The Mothership (58 page)

“They’ll detect the shockwaves,” Beckman
said. “They’ll know they hit days after the ship crashed.”

 We have disabled your world’s energy
supply, rendering your seismic sensors inoperable.

“You did what?”

At this moment, there is no electricity
generation anywhere on your world.

“How could you black out our entire
planet?”

Your technology is fragile, easily
neutralized. We have also collapsed all Intruder mine shafts, making them
appear to be subsidences caused by the asteroid impacts.

“No one’s going to believe two asteroids
hit the Earth at the same time. The odds of that would be insane.”

They will think it was one asteroid, that
broke up as it entered your atmosphere. Analysis of the asteroid debris will
prove that beyond doubt.

“What about the satellites? And the planes
that crashed? I suppose the asteroids bounced off them on the way down?”

Your star is currently experiencing what
you call sunspot activity. It is the most severe such event in your recorded
history. It has already disabled all of your satellites and will be seen to be
the cause of your planet wide power failure.

Beckman looked puzzled. “Kind of
coincidental, isn’t it?”

No. We stimulated your star to produce the
required activity.

Beckman was shocked. “You can do that?”

 The inner planet you call Mercury has been
slightly damaged, but it is a lifeless world, and the damage will not prevent
you utilizing its resources when your civilization is more advanced.

“Tough break for Mercury.”

The image returned again to the wide angle
view of the fleet floating above the Earth. The two brilliant points of light
in northern Australia turned slowly to brown clouds that mushroomed up through
the stratosphere.

“You’re forgetting one thing. I know. The
people with me know.” Beckman glanced down at the Earth with a sinking feeling.
“That’s why I’m up here, isn’t it? You’re not letting us go back?”

You have been brought here for cleansing.
No trace of contact will remain within your cellular structures. That is all.

For the first time, Beckman remembered the
plasma wound that had burned his chest. He looked down confused, finding no
trace of the wound. He rubbed his hand across the perfectly healthy hair and
skin on his chest, wondering if the self inflicted wound had been a bad dream,
then he stared out at the technological leviathans floating above a beautiful
and ignorant world. “But I’ll still know.”

The Biologist’s response was a long time in
coming.

No, you won’t.

* * * *

Dr McInness stood
on a rocky outcrop, peering at the dust cloud ten kilometers away. It filled
the western sky, obscuring the last rays of sunset as it was carried away to
the north by the prevailing winds. In spite of the long hot hike from the
coast, he felt remarkably fit, even refreshed. He was surprised that his
fitness had held up so well. He had no idea that just a few hours earlier the
bones in his ankle had been crushed.

Standing beside the scientist, Beckman
peered through his binoculars toward the base of the asteroid impact. The
debris cloud was still too thick to see the impact area, but it was clearing.
“We should be able get in there tomorrow.”

“We should wait another day,” Dr McInness
said. “The air is like soup down there.”

“No, I want to get this over with. I have
letters to write,” Beckman said grimly, glancing uncomfortably at the four
freshly dug graves laid out under a white limbed gum tree. Burying Markus,
Steamer, Cougar and Timer had been grisly work. He wasn’t even sure if they’d put
the correct body parts in the right graves, but they’d done the best they
could. At least, that was what the implanted memories told him. He didn’t know
why Steamer’s fatboy had exploded, killing all four, but the sight of his men
being torn apart was something he’d never forget. No autopsy would ever
discover that the body parts in the graves had been synthesized from DNA
samples and irradiated as if exposed to a weapon overload. He kept telling
himself it was an accident, but even so, he was going to kick some egghead’s
butt when he got back to Groom Lake. They should have known the damn things
were unstable.

We should have stuck to the weapons we
understood
.
This alien
crap is too unreliable.

Beckman would fight hard until the day he
died to make that policy. It was an implanted drive programmed by a quantum
electrical device buried deep within the cellular structure of his brain. It
isolated some memories from his conscious mind, but otherwise did not interfere
with his functioning. The quantum implants that he and his companions now
carried would function only while they were alive. Once their core temperatures
cooled, the implants would dissolve into the surrounding tissue, leaving no
trace of their existence. “We’ll hike in tomorrow, evac tomorrow night,” he
said, then started down the slope to the camp.

Virus had his headphones on and was channel
surfing the short wave. It was an exact, indistinguishable copy of the radio
that the seeker had blown out of Hooper’s hands. Care had been taken to ensure
that even the impurities in the metals were copied, to prevent any indication
that the radio had been fabricated by a vastly superior civilization.

“You established contact yet?” Beckman
asked.

Virus shook his head, motioning towards the
southern sky. “It’s a total shut out.”

“Keep trying. I want those choppers here in
forty-eight hours.”

Beckman walked over to the Australian
zoologist standing near the campfire with her husband. The aboriginal trackers
and a group of local hunters sat around the fire watching a big kangaroo
roasting in the flames. Laura was gazing up at the colored lights winding
across the darkening sky with a puzzled expression. Beckman glanced up at the
waves of color streaking the heavens, impressed. He’d heard they were similar
to the northern lights but now that he saw them, he realized they were much
bigger and brighter.

“They’re beautiful.”

Laura looked confused. “They are, but I’ve
never seen them this far north.”

“What do you call them?”

“Aurora Australis. You normally have to be
way down south to see them. And they’re never this spectacular.”

“It’s the sunspots,” Xeno said.

“Bloody big sunspots,” Slab said from the
fire. He sat beside Dan pushing the kangaroo into the flames with a stick. He
was still silently cursing Bill’s lousy navigation. If Bill hadn’t hit that
submerged rock and sunk their boat, he’d be downing his favorite beer now, not
drinking tasteless water full of purification tablets.

Guess it’s better than dying of thirst
, he thought miserably.

Sergeant Hooper looked at the roasting
kangaroo dubiously. His right side felt strangely stiff, a side effect of the
accelerated cell regeneration that had healed his burns. In a day, the
stiffness would be gone and forgotten, although it would not be until he
returned to base that he would discover the inverted dagger tattoo on his right
shoulder had inexplicably vanished. His left arm, by contrast, had no
indication that the bones had ever been broken. “What’s it taste like?”

“Chicken!” Wal declared with a grin.

Bill smacked his lips together in
anticipation. “Very lean beef.”

“I don’t care what it tastes like,” Nuke
said eagerly, “I’m starving.” Like Hooper, he felt stiff, although it would
take almost a week for his cloned lungs to fully meld into his system. Even
though his chest had been opened by the surgeons, there were no scars, while
the synthetic blood flowing through his veins would significantly increase his
life span.

“You don’t mind eating your national
symbol?” Hooper asked.

“Meat’s meat, mate,” Slab said.

“Slab would eat boot leather,” Cracker
said, “if he had a cold one to wash it down with.”

“You should try tiger shark,” Dan said.
“Now that really is like eating leather.”

“I’d eat fried eagle, if I was hungry,”
Tucker said, fingering his knife impatiently.

Hooper sniffed the aroma rising from the
roasting meat, deciding it smelt like beef. He was hungry enough to eat half a
dozen steaks, but then increased appetite was a common side effect of the treatment
he’d undergone.

Bandaka pointed to the western sky. “Look.”

Beckman and the others turned in the
direction the hunter indicated. Approaching barely a hundred meters above the
ground were three brilliant lights. Two were spheres of glowing white light,
dazzling against the darkening sky and the debris cloud in the distance, while
darting back and forth between them was a much smaller, brilliant red light.
The red light zigzagged erratically, making acute angle high speed turns, while
the two glowing white orbs floated in formation as they glided towards the
east. The leading white light was slightly higher and ahead of its trailing
companion. When they were almost due south of the camp, the two white balls of
light hovered motionless, while the small red light performed several more
acute angle turns, then came up into formation between its two larger
companions. For a moment the three lights floated in the sky, then in perfect
unison, they streaked away to the south, curving up vertically, to shoot straight
up out of the atmosphere.

“Did you see that?” Laura asked with
amazement.

Beckman looked around, feigning ignorance.
“See what?”

“I suppose they were weather balloons?” she
asked.

“Could be,” Beckman conceded with mock
seriousness. “Or Venus.”

“Or swamp gas,” Dr McInness said, then
furrowed his brow. “Is there a swamp around here?”

Laura glanced meaningfully at the midget
strapped to his hip. Beckman didn’t know it yet, but the tiny weapon would
never again fire. It had been returned to him, with its power source depleted.
In time, they would discover all of the recovered weapons in their possession
had ceased functioning. A panel of experts would eventually conclude the mass
malfunction was the result of an unknown side effect of the extraordinary
sunspot activity boiling across the face of the sun.

Beckman smiled, relenting. “Or maybe
someone else finds this asteroid impact as interesting as we do.”

From the shadows at the edge of camp, a
small form appeared. It was Mapuruma, anxious and uncertain. She eyed the
adults apprehensively, then glanced warily into the darkened forest.

“There she is!” Bandaka exclaimed with
relief, rushing over and scooping his daughter into his arms. “Mapu, I was
worried about you.”

Mapuruma hugged her father with wide,
flitting eyes that darted anxiously towards the darkening forest.

“Where have you been?” Bandaka asked.

“Hiding,” she replied in a tiny voice.

Bandaka looked surprised. “From what?”

Mapu stared into her father’s eyes,
unsettled by his calmness, then she gazed up in amazement at the colored lights
rippling across the firmament while her father pressed her for an answer.
Finally, she replied, telling a bizarre tale of demons in the forest and evil
spirits in the sky. She told it with a sense of awe, for in her eyes it was a
tale of magic and monsters. When she finished, she swore every word was true,
and that a spell had stolen the truth from their minds.

Though she pleaded for them to believe her,
no one ever did.

During her
captivity, no one spoke to Nemza’ri. She knew her implants had been repaired
and reactivated, but they were no longer under her control. Her captors used
them to drain her mind of her most personal experiences and gather all she knew
of her own kind. While she sat in isolation in a white walled room with nothing
but a small bed to sleep on, the information extracted painlessly from her mind
was spread far and wide, to more than a thousand civilizations who were now
intimately aware of the true nature of the Intruder species. Formal alliances
multiplied across the Galaxy to ensure the security of all peaceful societies
would never again be threatened. Those unfortunate worlds that had fallen under
Intruder control had been liberated in the blink of an eye by the Firsts, and
were now being more slowly restored by the Alliance to the levels of
development they had achieved before their conquest.

Nemza’ri knew none of this. She’d expected
when her interrogation was over, to be executed. She was crew and of a military
clan, deserving nothing less, for she had failed. Their campaign had failed.
She wondered if her homeworld had been destroyed, and her kind exterminated.
She even suspected she was the last survivor of her race, so brutal did she
expect the reprisal to be.

When her interrogation ended, one of her
implants induced her to sleep. What followed was a dreamless state more akin to
stasis than slumber. When she awoke, she was surrounded by med drones of a
familiar design. To her surprise, her implants were again under her control.
Nemza’ri sat up, confused. Medical officers of her own race told her she was in
perfect health, and that high clan officers were waiting to speak to her. They
wanted a full account of her experiences, and especially her contacts, for she
was the last to return.