The Mothership

by Renneberg, Stephen

  The seeker was driven onto its “knees” by the impact. Now blind, with its data link to its companion severed, it lashed out wildly with one of its shield arms, striking Liyakindirr in the chest, hurling him into the bushes, stunned and breathless. Laura now fired from behind her tree, striking the seeker’s torso several times before her ammo ran out. The crippled seeker wobbled on its knees, disoriented, firing blind uncontrolled bursts as the second seeker circled at high speed to avoid being hit itself.

  Hooper holstered his pistol. “Grenade!” he yelled as he pulled the pin with his burnt right hand and rolled the explosive underarm. It bounced along the ground, under the seeker’s shield, landing between its knees.

  Laura ducked back behind her tree while Hooper went to ground. The grenade exploded, tearing the seeker’s legs off and throwing it into the air. It landed on its back, shooting continuously into the sky as Hooper fired his pistol into the gaps in the crippled machine’s armor, triggering an internal explosion that silenced its weapons. He forced himself to a sitting position and scanned the trees for the other machine as he reloaded. It was circling at high speed deep in the forest, preparing for another attack. Nearby, Liyakindirr crawled out of the bushes, coughing blood.

  “Hurry,” Liyakindirr wheezed as he helped Hooper to his feet.

  The aboriginal hunter reached for the radio pack, but Hooper restrained him. The side flap of a pocket was open and two black rectangular devices had fallen half out of the pocket. One was Timer’s radio detonator, the other had a short black aerial and a display that pulsed the same signal repeatedly. He holstered his pistol and picked up the rectangular burst transceiver, turning it over curiously. In a flash of understanding, he realized it was broadcasting a radio signal into the ether.

  “That’s how they’re tracking us!” he declared.

  Laura’s mind spun as she realized Markus had planted the burst transceiver in the radio pack and set it so the seekers could find them. Kill them. Kill her! And she’d helped him! “It belongs to Markus,” she blurted. “I’ve seen him with it.”

  Hooper looked confused. “Markus? Why would he …?”

  “He wants the ship,” Laura stammered. “If you call in an air strike, it’s gone.”

  Hooper’s expression grew dark. “That filthy, god damned son of a–” He promised himself, if he got out of this alive, he’d ring Markus’ neck. He was about to hurl the transceiver into the woods, then caught himself. His eyes leapt from Markus’ small black communicator to the silver streak circling out in the forest, then he carefully returned Markus’ transceiver to the backpack’s pocket.

  “What are you doing?” Laura asked incredulously.

  Hooper threw Timer’s radio receiver to her with a grim look. “Buying you time. Don’t waste it.” He nodded to the detonator. “Left button to arm, right button to detonate.”

  Laura dropped Xeno’s empty pistol and picked up the radio detonator, knowing she now held her husband’s life in her hands. She slid the device into her pocket, trying not to think about the consequences of using the detonator.

  Hooper picked up the fatboy special, and handed it to Liyakindirr. “Point it that way, touch that mark to shoot. Got it?”

  Liyakindirr shouldered the backpack and nodded, holding the weapon, feeling its weight. “I shoot good.”

  Hooper gave Laura a final nod, “Good luck.” He drew his pistol and pointed into the trees, away from the path. “That way.” Liyakindirr started off on the new direction, with Hooper close behind.

  When they had almost passed from sight, the seeker sped through the trees near Laura, after Hooper and Liyakindirr. She saw it fire several bursts of brilliant white energy through the trees before it vanished from sight. A moment later, she heard the distinctive bang of Hooper’s big .50 caliber pistol.

  For several minutes, Laura hid beneath the thick green tropical ferns that carpeted the forest floor, listening for the distinctive whine of the seeker’s cannons, and the periodic thunder of Hooper’s heavy hand gun. When she was certain she was alone, she ran crouched through green ferns towards the east, hearing the sound of the running battle moving further away to the south. After several minutes, an explosion rumbled through the forest from Hooper’s last grenade. A short time later, the seeker’s cannons sounded, telling her the grenade had missed its target. She knew the crippled soldier could not hold out long, and when the seeker finally finished him and Liyakindirr off, it would came after her.

  With Markus’ treachery burning in her mind, Laura was determined not to waste a second. She sprinted through the trees, putting distance between herself and the seeker. Soon she reached the lip of a gulley, where she paused to catch her breath. A shallow stream trickled below while on the far side was a steep climb, strewn with rocks and trees. A kilometer further on was the summit, girded by rust colored sandstone cliffs. Breathing heavily, she scrambled down into the gulley, her heart beating from fear and exhaustion. When she reached the bottom, the boom of Hooper’s gun carried to her from very far away.

  She did not hear it again.

  * * * *

  A two meter wide archway vanished, then Beckman stepped into the domed chamber, followed by Bandaka and Markus. The three dimensional wireframe schematic Vamp had used to guide them through the ship floated in front of Dr McInness, who sat in the control chair holding his broken ankle off the floor.

  “I thought we’d lost you,” Beckman said as Timer and Vamp turned toward him with relief.

  Timer grinned. “We thought you’d lost us too.”

  “We just made it into the tunnel,” Vamp explained, “before the explosion.”

  Beckman thumbed his mike. “Clear.” A moment later, Nuke, Virus and Xeno entered, then Tucker took up position covering the archway. When they were all inside, Beckman turned his attention to the wireframe image. “What’s this?”

  “This room has access to all of the ship’s technical data, and its ship’s log,” Dr McInness said. “Apparently it can drill down to the molecular level, giving a very detailed map of the ship.”

  Beckman glanced at the alien characters on the screen, then cast a curious look at Virus. “Can you make sense of this?”

  Virus stared at the characters, on the brink of understanding. “Sort of. Some of the symbols represent zones inside the ship. Territories. It’s linked to their command structure. It’s not organized the way we do it. It’s like . . . clans, or families.” He winced, straining to remember. “They have ranks, but family relationships and gender are more important.”

  “Gender?” Xeno said surprised.

  “There aren’t many females,” Virus said, “But they’re in charge.”

  “I like the sound of that,” Vamp said with a mischievous grin.

  “This device records everything the ship sees,” Dr McInness continued. “Everywhere it’s been, and it’s been to a lot of places.”

  Beckman’s eyes narrowed. “Does it say why it’s here?”

  “In spectacular 3D,” Dr McInness replied as he inserted his hand into the sphere of light in front of him which he used to control the system.

  The room transformed about them into the black velvet of space sprinkled with densely packed points of star light. Behind them, a distant yellow-orange star shone brightly, the only star larger than a point. Floating all around them was a fleet of dark rectangular leviathans, barely discernible in the feeble light at the edge of the yellow-orange star’s system. The fleet moved as one, nearly thirty great vessels spread across thousands of kilometers of space.

  Ahead of Dr McInness’ control position, two columns of swirling characters continuously morphed into new shapes as computations were rapidly updated.

  “We’re the ship,” Dr McInness explained, “We’re seeing everything recorded from the ship’s perspective.”

  “We’re not going very fast,” Markus observed.

  “How can you tell?” Dr McInness asked. “There’s no point of reference. Those other ships are travelling
as fast, or as slow, as we are. And the stars are far away, even the orange star.”

  Virus pointed to the swirling characters in the left side column. “That says the ship is slowing down.”

  “These ships appear to travel no faster than about ten percent the speed of light,” Dr McInness said. “Fast by our standards, but not fast enough to go very far.”

  Beckman motioned towards the majestic sprawl of a barred spiral galaxy that dominated the far wall of the chamber. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Yes. No human has ever seen it from the outside before,” Dr McInness said, “But that is the Milky Way Galaxy.”

  “So how did this ship get here, from out there, if it’s so slow?”

  “Engines have stopped!” Virus called out, pointing to a set of frozen symbols. “The ship is completely motionless.”

  The black void of space blurred, then faded as the pinpoints of star light merged into a soft, gray sphere surrounding them. The rest of the fleet was now obscured from sight, as was the universe beyond.

  “Are we in hyperspace?” Timer asked.

  “No,” Dr McInness said. “We’re very much in normal space, what Einstein would call flat space. That grayness is a bubble encasing the ship. Spacetime is sweeping around the bubble, pulling it forward from the front, and pushing it from behind.”

  “How can you tell?” Beckman asked.

  “It’s a theory for us, a reality for them.”

  “But didn’t we just stop?”

  “Technically, yes,” Dr McInness replied. “The ship isn’t moving, only spacetime outside the bubble. That’s how they got here. You can’t see it, because nothing can get through the bubble, in or out.”

  Beckman looked incredulous. “You mean it’s flying blind?”

  Dr McInness nodded. “Totally blind. It’s completely dependent on the course it calculated before it started, and on the quality of its navigational data.”

  “Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”

  “They don’t have a choice. Providing they don’t fly into something big, like a star or a planet, they’re OK. It’s not as risky as it sounds.”

  “Heat is rising,” Virus translated. “I’m not sure of the numbers, but it’s getting really freaking hot out there.”

  “It’s Hawking radiation, from the quantum effects around the bubble wall.” Dr McInness sped up the recording. “It stays like this for several days. No way to know how fast the ship is going, but it appears to have come from a globular cluster above the galaxy. That’s tens of thousands of light years in a very short time.”

  The bubble surrounding them collapsed, and the walls of the chamber once again turned black, only now, a thick band of stars snaked all the way around the chamber, marking the plane of the Milky Way. The ship had followed its preplanned path blindly down into the galaxy, skirting the dust clouds of the main spiral arms and avoiding the hidden gravitational shoals of black holes and dark matter concentrations, halting only when it entered a small spur of stars branching off from a major spiral arm. Swirling characters identified a small yellow star glowing dimly off to the left, while other characters marked the locations of planets, moons and asteroids too small and dark for the naked eye to see.

  “Welcome to the Solar System,” Dr McInness announced.

  “Our Solar System?” Markus asked surprised. “From outside the galaxy? That was . . . fast!”

  “Wasn’t it!”

  Xeno looked at the stars enveloping the room apprehensively. “It’s bad for us that it’s so easy for them to get here.”

  “It ain’t good.” Tucker said as he tried unsuccessfully to scratch the wall with his knife where several stars were clustered close together.

  “Hey man,” Nuke said, “Write your name in space!”

  Tucker scowled at Nuke and flicked him the bird.

  Bandaka put his hand to the wall covering a white star and watched the light refract between his fingers. He quickly discovered the image was not on the wall, but floated in front of it.

  “What do you think, Bandy?” Nuke asked, expecting the hunter to be overawed by the technology, “Is it magic?”

  “No magic. TV.”

  Nuke looked at the wall and nodded. “You’re right man. I wonder if they can get cable on this thing?”

  Dr McInness looked thoughtful. “Considering they can’t see through the bubble, they’d need good navigational information to make that kind of trip.” He gave Beckman a meaningful look. “You know what that means?”

  “Sure, they need good maps.”

  “Yes, but no one civilization could possibly map the entire galaxy by itself. They must share navigational information, to make travel safe, to make trade possible, which means every interstellar civilization in the entire galaxy knows where we are. All of them! They trade maps, and those maps will have Earth’s location as a footnote saying ‘Warning! Primitive anthropoids with nuclear weapons live here’. Some people think we should hide, not send out signals or probes in case we let the wrong kind of advanced civilization know we exist, but they’ve missed the point. There is no hiding. Everyone, probably thousands of civilizations across the galaxy, already know we’re here. They must!”

  “Now that,” Nuke said, “Is a scary thought!”

  “And notice, we now have company,” Dr McInness said, pointing towards several large dark masses floating nearby. Other ships appeared one by one, until the entire fleet had arrived. The scientist fast forwarded again, showing the Intruder Fleet accelerating in formation into the Solar System.

  “Where’s Earth?” Beckman asked.

  Dr McInness pointed to a distant blue dot that was slowly sliding along the left wall, well away from the fleet’s flight path.

  “They’re not going to Earth?”

  “No, they’re not.” The scientist pointed to another dot accompanied by a swirling character above the plane of the ecliptic. “That’s Pluto up there.” It passed overhead as the fleet moved inside the dwarf planet’s orbit. “There’s Jupiter ahead. The rest of the outer planets are scattered around the walls. Neptune is on the far side of the sun.”

  Beckman realized the fleet was accelerating through the Solar System’s ecliptic plane towards open space. “They’re crossing the Solar System?”

  “Exactly. We were never their destination, just a course correction.”

  Beckman looked confused. “So what’s this ship doing on Earth?”

  “It shouldn’t be here,” Dr McInness said as he swept the forward view towards Jupiter. The orange and yellow bands of the largest planet in the Solar System, swirling beneath vast, thin rings of ice particles, filled the view before them.

  Beckman peered intently at Jupiter, shining with a pristine clarity no Earth telescope or probe had ever achieved. It wasn’t the precision of the image that drew his attention, but the glistening shapes emerging from the giant planet’s upper atmosphere.

  * * * *

  The Intruder Fleet accelerated through the Solar System in a circular formation, enabling all weapons to bear without one ship blocking another’s fire. It was as common a battle formation as line ahead had been in the age of sail. Instantaneous communication enabled the entire formation to wheel and pivot as one, directing concentrated attacks on any target within tens of millions of kilometers. It was a convergence of technology, discipline and tactics that had been proven in battle long before Homo sapiens had even emerged as a species.

  The great ships continuously scanned for tell tale anomalies that would signal the arrival of the enemy. Intruder stealth ships had already eliminated a handful of scientific outposts studying the xenophobic barbarians on the third planet, ensuring the fleet could transit this backwater system undetected. The lack of anomalies confirmed what the Intruders had long suspected; that their enemy, while highly advanced technologically, was weak willed and indecisive. They knew this region had not known war for eons, because the ancient civilizations inhabiting it did not permit such disturbances. The di
sparity in technology between old and new civilizations meant the issue was never in doubt. There simply was no alternative to peaceful coexistence for any who sought a place among the stars.

  It had been that way throughout the galaxy since time immemorial.

  It was not so for the Intruder Civilization.

  They arose in a remote globular cluster deep within that vast expanse of highly ionized gas surrounding the great spiral of the Milky Way known as the Galactic Halo. Safely beyond the gaze of the great and peaceful societies of the spiral arms, their power grew unchecked. Each victory fed their predatory and maternal drives for territories to safeguard the future of their species and meet their ever expanding need for resources. Through careful diplomacy and selective aggression, they came to dominate their region and emerge as a mature civilization, a rare achievement for an intensely warlike species. Their instinctual need to expand and to address the chronic shortages that plagued their mineral poor cluster, drove them to turn their attention towards the riches of the great barred spiral galaxy that filled their night skies. For thousands of millennia, they watched the supernovas burst across the Milky Way, knowing those colossal explosions had made the galaxy mineral rich beyond measure, all too aware that due to an accident of nature such great events were rare in globular clusters like theirs. It was why their great civilization was so starved of resources, trapped amidst a cluster of impoverished stars. For eons, the lure of that vast sea of light, swirling out from its central bar, had called to them. It was a dream and a promise of what their distant isolation had denied them. In time, they discovered the technology, acquired the power and bred the numbers to grasp that dream.

  They came to believe it was theirs for the taking.

  At first they approached cautiously, establishing small outposts in the Perseus Arm, then later fortified strongholds, fleet bases and logistics centers. Like true predators, the Intruders stalked their prey, just as their ancestors had hunted the waterways of their homeworld. Once established, they began to expand with a speed and efficiency that stunned the region’s inhabitants. Densely populated worlds fell with frightening rapidity, primitive fleets were swept aside at a stroke, until soon an ancient Homeworld stood enticingly before them, the greatest jewel of the Orion Spur. That magnificent world, orbiting Tau Ceti barely twelve light years from Earth, had known civilization for more than two hundred million years. Its name was legend throughout the galaxy and even though it stood on Earth’s doorstep, Mankind knew nothing of its existence.