by Saxon Andrew
Poul and Kam rose and rushed up to the platform and began lifting the huge bags. On the ninth bag Poul lifted he grunted slightly. The Traugh waited until he placed it on the conveyer belt and then slammed his claws into Poul’s chest ripping his heart apart. Kam was shocked and too stunned to move. “If you don’t want to die like this weakling, you will finish unloading the bags!”
Kam forced himself to complete the job and the Traugh looked at him as he closed the huge doors. “Clean this mess up before you leave and if you send another weakling, I will kill both of you!” The Traugh wiped his claws on Poul’s shirt and laughed as it walked away. Kam went to his knees beside his father and wanted to scream his anguish but forced himself to silence. He lifted his father’s lifeless body and carried it to the hauler. He placed it in the back and used his shirt to clean up the blood on the platform.
He mounted the hauler and turned away from the giant warehouse. He looked up and saw a Traugh warship moving toward the spaceport. He saw every circuit, every weapon and every system on that ship and vowed to one day avenge his father. He didn’t know how he would be able to do it but one day, he would be given the opportunity and he would take it. He was seventeen years old and now he was alone.
• • •
Twenty-year-old Kam unloaded the hauler and knew that soon he would be forced by the community to choose a mate. He had no desire to have a mate and felt his soul was at its breaking point. The Traugh watched him until the last bag was placed on the conveyer belt and them said, “Pick up this bag and put it on my hauler.” Kam moved forward and saw a large bag just inside the open doors. He grabbed it and grunted as he picked it up. He expected to feel the Traugh’s claws but it laughed, “I’m surprised you could lift it. You will come with me.” Kam put the heavy bag on the back of the Traugh’s hauler and climbed on. The Traugh appeared to be in good spirits, which was highly unusual for them. The Traugh drove the hauler to the spaceport and parked it outside a gleaming new warship.
The smiling Traugh stepped out of the hauler at the open port and walked up to a Traugh holding a board with a document on it. “Do you have the final payment?”
“I do.” The Traugh with the board waited and the other began pulling items out of the bag. Ten silver colored bars of metal were placed on the ground and the Traugh said, “I believe that completes our business.”
“You’ll be proud of the vessel you’ve purchased. Now you’ll need to hire a crew to fly it and you’re on your way to wealth and success.”
The Traugh smiled and reached for the bag. He attempted to lift it and grunted. He looked at Kam and said, “Lift this and follow me.” Kam lifted the bag easily and now knew that he was stronger than the Traugh. The Traugh led him through the huge ship and Kam looked at the operation center at the front of the ship. He focused on a circuit and smiled. The intruder lasers were not activated. He followed the Traugh to what had to be its personal quarters and the Traugh bent down to open a large metal door on a thick metal box. It turned a wheel with numbers on the front and smiled as it swung open. Kam lifted the heavy bag and swung it over his shoulder and smashed it down on the Traugh’s head. Its head splattered and the dead body fell to the floor. His father’s murderer was dead.
He walked out of the room and ran toward the operations center. He pushed a button and the huge port swung close. He stared at the panel and sat down in the chair in front of it. He closed his eyes and began pressing more buttons and pushing switches as the giant ship began to come to life. Kam looked at the stardrive panel and saw the numbers in display. He memorized them and locked them in his memory. He cleared the panel and pressed the button that changed the system to manual.
The Traugh that had sold the ship thought it was unusual that the owner would take the ship out alone but he knew he had to be excited about his purchase. He was so used to just not noticing the Kindred around him that he didn’t even think about one going on board with the owner. He bagged the silver bars and boarded his hauler. He pulled away as the giant ship rose above the ground and lifted into the red sky. It was three weeks later that the Traugh leaders determined that the new owner was not in control of his ship. He had not communicated with his commander and that was never done. By that time, there was nothing they could do to find it. They did learn from the ship’s seller that he thought a Kindred might have gone on board with the purchaser. Ships were dispatched to find it.
Chapter Two
Kam flew the giant grey warship out of the star system where his home planet was located and didn’t stop until he was far outside the area designated in the ship’s database as Traugh controlled. He closed his eyes and looked at the ship’s internal diagrams and memorized it. He went to the ship’s feed room and found the stores of food put in huge containers. He opened one and took out enough food for a meal. He sat down at a table and began eating while thinking about what to do next. The ship could be operated and flown by just one being. However, that was not true for the weapons. The ship needed a crew to operate them. He looked at the reactors and went into the database and found how they operated. He realized that both of the reactors only had a minimal load of fuel. He closed his eyes and read for more than two hours.
He opened his eyes and went back to the dead Traugh’s quarters and put the dead body into the refuse tubes. He shoved the body into the tube and pressed the orange button on the wall. There was a brief sound as the outer cover on the tube opened and the body was ejected into space with the tube’s decompression. He lifted the bag and looked inside. He smiled and hoisted the bag over his shoulder. He carried it to the engine room and closed his eyes for a moment. He opened them and went to the first reactor and began pressing a series of buttons on a raised panel in front of the reactor. He saw the display had a red line that extended a quarter of the way across the crystal display; it started reducing. The line changed to light blue after a few minutes. He went to a locker located against the wall and removed a heavy suit that was fitted with a helmet. It was hard getting his long frame inside the suit but he managed with only slight discomfort from having to bend in the middle. The Traugh were just too short.
He went to the reactor, pressed a blue colored button, and saw a tray emerge from inside the reactor. He lifted ten silver bars out of the bag and put them on the tray. He pressed the blue button again and the tray slid into the reactor. He pressed the activate buttons again and the red line extended across the entire face of the display. He lifted the bag and went to the other reactor. Within twenty minutes, it was operating at full power.
He went to the operation’s center and pulled up a list of supplies on the ship. He went through the database and found what he needed. He walked to the storage area inside the huge landing bay and began removing items from storage. He dragged more than two hundred feet of electrical conduit to the front disintegrator room and went back and removed a panel from another storage room. He went to the operations center and took tools out of a wall locker. He spent the next two days attaching the new control panel to the end of the existing panel.
He took a break and went to another room and sprawled out on a bed. There was so much he needed to do. He tried to sleep and felt his hatred of the Traugh. He thought about how he could really hurt them and then sleep took him.
• • •
He woke up and took a deep breath. He knew his task was going to take a lot of time and he forced himself to avoid giving up on it. He went back to the landing bay and brought three crystal displays with him back to the control room. It took more than four months to wire them into the new panel. He spent the time soldering the connections learning how to send instructions to the computer. By the time he completed installing the displays, he knew the code to bypass the computer’s safeguards and enter the codes he needed. Then he began the really difficult job. He went to the first disintegrator and removed the top of the weapon’s control panel. He took the end of one of the electrical conduits and began soldering it into the weapon’s control panel. I
t took two months to wire each disintegrator to the new panel he installed. He tested the first one and found that the computer would now direct it to any target the ship’s sensors placed the new display’s crosshairs on.
It took another five months to work out the bugs in the aiming circuits. Most of the time was spent pulling the conduit from the weapon’s room to the operations center. He didn’t know how he did it but he knew every wire in the huge bundle and where it was connected to the disintegrators. He ran the conduits against the wall under the main control panel and bolted them down to the floor. He knew if the ship was rocked hard, those conduits could be thrown against each other and short out. Throughout the process, Kam saw the Traugh were very inefficient in their designs. There was so much wasted space and poorly transferred energy. The communication lines were slow. Even the targeting system for the weapons was poor at best. The only thing that made them dangerous was the huge beam they fired. It was a dreadful waste of energy. He wondered why they didn’t use the computers to control the disintegrators but decided that would eliminate jobs for poor Traugh to crew their ships. Their system allowed Traugh that were not wealthy to work their way up through the ranks and one day own their own ships.
• • •
Finally, he was done. The last item he modified was the ship’s force field. He changed the conduits to the emitters to a higher gauge of wire and raised the power. He looked at the readout and determined that the disintegrators used by the Traugh would not penetrate it.
Maybe ten or more hitting simultaneously might but that was highly unlikely if the ship were being flown evasively. He had spent eighteen months working on the huge warship and learning how to fly it; it was time he decided what to do with it. He went to sleep and the answer came to him in a dream.
He put the helmet on that he had reconfigured its micro-circuit boards and felt the tingling feeling in his brain as the helmet locked in on the part of his brain that controlled his thinking processes. He waited for five minutes as the connections were established to the computer and then he thought, “Show me on the monitor all the planets ruled by the Traugh.” The monitor illuminated and he saw a wide swath of red blinking lights across the image of the galaxy appear on the monitor. “Show me the planets controlled two hundred years ago.” The image changed and he saw the lights diminish in number and move around the edge of the giant black hole at the center of the galaxy. “Project the path of the Traugh advance over the next three hundred years.” He heard in his mind as the typed words appeared on the monitor, “That is unknown due to not knowing how many intelligent species lie on the line of their advance.”
He smiled. Putting the computer’s output to a voice circuit in the helmet made this so much easier than having to look at the monitor to read the raw data. “Assume the same number of their previous advances.” The image on the monitor changed and he saw the line was much further ahead of the previous advances. He stared at the image and thought, “What are the coordinates fifty years in front of the center of the line on the monitor?” He looked at the stardrive display and saw the number appear. He pressed the button next to the numbers and he saw space outside the ship moving toward him at an incredible speed. Stars became long streaks of light as he passed them and in thirty minutes the ship slowed and came to a stop. He gazed out at the millions of stars in the viewport and said, “How do you detect planets with intelligent life?”
“My sensors search for electronic emissions traveling through space.”
“Do you detect any now?”
“There are emissions present.”
“Show me the path they are coming from on the current map.” Kam stared at the monitor and saw a bright red line extending into the distance to the left side of the ship. He turned the ship until the bow was pointed along the line on the map and activated the stardrive. He flew the ship manually and six hundred light years later, he found a planet with intelligent life. It was the third planet from the central star and had a large moon circling it. He left the force field active and moved the ship three thousand miles above the planet. He removed the helmet and heard the billions of thoughts of the beings on the planet’s surface.
He focused on them and began searching for one of the beings that was discussing the history of the planet. It took an hour but he found six that were…teaching? He settled back in his chair and closed his eyes as he listened to the…professors? He remained with his eyes closed for nine hours as he moved from one teacher to another as they stopped teaching. He only stopped to eat and then went back to listening to the teachers. He continued this for a month.
Kam shook his head and wondered if he had made a mistake coming to this planet. This species actually killed each other, sometimes in numbers that were hard to fathom. Why would they do that? The answer had to lie in their past. He began searching and after two days he found a teacher at something called the University of Florida that specialized in the earliest known members of the planet’s species. He listened to the professor and began to understand.
• • •
“Dr. Robinson, are you trying to tell us that man’s violent behavior is a learned behavior?”
Dr. Robinson looked at the graduate student and smiled, “There is a long argument about what drives human behavior, environment or genetics. The answer is debated by most academics and there are equal numbers on each side of the argument. However, one must understand the environment our ancient ancestors lived in to truly understand their behavior.”
“But man is still incredibly violent in a completely different modern world.”
“Learned survival behaviors are extremely difficult to erase from any species. Ancient man lived in a world surrounded by predators that make today’s apex predators pale in comparison. Sabretooth tigers would make the current lions and tigers look tame. The Mammoths make the African Elephant look small in comparison. Prime living spaces, such as large caves located above the land below them, were few and far between. The struggle to survive was determined by skills that developed killing strategies that provided the small groups of early humans their food and shelter. The most dangerous predators were other humans that sought to take their living space. Even today, most of the wars fought in modern times have been due to humans attempting to control lands considered better than their own. Eventually, humans banded into nations and survival became a fight to gather the necessary items that drove their economies in this modern world.
“Early humans had to fight each other to survive and those behaviors have not disappeared. Today’s nations are simply much larger tribes fighting to ensure their survival.”
“When does it end, Professor?”
“It doesn’t.”
A young female raised her hand and Robinson pointed at her, “Are you saying that there are no circumstances that would cause humans to quit killing each other?”
Robinson smiled and looked around the class, “I suppose that if all mankind were confronted with a common danger, there would be a possibility of its happening until that danger was met.”
“You’re talking about alien invasion.”
“Or a disease that threatened to kill everyone on the planet. If there were a way to remove all weapons of war and ensure they weren’t rebuilt, man might learn to live together in peace but that is also doubtful. If modern weapons are eliminated, man knows how to make bows and arrows along with long knives. But these are things that are conjecture and will not happen. We must find ways to minimize the danger we represent to each other and resist using our most powerful weapons in future conflicts. If that happens, humanity will cease to exist and the planet will be ruled by insects until one of them evolves enough to be the prominent life form. Humanity’s most dangerous enemy is itself.”
• • •
Kam leaned back in his chair and thought about the history of this species he had listened to and played it against what the teacher was saying. Against the backdrop of the dangerous environment this species had evolved unde
r, there was an obvious causal connection. He turned his attention to the history of the warriors on the planet and began studying the humans that controlled them during their wars. He didn’t like what he saw. He looked at the history of the giant wars that were fought during modern times and two things became abundantly clear. A common threat united humans like nothing else could and when they fought; they were willing to die for what they were fighting for. Those traits were invaluable if they had to face a Traugh invasion. He thought about those traits for a day and then decided to start listening to the thoughts of the current warriors. He looked around the planet and decided to focus on the five-sided building in one of the more powerful nations. There were thousands of them in that one building.
• • •
“Sir.”
Col. Brighton looked up and saw an athletic looking Captain standing at the door to his office. He was six feet tall and had penetrating deep-set blue eyes. His black hair was cut to regulation length and he was what women would call quite handsome. However, this Captain was nervous about something, “Yes, Captain.”
“I’ve received word from scientists operating the Mount Graham, Lick Observatory, Palomar, and the Hawaii Observatory that they have discovered something that they feel we should be aware of. I’ve asked them to confirm their findings and they say nothing has changed.
“What is that?”
“They’ve all checked their telescopes for possible malfunctions but all of them have recorded the same thing even when they triangulate their telescopes. Something located about three thousand miles above Earth in stationary orbit is blocking the view of stars behind it.”
Col. Brighton stared at Captain Connor and his eyes narrowed, “I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, Captain. Isn’t it impossible for something to remain in stationary orbit without being pulled in by Earth’s gravity?”
