Here Comes Earth: Emergence (34 page)

After looking off into
space for a few moments Semi said, “You have a name for it in your medical
journals. For Earthers it is extremely rare and it is called
Specific Musical Anhedonia. It is a
condition where a person derives zero pleasure from listening to music.”

“Ah,” said
Anzio. “You mean to say your men they cannot make sense of the musical notes?”

“No. Your
journals call that Amusia. Our men can hear the notes; they are just not
emotionally moved by them.”

“But your
women do feel our music?” I reiterated.

“Oh yes Mark,”
Ashima assured me. “Except for being with you physically, Earther music is the
greatest thing about knowing Earthers!”

I really
didn’t know how to respond to that.

ΔΔΔ

I finally did
manage to get some sleep that night and it was early the next morning that we
found ourselves in orbit around the planet Dreken. I’ll admit that it was
somewhat difficult to get my breakfast down. I don’t think I tasted any of it
and I couldn’t recount to you what I actually ate even on a dare.

Anzio was
obviously being supportive but unlike the girls he knew me well enough to give
me some room. Ashima eventually picked up on my unresponsiveness and they both
followed Anzio’s lead.

The planet
looked more or less like all the habitable worlds we had seen so far except
there were no orbital platforms, satellites, or cities visible on the surface.

We travelled
planetside in a shuttle and landed in a small clearing. After a few moments of
silence Semi stood and moved to the hatch which automatically opened for her.
Glancing once over her shoulder to us she left the shuttle.

We followed
her outside and onto a wide path through a dense forest that was filled with
flowers and vegetation of startling color. Competing for kaleidoscopic majesty
were insects with large iridescent wings and some type of multicolored lizard.
The smell of the forest loam was pleasant and the temperature was perfect.

After crossing
a small brook with tantalizingly clear water we passed through a large stone
arch and entered a stone-paved pavilion roughly 30 yards across.

Semi stopped just inside
the arch and looked at me expectantly.

“Where to now?” I asked.

“We are here,” she
responded. “This place is the Al-Drek Circle.”

“What do I do?” I
persisted.

She looked at me, smiled
resignedly and said, “Speak your thoughts.”

I looked around the
clearing realizing that this was nothing like I had visualized. There was no
door to knock on, no bell to ring; there was apparently only one way to
announce myself.

I gathered my thoughts and
prepared to speak…

Major Mathew Reagan, US Army

We had just boarded our
new ship and were still settling in when Silva found me.

Except for the shuttles
all the alien ships we’d boarded so far had been a relatively flat square,
oblong, or circle in shape; and even though I’d thought the original Noridian
ship was large its diameter had been measured in hundreds of yards. Our new
ship’s diameter could be measured in miles. When you view things in space you
really don’t get a good perspective on size until you actually touch the object
you’re moving towards. When our shuttle was on approach I was impressed by our
new ship’s size but it just kept getting bigger and bigger the closer we got.

It was the first time I’d
felt vertigo in space. If you’ve ever experienced that funny queasy feeling as
your rollercoaster slowly tops its highest peak and prepares to plunge straight
down you know the feeling. Once we were inside everything was normal but on
approach the size of this ship was intimidating.

Unlike our previous trip
we would be stowing all our personal gear in our own staterooms; we had a long
trip ahead of us but I also had a demanding training schedule in mind. I wanted
everyone to have instant access to everything they might need - including the
civilians.

To that end I was helping
everyone get organized when Silva pulled me aside.

He’d just gotten word;
Jaki and our original team had arrived back at Earth.

ΔΔΔ

I considered delaying our
departure long enough to send another message to Earth but there really wasn’t
anything else to add to our previous report. I made the decision to continue
with our imminent departure. I did pause in my duties to check one more time
but there apparently wasn’t any way to speed up the months-long transit time in
front of us.

The ultimate
‘Hurry Up
and Wait’…

That’s why I’d called this
meeting.

Within hours of leaving
Largan orbit I’d arraigned for our entire team to meet in what passed for a
Coridian amphitheater. If you’ve ever attended a required college basic
freshman course with over 300 students on the roll, or an old-time movie
theater, you know the type of seating arrangement I’m talking about; each row
rising level by level from a lower stage and acoustically designed so that the
speaker can talk in a normal voice and still be heard by all.

The main difference from
what I was used to was that the lower stage was completely encircled by the
raised seating. There was no wall or whiteboard to write on but my
understanding was that the vast space above my head could be filled with
holographic projections totally controlled by the bioware that I didn’t have –
not that I was planning on using slides anyway.

Minus the casualties we
suffered on Stiger, and minus Dr. Spencer and Dr. Spelini, my entire team was
present along with Silva, Toni, and a couple of dozen other Coridians that had
tagged along for the ride to Earth.

What percentage of the
Coridian ‘crew’ this represented I wasn’t sure. When I’d asked Silva, more than
once, exactly how many of his dynasty would be accompanying us he’d been very
nonspecific. The closest he would come to giving me a straight answer was ‘over
a hundred.’

Did I have mixed feelings
about bringing so many Coridians back to Earth? Sure.

Could I even be sure that
the real number wasn’t over a thousand? The ship was certainly big enough.

I didn’t like to think
that I might be bringing an invasion force back with me but at the end of the day
I realized that I had very little choice. None, actually. The Coridians were
fully capable of heading back to Earth with or without me and we didn’t have
any other options to get home. I spent a good part of the cruise forcing myself
not to dwell on the subject.

“I thought it best that we
recount our experiences so far so that we can contemplate all of our future
actions with a full perspective. In my experience it is sometimes very easy to
let our decision making get swayed more by recent events than by the full
picture,” I said to the crowd.

“Our civilization was
shocked when we discovered that we weren’t alone in the universe. It was even
more stunning to realize that not only were at least some of the aliens hostile
but that our technology was also vastly inferior to theirs.

“We had no idea of the
galactic political games being played when the Noridians first openly contacted
us. and because they were claiming to be our friends many of us found hope
again.

“That hope turned to fear
and dread as the truth of the Noridians slowly became known. We learned that
they bioengineered our race and then later attempted genocide on us. We also
learned that we were denied our heritage and purposely given shorter life-spans
in that genocidal attempt. Both Dr. Schein and Toni of the Coridian enclave
tell me that many of our cancers and other genetic diseases could very well be byproducts
of that same genetic engineering.

“And the Noridians aren’t
finished with us. Today they’re trying to enslave us. Following the political
rules of The Accord they’re trying to absorb our achievements and cap our
freedom and sovereignty.

“They make it tempting to
us by offering a higher standard of technology and living but they would still
own us, our achievements, and our future. And even if they were sincere about
giving us a better life how could we ever trust a people that attempted to wipe
us out?

“We must remember that
every mousetrap has its cheese.

“The Coridians have given
us hope again. They have protected this team and worked behind the scenes to
thwart the Noridian’s plans for Earth.
The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend
is a good way to describe our relationship thus far.

“We are grateful to them.

“But I must say this to
you in front of them – just because we like each other doesn’t make us friends;
and just because we help each other doesn’t mean we can trust each other.

“Many of the original
Earth Team have been duped into believing Noridia is a friend and some, like
Colonel Nesbit and Dr. Decker, have betrayed us. They have already returned to
Earth and have a large head start on convincing the rest of the population to
accept Noridia’s offer.

“We personally have lost
friends on this journey. We’ve watched our colleagues callously cut down or
sacrifice themselves so the rest of us might survive. There will be a time and
place to properly mourn them; today I suggest we honor them by learning from
them.

“When we realized that
we’d been separated from the rest of the Earth Team and marked for death not a
single one of us laid down to die. When the Noridians came after us with
futuristic weapons we fought back with sticks and stones and our bare fists,
and in too many cases paid the ultimate price.

“What we did not do,
however, was give up.

“The Coridians need the
Noridians to fail but they’d also like us to be their protectorate. We need
Noridia to fail but we don’t want to give up our sovereignty to anyone.

“When this is all said and
done, when we’ve gotten all of this figured out and Earth is still free,
whether it’s six months from now or six hundred years from now Coridians need
to understand that Earth will either think of you as bystanders that gave moral
support or allies that openly fought alongside of us. We will either think of
you as a people that would help us only if there were something for you to gain
or as true like-minded friends that we owe a debt of gratitude to.

“What Earth will never
think of you as is our owners; our superiors; our protectors.

“We appreciate you taking
us to Earth. We appreciate you giving us familiar weapons to defend ourselves.
We understand the political expediency of keeping your involvement quiet for
the time being, however, know this; there will come a time when you will need
to take a stand.

“There will come a time
when Earth needs to know how to think of you – and it will be your actions that
will determine that.

“I am a simple soldier;
one amongst billions of my people, but I can confidently tell you that we value
loyalty and we would welcome you as a true ally. You won’t earn our respect by
playing political games, but you will earn it by standing with us as equals.
The things you hope to gain from being our protector will taste so much sweeter
when you’ve earned them as our friends.

“Earth will beat the
Noridian threat. I just hope that we can forge a partnership with Coridia along
the way.”

I’m not much of a
speechmaker and I certainly wasn’t trying to make this dramatic so I moved
ahead to discuss the various details of the training schedule I had set up
along with the outlines of our tactics once we reached Earth. I had briefly
toyed with the idea of trying to keep some of the planning to ourselves but… I’d
literally laughed out loud when I realized how impossible that would truly be. I
was banking that transparency with our Coridian hosts would suit us better for
the moment…

At any rate, we had a long
trip ahead of us and I still hadn’t quite figured out how to tell Julie that
there was no way on God’s green earth she was going to be on the raid that
boarded the Noridian ship.

ΔΔΔ

“I’m telling you Matt,
she’s a natural.”

Major Mike ‘Iron Jaw’
Reynolds seemed to think my reluctance to let Julie play commando was based on
me not believing his reports on her training.

“She’s literally got the
highest marksmanship of any of the civilians - #1 on the rifle and #7 on the handgun.
She throws herself into every training scenario and rarely makes the same
mistake twice. Her hand-to-hand still sucks but all the civvies do. We’d
already planned on pairing them with our soldiers so it’d be less of an issue.”

He wouldn’t be pressing on
this issue except that we’d already determined we were going to need civilian
help to take the Noridian ship. It was just too big and our need to take it out
quickly, before alarms could be raised, had reduced us to planning a surprise
Blitzkrieg type of operation. We’d use deception to get on board and then take
out the resistance (hopefully)
before
they could get a message to either
their colleagues planetside, or back with the dynasty.

Unfortunately, for this to
succeed we needed more shooters than what we had. We were going to have to use
some civilians.

But I really didn’t want
Julie to be one of them.

I had a number of very
good reasons for this. She had become the unspoken leader of our unofficial
‘Keep Earth Free’ movement and the Noridian ship raid could very well turn into
a suicide mission. If everything went perfectly the boarding team would be fine
but she had become too valuable for such risks – or so I told myself.

Besides I had another
mission in mind for her…

When we took out the ship
someone was going to have to declare ourselves to the Earth authorities.
Someone was going to have to explain why we’d just killed the nice aliens that
were promising to give us great technology and protect us from the bad aliens.

I was pretty sure that
that kind of message needed to come from our civilians and not just our
military.

We also had no idea how
many of the Noridians would be left down on the planet.

I had just finished
explaining to Iron Jaw that I wanted him to lead the boarding party and about the
other mission I had in mind for Julie when he asked how we were going to keep
the Noridians left on the planet from sending a message back to the Noridian
Dynasty.

“Mike, we’re going to have
to time this carefully,” I responded. “But taking the ship will also shut down
the communications node that connects them to the rest of the galaxy.

“Silva has assured me that
if he times his bioware ‘cyber-attack’ on the Noridian ship correctly we’ll be
covering all those bases.”