Earth on Target (Survival Amidst the Stars)

by Angel Bright

  “This is a difficult task,” Nolen said. “Besides, you don’t know what you are getting with mind scanning.”

  “We will apply our knowledge in this field to the maximum. All emotional areas will be extracted from the scans and stored separately. I want your corporate managers to organize the research of the alien technical, technological, and scientific knowledge. All innovations unknown to us must be studied and swiftly implemented in our arms arsenal. We have no time to waste. We will train pilots, navigators, and commanders for their star destroyers. It’s a huge job I will leave to Earth’s Army Command staff. They have experience in training specialists. We will again resort to mind uploading because of the lack of time for extensive training. We already started working on putting together parts of the bodies of the wrecked star destroyers orbiting Mars. Whatever we manage to restore will be of use for training. If nothing else, we can use it for training with real weapons, real motor and energy systems, real control rooms, and real crews.”

  “That’s on a massive scale. I hope we’ll have time.”

  “I pray for that, too.”

  “To whom?”

  “To time, to chance, to destiny. You will remain by my side.”

  “The corporation will need me more.”

  “No! I was attacked and injured in the asteroid belt by a magical weapon I did not detect. I did not feel it at the time. I was unprepared. Now we are going to brainstorm and draft a program for my practical training in detecting and blocking spells and protection from the harm of spells.”

  “Did you again return to the idea of exploring the technology of witchcraft? I am only a practitioner, not a technology research scientist.”

  “Yes, but you are the best practitioner I’ve ever met and the only one whom I trust.”

  “Hardly! I’ve heard of so many powerful practitioners who are allegedly almost equal to Gods. But, thank God, I haven’t met any of them.”

  “I need you, Nolen. I know you, and I won’t be able to do it without you.”

  “Wow, you flatter me.”

  “Please remind me how to identify spells.”

  “I remember what you have told me on this subject. Once, you were brilliant with your sharp sensitivity, and these abilities saved your life multiple times. Remember how we were putting together your broken ribs after—”

  “I’ve lost those abilities.”

  “You haven’t. You were highly alert at that time and would react to even a small air discoloration. Bring back this ability of yours to observe the change of colors around you. You know that any change in energy changes the corresponding color of the visible spectrum. It is more difficult when the energy used is from a frequency spectrum we are unable to detect. But you have told me you feel warmth or cold coming from the side of the threat.”

  “Yes. Get my quick recovery exercises ready. This is urgent! I don’t know how much time we have. Help me, Nolen.”

  “Is it that serious?”

  “More than serious. The entire solar system is counting down its final days.”

  “Call Hasterazis.”

  “Nolen, he is the one who needs action here in our solar system. The longer we attract fire against us, the more time we give him for something important somewhere, anywhere.”

  “Are you sure of that?”

  “Absolutely. This is a tactical approach. Provide more targets for the enemy and scatter its forces. This makes it easier for you. More importantly, we should do it in a precisely determined interval of time.”

  “What about…us?”

  “We must think faster than all of them. I will keep you close, and I will pull you out of the battle when it becomes…when the solar system comes to an end.”

  “The end of all our friends, partners, employees, bases, companies, inventions, and development projects. I’m staying here with them. We will defend ourselves as much as we can. My life is short, and I will live the rest of it as I choose.”

  “You can live much longer with my help. You are useful.”

  “Where? In Hasterazis’s Palace? There, I wasn’t sure if I was going to survive even for five more minutes after those monsters. I found a home here, as well as friends, and we are of the same race, too.”

  “What kind of monsters have you been living among?”

  “The ones I trained. You were one of them. Remember how I barely survived each encounter with you? They stitched me multiple times after a confrontation with you; with the others, it was even worse. Very few among them had brains. So, I did my best to survive, but I had to pass certain programs and trainings with the monsters that Hasterazis was creating. They replaced the likes of me every three to four days—in pieces.”

  “How many of them have you trained?”

  “Of whom?”

  “Of the monsters.”

  “Nine. I was short of rounding the number to ten.”

  “And how many more while training me?”

  “Three. You were the only one left at the end.”

  “What about the others?”

  “You killed them. Don’t you remember the last one in the mud of the swamp?”

  “So, all of us were created for the same purpose. May the strongest survive!”

  “That’s you. But you were also ruthless and much more dangerous.”

  “I spared you. I was fond of you.”

  “Yes, because I lasted longer.”

  “You were one of them. I was trying to survive, too.”

  “Yes, but there is a big difference between you and me.”

  “How was I to tell you apart?”

  “You inherited your gifts from your family.”

  “Nature gifted you. How did you come across Hasterazis?”

  “I wanted to be the strongest. It is a tradition with warlocks and mages, after confrontation, that the defeated becomes property of the stronger. If their powers are equal, they would cripple each other or, worse, both die. Hasterazis would collect us—the dying—treat us, and throw us to you as sparring partners.”

  “So, I am a ‘project,’ too, and he called me his ‘son.’”

  “His son! He has many. He constantly experiments, and the winner goes to a solar system chosen by Hasterazis. This is a tactical approach, as you said.”

  “Why did he send you with me?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps the rest of the mages don’t die, too. Instead, they send them with some of the winners—the survivors among you, the crowned ones.”

  “How many mages do you know before you?”

  “We do not stay in contact with each other. We don’t trust each other.”

  “Hmm, what about you and me? Do we trust each other? Wait, you will lie to me, no matter what you say. It is a pity. I had a friend, I believed, but I lost him. Go away.”

  “I am your friend.”

  “Go away! You are my employee.”

  “Here, with me, I brought one of the enemies. He wants to meet with you. He said to tell you that he is а first.”

  “Are you crazy? You signed his death sentence by bringing him here. He can’t tell me anything that I don’t already know. You brought him to the moon—to one of our main manufacturing centers. I will throw both of you into the sun.”

  “You don’t think that the moon is beyond suspicion, do you? The moon will be pulverized first.”

  “With your help.”

  “No. Talk to the first.”

  “No.”

  “You own his past, but you don’t own his thoughts and his future, which hasn’t happened yet. He wants to tell you something in his words, something important to him and to Earth.”

  “OK. Keep doing what you are doing at the corporation. Go!”

  Nolen turned around and left the room, yet another disappointment. At least he was good at managing military production. Now it became clear to me why my progress in learning magic skills stalled a long time ago.

  Our mage teachers barely managed to overpower us, so they stopped our training to
survive. Hasterazis screwed this one up.

  Magic. I knew some basics. Under stress, I was able to activate quite powerful spells, but I had postponed the theory and technology or diversification of the desired results to the limits of the possible experimentation. They were merely intentions for a distant, less precarious future when I would have more time. I always knew Nolen was nearby when I needed him, but I did not expect him to resist sharing part of his knowledge. Now I realized the secret knowledge of the higher mages determined whether they ruled or became slaves. It was their most valued possession; even their life was worth nothing in comparison. And I expected to have it for free! I wasn’t aware of what I was asking for, but it was very hard to say no to a God—that is, unless you were so brave and powerful that you could defend yourself against a God’s wrath. Nolen, Nolen…I couldn’t believe my faith in him was fading. My only “reliable” support fell through.

  I still had the foundation, though.

  I had practiced magic, and I knew some spells, effective gestures, and a series of moves of parts of the body that activated magical accumulation of energy. I had searched for meaning in these combinations before, but nothing could be done without chaos. The strange achievements of alchemists, who had also considerably advanced in witchcraft, reduced our well-constructed materialistic theories about the world to a special case.

  There was a multitude of parallel universes around or near us, but if we ran into another parallel reality, our materialistic minds would hardly be able to process the impossible events happening before our eyes. Everyone possessing innate magical abilities had tried to avoid guessing but instead create a system of designing magical events or material whims. It was a universal key of sorts that would bring the world to its knees.

  What happened after that was a sort of a cause-and-effect sequence. Every creative researcher took detailed notes of experiments, which in most cases led to failure and crippling. These notes, however, were not destroyed but rather recorded with the same diligence as the successful combinations, because they represented a passive protection for the true sequence.

  Only adventurers relying on luck would read these books and would selectively test a witchcraft procedure with a minimal chance of survival. Incomplete rituals would not activate one of the procedures, so the risk would always be at 100 percent.

  And yet…

  Despite that, there were legendary mages and warlocks who created compositions with tremendous power, and legends eternalized their names. But where were they now? They were immortal, weren’t they? They should have had full power over our planet and solar system. So far, I had met one of them: Thornkeract. He had never been overpowered.

  He remained an enigma.

  Could it be that I challenged anyone’s power?

  Or perhaps they were the Gods?

  I started training in the creation of different kinds of magical protective force fields. The lesson I had learned from my encounter with Thornkeract laid the foundation of my new understanding of preliminary magical compositions. Faced with him, the Great Mage, I couldn’t think of any of the fields I had already practiced. I had the chance to attack him, but I didn’t.

  The effect of a sudden attack was confusion and paralysis.

  Still, I spent most of my time practicing different protective force fields. I knew them best, and I was fast and perfect. I practiced them by quickly replacing one with another or transitioning from one to another. I transferred them over an object and destroyed them with my Scorpions. I quickly got tired of them. The problem was that I was unable to observe the change of color in the surrounding environment while creating the protective force fields. I was frustrated. Suddenly, I had a brain wave. I tried to reject the thought, but the damned thing stuck in my mind like a fish bone in a throat.

  When you learned to use certain techniques at a decent level, you stopped developing. You repeated and repeated what you had learned, just as I was doing. That was it.

  That was surely what to do.

  What had I done so far?

  I created protective energy force fields and stacked up three to five protective spheres, one into the other, with fine gaps between them and negative temporal phase shifts to minimize interaction between them.

  While developing this method, I thought of ways to act in case an enemy were to create such a field. If this happened, we would circle around each other, keeping our eyes fixed on one another, like two elusive shadows. Hmm.

  I had to continue working on the development of certain ideas I had postponed for times with less urgent problems.

  I had to do it.

  Now!

  Tomorrow, I would be swamped with other pressing issues, as usual. The last and most immediate magical attack was a warning to me, which I survived. I survived because the direct attack was uncoordinated and poorly conducted. My major mistake was that I was a stationary target.

  A perfect target.

  A smug and stunned target.

  An attack with an extremely weak magic tool was able to reach me. This was the other reason why I didn’t feel it, because I did not feel threatened by a minimal energy charge. Numerous other targets diverted my attention.

  This tactical idea was also part of my arsenal. I shouldn’t have ignored it. I had used it very skillfully along with a series of illusions as a defense or attack strategy for covering the real destructive strikes. And yet, they caught me off guard. This meant they knew they were going to succeed. They must have done it before, but why would they so guilelessly fall into my hands?

  I sat for hours considering different training schemes, favorable and unfavorable conditions, radical moves, destructive moderate spells, and extremely powerful spells. But most importantly, I practiced sharp, instinctive observation.

  I had learned a lot and had been using it for a long time with a decisive success. I was not helpless at all, but the unclear points in certain spell construction techniques bothered me. Perhaps for every magical act, there was a conceivably more concise and effective solution. For example, to collapse large earth layers, I had to look for faults with a lot of tension stress. I could amplify the tension by triggering underground land slips and rubbing of plates but not in areas of my choosing. I could trigger the same effect wherever I chose by means of accumulated static electricity, but the process was slow and therefore impracticable for military purposes.

  Thornkeract, however, managed to do it on unfamiliar terrain and without preparation.

  There was a third technique. I had the idea and part of the technique, but I put off its further development for less stressful times, and they never came. The third technique was faster.

  Several other types of large-scale spells could be constructed using multiple techniques, too. This led me to believe variety was the rule; different methods would produce the same result at different speeds and loss of energy. This process was interesting and promising. One could conceivably expect serious capabilities.

  Once this senseless war was over, I would begin research and development.

  Somebody knocked on the door.

  I answered and saw a policeman from my personal security squad.

  “Mr. Nolen sent you an extraterrestrial brought here from Mars,” he said. “What would you like us to do with him? Shall I bring him here? He is being held in one of our hotel rooms, since we don’t have holding cells on the moon.”

  19 Battle for the Planet Prima Davos

  “Waste of time,” I thought. They said Nolen insisted. Let’s hear him.

  “Bring him here!” I said.

  Several minutes later, they brought the first in command into the room.

  He had a huge short-legged torso, a thick neck as if it were made of separate twisted pipes, and a triangular muscle on the back of the neck. His solid head narrowed toward the crown, with a high forehead transitioning into a bone cone. It was solid natural protection, but the weight of the head would impede rapid response with the inertia of its excessive mass. Big
gray eyes without eyebrows, a hooked nose, and proportionate mouth greeted me.

  I waved at the security guards to free his hands but did not invite him to sit down. I released two of the guards.

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  There followed a series of rattling and popping base sounds.

  I understood the phrase he uttered; he was asking for an interpreter. OK. We had to wait for about ten minutes while studying each other.

  He was not upset with my sitting in his royal presence. The interpreter arrived, and I began the questioning.

  “What is the reason for your eagerness to meet with me?” I asked. “We have everything we could possibly get from you. What more can you offer us?” I stared him down, and he seemed to shrink before my eyes.

  “We were forced to come to your system. There is nothing for us here. It wasn’t worth it for the great power we are to come here to threaten to destroy you. We put off the inevitable attack under various pretexts with the hope that the parties would come to some sort of an agreement. There was an overlord in each of the star cruisers whose task was to demonstrate a show of power by killing any commander who exhibited signs of hesitation or disobedience. And then you defeated us. It was a complete surprise, considering your backward tiny star system. I witnessed the panic of the hated overlord when our cruiser split, despite its protective force fields, and I was happy there was someone who could crush them. I prayed for you! I hope you are the ones whose coming was eagerly awaited and dreamed of by the entire population of our planets.”