Chronicles of the Interregnum

[Accounting Troll]

Authors note: This is a story about a settlement founded between the events of UFO: Aftermath and UFO: Aftershock, and the interactions between the settlement and its neighbours. I wrote it over a year before the release of Aftershock, at a time when Altar had released very little information about the storyline in Aftershock. If you decide to read on, please understand that there are a lot of inconsistencies with the official Aftershock storyline.

 

The chapter entitled 'The Prisoner' contains scenes of a Reticulan prisoner hearing another prisoner being executed somewhat messily, so don't read it if you don't have a strong stomach.

 

I would like to thank Izchan for his thoughts on the storyline.

 

 

"Oh happy posterity who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable." - Petrarch.

 

 

THE MILITIA

 

The sirens blared through the military base and refugee centre outside Nantwich. "Alien attack imminent, all militia units to go to designated assembly points, this is not a drill..." Edward Whittaker endeavored to run to the assembly point for Charlie Squad, although he was impeded by the press of panicking civilians. The word squad was slightly optimistic as beside Edward, Charlie Squad consisted of Paul Davies, Andy Jackson, Claire Mitchell, Richard Morgan and Kerry Hitchen. The only member of the squad with any real combat experience had been on the business end of an alien incendiary rocket during the last attack - biomass repulsor bases were prime targets for alien attacks. Edward had been horrified when he had been told that being 24, he was the oldest member of what was left of the squad and he was therefore in charge. He had no idea how he would cope if any of his friends died because he made the wrong decision.

 

Richard was the last person to turn up at the assembly point, about half a minute after Edward. "Sorry I'm late, sir. Next time I'll bayonet any damm civilian who gets in my way sir" He gave an exaggerated salute.

 

"A commendable attitude in the platoon medic," commented Edward, dryly. "And knock off the sirs and the salutes, I was just as shocked as you lot when some deskchair warrior promoted me to the giddy heights of corporal."

 

"Is the war going so badly that they're reduced to promoting you then?" asked Claire.

 

"And are you going to come up with that cheesy line about how we must be a right bunch of charlies to serve in Charlie Squad?" added Richard, to groans from the others.

 

Edward didn't mind the banter and joking as it seemed to help release some of the prebattle tension. As far as Edward could see, militia squads were just cannon fodder whose purpose was to delay the aliens long enough for the self-important officials to escape. The regulars could only be counted on to take the credit for launching a counter attack to drive the aliens back once the militia had done the real work, and suffered the casualties. Edward and Paul took out their keys and unlocked the double-locked armory cupboard. The contents were not that impressive. Phoenix Company got their choice of the best equipment, then the regulars took the best of what Phoenix Company didn't need. The militia got what nobody else wanted. Six SA80 assault rifles, the standard in the British Army but unpopular due to their reputation for unreliability, an obselete field radio, a basic first aid kit and a pair of binoculars. Even some helmets and a few grenades would have been welcome. Both of Edward's grandfathers had served in the Home Guard in an earlier war and he remembered them telling him that they had experienced this sort of thing.

 

"I hope my gun doesn't jam this time," complained Andy.

 

"You know that officially it was your fault for not spending two hours cleaning your gun each time you fired a shot," replied Claire. "I'm sure that plecton wouldn't have minded waiting."

 

Edward sympethised with this. Did the designers have any idea how hard it was to dissassemble a gun and clean it in the middle of a firefight? "Okay, our equipment isn't much, but it's what we've got, and we're going to hold the aliens off until the staff officers have waddled their way to the transporter."

 

"If they don't get stuck when they all try to take a door at the same time," replied Andy.

 

Kerry had been fiddling with the radio and she interrupted the banter to report a radio message from the base control centre. "Echo Squad have spotted a Reticulan battleship landing two miles to the north. Orders are for us to advance north and support Echo Squad."

 

"Leave the base, spread out and move north," shouted Edward, all fears and doubts suddenly dissipated. "If Echo Squad are holding their ground, some of the aliens will come our way to flank them."

 

The squad moved through the base and the surrounding collection of tents that made up the refugee camp. They saw their first two Reticulans in a field ten minutes later, one of whom was armed with a warp assault rifle and the other one had a collapsible plasma cannon. The two Reticulans were so busy trying to circle around Echo Squad that they didn't notice the approach of Charlie Squad. Six SA80s firing in burst mode took down the first Reticulan before they realised what was happening. The second tried to unfold his plasma cannon, but even the best human or Reticulan soldier needs at least six seconds to unfold and deploy a collapsible plasma cannon. This one only had three seconds before he fell. The squad were cheered by their early success against the Reticulans.

 

Barely a minute later there was a volley of gunshots and Richard was suddenly down, shot in the head. The others dived for what little cover there was in the middle of a field of rotted corn.

 

"Who the hell fired that?" shouted Edward. "That was a human gun."

 

Claire spotted a small group of humans heading towards them from the south west. They seemed to be even worse at making use of available cover than the average member of the militia was. "Behind us corp, there's at least four of them."

 

As more shots were fired, Edward wondered who had thought that there was anything friendly about friendly fire. Then Andy screamed as he took a round in the chest. Edward realised that the squad was being targeted deliberatly. "Fire back, they're some sort of renegades." Edward checked that his rifle was in burst mode then started firing at the renegades, who dived for cover.

 

Kerry got on the radio, reporting that they were pinned down by a group of renegades and asking for immediate backup. She had to repeat herself twice before the staff at the base command centre understood the situation and promised help in the form of Hotel Squad. Hotel Squad had the job of reinforcing any section of the perimeter defences that was in danger of being overwhelmed by the attackers.

 

The surviving members of Charlie Squad exchanged fire with the renegades over the next few minutes. Edward ordered them to stick to single shot mode as they didn't have enough spare magazines to use burst fire in a prolonged fight. One of the renegades was down, and as he didn't make any attempt to get up, Edward guessed that he was dead.

 

Then some automatic fire rang out from a different direction, Hotel Squad had arrived. In less than a minute, two more renegades were dead, and the last, a woman, was approaching Charlie Squad with her hands in the air. Edward ran over to where Andy was lying, but it was too late.

 

When the renegade woman was within eighty yards of the group, Claire suddenly opened fire on her, killing her almost instantly. "Down, grenade" shouted Claire a couple of seconds before the explosion.

 

"Sorry about that, there was no time to explain," said Claire. "That woman had a grenade of some sort in her hand. She was going to throw it at us when she got close enough. It must have been on some kind of dead man's switch so that she wouldn't have to spend time pulling the pin out in front of us."

 

Edward realised that the renegades must have been members of one of the pro-alien cults springing up in the refugee camps. Many people had been driven to the edge of their reason by the devastation unleashed by the aliens, and they were willing to listen to anybody who had an explanation of what had happened. Even if that anybody was a mad preacher who thought that God had decided to destroy the world as a punishment for man's wickedness, with the aliens being God's chosen instrument.

 

The mood of the four surviving members of Charlie Squad was sombre after they were debriefed and they headed for one of the improvised bars among the tents of the refugee camp. The last thing they had wanted to see was about twenty people listening to a preacher standing on a crate.

 

"Let us follow the example of those who took up weapons and became glorious martyrs in defence of our alien brethren earlier today. Let us stand against the servants of Satan who have refused to accept the judgement of God and fight those whom God has appointed to oof..."

 

The 'oof' was because Edward had walked up to the preacher and punched him in the stomach. Paul, Claire and Kerry tended to think the same way as Edward and they were soon among the preacher's audience, distributing kicks and punches. Although they were outnumbered, they were fired up by the anger and frustration of the day and the remaining upright cultists were soon running away. Edward gave the preacher a few more kicks for good measure before he dragged him up by the hair.

 

"You're nicked on charges of incitement to committ murder and high treason. And I'm glad to say that treason still carries the death penalty."

 

When two burly military police officers dragged the semi-conscious preacher away, Kerry asked "Edward, do you think they'll manage to put him on trial with all this chaos?"

 

"He won't live long enough. Do you have any idea what the guards will do to him after what happened out there today?" Edward grinned, he did and this thought had gone some way to cheering him up. "Come on, let's get those drinks."

[Accounting Troll]

DECISIONS

 

"You can't be serious" roared Brigadier Taylor, supreme commander of all Council of Earth forces. "Those blasted aliens have murdered seven billion people and now you're going to accept their peace treaty. Why?"

 

The chairman of the ruling council spoke calmly. "We have no choice, Commander. We cannot win this war and even if we could, how can we feed the population? Almost all the plant and animal life out there is either dead or swallowed up by the Biomass. And even with seeds from agricultural supply stores, we don't have the labour to cultivate fields and defend our crops from the transgenants, we barely have enough people to defend our bases and refugee centres. This morning I had a meeting with some scientists who warned that we might only have enough oil stockpiles for twelve years, and we don't have the labour to man any oil wells. How will we cope without oil? Our only option is to make peace with the Reticulans and allow them to help us to survive."

 

"But the Biomass is being driven back and we've got a plan to attack the enemy command centre. Once their command centre has fallen, we can easily mop up the remaining aliens and transgenants on Earth."

 

"Even if we win, few of our people can survive the two decades until the Old Grey fleet gets here. And you're assuming that they will want to help rebuild our world. They've been here for thousands of years, and they did not intervene in our affairs once. What about all the wars, famines, natural disasters and diseases people have endured in all that time? Each time, they chose not to help us. The Old Grey ambassadors say that their people have a policy of not interfering with the destiny of primitive civilizations. We cannot afford to gamble what's left of humanity on the possibility of them deciding to help us this time. They might easily decide that struggling to survive in the ruins of Earth is our destiny."

 

The Reticulan plan to build a space settlement for humanity was impressive. The settlement was based on the Stanford torus design, and designed to hold 2.5 million people. The rim would have a width of 1.9 miles and a diameter of 21.7 miles. Its twenty decks would provide ample space for living quarters, water and atmospheric recycling plants, recreation facilities, shopping malls and some agriculture as an alternative to synthetic food. The hub would house the industrial facilities, synthetic food manufacturing facilities, space docks and solid waste recycling plants. There would be no single life support facility, but hundreds of facilities scattered throughout the station - if one atmospheric recycling facility malfunctioned, the others would be able to pick up the slack.

 

Power would be obtained by simply covering the exterior with solar panels, and several large fanlike solar panels would be attached to the hub - these large panels could be rotated so they would always face the sun. It would be necessary to simulate gravity to prevent the inhabitants from suffering from muscle and bone wastage; the most energy efficient method was to have the settlement rotate once every three hours. The centrifugal force would create Earth-like gravity in the rim although people working in the hub would experice low or zero gravity conditions.

 

There was a danger from occasional meteorites and radiation from solar storms. The Reticulans planned to use a scaled up version of the energy shield used to protect their lunar base from such hazards. Ships would be able to enter or leave the settlement at will but meteors would be deflected and it would be possible to control the amount of solar radiation of any wavelength received by the settlement.

 

The settlement was to be placed at one of the Lagrangian points (points in the orbital plane of two objects circling their common centre of gravity where an object of limited mass can remain in equilibrium). L4, 60 degrees ahead of the Moon was selected for the human settlement that the Council of Earth agreed to call the Laputa. The smaller Reticulan settlement, named the Lagado in continuation of the Gulliver's Travels theme, was placed at the L5 point, 60 degrees behind the Moon. Both settlements had a series of thrusters which would allow their position to be adjusted if necessary. Although it would have been more convenient to have the settlements closer to Earth, that would have meant having them in Earth's shadow for much of the time which could be problematic because of the reliance on solar energy.

 

The materials required for the two settlements could easily be mined from asteroids and the Moon by the Reticulans. The industrial matter converters, an application of transporter technology, were capable of transforming the raw materials into whatever components were necessary.

 

Perhaps surprisingly, the majority of the civilians in the refugee centres supported the decision to end the war. All the survivors had lost friends and relatives during the Fall, and they could see for themselves how lush green fields and hills had been turned into a silent, lifeless wasteland. Some had committed suicide, some had gone insane, and many had started drinking themselves to death. The end of the war and the plan to transfer the survivors to the space settlement gave people hope for the future. Most of the military were less sanguine but they could not go against the will of the majority.

 

The four survivors of Charlie Squad met up in a bar a few hours after the Council announced its decision to accept the Reticulan offer. Having spent the last year fighting the Reticulans and their minions, none of them believed that the Reticulans had suddenly become full of respect for the species they had come close to destroying.

 

"I know, I'm not happy about it either," said Kerry, indistinctly because she was on her third glass of moonshine. "But what can the four of us do about it?"

 

Edward had been thinking about this. "Well, we don't have to go. I mean, who's going to stop us if we decide to stay on Earth?"

 

"What about the council?" asked Paul.

 

Claire put down her drink for a moment. "No, they couldn't care less about us. Politicians never do. When have you ever heard of a politician caring about anything apart from getting reelected? Remember the lies they told us last time? They only cared when they needed us to save their worthless hides."

 

Edward agreed. "There'll be other people like us here who don't trust the aliens and their wretched offer, and other people who prefer to live without all that beaurocracy. We can find some place out of the way. Somewhere we can start a new life without the aliens or the politicians screwing things up for us. There's a place I know on the coast that'd be great."

 

The plan would have remained the drunken ramblings of a few embittered veterans if the leader of Bravo Squad hadn't approached Edward the following afternoon and said "I was in the bar last night and if you're planning on staying on Earth, we're with you. I've been talking to the other militia squad leaders as well, and they don't want to accept the Reticulan offer either."

 

This meeting gave Edward some food for thought. A group of people who decided to remain on Earth would be able to scavenge everything they need to create a viable community from the ruins of the cities. The main problem was that you needed dozens, maybe hundreds of people willing to commit themselves if you wanted to create such a community. If the people in the other militia squads were in, then they would have the numbers that they would need. Edward decided to arrange a meeting with those members of the militia squads who wanted to remain on Earth.

 

The first meeting was attended by nearly sixty members of the base militia squads. Edward knew that some would lose interest in the project while others would tell other people who would want in. It was agreed that the eight milita squad leaders who were in would form a Council of Elders, despite their average age being less than thirty. The idea was that people would accept their judgements and orders because they believed them to be right. If you didn't agree with the decisions of the Council of Elders, you would be free to leave the settlement. They arranged to work out what would be a good location for the settlement before the next meeting in two days time.

 

There was a considerable amount of consulting of maps and arguing before the tiny village of Dale in Pembrokeshire was settled on. Dale was on a peninsula in the west of the county. By erecting a mile long fence, it would be possible to seal off the village and five square miles of fertile farmland from encroaching transgenants. There was a Victorian fort that had been converted to provide tourist acomodation on a promonotory on the east side of the island. This would make an ideal base while the fence was being constructed and the peninsula was being cleared of transgenants. Almost the entire peninsula was on eighty foot high cliffs, making the entire site highly defensible if pirates ever became a problem.

 

Somebody asked about growing food once canned supplies from the cities ran out and the Biomass reached Pembrokeshire. Edward, who had been the one to suggest Dale, had an answer. "From what I've heard about the Biomass, it only managed to take so much of the world so quickly because the spores killed all the plants. It needs sunlight in the same way as native plants do, so I think that if we plant our crops over the Biomass, our crops will simply starve it of light. Most of the Biomass is a spongey layer two inches thick max, so our crops can outcompete it for light. I think we're going to have to concentrate on planting stuff like grain and oats because they're hardy and wind pollinated which is important now there's no insects left. Maybe we can even start planting ferns and grasses along the coast and begin reclaiming Earth from the Biomass. We're also going to need to plant some pine trees and nut trees while the seeds are still viable. As well as the food from the nuts, we're going to need supplies of wood and tar one day.

 

"We're going to have the sea on three sides, so we can go fishing and harvest seaweed. All the coastal shellfish will be dead, but the fish and seaweed will have survived at lower depths and they're now beginning to recolonise the shallow waters. And yes, seaweed is edible. The locals made a delicacy called lava bread out of local seaweed and oats, we can do the same.

 

"There's another factor to consider. Those idiots in the Council aren't going to let us have any provisions to get us started. We're going to have to resort to scavenging some transport from Nantwich or Crewe. I've been doing some research, and all the capital we're going to need to set up the community is in easy reach of Dale. The towns of Pembroke and Milford Haven are a short boat trip away across the inlet of Milford Haven, we can get all the basic equipment, seeds and food there. The town of Milford Haven has a large oil refinery, so we'll have enough oil and petrol to last us decades at least. There's an army range south of Castlemartin, about eight miles from Dale as the crow flies. We can scavenge some guns, and probably some mortars as well. The best of it is that the army never bothered to send scavenging teams to Pembrokeshire because they can find closer supplies of eveything, so the base here has been using petrol supplies scavenged from the refinery at Birkinhead. We can get to Swansea, Cardiff and Bristol by sea easily enough for anything we can't scavenge locally. Even boats aren't going to be a problem, boating and sea fishing were popular pasttimes for tourists in Pembrokeshire and Swansea. We can winter them in the harbours at Milford Haven and Pembroke, or just beach them if they're small enough."

 

Not everybody in the group was convinced that Pembrokeshire was their best option, after all an island would be easier to defend against the transgenants. Edward spoke again. "Look, I know that a lot of the people who are planning to stay on Earth are talking about colonising a small island, but that's not our best option. There are already three other groups planning to colonise the Channel Islands or the Isle of Wight at Nantwich alone. There's going to be other groups planning the same thing in the other refugee camps in Britain and northern France. Several of us have been given 'friendly' warnings not to take our group to Wight or the Channel Islands, and there have already been punchups between members of the other groups over this. There's going to be open warfare for control of the more desirable islands. Lots of people are going to die needlessly because of this stupidity. There's simply not enough people left to use up all the stuff that can be scavenged before everything deteriorates with age. Most of the more northerly islands only had a small population because the farming was bad, so we can't make a go of it there. If we go inland we'll just stagnate, that is if we can keep the Biomass transgenants at bay. The peninsula gives us everything we need to get started, the sea access will be important when the communities settle down and start trading with each other, and we can send out patrols to keep the transgenants to the north from becoming too numerous. There's even a couple of streams and a pond, so fresh water for drinking and irrigation isn't going to be a problem."

 

One problem that only Edward and the other ringleaders knew about was that the Council would not let them take any weapons, and they would probably have to fight some transgenants on the journey and in Dale. They quietly agreed to steal some weapons from the base armory before the group left. In return for four bottles of a fine Irish single malt whiskey fortuitously found on a scavenging trip (an infinite improvement on the moonshine being brewed in the camp), the two soldiers guarding the armory agreed to let themselves be overpowered from behind. Edward and his companions stole twenty automatic pistols along with ammunition and grenades. Before the theft was reported, they had gone on a scavenging expedition, the main purpose of which was to hide their haul. As they had expected, the camp was searched to no avail. Suspicion fell on the groups planning to stay on Earth, but nobody could prove anything.

 

In September, several members of the group travelled to Pembrokeshire for a week to examine the possibilities offered by the proposed site. Although it was a barren wasteland, they could see that it offered everything the community would need to survive, and there were hardly any transgenants in the area. They gave the decomposed remains of the former inhabitants of Dale a decent burial.

[Accounting Troll]

DALE

 

The date for departure from Nantwich was set for an hour before dawn on the morning of January 3rd, 2006. The ceasefire had come too late in the year for any food crops to be grown in 2005, and the leaders of the group were concerned that the resolve of the community would be sapped by the onset of winter in a dead land. This way, the group that now consisted of 179 people would be boyed by their New Year resolution to carve out a new life in Pembrokeshire to get them through to when the crops they sow start growing, and the adults would have recovered from their hangovers from the combined New Year/Leaving party. There had been an extra reason to celebrate the New Year as that was when Edward Whittaker and Kerry Hitchen got married. Although the Laputa was not going to be ready for another 18 months, nobody wanted to spend as much as one more day sitting around in Nantwich with nothing to do except watch other survivors getting drunk. Before they departed from Nantwich, they told as many people as possible about their intention and they issued an open invitation to anybody who might later decide to join them.

 

During the journey the mood among both the children and the adults in the group was one of great excitement. They knew how hard they would have to work even to survive, but it would be work with a purpose. In leaving the refugee centre, they were leaving behind everything they had known in order to create something new from the ruins of the world around them. Normally the sight of the dead landscapes of the English Midlands and the rugged Welsh hills caused survivors to be filled with despair, but instead it helped to inspire the group to begin to create a new world.

 

In the first couple of weeks, people were working too hard to worry about the future. Patrols were having to sweep the region clear of transgenants and a wire mesh fence was erected across the peninsula to prevent other transgenants from wandering into the settlement. Scavenging expeditions were sent out to obtain large amounts of provisions including food, weapons, tools, construction materials, medical supplies, fuel and seeds.

 

In mid January several people were surprised by the sight of daffodils apparently growing wild in several parts of the settlement. The contrast between the fresh green of the leaves and the brown of the dead land was unmistakable. Paul Davies, one of the leaders of the group cleared up the mystery. "We planted a bunch of daffodil bulbs during that scouting trip last autumn as a sort of covenant with nature. The world we knew is dead thanks to those dammed aliens. But we have the power to see that at least this corner of it is born again. And when our efforts turn the land green once more, it will be able to support our population."

 

The types of crops that were planted was limited by the lack of insects and birds to pollinate the flowers - everything had to be either wind pollinated or capable of sending out runners. Two of the settlers had experience as farmers and they impressed upon everybody else the need to do the planting while the seeds available for the taking in garden centres and agricultural supply stores were still viable.

 

Wheat, oat and potato crops were sown in the settlement. Then both in the settlement and at sites across Pembrokeshire wild grasses, ferns and mosses were sown. The wild grass seed mix included buttercups and clovers, both of which can propogate through runners. Sedges were planted alongside river banks - once the sedges established themselves, it would be possible to harvest their leaves and weave them into baskets. Beech, chestnut, hazelnut, walnut and pine trees were planted in a variety of locations; given time they would need the wood, and the nuts would be a welcome addition to their diet. Grasses, ferns, mosses, heather and thyme were planted on the rolling hills in order to make the landscape green once more.

 

The only dissapointment had been that the only legume anyone had been able to find that would thrive in a world without birds or insects was the clover. As chemical fertilizers would soon become a thing of the past the lack of legumes meant that a proper crop rotation system would be impossible, resulting in severely limited crop yields.

 

During the summer months, a windmill was constructed, giving the settlers the ability to efficiently mill the harvested cereal crops. Several sailing yachts were aquired and fitted out to become fishing vessels operating out of Milford Haven harbour. A bakery and a blacksmiths workshop were set up during the autumn and winter.

 

Several families and small groups joined the settlement from the refugee camps during the course of 2006. They reported that there had been a series of riots in the camps as a result of discontent over food ration sizes and the decision to accept the Reticulan offer. One group of regular soldiers had apparently deserted en masse when they were ordered to fire on the protesters. Worryingly, the cultists had decided to stay on Earth and they were talking about cleansing the world of the non-believers. The settlers responded by installing some salvaged anti-aircraft cannons and laying in stockpiles of small arms. Anyone who decided to pick a fight with them would suffer.

 

They saw their first ship from another community in May 2007, an old pleasure yacht with eighteen crew and passengers. The captain of the ship, Alfred Frazer asked to speak to the Council of Elders. He then gave them their first news of the other splinter groups.

 

All the splinter groups in the refugee centre in Hampshire had wanted to go to the Isle of Wight because of the favourable climate and fertility of the farmland, also the island would be relatively secure once it had been cleared of transgenants.

 

The first group arrived on the Isle of Wight in the middle of January 2006 and several other small groups arrived in the next few weeks and months. In the first few months, the groups had been happy to cooperate in the mammoth tasks of killing all the transgenants on the island and establishing a farming system.

 

During the summer and autumn months more people had made their way to the Isle of Wight, pushing the pupulation up to 2,000 and causing the early settlers to become worried. How many more people would turn up on the island? Would it be possible for the island to support them all? After all, there must be a limit to how much could be scavenged from the old towns on the island. Besides, the early settlers had been the ones who had cleared the island of transgenats - eight people had died in the fighting. They did not see why they should have to share the rewards with people who had spent the last few months sitting around in the refugee camps.

 

In November the early settlers formed a coalition to drive out the later arrivals and keep others from landing. The later groups responded by forming a coalition of their own and there was a series of increasingly violent incidents. After hearing about a double murder, Alfred Frazer decided to offer to take his small group off the island once the winter storms abated if they weren't attacked. The early settlers were happy to agree as they had plenty of other targets. As nearly thirty people were murdered in the fighting between the two coalitions over the winter, Alfred had found that everybody in his group was happy to abandon the Isle of Wight.

 

They sailed to the Channel Islands, only to find things were no better there. French and British settlers had started fighting each other on Jersey the previous summer and the more numerous French had pushed the British off the island. The British settlers then established themselves on Aldernay from where they had launched several raids on Jersey. Neither group was prepared to take in more mouths to feed.

 

There was a single group of about 120 people on the Isles of Scilly, however it was unwilling to take in extra people bcause of concerns about the limited avaiability of things to scavenge in the small towns and villages of the Scilly Isles and western Cornwall. Alfred's wife remembered hearing about a group that had struck out for Pembrokeshire and had offered an open invitation to anybody willing to join them. It was that or return to the refugee camps as there were too few of them to build a thriving community on their own. Fortunatly, the settlers at Dale were happy to take in the new arrivals.

 

The attitude displayed by the communities in the English Channel seemed incredibly petty to Edward Whittaker. The islands could effortlessly support more than twenty times their current population and the quantity of the supplies available in the old towns and cities was so great that the survivors could not hope to use them all up before they deterioated with age.

 

That August a helicopter containing an envoy representing the Council of Earth landed in Dale. He explained that the Laputa was now complete and the evacuation of the survivors had begun. He urged the settlers to abandon their "foolish and unpatriotic" plan to stay on Earth. He was dissapointed but unsurprised when nobody wanted to abandon the settlement and move to the Laputa; most of the people in the other settlements had been equally obstinate.

 

Edward decided to take the envoy on a tour of the settlement to explain why they were happy to remain in the settlement. "In the time we have been here, we have made the land in and around our village turn green again, for instance, that lavabread you had for lunch was entirely made from ingredients grown locally, milled in the windmill we built over there, and baked in the bakery we set up in the village. All this effort has made us closer to the land and to each other. We really are a proper community now in a way you just didn't get before the invasion. We've got an inner stregnth now because we chose to take our fate into our own hands, rather than fatalistically accepting whatever happens to us and going to Laputa.

 

"Man has shaped the world for a million years, but in turn the world has shaped man. How do you think your people will fare knowing that they are a thousand miles away from the world they turned their backs on?"

 

The evacuation of the Earth was completed in November. 2.1 million people were now living in the Laputa settlement and it was estimated that one million people were left on Earth - a mixture of people who hadn't made contact with the Council of Earth, and people who had refused to relocate to the Laputa for whatever reason. It was amazing how many people actually preferred to live without having the government micromanaging their lives, even though it meant having to cope with dangers and hardship. During the course of the winter, the population of the settlement at Dale had risen to just over five hundred. It was another unusually cold winter, which most people in the settlement regarded as proof that the devestation of the Fall had knocked out the Gulf Stream.

 

By 2008, things had settled down in the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands. Several trade ships visited the settlement of Dale. One trade boat had come from the communities that had estabished themselves on the peninsulas of County Kerry and County Cork in Ireland, and another trade ship had come all the way from Norway. Trade ships tended to be medium sized yachts using a combination of sail and diesel engines. One day fuel would become impossible to obtain, so all ships would have to have sails.

 

The only thing people were interested in trading for was food surpluses from the farms. Everything else was still there for the taking for people willing to scavenge in the old towns and cities. The pre-invasion currencies were worthless now, so people had reverted to bartering.

 

The growth of the Biomass had been of some concern. The sight of it growing so quickly that it appeared to slowly flow across hills and plains was unforgettable. Fortunatly it was only able to assimilate dead organic matter. The living crops and wild plants around the settlement could not be assimilated. The indigenous flora was able to oucompete the Biomass for the available light, so the Biomass never became the dominant life form in the area around farming settlements.

 

Most of the early transgenants had been creatd with the sole purpose of killing the humans who had survived the Fall. Being created from the mutated remains of people and animals killed by the spores, they had no means of reproduction and so they simply died out in the aftermath of the war. The only species of transgenant that the people of Earth had to worry about were the ones that were found on the Biomass. Fortunatly, they were less dangerous than the first wave transgenants.

 

People in the settlements on the mainland soon found some interesting benefits from the Biomass and its transgenants. The fibres of the shrub-like plants of the Biomass had similar properties to cotton, resulting in the growth of a cottage textiles industry. Timber and a sort of tar could be obtained from the tree-like Biomass growths, making construction and ship building possible. The tentacles of a Man-of-War could be spun into a strong rope, with all sorts of applications. Lobster traps were set for scuttlebugs as a fresh scuttlebug was delicious when boiled. People across the world were quickly learning how to live off the Biomass and its transgenants.

[Accounting Troll]

CONFLICT WITH THE CULTISTS

 

In late March 2009, two small fishing boats from the Scilly Isles arrived at Dale. The two dozen people on board were suffering from hunger, thirst and borderline hypothermia. They reported that their settlement had been attacked and overwhelmed by a cultist fleet sailing from the east, and they had been the only ones to escape in the confusion. Their descriptions were worrying for the community leaders, evidently this was more than a simple raid and the cultists now had an excellent base for launching raids throughout the Bristol Channel and the Celtic Sea. They had no idea what to make of the fact that the cultists seemed more interested in taking prisoners than in killing all the people they regarded as unbelievers.

 

Although Alfred Frazer hadn't been too sorry to see the islanders taken down a peg or two, it was resolved by the Elders that Edward Whittaker should lead a force of twenty members of the Dale militia armed with assault rifles plus eight of the islanders to serve as guides. Although it wasn't a big invasion force, it was all that could be spared with the spring planting coming up. Fortunatly, one of the islanders had been a fisherman before the Fall, and he was confident that he could guide the yachts through the rocks around St Mary's Island, where the invaders were congregated.

 

The invasion force landed on St Mary's Island shortly after midnight on April 12th, a day late because they had been forced to tack against the wind for most of the way. It was a clear night and there was plenty of light as it was only three nights after the full moon. Edward and half the men landed in the north and the other half, commanded by Alfred Frazer landed in the west. The plan was to approach Hugh Town from two directions, thus confusing the cultists if they spotted the yatchets or the invasion force. The curious thing was that there didn't seem to be any patrols or sentries.

 

Both groups descended on the church in Hugh Town. Before they had seen some light streaming from a broken window in the church, Edward had begun to worry that they might have picked the wrong island or that the cultists might already have left. Edward and Alfred quietly conferred and they agreed that Edward's group would enter the church and Alfred's group would take up positions around the church in case of ambush. When they burst into the nave, the fight was pretty anti-climatic. All but two of the cultists were asleep, and the two that were awake were swiftly killed. The others were swiftly disarmed and tied up, ready to be put in the crypt.

 

Curiously, the door to the crypt had been barred. One of the militiamen unbarred the door, shone his torch into the crypt and then shouted in alarm. The crypt was full of living morelmen! Edward and another militiaman came over and looked at the morelmen. A morelman can only live for 18 months, after that the resources of the host body are consumed and the parasite must then find a new host or it will starve, and new host bodies were no longer easy to come by. The Reticulans hadn't created any new morelmen for four years, so there was only one way these ones could have survived. Edward remembered that the cultists had been trying to take prisoners and some of the host bodies down there looked fresh rather than the emancipated look normally associated with a morelman host. Edward wondered how even the cultists could sink low enough to practice human sacrifice.

 

Edward angrily strode into the middle of the nave. "All right, where are the surviving prisoners? And if you don't tell me, I'm going to personally feed each one of you to your pet morelmen" After Edward shouted at the cultists for a few more minutes, one of them admitted that they had the prisoners under guard in an old hotel a few hundred yards to the west. Alfred and another seven men were left to guard the church while Edward took the rest of his men to the hotel.

 

The plan was to surround the hotel and then six of the men would burst in through the door to the kitchen and begin a room to room sweep. Things got messy when the prisoners realised that rescue was at hand and they turned on the cultists, and one of the militiamen was killed in a shootout with two cultists, yet the end result was never in any doubt. The freed islanders confirmed Edwards suspicion that the cultists had been using them for human sacrifice. The search for fresh victims for the morelmen had caused the cultists to destroy several small communities on the south coast before they invaded the Scilly Islands.

 

The islanders asked Edward to let them be the ones to execute the cultists and the morelmen. He agreed, but only when they promised to give the cultists a quick death - there would be no torture.

 

During the course of the summer, a mutual defence pact was drawn up between the communities of the Bristol Channel, the hope being that any other cultist groups out there would be discouraged from launching an attack in the region for fear of a major confrontration. During the course of the following year, the communities of County Kerry, County Cork the Isle of Wight and the Channel Islands also signed up.

 

By 2011 most communities were aware of genetic mutation among a few of the children born after the fall. Nobody knew if the genetic damage had been caused by low level exposure to the spores during the fall, constant exposure to the biomass or the emissions of the biomass repulsors used during the war. Fortunatly, most of the mutations were minor things like an unconventional number of toes. While the people of Dale did not judge a child as unworthy to live just because of a mutation, there were stories of some communities attempting to maintain their genetic purity by killing such children.

[Accounting Troll]

VOYAGES OF EXPLORATION

 

Although trade links as far as the Baltic and Oleron Island in the Bay of Biscay had been set up by 2012, there were no hard facts about the inhabitants of the rest of the world. The community at Dale and its allies agreed on a cooperative venture to explore more of the world. The ships being used by the coastal and island communities were coasthuggers, so two sailing cruisers had to be scavenged. The advent of steam and then diesel power meant that there had been very few sailing ships capable of a deep sea expedition left before the invasion. The two ships were refitted to each hold a crew of twelve with plenty of food and fresh water and equipped with fore and aft mounted heavy machine guns for defence. They left dock as soon as the winter storms of 2011/12 had abated.

 

The first ship, the Vinland first travelled to Iceland and southern Greenland, however there was no sign of human habitation. The ship then travelled south-west towards Newfoundland before finally encountering some people - a small fishing village on the east of Anticosti Island. They welcomed the crew of the Vinland and told them everything they knew about the other groups of survivors in the region.

 

The main regional power was a cultist group on Long Island who had established several colonies in Maine and Nova Scotia. The independant settlements in the region of the Gulf of St. Lawrence survived by paying tribute to the cultist faction. The cultists were content with this arrangement because they were in the middle of a war with a mysterious faction to the south. The settlement on Anticosti Island had once encountered a trade ship from a faction that had emerged on the Great Lakes, although for the most part this faction seemed to be happy to mind its own affairs.

 

The next port of call was Long Island, where the captain of the Vinland bluffed the cultists into thinking that they were fellow brothers of the cross and that they were on a missionary expedition to convert unbeliver communities. The cultists were happy to replenish their supplies and they informed the captain that the nearest outpost of the godless heathens was located in the Bahamas. The captain had been surprised that the cultists thought nothing odd about a missionary ship armed with heavy machine guns, but it transpired that the cultists were quite used to the concept of using weapons to spread religion.

 

The Vinland then sailed to Freeport in Grand Bahama, the northernmost outpost of a faction calling itself the American Union and based in the Caribbean. The captain of the Vinland decided to accept the offer to winter in the Caribbean as guests of this faction before returning to Europe in the spring; it would give the crew time to find out about the regional politics.

 

Most of the people in the American Union were Americans and Mexicans who had decided to stay on Earth because they believed that the Reticulan Offer was insincere. They had chosen the Caribbean islands because of a combination of the climate and their relative security once the transgenants had been destroyed. When the cultists started raiding them, they banded together in self defence and drove the cultists out of the Caribbean. The war against the cultists had become stalemated owing to a mutual lack of resources and the distance between the territory held by the rival factions.

 

The second ship, the John Cabal first sailed to the Azores, where there was a small farming community based around the old Nato base on Terceira. The inhabitants were delighted to make contact with another faction and they were eager to establish trade links with the communities of north-western Europe.

 

The next port of call was Madeira. Madeira was uninhabited, although the crew found an abandoned fishing village that looked as if it had been inhabited as recently as the previous year.

 

The mystery was solved when the John Cabal reached the Canary Islands. A community on Tenerife revealed that some of them had been living on Madeira before they were raided by slavers. The survivors had decided to abandon the island and merge with the larger community in Tenerife for mutual self defence. The captain ordered that a day and night watch be maintained for potentially hostile ships.

 

The ship then hugged the Spanish coast up to Valencia, where it headed east to Majorca. The ship circled the island - there were no signs of habitation along the coast, but cooking fires had been spotted inland. A landing party headed for one of the villages, only the inhabitants had fled before they got there. Fortunatly the captain had anticipated a certain nervousness on the part of the inhabitants after what he had been told by the community at Tenerife. The landing party left some parcels containing canned food, tools and firearms scavenged from Valencia before it went back to the ship. The captain ordered more goodwill expeditions to the village. The landing party on the third expedition was greeted by a group of armed men. One of the men spoke good English and he explained the history of the settlement.

 

Most of the survivors in eastern Spain had decided to settle in the Balearic Islands. Majorca was the most popular option because of its size and the presence of copper and lead ores on the island. They had been doing fairly well until five years previously when the first slave raids occured. Since then, the island had regularly been plagued by slavers from Sardinia, forcing the inhabitants to abandon the coastal settlement and move inland for defence. The islanders suspected that there were other communities in the Western Mediterranean, but nobody could send out fishing or trade ships for fear of the slavers.

 

The captain decided to call off the rest of the expedition and return home. Although the John Cabal was armed with two gatling guns, it could not hope to beat off an entire slaver fleet without help. Besides, since the slavers had already started raiding in the Atlantic it would not be long before they reached the British Isles. It was important that they return home and recommend that a squadron of gunships be fitted out to deal with the slaver threat.

 

As the John Cabal neared the Straights of Gibraltar, the crew spotted five small yachts on an intercept course. From their angle of approach, the captain estimated that they were operating out of Melilla. He also deduced that from their size and speed that their purpose was the short range interception of larger ships. They didn't have the cargo capacity to operate more than a couple of days out of port.

 

"Slavers" spat the captain. "They must be finding pickings scarce around Sardinia, so they must be spreading out. We can't outrun them, I imagine they'll try to get close and swarm us."

 

"Think they've got any cannons?" asked the first mate.

 

"No, that would slow them down, and in any case they want us alive if possible. It'll be small arms only. Use the aft Gatling to fire a few shots in front of them. If they don't turn round, put a few rounds in their sails. I want them to see that we're not a helpless fishing or trade ship."

 

The only effect the warning shots had on the slavers was that one of their ships slowed down slightly because of the ragged holes in its sails.

 

The captain watched for a moment. "They've had their warning. Turn starboard 90 degrees, then let the lead yacht have it in the hull with both Gatlings."

 

The armour piercing rounds of the two Gatlings made short work of the fibreglass hull of the lead yatcht, and this display of firepower persuaded the crews of the other yachts to break off the attack.

 

In 2014 a slaver fleet heading for Cornwall was destroyed by a squadron of armed yachts operating from the Scilly Islands. The remaining slaver ships were destroyed in a battle ten miles south of Cagliari the following year. After the battle, the sailors landed near the town in order to begin the liberation of the slave population. The goodwill earned from defeating the slavers resulted in the creation of a loose federation of settlements across the Western Meditteranean, the European Atlantic coasts, the British Isles, Brittany and Norway.

[Accounting Troll]

COMBINED FLEET

 

The efforts of the human forces during the war had slowed down the progress made by the Biomass, and they had even come close to destoying the entire project. The Biomass project fell even further behind when the war ended, as one of the stipulations of the peace agreement was that the growth of the Biomass should be halted while the Laputa was being built. It was clear to the Reticulans that the Biomass would not be ready in time to oppose the Old Grey fleet.

 

On October 5th 2013, Ambassador Ictovera was due to address the Laputan Council. Being a Reticulan, his name was merely for the convenience of the humans he had to deal with; in Reticulan society, the personal identity of an individual is derived from his function within society. Ambassador Ictovera was the youngest Reticulan ambassador, yet he was also the best at persuading the humans to do what the Reticulans wanted.

 

"Our scientists now know for certain that the Biomass will not gain full sentience before the invasion fleet reaches this system. When the leaders of our homeworld understand the potential of what is being created on Earth, they will seek to control its power for themselves. They will prefer to destroy both your people and those of us who are already here rather than share the power and benefits that Planetmind will bring. If the invading forces prevail, the sacrifices and acheivements of your noble people will have been for nothing.

 

"Our only hope of mutual survival is if we work together to build a fleet of warships to engage the enemy fleet when they enter your system. The allied fleet will have a technological edge because it will utilise hybrid human and Reticulan technology." The ambassador gave the Laputan Council some more flannel about the nobility of man to ensure the motion to cooperate against the Old Grey fleet would be carried.

 

All attempts to grow a ship around a human pilot in the traditional manner had failed, the human mind is too different to the Reticulan mind for the graft to take and some of the results had not been asthetically pleasing. As an alternative, Reticulan scientists designed cybernetic implants that would allow a human pilot to have a telepathic link with his craft - he would think instructions and the craft would instantly respond to his thoughts. This meant that the reaction time was far less than the best fighter pilot could have managed before the war. The only disadvantage was that the mental discipline needed to control one's thoughts required a lot of specialist training.

 

Since it would be necessary to design a new hybrid fighter capable of being used by humans, Reticulan engineers took the opportunity to include some upgrades based on human technology. One problem ith the Reticulan method of growing ships was that since the ship itself was alive, it was almost impossible to upgrade an individual component of the ship.

 

The twin plasma cannons would be a scaled up version of the human advanced plasma rifle, which would allow far greater range and accuracy than the standard Reticulan fighter plasma cannon. The Reticulan fighter plasma cannon had shown itself to be ineffective against agile opponents during the invasion. The Reticulans had been impressed by the range and accuracy of human guided missiles, so the heavy fighter would be capable of firing upgraded guided misiles. For close range combat, there would be two 40mm projectile cannons firing alternating armour piercing and high explosive rounds. With these weapons, a single heavy fighter would be a serious danger to a battleship

 

The improved weapon systems greatly increased the mass of the heavy fighter, so the engine thrust had to be upgraded to prevent a reduction in acceleration. Although the heavy fighter was less manoverable than the standard Reticulan fighter, its improved weapons made it an important addition to the combined fleet.

 

Human and Reticulan scientists could think of more possibilities for cybernetic implant technology. It would probably be necessary to board the some of the enemy ships, so some human soldiers had their strength and speed enhanced by the use of cybernetic implants. Other soldiers were given psionic abilities through implants. The development of soldiers with telepathy or superhuman strength made many Laputans uneasy, so the Laputan Council decided to establish a base on Earth to house them. Camp Maldonada was set up in Tasmania. Being politicians, the members of the Council were particularly keen on having psionically enhanced soldiers kept at a distance to prevent their minds from being read.

 

The Old Grey fleet had to reach the Terran system by travelling through relativistic space from Alpha Centauri, a twenty year journey. This journey was too long for Reticulan fighters, so the fighters were carried on board the battleships and auxiliary carriers. The fleet included other auxiliary craft whose roles included the transportation of supplies and the components needed to manufacture a new Qport. All auxiliary craft would endeavour to stay well away from the fighting with the renegades.

 

When the old Grey fleet entered the Terran system in November 2024, it was clear that their combat ships outnumbered the combined fleet by a ratio of three to one. The only advantages the combined fleet had were that the Old Greys were not expecting to face humans or weapons based on a combination of the best of human and Reticulan technology. The two fleets engaged each other about a million miles out from Earth.

 

The heavy fighters of the combined fleet quickly gained the ascendancy in the dogfight despite being outnumbered. One Old Grey fighter after another was destroyed in a flash of light as they were torn apart by homing missiles and projectile cannons. Then a fighter wing engaged the lead Old Grey battleship, destroying it in less than a second, before turning on the other battleships. The battleships of the combined fleet began exchanging broadsides with the Old Grey battleships and soon the numerical advantage of the Old Grey fleet began to tell. Meanwhile, the hybrid heavy fighters had destroyed most of the Old Grey fighters and they were now free to atack the Old Grey battleships. The battleships never stood a chance against the new onslaught.

 

Within five minutes all the combat vessels in the Old Grey fleet had been destroyed, along with humanity's best hope of ending this new dark age. The only bad news for the combined fleet was that it had lost nearly half its battleships in the action.

 

The only thing left for the combined fleet to do now was to hunt down the unarmed auxiliary ships that were all that was left of the Old Grey fleet. Boarding actions were fought against the larger ships, the objective being to aquire prisoners for experimentation. A boarding action was fought by getting a battleship or a transport ship so close to the target craft that it is actually within its shields, then teleporting cybernetically enhanced human warriors on board to do the room to room fighting.

 

In February 2029, the following coded tight-beam transmission was picked up by a surveillance outpost on the edge of the Alpha Centauri system: "The renegades have destroyed our entire fleet. They have allied with the humans against us and they have created some new weapons that decimated our forces. Our probes spotted a reddish discoloration of Earth's landmasses, although we do not know what it is, or if it is connected with the interest in Earth shown by the renegades."

 

The news was greeted with dismay in the Ruling Assembly on Zeta Reticulum III, and not just because the renegades had destroyed a fleet. Two years previously a fleet had been investigating the reason for the loss of contact with a remote Reticulan colony world; the last news that the colonists had reported was that the skies had turned dark owing tmysteriousden appearance of a mysterious type of spore. The fleet had suffered severe losses when it was attacked my enigmatic ships of organic construction. The surviving ships had destroyed the system Qport behind them to slow the progress of the mysterious invaders.

[Accounting Troll]

EXTERMINATION

 

With the Grey fleet defeated, the Reticulans were free to turn their attention to the problem of the Biomass. It had been growing far more slowly than they had anticipated. Satellite images were showing that Biomass was actually retreating in the areas around many of the human settlements surviving on Earth. So far the areas affected were small, but the inability of the Biomass to compete with human crops had alarming long term implications. Even worse, there were reports of humans being able to survive in the Biomass without being attacked by the defending transgenants.

 

There seemed to be little chance of the Biomass reaching its full potential while humans remained on Earth. As they didn't want to live on the Laputa, the only alternative was to destroy the remaining humans on Earth. This would be a breach of the treaty with the humans. Morally, this did not present a problem, the treaty had only been drawn up to prevent the humans from wrecking the all-important Biomass project. The problem was that direct action against the inhabitants of Earth would result in a difficult war against the Laputans. Fortunatly, there were less direct ways of dealing with the problem.

 

Ambassador Ictovera sighed as the pilot reported that the observation ship would be landing in twelve thousandths of an Earth day. This would be the seventh cultist group he had to make contact with. He did not know how his assignment fitted in with the overall plan, but he did know that it must be important because the Queens had summoned him to the Royal Chamber where they had informed him of his assignment in person! Being a good Reticulan officer, he would obey his orders without question regardless of personal discomfort or danger. The main discomfort on this assignment was that the cultist communities would insist on offering him a meal. He had never developed a taste for human cuisine during his time on the Laputa, and what the survivors of Earth were eating seemed disgusting. It might offend his hosts if he refused the food they offered, yet he had thrown up during the communal meal with the first group of cultists. The most diplomatic option was for him to take an anti-emetic and have a medic with a stomach pump back on the ship.

 

The community consisted of about eighty men, women and children living by the Lincolnshire coast. None of them showed any signs of physical mutation. Cultist groups tended to regard mutant children as being intrinsically evil, so they would be either killed or abandoned to die from exposure.

 

As the ambassador had expected, the cultists welcomed him as a fellow 'Brother of the Cross'. He conferred with their leader for a short time before he accepted an invitation to stay for the communal evening meal.

 

Before the evening meal it was customary for the leader of the community to give a speech thanking their god for providing whatever foul slops were being passed off as food. From the smell of the food, the ambassador assumed that they found it comforting to have someone to blame.

 

"Fellow brethren of the cross, tonight we welcome an emissary of the Lord. Twenty two years ago, the sun turned dark as a sign of the second coming of our Lord. The sins of men were hateful to his eyes, and he resolved to unleash the spores to cleanse the Earth and start again, those who had been devout were reincarnated as his servants while the rest were sent to hell. Yet though men's wickedness had provoked our Lord beyond enduring, he showed his beneficient mercifulness by allowing some men to survive. Yet even after the rebirth of the world, many of the survivors chose to continue their sinful ways. They proved their irredeemable wickedness by attacking the servants of the Lord who had been sent to remonstrate with them. Those of us who had renounced our sins tried to show the others the error of the ways, and defend the servants of the Lord from their cruel violence. The godless ones were angry at our good work and many of us suffered persecution at their hands. Yet the wise and ever-merciful God finally prevailed upon them to end their futile opposition of his way. In his generosity, he gave them a place in heaven at his right hand, while we chose to continue a life of devotion and worship on Earth.

 

"Today the Lord has chosen to reward our many years of faithfulness with an important holy task. On the Welsh coast there is a community whose inhabitants have dared to repay God's mercy in sparing them by turning their backs on his teachings. They have foully murdered his servants and their crops are injurious to him. As these people revel in their wickedness, it is the will of God that we smite them as God smote Sodom and Gomorrah. The emissary has supplied us with weapons blessed by the Lord for the coming crusade and the means to travel through the Lord's realm without coming to harm. He has warned me that the heretics are well defended and the task ahead will be difficult. However, we can be comforted by the knowledge that those who fall will be reincarnated in the service of the Lord."

 

After the meal, Ambassador Ictovera managed to excuse himself politely before the communal self-flagellelation ceremony could start. Even the stomach pump was better than that.

 

Next morning, Emma Whittaker woke up screaming from her vivid nightmare. Sobbing, she told her mother what she had dreamed. "People, dressed in white attacked the village. They had strange and powerful weapons and they were killing everybody. People were running around and screaming. There was some kind of smoke, anybody who breathed it died. I saw Dad on the ground, he was wounded. I saw an old woman smile as she bent down and slashed his throat with a knife. Then it ended." Most 17 year old girls would not be so upset by a bad dream, but Emma was blessed with the ability to predict the future in her dreams.

 

Kerry Whittaker comforted her daughter. "It was just a dream. You know that your father has said that these dreams are what the future may be, and not what the future is going to be. Thanks to your dream, he's going to make sure we're ready for the attack if it comes."

 

After Emma had a similar dream the following night, Edward called a crisis meeting of the Council of Elders. The elders took an interest in Emma's dreams since she had sucessfully predicted three storms and a pirate raid. In three weeks time, they were going to be attacked and destroyed by a mysterious group of humans armed with alien lasers, plasma launchers and some kind of mortar that would fire gas filled shells. The level of destruction being reported was unusual. When a settlement got raided for food, it was in the best interests of the raiders not to destroy the settlement, so they would be able to raid it again the next year. If the attackers were slavers, why kill everybody? The gas shells were particularly worrying. Even if they could find any gas masks in the ruined towns, the rubber would have long since perished. Edward told his daughter that he needed her to focus on more details of the nature of the enemy and their plan.

 

Over the next few days, Emma discovered that the enemy was one of the cultist groups that thought that the Fall and the Biomass were part of a divine plan, and they regarded the plants that were slowly relaiming land from the Biomass in Pembrokeshire as being in some way sacrilegous. Curiously, the entire group was on the move - men, women and children. Emma had not been able to work out why the cultist group had suddenly decided to launch an attack, or where they had got their weapons from; she did not have the ability to have visions of the past. The most surprising revelation was that they were travelling from their home, somewhere on the East coast, to Pembrokeshire across land and on foot! How could they protect themselves from the sheer numbers of transgenants they would encounter?

 

The best plan seemed to be for a small force to ambush the cultists before they managed to reach the settlement. As a precaution, the population of the settlement would be waiting in boats in St Brides Bay, where they would not be seen by the cultists. A few volunteers would remain behind to tend fires and man one of the fishing boats, giving the idea that the settlement was unprepared. The ambush force would have to hit the cultists on or near the peninsula because regular patrols and hunting parties had kept the transgenant population down.

 

For the ambush, Edward decided to take Emma and thirty militiamen with him. They would be armed with SA80s and bows. The bows would allow them to deal with any transgenants in the area silently. Edward was unhappy about taking Emma into battle, but she was the only person in the settlement who was capable of controlling her dreams, making her the best scout they had. The selected ambush point was an earthen embankment overlooking a ford on the Western Cleddau river after Emma assured her father that that would be where the cultists would cross. Some ferns growing along the embankment would provide some cover for the ambush.

 

Emma's prediction proved to be correct. They saw a band of about eighty cultists, including women and children. All the cultists, including the children, were armed with alien laser rifles and plasma launchers. Each cultist was wearing a belt with some kind of small box attached. Emma said that the contents of the box had something to do with how the cultists managed to travel across land without being attacked by the transgenants, although she had not managed to work out how these devices operated. She did manage to confirm that the cultists were not expecting to be attacked before they reached Dale.

 

Edward ordered the militiaman to spread out then open fire when the cultists reached the ford. The fight was over in seconds - the cultists were quickly cut down by thirty assault rifles firing in burst mode. Unfortunatly one of the cultists, a boy of no more than ten managed to fire a round from his plasma launcher before he was killed. Edward heard some screams from his left and he smelt the sickly roast pork smell of burning human flesh. He realised to his horror that ome of the screaming was coming from his daughter.

 

When the shooting ended, all that was left of Edward's daughter was a blackened skeleton. It had been a victory - eighty cultists killed, the village saved and only three people lost, but it did not feel like much of a victory to Edward. As he wondered how he was going to break the news to his wife he realised that Emma would have foreseen her death in the fight, but she had kept it to herself so the village would have its best chance of survival.

 

The only good thing to come out of the day was that they worked out how the cultists had managed to travel acros land without being attacked by the Biomass transgenants. Biomass transgenants used their psionic ability to detect the presence of a human mind. Quartz set in copper had the ability to create a blind spot in a psionic scan, making it possible to shield a human from being detected by psionic means. As this system was entirely passive, there was no way that psionics could be used to detect or thwart it. Quartz and copper were easy to find and work with - strip the plastic insulation off some wire and you are left with pure copper. Soon the village blacksmith had made copper torcs for everybody in the settlement and the knowledge of this discovery was spreading via trade ships across the world.

 

The Reticulan Queens in the Lagado summoned Ambassador Ictovera to the Royal Chamber. The eldest of the Queens addressed him. "We are most pleased at the progress you have made in ridding Earth of its surviving human population. Of the fourteen attacks you incited, twelve have suceeded. Even the two failed attacks resulted in considerable loss of human life. It is estimated that the wars you have incited have resulted in the deaths of over 12,000 humans.

 

"Regrettably our policy of provoking tribal warfare has only eradicated a small percentage of the human population. We have decided to reward your efforts by promoting you to commander of our Lunar research facility. You will have the task of overseeing the design and creation of new transgenant species in order to further our goal of exterminating all the remaining humans on Earth."

 

"May I presume to offer a suggestion for your consideration?" asked the ambassador. Normally a Reticulan did not consider it to be his place to give unsolicited advice to his superiors.

 

"You have earned that right. Speak."

 

"During my time on the Laputa, I have seen the humans there develop prejudices against the population of Earth. They regard humans on Earth as disease-ridden barbarians, while terrestrial humans regard the Laputans as traitors for allying with us. If we encourage the development of such predjudices, the Laputans will decide that it is right that they should destroy the remaining population of Earth without involving us. I know how irrational this sounds, but in my experience humans are tribalistic by nature, and members of one tribe will treat members of other tribes with contempt, even hatred. There have been many instances in human history when one tribe decided to exterminate its neighbours."

 

The Queens discused this suggestion among themselves for a few moments. Then the oldest Queen spoke again. "We see that we have chosen well in promoting you. As a reward for your efforts and an encouragement for you in your new position, the youngest among us has chosen you to be her consort."

[Accounting Troll]

THE MANDRAKES

 

Anthony Jones and Peter Todd were on a routine patrol four miles to the north of the edge of the settlement. They were armed with bows and their job was to prevent the transgenants from becoming too numerous in the area and to harvest men-of-war for their tentacles. They had killed a man-of war that morning and they were now carrying its tentacles.

 

They noticed something unusual standing by a partially ruined cottage. It stood at fourteen feet, towering above the nearby grass and ferns. It looked like a leafless tree except that it had some kind of head and its two branches looked uncommonly like arms. A double row of interlocked spikes ran down its trunk. Whatever it was, it had not been there yesterday. As they cautiously approached the transgenant, bows at the ready, they could see that it had two large insectoid eyes.

 

"What do you think it is?" asked Peter.

 

"Dunno," said Anthony. "Must be some new kind of mutant. Don't get any closer to it"

 

Peter walked up to within ten feet of it as he puzzled over a yellowish bulge just above the base of the transgenant. "It's only a mutant tree, what are you worried about? Come on, let's go."

 

Sudenly the transgenant bent forward and its arms grabbed hold of Peter, lifting him into the air. As Peter screamed in panic, Anthony started shooting arrows at the transgenant, to no apparent effect. Then its trunk split open along the two rows of spikes, revealing a hollow cavity.

 

The transgenant pushed Peter into the cavity effortlessly, despite his frantic struggles. Then the trunk sealed itself again, trapping Peter in the cavity. The bulge at the transgenant's base appeared to deflate as it emptied its digestive juices into the cavity. Peter screamed in unbearable agony for half a minute before he lapsed into unconsciousness.

 

Anthony shot his last arrows at the transgenant in a futile bid to save his friend. None penetrated more than half an inch into its body. Then the transgenant started walking towards Anthony and he realised that the only thing he could do would be to run back to the settlement and report what he had encountered. It was only when Anthony reached the settlement that he realised that as they had both been wearing their torcs, they should have been safe from attack.

 

The months that followed saw a lot of field testing on this new kind of transgenant, nicknamed a mandrake, in order to find out more about its life cycle and how to kill it. It was an ambulatory carniverous tree capable of growing up to thirty feet tall and walking on its roots at a speed that would be a brisk walking pace for a human. It took two years to grow from a seed to an adult, during which time it would stay rooted to the the ground, getting its nutritional needs from the soil and the sun. After two years, it would shed all but its main roots and begin walking. The adult hunted for prey which would be broken down by digestive enzymes in its stomach cavity, however as it preferred sunny places it was theorised that it was also capable of getting all its energy needs from sunlight. A single mandrake was capable of producing millions of wind-dispersed seeds in a year, it was not known whether they were clones or wind pollinated. The 'flesh' of a mandrake was tough and fibrous but surprisingly flexible, allowing it to suddenly lurch forward, increasing its attack range by an unexpected six to ten feet. The 'head' appeared to possess eyes and ears as well as a nervous system, something previously unheard of in plants.

 

Adult mandrakes would attack a human regardless of whether the human was wearing a torc, so clearly a mandrake used its eyes and ears to detect humans rather than the psionic means used by everything else the Biomass had produced. Fortunatly it was not difficult to outrun a lone mandrake, but the captain of a Norwegian trade ship had reported an account of mandrakes operating in packs, with one mandrake chasing a human into an ambush created by its friends; noone would forget his descriptions of people being literally torn in half in a hurry. Mandrakes had the ability to sutain a lot of damage from bow or gun fire without suffering serious damage - not that guns would have been practical with so little ammunition left anyway. The only thing that worked against mandrakes was fire, as their sap was very oily. It was theorised that plasma weapons would be highly effective but neither the Reticulans nor the Laputans were inclined to supply them. The most effective weapon was fire arrows, where an oily rag (ironically, mandrake sap was highly effective) was wrapped around an arrow and ignited; the extra weight reduced the effective range to 50-100 yards. One hit from a fire arrow would make a mandrake retreat, 3-4 would often kill it.

 

The worrying thing was that mandrakes were an entirely new type of transgenant as opposed to the mutated forms of existing Biomass transgenants that cropped up occasionally, which meant that the Reticulans had been cooking them up in their laboratries. How long would it be before there would be standing room only for mandrakes on Earth? And if humanity managed to deal with the mandrakes, how long would it be before the Reticulans unleashed something even more deadly?

 

All the coastal settlements began to launch regular long-range patrols armed with fire arrows to keep the adult mandrakes from congregating near the settlement in any numbers. If they didn't, a group of mandrakes would congregate near the outer wall and use their limbs to tear down the wall before attacking the settlement. Island communities had it slightly easier - all they needed to do was launch regular patrols to make sure that no airbourne mandrake seeds had taken root on the island.

[Accounting Troll]

CYBORG ONSLAUGHT

 

On the afternoon of July 11th, 2032 the crew of a fishing boat in St Brides Bay saw a cigar shaped UFO appear from the clouds to the west. It moved at an impressive speed until it was above the Stack Rocks, a group of three sandstone rocks reaching up to thirty yards above sea level over a mile out to sea. Then it descended until it was just above the rocks before it suddenly dissapeared. They then abandoned their fishing and went back to Dale to report this development to Edward Whittaker. From the description they gave, it was clearly a diferent design to the ones normally used by the Reticulans or the Laputans. And what were they to make of it apparently landing on the Stack Rocks?

 

Two patrol boats were despatched to examine the area around the Stack Rocks, although they were unable to find any sign of anything unusual. As a precaution, Edward ordered a doubling in the number of people on sentry duty.

 

The calm of the next morning was shattered by the sound of a squadron of three Reticulan heavy fighters heading for the village! The Oerlikons started hammering at the agile fighters to no avail. Then the fighters fired their plasma cannons, destroying several buildings in the village. The church bell began ringing, a warning that the settlement was under attack although everybody would have heard the fighters. The fighters then turned round and used their plasma cannons to strafe the fields of crops. The air was filled with smoke as plants were incinerated by superheated plasma. The fighters made a third run, destroying more crops and several buildings on the eastern side of the village.

 

Then the wind changed direction, clearing some of the smoke and Edward could see that two large transporter ships had landed near the southern tip of the settlement, where they had disgorged dozens of cyborg soldiers. Among the invading soldiers, Edward could see something that looked like a large metallic spider extend itself to eight feet high. He saw it turn round and fire a heavy plasma cannon at the old lighthouse on St Ann's Head, before it started walking north, towards the burning village. The Oerlikon placed in the fort on Dale Point started firing at the cyborg soldiers, killing one but the rest kept advancing north. The fighters had withdrawn, possibly for fear of hitting the soldiers.

 

Edward looked at the screaming people in the village, nearly tripping over a body. He instinctively realised that this battle could not be won and the only thing to do was to save as many lives as possible. "Begin the evacuation" he shouted at the top of his voice.

 

An evacuation plan had been drawn up for a scenario in which the settlement was attacked by overwhelming force. The people would attempt to escape by land or sea and regroup at Pembroke Castle, where a supply of food, tools, weapons and first aid supplies had been laid in. The militiamen would do their best to slow down the attackers.

 

A few of the less panicky militiamen started shooting arrows at the invaders who wasted no time in returning fire. Unfortunatly a cyborg was so heavily armoured that even if he was hit by an arrow, he would be very unfortunate to be injured or killed; the militamen had no defence against the more accurate plasma and laser rifles being used by the cyborg warriors. Edward saw a group of militamen running towards the fort. He hoped that they would be able to hurt the enemy before they got overwhelmed. Almost everybody else who was still alive was running towards the boats anchored off the east coast. The only good thing in the situation was that the smoke from the strafing runs was giving some cover for the fleeing people. Edward took a bow and a quiver of arrows and then he entered the unequal fight.

 

Edward felt a wave of heat hit him from a near miss from a plasma rifle. He caught a glimpse of a cyborg through the smoke and he shot an arrow at him. The cyborg fell to the ground, wounded and then fired a plasma shot at Edward, narrowly missing him. A couple of unseen militiamen shot arrows at the cyborg, killing it. Edward ran over to the fallen cyborg and picked up his plasma rifle and a couple of spare power packs, a more powerful weapon than his bow.

 

"We can't win, get out of here" shouted Edward to the unseen militiamen. Edward ran to the nearest cover - the small valley of Dale Brook. The stream flowed down to the north and then the east, meeting the sea in the town. Hopefully it would provide the cover Edward needed to get away. As Edward quietly picked his way downstream, he heard the sound of the Oerlikon and some small arms fire from the fort. Then there was a series of explosions and the guns of the fort's defenders fell silent. Edward hoped that at least some of them had survived.

 

The whole thing seemed so unfair to Edward. They had spent the last 28 years rebuilding their corner of Earth after the devestation of the Fall. They had created a self sustaining community that had survived every threat that had arisen. Now everything they had built had been destroyed in the space of a few minutes. The worst thing was that the attackers were not Reticulans but the quislings. At least his elder son would be safe - he was currently attending a conference in Jersey.

 

As Edward neared the beach, he saw the robot spider standing in the village near the bodies of a woman and her children who had been cut down as they had tried to flee. It was standing entirely still, Edward wondered if it possessed any genuine artificial intelligence or if it was under remote control. He fired two rounds with his plasma rifle. He must have hit somethin vital because the robot exploted with a flash of light. A number of cyborg warriors started running towards Edward's position. He gunned the first two down before the others thought to return fire. Edward had time to realise that this time he was going to die before unconsciousness claimed him.

[Accounting Troll]

NEW ALLIES

 

Kerry Whittaker opened her eyes to find that she was lying on a bed in a strange room with metallic walls. There was a seven-foot tall robot standing over her, apparently monitoring her condition. Terrible memories came flooding back to her; memories of the attack on Dale Fort and her younger son dying in her arms, his intestines exposed by a laser shot. Kerry kicked and punched the robot as hard as she could again and again. If she was a prisoner, she wasn’t going to make it easy for the aliens and their cronies. However, the robot just stood there.

 

Sally Asaba walked in the room. “I take it from that clanging that you’re awake then?” The robot walked out of the room – Kerry noticed that it seemed to be curiously light on its feet for something so large.

 

“Where are we?” demanded Kerry. “What happened?”

 

“We’re in a subterranean alien base. Its okay, they’re on our side. They stopped the cyborgs and took us here to treat the injured.”

 

“Michael’s dead. What happened to Edward?” A look at Sally’s face told Kerry all she needed to know. She burst into tears.

 

Sally put her arm round Kerry and tried to comfort her. “They said it looked like he’d killed about four of them and their fighting machine before he fell. The evacuation plan he had drawn up and his actions in the fight saved a lot of lives.”

 

“He couldn’t save Michael though. I held him as he died.”

 

Time passed. You can only cry for so long before you realise that it has not made anything any better and you realise there are things you need to do. “How many others were killed?” asked Kerry.

 

“Allowing for stragglers, about one hundred.”

 

Kerry felt like she had been kicked in the guts. One hundred dead in a tight-knit community of five hundred. There would be time to grieve for them later; right now there were things she had to do. “I want to speak to their leader. And what do you know about them?”

 

“Well, they look like people, only they’ve all got blond hair. They call themselves the Achirdeans. Oh, and they’ve got a number of robots like the one you tried to beat up.”

 

They walked into a corridor, where they saw a young fair-haired woman wearing a metallic jumpsuit. Kerry didn’t recognize her from the settlement, so she guessed that the woman must be one of the Achirdeans. “Take us to whoever is in charge here”.

 

The woman nodded and led them through several corridors to a large circular shaped room. There were several portals that provided an attractive view of the sea bed. A few curious fish were peering in at them. Several other Achirdeans were operating machines that Kerry suspected were alien computers. A middle aged man standing in the middle of the room approached Kerry and Sally and spoke to them in excellent English. “Welcome to our base. I am Captain Allowyn of the Achirdean Exploration Corps. I suspect that you have many questions for me.”

 

“What about my people?” asked Kerry. “What are you doing for them?”

 

“We are providing medical help for the people who were injured in the attack, and distributing food aid to the others. After we stopped the cyborg attack on Dale, we rounded up the cyborgs and we are holding them in improvised containment cells elsewhere in the base. They cannot escape.”

 

“Why didn’t you just kill them? It’s what they deserve.”

 

“We prefer not to take life if it can be avoided. Many of your people offered to save us the trouble of being the ones to kill them, but we persuaded them to wait for a few days. We will allow your people to execute them if that is what you really want, but you should not make that decision in anger.”

 

“Okay, I’ll think about that one. Maybe we can get some useful information out of them first.” Now they had been reassured that the Achirdeans were helping the other survivors of the attack on Dale, Kerry and Sally had a barrage of questions for the captain about his people and why they were so interested in Earth. Gradually the picture emerged:

 

The Achirdeans come from the second planet in the Achird (or Eta Cassiopeae) system. Achird is a sun-like star 19.4 light years away. Achird II is a cooler world than Earth and even its equatorial regions only have a temperate climate.

 

The Achirdeans had been delighted to make contact with alien races when they began interstellar exploration. The most exciting discovery of all was when they reached Earth in the year 1421, where they discovered that humans and Achirdeans are genetically identical. This revelation shook Achirdean society to its very core as it verified an ancient legend that their people had been transplanted to Achird II from another world by an alien race thousands of years ago.

 

The Reticulan ambassador to the Achirdeans admitted that they had dreamed of creating an interstellar empire in their early days of space exploration. They invaded Earth, although they never managed to fully subjugate the native population. Tens of thousands of humans were transported to the world of Achird II to be used as slave labour in the efforts to terraform the world into something comfortable to the Reticulan colonists. Then the humans of Earth and Achird II inflicted a series of catastrophic defeats on the Reticulans, causing heavy casualties and destroying the Qports in all Reticulan held systems. Freedom was gained for humanity, but at the cost of separating its two branches. Even in modern times, the Reticulans still had no idea how the humans had defeated them without help. This defeat utterly discredited the imperialist government and the Reticulans adopted a more cooperative philosophy for dealing with alien races. Some Reticulans then argued that they should return to the human worlds, but this time they should come as teachers and helpers. However, the prevailing view had been that they had already done quite enough damage to humanity.

 

The Achirdeans built a base under the Stack Rocks in St Brides Bay in order to observe humanity without interfering with its development, and they settled in to watch the Age of Exploration. Although shocked by the violence of the era, they were also impressed by the willingness of human explorers to cross the wide oceans of Earth in fragile wooden ships. The presence of the Achirdean base on Earth reignited Reticulan interest in humanity, a move that increased tensions with the Achirdeans who were suspicious of the Reticulan motives towards Earth. Tensions came close to war in 1947 when the Achirdeans shot down a Reticulan scout ship above New Mexico, inadvertently advertising the existence of aliens to humanity. The Reticulans then made contact with the major human governments under the Dreamland project. The Achirdeans used their humanity to infiltrate the rival Dreamland projects to keep an eye on the Reticulans.

 

In the 1960s, the Achirdeans discovered the global magnetic and psionic anomaly known on Earth as ley lines. They suspected that ley lines had been involved in humanity’s ancient victory over the Reticulans, and so they decided to study the ley lines while taking care not to let the Reticulans learn of their interest. However, the local authorities were alerted to the possibility of an alien base in Pembrokeshire following a series of UFO sightings. The Americans established a military base to observe the aliens in the mid 1970s, while the Soviets sent several trawlers to patrol off the coast. However, the Americans and Soviets ended up too busy spying on each other to care about what the Achirdeans were doing.

 

In the weeks after the Fall, the Achirdeans sent the exploration ship AEC John Cabot, with a crew of 60 people and 20 robots, to Earth to find out what had happened. As Achirdean propulsive science is less advanced than that of the Reticulans, it took longer for them to reach Earth. Their base had been abandoned and it was theorised that the personnel had died in rescue operations during the Fall. The arrival of the Achirdeans triggered the attack on Dale as the Reticulans and Laputans erroneously believed that the Achirdeans were connected with the human settlement. When the Achirdeans realised what was going on, they projected a psi-stun field across the battlefield to end the attack.

 

Captain Allowyn finished off by apologizing for the attack as he felt that it would never have happened if the Reticulans and their allies hadn’t spotted either the John Cabot or one of the shuttles landing close to the settlement. “It’s not your fault, I know who I blame for the attack,” replied Kerry.

 

In the days that followed, the Achirdeans tended the wounded and helped with the rebuilding of the settlement. None of the survivors were willing to consider abandoning their hard work at Dale and dispersing among neighbouring settlements in the wake of the attack as that would mean giving in to the Reticulans. A mass cremation and memorial service was held for the 107 men, women and children killed by the cyborgs. Although most of the crops had been lost, it was promising to be a good harvest, so the neighbouring settlements would have large food surpluses. As the settlement at Dale had gained a reputation as a provider in times of need, its neighbours made promises of food aid as news of the renewal of hostilities began to spread.

 

John Whittaker returned from Jersey on a sloop three weeks after the attack. He had learned about the attack when the sloop visited the Scilly Isles on the return journey. It was only upon his return that he learned of the deaths of his father and brother. He angrily asked his mother why they hadn’t executed the cyborg prisoners when they had the chance.

 

“I wanted to at first, but then I thought that they are more use to us alive. Yesterday I sent a radio message to the Laputa, saying that we have 29 cyborg prisoners, and we’ll execute them all if there are any more attacks on terrestrial settlements. They’re still working out how to respond. I don’t think they’ll bother to negotiate with Earth people, especially not for people they regard as cannon fodder. But they won’t launch any more attacks for a few months because they’d have some explaining to do.

 

“The scientists in the Achirdean crew are pouring over the captured troopship and trying to unlock its secrets. They’ve already worked out that it was despatched from a base on Earth, and not the space settlements, but they don’t yet know where the base is. Why don’t you help them? It’ll do you good to keep your mind occupied.”

 

After five days of examining the troopship and ‘interviewing’ the prisoners, John called a community meeting. In the years after the Fall, it was quite normal for a settlement to call a community meeting to discuss an important issue; in this case, John had a plan to launch a counterattack, but although he had the support of the people of Dale, he needed the support of the Achirdeans for the plan to succeed. Kerry had noticed that he seemed to be spending a lot of time with the youngest of the Achirdean scientists, Tavia Itaffri, a young woman the same age as John.

 

John addressed the people at the meeting. “As you may know, we’ve figured out that the enemy soldiers came from a base in the middle of Poland. An Achirdean reconnaissance flight this morning showed the presence of several enemy transport ships and heavy fighters on the ground. We are going to attack and destroy that base.” John waited for the cheering to die down before he continued. “The John Cabot is too big to get us there without being spotted, but the Achirdean base has several shuttles assigned to it. They can fly low and transport a commando force to the base perimeter without being spotted. When we’ve taken the base, we can steal their heavy fighters and turn them against the invaders.”

 

Captain Allowyn spoke out. “Perhaps a better use of our resources would be to rebuild the Qport instead. Then our fleets can come through and defeat the Reticulans.”

 

“Wouldn’t work,” replied John. “The Qport has to be constructed in space, so you won’t be able to protect it from the Reticulans. And the military technology of the renegade Reticulans is far more advanced than that of the mainstream Reticulans or your own people. Remember that they quickly destroyed the Old Grey fleet. So you’re stuck here for the duration, and the only thing your crew can do is to help us fight back against the invaders.”

 

“Very well, my crew and I will give you our full cooperation in your campaign.”

 

“Excellent. Now Tavia told me that the generator for the psi-stun field is heavy and power hungry, so it can’t be taken out of the subterranean base and used in the field. We are going to have to use the weapons we captured off the cyborgs. I think we should launch the assault just before local dawn on October 21st. It will be a couple of days after a full moon, which means that we will have enough light to see by when we take up positions prior to our attack. It also gives us ten weeks to learn to use the hybrid weapons, and for our pilots to learn to fly using the captured troopship.”

[Accounting Troll]

THE COUNTEROFFENSIVE

 

Alpha squad began the attack by firing field mortar rounds and incendiary arrows over the perimeter fence. The incendiary arrows probably wouldn’t do much damage, but they would spread panic among the defenders. Mere seconds after the first mortar rounds hit, a siren blared to life. Panic-stricken base personnel were running around – it had not occurred to them that the terrestrial settlements were capable of launching an attack.

 

Two minutes after the attack began, Beta squad opened fire with a combination of SA80s and advanced hybrid laser and plasma rifles. Somebody with an RPG7 scavenged from a former IRA arsenal destroyed a watchtower as a cyborg with a collapsible plasma cannon slung over his shoulder scrambled up the ladder. Other commandos were picking off enemy soldiers and civilian workers alike.

 

Evidently, the defenders thought that Beta squad, with its more powerful weapons was the main threat. Some of the cyborgs had recovered from their initial shock and they were now exchanging long range fire with Beta squad.

 

John ordered robot D15 to knock down the wire mesh perimeter fence five minutes after the attack began. The robot began running towards the fence at maximum speed, barrelling into it. Most people in Dale had got used to the way that Achirdean robots are remarkably light on their feet owing to the clever use of anti-matter thrusters in their construction, something that comes in useful in a muddy field. Unable to stand up to the momentum of the robot, a twenty-yard section of the fence collapsed.

 

“Follow me,” shouted John to the rest of Gamma squad. Too many of the cyborgs had gone rushing off to deal with Beta squad at the opposite end of the base, and Gamma squad poured through the gap in the fence. Alpha squad moved round to support Gamma squad while Beta squad kept as many defenders pinned down as possible.

 

As the commandoes spread out across the base, John saw smoke billowing out of the administration block, presumably from the incendiary arrows. There were more cyborgs than had been anticipated and many of the civilians had found weapons. John saw the commando next to him fall, the top of his head severed nearly in two by a laser burst. John and two other commandos fired simultaneously, hitting the civilian who had killed their comrade. A laser shot hit the ground inches from John as he ducked into a side building. The building appeared to be some sort of barracks. Two cyborgs turned round to meet this threat, but a burst of automatic gunfire from John’s rifle sent them both sprawling to the floor.

 

The other occupant of the barracks was an unarmed bald headed young woman wearing a pale-blue jumpsuit. The notion of gunning down an unarmed woman was repugnant to John, so he shouted to her to surrender. Then she looked straight into his eyes.

 

A strange feeling washed over him – a feeling that he should defend the base personnel in general and her in particular from his comrades. He was horrified at the realisation that she was invading his mind. He tried to shoot her, but his muscles didn’t seem to want to respond, and the voice in his head was getting harder to resist.

 

Things might have ended very differently if Tavia hadn’t burst into the barracks and seen the psionic cyborg whose entire concentration was taken up with the invisible battle of wills with John. Tavia quickly checked that her laser rifle was on auto fire, and then she shot the psionic cyborg in the chest. The dying woman’s pain and fear flooded through John via the psionic link for a moment before the link was broken. John felt weak and shaky, as if he had just woken from a bad dream.

 

“Are you okay?” asked Tavia. “I could sense her presence with my mind, but it took me a moment to track her down.”

 

“How did she get inside my head? My torc should have protected me.”

 

“My best guess is that the torcs prevent people from being detected through psionic means, but they can’t do anything if an intelligent being gets a line of sight on somebody. One of the other commandos fell under psionic control, and he killed two of his comrades before the others managed to kill him and the psionic cyborg.”

 

There must have been a mental link between the psionic cyborgs and the others as the ordinary cyborgs were demoralised by their deaths. When John and Tavia emerged from the barracks, they saw that the surviving cyborgs and civilians had surrendered and they were being herded to some open ground in the middle of the base.

 

John shouted orders to the surviving commandos. “We’ve got maybe three hours before enemy reinforcements get here. Those of you who learned to fly Laputan ships, take the heavy fighters and fly them back to Dale. Some of you others guard the prisoners and the rest of you load up the Aurora with the captured weapons and ammunition. Destroy any equipment you can’t take, including their troopships and the fighting machines if they’ve got any here. Then take as many of the prisoners as you can secure on the Celtic Dream. Shoot them if they cause any trouble. We can leave the rest for their friends.” John had originally proposed having the prisoners executed, and their severed heads nailed to a door as a warning. His mother had explained to him that such an action would unnecessarily enrage the other Laputans and ensure that they would never accept a negotiated end to the latest conflict.

 

The attack had been a success. Eight hybrid heavy fighters had been stolen, over one hundred Laputans had been killed and another seventeen were prisoners. The people killed in the attack on Dale had been avenged. However as the ships made their way back to Dale, John reflected that the price of revenge had been high; nine commandos and two robots had been killed and several other commandos had been seriously wounded.

 

Several other Laputan bases were discovered by intercepted transmissions and long-range patrols in the weeks that followed. In view of the casualties suffered in Poland, the attacks were limited to air raids only. The first few air raids were successful, but then the five heavy fighters returning from an air raid on the main Laputan base on Earth, Camp Maldonia in Tasmania, realised that they had company.

 

“Carl here, my scanners are picking up nine bandits at Angels 260, vector 65 and on intercept course.”

 

“You sure they’re bandits?” asked Flight-Lieutenant Pierre Higgins.

 

“Who else could they be? Nobody else has any crates or we’d know about it by now.”

 

Pierre realised that the enemy fighters were ideally located to dive down with the sun at their backs, hitting his squadron as they returned from the raid. The Resistance fighters were at a disadvantage as they were outnumbered and they had no missile weapons. “I’m picking the bandits up as well. Scatter and climb at gate.” The order to scatter and climb at maximum acceleration would hopefully prevent the enemy from dominating the beginning of the coming dogfight by launching a diving run.

 

The pilots fought to avoid blacking out from the terrible acceleration as their fighters climbed. Pierre had once seen a picture of an elephant in a book written before the Fall, and as his colour vision faded to monochrome, he wondered if this was what it felt like if an elephant sat on you. Pierre’s on-board computer reported that the bandits were Reticulan heavy fighters, which meant that the pilots would have better reaction times. As the skies darkened at the higher altitude, Pierre got a glance at the enemy fighters and he saw that they were flying in three groups of three in their favourite inverse-V formation.

 

The attackers targeted three of the Resistance fighters while the two remaining fighters launched strafing runs in an attempt to disrupt the Reticulan formations. As Pierre’s fighter was one of the ones targeted, he was using every evasive trick he could think of.

 

“I could do with a little help here, Lieutenant” said one of the other pilots.

 

“Bit busy at the moment,” said Pierre as his fighter was rocked by the shockwaves from a nearby plasma burst.

 

Pierre had an idea – he suddenly slammed his fighter into full reverse while firing his forward mounted laser and warp cannons. He blacked out for a moment, but when he recovered he saw that one of the fighters that had been on his tail was trailing smoke. One of his wingmates saw the wounded Reticulan fighter and moved in to finish it off.

 

In the next instant, Pierre’s computer flashed a warning that two enemy missiles were locked on to him. He went into a stomach churning dive which only bottomed out a handful of yards above the tops of the ocean waves, and nearly tore his fighter apart in suddenly pulling out of the dive. He managed to control the sudden urge to throw up – in training he had learned the hard way what happens when you throw up while wearing a breathing mask. The manoeuvre worked; the enemy missiles failed to manage the turn and crashed harmlessly into the sea.

 

As Pierre climbed, he saw an enemy fighter in his sights – it was an unmissable shot. He heard the characteristic whine of his forward mounted warp cannons and he saw the enemy fighter consumed by fire as it was sheared in two. Only a second later, Pierre saw another enemy fighter tumbling from the sky, but so was a Resistance fighter. The dying screams of one of Pierre’s wingmates filled the airwaves as his cockpit was engulfed with flames.

 

Pierre closed in on a Reticulan fighter on Carl’s tail, lined it up in his sights and fired. Then there was only one enemy left and the four Resistance fighters were launching attack runs from different directions and suddenly the dogfight was over. With a final tally of 9-1, it was a great victory for the Resistance, but it didn’t feel like one to the exhausted pilots with yet another comrade killed in action.

[Accounting Troll]

OPERATION LUNA

 

On the night of December 15th, Captain Allowyn saw Kerry Whittaker sitting by herself on a tree stump in one of the fields around Dale. There was a rather delicate matter he needed to discuss with her concerning the level of interaction between their peoples, and he wasn’t sure how to go about it.

 

“Do you know why your son and Tavia called that War Council meeting for tomorrow?”

 

“Not exactly. I know that John thinks the war should go in a different direction, and he has been spending a lot of time interrogating the cyborg prisoners lately.”

 

“I know. My medical officers have told me that some of the cyborgs looked rather bruised and battered after your son and his friends interrogated them.”

 

Kerry smiled. “I told him that we shouldn’t kill them, but nobody said he can’t knock them about a bit.”

 

“Incidentally, have you noticed that your son and Tavia have been spending a lot of time together?”

 

“I’ve noticed. And yes they are sleeping together, which I think is what you’re worried about. They’re not the only ones as well. But are you so surprised? You said yourself that with the Qport destroyed, you and your crew had to go into deep sleep for the 28 year journey to Earth. You were all so committed to your mission to help us that you said goodbye to your families and friends back home knowing that you would never see them again. That might not be a big deal to a Reticulan, but you’re as human as us.”

 

“And you don’t mind?”

 

“Not at all. Before the invasion, we desperately wanted to make peaceful contact with other races. A planet of seven billion people and as a species we just felt so alone in the cosmos. You are the aliens we should have met in 2004, not the Reticulans.”

 

Captain Allowyn felt relieved at Kerry’s words. Human tribalistic attitudes had meant that interracial marriages were still rare before the Fall, and he had expected Kerry to be far less tolerant in view of what Earth was going through at the hands of the Reticulans.

 

“It’s a strange thing, but in the five months since planet fall, I haven’t found out which one of those stars is Achird. It’s amazing how different the skies look only 19 light years away.”

 

“Do you see that bright group of stars up there that look like an M? Achird is that slightly dimmer one just to the right of the star that forms the upper left hand corner of the M.” Kerry noticed Allowyn looking at her in the moonlight. “Edward loved astronomy even after the Reticulans came, and I picked up a lot from him. He used to say that the best thing was that Zeta Reticulum never rises above the horizon at this latitude.”

 

“Fascinating. From Achird, your sun is a prominent part of the constellation you call the southern cross.” Captain Allowyn paused for a moment before he continued. “Incidentally, why are so many people willing to follow your son? He has only just turned twenty and he has the unquestioning support of the people of your settlement. And there are people arriving from neighbouring settlements asking to join ‘Mr Whittaker’s army’.”

 

“It’s partly because of who his father was. Edward was one of the founders of our settlement, and he was the one who chose this site. Over the years, he always made the right decisions and the settlement prospered, so people came to think of him as their natural leader. It’s only natural that they should expect the same from his son. Also, John promised and delivered revenge against the Reticulans and their allies. It’s been a generation since anyone else managed a real victory against the aliens. As John knows that he has popular backing for his policies, the point of the War Council meetings is to maintain the alliance with your people, and to make sure his lieutenants know what needs to be done.”

 

At the meeting the next day, John noticed that the captain and his mother were holding hands under the table. He was pleased about that, they would be a good match and it would give him some influence over the Achirdeans. He began to speak. “The attacks that we’ve launched on the Reticulans and their quisling allies have only caused a few minor inconveniences. They probably show on a report read by a mid-ranking official, but that’s about it. They’re starting to increase the level of defences for their bases on Earth, so we’re going to lose a lot of people if we keep launching these pin-prick raids.

 

“We can’t win this war unless we get Laputan public opinion on our side, but first we’ve go to get them to notice us. I can only think of one way to do that. We’re going to attack the lunar base.

 

“After the Reticulans built the space settlements, they transferred their headquarters to the Lagado, but they still maintain their lunar base. According to the cyborgs they use it as some sort of research base. The captured troopships can’t go that far, but the Celtic Dream can.

 

“Taking the base will give us three benefits. First, we will capture some weapons, and maybe some spacecraft. If we’re lucky, we’ll nab some Reticulan scientists as well. They won’t negotiate for the release of some cyborg soldiers, but Reticulan scientists will be another matter.

 

“Second, the lunar base must be where they’re cooking up new transgenants like the mandrakes. They can’t be using the space settlements because the Laputans would find out that they’ve broken the treaty. If they were on Earth, some Dreamer would have found out about them by now like they recently found out about the Old Greys hiding in Canada. Taking the lunar base will hamper Reticulan attempts to create new transgenants.

 

“Third, it’ll increase our prestige with the Laputan public. Even the Phoenix Company couldn’t take the lunar base, so if we do it they’ll sit up and take notice. Some of them will then start asking difficult questions.”

 

Captain Allowyn spoke. “John, are you sure that the commandos can overwhelm the security forces they will encounter there? And even if they take the base, how long can it be held?”

 

“The base won’t be well guarded because the Reticulans don’t think anyone is going to attack it. And we’re not going to try to hold it; we’re going to nuke it. A veteran soldier in the Baltic settlements told me that the remnants of the Russian government didn’t hand over all their nuclear bombs after the armistice. He helped move dozens of nuclear bombs to an underground base in the Karelia region. Apparently they didn’t quite trust the Reticulans to keep their word.”

 

It was agreed that the expeditionary force would leave an hour after sunset on March 1st 2033, St. David’s Day. That gave them over two months to assemble the necessary personnel and equipment. The plan was for a strike force of 24 Resistance commandos to be transported to the Moon in the Aurora and the Celtic Dream. In order to gain the advantage of surprise, they would have to plot a complex course and it would take them twelve days to get to the Moon, which meant that they would have no fighter coverage. It would also mean that they would have to begin their journey during a new moon, which was one reason why March 1st had been chosen.

 

It was a quiet winter with the only hostile activity being an air raid on Dale. The attack was foiled by the Achirdeans who used their psi-stun field to bring down the attacking fighters before they could do any damage. Two of the fighters had been salvaged and were now being used by the Resistance.

 

Royal Consort Ictovera was getting frustrated by the slow progress of the research. Although the mandrakes were a success, the other new transgenants had been a failure. The first batch of balloon sharks was particularly disappointing; one had got indigestion with explosive results. A second had got wedged in a corridor and had blown up, killing the handler who had tried to get it unstuck by repeatedly prodding it with a stick.

 

The problem was that Reticulans just weren’t as good at original thinking as the hated humans; even a human accountant could outdo the best Reticulan at original thinking. It was unsurprising that so much human art and music had been exported to the Reticulan worlds before the Fall; no Reticulan would ever think to go on a spree of grave robbing and then call the results art. The scientists had got so desperate for new ideas that Ictovera had been forced to order scavenging expeditions to acquire human computer games and books on mythology.

 

The silence in the control room was broken by a report from a navigation officer that two spacecraft were about to penetrate the outer energy bubble, although no scheduled flights were due. “Who are they?” asked Ictovera.

 

“Unknown. They are coming in with the sun at their backs; you know how the solar radiation floods our sensors. They have not responded to my attempt to hail them.”

 

Ictovera was alarmed at the report. He was well aware of the renewed fighting on Earth as the Queens had sent him increasingly urgent memos demanding new types of transgenants. Somehow he knew that the approaching ships had something to do with the rebels. Unfortunately the anti-ship defences had been transferred to the Lagado, so it would come down to hand-to-hand combat. “We are under attack, so get the security guards on the lunar surface right now!”

 

The commandos on board the Aurora and the Celtic Dream had been amazed by their sensor readings. The lunar base had been easy to find as it was at the centre of an energy shield with a radius of six miles in the middle of the Moscow Sea. The most surprising thing had been that the energy shield surrounding the base was containing an atmosphere with the same chemical composition and air pressure as at sea level on Earth. John Whittaker ordered that the commandos remain suited up in case the Reticulans turned the shield generator off.

 

The ships landed just over two miles to the west of the base entrance. The dust cloud kicked up by their landing provided the commandos with cover as they emerged from the ships and then began advancing on the base entrance in a skirmishing line. The Moscow Sea is a flat lava plain with few rocks to provide cover for either side. The Resistance commandos had the tactical advantage as, just as they had planned, they had the setting sun at their backs. The Reticulans had to look directly into the sun, whose light was far stronger than on Earth despite the effect of the energy shield. As Reticulans have more sensitive eyes than humans, the result was quite painful.

 

The more accurate fire of the commandos soon finished off the half-blind Reticulan soldiers who were only able to fire more or less randomly in the general direction of the attackers. The lower gravity and the ease of the victory were proving to be exhilarating to the commandos and Tavia had to remind them that they still had to defeat the Reticulans inside the base.

 

As the ships were moved closer to the base entrance, John planted a Union Jack, the cheap red dye faded to orange with age, in the lunar soil. In reply to Tavia’s question, he said “I think that flag the Americans planted up here in 1969 must be a bit lonely by itself.”

 

It was sheer pandemonium inside the base. The humans had killed all the soldiers assigned to the base, and now interior security cameras were showing images of human soldiers inside the base. It did not look as if they could hold out for the four hours it would take for reinforcements to arrive from the Lagado. The research personnel and engineers had armed themselves with Reticulan laser rifles, but they were looking nervous when they moved out as they had all heard stories of how human warriors would go into berserker like frenzies.

 

John was enjoying himself as he ran down a corridor in the low gravity, shooting at anything that moved. He had expected the battle to be difficult, but as it turned out the commandos were romping it – the Achirdean space suits had been designed to cope with the intense solar radiation in space and they were proving surprisingly effective against the Reticulan lasers. He entered a room at the end of the corridor and saw two Reticulans. His plasma rifle spat out and one Reticulan was down, the super-heated plasma burning through its torso. Then John looked at the power indicator display on his rifle – empty. It would take over ten seconds to replace the battery, so John hefted his axe as laser bolts were harmlessly dissipated by the suit. As John’s axe swung towards the Reticulan, he remembered that several years ago a Laputan diplomat had visited Dale and urged its inhabitants to bury the hatchet and accept Laputan rule. John wondered if the diplomat had meant for him to bury the hatchet in a Reticulan’s head.

 

There was another corridor leading off from the room. John reloaded his rifle, just in case, but instead of more Reticulans, he found what appeared to be some kind of holding pen containing around ten humans. But what were they doing on the Moon?

 

“Jesus, get us out of here. And who are you guys anyway?” It took John a moment to recognize the dialect as American. Relations with the American Union had soured because of the harsh way the Americans were treating mutants and the failure of the communities in Western Europe to commit their manpower to fighting the cultists based in New York. It had been five years since the last icy transatlantic diplomatic exchange.

 

“John Whittaker of the Anglo-Alliance. We’re shutting this base down. Are you lot all Americans?” The control panel was not difficult to operate as there was only one button to press. John turned off the energy field, releasing the prisoners.

 

“Seven of us are. The other three are Africans I think, and they don’t speak English. Those damm cultists kidnapped us and handed us over to the aliens. There were more of us, but the filthy aliens experimented on them. They wanted to see how the new transgenants react to the sight of a human.”

 

John radioed in this discovery to the rest of the commandos. It seemed that the fighting was over, and the base had been taken without fatalities. They had also captured a high ranking Reticulan who had hidden in what smelled like some sort of Reticulan midden near the control centre. John and the former prisoners walked over to the control centre.

 

“I don’t think he speaks English,” said the commando who had found the Reticulan.

 

John knew as a fact that all Reticulan officers were expected to be fluent in several human languages, including English. “In that case, he’s no good to us. Cut his limbs off and then behead him, just like we did last time.”

 

“I am Royal Consort Ictovera,” said the Reticulan hurriedly in excellent English.

 

A royal consort was an excellent catch. They were the highest ranking males in Reticulan society, and his people would surely negotiate for his safe return. “Well you are our prisoner now. Cooperate and we won’t hurt you. Fail and we hand you over to the tender mercies of your former prisoners.”

 

Tavia then recorded the evidence of transgenant research in the base, while the other commandos primed the nuclear devices and the released prisoners got their first decent meal in weeks. They were ready to go with an hour to spare. The return journey was a direct route as the lunar base would have had time to transmit a distress message before it fell. The nuclear explosion ripped through the base and destroyed the three Reticulan battleships despatched to relieve the base personnel.

[Accounting Troll]

THE PRISONER

 

A week after the destruction of the lunar base, Ictovera was moved to a new cell in the Achirdean base. The cell was featureless apart from a curiously large spike set in the middle of the floor, and a bucket that Ictovera had already learned was standard human sanitation technology. After the guards bolted the cell door, they moved to the next cell and opened the door. A grey haired woman who seemed to be their leader spoke, “Okay you filthy alien, you’ve had time to think things over. Are you going to talk or not?”

 

“I would rather die than betray my people,” answered the Reticulan.

 

“Suits me. Guards, tie him up and impale him. Let’s see if this one likes anal probing, human style.”

 

Ictovera looked at the spike in his cell in terror. Surely even the humans would not be so barbaric, would they? A few minutes later, the agonised screams began. It took a lot to force a scream like that from a Reticulan. Ictovera imagined himself impaled on a spike lubricated by his own blood, his weight pushing the spike further into his body. What made it worse was that the humans were laughing and betting on whether the dying Reticulan would last an entire hour while they drank home made beer. As each new scream cut through Ictovera like a knife, he knew that he would do anything to avoid such a horrible death.

 

Finally, the screams came to an end. The guard who had predicted 53 minutes was looking particularly happy as he and his comrades hauled away the body wrapped in a shroud. The woman tapped on Ictovera’s cell door and laughingly said “Your turn tomorrow,” before Ictovera was left to his solitary thoughts.

 

Captain Allowyn visited the cells a few hours later. “How are you holding up?”

 

“What are you Achirdeans doing helping these savages?”

 

“Granted they can be a bit rough and ready at times, but you have to remember that Earth is sacred to my people.”

 

“A bit rough and ready? They were enjoying themselves as the other Reticulan died in agony. His screams were entertainment to them.”

 

“Was it really any worse than what you did to the humans you experimented on, in clear breach of the ceasefire agreement?”

 

“But it was vital for our research effort. The sacrifice of the humans is unfortunate but necessary for the greater good. They are so stupid and barbarous that I doubt any sentient being would truly miss them.”

 

“We would. And they were clever enough to destroy your lunar base and three battleships in a single attack. Remember that they now have you at their mercy.”

 

“Why are they going to kill me? The human soldiers said they were going to ransom me back.”

 

“They changed the plan. That middle aged woman you saw earlier runs this settlement, and even I cannot countermand her orders, as much as I would like to. She hates Reticulans with a blazing intensity I have never seen before. You see, her husband and two of her children were killed in attacks on the settlement. Attacks that were sponsored by your people after you supposedly ended the war. She wants you to suffer for her loss. Personally, I still think that we should use you to negotiate an end to the current fighting, but she has the final say.”

 

“But you can speak to her? Please, I beg of you to persuade her not to kill me.”

 

“Once she has decided on a course of action, it is very difficult to persuade her to change her mind. I would need to be able to give her a very good reason to keep you alive.”

 

“As a Royal Consort, I know all our plans. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. I don’t want to die on a spike.”

 

“Very well. We know that you were manufacturing pre-Fall human weapons in your lunar base, and giving them to the cultists in exchange for prisoners to experiment on. I presume you wanted to save yourselves some effort, and avoid the risk of the Laputans realising that you never intended to honour the treaty. When is the next exchange scheduled to take place?”

 

“In four days time, in New York at local sunset.” Ictovera gave as many details of the planned transaction as he could remember.

 

“Excellent. I should be able to persuade the humans to keep you alive until then. If your information checks out, I am sure they will keep you alive. If not, well the humans will choose a method far nastier than impalement for your execution. They can be… most inventive. Sleep well.”

 

In a way, Ictovera felt relieved as it was done now and could not be undone. In betraying his own people to stay alive, he had broken the most fundamental tenet of Reticulan society: the good of the whole is far more important than the good of the individual. But he had a chance now, and he would do whatever was necessary to stay alive. Sleep was still a long time coming though.

 

At first, the trade seemed to be proceeding as normally. The prisoners were lined up as the ship landed right on schedule. Then the cultists discovered that instead of fellow Brothers of the Cross, the ship was crewed with heavily armed heretics! Dozens were martyred in a matter of seconds. And then the air raid began.

 

Sally Asaba addressed the next meeting of the War Council. “Even allowing for the tendency of pilots to be over optimistic about the amount of damage they caused, the effect of our attack on Long Island has been considerable. The destruction of so many cultist ships will weaken their hold on their tributaries to the north and relieve the pressure on the American settlements. If the tributaries rebel and the Americans press home their naval advantage, the cultists will lose access to much of their natural resources which will offset their better weapons. Also, as several mutants were involved in the rescue of American prisoners in the lunar base and New York, the Americans have promised to reappraise the role of mutants in their society.

 

“Now that the Reticulans know that we have nuclear weapons, the capacity to reach anywhere in the solar system and a royal consort in captivity, they want to negotiate a cease-fire in return for a prisoner release. The negotiations will take place on the Laputa in twelve days. They anticipated a certain lack of trust on our part, so they will be sending several high ranking Reticulans and Laputans as hostages for the safe return of our negotiators. We cannot win this war at present as we are unable to launch a direct attack on the heavily defended space settlements. We have to buy time to work out a way to beat the aliens once and for all.

 

“Qualveg, you should have won an Oscar for your performance in that cell, and I’m glad your throat is better, but how did you know that Ictovera would crack? The only way we got anything useful out of the Reticulans we captured during the Aftermath was to pump them full of truth drugs, and hope they gave us enough useful information before they died.”

 

“It was because of how our people reproduce. Each individual Reticulan is a member of could perhaps best be described as a hive. Each hive consists of one Queen and hundreds or even thousands of males. The Queen selects one of these males to be her consort. The other males simply do not think about reproduction except in an intellectual and abstract sense. The individual Reticulan therefore lacks the human biological imperative to survive in order to reproduce, and he is more prepared to sacrifice his life for the good of his people than a human would be.

 

“All Reticulans are born male. When a Queen dies, a senior ranking male goes through a hormone storm that changes his gender. The new Queen then selects a male from a different hive as a consort. This hormone storm also happens when a group of males from different hives start up a new community, such as Queen Slooz in our own group in Canada. A Queen emits pheromones that prevent any males in her hive from going through a hormone storm. We have used genetic engineering to perfect this process to allow for the peculiarities of modern urban living.

 

“A male who is chosen to be a Royal Consort has the opportunity to become the father of thousands of Reticulans, which causes him to have a desire for personal survival that is far stronger than that of most male Reticulans. Only a Royal Consort could have been coerced into betraying his own people in order to ensure his own survival.”

 

The plan for the negotiations was for Sally Asaba and John Whittaker to take the Celtic Dream to the Laputa. Sally was happy to conduct the negotiations on board the Laputa because of the potential information they would gain on how Laputan society was evolving. Several commandos were to accompany them in order to prevent the Laputans and Reticulans from taking the opportunity to examine Achirdean spacefaring technology.

[Accounting Troll]

THE NEGOTIATIONS

 

The ship managed a perfect landing in one of the docking bays in the habitat ring onboard the Laputa. Sally and John were greeted by several Reticulan and Laputan functionaries who politely suggested that while she conducts the negotiations, John might like to have a tour of the Laputa so he would be able to tell his people how much better off they would be if they would only accept Laputan leadership. John looked at Sally who nodded agreement as it would give him a chance to assess the Laputans. One of the Laputans gave John a small plastic card and briefly explained how electronic funds transfer worked. If John felt like going on a shopping trip courtesy of the Laputan government, all he would have to do is to hand the card over to the shopkeeper for a moment.

 

As John wandered through the largest shopping precinct on the Laputa, it did not take him long to realise that several people were following him. They were all pretty amateur – the one person who looked like he might have some idea of what he was doing was a portly, middle aged man who had a tendency to have severe coughing fits which reduced his ability to blend in with the crowd. Mandrakes were far better at tracking people across the wilderness than these clowns. John was puzzled about the middle aged man as his coughs were drawing even more attention from passers-by than John in his clothes of homespun and transgenant leather. Presumably as the Laputa was a closed system, diseases and hence coughing were practically unheard of. So why pick him for undercover surveillance?

 

John walked up to the man. “Okay, you’re clearly not one of the government spies, so why have you been following me for the last hour? And this had better be good.”

 

“I need to talk to you about your people’s insurgency. In private”

 

“And why do I need to listen to you?”

 

The man pulled a battered cloth badge out of his pocket; John recognised the stylised bird design instantly. “I fought in the Phoenix Company in the Aftermath. The government sold us out at the end of the war so they could get a place on the ruling council. The Reticulans have broken the peace treaty time and time again, and the government does nothing to stop them.”

 

“All right, I’ll listen to what you have to say. Do you have a name?”

 

“Malcolm McLean.” Malcolm went into a coughing fit for a moment. “My lungs got shredded by a damm sporeblower one mission. They patched me up enough to send me back out there, but I was never the same afterwards.”

 

Malcolm spent the next three hours showing John around the Laputa. Riding on the monorail mass-transit system, they visited the other shopping precincts, the zero-gravity sports centre and the entertainment complexes, although John disapproved of the nature of much of the entertainment on offer. Finally, Malcolm was satisfied that they had shaken off the government spies, so he took John to the observation deck in the lower part of the central section. John was surprised that there was nobody else in the deck as there was a stunning view of Earth. John looked through one of the telescopes at the planet; he was disappointed to see that the British Isles weren’t visible, but he could see a small green patch on the Chinese mainland which he resolved to have checked out when he returned. Green meant native vegetation, which meant people.

 

While John was looking through the telescope, Malcolm began speaking. “It’s safe to talk here. Nobody ever comes here because they don’t like being reminded of what we surrendered to the Reticulans. Means the dammed politicals don’t bother with surveillance here as well.”

 

“Politicals?”

 

“Secret police. They’ve got all sorts of informants and electronic surveillance devices. If they find any dissenters, they exile them to Earth or send them to the asteroid mining prisons. Either way it’s a death sentence. We never thought it would be this way back in 2005.”

 

“Why do your people stand for this treatment? We wouldn’t.”

 

“There’s only one television station, and its government run. Programmes are full of sub-neural ads that keep most people loyal. And they buy their happiness with easy availability to artificial reality suites and free recreational drugs. Anyway, there are so many informers that the few of us who are dissidents can’t conspire against the government because we don’t know who’s genuine and who’s a spy. The only people I really trust are my daughter and the people I fought alongside in the war.”

 

This was appalling to John. On Earth, anybody who disagreed with the decisions of the community leader was free to join another community or strike out on his own if he wanted. What was the point of ruling by fear? “Yet some people like you can see the lies for what they are?”

 

“Yes. A few people are immune to their mind-control techniques. Also if you strongly disagree with the lies they tell you, the sub-neural ads don’t work. It’s difficult to explain, but they can only suggest to you to think a certain way, and if they force you all they get is a bunch of mindless zombies. Those of us who fought in the Council of Earth forces before the armistice know the aliens for what they are, and no government BS can kid us otherwise.”

 

“What can I do to help you and the other veterans?”

 

“You showed it’s possible to take on the aliens and their minions and win! Set up a radio station and broadcast the truth about the war. Tell everyone what the government and the aliens are up to. With you helping us, we can start an underground movement and eventually overthrow the government. We tried to set up a radio station once before; the ringleader was executed and the others were sent to the asteroid mines. Your people are out of reach.

 

“I have one more favour to ask you. I have a daughter about your age. She is… special. She can sometimes see flashes of the future. The authorities don’t know this. If they find out, the Reticulans will study her to find out how she can do this.”

 

John remembered seeing the remains of some of the people the Reticulans had studied in the lunar base. “This is the real reason why you met me, and took me on that tour to stop anybody getting suspicious of your motives. You want to smuggle your daughter to Earth where she’ll be safe.”

 

“Yes. Her mother and I will never see her again, but the other veterans and I can’t protect her here. We’re a bunch of washed up drunks and we can’t even look after ourselves. And she wants to go. She knows the government is corrupt. We can get her to your ship ourselves. All you have to do is get her to Earth and accept her among your people.”

 

“If that’s what you want, we’ll do it. But you know they’ll arrest you when they find out. Why don’t you and your wife come with us?”

 

Malcolm shook his head. “We can smuggle my daughter onto your ship, but three people would be too difficult. The secret police watch us too closely to get away with it. But when they come for me, I’ll be ready for them.”

 

Although the Reticulans and the Laputans had agreed to end the attacks against the terrestrial settlements in return for the release of all the prisoners, the people of Dale knew to their cost how little these assurances were worth. It was for this reason that Captain Allowyn had visited Ictovera’s cell. “Your people have agreed to our terms, and you’ll be pleased to know that they are going to send a ship to pick up you and the other prisoners in two days.”

 

“What difference will it make for me?” As Captain Allowyn had studied Reticulan culture, he understood why Ictovera seemed depressed by the news of his impending release.

 

“Oh yes, the recording of your confession. You told us how your people have repeatedly broken the treaty, didn’t you? Selling out your people to save your own skin is the worst thing a Reticulan can do. It’s the only crime you have the death penalty for. The fact that we threatened to torture you won’t make any difference to your people. Well we told them that you refused to answer any of our questions, so you’re not about to be executed.”

 

“I would have thought you would be happy to see me executed.”

 

“A lot of us do, I admit. But as a Royal Consort, you have the power to make sure that your people and the Laputans keep to the agreement. There will be no more attacks, no abductions, no new transgenants, no more arms shipments and no inciting local wars. If you fail, we will broadcast your confessions to your people and you will die. I believe a Reticulan telepathic execution takes several hours. Hours of every nerve cell in your body being tormented. And they change your perception of time so it feels more like years of unbearable agony.

 

“You would have worked this out for yourself, but the execution of that other prisoner was a fake. We got one of the surviving Old Greys to scream for a bit. We needed you alive, so the worst anyone was ever going to do to you was to piddle in your soup.”

 

Well that explained why the humans had wrapped the other Reticulan in a shroud and why the food had tasted even fouler than human cuisine normally did.

 

“There may be occasions when we will contact you and ask you to carry out certain missions on our behalf. If you don’t succeed, we will tell all.” Captain Allowyn knew that that Ictovera would cooperate. Eventually he would be found out, but until then there would be peace.

 

Brian Rowley made sure that his earphones were plugged in before he turned on the radio in his apartment, as he wasn’t certain that he had removed all the secret police bugging devices. The government had announced that anybody caught listening to Radio Earth would be sent to the asteroid mines, which was how Brian had found out about the new station. He had heard that the Resistance was using an alien tight beam radio transmitter aimed at the Laputa, which was why the reception was so clear quarter of a million miles away. He missed the first part of the broadcast as it took him a moment to find the correct frequency.

 

“…We now know that the murder of Malcolm and Yanling McLean last month was committed by government security forces after they smuggled their daughter to Earth. They both fought with distinction in the Phoenix Company in the months after the fall, and it is a bitter irony that they were killed by the very government they had fought to defend…” Brian hurled his radio against the wall in his impotent fury, dashing it into a thousand pieces. The broadcast confirmed his suspicions about the murder of two of his closest friends.

 

Jenny McLean managed to settle in on Earth far more easily than most Laputans who found the open skies and distant horizons to be disconcerting. She married Pierre six months after her escape from the Laputa.

[Accounting Troll]

ECONOMIC WARFARE

 

Royal Consort Ictovera was hailed as a hero upon his return from captivity, despite his failure to defend the lunar base. He knew that if he was to maintain the peace and survive, he would need to have a hold over others in the same way that the Resistance had a hold over him. It was for that reason that he volunteered to become the overall director of internal security for the space settlements. He convinced the Queens that his time as an ambassador gave him the understanding of sneakiness that would be needed to combat the Reticulan and Laputan dissidents.

 

In 2036 Ictovera received a private message from the Resistance ordering him to smuggle a shipment of hand weapons to the workers in the mines of Pallas. He knew that if he didn’t cooperate, the Resistance would tell the Laputans just how heroic he had really been during his short time in captivity.

 

It was not difficult for Ictovera to get the weapons onto one of the cargo ships heading for Pallas. He arranged to have a private discussion with Captain Tyler of the cargo ship Blue Horizon. “Do you remember that decompression accident one year ago in which two of your crewmen died?”

 

“The Board said it was an accident and nobody was at fault. What are you wasting my time with this for?”

 

“The Board of Navigation only concluded that nobody was to blame because you managed to suppress certain evidence. Evidence of your negligence. Evidence that would have sent you to the asteroid mines as a labourer, where a disgraced officer like you would have been quietly murdered by the other labourers in a matter of hours.”

 

“How the hell did you know that?”

 

“Being the Director of Internal Security means that all sorts of interesting information comes my way. In this case, my officers came across evidence of computer tampering during the routine investigation into the accident and they managed to recover the original files. They then discovered a large money transfer from your bank account to that of a known computer hacker. I put the case on hold as I felt that there might be a time when I wish to make a private arrangement with you.”

 

“Maybe I’ll just scrag you instead you sneaky alien bastard.”

 

“You think you will walk out of here alive if you try to harm me?”

 

“Okay, but I’m going to scrag that punk kid. He promised no one would be able to trace the changes.” The captain seemed to be bright enough to realise that he was beaten.

 

“If you cooperate, I will ensure that his forthcoming unfortunate murder will remain unsolved. Now, I have a shipment of handguns that I wish you to smuggle onto your ship and then into the mines of Pallas. This should present no real difficulties for you, as I also happen to know that you regularly smuggle narcotics to the miners.” Ictovera waited for Captain Tyler to finish swearing and promising a violent end for the incompetent hacker, Ictovera was surprised to realise that he was enjoying this. “Succeed in this task and I will ensure that my department never bothers you. Fail, or refuse to cooperate, and you can expect to die in the mines very soon.”

 

Shortly before the Blue Horizon left for Pallas, the mutilated body of a known computer hacker was discovered in his apartment. Internal Security concluded that he had interrupted an attempted burglary. In the four months before the Blue Horizon returned, Ictovera concluded that Captain Tyler was too dangerous to live. Sooner or later, he would be investigated by a rival police department and sell out Ictovera to save himself. His body was discovered a week after his return to the Laputa. As Ictovera arranged for evidence of his drug dealing to emerge, the police concluded that he had been killed by a rival dealer.

 

Ictovera was feeling pleased with himself for the first time since his capture. Although his fate was still in the hands of the Resistance, even more so as he had compounded his original crime by his actions, he had learned how to blackmail a human and then disposed of him when he had served his purpose. He was feeling less pleased when news emerged that the labourers in the asteroid mines had rebelled and taken control of the shipyard located nearby to save on the difficulty of transporting raw materials half way across the solar system.

 

Four months after the miners began their rebellion, a meeting of the War Council in Dale was discussing the political and economic impact upon the space settlements. Sally was reading out a report transmitted by the Laputan Underground. “After the miners seized the spaceport, they found several battleships close to completion, and others waiting to be transferred to the space settlements. Two months later, they defeated an expeditionary force sent out to quell the uprising.

 

“Pallas is now on the opposite side of the sun, and it will be at least another four months before another expeditionary force can get there, and a further two to three years before they can replace the miners and get production back up to the original level. And if the miners realise they can’t beat the expeditionary force, their ships will just melt away and make a living from pirate attacks on the supply routes.

 

“The Reticulans and Laputans are running out of raw materials now, and the prices of manufactured goods have already trebled. Ordinary Reticulans will accept these minor hardships stoically, but when Laputans find that they can no longer afford to upgrade their computers and television sets, they will begin to grumble and complain about the inefficiency of their government. The Laputan population will become considerably more receptive to our propaganda efforts.”

[Accounting Troll]

THE BIONODES

 

In the years after the rebellion in the mines of Pallas, Ictovera managed to maintain an uneasy peace between Earth and the space settlements. There were occasional small wars between the emerging factions on Earth; with the planet so sparsely populated, these quarrels were down to different philosophies and not control of resources. The Achirdeans managed to set up a network of solar powered radios in most of the major settlements, allowing rapid communication across the world for the first time since the Fall. Although many of the factions were willing to ally against the external threat from the space settlements, their political differences were too great to allow world unity.

 

The mines of Pallas had to be abandoned because of the frequent pirate attacks on the supply route. Open cast mines were constructed in the vast lava plains of the near side of the Moon, where there are rich deposits of titanium, iron, thorium, magnesium and aluminium. Unfortunately, the ores are far harder to get to than with asteroid mining, but the protection offered by the proximity of the space settlements made up for that. The work was difficult and even more dangerous than asteroid mining because of the intense solar radiation, so convict labour still had to be used.

 

The Resistance commandos concentrated on keeping the global mandrake population down, a task made considerably easier by using the captured warp assault rifles that would shear a mandrake in two and give easy access to the precious mandrake oil. The radio propaganda caused public support for the Laputan government to decline, however fear of the secret police prevented any serious protests. There were also increasing numbers of dissidents among the ranks of the Reticulans born after the Fall. Most of them were found and quietly exiled to the mines, but a few managed to avoid detection long enough to escape to Earth where they joined with the Old Greys.

 

In the early months of 2046, there was a series of cases of insanity in settlements across the world. The symptoms were the same in each case; the victim would be acting perfectly normally and then suddenly attempt to destroy his or her settlement. Sometimes this involved attempting to destroy the settlement’s defences, thus giving the mandrakes a chance to attack the settlement, and sometimes the patient would go on a killing spree. When the first case occurred at Dale, the victim was killed by the commandos before he could do any damage; his body was hauled off for an autopsy in the Achirdean base, and what the Achirdeans found terrified them.

 

Tavia addressed the emergency meeting of the War Council. “The aberrant behaviour observed in these individuals is not insanity, but the result of a new kind of parasitic transgenant living inside their bodies. This transgenant takes over the mind of its victim and forces him or her to do terrible things.”

 

“What do we know about it?” asked Pierre.

 

“It probably enters the human body by ingestion while it is microscopically sized. It then makes its way to the intestines, where it spends two to three years growing to adulthood. The slow development is because it is highly intelligent and needs time for its mind to mature. When it reaches maturity, it burrows into the spinal cord where it hijacks the nervous system of the unfortunate host. We cannot find any method by which it can propagate its species, so it has clearly been genetically engineered.”

 

“You mean the damm Reticulans have broken the peace treaty again?” asked John. He was starting to worry that he might already have one of the parasites growing inside him.

 

“They haven’t,” replied his mother. “From what I’ve found out from the Reticulan and Laputan dissidents, their governments are even more puzzled than we are. The first case occurred nearly two years ago, but they managed to cover it up until recently to avoid panicking their population. Somebody created these soul leeches, but it wasn’t the Reticulans, the Laputans or any of the terrestrial settlements.”

 

“So who does that leave? Where did these creatures come from?”

 

“Broom Hill,” shouted Jenny.

 

“I beg your pardon?”

 

“Broom Hill, in the Medway area. It’s where the nearest bionode is. When you asked where the soul leeches come from, I just suddenly knew they have something to do with the bionodes.”

 

John decided to mount an immediate expedition to investigate the bionode. He took forty commandos with him, as well as Jenny and the Achirdean scientists as their insights would be useful.

 

The Aurora and the Celtic Dream landed in the inner bailey of Rochester Castle, an excellent defensive position once it had been swept of transgenants and lookouts posted. John led his force by foot across a Victorian bridge and into the town of Strood which was built going up the gentle slope of Broom Hill. The occasional man-of-war lurked in the streets and gardens of the derelict town, but as everyone in the group was wearing a torc, the transgenants never spotted them.

 

The summit of the hill had once been parkland and light woodland. Now it was dominated by Biomass related vegetation. There were large numbers of transgenants, including a new species that looked like morelmen, only shorter and stockier as if the hosts had been Reticulans. Although the transgenants were unarmed, they were so numerous that for a while, John worried that they would run out of ammunition. However, in the end the area around the bionode was secured without casualties.

 

The bionode itself was a large twisted mass of flesh, looking similar to the photographs of the two bionodes destroyed by the Phoenix Company. Strange yellow lines in the Biomass seemed to emanate from the bionode. Jenny could feel more than see a bluish line that emanated from the Biomass and was aimed at somewhere in the sky. The Achirdean scientists managed to detect high levels of psionic energy, but they could only vaguely make out the line. The other commandos could make out nothing. The scientists took as many readings as they could before the commandos destroyed the Bionode and most of Strood with a tactical nuke.

 

At the next War Council meeting, Tavia presented the preliminary findings of the scientific analysis of the tactical data. “We now understand what the main function of the bionodes is. Although the bionodes help to spread the biomass, their main purpose is to act as a Qport, through which new types of transgenants can be transported. This is how the soul leeches and the morelrets got into this world.

 

“The rifts through space/time that are needed for interstellar travel are easy to create. However, they tend to collapse within a millionth of a second because the location of each end is not fixed, but it shifts through relativistic space. Each star orbits the centre of the galaxy at its own individual rate and the galaxies orbit each other. The Qports do not actually generate these rifts, but they anchor them instead, so the rift doesn’t collapse when a ship is passing through. For the sake of safety, Qports have to be built in space.

 

“The bionodes are a new kind of Qport. They somehow use psionics, which we know isn’t bound by the ordinary laws of physics, to generate and maintain this link between two or more worlds. The new transgenants were developed on another world. It is almost certain that the Biomass started out on another world as well.”

 

John found this thought worrying. “So you’re saying that other worlds have fallen sway to the Biomass? There’s no way that so many Reticulans in the Lagado could have become transgenants without our finding out, which means their worlds must be falling to the Biomass. That also means the renegade faction hasn’t got a clue about what they’re dealing with. The Biomass project was screwed up from the beginning. All those people were killed for nothing.”

 

“If the bionodes are in fact portals to Biomass infested worlds, which would explain some anomalous data we have on the renegade faction that attacked Earth,” said Captain Allowyn. “They seem to have access to a lot of advanced technology that the rest of their people do not possess.

 

“There are the spores they used in the initial attack. It is unfortunate that nobody managed to gain samples of the spores, but their ability to kill and then create the first wave of transgenants from the dead is impressive. Nothing like that could have evolved naturally, so it must have been created for biological warfare. However the Reticulans have never developed biological warfare, and no race that we know of has developed it to such a sophisticated level.

 

“The spore carrying ship is enigmatic. Your people managed to get good radar and visual images of the ship and it looks radically different to any known class of ship, and certainly different to anything the Reticulans possess. Also, the Reticulans have never used it in the fighting since 2004. It must have been custom made for this one function while all other Reticulan ships are designed for multiple roles.

 

“The first wave transgenants were mutated forms of some of the people and animals who died in the Fall. Somehow they managed to control the muscular and nervous systems of beings that were not only dead but had begun to decompose. This control was so total that the transgenants were able to use weapons in battle.

 

“Also, the Reticulans managed to develop new weapons with remarkable speed. They lack human ingenuity, and even with the large contingent of scientists in the invasion force, they should not have been able to invent new weapons systems so quickly. Their technology utterly outclassed the far larger Old Grey fleet. It finally makes sense if they have allies on the other side of the bionodes.”

 

It seemed like the Resistance simply had the task of destroying all the bionodes on Earth to defeat the latest threat. However, it was estimated that there were hundreds of bionodes, and a concerted campaign would doubtless bring down the wrath of the Reticulans. The only alternative was to find a way to kill the soul leeches after they had entered the body.

 

The breakthrough came two months after the destruction of the bionode in the Medway district. What was surprising was that it did not come from the Achirdean scientists, but from the Laputan Underground. A new anthelmintic drug was issued to citizens of the space settlements, and a heavy fighter piloted by an Underground operative made an escape attempt. The pursuing fighters only broke off 20,000 miles from Earth when they encountered the Resistance fighters; Laputan fighter pilots were not paid enough to take responsibility for starting a war.

 

The Achirdeans analysed the sample and discovered that an excellent source of the active ingredient was mandrake oil. A single small dose could provide protection against the soul leeches for up to two years. The commandos stepped up efforts against the mandrakes, however they could not hope to acquire enough mandrake oil for the entire planet, and they would have to find a way to shut the bionodes down soon.

[Accounting Troll]

THE SEARCH

 

The next War Council meeting was called by Jenny after she had a dream. “Captain Allowyn, what is it about the ley lines your people find so interesting?”

 

“We think that they have the potential to magnify the psionic ability of an individual, although we are unsure how one can actually harness this ability. We think there must have been some sort of artefact that acted as a key, but we have no idea what it was or where it is.”

 

“I thought so. Last night I dreamed that it still exists and that somebody found it and put it in one of the museums in London. I also think that it is the only way we can shut down all the bionodes before they let even worse transgenants into our world.”

 

John had learned never to doubt Jenny’s ability. The fact that his sister had also been a Dreamer helped to make him more open minded about these things. The only problem with Dreamers was that it was impossible for them to control their visions, so there was no guarantee that a Dreamer would be able to warn you of a forthcoming problem or help with a particular task. John decided to authorise the search.

 

The effort to find the key was made more difficult by the spy satellites that had kept a close watch on the people of Dale since the end of the insurgency. If the Reticulans or the Laputans realised what the Resistance was looking for, they would join the search themselves. The trick was to make the search efforts look like routine scavenging expeditions in the old cities.

 

It is a little known fact that a museum in Britain never has more than 5% of its artefacts on public display owing to lack of room. The other artefacts are storied in various warehouses and less than a third of them have been catalogued. It did not take the Resistance to discover this and understand the implications for their search.

 

The breakthrough came in late 2052 when Pierre and Jenny were looking through an archive of the private diaries of a mid 19th century antiquarian named Cornelius Fitzherbert; they were finally getting used to the difficult handwriting style then in vogue. Between a reminder to see the chiropodist about his bunions and a complaint about the falling standards of tradesmen – the butcher’s delivery boy had not even worn a hat and had behaved ‘most coarsely’ when he was remonstrated with, was the following passage:

 

“…In the course of my investigation of the Devils Quoit, I was hampered by the superstitions of the uneducated locals who foolishly think the site to be haunted and refused to assist my endeavours, although I charitably offered to pay them three farthings each. I uncovered potsherds and what appeared to have once been a bronze axe head. Most interestingly, I uncovered a sphere, of similar size to a cricket ball, made of solid quartz. A groove had been cut into its circumference, although I know not how savages managed to work a crystal to such great perfection and beauty…”

 

There was another reference to the artefact in an entry dated three months later. “…Since acquiring the sphere, I have had unsettling dreams of what I believe to be the future. Every night I dream of the world being choked by something like coal dust. I saw the dead turned into inhuman demons and given the task of hunting down the living by strange ethereal beings while the survivors fought back with miraculously rapid firing rifles. I then saw the world being swallowed up by lurid reddish vegetation, while men survived by selling their souls to the demons and living in an artificial world in the heavens. By some unknown agency, I know that the crystal sphere will prove to be the cause of mankind’s salvation or final destruction in the trying years to come…”

 

Such an accurate description of the Aftermath War stunned Pierre and Jenny; somehow they knew that the artefact described by Cornelius Fitzherbert was the object of their search. The experiences of the antiquarian after he recorded his dream had been unhappy. His attempts to warn people of the coming danger resulted in his committal to a mental hospital, where his ravings and those of the other inmates were a popular tourist attraction on a par with a visit to a zoo. There was also a helpful document stating where his collection of artefacts had been stored after he bequeathed them to what would one day become the Natural History Museum.

 

The analysis of the sphere came up with some puzzling results. It was mostly clear quartz, but it contained traces of what appeared to be element 142, even though no element with an atomic number of above 92 is supposed to be able to exist in nature and Achirdean, Terran and Reticulan scientists had yet to create a transuranic element with an atomic number of above 128. Further analysis showed that the traces of element 142 were ordered in a manner reminiscent of a printed circuit board.

 

John toyed with the sphere while the Achirdeans discussed the possibility of calling element 142 ‘cornelium’ in honour of the long dead antiquarian. Thinking about his torc, he wrapped a length of copper wire around the groove in the sphere. He then held the sphere in both hands, concentrated for a moment and his consciousness suddenly expanded.

 

John found himself aware of the entire planet. He could sense every lifeform on the landmasses and in the oceans and feel their minds. He could see the space settlements and the people living in them. He instinctively understood that he was mentally connected to the global ley lines network. He had gained the powers of a god! Visions of the true history of the ley lines flooded into his mind.

 

The first vision was from 40 million years ago. The sphere was a computer built by a highly advanced alien race to give their ships the ability to use psionics to travel between the stars. This time, something had malfunctioned and a ship that was on a scientific mission to study Earth’s eco-system crash landed.

 

32,000 years ago, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon humans were coexisting peacefully when the Reticulans invaded Earth. The Reticulans destroyed several cities as a warning against resistance, and then began exterminating the Neanderthals as their psionic abilities were a potential danger to the Reticulan plans. Countless thousands of people were transported as labourers to the new colony of Achird II. As the new colony was even colder than Earth, most of the labourers were taken from the European tundra as they would be likely to be hardy enough for the conditions on Achird II.

 

By this time, the sphere had been recovered by humans and had become an important religious artefact. A shaman had a vision that showed him how humanity could create the ley lines harness the Earth energy to drive the Reticulans from Earth. It was the work of a generation to create the network without the Reticulans noticing what was going on.

 

When it was completed, the head shaman used the sphere to tap into the ley lines. He killed all the Reticulans on Earth and destroyed the network of Qports that connected the Reticulan worlds, thus preventing reinforcements from arriving and giving the humans on Achird II their chance to launch a separate rebellion.

 

The power proved to be too addictive, and the shaman refused to give it up. He came to see other people as being insignificant insects and attempted to destroy them when they got frightened and decided to take his power away. The destruction that he unleashed before he was stopped came close to wiping out the human race. The survivors realised that misusing the sphere had unleashed even more destruction than the Reticulans could manage, and they knew that they lacked the maturity to use it properly. The only solution was to hide it somewhere remote where they believed that nobody would find it until humanity became mature enough to avoid misusing it.

 

John realised that he finally had to power to defeat the Reticulans and their allies. A single thought and all the enemy spy satellites winked out of existence. Then he felt the bionodes and the psionic rifts connecting Earth to the homeworld of the Biomass. Although he could see what star system the Biomass came from, he did not seem to have the ability to use the ley lines to launch a direct attack. No matter, he still had the ability to destroy all the bionodes on Earth, thus severing the connection.

 

He toyed with the idea of destroying the space settlements, but he could feel the minds of the Reticulans and the Laputans and he could tell that they were not evil but merely misguided. He was not about to repeat the mistake made by the shaman who had destroyed the Atlantean civilization. He reluctantly put the sphere down.

[Accounting Troll]

RECONNAISSANCE

 

After John’s experience with the alien sphere, the Achirdean scientists realised that it would be possible for him to use this strange power to create a rift in space/time in the manner of the Qports. Jenny was of the opinion that it was important for them to launch an expedition of the homeworld of the Biomass to see what information they could obtain. Pierre suggested that they take the opportunity to launch a nuclear attack on the homeworld of the Biomass.

 

At first John was reluctant to use the sphere again, but Tavia managed to convince him to go for it. “You showed far greater maturity than the ancient shaman. You understood the consequences of using your powers, and most importantly, you were willing to give them up.”

 

“I still don’t like it though. It’s addictive and I’m probably going to find it harder to give up the powers a second time.”

 

Jenny spoke up. “It’s necessary for the war effort. We need the data we’ll get if we send the John Cabot through. I think it’ll finally convince the Laputan public to rebel against their government.”

 

“Oh all right, but this is the last time. I’m going to throw that damm sphere into the sea when you get back.”

 

The planet below the John Cabot was covered with the familiar mottled brown and orange of the Biomass. The gravity was slightly below that of Earth and spectrographic analysis revealed a similar oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, breathable but slightly thinner than that of Earth. Passive scans revealed a number of zones of industrial activity. The plan was for Pierre and a group of commandos to land the Celtic Dream a few miles from the edge of one of the industrial zones, and then they would go on a reconnaissance mission.

 

The descent through the atmosphere and the landing went smoothly. Pierre decided to lead a group of six commandos, including robot D9 and Jenny, while the other eight guarded the ship and landing site. They were armed with a combination of hybrid laser and plasma rifles, and each commando had a black market MP7 for backup. D9 took the 40mm autocannon that represented their heavy weaponry. The thin air made the two hour trek through the Biomass as arduous as hill climbing back on Earth.

 

Pictures taken from space had revealed that the industrial zone was comprised of numerous long box shaped buildings, with several open areas between them. Outside the entrance to the nearest factory were some humanoid workers using what appeared to be forklift trucks to move some containers from a transporter craft to the cavernous factory interior. Then the foreman spoke to one of the workers, and what he said shocked Pierre.

 

“Careful with that box mate, these things are delicate.”

 

The foreman was as human as Pierre, but what were people from Earth doing working in an alien factory? They had to get in there and find out what was going on. “Anybody got any idea how we can get past those workers?” he whispered to his companions.

 

“Follow me, I’ve got an idea,” said Jenny. They walked towards the foreman and then Jenny spoke to him. “Excuse me, could you direct us to the shift supervisor’s office please?”

 

“In there, a hundred yards on your right. Go into the office block there and ask for him.”

 

“Thank you.” Jenny noticed the others, including D9 staring at her in disbelief. “You heard the gentleman, let’s go.” As they walked into the factory, Jenny explained that she had detected no surprise at their approach in the minds of the workers and the foreman, another mystery since they were heavily armed and a seven foot Achirdean robot is not good at blending in the crowd.

 

There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of human workers inside the factory, all working on the construction of saucer shaped alien fighter craft. Pierre’s attention was drawn to a wall poster depicting an elderly, somewhat cherubic looking man and the slogan ‘Let us go forward together’. Next to it was a poster depicting two people chatting in a restaurant while a man with an odd looking moustache was hiding under the table as he took notes, the slogan read “Careless talk costs lives”.

 

“That one’s Winston Churchill, dunno who the other one is though,” whispered Julian Asaba. “But I don’t understand what those posters are doing halfway across the galaxy – the Second World War ended over a century ago!” They walked a little way further into the factory, watching the workers operate strange machinery and assembling the alien craft.

 

One of the workers seemed to be on his break. He approached the group and asked “New here, right?”

 

“You could say that,” replied Pierre grimly.

 

“It’s not a bad job this. Supervisor’s a bit of an old woman though. My name’s Wilf Fuller by the way.” The man reached for a carton in his pocket and pulled out a small tube of some kind of vegetable matter wrapped in paper. He put the tube in his mouth and lit the other end, causing the tube to smoulder and give off pungent smoke, which he appeared to enjoy inhaling. He noticed that he was being stared at. “Sorry, would anyone like a fag? Rationing’s a bit hard these days, but I’ve got a mate in the Smoke who sees us alright.”

 

“Thanks, but none of us smoke,” said Jenny. “What do you do here?”

 

“I help fix the cannons onto the Spitfires.”

 

“Those are Spitfires?” Jenny had seen a picture of a Spitfire fighter in a book, and they did not have the slightest resemblance to the alien craft being assembled on the factory line.

 

“Well, I know the boffins made a few changes, but surely you recognize them?”

 

Pierre remembered his own days as a fighter pilot. “They look rather different close up, and these ones are only half finished of course. Erm, how long have you been working here?”

 

“About three months now.” They chatted for another few minutes before Wilf said that it was time for him to go back to work.

 

Jenny summed up her assessment of Wilf’s mind. “He is human, and he genuinely thinks that he is working in an aircraft factory in Britain in the early 1940s. He seemed good at filtering out and interpreting anything odd like the design of the strange craft and technology, also our weapons and the robot. I don’t know who tampered with his mind, but I’m guessing that they are using the patriotism generated by World War Two to persuade the workers to work harder.”

 

“So have they been out here for a hundred years then? Wilf looked no older than 40, so how is it possible?” asked Julian.

 

Robot D9 was next to speak. “If you recall, sirs, Mr Fuller looked similar to the workman outside who was spoken to by the foreman. I have recorded numerous other instances of such physical similarities between two or more factory workers. It is likely that the factory workers are being cloned before they are sent here.”

 

Jenny had learned about genetic cloning in school back on the Laputa. “But that would just result in someone with a passing physical similarity to the original, like the way a man looks like his father. Where did he get his memories from? He genuinely thought he was a factory worker on Earth in the 1940s.”

 

“Several more advanced races had been experimenting with memory transference before we left Achird II. Memory transference allows you to download all the thoughts and experiences of an individual onto a digital medium and then upload them into the mind of another individual. Curiously, the Reticulans are not thought to possess this technology.”

 

Pierre thought about this for a few seconds. “Okay, we aren’t going to learn anything else here. Let’s get back to the Celtic Dream before we get spotted.”

 

Pierre had plenty of time for thinking on the difficult hike back. Evidently humans had been abducted for decades, perhaps even centuries, before the Fall. They had been cloned and set to work building vast numbers of ships. As numerous industrial zones had been spotted from space, that could only mean that the Fall, terrible as it had been, was only a small part of a far wider conflict. The renegade Reticulans had thought that they were bringing something new and unique into the universe with the Biomass project on Earth, but as at least one other world was infested, and more would be soon, the Reticulans were clearly unwitting dupes just as much as the human factory workers. It also explained how the renegades had apparently developed so much new technology before the Fall without the mainstream Reticulans noticing.

 

About a mile from the landing side, the group realised that they were being tracked by beings that Jenny confirmed as hostile. As the beings moved closer, Pierre ordered the group to spread out and open fire. The hostiles were vaguely humanoid shaped, but they had a fuzzy outline and they were so dark that they seemed to absorb the available light into some bottomless depth. They seemed to give off a miasma of pure evil, causing the hairs on the back of Pierre’s neck to rise. Instinctively, Pierre knew that something terrible would happen if one of those creatures touched him, and he tried to fight down his feelings of panic. The lasers and MP7s seemed ineffective – no point shooting into a hole thought Pierre and then he wondered why he had thought that. However, plasma weapons appeared to work.

 

D9 spoke as he was shooting, “Sirs, I suggest that you abandon your weapons and backpacks and then run to the Celtic Dream, while I hold the attackers off. As an artificial lifeform, I am the most expendable person here, and I can hold them off for a long time with your plasma rifles.”

 

Although the robot was right, Pierre was reluctant to leave one of his own behind, even a robot. “All right, but we’ll try to delay taking off as long as possible to give you a chance to escape. You’re no use to anybody dead.” Two minutes after the out of breath team had boarded the ship, they saw D9 belting along at eight times the speed a human could have managed. As the robot ran up the gangplank, Pierre noticed that it had thought to gather up the weapons and backpacks dropped in the rush to escape.

[Accounting Troll]

ENDGAME

 

The data broadcast by the Resistance caused widespread rioting on the Laputa. Fearing the collapse of their efforts on Earth, the Reticulans and Laputans launched a series of attacks on the terrestrial settlements with the aim of wiping out the population of Earth once and for all. The Resistance promptly retaliated by broadcasting the long suppressed truth about Royal Consort Ictovera. The scandal of Ictovera’s web of deceit further destabilised the Laputan society, but it failed to slow the attacks.

 

The Resistance commandos were doing their best to stem the tide, but the cyborgs and Reticulans were too numerous and Resistance casualties were mounting. A failed air raid on Camp Maldonia resulted in the loss of all the Resistance fighters. Over ten thousand people were being killed each month.

 

The breakthrough came in the fourth month of the fighting. A group of commandos had managed to flank the cyborgs attacking a settlement in Brazil, and although they had been beaten off, they had managed to capture one of the telepathic cyborgs. She was taken to Dale, where John decided to try to convince her of the truth of the war.

 

“Even though I’ve taken my torc off, you cannot escape even if you take over my mind, so you may as well listen to what I have to say. For a start, the Reticulans only think they control the Biomass. In reality, it’s the other way round and they’ve been the dupes for over a century. As are your people.”

 

“You‘re lying.”

 

“Look into my mind. You know that here and now, I cannot lie to you even if I wanted to. If you don’t listen to me, the Biomass will destroy the last remnants of humanity and then go on to conquer the galaxy. If you listen, then maybe we all have a chance to survive.”

 

“Go on.”

 

“Our scientists and Dreamers think they’ve finally worked out the big picture with the Biomass, and it’s far worse than we thought back in 2005. The Biomass originally evolved into a single sentient mind on a planet hundreds of light years away. It became aware of extraterrestrial life after a Reticulan survey ship explored the planet. Planetmind took over the minds of the crew, and she learned the secrets of interstellar travel and the Qports from the Reticulans. One of the Reticulan males went through the hormone storm, allowing Planetmind to establish a breeding population.

 

“Planetmind used these Reticulans to gather information on the genetic structure of the inhabitants of many worlds, including Earth. It used this information to create the deadly spores of the Fall. By the 16th century, Planetmind had also worked out how to create interstellar neural connections which would enable a conquered world to become part of a greater Planetmind instead of becoming a rival intelligence. Planetmind used its minions to abduct people from various worlds to build and crew the massive invasion fleets. Humans and Reticulans were popular choices because we were perceived as being advanced enough to be useful labourers, but not advanced enough to be a threat to Planetmind. The Reticulans who carried out all those abductions in the 19th and 20th centuries, and invaded Earth, were in fact abductees and the descendants of abductees themselves. And today there are probably more humans on Planetmind’s homeworld than in our entire solar system.”

 

“But why would so many people choose to serve the force that had abducted them?”

 

“Because Planetmind messes with the minds of its victims. It changes the way you perceive reality so you think that serving its cause is the right thing to do. That’s why our Reticulans think they control it and why your people helped them defeat the fleet sent by the rest of their people to liberate humanity. Have you never wondered why you and the other cyborg telepaths were permanently stationed in Camp Maldonia even though some of the ordinary cyborgs are present in the space settlements? Planetmind needs your skills, but it can’t alter your minds without ruining your ability. And if you were allowed on the space settlements, you would eventually realise that the Reticulans and Laputans have had their minds altered. The only solution was to keep you and the implant factories on Earth.”

 

“If what you say is true, how do you know your own mind hasn’t been altered?”

 

“I can prove it to you. We found a way to travel to a distant solar system without using a Qport. Look at the recordings we took.” John showed Shu the recordings they had taken in the alien factory and images of the strange creatures that had attacked them. “When your people and the Reticulans realised what we had managed, they started the current war. They are trying to exterminate the remaining humans on Earth once and for all.”

 

“You’re wrong; we’re only attacking the settlements involved with the rebels.”

 

“I understand that you want to believe that, but it’s simply not true. Dale is the only terrestrial community that has attacked you since the armistice of 2005, and that was only after you launched two unprovoked attacks on us and introduced the mandrakes in clear breach of the terms of the 2005 treaty. It was the people of Dale under my leadership who fought and defeated you in the Insurgency. Nobody else has the ability to hurt you. Most communities are looking to us to defend them from your aggression. Maybe 50,000 people have been murdered in the last four months of fighting, and that includes over a thousand dead in New York, even though its inhabitants have always supported you.”

 

“But you launched an air raid on New York in the Insurgency.”

 

“True. We bombed the cultists to stop them from raiding the Americans. Before we did that, they were handing prisoners over to the Reticulans for biological experiments.”

 

“I can see that you’re telling the truth. But what can I do?”

 

“Simple, we’re planning to return you and the other cyborgs we’ve captured in the recent fighting. We’re going to make it look like a goodwill attempt in the hope of ending the fighting. When you return to Tasmania, tell the other cyborg telepaths what I have told you. Then tell the ordinary cyborgs as we know that they rely on the telepaths to lead them. Once you’ve done all that, you can launch a rebellion. The Reticulans and Laputans use you as cannon fodder to do the real fighting for them.”

 

“It’ll take a few days for me to make the arrangements for your release, so in the meantime I suggest you read this.” John handed Shu a battered copy of Gullivers Travels. “You might be interested to read about the original Laputans. They’re more like your people than you realise.”

 

The Aurora left for Camp Maldonia as soon as safe passage through enemy airspace had been negotiated. On board were Shu Tang, the four cyborg prisoners and eight commandos as well as the pilot and co-pilot. The flight went smoothly until the Aurora was flying above the Australian Alps when its scanners reported a flight of enemy fighters on an intercept course. The co-pilot broadcast the pre-agreed recognition signal, but the fighters remained on their course and then opened fire on the Aurora.

 

As the pilot did his best to evade the shots, the co-pilot continued to broadcast the recognition signal and demanded that the fighters break off their attack. Shu looked into the minds of the fighter pilots and tried to get them to decide to attack each other instead. With horror, she realised that the attack was deliberate. “They’ve betrayed the ceasefire. They want us dead!”

 

Despite the best efforts of the pilot, it was not long before the Aurora was severely damaged. “Prepare for a crash landing,” shouted the pilot. “Here we go!” The impact threw Shu forward from her seat. She felt something inside her snap as she hit the bulkhead a moment before somebody barrelled into her. Then the ship hit a rock, causing it to flip over.

 

After the crash, Shu heard some shouting, but she didn’t really take it in. She couldn’t feel her legs and it hurt to breathe. She felt tired and she wanted to close her eyes, but there were things she needed to do first. There were six other survivors including two cyborgs, one of whom was nursing a broken arm. She called Corporal Falling over. He looked frightened at the realisation that he was in charge.

 

“Corporal, the attack was deliberate. They wanted to kill us because they were frightened of what I might have learned in my time living among you. Get the other survivors to take the emergency survival packs and get as far away as you can before they examine the crash site.”

 

“Can you walk? We’ll get you out of here.”

 

“I’m dying. My back is broken and so are my ribs.” She started coughing up blood and nearly passed out from the pain. “Internal bleeding as well. You can’t do anything for me, get away while you can.” Shu entered the corporal’s mind to overcome his reluctance to abandon her. The corporal and the other survivors left barely two minutes later, hopefully they would be able to avoid the detachment of Storm Marines that would soon be looking for them.

 

This close to Camp Maldonia, Shu was able to feel the thoughts of the other telepathic cyborgs providing she concentrated. No outsiders knew that they could communicate telepathically over hundreds of miles. She soon felt the comforting presence of the other voices in her mind.

 

*What has happened?*

 

*Am dying. All have been betrayed for fifty years. Reticulans and Laputans are controlled by Biomass. Always have been. Killed us to suppress truth. Join rebels or humanity will die.* Shu felt the growing anger of her friends through the link. One continued to ‘speak’ while the others dulled her pain.

 

*It is all right now. We will rebel. Other cyborgs will follow.*

 

*Six survivors hiding in area. Save them.*

 

*We will. Rest now.*

 

*Thank you.* Now the truth was out, the people around Shu wouldn’t have died in vain. She could finally close her eyes.

 

The telepathic cyborgs were quick to spread the message that Shu had died to bring them. Camp Maldonia was under the control of the rebelling cyborgs within an hour. Nearly a quarter of the combined fleet, including twelve of the new attack cruisers, were captured on the ground. The other cyborgs stationed Earthside joined the rebellion in the next few hours. They even succeeded in locating and rescuing the crash survivors.

 

In a panicked response to the rebellion, the Laputan government ordered the massacre of all the cyborgs in the space settlement. Some of the cyborgs got wind of the plan from a Resistance operative and managed to arm themselves, resulting in a six hour firefight in which over five hundred Storm marines and secret police officers were killed before the cyborgs were defeated.

 

The Laputan government had relied upon the cyborgs to do most of its fighting since the 2020s. Their rebellion finally gave the Underground the chance to begin the final uprising against Laputan rule.

 

 

EPILOGUE – DECEMBER 2053

 

On a distant world lit by the sullen light of a red dwarf, Planetmind reviewed the current situation of the conquest of the galaxy.

 

The last few decades had seen the conquest and assimilation of thousands of worlds. Trillions of sentient minds representing thousands of species and their knowledge had been absorbed into the Biomass, even the most advanced civilisations in the galaxy were fleeing before her sporeships and new worlds were falling to her every day. If a mind was too alien to be absorbed, it was simply exterminated as no rival could be permitted to exist.

 

However, the situation with the humans of Earth was vexing as nobody else had managed to inflict any real defeat on Planetmind’s forces. She had no idea how after the sporefall on their world, a handful of broken survivors had rallied and defeated her, and she suspected they had something to do with the security breach at the factory on the First World. She had originally concluded that there was no possibility of the humans being able to offer any significant resistance. It was important for her to find out how they had managed to resist her power before they told other races how they had done it.

 

As for the Reticulans, it had once seemed like a good idea to make use of an internal Reticulan factional dispute to further her aims. Their love of power had made their minds easy to manipulate. However they had proved to be too incompetent to prevent the humans from rallying and interfering with the project in the aftermath of the invasion.

 

The Reticulans were clearly only fit to provide untrained slave labour and cannon fodder; she had plenty of that after rounding up the survivors of the conquest of Zeta Reticulum and its main colonies in 2029. The surviving Reticulans were building and manning large numbers of escort ships in her cause after having their perception of reality altered. Reticulan factory workers were working themselves to death in their patriotic zeal to serve the very cause they believed they were opposing.

 

Planetmind decided to find out more about how they had resisted her before she destroyed them as this was an intriguing puzzle. She decided to send an expedition force comprised of the subject races that had proved themselves to be the most useful at science and warfare.

 

The Reticulans in the Lagado would have to be destroyed however, as Planetmind could not afford for the knowledge their Queens had about her to fall into enemy hands. She opened up a rift in the human system, felt the Reticulans with her mind and then she struck.