The Star Collector

by Matthew William

  Tammy took the opportunity to kneel off to the side and say a quick prayer to her instruction manual.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Cassandra whispered to Joe.

  “If you ask nicely, she’ll put in a good word with the blender god,” he replied.

  The Seer finally came about 15 minutes late and didn’t say much. He was an old Pakistani man, in a brown suit and sunglasses. Joe immediately thought he looked familiar. It couldn't have been the old man on the asteroid… could it?

  The gentlemen unlocked the door for and they shuffled inside the hollowed out beech tree. The room was dark, spare for the few windows letting in the last of the evening light.

  “Let us begin,” the Seer announced, closing the door.

  Cassandra bowed her head, then turned to the window and opened it wide. A cool gust of nighttime air came flowing in. Joe remembered this part of the ritual, she was assessing what the planet was missing.

  Talashamen took pride in being perfectly in tune with nature. They fed it and it fed them. The trees breathed in the air they breathed out. And when they died, the planet would take them in as one last deposit to the ecosystem. And, at times, if you gave the planet what it was missing, it could give you what you were missing – in this case, crucial information.

  Merger claimed that the Talashaa themselves believed the same. The Great Talashaa Specter was their deity and the Talashaa were its people. Now the Specter roamed the universe alone, searching for its children.

  Cassandra mixed the necessary spices she had brought from home and poured them into a cavity the Seer had dug in the ground. She then poured water over them. Whatever life the planet had in itself became more in tune, more in harmony.

  The thing with any superstition was, there’s always some sliver of truth in it. They take something logical, then put a weird twist on it, tying it to something larger, something imaginary.

  Joe stared at the wasted spices. They could have made something tasty. He crossed his arms and glanced at the Seer. If his eyes weren’t deceiving him, he could have sworn it was the same old man he had encountered sitting on the asteroid back in Sector 121. It looked exactly like him, it could have been his twin brother. Maybe Joe’s brain was just tricking him into seeing things.

  “May I see what all this is about?” the Seer asked.

  “Here’s the artifact,” Tammy said, holding up the flashing, gray plastic bag and presenting it to the old man.

  “It has great energy,” Cassandra said.

  “Don’t give him any hints,” Joe said. The last thing they needed was to give the guy clues so he could figure out exactly what it was they wanted to hear.

  “May I see it unsheathed?” the Seer asked.

  Tammy nodded and pulled the blinking artifact from the bag and let it hang there in the air.

  The Seer looked at it blankly, then smiled. He soaked a napkin in cannabis oil and set it alight on top of the damp spices on the floor. The smoldering paper smoked profusely. Joe stuck his face out the window for this part of the ritual, he wanted to keep his senses. The fumes rose and began to intoxicate the others. Not Cassandra though, her brain was unaffected by smoke transfused narcotics. Once the smoke dissipated, Joe rejoined the room.

  Looking at the Seer now, Joe realized that he looked just like someone else from his past. The old man, Sam, who used to cut his hair when he was a boy back on Alpha Centauri. He must have had one of those faces.

  In reality, it really was the old man, Sam, who used to cut his hair on Alpha Centauri and the old man on the asteroid in Sector 121. But neither Joe nor Sam truly recognized each other. They were strangers at that moment. Time and distance and doubt filled the ocean in between them.

  “Here’s what I see,” Sam said. “This artifact is something hopeful. I see a new beginning for mankind. I see an end to our toil and our struggle. The dawn of a new day and unity. But at the same time I see gods who don’t care. I see us trying to get through the gateway, but they won’t let us pass. I see ivory towers with silver tubes running up to eggs into the sky.”

  Joe had found it interesting right up until that last part. Then he realized, through the small buzz that the secondhand smoke had given him, that all of this was a gimmick. The Seer was getting paid for this, Cassandra had declined to mention, and he was good at what he did.

  His ex sat next to him with her eyes closed. She wasn’t getting the same buzz was she? Due to her empathic nervous system she felt what the others in the room were feeling, but what exactly was her positronic brain saying when others were having a spiritual experience? How could ones and zeroes interpret the spiritual?

  Next to her sat Tammy, with a sour look on her face, afraid that her god might somehow be disapproving of all this.

  Alma knelt next to the Seer – buying in whole-souled, because this was temporary and that was sustainable. Not to mention potentially profitable.

  Next Joe looked to the Seer himself, who must have believed in what he was selling, otherwise how could he sell it? The man’s eyes were closed and he was nodding along. But then, quite discreetly, the Seer peeked around the room to make sure everyone was buying in. He met Joe’s gaze and shut his eyes once more.

  Goodness. The guy didn’t even believe in all this himself. It just an easy way to make a buck.

  Joe then thought of himself. In that moment, instead of having a genuine experience, he was merely watching everyone else. That had been the story of his life – looking to others for cues on what he would value, what he would believe. It made him feel like a fake human.

  “I also see a creature named Roy,” the Seer added.

  ‘That’s strangely specific,’ Joe thought.

  Suddenly the ground rumbled, but this didn’t feel like the normal Bolstra 5 tremors.

  “What was that?” Tammy asked, struggling to remain upright.

  “It’s the Great Talashaa Specter,” the Seer announced. “Filling this place.”

  Joe looked out the window. “That or those Chinese battle cruisers entering the atmosphere.”

  The chess-piece-shaped ships were hazy white and barely visible in the sky over the ocean.

  “What?” Cassandra asked, she was the first to snap to her senses since she wasn’t under a spell. “What are they doing here?”

  “Looking for this, I suppose,” Joe said nodding to the artifact. “Tammy, pack it up and let’s get going.”

  Tammy reached down to get the empty plastic bag from underneath a table.

  Up in one of those ships, Enoch Applebottom stood before the round window in his office overlooking the underbelly of the planet. His computer dinged with the report from his chief officer Saburo.

  Our scanners confirm that the artifact is on the planet’s surface – not in orbit, on the planet’s moon or on any of the surrounding planets. Unfortunately, due to the tremors from the tectonic plates, we cannot say specifically where exactly the artifact is. Any speculation as to it’s location would be pure guess-work on our part and not very useful.

  Applebottom rang the officer. “What exactly am I supposed to do with this information?”

  “It’s all I have...” Saburo answered.

  “I’ll ask again, what am I supposed to do with it? All I have are fifty ships and thirty thousand men. How am I supposed to search an entire planet?”

  “Maybe we could flush them out?” the officer weakly suggested.

  “How?”

  “With bombardments?”

  “So we’ll bombard the entire planet?” Applebottom asked.

  “Look, I can’t trace exactly where the artifact is. Our GPS system is useless here. All I know is that it’s on the surface.”

  “What about Corbit’s ship?”

  “It’s off-line, there’s no telling where it is until he starts it up. Theoretically, if he were to start his ship, then we’d be able to pinpoint their location and scan that area for the artifact.”

  Applebottom moaned and rubbed his face. “Bombard th
e whole planet then.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Sir, that was really only a suggestion.”

  “Well, I liked it,” Applebottom said.

  The officer sighed. “What should we use for bombardments?”

  “Use the PBS,” Applebottom said, sitting down in his chair and spinning around to admire the view.

  “The PBS, sir?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  The Planetary Bombardment SystemTM (or PBS for short) was the natural evolution of the nuclear weapon. Powerful enough to annihilate an entire planet from orbit, the PBS was so devastating that legislation was immediately passed in order to make it all but illegal to use. However, that didn’t stop every nation in the galaxy from amassing them.

  Thankfully, the PBS was as big as weapons of mass destruction could get, since the nature of explosions prevented them from traveling through space.

  A use of the PBS would have meant a declaration of war by whomever owned the destroyed planet and all their friends, allies and corporate sponsors. Unfortunately, for the folks living on Bolstra 5, there was no owner, friends, allies, or corporate sponsors to speak of.

  They were fair game.

  Applebottom received a call from the PBS control room. It was the chief operator asking if this was all some sort of joke. When Applebottom informed him that this was, in fact, not a joke – the tech in charge of the control panel refused to push the button. His superior officer had him executed and another tech was promoted to his position. The newly promoted tech was asked to push the button without being informed as to what the button actually did. He pressed. The chain reaction that generated the atomic power began and an opening appeared in the base of the battle cruiser.

  A red ball, the size of a small city and the temperature of a dwarf star, slowly descended from the ship and burned its way through the upper atmosphere. The resulting firestorm could be seen from 30,000 miles. When the plasma made contact with the planet’s surface, the ground evaporated and opened up like a gateway to hell. The shock spread through the entire mantle.

  “And I’m pretty sure that’s a PBS,” Joe said, struggling to stay on his feet.

  “As in a planet destroyer?” Cassandra asked.

  Joe nodded.

  “Why are they doing this?”

  “They’re after the artifact,” Joe said.

  “Won’t this destroy it?”

  “Maybe they don’t care,” Joe answered, staring out the window at the coming holocaust.

  “They just want to kill whomever took it,” Alma said, clearly inebriated.

  “It’s time to go, boys and girls,” Joe said, helping his old mentor to her feet.

  Cassandra merely gazed out the window at the hypnotizing fire that was slowly making its way towards them and lighting the room bright orange. “It’s destroying everything.”

  “I’m so… sorry,” Joe said. This was all his fault. He should have never brought the artifact here. Why did he destroy everything he loved? He went to put his hand on Cassandra’s shoulder but stopped short.

  “Help the others,” she said. “I’ll go and get the car.”

  Joe nodded and helped the stoned Alma and Tammy to the door. He turned back to get the Seer, but the old man was nowhere to be seen. Was he really magic?

  The truth was, he had gone out the backdoor at the first sign of trouble.

  They left in Cassandra’s hovercraft. Unfortunately, it wasn’t capable of getting off the planet, they needed to get to the Crown Vik to do that and fast. Hopefully it was still in one piece. The ground around them split open as they flew over the landscape.

  Joe tried to get his bearings on where they were, but the topography had changed too much.

  “You know the way back?” he asked.

  Cassandra nodded, her internal map didn’t rely on visual landmarks.

  “How can they be doing this?” Tammy asked.

  “The planet isn’t in the Coalition,” Cassandra answered. “And we have no corporate sponsors.”

  “So what?”

  “So it has no protection,” Joe said.

  “No one cares about us,” Cassandra added, pulling the hovercraft down beside the Crown Vik. She got out and lifted Alma’s arm up and over her shoulder. Joe did the same with Tammy and they limped to his ship. Joe stopped at the on-ramp and looked back at the old hovercraft he’d be leaving to die on the surface.

  “How big is my storage compartment?” he asked Tammy.

  “Five meters by five meters,” Tammy said.

  “And how big is that Bezreal fruit container?”

  “Uh I don’t know, one and a half by one and a half?”

  “That means I can’t fit the hovercraft... son of a bitch.”

  Joe carried his deputy inside, set her down in a chair and got behind the controls. A nearby, newly erect mountain began to crumble down upon them. Joe put the ship into second gear and chugged away from the debris that rained onto the vehicle’s roof. He slowly brought the vessel up into the stratosphere and looked down over the hellscape. Deep chasms formed in the ground as red magma spurted into the sky. Towns fell into pits, houses and parks disappeared. No other vessels were leaving the surface because interplanetary ships were expensive and these people were poor. They were dying in their homes, being instantly burnt to crisps. Children, clung to the legs of their parents – clinging to the only people they hoped could help them. But their parents were just as powerless, and they hand no one to cling to.

  The Great Talashaa Specter was nowhere to be found.

  Joe looked to Cassandra. She had her face in her hands. The feelings she was receiving must have been coming from all of those people down on the surface. Although they were minuscule and from such a great distance, when added up, the existential fear of this magnitude must have been overwhelming.

  “Well, I’m too stoned for this,” Alma said as she went up to Joe’s room to sleep off her high.

  “We have good news,” Joe announced.

  “What is it?” Tammy asked.

  “Fortunately, all the destruction will mess with their radars,” Joe said. “And I don’t think they can track us. So it’s smooth sailing to the highway and goodbye Bolstra 5.”

  “Goodbye forever,” Cassandra added through her tears.

  Joe sat back with a deep breath and had the creeping feeling that this escape was all too easy. He looked down to the gray plastic bag next to him and looked inside.

  “Tammy?” he asked.

  “Yes?” the deputy answered, sitting in the seat behind him, struggling to stay awake.

  “Did you put the artifact into the bag?”

  “I grabbed the bag it was in,” she answered.

  “Are you sure the artifact was in there?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Oh good,” Joe said. “Then this empty bag is just an illusion.”

  Tammy leaned up and stared into the empty bag. She reached around inside for good measure.

  “Find anything?” Joe asked.

  “No,” Tammy answered sincerely.

  “Can you drive this ship?” Joe asked, looking to Cassandra.

  She wiped the tears from her eyes. “I can drive anything.”

  “That’s what I like to hear,” he said. He got out of the seat and guided her down into it.

  “Where am I going?” she asked, taking the controls.

  “We are going back down to the tree, if it’s still there.”

  “While the planet’s falling apart?”

  “If we don’t, then Bolstra 5 just got blown up for nothing.”

  Cassandra flew amidst the dust and fragments and flames. The planet was losing its shape and the magma from its core began to float aimlessly in space. It was all beginning to resemble a fresh asteroid field.

  “The gravity is all over the place,” Cassandra said.

  Up ahead was a ball of dirt which had the hollowed out tree connected to it, with it’s roots stickin
g out in a thousand directions below. Cassandra established an atmospheric/gravitational bubble large enough to cover the room where the seeing was performed and extended the on-ramp.

  Joe scurried down, hopped off and entered the tree trunk, trying his best to keep his balance in the wonky gravity. The artifact stood there flashing right where they had left it, except now its luminous blinking was lighting up the room. Joe grabbed the orb and put it back inside the plastic bag. He was about to run back to the ship when he saw Enoch Applebottom sneaking in through the back door in a space suit.

  In shock Joe pulled his gun. The scientist was unarmed.

  “Give me the artifact,” Enoch said.

  “Um… no,” Joe replied, nodding to the gun in his hand.

  “You don’t even know what you have there,” the scientist said.

  “We’re about to find out,” Joe answered, gesturing for the man to back up towards the wall.

  “You don’t know the power you’re dealing with,” Enoch said. “The future of the human race is at stake. All this destruction you see... it’s nothing compared to what you hold in your hands.”

  Joe froze in his tracks. Was what the man said true?

  “Come on Joe!” came Cassandra’s voice from the Crown Vik’s loudspeaker.

  Joe shook his head and came to his senses. The others were counting on him. He stepped out of the room, his gun trained on Enoch Applebottom the whole way, and hopped back on board the ship. Cassandra quickly pulled away.

  “Who was that man?” she asked.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Joe answered.

  “Try me.”

  “Enoch Applebottom.”

  Cassandra let out a whistle as she maneuvered the ship expertly up through the asteroid field. It was a better reaction than Joe had anticipated. Applebottom was more or less the reason they weren’t together anymore.

  In space above them, a Chinese battle cruiser slowly moved into position to block their escape.

  “How were you planning on getting past that?” Joe asked.

  “I don’t know,” Cassandra said.

  An alarm in the Crown Vik went off.

  “Incoming fire,” Joe announced.

  “I don’t see anything,” Cassandra replied.

  “From behind us.”