Finding it difficult to concentrate with all the telepathic mewling coming from the injured VunnRer Slizzt, Zeck walked to the end of the room where the sub-Commander sat on the floor next to his severed arm. Looking disgustedly at the cowering Chrysallaman, he pulled his cutter ray pistol and sliced the head off the offending whiner.
In the ensuing blessed silence, Hisspat decided it was time he set foot on his newly conquered planet. He had to admit a little fresh air and wide open spaces would make him very happy. Since he had just eliminated the annoying VunnRer Slizzt, the Cherx Group responsible for the North and South American continents needed a new commander anyway. Who better to command than General Hisspat Zeck?
Chapter 20 – The Tiara
Fleet General Hisspat Zeck landed his mother ship on the wide expanse of President's Park in Washington, D.C., the Capitol of a nation formerly known as the United States of America. The circular shaped park was a broad, grassy field bounded by a paved roadway named the Ellipse. Knowing how much the humans valued their important national sites, Hisspat Zeck took particular pains to deeply burn the official star pattern and stylized logo of the Chrysallaman Empire into the grassy surface just before he landed.
To properly commemorate the occasion of conquering a new colonization planet in the name of the Chrysallaman Empire, he dressed himself in his grandest Fleet General golden robe. The ceremonial robe of conquest had deep red epaulets and matching cuffs symbolizing the blood spilled by the natives of planet HG-281 in their futile efforts to stop the invasion. Standing before a mirror in his quarters, he fitted a tiara-like crown of diamond glass on top of his head. Satisfied his regal appearance would inspire reverent admiration from his human subjects, he marched from his quarters to the exit ramp of his ship followed by his personal guard of ten heavily armed Chrysallaman soldiers.
Looking around imperiously from the bottom of the ramp, General Zeck spied a stately, two-story white house nearby and decided it would be the appropriate abode the humans would bestow upon their gracious conqueror as his principal residence. Contemplating the infinite benevolence he would offer to the blighted natives of the planet, Zeck stepped off the ramp of his ship and set his royal foot upon the new World.
An odd buzzing sound interrupted his thoughts, and Zeck looked upward just in time to see a rather small, whirring mechanism diving at his head. Ducking just in time to avoid being hit by the flying object, Hisspat Zeck felt two stinging thumps on his chest and heard other muffled thumps coming from the direction of his guards. Looking down, he discovered the front of his beautiful, golden robe had been defaced by large splotches of a thick, fluorescent lime-green liquid. Spinning quickly to see if his guards were ready to defend him from the unexpected attack, he was horrified to find they were being pelted with similar liquids of varying colors, ranging from vivid oranges to bright blues to the horrid lime-green his robe had suffered. The offending projectiles looked like some kind of balls that burst upon impact.
As he stood before his imposing mother ship, anger raising his blood pressure to dangerous heights, he suddenly felt another stinging thump in the middle of his back. Whirling around with his cutter ray pistol ready to fire, he heard the distant sound of children's laughter and spotted several young humans hiding behind some trees about 200 feet from where he stood with his guards. Hisspat was amazed by what he observed. Despite the distance separating them from his mother ship, the children were throwing the globules by hand with an alarming accuracy.
The Fleet General watched one young boy, who couldn't have been more than 11 years old, throw an orange ball at one of his nearby guards. With a seemingly effortless flick of his wrist, the boy threw the ball with such force that when it smacked against the guard's nose, the impact splattered Hisspat with droplets of orange goo. One of the human children held what appeared to be a radio transmitter with a long antenna. Hearing the buzzing sound again, Hisspat Zeck looked up and saw a flying toy with four helicopter blades hovering in the air about 30 feet above his head. Angered beyond reason by the disrespect of the human animals, he aimed his cutter ray at the flying nuisance and destroyed it with a single silvery beam.
Turning his wrath upon the laughing children, he swung his cutter ray in a sweeping motion at ground level and sliced down the trees the children were hiding behind. The laughter stopped immediately as the thick trees began to fall over.
"Let's get out of here!" the apparent leader of the human vandals yelled, and all of them turned and ran toward other trees and brush cover hundreds of feet away on the outskirts of the park boundary.
General Zeck turned a withering gaze upon his guards and yelled, "Well don't just stand there! Go after them! Capture or kill as many of the vermin as you can!"
Dashing off the ramp, the guards chased after the young humans, but with amazing speed and stamina, the children reached the park boundary and had time to turn and taunt the guards as they puffed toward them across the grassy field.
Hisspat distinctly heard a mocking, singsong chant coming from the direction where the children had run. "Na Nannie Boo Boo, Chicken, Nicken, Noo Noo!"
Another voice loudly proclaimed, "What a bunch of losers! My Grandma has a better looking bathrobe than old lizard-face!"
Realizing his guards wouldn't be able to catch the human children and feeling too exposed to possible assault by hidden assassins, Hisspat recalled his weary men from their pointless pursuit. Turning on his heel, the furious Fleet General marched back into his mother ship and lifted it to a hover at 3,000 feet. As he floated in his gravity drive envelope over the park, he used the combined heat and cutter rays of his mother ship to completely destroy the white house he had considered living in for the duration of his reign as the new overseer of planet HG-281.
More determined than ever to launch a ground assault to ferret out the vile humans hiding in the warren of buildings on the planet's surface, Hisspat Zeck stalked to his quarters and peeled off his stained, gooey robe. Pausing for a moment to again admire the way the glistening tiara gave him a kingly aura, he lifted it from his head and placed it gently back in its velvet lined box. He would have another opportunity to wear the diadem, and he vowed the next time it adorned his head, there would be hundreds of humans kneeling before him in awe and reverence.
***
"Watch closely as I rerun a segment of the video where the MA beam contacts the gravity drive field," Dr. Miguel Roemer said to General Tom Blunt and his staff as he keyed commands into his entry pad.
Miguel Roemer was an 18 year old quantum physics prodigy. Standing 6 feet tall with the rangy build of a soccer player, Roemer had the youthful appearance of a 13 year old. He had given up trying to grow a mustache to make him look older. His hormones and baby-face simply wouldn't allow whiskers to sprout in any meaningful quantity. Even his voice still sounded high-pitched. His Hispanic mother had gifted him with genes for golden brown skin and coal black hair. His American father had gifted him with a sloping tip nose and blue-green eyes. All-in-all, women usually found Dr. Miguel Roemer captivating.
Within five minutes after meeting Dr. Roemer, aging Dr. John Heinbaum had declared him to be his successor saying, "At last a person fit to follow in my famous footsteps. A genius who approaches my IQ and the lofty ideals I have established. He may not have my fabulous looks, but that's not necessary."
"Now watch closely as I show this close-up in extreme slow motion," Roemer said.
All the overhead monitors in Blunt's Staff Conference room showed the scout saucer hovering in the Andean Mountain valley. As the white MA beam touched the gravity drive field, the field appeared to flow around the white beam rather than being cut apart by it.
Advancing the video second by second, Roemer explained, "Notice how the gravity drive isn't disrupted by the MA. The field simply flows around the beam as if it's accepting the MA in a special relationship. The MA beam is only destroying the structure of the saucer, not the gravity drive field."
"I see what you mean!" excl
aimed Major Amanda Kurstow. "The gravity drive doesn't fail until the MA cuts through the power couplings above the fusion reactor."
"Exactly!" Roemer agreed as he paused the video at the moment the cascading waterfall of sparks appeared. "I need you to capture a working saucer with an intact gravity drive system. The saucer in our warehouse here was too damaged by the crash in Roswell to permit me to experiment with its gravity field."
"Capturing an undamaged saucer will be difficult," Colonel Jason Stoneman replied. "The saucer would have to be in an isolated location, and its crew outside, vulnerable to capture. Whatsit says the usual crew is four Chriks. I wouldn't want to use cutter or heat rays inside or outside the saucer to kill them for fear of damaging delicate equipment. Hand-to-hand combat would cause the least amount of damage but total success would be iffy."
"I may have a better idea," Major Becky Chang announced.
As everyone turned toward her with expectant looks, she continued, "Why not use the Skullreader unique and have the Chriks fly their own saucer to a designated safe spot? We would simply need a soldier who has been practicing with illusions to be captured by a saucer crew. Once in close mental contact, our soldier would impose an illusion into the brains of the Chriks and have them bring their saucer directly to us."
"In fact," she said in a determined tone, "I volunteer for the mission. I've been practicing my illusions almost every day. I'm sure I can pull it off."
The looks she received from the Staff were mixed. Everyone appreciated the danger she would be exposed to on a mission such as she was proposing. From the pensive look on General Blunt's face, Becky had the impression he was going to veto her idea outright. Surprisingly, he agreed with her.
"I reluctantly agree Major Chang's idea has the greatest chance for successful retrieval of a fully functional scout saucer," Blunt said. "I don't like the idea of one of my staff being exposed to such danger, but Major Chang has shown a particular affinity for telepathic communication."
"I volunteer to go with her," Colonel Doug Jenson announced. Peering at Becky to see if he could detect any objection and seeing none, Jenson continued, "I have one-on-one experience with controlling three Chrysallaman crew members at the Andean Mountain valley. If anything goes wrong with her illusion, I'll be her backup to handle any unruly Chrik."
"Colonel Jenson should go with her," Stoneman declared. "I watched him handle the Chriks in Colombia. He is the right choice to go on the mission with her."
"Very well," General Blunt said. "Let's make this happen."
Looking at Chang and Jenson with a stern expression, Blunt told them pointedly, "Don't take any unnecessary chances. I want a working saucer not dead heroes."
***
Curtilact Kutlurr, captain of the Chrysallaman saucer, Jasirac, scowled at his main view screen as his craft sped across an arid desert plain in the southwest area of North America, annoyed to no end by the mind-numbing dullness of his assignment. Thinking his missions would improve after VunnRer Slizzt was eliminated for gross incompetence by Fleet General Hisspat Zeck, Curtilact Kutlurr had been supremely disappointed when the Fleet General had explicitly ordered him to patrol an area encompassing a vast desert region of the southwest.
Trying to understand why General Zeck thought the arid, largely unpopulated desert area was so important, Curtilact had done some research. The Fleet archives had contained the detailed logs of the exploratory survey of planet HG-281. The General had lost one of his scout saucers in the deserts of the Southwest. In the entire history of the Chrysallaman Empire, no expedition had ever suffered the loss of a crewman, much less a scout saucer. Upon his return to the planet as Fleet General, Hisspat Zeck had vowed to capture and torture any humans found in the ever to be damned desert.
A small ping jarred Curtilact from his reverie. His automatic scanners had detected movement below his flight path. Tapping the commands into his entry pad to narrow the focus of the scanner array, Curtilact was pleased to see a land crawler the planetary natives called a car traveling along a deserted roadway bordered on both sides by high canyon walls.
"At last!" he smiled to himself as he reduced speed and carefully twirled the steering swivel ball to guide his saucer toward the car.
***
"You've got a bogie on your 6 o'clock," a FORCE observer's voice spoke softly to Doug Jenson and Becky Chang through their K-wave earbuds.
General Blunt had insisted a squad of soldiers provide backup protection for Jenson and Chang just in case the Chriks tried to kill rather than capture. The five mile stretch of desert highway they'd been traversing over the past two hours was dotted with camouflaged soldiers armed with MA Bazookas and ray pistols. Every person was in constant communication via K-wave transceivers. Any attempt to murder Jenson and Chang was going to be met with irresistible deadly force.
Doug, who was driving the white sedan, glanced over at Becky and said, "Here we go. Just keep in mind these Chriks all have massive superiority complexes. They firmly believe every race of beings is inferior to them mentally and physically. We have to play along."
Becky's face was practically glowing with excitement. Clasping her hands together in her lap, she had to fight the urge to turn in her seat and watch the saucer dive into a hover behind their car. She was itching to try out the illusion she had been formulating, but they had to sell the ruse of being two defenseless humans at the mercy of the bloodthirsty aliens in order to have any chance of getting aboard the saucer.
Without warning, the car's engine sputtered, and Doug struggled briefly with no power steering and sluggish brakes to guide the car to a stop on the side of the road. Opening their doors, Doug and Becky stepped onto the sandy asphalt of the highway as if they were going to investigate what was wrong with their car. A hot breeze and blowing sand from behind them attracted their attention, and turning with frightened expressions, they watched as the Chrysallaman saucer lowered its landing gear and settled to the ground.
A ramp folded down from the bottom of the saucer, and two Chriks sauntered from the craft to stand in the bright sunlight. Both of them wore combat vests and held cutter ray pistols casually aimed in the direction of Jenson and Chang. The Chrik with an insignia of two starbursts pinned to his vest pointed his pistol at the car and sliced through the motor block and left quarter panel with a quick flick of his wrist. With its left front axle and tire cut away, the car dropped heavily to the pavement, and the left fender and tire assembly fell away from the vehicle's body onto the roadway with a metallic crash.
Grinning confidently, the lizard focused its black eyes on Doug and Becky and issued the mental commands to take control of their minds. Easily fending off the telepathic attack with their activated mental powers, they feigned the reactions necessary to convince the Chrik he was now in control of their bodies.
"This is just too easy," Kutlurr chortled as he holstered his ray pistol. "I haven't found a human animal yet who could withstand my mental powers."
"The female looks tasty," Ferrll Yirr rumbled as he walked toward Chang. "The male's meat is probably stringy like the last one we captured."
"Unfortunately for you, as Captain of this vessel I have first selection of meat from the animal. Her tender thigh meat is mine," Kutlurr responded as he looked directly into Yirr's eyes.
Not wanting to upset his Captain, Yirr nodded quickly, changed his direction toward Jenson and said, "I prefer the eyeballs and liver anyway. You can have all the female meat you desire."
Grabbing Jenson's left arm, Yirr guided him toward the saucer and up the ramp. Fighting hard not to flinch away from the Chrik's touch, Jenson allowed himself to be walked into the saucer. Curtilact didn't bother to walk over to the female. He simply issued a mental command for the human to follow him, and Chang obediently walked up the ramp and into the companionway that circled the inner core of the saucer.
Acting like he was coughing, Jenson spoke to Chang and the observers hidden in crevices in the canyon walls, "I'm going to let this Chr
ik lead me deeper into the saucer. Once I have eyes on the other two crewmen, I'll take care of them all. Becky, you'll have Captain Chrik all to yourself. I'll remain hidden until you let me know it's okay to join you."
Becky responded with a coughed, "Okay."
Reading the mind of the unsuspecting Captain, Becky learned his name was Curtilact Kutlurr, and the ship was called Jasirac. Gathering her thoughts, Becky began the process of imposing her illusion into the Chrik's brain.
***
The illusion Chang had conceived required the Chrysallaman to believe he'd been ordered to annihilate a vital human military base. Since the whole point of her operation was to deliver a fully functional scout saucer to the secret Nevada installation north of Las Vegas, the selection of the target was simple. She would have the unsuspecting lizard fly his saucer directly to the Nevada base.
Sifting quickly through the memories of the Chrik, she found distinct recollections of his interactions with the Fleet General Hisspat Zeck. Linking her illusion into those memories, she initiated the planned sequences of the hallucination the moment the Chrysallaman led her into the master control room of the saucer.
The ship-to-ship communicator was blinking yellow when Curtilact Kutlurr entered the master control room with his captive human female. Ordering her to sit in a corner and not move, he sat down in the command couch and pushed the toggle to accept the transmission.
"Where have you been? Why was your acknowledgment of my transmission delayed?" General Hisspat Zeck asked angrily.
"I was in the process of capturing humans in the southwest desert area as you instructed, General," Curtilact answered. "Is there a problem?"
"We have discovered a central command post of the human military. It's close to your position. Here are the coordinates," Hisspat Zeck replied as a series of location parameters appeared on the main view screen.
The Origin of F.O.R.C.E. Page 31
