by Bob Mayer
Table of Contents
Title Page
“LOVE ME”
MONS OLYMPUS
A VISITOR
A DECISION
TESLA’S LEGACY
A RESCUE
THE UNDEAD
SHOULD HAVE LISTENED
AVALON
THE ARK
“WE HAVE BECOME DEATH”
THE ANCIENT ENEMY
BE THE CHANGE
‘LIVE AND DIE ON THIS DAY’
DESTINATION EARTH
DANCE WITH THE DEVIL
BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
THE END OF THE BEGINNING
Author Information; Excerpt; Copyright
About the Author
ALL SERIES
The Story (As Far As We Know, So Far)
AREA 51: Invasion
THE FIRST DAY: ARRIVAL
Copyright
AREA 51:
REDEMPTION
By
BOB MAYER
“LOVE ME”
CYDONIA, MARS
“Man’s best friend.” The alien murmured the words in English, but in a singsong, high-pitched voice, unused to speaking the language.
“Sit!” Nyx commanded. “Sit, Rover.”
The dog promptly sat, staring at her with soft brown eyes. It was a perfect Border Collie. Black and white fur, body longer than it was tall, and ears that perked up when she called out its name. Nyx had chosen the breed because her research indicated it was one of the most intelligent of the canis lupus familiaris species and renowned for its obedience.
Nyx returned the stare with her red, vertical, cat-like pupils. The two sat like that for a few minutes, the only sound Rover’s tail sliding back and forth over the control center’s floor and his breathing, tongue hanging out the right side of his mouth.
“Down,” Nyx ordered.
Rover obediently went to his belly, still looking at her.
‘Rover’ was an inside joke that Nyx’s fellow Airlia had failed to find the humor in, but Airlia, as a species, weren’t keen on humor. The humans called the vehicles they sent to explore the surface of this planet ‘rovers’. Initially, the Airlia sabotaged the Mars probes in various ways, beginning with Mariner 3 in 1964. Eventually, the Airlia commander at the Cydonia Base had decided that these primitive devices posed no threat. Too much sabotage would strain the mathematical probabilities of chance and the humans might grow suspicious.
Some were allowed to land and do their limited job.
“Roll over.”
Rover performed flawlessly.
But there was something missing in Rover. Something very important. Something Nyx desperately wanted to feel: the key to the bond between canis lupus familiaris and homo sapiens.
Nyx accepted it was possible the fact she was not homo sapiens and thus a species unfamiliar to the canis. Her fellow Airlia thought it ironic when the few who bothered, asked about the origins of the words. That humans labeled themselves homo sapiens from one of their older languages, translated as ‘wise man’ in the prevailing modern language which seemed a pitiful arrogance for a species that was, as far it knew, confined to one planet. According to the way the Airlia rated levels of life across the galaxies, homo sapiens barely made it to Scale, the threshold defining an intelligent species.
The fact she was a different species was also part of the experiment. Could whatever unique ability canis lupus familiaris possessed to bond with homo sapiens be replicated with another species? Was it the answer she’d been seeking for so long?
Was it her voice? Was it her appearance? Could canis lupus familiaris only bond with homo sapiens because of their long association and evolutionary development side by side? Or had she missed something in the programming?
Nyx got on one knee, leaning over, face close to Rover’s.
“Love me,” she whispered. “I need you to love me.”
Rover’s expression didn’t change.
An alarm sounded. A proximity alert from a remote sensor accompanying her comrades hundreds of kilometers away on the surface of Mars, who were desperately working to complete the interstellar transmitter in order to reach the Empire and request aid.
Nyx stood and looked at the display from the Mons Olympus array. She realized that the hijacked mothership wasn’t going into orbit as she’d assumed it would, but was heading directly toward the array.
“Oh, no,” she said as she realized what was happening. “Terminate program,” Nyx snapped.
Behind her, Rover dissolved into a puddle of nanotech slurry.
MONS OLYMPUS
MARS
The Airlia mothership accelerated toward the red planet, guided by human hands in the last act of a long rebellion. Perched kilometers away on the slope of Mons Olympus, Major Mike Turcotte watched the mile-long black cigar-shaped form crash into the massive communications array on the side of the tallest mountain in the Solar System.
Seconds later the concussion from the impact hit with a tidal wave of red dirt and shattered rock and thin Martian air. Turcotte was lifted from the ground and ‘rode’ the front of the wave two kilometers, before being unceremoniously deposited on the surface his armored TASC-suit taking most of the impact. His body was battered, his ears ringing, but he was functional, the suit’s integrity preserved.
It took a moment for this new reality to sink in. He was alive, a shock after he’d been fully prepared to die in the attempt to destroy the alien transmitter and prevent further Airlia forces from returning to the Solar System.
Turcotte scrambled to his feet. There was a massive crater where the mothership had crashed. So large, the lip of it was only half a kilometer away. Turcotte bounded toward it, using the servomotors in the TASC-suit to assist in the lower Martian gravity. He reached the crest of displaced Martian soil and stared into the hole. It was twenty times the size of the almost completed alien array and a half-mile deep. There were pieces of debris scattered about, most the black metal of the alien mothership, none larger than a few meters. He could see nothing of the array, the pylons, or the Airlia vehicles.
Nothing, and no one, could have survived that.
Lisa Duncan, his lover and betrayer, who’d piloted the ship, was gone.
Along with the Grail that promised eternal life.
Humanity had won the final victory over the Airlia.
Mankind was free.
*****
Nyx watched the displays from Mons Olympus go black, the last image the mothership filling the screen in its downward plunge. The screams of her fellow Airlia as they realized their fate was also cut off. A few seconds later the shockwave rumbled through the underground Cydonia Base, hundreds of kilometers distant from the massive volcano. Nyx put one six-fingered hand on the control console to steady herself.
Humans never ceased to amaze her, even though they were her job.
She was in the underground control center, facing a panel of displays and controls, but there was nothing she could do. The array had been the last ditch attempt to contact the Empire via FTL transmission and bring rescue, to summon help to bring this rogue planet under control.
There was no doubt the crash had killed all her comrades who’d been building the communications array. It had also destroyed the only functioning ship in the Solar System still capable of FTLT—faster-than-light-transfer.
No phone home now. Nyx grimaced at recalling the silly expression from one of their fictional visual/sound digital creations. She’d watched thousands of films for her job in an attempt to understand the human psyche. That particular one showed their naiveté of how the Universe really functioned, yet also their unending optimism. If only humans were consistent. Because many of those movies also displayed their extr
eme capability for violence against their own kind. Presented as a form of entertainment. The spectrum presented in human art was incomprehensible and illogical. How could depicting killing others of the same species be entertaining? Yet other films presented humans going to extraordinary lengths to care about each other.
Such wide variance of data made her calculations inherently unstable and her conclusions questionable. The complex Scale equations from her training failed to generate usable results.
The true problem was that humans not only presented such wide variance as entertainment, it reflected their reality, their constant warring against each other for causes that were often difficult to understand, and, under other circumstances, going to extremes to assist each other, even complete strangers. Nations would deploy their military to kill others, but also to assist in different circumstances, on a seemingly random basis.
Right now, the planet was embroiled in the former: killing.
Still numb from the sudden change in her fortune, she shifted her gaze to the feeds from the Airlia mini-satellites (msats) in orbit around the third planet. Each msat is a sphere, less than six inches in diameter. They’d been emplaced thousands of year ago in geosynchronous orbits to monitor the planet.
Nyx looked over the summary of recent events on Earth, the ongoing accumulation of what the humans were calling World War III:
Seoul was obliterated, the result of nerve agents and nuclear blasts. War still raged on that peninsula.
Half of Taiwan was radioactive and blasted. Battles were still being fought on that island.
Muslims in Western China were rebelling.
Iran and Iraq were at war, a maelstrom of Sunni-Shia sectarian violence. The fighting was drawing in surrounding countries, and Israel was at full alert. Turkey was using the confusion to launch a military campaign against the Kurds to wipe out that troublesome problem once and for all. There were a half-dozen coups in Africa. The government in Venezuela had fallen. Again. Other governments were teetering on anarchy. Russia was facing internal dissent at a level not experienced since the 1917 Revolution.
The United States, the most powerful of the Earth nations, was breaking apart with its west coast declaring secession and Texas seeking independence. A Civil War on the scale of the 1861-1865 one, an event Nyx had studied intently, didn’t seem imminent, but one never knew with humans.
One screen showed a running tally of dead: 14 million and clicking upward based on information gathered not only by the msats but Nyx’s surveillance viruses deep in the planet’s “world-wide-web”; an antiquated networking system that connected the human computers. The invention and spread of that network had vastly improved her information gathering capabilities for the past several decades. Given the speed and carelessness with which humans had embraced this technology, there was practically no corner of humanity into which she could not delve from her base on Mars, forwarded via the msats.
Not only were countries at war or immersed in civil war, but across the planet, Isolationists were battling Progressives. Those people who wanted to bury their heads in the sand, a uniquely human expression, and ignore the reality of other Scale life versus those who wanted humanity to move forward and find its place among what they finally knew was a populated universe.
If there was one thing she’d learned about humans it was that if more than two were together, there would be disagreement. Chaos was integral to their species.
Canis lupus familiaris seemed the exemption almost everywhere although even in that instance there were exceptions. Countries where they were bred and treated as food. Humans who reveled in having the species do what humans were so good at: fighting each other.
Yet humans had defeated her people. This system was just an outpost of the Airlia Empire, but still it was an event with only one precedent. Of course that precedent had helped initiate this defeat.
Nyx was below average height for an Airlia, only six and a half feet. Her blood red hair was tinged with white and cut unfashionably short. The hair contrasted sharply with her alabaster skin and revealed her elongated earlobes. The six, long fingers of each hand were interlaced and rested on her lap as the msat images scrolled by.
Over the ten thousand plus years of this assignment she’d spent enough time contemplating her likely demise in this distant galaxy, one would think she’d come up with some deep philosophical determination. Some profound statement that she could leave in the records that might, but not likely, be found. She had theories, including several she considered significant not only about humans, but her own species.
Not that any of it mattered now. Even if the Empire followed up on the long silence and came back to this system, recent events appeared to negate her theories.
She glanced over her shoulder at the inanimate pile of nanotech slurry.
She’d had high hopes for Rover, using every possible piece of data about canis in the programming. Her fellow Airlia had treated the thing as a pest, ignoring her pleas not to interfere with the experiment. She’d also had to mute its barking after complaints. Some had taken an active dislike, kicking at it when it came within range. That might have been a negative factor, but she sensed she was missing something much more fundamental. It was an inherent problem of the programming she was trying to use to find what she looking for, a contradiction, what the humans called a Catch-22.
One thing about their books and film and art that had impressed her was their ability to present difficult concepts in abstract ways. Humans were much more individualistic as a species than the Airlia and therein lay their greatest weakness; but, also perhaps their greatest strength.
Her summation of the overall situation was the same as it had been, off and on, for all these millennia. The off was the long stretches when she was in deep sleep, over ninety-five percent of the time. The on were the times she was awake, scanning the hundreds of years worth of Earth data that compiled.
Even though the computer parsed the massive trove of data based on her specific parameters, there was a tremendous amount that required personal attention. At least that was her belief. The rest of her compatriots: leaders, warriors, technicians, maintenance, crew, bureaucrats, etc. viewed her job, astrobiology, as a waste of time. They didn’t see the need to understand humans; just the power to control them, whether overtly or covertly.
That hadn’t worked out well in this instance.
Which lent credence to the Airlia faction that advocated eradication of homo sapiens.
It was ironic that she was the only one still alive because she’d been viewed as useless and been left behind when the rest departed in the surface convoy to complete the array. She was the lone duty officer to maintain the base.
Nyx felt the data ka on the chain around her neck; a medallion shaped like two hands upraised from a center bar. So much work. Thousands of years of observations. Thousands of hours spent honing theories.
Why bother any more?
The capacity of humans for killing and making war on their own species still disturbed her after all this time. It was something the Airlia, even in the ancient records, had never done. According to Scale, intra-species violence put humans at the low end.
Yet one, Duncan, had just sacrificed herself to keep the rest of the species safe.
Others, including Turcotte, had dropped from orbit in their armored suits toward the array, also willing to sacrifice themselves in the attempt to destroy it.
Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
From the most popular book on the planet, one constantly quoted, preached from, and sworn allegiance to; yet filled with aspirations that humans never achieved. As if they set rules and standards they knew were impossible to their nature and then spent their lives in constant tension and angst because of that failing.
Another enigma at the core of humanity.
Duncan was a specific subject Nyx had been tracking. She was not native to Earth, although that determination had onl
y come recently. When Nyx had realized who Duncan really was, so many events of the last ten millennia had finally clicked into place.
This was because Duncan had come from the precedent, the one other human world that had overthrown their Airlia overseers. Nyx’s failure to determine early on that Duncan was an anomaly was a large factor in this utter defeat. One her commander would have punished her for, except he was now atomized on Mons Olympus.
Movement on the Mars display from the drone that had been following the construction on Mons Olympus caught her attention. A human in a combat suit was bounding across the slope of the mountain.
Nyx sat up a bit straighter. He’d survived.
Turcotte. Another human inside of Nyx’s bubble of specific individuals from among the billions of humans requiring more detailed study. She watched as he arrived at the small ship that had crashed just before the mothership impact. The ship that had somehow infiltrated this system un-detected by the outer ring of Sentinels ten millennia ago, bringing Duncan and her mate from another human planet.
She watched as Turcotte entered the spaceship. Came back out and did some repairs, patching a tear in the hull. He went back in. Then the ship lifted, going to the evacuation pod that had been ejected from the mothership before the crash. Four humans scuttled from the pod to the ship. It lifted off.
The survivors.
Nyx tensed. The logical thing for Turcotte to do now was come here. Make sure the base was empty and the threat completely negated. It was what an Airlia leader would order and a warrior would instinctively do.
The humans had been interested in this location since 1976 when one of their first primitive probes was able to photograph it in some detail. Nyx had followed the human speculation with a bit of dry humor and a dash of curiosity.
Human archaeoastronomers, and there weren’t many of them, claimed Cydonia had a ‘face’ and a ‘fort’ and a great ‘pyramid’, larger than the biggest one on their own planet at Giza, and a “city” composed of several smaller structures. Of course they had no idea what they were really seeing was that the face was the remains of the large FTL transmitter from the initial Airlia mission into this Solar System, built by Aspasia and destroyed by Artad. And the fort had been a hangar for six talons, now lost on Aspasia’s final mission to Earth. The pyramid, now unfolded, was a massive solar array, providing power for the base’s close-in defenses.
