Foreigners: Flame of the Galaxy

By Jay Zhou

These are tenebrous, ominous days. The armies, Lifeseekers and Scavengers have learned that their mother planetEarth, is now the battlefield of a galactic war. Two superior species seek domination through technological and physical powers. Earth is suffering in a sea of flames, and only the true heroes can prevent the ultimate demise. With their limited resources and fearsome enemies, can the humans defend their own planet against invaders, or shall the entire planet fall into the hands of invaders from outer space?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543451979

Jay Zhou

Jay Zhou is an eighth grader at The Bement School in Deerfield, Massachusetts. He was born on July 2002 in Shanghai, China but since his sixth grade year has studied in the United States. Fluent in three languages, this is his first book, and as a result of this grand adventure he seeks to become a professional writer. In the meantime, he is also a pianist, an oboist, an ultimate frisbee player, and a cross-country runner. He loves to read, a passion that heavily influences his writing. Jay began working on Foreigners at the beginning of seventh grade, his first step into the writer's journey.

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Copyright © 2017 by Jay Zhou.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2017914326

ISBN:                        Hardcover                   978-1-5434-5195-5

                                   Softcover                     978-1-5434-5196-2

                                   eBook                          978-1-5434-5197-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 10/02/2017

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Jamsin I

Caesar I

Douglas I

Jamsin II

Vular I

Douglas II

Karthus I

Jamsin III

Ezreal I

Douglas III

Jamsin IV

Karthus II

Lucifer I

Vular II

Karthus III

Ezreal II

Lucifer II

Douglas IV

Jamsin V

Karthus IV

Ezreal IV

Lucifer IV

Karthus V

Vular III

Lucifer IV

Ezreal IV

Jamsin VI

Karthus VI

Appendix

Here I wish to acknowledge all my friends and classmates who made my Bement life an unforgettable experience:

Ashley Brennan

Ava Clarke

Kortny Coleman

Xiaoyan Katie Dong

Lohi Ehimiaghe

Yutian Tim Fan

Conner Flannery

Adrien Fountain

Clarese Gardiner

Claudio Giavalisco

Emily Godden

Giles Gordon

Difei Philips He

Camryn Howe

Kelly Howe

Liam Johnson

Lourdes Klem

Kelci Lewandowski

Jae Yoon Jamie Lim

Tiffany Lin

Kate Loughlin

Gregorio Martinez

Seth McKenzie

Sebin Park

Claire Patton

Madeline Poole

Zachary Poulin

Dahlia Riddington

Peter Sanford

Jason Shi

Justin Shi

Adam Sussbauer

Rosey Young

Shunyi Jess Zheng

Tianqi Angel Zhou

Here I wish to acknowledge my teachers at The Bement School whose teaching had a significant impact on the completion of this book:

Mr. David Belcher

Mr. Dan Bensen

Mr. Ross Feitlinger

Mr. Jeremy Galvagni

Mr. Daniel Hales

Mr. Frank Henry

Mrs. Shelley Jackson

Ms. Amie Keddy

Ms. Emily Lent

Mr. Frank Massey

Ms. Silvia Mugnani

Ms. Sandra Perot

Ms. Martha Price

Mr. James Snedeker

Ms. Anna Wetherby

Mr. Blake Wilson (Bdubs)

Mr. Chris Wilson

I would also like to thank my teachers at YK Pao in Shanghai who inspired my interest in English:

Ms.Victoria Adamovich

Ms.Michelle Ip

Mr.Peter Rotundo

Additionally I wish to thank my extracurricular instructors whose lessons in language enhanced my writing skill:

Mr. Edward Kim

Ms. Ashley Lu

Ms. Jacqueline Wang

Mr. Qingnan Zeng

Special thanks as well to Mrs. Kim Loughlin, who discovered my writing talent when admitting me to The Bement School and who encouraged me to pursue my passion.

A special thank you to Mr. Joe Elias, who encouraged me to finish my book.

Special thanks additionally to Mr. Leif Riddington, my 9th grade English teacher, who taught me how to write in my own voice and who wrote the foreword.

Most of all, my deepest gratitude to my parents who brought me across the ocean to study abroad; I appreciate everything they have done for me. My sincere affection for my mother who guided me to write out a plot line when I encountered writer’s block and was about to give up. In addition, she also encouraged me to publish this book with her support in every aspect.

FOREWORD

by Leif Riddington, English Department Chair at The Bement School,

A T ONE POINT in time, our world was changing, when geopolitical forces struggled for planetary dominion. As rising temperatures reorganized the atmosphere into new hierarchies of vapor, the great deserts bloomed across the world map into even vaster sand regions. Glaciers evaporated, coasts shrank, ecosystems wheezed, and the once diverse cultures of the earth’s most advanced denizens dissolved into a single, global identity. Super cities, cloaked in swaths of smog, became the New Center. Times were uncertain. It was 2017.

Through that swirling haze has emerged the muscular, narrative voice of author Yiheng Zhou, a deep thinking, far-seeing teenage sophisticate in whom imagination and mercurial visions of the future have amalgamated and pulsed to life in his first novel. Zhou, like his many thousand teenage peers being educated abroad, left the arid, uncompromising landscape of Chinese education at an early age and joined the diaspora of eastern contemporaries being raised intellectually in western institutions. Amid this unprecedented mass movement of youth spreading across continents and oceans, Zhou has announced his precocious imagination to the world, with clarion distinction.

It would be easy to say that Zhou writes about the future, but more accurate to say that he writes from the future, his own imagination expatriated from the present. The themes within Foreigners draw autobiographically on a Confucian world-view influenced by the free-market ideals on which Jay was also raised: In real life he identifies culturally as Shanghainese first and foremost, with an emphasis on his urban roots, and then Chinese. Brought up in the center of that expanding metropolis and relocated to rural western Massachusetts, Zhou’s worlds, like those in his novel are physically, culturally, and linguistically disparate, the entirety of this work having been composed in his second language. This tome has yet to be translated into Mandarin so that, like him, the novel exists outside of both Zhou’s native tongue and country. The result is an originality of diction, evidenced by ignis bolts and kyriotetes, and the melding of real with imaginary so characteristic of the science-fiction genre.

And while he is fluent in three languages, Zhou resists the urge to give full allegiance to any single one of these identities battling for supremacy within, a feat he masterfully accomplishes in the plot as well. Outwardly Jay is just another Chinese student of my ninth grade English class, yet one would never know from his sanguine, outgoing nature of the internal struggles with which he and his foreign-born peers must struggle. While these internal clashes are invisible to the outside world, the artist in Zhou has made an exquisite story of the wars waged within. Rather than yielding to any one claim on who he is, though, Zhou has done what only a writer can do when life deals in such contradiction: He has preserved a balance of unique selves carefully and artfully, transubstantiating them into a science fiction novel whose protagonists and antagonists fight for interplanetary dominion, a perfect metaphor of the hyphenated self monumentalized in Foreigners. The world herein is epic and dazzling in both scope and originality, and is where answers, like allegiances, won’t be easily won.

JAMSIN I

T HE GODS LEFT us no mercy. September 9, 2036, was a night no one would forget. A huge vortical hole like a white whirlpool tore the starless evening sky open. It appeared harmless at first. Fools thought it was a rare scene and stampeded out to the vacant streets. Moments later, blazing meteors stormed out from the whirlpool and overwhelmed the sky, replacing the darkness with a dazzling white blanket. Onlookers praised this miracle of nature—until they realized the meteors were crashing to Earth instead of flying across the sky

Then came a catastrophe. When each meteor landed, it detonated with a blast of energy that melted everything within ten yards. Suddenly, hideous beasts struggled out from the craters. Each one of them had bulgy muscles and almost two stories tall. Two muscular back legs allowed it to run fast. Each Barauny’s body was always leaning forward, as though it were prepared for any kind of attack. A pair of crimson wings protruded, with monstrous bone spurs stretching out from each creature’s back. Long claws in place of fingers could cut through alloyed metal as if they were chopping carrots. Worst of all, the creatures spit fire. Scorching flames blazed all over the world, killing nearly half of all humankind. The other half? We were dying.

Countries and nations existed no more. There were only two groups of people left: armies fighting valorously on the battlefront and civilians, who formed a group called Lifeseekers. As Lifeseekers, we offered protection to each other and undertook the responsibility of continuing human civilization. We also attacked Baraunys to help the armies alleviate disaster. Every member of the Lifeseekers did whatever he or she could for the community. Chemists devoted themselves to creating poisons that could harm Baraunys. Weapons specialists and engineers tried to develop new types of weapon that could cause deadly damage to Baraunys. Electricians were building dynamos and antennae to reconstruct the Internet. I had lived my whole life as a biologist, so I was assigned to collect samples of Baraunys’ genes from their corpses.

Jamsin! Are you acting like a philosopher and sinking in the sea of your imagination again? Lem shouted as he dragged me out of my thought. I had been assigned five guards and an ancient mudding truck in case I came across any Baraunys that had wandered off from their group and gotten lost in the dense forest.

We have been traveling for two days and seen no signs of battle. Isn’t that queer? I said.

Our base was always moving to keep everyone secluded. Recently, we’d settled in southern Seattle, in the thick red alders. Although our truck was sluggish because it carried fuel and provisions, we were scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles in a couple of hours. However, we’d discovered no signs of battle and no corpses so far. We saw only hollow craters everywhere. I was curious about what Earth would look like if viewed from a satellite map. Unfortunately, all of the satellites also had been destroyed.

Based on reports from scouts that most battles were fought in downtown Los Angeles, none of the conflict has spread this far north yet, Captain Royce replied solemnly. We will be arriving in a few hours. Best for you to take a nap now.

I did what he bid. I closed my eyes, and instantly, my wife’s amaranthine eyes appeared. This had always soothed me in my darkest times, but now it greatly saddened me, because she’d died on Meteor Night. I drifted into a miserable sleep, carrying tears in my eyes.

***

I woke in a sudden panic. The sensor device was beeping frenetically, flickering with red dots. People were grabbing their weapons, and the truck accelerated suddenly.

Baraunys? I bellowed over the rumble of the engine.

What else could it be? There aren’t supposed to be this many. Just look behind us! Dac, the vanguard, replied manically as he went back to loading his shotgun.

I looked back and thought I would surely be with my wife soon. Thousands of Baraunys were chasing us, and some of them would definitely outrun our damn truck. They were hissing, prepared to let loose fire bolts. Our barrage didn’t halt them for even a bit.

One Barauny reached the truck and managed to grab Lem’s arm. Captain Royce shot the Barauny right between its artichoke-colored eyes, which coruscated with hatred and savagery. The claw left a grievous wound after the Barauny was rebounded by the recoil. Lem dropped his rifle and collapsed with agony. Without his barrage support, another Barauny vaulted over the tailgate and breathed fire. Lem and another guard melted instantly. Some of their beige lipids leaked from their burning corpses, which caught on fire again. Burning flesh smelled no different from grilled mutton, and the scent actually made my mouth water. Dac leaped over the side panel and successfully dodged the blazing fire, but then other Baraunys overwhelmed him before he crashed to the ground. Captain Royce aimed for one Barauny, but its fire bolt fully engulfed him before he could pull the trigger. It was anguishing to hear a brave man like Captain Royce scream in agony.

I found myself lucky that the fire breathing ended after Captain Royce’s death. The Baraunys trudged toward me, but instead of killing me, they studied me for a second. They soon knocked me down, and my temple banged against the edge of a tracking device. The last things I saw before fainting were the red dots on the tracking device.

CAESAR I

T HIS PLAN IS a farce, General Dekipsa said.

General Apaleo stepped forward. Maybe it is, but we have to retreat. Humans need oxygen to survive, just as we need argon to live. It has never been a problem in Pandaemonium, but guess what the amount of argon in Earth’s atmosphere is. Less than one percent. I agree. Fighting increases the motions of our body, which makes us consume more argon. Many of us will die because of a lack of argon. Less than half of us survived on Meteor Night. Some were grievously wounded in the explosion, and some were killed instantly by the spatial crossing distortion, but most were smashed in the water and drowned.

General Dekipsa protested. Are you a buffoon or a lackwit? Our soldiers are demoralized from continuous retreating, and supplies are in shortage. We have to fight. And my mace is blunt without blood nourishing it.

Save your might, Sir Unicellular, said General Mettle in ridicule. If your mace is blunt, sharpen it with your claw. We need to retreat until Pandaemonium sends us reinforcements or we can find another way to sustain life without breathing argon.

Do you wish to get us all slaughtered by humans before that? General Dekipsa demanded, unyielding.

General Apaleo spoke with an irritated tone. If ignorance is bliss, you are clearly overjoyed.

Enough of this! Commander Vular slammed his claw on the table, scanning everyone in the room. General Caesar, you are very quiet today. What do you think of this plan?

I considered it and spoke. Commander, General Mettle and General Apaleo are absolutely right. If we retreat and wait patiently until Pandaemonium sends reinforcements, we will definitely win this battle. Timing is key, and meaningless battles should not be fought. In addition, fighting exhausts argon rapidly. We should retreat.

General Dekipsa glared at me with fury. He hissed and reached for his mace, which was covered with crimson paint the color of blood and shaped like a thunderbolt. It was gilded on the handle, but part of the gold was battered.

General Apaleo was faster. He had his knives ready even before General Dekipsa could tilt his mace toward me. Two matching pairs of short swords made for quick thrusting. They could make one bleed to death before he or she realized the pain and the wound. Made of Pandaemonium steel, a mysterious alloy of immemorial meteors’ remnants and Baraunys’ infant claws mixed with multiple potions and some sorcery, it had become unfathomably strong and deadly.

Apaleo was holding one blade upright, aiming it at Dekipsa’s hideous face, which was twisted by anger. Another blade was pointing downward, ready to slit his throat. General Mettle’s long spear shimmered against Dekipsa’s groin. The onyx spearpoint seemed to absorb the light around it; the room dimmed with its presence. General Mettle, who was leading the Bane Troops, had done a marvelous job on his own weapon.

I let the energy flow through my veins, from my abdomen to my claw, until my palm burst with iridescent flame. It was gelid, but no one should have underestimated it. Once I awakened my flame, the freeze burned fiercer than all flames combined. The most lethal part was the flame-absorbed energy, either from the dead or the living. It would grow and grow, and when I could control it no more, the flame absorbed all my energy and left a spiritless corpse behind. The phenomenon also had a pretty name: the bewitched lotus.

General Dekipsa might have been the best fighter among all other generals, but he had no chance when the three of us struck at once. Dekipsa vaulted over the oak table and raised his mace high; then he slammed down until a humongous ivory sword crashed heavily on the table, splintering it into pieces and piercing the marble floor. General Dekipsa stopped clumsily in midair to avoid being beheaded and landed on the debris.

A brawl in the commander’s room? Do you take me for a peacekeeper? Commander Mettle roared. Dekipsa, trying to start up a fight one more time and I will send you back to Pandaemonium! You hear me? Now, be gone! All of you!

We left the room one by one. I lowered my head to avoid the doorframe but still hit my head with such force that the wooden frame cracked.

Humans build their houses so tiny. This room is about the size of a privy. I gasped in pain and rubbed my temple gently to soothe the sting.

Which implies that they are wimpy and that we can stamp through their siege without being scratched—if not for the argon problem. Apaleo paused for a moment. Why, just provoke Sir Unicellular, and he will slaughter everyone.

I am General Dekipsa and a Barauny, not Sir Unicellular, General Dekipsa replied, as if we were fools.

I never said you are Sir Unicellular, but you just admitted it, Apaleo said mockingly. Mettle and I guffawed uncontrollably. Apaleo tried holding a poker face but finally joined the laughter. We left Dekipsa gritting his teeth and waving his mace furiously in the field.

Now he truly looks like a dimwit, said General Mettle. I wish Commander could send him back or, even simpler, kill him.

Not Commander Vular. He excels at balancing different kinds of people. We could deny everything about Dekipsa but not his fighting, audacity, and steady nerves. He barely feels pain. We need that sort of thing in battle. You are called Mettle, but Dekipsa clearly showed more mettle than you ever have in your whole life, I said.

Oh, now you’re judging me, when you are fooling around with the bewitched lotus? My bane can quench your fire with a slight touch. Mettle reached into his haversack, looking for potions to challenge.

Enough, you two. Dekipsa is annoying and short-tempered for sure. Someday he may murder us just because we opposed his battle plans too much, said Apaleo solemnly. They seldom saw him that way; he always wore a sly smile and spoke with mockery.

He would never dare to kill us. The First Law punishes Baraunys who harm their own people, I said. The punishment is being slowly scorched by the bewitched lotus, if I recall correctly.

What if his anger possesses him? We need to consider the worst situation.

Then we have to defend ourselves, suggested General Mettle. Which means—

Kill him before he kills us, Apaleo finished.

Are you mad? This is treachery you’re speaking of. If anyone heard that and reported it to Commander, we would taste the bewitched lotus. I promise you it would not be pleasant. I looked around to see if