by Angel Bright
In fact, they were frighteningly heavy.
Several times, I was barely able stop myself from contacting the governments of the strongest states in terms of industry and military, but they could hardly change anything because of their backward technologies. I felt I was already a significant combat unit but within the bounds of the foreseeable horizon. Waiting would bring us the destruction of the planet itself. I had to enforce the coordinated construction of protected underground shelter-cities to preserve at least a small portion of the present civilization. It was not clear how much time we had.
I gathered together the scientists who were around me, and we created an improvised evacuation headquarters. We developed systems for long-lasting underground cities for providing air, water, food, and production of machinery and equipment, the latter mainly with military applications. Humanity was facing an indescribable disaster. The time had come for the creation of out-of-planet settlements to preserve a community that would be large enough to revive a new civilization.
One of our most secret developments finally reached the production stage. It was a movable energy installation emitter with an adjustable beam frequency. Its most difficult component was the autonomous and powerful energy supply. We managed to create a concentrating crystalline point inductor transforming energy from the surrounding space. It was capable of accumulating it in a sphere of crystals with an appropriate fixed geometrical location so as to convert the internal volume of the sphere into a special type of plasma that could serve as a powerful energy source when necessary. The management and guidelines for fixing the limiting and interfering crystals were tasks I had to do myself because only I could see the structure of the interacting energies, and I managed to place the layers of the different types of plasma as close as possible. We created something really fine, precise, and powerful. We also developed a set of antennas arranged one in another with the possibility of narrow and wide cone adjustments for the emitted beam.
Under the guidance of my indispensable friend and associate Nolen, we planned the discreet serial production of numerous details in suitable small factories unrelated to each other and located on different continents and in countries all over the world. It was necessary to build a factory in orbit around Earth for the structuring and growing of the various crystals included in our various projects. Zero gravity was required because of the production peculiarities of crystal growing. We started with a small production workshop, but it was necessary to spread the new emerging workshops in the form of different satellites, always with my direct participation in the form of teleportation to avoid too much shuttle traffic between the workshops.
The final assembly workshop divided into non-inter-connected fitting wards I placed in an underground settlement on the moon. The sophisticated delivery system for the finished parts existed only in my head because we created a multifunctional phase destroyer with the code name Project MPD.
My initial idea was to create a portable destroyer of defensive fields for the hunters’ future offensive systems. But in the trials, I watched and recognized the effective resonances of the initial decay of complexly organized systems. They were energy systems or systems in the form of matter differing in capabilities only through the submitted power limit for which they were built. I built my own powerful weapon, and I already started storing the first types of finished units in underground warehouses on Earth.
In some of the Earth states with the most powerful militaries, using energetic lobbyists, I carefully suggested the idea of underground cities. I was looking for possible meetings with their chiefs of staff. With a team of psychologists, we developed a uniform instruction to persuade these leaders as contractors and organizers of our future army. We had a variety of proposals attractive for them, mainly new types of weapons for armies specially designed for increased defensive-offensive capabilities.
Careful personal approach gave us success, and soon we had to start building extensive underground areas for tactical training with widespread use of the new weapons. It was not necessary for our senior military leaders to be informed about similar training exercises conducted by other military units in non-neighboring countries. The temptation was great, and nowhere were we rejected. I also had another goal: create spaces for construction of underground cities for evacuation and preservation of manpower. Moreover, during the construction of the underground caverns, we studied and demonstrated the capabilities of MPD weapon project. We used the smaller destroyers to excavate and petrify the walls of the underground spaces as future shelter-cities. Underground, we created halls and galleries with conditions similar to those above ground for larger-scale combats but mainly for strategic purposes. We constructed armored underground shelters with lakes, rivers, pastures, fields, and mines with complex purification systems. More people were recruited for work and maintenance of the “military” facilities, repair workshops for military equipment, and the justified import of machinery and equipment, which required the expansion of underground life-support volumes.
What I could not achieve in negotiating with the politicians, I achieved through negotiations with military leaders.
Earth was becoming a mobilized military camp.
When I realized the psychological approach to persuasion was a highly motivating one, I convinced a number of smaller states to build underground ranges for secret training of small armies for self-defense, and then I began to provide the free underground shelters to ecologists, where these weirdos could settle animals and plants and create appropriate climatic conditions for them.
Unimaginable quarrels began among volunteer groups of ecologists with demands for volumes, energies, water sources, purification plants, fertilizers, and everything they could come up with. I left these headaches to politicians, who quickly saw new potential for gaining popularity and power because the unemployment rate had dropped quickly.
In the main area of military training for large armies, I gradually incorporated tactics and strategies for war in space and on planets without atmospheres. I wanted to infiltrate and take control of space warships without destroying them. The huge military machine needed more challenges. I included the condition of mass participation and teaching everyone the tactics and the means of fighting actions and survival in extreme conditions.
One day, I realized I had become a component of a huge meat grinder that would soon want appropriate space targets.
I threw a huge portion of Earth scientists and engineers into building “ranges and shelters” on the planets of the solar system and among the asteroids, like utopian future interstellar spaceships. Later, it occurred to me to install a suitable defensive-offensive weapon to protect the relatively small space objects. An essential part of the asteroid-protection tactics was its disguise as a lifeless space object. The imagination of the settlers themselves reached a striking elegance. Chaos occurred because mobile asteroids begun maneuvering around the asteroid belt. Their observation stations had allowed them to be supplied with food, air, and water, and some had developed quite good autonomy. Politicians and the administration of the solar system continually developed and perfected complicated legislative systems according to my urgings, which prompted me to declare I was not taking part in the organization of the super civilization that had arisen. This led to rivalries and struggles for supremacy, and again I had to intervene.
Mankind could not exist without supreme control. But this civilization boiling with raging passions was the reason to be proud, along with these administrations constantly complaining. Humanity was growing strong and aggressive.
10 Shadows in the Dusk
On the evening of June 12, 2139, I was enjoying the sunset from my maisonette’s terrace in the forty-floor Space Tower Center, which I sometimes used when I came to relax in San Diego. The warm ocean breeze was stroking my skin like a caress. I had just turned off the simulator with which I kept the speed of my reflexes in shape. From the corner of my eye, I detected movement to my right. I immediatel
y tensed, and a dark spot slowly descended in my peripheral vision.
I leaned over the railing and saw a human figure on the roof of the lower building opposite me. He wore a dark halo reminiscent of the shape of arms akimbo, as if they were small wings. Strange anxiety began to persuade me to take a step backward. Other instincts I had neglected began to activate, too. I bristled with inexplicable tension. I noticed a second figure on the helicopter platform of the opposite building. He had gear pressed against the concrete, and I saw he was aiming it right at me. I instantly jumped back and rolled into the bedroom, where I had stripped off my protective suit. After twenty-three seconds, I was under the protection of my crystals. But at the same time, I scattered behind me a few moving-target balls.
For such a type of attack, I had trained enough and had set up rules of action. From one of my upper-front pockets, I pulled out and threw a glass ball about ten millimeters in diameter. After it shattered, several robotic observation devices—called “eyes”—in the shape of small ceramic insects took flight from it. I mentally sent them the images of the targets I had captured and the command to follow them. Simultaneously, I teleported to the nearest crowded mall and descended to the lowest level of the underground parking lot.
Two of the eyes reached their targets, hovered about twenty meters above the aliens, and were almost instantaneously destroyed. But they had already done their task of blowing up their bellies silently and scattering a dozen nano-cameras over both figures. Some of the nano-cameras rushed into their costumes like dust and were thrown away immediately by the static electricity of protection. But others dropped to the portable luggage, where they chemically and almost instantly stuck on the surface of the metal container and the tube of a missile weapon. Their antennas opened and indicated the coordinates of the property, and the cameras turned to the aliens. I received a full image with good contrast just in time to see how my maisonette was turned into dust, along with the two neighboring floors and their unlucky inhabitants. I did not see what weapon the aliens had used to do that.
Still, I had a similar weapon: my portable MPD.
I waited.
First, I had to figure out how many attackers there were. Where were they located, and what was their sensitivity zone? My senses were sharpening. The faint glow of two more of the assailants appeared. They were not perfect, either. There was a residual resonance, and I already learned their coordinates around the place of the ambush. Through my “eyes,” I continued scanning the surrounding area for the full range of their presumed frequencies but did not find any telltale signs of light.
A strong earthquake shook the shopping mall, and I realized they had collapsed the remaining floors of the Space Tower Center. I placed my crystal crown on my head and set off toward the street. In the elevator, I sensed from the passengers a surprise mixed with fear and curiosity. Through one of the shop windows on the ground floor, I saw the street filled with dust and cars in a state of total chaos and panic. With my inner vision, I watched the assailant closest to where I was and determined exactly where he was in an ambush position. He was on the roof of the neighboring building—a convenient place to watch but comfortable for me, too. The elevators of that building were moving, and I chose to climb with them so as not to disturb the observer. He could enjoy the view a little more—as long I chose to allow him to do so, of course.
I sneaked the optical cable over the door to the roof and put the visor over my eyes. I checked the open spaces for surprises and turned back to the hidden snipers waiting in ambush.
I saw a young man with blond hair tied up in a bun, leaning over a weapon. He had set up some not particularly complicated traps between him and the front door. I would have done exactly the same. Paralyzing traps were relatively easy to detect but were effective when combined with hidden offensive traps. There was no reason for me to go into his perimeter. I first covered him with the “fishing net” and immediately tied it around him and the device he was working on. At the same time, I initiated illusions of explosions in a series of mesmerizing lights. I also attacked those who were covering him by generating illusions of awful monsters, throwing themselves at them—a tried-and-true method of surprise. Almost instantly, two heavy chunks of concrete dropped down from the roof and near the young man’s head; a concrete column had been split in two. But the other attackers were waiting for me. Were they seeing me or just sensing me?
I lifted the expanding tube of my portable MPD and, with circular movements, disintegrated the roof of the staircase shaft. It happened so quickly that the two falling, flickering figures sank. In the next moment, they shot up, but they then fell into the MPD beam and lost their protective screens and parts of their bodies.
Over where I had trapped the blond assassin, a frenzy of fiery collapsing balls swirled in an attempt to tear the net. I energized my creation again by adding a reflective shield and a neuronal scourge that chased the prisoner each time he attempted to escape. Thus, his resistance soon subsided. I immediately teleported the prisoner’s package to a location predetermined by my team of scientists. It was isolated by an energy-reflected crystals lab where we planned to close down potential prisoners and sources of information.
My goal was to deprive prisoners of their energy supply and make them helpless for a certain period while copying all the information at their disposal, such as their place of origin, place of training, methods used, modes, machines, weapons and flying machines, bases and locations…everything.
Several secret services on Earth had already used the mental-copying technology, so I did not require cooperation from the prisoner.
I had several large halls located on three floors where scientists and technicians with different specialties worked in three specialized departments, and each person had special limitation permit cards for each floor. These were not my most important scientific divisions, but here was the Brain-Energy Research Department, which had taught me the existence of so many things that were now part of my protective capabilities.
In the laboratory expansion design, I had also planned an isolated room with the best energy isolation I knew. That way, in case of a massive invasion of hunters, I could hide my telltale energy sparkle. The screening isolated the penetration of energies from inside out and vice versa. In accordance with its first inhabitant, it became a prison cell. Upon arrival, I transferred two nano-cameras to the cell to get immediate impressions from my honored guest.
He was a tall, well-crafted humanoid who was slowly changing.
His human features had lost their original shape, and part of his blond hair was falling in bunches from his shoulders and spreading down the floor. I switched on a recorder. I pulled out and wiped off whatever was left of my “fishing net,” along with his captured weapon of unknown principle of action and potential. The creature sensed the cameras and the lack of stiff limiters very quickly, but he kept calm and turned to face the camera—that is, me. I could not understand if he was seeing me in any way or not. I had to hurry before he decided to self-destruct.
My assistants carefully injected minimal doses of soporific gas into the room. In small doses, the gas was tasteless and odorless, but the creature felt the intervention and changed his breathing to rare, shallow breaths, probably to neutralize the chemicals it was taking in as poison or in accordance with its true purpose as a sleeping drug.
I would analyze the substance, but I would pretend that it had an effect on me even in smaller doses. This may be an unknown magnitude at a first meeting between creatures of different kinds.
We increased the dose. After a while, the creature fell into convulsions and collapsed on the floor. I let one of the psychologists come in and carefully mount the electrodes of the recording equipment in the alien’s brain. There was no reaction. Nano-electrodes were injected and distributed along the brain centers. We started full and deep mental copying, and the recording went well. The creature was not dying, so we did not hurry. At the same time, we continued with the inje
ctions of the sleeping drugs with increasing doses as initially planned in accordance with his body weight.
Ten hours later, we had a secure, detailed record of the selected most important knowledge and memories of the client. I took my place under the special helmet for data exchange and memorization. I received lots of extremely valuable data, knowledge, and information. I found out how to teleport myself to places I had known to be at great distances. I learned how to teleport according to images and photographs of landscapes.
I now understood how the Gods did it.
We transferred the technical information to specialized equipment that was able to draft technological drawings of observed details of any models of machines or devices, and we prepared for the exchange of technological and industrial information.
One of the brightest images we took away from the alien was from the planet on which he had lived or had stayed lately: Prima Davos.
I saw a base of flying machines with unique structures and extremely strong armaments. There were single-seat fighters for planetary and orbital defense. I also saw larger spaceships, such as cruisers, frigates, support ships, and carrier ships for combat shuttles.
We wanted prototypes from all models. We needed all that so we could survive. The whole planet needed that. Until now, all my efforts had been aimed at my own survival. I didn’t have the power to save Earth, and I saw that clearly. From now on, there was hope to change that.