Mimic's Last Stand Read online

  “First we eat. All of us. We’ll need a full stomach for our next task.”

  “Which is?”

  Mimi looked to me a bit guiltily, but that only intrigued me more. “We’re going to reach out to Earth Gov and the resistance.”

  “Wait, what? At the same time?”

  She nodded. “We all need to be on the same page. Now that the coup is known and being eradicated, we can’t afford for there to be factions. We need to be a united front against our attackers.”

  “Yeah, but, like…humans don’t really forgive or trust each other that well.”

  “I know,” Mimi said with a wan smile. “That’s why we’ll have to be extra convincing.”

  She paused for a moment, as if thinking. “Do you think Harunya will be willing to let me borrow her baby?”

  “Her ba— What exactly kind of phone call is this gonna be?”

  But Mimi was already heading down the stairs, her mind no doubt on a million different things. I followed after, wondering just how this could possibly go well.

  “Are we really doing this?” Gonzales asked, her bionic eye’s light beginning to glow. In the months that we had been trapped on the alien ship together, rushing for home, I realized that she had the tendency to use it as a way to emphasize her words. It was certainly pretty intimidating.

  “If you have a better idea, I would be quite pleased to hear it,” Mimi said calmly.

  “Yeah, I bet you would.”

  Bother.

  While Gonzales and I had managed to get back to some of our old level of friendliness, I couldn’t help but notice that occasionally, she and Mimi would clash. Thankfully it wasn’t every day, but seeing the two powerful women vie against each other was like watching two planets try to out-gravity the other.

  Thankfully, Gonzales shrugged, and her eye switched to blue before fading out entirely. “But as it is, I don’t have anything better to offer, so by all means, let’s have what’s probably going to be the most frustrating conversation we’ll have this year.”

  “Who is even in charge of Earth Gov nowadays?” Ciangi asked, bouncing Harunya’s baby on her knee. “Do we even know?”

  Gonzales shrugged. “I could probably send a message to the resistance and ask, but by the time they answered, we’d already be on our call.”

  “Are we sure this is going to work?” Eske asked, idly feeding a couple of mini-mimics on her lap. “Last I knew, we were too far from Earth for direct communication and had to send holos.”

  “Like I said before,” Bahn muttered, tinkering with something below one of the consoles of the ship. “I was able to integrate the alien’s technology with ours, and their range is considerably longer. Earth shouldn’t be a problem at all.”

  “So you say,” Gonzales countered. “But what you say and what actually happens are two different things.”

  “True.” Bahn slid out from under and looked to us. “Guess we’ll have to find out, won’t we?”

  “Has anyone considered what we will do if no one answers?” Harunya asked quietly, sipping water from a battered canteen.

  “They’ve gotta,” Gonzales said with an amount of determination that I was jealous of. “We left at the end of a big battle, but certainly not the whole war. They’ll have at least one person on the comms, even if it has been months since we last made contact.”

  “I hope so,” Ciangi said, draping the baby over her shoulder and gently patting her back. I watched her keenly, wondering if that was something that I would one day have to do. Did mimics even need to be burped? I didn’t think that I had ever seen any of them need to cough up anything like humans did.

  Actually, now that I thought about it, humans were a pretty weak, strange species, weren’t we?

  Mimi took a deep breath, even though she didn’t technically need to breathe oxygen like we did, and squeezed my hand. “Is everyone ready?”

  “As ready as we’ll ever be, I suppose,” I said. “Let’s call up Earth Gov and the people who we helped overthrow Earth Gov.”

  “Technically, we overthrew a coup that had infiltrated and undermined Earth Gov. If anything, they should be thankful for that.”

  “We also caused millions or billions of dollars of damage and plunged the world into a chaotic power vacuum and reconstructive phase,” Ciangi said, the baby letting out a loud burp to punctuate her sentence.

  “She has a point…” Gonzales murmured.

  “Annnnd I’m calling now,” Mimi said, pressing the necessary controls. There was quiet for a moment and I could swear I heard all of our hearts beating, and then…and then there was the startup sound of a standard comm booting up.

  “Wow, is it working?” Eske asked, leaning forward.

  “Why do you sound surprised?” Bahn asked indignantly, brushing his hair out of his face. Although his dark hair had grown enough to put into a bun, it still regularly fell out of the hold and into his line of sight. We still all bore the scars of our time through processing, it seemed. “When have I ever made anything that didn’t work?”

  “Well, there was that one time you turned our food generator into a seed germinator.” Gonzales said. “And then it exploded.”

  “And you made the filament of my favorite gun melt when you tried to add Gonzales’ upgrade,” Ciangi offered.

  “You’re an engineer. You only had one gun.”

  “Yeah, and you broke it. Your point is?”

  The console buzzed, and I cleared my throat. Everyone piped down just in time for a view of a room populated with high-ranking military officials to flash up from the holo projector.

  My throat squeezed at the image. I tried to tell myself that these were the good guys. That the coup had been mostly eliminated and taken out of power. But somehow my mind wouldn’t let me. To me, the uniforms I was seeing meant danger and betrayal.

  Thankfully, it was Mimi who did the talking. Not me.

  “Are we receiving a communication from who I believe we are?” a woman asked from Earth, her grizzled voice matching the many medals on her chest.

  “Yes. I am the leader of the mimic race, and these are my compatriots. I believe you are familiar with our escapades, but that’s not why we’re—”

  She was cut off as another projection lit up next to the military room to reveal what looked like a nearly empty helm of a ship.

  “Holy boji! Gonzales, is that you?” the young man cried, leaning forward.

  “Ay, yeah. It’s me. We’re gonna need you to get whoever’s leading you now.”

  “Yeah, yeah, but, like, you’re alive now?”

  “Boy, I’ve always been alive. Now go get a leader.”

  “Well, when you went radio silent for four months, we just assumed—”

  “Leader. Now.”

  “Right.”

  He scampered off and it seemed that whatever shock the military folks were going through had just worn off.

  “Are those the revolutionaries?”

  “Is this serious?”

  “Surely you don’t mean—”

  “Look, I realize that rationalization is a normal part of humans adapting to a surprise situation, but I do not have time for it,” Mimi said with quite a bit of authority. “Yes, we are broadcasting our holo-signal to the two of you and you are able to hear and see each other.”

  “How is that possible?” a slimmer person in just a suit instead of a military outfit asked. “As far as we know, your planet is too far for us to receive this in real time.”

  “We invent things,” Gonzales said lackadaisically. “Think you’d be used to that by now.”

  “Most of what I’ve read is you stealing things.”

  “Well…that’s also true.”

  “Gonzales…” Mimi murmured warningly.

  “Right, right. Don’t sidetrack the conversation. By all means, proceed with what’s sure to be a very productive conversation.”

  “Gonzales! It’s good to hear your voice again!”

  It took a lot of work n
ot to sigh as someone strode into the revolutionist’s side. It felt like the conversation just wasn’t willing to cooperate. The man was someone I vaguely recognized from the last big raid we had to expose the coup, but I couldn’t remember his name or his part other than he and Gonzales argued both loudly and emphatically. I guessed months isolated on a ship with just my friends would do that.

  “But what’s with all the suits? Last I knew, they were trying to bring all of us in for our crimes instead of thanking us on their hands and knees.”

  I heard several of the Earth Gov members draw in a deep breath to object, but Mimi took her moment.

  “The reason that all of you are here is because there is a threat that needs all of us to work together to head it off.”

  “Oh, please,” someone from Earth Gov muttered. “Not with this alien threat again. We’ve been prepping ever since you handed over the tech you collected and your cell samples and there hasn’t been a peep.”

  “Not a peep?” I asked incredulously, forgetting myself. “I lost half my hand in the first attack!”

  “Nevertheless, according to our reports from the mimic that was working with the coup, you succeeded with very few casualties. If they are to attack again, we’re sure you’re quite capable of handling the threat with all the tech you’ve stolen from us.”

  “More like reclaimed,” Ciangi muttered. “You wouldn’t have had any of that without Mimi anyways.”

  The guy from the rebel side spoke just as someone else joined him on the screen who I also didn’t remember. “Yeah, as much as I love y’all, we’re kinda busy with helping expose any remaining coup members and hiding from the gov as they try to scapegoat us.”

  “All of you deliberately—”

  Mimi cut off the suit with a high-pitched screech that sounded almost like static. “Enough. The aliens did attack again and ravaged the fledgling city we’ve been building here. I’m sure you’ll all be fascinated to know that we can actually die.” I heard the crack of pain in her voice and my heart squeezed. There had been many nights where I had caught her staring up at the ship ceiling, strange clicking noises issuing from her throat. Holding one of her siblings/adopted children in her arms as they died had clearly taken a toll on her. There had been far too much death in her short life.

  Although it all started with me.

  “Of course, I do not believe any of you will trust us at our word, so here, our ship collected footage of our arrival when we found out that we had been ransacked.”

  Mimi clicked a few commands and soon I heard audio from our ship’s logs from when we first saw the smoke blanket covering the city. Mimi turned her back to it, and I followed suit. In the short time that we had been in contact with the survivors we left behind, we found out that at least three other mimics had perished in the attack.

  Sure, maybe that wasn’t a huge number, but how many would it have been if the aliens weren’t intent on kidnapping all the younglings? The thought terrified me. Besides, four souls lost was far too many in a civilization that was in the thousands and still trying to establish itself.

  Mimi let the log continue until shortly after we left the ship and then she cut it off. I was glad that we didn’t have to witness that death again. I didn’t think I could handle it.

  “And yet you’re here,” one of the government people said dubiously.

  “Yes. We managed to use some pilfered tech to get to their dimension and steal one of their ships—”

  “You really do have a MO, don’t you?”

  But Mimi continued. “It was then that we discovered just how much of a threat these creatures are. I’m sending you what we’ve managed to decode of both their history and the level of technological threat. This isn’t all of it, of course. I only want you to see exactly why we’re reaching out to you.

  “All of you.”

  More buttons pressed, and I could hear something being played for them. It was a bit annoying that I couldn’t see what they were seeing, but that wasn’t how sending holos worked. The projector on one side would scan everything within the field and then send it to another projector, which then created a semi-3D image that could be displayed as a flat image—like the movies of ancient times, or as an image with the standard depth of vids now.

  Finally, though, it ended, and everyone looked a bit more cowed.

  “So basically, these guys are intergalactic harvesters,” the revolutionist murmured, finally sounding like he was taking everything seriously.

  “Yes,” Mimi said, the tiniest bit of relief in her voice. “And just as before, once they take us, they will no doubt be eager to wipe out and integrate the rest of the living animals in the solar system.”

  “We still don’t know that any of this—” one of the military officials started.

  “Oh, shut up, Connors,” one of the suited women snapped. “There is no reason that they would specifically create a technology to contact us, who are most likely one of their greatest and least trustworthy enemies they have, and ask for our help. The risk is far too great unless the reward is survival.”

  “Or the reward could be them trying to destabilize what little structure we have left!”

  “For what purpose?!” she continued, her voice just as sharp. “They’re the ones that exposed the coup to us. And they left right after to go back to the home that we kidnapped them from. If they wanted to take over, they would have just taken over. And they might just do a better job than us.”

  Another man nodded. “Just look at us. We’re the only people who have been fully vetted and there could still be a couple of us who the general didn’t give up in his confession. We let our government, which is supposed to be for the people, bloat into this cancerous, corrupt beast, and it took outsiders to knock us out of it.

  “It’s time that we grew up and helped them like we always promised!”

  There was quiet for a beat and then the revolutionist was speaking. “Wow. Never thought I’d ever hear a lick of sense and responsibility come from a government mook.”

  “Let’s, uh…let’s not go with the name calling, shall we?” Mimi asked. “If this is going to work, we all need to be allies. We must be a force together, unintimidated and united.”

  “And how exactly do you think we should unite?” another military person asked.

  “Simple. As the planet closest to the aliens, and arguably the one who has pissed them off the most, they’re going to come here. By our calculation, in two months, three months max.

  “So, what we need is for both of you to send supplies and people to our planet. We need everything from single-man fighters to your full-blown warships, guns, engineers, demolition experts, and marksmen. We have mere weeks to plan for an invasion, and this time, they’re not just going to send a ship. They’re going to send their full armada after us.

  “And humans,” Mimi continued, her voice grave. “This victory won’t just be us protecting ourselves. Destroying the entire army that they send after us will essentially cripple their home planet. These aliens have many enemies that are scattered across the various corners of the universe. I’m sure they will be more than happy to take advantage of that weakness.”

  “So you’re saying we’d effectively be ending an intergalactic terror that’s been roving their sector of space for centuries?” That was the other revolutionist, who had been silent up to that point.

  “Yes. Exactly. There’s a whole universe of different lifeforms, not just mimics and humans, and these aliens have been systematically wiping them out and integrating them into their biologies and technologies. I say it’s time we end that.”

  “If I am understanding this correctly,” the first military person spoke again. “Then you want us to basically empty what little forces and prep we have remaining and send it to you, leaving us completely open to attack from your merry band of uprisers.”

  “Excuse us, you guys had the uprisers. We’re just the ones that brought them to your attention.

  “…v
iolently.”

  “Enough!” the same suited woman from before snapped yet again. “I’m so tired of this. I worked my way up to council leader because I believed I would make a difference. And right now, this is the difference I’ve been waiting my entire life for.

  “So,” she said with a breath. “I vote that we help. On one condition, that is.”

  “And what is that?” Mimi asked, voice guarded as she stood up straight.

  But the woman just smirked ever-so-slightly. “We get to name these alien bastards.”

  4

  Long-Term Guests

  “The reinforcements are coming!”

  I looked up from the panel I was taking apart, hoping to find some materials that could be salvaged. Eske was beside me, taking away things when my bin got full and tossing junk when it was in the way. There in the scorched, leaning doorway was a young mimic, their skin a vibrant purple and little horns sprouted all over its head while their lower body was still an inky black.

  “It’s the Earth Gov supplies. They’ll arrive by mid-afternoon!” And then they were scampering off, no doubt to tell the others.

  “Has it really already been two weeks?” Eske asked, wiping her face with her sleeve but just smearing more grit across her face.

  “Not quite,” I said, looking down at our scanners. “Looks like twelve days. Earth Gov has improved their engines yet again.”

  Eske shook her head, clicking her tongue as she did. I had long since learned that it was a sort of tick she took on whenever she was thinking very hard, so I waited for her to gather her thoughts enough to express them. “To think, if I hadn’t fallen asleep during one of those new, experimental weapons build sessions, I never would have been here.”

  “Yeah, and your family would have never been targeted and had to go into hiding.”

  “True, but I also wouldn’t have been able to be such a huge part of history.” She saw my dubious expression and crouched down next to me, long legs taking up most of the space. “Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it, right?”