Temporal Exploring 101 - Deep Future

IV. 44 The last stand

"Why don't we all take a deep breath and calm down, shall we?" Larissa Montreve suggested.

"I am totally calm," Natty declared.

"So am I," the boy claimed.

"Fine. In that case, allow me to come back to my earlier question if there is anything else that Natalie and Catherine would like to know."

"Oh, there is plenty I would like to know," I assured her. "In particular, about the enemy. Who are they and what do they want?"

"They do come from outer space, that much is certain," Brianna explained. "They also have made it perfectly clear what they want from us. They want our temporal transit technology. As to who they are: we believe that they are non-organic life-forms."

"Machines?" I asked.

"Extremely advanced machines, created by an ancient civilization of organic alien life-forms that no longer exists. At least that is what they told us. They are not only very much technologically advanced – supposedly their own civilization has lasted more than a hundred thousand years already – but they also appear to be extremely intelligent. They had no difficulties to learn our language, and they are speaking it fluently, by now. They even seem to have an odd sense of humor. It appears that we amuse them."

"So you are actually communicating with them?" Natty asked. She looked pretty excited about it.

"Yes, we are. We talk to them fairly often." She turned towards Larissa. "Actually, to contact them may be the easiest way to answer Catherine's questions, don't you think so?"

"You are right." Larissa rose from her seat. She raised her voice.

"X1 initiate vidconf target ms1," she said, to no one in particular.

In response, one of the walls of the seminar room transformed into a large monitor. The initial static white noise turned into a view of what looked like a nondescript large room. Five shiny metallic spheres appeared to floating in mid-air, two of them in front and three in the background.

"Greetings, Montreve unit." The pleasant male voice sounded slightly bored. At the same time, one of the two spheres in front was blinking, as if to indicate which one of the alien beings was talking to us. "Have you finally decided to accept our terms and conditions?"

Larissa Montreve shook her head. "I told you already that we are never going to do that."

"You are aware that our ultimatum will expire tonight, three hours past midnight your time, aren't you?" the same voice as before asked.

"We are aware of that," Larissa confirmed.

"In that case, I fail to understand why you chose to contact us at this point." The voice sounded faintly disapproving now. "Incidentally, who is the young one sitting to your right?"

Natty's face lit up. Before anyone could stop her, she got up and answered: "Greetings, alien beings. I am Natalie Fogg."

"Natalie Fogg?" The voice transmitted from the alien ship sounded intrigued. "Would you believe it? They brought the Fogg unit from the past to save them. The one who derived the equations behind their time travel technology."

"If nothing else, that may render the game somewhat more interesting," a new voice declared, as the second of the two spheres hovering in front on the display blinked.

"A game? So this is a game to you?" Brianna Vercours asked.

"Of course it is. What else could it possibly be? A game not unlike your board game, chess. Sadly, in the current case the outcome is already decided. Only a few final moves need to be played out."

"It is not a game to us," Larissa Montreve coldly told them. "To us, this is about life or death for our people, and we shall defy you to the very end. X1 terminate vidconf now."

The screen on the wall flickered and went dark.

There was a moment of uneasy silence.

"What kind of drive to they use for their spaceships?" Natty inquired.

"To the best of our knowledge, they use a modified form of what was called a warp-drive in the 20th and the early 21st century," Brianna replied. "While the concept as such is well understood, nobody has figured out until today how the huge amount of energy and the negative energy states necessary to make it work might be implemented in practice. However, the enemy appears to have solved those problems. Which may not be such a big surprise considering that they had a hundred thousand years or more to do so."

Natty frowned. "What exactly is a warp-drive?"

Victor rolled his eyes.

Larissa ignored him. She leaned over and touched a spot on Natty's desk, which promptly turned into a screen. "Display the basic mathematics of a hypothetical warp-drive," she intoned.

On the display in front of Natty, text and mathematical equations appeared.

Natty grinned. "That's neat." She focused on the display. "Ah, I see ..."

Both Larissa and Brianna smiled.

I could have told them that they had made a grave mistake. Engrossed in the math, Natty would be all but lost to us for the remainder of our discussion.

"So, you are seriously planning to transit all citizens of the Alliance to the past, to a time well before homo sapiens developed?" I asked them. "How are you even going to do that?"

"We have prepared facilities for mass transit underground, deep underneath the Cities," Xavier Torc replied. "Tonight at 3 a.m., the enemy's mother ship will approach to initiate the final attack that will blast through our shields. We shall then initiate mass transit and at the same time spring our trap, which hopefully will deal the enemy a crippling blow."

"But even if that works, won't they just send for reinforcements from home?" I insisted.

"No reinforcements will arrive," Xavier told me. "From what they have told us, the enemy are few and spread thin when viewed on a galactic scale. They send small groups of spaceships on missions of exploration in the hope of gaining new knowledge and technology, but if such a mission fails they will not waste any further resources on exploring that particular region of space. Besides, if the enemy finds us gone and sees no more chance to obtain our transit technology, they are likely to leave Earth, anyhow. There is nothing else of interest to them here."

"But what are you trying to achieve by retreating deep into the past?" I asked. "Chances are that our people will fail and perish there. As far as I know, neither paleontologists nor archeologists have found any trace of an ancient civilization predating the advent of homo sapiens."

"That just means that we have to be extra careful not to leave any traces of us to be found," Larissa said. Her smile looked a bit forced. "Who knows, perhaps we shall develop our own interstellar drive and migrate to the stars, leaving Earth behind us."

"Whatever we do, we cannot stay and hand over transit technology to the enemy," Brianna summarized. "There is no telling what they would do with that knowledge. And where but to the time before homo sapiens appeared would you have us go? We are not prepared to mass transit to the year 1000 A.D. the way the Seipra did, and in doing so give up our civilization."

"That's what it comes down to," Larissa Montreve concluded. "We will make our last stand here, tonight, and then we shall retreat to the past. In doing so, we shall deprive the enemy of their prime objective and hopefully dissuade them from further attempts to conquer our planet."

In the heavy silence that ensued, Natty looked up from the equations displayed on the screen in front of her.

"You can do a lot more than that," she declared. "Also, I do not think you ought to retreat deep into the past."

***************************************

A / N :  As always, I am looking forward to get your feedback, so please consider adding your comments or voting.