Earth on Target (Survival Amidst the Stars)

by Angel Bright

  17 Rhem the Earthman

  (Narrated by Rhem)

  This time, we received a postponement. I didn’t believe we could succeed next time in hitting a group of ships. Who knew how much extra time we would have. Our weakness was that we had an address.

  We were stuck here.

  Earth civilization was tied to the solar system, and I was a part of that civilization. Again, we had to fight by using the element of surprise. The initiative was on the side of those who did not hesitate to attack us. At some point, some invader would succeed.

  Surprise was an important advantage for them. They hadn’t used it fully, but with time they would become more skillful.

  We had enough living captives, but I didn’t expect them to know much. Still, I couldn’t miss my chance.

  I was landing for the second time on the Martian surface. A very dynamic man was waiting for me with a wreck of an electric vehicle with chipped paint scraped by the turbulent Martian winds. He took my bags and offered me the only second seat next to his. The cab’s back was full of boxes and spherical and cylindrical containers, perhaps gas and liquid tanks. We were literally flying in some direction with high speed and long jumps. This loony reassured me there was no danger, because on Mars the car was not very heavy, and there was no need for roads. And the camp was nearby. It was about half an hour away; for him, however, it was several minutes shorter, and I was going to find out why when we jumped the edge.

  To avoid jolting, I lifted my body a few centimeters above the seat, but my driver immediately noticed it.

  “You are cunning. Others do it, too, but they lose the pleasure of the road and the speed!”

  “And how do they do it?”

  “Inflate your suit and hang above. He-he!”

  “Do you often transport people to the spaceport?”

  “No. Oh, who will come? Sometimes a man with glasses comes—some kind of an inspector who collects our complaints and goes away. We alternate to deliver something, some apparatus, some machine, empty containers, and everything that can be filled with liquids and gases.”

  “Foods, breathing gases, water—don’t you receive supplies of that?”

  “We used to, but now we are producing them, and this was a welcome sight for the city. And they need it, too.”

  “How do you produce them yourself?”

  “We dig ice. We ordered some tiny stations—blocks—and developed technologies, and the Tanufs joined.”

  “What are these Tanufs?”

  “Well, they are the ones who were brought from the sky. They have a lot of engineers and produce machines all the time. It is easier to live now. We sell something—food, machines. We do not hinder anyone, and the authorities do not intervene. The only thing we don’t sell is weapons. This is forbidden.”

  “Do you have weapons?”

  “How do you control four hundred fifty aliens and fifty-seven of us?”

  “So, you are walking around the camp with weapons, and those who are not lazy shoot?”

  “Well, there is an agreement.”

  “How and on what did you agree?”

  “Whoever injures or kills someone with a weapon, the judges do the same to him.”

  “Do you have judges?”

  “We have, and every month they change, one of us and one of them. We are fewer, and therefore we serve as judges more often. Nasty job!”

  “Interesting. And how do you get along with these…Tanufs?”

  “It was difficult at first, but we both learned a bit, and now we speak both languages—the official languages, I mean. And they, like us, have differences according to origin.”

  “I think you passed by the base camp.”

  “Ha! Who lives there? Everyone is below.”

  “Below? Where is this below?”

  “Well, we dig downward, don’t we? It is getting wider. We closed the entrance so we would not have to wear space suits.”

  “Are you kidding? How do you breathe together?”

  “We produced a mixture that’s tolerable for us and for them. One gets used to it. This is the entrance. I will show you. You press this button and enter the wardrobe. Doors are automatic. Go straight, and ask for the king. I have to unload and then come back with the Big.”

  “Big what? And who is the king?”

  “The Big is a truck with a wagon. The king is the camp manager. Go from here and forward all the way.”

  In the corridor, I smelled different, foreign scents. I found the king. He was a small, worried man sitting at a table right in the small plaza square, constantly calculating something and giving directions to invisible performers in a strange language. Tanufian! He pointed me to a chair and finished his orders.

  “You are?” he asked me.

  “Inspector.”

  “Aha! And what have we done wrongly?”

  “Nothing. I want a few meetings with…some of the Tanufs.”

  “Give me a list, and I will call them. They are nearby.”

  I passed a short list to the screen in front of his eyes. He stared, surprised.

  “You click your fingers, and it turns on? Wow! Give me one, and you won’t regret it! Anyway, we’re a little behind here. The first on the list is gone. A gallery collapsed and buried him. I’ll call the second one.”

  The interlocutors I chose were ordered according to rank. The first one was a commanding officer of a group of nine-star destroyers. The second was the chief engineer of a trio of combat machines.

  I waited for ten minutes. I looked at the small plaza square; it resembled one from a mid-western town, with three store facades, terraced apartments, and potted flowers. Was that a holographic blue sky with floating clouds? Cozy!

  “Where do the rest live?” I asked.

  “We have three more ready halls and will soon have another one. We have a place for guests. Will you stay?”

  “I would like to, but I have obligations. Is the one who is coming the second in command?”

  “Yes. A decent man, a technician. He’s still fiddling with something.”

  “Give us a room so that we will not be in front of everybody’s eyes.”

  “OK. My office, behind me, is empty.”

  The one who came was a tall creature dressed in his ship’s uniform. From a distance, he looked like a human. Upon closer inspection, his face was apparently made up of different parts constantly on the move. However, his reptilian origin was evident.

  “Hello,” he said. “They invited me to a conversation with an Earth inspector.” His voice was low and carefully emphasized on drawing words.

  “Hello, Second,” I said as I motioned to the office. We headed there. “You are second in rank in the group gathered in this camp?”

  “Chief engineer of the class B maintenance-and-repair group.”

  “Do you have a family?”

  “I had, but I am over fifty cycles, and I do not need a family.”

  “Do you have relatives? Do you want to go back to your planet?”

  “For many cycles now, I have been dispatched to the star fleet and lived only in military bases. I do not keep in touch with my family.”

  “Why are you in the solar system with warships and military forces?”

  “That’s what the overlord ordered.”

  “Who is he? Have you seen him?”

  “No one’s seen him. He appears.”

  “Before whom?”

  “Before those who ascend.”

  “How do they ascend?”

  “They enter into the frame, and the overlord takes them.”

  “What is the frame?”

  “The venue of contact with the overlord.”

  “Is this place the only one?”

  “No, it is in many places.”

  “All right. Why did he send you here? Tasks?”

  “We get our tasks when we are where we need to act.”

  “You were here precisely when you were about to act?”

  “Yes, but only th
e commander knows the tasks.”

  “Well, starship commanders need to know the tasks if the ship is to move. No one goes blind.”

  “The commander is in the helm and does not get out of there.”

  “What is the helm?”

  “A dark room with a chair and a metal helmet for the head. Once the commander enters it, he does not go out, and we cannot wake him up. Everybody gets a command in their head. And it works. If he delays, he disappears, and another appears.”

  “Tell these lies to somebody else. You do not remember where you came from, your family does not matter to you, but you consciously hide your star system and your native planet. You do not realize who you are talking to and how much you still have to live for. You lie about everything, even about your task of killing, burning planets and colonies, and sterilizing our star system. We let you live and let you get to know the people you wanted to kill. And you took them as fools. I have a list of the machines you are manufacturing. All are Earth constructions. Nothing was learned from you, even though you work with materials from your warships. You have accumulated a military arsenal and are still playing soldiers. This ends now! How will you erase your memories, your knowledge of your devices and technology, and where you came from? With what? Who and where is your overlord or overlords? You hid the first in command under the collapse, but the previous collapse was real on your navigator. We do not need you. From your heads we will retrieve the information we need. What would you prefer, from your living or dead heads?”

  I was getting increasingly angry because of the lost precious time.

  I continued angrily. “Do you think you’re going to die like a hero? You are deeply wrong. You will die within an hour, and to your compatriots we will say that you have spilled all the beans without any threats!”

  I waved and paralyzed him.

  I teleported the two of us to the Moon Scientific Research Center, where I handed the second in command to mentalist scientists for full mental copying. This extraterrestrial knew a lot about the techniques and technologies of their rapacious planet, as well as the location of their star system and the coordinates of their military bases. He knew which planets they had invaded and burned. He knew which and how many civilizations they had destroyed. There we would look for remnants of a survived life, to which we would give a new impetus to recovery.

  We would mental copy all the technical knowledge and skills of the second in command to selected volunteer scientists from our technical specialties.

  “What about the first in command?” I asked myself.

  They have already discovered him. He would teach our strike groups about storming their star warships and the science of piloting them. In addition to him, we had enough spare alien specialists in the two prisoner camps on Mars. We expected destroyers to come from their planets because I was sure they had established a relationship with their own people and hoped for a rescue mission that would be devastating to the survivor captives. After all, this same knowledge had become very dangerous to the repulsed aggressors.

  They were preparing.

  We were also preparing.

  Soon, we would have a new clash with much stronger opponents, but we would know more about them, their weak spots, and their weapons. There would be surprises as well, for sure, on both sides. For our side, I had already given instructions on what to build, how to build it, where to place our surprises, and how to activate them.

  I had underestimated important things, such as magical protection and how to active significant magical actions for attack. I needed the teacher, Nolen.

  18 Spell-Casting Technology

  I had given up on using powerful spells for attack and defense. I had innate skills for those, and I did some of the spells instinctively and was trained to do others. The effects of powerful spells frightened me. Though effective, they were also harmful to the ones practicing them. Once, Nolen took me to an annual gathering of warlocks and mages where all the practitioners were disfigured and crippled.

  Nolen wanted me to see what happened when a warlock unleashed a spell beyond their power. Nobody knew the extent of his own power, but if you experimented beyond your limit, you didn’t come back the same. Everybody pushed against the boundary at least once while practicing this macabre science. Magic made daily life, entertainment, and even wrongdoing easier. Well-crafted magic sometimes caused disasters, floods, earthquakes, ruptures, and shifts of the earth’s surface, but such things were rare, for not everybody had such substantial skills and knowledge.

  Many safety procedures had been developed for dealing with great power. The principal research in the field began in ancient times. Hundreds of years of experiments fringed on insanity enriched this science, and nameless practitioners created their own manuals with descriptions of dangerous experiments, consequences, and ways of preventing or minimizing damage.

  In the following millennia, a real hunt for these precious collections erupted, along with many falsified experiments and ways to survive. Misinformation spread like wildfire; soon, universal disbelief set in, along with a deep fear of the ancient grimoires. A natural stratification of practitioners based on their abilities, desire to take risks, and survival skills took hold. Naturally, specialists able to treat warlocks and mages came into being, but the only goal for most of them was to accumulate experience in treatment and self-treatment through experiments on injured colleagues. Higher mages retained this knowledge and became famous for their skills; their legendary names and nicknames exposed them to ferocious hunting and prosecution.

  Such knowledge was not to be overlooked; the talent for magic was innate and accessible only to the gifted and was uniquely tempting with its power. The safest practice of the art was in soothsaying and predicting the future, though one might have argued that these skills did not allow a mage to realize their full potential.

  Thus, it was true that the talent of the weakest mages, or those unaware of their powers, was in glimpsing through space and time. The dynamic expression of this talent, when the practitioner became aware of it, was an ability to physically teleport himself between locations or jump into a different historic timeline. Some had been so gifted to be able to teleport not only themselves but also their immediate surroundings. I had come across descriptions in the ancient texts of pockets of time where life continued in an isolated part of Earth’s surface, while the mage himself, who ran out of power or lacked the knowledge to control his creation, lost his mind.

  Nolen and I were probably trained in such a pocket, where numerous test areas with different environments complete with genuine flora and fauna were intentionally separated and specialized for training purposes.

  I practiced some of these primal abilities, such as teleportation, levitation over gravity wells, and telekinesis of heavy objects. All the while, I believed my data were being recorded in Vigor’s hard drives so that I could be reproduced. I also had my doubts. Why hadn’t my father, Hasterazis, reproduced himself? What if I were a copy—a Hasterazis clone—tasked with providing symbolic security to this distant and unprotected part of our spiral arm of the galaxy?

  My refusal to use spells would definitely subject me to deadly surprises from this perfidious area. Their spells nearly killed me. Had there been one more assailant among them, I would have been killed. Why didn’t I sense the coming of the spell before the hunters’ attack?

  I had bought in to the common misconception that technology superseded spells. Spells still had their place in the art of war. They could be used alongside specialized technology and weapons or even in the absence of such. And the effects of spells could linger for centuries until a natural disaster shifted the energies. I lagged behind in learning these details, and coming up to speed was going to be difficult.

  Almost all mages and warlocks used spells as in their complete, ready-to-use form. They memorized what somebody had discovered before them, a string of spells, as well as specific movements, primarily of the arms and particularly of the eye
s. The mage directed the action with his eyes; they were the channel through which he concentrated energy. A ray directed by a fixed stare could reach the horizon, and a wandering gaze resulted in a wide-area impact with a maximum distance of about three to four miles. Thousands of combinations were built with the knowledge gleaned from ancient magic practice. Some were light and treacherous; others were strong and brutal. The latter I feared the most. Brutality ran like a battering ram through everything in its wake. There was no rhyme or reason in it, only energy unleashed in a fit of untampered rage.

  And now it was time for me to experience it, too.

  Soon, Nolen was with me.

  “I bet I know why you called me,” he said. “I have already set things in motion. Soon, our corporation’s branches operating on Mars will be three instead of two.”

  “You guessed wrong.”

  “Ha! Then you must just miss my wrinkly mug. By the way, you look great! You seem to have stayed the same, all while I have been growing old.”

  “You don’t look too bad yourself. You have become such an important businessman that I couldn’t help but welcome you at the door of my office on the Moon City, out of respect.”

  “So, did you summon me for something serious or just for chitchat? I prefer the latter.”

  The attack on the Earth Defense followed an offensive reconnaissance by a group of battleships on the asteroid belt sector because they knew I was there or because they considered it a forward defense installation with pushed-forward observation points. They literally pulverized all suspicious pieces of rock. We destroyed the battleships that attacked our forward observation posts, but they still had the joint forces gathered, ready to attack Earth. According to our estimates, those forces were very powerful, and the damage from an attack would have definitely destroyed our planet. Then, I demolished their ships. Only four destroyers escaped. Again, we were able to postpone their next attack for days or perhaps years, but we knew it was going to be an obliterating one and that we wouldn’t stand a chance. Their final attack would be better prepared. They would use new technologies and new weapons because they knew we were aware of the locations of their planets and military bases from the captured specialists. They would hurry, knowing their technological know-how, piloting and navigation skills, and detailed information about their ships were at our disposal. We had to use everything from their mind scans. I had already sent hundreds of Earth volunteers to undergo physicals for mind scanning and imprinting of the knowledge from the captured specialists.