Something to Read While I'm Formatting - Alien Invasion from Another 365 Days of Flash Fiction
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365 pieces of flash, one author forward and some author notes, later, and it's over 120,000 words long, and traveling the spectrum of science fiction to fantasy to a few variations in between.
The piece I started the day formatting is this one:
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Alien Invasion (II)
Joseph wanted the world. He’d seen it from the liner as it docked at the orbital and fallen in love with it straight away.
“How much?” he demanded from its representatives, but they’d shaken their heads.
“Our home is not for sale,” they told him. “It is the only one we’ve got.”
“But I want to own it,” Joseph protested, but they’d stood firm.
“No.”
And he’d thrown a fit, storming from the room like the spoilt brat he was—and then calling in the fleet. What he could not buy, he took.
The planet’s inhabitants came for him in the night, moving invisibly through the orbital’s metal corridors and into his luxury suite. They’d floated him out in a laundry hamper, undisturbed by the guards. Cleaners...in every sense of the word.
The fleet continued its attack even after they discovered he was missing, following the course filed by the ship that had left late that night. It was a freighter, but where else could the boy be? It wasn’t like he could go dirtside with a war raging.
“Is this what you want?” the aliens asked, showing Joseph the aftermath of his devastation. “Is this what you desired when you first saw our world?”
“I don’t care,” the boy told them. “I just want to win.”
“And when you do, you’ll leave this world behind and go looking for another, as you have done with the last few worlds that told you no.”
“They are mine, now,” the boy answered with some satisfaction.
“And nothing like they were when you first saw them.”
He shrugged, trying to shake the memories of those planets from his head.
“They call you the Destroyer of Worlds,” the aliens informed him, “and we will not let you take another.”
“As if you could stop me,” he sneered, and was not comforted when one smiled.
Above them, the first of his shock troops collapsed to the deck, and the medics came running. Hours later, not a single trooper remained on the planet. Two days after that, the fleet commander requested an audience with those on world.
“My men are dying,” she said, and the aliens regarded her with as much indifference as they could muster.
“And?”
“The closest the medics can ascertain is that they need to stay within Gieremma’s atmosphere.”
The aliens dipped their head. “This is true.”
The commander looked haunted, her eyes straying to a monitor whose contents they could not see. “My...employer is unavailable for consultation.”
The aliens regarded her with an unblinking stare, their silence forcing her to continue.
“And technically, I am in breach of my contract if I cease the attack.”
“Let us consider this,” the aliens said, and ended the call.
They turned to the boy.
“Do you want to see what happens to a human when they leave our world, having been inside it’s atmosphere for over four hours?”
“I can’t see why that would interest me,” Joseph told them, not admitting that he very much wanted to see, since those conditions applied to him.
They showed him anyway, leaving him in his quarters and playing the footage from a dozen rooms in the medical facilities above until he begged them to come back.
“Yes?” they asked.
“Will that happen to me?”
“In a day, you will find out for yourself. We have been cycling tank air through your quarters for the last three hours.”
Two days later, the aliens called back, with Joseph seated between them.
The boy looked pale and wan.
“Call off the attack,” he ordered. “The kaveeti and I have come to an agreement.”
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And, now, I'll get back to it. Have a great day out there, wherever and whenever in the world you happen to be.
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