by Paul Phipps
“I’m not sure Dr., was it one of the visitors to our site?” Juan asked slowly.
“No, although there were some of them who were most memorable. Remember that blonde boy with the Red Shirt? Ah, there was a boy who should have been a mountain goat!” He chuckled and then laughed at the memory. “But no, I mean the girl in the bright blue robe like garment.” He paused and then said, “I’ve never been sure about her you know. Was she real or a ghost of a memory?”
Ansel leaned forward and said, “Go on Doctor, I’m finding this interesting.”
The Doctor leaned back and closed his eyes. Then he started to speak;
“It was dawn; I had been awake most of the night you know. The Earth had been moaning that weird three toned note. You know the one, Juan.” He added with a glance and then closed his eyes again. “I saw a flash of light like a door had been opened and the light was coming from inside a room. She was there looking out with a hopeful yet frightened look. She turned her head to speak to someone behind her.
I know she didn’t speak English or Spanish, her speech was fluid with a few guttural words intermixed. But somehow I still understood her. She said something about the Eater of Children was here. Then she threw something out onto the ground and the door was closed.
I was shocked beyond all reason. You know it is one thing to investigate strange places and quite another to have them respond.” He then opened his eyes and looked at his old friend and Ansel. “Would you like to see what she threw?”
Ansel was the first to respond a minute later after his shock was under control. Dr. Golden had just kept watching the two TSN officers with amusement in his eyes.
“Yes Dr. Golden, I WOULD like to see this thing she threw.” Ansel told him.
The three men went to the Doctor’s room and Ansel kept a watch on the room and the hallway outside as the Doctor opened up a locked footlocker. After rummaging a bit he brought out a finely crafted leather pouch.
“Ahhh! I see you kept my gift after all these years Manny.” Juan said with pleasure.
“Oh yes Juan. And now….” He slid out of the pouch a disk, it was about a foot in diameter and gray in color with white streaks throughout it. “I’ve studied this for years. I think it is a combination of a plastic and metal ceramic. It weighs less than you might think to look at it. It also radiates in the radio spectrum with a repeating pattern. The writing on it is not familiar at all to me.” And with that he handed it to Ansel.
Ansel in turn looked at it all over and smiled suddenly. Here was another clue. And the writing was familiar. It was the same as the Tablets from the dig in Iraq that Dr. Anagnostis and Dr. Li had discovered.
“Dr. Golden would you be interested in a contract to come work for me?” Ansel finally said.
“A contract Commander Webster? Doing what, pray tell?”
“Doing what you love to do Doctor, exploring the strange places.” Ansel replied with a smile.
Dr. Golden looked at Ansel in surprise and then smiled slowly. “If an old man near the end of his time here on Earth can be of assistance to you. Then yes, I accept.”
Friday, January 29, 2027
Committee for foreign affairs, Knesset of Israel
Fleet Admiral Webster had been in the committee’s interview room for nearly two hours. It had been an interesting time for him as he had made no opening statement and just answered their questions as they came up.
The truth Verifier on the table in front of him was a larger than usual model so as to be very obvious to the TV Cameras and the committee members in front of him.
Once again he mused as the Chairman in the center of the panel in front of him gave a very carefully worded question in the form of a mini-speech. ‘It is amazing to see the reaction of these politicians when they are forced to tell the truth.’
“Let me restate your question so that I am clear on what you are asking.” Admiral Webster said calmly, “You are asking what will the Terran Space Navy do if the Knesset votes against a ‘Working Agreement’ between the Nation of Israel and ourselves, correct?”
“Well… Yes, to put in in basic terms.” The Chairman finally admitted.
“Nothing, Mr. Chairman, absolutely nothing, your elected Government approached us, not the other way around. We listened and agreed with your desires and expressed our own desires. You as the direct representatives of your people need to insure yourselves and through you that this is a good thing for your Nation.
The Terran Space Navy believes that Humanity needs to find its own way into the future. Its own destiny if you will. That doesn’t mean that every Man, Woman and Child has the exact same destiny because they don’t. Our major purpose is to guard humanity from those who would destroy it. That also means that we must by necessity accept that as our path into the future. To give the rest of humanity freedom to choose, some must take up the burden of protecting the rest of humanity.”
The Committee had heard a variation on that several times now. And just nodded along in time to the Admirals Words. “So, you will just go away and leave us alone to find our own destiny?” The Chairman finally asked in a blunt question.
At these words, Admiral Webster flashed a smile. “That is correct Mr. Chairman.”
The committee in front of him just looked at each other in confusion. The Admiral just wasn’t the normal sort of person they had in front of them to ask questions of. He didn’t obfuscate, demand, wheedle or subtly pressure with threats. Finally a woman at the far left end of the panel indicated she had a question. She had said nothing so far during the entire committee hearing and her fellow politicians had studiously ignored her as being of no consequence.
“Fleet Admiral Webster, I have a very simple question for you.” She waited for him to respond and when he didn’t she smiled a toothy grin. “If the peoples of the Nation of Israel were to ever ask to be transported to one of your twenty unoccupied worlds, could you do it?”
“Yes we could, Ms. Livni.” Admiral Webster answered her taking a quick look at her name plate.
The question and the answer stirred up a veritable storm of whispering through the chamber.
“And how long would it take you to do that?”
“If it was an emergency, probably in about four hours to embark everyone. Then another three days to get you there. If it was an orderly exodus? However long you needed.” He answered her forthrightly.
“Thank you Admiral Webster. I have no further questions.” She added looking down the panel to the Chairman.
“Does anybody else have questions for Fleet Admiral Webster?” The Chairman asked and then looked to his right and left to confirm with each of the members of the committee. And with that the Admiral was thanked once again for agreeing to participate and the hearing was terminated.
* * *
President Richardson rubbed his burning eyes with a damp cloth. It was six in the morning in Washington D.C. and he had been awake through the night having briefings and then watching the televised hearing from the Knesset. He thought slowly and then told his chief of staff.
“Mark, please get a transcript of that hearing made up, and have any pertinent video available to our esteemed members of congress as soon as possible. I am going to get some rest. Please cancel all of my appointments until one o’clock.”
“Yes Mr. President, I’ll make sure that is all done. Now go and get some rest, we’ll take care of the routine stuff until you are up.”
After the President had left the room, there was some chatter going on about the hearing.
Finally the Chief of Staff spoke up. “Ladies, Gentlemen, I have felt for some time that the Terran Space Navy was a game changer and it is. But it’s not in the way I ever expected.” He paused, “Did anybody else get the impression that although they are willing and indeed want to be helpful that they are perfectly content to stay out of the way or if told to go away they will do that just as cheerfully?”
“Mark, I think you have hit the nail on the head there
.” Jose Caudillio the press secretary said thoughtfully. “It’s kind of unnerving isn’t it?”
“Yes it is Jose, Every nation, hell man, every person I have ever known has a hook of some sort. Something they care passionately about. And that something is what allows them to be pushed in a direction we find to be favorable. What about these people, what is their ‘hook’?” He then looked around the room and got back a bunch of shrugs or blank faces.
“Sir, I think their hook is something we can’t touch.” Said one of the young staffers who was just beginning to learn the trade of politics. “They told us up front, their prime directive is to ‘Nurture and Protect the human race’.”
“And what does that mean to you Judy?” asked Mark Bellingsway the Chief of Staff in curiosity.
“Sir, I think it means that unless a person, group or country becomes a danger to the human race as a whole. They will watch to see what we do. On the other hand we can see that in the case of the IUR that they can and will act unilaterally. And as it stands Sir, there isn’t anything anybody else can do to stop them or impede them.”
“So we should be grateful that they are basically benevolent toward us?” The press secretary asked angrily.
“Yes sir, I think we should be very grateful.” The young woman told him seriously. “If we had that sort of power could we keep from using it to gain an advantage over all of the other nations of the world?”
“Basic honesty tells me no.” The chief of staff said soberly. “And that same honesty tells me that the President is correct in pushing for this working agreement. And ladies, gentlemen it’s our job to facilitate the President’s wishes. So let’s get to it, why don’t we?”
* * *
Dr. Golden was looking much better after two days in a gel-cell in the Bloodhound’s Med-Center. He was currently in a VR discussion with Dr. Li and Dr. Anagnostis who were still in isolation in their dome at the M1 Moon base.
“Dr. Golden, this artifact you found in the Zone of Silence, is amazing! The writing on it is very similar to ancient Sumerian and matches up almost perfectly with the tablets we found in Iraq. Ishmael the A.I. the TSN has assigned to this project has been examining your artifact and our tablets in depth and has some interesting things to tell us.
Ishmael, if you would?”
A deep baritone voice came through the VR connection to the three Doctors and the other observers who were remaining silent. “Certainly Dr. Li, my preliminary analysis is that all of the artifacts were made by the same culture. This culture also appears to be identical to the culture that had placed a data storage facility on the moon orbiting Earth E00342.
The signal from the Zone of Silence artifact is radiating a very low powered signal. At first I thought it was a binary signal but I can now say that it is actually a base twelve signal. Using that as a key I was able to decode it slightly. Just enough actually to recognize that it was a file location key.
Mr. James gave me a direction to go in and I was able to find a file location in the data dump from the moon base. In the data was a pictorial description of the artifact in question and a repeat of the message and several other file locations to search.
Translating that data into English is still going to take time as we are still in the process of building up a translated dictionary of words. And that’s my report for now.”
“I just wish there was an audio file associated with this. It would be so helpful to hear the words as well as just see them and wonder what they mean.” Dr. Anagnostis mused out loud.
“Dr. Anagnostis,” Ishmael said in surprise, “there are numerous audio files associated with this data location.”
“What?!” All three doctors exclaimed in their own ways. “Why didn’t you tell us this before?”
Ishmael said a bit sheepishly, “When you gave me your directions and requirements you didn’t place any emphasis on audio files. And since I could not translate them they remain as background unassimilated data.
Would you like me to play them for you?”
After listening with the others to the audio files for almost 15 minutes, Ansel heard a word that electrified him.
“Ishmael! Please stop and go back one minute into the recording and play the audio from that point.” He listened and once again he heard it. A young sounding woman’s voice said “Qwa-arh-an”.
The three Doctors were very interested in what Ansel had heard. And after listening to their queries and getting approval from Seeker and Admiral Webster briefed all of those attending on the Quarn and the danger it posed to the human race in this dimensional analogue.
“So you are telling us that the ‘eater-of-children’ might be this Quarn creature?” Dr. Golden asked quietly.
“It might be Doctor. Certainly we know that it did eventually eat and kill the Earth in that Analogue as evidenced by the Gho L’Gamesh’s data gathered when it discovered it.” Ansel told them.
* * *
Elsewhere:
A secure satellite phone call is taking place.
“Great Leader, I have some good news for you.” Secretary of Defense Anderson said.
“What is it? Has Richardson and the others joined us?” The Great Leader formerly known as the President-for-Life asked eagerly.
“No Master, that isn’t possible at this time, the Quarn-Slave known as Jilna al-Salaam is no longer in Washington D.C. She left the embassy and returned home to Indonesia. In fact many of the others have also done so. Perhaps the Mother is calling them all back to her?”
The Great leader sighed mightily and said, “Yes, that is very possible. She keeps calling to me and I am trapped here. So there are no more Q-Mots for you to use?”
“I’m sorry Master, but there are no more here or anywhere else I can find.”
“Very well then, do the best you can.” Came a slow dejected voice, then it became more demanding. “What is this good news you have then?”
“As a sign of cooperation with the United States the Terran Space Navy has notified us that they are giving us some limited help in aircraft and Single Stage to Orbit vehicle designs. We may be able to free you within a month or two if all goes the way I think it will.”
“That IS good news Anderson, very good news.” The suave, urbane voice was back. “Make sure the pilots are our people or at least loyal supporters.”
“Yes Master, I will.”
“I will arrange a… Distraction, I suppose you could call it when the time comes. Those people will be so busy that you should be able to slip in and out without them ever knowing.”
* * *
Lt. Commander Fuller swung his seat around and looked at his ‘Apprentices’ in Intelligence Central. With a smile on his face he said: “Johan! Great work breaking the encryption so quickly.” Then with a look of satisfaction he said.
“It looks like stage one will be successful. Now however we need to find out where the Quarn are gathering. And if they are acting like a hive the ‘mother’ will be there or close by.
Ratter, Tom-Cat I’m going to get you a Scout Cruiser. I want you to find the Quarn-Mother. I’m not going to blow smoke up your ass. This is fucking dangerous, if you can imagine a mental power, the Quarn-Mother probably has it. Mind you she’s probably weak right now in comparison to what she could be.
The A.I.’s are both your greatest strength and your greatest danger. They are extremely susceptible to takeover by the Quarn. So you need to be constantly aware of that fact. But it might help too, if you lose the Command A.I. you are probably in the right area.” He finished with a sardonic tone of voice.
“Thanks for the advice Mouser, Is it just us or will we have a Human Crew too?” The man called Tom-Cat asked.
“I’ll get you some Humans for the crew as well as a Human Captain. He’ll listen to you and do his best to facilitate your search.”
* * *
“Admiral, Sir Arnold Jamesway is on the phone for you.” Julie Nolans announced from the open door to his office.
“
Thank you Julie, I’ll take it here.” Admiral Caparelli said with a smile.
“Yes Sir, line four sir.”
“Sir Jamesway, it’s good to hear from you.” The Admiral boomed happily.
“God Damn-it, Augustus! How in the name of all that’s holy did you do it!”
“Do what, Arnold?” Admiral Caparelli asked in a sugary sweet tone of voice.
“Do what! You Goddamn pirate in uniform. Get that floating hotel you call a Super-Aircraft Carrier pass my Satellites, my search planes, my God-damn Fucking Task Force!” The voice on the other side said profanely.
