Scorched Earth, Alien Wonders
Chapter 12: Blindsided

Another week crawled by and the spy in my group was still unknown. And every day we would make the trek to the lab to hang out with Cassie and Sara, so Jones could work on the deep-core extraction plans with them, and we could clandestinely try to figure out a plan to get to Mars.

Every. Damn. Sweltering. Day.

And every night we would get back to the Rabbit Hole in time to join Daisy and the town-folk for entertainment.

One night, on the way back to our burrow after watching a notorious movie called “The Ancient Expendables” that thrilled the jolly town-folk all nine times they had seen it—Jones and I held back to talk, and let the rest of the team head in for the night.

I took the mini-binocs from around my neck, expanded them to full size, set them on the ground at the side of the burrow, then climbed on the top to balance on my hind feet, so I could...almost...look Jones in the face.

“Qualdron told me this morning, that another coded message was intercepted two days ago. That makes a total of three,” I told her.

“How can that be, when you said the binoculars haven’t been out of your sight?”

“I don’t know, because the only time they have NOT been around my neck during the day or under my head at night, is when Torie has shifted from the binocs into another form and it wouldn’t be possible for anyone to send any kind of message when he is out of stasis.”

“Are you ready to listen to my idea yet?”

I found myself reluctant to hear Jones’ suggestion. Was I afraid it would be a good idea or a bad one?

“Okay, what is your plan?”

“Why don’t you just ask them?”

Hmmmmm?

“Jones, that’s absurd. Let’s suspend reality for a second and say I just blurt out the question ‘oh, by the way, who has been sneaking messages back to Rosen on the binocs?’ What happens if no one confesses?”

“Yeah, you’re probably right. It’s not like you haven’t known most of these guys for a long time and couldn’t tell if they were hiding something.”

“What about Doc? He is the one I suspect, and if I just lay the question out there, it alerts him that we know what he’s been doing.”

“Well, then. If the messages stop, you would pretty much have your answer, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, puckered piss-ants,” I whispered under my breath, annoyed by her logic. “We better get in before the others get restless.”

A few minutes later, as we were all getting settled onto our fluffy, dirt beds in the darkening chamber, I don’t know what came over me...but I just blurted out the question.

“Listen up, for a minute, guys. Have any of you taken the binocs on this mission to send messages back to Rosen?”

“What?” Brown asked. “Because I was just starting to fall asleep way over here and I’m not sure I heard you right.”

“Yeah,” said Davis. “Because it kinda sounded like you just asked if one of us is breaking protocol and I’m the one who usually tells jokes around here.”

Moore stood up and glared at me. He didn’t say anything. He just looked me straight in the eyes without blinking.

“How about you, Doc?” I asked Jenkins, as he was putting his glasses back on his face to gaze around the room.

“The only time I’ve used the binoculars is to diagnose your malfunctioning subroutine,” he replied. “I wouldn’t even know how to send a message. Although I’m sure I could figure it out if my feet were on fire, which is pretty much how they’ve felt every day since we got here.”

The comic relief was welcome, and everyone had a good laugh. They all seemed convincing, and now I was caught in a corner, just like I feared. I threw an accusing look across the room at Jones.

“You forgot someone,” she said, leveling her gaze at me.

“Who?” I laughed and scoffed at her question. “Well, I sure as fica-hell didn’t do it! Why, did you?”

“I’m not talking about me or you...I’m talking about Torie.”

Another glorious day on scorched Earth arrived a few hours later, filtering hazy sunlight down the entrance to the inside of our stuffy burrow. I sent Jones and the team on ahead to the lab, while I connected an unscheduled call to Qualdron.

“Last night, Torie admitted sending the unauthorized messages to a section in the office of the assistant chief to Empress Osette,” I told the disheveled looking Rosenian, as we talked to each other through the expanded lenses of the binocs.

“But how could he do that in stasis?”

“The more important question is why?” I responded to Qualdron.

“Last night after I called him out and asked if he knew anything about it, he said ‘yes’, but when I asked him why, he just repeatedly declined to answer, other than to confirm it was a two-word code and not Rosen language.”

“What does Jones think?”

“She said that it’s not unusual for bot-shifters to retain some sentient awareness even in stasis. Especially, ones like Torie, who have a lot of experience working on long, off-world missions.”

Just then Torie confirmed his awareness by running the words “ain’t love grand?” across the inside of the lenses for both of us to see.

“Okay, Torie,” I said, giving Qualdron the sign-off signal. “Please come out and tell me what’s on your mind.”

The binoculars swirled into the familiar grey funnel, than Torie stood in front of me with a mischievous look in his grey eyes.

“Are you ready to share with the other boys and girls now?”

“Okay, I was sending a message to my girlfriend in the administrator’s office. That’s all.”

“Girl friend?”

“I’m old, but I’m not on the Nano-trash heap yet. I know it’s not accepted protocol, but I just didn’t think I would miss her so much.”

“You know that Qualdron will insist on knowing who she is and what you said to her.”

Torie scuffed the dirt with his bare, purple toes.

“Her name is Arthea. She is a retired bot-shifter with free will, who resides in a decommissioned telescope sitting in Empress Osette’s administrative lab.”

He scuffed the dirt with his toes again.

“We discovered each other a year ago serendipitously, when we were both in the form of blue, dragonflies on a local botany research trip with Osette’s science panel.

Dragonflies?

“Okay, I get that you miss this female, but you know the rules.”

“When you get as old as I am, the rules just seem silly sometimes, when we all know these galactic adventures won’t amount to a hill of tropian-turds a hundred years from now.”

“Ah, gee-whiz, Torie. Next you will be calling me ‘dude’ and quoting ancient Deineze philosophy.”

Torie just shrugged a defiant shoulder.

“You know I couldn’t care less, but Qualdron will insist on knowing what your code said, and if it’s all innocent like you just explained, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“It WAS innocent, without a trace of treasonous intent. It was a message between my girlfriend and me, and it’s none of anyone else’s damn business.”

Hmmmmm...

“When should I tell Qualdron you will have an answer for me on the messages you sent?” I asked, thinking he just needed a little time to be reasonable.

“You can tell him the answer will be at the corner of No Way and Not Gonna Happen!”

Then he swirled into the mini-binocs and slammed into the dirt.

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

Anyway, with the great spy mystery solved, and time ticking away, I could no longer avoid the possibility of mission failure to uncover plans by mankind to raid Rosen.

Sure, we could say with sufficient certainty that today’s humans were no longer depraved, brutal bullies toward inferior beings like many were a century ago, but the question of a possible raid on our planet was no closer to being answered than I was to riding Torie’s donkey on Rosen’s second moon.

The answer was on Mars with Cassie’s father and we couldn’t devise a way to get there in time. I even considered having Torie shift into a shuttlecraft to transport us to the Red Planet, but there were only about a dozen things wrong with that little plan. Even boosting his metrics and using super-flash speed, Torie could never hold that form long enough. And there wouldn’t be enough time to get there, find out if humans are cooking up a plot to seize aluminum from Rosen and get back in time to catch a ride home in the wormhole.

It just isn’t feasible...

Even if we didn’t have those problems, and could land on Mars cloaked and undetected how would we get entrance to the right settlement to find Cassie’s father? But we COULD get hit by an asteroid on the way and end our misery.

I had never failed at any mission, but I was seriously thinking of throwing in the towel and going home...where at least it would be cooler.

Oh...stop being such a whiner and find a way.

Suddenly...a crazy idea popped into my hay-wired head that just might be the answer.

I put the mini-binocs around my neck and hot-footed it from Suburbia in the mid-morning heat to join up with everyone at the lab. I opened the door and embraced the rush of cool air from inside. The room was lit by overhead lighting for the first time. I was surprised by the sight of Cassie and Sara watching every member of my team dancing in the middle of the room to very loud, unfamiliar music.

Hot-diggity-damn!

I put the binocs on the floor, and ran over to join the line-dance my team had going, with Jones at the end.

We stood on our hind legs, and did the wide-step shuffle, arm-waves, robot moves, scissor-steps, circle-hands, and at the end of the song Doc did a few back flips so smoothly his eye glasses didn’t even fall off.

Cassie and Sara laughed and applauded loudly.

“How did you guys learn to dance like that?” asked Cassie.

“Well, since we have been a captive audience of the movie Footloose at the Rabbit Hole every Saturday night since we got here, and since every town-folk, young and old gets up and dances along with Kevin Bacon at the end—I guess we picked up a few moves,” I explained, feeling a bit dazzled by the admiration.

“Yeah, the town-folk love Kevin Bacon so much they even have a picture of him hanging in the Community Center, along with Ted Turner,” explained Brown.

Cassie and Sara smiled and marveled at Suburbia’s prairie dogs for their insight, talent, and humorous nature.

“That was so much fun,” Cassie said. “We just don’t have much to laugh and dance about these days, and actually, today is no exception, but we couldn’t resist putting on Lady Gaga’s classic song, ‘Poker Face’, to cheer ourselves up.”

“And, it was a delightful surprise when everyone started dancing,” Sara joined in. “Music is sometimes the only way to remember what joy really feels like.”

“We have music on Rosen, too, but it’s quite different...more like Govi, than Gaga,” explained Brown. “During my research about the history of this planet, I came across an interesting quote about music.”

“It goes something like this...you know what music is? God’s little reminder that there’s something else besides us in this universe—a harmonic connection between all living beings everywhere; even the stars,” recited Brown.

“It was quoted by Robin Williams, a great actor and comedian, in an early 21st century movie.”

The room was silent for a bit as we all absorbed the wisdom of the quoted words.

“Why was today no exception?” I asked, snapping back to reality. “Did something bad happen?”

Jones, Sara and Cassie looked at each other as if to say, “Who wants to answer that question?”

“The new experiments we finished had positive results on how to unlock the H2O from core-rock molecules, but the problem is still how to get deep enough into the mantel of the planet to use electronic waves on hydroxyl fragments, causing them to release their water content,” said Cassie, like she was explaining something as simple as inner-ear itch.

Yep, there’s that science talk again.

I’ll tell you later,” Jones said in response to our puzzled looks.

“How deep are we talking about?” Davis asked.

“Precisely 200-miles down to reach the ancient aquifer we found here,” said Sara. “And that’s considerably closer than 300-miles scientists estimated over a century ago. There wasn’t an oil-drilling rig on the planet big enough to go down that deep, and we still have the same problem.”

“Instead of thinking big, like oil drilling rigs, Sharknados or Godzilla,” said Moore. “Why don’t you think small?”

“Are you remembering the Black-Passeus exploration mission?” Davis asked.

“I wasn’t the captain on that one, so tell us what happened,” I requested, trying to remember details from back then.

“I was the lead on that project over a year ago, because you were busy with that whole pintwaq removal thing,” Moore said, reminding me of a painful surgery I had during that time, which put me out of commission for weeks.

“Me and Davis were walking along a trail, when we encountered a bazillion tiny sand hiebbies”, explained Moore. “They bubbled up out of the rocky terrain and crawled up one of Davis’ long legs. He screamed like a banshee getting an ear sawed off with a rusty knife!”

“You’re just glad it wasn’t you,” responded Davis, with a laugh. “Besides, I wasn’t scared...I was NOT scared...I was TERRIFIED!”

Everyone one got a good laugh out of the way Davis made fun of his embarrassing encounter with flesh-eating insects, but all told, they were no match for Torie’s bot-nytes.

“Explain that bot-nyte thing,” said Cassie, after Moore concluded his story.

“As soon as Davis started screaming, I hit the emergency response button on Torie’s binocs. In less than a second he took the appropriate defense, which was to shift into millions of tiny, swarming, bot-nytes that fatally squelched the nasty, little micro-killers.”

“Outstanding,” said Cassie, “but how does that help us with the deep-core problem?”

“I don’t know,” said Moore. “You guys are the scientists. I thought maybe small things crawling deep into the ground might be something to consider rather than digging down with big things you don’t have...or not.”

Cassie, Sara and Jones looked at each other across the room, then they moved over to one of the hanging computer screens with equations on it and stood there looking at it for the longest time.

Occasionally, one of them would wave their hand or point a finger and move things around as if searching for an answer to a question or a new concept. Then Jones did a funny thing. She grabbed her bifurcated tail and held it up to explain something to Cassie and Sara.

“Could Torie’s bot-nytes carry anything?” Jones asked, looking at me from across the room.

“Well, individually they are microscopic, so what do you have in mind?”

“Could they be sprayed with a coating that contained cloned hydrogen and oxygen molecules?” Jones continued.

“I think I see where you are going with this,” injected Sara. “But once the bot-nytes reach the underground fragments, wouldn’t we still need something to cause a physical change in the properties of molecular elements to prompt the release of water components?”

“Yes, and that’s where Jones’ weapon comes in,” replied Cassie.

Wait. What?

Everyone looked at Jones.

Weapon?

Suddenly, the science stuff was sounding a lot more interesting to me.

“Weapon!?” I asked loudly, as everyone’s attention perked up. “You know weapons aren’t allowed Jones.”

“Well...it’s not a weapon...not really. It is a Draxian monkey’s natural self-defense,” Jones explained. “And...”

She paused.

“Oh, please...DO go on,” I said, sarcastically. “What else have you been keeping from us?”

“Okay...it was actually the real reason why I didn’t want a prairie dog subroutine,” explained Jones, holding her tail up with one hand, and stroking it with the other, making her look a bit like the cowardly lion in the classic Wizard of Oz movie we saw on Friday night.

Cute, but very bizarre movie, and ironically, the flying monkeys scared the fica-hell out of Jones.

“This tail can deliver electrical shocks that are strong enough to paralyze the predators on Draxia, which are mean-spirited, hairy, little spider-beasts,” Jones continued. “I knew this mission was more than surveillance, so it was just a precaution solely on my part.”

Before I could say another word, Cassie cut back to the science talk.

“We think if Torie’s chemical-coated, bot-nytes could penetrate deep enough to connect with hydroxyl fragments in the dried underground aquifer, then Jones could use her tail to spark an electronic pulse, and set off the reaction that would cause water to be released from the molecules and force them up through the ground,” said Cassie, excitedly.

“Or, it might not work at all,” said Sara, who was always the pragmatic one.

The only member on my team that had NOT developed glazed eyeballs by this point was Davis, our tech guy, so we looked at him like idiots seeking enlightenment.

“Okay,” he said. “Remember how Jones pointed out that Sheldon Cooper said people’s brains should be installed with a trigger that would explode if they said something stupid about science?”

“Ummmm...no”, I replied.

“Anyway, this is something like that, except the bot-nytes will install H20 laden-triggers into the fragments, and Jones’ tail will deliver the electric pulse that will cascade down for miles, and cause little itty-bitty explosions times a million, thereby releasing tons of water,” concluded Davis, smiling at his own genius explanation.

“Ah-haaa,” Moore and I said in unison, shaking our heads in mock understanding.

I looked over at Jones for confirmation of Davis’ description of what Torie would be doing and she shrugged one shoulder, so I didn’t know how accurate it was, but I had too many other things on my mind.

Suddenly, I could feel the mini-binocs trembling around my neck and I knew that Torie had been listening to our conversation, so I removed them and set them on the floor.

“Something you want to share with us, Torie?”

The bot-shifter swirled up and stood in the middle of the lab surveying us all like we were second grade morons...no offense to second graders.

“There are so many things wrong with your pea-brained, short-sighted, water-extraction idea that I hardly know where to begin,” Torie said bluntly.

Oh, here we go...

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