Part 1 . Little Happy Pills

Anchored In Sight, And Falling

unlight poured down onto the roof of the small, neatly mowed lawn attached to the lovely Portland style home that overlooked it. Not too flashy, but hardly rundown, this was the home of the Jaracz family. Nestled at the bottom of a road with the nearest home several miles away, the house was very secluded, with a high white fence separating it from the other homes, making it’s garden difficult to see from the street.

Late afternoon was kind to the house, making its white walls take on a softer, redder colour than normal, an almost romantic effect. Indeed, the afternoon would have been a perfect one, filled with the scent of roses and newly-mown grass, had it not been for the fact that a teardrop shaped metallic object weighing several tons and about the size of a small car ploughed into the garden of the house, after a screaming descent through the thicker region of the atmosphere.

Jenna didn’t know what had happened. A moment ago she had been busy serving her family’s early dinner, for tonight was a Meeting Night after all, and they had to eat at half past 5 to make the meeting, which started at 7PM, on the dot. Lateness was not really tolerated by the members of her religion. As she was placing the peas down in the centre of the modest dinner table, a strange sort of screaming noise, almost like a jumbo jet flying over, only deeper, so deep that it seemed to resonate in the centre of your chest cavity, had started up.

Maybe it’s one of those military jets that have been flying around so much since 9/11 she thought to herself, and as she was about to scoop some peas out for little Jimmy, the noise had reached a horrifying crescendo. She was sure that Armageddon had arrived! With the entire house shaking and her heart pounding in sympathy, she screamed with her children as her husband shouted “DOWN! EVERYBODY GET DOWN!”

When it seemed as if the screaming noise couldn’t possibly get any louder and her ears were beginning to hurt from it, it suddenly stopped, ending with an almighty explosion that happened very close to the back porch. All the dishes were thrown off the table, which was itself hurled across the kitchen, along with the family that had been sitting at it a minute ago. There was broken glass everywhere, and she could smell acrid, burning grass and other, stranger fumes coming from the back garden. The sudden silence struck like a hammer blow, and all they could hear was a loud sizzling sound coming from behind the kitchen door, which overlooked the yard.

Getting up gingerly, she picked Jimmy up from the floor. He was unconscious, having hit his head on the floor when the explosion had hit. She began to cry and held him against her as her husband groaned on the other side of the kitchen. Jimmy stirred and opened his eyes, saying “What happened, Mommy?” and she held him tighter and began saying a little prayer in her heart, Thank you Jehovah, Oh God, THANK YOU, for saving my son!

With relief nearly making her pass out, she got up and brushed the glass off Jimmy and then herself. It seemed like all the dishes on the table had exploded, and their back windows were gone too, gaping holes with dangerous teeth being all that was left of them.

By the time she had Jimmy cleaned up, with a bruise forming on his forehead, her husband was gingerly opening the back door. When they looked out, she could see straight away that Armageddon had indeed not arrived - something had fallen into their back yard and caused the explosion. Maybe it was one of those fighter jets after all, that had crashed there. It was certainly plausible, at the insane speeds those machines of death and destruction careened around at in the sky all the time lately.

However, there was no fighter jet, not even the remains of one. Instead, there was a single, huge crater, almost 10 meters of blackened soil, filled with a silvery teardrop shape made of metal.

Not knowing what it was at that point, her husband stupidly ventured out towards it, and it wasn’t until he got halfway to the strange object that he began to scream again and jump around like he was trying to improvise some Fred Astair footwork. His shoes were melting. The ingot of metal had hit the ground so hot that it had turned it almost into lava for a meter or two around itself, due to the angle of penetration. Jenna knew that their house sat on thin soil, barely more than a meter in places, which covered hard shale bedrock, and that this had probably prevented the metal teardrop from punching dozens of meters into the soft river soil bordering their property.

Jenna had been a scientist once, before she met Hector, who had turned her nascent Christianity into something different, something superior. Hector had given her a Bible Study, and the things she had learnt had awakened her to a new understanding of her childhood religion. Six months after meeting Hector, she was baptized as a Witness of Jehovah, quit her job, and married Hector a few months after. Now she was a regular Pioneer, given to walking around in nearby neighbourhoods for entire afternoons and mornings, attempting to spread the Word of Jehovah in the form of magazines and books printed by a large company in New York called the Watchtower.

Of course, her earlier career in the aerospace industry still exerted it’s influence on her - even now she was calculating how fast this object had to have been moving when it hit the soil, and she realized that the only way it could have been moving so fast was if it had come from space.

But that was impossible! Nobody had ever made metal ingots that could survive re-entry and impact at speeds great enough to melt rock without being utterly destroyed themselves! She had only left the aerospace industry just under a decade ago, and although she hadn’t been very involved in it or spoken with many of her friends since becoming a Witness (having non-Witness friends was frowned upon - they were Bad Association), she was fairly sure that no company or government had this sort of technology.

Maybe it was a sign from Jehovah!

After about ten minutes, the ground had cooled down enough to walk on, and the mesmerised mother and father watched in terror as a seam developed on the side of the ingot. It appeared out of nowhere, and a perfect circle of metal soon lifted itself away from the side of the ingot, got stuck for a moment on the soil near it, and then popped out.

Inside was a man.

He struggled out, and after some seconds of grunting and groaning, lay on the ruined, cracked soil outside the ingot. Dressed in an air force jumpsuit, he looked like an ordinary fighter pilot, with the exception being that there was a thin ream of silver that appeared to have been surgically attached to his right temple somehow, encircling his upper ear.

Looking up, the man said “Argh…God…please help me…I think I broke my arm…” Jenna couldn’t place his accent, but that didn’t stop her from running up to the poor man and helping him to his feet. Hector took the man’s left side, and they helped him through the ruined kitchen and into the bathroom, where Jenna gently unclipped the flight suit from the stunningly toned upper body of this mysterious pilot.

Now that she was able to look at him up close, Jenna realized that this was quite possibly the most beautiful man she had ever seen. Every line of his face seemed to have been sculpted to make him appear like an Adonis, and his muscles were toned to perfection, not too huge, just right for his frame, which approached 2 meters in length. Her heart fluttered when his oddly coloured lilac eyes settled on hers.

“Take it easy with that arm, ma’am…looks like even the suit couldn’t save me from breaking that…” he muttered as she unzipped his flight suit. With a curious feeling in her fingers, the arm of the suit came entirely off, and as she dropped it to the floor, she saw it floated down as if it was made of silk, not heavy fabric. Hector’s eyes widened when he saw this too.

“Just hold still. I took some first aid courses when I worked for Boeing, and I might need to splint your arm. Hector, could you call an ambulance? It looks like this man’s arm is pretty badly broken. What’s your name?” she asked him as she washed her hands with soap in preparation for the splinting process. A broken arm did not merit a helicopter from the hospital, that she knew, and she knew that Hector would explain this. Besides, there was no real place for a helicopter to land here, near their house, surrounded as it was with trees. They would have to wait for the ambulance to drive to them from the nearby O’Hare hospital, nearly 30 kilometres down the Interstate.

“My name is Ahmed Suhijeen,” the pilot replied, after grimacing in pain as she began slowly pulling the wrist bones into place, checking for a radial break.

“Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Suhijeen, only I wish it could have been under better circumstances. My name is Jenna Jaracz. Tell me, what happened to your plane? It looks like a big ball of metal now, not a plane! That impact looked pretty bad - what kind of armour did you put into your plane to allow you to survive a crash like that?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. We have special fibres woven into our flight suits for protection.”

“No, but seriously, I saw the crater, any human being would have been turned into strawberry jam by an impact of that magnitude. You are very lucky to be alive. Or perhaps there is more than luck involved?”

“Why do you say that, Mrs. Jaracz?”

“A deal with the devil, perhaps?” she said, smiling for the first time since the impact.

“No such thing was involved! I had an engine malfunction, and I fell for a pretty long time before I hit the ground. My flight suit protected me.”

“Mr. Suhijeen - can I call you Ahmed? Ahmed, I worked at Boeing for six years, as a ballistics engineer, and to be honest, there is no way that you could have survived that crash. You see, I specialized in the physics of plane crashes, and I know many detailed things about what the human body can and cannot survive in an impact situation. There is simply no way you can still be alive after that crash.”

“Why, oh why, dear God, did I have to crash in the garden of a ballistics engineer? Oh good God.”

“You’re from the Navy, aren’t you?”

“Kind of.”

“What do you mean, kind of?”

“Its classified information, Mrs. Jaracz, if you don’t mind. Thank you very much for your help, I don’t mean to be rude, but it is top-secret information.”

Hector chose that moment to walk back into the bathroom, and Jenna had him hold Ahmed’s upper arm. While he pulled, she straightened out the fracture. Ahmed groaned and gritted his teeth, nearly screaming once when Jenna slipped, and then the arm was splinted. As she was busy tying some more bandages around the thin tomato-case plank she had used to splint the break, she said:

“Ahmed, one of my dear friends is from Pakistan. Her surname is also Suhijeen. Are you from that same region of the world?”

“I am, in fact. Punjabi, to be precise.”

“Well, Ahmed, I hope the Air Force or whoever that machine of yours belongs to is going to pay to repair my lawn!” she said, unable to stop smiling at the gorgeous face of this top-secret flyer.

“Oh, that lawn will be the least of your worries soon!” he replied, grinning.

“What do you mean?” Hector asked, puzzled and more than a little bit jealous.

“Don’t think my commanders don’t know where I am. The rescue team will be here long before the ambulance arrives. It is OK to tell you this, because you are now under United Nations Protectorate status. You see, I am not just some pilot. I am in fact an officer in the United Nations Protectorate Forces, which you of course know nothing about. It is an inter-orbital, indeed, inter-planetary force, mobilizing tens of thousands of extremely high-tech vehicles such as mine to keep the peace here on Earth. It is a credit to our Department of Security that nobody on Earth apart from a few conspiracy theorists even knows we exist, considering the extent of our military presence here. You will not be arrested per se, but neither will you be allowed back on Earth for a very long time.

I suppose it’s OK to tell you these things, because it’s exactly what you’ll hear from my subordinates in a few minutes anyway. You now have two options, my friends. One, you can vote for an elective memory-wipe, and you will not remember the events of the previous day or two. Your lawn will be repaired while the memory wipe is in progress. You will be able to resume your normal lives. Two, you will be taken with us to the Protectorate base in High Earth Orbit, and you will not have to undergo the memory wipe procedure.

You see, nobody here on this world, apart from the conspiracy theorists that everyone else thinks are bonkers, knows about our presence here. My survey craft crashing was unfortunate, but it happened, and there is nothing to do now but cover up the situation and hope nobody important notices. You do understand the situation, do you not?”

Looking from the face of Hector to that of Jenna, both of whom were staring at him in stunned disbelief, he said:

“I know it seems hard for you to fathom. I haven’t even told you much about the Protectorate. You, Jenna, you know that no human technology that is available today would have protected me from that impact. Look out of your bathroom window; notice the radial silicon that was created. I hit the ground moving at nearly six times the speed of sound at sea level, Jenna! Even if I had been wearing padding a hundred meters thick, my brains would still have been turned into grey slush inside my pulverised skull! I appeal to your sense of logic! Please don’t run away. We mean you no harm whatsoever.”

Hector’s brow furrowed, and, filled as it was with sudden sweat, a droplet of it was suddenly liberated and fell to the floor.

“That is BULLSHIT. You are no Protector; you’re just a pilot with funny dreams. Maybe the crash screwed with your mind, I don’t know. I’m calling the cops. Jenna, let’s lock this bathroom. Seems Ahmed hasn’t quite recovered from the crash yet.”

For a moment, it seemed like Jenna would follow him. She desperately wanted to, to cleanse her mind of the incendiary words this man had spoken, but after a minute’s deliberation, she remembered the thin layer of silicon that had coated the ground, something she had only seen once in a very high speed crash simulation of a new passenger plane that had been developed, a plane that could go nearly five times the speed of sound, a crash simulation which had shown zero survivors in all possible scenarios. No human technology, indeed.

“Hector, he’s right. Nothing any company or government ever made could survive the crash. I don’t know where they got that machine from, but we’re in very hot water here. These people are dangerous, don’t you understand? If they have a machine like that, who knows what else they’ve got?”

“You should listen to your wife, Hector. She talks a hell of a lot of sense,” Ahmed said, looking from one face to another.

It was at that moment that the stealth extraction team’s flyer descended silently outside. Thirty meters above their house, a group of six men clad from head to toe in silver with small backpacks visible underneath the silver on their backs leapt onto the ceiling like cats, their bones not shattering from the huge fall. Nor did the tiles shatter. It almost seemed as if they had fallen slower than they should, without ropes to slow them down. Thirty seconds later, they stood at the door of the bathroom, peering at Jenna and Hector. Ahmed grinned and said:

“Good evening, gentlemen. So nice of you to make an appearance at our private party here!”

Looking from Jenna to Hector, the figure in the front said:

“We have isolated the impact zone. Nearest home is approximately three point 6 kilometres away, and a team has been dispatched. Early reports indicate that the couple called the police, and a brace of sergeants in mock Navy uniforms were sent to inform them not to worry, that a weather balloon had landed on this property. The situation is under control. Oh, and there’s a kid downstairs.”

Jenna gasped. She had hoped that little Jimmy would escape unnoticed.

“I trust you have already informed these citizens of our modus operandi, Commander?” the silver man said again. It was amazing, even his lips were made of silver, as if it had been poured over his flight-suited body.

“Indeed I have. So what is your decision, Mr. And Mrs. Jaracz?” Ahmed asked, after gazing at their stricken faces for a few seconds. Above and beyond the impact site, the silver men had convinced Jenna that Ahmed was telling the truth.

“You can put us in jail if you want. This country has laws and a Constitution, you know. Take your best shot, and we’ll see you bastards in court. Now FUCK OFF!” Hector said, his face swelling in rage.

“Sergeant, sedate this man. He has become a liability,” Ahmed said, his voice suddenly turning into the cool, clinical voice of a surgeon about to enter the operating room. Hector spun around, fists in the air, and was greeted by the muzzle of what appeared to be a gun made of glass. He crumpled to the floor as the silver man squeezed the trigger once, silently.

Tears welled up in her eyes as she was led out of the bathroom, where one of the men was waving a little black box over Hector. Ahmed placed his hand on her back and gently guided her out of the bathroom.

“Don’t be concerned. We have no desire to hurt you. It would, in fact, earn us a court-martial if we did. Your husband was already marginal, but the appearance of my officers seems to have sent him over the edge. I find that you are a much more reasonable person.”

“My son! Where is he?” she gasped, panic stricken at the thought of silver men doing to her son what they had done to her husband.

“He should be with you in a moment,” Ahmed replied instantly, and she screamed in joy when her son arrived at the top of the stairs, escorted by three silver men.

That Cold Smile

fter they carried out the snoring figure of Hector to the front lawn, Ahmed led Jenna outside. Floating blithely over the house was what at first appeared to be a forty meter wide Stealth bomber, its fuselage darker than the darkest night, seeming to absorb all light that hit it - the moon has risen, and the stars had come out, but this chunk of night hovered silently above her house, like a solidified shadow. A deep thrumming pervaded her chest and rattled her bones gently, and she realized it must be the engine of this bizarre machine, an engine so powerful it could make the stupendously huge floating wing hover without so much as breaking a sweat.

Ahmed looked up and smiled that cold smile of his, then looked at her and Jimmy, who was cowering behind his mother, frightened of the silver-suited men who were even now placing his father on a stretcher.

“I bet you’ve never seen a dropship! Nifty little piece of hardware, isn’t it?”

“Wh-what is holding it up?”

“Confidential information, ma’am. Let’s just say its something a touch more sophisticated than a chemical-powered jet engine.” That icy smile again.

The silver men picked up the stretcher, and they all stood up, backs rigid, as if they were pressing against something, then their toes left the ground and they began to rise up slowly, in concert, towards the awaiting square of blinding white light that adorned the centre of the dropship’s triangular lower surface.

“I’m afraid we can’t manoeuvre the dropship any lower than its current altitude, ma’am. It’s against UNPC regulations to fly a dropship lower than 40 feet. So, we’re going to have to resort to something a bit more old-fashioned. Ah, here we go,” Ahmed shouted, running towards a rope ladder that had unfurled from the dropship, which seemed to be frighteningly high up in the air.

“My boy and I are not climbing up that thing!” she shouted at Ahmed, who was by now already perched on the rope ladder, testing it’s strength.

“Afraid you don’t have a choice, ma’am. If we overrode the dropship’s software locks and dropped her any further, she’d crush your house like a boot on an eggshell. It’s the God-honest truth. She hasn’t got a gravitic sieve, so all the thrust coming out of her drive leaves unrestricted and just inverts the nearest gravity well sufficiently to keep herself floating. Anything that gets between her and the ground will be flattened!”

Behind her, a cough.

The three silver-suited men were standing behind them, hands on their hips, where the ominous glitter of glass betrayed the presence of three identical stunguns, one per silver-suited man. Jenna glanced up at Ahmed, already halfway up the ladder, and he shouted back down: “Don’t make this hard on yourself. Let the boy go first. It’s perfectly safe, and you’ll be in the dropship before you know it. Please don’t force my men to do something they’d rather not. It’s quite a chore carrying a comatose person up here, let me tell you!”

Hesitating only long enough for the thought of the silver men knocking out Jimmy to fleetingly cross her mind, she pulled him towards her and said:

“Jimmy, Mommy wants you to climb up the ladder, OK? I’ll be right behind you the whole way.”

“I’m scared!” Jimmy sniffled.

“Please, Jimmy.”

“All right.”

Jimmy began clambering slowly up the ladder, gained his feet, and began moving faster, and she followed him carefully. The rope swayed alarmingly, but she noticed that the fabric of it felt very strong in her hands, like woven metal, and so she pushed on, until they were nearly blinded by the strong light coming from the dropship’s hatch. Once there, she clambered into it, grabbed Jimmy, and hugged him tightly. Below, the three silver-suited men were ascending again, just floating up again like the last time, just faster now that they didn’t have to bring Hector up with them. Hector’s stretcher lay in the corner of the small room, and she could see they’d done a good job, trussed him up like a turkey. She ran a hand over his forehead and sat close to his stretcher. As she did this, the silver men floated neatly up through the hatch and landed without a sound on the lip of the hatch. One of them did something complicated with his hand, some sort of weird abstract gesture, and the hatch slid closed silently. Now they were all facing each other in this impossibly bright room.

Every wall glowed, and under the floor, she could vaguely make out something that looked like a sparkling carpet that seemed to wave like glowing seaweed. But that was impossible - the floor was nowhere near that thick! The bright fronds waved to and fro as if they were at the bottom of an unimaginably shallow ocean, their tendrils alive with an inner fire, and she did not understand.

Ahmed’s hand was on her shoulder.

“You’re safe with us. Remember, we mean you no harm. For the moment, we’re going to leave your husband in that stretcher. He has been sedated, and I fear he will become a problem if we cancel the sedation implant too soon. For now, he will be placed in the Autodoc, and will receive the best medical care we can give. As a citizen of the New Territories, that is his right,” Ahmed said, brow furrowing as he looked at his wrist, which he held over Hector’s head, making Jenna nervous.

“What do you mean, citizen of the New Territories?”

“Well, the moment you stepped on board this dropship, your entire family came under Protectorate status. Sadly, we cannot allow you to resume living on Earth with what you know unless you agree to undergo a memory-wipe, a very detailed one at that. In addition, just to be sure, you will probably have new memories implanted and be placed in a different community, preferably on the other side of the planet. We cannot allow humanity in general to find out about our presence.”

“But…I…I don’t understand…so what if you have a big airplane that can float? That’s no reason to hurt my son and my husband!”

“We have not hurt you. I have only told you a few small things, and you are most likely incredibly confused. Please follow me, and we will do our best to explain the situation to you.”

Not saying a word, the three silver men picked up Hector’s stretcher again, and they all filed out of the small room they had entered the dropship in, Ahmed leading the way through more bland corridors. This dropship was huge inside - she had not really appreciated its true size until she was actually in it. From one corridor, a muffled laugh - the walls did not reflect sound very well, and they were all filled with a strange suggestion of sparkle, almost like mother-of-pearl combined with the finely-ground surface of a CD-ROM, but somehow more…alive than that.

Soon they reached a room that held over half a dozen small coffins, arranged in three racks. One of them opened along its side, and the men slid Hector’s stretcher neatly inside the glowing cavity.

“What are you doing to him?” she asked, her face assuming a mask of fright.

“He is in the Autodoc now. An electronic doctor, if you will. It is purely there to monitor him and make sure that his heart does not falter. Really, there is nothing to worry about.”

“But he’ll choke in that box!”

Ahmed laughed deeply at this, his flight suit rippling as he stifled his mirth.

“Nothing could be further from the truth. He will definitely feel very spry and healthy when he comes out of there when we arrive at our destination. Our Autodoc is one of the finest ever made - depending on how long he spends inside it, he'll probably be healthier when he leaves it than when he was put in!"

Jenna didn't trust these strangers, people she didn't know who had just put her beloved Hector inside a glowing plastic box, but the ominous presence of the three crystal weapons on the hips of the silver-suited men was the only reason she hadn't begun screaming in fright yet. She hugged Jimmy closer. Ahmed saw this, and said:

"Gentlemen, would you please disable your silversuits? Thank you."

When she looked around again, the silver that had been poured over the features of each of the three men behind her was disappearing, becoming fuzzy. It almost looked like it was evaporating. Within a few seconds, it was gone, and Jenna stood transfixed. Each of the men had a perfect face, jaws proportioned finely, with just a touch of brutality in the slope of their cheekbones. In other words, just as good-looking as Ahmed. One smiled bashfully.

"You must excuse poor Xavier on the right, he's a bit of a shy one. Gentlemen, would you join us for a cup of coffee? After all of this excitement, it would be most gratifying for our visitors to sit down and relax while we fly. Care to join us, Jenna?"

The way he said it indicated that it was a rhetorical question. Reduced to being a follower, Jenna walked quickly behind the four of them, who had now begun chatting amiably in a language she wasn't entirely familiar with, but one that seemed to have at least the occasional English word in it.

More bland corridors passed, and all of a sudden they stepped inside something that looked very familiar to Jenna - a conference room, just like any other conference room she'd ever been in, with a small table made of solid wood and comfortable padded chairs, looking as if it had come straight from an office supply store. Relieved at this touch of normality, Jenna sat down in one of the chairs. The last hour and a half, according to her watch, had been exhausting. Jimmy snuggled onto her lap, hugging her tightly, gazing at the grinning men suspiciously.

"Why is there a carpet in here and nowhere else?" she asked, noticing that a plain blue weave carpet, also appearing to be straight from a normal office supply place, had been laid inside this room.

"Oh, we didn't see the need to carpet all of the dropship. We don't spend much time in the section we just came from, where the airlocks and Autodocs are. Mostly we just work from this part of the ship," Ahmed said, waving his hand at another door that opened on the other side of the conference room, where she could see the carpet extended.

After all four of the men sat down, lounging in the soft chairs, Ahmed knitted his fingers together and bent forwards, staring at Jenna and Jimmy on the other side of the table. He began to speak:

"Jenna, Jimmy, the things I'm going to tell you aren't going to be very easy to digest, but you have to know them. You can still choose to go back to Earth, but to do so would involve a lot of trouble for us. We'd much prefer it if you could come and live with us, as we do not particularly enjoy tampering with people's memories in any way.

I brought you here because you're both familiar with this sort of room, a conference room. What a joke, eh? A conference room in the middle of a dropship that can fly without chemical power! You'd think such a thing would be misplaced, but oddly, it isn't. We try and keep things as informal as possible here, because we can. This table is made of solid oak, and was imported at great cost, purely because it is a nice table and we thought it'd look good in here. The dropship doesn't mind the three quarter of a ton that it weighs - we don't even know what the theoretical mass limits are on this specific dropship yet. Suffice to say, it can handle an incredible load, an almost immeasurable amount of weight.

Jenna, I'm speaking to you now. All these things you've seen, all of it, you probably have a million and one questions to ask me. What I need to do first is give you a bit of history, show you how we just happened to acquire a flying machine that has no jet engine and yet can hover like a Harrier, that has no chemical powered motor and yet can fly faster than any commercial airplane ever made. As a former Boeing employee, you would surely know that it is virtually impossible today to reach orbit and not even feel it, would you not? You'd imagine that there would be a lot of noise and vibration, correct?"

Feeling that an answer of some sort was expected, Jenna said "Yes...I guess..."

"We'll get back to that whole space flight part later. Let me first give you a small potted history of our operation, who funds it, who built this dropship, things like that. Xavier, please man the projector," Ahmed commanded, and Xavier got up and fiddled with a small keyboard recessed in an even smaller table in one corner of the room. A projector began to shine on one of the pale walls, which she noticed had been painted, unlike any of the others.

"This is a little introductory video that we show all of our new people, who have never been inside a UNCP vehicle before. It is not terribly long, which is perfect as Xavier looks very much like he wants to make us some coffee, don't you Xavier?" Jenna detected a certain easy-going camradie between these men, as if they had known each other for a very long time.

"Sure. Sugar, cream?" Xavier asked, eyeing Jenna and Jimmy.

"Black. Three sugars. Strong. Milk and one sugar for Jimmy," she replied automatically, surprising herself at the normality of her reaction here, in this utterly bizarre situation. It was like something out of a fantasy tale. Jimmy seemed to be taking it all in eagerly. Kids are so flexible, she thought to herself, marvelling at her son taking all of these things in his stride.

Ahmed smiled and settled back in his seat, as did the others. They had obviously done this sort of thing before, judging by their familiarity with the whole process.

On his way out of the room, Xavier dimmed the lights to about half their level by twiddling a small knob on the wall. Jenna almost felt comfortable here, although she knew that if she stepped outside the door, she would be overwhelmed with strangeness again. A cluster of stars appeared on the wall, and a voice began to speak from speakers mounted in the ceiling:

The Cygnus Star System, 130 light years away from Earth. Being one of our closest neighbours, it came as no surprise when a signal was received from this star system fifteen years ago, in 1993 Anno Domini. One of the first people to see the signal didn't really understand what it was, and it was passed over as a bunch of random noise from the primary star of the system, just an outburst of radiation, as stars are wont to create at times.

It was only a year later, after the SETI project began to sift through its enormous archives using a new neural-network algorithm, looking for patterns, that this burst of what had been thought to be stellar radiation proved its true nature. A signal arranged in an unusual spiralling format according to an exponential curve determined by the ratio of Pi, it was immediately picked up by the new algorithm, and a week later the project was placed under the highest security clearance available, Code Purple, a clearance so high that the general term is not even familiar to most people in the intelligence community of the United States.

Soviet, French, Chinese and British scientists were assembled at the Los Alomos military base to attempt to decipher the signal, and they soon met with success. Cunningly arranged in concentric layers, the information seemed to be a compressed table of offsets into fractal space, as visualised in a simplified format by the familiar Mandelbrot series of equations. Once the offsets were visualised in the spiralled format, it soon became apparent that we were receiving the equivalent of an interstellar education, for the information started off and was interleaved exquisitely well.

Using the incredibly detailed instructions in the signal, we built the first Hochstein-Chinoi transceiver, a device deceptively similiar in appearance to a standard computer modem, but concealing an incredible secret - the secret of manipulating matter at the quantum level, and generating distortions in the fabric of space-time that could be read and understood anywhere within a specific operating radius.

Our visitors were very specific in their instructions, telling us to be very careful to ensure that the transmitter circuits didn't exceed a certain power level. Today we understand why this was neccessary - it would effectively have been a dead giveaway, telling the many other, non-benovelont entities that exist in the regions of space around Earth that we were a prime target, a new race ripe for the picking.

Thankfully, the Ordinals reached us before any of the Berserkers, which we have been taught so much about by them. Our transmitter was set to broadcast only 130 light years away at maximum power.

To get back to our potted history, the transmitter sent of a single, very brief signal, specifying stellar coordinates relative to the Cygnus system, and we received an even briefer reply back, indicating that our message had been received.

A week later, an amateur astronomer scanning the skies near Jupiter with his electronic telescope happened to get a consistent lens flaw, whenever he looked at a certain region of space. After calculating that his lens flaw was in fact flying inwards at close to the speed of light, and decelerating, he rushed his findings to the nearest big scope, and the research was soon picked up and converted into a Government project.

Telescopes revealed that huge object, definitely too smooth to be a piece of interstellar debris, was on a collision course with Earth. Heated activity followed, and after refining their calculations, the panicked scientists found that the object would indeed slot neatly into a parking orbit around Earth when it reached the end of its deceleration curve.

Orbital mechanics being what they are, it took nearly a month for the object to reach orbit, and then it just sat there. In the meantime, a frenzied expedition had been assembled, an unmanned probe, actually a converted Sun probe, intended to orbit the sun and return measurements of various radiations. Being the only thing we had at the time that had the appropriate instruments on board, it was sent out to the Anomoly.

Nervous hours passed as the probe spiralled outwards in a climbing orbit and then braked to a position barely a kilometre away from the Anomoly. We needn't have worried - it was silent. Silent, that is, until we instructed the probe to begin measurements. Immediately the probe received another transmission, which initially looked similiar to our first transmission, but had marked differences. For starters, it was much shorter, and far less benign. In it's entirety, it read:

Send one person.

How the Anomoly had learned thirty-eight different languages was a mystery, but that was all we got, repeated over and over in every conceivable dialect.

Days and days passed, and the resident group of astronauts on Mir figured out how they would do it. They drew lots to see who would go, and the lucky person, now a revered Hero in the Protectorate, Sergei Kalivosh, was bundled into a rack of metal that the scientists had bolted a few hundred kilograms worth of LOX (Liquid Oxygen), computers, variable thrusters taken from a lander that had been destined for the Lunar icecap, and a jerry-rigged remote inclination controller cannibalised from the Soyuz module which had brought the astronauts to the station.

He nearly didn't make it, but the inclination control computer managed to get him back on course after a thruster stopped firing halfway through his burn. Strapped to a large metal frame along with some computers and a bunch of other miscellaneous hardware and enough LOX to blow up a block of apartments, Sergei must have been rather scared.

Eventually, after he braked and floated near the Anomoly for a few minutes, Sergei decided to go closer. Although our radio contact with him was somewhat tenous, we were still alarmed when he disappeared in our telescopes.

Hours passed, and already preparations were being made for a defence against the Anomoly - but these defences proved to be irrelevant, because Sergei reappeared again in the exact same spot he had disappeared from earlier, about sixty meters away from the Anomoly, and then he began babbling, almost incoherent. Luckily, the inclination control computer on his metal frame kicked in right then and guided him back to Mir, where an impromptu spacewalk was performed in order to recover him.

Clenched in the hand of this astronaut was a metal ring containing, amongst other things, a cure for common cancer, most kinds of influenza, as well as a spattering of other diseases, and plans to build a rocket-less spacecraft.

It took a joint Soviet-American team a year to decipher the ring’s instructions and build the first dropship, a ramshackle one that is today enshrined in a vacuum chamber at the centre of the underground city known as Attila on the Moon. Washington and Moscow scrambled to keep all of this a secret, and for the most part, they were successful. We learnt much from the metal ring, secrets of technology and mathematics that we might never have known without it. Ordinal technology, or at least the tiny subset of it which humans are allowed access to, is very much an organic thing - all of our ships and machines are grown today, not specifically manufactured.

On it’s first flight, the recovered Sergei, who didn’t remember anything about going into the Anomoly, accompanied a team of ten researchers and scientists who flew to the Anomoly. Simple to control and silent, the dropship was launched from a remote Pacific island, where it had been built under enormous secrecy. It effortlessly left the atmosphere of Earth on the 3rd of September 1995.

No one has ever truly “met” an Ordinal - many of our scientists believe that we wouldn’t quite be able to comprehend them even if we did. They comprehended us, however. Once they entered the Anomoly, the scientists and researchers were met by a group of people dressed up in Star-Trek like suits. Later on, we found out that the anthropomorphism of those first ambassadors of the Ordinals was explicitly designed to make things easier for us. All along, they’ve understood us very well indeed, much as we intricately understand the ways of ants.

Although the first meetings continued for nearly three weeks, many things were left unsaid and undone. It turned out that the Ordinals were part of a group of sentient beings who were devoted to helping out fledgling races reach their full potential, and that they routinely sent out messages to try and contact beings lower on the evolutionary ladder than themselves. To use an analogy, they are the game rangers of the Galaxy, attempting to preserve the natural environments of young races.

Thanks to Ordinal technology contributed to humans in exchange for certain pacts and amendments designed to keep the peace on Earth, we began to build Attila, the Lunar base which is the sister of Allyssa, a large space station covered entirely in a huge mirror field a kilometre wide, which itself orbits the Moon, regularly passing over Attila. Raw rock was transformed into refined metal and then bolted together rapidly by Ordinal robots created specifically for the purpose, and soon the UNPC was formed, the human spearhead of the Ordinals’ effort to preserve humanity through our adolescence as a species.

Young races are nothing new to the Ordinals. They have vast amounts of available research on the subject, and we have discovered that many young races develop weapons of mass destruction in the pursuit of power and status, or other things, and most perish if there is no intervention in their affairs. Luckily, they got to us in time.

Over the years that followed, many changes were made to the situation below on Earth. Nuclear stockpiles were silently disabled by ingenious nanomachines of Ordinal design, which neutralized plutonium and uranium in the warheads. Since none of the weapons were ever fired, no one except the UNPC and the Ordinals were wise to this fact. Earth has not had significantly destructive atomic weapons that could be fired for over a decade now.

Another problem has recently begun to present itself - the threat of a rogue virus or bacterium, engineered in a laboratory, which could wipe out all of mankind. Thus, the Ordinals have instructed UNPC officers in the creation of monitor bots, very advanced and invisible to all detection by Earth scientists. Right now, most of Earth has been preserved as it was before the Ordinals arrived, as a sort of petri dish for the development of humanity.

Today, thanks to the advancement of our study of the subset of Ordinal technology and knowledge we are allowed access to, we have begun plans to terraform Mars, but they will only realize completion in about a century or more. Many other significant changes have been made to the way society functions on the two sister stations on and around Luna, a sort of microcosmic test of things we are hoping to implement on the world at large soon.

The presence of the Ordinals cannot be hidden forever. For now, they have judged it better to hide themselves for a little while longer, but humanity will have to enter it’s third phase sooner or later.

This has been a UNPC Educational Video.

Ahmed sighed and sat back, taking a sip from his coffee as he did so. After hesitating for a moment, he got up and said:

“Any questions?”

Jenna sat, stunned. Throughout the course of the video she had just seen, she had never imagined anything as bizarre or so deeply disturbing. On the verge of rejecting the entire thing, she said:

“I haven’t heard anything about all that Ordinal stuff. Nobody’s ever said anything. It would have been all over the news. You’re lying, and so was that video!”

“Jenna, let me ask you a question. How do you think life on Earth would change for the average person if everyone knew that a sixteen-kilometre wide xenoc spacecraft was in parking orbit around Earth? Don’t you understand how chaotic everything would become? This way we can gradually bring humanity up to speed with the rest of the Galaxy, with as little trauma as possible.”

Considering it, she knew that Ahmed was right, but it all smacked of a giant lie to her nonetheless.

“Prove it!” she said, her voice becoming a little louder. Jimmy whimpered and held her tighter. Of all the things that were wrong about this situation, the worst was that her son was being upset.

After giving her a long, desultory look, Ahmed said, “Follow me. Let me show you a little something.”

Hesitant, but too scared of the glistening guns carried by Xavier and his two consorts, Jenna followed Ahmed into a very tiny room - an elevator. The door slid closed silently, and she felt them moving, although the motion was almost undetectable. However, she could feel that they were moving upwards. After travelling for a few seconds, a delicate ding sounded, and the door opened. Leading the way, Ahmed guided Jenna and Jimmy out of the elevator. They were in the centre of the dropship, and probably on top of it - Jenna could see the triangular wing-shape spread out beneath them. It was a bit like standing on top of a 747. Above, there were stars and she could see the Moon, glowing brightly in the darkness. She could see nothing below them.

“Generally, whenever we liberate someone from Earth, the person knows what is happening to them and fully grasps the enormity of the technological progress that we have accomplished under the guiding hand of the Ordinals. Many people think that only a few dozen humans have ever been into space. So the media would have you believe. The first person in space, Yuri Gagarin, was also the first human being ever to see a sunrise from orbit. Whenever someone joins us, and it hasn’t happened in the same way as you have joined us for some time now, the first thing we do for them, as a sort of a primer in the life they are soon going to start, is to show them their first sunrise from orbit.”

Seeming almost languid and worshipful, Ahmed stood and gazed upwards, then glanced at Xavier, who was standing in front of a little table with a few glasses on it and a bottle of champagne on ice. As if being abducted by silver men wasn’t enough, these silver men were now about to feed her champagne! The sheer hilarity of this event almost made her laugh out loud, until Ahmed place a gentle hand on her shoulder and said: “Look. Down there.”

Jenna never forgot the first time she saw an orbital sunrise. At first she did not really understand what she was seeing, and then everything she had been told and shown in the last two hours hit home with devastating effect, turning her knees into rubber. She shuddered and held Jimmy closer. Unlike her, he was enraptured at the sight spread out before them.

Just below them, the terminator line was racing towards the keel of their dropship. She cried out and shielded Jimmy’s eyes when the sun exploded out from behind Earth, but then she lowered her hand from her frustrated son’s face and realized that they were uninjured - somehow the full, unmitigated glory of the sun had been lessened to suit human eyes. Day rushed towards them and then sped past underneath, and she was seized with the most terrific sense of vertigo she had ever felt.

Immediately beneath them, Earth was spread out in all her glory. After biting her lips and struggling to stay standing and not flatten herself against the ceiling of the dropship, she realized that they must be somewhere near the rim of the Pacific Ocean. Wispy clouds bedecked the glittering ocean far, far beneath. A tear slipped out of her eye as the intense beauty of what she was looking at seized her.

“Why don’t you have some of this, Jenna? It’s traditional to have champagne when you see your first sunrise from space,” said Ahmed, placing a fluted champagne glass in her hand. Taking a small sip, she said:

“It’s so beautiful. I couldn’t even have imagined it would be like this. I never thought I’d get to see this, in this way. Why aren’t we dead from exposure? We must be a hundred kilometres high, easily,” she murmured at Ahmed, while slowly letting go of Jimmy, who walked forward and then stopped when he saw she was crying.

“A special field has been erected over the top of the dropship’s wing for this occasion. It is pressurised and temperature controlled, as well as having special glare filters, otherwise we’d all be blind now.”

Jenna finished her champagne and then the group got back into the elevator and descended into the depths of the dropship once more.

Milo and Sylvan

wenty stories above the small single bed, rain pattered lightly against the roof of the tenement block that Sylvan and his little brother, Milo, had been sharing for nearly two years now. Although it was a council flat, they had gone to great lengths to get it fixed up and inhabitable since they'd moved in, and now it provided comfortable lodgings for the two unemployed twenty-somethings.

Sylvan was tossing and turning in his sleep. For the last few nights, he'd dreamed about something enormous and menacing, barely seen, but always presenting a very real danger - these vague dreams frustrated him, and he worried that he was taking too many of his own little chemical cocktails of late. Gotta cut back on those Molotovs, he thought to himself as he slipped out of the exceedingly untidy bed and padded into the kitchen/dining room/lounge/study area of the flat. There, on a single, somewhat grubby old Formica table, sat The Beast. Every time Sylvan talked about his computer, you could almost hear the capital letters in its name. Although it was simply a truly jacked-up box, Sylvan was inordinately proud of it - he had lifted the microprocessor array from a High Street store himself, at great risk of being busted by an automated face-recognition program running on the surveillance cameras.

Now he sat down in front of it and lightly touched the keyboard. Sylvan was somewhat of a stickler for tradition in a universe populated by teenaged hacker Gods, and his ancient Fuzzz keyboard was testimony to this fact - there was no shop that sold this particular type of keyboard anymore, save perhaps for the occasional second-hand store down town, but even so, they were very rare. Appearing to be a somewhat plain old-fashioned touch-typing keyboard, of the type that had been connected to computers since the 1960s, it had a large, flat touch pad instead of a numeric keypad on the right - the touch pad could recognize hand gestures and finger movements and also doubled up as an ordinary numeric keypad when required. Sylvan found that this little accessory was a very, very fast way to navigate the vast plains of the Web, and he used it constantly, and lived in fear of the day the touch-sensitive cells in the pad gave up the ghost, which they were bound to do sooner or later.

Today they seemed to be functioning pretty well. His fingers made little swirling locking and unlocking motions, and the keypad recognized his special password, unlocking the administration console for him to begin his day's work.

Dark brown hair complemented the gentle curves of Sylvan's cheekbones - he was certainly not a typical masculine man, with his naughty boyish grin and twinkling violet eyes. He's spent a ridiculous amount of money on those eyes, back when he was working as a government-paid spy in the former Communist Republic of China, and he could still remember the way they had ached as the custom nanobots injected special ribonucleic sequences into the genes of his iris cells over a period of a week. He had emerged with green eyes, which rapidly become violet, and stayed that way. It was a quite striking effect.

For the past few weeks, Sylvan had been trying to break into a particularly difficult box that was apparently located in Chechnya, a place where the law enforcement was notably lax, and this paved the way for a multitude of dodgy enterprises, such as the one this mysterious box, which his crew had labelled 3Mamma, appeared to be engaged in. Snooping using hijacked routers and switches, Sylvan's crew had discovered that the box regularly spoke to only certain very specific machines, most of them in high orbit, and appeared to be hiding some very valuable secrets. All of the machines it communicated used military-grade encryption for their transmissions, and the chances were slim to dwindling of breaking into 3Mamma using a spoof transmission due to this fact. But Sylvan had figured out a way to do it. He'd awoken just in time - his cell phone would have begun beeping minutes ago, reminding him to wake up and be ready. Over the course of the last three weeks, the ragged members that composed the crew of which Sylvan was the lead cracker had noticed that the same machine always logged in at exactly this time in the morning.

Much negotiation had been required to get access to a very specific router that lay on the outskirts of Chechnya, that the mysterious military machine normally used specifically to communicate with 3Mamma. There were no other routers providing access to that specific part of Chechnya, which was still not the most connected of countries, even in this age of ubiquitous computing. The Chechnya boys who "owned" the router had been reluctant - Sylvan suspected that they knew exactly what his crew wanted that router for. But, as Sylvan's father had always said, money speak every language very delicious, and they had caved after a sizeable and quite untraceable transfer of money had been made into their bank account. 20 minutes was all they had - then the router would revert control back to its owners in the Chechnya highlands.

Sylvan had written the blocker program himself - it was his masterpiece, and had required nearly sixteen pots of strong black coffee to prototype, implement, and test. It was a very vicious program - he had hooked up sixteen extra Matsushita "Hintoi" Generalized Parallel Processor matrices to The Beast the week before to allow it to run at something approaching it's true power. Sticking out like long, thick and very grey middle fingers from the rear of The Beast, the Japanese GPPM blocks looked vaguely phallic. Since the dawn of cracking, back in the days when actual insects still presented sizeable hazards to the pioneers of computing, computers had been female. Nobody quite knew why - Sylvan suspected it was just because many of the people who knew these machines so intimately equated their vagaries with the often extremely unpredictable moods of the opposite sex, but he couldn't tell for sure. Such things were lost in the mists of time, or at least only remembered by people in retirement homes.

Numbers whizzed across Sylvan's huge twenty-five incher LCD panel as The Beast slotted in the blocker program. Technically, it wasn't really a blocker - Sylvan wasn't sure that a phrase existed that could describe its function. Smart Phage was the name he had coined as he was writing it - it was a bit like a very smart virus that impersonated another computer, to devious intent. Today he would live to see the power of this masterpiece, which he was sure would go for a very good price on the open market before everyone else started using it and it became Just Another Utility.

Seconds passed, and then a single LED began to glow in the front of Sylvan's box. It was one he had hooked up himself - soldering was a skill that was falling out of grace now that motherboards came sealed into a block of silicon to protect them against abuse, and could be reproduced more cheaply than they were repaired. All that the little blue LED indicated was that The Beast was now connected to all 16 of the GPPMs, and that the phage was ready to execute, its awesome processing power held in check only by a few small plastic keys and one rather groggy programmer.

At the peripherals of his vision, Sylvan noted that the rest of his crew were present and monitoring the situation - some of them were performing sentry duties, watching for unusual traffic on the nodes of the Web surrounding the Chechnian focal point of today's attack.

Smiling, Sylvan pressed the Return key.

Three hundred kilometres high in the ocean of vacuum that forever holds Terra in an icy grip, something extraordinary was happening. Shaped a little like a squat stack of black Lego blocks with rounded edges, the twenty centimetre tall military satellite began to broadcast a distress signal to a location that coincided exactly with high lunar orbit, although to the casual eye it seemed like there was absolutely nothing there. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and the weak AI executing on the ageing processor mesh that occupied the lion's share of the satellite was concerned. The message was very terse, and took less than a picosecond to transmit, but Allyssa station only got the message an instant later, due to the speed of light that hindered ordinary radio messages.

Fingers hummed on old-fashioned keyboards across the planet as the Sylvan's crew coordinated and developed the attack. None saw the numbers, the IP addresses, the subnet masks - in fact, few even had their eyes open. Few were brave enough to watch, but they knew their duty and they did their jobs well. Spearheading the glittering binary mask of the phage was a slew of containment proggies, DDOS utilities, all aimed at subverting and exposing the core of 3Mamma to enable the crew to work her over in the 20 minutes that they had.

Allyssa's main Security Division was roused by the little satellite in High Earth Orbit twenty seconds after the attack. Inside the perfectly controlled air of the orbital, alarms echoed down the thinly carpeted corridors, and systems operators were roused from their sleep, to jump up and run into the Security Division.

When they got to their seats, they realized what was happening. Allyssa orbital's processor core, a third-generation Malay design, wrought in thirty seven meters of unified organic silicon processors, and also executing one of the largest Artificial Intelligences ever created by human minds, was under siege. It seemed like the attackers were coming in on every transmission at once - but the operators knew this was a falsehood, quite probably the work of a single program, a hitherto unknown combination of virus and incredible timing.

Working feverishly, the operators tried to shutdown all external communications, and to hell with the Ordinals. Even with the very advanced technology that the Ordinals had supplied them, Allyssa orbital's processor mesh was still in charge of the life support system, and if that was taken over, all of the three hundred people on the station were fucked, would in fact probably die choking on their own vomit as they ran out of O2.

This was going better than Sylvan had dreamed possible. Once they had gotten past the encrypted password locks, 3Mamma had been laid out before them like so much candy, and his crew were going insane locking things down, running rootkits, and otherwise nicely patching things up for a second run later on, when the dubious sysadmins who ran 3Mamma would undoubtedly think they were safe again. Sylvan ran a sysdiag on 3Mamma, and found that she had unexpectedly large amounts of available processing power - he had never, in actual fact, seen that many zeros in the Available Processor Cycles column of the datasheet before in his entire life. It took quite a lot to impress Sylvan, and today he was astonished.

A thoroughly debauched idea occurred to him - why not run the Phage on this processor instead? Before he could think it through, he ran a shell script that upped the Phage into 3Mamma's main memory pool, and his finger hovered over the key that would execute the Phage for far less than a tenth of a second. For some reason, he couldn't bring himself to do it. He had a very bad feeling about what would happen if he did run the Phage on this process0r - the Phage had a nasty habit of consuming every available processor cycle, and what if 3Mamma was doing something important, like controlling a nuclear reactor or a missile silo?

He stopped Phage, and then they were all left in darkness as the Chechnians took back their router. Opening up a protected IRC channel, Sylvan said:

Did we do everything neccessary?

Moments passed, and then a single reply came back and the connection closed itself:

3Mamma is ours (:

In his room, Milo whimpered in his sleep and rolled over.

Tormentor of Angels

onight the stars shone coldly above Vesper, which was the name the UNPC High Commander had bestowed upon the small atmosphere-capable dropship that could carry sixteen men with a degree of comfort. Dumpy and inelegant in their default hull configuration, but nonetheless a very flexible cargo and crew carrier, the small military dropships were the pride and joy of the men and women who rode in them, day after day.

Mac’s crew had seen action several times in the past couple of weeks, and the Captain had felt it fitting that they get a bit of rest, so he had pulled a string or three and gotten his team assigned to a sub-orbital watch that normally entailed nothing more than being available at extremely short notice anywhere on the planet in case another striker team needed backup. Incidents where a single striker team composed of about sixteen people couldn’t handle a job were quite rare, which was why his entire team had heaved a unanimous sigh of relief when he’d told them about the new assignment. For a week, they’d be cooling down in the stratosphere, catching up on sleep and mending the wounds they’d incurred during the last three weeks.

Tumultuous times those last three weeks had been, that was for sure. Even with strikers crisscrossing a point within 300 kilometers of every single square centimetre on Earth, there was still occasionally trouble that they needed to intervene in. Twice in the last week they’d been called upon to squelch minor coupes in unstable Third World countries, which was in itself exhausting work. What made it even more tiring was the fact that they always had to hide themselves from general observation – their standard uniform stood out quite drastically from the cloth that normal Earth soldiers usually dressed in. Of course, the chameleon suits were a great help, obscuring them from any trivial kind of observation, but they still weren’t perfect, and Govcentral had sent word down that several groups of people now knew of their existence and what they were capable of.

Evening came rapidly when you were moving at just under the speed of sound 20 clicks straight up – Mac and his crew hardly noticed it. Their full attention was being held either by TV or the snooker table. Quite a few of Mac’s team had become bona fide pool sharks, and they trounced him regularly, even though he’d been playing pool before most of them were born. He bore it with a joking geniality, knowing that the men knew that he’d been running sniper missions for The Man when they were still sucking The Teat, as he never ceased reminding them. It was strange for any striker team these days to have more than one First Generation crew member – First Gens were becoming a statistical rarity as the people on Allyssa and her sister station, lives accelerated a hundred times by the huge spherical time distortion fields encircling their homes, gave birth to children who grew up inside the confines of the Confederation, never knowing Earth until they matured and were old enough to be sent to it, perhaps as part of a striker team or a research or investigation team.

Although there were no windows on the outside of the dropship, the inside walls could easily be programmed to display views of the outside at such a high rez that they were virtually indistinguishable from what an actual glass window would have shown. Windows and other irregularities were impractical on the outside of a machine which used its entire surface area as a giant sensor all the time, and could change the shape of that surface area to whatever it pleased. Some joker scientist in Allyssa who had once worked for an aerospace company had written a clever little program a few years ago that made a dropship extend four dragonfly-shaped wings from its sides and flap them up and down so quickly and so accurately that it could actually hold itself steady and move around like a dragonfly in the air. Of course, the dropship had the disadvantage of several billion times more mass than the insect it was striving to emulate, and as such it tended to destroy objects on the ground with the sheer force which it ripped through the air with when using these wings, so the scientist got a commendation for his work and everybody continued using the standard gravitic lens engines.

No windows were in evidence tonight – somebody had probably set them to silently disappear at nightfall, which suited Mac just fine. He was looking forward to getting a good night’s rest for a change, and his bunk was beginning to become a very tantalizing option. All of the décor in the dropship was military-standard, a tradition he preferred – there was after all no point in coddling soldiers.

Before he headed for his bunk, he decided to make a last inspection of the ship and check that all systems were working smoothly. Starting at the cockpit, he made sure all the nav systems were functioning, eyes glazing over as huge columns of figures scrolled across the flat panels that showed all the nav info to the absent pilot, who was no doubt already asleep. Although he was not a fan of lax discipline, he knew that the pilot would essentially have been a fifth wheel sitting in the cockpit – instances where pilots actually piloted dropships were rare, diminishing towards zero as the programmers on Allyssa perfected the AI control routines for these miniature flying fortresses. Mac was more a pilot than the pilot himself, because the dropship obeyed his orders and his alone, or those of the officer below him in rank should he not be available.

Next he made sure that all of the munitions were bolted down properly – probably a redundant task, but it was something he found reassuring. Some of the weapons they’d been given by the Allyssa Special Forces Division were dangerous in the extreme, some so powerful that they could probably take out even a dropship if used skilfully, which was a feat in and of itself. Dropships were so robust that they could withstand megaton nuclear explosions happening only a kilometre or two away, even shielding the crew from the radiation involved, although God knew Mac never wanted to be in that sort of situation again, not after the one his team had barely diffused in the Congo basin two years ago, where there had been a very real possibility of a good fraction of the remaining Congolese forest being turned into a very large parking lot.

Those first few decades, when all the striker teams had still been amateurs, recruited from military bases around the world, had been strenuous ones, filled with fear and the anticipation of discovery. Thankfully, no dropship had been damaged so badly that it was discovered. Back then, few governments had possessed anything that could even damage a dropship, let alone shoot one down. Coated in a millimetre of smart biotanium, a material which according to the science boys was an organic composite that could change shape very rapidly and still retain the strength of a flawless diamond, it was not uncommon for a dropship to fly heedlessly through a heavy-fire zone, machine gun and anti-aircraft bullets glancing harmlessly off the skin as it made it’s way through war zones. Of course, for a dropship to be seen in the first place was highly unusual – only if they were severely damaged were they incapable of keeping the hidefield running.

Finally the Captain reached the Engine Room, really only a fanciful name given to the centre of the dropship by a previous engineer. Growing up in a Western-civilization dominated society, Mac had always imagined an engine room to resemble something out of Star Trek, with a huge streaming plasma beam centred in a room filled with technicians tending to the every need of the engine. Dropships had no such luxuries – the engine was encased in a meshwork of metal woven between it and the hull by trillions of nanobots, clamping it firmly to the hull of the dropship. Considering the forces that little cube of darkly glistening metal could exert upon the dropship, this was a comforting thought. Beneath the first drive sat the second, a backup used if exorbitant amounts of acceleration were needed. Mac couldn’t recall the last time the dropship had needed the backup drive – it really sapped the electrolytic foam batteries to use both at once, doubling the rate of power discharge. Electrolytic batteries were integrated into just about every non-utility part of the ship’s hull, tiny pockets of quantum foam into which billions of volts of electricity had been pumped by Allyssa station. Allyssa manufactured 3 different vehicle classes, A, B and C. Mac’s dropship was a Class C, which meant that it’s internal power sources could last a very long time, but that it’s engines were powered from stored power, not power generated by an onboard fusion reactor. Their reactor was too small to provide the brute force needed to move the dropship around, so they recharged their batteries at regular intervals. Spreading the millions of tiny batteries through the hull of the dropship meant that they could take a severe pounding and remain flying, as long as the drive wasn’t destroyed. Theoretically their reactor could generate enough power to fly the dropship without batteries, but that would mean everyone on board would have received a lethal dose of radiation by the time the drive could reverse gravity powerfully enough to move the dropship upwards, and to attain any decent speed would mean instant death for any human on board. The reason theirs was a Class C ship was that there was no space for the bulky radiation shielding required to survive the gamma rays emitted by an Ordinal reactor functioning at high energy output levels. On larger ships there was enough space for that, but not theirs, so they flew by the seat of their pants. Thankfully the energistic potential when all the dropship’s batteries were fully charged was sufficient to fly them into orbit and back six times, and around the world almost twenty times, with some help from aerodynamics.

Mac took a last glance at the crowded, brightly lit interior of the engine room and meandered off to his room to catch a bit of shuteye before tomorrow’s drills.

Captain Mac had been asleep for only half an hour when a dazzling mazer beam, composed of microwave radiation oscillating at an extremely specific frequency, sliced neatly through the middle of the dropship, completely destroying both the primary and secondary drive units, and shorting out almost two thousand electrolytic batteries. Freed from its confines, the electricity sparkled on the slightly conductive exterior of the dropship for a few seconds, briefly disabling the dropship’s hidefield.

Endorphin-analogues crashed into Martine’s mind, rocketing her into full consciousness uncomfortably fast. Panic drilled into her as her optic implant chips emblazoned almost every inch of her vision with glowing red warning blocks, system readouts showing imminent failure. Her practised eye scanned the list and she realized what had happened – somebody had struck the dropship, disabling and melting every system across the centre of the fuselage, and worst of all, their attackers had destroyed both of their drives and damaged the low-power reactor used to shapeshift the hull of the dropship. In so doing, the enemy had succeeded in turning Vesper into a 17-ton paperweight stuck at an altitude of 30 kilometres.

Quick as a snake, Martine checked the biostats for the other crewmembers. Luckily, no bunks had been in the path of the mazer beam, although she suspected a few of her team might have incurred burn wounds from hot metal dripping onto them from the melting ceiling. If it hadn’t been for the reflexive healing action of the outer hull, the dropship would have fallen apart, split neatly into two halves, like a metal coconut.

Captain Mac stuck his head through her door and shouted, “We’re evacuating ship, get out, move, move, MOVE! Suit up and meet us at the rear airlock!” then popped back into the narrow, brightly lit corridor. Martine hurriedly pulled off her shirt and pants and wriggled into the thin, sticky fabric of her combat suit, feeling it loosening and then tightening around her as it activated and began functioning. Lungs tightening, she realized that they must’ve started losing air pressure inside the dropship – already she was having difficulty breathing. With a sigh of relief, she zipped up the front of her suit and grabbed a helmet from the repair slot outside her door. She noticed that all six of the other helmets had been removed, which was a good sign – her team was complete. Cool, firm air greeted her an instant after she sealed the helmet to the neck of her suit and began running towards the rear of the dropship.

When she arrived at the airlock, she saw Anton standing by the hatch, ready to cycle the outer atmosphere and crack open the wide yellow-painted door, which could be blown open in an emergency. Covered in warnings in 16 languages, the door was their only chance to escape the doomed dropship. Underneath her feet, strange vibrations had set in, air thickening and tugging at the dropship as it fell.

“Right, that’s everyone. We leave the airlock one by one, current altitude is 25 thousand metres, and optimal drop rate at this position will give us 2 minutes 30 seconds fall time. Keep coms to a minimum, wait for my signal, I’ll say where we should reconvene, but time me out at 4 minutes after I hit the sand. Got it?” Captain Mac said, voice rising automatically over the rising wail coming from the hull of the dropship, even though their suit coms reproduced it more than well enough. He sounded considerably calmer than she felt he should be, seeing as how he was talking about their lives in a blasé way.

Time ran out for them then, and Anton slammed the emergency open switch down, machine-enhanced muscles triggering a tiny explosion outside. Six circles of hull fabric were torn away, and then the airlock followed, a meter and a half wide, taking nearly three square meters of hull fabric with it. Martine knew from her readouts that the dropship’s automatic repair routines had been disabled, so they would not have to worry about bouncing off the inside of the hull when jumping out. Anton flipped in the microgravity they were experiencing as a result of the fall and slid out of the screaming airlock hole like a fish into a tidal pool, smoothly slipping out into the empty sky. Following him barely an instant later was Avette, Matty, Sam, and then it was her turn. She gave Captain Mac one last look, seeing her suit reflected in his silky visor, and then pushed herself out of the airlock, struggling against the powerful wind blowing through it now. Captain Mac sped out of the airlock behind her, and then they were all alone in the sky. Having done a few paratrooper training runs during her training, she had no trouble selecting the paratrooper routines using her cortex implant, and the dropship’s status readouts scaled themselves down and shrank into a corner of her sight. All that mattered now was opening her parawing once she reached terminal velocity. They had little time to reach the ground, and she knew that they were sitting ducks in the sky.

Exactly one minute and three seconds after Captain Mac exited the dropship, her cortex implanted opened her parawing for her, and she grimaced as the suit dug into her shoulders, stiffening and compressing against her as the wing fought with the air for a few seconds, then stabilized, and she was gliding. Although she was moving very fast, she was now in control of her descent again, and it was a relief to know that the ground was no longer a certain death, but only an obstacle. Beneath her she saw four identical black triangles slicing through the thin night air, heading towards the rendezvous point.

“Where are we?” she asked her cortex implant. It flashed back:

Current Location: Braamfontein, Johannesburg, South Africa, African Continent.

Heading: Northeast

Speed: 210 kph