Unwilling From Earth

by Andrew Maclure

  “What about the other civilisations that use it, they must understand it.”

  “Good grief no! Like a lot of the Peoples technology, it is far beyond what anyone else has. Other civilisations either create their own wormholes or use other peoples.”

  “So what happens when you press the go button?”

  “You mean when we go from where we are to where we want to be?”

  “That would be it.”

  “When I instruct the Navigation AI that I want to go, we go.”

  “Is that the best explanation I am going to get or shall I continue trying to squeeze information out of you?”

  ”You can continue with the questioning if you like, we are in no hurry, but it won’t elicit any more information from me. I’ve told you everything I know.”

  “OK, we’ll forget that.” Mark said brusquely. “I bet you don’t have a name for it.”

  “Why would we have a name for it? We know what it is.”

  “Thought so. I’m going to call it the Somewhere Else Drive.”

  “If it makes you happy.” Alan said.

  “What do we do now?”

  “I want you to study all we know about the Chookli’ch and start your gym regime. The synthesisers on Mother are a lot more sophisticated than the ones on the orbiter, you should have a better chance of getting food more pleasing to your palate and they know your dietary needs so you can’t fill up with unhealthy food. Mother’s main AI has analysed your dietary preferences and your cultural cuisine so programming patterns should be easier and more successful than on the orbiter, though still hampered by you insisting on using the tablet to interface with all the systems. We will be here for several of your sleep cycles and we will be busy during that time. Towards the end of that period, before we go down to the planet, we will need to perfect the camouflage we will need to wear so we blend in with the population.”

  “Sounds like we have a lot to do. What’s this about the camouflage. I thought you like to run around with just a hat and coat on?”

  “That was all right on Earth. I blended in easily there.”

  Mark harrumphed loudly but said nothing.

  “It won’t be so easy on Chookli’ch, they are reptilian.” Alan continued.

  “Reptilian! Like lizards?”

  “They are bipedal tetrapods, like humans. Their average height is roughly halfway between your height and mine so we both fall within their physical norms. However, they have large mouths with wide jaws and small wide-set eyes so we will both need to wear prosthetics to pass as natives of the planet. Eyewear is popular with them so that gives us a bit of an advantage, but they have never developed the technology of cooking their food, so they have large stomachs to enable them to digest enough food to meet their calorific requirements, which means we will also need body padding. Do you have any phobias about reptiles like you do with insects?”

  “No, none at all. I volunteered to look after the reptile collection at school in Romsey and when I first moved into my flat, I kept a couple of lizards as pets in a large tank.”

  “How interesting.”

  “Really? You think so?”

  “No.”

  “Uh huh. Well, the body padding will help disguise your extra set of arms.”

  “Yes, it will. I will also be able to move them a little. They got terribly cramped while I was on Earth. It is time now that you had a meal and another sleep cycle. When you wake up you will be refreshed and ready to start learning about the Chookli’ch and you can start your gym regime. Your quarters are fifty metres on the left of the corridor, turn left as you leave here. I have set them up to be the same as you had on the orbiter but you can change and extend them as much as you like. Try not to go above twelve cubic kilometres otherwise, you may have to be relocated to another part of Mother. Hopefully, you can program a good meal.”

  Now Alan had mentioned sleep, Mark realised that he was tired, hungry and thirsty and felt like he could do with a good shower. He left the command centre and walked fifty metres down the corridor where he found a door on the left which opened as he approached it. The rooms were an exact replica of his quarters on the orbiter. Mark stood in the middle of the main room looking round and thought he could make it much more to his taste with a bit of thought, particularly if he could get rid of the overall pale grey of the walls, floor, ceiling and furniture. He thought that if he had to live with that bland monochromatic colour scheme for any length of time it would drive him psychotic. He wondered if that was what had happened to Alan. He’d like something bigger but somehow couldn’t see how he would get close to twelve cubic kilometres of living space. He wanted an apartment to live in, not a small country.

  Reunited

  Mark woke up having had the best sleep since leaving Earth. He reached out for his tablet and ordered tea from the synthesiser and while he was at it, ordered a fresh jumpsuit and shoes.

  After showering and dressing, Mark sat at the table with his tablet and pulled up the interface for creating food patterns. He asked the main AI for assistance and with its help programmed bacon and toast. Having saved the patterns for them, he ordered scrambled eggs, bacon and toast with another tea. He rapidly formed the opinion that the AI was a lot more helpful than Alan.

  By the time he walked over to the synthesiser his breakfast was ready. Mark tasted it with some caution, remembering his experience when making a pizza on the orbiter. The bacon and toast weren't up to the real thing but were OK. The scrambled eggs he had created the pattern for before were great and at least the tea was pretty good now.

  When he had returned the plate and cutlery to the synthesiser to be recycled, Mark sat back down with the now cool tea and his tablet and started working at programming patterns for socks and underpants. Drawing on the database through the main AI, Mark soon had the patterns saved and made by the synthesiser and tried them on. The first attempt was OK, but Mark persevered and when he pulled on the results of his third attempt, he felt properly and comfortably dressed for the first time since his own clothes were recycled.

  The AI retrieved Alan’s pattern for the wood effect finish and applied it to his table. It didn’t change the look and feel of the room much, but it made Mark feel like it was a bit more his. He applied the same effect to the doors that led into the corridor and the bathroom.

  Having made a start at personalising his room, eaten a good breakfast, and for the first time since leaving Earth being dressed properly, Mark was feeling quite good and was even looking forward to messing about in the gym a bit. He ordered up another tea and carried it with him down to the command centre.

  As he walked in, Alan was bent over the console and initially ignored Mark’s entrance. Mark sat down at the conference table, leant back in his chair and put his feet up on the table. After a couple of minutes, Alan looked up and said “Bad news. Gnn’Ath has been attacked by pirates. I need to get the Colonel in there.”

  “Sorry, run that past me again? First, Gnn’Ath. Is that a person or a place - or were you just clearing your throat?”

  “It’s a pre-emergent civilisation, a bit more advanced than humans. There are eight billion of them on their planet. They have been a fairly peaceful civilisation for some time apart from their frequent but small and fairly bloodless wars, but were never particularly warlike. They will be crushed if no-one intervenes.”

  “How far away are they? If they are a few light years away and you’ve only just got the message, that would have happened years ago. It will all be over by now.”

  “We have instantaneous communications from anywhere, to anywhere.”

  “Really? Is that possible? No - don’t tell me, of course it is because you are doing it. I am just a bit surprised. How does it work - the simple version please.”

  “The principle is simple. You know that space/time has a granularity?”

  “No, I thought it was smooth.”

  “A perfectly reasonable assumption but even your scientists know that it isn’t
. They have calculated it’s granularity pretty accurately and even named it as a Planck length.”

  “After Max Planck?” Mark asked.

  “Yes.” Alan answered, a bit surprised that Mark would have heard of him, and then continued: “The space-time continuum appears to be smooth, you can keep dividing it until you get down to very small measurements but when you get down to a Planck length, you finally can’t divide it anymore. A Planck length is 10 to the minus 35 metres, or very, very small. If you can squeeze a signal between this granularity, it enters subspace which is like a tiny little dimension. It is small enough that if you insert a signal into it and if you have the ability to detect and receive that signal from anywhere else in the universe, you can communicate instantaneously between two points no matter how far apart they are from each other.”

  “Is that how the Somewhere Else drive works?”

  “No, that is a completely different principle, much more complex. You can’t rip a hole into subspace and shove a craft the size of Mother through it and out the other side. I did say it is tiny. Anyway, ripping a hole into subspace is not a good thing to do.”

  “Oh, so the People have tried to. How did that go?”

  “It gave less than satisfactory results.”

  “What does that mean?” Asked Mark.

  “In the same way that the Area 51 wormhole experiment gave less than satisfactory results.”

  “Oh. So does everybody use subspace communications - or is it another of those People only technologies?”

  “The principle is well understood by many civilisations, but only the People have the ability to do it.”

  “And you won’t share that technology with anyone else?”

  “No. I thought I had explained that technologically advanced civilisations don’t share technology with primitive ones.”

  “So why don’t you share it with the other technologically advanced civilisations.”

  “Hmm. I must have explained it badly before. All other civilisations are technologically primitive compared to the People.”

  “Oh, right. That explains a lot. And who is the Colonel? I didn’t know the People had an army.”

  “We don’t. We only have defensive capabilities. We don’t get involved in conflicts and we don’t interfere. Well, not much. The Colonel leads a mercenary force, the best in the galaxy. The report is that a large invasion force of pirates - possibly tens of thousands have invaded Gnn'Ath. If anyone can step in and stop this, it will be the Colonel. Failing that, the Ants will intervene.”

  “Pirates? How can a disorganised rabble of misfits and rejects mount an invasion force of tens of thousands? That’s a bloody big army!”

  “It doesn’t matter what we call them. We are going to transport the Colonel’s force there. We are collecting the Colonel who has been on a team building exercise with some of the senior officers and then we’ll get the rest of the force from their base.”

  “OK, when are we leaving?”

  “We are already there. We are waiting for them to come up from the planet, then we’ll go and pick up the rest. There are passenger quarters already made up for them in a separate part of Mother but unfortunately, we’ll have the Colonel up here with us.”

  “Why unfortunate? Don’t you like the Colonel?”

  “I like and admire the Colonel, but that fondness and admiration is not reciprocated. The Colonel is in a particularly bad mood right now so I don’t think our time together will be pleasing.”

  “Why is the Colonel in a bad mood? Is it because we - sorry, you, interrupted the team building exercise?”

  “When I said a bad mood, I probably should have said furious and you’ll find out why soon enough.”

  “Bloody hell Alan, can’t you ever give a straight answer? Why do you have to be so enigmatic all the time!”

  “Trust me on this one Mark, from what the Colonel said to me, it will all make sense quite quickly.”

  “How long before they get here?” Mark demanded. He was a bit grumpy about the lack of information from Alan - as usual. He hardly felt like he counted as he was kept in the dark so often.

  “Not long, in your timescale, about fifteen minutes.”

  “Right.” Said Mark. “I’ll have a fresh tea, this one’s gone cold. Do you want a drink?” Mark asked. It wasn’t an offer of friendliness, Mark just offered out of habitual politeness.

  “Thank you.” Alan replied. “There will be one in the synthesiser with your tea.”

  Mark got his tea and the large silver coloured flask that contained Alan’s drink and handed to him. He was still annoyed and sat at the conference table to drink his tea. He put his feet up on it again as he thought that Alan looked disapprovingly at him the first time he did it.

  “So where in the galaxy have we come to collect the Colonel?” Mark asked.

  “Earth.” Alan replied.

  Mark had just taken a mouthful of tea and was so shocked by Alan’s reply that he spat it out and spilt most of his tea on the floor.

  “Earth! The Colonel was on Earth! What is the leader of a bunch of semi-psychotic mercenaries doing on Earth? We’ve got enough problems on Earth without a load of warmongering alien nutters roaming around!”

  “I can’t see any good reason for it either, but I did tell you that Earth was a popular tourist destination.”

  “In my experience team building exercises are where you go paintballing in a remote corner of Wiltshire or on a survival course in Wales. If they are doing their equivalent of alien army paintballing, they could take out half the population of Wiltshire!”

  “I don’t think that is the kind of team building they were doing. I think it involved a lot of socialising and drinking.”

  “I still don’t like the idea of a load of alien soldiers partying on Earth. I’ve seen soldiers with too much beer in them in Portsmouth when they’ve come back in troop ships. It’s not pretty. I’ll get a cloth and clear up this tea, then get a fresh one.”

  “Don’t worry about clearing it up, the floor and the table will absorb it all for recycling. Didn’t I tell you that the smart materials they are made of will do that?”

  “No. There is a lot you haven’t told me, even when I’ve asked you.”

  “There is a lot for you to learn, but you’ll soon pick it all up.”

  “Just a minute - how can they get from Earth to Mother in what, twenty minutes? We took several days to get from Earth to Mother when we left.”

  “Mother was parked hidden from sight for four hundred Earth orbits - or years as you call them. We are now in a high orbit above Earth, heavily cloaked. But there is a chance that your Earth defence systems might spot us as an anomaly so we won’t be here long. I wouldn’t bring Mother here if it wasn’t an emergency.”

  “That sounds reasonable.” Mark said grudgingly.

  “Our passengers have arrived. Brace yourself.”

  The double doors behind the conference table opened and four people dressed in black jumpsuits strode in.

  “Sally?” Mark said incredulously. “What are you doing here?”

  Meet The Team

  Sally had a stern expression on her face as she walked up to Mark, she paused a moment, then punched him hard on the nose.

  Mark fell backwards on the floor with blood gushing from his nose. “What the fuck… I think you’ve broken my nose!” He said through a welter of blood that was also going down the back of his throat. One of the newcomers, clearly a reptile even though Mark hadn’t seen one before, sprang to his side and helped him up to his feet.

  “I don’t think I have broken your nose, I know I have.” Snapped Sally. “Just think yourself lucky that I didn’t break your neck.”

  Turning to Alan she continued. “And as for you, you bastard, if you weren’t one of the People, I’d kill you where you stood.”

  “And it’s a pleasure to see you again too.” Alan replied. He turned to Mark who was sagging against the reptile and covered in blood. “Mark, allow me to
introduce you to the Colonel, or Sally as you know her.”

  Mark’s broken nose was very painful now, and it was making him feel quite sick. He didn’t mind the sight of blood particularly, unless it was his. There was a lot of it all down his front and it was also dripping on the floor. The smart material that the floor was made of wasn’t doing a very good job of absorbing it.

  “What did you do that for?” Mark asked. He had been quite fond of Sally but his feelings for her were cooling rapidly.

  “You let that thing,” She said, gesturing towards Alan “persuade you to just leave without even saying goodbye! You two-faced bastard.”

  “Steady on now. There’s no need to be offensive, or to assault me. Anyway, what were you going to do when you finished your so-called team building exercise? You were going to just piss off and leave me there - or did you plan to leave no witnesses?” The pain and shock were making Mark sound braver than he felt. Then he noticed who one of the other people in Sally’s entourage was. It was Simon, the man-mountain who had threatened him in the Chequers the night he went there with Sally. “Oh shit.” He thought.

  Mark’s words hadn’t seemed to calm Sally at all. Looking, if possible, even angrier she stepped towards Mark. The reptilian alien that was propping Mark up stepped backwards and turned to shield Mark from Sally’s approach. At the same time, Simon stepped in front of Sally and said: “Excuse me Colonel, but do you think we should take five and just re-evaluate our course of action?”

  “Out of my fucking way.” Snarled Sally but Simon held his ground and blocked her way. She could have walked around him, but that would have looked ridiculous. She could have cut him down and stepped over his body, but he was a friend and too good a soldier to lose. Sally looked around and saw the fourth member of her party, a man-like creature just over seven feet tall with a thick body, immensely thick arms and legs and a squarish head which appeared to be mounted directly onto his shoulders with no intervening neck. He had distinctly orange skin. Not orange like a TV presenter, but a dark, burnt orange colour. “What are you looking at? Get me a drink.” She snapped at him. The orange man shrugged his shoulders and turned to the synthesiser. The door opened and he took a tall glass which contained about a third of a litre of clear fluid and carried it over to her. Sally drunk half of it and turned to Alan. “You’d better fill me in on the situation. Simon, you and Mike take that,” She gestured toward Mark “to a med station and get him fixed up. Orange, you’re with me.”