Primal Estate: The Candidate Species (48 page)

Ryvil and Syrjon arrived on a rocky hill in a thicket above a small village, one target of many for their survey. It was a potential whole community harvest that could be concealed with a landslide. Initial scans by Syrjon seemed to indicate the area was of low value for landslide potential, although the inhabitants of the village were perfect.

It seems that the native Inca of the area had relied on quinoa as a staple food for generations. Decades ago it became popular in other areas around the world as an alternative carbohydrate when many recognized their problems with wheat. This brought money to the Andean farmers who owned their farms. It allowed them to afford more imported products, to include highly processed foods. For those workers who were merely paid a wage to labor on these farms, the increased cost of quinoa now made it inaccessible. For both groups, the increased use of grain starches to include inexpensive wheat had fattened these communities nicely. They hadn’t yet developed a significant medical industry capable of dispensing drugs for the chronic illnesses that followed. The population of almost two thousand in this village area alone were both fat and organic, perfect for harvest. Syrjon scheduled them for processing.

On the Provenger Nation Ship…

Utu arrived in a massive white corridor lined with windows all around. Above, he saw what looked to him like the night sky. He immediately panicked and thrashed about for something to grab as his body told him, with a hollow feeling in his gut, that he was falling. He blinked hard as he tried to perceive the walls around him move, but they remained still. They should have been racing by, he thought. He should hit the floor that he saw beneath him. He felt like he was falling, but he was not. This was very strange. If he ignored the feeling of falling, he next realized that he was drifting, moving about as if in water but still falling and going nowhere. Utu couldn’t understand what was happening to him or where he would go at the end of his fall.

The whole ship must be falling with me. I’m in a falling ship. When will it hit, he wondered? Utu thought that perhaps the entire Provenger ship was somehow in trouble, and that if it was falling, perhaps he wouldn’t need to destroy anything. In fact, he needed to get out of the ship before it hit. He had his finger over the green control, ready to transport back, when he wondered whether or not the fall would destroy the ship.

He thought of the last mammoth he ever saw go down during a hunt. It fell to the ground and everyone cheered. They thought it was dead because it didn’t move. Some made the mistake of stopping the attack. They got in too close and were killed.

Perhaps it would not be destroyed. Maybe he should continue the plan to make sure the ship was damaged, and between disabling the ship’s power source and the impact, the ship would be smashed.

Utu decided to continue as planned but to proceed as quickly as possible. He looked out the nearest window and saw, perhaps, only a quarter of the ship. It was truly massive. He had no comparison. The ship filled the entire view straight out the window. It was only when he looked up that he saw the stars. “Those things must be the spoke,” he said aloud, looking back at the massive structure directly out the side window. Grabbing a railing under the window, he crushed his face to the pane. Looking to one side, he followed its length as far as he could.

“That must be the big wheel,” he observed of the massive arch that curved away from him in the distance.

Then he turned his head and looked in the opposite direction.

“That must be the small wheel,” he said of the arch that looked to be at the center of the larger outside arch. “Destroy a section of the small wheel.”

Utu pointed the gauntlet in the direction of the small wheel and activated the beam. Nwella had set the range for distance, and Utu was glad to see that it didn’t damage the wall in front of him, but he could tell something was being destroyed. He could see and hear his corridor vibrating. He pressed his face to the glass again and looked as far as he could in the direction he’d fired. He thought he saw material moving free of the rest of the ship.

Utu then looked directly out the window, at the spoke immediately to his front. It seemed very distant, but it was difficult to tell. Utu again steadied himself on the rail so he wouldn’t float around, took aim, and again activated the beam. The spoke in front of him looked blurry for a moment, and then the section receiving the beam burst into a cloud of crumbled pieces.

“Oh, yes!” Utu said with excitement. He waited a moment to determine if he could see the inner wheel and the spoke it was connected to start to move. Everything was so massive he couldn’t be sure if he saw movement. He could see the next spoke through the gap in the section he had just destroyed and decided to proceed with a shot at the second one. With these three sections destroyed and the ship still falling, certainly the whole thing would break apart, he thought. Utu took the third shot and marveled as the next spoke blew to pieces even more violently than the first.

“Hasta la vista, baby!” Utu quoted from a movie he’d enjoyed. He touched the green control and found himself standing in Rick’s living room.

Deep in the mountains of Idaho…

Synster and his entourage had been at Kylamity Base for two days giving a tour to members of the Project Council. He’d brought his sixteen-year-old son, Beyn, with him for educational purposes, as well as his two trusted associates, Layrd and Streyn. When Rick disposed of that troublesome Ryvil, Synster didn’t want any of his best Provenger to be suspected.

The tour consisted of a half-day presentation on the progress of the Project. It highlighted the adaptations made to the harvest strategy to accommodate the additional time and resources that were needed to compensate for the inorganic development of the subject species. The council members understood that something unexpected almost always happens with these projects, especially when dealing with living entities. It was the superior project director who successfully overcame those issues. It appeared that the quotas were being met and the Project was on track.

The group had attempted a hunting trip in the mountains of New Mexico, as it was too cold in Idaho that time of year, but they had been stymied by foul weather. They were getting a tour of the full capabilities of Kylamity Base when they learned they would be there longer than they’d planned.

They all simultaneously received an alarm on their com-monitors. The message was simple. A catastrophic structural failure of unknown origin had caused considerable damage to the Provenger Nation Ship. According to protocol, to reduce power usage, all transports between ship and planet were indefinitely suspended pending further notice. They were reminded that if they were in an area not yet neutralized or in any region of Earth conducting field work, they were to immediately activate their cloak for the next hour and their shield for the next five hours.

“Damn,” Synster said out loud, to the surprise of everyone present. They were all equally disturbed by this development, but Synster’s outburst seemed to them unprofessional. Even though they had conducted drills for this type of thing, it had never actually happened, and they were all on edge.

“Father, do we have to cloak and shield ourselves?” Beyn asked.

“No, son. We’re in a neutralized area. Only those conducting field work need to do it.” Synster turned to the others. “Provenger, we should probably go to the main deck and wait for further information,” Synster commanded as he turned quickly and strode away from them. “Ryvil,” he seethed under his breath.

Back at Rick’s house in Cortez…

Utu smiled at Rick and Nwella. They had been patiently waiting for him, pacing the room. Carson was sitting on the couch, still trying to figure out what was going on. Because of the minimal time dilation of Utu’s transport, his absence seemed a little bit longer for Rick and Nwella.

“How did it go?” asked Rick, feeling encouraged.

Nwella rushed to his gauntlet to see how much power he had remaining and stepped back. “A little,” she said. She was going to remove it but feared Utu might suspect her of something.

“Take it out,” she said.

Removing the bolt from the gauntlet, Utu began to brief them. “When I got there, the ship was already falling, so I figured they were in trouble from something already. The damage I did would only add to it,” Utu reported.

“What do you mean they were falling?” Nwella asked.

“The ship was falling, the whole thing, with me in it.”

Not quite understanding what Utu was talking about, Rick quickly asked him, “Did you take the shots that you needed?”

“Yes, of course, but I hurried a bit. I didn’t want to be in the ship when it hit.”

“Hit what?” Rick and Nwella asked in unison.

“The ground?” Utu asked, sheepishly.

Nwella started shaking her head. “This is my fault.”

“Utu, there is no ground. The ship is in space. You don’t fall anywhere in space.”

“I felt like I was falling.”

“Did you take the shots you needed?” Rick asked, frustrated.

“Yes, of course.”

“Did you see destruction?”

“Oh, yes! What’s wrong?”

“Utu, the falling feeling you had wasn’t you and the ship falling,” Rick explained recalling the sensation of skydiving and rapid descent in aircraft. “It was zero gravity.”

“He’s never experienced it before. It’s my fault. I was rushed, and I forgot to tell him,” Nwella confessed.

“Oh, Hell! I almost left before taking any shots. I figured, what could survive a fall that far?”

Everyone collapsed in the chair nearest them. “If he’d come back then, there wouldn’t have been enough energy in the bolt to complete the job,” informed Nwella.

Rick’s nerves were shot. Now, he had to complete the assignment Synster had given him, he reminded himself. Shouldn’t winning a gunfight, digging a grave, almost shooting a friend, and disabling an interstellar space ship be enough for one day?

“I need to start thinking about this thing I’m doing later,” Rick said, glancing at his watch. “Nwella, how do we know he got the job done? What I mean is, how do we know the ship is disabled?”

“Well, really, the only way we’ll know is if they don’t come after us. If it was successful, all scanners would have shut down automatically. If they had done that, they wouldn’t have had the time to detect this bolted battle gauntlet. Also, Rick, by protocol they would order the suspension of all transports between the ship and Earth, to save energy, and have Provenger remain in place, for safety,” Nwella explained.

Well that should make it easier to get to Ryvil, Rick thought. “Nwella, how do we know when or if your father has heard about all this? I mean both your situation as well as the ship?”

It finally sunk in for Nwella where her father was. “Oh, Rick, Synster is here on Earth. Things happened so fast, I’d forgotten.”

“Yes, I know. That’s why I still have to go through with my assignment. This project of yours is still ongoing. I guess they won’t be harvesting, right? …without the power to transport all those people? Right?”

“Well, yes, I suppose,” Nwella responded, fairly certain of herself. “With that power source gone now, they’ll be conserving all energy sources just to keep basic systems running. Except for the use of the bolted battle gauntlets, all ship-to-planet transports are powered by the primary source, which we think Utu just destroyed.”

“Oh, yes. Don’t worry. I destroyed it. Don’t doubt me just because I thought the ship was falling,” Utu said, feeling a little inept, “or because I wasn’t up to speed on the whole spoke wheel thing.”

“So they can still come here with the battle gauntlets?” asked Rick.

“Yes, as long as it has a bolt. There are plenty of those. They won’t want to use them, though. Now they’ll need them to power systems on the ship. The important thing is to keep that bolt,” Nwella emphasized, pointing to Utu, “out of that gauntlet. We never know when they might recover their ability to see it. As long as their main power source has been destroyed, they will have lost their opportunity to find us. We should be safe.”

“Be that as it may, I don’t want to risk it. Everybody, pack up what you need for a few days. Carson, take everyone to Denver. You know that town. It’s pretty big. Maybe you can hide there better, and the Provenger might be less likely to make a scene coming after you. I’ll stay for this other assignment. You’ve got three minutes. Let’s go.”

Rick also wasn’t completely sure he’d be successful, and if he wasn’t, they’d all be safer somewhere else.

Everyone was working frantically at stowing some things for the trip. Shainan was roused and feeling better. She was talking quickly, mostly to Utu in whatever language it was that they spoke. Utu occasionally said something to Nwella in the same language. Maybe this will all work out, Rick thought. He made a note to himself to ask the name of the language. It was pleasant to listen to. Since they all spoke it, he thought maybe he should try to learn it. It would be their own little tribe’s private language.

Rick was in his room grabbing some things for Nwella to wear when he realized they could buy whatever they needed along the way. Then he heard the door creak. Looking up, he expected to see her. But it was Utu.

“Do you have a second?” Utu asked.