Covenant Invasion of Earth Series 2: Catalyst

Tom and Cameron had managed to get into the control room and now had the shipmaster pinned in a corner, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they had the upper-hand, and Tom’s mind was busy counting down the seconds until the explosion that would ripe the ship into millions of tiny little pieces.

            “Where’s your leader’s ship?” Tom snarled as he held his knife to the reptile captain’s throat.

            “With your friends,” the creature smirked, using his left hand to bring up separate camera footage of both Connor and Jack. Jack was lost and wondering through winding purple corridors trying to find a way out of the ship while Connor was in the process of being beaten to a pulp by three big apes.

            “Two minutes,” Tom warned. “Its not fast enough for us to locate Jack and get him off of this pile of metal.”

            “Why would they set it for two minutes?” Cameron questioned.

            “They are looking for something to catalysis the explosion, thus ensuring that it becomes bigger quicker and destroys the ship,” Tom explained.

            “Wait. Why do we have to find Jack?” Cameron quizzed further, realising what Tom meant.

            “Because he is on this ship, and we don’t have time to get back to the location where we caused the carnage that was on the video with him,” Tom elaborated quickly while watching Connor suddenly become purple for a brief second allowing him to deflect the brutes out of the cage and shut the door. Then he suddenly glitched causing Tom to just stare in astonishment as his friend came out of his absorbed material state faster than he ever has before.

Tom quickly turned back to the elite and slit his throat before gesturing for Cameron to follow as they headed to try and locate Jack and get him off the ship before it explodes. Cameron began to move before he suddenly began to feel light headed, causing him to fall to his hands and knees. When he looked up he could see Flavio, although this time he knew it wasn’t real.

            “It was your fault,” the hallucination snarled. “Connor being beaten, Jack being lost and likely to die in a fiery explosion any minute now.”

            “You’re wrong,” Cameron argued in a whisper, his dizziness allowing him to only move a fraction without threat of collapse. “We were all dead, I left because it was the only way to ensure that my power was available to fight…I didn’t want to leave! Jack pushed me into the Banshee causing it to fall, I didn’t have a choice but to run!”

As Cameron argued with his hallucination, Tom sighed and opened a small portal under the boy, which he slowly began to sink as Tom turned and ran towards the position he guessed Jack was likely in by that point, all while the countdown in his head began to count upwards. Come on guys, he thought. Find the dude with a fuel rod. Destroy the engines.

*****

Naomi, Emma and Darren had been franticly searching for something to detonate the engines with for five minutes, which was an extremely messy job considering that they were forced to move through corpses upon corpses of squished, exploded or suffocated aliens in order to locate the weapon. Out of the blue Emma’s watch began playing “All About that Bass”.

            “Really?” Naomi asked. “That of all things is your ringtone…”

            “Not my ringtone, just the sound it makes when I get a message,” Emma smiled sheepishly.

            “Who’s texting you then?” Darren questioned.

            “Dad did, he needs us to find the catalyst but wait for his signal…” Emma explained.

            “Why?” Naomi asked, annoyed that her daughter stopped mid-sentence.

            “Because Jack is alive and on this ship somewhere,” Emma responded. “Dad is looking for him.” Suddenly her text-tone sounded again. “‘Back of the room, under the monkey pile.’ Um…did he just tell us where the one thing we need it without being here?”

            “Yep, and now we have to check the pile of monkey corpses that we all silently refused to check,” Naomi groaned as the three of them walked over to the pile. “Darren, get most of them off will you.”

            “I am not touching them.”

            “You control gravity, lift them into the air,” Emma snapped.

            “Oh. Yeah. Okay,” he decided before concentrating on the creatures and lifting them up one by one by cancelling gravity on one of them before using a wall on the other side of the room to act as a gravitational antenna to attract the deceased creatures that were floating in the air.

Eventually they discovered a yellow, alien rocket launcher in the heart of the pile, although everyone’s hesitance to pick up the blood splattered device gave Tom enough time to get into the room with an unconscious Jack on his back. “Just pick it up and fire it at the two cores and then we can go!” he yelled as he saw the three of them staring uneasily at the device.

            “You pick it up,” Naomi countered weakly.

            “You carry Jack then,” Tom retorted.

Emma decided that it would be quicker and allow her to go home and shower if the cores were quickly destroyed, so she picked up the weapon and pointed it at one of the cores and pulled the trigger. Once the green, blob-like-rocket hit the core, it initiated a series of detonations and explosions that ripped up the pillar that led to it.

Tom opened another portal that Darren and Naomi ran into while Emma slowly turned and aimed the device at the second core before pulling the trigger, effectively destroying the ship before it even hit its target. As the radioactive blob flew, Emma slowed time down enough to allow her to get to and through the portal before the explosion vaporised her and her father.