The Euclidian: When Worlds Collide

PROLOGUE

Morgan was a teenage loner. He spent most of his free time wandering the streets of DC playing with his tennis racket, hitting balls against a wall or at targets. One day while playing in an alley he was thrust between an alien hunter and his alien prey. He ended up saving an alien kid not unlike himself and now he is the last hope for the planet Earth.

CHAPTER 1

CAPTAIN SHISAL

Two individuals in deep discussion walked down a long, wide, dimly lit corridor, followed by a shadowy figure. Light tubes stretched across the ceiling and down the walls, providing some light in the otherwise dark expanse. The sound of their boots striking heavily against the metal floor echoed down the vastness of the corridor. One of the individuals was Captain Shisal, the skipper of the space vessel Andrea in which they were traveling. The other was Commander Lippon, the chief interrogator. Locked metal doors lined the corridor. Each door led to a cell for the enormous resource extraction ship’s interrogation area. The cells were full of captives from other planets. Some were spies. Some had been captured in hopes of recruiting them as spies. Others had been captured during mining operations on distant planets, thought to hold valuable information that the captain wanted to extract.

Figure 1. Captain Shisal and Commander Lippon followed by shadowy figure

On rare occasions a crewmember, probably guilty of some mutinous activity, could be found imprisoned in a cell. Crewmembers didn’t last a long time on this level. It was well known how to interrogate Euclidians, the race of people that ran the ship. Once a crewmember had spilled the beans about intent, plans, and accomplices, he was typically tossed into space in full view of other crewmembers. The captain felt that type of punishment acted as a deterrent to others that might be considering mutinous acts. To maintain discipline and discourage insurrection, the captain sometimes bestowed a more ruthless form of punishment against crewmembers.

The many security measures on the ship made mutiny extremely difficult, but not impossible. One successful method was to take out the captain and form an alliance with the XO. The ship’s sensors mitigated the captain’s risk of assassination but they were fallible. Captain Shisal had survived an attempt on an earlier mission, and learned a valuable lesson about decreasing his level of vulnerability. Hence the shadowy figure that followed him as he toured the ship. That person had a sole purpose on the ship: keep the captain alive.

The conversation continued as they walked by an interrogation room where an Earthling was being questioned. The interrogator was trying to get the captive to provide a map of where the nuclear material under his command was stored. The sound of a power drill broke through the voices.

I don’t want to waste any more time torturing you, said the interrogator to his prisoner. I’m going to drill a hole in your head, he said, pulling the drill’s trigger so the man could clearly hear the sound, and then I’m going to place these Bellini bugs over the hole so they can enter your skull and eat away at your brain. The section of your brain that I will be drilling into is the one that controls your ability to withhold information. Little by little you will feel your self-control slip away until you will be conversing with me as freely as if you were talking to a trusted friend.

The workers in the interrogation area were ruthless beings. Not because they were necessarily evil, they just hadn’t evolved with a compassion gene. When a grizzly bear attacks a human and mauls it to death, it doesn’t do it because the bear holds a grudge against the human or derives pleasure from the attack. It’s just what they do. The Perjorans were a race of emotionless beings, much like sharks or jellyfish. They tortured other beings to get answers requested by their superiors. They might kill their captives on occasion, but not with malice or enjoyment. They were just doing their job.

Unfortunately, the interrogator continued, once I have the information I need I won’t be able to retrieve the bugs from your brain. Not to worry though, we will dispose of your body in space long before the little invaders eat away at any parts of your brain that might lead to an excruciating death.

The interrogator pulled at the drill’s trigger a few more times to drive the point home and then placed the drill bit against the human’s head. The human screamed and begged for mercy. If I tell you what you want to know, pleaded the prisoner, will my life be spared?

I promise that we won’t kill you, replied the interrogator. We will give you a comfortable and safe place to live out your life. Now tell me what I want to know and STOP WASTING MY TIME!

The prisoner confessed everything he knew about where the nuclear material was hidden. A message was sent to an agent back on Earth and the human was placed in a holding cell while his information was verified. Later he was sold to a private collector of alien species and spent the rest of his life on display like a zoo animal.

Captain Shisal was happy to hear that this particular prisoner had decided to talk. Knowing the whereabouts of the nuclear material would be important to the success of the ship’s next mission. Captain Shisal did not like going into a mission with too many unknowns. He also didn’t like surprises like the one he had gotten from a cell he visited earlier. An Alpha had been captured on the last planet they visited. How did he get there, the captain wondered, and what was his purpose? And what was he to do about it? Technically, according to the truce, he was not supposed to hold any Alphas hostage. Interrogating one could cause him to lose his ship or even land him in prison. He figured he would quietly put a psych on the Alpha and see what he could figure out surreptitiously before letting him go at the next port. No reason to waste electrons using the Andrea’s transporter.

Blue tubes in the corridor marked the entrances to cells holding those waiting to be interrogated. Red tubes marked the doors of rooms where prisoners were actively being interrogated. Captain Shisal and Commander Lippon were headed to a particular cell with a red tube.

The ship was normally silent. Ventilation systems, engines, and equipment were normally pretty quiet. Here, however, screaming, begging, and whimpering could be heard coming from the cells over the sound of the uniformed figures’ heavy boots. The smell of fear was in the air and not just from those being interrogated. The captain was irritated about the lack of progress in interrogating a certain prisoner and he wanted his irritation to be known. Have you tried everything? the captain demanded. Pain, drowning, manure, killing a family member, the animal cage?

Yes, Captain, we’ve tried all that and more, replied Commander Lippon, nervous about disappointing him. The captain was not very forgiving. He had survived two wars and a mutiny, basically unscathed, and after all that did not suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The captain was not prone to mental scarring. That was something he inflicted upon other people, like interrogation officers who didn’t get him the information he needed.

Bring in the psychic. I want to know how that weapon works by this time tomorrow or you’ll be the next one that we test new interrogation techniques on.

Aye, aye, Captain, replied Commander Lippon. He bowed and hurriedly left the captain’s side.

Captain Shisal continued his tour of the interrogation area. He had just completed a mission and was on his way back home to turn in his bounty. He needed to know the worth of everything to be certain of maximizing his earnings from the haul. Understanding how all the captured systems worked helped him understand how much he could charge. The new weapon they had discovered was a good example. Sometimes he had to torture people to find out what he needed to know.

Captain Shisal commanded one of the many ships that were used to mine distant planets for their resources, which were then sold on the open market. Most of the spoils from the mining operations were purchased by the government, which either added them to their military arsenal or distributed them to the citizenry to help continue their dissemination throughout their galaxy. The Euclidians had learned from the Alpha attack that they needed to deploy their military capabilities beyond their home planet to avoid being trapped there. The government had funded the research and development for the original ships used in the early mining missions. In return, it had first right of refusal for all goods that were returned. Once they had their pick, businesses, wealthy individuals, and other planets could purchase the goods returned from mining missions.

Captain Shisal had been lucky on his latest mission. He had discovered a remarkable weapon just developed by the inhabitants of the newly conquered planet. The weapon could somehow break down the molecular bonds of a substance. By simply dialing-in an element’s atomic definition and firing the weapon at an object, all traces of the element within the object were deconstructed, and the object destroyed.

Their military never had a chance to use it against the Euclidians; it was still in development. Their scientists destroyed the design and usage files before the Euclidians could acquire them. Unfortunately for the scientists, they had been captured and eventually the interrogators would get the information they needed. The Euclidians had mastered several means of interrogation, and no captive could keep his secrets from the Euclidians for long, except through death. But the Euclidians were careful to keep their captives alive until they were ready for them to die. Dead captives were of no use to Euclidians. They only represented lost knowledge, labor, or money. Killing them was not tolerated unless absolutely necessary. If a prisoner became unruly they had several means to non-fatally subdue them.

Shisal had been in the mining business for the twelve years since he left the military. It was not something he would have ever put on his list of desirable occupations while he was in school. It seemed too much like being part of a large business, which he had always resisted.

Chaell Shisal grew up in an upper middle class family in an exclusive region of the Peejay Province. His father was a retired army officer, become businessman, and his mother was a professor of astronomy at the university. He had loved his father’s war stories and often dreamed of being in the military, leading the charge against an enemy. But the wars ended shortly after he joined the military, and his father felt that to remain would be a waste of his talents. Chaell’s father ran a successful resort and pleasure business catering to wealthy Euclidians, founded with the help of his military and political contacts, and he wanted his son to help run it.

Chaell’s mother thought he would enjoy being a college professor like her, based on his curiosity about technology in the science fiction movies that he enjoyed watching. She didn’t know that it was the fighting and carnage he enjoyed more than the space exploration or scientific aspects of the movies. Chaell always saw himself as the commander of one of the space vessels, attacking a formidable enemy and winning. Sitting in a classroom and teaching students, or sitting in an office and measuring return on investment, was not his idea of excitement.

As soon as Chaell was old enough, he left home to join the military. Though it didn’t deliver the action he had hoped for, it got him away from his parents and their constant nagging about following in their boring footsteps. After basic training, Chaell specialized in air combat. He took advanced training in hand-to-hand combat, weapons, and assassination techniques. He considered himself a peaceful person, but he longed to kill someone in the line of duty.

The first two years of his military life were drudgery. Chaell felt he might as well have joined his father’s business. Then the Alpha attack came. He was a junior flight officer of a military aircraft but due to the loss of command and control, he had been grounded and unable to participate in the battle. The military lost so many aircraft during the attack that it was afraid to send any more out and besides, those currently in service were not designed to operate in space. The event had darkened Chaell. At the moment he had been waiting for all of his life, all he could do was sit back and listen to the reports of his comrades being slaughtered by the thousands.

Years later when a counterattack was launched, Shisal, now a squadron commander, was assigned to destroy any enemy vessel that attempted to escape to their outer planets. The plan was to do as much as they could to minimize the Alphas ability to ever attack the Euclidians again.

As commander, Shisal was expected to stay back and manage the logistics of his squadron’s attack. But that was not his way. He not only led the attack, he destroyed more enemy vessels than anyone in his squadron, and against the orders of the air wing commander led an attack against a remote planet to which some Alphas had fled. Afterward, instead of a reprimand, he received a commendation and was promoted to air wing commander when the current commander suddenly retired.

Chaell had finally achieved his dream. This was why he had joined the military. He was not going to pass up an opportunity he’d waited for his entire life because of some silly rules of engagement. Luckily, his gamble paid off.

After the Alpha attack, life returned to normal for Commander Shisal. His air wing was assigned to patrol the solar system frontier, the duties split amongst his six squadrons. He found it painfully boring. Then, at the end of a long patrol he received a distress call from the Delta Quadrant. Several thousand Alpha ships had attacked the Delta home planet, landing a large force of ground troops and establishing a foothold on an isolated part of the planet. The Delta air defenses were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer number of ships that the Alphas had propelled into the battle. The Alphas lost a lot of ships, but didn’t seem to care. Their main objective was to take out the Delta space defenses and the major military bases on the planet so they could land their ground troops, and they accomplished that mission early on.

The battle raged for a week before the Deltas sent a distress call to the Euclidians. The Euclidian high command spent a day reviewing options and finally decided to send in Commander Shisal’s air wing to protect the space around the planet and set up new base stations. A mining vessel was sent to collect four of Commander Shisal’s six squadrons and place them in orbit above the Delta home planet. Within a month the squadron had secured the area above the planet and placed in orbit four new space stations with tactical capabilities. As the Alpha space fleet and bases became ineffective, the fighting moved to the planet’s surface.

Over the next six months, the Delta planet was overrun run by the superior Alpha military. A truce was signed to prevent the slaughter of billions of the Delta population. The Euclidian fleet was forced to pull back and remove their space stations, which were soon replaced by Alpha space stations.

Commander Shisal was annoyed at the truce. He had lost several of his men in the war and was not ready to accept defeat. Why, he demanded, should a truce between the Alphas and the Deltas apply to the Euclidians? Why couldn’t he send his air wing into the Alpha Quadrant and wipe them all out of existence? The greater good was the only response he received.

Once Shisal’s tour of duty was over, he left the military in disgust and joined the mining alliance as security officer on a resource extraction ship. He felt that, with their excursions into deep space, he would eventually run across some hostile species that was looking to start a fight. But he soon found out that the real danger came from greedy crewmembers that wanted to keep more of a ship’s haul for themselves. After fending off those types of attacks for several years he became the executive officer (XO) of a resource extraction vessel. Three missions later he became captain of the Andrea, one of the newest resource extraction vessels. That had been five missions ago. Now he saw it as his destiny to eventually retire with mining wealth, and to join the ranks of the idle rich waiting to die. It was not something he wished for, but at his age it seemed all but unavoidable.

As much as he resisted it, he found his parents’ dreams for him intertwined with his own destiny. As the captain of the ship he was running his own mining business, and he was responsible for teaching new crewmembers about the wonders of space. He sometimes laughed to himself about the cleverness of fate. But as he found out on his next mission, when he became the commander of a new army against an all too familiar foe, fate had a lot more in store for him.

CHAPTER 2

THE EUCLIDIAN

The Euclidian were a homogeneous society of humanoid creatures that have moved beyond large-scale conflict among themselves. A central council with representatives from every major region governed the planet. After their mining operations started, the Euclidian citizens did not have many needs. They continued to have wants and desires, though, and many of those had been satisfied as citizens became part of the mining trade, which was extremely lucrative.

The space mining business, which had grown to be the most profitable enterprise on the planet, started gradually. Before conquering space, the Euclidian had to first learn to conquer the skies. According to Euclidian history, which dated back some 120,000 years, it took them 30,000 years after the first written word to invent the first aircraft. There were disputes over who had created the original glyphs that made up the early written languages. It was known that in prehistory, there had been two other humanoid civilizations on Euclidia, both extinguished during early tribal wars.

The Euclidians of the modern era were intelligent, tall, muscular beings who averaged just over 2.5 meters in height. They had rough brown skin much like the Central Bearded Dragon. They had flat noses with two nostrils. They had small pig-like ears. They didn’t have much for hair, just strands here and there. The other two humanoid species were smaller, more agile creatures. Disputes over land and food had often led them to war, and while the modern Euclidians were outnumbered, their brain and brawn was more than a match for the smaller, less intelligent creatures. At the time the climactic wars began, the modern-day Euclidians had advanced to metal weapons and shields while the other humanoids were still using wooden and stone weapons. After an attack by one of the smaller humanoid tribes killed over 50,000 and destroyed many of their villages, the modern Euclidians were so enraged that they decided to exterminate each and every one of the other species.

Museums displayed the skeletal remains of the other humanoid species, but that was all that remained of them. The modern Euclidians continued to evolve, forging new kinds of metals, discovering new ways to use minerals, and inventing new technology. After 30,000 years they learned to fly. A hundred years later they were flying into space. And after 31,000 years, they had mastered intergalactic travel using a gravity-based technology. In their early history they had spread across their planet and brought home new discoveries from far off lands. Now, in the age of space, they brought home new discoveries from far off planets. They discovered many other planets as they spread across their galaxy, but they never considered attempting to populate a new planet. There was plenty of room on their planet and no one showed an interest in setting up a colony light-years from home.

After the Euclidians developed gravity-based space travel, getting around their solar system became routine. They simply used a negative gravity field to lift off from their planet, pointed the gravitational engine at a target planet, and away they went. Their ships reached speeds in excess of 50,000 kilometers per second, which would get them to any planet in their solar system within a day. The Euclidians soon learned, however, that they had to develop shield technology if they wanted their ships to survive a voyage at galactic speeds. Any small piece of material floating in space that a ship traveling at high speed encountered could easily rip through the hull and destroy the ship. Before they developed shield technology, they would send out a scout drone to fly ahead of the ship and report any objects that were detected. This technique mitigated the risk of hitting an object in space, but it was not foolproof, and they typically lost several drones on each trip.

After several failed attempts, the Euclidians finally developed a shield technology that kept their ships safe. The next challenge to overcome was teleportation. If they were going to bring back loads of minerals from other planets they had to find a simpler means to move material from the surface of a planet into the orbiting mother ship’s holds.

When visiting foreign worlds, the Euclidians rarely ran across humanoid inhabitants. When they did, they were careful to share only technology that would make the inhabitants more productive. They kept all weapon and space technology to themselves, and were careful not to expose the inhabitants to any advanced technology that might place the Euclidians in a difficult negotiating position. At this stage of their societal development, the Euclidians sought friendly relationships with other civilizations. They only strip mined uninhabited planets and were careful not to disrupt a planet’s composition to the point that it would be destabilized or left uninhabitable.

The minerals and goods that were retrieved from mining operations were used to improve the lives of all Euclidians. Their polluted air was even recycled with clean air from other planets. They were surprised to learn that some civilizations had created cheap clean sources of energy, but had not discovered space travel. Even the civilizations that had achieved space travel were primitive in their abilities compared to the Euclidians. None were to the point of being able to leave their solar systems in manned vehicles.

The Euclidians eventually established outposts on their three moons. These were used as expensive getaways for the extremely wealthy. The idea of creating a colony on a distant planet still did not interest the government or the average Euclidian. Nor was the idea of using distant outposts for military purposes of any interest to the Euclidians who thought it would be a waste of resources and manpower. But with the invention of long distance space travel, they eventually changed their view on colonization.

The Euclidian’s discovery of technology for long distance space travel was purely accidental. There were many challenges to overcome, and plenty of mistakes during the early phases. An extensive trial and error period as they refined the technology did not prevent subsequent unforeseen events from occurring.

Gravity propulsion to provide high-speed travel for the mining vessels was developed through hundreds of years of research. The technology involved simulating gravity to propel a ship toward or away from any celestial body, and it did an amazing job of moving ships of any size quickly or slowly through space. Controlling the engines was a challenge. Taking off too fast, stopping too fast, going at too high a speed, or trying to operate more than one engine at a time tended to cause the ships to become unstable and disintegrate.

Once the kinks were worked out in the gravity drive, extraterrestrial mining became a growing concern. The Euclidians mined the planets and moons in their solar system as much as they dared and then went to nearby systems. The mining ships had to be large, to make the multi-year trips worthwhile, and they incorporated all the creature comforts needed to attract a crew beyond just the money. Artificial gravity permitted the crew to walk around easily. There was a gym, a library, a pool, and an entertainment room and bar where the crew could socialize with each other.

Crewmembers were free to fraternize as long as they did their jobs. The standard complement of 120 seemed a bit large considering the simple mission of the ship, and for the most part they didn’t have much to do until the mining started. Then they were all busy ensuring that the mining progressed as efficiently as possible. Most of the crew were trained in several areas. Doctors were cooks, mechanics steered the ship, and everyone knew how to drive the mining vehicles. They also had to understand what to mine for because they didn’t want to fill the ship’s stores with useless rock.

Because of the length of missions and the dangers of space, there were not a lot of applicants to join mining crews. Most missions were to locations an average of three light years away. At 200,000 km/sec, the speed of the fastest ships, it took just under three years to reach their destinations, and made for a round-trip commitment of about five years. The high-speed got the crew there and back quickly, which is what they wanted because they hated the isolation of space travel. The increased speed was welcomed, but there remained a huge danger from the minute possibility of the ship running into something in space. An object only a centimeter across could rip through the ship, destroying it and killing the entire crew. To minimize this risk, the crew was housed in the center-rear of the ship. Critical systems were duplicated and dispersed throughout the ship.

The innovation that made high-speed travel truly practical was the force shield. This shield, once perfected, extended for two kilometers around the ship, and helped to destroy, block, deflect, and cushion objects