A violent buzzing set itself about the room. Out of the pile of sheets in the center, a hand reached out to silence the alarm. Slowly, Michael Shore rose from the cluster of bedding and set about folding up the sheets neatly in the corner. He had to go job hunting again today. Only a few months ago, he had been a private army’s top pilot instructor. Now, with the mercenary force he had served in dissolution, he was jobless, and mercenary pilot didn’t shine too well on a resume. It didn’t show up on his resume at all, actually, but that was a separate problem. In this overpopulation job market, someone who couldn’t account for the past twenty years of their career didn’t look too great.

He turned on the old TV he’d had for the past thirty years and listened as the broadcast continued on the UN summit being held today. It had been all over the news for the past week, and now it just seemed to Michael to be blown out of proportion. He only really kept up with it because his daughter was excited about it as a translator. I must be a terrible father, he thought. After all, he didn’t even know what other languages she spoke anymore.

As he always did, he ensured that his cigarette box was secure in his jacket before even getting ready. He then headed to the bath, filled with water from the night before. He scrubbed himself clean thoroughly before rinsing off and draining the tub. After it was fully drained, he set about drying the tub with a hand towel. While he dried, he overheard the woman on the news talking about the possible prospects of the summit: social reform, counterterrorist action, financial security… It was all the things that had been promised to be resolved in the last five summits. Nothing was getting better. The economies, governments, and terrorism threats all across the world were only getting worse every day. Mercenary armies had done what they could with the terrorists, but the various sponsoring countries refused to let them inside their borders.

Michael rose and turned to the sink, where his toothbrush and toothpaste were smartly facing the east wall. He picked them up and carefully placed a measured dab of toothpaste onto his toothbrush. He then brushed his teeth in a clockwise motion, going in order of tooth number and ensuring he reached every part of each tooth. When he had finished, he rinsed the toothbrush and his mouth and repeated the process twice more before carefully flossing twice. He rinsed his mouth with mouthwash after each floss and added in one last rinse for good measure when he couldn’t remember if he had done so after the first floss.

After he finished his hygeine routine, Michael deftly placed each item back into its original place, marked with a border of waterproof tape. He then moved back out into the bedroom, where he checked his jacket for his cigarette box again. The woman on the television was introducing the delegates now. He wondered if any of them were named Bob or John. Probably not, he decided. Michael then went about putting on his clothes, which had been carefully ironed the night before, right down to the socks and briefs. He made sure at each step of the way that everything was properly aligned. When he had finished donning his garments, he moved over to the kitchen, where he had slow-cooked a beef stew overnight. He poured the stew carefully into a plastic container before taking the slow cooker to the sink to be thoroughly washed. After he had washed and dried the cooker, he put a lid on the container, ensuring it was the lid properly matched to the small tub.

Once the food was properly sealed to Michael’s satisfaction, he placed it carefully into the bottom left corner of his lunch box, into which he also put a banana, an already-baked potato, and his required utensils, tightly held together with a rubber band that matched the color of the lunch box perfectly. After his lunch box was zipped and placed flush with the edge of the counter near the door, Michael went into his refrigerator and grabbed the tub marked for April 1st. He set the tub on the counter three inches from the stove and closed the refrigerator as he read the slip of paper taped atop the lid of the tub.

As described on the paper, Michael pulled out a small skillet, set the stove to 15 degrees past the medium mark on the dial, and opened the tub. Reaching inside, he removed a small cube and unwrapped the wax paper around it. Taking the cube of butter, he placed it exactly in the center of the skillet and began to count to two hundred in two-second intervals. When he had, he removed the baggies of chopped ham, bell pepper, chive, tomato, and potato, carefully emptying the baggies onto the pan in that order and placing the empty baggies neatly atop one another directly opposite the tub. After counting to thirty, he pulled out the small cup of beaten egg and poured it onto the seared ingredients. He finished his omelette and folded it neatly into a traditional napkin fold on the small, square plate he pulled out of the tub. He turned off the stove as he set the plate on the counter where he picked up the baggies, wax paper, and cup. While it cooled directly next to the warm stove, Michael took the baggies, wax paper, and cup to the sink, where he washed them all for reuse and dried them with a dish cloth.

Removing the fork from the tub, Michael picked up the plate and ate his breakfast neatly. Upon finishing, he pulled out the final item: a cup of orange juice, carefully measured and sealed in a plastic container. He drank the orange juice and washed and dried his remaining dishes, placing each item back into the tub and placing the tub in its place inside the cabinet, where it would sit until the 23rd, when he would prepare for May 1st’s breakfast.

Now satisfied with his morning routine, Michael double-check the status of all his switches and knobs, triple-checked his jacket for the cigarette case, and donned the jacket. Walking to the door, he reached into the countertop bowl and retrieved his phone, keys, and wallet. After placing them all in the appropriate pocket, he checked one last time for the cigarette box and grabbed his lunch box. He opened the door and was a
bout to flip the breaker switch to his peripheral electronics and lights when he heard the following words on the television, no longer in the woman’s familiar voice: “Ladies and Gentlemen of these United Nations of Earth, I come to you on behalf of the Empire of Thorlinthia.”

Michael Shore dropped his lunch box and pulled out his phone, his fingers automatically punching in the number he thought he had forgotten long ago. It rang twice before he heard, “Hello? Who is this?”

Sounding almost mindless, Michael said, “Lieutenant, this is Mickey. The Phoenix is rising.” A quick tumult could be heard over the phone. Then scraping and a clatter as the phone was picked up again.

“Confirmed, Mickey. The Hummingbird is ready. Pick me up at the planned location in one hour. Lieutenant out.” Just like that, the conversation was over. Mickey placed the phone into a random pocket, pulled out the breaker, and retrieved the small key from inside the small hole behind it. He picked up his lunch box and ran out the door, slamming it hazardously behind him, ignoring the sound of breaking glass as his bowl fell off the counter and sprinting down the stairs to his car. It was time. Phoenix Day had come, just as the Lieutenant had told him when they met five years ago. All Mickey could think about was his daughter, who was currently in the world’s most dangerous location.

[The following story contains graphic descriptions of violence and mildly suggestive content. Reader discretion is advised.]



“Hey, sweetie. Where’d you go?” Nora Denton wrapped her arms around her husband’s shoulders as he sat down beside her in the bed. “I was hoping we could have some fun before going to bed, but you’ve been gone for hours. Did something happen? Are Angus and Summer alright?”

That was always Nora’s first thought when Larry came back unscathed. While he was gone, her worries were usually focused a bit more centrally on him, but once she knew he was alright, she started worrying about the other family she had in the Resistance. Larry was always careful not to give any details about ongoing missions, but if she was ever connected to the Lieutenant, it would already be too late to pretend she didn’t know about the Resistance’s activities. Her family had bigger secrets to keep than that.

“Yes, Nora. Everyone’s fine. I was just checking out some new armor and a nifty little piece of equipment Sara gave to Summer to give to me. I’m pretty sure she got it from Drake, too, because it’s some seriously impressive stuff, Nora. There was an artificial–”

He was interrupted by the sounds of repeater fire from outside. Snapping to his feet, he crouched down slightly before moving to the window. He motioned for Nora to secure the door, and by the time he looked behind him, she had already deadlocked it and started moving toward the kids’ room. Looking back to the window, Larry peeked through the blinds to the streets below.

There wasn’t too much to see from the top floor, but Larry had good eyes. Down on the street, there seemed to be a group of heavily armed men firing on Armadian Police Forces. All Larry could think of that particular idea was that it was a very bad one. A few uniformed Armadians were lying on the street, arms sprawled and blood spreading about them. That being said, the rebels, who obviously hadn’t thought this through properly, had spread out on the sides of the road.

A few Armadians were still alive, though, and they started laying down suppressive fire on the rebels, who were dropping like flies for lack of cover. Eventually, the rebels started using their fallen comrades as shields to hold back the Thorlinthian fire. The Armadians were wittling down the rebel forces, but they were still taking heavy casualties. After a few more minutes of mixed gun and repeater fire, rounds stopped flying about. The last Armadian had dropped.

It was now, Larry thought, that the rebels made their biggest mistake. Instead of dispersing and moving out, they grouped together and started confirming their kills. These men weren’t professionals. They were hunters, and hunters need trophies. Larry started to feel sick as the rebels removed the Armadians’ helmets and started on one of the most disgusting human-hunting rituals mankind ever invented: scalping.

Larry watched in horror as the rebels pulled out their knives and grabbed their kills by the hair as they began to saw away the flesh over the heads of the Armadians. He was reminded in that moment that his team was the exception, rather than the rule, when it came to civilized operations in the Resistance. They would never have performed such a messy operation as a full-on firefight in the middle of a heavily populated, civilian area. They certainly wouldn’t have resorted to barbarism as these men were, defacing the bodies of their fellow man.

But many rebels didn’t see the Thorlinthians as members of mankind. They just thought of them as alien animals and enemies. Even now, as they tore away the flesh of someone so like themselves, with families and pets, the rebels only saw what they wanted to see: demons. It was like a World War II video game. If it was German, it was a Nazi war criminal as evil as Hitler, who would clearly be a match for Satan when it came down to who was a worse person. But Larry hated that outlook. These were people. He knew some of those men, he was sure. He had been asked so many times for autographs or photo ops with Armadians in and out of uniform that he was certain at least one of those men was in the street, dead, right now.

The rebels were almost done securing their trophies when they found out why Larry had already known it was a strategic mistake to do so. Dragon Riders may have been the most feared mortal men on the planet, but the eight blue-haired women that just dropped onto the street from the sky were something worse.

Valkyries were known for their raw potency as warriors. A single Valkyrie could take down a city. The rebels had just pissed off eight of them. Despite being outnumbered almost twelve to one, the Valkyries had already won. The men on the street right now were walking dead. They knew it even as the Valkyries pressed slowly in on their position, walking as calmly and peacefully through the hail of resumed gunfire as one might walk through the store. After several seconds, the rebels had to r
eload. The Valkyries used this moment to strike.

Armadian Special Forces were known for using precision weaponry akin to sniper rifles and heavy repeaters similar to standard assault rifles. Dragon Riders were known for using knives and the occasional sword, getting within arms’ reach of their opponent, though they still carried small repeaters on their sides. Valkyries, too, carried these weapons, but they weren’t exactly known for using them. They even had suits with built-in weapons that were often used in medium to long-range stealth attacks. In close quarters, however, the Valkyries used no weapons. It was the one reason you might be pleased to see a Dragon Rider. Dragon Riders were kinder than a Valkyrie.

Now, Larry watched as eight furious Valkyries used their hands to slowly tear apart the men who were still making a futile attempt to kill them. The first man to be touched by one of the Valkyries screamed as she pressed her thumb into his eye socket and used it to grip his head as she ripped it off of the rest of his body. His screaming didn’t last long. The second man actually seemed to have some martial arts training. When the Valkyrie’s hand reached out, he swiftly moved around her in one smooth movement which would normally have dropped a grown man to the ground with a dislocated shoulder. Instead, the Valkyrie merely danced through the motion and used the fall to grab his shoulder with her feet. Quickly, she kicked her legs downward, swinging the man beneath her and bringing herself to an upright position as she pulled his hand off for daring to touch her. His throat soon met her foot as she crushed it.

Larry watched sadly as the spectacle below turned into a scene straight out of a horror film. There was nothing the men could have done against a single Dragon Rider, let alone the eight Valkyries. If they had known the Valkyries were in New Qzcivden, Larry doubted they would have been so keen to stick around, though they still probably would have performed the attack. Men’s egos weren’t easy to deflate, after all.

Now, as the men below found themselves being made into many more pieces than they were designed to have, they must certainly have regretted the attack. Larry watched as the last of the rebels dropped to his knees, his hands above his head in surrender. The Valkyries walked about him in a tight circle, then started to walk away. Just as he was sure he would live, however, the man’s lips began to move.

Larry didn’t know what the man said, but it clearly wasn’t anything the Valkyries wanted to hear. They stopped in unison and turned around like they were the same person. Then, seven of the Valkyries took a single step back while the one directly facing the man began to walk forward. It was like a well-rehearsed dance as the other seven began moving in a circle, evening out the gaps between themselves and never turning away. The Valkyrie who had stepped forward reached the man and knelt down, bringing herself to his eye level before placing both her hands on his shoulders. She seemed to speak a few words, probably explaining that he could have lived, before moving one hand to the man’s hip and one to the base of his neck. She then swept her arms in front of herself, flipping the man sideways like a coin before driving the hand on his neck into the street. The man’s skull collapsed as it collided with the ground, and his brains spread across the road like pancake batter.

The Valkyrie rose to her feet. The others stopped their circling. As they moved toward her, Terira Khuda’Cronell looked up to her cousin’s window. Larry quickly dropped his finger and stepped away from the blinds, as if he had touched something hot. After that, he didn’t look back out the window or go back to talking to Nora.The couple just made sure that the children were still asleep in their windowless room (though it did have a beautiful skylight) and went straight to bed without saying another word. Nora simply curled up tightly into the embrace of her husband as they both set off into a restless sleep.

When Larry awoke in the morning, he returned to the window and looked out to the street. As he had expected, the bodies and even the bloodstains were gone. Larry wondered if it had been an act of mercy that Drigondii had allowed the Valkyries to eliminate the rebels when he had been so close. Drigondii Sheii’Cronell didn’t need hands to kill a man. With that chilling thought reverberating through his mind, Larry turned the wireless straight to a children’s program before setting about making breakfast while Nora got little Drake into his day clothes. He wasn’t going to let his children hear the news today.

“You know, I was a doctor once,” Colt Tyson spoke aloud to the guns he was cleaning. It was a story he’d told no one many times. “I worked in a top secret facility designed for studying extraterrestrial activity. Unfortunately, funding got pulled pretty drastically long before I ever showed up, so it wasn’t properly equipped when we actually found an alien.” He set down his latest work and picked up a Thorlinthian repeater for disassembly.

“I’m still not sure if it was a male or female,” he stopped as he said this, looking forward for practiced dramatic effect. “I never could get it to answer that question, and it was such a foreign creature that I couldn’t figure it out by conventional means. In any case,” he said, removing the firing rail, “I think it was female. The voice was too light to be male, in my opinion. So let’s call her a ‘she’.” He set the firing rail on the workbench and pulled out his soldering iron.

“Her name was Kahlisa. She was from a world long dead, apparently. Last of her species…” He trailed off as he fiddled with the more complex bits of circuitry in the repeater, setting it for a lower rate of fire to improve accuracy. “She was the Guardian of our galaxy. A Kuli…” The soldering iron came down again, and his voice trailed off to allow him to concentrate.

“The first time I went in to see her, one of the other doctors had already gotten his hands on her. He wasn’t quite as stable as I am, and I’m fairly certain he crossed his fingers when he took the Hippocratic Oath. He did so many horrible things to her. I didn’t have the heart to say what he did to her eyes, though I’m sure she knew.” He slid the rail back into position over the cooling electronics.

“It wasn’t even just her eyes. He took massive samples of all sorts of different tissues. It all ended up being useless, anyway. We couldn’t isolate her genetic code, and we couldn’t figure out why she was able to do the things she could do. Her brain was incredibly small compared to our own, and we couldn’t get to it on account of some sort of metal intrinsic to her bones. We couldn’t drill into it without producing enough heat to cook her brain. Not only that, but anaesthetics just didn’t work.”

He finished reassembling the modified repeater and pulled out an old assault rifle. “Whenever we thought we were making a breakthrough with finding her genetic code or analyzing a tissue sample, the sample would just fall apart. It was like she knew, and she just disassembled it from her cell.” He pulled off the mounting rails and chuckled. “Even now, it sounds crazy, but I’m sure it’s what was happening. It was always literally right before a breakthrough.”

He finished removing the barrel. “She healed from everything, too. Even the eyes came back after a few weeks. There were scars, but everything healed. I ended up blindfolding a creature I had met with no eyes. That’s actually kind of cool when I think of it…” He ran his brush over the carbon deposits on the glossy metal.

“But it all came to an end rather suddenly.” He started to oil up a rag to clean the barrel. “One day, my boss just came in and said they were shutting down our research. No progress except a few notes on Xenopsychology was hardly impressing the few investors we had left. They decided to shut us down and convert the facility to a prison. I wouldn’t stand for it, of course. I had my standards. I had sworn to take care of my patient. I said I would stay as long as my name was Doctor Colt Tyson, so they had my license revoked and my degree annulled, which I didn’t even know you could do.” He began cleaning out the barrel.

“They told me that I was the one who had to tell her they were going to stop feeding her, just to get to me, I suppose. Just to rub in the fact that I was no longer ‘Doctor’ Colt Tyson, they sent me back to Kahlisa one more time to sentence her to death.” He started putting the rifle back together.

“But when I spoke to her, she wasn’t even surprised. She said she already knew and that she was prepared for it. She made me swear not to tell anyone, but she apparently didn’t need to eat to stay alive. She could do this super meditation/sleep thing that completely halts her metabolism. Her brain would just operate on fumes until the Phoenix rose.” He snapped the mounting rails back on.

“I didn’t know what that meant at the time, of course. I just figured she was being all mystical about her death or something. I left and joined up with a mercenary group that didn’t particularly care if its doctor had had his license revoked over some political scandal. I did my best to forget. I told myself it didn’t matter anymore. But that was a lie.”

He set the reassembled rifle back on the workbench and leaned back in his chair. “Then, one day, the Tees came. Drigondii Sheii’Cronell showed up, and the Phoenix rose. I thought maybe she was still alive, somehow, for that moment I saw that man speaking on the television. I headed back to the facility. But it was gone.”

He picked up the rifle and pressed the stock into his shoulder, aiming down the iron sights just like his friends had taught him all those years ago. “I got there and it was all gone, blown to pieces. T
hey must have blown the facility when they heard aliens were here in some vain attempt to cover up what they’d done. She’s gone now.”

“She’s not gone, Texan.” A second voice came from the door behind Colt. It was the voice of Summer Ayling. She must have been listening the whole time. Colt set down the weapon and turned around.

“How do you know that, Summer?” His eyes expressed a desperate need for knowledge that his voice refused to betray. Summer smiled back, understanding.

“I know because I’ve met the Kuli, Kahlisa of Fehmadad. She’s about five feet tall on four haunches, six and a half on two?” Colt stood at the description. She was telling the truth. “Kahlisa lives in Texas now, in the town where I grew up. The same town where Drake Kendrick grew up.” Colt’s face didn’t react the way she had anticipated. Instead of donning an expression of realization, his face had adopted a more confused look. She tried again. “It was the same town where Drigondii Sheii’Cronell grew up.” There was the look. She knew she had a lot of explaining to do now.

“Wha–? He grew up here? He’s not a–? But the Thorlinthians…” Colt was totally befuddled. Summer gestured for him to join her in the main cabin, and she waited until he had entered to close the door behind her.

Summer knocked gently on the door to the cockpit, where Angus and Michael were playing an old-fashioned game of Go Fish. “Angus? Mickey? I need you two to come out here.” When they had, she said, “Angus, it’s time we told them what we know. Colt knew Kahlisa.” Angus’s eyes widened, and he nodded. He got everyone to sit down at the low table in the center of the room and waited for Summer to join them.

“Well, everyone,” she said as she said on the couch beside her husband, “This is probably going to take a while, but it all started when two Valkyries came to Earth over thirty years ago…”