Polarian-Denebian War 4: Space Commandos

by Jimmy Guieu

  “You hear that, Injya?” Hogounn asked in his mic as he strode calmly back to the ship. “Doesn’t it sound like the cry of a Z’nog being hit by a stream of energy during a hunt on the planet Myln’dha?”

  “Yes,” Injya smiled in agreement. “It really does sound like a Z’nog. That’s funny.”

  While a tragedy with serious implications was being played out on Mars and while Zimko and his squadron were preparing to take off from Venus, the “flying saucers” on Earth were carrying on their business, submitting the primitives to tests in order to study their reactions to the presence of “Martians.”

  With a Polarian at the controls a single-seater Fimn’has landed in a rather remote area on French soil. Night was falling. Hidden by a hedge the small ship, around 15 feet in diameter, could not be seen from the bend in the road at this spot.

  Through the bushes the Polarian watched the Earthling coming in his direction. When he was only a few yards away he stepped out. The Earthling, surprised at seeing a man dressed in a mechanic’s uniform with a motorcycle helmet come out of the bushes, stopped short. On the defensive the primitive swung out a long, wooden instrument ending in four, slightly curved, metal spikes.

  This movement surprised the Polarian. He had thought the instrument could only be something to help the Earthling walk. Waved in front of him like this the long, wooden pole with a split end became a dangerous weapon. The Polarian decided to smile and holding out his hands he approached the Earthling and said something that the Earthling could obviously not understand.

  The human hesitated a moment and ended up lowering his instrument. The Man from Outer Space stepped closer and in a friendly manner took the primitive’s hands in his, squeezing them fraternally. The Earthling, standing agape, let him do it, thinking he was dealing with some harmless lunatic escaped from a foreign asylum, since the lunatic did not speak his language.

  The Polarian dropped the human’s hands and jumped through the bushes and back into his Fimn’has. Then he took off, glad to have made friendly contact with a primitive of T2714.

  Tired of playing now the Polarian, Wolfian and Centaurian children, after miraculously escaping the effect of the Denebian annihilating rays, were getting ready to go back to the astrodrome and join their parents. Since the entire population was busy they were pretty sure that their escapade would go unnoticed.

  But when they were on the way back they saw the first adults returning to the city. In fear of being scolded the kids hid in a big, perfumed flowerbed and waited for life to get back to normal on the base before sneaking back to their houses. They would come up with a good excuse for their absence and tell their parents that they were at the end of the row when Chief Hudako started the evacuation drill.

  Therefore, peaking through a bush the three different races of children watched the “big people” marching by. Tink, the group’s leader, opened his helmet, as did his Polarian friends. The Wolfians and Centaurians did not breathe the same air so they kept theirs on. B’tna crawled over to Tink and with her little, six-fingered hand tugged at the thick spacesuit to get his attention.

  “What is it, B’tna?” the boy asked, putting his hand on the tiny creature’s helmet.

  “Look, Tink,” she pointed at a group of Wolfian adults passing by a few feet away.

  The Wolfian children stopped whispering together. They were stunned seeing the adults wandering back to the center of the base.

  “Did you see that, Tink?” the Wolfian girl asked.

  “See what?”

  “Their eyes, come on!”

  “Oh, yeah!” Tink blurted out. “That’s funny…”

  In fact the big Wolfian eyes were unusual. All of them, without exception, were not only motionless but even the same yellow color.

  “Yeah, that’s funny,” G’bho, one of the young Wolfians, said. “You know, Tink, our eyes never stay the same color for long?”

  “Of course,” Tink affirmed. “Wolfian eyes change color depending on their mood or in reaction to their environment,” he repeated from a textbook on basic cosmobiology.

  “By Kosmos!” he cried out. “Why are they all the same color? Could they all be thinking about the same thing and reacting in the same way to their thoughts?”

  “That’s impossible,” G’bho said, his own eyes popping out of their sockets. Fidgeting his four fingers in his bulky spacesuit, a sign of deep worry, he grumbled, “My brothers are different somehow.”

  Watching the Polarians carefully Tink noticed that they were all walking alike, staring straight in front of them. Nobody was talking.

  Tink was disturbed by this. He felt vaguely like some extraordinary event had taken place, an unimaginable event that kept the “big people” from acting normally.

  A group of young Polarians Wolfians and Centaurians was walking past Tink and his friends. Not a one of them was talking. They were not playing either, just keeping that weird blank expression on their faces, staring ahead, inexplicably. They looked normal but were not acting like they usually did.

  Tink yelled and jumped out of his hiding place in front of a young Polarian couple: his parents. They looked down and stared at him blankly. A shadow of a smile crossed their faces and without saying a word they continued on their way, leaving the boy dumbfounded.

  Panting and crying Tink was about to run after them but B’tna held him back, grabbing the leg of his spacesuit. Her little voice begged through the microphone, “Don’t go, Tink! Stay with us. Something happened when we were playing. Something we don’t understand. Did you see all my brothers and sisters?”

  Tink sniffled and nodded his head.

  “They’re as weird as your parents and brothers. I think that we’re the only ones in Rynka who stayed normal.”

  “We have to do something, Tink!” G’bho cried, grabbing the young Polarian’s arm.

  The other voices called out to him, begging, demanding that they do something. In other circumstances Tink would have felt a certain pride in this unanimous trust in his capacities as leader, but today, faced with this incomprehensible stupor that struck the inhabitants of Rynka, he felt very uncomfortable. A knot formed in his throat. He wiped away a tear and plopped down in the high grass.

  B’tna climbed up his knees and rubbed her six-fingered hand over his tear-soaked face. “Oh, Tink, do something! Do something!”

  The shadow of a huge flying object passed over the group of desperate children. Tink looked up and through his tears saw a gray spaceship flying over the transparent dome. He wiped his eyes, blinked and stopped crying. Then he jumped up. “Look! That’s not one of our ships!”

  In the purple sky where the thin atmosphere let a few stars shined at the same time as the small, bright sun, a huge spaceship was coming down.

  “It looks like it’s going to land…”

  “Right… It’s coming down on the outside astrodrome.”

  “Let’s go see!”

  “Okay but be careful and try to see without being seen,” Tink advised.

  The gang ran down the streets past the adults who were acting so strangely. No one paid any attention to them.

  Soon they slowed down and walked along a green metal wall. They slipped into a building and stormed into the gravito-magnetic elevators. A minute later they were floating in all positions over the pipe leading to the flat roof of the building. An agile leap carried them out of the repellent field and they all landed on the edge of the vertical well, waving their arms to keep their balance like tightrope walkers on a high wire.

  They hurried to the west edge of the roof and threw themselves on their bellies. Cautiously lifting their heads to look over the low metal wall they all cried out in surprise. High over the city they could see the part of the astrodrome stretching out to the west of the base. Beyond the dome surrounding Rynka a huge spaceship had landed on the ocher sand of the Martian desert. A long, rectangular hatch was open in its belly.

  “Oh, look at…”

  The words got caught
in Tink’s throat. His trembling hand pointed at the 25 Fimn’has that made up the Commando Unit of Ruanoor and Woodna. The decompression chambers in the ships had just opened and from each of them came out two green monsters, roughly human in form but covered with scales from head to toe.

  “De… Denebians… here in Rynka,” G’bho stuttered in astonishment.

  The 50 scaly green creatures activated the opening of the exit hatch and went through the dome’s thick wall. After closing the hatch behind them they walked into the Martian air, their spacesuits under their arms.

  “They… they can breathe outside? A young Wolfian was surprised.

  “They’re sympodic beings,” Tink explained distractedly, fascinated by what he was seeing. “These monsters can adapt to almost all physical conditions and I think they can even survive for a time in outer space.”

  The 50 Denebians strode toward the spaceship. They looked satisfied. The trap they had set for Zimko should succeed. Thanks to a tiny adjustment of all the mechano-psychic relays left working in the 25 Fimn’has, the population of the base was completely under the control of an electronic super-brain in which the Denebians had put tens of thousands of very precise instructions. These instructions would allow the fantastic instrument to make the inhabitants of the base act intelligently in a number of unimaginable situations. Naturally every action thus programmed would preserve or further the interests of the Denebians.

  This huge, intricate plot was supposed to end up, sooner or later, in capturing Zimko alive. The Space Commando Chief would fall into the hands of the Denebians and they would just have to annihilate his will. Under their control Zimko would then give orders to his squadrons to bring them into the carefully prepared trap. After that the conquest of the solar system would be just a little interplanetary war, a series of sporadic battles that would all end up in the surrender or extermination pure and simple of the inhabitants of the bases set up in this galactic zone by the Federated Worlds.

  The giant spaceship—a disc 1,300 feet in diameter with a phosphorescent dome on top—rose into the purple sky where the stars were shining faintly. Shooting off into space it went 30,000 miles from Mars surrounded by a force field that absorbed all detector waves and waited patiently for the arrival of the Space Commando squadron led by Zimko.

  Trying to capture him in flight by doing the same thing they had done to the Wolfians and Centaurians to enter Rynka was not reliable enough. The Denebians, as hardened warriors, did not underestimate the strength or insight of their enemies. However, they were sure that their plot was foolproof. Everything would work like a fine-tuned machine impervious to outside influences.

  What they apparently did not know was that an inside influence was in serious danger of messing up their plans.

  CHAPTER VI

  “What are we going to do?” Zendka sobbed, a ten-year old girl with very curly blonde hair.

  “Well, stop crying, all of you!” Tink got angry at his comrade and the two young Wolfians whining at his feet, their hair standing on end and their big eyes vibrating in fear. He regretted his outburst right away and patted their helmets while running his hand through Zendka’s blonde locks. “Don’t get upset with me, friends. I’m… as scared as you are and I don’t really see what we can do.”

  He looked toward the horizon where the disc of the sun was slowly going down and absent-mindedly he watched the two small Martian moons—Phobos and Deimos—pursuing their orbits in opposite directions, Phobos following a retrograde movement.

  “I think we should go back home,” he ended up saying. “Don’t be surprised to find your parents acting weird like we saw. Let’s watch them and tomorrow morning at dawn we’ll meet in the central park near the Knoktbanss. I don’t think our parents will try to stop us leaving so early… They probably won’t even know we’re gone,” he said sadly, dreading to return home.

  In groups of three or four the young Polarians, Centaurians and Wolfians reached Central Park. The lighted walls of the buildings cast a gentle glow over the wide, deserted paths. The sky above the dome was soot black; the stars were twinkling dimly in the rarified atmosphere of the planet Mars. The sun would soon appear on the horizon as its light was just starting to seep into the background.

  When the young survivors of the Rynka base were all together—there were about 40 of them—they sat in a circle around Tink. Over their heads the hooped flowers of the Knoktbanss, the weird plants in the shape of concentric circles like giant cacti crossed with magnolias.

  “I tried to talk with my parents,” Tink began. “They paid no attention to me.”

  The boy tried not to let his emotions get the best of him and went on, showing his friends a big belt with a black, triangular holster hanging from it.

  “My father even let me take his disintegrator when he usually won’t even show it to me up close.”

  They took turns telling what their night had been like in the crazy environment around their parents who seemed sunk in a perpetual daydream.

  “Does anyone know how to fly a Fimn’has?” Zendka, the blonde girl, asked.

  Tink shrugged his shoulders, “But even if one of us can, where would we go? Flying is one thing but space cruisers are something else altogether. We’d have to be able to read the galactic coordinates on star charts, translate the astronavigator readouts and especially know how to spot the electron currents being spit out by the sun… Getting a Fimn’has caught in a flow of whirling electrons would be certain death if we couldn’t get around it.”

  “So, what do we do?” a Centaurian girl asked, her head barely higher than Tink’s knee.

  “Since our parents are still out of it, I figure we should send an alarm to astrobase 2 and explain what’s happening.”

  “You know how to work a space viewer?”

  “Yes. One day my father showed me how to put a selector unit on whatever wavelength you want.”

  B’tna, the little Centaurian girl, grabbed his boot and said, “You think the Denebians did ‘this’ to our parents just to mess with them? They must be preparing something that needs everyone in Rynka sleepy… I’m sure they’re watching the base from their spaceships parked off in space…”

  “And if they’re watching the base, they’re also watching over any possible communications!” Tink finished her thought.

  He looked at her with obvious admiration. This frail creature was really sharp. If it was not for her, he would have made a serious mistake.

  “You’re right, B’tna, so now we’re back in the same place. We know that something serious is happening but we can’t ask for help from the other bases in the system. If there were one adult among us he could at least send a psychic message into outer space… but we’re just kids! Our mental waves can’t even get beyond the orbit of Deimos.”

  Nervous and angry at feeling helpless Tink paced back and forth inside the circle of his comrades. After a few minutes of deep thought he stopped suddenly, his face beaming with joy.

  “I think I’ve found a way to communicate with the astrobases or a squadron in this zone of space. What we have to do is make the Polarians on the bases or the Fimn’has understand that we need to get in touch with them. Even though we can’t sent a long range psychic message, the adults can receive our thoughts with no problem. So, we have to get their attention without the Denebians suspecting that there are minds in Rynka that aren’t under their control.”

  “And you think it’s possible?” G’bho asked, very excited by the prospect, which made his big oval eyes quiver in their orbits.

  “It’s simple. We’ll get into the Space Transmission Center and while you’re keeping an eye on the technicians I’ll get the attention of the Space Commandos. Come on!”

  Without trying to hide the 40 survivors hurried after Tink down the streets of Rynka. The city was starting to wake up with the purple dawn typical Mars. The Polarian men and women were coming out of the buildings and heading for their various posts. The Wolfians in their metallic spacesu
its and the Centaurians wearing their opaque or transparent spacesuits were also on their way to the research centers or science sections. But everyone, no matter what race they belonged to, looked like they were sleepwalking.

  Just as the survivors had expected no one paid any attention to them. They marched into the lobby of the Space Transmission Center without a single guard trying to stop them. It was the same for getting into the huge, round room in the middle of which were six big three-dimensional screens, each hooked up to a semi-circular control panel on a chrome stand.

  Tink’s father, the chief engineer of the tele-transmissions was standing before one of these machines. Five other operators were at the other commands. When the face of a Polarian, Wolfian or Centaurian—a spaceship pilot or base technician—appeared on the screen a strange transformation took hold of these previously passive tele-transmitters. Their faces became normal, their eyes lit up and calmly, perfectly naturally, they answered the questions of their distant collaborators.

  “Hey, did you see that?” B’tna whispered to Tink.

  “Yeah. Now I understand. The evil green monsters are controlling our parents’ thoughts. When they don’t have to deal with someone off Rynka they’re acting like on automatic control. But when they have to communicate with the outside the Denebians make them act naturally so they don’t raise any suspicions with their blank expressions and droning voices. They say what they’re told by whoever’s holding the keys to their brains.

  “I think I saw once in some school session that an omniorama has these very effects. So, our fierce enemies can destroy the will and then control their subjects who are completely at their will and can commit the worst crimes without even realizing it. Like we just saw with the viewers. When they have to the Denebians can twist our parents’ minds to make them look normal while still keeping them under their mental control.”