Beyond the Sky: Chapter 20
The End of a World
Velli disturbed Takji, now. It wasn’t just the attempted murder-slash-kidnapping and the JNF’s attack on her guards. Rather, it became the seeming naivety with which she trusted these creatures from space. As if they’d make everything right, as if history wasn’t full of a thousand wisemen and creeds promising exactly that. Didn’t battle-hardened rebels have more sense?
She didn’t know whether Arthur Benson deliberately manipulated her, but she fell for it—on one condition:
“Find my family,” she said, as the machinery of an alien spaceship thrummed faintly in Takji’s ears.
“They were taken as slaves?” asked Benson.
“To Mespreth. After that, I don’t know.”
He pondered for a moment. “I can’t promise anything, but I will try.”
Benson looked to Takji.
“Send me back down.” She summoned her firm-but-diplomatic voice. “I have to tell my father.”
“Will he believe you?”
“If I come down in the Black Triangle, maybe!”
“Sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t do that. We can’t have word of us getting out before open contact.”
“You’re letting her go!”
“To work with us, under my supervision. Could you promise me that, if I sent you back, you would not breathe a word of this to anyone until all is revealed?”
Takji growled, “No. So you will hold me prisoner?”
“You are accused of no crime.” Spoken like a King’s Eyes commissar. “But, I will make you an offer: Let me try to convince you to help us. If you do not agree, you may go.”
“Very well.”
He took her to another door, this one opening to a stairwell. The steps were narrow for her long Leaper feet, she descended gingerly lest she fall. The spaceship’s apparent size began to grow on her—how much more remained unseen? This next deck featured slightly wider hallways, black panes of display-glass lining their sides. Like the one above, it seemed to be a generally circular shape, halls curving away to either direction.
Benson saw her looking around. “I’ve sealed off these compartments and pressurized them to your planet’s atmosphere. The normal breathing mix used by humans is only half that, you’d not have enough oxygen otherwise.”
The human homeworld’s exact particulars joined the questions piling up in her mind. It was older by a factor of two—how did life manage to exist, when their sun would’ve surely brightened and burned it away?
They stopped at an open room, empty save for curving display-walls showing scenes of her planet. In the floor was a large metallic circle.
“Carter, you there?” Benson asked.
“Yes, Captain,” a male voice replied by speaker. Clearly this alien watched from somewhere else, Takji searched for a camera but found none. Ollie closed the door and assumed a spread-legged stance.
“Allow me to illustrate the gravity of the threat your civilization faces.” Benson held an object like a slab of glass, glowing buttons and text illuminated on it. He tapped one.
The room went dark, and in the middle projected a floating hologram of an alien planet. Takji gasped in wonder, and carefully stuck her hand in. It went through, with a slight tingle that might’ve been her imagination. Its landmasses were covered in purple foliage interspersed with brown deserts and white-capped mountains, between them seas filled out the rest.
“This is the homeworld of Ollie’s species, the Tofflans.” Benson nodded towards him. “And this is yours, which we call Lemuria.”
He flicked the glass pane as if throwing something from it, and another globe appeared beside the first. Takji saw familiar landscapes rotate past as it floated in place, notably smaller by comparison.
“What’s it like?” She pointed her snout to the Tofflan planet.
“The concentration of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere would be lethal to you,” replied Captain Benson. “Otherwise, it is temperate though somewhat dimly-lit, orbiting further from its sun. A hundred-and-fifty years ago—three hundred years, in your calendar—it hosted an industrial civilization, just like yours.”
Ollie said, “The World Before was a few decades ahead of you, in particular they had a global computer network through which one could access any piece of information or communicate with whoever one wanted, regardless of location. They also had nuclear weapons—a hundred thousand.”
“And used them.” Benson looked to the globe.
She didn’t see it at first. Then, like light-bugs rising from a branch, a swarm of yellow motes climbed above the horizon. From the hemisphere facing her, amid an expanse of desert, another swarm illuminated and rose.
Missiles.
“This is a simulated reconstruction of the war as it unfolded,” Ollie explained. “You observe at ten-times speed.”
Even so, the missiles climbed with dreadful slowness. The yellow glows of rocket motors winked out one by one, splitting into almost-imperceptible dots of warheads. For a missile to travel from Mespreth to the Amalgamation took some twenty minutes, how much longer on a larger planet?
A few struck close targets, islands and seemingly-random patches of wilderness, crossing the atmosphere in an orange curl before erupting in the incandescent fire of nuclear reactions. Several more bombs went off with no forewarning at all. Near the south pole, a third fleet of missiles rose and split in two, diverting towards the sources of the other two strikes.
The warheads continued their coast with foreordained exactness. Then, they fell upon the cities, flashing white as yellow streetlights died like withering plants. The planet flashed like fireworks, warheads striking on every surface in seemingly endless quantities. Another three-way exchange of missiles, much smaller than the first, ensued, and at last the bombings began to die down. Orange fires raged where they had struck.
Ollie tapped his own glass slate. “I increase to ten thousand times speed, approximately one day per second.” In a few seconds, smoke from the fires spread like water poured on a floor, blanketing the planet in grey-and-white haze. Only the poles were spared. “Particulate matter from the blasts entered the atmosphere, reducing sunlight at the surface. Snow fell at the equator, the sun became a dull disk safe to look at, and no plants grew.
“The nuclear strikes killed a quarter of the population from direct effects. Of the survivors, a further half died in the starvation and violence which followed.”
Winter’s grey clouds swirled, periodically pockmarked by the flash of a remaining atom bomb.
Ollie continued, “When the clouds finally broke and the Black Rain stopped, less than a quarter of us remained, surviving in the polar regions, at sea, in a handful of isolated refuges, and on each other—six billion dead constitutes a great quantity of meat.”
Takji shuddered.
The mysterious voice of Carter said, “An equivalent simulation for your world is trivial.” Its globe appeared, and yellow motes of ballistic missiles began rising from their siloes.
“No, STOP!” she shouted. The hologram winked into nothingness. “I was thinking...” She shuddered again. “I’d been thinking maybe this was a plot, to disarm us of our weapons before you attacked and destroyed us.”
“You hardly need aliens to take care of that,” Benson said.
She turned her head towards Ollie. “What happened, after?”
“A century of rebuilding, then we discovered interstellar travel. One of the first worlds we targeted for exploration had been surveyed by the Stellar Compact—” he waved one of three arms towards Benson “—and in short order they made contact. Every citizen must watch that simulation, and other historical records, at least once a year, to remind ourselves of what must never happen again.”
Takji stepped backwards, steadying against one of the display-walls and its consoles. “Thirty-three thousand, four hundred and fifty-seven.”
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