[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (22 page)

A dull thud resounded in the room, feeling like someone had driven a truck into the base of the building, and a conical pyramid of air in front of the Agent’s eye seemed to waver. The armchair leapt backwards, crashing into the wall, then falling to the floor. A series of dents were left in the plaster where its corners had imbedded themselves.

“That was on about 25% of available power. I can also vary the focus of the wave from constant to an expansion ratio of about 100 to 1, meaning I can knock over a small crowd of people from about eight feet, or put a hole in someone’s torso from across the room. The laser I can increase to nearly treble the power of what I just used, but at this range that would have spontaneously ignited the entire mattress.

“There are other features of the weapons system, but those are the most dramatic, and, I hope, adequately demonstrative.” And with that, the Tactical Contact Weapons Array folded back into his eye socket, and the façade of an eyeball rose to cover it again.

“Neal, Madeline,” he said, looking from one to the other, “I need to know you believe me now, we haven’t much more time and we have much to discuss. Hopefully from my demonstration you have extrapolated at least a couple of things …”

Neal raised a hand and John paused. Neal was, understandably, stunned by what he had seen, but as fast as things were moving, he mind was racing, starting to stretch to meet them, and he knew it was his turn to show what he could do.

“Allow me,” Neal said, looking earnestly at John, his hand still raised, “Firstly, it is clear that if you meant us harm we would not be alive now. We have no way of defending ourselves against what I have just seen.”

John nodded, happy Neal was taking the opportunity to prove he could handle the responsibility John was here to put on his shoulders.

“Second, I am quite certain we cannot produce anything capable of what you can clearly do, so that makes me as close to certain as I can bring myself to be that you are … not … from … here.”

John nodded at Neal, who let that sink in, glancing at Madeline, who’d had much longer with this, but was still now only just getting to the place Neal was arriving at now.

It was clear why the scientist had been one of the few to surmise the importance of the meteors, and why he and his friends had been the only ones to figure out how to go after them. It filled John with something approximating hope that he had found these two, or rather that they had been the ones who found him.

Neal seemed about to go on, but John decided to give him a break, “
Not from here
, that is certainly one way of putting it, and maybe that aspect of my story is as good a place to start as any.”

John picked up three pads from the desk and handed one each to each of the members of his small but eager audience, keeping one for himself as he said, “You’ll need these.”

Madeline grabbed a couple of pens from the desk and took a seat next to Neal as John began.

In the annals of the past, at about the time that the first caveman was accidentally striking a flame to life with what was to be the first flint firestarter, the still evolving people of another planet were also expanding across the continents of their globe.

They were, in many ways, very similar to us. They had evolved on four legs, their front feet eventually adapting to allow them to pick up, and finally manipulate the objects that surrounded them. They were also, like us, hunter-gatherers, the same natural selection bringing their two eyes to the front of what we would call their heads so that they could have the depth perception necessary for pursuing prey.

Their opposable digits evolved slightly differently than ours, with two of their ‘fingers’ bending backward, and two forward. Their ‘hands’, therefore, evolved as having two fingers and two thumbs each, making them extremely dexterous, but without anything analogous to our palms. Their wrists simply ending in four flexible joints from which their thick interlocking fingers and thumbs protruded.

Their hind legs were bent backward, lending them to something closer to a rhythmic hop than our own run. Thus their hunting tactic had been more of an ambush than a pursuit, but their powerful legs could carry them over great distances with ease, making migration a natural step in the development of their species.

As time passed, the developing intelligence of this species began to discover the benefits of agriculture, as humanity also would many light-years away. This began with planting crops apparently at random along their path, but returning prior to harvest to reap the rewards.

Their primitive culture continued much like this for millennia, longer even than the Stone Age of the first cavemen. Because of their nomadic way of life, the concept of property came much later, and with far greater brutality than even our own prehistorically violent past. At inherently strategic places at the touching points of their great continents, certain tribes began to settle and fortify. As their still nomadic cousins passed by with the changes of the seasons, these first settlers became traders and primitive hoteliers. As the populations of these first cities and towns grew, the cost of maintaining their ever larger populations grew accordingly, and eventually the concept of tax and levy came to them. With taxation came feudalism, with feudalism came further fortification, and soon the towns became city states, bordered by great walls, imposing their costs upon the still migratory peoples of the great continents they bordered.

Partly as a consequence of these levies, the migratory paths of the remaining nomads started to be pushed into new sea-lanes, a revolution in naval technology and navigation driven by the necessity to survive.

Over time, the fortified city states became nations, expanding their borders into the wide open continents to either side of them, and claiming more and more of the lands of their nomadic cousins. As these burgeoning empires, and their great dynastic families, made the agriculture of the nomads a permanent feature of the land, the nomads were forced into ever more isolated patches along the coast, migrating between distant free lands on their ever improving ships.

Over the next few thousand years, the roles of the two slowly shifted. Whereas the nomads had previously made up the vast majority of the population, the empires now held a greater number. The nomads, relegated to the remaining freelands, slowly became traders, moving first the food, and then the goods of the great empires across the planet’s oceans. As they did so, the small ports that had grown up in the freelands began to grow into a loosely allied network of great port cities that housed their meager but growing wealth and influence.

The great empires eventually covered all the land and began washing up against each other. Great wars raged along their highly contested borders, alliances and feuds bending them like the tides of history as great leaders came and went.

Meanwhile, the trading families of the world stood firm in an alliance of mutually assured destruction, uniting as necessary against any over-ambitious empire that tried to dominate one of their brethren. Their ships made up the life blood of the planet, pumping its goods between its nations, and the strict sanctions imposed on any nation that attacked one of their port cities constricted that flow until either control of the port was relinquished, or the interloping empire shriveled, leaving it ripe for destruction at its neighbor’s hands.

And so centuries passed.

The warring empires kept a strict control over their populaces, limiting freedom but concentrating their resources into the development of ever-greater weaponry and defenses.

Meanwhile the freer, but much smaller, trading families enjoyed greater inventiveness and creativity, their ships’ size and armament growing apace with the perennial potential for attack by jealous emperors.

This might have continued indefinitely if not for the two inventions that would change the planet’s fortunes as drastically as they would shape our own when we, in time, also stumbled upon them.

The invention of the steam and combustion engine spurned a new age of productivity and warfare. While the great tanks of the empires raged across the lives of their unfortunate serfs, the trading families’ ships underwent an order of magnitude change in size and speed, giving these merchant navies even greater mobility, and with it, independence.

A hundred years later the invention of the nuclear bomb froze every empire in its tracks. After the destruction of a quarter of one empire’s population by another, even the victors were forced to concede that their victory was moot at best, the land they had craved having been rendered useless for a generation. But while nuclear power temporarily ended the wars on land in a tense stalemate, the creativity of the trading families saw another use for the great heat of the atom.

The first atomic vessel sailed from the port city of Seilajeh at the beginning of the decade that would change everything. In its holds were the reactors it was shipping to its allied city states. Working together, they had managed to harness the power of the atom to useful ends, and a new age was about to begin. Ten years later, they used the wealth flowing from the electricity they were selling to the great empires to build the first craft to escape the confines of their atmosphere. That first craft was manned by a host of volunteers who had begged to make the voyage, their nomadic instincts driving them all to lust after this first voyage of discovery in an age.

The next century saw the establishment of great lanes of travel and trade across the stratosphere. The trading families purchased from the stagnating empires a series of islands and peninsulas on which to build the planet’s first spaceports, and slowly but surely the embryonic technologies of space travel took form.

Fearing the potential for a shift of power, the empires eventually began to rein in on the expansion of the traders and restart their own growth. They leveraged their tight control over the majority of the world’s natural resources to buy themselves into space alongside the traders.

But the empires’ goals in space were different from their still inherently nomadic partners. The nuclear bomb had put an end to their ability to grow, and their populations were filling their borders. They needed property. They needed space.

First to be colonized were the three small moons orbiting the planet. Then the great space stations started to form, haphazardly at first, until Junta was started, a great hub large enough to be seen from the planet’s surface by the naked eye, even in daylight. When it was finished, it would cast a great shadow below, eclipsing the sun as it passed by overhead.

It housed nearly a billion people on its huge, spinning wheel, but it was clear even before Junta was complete that even great space stations would never be enough to house the ever growing population, nor to satiate the hungry palates of the great dynastic families still ruling below.

They needed another planet.

This, of course, was not a new idea, the first thing that the empires had paid the traders to do was send out probes past nearby systems seeking such a prize. But none were found within the range of practical flight.

As technologies for faster travel were explored, the option of subspace or hyperspace travel was exhaustively pursued. While the vast wealth that was ploughed into this avenue would produce no method of travelling faster than light, it would produce fruit of another kind, and so the subspace tweeter, with all its considerable benefits, was born. And it was after creating one of the minuscule wormholes necessary to make the subspace tweeter work that one team of Nomad scientists was able to stretch some of the properties of that subspace strata outward like a bubble in the hopes of creating a doorway into this realm of instantaneous travel.

But the experiment had some strange results. As the subspace sphere enveloped the very engine that was expanding it, its contents temporarily ceased to be governed by the rules that hold sway in our universe.

Scientists were baffled, at first, by the results of the experiment, as the apparatus had appeared to simply vanish. But, after the building they were experimenting in started shaking and then collapsed, the survivors had discovered the remnants of the apparently partially successful experiment merged into its very foundations.

As the sphere had formed, it had, indeed, removed the constraints of the universe on its contents, as had been hoped. It had not disappeared, but had become invisible and intangible, light and matter now passing through it like it was not there. Unfortunately, it was still subject to forces in subspace, and the gravitational well of a planet is so great it affects even the non-space below the skein of reality. And so, without the solidity of matter to stop it, the sphere and its contents had started to fall into the very gravity well it was being designed to escape, rematerializing a moment later, merging with the building’s foundations, displacing and undermining them; quite literally bringing the house down.

The next time the premise was tested, the scientists were ready, and the world looked on in amazement as the sphere, dropped from a great height, passed clean through the planet to materialize in open space on the other side, not only unharmed by the passage, but sling-shotted outward by it.

It did not take long to realize the vast implications of this discovery. Seeking to harness the power of the stars, scientists tried to tap into the phenomenal gravitational pull of their sun. The next evolution of the new invention was accelerating toward the sun when they initiated the sphere, blinking back into existence a month later on the other side like a ball shot from a stellar cannon.

It was a steady evolution from there on. Changing the angle of entry into the sun changed the direction of exit, and speed could be progressively increased more and more by stringing together progressive ‘jumps’ through other stars, planets, and moons en route.

The only limit to the speed attainable was the power necessary to maintain the sphere’s integrity during solar entry and exit, and the vast engines that were necessary to decelerate it afterward.