gun pointed at us, and gestured for us to exit.

We did, of course, and trudged out only slightly damp. Once we were out, they didn’t lead us back the way we came. No, instead we were being shuffled toward another entirely new part of the ship.

What could be going on? We certainly didn’t need any more showering, but it wasn’t like the commander or any of his crew was going to explain. So, we all marched along, observing as much as we could, until we were in a landing room, full of chairs and harnesses.

“Sit down,” one of the soldiers ordered.

We complied, each going to a different seat and allowing the soldiers to strap us in. I felt the slightest bubble of hope in my stomach. If we were in a landing bay, that meant we had to be at Earth, and being at Earth meant our surroundings were definitely going to change. But for the worse or for the better? I supposed there was no way of knowing.

Once we were all properly secured, the soldiers settled themselves. The commander wasn’t present, but I was guessing that he wasn’t going to go through the landing with his underlings. The perks of being a high-ranking military member in an illegal coup.

The rumbling started up soon after, interrupting my thoughts. Their entering the atmosphere was far smoother than that of our warship, but I didn’t know if that was because the ship was smaller, or if their technology had progressed that much since we had left. I supposed I would never know, but I decided not to think about that. This couldn’t be the end of us. I refused to believe it.

Whether I believed it or not, however, the one thing I noticed was that Mimi was conspicuously absent. That was less than ideal. But where on Earth could they have her? While the ship was bigger than a fighter, or a small-team fighter vessel, it was definitely a fraction of the size of our warship. I couldn’t imagine them having a secondary brig or cleansing area.

The rumbling and shaking was starting to end, but a quick movement from Eske caught my eye. I glanced over to her, to see her gently sweeping her foot around. I didn’t know what she was doing for a moment, until I realized that—with her limited vision—she was feeling out for where the soldiers were.

Oh. Her feet were free. Even with her hands restrained, Eske was more than capable of kicking some serious behind. But I was worried her movement might draw attention. She needed a distraction, just to be safe.

But what could I do? I certainly didn’t have any amazing martial art skills to call upon or great skills with people. So, I just started coughing.

Well, perhaps hacking was a more accurate term. I really gave it my everything, pretending like I was hawking a loogy, and I felt all of the soldiers looking at me with either concern or disgust.

But that was all Eske needed. She flipped her leg up from her seat, her shin slamming into the head of the soldier next to her. In one fluid motion, she unbuckled herself from the harness and rolled forward, diving into another soldier with both feet slamming into his chest.

Suddenly, the landing room erupted in chaos. The three of us unbuckled ourselves as well, throwing ourselves into the fray.

By throwing ourselves into the fray, I mean we focused on the two soldiers that weren’t grappling with Eske, trying to grab their guns and prevent anyone from being blasted in the face.

Of course, there was entering the atmosphere to worry about. Just when the soldier I was dealing with seemed to get the upper hand, a particularly hard jolt rocked the entire cabin, sending us all slamming into the wall.

When the ship settled, we were all tangled in each other, and it was a hot mess as the struggle picked up again. Somehow, in the tussle, the soldier had gotten the upper hand on me and was pressing the length of his blaster against my throat. I could hardly breathe, and I pushed up against him with all my might, but he didn’t even budge until a booted foot slammed into his temple.

He fell to the side and I sent a quick, grateful look to Eske. She had no time to return it, however, already turning to deal with the remaining soldiers.

There was more rattling and more rolling, slamming us into the ceiling or sliding us across the floor, but somehow—blind and bound—Eske managed to take down all of the soldiers while we, uh, kinda helped. A little. By the time the ship settled, we were riffling through the soldier’s pockets, trying to find some sort of key or card to get out of there.

“I can’t believe that worked,” Eske murmured, standing to the side. I saw a bruise blooming on her cheek, but she didn’t even seem to notice. I had long since grown used to her hazy eyes traveling around at will, but I couldn’t help but notice that their wandering seemed much more frantic than usual.

“I’m impressed,” Ciangi said from beside me, before pulling out a thin security card from the soldier she was feeling up. “Even after six months of peace, you still got it.”

“I suppose teaching the children everyday has really helped me.” She sighed lightly. “I miss them, actually.”

“I do too,” I said, grabbing the blaster from one of the guards and taking the security card as Ciangi handed it to me. “So, let’s make sure we get back to them.”

These corrupted officials wanted a coup? Well, we would give them a coup. One way or another, we were turning this ship around.

I slid the card into the door, ready to charge out and make sure we seized the element of surprise. But as soon as the entrance slid open, I was immediately faced with a half dozen or so more soldiers, all of their guns drawn.

“Well, sh—”

I never got the word out. An arc of energy shot out of their weapons and I was thrown back into the far wall. With a disappointed sigh, I felt myself slip under.

So much for that idea.

7

Processing

It turned out that the commander and his crew didn’t like prisoner uprisings. They also didn’t like that four members of their crew had been beaten to a nice pulp. Who knew?

While I couldn’t say exactly what happened after I lost consciousness, I did know what happened once I awoke strapped to a gurney-like thing, unable to move my arms, legs, or any of my body. They had us bolted down mercilessly, and all of my limbs were tingling from the tightness of the bonds.

I had missed the part where we exited the ship, waking up in the back of a transport craft with a dozen or so soldiers sitting all around us, weapons pointed at our little tables.

I tried to move my neck what little I could, seeing if I could find Mimi among our number, but I could only really catch a glimpse of Eske to one side and Bahn to the other. None of us were talking, and I didn’t know if that was because I was the only one conscious or because we were all equally defeated by the current situation. Had they all been knocked out like me? Or had they been apprehended more peacefully than me? And what had they shot me with? It wasn’t electricity, but it wasn’t a light beam either. If anything, it had seemed like some sort of concussive force.

While it was unpleasant, it let me know that they needed me—or us—alive, and couldn’t risk mortal injury. Which, while it didn’t seem most important at the moment, it gave me a certain sense of comfort to know that for now I wasn’t expendable.

The hovercraft we were in finally stopped, and the soldiers all stood, their glares intense. The door at the end of the cabin slid open, and for a moment, I was blinded by the light. When my eyes finally did adjust, I saw we were in some sort of hangar bay. It was different from the one where we had hijacked the warship, with brighter lights and far fewer ships. As we were rolled out, I noticed the ceilings were lower, and the room wasn’t nearly as large.

They rolled us down the walkway, and we hit ground none too gently. I didn’t expect much from the soldiers considering how peeved they were at us, but I also didn’t expect the jostling to be so disconcerting. But I guessed how tightly we were strapped down was amplifying every move we made.

We continued rolling, moving out of the bay and into an overly bright hallway. We passed by several doors, and I saw soldiers stationed at each one.

At least these guys offered a little variation. There were both male and female soldiers, with uniforms indicating different ranks and jobs. Their weapons were decidedly different too. Were the soldiers on the ship specially outfitted to deal with us? That was…interesting.

After going down the hall a bit, we turned abruptly to the left, and they wheeled us into a room with a chair in the center and a table full of equipment next to it.

But as we turned, my eyes caught several more soldiers moving something past the door. It was a large container with what looked like several shield emitters on top, and I could see some sort of smoky figure within the liquid.

“Mimi?” I asked.

The door slammed shut and my view was cut off before I could see any more detail, but I was sure that the container held Mimi. There was no other answer that made sense! I needed to know where they were taking her, but I very much doubted that they planned on telling me anything.

Perhaps I should just focus on the room that we were in now, because the soldiers were moving, arranging our beds into a neat little line.

“Ready for processing,” the soldier said, pressing a button to the comms.

“Affirmative. Sending personnel now.”

And then we just…waited.

A few minutes passed by, and then a few more, and then two more workers in scrubs with aprons over them came in.

“We were called down for processing?” the smaller of them said, a female, but that was about all I could see of her considering her head was completely covered by a hairnet and part of her face was obscured by a silicone medical mask.

“Yes. These four. They’re hostile.”

“Who, me?” Ciangi countered, and I could practically hear her batting her eyes at them. “I’m far too cute to be hostile.”

The worker gave her a look before walking over to the table.

“Alright, put one of them in the chair and we’ll get this started.”

“Get what started, exactly?” I asked, feeling more than a bit apprehensive.

But no one answered me. Instead, they wheeled my gurney over to the chair, one of them reaching below me to press something that turned my horizontal bed completely vertical. Then they pressed something else that released all of my bonds at once and suddenly, I was toppling forward, my limbs solidly asleep.

The soldiers caught me, which surprised me a bit. I had definitely expected them to let me smack into the hard floor like a sack of potatoes. Together, they maneuvered me into the chair, then closed more bonds around my torso, wrists, and ankles.

The shackles definitely stung against my raw skin, which was even angrier at all the different restraints I’d been stuck in since my capture. I was pretty sure we were all going to have scarring when we got out.

Assuming we got out.

I shook my head, trying to get that idea out. I couldn’t afford to be pessimistic. I had to believe that we would make it through no matter what, but it was hard to remain positive when they were pulling my hair-tie from my low ponytail.

“What are you doing?” I asked, jerking violently away from their touch. I didn’t like the sensation of people interacting with my hair. It made my skin crawl and set me on edge. Even cutting it myself often agitated me, which was why I had let it grow so long in the first place.

“Calm down, inmate. You’re being processed.”

I saw them pick up a reverberating blade with a bag attached to it to catch the fallout. I knew what that was for and my whole body went cold.

“Get away from me!” I ordered, jerking against my restraints. The whole world was starting to get…prickly, and I just needed to get away.

Several beeps sounded from above my head and the closest of the masked workers cursed. “What’s going on? This isn’t a usual reaction.”

The other one pulled something up on their datalog. “Ah, it says he’s got some sensory issues. We’ll need to sedate him.”

“Or you could just stop what you’re doing!” I heard Ciangi cry from her bed. “You’re really gonna torture a blind woman, a neuro-divergent janitor, and a couple of eggheads? Just a couple of winners, aren’t ya?”

“Relax,” one of them told me, bringing an injector up to my arm. Before I could wrap my mind around what was happening, they pressed it to my arm and I was slipping off into oblivion.

I wasn’t out for long, or at least it didn’t seem like long. My mouth wasn’t nearly as dry as it usually was after an extended bought of unconsciousness. Also…it was probably a bit sad that I had been knocked out often enough to know that.

But when I came to, I was in a cell not too different from the one I had been captured and put into nearly a year ago.

“Ugh, this is the worst case of déjà vu I’ve ever had,” I said, picking myself up off the floor.

My entire body hurt, and my head was hazy, but I managed to get upright without falling over. Blinking, I took inventory of myself, noting that I was no longer cuffed or shackled or any other form of restrained. That was a relief. And it seemed that my wrists and ankles had been appropriately cleaned and bandaged.

I stretched, feeling my body snap, crackle, and pop, but when I reached up toward my head, I realized something was horribly amiss.

That was when my memories came rushing back to me and my entire organ system lurched. My hair! My hair!

Instead of long, long tresses that made me feel like an ancient Viking, or Celt warrior, I was buzzed completely bald. The sensation of smooth scalp was uncomfortable, and I found myself wanting to spiral again.

I tried to breathe deeply, looking around for anything that might help my mind stop hyper-fixating on the change and let myself focus on what mattered. I was pretty much in a big, empty box, with nothing but three walls and a forcefield around me.

“Hey there, Higgens, you okay?”

I looked toward the sound of the voice to see blue eyes staring from the cell across the hall from me. I looked at them dumbly, my brain trying to figure out who they were, before I realized it was Ciangi.

“They cut your hair…” I murmured, unsure of what emotion was even in my voice. While she wasn’t buzzed completely bald like me, her hair was about one knuckle-joint in length and had turned into a soft halo of mini curls around her head.

“They cut all of our hair, buddy. Are you okay?”

I took a minute to think about it. A lot had gone wrong in a very short amount of time and my mind was trying to catch up. I knew there was a whole lot worse that could have happened, but this seemed pretty terrible.

I looked to Ciangi again and noticed something else different about her. “On your neck. Is that a bruise?” I squinted, trying to see more clearly, but she was too far away and there were two blue-hued shields between us.

“It’s not a bruise, actually. I got to watch them lay one on you and it’s a sort of an electromagnetic tattoo. They just slapped it on all of us like cattle.”

I reached up to my own neck, and I did find that there was an unusually smooth spot, like it had been shaved of my natural body hair and glossed over. “What on Earth is the point of all this?”

“Well, the hair, I would guess demoralization. It’s been proven that altering someone’s hair against their will is a way to exercise control and reshape identities. It shows the victim that their body is not their own.

“As for the tattoo, I’m sure that same demoralization plays a part in it, making us feel more like property, but if I had to put money on it, I would guess that they have a specific electromagnetic isotope in them to allow them to track us, on the off chance that we should escape.”

I… I couldn’t believe it. We really had been branded like cattle, and even if we did get out, they would know where we were. There would be no hiding, even if we left the mimic’s planet.

“How are the others?” I asked.

“Eske’s still asleep.”

“They knocked her out too?”

“Yeah, apparently coming at a nearly blind person with blades can trigger a panic attack. Who knew, right?”

It made sense. Eske always had fun making multiple hair styles since we had been together and had taught many of the mimics how to braid and make other elaborate styles. Losing that was probably like losing a crown to her.

“And what about Bahn?”

She sighed. “Bahn is…trying to come to terms with what happened. He didn’t cut his hair for religious purposes, and now that’s been forcibly taken away from him. It’s hard for him not to feel like he’s been separated from his God.”

I let out a long breath. “Any sign of Mimi?”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry. They didn’t knock me out, so I tried to observe everything I could, but I didn’t catch a glimpse of her at all.”

I slid to the floor, what little strength I had left fading fast. “What are we gonna do, Ciangi?”

“I don’t know,” she answered honestly, sighing not too differently from me. “But we have to believe we’re going to make it. We’ve been in worse situations before and gotten out of them. Heck, this isn’t even our first time in prison!”

“I know,” I murmured. “But somehow, it feels so much worse.”

“Yeah… Yeah, it does.”

With nothing more to say, the two of us fell silent. Although I tried to steel myself and stay strong, I felt hope quickly fading from me.

This wasn’t going to be easy.

8

Chat with Old Friends

We were given no blankets, no pillows to speak of, and yet I still managed to fall asleep. Maybe I was just that tired, or maybe my mind needed an escape from everything it had endured in the past couple of days. Or weeks. It was strange to think that less than a month ago, I was home on the mimic world just blithely going through life, never knowing that we were about to be betrayed by one of our own kind.

When I awoke, I half-hoped that it had been some horrible nightmare, but no, I was still in the cell with Ciangi across from me. I could see slightly into the cell next to her as well, but I could only catch the edge of Eske’s elbow where she was huddled on the ground.

I’d forgotten that she hadn’t been imprisoned like we had when we were first betrayed by Earth. This was an entirely new experience for her and I certainly didn’t envy that.

I opened my mouth to give her some tips, so maybe I could make her stay a little easier, but before I could, there was the sound of a door opening not too far away and multiple sets of footsteps approached us.

It didn’t take long for them to reach our cells, and of course it was none other than one of the generals that had initially broken the pact with us. His face was still just as red and squashed, and the look he gave me was one of utter disdain.

“I bet you thought you would never see me again,” he said, voice low and raspy.

“I certainly hoped so,” I answered slowly, minding my words. As much as I hated the man before me, I needed to tread carefully. “Sadly, it seems that wasn’t meant to be.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you’re real sad, but this is just the beginning. We have all of you now, and you’re going to face the trial of the century for what you’ve done.”

“Really?” Ciangi scoffed from her cell. “You want us to buy that you brought us back purely for some litigation? I know you think we’re idiots, but we’re not that stupid.”

“Aren’t you?” he countered. “You’re the ones who were moronic enough to be betrayed by one of their own kind, a child, who’d been sentient for less than a year. We didn’t even have to give them much. All they wanted was you gone and some simplistic weaponry. The best deal we’ve ever cut, if I’m honest.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ciangi continued. Although she was being flippant, I could tell there was something underlying it. A type of rage that I hadn’t seen in her in a very long time, seething just under her skin and her honeysuckle smile. “You wanna stop with all the chitchat to hype yourself up and get to what you need from us, or are we going to stick with the useless posturing thing?”

He turned away from me to glare at Ciangi. “If you want to rush things, fine. I believe we have our first volunteer for interrogation.”

“Interrogation?” she countered, crossing her arms. “How gullible do you think I am? Unlike this place, our world knowledge is open to anyone and everyone. There are no secrets. Anything that we know, Mari knows, so there’s nothing you’re gonna learn from any of us.”

The general faltered for a moment, and even I caught the surprise across his features. However, while it made me curious, it made Ciangi outright howl with laughter.

“Oh man, she snowed you!” The words were nearly impossible to make out between her peals of laughter, but I managed to make out what she meant. “She played dumb and you totally bought it!”

The general was bristling now, and his angry, bulbous eyes scanned over all of us. “She said she was young, that she’d only had time to learn so much.”

“I mean, yeah, that’s true in the sense that she probably couldn’t tell you about theoretical physics or how to build a sub-light engine, but when it comes to her planet and its defenses, she’s one of our lead mimics who helps on those projects.”

Now he was turning several shades ranging from red to outright purple, and his soldier escorts were exchanging nervous glances. “We will deal with her indiscretions later! For now, we have you, so your knowledge will suffice. Take her.”

The soldiers moved forward, as if they were going to hit the button to drop the shield to Ciangi’s cell, but before they could, a high-pitched wail pierced through the relatively quiet hall, causing all of us to clap our hands over our ears to try to protect ourselves from the shrill alarm.

Hello? Sorry about that. Got the wrong frequency.

The familiar voice on his comm made us freeze. None of us reacted for a moment, my heart seeming to stop beating right in my chest. “Gonzales?” I whispered.

“Who the hell are you?” the general bellowed, turning this way and that. “Show yourself!”

Dude, I am obviously coming through your comm. And are you telling me you don’t remember me? I’m almost hurt.

“Gonzales!” Ciangi cried, rushing to the very edge of her cell. “Is that you?”

You bet your bottom dollar it is. Sorry for the delay. It took me a while to find you guys.

“How did you even know we had been taken?”

Don’t worry about it. All you need to know for now is that I’m coming for you. Oh, and, General? You might want to recheck your security grid, considering I was able to hack into this and I’m just a weapons engineer, not a system specialist.

Oh, and you can totally go kick some moon rocks while you’re at it.

His comm went dead and we were all left standing there, not quite sure what to do. While Ciangi, Bahn, Eske, and I were suddenly filled with a hope that we hadn’t had since this whole thing started, the general was practically vibrating with unchecked rage.

“This. Isn’t. Over,” he managed to spit before turning on his heel and screaming orders to his escort. It was too difficult to repress a laugh as they rushed out, no doubt to hurriedly scramble through their defenses, so I just let myself bellow as loudly as my mind needed.

“That was certainly unexpected,” Bahn said, the first time he had spoken since we were processed.

“Is it?” Eske murmured, sitting up in her cell. “I don’t know about you, but this seems exactly like something Gonzales would do.”

“You know what? You’re right.” I said, crossing to the back of the room and sitting down. “So, I guess now all we have to do is wait. Whatever they throw at us, whatever they try to throw at Gonzales, she’ll have us free and kicking.”

Too bad that was never really my strong suit.

9

Patience is a Virtue

Our stay this time around certainly was different from our first imprisonment. For one, there wasn’t a guard terrorizing us. However, they also didn’t feed us every day. Or at least, I didn’t think they did. It was hard to tell, because once again, we were given no indication of what time it was. The lights were never turned off or dimmed and there were no clocks. But after two weeks of the same on the ship, I mostly had figured out how to listen to my internal clock.

As far as I could tell, they came about every other day with a set of rations and some water pills. I knew they were trying to weaken us, to make us crumble, but they were doing a terrible job of it. Sure, we were hungry and thirsty, but I’d been through worse when the colony was short on rations when I was a kid and we’d had to work on quarter portions.

As for the supposed ‘interrogations,’ they came around once or twice and injected us with something then asked a lot of questions, but the whole situation backfired terribly.

I didn’t know who was doing their research, but whoever they were had forgotten to check whether the truth serum they were using would even work on us. Although we’d come a long way from the ancient days where sodium pentothal was a thing, there was still no reliable way to override the human brain enough to prevent lying, and it turned out, drugs that lowered inhibitions didn’t really work on any of us.

For myself, like most people who landed somewhere on the spectrum, it just made me confused and become very concerned with textures. Although I was blasted out of my mind for the entire interrogation, Ciangi told me that I kept trying to rub my hands on the soldiers’ uniforms and even grab their shock batons.

Eske didn’t fare much better. Considering that they were still keeping her blinded, refusing to give her the corrective eyewear she needed, she just became hyper-fixated on her goggles and where were they. Although the situation was certainly tense, there was something hilarious about a six-foot woman asking where her goggles were fifty times in half an hour. By the time they gave up, goggles no longer sounded like a word.

As for Ciangi? They should have known better from the satisfied smirk on her face when they went into her cell. I could remember it clear as day. She sat down, asked them if they had medical staff nearby, then raised her arm so they could inject her.

…then promptly had a massive allergic reaction.

That part was scary, and I certainly didn’t appreciate it, worrying that my friend had just been murdered. Thankfully, the medics arrived within a minute and they had adrenaline in her system just as she was coming down from the attack.

Once she was fully back, she just laughed and laughed and laughed, telling the soldiers and general that they should have seen their faces They struck her once with the baton then headed out, no better off for all the torture they had handed her.

Then Bahn, taciturn, hairless Bahn. He just went into a religious lecture about the importance of his hair and how many laws they had broken in removing it from him without his permission. No matter how much they tried to get him on subject, he just went back to the legal ramifications of their shaving his head and his hair-care regimen that had given him so many inches of healthy tresses.

It slipped into a sort of routine, with them coming by to get information more than they gave us food. They grew more and more violent every time they came back emptyhanded, but we were usually too high to care. Granted, I hated being high, but I didn’t know that until I came down from each occasion.

Anytime that I started to feel too miserable, I reminded myself of what Gonzales had to endure when she was locked up alone for two months on her own, completely cut off from society and tortured by the insane guard that had taken a shine to her. She never complained about that, even when the memories from it haunted her dreams, so if she could tolerate that, I could deal with a week or two of discomfort.

So as much as I tried to never complain, I could feel myself growing weaker and weaker. I always kept that hope alive, but it was growing more and more difficult to keep myself alive. Often sleep was our only respite, whisking us away from our somewhat macabre reality for a little while.

It had to be at least a week later before I was suddenly roused from my sleep by loud footsteps stomping toward me. I opened my eyes groggily, only to have a stun baton slam into my ribs.

My entire body jolted, and a chopping cry escaped my throat. I convulsed for several seconds, before seeing the red face of the general leaning over me.

“How did you deal with the alien threat?!” he screamed, veins popping out all over his face, right and left.

“We asked real nicely,” I said, my voice cracking from the aftershocks of the electrical jolt. While it was nothing compared to what I had endured on the ship, it certainly wasn’t pleasant either.

The stun baton landed again, this time on my arms as I tried to protect my face. My muscles locked, and I faintly heard my friends protesting in the background.

“Enough with the coy little banter, and your group’s quirky reactions to drugs. I’m done with it. You’re all a group of nobodies and you never should have been able to make it this far! So why don’t you stop wasting my time and tell me what I want to know?!”

When I could finally speak again, I could taste blood in my mouth. Great, because I really needed to deal with a busted tongue again.

“I could tell you,” I answered slowly. “But there’s really no point. You see, if I stay quiet, you’ll hit me a lot. If I tell you beans, you’ll hit me a lot, then kill me, then go back to our planet and try to kill our friends. It’s really a lose-lose situation so I might as well antagonize you as much as I can.”

“You insolent—”

This time, he pulled his fist back and struck down at my face. But I used the self-defense that Eske had taught me, knocking it to the side with one arm and chopping at his throat with a flat palm.

He fell back, gasping, and I bet regretting that he hadn’t come with his usual entourage. But that was what happened when people let their anger rule them—they made mistakes. Mistakes that would certainly help me.

A small sparking sound caught my attention and I realized that the general had dropped his stun baton. It had fallen to the ground right between us. I dove for it, but of course he did too, and we were suddenly locked in a wrestling match that I had never seen coming.

Despite his age, the general was bigger than me, more fed and certainly more rested. I felt him quickly overpowering me, positioning his body so that I couldn’t get any cheap shots in. I figured I only had one option considering our current situation, so I relaxed one of my hands on the baton just enough so I could flip the switch for it to discharge.

The corresponding shock went through both of us, knocking us back and leaving the baton once more lying in the middle of my cell. Just as I had hoped, I recovered first and was able to roll back to the baton, grabbing it for my life.

Only to get kicked right in the head.

The world spun for a minute and everything was pain, scrubbing all thoughts from my mind. When I recovered a few seconds later, the general was outside of the cell and had already activated the shield again.

Well…at least I had a stun baton now. A lot of good it would do in my cell, but I guessed I should be grateful for the little things.

The general stood, chest heaving as he glared pure murder at me. I gave him a little shrug, twirling the baton in my hand like a dare.

“You son of a—”

A massive explosion cut him off, rocking the hall and sending dirt raining down around my head in a little halo.

The general stumbled, swearing up a storm. I was tempted to say something snarky like Ciangi would, only to be deafened by alarms and blinded by flashing lights.

“What was that?” Eske asked, jumping to her feet and looking around wildly.

“I think that’s Gonzales!” Ciangi said, also eagerly scrambling into an upright position.

The general righted himself. “That’s impossible,” he spat before turning to rush out the door at the end of the hall.

He never quite made it. Just when he was almost there, an entire section of the wall blasted itself to smithereens, sending him slamming into the opposite partition with enough force to knock him unconscious.

The hall was filled with smoke and dust for a minute, causing me to cough, but when it cleared, there was a solid hole where the wall once was, and three figures were walking through it.

“Heya, friendos,” Gonzales said, lifting the gun in her hand. “Welcome to our little rebellion. I heard someone was in need of a rescue?”

10

Looking for Group

I stared in a wide-eyed wonder at my friend. She had changed quite a lot in the months that we had been apart. Gone was her eye patch, and even her scanner-patch, instead replaced with an eye that had to be bionic, considering the bright blue light it glowed with. While she had a large blaster-rifle in hand, she also had what looked like a stun-staff strapped to her back and another, smaller blaster in a holster on one of her thick, muscular thighs.

“Hey there, Higgens,” she said with a smile. “Did y’all miss me?”

“You better believe it!” Ciangi answered, interrupting me. But I didn’t mind, because I had no idea what to say.

“Whoa, girl. Did you get a haircut? Wait, did all of you get haircuts?”

Ciangi shrugged, handling it about as coolly as humanly possible. “Processing, apparently.”

Gonzales let out a long curse. “Well, we’re making sure that they get theirs. But first…” She gestured to the two people beside her. One was a tall, absolutely jacked man who was somehow even more armed than Gonzales, and the other was a short, Ciangi-sized woman who had full body armor and what looked like an entire bandoleer full of bombs. “Meet my friends.”

“Hello,” I said weakly, wondering who they were and how they got caught up in our mess.

“Hello,” the tall one responded while the smaller one remained silent.

“Fregos, this is Higgens, Ciangi, Bahn, and Eske.” She motioned to the woman standing next to her. “And this small, silent one is Jannin.” She nodded, as if she was satisfied with that introduction. “Now that that’s taken care of, how about we get you guys out of here?”

“I think that would be the best course of action, yes,” Bahn said, practically pressing himself against the forcefield of his cell.

The three rescuers spread out, pressing the buttons on each of our cells to free us. Gonzales was the one to let me free, and she looked curiously to the stun baton in my hand. “Where’d you get that?” she asked, cocking her head to the side.

“The general and I had a little disagreement.”

“Ah, makes sense.” And that was it. Our grand reunion and she was already turning away to address the others.

Disappointing.

But I didn’t have time to voice that opinion, because she was already speaking again.

“Alright, there’s a back exit toward the fire escape that we can go through. I have a number of our forces fighting it out on the upper levels, but please don’t delude yourself that this is going to be nearly as easy as last time. We’re—” She paused, looking around. “Where’s Mimi?”

“You don’t know?” I asked, my stomach sinking.

“You mean you don’t know? What exactly is going on here?”

“We were separated ever since we were captured,” Eske said, approaching with her hand on the taller man’s—Fregos, I believed—shoulder. “We have no idea where she is.”

“Oh, right! Eske, these are for you.” Gonzales stepped forward and gently pressed something into the woman’s hands. Her grin was near blinding when she realized that it was a brand-new set of corrective goggles and put them on happily.

“Goodness gracious,” she breathed, looking around. “You have no idea how much I missed that.”

Gonzales just pointed to her still-glowing eye. “I think I might a little.”

“Ha, good point.”

As I much as I appreciated having Gonzales back, and all of the humor that came along with her, there was something more pressing to deal with.

“We need to find Mimi,” I said, perhaps a little more forcefully than I should have.

Gonzales fixed me with a look but still went on to press the button on her comm. “Hey, Lim, can you do a scan for any sort of unusual concentration of containment fields? We’re missing our queen lady.”

Yeah, but it’ll take a couple of minutes. This facility is even bigger than our scouts were aware of.

“That’s the way life is sometimes.” She looked over all of us and sighed. “I’m gonna arm up the objectives and do a floor-by-floor sweep going up until you get back to us. I have a feeling that if we stay here for long, we’re gonna end up surrounded.”

Roger-roger. I agree with that.

Her comm went dead and she nodded to Jannin, who handed a smaller ion-blaster to Ciangi and Bahn. Eske, however, Gonzales handed her stun-staff with a wink.

“You strike me as the type of person who knows how to use this.”

“You would be correct,” Eske said, taking the staff in hand before twirling it.

“Showoff,” Gonzales said teasingly before heading back toward the hole. “This way, guys. There are bulkheads at either side of this hall and they immediately shut down in the event of an alarm being tripped. If we want to get out, we’re gonna have to use the path we made up to a higher floor where we can start doing sweeps.”

“You seem…entirely too comfortable with this,” I murmured, following her with my stun baton ready. Fregos and Jannin took up the rear, no doubt to protect us. “And who are all these people?”

“Well, it’s been one heck of a journey since I saw—watch your step—you last. Trying to find Eske’s family caused me to build some connections with a lot of people who have a beef with our current government or have been actively burned by this coup.”

She continued explaining while we walked through the jagged, gaping tunnel that she had blown through. It only went a surprisingly short distance before suddenly cutting upwards, and it was then that I realized they had blown a hole in the floor of the level above us just to get to where we were. Those explosives had to be pretty darn powerful.

“You know how it is, you stop a kidnapping or two,” Gonzales kept on, “you break up a hit fight, word starts getting around. So, when I was almost back home with all of Eske’s family and picked up on the peace negotiations that were really anything but, I knew that I had to do something.

“So, I dropped them off on the planet, since little traitor Mari seemed to be hitching a ride with the humans and hadn’t started her plan of total conquest yet, and went back to Earth. From there, I started recruiting and calling up favors on people who had the skills I need. The next thing ya know, I’ve got my own little task force. Actually, Jannin here is an escapee from the same holding place we broke out of. Small little galaxy, isn’t it?”

“So, what’s you’re saying,” Ciangi said, sounding about as flabbergasted as I felt, “is that in the span of two weeks, you managed to assemble an entire rebellion?”

“Well, I don’t know about an entire rebellion,” Gonzales answered, crouching down and cupping her hands to give me a leg up into the room above us. “But it’s enough to get started.”

“Apparently,” I muttered, but then I was stepping up and being thrust upwards. I gripped a piece of jagged rock sticking out of the floor, using it to pull myself up. Once I was solidly in, I laid on my belly and offered a hand down to help someone else up.

One by one, we all ended up in the same room. Although I was concentrating on making sure everyone got up safe, I was beginning to hear the sounds of a firefight outside. Yelling, blaster fire, things falling over, people running, it was a very particular sound that one didn’t forget.

My mind was starting to flash back to the grand battle we’d had during the Great War with the invading aliens, but I shoved that down.

“Are all of you ready?” Gonzales said, crouch-walking forward to the door. “Because once I open this, we’re going to be embroiled in a whole lot of awful, and although I’m going to do my best to make sure we all get out of here, I can’t guarantee it. This isn’t the kid stuff we’re used to, where they constantly underestimate us and think we’re not a threat, just something to be used. These soldiers are aiming to kill, and the leaders of the coup are very angry.”

“We’re ready,” I said, shoving down the fear. Once, long ago, she had beaten terrible odds to come rescue us, so the least I could do was return the favor.

“Alright, guys. Let’s go show these upstarts what a little bit of loyalty can do.”

She gave me a wink, her bionic eye closing and opening with the slightest of whirring sounds, then opened the door. She leaned out carefully, taking inventory of the hall only to jump back immediately as several bolts of blaster fire streaked past her.

“Jannin,” she said, moving to the side. “I believe this is a situation for you.”

The smaller woman still didn’t say anything but crept up to the door and took one of the bombs from her bandolier. With expert aim, she tossed it into the back of the hall then slammed the door shut.

But even the closed door couldn’t buffer the large explosion and I felt a wave of heat wash over me. It lasted for a few seconds, then dissipated, and when I turned back to the entrance… Well, there wasn’t really a door there anymore. Or a doorway. Just a gaping hole that was dripping molten metal.

“Fregos, wanna hit that with your coolant?”

The bigger man nodded and walked forward, pulling something from the many pockets in his pants and spraying it onto the superheated metal.

There was a whole lot of crackling and popping, with sparks going everywhere. Once more, I ducked away to protect my face, and when I looked forward, the broken entrance was no longer a fiery opening of death.

“Alright, let’s try that again,” Gonzales said, peeking out into the hall. This time, there was no hail of blaster fire and we headed out.

The hall we were in looked even more locked down than our own had been. There were bulkheads every ten feet or so and it looked like each door required a passcode and a keycard.

“They gotta be holding something good here,” Gonzales remarked, heading toward the first room.

“Didn’t you come this way, though?” I asked, still following her. “Wouldn’t you have checked for Mimi already?”

“Well, no, because I assumed she was with you all. Now that I think about it, I realize that was a silly assumption to make, but it’s my first time planning a coup to a coup, so I think a little error is allowable.”

Ciangi cleared her throat beside me and I couldn’t tell if her tone was teasing or patronizing. “Sure, whatever you say. But can you actually open any of these doors? They look pretty fortified.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Gonzales said, pulling something from one of the utility packs attached to her belt. “I tried to come at least a little prepared.” She placed the small, circular thing on the door and pressed the center button before stepping back. The disk gave off a few beeps, before I felt the electricity in the air suddenly spike and the door blasted off its hinges as the circuits around it overloaded.

“And that’s how you make an entrance,” she remarked, stepping in.

I followed quickly after her, my heart in my throat, but instead of seeing Mimi, or even a containment chamber, there was just server after server after server full of memory crystal chips.

“She’s not here,” I said, unable to keep the defeat from my tone.

“No,” Bahn said, coming up behind me. “But I think what we’re looking at might be the entire data center for this particular base.”

“You’re kidding me. They really just have all their vital info here for anyone to just come along and blow up?”

Bahn ran his hand over his stubbly head, grimacing as he did. “Considering that one normally has to go through a dozen or so layers of security to get here, I doubt they thought it would be an issue. Also, I have no doubt that they have backed this information up elsewhere as a failsafe, so damaging it, while being cathartic, would ultimately be a useless endeavor.”

“So, what? We found a treasure trove of their data and it’s useless?”

The taller engineer smiled ever-so-slightly, perhaps for the first time since we had been captured. “No, not quite. While it would be counter-productive to destroy it, I never said anything about stealing as much as we can possibly carry.”

Gonzales’s face lit up and she shook her finger at Bahn. “Clever, clever. See, this is why we all need each other. Fregos, Jannin, I need anything you have resembling a bag. Pass them around to everyone cause it’s time to load up. Quickly, of course, considering we have that whole rescue thing to get to.”

Although I hated the idea of delaying our search for Mimi for even a couple of seconds, I knew that this opportunity was too good to pass up. So, I helped fill up all the packs we had, slinging one over my shoulder and looping my arms through the straps of another.

A man’s voice suddenly came over Gonzales’s comm, causing all of us to look at her. “My help on the outside,” she whispered with a wink as we listened in.

Hey, gun-head. I’ve got a blip on a floor above you, but all the way over in the west wing. It looks like they’re using some of the shielding from the landing bay to power a room that’s almost completely scrubbed off the map. I was only able to find it thanks to some old maintenance blueprints.

“What do you know,” Gonazles said, smiling at me. “Looks like that good ol’ janitor knowhow is saving our rear end again.”

“Does that happen often?” Eske asked.

“Oh, more than you know.” She looked to the door and lifted her gun again. “So, who’s ready to finally save our fearless leader?”

I didn’t need to be asked twice and followed her out. One way or another, we were going to get out of this, all together or not at all.

11

Storming the Castle

With the lifts being out of order due to the lockdown, we made our way to the closest stairs. While I could still hear the battle going on, they all seemed to be from above us. How far above us, I didn’t know. While we had only encountered the one group of soldiers that Jannin had promptly blown up, I was certain that there would have to be others we would run into along the way.

Geez, this was nothing like our previous escapes, where few people ever got hurt and weapons were more of a suggestion than a requirement. I almost felt like that was a simpler time, like another life where I wasn’t aware of just how evil so many people could be.

Inner existential crisis or not, I had a task at hand, so I brought my stun baton up as we climbed the stairs. We didn’t run, but we didn’t quite walk either. It was more like we rushed along at a heated pace, pausing only long enough to make sure there wasn’t an enemy waiting to drop out of some hidey hole.

When we made it to the next floor, I could tell that the firefight was definitely taking place right outside the door. Well, not right outside, but close enough that it was definitely a threat.

“Stand back, guys. We’re going to lay down suppressing fire.”

“Why not just bomb them out of existence, courtesy of Jannin?” Ciangi asked.

“Because some of our operatives might be in this hall and I didn’t manage to turn off the friendly fire settings on real life.”

“Oh.”

“Exactly. Now stand back, it’s time to see if all my practice has been paying off.”

“But we have guns too!” It seemed that Ciangi was in an argumentative mood now that she was freed. Maybe she was hungry, or maybe she was on edge from the fact that any of us could die at any moment. That was reasonable enough.

“Yeah, and if you don’t mind, I’d rather not be shot in the back by them. I’ll tell you when you have clear shots, so please don’t fire before then. I love y’all, but I’d rather not be killed by you.”

“Fair,” Ciangi said.

“Glad you approve of my logic. Now, if you don’t mind, get out of the way.”

Ciangi finally stepped to the side and the three rescuers took their positions in the doorway. There was the tiniest second where they all centered themselves, and then Gonzales kicked the door open and they all moved forward as one.

The sound of blaster fire picked up immediately, amplified that much further by their sweep forward. I tensed, sure at any moment that I would hear the death cry of one of my friends.

But eventually, the shots faded, and I heard a small cheer instead. Peeking out, I saw Gonzales hugging a young man whose bionic arm was draped around her.

“Carlos, you did good getting down here,” I heard her say as we approached.

“Thanks. Unfortunately, I lost Gibbens.” His face screwed into a look that was somewhere between mournful and angry. “Took a blast right to the face. At least it was instant.”

My stomach flipped at that. Were…were people actually dying for us? The thought made me feel more than a bit sick. As much as I loved each of us, sacrificing a life that was not my own for the cause seemed like far too great a price.

As if she was reading my mind, Gonzales looked over to me. “Relax, Higgens. They’re not dying for you. They’re dying in the hopes of getting rid of the people that have ruined so many lives. Beyond how they’ve royally screwed us over multiple times, they’ve hurt a whole lot of people a whole lot worse.”

“I…I guess I understand.”

“These are the folks that we’re supposed to add to our number?” the man, Carlos, asked, giving us a charming smile.

“That they are. My original crew in the flesh.”

“Huh. I thought they’d be taller.”

“I would supremely not like that,” Eske said. “It’s already hard enough to find clothes as it is.”

“I love the banter and all that, but we have a shapeshifting alien to save.”

“Right,” Carlos agreed. “Let’s get going.”

Once again, we were moving along, passing by tons of evidence of fighting. The sounds were still coming in loud and clear above our heads, making me wonder just how many people Gonzales had managed to recruit.

I guessed I would find out eventually…if we were successful, that was.

Hey, Gunslinger, her comm crackled, nearly jolting me out of my skin. Obviously, she had the volume turned all the way up so it could be heard over the ambient sounds of battle, but I hadn’t thought about that before. According to my scans, you’re almost there, but it seems like at least a couple people knew what we were gonna do and they’re barricaded there behind a lot of energy shields.

“Gotcha,” Gonzales said, putting her large gun in a magnetic holder on her back and pulling out her stun-rod instead. “And what about our ride?”

Working on it. With varied success.

“Ride?” Bahn asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Gonzales said abruptly. “But hey, for this next chunk, we’re going to do the same thing as before. Y’all hide, while we—”

Oh, crap! Remember that barricade thing I just mentioned? I’m reading three shields approaching you rapidly. It looks like they’re going on the offensive. You need to find cover, now!

Gonzales’s eyes went wide and she whipped toward us. Her mouth opened, and I could tell that she was about to give us some tactical order, but the door blew open behind her and knocked us all off our feet.

My skin felt the raw heat of the blast, then my back crashed into a solid wall. I tried to open my eyes, but the sting of acrid smoke blinded me anyway.

Time wasn’t willing to slow down to let me recover. I heard footsteps running toward us, and the hair on my arms was standing up from the electrical charge. I’d never encountered someone using an electrical riot shield before and I had no idea how to deal with it.

I fought to get to my feet, blinking rapidly, but I couldn’t make anything out beyond some shadows flittering this way and that. But what I did hear was Eske letting out a huge battle cry that quickly approached the footsteps running for us, then ended up behind them.

Did she…did she vault the shields?

I wished I could have seen that, but I didn’t have much time to worry about the missed moment. The smoke was beginning to clear just in time for me to hear several blasters discharge and then suddenly, I was fully embroiled in a firefight.

With no gun.

But in a way, I guessed that was alright. I didn’t want to have to kill another living human being. I still had nightmares about the aliens that I had shot out of the sky. I didn’t need to add anymore trauma onto my already sizable pile.

I wasn’t sure why no one was firing at me, but I realized that I had landed by a door that was barely hanging from its hinges, and even though I was on my knees, it was protecting me from their view.

I could easily just crouch there and wait for the battle to end, with other people having the weight of the fight on their conscience, but that just wasn’t my way. Bracing myself, I peeked around the corner and saw that Eske had indeed managed to break their ranks, allowing the others to take advantage of that. Gonzales had ducked into a side room, with only her gun out as she shot at anyone who tried to take any of us out. Fregos had some sort of massive hammer that was crackling with electricity, and he was swinging it back and forth with abandon.

It looked like it had definitely become a melee battle. Sure, people were shooting, but between Eske’s expert staff-wielding and Fregos’s wild movements, this had definitely become a battle of who could smash things the hardest.

That was when I spotted that one of the soldiers had broken away from the brawl and was aiming toward where Bahn and Ciangi were huddled behind a piece of debris, their guns at the ready.

No.

I would not allow that.

I bolted toward him, my longs legs taking me across the hall in seconds. I didn’t know what was guiding me with such certainty, but I didn’t question it.

My thumb flicked over the switch to my stun baton and the next thing I knew, I was slamming it into the leg of the marksman as I slid in beside him.

He fell to the side, but unlike the general, he didn’t drop his weapon. Instead, I found myself staring down the barrel of his weapon.

That was unfortunate.

I took a breath, waiting for my life to end, but two beams of energy slammed into the gun, making it explode into several pieces and throwing me backward once again.

The amount of times I’d been airborne in such a small time was uncanny, yet I still hadn’t nailed the landing. My shoulder hit the ground first, absorbing all the impact and making my head rattle. Then my chest hit the ground and it took all of my effort to get one of my arms under my chin so I didn’t break my jaw slamming into the ground.

I slid several feet, ending up right by Ciangi and Bahn, whose guns were smoking.

“Thanks,” I gasped, sitting up. “Nice shot.”

“I was aiming for his head,” Ciangi said with pout.

Oh…well…

“Not bad, guys,” Gonzales said, walking over and offering me a hand up. It was only just then that I realized the fight in our immediate vicinity had stopped. We had beaten them.

My brow furrowed as I looked over the carnage. Why had it seemed so…anti-climactic? Was it because there was no war to win? Or because I knew there was a whole other group of people between us and Mimi?

“Fregos, make sure to relieve all the soldiers of their weapons. We’re going to use those to our advantage.” She took a breath, looking to the rest of us, and I was struck by how different she looked from when I had seen her last.

Sure, she was the same Gonzales in general, though her bionic eye certainly was disconcerting, but there was more to it than that. The lines on her face were harder, and her normally short, thick hair had grown out considerably. She looked much more muscular than I had remembered, and she was considerably tanner, but it wasn’t that either. It was like something inside of her was different, something subtle, and I couldn’t quite place my finger on it.

“Alright, everyone grab as many as you can and come with me to the last bulkhead before we meet our new friends. I have an idea.”

Whatever your idea is, you better hurry. They can hear that the fight has stopped, and I don’t doubt that that they’ll send another wave soon.

“Good to know. Let’s shake a leg everyone, we’ve got a time limit here.”

“Oh, I thought I’d just do it leisurely,” Ciangi countered. “You know, take my time, stop and smell the bodies.”

“Again,” Eske said, powering down her staff. “I do not think this is the appropriate time for sarcasm.”

“It’s always the right time for sarcasm.”

“It’s always the right time to hurry your butts up and get to picking up stuff,” Gonzales interrupted, tossing a blaster toward the smaller engineer.

She caught it, and then we were all hurriedly picking up as many weapons as we could carry. A minute or so later, we were trudging toward the door, arms full of death and destruction.

When we made it to the bulkhead, Gonzales fixed us all with a serious look. “Listen up, when I open this door, I want all of you to throw these guns as far as you can then dive to the side. You got that?”

“Yeah, but why—”

“Jannin, you know what to do after that, right?”

The smaller woman nodded, still entirely silent, but that seemed to be enough for Gonzales because she was moving to the button that would have the bulkhead slide up into the ceiling.

“Everyone ready? The blaster fire and maybe worse is gonna be coming in hot the moment these gears go off, so be careful.”

There was a general round of affirmatives and Gonzales slammed down on the button like it had done something to personally affront her. The door slid open, thankfully much faster than the doors on Giomatti’s ship had ever moved, and true to her word, a dozen or so bolts fired through in an orange, blue, and red haze.

It lasted ten seconds, maybe more, not stopping until the soldiers must have wondered why no one was coming in. That was when Eske and I took our chance, chucking our armful of guns forward.

They didn’t make it far, maybe ten feet or so, but it was enough to get the folks behind the barricade firing again.

They lasted a lot longer this time, nearly a minute, but none of them seemed to dare to come closer. Either they were just that terrified of Gonzales and her friends, or they were in such a superior position that they didn’t want to give it up. Either way, I hoped our weapon engineer’s plan worked.

Eventually their fire wound down as they realized they weren’t hitting jack diddly, and the remaining people tossed their weapons in. Of course, Fregos made it the farthest, nearly skittering to the barricade of debris and energy shields.

That was when Jannin rolled into the doorway, pulling two somethings from her bandolier and throwing them inside. I barely had time to blink before she rolled back to safety and Gonzales slammed the button to close the door.

“Everybody duck and cover!”

We did so, huddling into a pile, and the entire hall was rocked as an explosion sounded just on the other side of the wall. If it hadn’t been a room built specifically with a reinforced bulkhead, we would have been toast. But even with all of the extra precautions, chunks of the ceiling fell on us, and the blast of heat was incredible. I was absolutely sure I smelled burning hair, but I didn’t dare to let go or raise my head from our cocoon.

The blast lasted a while, with dozens of mini-eruptions that told me whatever bombs Jannin had tossed in there were overloading the cores of each blaster. Clever, and I couldn’t help but both admire and be intimidated by Gonzales’s quick thinking.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the maelstrom faded and there was nothing but smoke and terrible smells left. We uncurled slowly, taking inventory of the hellscape of our own making.

“Well, that was fun,” Gonzales said, dusting herself off. “Let’s go find your girlfriend.” She pressed the button to open the door, but instead of sliding upwards, the thick square of metal just fell forward, slamming into the floor with enough impact to make my ears ring.

“Yeowch,” Eske murmured.

“Don’t worry, there’s room for a lot worse on our way up once we have Mimi,” Fregos said, his voice low but with just enough tone to know that he was joking.

Maybe.

We moved forward, picking our way over the mess we had created. Smoke, rubble, and bodies laid everywhere. With all the carnage, I couldn’t help but wonder if we were the good guys after all. Sure, everyone always thought they were on the right side of things, but it was hard to keep believing so when there was so much death all around us.

I didn’t want our legacy to be this. I didn’t want to kill. I just wanted to live, and help the mimics live. How had our path ended up so dark and awful?

Greed. That was what happened. And the stupid coup. If it wasn’t for them, none of this would have happened, but as long as they were around, people were going to be hurt, imprisoned, abused, and killed. They had to be stopped.

“You okay there?” Eske asked as we passed the burned and broken remains of the shield generators.

“Yeah,” I answered quietly. “Just thinking.”

Before she could ask me what exactly I was thinking about, we reached a large, metal box in the middle of the room with only a single door.

“I think we’ve found her,” Gonzales said, smiling brightly. “I’ll get the door.”

She pulled out the same disc she had used earlier and placed it on the entrance. It went through the same show, then suddenly, the door was blown off its hinges and we were in.

There were only two things in the room, one being a console, and the other being a massive containment vessel that was about as tall as two humans and just as wide. In the center of that container was a roiling, spikey ball of blackness floating in limbo.

“Mimi,” I whispered, hardly believing it.

After nearly a month, it was finally her.

Now we just had to get her out.

12

Reunions All Around

I couldn’t believe it. I stared up at the constantly shifting mass that was the creature I loved. Even if she wasn’t human right now and didn’t have any discernable features beyond her constantly reforming spikes, my heart was still soaring to see her.

“It looks like they have her in some sort of lockdown,” Gonzales remarked. “I’m not sure I want to monkey with it if I’m not certain what to do.”

I got it. Give me just a couple of seconds and your lady love will be freed.

“You can remote access it from where you are?”

Sure, just hook your comm up to the output. I’ll take it from there.

“Whatever you say.”

Gonzales pulled it from her wrist and connected it to the console. There was a whole lot of buzzing and beeps, then finally, the liquid inside started to drain while the fields around it powered down.

The black mass reacted instantly, shooting outwards violently. The glass—or whatever the material of the chamber was—never stood a chance, shattering and falling to the ground in a shower of materials.

Then, finally, after everything that we had survived, everything that we had gone through, she landed on the ground in a spikey black amorphous blob.

“Mimi!” I cried, running toward her.

Her form didn’t react at first, still roiling without control, but I didn’t care. I fell on my knees in front of her and pressed my hand into her cold, hard flesh.

“Thank God,” I murmured. “I missed you.”

She let out the slowest warble I had ever heard her utter, and then her form began to slowly draw inwards, rippling and changing colors as it shaped itself into something somewhat resembling a human.

“Hig…gens…?” she wheezed, her voice jumping through several different pitches before settling on the one she normally used.

“Yes, it’s me,” I said, pulling her tight to me. Before I could stop it, tears were rolling down my face and sobs wracked my chest. I was just so relieved, so happy to have Mimi back in my arms again. With her, I knew that we were doing good. Because if evil could ever be a person, Mimi was the antithesis of that. She was light and kindness and a type of fortitude that I could never hope to have.

“I…I’ve been gone a long time, haven’t I?”

I could tell she was still quite confused, and I internally cursed the generals and all of their men for holding her so unnaturally for so long. Surely that had to have been less than ideal for her mental state.

“About a month, but we’re being rescued now, so we gotta go. Do you think you can get up?”

She nodded, her features almost back into place. Sure, her hair was the wrong color, she was missing some teeth, and her nose was too big, but none of that mattered. No matter what form she took, my Mimi was still my Mimi.

And I was hers.

“Here, let me help,” Fregos said, offering his arm. Mimi took it, and he got her to her feet in no time.

We hobbled off, Gonzales putting her comm back on and everyone spreading out in case of attack.

Hey, not to crash on this happy reunion, but they know you’ve got her free. Soldiers are abandoning our distracting fights and converging down the lifts toward your floor. I’m having the lower level operatives that are still alive sabotage the staircases, but I’m not sure how you’re gonna get out.

“Well, you better think of some way, otherwise this entire mission is toast and y’all gonna lose a bunch of figureheads.”

Crap. Alright. Gimme a second. It’s just, if there’s any sort of way to get out of here, I guarantee you that soldiers are now crowding it and chock-full of weapons.

“Come on, there’s gotta be something.”

“What about any building ports?” I said, something clicking in my mind.

“Building ports?” Gonzales asked.

“Yeah, this place is really far underground, so there had to be tunnels and areas where workers could move between levels as they fabricated them. When buildings are built upwards, they’re always taken down because they’re eyesores. But underground? You can just cover them with dirt or concrete and not really worry about it.”

Whoever this guy is, I like him. Let me change the settings of my scanner and see what I can do.

“Alright, we’ll keep moving forward. I get the feeling that staying still is not the best idea right now.”

“I…I don’t understand how we got here,” Mimi murmured from beside me. “We were talking peace, their ship was too small to overtake us…”

“Do you really not remember?”

“…give me a minute. It’s coming back. Everything is just so fractured…and mixed together. It’s like one of those ancient Earth puzzles in your sims.”

“I gotcha.”

Bingo-bongo, I found it! Go back to the staircase and there should be a panel you can blast out of the wall. From there, you can take it up two floors, then hop into another one close to an emergency fire tunnel, then hopefully make a break for the bay.

“The bay, that’s where we’re going?”

Yeah, your ride is comin’ in hot, so try to make it in ten minutes.

“And if we don’t?” Gonzales asked.

Then it might just get shot out of the sky before you have a chance to get onto it and all of this will be for nothing.

“Right. So, no pressure.”

Nope. None at all.

“You heard her, guys,” Gonzales said, turning to us sheepishly. “We gotta find an access port.”

“No argument here,” Ciangi murmured, looking back at Mimi and me.

We hurried along, tensions high. Any moment, we could be overridden by soldiers and decimated. Our freedom was hanging on a thread, and it was fraying at the middle.

Somehow, we reached the staircase, navigating our way through the mess that we had caused, and Gonzales used her wrist-comm to find the panel we were looking for. I found myself alternating between holding my breath and panting, sure that at any moment, we would be dead.

Except we kept surviving. We tumbled out of one of the tunnels into what looked like a processing room, then kept going to the next one.

The sounds of firefights were no more. There was only the gentle thundering of hundreds and hundreds of pairs of feet as they tried to get to us. How big could this coup be? Did they have the entire military at their discretion? Or just a good chunk of it? There were so many questions I had, and I could only hope that they would be answered by the crystal chips still slung across my back.

We made it out of the second tunnel, covered in dirt and grit and waste castoff that I didn’t even want to think about, but we made it.

“I’m definitely going to need a shower after all of this,” Gonzales said, looking down at her comm. “This way.”

We followed, picking up our pace as Mimi got more control of herself. I could see the massive doors of the hangar, way down the hall, over bodies and dropped weapons and the rest of the aftereffects of a gunfight.

We were almost there! While all of the soldiers were rushing to corner us in the bottom floors, we were going to slide right out from above them!

“Mimi!”

We all skidded to a stop, that familiar voice filling me with a sense of dread and rage. Turning, I saw none other than Mari in the center of the hall.

“I don’t know how you did it, and I don’t really care why,” the small girl said, advancing toward us. “But I can’t let you go back to our planet.”

I felt Mimi pull away from me. I tried to hold onto her, but she slipped from my grasp. “Why have you done this? You’re my sister.”

“No, I’m your underling, just like all of the other mimics who are okay with your subjugation.” She sneered, and her cute features seemed a whole lot less adorable. “Why do you get to rule over us all? You weren’t the one in slavery for generations! You got to live out your little life on that stupid little comet and you would have stayed right there, doing nothing, if the humans hadn’t stumbled across you! You’re a usurper. A pretender to the crown! You didn’t suffer like we did, you just swept in and took over!

“So that’s why you can’t go home. At first, I was going to go right back and tell them you all had been taken, but I realized that might be a bit too suspicious. So, I hid on that ship and came all the way here.

“I had no doubt that the humans would eventually betray me and try to come for us, but when I told all the other gullible idiots about your noble demise, they’d make you into a martyr and crush any and all humans that came our way. Then, once we were ready, we’d come and take over this stupid little planet until our species was the apex of the universe and I its queen!”

“You did all of this for power?” Mimi cried, her voice full of frustration. “Haven’t you learned anything from these humans and how futile that is? We’re a society! We work together for everything. If you wanted to lead, you could have asked, proven yourself, and I would have been more than happy to step down!”

“Sure, you would of,” Mari spat. “But it’s better to ask forgiveness instead of permission.” Her jaw started to extend, and her body spread outward. “So, tell me, great leader Mimi, do you forgive me before you die?”

“You don’t have to do this, Mari. We can go home together, and you can stand trial for what you’ve done.”

“No thanks,” she hissed, the sound almost unable to make it out of her gnarled, growing mouth. “I prefer to deal with things in the now.”

“Very well.” Mimi looked at me with a regretful expression. “You all should probably run,” she murmured.

“Wait, Mimi— No!”

But she was already sprinting forward, her body exploding in a mass of spikes and limbs. I watched, in absolute awe, as the two mimics crashed into each other, their forms rippling and bucking until they were two giant creatures.

They barely fit in the hall, and it was definitely dangerous to be anywhere near them, but I couldn’t move. I was rooted to my spot, staring in a wide-eyed wonder at the sight of the two colossi grappling before me.

Mari, or at least I thought it was Mari, was some sort of amphibious creature with a long snout lined with incredibly sharp teeth. She had four eyes, each of them a brilliant green, and six legs. Her tail was long and as thick as a tree, with the end split into two spikes. I didn’t recall seeing anything like that on Mimi’s planet, which led me to wonder where she had picked that form up.

Mimi, however, was the same creature that had once defended us when we were in another part of the galaxy hunting for a way back home. She was still just as terrifying as before, and she fought Mari with all she had.

“Come on, Higgens!” Gonzales cried, grabbing my shoulder.

But I shook her off. How could I abandon Mimi? Even though I was absolutely useless, it killed me to just leave her to fight our battle.

Mari tackled her leader, her massive jaws closing around her neck, but Mimi managed to counter, shifting so that her head suddenly wasn’t there anymore, before a dozen or so tentacles shot out of her, forcing Mari back.

They were a mass of colors and limbs, slamming each other into walls and ceilings. There was no way the soldiers didn’t hear them, which meant soon we’d have another entirely different problem on our hands.

I’m reading all sorts of crazy energy signals there, so I’m sure you’re having a real party, but your ride’s coming in hot in about two minutes.

“Higgens! Come on! Mimi will catch up in a way that you can’t!”

But I just shrugged Gonzales off again. “I’m not going to let us be separated again,” I said firmly. “You guys get the door. Either we come together, or not at all.”

“You’re not a shapeshifter like her! You’re just going to get in her way!”

“I’ll be fine,” I said, looking back to the two. Mimi tackled the younger mimic again, causing them to go flying toward us. Gonzales and I dove to different sides, and I took that opportunity to look back at her.

“Go! We’ll be there.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said, shaking her head. “I guess you’re really always going to choose her.”

“What did you s—”

“Come on, guys! Let’s clear a path!”

They ran off, dealing with the door, and I scrambled upright again. Mari and Mimi were still rolling, biting, and scratching at each other.

While the floor certainly hadn’t been clean before, now it was slick with the blood of their respective creatures. My stomach twisted in pain watching Mimi being hurt and watching the fallout of Mari’s betrayal. When it was a mimic vs. mimic, no one won.

Finally, Mimi had Mari pinned, her tentacles wrapped around all of the creature’s limbs. She bared her teeth and let out a mighty roar that nearly knocked me off my feet, which I hoped was some sort of offer of mercy.

Then, just when I was sure Mari might kowtow, she wasn’t there anymore. Her form shrank so rapidly that it popped, and suddenly, a lemur was running out from under Mimi’s massive body.

The leader of the mimics rolled, trying to catch her adversary. But the lemur lunched itself through the air, only to erupt into another massive form and slam into Mimi’s body.

Round and round they went, twisting, turning, gnashing teeth and bloodied claws. I could see Mimi weakening, and Mari was high on her bloodlust.

I couldn’t let my love lose, but I also wasn’t a massive alien creature. What could I do?

Looking down, I saw I still had the same baton in my hand. Flicking it on, I tore off a piece of my prisoner jumpsuit and wrapped it around the power switch.

If the stun baton was like any of the others I had been trained on in my basic space-life prep, holding the button for a minute would cause it to overload. It was particularly useful to miners, who would use them to escape if there was ever a cave-in.

I felt it starting to vibrate, harder and harder, until I knew I only had seconds left. But I waited until I had a clear shot, before throwing it as hard as I could into the folds of Mari’s skin.

It stuck for just the briefest of moments, but that was all it needed. There was a quick pop, and the thing went off.

While it wasn’t even close to the biggest explosion I had experienced, it was enough to knock her ever-so-slightly to the side. Mimi took full advantage, her tentacles wrapping around her opponent’s neck and throttling as hard as she could before repeatedly slamming her into the floor.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

And then finally, there was a stillness.

Both of their forms slowly shrank down, much differently than how they had combusted into the fight, until Mimi was standing with her hands around Mari’s neck.

“Mommy,” Mari murmured, her blue eyes big and scared. “You wouldn’t really kill me, would you?”

“I am not your mother.” Mimi spat, her teeth bared in a snarl that looked so alien on her features. But then, just when I was sure that I was going to watch the woman I loved murder one of her own kind, she let go. “But I’m not a killer either. Surrender. Come home, Mari. It doesn’t have to end here.”

“Aw, come on,” she said, dropping to the ground and rolling her eyes. “Idiotic mercy like this is why you’ll never be the leader we need.”

She surged forward, a massive spike starting to shoot out of her body. Mimi was caught by surprise, but before she could do anything besides stumble back, something sailed through the air and landed at Mari’s shifting feet.

It only took a fraction of a second to recognize it.

“Mimi, get down!” I said, diving for her.

I managed to collide with her and we both hit the ground then slid, barely making it behind a chunk of debris just as the hallway erupted into a ball of fire.

Black liquid spewed everywhere, stinging slightly as my ears rang violently. \ We sat there for several seconds until the air cleared, and I could see Gonzales standing several feet in front of us, Jannin’s bandolier in her hands.

Mimi and I stood, my legs shaking, and I turned to see that there was no sign of Mari anywhere. Just the thick, viscous black liquid covering everything.

Despite everything that was happening, the three of us stood there for a second. For the first time in known history, someone had seen a mimic being violently killed.

And we had been the ones to do it.

13

Declarations

“So…” Gonzales said slowly, as if trying to think of what could possibly be appropriate to say after Mimi had watched the death of someone she had raised over the past year. “Anyone wanna get on a stolen warship?”

“Wait, you brought ours back from the planet?”

“No, actually,” she answered slowly, her eyes still locked on the black goop everywhere. “They abandoned it right above the planet, they were so worried about their little kidnapping going wrong. I’m talking about an entirely new warship.” She looked down at her comm. “And we’ve got about one minute to catch it before it risks hovering long enough to be shot down.”

“Come on, Mimi,” I said, gently pulling at her. “Let’s go.”

“…I never wanted to kill her…” she murmured, her face pale. “I wanted to bring her home.”

“I know, I know.” I wrapped my fingers through hers. “But we have to go now. The mimics need you.”

She nodded, and just like I said we would, we ran out together.

We passed through the doors that the rest of the people opened while I was with Mimi, into a hangar bay that wasn’t quite as big as the one we had first escaped through, but still impressive, with rows and rows of fighters.

“They really are gearing up for war, aren’t they?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Gonzales said. “But our ride will take care of that.”

The ceiling was abruptly blasted away, and I looked up to see a massive warship hovering in the gap. Like something out of a sim, it slowly descended, extending a rampway as it did.

We ran up, the whole thing feeling a bit surreal, and once we were in, it hurriedly shut behind us.

Hey, guys, you wanna join us up in the cabin? We’re about to have a little pyrotechnics show here.

Gonzales heaved a sigh and looked to us. “No rest for the wicked, right? Come on, our last big run for a bit.”

“Sure,” Ciangi said. “I don’t want to miss any fireworks.”

So, we all ran, unsure of where we were going besides following the blips on Gonzales’s comm, but it led us right to a lift. We piled in, and Gonzales pressed the button.

“Did that just happen?” Bahn asked. “And are we really here right now? Riding in an elevator like life is normal?”

“Oh, life is far from normal,” Gonzales said. “But we’re about to get a little bit of payback to make up for some of the pain these folks have caused.”

The doors opened, and we stepped onto the bridge. It was bigger and sparklier than the one we had, although clearly made with the same style in mind.

There were a whole lot of people there too. There was large woman in the communication seat, her bright red hair pulled into buns atop her head. There was a taller, lanky man at navigation, another man in the captain’s seat, and four other people sitting in the chairs.

“Almost done rotating the ship,” the lanky man said.

“Thanks, Castellanos,” Gonzales said, hopping into a seat and strapping herself in. “I’ll do the introductions later. For now, I believe we were promised some boom-booms?”

“Indeed you were,” the man in the captain’s seat said. “Everyone should buckle up, because we have about ten seconds before we have to take off.”

We all rushed to do so, and by the time we did, the front of the ship was looking into the bay. Rows upon rows of ships all stood there, gleaming in their newness. I barely had time for my mind to comprehend the size of it all before three charges shot out of the front of our ship and suddenly, everything was ablaze.

Oh.

“Good work, everyone,” Gonzales said, letting out a whoop. “Now get us out of here!”

Just like she ordered, the ship backed up, then shot up into the sky. And as we navigated through the atmosphere, Earth’s defenses trying—ultimately unsuccessfully—to keep up with us, I realized something.

We couldn’t just run away to our planet anymore. We couldn’t play house and rebuild our civilization. There was no more running, and there was no more waiting. We had to go on the offensive.

We had to bring down the coup.

Mimic Changes the World

1

Between a Rock and a Far Place

“I’m just saying, it would be nice to drop off our wounded before we turn right around and try to bring down an entire sub-government.”

I looked at the small woman who was speaking quite passionately. I still wasn’t good with people, or names, but I was fairly certain she had been the one guiding us through the halls as we were escaping prison for the…second time, or was it the third? I could go my whole life without ever being behind bars again, and I would still have way too much experience as a prisoner.

I then looked to Mimi, who was sitting beside me and being unusually quiet. Not that she was as loud as say, Gonzales or Ciangi when she got heated, but usually she was pretty good at being the voice of reason through all the noise.

Not now, though. There were about two dozen humans in the room, some talking, some shouting, but it mostly seemed like we were getting nowhere.

“And I’m saying,” Gonzales retorted, “that we don’t have the time or supplies to waste. If we give them too many days, they’re going to mount an attack against our planet that we’ll be hard-pressed to fight off.”

“Didn’t you fight off an entire alien mothership bigger than anything Earth has?” the man who had escaped the prison with us said, his rugged smile doing nothing to sway the weapons engineer.

It seemed in our time apart that Gonzales had turned into a real rebellion leader. She was certainly gripping to watch, but honestly, it just made me think of how much I missed my friend. Maybe, when this whole war was over, we could be close like we once were.

Probably not. I wasn’t the best at understanding my fellow humans, but I knew that when things changed between people, it was almost always impossible to go back to how things used to be.

“Yeah, and that was before they had someone on our side tell them all of our nitty gritty details to try to get a slice of power.”

Finally, Mimi spoke.

“I don’t think she told them everything.”

The room went sort of silent, and Gonzales looked at her with interest. “What makes you say that?”

“She was hungry for power and wanted to go back to our people a hero. If she sold every secret we had to the humans, she knew that they would eventually return and just take whatever they wanted from her. No, Mari was a smart, ambitious girl. She kept enough in her back pocket to secure her own interests. I am sure of that.”

“See?” another human spoke up, one I had no idea who they were. “We should go back!”

“I did not say that,” Mimi continued calmly. I never understood how she kept so levelheaded in these situations. “In fact, the last thing the humans would expect is for us to stay here and try to land on the planet we just escaped. I say we use that element of surprise to our advantage, just like Gonzales said.”

“There ya go.” The weapons engineer perked up. “I think that settles it.”

“Wait a minute,” one of the burlier men said, standing and stalking over to Gonzales’s seat. “Shouldn’t we take a vote? I thought we were escaping a corrupt democracy, not creating a new one.”

Gonzales just laughed, and I felt a shiver down my spine. Something had definitely changed within her.

“Now that’s where you’re wrong, friend. This isn’t a democracy. This is a rebellion. And a rebellion needs generals who have the final say. Like it or not, that alien sitting right there is the leader of all of us, and if she tells all of us to stand on one leg and do the hokey-pokey, you ask which hand you put in first, capisce?”

With every word out of her mouth, she rose a little higher until she was standing on her feet, chest practically against the aggressor, her chin tilted up as if daring him to defy her. There was a small moment where I thought he might, but he just shook his head and walked out.

“Very well then, let’s move on.” Gonzales cracked all of her knuckles, then her neck. “So, we’re going to stay here and keep our momentum going, but we all know the defense grid is going to be on high alert to detect our ship. How are we going to subvert that so we can land?”

“I don’t know,” the small hacker girl said, also taking a seat at the large table. “We would need to somehow get through without them scanning a single one of our serial numbers.”

“That’s not physically possible,” Eske said from beside us, still nursing her swelling lip. She had taken an elbow pretty hard, but it was one of the least of our injuries. “You’d have to replace every part on this ship. Everything, right down to the support beams, all have a specific chemical marker that’s logged into the defense grid. As soon as we approached Earth, they’d know.”

“And you’re sure about that?” one of them challenged.

“I certainly hope so,” Gonzales cut in. “Considering she’s one of the mechanics that helps build these things.”

“I think I may know someone…” An alarmingly mechanical voice joined the debate and I looked all around before my eyes finally landed on the person who I was pretty sure was the one talking.

Well…maybe ‘talking’ wasn’t entirely accurate. He was maybe four or so years younger than me, with bright red hair and weepy green eyes. He was so thin that I wasn’t sure how he was supporting himself enough to sit up, and he had what I recognized as a portable ventilator over his mouth to help him breathe. His voice came from a speaker on his shoulder, and his hands moved emphatically with every word, signing things that I wouldn’t have been able to understand without the digital voice.

“Ah, everyone, meet Babel, the polyglot of basically every code language ever.”

“Babel, really?” Ciangi asked, raising her head from where she had been resting it on the table. “Did your parents name you that?”

“Yeah, actually,” he answered, raising his eyebrows and making his hands shake in a way that was somehow quite sarcastic. “Are you telling me yours didn’t name you Sarcastic Blonde?”

“Funnily enough, that’s my middle name.”

“Look, I love some interpersonal banter as much as the next girl, but you said you know someone?” Gonzales interrupted, steering us back on course. I was still in a bit too much of a shock from everything that had happened, but I admired how levelheaded so many of these people were being. “How and why please, in three minutes or less.”

“There’s this guy in the underground. I don’t know how, but I know he’s real good at scrubbing or subbing serials. He’s the one who got me both my breather and my vocal system when I was on about every watchlist there is and setting off personal scanners right and left. And I’ve heard about him doing it for others too. Pacemakers, bionic limbs… Actually… I could be wrong, but I think he’s the one who originally procured your eye, Gonzales.”

“Well then, some good news.” Gonzales smiled and crossed her arms in front of her with satisfaction. “So, how do we find this guy? I’m assuming someone has some favors they can call in.”

“Actually…it might not be that easy…”

Everyone could sense the change in his tone, despite the fact that it was a machine talking for him, and I wondered just what kind of interface he had between it and his own system.

“I think I’m getting to the age where I don’t have the patience for people talking in ominous cliffhangers,” Gonzales retorted.

“Word in the underground is that he got mixed up with the wrong people and now he’s paying off his debts to one of the big crime families that has connections in the gov.”

“Debts?”

“If he’s talking about who I’m talking about,” the tiny girl said, “then he means gambling. Kagmire is said to like anything that involves a bet.”

“Wait,” Ciangi interrupted. “His name is Kagmire? Who is naming you people?”

“His parents, I assume,” the thin boy’s robotic voice answered flatly. “Just like your parents named you the Snarky Blonde.”

“Um, it’s Sarcastic Blonde, get it right.”

“Great,” Gonzales said. “Glad that we’ve talked enough to have callback jokes. But how are we going to get this serial-scratching genius out of the grips of whatever mafia megalord he’s gotten himself involved with?”

“Well, we can’t go down to Earth to rescue him.” The same man who was giving orders when we first got on the ship spoke up again. “We can’t exactly call him and ask for help. And although I know we’re an illegal rebellion and all that, I’m not exactly eager to hop into bed with crime lords who may or may not betray us to protect their own issues.”

“A mouthful, but I agree.” Gonzales rubbed her face. “What about all you military experts?”

“I wasn’t a strategist,” the hulking one who had helped us escape said. “Unless it involves blowing things up or breaching a siege, I’m not gonna be much help.”

“I think…” Mimi murmured quietly. “If we want this scammer, we are going to have to get his employers, or owners—I am not sure which term would be appropriate to use in this situation—to bring him to us.”

“And how do you suggest we do that without becoming indebted to them ourselves?”

“I have been around your kind enough to learn many ways of interacting. So in this case, I think the traditional thing to do when you want something that someone else has is to steal it.”

“…you want us to steal a person?”

Mimi shrugged before rising to her feet. “Why not? I believe, from what I have read of your history, that this is not a new idea.”

“I… Did we just get called out?” Ciangi muttered.

“I believe, for tonight at least, that we have had plenty of talk,” Mimi continued. “I would like to rest. Today has not been kind, and I am still feeling the effects of being confined for so long.”

“I could use some rest as well,” Bahn said, also standing. “I have no doubt that it will help us plan better to rest now, while we can. I have a feeling that sleep will soon become a rare commodity.”

“You’re probably right,” Gonzales said, stretching and yawning. “Let’s all go lick our wounds. Quarters are first come first serve.”

Mimi gave her a slight nod and turned to go. I, of course, quickly followed her.

Although I was sure that most people would assume she looked collected, peaceable even, I could tell that something was wrong. Her shoulders were slightly tense, and her steps were quicker than normal. Granted, those differences could just be because she had been unable to assume her human form for so long and I had been separated from her as well, but I supposed I would find out when she was ready to tell me.

We found one of the officer’s quarters and she quickly stepped in. I supposed that some of the crew that rescued us might be miffed that we just assumed we could have one of the nicer rooms, but I certainly wasn’t going to argue with Mimi with the vibes I was getting from her.

She closed the door behind us and took my hand, pulling me to her. My tired, adrenaline-weary mind realized that this was the first moment of peace we’d had since our escape, and I wrapped my arms around her.

I held her for quite a while, neither of us saying anything. Eventually, I felt her begin to shake, and I thought I felt something wet against my shoulder.

“I… This is crying, correct?”

“Yeah, yeah, it is,” I said, smoothing her hair. “It’s a pretty normal response. I know you liked Mari very much.”

“I… I do not like this.”

“Yeah, most people don’t.”

She continued silently weeping, and I couldn’t do much besides hold her. I too was exhausted, and my mind couldn’t think of the words to say to make this all better. Not that I was ever that great with words anyway.

“I am so tired, Higgens.”

“I know. And you have every right to be. Let’s get some sleep.”

“No, I mean I’m tired of all of this. Of the war, the fighting, the constant running. I just… I feel like I’ve been fighting or preparing to fight ever since I became truly sentient, and I’m just so weary. I want peace and happiness. To not look over my shoulder and wonder who is trying to kill me and those I love.”

Wow. She had a point, but I really didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry. Maybe after we’re done with the coup—”

“But what if there’s something else after that? There always is something else.”

I pulled back just far enough to take both of her hands and lead her to the bed. I sat her down, then sat next to her.

“I know that our lives have been very, very hard. And you’ve seen the very worst that two species have to offer. But I swear to you on my last breath, I will make sure that one day, you will have the retirement you’ve always deserved.”

“But how can you promise such things?”

I pulled her to me again, letting her rest her head on my shoulder. “Because I will do whatever I have to in order to make sure that you are happy. You’ve earned that at this point.”

“I… Thank you.”

“No thanks needed. But for now, how about we get some sleep?”

She nodded, and her form slowly rippled away, until she was a mass of black, slippery spikes. She was much larger than she had been when I first met her, taking up about half of the bed. I patted a spike-less part of her, then snuggled to her side as best I could. And together, we slipped into our first sleep with one another in what felt like ages.

2

How to Steal a Human in Three Not-So-Easy Steps

Once more I found myself sitting at the oversized table, wondering who half of the people there were. Gonzales was present obviously, as were Ciangi, Bahn, Eske and the two hackers that I knew of, but there were several others as well. Not nearly as many people as last time, but still plenty. I figured I should probably find out who they were, but I was about maxed out on my interpersonal relationships. Gone were the days where I was a lonely ship maintenance man with no friends to speak of and a grand total of three acquaintances that tolerated me.

“So, I’m assuming a straight-up bribe is out?” the same tall, official-seeming man who had spoken yesterday said, this time much more calmly.

Ciangi sighed. “We don’t have nearly those kind of resources, and we have no guarantee that whoever we buy him off of won’t just immediately turn around and sell us out to the coup for a double profit.”

“And if they’re as good with money as I hear, they definitely would do exactly that.” Gonzales said, rubbing her temples.

“So, we need them to bring him to us of their own free will,” Ciangi clarified.

“And without knowing who we are,” another added.

Everyone seemed stumped, and it made me wonder if we should watch the ancient Earth sim about the mob and a powerful house. I remembered watching it several times during my teenage years, and each time, I picked up on something new. If I wanted to try to get those characters in that film to give me something… What would I do?

“Well, if these guys are such great businessmen,” I murmured slowly, almost feeling like it wasn’t my place to speak at such a meeting. “Then why don’t we just give them an offer they can’t refuse?”

“Come again?” Gonzales asked, her head picking up.

“They’re all about business and money, right? Well, if they’re going to go through the trouble of having a scammer who can fake or hide serials, then it makes sense that they’d want to find parts that would need that. Rare parts. Expensive parts.”

“Oh my gosh, you’re a genius!” Gonzales slapped the table and let out a crowing sound. “We set up a black-market sale. Super clandestine. Incredibly secret. Encrypted, obviously. And when they show up, BOOM, we take the guy and go about our business.”

“Wait, so are you suggesting we try to trick a crime family into meeting with us, then engage in a shootout with them?” It was the demolition man again, and he sounded a bit skeptical, to put it lightly.

“Yeah, why? Honestly, that doesn’t even rank in the top ten craziest things we’ve done.”

This time, it was a tall, golden-skinned woman who shook her head, clicking her tongue as she spoke. “That is not exactly a reassuring thing to hear.”

But Gonzales just shrugged blithely. “Hey, it got us this far, didn’t it? And considering that we’ve managed to discover alien life, defend that alien life, defeat another alien enslaving that alien life, and then wage a literal war on said enslaving-alien, I think you should trust us when I say something sounds relatively easy.”

“Wait…” the first man spoke again, clearly surprised. “That wasn’t just propaganda?”

“I wish,” Ciangi said with a snort. “If it was, Higgens would have a few more fingers, Gonzales would still have her eye, and my flawless complexion wouldn’t have been compromised by a dozen or so burn scars from shrapnel.”

“I lost my hair,” Bahn nearly whispered, his hand running across his shaved head.

“Yeah, and Bahn lost his hair!”

“I…I don’t know what to think about that. I just assumed a lot of it were tall-tales to excuse your extended absences from society, which we now know was your imprisonment.”

“Well, they’re probably all true,” Gonzales said. “Now, as much as I love talking about me when the occasion demands it, let’s turn back to our idea of hijacking the serial-scrubber. I vote we have people play smugglers, and the rest of us set up an ambush, while Mimi makes sure to encase this guy in…well, herself, so he doesn’t accidentally get shot and we end up at square negative ten.”

“…that’s a thing too?”

I nodded. “Mimi has literally saved us from an explosion that way before.”

“Huh,” the one named Lim muttered to herself. “She’s like cheat codes IRL.”

“Let’s say we go with this crazy kidnapping plan and contact them.” Babel said, his hands signing quickly. “Where are we going to have this sale? Inviting them on this ship would be a dead giveaway and they’d turn us in faster than lightspeed. I may not be some master tactician, but I’m pretty sure the most successful way to pull off the caper you’re suggesting is not having your targets know you’re a fake before you even make contact.”

“Good point,” Gonzales said. “We’ll just have to do it somewhere else then.”

“Like where?” Babel continued. “You want us to lasso a meteor? I understand the miraculous seems pretty mundane to you, but try to bring things down to the level us regular mortals can understand.”

I wasn’t quite sure how he said it without sounding completely rude. There was a sort of…dry charm or wit to him that I would never be able to replicate. Maybe it was the way he moved his face so strangely. Maybe it was how his hands gestured. Either way, it was kinda fun to see Gonzales meet her match—even if it was an incredibly stressful situation.

“As much as I love the idea of strapping a saddle on a comet and telling it what to do, I think we could do with something more practical.” Gonzales looked to the thin girl, who was perched on top of a chair. “Lim, can you do a scan of this sector of space? Find if there’s any civilian-free zones we can do this shindig in without having to worry about the gov showing up.”

The slighter hacker girl saluted. “Sure, give me about ten minutes.” She busied herself with her holopad in her lap and we all waited, a sense of excitement in the air. “Ah! I got it! There’s an abandoned colony just a few hours’ journey from here. No feds would go there because it’s off the support system and completely stripped of resources. I believe it used to be called the Voss Colony.”

“Yes! That’s what I like to hear!” someone said excitedly. I couldn’t tell who it was, their tone hardly audible over the ringing in my ears. “And are there any sort of plans we can access without alerting anyone that there might be some suspicious activity there?”

“You won’t need to do that,” I murmured, my own voice sounding so incredibly strange.

I could feel Gonzales’s eyes on me, but I couldn’t meet them. My mind was going down a path I usually closed off to myself, walking a line of reminiscence that was not welcome.

“Why’s that, Higgens?”

“Because I was born there,” I answered flatly. “Voss Colony is where I grew up.”

3

The Prodigal Son Returns

I breathed deeply, in and out, in and out, in and out, but no matter how much I tried to focus on my inhales and exhales, my mind refused to be quiet.

I had never thought I would see my home colony again. I had left it behind to pursue my education on a passing space station, and I never looked back. Even when I finished all my certs and ended up on an outer rim colony that was in even worse condition, I was never once tempted to go back to where I was raised.

What was even more surprising was how much it was already affecting me. Bile rose bitterly in my dry mouth, and my heart was thundering away without reserve. Sure, I hadn’t had the greatest time on Voss, but it wasn’t the worst. I had always thought of it as an unpleasantness that no longer bothered me. But as I waited for our pod to touch down, I realized it still bothered me very much.

“Initiating landing protocols now,” Gonzales said from the front. Of course, our whole gang went down together in one of the pods. It was the first time all of us had been truly united in what felt like forever, and I was sure none of us wanted to be apart for long.

Voss Colony may have been where I grew up, but none of those colonists had been my family. No, my family was surrounding me now, and I would never stop being grateful for them.

“Do you know why they abandoned this place?” Eske asked from behind me, her eyes staring at me from behind her new and improved goggles.

“No,” I answered after a beat. “I didn’t even know that they had abandoned it.”

“Really? Nobody told you? It feels like something your family or friends would mention.”

“Perhaps they would, but I never had either of those on Voss anyway.”

“Oh…” I practically heard the realization in her mind. “Sorry. I’m just… Family is a big part of my culture. I always assume that it is just as much for everyone else, but that is not the case.”

“No, it’s not.”

I liked Eske, I did, and I could tell that she was just trying to understand what was so foreign to her, but I wasn’t in the mood to talk. I moved to the other side of the pod, staring out one of the tiny windows as if I could see something through the smog and dust.

I couldn’t, of course. At least that much hadn’t changed. A few moments later, a thud sounded and the ship rattled then sighed as we landed.

“Alright. Everyone make sure they have their breathers on. The nuclear core of the atmosphere processer is still working, but the air filter and oxygen system is definitely not.”

“Aye, aye.”

We all put on our necessary equipment and then the door was opening, revealing the small city that had once been my whole world.

Before the door completely opened, and all that was visible was the perma-gray that described Voss so well, I felt a hand slip into mine. Looking to my side, I saw Mimi there, gazing up at me with a sort of confidence and assurance that I certainly needed.

What had I ever done to deserve such an amazing person by my side? How silly my inner meltdown must have seemed after everything that she had survived, but I couldn’t find a hint of judgement in any of her features. She truly cared for me as no one else had.

That thought bolstered me, and I took a deep breath. Holding it within me for seven seconds, I then let it out and walked into the gray soup.

It was just how I remembered. The ground was a strange mix of grit and sludge, depending on where you stepped, and each movement of the foot resulted in a sort of nauseating sucking sound. I hadn’t even noticed it when I was younger, it had always been a part of the background noise of my life, but the moment I had first escaped to a station I had marveled at the quiet.

And then there was the gray horizon in the distance, the only drops of color being the slight touch of blue—not from beautiful sky but from helium gas being burned off the planet’s crust by the sun.

Wait, no, that wasn’t entirely true. There were looming shadows, stained black by soot and grime. The buildings of the colony cast long shadows that crept into my mind. Wraithful reminders of everything I had left behind.

Gross.

“Well, you lead the way, Higgens.” Gonzales said, the last one off our little ship. “Where’s the best place to set up our headquarters, considering we had to hide our ship behind a different planet so we wouldn’t get detected.”

“We’re going to want to go to the testing center. It’s connected to the med area, the comms, and the community center. That will be the best place to organize and even get some leverage if we do end up in a shootout.”

“I don’t know this ‘if’ you’re all talking about. There’s only one way a confrontation with these kinds of people ends, and it certainly isn’t with a please or thank you.”

“Hey, I’m not sure when we started assuming that violence was necessary for every situation,” I replied confusedly.

Gonzales shot me a look. “Since when hasn’t violence been our solution for every situation?”

“I dunno,” I supplied, not wanting to start a fight. “We took over an entire abandoned research station without hurting anyone.”

“Oh, yeah… I wonder how those guys are doing. I guess they wouldn’t exactly send a Christmas card.”

“It’s not like any of us have an address.” Ciangi sighed wistfully. “I miss my mansion.”

“I miss my home and all of my brothers and sisters,” Mimi murmured, almost to herself.

Gonzales snorted. “Oh, okay. Well, that puts things into perspective, and I feel like a spoiled brat now.”

“That is not what I—”

“Don’t worry about it, fearless leader. After our last stint in prison, I think my sarcasm meter isn’t functioning at peak performance.”

The shapeshifter beside me nodded. “I see. I’m sure we all need some time to return to normal.”

“Too bad time is the one thing we always seem so short on,” Eske murmured, looking around and taking everything in. I assumed she was also logging scans with her new goggles. Apparently, they had a whole slew of new functions, but she hadn’t had much time to explore them since Gonzales had handed them to her.

I stayed out of the conversation, however, focusing on one foot in front of the other. I felt like I was walking through a graveyard, except what was buried here was all the memories and choices that made up old Higgens. The maintenance worker who never believed in himself. Who thought he deserved the terrible treatment from Giomatti, and that he was stupid, and unworthy of friends. This was the place that had created the little voice in the back of my head that told me I wasn’t ever good enough.

I had come so far, and I didn’t want to let this environment ruin all my growth. I was still Higgens, but I was better, and working toward being the best I could be.

“We’re here,” I said, pointing to the large building in front of us.

It was funny; when I was a child, the central building of the colony had seemed so impressively huge. Now…it was just large. I guess I had gained quite a bit of perspective since I had last left this place.

Suddenly, all our comms buzzed. “Team B has landed. Can you guys update your location? Apparently, the high levels of radiation, helium, and neon are making our auto-trackers a bit shaky.”

“Ugh, how much do you want to bet that that seems insignificant now, but will come back to bite us in the butt later?” Ciangi grumbled.

“I think it would be best if we do not gamble,” Bahn answered. “Considering that particular vice is what got us in this mess in the first place.”

“What do you mean— Oh, right. Scammer-scrubber guy is indebted because of his gambling thing. I was totally paying attention.”

“Honestly, when those military types start talking, I just kind of tune them out too.”

“…you know you guys are still live on comms, right?”

“Well, now I do,” Gonzales said with a shrug. “Plugging in our location now. I’ll see y’all soon.”

She clicked off her comm, as did the rest of us, and we kept on trudging.

The roof of part of what was once the front entrance had caved in, leaving a decrepit sort of haunted house feel. What had once been solid, reinforced, plasticine-alloy windows was now all cracked and dirty. I would like to have said plants were overgrowing it, but there wasn’t a living thing in sight. No bugs, no plants. Nothing. Just the skeletal infrastructure of my past life.

“I gotta say… Seeing this place kinda makes me understand why you were how you were when we first met.” Ciangi said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, shoving the door open only to have it fall off its hinges.

“I mean… I know that this place is kinda falling apart, but you know how you can kinda pick up on the feel of a space? Well, this feels cold. And unhappy. There’s a sort of bitterness to the walls.”

“And here I thought you were a scientist, not a poet.” Eske ribbed.

“Hey, a girl can moonlight when she wants.”

We picked our way through the first room, which was full of desks and shattered equipment. This had once been the intake room, where the farmers and scientists would drop off samples for other scientists to test and log. It was supposed to help us better understand space and our planet so we could continue to improve our environment, but eventually, we just kinda ran out of money and most of our testing went into how we could maximize our profits.

It still seemed weird to me that money even mattered when we were all just trying to survive together, and it was in Earth’s best interest if we were successful, but maybe I just didn’t understand capitalism. There were a lot of things that I didn’t understand.

“This way,” I said, heading toward the stairs. I was sure the others were weirded out by the thought of such structures within an official building, but we couldn’t waste the energy or resources to have hover-lifts going twenty-four/seven. “Up to the comm center. It overlooked most of the colony.”

I kept going, noting that there was hardly even any dust. I supposed you needed living things to make dust, and there wasn’t much of that here.

“How long has this place been abandoned?” I asked. “Were we able to look that up at all?”

“Yeah, I got some peripheral info,” Ciangi said. “About four years ago.”

“Wow, all this decay in just four years?” Eske murmured in wonderment. “If you asked me, I would have guessed this place has been abandoned for generations.”

“It was already falling apart when I lived here,” I said, coming to another set of doors and pushing them open. “I left when I was sixteen. I’m sure there was a lot more degradation after I left.”

“That is awfully young…”

I shrugged. “They accepted me at the space station for a vocational program, so I took the first ticket they paid for. Now, I’m very glad I did.”

Gonzales didn’t seem to buy my nonchalance. “You have a very interesting past all tucked up inside of you, don’t you?”

“Yes, I have not heard of such things,” Mimi said, clearly a bit miffed. “In all the nights we have stayed up talking, why has none of this ever come up?”

Gonzales made a gagging sound. “Alright, lovebirds, we can leave the tales of your clandestine affair between the two of you.”

Ciangi came up beside her friend and ribbed her with her elbow. “Green is not a good color for you,” she muttered, but I didn’t quite understand the reference.

Whatever it meant, I let it drop, as we had reached the comm center. It was just how I remembered it, a circular room atop the rest of the building, the windows all looking out across the landscape, showing buildings and farmland alike.

Except now it was dead. All dead.

“Good job, Higgens,” Gonzales said, patting me on the back. “This will be a great place to set things up. Now, show of hands, who here wants to be on the traps team, and who wants to be on the fortification team?”

4

Déjà No

“The tricky part of this reinforcement thing is that we don’t want any of the reinforcements to be visible at all. These guys will be professionals with a keen eye, and if they see something new or shiny, or something that doesn’t fit, it’ll blow our plan sky-high.”

I listened as the leader of the ‘reinforcement team’ talked. He was the same man who had been giving orders when we were first rescued, and as far as I could tell, he was sort of Gonzales’s second-in-command on the rebellion side of things.

Where did that leave us, though? Normally, I would consider Mimi our leader, with Gonzales and I being her opposite hands. But now…things were different. Our group may have been one of the triggers of this rebellion, but it was clear that we weren’t the sole decision-makers anymore.

“Alien and engineer, I’ll have you take the old community center. I want the eastern wall completely barricaded.”

“It’s Mimi and Higgens,” I corrected. “Unless we’re going to start calling everyone Human. And I’m not an engineer. Yet.”

“Alright then, Mimic and Higgens, get to it. I trust you don’t need directions.”

I gave a little nod and we headed off. I got the distinct feeling that the man wasn’t trying to be rude, just that he was ex-military and was used to things going a certain way. That way was very different from how Mimi and I liked to do things.

My eyes were everywhere as we walked along, and Mimi didn’t miss it. “What are you thinking of?”

“Just memories,” I answered honestly.

Her hand slid into mine, and I felt her squeeze my fingers. “Tell me them? You know all of mine. You were there when this version of me was born yet I know so little of you.”

“That’s because I’m not that person anymore, and it doesn’t matter.”

“I understand that, but I believe it was a human who once said our past is the path that leads us to who we will be. If you’d share it with me, I’d like to know the journey you took to be the man I love.”

How could I resist a request like that? And it was true, I knew everything about Mimi. She didn’t have a single secret from me, why should I have them from her?

I pointed to a room over in the distance, one that had once been full of toys and random playsets. “That was the daycare where all of us young ones hung out when our parents were busy working.”

“It seems odd that they would bring children here, considering what you have said about the economic situation. Young ones are supposed to be a symbol of prosperity, yes?”

“The initial program actually encouraged people to bring kids over thirteen so they could help in the fields and other chores. Kinda like free labor. Then, once the colony proved viable, they were encouraged to have babies. There was never a lot of us, maybe ten or so a year in a city of three thousand, but there was always some.”

“…interesting. You make it sound as if you were a renewable energy source.”

“That’s because we were. We were raised on colony life, and we were assigned roles that we were supposed to be for the rest of our life. Well…most of us were.”

“I take it from your tone that you were not?”

I shook my head, gesturing to another set of doors we were passing. “If you go down that hall and to the next building over, that would be the school. I did okay on some subjects, but most of my teachers gave up teaching me. I was a lot different then. I didn’t talk a lot, I was overwhelmed easily, and I understood humans even less than I do now. Opinions on me ranged from weird to brain damaged, and that didn’t exactly make things easy.”

“That…sounds difficult.”

“It wasn’t the easiest. But for a long time, I just assumed that was how it was supposed to be. It wasn’t really until I met you that I realized that maybe I wasn’t supposed to be treated that way.”

“I…” She seemed to falter with her words for a moment, which was unusual for her. “I am glad that I have helped with that revelation.”

She fell silent again as we went down the final staircase leading to the community center.

“I thought I had read that human parents have stronger relationships with their offspring. How did your parents feel about this different treatment?”

“Honestly…a bit guilty.”

She nodded. “Perhaps if they were not on the colony, you might have had a better life?”

“Oh, nothing like that, but on Voss everything was about survival and making tomorrow better. I wasn’t contributing anything to the colony and everyone assumed I never would. I was just a drain on resources, and they felt guilty for taking away from supplies.”

I sighed, the memories all flooding back. “But that was also probably why they didn’t fight me when I left. Normally, anyone leaving the colony was a huge scandal, but they seemed happy to see me go. At the time, I thought that they were proud of me for making something of myself, but now… Well, hindsight is twenty-twenty, as they say.”

“I do not understand that phrase,”

“Ah, human vision is measured with a bifocal ratio between one through twenty, with one number referring to the right eye, and one referring to the left.”

“I see.” She seemed to be thinking again, so I just waited while she put together her words. Which worked for me considering that I was feeling a bit talked out at the moment. “And you have not talked to your parents since?”

“No. Never felt the need. I figured if they wanted to find me, they would.”

“I… I am sorry, Higgens.”

“For what? You didn’t do any of this.”

“No, but it makes me wish that we had met sooner.”

“That would have been nice.” Now it was my turn to squeeze her hand. “But I might not have been ready to meet you.”

“That is fair. Maybe things happened exactly as they were meant to.”

“I would like to think that.”

It certainly made everything that had happened before seem a bit better. Maybe I needed to endure all of that to survive everything I was going through now.

Or maybe sometimes people were just needlessly cruel. In the edges of my vision, I could see the other children running off to play and leaving the ‘stupid one’ behind. I could feel the pitying looks from those with a shred of compassion, and the dismissive looks from those who just saw all the food I ate and oxygen I inhaled, counting me as a loss. They stung, but they held no power over me. Every one of those feelings, or specters of the life I once led, were all in the past, and even though I could feel them hanging heavy in the air around me, I could take comfort in the fact that I had moved on. They no longer dictated my life, and if we weren’t physically there, I probably would have never give them a second thought.

I was no longer little Hjarta, the strange, slow boy that everyone endured. I was Higgens, and I liked who I had become.

5

Firefight at the Voss Corral

I stood at the top of the comm center, a flurry of movement going on behind me. It seemed that almost everyone had something to do, but I was unassigned.

Mimi and I had helped with all of the barricading, but that was pretty much done, leaving me with not a lot to offer.

I knew enough about engineering that I could help restore the comm systems, but they had more experienced people on that, like Ciangi and Bahn. The hackers were obviously busy spreading whatever net rumors they needed to in order to catch the eyes of the crime family, while Gonzales and the others were setting up plans for what to do in the ambush, and when we finally got back to Earth.

I was relatively useless, which was unfortunately close to how I felt when I was a kid, but I wasn’t going to let myself sink back into those feelings.

Or at least that was what I told myself.

“Any update, Lim?” Gonzales asked, coming around to the systems that Babel and she had hooked their tools up to.

“So far no bite.”

“What if they never bite?” the demolition man asked. “What if we’re doing all of this for nothing?”

“Have a little faith,” Gonzales said, clapping him on the back. He didn’t look like he appreciated it and she didn’t look like she cared. “If I know one thing about the rich and greedy, it’s that they won’t pass up an opportunity to make some serious bucks.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I got a hit!” Babel cried, pumping his slender fist in the air.

“Wow, I couldn’t have timed it better if I tried.” Gonzales bent down next to the hacker. “Spill the deets. What’re you pulling up?”

“It’s just a feeler, but the encryption on it has the crime family’s signature all over it. Let me see how to play this.”

“Um, excuse me, since when did you have permission to negotiate the whole pitch?”

“Since I got the bite. Just trust me, Gunner, this isn’t my first black-market deal.”

“First of all, if you ever call me that again, I’ll unplug you from so many things until you and your breather have an ethernet connection and that’s it. Second of all, tone down the cockiness. If you botch this, the whole plan means absolutely nothing.”

“I gotcha. And trust me, I take the situation seriously.”

“Good to know. Just…be careful, alright? And if you aren’t sure of something, ask.”

“Righto.”

By then, a whole group had gathered around and we were all waiting tensely. I had to admit, Babel was handling things pretty well, inputting this and that.

It seemed like an eternity before he looked up, blinking as if he didn’t realize how many of us were there. “We have a go.”

“Holy crap! We do?” Gonzales asked.

“Yup. They’re sending a so called ‘expert’ to look it over and make sure that it’s legit. If that ain’t our scammer, I don’t know what would be.”

“Yes!” Suddenly everyone was high-fiving each other and celebrating. I thought it was a bit premature, but I guessed it was good for morale.

“Good job, Babel. Now how much time do we have?”

“They said they were going to hit our dropoff point in exactly twenty-four hours.”

Gonzales gave a determined nod. “Then let’s all get ready, folks. It’s time to put on one hell of a show.”

“So why exactly are we stuck up here?” Ciangi groused, spinning in a chair that used to be for the relay lieutenant back when this place was fully functional.

“Are you really complaining that we’re not the ones who are going to be involved in a firefight?” Bahn asked dubiously, leaning forward in his chair to look down into the valley below us.

There was still another hour or so until the crime family was supposed to land, but everyone had pretty much gotten into positions just in case. The last thing we wanted was for them to send some sort of scout or envoy and have none of us be ready.

“Well…no, but it just seems kinda weird that all of us ended up here.”

“You think so?” Gonzales said nonchalantly, busy working on something I recognized as a long-range pulse rifle. “Because the way I see it, all of us are pretty famous, and if I was trying to run some sort of covert ops that involved tricking my target long enough for them to reveal their highly valuable personnel, I wouldn’t want a famous—or infamous—person within a hundred yards of it.”

“Huh, I guess I never thought of it that way,” Ciangi muttered. “That rock star feeling wore off pretty fast when we were betrayed and imprisoned for months.”

“It is funny to hear you say that,” Eske added from where she was sitting at another set of controls. As far as I knew, the engineers had done something with that too, but they had trained the maintenance worker specifically for it, so I wasn’t sure what it did. “Because to me and my family, you were so incredibly famous. Right now, it feels as if I am saving the day with Sir Isaac Newton, or Madame Curie, or Kailani Batara.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Gonzales joked right back. “But we are pretty cool…”

That brought a smirk up in me and I checked my datalog for what had to be the twentieth time. I was in charge of the two small, deployable drones we had that were each equipped with a smoke screen, and some sort of chemical powder that was supposed to cause sleep. One of our medics below was waiting with injectors if one of the men had a bad reaction to it, but I was nervous.

What if I messed up? Or gassed the wrong person? This wasn’t one of our harebrained, slapdash plans anymore. This was a true, military venture with a dozen other people involved. Which was pretty crazy to think about considering our whole adventure started with just Mimi and me.

It seemed completely out of nowhere when our comms suddenly buzzed and Lim’s voice came over the line.

“I’m reading a small ship doing scans of the planet!”

“How big of a carrier is it?” Gonzales asked.

“I’m picking up about twenty life signs. They’re probably going to send half that in a landing party and have the other half stay as gunnery and escape backup in the ship.”

“Good. Sneak Team, you hear all that?”

“Is that really the name we’re going with?” I heard a masculine voice argue.

“What is it with all of you and questioning names?” Babel wondered aloud. “Is this a new net-trend I missed?”

Lim’s voice cut back through the noise. “It seems like their scans are completed. Everyone, get ready to initiate the plan!”

“Oh, is this the point where we get an exciting drumroll?” Gonzales joked. I knew that she did it to relieve her tension and boost morale, but I wasn’t entirely sure all of the rebels knew that.

To everyone’s surprise, Eske suddenly began to slap her console in a specific and escalating beat that almost sounded like it could come from the instrument itself. When she finished, she crossed her arms and looked sheepishly at us.

“Ta-dah.”

“Now that’s just impressive. Don’t let that go to waste, everyone. Assume positions, lock and load, then assume comm silence unless it’s an absolute emergency. And if there is an emergency, make sure you’re encrypted.”

There was an echo of affirmative noises and then an eerie sort of silence settled over us.

This was it.

The smog and clouds parted, revealing the red-hot underbelly of the ship. I wasn’t sure how we were avoiding its scans, but it had something to do with the helium and other neon gasses, as far as what I had heard from the other engineers.

I really needed to get my head on straight. Being home again had me sinking to the background like the nobody I used to be. I had told myself I was a new man now, so why was I letting myself act like the old me?

There were probably a lot of reasons behind that, enough to fill about a dozen sessions with a therapist, but the ship was landing. I pushed those thoughts away to deal with another day.

It almost seemed like everyone was holding their breath as the ship lowered its door and a party came out.

All I could think was… Wow, the men were equipped.

There were four on each side of their procession that wore heavy armor and had guns as big as my upper torso. One lead the way with a more stylized armor and the type of recombinant gun I remembered being invented soon after we first introduced Mimi into the world. It could switch from a wide blast, to a precision sniper beam, to a short sort of SMG type of spray. It was certainly potent, and I didn’t want to be caught by one.

Lastly, right in the middle of it, had to be the scrubber.

He was smaller than I thought he would be, about Ciangi’s size, or maybe even slighter than that. He wore a heavy, sort of patchwork jacket that seemed to dwarf his frame that much more. He wore a thick hat on his head, and a scarf over the bottom of his face, making it so I wouldn’t be able to tell his features even if I was up close instead of at a distance. Although he wasn’t shackled or bound in any way, he had the mannerism of someone who was always watching out for something. It was interesting to watch him move, and I wondered at what this little gambling black-market genius must be like.

Well, if everything went well, I would be finding out shortly.

I watched from our position as the squad moved forward, marching almost like military. I had to admit, I had never had much experience with Earth’s crime family, but I had been expecting them to be more like the ancient flick I had watched. I didn’t want to say I was disappointed, because romanticizing gangsters was stupid and silly, but…I was kinda disappointed.

I saw movement to the east and sure enough, it was the four that we had picked to be our own little smugglers. One was the gunslinger who we had met up with in the prison and was there for the final leg of our escape.

One was a large woman, in both height and weight, who looked like she might be able to crush a skull between her thick thighs in one moment then snuggle someone against her bosom the next. She reminded me of an old comic character that I had a crush on in my teenage years…

I shook my head at that, moving my attention onto the others. I recognized the demolition man, and then the fourth as the silent woman who had rescued us with Gonzales.

The gunslinger was the one holding the containment unit that our bogus part was supposed to be in. I was impressed at the nonchalant way he held himself. I knew that if I was down there, I would most likely be sweating and stuttering. Even after all this time, lying and trickery were not my strong suit, and I was pretty sure that everyone knew that too.

The two groups approached each other, and I was reminded of the ancient spaghetti westerns that they used to show us sometimes in class. They had been meant to be a way to see how the old Earth celebrated violence and divisions, but honestly, I thought they were the coolest things. Stories of good, or not-very-good, men going up against incredible odds and beating the bad guys? That was always my cup of tea. So much so that apparently, I had let that affect my life a whole lot more than I thought I had.

Huh.

The two finally met and I could see the stylized armor guy talking to Gunslinger. It was intense, but not aggressive, and for the life of me, I wished that I could hear him. But using the comms risked that one of the signals might make it through the helium and neon haze the engineers had harnessed, tipping off the bad guys that they weren’t alone.

Then again, we were the ones literally planning on kidnapping a human being. So maybe there were no good guys here and just a whole bunch of morally gray characters.

That wasn’t very Western at all.

I heard the slightest three beeps on our comms, and only from our vantage point were we able to see our covert team sneak up the lowered ramp onto the ship. Hopefully, they would be able to imprison everyone quietly and efficiently. In a perfect world, no alarms would be set off and nobody would have to die.

Of course, we lived in far from a perfect world.

Just as the scammer was moving forward to take the containment unit, a loud shriek sounded from the ship behind the scene. All the crime-soldiers jumped into action, with four of them finding cover and taking aim at our guys, and the other four running back to the ship. Our comms suddenly blazed to life—the jig now up—and a flurry of voices called out to us.

“Lay down suppressive fire! This was a setup! The whole thing’s a setup!” That had to be the voice of the enemy leader down there. I could see him diving behind cover and having his gun reshape itself into a form I didn’t recognize.

“The ship has been taken. We have light casualties on their side, but I’m going to need a medic!”

“Let’s make sure there’s no friendly fire, alright? I don’t like most of ya, but that doesn’t mean I want you dead!”

It was a maelstrom of stimuli and I felt myself getting overwhelmed. My eyes scanned over the entire area and I just happened to catch sight of the scammer as they ran for cover.

Wait.

No.

They weren’t running for cover. They were running in the direction that we had hid our ship. But that couldn’t be… There was no way that he could have detected them…right?

I stood up, watching him as he beelined and I suddenly knew that was exactly what he was doing. Well, that was no good. If he escaped, then all of this would have been for nothing.

“I think I see where they’re orchestrating this! I’m gonna take it down!” That was the voice of the enemy leader again, but it hardly registered in my brain.

“Higgens, get down!”

I felt someone tackle me, which only served to push me farther toward our shielded windows. My gaze breaking away from our runaway scrubber, I saw that the stylized armor leader had finished recombining his gun into none other than what looked like a very nice rocket launcher.

Well, that wasn’t good.

Before I could even breathe, he fired the missile at us. I saw the conglomeration of energy spike out of his weapon, striking through the air like a hurricane.

But it didn’t get very far.

There was the sound of rapid-fire crunching, like someone was crumpling metal too fast for its own good, and suddenly, a black, spikey mass vaulted out of the ship. Of course Mimi had been on the sneak team—who better than a mimic for infiltrating a ship?—but there was no way she could reach it in time.

Everything seemed to slow down as she charged after the blast, almost too quick to see, but then two spikes shot out of her, stretching forward well beyond her body, until it made a sort of wall.

And then the energy hit that wall, and everything seemed to explode.

Smoke and dust went everywhere, obscuring my vision for a second. All thoughts of the scrubber escaped me for a moment, and I lurched to my feet, calling Mimi’s name.

“Mimi! Mimi!” I knew that she had literally taken the entire blast from my fighter exploding before, but that didn’t put me at ease at all.

I ran to the windows, trying to see, but there was so much smoke. I was about ready to turn right around and run back to the remainder of the firefight, when those two black spikes poked through the shattered window, their edges blown to red-hot and jagged little bits, then Mimi pulled herself the rest of the way in.

“Oh my God! Are you alright?!”

Slowly, although in reality it probably only took a minute or so, she returned to her human form. She still had all of her limbs, but she was covered with both soot and a sticky sort of blackness.

“I’m fine,” she wheezed. “That stuff just always vibrates me real hard. It feels like my brain is scrambled.”

I crushed her to me, incredibly grateful. Then I heard just about the only thing that could pull me away from her.

“Hey, where did the scrubber go?”

“I’m on it!” I cried, carefully extricating myself from my love. “Mimi, you stay here!”

“Higgens, where are you going?”

But I was already vaulting over one of the consoles and blitzing out the door. I had something I could do now, and by golly I was going to do it like no one else in this place could.

I zipped through halls and corridors, taking the same shortcuts I did when I was a kid and needed to get away from people fast. Sliding down this railing, jumping over that counter, slipping between two walls that were never fused quite the way they were supposed to. I raced and raced and raced, never daring to slow down, and when I finally dropped out of a venting shoot, I landed just in front of our would-be escapee.

“What the hell!?” he cried, stumbling backward and nearly falling over. He was even shorter up close, which really wasn’t supposed to be possible, coming just up to my hip.

I was so startled by it, I didn’t react right away, and apparently, that was an invitation for the guy to stab me in my thigh!

I let out a cry and jumped back, trying to figure out what had happened, and he raced off. I recovered and pulled the blade from the side of my leg, relieved to see that it was small—shorter than my pinky and about as thin. Racing after him, I quickly caught up with his shorter strides, and tackled him before he could reach one of our ships.

“Get off of me! Get off!” Strange, his voice was also different from what I would have imagined, but I didn’t let that shake me. Instead, I held on for dear life and spoke as quickly as we could.

“Hey, hey, hey, relax. We’re not here to hurt you, I promise!”

“Yeah, well the fact that you killed my entire landing party speaks to something different!”

“We didn’t! I swear we didn’t. But look, we did this because we need your help. All you gotta do is help us with one single thing, and then we’ll let you go.”

He stopped fighting me at that, and I realized that it almost felt like I was holding a younger, much smaller version of myself when I used to have fits. “You serious?” he said cautiously.

“As the grave. Please. We’re desperate.”

I felt him relax completely and I slowly lowered my arms. I was still on the defensive for being stabbed again, because I really hadn’t enjoyed that part of our interaction, but thankfully, the scammer just stood and turned to me.

Huh, he was about the same height as me when I was sitting down. Was the scrubber somehow a child and no one had mentioned it before? But his stature seemed far too stocky and fully formed for that, and now that I thought about it, his proportions were…different.

“Aja Dela at your service,” he said, extending a hand. “And what can a girl like me do for a lot like you?”

6

Beauty in the Imperfections

In the end, it was definitely a mission well done. No one on our side died, and only two of the crime family’s forces met their end. We, along with their comrades who were now our prisoners, had a funeral for them and cremated their bodies as the rest of the soldiers indicated.

Our brig was suddenly much fuller than it had ever been, but we made sure they had food and water while we decided what to do with them. The general consensus was to keep them in our custody until we were done with the coup, then release them far away from the damage.

The one surprise out of all of it was Aja, who apparently was not a young man but a middle-aged woman with gray hair and gentle wrinkles in her face. She was indeed shorter than anybody else I knew, with bowlegs and soft sort of joints.

“I thought you were a man,” Lim said, perched once again on the top of a chair. I didn’t think I had ever seen her sit normally in the short time that we had known each other.

“And now why would you go and think that?”

“Um, because I’ve met you,” Babel interjected. “I mean, it was in passing as you dropped off a part, but you were definitely a man. And taller.”

She laughed at that. “Do you really think I deliver parts like some sort of parcel boy? That was one of my assistants. Probably Rolph, if he was a tall one.”

“But why the secrecy?” I asked.

“I’m a criminal who makes a living doing very illegal things. I’m not exactly a fighting expert like some of y’all, so I like to keep myself as far removed from the action as I can. Obviously, that hasn’t been working out so well for me lately.” She cleared her throat and looked us all over. “Anyway, what is it you all need of me?”

We all exchanged glances and it was Gonzales who spoke first. Funny how she had become a bit of our spokesperson when it came to all of this human interaction. “We…we want you to scrub all the serials from our stolen government ship so we can get back planet-side and overthrow the coup that’s currently trying to do their own overthrowing of the government.”

“Wow, well, that’s certainly something. Well, what have ya got? A multi-man fighter? A freighter?”

“Um…a brand-new military warship.”

“Wait, what? I thought those things weren’t done.”

“They mostly aren’t. We just procured one a little unethically,” Eske murmured.

“So, do you think you can do it?” Gonzales asked, looking down at the gray-haired woman. We had all gathered in the comm center once again, and I found myself looking over my shoulder constantly, looking for a missile coming our way. I wasn’t looking forward to the nightmares that were going to come from that whole situation.

“I dunno. You’re asking me to scrub every serial from a ship that’s probably got a million parts. Normally, I’d have a team to help me with all the grunt work, and although I’m guessing some of you could maybe help, it wouldn’t be the same.”

“…what’s wrong with you?” Babel asked curiously, his hands signing almost abashedly.

“Well, that’s rich coming from you.” She laughed heartily, and I found myself liking this woman. She reminded me of the bawdy, confident sort of bards in adventure stories I had read when I was a child. “I’m a dwarf.”

“A dwarf?” Ciangi murmured. “I thought we invented a way to fix that in utero.”

“First of all, curly-que, there’s nothing about me that needs to be fixed. Secondly, I was colony-born and my parents weren’t too keen on the government fiddling with the makeup of their child before they were even born.” She looked at me and raised her eyebrow. “I’m sure your parents had much of the same, yes?”

My eyes opened, surprised. “What do you mean?”

“Aw, come off it, lad. I can tell a different soul when I meet one. You don’t look at me like the others. In fact, I’d say you hardly look at anyone but your white-haired lady friend there, and the gun-happy girl.”

“Oh, am I the gun-happy girl?” Gonzales chirped, seemingly pleased as punch.

But I wouldn’t let myself be distracted. “Our doctor was injured in an equipment explosion that took out several of our systems at the colony. There was no one to do the pre-screening and genetic testing until I was too old for any alterations.”

“There ya go. Maybe if our government did a little less genetic meddling, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now. Anyway…” She clapped her hands. “There’s no way that I can scrub your entire ship in the time you need.”

“Seriously?! But y—”

“Ah-ah-ah, hold your metaphorical horses there. I said there no way that I can scrub every individual part, but I’ve been tinkering with a new sort of system, something that would kinda, uh, let me think of how to put this into layman’s terms…kinda cloak the ship in a different serial that would just mask the ones that they have now.”

“Really?” I asked, intrigued. “You think that would work?”

She shrugged. “I dunno. Like I said, I’ve been working on it. It still needs some final touches, but if y’all are who I’m thinking you are, then I’m sure we won’t have a problem brainstorming a proper solution.”

“And just who do you think we are?” Bahn asked.

“Well, judging by the white-haired lady who hasn’t talked but her dirty face keeps changing shapes, and the para-military folks, and all the chatter I’ve been hearing in the underground, I would guess that y’all are the alien and her crew.” She let out a little laugh. “And her crew definitely got an upgrade from the last numbers I heard.”

“Well, you heard right,” Gonzales said, offering her hand. “The white-haired lady is Mimi, I advise not pissing her off. That’s Ciangi, Bahn, Higgens, and I’m Gonzales. We’re the original crew. Eske is our plus-one who joined us about halfway. Watch the legs on her because I’ve literally seen her kick someone unconscious.

“And everyone else is new to our crew, but I guess you could call them the founders of our rebellion.”

“Rebellion?” Aja asked, looking around pensively. “What exactly have I missed while I’ve been busy?”

“By busy, do you mean your indentured servitude from your gambling habit?” Gonzales asked, raising a brow.

“You say potato, I say potahto.” The woman stood, which actually made her shorter than when she sat at the table. Aja fascinated me, there was no two ways of saying it. I had never met someone else who had skipped the genetic screening most people did to make sure their babies were both happy and healthy. After centuries of losing children, humans had learned how to cure most things before a child was even born, but I couldn’t help but look at her and think of my own journey, wondering if there were certain things that didn’t need to be fixed.

“So, how about you take me up to your ship and we all get tinkering? This whole mission is going to involve lots of trust, so we might as well get started off on the right foot.”

“Really? It’s that easy?” the leader-man challenged. I really needed to learn his name. “No demands for credits, or the ship when we’re done, or power?”

Aja just looked up at him with a wise expression. She reminded me of someone’s mother, patiently enduring a child’s naiveite before she explained why they were wrong.

“You say that you’re taking down a coup to save the government, but from what I’ve learned with working with the crime family, most of the government is already infiltrated. So, if you’re saying you’re going to bring it down, I’m all for that.”

“Why?” someone else asked curiously. “What’d they do to you?”

“Son, I make a large part of my living stealing necessary medical parts for people who have been deemed not a productive enough member of society to earn them. I recognize that breather I configured for you, boy. If I recall right, you were in a building collapse in the slum, the cause thought to be the federal raid that was trying to find you because you’d been spying on their illegal search and seizures and warning people.”

“Oh, huh,” Babel said, obviously surprised. “That’s right.”

“And I recognize your eye too…Gonzales, was it? What I was told was that it was needed off-planet for a colonist who was raising hell with some of those contracted ships who liked to force their workers to work twenty hours at a time. Obviously that tale was embellished a little, but that pretty much makes me think that the stakes you lived through were higher.”

“Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty accurate.”

“And there are a hundred more stories just like it. Day in and day out, I deal with people who are down on their luck and have been punished for it by the powers that be. So, anything that takes them down is alright in my book.”

“That is good to hear,” Mimi said, the first time that she had spoken since she’d taken the RPG blast. “Come, we have much to do and so very little time.”

7

Some Assembly Required

It turned out a whole lot went into inventing a new system to scrub out important ship markers, but our whole ship dedicated itself to the task.

Obviously, all the certified engineers and hackers put themselves to the task of working on the actual logistics, but everyone else also played a part.

People like Eske and I, who had medium to fringe knowledge, ended up as the monkey wrench runners and testers, doing the grunt work to save the time of Aja and the other project leaders. People who had no technical knowledge whatsoever took turns either taking inventory of supplies, guarding the prisoners, or grabbing food and water from the meal generators in the cafeteria and bringing them to us.

I got to know Aja over the few days that we worked with her, and I had to say I hoped to be like her when I grew older. She was endlessly fearless, and her failures didn’t faze her. She would just log what was wrong and move right on to the next try. She was precise with her instructions to others, and rarely ever yelled at anyone—although every other sentence out of her mouth did seem to be razzing someone.

I could tell she grated on the nerves of others in the same way that Gonzales did. It was clear that she didn’t care about ranks or labels or any of that and talked to most everyone as if they were her assistant. I appreciated the candor, but it was quite obvious that others did not.

“Hey, you, buzz-head, come ‘ere.”

It took me a second to realize that Aja was talking to me. I was so used to having my long ponytail that I still forgot my head had been shaved just a couple of weeks earlier. While Ciangi’s crown was already covered with little blond ringlets, and another rebellion soldier had given Eske a wig, both Bahn and I were looking particularly short-haired. I supposed I would get used to it eventually, but by then, it would probably be long enough to put right back into a ponytail.

“You needed me?”

She nodded and headed toward the door. “Walk with me, I wanna have a talk.”

I couldn’t imagine what she could possibly need to speak with me for, but I complied anyway.

We walked in silence for a while, heading to a lower level of the ship that was hardly used. It was mostly supposed to be storage for a year’s worth of supplies for an entire crew, but considering we had less than fifty people and no way to gather said supplies, the space was mostly empty.

“So, tell me about all these folks here who are hustling around like they’ve got a fire under their behinds.”

“I don’t know most of their names, actually, but Gonzales you’ve met—”

She shook her head, cutting me off. “That’s not what I mean. Every person out there isn’t like you or me, with maybe the exception of that tall black woman who looks like she might be secret nobility, an ancient warrior or both.

“Their genetics were all fiddle-faddled with to fit into a society that looks at us like we’re something to be cured. People like that tend to treat people like us different, so I’m asking, what kind of people are they?”

“Well, Gonzales, Bahn, and Ciangi have always been kind. Even before we all got wrapped up with Mimi. They were the few people on the ship who bothered to learn my name, and they never treated me differently or looked down on me for working maintenance.”

“Uh-huh, who else?”

“Well, Babel and Lim seem alright, but I have to admit to you, I’ve only known most of these people a week longer than you have. And, um, I’m not always the best judge of character.”

“Nonsense! I don’t believe that for a second.” She reached up to sling her arm around my shoulders, which effectively made me nearly double over to meet her gaze. “In order for you to have survived this long, you’ve gotta have a certain ability to read people. Sure, maybe a folk or two slipped through your radar, but I bet in general, if you’re real uncomfy with someone, you’ve got a reason why.”

She nodded and let me go. “Like I can tell you’re a good kid. I almost feel bad about stabbing you.”

“Only almost?”

She winked at me, and I cracked a smile. “Well, it wasn’t my fault you jumped out of the sky and startled me half to death. Honestly, what did you expect at that point?”

“You’re right. Next time I’m chasing after a fugitive, I’ll make sure to announce myself first.”

“There ya are! Now, that we’ve had our little convo outside of where all those prying ears like to overhear, how about we go do another test run?”

“Really? We fixed the bugs of the last one?”

She nodded, her eyes twinkling. “Aye, and I really think this is gonna be it. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Didn’t really want to start a war with a group of villains and all.”

“That’s fair,” I said, my lips curling. I really did like this Aja. I hoped she stuck around after all of this was said and done. “Except we’re not starting a war. We’re finishing it.”

“Set energy influx to forty percent,” Aja ordered, standing atop the catwalk that looked down on the field generator we had all built together.

“Setting energy influx to forty percent.”

“Reverse the ion field by twenty percent!”

“Reversing the ion field by twenty percent.”

Everyone had gathered to see if this really was the moment we would be successful. I could feel the tension in the air, and even Mimi leaned over the rail beside me, curiously taking it all in.

She had been…different, lately. At first, I thought that maybe it was just her time in the tank that was causing such a stark difference, but I was beginning to understand that wasn’t it at all. Every night, she held onto me, as if afraid I would disappear, and often I found her roaming the halls in her original form, apparently needing a break from her human one.

It was clear that all the war, all the constant fighting, was weighing heavily on her. Exhaustion was definitely settling in, and she needed to have peace soon.

If this all worked out, hopefully, she would have it soon. It all depended on how this test run went…

“Alright, take down the last of the firewalls to integrate it into the systems.”

“Are you sure?” Ciangi called up from where she was working with the other engineers. “If it overloads, well, I don’t have to explain how that would be bad.”

“Oh, don’t worry your little curly head. I’m well aware of what that could do. Now drop the firewalls.”

They all flurried into action and suddenly, the chamber began to fill with a low hum. The little generator began to glow green, and all of our hair began to stand on end. Well, those of us that had hair.

The tension built in the air, and I could sense that most of us were holding our breath. Then, as suddenly as it had all started, the thing burst to life. The wave of energy washed over all of us, not quite knocking us backward, but definitely pressing along our bodies.

“It works!” Aja cried. “What d’ya know it works! Somebody run a scan before my heart explodes!”

“I’m on it,” Babel cried, already pulling up some sort of mechanism that I didn’t recognize.

“I’ll do it too,” Lim added. “You never can be too sure.”

“I will scan as well.” I was surprised to hear Bahn speak again. He had been fairly taciturn since his hair was stolen from him, and I didn’t blame him. “It would be good to know if the shielding would work against even unorthodox scanners.”

“You make that yourself?” another one of the engineers asked him.

“That I did. Seemingly a lifetime ago.”

The rest of us fell quiet as we waited for the trio to affirm whether we were successful or not.

It was Lim who spoke first. “I can’t believe it. I’m picking up serials from about a dozen different manufacturers, and none of them are on the red-list!”

Babel was close after her. “Same on mine. We’re clean.”

We all looked to Bahn, waiting for our final confirmation. He sure milked it, pressing several inputs on his datalog before nodding gravely. “I can confirm that as well. We are in the clear.”

A raucous cry sounded from all of us, and I hugged Mimi happily. We had done it! One more hurdle down.

“Well, you did it, old lady,” Gonzales said, clapping Aja on the back. “I hope everyone’s ready to go home and get some recruiting done. It’s time to kick this rebellion into gear.”

8

Duping the Bouncer

“Approaching the defense grid in T-minus five minutes.”

I sat in the very back of the bridge, watching out the front as our tiny blue planet came into view. This was it, the moment that we found out if Aja’s experimental invention would work against the real deal.

“Good. Make sure to have evasive maneuvers and a scrambling field ready in case this goes belly up,” Gonzales said. “If we get so much as a hint of something wrong, I want us pulling out fast enough to get whiplash, you got me?”

The pilots nodded. For the first time in our entire journey together, we actually had trained pilots flying a ship we were in. It was a strange change, but not entirely unwelcome.

We approached the Earth far too quickly, or at least that was what my heart told me, pitter-pattering away inside of my chest. But everyone else was acting like nothing was wrong, so I just focused on my breathing and made myself not panic.

“Boot up the generator.” Aja said, her voice crackling over the comm.

“Isn’t it a little soon for that?” the leader-man asked.

“We don’t want them reading a random surge of energy right before we approach the grid. Best to play it safe.”

“Pardon me if I’m wrong,” I heard Ciangi’s voice come over the line as well. “But didn’t you say that sustained use of the scramble-generator could possibly cause an overload in the electronic systems that would force a reboot of all of our…well, everything?”

“I might have mentioned that, yes.”

“Oh…well…I— Carry on then, I guess.”

“Thanks for your permission.”

“Hailing Earth now for permission to land,” Lim said from the navigation console. “The scan should start any moment now.”

I was probably making a habit of holding my breath way too often, but I wasn’t sure how else to keep myself as still and silent as I felt I needed to be. It certainly didn’t help that Mimi didn’t necessarily need to breathe next to me and would occasionally forget to do so during tense moments.

The minutes seemed to drag on, taking forever and ever until finally, a beep sounded from the console.

“Yes! We’ve done it! We have permission to enter orbit!”

“You heard the girl, punch it and get to the far side of the planet so we can drop our scrambler before everything melts down.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice.”

Abruptly, the ship picked up speed, and I felt my body press into the seat as the environmental supports tried to compensate for the sudden switch in inertia.

“Dropping the scrambler now,” Aja said. There was a slight pause, then the lights of the entire bridge flickered before shining more brightly than they had before.

“Um, that was a good thing, right?” Eske asked.

“I think so…” I murmured.

“Now,” Gonzales said, completely oblivious to our conversation. “Let’s hope they don’t track where we land. I worry that—with being on high alert and all—they might be individually investigating every single ship that docks, no matter where it does.”

“Oh, they won’t be able to do that,” Aja said, and I could hear her smile through the comms.

“Really? And why’s that?”

“Do you really think I put nearly a week into building a generator that was only for scrambling serials? Child, please.” She cackled, and I saw several people wince, but I liked the sound. “I made sure that we could land in peace.”

“Did…did you make a cloaking device, old woman?”

“You watch your tongue, you gun-happy ball of vinegar,” Aja shot back. “And I guess you could say that. If a cloaking device can shield you from their readings while installing a virus into their system that inputs the same readings as the last commercial flight that went through its logs.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Hardly. I wouldn’t trust any of you young ones to know good humor if it bit you.”

“My goodness, if you were up here, I could kiss you!”

“Take me to dinner first. Now finish out your landing. When we hit ground, there’s some things I need to take care of.”

The comm clicked off, and the feeling on the bridge totally changed. Before it had been hopeful, but quite tense. Now, it was like a weight had been pulled from us, and we were now streaking through the atmosphere unfettered. For better or for worse, we were back on Earth.

Hopefully this time, I’d manage to stay out from behind prison bars.

“We’ve reached the coordinates you wanted,” one of the pilots said. “Initiating landing sequence now.”

“It is night, just like we were hoping,” Lim said.

“We weren’t hoping,” I heard Ciangi say over the comms. “We very carefully calculated it, thank you very much.”

“Easy there, blondie,” Gonzales said with a chuckle. “Don’t get your engineering britches into a twist.”

“Yeah, I think you’re trying to do this cool, rebellious sort of humor thing, but I’m not a super fan of it.”

“And landing sequence has been completed. Welcome back home.”

“This was never my home,” I said, unbuckling. “But let’s save it anyway.”

En masse, we headed toward the door. The engineers from below, Aja, all of us on the bridge, everyone. We stood in front of the exit, waiting for the ramp to lower, wondering if we were fools to think that we could get away.

I wasn’t quite sure where we were, but I was aware it was at a landing area used only by those on the wrong side of the law. Nothing could quite prepare me for what I saw when the ramp did finally lower.

It was a city, a huge, complex city, rising high above us in peaks of chrome and neon. It just dripped with seediness, with tattered flags and banners hanging every dozen or so feet. The whole city felt like it was crawling with activity that shouldn’t be mentioned in polite company, and I was almost surprised when my boots didn’t stick to the ground as I took my first steps onto it.

“What is this place?” I asked breathlessly. In all my life, I’d never heard of a spot on Earth looking so decrepit, ramshackle and obviously ne’er-do-well.

“Every city needs a bad part of town,” the demolition man said, stepping forward and taking a deep breath of the foggy, sludgy air. “And since the whole world’s pretty much connected nowadays, consider this the bad part of the planet.”

“You humans are dramatic, aren’t you?” Mimi said, looking out at the expanse.

“Girl, you’ve been living with them for two years and you didn’t know that already?” Aja said, coming up from behind us.

“I had my suspicions, but I thought perhaps I just happened to make contact with a few particularly…flamboyant characters.”

“Did you just call me flamboyant?” Gonzales shot back. “I prefer to think of myself as charmingly over-the-top.”

Aja laughed. “Use whatever words you want, I’m not the one who has her bionic eye set to glow when I am absolutely sure I put a biological mask over it so you couldn’t tell anything was amiss.”

“I, uh… Well, that’s—”

“Come on, everyone,” Aja interrupted. “I’m sure you’ve got a long list of people you’ve gotta find, and I betcha that I’m not the only one you’re gonna have to save from a sticky wicket.”

“What the heck is a sticky wicket?”

“I guess you’ll find out when we get going, won’t you?”

“Ugh, is this how you guys feel when talking to me?” Gonzales asked the other rebels.

“Yeah, pretty much,” the leader-man answered before following after our scammer. We went too, and I felt my nerves building right back up again. I just hoped that this didn’t end up as an out of the frying pan into the fire sort of thing.

9

Party Invitations

“So where are we even going?” Eske asked as we moved along.

“We’re getting to the main road, where we’ll then split up and go find the people we’re gonna find,” Gonzales replied.

“And are we equipped for that?” I asked. “I don’t even know who we’re looking for, let alone how to get them to come with us.”

“Oh, no, no, no. You guys misunderstand. Everyone else is going to go do some serious recruiting. All of you will be coming with me to pick up some supplies then march right back to the ship.”

“Wait, what?” Ciangi protested. “We’re getting sidelined?”

Gonzales raised her eyebrow. “Since when were you Miss Action Hero? I would have thought you’d be happy to be able to sit out of trouble for once.”

“You got me wrong. I like being out of trouble when there’s no trouble to be had. What I don’t like is being out of trouble when trouble is clearly happening all around me and I’m just considered too useless to do anything about it.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Just walk those insecurities back a minute there. We’re on the sideline because, whether you like it or not, we’ve kinda become the figureheads of this whole mini-movement. We’ve gotta stay alive as best we can, and we can’t risk our lives needlessly. It may seem unfair, but the rest of them? They’re expendable. Us? We have to sit nice and tidy until it’s time to take this fight to the bigwigs.”

“Wait, what?” I asked, surprised by that line of thought. I had figured I would just be in the way and stick out as way too much of a goody-goody, but apparently, there was more to it than that. “I don’t think anyone’s expendable.”

“Aw, that’s a cute way to think, but let’s face it, we’ve been incredibly lucky that we’ve never lost a person, just various limbs and appendages. That might change soon, and we have to take inventory of whose death would hurt us the most. So, for now, all of us sit out.”

“I, for one, agree with her,” Mimi said quietly. “And although we may have started this fight, it’s clear it’s gone beyond all of us. So, if Gonzales thinks that’s the best, I’m inclined to believe her. We’ve done some amazing, incredible things, but those were on our own playing fields where we were making up all of the rules. Now, we’re in their game, and they know the rules much better than us.”

“Wow, uh, thanks, Mimi. That was surprisingly eloquent.”

Mimi tilted her head slightly. “Oh, really? Why is that surprising?”

“I, uh—”

“Looks like we’re here,” Aja said, interrupting whatever Gonzales had been about to say. “I assume all of y’all have your orders, so I’ll be seeing you tomorrow. Laters!”

Before I could so much as manage a good-bye, she was hurrying off and slipping down a back alley. With various nods and short grunts, everyone broke off into different groups until only the core of us were left.

“Just like old times, right?” I asked.

“Just like old times,” Gonzales answered. “This way. We’re going to the market.”

“I thought this whole city was the black market.”

“In a metaphorical sense, not a literal one. If we want to actually buy something along the lines of what we need, there are actual markets to go to.”

“And what exactly is it that we need?”

“Well, I guess you’ll have to wait and find out, won’t you?”

“Yeah, you know how you were just complaining about Aja? You’re doing the exact same thing,” Bahn said, rubbing the stubble on his head. It seemed his hair didn’t grow very quickly at all, especially considering that I already had at least a knuckle’s worth of growth in the few weeks since we’d been ‘processed.’

“Well yeah, but like, with style.”

“If you say so,” Ciangi murmured. “But why don’t we get to actually going?”

Gonzales shrugged and started walking, leading us down a side street that was even less lit than the rest of the pathways.

It was an interesting sort of setup. Some of the streets were so narrow that two of us couldn’t stand shoulder to shoulder, and some of them were wide enough for hover-trucks and the like to move by without scraping their sides. Sometimes, the buildings were towering above us, looming like dark clouds, and sometimes they were hodge-podge shacks that looked like they were cobbled together with twine and debris from junked vessels.

We strolled along, Gonzales recalling the first time she had ever visited the place after a dare in college, but I got the feeling that none of us were really listening, choosing instead to take in all the sights, sounds, and perhaps more pervasive, the smells.

We cut through the city in winding, meandering paths, and only after fifteen minutes did I realize just how far we had been walking. I opened my mouth to ask Gonzales where the heck this literal market was within the metaphorical market, but before I could, Mimi stopped short.

“There is a large group approaching us very directly.”

Gonzales groaned. “Aw, are you serious?”

“I do not think that this is something I would joke about, and if I did, I believe it would be in poor taste.”

“Yeah, yeah. Get close, everyone. Normally, people just leave each other alone down here, but we might be getting a welcome committee.”

“I am confused. Normally welcome committees are good things, yes?”

Gonzales didn’t respond. Instead, she turned in the direction that Mimi had originally pointed on let her hand rest over the gun strapped to her hip.

It was strange to see her standing so casually when I could see all the muscles in her back tensing, but I tried to take a nonchalant stance too.

…I didn’t think I was very good at it.

It didn’t take long for faces to emerge from the dark shadows of the alley, and they looked just as gaunt and dirty as one might expect. A man stepped forward from the center of the little group as it spread out to block the rest of the way, twirling what looked like a thermal knife in his hands.

“Why, hello there, friends,” he said, smiling wolfishly. I couldn’t help but feel like we had just walked into one of a dozen or so novels that I had read when I was younger where nefarious persons beset the heroes who wandered onto the wrong side of town. “What brings you here?”

“Oh, you know, the usual, looking to get supplies without having to worry about dodging cops, scanners, or feds.”

“Really? You don’t look like the type to have a ‘usual’ in this kind of place.”

“Haven’t you ever heard that looks can be deceiving?” Ciangi bit, clearly sounding irritated.

“That’s a good point. In that case, let’s skip the theatrics. One of my girls picked up some strange readings on one of our loot scanners. Some sort of space material, and as we all know, that’s quite valuable. So just hand it over and we’ll be on our way, and you can get to your little shopping trip.”

“Space material?” Gonzales echoed dubiously. “What are you even on a—”

“Me,” Mimi cut in, almost sounding amused. “Their scanners must have picked up on me.”

There was a quick moment of confusion as our unexpected new friends exchanged glances, and Bahn snickered. “What kind of ramshackle technology are you using where she came up as a small bit of space material?”

“Look,” the knife guy said. “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, but I’m extending this politeness as a courtesy.”

Gonzales snorted. “What, you’re saying you don’t believe us fine, upstanding gentlepeople?”

“I gotta admit, no, not par—”

“We do not have time for this!” Mimi snapped, reaching forward.

Except her arm very quickly became not so much an arm, shooting toward the man while expanding in width. By the time it reached him a second later, it was nearly as thick as him and a deep, oily green.

It was hard to comprehend everything that happened, but one moment, it was just a sort of long, grubby and gross limb, while the next, the end split right down the center, massive teeth erupting as it formed a dripping maw. One of the would-be thugs let out a yelp, but that was the only sound that escaped before Mimi’s new armthing bit down on knife-guy’s leg.

“Ah! What the hell! Get it off! Get it off!”

But Mimi didn’t let him go so easily. Instead, she jerked him upwards, where I heard a loud pop amidst the screams of his crew, then slam him back down to the ground.

Just when the scene was becoming a real madhouse, Mimi let him go. He let out a borderline amusing sort of cry, but she just stalked over to him. “Listen here, friend, I am very busy and I would like to get back to my family. You are delaying us. Go and seek medical help, and I will forget your name for the rest of time.

“But if anyone comes after us I will assume that you or your associates were a part of it, and I will have all the little aliens like me come and visit everyone you’ve ever known and loved. Understood?”

“Y-yes!”

“Good. Now go, before I decide to take two years’ worth of transgressions against me out on your fleshy, breakable body.”

They scrambled off, a couple of them coming to help their leader hobble away, and we waited until they were completely out of our sight before continuing.

“Huh, if I didn’t know you better, Mimi, I would have thought you were serious,” Gonzales joked.

“I was.” We paused for a minute, her answer surprising even me. She noticed that we stopped and looked over her shoulder at us. “I believe I am at the end of my patience, and I would very much like to go home. So, let’s hurry this up, yes?”

Gonzales flashed me a look of surprise. “Uh, sure. Whatever you say.”

We started walking again, this time much more quietly as we went along.

It took just as long to go the rest of the way to the market, and when we finally reached it, I was surprised to see that it looked exactly like what one might imagine if one was thinking about an open-air bazaar. There were stalls lining what looked like a couple blocks, with the occasional shack to break them up. I saw all sorts of wares hanging up, from food to cloth to tech, and to be honest, it was a bit overwhelming.

“At last!” Gonzales said, clapping her hands. “I want you guys to find everything you might need to make a sort of gallant last meal. Me, I’m gonna go see what kind of batteries and dischargers they have here.”

“Wait, you want us to split up?”

I agreed with Eske’s dubious tone. Good things hadn’t exactly happened the last time we were all apart.

But Gonzales just waved us off. “Don’t worry, it’s safe here. Anybody who would want to start anything would have to deal with a whole bunch of pissed-off sellers for making them lose out on sales.”

I wanted to go after her, to insist that we all stay together and do whatever it was we needed to do, but she had already disappeared in the crowd. Giving the others a look, I shrugged, and we all headed toward whichever stall smelled best.

Last meal, huh? I hoped it was more of a last supper before the new age, and less like warriors having a feast before battle because they knew they wouldn’t make it till the morning.

But why did I have a feeling that it was more the latter?

“So, what’d ya’ll get?” Gonzales asked as we got onto the ship, each of us laden with our own packs. Curious that she hadn’t asked us back when she had paid for all of it with credits from an account that I had no idea how she got access to, but I guess she just trusted us that much.

Either that or she was in a rush. I wasn’t really sure which, actually.

“Food,” Ciangi answered bluntly. She still was very obviously perturbed about Gonzales ditching us, but the weapons engineer just glossed right over it, not even breaking stride as she headed toward the cafeteria.

“Oh, great. That will go over well. Everyone loves food.”

We followed her and I decided to be the one to extend the olive branch. “I got some mulberries for a cobbler, and then some steaks that were apparently really good cuts.”

“I can’t believe that these are actual ingredients from Earth, and not created through a food synthesizer.”

“Yeah, you can get all sorts of things from the black market that just aren’t done anywhere else.”

“Remind me again why this stuff is illegal?” Eske asked, biting into an apple and making happy sounds.

“It’s not approved by the Universal Health Commission. Non-synthesized food just has too much of a risk of parasites or other food-borne illnesses.”

“And by that, you mean less than a one percent chance?”

“About,” Gonzales answered. “Agriculture came a long way from the stone age, but then we exhausted most of the Earth’s resources and had to turn to combining certain elements and nutrients into sustenance.”

We reached the cafeteria and she led us to the back, where I saw what looked like the most bare-bones and yet high-tech kitchen I had ever seen.

“Which is why we’re gonna hand cook this meal together for everyone. It’ll be a real party, ya know?”

“Whoa,” I murmured, taking it all in. “Why is this even on this ship?”

“In case the synthesizer goes out,” Eske answered, pushing her goggles up out of habit. “They wanted to make sure that they’d be able to cook food from raw ingredients and not starve.”

“Huh, I guess they really did think of everything, didn’t they?” Ciangi grumbled, looking slightly less churlish.

“Yeah, except for a shapeshifting alien and her crew coming in and stealing their biggest warship away,” Eske said, her smirk evident in her tone. “Twice.”

“Yeah, after the first time, they really had no excuse not to see that coming.”

“There we are!” Gonzales cried, dumping out one of her bags on the table, causing food to tumble out. “Bantering just like old times. Come on, let’s get to cooking before our new guests arrive!”

We exchanged looks but went to work anyway. Mimi, for never having cooked in her life on account of the whole not eating the same food we did, was actually pretty helpful. She listened to all of us as we asked for various things to make our random assortment of dishes and was the only one who could reach into the ovens without being burned. Apparently, despite all their oversight, the government had forgotten to include any sort of heat-retardant tool to grab anything hotter than room temperature.

I was working very studiously on my pie. I hadn’t cooked it since I was a kid, when the synthesizers had gone out at the colony, but I remembered my parents being surprised and liking it. They had taken it around to all our immediate neighbors, telling how their son made food out of raw ingredients from the storeroom. It had been then that I thought I’d seen a brief flicker of pride in their eyes that I would turn out to be useful after all, but then the synthesizer was fixed three days later and after long enough, no one remembered my food anymore.

I was just rolling out the top crust using Mimi’s shifted arm as a rolling pin, when I heard some familiar voices and some unfamiliar ones calling out from the other side of the wall.

“Hulloooo! We have a mission success here and I believe our orders were to return here upon completion.” I was pretty sure that was Babel’s automated voice, pumped higher in volume and with a slightly sassier tone than usual.

I peeked out of the kitchen door as Gonzales rushed to the entrance, face flushed with excitement. “Hey! Glad you could join us! Uh, we’re not quite ready yet. You got everyone on your list?”

“Of course we did,” the demolition man interrupted. “If we hadn’t, we would not be here.”

Babel held up a finger however, as if interrupting. “I should add that we got everyone on our list who is currently alive and planet-side. Gonzales, meet Avery, James, and Min-ho.”

The three people standing behind the folks I knew stepped forward, and they couldn’t be more different. One was a tall, slender man with piercing eyes, one was the tallest and most muscular woman I had ever seen, with long, flaxen hair past her backside, complicated braids hidden within the copper-brown waves, and the third looked like an everyday middle-aged woman, complete with scuffed shoes and black hair in a bun.

“Oh, fantastic to meet you,” Gonzales said, offering her hand. “I’ve heard so much of all of your work.”

It was the muscle-bound woman who stepped forward first, her large hand dwarfing Gonzales’s as she bent over so they were almost face to face. “And I think it’s a shame that I ‘ave not ‘eard of yours, ma chere.”

The woman who I was guessing was Min-ho giggled, but Gonzales just smirked with her usual charm. “Don’t worry. During dinner, I’m sure everyone will be glad to tell you exactly what they think of me.”

She laughed, a surprisingly loud bellow, and stepped back. There was a bit more conversation, but I needed to finish my pie.

As I worked and finally put the last of the food in the oven, more and more people came in. By the time half of our number had returned, I figured our crew had about doubled in size. I didn’t think that I had been around this many humans since I was on the space station where I had received my certification. It was loud, very loud, and there was a type of energy that grated on my nerves, but it was also…nice.

None of us were alone anymore. It wasn’t us against everything. We had allies, experts, people who didn’t have to fly by the seat of their pants while hoping they didn’t do something that ended up killing all of their friends. It was an adjustment, but a welcome one.

Although I would still be very happy when we returned home.

Another group came in, much less boisterously than the first couple, and I quickly realized that what we had was not enough. Maybe if Gonzales had told us a bit more about what we were expecting, we could have prepared properly. I felt my anxiety build at the thought but a quick look out the door revealed Ciangi, Bahn, and Eske programming various thing into the processors.

Ah. I should have known. Sure, maybe we didn’t always plan the best, but we were pretty good at compensating when we could.

My pie had about twenty minutes left—I was always terrible at judging cooking times—as we began to haul food out to the masses. I saw what had to be ex-soldiers, obvious criminal types, young teenagers, and even old men and women. For being anywhere from fifty to seventy of us, there certainly was a wide variety.

I supposed that was what we needed—demolitions experts, thieves, strategists, hackers, and the like. We would be bringing a force that no one ever had before, and the coup was going to have one heck of a time dealing with it.

We managed to get all the food out onto two big tables for everyone to come peruse as they wanted. I could see the hungry look across many of their faces, and I wondered how many of these people the coup or the government had done so dirty. Unlike me, they didn’t have a shapeshifting alien friend and another world to run off to. All they had was what they could take with their two hands on this planet.

That wasn’t exactly fair, and that bothered me.

They started to line up, but as they did, Gonzales grabbed a chair then stood on it, her hands raised as she tried to catch their attention.

“Hey, guys! Hey now, y’all!” It took several seconds for them to realize that she was there and quiet down, but she waited until all eyes were on her. “I know the folks who brought you here told you that the stakes were high. That we’re going up against a corrupt movement within our own government and cutting off the snake’s head.

“Some of you are familiar with this coup, as we call it. Some of you have lost everything—your homes, your families, your reputations, and some of you have only heard of it in whispers. But let me tell you that what they will do if they seize full control of the Earth Gov will be so much worse.

“This last meal is a thank you, and an offering. We all know that it’s impossible for everyone to make it through this next fight, and if you’re not ready to make that sacrifice, then eat and show yourselves to the door. We will not keep you here. We will not judge you, but if you choose to fill your plate and stay, then in a day’s time, we will be marching down the door of the biggest base they have and making them pay for all the lies they have told. All the blood they have spilled.

“Tomorrow, we cut their puppet strings and return our world to the true federation it once was!”

Her speech was certainly thrilling, and she threw her fist into the air at the end. The men and women before her all cheered, and pride began to swell in my chest.

“I think Gonzales just might have outgrown our little clan of misfits,” Ciangi murmured, admiration in her tone but tears pricking at the corner of her eyes.

I knew what she meant, and I threw an arm around her shoulder. “She may have a bigger part to play in Earth’s future than we do, but we’re always going to be her family.”

Ciangi smiled at me gratefully, then Bahn slid his hand into hers. Eske soon joined us, and then Mimi, until our little cluster was standing in a semi-circle, looking up at our weapons engineer turned rebellion leader.

It was a good moment, even if it was tinged by a little bit of melancholy. But the mood quickly broke when a panicked realization washed over me.

“My pie!”

10

Promises, Promises

I laid on my back, completely full of the feast and feeling contented. I’d gotten my pie out of the oven in time and it had been a hit among the new recruits. After plenty of introductions that I was sure I would forget the next day, I was feeling weary and ready for a rest.

Even with the ship fuller than ever, no one tried to join us in the incredibly spacious officer’s suite we had. I guessed that even though Mimi was a big part of the rebellion we were throwing together, plenty of people were still uncomfortable being around her.

She laid in bed beside me, having enjoyed much of the food but not eating nearly as much as I did since she didn’t actually get nourishment from it, but she was uncharacteristically antsy.

“You alright?” I asked, rolling on my side and looking at her.

I knew this form was just one she put on for interacting with me, but she just looked so beautiful with the dimmed light of the suite splaying across her features. She had taken to wearing a small smattering of freckles across her nose, and I loved each and every one of them.

“Yeah,” she answered quietly. “Do you still have your datalog?”

“Yeah, I do. Why?”

“Can we watch one of your sims? A happy one?”

“Yeah, of course. Whatever you want. Let me look at what I have.” I grabbed my datalog from the nightstand and perused my collection. She wanted happy, did she? I could do that.

I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled, before settling on a love story that was supposed to be set a century ago, when we were just getting seriously into space travel. It was a great story about an awkward scientist and a charismatic astronaut. I hoped that she liked it.

I quickly put it on and we cuddled together as it got started. It took me several moments for me to get comfortable, arranging pillows and the like behind me. But I did manage to settle in, and soon the sim was washing over both of us.

It was just as funny as I remembered, and both of us chuckled several times during its run. When it finally finished, I really wasn’t in the mood for it to be over.

“Want to watch another one?” I asked Mimi, giving her a gentle squeeze.

But she didn’t answer right away, instead staring dubiously at my holopad.

“What was that ceremony at the end? Where she was wearing all white, and people were throwing flowers?”

“That was a wedding. Certainly, you read about those back when you were discovering everything about my people.”

“I…I guess I may have, but I do not remember. The wedding is a ceremony that has to do with them being in love, but I do not think I understand.”

Huh, I guess it made sense that she wouldn’t know about it, but it seemed a bit uncanny to be explaining something so simple to her after all our time being together. Nevertheless, I did.

“Well, when two people love each other, they decide to make a declaration of that in front of all of their friends, family, and the government they are under. That’s called marriage, and it’s supposed to link them together forever.”

“That…that sounds nice.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” I remembered daydreaming when I was younger of finding some sort of perfect partner, one that was rich and smart and would whisk me away from my colony life. Those thoughts had long since faded, but I could still remember them at the edge of my subconscious.

“Higgens?”

“Yes, Mimi?”

“Let’s get married.”

If there was anything that could make me sit bolt upright, it was that. “Wait, you want to get what now?”

She turned to me, utter seriousness across her face. “I love you. I know that you may have been the first human I ever met, and some might argue that my love is clouded by that, but I know you are the most spectacular person I have ever met.

“Right now, we both know that I will live well beyond you, and that idea haunts me every day. So, if I’m going to have to live with the fact that I will lose you far too soon, then I want to cherish you as much as I can in the time we’ve been given.

“If this is how your people show commitment and love to each other, then I want to do it. So please, Higgens, will you marry me?”

I stared at her, my mind reeling. We had been so busy with, well, everything, that I had forgotten that was even an option. Was this what I wanted? I knew without a doubt that I loved Mimi like I could love no one else, and that I would never feel about anyone else the way I did about her. I knew that I was happy in the morning knowing she was by my side, and the weeks we had been separated by the coup had been pure torture.

“Yes! Yes, of course!” I slid off the bed and knelt before her.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s tradition. Remember the sim?”

“Oh! Proceed.”

“Thanks.” I took her hand in mine, and although I didn’t have a ring, I gripped the bottom of my worn tunic and pulled off a piece of fabric. Tying it around her finger, I held it to me. “Mimi, will you do me the honor of marrying me?”

“But I was the one who asked you fir—”

“Mimi, just trust me.”

“Ah, sorry. Yes, Hjarta Higgens, I will marry you.”

I surged forward, and we embraced, lips pressing upon each other as my whole body welled with happiness. Somehow, despite all the lies, the strife, and the war, we had found each other. Out of the entire universe, it had chosen me to meet the stunning woman in front of me.

And I was never going to let go.

I would love her, protect her, listen to her, encourage her, support her, anything she needed, for the rest of my time with her. And although we knew she would go on to have centuries without me, I could take contentment in making sure the time we had together was the best that it could possibly be.

Because goodness knows, she deserved it. Since she had been reborn, life had been throwing her spiky, poisonous curveballs every step of the way, and she never grew sour. She never turned on me, even though I was a large part of the reason that she was in this mess.

“I love you,” I whispered against her lips, holding her as tightly as I could, as if that would somehow punctuate my feelings.

“And I love you.”

She kissed me again, and we fell to the bed where we continued to hold each other and would continue to do so until the day I drew my last breath.

11

The First Wave

Unsurprisingly, Mimi, Eske, and I were not included in most of the planning. Ciangi and Bahn were a bit more involved considering they were helping build one of the cargo-crafts we were going to use to help infiltrate the base.

How we knew about the base, I had no idea, and also why we were never imprisoned there was beyond me. I figured they would want to keep us in the place with the highest security and biggest facility, but apparently, there were secrets and supplies even more important than us.

By the time we were ready to go, I felt like I was going into battle with one eye covered. Maybe I should have attended more briefings or planning sessions, but Gonzales and her friends made it quite clear that they wanted only those necessary to attend.

How the shapeshifting alien who could literally survive missiles to the face was somehow unnecessary, I didn’t know, but I wasn’t a military strategist or genius like some of the people in our number. Actually, now that we had at least seven engineers by my last count, I was pretty useless overall.

I was fine with that. I didn’t need to be the center of the action anymore. I didn’t feel the need to prove myself. I had the love of my life, and we had accomplished quite a lot together. I didn’t mind being an assistant in this play instead of the main event.

So, when our first wave went into action, and I was standing on the bridge with Gonzales, the leader-man, and a few others, I felt interested rather than inadequate.

It had been about eight hours since our first wave went out. There were three spies who, in our day and a half of preparation, had managed to steal the identities of several workers so they could slip into the base. What had happened to the actual workers, I wasn’t sure, but Gonzales promised to me that they wouldn’t be killed or maimed unless absolutely necessary.

I believed her, but so many things could go wrong. I’d hate to think of someone innocent paying the price for the evils of the coup, but that was exactly what could happen.

Then there were our handful of hackers—Babel, Lim, Min-ho, and a few others. They apparently were setting up their own mini-site, closer to the base and separate from us. There were super scientific and hacker-specific reasons for that, but I didn’t really understand, so I just trusted them when they said it would give us a leg up.

“Third Splinter, confirming identity grab and approaching the base.”

The tension in the air ramped up as our comms buzzed to life for the first time since everyone had left.

“Good job. Remember, secrecy is of the utmost importance. If we blow our cover now, it will make everything else nearly impossible. So, if you think you’re being made, beat a hasty retreat.”

“Got ya. Over and out.”

Gonzales looked to the people beside her, and they all exchanged a look I didn’t quite understand. I guessed it was some sort of solidarity, or maybe a confirmation that they all realized the plan was truly kicking into gear.

A few minutes later, the comms came alive again.

“First Splinter, checking in. Identity has been successfully assumed and I am heading into the security check now.”

“Thank you, First Splinter.” Gonzales repeated the same warning she had told the other, minus a couple of words or so, then silence again.

“Come on, Second Splinter,” the leader-man mumbled. “Where are you?”

It was an hour before we heard anything again, and then it was the hackers checking in.

“Hey there.” I recognized Babel’s tone through the comms. “Sorry that took a bit. We had a bit of trouble with the encryption and scrambler that Aja made.”

“Ay, don’t be blaming my work!” Aja’s voice cracked through right after him. “It just seems that our old coup buddies have gotten a new decryption system and some better scanners. I had to make some adjustments on the fly, and that took some time. Good grief, you young ones want everything so instantaneously.”

“What, are you a thousand or something?”

“Just maybe!”

“Guys! Focus! Are you into their system?”

“Almost. We’re injecting into their networks now, but we have to do less than a thousand at a time, otherwise we could get locked out.”

“Um, yeah, whatever, just tell me when you’re in. We have two operatives who are attempting to infiltrate right now.”

“Well, isn’t that exciting,” Aja said tersely before cutting off the comm.

Gonzales didn’t seem to mind, however, and instead paced. I guessed that she was anxious for the second splinter that had yet to check in, but there wasn’t much she could do about it.

“First Splinter, checking in. I’ve made it inside and am assuming my post. Ceasing all communication until the engagement of the plan. Beginning the checklist now.”

“Roger, roger, over and out.” Naturally, that was not Gonzales who spoke. The day she used such official language was the day that she straightened her hair and wore her old uniform.

No, the weapons engineer seemed pretty preoccupied.

“Come on, Second Splinter. Come on.”

But nothing. Just silence. I knew that there was a kind of risk of our entire operation being blown before it even got started and we would have to go with our back up plan—which in my understanding, involved a whole lot more explosives and chances of casualties.

“Alright! We’re into the cameras! We’re trying to get into their security logs now. Radio silence until update.”

The hackers clicked off and it was silent again. The tension ramped up with every passing second, and I was beginning to worry that Gonzales was going to have a stroke.

“Second Splinter here, had a rough go, but I’ve assumed the identity of my target and I’m moving to enter the base now.”

A huge sigh of relief rushed through the room, and Gonzales visibly relaxed. “Thank God, you had me worried there.”

The person on the other end laughed lightly. “Don’t have to worry about me. Great thing about modern weapons is that they cauterize instantly.”

“Wait, you’ve been shot? Is your ability compromised? Do you need to abort?”

“Whoa, relax. I’m fine. Assuming radio silence until I’m in position.”

The comms went dead again, and Gonzales held up her hand for a high-five. Naturally, leader-man didn’t return it, but Eske snuck her long arm over and slapped the woman’s hand instead.

“Thanks. Anyway, now that that’s taken care of, let’s all suit up for the second wave.”

Suddenly, the bridge bustled into motion, everyone going this way or that with purpose, but I could only raise my hand and wait for Gonzales to notice me.

“What’s up, Higgens?”

“Um, what’s wave number two?”

Apparently, wave two consisted of us barreling down the door and getting the fight started.

Why that was wave number two in our four-wave plan was beyond me, but I was beginning to understand that I knew even less than I thought I had when it came to our big, crushing blow to the coup and corrupt part of the government.

I sat next to Mimi and Eske in our little hovercraft, twenty of us crammed in a vehicle that was meant for twelve. We were all armed to the teeth and equipped with guns I would rather not use.

“Splinter team, cue on whether the presents have been delivered,” Gonzales said into her comm.

“Splinter Three, delivering the last present now.”

“Splinter Two, I have two left.”

“Splinter One, I’m struggling a little here. I’ve got one present delivered, but I’ve gotten roped into a QA meeting.”

“How are you talking to us now then?”

“Excused myself to the bathroom, but I don’t have a lot of time before they get suspicious.”

“Do the best you can then, but we need your load in position.”

“What’s your ETA?”

“About five minutes.”

“Roger. I’ll do what I can.”

The comms went out again and Gonzales let out a breath before hailing our other hovercraft. “Did you get that?”

“I did.”

“What are we going to do if everything’s not in place?”

“What you and your friends always did before you met us.”

“And what might that be?”

“Improvise.”

Gonzales smirked at that, then switched over her comms to our second brain. “Aja, how sure are you that we’ll be able to stop them from detecting our approach?”

“Why did you rescue me from people who trusted my work if you were going to second-guess me every step of the way?” came the surly answer.

“Right. So, I take that as pretty confident?”

“Extremely confident, little missy. Now, if you excuse me, I’m working on disabling their auto-detection on their turrets.”

“Wait, there are turrets?” Ciangi asked in concern.

Gonzales just shrugged and gave her a cheeky grin. “Hey, you’re the one who was complaining about being sidelined.”

“I now see the error of my ways and recant.”

“Too late,” the weapons engineer shot back, perhaps a little too gleefully. “Be ready, everyone. The big breach is in less than three minutes now.”

I swallowed as we floated along in what essentially felt like a tin can. Well, if Mimi and I wanted to retire from this high-flying life, we were certainly going out with a bang.

12

The Second Wave

“ETA one minute. Walls are in sight.”

“Thanks, Wergo,” Gonzales said. “Can I get a visual sent to the holo back here?”

In the center of our cramped vehicle, a holo-map came to life. It took a second for the image to load then clarify, but then we were staring at the biggest base I had ever seen.

“This is what we’re storming?” I asked incredulously.

“Yeah. Why?” Gonzales asked, batting her eyelashes at me. “Are you intimidated?”

“Of course I am. Sure, we’ve managed to bust out of two of their places before, and bust back into one, but you could take all three of those and fit them inside of this place, then still have more wiggle room!”

Gonzales nodded, seemingly amused. “That’s how it goes in life, right? You take baby steps at first, and then bigger and bigger strides until you’re walking like an adult.”

“Yeah, but walking like an adult and sieging what might be the biggest military base I’ve ever seen are two very different things.”

“Fair enough. This one’s gonna be a whole lot more fun.”

“Has she always been like this?” Avery asked from across from us. None of the armor really fit her, so she had attached two upper leg deflectors to her biceps, then used binding tape to curl chest armor around her thick, skull-crushing thighs.

“Actually, I think it’s gotten worse,” Ciangi said, sticking out her tongue at her longtime friend.

“If by worse you mean better, then yeah.”

“Approaching the walls now!”

Suddenly all the banter cut off, and Gonzales was all business again.

“Splinters! Detonate your packages now!”

For a moment, nothing happened. There was no response, no crackling of the comms, but then a low rumble crept through the air, increasing until fire erupted from the wall in front of us.

A cheer sounded from everyone around me, and the wall suddenly exploded outward. The moment there was an opening, we surged forward so fast, the back of my helmeted head smacked against the wall.

I could feel that the hovercraft was going faster than it was ever meant to, the engines whining behind us, but just as suddenly as it started, it stopped, and I nearly flew out of my seat.

“Go, go, go!”

The door slammed open, a wave of dust and ash shooting up, and then we were all running into the fray.

What had once been a massive wall crumbled behind us, and in front of us was the smoldering remains of what looked like it might have been a high-security entrance. I didn’t need Gonzales yelling in my ear to run that way, so I did, gun at the ready.

I wasn’t alone either. The other hovercraft was unloading at the same time, and the thirty of us stormed the place like we were professionals—which I guessed several of us were.

Everything was chaos all around us. Obviously, there were competent soldiers running to find cover or laying down fire to try to hold us off, but between the explosions and others running for cover, there was only so much they could do. It wouldn’t be so easy once we got down into the lower levels, where security was bound to be tighter, so I figured I might as well be grateful while it lasted.

Ahead of me, I saw a soldier crouching behind a pile of rubble, aiming for Gonzales as she sprinted forward. That wouldn’t do at all, so I rushed as fast as I could, vaulting over the rubble and landing right over his back.

I dropped my gun, choosing instead to get my arms around his neck in a chokehold. If I could just make him pass out instead of ending his life, I would be pretty happy with that. He reared back the moment he knew what was happening, kicking and writhing, but I held on until he stilled.

When I let him go, I checked his pulse. Yes, he was still alive. That was one thing to be grateful for.

“Higgens!”

I heard someone cry my name and whipped toward the sound only to see the barrel of an ion rifle aimed right at me in my peripheral vision. Instantly, I collapsed to the ground, pressing myself flat as a beam of energy shot across my chest, scoring the armor there.

I rolled onto my belly, trying to find an escape route and realizing that I had lost my gun in the process, only for Eske to dive-tackle the soldier about twenty feet from me.

I scrambled to my feet and rushed over to help her, but by the time I reached them, she had already slammed the butt of her own gun into his head and ended the scuffle quite quickly.

“Here,” she said, handing me his rifle. “Don’t lose this one, okay?”

“I’ll try not to,” I answered. It still felt uncomfortable in my grip. I much preferred when we were fighting aliens who didn’t look, sound, or smell like us.

“They’re trying to shut down the elevators!” I heard someone cry over the comms. Aja maybe? Or Lim. It was hard to tell over the maelstrom of noise around us.

“We need those up and running!” Leader-man yelled back.

“Oh, really? I thought it wasn’t important. That’s why I’d just casually announce it in the middle of a battle.”

“I don’t think this is the proper time for sarcasm,” Bahn said, crouching back to back in a doorway with Ciangi, shooting at something that I couldn’t see.

“Fine! They’ll be working when you get there.”

“They better.”

The voice on the other end let out a string of curses then cut off abruptly. We kept pressing forward, making our way to our destination.

There was so much heat and noise around us. I could hear screams and cries for medics. I didn’t like it, it ate at my nerves and made me nauseous, but I kept on running and firing.

Finally, after what seemed like an age, we reached the stairwells and lifts down to the lower levels. Gonzales and a couple of others were already there, loading things from their packs into the elevators.

They worked swiftly, their moves incredibly efficient, until all of their packs were empty, then they slammed the buttons to send them downward.

“The big presents are about to be delivered. Anyone who can hear me, stay away from the lifts. For everyone else, let’s race.”

She gave me a wink then dashed off to the staircase, barreling through the door and already firing her gun.

“Hey, I hope you’ve got our signatures scrambled, brains, otherwise this is going to be a very short descent.”

A voice came over the comms. “You should be good to go. I have most of your vitals coming from the elevators or gathering supplies over at the ruined entrance. It won’t fool them for long, and we’re screwed if they reboot, but it should do you for at least a couple floors.”

“That’s all we need.”

Some of us were already following Gonzales, while others had split to one of the three alternate cases in the same hall. I wasn’t sure which floor we were supposed to stop at, but I figured once Gonzales halted, then I would too.

We made it maybe a floor and a half before our comms came to life again.

“Get ready for a boom.”

I didn’t have time to figure out who was speaking before a clap of thunder sounded below me. It was so loud that it felt like my ears popped, and several of us lost our footing on the steps, toppling downwards.

“Whoa there,” Avery said, pulling me up with one arm. “You okay?”

I nodded, but that just made my ears ache more. I didn’t have much time to recover, however, as we were running down the stairs again.

“Second Wave Group B has reached our floor. Securing and distracting now.”

“Roger,” Gonzales said, panting as we continued to sprint.

“Second Wave Group C has reached our floor. There’s heavy resistance here. We’ll hold it as long as we can.”

“Heard. Group D?”

“Almost there. We’ve run into a group on one of the turns that’s holding their stairwell pretty dang well.”

“Lim, can you get them some sort of emergency hatch like the last place?”

“I’ll see what I can do.” There was a series of beeps and negative-sounding alarms before she let out a triumphant cry. “Got it! Sending the path to Group D’s leader now.”

“Received. We’ll be at our floor in less than three minutes.”

“Good, because we’re almost to the administrative floor,” Gonzales said. “Are you sure the targets are here?”

“Uh…about that…” Babel answered, sounding a bit sheepish.

“Even I know that tone isn’t good,” Mimi murmured, just loud enough for us to hear.

“What?” Gonzales hissed icily.

“One of the generals was apparently in the facility when our attack happened. She managed to get to the hangar bay and I don’t think we’ll be able to stop her in time, but everyone else is currently on lockdown within their oh-so-special bunker.”

“Good. Let’s keep it that way. And our path there is clear?”

“Not a single soldier in sight. Honestly, most are probably within the bunker. The turrets on the outside have been successfully hacked.”

“Good. Now we just need—”

“Second Wave Group D is securing our floor.”

“That’s our cue,” Gonzales said, turning toward us. Our group had certainly gotten smaller. We were now just us, plus Avery and someone else who I didn’t know at all. “Everyone ready for the fourth wave of our plan?”

“Fourth wave? What happened to the third wave?”

“The second and third took place simultaneously. All the stuff our hackers are doing to guide us now that we’re in, and them constantly injecting the network to stay in even when they reboot or run a systems cleanse is the third wave.”

I couldn’t help it, I let out a long sigh and gave her a serious look. “Is the first part of the fourth wave you telling us what it actually is before we go running in guns first?”

“Huh…” Gonzales rubbed her chin. “I probably should have had you around for more briefings.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Well, it’s not like it matters. We’ve always flown by the seat of our pants. But the fourth wave is where we blow our way into the generals’ bunker, take one or more prisoners so we can secure a confession, and then escape with our air support.”

“You know, that sounds more like a fifth wave,” Avery remarked casually.

“Who cares what number it is! Let’s just go end this thing, alright?”

I nodded—beyond ready myself—and with that, we charged out of the last door.

13

The Final Wave

We burst into the new room, and I was suddenly aware of several things at once.

One was that the layout of the floor we were on was very different from any other I had been in before. It was almost like a hangar bay, but only a dozen or so feet in front of us was a looming, metallic wall with no doors, windows, or other discernable openings.

Second was a line of maybe fifty or so soldiers, twenty-five of them kneeling in a line spanning the hall, and twenty standing behind them. All of them had guns ready and waiting.

“Oh, shi—”

I heard the first muzzle discharge, and I was sure it was the end. Some of us dove to the side, some fell to the ground, and some of us just stood there, knowing there was nothing that could be done to dodge an entire hallway worth of fire.

Then, just as suddenly as we were faced with our fate, the world winked out of existence and there was only black.

Was this…death?

It didn’t seem like it. I couldn’t see anything or hear anything beside the panicked breaths of my friends, but I could still feel, and inhale.

Surprisingly, it was Eske who spoke first. “Second Brain, can you tell me if you have control of the cameras down here?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Just send the feed to our leader’s datalog now.”

“Alright, give me ten seconds. What, are you having a hard time finding the bunker? It’s huge! You sh— Oh… That’s not supposed to be happening.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

A small section of the darkness illuminated as Gonzales pulled out the tech, and I got a glance of the utter darkness around us. Once the light hit the surface, I recognized the inky, oily textured blackness instantly.

“Mimi,” I gasped.

“Oh, it’s your girl Mimi alright,” Gonzales breathed. “And she’s doing something I didn’t even know was possible.”

I quickly crossed over to look at the datapad, my mouth dropping as I took in what was happening.

The back end of Mimi had shot out like a mirror to the chrome wall in front of us, forming a shield against us and the onslaught.

But the front end… That was something else entirely.

She had stretched herself out into what looked like two separate creatures joined at the base by a single thick, gyrating stump connected to the black wall protecting us. One half had a mouth as long as a hover vehicle, with several rows of serrated teeth and a long, black tongue, while the other was all long limbs ending in massive claws. While one was all greens and grays, which gave the impression of poison and other vile things, the other was brilliantly colored like some sort of bird of paradise. It was a cacophony to the eyes, and there was far too much to watch to keep track of it all.

The fifty soldiers didn’t have a chance, and neither did the wall behind it. She flung people left and right, maiming them, but as far as I could tell, trying not to kill. The wall, however, she was much less kind to, attacking with full force.

It was an artful display of violence, and I almost would have admired it if it wasn’t so nauseating. But she didn’t stop, and I could feel the anger pouring from her, until finally no one was left standing.

The wall in front of us slowly shrank, and the two separate bodies joined into one disgusting amalgamation of a creature before receding entirely. A minute or so later, we were all staring at a breathless Mimi.

I wanted to say something to her, but before my mind could even supply the words, she wobbled and started to fall. Of course, I was over to her side in an instant, catching her as we both sank to the ground.

“Hey, hey,” Gonzales said, rushing over. “Is she alright?!”

Eske and Ciangi joined us, with Bahn not far behind.

“What the hell did I just see?” Avery asked, staring in shock at the blood and groaning men all around us.

“I’m fine,” Mimi said. “I just need to breathe for a second.”

“Thank you,” I said, stroking her hair from her face. “You saved our lives.”

She grinned cheekily up at me and I swore I saw a flash of the old Mimi, the one before her betrayal by Mari. “At this point, isn’t it old hat by now?”

“I don’t think I could ever consider anything like that old hat.”

“I hate to interrupt this moment,” Lim buzzed over the comms. “But I’m getting a lot of readings flooding in from that floor all of a sudden, and all of them involve the generals making a break for it.”

“Crap!” Gonzales said, offering Mimi a hand. “We gotta go!”

She hauled the alien up to her feet and I swore that when they were both upright, they shared a look that I didn’t understand.

I didn’t ask, however, because then we were running again.

We lurched over the utterly destroyed wall and into what did indeed look exactly like a bunker. We could hear footsteps rushing off in the distance, and we quickly closed in on them.

“Uh…guys?”

“What is it, Lim? We’re a little busy.”

“Well, I just thought you might like to know that three life signs just suddenly winked out on my feed.”

“Our men?”

“No, I mean in the bunker with you. Something is killing the generals.”

“Wait, what?!”

“I don’t know what’s going on, but you better hurry.”

It didn’t seem possible, but we rushed forward even faster, kicking down doors that stood in our way rather than opening them. Well, Avery kicked them down. The rest of us made do with blasting them off their hinges.

After a minute or so, we reached a set of double-doors that looked like they were wired to high heaven.

“Um, Lim, I’m going to need some of that fancy hacking of yours.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Are you not seeing what I’m seeing?” Gonzales spat back.

“Oh, I’m seeing it, but I also have a lot of readings telling me about things you can’t see, and one of those things is that the door in front of you is unlocked.”

“Unlocked?”

Who was I to question Lim? She hadn’t led us wrong before, so I walked forward and pushed the door.

Sure enough, it swung open, revealing what looked like a command center, complete with a round table and plenty of holo-projectors displaying all the carnage we were laying out on the coup.

There were a dozen or so chairs around the table, and it looks like several of them had once held generals in the middle of a meal. But now there were only bodies, most of them with blaster-burns in the center of their heads.

“My God,” Ciangi gasped, her hand going to her mouth.

“No god would do this,” Eske murmured. “This was execution.”

“This was a surrender.”

All our heads snapped toward the voice, where I saw none other than the original general who had tormented us in prison. He was sitting calmly, his hands folded and his gun still smoking slightly.

“What have you done, man?” Gonzales asked, cautiously walking round and removing the gun from beside him. He made no move to take it, and instead continued to lock eyes with Mimi, hardly even blinking.

“We never thought that you would ever have the numbers or resources to break into our most heavily-guarded facility, so we grew lax. All of our generals were meeting here to discuss our attack on your home planet when you blew the doors off this place and effectively trapped us here.”

There was the tiniest flux of expression on his face, but otherwise, he remained just as stony as before.

“All the knowledge of our entire movement, all the connection, all the planning gathered in this one spot… I knew, once you were here, that you would make your way down to us. The others, they thought their little soldier surprise, or the wall, would foil you long enough for reinforcements to arrive, but I knew better. I also knew that out of all of my compatriots in this room, I was the one you held the largest vendetta against. If it came down to it, it would be very easy to exact revenge on me, then use the rest of our fold to give you the information you need.

“So, I took them out of the equation. I am the last of the generals you will find here. Those who are to step up to replace us are stationed all over the world for our protection. If you want to kill what we are, really and truly, you have to let me live so I can expose everything.”

“Why you—” Gonzales surged forward and grabbed the man’s collar, pulling him up to her snarl. But he had almost no reaction, looking borderline pleased instead of uncomfortable. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to us? How much we’ve suffered? How much we’ve lost?! And now you’d kill your own allies just to make sure you get to rot in prison for the rest of your life?”

“Yes.”

“Fine then! You want to live so bad to tell all the secrets, then you’ll do it right now.”

“Gonzales,” I murmured, taking a step forward.

But she was already a whirling dervish of motion, grabbing datalogs and holo-projectors alike.

“Lim, you see all this tech in here? I want you to make it send out a global broadcast. Everyone who has a way to receive a signal is gonna see this.”

“Um, I can do that, but it’s gonna take time. The system you’re in is completely different from the one that runs the rest of the place, which is why I didn’t see the soldiers or the vital-obscuring program.”

“Don’t worry about that, because our good ol’ friend here is going to tell you the password, aren’t you, friend?”

“What? Now?”

“Yeah, right now!”

The general didn’t say anything, and his stony gaze grew a little shakier.

“Aw, what’s a matter?” Gonzales hissed, her tone dripping with poison. “You worried that with all of your secrets out of the way that we won’t have a reason to keep you around? Is that what you’re scared of? That we’ll treat you how you treated us? Expendable!”

The general stared at her for a long, hard minute, then suddenly reached into the lapel of his uniform.

Avery and I lunged for him, while Mimi launched herself across the table. We tackled him, knocking him to the ground and yanking his arm from his clothing, but it was too late. He had a small metal tube, no longer than his pinky, with a single button on the end, which his thumb was already pressing.

“What is that?” Ciangi asked, her tone shooting up several octaves.

“Consider it a failsafe,” the general spat. “You think we’d really build this whole place and not have something in place if someone caught wind?”

“Uh, guys?” Babel’s voice cut through the tension, although it certainly didn’t do anything to abate it. “I’d like to think this isn’t relevant to our situation, but an un-licensed nuclear warhead is coming your way.”

“You’re bluffing,” Gonzales said, getting in the general’s face once more. The amount of unbridled hate she exuded to him was intimidating, but I couldn’t blame her. I too held more anger toward him than anybody else I ever knew. “You just killed all your friends to ensure you’d live. Why would you blow yourself to bits?”

“I ensured my survival. If you’re going to endanger that assurance, then I’m going to make sure I take every single one of you with me.” There was a moment of silence as Gonzales just shook with anger and the rest of us stood in shock. The general decided to press his luck. “You don’t have much time, engineer. Are you sure you want to spend your last minutes looking at me?”

Wrong move.

“Alright. You wanna go out together? Then let’s make it something worthwhile.” She grabbed his lapels again, hauling him back into a chair despite his weight, and pulling a binding wire from her belt. With it, she bound him several times over.

“Lim, stand by for that password.”

“Are you kidding?” the general cried. “I’m not going to tell you anything until my safety’s guaranteed and we’re far away from here.”

“Gonzales,” Babel said uncertainly. “ETA is about five minutes on that warhead. We need to evacuate.”

“Then evacuate. Get everyone out of here and far enough away from the blast. But the general and I are staying here.”

“What!?” he cried. “Are you mad?”

Gonzales bared her teeth at him, nearly catching the red skin of his nose between her canines. “Yes, I am. Mad as hell.” She looked to us, fire in her eyes.

“Go. All of you. I’ll stay here.”

Suddenly, everything was too much for me. We’d been through a lot, but this was just ridiculous. “Are you kidding? We’re not leaving you.”

“Yeah, I don’t know if you think things have changed since we last lived together,” Ciangi said, “but there’s no way we’re abandoning you.”

Gonzales’s tone softened, and she looked at us with reddened eyes. “Guys, you don’t have to.”

“Of course we don’t,” Bahn said. “But we will remain nonetheless.”

Avery sighed and plopped into a chair. “I’m not part of your little clique, but I think I’m about to see history being made and I’m not gonna bail now.”

Gonzales let out the tiniest of chuckles, then looked back to the General. “Looks like we’re gonna have a real party, all in your honor. What’s that, four minutes now?”

“You’re bluffing,” he growled.

“Ah, ah, don’t be a copy-cat. I’ve had a good life, and I’m very tired. I don’t really have a family, I don’t have some star-crossed lover from across the galaxy, and all of my friends are here. If it all ends now, I wouldn’t complain. But what about you, General? You got any regrets?”

“Three minutes until impact.”

“Huh, looks like even if you gave us the password now, we still probably wouldn’t have time to get away. That’s a shame.”

“It’s Invictus-two-two-one-alpha! Two-two-one-alpha!”

“Aw, why, thank you, General, for being so forthcoming. You got that, Lim?”

“Got it! Getting into the system now. Give me thirty seconds and I’ll have a broadcast set up!”

“But that will be too late!” the general objected. “We’ll never make it to the hangar bay in time.”

“Oh, I know. We were never going to the hangar bay,” Gonzales answered. “For all your guys’ planning, you never did set up many precautions for assaults from below. While we’ve been having a heyday up here, our demolitions and digging crew have been tunneling under here with some stolen equipment.”

“You…you were bluffing.”

“Hardly. It will take us at least a minute to drop down the extraction point and then get the shielding up. Right now, you’ve only got two and a half left.”

“That’s not enough!”

“Oy, ya bunch of dramatic babies,” Aja’s voice burst through the comms. “I may have managed to buy you some extra time.”

“What’d you do?”

“Well, I made a sort of tractor beam a bit ago, and I managed to hook it up to your system. Right now, it’s latched onto the back of that warhead, and I recon we got two to three minutes before it overloads my system and continues toward you.”

“I just finished setting up the system!” Lim added. “You see that green button on the wall? Press that and you’ll be broadcast everywhere.”

“Perfect.” Gonzales clapped the general on the back of the chair. “Now, I give you my word that if you cooperate like the good man you might have once been, we’ll save you from the missile and let you stand trial for everything you’ve done. You got it?”

“I… Yes.”

“Good. Now, if everyone’s ready, lights, holo, and action!”

She walked forward, her fist slamming the button, and the room burst to life. This was it. The moment we had been working so hard for.

It no doubt took years for the coup to gain as much power as it did, but now it was all going to crumble with a few words.

14

Aftermath

“Citizens of Earth, I am broadcasting this as a form of my surrender,” the general grudgingly began. He looked like maybe he was thinking of stopping, but Gonzales just calmly tapped on the timer that she projected from her datalog. “Unbeknownst to most of you, there has been a hidden, secret faction of Earth Gov seeking to consolidate power and return to the olden days of the federation.

“Upon the discovery of extraterrestrial life, we moved forward to use that technology not how it was intended, but instead amassing a large military armada illegally, in the hopes of subjugating all non-human life and using it to further our goals.”

“The missile just broke loose! You’ve got two minutes max!”

“Untie me and let’s go!” the general cried. “Wasn’t that enough?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Gonzales said, crossing her arms casually. “I think the people need to know more of what y’all did wrong.”

The general stared at her, incredulous for a moment, before continuing. “We have broken many laws, and now it has come time to pay for those injustices. As the last surviving member of our leadership, I will stand trial for all we have done.

“These people behind me, you may know as the first contact crew. It is to them that you owe your gratitude, and I will be eternally indebted to them for their mercy. In the weeks to come, you will hear many incredulous, insidious stories of what we have done. All I can do is apologize and hope these people behind me can fix all of the damage we have done.”

“That’ll do. Cut the broadcast,” Gonzales ordered tersely.

“Broadcast has been severed.”

I reached over and grabbed Mimi’s hand. Squeezing it. I knew that this was the end for us, that we would never go home, never see all the little mimics I had learned to love. But at least we had ensured their future with humanity, and perhaps a lasting peace. And what could be better than that?

“Great,” Gonzales said. “And now that that’s all taken care of, what’s really happening with that missile?”

A jolt of shock went through me, and my head jerked in her direction.

“Extraction team confirming successful intercept. It’s now about a hundred yards outside of orbit and about to detonate in the cold vacuum of space.”

“W-what?” the general sputtered. “You tricked me?!”

“Yeah,” she said, shrugging. “Sorry about the dupe, guys. Only the second brain, extraction team, and I knew about that last part. We figured they might fire it and wanted all of your panic to be real to sell the bit.” She smiled sheepishly at the last part, however. “But…it was real nice that all of you were willing to die with me.”

Ciangi stomped forward and before anyone could react, she slapped her friend across the face. “That was cruel, and you know it!” she snapped, her tone shaking. But then she wrapped her arms around the other in a tight hug. “But we did it. Thanks to you, we did it.”

“We did. And now that the building is clear from the threat of a nuclear blast, why don’t we get the not-so-good general into custody and then go home?”

“By home, do you mean my planet?” Mimi asked.

“Uh, no. I mean our planet.”

A rush of relief flowed over all of us, and we walked out together, rolling the general along in his padded chair.

It was hard to wrap our minds around it, but an era was over. I was sure there were lots of things to do to still broker peace, and that the road ahead was by no means easy, but finally, the coup was dealt with. It was a new dawn, and we were walking into it together.

There was never a celebration quite like the one we had as we entered the ship. There were cheers and tears and triumphant chest bumps all around, but after a few moments, it cooled. That most likely had to do with the injured and dead being brought on board.

Our casualties were incredibly low considering the maelstrom we had created. Just two souls had succumbed to the blaster wounds they received in the field, and I cursed myself for never learning their names. They had sacrificed themselves for my cause, and I had treated them like anonymous plus-ones without their own histories or families.

I promised myself I would do better and memorized their names then and there. We made preparations to cremate them while we traveled to pick up the second brain crew, and then held one spectacular funeral. Of course, it was nothing compared to the lives that they had given up, but it helped.

It wasn’t until after the dead were properly mourned and respected that we returned to the black market and had the biggest hoe-down I had ever been in. There was food, dancing, drinking, and singing. People celebrating, people dreaming. Just happiness all around. There was a new hope for the future that I was pretty sure a lot of them had been without for a long time, and although I enjoyed watching them heal and build their fantasies for the new era, I couldn’t wait to get home.

It took us three days before we could finally leave, and by then there was a whole hail of things to do from the fallout of the coup. It seemed every day the tasks were mounting higher and higher, and I almost wondered if Gonzales was going to ditch us again. Especially considering the custody of the general.

A whole lot of people wanted the man dead, as in really dead, so he had to be under guard twenty-four/seven. Then there was the deal with the actual Earth Gov stepping in and wanting to team up with the rebels on their rebuilding and flushing out of the rest of the scum.

With every problem that was tackled, a new one would arise, and I gave up my hope of ever having our friend group all together like it once was. Which was fine, in a way. People grew older, finding new things and new paths. We would all still love and cherish Gonzales, but we needed to support her in a new life as an engineer turned political leader.

Surprisingly, however, she kept her word, seemingly relieved as she chose Avery to replace her, and we all boarded the warship to go home.

“I’m not gonna lie,” she murmured once the doors closed. “I think I never want to issue another order for as long as I live.”

“Uh-huh, I’ll remember that for the next time I leave my equipment in your build area and you yell at me to pick it up,” Ciangi retorted.

“Ay, come here, short-stack. Just because you look like Shirley Temple now doesn’t mean I still won’t lay the smackdown on you.”

But Ciangi just scurried off, Bahn following her quickly. Gonzales paused at the last minute and gave both Mimi and I a pointed look.

“I missed you guys,” she murmured.

“We missed you too,” I said.

For a moment, we all stood there awkwardly, but then I decided to take a gamble. Stepping forward, I offered a hug, my arms spread wide. Gonzales seemed surprised at first, then hesitant, before stepping forward and embracing me with all the strength she had.

We stood like that for a while, our hearts beating against each other, and then she pulled away. She gave us another subtle nod, then disappeared down the hall.

I turned back to Mimi, our hands finding each other’s again and our fingers interlacing. “Let’s rest, shall we?” I asked, body and soul weary.

“I would like that very much,” she said, smiling as she pulled me back to our quarters.

The two-week trip there at top speed seemed almost torturously slow, but we all took the time to reconnect. There were a lot of wounds, both emotional and physical, caused by our last jaunt, and we needed to have them out before we were thrown back into mimic planet life.

And of course, there was the announcement of our engagement to our friends.

Ciangi was beside herself, and quickly began rattling off wedding plans, while Eske just clapped softly for five solid minutes between her silent tears. Bahn nodded, and said he hoped to grow his hair to appropriate levels by the time we wed, and Gonzales… Well, Gonzales congratulated me with tears in her eyes before disappearing into her cabin for a couple of days.

Most importantly of all was Mimi. With the weight of Earth lifted from her shoulders, she seemed so much happier. She laughed with me, and watched sims with me, and we ran down the halls sometimes just for the heck of it. Finally, we were going to have a part of our life with no war. No conflict. No wondering if we would make it until tomorrow.

Sometimes, we would just lay in each other’s arms in bed for hours, watching space whip by at impossible speeds and enjoying each other’s presence. We were exactly in that position when Gonzales’s voice came over the comms.

“Hey, we’re approaching the system now. I’m going to drop out of hyper speed if you want to make it to the bridge for landing procedures.”

Mimi sat up like a shot, pulling me with her. “It’s time! We’re home! We’re finally home!”

She took off, never letting go of my hand, and I didn’t fight as she dragged me along. I loved seeing her this happy.

I loved her.

We arrived at the bridge just as we dropped out of our incredible speed, and quickly buckled ourselves in, Eske, Ciangi, and Bahn joining us shortly after.

“Y’all ready to be home?” Gonzales asked, smiling slightly.

“I am,” Mimi answered, letting out a breath. “I wonder how many children have reached maturity while we’ve been gone.”

“Yeah, it’s been a couple of months, hasn’t it?”

“Sixty-eight days.”

“Well, that sounds like sixty-seven days too long,” Bahn said. “But it’s almost over.”

“Yeah,” Gonzales agreed. “Initiating landing procedures now.”

Slowly, we began descending, the ship hull glowing red as we rushed through the atmosphere. I could feel excitement building in my stomach, and I was going to embarrassingly hug each and every mimic I saw when I landed.

Finally, we slowed and broke through the clouds, leveling out as we prepared to land. But as our vision cleared, something was…amiss.

“Why is there so much smoke?” I asked, leaning against my harnesses as if that would allow me to see better. Was something wrong with the engine? Did we take a hit somewhere?”

“Um, I don’t know. I didn’t get any warnings from my dash.”

“It’s so thick,” Ciangi murmured. “And gray. This isn’t what smoke from a natural fire would look like.”

“That’s because it isn’t,” Bahn said, looking at his scanner. “According to this, all of that is coming from the ground.”

“…what the hell happened here?” Gonzales breathed as we finally landed in the thickest, blackest smog I’d ever seen.

“I do not know,” Mimi whispered, her face draining of all color. “But I have a terrible feeling about this.”

Mimic Saves Her People

1

What Breaks the Silence

I held my breath as Gonzales landed as quickly as she could. But as we descended, smoke—thick and noxious—cloaked our ship, making visibility zero and the forward window switch to a holo-map of our surroundings. My stomach left somewhere behind in space, I could only pray that there was just some sort of strange fire situation back at the home that we’d so carefully built.

The moment the thrusters dipped into a low hum, Mimi surged out of the room, her human form dropping as she shifted to her much quicker, spikier body. I quickly unbuckled myself and followed, nearly tumbling over when we finally did set down.

I could hear footsteps behind me, all rushing to catch up, but I didn’t wait for them. I rushed to catch up with Mimi, only to find that the walkway had already dropped, and she was nowhere to be seen.

So I ran as hard as I could toward the direction of the happy home we had built together. The smoke wasn’t nearly as thick as it was in the air, which meant that it had to have been a while since whatever had happened…happened, and a majority of it had risen upwards.

My breath echoed in my ears as I sprinted, and I wondered how badly my time imprisoned had destroyed all the hard-earned muscle and stamina I had won while helping to build our community. After a few moments, I realized that I could hear my breathing far too clearly.

Where were all the sounds?

There were no spaelgoks trilling. There were no sounds of children chirping. There weren’t even the ever-present sounds of training from the yard. I could have sworn there was always someone on that roughly hewn field, and it had given me comfort many nights when I couldn’t sleep.

That made my heart squeeze even more painfully in my chest, but I kept pressing on.

Or at least I did until I heard a piercing, heart-wrenching sound that made my head throb like I had been hit with a sledge hammer.

I stumbled a moment, my hands catching me in the dirt as nausea overtook me. It only lasted as long as the cry, but as soon as the sound cut off, I knew I had to run even faster.

Because that sound was Mimic, or as I affectionately called her, Mimi.

I didn’t know how I knew considering that I had never heard her make that sound before, in fact, I’d never heard a mimic scream in their original form. I poured everything I had to pelting forward, and when I broke through the trees, even my worst fears didn’t prepare me for what I saw.

The training fields were to the left, the village was ahead, and our defense center was far to the right. For the tiniest of moments, it seemed like everything was fine. There were no buildings on fire and no giant craters.

But then my brain caught up with all the data in front of me and I saw destruction scattered along the entire path up to the city.

The barricades we had built for that attack long ago were all gone, and those seemed to be where the smoke was coming from. The informal school looked like someone had purposefully gone at it with an old-fashioned wrecking ball.

But none of it looked like it had been blasted from the air. No, this was deliberate, methodical destruction that had to have been done by foot troops after an attack, not during.

Another wail ripped through the air and I realized that I had stopped cold in my tracks. Dashing off again, I managed to find Mimi behind a smoldering pile of coal. She was crouched down, her form shaking as that awful sound escaped her mouth again.

I rushed around her, and all my breath left my body as I saw what she was holding.

Or rather who.

Astaroth lay across the ground, his torso pulled into her arms. He was mostly in a human form, but his limbs were melting into black, putty-like pools and more of that dark liquid was coming up from between his split lips.

“I…I don’t know how to help him,” Mimi said, looking up at me with red eyes. It seemed she still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of crying, but she desperately wanted to. “We’ve been studying our anatomy for almost two years and I don’t know what to do! What’s the point of everything we’ve built, of everything we’ve done, if I can’t even help my brother?!”

A low wheeze sounded from below her and Astaroth’s eyes fluttered open. Mimi gasped, and clutched him even more tightly.

“Astaroth! Stay with me!” Her tone was panicked, far higher and more fearful than I had ever heard. I didn’t know what to do, whether to go to her or give her space, so I ended up just frozen as I watched the exchange. “That is a direct order from your leader. Just focus on my voice, okay?”

The large shifter smiled weakly, and his hand came up to caress her cheek. Form rippling and dripping, he left a streak of black across her face, before his hand fell back to the ground with a thump

“No! Astaroth, come back. This isn’t the time to sleep, okay? Just stay with me for another moment!”

I finally got my brain in gear enough to go to her, but I barely made it two steps before his body let out a sudden, intense shudder. Mimi sucked in a breath, as if she was afraid a single move would ruin everything.

The world seemed to pause for a moment, and the two of us clung to the hope that his eyes would flutter open again. I was vaguely aware of Eske arriving somewhere in my peripheral vision, but I didn’t dare turn my head.

Then, as if time was snapping back to its normal rate, his body stiffened, turning the same metallic black that I was used to seeing, before crumbling into ash that blew across the smoldering landscape in a faint cloud.

“No!” Mimi screamed, her human form cracking as shimmering ebony peeked through. I dropped to my knees and held her to me, binding her as tight as I could with my arms as her body wavered, bucked, and roiled with her desperate, tortured cries.

I’d never seen her act like this, but I realized that I’d never seen a mimic die. In fact, I hadn’t even been sure that they could die once they reached their adult form. Sure, Mimi’s family had been chewed up by my ship when we had first met, but she had told me that they had been so tiny and undernourished that they had hardly been sentient. She had been terrified and hurt at the time, but I was sure that was nothing compared to losing what was essentially her little brother.

A few moments later, the rest of our crew arrived, and we all stood in silence. My own eyes were itching, tears threatening to spill over, but I could mourn later. For now, all of my attention needed to be on Mimi.

I couldn’t say how long we stayed there. Maybe it was a minute, maybe it was ten, but eventually Mimi’s sobs stilled and she looked up at my face with a sort of desperation that I wasn’t used to on her features.

“We have to see if there are any others!” she cried. “We have to save them!”

2

Scattered Pieces

In my life since Mimi, I had done many insane things, seen many impossible things, and had plenty of stressful, painful, and horrific things done to me. I’d lost several of my fingers, and I had enough scars that I’d forgotten half of their stories.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to looking for survivors in the ruins of our home.

Except perhaps ruins wasn’t the correct word. All of the buildings were standing, with the windows and doors, which had taken us quite a while to learn how to make, all intact. But once we stepped in, the signs of battle were evident.

Blaster fire, things shattered, beds flipped over, rations everywhere. If I had to guess what had happened, all of the able-bodied mimics had flooded the battlefield for a fight while a second wave came up behind to attack the town and all of the non-combatant and younger mimics.

“How could they only leave one behind?” Mimi asked, her tone empty and her face blank as she stood in the center of the town.

She’d been standing there since we had finished our search and hadn’t moved an inch.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she continued, looking at me with wide eyes. “Was it to leave a message? He was too hurt to tell me anything. Surely, they must have known that. So, what was the point? Why leave him? He couldn’t have been the only one…the only one…”

“It’s okay,” I said, pulling her to me. “You don’t have to say it.”

“The only one that they killed,” she finished in breathless gasp before her voice cut off. I could tell she was still fighting to hold onto her humanoid form and wondered why she didn’t just sink into her original body.

It was only as she buried her face in my chest did I realize that it was so I could comfort her. While we’d certainly cuddled many times around her spikes, this was different. She needed my touch. She needed me to be there for her.

“So, what do we think happened?” Eske said, wiping the dirt and ash on her hands across her previously clean clothes. I didn’t know why the motion caught my attention so much, but I couldn’t help but wonder if what she was cleaning off were the remnants of other mimics who hadn’t made it.

Had they turned to ash like Astaroth? Was that what mimics did? Or had they done something to him? I had a hard time believing that the entire settlement had been taken so easily, so did that mean that whoever landed had something up their sleeve? That they knew mimic anatomy better than the mimics themselves?

“We won’t know until the twins come back with their findings.”

Eske nodded, rubbing the edge of her new visor. I noticed she had taken to doing that whenever she was particularly concerned. “Are we sure splitting up was wise, given everything that’s been going on?”

“Maybe it wasn’t,” I answered honestly. “But Harunya was already here, and your family. If they would be anywhere, it would be at our defense grid, and I’m sure you can see the smoke rising from there all the way where we are.”

“Yeah…” Eske murmured, rubbing her goggles even harder. Thankfully, Aja had built those things to last, but that didn’t mean I enjoyed seeing her so worried. Nothing about this experience was really enjoyable, though, was it?

Mimi let out another wracking sob that was somewhere between human and inhuman, and I stroked her hair. I felt completely useless, like my brain was stuck somewhere between knowing I should be comforting Mimi and trying to comprehend the horror that was strewn out all around us.

The kids couldn’t be gone…could they? Could everyone really be gone? Were they all dead? Were they… Well, what else was there? Whoever came here wouldn’t have just kidnapped an entire city worth of children and young adult mimics, right? How could they contain them? It had taken the generals so many resources to contain Mimi, and although she was the most powerful mimic by far, she was just one.

There had been a couple thousand mimics. There was no one who could possibly have the resources to restrain all of them?

“Hey, do you hear that?” Eske asked.

I turned my head in the direction the former maintenance worker was pointing, and I saw the faintest bit of movement on the horizon. I wasn’t willing to let go of Mimi, so I only took a few steps while squinting hard.

Not that squinting actually made me see better, but it made me feel like I was at least doing something. My efforts were paid off as I saw a line of people shakily approaching from the tree line.

“Inate!” Eske cried, pelting across the field faster than I had seen her move in quite a while, and I’d certainly seen the girl sprint before.

By the time she reached them, I could make out Gonzales leading them, her face a telling mix of both grim and relieved.

“Come on, Mimi,” I said quietly, gently pulling her toward the approaching line of people. “They might know what happened.”

She nodded, and we shuffled forward, reaching the group while Eske was still hugging and crying with a middle-aged woman.

“Higgens, Mimi, this is my mother. Mother, these are the leaders I told you about.” She finally let go of the woman and pointed toward the older man beside her. “This is my father, and these are my brothers, Abel, Yonas, Negasi, and Kofi.”

“I wish we could say it’s nice for you to meet us,” the older man said, his voice pleasantly accented. “But these circumstances are less than ideal.”

I nodded, not sure what other gesture was appropriate given the situation. “Do you all know what happened?”

“No, unfortunately,” Eske’s mother answered. “The alarm sounded and we were all rushed to the closest bunker.”

“Were there any mimics with you?” Mimi asked hopefully.

“Only one.” She reached into the bag at her side and pulled out what had to be the smallest mimic I had ever seen. “We just got here a week or so ago, so we hadn’t had time to make friends with anyone. This one was showing us where you keep the animals when the alarm sounded. They’re also the one who led us to the safe place.”

“They look a little small for cross-species communication,” Mimi said, kneeling and taking the child tenderly into her arms. His spikes could hardly be called that, looking more like pin-pricks than anything. “He’s even smaller than when Higgens first found me.”

“We were down there quite a while,” the mother continued. “There were human provisions in there, but apparently, only a very small amount of food for your kind.”

Mimi grimaced. “We were still worrying about stocking our storerooms. The outer bunkers haven’t been finished. That should have been our priority…but it just seemed like we were finally going to have peace.”

She took a deep breath and I could see her struggling to hold herself together. “Let’s go to the storeroom. There should be at least a little food still left there.”

We all followed her, but as we walked, I noticed there was someone missing.

Harunya? I mouthed to Gonzales, hoping that somehow, I had just overlooked her and the feeling in my gut was wrong.

But the weapons engineer just shook her head slowly, to not draw attention, and I couldn’t help but wonder where the pregnant woman was.

We reached the storeroom without any incident, the only noise being Mimi as she cooed to the starving mimic in her arms. It reminded me of how she had once almost starved to death herself and seeing that her body could have eaten itself into nothing told me that we missed a truly awful fate.

But if he was that small after being able to communicate, then at least a couple of weeks had to have passed since the attack, which meant Astaroth had been waiting for us, barely clinging to life, only for us to arrive too late.

That wasn’t a good feeling.

“Hey there, baby. Come on, just a little nibble,” Mimi murmured, holding what looked like some shale rock and dirt to its underside. I heard the telltale crunching and the small thing trilled in relief.

Well. We had one mimic. One out of thousands. What had happened here?

My comm buzzed and I heard Bahn’s frantic, enraged voice over it. “You need to come to our coordinates,” he said, voice just as tense as it had been in some of the battles we had survived. “Get here as fast as you can.”

That was it. No explanation, no reason, just an order. I looked to Mimi, but she was so preoccupied with the little one in her arms that I didn’t think she had even heard Bahn.

“Gonzales, with me. Everyone else, stay here with Mimi,” I said, trying to keep my tone level and as devoid of panic as possible.

But it wasn’t easy. Every bit of my mind wanted to freak out, but it was going to have to wait. Gonzales offered me a slight nod, and then we were jogging out into the open.

It still didn’t make sense. How could the buildings we created be mostly intact while the ground smoldered and smoke was still rising from our training field? After all, if it had been at least two weeks since the attack, everything should be cold and still…right? Not still spilling fumes into the air.

“Any ideas?” Gonzales muttered to me while we jogged. Her face was grim and reminded me of how her expression had often been when she had first lost her eye.

“I want to say no,” I answered honestly. “But there’s only one other massively advanced alien race that we know of.”

“You think this was them? This is nothing like the firepower they had last time. If they had this kind of tech, there’s no way we could have beaten them the first time.”

I shrugged, wishing that we had created some sort of transport system. I had forgotten how long it took to get from one end of our settlement to the other. “It’s been a little over a year since the attack, right? Maybe they got more advanced. Or maybe what we fought was just a baby ship that they thought was enough to deal with us and they realized afterward that they would need more.”

“I mean… I guess, but why didn’t they just blow off the surface of the planet? Why take everyone? That had to have taken so much effort, and you can’t tell me that we didn’t manage to take a single one of them down, which meant that they collected all of their dead.

“But if they expended all that energy to do that, that means it was important enough to make sure we didn’t get a hold of one of their bodies, which is…worrying.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Worrying is right.”

The conversation stilled, mostly because what else was there to say? We both jogged in silence, only our harsh breath and our fear to spur us onwards.

I didn’t think it was possible, but my heart dropped even further as what was left of our defense center came into view. The cannon that we had put so much work into stealing and adapting then perfecting was gone, leaving only a smoking cradle in its wake.

The shining, shimmering building was nothing but rubble, all the technology and shielding we had been working on reduced to ash.

“My gosh…” I whispered breathlessly, words hardly enough to communicate the fear and dread that rushed through me, but they were all that I had.

“Higgens, Gonzales, is that you? I see your datapads are almost here.”

“Yeah, it’s us.”

“Where’s Mimi and Eske?”

“They’re back with the other survivors.”

“Other survivors? Good. That’s good.”

“You gonna tell us what’s going on here?” I asked, finally reaching the edge of the rubble. I squinted to try to see where they could have gotten to when I saw what looked like a half-collapsed hallway sticking up from one of the rises of twisted metal.

“That way,” I whispered to Gonzales, not wanting to interrupt Bahn’s answer.

“Yeah. We think we’ve found Harunya.”

“What?”

“There’s no signs of life but there’s the faintest blip of her datapad’s signature. It’s damaged, badly, but it’s there.”

“Holy crap, Bahn, way to bury the lead!” Gonzales cried, sprinting past me. “We’re coming!”

“Please hurry,” Ciangi’s voice flashed over the comm for the first time and I could hear that she had definitely been crying. “We’re digging through as fast as we can, but we have to be careful. We don’t want to hurt her if she’s in a precarious position.”

“Right, of course. We’ll be there in just a second.”

Light faded around us as we went further and further down the corridor. Only a minute or two later, we arrived in a small, crumpled room to find Bahn and Ciangi desperately throwing pieces of rubble this way and that.

Gonzales and I joined without a word, digging just as furiously as they did. It was so tempting to just blast through the walls and get to her that much faster, but what if we accidentally blasted through her? Or suffocated her with chemicals? Or burned her alive?

No, we had to take it slow.

The four of us worked in silence, the only sounds being our grunting, Ciangi’s tears, and debris clattering against the wall. I wished that I had interrupted Mimi. Her brute strength would certainly be useful, but I couldn’t help but think that she was quite distracted by the young mimic.

“Gonzales, come help me grab the edge of this,” I said, gripping one side of a large, jagged slab of metal and piping on the ground toward the end of the mini-tunnel we were creating.

She rushed to help me, and so did Bahn, and the three of us managed to lift it about an inch and slide it to the side.

A scream sounded almost immediately, and I saw Ciangi shakily pointing. Following her finger, I saw a tanned hand, swollen and dusty.

“Harunya!” Bahn cried, rushing to her. “Harunya, I’m here!”

We descended on her in a desperate fury, throwing things this way and that. Little by little, her arm and one of her legs were revealed to us, until only one large slab obscured her torso from vision.

“Let’s lift this together,” Bahn said, covered in sweat and dirt. “Ciangi, you pull her out.”

“Yes, of course.”

Wiping my arms on my pants, I crouched and slid my hands under the slab. Waiting until we were all in tune, I gave a short count and then we were all putting our everything into heaving upwards.

Our groans sounded throughout the room, but I could feel us all trying our hardest. Bit by bit, the slab lifted, until Ciangi was able to grab Harunya’s exposed leg and pull with all her might.

There was resistance for a moment, and I feared the worst, but then there was a scraping sound and the woman’s entire body popped out, sending Ciangi flying backwards.

As soon as we were all sure she was clear, we dropped the slab and rushed over.

“Is she breathing?” Ciangi cried. “Is she breathing?”

“Just give me a moment,” Bahn answered, kneeling beside her and crouching close to her face. We all went silent and my stomach was performing its own acrobatic assault. She had been down there for weeks, there was no way she could be alive, right? A human could usually go only three days without water, and she had been stuck far longer than that.

“It’s faint, but I have a pulse!”

“Let’s grab her and get her to the med-bay then!” Gonzales shouted, jumping to her feet.

“We can’t move her!” Bahn snapped, sounding harsher than I had ever heard him. Not that he didn’t have good reason, of course. “Use that eye of yours to scan her. Judging by that slab, her arm and leg are broken, and she probably has a spine compression at the least, and I don’t want to think about what’s the worst.”

He seemed to think for a split-second while the rest of us stood in stunned silence. Hitting his comm, he was giving orders again. “Eske, I know you’re with the other survivors, which I’m guessing are your family, but we need you. Run to the med-bay as quickly as you can and get the stabilizer, then hover-bed transport.”

“What do you need that for?”

“The woman we love, and our child, is barely clinging to life.”

A long string of surprised expletives burst over the comm then cut off, which I could only assume meant that Eske was using her long, long legs to cut across the landscape.

“Higgens, you know CPR?”

“Yeah, it’s a requirement of maintenance training and having employment on government ships.”

“Then I need you to compress her chest.”

“Alright.” I dropped to my knees and started using the exercise I never thought would be relevant to my life. It felt strange doing it on an actual human instead of a medi-bot, but I forced myself to focus.

Bahn pinched her nose with his fingers then bent down, inflating her lungs with his breath. The two of us worked on her in tandem, and I lost myself to the rhythm. Nothing mattered but making sure that I stayed exactly on beat.

Pump. Pump. Pump. Pump. Pump. Breathe. Pump.

Pump. Pump. Pump. Pump. Pump. Breathe. Pump.

Over and over and over again until finally I heard footsteps and a shout behind me.

Someone was pulling me off, and I resisted for a moment before Gonzales’s voice sounded gently in my ear.

“Higgens, you can stop. Help is here.”

Help? Oh.

I fell back, and my vision cleared to see Eske placing the stabilizer on Harunya while Bahn set up the medical hover-bed. As soon as the equipment was on the pregnant woman, her chest started to rise and fall on its own, and her vitals hovered above the head of the hover-bed.

“It’s working!” Bahn cried, squeezing the woman’s hand. “It’s working!”

“That it is,” Eske said, her tone and face completely serious. “But how about we get her to the ship and do a scan so we can get her whatever other help she and the baby need.”

“Yes,” Ciangi gasped. “Please.”

I shakily got to my feet to follow them, Gonzales’s arm wrapping around mine for support.

“You did good, Higgens,” she murmured, gently ruffling my still-short hair. “You did good.”

3

Loss and Life

Somehow, we made it to the ship without any more catastrophes. Along the way, Gonzales called Mimi to join us. I was in a bit of a haze, but I was incredibly grateful for my friend.

Every moment, I was afraid that the weak vitals on the cot would blink out and then we all would lose it. I couldn’t begin to imagine what this felt like for both Ciangi and Bahn. I didn’t quite understand their relationship, who was dating who and whatnot, but I knew that they were all incredibly tightknit. Finding their loved one crushed under a pile of rubble, not knowing if the baby they had been expecting was still alive, had to be maddening.

A few minutes later, we were all huddled in the medical room, watching as Ciangi hooked up Harunya to all the equipment the small bay had. Soon we had plenty of readings on her, and we were all frantically searching on our datapads for what reading meant what, when the tiniest of voices cut through our desperate queries.

“D…darling?”

It was like lightning jolted through me, and our heads all snapped to the table. There, I saw Harunya’s eyes flutter open, and her cracked lips moved slowly.

“…I…think I…hear you…”

Bahn and Ciangi dropped everything, sprinting to her and gripping her hands.

“Oh my God, Harunya!” the smaller of the coin twins cried. “I thought we’d lost you!”

“You think you could get rid of me that easily?” She chuckled weakly. “Now, let me see my charts so I can tell you what’s going on. I see that you have a stabilizer on me, but I need some injections to bring my levels back up.”

They quickly handed her a datapad that had all of her readings and she puzzled over it for several moments. It was right about then that I remembered that the woman was an actual doctor, and probably the best one among us for figuring out how to treat herself.

“Alright, go to the medical cabinet and punch in the code two-three-six-nine. Then I’m going to need you to take out the injector, and two vials of the hydrogenation kit.”

Bahn rushed to do as she said. “Which kit is that?”

“It’s the blue one. For water.”

“You, Eske, I need you to go to the medi-generator and print a tibia-reset splint to my scans. It’s fairly straightforward.”

She rattled it off so matter-of-factly despite her raspy voice and bright red eyes. I knew the stabilizer worked a lot of wonders, but I didn’t know that it was downright magical.

“In about half an hour, I’m also going to need some of the vials in the pink kit. About every half hour or so. Oh, and Higgens, do you mind getting the fetal sc—” She stopped mid-order, and I swore the whole room froze with her. “Oh.”

“Oh?” the twins echoed.

“It appears that I’m about to go into labor.”

“What?!” That was probably the entire room, including myself.

“Bahn, in addition to those blue vials, give me one purple one, and one green one.”

He was at her side in a flash, and all I could do was stand there and watch.

“What are these for?”

“These are going to delay the labor for at least an hour or two, hopefully long enough to get me at least somewhat stable.”

“You’re not stable now?” I heard Ciangi ask fearfully.

“No. Hardly. If I have this baby now, it is highly likely that you would lose both of us to the stress. I need everyone to listen very carefully. I believe I am in shock and that’s why we’re able to have this conversation. It’s very possible that at any moment, I could succumb and pass out. This is what I need you to do.”

Suddenly, we were all getting issued orders right and left. We followed them to a T. My whole mind attuned to only her directions and her vitals, there was nothing else. Only making sure that whatever she said was completed to perfection.

Leg brace, neck brace. Injections. Scans. More injections. A breather. A medical bassinet. A sanitizer. The list went on and on and on, until Mimi joined us, the smaller mimic seeming to have grown a few inches. She stood to the back, just watching us as time slipped by.

Before we knew it, she was completely hooked up to everything she needed, and her vitals were all starting to rise.

“This is it,” she gasped, her voice still reedy. “My water is about to break.”

“Is that literally or figurative—”

Before Mimi could finish that question, Harunya’s water did indeed break and I rushed to clean it up with the floor sterilizer that I had been assigned. I caught Mimi turn pale in the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t pay attention.

“Bahn!” Harunya cried. “Give me your hand!”

“Did we not give you the pain medicine correctly?” he asked, shocked.

“Given my condition, and that my spine might be compromised, you couldn’t give me the normal epidural. You’ve injected some general painkillers, which will take off the edge, but given my broken leg, arm, and chipped vertebrae, this isn’t going to be easy.”

“Geez, Harunya, you should have—”

A cry ripped out of her throat and both of them were holding her hands. I sprinted to the coolant tube to spray some of its water on a medical-grade towel then ran it back to her for one of the twins to place on her face.

Once more, our whole world became only focusing on Harunya and the life that was fighting its way out of her.

It was messy, it was terrifying, and it was certainly loud. But after two hours of Bahn and Ciangi making sure every one of her vitals stayed in the orange and out of the red, and the rest of us focusing on our own tasks, Eske caught and cradled the child to her.

“The scanner,” Harunya gasped, her voice barely a whisper. “Get my baby into the scanner.”

The maintenance worker rushed to do so, and the rest of us started on our post-labor jobs. I had learned just two hours earlier that the baby wasn’t the only thing that needed to be birthed, so I rushed to her with a sample collector that would test the waste to see what the baby was lacking and if there was anything we should worry about.

A moment later, I heard a happy cry from Eske. “She’s healthy! She’s jaundiced and underweight, but she’s healthy!”

A weak, sliver of a laugh slipped from Harunya’s mouth, then her eyes fluttered closed. We all jolted for a moment, but then her vitals above her head steadied and rose the tiniest amount.

She was resting.

Bahn lovingly kissed her forehead while Ciangi went over to their baby. They quickly went through the process with the umbilical cord, and cleaning it, and before I knew it, I was watching as the blonde woman handed the baby over to her twin.

“She’s beautiful,” Ciangi breathed, hope, happiness, and relief all mixing in her voice.

Bahn took one look at the precious, wailing child in his arms and then broke down in tears. I couldn’t blame him, and I stepped forward to envelop him in a gentle hug. A second later, I felt Eske’s muscled arms around us as well, and then Gonzales’s, then Ciangi’s, and finally Mimi’s.

“Welcome to the family,” I murmured, a hitch building in my own throat.

“We’re so glad you made it,” Bahn added between tears.

We all held onto each other until he was ready for space, and when we stepped away, he wiped his face gratefully.

“So, does my little niece have a name?” Gonzales asked, her own voice sounding both strained and relieved.

“Asha,” Ciangi said, standing beside Bahn and cooing at the child, who seemed to have calmed and was shakily reaching up toward Bahn’s face. “We decided on it before all this happened, and I think it’s only grown more appropriate.”

“That’s beautiful,” Eske said. “What does it mean?”

“It’s Harunya’s mother language,” Bahn answered, sneaking a free hand over to rest on the arm of the woman he loved. “It means ‘hope’.”

“Hope,” I repeated, my own heart giving out a meaningful throb. “You’re right. That is a good name.”

4

Witness

We all slept right there in the medical room.

Sure, there were plenty of rooms that we could have slept in with actual beds, and also, I was sure that Mimi was less than pleased that we all needed to rest. I could tell that every second we weren’t actively running toward whichever direction the children had been taken was incredibly painful for her, but we couldn’t help it. The events of the day had drained all of us, and our biology required that we sleep.

Thankfully, she didn’t pitch a fit or anything, and I happily curled into a corner with her, dozing off while Bahn and Ciangi sat in two of the padded chairs with the baby.

After what had happened, it was clear that none of us wanted to be very far apart. Something had come and completely turned our world upside-down, then something else came along and inverted it again. And although there was a new, wonderful bundle of joy in our life, we had to figure out what happened to all of the other children who were just…gone.

But that managed to wait until the next morning, when an urgent cry roused all of us. I bolted upright, fear of battle rushing through my limbs, before I remembered exactly what had happened.

It was the baby. Bahn practically teleported over to her in the monitoring pod and carefully took her out. By the time I was able to fully open my eyes and comprehend the world, he was placing her in Harunya’s arms.

“My little girl,” she murmured happily. “My beautiful little girl.”

“Strange, according to what I know of general human aesthetics, she is still very red and compressed. Is that not considered ugly to—”

I nudged Mimi and although she gave me a confused look, she seemed to know that I was trying to get her to stop. Even I knew you never insulted a woman’s child.

“She’s amazing,” I said.

“She is,” Ciangi agreed. “Now, I know you all have a lot to do with the situation at hand, but do you mind giving our family some privacy while she learns how to feed the baby?”

“Feed the— Oh. Right. That is a thing that we humans do,” I said, just barely catching myself.

“Ah, yes,” Mimi said. “I remember reading this about your Earth mammalian species. So fascinating that the mother’s body can create food for her children. My species has no such ability. I would love to see such a process.”

“Yes, fascinating,” Harunya agreed. “But it can be difficult at first, and I choose for it to be a private moment for me, if you don’t mind.”

“But—”

I grabbed Mimi’s hand and pulled her out with the rest of us.

“I do not understand,” she mused as Eske, Gonzales, and I headed out. “Normally, Harunya is excellent about explaining human culture to me.”

“Yeah, but you remember how I had to explain to you how nudity is a private thing a lot of the time to us?”

“Yes, it is why you waste so much time on creating clothes even when you live in perfectly maintained environments.”

“Well, this is kinda just one of those things. You may think it silly, but some people want to keep some very personal things to themselves, and some people want to share it.”

“I see.” She nodded, and I got the feeling that she mostly understood. “We should be focusing on the children anyway.”

“Exactly,” Gonzales said as we headed into the same room we had used for many meetings before. But after being gone so long, the room no longer felt nearly as familiar to me. I guess we certainly had been gone for a while. “And I think we all know exactly who took them.”

“The aliens,” Eske said. “I mean, the alien slaver people. You know we really should give them an actual name.”

“Like giant pain in our behinds and kidnappers?” Gonzales shot right back. “Or GPIOBAK for short. It kinda rolls off the tongue.”

“But the question is, if they had this kind of firepower, why didn’t they send it the first time?” Mimi asked, sitting at the table. “All of us here know we wouldn’t have survived, and they would have saved themselves a good chunk of time.”

“Well, we’re assuming that warship was their standard warship,” I said quietly, fiddling with my datapad. I didn’t like how naked I felt without my hair. Too many people were looking at me all at once and there wasn’t anywhere for my eyes to go. “What if it just happened to be an old model that was on an outer mission, or even on its way to being junked, when they got the distress call from the alien who was here? Maybe they only sent the big guns once their other ship limped home and told them what we were packing.”

“Huh,” Gonzales murmured. “Sometimes you understand these guys a little too easily.”

I shrugged. “I guess I like thinking of all the possibilities.”

“Fair enough. So, what do we do?”

“What do we do indeed?” Mimi asked, rubbing her head.

“I think the answer is fairly obvious,” Gonzales said, the glib expression on her face darkening. “We go to them and we steal our family back.”

“We can’t just go to them,” Eske said. “…can we?” She looked around uncertainly. “I mean, they got at least a two-week head start. I can’t imagine how long it would take us to get there.”

“Too long,” I said. “I think also, this is a conversation for Ciangi and Bahn, maybe they can work something out engineering-wise.”

“Maybe,” Gonzales muttered with a nod. “Or maybe this is something where we need someone with a knack for breaking the rules.”

“And who exactly would that be?” Mimi asked with concern.

“Oh, you know exactly who it is.”

5

The Quickest Way from Point A to B is to Cheat

“So lemme be clear on this. You lot want me to help break all known laws of physics and get ye to a place faster than possible.”

“Basically.”

I watched several emotions flit across Aja’s holo-face as she considered what we were asking.

“You realize the last time you traveled that far, you used a wormhole from a sun that also had a nuclear bomb detonated into it, and that was a wild toss. You want me to somehow accurately do that?”

“That about sums it up,” Gonzales answered again, just as levelly.

“I…” She let out a string of words, laughing the entire time. “You know what? I’m not the one who’s gonna have my hind on the line, so sure. I’ll help ye with yer little project here. And why are you all in a rush? Got another planet to save?”

“The alien race that we already encountered once came back while we were gone and took all the children.”

“All the children?”

“All the children,” Gonzales answered flatly.

“Well, why didn’t you say that first?! Get me those money twins. We have crap to do!”

“Coin twins,” I corrected automatically. “And they’ll be a little busy for a few more minutes. Is there any prep work us grunts and newbies can take care of for you?”

“Wait, is that my Higgens boy?” She peered around as if I would somehow appear in the background of the holo-scanner, but I wasn’t within its path. Letting go of Mimi’s hand, I stood and walked into the area that our tech was holo-projecting to Aja. “Ah! There he is! How have you been?”

“Well, all of my adopted brothers and sisters have been taken and I watched one of the eldest die in Mimi’s arms.”

“Right, straight to the point as always, friend.” She paused for a minute to shuffle through some things below her. A moment later, she held up what looked like a book made of loose paper. I thought I had seen those in a net-museum once. “Alright, here’s what we’re gonna need.”

“But how are we going to test making a temporary wormhole?” Ciangi asked from below the console she was modifying.

“Well, that part’s easy,” Aja said from her ever-present holo. “We replicate the details of your escape.”

“Meaning we make a big boom?” Gonzales asked from her own work station where she had been altering every weapon we had for the past two days.

“A big ol’ boom,” Aja confirmed.

“I know we have been hazy on the details considering we’re still trying to do the basic hardware changes,” Bahn said from somewhere above us where he was suspended from…something. While I had learned a lot about engineering, there was still a whole lot more I needed to learn about how our warship worked. “But I’m still not clear on how we’re going to exactly replicate all the variables from our initial trip while also somehow controlling it enough to follow the alien ship. For that matter, how do we even know where the alien ship has gone? It’s not like we have a tracker on it.”

“Actually, you kinda do,” Aja replied. “Your Mimi friend’s makeup is unique over everything I’ve ever encountered in my long life. I figure we create a sort of scanner set only to that, and we can set an amazing range on there.”

“Really? A scanner that goes lightyears?” Ciangi asked skeptically.

“You know, if y’all aren’t going to believe me, then I can just go.”

“No!” Mimi snapped from where she had been pacing quietly. “We have done stranger things. I believe in your skill.”

“You know, normally, I would say that’s an exaggeration, but considering what you’ve all been through, I think you’re actually right.”

That seemed to quell the doubts of the coin twins, but it didn’t do a lot to calm all of us. It had been two days since the birth of Harunya’s daughter and while we were working around the clock as best we could, there was still so much to do.

And the time definitely hung heavily on Mimi. She helped as best she could, basically being the grunt for all of us, but she knew even less about ship engineering than I did. However, every second she was away from her brothers and sisters seemed painful to her, and I certainly couldn’t blame her.

We’d been up against some insane deadlines before, but nothing like this. Nothing that had thousands of children hanging on the line. And as we frantically worked toward our goal, I couldn’t help but wonder: what if it was too late?

I tried to ignore that thought, never giving it the time of day—especially when time was so precious, but occasionally, it would float to the top.

We didn’t know how long they’d had the children already. We didn’t know what they wanted to do with them. Logic said why take them if they were just going to kill them, but there was always the chance they just wanted to use them for scientific experimentation, or to destroy them in a contained environment. The thought made my stomach churn, and I imagined Mimi was going through much of the same.

“Higgens!” Aja’s voice surprised me out of my reverie, and I looked up from some of the safety hardware I was dismantling.

“Yes?” I asked her floating face. Normally, holos projected full bodies and scenes within a certain field, but it seemed that Aja had altered hers to just show her giant, disembodied head.

“How’s the shielding coming along?”

“Still dismantling some of the failsafes so I can put in the…thing you had me make yesterday.”

“That thing is an illegal process converter,” she said, sounding far too excited over a single small mass of wires and crystal parts. “It’s going to allow you to divert way more energy to the shields than was allowed before our, uh, modifications. I think you’ll find it’ll serve you well when you’re hurtling through a wormhole at lightning speeds.”

“I’m glad you think so,” I said idly, continuing through the instructions that she had given me that morning.

“Oh, I know so. Just make sure you do it right, ya know. Otherwise, you might just all end up blowing up in a space that’s neither here nor there and maybe not even a part of the fabric of reality.”

“Comforting,” Ciangi remarked dryly, still under her console.

“What can I say? I’m here to get you guys across the universe so you can all be heroes once again, not hold your hand and tell you it’ll be alright. So, let’s keep on crackin’ y’all. We keep on going at this rate, we can have ya hurtling toward either death or rescue in another two days.”

“Another two days,” Mimi echoed under her breath, so quiet even I almost didn’t hear her, and I was always listening for what Mimi might say. “Just another two days.”

6

Do or Die, but Preferably not Die

“And you guys are sure you went down the preliminary checklist?” Aja’s floating head asked us, for once the tone honest instead of layered with sarcasm and puns.

“We are,” Bahn said confidently. “We’ve gone through it three times, in fact.”

“But the time for testing is done,” Mimi said, her tone determined. “It’s time to either succeed or fail.”

It had been a busy two and a half days since I had finished with the shielding alteration I had to do, and we’d basically been working around the clock. Even Eske had been pitching in from time to time between her hours tending to Harunya.

Apparently, I’d never been educated on how long it took a woman to actually recover from birthing a child. I had always thought they’d need a good sleep and then that would be that, but apparently, there was a whole healing process involved.

I just wished there was somewhere we could have left the woman behind. Not because I thought she would slow us down, but because if we messed up, I wanted at least one of us to live. Well, two of us.

But leaving her behind would mean putting her alone on a planet that had recently been ransacked when it was clear that she had a whole lot more healing to do. So that really wasn’t an option either.

Besides, we had Eske’s family in the hold too, as well as the rescued baby mimic, since we really couldn’t leave anyone behind in that mess.

“I like your determination, girl, but I’m feeling way more nervous than I should be about this kind of thing.”

“You and me both,” Ciangi muttered. “Everyone ready for me to engage the engines and take to orbit?”

My hand slipped into Mimi’s and our fingers interlaced. “Ready,” I said, giving her a nod.

“Ready,” Bahn echoed.

“Let’s do this,” Eske said, Harunya sitting in a medical hover-chair we had printed for her. It was amazing what kind of supplies the medical room had in their database.

“I believe in all of you,” was the woman’s calm reply, her baby letting out a coo as if she too agreed.

“Alright, friends. Here goes nothing.” She began to engage the engines from the pilot seat. Normally, that was Gonzales’s job, but for the initial launch after such intense meddling in our ship’s already pretty complicated systems, it made sense that an engineer was carefully taking us through each step.

The engines buzzed to life, rumbling and thrumming beneath our feet. There was a solid three seconds as it picked up in pace and pitch, but we didn’t explode into a fiery end.

“Well, that’s encouraging,” Gonzales remarked.

“Let’s not get our hopes up too early,” Ciagni said before hitting the comms. “Bahn, I’m about to initiate and exit from the atmosphere. How are things looking down there?”

“So far, every reading is in the green. The fields on our internal environment control are inching toward yellow though, so I’m diverting power from the lower decks for that.”

“Good. Make sure you keep an eye on the internal gravitational generators. I’m short enough as it is.”

“Heard. Preparing to leave orbit. I highly advise that everyone buckles up.”

He didn’t need to tell me twice. As we lifted into the air, I could feel that the ship was inherently different. I couldn’t quite say how, but I could say that I had flown around in it enough to know how it felt, and right then it definitely didn’t feel like it was supposed to.

But hopefully that feeling was a sort of stumbling into success feeling instead of a “we’re about to die” feeling.

The rattling and vibrating picked up in earnest as we moved to the higher levels of the atmosphere, and I found myself gripping Mimi’s hand once more. Funny, I had never been much of a physical person before her, but I guess I had changed a lot since I had met her.

“Engaging the shield system now,” Ciangi said. “I hope you did a good job, Higgens.”

Yup, definitely a whole lot. There had been a time where I couldn’t help with anything beyond being a wrench monkey. Now I had taken on an entire project by myself.

Hopefully, I hadn’t messed it up.

There was another, competing thrum at a different frequency and for a moment, it seemed like the conflicting vibrations were going to rip us apart. I gritted my teeth, sure that this was the moment we would fall to pieces, but then the two found a common ground and we were shooting toward the final atmospheric layer between us and space.

“Leaving the planet in three…two…”

She didn’t even need to say one, the feeling of us rocketing out into space was such a stark difference between rattling through the planet’s thick atmosphere. Like a hot knife sliding through butter, we glided through the great void.

“Wow. We made it,” Ciangi said with a breath.

“Step one done,” Eske murmured. “About five more to go, each one harder than the last.”

“Well, now that we know at least part one has gone well,” Gonzales said, far more chipper than she should, “I guess I’ll take over the helm while Ciangi goes down to engineering for more damage control?”

“Sounds good to me,” the blonde said, undoing her buckles and sliding out of the seat. “That was just plain uncomfortable. Give me like five minutes to get down there.”

“Five minutes heard.”

Gonzales slid into the seat and called up Aja’s hologram. It took a few minutes before the woman answered, but when she did, she looked outright surprised.

“Huh, y’all are still alive.”

“Why, did you doubt our technological expertise?”

“Well…yeah.”

“Fair enough. But we’re about to boot up the scanner. Any last bits of advice?”

“Yeah, don’t die.”

“Fabulous.” Gonzales rolled her eyes and called down to engineering. “Start up that scanner as soon as you’re ready.”

“Booting up now while I’m waiting for Ciangi,” Bahn said. “Eske, how’s Harunya?”

“We’re all buckled up here with the wee little babe in a secured infant containment unit. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure they’re protected.”

I could hear Bahn’s sigh of relief even over the comms.

“Thank you,” he said before returning to his normal engineering tone. “Scanner at forty percent boot. Gonzales, you might want to kill the engines and hold our position to get a good reading.”

“Alright. Killing our momentum now.”

This time, I didn’t feel the transition of our speed, which was impressive in and of itself. One moment, we were moving and then the next…we weren’t.

“Wow, that was smooth,” Gonzales remarked with a whistle. I definitely agreed, but before I could verbalize that, Bahn’s voice was crackling over the comm.

“Scanner at ninety-five percent. Ciangi is loading the tissue sample.”

I found myself holding my breath once again while Mimi squeezed my hand. I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing that I had taught her that particular coping mechanism, considering she could easily crush my bones, but I was already down a couple of fingers—what would some crunchy metacarpals hurt?

It seemed to take forever before the nav-system finally let out a series of beeps, and Gonzales leaned over it. “Um… I’ve got like eight readings on here,” she said after a beat.

My heart fell, and even holo-Aja’s face crumpled.

“You sure?”

“Look, I know that I’m only a weapons engineer to y’all, but I know how to count to eight.”

“Okay, so there’s a whole lot of insecurities to unpack there, but we don’t have time for that,” Aja said. “Try narrowing the variable of allowance to a single percent.”

“A single percent for a margin of error?” Ciangi said dubiously over the comms. “I know that we did some improvements, but that’s a little extreme, isn’t it?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. You might as well try.”

“You heard her,” Gonzales urged.

There was another hesitation before Bahn responded, “Changing margin of error now.”

There was another delay while we waited, every second weighing at my heart and soul, until finally it beeped again.

“Alright! I’m down to two readings!” Gonzales crowed. “One for right here and one for, uh…” She paused and reached over to the nav-system, shrinking the map down on one of its panels and squinting. “Very far away.”

“Holy crap, that worked,” Aja’s hologram muttered.

“And to think you ever doubted us,” Eske said over the comms.

“Alright, I’m putting in the coordinates now. Engineering, you ready to fire those warheads?”

“Only if you’re ready to catapult us around the planet.”

“I’m plugging in the flightpath now.”

“I guess this is where I’ll take my leave of ya,” Aja said. “If we get this right, the transmission will cut off as soon as you’re past the event horizon of the wormhole and I don’t really need to be takin’ up any of your ship’s resources before then.”

“Thank you, Aja,” I said, giving her a nod even though I knew she wouldn’t see it. “If we never meet again, I’d—”

“Ah, shut it with that crap. You’ve done some great things, Mister Higgens, but I can tell your story ain’t done yet. We’ll talk again, but for now, you get those kids, got it?”

“Got it,” I said, a small smile finding its way onto my face.

“Flightpath is in the system. Are we ready to see just how good we are at what we do?” Gonzales asked.

“Yes,” Mimi said breathlessly. She hadn’t spoken in so long that I had almost thought she’d forgotten human speech for a bit. “Let’s go save our family.”

There wasn’t anything else that needed to be added to that, so Gonzales just gave a nod and started up her flightpath.

This time, I could definitely feel as we rocketed forward, my skin pulling back from my face under the strain. I could see from our front-facing viewing shield that we were just shooting off into empty space before eventually curving right back to the planet we had just left.

Closer and closer we zoomed until it felt like we were going to crash right back where we had started, but at the last moment, we started to tilt to the side, just barely skimming the outermost atmosphere.

I didn’t think it would be possible to feel it as we were caught in the natural gravitational pull of the planet and then flung off into space with even more momentum, but I definitely did. My organs seemed to all smoosh to one side and even the rise and fall of my chest was labored before the tension was suddenly broken in less than a second.

“On track for target wormhole location. Twins, fire those missiles.”

“Firing missiles!”

Two pairs of bright, magenta streams shot out far, far ahead of us, almost completely disappearing from vision before an explosion bloomed. Even from so far away, the eruption of energy was truly a beautiful sight of spiraling colors and fire, with the force of it rippling through our ship.

“Uh, that field of destruction is gonna die down before we hit target, right?” Gonzales asked from the helm.

“Of course,” Ciangi answered, and I could hear the nervousness in her voice. “What’s the matter? Don’t you trust us?”

“Now that’s a very loaded question in a time like this.”

“Uh-huh. What you have to worry about is if the wormhole actually forms or not.”

“Oh, is that all?”

“I can’t get a solid reading on it,” Bahn said, cutting in on the nervous banter that the two did so love to slip into. “There’s still too much radiation.”

“I could be wrong,” Mimi said calmly. “But isn’t radiation quite dangerous for your species?”

“Yes,” I answered flatly.

“I see.”

We hurtled toward it, faster and faster, and I could see that the fire wasn’t dissipating fast enough. Wasn’t that supposed to be impossible in space? It being a void and a vacuum all at once, right?

“Uh, we’re getting a little close here.”

“I’m getting some strange readings, but none of them can confirm a viable wormhole.”

“I’m going to need to know whether I need to alter our course in about three seconds,” Gonzales said tightly. “Because if that wormhole is only half-formed, or stabilizing, we could be vaporized on contact. And that’s, like, the good death.”

“I am well aware of the implications, but I can’t help that the radiation from our missiles along with the natural radiation of space is affecting our readings. Especially since all of our ship-level scanners are now wired into the process that’s allowing our nav-system to find the other mimics.”

“Yeah, I’d like some answers, not excus—”

“The wormhole has stabilized behind the radiation cloud!” Ciangi cried, interrupting the two. “Go, go, go!”

I didn’t think it was possible for us to go any faster, but we did, and I was thrown back against my seat, skin pulling once again. It was hard to even keep my eyes open as we shot toward the still fading inferno hovering in space, the energy of it crackling through me.

Closer and closer it rushed until we were about to burst through. I held my breath, waiting for our inevitable demise, only for us to smash through it like an ancient wrecking ball through a brick wall.

One second, we were racing through space, and the next, we erupted into what looked like a kaleidoscope of color. Gone was the eternal velvet black, interrupted by only the occasional star or planet. Instead, we were surrounded by swirls of pink, blue, purple, and teal, all twisting in on each other and lancing out, like some sort of multicolored lightning.

It was beautiful and blinding all at the same time, making me squint while also not wanting to close my eyes until it was all over. My teeth chattered, my muscles tensed, and it felt like my cells were all going to burst into hundreds of thousands of little reverberating pieces.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even turn my head to see any of my comrades. I was just a witness to the incredible feat of science we were accomplishing.

It would be a shame to die in a fiery blaze at the end, all of our progress being lost forever to mankind. I supposed I would just have to hope that we made it out the other end, but at the moment, that was difficult to believe.

The rattling grew even more intense, quadruple of anything I had ever experienced during our many planetary takeoffs. The ship groaned, protesting the strain. Somewhere behind me, or maybe it was even below me, I heard metal buckling, denting, and straining.

Then, as suddenly as it happened, it was over. We popped into space, once more enveloped by the onyx embrace of the void.

And then about ten alarms went off.

“Pull up, pull up!” Ciangi’s voice crackled over the comms. “We were dropped right into an asteroid field!”

“I thought the thing you guys built was supposed to stop us from exiting into death-conditions!” Gonzales cried back, grabbing the controls and jerking them to the side.

This time, I almost did lose my lunch as we suddenly changed directions, and the ship let out several noises of protest.

“This is just like the first time we escaped, except that time, the big death rocks were before we shot through a wormhole that accelerated us well beyond the red-zone of our speed capacity!”

“It’s a prototype,” I could hear Ciangi bite, even over the comm. “It’s not going to be perfect. You can do this.”

“Glad for the faith,” Gonzales said. There was another beep from the comms and she let out a loud curse.

“Is that a planet I’m seeing on my readings?” Ciangi cried.

“Yup. And we’re heading for it too fast to go around it, so prepare for another slingshot.”

“Another?” Bahn asked, and I felt my own interest rise in alarm. I was pretty sure that was not a good idea. “But at the momentum we’re already going, we could—”

“I’m aware, but I’m not the one who made a system that decided to drop us in some of the worse situations possible. So, hold on, I’m about to see how well our shielding is gonna hold up.”

I swallowed, about the only action I was physically capable of as the asteroids gave way only for the dark blue planet to suddenly surge into view.

In a déjà vu-like repeat of how we had started our little jump, Gonzales pushed the ship as hard as it could go until we were almost initiating a landing procedure. Then, at the last second, she changed the bearings until we were being whipped around the planet by its incredible gravitational force.

My vision grew hazy as the g-force exerted itself without discrimination. I knew I had maybe seconds before I lost consciousness, and I fought to force myself to breathe slowly and powerfully.

The moment we broke out of the slingshot was nearly enough to send me over the edge, but I managed to cling to consciousness. The dizziness slowly faded, and by the time I caught my breath, I realized we were floating peacefully in space.

“I think…” Mimi murmured cautiously, undoing her buckles, “…that we did it.”

It took all of us a moment to respond, our puny human bodies still trying to recover after the massive stimuli we had just put them through. But when we did, it was Gonzales who let out a loud whoop.

“You bet your shapeshifting bottom we did!” She let out another whoop before sobering. “Now, let’s find the little ones, shall we?”

“Yes,” Mimi said, her face hardening with determination. “Hopefully, we’re not too late.”

7

Needle in a Haystack

Normally, I felt such an extreme experience would require a little downtime and recuperation, but we just didn’t have that time. Granted, most of our adventures involved flying from one insane situation or another, so maybe this was what all of it had been preparing us for: the singular most important mission of our lives.

But the moment all of us caught our breaths was the moment we were all moving again. Eske checked in from medical that everything was alright then rushed to engineering to be the wrench-monkey for repairs.

Ciangi and Bahn started narrowing the scanner we had jerry-rigged to go from a range that was looking for a general planet location to one that could find precise coordinates. I wasn’t entirely sure how that entire process worked, but I knew it took some rewiring, reworking, and then recalibrating. Not exactly a quick process.

And Gonzales? Well, Gonzales busied herself with quickly mapping out the area she was in as best she could. I had no doubt that in her head, she was going over all the places a battle could be staged or a quick escape if we needed to regroup. While the weapons engineer had always been great in a fight, I could tell that her skills had been far more honed during all the time we had been apart. I couldn’t tell if that was a good or a bad thing, but for the moment, it was useful and that was all that mattered.

As for myself, I hopped on the extra-ship communications to see if I could glean any info trails or other messages. Chances were, we wouldn’t be able to understand them considering the aliens’ language was completely unknown to us, but maybe we could find a frequency and track it without waiting for all the reworking from our scanner. For all we knew, the ship we were looking for was still days away and our wormhole only did us the favor of dropping us off in the same solar system.

I was just scrolling through the chatter when Mimi suddenly snapped her head in my direction.

“What was that?” she asked, leaning over the display. While she was incredibly smart, smarter than I’d ever be, I was pretty sure that she had never learned what any of the readings meant.

“What do you mean?” I asked, my fingers automatically flicking back to the frequency I had just been on.

“That!” she said, her hand shooting to mine to make sure I didn’t change the frequency anymore. “It’s them! They’re speaking!”

“I can’t hear anything,” I said, turning up the output as high as I could. All there was to me was a faint static. “What are you hearing?”

“It’s… It’s quiet, and garbled. But it’s basically a distress signal, from what I can surmise. It’s broken up, but…” She closed her eyes and seemed to listen deeper. Slowly her human visage started to fade, and her skin grew the darkest black with little spikes starting to poke out of it. “They have us. Deep in the ship. There’s…large containment vessels all around them. Small crew. Ten? Twenty? Armed. They’re hungry. No food in days. They’re being kept weak. They… They…” Her words faded, and she returned to her completely human form.

“They what?” Gonzales asked, making me jump. I had no idea that she had even come up behind us.

“They’re scared,” Mimi finished, her face even paler than usual. “They are very, very scared.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “I think all of us have been in similar situations and being afraid is quite the natural reaction.”

Gonzales shivered. “I wouldn’t want to wish that on anyone.”

“Me either,” Mimi said. “Starvation is not fun, and neither is containment. Imagining them both together is…” She shuddered as well. It seemed even after our many months together, she was still learning human traits. “Unpleasant.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

The conversation faded for a moment, but the quiet didn’t last long as the comm buzzed to life beside us.

“We’re booting the configurated scanner now,” Ciangi said, sounding exhausted. “How’s it going on your end?”

“We may have found a distress signal.”

“A distress signal? Are you for real?”

“That is a curious question,” Mimi answered. “Why would you question the reality of whether we are—”

“Yes, we’re serious,” Gonzales interrupted.

“Send it down here, man. We can put it into our scanner to make sure that we get an accurate reading. Having two points of data instead of just the skin sample makes this much more foolproof.”

“Sending down,” I answered before recording the sample in our logs and then uploading it to our database for them to access. Once that was done, I turned back to Mimi and Gonzales.

“That’s step two then. How about we gear up for step three?”

Both women nodded.

“Step three indeed.”

“We have the location!”

I looked up from the bowl of soup I was hastily slurping down. Sure enough, the comm in the mess hall was indeed buzzing away with Bahn’s voice.

“Truly?” Mimi said, jumping to her feet and knocking her own nutrient slush to the floor. It was the only food-like thing she could eat while not in her natural form, and it smelled like iron and cleaning solution. I made a note to myself to clean that up later before it permanently discolored the floor.

Huh, I guessed there were some maintenance man tendencies still within me. Some things never changed.

“That was less than half an hour,” I said in surprise, setting the bowl down. I hadn’t known the next time I would be able to eat, so I had made sure to get at least some nutrients in me. Ever since we had found our home massacred, we hadn’t exactly had the best diet, and I had a feeling that I would need all the strength I could get.

“I know,” Ciangi’s voice answered. “It’s pretty great, right?”

“As humble as ever, I see,” Harunya’s voice added before Eske cut in.

“So, is this the part where we chase down a ship that’s bigger, stronger, and better equipped than us?”

“No,” Gonzales answered from beside me, having taken the extra seconds to actually finish her soup. “This is where we sneak up on a skeleton crew and show them exactly why you don’t mess with our family.”

8

Hush

“Engines running on silent,” Ciangi’s voice whispered through the comm as we gently flew through space.

All of us knew that we could probably shout at the top of our lungs and it still wouldn’t affect anything, but that fact didn’t make a difference. Everything was riding on us not being picked up by whatever scanners these aliens had in place, so we were taking every precaution possible.

“Let’s hope Aja’s scramblers and cloakers work,” I heard Eske breathe beside me. Originally, I had thought she would stay with Harunya, but the woman was busy setting up something in the med-bay that I wasn’t privy to. I didn’t quite think it was the time to be keeping secrets, but I also knew it wasn’t the time to try to argue with a new mom, so that was that.

“I mean, would she have been forcibly indentured by one of the biggest crime families on Earth if she wasn’t able to do what she said she could do?” I pointed out in response.

More than anyone else in our little crew, I trusted Aja. She had a talent for going just outside the rules of things that I respected. Following rules and regulations to a ‘T’ had been my bread and butter when I was younger. When I finally went rogue to save Mimi, I had never looked back, and I felt like Aja understood that more than anybody else. Even Mimi.

Or maybe it was because I was just desperate for a mother figure. I didn’t know. Psychology was well beyond my expertise.

“Alright, fair point,” Eske conceded. “How close are we?”

Gonzales simply pointed to the nav, not moving her eyes from the center of our view. “We’re going to try to swing up along its flightpath and hide behind a planet, so we can run covert scans on it.”

“Oh, is that all? Just predicting an alien vessel’s alien flightpath to their alien home planet.”

Mimi snapped from beside me, “I finally understand what you guys mean when a word suddenly doesn’t sound like a word anymore.”

“Really?” Gonzales asked, still not looking back. “It’s been over a year and you finally got that?”

“Forgive me. I’ve been occupied by a couple of things. Such as finding my own people, saving them from slavery, and then being captured and tortured by your species.”

“Point taken,” Gonzales said with a chuckle. “Now, quiet. I’m concentrating.”

We did indeed fall silent as we drifted through space. Although anticipation and nerves were crawling up and down my spine, I tried my best to look out of the window and enjoy the view. After all, I was seeing planets that no human had ever set their eyes on. This was the second time I had been flung across the galaxy into an entirely new system, and I was going to try to enjoy what few seconds of peace we had.

But those seconds turned out to be several solid hours. The tension was quite draining, with my eyes constantly sweeping space for any sign of the ship we were chasing, but I couldn’t look away.

None of us could. The entire ship was silent and wound tighter than an ionic top, the only sound being the dampened squeaks that managed to escape from all the stress injuries from earlier.

I was pretty sure over five hours had passed before we finally heard the tiniest of blips on the nav-system. My breath cut off, and I leaned forward from where I was still sitting at the communication station.

“We have a reading,” Gonzales whispered. “They’re within an hour of us. It’s plotting out a more solid estimation of their trajectory now.”

“Man, if we survive this,” Eske whispered, “we’re gonna owe Aja one heck of a thank you.”

She wasn’t kidding. Sure, we were running all prototypes and there was a good chance that we could explode at any minute, but we wouldn’t even be that far if it wasn’t for Aja and her insane, law-breaking tech.

“The plotting’s done. Setting our course now. We’ll be hiding in the crevasse of a moon that they’re passing. It should give us a big enough depth of field to get a full scan of their layout.”

“Good,” Mimi said with a nod. “And while you do that, I’m going to try to talk to them.”

That surprised me, and I looked to her with wide eyes. “You think you can do that? You’ve never tried to broadcast your subharmonic communication.”

“True, but if the children can figure it out, then so can I.”

I reached out to her, pulling her to the station. “I believe in you,” I said, taking in all the features of the face I loved so much. “Let me show you how to work this thing, and I’m sure you’ll be having conversations with them in no time.”

She smiled gratefully at me and I went about showing her all I knew about that particular system. Which, as it turned out, wasn’t a whole lot. Within five minutes, Mimi was sitting there on her own and I was left with nothing to do but wait, just like Eske.

Thankfully, the comm buzzed right back to life a few moments later.

“Higgens, what are you up to right now?” Ciangi whispered.

“Actually, not a whole lot.”

“Good. Please come down to med-bay. Bahn needs me in the engineering room and I’m not done here yet.”

I was tempted for a moment to ask what she could possibly need me for and if it involved anything similar to changing a diaper, but I quickly pushed those words down and headed out. Mimi gave me a sort of half-wave, her entire human face gone as she tried to get our very much people-designed system to pick up the part of her language that my species couldn’t even hear.

I shook my head as I rode the elevator down to the med-bay. I only spoke common, some loose English, and now the bare bones of the standard programming language Jixbyl. All of those shared the same premises though, audible sounds that related to the same alphabet, or at least similar.

But Mimi? She had gone from speaking a language that I couldn’t hear all the way to speaking common better than anyone else I knew. The mimic race was certainly a formidable one, and I didn’t think these aliens knew what they were getting into.

Not at all.

That was a pleasant thought to end my journey on and I stepped into the med-bay expecting to fulfill some sort of baby-related task.

That was definitely not what I got.

Ciangi was barely visible, her upper body completely submerged behind a mass of wires coming out of the panel she had ripped from the wall. She also had the old carcass of what I recognized as the flying panel from one of the fighters that had been damaged in our first fight.

“What are you even doing?” I asked, staring at the mess and her two small legs sticking out of the wall. She answered me, but the sound was so obscured that I just looked to Harunya for explanation.

“We had a talk last night,” the woman answered softly, Asha asleep in her arms. “And if we find these aliens and manage to get the jump on them, most likely what will happen is all of you either board their ship or help with the distraction. Even leaving one of you here to steer the ship would be taking away from your number when you’ll really need everyone you can get.”

“So, you’re going to fly the ship?” I asked in surprise. “From down here?”

She nodded. “Naturally, with my injuries, there is no way I’d be able to make it up to the bridge and maintain any sort of flight pattern. But if we were to set something up here that I can control while in this bed and place Asha’s containment unit next to me, I don’t see why I couldn’t hold the most basic of holding patterns.”

“Have you ever flown before?” I asked dubiously. I knew that Harunya was an incredibly accomplished doctor, but as far as I knew, medical school didn’t have a unit on space-flight.

She paused a moment, giving me a patient look. “You do know that I was contracted through the military, right? The requirements I had to get my position were the same as yours to be on that mining ship.”

“Oh. That I didn’t know, actually.”

Ciangi finally slid from the wall, covered in dust and what I assumed were insulation fibers. “Plus, if we all die on what is essentially an insane suicide mission, she can beat a hasty retreat.”

Harunya’s patient look turned sharp. “But that’s not going to happen. You’re going to be successful and save the children, and we’re all going to finally have about three seconds of peace before the next thing hits us.”

“Uh…right. That’s exactly what’ll happen.” Ciangi looked to me and shrugged. I knew what she meant. The children were more important than any of our lives. Sure, most of us may have not been the same species as them, but that didn’t matter. Between being enslaved by an alien for thousands of years, being forced to kill their parents and live a life of barely-there sentience, then fighting a literal war against an invading species set on revenge, they deserved to finally live their lives.

And we were going to make sure they did.

“So look, I left a pretty simple plan here. I trust you with the rewiring and testing this out. You okay with that?”

I swallowed, allowing myself a second of doubt before abolishing it. This was actually simpler than the shielding upgrade I had done, so I had no reason to fear.

“I got it.”

“Great,” Harunya said brightly. “I’ll have someone to keep me company.”

“Yes, you will,” Ciangi said with a smile before returning her attention to me. “Come on, Higgens, let’s do a quick walkthrough before I head down to engineering. You’ve got maybe four hours to finish up what should be about a two-hour task, but this has to be up and running before we leave the ship. I’m adamant on that point.”

“Sounds great to me.”

I finished the wiring with time to spare. Ciangi was right, she had written out a very good list of tasks which made me wonder if she always did that for herself or had anticipated needing to run to engineering.

But I supposed in the end, it didn’t matter, because the task was done, and I found myself just sitting and talking with Harunya.

Even on Earth, I didn’t think that we had ever been in a one-on one situation. Almost every time we met was in the coin twins’ presence. In fact, I was sure that every time we had ever interacted had been with either of them on her arm.

She was a nice lady. Smart. And although I could tell that she was clearly aware of how dire the situation was, there was a defiant sort of hopefulness to her.

“Hey, guys,” Gonzales’ voice came over the comms, soft and whispery. “I’m about to approach the moon. Once we’re settled, I want zero cross-floor movement until they’re out of scanner range, so get to where you want to be now.”

I looked at Harunya over the interface that I had posted over her bed, almost like a table. “Are you alright being alone?” I asked.

She nodded. “I’m not alone here. I’m on a ship with all of the people I love.”

“Well, you know what I mean.”

“But I don’t think you do.” She reached out, her hand resting over mine. “I was trapped under that piece of metal for days upon days. The only drink I had was my own blood and condensation on the metal around me as it cooled. I had no food, and I was either freezing cold or burning hot depending on where the fire was raging in the ruins in those moments.

“I was so scared, and I was in so much pain. I was certain that me and my precious little child were going to die there. And during those dark thoughts, I was more alone than I ever could have possibly been.

“But then you, my family, found me, and I wasn’t alone anymore. And I don’t think I could ever possibly be alone like that again.” Her face hardened ever so slightly, and I felt strength emanating from her. “Those children are all alone with those aliens, so you do whatever it is you have to do to make sure they never have to feel that way again too. You got it?”

I nodded, understanding pouring through me. I guessed I hadn’t really given much thought to all the trauma that Harunya had faced in the attacks—everything had been going so fast since then—but she was way more resilient than I probably would have been.

“I got it.”

“Good. Now get up to the bridge. Goodness knows they need you.”

I gave her hand one last squeeze before rushing up, and just in time, apparently, because Gonzales was about to boot up the scanner.

“Ready?” she asked, looking back at us.

“Ready,” everyone answered in a wave from their various parts of the ship.

“Alright, starting the scanner now. Hopefully, they’ll be within range soon.”

“And if they aren’t?” Eske whispered.

“Then we wait.”

9

Know Thine Enemy

Several times, I found myself holding my breath as I waited for the scanner or the nav-system to give any indication that the aliens were coming within range. It was only after the corners of my vision went dark that I would remind myself that inhaling was just as important as exhaling, and I would start that pesky breathing pattern up until I forgot again.

But just when I felt like I might actually go mad from all the waiting, there was the tiniest flicker of a blip on our nav.

“They’re within range,” Gonzales whispered. “Now we’re going to be able to see just how big a ship we’re dealing with.”

“Surely it cannot be that large,” Mimi murmured from the comm station, only the bottom half of her face reconstituting itself into human form so she could speak, leaving the other half as prickly obsidian smoothness. “The children are still saying that they’ve only seen about twenty their entire time there.”

“Are they responding to you?” Gonzales asked sharply, excitedly. “They can hear you?!”

“No, they’re just stating random facts in a loop. I couldn’t hear them without this communication station so maybe they cannot hear me. Nevertheless, I will keep trying.”

“Yeah, do what you can.”

“Uh, guys?” I murmured, not wanting to interrupt. “I thought ships were supposed to be marked in red for their general shape.”

“They are,” Gonzales answered simply.

“Then why is the ship just a thick red line on the nav-screen?”

Gonzales’s head whipped to where I was pointing, and she too saw the thick line. “Oh…my gosh,” she breathed. “That’s the ship.”

“That’s the ship?” Eske breathed. “That’s nearly a quarter of a screen. There’s no way it’s that big.”

“It’s not,” Gonzales murmured as the red line grew longer and longer. “It’s bigger.”

This time, we fell silent from shock instead of fear. How was it possible for a ship to be that big? Even our own vessel, the second biggest that Earth had ever created, was about the size of a wide thumbnail on the display. But the alien ship? It was a whole finger and then some.

My heart hammered in my chest as it came closer and closer, and closer, until finally the craft passed in front of the moon we were nestled in. My jaw dropped the moment I saw the tip of its pointed snout, my mind struggling to comprehend what it was seeing.

The ship was taller than the entire moon.

Of course, it made sense that they would have to have a huge vessel to carry the thousands of mimics they had abducted, but the sheer scale of the thing was massive. How were we ever going to take that down?! It was impossible.

Then again, so was just about every other thing we did.

Yet somehow none of us breathed another word until the ship had passed nearly a half an hour later. They were running at a low speed, which was an interesting choice, but I was sure that even the fastest speed would have left its journey across our view still pretty lengthy.

But eventually, that impossibly long red line disappeared from our nav-display and I let out a long sigh.

“That physically hurt me,” Gonzales muttered, dropping her head to rest against the pilot’s dash.

“The scanner is compiling the info it picked up now. We should have a blueprint soon.”

“And that blueprint is gonna include how many life signs are on there?”

“Well, the life signs that we know how to read, yes,” Bahn continued. “Reminder that this is an alien vessel and they could have a litany of things that we have no idea how to search for.”

“Thank you for that cold dose of realism,” Gonzales said, rolling her eyes and giving me a knowing look. I didn’t know why she felt the need to draw me into her ire. I wanted to know all the variables of what might go wrong ahead of time. “How long will the compiling take?”

“About an hour.”

“Ugh. More waiting.”

“How did that secondary dash come along?” Ciangi cut in, clearly addressing me.

“Wait, secondary dash? What?” Gonzales gave me a much sharper look. “What do you mean?”

“I’ll explain later,” I muttered under my breath before addressing the smaller of the coin twins. “We finished it. You’re welcome to go up and take a look for yourself and test it. I won’t be insulted.”

“Great. Don’t mind if I do.”

“Hold on, I still wanna know what—”

Suddenly, a sharp warble of sound cut through the bridge, so high-pitched I could barely hear it, but just low enough to feel like it stabbed me in the ear.

“Ow! What the hell!”

Confused, I spun toward where I thought it was coming from to see Mimi on her feet, both of her arms in the air. Well, they were what usually were her arms, but now they were prolonged, metal spikes.

She seemed to startle, and her form quickly returned to human, including her head.

“I did it!” she cried, and I realized that lance of sound had been her subharmonics drifting into a range I could actually hear. “I established communication! They can hear me and respond!”

I jumped up too, definitely excited. “So, you’re saying that we have men on the inside?”

“No, I’m saying that we have almost ten thousand men on the inside.”

“Well,” Gonzales said, smiling goofily. “I’d say that our odds just significantly improved.”

We all sat in the meeting room, tapping our fingers as the scanner finished its last couple of percent worth of compiling. I personally thought it would have been a whole lot more useful to put out energy every twenty percent or so, so that we didn’t have to try to scramble to understand all the info at the end, but I also understood why it couldn’t. A tiny piece of data that it picked up at the end could change whole hunks of previous information that it had told us.

But still, it was definitely grating on my every last nerve.

It was clear that we were all on edge, tensely waiting to see how we were going to successfully take on such a behemoth. Clearly none of us wanted to say it, but these might have been some of the worst odds we had ever been up against, and that was definitely a statement in and of itself.

Finally, the thing gave a beep and our holo-projector began to hum as it processed the deluge of information that was no doubt being shoved into it.

When the imagine finally appeared above the round table, I was even more defeated than I had been just seconds before.

“My goodness, that is a big ship,” Eske breathed, adjusting her goggles. “I just… I thought maybe I was exaggerating it in my mind, but that’s just a big ol’ ship.”

“That could end up being a good thing,” Gonzales said, standing up to look more closely at the thing, using her datapad to twirl the holo this way and that. “Its so big that there’s no way that there could be eyes on every single opening and weak point in the whole giant ship. Right?”

“I mean, that would stand to reason,” I said, looking at the thing. I saw exhaust ports, multiple thrusters, and what definitely looked like multiple versions of the same gun that we had stolen from the original ship we had fought. “But the first thing I would like to know is why they’re going so slowly. They’re in their home territory. If I were them, I’d be jetting as hard as I could back to my planet.”

“Unless they can’t,” Bahn said.

“Come again?”

“Our gun back at home was destroyed, wasn’t it? If they targeted it, that most likely means it was an actual threat to them. What if it actually did some damage before they took it down?”

“Really? You think our one dinky gun was able to do all that?” Gonzales asked, rubbing her chin.

“Yeah. Especially if Harunya was able to divert a significant level of shielding to it. It’s quite possible that they might have underestimated its power considering all the improvements that we have done in the past year.”

“Here, I’m going to have my datapad run the info we got to see if it can find any visible damage. Give it a few seconds.”

It took more than a few seconds, but compared to how long we had been waiting, a full minute was nothing. Once the info did finish processing, the holo lit up with paths of bright purple streaking through different parts of the ship.

“They’re leaking something,” Mimi said, pointing to a faint smattering of green beside the ship. “Bahn, have your datapad figure out what that is.”

“Coming up.” Another few breaths. “Apparently, it’s nuclear waste output. But…different from ours.”

“Different from ours how?” I asked.

“I don’t know. There’s some compounds in it that just aren’t in our databases, but it does indeed read as nuclear waste even with that missing info.”

“Nuclear waste, you say?” Mimi asked. “Well, I know exactly what to do with that.”

“Uh, I’m not sure you should just go into random alien ships and chew on their waste output,” I said cautiously. “We have no idea if that’s actually edible for you like ours is.”

“I’m willing to risk it,” Mimi said determinedly. “Besides, I can always test it with what’s leaking on the outside. And then, once I’m in, I’ll be able to slip in with the other mimics and we can plan in earnest.”

“And just how do you expect us to get you close enough to that thing without being spotted?”

“Well, that part’s easy,” she said with a smile. “There are almost ten thousand little mimics in their hold. I’m pretty sure we can ask them to make quite the ruckus and they would be more than happy to oblige.”

“Alright, so we have the how you get in,” I said, still not liking this plan at all. “But what do we do once you’re in?”

“I…I think I might actually have an idea about that,” Ciangi said, raising her hand. “I could be wrong, but I thought I saw a total of forty life signs total on our scan, right?”

“Let me double-check,” Bahn said, quickly hitting a couple of buttons. Sure enough, in addition to the purple lines and the green spatter, several clusters of red blips started to glow on the holo.

“Forty-three, to be exact.”

“Okay, forty-three on a ship that huge isn’t nearly enough for them to be everywhere all the time. Or even in most places at all times. There are most likely some pretty damaged areas of the ship that they’ve cut off to save resources, and I vote we stay within those areas while we take out the crew one by one.”

“So essentially, this is a sneakier, larger scale version of that one time we hijacked a space station?” I asked, trying to go through all the variables in my head and see if what she was saying was indeed possible.

But Ciangi’s eyes just went wide for a moment. “You know, I totally forgot we did that. Huh, how sad is it that hijacking a space station doesn’t even make it into the top ten craziest things I’ve done.”

“You call it sad,” Eske said, “but I just wish I had been there to see it.”

“Looking back, it wasn’t actually all that exciting.”

“Guys, can we focus here?” Gonzales said, pulling us all back to the matter at hand. “So, we use the mimics to sneak Mimi close enough so she can get in. She then gives us what interior readings she can while on the inside then joins up with her brothers and sisters while we get inside. We make it in through one of the damaged areas in our envirosuits, then we stay there until Mimi makes her first snatch and assumes their form. Is there anything we’re missing?”

“Yeah,” Eske said, pushing her goggles up her nose, a habit I noticed she did when she was especially nervous. “My family is in the hold and I’m not keen on leaving them floating in space in case this plan goes belly up. So, who’s staying on the ship to fly it and work as a rescue if we need to get out quick?”

“Funny you should mention that,” Harunya’s voice echoed from the comm down in the med-bay. “I have a solution to offer.”

10

Hitching a Ride

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” I said, hooking myself to the chunk of the moon that we had blasted out of the fissure.

“Really?” Gonzales asked, her cybernetic eye glowing brightly in the darkness of space. “Out of all the crazy stuff we’ve done, this is what you can’t believe?”

“Yeah,” Ciangi added on nonchalantly. “This isn’t even the first time we’ve used some sort of celestial debris as cover.”

Eske shook her head beside me, still securing herself to the rock. “Boy, what all did I miss out on before I joined you guys? I don’t remember that being in the story.”

“Some details of how we hijacked a giant mining ship weren’t made available to the public. Apparently, there was worry that some people might try to replicate what we did.”

“I guess it’s just us who are replicating what we did,” I said with a shrug. “So that all worked out anyhow.”

“I don’t know if you would call this working out,” Bahn said. “Let’s wait until we get Mimi into the ship, and maybe then we can say it might possibly have a greater chance of working out than zero.”

“Aw, come on,” Ciangi said, ribbing him. “Have a little faith.”

“A little faith is all I have nowadays.”

“Are we all secure?” Mimi said, interrupting the banter. It felt like it had been ages since we had spoken to each other like old times, and it was a welcome change. Especially since this really could be the last time all of us would be all together.

“Almost,” Eske said, finishing tying herself off. “Alright, I got it.”

“Gonzales, are you sure those charges and thrusters you set won’t blow us up or notify the ship of our presence?” I asked.

“I mean, as sure as I can be.”

“Right, I guess that’s the best I can hope for.”

“Everyone ready?” Mimi asked.

There was a murmur of agreement and I took a deep breath, fogging up the visor of my envirosuit before the controls cleared the condensation.

“Charges releasing now,” Ciangi said before I heard her press a button on the control box attached to her waist.

There was a slight delay, but I heard the sputtering of explosives and then we were shuttling away from the top of the fissure and heading out into space.

“We’ve got maybe about a half-hour before we catch up with the ship’s impulse power,” Ciangi reiterated as we flew through the dark void.

“Is that all?” Eske asked. “I felt like it would be longer. It’s been a couple hours since they fully passed out of our scanner range, right?”

“We’re a whole lot smaller than them and their ship seems to be crippled.”

“Huh, I guess it pays to just belt yourself to a small rock and fly through space.”

“Yeah, something like that.”

I didn’t talk, however, and just focused on Mimi’s face. Or at least what I could see of it. She was holding onto the rock by herself rather than being strapped to it like the rest of us, but that was mostly because she needed to be able to spring off it quickly. Besides, considering she could shift her fingers into rock-piercing daggers, she didn’t have to worry about being flung into the void like we did.

Also, she didn’t have to breathe in space either. That certainly made a difference in her level of fear.

The minutes ticked by, our envirosuits doing their best to keep us warm and breathing. But the more time passed, the more and more the ultimate cold of space began to leech into our bodies, reminding me of just what was beyond the polymer protecting us from the depths of space.

“The ship should be coming into view soon,” Gonzales said, eyeing something on the old arm-scanners that Bahn had made for us before everything went to hell in a handbasket. “You might want to start talking to your friends now, Mimi.”

“Turning my comm to broadcast,” she said, fiddling with her handheld scanner as well.

Just like before, her face slipped away, leaving only her natural shiny blackness. With no mouth or eyes, it was wholly strange to see her features vibrate as she sent messages across the vast gap between us and the ship. It was even stranger to have absolutely zero idea of what she was saying.

It lasted for several moments, all of us deathly silent so we didn’t somehow accidentally tip off the aliens to our presence, and when her face finally came back as her comm clicked off, I couldn’t help but heave a huge sigh of relief.

“Did they get it?” I asked, almost afraid to ask.

Mimi nodded. “I was able to put the knowledge of how to shift into something in their mind. All of them are going to do that at once, and the sudden shifting of mass should certainly make quite the ruckus. That should be enough to distract them while you close the final distance, Gonzales.”

“What, a loud noise? That’s our great plan?”

“Of course not,” Mimi said matter-of-factly. “I never would have been satisfied with that. But as I’m sure you’ve noticed with all the readings we’ve taken of my species over the years, it expends a great bit of energy to shift. Having ten thousand or so lifeforms—even if they are small lifeforms—suddenly take up that much energy will certainly scramble their instruments, and at that moment, you land, then we activate the same cloaking ability that Aja gave us.”

“Oh. Well, that makes a whole lot more sense then.”

“Of course.” I couldn’t be sure because of my angle, but it looked like Mimi winked at the weapons engineer. “This isn’t my first day invading a vessel that I wasn’t invited onto.”

“Heh, that was almost funny. Guess you’ve had time to develop your sense of humor while I was gone.” Gonzales sighed, but I sensed it was a wry one. “Couldn’t even leave that for me, could you?”

“Pardon?”

“Mimi, we’re about to reach your jumping off point,” Ciangi cut in, and probably just in the nick of time. Sometimes it was difficult to tell when Gonzales was joking or not, and this was definitely one of those times where we were teetering on the edge of something uncomfortable. “Get ready.”

“I am prepared.”

“Now’s also about the time you might want to do that thing you were talking about,” Gonzales added, looking at her own scanner.

“I will do so now.”

If I didn’t know better, I would say she sounded nervous. Mimi was hardly ever nervous. Then again, maybe she had been much of the same at the battle a year ago. Funny how details like that slipped my mind. In my head, she had been the eternally fearless leader who had come in at the last minute to save the day.

“Jump!”

I was surprised by the sheer ferocity that Mimi launched herself up and over the piece of rock that we were all clinging to. I didn’t know how I still kept being astonished by the inherent raw physical power that each mimic had, but I found myself staring off after her in shock.

“And she stuck the landing!” Gonzales hissed in a triumphant whisper a few moments later. I supposed I could have just looked at my own scanner to see that, but I had been far too distracted by watching Mimi’s graceful launch.

“Navigating our rock to the damage point we saw in their hull,” Gonzales said, grabbing her own control-box from her belt. “There’s a chance that we might not have contact for a bit as you’re crawling around their systems and feeding on that nuclear waste. So, if ya gotta say something, now would be the time to do it.”

“…good luck.”

I smiled at those simple words from Mimi’s comm chip that Ciangi had grafted into her collar. Short and simple, just the way she liked it.

“Good luck,” I answered before a spike of static cut me off.

“Wow, she really does work fast,” Gonzales remarked before shaking her head. “Ciangi, you gonna help me land this thing or what?”

“Oh, right. On it!”

It wasn’t exactly the smoothest flight of my life, but the two of them managed to get us close enough for Eske to nearly bend over backwards and shoot a single grappling magnet to the side of their ship. Goodness knew they would probably think a giant rock that was just sitting on their hull was a little strange, which meant we had to ditch our ride while we still had the distraction of Mimi and her followers.

Oh, and also break our way into the ship. I might have forgotten to mention that part earlier.

The grappling magnet secured itself and Eske hooked one of the magnetic carabiners on her utility belt before solidly anchoring the tether into a fissure in the rock.

“Here goes nothing,” she said with a shrug before undoing her buttons and sliding away.

As if in response, our instruments all let out a warble and there was a distinctive sort of mechanical fry over the comm in my suit. For a moment, I felt my oxygen switch out and my visor instantly fogged over, but that terrifying instant passed just as quickly as it happened.

“I’m guessing that was Mimi,” I said, pulling my own carabiner from my belt.

“I hope so, otherwise we’re in for something much worse than we expected.”

“Hurry, guys. We’ve got only a minute or so before our presence is gonna get real risky,” Bahn said, his tone forcibly restrained.

“As if this whole thing wasn’t risky,” I muttered before unbuckling myself from my anchors and let myself drift off the rock.

It’d been a while since I had to do a spacewalk, and once more I was struck by how small and insignificant I was in the grand scheme of things. It would be so easy to just die a cold, unfeeling death out in the void. It was as simple as the tether snapping, or my magnetic carabiner just releasing from the line. Just one little mistake and—

I reached the hull and adjusted my feet to hit the surface. My envirosuit took over, orienting me to ground and making sure my soles locked on.

“Help me with this ionic welder,” Eske said, the front of her visor glowing a vibrant blue as she took the instrument to the hull. “I haven’t used one of these in a while.”

“It has been a shockingly long time since I’ve done any actual maintenance,” I said, kneeling beside her and pulling my own tool from my belt. “Granted, none of my previous assignments involved welding a hole into something. Usually I was more in the repairing line of things.”

“You and me both, friend.”

We shared the smallest of chuckles before concentrating on our work. Normally we would never be able to sneakily weld through such a thick hull on a massive ship, but that was why we specifically targeted an area that was already damaged. We figured that was our only chance.

I heard the faintest thud of Gonzales landing beside us, most of the soundwaves being snatched away by space. “We’ve only got a few more seconds. How are we doing here?”

“Almost done,” I answered, the hot line of metal I was carving nearly having reached Eske’s.

“Good. My instruments are back to normal, so I’m guessing that this ship’s will be soon too, and I’d like to be in there rather than out here when that happens.”

“You afraid they might come out here or something?” Eske joked as Ciangi joined us.

“No, I’m afraid that they’ll point one of their eighty bajillion turrets at us and we can kiss our general arrangement of matter good-bye.”

“Ah, that’s a good point.” There was a pause. “But don’t we have a cloaking device thingy?”

“Yeah, we have one for an emergency, but it’s not like we know for sure that it’ll work. And I’d much rather activate it inside, where we can splice into their system and see if it’s successful, than stand out here and test it.”

“Ah. Right. Maybe I would have gotten more of this if we explained all of the finer details at our little team meeting together.”

“No time. Are you done yet?”

“Eske,” I ordered quickly. “Grab another magnetic anchor, it’s about to fall.”

“Aye-aye,” she said with a bit of a salute before pulling another tool from her utility belt. It only took her a couple of seconds to attach it, and then she was pulling it upwards and setting it to the side.

I took a cannister from my belt and held it to the red-hot edge, spraying it with a super-fast coolant that would make sure we didn’t give ourselves third-degree burns just as Bahn joined us.

“Who wants to go first?” I asked with a sort of wry smile that could only be born out of such situations.

“I’ll make the splash,” Gonzales said, sticking her head into the hole. For a moment, a thousand and one things that could go wrong flashed into my mind, from a hand suddenly dragging her away to spontaneous combustion caused by a simple spark.

Thankfully none of that happened, and the weapons engineer simply found a handhold that allowed her to slowly pull herself into the ship.

“Setting an anchor now. Give me, like, ten seconds.”

“I think we’ve only got about ten seconds,” Ciangi said nervously. “My scanner is telling me the ship is booting up to full power. I’m willing to bet they did an entire system restart, and you know what always comes after one of those.”

“I…uh, don’t actually.”

“A full system scan,” I answered, knowing the answer myself. “It’s the first failsafe in these kinds of situations.”

“Yikes. Alright then. No pressure.” There was the briefest of pauses and then another tether came out of the hole. “There! Now hurry up and get in!”

We didn’t need a more thorough explanation and hastily beat it indoors. I was the last one in, and I grabbed the magnet holding the opening we had cut and dragged it after me, securing it once I was through.

“Eske, help me secure this back in place,” I said, using one of my hands to support it and the other to try to weld the same edge we had just super-cooled.

“Okay, but you better not let go and let me float into space.”

“Wasn’t thinking about doing that, believe it or not.”

She let go of the tether and came up to join me. As she did, I heard Gonzales and the coin twins begin hastily setting up the device that would hopefully completely shield us from any sort of readings.

Hopefully being the key word.

Finally, Eske and I finished resealing the entryway we had made, and I felt the area we were in slowly start to pressurize. Emphasis on slowly. I could feel as the environment shifted, making Eske and I slowly float downward, and the engineers finished their work just before our feet were going to touch ground.

“Done!” she whispered with a quiet fist pump into the air.

“Engaging now,” Ciangi said, using her control box to start up the machine. How they had hooked it up to a power source and calibrated it in less than thirty seconds was beyond me, but I was quite happy for their skill.

The machine gave off a quiet hum and glowed the faintest yellow, like the sun rising after a very dark night, but then that was it.

“Uh… Did it work?” Eske asked, tilting her head and viewing it through the tops of her goggles.

“I don’t know,” Ciangi answered honestly.

“But the fact that we’re still here and there’s not any alarms going off is hopeful,” Bahn said with a nod. “I’m going to attempt splicing into their system now to see if we can get some sort of reading.”

“If we do get one, are we even sure we can understand it?”

“Data is data,” Bahn answered. “The language it’s cushioned in doesn’t matter.”

“If you say so…”

While they were busy doing that and talking back and forth, I busied myself with removing the pack that I had brought with me and laying the contents out on what looked like it might have once been a bed. It was far too bent and blackened now to be sure, but it served well enough for my purposes.

I had never been much for guns, but I had several of them laid out before me, along with the previously used ionic welder, my own grappling magnet, restraints, and a whole lot of explosives.

Hopefully that last one wouldn’t come into play, but I wanted to be ready for anything. This wasn’t a situation I could count on lucking out of like we tended to do. I needed to make sure if there was a dangerous scenario we landed in, I had a way out.

“I think I’m into their system now,” Bahn whispered, breaking me from my reverie. “As far as I can tell, there are no alarms going off now, but there was…something on the starboard side of the ship a few minutes ago.”

“That must have been their response to Mimi,” I said, my stomach flipping as I was reminded of how we were separated at the moment. The last time we had been separated was when we were kidnapped by the coup and I had my head shaved, so I wasn’t eager to repeat anything about that awful process.

“Speaking of which, I’m a bit worried that she hasn’t tried to contact us yet.”

“Maybe she has to be covert for a bit while the guards investigate,” I suggested, trying to be hopeful.

“Or maybe she’s feeding all the little ones some sweet, sweet nuclear energy so they can get back to being their sentient selves.” Eske offered, unloading her own pack.

I nodded agreeably. “Or that.”

“Alright, let’s hope for that then. But for the moment, it seems like we’re on the ship and everyone is none the wiser. We’ve made it behind enemy lines…again.”

Ciangi stood from where she had been crouched by the cloaking device, stretching all the tension out of her small body. “So, what now?”

11

Not the Folks One Wants at a Party

‘What now’ turned out to be even more waiting as Bahn tried to further infiltrate their systems and the rest of us waited for Mimi to establish contact. As hard as I tried to force myself to think positively, all sorts of dark and terrifying thoughts managed to wiggle their way into my mind.

I didn’t like it.

But I couldn’t exactly help it either. Mimi was such a huge part of my life that I couldn’t imagine existing without her. If it weren’t for her, I probably would have always believed that I was some moronic screwup that wasn’t even good enough for the maintenance job I had. That I was nothing, and I would always amount to nothing.

Knowing Mimi had opened my eyes to the fact that I was just…different. Sure, I didn’t process things like other people. And yeah, I could get overstimulated and sometimes social cues flew right over my head, but I almost had my engineering degree, and I had saved my friends’ lives just as much as they had saved mine. We were a unit, and I didn’t want to imagine what I would be like without any of them. Being apart from Gonzales for a year had been hard enough.

“Uh, guys, we’ve got a problem here,” Ciangi said, standing up from where she was huddled by Bahn, reviewing some of the information he was siphoning.

“What’s going on?” Gonzales asked, crossing to her.

“We’ve got a lifeform approaching us.”

“What, really?”

“Yeah, and it fits the general parameters of all the rest of the lifeforms on this vessel, meaning it’s probably an alien.”

“But there’s no alarms going off?” I reiterated, pulling up my gun.

“Not that I know of.”

“Well, we’re missing something then,” Eske said, grabbing one of my weapons as well.

“Let’s go on either side of the door.” Gonzales slipped into giving orders quite naturally. “Try to keep it quiet. If we mess this one up, we could blow this whole thing before we even get started.”

“Let’s not do that,” I said, pressing myself against the wall.

The mood grew more and more tense as they drew closer, and when the door of the place finally creaked open, I had my gun cocked and at the ready.

A large, yellowy foot stepped inwards, and then another. I could feel that we were all holding our breath, and I was prepared to do whatever the heck it was I had to do to make sure that—

“Are you all going to actually attack me or are we going to avoid that whole misunderstanding and skip to figuring out how to take over this ship?” its voice asked, low, guttural, and like nails across a chalkboard.

“Mimi?” I asked, almost dropping my gun entirely.

The alien’s body slowly faded away until only Mimi’s human form remained. “Glad you could tell,” she said, cracking a smile. The first one that I had seen her wear since we had returned to our planet. “It would be terribly inconvenient for you to have shot me.”

“Would that have even hurt you?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know exactly what advancements Gonzales used on her weapon upgrades there, and we do know now that my species can indeed die from weapons fire.”

I thought back to Astaroth and how she had held him in her arms as he passed from this world to the next. “Right.”

That was enough conversation for my taste and I rushed forward to hug her. She slid right into my embrace, where she was supposed to be.

To their credit, the group let us have our moment before Gonzales cleared her throat.

“So, what did you learn in your little party with the young ones?”

“So much,” she said with a pained expression. “So, so much.” She walked to the center of the room and sat down, gesturing for me to join her. I did, as did the rest of our little group.

“The aliens’ ship is damaged, yes, but one of the reasons they’re going so slowly is because they have a mandatory quarantine for bringing any new life to their planet.”

“Hold on, they have a mandatory quarantine procedure? Meaning that they do this so much that they have a literal procedure for it?”

“Yes, exactly that,” Mimi said with a nod. “These aliens are not good. Apparently, they were always warlike on their own planet, but once they discovered space travel, their bloodlust moved on to other species they found.”

“Other species?” I asked. “So, this isn’t like our system where so far there’s only been humans and mimics?”

“Not at all,” Mimi said. “And it’s hard to say because I don’t have nearly enough evidence, but I would be willing to bet that we somehow came from this system and just are transplants of our own.”

“That’s a loaded theory,” Gonzales said. “What makes you think that?”

“It’s a long story and ultimately irrelevant to the matter at hand, but what is important is that we know these people are conquerors. And not just conquerors, but violent, hateful ones at that. Who they don’t kill, they take back to their planet as slaves or for…experimentation.”

“Do I even want you to clarify that?”

“Most likely not, but I will anyway. Do you all remember how the original slaver alien we met had altered itself significantly with his ship parts and the elements from our home planet?”

“I don’t think I could forget,” Ciangi said, shuddering slightly.

“Man, I really missed so much, didn’t I?” Eske murmured.

“Yes. Yes, you did. Why are you bringing that up so much lately?”

“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “You guys just don’t talk about your past a lot even though it’s literally world history, and you’ve just been doing that more often since this whole attack thing.”

“Huh, I guess we have. I guess it’s because people from our past don’t always like staying there.”

“That is quite true,” Mimi said with a nod. “And these aliens are partially so insistent because they want to integrate us into their biological forms. Our resiliency, our shapeshifting, our ability to absorb knowledge. They want all of it, and they’ll get it even if they have to take apart each and every mimic they have in their hold. If they do succeed, you can believe they will come for Earth next.”

“But why?” Bahn asked. “If they already have you, they kind of have the superior species.”

Mimi tilted her head, giving him a confused look. “How so?”

“I mean… I would think that’s obvious. Your kind is just generally…better than humans in every way.”

But Mimi looked utterly baffled by the idea. “I do not agree with that at all. Sure, we have some amazing abilities that you do not, but I would hardly consider us superior.

“For one, your ability to adapt to nearly every situation is downright astonishing. From burning deserts or freezing tundra, you find a way to survive. Even space wasn’t enough to corral you.

“And your ability to reproduce? Shocking. Also, your sense of empathy and creation is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Us mimics may be able to learn and replicate your inventions with ease, but I’m sure you’ve seen that we don’t really innovate or create anything on our own. Often how all of you come up with your own ideas, and these ‘harebrained’ schemes that we go through is truly mind-blowing to me.

“Which means, of course, the aliens will come after you after acquiring my species. If I was them, there is no way that I would ever pass up mankind.”

“Well, that’s a morbidly wonderful compliment.”

“So what, then?” Ciangi asked. “We find a way to sneak all the mimics off and go home none the wiser?”

“No,” Mimi said with determination. “It is clear to me that these beings will keep coming after us and throwing more and more resources until their forces are decimated. If we were to just slip off to go home, we would need to start preparing for another war.

“So, what we’re going to do is steal this ship.”

“You know…” I said after a moment’s thought. “This can’t be our solution to everything.”

“Why not?” Mimi said with a crooked smile. “It’s worked for us so far.”

Gonzales let out a short laugh. “She’s not wrong.”

I sighed and just rubbed my temples, wondering how exactly I had gotten to this point in my life.

“Alright then, how are we going to hijack the biggest ship that we have ever encountered while simultaneously being in enemy territory and not knowing the language of any of the systems?”

“I have a plan,” Mimi answered, unbothered by my doubt. “It is an old Earth saying, I believe. Simple, but proven effective.” We waited for her to say exactly which adage she was banking our future on. “Divide and conquer.”

“Divide and conquer, huh?” Gonzales asked, pulling at one of her curls thoughtfully. “You know, I like the sound of that a whole lot more than I thought I would.”

12

Divide and Conquer

I chewed nervously on my lip, my heart going a thousand miles a minute. I desperately, desperately wanted this plan to work, but it just didn’t seem possible.

“According to what I was able to observe while I was in their form,” Mimi murmured, peeking her head out of the door, “the furthest the aliens venture right now is to the hold where they’re keeping my kin. All of the support systems and power has been shut off beyond that point.”

“Well, that’s convenient,” Eske noted happily.

“So, it’s simple. When one comes in, I have the little ones shift enough to disrupt their comms again. We grab them, then I assume their form long enough to complete the rotation, then I’ll circle back to you guys in time to take the next one, and we replace them with a mimic too.”

“Wait, another mimic?” Gonzales asked. “Are any of them to the point of being able to shift into an alien?”

“Well, no, not right now. That’s your guys’ part of the plan. After I take the form of the first alien, you’re going to take the biggest mimics in there to their engine room, where they’re going to eat out of the same off-put system I crawled through.”

“Uh, won’t they notice that?”

“Not if you set up that cloaking device correctly, and if they do, it’s your job to dispatch them quickly and quietly so the mimics that just fed can take their form.”

“So that’s it? We just take them over one by one until we outnumber them?”

“Basically. The hardest part will be once we get to only the bridge crew left. From what I noticed on my walkthrough, there are always at least seven of them in there. I doubt that they never sleep or eat, so they most likely are expecting reliefs eventually. We have to start our engagement with them before they become suspicious.”

“Alright, so subtly take over the ship and don’t let anyone sound the alarm. If we do, it’ll just ruin everything.” Gonzales stretched and rose to her feet, offering me a hand. “Twins, you start packing up the cloaking device again. I guess we’re gonna find a hidey hole and re-set it up.”

“Sure, that’s not an intricate task that our entire plan hinges on.”

“You literally set it up in less than a few minutes when we came on here. Pardon me if I don’t believe your doom and gloom now.”

“Maybe that was just luck.”

“Or maybe we’re a team of highly-skilled individuals who have done the impossible so many times that we should drop the humble pretenses.”

“Fair enough.”

“Thank you.” She went to pick out which guns and weapons she wanted from the impressive array we had hauled over. “Now I call the big boom-boom.”

“Didn’t you just make a point about how we had to do this stealthily?” I asked, coming up beside her.

“Well, yeah, but the boomstick is just for a worst-case scenario.”

“Uh-huh. I’m sure it is.”

The rest of us geared up, picking what tools we thought we needed. It echoed so many other moments in our life lately, between gearing up to take down the coup and the many other firefights involved in that whole mess. I would be happy when my life no longer required me to ever hold a weapon again.

But we weren’t to that point yet.

“Give me three minutes to see what I can do about this cloaking device. But the moment I have it offline, I suggest you tell the mini-mimics to make with the shifting.”

“They’re not too exhausted for that, are they?” Eske asked.

“I don’t think so. They were able to feed a little from the excess radiation on my form and that gave them a little boost.” Her face darkened. “But they are so hungry, Higgens,” she murmured. “So incredibly hungry.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just nodded.

“Alright, I think I’ve managed a sort of portable power system that might get us through the halls until I can graft it into their power system,” Ciangi said, Bahn holding a hunk of cord that was woven into one of their packs. “Time to set off the little ones.”

Mimi closed her eyes, her face once again sliding away. I was getting used to her demi-human, demi-mimic form and watched as different spikes rippled across her flat visage. It lasted maybe a handful of seconds, and then all her features came back.

“They’re going to shift in three seconds. I think you’ll be able to feel when it happens.”

“Do you think that it’s a good idea to repeat the same trick that got us in—”

Eske’s words were cut off as the ship almost seemed to buck, and the hair on the back of my neck rose. A quick warble from our instruments and the immediate fog-up of my visor told me that the little mimics were indeed doing their thing.

“Let’s go!” Mimi hissed, opening the door and creeping forward.

We followed her, trying to be as quiet as possible while still moving quickly. We knew that we had to get to the hold first, but we also had to not be detected. It was a delicate balance, and one we couldn’t exactly practice for.

Sure enough, after a few seconds passed, I heard alarms start to go off and the lights all around us flashed.

“That’s our cue,” Mimi said, ducking down a hall. “Here, up in this vent. I melted a path into a duct that drops right into the hold.”

“Really, you just…melted whatever alloy this is?” Gonzales said as I knelt to boost her up into the chute.

“I was hopped-up on nuclear energy at the time.”

“Ah, right.”

It didn’t take us long to all get in the vent. At first, I thought that we were in for a long, uncomfortable trek through some cramped system, but the experience was surprisingly short. We traveled less than a cafeteria’s length before the vent suddenly tilted, and I started sliding down almost the moment I hit it.

I was reminded of one time we had escaped from prison. For the first time, if I recalled correctly, but instead of some terrifying slide down a massive shoot that might kill us, we only went down maybe ten feet or so before we slammed into another pipe.

“This way,” Mimi said, leading us a small way to where I saw a grate that had already been moved to the side. She slid down and away into darkness, so I followed her without question.

I landed hard, completely unable to see, but I felt a spry hand grab my shoulder. “Just back up slowly until you’re against a wall. The children will shield you from view.”

“What view?” I whispered, stumbling to the side as Gonzales landed beside me and elbowed my side. “I can’t see anything.”

“Sorry, we can’t risk a light. Just trust me. They’re almost here and I need to get into position.”

Three more thumps as the rest of our group landed. Stretching out in the absolute pitch black, I found someone’s arms. “We just need to carefully back up,” I said. “The mimics will do the rest.”

“Back up, he says,” I heard Gonzales grouse. “I’m not sure if I even know which way is back. What if I stood up facing a different direction than you?”

“Here, everyone link hands. I’m holding onto someone.”

“That would be me,” Bahn said calmly.

It only took us a couple of seconds to find each other and then we slowly scuttled backwards like a child learning to walk. I could hear and feel little figures moving quickly past my ankles.

The entire experience was unnerving.

After what felt like forever, my back finally hit solid metal. I crouched down, as did everyone else, assuming that the hand I was holding followed me, and I felt movement a foot or so away from our faces.

Just in the nick of time, it seemed, as I heard a door above us open. Light spilled across the room, forcing its way through the tiny gaps in the mimic pile that was domed over us.

Wow, the little ones really were tiny. It was like when we had first found Mimi’s planet all over again, but at least this time, they had their own free will.

Leaning forward, I peeked through one of the tiny cracks and didn’t expect what I saw. When I heard they were holding the mimics in the starboard side of the ship, I imagined they had just dumped them in a secure sort of cargo hold and sealed off any exits.

That was definitely not the case.

We were in what looked like a specifically-created containment unit, with no door down here or other exit. Now that there was light, I could see that there were only two pipes, which I assumed were usually for pumping oxygen—or whatever this system’s species breathed—into the prison.

Up above by several stories, so high I almost couldn’t make out any of their features, stood an alien in what looked like a clear polymer box, a control panel in front of him. So, he didn’t even come into the unit? How was Mimi planning to…

My line of thought drifted away as I spotted her hastily climbing the wall directly under the box. It seemed to be the only blind spot, but I wondered what had stopped the little ones from doing just that in the weeks since they had been captured.

I got my answer as two long, deadly-looking legs extended out of her as she shed her human disguise. They reached up, up, up carefully until they stopped suddenly. Squinting, I could see little crackles of lightning where they were making contact with something.

Oh. An energy shield that could actually hold mimics? I didn’t think that was possible. How—

Before I could even finish mentally asking myself the question, there was a surge through her body and her legs practically exploded from the field. Shooting up too fast for me to see, they ripped through the floor of the polymer box high above, ripping the alien down from his post just as I saw the tiniest flash of alarm-light glow from his dash.

From there, she dropped from the wall and my vision was obscured by the mimics. That only lasted a second, however, and they all started to scuttle away as Mimi dealt with the threat.

Free from our little mimic cocoon, I jogged across the wide expanse to see that the mimics had formed themselves into a type of living restraint, holding the alien in place while Mimi pulled some of his equipment from him.

“I’m not gonna lie,” Gonzales muttered as we approached. “I half-expected y’all to have killed him.”

“According to the little ones, they get alerts when one of the crew’s vital signs go out. That’s what stopped their first escape attempt.”

“First?” I asked, my mind spinning with several quick revelations. ‘First’ implied that they had tried many times. They were still captured, which meant that they had failed each time, and if they knew that vitals ending sent an alert to the rest of the crew, that meant they had killed at least one of the aliens.

Huh, even starved, terrorized, and imprisoned, it seemed that mimics were still as tenacious as ever. I wondered if any of Mimi’s lieutenants had helped lead most of the failed attempts. They seemed like the type to never give up.

“Yakoba,” Mimi said, standing and holding her arm out. One of the slightly larger mimics quickly climbed up her body to sit on her hand. “Show these humans the way that I came from. I’m going to do more recon as I finish my patrol.”

The mimic gave a warble then scurried off her body and onto my back. I blanked for a moment, my thoughts going to the awful mimic that had betrayed us, but I quickly shoved that thought out of my head to be dealt with at a better time.

“Vellol, your job is to go up there and mimic yourselves into making the box look pristine. That includes making a layer over the dash. When someone comes in, you take them, and you bring them down here for those who’ve fed to shift into. You got that?”

That mimic trilled too and started climbing the wall with nearly twenty or so other children following.

“So, is everyone clear on the plan?” Mimi asked, her eyes full of fire.

I nodded, and there was a wave of affirmative chirps from the rest of the mimics.

“Good. Let’s do our best, everyone. We’ve got a ship to steal.”

“Again,” Gonzales added. “A ship to steal, again.”

13

All You Can Eat Buffet

I had thought that it would be a challenge to go back into the same vent that we had dropped out of, but the mimics made a convenient flight of steps for us to ascend into the pipes. Once we were in, Yakoba crawled from my back and led us forward, a host of mimics behind us.

I didn’t know why Mimi had sent us along with the mimic children when they seemed perfectly capable of feeding themselves, but the answer quickly came as we dropped out of a shoot in front of a door with what looked like an old-fashioned code lock.

“Are you kidding me?” Ciangi said when she saw it. “I thought these guys were advanced, and they’re using regular old combination protection in their ship?”

“Actually,” Bahn said, coming up along beside her and examining the thing. “It’s pretty smart. It can’t be hacked and can’t be brute-forced without setting off an alarm.”

“But why didn’t Mimi just tell us the code if she came this way?”

“Because you don’t need the code to get out of that part of the ship. Only in. this is probably why she didn’t have the mimics just surge back here the moment that she got in, and why she didn’t go back to feed again.”

“I know we’re in the middle of something,” Eske said. “But I feel like this is something she should have told us about before we split up instead of finding it halfway.”

“It’s fine,” I said, kneeling before the door and pressing my ear to it. “We used these kinds of locks on the colony. I kinda know my way around them.”

“Kinda? Like…how kinda?”

“Kinda as in if all of us aren’t quiet, I won’t figure out anything before someone else comes along and finds us here.”

“Oh, right.” Gonzales turned to the mimics behind us and bent down. “Hey, I know you guys can’t handle a ton of shifting now, but can you change your form to be smooth and add colors?”

There were a couple of warbles that almost sounded like yeses.

“Alright, I want you to block us off from view and try to make a picture of the end of this hall. Kind of like a fake painting. You guys remember those from Eske’s classes back home, right?”

This time, there was no vocal answer, but the little beings did indeed form a wall, obscuring the rest of the hall from our view.

“I hope that worked,” I remarked before concentrating on the door in front of me.

I held my breath as I listened, wishing I had the echolocator I had built for myself when I was young. But I would just have to make do and concentrate on each and every sound that came from the door.

I moved the winch of the combination methodically, closing my eyes. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Finally, there was a grating sort of latch sound and I allowed myself to breathe. One chamber done.

Three to go.

My hand went to the next one, turning it in the opposite direction.

Tock.

Nope, that was very much the wrong sound. It seemed that the second one was clockwise too. I spun it in that direction, listening for another release.

Eventually I got it, and the next one. By the time I finished the final one, I was beginning to sweat, and my head was throbbing. When all of this was said and done, I deserved a real nice nap.

Then it happened. The final click and the door swung open. I almost let out a whoop of excitement but caught myself just in time.

“This way,” I said, stepping inside.

The mimics followed first, all dropping from the wall they had made, and Gonzales was in last. She closed the door behind us and I almost told her to leave it open before thinking better of it.

If we didn’t want the aliens to know that we were here, we needed to make sure everything looked the same as we found it. But I couldn’t help but feel that the closed door was going to kick us in the rear end later.

We all jogged down a catwalk over what looked like it might be a sub-engineering level or even emergency quarters. The tech and setup was all so alien that I couldn’t be certain, but I did know that there wasn’t anything present that could possibly serve as the engine, thruster relay or waste output for the giant ship.

We reached another door, this one without a complicated code, and rushed through it. And there, lit by a dull green glow of emergency lighting, was the exact room we were looking for.

“Thank God,” I whispered, feeling a tiny bit of relief. This was really the lynchpin in our plan. Once we got the mimics fed, we would have a beefed-up army of our own that could also take the shape of the enemy.

“There!” I said, spotting a massive container with several markings on it that just screamed out warning labels. “You see how it’s connected to the engine and what I think may be a crystal generator? That’s gotta be for the runoff.”

“Good eye,” Ciangi said. “I agree.”

That was apparently enough for the little mimics at our feet because they all shot forward in a surge of obsidian. Sure, there were less than a hundred of them, but the sight was still impressive as they reached the massive container and swarmed it to find a way in.

Just like Mimi had that very first week I knew her, they found a tiny chink and worked their way into the energy source. The five of us watched, and I could feel myself basking in the victory of what we had done.

This was it. We had made it to the turning point. From here, it was just—

I was cut off as sirens blared to life, nearly deafening me. It was short, lasting less than a second, but it was enough to break the spell of assuredness I had just been creating for myself.

“What the heck was that?” Gonzales asked, her bionic eye blazing to life, no doubt scanning the area for any threats.

I heard the sound of rock scraping past metal and whirled to the runoff container to see one of the mimics sliding out. It was certainly bigger than when it had gone in, but not nearly the size it would need to be to shift into a bipedal, sentient creature.

Despite that, its form rippled and surged until it was a puddle of what looked like sludgy pink flesh.

“I think I’m gonna barf…” Ciangi groaned, leaning over the side of the catwalk we were on.

But I just stared, watching as very human lips rose to the top of the pile. I felt like I was in shock, unable to comprehend what I was seeing, but that disbelief fled real fast as those lips opened in a scream.

“DANGER!”

“Danger?” Gonzales repeated. “Can we get a little more info there?” Already she was pulling her weapons out and it was clear to me that our covert expedition was suddenly a whole lot less covert.

“LEADER COMES. NOT ALONE!”

“Better. Everyone form a defensive line around this runoff. We want these children to be as well fed as possible, and it’s unlikely the aliens would risk shooting this thing and blowing us all to the afterlife and back.”

We all rushed to do what Gonzales said, equipping ourselves with the guns we had brought. Mine was the same kind that I used when I had defended Mimi’s home planet and when we had stormed the coup base. It had served me well, and I hoped to continue my luck with it.

“What if Mimi can’t get through the door?” Eske asked quietly as all our weapons were trained on the entrance we’d come in through.

“She’ll find a way,” I said determinedly.

As if on cue, there was a slight rumble under our feet. That was the only warning we had before the wall on the opposite side of the room exploded outward, and the biggest mimic I had ever seen sailed through the air.

“Mimi!” I cried, lifting my gun to aim behind her.

Sure enough, there were at least a dozen aliens all chasing after her, firing weapons that left large, smoking holes in her body. I didn’t know what they were using but seeing them hurt her and hearing the resulting squeals of pain filled me with a fury that I hadn’t felt in a long time.

I charged forward, firing at each one that I saw. In the back of my mind, I knew what I was doing was extremely dangerous, and that I was probably going to die, but I didn’t care.

The only thing that mattered was Mimi.

Thankfully, I wasn’t alone. The rest of our group also ran behind me, giving me cover as I advanced. For a moment, the whole room was just heat and anger, blasts firing off one right after the other.

But then we finally reached Mimi where she had landed across the catwalk. Her form was rapidly shrinking, leaving little plumes of smoke as she returned to her human body.

Leaving the firefight to my companions, I ran to her side, sliding my arms under her. “Mimi, are you alright?!” I cried.

Her eyes opened, and she gave me a look that was somewhere between angry and embarrassed.

“The aliens knew we might come for them,” she rasped. “So they made sure to mark themselves in places that weren’t immediately noticeable.”

“Huh, they really are some smart son of a guns,” Gonzales remarked.

It was only then that I noticed that the sound of blaster fire was gone. Looking to the hole that Mimi had ripped into the wall, I saw that most of the aliens were either dead or gone.

“We have to make it to the front before they seal us off,” I said, pulling Mimi to her feet.

“Wait!” she gasped, and hearing how in pain she was made my heart ache. “There’s more than just aliens on board.”

Before I could even open my mouth to ask what she could possibly mean, there was a whirring sound just outside the gap and I saw a pair of glowing red eyes staring back at me.

“Is that…”

There was another whirring sound and a shape launched itself at us. Gonzales let out a cry, and we all opened fire on whatever it was.

I couldn’t say how long we showered the thing in firelight, but it wasn’t until it collapsed to the ground as a group of random, smoking pieces that we let off our triggers.

“Was…was that some sort of attack robot?” Ciangi asked breathlessly. “They have fully autonomous robot soldiers?!”

“Yes,” Mimi gasped. “More stolen tech. A lot more stolen tech.”

“Uh, just how much is a ‘lot’ of stolen tech?”

She didn’t answer with her mouth, instead raising a shaking hand to point at the hole. My eyes followed her to see dozens and dozens of glowing eyes staring at us from the fissure.

“Oh,” Gonzales muttered. “Oh no.”

That was the last thing any of us managed to say before the wave of mechanical creatures surged forward as one.

There was so much metal, so many flashing lights, that it was impossible to get a read on what they actually looked like. Somewhere between a scorpion or some other insectoid-like creature, they opened fire while their pincer-like hands reached forward to grab at us.

I was certain that for a moment we were about to meet our end when Ciangi dropped her pack and pulled out a small, glowing sphere.

“Take that, you mechanical douchebags!” she cried, pressing the button and slamming it on the ground in front of us.

Instantly, a blue wall lanced up to the ceiling, just like the same walls that had imprisoned us back with Lazer. The machines hit it, then fell to the ground far below, buzzing and crackling.

“Did…did that actually just happen?” Gonzales asked, blinking in shock.

“I told you I came with a bag of tricks,” Ciangi said with a smirk.

I got to my feet, intent on congratulating her, but we didn’t even get enough time to celebrate before I saw at least a hundred times more eyes glowing from the other side of the hole.

“Run,” I said breathlessly.

Mimi tilted her head back, letting out a grating, chilling sound that reverberated through the entire room. In response, a crack opened in the runoff containment and the mimics came erupting out.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, they weren’t the only material that sprayed out of the opening. Waves of molten, nuclear waste erupted in a fountain that went straight for the oncoming horde of robots. That bought us some time, but I knew that wouldn’t be enough. Looking behind me, I pivoted and ran back to the point where the first wave had tried to strike.

“Higgens!” I heard Mimi cry, reaching after me.

But I didn’t stop, sliding under an errant spray and grabbing the shielding orb that Ciangi had jammed into the ground. It took a second and the help of my ionic welder to yank it from the ground, but I managed.

I shot to my feet, yelling for her to activate it, when suddenly it felt like my arm was slammed with a sledge hammer that was also part sun. Looking down, I saw a burned hole no bigger than the head of a syringe in the arm of my suit and an immediate wave of nausea hit me.

It seemed that I’d been hit with a droplet of concentrated nuclear waste. That wasn’t good.

The headache was almost immediate, but I didn’t have time to worry. My suit was already trying to fuse itself back together, coolant and an analgesic gel rushing to the damaged area. Thankfully, Ciangi had heard my cry and activated the shield again, this time in a curved shape.

Forcing myself to run again, I attached it to my belt behind me to buy us a little extra protection until we were out the door.

But I realized something as we pelted toward the exit. Even if we shut the door and the creatures somehow couldn’t break it down, they would just go back out the hole and around to meet us. If we wanted this fight to end, well…we needed to end it.

But how?

I dashed along, almost to the door, when the blue glow behind me began to flicker out. The thudding and zaps of robots hitting the field faded and dread filled me.

“Ciangi!” I cried. “What’s happening?”

“It’s just a little ball, it’s only meant for temporary use!”

“It’s overheating,” Bahn answered more plainly.

“Uh, that is definitely not good.”

“We’re almost there,” Mimi said. “It just needs to hold another second!”

I didn’t know if we had another second, and I was last in the group. I could see the machine soldiers climbing along the walls and ceilings, waiting to get a drop on us with every flicker.

But then the first wave of mimics made it out the door. Then Eske. Then Gonzales. Somehow, we made it, and my foot crossed over the threshold, all my friends ready to slam the door shut behind me.

Unfortunately, my other foot never quite made it over.

This time, it felt like lightning had straight up enveloped my already injured arm, and I looked to see that one of the machines had reached through during one of the flickers and grabbed my limb. Already blood was welling up and I could feel oxygen rushing out of my envirosuit.

“No!” Mimi cried, pulling me to the side. She got most of my body out of the door, but the machine dug its feet in, trying to yank me backwards.

If the shield flickered again, his buddies were waiting right there. They would snatch me up in a second and I would be done for.

I would die.

Normally, I would say that I was willing to sacrifice my life to make sure that Mimi and the little ones lived. And if I had to now, I would do it. But I was suddenly filled with such a burning will to live. I knew I wasn’t ready to go yet.

“Close the door!” I yelled.

“But your arm!”

“Close the door!” I repeated. “All of you! As hard as you can before the shield fails.”

I looked down to Mimi, who was holding onto my waist with all of her might. I smiled at her as best as I could given the situation, before pulling my gun from my waist and aiming it right at the nuclear waste runoff.

I had to time it perfectly. The door swung closed, narrowing my field of vision, but I waited until it was less than half a foot open before firing at the vat. Just like I hoped, a massive explosion rocketed out of it just as the door slammed shut with a crunch, the force of all the mimics and my friends behind it.

The pain was indescribable. I didn’t look, I didn’t want to see, but in my mind’s eye, I had a pretty good idea what it looked like. I tried to be positive about it as I swayed, my envirosuit now really scrambling to repair its damage. After all, I had already lost some fingers on that hand anyway, plus the nuclear poisoning. Really, I was lucky to lose it.

“Hold on, Higgens,” Mimi said, her tone sounding just as frantic as it had been on our home planet. “Just hold on.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, recognizing that shock was most definitely setting in. “You’re stuck with me, minus an arm or not.”

“We need to patch his suit and stop the bleeding,” I heard Eske say from beside us. “We should get him to Harunya.”

“No!” I argued. “There’s no time. There’s still at least forty lifeforms on this vessel we have to take care of.”

“Thirty-five, actually,” Mimi corrected. “But I think I might…have an idea.”

I looked to her blearily, my body feeling very, very cold. “Oh really? An idea? I like ideas.”

“It will be painful.”

I went to shrug but that just caused a welp of pain to escape from my lips. “I think I’m already in pain.”

“Right.” She took a deep breath and looked to the others. “We need one of their weapons.”

“How do we get that?” Gonzales asked.

“The hold!” she said, her eyes widening. “I’ll have one of the little ones bring one from the second guard in the hold.” She closed her eyes and her face did the thing again. When her eyes opened, she looked a modicum more hopeful. I didn’t know why she looked so bummed, though. I was the one with a missing arm, and I felt great.

Ow.

Okay, maybe not great, but it hurt a whole lot less than some of the other things that I had been through.

“Come on, let’s pull him into one of these room and prepare ourselves for a possible attack.”

Her arms slid behind mine, pulling me up, and there was that pain that had been missing. I screamed, and she just shushed me desperately while dragging me into the space.

We got into the room, and that was about when everything got super fuzzy. Time seemed to waver between a rigid structure and a sort of pile of mush. But I was very clear when the little mimic carrying the gun came crawling in through a pipe. I went hazy again as Mimi handed it to Gonzales then stood against the wall, but I definitely snapped to attention when the weapons engineer shot her in the side.

“Wait, what?” I sputtered, trying to sit up only to have Eske, Bahn, and Ciangi hold me down.

“It’s okay,” Mimi groaned, stumbling toward me. My vision wasn’t exactly the greatest at the moment, but I could make out that her side was just a mess of oozing, gooey darkness.

“Why did you do that?”

“Shh,” she whispered, her forehead pale and covered in sweat. “I’ll heal fast, and now you will too…I think.”

She reached to her side, grabbing a good handful of the thick, onyx ooze and slathering it over the end of my stump. “Bind it,” she gasped, stumbling backwards. “Seal it in there in the suit.”

The others rushed to do it, and I was more confused than ever. But that confusion quickly flew to the back of my mind as my entire body began to seize.

It felt like my body was one giant raw nerve and I had stuck an ionic wrench into a live feed. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I was being scoured from head to toe until there was nothing left.

And then, suddenly, it was all over. My soul and body felt like it was dunked in cold, refreshing water, and it was all over.

I sat up, looking around for Mimi. She was sitting in a chair, her body reknitting itself, and she looked at me weakly.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Um… Good.” I said. “How do I feel good? That shouldn’t be possible.”

Ciangi let out a scream, nearly giving me a heart attack. “Higgens! Your arm!”

I looked down to see that the hasty patch job on my envirosuit’s sleeve was pushing outwards, eventually popping off to reveal a growing limb of pure black.

“Is…is this what I think it is?” I asked, raising it to my face.

Sure enough, it moved when I wanted it to, and I could feel a strange sort of coolness to it, but it was entirely alien to me.

“It’s our cell structure, yeah,” Mimi said. “It’s integrating into you.”

“I…” My brain was still struggling to catch up with what was happening. “How did you know this would happen? Did you know this would happen?”

“Not for sure,” she answered honestly. “It was a theory I had back before we left our planet, but I never had time to confirm it. These aliens and their tendency to assimilate reminded me of it.

“You see, you humans are so adaptable. You evolve at an insane rate. I figure if there was a way to reduce our flesh into a state of repair, it might be able to integrate into your system.”

I couldn’t believe it. Of all the things I thought were possible in the grand universe we were in, this was not it. “So…I’m a mimic now?”

“Well, part of you is, but you are also human.”

“I think I’m almost jealous, but also a whole lot of queasy,” Gonzales said, coming over to eye my arm. “That’s something else, man.”

I looked down at it, willing it to take a form that was more familiar to me. It surged and buckled for a moment, little waves of spikes running along it before it finally looked like my original arm.

“That’s incredible,” I breathed, wondering if I had passed out from blood loss and was just dreaming this incredible circumstance.

“You’re incredible,” Mimi added, rising to give me a soft peck on the cheek. That was about the last of her tenderness, however, as her face grew suddenly serious. “Now who’s ready to take over this ship?”

“Oh, I definitely am,” I said, standing up. I felt more energized than I had in ages.

“Wow, a frontal assault,” Gonzales murmured, grabbing one of her many guns. “My favorite.”

14

Cleaning House

We stalked down the halls, a sort of strength in us that I hadn’t felt in ages. There was no uncertainty, no fear. Just a whole lot of rage and justifiable anger. As we walked, two more aliens spotted us and came charging down the hall, but Gonzales took out both before Mimi even had a chance to shift.

Normally, I didn’t revel in violence. I didn’t like seeing people hurt. I didn’t like causing hurt.

But this…this was so different. These aliens had caused so much pain, so much torment, and I was here to end this.

We all were.

We continued down, and I heard more footsteps pounding toward us from a side hall. I looked down it but before I could shoot, my arm flashed forward toward the alien and picked him up, slamming him between the ground and ceiling repeatedly until he didn’t get up again.

Nothing could stop us. We were like a wave, relentlessly marching forward. By our count, we had downed twenty of them before we reached the barricaded door to the bridge.

I reached into my pack and pulled out one of my charges, but Mimi just shook her head. “This is for us,” she said quietly.

We all understood and moved to the side. Mimi closed her eyes, her head bowed, and for a moment, nothing happened. But then a low rumble filled the ship, growing louder and louder until I saw the surge of mimics come churning down the hall like an unstoppable force, the mimics that had fed from the runoff vat.

They hit the door with more force than the explosion I had just caused, and it flew inward. The five of us humans just stood there, listening as the bridge devolved into a cacophony.

It was a long, long few moments as shrill noises, screeches, and bangs filled our ears, but eventually there was silence.

We stepped in, expecting carnage, but there was none. Sure, there was blaster fire and most of the furniture in the room was smoking, half-melted messes while several displays were giving off sparks, but there were no bodies. There was no blood.

I didn’t question it. For once, I was glad for a little break from all the grimness in our lives.

Mimi turned to us from where she sat in what I assumed was the captain’s seat, a wan smile on her face.

“I believe this is the part where we steal this ship and drive it home?”

“Holy halibut, you really did it!” Gonzales said, rushing the woman and throwing her arms around the shapeshifter in a hug. It was certainly unexpected, but not unwelcome, and we all broke out into our own laughs, tears, and shouts of joy.

“I have to hail Harunya!” Ciangi said, bounding past me to grab one of the few non-smoldering seats.

I didn’t mind standing. I locked eyes with Mimi, so much emotion pouring through me. She caught my gaze and offered me her hand. I took it with my new arm, and we were connected more intimately than I ever thought possible.

“Let’s go home.”

“Yes, let’s.”

It was a long journey home, even with enveloping our ship into the docking bay of the alien ship and using its advanced engines to send us there. First of all, we had to learn how the whole thing worked, and despite all of our hacking into their systems, that still took several solid days to be familiar enough for cross-system travel.

Eventually we did make it, though, and the mimics rushed out to rebuild the city that had been razed.

There was a massive celebration, of course. The young mimics gorged themselves while Eske’s family cooked food from the processors and the coin twins played their favorite songs. There was dancing, there was peace, but I couldn’t get into the cheery mood.

I found Mimi standing in front of the ship we had stolen, the night sky dark against her pale silhouette. I wrapped my arm around her and leaned my head on her shoulder, feeling comfort in her presence.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I could feel that she was upset in the same way I could feel if I was hungry or thirsty. Something had certainly changed within me when she integrated her cells into my body, and I was interested in seeing how that played out. But for the moment, we were more connected than we had ever been.

“They’re going to come back for us.”

“Yeah, we know that. But they won’t come back today, or even tomorrow.”

“That may be,” she said, her arms wrapping around me as well. “But I can feel it, and I don’t think I’ll be able to relax until this is all over.”

“I understand. I don’t think I’ll be able to either.”

We fell quiet for a moment, looking up at the stars, one of which was the sun that warmed the backs of the beings that wanted to kill us all. That certainly made the beautiful display a lot less welcoming.

“I don’t think we can defend this planet, Higgens,” Mimi whispered finally. “We’re still growing, and I worry trying to keep it safe will destroy it entirely.”

There was a ring of truth to what she said, and I swallowed harshly. “Then what do you suggest we do?”

“I think…” She hesitated ever-so-slightly, causing curiosity to bubble up within me more than ever. “I think we have to take this fight to Earth. If we team up, maybe we have an actual chance of stopping them for good.”

“Earth?” I echoed dubiously. “You mean the one that’s recovering from a massive coup after we threw it into political upheaval?”

“Yes, that one.”

I sighed, wanting to argue with her but knowing she had a point. “Well, at least things never get boring with us.”

Mimi turned to me, the stars reflecting in her eyes as she gazed at me with all the emotions neither of us were good at expressing. “But at least we’ll face it together.”

“Yeah,” I confirmed, giving her forehead a kiss. “We will.”

Mimic’s Last Stand

1

Gearing Up for the End

“Entering orbit now.”

I looked out of the view shield of our stolen ship, taking in the sight of the mimic planet. We had been gone for so long, rushing through space and unable to use the same trick we had getting there. Three months had passed since we took over the ship.

Three months was a long time to have a host of very hungry mimics on board. We fed them what we could, unable to stop and mine space for any nourishment, always fearing that the aliens would come bearing down on us at any moment—even if we knew that was practically impossible.

And also, three months to get used to my new arm.

Yeah.

That was strange.

Most of the time, it felt like my arm and looked like my arm, but it took up a chunk of concentration in my mind, often leaving me exhausted at the end of the day. However, occasionally my concentration would slip, or I’d get nervous, and the arm would go wild. Sometimes it whipped around, a tentacle of shining darkness. Sometimes it just bubbled up like a cauldron full of onyx goop. Mimi was pretty good at talking me through those points, but it was always a bit alarming to have part of my body acting so completely on its own.

I was a mimic now, in a strange, not really sort of way. Somewhere between human and shapeshifter, I was something else entirely.

Because I could tell that it wasn’t just my arm. Sure, that was the only part of me that could change its form at the moment, but I could feel something else, deeper within myself. Maybe it was just my body accepting the mimic DNA—assuming they had DNA. Really, we didn’t know a whole lot about their anatomy considering we were still trying to figure out what made them shift.

Unlike most of my other experiences in ships, this vessel didn’t shake or rumble as we raced through the atmosphere. Instead, it gave a little bit of a buck and then we were cutting down through the sky to the ground, where smoke wasn’t cloaking the sky as it was all those months ago.

Had it really been so long? In some ways it seemed like it, and in others it seemed like an eternity. Although we had used planets to slingshot ourselves along much faster than we would have gone normally, it had still taken just so darn long to arrive.

“I can’t believe we’re here,” Eske breathed, shifting from foot to foot anxiously. “Did we make sure my family knows we’re landing?”

“Oh, they know,” Gonzales said from the pilot’s seat. “You’ve been sending them holos since we hit this system, and you’ve talked to them three times since we’ve been in communication range.”

“I know,” Eske murmured. “But it seemed like just after we were reunited last time that we were parted again almost instantly. I want them to know that everything is going to be okay.”

“To be fair, I wouldn’t promise them that,” Harunya said, rocking her little one back and forth. “We have quite a fight looming on the horizon, and we’re not guaranteed our safety.”

“No, we are definitely not,” Bahn agreed.

The ship finally landed, its docking feet extending then settling. I almost wanted to pinch myself, but I still wasn’t very good at gauging my strength with my mimic hand and I didn’t want to injure my fleshy arm.

…even after three months, it was strange to think that I had limbs of different substances.

“Uh, guys…” Ciangi muttered, turning back to the communications helm as it suddenly let off a series of beeps. During the time that we’d been rushing through space, Ciangi, Bahn, Gonzales, and I had set up a sort of relay to run any communications we got on our warship down to our stolen alien ship. Of course, we didn’t get any communications considering how far out we were, but it was something to do and helped us understand the ship better.

It turned out that we could learn a whole heck of a lot about our stolen alien vessel in a quarter of a year. While there was still so much to disassemble and analyze, we understood their level of technology and how their systems worked so much more.

And we would need every ounce of that knowledge we could squeeze out for when the aliens would come.

Because they would.

And this time, they wouldn’t send some sort of dinky fighter that we just barely managed to beat.

No, they were going to send a full armada. Every ship they had like the one we had just stolen would come to our planet at once and rain down terror. Maybe even blow up the whole thing. And once they dealt with us, they would move on to Earth.

No one was safe.

And we all knew that.

“Alright,” Gonzales said with a breath as she pressed some levers and there was a slight thunk from outside. I guessed that was the disembarking door, and I took a deep breath.

We were finally home, so why were nerves twisting so harshly in my stomach? I should have been happy, but instead, I was filled with a distinct sort of dread.

Maybe that was because I knew that if we were here, it was probably only two to three months before the aliens arrived themselves.

And we had a whole lot of work to do. If we thought our preparation for them the first time was difficult, this was going to be a whole new level. The aliens knew what we were capable of, and we knew what they were capable of.

“Let’s go home,” Mimi said, wrapping her arm through mine and walking out of the cockpit where we all tended to congregate. While we had dismantled anything in the ship that might harm us, it still wasn’t exactly a welcoming place. It was like the greedy malevolence of the alien conquerors had seeped into the walls and floors, leaving a bitter sort of violence to the polished metal.

As usual, my mimic arm pleasantly hummed when we touched. Somewhere between a tickle and a massage, it was an enjoyable, albeit distracting, sensation. It had once concerned me greatly, but I’d mostly learned to live with the confusing development.

We reached the outside and real, actual sunlight washed over us in a comforting blanket of warmth. We had landed the ship right outside of the ruins of our main town, and I was surprised to see that several buildings had been completely redone. Their workmanship was a bit haphazard, but it was definitely an improvement to the smoldering piles of debris we had left behind.

As expected, there was a sizable crowd waiting for us. Or at least, a sizable crowd considering how devastated our planet had been the last time we were around. All of Eske’s family was there, looking a bit gaunt but otherwise happy, and the mimics that had managed to hide or had stayed hidden shifted and bucked.

I noticed that none of them were wearing the human forms that they had used during the first war.

Huh. It was weird to think that our small, young colony of a nation had already had a first war and was about to head into its second one. It felt like I was having all sorts of personal revelations about the state of our massive family after three months of being in some sort of strange stasis, completely separated from both Earth and our home planet.

It was like my brain was sweeping out all the cobwebs, inventing new thoughts and neural pathways. All the activity made my hands shake, the urge to rub my fingers across something satisfying increasing.

But there would be time for that later. Happy to be home, all of us rushed into the warm embrace of our old friends, a wave of young mimics sweeping back into their once home.

Although it was a happy reunion, one full of relief and hope, there was another layer to it. This time, we could feel the coming threat more than ever, and unlike the previous attack that we had warded off, none of us seemed to think that we would survive.

2

Dreams Safe in A Warm Embrace

Night settled over the town like a thick blanket, and for a few moments, it was easy for my brain to think that we were right back in space again. I figured it out quickly, however, and settled into what was left of the bed in my and Mimi’s old house.

It was damaged, that was for certain, and there was a patch of roof that was ripped out, allowing me to stare into the night sky, but it was whole enough that we could rest there. And although it was certainly less comfortable than the warship we’d gotten from the revolution, there was something to be said about being home.

My fingers traced along Mimi’s pale arm, my own skin shifting to the inky black that I had come to identify with her. That same thrill of pleasure tickled along the back of my brain, and I didn’t think I could ever grow tired of it.

“You’re doing much better with that,” she murmured, her eyes flicking to me.

Most of the time, they were a brilliant purple or blue, but lately, they had taken on a pitch-black appearance, sometimes the white of them disappearing entirely. Most of us had the good sense not to mention it, but now I found my curiosity piquing.

“Thank you,” I said, trying to figure out a segue. But I was never very good at them, so I settled on my usual tactic. “Why’d you change your eyes?”

“Have I?” She sounded a bit surprised, which in turn surprised me. Had she not noticed? I guess we hadn’t exactly spent a whole lot of time looking in mirrors when we were rushing home as fast as we could.

“Yeah, they’re all dark now.”

“Dark?”

I nodded.

“Interesting.” She was quiet a moment, but we had known each other long enough for me to figure out that she was just thinking. “I’ve been sentient for so long, but there is still so much I don’t know about our own physiology. Entire records that still need to be discovered or decrypted. Perhaps it is because of my mood. Or perhaps I’ve used one form too much. I have no way of knowing, and I find that frustrating.”

“What do you mean by your mood?” I asked, picking up on the one I thought was more likely.

“I don’t know. It’s… It’s dark. I feel dark inside. What used to make me happy seems too impossible to grasp now and I’m just so tired, all the time.” She rolled to me and those dark eyes started to fade a bit, her usual gaze appearing the longer she maintained eye contact with me. “I feel like no matter what we do, no matter how hard we fight, no matter what insane circumstances we overcome or invent a solution for, we’re always going be fighting something even worse.”

Hearing her so in pain jolted me to my core. I supposed that during our mad dash back home, she and I hadn’t talked about much that wasn’t planning for the eventual attack. How long had she been holding these feelings inside? Letting them ruminate and fester?

“I know the past year has been rough, but—”

“It’s not just that it’s rough,” Mimi kept on. “It’s that it’s…it’s soul-shattering. Being betrayed by one of my closest underlings, one that I thought was going to succeed me when I finally got to lay my head down. Fighting a revolution. Losing almost every single one of my adopted children, brothers and sisters.

“Over and over again, it’s like life has brought my worst nightmares to life, and I don’t even really have nightmares. I just want it all to end. I want it to stop.

“I want peace.”

Her eyes searched my face and I understood the desperation there. With every word she spoke, it was like it was waking up thoughts that I had tried to shove so deep into my subconscious that they would never see the light of day.

“I want more than constantly fighting. More than war every day.”

I stroked her hair out of her face. “I know, love. I know. And you deserve that.”

Her eyes started to water but the tears didn’t quite come out. She was still working on that particular human response. “I want what I see in those happy holos we watch. I want happiness, with a reliable home, and no one coming to attack us. And children! I don’t understand it, but part of me wants to make little ones that are parts of both me and you.”

I looked at her with wide eyes. “You want a family?”

I didn’t know why, but I had never really thought about that. Maybe it was because our life had been one slapdash rush for survival since we had met with only tenuous months of peace. Maybe it was just because I had never thought that someone like me would ever have someone who wanted a child with them.

“With me?” I continued, my words coming from my brain like sludge. “But I’m…I’m…different.”

She let out the tiniest of laughs. “A shapeshifting alien with no actual gender or human anatomy just told you they want a family, and you’re worried you’re the strange one?”

Alright, she may have had a point. “How would that work anyway? We already have about two million children that we’ve adopted.”

Mimi snuggled closer to me, her form soft and familiar. I knew it wasn’t her natural body, that she put it on to be more like me, but I didn’t mind. I loved her no matter what body she was in. No matter what she looked like. Because what mattered to me was that beautiful, fearless soul inside of her. The one that fought so hard for those she loved and protected everything she could.

“You know what I mean.”

“I think I do, but I’m not really sure on the…technicalities of how that would work.”

She shrugged. “We have years to figure that out if we survive. You’re at least part mimic now, so I’m assuming you’re going to live a bit longer than the average human.”

“Oh, that’s what it is, isn’t it?” I teased. “Before you were biding your time for your weird human boyfriend to pass, but now that I’m here long term, plans have changed.”

She laughed. “You know that’s not what happened.”

“I know,” I said, pulling her to me, my hands gliding up and down her spine. I loved holding her. It proved that she was here. That we had fought against everything and managed not to be separated yet. “If a family is what you want, then that’s exactly what we’ll try for.” I kissed the tip of her nose. “I’ll get you that peace you want, Mimi. I’ll get you anything you want.”

“Easy to promise that when in a few months, violent aliens could come and wipe us all out.”

“Yeah, but I’m hoping to avoid that whole genocide thing. One might even say it’s my mission currently.”

“Our mission,” Mimi countered. “Now I have a real reason to make sure we survive.”

“Oh really? It took marriage and crazy scientific experimentation to have children to make you wanna live? Not, ya know, the thousands of younglings we have skittering around, our friends, and actually, uh…living?”

“It never hurts to have a little extra incentive.”

I laughed, perhaps a bit louder than I should have, but the feeling was so nice that I didn’t care. When was the last time that we had bantered back and forth so freely? Talked about our dreams and our hopes? It had to have been before we were betrayed and held in confinement for so long.

In some ways, that seemed just like last week, but when I reached up and felt that my hair was just past my ears, I realized it was months ago. Strange how time worked.

“What are you thinking?” Mimi asked, seeming to sense that my mind was drifting backward.

“About that time we were separated.”

She frowned and pulled me closer, arms winding around me. “I never want that to happen again. Of all that I’ve experienced since I became me, that was the worst.”

I nodded, squeezing Mimi just as tightly. “It really was. And we’ve been through some stuff.”

“We really have.” She looked up at me, those eyes sparkling brightly once again, and gently pressed her lips to mine. “I love you, you know?”

“I do,” I responded, pulling the covers that we had brought from the ship over us. “And I love you just as much.”

3

Three-Way Call

I awoke in the morning with Mimi still curled in my arms. Unusual, considering she didn’t have to sleep and would usually slip off in the middle of the night to be productive, but I guessed after our conversation, she didn’t want to be apart.

I didn’t blame her. When I was beside her, things seemed more possible and the world was less harsh. When we were parted, that was when all the dark thoughts and doubts seeped in, whispering about all the danger lurking and how the odds were stacked against us.

Mimi’s eyes fluttered, and she looked at me with a drowsy sort of smile. Maybe as I was becoming more mimic, she was becoming more human. That would certainly be interesting.

“Morning,” she murmured, standing up and stretching.

“Morning,” I responded, pulling her closer to place a kiss on top of her head. “What’s the plan for today?”

“First we eat. All of us. We’ll need a full stomach for our next task.”

“Which is?”

Mimi looked to me a bit guiltily, but that only intrigued me more. “We’re going to reach out to Earth Gov and the resistance.”

“Wait, what? At the same time?”

She nodded. “We all need to be on the same page. Now that the coup is known and being eradicated, we can’t afford for there to be factions. We need to be a united front against our attackers.”

“Yeah, but, like…humans don’t really forgive or trust each other that well.”

“I know,” Mimi said with a wan smile. “That’s why we’ll have to be extra convincing.”

She paused for a moment, as if thinking. “Do you think Harunya will be willing to let me borrow her baby?”

“Her ba— What exactly kind of phone call is this gonna be?”

But Mimi was already heading down the stairs, her mind no doubt on a million different things. I followed after, wondering just how this could possibly go well.

“Are we really doing this?” Gonzales asked, her bionic eye’s light beginning to glow. In the months that we had been trapped on the alien ship together, rushing for home, I realized that she had the tendency to use it as a way to emphasize her words. It was certainly pretty intimidating.

“If you have a better idea, I would be quite pleased to hear it,” Mimi said calmly.

“Yeah, I bet you would.”

Bother.

While Gonzales and I had managed to get back to some of our old level of friendliness, I couldn’t help but notice that occasionally, she and Mimi would clash. Thankfully it wasn’t every day, but seeing the two powerful women vie against each other was like watching two planets try to out-gravity the other.

Thankfully, Gonzales shrugged, and her eye switched to blue before fading out entirely. “But as it is, I don’t have anything better to offer, so by all means, let’s have what’s probably going to be the most frustrating conversation we’ll have this year.”

“Who is even in charge of Earth Gov nowadays?” Ciangi asked, bouncing Harunya’s baby on her knee. “Do we even know?”

Gonzales shrugged. “I could probably send a message to the resistance and ask, but by the time they answered, we’d already be on our call.”

“Are we sure this is going to work?” Eske asked, idly feeding a couple of mini-mimics on her lap. “Last I knew, we were too far from Earth for direct communication and had to send holos.”

“Like I said before,” Bahn muttered, tinkering with something below one of the consoles of the ship. “I was able to integrate the alien’s technology with ours, and their range is considerably longer. Earth shouldn’t be a problem at all.”

“So you say,” Gonzales countered. “But what you say and what actually happens are two different things.”

“True.” Bahn slid out from under and looked to us. “Guess we’ll have to find out, won’t we?”

“Has anyone considered what we will do if no one answers?” Harunya asked quietly, sipping water from a battered canteen.

“They’ve gotta,” Gonzales said with an amount of determination that I was jealous of. “We left at the end of a big battle, but certainly not the whole war. They’ll have at least one person on the comms, even if it has been months since we last made contact.”

“I hope so,” Ciangi said, draping the baby over her shoulder and gently patting her back. I watched her keenly, wondering if that was something that I would one day have to do. Did mimics even need to be burped? I didn’t think that I had ever seen any of them need to cough up anything like humans did.

Actually, now that I thought about it, humans were a pretty weak, strange species, weren’t we?

Mimi took a deep breath, even though she didn’t technically need to breathe oxygen like we did and squeezed my hand. “Is everyone ready?”

“As ready as we’ll ever be, I suppose,” I said. “Let’s call up Earth Gov and the people who we helped overthrow Earth Gov.”

“Technically, we overthrew a coup that had infiltrated and undermined Earth Gov. If anything, they should be thankful for that.”

“We also caused millions or billions of dollars of damage and plunged the world into a chaotic power vacuum and reconstructive phase,” Ciangi said, the baby letting out a loud burp to punctuate her sentence.

“She has a point…” Gonzales murmured.

“Annnnd I’m calling now,” Mimi said, pressing the necessary controls. There was quiet for a moment and I could swear I heard all of our hearts beating, and then…and then there was the startup sound of a standard comm booting up.

“Wow, is it working?” Eske asked, leaning forward.

“Why do you sound surprised?” Bahn asked indignantly, brushing his hair out of his face. Although his dark hair had grown enough to put into a bun, it still regularly fell out of the hold and into his line of sight. We still all bore the scars of our time through processing, it seemed. “When have I ever made anything that didn’t work?”

“Well, there was that one time you turned our food generator into a seed germinator.” Gonzales said. “And then it exploded.”

“And you made the filament of my favorite gun melt when you tried to add Gonzales’ upgrade,” Ciangi offered.

“You’re an engineer. You only had one gun.”

“Yeah, and you broke it. Your point is?”

The console buzzed, and I cleared my throat. Everyone piped down just in time for a view of a room populated with high-ranking military officials to flash up from the holo projector.

My throat squeezed at the image. I tried to tell myself that these were the good guys. That the coup had been mostly eliminated and taken out of power. But somehow my mind wouldn’t let me. To me, the uniforms I was seeing meant danger and betrayal.

Thankfully, it was Mimi who did the talking. Not me.

“Are we receiving a communication from who I believe we are?” a woman asked from Earth, her grizzled voice matching the many medals on her chest.

“Yes. I am the leader of the mimic race, and these are my compatriots. I believe you are familiar with our escapades, but that’s not why we’re—”

She was cut off as another projection lit up next to the military room to reveal what looked like a nearly empty helm of a ship.

“Holy boji! Gonzales, is that you?” the young man cried, leaning forward.

“Ay, yeah. It’s me. We’re gonna need you to get whoever’s leading you now.”

“Yeah, yeah, but, like, you’re alive now?”

“Boy, I’ve always been alive. Now go get a leader.”

“Well, when you went radio silent for four months, we just assumed—”

“Leader. Now.”

“Right.”

He scampered off and it seemed that whatever shock the military folks were going through had just worn off.

“Are those the revolutionaries?”

“Is this serious?”

“Surely you don’t mean—”

“Look, I realize that rationalization is a normal part of humans adapting to a surprise situation, but I do not have time for it,” Mimi said with quite a bit of authority. “Yes, we are broadcasting our holo-signal to the two of you and you are able to hear and see each other.”

“How is that possible?” a slimmer person in just a suit instead of a military outfit asked. “As far as we know, your planet is too far for us to receive this in real time.”

“We invent things,” Gonzales said lackadaisically. “Think you’d be used to that by now.”

“Most of what I’ve read is you stealing things.”

“Well…that’s also true.”

“Gonzales…” Mimi murmured warningly.

“Right, right. Don’t sidetrack the conversation. By all means, proceed with what’s sure to be a very productive conversation.”

“Gonzales! It’s good to hear your voice again!”

It took a lot of work not to sigh as someone strode into the revolutionist’s side. It felt like the conversation just wasn’t willing to cooperate. The man was someone I vaguely recognized from the last big raid we had to expose the coup, but I couldn’t remember his name or his part other than he and Gonzales argued both loudly and emphatically. I guessed months isolated on a ship with just my friends would do that.

“But what’s with all the suits? Last I knew, they were trying to bring all of us in for our crimes instead of thanking us on their hands and knees.”

I heard several of the Earth Gov members draw in a deep breath to object, but Mimi took her moment.

“The reason that all of you are here is because there is a threat that needs all of us to work together to head it off.”

“Oh, please,” someone from Earth Gov muttered. “Not with this alien threat again. We’ve been prepping ever since you handed over the tech you collected and your cell samples and there hasn’t been a peep.”

“Not a peep?” I asked incredulously, forgetting myself. “I lost half my hand in the first attack!”

“Nevertheless, according to our reports from the mimic that was working with the coup, you succeeded with very few casualties. If they are to attack again, we’re sure you’re quite capable of handling the threat with all the tech you’ve stolen from us.”

“More like reclaimed,” Ciangi muttered. “You wouldn’t have had any of that without Mimi anyways.”

The guy from the rebel side spoke just as someone else joined him on the screen who I also didn’t remember. “Yeah, as much as I love y’all, we’re kinda busy with helping expose any remaining coup members and hiding from the gov as they try to scapegoat us.”

“All of you deliberately—”

Mimi cut off the suit with a high-pitched screech that sounded almost like static. “Enough. The aliens did attack again and ravaged the fledgling city we’ve been building here. I’m sure you’ll all be fascinated to know that we can actually die.” I heard the crack of pain in her voice and my heart squeezed. There had been many nights where I had caught her staring up at the ship ceiling, strange clicking noises issuing from her throat. Holding one of her siblings/adopted children in her arms as they died had clearly taken a toll on her. There had been far too much death in her short life.

Although it all started with me.

“Of course, I do not believe any of you will trust us at our word, so here, our ship collected footage of our arrival when we found out that we had been ransacked.”

Mimi clicked a few commands and soon I heard audio from our ship’s logs from when we first saw the smoke blanket covering the city. Mimi turned her back to it, and I followed suit. In the short time that we had been in contact with the survivors we left behind, we found out that at least three other mimics had perished in the attack.

Sure, maybe that wasn’t a huge number, but how many would it have been if the aliens weren’t intent on kidnapping all the younglings? The thought terrified me. Besides, four souls lost was far too many in a civilization that was in the thousands and still trying to establish itself.

Mimi let the log continue until shortly after we left the ship and then she cut it off. I was glad that we didn’t have to witness that death again. I didn’t think I could handle it.

“And yet you’re here,” one of the government people said dubiously.

“Yes. We managed to use some pilfered tech to get to their dimension and steal one of their ships—”

“You really do have a MO, don’t you?”

But Mimi continued. “It was then that we discovered just how much of a threat these creatures are. I’m sending you what we’ve managed to decode of both their history and the level of technological threat. This isn’t all of it, of course. I only want you to see exactly why we’re reaching out to you.

She gave both groups a cold stare. “All of you.”

More buttons pressed, and I could hear something being played for them. It was a bit annoying that I couldn’t see what they were seeing, but that wasn’t how sending holos worked. The projector on one side would scan everything within the field and then send it to another projector, which then created a semi-3D image that could be displayed as a flat image—like the movies of ancient times, or as an image with the standard depth of vids now.

Finally, though, it ended, and everyone looked a bit more cowed.

“So basically, these guys are intergalactic harvesters,” the revolutionist murmured, finally sounding like he was taking everything seriously.

“Yes,” Mimi said, the tiniest bit of relief in her voice. “And just as before, once they take us, they will no doubt be eager to wipe out and integrate the rest of the living animals in the solar system.”

“We still don’t know that any of this—” one of the military officials started.

“Oh, shut up, Connors,” one of the suited women snapped. “There is no reason that they would specifically create a technology to contact us, who are most likely one of their greatest and least trustworthy enemies they have, and ask for our help. The risk is far too great unless the reward is survival.”

“Or the reward could be them trying to destabilize what little structure we have left!”

“For what purpose?!” she continued, her voice just as sharp. “They’re the ones that exposed the coup to us. And they left right after to go back to the home that we kidnapped them from. If they wanted to take over, they would have just taken over. And they might just do a better job than us.”

Another man nodded. “Just look at us. We’re the only people who have been fully vetted and there could still be a couple of us who the general didn’t give up in his confession. We let our government, which is supposed to be for the people, bloat into this cancerous, corrupt beast, and it took outsiders to knock us out of it.

“It’s time that we grew up and helped them like we always promised!”

There was quiet for a beat and then the revolutionist was speaking. “Wow. Never thought I’d ever hear a lick of sense and responsibility come from a government mook.”

“Let’s, uh…let’s not go with the name calling, shall we?” Mimi asked. “If this is going to work, we all need to be allies. We must be a force together, unintimidated and united.”

“And how exactly do you think we should unite?” another military person asked.

“Simple. As the planet closest to the aliens, and arguably the one who has pissed them off the most, they’re going to come here. By our calculation, in two months, three months max.

“So, what we need is for both of you to send supplies and people to our planet. We need everything from single-man fighters to your full-blown warships, guns, engineers, demolition experts, and marksmen. We have mere weeks to plan for an invasion, and this time, they’re not just going to send a ship. They’re going to send their full armada after us.

“And humans,” Mimi continued, her voice grave. “This victory won’t just be us protecting ourselves. Destroying the entire army that they send after us will essentially cripple their home planet. These aliens have many enemies that are scattered across the various corners of the universe. I’m sure they will be more than happy to take advantage of that weakness.”

“So you’re saying we’d effectively be ending an intergalactic terror that’s been roving their sector of space for centuries?” That was the other revolutionist, who had been silent up to that point.

“Yes. Exactly. There’s a whole universe of different lifeforms, not just mimics and humans, and these aliens have been systematically wiping them out and integrating them into their biologies and technologies. I say it’s time we end that.”

“If I am understanding this correctly,” the first military person spoke again. “Then you want us to basically empty what little forces and prep we have remaining and send it to you, leaving us completely open to attack from your merry band of uprisers.”

“Excuse us, you guys had the uprisers. We’re just the ones that brought them to your attention.

“…violently.”

“Enough!” the same suited woman from before snapped yet again. “I’m so tired of this. I worked my way up to council leader because I believed I would make a difference. And right now, this is the difference I’ve been waiting my entire life for.

“So,” she said with a breath. “I vote that we help. On one condition, that is.”

“And what is that?” Mimi asked, voice guarded as she stood up straight.

But the woman just smirked ever-so-slightly. “We get to name these alien bastards.”

4

Long-Term Guests

“The reinforcements are coming!”

I looked up from the panel I was taking apart, hoping to find some materials that could be salvaged. Eske was beside me, taking away things when my bin got full and tossing junk when it was in the way. There in the scorched, leaning doorway was a young mimic, their skin a vibrant purple and little horns sprouted all over its head while their lower body was still an inky black.

“It’s the Earth Gov supplies. They’ll arrive by mid-afternoon!” And then they were scampering off, no doubt to tell the others.

“Has it really already been two weeks?” Eske asked, wiping her face with her sleeve but just smearing more grit across her face.

“Not quite,” I said, looking down at our scanners. “Looks like twelve days. Earth Gov has improved their engines yet again.”

Eske shook her head, clicking her tongue as she did. I had long since learned that it was a sort of tick she took on whenever she was thinking very hard, so I waited for her to gather her thoughts enough to express them. “To think, if I hadn’t fallen asleep during one of those new, experimental weapons build sessions, I never would have been here.”

“Yeah, and your family would have never been targeted and had to go into hiding.”

“True, but I also wouldn’t have been able to be such a huge part of history.” She saw my dubious expression and crouched down next to me, long legs taking up most of the space. “Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it, right?”

I shrugged. “What exactly do you mean?”

“Well, people like you and me… We’re always left to the sidelines of things. We’re burdens. When have we ever been in the pages of history books? Never. We’re inspirational stories, and ‘aww, isn’t that great,’ but never people that are learned about.

“But you…you discovered life besides us and bonded with it in a way almost no one could. You made an alliance that has literally changed the course of our history forever. And me? The janitor with a head injury who’s always been a bit different from everyone else? I helped train an army. I’ve seen all of you use the hand-to-hand combat techniques I’ve taught to you. I’ve had my head shaved and been imprisoned because I was deemed essential to our side.

“And all of that was just because I took a nap.”

I let out a breath. I suppose that I hadn’t thought about all of that in a very long time. Strange, in the early days, our impact on history used to be a bit of a bigger deal to me, but now… Well, now I was just worried about surviving until tomorrow.

But still, if we did survive, hundreds of years from now, would they know about me? Would they talk about me and Mimi and Gonzales in history class? Would they teach that I was different, that my mind didn’t work like a neurotypical person’s did? Or would they say I was just like everyone else?

I hoped not.

I could have used any sort of role model to look up to when I was younger. To know that I wasn’t useless and strange and destined to be nothing but a cleanup guy who tinkered around on mining ships in deep space. In fact, it probably would have made a huge difference in my formative years.

If I could be that for future generations… Well. It was something to think about. Assuming all of civilization didn’t fall when the aliens arrived in our quadrant of space.

Wait, no, not aliens. The Harvesters. I wasn’t very partial on the name, but Earth Gov had a meeting that apparently took an entire day amongst themselves and decided that was what they were going to call the big ol’ menaces in the sky.

“So, are you gonna meet them down at the landing area?” Eske asked. “The mimics have been cleaning out a pretty good chunk of the mountain’s foot for all of them to land.”

My gut twisted nervously. I still didn’t trust these Earth Gov folks when we had already been betrayed once before, but I guess I didn’t have much of a choice.

Still, there were some things that we kept under wraps from them. For example, they didn’t know that I had mimicry literally grafted to my body. That was going to be harder to keep under wraps considering that my control on it was still only so-so. I supposed that in war, we couldn’t afford to keep secrets from each other, but my trust would have to be won in time.

I shuddered and ran my hand through my hair. Its shortness reminded me of just one of the many things that had traumatized us since we’d found out about the coup. From Lazer and his very specific torture of Gonzales. From being chased halfway across the galaxy in fear for our lives. From being strapped down and having my hair forcibly shaved and then being starved and dehydrated.

It wasn’t pleasant, and it filled me with a sort of anger that wasn’t very comfortable. I hated it. And I hated how Earth Gov made me feel.

“Are we doing the right thing?” I asked, looking to Eske uncertainly.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I think repairing our old war and tech base first was the best thing to do while we waited for their supplies to come in.”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t mean that. I mean with trusting them.”

She frowned, thinking again. “Hmm, I, uh… I guess I don’t know. But I think if Mimi thinks that this is the best idea, then we should believe her. She’s never led us wrong before, and you know that her mimic mind is way more advanced than ours.”

“Yeah…” I murmured.

I thought back to all of my nights in the past two weeks. I’d spent them in Mimi’s arms, cherishing what time we had together. We were constructing our own little fantasy life about everything that we’d do when we finally had peace. Maybe it was a little putting the cart before the horse, but it gave us something to hope for.

Something to live for.

“Well, we’ve got a few more hours,” I said, delving back to the panel I was scrapping. “Let’s try to finish this then head to the landing. I’m sure Mimi will be down there.”

“Yeah, I think this is one thing that she would never miss.”

I looked up to the sky as the several ships descended through the clouds, the bottoms red-hot from the friction. I could feel the vibrations from their engines even from where I was, and it only made my nerves increase.

Were we doing the right thing? Were we going to regret this? Were they going to betray us before the aliens even arrived?

The Harvesters, I reminded myself.

I felt a hand slide into mine, and I looked over to see Mimi standing there. I hadn’t even heard her arrive, but I assumed that she had probably been instructing other mimics on what to do.

“You ready?” I asked her, feeling guilty that I had doubted her. She had so much weight on her shoulders, far more weight than was fair, and the least I could do was support her.

“As ready as I could ever be,” she murmured, her eyes looking up.

More and more ship bottoms dotted the sky, and in total I counted five war vessels. That was increasing our current armada by quite a bit. I wondered if these were just ships from different locations that we didn’t steal, or if they were newer models that had been made since our last visit. I supposed I would find out eventually, depending on how this plan went.

When they finally landed, I forced my face into a neutral state. We were lucky that our negotiations had gone so smoothly, and it wouldn’t do to meet them with aggression right out of the gate.

Even if I so terribly wanted to.

The spacecraft let down their ramps in unison, but most of them remained empty. It was only the second ship that had personnel coming out of it, and I counted ten figures.

Ten? That certainly wasn’t the army we had expected.

But I recognized the military person who had spoken first, an older man with goldenish skin and grey eyes, and the suited woman with blazing red hair and a piercing, black gaze. The rest all seemed to be security folk who were armed to the absolute teeth with guns I didn’t recognize.

“Ah, greetings,” the woman said with a nod. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

“Is it?” Gonzales asked from behind me, causing me to jump. I had been so concentrated on the ships descending that I hadn’t even noticed that she had arrived.

“Enough,” Mimi whispered before addressing the woman. She offered her hand in a shake, which the woman took. “Thank you for coming.”

“Of course. I realize that you all are going out on quite the limb by inviting us here, but I assure you we are here to make amends, not sow more discord.” The woman put on a winning smile, and I was beginning to see why she had been elected by her district. “I’m Councilwoman Eva Delicato. You can call me Eva for short. I have a list here of all the supplies we brought.”

One of the guards handed her a datalog that she immediately passed to Mimi. I looked over her shoulder and my eyes bulged at the detail.

Five fully functioning, tested warships.

Four hundred fighters of most current, fully tested models.

One hundred long distance munitions

Six hundred standard combat munitions

Explosives

Fifty Engineers

Fifty accredited pilots

Ten strategists.

Five sub-commanders

Nutritional supplies for a year

Two Earth Gov members

“Thank you,” Mimi murmured, looking it over. There was a further breakdown as she clicked on one of the tabs, and it started listing the exact specs of one of the many guns they had brought. She tucked it under her arm, and I had to resist the urge to whistle. “This is assuring.”

“We want you to know how serious we are about this,” Eva continued. “There will be more coming, of course, but these are what we could amass immediately.” She looked around. “I take it the, uh, other third of our unholy trio have yet to arrive?”

“We thought it better that we stagger your entrances,” Mimi said. “Allows us to adapt and allocate more efficiently.”

“Yes, that makes sense. So tell us where you’ll have us, and we’ll get to it. I’m sure your mimics need some practice flying in our fighters. I believe in your report you said you had a few?”

“Very few,” Mimi said, gesturing for the woman to follow her. I could tell we were heading for what had once been the makeshift school that we had built but now was just the rubbly center of our barely rebuilt town. “And of a significantly older model.”

“Yes, I believe you seized a research station and took theirs?”

“That would be correct.”

“At least it was nonviolent,” the military man said, his first words since he had stepped foot on the planet. I got the idea that he was observing his surroundings, observing us, and seeing just how much of a threat we were.

We strolled to the burnt-out remnants of our school and if there was any doubt in these people’s minds that we were telling the truth about the ransacking of our home, it visibly faded from their eyes as they took in all the damage.

Granted, their shock at the decimation around us fled from their face as they spotted a group of small mimics scuttling towards some of the foot storage at the very edge of our commune. Although they had seen plenty of footage of Mimi and our exploits, it was probably still jarring to just see a herd of aliens roaming about. It was one thing to know that shapeshifters existed, it was another to see several of them rushing along the ground, onyx, spikey skin glistening in the sun.

“Those are your versions of babies, yes?” the military man asked.

Mimi regarded him, and I could tell that she was doing that analyzing thing she did whenever she was learning something very quickly. What kind of information was she gleaning from him? I wasn’t sure, but I would have to ask her later.

“We are still learning about our people. When the Harvester ship crashed here and subsequently wiped out all of the adults, they also erased much of our history. Technically, we don’t know how we reproduce or most of our life cycle.”

“What?” Eva asked, shooting us a skeptical look. “You lot have been up to quite a lot. Are you telling me no little ones have accidentally popped up since then?”

Mimi shook her head. “No. Many of us have reached sentient status, but there have been no births. Or egg laying. Or osmosis. Or any of the many reproductive processes that happen on your planet and others. There’s just us.”

“Huh. That’s a bit interesting, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps. But that is a mystery we can address once the Harvesters are defeated. Now, shall we discuss the allocation of everything you have brought as well as strategies?”

“By all means,” Eva said. “As soon as we give the order, our men will begin disembarking with all of the supplies.”

It was a bit strange to stand there and discuss such important military details and the gravity of the situation. I felt like these situations normally took place in a ship’s meeting room, or our own main house when that had been a thing. Instead, we were just standing in a loose circle surrounded by the rubble of what once was.

Well, it wasn’t like we could build a meeting room now. Considering everything that was going on, that was the last thing on our minds.

There was so much to do and so very little time.

5

Long-Term Confession

Wind whipped past my hair with a weird sense of déjà vu as two more massive ships descended through the cloud cover. It had been three days since Earth Gov had arrived, and they were still settling in.

The strategists had been the first to assemble, gathering in the ruins of our main house and immediately discussing the best things to do to whittle down the numbers of Harvester ships coming to take us down. I didn’t contribute much to those conversations, but they discussed everything from minefields to a forcefield to a line of floating cannons. All complicated and all with so many ways to go wrong, most of the technical talk went way over my head.

The engineers were doing what they could to repair our main base, cannons, and shielding. While they waited for newer orders from the strategists, the soldiers and military personnel took inventory of the defenses and capabilities we already had.

I also noted that there were some staff that hadn’t been listed on the datalog handed to Mimi. There were at least fifty maintenance workers across the ships and it seemed as many mechanics. That would certainly do us good since the engineers were much too busy working on reestablishing our defenses rather than repairing or upkeeping the many ships.

Certainly concerning if the military folks decided to band together and overthrow us, but I was beginning to think they wouldn’t.

Not that I trusted them. Oh, not at all. After getting burned once, I rarely ever forget. But even though they had an impressive amount of supplies, they didn’t really have enough to contain all of the mimics at once. They wouldn’t have the drop on us or the power level that the Harvesters had.

But still, I was glad that the revolutionists were finally arriving. These people I could trust, even if I didn’t completely remember them. But there was one person in particular I was looking forward to seeing…

The ship landed, and its ramp slammed down, causing an unreasonable cloud of dust to rise up. Clearly, they hadn’t taken the time to recalibrate the opening mechanisms in their time on Earth. Technically, they needed to be evaluated every month they were exposed to natural forces such as wind, rain, and salt, and not the vacuum of space. They really should have—

Something smacked my thigh, hard. “Ay there, my boy! You look like you’re thinking deep thoughts!”

I looked down to see Aja staring at me, a broad grin across her face.

“Just about general maintenance.”

“Hah! That’s my lad!” She clapped my thigh again. “Good to know that even with all of this going on that you still have your head right on your shoulders. Let me guess… It’s that they ain’t been upkeeping with the peripherals of the ship, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “The ramp. It’s making the wrong sounds.”

“Right, right, we were in a bit of a swampy area back at home. About the only place their sensors couldn’t find their own ship.”

“What? I thought you made a parts scrubber. That’s the whole way we were even able to land on Earth. That’s why we saved you from the gangsters you wound up with.”

“Speaking of which,” Gonzales said, bounding up. “How are you doing with that whole gambling thing?”

“Ay, you’re much too young and I’m far too old for you to try to mother me.”

Gonzales shuddered. “Ew. Don’t say the m-word around me.”

“Hah! A girl after my own heart.”

“That I am,” Gonzales said, patting her back a few times. “And because of that, you’ll do me a favor and give me some time alone with our boy here, right?”

Aja looked up to her suspiciously. “Uh, forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t he with the more alieny one—”

“Not like that, Aja.”

“But I’m sure I’ve seen ya moonin’—”

“Hey, Aja!” Ciangi cried, also bounding up. “You haven’t met the baby yet! You should come with me!”

“Ew, baby? Why would I want to see that?”

But Ciangi had a firm grip on the woman and was already leading her away, their heights nearly the same. I thought I saw her look back and wink at Gonzales.

“What do you need?” I asked, looking to the weapons engineer.

“Not here,” Gonzales said, wrapping her arm through mine. “How about we take a walk? Maybe to where the animals used to be?”

“You sure?” I asked. Almost all of them had escaped in the massive amount of damage that had befallen our little commune. They were just an empty example of one of the many ways our preparations had all been for nothing.

But we wouldn’t let that happen again. This wasn’t just defending our turf, this was wiping out a menace that had been committing genocide, medical torture, and slavery for eons. This was making a declarative statement that not only were we a people, but we were a force to be reckoned with.

Or we would all die.

While I was musing on the cyclical nature of our issues, we ended up reaching the abandoned animal enclosures. I looked around, surprised at how much time I had lost. I hadn’t done that in a long while. Perhaps it was the stress?

“So…” Gonzales said, unlooping her arm from mine.

“So,” I repeated, then waited for her to continue. I had no idea what she could want that she would need to speak to me specifically about. I wasn’t one of the lead engineers like Ciangi or Bahn. I wasn’t our leader like Mimi. I didn’t even handle the hand-to-hand fighting like Eske. I was the spare. I helped everyone but ran nothing.

I would think that maybe she just wanted to talk about things like we used to, confide our worries to each other or share jokes, but we hadn’t done that for quite a while. Although things had certainly gotten better since her disappearance, they certainly weren’t to the way they were before… Well, before I had ruined everything without quite understanding how.

She laughed. “Hah! Classic Higgens.”

But I kept quiet, sensing that part of her was just looking for a way to weasel out of whatever it was that she had brought me here for. I may have had a pretty hard time understanding most humans, but I was beginning to understand my friends.

It had taken me long enough.

She laughed a bit more, then that faded to uncomfortability and she just stood there for a bit, walking back and forth.

I watched her walk to and fro, looking the most insecure that I had ever seen her. Even when she was scared out of her mind, even when she was being tortured by Lazer, there had been this spirit of assurance to her. A sort of certainty that I always admired but didn’t think I could ever have myself.

It was strange, watching her walk back and forth was a lot like watching a mirror when I was in one of my moods. I knew I often needed time to calm down and get my mind right, so I just let her stalk about until finally she looked at me with an expression that was half-wry, half-pained. How did she do that? Emotions were often so difficult to communicate and there she was with two of them on at the same time.

“Did you ever know that I was in love with you?”

Wait.

What?

I stared at her, knowing my eyes were huge and unblinking, causing her to let out a much drier chuckle.

“I thought as much.” She let out a sigh and plopped onto a pile of broken barrier posts. “You never had a clue.”

“But you didn’t—” I sputtered, feeling like someone had just put an ionic wand into my brain. “You never— When did you—” Nothing seemed to make it out intact as my mind spun in about a million different directions.

Gonzales was in love with me?

That was impossible. She was a beautiful, impossibly strong, impossibly smart weapons engineer who I had personally seen shoot down many a hopeful suitor back on the mining ship. She was the woman that looked terror in the face and told it to take a hike, then stole its gun and rewired all of it to her own liking. She was lightning in human form and one of my only friends.

“Easy there, bucko. Don’t hyperventilate. I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’ve had to deal with someone having a crush on you.” She glanced to me and seemed to think differently after seeing my expression. “Oh. Or is it?”

I nodded, and she shook her head, laughing once more and still just as acerbic. “Oy. Trust me to fall in love with possibly the only guy I knew who would never get it.” She squinted at me, as if thinking, but my mind was still trying to fit puzzle pieces together that just didn’t seem to be possible.

“I didn’t mean to, ya know. When I first met you, I thought you were one of those weird, creepy guys who didn’t know how to act in front of women but would secretly go home and plot how to dismember them.” That shook me out of my feedback loop of thought and I shot her a mildly offended expression. Did I really come off that way?

“Sorry,” Gonzales murmured, blushing a bit. “But after coming up where I did and then going through everything I needed to become a weapons engineer, I’d learned it was better to think the worst of people and have them correct you over time rather than give someone your trust who doesn’t deserve it.

“Besides, I definitely learned that you weren’t like that at all. You were sweet. And funny. You were awkward, of course, and sometimes you didn’t get my jokes, but I could overlook that.

“And then, of all the people in the known universe, you were the one to make first contact. When I found that out, and when I saw that you stood up to our butt of a captain, I realized there might be a bit more to you than meets the eye. I remember standing there with the coin twins, deciding what we were going to do, and I realized that you just might be a real friend. Something I’d only had three of in my whole life up until that point.”

Now I was the one pacing, listening to her spin her story with a nostalgic, wistful sort of tone. The rational part of my mind was telling me that her explaining what happened was probably cathartic for her. Maybe it was giving her a resolution that she had been seeking for a while. But it was actively shifting my entire world view, making me look back at my old memories in a new light. How much else had I missed? Had I led her on? Had I been cruel?

Now that I thought about it, everyone else seemed to have known. Suddenly all the strange things that people had been saying to me made sense, and I didn’t like that at all.

“You took me on adventures that finally made me feel something. All my life, I’d had this craving to do great things, important things, and I had never measured up. But with you, we did everything from discover other planet systems, to new life, to help Mimi discover her entire people.

“But that whole time, you never once became conceited, or even seemed to realize just how amazing everything you did was. Sure, you changed a bit, you grew, but you were always the kind, caring guy who just wanted everyone to be safe and happy.

“And that was right about when I realized that I may have had feelings for you, and that you were definitely starry-eyed for an alien and only her. I didn’t know if it was because the two of you got each other in a way I never would, or if it was because she could be whatever you wanted her to be, or if she just had the luck of realizing exactly what a catch you were before I did, but for whatever reason, I tried to shove those feelings down, down, down until not even my dreams could pull them up.”

The hints of pain in her voice made me look at her and finally stop pacing. “I’m sorry,” I murmured. Ugh, how could I have been such a fool?

“You have nothing to be sorry for. You didn’t do anything wrong. That would have made the whole thing easier.” She leaned her chin in her hand and looked me over. “Even when we were on Earth, completely separated from Mimi, I could tell how unhappy you were. And honestly, that stung me. So, I traveled more than you guys, signed onto more gigs, until eventually I caught onto some things I shouldn’t have and we all know how that story goes.”

Ah yes, she was taken by the coup three months before us. It still made my stomach twist to think about everything that she had endured at their hands. At Lazer’s hands.

“I only held on all that time because of sheer stubbornness. I wasn’t going to let some ass with a weird fixation on me destroy all the surviving I had done up to that point. But towards the end, it was hard. I wondered why you guys hadn’t come for me. I feared that you’d forgotten me.”

I felt a pang of guilt at that. We had gone a terribly long time without figuring out what was going on and that she had been taken. In fact, if we hadn’t been taken ourselves, I wondered if we ever would have noticed. The thought was crushing and certainly didn’t make me feel like someone deserving of love and affection.

“But then you guys were there, and you fought so hard to stop him.” She closed her eyes, and it was almost as if I could see the memory replaying over her head. “Your cell was right across from mine, so I remember you trying to push through that barrier, slamming into it with all your might like your sheer willpower was going to break it down. You screamed for me, you tried to draw his attention away, even though you knew he was going to hurt you—badly. When I was being hurt, it was like nothing in the world mattered to you.”

I wanted to tell her that was because it didn’t. She was my friend that I loved very dearly and seeing anyone I loved hurt was the worst torture I had ever endured. But I knew that this wasn’t my time to speak. It was hers. And the least I could do was listen until she was fully done.

“And afterwards, when my nightmares were the worst, you would hold me. You would be the one to listen and tell me it was alright. But there wasn’t any pity in any of it. You didn’t look at me with those sappy, sympathetic gazes that everyone else had. You just treated it sort of matter of fact. Like I had broken my arm and just needed a splint, and this was to be expected. It was…refreshing, to be honest. And I’ll always appreciate that.

“But I think that was right about when I hoped that maybe there could be something for you and me. How could you look at me the way you did and truly not feel any of the feelings I had? I started to get a bit jealous of alien-face. Maybe even resent her a little. What did she have that I didn’t?”

Gonzales snorted at that. “Obviously I wasn’t thinking clearly. That woman is practically a god in inky flesh, and I’m just a girl from the slums with trust issues.

“So yeah, when you two confessed your love to each other and I realized there was never going to be room for me, ever, I needed space. So I left. Even when I came back, looking at you hurt me. Sometimes, looking at you still hurts me.”

She sighed and stood up, wiping her hands on her pants. “So, I figure it’s time to finally give all of that up. I know that friendship is all we’ll ever have because Mimi and you seem to be utterly made for each other. But still…”

She took a step towards me, her tanned hands reaching up until they were gripping my lapels. Her fingers traced along them a moment, her breath shaking, and all I could do was look at her curiously.

“Or at least my mind knows that. But my heart? My heart keeps right on wondering.” She stood on tiptoes and I could feel her breath upon my face. I knew that if I objected, she would immediately stop, but I didn’t.

And then her lips were on mine.

It was an uncertain kiss, with little pressure and a whole lot of questions, but I didn’t object to it. I knew what this was. It was an answer to a question that she needed the resolution to.

Just as soon as it had begun, it stopped, and she dropped back down onto the soles of her feet. “Huh. Well, that answers a lot, doesn’t it?” Gonzales sighed and stepped back. “Thank you for giving me that closure. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take a walk now. I’ll see you…in a day or two.”

“…see you,” I murmured weakly, giving her a little wave.

She walked off deeper into the forest and all I could do was watch her, still in a bit of shock from everything that had happened. One day, when I had the time, I would sit down and actually analyze everything that had gone on between us with fresh eyes.

But for now, I supposed there was a lot of work to do.

Heaving a sigh, I went back to work on our main base of operations. At least there I mostly knew what I was doing, and I would be a bit of a wrench monkey for all the engineers. Goodness knew preparing for battle against a giant alien armada seemed a whole lot easier than explaining to Mimi why I had let my friend kiss me.

…maybe there was a thing or two that Mimi didn’t need to know.

6

Tick Tock Goes the Ancient Clock

“I’m just saying that if we reconfigure your energy source like the alien ship’s that you’ll have twice as much power and strength for the shield without risking any sort of overload. And if there even is an overload, apparently you have an entire army of little alien creatures who are happy to eat it and then grow into super-powered weapons.”

“About that,” Urdet said wearily. Since we had last been taken by humans it seemed the most government-minded of the advanced mimics had done quite a lot of growing. While he was the same age physically, he seemed to understand human manner much more and didn’t question every other thing that came out of one of their mouths.

“We’re not sure that is a great idea. We have been monitoring our vitals as best we can, and it seems that those of us who ingested the spill-off radiation and forced rapid growth actually have certain cellular microtears that those who did not ingest do not have. The more run-off that’s been absorbed has resulted in more of these tears along with a slightly increased rate of cellular degradation.”

I jolted at that instantly. It had been a full month since both the revolutionaries and the government had started working with us on our planetary defenses and even more had arrived since. Two ships from the government and a smaller mining ship from the other side of our merry trio. But the real gain was in people. There were a little over a thousand of us now, all building and learning together with the fifteen thousand or so mimics that were left. It was a strange and very intense crash course in assimilation, but for the most part, we got along.

Although that might have just been because we didn’t have time to get into fights or waste a single drop of energy on conflict. Everything was either training, building, repairing, or scrapping. If someone had an idea that would add an iota of defense, it was usually put into action. Just the organization of it all was intense, and the strategists dedicated most of their time to keeping the base team, the troop team, the space team, and the pilot teams all rotating efficiently.

It would have been easier if everyone could have stayed in one spot or everyone could move in the same pattern, but it didn’t work that way. The core team of engineers would stay planet-side in the base, but a chunk was being added to two-man fighters or the warships to perform in-battle repairs—a harrowing and deadly job. They split their time between repairing and rebuilding and learning every single in and out of the ship they were assigned to.

Then the rest of the engineers were up in space, integrating the defenses we were hoping would narrow down the Harvester numbers. They needed longer up there to get anything accomplished, but then they too had to come down to Earth and work on the ships that they would be assigned to.

The soldiers were much the same, busy learning how to fight with mimics and use their unique anatomy to their advantage, building barricades, and teaching how to properly use the munitions they brought to everyone else. Their weapons were far more advanced than anything we had used before and I was glad for the several lessons I had.

So on and so forth it went, and yet somehow we were running like a well-oiled machine. The fact that we had repaired our central hub enough to reerect the cannon that we stole, and its corresponding shield, was a great accomplishment.

But all of those warm and fuzzy feelings of getting things done faded as Urdet’s words sank over my brain.

“Are you saying that the mimics who’ve absorbed radiation are sick?” I asked, voice sounding strange in my own ears.

That couldn’t be possible.

Mimi would tell me that.

Wouldn’t she?

She wouldn’t keep that from me…

“No, of course not,” Urdet said. “I am merely stating that we have observed a trend that has caused a concerning reaction in us. We do not yet know the consequences of said damage and we also are not stating that we wouldn’t do it again. I am just merely proposing that we do not count on our ability to absorb great amounts of energy as a matter of course.”

“Right…” I murmured, my world spinning.

Mimi was damaged.

How many times had she absorbed radiation run-off? More than I could even remember. That was the whole thing that allowed her to become sentient and shift into a human form. But was it gained too quickly? And what did that mean for her? What did that mean for us? I had her alien DNA grafted to my body.

“Uh…Higgens?” Ciangi whispered, grabbing my hand in and hauling it into her lap.

Surprised, I looked over to her to see that my skin was starting to ripple and buck. Goodness, that hadn’t happened in quite a while. Breathing through my nose, I forced myself to calm down.

“Alright,” the same engineer said that had spoken before. “Point taken. We need to make sure the output dampener and reservoir chamber are capable of handling the load. Fine. I still think this is the best way to wo—”

A loud alarm went off, and the engineer let out a cry.

“Now what?” she snapped, looking at the holoscreen booting up behind us. A few moments later, we could see the face of one of the military leaders looking anxiously at us.

“What’s going on?” another engineer asked, clearly much calmer than the first woman who was speaking. “Did someone lock themselves in the officers’ head?”

“Officers’ head?” Urdet whispered questioningly, flicking through his datapad as if he was looking for notes. “Is this slang for a mental illness?”

“It means toilet,” Gonzales said, snickering slightly from where she was draped over her chair. I risked a glance in her direction and she just gave me a wink which made me blush furiously.

Goodness, I was going to need to get over that if I ever wanted things to be normal between us again. If they ever could be. It was very strange to know that someone like her had ever loved someone like me. I didn’t know if I was lucky or if they were just unlucky that amazing people like them had feelings for me.

“No. I’m sending you a report now. The sensors on the alien ship went off up here, and I think you’d like to know what they saw.”

Instantly whatever levity or relaxation there had been in the mood of the room vanished and it was almost as if we were all holding our breath at once. The holo projector finished booting up, then we were looking at a fairly simplistic map of the entire system we were in.

And we weren’t alone.

Slowly, agonizingly slowly, a red blip started to slide in at the top of the holo-field. I didn’t need to read the analytical data flashing along the bottom to know exactly what it was.

A Harvester ship.

My throat caught as it fully emerged from where it came from and onto our screen. But still…one ship wasn’t that bad. I could guess by the size of its representation that it was probably bigger and more weapon-capable than the ship that we had stolen from them, but not by too much. Still…after we had been such a thorn in their side, it didn’t seem likely that the aliens would just send a single ship to deal with us.

Just as I thought that, the tips of two more ships appeared behind them, lengthening and lengthening until they too were fully visible.

And then three more ships behind that.

Then four more behind that.

On and on it went until there was a full triangle formation of Harvester mega warships coming to wipe us out.

“Well,” Gonzales murmured after a long and breathless pause from all of us. “It seems like our alien friends are ready to have a real party.”

That seemed to break the tension, and suddenly everyone was talking at once.

“Defense is clearly our greatest priority right now.”

“We don’t have the capabilities of taking on an armada that huge!”

“Each one of their ships is like three of ours, and we only have eleven!”

“I don’t know how, but we need to make some bigger guns.”

But all of that furor simmered down as the door open and someone coolly cleared their throats.

We all looked over to see Mimi, standing in the doorway with a collected expression. “I see you’ve heard the news,” she murmured, stepping into the room.

While Mimi was certainly handy in a pinch and quite intelligent, we had decided with all of the specially-trained engineers we now had at our disposal that she would lead and manage the mimics like more of a military leader. After all, there wasn’t really anyone who could inspire and motivate them like she could. But even so, I was incredibly appreciative of seeing her in front of me.

“Yeah,” one of the older engineers groused. “But how did you see it?” Some of the humans were still a bit wary of the mimics. Not that I could blame them. They’d been fed a lot of propaganda about us and that wouldn’t be easily forgotten.

Us?

I guessed I kinda was a mimic now. I hoped that eventually I would have some time to think about what all that meant.

But Mimi just pointed calmly to her scanner. Ah, Bahn really had built us a catch-all tool. Maybe if we all survived, he’d share that tech with Earth Gov.

Probably not.

“I know that we were hoping for less, perhaps ten to fifteen, but I fully believe that we can win this battle.”

“How?” one of the engineers asked. Barry maybe? Larry? Harry? Why were human names so similar? “Even if every single one of our plans worked, we still probably only have the capabilities to take on a dozen or so of those things—and that’s if everything goes exactly right.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m not so certain on our chances here. I wouldn’t even give us a fifty-fifty shot.”

“I understand that,” Mimi said, still just as cool as ever as she sidled beside me. “And I trust your opinions as experts. So if you say we can only handle a dozen, then we can only handle a dozen.”

“So that’s it then?” Ciangi asked curiously. Like me, she could feel that something was up. It had been a while since Mimi had done anything dramatic. Maybe it was time for her to show that particularly human flair again. “We just give up?”

“Not at all,” Mimi said with a wan smile. “If the verdict is that we can only handle twelve ships, then we make sure that only twelve ships actually get to this planet.”

“What?” the original engineering woman spoke. “What do you even mean?”

“What I mean,” she said, calling up a vid of some very old earth documentaries on war. Explosions were everywhere, and I was taken aback for a moment at the ancient and rudimentary carnage. “Is we make sure that eight of those ships never make it here.”

Her eyes flitted to the holo projector and took in all the data. “I’m estimating that we have one month until they arrive. Do the rest of you agree?”

There was a series of affirmative responses all around the table, and Mimi’s smile grew brighter.

“Good. They say that history is always repeating itself, so I thought I might borrow some from you humans since ours is so short. So…” Her hand slid into mine and I swore I felt some of her determination and optimism flow into me. “Are you all ready to get started on phase two?”

7

Beginning Phase Two

I stood at my console in our main command hub, one of the cannon’s metrics and controls arranged all around me. It had been thirty-four days since the aliens arrived in space, and they were coming within communication range of our planet.

Which meant it was time.

We had all spent thirty-four days preparing everything that we could. There was no stone unturned, no violent resource that we didn’t exhaust. We had traps and plans and training out the wazoo.

One thing was for certain: even if we failed, we weren’t going down without a fight.

But I didn’t want us to go down in flames. I wanted us to win, I wanted to hold Mimi and have that magical family with her, and for all of my friends to know what it was like to wake up in the morning and know that there wasn’t anyone coming to kill them.

I wanted peace.

And maybe, just maybe, we were on the cusp of having it.

My palms began to sweat as I gripped one of the levers in front of me and the large aiming toggle. Our weapons team had managed to construct two smaller cannons that mimicked the function of the larger one that we had stolen. While they weren’t generating a shield to protect our city, nor could they punch a hole through one of the ships, they would still do quite a bit of damage. I just had to be careful that I didn’t accidentally commit friendly fire and destroy one of my allies.

Maybe I shouldn’t have volunteered for this position, but it was the only place where I was really needed. All of the small fighters were manned by mimics, with the two-person ones carrying an in-battle repair engineer. The reasoning was that they were the only ones who could really survive the vacuum of space and most explosions. All of them had ingested a tracker so that if they did get flung off into the void, we would be able to go find them.

Assuming, of course, that we were victorious.

And as for the warships, they all had military personnel piloting them and managing their own weapons systems. While Gonzales had managed to get established as the captain of one of them, I certainly didn’t have the skills for that either.

Mimi and Eske were with the ground troops along with Eva, armed to the teeth and set up behind many barriers, smokescreens, and other traps that would hopefully push the odds in our favor.

The only way I would end up in the battle on the ground was if phase two and three of our planned work. And when we ran the simulations, even under the best conditions, our plan only worked a third of the time.

Those weren’t great odds.

But as I held onto my cannon’s controls, I couldn’t help but hope that it would be enough.

“I have a reading,” Aja’s crackling voice came over the comms. We had an order for silence except for necessary updates relevant to the phrase we were on, and so far, only Aja and Mimi were supposed to talk. “Looks like they’re about to reach our outer rim of defenses.”

“Are they slowing down at all? Have they showed any sign of reading your signal?”

Aja let out a derisive snort. “I didn’t spend the last three weeks out here spreading thousands of little surprises and building my own little hidey hole to get spotted before the fun even began. Don’t worry, they’re going full speed.”

I looked down at my scanner to see the readings that Aja was sending to us. At first I had objected to her staying on such a far, outer rim on a small ship, too far away to be helped at all, but she had insisted. She said that most of the alien’s scanners were set to a sort of standard human or mimic structure, and since she technically had a significant mutation, she would be the easiest to shield from their sweeps. She also was the one with the greatest technical knowhow to do what we needed her to do.

“Remember, we need at least half of them in the web,” Mimi reminded her calmly.

“Girl. I know you may be some sort of super alien whatever, but I remember the plan. We’ve only been working on it for four whole weeks.”

“Right. Just hold steady. By my mark, alright?”

“Sure, by your mark. Not by the mark of the lady that’s actually here and set most of this up. Noooo, definitely not by her mark.”

“I’m glad you understand.”

Aja let off some choice words but quieted as all of our scanners beeped. The Harvesters were about to reach another one of our proximity warning markers. So, hold steady she did. I watched as that triangle of death moved closer. And closer. And closer. Until they were only about twelve hours from us at their top speed.

Until they reached the asteroid field.

So thick that one could hardly see out of it and stretching many times farther than our planet’s diameter, it was a heady field. Stuffed to bursting with floating rocks, space particles, and cosmic radiation, it certainly was a sight to see.

Those kinds of fields were often a huge problem for our ships before we had integrated mimic technology. Heck, we’d used them as cover before. But with ships that big and that strong, they could just plow right on through the mess with only a bit more energy to their forward shields.

And that was exactly what they did.

I watched on my screen as the triangle hit the grainy field of little red dots. Just like we knew they would, they weren’t bothered in the slightest and cut quite a path through the debris. They just kept going and going, until finally all but the last line was within the field.

“Aja, now!”

The eccentric woman didn’t hesitate for a moment. The readout on our scanners switched from the more informative and technical readout to direct visual feed of the event. One moment, the ships were coasting forward like nothing was amiss; the next moment, everything was exploding all around them.

It was pure and utter chaos as fire, rock, and shrapnel went everywhere. The ships didn’t have any time to respond as each and every asteroid around them exploded violently, doing as much physical damage as they possibly could.

It had been Mimi’s idea to employ the same strategy that had been so popular during ancient wars. Mines. Apparently, humans used to just fill the ground with them so that whoever stepped on them was blown into bits—or at least their limbs were. This left many people crippled, and that was exactly what we were hoping to do to their ships.

The first six ships were completely engulfed by the fire with the middle ones trying to slow behind them.

However, one couldn’t stop a multi-ton vehicle on a dime, and they soon slammed into their damaged brethren as well as the farther out asteroids. A couple tried to veer out to the sides, but instead they hit the other asteroids that were quickly closing in on them.

Normally, that wouldn’t happen. But normally, asteroids weren’t filled with magnetic properties and full of explosives. That was what Aja and a very small group of engineers had been doing ever since Mimi had her idea, and I couldn’t believe that it was actually working.

The final line of ships did manage to slow to a stop, then changed course, going around. But the rest of the ships that had entered the field were quickly being surrounded by the magnetic geodes that had already locked onto them. With no option to back up themselves, they either had to forge forward or perish.

It was morbid yet satisfying to watch them try to jet through the mass as fast as they could. Eleven of them entered the field, and by the time five of them burst through, smoking and limping, six of them were in burning smolders.

“I can confirm that a half-dozen are stilled,” Aja said. “I repeat, a half dozen! I’ll discharge an EMP to make sure they’re fully disabled, but you still have fourteen of them barreling towards you hot and heavy.”

“And now the element of surprise is gone,” Mimi murmured. “They’ll be on the lookout for defenses. This will make your job harder. Are you ready, Beta Team?”

“You betta believe it,” a vaguely familiar voice answered. Was it the demolition expert from our grand takedown of the coup? I couldn’t quite place it. “Are they still traveling on the paths we predicted?”

“According to my readings, they are,” Aja said. “But they’re about to go to my field and I think there’s gonna be a little delay before they get into your range.”

“I ’spose that’s the price we pay for a little secrecy.” That was true. In order to keep them out of the scanning requirements of the Harvesters’ ships, they couldn’t have the same fancy, long-range equipment we had planet-side. That would make them put out far too much energy and they’d be spotted in a snap. And if they were spotted…

I shuddered to think of what would happen to them and put it out of my mind. There was still far too much that could go wrong for me to be thinking negatively. I had to stay positive and alert. It was almost time for the last part of phase two.

We waited, and I realized I was holding my breath again when my chest began to ache. Reminding myself to inhale and exhale, I waited for the revolutionist to give us an update as my scanner switched back to the technical readout from our long-range sweep.

“They’re approaching. Do you have the satellites in arrangement?” Mimi asked, her voice still as calm as a lake.

“Nah, I decided I’d just sit here with a thumb up my butt.”

“Cut it, Jax,” Gonzales said, breaking the radio silence. She wasn’t supposed to do that, but I appreciated that she did. “I know you think you’re cute, but when I say that it isn’t the time for cheeky banter, then it really isn’t the time.”

“Right. Got it. Satellites are in place but dead currently. It’ll take me at least thirty seconds to boot ’em up, so I can’t do that until these suckers are in range. The moment they see them flicker to life on their screens, they’ll know something is up and hightail it around us.”

“Steady,” Mimi repeated, as stalwart as ever. Man, did I wish I was there to hold her hand. To leech some of her bravery. But I had one real job, and I was going to do it. “They’re still a bit away from you by our readings. You’ve got about two minutes before they’re in your sweet spot.”

“Sweet spot? Oh, talk dirty to me,” he muttered before Gonzales let out a small growl. “But I’m not so sure I like that ‘about’ word you used. I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit more of an exact kind of guy.”

“You’ll know exactly when they come into the range of your equipment. Something you might notice more quickly if you were quiet and focused.”

“Ouch. Point taken.”

He was quiet a moment, then we heard a bit of a whoop. “Alright! We have visuals on our scanner. According to my estimates, they’ll be in the perfect location in fifteen seconds. Beta Two, Beta Three, engage your satellites on my signal.”

In an ideal world, he would have had a master switch that he could use to flip them all on at the same moment. But something like that ran the same crux of the high-powered scanner and would be too easy for the Harvesters to pick up.

So that left three revolutionists in three small ships with satellites integrated into their systems as they hid in the shadows of several moons and large celestial objects. Ironically enough, in the shape of a triangle.

“Ten seconds,” the maybe-demolition expert murmured.

I didn’t think it was possible, but the tension ramped up even higher. I forced myself to breathe as the seconds ticked away.

“Five seconds.”

We were so close. This was the last little trick up our sleeves before it was onto phase three. Aka, direct space combat. We needed to take out at least two of the ships. Just two. We could do that.

Right?

“Three seconds.

“Two…

“One…

“Engage satellites now!”

There was yet another silence on our end, but slowly, three very small red blips illuminated on our screen as the satellites booted up.

I could see the remaining Harvester ships also alight with energy, no doubt seeing the small ships just like we did. But that only lasted for a second before the entire screen filled with static.

“And we have ignition!” the revolutionists crowed. “Engaging our escape pods now. See y’all on the flip side. Please don’t let us all die in the dark void of space.”

Before anyone could say anything else, the line was filled with a sort of screeching sound that nearly pierced my ears before the automatic dampeners toned it down.

“Aja, is it working?” Mimi asked, her voice wavering slightly.

“Aye, you bet ya. I don’t have any sort of nav or scanning system at all. Those ships are flying about as blind as they come. Manual skill, baby!”

“Alright, send in the second wave.”

“Nothing would please me more. Good thing that I happen to be a great pilot on top of being an absolute technical genius.”

“Yes, lucky.”

“Dragging now. I’m sending you my manual feed. I can’t see it myself, but maybe you might.”

A hazy sort of picture flitted over my blank field screen and sure enough, I saw the remaining Harvester ships loom in the distance. All of them were sitting in a loose pattern, no doubt trying to reset their systems.

But they weren’t going to have any luck with that, because the three satellites we had set up were all emitting a feedback loop of frequencies that we had specifically set up to scramble both their navs and their comms. We based it on the tech from our own ship and although it seemed more of nuisance than anything, it soon would hopefully have some grave consequences.

“Approaching now! The asteroids should soon catch onto their magnetic pull instead of— Oh, and there they go! Spinning back now, and hopefully I can get first class tickets to the show.”

True to her word, she spun backward, and I was able to see the hundreds and hundreds of asteroids that flew forward, heading straight for the Harvester ships.

The ones at the back had absolutely no way of telling what was happening until the mines crashed into the backs of their ships. The whole lot of them rocketed forward, but with no navs and no comms, there was no way to communicate their flight path. And maybe, just maybe, they all could have gotten out of it unscathed if Aja wasn’t bringing up another wave of bomb-filled asteroids in a perpendicular line.

Once more, she flew off at the last minute and once more, one of the ships was hit full on by the first of the wave. It veered to the side, trying to avoid the barrage, only to have one of its brethren come flying up behind it and cleave right through it. The resulting explosion was insane and whited out our screen for a moment.

“Holy…” Aja breathed, her screen shaking as she rapidly retreated. “That went even better than I hoped! Are you guys enjoying the view?!”

We certainly were. I watched, heart in my throat, as the ships continued to scrape and collide with each other as they frantically raced forward ahead of the last of the mines. It was frantic and haphazard, full of shrapnel and fire. It seemed almost too good to be true until one of the ships happened to crash into the small satellite-bearing ship and disrupted the feedback loop.

After a moment or two, they had outrun the last of the asteroids and there was just silence as they floated along. One could almost feel the shock emanating from those vessels and I slowly counted them, not daring to believe that we just might have set out to do what we wanted.

“Well, I’ll be,” Aja murmured, confirming my hope against hope. “Looks like we got it down to ten of them.”

“Perfect,” Mimi said, and I could feel the fire all the way from where I was standing. “Prepare Phase Three.”

8

The Third Phase’s the Charm

More noise but this time, not as much chaos as all of our pilots began to prime their ships. According to our calculation, we still had at least ten hours before the aliens arrived, but considering how cautiously they were proceeding after our two little space surprises, it seemed that we might have a bit more.

But time was a double-edged sword. I felt so on edge that I wasn’t willing to leave my seat in the control bunker of the cannon I was in. I was afraid that going to get a drink of water, or even relieving myself, would cause me to miss something vital and I would somehow doom us all with my negligence. For someone who often thought I wasn’t that important or vital to much, I sure did like to mentally exaggerate the scope of my failures.

“Higgens?” I heard a familiar voice murmur.

Surprised, I watched as my small bunker’s door opened and saw Mimi standing there, looking far more exhausted than I ever liked to see her.

“Hey,” I said, getting out of my seat and crossing the short space to her. “What are you doing here?”

“We have time until those aliens get here,” she said, lifting her hand to rest it on my cheek. “Far too much time. I feel like my mind is going to close in on itself and my heart explode. I don’t even really have to have a heart, Higgens. I just make one up sometimes, so you can listen to it beat.”

I pulled her into a hug and rocked us both gently. The steady motion calmed my own mind, and I hoped it helped her as well.

It seemed to after a few minutes, as her fake heartbeat faded into nothing. I appreciated that she put it on for me, but she really didn’t have to. I loved the alienness of her just as much as I love her humanness. I was sure she knew that, but sometimes what the heart knew, the mind would argue against.

Eventually, we pulled apart and I looked into her eyes once more. They were black again, with the darkness almost reaching the corners, and I understood that feeling.

“Hey, Mimi, have you ever heard of depression?”

“Yes, it is a human ailment, correct? A mental disorder that negatively effects how humans think, feel, and act.”

“Uh-huh, and do you know what anxiety is?”

“Another human mental illness.”

“Yeah, well, I’m beginning to think it’s not just human. All those things you talked about, the things that are weighing you down? I think they might be signs you’ve got one or two of those.”

“Oh. How unfortunate. Of all the human habits I had to pick up, it was those two.”

“Well, I’m no expert. It’s not like we could afford a therapist on the islands. If we did, maybe I would have been treated a little better.”

Maybe, but not likely.

“Goodness knows you deserve it.”

She pressed into me again, and then we were rocking. I couldn’t say how long we held each other like that, but eventually it faded into an idea.

“Hold on a second,” I said, pulling away from Mimi. Looking down at my scanner, I called up some old-time, calming music and it gently drifted through the tiny little control bunker. Holding out my arms again, she walked into them and we slowly danced around.

“This is nice,” she murmured into my chest. “Here, it’s almost easy to…”

“Forget that there’s a malevolent alien race bearing down on us that’s intent on our complete and total annihilation?”

“Yeah. That.”

I felt the tiniest of chuckles go through her, and that made me smile. Even in times like these, I could ease a little of her burden. I might have been a fledgling engineer and wrench monkey, but I was her fledgling engineer and wrench monkey.

“So I was thinking, with this union of ours…”

“Yes?” I murmured, eyes closed and calm filling me for a few moments.

“I think I want some of your earth flowers there. The really pretty ones that I saw holos of in Gonzales’s room back on the mining ship all that time ago. I… I think those might have been the first flowers that I ever saw.”

“What were they?” I asked. “Roses?”

Mimi seemed to ponder a moment then shook her head. “No, not those. I’ve seen those in your vids often. No, these are…uh, more pointy? I think I read something about them being harmful to your domesticated creatures.”

“Wait, do you mean lilies?”

“Lilies?” she repeated as if she was turning the word over and under on her tongue. “Yes, I think that’s it. Lilies. I love them. In all sorts of different colors.”

“You know, I think my mom once told me that lilies mean devotion.”

“Really?” Mimi murmured. “How fitting.”

“Glad you think so.”

The minutes faded away as we continued slowly twirling around the room. Maybe it was silly to be holding each other like that, listening to pretty music as we talked about flowers for a wedding that we didn’t even know would happen for sure. But it was what worked for us. And as the seconds passed, my determination built higher and higher.

We would do this.

If it was the last thing I was going to do, I was going to make sure that Mimi got her happily ever after.

And if I got mine too along the way, then that was just a bonus.

“Warning, the ships are about to reach weapons range.”

Ciangi’s voice buzzed over all of our comms. I swallowed, sitting up in my bunker. Mimi had already left, going back to her leadership position hours ago, but I could still feel her pressed against me. I swore to myself that I would feel that again. No matter what.

“Everyone up to their ships! Remember to prime them, but do not engage your engines until my mark.”

A curious order, but more of our strategy. We didn’t want the Harvesters to know exactly how many ships we had until the last possible second. Our only saving grace in this entire conflict was the element of surprise, and we were going to milk each and every second of it we could.

At first, we weren’t sure our plan would be possible. Wouldn’t the ships just fire on our planet and overwhelm our shield before even getting into orbit? But we came up with a bit of an idea to delay them.

And now that there were only ten of them instead of a dozen, I was more hopeful than ever that our strategy would work.

“I show their weapons are engaging,” Bahn said.

It sounded like the two were in the bunker with me, but I knew that they were in the center of our hub with the cannon, running all of the screens and input from all the different sensors. While they hadn’t had much to do besides calibrate the systems we had planet-side, now was their time to shine.

“Can you tell their aim yet?”

“No, not quite— Ah. They’re taking the bait.”

“Yes!” I heard someone hiss who shouldn’t have been talking. They shut off their feed quickly, but I couldn’t help but agree with them.

But maybe that was because our bait was the same alien ship that we had stolen.

Well, at least it was the outside of the alien ship—minus all of the useful weaponry, of course. We had stripped that thing bare and repurposed it into all of the rest of our plans and figuring out just what kind of weaknesses that we could exploit.

What it was filled with now was a buttload of EMP charges.

“They’re opening fire!”

Our planetary shield blazed to life, cloaking that entire hemisphere just as the Harvesters’ weapons slammed into the vessel.

I assumed that usually their vessels could take a whole lot more damage, but usually their ships weren’t reduced to barely-functional carcasses. The firing hit true and my scanner’s field once more flashed white as the ship exploded in an electrical, fiery blaze.

“Ships engage now! Activate exit protocol! Now!”

I could feel our entire base shake as all eleven of our improved warships took to the atmosphere. While most of the engineers had been working on defenses and rebuilding, there had been a very select crew that had worked hand-in-hand with all of the maintenance folks and mechanics to integrate all the bonuses and advancements we had learned from the Harvester ship into our own technology.

I looked to my screen to see that the remaining ten Harvester ships had indeed been affected by the EMP, and the readings on my scanner indicated that they were doing total system reboots. We had learned from testing our own ship that it would take at least fifteen minutes.

Unfortunately, even at our absolute fastest, it took our ships ten minutes to get into space and firing range, which meant that we only had five minutes to do what we needed.

And that was personally shoot off each and every external cannon while also delivering a virus to the ships that would disable their main internal firing system.

…boy, our plan was complicated.

But the ships made it into space right on time, and Mimi was giving orders again.

“Release the fighters!”

Boy did they. All of the landing bay’s doors opened at the same time and hundreds upon hundreds of lighter, faster ships zoomed towards the sitting ducks.

My screen filled with light again as most of the ships focused on the gunnery. This was their sweet spot, as the ships couldn’t turn their cannons to target them and also couldn’t open their own hangar doors for their fighters. It was five full minutes of absolute carnage.

But of course, that wasn’t enough. There was a small cadre of twenty or so fighters that were absolutely covered in inky blackness. They pulled right up to the gaping barrel of death that was the chute that lead to the internal cannons and that inky blackness broke into hundreds of mimics that scurried inside of the tube.

I held my breath. If their power came back early, or if they found a way to fire their inner weapons without their systems up, then we were going to see massive casualties. I just had to hope those little ones could find the same connection port that was on our vessel and upload the virus that our data-specific engineers had come up with.

“You’ve got three minutes,” Ciangi said. “I recommend all ships pull back at the thirty-second mark because these guys are gonna be pissed.”

“Roger, roger,” one of the human pilots said. I knew there had to be a whole lot of radio chatter between the mimics up there, but they were on their own channel. It wouldn’t do for all of us human to hear a nonstop stream of squeaks, chirps, trills, and barks, but I couldn’t help but wonder what all of them were thinking. Was Pyjek up there? Or Nyiel? Or were they on the ground?

My stomach twisted at the thought of any of the little ones being in danger, but I supposed that this was what I had to get used to for just a little while longer. Then, finally, we could all rest.

“Two minutes until estimated reboot. Mimi, can you hop on your younglings’ channel and tell them to hurry it on up?”

“On it.” She was silent for several long seconds until her voice came back. “The port isn’t in the same place.”

“What do you mean it isn’t in the same place?” Ciangi exclaimed.

“I mean that—”

“I know you’re about to just repeat the same thing back to me so let’s cut that off. Can they tell you what they’re seeing?”

“Mostly just darkness. There’s five or so faint energy signatures but none of them lead to a port. They’re searching everywhere.”

“Alright, alright, so this is a newer model,” Ciangi murmured, and I could almost hear her brain churning. It was so hard not to say anything, but I knew this wasn’t the time. I had to trust. I had to believe that my friends could do this. “That means they’ve improved it. What would have improved the weapons system that we had?”

“Well, there was an obnoxiously long cooldown time,” Bahn offered. “If I was trying to engineer an upgrade, I would deal with that first.”

“That’s it!” Ciangi cried. “They cooled it down! Tell the younglings to look for the coldest spot! They would have the port and dampeners right next to whatever they used to keep it from overheating!”

There was silence again, then Mimi was back. “They’ve found it.”

“Good, because they’ve got one minute until those things boot up, and I’m starting to get some energy signatures. Tell them to get the hell out of there!”

“All troops draw back into a defensive line!” I heard Mimi order across all channels. “The real battle’s about to start!”

One of the pilot’s voices came over the radio. It was completely unfamiliar, so I assumed it was one of the humans.

“Uh, none of your children have left the chute yet.”

“What?” Ciangi asked.

Screeches and sounds issued from Mimi’s mouth, and I assumed that was an intense warning to the younglings.

“Oh! I see them coming!” one of the pilots cried.

“Thirty seconds! Get out of there! Get out of there now!”

“Hold on,” the pilot said. “They’re almost to us.”

“Hurry,” Mimi whispered. “Please, my babies. Hurry.”

“They’re almost here. Almost…”

My heart was in my throat and I was so sure that we were about to see hundreds of mimic children die. But then I heard a shout of victory.

“They’re out! They’re on me now!”

“Good, then get the hell out of there because I read that they’re booting up right now!”

“Roger, over and out!”

I watched on my scanner as they zoomed away, the ships blazing to life and their gun barrels beginning to glow with power. I was so certain that they weren’t going to get away, but then the barrels began to burn orange. Then red. Then a powerful white-blue.

And then, just when it was time for them to fire, the light fizzled out entirely.

“I show one hundred percent virus integration!” one of the engineers cried.

“Good. Prepare for fighter-to-fighter battle. And cannons, it’s time to ready. You’re about to have a whole lot to do.”

“Ready,” I said, with the other gunner echoing me. Apparently, they were a marksman from Earth, but I didn’t know them personally.

With almost uncanny timing, the hangar doors of the ten ships slammed open and hundreds upon thousands of ships poured out in a blaze of small-ship gunfire.

Our own fighters formed a line behind our warships, who formed a solid line of defense. They opened fire in our own blaze and I readied my cannon, waiting for a good shot. As hard as our engineers had worked on them, they still had a cooldown period between shots, and I couldn’t afford to mistime anything.

The sky lit up in a blaze of fire. Our warships closed in on the ten gunless ships while our fighters took on the Harvesters’ smaller ships.

“The Harvesters are starting their landing initiative! They’re trying to get planet-side,” Ciangi hissed.

“We can’t have that happen,” Mimi said. “We’re equipped to handle the three or four that we planned. Ten will decimate us all.”

“Gunners, focus on their bellies,” Bahn said heatedly. “That should be where several of their landing mechanisms should be.”

I nodded and gripped my controls, aiming the cannon at the closest ship. “All fighters, clear coordinates in green on our navs. I’m about to fire in three seconds!”

I watched my clock count down in the trio of clicks and then squeezed the trigger as hard as I could. I felt a slight jerk from my controls and then my own screen showed a bright beam of light shooting up into the sky and out of the atmosphere.

I watched as it hit true and the ship sputtered for a split-second before continuing its descent.

“Dammit,” I hissed to myself before waiting the necessary cooldown and firing again.

My world faded to just firing, firing, firing as soon as I could. I kept my eyes on the readings, I made sure I didn’t aim at my own people, and I shifted my fire from each ship in an effort to slow them down.

The warships upstairs were going just as hard, flying in repeated swoops, trying to take out more targeted systems. I tried to keep my eyes on the fighters, but there were far too many to count.

But what I did see was a very specific count slowly rising in the corner of my display. It was the ships lost count, and one I hoped to keep at zero. Every single digit on that readout meant that a mimic and maybe also a human was now floating somewhere in space, hoping that we would win and then come to save them.

I hated it. I hated the thought that what were essentially children were fighting a war after being starved and used for centuries. I wanted this all to be over.

I felt tears in the corner of my eyes, but I forced myself not to wipe them away. Not even to blink. I had a job to do.

I fired.

And fired.

And fired again.

Every second that I could take an important shot, I did, and soon my screen started to glow red from all of the massive heat and electrical signatures all around us.

“Ship one is down!”

I paused my firing only long enough to swing to the next ship. I was taken over by my concentration, shutting everything else out until Ciangi’s voice cut through the wall in my mind once more.

“Ships two, three, and four are down, but we still have six of them entering our atmosphere! Warbirds, you need to get rid of at least two of those right now or you’re about to be the only survivors of this whole battle.”

Six ships? That was way too many! We would never—

I cut that thought off as I saw a very specific pattern on my control dash. One I could definitely take advantage of.

“Gunner two,” I said into the comms, breaking my radio silence for the first time since my ready. “Aim at the coordinates that I’m telling you on my count. Full charge!”

“My gun’s about to overheat. I need at least thirty seconds.”

“No time,” I snapped. “Let it overheat. If we miss this shot, we’re dead anyways.”

“Geez, no pressure.”

I punched in the coordinates to him and then lined up my own shot.

“You ready?”

“Charged and waiting.”

“On my mark! Three, two…one…fire!”

We both let out a full blast and I could immediately tell my systems were unhappy as they jumped up into the red zone all at once. But that didn’t matter. I watched my scanner breathlessly, waiting for the moment that I hoped would happen.

It would never work in space. Or even at the upper edge of our atmosphere. But since these ships were dealing with planetary entry, all of their shields were diverted to the front and top of their ships as they cut through the air. That left their bottom—where they liked to store their engine and nuclear run-off—completely exposed to a shot.

Just as I hoped, our combined blast punched straight through one ship, and then another. There was a thunderclap of an explosion and then a third one was swallowed up in the resulting explosion.

I couldn’t help it—I let out a huge whoop of victory as Ciangi’s voice burst over the comms again.

“You did it! We have three ships landing. I repeat to all troops, we have three ships landing. Prepare for ground fight!”

Grabbing my gun, I nearly vaulted out of my bunker and to my designated position at one of the protected firing balconies that we had created and camouflaged.

Phase two and three were done. Now it was time for the grand finale.

Hopefully it would be the Harvesters’, and not our own.

9

Take it to the Ground

The wind churned, and large chunks of debris landed all around us, but I steadied myself. Although we had a general idea of where these massive ships would land, they were just that: estimates. I had to wait for them to land before I could point my gun in the right direction, and every second seemed like agony.

But in reality, it only took a few breaths before they were setting down. Far too hot and heavy, they crashed into the ground more than settled on it, with the thundering sound of crunching metal filling the air and dirt flying everywhere.

I didn’t let that distract me, though. The most important thing was making sure we took out as many of those aliens as we could when they exited the ship. We wanted those on the actual battleground to have to deal with as few enemies as possible.

There were smaller booming sounds as the ramps of the ships slammed down and for the tiniest of moments, there was nothing.

And then the machines came rushing forward.

I wasn’t surprised. After our little tussle with the attacking things on the first Harvester ship we had snuck onto, we had prepared that they would no doubt have an entire army of the electronic foot soldiers to send out before risking one of their own lives. After that first battle so long ago, they knew better. They knew that we could kill them, so they were trying to mitigate their losses.

They should have thought of that before they decided to wage war with us then.

The machines rushed forward, a wave of blinding metals and lights, but that quickly ended as our old fighters—the ones that we had stolen from the research station—flew by and dropped their payloads.

I knew better than to look directly at the resulting blast, but I could still feel all the hair on my body stand right up. The distinctive sound of an EMP crackling filled our entire sky, followed by the pitter-patter of the machines falling apart, whatever technology that was holding them together losing its grip. Then, after that, a crunching sound as the next wave of robots stepped over their fallen brethren.

It would take the line of pilots at least five more minutes to load up more bombs and do another pass. We thought of holding back more fighters from our phase three, but that put us at too much of a disadvantage.

“Fire on the front line!”

I didn’t need a second order. I aimed my gun and started firing in a thick line across one of the ramps.

The machines fizzled and popped, one after the other, but there were just so many. They raced forward into the hail of plasma and ionic fire coming from straight ahead and above, thousands of them being ruined but thousands more taking their place. There were so many of them!

They rushed closer and closer, and just when it seemed like there was going to be first contact with the front line and the barriers there, the fighters flew over again.

More EMP bombs. More crackling. More robots falling apart. I didn’t let up firing, and neither did anybody else. The world was brimstone and ozone and burnt rubble and melting metal.

It was cacophony. I could hardly hear anything over the crunching and the thrum of all our weaponry. There was nothing to hear. There was only survival.

But then the smoke cleared, and the crunching stopped, and we realized that there were no more machines.

There was something…else, though. A sort of charge in the air that I couldn’t put my finger on. My eyes swept over the mess and the mechanical carnage, wondering if they were reconfiguring themselves or turning into bombs or some other horrific thing, but the pieces stayed dead.

It seemed that even after all this fighting with us, the aliens still hadn’t learned the power of boobytraps and surprise. Strange. They were relatively intelligent and far more advanced than we were. One would have thought that they would have picked up on it. But they—

Then Ciangi’s voice cut through the haze. “They’re firing up their shields!”

“Shields?” someone else murmured. Bahn maybe? I couldn’t tell, it felt like my brain was nutrient paste spread across too much bread. “What could they—”

But then there was a change of pressure in the air and I could see the faint green charge of a shield rush forward and envelop most of the battlefield.

“Looks like they finally caught on,” the human beside me murmured.

But my stomach dropped out and went through the floor. The shield meant no more flyovers with the fighters, and that our landing ships wouldn’t be able to contribute either until their soldiers disembarked. It also meant that all of us that were posted high above, meant to rein down suppressing fire, would no longer be able to help at all.

No.

That wouldn’t do at all.

I looked around, trying to see all the ways I could escape, but they were all too slow. I could see the line of alien foot soldiers marching forward, their own massive guns drawn.

I grabbed onto the railing with my mimic hand and threw myself over the edge. As I fell down, for the tiniest beat I was afraid I would jolt to a stop with a dislocated shoulder.

But I didn’t, and instead my arm turned as dark as night, stretching and stretching and stretching. I expected it to hurt. I expected my arm to burn and my strange, mimicky skin to crack and bleed. But that didn’t happen either.

Instead, I landed on the ground, the force of my fall enough to send me toppling forward into a shoddy sort of roll. My arm took several moments to get back to me, winding into itself like some sort of ancient, revered jack-in-the-box.

But I paid that no mind and got back to my feet, pelting towards the front and to where I knew Mimi would be.

I wasn’t going to let her fight this battle alone.

I ran possibly harder than I had ever run before. Harder than when I was racing away from explosions or giant tentacle monsters or anything else.

We’d been through so much, I couldn’t leave her now. If this was how things ended, if we fell at this final hurdle, then we would be together for it.

I made it to the front, looking back and forth, trying to pick her out of the barriers. There were so many faces, so many bodies.

And then the deep thumping of footsteps.

So many footsteps.

They picked up their pace, row after row of Harvesters charging forward. It was a weird sense of déjà vu to the same sound that I had heard during the first invasion, but this time, I was able to see it firsthand instead of when they were charging up the main lab base.

“Mimi!” I cried. “Mimi! Where are you?”

Of course, there was no answer. Just that last breath of bracing before the final clash.

And then the two lines fired.

I ducked behind one of the barriers, surprised when their shots glanced off of it, fizzling out into the air in multiple directions. I didn’t know why I was surprised considering I had spent at least five different days working as a wrench monkey on that project, but perhaps there was a difference between the theory and seeing it in action.

I leaned out from behind the barrier and fired my gun. I thought I saw someone fall, but I couldn’t tell for sure. Once more, my world was devoured by violence.

I hated it. I hated how it made me feel. I hated how it made me think. I hated how it made me act. I just wanted everyone to be safe. To be comforted and happy. I wanted no one else to be in danger, and I kinda just wanted to tinker around with stuff and make fun little doodads that did stuff that nobody really needed done.

I didn’t want to kill. I still remembered the first alien that I had ever gunned down. How it had taken a chunk of my own soul.

And here I was, doing it again.

Hopefully for the last time.

My nose burned and my eyes watered, but I kept fighting and firing and firing. Until finally the aliens reached us, trampling over their fallen kin in the effort to get to us.

It was a strange transition. One moment, we were in a long-range firefight, the next moment, someone was launching themselves at me, flying through the air with an unintelligible snarl falling from their lips.

Did they even have lips?

Not the question to worry about.

The two of us rolled to the ground, fighting for purchase. I could hear dozens upon dozens of other struggles—mimics screeching, humans crying out, the Harvesters letting out those bellowing roars that made my teeth chatter.

I managed to get on top and punch downward with my arm, it shifting and morphing into something akin to three large, dark hammers. It only took two hits until the beast stopped, but then I was grabbed from behind.

I went flying forward yet again, my face scraping along the dirt. We came to a stop when I slammed into a body. Whose body, I didn’t know.

I fought to get up, but the pressure on my back was so incredibly strong. Then I felt someone grab my feet, someone grab my arms, and pull.

Pain raced through me, and I choked on the dirt and grass my face had uprooted. I couldn’t see, I could hardly think. There was just the ice-cold panic as my lungs started to protest the lack of air. I needed to get free. I needed to fight.

But my body was so incredibly tired. Even just getting down to the ground with my rudimentary mimic abilities had taken so much out of me. I needed just a moment, a singular moment to breathe and gather myself and shake the haze of battle from every thought in my head.

But I didn’t have that. All I had was dirt and suffocation and the grunts of the aliens above me. Why wasn’t anybody helping? Were we losing? Was this where the tide turned and our luck finally ran out?

I could see the vision forming in front of me as my head swam, more dirt coating my tongue and forcing its way down my throat as my attackers pushed my head down father and pulled my limbs that much tighter. I could see the scattered carcasses of mimics dotting the landscape, some turning to dust just as Astaroth did. I could see another one draped across a barrier, its blood staining the ground with loss. I could see all of them. Destroyed. Stolen. Cut short when we had fought so incredibly hard just to live.

And of course, I saw Mimi. They would never kill someone like her, the mother of a species that could grow up to protect the entire universe. No, they would take her and trap her like the humans once had. I had read the briefest snippet of their medical files they had on board and I knew exactly the sort of insidious things they would do to her in the hopes of integrating her into their systems as she had integrated with mine.

I couldn’t let that happen.

Something changed, and the flickering flame of life within my soul burst into a raging inferno that refused to be put out. It wanted to live. It wanted to consume and clear away all the danger until there was only peace.

I could get behind that kind of message.

Reaching down inside of me, I called upon the slippery, inky cool that now resided in my DNA. I couldn’t see what happened, but I could feel my arm split and curl, winding into a swarm of whipping tentacles that lashed out at all who were holding me.

They fell back, and I jumped to my feet, snarling in a way that I have never heard myself utter. For just a moment, all the rest of the world fell away, and I was solely honed in on destroying the three Harvesters who were struggling to get upright.

Unchecked power rushed through me. With a cry, I felt my body bend and snap under the pressure, and then I was something else entirely as I crashed down on my enemies.

I didn’t really know what was happening. I didn’t understand all of my bodies or limbs. But that didn’t matter. I reached out and tossed the offenders away. Was this how Mimi felt all the time? Powerful and limitless and always rushing just below my skin? Overflowing with energy, ready to do whatever it was that I needed.

A strange, thrumming sort of hum filled my entire brain and I jerked, craning my head around. Heads? Did I have more than one? I couldn’t quite tell. Everything was confusing and different and oh so delicious.

And then I saw her.

Tall and towering and massive. She had taken on the form of something purely out of her own head. All limbs and gnashing teeth and pure power. And in that moment, she was just so beautiful.

I bounded over to her, feeling my form shift back to the human one that I was more used to as I went. I was so small, so insignificant next to her power. But instead of making me feel inferior, it filled me with a giddy sort of happiness that made me want to follow her everywhere and do anything she asked.

Goodness, was this what all the mimics felt when she had freed them from the original Harvester’s cruel grasp? No wonder they were willing to die for her.

I reached her just as she stomped on a group of Harvesters that were unloading their weapons all on her. She spared me only a glance, but when our eyes met, it was like I was filled from head to toe with purpose.

Fight.

No fear.

Just fight.

And so fight I did. I felt my mimic arm grow and expand into those snaking tentacles that I was able to control the easiest, but that wasn’t the only thing that changed. I felt a cooling sensation run across my body and down my spine until my other arm started to ripple and buck too.

I didn’t fight it, didn’t doubt it even though my brain couldn’t understand what was going on any more than it had when I had fended off the three attackers, but it formed a thick, hardened shield that looked exactly like a mimic’s skin.

“Higgens!”

I recognized Eske’s cry and whipped to see a Harvester leveling their gun at me at point blank range. For a breath, I was sure that I was going to die—rather anti-climatic after all of the revelations and discoveries I was having—but then I remembered that I had seen Mimi take a full-on ship missile to the face and be fine.

I jerked my shield up and the blow crashed into it, ricocheting somewhere else. I also flew backward, my feet digging into the ground for purchase, until I finally slowed.

Right in the center of a group of Harvesters who were facing off with some of the middle-developed mimics.

Now that wouldn’t do.

I set in on the closest one, grabbing him, lifting him up in the air as high as my tentacles would allow, then slamming him into the ground. By then, all of them had noticed me and began to close ranks.

It was intoxicating, this intense power that I felt. And suddenly I understood how Mimi managed to be so calm all of the time. I felt more powerful and connected to myself than I ever had.

Yet even as I knew that my mind was hovering somewhere between mimic and human, I realized that the hive-sort of mentality wasn’t all that different from my own sort of strange thought.

Huh. That all made sense, I guess.

But it didn’t matter. What mattered was ending this fight.

So I fought. I sank into what my body thought was best. Punching. Throwing. Deflecting with my shied.

Time took on no meaning, although my body grew more and more exhausted. It seemed that even with all the raw energy I felt rushing through my veins now that I’d finally given in to my mimic DNA, the well was beginning to run dry.

My forehead beaded with sweat. My breath grew short. All of my limbs became heavy and sluggish.

But I kept on. I punched a Harvester across the jaw that was trying to relieve a soldier from his head. I purposefully threw Eske against another two to whom she delivered violent kicks. I kicked, and tentacled, and carved a path through the battlefield.

Eventually, however, the attacks began to slow. My targets grew farther and farther part. And that was right about when our ships lowered themselves into the atmosphere, each bearing their own device that had been mounted during the whole ground battle.

I wanted to watch, but I couldn’t. Even though I knew exactly what was happening. They created a formation and slowly lowered.

With the alien ships having no way to fire up at the vulnerable underbellies of our own warships, they could only sit there, trying to force out all of their troops.

But there wasn’t any way for them to push that many of their foot soldiers out that quickly, and I felt the change in the air pressure as they booted up their different components.

And then, once they were all up, a tractor beam locked onto all three of the ships, hauling them high into the atmosphere.

Up, up, up they went until they were high enough that the foot soldiers would die if they dared to try to exit. And then, finally, the resounding background noise of our main base stopped, and I felt our planetary shield drop.

It was a strange sort of sensation, and one I didn’t let distract me from the battle at hand. But even in the back of my mind, I could tell that there were less and less to fight.

Then there was the sound of our main cannon coming to life, charging up to a full blast and aiming directly toward the three ships locked in our beam.

We had done the calculations at first and even with Aja’s help and the best of the best happening, we had known that there was no way to lift them as high as we needed if they were packed to bursting with their weapons of war. So we had needed them to empty a bit. That was why destroying so many of their fighters in the space battle had been important. Why all the robots and all the hulking soldiers with massive guns needed to be out. Or at least most of them.

The cannon’s buildup sound faded and for the first time in what felt like hours, there was utter silence.

Then it fired.

This time, I did finally spare a glance from the battle and I saw an incredibly brilliant bolt of pure energy shoot into the center of the three ships just as our own let it go and took to space as fast as they could.

The resulting explosion was insane, and I had to close my eyes from the vibrancy of it. But even from all the way on the ground, I could feel the heat of it and all of us were blown back several feet.

Heat and smoke filled the air while rubble flew everywhere. The mimics all around us bucked up and flattened, lancing out over any humans near them as shields from the falling shrapnel.

It was like the hellfire of old legends, and for a moment, I wondered if this was the end of our own world. That if in trying to save ourselves, we had destroyed ourselves.

But then, after what seemed like an impossible amount of noise, there was finally quiet.

I looked up from my own arm-shield to see that the sky was clear. Rising slowly, my body shaking the entire time, I looked around to see that what few foot soldiers that weren’t crushed, dispatched or wounded were holding up their multiple arms in surrender.

Surrender?

…this was it.

We had won!

A happy sort of cheer rippled through the entire field, some of us laughing, some of us crying.

We had done it! We had finally done it! We had wiped out the entire army of the Harvesters and sent a message that their tyranny wasn’t going to continue.

We had our peace.

“Higgens!”

My neck craned, and I saw Mimi running towards me. She was covered in soot and sweat with bruising along her face, but I didn’t care. She was alive, and we had won!

I ran to her too, and when we reached each other, she jumped into my arms. Our lips crashed against each other, neither of us paying attention to the fact that our faces were filthy and beaten up. We kissed like we were breathing for the first time, and when we broke apart, I felt like I could cry.

“We did it!” Eske said, running up to us. Her goggles were cracked, her lips were split, and it looked like some of her royal braids had been burned off, but she was happy and healthy too.

And then I heard crying from over the scanner and the unmistakable voices of the coin twins came over the comms.

“We did it!” Ciangi cried. “It’s over! It’s all over!”

“We ended it,” Bahn breathed, almost as if he didn’t believe.

I couldn’t believe it. I felt like laughing, I felt like crying, but most of all, I wanted to hug every single person I loved.

And speaking of everyone that I loved…

“Does anyone have contact with Gonzales?”

“Gonzales?” Ciangi echoed. “Let me look up her…” the engineer trailed off and my stomach dropped.

“Ciangi,” I growled.

No. After all this time, we couldn’t have lost her.

I refused to believe it.

We didn’t get this far, we didn’t win, just to lose her.

“Can you find her signature?”

“I…I’m so sorry, Higgens. It’s not anywhere.”

“No!” I snapped, feeling Mimi’s arms tighten around me. How could we stand here and celebrate our victory when we didn’t know where she was? “She’s not— She can’t—”

“Would you relax?”

I whipped around and sure enough, Gonzales was standing there with blood dripping down her arm and no scanner.

“I just lost my techno gadget thing. Nothing to freak out about.”

I laughed giddily and ran to her, pulling her into a hug. Mimi and Eske joined me, a happy pile of laughing and crying and disbelief.

We had done it.

We had beaten the aliens. Our planet, and Earth, would finally have peace. All those dreams that we thought could never be real now were total possibilities.

And it was in each other’s arms that we greeted our victory. Because we were going to have the rest of our lives to see just what living meant.

I couldn’t wait.

10

Happily Ever After, For Now

The sun shone brilliantly down on the field I was standing in, not too bright and not too hot, but perfect—just like the day that was unfolding before me.

I looked around at my friends, my family, who were all sitting on blankets in the grass, looking up at me expectantly. It wasn’t every day people got to see a wedding between a mostly-human and an alien, so I couldn’t blame them for their interest.

There was Gonzales, curled up with a pile of human mimics and dressed in a soft, lavender sort of dress that I never would have guessed she owned. Then again, ever since our victory over the Harvesters about a half-year ago, Earth had been much better about establishing trade routes with our planet.

Ciangi and Bahn were there too, with Harunya’s baby toddling between them. Already the scientist’s belly was rounded again, their newest baby coming in a few months or so.

Aja was present, of course, as well as Eske and her whole family. There were even some prominent Earth figures and members of the resistance.

And of course, there were thousands upon thousands of mimics. Even more of them had learned to take on human form since the great war had finally ended, but there were still plenty who couldn’t or had other bodies that they preferred to reside in. But I still cherished each and every one of them, as well as the society that we were building together.

Urdet stood before me, having taken on the form of a standard human male. I supposed he kind of was the role of the preacher in our little arrangement, but considering our wedding was supposed to be somewhere between human and what little we had dug up about Mimi’s people’s old culture, I wasn’t exactly sure how accurate that presentation was.

Nonetheless, I was practically shaking with excitement. I was about to marry my best friend, the love of my life, and my confidant. I was finally uniting with the one soul who had always understood me.

I heard the faint buzzing of several media droids and did my best to ignore them. Apparently, there was plenty of hubbub on Earth about our nuptials, and we had agreed to let them be shown there in the hopes that it would further our Earth-Mimicry relations. Considering humanity’s track record with accepting those who were different from them, I found it prudent to do everything we could to help our two cultures blend.

After all, we had fought off the big bad creatures that went bump in the dark, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be another swooping in to take their place someday. We needed to be even stronger and more prepared for that.

But all of that could wait until after I married the most perfect entity that I could have ever hoped to run into.

The ground shook, jerking me out of my reverie. My breath caught in my throat and I wondered if this was it.

The ground shook again. And then again. And finally, a great beast broke through the trees and entered our little gathering.

There were cries of alarm from a few people, but most seemed to understand this was all a part of it. A few moments later, Mimi slid down the front of the creature’s head and landed neatly on the ground in front of him.

She looked…amazing.

Her whole skin was glistening, obsidian black, like she had been made out of the most beautiful, iridescent diamond the color of the night sky. And yet when her eyes gazed at me, they glowed a warm and welcoming purple, her white hair done up in a complicated series of braids.

She wore a dress, as was Earth custom, and it too was a shimmering, form-fitting white thing that went all the way down to the ground where it pooled like liquid. It almost looked as if she was floating as she walked to me and I wondered if somehow, I had fallen in love with an angel.

She reached me and held her hands out. I took them, and we both moved to stand in front of Urdet.

He took a breath, and then he was speaking the carefully agreed upon words that we had chosen.

“Humans and mimics, friends and family, we have all gathered here to celebrate the freedom that we fought and bled for. Not too long ago, our people were locked in slavery while yours were being manipulated toward nefarious ends. Neither of us with any hope for improvement, it took only a small band of renegades to unlock options that none of us ever knew were possible.

“And now we celebrate the union of those who helped start the chain of events that freed us all from our bonds. Higgens, of the human world, and Mimi, of the mimic realm, you have gathered all of us today to witness your love for each other. With your pledges, we unite the two of you as one. Two of our peoples. Our ideas. Our information. All of those belong to each equally. There will be no line between you. No divisions. No secrets.

“We will be two peoples united as one through your love. For now. For the future. And for always. If there is anyone who objects to this merge, we ask that you leave now, as we have fought through your hell and back to stand here on this knoll before you.”

There was a slight murmur of a laugh amongst them, then Urdet continued.

“Higgens of Earth, we have heard that you have written words for each other? Promises for your future.”

“I have,” I said resolutely. I was tempted to pull out the datalog I had hidden in my breast pocket of my ceremonial robe, but I had the words memorized. I had gone over them again and again, trying to get my brain to put out something that could possibly mean half of what I wanted to say.

“Mimi, I remember the moment I first saw you. If I knew all of the insane, terrifying, and painful things that would come from hiding you in my bunk, I would still do it all again.

“You have changed my world forever, and I can’t imagine how it would be without it. You’ve made me realize all that I can be, things I never thought possible. You’ve shown me worlds and ideas and experiences that were beyond anything I ever imagined.

“I love you, Mimi. When I thought love was impossible for someone like me. I thought that was the fate for my kind. I can never thank you enough for changing all of that for me, but I hope that you’ll give me the rest of our lives to try.”

Great, I could feel the tears welling up. I told myself I wouldn’t cry, but how could I not? She meant the entire world to me. All of the worlds to me.

“Mimi of Mimicry, we have heard that you have written words for this man before you?”

“I have,” she murmured, and I swore her voice was cracking too. Could mimics’ voices even crack? After all these years, we still had so much to learn about each other.

“For a long time, my world was dark. There was only the drive to find food and nothing else. Just surviving. Never living.

“But then I saw the faintest glimmer of light. It pulled me violently from my small, void of a world and thrust me into something that was big and bright and terrifying. I was just so small. And nothing made sense.

“But then you were there. Somehow, there was this giant, strange creature that wasn’t quite as terrifying as everything else and I knew I was safe.

“It was quite a gamble, really, but back then I didn’t even know what a gamble was. All I knew was that I should trust this giant thing that was making strange noises at me.

“And I was right. Bit by bit, I learned, I watched, and I became me.” She took a deep breath—even though she didn’t need to breathe—and I felt my heart kick up. “Slivers of life and thoughts and self bled into my mind, and in the center of it all was you. I had a whole universe opening up to me, but you were the rock that gave me an anchor to cling to when I felt like I was flung into this insane miasma of everything that was and that could be.

“I tried to tell myself not to idolize you. That you were different from me and would likely never see me as anything other than the creature you had wrested from the celestial muck in your drilling room. I told myself that the strange feelings that I was discovering weren’t real, that they were a form of god worship to the amazing man that pulled me from nothingness.

“But the more we learned of each other, the more I saw you risk life and limb for those you cared about, the more I knew that everything I was feeling was real. And that was when I knew I couldn’t pretend that I felt nothing anymore.

“Never in a million years did I think that you would ever reciprocate. I was just content in my own truth, a strange, shifting fly in the wake of a god.”

I couldn’t say anything, although I knew it wasn’t my turn to speak even if I could. Somehow, the most glorious, powerful woman in the universe was telling me that she had looked up to me. It was impossible. It was bizarre. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. But she kept on talking, and I kept on sinking right into the pool of love that engulfed so much of us.

Ugh, when had I gotten so sappy? I didn’t know, but it was kind of fun. Addicting even.

“But then the impossible happened and it seemed you felt as I did. And then my new world became even bigger and more rich and vibrant than I ever could have hoped.

“And now I am standing here, before all these people, uniting as equals and as equal loves. Something I never thought could be is happening right now, and I want to hold onto this memory and burn it into every far corner of my mind until there’s nothing left than the joy that you give me.

“So please, Higgens of Earth, my partner, my love, even a lifetime together wouldn’t be enough, but I ask you for every single moment of that lifetime that you can give to me.”

My heart felt like it was going to burst, and for once, it wasn’t because of fights or aliens or looming danger. It was because she filled me with so much happiness that I couldn’t speak.

Or at least I couldn’t until Urdet continued.

“Your words have been spoken. The union has been stated. Do you both accept to have each other, to cherish each other as two parts of the same soul? To protect and love, to care for and grow old with?”

“I do,” Mimi and I said at the same time.

“Then I now declare this union complete! Show us your love and let us share your joy for at least a short time.”

A cheer erupted from the crowd as Mimi and I pushed towards each other, pressing our lips against each other’s. It was a bit sloppy, and of course over-eager, but I didn’t care. There weren’t words for what I felt. It was all just too good!

Eventually we parted, however, Mimi blushing furiously at the applause, and I could feel myself turning a similar color. We turned and were swarmed by all of our friends, enveloping us in a warm and binding hug. There was laughing and tears and true happiness all around.

“Alright, enough of the waterworks!” Gonzales said, breaking away finally. “Let’s get some food and paaaarty!”

I laid on the bed in the captain’s room of our honeymoon ship, drifting off into space with no specific destination in mind. At first, neither of us were going to have a honeymoon, but everyone had been quite insistent.

They had packed a ship well and truly for us. There were flowers and real foods and all sorts of things in there to amuse us. But mostly, I just wanted to hold the beautiful woman lying in the bed next to me.

I looked over her skin, which was still as black and inky as at our wedding ceremony. I liked that she kept herself in this medium form, somewhere between human and mimic. Just like me.

I kissed her once again, gentle and a bit nervous.

“Hey, you know I love you, right?” I murmured.

“Of course,” she said with a smile. “That’s what all the spectacle was about today, wasn’t it?”

“Is that what you call it?” I asked with a grin. “A spectacle?”

“Well, it certainly was very dramatic.”

“Considering we literally have blown up an armada of ships, you really think a party with fancy clothing and a few pre-rehearsed words is dramatic?”

“Yes. Definitely.”

I laughed and snuggled into her, but my heart was going a hundred miles a minute. I knew what was supposed to happen on wedding nights, but that still seemed so strange and foreign and impossible—

She pressed a kiss to me this time, and my arms wrapped around her.

We laid there for a long time, nerves rising, and I began to wonder just why we were both feeling so anxious.

We had defeated our enemies. We had rebuilt our city. We had a flourishing relationship with Earth and were exploring that much more of space.

We finally had our peace.

“You know, we’ve faced down monsters and aliens and genocide, but I’ve never felt more scared than I am now,” Mimi murmured.

“Scared?” I asked, stroking her side with my arm. It too had turned into a shining obsidian, as if it wanted to prove just how similar we were. “I… I think I am too.” I paused to swallow, my mouth very dry. “Do you still want…everything that we talked about?”

“Yeah,” she whispered. “I want a family and a house and no more war. No more guns or explosions or fighting. I want little ones.”

“And I do too,” I muttered, my heart thrumming.

“But…” It sounded like Mimi was really struggling with what to say, but I waited. And waited. And waited. Even though my nerves were fraying, and I wanted to blurt out a million and one things, I waited.

I could see the children now—they would be able to shift like both of us, but they would still be human. They would need to eat and sleep like I did, but they could survive in space like she did. They didn’t learn like she did, but they would be smarter than me. Always smarter than me.

The thought was enough to bring a smile to my face. We would have a house that they would play in and around, and they would all get along. I didn’t want to think about puberty, though. I’d barely gotten through my own.

“But maybe not right now.”

“Not right now?” I echoed, relief flooding me.

The children and the house vanished. But not entirely. More like…temporarily. They faded to the background of my mind for another day.

Maybe when we were a bit more ready.

Maybe when it didn’t feel like my heart was going to climb up my throat and out of my body.

“Yeah. Is that alright?” She sounded so uncertain that I just wanted to hold her until that worry cleared from her face. Even after the Harvesters were no longer a threat, our entire life had become rebuilding our home and establishing our colony once more. It was intense, and sometimes thankless, but it was completely worth it.

But now that was mostly done too, and now that we were on our honeymoon, I didn’t want her to ever worry again. I wanted only happiness and ease for her.

I mean… I still didn’t believe that it could last. It often felt too good to be true, but after two years, I had learned to tuck my paranoia away and enjoy the blessing that we had been given.

“It’s just that…” Mimi took a breath. “I just want time. Everything just seems so unreal. I know we’ve been kinda talking about this forever, but I’m still not ready. I still feel like I’m learning who I am and you’re learning who you are.”

“I feel exactly the same way,” I murmured, laughing lightly and pressing a kiss to her cheek. “Yes. Of course. We’ll wait until we’re ready. After all, we have all the time in the world.”

“Yes,” Mimi said, returning my kiss and placing a dozen more or so across my face. “We finally have all the time in the world. All the worlds.”

“Yeah, we do,” I said between little pecks. Goodness, I loved this woman with every fiber of my being. Just being there with her was enough.

And the insane thing was that we had so much more to still learn and experience with each other, but we didn’t have to rush about it. For once, we could take our time instead of fearfully flitting from disaster to disaster.

I could finally find a word for the way I felt when she walked into the room. We could both solve the riddle of my arm and getting it to behave. We could figure out what felt good to us, what didn’t, and what was right. There had never been a couple like us in all the universe, but we didn’t have to rush all of our new discoveries. No, we could savor and cherish every step going forward.

We’d been just two lonely creatures locked in our own personal prisons not too long ago. Now that we were free, truly free, I was going to enjoy every single moment of it.

Because we had earned it.

“So which world should we go visit first?”

“All of them,” Mimi said breathlessly, her body returning to her human form that was most familiar to me. “Any of them. As long as I’m here with you.”

I took up her hand in mine and kissed the top of it, her cool, smooth skin sending goosebumps up my human arm. “Don’t worry. For the rest of time, I will be.”

“Promise?”

One last kiss to her nose before I called up the nav interface on our datalog. “Promise.”

And I meant it down to my very core. As long as we both lived, I would always be by her side. Her eternal shadow and support.

And that was possibly the best happily ever after that I could ever imagine.

THANK YOU

Thank you so much for reading the Mimic: the Space Shifter Chronicles Boxed Set which includes all nine books in the Space Shifter Chronicles.

I really hope you enjoyed the stories. If you could leave a review for me, that would be awesome because it helps me tell others about my books.

There aren’t any more stories featuring Higgens and Mimic right now, but you might want to check out Mercury Blade, the first book in the Valyien Far Future Space Opera series. It features a crew that many have compared to the crew of the sci-fi classic Firefly.

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