by Alex Deva
“See you later, Yuri. Effo, out,“ said Aram, and turned the music back up.
Another hour left to fly.
He'd welcomed the opportunity to fly, even when there was nothing to, well, blow up. His ship, Effo — Mark had unintentionally suggested the name, saying it was only one U short of a UFO — felt to him like a second body. Like Doi-the-ship must feel to Doina, Aram thought.
He'd had no idea that he had the makings of a space pilot. Hell, he hadn't even been aware of outer space. Even the word “pilot“ was just another of those concepts injected straight into his brain by the alien starship, when it decided that he needed to know English in order to communicate with Doina and Mark.
How long ago had that happened? He frowned and thought. A month? Two? Something like that.
The shiny orb of the Sun rose up over his head, a star like any other, if relatively bigger. Shadows crept over his controls, as he turned in a large arc, aiming back towards the solar system plane.
From shepherd to space pilot, he thought again. He couldn't even rightly remember what sheep looked like.
And then, after Doi's automated satellite, or whatever the hell it was, plucked him straight out of the third century and onto the alien starship, and he'd met Doina, the twelve-year-old girl from the twelfth century, and Mark, the former soldier of the twenty-first century, and after they'd been attacked by Americans, and after they'd fought with their best soldiers and been taken prisoners and flown to an American cruiser, and half-fought, half-found their way back out again, Aram found himself forced to fly a “crate,“ a small American space craft.
And that, — more than waking up in the future, more than learning English, more than finding out about aliens — that changed his life forever.
He discovered that he was a natural pilot, and he discovered that flying was what he'd been born to do.
Giving up that crate had felt really wrong.
But discovering Effo, parked right under the airlock of their own starship, felt incredibly good.
The three of them — Mark, Doina and himself — had ended up mingled in the Moon War, a space conflict between Americans and Eurasians over mines on the Moon. Both the Yanks and the so-called Queens had tried to win them on their side. The Yanks had used direct force; the Eurasians had been more devious. Aram felt sure that neither the unfortunate American cruiser commander Gaines, who had nearly killed Doina and nuked them all up (and whose bones Aram had endeavoured to methodically break for that reason), nor the scheming German colonel Tiessler whom they met later, was anybody on whose side Aram would've gladly fought in a war.
After all, the only thing they were all after was Doi.
The amazing starship, which customised itself for its three-person human crew, with its near-lightspeed engines and versatile matter converter, was what they wanted.
Of course, the starship alone would've been useless. Only Doina, the young girl who kept talking about God (Christianity was another thing that had Aram perplexed), she alone could tame the huge flying alien torus into doing whatever she wanted. Even the ship's name, Doi, had been imparted from the young girl's name — it had been what her mother used to call her, over a thousand years before. When Doina went into Room One, the starship's designated command-and-control centre, and connected with the ship, that was an amazing sight.
Not that he was easily amazed. He was a cool young man, who took everything in stride and made the best of everything. His people, the Dacians — the ancestors of Doina's Vlachians, and the forefathers of the Romanians, now part of the Eurasian alliance — had always believed that they were immortal. At some level, Aram was still pretty sure death was somehow inconsequential. Or, at least, something that mostly happened to other people.
Mark, on the other hand, as the chief strategist of their little group, was always trying to err on the side of caution.
Aram respected Mark. When he'd first met the small, wiry Englishman, he knew he was looking at a soldier, even though Mark's manners were reserved and his tongue gentle, like the scholar he'd said he was. That he was also a soldier, it turned out, had been a well-guarded secret. Mark had been a member of the British Special Forces. During a secret mission, he’d been badly tortured and then forced to watch his friend being decapitated, somewhere in what they called the Middle East. He had promised to look after his friend's family, but failed. He’d been medically discharged from the military and, in an attempt to save him from himself and from the vengeful jihadists, he was sent to the quiet backwaters of Romania as an English teacher, and then swiftly kidnapped by Doi before he'd even set foot in a Romanian school.
The little girl whom he'd failed to protect had been about the same age as Doina.
Aram knew what that meant for Mark. The Brit was extremely well trained, both physically and mentally, and he could think on his feet. He had a thorough, analytical mind and he knew how to work things out. Aram had lived his life mostly by jumping headlong into whatever came his way, but Mark was nothing like that.
Aram had seen Mark fight. They'd even fought each other, both for real and for practice. He'd seen how he planned and judged his moves in fractions of a second, and how he made the most complicated fighting techniques seem effortless.
Now Mark was a man he was really, really glad to have on his side.
The three of them made up the whole crew of Starship Doi. It was difficult at first, to be sure; even finding food had been a challenge. The alien starship was capable to create things, assuming it could be made to understand what to do. Of course, it was easier when Doina did it, as she usually merely had to think about the things she needed created. Her connection with the starship was intellectual, emotional and spiritual. Mark and Aram were reduced to tapping dark icons on the command panels, or speaking with the ADM, the ship's Automated Decision Maker, who, more often than not, seemed to have its own agenda.
Even the uniform he was wearing — matte black, with a silver, elegant “Doi“ on the chest — had been created out of the strange alien gel that the starship seemed to have in endless supply. And it fit much better than his old woollen pants.
In war, it's always important to have good clothes!
The Moon War. Aram had seen people killed in a million ways before. If it hadn’t been for the poor Romans who did their best to keep some order in the land, there would've been nothing but war in Dacia. He wondered what Naevius, the Roman centurion with whom he had chatted right before he'd been plucked by Doi, would've made of the idea that people wage war in the skies.
He'd seen people die before. But not the way they died in space.
He would never forget the first dying people he saw on the Moon's orbit.
Helpless puppets tumbling through space at great speed, flailing their arms and legs, doomed to a horrible fate, some killed by Doi's automated defences in what later seemed like mercy.
Aram shuddered.
It was a horrible war. And, right in the middle of it, they had been given an ultimatum: choose a side, or face both.
Neither the Americans nor the Eurasians could afford the alien starship on the other side. The crew of Doi had been asked to choose, or else.
They were spared the choice, however, by the sudden arrival of Five — an unbelievable being made of literally astronomically long strands of antimatter (Petrov had tried to explain to Aram what antimatter was, with moderate success); a single individual who could stretch itself in space over billions and billions of kilometres. A single individual of a race consisting of exactly eight. The Eight.
The Dacian Wars paled in comparison to the World Wars.
The World Wars paled in comparison to the Moon War.
And the Moon War paled in comparison to the Cold War between the Eight and the Builders.
The Builders were the aliens who had created Starship Doi. They were masters at manipulating matter. Their enemies, The Eight — that incredible race of only eight conscious, intelligent and powerful antimatter beings — ruled over a
Union of many alien races. They could be undetectable even for the Builders technology, and they moved through space riding gravity waves, small molecular-sized antimatter bundles forming gigantic filaments.
They'd arrived and carelessly destroyed an Eurasian base, the Yǒngqì. They'd arrived and immediately demanded that Earth choose a side.
Speaking for the entire planet, the German Tiessler and the American negotiator Drake asked for some time to think about it.
Five agreed and vanished without another word. Nobody knew when it would return and what they'd tell it then. Aram had been tasked to fly Effo, the little starship that was like his second body, in recon missions around the solar system, looking for odd gamma radiation patterns that might herald the presence of an improbable, huge being made of antimatter on its way back to Earth, demanding an answer on which would depend the fate of his entire planet.
“It's the final countdown,“ yelled Joey Tempest.
III.
“Need a hand with that, sergeant?“
Mark looked up in surprise. A young woman dressed in light grey shorts which stopped just above her knees and what he could only call a sleeveless tweed suit jacket, buttoned all the way to the neck, was smiling ironically at him. Her naked right arm was suspended in a transparent sling across her chest, and her left arm was stretched towards him in a gesture that was half greeting, half offer to help.
He fumbled with his suit helmet lock, took it off, and inhaled deeply.
“Lieutenant Lawry,“ he said. “Isn’t this a nice surprise. Thank you, but I won’t take the only one you have left.“
“Last time I saw you, you were getting into one of those suits.“
“Yes. Though it had a different flag patch.“
“Welcome back to Earth, Greene. Or Gardener.“
“It’s good to be back,“ he said automatically, looking around.
The space shuttle had taken him all the way from Doi to a hangar somewhere in Austria in less than a half hour. As the huge doors of the military building closed behind them, and the crew helped him out of the ship, his inner voice muttered: damn, here I am again.
A team of four soldiers assembled silently behind Jessica Lawry; he glanced at them with some interest, reflexively trying to read their uniforms and gear, and not having much success.
She watched him as he found the unfamiliar suit latches and zippers, gradually freeing his way out. She picked up a bag from the hangar floor and gave it to him one handed.
“Civilian clothes,“ she said. “Change. We’re leaving soon.“
Half way out of the space suit, he accepted the bag and opened it curiously.
“My size, I assume?“
“Bought them myself this morning.“
“How did you know?“
“I’ve already seen you naked, remember? Got a good memory. Useful thing to have for a spy.“
The last words brought back the memories of his and Aram's adventures in the American cruiser’s low gravity brig, making him cringe inwardly a little.
“I didn’t have a chance to thank you properly for saving our lives up there on the Kennedy. Thank you,“ he said, earnestly. “And don’t take this the wrong way, but I didn’t really expect to see you again.“
She looked down.
“And you wouldn’t have. Thank God for intergalactic warfare, or whatever it is you’ve gotten us into.“
“Excuse me?“
“With Gaines out of the picture, the XO didn’t really want to risk court-martialling me as his first decision in charge, so he just threw me in the brig and asked for orders. I rotted in there for a while, until we were sent around the Moon in that little ambush you may recall.“
Mark managed to get the last bit of space suit off him, and climbed barefooted out of the heap of metal and textiles.
“Ah,“ she said, with her ironic smile back. “Three hundred year old underwear.“
“Go on.“
“I don’t know exactly how well we were doing in the battle, me being in the brig and all, but I do know that it all went to shit when our new antimatter antibuddy showed up.“
“Five,“ said Mark.
“Right. Five. We were near the Yǒngqì when Five blew it to hell. Even our own hull ruptured in a couple of places. I remember wishing I’d’ve been thrown out of the airlock the old-fashioned way.“
“Was that when you hurt your hand?“
“No. That would be when one of our SEALS shot me as I was trying to escape in a lifeboat.“
Mark froze and looked at her.
“Yeah, I know,“ she continued in a low voice. “I, too, fought a SEALS and lived to tell the tale.“ And then, even more quiet: “Never underestimate a traitor’s will to survive, I guess.“ Suddenly aware of her injured hand, she scratched it absently.
Mark finished putting on the first man-made clothes since the jeans and Timberlands he’d had in 2014.
“Come,“ she said, and started down a set of stairs. The soldiers fell quietly in formation around them.
Mark had hoped to see a little more of Earth in 2343, but it had been night over that part of Europe and all he had been able to glimpse during the shuttle landing were lights that he couldn’t convert into any familiar map. Following Lawry, he went down the stairs, went through a short corridor, opened a double door and entered what he surmised was an underground car. They all took seats and the vehicle departed noiselessly.
“How far are we going?“ he asked.
“About fifty kilometres,“ she answered.
“How long?“
“Three, four minutes.“
“Jesus. Are we going supersonic?“
“Not technically, because the tunnel is vacuumed. Didn’t you have vacuum tunnels in your time?“
Hearing her last words, a couple of the soldiers turned their heads slightly towards Mark, wearing carefully neutral expressions. The Brit wondered what they were thinking. He knew what escort duty was like, and while he had never expected to be the VIP himself, he knew how special he was on this particular occasion, and how curious the soldiers must be about him, but how their discipline prevented them from asking questions, and how they must’ve made their own assumptions instead.
A traumatised grunt, he remembered. That’s what he’d been called by the Chinese colonel Jing. A medieval girl, a caveman and a traumatised grunt, he’d said.
“No vacuum tunnels in my time,“ he answered curtly.
* * *
“Welcome back, Greene“ said a middle-aged woman with an ash-white bun. She smiled thinly. Her name was Lykke Dahlberg and she was Norwegian.
Mark nodded at her has he sat down at the conference table.
“Hello,“ said Tiessler. His perpetually tired smile was framed by the screen of the conference calling system; the German colonel was a few hundred kilometres above them, aboard his cruiser, the ESS Monnet. Mark nodded at him, too.
The conference room was at the ground level of a simple hotel, in a small, obscure Austrian ski resort. But the participants were anything but obscure. Lykke Dahlberg was Director of Civilian Security for the entire Eurasian Alliance. She had command of every secret service of every country in the united continents. She had held the job for seventeen years. The little running joke was that she knew the whereabouts of enough skeletons to populate an entire country.
Mark hadn't thought that the joke was particularly funny when Lawry whispered it to him on his way to the conference room.
With the exception of colonel Tiessler, Lykke Dahlberg and the spy Jessica Lawry, there was one more participant in the conference. Like Tiessler, he was reduced to a torso on a screen. He was young, clad in black clothes, and had a white tab collar with a diagonal red stripe on it. As far as Mark could tell, he was the epitome of a nondescript cleric. He had not said anything yet, but a simple black cross on the white wall behind him completed the message of his collar.
Some of the people in the room were among the most important people on Earth, Mark
knew. This told him that the cleric must also belong to the same elite, and that had to be why he attended remotely. It had been judged that two physically present high-ranking officials were just short of enough to attract the attention of the planetary media.
Because the media would've gone hysterical if they'd found out that Mark Greene was on Earth.
Of course the media knew about Doi. You can't have an alien starship and a destroyed Chinese space station on your orbit without the media asking some questions. And there were enough witnesses, on ground and in space, to describe to the journalists, with a luxury of details and video recordings, how a strange torus, flying impossible trajectories, intervened in the Moon War, and how three people lived in that strange torus, Earthmen displaced from their times, about nine hundred years apart each.
The media knew everything there was to be learned about Doina, Aram and Mark. They even had access to Mark's DNA genomes, because media spies were just about as capable as military ones.
But the spies soon found that they didn't really need much spying, after all. There was a man willing to come forward with plenty of intel on the alien starship. A man whose stories came straight from the facts. A man who had met the crew in person. A man with credibility, pedigree and stature.
An American colonel named Steven Gaines.
Gaines had commanded the USS Kennedy in the battle against the ESS Monnet, the one where Starship Doi made its entrance. He had attacked the starship with everything he'd had — guns, SEALS and cunning — and had nearly managed to trick Doina into submission. His ego and impatience pushed him to rush the young girl and then try to kill her. Mark and Aram, arriving just in time, managed to stop him and rescue Doina. Beaten to a pulp, Gaines was then jettisoned with his American ass firmly glued to his own nuke.
The first thing he did as he recovered, some time later, was to appear in the news.
And it had been the most important news in the history of news. Aliens existed, and they came to Earth! More, they’d been visiting for hundreds and hundreds of years!
