by gerald hall
“That may be so. But, we do also have plans on leaving the jihadists a ‘parting gift’ that has the potential of gutting the upper echelon of their leadership, Ma’am.” Secretary Hornsby replied before beginning to detail the operation.
There were more than few raised eyebrows at the desperate plan that several senior Alliance officers had developed.
“There is no way that we are going to be able to do this without killing thousands more of our own people at the same time, Ma’am.” Homeland Security Secretary Josh Epstein complained.
“Maybe, but these are the same leaders who have already killed hundreds of thousands, maybe even several million innocent civilians since the invasion of our country. Do you really think that they are going to stop the killing once they take over the rest of our nation?” Secretary Hornsby countered.
“But do we have the moral right to make that choice for the ones that we will end up sacrificing, Al? The potential reprisals that could ensue might be even worse.”
“Not if the decapitate the entire leadership of the Caliphate and the Brotherhood with this operation. Hell, we might even throw the entire jihad into such disarray that we could mount a successful insurgency later on to take our country back. But also without that leadership, their various factions will likely begin to fight with each other. Such internecine conflicts will further ensure that no attempts will be made against our people on the Moon, much less those on Mars.
The people living on those offworld colonies are our future. They can preserve the knowledge of our most advanced technology. Eventually, they may even be able to return to Earth and reclaim our world from the jihadists after our enemies have managed to take themselves back to a pre-industrial level.” Secretary Hornsby confidently stated.
“It still sickens me that our people who will be left here under the rule of the Islamists will basically lose everything, including the modern amenities that they and even their grandparents grew up with. The vast majority of our infrastructure, even our hospitals and power plants will eventually fall into disrepair and no longer be of use to our people. Yet, we are talking about destroying even more of it in an act of vindictiveness.” Secretary Epstein bitterly noted.
“It sickens me too, Josh. I know that both you and Carlotta would rather find some sort of accommodation with the Caliphate to try to make life easier for the people that remain in the Alliance. But, Al is also right about what the leadership of the Caliphate and Brotherhood have already sanctioned. The chemical weapons attack on Ashley, Ohio was only the beginning of the use of weapons of mass destruction by the Caliphate. We did not begin this. But we may be forced to retaliate in a similar manner at the end as a result.
Chapter Forty One:
Peter and Deborah Marcum’s Quarters
Hebes Chasma, Mars
March 4, 2049
“How are my darlings doing today?” Deborah joyfully asked the twins.
“We’re doing fine!” Mary and Timothy said in practically one voice. In many ways, they seemed to be of a like mind. But there were some clear differences that Deborah could already sense. While both of the twins were already demonstrating their talents as polymaths, Deborah quickly sensed early on that Timothy had inherited the full extent and capabilities of her ‘gift’. He would need to be trained carefully on how to use his gift very wisely and only when absolutely necessary.
Mary did not have the gift to manipulate matter and energy like her twin brother. But she could still heal people, both physically and emotionally, with a mere touch. That was a gift that Deborah was very glad to share with her daughter.
“I hope that you have been playing ‘nice’ with your sister, Timothy?” Deborah asked.
“Yes, Mom. Sometimes I have to be careful though.”
“I know. I had to be very careful around my adopted brothers and sisters too when I was your age. But I loved them all dearly, as I know that you love your twin sister.”
“I know, Mom.”
Deborah saw a look of discomfort in Mary’s eyes then.
“Tim, could you go see what you can do to help your dad? I want to talk to your sister for a few minutes.” Deborah told her son.
“Sure, Mom.” Tim said before running out to the home office where Peter was at.
“Is everything alright, Mary?”
“I’m just a little worried, Mom. Tim is already able to do some of the things that you can do with your gift. I just don’t know why I can’t do the same things.”
“Sweetheart, you are every bit as brilliant as your brother or anyone else here on colony. You just have different gifts that the Lord gave to you.”
“I know, Mom. Perhaps the fact that I did not inherit your gift, at least not the ability to change things with a mere thought, may actually make life a lot easier for me. I don’t have to deal with the stress of whether or not to use that immense power. But there is one other gift that I did inherit from you, Mom.”
“I already know about that one. That gift is more special than you dare imagine. But you are also just as brilliant as any of the polymaths here on Mars. That will serve you very well as long as you remain morally well grounded. We must always use our gifts to serve others, not to rule over them or to take from others. In any event, I’m sure that God has great plans for you and the gifts that you have, Mary.
But do you know that the most important thing is, Sweetheart?”
“What is it, Mom?”
“Your father and I love you so very much no matter what gifts that you had or didn’t have, Mary. In fact, you love both you and your twin brother exactly the same. Both of you are incredibly special to us and to all of humanity. But most of all, both of you are very special to God, who also loves you very much too.” Deborah said as she picked up her daughter, held her tight and kissed her on the cheek.
“Thank you, Mom. I love you and Daddy very much too. I even love Timothy.” The little girl said with a glowing smile.
“Well, you better run along now. I know that you have some schoolwork to do before you go to bed. Goodnight, Sweetheart.”
“Goodnight, Mom.” Mary replied before dashing off to her bedroom to work on her computer terminal.
At very nearly the same time that Deborah was having her little chat with Mary, Marilyn was walking through one of the corridors in the underground complex when she saw a group of about twenty children hurry through, followed along by about half a dozen polymaths including Melody Atherton.
“Hello, Melody.” Marilyn called out, causing the tall, beautiful polymath to stop and turn around.
“Hello, Marilyn. I hope that you and your children are settling in well here at Hebes Chasma.”
“Yes. Benjamin and Lissette have already started working at your little manufacturing center. They’ve even managed to surprise a couple of your polymaths with some of the innovations that they had pioneered at the facility that my kids had built in Ashley. Lissette has told me that they are already working on incorporating some of the Ashley modifications here.”
“That’s great! I knew that you and your family would be tremendous assets here just on what Deborah had told me about you. I am very pleased to hear that I was correct about you.”
“Thank you, Melody. I would never come here just to be a burden on someone else. This colony of yours is just so incredible that I will do anything that I can to contribute to it.
Walking around here, I see that you are having quite the baby boom here too. Are they all as intelligent as their parents?” Marilyn asked.
‘They all certainly appear to be. But even more importantly, they are all turning out to be good people at the same time. That is even more vital to the civil society that we are trying to create as far as we are concerned.” The former actress proudly replied.
“If that is truly the case, then I thoroughly applaud what you and the others like you have done then. If we are going to build a new society on Mars that is going to work, we will definitely need our children to have the right upbringing and th
e values that go with it.”
“Of course, Marilyn. We are trying to preserve the best of humanity, especially in view of what is happening on Earth. There is so much to do here. We all have to work together to make this world a paradise and the stepping stone for our species to go out among the stars.”
“Thank you for bringing me and my family here to be a part of what you are doing here, Melody.”
“It was my pleasure. In the meanwhile, I need to catch back up with my children. Take care and have a great day.” Melody quickly said before hurrying down the corridor.
Marilyn stood there for a few minutes, thinking about the new world that she had become part of. Then, she simply smiled and continued to her original destination. Marilyn was still a little sad about all of the friends that she left behind, including her dear, departed friend Melanie Knox. But it was now time to look ahead to the days to come.
A couple of days later, Deborah visited Arthur Wheeler at his lab deep within the underground catacombs beneath the surface of Hebes Chasma. When she arrived, Deborah was surprised to find that Melody Atherton was already there with Arthur.
“Hello, Deborah. How have you and the twins been doing?” Arthur pleasantly asked after she arrived.
“They are both doing great. Even I can’t believe how intelligent they are.” Deborah replied, not saying anything about her children’s special ‘gifts’ to even one of her closest friends.
“I’m not surprised at all, considering who their parents are. I try to spend as much time as I can with my kids, even though it is a challenge with all of the work that I do.” Arthur said with a wink, followed by a grimace.
“How many children do you have now?”
“Four, so far. Sometimes, I think that Andrea must be a secret Mormon or Catholic because she wants even more children. But it is fun making them, isn’t it?” Arthur chuckled.
“Yes, it is. Peter would definitely agree with you about that. Though, you guys aren’t the ones who have to go through labor pains.” Deborah admitted with a laugh of her own.
“Of course, but we love our children all the more. But even all those children of ours, their numbers pale in comparison with all of the new arrivals that have come here from Earth, Deborah. I just learned that we reached a tremendous milestone in the past couple of months. Now, for the first time in many years, the new colonists here on Mars truly outnumber the polymaths and their families. This is due, in large part, to the influx of refugees from the Eastern Alliance.” Arthur told his long-time friend.
“We have had a lot of people arrive here. But we left a lot of good people behind too, I’m afraid.” Deborah sadly replied.
“I know. But soon, the last holdouts against the Islamists are going to lose their battle. Then Earth will belong to the barbarians. Mars is well on its way to becoming a truly habitable world though with the ongoing terraforming process. The colony here will be able to survive without us now. It is time for us to prepare to leave this world to travel to a new home among the stars.”
“But will we actually be able to reach another planet in our lifetime? Even with a nuclear-thermal engine, it would take us thousands of years to reach the closest star. I know that you mentioned earlier about a new conceptual interstellar drive, but you didn’t give me any details on it.” Deborah said.
Arthur then began to elaborate upon the technology that he believed would take humanity to the stars.
“Actually, we think that we can travel to the stars far more quickly now. A group of polymaths and I have been developing a variant of the Alcubierre warp drive that is powerful enough to take a very large mass to beyond the speed of light. Our design uses a combination of Alcubierre’s research along with some technologies that I had originally developed for my gravity drives.”
“I had always wondered how you actually were able to succeed in creating an anti-gravity drive for your shuttles, Arthur.”
“Well, it required the discovery and acquisition of negative or dark matter. I was unable to successfully find this material on Earth. However, I had commissioned the launch of several private unmanned space probes. I was able to confirm, not only the existence of negative matter, but was also able to acquire small quantities of the material from the surface on the dark side of the moon.
Even with these small quantities of negative matter, I was able to create my anti-gravity modules and revolutionize the space launch industry from Earth. Armed with the knowledge of what to look for and the means to collect it, our deep space probes have not merely been moving asteroids around to give Mars more water and to push new moons into its orbit. They have also been collecting much more of this negative matter for the new warp drive at the same time.
Naturally, we have kept this particular operation under wraps. Even the manufacturers on Earth of my gravity drive shuttles had no idea of my use of negative matter in the construction of the gravity drive modules. To their engineers, they were simply ‘black boxes’ from another contractor that were plugged into the appropriate places in the shuttles’ hulls.”
“I was a little surprised to learn about this warp drive that you have been working on. Do you really think that it is going to work?”
“Yes, we are very confident. Of course, we are going to have to build a sub-scale prototype of the drive and put it on a drone ship. Then we can test it to see if it will truly work. We will have Sali install one of her daughter AI programs into the drone so that we can get the best possible information on the performance of the drive. But after a successful test run, a complete full-scale warp drive will be constructed to make a much larger vessel into a truly starfaring home for all of us.”
“So when will construction of this new warp ship of yours begin, Arthur?”
“We are not actually building a ship. We are going to turn one of the smaller metallic asteroids now orbiting Mars into a vessel by installing the warp drive inside of it. This will help keep anyone observing from Earth from seeing what we are actually doing until we have actually finished the project completely. But in any event, this project will still take years to complete.” He explained.
“You are going to be like a real-life Zefram Cochran, Arthur.” Melody said, smiling at the intentional reference to the fictional character from the Star Trek universe that had created the first human-built warp drive.
“This time, we are probably not going to run into Vulcans though. But we will have an entire galaxy to explore and find a new home on. That is something to truly look forward to. We will finally live in peace without having to hide what we are.”
“Well, all we have to do is break half of Einstein’s Laws of Relativity or at least find all of the loopholes in those laws.”
“Melody, that sounds like a light afternoon’s work. Let me know when you find me a real challenge.” Arthur laughed.
“OK. You get to tell this woman’s family that we are all moving again in a few years.” Melody mischievously replied while pointing towards Deborah.
“That’s not fair.”
Chapter Forty Two:
Oval Office, White House
Washington, DC
March 10, 2049
“The Islamists are not going to be very happy about this little ‘gift’ of yours, General.” President Harper noted.
“I know. But we need to do whatever we can do to gut their forces and possibly also their leadership so we can delay any future attempts to come after us on Mars. We have to buy our people on Mars and the Moon as much time as possible to expand their colony and build up their ability to defend themselves in case the damned jihadists decide that possessing one world is not enough for them.” General Sharps explained.
“I know. But it could also leave such a bitter taste in their mouths that they will be determined to reach our people offworld, no matter what it takes. Revenge is a pretty big thing for their culture.”
“Perhaps so, but look at the history of Islam. They have relied on others to advance their technology for most of the
ir history. They are already losing their ability to maintain the twenty-first century systems that they purchased from the various First World countries. It won’t be much longer before they will be unable to support the twentieth century technology that they possess. The Caliphate and the Arab Brotherhood will not have the active support of free nations and advanced capitalist economies to provide them with the fruits of free minds any more.
How will they be able to go into space and threaten any of us who have left? They have no space launch vehicles and few of the engineers with the expertise to build more of them. If we gut the hell out of their leadership, they will ultimately turn on each other with a viciousness that we can only imagine. That will mean that their technological levels will drop even further before they could even think about trying to reach our people on the Moon or Mars.
The Islamists will be lucky if they can maintain anything at all beyond a steam-age technology. Eventually, we will come back and reclaim our world from these barbarians. But we must deal one last massive blow to the Islamists while we still can while not initiating another nuclear autumn at the same time, Ma’am.”
“Our own survivors that are left behind here will also be in the same boat too, General.”
“I know, Ma’am. But there is only so much that even the Islamists can do to them. There’s a lot of land in North America where a person can hide for a very long time once they get away from the cities. The smart ones will do just that. But we still have to whittle down the enemy a bit first.”
President Harper silently thought for a few moments before finally responding. But even then, she would not look into the general’s eyes. She simply said.
“Go ahead, General. Make the necessary preparations. Let’s pray for a miracle so that we will not have to implement them, however. I sure as hell don’t want to do this if I don’t have to.”
The evacuations continued in what little of the Eastern Alliance remained free from the jihadists. But that area was steadily shrinking by the moment as the jihadists continued to steadily advance. The jihadists were pushing from the west, north and south. Only the east coast was relatively secure for now. But that was only the case because of the last ships of the Eastern Alliance Navy and its allies preventing any amphibious landings for now. But even these naval forces were being squeezed out of both their northern and southern-most bases by Caliphate and Arab Brotherhood land forces. The last major naval base left was in Norfolk, Virginia.