Authors: Gordon Mackay
“A camera,” Scott said.
“Looks kinda like it,” agreed Mike.
But before another word could be spoken, Mike’s rifle butt was connecting with it. A few sparks and splinters of shattered material headed for the floor as the thing came apart.
The commander had seen them, four in all, carrying something that resembled a club. The junction’s camera was now out of action but it had served its purpose. He knew where they were and could now direct the remaining clones to finally apprehend them. What might have been another smile crossed his wrinkled face. He wanted to say the humans will not live for much longer, but there wasn’t anyone present to hear him and he dare not send it.
Mike still led the way, his pace picking-up as they progressed. Without any other turn-off’s or diversions they were only able to go where the tunnel led them, so their marching speed could be increased until a reason to slow down got in their way. The women followed silently, occasionally looking over their shoulders to see if they were being followed. Mike hardly blinked his eyes, not wanting to miss anything up ahead. Scott continued looking in both directions.
The remaining Grey force on Mars was regrouping around the Control room. There were less clones than the commander anticipated, but there wasn’t anything to be concerned about, he considered. With only one puny club between them, what damage could they possibly do?
Another camera was quickly despatched by Mike, almost before they were observed. The area monitored by this one was much closer, too close to the Control room, he thought. “They must be stopped… Now!” he
demanded.
The remaining Greys filed into the tunnel system without question. No words were spoken and no other means of communication passed between them as they turned to intercept the humans. They each knew what must be done and would carry out their orders. Not to succeed would be viewed as failure to respond, with destruction assured as punishment. It was a simple case of do or die; such was how the Grey Empire treated inferior beings.
“Another camera, Mike?” asked Scott.
He replied with a smirk. “Yeah, but it’s already gone to the great camera heaven in the Martian sky.”
Then the footsteps were heard, softly at first with a bit of an echo, then a deeper pounding sound as they got closer.
“Mike,” Scott said, “prepare to fire. I’ll use the revolver as backup should it be necessary.”
“Aint no problem,” Mike said jokingly. “Did you see the way the bullets went through a load of them one after the other before, like they were made of soft-jelly or runny-shit?”
“Erm, yes, I did.” Scott replied while recalling the destruction.
“Well, because of that, and the narrow tunnel, I reckon one magazine will waste ‘em all, as easy as cuttin’ apple-pie.”
Scott could imagine the forthcoming scene, little guys getting blown to smithereens, with a single bullet passing through several before another needed to be fired.
“Jesus Christ, Mike!” declared a horrified Scott.
Mike turned to him, smiling. “Nah, just Mike will do. And if you call me JC again, folks might get suspicious. So fucking don’t!”
Scott couldn’t help releasing a smile at Mike’s humour at such a time, although he reserved judgement about his choice of words.
They came on them in haste, little grey coloured guys running like athletes in a race towards them. If they hadn’t already been prepared for defence their small group would have been rapidly overwhelmed by the grey tidal wave as it surged through the tunnel. Mike fired his first round, watching half
-a-dozen little bodies explode into pieces of soft globular flesh, coating the tunnel walls and floor with a horrible sticky-wet slime. More followed, one after the other, all in line and receiving exactly the same treatment. The blown-apart unrecognisable remains began to gel, hindering the passage of those yet to attack by slowing down their pace. Mike was down to the magazine’s last bullet when there was none left to kill. The silence was deafening after the thunderous onslaught of single ripping explosions that steadfastly wiped out the advancing grey-coloured hoards.
“See, I told you!” Mike shouted proudly. “I knew I could take ‘em all with a single mag’. I only needed twenty-
eight rounds to finish them off. Not bad, eh?”
Neither Scott nor the ladies spoke. The scene of carnage and death in front of them took their breath away, especially with the stomach-churning stench that oozed along the tunnel towards them. Mixed with the gun smoke, it tried hard to make them vomit. No one did, but their queasy guts heaved all the same. Mike laughed with joyous glee as he swapped the almost empty magazine for a fresh one. Gripping the AK-47 with one hand
, while smoothing the other across its smoking working-parts in a suggestive manner, Mike softly said, “Oh, baby, baby. You sure do know how to waste these funny little gooks with your spit, don’t ya. Huh babe?” The weapon never replied.
Having been on station for what felt like a lifetime, the submarine’s Captain was becoming restless with a distinct lack of progress to show for their efforts. “It’s beginning to look like a wild goose chase,” he told his second in command, who sadly agreed.
The Captain broke his orders from his higher-up chain of command by reactivating the submarine’s communications. He sent a request to his own Commander-in-Chief, asking to return to normal duties as nothing of interest had shown up.
The deciding-powers debated the received communication from the sub’s captain, with his personal profile reviewed by several interested persons to further determine why he might wish to depart the area in question.
“It’s his last voyage before retiring,” suggested one.
“In a hurry to reach the golf course,” added another.
“Or a nice sunny beach in Hawaii with a few chilled beers,” interjected someone who wished they could do the same
but it would be some years before
he
could retire.
A shadowy figure from a dark corner of the conference room stepped forward, announcing, “Whatever his reasons for asking to return to normal duties, they must be refused. If there’s a remote possibility there’s some kind of extraterrestrial activity in that region we need to know about it?”
It was quite some time later when a decoded reply was personally handed to him by the ship’s Comm’s officer. The message was one that thanked him for his suggestion, but refused to allow his ship to recommence normal duties in the light of so many independent witnesses reporting the same sighting; and would he please return to silent running. The matter concerning his decision to reactivate communications will be subject to an enquiry when his ship returned to port.
The submarine’s communications were promptly shut down, with rumours of him being given a telling off by HQ spreading through the crew’s quarters and workstations like wildfire.
The Grey undersea base had overheard the electronically digitised and scrambled transmissions between the submarine and its Command. Their own systems were also shut down to silent mode, but incoming signals were still received. All activity regarding entry into the atmosphere or sea was postponed indefinitely. And until the submerged vessel above had departed the area there could be no movement or energising of systems. The ship’s on-board detectors could sense any electrical activity; so strict silence with no communication was paramount for its safety. Since the last ship had arrived from Mars there had been no communication with its base, having previously advised the planet’s former commander of the current situation. And until there was a change in these circumstances there would be no further communications or traffic.
With the last of the clones dispatched to capture the humans, and no subsequent communication from them
like the first group, the commander began to feel things weren’t going the way he originally planned or hoped for. His mind was cast back to his thoughts of catching and destroying the human problems that now stalked his base unchecked. He’d fallen foul of his own overconfidence, thinking his superior intellect would win him the thanks of his Empire for ridding them of these viruses. He watched the monitors as he tried to think of another way to beat them.
To continue their journey into the heart of the base meant having to wade through the remains of the Greys, an unsavoury proposition as guts and slime was splattered
all across the walls, roof and tunnel floor. The roof dripped long strings of ooze, resembled lumpy syrup running off a spoon. With hands covering their noses to reduce the smell, they plodded through the stinking and sticky quagmire of death. Scott couldn’t help himself; he had to look at the remains as he waded through, observing the endoskeleton consisted of cartilage rather than bone. The eyes looked exactly the same in death as they had in life, black and almond-shaped, glossy with no sign of a pupil or an iris. There was no clear resemblance with human life, other than the basic bipedal morphology. He would have preferred to stop to examine the bodies closer, but chose to follow Mike without hesitating. Once passed the clutter of body parts and stink, Scott pointed out their suits were untarnished, positively clean with no hint of a residue or mess.
“The suits are self cleaning,” replied Phyllis. “The metal throws off contaminants like a magnet does when it repels.”
“Right, yeah, I can understand that … I think,” he answered, remembering playing with magnets as a child at his grandparents’ farm.
It was during the freezing cold winter months when his few visits usually meant being stuck indoors to escape the horrendously severe blizzards that raged outside, when his clever grandfather would appear with handfuls of magnets and a chemistry set. Scott was always fascinated by a magnet’s invisible and magical ability to attract and repel, recognising there was an amazing potential in the unseen force, although unable to fathom the possibilities within so young a mind. The chemistry set wasn’t ignored either. It
really belonged to his older brother who had received it as a Christmas present but Scott had used it more. Apart from copper-sulphate powder being used to grow crystals or to make ink by adding it to crushed acorns and water, it had lain largely untouched; until Scott had shown a keen interest. He recalled being bored with the inert chemicals one storm battered evening at the farm, deciding to add an amount of brilliant blue-coloured liquid he’d spotted in a bottle sitting on the highest kitchen shelf. It never dawned on him that it had been kept so high for a good reason. Having decanted some of it into a test-tube before mixing it with a few simple chemicals from the kit, including some snow from outside the front door, he vigorously shook it to see if it might actually do something. The frothy solution had steadfastly refused to fizz, spit, bang or explode; so... in frustration, he threw it on the log fire in the lounge to get rid of it. With the biggest and brightest whoosh and fireball seen since Krakatoa exploded, he almost lost both grandparents to simultaneous heart-attacks. The chemistry set was hidden and he was banned from touching it ever again. He remembered his grandfather reading the box’s cover while clasping his chest, exclaiming it was supposed to be safe for children from the age of five upwards, and how he expected Scott to one day burn his house down should he be allowed to play with it again. Scott never did own up to using the wonderfully coloured liquid from the kitchen. It had been a long time after the event, when he was much older and wiser, that he finally discovered it was a highly inflammable liquid called methylated-spirits. He couldn’t help laughing when he discovered the stuff was pure alcohol, feeling thankful he hadn’t burnt-down the house and killed his grandparents. He never did get to see the chemistry set again, which is perhaps why he enjoyed chemistry at school where he could officially mix the contents from little bottles with cork stoppers, watching subtle colours change into something completely different, or witness bubbles that gained in momentum as the frothing contents rose up the beaker to spill over the edge, staining the laboratory desk while stripping the varnish and burning the wood beneath. This happened once to Scott, scaring the hell out of his classmates as they ran for the classroom’s door to escape the smoking horror of it all.
“Hey, stop dreamin’, man! We’ve still gotta job to do before you
can start thinking about makin’ whoopee with the broads.”
With a forced smile, Scott replied apologetically, “Yeah, sorry about that, old boy. Whoopee comes later.” All eyes were on him as he spoke, the ladies looking on with questioning expressions while Mike’s were tainted with boyish humour.
“Old boy? Yeah? Well, maybe you’re right about that. I’m still alive though, live’n kickin’, that’s me, and that’s something I never thought would happen when I was lying back there in the jungle with my soggy-red googly-bits hanging loose and fancy free, for all the hairy-arsed world to see. Hey, a’am a born poet, and don’t know it.”
Scott laughed and the girls giggled at Mike’s humour and choice of comical words to describe the life threatening moment he
had once narrowly escaped from.
Until the women met Scott, Earth born language was something they didn’t have much experience of. But since they began conversing with him, followed by Mike’s indifferent kind of repertoire, their understanding of the language, in this particular instance, English, had multiplied ten
-fold. Some of the words uttered by either were quite unknown to the ladies, but when taken in context with what was inferred, their meaning could be readily interpreted and identified.
The ladies
advanced ability to learn was beyond most Earth humans, having been genetically and physically conditioned to it. Their knowledge and extensive mental library of information wasn’t so much down to their increased IQ, but to the microprocessors planted within their brain. The implants were inserted not long after birth, injected through the skull’s fontanel before its natural closure. While the neurons were still tracking their chemical and synaptic pathways, tracing and tracking system connections between specific brain cells and their autonomic functions, the implant successfully connected with their intended additional respective connectors. That was when the processors linked into the neural system, minute pieces of hardware that bonded with the corpus-callosum, hippocampus, pituitary gland, and many more vital organs. In addition to these chips, there were extended memory cells, all artificial but purely organic. They consisted of living tissue, supplied with energy from their own special mitochondria. A body’s immune system might have seen these invasive bits of microprocessor as invading viruses, reacting to destroy them as quickly as possible, except for the fact that each little bit of equipment had been uniquely nurtured specifically for each individual, like small cloned fragments of that particular body with adaptations modified into their design. The successful combination of processors and organic tissue culminated in an increased ability to carry out most functions, whether multilingual or multiplexing tasks, mental equations or practical hands-on; with many more functions available at the completion of a download. The only drawback was the individual needed to have the correct genetic aptitude for the purposes in hand, otherwise there could be a system crash. Educational establishments didn’t exist on the ladies’ home planet like they do on Earth. The curriculum for each individual was personal, programmed into him or her automatically by ultrahigh frequency carrier signals transmitted into the imbedded receivers within the living brain. Scott understood he’d received some form of implant within his head, but didn’t fully understand its implications. As an adult, the implant could only be done through existing entrances into the closed skull. In this instance, it was by way of his right ear, inserted through the inner wall. It had to be the right ear as the all-important, Broca’s area, responsible for speech generation, was next to the left. This prevented any form of invasive disturbance to that side of the skull. He could never guess that the occasional whistling he heard in his right ear was due to the noise of up and downloads, believing it was all part and unwanted parcel of the annoying tinnitus which he suffered from. The screaming jet-engines he’d been subjected to for many years had left its effect on his hearing, damaging the fine hairs within his ears to produce the faint ringing sound he would often hear during quiet spells, particularly when he awakened in his bed after a good night’s sleep. The malady could easily have been treated and cured while they’d spent time on the Mothership, but it suited them to leave his affliction alone as it helped to disguise the sound of transmissions with a readily acceptable reason for it. The hardware within his head was programmed to store new information, with the intention of installing whatever had been downloaded, but only when Scott was suitably relaxed, usually while asleep. The new information might be connected with his activities, or perhaps with something he needed to do in his future. When he’d felt the desire to visit the Isle of Skye, for instance, it had been programmed into him that he should get there within a specific time frame. The date he chose to be on the island was automatically uploaded to a receiver/transmitter unit with the information used to organise a meeting. This unit had been secretly installed close to his home, buried deeply and shielded from intrusive sensors. This is where information would be sent to and from, unknown by Scott but suspected by the Grey Empire. They had already sent a scout ship to locate the device, but overhead electricity power cables had adequately cloaked its exact position, an area where a strong resonating magnetic field had obscured its presence from prying eyes and searching sensors. The Grey scout ship failed to find the device, having to quickly vacate the area when some locals inadvertently discovered its presence. The departing ship’s own powerful force-field generated a glitch of electrical power across the national grid as its own magnetic flux cut the cables as it passed overhead. Many witnessed two electric-blue flashes as it left the area, with the surges of power flashing like electric arcs between the parallel wires of three-phase cables. Scott had also witnessed the flashes in the evening sky that evening, never realising the sensations of anxiety he was feeling at the time were due to the ship’s presence. It had landed a mere three kilometres away, which was very close for someone who had received an advanced processor into their brain. With a locator trying extremely hard to link in with him, it was no wonder he had felt their presence. The breathtaking news concerning the discovery of an extraterrestrial ship in a nearby farmer’s field had made it into the country’s newspapers. A few more around the world picked up the information and printed the details, thereby, in a roundabout sort of way, informing those who needed to know that Scott’s approximate location was in danger of being compromised. It also reinforced the colony’s knowledge that he had returned home successfully, even though Frell and Drang hadn’t. It was known the mission was mostly successful, everything completed except for its conclusion. It wasn’t long after the Grey craft had attempted to locate Scott’s transmitter that a ship from the human colony had flown over Scott’s village, sent to check everything was still satisfactory with the installation. It was, but as the extraterrestrial occurrence was still hot news, hopeful eyes had been frequently turned towards the sky, more often than normal and usually during a topical conversation concerning the recent reports about UFO’s. Quite a lot of people spotted the second visit, all protesting it was true when non-believers and doubters insinuated otherwise, suggesting those who stated they saw it were just jumping on the proverbial bandwagon and seeking publicity. The second sighting was mentioned in the papers too, continuing the mystery that began to surround the little-known village called, Cheifure. Many began to wonder what might be going on, while adjoining villages and their respective committees were convinced it was just a publicity-seeking event. They recognised it had enormous potential as an idea, a formulae for getting worldwide attention without any expense or evidence to substantiate the claims. The committees gave careful consideration to what they themselves might do to compete for media attention and the same amount of cheap publicity.