“More likely the entire system if you have crossed to other bodies in that time. It has happened before. The Greenfly colony I come from was the home of a troublesome species. They had spread to every planet in the system and many asteroids. We broke up the planets for our homes. It took a very long time, but we are certain of their extinction. I have memories of the species given to me by another Greenfly, if you would like to see them.”
“That’s alright, Greenbeard. Maybe later,” said Butler. “Right now, I’d like to discuss something else with you, which we hope will end this conflict without our extinction.”
Greenbeard appeared interested. This emotion displayed itself through a single ridge of raised pylae down his mid-line.
“You have interest in being domesticated? I am sure some use can be found…”
“Not exactly,” interrupted Butler. “We wish to hire you and other Greenflies and invite you to stay here in this system. We have developed the capability to create a great deal of Greenfly blood using our technology. If you and other Greenflies agree to help us against the Whaleship, to help us use the domesticated animals, we will give you blood for as long as you need it. From what you tell me of the length of the Greenfly life, if we are victorious, you will be long dead before another Whaleship can arrive to counter-attack. For the remainder of your life, humans will give you whatever will make you happy. This is what we humans refer to as a ‘blank check.’”
“I agree,”replied Greenbeard.
Butler was a little surprised, “You agree very readily.”
“I have little choice. When the Whaleship leaves, time will no longer pass for it until it reaches its destination. It holds the sum of my blood savings, and if it displaces, it will no longer feed me blood. I have no method of communicating with the Whaleship, so I am obligated to find a new source of blood. I also anticipate that when humans go extinct, I am more likely to be killed than set free,” said Greenbeard.
Butler had never realized it before, but it made sense that an individual Greenfly’s savings would be held by the ship on which he was employed. If the ship became relativistically frozen in time, and the Greenfly wasn’t on it, the blood flow would stop instantly. Incarceration didn’t bother Greenbeard, nor did social isolation from his kind. Death did.
“No other Greenfly will agree to your terms,” said Greenbeard. “You offer poor job security.”
Several emptied plates lay on the booth table, gleaming clean, as if licked. The figure seated there had never removed his parka upon settling in, even with the fire flickering in the wood stove nearby. His face was a mass of furry gray beard through which peered a pair of sad eyes. While the parka was responsible for most of his perceived bulk as he slumped in the booth, there was clearly a great deal of mass beneath it. He had, after all, gone through four full dinners since he had sat down.
The closest analogy for this place was a restaurant, but it served many other functions here in this small village near the border between Siberia and Mongolia. It was a meeting hall, pub, general store, and rest area for travelers, travelers such as the old, burly Russian consuming as much as many Mongolians ate in a week. They were still on the Siberian side, so a Russian woodsman was not at all unusual, even one who had never been seen in the village before. This man was different, though. More than just the gloom he had brought with him from the outside, this man had an oddness to his bearing. The rifle sitting next to him in the booth was not terribly reassuring. Guns weren’t unusual here either; there were eight other people in the restaurant, four of them armed.
The proprietor of the restaurant looked at him warily. The Russian kept his right hand beneath the table, hidden against the wall. The proprietor had the impression that the man was passing food to it, when he was certain no one was watching. Not an expert at stealth, the Russian had been seen doing it by nearly everyone in the place. While uncouthness was a common trait here, the Russian was beginning to unnerve the locals, and the dinner crowd would be moving in in another half hour. The proprietor tucked the rag he had been wiping glasses with into his trousers and got onto the business of clearing the Russian out of the dining room.
He marched over to the booth table, laid a check on the table, “You about ready to move on, old man?”
The Russian had been glancing out the window into the minor snow squall, deep in thought, and he looked shocked to turn and see the proprietor suddenly standing at his table. The burly old man’s eyes were strange, the proprietor thought, with a yellowish cast to the whites. There was also an odor here, stronger than the smell of unvarnished wood, log fire, and sweat that normally permeated the restaurant. This was something metallic. While the proprietor thought he was imagining it, there also seemed to be a soft growl from beneath the table. In a split second, and totally unintentionally, the Russian had made the proprietor regret coming over here with the check.
“Sergei,” the old man said.
“What?”
“My name is Sergei. I am waiting for a ride. It should be here soon.”
“We ain’t a bus stop, Sergei. If your ride isn’t here in twenty minutes, you’re out on your ass,” the proprietor tapped the check on the table, “You can cover this now.”
The Russian’s eyes hardened for a moment, and the proprietor felt certain he heard that dull growl again over the winds outside the window. The moment passed, though, and Sergei had evidently decided to control the temper he had been about to release. He reached his left hand into his parka and withdrew a dirty wad of American dollars, a slight tinge of red on the outermost ones. He set the wad on the table and picked out three bills with his left hand, his right never emerging from beneath the table. The proprietor looked around to see the other patrons, an even mix of Russian and Mongolian, had their eyes set on the wad as well.
“That’s an awful lot of cash,” said the proprietor, his manner warming, “Traveling through on business?”
Sergei seemed distracted for a moment, glancing down to his right, “I know.”
“You know? You know what?”
“I was answering the little birdie on my shoulder who told me that the air in here just became tense. There are those in here who just scented prey.”
The proprietor’s gaze drifted to Sergei’s rifle, but, so far, the Russian hadn’t made any move towards it. He was just sitting there against the wall, his attention evenly split between the proprietor and the snow storm.
“Well, like I said, it’s an awful lot of cash and a rough crowd tonight… but I doubt anyone would…”
“Russian mob,” said Sergei, at a completely conversational decibel.
The proprietor just stood there, stock still.
“They’re who I got the money from,” said Sergei, “You were wondering.”
“So your ride will be here soon?”
Sergei smiled slightly at the change in conversation, but then the sadness returned to his eyes. He looked back at the snow outside wistfully.
“Yeah, right here. Very soon,” Sergei said, “I saw this place the other night and let them know to pick me up here. They didn’t like the idea at first. They wanted to wait for better weather and pick me up out of town. I had to convince them this would be a good experiment.”
“Just picking you up here? An experiment?”
Sergei nodded. The proprietor also thought he saw a literal glint in his eyes, a quick flash around the whites, but it had to be a trick of the lighting. “I was here yesterday, when your waitress was in charge. I walked around a little, took measurements. They needed to be absolutely sure they wouldn’t run into anything. You have such high ceilings, I said it shouldn’t be a problem. We should probably move those tables, though.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You’re right,” said Sergei, “I’m probably being overly cautious.”
The proprietor nodded and moved back to the counter. He’d be glad to be rid of this strange customer, but having just gotten a closer look at the Ru
ssian’s size, he was in no hurry to try to remove him. Continuing to speak to the man would just prolong his stay.
Sergei went back to staring out the window into the blowing snow outside.
From the outside, the building appeared to be a simple structure of aged planks, identical to a half dozen others along the frozen mud road. Only the smoke rising from the chimneys and a dim flickering through the windows gave any indication that it was occupied. There was a bright blue flash from within the building, escaping where it could, through windows and gaps in the planking. When the light disappeared, there were a few gunshots audible, but mostly just the sound of angrily buzzing bees.
Chapter 21: Downtime
It had been more than three months since the last Greenfly sighting on Earth, but there was no doubt they were still out there. With the destruction of the moon base, the Greenflies had been restricted to arriving via their primary teleportation Window, on a direct line from the Jupiter trailing Trojans to the Earth. As Earth moved behind the sun, in relation to this vector, the Window shrank and finally disappeared. The Whaleship could not see the planet Earth through the glare surrounding the Sun, and, for some reason, it was unwilling to move to improve its view. It was unwilling to commit its forces to anywhere it could not see.
With the orientation of the planets, there were only a few telescopes, all belonging to deep space probes, that could still make out the great spherical mass of Troy and a growing collection of similar asteroids around it. A Mars orbiter got the clearest view of the collection of bodies, and what it saw was making the strategic thinkers of Earth nervous. In addition to the great solid metal sphere of Troy itself, its neighbors could be seen changing over time. They started off as irregular, potato-shaped masses of rock and iron, but as time went by, the bodies glowed molten and blew up like balloons. Infrequent outgassing gave a clue as to what was in these metal gas bags, terrestrial gases such as nitrogen and oxygen. After the spheres cooled, each one was kept at a different temperature, measurable by black body radiation in the infrared. It was not lost upon the scientists that one of those bodies was kept at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. It was hypothesized that each of these bodies, hundreds of meters across, was actually an incubator for the Greenflies’ slave animals. In the first month alone, fifteen such incubators were observed by the Mars orbiter. There was also the first, blurry image of the Whaleship, a great acorn-like shape among the floating orbs.
The break in Greenfly hostility and their obvious intention of returning in greater force did wonders for international relations. Israel withdrew from Syria, spending its funds instead on stockpiling fuel for the alien threat, expected to return shortly. It had extracted concessions from its neighbors in terms of interception and recovery of alien craft, but it had been forced to concede itself that maintaining its shields across the entire Middle East was more dangerous than the alien incursions or the ramifications of their technology. Similar stabilizing troop mobilizations were taking place all over the world. India and Pakistan were shelving hostilities and discussing joint interception programs for the subcontinent. China and Taiwan had come to a similar understanding, the issue of what belonged to whom secondary to mutual self-preservation. Cooperation was becoming the rule to a degree not seen since the beginning of the incursions. Video footage from the Tokyo incident had spread across the internet, and no one was willing to face whatever might be in those incubators alone.
There was a sense of confidence in the air, though, for the Greenflies were not the only ones with incubators, both figurative and literal. The incubators of mankind’s technology lay in its intellect and its factories. The pharmaceutical industry had found a way to mass produce the alien fuel, and this technological innovation alone made possible the new laser and repulsion technologies dreamed of by Lassiter and the other planners of the Pentagon and across the world. Automotive industries were producing hovering military vehicles. Old cathode ray tube manufacturers retooled to produce the gas-filled tubes for lasers in huge quantities. The electronics specialists of Japan were just six months away from heads-up displays to give human soldiers a sensory and tactical advantage over their enemies, if not a physical one. Aerospace companies were cranking out spy satellites at a rate unprecedented even in the Cold War. They followed standard designs, save that they had a single extra tube to house a heavy laser. The launchpads of the United States, Russia, China, Japan, Brazil, and France sent up a steady stream of these satellites intended not just to detect alien craft, but to obliterate them upon arrival. As the effective range of these lasers was enormous, each of these satellites could be pointed outwards. A plan was in place, once the Window had grown large enough after its reappearance, to fire a volley at the alien positions in the Trojans.
By the end of this breathing period, Utah Base had grown like a living thing beneath the winter snow. It was still divided into its two lobes, one dedicated to military operations and the other dedicated to research, separated by the runway tarmacs, but both lobes had expanded. The research section, while still mostly underground, had budded off a number of smaller structures, peaking above the prairie. These new buildings were mostly manufacturing plants affiliated with government contractors to produce the new generation of military equipment. The military lobe had become a mesh of concrete structures, the original temporary buildings completely replaced at this point. There were also new training facilities, such as a second runway for training with the new vehicles and a firing range for the new heavy lasers, ringed by three layers of reinforced concrete wall. The entire base was ringed by a line of computer-controlled laser artillery.
And there was new staff…
It was still an effort for Greenbeard to refrain from crawling on all six limbs when he wanted to travel more than a few yards. He had learned to keep his central pair of arms crossed in front of him and to walk continuously bipedally to keep his coworkers calm, but it was not instinctual. Instinct was very strong among the Greenflies.
He stood before a special table in the great argon-filled chamber that still housed some of the alien artifacts from the initial Greenfly incursions, a number of human lab workers milling around the other tables and consoles of the former hangar. It still possessed the great sheet of plastic insulating it from the catwalks above and keeping the oxygen out, but now there were far more people wearing far less safety equipment. This lab was now dedicated to understanding the interface between Greenflies and their domesticated animals. Engineers and computer techs had joined the scientists here, all wearing a simple breathing mask and oxygen tank on their back.
While not entirely understanding the purpose, Greenbeard now wore two pieces of equipment while he worked as well. The first was a lab coat, an extra pair of sleeves stitched across his middle torso for his extra arms. The other was an apparatus looking much like a gas-mask strapped to the underside of his head. The extra bulk right below his eyes gave him the impression of possessing a mouth and chin, if a weak one. While he had no idea how it performed this function, when he ‘spoke’ with the Morse-code-like flash language he had perfected with Butler, the mask would translate into the audible language of the humans. A lens over his one remaining functional eye performed the reverse, as well. There were frequent misunderstandings, as both Greenfly and the device made translation errors, but it had enabled Greenbeard to work directly with the scientists.
There had been sacrifices, however. In his lowest torso, there was now a human-built device that would circulate a new blood supply should the Whaleship cease to provide it for him. Once activated, the system would have to be recharged with fresh blood and a compressed gas canister about once a week. Fortunately, the cavity within that torso was designed to be opened on a regular basis. Once the Whaleship left the system, that mysterious device would be his only lifeline. While the humans had not been specific about how, there was evidently a way for them to kill him using the artificial heart. The concept of an explosive device was a little hard for him to grasp, although he was i
ntimately familiar with animals on several planets capable of performing a similar combustion reaction.
He understood that the ‘fail-safe’ on the artificial heart was another indication of the humans’ fear of him, but he did not begrudge them their desire for safety. If having an armed guard in the lab improved their attitude toward him, he had no complaint. Nor had he complained when they had ground down his claws into dull knobs. There were no pain receptors in the claws, after all. If anything, the alteration had improved his adaptation to the human world. He was slowly grasping the hidden truth of doorknobs, for instance.
Most of the human equipment remained mystical. Right now, he had his uppermost forelimbs hovering above the table in front of him and he was signaling to the table with the pylae on his hands. He was treating the table, which seemed a very complex piece of glass and plastic, as if it was the interior of one of the hovering transports. Greenbeard systematically instructed the table to fly in different directions or teleport into deep space, which, of course, it did not. The humans insisted that his activities were leading to new mystical devices that would some day allow humans to pilot the transports themselves. Unfortunately, all of the alien animals they had collected in the first incursion had since died, the Whaleship having cut their blood supply. As such, Greenfly was instructing the complicated table instead of a real transport.
He sensed vibration through the floor and turned his sinewy neck to face the person approaching him, his work with the table completely uninterrupted.
“Hello Butler,” he said, his mask translator possessing a higher, softer voice than his massive stature would have suggested.
Butler started a little at witnessing the Greenfly’s Exorcist-like rotation of his neck, but quickly recovered. Butler didn’t work in this lab himself, but he was frequently called in to communicate with Greenbeard when there was a miscommunication with the rest of the lab staff. Thoroughly uncomfortable with the breathing mask, Butler adjusted it constantly, but he never refused an opportunity to work with Greenbeard, even in delivering bad news.
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