Earth on Target (Survival Amidst the Stars)

by Angel Bright

  “It has. Prima Davos is no longer.”

  “It is there. It’s a bit burned, but we’ll fix it. You’ll allow us to send rescue groups to look for survivors in underground cities, under your guidance. You will gather surviving rescuers from your colonized planets, too. In fifty years, a flourishing civilization will be there again. It depends on you, and I will add that you are obliged to correct your mistake. Why did you not ask me for help? You were a direct connection with me—only you. This was your responsibility and your duty to protect your planet. In a month, we will restore you, and then we will overwork you. What did you want to tell me when you said to keep away from Alpha Centauri?”

  “These…invaders…the Horners…their main base in our spiral galaxy branch is…the planet Tugo in the Proto Star System.”

  “Thank you! We have prisoners from these insects. We will ask for everything they know. Are they planning an invasion in our direction soon?”

  “I could not find out. The empire wages unsuccessful battles with them but does not understand their technology; each time, it suffers great losses. Now it just withdraws when they appear. It will be hard for them to find you.”

  “We are not afraid. And we are not hiding. Recently, when we came for you, we destroyed two and damaged the rest of their ships. We let one escape so that they would be afraid to enter our regions.”

  “There is no fear in them. They do not know what fear is. They throw themselves forward and perish by the hundreds, by the thousands, but quickly recover their numbers.”

  “If you want to watch them in person, we’ll take you with us next time.”

  “If they fail with technology, they will try with poisonous gases.”

  “I know. I saw them with the gas tankers and destroyed two of them.”

  “Unbelievable! No one has ever been able to shoot at them. If you go against them, take me with you. Watching how you kill them will heal me best. This is my biggest dream.”

  “Get better. You have many tasks you have not finished, and they are waiting for you. Do not think anyone else will do them for you! I brought you a gift. One symbol. A beautiful symbol. I think you’ll like it.”

  I placed my hand on his bony, lifeless arms. His aura was glimmering, but I found a relatively healthy sector, and at the same frequency I induced additional vital energy in his body. In my inner sight, some sectors of his aura glowed. I went out into the corridor but stopped to see if he liked the gift. With the sharp claws of his right trembling hand, he opened the packaging, raised the hologram stand, and turned it on. Above his chest, the rotating native planet rose in all its former grandeur and beauty.

  Together with the groups of specialists, we transferred the robot machines for chemical cleansing to all the cavities in the dark ship. Decontamination was carefully considered and discussed many times until all ideas were included in the technological process. I could not believe we would be decontaminating intelligent beings, but the existence of one species rejected the other. Their feeding, and probably their breeding process, included warm-blooded hosts—an infestation to us. I did not want to risk leaving alive one of those creatures without control. Robots with X-ray scanners went in opposite directions along the oval corridor to map the ship’s space. The group of specialists with surveillance devices and machines with manual control located their equipment in the engine-reactor compartment. On a large holographic screen divided by a volumetric coordinate system, the black ship’s structure began to appear in green. We saw the spirals of the oval corridors and cells containing the insectoids’ cocoons. The economic planning of the interior space was ingenious. Hundreds of cells were arranged in rows and spirals connected in some groups according to some unifying feature. It would be interesting to wake them up. What a convenient occasion for a full observation. We did not know the trigger mechanism to activate them. Again, the discussions would be heated, and conflicting opinions would clash.

  The most heated dispute would be whether we would be able to control such advanced technologies and whether they would easily get out of STASIS. I myself had trained in a STASIS balloon created by someone else on a giant scale and had failed to get away.

  We could not allow such a risk of this beacon ship escaping our control. It would be a nightmare for any warm-blooded creature. We still did not know enough, but we had several live specimens, and I did not want to take a risk with these cocoons and in their ship environment to boot.

  And this ship hid many secrets.

  I had sharpened my senses to the extreme so I could react quickly to surprises. That’s why I was here. In this unfamiliar environment, my accompanying specialists could be only victims. To protect them, I had put everyone in his own protective power-field cocoon. If a creature tried to penetrate it, it would instantly take them out of the STASIS balloon and directly into an empty metal room under the crosshairs of our most powerful emitters. In a sheltered container in the same room, we also placed a powerful explosive device with external control.

  In the corridors where the scanning had completed, I ordered the start of the second phase of the operation. Robot cutters that cut through the entrance doors of each cell moved in both directions along the corridor. We then poured concentrated nitric acid on the insect cocoons, which melted into piles of ash. This whole operation was proceeding fast, and we already included the robots that entered the internal cells along the spiral chains as they were stacked and connected.

  At one point, I felt a sound and a shaking behind my back. I bounced aside and activated my protective field. It gleamed from a beam strike. Immediately, I heard the trapping of my fishing net around something, but a second attacker jumped on the specialist sitting farthest to the left. His protective field worked, and both the attacker and the attacked disappeared from the STASIS balloon. With wide-open senses, I ran past the stagnant aggregates and looked for another attacking insectoid, but I did not detect a presence. In the middle of the room, smoke drifted, perhaps caused by teleportation or materialization. I went to the golden halo of the extraterrestrial protective field pressed by the fishing net. I determined its energy frequency and released two of my Scorpions. I watched how the two frequencies quickly entered in a faded counter-resonance, and the beautiful golden halo disintegrated into rags. The fishing net instantly tightened around the creature’s body. We grouped around it. The creature was shorter and leaner than us and had four pairs of limbs with suckers. The rest of its body was protected by black armor made up of rectangular segments connected below so that it would not stifle movement. The head was hidden behind a respiratory mask with four eyeholes, yet I could see a pointed, triangular, solid sucker that retracted in a case attached to the armor. This terrible monster was larger than the insectoid engineers—special forces, probably.

  Numerous weapons were on the chest and around the waistband, but the creature wasn’t wielding any of them. He had not expected our presence and was surprised. I brought back my wrist sharply, and the fishing net smashed his limbs. His voice was muffled by the breathing mask. I did not want him to teleport somewhere, so I threw him away in the vacuum of open space. My work group watched in silence. I urged everybody to continue their work on robot control.

  I realized the activation of the pupae was carried out by specialists sent from outside in response to an unknown signal emitted by the ship’s sensors, which surely periodically indicated the specialists’ location. The black ship’s decontamination was advancing at an increasing pace because we included more robots.

  I was hurrying a lot because I realized the two aliens who had visited us had found us in the STASIS balloon.

  I had no idea where to hide the black ship, considering the presence of an internal marker. I went back to the idea of splitting it in half and sending the two parts to different planets. That way, I would find out in which part this marker was hidden and would find it by switching off the power supply of the individual sections. This marker might work for a moment once in an unknown number of
years, making it difficult to detect. And it may work when moving to a new location.

  For now, we would finish decontamination and get out of STASIS. The black ship was now a dangerous lure that would cause us unnecessary casualties. But we had already marked ourselves, and we needed to quickly find out what new technologies were in it and how they were applied, as well as where the weak spots of its protective fields and armament were.

  How did they find us in STASIS? How?

  I was also expecting new insectoids teleporting in from their special forces because their base had not received the arrival signal of the activation pair.

  The cutters ended their work, and I teleported them to Moon City with their controllers. I was expecting the others to finish cleaning any minute now.

  Last checks brought a sigh of relief. I teleported the black ship back into orbit around the moon. Within an hour, I began transferring the students. I also gathered the weapons from the destroyed commando Horner and dispatched them to the Military Institute of Arms for research.

  I was sitting on the floor in the darkness completely motionless and waiting in ambush, hoping the commandos would come before the students. I needed time. Again, I had a lack of time. Could the commandos teleport anywhere or only in the engine compartment? And why they did they need such massive and powerful engines if they controlled teleportation? In my inaction, I shifted my vision mechanically to each of the three types I was capable of, and in ultraviolet mode I found that the circle on the floor where the two commandos materialized was lighter gray than the rest and less dusty. I blinked several times, but the effect remained.

  So, it was a teleportation platform, or machine teleportation at a specific location.

  Ha!

  I was relieved.

  I could see the platform even better in the infrared spectrum. This was the entrance to the mysterious black ship. Well, I would prepare nice surprises.

  I would create a safari hunt for cockroaches.

  I rejoiced and entwined a spider web of spells around the place to produce a series of illusions and reality—a normal battlefield.

  All teleportation facilities, machines, and devices had to be protected. And the receiving part could be switched on and off when we found the devices and the control panels. This would free me from the boring transport operations with my mandatory participation.

  Teleportation platforms would be on asteroids, in colonial settlements, and on the emerging federation planets. An afternoon outing to the beach of Mars could lead seamlessly to festive tourism on Ceres or the satellite planets, with huge Saturn filling the whole sky.

  Wow!

  People could book a dinner table in the Gambling Ring with dancing at artificial gravity in front of window with a starry sky. Even more spectacular would be Saturn or Jupiter hanging over the window of the hotel balcony.

  Everything was ready. The trap was loaded in anticipation.

  And I could now concentrate on the students or on my new hope.

  I was on duty.

  A week ago, I teleported the transport ship with the rescue teams in orbit around Prima Davos. Commodore Kobo traveled in the medical section of the ship.

  Through the mental-copying technique, we managed to blur his most disgusting memories of him being drained by the chief commander Horner. We did not delete them completely. He had found his second life and a new meaning in it.

  We would proceed with exterminating the insectoids together.

  I attended the students’ working groups. I was looking at disassembled sophisticated mechanisms. Everywhere, I saw holographic screens with changing drawings and images of machine parts, star maps, and routes. I saw images of engines in impulse, cruise, and combat mode and screens with multilayered protective fields with several changing modes. Earth’s fleet outperformed their battleships with more powerful, more efficient, and more lethal weapons. This was also something important for us to know.

  Our sun-type reactors were much more advanced in technology and science and much more powerful than the cold fusion economical reactors, which we had correctly abandoned for military purposes. The equipment for control of the teleportation platforms was located in sections above the ceiling, where we also found a small cabin for the operator. The operating equipment was beneath the floor panels of the teleportation platforms. I did not allow anyone there because of the set traps. We cut an extra side-access passage under the floor space. We made recordings, copied them, and sent them to various information banks with special DNA access for certain individuals. All total, it was huge volumes of information different from our way of creating artificial ship gravity.

  Around me was a flurry of activity in work and life.

  We did not find a specialist who knew anything about a notification-and-marking system. Such systems were part of the duties of security officers. After copying all the ship’s information, our computers pointed to a sector they could not access. To open these files, we used teams of mathematicians but in vain. And I wanted to install such systems on each of our ships.

  I ordered us to start dismantling systems which had the most advanced technologies. The black ship would end up in the sun’s nuclear furnace. And then we found a number of small cabinets containing bundles of cables. That was their marking system. We abandoned it. The ship’s self-destruct system was also there. In the event of big damage to the hull of the black ship, the self-destruct system would activate, and the ship would turn into a fireball.

  I did not want to sacrifice valuable specialists. We took only the crystals in which the information was stored. Under its own power, the black ship started its final flight to visit the sun.

  I was satisfied.

  We learned a lot about the insectoids. Their protective fields were no better than ours. They could not resist our Scorpion-1 and Scorpion-2. But we had also developed a special resetting of our beam board and ground batteries with which we effectively destroyed the floating energy frequencies of their three layers of protective fields.

  Their method of invasion with black ships sent as bait for intelligent creatures seriously threatened their populations. They had overstretched themselves quite a bit. They had been well protected, but now we would not keep secret their key weaknesses. And we could gas their planets, too.

  Rescue operations on Prima Davos yielded results thanks to my directions where and how to search for underground colonies. For now, they would remain underground because the planet was heavily burned. Everything that could burn had been burned. Only one-third of its oceans were left, but water vapor had remained in the atmosphere. We knew how to revive the lakes, rivers, and oceans. We would create a new flood and a new beginning for the planet and its civilization. The plans were ready, and we would soon start the technological sequence of the restoration flood.

  We were actively supporting Prima Davos’s colonies on the other three planets where we had resettled their stationary terrestrial and orbital batteries for protection from the Horners. Commodore Kobo took over organizing their security systems and, with the help of Earth, created an energy shield on the planet.

  The Prima Davos System was proclaimed to be a part of the Earth Federation. They sought protection and respect. Why not? The System needed defense and respect for their survival. It was a province of the Earth Federation, whose location we knew only by conditional coordinates relative to a random center.

  We solved our problems with the research and production of ship electronic blocks. At our request, their production was resumed with the Earth Federation, the main customer. The accumulated nine warships of the Prima Davos model waiting for the electronic spare parts were refitted and put on combat duty. We had had hope for these spare blocks before, too, and that wait had been used to rework the hulls of the waiting ships according to our latest aircraft carrier doctrine. With this foresight, someone from our military leaders had shown love for their profession and a sense of belonging to their home place that needed protection now and in the fut
ure.

  Machine teleportation was our blessed reward from the clash against the Horners. The procedure was insufficiently developed with limitations of distance and quantities of people and cargo that could be sent or received.

  I studied all the materials obtained by mental copying the insectoid specialists. The technical information was detailed, but the science in this direction simply had not advanced for some reason. It was unfinished, maybe interrupted at an intermediate stage. But the directions for its future development were described clearly and unambiguously.

  We would think, and for now we would build what we had learned and whose schematics and parts we already knew. For the solar system, the machine teleportation network would be good enough. I was happy like a child.

  The bilateral agreements signed by the Earth Government, settling the status of the two parties and the relations between us, lay in front of me for ratification. Everything would be complicated when the chaos of teleportation began and the distances between the planets themselves would disappear.

  Even now, everything in our relationship with the government became unreal even only when listing and recording things as they were. Certifying them with two signatures, one of which was of a politician and the other a lawyer—an authorized person who signed on my behalf and whose signature could be changed on the very next day—changed the relationship itself to that of a signed contract with God.

  God became a real individual you could deceive unless explicitly mentioned in the signed contract. Many politicians would benefit from the propaganda about the benefits of this agreement. They would rise to be equal with God and sit next to him.

  I was making a huge mistake with my devaluing to an Earth citizen. That’s why I started withdrawing from Earth everything connected to me. I changed the name of the federation from Earth Federation to Solar Federation, in which Earth was not a member.