by Richard Sosa
Ra frowned analytically but his face was also frightened. “Are you saying I am in danger somehow, I always want to kill myself, so that’s nothing new.”
“Ra, we’re your friends, or at least I am,” Iris said carefully, “if you’re in danger in any way then I want to know about it. You can trust me.”
“I don’t know a lot about what I experienced but proximity is a factor,” Ra said, “this happened to me on the Orbital Platform when it was attacked and didn’t continue afterward,” Ra’s scientific mind was taking over, “If what I experienced was a real event and not the result of the pain or the stressful situation,” Ra thought, “why did all the voices I hear not come back?”
“All the voices? How many do you think you were hearing?”
“Hundreds,” Ra folded his hands and looked away and then at Iris nodding to her to record, he looked directly into the recorder, “millions.”
“Well that’s not something I’ve encountered before,” Rik stood up and his eyebrow arched, “you heard them at the Orbital but no other time, right?”
“Exactly,” Ra said, “it occurred just like you said, I had the taste you talked about, I concluded it was the food, I barfed and then as I was sitting at the terminal and Delv was sleeping, I could hear them. It was in my mind, part feeling and not definite words, more like impressions, but easily converted to words in my mind. I don’t know how else to explain it. There were multiples of voices, lots of them organized in layers or planes and dimensions.” He searched at the recorder and Iris continued to record, “it was a geometric language. At the end of the process what I felt and knew instinctively was that they were going to follow a ‘path’ and come here but I couldn’t act on it because I didn’t know how or what I was experiencing,” the scientist in Ra was processing his memory, “I knew in my mind they said the equivalent of, ‘this is the route or path, they needed to attack here, telling others about a path for others to follow, but again not defined as those words. I was uncomfortable and conflicted with the sense of operating on ‘instinct’. I panicked.”
Rik cradled his head in his hand while looking at Iris said, “You know what I think?”
Iris’ eyes were wide. “Pop singer Brethair might have a mustache under all her makeup? No, of course, I don’t know what you’re thinking, you idiot.”
Rik smiled. “I think Ra was connecting to more than six CS’s but not an entire invasion force in the neighborhood. If the invasion force was here in our system they would have shown up, they never hold back, they feed wherever they find food without qualification. They’re opportunistic.”
“They were lost, dude,” Ra said quietly, “and projecting out to others.”
“Lost?” Rik crosses his arms.
Ra said softly, “They were lost and desperate. I could sense that.”
“Ra, they didn’t come to our system accidentally, they never leave a defined harrow appointment,” Rik stopped in mid-thought, “they followed us. Neil and me. But then got lost the same way Neil and I were separated. Maybe the large invasion force was supposed to land after Neil and never showed. I can’t explain why. I’ve never encountered this before. Our locators did not indicate a malfunction like that.”
“We’re not supposed to be here on this planet,” Iris addressed Ra, “Rik thinks they typically would have invaded ancient Aoife. We’re off the ‘beaten path.”
“The lost Orbs were connected to Rik, he had a locator,” Ra nodded as he theorized, “and maybe other technology like the cube drew them. They showed up in his time slot. When they should have arrived over eighty cycles before. I need to do some math.”
“What Ra experienced had nothing to do with the main invasion force,” Iris was happy,
“we’re safe.”
“Before we start celebrating, we need to test that,” Rik said.
“Beat Pathras?” Ra asked.
“No, beaten path,” Iris corrected, “a trodden down route with multiple points of entry where the established known parameter is fixed but the terminus is unknown.” Ra frowned.
“Iris, you’re just making it worse by trying to define it,” Rik said.
Ra’s eyes blinked rapidly. Rik noticed his confused expression and repeated, “off the beaten path”.
Ra looked at them in turn. “No, they’re furry.” Iris smiled. Ra sat up higher in his bed, “I don’t believe this will happen to me again. For the moment, while I gather data, let’s not make a big deal out of this unless something changes.”
Rik padded Iris’ shoulder. “Let’s get out of here and let Ra get some rest.”
“Rik,” Ra pleaded, “keep this under wraps until something changes. I’ll let you know if I start hearing ‘voices’ again. I need some time to review all of this.”
Rik and Iris left Ra and walked to Hangar Fifty-two to report for a briefing. There was a large crowd gathered in Hangar. The space was empty of equipment but packed with marines and pilots. Rik got many pats on the back as they entered the hangar. He cringed at the attention.
Dask stood a bit wobbly on a flyer wing already speaking. “Outstanding job. Your courage and determination in the face of the enemy honor those who have fallen. We have some work to rebuild and to be prepared in case they want to take another run at us. We are developing an early warning system and it looks like those rockets Karl came up with did a number on those invading ass holes. If we can get those things to work in space, then we’ll always be secure. That’s our next task.”
Everyone cheered.
Dask scanned the room and wobbled more, “Soldiers buck up, but you’re not robots either, so help each other heal because if they come back, I am going to be calling on you,” Dask pointed at everyone.”
Iris frowned, “I think Dask is drunk,” she watched closely, “Yep, he drunk on his ask.”
“Give a hand to the man of the hour Doctor Karl JaensAt,” Dask shouted. Everyone clapped and cheered, and Karl looked up because he heard his name.
Rik peered over at Iris and bent his head in a questioning manner. “Don’t even go there. Damn you,” Iris said.
Rik noticed Iris was holding a bottle of booze and she took a big draw while smiling at him. Everyone was quickly getting drunk. “What are you doing?” Rik peered around as everyone cheered again.
“I am getting drunk too.”
Dask shouted to Rik. “Come up here, son.”
Iris pushed at him. “Better you than me.”
He climbed the ladder of the Flyer and stood uncomfortably next to Dask. Dask’s large hand landed on his shoulder shaking his whole body. “This man can fight. Did you ever think? He’s my father’s brother and we were prepared to meet the call thanks to him. I say to Rik, Here, Here.” He raised his bottle in the air and everyone did the same.
Rik scanned the hangar embarrassed by the attention. “Where’s my damn drink? I need a beer.” A beer container tumbled in the air and Rik caught it one-handed. Suds bubbled out over his hand when he opened it and he gave a salute to everyone while cheers, shouts and ‘whoops’ filled the hangar. Music began to play, and an impromptu celebration erupted as the electronic techno-like music was turned up, dancing and cheering began.
Iris climbed on the Flyer wing, standing with Rik and Dask and waved like royalty. Dask shouted, “I am proud of you,” Rik smiled at him and thumbs up and Dask called back, “not you, dumb ass,” pointing at Iris, “her.”
Iris danced in a quirky way, making faces at her friends, many joined her by mocking her strange dance movements and breaking out into more cheering. Rik saw the recorder at the top of her bag and grabbed it to record the celebration. He paned over to record her dancing and all the others joining her. Dask came by doing an old man shuffle, arms rigid, pumping back and forth and everyone laughed. With more than twenty percent of his bones repaired, the stiff dance motions were intentional and painful, but he forced a broad smile on his face. Iris mimicked him and then everyone did the same shuffle. The music and the laugher continued in
to the night. Celebrations occurred in hangars, trenches, offices, homes and on the streets throughout the cities, regions, and planet.
A small face looked into the eyes of her mother. “Mommy will the mean biting tre-bitjouls came back to hurt us?”
Robec-3 adjusted the blanket covering her daughter. “No sweetie, lots of people helped to make sure they have gone far away, and they are afraid of us, so they don’t want to come back and even try to hurt us.”
The child's eyes searched her mother’s face. “Mommy, I am sad when you go away up in the sky.”
“I love you pumpkin, I am not going away again until you’re older. I am going to be here and help other parents repair your school. Tomorrow we’re going to find someplace to bake cookies. Would you like that?” Her daughter nodded.
“Mommy, will I have bad dreams?”
“I am right here by you all night, you’re safe now.
Robec-3 kissed her daughter as the little girl rolled over on her side. After watching her fall asleep, Robec-3 quietly left and stepped outside. There was muted activity everywhere and rows of family tents hastily set up as emergency temporary shelter lined the long avenue. She looked at the horizon and her gaze turned upward into space. She gazed at the stars for a long moment.
Chapter Fifty-five
Iris danced, smiled, laughed, made faces, and continued to dance with her hands in the air. Her image on the cracked face of the recording device was curious to the kneeling military Commander as he reached for it with dirty hands and turned it side to side and over inspecting it as if it was something he had never seen before. “What the hell is that Sir?” the Private standing behind his CO asked.
“Have no idea.” The Commander examined the small blacked recorder running on a continuous loop and Iris appeared again, singing, laughing and dancing with arms in the air. A strange foreign voice outside the view said something and she smiled and responded and danced disjointed. The loop continued and she moved over to another person, cautiously, who suddenly grabbed her in a playful headlock, they tumbled out of view, laughing. The Commander tried to listen carefully and concentrated but couldn’t understand the words they were speaking. He shook his head and watched the strange character text scrolling under the images, “sounds like the Parmekan dialect but I can’t tell for sure,” he stood up holding the recorder and looked up at the sky then ordered the private, “try to find us a link or patch-through to HQ, we’re moving out.”
The sky was black with ash suspended in the upper atmosphere as if a million volcanoes had erupted to turn the planet’s white clouds into gray billowing stacks rising into the sky and flattening, trapped by an invisible ceiling. The only white clouds were the nuclear mushroom clouds climbing into the upper atmosphere. The wind was hot and carried small debris that stung his face. The air smelled oily. The Commander inspected the ground littered with debris. There were twisted metal, glass, concrete and piles of burnt materials where buildings once stood. A single burning blackened alien Orb sat on the surface, broken in two large parts. Smoke and an unrelenting fire belched from its center, it popped and hissed as the heat from it made the air shimmer. Caramelized mounds of black burnt soil composed of organic material, leaked pus-like material that formed pools in low areas. Human bodies charred and flattened appeared like pancakes from a hot griddle and were pasted together in random stacks that stunk in the heat.
“Shit,” the CO said and spat, “how many clicks are these things ahead of us?”
“I don’t know, Sir,” the private tried to understand his paper map.
The CO looked after the Orbs in long lines far in the distance moving away from him and refocused. He gently tossed the player to the ground and it tumbled on the surface and came to rest, continuing to loop the images of Iris speaking, laughing, in her alien language.
“Why is the sky so black?” The private asked.
“Because the whole God damn world is burning. HQ said this is happening everywhere. These damn things just came out of nowhere. If we make it to the Santa Clara Station, there is ready transport to evac us to a regrouping site near the Jos-uha desert.”
The Commander picked up his weapon, stood taller as his equipment clanked, “we keep the ocean and North Bay to our back maybe those things will turn South and we can fight them at Ajlune Crater Lake. I don’t think they are going through the mountain range,” he walked wearily toward a large contingent of soldiers. As the CO approached, soldiers stood to don equipment and their weapons. A cacophony of equipment clanged as it was being re-shouldered. The soldiers were spent, welcoming the brief rest and challenged to get moving again. “Any intel from HQ on how we took down that thing?” the Commander said to his radio operator while pointing at the destroyed Orb.
The radio operator examined his equipment. “There’s no HQ left to ask, Sir.”
“Let's move out people,” the CO ordered.
The group began to walk in a marching line like a retreating army with no hope of catching the Orbs. One soldier kicked at one of the brown blobs on the ground expecting it to tumble away but it was hard, anchored and didn’t move. There were thousands in rows like a field of beans. As the soldiers moved further down the hill, a young soldier spied a shiny object half-buried in the ground and bent down to retrieve it. He inspected it as they marched, it’s a silvery shiny tube, slightly tarnished, and after trying to open it he tossed it over his shoulder. The line of troops walked along what was once a road through a neighborhood on a ridge. The city in the distance once had skyscrapers and central neighborhoods but they are gone and the ground is leveled, scorched by raging fires, with no sign of life.
In the far distance, primary Orbs silently moved above the ground, tilling their crop with smoke rising into the horizon like a dust storm. Da-earra’s human presence will be gone within days along with evidence they existed. The soil underfoot was barren and lifeless. The distant Orbs rowed in long lines continued their work like tractors in a far-flung field. They vaporized life to consume and create fields of brown hairy droppings, the seedlings of future humanoid life on the planet, stretching everywhere in sight for miles.
The Commander stopped at the top of the hill and scanned the harrowed fields then his gaze climbed to the sky. Millions of Orbs blackened the sky while descending rapidly. “Geez. What in God’s hell are those things?” The sun was setting.
END
Characters
Captian Rik Onanes
Iris JaensAt
Lieutenant General Dask
Doctor Megs Savan
Rabid Prez “Ra”
Places
Planet Aoife (E Fa): Iris’ home
Da-earra: prime Earth also Da-earra Treim 5689
Glossary
Cam-sl: about 1,000
Gamls: second (about)
Gaml-ites: minute (about)
Gav-clicks: one-tenth light speed per second (gamls)
Gavit: increased artificial gravity
Gavitonic: an artificial ‘well’ that creates a powerful gravity-like force in a small space
Germts: measure in feet (about)
Gmamatic: forward and backward cycling power source for a Flyer
Gram-sl: one hundred (about)
Grizath Provence: A remote region on the planet
Har-blej: about sixty
IARI: Interconnecting Augmented Reality Interface, personal mobile computing, and communication device connected to the planet Aoife.
Jerperper: an unstable person or a jokester
Korpe: a rat-like creature that is generally unwelcome
Logermatic: continuous self-correcting navigation systems
Logistif: an escape pod with a self-programmable launch system
Metlacks – altitude measurement
Pathras: harmless rabbits that have canine attributes
Ragnin-Tid: an atomic element common to Aoife’s outer planetary system
Rad-piaks: a distance or aperture reading adjusted while in flight
&nb
sp; Spipeculas: alien invaders
Terth-lts: triangulation distance measure using gravity mass
Trems: hours (about)
Trimatons: light reflection microscale reflectance measure
Tripomagilias: Spipeculas seeds with human DNA
