by Ivan Kal
He looked around the room. “You resorted to violence and murder in order to obtain it. You did all that when all you saw was technology that was barely a few years ahead of yours. And the sad thing is that if you had pooled your resources, if you had set aside your differences, you would have been able to catch up to that technology in a few years at most. What you saw was only what we showed you. Our technology is at least fifty years ahead of anything you have, and some even more. I never intended on keeping our advances from you; all I ever wanted was for humanity to become what I knew it could be. All you had to do was learn to work together in peace. To care about your people and not your wallets. The moment you did that, I would have given you everything. But your actions have convinced me that you will not change any time soon. We went through a devastating war, and still you can’t see that if we continue on this path, we will doom our entire race. My people and I have reached a decision. We will not wait for you anymore. We will not watch as you kill each other, nor will we allow you to kill us. We are removing ourselves from the equation. Olympus will leave the solar system. We will start a new life on another planet, far away from you and your stupidity.”
At that, the room erupted. President Von Holt stared at Tomas Klein; he’d expected many things, but never this. Concordis had been preparing for war as the worst-case scenario. They knew that there would be a response from Olympus, that they wouldn’t let it lie forever. And yet, leaving the solar system? He knew that Olympus technology was better, but by that much? Perhaps if what Tomas was saying was the truth, they could do it, and there was no reason for him to be lying about this. And then he realized what Olympus leaving would mean.
“What about our trade with Olympus?” President Von Holt asked. “Earth is dependent on it.”
The rest of the room grew quiet and turned to look at him.
“I made a mistake all those years ago,” Tomas said regretfully. “I made you too dependent on Olympus. But the fault was not all mine; it was you who allowed it. It will be hard, but you will recover. If you work together. Our facilities on Earth are now yours to do with as you see fit. But we will not be leaving you our technology; we will dismantle or destroy anything that we can’t take with us.”
The League president stood up.
“You would throw the world into chaos and run away?!”
“I’m not running away. We are just tired of looking after you. Sometimes children need tough love. We showed you the way. It is up to you now to grow up.” With that, he turned and left, and the room immediately exploded into arguments. Von Holt heard that the topic of most of the arguments was the distribution of the Olympus facilities and territory. They didn’t care that Olympus was leaving. My God, he is right. We are children, President Von Holt thought. He looked around to see his staff members joining the yelling matches. He turned from them, disgusted, and walked out of the conference room. There was no one around, no security officers that were there before. He walked down the corridors, and then took the elevator up to the surface. As he stepped into the bright light of the day, he saw that Olympus transport ships were gone. And then up in the distance he saw small black dots that were gone the next moment.
***
Two months later
Seo-yun sat in her office on the station orbiting Jupiter. She looked at the screen mounted on the wall; it showed the image from outside the station. Most of the screen was taken up by Jupiter, but there in the distance she could see four massive ships. They were still under construction, but it would take them only one more month to finish them. Most of Olympus’s fabricators were now working full time on their construction. The others were working on fabricating things that they would need for the long trip, mainly stasis chambers. It would take them just over a month to reach the number of stasis units required for everyone.
The last count put Olympus’s population at 7 and a half million, and every one of them had chosen to come with them. Five months ago, just after the incident, Tomas had addressed all of Olympus citizens. Some had watched him live via FTL comms devices, while others had watched as the signal got to them. He’d revealed everything. He’d told them about the alien ship they’d found. He’d told them about his childhood dream. He’d told them all of his plans. And Olympus had listened in awe of this one man. A man who had changed their lives, who had made them better. Who had wanted to do that for all of mankind, but couldn’t fight against the corruption of the world. The feed had gone on for hours. He’d told them all of his fears and all of his hopes, about all the advances, all the technology that they had or were working on. He’d told them about the strides in genetics that would allow humans to live forever. He’d told them about his struggles, how he didn’t know if he should give that technology to the Earth. How he feared that it would destroy them, because they were not mature enough to wield it. And then he’d told them how he didn’t want to see any one of them die for the greed of others.
He’d told them his plan, that he wanted to leave this solar system and Earth behind and start over somewhere else. He’d asked them to come with him. And then he’d waited. The people had talked with their families, their friends, and their acquaintances, and then they had sent him their response—every single one of them had chosen to leave with him, with the person who had given them so much.
Olympus had always been run by Tomas. But even when they had become independent, they’d still operated as a company. No more—the people had spoken, they’d made Tomas their ruler, their king, their president, and their emperor. They had put their trust in him, knowing that it would be safe with him.
The Olympus population had moved to Mars, waiting there for the ships to be finished. The other ships that Olympus had were now retrofitted as transports that would take the population to the colony ships in a few trips. None of those ships would go with them; some would be scrapped for materials, and others destroyed. Only the 8 warships that they had would be fitted with stasis units and a hyperdrive and come with them. The stations and shipyards they had in the system were already mostly dismantled or stripped of all technology, their mining operations likewise.
Tomas had given the order for the genetic treatment to be administered to anyone who wished it, which was everyone. Who didn’t want to live forever? Seo-yun herself had already had the treatment; somehow it didn’t seem real yet. She looked the same. Intellectually, she knew that she would never change, and that she already had an unlimited lifespan. But she didn’t feel it yet.
Seo-yun turned her gaze from the four ships to the report on her desk. It was a regular update on the stasis units and their construction progress. In a month, Tomas would arrive at Jupiter, and then people would start arriving and be put into stasis. Next time they woke up, they would be on an alien world far away from Earth. She brought up the image of their future home. They’d found it in the alien charts. The aliens had visited it. They’d classified it as an Earth-like planet, with a gravity level just a bit over Earth’s at 1.1 g, orbiting one of the suns of the system, which was the same class as Earth’s own Sol. The system itself was completely inside a nebula. There were two stars—the second one was a red dwarf—and six planets, two of which could be inhabited by humans, though one was a lot colder than the other.
They had chosen the one that was warmer as their destination. The files said that there was life on the planet, though no life with higher intelligence. The world had a bit more land than Earth did, but nothing drastic, so the climate should be very close to that of the Earth. The system also had one gas giant about the size of Jupiter, and three more planets that were basically just rocks. There were also a lot of moons orbiting the gas giant, some of which had an atmosphere, though the records didn’t have any more information. The nebula was 600 light years away. With their current hyperdrives moving at ten times the speed of light, it will take them around 60 years to get there. Most of them would spend the time in stasis, while others would be woken periodically to check on the stasis units and make sur
e that everything was alright.
Tomas didn’t want to leave anything behind, but Seo-yun still had hope for the people on Earth. So she’d gone behind Tomas’s back. She would be leaving a ship in the asteroid belt, the hyper-capable scout ship that they’d sent to Alpha Centauri. She’d equipped it with an FTL comm, and she had also put an AI she trusted in the ship’s computer, and had given him instructions to release the information and control of the ship only if he thought that those who found him deserved it. She’d also given him the coordinates of the Nebula they will be leaving for, and then she’d powered it down. Perhaps by the time the ship was found, they would have learned to work together.
***
November 2103 - Three months later
Adrian sat in the command chair of the Athena. Bethany was sitting beside him, and the rest of the command center was filled with the same people from seven months ago. The holodesk showed the Athena leading the formation of seven other Olympus warships. In the middle of the formation were four enormous ships. They were box-shaped, slow, and maneuvered poorly.
They had been made in haste and with only one purpose in mind—to get them to another world. They didn’t have any wasted space; the stasis pods took over most of the ships’ room, with a small bridge, hyperdrives, and sub-light engines taking over the rest. Each ship carried a little under 2 million people, with all the resources they would need to start on another world—their fabricators, food-processing plants, and other things. Most of the population was already in stasis, even though they hadn’t yet left the solar system, and were just now approaching Saturn.
There were still people who were awake on the colony ships, making sure that everything was in order, making some final adjustments. They, like those on the warships, would go to sleep when they entered hyperspace. After that, only a few of them would be periodically awakened, just like Adrian and his crew, though those on warships would wake more often. They, alongside a few from the colony ships, would be awoken prior to their arrival in the nebula. The system wasn’t yet named, and would be only after they arrived. For now, Adrian had to look forward to another four months of travel through the solar system. It would be a long time before he and everyone else set foot on a planet again.
Epilogue
February 2159 – 56 years later
The boy ran down the ruined streets of Berlin. It was once a great city, or so his father had said in his stories before he died. The boy was just 13 years old, and the city had been in ruins for at least thirty years. It had been destroyed in the Great War that followed the Treason, when the lawbreakers stole Earth’s technology and left them to starve. The Great War had lasted for twenty years, and had decimated the Earth. The boy had heard some stories about how there were cities that survived. That still had technology. But Berlin was not one of those cities. Berlin was what was commonly referred as a slum city. People who had no place to go came to those cities. They whored, stole, and killed to survive, but survive they did. Food was scarce, and there was no way for a 13-year-old boy to survive in a slum city other than by stealing.
The boy entered a building; it was abandoned so long ago that no one remembered what it was before. An old man who’d lived there before the boy and his crew moved in had said that it was an “apartment building”—whatever that was. The boy didn’t know, nor did he care; it served them well now.
“It’s Mathias!” a girl of fourteen yelled out as he entered the first room. Just as he’d taught them, the others came out of hiding, their weapons ready. They had a few guns, but those were reserved for a real need. Now they were armed with knives.
“Aileen,” the boy, Mathias, greeted the girl that led the other kids. She and Mathias led this crew together.
“You got something?” she asked hopefully.
Mathias grinned. “Of course!”
He reached for the pack on his back and showed its contents to everyone. The others all exclaimed in surprise. Aileen reached in and took out a can of food.
“Where did you find this?” she asked in awe. Mathias knew that she’d never seen so much food in one place before.
“I found one cache; there is more there. We need to gather everyone we can and go back before someone else finds it too,” Mathias said.
Aileen nodded and started calling out to the others who were deeper inside the building, when suddenly they were all startled by a powerful boom, followed by a sound unlike anything they had ever heard. Mathias and Aileen ran outside and saw a cloud of dust rising in the distance, a long way from their city, and then they noticed other such clouds rising from other directions as well. The noise kept growing stronger, and Mathias finally realized that it was coming from above them. He turned his eyes to the clear blue sky. There he saw something slowly coming down.
A few minutes later, it set itself down a few building blocks away. He and Aileen moved immediately to investigate. As they came closer, they started hearing screams and other unidentifiable noises. When they were finally close enough, they froze. What they saw was something unthinkable. People were dead, lying in the streets in pieces, or with holes blown through them.
Others were being taken back to the things that came down from the sky, the things that did the taking and killing—and they were things, not human. They looked like giant red metallic spiders, at least at the first glance. They had four spider-like legs, and a torso that looked vaguely human. They had two hands with three digits that ended in sharp claws, and their heads were elongated and covered in metal.
Mathias realized that they were wearing armor. Each of them had weapons built into the armor itself, and didn’t carry any additional weapons. They were taking some people while killing the others. Mathias took Aileen’s hand and started running. She was following his pace, and soon they were just one street away from their hideout. Just as they rounded a corner, Mathias’s vision was filled with red. A moment later, he felt pain, and then nothing.
***
August 2169
Mathias sat down hard on his cot. He was exhausted. He had spent the last 4 years moving from asteroid to asteroid, mining ore for the blasted aliens. They had enslaved humanity and placed their bases and people on Earth. They’d found the humans’ planet quite suitable for their needs. They used humans for manual labor, sending them to mine materials for them.
Humans built the aliens’ buildings, cleaned their houses, and were slaves on their own world. Many had tried to fight back at first, until the aliens, the Ra’a’zani, put down the resistance by executing a third of the population. Since then, there were no more attacks on the Ra’a’zani; the resistance had gone underground. And they let their tendrils out and they waited and watched. Mathias was a part of the resistance, though he kept the fact mostly to himself and those few that already knew. There were humans who collaborated with the enemy, and he could never know if or when one of his own would betray him. Mathias’s job was to watch and listen for anything that might help them in their fight against the Ra’a’zani.
“Mathias,” he heard someone call him, and he turned and saw Gloria. She was also in the resistance, and she was twenty-six years old, three years older than Mathias.
“Gloria,” Mathias greeted her.
“We got a message. There will be a distraction in an hour, and we are getting out,” she whispered excitedly. Mathias was shocked; the resistance rarely helped people escape. They were usually too useful in their positions as slaves. And Mathias knew that he wasn’t special, and that there had to be a good reason for them getting him out.
“Do you know why?” he asked.
“They got a tip about something deeper in the asteroid field, and they want us to investigate. Apparently it is something interesting enough to warrant a look, but not enough for them to send a team. So they are sending us,” she said.
“How are we getting out?”
“Don’t know all the details; the message just said that we will be given orders to board a shuttle and take some machinery to the o
ther mining station. When we take off, they will shut down their sensors and we are to disappear,” she said. Ra’a’zani rarely kept a close guard on those working on the asteroids; there really wasn’t a place that they could run to, and if someone did escape, it was preferable that they ran out of food and died before the Ra’a’zani found them.
“Alright, how will we know where to go?” Mathias asked.
“The shuttle will have the coordinates already programmed in,” she said.
Mathias thought for a moment. The resistance would need to have someone on the inside in order to pull this off. And since there wasn’t a chance in hell that a Ra’a’zani would betray their own, that meant a collaborator. It made sense; there were some humans that had greater access than the other slaves. The resistance would have been stupid not to insert their own into them. Mathias just didn’t want to think about what that person might’ve had to do to prove himself to the Ra’a’zani. He shuddered as he remembered the stories.
“Okay,” he said. An hour later, they got the order from their Ra’a’zani overlord to take a spare part to the mining station a few hours away. They got into the shuttle and got on their way as planned. They waited for any sign that they were safe to turn away from the course—and then they lost all communications with the station.
“I guess that means go,” Gloria said.
