by Lea Tassie
Chehx had the authority to allow Betty to enter the time-lock with him and travel to the Grays' home world, because of his clan's position in the hierarchy. But to do so would only prolong the fearful time they must endure before facing death and, for this reason, Chehx refused. After an hour, Chehx finally had to physically push away Betty, who was weeping and trying to cling to him, and leave their apartment. He traveled quickly to the lone ship awaiting the launch. While the Grays' battleships began their final assault on planet Earth, the time-lock device was programmed and paired to the computers of the reptoid ship.
It managed to escape not only Earth’s atmosphere, but also detection by the Grays' armada, and slip into deep space. It took nearly three hundred years of travel to get to the Grays' home world. Had the ship been detected and destroyed, the reptoids would never have known, because they traveled in time-lock.
The small ship burned through the thick atmosphere of the Grays' primary home world and impacted the surface, crippling the ship permanently. It succeeded, however, in ejecting the time-lock and activating its controls. The time-lock immediately began its program of dragging the time line of the Reptoids into that of the Grays.
This action was detected at once by the Grays' military, and thousands of troops poured onto the new battlefield. This was exactly what the reptoids had anticipated. Unarmed and vulnerable, the reptoids merely aimed to spread as much of their virus over the planet as they could.
During their stay in the time-lock, the Dinosauroids had bred new and exotic Dinosauroids to ensure utter destruction of the Grays' home world. These were more or less mindless, aggressive, four-limbed beasts capable of running at great speed, with thickened skin like armor and vicious claws and teeth. The wrath they brought down on the Grays' cities and population was swift and decisive. Never stopping to sleep or eat, they engulfed the planet in terror and chaos. The call for reinforcements went out to the other colony worlds, but when those Grays arrived on their troubled home world, the reptoids had successfully completed their campaign.
The ships fled, but every one of them carried the contagion back to the planets they had come from, ensuring the complete extermination of the Gray empire. Almost a thousand years later, when the world ship of Neo Terra found its way to the Grays' home world, they found an agrarian society which posed no threat. You'll remember that the humans of that time took pity on the Grays, and decided not to punish the survivors. They left them in peace and traveled back to orbit New Eden.
That was humanity's big mistake, Reader. Because they had found no evidence of warlike Grays nearby, they assumed the danger had been eliminated. They did not realize that the Grays' empire had stretched over vast distances.
But Abarth knew. He traveled the galaxy near and far in the world ship, searching for humanity's ancient enemy, and he found them.
Abarth now had his potential army and he wanted to get these violent, rapacious creatures back to Earth to fulfill his dreams of revenge. But he had time to spare and he intended to find a way to use the world ship as well as the Grays, to destroy all humanity.
***
No one realized back then that Charger R/T had mastered the blink. He wasn't connected to the New Eden system, but used his god-like powers to replicate the process once he deciphered how it was done. He wasn't restricted to the planet, like ordinary people were. He could go anywhere.
Charger R/T blinked to the planet where he had grown up. He stood on the surface of Earth, which was encased in the black rain of the Grays' attack long ago but, to Charger R/T, that presented little problem. He could see beneath the iron encasement to the old roads and the buildings buried deep. Like a hobo, he walked the virtual roads he remembered from his boyhood.
As the years ticked past and there was no progress in finding Charger R/T, Abarth found it increasingly difficult to keep control of the church. He needed to find Charger R/T and punish the beast for Pennington's disappearance and subsequent death in order to gain favor with the congregation. The endeavors of science were constantly under threat from Abarth and his followers, for they pressed humanity to accept that science was responsible for the creation of the beast in the first place, and that medical science in particular was an abomination.
It took many years but, through hard work and deceit, Abarth managed to get members of his congregation onto the council. That meant he had the puppets he needed to force the world into accepting religion as the prime authority for moral and spiritual behaviors. One of his first acts, which had real power, was the reinstatement of the church as an equal partner with the state. Now New Eden's council would be guided by the church and ultimately by Abarth.
When he got word that a satellite sent to Earth for reconnaissance had recorded the movement of an object on its surface, Abarth suspected it might be Charger R/T. Abarth demanded high resolution images of this object and when it was discovered that the object was indeed Charger R/T, Abarth insisted science find a way to get to him.
"You are sure this new blink will do what we need?" Abarth asked the lead scientist in charge of getting back to old Earth.
"We have had success sending objects out into space some distance away from our planet using the laser beam system, but our attempts at sending living tissue have been somewhat stalled," Glenda replied. She'd been developing systems for the blink network for several years, having started from the bottom of the bureaucracy and working her way up. Now in charge of the network, she was well-informed about its abilities and limitations.
"What limitations could you possibly be facing? You have had no shortage of staff or resources. I would hate to think you're deliberately holding up progress." Abarth's voice was cruel and sharp, his tone sneering.
Glenda said calmly, "If you are willing to trust our system as it stands, feel free to step inside the chamber and we will try to blink you a few thousand kilometers out and bring you back."
Abarth's face was red with rage, but he knew the event was being televised and he could not afford to be seen as authoritarian. He quietly retorted, "I have trusted science for many years, and I have faith that you will succeed. Our belief in god has gotten us this far and I'm sure he will soon gift you the knowledge you require."
As the broadcasted session ended and Abarth was leaving the science labs, he turned to a bishop near him and whispered, "Get rid of her. I want progress, not smart-asses!" Glenda lost her job and, two months later, the first biological tests were under way. They had mixed results.
The blink system had been a form of travel limited to some very specific rules of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, but now it ventured into unknown territory. Using a laser to guide an object to a destination only worked if the destination was in a clear line of sight and had a solid surface for the object to land on. Some attempts to send living mass to a point in space a long distance away resulted in total destruction of the biological traveler in a gruesome way.
Abarth felt his control of events once more grow tenuous as the months slipped past. Then the breakthrough came. Using the Enochs' method of hard light, a beam could be cast like a fishing line into a pond. The light could be bent around objects using gravity, and tracked in miles as it traveled, which gave science the ability to send animals a specified distance in any direction and have them safely return.
With this success, Abarth progressed to the second level of his plan, the capture and punishment of Charger R/T. Devout followers were to travel to Earth and ensnare Charger R/T in a hard-light net, then drag him back to New Eden for trial. Abarth sent a small well-armed team to Earth, but they did not return. He then sent a large force with heavy equipment and several well-trained assassins. They didn't return either. The church, now desperate, recruited and sent an army of poorly trained and hastily prepared soldiers, who arrived but also didn't come back.
Abarth was beside himself with rage. And he was right that humans had gone soft. For they no longer possessed enough aggression to capture Charger R/T. Every night he broadcast
the results to the public, showing what the monster had done to innocent young men and women. Satellite images showed the kind of destruction that Charger R/T wrought, though the deaths were quick and painless, or so they appeared.
Charger R/T found the attempts to capture him so feeble that he felt no threat. He simply blinked the attackers to planet Ceres, or Meshed, as the local inhabitants had once called the place. Meshed had remained in Charger R/T's memories from his past encounter with Marcus when the two worked on the Mars terraforming project together. These memories seemed distant and shadowed, but he realized he had inherited them from the Charger of long ago and that they didn't form part of his own experience.
Charger R/T felt quite satisfied with himself as he sent people to a forgotten and deserted world, leaving them stranded there. He thought they could repopulate it, though he made it appear that they had died. It gave him good press coverage as a true villain.
One image in particular really disturbed Abarth. It was a photo of Charger R/T just after he allegedly destroyed several attackers. Charger R/T seemed to be staring up at the satellite and smiling, as if he knew it was Abarth seeing the photo.
Abarth declared war. He would not allow Charger R/T to get away with murdering Pennington and he would most definitely not be allowed to flout Abarth. The world under Abarth's control responded.
So began the great human war on the god known as Charger R/T. In charge of this war was General Pursing, a tall, no-nonsense type of officer, whose military leadership had been forged by many years of reading and watching documentaries on war. A world authority on the lost and forgotten art of war, he trained special teams of soldiers in the arts of evasion and capture.
Abarth demanded that science rein in its beast, and ordered the most advanced technologies be used to subdue Charger R/T. Science did not fail. It produced some truly terrifying methods for General Pursing to use, and the humans trained to deploy these methods against Charger R/T practiced daily in preparation.
"We'll use the world ship because the engines are powerful enough to deploy a sizable restraining field on the beast, and with the number of troops we have, it should be relatively easy to stun this creature into submission," General Pursing said to Abarth as he drank deeply from a goblet holding sacramental wine. "Our first jump with the ship will be in a few days. We just have a few loose ends to tie up first."
The room the two sat in was considered the holy of holies, reserved for only a select few to enter. The space was dominated by white marble and ivory. Rich objects adorned the wall niches and floors. Long red, velvet drapes hung from the walls to cover decorative glass windows, and gold trim traced the ceiling above massive paintings generated by computer monitors.
Abarth sat quietly in his ostentatious chair, the one reserved for the pope. Finally, he spoke. "You are certain this system will not kill the beast? I want him returned alive, and the people will only support our endeavor if there are no more deaths."
General Pursing tugged on his gray beard and adjusted the jacket of his extensively decorated military uniform. "I was especially impressed with an old Earth episode of Wild Kingdom that I found. The method used to trap wild tigers is perfect for this military campaign. I am most confident that this plan will succeed, and with no casualties."
The last thing General Pursing did before launching was to have copied all the parts the QEP drive system, so that science could begin duplicating the quantum entangled particle drive. The plan laid out by Abarth was twofold, designed so the people of New Eden would support him as pope and ultimately as ruler of the world.
The first part of the plan was obviously the capture and trial of Charger R/T.
The second part would once have been unthinkable, but now, moving this planet from its present location to a new orbit around Earth's sun in the Goldilocks zone, was something that humanity knew could be done. A blink system able to use hard light with lasers to beam material to any point in space combined with the planet ship's jump engines, made it now possible to dematerialize an entire planet and send its molecular mass, including the jump engines, to a new location. This meant that New Eden could be dematerialized and then rematerialized opposite Earth in an orbit around the sun.
Abarth had promised his people new lands to cultivate and own. These were needed because those people who had lived in the world ship before it was commandeered by Abarth were once again living on New Eden and the planet was getting crowded. This need for land also resulted in restoring planet Earth back to its former glory by removing the black iron shell, repairing the damage, and reseeding it with life.
Abarth knew that with two planets circling the sun, he could be a ruler as never before known in human history. And why stop there? With the QEP drive replicated and working, he could find other worlds to move into the sun's Goldilocks zone for human habitation. Grand promises of directing science to better the lives of people everywhere were just what the church needed to attract new followers.
Mars would be moved into the Goldilocks zone. Then the process of terraforming the surface could start, much easier than in Mars’ old orbit.
New Eden would be chosen next. With QEP printers already in place, the world ship would jump from Earth to New Eden in a matter of a few months. Once there, the portable QEP drive could be used on New Eden to drive it back along the world ship's course and then carefully guide it into an orbit around the sun with Earth and Mars. It only made sense that Ceres would follow, for a sizable colony had managed to settle there. With four stable planets rotating in perfect balance around the sun, life would flourish. The human population would explode with abundant land for food. War and diseases had already been abolished.
Towns would grow into cities, then metropolises of incredible size and density, while all the land would be clean and plentiful. The waters would flow clear and fresh, giving a crisp cool pleasure when drunk, and birds would fill the trees with song. Abarth would rule over all of this. If he allowed humans to live at all.
Abarth finally rose from his chair and walked over to General Pursing. He placed his hand firmly on the general's shoulder and said, "I don’t want any fuck-ups. Screw this up and I will see to it that you spend your eternity in hell!" With that, Abarth left the room. The general, shaken and nervous, responded by finding the scientists working on the QEP drive and ripping into them.
A few days later, when the two worlds were ready, they jumped both the planet ship and New Eden into a synchronized orbit around the sun on the side opposite to Earth. With perfect calculations, the solar system now had two habitable worlds for humanity to walk on. The audacity of the effort surprised even Charger R/T, who instantly became aware of the planets when they arrived. Intrigued, he blinked to the surface of New Eden for a look.
This was precisely what General Pursing had hoped for, and he immediately put his plan into operation. Charger R/T had not arrived in the center of a city or at a place where people might see him. He chose to arrive on the ice plains of the frozen northern regions, sure that his appearance would be undetected.
Because of small satellites in orbit, General Pursing knew at once where Charger R/T had landed, and ships were dispatched to the beast's location. The planet ship swung into action and started spooling up the engines to generate the power required for a containment field to encircle Charger R/T. The planet ship moved, with its magnetic drives, to hover, a dirty, black mass, over Charger R/T's head.
Suddenly, without warning, five red laser beams from the ship struck the ground surrounding Charger R/T. Then a blue plasma beam filled in the spaces the red lasers left, encircling Charger R/T in a cage of light. A magnetic field of immense power began squeezing from above and below, pinning Charger R/T and holding him fast. Several ships arrived and troops scrambled through the high, biting, cold winds to encircle the beast, drawing weapons and digging trenches ready for a fight.
Charger R/T found himself more confused than alarmed, for he didn't know why the humans were attacking him. As t
he restriction field began to close in and contain Charger R/T, his anger flared up and he began compressing space inside the containment field. The effect of pulling in the walls of the force field caused the planet ship's engines to surge. Then he reversed his efforts, pushing outward hard against the walls. The engines groaned with the strain.
"Damn it, man, run the engines at full throttle if need be, but keep that beast contained!" General Pursing was panicking as alarm bells sounded the imminent collapse of the field. From the general's viewpoint, in the command center of the planet ship, he could see Charger R/T beginning to expand the field and, fearful that the beast could break free, he ordered the troops to commence firing. The weapons these troops carried were sonic. They shot out bursts of high intensity sound waves which, when at full power, could tear a man's skull apart.
Charger R/T was hit from several angles by bursts of sound waves that passed with little effort through the force field. He winced at the momentary pain. There were snipers hidden from Charger R/T's view who joined in the fight, but their weapons were much more ominous. The universe contains subatomic particles called neutrinos, which are mostly harmless to humanity when scattered and moving freely. However, the weapons these snipers used compressed the neutrinos into an intense beam which Charger R/T's body armor could not stop. Patches of Charger R/T's armor began to heat up and glow red hot, causing him to twist and move with some discomfort.
"Send in the thumper!" General Pursing ordered in a panicked voice, beads of sweat forming on his brow. The thumper was a weapon like a tank, with the ability to blink. It materialized on the battle field and did as the name implies. With one great thump, a wave of magnetic energy, always the opposite charge to whatever it was attacking, would pound the target and crush the life from it.
