I had never stabbed someone before, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience, especially when their body was a weird mix of flesh and crumbly sandstone. I shuddered as I pulled the pitted knife from the nearest Dulox, the blade scraping and sliding like I’d just stabbed a dried-out sponge. Instinct had kicked in when the alien ran past me toward a rack of rifles on the wall. Whether by sheer luck or my newfound understanding of their anatomy, I’d hit the right spot near its waist. Pale yellow blood, which I had seen entirely too much of lately, gushed from the wound, and the short alien crumpled at my feet.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I’d pierced one of the Dulox’s two small hearts. Tough break, kid. It didn’t matter which of the two got stabbed, either way, a ragged blade strike was fatal. Honestly, it seemed like bad design: a bit of a smaller target, but with twice the chance of getting hit.
A laser bolt zinged off my chest plate, shattering and sending a spray of blue sparks from a nearby console. I flung myself to the side, just in time to avoid another shot that obliterated the terminal I’d dove behind. In the corner of my vision, I saw Faleun holding one of the Dulox as a shield, trying to fend off the laser fire from two more of the aliens. She wouldn’t last long, not with her cover quickly deteriorating and laser bolts getting closer with each shot.
A weird blue substance began dripping onto me from the ruined console, an energized, sparking goo mixed with shattered glass and alien tech. It burned as it splattered across my chest plate, catching the side of my neck and face. Almost without thinking, I was up, one of my arm guards off and full to the brim of the strange substance.
"Pick on someone closer to your own size!" I shouted, flinging the weaponized computer goo at the two Dulox firing at Faleun. It sparked and fizzed as it flew through the air, splattering across their faces.
Unfortunately, the substance had either lost most of its charge or the Dulox were more resilient to goo than I expected. They looked mildly annoyed at worst and slightly perturbed at best, then quickly redirected their weapons toward me. I barely had time to duck behind the console, landing hard on shards of broken equipment and more stinging goo. Before I could even catch my breath, one of the Dulox stepped around the corner, flanking my poor position, rifle aimed squarely at my head.
I was too late. I mentally hammered on the trigger for my adrenaline skill, but it must have been on some kind of cool down and didn’t trigger. Stuck on my hands and knees, I watched the Dulox’s claw tighten around the trigger. Just then, a rigid, singed alien body flew into view, slamming into the Dulox with a spray of crumbling flesh. It was like watching a slow-motion boxing match, instead of sweat flying off the opponent’s face with a well-timed hook, it was the guy’s actual face, debris catching the light as it arced away. The Dulox lost its balance and tumbled to the floor.
I didn’t waste the opportunity. I lunged forward in a mad scramble, leaping onto my foe before he could fully recover. We wrestled over his rifle for a moment, but I managed to wrench it away and slammed the butt of the weapon between the points of his crescent-shaped head, right where the Kleeth’s proboscis always seemed to settle. Instinct kicked in, and I rolled away just in time, catching only a glancing laser shot from a Dulox across the room.
I sighted down the rifle as quickly as I could, awkwardly prone on the floor. My fingers fumbled against the strange protrusions that made up the trigger. My pinky barely fit into place, and I flicked one of the unfamiliar controls, half-expecting the thing to kick back like an old-fashioned gun. I knew it wouldn’t, but years of shooting conventional weapons made it hard not to brace for recoil.
Thankfully, the shot hit true. A laser streaked across the room, catching the Dulox mid-movement, and it crumpled to the floor.
The sudden silence was eerie, and I crawled to the edge of a nearby console, peeking around the corner.
“The room is clear,” Faleun’s voice rang out, calm as ever. I definitely stood up with total confidence, not at all expecting to get my forehead blasted off by a stray laser.
Faleun, to her credit, didn’t gloat about her eight kills to my three, which I appreciated. She probably had a few more levels on me, anyway. We stood there awkwardly for a moment before Faleun gestured toward the consoles. It hit me then, she fought with knives, bows and arrows and had probably never seen anything more advanced than the alien conveyor belts.
“Right,” I said, trying to sound like I knew exactly what I was doing, striding confidently over to one of the strange consoles. What I initially thought was a computer screen turned out to be a sheet of clear glass, with the goo and strange components floating inside it, shifting to display Dulox text and figures.
Cool. Weird, but cool.
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Turns out, learning how to dismantle a massive energy space elevator wasn't as easy as just flipping a big red off switch, striding out with your big gecko companion, and getting a celebratory luau on the beach in your honor. If you lived in fantasy land, sure, but I lived in space-fantasy land, where things just didn’t work that way.
I stood there for at least ten minutes, desperately trying to figure out how to control the stupid console. Navigating the menus turned out to involve making gang signs into a bunch of odd protrusions that passed for a keyboard. I finally managed to pull up something useful: highly detailed schematics that laid out all the internal workings of the lift generator. Awesome. Except I had no idea how to read alien schematics, and my skills were geared toward spacecraft, not space elevators. Even if I somehow had a level or two in "Space Elevator Mechanics for Dummies," I doubted I’d find a "cut the red wire" solution that would neatly shut the whole thing down.
“Well?” Faleun asked, nervously pacing the room, glancing at the entrance as if expecting a Dulox patrol to barge in at any second.
“Not very productive,” I admitted. “I couldn’t tell you how to take down the place, but I at least know where the lift generator is.”
“Good enough,” she said, already moving toward the door.
“Hold up. Don’t you think we’ve pushed our luck far enough? Maybe we should take our good fortune and non-lasered bodies back outside, gather up some reinforcements, and not turn this into a full-blown suicide mission?”
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She shook her head. “No. Slipscale die every day while this el-uh-vator” - she stumbled over the unfamiliar word - still taints the sky-ocean. We take it down. When the ele-vator is gone, Dulox will go with it.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “It’s not that easy! From what I can tell, the generator is massive, and I don’t have the first clue how to take it down. We can’t just flip a big red switch and have your people throw me a luau.”
“What?” she asked, confused.
“Nevermind,” I sighed.
Faleun paused, then strode over to one of the consoles that hadn't been shredded by laser fire. “Dulox technology?” she asked, gesturing toward it.
“Yeah?” I replied, not sure where she was going with this.
She pulled a chunk of coral from her armor. I couldn’t tell if it was decorative or functional; it just looked like a spiraling sea creature. “Lift gen-er-ator big version of Dulox technology?” she asked.
“I guess… but it’s not that simple-”
She cut me off, “Technology stronger than sacred coral?” She pressed the spiral’s tip against the glass of the console.
“Uh… I mean, most stuff secured inside isn’t made to be super tough-”
Before I could finish, she pushed the coral harder. It ground against the glass, which held for a moment before cracks splintered across the surface, and goo began to glorp out of the hole she had made.
“Dulox ship outside strong. Dulox ship inside?” She waved her free hand in a dismissive "so-so" gesture. “Eh.”
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And so we found ourselves slipping through hallways that were quickly filling up with more and more Dulox patrols. We were making pretty decent progress, sticking to corners and only having to fight a handful of times as we ascended a few flights toward the droning hum of the lift generator. My pinky, however, was starting to ache, it was the only finger that fit into the Dulox trigger. There were other firing modes, but with my barely functional understanding of their weapons, I wasn’t about to risk it. Could you get a hernia in your hand? Probably, if you tried firing a crab-alien’s gun in "party mode."
Despite the discomfort, the rifle felt amazing in my hands. The second one strapped to my back for good measure didn’t hurt either; who knew carrying a couple of alien guns would do wonders for your confidence? It also helped that the Dulox were terrible shots. Anyone who got close enough met the full wrath of Faleun’s dull, but deadly gecko claws, and those trying to snipe us from a distance learned that I was more than happy to light them up with my laser rifle. I finally, finally got some payback for my earlier encounter with the Dulox, returning the favor quadruple-fold by blasting many a Dulox in their dumb, narrow chests.
“There!” I pointed to what resembled a large airlock ahead. “That’s one of the entrances to the lift generator. Once we’re in, you can do your little coral trick on the generator, and maybe, just maybe, it’ll shut down peacefully instead of blowing half this hemisphere to bits.”
She nodded, as if either outcome was perfectly acceptable to her.
We reached the airlock, and it turned out to be slightly more annoying than expected, what with the retinal scanner required for entry. I won’t get into how we found a willing participant to, uh, calmly lend their beady Dulox eyes to the scanner. Let’s just say... we didn’t.
The lift generator was enormous. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but some things are hard to wrap your head around. It’s like when people say: The star VY Canis Majoris is so big that we could fit 9.3 billion of our suns inside it. You can hear the numbers, but your brain just isn’t built to comprehend that kind of scale. It just doesn’t compute. Too big for the ol’ monkey brain. Hell, a continent without the modern conveniences of travel are just massive. Well, the lift generator wasn’t that big, but it was still... pretty big.
“No!” I shouted as Faleun made a beeline for the nearest chunk of machinery. “That whole side is part of the electrical system.”
She stared at me blankly.
“If you so much as scratch it, you’ll be vaporized faster than you can blink! And I didn’t bring any eye protection, so the arc flash will blind me, and I really don’t want gecko ash in my eyes.”
“You’re weird,” she said.
“I know. Now, let’s move before they follow us through the airlock and discover that Dulox head you left behind.”
We bolted through a labyrinth of walkways that felt more like a fever dream than any kind of logical design. These weren’t proper hallways, they were passages cut through the heart of the lift generator, an industrial monstrosity of cables, pipes, and glowing coils. It was hard not to feel unsettled by the sheer mismatch of super-advanced tech beaten into submission by the Dulox’s strange aesthetic. Think steampunk time machines, but cranked up to eleven.
I led us toward a section I’d seen on the schematics, steering clear of the massive transformer coils and hulking power arrays, aiming instead for an area that looked like it contained more delicate hardware. Well, delicate relative to the rest of the place.
We burst into a room that stood in stark contrast to the chaotic mess we’d been navigating, a space lined with sleek, black towers that looked out of place among the rest of the generator’s crude, cobbled-together machinery. The walls pulsed with a soft hum, lights flickering in a rhythmic dance, emanating from within the black, metal boxes that reached up toward the ceiling, fifty feet high.
“It’s like a brain,” I muttered, the thought coming unbidden but somehow feeling right. “We’ve moved from the rugged body to the quiet, controlling core.”
“I can still smash it?” Faleun asked, and I glanced over to see the blue-stained coral already in her hand, ready for action.
“Oh, definitely,” I said with a grin. Despite everything, her shooting me, her violent-first approach to solving problems, I couldn’t really blame her. After everything she’d been through, living in an oppressive, deadly world for the past year, it’d be weirder if she didn’t want to go scorched earth on these Dulox motherfuckers. Excuse the language, but it’s just so right at a time like this.
As if she thought I’d change my mind, Faleun moved to the nearest tower, hefted the coral in her hand, and smashed it into the sleek material. Nothing. Another hit. Still nothing.
Just as I was beginning to think the tower was made of some near-impenetrable alien alloy, a crack formed. A few more encouraging strikes with her sacred coral, and the crack spread, spidering across the entire surface of the tower. Peering around Faleun, I glimpsed a wonderland of odd tech inside. It was clear: destroy enough of this, and the space elevator would be toast. Kaput. Done for. Pick your synonym for ‘dead.’
A strange noise sounded behind me: a tinkling, grinding noise that sent a shiver up my spine. I spun around, my trigger-pinky poised for action, ready to unleash some laser fury on whatever my crescent-headed friends had cooked up this time.
It wasn’t a Dulox.
The alien voice that followed was scratchy and discordant, modulating as it crossed the air until, somehow, I could understand it.
“Could you please stop banging on one of my Zenith Command Towers? They’re dreadfully expensive.”