by Jim Melanson
Tommy Freemantle, 12 years old, Belchertown, Massachusetts, United States - Tommy was sitting at his computer watching events on Mars. His mouth was agape and his eyes as big as saucers (no pun intended). His friend, Carl, had called him two minutes ago and told him what was happening. Tommy was now raptly watching the action. Just as the image dissolved to static he said out loud, “Rocks? He’s using rocks?”
The Drone
THIS HUMAN MOVED FAST. PERHAPS THIS HUMAN BETTER THAN MERE SCUM. PERHAPS THIS HUMAN WORTHY OPPONENT. The human stood up again and threw two more rocks. They were good-sized rocks, and the Drone heard the thump of them hitting the front of the ship. The Drone was not worried. The Drone’s opinion was that the ship was far too advanced to worry about rocks. The Drone saw a bunch of indicators light up, and felt a tremble in the seat. WHATEVER HUMAN DOING, ROCKS OR NOT, IS HAVING EFFECT.
The Drone tried to get out of the way of the human, but the human kept tracking and throwing. The Drone didn’t doubt the human would die, not yet anyways. In an even blinder rage, the Drone pointed the ship’s weapon at the human, and pressed the firing button just as the human threw two more in its now almost constant stream of rocks.
Mike
One after another, pick up two rocks, throw two rocks. I was close enough and had thrown enough that they were all hitting the little ship, and hitting it near its little weapon nubbin; the little weapon nubbin with the big punch. One of the rocks, slightly bigger than a hockey puck, hit the nubbin dead on. Just as it did, there was a brief flash of light, then the area around the nubbin glowed briefly, then nothing. No energy ball.
“I hope that was the Hail Mary pass …” I kept throwing more rocks.
The Drone
Instead of the longed for vaporization of the human, the weapon didn’t fire. To add insult to insult, the full system control board lit up red. The ship bobbed and wobbled, and the Drone opened its helmet’s faceplate and could smell something electrical burning. The Drone shut and secured the faceplate again. The futuristic radar went dark. The weapons system fire-control module shut down at the same time. This was a really odd situation for the Drone, because there wasn’t that much that was traditionally electrical, not as humans think of electricity. The vessel used numerous localized power sources for each system specifically to avoid such cascading failures; but the localized power sources weren’t joined together. The small vessel did not have a centralized power source. So why had two different systems shut down simultaneously?
The downside of multiple independent power sources to individual components is a lack of overall redundancy to any individual component. The Drone moved the ship over top of the human to try and get the advantage by firing from behind the human; but the ship momentarily lost all lift. It hit the ground and bounced back up as the lift engine re-engaged. That was the second time that had happened. The Drone needed a few moments to get the systems stabilized before pressing the attack. The Drone swung the vessel around behind the line of six ships on the ground to gain some cover.
Putting the vessel in hover mode, the Drone pulled out one of the guidance modules, found the leads from it, darkened by electrical energy overload, and began swapping out these leads with the few spares that were carried on board. The Drone couldn’t afford to lose the propulsion engine on top of lift engine problems. Weapons were secondary at this point. The Drone was able to do all this without moving from the cockpit seat. Everything was within easy reach of the 1.3 metre tall creature.
More warning lights came on, and a klaxon sounded. The Drone looked at the external view monitor and could see the human crouched beside one of the ships on the ground. The Drone hurried to finish its work, and then dropped the guidance module back in place at the same moment the human stood up to throw more rocks.
The Drone tried to advance the ship, but it wouldn’t go forward. The Drone tried backing up the ship and it moved back slowly. It would not go in any other direction. Backwards was fine, the now almost constant thumping of the rocks was distracting. Getting away from the human’s annoying and distracting rocks would let the Drone focus on the repairs. The Drone reset the weapons fire-control system and tried firing the weapon again, but it still didn’t fire. Another klaxon started bleating in the small space. The Drone started the small vessel moving backwards, away from the human, slowly.
The Drone pulled the same guidance module out again and realized one of the leads it changed was defective. The Drone pulled it off the module, and reached in the small supply box for another one. The Drone’s hand came up empty. The Drone put the module in its lap, and pulled the supply box upclose and peered into it with one of its big eyes. Empty, completely empty. The Drone looked up at the monitor showing the human. The Drone suddenly felt the failure of the situation, and the failure of the day overtake it completely. Defeated by rocks? No! The Drone had underestimated the human.
The Drone had so utterly and completely failed; the Master it knew now, and all it could do was go back to the Eridani complex, in reverse, and jump in the acid vat in the hangar bay.
Watching the human on the small view screen, the Drone wondered, amidst that self-pitying inner monologue, why the human had stopped throwing rocks, turned around, and was running away from the Drone. Shouldn’t the human, rocks or not, have pressed the attack?
Lt. Col. Gref KamPen
He had his hands full, yet again, thanks to Achael and Hlef. He had made a quick inspection of the physical damage to the base, and now he was walking out of the sick bay after checking on Sergeant Tucker. He turned left and headed to the Communications Room. They were good girls, really, but damn, they had to stop putting humans in the infirmary. He had tried the discipline route. It usually had an effect on Achael, but not on Hlef. Then Hlef would get Achael wound up, and pretty soon they would both be insufferable until he relented. Lieutenant Colonel Gref KamPen, United States (Exo) Air Force, had been accused of being a little easy on the hybrids more than once. Truth be told, he was. For all the obvious reasons. He hadn’t chosen to come into life as a hybrid, neither had any of the others. However, they were what they were, and that was that. They had to stick together. In all the Verse there were only 216 Eben-Human hybrids in existence (twelve on Earth, seventeen on Sapro, and 187 on the base). There were four more gestating in growth tanks right now, but they hadn’t been legally born yet; so he wasn’t counting them.
Lt. Col. KamPen was appointed as Base Commander when he graduated from AFIT as a wide-eyed (literally) Captain, over thirty years ago. A few years later he was promoted to Major after successfully negotiating the terms of the détente, the accord, with the Eridani. Ten years ago he was bumped up to Lieutenant Colonel; and was now looking forward to getting his full Colonel bird next year … if Achael and Hlef didn’t totally frak things up for him. Gref KamPen (Gruffy to those close to him) had become a father figure to many of the younger hybrids, and he took great pleasure and pride in that. If he had been asked, point blank, where his loyalties were focused (career or hybrids): he would have had to admit he was more concerned about the pseudofamilial connection, than he was the uniform. Nonetheless, his career was important to him.
As Achael was approaching the new human colony site, the human dominant Lt. Col. KamPen (son of Kam) wandered into the Communications Room of the Mars base. He ordered the human corporation’s Mar-Sat signal to be disrupted. The human tech on duty made the necessary calculations, pointed the pulse generator, and began assaulting the Mar-Sat with both radio and electro-magnetic waves that would disrupt all signals to and from the Mar-Sat, without damaging it. The video and telemetry signals back at the Corporation’s headquarters, 18 minutes and 22 seconds later, dissolved into a solid mass of static.
The other satellite was a different story. That one was hardened against such interference by the same people who had built the interference generator. It required a different approach. Since Lt. Col. KamPen was the only one on the base that knew about that satellite, he would be the one th
at had to take care of it. He smiled a bit; the designers hadn’t told the humans quite everything about that satellite. They had told them that the weapons could only be launched by a signal from Mars’ surface, but they hadn’t told them that the human wasn’t the only one on Mars that could do it. There were a few other, shall we say, “quirks” that the human on Mars didn’t know about as well. For now, the important one was that Lt. Col. KamPen had the same full access that Mission Control had, and he had that access without the communication signal lag time that the far, far away Mission Control had. Returning to his office, it took Lt. Col. KamPen ninety seconds to establish a connection and deactivate the data signals being transmitted to Earth from The Platform.
Lt. Col. KamPen sighed deeply. Now came the duty he was dreading. He had a good idea how it would go. He activated the ERB Communications unit and established a connection with the Wright-Patterson ERB Communications unit on Earth. He then placed a real-time, secure phone call to the 88th.
Mission Control : 18 minutes, 3 seconds later
First the Mar-Sat display, and then three minutes later the new display were both lost and replaced by static. First there was dead silence. Ernst and Frankie fiddled uselessly with their controls. Then the room erupted.
Mission Control was once again, to put it nicely, going bugshit crazy. There was nothing Karl could say at this point, so he just sat there, waiting.
Mike
Crouching by the number five supply drop, I was wondering why the alien wasn’t still shooting at me. I had expected to have to jump up and change position, but all it did was float slightly backwards.
Then sexy voice spoke up again, “New target detected in area of compromise. New target designated target number forty, referential target number three, is a classified reference. Tracking classified reference.”
Classified what? Fraaaaakkkkkk!!! “Command, target number three, vector and speed.”
“Target is moving north-north-east at one thousand, 200 and 300 kilometres per hour.”
Holy frak-a-doodle, that’s less than five minutes away. At that speed it could be a spacecraft, an aircraft like an Earth jet, or it could be a warhead. Fraking alien called for fraking backup. So why is it classified, I asked myself.
Alright, never mind, prioritize. I can’t do anything about whatever it was until it gets here. With spool up time and delivery time, a weapon from the platform wouldn’t reach the object until it was here. Oh well, I had my faith in God to look after me, and this was definitely turning into the valley of the shadow of death. Speaking of shadows … I looked up and saw the fourth stage RAD engines jettison from the PDV. The PDV was almost directly over the gray space ship, and the gray space ship was still slowly backing up, exactly where I had hoped it would. The final stage, RAD unit #5, was about to light up.
“Ummm, shit.”
Pliny-the-Elder-be-damned, I turned and ran away as fast as I could.
The Drone
The Drone was in the middle of bright red lights, there were two different, two-tone klaxons blaring, and a cabin filling with smoke. All of the rage and anger on the Drone’s face had turned to despair. The Drone’s hands were curled in a tight ball on its lap. The Drone screamed at the top of its lungs inside its helmet. Suddenly the ship screeched and slammed into the ground. The Drone saw the side of the ship buckle inwards, and then the Drone was spinning and bumping so hard it lost all sense of direction, and then all sense. For the first time ever, a Drone had been knocked unconscious.
Achael
Looking out the forward view screen Achael could now see the encounter site in the distance. She could see the habitats behind and to the left of the encounter site. She could also see the six supply drops, and the gray Eridani ship and … and … she shook her head and still couldn’t believe her eyes.
She saw the cargo ship just as the final RAD engines fired for the landing. At the moment those engines fired, the Eridani vessel was right underneath it. The force of the roaring engines caused the Eridani vessel to move sideways - but before clearing the falling cargo container, the extending landing struts trapped it against one of the engine cowlings.
The PDV smashed the Eridani vessel into the ground. The number three engine cowling exploded in bits and pieces at the point of contact, and the two landing struts trapped the Eridani vessel, snapping back upwards with more bits of metal flying. She could see the Eridani ship cave in on one-quarter, before it plopped out from under the landing cargo ship, like an apple seed in a child’s fingers.
As the Eridani ship rolled and bumped away on the ground, the now-landed cargo vessel’s engines finally extinguished, it started tilting over to the side with the broken landing struts.
Mike
I stopped running when I heard the explosion, ducked and turned sideways. The supply drop was on the ground, there wasn’t much flame, but there was a lot of smoke. I saw bits of metal, it looked like engine cowling, falling around me. I felt the impact of a few small pieces hitting me, but the carbon nano tube reinforced Kevlar fabric worked exactly like it was supposed to.
I saw the little grey ship, now deformed with a concave impact point, rolling and bumping away from the cargo drop, and rolling towards me. I stood up and was about to run but I realized it was slowing down. It finally stopped about twenty feet from me, having rolled right by supply drop #6, without hitting it.
I looked over at the supply drop billowing smoke and saw it leaning over … further … further … further … and then it stopped. The spot it had landed on wasn’t perfectly level, and the landing struts that appeared to still be functioning took its weight. It just sat there then, billowing smoke and listing about 35 degrees.
Then more movement caught my eye. I looked up and saw a triangular black piece of sky moving towards me. It was so black I couldn’t make out any lines other than the outline; but it was getting closer, fast, and doing it silently. The closest cover I had, oddly, was the small gray damaged space ship that had so recently been trying to kill me. I ran over to it and crouched, although I knew at this point it was useless.
They had me.
This small spaceship was no real tactical cover. Heck, it might even explode any minute. Hell, whatever was in it might open a hatch and come out after me. This new ship was now almost overhead, and there was nothing I could do to hide from this one. I sighed. I took a deep breath and stood up. I stepped out from around the little gray space ship into the open.
The black triangular craft was now only about five feet off the ground. It hovered there for a few minutes doing nothing. I just stood there looking at it, glancing at the damaged craft on the ground every few moments, still half expecting some hellish creature to emerge from it.
When I looked back from one of these furtive glances I almost came out of my skin. There was an alien figure standing in front of me. It was wearing an environment suit and a helmet. The environment suit was a bit bulkier than mine, but not as bulky as a proper space suit. It was orange-red, the kind of orange-red that would blend in with the Mars surface. The environment suit and the helmet looked oddly human, like something NASA would have created. The helmet faceplate was opaque black. I couldn’t see what was inside it. The one thing I did notice, as I took a single startled step backwards, was how long its arms and fingers were. Its hands hung at its knees, and its fingers were about half again as long as my own, even in the gloves of the environment suit.
This new alien stood there for a few moments, then turned toward the small gray ship and walked over to it. Not knowing what else to do I started following it but it stopped, whirled around and its left hand went to its hip. I saw then that there was a bulky piece of equipment that looked like a hand gun with a can welded around it. The alien didn’t draw the weapon, but the implication was clear, follow any further and I’d find out for real what that weapon actually could do.
Achael
Seeing the dawning realization in his eyes, Achael took her hand off of the low atmo modified De
sert Eagle, and started walking to the Eridani vessel again. Reaching the damaged section, glancing over her shoulder at the earthman, she then peered inside through the damaged and torn metal. She could just see inside the cockpit, and the control system lights let her see the little gray Drone.
