“Did you see that?” Laura asked with amazement.
Beckman looked around, feigning ignorance. “See what?”
“I suppose they were weather balloons?” she asked.
“Could be,” Beckman conceded with mock seriousness. “Or Venus.”
“Or swamp gas,” Dr McInness said, then furrowed his brow. “Is there a swamp around here?”
Laura glanced meaningfully at the midget strapped to his hip. Beckman didn’t know it yet, but the tiny weapon would never again fire. It had been returned to him, with its power source depleted. In time, they would discover all of the recovered weapons in their possession had ceased functioning. A panel of experts would eventually conclude the mass malfunction was the result of an unknown side effect of the extraordinary sunspot activity boiling across the face of the sun.
Beckman smiled, relenting. “Or maybe someone else finds this asteroid impact as interesting as we do.”
From the shadows at the edge of camp, a small form appeared. It was Mapuruma, anxious and uncertain. She eyed the adults apprehensively, then glanced warily into the darkened forest.
“There she is!” Bandaka exclaimed with relief, rushing over and scooping his daughter into his arms. “Mapu, I was worried about you.”
Mapuruma hugged her father with wide, flitting eyes that darted anxiously towards the darkening forest.
“Where have you been?” Bandaka asked.
“Hiding,” she replied in a tiny voice.
Bandaka looked surprised. “From what?”
Mapu stared into her father’s eyes, unsettled by his calmness, then she gazed up in amazement at the colored lights rippling across the firmament while her father pressed her for an answer. Finally, she replied, telling a bizarre tale of demons in the forest and evil spirits in the sky. She told it with a sense of awe, for in her eyes it was a tale of magic and monsters. When she finished, she swore every word was true, and that a spell had stolen the truth from their minds.
Though she pleaded for them to believe her, no one ever did.
EPILOGUE
During her captivity, no one spoke to Nemza’ri. She knew her implants had been repaired and reactivated, but they were no longer under her control. Her captors used them to drain her mind of her most personal experiences and gather all she knew of her own kind. While she sat in isolation in a white walled room with nothing but a small bed to sleep on, the information extracted painlessly from her mind was spread far and wide, to more than a thousand civilizations who were now intimately aware of the true nature of the Intruder species. Formal alliances multiplied across the Galaxy to ensure the security of all peaceful societies would never again be threatened. Those unfortunate worlds that had fallen under Intruder control had been liberated in the blink of an eye by the Firsts, and were now being more slowly restored by the Alliance to the levels of development they had achieved before their conquest.
Nemza’ri knew none of this. She’d expected when her interrogation was over, to be executed. She was crew and of a military clan, deserving nothing less, for she had failed. Their campaign had failed. She wondered if her homeworld had been destroyed, and her kind exterminated. She even suspected she was the last survivor of her race, so brutal did she expect the reprisal to be.
When her interrogation ended, one of her implants induced her to sleep. What followed was a dreamless state more akin to stasis than slumber. When she awoke, she was surrounded by med drones of a familiar design. To her surprise, her implants were again under her control. Nemza’ri sat up, confused. Medical officers of her own race told her she was in perfect health, and that high clan officers were waiting to speak to her. They wanted a full account of her experiences, and especially her contacts, for she was the last to return.
She’d thought she was the only survivor of the entire campaign, but they corrected her misunderstanding. Only two ships had been lost, both in the system where her ship had crashed. The rest of the fleet had appeared at their objective, only to discover their technology did not function. Weapons and sensors had all been instantly destroyed by technology the like of which her species had never encountered, and every ship’s propulsion system, along with tens of thousands of drones, had inexplicably failed. Even the fleet’s Inter-Command Nexus, with its twenty-eight guiding intelligences, had fallen asleep to awaken later with no memory of the event. Out of all the thousands of technologies within the fleet only life support continued to function. Several minutes later, the entire fleet appeared in orbit over their homeworld, with only maneuvering propulsion restored to maintain orbit. In the hours that followed, hundreds of other Intruder ships appeared in orbit in the same condition, removed from the conquered regions of their far flung empire.
It was an inexplicable disaster that would take years to repair.
After their crippled fleets had appeared, communication devices on every channel across thousands of light years of Intruder space received the same message:
HOSTILITY AGAINST OTHER SPECIES WILL NEVER BE TOLERATED.
Every scientist they had was working feverishly to understand how every armed ship they possessed had been captured, disarmed and returned, how their technology had been neutralized so easily and how their communications system had been compromised on such a massive scale, but as yet, they could not explain any of it.
Nemza’ri stood up, feeling a strange sensation. Without speaking to the doctors, she checked her biostatus implants, discovering she was sterile again. She felt no disappointment, only understanding. It had never been intended that she would breed. The doctors, once they discovered her condition, simply reversed the process, returning her to her appropriate biological status.
Nemza’ri walked toward a view port through which familiar yellow-orange sunlight shone. She discovered she was in one of the orbital cities. Through the window, she saw thousands of orbitals and ships, and below a beautiful blue world with steel capped mountains and quilted oceans. It was a strangely comforting sight.
Kaleezsha(Alashra-Warm)Nemza’ri was home.
* * * *
Fifty thousand microscopic eggs drifted down the Goyder River. They’d been poured into the river’s ashen waters by two med drones, emptying the mothership’s last surviving clone tank. Once the Command Nexus had given the order, it wiped all trace of their existence from its memory. When the med drones had been destroyed during the orbital bombardment, the clone tank had gone with them. It had been assumed by the fleet in orbit that the blast had destroyed the eggs, as no trace of them remained. Even Nemza’ri was unaware of their escape, as the Command Nexus had not informed her of its plan.
With no tell tale technology implanted, the microscopic eggs were missed by orbital sensors during the cleanup operation. Their presence on this unusually fertile world was hidden by a mass of microscopic and complex life forms so dense, it had few equals anywhere in the galaxy. Some eggs attached themselves to submerged rocks and fallen trees. Others reached the sea, and were carried along the coast to mangrove lined estuaries or out to teaming coral reefs. Everywhere they went, they found warm tropic waters offering a habitat idyllic by their standards.
There was little difference between the warm tropic waters of the Timor and Arafura Seas, and the temperature controlled amniotic fluids of the clone tank. Imbued with the myrnod growth hormone, their cellular structures would experience accelerated growth, both through gestation and as hatchlings. Later, their battle for survival in a world of predators would be strangely similar to the life their distant ancestors had led millions of years ago.
Some hatchlings would perish, as the natural environment would be harsh to a naked amphibian, even one with prodigious intelligence. Sharks and crocodiles proliferated throughout the region, and would quickly acquire a taste for them. Without technology or education, they would start life with nothing but their intellects and their predatory instincts. As was their natural inclination, they would form family groups and evolve strictly hierarchical structures around matriarch
al concepts. They would not understand from where they came, or why the hot bloods were intent upon their extermination, but they would quickly come to understand which species was the superior.
In time, they would thrive.
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The Kremlin Phoenix
by
Stephen Renneberg
“Renneberg delivers a typically exciting thriller, with plenty of sharp turns, heavy weapons and touches of science fiction” - Kirkus Reviews
In the 21st century, Craig Balard, a young New York lawyer, is unwittingly swept up in a conspiracy of global proportions that threatens to trigger the fall of the West and the rise of a new totalitarian world order.
Hunted by agents of the international conspiracy, Craig encounters a mysterious woman who knows his every step – before he makes it – and who intervenes to keep him alive for her own purposes.
He discovers she is a hologram, transmitted back in time from the late 23rd century, where a small group of survivors of a cataclysmic war are trying to use him to change their past in order to save mankind’s future.
Under her guidance, Craig becomes the fulcrum of time, where his every move triggers changes in the timeline that will either save humanity, or guarantee its extinction.
Paperback Length 334 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9874347-7-7
The Siren Project
by
Stephen Renneberg
When a top secret 'black' project turns rogue, a shadowy organization entraps disgraced former Secret Service Agent John Mitchell into tracking down the missing scientist behind the project. What he uncovers is an insidious conspiracy reaching to the highest levels of the military and the government. The discovery makes him the most hunted man on earth, pursued by a ruthless enemy armed with a sinister new technology.
Aided by a woman with extraordinary abilities, and an enigmatic defector from deep within the conspiracy itself, Mitchell challenges the greatest technological undertaking since the creation of the atomic bomb. To his horror, he finds that rather than destroy entire cities, the monolithic Siren Project threatens to destroy the free will of Mankind itself . . . without anyone ever knowing!
Paperback Length 499 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9874347-2-2
The Mothership Page 44
