Terra

by Robert Turnbull

  “Sorry,” she laughed “we coated ourselves with dust constantly hoping to keep off the sun. While we could sweat, I fear that we have caked a few layers of mud on ourselves.” She stepped away from the stream that was so small that when she laid in it, she formed a dam. Finally clear of mud and freshly washed hair, Meg was stunned by her beauty. She had washed her clothes and now wore wet jeans and short-sleeved blouse.

  “You could have been a model.” Meg muttered as she walked up to her.

  There was a pained look about her as she muttered back “I was worse.” However as the men walked around a large clump of sagebrush, she smiled and whatever she was about to say, passed.

  Ready to push the chopper into the small hangar for the night Gil motioned the returning couples to give them a hand. Now clean Izzy stared at the woman with a bewildered gaze, but quickly looked at the tall nice looking man that accompanied them. He had shaved and was a striking man that drew everyone’s attention. His looks were as if some chiseled Greek hero had come to life and now walked among them. As they stopped he smiled and nodded.

  “I am so sorry my friends, I forgot to introduce myself and my companion here.”

  Sue smiled and blurted out “His name’s Joep.” Everyone smiled and nodded back as Izzy stood and cocked her head.

  “Joep? That’s a funny name, you aren’t from around here are you?”

  “He’s from back east guys.” the woman muttered as she pulled out an old worn photograph “My name is Susan…Sue. I’ve been looking for my little sister and my mother for…”

  Izzy flew into Sue’s body and threw her arms around her “I have a picture just like that!” she cried as she pulled her old worn picture out of her pocket…a picture of their mother holding a four year old on her hip, and Sue standing next to them. Izzy blurted out to the others as tears streamed down her cheeks “It was taken the day before sissy…Sue…left.” they hugged each other tightly. So long in the making and so long searching, they just stood there holding each other as the rest quietly pushed the chopper into the hangar.

  Finally prodded to come in before it got dark, the hangar was secured and the group settled in for the night, and a lot of catching up to do.

  They had the usual dinner of MREs and water, but instead of the usual ‘what are we going to do next’ conversation, Joep threw them all a curve.

  “My friends…Susan, my friendly companion of all these months…I haven’t been completely honest with you. I told Sue that I had come from back east which is true, but the truth is…that it is where I landed actually.”

  Izzy smiled “You’re from Europe?”

  Joep chuckled which was strange to Sue as he rarely smiled or joked around in the many months that she’d had known him.

  “Europe, no young lady, I am not.” he settled back against some old tarps and empty crates.

  Let me start with a little about where I come from.” he sighed as the slight smile vanished “It is a place of beauty and peace…or at least was. Our scientists found some old wormhole technology records. Apparently a wormhole had opened near our planet one hundred and ninety some odd years before. The readings they had taken gave them a lot of information, but it was considered too dangerous to try to use at the time. Jump ahead nearly two hundred years and we had become over populated to the point that our limited space travel wasn’t good enough to travel outside of our own solar system. We had seven colonies on other planets, moons, and satellites in our solar system, but interplanetary travel was deemed impossible in the time they estimated we had left before our ecosystem collapsed. So they pulled out the old records and studied them. The old wormhole was weak and didn’t last long, but one of our spaceships was close enough to garner data from it before it collapsed and…”

  Gil groaned “But I’ll bet the probe they retrieved helped immensely.” Everyone looked at Gil with shocked expressions, especially Izzy.

  “Gil? You heard this story before?” the astute fourteen year old asked.

  “A recording…” he frowned “Jesus Christ, Joep you’re from the planet Dr. Rand headed the wormhole to.”

  Joep chuckled and nearly choked doing so “Planet, yes, but not aimed for…no.” he looked around the small group and sighed “Your doctor and his people made one small miscalculation on gravitational pull. You see my friends his wormhole looped around a black hole’s gravitational field and swung back to Earth, one hundred and ninety years into the future.”

  “BULLSHIT!” Sarge sputtered and looked questionably at Gil.

  “What little I know about shit like that Sarge, it is conceivable. Wormholes are thought to move through time and space, but…” his gaze drifted back to Joep.

  “It did, and from what I read our scientists determined a general theory about the year. Of course that wasn’t of import at that time so they corrected the math, and using the data from the probe gathered from the new wormhole…” he smiled “to the world in which it was originally intended; a world we knew of, but had not the technology to reach. Even in my time, traveling to the other side of the Milky Way was out of the question.”

  “I’d like to have thought in almost two hundred years we would have progressed more scientifically.” Gil muttered thoughtfully.

  “History shows that we turned our science inward. We colonized the oceans of the world, counteracted global warming, food production so everyone could have food, and cured most diseases.”

  “Sounds beautiful.” Meg responded all most dream-like.

  “I guess it was, but nothing ever was done about population. Without wars or disease, we basically sentenced our race to a slow death. So the portal was created near a world in a solar system the people in this time called Zed. The problem was it was inhabited by a race far more advanced than we. They intercepted our probe and welcomed us, showed us around, told us they would help as they had far more advanced wormhole technology, or portals as they called them.” Joep’s face tightened in a horrible frown “One of our scientists that had been working on their languages, they had used a kind of electronic translator to that point, was in their libraries pouring though volumes of their works…and stumbled across a few things. The first was records of war after war with other races. When our people asked about them, the Orians said that they had been attacked first and nearly destroyed, but they designed and built the things you call grinders in factories the size of the state of Kansas. From test tube to a genetically created umbilical sac they moved along a two hundred mile assembly line, the sac was popped and the fully grown grinder popped out and dropped into a portal that opened onto the enemy planet.”

  “One damned line? They should have been easy to kill.” Izzy sputtered.

  “The Orians had two thousand of these assembly lines and they all opened portals in different places and dropped grinders all over the world that was being attacked by the Orians, all two thousand line at once. Each assembly line dropped grinders five or six times a day and the portals moved slightly with each drop. So you see thousands of grinders would drop within a hundred mile radius, the next drop might be hundreds of miles away, or thousands. They appeared on our world, would pack together and kill everything and then move on. Seems once hundreds of square miles were cleared of the majority of human life, they’d split up in pairs so they didn’t encroach on the other’s hunting areas. There was plenty of game or domestic animals for them to survive…” he looked oddly at the rest “seems that they knew to attack humans, but not what was soon going to be their main food source…the animals.”

  Izzy looked at Gil and snorted “Oh, not so easy to spot and kill, Joep? So how’d we get attacked? I mean in this time?”

  “Good question Iz…” Sarge blurted out “and what the hell do you have to do with all this?”

  Joep nodded “Fair questions guys...and I shall try my best to make you understand. As I said the first thing was the war after war, the second thing was they were so curious where we, our planet, was located. They pretended to understand our
reluctance as our races had just met.” he sighed “And then two of our people came back through the wormhole and shouted for it to be closed and never reopened.”

  Joep arose up and began pacing “Well somehow, maybe from those that didn’t make it back, well…they figured out where we were. I mean the records show we detected their planet way back in this time, so it is safe to assume that with a little scanning, they figured out our location. The contact was almost forgotten about until another portal opened right in our atmosphere and a small probe came through. Our scientists figured out it was still from this time.”

  “Those portals as you call them were only a couple years apart.” Gil interjected.

  “A few hundred years apart in the future.” Joep informed them “I think from the records that the Orians might have had wormhole detectors and perhaps that is how they found us. At least that was one of the theories floating around.”

  “And the grinders started coming?” Sue asked.

  “No, not for hundreds of years later. We had sent ships to Alpha Centauri, our closest star in hopes of settling there, the round trip took a little over eighty something years so we managed to save some people before the grinders started dropping out of thin air. We too had developed portal warnings and they came so fast and furious we couldn’t keep up with them all. We were devastated, nearly wiped out when we got an alert…a huge one. When what was left of our forces arrived they found a man setting up a portal, he was human and not Orian…the records contained details of them and this was not an Orian.” Joep chuckled softly and almost warmly.

  “From our time?” Gil asked.

  “He was. Of course our people over reacted and tried to destroy the portal generator and something happened…our scientists…well, weren’t sure what happened, but the enemy portals stopped opening.”

  “Yeah they came here.” Sarge grunted “way to go Joep.”

  “They did and once our scientists figured that much out, they tried to find a way to stop that as well as take care of future threats.”

  Sue looked at the man she had been traveling with for nearly a year “You’re the solution?”

  Joep chuckled “Me? As Sarge here would say, aw hell no!” he grinned “But I may have a way to do both if I can get into this top secret lab of yours Gil.”

  “Ok, let me say one thing Joep, you don’t sound like a scientist of any kind, how the hell are you going to stop an invasion?”

  Joep shrugged “I was given a crash course and fed the same formulas over and over again so I could never forget. I was given the short sword you see that I carry, and trust me, my people used valuable materials to make it…” he grinned “but it will cleave a grinder in two with one good swing.”

  “I SAW HIM…do it.” Sue lowered her voice “Many times he’s gotten us out of a pickle with the blade.”

  Gil nodded “Back to your story…why you?”

  “Because I have no one any longer. My dad and mother met in the hospital after he was wounded and I knew little of him. He never really completely healed and died about two years later. My mom raised me, she was one of the few scientists left and our underground complex barely got by with our artificial sunlight and hydroponic gardens. She taught me everything, my other dad, the only one I ever knew, was a soldier and taught me how to survive.” he sighed as he paused to reflect. “I think mom trained me from birth to carry out this mission knowing full well that if I succeed, I most likely cease to exist.”

  “That’s horrible!” Izzy shouted.

  “That’s the war for survival Izzy.” Sarge replied in a not too kind tone “Look Iz, Joep knows this, so does Gil, we have to fight to win. Not for us to live, but so humans as a race can win. Here and now, the future, survival is the same thing.”

  Gil looked at Joep, who in return was looking strangely at Gil’s blue uniform. “Joep? Something bothering you?”

  “Why are you not called Gilw?” he muttered as he pointed to Gil’s name tag.

  Izzy giggled girlishly “Oooo Gilwa” making sort of a whooshing sound after the ‘w’.

  Gil looked down to his name tag, slowly up toward Joep…and then quickly back to his name tag “Holy Shit!” he looked quickly to the stranger from the future “How’d you get your name?”

  “My mother? You see, she said that my father never could talk and had little used of his hands. Oh, mother loved dad so much, but they could never talk, he was always in and out of the medical facility. One surgery after another for the two years that he lived, but toward the end he had some quality of life, they fell in love and married. He died, we had to move to another scientific complex and all before they named me. My mother called me Axili, but I found dad’s old uniform years later and demanded that I be called by my father’s name Joep…like on your name tag.”

  Gil smiled and motioned for Joep to sit next to him. As he sat Gil reached out and shook his hand “I knew your father Joep his name was Joe Parker…Joe P is always put on our name tags. First name and the first initial of the last name. The P is for Parker, so if you are to take your dad’s name…” he smiled as he shook his hand “Welcome to the twenty-first century Joseph Parker…junior.

  Tears streamed down Joe’s cheeks as he covered his face with his hands, buried his face in Gils shoulder, and sobbed. The man from the future finally knew his real name.

  Chapter 15.

  Joe and Gil spent most of the night talking about Joe’s father, his friendship with Gil, and the times they had together. Joe Jr. told Gil of his world, the world that his dad had fallen into. However after a few hours’ sleep they picked up again and one by one the others slowly awoke and joined in as Joe began pretty much where he had left off.

  “Even though your wormholes were only years apart, they were centuries apart in the future. The first portal gave scientists information they needed to create wormholes, recalculate, and then decide against using it and they buried the technology. The second spelled our downfall and the invasion.” he sighed softly “The last one sent my dad into my world, into a world that had been in the throes of invasion…let me rephrase that, in the throes of annihilation. We don’t believe the Orians ever intended to invade Earth, just eliminate our race as they had done to others ever since their very first encounter with a new race of beings. They destroy everyone before there is a chance of invasion…from what I gathered they are a powerful race of paranoid beings.”

  “And they just drop those things in a wormhole? They can make them that easily?” Sarge mostly snorted his questions at their contempt for life.

  “Portals Sarge, wormholes are natural, portals are created using science…but yes. You see the Orians, until that first contact and invasion, had never seen war. Their science was stunning from what little had been written about it, and it was turned on us out of fear. Early scientists tried everything; viruses, chemicals, you name it they tried it. We on the other hand were fighting to survive what generations had left us; pollution, over population, and deforestation. All our science had been turned toward saving our world.” he frowned and let out a huge exasperated exhale “So when we closed the portal and got hit with the grinders dropping out of portals all over the world and nothing working well enough to kill them in mass, we died by the billions. Sure someone found this alloy that cleaves them easily enough, but it is an extremely rare element that binds the alloy, thus, much too rare to be of use for main defenses.

  Of course over the decades they never stopped, by the time dad fell into our world we had created the swarmers to attack the things you call grinders.”

  “Your people created those monsters?” Megan nearly shouted as she stood and then slowly sat as Sarge calmed her down “For God’s sake why?”

  “To kill grinders Meg. From what mom told me they genetically engineered wasps and instilled an instinct to see grinders as the enemy and food. You see all of those living in my time had one certain marker that allowed our scientists to more or less be invisible to the swarms. It was a last ditch e
ffort and of course failed as swarmers only flew and hunted during the day, and only found grinders that were not well hidden.” he chuckled “That and the fact that they ooze a form of liquid methane and burst into flames if they come any fire didn’t them survive, one of the side effects of the bio-engineering them.”

  Gil nodded wryly “All for naught I assume, as they wound up here.”

  Joe nodded in agreement “Yes. Guys, look, when dad came and activated his portal…mom said it was set up so one man could open it and set it up, it was mostly automatic. Dad did what he was sent to do and what you all couldn’t know is that what you called a wormhole actually triggered some unknown event that began sending both grinders and swarmers in your present. Mom said they tried for years to stop or turn it off, but everything failed. Then just before she died she came up with a plan.”

  “Use our old equations, tweak it and send someone back to this time and shut it down.” Gil surmised correctly.

  Joe nodded “You see they thought about blowing it up, but once my father came through, the grinders and the portals stopped.”

  “Yeah, they came here…to our time.” Meg snorted.

  “Sadly, yes. Of course at the time we didn’t know it at the time and by the time mom and her team figured that much out the old portal was forgotten by most. We rarely left the bunkers that had been built…and your portal was so far away where we had fled to. When mom’s team finally went to check if it still existed, they found greatly diminished grinder populations. When they reported back to say they had seen several grinders and swarms vanish into thin air…”

  Gil nodded “And that’s what gave your mother pause to figure out why and where?”

  “It was. Something triggered not just the arriving grinders to drop into our past, but each time they did they took something similar with them. A grinder appeared, and then just a quickly vanished and so would any grinders or swarms within a mile or two.”