Uplift (19 page)

Someone in the back said, “Where’s Circleville?”

Wallace Taylor whispered back, “It’s about 500 kilometers west of here. I’ve taken my kids through there. Blink, and you’d miss it when driving.”

Carole stood up, and all eyes went to her. “Conner. We are very happy to get you back. Hershel. Would you go with him over to our medical facility? We need to get him fixed up…matter of fact – I’d like all of you to get a baseline medical checkup. It looks like we may all be traveling pretty soon. I want you to have the advantages my security, and military people have. As employees you get access to treatments that retard aging, and heal injuries. You will then be almost invulnerable to disease.”

“I thought that was just rumor,” said Jeanine Nakamura.

“Nope. Jeanine. Richard Patterson is seventy years old. Any of you seen photos of him,” she said.

“Wow,” Jeanine said. “He looks good.”

“It also includes adults in your families. You decide which adults get it, or not…though the non-disclosures hold for telling them about it, unless they sign non-disclosures too. It’s the same treatments we provide for the Special Forces troops over at Ft. Bragg,” Carole said, and that got a couple of ‘wows’ from the back.

“Wallace,” she said, and Wallace Taylor sat up in the back. “Get a team, and vehicle together, and retrieve our shuttle discretely? Conner – as soon as you’re fixed up… I’ll need you to take Wallace back to where you landed. Oh…and please call your wife. She has been calling every couple of hours since yesterday, and it’s been hard finding excuses. Tell her you’ve got a weeks vacation coming, and take it anywhere you want in the continental United States. You’ve earned it, and at company expense. Don’t want you out of the country right now, and I’ll assign some security to you. Hershel. Pick Conner’s brain while he’s getting fixed up.”

Carole. Twenty light minutes in one-tenth of a second is better than my people could do.

Better than your people did 80,000 years ago, you mean? Carole retorted.
We don’t know what the Horde might have come up with since – they had excellent detection abilities even then, didn’t they? They could be extinct by now couldn’t they? Carole queried. Do you think they are still out there, or are we just tilting at windmills?

Tilting at windmills? (pause) oh…I see. Scared about a non-existent threat…I had duplicates of the HPC sent out in a desperate hope to fight off the Horde. We were losing badly, and needed allies,
Corvette thought, and shared the discussions with Corey
. Corey says that our people plan for much longer periods of time than your people do. We thought younger races, like yours, might be uplifted faster so you could fight the Horde. Any race near the galactic core that aided us, early in the fight, was wiped out. Gamma ray bursts from around our galaxy over the last 80,000 years were those civilizations being destroyed – after those worlds were plundered. A thousand years will have passed for the Horde since they started their expansion.

Wait Corvette. I thought you said, 80,000 years. Which one is it?

My world was invaded about 80,000, of your years ago. The Horde’s personal time scale is different – for them, that would be about a thousand years in their past. They age much slower when traveling compared to the universe. They cannot go back because the method they use slows time when they are traveling. Everyone would be dead that they knew so they keep going outward.

“Carole. Carole! Hey! Hershel here, boss. You faded out on us. What’s going on?”

“Get treated at medical with Conner, and then we need to have a talk.”

“Treated…with your miracle nanites…wondered when we’d get that. I’ve been following you folks for a while, and I can put one, and three together to make eight.”

“…Knew you were ahead of the curve… hurts at first. It’ll take about an hour initially, then get right back here.”

“K boss,” and Hershel thought – Good god she’s a wonder. He knew he’d find out where all these ideas were really coming from soon. Worth the wait…

****

Hershel, and Conner had listened patiently as the new medical staff had explained what was about to happen. They grimaced with tears running down their faces as the nanites started work in their bodies. Conner grabbed his knee, and cried out briefly, but was able to walk without a limp in about an hour. He went to show Harold, and his crew where they would have to get equipment to retrieve their craft from the Monongahela Forest. It was going to take a while even with two heavy off-road vehicles they had with them. Hershel went for his private one-on-one with Carole.

****

“I plan to level some with you Hershel. I need a large Echo dimension field set up so we can have a team work under it at thirty times normal speed. We may not have much time. Figure out a way for workers to have air, water, food, supplies, entertainment, and getting rid of waste. We need to build a larger vessel we can equip with weapons when Richard gets them designed. Richard is also going to design a communication system for the ships. It should be the first of many such vessels – made relatively cheaply with lots of armament. We’ll need sensor probes far outside our system that can alert us to superluminal craft.”

Hershel tilted his head to one side…paused…tilted it the other way. He was trying to decide if his boss was kidding, or insane. Nope. Good god. She is serious. “I’m all ears.”

You sure you want to do this Carole. This could unravel everything. Right now he considers you a brilliant inventor.

How long do you think Hershel here, would believe that fairy tale? We’ll have to tell somebody something soon.

Corvette discussed it with Corey, and they decided they would monitor all communications, and eliminate the man if he even started to reveal secrets to anyone else…couldn’t allow that.

Carole gave him a shortened version, with enough facts about technology ahead of Earth’s current standard to make a believer out of him.

He sat there, stunned, for a long time. He stretched, and felt really wonderful…better than he had felt in college. Nanites… force fields…inertialess faster than light travel…exotic new weapons…hostile aliens? How could he not believe her? “Who knows besides me?”

Carole wondered if she should tell him. “You cannot tell anyone. I will assign you a security detail. Take the personal protection training modules, start wearing armor, and carry a weapon after training.”

“Our people will need a cover story on the probes. We can say we build them to assess our craft performance envelopes in deep space. They could serve as location markers all over the solar system. Any larger ship we build ‘could be called an asteroid mining vessel – built large enough to hold lots of valuable ores’. Later weapons can be mining equipment, and the construction under a time field is to beat out the competition in China, and India. The security is because they’ve tried to kidnap employees of Richard Patterson to steal industrial secrets. The kidnappers have had nation state support with major economic rivals. The nanites are to lessen the aging effects in the time acceleration fields. Think those stories would tie together well? Is there a way so employees who leave can’t tell secrets even under duress?”

Carole looked surprised, and Hershel went up even further in her esteem. “Sounds reasonable,” she said. “I’ll check out the non-disclosure conditioning.” She didn’t tell him that every training module the employees used would just reinforce their resistance to disclosing information.

WEAPONS

Richard Patterson was very pleased with Carole’s success, but less pleased with Corey’s late disclosures.

Why did it take you so long to tell me these things you, and Corvette told Carole? You were losing…everyone who tried to fight the Horde had their stars destroyed. Earth could be wiped clean of life just by having a gamma ray burst too close, or in our direction. Now you tell me that ships outside geosynchronous Earth orbit are detectable, and will probably speed up a response from the Horde.

It isn’t like you could do anything about it earlier. I think we are making remarkable progress. It isn’t like you have faced much opposition yet. You will face more as the die-offs begin with the GM food, and with attempts to control your new technology. I have bought up much of the land around our facilities. It is time for you to deploy your private soldiers around them. You will need it as soon as you put up the echo dimension structures.

Why is that?

The genetically modified foods designed to be resistant to fungus, specific herbicides, and pesticides have been accumulating those chemicals in the world’s population. It is starting to have significant effects on the general population – especially in the United States where legislation allowing them has been passed. The costly US election processes have allowed private interests to buy access, and push agendas. Reckless GM food is one aspect of technology. Overfishing is another aspect of your technology that is having significant detrimental effects on your ecology. Many of the remaining fish species have high concentrations of toxins in their systems. The number of cases of tumors, and rapidly debilitating cancers has risen sharply.

So. Modern people are exposed to lots of sources of carcinogens.

Yes, but the current Earth research I am following will show the conflated effects of certain combinations of your chemical industries. Your world just hit the threshold that will spiral out of the control of your medical science’s ability to mediate the effects. Millions will die within the year, and billions overall in the next few years.

Really? Can’t we do something? How could it be billions?

You should ask, “Should I let it run its course, and how could I change the effects?”

We could give them nanites – costs would be next to nothing.

Would you give them the type of nanites the soldiers’ use – the ones that give soldiers extra stamina, and strength? You have to generate those as they aren’t self replicating. No? You’re thinking the nanites you, and Carole use – they are self-replicating. Then they could spread easily at no cost. They wouldn’t work on people who were too far along; but they could save a lot of people. The military nanites only work on very smart people. The nanites you have are even more rare — giving you anti-aging, and super abilities. You have to be pretty special to survive those. Should you give those to millions of people?

One in ten would die during introduction, and another forty percent would be rejected. You were lucky with Carole. Fifty percent of the people would die, or it wouldn’t work. People would blame you for everyone who dies before treatment, for every treatment withheld, for any rejected, and for every nut that used their new power indiscriminately – it has caused a blood bath on every planet given widely.

How many will die? How soon? How would the Horde be different? Worse?

I have seen it before. You asked for this – remember. Earth has about 20 million currently dying of cancer each year. In six years you will lose five billion.

…to cancer, alone? Impossible…that’s too many.

No. You’d lose about 640 million to cancer yearly by then, but the warfare over scarce resources will kill the rest. Your elite, no other way to say it…your wealthy elite will outlive the rest.

How can we survive?

You need to build large enclosures that speed up organic food production, make weapons, and warships to protect against the Horde.

You never told me about the Horde. What do they look like? Why are they so bad …worse than starvation now?

You have never been to a pig, or chicken farm I see. Humans would be stripped of thought, and bred like chickens in pens. Babies would be redesigned to come in quadruplets, requiring one-third the gestation period. Most humans would be processed for food. Human workers on mind-altering drugs would harvest forests wearing explosive collars, or implants to control them. Resistance fighting would destroy whole areas of the surface. When your world is laid bare – the sun would be turned nova.

You never said what they looked like.

Their ships look like huge spheres – almost small moons. They travel in groups of five, with four spheres around the fifth.
They travel relatively slowly – compared to what your people will be able to do. We only know what they do to planets because one star failed to nova, and my people found the aftermath. Also, one inhabitant stole a Horde shuttle, and that’s how my people found out how to build the shields. Several of our best scientists had escaped before they arrived, but the escapee reported that the remaining scientists were converted to work for the Horde.

Converted?

Physically changed so they had no will to resist – they only do as they are ordered. Their reward was ecstasy for pleasing their host, and horrible pain when their host was displeased.

Wait – you say their hosts.