by P P Corcoran
Ramirez and T moved up to the cart together. Ramirez took his seat quickly, but as T undulated up the platform, he paused at the top and looked out over the group of humans who had welcomed them.
I would like to thank you all for such an agreeable welcome. You have made me feel immediately at home, and my gratitude is without bounds. He lowered his head once, mimicking a human bow, and the crowed erupted into cheers and applause. He took his place, and as the cart pulled away, Ramirez turned to his friend. That went well.
Agreed, T replied. They are a friendly people. Noisy, but friendly. He added.
Ramirez’s laughter flowed through the airport as they rolled past one gawking face after another.
#
They stood together in a side passage behind the amphitheater stage, waiting for Chancellor Prassad to finish his speech to the thirty-thousand people seated beneath blue skies and a warm, yellow sun.
Will you be able to speak to them all? he asked.
I believe so, T replied. On my world, the range of our communication went beyond the confines of the city. In fact, I can hear the minds of more human minds than I thought possible. It’s actually a little disconcerting.
Ramirez felt a sharp pain at the base of his skull, but he realized the pain wasn’t his. He turned to his friend, a concerned look upon his face.
Are you alright? he asked suddenly worried for his friend.
Ambassador T’s body twitched slightly, almost like a shiver across his entire body.
I believe I am fine. We experienced a similar sensation back on my world when your landing team first arrived. I suspect it is just an adjustment to being exposed to so many human minds in one place. T’s thoughts were steady, but there was an underlying strain that Ramirez could clearly sense.
If you are in distress, Ramires said, we can postpone this. You don’t need to give a speech. I have no doubt they will understand.
No, T said emphatically. This is important to your people, and I can endure a bit of discomfort for the good of interplanetary relations.
Ramirez felt T’s determination and a strong sense of good will.
If you’re sure, he said.
I am, T replied.
A thunder of cheering and applause reverberated throughout the entire amphitheater, echoing against the walls around them.
As I said, T gave a mental version of a chuckle. Noisy.
Ramirez laughed again as T’s body vibrated once again and another sharp pain hit Ramirez’s mind.
Pay it no heed, T said. I will endeavor to make sure they do not feel the sensation.
A young woman with long, dark hair and a flowing gown appeared at the top of the steps a short distance away, smiling at them both.
“They’re ready for you, Ambassador,” she said. “If you will both follow me, I’ll take you onto the stage.”
Let us proceed, T said, and he shuffled after her.
Ramirez followed, suddenly very worried for his friend, but T’s insistence left him with no recourse other than to see it through.
As the curtain was pulled aside, they both walked onto a wide stage. Bright sunlight shined down from a virtually cloudless sky. Chancellor Prassad stood before a podium, facing them both. He immediately began clapping as Ambassador came into view, and when the crowd spotted him, they, too applauded.
T shuffled across the stage, and as he did, the entire audience rose out of their seats. Many started cheering and whistling as he neared the center of the stage, and as they did, Ramirez felt another pain lance through his mind. He glanced at T, but there was no telltale shudder across his body. He hoped that he would be the only one to feel it. He opened his mind, doing his best to lend T all the mental fortitude he possessed.
If you need to channel it, please use me. I will support you in any way I can, Ramirez said.
Thank you, my friend. There was a strain to his thoughts. I may just do that.... So many minds...
I’m here for you, Ramirez added, opening himself even further.
They made their way to the center of the stage, and T stopped in the middle, right beside Chancellor Prassad. As they came to a halt, the crowd stopped applauding and seated themselves. Ramirez looked out to a sea of faces. A stiff wind blew through the amphitheater causing a dozen flags lining the back of the amphitheater to flutter at attention. The wind blew straight towards the starport beyond, only a mile away. As he watched several planetary and orbital aircraft rose into the air, taking people not only across the globe but to Luna and even Mars on their regular runs.
Ambassador T nodded once to Prassad.
Thank you, again, Chancellor Prassad, T said.
A collective gasp ran through the entire audience, and Ramirez could tell that even the people in the back row reacted to their first telepathic communication.
Pain hit Ramirez hard, pressing from the base of his skull and lancing over the top. He tried not to wince at the intensity of it. He opened himself further, willing his mind to become the conduit for T’s pain.
I would first like to thank every human here for such a wonderful greeting, Ambassador T said. I could never have imagined that so many entities on a distant world could be as welcoming to one of my kind.
Pain hit Ramirez again, and this time he saw T’s body shudder.
From the first moment we encountered my friend Ramirez and the crew of the Patrocles, we sensed nothing but goodwill. Indeed, their kindness and willingness to learn from us as we learned about them was one of the reasons I was willing to make such a great journey across the stars to meet you.
Pain.
Ramirez thought his head was coming apart, and as he glanced at T, he saw a slow vibration running along his skin. As he looked out at the audience, he saw a number of people in the front rows wincing.
I ... T paused, as if he were collecting his thoughts, but Ramirez knew his friend was having difficulty. I would like to extend our warmest ... pain ... greetings to each and every ... PAIN ... one of you.
PAIN.
Ramirez dropped to his knees in agony, and Chancellor Prassad staggered forward, grasping at the podium to support himself. Several in the front row cried out, grasping their heads.
I ... T started, and then he flopped forward, his legs crumpling beneath him. I ... seem to be ....
Another wave of intense pain washed through Ramirez’s brain.
Ramirez? T cried on the private mode. I think ... dying....
Many in the front row screamed as Ambassador T’s body shuddered violently. His skin color rapidly shifted from the pale green to a deepening hue that in seconds turned black.
Ramirez crawled over to his friend.
T! he cried.
Dying.... T said. Dying.
T’s head disintegrated in a cloud of black dust, and as it did, the pain immediately subsided in Ramirez’s skull. He gasped as it a wave of relief washed through him, and then he watched in horror as Ambassador T’s entire body disintegrated into a large cloud of black dust that was quickly carried by the breeze into the audience and onto the wind.
Many in the audience screamed, and a number of them rose from their seats, ready to bolt at the sight of what had happened.
All Ramirez could do was kneel in front of what had been his friend and weep.
“Everyone!” Prassad’s voice, carried over tumult of the frightened audience by the PA system, boomed throughout the entire amphitheater. “Everyone, please!” He tapped the microphone several times. “Stay calm!”
The audience turned frightened eyes towards the Chancellor.
“What we have seen here today is a terrible tragedy, but we must not panic.”
The clamor in the audience subsided slowly.
“I do not know what has happened to here, and I grieve for the loss of such a brave individual as Ambassador T. He traveled so far, and he brought with him the hope and enthusiasm of two peoples. We must all honor his sacrifice and take it into our hearts.”
Ramirez felt hands lifting h
im from the stage.
“As Chancellor of the GU, I promise you we will do everything in our power to discover what has happened. I must ask you all to make your way to the exits and go home. The Council will provide you any and all information available as we investigate what has happened here today. I would also ask that you keep Mr. Ramirez here in your thoughts and prayers. He has suffered a greater loss than any of us, for I know that the Ambassador was a dear friend of his. His loss is ten-fold greater than any of our own, and we must do what we can to support him as he navigates the days and months ahead.”
The crowd rose slowly, and all of them applauded as Ramirez was gently led off the stage.
He never did recover.
#
It took nine months for the spores, borne of Ambassador T’s disintegrating body, to gestate into the microbial versions of itself that would wipe out the human race. Within days of the gestation, a host’s body began suffered first from organ and brain failure, and it didn’t take long for human doctors to realize what was eating them all from the inside out.
But by then it was too late.
The spores, carried upon the breeze that day, had infected the entire audience. It had infected the travelers at the space port. It had infected every person they came into contact with, wherever they went.
Within twenty-four months, the inhabitants of two worlds, one moon, a half-dozen space stations, and the mining colonies in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, were devoid of human life, and their bodies were the first things consumed by the rapidly growing descendants of Ambassador T.
The last human alive died alone, afraid, and screaming in a cargo bay in the Asteroid belt around Mars. She became the last human meal in the Sol system for what had long-been the most dominant life form in the Milky Way.
#
Part 5 - Investigation
3,000 Earth Orbits Later – Sol 3
“I wonder what happened to them?” Sub-Adjunct Koytail said, his voice filled with awe. He was thick-bodied, like most of his species, with pale blue mottled skin and a crest of red spines running over his flat head, each tip glowing faintly within his environmental suit. The oxygen and nitrogen-rich atmosphere was close to that of his home world, but they his team had to concern itself with possible contamination and infection.
The exo-team commander and botanist by training, stared up at a monolithic structure made white stone. Its surface was darkened by patches of green moss and streaks of gray that had accumulated over a long period of time. The structure, a tall, narrow, four-sided pillar with a pointed top, rose above an ancient city full of what had once been white buildings decorated with thick columns. Contrasted against a pale blue sky, it reminded her of a history marker back home.
“Disease, maybe?” Tertiary-Adjunct Vess suggested from where he stood atop a parked vehicle across the street. It had a flat top and seats built for an occupant twice the size of a sugan. He’d suggested that the indigenous species of the alien world would have been bipedal and, based upon the controls of the vehicle, possessed with only two arms. “A global plague?”
“I don’t know....” Koytail replied. “Maybe?” She felt a slight cranial pang coming on. “And you’re sure the scans haven’t picked up any fauna other than the insects and these green life forms?”
She glanced over to a set of stone steps where one of them chewed on a patch of moss in the shade. It was small, maybe half the length of her arm, with a folded in face, a cylindrical snout full of bony white dentia, and reminded her of a microbial life form found in some of the more extreme places of her homeworld.
“Hello, my little green friend,” she said. “Can you tell me what happened here?”
She winced again as a mild pain shot up into her cranium.
- THE END -
About Quincy J. Allen
Nationally bestselling author Quincy J. Allen is a cross-genre author with numerous short story publications in multiple anthologies, collections, and magazines. His first short story collection "Out Through the Attic," came out in 2014 from 7DS Books. He made his first short story pro-sale in 2014 with "Jimmy Krinklepot and the White Rebels of Hayberry," included in WordFire's "A Fantastic Holiday Season: The Gift of Stories," and his most recent short story sale, "Sons of the Father," appears in Larry Correia's "Monster Hunter: Files" from Baen, published in October of 2017.
"Chemical Burn," his first novel and the first volume of the sci-fi detective noir series Endgame, was a finalist in RMFW's Colorado Gold Contest in 2011. His latest installment of the Blood War Chronicles, "Blood Curse," is book 2 in an epic fantasy series starting in the Old West and featuring a clockwork gunslinger. His first media tie-in novel, "Shadow of Ruin," set in the Aradio brothers' Colt the Outlander universe, is expected out in early February of 2018.
He is the publisher and editor of Penny Dread Tales, a short story collection in its fifth volume that has become a labor of love. He also runs RuneWright, LLC, a small marketing and book design business out of his home in Charlotte, North Carolina, and hopes to one day be a full-time writer in Baen's stable of fantastic authors.
Discovery
by PP Corcoran
The churning brilliant blue cloud which surrounded the first stable wormhole known to exist held the crew of the Discovery fixated with its ever moving, intermingling clouds. More than one person had remarked at how similar it was to one of Earth’s own turbulent hurricanes, the clouds madly racing this way and that but always, at its very heart, the completely still eye.
This hurricane, however, was caused by no earthly phenomenon. The Singularity was the result of an ultra-secret government project with the express purpose to back engineer alien technology recovered from a ship which crash landed in the Arizona desert in 1947.
It had taken the best brains the United States military could get together in one room the better part of a century to reproduce a working prototype. Though a prototype of what none could say for certain because nobody had the faintest idea what would happen when the device was switched on. The scientists best bet was that the device was a type of inertia canceling engine. However, for all they knew it could very well have been a rather complex garbage disposal.
With a caution which many at the time had though unduly over reactive the prototype was, in the darkest secrecy, loaded aboard a resupply ship headed for the fledgling Martian colonies and, when the ship had reached what was deemed a safe distance, this distance being several million miles, the crew donned space suits, opened the wide cargo bay doors and removed the device from its storage container. Attaching a small chemical motor to the device it was allowed to float free of the ship of its own accord before the engine ignited slowing the devices forward velocity and allowing the supply ship to accelerated away. On a command from Mission Control the power supply to the device was activated and everyone waited with bated breath to see if anything would happen or if the past 100 years had been a colossal waste of time. They were not disappointed. What happened next was best explained as breath-taking. With a flash as brilliant as a star going supernova the alien device functioned and in the blink of an eye a stable wormhole appeared in the solar system.
With the secret out of the bag the government had been forced to reveal the whole truth. For the better part of a century they had not only known that aliens existed, but they had been running a secret program to reverse engineer and replicate the alien technology. The conspiracy theorists jumped with joy and pointed fingers at those who had dismissed them for so long while governments around the world expressed outrage that they had been deceived for so long. Scientists and engineers demanded the release of all the previously classified material.
Under such massive pressure the government caved and then came the second great revelation. The device that had generated the singularly was only the beginning, the government had already taken the next step and constructed its own hybrid spacecraft based on the pieces recovered from the crash in 1947 and the most advanced human technolog
y. And it was ready to fly.
This second revelation only served to fuel the demand, for international oversight and reluctantly the government handed over control to a multi-national space agency who would operate under the auspice of the United Nations however, the only people currently trained to fly the Discovery were a US military crew, this would not do cried the UN, but this crew had been years in the training responded the US. Years of detailed research had gone into tearing the Ralak technology apart figuring out how it ticked. Doctors had poured over the remains of the four dead Ralak’s who had crewed the original crashed ship. Linguists had taken decades to build up working knowledge of the alien’s language both written and spoken through long tortuous hours of frustrating conversations with the damaged ships Artificial Intelligence. Conversations that had left more questions than answers. According to the AI the ship had been a one of a kind probe. Designed specifically to travel through the wormhole in search of a new home for the Ralak whose home planet faced some sort of impending cataclysm. What form that cataclysm took was not clear, that part of the data banks had been wiped clean, presumably as a result of the crash. The only way to find out was to travel through the wormhole and that was precisely what Colonel Diane Kielty and her crew had spent the past five years, day in day out, training to do.
Compromise was now the word of the day. Bolt an extra couple of seats into the already cramped cabin and there you had it. Room for a couple of observers.
Kielty surreptitiously ran her damp palms along the leather arms of her command chair. The Singularity cast its bluish tinged light all across the cabin, the light played on the already blue jump suits of her crew making them apparently fade into the background of the cabin, fleeting glimpses of pale skin the only thing alluding to their presence.
However, the two brilliant white jumpsuits of the international observers, Colonel of Cosmonauts Joseph Molanokov representing the Russian Federation and Dr Mi Lee So, China’s leading astrophysicist and, in Kielty’s opinion, far more approachable than the gruff Molanokov. The observer’s jumpsuits had taken on a vibrant electric look to them which only served to highlight their... Kielty’s search for a suitable word eluded her so she settled on the first descriptor that popped into her head... wrongness she thought with a wry smile.