The Beginning of the End, Part 1

Peter emerged from his tank, pale and exhausted, to be greeted by the wailing of an alarm reverberating incessantly through the Egg. “Maia,” he said, as she approached him, mopping herself hurriedly with a towel, her expression grave, “Maia, they’re coming.”

She nodded. “I read your anxiety. I sounded the alarm. We need to move.” She tossed Peter a towel. “Dry yourself up. We’re off to our battle posts.”

“Wait, what?” He followed Maia as she walked briskly out the Egg and down the corridor towards the Platinum’s bridge. “Maia, I fly helicopters. I’ve hardly been trained for—”

“Peter,” she said, stopping dead in her tracks and turning to face him. She grabbed his head with both hands, closed her eyes, and before Peter could take a guess at what she was doing, sent a jolt of electricity through Peter’s skull that knocked him flat against the corridor wall. “Don’t second guess yourself now,” she said seriously.

“What the hell—” he cried, confused.

“You now know how to man a Foggistani StellarFighter, at least as well as I do. Let’s go.”

Peter stared after her wide-eyed as she turned around and continued down the hallway. “You can do that?”

“I’m Head Psychic Officer. Of course I can. Now hurry.” Peter followed, puzzled by Maia’s sudden change of character. Her sweetness and casual tone had been replaced by the strictest sense of business and urgency.

“The Space Disk is evacuating as we speak,” said Maia as they stepped into the Starship Platinum’s bridge. It was abuzz with the anxiety of dozens of bustling crewmates, and Peter instantly felt the pang of general tension overwhelm his mind. “Jagesic himself should be on his way to a safe post. As for us, we’re too close to Styx to make a run for it. We have to defend the Starship at all costs. Richard,” she said to a nearby officer manning a control panel. “What’s the estimate?”

“They’re moving fast,” replied the crewmate, his fingers sliding full speed over the touch-screen control panel. “I’d say they’ll be reaching us within ten minutes.” Peter could sense Richard was scared out of his wits, though he was putting on a mighty good show of hiding it. Again Peter felt the growingly familiar tinge of guilt he got every time he sensed something someone was evidently trying to hide. Then he felt a pang of fear, brief but clear as day, come from Maia.

“We’ll have to move faster, then,” Maia said, placing her fingers against her temples and closing her eyes. The purple stripes of her cat suit flashed brightly and immediately Peter and everyone else aboard the Platinum could hear Maia’s voice echoing through their heads. “Everyone to your posts,” she said. “Soldiers, man your StellarFighters. Arrival of enemy forces imminent in nine.”

Maia opened her eyes and seized Peter’s hand. “Follow me.”

She led Peter down numerous corridors flooded with the flashing red emergency lights, until they reached what Peter figured was the launch pad: a circular room lined along the walls with transparent cylindrical pipes like test tubes, just large enough to fit one person each. Maia slid the door to one of these open and shoved Peter, still dripping wet, in.

“Good luck,” she said. And without another word, Maia slid the door shut in Peter’s face and he was siphoned off down the pipe. A moment later he fell unceremoniously into the pilot’s seat of a Foggistani StellarFighter, Foggistan’s smallest and most nimble aircraft designed for close-range space combat. Peter gained his bearings, scanned the controls, put the knowledge he had just received from Maia to work and brought the StellarFighter to life.

A moment later he was hovering through space around the Starship Platinum alongside hundreds of other Foggistani soldiers, nervously anticipating the imminent arrival of the AssMachenstani forces. A minute later he had a visual.

“Ready for combat,” Maia’s disembodied voice rang in his head. “Hold your positions.”

In the distance, coming straight from Styx, Peter could see them, tiny red specks growing larger, brighter. There seemed to be hundreds… thousands… Enough to make Peter’s stomach lurch uncomfortably, affected by his own emotions as well as those of every soldier around him.  “Steady,” came Maia’s voice. “Steady.”

And then it came. In less than a second, a speeding beam of light from afar transformed itself into a massive explosion, setting the entire sixth wing of the Starship Platinum aflame.  

“They’ve opened fire! They’ve opened fire! Go! Go! Go!” came Maia’s voice.

Peter’s heart plummeted. As the glare of the explosion bathed his cockpit in a shivering, orange glow, in his head everything went silent, and for a moment Peter felt like time was standing still. All the anticipation… the questions… the general anxiety… The legends of old of the malevolent, magical race that was AssMachenstan…

The climactic moment had arrived. AssMachenstan did, in fact, exist. They were attacking him. They were attacking everyone. And while the magnitude of the moment seized Peter, he couldn’t help but wonder a million things at once: Why were they here? Why now? How strong would they be? How would everything change? All of Coralende would finally come to the realization that AssMachenstan was more than a legend; they were a reality, a terrifying, apocalyptic, historically significant reality. A thousand years ago, AssMachenstan had rendered Planet Breckinridge uninhabitable. What would happen now? What would happen to Coralende? What of all the civilizations on the planet that had nothing to do with AssMachenstan and Foggistan’s ancient feud?

What about Latvia?

A second later Peter was jolted back to reality by the overwhelming terror of hundreds of different Foggistani minds. Peter gripped the controls—closed his eyes tight—tried to shut everyone out. The soldiers were terrified. The AssMachenstani fleet was fast approaching—already firing. Small, chaotic black ships wrapped in intricate patterns of glowing red stripes, hurdling through space like webs of hair and metal. Their fleet was huge. Vast. They were everywhere. Peter felt his mind about to explode. He could scarcely dodge enemy fire.

He needed to focus. He needed to focus. Emotions rushed into him from every direction. He felt drunk—dazed—cluttered—blind—

 “LATVIA!” he screamed.

And then he could think. He was clear. Whether it had been the force of the echo of his own voice within the cockpit, or whether he had blown a fuse for the better, whatever it was, he could think. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he could access everyone’s emotions. Everyone around him—Foggistani and AssMachenstani alike—he could access them, feel them, pick and choose and dip into them—dip into their excitement, their terror, their determination, their focus. It was like the chaos of puzzle pieces had all fallen perfectly into place—like Peter had suddenly been flooded with a wave of perfect, uninterrupted lucidity that extended everywhere.

He gripped his controls, straightened the craft, whirled around and dove straight into the thick of battle. He had realized the emotions of every AssMachenstani he sensed were the same: an obsessive, focused, fanatical sort of zeal, mixed with excitement, determination, and rage. The Foggistanis, on the other hand, were a jumble of surprise, fear, anxiety and confusion.

“We need to focus,” Peter said. “We need to focus!”

Foggistani StellarFighters were exploding all around him. One by one, he felt soldiers, the sources of particular sets of emotions, vanish. The AssMachenstanis were winning, and the Starship Platinum was being destroyed.

And then it hit him. Peter knew exactly what to do.