by Weston Ochse
“What’s going on?” Olivares asked. “You talking to someone? Thompson? Salinas?”
“Something like them,” I said out loud.
“Switch view to thermal imaging,” Ohirra said. “There are three saucers to your twelve.”
Before I could switch, three space craft appeared fifty feet in front of us and about fifty feet off the ground. They were the same as the one I’d previously seen. Donut shaped and about the size of a house, their skin was constantly moving in circles around the circumference of the machine except for a section on the bottom. Weapons bristled out of the top, while what looked like sensors circled the base.
“Now that’s cool. Cloaking device,” Earl said.
“Ferrofluids,” Alpha corrected as he beamed at the space craft. “But does the same thing.” He chuckled. “Just love all the Star Trek references.”
All three craft set down on the tarmac and were temporarily lost from view.
I thought about dispersing my EXOs but I didn’t want to do anything that might precipitate violence, so I just waited. It wasn’t long before a single Khron rounded a corner from the airfield. He looked a lot like Alpha. He looked like… one of us.
Alpha stepped forward.
I noted that they were about the same height. In fact, they could have been related, grandfather and grandson. The newcomer wore a flat black jump suit with pockets on the arms and legs. He wore the same black metal band around his neck as I’d seen in the Arctic. He carried a case with him.
“Greetings, 3962,” the newcomer said in perfect American English, holding his hand open, palm up.
Alpha mimicked the move and said, “Greetings to you, 3964.”
Then it hit me. They were both clones, only Alpha had been the one to age. I wondered vaguely what happened to 3963. Then the number hit me. It meant that there had been 3964 instances of a Khron watching the status of Earth. To think that far back in time was incredible. They’d been watching Earth before the first man wrote the first word in the first language. I suddenly felt incredibly insignificant.
The newcomer handed the case to Alpha, who then turned to me.
“You need to put these on,” he said, opening the case. Inside were seven black metal bands identical to the one worn by 3964.
I remembered when we postulated that they were slave circlets like the thralls wore in Star Trek episode. Although the newcomer wore one, Alpha didn’t.
“I don’t know what those are,” I said.
“Neural interceptor device. They have three functions once paired with an individual. They provide access to the Neural Net to those who had not been given the spore. They also translate all known Khron languages. And finally, but most importantly, they block Umi takeover.”
“Only those three? Does it also keep track of us?”
“All connections to a planetside Neural Net are logged and geotagged.”
“I don’t think so,” Olivares said. “Looks too much like a slave collar.”
“I assure you that this is nothing of the sort. Your EXOs function as a moveable weapons platform, but are they not capable of providing command and control your location as well? This is a standard concept.”
I wasn’t at all thrilled with the idea of putting some strange alien tech around my neck, not that I wasn’t a believer in all that Alpha had told us with regards to the Khron and the Umi.
“I don’t think we’ll be able to comply,” I said.
Alpha’s face grew serious. “But you have to. The Khron does not allow partner species to co-exist without the wearing of NIDs. The chance that Umi could be using you is too great. The consequences are too dire.”
“Won’t do it,” I said.
The two clones conferred for a full minute. It was clear that Alpha was arguing on our behalf, but the other clone wouldn’t be moved. Finally, Alpha turned back to me.
“Listen, Mason, there’s just no other way. Every single human who is helping the Khron is wearing one.”
“That argument isn’t helping your position,” I said. “That you’ve convinced everyone else to do something possibly detrimental to their health doesn’t make it any more logical for me to do the same thing.”
“If your primary concern is to protect someone against Umi takeover, then those who haven’t been exposed to the spore need not wear it,” Ohirra pointed out. “Neither Earl nor Chance have been exposed to the spore.”
Alpha wiped a hand across his face and shook his head. “I did not anticipate this.” He looked at me imploringly. “I know we don’t really know each other so my word means very little, but this is not something we should be arguing about. The NID is meant to join Khron, to allow them to work together without fear of takeover. It’s not something nefarious.”
I got on private chat with Olivares and Ohirra. “So what do you think?”
“Everything he said makes sense,” Ohirra said.
“I just don’t like putting myself in a position to be controlled,” Olivares said.
“I agree. It’s too much like OMBRA,” I said.
“And look where that got us,” Olivares said.
“So this is where an irresistible force meets an immovable object,” I said. “If we don’t do it, we’re out of the fight. If we do, then we’re placing ourselves at the mercy of the Khron.” I turned to look at Merlin and the doctor and his daughter. “I want to fight.”
Ohirra said, “What if we wear them, but Chance and Earl don’t. Think they’d go for that?”
To Alpha I said, “Okay, here’s our plan. Those of us who were exposed to the spore will wear them. But the two who weren’t, won’t. We’ll pass any and all information to them.”
3964 said something to Alpha, and when Alpha turned I said, “If he wants to say something, why not just say it to us? I know he speaks our language.”
3964 sighed. “How can we trust that you aren’t deceiving us regarding who has been exposed to the spore and who hasn’t?”
“The same way we’re supposed to trust you that nothing nefarious is going on with the NIDs.”
3964 stared at me for a cold minute. Then he nodded his head. “So be it.”
We spent a few moments wrangling our helmets off to get the NIDs around our necks. They were small enough that we could wear them without interference. When I put mine on I felt an immediate connection to something broader, something bigger. I could hear what sounded like a constant buzz just on the edge of hearing. Then it grew louder and louder, becoming an almost painful static. Finally the static bled away and followed by the words, “NID Pairing Successful” in what sounded like a young woman’s voice with an English accent.
I didn’t feel any different. I hoped that I’d made the right decision.
“Can we go?” I asked Alpha, who was now also wearing an NID.
When he nodded, I turned around to say my goodbyes. I gave both Nancy and Paul a warm smile and thanked them for fixing me up. I told Merlin to be safe and that I’d try and come see him when everything was over. We weren’t about to leave Leibl’s armor behind, so Alpha climbed in and with a little guidance was operating it with ease. All of us marched to the tarmac where the three ships hovered just above the ground. Olivares and Chance were set to go on one. Ohirra and Charlemagne would go on the other, and Earl and I would travel in the third along with Alpha. Bravo’s remains would be shipped in the first ship along with 3964.
Standing in front of the ships, I wondered how we were supposed to get inside. Then the side of the ship closest to us slid open and a ramp descended.
We started making our way aboard ship. I was halfway up the ramp when Earl stopped me.
“Sir, I’m not going.”
I paused. “Did you figure out what your sister would have wanted you to do?”
“We’d never planned on being soldiers, you know. We were just kids.”
“But you’re soldiers now,” I corrected.
“Not really. This was all just a game. The suits made us invincible, or so
we thought. Strapping them on felt like a level-capped Pandaran Death Knight From World of Warcraft’s Warlords of Draenor expansion set. There was nothing we couldn’t fight. Then you made us stop being characters in our own first person shooters. You made us be us and kill being us. It became different. I was happy when I was playing Ender’s game, but you made us responsible.” He paused to breathe. “I just can’t be responsible.”
“Maybe that was my mistake, opening your eyes.”
“No, I realize now that there are consequences. I’ve done some things I can’t unsee, that I can’t undo. But I wish I’d never done any of it.”
“That’s how we all feel.”
“But you’re soldiers,” he said. “I’m no soldier. I’m just a kid playing at games, you said so yourself.” He sighed. “My sister would have wanted me to go back to being a kid if I could. Now I have that chance. That chance for things to be normal once more.”
“Things can never be normal, son.”
“They’ll be more normal with Merlin. Plus, he can’t make the journey alone. He needs someone… someone like me.”
I’d given him the opportunity to leave and wasn’t about to take it back, but I had to ask, “So you feel no need to avenge her death?”
“No. No matter who I kill, no matter how many I kill, it won’t bring her back. Revenge is a hollow panacea.”
“Okay, son. You go do what needs to be done.”
He went inside the spacecraft and slid out of his EXO, ran back down the ramp and across the tarmac. I had no doubt Merlin would appreciate the company, especially considering he was taking Sykes with him as well. That Earl was going too actually made me feel better.
Then I stepped into my very first UFO.
Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.
Robert A. Heinlein
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
THE INTERIOR WAS both more and less spacious than I’d imagined, probably because of the extra bulk from three EXOs. The area to the right of the door was filled with metal boxes stacked to the ceiling. The area to the left held a low slung couch. Alpha pressed a pad above the couch and it merged with the wall and disappeared, leaving a flat surface. Alpha had me press my back against the wall and I immediately felt it engage around my suit. I tried to pull away and found that while I could, it wasn’t easy. Probably necessary to keep things in place. Alpha slid beside me, then got out of the EXO and left it parked. I exited my EXO then took a moment to park Earl’s EXO as well.
Alpha invited me to the front where another low slung couch hugged the floor. Before it were a series of controls right out of something I’d seen in countless sci-fi movies, including a holographic display. They were at once familiar and not familiar, but I had no doubt that they controlled the craft. Sitting in a webbed cradle above this was another man, dressed similar to Alpha’s clone. My guess was the pilot.
He turned to greet me. His mouth moved in a strange manner and his words were unrecognizable, but in my brain I heard, Welcome, Earthling, and then he laughed.
I might have laughed as well, but I couldn’t stop looking at his eyes, which were at least three times larger than my own. Add that he didn’t have eyelids, but a nictating membrane like a snake. If it weren’t for the eyes, he’d have looked completely human.
It spoke again. It’s not polite to stare.
I coughed. “Uh, sorry. I just—I didn’t—sorry.” I averted my gaze and glanced at Alpha, who was smiling.
“Our pilot is from what you would call Epsilon Eridani, which is about ten and a half light years from here. His planet is remarkably like yours and mine, except it has a luminosity of less than thirty percent of your star, necessitating the evolutionary characteristic you see here.”
He means to say I have bug eyes.
“I didn’t mean anything of the sort,” Alpha said.
You two need to strap into the crash couch so we can get moving.
Alpha reached down to the couch and pulled at it, stretching a piece around one hip and attaching it back to the couch above the opposite shoulder. Then he did the same on the other side, creating an X across his chest, affixing himself to the couch.
It took several tries, but I managed to do the same, all the while amazed at the stretch and stickiness of the unknown substance that made up the couch.
A sensation of movement suddenly made me dizzy as an oval view screen opened in front of me—correction, a display of some sort. I could just tell that it wasn’t an actual port by the ever so slight out of focus edges. I tried to detect a spin but couldn’t, so I asked Alpha about it.
“Why would you believe we’re spinning?” he asked. Then he nodded. “Ahh, the movies. The Viper is not one of your flying saucers. It does not spin, although the ferrofluids on its outer surface give it that appearance.”
“What’s a ferrofluid?”
“The Viper has three layers of ferrofluid. The layer closest to the skin of the ship is a thick layer of magnetorheological fluid that can stiffened to a solid to protect the Viper from physical damage, such as meteorites and missiles. The middle layer is the thickest, and is a magnetic ionic fluid that actually provides the Viper’s atmospheric propulsion. The top layer, the thinnest, is a ferrofluid made with reflective magnetic nanoparticles which can be tuned to pass light, etc. from one side of the craft to the other to give the ship the appearance of being transparent.
“Ferrofluids themselves use nanoparticles of magnetic material coated in a surfactant to prevent clumping and suspended in a viscous fluid. Magnetorheological fluids use larger particles and so are not permanently suspended in the oil, but give it the property of becoming almost solid in the presence of a strong magnetic field. Finally, Magnetic Ionic Fluids—the basic molecular structure of this fluid has a magnetic component, so the liquid itself responds to the magnetic field like a ferrofluid, not just the nanoparticles suspended in the liquid.
“Atmospheric propulsion is generated by a changing magnetic field that creates what you would call turbine blades of magnetic fluid that project from the skin and appear to move along it in a way to produce propulsion by pushing the air. For stability’s sake, the fluid along the inner surface propels in the opposite direction of that on the outer surface. Both the inner and outer skins do this in opposite directions for stability reasons. We can adjust the blade patterns to gain and reduce speed.”
My eyes were following our dizzying path on the display as Alpha gave the science lesson. I couldn’t understand half of what he said. All I know is it had something to do with magnetic fluids that could be programmed and controlled, which was pretty astonishing. The crash couch hugged me in such a way that I could barely feel the turns and movement. The only way I could really tell anything was by watching the pilot, whose cradle moved left or right depending on the pitch of the ship.
“How fast are we going?” I asked.
“Two thousand miles an hour,” the pilot said.
I could only imagine the string of sonic booms we were leaving behind. The speed was beyond comprehension.
“We will arrive at the destination in thirty-two minutes.”
“Odessa, Texas?”
“Yes. That is our destination.”
I was astonished at the speed. I watched the terrain race by below.
“What’s your name?”
The pilot said, “Me?”
“Yes, please.”
After a moment, he said, “You can call me Jarn.”
“Jarn, can you tell me about what happened on your planet?”
“Before my time,” was all he said, but I waited. After a minute he answered. “The Umi did much the same to your planet as they did to mine. The Home, as we called it, had about a quarter of the ocean water Earth has. On one hand that was a good thing, because far less Umi were being bred and the Khron responders were able to stop the Umi from leaving the planet. But on the other, The Home was twenty-five percent smaller than Earth and our population was far less, especially the
survivors. We hadn’t developed your level of technology either.”
“Then how did you fight the Umi?”
“Fission bombs… slightly more powerful than you used on Japan.”
World War II? That put their technology a good seventy years back. I never thought of other planets being invaded at different times, but of course it made sense. I could only imagine if the Cray had come three thousand years ago. We might never have known.
“So you found out where the Umi were going to be taken off planet?”
“No, we used the fission bombs on everything. Every Cray hive. Every Leviathan we came across. Every instance of the vine that carried the zombie spore. Everything.”
“Everything?” And then it dawned on me what he was saying. Imagine if we’d nuclear-detonated every instance of every hive. Every single major urban area would be so irradiated it would be unlivable. I remembered studying something about a nuclear winter in school, as a possible result of the Cold War idea of mutually assured destruction. The temperature would drop and the sky would be covered with thick layers of ash for decades.
“So your planet…”
“We destroyed it. In destroying the invasion, we destroyed everything else. Less than five percent of our population survived and were removed from The Home. For us, The Home is dead.”
“How long has it been since this happened?”
“Mine was the last planet the Umi attacked before Earth.”
“So you don’t have memories of The Home.”
“I do. We all do. Those of us who survived still remember like it was yesterday.”
Alpha answered for him. “Clones. All of us are clones.”
“You mean there’s not a real one amongst you?”
Alpha frowned. “I take umbrage at that. I’m as real as the Prime Version. The single exception is that I have had experiences that Prime has not.”
I held out a hand. “Wait a moment. You are a clone and have the memories of the original person who was cloned? How is that possible?”
“Look at your HMIDs and the Umi’s AMIDs. Once that level of technology is derived it’s not so difficult to determine a method of downloading consciousness. Everything else after that is just quality control and efficiency.”