Chapter 16

The Shreejads were ready with the radio beacon when Golden Goose showed up with its complement of engineers and technicians to start transferring information. The first thing they needed to do was to establish a video link, and that was probably the most difficult part of the whole operation. There was no way that a gravity shield was going to function in that atmosphere without some cooling quickly and judiciously applied. The resonance bar made of potassium would melt before it got to the surface in the normal configuration. Furthermore, the situation was just as bad aboard their ships, so some major redesign was called for.

At least, the escape ships were virtually ready. The Shreejads had known for almost 50 years that their sun was going to go nova, and they had been working on everything that they could to save themselves. All the escape ships needed was the application of the gravity shield and FTL drive. When that was done, they could be loaded and sent on their way.

The Shreejads had known that there were space fairing races for over a hundred years, and had spent most of the last 50 doing everything they could to attract attention in hope of getting the help they so desperately needed. The wildly painted spaceship was just one of the tricks that they had used to try to get somebody to visit them. As it happened, they were the victims of a run of bad luck, up until the time that we showed up. Well, now their troubles were not over, but they at last had a fighting chance to save themselves.

It seemed to me that Venus could be a possible place for the Shreejads to relocate to. I described what I knew of the place to Adlik, and he was definitely interested. Therefore, we rigged up a special chamber for him aboard Emily VI and took him and a couple of other experts to Venus to have a look. When they saw the place, they were delighted. They went outside the ship and cavorted like children without their spacesuits. They claimed that Venus was so much like home that everybody was going to like the place. They were so comfortable on Venus that they were reluctant to come back to the ship to return home.

In the interest of saving time, they wound up buying finished gravity and FTL systems from GE and they were installed bodily in the Shreejad ships. GE provided the necessary environmental protection to the systems and they were transferred to the ships already housed in the protective cocoons. It's amazing what carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid can do to materials at 850 degrees Fahrenheit!

The Shreejads were able to transfer everybody who wanted to go to Venus. A few die-hards stayed behind because they just could not face giving up their old home and hoped that the doomsdayers were wrong. Well, they weren't!

They had been able to transfer their food plants and most of their decorative ones, too. It would be a while before they were fitted out with their customary housing, but they got by in modified shipping containers. All in all, it was a pleasant experience to relocate to Venus, especially since they were able to leave an annoying parasite behind—something equivalent to our mosquito.

The Shreejads were nice people and pleasant neighbors. We learned a lot from them and vice versa. We were relieved to find that their calculations showed that our sun was stable for at least another five billion years. Hopefully, our next encounter with aliens can be as satisfying.

Once our friends at GE had a chance to go over the innards of the translator, they were able to increase its range to something over 150 million miles. They still were not able to do anything about the lag from the speed of light. When last seen, their labs were madly trying to marry the translator to FTL radio. That would be a wonderful breakthrough!

The Shreejads now had their own space fleet, and there was no way that they could compete with us, even if they wanted to. Space was too big for that to be a problem, and our customers were so different that we almost never met in space. Fortunately for the Shreejads, planets similar to Venus were common enough that they were able to establish a trading empire and to make a nice profit off of it.

The first time we ran into real trouble was with a bunch of chlorine breathing fanatics who believed that they were given the divine mission to rid the galaxy of any other type of life. I was taking Jenny and the family (four kids, now) around the galaxy on a kind of sight-seeing tour. The Emily VI was plenty big enough for that, since we six were the only people in her. I didn't have anyone else along, since this was supposed to be a vacation trip.

The kids were fascinated by the "strange" stars and planets that we visited, and were eager to see as many as they could. However, the situation changed when we popped out into normal space at a star known as BR-1117-MA. This star had several planets that appeared reddish tinged in our telescopes, so we went there to see what was the cause.

We arrived in time to see one of the planets being bombarded from space by hundreds of attacking space ships. We were appalled by the destruction we could see even from space. Of course, I had the defensive shield running, so we were unharmed when the attackers turned on us. Nevertheless, enough missiles were pounding against our skin that we were actually pushed to one side, even though we had a gravity lock on the star.

I beamed at the attackers, "Hold off, dammit! You can't harm us behind our defensive shield, so stop attacking us. What is going on, anyway?"

There was a gurgle of noise inside my head, then a voice came through. "You are another one of the abominations of nature that it is our sacred duty to destroy. Our instruments show that you breathe oxygen instead of the sacred chlorine, so it is our duty to remove your blasphemous bodies before you can further pollute the universe. We will keep pounding at you until you are destroyed. Urgol will give us the power to accomplish this!"

"OK, this is the only warning that you will get. Stop the hostilities against us and the planet below, or we will be forced to destroy you. If necessary, I will call in more vessels like this one to carry on the fight."

"We will never stop trying to destroy you. It is our sacred duty. Amsulophonagus will martyr itself to destroy you." One of the ships turned toward us and built up speed in an obvious attempt to ram us. The kids all shouted for me to let them try to hit us, and Jenny agreed, so that's what I did. The alien ship ran into us with enough force for us to feel it if we had not been fully inertially dampened.

Of course, the alien ship was destroyed in the impact and we were not harmed. The translator transmitted an untranslatable howl of fury when we escaped from the impact unscathed. This also resulted in an increase in the ferocity of the attack on us. I think that every ship in the attacking fleet now was shooting at us instead of the helpless planet. At least, this relieved the pressure on the planet as their attention was diverted to us.

At Jenny's urging, I began to shoot back at the attackers while she called in for help from Earth. All we had were the Quad-50 machine gun mounts, but those things could throw a gigantic quantity of kinetic blows at another space ship. We were not moving very fast relative to each other, but the bullets were being fired from inside a field where their inertia was dampened down to essentially nothing. Thus, the exploding gas drove the bullet at a speed approaching half the speed of light by the time it exited the barrel of the gun. Fortunately, the bullets and the barrel were rendered immune to damage by the defensive shield, or they would have melted with the first bullet fired. Of course, once the bullet exited the influence of the inertia dampening field, it regained its normal inertia and became a raging projectile of destruction.

I have no idea what the enemy ships were constructed from, but they were not protected by a defensive shield, so the bullets had no trouble causing extensive damage at impact. Each of the kids took over a gun control station, and quickly became adept at hitting their targets. The ships of the chlorine-breathers began to explode all around us, and the battle was over, for practical purposes, before help even arrived.

Albatross and Gull mopped up the remaining enemy and stayed as cover while I took Emily VI down to the surface of the planet. Talk about a mess! The attackers seemed to have targeted any structure in sight and clobbered them to dust. Now that we were on the surface, it was obvious that the red tinge to the atmosphere was the result of so much dust being kicked up by the attackers. I was willing to bet that the same thing had happened to the other reddish colored planets.