Talisman of Earth

  Ming knelt down beside the girls and wrapped an arm around them. She smiled and said, “What are your names? What can we call you?”

  The twins looked at each other, before squinting suspiciously back to Ming and Rhodes. The one on the left, with a thin, barely noticeable scar cutting across the bridge of her petite nose, spoke first. “I am Jerni.”

  The other twin said, “I am Ruri.”

  Rax grunted in the doorway. Rhodes looked over his shoulder at the huge Kenek, waiting for him to speak. Rax grumbled, “Those names are Pernet.”

  “Pernet? They’re supposed to be extinct,” said Ming.

  Rax nodded, “They are, according to what we knew as of a few seconds ago. Right now, I am not so certain we have an accurate picture of the Pernet’s supposed state of existence.”

  Ming motioned to Hu, and he walked over to her and the girls. She pulled food bars and water from his pack and opened the containers, handing them to the twin. They cautiously took the items and slowly began to taste them. “Sweet,” said Jerni, a big grin suddenly appearing on her weary face.

  Dr. Martell cleared his throat and asked, “Are you sisters? Siblings?”

  “I’d say that’s obvious, Doc,” said Rhodes.

  Jerni and Ruri glanced at one another, and held hands. “Are we sisters?” Ruri asked, looking into Jerni’s eyes.

  Martell looked at the twins, and back to his tablet, and back to the girls again. Rhodes shook his head, exasperated, “Just what is it, Martell?”

  Martell said, “They’re not twins, sir. Even identical twins don’t have the same fingerprints. These girls are 100 percent exact duplicates of one another.”

  “I thought identical twins were, well, identical,” said Greg Hu.

  “That’s a common misconception,” replied Martell. “Yes, identical twins come from one single fertilized egg. But each twin’s DNA is actually different at various certain points on their genomes. We call it copy number variance. One twin might end up suffering from a disease, such as leukemia, while the other does not, due to this. Fingerprints are formed in the embryonic stages, and physical differences like eyesight, weight and height are all affected by the environment they are raised in. But these two are exactly the same. They are perfect copies of—- of some template. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

  Ming nearly yelled at him, “They’re children, Martell! Not experiments!”

  Rhodes held up a hand to stop Carly and said, “What kind of condition are they in?”

  “Dehydrated, a bit undernourished. But otherwise healthy,” said the Doctor.

  Rhodes began to rush around the room, opening cabinets and storage units as he went. “Chief, help me look for anything we can use to rig up two more breathers for the girls. They’re coming with us.”

  “It’s too cold out there. Without SES’s they’ll freeze before we get them to the shuttle,” Ming said as she unwrapped two more food bars for the twins.

  Martell backed up to stand next to Rax, still paging through the holographic displays on his tablet. Rax heaved a great sigh as he peered over the Doctor’s shoulder. “The Pernet were very curious creatures. Their kind produced the most legendary scientific minds we have ever known in the galaxy.”

  “I thought the Insigari were the inventors for the League,” said Martell.

  “They are now. But they place logic above all else. The Pernet, on the other hand, took risks. And they made the discoveries that paved the way for galactic civilization to flourish.”

  Martell raised his eyebrows, “Ah, yes. Accidents often lead to results most unexpected, and sometimes breakthroughs. Gunpowder, penicillin, x-rays, nuclear fission.”

  “Some would say the Pernet were reckless,“ Rax continued, “Many of their brightest minds were. If not for them, the warp drive as we know it would not exist. Unfortunately, the Pernet were not the best of warriors, and they were overcome by the Valgon Alliance. There were many Pernet inventions that had not been distributed outside of their home system before that time. The damned Valgons assimilated that technology, giving them some advantages over the League. One of the rumored lost technologies was imperfect quantum cloning.”

  Martell‘s jaw dropped and his tablet slipped out of his hand to the floor. He scrambled to pick it back up and stammered, “B-but how?”

  “From the look of this place, whoever did it removed any trace of how it was done, but left the evidence,” Rax said gravely as he pointed to the twins.

  Martell said, “What could it mean? Why would they?”

  “You are the doctor,” Rax shrugged his massive shoulders.

  Rhodes slammed the last empty cabinet in a rage. “They’re nothing! No useful equipment. No supplies. They left these girls to die!”

  A chime sounded from Jecky’s PSD. He looked at the display and frowned, “That storm. It’s only sixty minutes out and it’s looking violent. Eighty mile per hour winds. A lot of debris. Like an electrically charged dust storm, but with baseball-sized rocks instead of dust.”

  “We could wait it out in here,” Martell spat out.

  “The storm’s huge. It’ll take hours to blow through,” said Jecky.

  Nunez added, peering gravely at the twins, “This base’s systems are shot, too. Wind chill like that will take the temp in here below survivable for anyone without an SES.”

  Rax shook his broad head and spoke grimly, “It is not only that. The Malign are re-growing. If we remain here for hours, they will surely engage us once more, but likely with three or four meter-tall machine units instead of only the two large defenders we encountered.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  While the rest of the team scavenged the ruins of the base, rummaging around for anything useful, Rhodes made a quick report to Captain Lancer on the Talisman. They decided to keep Ayler’s death just between them until they returned.

  Rax and Jecky went back outside, helmets on. While Jecky actively scanned the area for signs of Malign, Rax finished the job he’d only started before, carrying Ayler’s body to the shuttle. Arno Jecky commed to the team, “There’s nothing left of the Malign. No energy fluctuations that would indicate them nearby, but there’s some interference this close to all these starfish things. Safe bet is that the Malign leftovers just went deep enough to stay off the grid. And the storm is picking up. Only twenty minutes away. Cutting it close, team.”

  Rhodes huddled up with Ming, Hu and Nunez, while Martell stayed sitting with the twin girls. “Okay, we’re packing it up and moving out now.”

  “I found some plastic sheeting for the girls. It should be enough, wrap them in that with some room for air, seal it up with—-“ Hu started.

  Ming shook her head, “The temperature’s still too low. They’ll freeze.”

  A terrific crash rumbled from the building façade, followed by a billow of dust. Nunez and Hu rushed forward, tespers up, thinking they would find their way blocked by a cave-in. The ruins were still open to the outdoors, and Rax and Jecky were stumbling in, over a new debris pile.

  “Winds are increasing heavily. We need to go!” Jecky said, waving an arm.

  Rax’s gaze fell on Doc Martell, as he began unrolling a large, blue polymer tarp. “Okay, girls, you will need to lay on here together,” he encouraged.

  “No, that won’t do,” Rax said brusquely. He began to remove his SES.

  “What are you thinking?” Rhodes demanded.

  “I’ll need to keep my backup breather on, but the girls need to be in a suit. My skin is tough enough to last me back to the shuttle,” the tall Kenek grunted as he peeled off parts of the suit. Ming quickly joined in, helping him, and Hu as well.

  “It’s not going to be a walk on the beach out there, Lieutenant,” said Hu.

  Rax yanked off the last part of an SES leg and started to lay the suit out on the blasted flooring. He looked at Jerni and Ruri, for the first time without his helmet, and said, “Get in here so we can take you away from this place.” He started to smile (with al
l fifty four of his sharp teeth) and thought better of it. The girls hopped onto the open suit without a word, but they smiled knowingly.

  A minute later, the landing party walked out of the wrecked research lab, headed back to Shuttle B double-time. Rhodes freighted the twins in his arms, sealed within Rax’s SES. Carly Ming, Petty Officer Nunez, Greg Hu, Jecky and Martell went after him, and Rax trailed them all, his iddik railgun tucked against his chest. The Kenek’s tail was tucked between his legs and his head bent low fighting the howling, icy wind. Dark clouds churned above them, while spider webs of violet and red lightning crackled in every direction.

  Jecky looked to his PSD, and he nearly choked as he noted the readings. In ten minutes, the edge of the storm would sweep over their position, a scythe of powerful hurricane gusts and hail. The winds were hitting 120 miles per hour. Even in their SES’s they would be toppled like dominoes.

  Once it hit them, they wouldn’t even be able to take off in the shuttle.

  Rax heard them before he saw them. Seven three foot high, pitch black Malign robots tore and popped through the mossy ground like seeds being squeezed from an orange. He knew instantly what he had to do. Announcing their appearance to everyone else would cause them to stop, a delay of a precious few seconds at least. Not only was the team’s life hanging in the balance, but also the two human children’s lives. If Rax could give them just a moment, they would get to the shuttle. They could leave, they could survive another day.

  The bulky saurian stopped running, his momentum causing him to slide, huge feet digging ditches through the ground. He turned on a heel, aimed and fired his railgun. One of the Malign “assassin” bots burst into hundreds of fragments, the others bolting away and zigzagging back toward the middle with frantic, single-minded purpose.

  Iddik: five seconds to recharge.

  Rax growled, lifted the railgun overhead, and brought it down like a hammer onto an anvil, smashing another of the machines. Its four spindly limbs parted ways with its little body.

  Shuttle B’s cargo hatch spilled open, howling as LM-32f’s wind sheared over its lip. Jecky and Nunez were the first to jump inside.

  One hundred yards behind them, the five remaining Malign assassins all leapt onto Rax at once, their combined force toppling the big Kenek. Without his SES, his skin was immediately sliced in twenty places by the vicious machines’ claws and microlasers. No one had ever heard Rax make such a truly desperate sound of pain until then. His anguished roar caused Rhodes to turn halfway around, nearly dropping Jerni and Ruri in their SES enclosure.

  “Aww, foist it!” He cursed as he hefted the twins on into the arms of Nunez and Jecky in the shuttle’s cargo hold, pulled his tesper and bounded back down the ramp.

  “Sir!” Hollared Hu, as he made a frantic break to follow.

  Rax continued yelling as the assassins scurried over his huge body. He managed to grab one of them and maneuver it under him, where he stomped it into the ground.

  Gray pushed his suit’s exoskeleton to its limits as he sprinted toward his bellowing friend. He raised his tesper, but the whirling mass of Kenek and Malign made it impossible to get an accurate shot off without the chance of hitting Rax. Letting the gun hang at his side, Rhodes decided. He pumped his arms and legs harder, and with a grunt flung himself across Rax’s broad back. Three of the glossy black robots were scattered, leaving only one assassin grappling with Rax’s right arm. CPO Hu finally caught up to them, dropped to a knee and aimed his tesper. With a staccato of supersonic beams, the Malign assassin was blasted apart.

  Back in the shuttle, Nunez and Doc Martell carefully laid the twins down on the deck while Jecky and Ming watched the three Malign assassins square off against Rhodes. The winds blew even harder, topping fifty miles an hour as the temperature continued to drop. Lightning bolts began to slash the swirling, ashen sky with more frequency. “Come on, Jecky!” Ming said as she ran toward her friends below.

  “I knew it!” Jecky said as he rolled his eyes and went after her.

  The assassins spread out, forming a triangle around Rhodes. He reached for his tesper, but one of the robots jumped at him. Rhodes ducked, the leaper soared over his head, and a second assassin swung toward his face with a blade-tipped arm. Rhodes stepped inside the swing, blocked the arm with an elbow and punched the machine with his SES-enhanced cybernetic arm. Its upper body broke off, flopping back against a boulder twenty feet away. The other two Malign were both behind Rhodes, claws and blades rearing back to strike. Gray looked over his shoulder and knew what was coming. He held his last breath and tried to remember the last time he had seen his wife and daughter playing together at Olympus Park during Martian Spring. The savage machines jerked forward to slash at him.

  Several tesper beams sheared through the two assassins, leaving limbs and pieces of obsidian armor plating in a wide spread across the craggy landscape. Rhodes breathed out, sinking onto his knees. Hu jogged up to him and pulled Gray up. “Nice moves, sir,” Hu said. As they turned back to the shuttle, Rhodes saw that Ming and Jecky were already helping Rax limp up the ramp.

  Wind and pebbles blasted at their backs as Hu and Rhodes clambered into Shuttle B’s cargo deck. As the hatch shut, the sky grew darker still and a last, monstrous bolt of lightning tore violently across the alien heavens.

  Dr. Weller and the entire medical unit, consisting of six medics led by senior physician Sven Niellson, waited in the Talisman’s shuttle bay air lock as the decontamination process ran. Shuttle B’s hull was scarred, a myriad of micrometer-thin scratches interspersed with many larger nicks, dents and various other damage.

  Sven shook his head, looked to Kyra and said, “Poor thing’s been through hell.”

  “It has, but the people inside it have been through worse,” Kyra stated. Sven glanced away, a bit scolded. Kyra knew he liked her and felt a little bad putting him in his place. She didn’t mind Dr. Niellson’s physique, no matter how quick he was to talk without thinking. Kyra never liked to see anyone romantically from her own department, however, so his chances were low.

  The UV and microwave decontamination came to an end, the shuttle bay’s indicator light switching from amber to blue. The air lock opened, and the medics poured out into the bay, pushing a long and extra-wide custom-made gurney ahead of them.

  Shuttle B’s scuffed rear hatch popped and its ramp descended. Rhodes, Hu, and Jecky were the first ones off, carrying Rax’s moaning form between them. The three men were all strong, and wearing SES’s to boot, but still struggled with the Kenek’s 650 pound mass. Sven and several of the other medics took over and transferred his body onto the gurney. Rhodes immediately dropped down onto his haunches, like a sailor of old reaching land after a thousand mile voyage.

  Kyra did a cursory look-over of Rax as the medics padded his wounds. His dark indigo blood was everywhere and it was hard to see where an injury began or ended. It was unsettling to see someone so powerful laid so low. Rax’s left eye opened halfway, and he tried to smile at her. She smiled back and said, “Save it for later. You just sleep. We’ll take care of you.” His huge black pupil widened in its sepia iris and his eye rolled up leaving only a misty rose sclera.

  Dr. Weller walked up the ramp with the two remaining medics and saw Dr. Martell, Nunez, and Ming sitting on the benches, and two dirty young female humans sitting cross-legged on the deck between them, on top of an unfurled SES.

  “Dr. Weller, allow us to introduce you to Jerni and Ruri,” said Carly Ming.

  Kyra hadn’t seen a child since she said farewell to her son, Christopher, leaving him in the trustworthy care of his grandparents on Earth before she left for the Talisman. Christopher would be about the age of these girls. These twin girls. Kyra paused, and then only said, “Extraordinary.”

  “We found very little in the base itself, but the girls had something with them,” Doc Martell said, holding up the Valgon transcorder.

  Outside in the shuttle bay, Captain Lancer and Sorakith strode through the air lock just as
Sven and the medics wheeled Rax past them. Lancer noticed Rax was unconscious. “Is he—-“ she started, but Sven interrupted.

  “No, sir, he’s alright for now. Just sedatives. He’s injured over more than fifty percent of his body. We’ll keep him under for at least a day until the nanos get any pain under control.”

  Lancer nodded and kept going. She stopped again at Shuttle B, where a couple medics were examining the remainder of the bedraggled LM-32f landing team. Dr. Weller was just exiting the shuttle with the two odd, identical girls that they had reported. They huddled together between Kyra and Ming. Sorakith immediately knelt beside Rhodes. “I’m fine,” Lancer heard him say to Sorakith.

  “You didn’t come back empty-handed,” said the Captain.

  “No,” Rhodes said from down on the deck. “But we had to make a trade.”

  Lancer looked forward. Laid in front of the cockpit was a body bag that contained David Ayler’s corpse. “There’s always a trade, isn’t there?” Lancer asserted.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The next day passed fitfully for everyone.

  Sorakith offered to berth with the two twin girls, and after they thoroughly passed medical inspection by Dr. Weller’s best, they did so.

  Rhodes debriefed the crew on the mission, and the announcement of Lt. David Ayler’s death was taken badly. It wasn’t the only death in the intervening years between the Talisman’s stranding and the LM-32f mission, but it was the first in several years. There would be a funeral service in two days.

  Kyra Weller and her science team busied themselves examining the only useful bits of tech that the landing party had retrieved from the lab: the girls’ holo tablet and their SOS beacon device.

  A small bright spot appeared when Rax was brought out of his short medically-induced coma. Rhodes was his first visitor. He found the giant saurian on the ship’s only oversized Kenek bed in Sickbay, half of him swaddled in bandages and gauze, and the rest attached to electrodes, IV lines, or breathing tubes.