Vatican Ambassador

by Mike Luoma

  Dell leans in towards BC. “We had a working shipboard fusion reactor by the end of ‘93. We moved into their base in ‘94. And we kept making new discoveries. But somehow our activity had, unknown to us, set off some sensors, some silent security alarm of some kind. That, and it turned out that our jumps between Earth and the asteroids had not gone unnoticed. Someone discovered us. We drew attention... alien attention.”

  “The original residents came back, huh?” BC asks.

  “They came back,” Dell nods.

  “Who were they?” BC asks him.

  “They’re the ones we call ‘The Domo’” Dell says.

  “We call them a lot of things,” Anita mumbles under her breath, loud enough so BC will hear her.

  “They are...” Dell hesitates. “They’re not all you would hope for in an alien race,” Dell says.

  “They’re greedy, nasty, bloodsucking, fat, little bastards!” Anita says.

  “Oh, yeah, you mentioned them before,” is all BC can say.

  “They’re okay,” Dell says, “as long as you don’t mind dealing with vampires.”

  “Okay,” BC shakes his head, “You know,” he laughs nervously, “I thought for a second there you said

  ‘vampires’.” He lets out another nervous chuckle.

  “I did say ‘vampires’,” Dell tells him.

  “Damn,” BC can’t help shaking his head again. “I was hoping I was having a flashback or something.”

  Anita cuts in. “We don’t have any proof... but we think Domo invaders on Earth in the seventeenth century may have been the basis for the old legends of vampires.”

  “Really? Did they suck your blood or something? Do they?” BC asks.

  “We’ve never caught them in the act,” Anita admits.

  “But there have been strange, um...” Dell pauses looking for the right word, “casualties, when they’re around. A few people just... die. Their life-force just sucked out of them,” he says quietly. “They seem to pass quietly in their sleep.”

  “Not too scientific there, doctor,” Anita admonishes Dell.

  Krish enters with food and breaks up the mood. He gives Anita and BC theirs, then sits down and begins to unwrap his own lunch. He stops and looks at the other three when he realizes no one is talking.

  “What’s up?”

  “The Domo,” Anita fills him in.

  “Oh, the Vampires, lovely ghouls. Stephen Spielberg would have been so disappointed,” Krish sighs, and then gets back to unwrapping his food.

  “Who’s that, someone in The Project?’ BC asks.

  “He’s an old moviemaker,” Krish says.

  “Krish is an old movie buff,” Anita explains.

  “Close Encounters? ET?” Krish asks BC.

  “What?” BC asks, at a loss.

  “They’re movies?” Krish prods him.

  “Sorry. Don’t watch them,” BC tells Krish.

  Krish puts down the sandwich he was about to bite into. “Spielberg thought we’d meet cute, even cuddly aliens. The Domo are more X-Files.”

  “You lost me there, too. X-Files? Is that Project lingo?” BC asks him.

  “That was a television show,” Anita interjects. “Krish is big on all that old sci fi,” she tells BC. “It used to be big a hundred years ago. Krish is a connoisseur of that crap. Hang around him long enough and he’ll try to get you to watch some of it with him,” she cautions BC.

  “It’s not crap!’ Krish says, defending himself and his interests.

  “I’m sure those Domo like that old sci fi,” BC says dryly, “Maybe they inspired that, too, huh? So what the hell is ‘that old sci fi’?”

  “Sci fi is science fiction, stories about the future,” Dell says. “It’s quaint to see what they thought we’d be doing by now.”

  “Wait until you meet one,” Krish says to BC.

  BC is lost by the non sequitur. “What?”

  “Wait until you meet a Domo. Just being with one is draining, like they’re siphoning off your energy while you’re with them. It feels like they’re taking something from you. We don’t know if that’s intentional or not,” Krish informs him.

  “Something?” BC asks.

  “Don’t listen to those two,” Anita says. “They’re a couple of surprisingly superstitious babies for being supposed scientists.”

  “Wah, wah, wah,” Krish mock cries.

  “Anita likes the Domo, don’t you,” Dells prods her. She glares back at him.

  “She did call them ‘greedy, nasty, bloodsucking, fat, little bastards’,” BC says in her defense.

  “She gets along well with a couple of them,” Dell continues.

  “They seem to warm up to me. I do not like them. At all,” Anita insists.

  “Well, you do see the best in everyone,” Krish quips.

  “How else could I stand to work with you?” Anita shoots back.

  Krish tries to laugh and talk and drink his soda, all at the same time. All he manages is a snort that sends soda shooting in a spray out of his nose. Everyone jumps at the sound, and to avoid the spray.

  “Nice,” Dell admonishes Krish.

  “Did he get you?” Anita asks BC. He looks down to see if he’s been hit Good... no droplets of snot soda here...

  “I’m good,” BC tells her.

  “Sorry,” Krish apologizes. He mops up his mess with some napkins.

  “May I?” Dell asks.

  “Go ‘head,” BC says with his mouth full of tuna sandwich. “Sowry, ma mouf is full.”

  “For all their flaws, the Domo were the first aliens we met,” Dell gets back in his storytelling groove. “We were using their old base. They grew curious as to who was operating on their old property. So they paid us a visit. It did not go well, or smoothly, at first.”

  “Ha! That’s putting it mildly,” Krish says, having recovered from his snort. “They were very... what would you call it... agitated? Annoyed? Pissed off? Put out? They weren’t happy someone was in there. Our presence was not welcome.”

  “And we imprisoned the first Domo who appeared on the base, so we did well right from the start, too,”

  Dell says to him.

  “You imprisoned the first one you met?” BC asks.

  “He looked almost human! And he wouldn’t speak to us. We thought he was a human spy from somewhere local,” Krish says trying to justify their actions. We locked him up, so they sent a bunch more.”

  “They have a planetary base not far from here,” Dell says. “Close enough that reinforcements arrived very quickly. We calmed that situation down, thankfully. And then we began to get to know the Domo. We found out the Domo had been here for a while. The base was quite old. And they’d been on Earth in the past, and blended in,” he tells BC.

  “The Domo are a highly adaptive species,” Dell explains. “We know they were on Earth about three hundred years ago. They’ve admitted as much to us. They adapted while here to look like us, to live among us undetected. They did look very human at one time... except for their mouths,” Dell says.

  “They have vertical smiles,” Krish says, then bursts out laughing.

  “An old joke,” Anita says. She reaches across the table to try to smack Krish. He leans back out of the way.

  “Their mouths move sort of sideways,” Dell explains. Anita sits back down, shooting Krish the evil eye.

  “Are they still around?” BC asks Dell.

  “Oh, they still exist,” Krish speaks first. “They’re just not around here much anymore.”

  “The Project still has dealings with them,” Anita tells BC. “Just not here,” she says, looking around the room to indicate the base they’re in. “Not on the Moon.”

  “Out at the asteroid base?” BC asks.

  “Some. They’ve got another planet we go to most of the time, now, the one I was mentioning. But let’s not get too far ahead,” Dell says. “Back in ‘94 we had just met the Domo. Once we ironed out our differences, we found we could share technology and both profit f
rom it. It turned out we were actually ahead of the Domo is some ways. Our Transpace Drive,” Dell grins, “was entirely new to them.” Dell smiles with pride. “’Never saw anything like it’, they told us. That gave us leverage for negotiating with them.”

  “You ask me, it was a good thing they had a reason to be nice to us, a different reason we were useful to the Domo... other than as a protein source, I mean,” Krish jokes. He looks at his sandwich for emphasis before taking another bite himself.

  BC swallows hard. “They eat us, too?”

  “Krish is exaggerating,” Anita assures BC. “We don’t have actual proof they do anything to us. They’re just unpleasant. And I hate watching their mouths move, it just looks wrong. But that doesn’t make them evil. Greedy, nasty, bloodsucking, fat, little bastards, yes, but not necessarily evil. We can work with them.”

  “A little bit like the UTZ,” BC jokes.

  Everyone laughs.

  “They do drain your energy, though. I’ve felt it myself,” Krish says. “They are kind of like vampires.”

  Dell clears his throat. “That’s where we were when you came back with the food and disturbed everything,” Dell looks down at Krish.

  Krish laughs, “Ooooh, I’m hurt,” he says with sarcasm.

  “Can we move on?” Dell asks them all.

  “I thought you were moving on,” BC says to Dell. BC pops the last corner of his tuna sandwich into his mouth.

  “I’m trying to,” Dell says, sounding all put upon.

  BC is trying to digest more than just his lunch. “Okay, so let’s see. You guys have a secret asteroid base, you’ve met aliens who are like vampires and imprisoned one, pissed them off, negotiated with them by giving them your Transpace drive, adopted their tech to advance your technology beyond what the general public could imagine... that sound right?”

  “Are you taking it all in?” Anita asked him.

  “It’s a lot to absorb,” BC admits. “Hey, could I go to the bathroom?”

  It’ll be good to stretch my legs and think.

  All three of them nod and Anita says, “Sure.”

  “Go out the door and to your left, down the hall, then take another left. The door’s at the end of the hall,”

  Krish tells him.

  BC takes his time. By the time he gets back to the conference room they’ve cleared the table. BC sits back down.

  “Let the briefing continue,” BC says with a flourish.

  Dell cracks a half smile. “Very well. Since we’re through eating, Anita suggested it might be all right to tell you about Doctor Kwan’s theories on the Domo.”

  “There’s more to the Domo?” BC asks.

  “Yes. More we’ve guessed at than they’ve told us. Doctor Kwan spent a great deal of time among the Domo, on their nearby world. He made extensive observations.”

  “He was your spy!” BC figures out.

  “He was a scientist. Scientists observe,” Dell states.

  “It’s what we do,” Krish adds. Dell gives him a look.

  “Just trying to help. Tell him about Kwan!” Krish says, laughing.

  “Kwan’s evidence suggests that when the Domo came to Earth for the first time, in what would have been about the sixteen hundreds, they probably did eat human flesh and drink human blood. In accounts of their travels to other worlds, Kwan found mention of them consuming the local protein sources to adapt to the local species. They take in the planet’s native DNA and assimilate it,” Dell says. “It stands to reason that the way they came to look like us...”

  “...was by eating us. I get it,” BC nods.

  “The Domo, of course, deny this,” Dell says. “They admit to consuming DNA, but insist they can get it, and did get it, from plant life and food animals. Kwan’s studies lead him to believe that was simply impossible. He studied their adaptability, to the extent he was allowed to by the Domo.

  “For the Domo to adapt and become more human, they would have had to have consumed human DNA repeatedly, over a long period of time.”

  BC feels his stomach shift ever so slightly.

  Damn. Vampires and flesh eaters... and bears, oh my.

  “As they no longer need to adapt to look like us, there should be no reason for them to consume our flesh and blood now, even if Kwan’s theory is right,” Dell says, by way of small reassurance.

  “They still drain your energy,” Krish interjects.

  “So, why do you deal with them?” BC asks.

  “We didn’t know any of this, not at the start,” Anita says. “Wanna see a picture?” she asks BC.

  “Sure.”

  “Hold on,” Anita says. She activates some controls in the tabletop in front of her. A three dimensional head appears in front of BC, making him jump.

  Krish chuckles. “Ugly bastards aren’t they?”

  “Nice fangs,” BC observes. “Their mouth does go the wrong way, doesn’t it? Kinda pointy headed. Are they all bald like that?”

  “Yes. None of them have hair,” Dell says. “Not anymore. Some of the first Domo we met did, but they’re long gone.”

  “Ones who’d ‘adapted’ in the past by chowing down on us?” BC asks Dell.

  “Probably,” Dell confirms BC’s deduction. “But you’ve got to understand. After our first misunderstandings, we thought we’d found an ally in the Domo. They helped us go to the stars!”

  “How? You’d developed the Transpace drive,” BC asks.

  “Sure, but that was just the start. The Domo were very nice to The Project, once they realized they weren’t being exposed to the general public. Our Transpace drive was faster than their faster-than-light drive. But their reactors and ship’s systems were far more advanced than ours.

  “We pooled our resources. They helped us soup up our ships, and we helped them travel between their planets faster than they ever had before.”

  “Planets?” BC asks.

  “The Domo control a handful of planets. They run a part of our galactic ‘neighborhood’,” Anita fills BC

  in.

  “They brought some of us from The Project to their ‘homeworld’ as they called it at the time. It turned out it was not their planet of origin, more like a new permanent base. The Project set up an outpost there back in ‘95. Kwan was on the original staff. I myself spent two years on the Domo ‘homeworld’.”

  “You’ve been on another planet, in another solar system?” BC asks.

  “I’ve been to several planets, Mr. Campion. Although, I wouldn’t call them other ‘solar’ systems, that’s our sun’s name, better to call them star systems,” Dell corrects him.

  “I stand corrected,” BC says.

  “The Project built ships with both the Domo drive and our Transpace drive. We use the Domo’s drive to get to a system for the first time. It’s still faster-than-light, after all. And thanks to the Domo, our ships have the shielding needed to withstand those speeds. They taught us how to manipulate gravity fields to create a safe pocket around the ship as we went that fast.

  “Once we got to a place, we could set the coordinates within the Transpace drive to get back there, and jump easily back and forth. And the Domo gave us directions and star charts to find our way there. They helped us get to twenty different worlds. They introduced us to other alien races, more alien looking than the Domo.”

  “Can you understand now why we first warmed up to the Domo?” Dell asks BC.

  “Sure,” BC says. “All the best toys and aliens, too!”

  “You know, though,” Krish cautions, “even though they look a little like us, the Domo are still utterly foreign, completely alien. And totally creepy.”

  “Thank you for your keen insight once again, Doctor,” Dell dresses down Krish, voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “How did you keep all of this a secret?” BC asks.

  “Easy,” Dell explains. “We worked out of the asteroid base. We were on distant worlds. We weren’t here to give away any of our secrets.”

  “But what about the mil
itary,” BC protests. “Didn’t they check up on you?”

  “You’d think so,” admits Dell. “But they were satisfied with the little dribs and drabs of tech we’d dribble out to them. As far as they were concerned, we were just their little R & D labs on the Moon.”

  “As far as they still know,” Anita says, bringing things into the present tense. She locks eyes with BC.

  “That is all they know. Now you know more, much more, than they do.”

  “I’m not UTZ military,” BC insists. “I barely have any authority in the NcC!”

  “You’re an ambassador!” Anita says, slightly raising her voice.

  “By default!” BC answers.

  They don’t need to know about the whole potential “Cardinal” thing…

  “Kids?” Dell cuts them both off. “I think Anita was just trying to let you know just how privileged this information is, Campion.”

  “Believe me. I know! I know. I get it,” BC insists.

  “We’ve never opened up like this to anyone outside of The Project before,” Dell tells him. “Who knows, maybe it’s time to let the rest of humanity know who else is out here in the ‘neighborhood’.”

  “Why now?” BC asks.

  “Because of what I told you when I contacted you,” Anita answers him. “We think an alien race may be responsible for the plague that’s now killing humans on Earth, on Mars, on the Moon and Earth Orbit.”

  “Why would the Domo want to kill us?” BC asks, confused. The others shake their heads.

  “It’s not the Domo,” Anita says. “The Domo introduced us to another race that we think are behind this.”

  “As we traveled with the Domo, we began to notice they seemed to enjoy subjugating other races. Most other races. They were nice enough to us, I guess, especially early on. But every other planet we went to, the Domo were in charge. Other aliens deferred to the Domo. All except for two: The Flaze and The Eldred.”

  “The Flaze and The Eldred?” BC asks.

  “Yes. We met them through the Domo. The Domo and Flaze treat each other as equals. The ones the Domo call the ‘Eldred’ they actually defer to,” Dell says.

  “We’ve only met the Eldred recently,” Anita adds.