Greenflies

by Darling, Andrew Leete

  Marshal held up a warning hand to Greenbeard and indicated for Hegerty and Ramachandran to check it out first. They climbed through the ripped door and into the interior. There was the sound of an electrical discharge from within. A moment later, Hegerty was throwing an anvil-heavy triped runner out the broken door. It looked like it had already been injured prior to its encounter with Hegerty and Ramachandran. It was probably waiting for evac.

  With the transport present and secured by human soldiers, Marshal felt no more compunction to keep the other two Greenflies around. His stun rod already out, he hit them both in succession, striking them in the middle torso just above their central nervous system. Both aliens collapsed to the ground. Marshal cast a quick glance at Greenbeard, but the loyalist Greenfly remained unmoved. He apparently respected that Marshal could have used lethal force. The Greenfly nodded in what could have been construed as a human gesture of gratitude.

  “Alright, all in.”

  The motley crew of humans and alien entered the transport. Its interior was nearly featureless other than its texture. There were no seats or consoles. It was only an empty hollow about twice the size of a cargo van lined with brown skin, ridged with pylae in much the same way as Greenfly skin. There were no windows, but rather the pylae writhed continuously, presenting any Greenfly within with a three dimensional view of the exterior of the craft. Instead of Greenbeard directly observing the outside world, he was ‘told’ what was around the craft by the craft itself. The humans, on the other hand, were limited to their narrow field of view through the ripped-open side door.

  “Get us out to Troy,” Marshal said, taking position in the rear of the craft, and indicating for the civilians to sit in the middle. In this formation, he could shoot the Greenfly if he judged it necessary.

  Greenbeard stood upon his hind legs in the front of the craft, and held his top four hands palm first towards the front wall of the transport interior. Four corresponding points on the brown skin of the wall writhed with complex information. The transport began to move.

  “It is not a favorable teleportation,” said Greenbeard in the soft voice of his translator. “We must first increase our velocity relative to our target.”

  The humans observed the ground moving by rapidly through the hole in the hull. Butler guessed they were traveling at a little over a hundred miles per hour. He could see a line of buildings coming closer, but the transport continued to accelerate. The humans aboard began to wonder if the craft was too damaged to teleport or if it would accidentally be destroyed by some of the remaining human forces before it could depart.

  Suddenly, a wind was blowing through the compartment and out the rupture in the door. The force of the wind was insufficient to blow anyone out, as the hole required effort to pass through under the best of circumstances, but it certainly motivated the humans to hold on.

  The scorched prairie had disappeared. There had been no sensation to indicate teleportation; just the wind and a sudden feeling of lightness caused by the reduced gravity here. Outside the hole now was a dull gray surface, very smooth, scrubbed free of any dust. There was a visible curvature to the surface as the humans looked out, and other alien transports could be seen whizzing over it in the distance. While speed was difficult to judge given the smoothness of the surface, Butler guessed it at several hundred miles per hour, much faster than when they had left.

  More interesting than the ground was what lay above the horizon. There were more stars than any of the humans had ever seen before with the naked eye. With very little glare from the dull gray surface, they were visible right from the horizon and up to the edge of the hole in the door. They were dimmed only in one corner of the sky, a region about wide as the moon as seen from Earth, where reflected light drowned them out a little. Sitting in the center of those dim stars was Jupiter, its red eye as visible as the man-on-the-moon.

  “Colonel…”said Hegerty, drawing attention away from the spectacle outside.

  The entire right side of his armor was steaming, as air and water vapor streamed out of unseen cracks and tears. It hissed out, visibly white, from between the joints in the armor and around the right side of the faceplate.

  Chapter 24: Life Raft

  The civilians were tackling the job of fixing the gashes in Hegerty’s and Ramachandran’s suits, both of which had taken damage in their hard fall after the teleportation bomb. Hegerty’s suit had taken more damage, so both Meg and Butler were moving around him, putting blue tape on any surface that appeared to be outgassing, and Franz was doing the same for Ramachandran. While the hissing gas had, more or less, stopped for Ramachandran, Hegerty’s suit appeared to be getting more breaches as time went by. Seals in the armor had tried and failed to seal off the right arm and torso, but the inflatable lining that was supposed to create the emergency seal had itself been punctured.

  As Meg looked into his faceplate, she could see that he was beginning to fade due to the low pressure in there. His eyes, while only half open with grogginess, appeared to bulge slightly, and his face looked badly sunburnt, the result of capillaries in his skin bursting. If he survived this, he would look like a prizefighter after the worst fight of his life.

  “Have you ever noticed how you’re the one who always gets hurt?” asked Meg, through the little radio of the pressure suit. “You always get hurt, but you still survive. Just another one of those days, right?”

  Hegerty nodded slightly, barely sensible. If not for high altitude endurance training, he would already have been unconscious. The pressure within his suit was already below the 1/3 atmosphere considered necessary for human life.

  “Can we make it back to Earth?” Marshal asked Greenbeard. Fortunately, his translator had also included a radio.

  “No,” replied Greenbeard. “I do not know the location.”

  Marshal moved his rifle so that it was in a more threatening position, “You got us here.”

  Franz, his work on Leena’s suit completed, put a hand on Marshal’s shoulder. “That was five minutes ago by our timeline, but Earth has experienced an extra half hour. Both we and Earth have moved since then. The path we took is no longer valid by hundreds of kilometers, and it could end in us teleporting into solid rock if we tried to backtrack and got it wrong. Greenbeard’s smart, but he can’t calculate the orbital mechanics we need him to, not on the fly.”

  “Then how are we supposed to get back?”asked Marshal.

  “Normally, the Whaleship tells them where to go,” said Butler, still working on Hegerty’s suit. “But individual Greenflies can plan out shorter jumps, just by looking with those telescopic eyes of theirs. He can get us back but it will take time.”

  Leena, her suit a patchwork of blue tape, moved over to Hegerty to check on his condition. The first thing which she checked was the pressure gauge, which she hoped was dramatically wrong. His appearance indicated that the gauge was probably dead-on, but still Hegerty clung to consciousness.

  “He might have minutes,” she said.

  “How quickly could we get to one of the incubator asteroids?” asked Franz.

  “Twenty of your minutes. They are currently occluded from view by the horizon,” replied Greenbeard. “Then we would need to enter, in which we would meet resistance.”

  “Come on, Liam,” said Meg, tears beginning to fog up her faceplate. “Remember when you came crashing down on my roof and pulled a Greenfly off of me with your bare hands…”

  “A jaundiced account,” said Greenbeard.

  Meg ignored the comment and continued, “This is nothing compared to that, right? The Colonel and Leena are going to find a way to get you some more air, and Jerry and I are going to patch all these holes. All you’ve got to do is hold on and give us some time. We’re not going to give up on you.”

  A look passed among all of the other humans in the vehicle. Butler reached out and pulled Meg away from Hegerty’s prone form. Given her resistance to this, in the end, Franz had to help him hold her. Leena opened up her field
medical case and pulled out a syringe. It wasn’t designed for vacuum, and the fluid within the needle was actually boiling a little. She appraised it for a moment and then drew her laser pistol instead.

  “What are you doing?!” Meg screamed.

  “He’s suffering, Meg,” said Butler. “We can’t save him, and he’s suffering because he can’t give up.”

  “We can fix the suit!”

  Franz replied, “No, we can’t, Meg. This tape wasn’t meant for a full atmosphere pressure differential. Leena only had a nick in her armor, and the tape barely held. None of us wants to do this, but we can’t leave him how he is.”

  “Wait, we can…”

  A flash of light illuminated the interior of the cabin for a moment, and the transport shuddered a little, as the laser singed its internal skin. Hegerty’s face was no longer visible beneath the faceplate. There was only a red foam, bubbling gently through the small hole left by the laser. The three civilians went silent, Meg burying her head in Butler’s shoulder, as Leena began pulling the gear off of Hegerty’s armor.

  “Greenfly, continue your course to take us to the Whaleship,” said Marshal in the front, moving the agenda along from the issue of Hegerty’s death. “We still have enough resources to complete our mission, either negotiation with the intelligence behind the Greenflies or the destruction of their vessel. We have twenty pounds of high explosives in addition to grenades and lasers. If we can identify a target of interest on the Whaleship, then we can destroy it.”

  “I can find one,” said Franz meekly. “I can recognize their high energy equipment.”

  “Excellent,” said Marshal. “Greenfly, how does your kind normally speak with the Whaleship?”

  Greenbeard paused for a moment, trying to frame its response in a way comprehensible to its masters. “It possesses eyes, similar to our own, at many points along its skin. Each of these eyes is surrounded by Greenflies at all times, reporting on their activities and receiving orders. I think it unlikely they will allow you to speak with the Whaleship.”

  “Do you know of any other way to make contact?”

  Greenbeard paused again. This time, it was because it had never given the question any thought before. There was a well-established way for Greenflies to contact the Whaleship. Why try to conceive of another one? Perhaps it was because there was still a Harvester within him, allowing for rapid new connections to form between neurons, but Greenbeard made an intuitive leap, not something Greenflies were known for.

  “There is a part of the Whaleship where Greenflies are not permitted to go and Harvesters are permitted only rarely,” said Greenbeard. “I do not know what you would find in there, but I know for certain there are no other means of communicating with the Whaleship elsewhere. If it is not in this area, either, there is most likely something of value there.”

  Marshal mulled it. “Alright, I’ll take the Greenfly, Butler, and Meg to the off-limits portion of the…”

  “I cannot,” interrupted Greenbeard. “It is not allowed.”

  “But, you don’t work for them anymore, Greenbeard,” said Butler.

  Greenbeard seemed to tremble a little. The motion of the alien transport likewise became erratic.

  “It must be one of the rules hard-wired into him,” said Butler. “He was probably programmed to not even think of it much. Whatever is there must be important.”

  Marshal nodded. “In that case, the Greenfly will be under your command, Captain Ramachandran, along with Dr Leitner. Your mission is to find another vital component of the vessel and prepare to destroy it upon my command. I will take Dr. Butler and Ms. Rudisell into the restricted region of the ship.”

  The transport continued to hurtle across the surface of Troy. The asteroid had once been one of the largest ones present in the Trailing Trojans, at nearly two hundred miles in diameter. That was before the Greenflies had reshaped it. The actual conversion hadn’t been very complicated. It had mostly consisted of melting the entire asteroid down and increasing its rotation to just the right amount. As the asteroid cooled, under careful supervision, it conformed to a shape nearly identical to earth, with a similar equatorial spin. With the correct lateral velocity, an alien transport could teleport directly to any point on Earth without appearing upside down or accelerating nose-first into the ground.

  The paths necessary for these alien craft to reach the correct velocities pointing in the correct direction could be very long, and transports were leaving for all parts of the Earth. As such, Troy was like a very complex airport, with transports communicating with each other visually to keep their trajectories clear. Other hovering vehicles raced by the one the humans were in, either on their way to Earth or returning, bearing samples or wounded units in need of repair. The human-occupied transport had to take a meandering route over the horizon of Troy to avoid the runways in greatest use right now.

  The first shapes to rise over the horizon were the great rocky spheres of the incubators. They had been constructed in a similar manner to Troy, but unlike the great iron ball, they were hollow and filled with gases appropriate for whatever was growing inside. Each of them was nearly the size of Troy, and despite the distances between the asteroidal bodies (the average distance between the Greenfly modified structures was 1200 miles), here in the Trojans, surface details could be made out on them as they rotated. There had been no need to smooth the surface of the incubators, so they still had their rocky surface texture, albeit with a stretched appearance. They were little more than great silicate balloons, but each with impurities that granted them subtle pigments. A half dozen of these structures hung like Christmas ornaments in the sky above Troy.

  Then the Whaleship came into view. Compared to Troy or the incubator asteroids, the Whaleship was a minnow. While scales were difficult to judge, it was most likely five miles in length from its bow to the tip of its “tail”. The massive living thing could only really be termed a whale if one squinted a great deal. Greenbeard had probably given it that name because of its great size and its existence in a 3-dimensional environment analogous to the sea. Even now, the Whaleship hung amidst the incubators like a sea creature swimming amongst great jellyfish.

  The front of the Whaleship looked something like an acorn, with an armored “cap” over the bow to protect it from micrometeoroids or other dangers of space travel. The remainder of the acorn bow was much more detailed, with mouth-like hatches visible and orbs that might have been eyes looking out. Tiny dots could be seen moving across this part of the Whaleship, most likely other alien transports clinging to the hull. The “tail” of the Whaleship looked something like a TV-aerial, with two prongs sticking out at the tip. The creature was distant, but it appeared to be hanging closer to Troy than to the other asteroidal bodies, perhaps using the iron sphere as a shield.

  Butler and Franz were both sticking their heads out the hole in the side to better see the alien vessel. A steady stream of dialogue passed between them regarding the Whaleship’s construction and function.

  “I imagine we’re going to match speed with the Whaleship and then teleport to cross the distance,” said Franz. “While we can’t see it, Troy is rotating at nearly 1000 miles per hour at this latitude. If we were to be stationary compared to the surface and then try to teleport, we’d teleport into the ship at the speed of a missile.”

  The alien transport continued on for several more minutes until the Whaleship was directly overhead. Then, the horizon of Troy disappeared, and the alien transport was standing stationary inside a large chamber. Once again, there was no feeling of dislocation or any other sense that the teleportation had taken place. The only noticeable change inside the transport was the complete cessation of the low gravity that had existed when on Troy.

  The chamber they had teleported to had none of the trappings of human-built structures. The floor was a transparent hexagon one hundred yards across, at which their transport was at the middle. Below them could be seen the iron orb of Troy, its round girth completely fill
ing the window-like floor. The wall was a hemisphere of hexagonal struts, looking much like the interior of a bee hive. The struts reinforcing the wall appeared to be made of wood, of all things. It appeared to grow in the strange hexagonal pattern, there being no sign of nails, pegs, or splices between struts. Each hexagonal unit was either filled with a shiny brown surface or not at all. The empty hexagons, of which there were many, led away from the cargo bay and became corridors alive with the passage of Greenflies.

  Instead of meeting the floor at a right angle, the wall curved in to meet the floor, allowing hovering transports to float along the floor and right up the wall. The regions higher up on the dome, furthest away from the transparent hull/window were evidently for alien transport parking. They hovered a foot off the wall, far above the humans and their transport, upside down in respect to them. Thirty-odd transports hung there. Most of which were damaged in some way, and a pair of them were obviously inhabited by Harvesters. Orange tendrils snaked out of their visible wounds.

  Despite the fact that this cargo bay appeared to be one dedicated to repair rather than one of the vessel’s more traveled cargo bays, there were a large number of Greenflies present. There appeared to be one on hand to tend each one of the alien transports being repaired. The transports required teamsters in much the same was as horses did. There were also a few Greenflies whose job it seemed to be to remove detritus from the alien transports. These garbagemen carried the remains of triped runners, blasted armor bugs, and other creatures from the alien transport interiors to one of the corridors closest to the transparent hull. The dead creatures still with open wounds steamed and boiled in the vacuum which filled the cargo bay.

  The human transport was not the only new arrival in the cargo bay. A transport had arrived just before them, its thick hide riddled with bullet holes, though very few of the rounds appeared to have penetrated to any depth. The bullet riddled transport was sidling sideways off of the transparent floor and up the side of the hemispherical wall, clearing the “landing” area for more alien transports to arrive. The humans’ own transport was beginning a similar maneuver, following the bullet-riddled one up the wall.