“Blockaded more likely,” Markus replied. “I wouldn’t lose sleep over it. It’ll be centuries before we get out there, so we can leave it to future generations to worry about.”
“But, we haven’t had a major war in decades. A world war I mean.”
“What you mean is, you don’t remember world war two, but it’s not your memory that counts. It’s theirs. The living memory of our oldest people stretches back sixty or seventy years. A thousand years ago our life span was thirty-five years. Now it’s eighty or ninety in developed countries. In another thousand years, we might live to a hundred fifty, or more. The thing is, we’ve good intelligence that alien life spans are measured in centuries, so in their living memory, they’ve seen two world wars, dozens of small wars, tens of millions of people killed, and our cities fire bombed and nuked. That’s their personal experience of us, not what they’ve read in history books. Do you know what that means?”
“Yeah,” Beckman cut in, “The sky is full of old people in spaceships.”
Markus ignored him. “It means we need a thousand years of peace, without war, without genocide, without nukes, before we’re no longer dealing with beings who’ve seen our barbarism first-hand. We may forgive and forget, but those civilizations observing our Earth won’t forget.”
Laura looked thoughtful. “You paint a very ugly picture of us, Mr Markus.”
“From a certain perspective, we look ugly.”
“Hey!” Nuke said, looking up with mock indignation, “I happen to like the way we look. They’re the ugly ones. Those Zetas, with the big black eyes,” He shivered, “They give me the creeps.”
“You think this is funny?” Markus asked.
“We are what we are,” Beckman said. “If they don’t like it, they can kiss my hairy butt and go back to Alpha Centauri, or Vulcan, or wherever the hell they came from. If we want to nuke the crap out of ourselves, that’s our business.”
“It’s that kind of attitude that’s got us under the microscope,” Markus said.
“I don’t care,” Beckman snapped. “I’m not kissing up to any bug-eyed midget on my own planet.”
“What if we scrap all our nuclear weapons?” Laura said. “And have a thousand years of peace, then what?”
“Depends where our technology is,” Markus replied. “You don’t see the US rushing to establish diplomatic relations with remote South American tribes living on roots and dirt, do you? What would be the point?”
“Yes we would,” Beckman said wryly, “If they had oil!”
“The problem is, we don’t have the kind of oil they’re interested in,” Markus said. “Open contact with alien civilizations will be the most difficult experience the human race will ever have. We think we’re the center of the universe, top of the food chain, but we’re not. Our perception of ourselves will change and our core beliefs may be shattered. We’re trained to think once we get interstellar travel, we’ll be out there playing a leading role, uniting the galaxy, or some such nonsense. Our big psychological problem is dealing with the fact that we’ll never be center stage. That role was cast a hundred million years ago. Or a billion.”
“We’ll get a bit part,” Xeno agreed, “If we’re lucky.”
“No matter how far we advance,” Markus said, “Civilizations thousands or millions of years ahead of us will also be advancing, probably at a faster rate than us, so we’ll never catch up. We should be thinking about how we can craft a small peaceful place for ourselves, where we’ll be accepted, where we can go where no Homo sapiens have gone before, unarmed and respectful, and determined not to tread on anyone’s toes. Leave the phasers and the photon torpedoes at home, because they’ll just make people out there mad at us, and our weapons will be useless anyway.”
“If people like you have their way,” Beckman said. “We’d just roll over and play dead when we’re told. I don’t see it that way. I’m nobody’s doormat, no matter how advanced they are.”
“That’s because you refuse to accept our place in the universe.”
“I know our place, but I happen to think we’ve got a choice. We can look them in the eye, or we can grovel. Having self respect doesn’t mean they’re going to exterminate us.”
“Why not educate the world now?” Laura asked. “Get people ready for it.”
“Because they’re not ready,” Markus said.
“You mean, you think they’re not ready,” Beckman said. “I’m ready.”
“There’s no hurry,” Xeno said. “There’s a lot of science to be discovered before we go anyway. That’s if we’re smart enough to figure it out.”
“You think we’re not?” Laura asked surprised.
“Dolphins are smart,” Xeno replied, “But they’re not smart enough to build a nuclear reactor. We need to be a lot smarter to figure out how to build a starship.”
“God help our stupidity,” Beckman said, “That’s if the Almighty can spot us in the crowd.”
“What crowd?” Laura asked.
“Groom Philosophy one-oh-one,” Beckman replied. “Once aliens exist, God will have a few questions to answer. Like, is man made in the image of God, or is ET?”
“That’s easy. Woman is made in the image of God,” Laura declared, “And man is there to take out the garbage.”
Markus smiled. “The tough question for the zealots will be, does ET have a soul?”
“Surely scientific civilizations are well past spiritualism?” Laura said.
“You’re an atheist?”
“I believe what I can put under a microscope. I’m prepared to believe in God, if he’ll just give me a blood sample.”
“Would you be surprised to know,” Markus asked, “that we have reports of extraterrestrials indicating they have spiritual beliefs?”
Laura hesitated. “I would, or perhaps they’re not as far ahead of us as you think.”
“One day, we may have to face the possibility that man is just one of millions of species that have a spiritual nature. If we have a soul, ET does too. You see, we’re not just interested in their technology, we’re also trying to figure out how they tick. That’s why we have philosophers on the payroll, as well as physicists.”
“So where does that leave religion?” Laura asked.
“If you believe Christ is our planet’s World Savior,” Markus said, “then it stands to reason every inhabited planet has its own World Savior, who will teach them what they need to know. What they teach may not work for us, but it will work for them. The moral of the story is no nukes or missionaries in outer space. Which is why they haven’t landed here to teach us their religions or conquer us. And that’s why if we ever get out there, we can’t expect to convert other species to our beliefs.”
“Tough break for the fanatics,” Beckman said, “so wound up with their petty little prejudices. The whole universe can’t be infidels, or born agains.” He glanced at his watch surprised how late it was. Dawn was barely four hours away. “It’s late, and we’ve got a long trek tomorrow. Better get some rest.”
Laura was about to object, but saw the others stretch out to sleep. She lay down, wondering if there really were no nukes or missionaries in space. And if they didn’t want contact because mankind was so backward, what was the ship doing here?
What had changed, after tens of thousands of years?
* * * *
The point of light marking the tunnel exit seemed as far away as ever. The tunnel was clear of obstructions, but their progress was slow because they had to feel their way forward through the darkness. Vamp and Dr McInness walked together while Timer lagged behind, checking his radio every few minutes, hoping to find an alternative to walking into certain captivity.
“You’re wasting power,” Vamp complained.
“Either the batteries are dead, or we are,” Timer snapped.
“We’ll have some explaining to do,” Dr McInness said, “but they won’t boil us in oil.”
“They’ll chop us up like bugs!” Timer declared.
<
br /> “Unlikely. They already know how the human organism functions, probably better than we do.”
“I hope you’re right,” Vamp said.
“Anyone advanced enough to get here will have highly evolved legal and ethical standards. Torture will certainly be unacceptable to them.”
They walked on in silence a moment, then Vamp asked, “How did they get here?”
“I wish I knew.”
“I thought you were king of the eggheads,” Timer said.
“Only on this planet, which is a tiny kingdom. The problem is the distances are so great, and yet nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. It’s a paradox that makes interstellar travel appear impossible.”
Vamp gave him a bemused look he couldn’t see in the darkness, “But that ship is here, Doc, so it’s not impossible.”
“True. There’s definitely a way of crossing vast distances without going faster than the speed of light.”
“Wormholes?” Timer suggested.
“I very much doubt it,” Dr McInness said. “They’re not practical. Say we wanted to create a wormhole to a star ten light years away, assuming we knew how to generate a unidirectional gravity field. Gravity can warp spacetime, but gravity’s influence travels through spacetime at the speed of light, so it would take ten years to open the wormhole. That can’t be the answer.”
“Why not leave the gravity wormhole thing-a-me on all the time?” Vamp asked, “Like a freeway.”
“It’s a thought, but the energy required to keep a network of wormholes open would be so enormous as to make it uneconomical.”
“Well they got here somehow,” Vamp said, her eyes locked on the distant point of light at the end of the tunnel.
“So no ideas, Doc?” Timer asked.
“If I had to guess, I’d say the clue lies in inflation.”
Timer blinked. “You want to increase the price of space travel?”
Dr McInness chuckled. “Not that kind of inflation. I’m talking about what happened to the universe just after the big bang. It briefly expanded, very rapidly, much faster than the speed of light. It shows two points in spacetime can be moved apart faster than the speed of light, by the movement of spacetime itself. I’ve always thought that was the key.”
“That’s warp drive!” Timer said. “Isn’t it?”
“What’s warp drive? How does it work?” Dr McInness asked. “An inflationary drive would have the ship remain stationary inside a bubble of local flat space. The crew wouldn’t experience acceleration, because the ship doesn’t move, and there’d be no relativistic mass effects, no time dilation, no problems trying to go faster than the speed of light. Spacetime would contract in front of the flat space bubble, and expand behind it. The idea is the bubble surfs on an expanding wave of spacetime, potentially travelling many times the speed of light, even though the ship itself never moves.”
“Space surfing!” Timer said. “I like the sound of that!”
Dr McInness smiled. “Einstein’s equations work for this model, but we’d need to generate huge quantities of energy and have a good supply of exotic matter to make it work, neither of which we have. Then we’d have to figure out how to generate the flat space bubble itself. It’s really way beyond us at the moment, but may not be beyond civilizations many thousands of years ahead us.”
“These guys up ahead must have figured it out, because they’re here,” Vamp said. “They can explain it to you, then you can explain it to us.”
They couldn’t see the scientist’s face in the dark, but it beamed with hope. She’d hit upon his deepest desire.
CHAPTER 13
The drop ship approached in silence.
The Tindal Air Force Base air traffic control radars failed to detect its approach, as did the air defense missile batteries guarding the airfield. Even top secret radars able to see stealth aircraft failed to detect the rectangular vehicle as it streaked toward the base at mach eight. The multiple radar signals were completely absorbed by the vehicle’s perfectly nonreflective hull, which was optimized to avoid detection systems far more advanced than radar.
The drop ship raced above the eucalypts toward the long runway as it completed its tactical analysis. Crude chemical explosives were stored in multiple locations, but it was the concentration of enriched U-235 that had drawn it to the area. While primitive nuclear explosions lacked the focused destructive power of modern quantum weapons, they nevertheless posed a threat that could not be ignored. Near the fissile material, the drop ship identified more than two hundred craft capable of flight. The primitive machines relied on air flowing over curved surfaces to generate lift, rather than the far more effective propulsion field technology it used. Unable to determine their role, the drop ship assumed these flimsy craft were mere decoys, designed to camouflage a genuine threat it could not detect. This conclusion agreed with the Command Nexus’ current assessment that the inhabitants were conducting deception operations with primitive technology, although what advantage they hoped to gain from such efforts was unclear.
The drop ship passed over the perimeter fence at 4.13 AM, decelerating in a fraction of a second to a complete stop. A hundred meters away, a four-man Royal Australian Air Force air field defense squad looked up in amazement. The vehicle’s approach velocity had been so high, and its deceleration so rapid, it seemed as if a brilliant ball of white light had simply appeared out of nowhere just inside the south east perimeter fence.
The squad leader fumbled frantically with his radio. “Foxtrot Four to Tower! There’s something in the air, inside the fence. Can you see it?”
“It’s probably the moon,” a bored control tower officer replied.
“It’s not the bloody moon!” the corporal yelled back as his three companions dived onto the ground, covering the object with their rifles.
“What does it look like?”
“A ball of light,” the corporal replied, unaware that the drop ship’s spherical propulsion field was causing the surrounding air to glow, hiding its rectangular shape against the night sky. “It’s about twenty meters across.”
The air traffic controller sighed skeptically. “Mate, there’s nothing on radar.”
“Screw the radar, you idiot, look out the bloody window!”
By the time the air traffic controller had walked to the tower window, the corporal had taken up position alongside his three companions. The squad held their fire as the spherical light had made no hostile move, while fifty meters away, the operators of a rapier missile struggled unsuccessfully to get a radar lock. On the far side of the runway, an American patriot battery couldn’t get a lock either, so they fired by line of sight, hoping for in-flight acquisition. The missile got halfway to the target, then its rocket motor inexplicably cut out and it nosed into the ground and exploded.
Finally, the control tower woke up. Sirens began wailing across the base as startled Australian and American crews raced to their Super Hornets, Lightning IIs and Raptors dispersed through the hardstands east of the runway. Each hardstand was covered by a wide curved metal roof and flanked by revetments to shield the parked aircraft from bomb blasts. Not far from the complex of hardstands, army crews ran to Tiger and Apache attack helicopters. Gradually, turbines began to whine and rotors began to turn, but it was all too slow.
The drop ship’s rear hull dilated and a heavily armored battloid floated out, unseen inside the brilliant light of the propulsion field. Once clear of the drop ship, the battloid floated on its two anti-g sleds down through the glowing sphere toward the ground. To the troops defending the runway, the sphere of light above the battloid vanished, only to instantly reappear five hundred meters away. No one guessed it was a burst of hyper acceleration followed immediately by an equally powerful burst of hyper deceleration. A few moments later, a second battloid emerged from the ball of light, then the drop ship disappeared again. It climbed to geosynchronous orbit, where it parked safely out of range of ground based weapons, and began feeding the two battloi
ds’ real time orbital intelligence.
The battloids floated towards the dispersed aircraft, and the men trying to get them aloft, while the drop ship jammed the base’s communications and continuously scanned a circular zone ten kilometers across. Over the next few billionths of a second, the two machines on the ground and the drop ship high above confirmed priorities, allocated responsibilities and agreed tactics, then they opened fire.
The first battloid blasted the patriot battery that had attacked the drop ship, turning it into a blazing inferno. On the battloid’s flank, the RAAF air field defense squad opened up with their assault rifles. Their bullets flashed uselessly against the battloid’s shields while alerting the machine to the presence of their feeble kinetic weapons. The battloid knew one of its kind had been destroyed hours before, and such weapons had played a part, so it reordered its targeting priorities to ensure all kinetic weapons would be rapidly eliminated. A moment later, the four soldiers vanished in a wall of fire. Before one of its weapon arms had finished annihilating the air field guards, another reduced the rapier missile battery to a burning ruin. The deadly black machine then advanced, its weapon arms spewing streams of super heated plasma across the taxi ways, incinerating the fighters in their hardstands, and detonating the bombs slung beneath their wings. Flaming shrapnel from exploding fighters cut flight and ground crews to pieces and flew high into the air, only to rain destruction upon nearby aircraft and buildings.
Half a kilometer away, an apache climbed into the air and raked the second battloid its with thirty millimeter chain gun. The battloid’s shields flashed, then one of its weapon arms popped up above its overlapping shields and fired at the Apache. The gunship exploded, then crashed onto the concrete apron, its spinning rotors carving a bloody swath of destruction through nearby ground crew and choppers alike. The battloid blasted the other helicopters with all of its weapons simultaneously, igniting fuel tanks and rockets and scattering dead and burning bodies around the blazing hulks.
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