M'tak Ka'fek (The T'aafhal Inheritance)

by Doug Hoffman

  “Obviously that didn't work, but how did he get to the ship?”

  “Ludmilla Tropsha has a quick temper and a wicked sense of humor. She decided that turnabout was fair play—the Frenchman tried to get her kidnapped so she kidnapped him. He was lucky the Captain didn't clap him in irons.”

  “By the captain you mean Captain Jack?”

  “Yeah, Capt. Jack Sutton, the Peggy Sue's original captain and the leader of our happy band until we lost him and eighteen other crewmates at Sirius.”

  “Almost no one will speak of him, do you really think he and the others are lost?”

  “Captain Jack? Aw hell no. Not lost as in dead and gone, I meant lost as in incommunicado. A man like Jack Sutton does not go gentle into that good night.”

  “Interesting, and you managed to slip in a snippet of Dylan Thomas. I've heard you're quite literary, despite your cowboy patina. So tell me, what did happen to the Captain?”

  “The Peggy Sue was running for her life from a flotilla of alien ships with weapons as powerful as our own, 'cept that there were thirteen of them. We took out four or five, but our shields were almost down and we were out of torpedoes and ammo for the railguns. Our only chance was to get into alter-space before the aliens blasted us into plasma.”

  “My God! How did you escape?”

  “Captain Jack and his skeleton crew managed to get this derelict alien battle cruiser we had found up and running—at least we're pretty sure they did. Because all of a sudden hostile alien ships started going off like fireworks on the fourth of July. We knew we weren't doing it, we didn't have anything left to throw at them. It had to be the Captain and the M'tak Ka'fek.”

  “M'tak Ka'fek? What is a M'tak Ka'fek?”

  “That's the name of the old T'aafhal battle cruiser we found. It was built by a long dead alien race and left adrift in a graveyard of ships in the Sirius system after some ginormous space battle long, long ago. In any case, the Peggy Sue made it safely into alter-space but no one knows what happened to the Captain and his crew.”

  “My goodness, no wonder everyone cringed when I mentioned Captain Jack to Ludmilla the other evening, I wish I had known.”

  “Yeah, I seem to keep putting you into situations like that without a briefing ahead of time. Sorry.”

  “Just promise me you will keep me briefed in the future.”

  “Sure, be more than happy to. Look, here comes Kim with our drinks.”

  NatHanGon's Quarters

  The inner airlock door slid open and Melissa stepped into the alien light of the Triad Ambassador's habitat. Livid blues and purples could still be seen in the bruises on the left side of her face. Melissa seldom wore makeup and never thought to camouflage the damage from her assault. As the door slid shut she could hear the tinkling of bells, like a flight of faeries come to greet her.

  It was early morning, before most base personnel had crawled from their beds, but Melissa had been raised on a farm and was used to rising before the Sun. The odd hours of her visits did not inconvenience the Ambassador, they came from an ancient planet that was tidally locked to its star—their world had no day or night in its habitable zone, just a perpetual sunset.

  “Hey there, NatHanGon, how are y'all today? I'm sorry I missed comin' by yesterday but Dr. Tropsha insisted on keeping me in the medical section for observation; I hope havin' all those people traipsing around in here the other day didn't upset you too much.”

  “Our roots tingle with happiness to see you up and mobile again, MelissaScottHamilton; Having no way to judge the severity of the damage you sustained, we feared for your continued existence when the members of your conclave took you for treatment; After the flurry of activity things returned to normal and we were left to meditate on our own.”

  “It's good to see you again too; I was just a little shook up is all, we humans are tougher than that; I'm sorry, I should have asked someone to come by and visit with you while I was bedridden.”

  Melissa examined the ground cover around the Ambassador's roots and shook her head. There were gouges in the moss and a number of the low cover plants were crushed and broken.

  “Oh my, look at all that damage; I am sorry, I probably caused most of the damage myself; It will take just a jiffy to fix this up so the plants can grow back right.”

  “We are less concerned with the ground cover and more worried about you, are you fully functional again? We wondered if such behavior, as demonstrated by the human we killed, is normal in your society? Have our actions caused any reaction among the members of your conclave?”

  Melissa took out a trowel and began repairing the damage at the base of the Ambassador's nest of roots. What she really wanted was for things to return to normal, to feel safe again walking the halls. Ludmilla had given her a compact stunner and told her to carry it with her when outside of her quarters. She was a country girl and familiar with firearms. Carrying a pistol, even a nonlethal one, was fine by her, but it didn't make her feel safe like she had before the attack.

  She was told the nervous anxiety would fade with time, that is what Dr. Morton, the staff psychiatrist, had said in her pre-release interview. She hoped that the psychiatrist was right, but for now the only place she felt truly safe was here, in the Ambassador's room, knowing that the giant, sentient plant would watch over her as she puttered about like a gardener.

  “Don't worry about me, NatHanGon, I'm almost as good as new; Attacking other people is not considered normal, but there are a lot of people who weren't raised right or are just plain evil; Most of the people who have heard about what you did approve, he could have attacked any woman or girl on the base.”

  NatHanGon considered the young human as she worked to repair the trifling damage caused during the assault. Though they were happy that their friend was not permanently damaged they had other things on their minds.

  They are such a young form of life, they must constantly balance between mindless, primitive violence and reason; Perhaps it is because of the T'aafhal's meddling, since they wished to create an intelligent and violent race; It would seem that the main question is have they evolved enough to not destroy or enslave other races.

  Violent they are, but they obviously care for each other and even for members of other species; It was not just the T'aafhal, they died out and left a machine intelligence to finish the job; Perhaps we can find satisfactory answers by discussing ethics with them.

  “We forget that your form of life has a much higher metabolic rate than ours, and can sustain significant damage yet recover; It is good to know that our actions have not alienated others of your kind, that would not have been a good thing for an Ambassador to do; You say some beings are evil, can we discuss your species' concepts of good and evil?”

  Interview Room #3, Base Personnel

  Lem had been cooling his heals in the base personnel office waiting room for more than an hour, waiting for a “mandatory” interview with some human resource types. Instead of reporting for work at 0700 he had come here, only to sit in the nearly empty outer lounge. Clem had already had his interview the day before and said it was no big deal, they didn't even require a urine sample. Since coming to the Moon neither had access to anything that would have shown up in a drug test, making Lem a bit peeved that they didn't require one—it might have been the only time in his adult life he would have passed honestly.

  An administrative type with a clipboard opened a door and called out “Souther, Lemuel Souther?”

  “Yeah, that's me,” Lem said, rising from the uncomfortable waiting room chair he had been sitting in.

  “Right this way, Mr. Souther,” the woman said, leading him down a short hallway and through another door. To the people inside the room she announced, “Mr. Lemuel Souther, assigned to base physical plant as a maintenance technician.”

  She backed out of the room and ushered Lem inside. Inside the room were four people and a bear. Lem quickly sized up the humans—his time in the army had given him a lot of practice with r
eview boards and interview panels. How to read a polar bear was outside his realm of experience.

  “Please come in, Mr. Souther, and have a seat,” said the older looking woman in the center of the table, motioning to the interviewee's chair. She must be in-charge of this goat roast, Lem thought.

  “How are you feeling today, Mr. Souther?”

  “I'm feeling fine, Ma'am.” Never hurts to be polite.

  “I'm Dr. Morton,” the woman said, “and these are Mr. Smith, Mr. O'Shea, Ms. Kurtz and Snowflake. We are here today to find out how you are acclimatizing to your new life here at Farside.” She paused and favored Lem with an institutional smile.

  “I'm doing great, considering the alternative.”

  “Does that weigh greatly on you, Lemuel? May I call you Lemuel? Do you often have thoughts about what happened on Earth?”

  “Not too often, but every now and then. Ain't every day that the world ends. And call me Lem.”

  “Do you find yourself frequently depressed, or having thoughts of suicide?”

  She's got to be a psychologist. “No Ma'am, I'm just happy to be alive.”

  The other woman, the one identified as Ms. Kurtz, entered the conversation. “Do you feel comfortable in the housing block you are living in and have you found new friends there or at work?”

  She's a social worker, I'd put money on that. “My quarters are fine. I was lucky to get picked up with a number of people I already knew, including my best friend.”

  “You used the term quarters for your apartment,” Mr. Smith interjected. “Are you a military veteran, Mr. Souther?”

  “Lem. And yes, I was in the Army, spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan.” This guy is some sort of cop. Both Smith and O'Shea made notes on their tablets.

  “Were you ever diagnosed with PTSD, Lem?” the Psychiatrist asked.

  “Nope.” Lem was growing bored and decided to redirect the conversation with some questions of his own. He turned to the polar bear and said, “Ms. Snowflake, my party was picked up by a shuttle with some Marines on it. One of them was a polar bear, was that you?”

  Snowflake cocked her head to one side and looked at the man for a few seconds before replying. “No, I didn't make many rescue flights and none to North America. It was probably Aurora, she was very involved.”

  “OK, I'm sure you would have remembered. One of the Frederick kids shot the bear in the helmet—no harm done, thankfully.”

  “I am sure that I would have remembered being shot, Lem,” Snowflake chuckled. “I'll ask the other females if they got popped by a kid on a rescue run.”

  “If you find out who it was, could you thank her for me? For all of us? Because if they hadn't come when they did we'd all have been dead.”

  “Sure.” Snowflake leaned back a bit from the table and seemed to be reappraising the human. Smith and O'Shea made more notes. After an awkward pause Dr. Morton resumed the questioning.

  “It says here that you are a maintenance technician, is that what you were back on Earth?”

  “Back on Earth I was a motorcycle mechanic. There ain't much call for that up here, as far as Clem and I can tell.”

  “Clem? Is that your best friend from Earth?”

  “Yeah, I was visiting Clem at his shop in Nebraska when the sky fell—otherwise I'd a been dead with all the others in Des Moines.” Lem figured that if he was talking they wouldn't be able to ask questions so he decided to be chatty. “See Clem and I met in the Army. He was a 91P, an artillery mechanic, and I was a 91K armament repairer.”

  Mr. smith interrupted. “Those were your MOS classifications?”

  “Yeah. Clem was more of a generalist than I was, though our jobs overlapped a lot. It was his job to perform maintenance on turret and carriage mounted armament, towed and self propelled artillery, associated fire control and related systems. Where as I was primarily responsible for repairs on tank turrets, tank weapons, small arms and other infantry weapons.

  “Together we repaired fuel systems, air induction systems, exhaust systems, cooling systems, hydraulic and electrical systems, fire suppression systems, and lots of other stuff.”

  “Did you enjoy that type of work?” asked Ms Kurtz, the social worker.

  “Yeah, it was pretty interesting, always something new to work on. Between us we worked on M109-series self-propelled Howitzers, M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tanks, M2A2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, M992 Ammunition Carriers, M88A1 Track Recovery Vehicles, MRAPS, you name it. Problem was, you had to go to some real shitty places to do the job.”

  “So you got out of the service?”

  “Yeah, but there's not a lot of call for tank mechanics in civilian life. I just sort of drifted into working on bikes as a way to keep from starving. Clem was more ambitious, he started his own chopper shop.”

  “So you must find that your work here is not nearly as challenging as your job in the Army.”

  “Like repairing bikes, it's a living, and believe me I am happy to be alive.”

  The panel whispered amongst themselves for a half a minute and then Dr. Morton addressed Lem again. “Lem, we think that you and your friend Clem are being underutilized. I'm not promising anything, but we will pass your name on to some of the engineering sections and see if they are in need of someone with your varied skills.”

  “Yes, Ma'am. Thank you Ma'am.”

  “You are free to go, the assistant will show you out.”

  “Thank you, have a nice day.” Lem smiled an insincere smile at the panel who likewise smiled back. What a managerial circle jerk.

  * * * * *

  The assistant led Lem from the room and the door slid shut. Dr. Morton looked to her colleagues and said, “what do you think?”

  “I wonder how this guy was missed in the first place,” said Mr. Smith, who was a former FBI agent.

  Mr. O'Shea, who had not spoken a word during the interview, glanced down at his notes and said, “I agree, this guy and his partner are definite oversights.” With a few taps on his tablet he sent pictures of both men to the wall display across the room. Clement Mathews and Lemuel Souther appeared in all their bearded, mountain man biker glory.

  “They seem like non-conformists,” began Ms Kurtz, “but they haven't caused any problems and their co-workers appear to like them.”

  “The beards and long hair are simply a response to being out of the Army,” stated Dr. Morton. “A way to declare their independence from that regimented life. Yet Souther was quite proud of his work in the army. In their civilian lives, they were independent, self motivated problem solvers who worked for a living.”

  Snowflake cleared her throat, which was not nearly as subtle a signal as when done by a human. “He was not nervous, at least not when talking to me. His answers seemed genuine—I liked him.”

  “I agree,” said Mr. O'Shea, the criminal profiler.

  “And he and his buddy are being severely underemployed right now,” concurred the FBI agent. “They are running around picking up litter in hallways and cleaning out air vents.”

  “Imagine that,” mused Dr. Morton. “We are doing interviews, trying to catch potential criminals while pretending to be ensuring workers are in appropriate jobs, and we actually found a pair of highly trained people who are being underutilized.”

  “So, are you really going to get someone to call them?” asked Ms Kurtz.

  “I'm going to bounce this up to the Administrator's office and let them handle it. We still have a room full of people to screen.” She tapped a symbol on her tablet and spoke, “Send in the next one, please.”

  Corvette Squadron Briefing Room

  The clock on the wall showed a few minutes before 0900 hours. Beth was waiting for the rest of the squadron's pilots and officers to arrive for the day's mission briefing. It was going to be a busy day, but any day she got to fly was a good one. Still, her mind drifted back to the time she spent with Billy Ray Vincent the previous evening.

  * * * * *

  The food at the restaurant was exce
llent—not haute cuisine but savory French country cooking. A marvelous seafood bisque followed by Coq au Vin Blanc, a French classic combining chicken, herbs and vegetables steeped in white wine. There was only one other couple in the restaurant that evening. The chef talked with them before making his way to their table. He was a tall man with dark hair and classic Gallic features. Handsome but with haunted eyes.

  “Bonsoir, mes amis,” he said, “how was your meal this evening?”

  “Good evening, Jean-Jacques, everything was fantastic,” Billy Ray replied, then turning to Beth, “Might I present Lt. Beth Melaku? Beth this is Jean-Jacques de Belcour, formerly of UNOOSA and a shipmate from Peggy Sue's second voyage.”

  “Bonsoir, M. de Belcour,” Beth added, “la nourriture était délicieuse.”

  “Merci mademoiselle, c'est un plaisir de vous rencontrer.” Jean-Jacques made a graceful half bow in Beth's direction. “Billy Ray, how did you manage to find such a delightful young lady here on the dark side of the Moon?”

  “Just lucky I guess. We met over the radio on a little alien hunting trip. Beth was commander of the squadron of corvettes that accompanied the Peggy Sue on the mission.”

  “Then I am twice happy to make your acquaintance, Lieutenant. Anyone who kills aliens is more than welcome in my humble restaurant.”

  “It is my privilege to help defend humanity, or what's left of it.” The tangible hatred beneath the restauranteur's words made her a bit uneasy and she looked to her dining companion to move the conversation off of killing aliens.

  “I'm really glad that you have opened this place, Jean-Jacques,” Billy Ray inserted. “It's great to sample some good, everyday French food, not that fancy stuff. I never knew you were such a hand in the kitchen.”

  “This is the cooking that my mama and grand-mère used to serve, good food fit for honest, working people. I hope to preserve some small part of France... now that ma bien-aimée France has been destroyed by those cowardly aliens.” De Belcour looked like he might start crying over the loss of his homeland.