Earth on Target (Survival Amidst the Stars)

by Angel Bright

  11 Vigorous Actions to Acquire Technologies

  We considered and planned actions to hijack and copy prototypes—increasingly desperate plans and increasingly hopeless and adventurous. But that was real. We had to have some hope in this race against death.

  Could they challenge a powerful civilization? No. They would not know who we were or from where we reached with our weak hands. But we had a gift: we learned fast, were adaptable, and were trying to survive.

  I started with a single-seat machine.

  First, I teleported myself to the mountain slope where I saw the base of the battle starships. To my surprise, I found myself next to something buried in the cliff on which I stood. I located it according to some vague, pale information in my head I had received during the mental copying.

  I found a small command sensor to trigger an entrance. I knew how to work it, but my physical data was not responsible for triggering it. It was not much of a hindrance. While I hid behind a blue-green bush, I lost a quarter of an hour uncovering the necessary signals. But the rock in front of me slowly rose to reveal a low horizontal entrance sufficient to allow me to squeeze inside the facility. I had come to an observation point excellently equipped with suitable equipment, and all the observation was concentrated on the base of the military-space base at the foot of the mountain.

  The records contained extensive information with a continually changing qualitative and quantitative list of flying machines. I checked the availability of fighters once again and chose one that looked the newest and with the best parameters.

  I teleported to the wing and slipped into its cabin. Together with it, I moved to the hangar of the plant, which would copy it and produce it on Earth.

  The whole hijacking operation went quickly and with great success. My research team was impressed.

  I did not see it as a theft because these machines and knowledge of them gave some chance of survival for humanity. I proceeded to the second part of the star-cruiser hijacking. I successfully repeated my actions from the previous time, but the cruiser had a crew that was sufficient to service it and fly over long distances. When I got into this situation and understood the difficulties waiting for me, I blocked all the ship’s entrances and exits and turned off its electrical system.

  Amazingly, the ship fell into our hands with ease.

  It was even more amazing when I entered the deck of the fighter where I had ordered the captured crew to gather.

  Upon my arrival, the lined-up officers from other plants knelt in tribute on their left knees, holding their helmets in their left hands. Was it a command from their senior commander? Regardless, they did it in a snappy, beautiful way.

  I did not understand what was happening until we entered the ship’s command cabin.

  There in the center of one of the walls rose a full-height portrait. It was my portrait or, more precisely, the portrait of Hasterazis, my father. Above his forehead, two tapered bone plates were turned in a half circle and gathered in a cone above the back of his head. His eyes had dark vertical pupils against bright blue. His skin was golden, and his fingers ended in sharp triangular nails. Rings of colorful crystals with heavy casing adorned the ring fingers of his two hands. That casing was strange, with numerous symmetrical ridges and gratings. It posed an interesting energy solution: symmetrical bundles. What were the capabilities of these energy capacitors-modulators? Later, I ordered from the Crystals Department a few sets of rings from this model.

  Were my father and I descendants of this…humanoid? And what role did he play in this distant civilization to give him such respect?

  I easily created a brief magic trigger spell to activate the illusion of these bone formations above my head. This image was the key to trust and supremacy.

  It would be useful to me.

  We began with a tumultuous activity of copying and assembling the two space warships. With the foreign crew’s assistance, we learned valuable information and trained our Earth crews. The crews were ready a long time before we were able to produce the first fighter, but then the work started with minimal interruptions and gave increasingly good results. We armed each fighter and cruiser with the MPD-1F, including a self-destruction device as well.

  Many of the parts of our first space cruiser proved to be impossible for us to manufacture. Others required a lack of gravity, and some details required special alloys of metals unknown in our solar system and gas mixtures for the production of these alloys for purity of the constituent components. Four cruisers were already leaving of the conveyors in the orbital stations, but they were missing important parts, and we didn’t even know their function. I intended to solve this problem in the simplest way—that is, through interplanetary trade.

  One day, I gathered the alien crew in their cruiser, and we teleported back to their military base. Our appearance caused a rather unpleasant bustle. What saved us was probably the fact that the commanders of the planetary defense systems did not want or dare to shoot a ship of their space forces. The commander of “our” cruiser joined the bustle because, for the elapsed time, the order in the base had changed. I put an end to the disputes and yelling matches by teleporting us with the commander to the chief command center of the base.

  I had forewarned the chief command center, but with our appearance on the main deck, total silence greeted us. A command then sounded, and the attending officers took up their kneeling stance. No one was hesitant.

  I had to learn what my status was with this show of respect and obedience. And my divine appearance with my protective clothing, mantle, and a shining crown with crystals may have played a not-so-small part. The aerospace base relaxed and continued its day-to-day activities, and “our” crew was taken to medical examinations and a possible quarantine.

  At my request, we began an immediate conversation about our shipping problem, which involved more officials with increasing power and responsibility. My spokesman was the commander of the space battle cruiser I had stolen, and I had instructed him to express carefully my demands and to achieve agreement at all costs. He needed to be able to negotiate the necessary machine parts if they did not give us manufacturing engineers for training Earth specialists.

  The negotiations were becoming increasingly complicated and tangled, and I regretted we had not brought Earth diplomats with us who would have achieved an agreement faster.

  On the third day, my patience ended. I stood up and said I would not wait for them to finish talking and would take what I needed in sufficient quantities when and where I found it. I took with me the four representatives of the factories for the parts I needed. Together with Commodore Kobortaros, whom I called Kobo—my negotiating officer from the cruiser—I left the room. I assured the other negotiators of our allied joint future military-economic actions and the opening of Earth diplomatic centers near their government. By the end of the long working day, my required details and spare parts had been loaded into a huge cargo spacecraft. With a few of their engineers, we teleported to Earth.

  Earth was failing behind, it was busy with excessive and costly production of combat equipment for the capabilities of an underdeveloped civilization. Simultaneously with the military equipment, the production of both transport and passenger starships increased. New knowledge and technologies boosted human entrepreneurship and expansion. Our military strength was increasing. Also, it would be hard for the Gods to destroy us when we were in hundreds of places. We began exchanging technology and scientific information with our allies from other planets to create atmosphere on planets rich in ores and crystals.

  I repeatedly returned for information from my divine captive, but he rejected me with hatred. I was curious how this creature with extraordinary abilities, which we had observed and studied with several teams of scientists and with the help of our most modern devices, would escape. We conducted special tests about the functions of some special formations in his body.

  Still, my suspicion was confirmed that this kind of God or aide of Go
ds did not perceive energies and their combinations visually but through some other perception or sense. They did not get a clear energy picture, and for this reason, the creature did not find any of the weaknesses of my energy prison.

  This observation was extremely valuable because we convinced ourselves of his way of perceiving vague energy images.

  When I decided we had established a relationship with each other, and after taking a number of precautions for my security, I went through the power shields with which I kept him imprisoned. I was dressed in a traditional Earth commando suit with built-in strips with suitable combinations of our highest-quality energy crystals. I took one of the armchairs in the living room of the improvised prison. My captive sensed me instantly, as I had expected.

  We stared at each other for about a minute until he snorted contemptuously. “Fartu!”

  I conceded his kind probably named representatives of the human race that way. In short, perhaps it was some kind of minor servant. Well, I did not mind. But his appearance had changed. He did not look at all like that blond-haired young man from the ambush.

  In front of me was a creature with my height but with a stronger, heavier body and strong, thick arms ending with a five-fingered hand equipped with long triangular nails. The bone plates on his head not only merged on the back of the head but protected his back and neck to his shoulders, giving him a threatening look. The bone plates were curved so they protectively covered the annular protrusion of the upper-back part of his skull, which I assumed to be the organ converting and controlling the energies and energy capacity of this mighty creature.

  This construction had some advantages, such as faster responses and more precise control of energy bundles compared to my body structure, but it would probably not work in the long run when using maximum amounts of energy in such proximity to the brain. He probably had a severe headache and dizziness with every bundle shot, which to me was just an unpleasant feeling, and my capacitors were bigger and more secure under both my arms and with similar bone armor.

  We studied each other for a few minutes. With him in this form, I saw him as a model of his breed with their possible improvements made by the ancient technology of Vortex. I hoped the several cameras were working and that the computers were recording what was going on.

  I was still seated quietly and assumed he would respond the same so we could have a quiet talk with invaluable study for both sides. I had identified a lot of questions, yet the most important to me was the question about the cause of our struggle to destroy each other. But with an animal growl and a series of incomprehensible words, the terrible creature jumped at me.

  He jumped from a distance of five to six meters without a running start but with a slight strain of the femoral muscles.

  The armchair broke into pieces, and the creature struck the wall while I stepped back at a short distance so he would not feel my movement. I used the chaos of the unexpected situation and struck him with a heavy blow to his back. The creature kept his balance after the strong crush against the wall, and with another heavy kick, I pushed him into the open door of his bedroom.

  I moved the other armchair opposite the door and again made myself predisposing to continue the friendly conversation.

  Almost immediately, the creature fluttered together with the door and, waving his terrible nails, jumped back at me. This time, I greeted him with bent legs and, overturning the chair, threw him upside down in a selected empty corner of the living room. He fell badly, with his head tilted at a right angle to the floor, and he lay down for a dozen seconds before he came to, which could have cost him his life in a real battle.

  I set the chair upright and sat down again with a mocking pose. I had already realized that sitting in his presence infuriated him. Why not? This gave me the opportunity to study him in direct combat.

  With an incredible twisting somersault, he attacked me for the third time. I gave him a pretty useful lesson by twisting his head through the bone growths until I felt a cracking of the vertebrae. I ended it with a spectacular direct knockout blow to his high forehead, and he fell unconscious. I roughly broke the sharp claws from his hands and legs and took them for research. I made a hole in the power shield, went out, and let him experience a terrible pain if he woke up.

  He had become tedious. He was a dumb creature with complexes—a primitive hunter.

  I wondered if I should leave him alive and have annoying trouble behind my back. I did not dare let him attack me with energy; there was a centuries-old technology behind him, and I knew I should not underestimate him. But these moments of collision were not to be missed, too. We had the unique chance to study and learn as much as we could about the many hitherto unknown abilities of hunters.

  12 New Technologies and New Weapons

  I teleported to one of the orbital Earth plants where some of our interstellar cruisers-destroyers were assembled in time to test our latest weapon, whose basic physical principles I had explained to the plant’s design bureau. I brought the command panel with me because I did not want anyone to deliver to the wrong hands the skills to manage this dangerous weapon. For a target, I had chosen a small asteroid slightly larger than a star cruiser. At a distance of five million kilometers, it was quite difficult to observe, so we had decorated it with reflectors. The numbers of the changing distance, depending on orbits of the station-plant and the target, shifted on the screen. I placed the control panel in the special socket, and the ready-to-go lights of the RDT (remote delayer of time) were lit in front of me. I entered the coordinates of the target, and the target and the sphere of temporal impact were instantly outlined on the screen. I moved it with one radius so that I placed the target on the edge of the circumscribed circle. I announced readiness for ten seconds. On the tenth second, the target dimmed its light but stayed within the observation area. With a short delay, I heard the observer report:

  “Reflectors three and four are observed.”

  The target increased its rotation and reached a higher orbit at a speed of 3.7924 km/s. The distance was rising. We calculated the location of the new target position.

  The computer was automatically targeted again, and I instantly produced a shot.

  The target was not detected in the calculated location. We searched observer positions six, seven, and eight.

  The result was as expected.

  Placing a physical object at the boundary between two temporal zones resulted in tearing the integrity of this object. After failing, I recognized the necessary extraordinary accuracy when fixing the boundary of the attacking temporal zone we created. The minimum and maximum impact distances were still unclear. We planned the next research experiments to be conducted in the asteroid belt of the solar system. We also planned to conduct field trials of the captive alien hunter’s weapon.

  I kept thinking I would soon have to pull my captive from his energy arrest and study him in a controlled environment with restricted access to energy.

  The very thought of such experiments made me bristle. It was suicide to leave such a mighty creature behind my back, especially when I needed a long absence. Someday, he would get hold of energy, and the destruction he could cause on Earth would be unimaginable.

  I was even thinking of leaving him on an asteroid from which he would be able to go anywhere, but the consequences for Earth seemed more catastrophic. For now, our space settlements were still within the boundaries of the solar system and extremely non-populous to preserve modern technological civilization.

  The Earth Armed Forces gained power and quickly absorbed the advanced technologies from the sister planet Prima Davos. Some of these technologies worked on principles that were absolutely unknown to our Earth science, and we began importing research equipment and devices along with alien teachers for our Earth universities. Our scientists particularly liked the ability to build electronic blocks resistant of high temperatures and inertial overloads.

  And most importantly, the blocks were universal and interchange
able. The same block could be profiled from its place in the electronic system from the task of execution and from the signal itself. Earth’s computers gained a completely new look. The era of miniaturization, freedom, and fantasy had come. Earth’s progress in the field of nano-technology again found its application in this field by revealing unprecedented opportunities for the development of artificial intelligence applicable in every area of life, particularly in intelligence-research activities and in particular the military field. Earth was transformed from a diligent student into a dedicated teacher in some specific areas of technology.

  Still, this creature whom I was naively about to leave behind my back was bothering me more and more. I was looking for answers to many questions but did not get them. I could not let scientists have access to him or they would be hurt. I could not examine his physiological characteristics of energy management because I was afraid to allow him access to power sources. I was afraid to incorporate in me his entire mental gram, lest I fell under his control and became obsessed with him.

  I decided this night to let him go or destroy him.

  I teleported to his dwelling. When I found nothing disturbing, I assumed the appearance of Hasterazis and went to him. The creature came in and stood by the door of his room. I pulled the chair over and sat down.

  He stayed in his place. In his own way, he was amazed or paralyzed by surprise because of my appearance.

  “I will ask you a few questions,” I said. “If I get the answers, maybe I can let you go. If not, you will have only yourself to blame. This is your last evening.”

  Silence.

  “Are you a clone?” I asked.

  No answer.

  “You have been here for a long time, and no one has spoken. I have given you the opportunity to run through the net. You’re here again. Why?”

  No answer.

  “Why have they forsaken you and have not sought after you yet? Your coming here was your personal decision?”