When they stopped firing so did the Zellhigh. The smell of burnt wood and the screams of the wounded captured the night. An announcement rang throughout the garden. “Put down your weapons and hold your hands above your heads.”
They did as commanded and as the Zellhigh converged on the Triolux team the Captain prayed there was an afterlife. He pushed his stomach out as far as he could and a bomb on his backpack went off. It was a neutron bomb and set to kill anything living in a ten - mile radius. Perhaps thousands of Zellhigh died. Most importantly Rueel was evaporated. The trees died and the plants and any animals in the zone of death stopped where they were. Neutron radiation from the thermonuclear device sent out a low - grade burst. Those on the periphery that were half - damaged suffered the most. The satellites sent the image back to Triolux North and all the watchers knew what happened. The team was compromised and the Captain made the ultimate sacrifice.
Tee was amazed at the bravery of the men and women who signed on to such a dangerous mission. Their patriotism was a source of pride to all. Statues needed to be erected and plaques needed to hang in institutions. This is what the bravest of the brave do. They chose country over self and all this death and destruction is a mounting verdict on the Zellhigh and their zest for violence. They must surrender without any claims. What are the odds for such an outcome? They are a damaged lot and our forgiveness quota is waning.
What is the value of one of our Triolux citizens compared to a thousand Zellhigh? It doesn’t tip the scale. And the Triolux were feeling superior on many fronts. Their plankton crop was at a record high. They had slapped the Zellhigh and gained their attention and they knew they were a blind planet. They were reduced to a floating mass of chaos locked in an orbit around their sun. They were totally unable to see the comings and goings of the other worlds that surrounded them. One of the members of the committee suggested that the Triolux aid the other planets that had fallen before them. “We could help them with an invasion of Zellhigh. A proxy army observed from the safety of our planet.”
Heraclitus said, “The only thing that is constant is change.”
And so the committee convinced themselves that they were aiding in the recovery of the planets that had fallen before them. It was a sanitized approach. They could ferry the Bendobe, the Vaterian and the Gretchnian from their planets to Zellhigh. They could even help with some training and arms supplies. When it was all over and these planets were back on their feet maybe they could repay the favor, perhaps pay a little extra for the plankton. After all Triolux North was a victim of the mad believers also.
As if the stars had aligned when the word was sent to the failing planets that they were being given a chance to regain some of what was lost they leaped at the offer. All three planets had millions ready to meet the call. The massive spaceships that the Triolux North now had would be used as a taxi service shuttling men and women to Zellhigh. The Triolux even volunteered to soften up the Zellhigh in an effort for the others to retake what was lawfully theirs.
Lain held a skeptical glare on Tee at dinner. “How is this improving the lives of all?”
“The lives of all can’t be improved Lain. We’ve chosen to improve the lives of the victims.”
A silence descended and the apartment felt starved for air. It seemed as if the new norm was for victims to create new victims. The inhabitants of Triolux North were pleased to see a distant war on a screen in the comfort of their homes. They were tired of death and destruction. They were pleased with Tee as a leader whose title was not known. He had navigated their return and the light had led him into a wise course. A course where the downtrodden and the beaten could dust themselves off and face their adversary one more time, only this time with some advantages of their own. And so Lain heard their chatter and people told her to tell her husband what a fine job he was doing and keep up the good work.
But she, a victim of every kind of violation a person could be subjected to, did not buy into it. She was ashamed that the man she loved had taken an easy way out. Once she learned the Zellhigh were being manipulated by all kinds of outside forces she saw them as a weak civilization that had physical strength but lacked any sort of inner fortitude. They were shells and when they had been freed of the inner shackle of the insert they were a reasonable and fair - minded people. And now no effort to save those souls for improvement existed. This false narrative that there is no solution is simply not true. And so she felt the whole ordeal was a big lie told to a populace that didn’t want to hear the truth.
Chapter 20
The Zellhigh have faith
Optimism mixed with revenge makes for a drunken soup. The believers were convinced that Rueel was in the Palace of the King at the right - hand side of Adim and therefore able to aid the fight against whatever was coming even better than when he was down here with the dirt.
“All - knowing and time - without - end.”
There was a plan; the one Rueel had left them with: Guide the invaders into shooting galleries, little traps, and take out as many as one can. Seize their ammunition, take their clothes, leave the dead naked and cold. Strike fear into those who dare to come after the believers of Adim. These godless hordes that drop down from the sky will pay a price. The Zellhigh can learn to be self-sustaining if need be. It will take time and that’s alright, they have storage vaults filled with food. They have land undeveloped and oceans not yet exploited. If they went after the land with the same enthusiasm they employed to raid planets they could whip Zellhigh into producing enough for export.
Their time will come again, they felt it. In their bones they had no doubt. And so when the first ships arrived in the dark of the night and the angry mobs stormed down from the gangplanks and marched into the streets with their shiny new laser guns the believers were ready. They fought and retreated at every stage in every town, drawing the naïve into their traps. From high on building tops and overhanging ridges they were met with cross - firing believers who had no qualms with killing. The gas was gone and in a way it made them sharper and more focused. They were defending their land and their families and they knew the territory. And best of all they had a plan and it came down from the heavens and they believed in it.
The Triolux saw the patterns and cautioned the various fighters from the different planets. They were warned to not follow the retreating Zellhigh but to instead seek high ground and find population centers. The Triolux varied their landing spots and avoided routines. After two months of fighting and no sign of the Zellhigh caving and all the various soldiers from the beaten planets suffering devastating losses the Triolux began sending in ground troops to bolster and guide the shiploads of people eager to have a chance at defeating the believers.
Nine officers from Triolux were embedded with a spacecraft full of fighters from Bendobe. They had suffered at the hands of the believers and were itching to even the score. The officers cautioned them to avoid emotions and look at this mission as an objective and do as much damage as they can without being pulled into one of the traps the Zellhigh had laid out for them. It was only after careful planning and not following the resistance they met that they were able to start inflecting heavy casualties but it was often on civilians who were too often children tucked away in places considered safe.
The officers would often come back from Zellhigh damaged by the indiscriminant violence that befell the children. They had no solutions, yet they couldn’t shake the images that plagued them at night. Tee was experiencing a personal crises of not having any indication of a light that once seemed to guide him and offered him solutions. He felt abandoned by the source and Lain suggested he spend some time away from everyone in deep meditation. He thanked her and made arrangements to retire to a mountain retreat.
Tee’s time of opening himself up to any power that might want to communicate with him ended the same way it began. He was no longer able to contact something that had once given him strength and moved him forward. This involuntary loss of a spiritual presence ange
red him. He at first directed his anger at the light. It’s – all - knowing knowledge and subtle messages were maddening. But that anger slowly sank into his bones and he realized he had lost his way and gone off a path once set to bring about peace and improvement. His unfaithful behavior had caused the break and now he was spiritually doomed.
The committee was beginning to turn on Tee. Their officers were returning from a war gone bad and they were undergoing counseling to deal with the horrors they were involved with on Zellhigh. Wasn’t it Tee who suggested we abandon our values and send in others as a proxy for us taking care of things? They were seeing him as the target to blame for their failure and he was an easy public figure.
“My friends, I have lost my way. I have lost contact with a spiritual guide by not following through on a plan to help the Zellhigh improve. I went along with using other souls to deal with the barbarians and it’s given the Zellhigh time to harden their defenses. This has cost lives. We are without a guide. If you want me to be a scapegoat I’ll be that. I certainly deserve blame. I have failed to stay true to a core belief that I once held close and believed in,” he continued.
“I think we must rethink our course. What we’ve tried has failed and we are now locked into a war that doesn’t have an end in sight. We are fighting an enemy that is technically beneath us. But they have a faith that seems to keep their spirits high. And we have lost our morality. I’m wondering about two things: One is asking if they would agree to a truce and the other is do we need to obliterate them?” The room was silent.
One of the younger engineers asked, “Why are our choices so limited? Give up, or destroy them. Shouldn’t our choices include moving them toward improvement?”
Tee said, “They’re animals. They kill people without any qualms. They are heartless.”
“And we’re superior.”
Tee stared at the young idealist and smiled. He was glad to see someone enthusiastic for finding a path that was for the best. And then Alex in a soft message to the committee, in their heads, told them one of the delivery ships from Vaterian had been captured. The crew and the ship were Triolux and a thousand fighters from Vaterian were being held with no word on their fate. There was also a small group of trainers from Triolux embedded with the fighters to help guide them in their desire for a land grab as well as revenge killings and plunder.
Tee looked at the face of the young idealist and he saw it plummet from the heights of hope to the valley of despair. Within hours the whole of Triolux North was in a state of animated suspense. These were their people and the ship held many technological secrets. They started to think they had fallen into a trap, they had underestimated their enemy and now they were paying the price.
It is better by far and safer for the aggressor to overestimate his enemy. When the opposite occurs it causes loss of life. And now images from the ships communication center began to arrive. They were horrible, real time atrocities being played out for the horror of the Triolux North. Their people were being tortured and as that occurrence unfolded a Zellhigh spokesperson in a monotone voice explained that this is what happens when you invade the believers against the will of Adim.
“Be assured the nonbelievers will pay the price tenfold for their trespassing. You have deprived us of our communications and weather satellites. You have confined us to our own hemisphere with the idea that we are so weakened that we will collapse. But it is you, the heathen nonbelieving and godless, that will suffer the most. See your captain as he squirms with the loss of his feet and hands. We have been humane and stopped the bleeding. We have used him as the example and removed his eyes because he was blind and did not know it but now he does. We have placed him in this vat of mild acid to have his skin feel what our hearts feel when you kill our children and our women.
“We have your ship, your crew, your technology and they will show us how everything works and how it was built and how to maintain it. Our techniques will give them no choice but to comply. In the art of extraction we excel, thanks be to Adim, ‘All - knowing and time - without - end share with us your power.’”
The plan to knock Zellhigh out of its orbit was quickly drawn up and even though it would kill millions, many of whom were slaves from Triolux, Bendobe, Vaterian and Gretchnian the suffering brought by these maniacs would end. Tee said, “These rudderless killers and their mad schemes to punish us have given us no choice.” In his mind he knew he had severed his connection with a spiritual force. He was marching his people into the realm of revenge and abandoning a higher path. His nationalism and pride, his ego and his fear were driving him and as he spoke he knew he had the masses on his side. “We must purge the universe of this cancer and our heroes will have monuments and statues and poems carved into stone and into our hearts. Part of them will die but their spirit will live forever.”
Alex was called upon to help create the most destructive bomb of all time. So strong and perfectly calculated would the detonation be that it would force the planet off its axis and out of its rotation. Slammed like the impact of a great meteor and knocked out of synch with its sun, drifting away from that solar source of heat the planet would soon be swamped by darkness and plunged into a state of deep vacuum and extremely cold. All life would come to a standstill and the only thing that would escape is the story of their history: A lost tribe practiced at the art of plunder pushed a peaceful planet too far. Nothing is as dangerous as a kind people ravaged. No populace is as ruthless as a planet forced to witness a tortured member for the enjoyment of revenge. ‘All - knowing and time – without - end share with us your power’ will disappear into the black vacuum of space.
And as the engineers and the scientists and the mathematicians began to move from theory to practice an alarm rang out in all of Triolux North as the one ship the Zellhigh captured was barreling toward them with knowledge of where their defenses were set up and how they worked. A general scramble ran across the planet as men abandoned the islands set up for defense since they couldn’t stand the power of their own ships used against them.
Also having seen how the Zellhigh ships had the weakness of a controlled group of lasers on one spot the Triolux had designed a system to dissipate the heat from such concentration. They had created a ship that was a floating battalion of weapons and it was now going to be used against the very persons who created it. The other six ships were being used as transport vehicles for the three planets the Zellhigh had destroyed. They were a minimum of a day away. The invaders knew about Wind Mountain. They knew where the defenses were and they had a ship capable of doing massive damage and destroying as much as one - tenth of the planet. The plan was not to seek shelter in place but to flee into the less populated areas and hope the ship would drain its fuel and firepower without finding huddled masses camped in forests and deserts and places with harsh environments.
As Tee and Lain and Lacy scrambled into their Airlite Tee thought about the warehouses filled with plankton. They were brimming with a bumper crop. Is there any time that is the right time to be invaded? Like illness it is always inconvenient. Lain had tears in her eyes and the air was thick with the people fleeing all the buildings and schools and hospitals. Everyone had their lasers locked on full power and each driver aimed their little transports with determination toward the caves.
They were going to be bombed into the dark ages just like Bedobe, Vaterian and Gretchnian. Their one saving grace was the remaining ships and an order went out like the final war cry in the dying embers of a slumping planet. “Destroy Zellhigh.” That one declaration brought comfort as the approaching obliteration grew ever closer. Complimentary behavior, the old eye – for – an - eye was alive and well even after all the history man had collected and analyzed. Various gods had come and gone. Some stayed for a few thousand years: most were nothing more than a footnote. Tee and Lain and Lacy forced their way into a crowded cave and found enough space to spread a soft blanket and sit.
In the semi darkness they saw the worried faces of thei
r colleagues and neighbors. How had this happened? Was it religion or the greed of man? Children whimpered, unable to fend off the smell of fear wafting from the huddled crowd. Then it happened. A light very bright and steady burned from the sky. It evaporated all it touched. Buildings that rose to the clouds were reduced to rubble heaps. Islands collapsed and water flooded the tunnels all the way into the mainland. Electrical grids were swamped and entire cities were reduced to ashes.
Noxious and dangerous gas clouds formed in smoke and dust and spread from the cities into the woods and the valleys and they so polluted the air that thousands died from it. Tee and his group were up high on the side of a mountain and they only caught small dissipated drafts of the particle - laced air. It was hardest on the children. Mothers covered their faces with cloth and rocked them with detached eyes that could no longer focus in the present. Lain and Tee had lacy wedged in between them. They protected her as best they could. Then the great ship moved on and the men prepared for a ground fight. It mustn’t be anywhere near the women and the children.
They moved out and saw their city burning and the rubble that was once their homes. The temperature - controlled cubicles were now dust. The memories associated with certain landmarks would fade since the land was so scarred and decimated there were no more landmarks. They covered their faces and shielded their eyes. And they moved in unison. There were tens of thousands of men moving toward the polluted ruins of their city hoping to be able to at least have a chance to defeat some of their enemy. But each knew. They had not heard the great doors swing down and lock and they also didn’t hear the noise of hundreds of feet descending to the ground.
Ths Sacking of Triolux North Page 14