Scorched Earth, Alien Wonders

Once topside, we saw town-folks gathered around in a few groups and something in the morning sky had their attention. I put the mini-binocs to my eyes and looked up to see a small, blue, object floating off in the distance. If it was a UFO, it wasn’t from our solar system. What were the things that had become so prevalent in 21stth century Earth skies? Oh yeah, they were called “drones”.

Nope, not one of those, either.

This thing floated, swirled and darted around strangely.

“Can you tell what it is?” asked Doc.

“It’s not a plane, it’s not a bird and it sure isn’t Superman,” said Davis, with a chuckle.

“It appears to be tethered to a thin line of some sort,” I said, shielding my eyes from the sun.

“How far away do you think it is?” asked Moore.

I pressed a button on the side of the mini-binocs and got the digital-distance readout. “Looks like only about a hundred yards.”

“Great, let’s go check it out!” said Moore.

Even the heat wasn’t enough to diminish his impatience for something to do besides scrounge barely eatable food during the day and watch Rabbit Hole entertainment at night.

“Yeah,” replied Doc. And everyone else agreed, so it was decided.

“Superman?” giggled Brown, who could be a little slow on the draw sometimes. “I get it now.”

“Okay, let’s go!” I said, with a sense of urgency and we all scampered off as fast as our prairie dog legs could carry us.

The mini-binocs jostled under my neck as I ran. Jones soon took the lead, because he always cheated with his expanded kangaroo hop. We traveled quickly across dried, barren, land toward the lofty object that looked bigger as we got closer.

“How much further?” panted Davis, pausing to stand on his chubby, hind legs for a better look.

I stopped to check out the data. The object was close and it was clearly attached to some kind of Earth-bound line.

“About 30 feet. We should be able to see what the thing is when we get to that mound of dirt over there.”

Jones stayed further back from sight as we moved closer until we cautiously approached a berm covered with tall, dead, ancient weeds. We started hearing a soft noise coming from the other side of the mound. It didn’t sound threatening, but who could tell on this world? I motioned for the team to stay put then I moved alone through the cover of the dead weeds, trying not to make noise. I was anxious to see what was on the other side. I peered through the lifeless vegetation...and my mouth dropped open.

What the fica-hell?

I was astonished to see what looked like a young, human female, and she was holding a line to the blue object. It was the female, who was making the noise. She was humming something that sounded like a bizarre melody. I withdrew as quietly as I could over crackling, dead weeds and went back to the others.

“You guys are not going to believe this. It appears to be a human girl,” I whispered. “We need to find out what she is doing and if the object she controls is some kind of threat to Suburbia.”

“Brown, you’re up,” I said, looking at my CO, as I removed the mini-binocs from around my neck and handed them to her.

“Fantastic,” she replied. “Finally, some action!” Brown hung them around her neck, and moved slowly forward through the tall twigs.

The rest of us inched along behind her, with Jones staying far back in the rear. The girl was wearing a floppy hat to keep most of the sun off her face. She appeared to be mesmerized by the object she had floating in the sky at the end of her line. She was still making a low-pitched purring sound like some kind of melody with a funky beat. Interestingly, we would find out later she was singing Adam Levine’s classic Earth song “Moves like Jagger”.

Brown quietly crawled up and positioned herself in the dead weeds about 15 feet from the light-haired human. But her face was looking skyward and for Brown to make the telepathic link, the girl needed to look in our way.

Impatiently, I picked up a rock as big as I could handle with my front paw-hands, and hurled it as hard as I could in the girl’s direction. The stone easily sailed to within two feet of her and thumped onto the ground. That did the trick, because she stopped singing and glanced toward us.

But suddenly, something else caught her attention and she looked back in the other direction.

A small space shuttle descended almost silently from the hazy, morning sky, and it landed about half a mile away. The young female giggled and squealed with delight, so we concluded it wasn’t a hostile invasion or anything sinister.

Quickly, she reeled in the object like she was pulling in a blue-finned tuna, then she gathered up the tethering line, put the whole bundle under her left arm and sprinted off toward the shuttle.

“It was a kid’s toy called a kite,” said Brown, as if she hadn’t noticed the astonishing arrival of an interplanetary spacecraft.

“Damn, we were so close,” I said to my team, as they moved up to join me. Then we watched the girl scamper in the direction of the spacecraft, which was no longer visible to us, until she disappeared from sight.

Later, back at the Rabbit Hole, as Torie hopped around the floor in the form of a dainty, green tree frog, we told Daisy about our discovery. But she was mesmerized watching that cute little frog hopping around on the ground making funny, ribbity-croaking noises.

Earth to Daisy...

Apparently, shuttle crafts were seen on a rare occasion, but it was unknown by Daisy or any of the other town-folk how often they came or why they were there. It would have been nice if the PD’s had mentioned that bit of trivia before, but why should they? Our new prairie dog friends had no idea why we were really hanging out in their little village, while pretending to be big shot explorers and getting treated like royalty.

At least I didn’t think so.

Daisy said none of the town-folk had ever seen the blue kite being flown in the sky before that day. Now that we knew humans were still on Earth and close by, it added a level of excitement to the waiting game, and all we needed at that point was a deck of cards.

It was three days before we got another chance with the Earth girl.

By that time, Moore was so sick of watching the Big Bang Theory three nights in a row that I thought he would gouge his eyes out if he had to sit through another one. But we couldn’t complain and it wouldn’t have done any good, anyway, because the town-folk loved the main character, Sheldon Cooper.

When the girl’s kite was finally spotted three mornings later, we wasted no time getting to the dead-twig berm. She was wearing her floppy hat again and watching the kite flying overhead. Brown and I crawled up and positioned ourselves in the same place a short distance from the girl. Brown got the mini-binocs aimed at the her face and once again a tossed rock got her attention.

She looked directly at us.

This time Brown was successful, as her gaze locked eyes with the girl through the lenses, and the telepathic connection was complete.

“Got her...” said Brown softly.

A smile slowly came over the young, human’s face as Brown explained who we were and all about our science-based mission, which wasn’t exactly a bald-faced lie.

Still holding the line to the airborne kite—the girl we would come to know as one of the youngest geophysicist left on Earth; a genius, who had a fondness for classic rock music—walked toward our little group with absolute enchantment on her face.

The girl sat down on the crusty ground. She crossed her legs without taking her eyes off Brown’s face except to look gleefully at the rest of us for a few seconds. We slowly approached her as if not wanting to startle a baby antelope and stood in a group looking back at her face. Even the arrival of Jones to the group didn’t raise any sign of fear or alarm from the girl.

Amazing...

Brown introduced each one of us to 16-year-old Cassie Wilder by our first AND last Earth names, but Dr. Jones was just “Jones”. Why? I could only assume it was because Jones had never mentioned his first name.

Cassie wore her long, blonde hair in a pony-tail tied with a blue ribbon under her hat and her right ear was adorned with a dangling, gold earring. The ribbon matched her twinkling blue eyes above a perky nose and freckled cheeks. Her light-colored pants and shirt were faded, but clean.

As Brown mention each of our names, the girl looked at us with utter fascination. And she had a sense of humor, too, because she laughed out loud when Brown introduced Fats Davis. He got a good chuckle out of it, but Davis was a natural-born chuckler anyway.

While the kite still floated overhead, we were able to start having a free-for-all conversation as everyone synchronized from PD vocalizations to the English language. We shared information, stories and discoveries like old friends during what was undeniably the most productive two hours we had spent since we landed on this scalding, planetary orb.

“The kite is actually a science experiment,” Cassie explained. “I’m trying to determine if the graphite-foam material on the kite’s frame is able to be converted into steam by sunlight.”

Jones understood the process and it quickly became clear the young human was versed in the most advanced geophysics pertaining to the planet. The girl genius was home-schooled by her brilliant scientist mother and engineer father. She had earned two master’s degrees by the tender age of twelve.

Cassie said her mother, Sara, was a geologist, and the two of them were working at a small research lab not far from the main domed compound that housed Earth-bound stragglers from every continent.

“The other people are waiting for the chance to be transported to Mars,” she explained in a sweet, mature voice. “But engineers ran out of resources to keep making the climate and gravity controlled settlements, so we could be stuck here for a while.”

Cassie said she and her mom were determined to find a source of water to revive the dying planet that literally had no aquifers left except toxic oceans, devoid of marine life.

“Rivers, wetlands, lakes and other fresh water sources ran dry hundreds of years ago, just about the time they started extracting and processing water molecules on Mars,” said Cassie.

A world without water? Fica-crap, Earth was doomed...

“All kinds of water is being syphoned from Mars now, but nothing drinkable left here on Earth. No aluminum resources to build more settlements left here, either, but Mars never had any at all,” the girl explained.

“Very interesting, please tell us more,” I kept hoping the girl might reveal something about aluminum being found on a remote planet, but she soon changed the subject instead.

Ironically, food, water and supplies for the people temporarily marooned on the once-green planet had to be shuttled down from the Red Planet. That was why the spacecraft from three days earlier had landed at the compound. It delivered provisions and left for the trip back to Mars the following day.

“My father is an important official with the new Mars government,” said Cassie, who seemed to sense we were interested in human activity. “So much has happened in the past few years that it caused him and my mom to separate and they are thinking of getting a divorce.”

Divorce? I’ll have to ask Brown about that later...

We learned that a year ago her dad had gotten a promotion in Mars leadership. It caused more problems in her parent’s marriage and they ended up living apart; him on Mars and her mother down here in the dome with Cassie.

The girl said her mother had even taken a short trip to Mars last month to try and talk things out with her father. But she concluded things didn’t go well, “because mom didn’t say much when she got back and I just stopped asking questions.”

“My father has been so busy helping establish the new government that I only get to see him occasionally when he hitches a ride on the supply shuttle. But he was too busy to come here this time.”

Cassie said she had no brothers or sisters. She mentioned something about the difficulty of couples being able to conceive children over the past 50 years or so, and it was blamed on decades of built up bio-contamination in food, air and other dwindling resources left on Earth.

At the end of our discussion when we were all half dead from the heat, Cassie agreed to make no mention of us to her mother and to meet with us again at the same time and the same spot the next day, so we could continue learning more about each other.

Then she reeled in her kite and we left in opposite directions.

As the clock was literally ticking away the days of our mission, we had finally found a source that might help us discover the level of human morality, and any plans of a potential raid on Rosen for aluminum by humans.

Great....but...

How were a few disguised prairie dogs, a bot-shifter and a Draxian primate supposed to hitch a ride to Mars and find Cassie’s father? Still, I was feeling slightly better about the human enlightenment equation, because Cassie Wilder didn’t strike me as the type who would find pleasure in killing any creature.

I had a mysterious and strong hunch about her good nature that I couldn’t explain.

The next morning, Qualdron sounded thrilled that we had finally made contact with a human, because it confirmed his intel, but he was not happy about what Jones had to say regarding an alternate mission. He sounded quite annoyed, in fact, and distracted. I could only guess, but it was probably an unknown counter-play by the council done at the last minute without previously consulting him.

I wanted to ask him who was actually running the mission, but I could tell by the look on his pale, pinched face that he was already calculating how to get at the truth of what was going on up the ranks.

Or at least that’s what I thought at the time...

We met Cassie again that day at the same strange berm covered with dead weeds. It was the second time all of us had gathered there and the girl soon discovered what made the berm so different and out of place from the rest of the landscape. She explained it was a big, long-buried steel expanse of pipeline, once used to carry oil over land to refineries that produced a source of fuel with atmospheric-polluting, planet killing, carbon emissions, as a byproduct.

“Finally, this can be used for something helpful,” said Cassie and we all pitched in to dig out one end that allowed us to forge a shady spot for our meetings.

“My mom and I are working on our experiments to find water sources on Earth without Mars Federation approval, and my dad doesn’t much like it, either, because he thinks it’s a waste of our time,” Cassie explained openly. “He changed a lot when he got promoted up the ranks.”

But she wasn’t able to answer any more of my questions about aluminum mining or details of her father’s involvement in the government’s space exploration projects. I didn’t want to press too much, so I changed the subject, and asked the girl one of the things I had read about in the society section of Earth’s history.

“Do you ever miss going to school with other kids...you know, going to sock-hops and prom dances, hanging out...and doing other teenage stuff?” was the clueless question I asked.

Cassie giggled out loud, but not in an unkind way.

“I have seen such things in educational documentaries,” she replied. “I did wear a pink, party dress once, with my hair all tied up for a ceremony before the last manned ship departed Earth for Mars a year ago. I had never worn anything like it before and I felt like a princess. But the celebration of human survival was bittersweet, because those of us left waiting for relocation had to watch the last giant transport ship lift off and disappear into the sky.”

Yes, this girl was intelligent and capable, but I couldn’t imagine what she and the other people had been through trying to survive as a species on a dying world.

Later that afternoon, my team and I sat around in our burrow munching dried roots and brainstorming strategies on how to get to Mars, and meet with Cassie’s father, but we just couldn’t come up with any conceivable way to do it.

Consequently, we were almost late that night for the Rabbit Hole entertainment session. We were actually beginning to enjoy watching humans in goofy, barely probable, make-believe situations.

“What delightful piece of performing art is in store for us this evening,” I asked Daisy as the town-folk shuffled into the chamber to assume the usual shoulder-to-shoulder position.

“It’s a thriller called ‘Sharknado 7’,” she replied excitedly.

Daisy explained the original story was about a catastrophic hurricane that flooded the streets of Los Angeles, with killer sharks that terrorized the hapless residents.

“So, this is the 7th remake of that scenario? How many different ways can the same storyline be told?” asked Moore, as we lined up at the far end in the back section reserved for us.

“Oh, we still haven’t seen 8 and 9 yet, but in every sequel the sharks get catapulted by huge 40-story-tall water funnels into a variety of major cities along the coastline from New York to Seattle,” explained Daisy, oblivious to Moore’s sarcasm.

Amazingly, the vision of teeth-gnashing sharks the size of refrigerators on a murderous pillage through flooded streets and buildings enthralled our PD friends for some reason.

Loveable and friendly they were, with just a pinch of never-boring eccentricity.

Clearly, they were aware of how ridiculous the plot-line was for the shark-fest movies, but it didn’t stop them from squealing in feigned fear and delight as the fake monsters steamrolled the Port of Miami tunnel to spread hair-raising mayhem everywhere.

Nothing could stop the ocean marauders...not steel, concrete or Godzilla.

“Oh, please just kill me now,” Moore, ever the critic, whispered into my ear.

Later, back at our burrow, I released Torie, who decided to change into a rattlesnake, and slither his way around our chamber before coiling up in the middle of the floor with his head raised up, so he could occasionally flick out his little snaky-tongue.

The rest of us got settled near our fluffy, dirt beds.

“I would give up my first cold shower if we could complete this mission and head back to Rosen before we are forced to watch any more of those sharks-gone-berserk movies,” said Moore, staring at Torie’s rattlesnake tail.

My thoughts turned to the mission. Mars was so close, but it might as well be a billion miles away. We had been meeting with Cassie every day for a few hours, but we were still stymied on how to determine the present level of overall human enlightenment with any certainty or how to uncover any plot by the Mars Federation to raid Rosen.

At that point, we only had a few weeks to complete the mission and vacate scorched Earth, because the wormhole connection was scheduled to automatically disengage as part of the mission-end protocol.

We were at a dead end.

Still...and maybe it was my stupid faltering prairie dog program, I felt edgy and sensed the worst was yet to come...and, oh bloody-hell, was I right.