Action Figures - Issue Seven: The Black End War Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Michael Bailey

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2018

  ISBN-13: 978-1981949786

  ISBN-10: 198194978X

  AISN: B079YF2Q62

  Michael Bailey/Innsmouth Look Publishing www.innsmouthlook.com

  Cover illustrations Copyright © 2018 by Patricia Lupien

  Cover design by Patricia Lupien

  Book production by Amazon Create Space

  www.createspace.com

  Edited by Julie Tremblay

  Contents

  PART ONE: STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  PART TWO: Into the Void

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Also by Michael Bailey

  PART ONE: STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

  Once upon a time, there was a girl named Carrie Hauser.

  (That’s me by the way.)

  One day, after learning that her parents were divorcing, Carrie went for a pity walk through the woods near her Cape Cod home, where she encountered an extraterrestrial named Lieutenant Yx. Yx, a member of an intergalactic peacekeeping force known as the Vanguard, had been mortally wounded by a renegade Vanguardian named Galt and, by pure dumb luck, had crash-landed on Earth.

  Before dying, Yx passed onto Carrie his astrarma, the hyper-advanced technology that granted him fantastic powers — powers Carrie used to become a super-hero. For eighteen insane months, Carrie fought the good fight, confronting evil in all its forms, never once stopping to wonder exactly where the astrarma came from.

  She found out the day Galt arrived on Earth to finish the job he started with Yx.

  Galt hunted Carrie down, intending to take her astrarma for himself, just as he’d done with many unfortunate Vanguardians before her — and he might have succeeded were it not for the timely arrival of a Vanguard squad under the command of Do Lidella Det. After teaming up to take down Galt and his forces, Commander Do led Carrie into low orbit above Earth for a private chat. The commander told Carrie about the obligations that come with wielding the astrarma and gave her an opportunity to relinquish her astrarma — and the attached responsibilities.

  “Release them to me and you may return to your homeworld that you may live a peaceful, normal life,” Commander Do said. “Why are you laughing?”

  “Like I said before, Commander: that horse has already left the barn,” I said.

  “Then you accept the astrarma? You accept them of your own free will?”

  “I accepted them a long time ago.”

  And then Commander Do sighed. “For your own sake, CarrieHauser? I wish you hadn’t.”

  “What do you —”

  ONE

  “— mean?”

  Whoa. What the hell was that? Felt like someone grabbed me by the face and yanked me through a funnel.

  I turn around. Earth is gone. It’s been replaced by a distant sphere of pure white light. It’s a sun — but somehow I know it isn’t my sun. It feels…wrong. There’s no other way to put it.

  “What did you do?” I demand. “Where’s Earth? Where are we?!”

  Commander Do Lidella Det releases my shoulder and holds her hands up, a gesture of peace. Lady, you’re going to have to do a lot more than gesture to keep me from going totally ballistic on you.

  “We are in Kyros Alliance space,” she says, “in the Zhyzyu System. I brought you here for a reason.”

  “You better have a damn good reason for kidnapping me.”

  “Kidnapping you?” Her expression hardens. “I warned you, CarrieHauser, that if you accepted the astrarma you also accepted the responsibilities that go with them. You agreed. That makes you a member of the Vanguard. More specifically, that makes you a cadet in the Vanguard, which means I am your commanding officer — and as such, I expect the appropriate amount of respect. Is that clear?”

  I almost tell her off, but considering I’m in the middle of literally nowhere and she could easily leave me out here, I bite my tongue.

  “But I may be getting ahead of myself,” Commander Do says, her tone gentle again. “You have accepted the astrarma but there is no guarantee the Council of Generals will accept you. They might well deem you unworthy to carry the astrarma, in which case you would be stripped of them and returned to your homeworld.”

  “Strip me of my —? But they don’t even know me.”

  “No. But they will. Come with me.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “You did,” she says. “And you made it.”

  She flies off.

  I follow.

  ***

  Flying in outer space is totally bizarre.

  Flying in general took some getting used to, but on Earth, I always had the constant tug of gravity and visual cues like the horizon to keep me oriented. Space has neither. I have absolutely no sense of up or down or of how fast we’re traveling. We could be moving at the speed of light for all I know. I focus on Commander Do, using her as my literal guiding light. If I lose sight of her...

  No. Stop. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about how easy it would be for her to abandon you in the middle of deep space and leave you to die a slow — oh, dammit, Carrie, I said don’t think about it!

  “Cadet?” Commander Do says, glancing back. “Are you all right?”

  “Little freaked out here,” I admit. “This is my first time in outer space.”

  “Yes, it can be disorienting, but once you’re trained to —” She pauses. “My apologies. I’m getting ahead of myself again.”

  “Maybe you’re just that optimistic the Council of Generals will give me the thumbs up?”

  “Give you the thumbs up?”

  “That means they’ll like me.”

  “Ah.” She nods. “Perhaps.”

  “They’re your bosses, I assume?”

  “The Vanguard’s high command. You present a rather unusual situation. Normally candidates for the Vanguard are exhaustively vetted by the council before being accepted into our ranks. You will have to prove yourself to them before you’re allowed to remain. That is why I’ve brought you here: so you can understand what it is we’re fighting.”

  “You said you were fighting terrorists.”

  “That is an accurate if somewhat simplistic description of the Black End. They are much more than mere terrorists. You’ll understand soon enough.”

  “All right, then, let’s go get woke.”

  I have to explain what the phrase get woke means, a gentle reminder that I’m not dealing with a human being, despite appearances. Commander Do has a slender but decidedly feminine build, delicate features, and long, dark hair, and if you took away the white, yellow, and blue Vanguard uniform and stuck her in jeans and a T-shirt, you wouldn
’t look at her and immediately think she was an alien being.

  “Almost there,” Commander Do says. She smiles and gives me a nod of approval. “You’re doing quite well. You’re a natural flyer.”

  I’m grateful for the compliment, but I am so far out of my comfort zone it’s ridiculous. In addition to losing all sense of distance and orientation, I’ve lost all sense of time. The clock on my headset’s heads-up display, which is normally synched to the Protectorate’s communications network, reads “--:--,” the universal symbol for I have no idea what time it is.

  Consequently, I don’t know how long we’re flying before we reach Helo, a planet that, at a glance, is remarkably Earthlike. At our current angle of approach, it appears to be spinning on a horizontal axis. There aren’t as many landmasses as on Earth, at least on the hemisphere facing us, and the ocean has a slight gray cast to it. I follow Commander Do down toward the largest of the landmasses, which is shaped like a comma. Amidst the dull, muddied greens and tans and grays of the distant landscape, I pick out a dark spot, like a smudge of soot. The spot grows as we descend, and we touch down in the middle of a blasted wasteland.

  It used to be a city.

  We land at the edge of a crater maybe a mile across and half as deep, but the damage carries on as far as the eye can see. Something huge fell here — fell, or went off. All around me the charred remains of buildings lay splayed outward, as if pushed over by a gigantic child playing Godzilla in a miniature Tokyo made of stacked wooden blocks. The ground beneath my feet is a mix of dirt and rubble and ash. I kick at it, and a wispy cloud swirls around my ankles. A smell like that of a long disused fireplace hits my nose.

  “This was Olar, the largest city on this world. The Black End dropped one of its ships into the heart of the city. When its plasma reactor exploded...” Commander Do says, spreading her arms in presentation. “All of this because the people of Helo refused to side with the Black End. They took a stand. They knew destruction would rain down upon them and still, they took a stand.”

  The rattle of shifting rubble catches my attention. An alien, tall and pencil-thin with skin like a leather wallet, cautiously pokes his head out from what I first believe is a squat building that, impossibly, survived the blast. It’s actually more of a makeshift hut assembled from large chunks of debris.

  (I shouldn’t call him an alien, should I? In this context, he’s the native, and I’m the strange visitor from another planet.)

  Commander Do turns toward the alien — er, the native to let him (her?) get a good look at her Vanguard uniform. Commander Do smiles and gives the native a small bow. He/she nods in understanding then retreats into the shelter.

  “Come,” Commander Do says.

  We fly low over the city. The very worst of the destruction stretches on for several miles. The debris field gradually thins out and grudgingly gives way to intact structures — intact, but bearing lighter signs of damage. The architecture of this world, or at least this particular city, favors round forms; the shorter buildings are oval in shape while the taller structures are perfect cylinders. We pass one tower made of a mirrored material that, on one side, is scorched and bubbled from the heat of the blast. The other is unscathed and gleams brilliantly under the planet’s orange sun.

  Signs of life return once we reach the far edge of the city. The buildings here completely escaped the blast, and aliens — sorry, natives — like the one I saw back near Ground Zero bustle about as we pass overhead. Everyone seems to be going about their daily business as if they’re not right next door to a massive graveyard. I can’t help but wonder what’s going on down there. Are they on their way to work? Are they on their way home from work? Does the concept of work as I know it even exist here?

  Our destination is an expanse of bluish-green grass surrounded by trees with twisting trunks and branches ending in matching blue-green foliage. This city’s equivalent of Central Park, maybe? Whatever it was once, it’s now an evacuee camp made up of row upon row of boxy metal shelters, each large enough to hold one or two people comfortably. Natives mill about aimlessly, shuffling through the refuge like zombies.

  We land in the center of the camp, near a cluster of hard shelters butted up against one another to form a mini-complex. An ali— sorry, a being in a Vanguard uniform emerges from one of the structures. He (I think it’s a he) is built like Joe Quentin, tall and broad, but has a head like a grouper and mottled green-black skin like a frog.

  “Commander Lotz,” Commander Do says in greeting.

  “Commander Do. What can I do for you?” Commander Lotz says in what sounds to my ears like perfect English, thanks to the translator devices Commander Do gave me. Now, if she could give me something that makes the movement of their lips match the sounds reaching my ears, I’ll be golden. This badly dubbed foreign film effect is really distracting.

  “This is a new cadet, CarrieHauser, from Earth.”

  Commander Lotz looks me over. “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s a world in the Lehzutan Arm.”

  “The Lehzutan Arm? That’s on the opposite side of the galaxy,” Commander Lotz says. Well, that answers that question. “What’s it doing in the Vanguard?”

  “Her world,” Commander Do says, subtly clarifying my gender for Commander Lotz, “was recently found by the Black End.”

  “Oh.” Commander Lotz bows his head and interlocks his hands. He has three fingers on each broad hand, and the thumb is located at the base of the palm, dead center. “I’m sorry,” he says to me, and then he returns his attention to Commander Do. “Was it bad?”

  “CarrieHauser and her people fought bravely. Many died protecting their world. Fortunately, the damage was contained to a small part of an insignificant town.”

  “Insignificant?” I say. Kingsport might not be much, but it’s my home.

  “Good fate placed CarrieHauser where she needed to be to discover Lieutenant Yx as he lay dying. He passed his astrarma on to her.”

  “Ho! Good fate, eh? Blind luck, more like.”

  “As you believe. But I’m sure you’d agree, how she came to join us is irrelevant.”

  Commander Lotz grunts in agreement. “If she’s willing and able to fight...”

  “Excuse me?” I say. “I’m standing right here, you know. It’s okay to talk to me directly.”

  That gets a huge laugh. “You’re feisty. Good. We need feisty. If you’ll excuse me, commander, it’s time for my morning rounds.”

  “Of course,” Commander Do says with a respectful little bow. “I trust the reconstruction is proceeding well?”

  “It’s proceeding,” Commander Lotz says diplomatically, and then he’s off to walk the grounds.

  “I don’t get it,” I say. “Why are you showing me this?”

  “Images can lie. Words can lie. Experiences don’t,” Commander Do says. “You have no reason to believe my claim that we’re fighting for a righteous cause and you’d be foolish to take me at my word. You needed to see the destruction the Black End has caused and what we’re doing to right their many wrongs.”

  I’ve already seen what the Black End can do, up close and personal, but she’s right. On the surface of it, the Black End certainly seemed like a bunch of murderous lunatics, but the difference between a good guy and a bad guy can sometimes be nothing more than a matter of perspective. What’s that saying? Every villain is the hero of his own story. That philosophy could apply as easily to the Kyros Alliance as to the Black End. I need to know who’s the real bad guy here.

  “All right,” I say. “You want me to know the whole story? Then tell me the whole story. I want to know every last detail.”

  Commander Do nods. “Very well.”

  TWO

  We warp in at the edge of Kyros Alliance Central, a six-planet solar system. The two outermost planets, Kyros Remote One and Two, share an orbit and act as defensive outposts. After checking in with the base on Kyros Remote Two, we fly to the fourth planet, Kyros Prime — the Alliance’s hom
e base.

  It’s hard to say for sure but Kyros Prime gives the impression that it’s much larger than Earth. Three major landmasses are visible as we approach, plus icecaps at each of the poles and several smaller chunks of land, all surrounded by an electric blue ocean. We drop toward the northernmost landmass. Its grayish color gives up detail slowly. Small patches of green and blue freckle what reveals itself as a city — a city that covers nearly the entire continent. Holy crap.

  We pass over the city, maintaining a respectable distance from a teeming layer of countless flying vehicles of varying sizes and styles — spheres and bullets, boxes and tubes, flying wings and flying saucers, some as small as a Cooper Mini and others as long as a commuter train. It’s street traffic without the street.

  The center of the megalopolis, a tightly packed collection of towers and domes Commander Do introduces as Kyros City, rises up to greet us. She guides me toward a fat tower with a circular landing pad jutting out near the top. As we land, a being steps out of a small booth near the edge of the platform. He’s wearing a variation of the Vanguard uniform that’s more of a loose jumpsuit deal. He’s another humanoid, but his arms are socketed on the front of his torso instead of the sides.

  “Commander Do, welcome back,” he says, though his focus is entirely on me. “Another new recruit?”

  “CarrieHauser of Earth,” Commander Do says. The being blinks at me curiously, his eyelids closing sideways. That’s unsettling. “I need a recovery team dispatched immediately. There’s a Lyztarian exploration vessel stranded on her homeworld and it needs to be removed as soon as possible.”

  Commander Do relays to her colleague the coordinates for Earth. At first, I think my translators are glitching because what I hear is total nonsense — not a recognizable word or number to be found — but I come to realize there might not be a direct translation for how they describe a location in space. Besides defying basic concepts like up and down, points of reference in space can be millions of miles apart from one another. Add to that the fact everything in the universe is in constant motion, and it makes sense they can’t simply tell each other to go straight for fifty thousand light years and hang a right at Tatooine.