Scorched Earth, Alien Wonders

I had not slept well since my horrific nightmarish reenactment, so I was instantly disoriented before dawn the next morning after being awakened by a strange sound. I sat up on my bed not far from the topside entrance tunnel. I listened...and there it was again. I reached for the mini-binocs...but they were gone.

Hmmmm. Oh, that’s right.

I had forgotten to ask Torie to go back into stasis the night before as we all rolled onto our beds, so I looked around for the rattlesnake. My eyes could actually see in the dark, which was convenient, but disturbing, because it meant the prairie dog side of my subroutine was getting stronger.

No rattlesnake. No Torie. No mini-binocs

Slivers of diffused light were filtering into the burrow, and I could make out the shadows of my team laying in their fluffy, dirt-beds, including a big lump where Jones slept.

But, what was that noise?

I climbed topside, looked around, turning my head in several directions trying to identify what I was hearing. None of the town-folk were stirring yet.

Was Torie playing a trick on me?

I cautiously left the burrow to find out.

A short distance from the edge of Suburbia on the same path we had been taking every day to meet Cassie, I came across an unexpected sight in the dim light of morning’s dawn. I blinked several times, and pulled the fur on my neck to make sure I wasn’t having another sleeping reenactment.

Ouch...let’s not do that again.

I blinked hard and focused my eyesight. What I saw was Cassie sitting on a bolder next to another female I could only assume was her mother. And standing in front of them was a big, four-legged, animal with curly horns. As I watched...the animal swirled into a gray tornado, and changed into the form of a big, burly, snorting, creature that I thought might be a buffalo.

Cassie and the woman laughed and applauded like they were watching a carnival show.

THAT’S the sound I have been hearing...

They walked over to the big fella, which was Torie showing off, and petted his knurly mop of brown hair that framed his massive neck.

“TORIE!” I shouted from 30 feet away. “MAY I HAVE A WORD, PLEASE?”

Followed by a cloud of dust, the buffalo trotted over to me immediately.

“Watcha’ doing?” I asked.

Torie shifted back into his organic form and gazed at me defiantly with his gray eyes set in his white, Siberian husky face, with his funky, Yoda ears leaning cockeyed off to each side. I had known this cantankerous bot-shifter for years, but sometimes just watching him try to be grumpy with that funny, odd face was so hysterical it was hard for me to stay composed.

“Look, you guys are having all the fun watching Sheldon Cooper and shark movies and hanging out with Daisy and Cassie, while I get to be an owl...a snake, a frog or a lousy pair of binoculars most of the time.”

“Okay, I get that you are bored, but how does that explain this,” I gestured at Cassie and the woman, who had sat back down on the boulder to wait.

“Just before dawn I shifted from the rattlesnake into a brown bat...I flew out of the chamber to see the sights and I heard singing. I came upon Cassie and her mother over there digging in the dirt with shovels.”

At that point, the rest of my team came strolling up just in time to hear Torie’s explanation.

“How did Cassie’s mother react to you, because she wasn’t supposed to know about us?” Brown asked.

“Well, they both shrieked when they saw me fluttering overhead as a bat...scared the hell out of me...so the auto-reflex changed my shape back to the previous form, which was a rattlesnake and that made things even worse.”

“Ahhh,” we all said shaking our heads with empathy.

“Cassie knew who I was from all the talks at the dead-twig berm, so I shifted to my real self and started chatting with her,” he explained.

“Then I shifted into the next thing on my Great Plains wildlife database, which was the burrowing owl...to show her mother.”

“Okay...then what,” I asked.

“I landed on Cassie’s forearm, to her mom’s amazement, so Cassie proceeded to tell her the whole story about our scientific mission here, including why you guys are all masquerading as overgrown prairie dogs.”

“Yeah...then what?”

“Cassie asked me to show her mother more, so I did by changing into a butterfly, then a gerbil, then a patch of violet-colored, field flowers.”

“Sounds reasonable...then what?

“They were mesmerized and so astounded they had tears in their eyes, because they had only seen pictures of such wondrous things. Those objects were once part of what they called the North American Serengeti. It was an endangered ecosystem, they said, that used to be part of this whole region before it completely disappeared except for the Suburbia population of prairie dogs.”

“Uh-huh....go on.”

“My display of creatures, fauna and flowers gave them such pleasure that I just kept going until I covered just about every critter, bird and plant that previously lived here. I changed into a black-footed ferret, prong-horned elk, a gopher and the buffalo. Cassie and her mom giggled and laughed and applauded every time.”

“Okay, gotcha...now what?”

Silence....

“I’m really tired,” said the ancient bot-shifter finally, before he swirled into the mini-binocs and plopped onto the dirt.

Man, I hate it when he does that in the middle of a conversation.

I was thinking Torie’s bot-shifter show was a tough act to follow looking at Cassie and her mother sitting patiently waiting for my odd group to walk over, and talk to them about what they had just seen. I picked up the mini-binocs, put them around my neck, took a deep breath of hot air and got ready to put my BS degree to work.

My team and I strolled up and started chatting with Cassie like old friends. Her mother didn’t appear to need any more convincing that we were, indeed, an alien science research team working on this planet as over-grown prairie dogs.

“I’m sorry I kept this from you, mom,” said Cassie, looking at Sara. “I was dying to tell you, but I made a promise and you know what you’ve always said about promises.”

“It’s okay, Cass,” replied Sara. “I no longer hold promises in the same high regard that I used to.”

Just then, we could hear a bit of chitter-chat back toward the colony, and saw some of Suburbia’s town-folk emerging to do their daily business. Cassie and Sara watched with fascination as the prairie dogs moved around in the distance.

“So, you are okay living next door to a bunch of rodents?” I purposely asked Sara the stupid, leading question to see how she would react. We already knew that Cassie liked our PD friends, but what kind of opinion did her mom have?

“Rodents?” Sara repeated indignantly. “Prairie dogs used to be the keystone species of the Great Plains, and dozens of other creatures depended on them for survival. They are the last known colony of Earth’s wildlife to escape the mass extinctions and we’re glad they’re here.”

“So, are you saying there haven’t been any humans you know of lately that have killed prairie dogs for target practice and sport?”

Okay, granted, it was a blunt question, but after my vivid “killing contest” episode...I needed to know the answer, and sometimes it was best to break with formality and just straight out ask the damn question.

Cassie and Sara were clearly unnerved and shocked by the gruesome thought.

“Kill prairie dogs? Never!” said Sara, emphatically.

“Not even if you were hungry enough?” asked Moore. The two women were clearly disturbed by the suggestion, but I knew Moore was following my lead to get Sara’s reaction.

Then, Cassie, who seemed to understand our objective, explained that humans left in the compound waiting for transfer to Mars were very concerned about what would happen to the last colony of prairie dogs once all the humans were gone.

And Sara explained another bit of vague information that was not made clear by Rosen research. We had surmised Suburbia contained the only remaining prairie dogs, but Sara said they were the only remaining wildlife on the globe.

“You mean the last colony of PD’s, right?” I asked for clarification.

“No, I mean the last mammal species on the Earth, period,” she answered, trying not to sound impatient. “We believe there are a few microbes, insects and invertebrates, but everything else went the way of the dinosaur.”

“We have DNA replicating and cloning technology,” Cassie joined in. “So, we can duplicate some wildlife and fauna if we ever have a suitable environment again, but right now these prairie dogs are all we have and they are treasured by all of us.”

And, we learned another surprising bit of information during that exchange. Apparently, there were no weapons left on Earth, either.

Humans without weapons? That was a shocker...

“After the big Arctic methane explosion in 2100 started a cascading failure that doomed everything on the planet, there was little use for weapons,” Sara said, emphatically.

Okay, that’s it...we had the confirmation we needed on human enlightenment.

My team and I exchanged knowing looks. Maybe it was by default...but we were ready to label humans as a benevolent tribe, and be done with that part of our assignment. Our verdict was that people of the 22nd century were far more enlightened on the treatment of lower life forms than their cretin ancestors. Too bad we couldn’t have called it a day and gone home to a planet that actually had temperatures below 100 degrees.

But the second, most crucial part of the mission was just beginning with time ticking away and I didn’t have the slightest clue how to get it done.

As the heat started rising, I moved our little group further down the trail to our familiar dead-twig berm. In addition to the shade depot we dug inside the pipeline, there seemed to be some kind of tricky air inversion that made the place feel cooler. At least, it did to me.

We sat together for several hours and learned more from Cassie and Sara. The two were very close and Cassie looked a lot like her blonde-haired, blue-eyed mother. We learned they were collectors of classic rock music, which we would come to fully appreciate in the days ahead. They had been singing “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”, as they were digging in the hard-packed dirt early that morning to avoid the heat.

When suddenly a little brown bat came fluttering around their heads.

We had never seen a bat before...not even in pictures,” said Sara, smiling. “So it startled us more than anything.”

That led to Torie’s one bot-shifter show.

Cassie explained they were digging samples to take back to the lab for new testing, because they were hoping to find a way to extract water molecules that lay several hundred miles down in Earth’s mantle.

“21st century scientists knew deep-core molecules contained hydroxyl fragments indicating the presence of water, but they weren’t able to devise an extraction method before abandoning Earth,” said the girl genius. “We want to explore more possibilities with the tests we have designed in the lab.”

Cassie did most of the talking and Sara seemed to be contemplating the outrageous concept of aliens from a faraway galaxy standing in front of her disguised as innocent looking, albeit bigger than normal...prairie dogs.

Cassie told us that mankind had colonized Mars, but had never before experienced other intelligent, terrestrial life forms

Wait a minute.

I knew that couldn’t be true if humans were eyeing the aluminum score on Rosen. But then out of the blue, Sara’s curiosity got the best of her and she started asking questions.

“Can you help me understand why aliens would be interested in a planet with nothing but dead oceans, deserted cities and decaying infrastructure?” she asked, with a tiny bit of suspicion in her voice.

Yep. I knew there was a reason I liked these girls. Cut right to the chase.

Oh, how I wished I could tell them the truth, but if I did and they told Cassie’s father...we’d be screwed. I almost felt my nose growing longer like the fable, Pinocchio, as I told her what we had already told Cassie...that we were on an exploratory, deep-space, mapping expedition, blah, blah, blah...which was essentially true most of the time...just not this time.

“We arrived through an intergalactic wormhole...not in a spacecraft and we carry no weapons, so you can see that our mission is peaceful.”

“Okay, I can accept that, but why are you disguised as prairie dogs? Is it because your real appearance would melt our eyeballs?”

“Well, we haven’t been known to melt anyone’s eyeballs...at least not on purpose.”

Suddenly, we heard a noise like thunder, and the ground started shaking beneath our feet.

Bloody fica-hell...

It didn’t last long at all, but it just about gave my team heart attacks. Sara explained the story behind the tremors and it was unbelievable. Evidently, hundreds of years ago, humans developed a perverse way of extracting fossil fuel from the ground by injecting massive amounts of toxic, chemical-laced, water under great pressure deep into rocks to force out shale gas that was used for energy.

“They did such a reckless thing on purpose?” Davis asked. “Sounds like action that should be nominated for the Galactic Bonehead Award.”

The practice became known as “fracking”, according to Sara, and it was eventually outlawed due to human health risks, not to mention the increasing frequency and strength of earthquakes blamed on the extraction process duplicated in thousands of locations around the planet. But all these hundreds of years later, tremors were still plaguing every region of the world where the fracking method was extensively used.

“We need to get back to the lab and check on our experiments,” said Sara.

Then Cassie invited us to visit the lab the next morning. I couldn’t tell how Sara felt about us after her melting-eyeballs comment, but I accepted Cassie’s invitation quickly before she could say anything.

Back in Suburbia, Buster told us the town-folk were annoyed by the quake—not because it scared them or did much damage, but the Rabbit Hole entertainment had to be cancelled for the night.

My team never experienced quakes on Rosen and we were a bit shaken by it...literally.

But no entertainment? That really sucked.

“Our chambers and burrows hold up amazingly well when these shaker-quakes happen,” Daisy told us when we stopped by the Rabbit Hole on our way to the burrow. “The hard-pan clay is like cement.”

True enough, because we found only a layer of dust and a few pebbles on the floor of our burrow when we finally got back there. After we cleaned everything, we sat and talked about the day’s incredible events. Gadflies, it had been so boring for weeks, but now every day there was a new adventure.

“Did you hear what Cassie said about the Mars government telling citizens they weren’t aware of other intelligent beings in the Universe?” I asked my team.

“Yeah, I caught that,” said Brown, “that just means the girl and her mother probably don’t know anything about humans sending probes further into deep space to search for aluminum. But it doesn’t mean it’s not happening.”

Everyone agreed. The mini-binocs were sitting on the ground, because Torie was still resting from his one bot-shifter show.

So, it was startling to hear the chime indicating Qualdron was on the line, since he rarely initiated communications here. I touched the side button that enlarged the binocs and positioned them with the lenses looking out at us before I opened the channel.

“Captain Memphis, you have a problem,” said Qualdron.

“I’m requesting you clear the room of your team members, because I need to talk to you in private on an official matter,” he said then he waited for me to comply.

I looked around at my puzzled group.

“Okay, you heard him. Maybe you guys could go over to the Rabbit Hole, and see if Daisy needs any help cleaning up.”

Everyone grumbled as they filed out and headed topside.

“Okay, it’s all clear,” I said, turning my attention back to the surly looking Rosenian. Without another minute’s hesitation, he said something that caught me totally off guard.

“You have a spy in your group and I’m not talking about Dr. Jones, either,” said Qualdron. “Unauthorized and coded messages are being sent to someone in the High Council by an unidentified member of your team.”

He went on to explain that someone had used the binoculars on two occasions to send coded messages in the past week to a department in the same building as Empress Osette’s headquarters.

One message was sent in the middle of the night and the other during the day.

“Dr. Jones is the only one you can trust now, because you said that she was bribed with an offer she couldn’t refuse for a new lab and funding for research, so she has no motivation for spying. Particularly since she came clean with you about the second half of the mission,” he concluded in a vaguely distracted tone.

“She?” was the one ridiculous word that found its way out of my mouth after just being told I had a traitor on my team.

Later that evening, my group returned and we sat around with everyone staring at me in silence.

“What the bloody-blazes was on Qualdron’s mind that was so secretive we couldn’t be included?” asked Moore, indignantly.

Using the cover story Qualdron suggested, I told my team that word had come down from Empress Osette’s office that everything we did from here on had suddenly become need-to-know status for the captain and science officer only.

“There’s nothing more I can tell you, so don’t bother trying to pry it out of me.”

I was feeling very conflicted about the position I found myself in, while trying to digest the thought that one of my three old friends or the newbie doctor was a duplicitous, spying, and fica-slug.

“Why does Jones get to know?” asked Doc. “He kept the main part of the mission a secret for weeks.”

“First of all, I have to correct an assumption we all made about Jones,” I said, cleverly avoiding answering the real question.

“Jones is not a ’he’, Jones is actually a ’she’,” I said, looking at the female Rosenian on my team who came to our Earth-spying party dressed as a Draxian monkey.

“Why didn’t you correct our mistake?”

“There was nothing about my disguise to indicate male or female,” she replied in her slightly squeaky voice. “You all just assumed I was a male, so I went along with it.”

“Besides,” Jones continued. “You weren’t very nice to me when I showed up that night. I understand your caution, but you were still an arrogant, pompous ass.”

I could sense the others getting restless.

“Point taken...I apologize.”

Groveling wasn’t my strong suit, but clearly I had to make peace with this female, because she was now the only one I could trust.

“Okay,” replied Jones. “But since I have been anointed by Qualdron to be on the short ‘need-to-know’ list, how about telling me what’s going on?”

“Sure, Ms. Jones...first thing in the morning.”

I had to learn soon who, what and why someone on my team was sending secret messages back to Rosen. I hated the suspicion floating in the back of my mind as I looked around the room at who I thought were my friends.