The coastal cities appeared to be active, ships moved in and out of port, wagon trains moved on their roads, and people could be seen, though the people showed up only as tiny dots. But the cities near larger reserves of fresh water, in the Valley and near the mountains, showed fewer signs of activity. Having visited Na Char, she paid special attention each time the satellite passed over, and the city seemed to be worse off even than those in the Valleys.
“We've looked at the orphanage, or the general area, I guess… But we couldn't really tell. The satellite doesn't pass closely over…”
Max's face was blank, staring at the wall.
“I shouldn't be hitting you with this, you're still just waking up—”
“They'll be fine. On the edge of the sea there's always danger.” He made a shrug, unwilling to give voice to the worry she knew he must be feeling. “We can only do what we can do.”
“I hope you're right… There is some good news though.”
He looked at her, interested.
“The drop-pods are landing—many have already landed by now. If we go now, we might catch the live feed in the toaster room.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him towards the door.
Gustov intercepted them, and held out a bathrobe to Max.
Max shook his head. “I'm not cold.”
“You’re not as well-dressed as you think,” Gustov said, gesturing towards Max's protruding vacuum packed nethers.
Max looked down then quickly snapped up the robe.
The toaster room was the new name for the bridge of the Longissima. The toaster in question was the Memory Rejuvenation Booth Snow had used to recover her own lost memories. Two long rows of seating had been erected along the wall facing the large monitor. The front row contained eight colonists chatting to themselves. They paused for a moment to greet Snow and welcome Max. The back row was filled with people wearing only white robes over white plastic suits. On their faces were looks of confusion, or frustration, or childlike wonder, and in some cases more than a little drool.
“They're waiting for a turn in the toaster,” Snow said, in response to the question on Max's face. The two of them sat down in the center of the front row.
“They look a little bit—”
“Stupid? Yup. They were asleep way longer than I was. earthling colonists. I was awake on the duty crew until right before we crashed. But they'd been sleeping since we left Earth.”
“I was going to say, they look out-of-it.”
“Ya. They'll be fine though.”
“That's good—”
“Probably. I mean there was that one guy that went a bit nuts. He started chanting and stuff and then he was smashing things…”
Max's face said no-kidding?
“Not kidding. That happened. Don't worry though. We put him down hard.”
Max raised his eyebrows, alarmed.
“No, I mean we put him back into a pod. I mean, yes, we did have some harsh words for him, and I did question his character and also his major malfunction. But he was going crazy. Breaking stuff. Stuff that we had just fixed.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding his head. “I thought you meant you killed him.”
She punched him in the shoulder.
The chatting in the room hushed as the main monitor suddenly changed from a message of 'no signal', to live footage from the cockpit of an M-9 Roughshod command mech on the surface of Grailliyn. At first she thought it was nighttime on the planet, given the darkness outside the cockpit screen and monitors, but the brightness of the picture adjusted and it was clear that there was something attached to the outside of the mech. Mottled gray and pink fleshy shag-carpet-like nodules writhed over both the camera view on the monitor and canopy window.
“Six, a little slice and dice if you would,” came a deep voice over the transmission. “I've got another one here trying to french me.”
“Six acknowledges,” said a male voice from the mech's internal speakers. It had a light, robotic quality. “It does not have your permission.”
“It does not,” said the deep voice of the pilot. “Jessica, note in our report: The Roughshod needs hands. These squid things are far too eager to suck face. Hands would be ah… you know.”
“Handy, yes boss,” said another robotic voice, this time female. “I have added the note and sent an updated report.”
“Are we online?”
“Currently. But the signal is intermitte—”
The signal went black, as if to prove the point. After a moment it came back but it cut in and out a few more times before stabilizing. There was a clunk as if something had impacted on the hull of the mech, followed by a series of lighter bangs and clanks. The creature convulsed as a blade slid through it and clacked against the canopy. Red blood gushed from the wound smearing the canopy. The starfish-like creature abandoned its assault on the Roughshod but hooked a tentacle to the leg of its android attacker and the pair tumbled from view.
With the cameras clear, images of the Roughshod's surroundings now filled the monitor. There were small buildings, houses perhaps, spread out generously, many with large, rocky, fenced yards. The picture changed as the mech rotated. Beyond the melee of androids and squiddy-starfish the land suddenly dropped from view to reveal a dense, wheel-shaped city below, sandwiched between clifftops. Snow recognized the city of Na Char immediately, having seen it from a similar perspective on their flight from SoChar.
The pilot was not distracted by the stunning view of the city. He coordinated the attack, directing his android team, and opportunistically fired the powerful arm mounted energy weapons of the Roughshod.
There was a shocked gasp as one of the androids, the HUD labeled it as number Two, dove straight at one of the oncoming creatures and was swallowed whole. When its twin blades erupted from the top of the creature, there was a controlled, but relieved murmur of appreciation. The dual blades sliced away from each other, the squid slid down around the android like a discarded bathrobe. There was a communal phlegmy 'yech' from the viewers in the toaster room.
Snow turned to find Max comparing his arm to the android on the monitor, his mouth slightly ajar. There was more than a passing resemblance. Aside from the color of the racing stripes and size, they were practically identical. Using Max's skeletal arm, she lifted his chin and he closed his mouth.
“Just… taking it all in.”
“You know if you're not careful, you will end up like them,” she said, whispering, and pointing at the monitor. At that moment, the image on the monitor changed to show a new formation of three Roughshod's along with three dozen androids marching up the plain towards Na Char from the west.
“An armor-plated soldier?”
“A combat drone. An android.”
“Is that what happened to Bob and Freenan? Did you chop their bodies off, turn them into drones and send them down there to atone for their sins?”
The teasing grin dropped from her face. “You didn't do this, Max. We didn't do this.”
“It seems like we might have had a bit of a hand in it. A bit of a big hand.”
“Ya. I mean it seems that way…” she shook her head. “but it was a trap, Max. Someone would have come here one day. Eventually they would have found the resources, or discovered a new technologies, something. And they would have triggered the jump. And then this would happen. This was just an ancient landmine. And we trod on it.”
Max's face was blank.
She knew he wouldn't be quick to reject blame once he discovered why she wanted him to stop the tiny jumpship from doing its jumpship thing by jumping. And especially when he learned what had happened when he had failed to stop it. It had taken her time to realize herself that they were not totally to blame. But she'd had the time to think about it.
“There's someone to blame. The people on Earth that sent us here maybe. But they didn't create the message. And they didn't send starfish monsters to wipe us out for the crime of instantaneous space travel.”
Max nodded, not y
et convinced.
The feed seemed to die and on the monitor a message appeared to explain that the feed was in fact dead.
“I just feel like I should be doing something to help.”
“If you want to help, go pop the next strudel in the toaster. The last one should be finishing up about now. It's okay. I'm the strudel master, it’s my job to delegate.”
Max made his way to the toaster. As she had promised, the machine soon finished cycling. An earth-tall —which was to say short— ginger-haired man still wearing his hibernation body suit and robe pried himself from the booth. He stretched his arm out to Max, hand wide open.
“My name's Aidan!” Aidan said, speaking with an Irish accent and seemingly very pleased to have remembered his name.
Max hesitated, then placed his stark-white-with-green-racing-stripes-hand into the man's offered one. “I'm Max. Nice to meet you.”
Snow stepped up behind them. “Strudel nine! You’re up!”
An Asian woman of average height stood up from the back bench. “I'm number nine… strudel number nine…” she said, stepping sideways, past a number of her fellow strudels, and approached the booth. She narrowed her eyes in suspicion as she met Snow. “What is a toaster strudel anyway?”
“I'm sure you will find that out as soon as you are finished in the ah…toaster,” said Max, pointing at the unit.
“You might not!” said Aidan, still smiling. “It still makes no sense to me.”
“Then zis is lucky for you,” said the German accented voice of a man, Ziggy, entering the starboard hatch of the toaster room, “Zhe toaster strudel vas an abomination of zhe late twentieth century. It brought with it shame and condemnation to strudels and indeed paztries of all kinds. It alone vas reason enough to abandon zhe earth and find a new home safe from zhe corrupting influence of toaster-heated paztries.”
“Are you being serious?” Aidan said.
“Vell… no. I vas only joking. A toaster strudel is just like a sort of… pop-tart. But wiz apple and also vas bit more flaky. But really, not much more flaky. Junk food you know? Not a good reason to leave home.”
The Asian woman said, “So you are just making fun of us then—”
“Into the toaster, Strudel 9. Save some of that feist for later. We will need it. And to be honest there isn't all that much of it around here,” Snow said.
Snow showed Max how to properly insert a strudel into the toaster and set it into operation. She set a timer on the wrist of her space suit. “How are you feeling? Do you need a rest after your long rejuvenation in the pod?”
“Ha. no. I feel fully rejuvenated.”
“Okay let’s take a look at the report from the counter-invasion and then you can take a spin in the trainer! Good times.”
They read the report in the toaster room, reading out loud any interesting points. But the report had little more information than was shown on screen. The counter-invasion had begun. The invaders were beatable. Future mechs going to Grailliyn should have hands. There was also a depressing list of problems that they could yet do little about.
They left the toaster room behind and headed to the recently de-iced and repaired trainer.
“I think you might have ah… made a mistake. When you named me Snow White.”
Max said nothing.
“Snow White choked on a poisoned apple and had like, basically, a cat nap. I think the princess you were actually thinking of was … Sleeping Beauty,” Snow said, as though it were no big deal. “Sleeping Beauty was totally asleep for a long, longity-long time. Like me.”
“Sleeping would be a terrible name for you.”
“I think we both know we would have gone with Beauty.”
“Beau.”
Then they were kissing.
Chapter 11
Max swung his mallet with practiced ease, earned through long use of his stone axe, and bopped the fuzzy rabbit creature between its two oversized ears before it could disappear into its burrow again. Numbers flowed up from the rabbit’s head and then down again in an arc, disappearing in the bright green grass that covered the landscape. The rabbit slumped to the ground next to its burrow. Max's friendship points increased by one. A number, indicating the points hovered in midair to the upper right of his vision no matter where he looked. He scanned the horizon looking for more of the troublesome rabbits. The low hills of green terrain that flowed gently up and down, were littered with brown piles of dirt that indicated burrows. He was looking specifically for rabbit holes, all of which had a similar brown hue, rather than badger or gofer holes, which for reasons he could not explain, had pink and blue hues, respectively. Spotting one, he jogged across the grass towards it.
Or he meant to. Instead, he stumbled and fell painlessly to the ground. Again. Tripped up by the strangeness of the environment's higher gravity. He climbed to his feet, cursing his clumsiness, and stepped determinedly towards the suspected rabbit hole. He heard an exaggerated snuffling noise as he approached and readied his mallet. The head of a rabbit popped up suddenly, but not unexpectedly. Max bopped it on the head. More numbers poured up and out, and the rabbit flopped to the ground by its hole. The friendship points tally increased. Max smiled.
“How's it going in there?” Snow's voice seemed to come from everywhere.
Max knew better by now than to look for the source of the voice. Snow wasn't really here.
“Fine,” he said.
“Just a sec. I'm coming in.”
Max looked at the body of the defeated rabbit. A feeling of guilt welled up in him. Killing the cute fluffy bunnies had been all fun and games when he was alone…
There was a pleasant sing-song tone and a shadow appeared beside him. He looked over and jumped back. He was expecting Snow, but instead there was a large menacing rabbit bearing down on him. Boss fight? He raised his mallet defensively.
The boss rabbit waved amiably. The sound of Snow's laughter came from the boss rabbit's mouth. “You're playing a kids’ game. Bunnies bunnies. I remember this one! With the farm fields and the scary dogs.”
“A kids’ game?” said Max. “That makes a lot of sense.”
Snow noticed the tiny slain bunny. Her huge rabbit paws came up to cover her huge rabbit mouth and nose. “What have you done?”
“I was just doing the … the quest—”
“Why do you look like that?” Snow said.
“Ah…” Max said.
“Why aren't you helping the bunnies defeat the amoral pantheon of bunny eating predators?”
Max looked down at his large furry body, then back up to her larger furry body. There was no hiding the truth.
“I've aligned myself with the field mice against the oppressive head bopping bunny overlords,” he said.
Her rabbit hands dropped from her rabbit face to her rabbit hips. “You can side with the field mice?”
After shutting down the trainer, they made their way to the command room for a general meeting. The number of awakened earthlings had swelled, and it was time to move from piecemeal operation, to a more organized system.
“Has anyone noticed,” Strudel Number Nine said, though she now remembered her name again. It was Hellen. “That The Message has changed?”
There were three responses to the question. A slight nod of the head, by those few that were in-the-know. A slightly raised eyebrow, by the majority who were not in-the-know. And then there was Aiden.
“That. Is. Mental,” he said. “You mean they wiped out another civilization while we were down for a nap?”
“Two,” Hellen said. “Two more civilizations.
Aiden grabbed his bright red hair in both hands, “Two?!”
“And two were knocked from the end,” Hellen said.
“Brutal,” Aiden said. “So The Message…that's not even the full list?”
It was information that had changed since leaving Earth. The list of languages that formed The Message was not a list of all the civilizations extinguished by GE, only the most recent.
>
“It still isn't clear to me how all of this came about,” Bob said, like the dimwitted rent-a-cop thug buffoon that he was. “I mean I know there was a message and it was carried on a darkwave particle, and that it was the same darkwave particle that allows the jump drive to work. But I haven't heard the full story of how that got us all here.”
Max opened his mouth to shut Bob down. For real and for good. But he was forced to close it again as he realized that he didn't have that answer either. And, furthermore, that it was perhaps not the dumbest question Bob could have asked.
“I slept straight through the voyage from earth,” Eva said, the light-skinned, brown-haired woman who had called together the council meeting. “So, I can only tell you indirectly, through reports that were made of the events that occurred during that voyage. The beginning of the story I can speak of directly, having been there myself, as were most of us here now… with the exception of Snow and our Grailliyn rescuers.”
The room held all of the post toaster earthlings that were still on Mega. The majority of those so far awoken had been sent to the surface of Grailliyn to aid the war effort.
Eva continued, “I was a young woman then and it was an exciting time to be alive. Even at the beginning, shortly after the discovery of darkwaves, there had been hints of its potential. That there might, through darkwaves, be a way to communicate, or even to travel instantaneously, skipping the space between origin and destination. It is fair to say that no one on Earth was unmoved by this development. The renewed excitement and interest in interstellar exploration was exceeded only by the discovery of a message carried by those same darkwaves. The Message. It was the first evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. We were all overwhelmed by the sudden discovery of the answer to that age-old question. While some of us continued to delve into the possibilities of darkwave technology, nearly all the rest of the world began a race to unravel the mystery of the message.
“Old feuds and grudges were put aside as humankind, with a mind to join into the galactic civilization as a unified people, joined together in a harmony never seen before throughout history. A contest was begun to reward those who decoded the message first, but it was soon discarded. The message was not one, but many. As the months and then years passed, there were many opinions and theories made. Some said such a message could only be of good intention. Others insisted it could only be of ill intention. Still others, more pragmatic of mind, said it was more likely to be a message of galactic order, neither good nor bad. But for those seeking the answer, it did not matter. For the first time in history discussion and debate on the topic was meaningless. The answer would soon be at hand.
Starship Invasion (Lost Colony Uprising Book 2) Page 8
