Charger the Soldier (6 page)

The Mahoud engineers soon learned that, while
the radiation emitted from their created sun was not very harmful
to humans, it weakened the core fragment. That was what had caused
the water to rise and swamp the island temple. The weakness in the
core fragment also began to affect the gravity experienced by
people.

This was only the beginning. The radiation
gradually caused mutation in the plants they grew. The ingestion of
plant matter by the herbivores who were, in turn, consumed by the
humans, along with generous amounts of plant matter, began to alter
the gestation period and the growth of newborn infants. This
alteration exacerbated the existing condition of dwarfism acquired
as an island nation on Earth. Now adaptation was producing
small-bodied, large-brained individuals who were more reliant on
their advanced robots, the Taskers, than they had been on the old
ones.

Endellan was sad to see the disappearance of
her beloved refuge on the water, but she understood the changes
that were taking place on their world and she was one of those who
guided the plans carried out to save the people. Their most radical
adaptation was the building of extremely complex synthetic suits
into which they encapsulated themselves. The suits included goggles
to protect their eyes from the sun's radiation, which made everyone
look as if they had gold-colored multifaceted eyes, much like the
huge eyes of dragonflies. The surface of the protective suit
absorbed minute particles of carbon and eventually appeared almost
black.

There were, however, dissidents to this
solution. These people saw themselves as non-interfering
individuals who wanted to continue a pure, natural adaptation to
the changing environment. They decided that, whatever the
consequences of evolution on this world, they would allow it to
happen to them, and so decided that retreating to an area outside
the influence of the city was the best course. They spent many days
wandering in the wilderness until they chanced upon a place called
the promised land by the leader of the group. Following him, they
entered the Valley of Shadows, never to interact with their city
kin again. They were thus lost to the memories of Mahoud.

>>>

Dart speaks to Reader:

Why was Alcazaba hollow?

Oh, didn't I explain that? When the black
sphere was first created, it spun so fast that all the center mass
of the planetoid was thrown centrifugally outward, creating a
hollow at the center. As more matter impacted the outer surface,
the planetoid created a gravitation well at its center. Objects
were attracted to the planetoid at first, much as a spinning magnet
might attract metal filings, but over the vastness of time, the
rotation slowed because of gravitational forces and because of
objects hitting the surface against the direction of spin.

Yes, the giant red sun will appear in the
story later on. Well, not the sun itself but a planet which orbits
it and which was mined by the Mahoud's robots until humans
colonized it as New Eden. Yes, I know you're impatient, but I
simply can't tell you everything at once.

When will Charger be in the story? Very soon,
Reader. The historical events I'm talking about all affect his
life. You know, in order to understand what's happening in the
present, sometimes you have to know what happened before.

No, I'm not being pompous! The Grays and the
Dinosauroids and the First Ones are all important parts of the
story.

Yes, Charger likes dogs. Henry especially
liked dogs. His father got him a collie after his mother died, and
Henry spent a lot of time with it.

I'll see what I can do about getting one for
you, but it will be very difficult, perhaps even impossible. Later
you will learn why.

T
he Grays had used their time-lock millions of years in
the past, in an effort to save their race from a viral infection.
Activating it on Earth, they traveled through time at a greatly
reduced rate. Three hundred years in time-lock equaled the passing
of sixty-three million years of universe time, an unexpected
result, and the reason it had long before been deemed a black
project by the Grays' council.

The Grays re-entered the time stream of Earth
at about two million years BCE, when several species of hominids
walked the surface. Most Grays left Earth at this time, setting out
to reconquer their once vast territories in space. But a rogue
group proposed that the greatest of all knowledge lay within their
grasp: a chance to find god. They believed a creator must exist,
and that this creator was building everything from the center of
the galaxy, forever expanding outward. With their vast knowledge,
they constructed a small but mighty ship, capable of incredible
speeds. They re-engineered a group of Earth hominids to act as
intelligent monkeys, much as America did with monkeys during the
space race in the twenty-first century. It took them most of a
million years to do this, but time meant nothing to the clones of
Betelle.

They placed seventy of the new hominoids in
stasis, to be reactivated when the ship reached the center of the
Milky Way galaxy. The hominoids were programmed to carry out given
tasks, and then return with the information to the Grays, who had
chosen to place themselves in time-lock again while they waited.
The hominoids proved to be a bit unruly, like the Dinosauroids, and
clever enough for several of them to escape confinement before the
Grays managed to create enough volunteers for the mission. The
Grays cared little for this event, thinking them too stupid and
ill-prepared to survive for very long, and dismissed the runaways.
They would surely soon meet their demise.

>>>

Dart speaks to Reader:

Were Blix and Ook the hominoids who escaped
from the Grays?

You're right. And yes, that was about a
couple of million years ago. They're the ones who prospered and
went on to become First Ones and Mahouds. The ones the Grays sent
to the center of the galaxy were the ones who didn't escape, the
ones who became extremely intelligent and long-lived, but obedient
to the Grays. Slaves, in effect.

You think that if Charger had been alive
then, he could have defeated the Grays?

I told you before, Reader, Charger is not a
hero, he's a bad idea.

How can I say that about my own father?
Because I know him. Charger has many talents, but being a hero is
not one of them. He has no patience, either.

You're going to make up your own mind when
you meet him? Good for you! I admire an independent spirit.

>>>

General Harris was, for the most part, as
human as those he lived among, with the exception that he had been
engineered to think at a more advanced level, and was bred by the
Grays to be obedient. His part on the long trek to the center of
the galaxy was as a security controller. He and a few others were
designed to make sure that the hominoids never took unnecessary
risks. Harris was one of the first brought out of stasis when the
great craft arrived at its destination. After five hundred thousand
years of travel to the Galactic Center, the Grays wanted no
mistakes that might ruin their investigation. Harris and his team
were to ensure that it was safe to wake the remaining crew members
so that they could carry out their predesignated tasks.

One of the crew members was a fair-haired,
delicate female, bred to think through tasks of a complex nature,
more complex than any artificial intelligence was capable of
completing. More than just a monkey waiting to have events happen
to it, she was designed to interact with and judge the nature of
god, the creator at the center. Therefore, when their mighty craft
reached its destination, and Harris and the others found it safe to
revive the remaining crew, she was one of the first chosen.

But, with the discovery of what was at the
center of all that is known, things almost immediately spiraled out
of control.

The first task assigned to the young female
and her team was to visually record what they found, but it was
soon realized, that as distant as they were from the center, they
were still too close to determine individual shapes. All the
missing mass of the galaxy was here, the answer to a mystery that
astronomers had long been trying to solve. The speed of the
orbiting stars and the associated gravitational force proved that
there was far more mass in the galaxy than could, so far, be seen
or detected by any means. And here it was: a mass of dark matter so
incredibly huge that the ship's crew, trained as they were, found
it impossible to comprehend.

The ship was commanded to 'back up' until a
clearer picture could be had and, a few months later, with enough
space gained, the first image was recorded. This particular mass,
enormous in scale, hung dark and foreboding before them. But the
image they had gained was pointless. At such a distance, almost no
definable details could be achieved. The object appeared only as
ambiguous blackness. The next command was then implemented, and the
great ship started a course forward, returning to the center, with
the goal of extracting a sample.

The crew of this craft had determined that
the god mass was a solid object and could be landed upon. It held
no gravity and so posed no threat, but it had blocked all attempts
from space to analyze its composition. Gauging the distance to the
surface was difficult, but not impossible. The crew settled on a
rather low technology to determine how to find a solid point to
land their craft. They simply jettisoned some cargo in the
direction of the mass. Following the falling object at some
distance, the ship took six months of Earth time before seeing the
cargo container finally impact the surface.

After the craft had made contact with the
surface, a crew of hominoids set foot on the surface and began
drilling for core samples. To Harris's dismay, the first
three-person team that tried gaining a sample was completely
absorbed into the surface they stood on. After several attempts and
the death of eighteen crew members, including the brilliant young
female, the next logical step was to leave the surface and try
instead to get a sample from orbit. Members of the crew rarely
communicated; they were designed to simply follow programming set
out by their command structure.

In orbit again, they launched a small probe
at the surface. It buried itself deep into the mass, cut a sample,
then retracted, all within a few seconds of being launched. It
headed back to the ship. The black mass actually appeared to flinch
and, at the point of impact, a welt began to form. This bump became
a rounded hill, then grew to the size of a mountain, which tore
itself from the surface and began approaching the Grays'
spacecraft. This round black mountain, in comparison to the god
mass, was very small, but to the crew it looked the size of a
planet. The next command executed was for self-preservation. The
ship turned and sped away, back toward Earth, back to the
time-locked Grays. The black sphere pursued, but at a much slower
speed. The hominoids in the spaceship returned to stasis.

>>>

Dart speaks to Reader:

Yes, you're right, the distance from the
Galactic Center to Earth is very great. Even using the Grays'
advanced drive, it still took better than five hundred thousand
years to make the trip. They could travel near the speed of light
with their standard drive system, but this was too slow to travel
the vast distance between the center of the galaxy and Earth.

You want to know about the advanced drive?
All right, listen closely.

Repeatedly the ship would re-emerge into
known space, find another quantum-entangled particle somewhere in
the direction they wanted to travel, and recreate themselves at
this new destination. The Grays had long known the best way to
travel the void was at the quantum level, even though it meant
destroying and recreating themselves in the process.

The process was quite simple, however. They
linked a particle they had to a particle at the destination where
they wanted to go. Because this distant quantum particle was the
opposite charge to the particle they had, it was considered binary.
The particle they had was 'one,' the particle where they wanted to
go to was 'zero.' The universe is vast, but not empty; matter
exists everywhere. The Grays sent information to the binary
particle to first attract matter with which to build a
four-dimensional printer in space.

The printers? The old three-dimensional
printers that humans developed a long time ago could print out a
non-living three-dimensional object. The four-dimensional printer
the Grays used produced living, thinking objects. That was the
center of their drive system, and once the link was established, it
could begin printing the information sent to this distant location.
In this case, the Grays were sending exact information of the
entire structure of the ship and its crew.

No, that's right, matter can neither be
created nor destroyed. But it can be rearranged. So, to keep the
universe in balance, the information the Grays sent resulted in the
destruction of the object they had. But with the information sent,
the object they had was dead anyway.

The Grays soon discovered that after creating
the printer at the destination they wished to travel to, it was
more efficient to create the objects they needed from the matter
found at that destination. Fractal geometry was the basis of this
reasoning; it made little sense to send matter great distances,
when matter was already at the point where they wanted to be. They
would thus recreate the ship and crew at the destination, and go on
to the next destination.

You want to travel somewhere that way,
Reader? Perhaps you'll get the chance soon. But first, we must
finish the story.