Chapter Thirty-Four
Knowing what I now know, with the benefit of hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised by anything that happened, but that’s how life is when you can’t see the future. I envied the few races of the galaxy that had known precognitive abilities, at least a little. However, the thing about the precog races is, they didn’t see literal futures, only probabilities, and with various degrees of reliability. While they enjoyed a marvelous reputation as advisors, the reality was that in checking the models made by normal human methods versus precog races, beyond a matter of days, human modeling outperformed the precogs.
Largely because precogs could only come to a single conclusion individually or collectively, they were so predictive that they were myopic and to put it bluntly, unimaginative. Humans, because of their lack of predictive power beyond simple pattern seeking, created elaborate models that imagined many outcomes.
Most precog races were so limited that they had just enough warning of danger to know it was too late to avoid it.
And I doubted even a precog could have seen coming, the things that I experienced next. The hoverbus route carried us well out of the city limits, this was a functional necessity as any ship coming in would need substantial space and it would be extremely loud. This is one reason why Kentucky was one of the states where landings of this sort were possible, there were twelve points around earth that had been built expressly for large ships to land, but none of them had ever been used.
While I rode, I began browsing through the media outlets coverage of the event.
“...For the first time in history, an alien ship will be landing on Earth. The world’s media outlets are watching, and we now go live to the scene where crowds have gathered to watch the historic event.”
The camera panned to show numerous onlookers, drones, and individuals who were gathered in the observation areas. There were a handful of protest signs, mostly misspelled. “No Alyen Invasion” “No Alyuns” “Erth First” “Go Home Extra Tirestrials”.
But for every vile and hateful sign, there was something better a dozen times over. “Welcome, neighbors!” “We’re All Aliens to Someone” and “Friendship”, “Discovery!”, for every bad human who lived in fear and hatred… There are one hundred more who would sooner lend a hand, a hug, and help the people around them. I couldn’t help but pity the hateful ones.
“Their world is so small, they can’t see how big it all is… and what we could all do if we worked together…” I was thinking out loud as I scrolled over the screen.
What I said got Fauve’s attention, and she looked up from her own datapad and over toward mine, “Remember what I said before?” She asked, and as she’d said a lot before, I shook my head.
“You’re going to have to narrow that down.” I told her and she chuckled.
“Alright, that’s fair. I mean before everything, at the table before we met with Percival, how I wanted to speak for myself. How I didn’t want to live in fear, how ‘Fauve Walker does not live in fear.’ remember now?” She asked.
I did, and gave a quiet nod.
“Yes, what about it?” I asked, and she put her finger on my datapad, scrolling it up to a man whose face was frothing with anger, mouth open, holding a sign with a caricature of an alien on a sign and a giant X through it. She tapped the screen and began to play the short video.
“They wanna replace humans, dangerous creatures, they’s bad, it’s all a lie, they ain’t like us!” He was shouting, bouncing around with nervous, manic energy, his pudgy face sweating bullets as he went on and on about a vast conspiracy that was utter nonsense.
“That’s why.” She said with more solemnity in her voice than a young girl should ever have had. “I don’t want to be like them. Full of hate, full of fear, full of… whatever makes people think like that. You see them all the time, even these days. Little worlds, little minds, they’re cruel and think they’re kind, they’re evil and think they’re good, they’re full of fear and think they’re brave because they lash out. I won’t ever be like that. That’s why I had to go talk for myself.”
She wasn’t loud, but it got attention shifted to her from a few faces. Of course Boatswain and I drew some attention, but less than we would have had the Earth government not broadcast what our species looked like all over the world.
However, at first glance, Fauve looked like any other human girl, so she drew no notice on the hoverbus until she said what she did. From there the whispers spread and she was recognized as the one who, depending on you asked, ‘started’ or ‘was the start’ of what was popularly referred to as ‘The Battle of Waterland Park’.
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She sat up straighter in her chair, ignoring the eyes and whispers, I wondered if we might have drawn more attention than I liked, but Byron crossed his arms in front of his chest, and between he and Boatswain trading stares at anyone who looked her way too long, whatever passed for a peaceful ride was restored.
In retrospect, I think people were just curious to get a look at her, a kind of morbid curiosity. I doubt anyone intended anything threatening.
But Boatswain and Byron are security officers first and they took their work seriously. I couldn’t help but wonder what it would look like to watch the two of them fight together… but I dismissed that as my natural predatory instincts rearing their head, and pushed it down.
Thankfully, the hoverbus took us over a more skyward route allowing us to bypass large swaths of terrain, there was no need to abide by the roads, and as such what would have been a two to four hour drive, was a mere thirty minutes away, and the giant platform came into view.
It was a marvel of human engineering, simple and pragmatic. The concrete surface was framed by enormous nets that would catch anyone who was blown away. A single high tower stretched toward the sky, and an array of smaller buildings including everything from a medical quarantine center up to and including a military security point, all remained just outside the netting. The net itself was composed of nylon wrapped metal that was highly magnetic. This ‘magnetism’ was magnified tremendously by an underground facility, the purpose of which was to help draw the ship toward the center where yet another magnetic field would draw the incoming ship in and then lock it into place. The amount of power required for this would be sufficient to keep a city going for three straight days, and it was all used in an hour.
It goes without saying that starships were not expected to land often. But if they did? They would land exactly where they were supposed to.
As the hoverbus landed in the parking area and everybody disembarked, we saw the crowds were already there mobbing the waiting areas and platforms, but at least there was a rope corridor and a security detail from my embassy, along with our ambassador, and a matching group from the Earth government.
“We’re here.” I said when we came within speaking distance of the pair of ambassadors. I had to marvel at the fact that I was here. Unsurprisingly, Sxlith was also present, as was the rest of my class, but for me this held special significance.
Because unlike my colleagues, I had a personal stake in this, while they were bonding well with the other branches of the Walker family, they were also not on the short list of people who might have to leave. As such, Sxlith ensured I would get to go with the official welcoming party, a chance to meet this crazed Captain and make my request in person.
The noise and furor was such that none of us could hear the other, humans are a very noisy species. The crowd made my hair stand on end and I briefly froze up, even my ambition was not enough to make my legs start moving. The scale of the crowd was obvious, the numbers of humans was growing from hundreds, rapidly toward thousands. The noise of even quiet drones was growing like the wings of thousands upon thousands of mosquitos, I saw so many faces turned our way as Fauve took my arm and practically yanked me forward.
So much was on the line for me, between this and the crowd… the sea of smells and emotional states seeping out of human bodies from excitement to fear to hatred… it was getting to me. I wasn’t the only one, either. I looked down at Fauve who held my arm tight in her slender fingers, she looked up and caught my eye, ‘Come on. I’m here too.’ She mouthed, though maybe she actually said it out loud, if she did, it was drowned out.
On a large electrovid monitor… which to those not used to human tech is basically a video screen on fabric that you could stretch between two poles or pin to a wall, was set up where it could be seen by all.
This particular model was fifty paces tall and a hundred wide at least, and was set between two long metal flag poles which had been pressed into service for the occasion.
On the screen I got my first look at the vessel that was closing in. A small square showed the human newscaster, one of the darker variations of humans with a rich, smooth voice who said, “We’ve just been sent a first transmission from the Captain of the vessel, along with a brief transmission, a freighter class ship designation E-626, Earth designation ID ‘Red Spark’ here it is, on screen from its file photo.”
The echoing voice of the newscaster was quite neutral and might have been drowned out save for the impromptu speakers, and at the sight of the ship, the human onlookers, even the protestors fell quiet.
It was definitely a dlamisan cargo vessel. But from where we were standing by the time that announcement was made, and thanks to the new quiet from the pensive crowd, I could hear our ambassador speak quite clearly.
“That is not the right vessel. They must be wrong.” He said it so definitively that I found it hard to doubt him, but even so I had to ask…
“If that’s wrong, sir, then how is it here?” I raised my arm and pointed toward the sky, clouds were moving aside, blown away by the ship's decelerators, parting the sea of white over our heads as it came into view.