Ironclad Origins Part 2
Could this be the end?
As Victor was being lifted to the metal contraption in the sky, men everywhere were getting mowed down by lasers in a green flurry of light and heat. The various machines birthed by the gargantuan mother flew in various formations dropping bombs along the field. Great blue electric bubbles would rise from the point of contact and grew to resemble huge, crackling bundles of blueberries, with each bomb forming its own berry in the cluster. The plasmic expanse would devour anything it came in contact with leaving a singed ring where it stopped.
Victor had never seen such an atrocity. Almost halfway up to the machine he saw what was left of his general crawling across the ashes of the frenchmen stationed in the trench, he had only smoldering stumps where his shins had previously been. The general grabbed one of the rifles next to an ash pile that used to be Private Holmes and started firing wildly at the sky. His desperate attempt to take something down with him only attracted the attention of another metal monster to fly over and finish him off with a blueberry cluster. The smell of O-Zone and sulfur wafted up to Victor who had finally reached the opening to the ship above.
The beam had lifted Victor into a small pentagonal room with terminals full of blinking buttons and levers. The floor, a big spiraled metal cloaca, shut silently before Victor was plopped onto the center of it. His legs jellied from the chaos of what had just transpired. There was a big podium of controls a few feet in length and just as high, it sat at the apex of the corner of the room opposite a blank wall. There’s got to be a way out of here. Victor surveyed the room looking for any signs of a way to get out of the room. He went to the terminal and tried to see if any of the buttons had any clues as to how to exit.
As Victor inspected the panel, he heard light footfalls approaching the room. Panic grabbed a hold of him and he did the only thing that made sense to him. He crouched behind the podium and held his breath.
The wall opposite the podium slid open revealing a tall muscular figure standing in the center of a perfectly circular hole in the wall. It appeared to be a man but with something about his appearance being not quite human. His gray suit looked like some sort of military uniform. Victor waited, looking for some loose pipe or something he could use to whack the looming figure.
The man reached the center of the cloaca with a straight look on his face as he closed his eyes for a second before resuming his pace and headed straight for the podium. This is my only chance. With a crazed wail of fear and exhaustion, Victor lunged at the man. Victor’s neck met the palm of the man who caught him and lifted him off the floor. Victor was startled and failing to get the man’s iron grip from around his throat, he started to swing. He could only manage a few oxygen-deprived blows before Victor gave up and let him sling him over his shoulder as he carried him out of the room.
They entered a long hallway, spanning at least 200 doors worth of length and the man began his disciplined walk down the hall, passing numerous doors, a few opened to scenes of nature, some earthen and others completely alien to Victor. The rooms with the environments in them seemed to hold far more than what should be possible in the cramped room he had just been lifted from. His ribs grew sore from the man’s jutted shoulder and despite his promises not to run or attack again, the man simply kept his pace, as though he heard nothing.
Finally approaching the last room at the very end of the hall, a door triple the size of the others they had passed, loomed ahead. Shouts in an unfamiliar language could be heard emanating from the other side. Deep guttural voices that sounded in the heat of an argument or debate. The circle door slid open as the man plopped Victor down at the empty side of a pentagonal table hosting four other men, also in gray uniforms with multicolored badges on the front of them, at each of the other sides. They too had those small details about them that didn’t quite seem human. Victor couldn’t quite place his finger on it, maybe it was the way their eyes are colored? Perhaps the setting of their jaws beneath their skulls? They sat there watching him, taking puffs off their smoking apparatuses all connected by hoses to a big beeping, floating machine just above the table. It was solid chrome with various colors of light beaming from several pores in its smooth finish.
The two men on opposite sides appear to be quarreling over something, with one standing up, red faced and eyes about ready to pop out of their sockets and the other, arms folded, nose upturned and brows furrowed. The one right of center between them slammed his fist on the table, belted something out which got the two to ease up and sit neutrally.
The man who slammed his fist looked Victor up and down before tapping the side of his neck, causing a bright blue light to shine through his skin before dimming again. He started speaking. The voice was the same deep and guttural voice Victor had heard, but the words that were audible did not match the words the man was mouthing.
“How nice it is to finally greet you face to face, Victor Donovan. You have proven a valuable specimen.” The man’s voice thundered. A hideous grin began to form.
“Valuable? I’m just a private in the US Military.” Victor said in a low cautious tone
“I care not for your rank in your military, for it has no meaning to me, you are of earth and that means you are prime for enslavement.”
Victor’s eyes widened at the last word, his stomach churned suddenly wishing he too had been vaporized with his fellow soldiers. He couldn’t fathom what type of work these guys would have him doing.
“Enslavement?”
“Yes.” The man’s eyes squinted, he took a long puff from his apparatus before continuing. “You meet the minimum requirements for a level 2 slave. As for the others, they weren’t so lucky. As per the request of The Emperor we dispatched them swiftly and indiscriminately.”
Victor trembled. “What makes me so special?”
“The lack of any genetic disorders in your blood makes you a clean candidate to serve our Emperor without fear of a random event of mutation in your DNA to cut your duty short.” The man took another puff. “That and you’re in good enough shape at a young enough age that most duties we assign shouldn’t prove too much of a challenge to you.”
All Victor knew of slavery at that point was what he had seen in the movies, how back in the old days of the pyramids being built with their slaves being whipped as they drug huge rectangular blocks of rock up steep platforms. The thought of being subjected to building huge structures while getting snapped in the back by straps of leather in the hot sun all day started to form a ball of hate in Victor’s core.
With all nervousness gone and replaced with defiance, Victor said to the man, “I’m not building shit for you guys, I’d sooner die than be put to mind numbing labor for people I care nothing about.”
Victor’s words brought laughter to the men around him, even the man who brought him in here couldn’t help but crack a smile.
“Building? Why should we waste such a good slave on such things? That’s what the bots are for. No. You will be doing things far better than building things. As a slave, you are required to enter our army and do grunt work so as to leave our soldiers free to do more meaningful assignments. If you prove yourself good enough an asset then you can rise in rank and get more important work.”
Too stunned to speak, Victor sat there as the circular door opened again with another man entering, saying something in the alien language to the man who had been talking to Victor.
“Ahh yes.” He turned back to Victor with a gnarly grin on his face. “It is now time to see you to your quarters now Victor, we have some other ‘business’ to attend to. I trust that over time you will come to accept your role and fit in well with the others we have taken into our ranks.”
The man shut off his translator and gave a few words to the latest entry to the room before having him escort Victor back down the hall to a door that had a bed and other furniture from earth behind it for him to rest until they arrived at their destination. There was a large triangular window at the other end that Victor approached to look out of. His eyes grew wide and his mouth fell open as he saw the landscape which he had just previously been entrenched in having been scorched beyond recognition with craters dotting the land like the moon. The shrinking of the image meant the ship was leaving his home planet. The frontline where his war had abruptly ended, grew smaller into a red speck of dust on a big green and blue blob of life as the Earth got enveloped in the dark of the vast vacuum of nothingness that cradled the fragile egg of which his species was born from.
Will he ever see his home again?
Thank you for reading!
You can find part one to this story here: https://readmedium.com/ironclad-origins-e86833ecf79f
You can also help support me by using my amazon affiliate link below to purchase the latest kindle paperwhite signature edition. I make commision off any purchase you make within the link.
