Chapter 4

She chose a globular cluster this time. Idling in intergalactic space, she watched with interest as the entire structure rotated like an immense swarm of fireflies. When able, she inserted herself feet first at the north pole (one of the poles of rotation, anyway), choosing this location for the lowest rate of spin. At random, she selected an un-noteworthy yellow-white star with an entourage of unremarkable planets. Or so she thought. Approaching the outer planets, she got a surprise.

“Professor?”

Grove reacted to her excitement. “What is it Kellie?”

“Would you believe, a spaceship?”

The tiny craft, no larger than a grain of uncooked rice against Kellie’s vast bulk, must be of immense proportions, she realized, to be visible at all. Grove calculated the craft at ten miles in diameter, and one hundred miles long. Given Kellie’s description, a distortion in space-time surrounded the vehicle, Grove thought.

“Wow, this thing is fast,” she marveled.

Approaching to within arms length, the craft circled equatorially half a dozen times, and then tracked her longitudinally, twice. She remained still, Shrinx eyeing the intruder with a jaundiced eye. “Don’t you zap them,” she warned. “Not unless they do something stupid.”

The alien craft withdrew, hovering ten feet to Kellie’s left. What did the visitors make of her pulsating quantum field, she wondered. Did they understand the danger it presented?

“I mean it, Shrinx,” she muttered. “Don’t shoot if they don’t do anything hostile. We’re the intruder here, not them. Imagine what it took to build a spaceship that big and that fast. These aren’t cave dwellers with clubs. And we’re no vicious dinosaur, either.”

At a crawl compared to its former speed, the spacecraft advanced, coming to hover above Kellie’s chest. She moved only her head, tucking her chin to keep the vessel in sight. It worried her than Shrinx pulsed brightest directly beneath the alien craft. Take it easy, she thought. They’re doing nothing you wouldn’t expect of an exploration party.

Her field affected the ship. The surrounding distortion, an artifact of the spacecraft’s propulsion system, Grove suspected, flickered, and flashed. The craft wobbled, apparently in trouble. Slowly, a finger of luminescence extended from her field and eased the ship away. At a safe distance, the distortion stabilized and the ship became steady again, retreating to arms-length. In a whisper, she asked Grove: “What are the odds of stumbling onto an advanced civilization, like this? What kind of technology do you need to build a one hundred mile long spaceship, Professor?”

Grove mused, “The resources required to build such a spacecraft are staggering. If metal, you’re talking the equivalent of an entire city’s worth of steel, aluminum, titanium, and other durables. What kind of fuel does it use? Anti-matter? Nuclear fusion? How can they tolerate the speeds you describe? It seems to rules out organic life aboard. Unmanned, then, a drone? I’d give anything to see the damned thing.”

“Maybe you will,” she muttered. “You never know.”

The vessel accelerated away. Grove was unsurprised. “You’re the size of a small planet, after all, with a surrounding force-field. The craft couldn’t approach without endangering itself. Perhaps they’ll regroup and revisit when you’re a bit smaller. In the meantime, what do you make of the planets?”

The fourth planet, with a single, oddly colored moon appeared hospitable. Mostly landmass, the planet sported tiny white poles and a handful of interconnected lakes. No body of water could be called a sea, or an ocean. Questioned, she estimated the ratio of land to water as 85:15.

“Perhaps the planet sustained a catastrophic event in the distant past,” Grove theorized, “vaporizing most of the water, blowing it off into space. Maybe the surface is overly porous, and the bulk of the oceans seeped underground, into huge subterranean vaults. Perhaps the surface actually floats atop the lakes, like our own surface floats atop molten rock. Maybe-”

“Professor...” Kellie interrupted his reverie. “I don’t think the moon is rock. I think the moon is made out of metal.”

Though hard to discern detail at her size and relative distance, Kelly thought a great many spaceships, off all shapes and sizes, nested in tight orbits about the moon. Its surface was peppered with hundreds of rectangular emplacements, each mile’s on a side, almost certainly weapons. More than a few tracked her apparent movement across their sky, she realized, as the moon and it’s home planet swept past. Watching them sent shivers down her spine.

“The moon is an armored fortress, Professor!”

Grove snorted. “I’m sure that’s not-”

“No!” she insisted. “The moon is completely covered in metal, with gun emplacements across the surface. They tracked me as it went by,” she warned.

“OK,’” he allowed. “What about the planet? The same thing?”

Kellie tried to determine if armoring had taken place there as well. She picked up the glint of immense cites on the sunlit side, vast highway systems linking the various metropolitan areas. Clouds obscured the landscape at the terminator between night and day. The overcast formed an almost continuous weather front, stretching north/south through both hemispheres, pole to pole. West of the front were the complex, glittering cities, behind it, nothing but eerie darkness.

“Professor ... this business is messed up. I’m gonna find a different star system to visit.”

“Is that doable?”

“I’m still big enough,” she concurred. “Maybe a hundred miles long.”

“Then go now. Don’t mess around, Kellie.”

Kelly didn’t immediately answer. Her attention had focused on one of the spaceships, dispatched from the moon. The approaching vessel was perhaps a mile long, dwarfed by the original visitor, but still huge by earthly proportions. It too, was rice-grain shaped and wrapped in a distortion field. Variations in the vessel’s surface were discernable this time: instruments, portholes, airlocks; other objects she couldn’t readily identify, although the familiar clusters at the front were probably weapon’s pods. Shrinx glowed, pulsed, and seemed almost to make crackling noises, like a pent-up static charge. “Don’t go off half-cocked,” she whispered. “These guys ain’t done anything but politely come visit us again, Shrinx. Wait to see what goes on.”

What the explorers did was circle as the previous ship had done, and then move off to arm’s-length. “They dispatched another spaceship, Professor. It just opened up and a shuttle is on the way over. I can barely see it, but it appears to be the size of an airplane. It looks nothing like a jet liner, to me, more like something you’d see on TV, a UFO.”

The craft appeared wide but not especially tall, blocky, tapered toward the rear with a row of pin-sized holes along the front of each wing. It reminded Kellie of a fighter plane with machine guns. She hoped it didn’t start shooting, because Shrinx was observing closely.

“The shuttle just circled my torso. It’s right above me now, about two feet away. Shrinx made a circular opening in my field, just big enough for the shuttle to drop through if they want. They seem to be thinking about it. Wait ... okay, they accepted Shrinx’s invitation.”

Slowly, the shuttle settled through the opening, alighting on Kellie’s shirt. Atop a triangular landing gear array, the spaceship looked decidedly like a backyard bug. After a few moments, a wide section atop the fuselage levered open, and a number of beings appeared. Kellie caught her breath. If I breathe, she thought, I could blow them down the length of my body.

The creatures were moth-shaped, possessed of gossamer wings and short stubby bodies. Eight in total arose to adopt a triangular formation above the shuttle, aligning wingtip to wingtip, buoyed by unfelt air currents inside her field. Kellie prayed she’d not have to cough suddenly, or even worse, sneeze. Did the creatures realize she was alive? How dangerous it was, being in close proximity to her? Any movement on her part, no matter how slight, could result in disaster.

“What’s going on, Kellie? Are the creatures inside your field? Tap your teeth together if they are. Three times for yes, twice for no. I should be able to hear that.”

Kellie obediently gave him a Yes.

“What do they look like? Never mind that. Are they humanoid?”

Kelly tapped twice.

“Lizard-like? Insectoid? Winged?”

Kelly tapped twice, and then three times twice. Grove was ecstatic.

“Insectoid and winged? Like a dragonfly or a moth?”

Kelly confirmed the latter with three clicks.

“Holy, crap!” Grove exclaimed. “Winged creatures! Immense winged creatures, if you can make them out with your bare eyes. Have they left the ship? Of course, they have; how else could you see them? How many? More than one, less than ten?”

Kellie involuntarily shook her head, and then tapped twice. She had counted a dozen.

The visitors bore off in all directions, exploring the terrain of her cotton shirt. Two approached her chin, and then withdrew after encountering turbulence. At a safe distance, hovering side by side, they apparently discussed their next move. Kellie hoped they wouldn’t attempt to land on her face. She feared an involuntary spasm. Instead, the pair took off in opposite directions, drifting above her collarbones.

Unexpectedly, a horn, barely audible to Kellie’s ears, sounded from the shuttle; the entire group of explorers turned swiftly and headed back to the ship. Within a minute, all had gathered and reformed their original formation above the wings. Kellie relaxed, feeling both her heartbeat and breathing drift back toward normal.

“This is so aggravating,” Grove complained. “Why didn’t I go with video?”

Sequentially furling their wings, the creatures descended into the craft. Kellie wished she had a way to communicate, but could think of no way to do so without endangering the creatures or their ship. Settling on a series of slow blinks, she caught the attention of the remaining trio of explorers. The aliens bobbed up and down, then faced each other in what Kellie took to be excited conversation. A moment later, the largest moth-being turned and executed a complex series of undulations, mimicked in turn by the accompanying pair. A goodbye wave, Kellie decided. Grinning, she winked. A moment later, all were gone and the hatch closed flushed to the surface.

“I’m landing on that planet,” she told Grove. “I need to find out what’s going on down there and right it if I can.”

“That could be dangerous,” Grove warned.

“I don’t care. I’m doing it anyway.”

The craft lifted off. Once clearing the periphery of Kellie’s now transparent shield, the ship accelerated and disappeared within the mother craft in less than a minute. Kellie relaxed and stretched her cramped limbs. She waved her right fingers shyly as the big vessel moved away, returning to the distant moon. Drifting aimlessly during the rendezvous, she powered up to follow, chronicling her alien encounter.

“Take nothing for granted,” Grove cautioned. “Not even Shrinx’s ability to protect you against sophisticated armament. A race so advanced would almost certainly possess nuclear, if not quantum weapons. Go in there big, and be ready to run at a moment’s notice.”

A prudent suggestion, Kellie thought. “Put me down near the front,” she directed Shrinx. “Just west of the L-shaped lake, in that big park. And like the professor said, be ready to run like hell.” She imagined an insurgent targeting the unexpected invader with a mushroom-cloud maker, and shuddered. Why was she doing this?

Delivering Kellie as instructed, Shrinx throbbed, the field crackling and pulsing bright green. Twenty miles distant, extending out of sight to the north, and miles to the south, spread a majestic city, half in ruin. Glass spires and gleaming towers of decorative metal and polished stone gave way to rubble. Artwork and landscaped parks (run wild in the absence of cultivating hands, she noted), graceful, soaring highways, connecting bridges between buildings--all under invisible assault. One grouping of mile-high buildings surrounded an immense structure nearly her height, every setback graced with marble statues, bronze sculpture, or glass figurines. A shimmering tower the side farthest Kellie suddenly shuddered, dropped a hundred feet in height, and then collapsed in a billowing cloud of dust. Far as Kellie could observe beyond the structures, a landscape blighted by twisted piles of debris, towering columns of gray-black dust and smoke. The storm front wasn’t weather at all, but a pall of destruction.

“Jesus Christ,” she muttered in horror. “It’s a city, Professor, or what’s left of one.” Describing the systematic devastation of the landscape on a north/south line, she advised, “I’m headed around the lake. I want to see what’s causing this destruction first-hand.”

Grove’s answer was immediate. “Are you crazy? Get out of there while you still can! See if the winged creatures will take you in.”

Kellie scoffed: “The easy way out, huh. Is that what you’d do, Professor?”

Stung by her animosity, Grove answered grimly: “Advanced as they are, the inhabitants pulled up stakes and abandoned the entire planet. That would certainly give me pause, yes.”

Coward or not, the bastard had a point. “Know what I think?” she said. “I think they’ll ignore me, Professor. Nothing this destructive could be unaware of my presence on this planet, and so far, they haven’t batted an eyelash. I’m no danger to them, or so they figure, anyway.”

Grove grunted. “Be ready to shoot first then, and ask questions later.”

Kellie advanced, ducking low under the overcast. Shrinx continued to pop and crackle, the hue of her shield, a flickering jade. Despite her bravura denouement to Grove, she sensed a powerful, if distant interest in her presence. On the other hand, a distinct lack of awareness greeted her near at hand, so maybe she’d be okay.

“Tell me what’s going on, Kellie!”

“Wait--”

A no-man’s land of pulverized glass, stone, and shredded metal lay between the immense piles of rubble and the line of a new, nightmare version of the abandoned city. Close in, an army of bustling machines subjugated the terrain, some nearly too small to see, others, gigantic, dump-truck-like monstrosities capable of hauling a city-block worth of debris at a time. Buckets slung by immense cranes filled the huge truck beds in a go. Arriving, trucks filled to overflowing, and then like a column of monster ants, departed to points unknown. Kellie felt on the verge of throwing up.

“This is insane! Machines demolishing a city, and replacing it with another?”

Passenger-vehicle-sized machines, armed with a plethora of clawed tentacles, gathered debris by hand, tossing it into towed hoppers, dumped when full before giant bulldozers feeding the mounds. Not once did she witness a small machine ground to pulp beneath the wheels of an enormous earthmover, nor any appearance of disorder in the ranks. Purposeful, and guided, they were. By what, she wondered.

“Tell me about this replacement city,” Grove said.

Kellie described mile upon mile of featureless, battleship gray structures, each hurting the eye to regard. Every scrap of metal hauled from the demo zone ended up in a mill somewhere, she thought, churning out raw materials for the replacement city. Every structure erected, meant a beautiful edifice fell. The destroyers cared nothing of elegance or architectural efficacy. A ton delivered yielded a ton available for new construction.

“This is not a war,” Grove advised.

Trembling, Kellie shook her head. “It’s a massacre. The natives never had a chance, Professor.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he said. “The inhabitants were allowed to leave. The entire civilization--or a sizable portion of it--en masse, or over a period, it doesn’t matter which. The machines likely weren’t aware of the inhabitant’s existence. No more than a car is aware of the bug it squashes, or a TV is aware of the viewer.”

Kellie pressed her temples and winced. “I don’t want to hear they did this to themselves, Professor. No civilization this advanced could do something that stupid.”

“We don’t know what happened here, Kellie. We might never know,” he insisted. “And it doesn’t really matter.”