Magestic 3

by Geoff Wolak

‘That leaves the ship in the west,’ Henry noted.

  ‘Slumber’s old ship is heading there now to locate it, Marines in helicopters heading there. We’ll have it bagged by tomorrow,’ I confidently stated.

  But I was still worried, worried that they had known about our presence here, and had still planned this incursion, that they had come to infiltrate us humans. And I worried about what was next; these weren’t the sort of guys to give up. I linked in to Jimmy.

  ‘The ambassador was a surprise,’ Jimmy admitted. ‘But it confirms what I suspected, which is that they’re opening portals to that world – or a parallel – at a later date, just to see how well the Seether are doing. When they don’t like what they find, they send another team. Slumber was one infiltrator, now three, so what comes next?’

  ‘A hundred, and armed!’

  ‘That’s what I would do if I was them,’ Jimmy agreed. ‘And since they have portal technology … they could take their own sweet time about it. So, I’m planning a little something for them. Oh, when Slumber’s old ship is finished there I have a job for it. It’ll be gone a while, relatively speaking.’

  In a snow-filled valley, Slumber’s old ship hovered above its sister ship as the helicopters landed nearby, Marines landing in soft snow and running as best as they could to the right location through knee-high snow drifts. They ran right into it, a Marine discovering the ship by a metallic ‘clunk’ as his weapon struck something.

  Surrounding the ship, its outline now defined by cold fingers probing the skin, they searched quickly for the hatch. Locating it, a Marine rubbed a cream onto his fingers, found the three indentations, and left his cold fingers in place for twenty seconds. The hatch popped open, a Marine – the smallest guy – being nudged inside. He turned away from the pilot’s dugout, and found the floor hatch, soon pulling out a silver orb and a glass crystal.

  Eight Marines raised white tents and made a happy home in the snow as the helicopters returned to Manson, and I sighed with relief. Our friend the hitchhiker was still out there, but I was confident that the police would pick up a stranger.

  A day later, and with operations returning to normal, a report came in of six Seethan police officers having been killed in the Rockies, in the town that we had highlighted. It was not good news, and we were all surprised – if not shocked – that our stealthy visitor was being anything other than stealthy. I dispatched a scanner to the road east of that town, and everyone was duly scanned as they passed. When two Marines went missing, their bodies discovered hidden a day later, we went into panic mode. Slumber’s people had sent Rambo, not James Bond.

  Security was tightened everywhere, especially at the embassy, and it was time to be radical. I had Slumber’s old ship fly low and slow up and down the road in question, in the hope that it would spook the guy on the ground. After all, one of his own ships should not be visible, and he may return to his own craft. That craft was now wired to blow, just in case, Marines carefully hidden.

  Then I got a call, late that night. ‘It is OK to talk, sir?’ came Dark Star’s voice.

  ‘You’re back,’ I noted.

  ‘Yes, sir, and I have monitored your communications. I am aware of the individual approaching your location, and I believe I may be able to help, sir.’

  ‘Help … how?’

  ‘By scanning all individuals moving along that road, sir. The Seether have a slower heartbeat than the known alien life forms, especially in the cold weather. I can detect heart beats from overhead, and scan up to two hundred individuals simultaneously.’

  ‘Excellent idea. You have a green light.’

  ‘I shall move with dispatch, sir. Have a good night.’

  ‘Oh, Dark Star?’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘What did the alien look like, on the ship you towed to the moon?’

  ‘We were unable to obtain an image, since my bolt destroyed the body, and they have been unable to access stored images so far.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Thanks anyway.’

  Dark Star moved off, and I went to bed. At 7am Dark Star was back on, my pad bleeping.

  ‘Yes?’ I croaked.

  ‘I have located the individual, sir.’

  ‘Excellent. Where is he?’

  ‘Just two miles from the city, sir, now walking along the road with a bag over a shoulder.’

  ‘And his face?’

  ‘A Seethan face, sir.’

  ‘Access our data-pads; there are many faces in there. See if you can find a match.’

  ‘One moment, sir.’

  I waited, getting dressed.

  ‘I believe I have a match, sir, a ninety-seven percent match.’

  ‘To which Seethan?’

  ‘To the individual known as Pleb, sir.’

  ‘Pleb?’ I queried, loudly. ‘I’m … surprised that they see him as someone worth imitating.’ I took a moment. ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘What course of action should I take, sir?’

  ‘Are you in a position to use your laser?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, sir, I am one hundred and twenty metres above the individual.’

  ‘Slice his arms off, then maintain a visual.’

  ‘He is now on the ground, sir, insufficient blood to have been a Seethan. People are coming to attend him.’

  ‘Could you hit his face with a microwave burst to make his skin very warm?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Do so. That’s supposed to force them to alter their appearance, so someone told me.’

  ‘His face is flushed, and now those attending him are moving back. A police officer approaches.’

  I rushed down and woke our football star, Pleb. ‘Quickly, call the police, the impostor is on the road west, his arms cut off.’

  Pleb rubbed his face, and made a call, the exactness of which I doubted. I woke a minder, and repeated the details, and two hours later an odd-looking Seether with no arms arrived, the arms now resting on the back of the truck that had brought him. The police escorts bundled the alien off, and dragged him inside the embassy and down to the boiler room. The arms were placed in a corner as the staff crowded around.

  ‘Give him water and tuna,’ I ordered, a human guard tending our prisoner. ‘We want him alive.’

  A quick search revealed a type of weapon, and a hand-held scanner of sorts, three other devices found. So much for stealth; this guy had come loaded - and expecting trouble.

  ‘I will not talk,’ our alien croaked out.

  ‘Don’t need you to, my friend, we just need your DNA,’ I told him as I knelt in front of him. ‘You see, we discovered that your DNA holds memories, and if matched with fertilised Seethan eggs, the offspring remember images from your world.’

  He stared up at me, not looking happy. It was a trick of course, because I just made it up. Still, everyone around me was convinced.

  ‘And we already know where your home world is.’ I stood. ‘But we’re not unreasonable people, and we’d like to negotiate a peace – if that is possible.’

  As I said it, I figured he would try and play for time.

  ‘Your physicians are skilled enough to attach my arms,’ he croaked.

  ‘They are, no doubt. But how about a little information first?’

  ‘What do you want … to know?’

  ‘Let’s start simple, such as … your mission remit?’

  ‘To infiltrate the embassy, and to observe for many years.’

  ‘And when the time came..?’ I nudged.

  ‘Just to observe and report.’

  ‘And there starts the lying, my friend, since people interested in years of passive monitoring don’t kill police officers – and draw attention to themselves. You, my friend, are a combat soldier. But your superiors made a huge mistake … by choosing to copy our Pleb. You see, you seem switched on and intelligent, whereas Pleb -’ The guards all laughed. ‘- Pleb is a fool that accidentally sets fire to his room every week. Last week he lit a cigarette, and tried to eat it. I think your research depart
ment needs a good kick.’

  ‘You’ll learn nothing from me,’ he croaked.

  ‘Which, I’m sure, is what Pleb would say if you asked him.’ The guards again laughed. ‘Slice his lower legs off, put them and the arms on ice, put him in a bag with an air hole, and send him to Jimmy’s old world.’

  ‘Wait, I can help you.’

  ‘Help us how?’ I asked as guards made ready to laser the legs off.

  ‘I can tell you of a world where we just placed an agent, a human world.’

  I took a moment. ‘What year is it … on this world?’

  ‘It’s 1982, and President Thatcher has just been assassinated.’

  ‘President Thatcher, eh?’

  ‘Yes, we just placed an agent there.’

  ‘And his purpose?’

  ‘To start a war.’

  ‘Do you have the frequency?’

  ‘No, just the detail.’

  ‘I’ll research the detail, and we might just put you back together, my friend. Take his legs off.’

  I went and linked in to Jimmy. ‘President Thatcher?’ Jimmy queried.

  ‘Might just be a mistake, and he meant Prime Minister Thatcher,’ I suggested.

  ‘We’d have to step through worlds till we found her being assassinated, but it smells like a trap. He told us what we wanted to hear - that they start a war on a human world. I suspect that there’s a nice trap awaiting us. Still, a trap is for springing.’

  ‘You’ll look?’

  ‘They want our frequency so that they can come screw with us. So, I’ll give them a frequency, just not the one they might hope for.’

  ‘Can the Moon base step through worlds and find the right one?’

  ‘Way ahead of you,’ Jimmy said with a smile. ‘They’ll be looking for us opening a portal on the ground to get our frequency. Instead, we’ll arrive from the Seethan future world, which will confuse them no end.’

  I ordered the drones back up, in a hurry, and arranged for those people we had sent off-world to return, hoping to get things back to normal quickly.

  And the next day I set out for the stadium, pleased to find that the builders had made good progress over the winter. Three quarters of the stands were now complete – large, ugly and grey – but complete. The changing rooms were bare concrete, but would do, and the urinals were very simple and basic, little that could go wrong.

  Thinking about televised games, I had a small box built at the highest point in the roof, and ordered that electrical cables be run to it. But that set me thinking, and I did a little research on the existing Seethan TV services.

  They were all government controlled, and they made use of bulky cameras from the 1950s, but also seemed to posses one or two more modern variants, possibly from the 1960s. Frustrated, I decided to jump ahead a little. Going to see the President in his drab offices, drab but well-protected, I asked if he would like better TV cameras to use.

  He shrugged. ‘OK.’

  I should have just ordered them. I thanked him for his time, and apologised over the loss of his police officers, soon back at the embassy and ordering TV cameras, but simple ones. I sent through a design criteria, and stated that the cameras were to be better than those models that the Seether currently possessed, but not too advanced.

  Back on my old world, in New Kinshasa in 2048, they looked at TV cameras from 1980, and modified a few things, soon having the parts made up. In the meantime, I had to do something about the TV studios. We had plenty of human experts around the place, so I found a few that were suited, and sent them off. They would now bring along the skill levels of the Seethans manning the TV studios, and I wondered how long it would be before adverts and re-runs pissed off the local population; daytime shopping channels - and soaps. What a cruel fate we were about to inflict upon the poor unsuspecting Seether.

  That night, sat in my room with a Whiskey in my hand, I considered the long-term development on this world, assuming that a war did not break out with our alien buddies. I knew what I wanted to do, but I also figured that it was too much and too soon. I linked in to Jimmy, finding him in bed with his wife. It looked like they were sat up reading. I explained my thoughts.

  ‘Paul, whatever thoughts you have … are the correct thoughts, because you were supposed to develop that world. So the thoughts that you’re having now are no more valid or less valid than what you did last time around – only this is your first time around. Do what comes to mind.’

  I decided to be bold, and in the morning told Henry. He stopped and stared at me.

  ‘Is this all not … a little premature and … bold?’ he asked.

  ‘Apparently, I was supposed to develop this world, and Jimmy says that I should go with my instinct, and not second-guess myself too much.’

  ‘Well, you’re suggesting quite a ramp up, and with dangerous aliens around, is it safe?’

  ‘Assuming that the bad guys don’t unwind this time line, we should proceed as if we win the battle here.’

  I called a full meeting, and linked into the guys over in Preether. Since the action I was proposing would take place away from here, it was not that much of an issue. Having made the decision, I sent a signal to many worlds, and asked for volunteers, around a million of them.

  A familiar routine

  A week later, portals crackled open in many places around the Seethan world, in Britain, Africa and Cuba, and keen volunteers streamed through with kit and supplies, long lines of electric cars to be seen by startled animals – animals that had never seen a human or been hunted by one. Some of these volunteers, they had been at this for sixty years if you included their time off world. It was fair to say that they knew what they were doing, and had a little experience.

  But their remit this time was very different to that of previous missions, in that there were very few humans where they were going – just a handful, and the purpose was not to build up this world, at least not in the usual way. The purpose was to lay the ground for the Seether, and to clean up this world a little. The volunteers would repair roads, bridges and buildings, but then leave those buildings empty, those highways to gather dust, expecting that in the decades ahead the Seether would occupy those buildings, and drive down those roads or over the repaired bridges.

  In Africa, around Mawlini, the teams would drill oil and cap it off, build oil-fired power stations and test them, lay wires ready. In the Congo, they would open up mines in suitable locations, drill for oil and cap it off, and create roads and bridges. Someday, decades from now, the Seether would inherit rail lines, oil wells, roads, all ready or them. Steffan Silo arrived, I was informed, and he would build a few roads and rail lines – from memory.

  In Britain, teams would open up coal mines and build coal-oil converters in several places. They found the motorways buried under twelve inches of soil, horses and sheep grazing peacefully on them. Theirs would be a long and difficult task.

  To start with, my main focus was Cuba, and our people arriving there started with an oil derrick in what had been Havana, others working on a road towards overgrown plantations in the east. They began removing fallen tress on those roads, roads that were now buried underneath six inches of soil and grass. Food and oil were the priorities on the island, and I went to visit the Seethan President a week after the teams had started to clear up a small section of the island.

  ‘Mister President, we have oil and food on an island to the south, and we’d like to develop that island with your people, but without the Preether knowing about it.’

  He was keen, since I was being sneaky.

  I added, ‘We would take five hundred men, but I would also like you to consider starting a Seethan colony there, so that they grow and … so that the Preether never grow there.’

  ‘Yes, yes, good. I’ll let you have some young boys, a few females.’

  ‘And some police and soldiers, to keep order.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘And some officials to run it for you.’

 
‘Yes, yes.’

  It was a done deal, and he would allocate bachelors to us – which were ninety percent of the Seether - whether the bachelors liked it or not. I explained that the ‘volunteers’ would need to travel through the magic ring of light in the north, and we started to arrange buses. Men were soon being told that they had gainful employment in the land of the ancestors, and most were keen; hot chocolate and football came to mind for most of them.

  The buses trundled north, the men carrying bags of personal possessions. They stepped through the portal without querying the technology, and were all lined up for a scan before and after stepping through, DNA samples taken. Led out from the portal, they were put onto more buses - only nice clean electric buses - for the short journey to the airport. There, a military transport awaited, eighty men stuffed aboard. Sat down, they considered the plane another bus – an oddly loud one, till it took off.

  Scared rigid, the Seether stared out of the windows for the eight hours that it took to reach Cuba. Safely down and on Cuban soil, they took in the warm air and the strange smells, soon stepping through another portal, and finding an overgrown airfield, tents erected by Rescue Force el Cuba.

  Tents had been set-up for the police, separate tents for the minders, and camp beds were grabbed, outer layers of clothing removed. It was hot here! They were shown the canteen, the toilets, and where to get supplies such as bottled water, and in the morning were duly split into work groups. Shovels issued, they started to clear a road, the work simple enough.

  Work halted at noon for three hours, and the men were led to the nearby ocean, where they stopped and stared in amazement at the blue water and the crashing waves. They had never seen a beach before, nor the ocean. Water bottles were issued, the men encouraged to strip off and to go for a swim.

  Nervous at first, they soon plunged in, their DNA reminding them how much they loved the water. Unlike us humans, they could focus underwater, and swam down, inspecting what they found, a few crabs caught and eaten raw. At 3pm, getting them out of the water again was like getting Klok and Chime out of the pool, and whistles had to be blown. The men started again on the road, finishing at 7pm, when a meal was served. After stuffing their faces they sat about a large fire of driftwood, enjoying the warm evening air and its fragrant smells. Many slept under the stars that night.