Chapter 16
Xolo sat up. Xolo put his feet on the ground. Xolo had stubble on his chin. Xolo was pale. Xolo looked up.
“Xolo?” said the king.
“Xolo?” said Xolo.
“I don’t speak your language, friend,” he continued. “Do you speak the common tongue?”
The king looked a bit irritated. It was interesting how people could be irritated no matter what was going on. You could be having the best sex ever and something could irritate you – like a fly on your ass. Or you could be in a trench full of corpses with rockets raining down and still something could irritate you. It could also be a fly, actually.
Flies and people, eh?
Flies literally do not know what people are, though,
Anyway…
“Yes. I speak the common tongue,” replied the king.
“And you speak it like an Earthman. But you walk like a leader…not a slave. I feel that much has passed here while I slept,” replied Xolo with firmness.
“Not really. Space invasion, maybe,” said Gomez.
Xolo walked over to Gomez.
“The invasion of Earth? How long have I been out?”
“A few hours.”
“And where is my fleet? Have they been summoned?”
“I didn’t know you had a fleet.”
Xolo put a hand on Gomez’s shoulder and compassionately ignored him.
“Friend,” he said to the king, “I need you to tell me what is happening and I shall do all I can to assist you.”
The king stepped forward. “It seems that my mission into space to call for Meseret’s aid to clean up our planet is leading to an invasion by one of the great powers.”
“Great, my balls!” he said, before noticing Sunny and blushing a little. “Lowly treacherous powers. She broke my heart, she did. Made me think she was ready to change the galaxy. But she lost her nerve. Then I lost mine. You can feel it, when it's gone. Suddenly you'd dare a thousand bullets but not a single pair of eyes on your face. Even space feels full of eyes when your nerve has gone.”
Sunny was worried. Sunny was aware that she had a need for father figures. For a long time her father had been great for that. She'd wave him away from the tent knowing he would crack the enemy in two but join the world together one day. She'd bounced on his lap and swam in his stories in the long evenings of victory.
When had he started to lose it: the magic? Probably after the zombies came on the scene. The story changed from the rebirth of the human race to the last desperate battles. He wasn't scared, he wasn't existentially challenged. He just wasn't into it anymore. His speeches were lackluster, his decisions built on sighs. He wrote his battle plans on napkins and practiced throwing his spear at trees rather than walk among the masses, inspiring and healing. His beard grew heavy on his chest, like a bib.
The old fire came on from time to time, enough that only his inner circle noticed anything at all and they were quick to chalk it up to fatigue and reassure each other that the old king would be back any day now, if they ever got a good break from the war.
Sunny saw more than other people though. She always had. People said, “she's been here before,” but in her heart she felt like the opposite was true: she had never been here before. She was a new soul and was not habituated to life's stupid gimmicks.
Sunny saw that her dad was not ready for a faceless, meaningless enemy: a virus in the soil from an age in history he didn't much care for. He saw himself in the mold of the pre-industrial age: a warrior king with horses and swords and guns only in so much as they were essentially swords.
It had been her idea to contact Meseret. From everything Sunny had read about her, she was the potentate who had most love for the home world and least love for the brainslave trade. Maybe really though she just wanted to leave home. At twelve, but looking ten, she was ready to abandon everything rather than watch it all get moldy and die. Maybe her dad knew what she was up to because he made her take her brothers along, like in ancient times when they would make you take an enormous lump of wood with a key on it with you when you used someone else's privy (or so she had read.)
So basically she had latched onto Xolo hard. The effortless way he had taken them under his wing, and the righteous, mathematical purity of his life mission were exactly what she craved.
Now he was a fruitcake. Would the cycle begin again with some other man or was she ready to go it alone now, she wondered.
Xolo turned to face the room. He had his hands on his hips and his chest puffed out and looked really different than before the battle of Black Mountain.
“But I have a question that must be answered before anything else. How did you get me here from my ship? By force? Am I among kidnappers?”
“Your space ship crashed during the battle, Xolo.”
“I mean my real ship. The royal yacht. I insist that you tell me how I was found and how I was taken. And make the answers good. And stop calling me Xolo, whatever that means.”
Everyone in the room was quiet except Gomez, because he liked to get to the bottom of things and connect with people. “We don't know about any yacht, man. And you told us to call you Xolo. So what do we call you then.”
“Call me Feliz if you like...or Boa Morte. But if you don't start talking about how you brought me here to Earth then you'll soon call me your doom.”
“Oh shit,” said Gomez.
…
In space the first shadows of the space fleet arrived. Gassy black clouds of so-called reality steam. Objects intending to exist pushed up subspace and Hawking radiation and post-Hawking particles fizzed around the intrusion. Subspace was everywhere, space was somewhere. It was hard to come from one to the other. There was an endlessly stretched nothing that had been imprinted with a memory. The memory was a fleet of starships. That memory was carved on the subconscious of reality, known also as the blackwarp. Up in realspace, millions of people were being paid to think about the ships, but to think about them being near Earth. The universe was still skeptical about this proposition. The journey was going slowly.
…
No one knew what to do with this new state of affairs. Boa Morte, even, was perplexed. After talking with these earth people for a while it was clear that at least a year of his memory, probably more, was gone. He had no idea why he had transformed himself into this Xolo. The last he remembered was the state of misery, the living suicide of the yacht. Had something happened to wake him up? Some possibility of pulling it off and shaking up the galaxy? Had he transformed himself into an inhuman killing machine, an independent agent who couldn't be bribed or betrayed? That made sense. To die but live. To kill but not to judge. It appealed to him. He smiled at that thought...his past appealed to him.
He looked up at them and they saw the weird sparkle in the eye that they had also seen back when he was Xolo. It sparked the room.
“My new friends, I can't claim to fully know my plan yet, but I hope it will come back to me soon. But it is clear that I have set a trap here. The Gukkools are coming to get me, breaking the truce and risking the ire of Meseret and the others. But if they can't catch me and wave my head on a pike, then they'll trigger a holy war by coming here. They must be praying to get in and out before anyone notices, snatch me and drag me back. They surely expect zero resistance from earth, but they are bringing a fleet so they must think I have some ships up my sleeve. They'll expect an attack from space, not from the ground. We have a chance! A fighting chance!”
“Not really,” said Tamano, sitting disruptively with one leg out, chewing on a root. “We can only fight on the ground. They can burn us to cinders once they figure out there's no space ambush coming.”
She spat out a coil of fiber that expanded slowly after the spit and you could hear it with your eyes, crackling.
“So much for the Bolivar of the Spaceways,” she continued. “Also, I have no idea what happened to the original ‘Bolivar.’ Did he die in some awful battle with a bunch of credulous sucker
s? Can we go and hassle a data farmer and ask him?”
Gomez was not happy about all this. If he had ever slept with Tamano, he would give her a look now to tell her to be quiet and let the king decide. They would have their own language.
He tried an eyebrow raise but it was kind of just like flashing a light. Noticeable but semantically weak. He needed that special language.
Boa Morte walked over to the king. “I'm hearing you have no space fleet. In the time left to us, we need to come up with a way of blasting them down from the ground. What have you got?”
The king grabbed Boa Morte by the arm. “We've nothing, Count. We've got mainly one on one weapons. Our battle has been against men, and lately against these zombies.”
Boa Morte went quiet. Even Tamano…even Sunny, surrendered to the awful extreme of desperation that is called ‘hope.’
“Zombies....zombies. I never fought a zombie. No one ever fought a zombie. Are they hard to beat.”
The King paused.
The king laughed.
The king roared.
The king threw his daughter in the air.
“IMPOSSIBLE!” he roared.