Chapter 9

As far as we could tell, our next step was to teleport to the spaceship that was in LEO (Low Earth Orbit). That’s where the six real villains were. The problem was that was on the order of 250 miles, and I was not absolutely sure of our range. The other option was to go by TK flight inside an air bubble.

That was the slower, but safer, choice. Well, at this point, we did not think that we were in that much of a hurry. We divided up the jobs into Jack building and maintaining the air bubble that we were going to ride in, and I would actually move us by TK. Actually, either one of us could have done this alone, but it seemed safer for us to split the responsibilities.

We knew that we could teleport for at least 100 miles, so I was going to hold us in that position until Jack could replace the air inside our bubble. That way, we would have fresh air to breathe while we were trying to enter the spaceship. That probably would be no serious obstacle, but we were working on the principle of better safe than sorry.

We aimed for where the spaceship would be on its second pass essentially overhead, and got there just as the spaceship hove into sight. We simply hung in space while the spaceship caught up to us. One thing that surprised us was how small it was. It had to be launched from Earth or it had to be some sort of an FTL (Faster Than Light) craft to have traveled here from another star. We already knew that there were no other inhabited planets in our solar system.

When the spaceship arrived at our location, I teleported us aboard. To our surprise, we met no opposition. Okay, that just made it easier for us. We used TK to float down the corridor in hope of confusing any intruder detection. At that time, we didn’t know if it had worked, but the first creature we encountered was purely organic and not a robot.

This creature looked so much like the robots that we had seen so far that we assumed that it was one of the “masters.” It took only a quick scan of its head to find the speech center of its brain, and we locked on to that. Its first reaction was to draw back from us and say, “What are you doing here? Humans are not allowed aboard the Masters’ ship!”

I couldn’t help it. I said, “Tough titty! You are not allowed to conquer Earth.” As soon as I saw this “person,” I knew that it had to be an alien. I could not fathom any trail of evolution that could go from us to it.

“But this is impossible! None of our projections of the future show this sort of thing happening.”

“Well, you either need a new means of projection or you need more information. We have been keeping ourselves a secret as far as you are concerned, and it is too late for you to change things. You have lost the war, though you might still win a few battles. Now, surrender before we are forced to kill you.”

“No, I will never surrender!”

Jack reacted before I did and enclosed the alien inside a hollow cube of frozen air. He remembered to allow for air to diffuse through the walls of the cube, but that was the only material thing that could do so. The creature pulled a weapon from somewhere that I had missed seeing and fired a shot at each of us. The slug flattened itself when it hit the wall of the enclosing cube and fell to the bottom.

For some reason, the alien then tried to commit suicide by shooting itself in the head, but I woke up and froze the mechanism inside the gun so that it would not shoot. Thereupon, the alien appeared to give way to pure frustration and collapsed to the bottom of its cube. Okay, one down and five to go. At least we had a living prisoner if we did have to kill the other five aliens on board.

The alien had entered the hall through a door, so we used that door to see what was in the room that it was leaving. Damn if it didn’t appear to be a toilet. Why not, I guess. There had to be one somewhere on the ship.

We went farther down the hall and came to another door that was closed. The problem was that it did not have an obvious doorknob. Oh, to hell with it. I used TK to melt a hole in the door large enough for us to pass through. That took only a few seconds, but it was long enough for the other five aliens to react to our entry.

The aliens were standing in front of a set of six display screens. I wondered if they ever sat, and, if so, how they did it. Fortunately, Jack was a bit more practical and put up a frozen air shield completely surrounding each of the five aliens just as they were reaching for personal weapons.

All five fired at us, and the bullets were stopped each time. I froze the weapons’ mechanisms so that they were no longer operational, and that gave time for each of the aliens to begin shouting at us. Jack and I started questioning the aliens, and none of them were cooperative. Oh, well, that was not all that important. We did individual mind scans on all five aliens and then merged our minds to pass along what we had learned.

I won’t bore you with all of the unnecessary details, but will summarize what we learned. One of the aliens was capable of time travel, but none of the others had that talent. As soon as Jack found that out, he clamped an MC (Mind Control) command on that specific alien not to do any time jumping without our permission. They were now stuck in this time unless Jack or I countermanded that order.

All of the aliens had very weak abilities similar to ours, but nothing approaching our strength or versatility. That was why they had tried to use guns on us instead of ESP.

We found out that this was an FTL spaceship from a planet some 1300 lightyears away that no one on Earth had yet spotted. We got the detailed coordinates of the planet’s solar system and a lot of detail about the planet, its star, and the rest of the planets in that solar system. The planet was very nearly a duplicate of Earth, so the aliens were intent on capturing ours.

They were busy searching for and capturing other Earth-like planets, killing the locals, and putting their own people there to live. Their strategy was to land on some relatively isolated site and establish a manufacturing plant for the robots. At the time, we did not concern ourselves about the manufacturing details. We found those later when we visited the plant.

Anyway, the ultimate intent of the aliens was complete control of this galaxy with the destruction of all other sentient life forms. Eventually, they would get around to invading other galaxies and/or other dimensions. Oh, God, talk about megalomaniacs! They had succeeded in conquering approximately 10% of the planets in the Milky Way galaxy with the strategy that they were using on Earth. Jack and I both immediately jumped to the conclusion that they had to be stopped, and as soon as possible.

The aliens had invaded Earth approximately 100 years in the future of where we were now, and were working their way back toward wiping out the precursors of the current humans. Once they got a wide enough band in time of no humans, the humans later on would simply cease to exist because their ancestors had never existed long enough to generate them. Don’t argue with me—the aliens said that it worked.

The implication was that if we jumped to the time when the aliens first landed and stopped them then, all of the effects of this war would cease to exist and the time line would immediately return to what it had been. Like I said, don’t talk to me. I am not good at resolving paradoxes.

If the aliens said that was the way time lines worked, I was in no position to argue with them. The one thing I wondered was whether or not Protector and Avenger would cease to exist because Sue and Dr. Anson would not be around to teach us. Oh, well, we would worry about that later.