by Greg Curtis
Like a man possessed he sprang to his feet screaming, and leapt at the creature. He leapt high guessing that it didn’t look upwards a lot. It wasn’t built to look up. So it had no chance. He saw lots of tentacles raising, going for the weapons or whatever, but it was simply too slow. His dive carried him right over the top of it and he simply reached out with both hands, grabbed the edge of its body and rolled it. It was surprisingly easy as the Mentan was lighter than he’d expected. Lighter than it looked. And it was frightened. Even as he landed David heard a distant electronic screech and knew the translator was trying to interpret the Mentan’s screaming, and failing.
On the floor he turned and watched as the creature slid away from him, spinning upside down, all its tentacles writhing like snakes. But it had no chance he knew. Not till it had stopped and regained some control. Meanwhile all its devices were spilling out all over the deck, as the holsters had no catches, and he knew that that was the chance he’d hoped for. The Mentan had never been designed by nature to be upside down and thus had never prepared for it. And worse for it, while it was screaming in fear it wasn’t ordering its robots to attack. That was the chance he needed.
David gathered up the closest of the Mentan’s tools as quickly as he could, and stuffed them down the front of his jacket. The tight waist band meant they wouldn’t fall out.
Some of them he glanced at as he stuffed, others he had absolutely no idea of what they even looked like as he simply shoved them in, but he gathered them all as quickly as possible. Then his luck ran out, as he saw the creature twenty feet away trying to rise, and he knew he was out of time. Whatever he had gathered was going to have to be it. Like a marine he improvised, trying to cover his theft with drama. He dived for the next nearest implement, a dark box of some sort, and pointed it at the Mentan.
“Stay back! Back or I shoot.” He was fairly sure the box wouldn’t be a weapon. Unless the creature carried at least a dozen guns the odds were surely against it. He also knew that the creature would know exactly what he held. It wasn’t the point. Slowly and awkwardly the creature righted itself and stared at him through half a dozen of its closest eyes, no doubt wondering if the humans truly were the savages the others had thought. And perhaps wondering how to reason with a savage. But even that would work to his advantage. Savages weren’t considered capable of planning so the Mentan wouldn’t realise what he’d done.
“Get him!”
A door opened to one side and a group of floating robots appeared. They were very different to the spider ones, but the same in one key respect. They were armed. David ducked behind a pillar on the other side of the room, certain that a little weapons play would follow. He wasn’t disappointed. The floor all around him suddenly exploded, with steel choosing to become shrapnel on all sides. He hit the deck, trying to avoid getting hit but was not entirely successful and endured the scratches and near misses until they chose to stop. But that was good. The more confusion the robots created, the greater the chance that the Mentan would assume his tools were buried under piles of rubble or destroyed. And things were falling down all around. Even on a steel ship.
David suspected that the robots weren’t really trying to hit him after a few seconds, as the explosions seemed to get further away. They were just pinning him down, awaiting their master’s fury. But the longer they kept shooting the more damage they did, and that worked to his advantage.
When the Mentan’s demand for him to give up finally came it was much more muted than he’d expected, partly because the creature wasn’t really hurt by his rough housing, but largely because it felt itself completely in control again.
“Put the scanner down and move beside your friends.” Even through the translator he could hear the confidence. The creature was certain it had him. He risked raising his head and taking a peak around. The robots were everywhere. They had entered silently en mass, and all his exits were cut off. He took the time to do nothing, forcing the creature to repeat itself. It was risky disobeying it, but it was also in keeping with his being a savage. He desperately needed it to believe that, to never imagine his ruse.
“You’re trying to trick me into giving up the gun. It won’t work.” A scanner huh? He’d guessed that it would be no threat to the creature, just an annoyance. And then if it still intended to abduct him, it would have to try and prove what it was that he held before he could disarm him. Before the stupid barbarian understood it. But for once David had under-estimated the creature. There was a sudden clicking sound immediately above him and something cold and hard pushed its way into his back. A robot had managed to float right over him in the confusion, and even if he had been holding a weapon, he was caught.
David screamed, mainly for a bit of theatre, and flung the device away from him as hard as he could. He made sure to throw it away from the Mentan as well. He heard it crash into a wall and then fall out of sight. When the time came for the creature to try and reclaim its stuff, it would just be another broken, missing or hard to locate item. Hopefully it would chalk the other missing devices up to the spill and random weapons fire.
“Get up.” Knowing there was no choice he did as directed, feeling the cold barrel of the robot weapon pressed firmly into his back all the time. He would not get another chance to escape.
“For your disobedience I suppose you’d expect to be killed. And I suppose if the universe was fair, you would be.” Even through the bland tones of the translator David could tell the creature was fairly spitting with fury. Swearing too from the gaps between translated words. As the others had told him, the advanced races were morally opposed to violence of any kind, and he’d counted on that when he made his move. But moral opposition to violence and anger were running a close contest in this creature. It really wanted to kill him, morality be damned.
“But my intentions have not changed barbarian, although now I worry about leaving you with these others. Your wildness may be too much for them. Nevertheless I appear to have no choice again. You are the father of her child, and I must keep you together, or bear the extra shame of having needlessly broken apart a family.” Which went nowhere near explaining how he would bear the shame of splitting up so many other couples, of whom only one partner was aboard. But David didn’t get the chance to ask that question.
The group of armed spider robots suddenly grabbed his wrists and herded him out of the common room. He didn’t resist. Even when he guessed where they were going. He knew the route along the curving corridors to the lifeboats. The captain had drilled them all in it several times. Others robots carried the rest of the crew behind him and in short order they were all beside the wall full of hatches.
Someone, it wasn’t the Mentan since David couldn’t see him, must have hit the button, and instantly all the metal hatches slid open revealing the tiny little chambers beyond. Chambers that were in fact the insides of the life pods. Each of them was nothing more than a little escape vehicle that could land on a planet and provide a little air and food when they got there.
The spider robots abruptly started picking up the limp bodies of the passengers and crew, and carrying them into the pods, placing them in the seats. And once they were in they strapped them down, exited the vehicles, and slammed the doors behind them. David knew that those hatches wouldn’t open again till they had landed on the planet, marooned.
There was nothing he could do any more to stop them being marooned. He couldn’t stop it from happening to him either. The robots were everywhere, they seemed to have multiplied somewhere along the way, and the floor was slowly being emptied of unconscious bodies. Soon it was his turn and one of the robots roughly shoved him through the hatch and forced him into the seat. It didn’t even give him a chance to do up the seat belts, its hands if they could be called hands, simply lashed out, grabbed the belts and did them up for him.
Then it stepped back, exiting the pod faster than he would have believed possible, and the hatch slid shut. His fate had been sealed.
He knew from his
familiarisation with the ship’s safety features that the pods were completely automatic, and once jettisoned they would guide themselves directly to the nearest safe point, which in their case had probably been decided for them by their captor. And worse still, he couldn’t even see where they were going. The pods were in effect little more than guided steel beach balls. They had no port holes, not much in the way of instrument panels, and nothing to see except steel and a few coloured lights.
At least he was strapped in beside Cyrea. She was moaning softly, clearly the shock of the device was wearing off, and he reached across to her worried. He needn’t have. Her pulse was strong, and at his touch she flinched and slowly started to rouse.
A sudden punch in his guts told him it was too late to do anything more as he knew they had been jettisoned, and he felt his lunch rising as the artificial gravity of the ship deserted them. From this point on he understood their destiny was now out of their hands. But that same movement brought Cyrea all the way back to life, and that was good. It wasn’t so good when she immediately understood their situation.
“We’re in a pod.” He nodded, knowing there was nothing else he could really say. The game was over and they were going down. He just had to hope they weren’t out.
“It’s a one way trip and we’re on our way down to an unknown planet. He says we’ll survive there, but we won’t leave.” Which was a silly thing to say when she’d already heard their captor tell them exactly that.
“Crap!” Cyrea cursed loudly and David couldn’t have agreed more with her, he only wished he could have done something about it. Though maybe, just maybe, he had done enough. But that wasn’t something to discuss just then, not when they were in a mechanical life boat controlled by the Mentan who could well be listening, assuming that the pod had some sort of radio on it.
Instead he just held her hand and waited for nature to help him adapt to zero gravity, before they hit the atmosphere. Then he suspected he might lose his breakfast.
“The others?”
“The same. The robots were loading everyone they could find into the pods.”
“Oh.” She sounded glum and she had good reason to be. And David knew he couldn’t tell her what he’d done. Whether it was good news or bad, the one thing he couldn’t afford was for the Mentan to guess his ruse, and he was sure somehow their captor would be watching them. So instead he had to offer her platitudes. Not that there were many for this sort of situation. Somehow ‘it’ll be all right’ just didn’t seem comforting. Luckily as they sat there waiting, her natural curiosity returned to her.
“What did he mean …?” David calmly told her of the archaeology of his people, and of Cro-Magnon man and Neanderthal man. Despite the fact that the discovery rocked his world and had even left him wondering about the place of religion in it, he was eerily calm, scaring even himself with his self-control. Modern dating suggested perhaps twenty to forty thousand years earlier, Cro Magnon had come on the scene and usurped the original Neanderthals, despite the fact that the older species was larger and had a bigger brain. Now they knew why.
“My guess is that your Mentan friends were somehow responsible for that. They came with a new human or Leinian species, or both, modified it to suit the local environment, and then set it free to play with the locals on Earth. And they must have done the same with the larger primates and perhaps a few other animal species, maybe even an entire ecosystem, as they too share DNA in common with us. In short they were playing God, reworking a whole world to their experiment. Now, they simply don’t want to admit it.” The terrible thing was that of all the scientists he’d met in the most top secret labs over the years, most he would have guessed, would have been perfectly happy to do the same if they could. The Mentan’s ancestors had committed an appalling act, wiping out the future of an entire hominid race to favour their own creation, but still one that was no worse than those of his own people. And the lengths those human scientists had gone to to cover up their crimes if and when they’d been found out he was painfully aware of. After all that had been a part of his role. So if the Mentan was anything like them and had superior technology, what would he do? What could he do? He didn’t want to know.
“It could be the other way. Thirty three thousand years ago, the modern Leinian was born, and like Cro-Magnon he dominated his world, usurping all competitors. Maybe neither of our people is from our own worlds.” It was a disturbing thought since it meant neither of them truly knew where their races belonged. Was the Earth mankind’s home, or had the garden of Eden been somewhere else entirely? Were men actually aliens? It was something he and all his people, had never questioned. It also meant that there could be other human Leinian races out there, still waiting to be discovered. But there were more important things for David to worry about.
“What I don’t get is why they’re so worried about us discovering it? And what use is it getting us out of the way? Sure some of the proof may now be missing in action, but all your people have to do is a few evolutionary genetic analyses and the truth will come falling into their laps.”
“The why is easy. It’s politics. Of the five space faring races, the Mentans and the Floyd are the oldest, both have been travelling through the galaxy for easily fifty thousand years. But their technologies and societies have become stagnant with very little progress being made for thousands of years. The three younger races are catching up their technology fast so that today there’s very little difference. They have an edge, but not an insurmountable one. And if any two of the younger races joined forces, they could overwhelm either of the elders, or both, one after another.”
“War’s very unlikely of course. None of the five are particularly warlike. The aggressive races seem to kill themselves off early, long before they reach space flight. But the pecking order in the sector is still based on power. As a result the elder races often choose the better systems for their people, trade is often heavily weighted in their favour, and usually they decide the space law for the sector.”
“The Mentans in particular pride themselves on their ethics and as such they dominate the courts, denying the other races many opportunities to exploit the sector, even seemingly harmless ones. Interfering with another sentient culture for example, is a strict no no, which all agree on. However, the Mentans have interpreted that to mean that even colonizing or mining on remote continents of worlds that have primitive aborigines who one day might develop space travel is prohibited. Not all are so happy about that. This is the first evidence that the Mentans themselves have been less than squeaky clean, and it will undermine what they say at Council. Every word they say, every law they dictate, every value they trumpet, will be set against this.”
“At the very least it would be a major slap in the face for them. But then consider that their interference has been instrumental in creating one of the other foremost space faring races, and maybe a second in a few short years. My people won’t accept that, no more I suspect will yours. To find out that we were bred like lab rats is humiliating, and we will have no choice but to demand redress.”
“Also, we need to know if there were any others of our people created. He did say you weren’t Leinian and I’m not human. The logical answer is that we’re both of yet another race. We may well have more brother and sister races. The other younger races themselves will be wondering whether they too were the result of Mentan experiments. They will demand to see the records, and rightly so. The Floyd meantime will take it as evidence that they are the top of the pecking order, and they will rub that in for centuries.”
“If the Mentans have been playing god as it were, the resultant chaos will change the balance of power in the sector. It could very well tear the treaties apart and leave the galaxy wide open. And it will also force them to open their history books, releasing more of their highly secret technology to the younger races in the process.”
“But it all happened at least thirty thousand years ago.” That was what David truly couldn’t get. It was s
imply such a huge length of time to be worried about. No one who had been alive then was still living. Not even anyone who had met them. And it was a natural principle of law that people weren’t responsible for the crimes of their parents. Cyrea just shrugged, and while he still couldn’t even begin to grasp the length of time involved, he gathered it was unimportant. That they had done it was all that mattered. Which led him back to the other thought that had been pestering him.
“What I don’t get is what he plans to do about the Earth? With apparently three babies on the way now, and since we’ve started a trend more are probably to come, how does he plan on stopping them all? He can’t just keep kidnapping every transport that leaves Earth, surely.” Unspoken in which was his very dark thought that the creature had serious plans for the Earth. Ones that would prevent any more babies being born, permanently.