The Arwen Book two: Manifest Destiny

by Timothy P. Callahan

  Radiation, heat, and gravity traveled through Wormhole space and affected objects on the other side. Could he use that to help him thaw the planet?

  He looked up at the sun again. It was dim and cold now, but it was still a sun and up close it was a furnace of unbelievable heat and radiation.

  He had a ship with wormhole bullets. He had the experience from years of experiments. He had an idea and the audacity of it made him smile. It could work. He thought and walked toward the shuttle.

  ******

  Karla sat next to Hans on the floor. She had her hand on his back and was stroking him as if he were a pet. Captain Cook sat in a chair and looked down at the two with her elbows on her knees. Behind her were four guards, each one with a powerful rifle ready for any aggressive action from the Handler.

  Hans tapped his back feet on the ground gently producing a clicking sound. Karla nodded and tapped her nails on the ground in reply. She looked at the Captain, “He said hello and asked if the armed men are necessary.”

  “Tell him yes, security is important.”

  She tapped on the ground with her nails again and made several clicking noises with her mouth. Ann had only demonstrated the clicking noise, she never mentioned the tapping on the ground. The Handler replied and Karla said, “He understands.”

  “So, let’s get down to business then. What do you want from us?”

  Karla tapped on the ground and the Handler answered. “We want to talk peace. We don’t want to fight you anymore.”

  “Why not? You’re very good at war. You’ve exterminated how many races?”

  “That was not us,” Karla replied as a puff of emotion exited the Handler. “The emotion he is feeling is anger. He apologizes, he is not angry at you, but at his race.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Captain Cook replied. “It’s been my experience that as long as the results are favorable for the winners they don’t care about the losers.”

  She translated that to the Handler who answered quickly, “It’s true. Those who oppose the policy don’t protest enough. The truth is most of us simply want to live out our lives.”

  “It looks like we do have something in common. But, I’m not convinced.” She paused and let Karla translate. Before the Handler could reply she continued, “What is your connection with the Alien Cabal?”

  Karla shot her a look and didn’t translate. “The who?”

  “The Alien Cabal. The group of aliens who go around finding remnants from the races you’ve destroyed.”

  Karla slowly translated that question as if she wasn’t exactly sure how to propose it. When she was done the Handlers seemed to freeze and his antenna’s stopped twitching. There was another puff of emotion and some tapping. Karla translated, “the emotion is fear. He asked how you knew there was a connection between them. That was supposed to be a secret.”

  “We know,” Captain Cook replied, there was no need to explain about the nanobots or the computer virus.

  After Karla translated Hans replied. “He said his group contacted them not too long after they came across your race. His group realized this was a great opportunity. They were aware of the Cabal but had never contacted them. His group had never had the chance to warn another race of an attack, never had the chance to help them defend themselves. They contacted the Cabal and asked them to help your race prepare.”

  “If you wanted to help why did you infect the Arwen and other ships with a virus? Why did you tell our ships to destroy themselves?”

  Once again Hans stopped to think of an answer. His reply was covered with another, strong scent. “He said he has no idea what you’re talking about. They didn’t infect your ship with a virus. The only thing they did was help to capture your shuttle to bring you here. He said the cabal told them they had asked the Arwen to join you as well.”

  “That’s a lie.” Captain Cook replied standing from her chair. “I’m not going to talk if you’re going to lie to me. We have proof that you and the Cabal infected our ships and told the Arwen to destroy Regal and to enter the wormhole.”

  “It wasn’t us!” Karla yelled. She didn’t even wait for the Handler to say anything. “We couldn’t do that. We don’t know why you think it was us, but it wasn’t. We only want to help you.”

  “Then tell me what I want to know,” Captain Cook replied sternly. “Why did you infect our ships?”

  “We didn’t.”

  It wasn’t that she didn’t believe him, she did, she just couldn’t believe that the Alien Cabal would have infected her ships by themselves. The small group of surviving aliens had helped Earth in more ways than she knew. They gave them technology that could help them win the war. To find out they could have send a virus to her ship seemed unlikely yet all the evidence pointed to them. “Are you suggesting that the Cabal could have done this without your help?”

  “They must have,” Hans replied through Karla. “I think we need a show of good faith.”

  Captain Cook raised her eyebrow. “Go on.”

  Hans’s spoke and Karla hesitated to translate. She tapped on the ground urgently, as if giving the Handler her opinion. He replied with a loud thump on the ground, startling Captain Cook and Karla who simply nodded and said. “He would like to take you to the home world. He wants to show you our home planet as a way to show trust.”

  “We’ve been looking for your home world for five years,” Captain Cook replied trying to sound detached.

  “You’ve been looking in the wrong place,” Hans said. “I’ll show you exactly where the home world is.”

  “What do the others think about this?” Captain Cook asked, her mind racing to catch up with the conversation. Knowing where their home world was would be too good to pass up. They could launch attacks on the planet, force the Handlers to sit down and talk or risk losing it all. Unless their home world wasn’t as important to them as Earth is to her. Earth was the center of the Corps worlds, a place where billions lived. However, even if they destroyed Earth humans would still go on. There were hundreds of settled worlds, small niches where human beings lived. How could the home world of a race which lived on hundreds of Dyson spheres be anything more than symbolic?

  “Those that are not with us, the ones that want to destroy all living beings, will not be happy, in fact, it will probably start a war with them.”

  “Civil war?”

  “Yes, but we are outnumbered trillions to one, it will be a short fight unless we ally ourselves with you.” Karla looked up from the Handler and said, “You need to understand their philosophy. They don’t want to destroy life anymore. They want to learn how to live with other races. The other Handlers can look ahead billions of years when the universe ends and believes they need to be the last race around. We believe we’ll never survive that way, that we’ll eventually meet a race that will overpower and destroy us. Only learning how to get along with other races will help with that. We should work with other races to deal with any other hostel force. We want to have friends and allies when the universe ends.”

  “That’s what we want too,” Captain Cook replied. She folded her arms and took a deep breath. “You do know this isn’t an information exchange. I’m not going to tell you where Earth is.”

  “We understand that,” Karla replied. “We need to get going though. It won’t take long for our enemies to find us.”

  “Fine, let’s get going. Talk to the navigator and tell him where were need to go then you go back into the brig until we get there.”

  Karla nodded. “That’s agreeable.”

  Captain Cook walked out and was met by Juliet. “Too good an opportunity to miss, huh?” She asked.

  “It is. I don’t trust him though so I’ll want to be on full alert and take all the precautions, including having a bullet in the chamber ready to go off.”

  Juliet knew what that meant, self-destruction by Strangelet, something she’s seen more over the past few months than she would have liked. “I’ll get all that ready. What do you thin
k we’ll find when we get to their home world?”

  “No idea,” Captain Cook replied. “Hopefully something we can use to help end this war.”

  ******

  “You want to do what?” Captain Bellows asked.

  Professor Ricter, getting tired of explaining it to him, did nothing to hide his frustration. “I want to place a wormhole in front of the sun and another wormhole near the planet. The heat from the sun will go through the wormhole and melt the ice on the planet, exposing the core. Once the Wormhole is exposed I want to send it into the sun, thereby ending this war once and for all.”

  “I got that,” He said. “But, how will this work?”

  “Come on Captain, even you should be able to understand this. Heat, radiation, gravity, anything from one end of the wormhole will travel through to the other end of the wormhole affecting anything exposed on that end. If we can’t bring the planet closer to the sun we need to bring the sun closer to the planet.” He leaned in to the Captain and said in a slow voice, “We have enough wormhole bullets to do what I need, the only thing we need to keep the wormhole open enough is material. The particles the sun ejects should be enough to keep that wormhole open but we need to figure out how to keep the one around the planet open.”

  “Well, we can always hook up the Particle accelerator and use that to produce the materials needed the keep the wormholes open. Shouldn’t take more than a day to get things up and running. We can fire a bullet, then charge up the accelerator which will allow us to throw as much material at the wormhole as we need. It’s simple, actually.”

  Professor Ricter smiled. “Yes, yes, let’s do that! Let’s go, Captain, we have a lot of work to do.”

  Chapter fifty- two

  The Handler’s home world lay one light-year from the Arwen. It was close enough that she could arrive at the planet after only a short trip through wormhole space.

  What the Captain saw on her monitor frightened and amazed her. The planet was obscured by millions of ships that were parked in orbit. The logistics of such an operation would dwarf anything that the Corps had ever done. There was a constant stream of ships flowing from several dozen wormhole openings, some arriving, other leaving the system. An assault on this world, even with all the ships they had, would be a slaughter. Was this what the Handler wanted to show her? How helpless they would be if they attacked?

  “Captain,” Juliet said. “We’ve done a scan of the surrounding area and, um, you need to see what we found.”

  She sent the results to the Captain’s screen. It was a simple image of a small start cluster, maybe one hundred or so stars. She looked at it carefully and as she did more details were reviled. The cluster had a lot more stars, maybe even a few thousand but most of them had the shell of a Dyson Sphere around them. Thousands of them from this one cluster alone. She looked at other images the Arwen had scanned and each one showed more and more stars encased in Dyson Spheres. This section of the galaxy was littered with them. She felt about as hopeless as she had ever felt. They outnumbered them by so many the number was staggering.

  “Captain,” Juliet said, “there’s a Beta Wormhole opening near us.”

  “Keep us at red alert, get ready for anything.” Captain Cook hoped it wouldn’t come down to a battle, she hoped that a flood of black slabs didn’t pour out of the wormhole and she hoped she would live to see another day.

  From the wormhole came a ship. It was large, about twice the size of the Arwen. Circular with a large hole in the center it reminded the Captain of a very large and powerful doughnut. Gun emplacements dotted the surface and the Captain was sure if she scanned close enough she’d see missile ports as well. The Captain knew this ship and she knew it well. It was the Cabal ship, the one that had taken Juliet and the Professor back to Earth. The one where hundreds of aliens, most the last of their kinds, lived and worked. She wasn’t surprised the Alien Cabal was here. “Communication, hail them.”

  “They’ve hailed us first,” her communication office replied.

  “Route the message to me.” Captain Cook said and looked at one of her screen. The face of an alien, it was flat with two black dots for eyes, looked back at her. Its mouth hardly moved when it spoke and its standard was choppy and accented. “Captain Cook. Thank you for coming.”

  “We’re not exactly here by our free will.”

  “Yes, we are sorry, we had to get you here and we didn’t think you’d come if we asked. Please, forgive me.”

  “We’ll let our ambassador’s deal with that. Why did you go through all this trouble to bring the Arwen to the Handler’s home world?”

  “We want you to destroy it, obliterate the Handler threat once and for all.”

  Captain Cook tried not to let the shock show on her face. “We can’t do that. It wouldn’t make any difference, destroying the home world will only anger them and besides, what good will that do? There are hundreds if not thousands of Dyson Spheres in this section of the galaxy alone.”

  “You don’t understand,” He said, his eyes changing color from dark black to a sort of gray.

  “Do speak for the entire Cabal?”

  “Yes, I am the one they chose to interact with you. The Professor and I had a good friendship back on Earth and they believe I understand human behavior better than most.”

  “Then why have you betrayed us?” Captain Cook asked. This was it, this was her trump card. The evidence was clear and it was time to confront the leader with what she knew. “Why did you infect our ship with a computer virus? Why did you order the Arwen to destroy Regal and why did you send clones of me to my ship?”

  The alien actually seemed to be surprised. His eyes, the only indicator of emotion, went from gray to a pearl white. It was disturbing to watch but the Captain never broke eye contact with her counterpart. “How did you know?”

  “We destroyed the nanobots on that disk you gave us and examined them. They match the ones you gave Juliet and Professor Ricter.”

  “It’s a shame your government didn’t listen to us when they had the chance. We needed to give them a better reason to attack and destroy the planet other than they were at war with them. We told them where to go, asked them to destroy it, asked them to bring the fight to the Handler’s home world but they refused.”

  “You made it seem that the Handler’s figured out how infect our ships computers. But destroying a few corps ships wasn’t enough. You needed to destroy Regal to show how much of a threat the new virus could be. You told them where Regal was.” The facts quickly built in Captain Cook’s mind. “You told them where my fleet would be. You should have known we’d never attack a home world this well-defended.”

  “That is not why your corps didn’t attack,” he replied. “The depth of human greed surprised us all.”

  Juliet waved her arms to get the Captains attention. “Captain, we have another Beta Wormhole opening.”

  Captain Cook muted the alien; his last statement hung in the air like a veiled threat, and looked at another screen. A Handler’s ship came through. It was a black slab, much larger than the ones that attack. Captain Cook noticed similar ships in orbit around the Handler’s home world. “That’s the ship Karla and Han came from.” Juliet said.

  Captain Cook unmuted her communication. “What about them? Did you tell them you were going to destroy their home planet?”

  The Alien looked off screen and nodded. “We no longer need them.” He said, “Destroy the ship.”

  Captain Cook sat up quickly in her chair and canceled the communication link. “Weapon, lock onto any missile that the Cabal fires, Helm get between us and the ship, protect it at all costs.”

  The Arwen lurched forward as its massive engines fired at full power. On the screen Captain Cook saw several dozen projectiles fired from the Cabal ship. Her gunners quickly aimed at them and destroy them just as fast as they could. None got close to the slab which was still stationary in space.

  “Juliet, get Karla and Hans up here now.”

 
; Juliet nodded and gave the order for security to escort the two to the bridge right away. She turned to the Captain, “Should we fire at the Cabal ship?”

  “Leave it for now,” She replied. “They don’t want to destroy us. They need us. As long as we’re between them and the slab I think we’re safe.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Captain Cook shrugged. “No, not sure, just very hopeful that I’m right.”

  ******

  Hans and Karla listened to the communication recording between the Captain and the Handler’s. As Karla translated small steams of scent were emitted from under the Handler’s body. When the broadcast was over he sat still for a long time.

  The bridge crew waited. The Cabal hadn’t tried to attack again and the slab hadn’t moved. It was hard to tell what was going on, who was waiting for what and just whose side the Arwen would be on when it was over.

  Finally Hans started to tap on the ground. Karla looked up and said, “He wanted to thank you for stopping the attack. The ships are hard to destroy but lack any real weapons. He would like to contact his ship to let them know about the deception so we many end our alliance with the Cabal.”

  “Tell him I will not stand for him attacking the Cabal ship and I will help defend it.”

  Karla translated and when she finished the Handler stood quickly onto its back legs. The motion was so fast it startled everyone on the bridge and brought the seven security guards to full alert, their energy weapons pointing at the group. His back legs tapped quickly. “He said that they must be destroyed. They were planning on destroying his home world.”

  “I know,” Captain Cook replied. “But there are many on that ship that are the last of their race and I will not have them destroyed. I know the Handler’s don’t care about that but I figured him and his group would since they’re looking to stop all the wars.”