The Soul Within

By Mae McKinnon

"Alien Invasion a complete hoax"

states President from underground bunker. Cont. Page. 9

 

That was several years ago. Now, huge, alien, harvesters are gobbling up everything in their path; plants, rocks, animals ... humans. Only places like Black Hawk Base, a — not so secret — military facility buried deep under the mountains, are relatively safe. That's where I live, just another of the many civilians the base can't really support.

That changed after I met Ike. Calculating and clever, Ike expected me to become a pilot. That's a lot to demand of someone who's not even thirteen yet. But how do you argue with a 14 ton alien hybrid fighter jet with a mind of its own?

 

Answer is: You don't!

It looked like I was going to have to help Ike save the world whether I wanted to or not!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dragonquill Publishing
• Release date: Oct 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9789918955862

Mae McKinnon

Mae McKinnon is one of those people who can't stop writing (or, more accurately, thinking about writing because, let's be honest, there's never enough time) any more than they can stop breathing who they characters probably see as a pair of convenient hads to type up their stories.  The worlds thus created are filled with fantastical settings, creatures, people and events (and sarcam, lots of sarcasm). A good place to stop by if you like:  Sarcasm (we covered this one already, didn't we?) Found Family, Adventures, Friendships, DRAGONS, Neurodivergent MCs, Snarky characters, hope, outcasts, stunning vistas, humerous footnotes ... and did we mention DRAGONS? 

Book preview

The Soul Within

A DragonQuill book

Copyright © 2019 by Mae McKinnon

The right of Mae McKinnon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the prior permission of the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to actual persons or events, either living or dead, is purely coincidental or used in a historical context.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

SOS Logo designed by Nightpark

Cover art by Elizabeth Rose Best

Cover design by Marlene Ockersse

First Printed in France, 2019

ISBN: 978-9918-9558-6-2

DragonQuill Publishing

www.dragonsandquill.com

Chapter 1

Nearly ten years ago THEM came! Aliens from another world.

They’d come in three ships. Three, huge, ships. Each as different as the next.

Did they come in peace? No. No, they did not.

Now, Earth’s cities lay in ruins while the world itself was being continuously stripped of what valuable resources it contained: Rare earths: Metals: Animals: People.

Only a few remained to fight back.  

Scattered around the globe, what had once been secret military installations have become the last safe havens for what remained of humanity.

One such place was Black Hawk Base.

It might have been built under a mountain. But it still felt like a hole in the ground, to me. A hole built out of steel and metal and concrete.

That’s where I lived.

It wasn’t where I planned to die.

  

Chapter 2

The ground of the hangar was concreted over, but if you looked up, no one had bothered with most of the ceiling. Natural stone, the craggy features of rock and broken stalactites were crisscrossed by long, black, wires and their pinpoint lights. Pipes were bolted in, hanging from metal frames. At regular intervals, large, oblong, utility lamps dangled precariously on wires — those that weren’t broken that was.

Down below, trucks screeched, people jabbered and forklifts trudged along stoically, lifting their heavy burdens of armaments and weapons into position.

Everywhere people moved. Some with purpose, like the scavenger patrol pilots. Some leisurely. Others, dressed in frazzled robes that might have once been white, clutched clipboards to their chest and huddled together in groups.  

Occasionally everything would shudder and rock-dust would fall from above. It was our luck that was all that was falling these days. Whatever was causing it was happening far away. The scrags didn’t seem to know we were here ... yet. I figured it was only a matter of time. That wasn’t a happy thought.

My life was full of those. It’s about the only thing it was full of. Watching what was happening beneath me, I figured it could be worse. It could be full of work. Or scrags.

To be honest, on some days I’m not sure which would actually be worse.

No one here ever moved in a straight line, for the hangar floor was crammed with vehicles of every sort. From up here, Level 5 always looked like so much organised chaos. Or just plain old chaos. What did I know? I wasn’t military. I wasn’t even supposed to be here.

Having snuck in through a seldom used — if not outright forgotten — door, down an enclosed stairwell, and out onto a metal walkway bolted into the concrete wall, a pair of curious brown eyes peeked out from amongst the shadows.

Yup. That’s me. From the brown eyes to the frazzled hair and a patched outfit that’s really too big. Not much call for small sizes around here, so you have to make do with what you can find. But it’s me, stains and all.

Apparently, this is also supposed to mean there’s plenty of material for me to grow into according to my dad. Personally, I think it just makes all of us who aren’t adults look like moving laundry baskets.

You did your best to make it presentable. The muddy colours didn’t exactly leave a lot of room for creativity. Not unless you could, how shall I put this, lay your hands on some things that you shouldn’t?

But stealing clothes wasn’t really my kind of thing. No future in that. Not here. And sneaking down here was by far the most interesting thing that had happened to me in the last week. Month. No, year.

Ok, I said sneaked, but what I had really been doing was looking for a place to hide, so I’d been barrelling through the corridors a few Levels up.

There are lots of places to get lost or cornered in. Lots of doors that are kept locked, too, and after a few turns, one corridor looks much the same as any other — especially if what you’re really concentrating on is what’s coming up behind you, yelling and bellowing at the top of their lungs, and not the peeled numbers painted on the walls telling you where you are.

Or should be telling you where you were, if you understood what they meant, knew the map like the back of your hand and, in this case, wasn’t being chased by a cleaver wielding Mess Sergeant.  

You see, civilians don’t usually get let down beyond the first few Levels, not unless they got, like, really important jobs to do. It’s not like we’re really supposed to be here in the first place, Black Hawk Base being a military installation and all.

And Sergeant Smiley and me, well, we didn’t exactly see eye to eye at the best of times. And I don’t say that just because he’s a burly ox of a man who’s probably never cracked a smile in his life and I barely even reach his midsection.

In this case, there’d been a misunderstanding over some bread rolls — he seemed to have taken exception to me reaching in and grabbing an extra when he wasn’t looking — and I had no interest in letting him catch me.

I knew what’d happen if I was.

So I’d run.

Away from the main canteen. Through the crowds of hunched people, random arguments, and into the world of endless doors and hallways. Honestly, there’re too many of them. The only good thing is that they’re all numbered — so if you can learn the system, you don’t get lost — very often.

This time I had gotten lost. Utterly and completely lost. So lost, in fact, that I ended up being the only person around. You’d think that’d be a good thing. But the only thing it meant was that every step I took, Smiley would know it was be me and would home in on the sound like an oversized, very angry, ox-pigeon.

The small robovacuums keep the floor clean, so he wouldn’t be able to tell where I’d run by catching my footprints in the dust. I’m not stupid. I knew that would have been a bad idea. You don’t go leaving traces behind unless you wanted people even less in possession of a sense of humour than Smiley to come asking you some seriously inconvenient questions.

But I hadn’t known where I’d ended up. Not then.

Each Level is really, really big and I doubt even the bigwigs know it all. There hadn’t been any people back there though — not even MPs guarding the stairwells to the other Levels. Maybe that was because there weren’t any or they were behind one of the many locked doors.

No matter how I’d run, the doors had remained locked. Handles were rattled and knobs twisted, but the result remained the same.

By then I could hear Smiley coming up behind me. He’d been catching up. He’d gone down the wrong way at first, which had been great, but what head start I’d gotten was wearing thin. And my legs ached.

I’d hit buttons, panels — anything I could think of really. He’d been taking things far too seriously for just one bread roll, but then food was scarce. Plus, I swear, he’d had it out for me since the first moment we met.

I wish I could remember that far back. But the memories of my early childhood are a bit vague.

Turning around a corner at full speed, I’d slammed into a wall. Blast it. This corridor was only a few doors long and I’d been running too fast to stop. Great. More bruises. Tomorrow was going to hurt, I’d thought.

Smiley had been close by then. I had heard his running footsteps echoing in the empty hallway. Yanking at the nearest handle, for the first time in quite a while, bile was rising in my throat.

That door, too, was locked. What had I expected?

Trying to get my breathing under control, at this point my legs had been shaking. I’d leant my back against the door opposite, beginning to sink down onto the floor.

At the time, lots of thoughts had been scrambling through my mind. This was it then? At this point, I’d have happily faced down a scrag rather than Smiley. They couldn’t possibly be as scary. Plus, they were far away and he was right here. Almost right here.

Then, there’d been a small click behind me and I’d tumbled backwards. The door shut behind me, nearly squashing my left foot.

For a moment, I’d heard Smiley stomping back and forth outside, cursing loudly. Stiff as a dead herring, I hadn’t dared to move. If the door opened now, all he needed to do to find me was to turn around. But after some slamming on the walls, on the door now in front of me, the noises had drifted away slowly.

Swallowing hard, I’d looked about, finding myself in a barren room, devoid of anything but four walls, a floor and a ceiling. There wasn’t much light to see by, a sickly emergency lighting panel the only thing to guide me.

At first I thought I’d ended up in some sort of broom closet. An empty one.

There were lots of empty storage rooms, the war had been going on for so long, so I hadn’t thought that much more about it at the time.  

That was until there came a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. An experience I had never felt before. My ears popped.

That’s when I’d realized the floor was moving.

The room hadn’t been even close to being a broom closet. It was an elevator. And an express elevator at that.

Eventually, it had stopped and spit me out here.

Since that day I’ve had a chance to examine it better and there’s not a button or panel in the whole thing. From what I can tell, it only moves between two places; Level 2 — that is, one level below the main entry to the base — and here, Level 5; the hangar.

Or so I figured. Since it didn’t have any buttons to press, it could be an elevator to the moon for all I knew; only going there on a Thursday afternoon, if you walked in backwards wearing a striped shirt and carrying a bundle of onions.

Why anyone would want to build a hangar full of heavy machines and planes on a middle floor of any structure is beyond me, but I’m sure there’s some reason. There’s bound to be, right? The thing is, I don’t think anyone had ever been meant to use it quite like this.

The Hangar that was, not the elevator. From as far as I could tell, no one uses that. No one but me.

If anything, this lofty peak had, in the past week, become my favourite hiding spot. It had a great view and a low level of likelihood I’d be discovered.

The thing was, there’s lots to see here and it wasn’t like anyone’s got a reason to look up. The walkway leading away from the elevator itself had broken. No more than a few meters away from where the elevator opens up, this mass of metal and wires turned into nothing but a twisted hoard and a big, jagged, gaping hole, at least ten meters across, separating it from the rest.

You’d think it’d have been repaired. But there’s much more important things to fix around here and anyway, the main entries to the hangar are several, much bigger, elevators and doorways at the far end. Those are the type that goes ding when they open.

This one, the one I was using, doesn’t make a sound outside the slight swoosh as the doors part.

Anyway, I’m sure the stairwells down here work just fine too. No one would spend time and material on something when there are other things that need them more.

You fixed things the best you could yourself no matter who you were. Down here, there’s often not much of an option.

Almost everything that actually works goes into maintaining and supporting what fighting forces we still have, the Resistance. That’s what they say, anyway.

They can’t be that many. In the whole week I’d been sneaking down here, I haven’t seen a single sortie. I hear that those that do go out don’t always come back.

Between the military forces and the white coats, there’s not much left here for us civilians aside from a safe place to stay.

If you want to call one of the last bastions of humanity, safe. Personally, I think it’s just a matter of time. If the scrags don’t get us, starvation will — or fuel shortage. It’s not like we can get out and order up some more.

The base itself had all the power it needed. It comes from way down below. If you wonder why I know that, I do know how to read maps, and I’ve found a few detailed ones rummaging around places everyone else probably thinks I shouldn’t have been in in the first place.

There was some deep humming coming up from the floor if you go down to Level 8, so I figured that whatever powers this place is probably somewhere below that.

But all that’s boring and this, this is far better entertainment. Not a lot of that around these days either. It’s not like people stopped to pack board games and consoles when, a few streets away, their town was being levelled into a smoking ruin. There’s movies, sure... but I like this better.

Plus, I’ve seen all the movies we’ve got. Several times over. Apparently, fighting aliens is much easier in movies. They never win.

Also, this way, I didn’t have to fight Tommy. T. and his friends for the remote. This little set-up is all mine.

Scattered across the hangar floor, looking down, I can see, stretching out before me, a vast, hangar like structure. Busy people and vehicles and machines are moving around on the floor. Most of them are carts being pulled by people or they’re little electric robos.

Parked, there’s everything from bulky transporters, to row upon row of fighter jets and many others.

None of them are moving.

Some have a lot of activity going on around them. Others, none at all. One of the biggest planes I’d ever seen, visible even when parked far off at the other end, has half a wing missing.

That’s probably been stripped for parts. You have to do that a lot. It’s not like we can order new ones from a factory somewhere. Food, clothes, spare parts. Unless the scavenger parties are lucky, around here, the word new just meant having turned one thing into another.

I’ve never dared find a way down ... yet. Out, out I have no desire to go. I like being alive, thanks.

Nothing down there is uniform. Heck, nothing in the whole base is uniform — except the actual structure. Which was kind of here before most of us were, so that makes sense, I guess.

I don’t know how they keep track of ranks and stuff like that, not with so many people here: from every branch of the armed forces you could imagine, and some that you could not. They do shout a lot though.

The only thing that really stood out were the ground vehicles that belonged to the base, which were all painted yellow. You could probably take someone’s eyes out with that colour, it was so jarring, even from underneath several layers of grime.

Also, it smelled.

That was uniform. A mix of grime and fuel and the sharp tangent you got around working blowtorches and burning rubber. Nothing like it to make you wish you hadn’t eaten breakfast, I thought, only to remember that I hadn’t, in fact, eaten breakfast.

You only got breakfast if you were working.

Maybe I should be working? Well, working more than I was, that is.

For starters, you gotta be pretty trusted before anyone’s going to let you fiddle with any of the equipment here. I know a lot looks pretty harmless, but pick a lock, walk into the wrong lab, and you might walk out again blue as the sky, or not walk out at all, on account of having been turned into a puddle.

And no one’s going to trust me doing any of that. Or maybe they do trust me to do exactly that. I’m not sure which.

Secondly, I’m twelve. It’s kind of easy to lose track of time down here, but everyone still makes a big deal out of ages. Maybe, elsewhere, I’d already be an upstanding citizen at this age, what do I know?

Here, not so much.  

That might not be such a big problem if I was like, I don’t know, a computer whizz or could calculate descent rations? Ratios? That thing they did with rockets, anyway, in my sleep.

I’m not. And I can’t. I was, what, two? When THEM came. My dad’s said we came here not long after.

I don’t know how he knew about this place. I mean, it’s not like they had put a big sign outside saying secret base. But I’m here now, and I do what I can to stay alive.

From up here in my little nest, the noise drifts over you like a blanket of cacophony, occasionally punctured by a piercing scream as someone nearby dropped a screwdriver into an engine or a two ton modifier broke free from their bindings and landed on someone’s foot.

‘Come on,’ I whispered. ‘This show’s getting old. Come on! Show me something good!’

I DIDN’T HAVE TO WAIT long as people and machines began to gather around the fighters parked almost right beneath my hiding spot. I stayed as quiet as I could, trying to listen over the other sounds of the hangar. Thankfully, those were far away and, almost directly below me, there is now a flurry of activity.

‘These A.E.S. readings can’t possibly be correct, can they?’ one of the younger white-coats exclaimed, her eyes darting between the readings on her screen and the clipboard in her hands.

The machines around them were growing increasingly distressed, judging by how the lights kept flickering on and off.

‘There’s no such thing as negative compatibility,’ her partner assured her, not even looking up from the dials he was adjusting. ‘Recalibrate them and run them again.’

‘No change, Professor?’

‘Very well then.’ The one they called Professor nodded solemnly, scratching off yet another name from the list in his hands.

Around him, a small group of white-coats began to unhook the various cables and wires that were attached to the strange looking suit. The guy in it must have been toasty, because even his hair was dripping with sweat.

They waved him away, and another, identically outfitted, guy stepped up on the raised white dais.

‘I don’t understand. The data cores aren’t corrupted and all the diagnostics on the suit are functioning properly...’

‘Could it be an error in the decoding mechanism?’

‘I don’t think so. If, after the next candidate, it still doesn’t function, we’ll reconfigure the parameters of the A.E.S. and replace the TC. Now, get the ... HOLY COW!’

The white-coat jumped back as the nearest machines erupted in a shower of electric sparks and smoke. Several techs rushed forwards with extinguishers, drowning the hissing and crackling devices underneath a shower of white snow.

A secondary plume of smoke, smaller this time, came from the back of the fighter they were working beside, where another, larger, set of cables were attached.

I could see it, like a tiny puff, before it was gone. It was on the far end to where all the white coats were. It didn’t look like any of them had noticed it.

‘Blast it,’ the white-coat fumed. ‘The whole control interface circuit-board just fried, just like that.’

‘Like those are easy to find,’ one of the assistants sighed.

‘Alright. Get in touch with supplies and see if they can knock us up a replacement. These were custom-made back in the day, you know.’

‘Don’t I?’ the white-coat replied. ‘Like this project needed another set-back. Be a good fellow and borrow the diagnostic machine from the other station, we’ve still got several candidates to process today.’

Yup, things had started with a bang alright, but if this was as interesting as my day was going to be, I might as well go somewhere and watch paint dry. That is, if we’d had any paint. If our paint does anything, it’s peeling off.

Rolling over on my back, I watched the ceiling of the hangar I’m in. It’s quite close, where I am ... but it’s even higher a little further out, with streamers hanging from it, crisscrossed with metal bars and pipes of varying thickness.

Looking at it, and knowing how the hangar itself is brimming with vehicles of all sorts, it’s hard to imagine there’s a whole other set of Levels below us.

None with this much open space though — that’s one of the reasons I liked coming here.

At this point, someone, or something, screamed. Not the piercing yell of the construction worker from before, but high and guttural.

I crept forward just a little bit.

The scream went on and on. Like the last cry of a mortally wounded orc in a videogame, only this churned and wallowed, ending in a sickening squelch.

Shuddering, I peeked forward to look. What I imagined couldn’t possibly be worse than what it really was — though for a moment I stiffened, the terrible idea that one of the scrags had found us echoing in my mind.

The scream of pain was followed by a lot of yelling and swearing as swarms of white-coats burst into view. But no gunfire, so we were probably safe.

Flat on my stomach, I tried to make out what was going on almost directly below me.

‘Open it up. Open it up NOW!’ one of the white coats yelled.

‘It’s not working, Professor,’ came the high pitched wail from the white-coat closest to the contraption. He was pulling at several of the heavy looking tubes leading into an open-looking cockpit.

‘The locks are completely shut off. I can’t stop it!’

‘Shut it down. Shut it ALL DOWN!’ the first white-coat yelled again.

Around them, there was a flurry of activity and, now that I looked closely, some very strange looking machinery. Even stranger than usual.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the details before. But now I realized that those details were ... a bit odd.

Anyway, what were they on about?