Incursion Protocol

“Come on, it’s not all that bad,” I said, sitting on the softer side of a dune while Faleun stared out at the water.

She hadn’t taken the news well. I didn’t know if the five stages of grief applied to humanoid geckos, but she seemed firmly stuck in denial and isolation. Back at the ship she had looked up, following my gaze, but like me, she couldn’t see her own title, or tag, or whatever The System decided to call it. I saw her eyes go unfocused as she opened her menu, then her shoulders sagged.

Without a word, she slid off the airlock and padded toward the ocean, ignoring my attempts to call her back. I stumbled down the dunes after her, managing only a series of awkward tumbles. Now she stood at the shoreline, the waves lapping at the dark sand beneath her claws. I kept my distance, nestled in a crook of the dune, while she stared out across the water. It would’ve been picturesque if the circumstances were different; a battleworn Slipscale outlined against the black sea, the burning orange horizon fading into a inky blue sky.

“Just think about the fear you could put into those Dulox hearts!” I said, trying to sound upbeat. “We keep up the raids, swat a couple of their patrol ships out of the sky, and soon there’ll be whispers about Faleun the Invader. If anyone even catches sight of a Slipscale with a red title, they’ll know to turn crescent and run.”

She reminded me of Abby. Not that Abby was a six-foot-something reptilian alien, but she’d had that same unshakable resistance to my words. Like Abby, Faleun probably knew that my jokes were just my way of coping. As long as I kept talking, I didn’t have to feel the sadness and fear, right? Right?

“How,” she started, her voice wavering, “how am I supposed to protect my people when I’ve been labeled this way?”

“It’s just a word floating above your head. It doesn’t mean-”

“We all heard the Slipscale who called itself The Construct. Everyone, to our own villagers to the farthest islands past the horizon, we knew its stories of the Invaders, set to destroy everything we hold dear.”

I guessed that The Construct must show up to each species looking like one of their own. I wondered if, after the trillionth introduction, it got bored and started messing around with whatever was lying around, just to amuse itself. Or maybe I was special, and it figured a cheesy cowboy routine was the best way to greet me.

“How am I supposed to stand with my shoal mates, tend to the sacred coral, or defend our village with that word… Invader, floating above my head?”

“It’s just a title, Faleun.”

“Titles matter, Crash.”

“Titles,” I said, standing up and wobbling only slightly in the sand, “are just fancy labels people throw around to feel important. Sure, some are earned and sacred, like your Matriarch’s, but most of them are just there to make folks feel better about themselves and hold over others.”

She stood silently, still unconvinced.

“Faleun, am I some kind of ultra-warrior who could wipe the floor with you in a fight?”

She opened her mouth to answer, but I cut her off.

“Alright, bad example. We both know I’m kind of a big deal,” I said, forcing a grin. “But you get my point. I’m not some villain here to ruin everything your people hold sacred. I’m just a dude trying to find a way home. I’m alone, I’m scared, I’m in way over my head… but do you know what I have that the Dulox don’t?”

She looked at me, confused.

“I have an Invader title. And if those Dulox aren’t the textbook definition of invaders, I don’t know who is. It’s just something The System slapped on us without any real meaning.”

She hesitated for a moment, then slowly nodded, the logic finally seeping through. Nobody can resist the argument of, "If you think I’m bad, just look at those guys: they’re way worse."

“You’re right,” she said. “If the Dulox don’t have the title, then who would?”

“Yes!” I said, grinning wide.

“Just a silly word floating above our heads.”

“Exactly, just a bunch of nonsense.” I was getting fired up now as Faleun moved quickly through the stages of grief to anger and acceptance.

“It means nothing, it does nothing!” she shouted, baring her teeth and raising a fist.

“Exactly!” I said, matching her energy, my own fist raised. “Just a useless word they threw at you to mess with your head. Let’s turn it back on them. If they think they can scare us off with some silly title, they’re in for a surprise.”

Faleun’s shoulders straightened, a hint of defiance creeping into her expression. “I won’t let them think they have power over me. Not anymore.”

“Now you’re talking,” I said, grinning. “They’re going to learn that Faleun the Invader isn’t someone they can push around.”

She gave a slow nod, her eyes turning to fix on the distant waves, the sadness finally lifting from her face. We stood there in silence, a quiet resolve settling between us.

And then I couldn’t help myself. “Except for the fifty percent damage increase,” I said, raising an eyebrow.

“The what now?” she asked, blinking at me in confusion.

“Oh, you know, just a little something extra The System-” I started, but before I could finish, a series of bright lights flared to life on the horizon. A moment later, the deep, bassy thuds of explosions rolled over the ocean, echoing across the open water.

“Oh, shit,” I muttered, the excitement draining out of me as a cold spike of fear took its place.

“What is it?” Faleun asked, her eyes locked on the plumes of smoke rising into the sky.

“They’re bombing the Slipscale.”

“We must kill them all!” Faleun roared in my ear as I cranked the controls of my ship, launching us into the air. She wasn’t the sportiest of spacecraft, but after flying the Dulox rust bucket, almost anything felt nimble. Plus, my hands didn’t feel like they’d been shoved into a meat grinder, which was a nice bonus compared to those crabby old controls.

“I wish! But we’re just one ship against a hundred, and that’s just from the one hangar we saw! I’m sure they’ve got a lot more than a hundred patrol ships keeping this planet in check. They’re ready to hit us hard for our elevator stunt.”

“Then what do we do? If we can’t take them all out, shouldn’t we find some way to stop them from killing all the Slipscale?”

“Step one,” I said, gripping the side-stick and settling into a chair that actually fit me, “we kick some ass.”

With that action-movie-worthy line, I slammed the throttle forward, and we tore toward a row of dark shapes on the bright horizon. The Strommäsk Test Vehicle wasn’t designed for high-g combat maneuvers, it was more like a couple of engines strapped to a prototype frame. If it just had the Mark-3 engine, the ship might look sleek and narrow, decent for patrols, but the Strommäsk Engine? It gave the ship quite the, uh, large rear end. The engine was nearly the same length as the cockpit and living quarters combined, sitting high on the frame, above the Mark-3.

In Earth’s atmosphere, I maxed out the Mark-3 just to get us off the ground, and we slowly climbed out of the atmosphere. The Strommäsk hadn’t been able to help then, as it was originally meant for FTL jumps. Now, thanks to The System’s interference, it had lost its jump capabilities but ended up as a well-rounded, powerful engine. And to top it off, my attitude controls, the Reaction Control System, had been upgraded, giving me more precise control. It wasn’t like I suddenly had a highly mobile fighter, especially in the atmosphere, but the enhancements definitely gave us a leg up against the Dulox patrol ships.

I blazed toward the dots that were fast approaching: a bomber with four patrol escorts buzzing around it in formation, its fat belly likely packed with high-power explosives.

Not wanting to lose the element of surprise, I dropped low across the water, biding my time as we closed the distance. Almost at the last second, just as I felt Faleun's claws dig into the back of my chair, I yanked back on the side-stick, rocketing us upward toward the enemy.

We quickly lost airspeed as the relatively large ship struggled against the atmosphere, but I’d timed it right, sitting at about a 70-degree angle with our nose pointed straight at the bomber’s swollen belly. Before we were even fully in the firing arc, I was already holding down the laser trigger, the turret on our hull buzzing angrily. For a moment, when the beam struck the bomber’s undercarriage, it seemed to scatter into a fine mist, refracting in all directions off its armor. I held my grip, knuckles whitening on the side-stick, refusing to let up.

After ten heartbeats, the bomber’s armor began to give, and the beam intensified as it burned deeper, the metal turning pliable under the heat. Just before everything went blinding white, I caught sight of the armor turning red and bubbling, the beam finally punching through.

The explosion lit up the sky, and suddenly, we were in the thick of it. Blinded by the flash and deafened by a chorus of alarms, one of which sounded suspiciously like a gecko scream, I yanked the side-stick and pushed the throttle to its max. The ship lurched into a spinning arc that slammed me back into the seat.

I grunted as the g-forces pulled the blood from my head to my feet, fighting to stay conscious while the ship bucked and twisted in the chaotic air. “I’d better,” I growled, using the muscle-tightening techniques they drill into you at flight school, “have gotten at least a ship level out of that little maneuver.”

I leveled us out, the darkness at the edges of my vision finally easing its grip as we cleared the explosion radius. My breath came in ragged gasps as I steadied myself, then turned to look back at Faleun.

For once, finally, she looked rattled. Even during her little existential crisis on the beach, she’d held it together, but now... One claw was sunk deep into the meat of my pilot seat, and the other clutched a support strut from the inner hull. Her scales seemed to twitch involuntarily, and I could have sworn I saw faint dents where her claws had pierced the aircraft-grade aluminum. Impressive.

“What,” she breathed, her voice tight, “what was that?”

“High speed, high drag, and a whole lot of pew pews,” I said, forcing out a shaky laugh, though my own hands were still trembling from the adrenaline rush.

“Never do that again!” she growled, her eyes locked on me, still not releasing her death grip on the seat and strut.

A sudden, urgent chirping erupted from my console, filling the cockpit with a sharp, staccato warning. Faleun’s eyes went wide, darting across the bewildering display of lights and scrolling data that painted the control panel. “What’s that?” she asked, her voice edged with a mix of confusion and fear.

“Hm,” I said, squinting at the display as I tried to make sense of it. “Looks like one of the Dulox patrols made it out of the blast and-” The cockpit was suddenly filled with the harsh rattle of high-pitched thumps, like a hailstorm striking against a tin roof. “And that would be the high-capacity machine guns they’ve got mounted on their patrol ships. Say what you will about their crappy lasers, but you can’t argue with the effectiveness of kinetic energy of a hundred rounds of twenty-millimeter metal tearing through your hull.”

“What does that even mean?” Faleun asked, a hint of desperation creeping into her tone.

“It means we dogfight, baby,” I said, flashing her a wild grin.

“I am not a child-” she began, but I didn’t let her finish, flipping the Strommäsk Test Vehicle onto its back and wrenching us around to meet our Dulox prey head-on.