Earth on Target (Survival Amidst the Stars)

by Angel Bright

  The proximity of Earth promised secure supply, execution of fast technical orders, and the help of a millennia-old civilization. Our withdrawal to Ceres was only a preparation for a longer jump to the society of the powerful star civilizations and to the star clusters in the star branch closest to the solar system.

  I realized this when I felt redundant and attacked at the heart of the system I was defending. We were in stagnation, and the stagnation promised striving toward personal ambitions. They, in turn, led to decline, regression, and destruction.

  I wanted to lead humanity toward equality and then strive for a new higher goal and then another. Movement in this direction was doomed when you dragged along one, two, three, and more civilizations.

  I always reached a situation where personal ambitions buried everything. Empires had collapsed because of internal struggles and aspirations.

  Around us, volunteer specialists of all ranks were gathering. They had received much of their knowledge and skills after the mental copying of extraterrestrial creatures captured from their destroyed warships. We would have reached such a development of Earth science and technology after millennia of evolution, but only if we had been left unnoticed. After the beginning of Earth’s cosmic era, we could not remain unnoticed. And we were already on the lists of more than one space civilization.

  The Ceres adventure infused adrenaline into the blood of our cosmic allies. The dark-red, heavy-clouded Mars was proof of the rising power of Earth civilization. This time, we were equipped in terms of energy, and we arrived at Ceres during the fine-tuning of the atmosphere. There was plenty of water there, and we even included it as fuel for warming the planet.

  Ceres would be a jewel in the crown of the asteroid belt.

  The UN debates on my status and my request for a full change of the members the General Staff and the re-subordination of the Earth Armed Forces had been going on for over a month. Particularly heated speeches had clashed on the issue of ownership over the Earth Space Forces because we proved that almost all fleet expenses were borne by the BWU Corporation, an importer of technologies and science. It was established as my property with CEO Nolen.

  The corporation was also the owner of thousands upon thousands of patents that gave us solid annual earnings. In almost every military or civilian company was a certain percentage of corporate intellectual property of ours that made us co-owners.

  Nolen was an economic genius.

  The surprise was for me and for the Earth Government under the auspices of the UN. The claims of Earth, even for the land specialists working for me, were dropped after the declaration of their newly formed trade unions they had developed as scientists and professionals in the training centers organized by the corporation. A list of educational institutions with impressively sounding space names was attached. It impressed me. All this bustling parliamentary activity was necessary to clarify our tacit relationships and put them in legal frameworks. More than one-third of humanity was working directly for me and was ready to follow us with confidence in our endeavors.

  It was an interesting time.

  People worked hard to keep up with their perception of taking part in spectacular projects related to recent results. Machines that we could not have imagined until recently were now transforming the Martian surface.

  It was not uncommon among crowds of people busy with the construction of the future cities to meet hardworking aliens who until a year ago had been our prisoners of war. If the aliens so desired, I could teleport each of them directly to his or her planet, but they had spent a long time in the emptiness of space and had no alive families or friends. It seemed these energetic, working human masses had attracted the aliens with their vigor and bustling vitality. The aliens were left to work among us and were happy of their choice.

  Tim had recovered and was again in the Moon Command Staff to be my alarm bell in case of an attack.

  Still, our navy withdrew from Earth’s orbital space and moved to the asteroids of the Gambling Ring. This “space Las Vegas” was an appealing place with its lavish lifestyle. I did not mind crews alternating in the brothels and casinos while spending their money willingly.

  Again, I heard a weak call from far away. Someone wanted to contact me. I discerned words: “Earth, Earth…beware! They are coming. The black ships are coming.”

  It was Commodore Kobo. “What happened, Kobo?” I asked mentally.

  “They erased us. The empire…the empire began. Beware of Alpha Centauri. My end is near. Finally.”

  “Hold on! I’m coming to help.”

  “Do not come. I’m locked in one of the black ships.”

  “Guide me!”

  “I do not know where we are.”

  “Keep in touch!”

  I had some hope of finding him because our connection was giving me the vector of direction. I would move in jumps and wait for the direction to turn.

  29 Exploring the Black Ship

  On my order, four nuclear warheads were loaded on the minifrigate Fearless, and the crew started gathering. I teleported inside the black ship we had found on Corba. I wanted to get an idea where to look for the captured commodore. I sneaked through low, narrow, dark corridors. The crew and soldiers had disappeared. The ability to switch between my three types of vision allowed me to get a clear idea of this type of aircraft and the technological level of their builders. They were short and lean insectoid creatures. It was easy to see the mixing of different types of technology. I was looking for the ship’s command room and residential section. The corridors had no doors but were dark and slick ovals that suggested the idea of limbs ending with suction cups. Corridors and halls that had been bustling were now frighteningly depopulated. Why had this ship, its crew, and its soldiers stayed with us? Was it engine damage or something else? Perhaps an epidemic was onboard.

  Perhaps I was passing by doors that opened by suction, but why was that necessary if there was automatic opening-and-closing control? It was the likeness of a swarm’s life in a hive.

  I switched back to my X-ray vision to look behind the walls of the corridor. Indeed, along the entire corridor behind the walls were barred cells. They were to the left, right, top, and bottom no matter how relative the directions in the space were. I chose one of the nearby cells and tried to pull or push the wall-door but was not successful. Then, I resorted to the simplest approach: cutting a hole in the wall. I faced my palms toward each other and created a hot blue ball. I spun it at high speed for about two minutes and directed it toward the selected spot on the wall. It went quite easily. I moved it into a circle, and it melted a large hole in the wall. I expanded this hole until the light of the ball became dim, and it was lost. I walked through the cut hole and got into the same elongated oval cell. It was empty except for at the top, according to my position, where I saw a cluster of dark-gray cocoons. Yes. There was a crew but under certain conditions.

  That was odd. What did these insect invaders want from us? Maybe they were parasites. Yes, that was probably it.

  I continued my walk through the corridor labyrinths. At the very front of the ship, I found a slightly larger room also absolutely empty. I set off toward the stern of the ship. The corridor made a smooth, inconspicuous turn and led back again. But according to my coordinate system, there were at least another one hundred meters to the end of the flat, black oval. Here were the generators and engines, as well as the weapons and protective systems. I did not sense a flow of energy. I identified a place where it was most convenient to penetrate and started cutting. Nothing happened. I did not even scratch the wall. I abandoned the ball cutting and created an edge on whose top a little sun shone. No metal or nonmetal could resist the super high temperatures in its center. As the cutter approached the wall, the wall swelled and began to melt. A rotating cone emerged from the center of the bulge, whose top was the same hot-white blade. The two blades met, and I felt how some force sucked the cutter’s energy. There was no point in boosting the cutter’s energy consump
tion because I also increased the power supply on the other side. But this was now a familiar territory. I had experience and thus knew not to oppose but to activate an antiresonance. I dropped some of my small Scorpions into the periphery of the rotating cone and decreased the energy fed to the cutter. Dark spots appeared on the periphery of the rotating cone.

  Its whizzing became stronger. It resisted. It received huge amounts of energy from somewhere behind. And I did not hear the radiation from operating reactors. I decided to let the two ghost machines self-destruct and teleported through the wall. This teleportation in an unknown space was dangerous because I could materialize inside a reactor or engine. A bulky machine stood against the wall. A thick jet of white plasma burst from the sharpened front part of it, and its burning decreased the cutter’s energy—a crafty counteraction. I found even smarter devices behind the machine: running reactors.

  Cold nuclear reactors, whose technology we had not considered promising and what we had achieved, had been exchanged with the planet Prima Davos. Then, we decided we were getting something for nothing, and it turned out that Commodore Kobo’s people had encountered this kind of reactor and knew what they were getting.

  It was an old rule of trade, with no losing side but a lack of information. The more invisible the profit, the deeper you had to dig.

  Everything around was familiar to me.

  Here were the three battery decks. These huge structures at the bottom must have been the engines. Here were their life-support systems. And these were the generators of the protective fields. And there were small armchairs or beds. Did they run their machines lying down? Suspended in front of a complex control panel was a flickering hologram of a star system or part of the galactic branch with thousands of stars and star clusters. Only tangible green lines connected distant sectors of the galactic branch, and one of these lines was starting from the emptiness beyond the star clusters.

  But it wasn’t totally empty; a tiny, faint single light indicated the solar system. So, this ship was a beacon marking ownership.

  Even now it emitted signals.

  It was marking us and was waiting for a command.

  I photographed this star map from all sides and left the ship. It would wait for me, but it was extremely dangerous. I closed it in a STASIS, a temporal star bubble in subspace.

  Now I was going hunting.

  30 Hunting for Black Ships—Machine Teleportation

  I called Commodore Kobo. When I received a faint answer, I spotted the direction.

  I did the first teleportation jump with the minifrigate Fearless to a low orbit over Prima Davos. Commodore Kobo once again responded to my call. I located the new direction. The intersection of the two vectors was the place where he was dying. I determined the coordinates in the direction of the Cygnus constellation and teleported Fearless to the selected point. I immediately sought Commodore Kobo but encountered weak, unclear contact. Yet I got a new intersection point nearby.

  “Get ready for action,” I told my crew. “Turn on the stealth system.” I then sent a mental message to the commodore. “Kobo, look around. I can get a sense of where you are.”

  There was a faint vibrating image of a multiscreen room and a domed ceiling divided into five parts through which stars were visible.

  I went to Fearless’s cargo section, where a prepared nuclear warhead was waiting for me. I teleported it and me to the Black Ship’s command room.

  I found myself among several guards, armed with personal light weapons, with huge faceted eyes and suckers on their limbs. Two of the guards were holding Commodore Kobo in front of a small, arrogant creature from the same race. I gave the creature a strong kick, activated the bomb, and grabbed the commodore. I teleported back to Fearless. It turned out that the two guards had arrived with us. They stared at me, shuddered, began to step away, and suddenly sprawled on their stomachs, with their hands on their backs. Under these hands, they had two more pairs of underdeveloped or rudimentary limbs. The aliens looked pretty threatening, so I teleported them into outer space. This gave me a new thought about how to acquire the new technologies.

  I left Commodore Kobo in the hands of the ship’s healer mage and went to the command room.

  After the explosion of one of these Black Ships, the two other ships flying nearby had suffered major damage. The blast had been in front of the dark ship and had shot the rear half to the two adjacent ships in the group. A fourth ship had been nearby. It was not hit directly but moved strangely. There was some damage, perhaps from smaller fragments.

  I gave an order to prepare rooms for captives, and I again took a nuclear bomb and teleported to the generator room of one of the surviving ships. The construction was the same as I expected. I noticed a dozen insectoids at their workplaces and put them under hypnosis. The holographic map table of the galactic sleeve proved to be unsupported.

  I brought the bomb to the engines. I went back and gathered and teleported everybody along with the holographic table to Fearless’s cargo compartment. I became a recidivist thief of technology. You can guess why. I had the machines, but I did not know how to turn them on. Again, I went quickly to Fearless’s command room right at the moment of the blast—a grandiose spectacle. A huge shimmering globe shone through the cosmic black, melted to red gleams, and disappeared. The group leader accelerated his ship in a random direction. That would not save it, but I chose to have surviving eyewitnesses with myths and legends and themes for reflection as to whether they should look for us or be careful and keep away.

  I visited the fourth ship and kidnapped its crew from the engine room and some of the armorers from the serving batteries onboard.

  With this good catch, we came back directly to the moon’s orbit. I made a deep mental copy of each of the prisoners and distributed them as lecturers-instructors in the classrooms. Our students were volunteers wishing to specialize in such advanced foreign technology. After mental copying, they received not only knowledge of the language but also knowledge of the majors in the fields of interest: reactors, armaments and protective screens, engines, operation, navigation, and piloting of the black ships.

  I insisted on an intensive course of study, especially in the armaments and protective fields major. These creatures were astonishingly quick to adapt, but only after the mental copying did we realize they were feeding on the blood of living creatures. This also explained the suckers on their faces, and it was the intersection of the aspirations of the different species.

  What could insectoids and mammals have in common? Morality? One ate the other. I would see how these ticks would practice the exercises in hologram training machines. We would get rid of those who don’t want to do it. I didn’t think we needed them any longer.

  My interaction with them and their technologies gave me the idea of active, offensive defense. The protective fields themselves occupied at least half of the energy resource of the protected object and buzzed in vain for almost all their time of operation. I did not deny they repeatedly saved the integrity of the ships and the valuable facilities in them, together with the servicing specialists. Protective fields would remain an indispensable necessity but would be weakened and moved far ahead as signal sensors to activate a multilayer close defense only when something passed through their borders.

  In addition to better utilization of available energy capacities, transferring additional energy from one aggregate to another would allow an active, offensive role for our protective systems. I had encountered this reaction while investigating “our” black ship. Here’s where we could use the failed idea for our orbital crystal space mines. On the front of the attack against the protection, we would put pre-charged crystals with maximal power.

  When confronted with a field of protection, their energy would have a different application—namely, breaking or destroying the protective field.

  Why not?

  We had the technology and the knowledge, and we were ready. Only the setting remained. It would become a reality f
ast.

  I started to assemble a team to divide into three parts our black ship waiting for us in the STASIS balloon. The control room at the front and the engine-reactor section would be necessary for us as training simulators for the Earth specialists, and the habitable section in the middle was dangerous, so we would destroy it.

  Commodore Kobo called me from the hospital and wanted to talk. I had an hour or two available and went to visit him with a present: a stand with a small, rotating holographic image of Prima Davos. It was the cunning toy we had made in the first years of our friendship. My personal model was a memento, but for Kobo it would be a relic. I had a recording of our last passing near the planet. The once-thriving and powerful planet was now almost destroyed.

  My assistants packaged it nicely, and I went to the hospital room with it. Through the corridor window, I saw what was supposed to be Commodore Kobo. He was a pile of bones with virtually no signs of life. The medical staff had placed him in a sterile environment hanging in the energy field over a snow-white bed. Numerous triangular scars were showing black on his gray-blue skin, stuck tight against the bones. He had been drained by those insectoid intellectuals.

  I went in, put down the gift on the bedside table, and sat down on the chair for visitors.

  “Hello, my friend. You do not look in the mood for guests, but the bad is now over. Now we will feed you and restore your body, and you will gradually forget what you experienced.”

  “Thank you. But you risked in vain for a finished soldier. I have no desire for life. I wonder why we did not cling strongly to our valuable and lifesaving alliance. There was nothing to divide, and we could win a lot together with you. I wonder, is there a limit of risk for you? To what extent can you afford the risks of saving insignificant creatures?”

  “Why? You are my conductor in your society. You did a lot for us, the Earthlings, when we were weak. Then, Prima Davos was our only support, and nothing has changed since then.”