Star Matters

by David John West

  “That is concerning. We do get to tackle the ones that are the most strategic but we can’t go everywhere,” said Keeran. “We have to rely on our teachings over time and the natural resistance of the Earth people to do the right thing after the centuries of advancement up to now.”

  “You might see it that way,” replied Rafaello sadly, “but we see what really happens when bad people get to rule parts of this world that never see the light of day.”

  “It’s like, because they don’t see their eternal soul is going to continue through the generations, they don’t look after it,” added Umberto, “so they fight and clamber over each other to rule with great cruelty. Once they have everything and their natural brothers and sisters have nothing they have no conscience. They live only for their present life with no thought to the health of their souls into the future – or from the past.”

  “Umberto and myself, well we sometimes go out to tackle some of the worst atrocities that we see, real genocides, mass killings, maltreatment of the little people on an appalling scale. These are the dictators that Spargar supports and if we don’t succeed in stopping them, that’s the way it will be here. There are always one or two people leading all that kind of evil and me and Umberto, we sometimes visit these people and persuade them to change their ways. And we explain that we will be back in a much more serious way if they don’t. It’s not much but it’s what we can do in the places nobody else goes looking.”

  “Interesting – we don’t see that side so much. We see civilisation here advancing about as fast as it’s possible to go but that’s mostly western democracies that have moved towards enlightenment. Where we are operating the bad guys have few places to hide, especially with us shining a light on them,” replied Keeran.

  “You and Alron can look after yourselves so you don’t call us often enough to join in any fun,” said Rafaello. “Zarnha Earth transports are always popping out of space drive to find out what the locals are up to and kidnapping a lot of them as they go along. It always surprises us how many people disappear and that no great investigation from the local authorities and police goes on. How do people here put up with all the disappearances? Amazes me! It’s like the military here like everything to be secret. Maybe they like to look in control, maybe they don’t trust the civilians to cope with the truth. Maybe also they want to get their hands on the technology Spargar are using out there.”

  “Probably Zarnha agents have infiltrated the military brass like they are supporting Harold Z Martens efforts at Evrisoft?” observed Keeran. “These Earth people seem to like their hierarchies, military or business, so it’s easy meat for Zarnha to worm their way in and promote their local puppet leaders. Once established it’s very hard for us or anybody else to change things for the better for everyone else.”

  “That would explain the activity around here,” said Umberto. “The locals seem to think every flashing light is a secret military aircraft, and those individuals who say otherwise are treated as crazy people. All makes great cover for Zarnha craft to come and go pretty much as they please. But they don’t fool me and Rafa, hey, Big Guy?”

  “It gives us a great chance to get out and about as well, my friend,” interjected Rafaello ignoring the jest about his relative height. “With all these cat and mouse games going on in the night skies we too can join in and both Zarnha and local military are left guessing whose side we belong to!” This amused Rafaello all over again. “Right now though we have two immediate problems. There is the threat about your family back on Gaya and your pretty little Earth car sitting as noticeable as a turd at a Worders’ banquet on the shore of our hidey lake here. That second problem is easy; we can deal with it after dark and get it in the hold of the Maria, she has little cargo on this trip.”

  “The first problem though it is a serious problem. We know that personal kidnaps and worse are absolutely forbidden by the Epsilon treaty but we also know that doesn’t trouble our old friends Zarnha of Spargar if the stakes are high enough. They clearly see this planet as belonging to them as it’s much closer to Spargan than Gaya and fertile ground for them now the locals are picking up technologically at long last. Spargar could easily get to rule here if they can just get rid of us!”

  “You know what I want”, said Keeran. “I have to get home right away and neutralise whatever threat they are plotting against Kyra and my home. We can get back as fast as any message we can send there and I want to check it all out personally. You can understand that, old friend?” Keeran needed Rafaello to buy into his plight and need for a clandestine mercy mission home.

  “We can most certainly understand and, hell, things have been getting pretty boring for a while so a little journey won’t go amiss, hey, Umberto?”

  “You bet, Rafa,” grinned Umberto in reply. “A little training run to Gaya would be a nice trip for Maria just now.”

  “Umberto is always in requirement of more advanced training. His progress is always a big disappointment to me so he can do some flying practice for us this night.”

  ‘Ha! Rafaello… My flying is much better than yours, whatever skills you want to talk about!”

  “So do you need flying practice tonight to help out our friend here or are you being slower on the uptake than normal?”

  Umberto’s eyes widened and he made a comic exasperation face in silent mime fashion. “Yes, as always, Rafaello, you are correct that I am in need of some quality flying time. Not that I need it any more than you do yourself, I am telling you.”

  The comrades spent the rest of the daylight preparing for the journey. In particular they prepared the messages and reports collected from various agents and travellers from Dawn of Gaya locally that needed to be taken with them if they were going to make the warp journey back to planet Gaya. The sun sank slowly towards the mountains to the west. It cast long dark shadows across the water from the limestone pedestals as the lake surface shone blood red in the late evening. On the lake bed the whole Maria lifted in a rounded rectangle. The spacecraft separated from the lake floor around it and rose in a cloud of sand and mud. When it had cleared its depth from the surrounding bed with clear water underneath it slid away to one side and the Maria tilted on its end axis, front edge angling towards the surface. The Maria then vectored forward out of its hiding place like a flatfish emerging in camouflage from its covering of sand. The lakebed floor cover slid back where it had come from and all sign of the Cavallos’ visit disappeared.

  Rafaello and Umberto were hunched over their glowing control panel monitoring activity in the skies above Lake Mono, Lee Vining and all the way to Area 51 in Nevada to the south east, the most active skies on Earth for Zarnha of Spargar spacecraft. Zarnha craft liked to keep track of the most advanced military capabilities of Earth people and here were the most advanced local craft from the US Air Force and NASA. As usual there were some Zarnha local transports ferrying their agents or abducting the local people in the local airspace that were capable of rendezvous with interstellar transports and their space station concealed within Saturn’s rings. The USAF would be scrambling stealth jets to play tag with visible and radar signs of Zarnha craft as this activity was a regular occurrence and USAF pilots were accustomed to chasing strange craft that could stop, manoeuvre and accelerate with incredible pace. The Maria would impersonate one of these craft once it had moved away from Lake Mono such that it would appear to the USAF as if it were coming from one of the Zarnha mountain locations known to Rafaello and Umberto. Strictly speaking they did not have to do this to avoid detection but they enjoyed the thought of Zarnha commanders having their locations betrayed by the Maria disguised as one of their own ships, and the ensuing confusion of their enemy gave them considerable amusement.

  First of all Maria moved slowly and smoothly just under the water surface towards the waiting car. Maria’s scanners showed there were no people in the area of the beach where the neat red Mustang was parked. If anyone took not
e of the car’s absence by the morning they would think the driver had finished his visit and moved on. If there had been any unlikely witnesses right this instant they would have struggled to understand why seemingly a section of the water slanted up and pattered the lake surface like a school of bass attacking small fry. Above it was a strangely shimmering piece of night sky where the Maria rode onto the beach without disturbing the sand and Keeran deplaned via the hatch. There were several ways to load the car but the simplest ways are often the best. He opened the car door, climbed into the driver’s seat, inserted the key and fired up the engine. He then drove forward and into the cargo bay of the waiting Maria. Our fictional witness would be yet another local with a strange story to tell, of a sports car vanishing nose first into a wall of invisibility until it completely disappeared. Umberto then raised the cargo door and locked it shut.

  Rafaello and Umberto pored over their control screens again as they rose into the fast cooling and darkening skies and headed low and east away from the final red glow backlighting the western mountain horizon. The screens were bright as day with enhanced views of life forms and any type of vehicle in view. They overflew dirt flatlands around the Old West town of Tonopah with low mountains to the north heading for the Quinn Canyon range where the land rose with sparse fir tree cover to a number of low peaks twenty five miles or so north of Area 51 at Groom Lake. Rafaello knew this to be a target for Zarnha of Spargar craft attracted to the not-so-secret headquarters for US government aerospace technology development. The desert dunes had faded to dusty pastels of slate grey and burnt umber in the late evening dusk. He flew up the low ground surrounded by the far bowl of low hills before switching his flight computer to mimic Spargar home planet Spargan call signs and lights and rose into view of Zarnha and US military observers stationed at Area 51.

  Area 51 Command Control were shocked to see a craft rise from the ground just a few miles away and immediately scrambled a flight of three F22 Raptors to intercept Maria as the ship cruised south towards the tiny hamlet Rachel on Interstellar Highway 375. Maria was sporting the light signature for arrival approach at capital city Braganza on planet Spargan. They buzzed right overhead the Little A’Le’Inn bar and diner as two old timers looked up from their cold beers in knowing, silent acknowledgement of the UFO passing by. They pointed to the aliens someone had painted on the side wall of the bar and raised their glasses to the passing craft. The F22s were screaming low, coming on fast now and tipped round in a tight clockwise turn to follow as Maria flew on to Bald Mountain just north of the Area 51 runways. The F22 pilots saw what seemed like a strangely lit stationary craft as they approached in a tight vee formation. They hailed the craft ahead with warnings of extreme violence if the craft did not form up and accompany them down to base.

  Moments earlier the Maria had also been picked up by the Zarnha Earth Station monitors, cloaked as they were in high orbit amidst the debris ring forming the huge disk around planet Saturn. As big as an airport their space station connected craft from home planet Spargan with vessels in transit down to Earth’s surface. Omeyn MuneMei and her Spargar technology provided physical transport for space flight as Spargar culture refused to believe in the separate existence of the soul. By outlawing such thinking, this limited interstellar flight to bodily form only, which required bulky and expensive space station hubs and space transit spokes in all sectors or the galaxy of interest to the Spargar Empire. This huge physical infrastructure did allow for the much greater volumes of people traffic required by Spargar assimilation of planets and the subsequent kidnapping and transport of local victims of abduction. The bulk of staff on board the station was classically Spargar, tall, thin and Asiatic in appearance from an earthly perspective but with a smattering of other races amongst them that were required by Spargar for their specialist skills. It was an open secret among the non-Spargar crew members about Gayans’ capability to travel as soul spirits outside their physical bodies but they could not be overheard discussing it outright as this would contravene Omeyn MuneMei’s declaration of beliefs resulting in their being cast out of Spargar society. This would be more than inconvenient from the space station in the rings of Saturn. Gayan society, in contrast, was much more eclectic and welcoming but also more difficult to manage as a consequence.

  Controllers on board Spargar Saturn Station were shocked to see comms relays of a Zarnha craft in clear viz appear right next to the highly sensitive Area 51 in Nevada. They did not mind regularly causing strange lights or images as that allowed a lot of freedom for them to hide their real missions amongst the UFO chatter, but showing up totally uncloaked as a Spargar spacecraft was outrageous. Someone would have to pay for this! They zapped instructions to Earth surface controllers adjacent to Area 51 that popped up two Zarnha hoppers to check out the rogue Spargar craft and close down the situation before the USAF response could intercept. The call signs from Maria were so current for Spargan capital Braganza that the Zarnha hoppers launched nearby thought the Maria was indeed one of their own despite it travelling so slowly, affecting landing approach speed. The fact that it was openly visible could mean a systems malfunction that certainly was drawing attention.

  Rafaello saw the USAF stealth jets approach head on in his control screen as well as in plain sight. He had stopped Maria dramatically and tilted through ninety degrees to imitate a Zarnha take-off procedure. The pilots of the approaching jets switched to ‘weapons hot’ and attempted targeting lock on Maria, which looked for all the world as easy to target as a London bus standing on end. As the USAF jets came on, Rafaello simultaneously spotted the Zarnha hoppers launch from the low hills behind and close in fast from the rear. They were in stealth mode so their substantive shape could not be seen but they were accompanied by striping light smears of lime and raspberry occasionally sparking oxygen molecules as they roasted the air they passed through like an angle grinder on granite. The USAF fighter pilots clocked these strange lights appearing beyond the poised Maria, which added to the overall confusion.

  Maria completed the gentle rise to a vertical nose-up pose as the USAF jets closed from Groom Lake to the south and the Zarnha craft headed down from the north. At a dramatically significant moment of his own choosing Rafaello engaged low orbit drive and immediately shot vertically with little to no build up acceleration from stationary. Certainly it was an acceleration rate that was so breathtaking that it could barely be perceived or believed by the USAF jet pilots. Maria was stationary one second and streaking vertically the next, faster than any missiles carried by the F22s. The jets thundered by underneath, pilots craning their necks to watch the lights vanish instantly up into the skies as Rafaello headed for deep space. A split second later the air friction lights of the first cloaked Zarnha patrol also shot under Maria’s last position and past the USAF jets that snapped the necks of their pilots back to level as the second alien craft blinked past from dead ahead to straight behind behind and disappeared. The pilots flew through the encounter on into the quiet desert ahead. Whatever they had seen was gone now. Time to report another UFO experience over military airspace in Area 51. They had not realised they had actually witnessed two rival alien cultures engaging each other in action above the immediate airspace of Area 51.

  Rafaello took the Maria up in a gently rotating launch, tiny particles of space dust sparking golden from the parallel edges of the Maria’s fuselage to create a double helix unwinding gently into deep space for DMF drive ignition. Rafaello smiled as he considered this, his pilot signature in the heavens. Beyond Earth’s atmosphere he could utilize the DMF drive with sufficient power to warp space to fold together the 444 light years between Earth and their home planet Gaya in the Pleiades. From his completely enfolding chair Keeran felt the rush into dark space followed by the quiet eye of the journey that was the warp node and then the spring back out of warp in space local to planet Gaya. He mused that the feelings of ‘in’ and ‘out’ were not logical but then again neither was his feeling of ‘
downhill’ driving south in the Mustang on Highway 101 in California and ‘uphill’ driving north. As the fold of space sprang back out towards Gaya, Keeran could see around the spacecraft a bright opalescent tube formed of the cylinder of stars they were catapulting through. Keeran was fearless in his role of struggling for supremacy against Spargar and all its agents in his various missions but he felt real anxiety in DMF drive where he was at the mercy of physics he had no control over. It was the notion of fighting entropy that was getting to him. The Universe tended to disorder naturally. That was entropy. DMF warp drive required remarkable ordering of the Universe to connect points across the void and then precise penetration through the warp – and that was not natural and most worrying to Keeran’s way of thinking.

  THREE

  The Cavallo ship ‘Maria’ sprang out of DMF drive and appeared to materialise stationary from nothing, in a starburst of glittering dust drifting in all directions from the spacecraft, spangling in the light from the brilliant yellow star Rama, host star of the planetary system containing Gaya. The Maria was a flattened cigar-shaped craft of the type used primarily by the Gayan warrior caste, the Cavallos. It gave off no light of its own other than actively displaying star images along the fuselage passed through from the other side as stealth camouflage such that the craft was difficult to see on casual inspection visually or on electronic detection systems. The heavens all around coruscated with the splendour of hundreds of close stars. The largest few were a thousand times brighter than Earth’s Sun and sat in the centre of blue thread webs that were the remnants of stardust from which they were formed. The spaces between the nearby stars were alive with lesser stars and nebulae of illuminated dust clouds. The Pleiades cluster neighbourhood was an order of magnitude brighter than that of Earth and its lonely star, the Sun.