Area 51: The Legend (4 page)

Other changes had occurred.

Armed guards patrolled the rebuilt wall around the mothership. On the inside were the chosen. On the outside the rest of the survivors. Donnchadh and Gwalcmai were on the inside, paired together by Enan’s council and by their own choice. The result of their personal union was their son, who was on the outside.

They had both seen so much death that despite the condition of the planet the decision to bring forth a life had been mutual. They had held on to the hope that the scientists would find a way to reverse the damage; or that their son would be allowed to come with them when they departed on their mission. Both hopes were now as dry and fruitless as the ash that covered most of the planet.

The parting had been brutal. They left their son in the care of Gwalcmai’s sister, having said their final farewells the previous evening, all knowing they would never see each other again.

As the final countdown for liftoff began, the troops were needed to encircle the launch site to keep out protestors who wanted to stop the launch and those not chosen in the last selection, who desperately fought to be on the ship.

Donnchadh and Gwalcmai were in one of the holds, which were full of others like them and supplies.

“Ten years,” Donnchadh said.

Gwalcmai knew what she was referring to—the best estimate by the scientists for how much longer the planet they were leaving could sustain life.

“At least it will be ten free years,” Gwalcmai said.

Both had argued long and hard with Enan to have their son allowed on board, but the leader had denied them every time. Where they were going and the mission they had been assigned was not amenable to having a child along. Once they deployed from the mothership, there was no room in the smaller spacecraft for a third person. It had been their choice to have a child, knowing their ultimate fate, and Enanhad declared they must accept the consequences of that choice.

The cargo door slowly began to close, cutting off their view of the distant crowd held at bay by the soldiers. Tears streamed down Donnchadh’s face. She knew no matter what her destiny, she would never see her child again.

She had had many discussions with her husband about the future of both the mission and their planet. He had been blunt and honest, as was his nature, hiding any emotions with a focus on preparing for the upcoming mission and the practical matters that had to be dealt with in doing so. But she noted his chest moving rapidly as the cargo door shut and their world disappeared from sight. He kept his face averted from hers as he reached out and put his arm around her shoulders. All on board had left loved ones behind; they were merely an island of misery amid a sea of pain. Large as the ship was, the five thousand chosen were tightly packed on board along with their supplies. Although only thirty would be deployed in teams of two on the fifteen spacecraft, the rest were put on board to populate any unoccupied planet amenable to human life that the craft found on its journey. In this way the line of their people could go on. If such a planet could be found quickly, perhaps the ship could be sent back to get more.

At the appointed moment, the ship lifted out of its cradle without a sound. It moved upward, accelerating through the planet’s polluted atmosphere until it was in the vacuum of space and out of sight of the millions of eyes on the planet’s surface who watched it with mixed emotions. It continued to accelerate conventionally away from the planet and the system star’s gravitational field.

After two years of travel, the star’s field was negligible and the mothership was moving at three-quarters of the speed of light. It was also far enough away that those on board hopedany sign of its passage would not be linked back to their home world and bring the Swarm.

At that point the mothership’s interstellar drive was engaged. With a massive surge of power as great as that of a brief supernova, the ship shifted into faster-than-light travel and snapped into warp speed.

12,362 B.C.
EARTH
CALENDAR:
CENTAURUS
SPIRAL
ARM
,
MILKY
WAY
GALAXY

The scientists had been wrong in one respect. Human life still existed on Donnchadh and Gwalcmai’s home planet sixty years after the mothership departed. Not much life, granted, and the existence was miserable, but man still walked the face of the planet. The people left behind had adapted as best they could, tilling the land by hand after the last of the machines had broken down and could not be repaired. They ate plants and animals their ancestors would not have even considered as food. It was the human way to cling to life and the survivors were the hardiest of the race.

Unfortunately, the scientists had been right about something else. The mothership’s warp shift had been picked up by a Swarm scout ship on patrol over twenty light-years away from the star system. While the scout ship had immediately turned in the direction of the shift, it also sent out an alert to the nearest Swarm Battle Core.

It took the Swarm some time to find the planet the mothership had come from and for the Battle Core to arrive, but the Swarm were a patient race, who had little concept of time except as an operational variable. On the planet’s surface, there were few still alive who had witnessed the mothership’s departure. Their descendants cared more about gathering their meager crops than stories of spaceships andaliens. There were fewer than twenty million humans left, down from the peak of over five billion prior to the Revolution. They were crowded into the few places on the planet’s surface where food could be grown and the land didn’t emit radiation that killed all who walked upon it.

According to the Master Guardian, the Swarm was a strange race, one whose origins were unknown even to the Airlia. There were some scientists among the races who encountered them who speculated that the Swarm was an invented species, designed as weapons, as it showed only a capacity to destroy and no inclination to create. Whatever alien race had invented the Swarm, if this was true, had long since disappeared from the universe, perhaps consumed by its own invention, the inherent danger in any form of bioweapon. And most species that encountered the Swarm no longer existed either. Only the Airlia, so far, had been powerful enough to resist the Swarm.

One of the Swarm consisted of a gray orb, four feet in diameter, with numerous eyes spaced evenly around the body. Anywhere from one to a dozen gray tentacles extended from bulbous knobs on the orb, placed next to the eyes. At maturity a tentacle was over six feet long. The orb had a massive four-hemisphere brain. Each of the tentacles had a rudimentary brain stem and could detach from the orb and operate on their own. The tentacles could infiltrate the bodies of other species and take over the cognitive functioning of intelligent creatures, a most effective means of reconnaissance. The tentacle could gather information hidden inside an alien’s body, then exit the body, reattach to the orb, and relay the information learned to the main brain. If a tentacle was lost, the orb could grow a new one from a knob.

It was speculated that the Swarm had some sort of basic telepathic capability among members of its own species when in close proximity to each other. Certainly no otherspecies had ever been able to communicate with it and no Swarm member had ever been taken alive. No prisoner taken by the Swarm had ever been recovered alive, and those who had fought the Swarm learned quickly to kill any of their own that had contact with the Swarm because of the possibility of tentacle infiltration. There was no negotiating with the Swarm—once contact was made, it was war, and a war that could only end in extinction for one side or the other. So far, except for the Airlia, the Swarm had wiped out every race it had encountered.

The Swarm scout landed on the planet and detached tentacles. They learned that this was indeed the place the mothership had departed from. Surprisingly, though, the Swarm also found no trace of the Airlia, its longtime enemy, who it knew had built the mothership. The assumption was made that the Airlia had, for some reason, fled the planet, abandoning these lesser, somewhat intelligent, creatures.

The race that still existed on the planet posed no threat to the Swarm. Indeed, it appeared that none would be left alive in another generation or two. That meant nothing to the Swarm. Over the millennia the Swarm had already wiped out numerous intelligent species in the universe.

Sixty years after the mothership’s departure, Donnchadh and Gwalcmai’s son was still alive and a grandparent. He had vague memories of his parents and their departure. For years he tried to tell the generations after him the story of the mothership lifting off, but the story became more myth than real as the years went by, and even he began to wonder at his own memories. If it were not for the ruins of a nearby city, he would not believe his own stories. People who could have built such a magnificent place must have been capable of great things.

Once, his grandson, after hearing the story for the umpteenth time, asked a few questions that kept him from telling it again: Why had his parents abandoned him? What was there out there in the stars more important than family?

By the time the Swarm Battle Core arrived in the planet’s system, the son was now confined to a chair and daily contemplated taking his own life rather than being a burden to his family. He ate little and his body was emaciated.

As the Core appeared in orbit overhead, it was visible to the naked eye, and for several wild moments, the son wondered if the mothership had returned. Then he realized that whatever was in orbit was far larger than even the massive mothership. In fact, though the humans had no way of knowing it, the eclipse caused by the Core cut off sunlight from half the surface of the planet.

As his family huddled around him in fright at the strange apparition, he remembered vague stories of an Ancient Enemy and a sensation of dread replaced the brief feeling of hope he had had.

The Battle Core in orbit was essentially a self-sustaining mechanical planet and starship; the Swarm had no known home world. There were hundreds of these Battle Cores spread out in the Galaxy. Each was over two thousand miles long, by a thousand wide, and two hundred in depth. Its mass was so great that it generated a discernible gravity field that affected the tides of the planet below. During the war with the Airlia several dozen of these Cores had been destroyed, but each at great cost, and their loss was offset by the annihilation of dozens of Airlia-colonized planets along the frontier.

The Swarm scout ship took off from its hide site on the planet and rendezvoused with the Core to render its report. The intelligent species on the planet below was dying out and offered no military threat. There was only one thing of value on the planet’s surface: the people themselves. Report done, the scout was dispatched to the point where the warpdrive had been initiated with orders to try to track the path of the mothership.

Smaller capital warships deployed from the Battle Core, moving to equidistant positions around the planet. Each of these “smaller” ships was still twice as large as an Airlia mothership. They were large orbs with eight protruding arms bristling with weapons and launch portals. The capital warships descended into the planet’s atmosphere above populated areas until they were at an altitude of ten miles and clearly visible to the frightened humans below.

At this point, the arms on the capital ships spewed out smaller versions of themselves. Over two million drop ships descended on the planet’s surface like black rain. They all touched down at the exact same moment. Portals in the craft opened and the Swarm emerged.

Donnchadh and Gwalcmai’s son watched as one of the craft landed in the field in front of his house. When he saw what emerged, the shock stilled his heart and he died relatively peacefully. He was one of the fortunate ones.

The Swarm began their harvest and in less than six hours there was no human life left on the planet.

10,800 B.C.:
THE
SOL
SYSTEM

Donnchadh and Gwalcmai, along with the other fourteen teams selected for planet infiltration, had been put into deep sleep shortly after liftoff from their planet. Placed inside the black tubes the Airlia had used for the same purpose, they spent most of the interstellar journey unaware of not only what was happening on their home world but events on board the ship. Members of the crew died, children were born, and new generations grew up in the unique environment of the alien spaceship. The only planets they foundcapable of supporting human life were ones that the Airlia had seeded and were still occupied by their enemy, so each time they swooped in close to the star system—but not close enough to be detected by Airlia surveillance—and dispatched one of the system craft with a crew of two to infiltrate the planet.

For those inside the mothership it seemed as if only eighty years had passed, but the relative physics of warp speed was such that much more time passed in the universe around them. Still, when Donnchadh and Gwalcmai were brought out of the deep sleep, they awoke to mostly strangers.

Brought to the control room, they learned that the mothership was looping near the edge of a nine-planet system at sub-light speed. It had come out of light speed over four years earlier, decelerating ever since. Prior to this, four teams had already been deployed in other systems. After each deployment, the mothership took four years at sub-light speed to move in and four years to move far enough out before triggering the warp drive, accounting for a great chunk of the relative time lost.

As Donnchadh and Gwalcmai stood in the control room and studied the solar system, unspoken between them was the acceptance that their son had long ago turned to dust. They did not know his fate, but hoped he had lived a relatively happy life. They also learned that Enan had died over thirty years ago and there was a new ruler on board the ship. They felt distant from the younger generation around them, a generation that had not gone through the Revolution and did not even know what it was to walk on the surface of a planet. They had only each other and the interior of the mothership.