Shadows

by Brian Whiting

  “I did. Like everyone else, I’m still trying to wrap my head around our history.”

  “My people have always believed in ‘the great threat’ to our civilization.”

  “Yeah, we have always had doomsday cults and such as well.”

  “Those feelings were perpetuated by my people, no doubt. While our interactions have been limited and short, we have always pressed the issue of the great threat.”

  “I have always found it interesting when people would hold a belief so dear they would pass those beliefs down to their children. Yet, when asked to explain and prove their belief system, they would reply with feelings and evidence they created themselves. I hope you can do better than that.”

  “The orb and the language you have been learning is from the Iconian civilization. The orbs are like intergalactic relays. The one you have in your possession is the only one that we know exists. Everything we learned was from studying the orb. Once my people discovered you were traveling through space, the spiritualists made sure you would find the orb so we could communicate with each other.”

  “So the orb told you that a great threat was coming?”

  “How did you get the orb thirty feet into the Earth, surrounded by hard rock?” Pete asked.

  “Yeah, that too,” Timmy seconded.

  “We transported the orb instantly into the path of your digger.”

  Pete and Timmy looked at each other.

  “What seems magic to you is only science to us.”

  “You still haven’t answered the big question: Why?” Timmy leaned forward in his chair.

  “Well, over the years during the study of the orb we discovered a new type of transmission being sent and received by the orb. Not subspace, more like hyperspace communication. They encrypt their communications, but the video transmissions they send are clear enough. Planet after planet, populated worlds, and solar systems one after another fall and are completely eliminated over and over again by the swarm. They do not communicate, they do not hesitate, they are methodical, relentless, and they do not stop. They systematically kill every living sentient being.”

  “You think they are the expanding border threat, in the message we received,” Timmy asked.

  “We do.”

  “Don’t you have the means to go look yourself?”

  “We do, but the ships that can get there in a reasonable time are under the strictest security. Our people have not been able to do anything other than get one or two people on board.”

  “What do you want us to do?”

  “Alex is about to begin negotiations to enter a treaty with our people. This is his chance to get what we need to prove the existence of this threat. He needs to obtain a copy of the Techyon FTL design. It’s our fourth generation of FTL engines. Travel to the center would take about six months.”

  “One-year round trip. That’s a steep price for a recon mission.”

  “It’s a bargain. The alternative is to wait until they show up.”

  “So the Ikons, they have these sophisticated orbs. They must have the technology to stop the threat.”

  “They do or did, but it seems they have abandoned our galaxy.”

  “They abandoned our galaxy!” Timmy tried to wrap his mind around that comment, the decision to abandon billions of planets and stars. How advanced they must be to make such decisions. He looked at Pete stunned. “Can you imagine telling your people, ‘Hey, we need to pull out of this galaxy and regroup’?”

  “Timmy, our window is closing fast. Alex must not accept the treaty unless he gets those FTL designs.”

  The orb rested back onto the pedestal, and the glyphs began scrolling once again.

  Timmy looked to Pete again, who was busy shuffling through his extensive list of questions. “So, how did you do?”

  Pete scoffed and walked back toward his computer station. When he got there he tossed his clipboard onto the desk, knocking several items over, some spilling onto the floor.

  “Don’t get all upset. The next window should be early tomorrow.”

  “You have no idea why I’m upset, stay out of it.” Pete stormed out of sight.

  Timmy sat perplexed, then turned to look back at the orb. “We need to split you open and peek inside.”

  ***

  Alex waited patiently in his conference room for the council to arrive. His attention was squarely on his datapad.

  Laura walked in and sat down next to him holding two cups of coffee.

  “I am glad you’re back. It’s been terrible manning your desk without you here.”

  “I can’t imagine you’ve been terribly excited, working in an empty office every day.”

  Alex took notice of her beauty, and remembered how concerned he had been about it and how it would affect his relationship with Amanda. He cracked a smile at her and noticed that she took notice of it. She smiled in return.

  Taking advantage of his newfound ability, he reached out to feel her emotions. He blushed immediately as he noticed a sense of desire focused on him.

  He sniffed the coffee and pointlessly blew on the surface. Taking a sip of coffee to hide his reaction, “It’s good, thank you,” he said.

  Just then Gloria and Cindy walked into the room. Laura stood up and walked out. Relief washed over Alex.

  Lastly, Grissom stepped into Alex’s office, still scanning the last-minute details from his datapad as he entered the room. The room smelled of fresh coffee, and the sun was just rising out the large expansive windows.

  “Is Anonymous present?” Grissom asked as he took his seat.

  “Yes, I am here,” a computerized female voice came from the speaker in the center of the room.

  “As you know, the council room is under renovations for expansion, to include other members of our alliance. In the near future I’m sure we are going to need a separate building for this, but at the moment this room will have to do,” Alex began. “My office was not set up for recordkeeping, and with the ‘anonymous setup’ we had to improvise. Most important fact is our member still retains anonymity, and it’s near the end of their session in service, so I see little harm in continuing. If we are all agreed, I don’t see why we can’t all continue with augmented voice interaction with Anonymous.”

  Gloria, Cindy, and Anonymous all agreed.

  “That’s fine with me,” Grissom said.

  “I’ll be honest, I still haven’t had a whole lot of time to get caught up on the material since we returned. I’ve been focused on the negotiations with the cousins. I was just reading about the orphan stories that broke a couple weeks ago. Tell me about that.” Alex looked between Cindy and Gloria, who were responsible for infrastructure and medical, respectively.

  “We are pulling more and more people from the fence line and training them in construction. Right now we are planning on another entire complex-sized area on the other side on the hangar facilities. Very soon our bottleneck will be raw resources for the fabricators. The new facilities will house up to ten thousand orphans. It will also house an additional two hundred and fifty thousand people,” Cindy said.

  “My God, that’s a massive structure!” Gloria said, looking over the design on her datapad.

  “It’s very simple to build large structures with the fabricators. We just don’t have the resources. In the meantime we are adding tents to an area allotted for the orphans.”

  “How are we going to solve the material issue?” Alex inquired.

  “Well, we are pursuing two solutions. First is, we are using more of the people from the fence line who are interested in resource gathering; we are shipping them to the locations, making hasty living areas. They are filling containers which we obtain and fill our fabricators. The problem with that is no one really knows what they are doing, and a lot of people are getting hurt. I’ve got some people down there stressing safety but it’s hard going right now. Our input is nowhere near our output requirements. We are looking for a highly qualified leader for mining operations, we are com
ing up short.”

  “And the second option.”

  “Jorge is offering to fill some of our needs.”

  “Jorge! How can he help?” Alex said with a shocked expression.

  Grissom lowered his head a bit, knowing that Alex had not really read the reports very well, to miss such an important aspect. “Alex, you should be aware that we estimate that Jorge has built roughly twenty antigravity vehicles. We suspect he used the technology to forge a Latin alliance of sorts. He has eight countries on board and he’s giving them the use of the new craft. Latest report says he’s got about forty more under construction.”

  “What!”

  “The current deal we have struck is that we supply them with one of four things, and we get a tonnage of raw materials.”

  “Really,” Alex continued, still in shock. “What’s he asking for?”

  “He calls them units. Each unit includes a tv, video player, and ten random movies, with one portable air conditioner. Each unit provides us with one load of raw material. Option two is we provide food. Every pound of food gets us ten pounds of raw material or two pounds of mostly refined material. He’s got a spreadsheet for precious metals. Option three is armaments; they are defending themselves against the Zorn as much as we are, and there is a ratio of arms to material by weight. Then finally there’s the mystery option. That ratio is like five-hundred-million-to-one. Something called DM. We’ve asked him about what this means, but have received no response.”

  “Dark matter,” Alex said with a forced sigh.

  “I’m sorry, I’m not sure what that is,” Grissom replied.

  “It’s the secret material that allows us to build the antigravity propulsion devices.”

  “Can you make more of it?” Anonymous asked.

  “We can, but the process is time-consuming. Either way, if we continue to ramp up production of antigravity ships we will need a much larger collector array, and I know just where to put it. But there’s another matter we need to discuss: the digiforms.”

  “Yes, we are expanding our use of the digiforms. Much of our autonomous design efforts were a result of a small team of digiforms. They have been helpful; I see no need to continue limiting their use. We should allow them to serve in any capacity they wish.”

  Grissom watched as Alex readjusted his headset. Then he appeared to be considering something but failed to respond.

  “We seemed to have gotten sidetracked. This meeting was convened to discuss the latest version of the treaty with our long-lost cousins.”

  “Do we even need to have a treaty with them? I don’t like the idea that they have such disdain for us and have treated us so poorly over the years,” Anonymous said.

  “We know we don’t, but that would be foolish. There’s nothing to stop them from taking our planet and subjugating us all in the name of ownership. When their need is desperate enough, they might just decide to do that. I think it’s safer if we build a treaty; that way we can get some much-needed technology and resources.”

  Grissom scanned several pages of his datapad. “Yes, there are some very interesting technological claims in this report.”

  “Exactly!” Alex stated.

  “They are not interested in sharing everything they have, that much Lindi made clear in the beginning.”

  “Right, it would be silly to expect them to provide us with all their technology, but we can ask for certain things. Like medicine, for example,” Gloria said.

  “Why do you push so hard for their engine technology? That was the first thing you pushed for when that meeting started.” Grissom put down his datapad.

  Alex slowly stood up from his chair and laid his hands on the table.

  “I am not a military major, or top-rated medical professional or scientist. I am just a twenty-something kid who played strategic video games, read books, and watched movies all my life. When I look at this image, I don’t see blobs of color, I see a massive territory controlled by one race. I am convinced there is a terrible threat approaching us from the center of our galaxy, and I need to go see if it’s true. As I speak the Gothans are building a ship large enough to crew maybe twelve people and yet I might be the only one going. I will scout out this area and determine if there’s anything to be concerned about.”

  “It’s not reasonable to make an assumption based on one picture, Alex,” Grissom said as he remained seated.

  “Our cousins have this fear, too. Some of them do, anyway. They believe it.”

  “They have a belief, not unlike those who believe in the apocalypse here on Earth. It’s just silly storytelling,” Grissom said.

  “Just today, our subspace communication monitors detected a burst of erratic communications coming from this star.” Alex activated one of the display screens on the wall, on which now appeared a huge collection of stars. One star was highlighted, and a box appeared around it. “Our reports indicate for the past few months there were on average two to four subspace communications sent from this star system. All attempts to translate the messages have failed like with the other message we have received. Then two days ago that number jumped to well over a hundred subspace messages; at one point our array was receiving so many subspace pings, we weren’t able to separate and filter out the messages. Then as of last night, we have not heard even one subspace message.”

  Alex began to walk around the table toward the screen. “And now, our listeners tell me that this star”—he pointed to one right next to the boxed and highlighted one—“began sending increased subspace messages this morning.”

  “It’s compelling, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions,” Cindy said.

  “Symboli, let’s assume that star was just overrun by a massive alien force and has moved on to the neighbor star. Given the amount of time it took them to silence that star and move on to the next, how long would it be before they arrived in our system?”

  “Alex, those parameters would offer a highly inaccurate timetable,” Symboli spoke from the overhead speaker. “There are numerous subspace messages received, yet I detect patterns where others do not. If we are to assume this activity is an invasion fleet, then it’s safe to say there are over thirty invasion fleets in operation just within our galactic arm as we speak, with many indicators to suggest there are even more. With this information I would say a loosely framed timeframe of arrival would be three hundred and fifty years with a liberal spread plus or minus two hundred years. I would also like to add that I calculate a forty-two percent probability that it’s something other than an invasion. It could be technological advancement or many other possible plausibilities.”

  “Nothing we need to devote attention to right now; not even our grandchildren would have to worry about this,” Grissom said calmly.

  “No!” Alex shouted. “That’s the problem our world has had from the very beginning. Every politician kicks the can down the road for someone else to deal with, until the problem is so big there is nothing to do but just let it fester. If it’s what I think it is, we need to divert resources to this problem right now!”

  “Alex, I agree with Grissom. We don’t know if it’s a problem; what I do know is that people are hungry with poor medicines and deteriorating infrastructure. We can’t even take care of orphans properly, and you want to build a war machine on a hunch,” Anonymous said.

  “I agree with Anonymous!” Gloria said with a raised eyebrow.

  Alex stood up and began walking around the room. “Look, I understand, I completely agree. Which is why I’m going to find out for myself, recon, and come back. To do that I need a much faster ship.”

  “Yours will be undergoing repairs for over a year,” Cindy said, with empathy.

  “Don’t worry. I know we don’t have the resources to increase our shipbuilding efforts even more than we have already. Which is why I have the Gothans building me a ship. We will put our new engine on it, and I will go find out for myself.”

  “That’s what I’ve come to expect from you! The man who�
��s always running,” Grissom said almost venomously.

  “What do you mean by that?” Alex said from just behind Gloria’s shoulder.

  “You built the Surprise and went off into space. You admitted to me you didn’t think about the consequences of that action. You built the Destiny and tramped around an alien ship without thinking about the consequences of doing that. Then we build a ship humanity has never built before, and you bring it back in shambles in less than a year. Alex, you’re a man that jumps without thinking if he should. I think you’re dangerous and irresponsible.”

  Alex looked away from Grissom and stared out the massive glass window that overlooked the UEF complex. Feeling a bit perplexed, he knew Grissom wasn’t entirely wrong yet things are different now. Theres a bigger picture everyone needs to adjust to, he thought.

  “It’s not our first,” Anonymous said.

  “What?” Grissom snapped.

  “I said it’s not our first. Our cousins were spacefaring while we were relearning how to create the wheel.”

  ***

  Grissom took a deep breath and relaxed in his chair. He was beginning to hate the “anonymous” aspect of the command structure. He had already started looking for clever arguments to dissolve that seat, but had always come up short. Today was no different.

  “You’re right,” Alex responded and then returned to his seat. “Which is why I won’t ask anyone to join me; I will go alone. If I fail I’ll hurt no one but myself. I say we put the latest version of the treaty to a vote now.”

  “She didn’t really seem like she wanted to provide the engine technology. I hate to think of what we will have to give up if sh–”

  “We won’t,” Alex interrupted her. “We won’t have to give up anything. They need this treaty as much as we do, but for different reasons.”

  “Alex, if you’re leaving for that long, you’ll have to give up your seat on the council.”

  “No, I’ll just send my proxy.” Alex smiled.

  “You just loving making things up as you go, huh?” Grissom replied.

  “Alex, actually our charter forbids the use of proxies, if you remember,” Cindy said. Grissom himself had forgotten, but was now smiling.