Illegal Aliens (18 page)

The avantor closed her mouth with a snap. So they had.

Impeccable in a cream-colored Nehru jacket and matching turban, Dr. Malavade noted that accidents will happen.

“Chalk it up to scientific fervor,” Sir John said, dressed in an incongruous, but historically accurate, tam-o’-shanter, weskit, family tartan kilt, knickers and silver buckle shoes. Only alien beings, or other Scotsmen, would think his outfit dapper.

Studying the human faces, Avantor briefly wondered if something was decaying on the planet of cheese makers. “Verify that it is him, 17,” she commanded her assistant.

As ordered, the golden male stuck a finger into the warm glop and put it in his mouth. Hmm, not bad actually. Modified vegetable fiber, slightly radioactive, enriched with elemental beryllium and benzene. Check, that was the physiology of Trell's species, all right.

“It's him, my liege,” he reported erroneously.

Satisfied, the avantor wheeled about and marched into the ship, The 16 following close at her heels with the covered bucket. Seconds later, the door to the loading bay closed behind them.

Almost immediately, a harsh buzzing sound filled the air and the white ship lifted up, as easy as a child's balloon, compressed dirt falling from the bottom of the sphere as it floated into the nighttime sky. Heedful of the Earth people below, Avantor kept the engines at 10/10, barely sufficient to lift the enormous vessel, until they were well away from the planetary surface. Then The 17 boosted the reactor to 20/20. With an explosion of power, the ship vanished into the starry black of space.

Shortly thereafter, NASA signaled Dr. Malavade on his cell phone that the alien craft had shunted into hyperspace, and he happily announced the fact to his compatriots.

“Well, well,” Nicholi smirked, feeling very pleased with himself and the world in general. “We did it.”

Dr. Wu took off her ceremonial robe and folded it over an arm, exposing the floral print dress she’d been wearing earlier this day. “Yes, it does appear that way,” she said in agreement.

“How long do you think it will take them to realize that they’ve been tricked?” Bronson asked, as a night breeze tugged on the lighter flame he applied to his latest cigar.

Prof. Rajavur shrugged. “With any luck, never. But we’re planning on lift-off in a month.”

Ignoring his buzzing pager, General Bronson exhaled a stream of smoke. “Is that possible? To build a starship from scratch in 30 days?”

“With the resources of the entire world behind us?” Rajavur asked, removing his red sash and tucking it into his silk hat. “Most certainly.”

“What was in that bucket anyway?” Mohad asked, as he unraveled his turban. Silly things, turbans, but women seemed to like them. Made him appear taller, at least.

Yuki gave him a tired grin. “Minced asparagus, bombarded with gamma radiation, laced with powdered beryllium and a dash of cleaning solution. I based the formula on what Trell had requested for lunch.”

“I am so glad this worked,” Sir John said, doffing his tam-o’-shanter and stroking his moustache. “But just in case, I had a duplicate of Trell waiting in the wings, so to speak. I based on that scenario we played out four years ago, in the event it became necessary to disguise humans as aliens. I even had duplicates of Avantor, Idow, the Bloody Deckers and us.”

In the act of checking his cell phone for any messages, General Nicholi raised an eyebrow. Another Yuki? Impossible.

Dr. Wu frowned. Another Nicholi? No thank you.

Deep in thought, the six members of the defunct First Contact Team turned away from the crumbling edge of the colossal hole in the ground. Taking their time, they strolled back to a waiting limousine and the fantastic task ahead of them.

“Where is Trell anyway?” Dr. Wu asked, after a while.

Rajavur smiled. “Right now? Aboard a B17 stealth jet, en route to Kennedy Space Center, telling us everything he knows about starship engines, force shields, proton cannons, hyperdrive, and galactic politics.” Then, sullenly, the diplomat kicked at a clod of dirt in his way. “Bit of a pity, though.”

“What is?” Nicholi asked, genuinely surprised. “Our plan seems to have come off flawlessly.”

Prof. Rajavur stuck his hands in his pants pockets. “Almost. You see, Trell claims to know absolutely nothing about Deflector Plating.”

Dr. Malavade stopped walking then and lifted his head to look at the twinkling points of light above the city, stars that were no longer so distant, or unreachable. “As you say, a pity.”

SEVENTEEN

Just like a yoyo on a string, the Cape Kennedy technician hung suspended from a steel cable and body harness rig high in the air alongside a nearly completed starship.

Grimly, the woman concentrated on her welding, as the fate of Earth might well rest on the quality of her work. Warm sea breezes gently tugged the woman's hair free from her cap. Visibly annoyed, she tucked it into the collar of her sweat-stained uniform. There had been little time for food and rest, and none for laundry if she was to stay on her rigid work schedule.

On the distant horizon, across a thousand flat acres of ferroconcrete, the towering space shuttle assembly buildings appeared like doll houses, and yet they seemed to look fatherly at the starship taking form before them. Pride of accomplishment overwhelming any negative feelings about the NASA state-of-the-art technology becoming obsolete virtually overnight.

Wary of pinching her fingers, the woman judiciously lowered the last armored section of the starship's hull into place and activated her hand tool. Very carefully, the technician guided a molecular softening beam along the joining line of the metallic plates, causing their atomic structures to intermingle and form a single unbroken mass. The entire hull of the colossal starship had been formed this way, out of thousands of curved adamantine sheets that not even a nuclear laser could have heat welded.

With her right hand, the woman artfully cold-fused the pieces together, while her gainfully employed left hand held the internal components of the alien tool in place. The hastily assembled device had been built under Trell's adroit direction, with no consideration given for unnecessary items like a case, handle or convenience.

Over the last thirty days, backed by the money and power of the United Nations, NASA had completely retooled its Florida base. They slapped together devices and machines with unheard-of abilities as fast as they could. Time was paramount. Every second saved was more precious than gold, a word that left a sour taste in everybody's mouth these days.

Also in the past month, the First Contact Team had abdicated from its position of power and returned the world to autonomy. The United Nations politely thanked them for a job well done, awarded the team a wheelbarrow full of medals, then disbanded the unit and reassigned its members to new, top priority duties. Then when nobody was looking, the UN Security Council took swift steps to assure that such an incredible usurpation of authority would never happen again. Among other things, they set fire to the FCT's mainframe Cray supercomputer, filled the Command Bunker with concrete and welded the door shut.

Meanwhile, thanks to their improved scanning devices, (courtesy of Trell, again), Earth knew precisely when the Great Golden Ones started moving in their mobile space forts to form a blockade around the planet. Subsequently, the final countdown for launch had been advanced. Spaceworthiness was the top priority, the internal work could be finished once the ship was in flight.

With a satisfied nod, the technician tucked her hand tool away and turned on the air tank of her scuba outfit. Under constant visual observation, this act told her superiors that the work was completed. They immediately cut her support cable.

Down through the air the woman dropped, expertly angling her fall to swan-dive into a huge vat of thermal jelly that had been waiting six stories below her. With a loud clang, thick steel shutters slammed into place and sealed off the top of the vat just in time. Second later, huge gouts of searing green flame washed over the launch site, cracking the ferroconcrete apron and melting every unprotected item. Smooth and majestic, humanity's first starship lifted into the clear azure sky.

But after a kilometer or so, the ion drive of the vessel began to sputter and cough, causing the interstellar craft to wobble about erratically. Extending for hundreds of meters about the ship, its poorly tuned anti-gravity field started liberating countless volumes of turbulent air, which quickly formed a hurricane about the comically bobbing globe. This only made the huge, ungainly starship doubly visible from space. Immediately on the alert, the Great Golden Ones dispatched a sleek war cube to intercept the sluggish escapee.

* * *

Aboard the golden flagship of the spaceborne armada, Avantor, now a junior grade avantor, and her primary assistant, The 16, sternly stared at the bow monitor. Only the extenuating circumstances of the situation had given them another chance to safeguard the primitive planet and protect their pensions. The Budget Department had wanted to send the two inept guardians back to Dirt in a Class 2 garbage scow. But Tactical had overridden that suggestion, although fitting, and equipped the pair with a Class 10 superdreadnought, along with an even thousand robot space forts. This was done out of a wish to see the job done properly, and partially the desire just to insert a dead tree branch into the sight receptors of Budgeting.

Their new ship was not a globe or a cube, but a mighty centihedron, a multi-planed sphere with a hundred sides and 150 points, each of them armed with energy weapons of frightfully destructive abilities. While it was many times the size of their old ship, the superdreadnought was still only designed for a two-being crew, since the gargantuan Choron reactor used so much room. Their personal suites were pleasant enough, though, and the brig was nice and large.

When asked, their new mega-computer had given a 90%+ probability of the Dirtlings trying something dramatic before finally accepting defeat. So it was no great surprise when they spotted a near duplicate of Idow's captured ship struggling to reach the freedom of space.

Avantor wiggled her eyebrows in professional admiration at the remarkable sophistication of the craft, crude as it was. They must have some extraordinarily good scientists down there to deduce so much of galactic technology after so brief a glimpse. It was a pity about the quarantine order. But such a violently robust species must be kept to their home world until they learned social restraint, and some proper respect for the law.

“What's our situation, 16?” the woman asked, relaxing in her new form-fitting command chair. She was serenely positive that everything was under control, and just as incorrect as she had been the last time.

“Something appears to be dreadfully wrong, my liege,” the male said, touching the bald spot in his golden hair where his new remote computer control had been implanted. “I am receiving reports from our space forts of not merely one, but numerous launches from all over this planet. Twenty, forty, no, fifty ships have lifted off!”

“Show me,” Avantor commanded, leaning forward in her seat.

The technician tilted his head and the walls of their control room filled with holographic views of the planet below them. Everywhere from the planetary surface, flocks of giant blue balls were struggling to reach the freedom of space.

Without a trace of humor, Avantor grimaced. A mass escape, eh? Damn clever these Dirtlings, but the trick would not avail them.

“Activate the color tracker, 16,” she loftily commanded.

Her assistant nodded to her, almost inadvertently causing the life-support equipment to turn itself off. “Affirmative, my liege.”

Then something on the monitor caught the avantor's attention. She blinked and then thoughtfully scrutinized the dozens of bright red globes floating above the planet. Hadn't those vessels just been blue?

“The Dirtling ships are changing color!” The 16 exclaimed, confirming her worst fears. “My liege, we won't be able to track them through hyperspace if they can do that!”

Stiffly, the female warrior rose from her command chair. “That does it,” she snapped irritably. “Activate the force shield damper and prepare to fire our main cannon. I hate to destroy sentient beings, but we warned them about this. Now let them learn that the Great Golden Ones are not entities to be trifled with.”

“Affirmative, my liege,” The 16 grunted, as unhappy about this as his Leader. Staring at the bow monitor with his pupilless eyes, the short male lowered his head and from point thirty-four of their geometric craft there reached out a shimmering gold pencil of destruction that struck the nearest of the Earth vessels. Capable of coring a small moon, the Dispersal Ray was unstoppable by anything short of pure neutronium. So it was a great shock to the Gee soldiers when the deadly energy beam bounced harmlessly off the smooth hull of the green ball and ricocheted back to vaporize the support drone flying next to them.

“Impossible,” the junior avantor gasped, limply collapsing back into her golden chair. “That was a Dispersal Ray, a full power Dispersal Ray. How could they have just shrugged it off?”

“M-my liege,” the pale 16 stammered, even paler drops of yellow moisture glistening on his forehead. “You don't suppose that the Dirtlings could have, you know, by themselves invented . . . ”

Avantor's eyes flew open wide, her mind flooding with comprehension.

“Deflector Plating?”
they wailed in unison. “OH NO!”

* * *

Of the fifty purple globes rising from the surface of the Earth, only the starship from Florida held a live crew. The rest were multi-million dollar decoys, robot ships whose sole task it was to confuse the Great Golden Ones by getting the manned craft lost in the crowd. A near precise duplicate of Idow's Mikon #4, the manned vessel was well over half a kilometer in diameter and had an 80 person crew: seventy-nine human beings and Trell. The little green opportunist had been happy to collaborate with the FCT, telling them everything he knew. Trell had even invented something called Deflector Plating out of thin air when they flatly insisted that he do so. In exchange for this, they didn't turn him over to the Great Golden Ones. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement, as nobody, especially Trell, wanted to see him shipped off to Galopticon 7.

Internally the starship was a mess, with empty packing crates, excelsior stuffing, spare parts, bedding, food, and mounds of supplies piled everywhere. In point of fact, the vessel carried almost enough spare parts to build another starship. But this was an absolute necessity, as the craft would be a long way from home and no stardrive parts were standardized. They more closely resembled Rolls Royce luxury cars, as the engines were handcrafted and thus performed with a smoothness of operation that was near legendary.

Aboard the human constructed starship, Planetary Ambassador Rajavur, Trell and a platoon of the brand new UN Space Marines nervously crossed their fingers and prayed. They were very glad indeed that Gees had only fired a warning shot across their bow. Hopefully, the space police wouldn't have time to unleash any real weapons, before they were long gone.

Champing with impatience, the diplomat, soldiers and alien waited for the moment when their Swiss captain would twist together a pair of electrical wires and activate the shipboard computer. The machine would then drastically shrink the size of their gravity field and boost their flabby drive flame into a raging inferno of power, exponentially increasing the ship's speed. With any luck, this would enable them to catch the Gees off guard and get far enough away from their home world to be able to shunt into the dubious void of hyperspace.

It was a brave, almost foolhardy plan, and the grand representatives of Earth honestly had no idea if they could actually smash through the impressive space blockade. Or when they did, if the captain could then find the real Galactic League, or if Rajavur could successfully argue their case for admittance. Everybody aboard the stout craft only knew a single fact for certain.

That the brave crew of the UNSF:
Hector Ramariez
was sure as Hell going to try!