I-PET

Dmitri ran. It was all he had left to do. He sprinted as hard as he could, running away from the menace he knew was barely ten feet behind him. He vaulted over a small pipe inside the ventilation shaft, then rolled under another. The menace crashed through them. He swung around a corner, continuing his mad dash. He carried the EVA helmet under his arm, and he donned it as he saw an airlock up ahead. He raised his borrowed plasma rifle and opened up on the airlock door. It burst open with only two shots, sucking him and the menace out into the cold, dark depths of space, from which Dmitri knew he would not likely return.
The plot that put him out in the cold was only the first step of a much larger scheme. It all began in a small house on the recently terraformed Iapetus, one of Saturn’s moons, on the Earth date 4-12-3523.
Joe sat rocking in his chair, his brain processing nothing save the chirping of the birds. There was none of the normally omnipresent hum of electrically powered machines. Joe was literally the last human to live off the land, and his body was one of the last to be uncontaminated by the goings-on living in a modern, “urban jungle” of a city. He chose to help colonize Iapetus because the entirety of the Earth had become one monolithic city, with no natural resources remaining. Joe often felt like he was the last human still willing to farm his own greens, hunt for his own meat, or gather firewood to heat his house, and in reality, he was right. He had had a hand the terraforming of Iapetus, the last “city-free” planet in the solar system, and made sure that over half the planet was reserved for what little was left of Earth’s wildlife. This Alaska-sized area was his and his alone. Back on Earth, he had a reputation for being fair and agreeable, which was a large part of the reason he was chosen to hold ownership of half a planet. He had lived there peacefully for five years before the incident.

Dmitri was crashing through Joe’s woods, carving out a new trail for his morning run. He had literally hundreds, as he made a new one every few days. Each trail was quite uniform; a slightly twisting loop exactly fifteen miles in length. Dmitri had been an astronaut, back in the days when space travel demanded more than money. He was one of the best athletes on Iapetus, despite only being about five foot two, which was saying something, since nearly everyone on the moon had been chosen for their athleticism, survival skills, and cooperation ability. Operation Iapetus, or the “I-Pet Project” as it was called by the colonists, was really just the government flexing its muscles against possible alien races. Dmitri had been a SOLARC trooper, or Special Operations Low Atmosphere Reconnaissance and Combat, soon after the United Government of Sol decided to militarize their space program. He was the best. When he retired, the UGS decided that they weren’t done with him yet, so they took him away for the I-Pet project. He had been one of two hundred and ninety-eight colonists to make it alive. Two died in their cryogenic sleeping pods en route. Despite major advances, space travel was still one of the most dangerous activities mankind had ever undertaken. Dmitri was the oldest living astronaut, despite being only thirty-seven. Most of the casualties were the first-timers, the twenty-year-olds, the ones who only had minor training. Dmitri had survived many a rookie mistake (most of them by others), and was plenty prepared for anything that could happen.
Joe, still rocking quietly in his chair, had never had such troubles. He was raised on a farm, one of the last ones on Earth that still used the thousand-year-old traditional methods instead of hydroponics. He had made the trip to Iapetus without incident, though, and he was confident that he could live there forever.

The only thing getting in the way of that was the incident.

As Dmitri crashed through the forest and Joe sat in his chair, Iapetus’s top astronomer, Vasiliy Nikolaevich, saw a donut. In space. His first reaction was to pull another normal donut out of the box, disregarding it as a misread of an incoming spacecraft. No laws were in place regulating spacecraft landings on Iapetus, so they came and went as they pleased. However, after a second glance, the donut continued to glide in towards the Iapetus Forest, where no spacecraft were cleared for landing. He dropped its normal-sized counterpart back in the box and snapped out his hundred-year-old styled keyboard, typing in commands and messaging the Sol government’s experimental spacecraft team. They said they had no idea what it was. The astronomer was worried. He nervously nibbled his donut as he started to search around the small moon’s computer systems for anyone who knew what this was. Before he found anything out, the donut hit the moon. To be accurate, it landed on the moon. Whatever it was, it was definitely a spaceship, but none he had ever seen.

Joe started, nearly jumping out of his chair after hearing the slightly dulled thud-thud of the spacecraft landing on a grassy clearing. They weren’t supposed to land there. He rushed out the door, prepared to run his mouth off on them until they got out. He was met with a sight he’d never thought he would see in his life. A twenty-foot wide, six-foot tall donut was sitting on his yard. Just as he burst through the door, Dmitri stumbled out onto the lawn, nearly falling in surprise at the sudden lack of undergrowth. He straightened up, staring at Joe, then the craft. Being the braver of the two, Dmitri crept up to the craft and poked it with a stick. Nothing happened. He put his hand on it and it started to hum. Joe and Dmitri both jumped back, but the hum stopped when he took his hand off. “Thermal starter?” Dmitri suggested in his thick Russian accent. Joe said nothing. He approached the craft and knocked on its walls, the hum spotting in and out as he contacted the metal. Dmitri ducked under the landing gear and checked the inside. “Anybody home?” He said jokingly. There was no response. Dmitri put his palm back on the craft and waited. After about ten seconds, the hum intensified and a hissing noise came from a small crack that had appeared around the inner equator of the donut. The top half suddenly hinged open, and Joe jumped out of the way to avoid being crushed. Dmitri smiled, chuckling. “What is this thing?” He hopped over the edge of the now-open donut, gesturing for Joe to do the same. They introduced themselves, and then pondered on what was going on. Neither of them had dabbled at all in spacecraft design or mechanics, but they were pretty sure there was no visible propulsion system on the craft. It had no apparent control system, and as Dmitri explored it, he found no sort of instruments or meters of any variety. He tapped his ear twice, saying, “Iapetus Command.” His in-ear communicator went to static, and then slowly faded into clarity. The young communications specialist greeted, “Hello, Dmitri. What’s up?”

“Hey, Alejandro. Uh, I just walked into Joe’s clearing and found a big donut spaceship sitting in the middle. Any idea?”

“What? No… Well, Vasiliy just saw a funky-looking spaceship head in for a landing there. He did mention something about donuts. He might’ve just been eating them, though.”

Joe gestured for Dmitri to hand him the communicator. Dmitri said to Alejandro, “One sec. I have Joe here with me. Hold for a sec?” Alejandro agreed. “Joe, I can’t just hand it off to you. It’s an implant. Just say what you’re going to say and I’ll relay it to him. Okay, Alejandro, Joe’s got something.”

Joe took a deep breath and said, “I think I know what this is.” Dmitri looked at him in surprise and relayed it to Alejandro. Joe continued, “I saw it once, flying over the farm when I was a kid. Nobody knew what it was or where it came from. It tried to land on our farm, but my dad shot at it with a shotgun and nobody ever saw it again. Wait! Dmitri, check the middle of the bottom for a couple small dents.”

Dmitri slid under the craft, spinning in a circle and scanning the surface. He paused and ran his hand around the bottom of the donut, then stopped when he felt unevenness in the hull. “Yeah, right here.”

“Crap. This means…” He was cut off as a pair of harnesses that were lying in the bottom of the donut snapped out and wrapped themselves around Joe and Dmitri. They were sucked into the ship, and the lid snapped shut. A small light switched on over each of them. Dmitri yelled, “What just happened? Alejandro? Alejandro! Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, Dmitri… What’s going on?”

“We just got sucked into the ship! It’s closed, and it feels like we’re taking off!” Dmitri felt all his blood pulled to the bottom half of his body, signaling the acceleration into a wormhole generator. “Alejandro! We’re going through a wormhole. We’re going to lose you. See if you can track it.”

“Can do.”

Dmitri felt the usual sense of hollowness, and his ears popped as they entered the wormhole. The zero-gravity made it feel like your insides were floating. He was used to it, though, so he managed to hold his last meal down. Joe, however, was not so lucky. If you ask an astronaut what the worst thing ever to happen to them in space was, ninety percent would say floating vomit. Dmitri felt the craft exit the wormhole and immediately ram into something. There was no more communication with Alejandro.
What felt like a docking coupling was actually a tractor beam, which Dmitri felt as the craft’s gravity suddenly shifted to his right. He exclaimed as the donut suddenly opened up and he was spat out onto the cold, semi-metal floor. He saw Joe fall out on the other side. A large, bony hand reached out and took hold of him. Dmitri’s eyes widened and he planted his feet on the ground, pushing himself back into the nearest corner, away from the menace that had grabbed Joe. He got his feet underneath him and crouched in the corner, still scared out of his mind, but somewhat functional. The menace carried Joe like a doll out of the airlock, with Joe struggling, his mind still in shock and his body flailing around wildly. Dmitri watched as he was tossed to the ground outside the airlock, and heard a sickening crack as his skull hit the ground. Joe rolled over on the floor in pain, while the menace loomed over him. The only reason Dmitri ever made it out of that airlock was that the interior door was closing. He got to his feet and sprinted out the door, sliding between the opaque gray doors. Planting his feet and getting himself up, Dmitri swung his face right into the hamstring of the menace. It was massive. It must have been at least fifteen feet tall. His first reaction was to try to slash its hamstrings, but he realized that he was in his running clothes and had no knife. He ended up smacking the menace’s knee pit with the side of his hand, accomplishing nothing but giving himself a bruise on its hard exoskeleton. The menace slowly turned, and before Dmitri could jump back, snatched him up in its massive hand. He squirmed and pushed, flexing his muscles so as to loosen its grip, but it was far too strong. Dmitri had no idea what to do. His training had said nothing about this. As far as he knew, aliens didn’t exist.

But there he was, at the mercy of one. All this was completely unbeknownst to Alejandro, still on the other end of their line of communication, frantically searching for the signal from Dmitri’s communicator. It wasn’t in the solar system, or the recently colonized Alpha Centauri system. It wasn’t even on the wormhole generator coordinate grid. There was no way a human craft could have gotten him anywhere specific. As he checked the signal strength, he found that Dmitri wasn’t even within fifty light-years of him. No known life-sup\porting solar systems were in the general range Alejandro had triangulated. He was still working on the signal lock, using three giant comms satellites used for communication with Alpha Centauri. After fifteen minutes, he finally got a signal lock. He plugged in the microphone and nearly shouted, “Dmitri! Are you okay?”

Dmitri, on the other end, was anything but. In the fifteen minutes that had passed, more happened than he cared to remember. After Joe threw his shoe at the menace, the menace had dropped Dmitri and turned. Dmitri’s first reaction was to scramble to his feet and as far from the alien as possible. He could do nothing but watch as Joe was raised up on a small pedestal in front of what looked like a scanner of some sort. The pedestal moved forward towards the scanner, shoving Joe inside. Dmitri started forward, but after shooting a glance at the menace, he decided one death was better than two. Judging by how the alien had acted so far, he guessed there was really no hope for Joe. It seemed cold-hearted for a second, but he realized that there really was no other choice. It was either Joe died or Joe and Dmitri died. Dmitri got up, edging around the walls of the square room to get a closer look at the scanner. He watched as Joe started levitating, and his clothes were stripped off and disintegrated by some unknown substance. What happened next was what pushed Dmitri over the edge. A red line appeared down Joe’s back. It lengthened until it spanned from the top of his skull to both heels. Dmitri could see Joe screaming, but no sound came from the scanner, or whatever it was. The red line widened, and Dmitri realized that it was an incision, running the length of his body. He cringed, horrified, as the skin was pulled forward, off of Joe’s body, revealing the bare muscle, ligaments, and bone underneath. That entire process took three minutes. It took all Dmitri had to stifle a scream as he rotated, seeing his eyeballs bare in their sockets. All the blood in his body turned red, having been exposed to the oxygen in the air in the ship. Joe, still silently screaming, was exposed to a gas that rushed through a tube in the top of the “scanner”, and silenced. His skinless head slumped to his chest. Dmitri saw the alien menace stick its hands in a small pool, presumably of sterilizing fluid, and reach out to grab Joe’s bare form. He carried it with great care out of a door; into what, Dmitri didn’t care. He just ran the other way.

There was another door not ten feet from Dmitri. He had to jump to reach the button to open it. It wasn’t designed for humans at all. Dmitri realized that he had a serious problem. Every challenge he had ever run into had been encompassed by his training. Aliens? Not so. He had no idea what to do. He didn’t even know how big the ship was. So when he heard the almost relieving sound of Alejandro’s voice in his communicator, asking if he was okay, he yelled back, “No, I’m not okay! I just saw Joe murdered!”

“What? Where are you?”

“I have no freaking idea! We landed in a tractor beam, and we went into a landing bay, and this… thing grabbed Joe and carried him into a room, and put him in a scanner or something of the like, and it ripped all his skin off in one piece!”

“Wait, wait, slow down- What grabbed Joe?”

“I don’t know! Alien?”

“Well, you are well outside of human space. It’s possible, I guess…”

“Well stop guessing and bust in here and get me out!”

“You’re off the wormhole grid. It’s not gonna be exact. Maybe within a hundredth of a light year.”

“Just go for it!”

“Calling the rescue squad up.”

“No, call the SOLARC troopers. These aliens are probably armed.”

“Got it. ETA fifteen minutes.”

Dmitri went off the comm line and continued to run down the large hallway he had found. He figured it was just a maintenance hallway for the aliens, but to him, it might as well be Taj Mahal. The ceiling was fifteen feet above his head. He looked for some sort of armory, since he knew he’d need to defend himself if he saw another alien. He saw a small sign with something on it that looked somewhat like a gun, and he jumped up and opened the door. Inside, there were rows upon rows upon columns upon stacks upon boxes of guns and ammunition. He grabbed the nearest, smallest one, which was about the size of a large rocket launcher, and headed further in, looking for ammunition or a knife.
There were aliens looking for him. They didn’t know that he had help coming in fifteen minutes, so they were taking their sweet time. After all, he was only a human. They had far more advanced technology and probably better training. They had pulled him off a small colony, so he couldn’t have been ex-military. In reality, they had been aiming for Joe. He was the last “pure” human, not affected by all the technology. They needed to study his body for weaknesses in the human race. Dmitri was just collateral. They could have a convenient comparison with him. That was why the researcher that met them at the airlock and killed Joe had let Dmitri go. He wasn’t essential. The aliens really had no idea where to be looking for Dmitri, but they figured he couldn’t have gotten far on his little human feet. They were armed only with something similar to longshoreman’s hooks, for grabbing the human and carrying him without effort. They took no armor, as they knew the human’s bare hands were not nearly enough to pierce their exoskeletons. They finally found the human in the armory, just waiting. He was sitting on one of their grenades.

Dmitri was sitting, waiting on what he thought was an alien pistol. He held the knife in one hand, which to him was the size equivalent of a broadsword. It would do just fine. He looked up as the aliens walked in the door. They couldn’t see him yet, and he picked up the “gun” and pointed it at them, hoping to catch them by surprise. He hit a button on the side, and heard a small hissing sound. It took him a second to put it together, but it sounded just like a fuse. His eyes widened and he lobbed the thing as far towards the aliens as he could. The explosion rattled his brain, knocking him off his feet. The aliens stumbled backwards, and in their confusion, Dmitri took the chance to charge up and swiftly climb one of their rough exoskeletons and try to plant the knife in one’s eye. He was swatted off, smashing into the wall. He dropped the knife-sword and slumped on the wall. Regaining his orientation, he felt his ribs. Three were broken. He groaned, sucking air in and out, his lungs barely evading being punctured by his ribs. As the aliens regained their senses, he focused on the task at hand, shunting the pain aside and got up, running as hard as he could with the injury.

Alejandro came through on the communications line. “They’re all through the wormhole. I sent three SOLARC units. They should be there in five.”

“Well, I’m in a bit of a tough spot here, I broke three ribs. Tell them to hurry!”

Another, deeper, gruffer, more Russian voice came through the radio from the SOLARC gunship. “Hey, Dmitri. Party’s on its way.”

Dmitri almost stopped running. “Alekseiovich? Ivan Alekseiovich? Is that you?”

“How’d you guess? Haven’t seen you in ten years. I heard you were in trouble, and I figured I was the only one who could get you out of the kind of pile of crap you can get yourself into.”

“Well, Ivan, can’t talk now. Aliens behind me, and they’re a little mad.”

“We’re two minutes out. We’ll punch a hole in the window and snatch you up. Remember the Titan maneuver?”

“Go for it.”

The Titan maneuver was anything but safe.

Dmitri swiveled his head, seeing the SOLARC gunship in the window and the aliens in the corner of his eye. The gunship loosed a rocket at the window, creating a shockwave that imploded the transparent metal, and the vacuum of space sucked Dmitri out. He had less than a second in the vacuum, which he spent rocketing through space towards the gunship. He broke the oxygen bubble barrier and fell to the floor, the directed gravity taking hold of his body. It really didn’t help his ribs. He was badly injured and probably shouldn’t have been moving, but he couldn’t resist the chance at revenge on the aliens. The medic checked him out and said he definitely shouldn’t go, but Dmitri wasn’t one for letting someone else do his job. The troopers immediately got him suited up in EVA equipment and prepared to, as Ivan liked to say, “Get in, make big boom, get out”. He told them he was injured, and they told him to stay, but he managed to get them to let him go. Dmitri was handed a plasma rifle, laser pistol, and three normal-sized grenades. The troopers re-opened the rear hatch and leaped out and through the broken window in one unit. Dmitri and Ivan led the way. Dmitri turned the corner to the right, where the aliens had been. They were all oxygen-starved, having been sucked almost all the way around the corner through the window. Dmitri kept on jogging, trying to ignore his broken ribs as they leeched away his energy.
They must have run at least a mile before they began to be picked off. They would hear a shout and gunfire from behind, and they would all turn and unload on the alien that had shot the person in the back. However, their plasma and laser weapons were no match for the aliens’ unidentified ammunition. They were outgunned and outnumbered. They couldn’t turn around for fear of running back into a squad of aliens. Between attacks, there was no sound to accompany them but their breathing and footsteps. Dmitri felt like he was in a horror movie; there was no way out of this mess. Half the squad was dead and the next half was on their way. It was as if the Grim Reaper was hovering over them, bringing his scythe down with the aliens on the next unlucky victim. “Why aren’t they just confronting us?” Dmitri asked aloud.
“I don’t know, maybe they’re leading us somewhere.”
“That’s encouraging.” They were driven deeper and deeper into the ship, and after another mile, it was down to Ivan and Dmitri, with Dmitri near the end of his physical control. They had only survived by pure luck; the aliens just hadn’t gone for them yet. They had been running in the hallways the entire time. They reached an intersection, and an alien from the rounding the corner spotted them and jumped, calling out an alarm. They opened fire on it, the soft pewpewpew of the plasma rifles echoing in the halls, but it only stumbled, continuing charging them. They turned and sprinted the other direction. They were cut off by an exceptionally large alien in full battle armor. Dmitri managed to roll under it, but Ivan stopped and shot at it. That was the last mistake he made. The alien, with impressive speed for its size, sliced down with its knife, passing it through Ivan at the waist. His torso dropped to the ground, the bottom of his body spouting blood. Dmitri’s face contorted and reddened with rage, and he yelled, “NOOOOO! IVAN!” Ivan, immobile and barely alive, simply mouthed, “Go.”

So Dmitri went. He ran, harder than he ever had before. With his broken ribs, he normally couldn’t have even sprinted ten feet, but he had more adrenaline pumping through him than he thought possible, added to the fuel of rage after they had killed his friend. He was far beyond the limit of his willpower, running on pure instinct, and all it told him was to GO. At the next intersection of hallways, there was a ventilation duct straight in front of him. He didn’t even shoot it, just putting his shoulder into it and bursting through. The pain that had hidden behind his adrenaline came back, and he stumbled, but he planted his hands and stumbled back up. It would be hard for the alien to follow him in the tight space. However, a smaller one ended up behind him, chasing him down the vent. He took off his EVA helmet so as to be able to breathe better, sprinting down the shaft. He didn’t even think to shoot the alien, since it would do no good. After rounding two corners, he spotted an opening. He burst through again and found himself in an airlock. Dmitri snapped his helmet on and opened fire on the door. It burst open, sucking him and the alien outside. He realized a second later that he really didn’t know what to do after this. He only had about an hour of fuel in the jetpack attached to the EVA suit. However, he remembered the SOLARC ship. Clutching his broken ribs, he began to jet his way over to it. “SOLARC pilot? Come in!”

“I read you loud and clear.”

“Come to me. I’m hurt. Everyone’s dead. We need to get out.”

“Can do, Dmitri. On my way.”

Dmitri sighed in near relief. The relief was wiped out by the sight of the battle-suited alien in the airlock. Dmitri cursed to himself, jetting away faster. The alien leapt from the opening, tackling Dmitri, sending them both sprawling out into space. Dmitri tried to wrestle away from it, but it was twice as strong as him. All he could do was give the beastly creature a hard time. He struggled and struggled, spitting up blood from his punctured lung, knowing that his body had reached its limit long ago and he was probably near death from the hemorrhaging in his chest. The adrenaline running his cells was almost gone. All he could think was that he wished he hadn’t missed lunch. He was mindlessly resisting the beast, knowing he would cave at any point.

He got lucky. The SOLARC pilot was good at bumper cars. He sideswiped the pair, knocking the alien off Dmitri and swinging around, opening the door. Dmitri used what should have been the last of his strength to grab a handle and pull himself inside. The alien followed him. It got up on top of him and said something in noises that were totally foreign to Dmitri, then raised its knife and prepared to stab him. Dmitri heard his drill sergeant from some forgotten time yelling at him. “Reflexes and adrenaline. The two best things to happen to combat. Use them well.” Dmitri’s knife was practically an appendage, so it was nothing but muscle memory for him to yank it out of its sheath and jam it up the neckpiece of the alien. It froze, falling to the side of him in its death throes. Dmitri said quietly, “Just go, pilot.” That was the last thing he remembered.
He woke up in a hospital bed on Earth. It was the whitest room he’d ever seen. His chest felt perfectly fine, and he felt totally rejuvenated. He stood up out of his bed, pulled on his normal clothes, and started to walk to the lobby. He met Alejandro on the way. “Dmitri! You’re back! Thank god you’re okay!”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Dmitri had no will to communicate. He was completely out of it. No conscious thoughts crossed his mind. Alejandro piped up, “They studied that alien you killed. We found a weakness. Well, you found a weakness. Their necks aren’t armored.”

Dmitri walked out to the front desk, not responding. They ushered him back to his bed, a place he really didn’t want to go. He stopped them, asking the date. A large, very clean doctor answered, “April thirteenth.”

“Whoa. One day?”

He was somewhat shocked that the entire ordeal had happened in barely twenty-four hours. It had felt like days. Just the fight with the large alien in the gunship had felt like hours, though it was only about five seconds. He tried to clear his mind of the thoughts as he walked outside, starting to shade his eyes, but realizing that it was barely three in the morning. Despite this, the city was quite busy.
In hindsight, he was almost unsurprised as the first bomb fell. It crashed into a tower two blocks to his right, and was echoed by the screams of people on the street. Cars and people sped away from the falling structure. Dmitri started to follow the crowd, and looking back, he saw a massive, dull gray shape break the roiling clouds with spotlights. The menace had arrived.