»Bull’s-eye!« screamed Davis.
The Globuster looked like it didn’t understand what had happened to it; then it fell on its side with splayed arms and legs.
Ivanova watched the creature’s body slowly change color, as it was covered by ice-crystals. Its protective shield was gone!
Tanomo breathed heavily and collapsed.
Davis ran to the kneeling commander, still clutching the Globusterfist. He put his hand on her shoulder. They both stared in silence at the dead Globuster.
»You did it!«
She shook his arm off her shoulder, unsteadily stood up and then slowly went over to the dead creature. Maintaining a safe distance from the Globuster, she studied the damage she had caused.
»The grenade didn’t kill it. It just damaged something the Globuster wore on its body. Maybe it was part of its life-support equipment. Look at this, over here, Lai. What’s this?«
Lai joined the two and stared at the dead being. The specialist obviously had problems maintaining his self-control but did his best to analyze the situation.
»It looks like it had several implants; see the bulges under its skin. Your grenade destroyed an implant under the skin exactly above its ribcage or whatever it is.«
Ivanova turned around, facing Major Davis.
»How much longer do we have, Major?«
Davis shrugged.
»What difference does it make? We’ll be dead in a few minutes anyway – we won’t feel much, I can guarantee you that.«
Silently they surrounded the dead creature, whose broken, crystalline eyes stared into the darkness of space above Quaoar.
»What was its mission? Why was it so hostile?« asked Ivanova, feeling strangely moved. She seemed depressed. »We could have captured it, instead of killing it.«
Davis frowned.
»What’s the problem, Commander? Your actions saved our lives. The Globuster sure didn’t seem at all interested in a peaceful contact.«
Ivanova shook her head.
»It was an intelligent creature. Aggressive and frightening, but it was an intelligent lifeform.«
Tanomo looked around.
»It’s a mystery how this creature could have survived on its own out here.«
»How do you know if it’s really dead?« asked Necolett, uncertain. »Anything so alien …«
To demonstrate, Pi approached the stiff body.
»It’s dead. Look at it. The grenade damaged this particular implant on its chest.« He pointed where the destroyed device had torn open the Globuster’s chest.
»This was probably the defense shield generator. When the shield collapsed, the creature was suddenly unprotected from a space environment. Not even a Globuster can survive that.«
Davis avoided looking at his watch and he knew that the others also felt the time slipping away. All this conversation distracted them from the inevitable.
How much longer? Three, perhaps four minutes? he thought.
Unexpectedly, a bright light from above appeared and threw long shadows on the ground. It took a moment for Davis to realize it wasn’t the flash of an explosion.
»What’s that?« yelled Lai in panic. »Another Globustership?«
»No!« Davis yelled back. »Gonzales with her Hawk! She made it and wasn’t shot down!«
Then they heard the voice of the specialist in their radio receivers.
»Did you guys down there call for a cab?«
»Gonzales … girl!« Davis screamed, trembling into his helmet microphone. »Get down here, fast! Take off as soon as we’re inside the Hawk! The bombs can go off at any moment.«
»¡Dios mio!« she swore and forced the Hawk down. She landed hard, opening the airlocks. Ivanova’s team ran for their lives and literally flew into the open airlocks. The last one in was Major Davis, yelling while he threw a last glance at the Globuster base, »Move, Gonzales. Get the fuck out of here, now!«
The Hawk jumped into the dark sky and quickly gained altitude. Davis and the team were thrown around inside the Hawk.
»Gonzales! Forget fleet regulations! Don’t worry about us! Just get us all out of here!«
The Hawk accelerated at full speed. Ivanova collided with a cargo container, but she still managed to produce a grim smile.
»Distance 10,000 kilometers and increasing!« Gonzales announced over the intercom when a flash appeared on Quaoar’s surface.
As planned, all ten warheads detonated simultaneously. The gigantic fireball they created broke through the surface, instantly vaporizing the Globustercave.
Davis turned his head away from the blinding blasts, which he had watched through the cargo bay’s window.
»My God!« he whispered, as the planetoid lit up like a small sun.
»That’s it for the Globuster installation. Took out the Globustership too,« remarked Lai in a hard voice.
»Rest in peace,« Ivanova commented dryly and buried her face in her hands.
»I’m registering strong explosions from deep inside the planetoid!« announced Gonzales in a frightened voice. »The underground installations are exploding in a chain reaction! The entire planetoid is breaking apart!«
Davis squinted and saw brightly-lit cracks develop all over the planetoid’s surface.
»The planetary propulsion system is blowing up!« yelled Davis. »It’s destroying the whole planetoid! Gonzales quit dawdling! We have to get as far away as possible!«
A second, more powerful explosion shook the planetoid. A ring-like shockwave quickly expanded from Quaoar like the ripples caused by a rock thrown into a still pond. Davis watched the planetoid slowly break apart.
»What did we do?« asked Davis.
Ivanova pushed Davis away from the small window to see for herself.
»Our job, Major Davis, we did our job. We just saved Triton!«
Gigantic pieces of Quaoar’s surface, some many kilometers in diameter, were blasted into space. Then a terrible blow hit the Hawk and everything went dark.
Dead tired
Donald Day stood in front of the command display. His hands trembled slightly. He had ordered the Ryan and the Shenzhou, as well as the rest of the evacuation fleet, to Neptune’s night side a couple of hours ago. Now he and David Morgenstern stood alone in the command central and looked at the rapidly approaching fragments of the former planetoid Quaoar.
Day had received no news from Maya Ivanova, Davis and the rest of the team. The commander feared the Hawk hadn’t escaped the bursting planetoid.
Triton’s night side was bombarded with lots of debris fragments of every size.
Day was worried. One fragment four kilometers in diameter had entered the Neptune system and was going to collide with the gas planet.
This fragment had just missed Triton and was now headed directly toward Neptune’s blue atmosphere.
The gas giant’s dense upper atmosphere was ripped asunder by the fragment’s impact. Triton’s data gathering station registered a fireball larger than Earth.
Day watched the gas giant’s atmosphere rip apart and then change color from the impact.
»Ryan is reporting strong shockwaves within Neptune’s atmosphere,« whispered Morgenstern, »despite its size, the fragment has burnt up in Neptune’s atmosphere. It didn’t even reach the surface. Incredible!«
Day closed his eyes.
»We’ve made it, Morgenstern. Our people have saved the base!«
He slumped back into his seat. The stress of the past few days had left its marks.
»Send a rescue mission as soon as possible. The Hawk may be damaged – our people need help,« he commanded. God, he felt tired. He let his head rest against the back of the head rest and promptly fell asleep.
Rescued
Twenty-four hours later
Report from Triton Hawk 4 pilot:
Triton Hawk 4 discovered one of the Shenzhou's Hawk rescue modules with six souls aboard drifting near Quaoar’s former location. These people survived with dwindling oxygen supplies, under extremely c
ramped conditions. Maya Ivanova, Bill Davis, Lai Pi, Banoma Tanomo, Robert Necolett and Anna Gonzales have all been recovered alive and well. Presently everyone is en route to Triton Base.
3 - Scorge
Written by Thomas Rabenstein
Shish
Agua City, with three million inhabitants, is a dynamic metropolis. The capital of the Europe Canton and cultural center of the so-called old world. Its architecture is radical but aesthetically pleasing, with an innovative infrastructure and every comfort its people could ask for. Did I forget anything important? Ah yes! The city is located on the ocean floor, almost thirty nautical miles off Crete. Do I like it here? Of course! The bottom of the Mediterranean Sea is my home. Life on the continent? What a quaint concept.
Toiber Arkroid recalled the answers he had supplied at the interview for his new job as Director of the Department of Extraterrestrial Activities. They had asked him all manner of very surprising questions before they decided to appoint him to the newly established post. Even now, the questions seemed strange.
Do you look at this post as a job with set responsibilities or something more creative? he had been asked.
Arkroid smiled wryly when he recalled the interview. At that time, he could not have guessed what the Fates would reveal.
The people responsible for the Department of Extraterrestrial Activities, or DEA, hadn’t been able to define exactly what was expected of him. Now his job had placed him at the center of a veritable whirlwind.
Two months ago, people had still smiled pityingly when he introduced himself. Today he was being bombarded with nervous questions. Everybody looked to him to have all the answers.
How quickly events had changed his life!
The Merinian pored absently through the data that had accumulated since the encounter with the Globuster. The mass of data was overwhelming, nearly more than he could comprehend, let alone assess. He had no answers for the Human race’s questions!
About one hundred probable Globuster outposts were known so far, all located in the Kuiper Belt and positioned in such a way that they entirely surrounded the Solar System. It was still likely that there were even more such bases than had been discovered.
Why were they there? What did they want? He was damned if he knew. Nobody knew!
Arkroid had enough data about the Globusters’ mental abilities to be the resident expert at any conference, but about their motivation, their origin, he knew – nothing!
Everything they knew about the technological level of the Globusters was sketchy, except for one thing: they were far superior to Humanity!
Well, we’ve made some progress, thought Arkroid as he navigated the neuronal computer’s interface via mind controlled menus. Mind controlled lists were the latest in global technology, enabling him to access databases at the speed of thought using several receptor fields, located on a bulge-like rim. Formed like an oval-shaped cape, it surrounded parts of his forehead as well as the majority of the rest of his head. The receptors sent strong thought impulses to a sub-neuronal interface and translated the thoughts into commands and directives, used by the neuronal mainframe.
Small steps; but the results they hinted at were astounding!
Arkroid’s office was linked to the largest neuronal computer on Earth via a secure interface.
Access to this system was allowed only to the highest levels of government. Since the Globuster crisis, Toiber Arkroid was among them. Red tape had been sliced away with unprecedented haste. He received anything he needed to make his work possible.
During his research and dialogues with the computer over the last several days, Toiber Arkroid had gained new and deeper insight into Human history. Tales of extraterrestrial sightings on Earth throughout the centuries took on new meaning. He found far more than he had expected.
More than I can shake a stick at! he thought to himself.
The Solar Union’s archives and databases contained thousands of articles about UFO sightings and abductions by aliens. UFO’s, once called airships, Foo Fighters, and Flying Saucers were at times responsible for worldwide hysteria. Most of these sightings had been written off as fairy tales, hoaxes, photographic fakes, and manipulations or just plain fantasy.
Beneath all of this were some sightings that couldn’t be explained away and still today gave researchers headaches.
Until now at least, Arkroid thought tensely.
The unsolved cases were exactly what Arkroid was looking for. So far, he had put aside ten reports which in his mind contained real evidence of encounters with Gobusterships.
Arkroid shook his head and buried his head in his hands. He massaged his temples and tried to overcome his fatigue after hours of research at the computer.
According to the data, the Globusters had been active for at least one-hundred and fifty years, probably longer! The Globusters pursued a long-range plan, one that couldn’t be explained by the term ‘Invasion.’
There’s more to it! We never knew they were there! If they wanted to conquer us they could have attacked a couple of hundred years ago, when we didn’t even have nuclear weapons or space travel. They’ve appeared over the Earth for years and just watched us! He ran the same thoughts through his mind over and over. Now we’ve discovered that the Globusters have maneuvered and aligned about one hundred Kuiper Belt objects –The time and the energy requirements for such a project were almost unimaginable. No one had any sensible idea why those terrifying creatures had done this. The joker who said "because they could" is as reasonable as any other theory. As to how, at least we know from Quaoar the Busters used a large planetary propulsion system, which is radioactive debris now. We’ll learn nothing more there.
Was the propulsion engine designed, he wondered, solely to change the planetoid’s orbit or had Quaoar originally been some sort of planetary spaceship that brought the ‘busters to the Solar System?
Then there were the one hundred objects, orbits all synchronized with each other, tightly surrounding the Solar System in a cocoon-like sphere! Unbelievable!
It would take at least ten thousand years, perhaps longer, according to our best estimates! At least using any technology, we can imagine, but then we have no knowledge how far ahead of us the ‘busters may be. Preliminary data suggests that this particular celestial body had originated somewhere else and orbited a sun with higher solar radiation. Maybe it was a stray, caught by our solar system on its galactic journey, maybe not. For all we know the ‘busters captured it and moved it into our system. Why, though? Or is pushing a planet their usual means of traveling between stars? Arkroid closed the search menus via mental instruction and shut down his terminal. He wasn’t going to find answers there, at least not today.
Before the encounter with the Globuster on Quaoar, Arkroid, and his department had always been considered a necessary evil, and always threatened by budget cuts. Now he was the world’s foremost authority. Union parliamentary committees contacted him on a daily basis and wanted answers; even Solar Fleet Headquarters had opened its gates for him – a place notorious for absolute secrecy. His appointment book was filled with meetings, seminars and secret conferences with the military.
How things have changed! he thought for the nth time.
Arkroid’s specialists’ success on Quaoar was a turning point. He and his department had suddenly become important to the media, the government, the fleet …
And he hated to tell them, he knew as much about the situation as they did.
His appointment book for today listed a meeting on the island of Crete.
Lost in thought, he got up from behind his desk and opened by remote control the big steel shutters which protected the windows of his house. Arkroid wanted to take a last look at the underwater world of his garden before he left for the surface.
As the shutters slowly moved to the side, he could hear clumsy steps behind him. He turned around quickly.
»Hi there, Cutie, are you already awake?«
Arkroid’s daughter showed
him a smile which made his heart melt like butter.
»Shish!« she just said.
The proud father smiled. He knew exactly what she wanted. She loved the ocean and wanted to watch the underwater creatures as they swam by the window.
Arkroid lifted his daughter on his arm and kissed her on the cheek.
»Let’s see if the dolphins are here again!«
A female dolphin had been swimming in the neighborhood with her cub for over a week now. It almost looked as if the animals were seeking Human companionship. They were without doubt intelligent beings.
As soon as the shutters had fully opened, Magda produced a gleaming smile and pointed with her fingers into the ocean.
»Sh-ish!« she said again.
Toiber laughed.
»Yes, my darling, there are many fish out there, and your friends are also here again, but dolphins are mammals, not fish.«
Both dolphins swam gracefully up and down in front of the big window and then disappeared with powerful swimming movements.
A bit farther away, a big squid pulsated in different colors and tried to adapt to its surroundings. A stupid act by the cephalopod, because it had settled on one of the many underwater advertising signs.
Toiber laughed and pressed his little daughter firmly to his chest. She, like him, was born in a submarine city and could call herself: Merinian.
Many people were born and raised in these new underwater abodes and were proud to be called Merinians. Dangerous UV-radiation couldn’t harm them and the underwater worlds provided plenty of opportunities for everyone’s enjoyment. There was a whole universe here to explore.
Suddenly a shadow fell over the window and Toiber Arkroid flinched. Even the squid pulled back into a small niche.
»This is Arkroid. A Great White is lurking outside again,« he sent a warning to the authorities via his wrist communicator unit. »Send the police, chase the shark out of town and activate the shark barrier! The colorful ads seem to attract them,« he explained to the city official, adding with a sigh, »as well as mar the beauty of the underwater vista. I really wish we could get rid of them!« His daughter just stared.
NEBULAR Collection 1 - The Triton Base: Episodes 1 - 5 Page 15