Enemy Immortal Read online

  Enemy Immortal

  First Contact

  JIM MEEKS-JOHNSON

  Copyright © 2019 Jim Meeks-Johnson

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1796842210

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to innumerable people who helped form this book. Some, like David Brin, Nancy Kress, Jack McDevitt, and Walter Jon Williams are well-known science fiction writers. Others, including Marcia Kelly, James M. Thompson, Stephanie A. Cain, Madeleine Dimond, Laura VanArendonk Baugh, Garrett Hutson, Stephanie Ferguson, Peggy Larkin, Joy Basham, Rob Dearsley, Barbara E Hill, Trina Phillips, Kelly Horn, and my family are my heroes for reviewing all or most of the book. The cover is by the talented Levierree.

  Dedication

  To Sally

  LCC Sector, Orion Arm, Milky Way Galaxy

  1

  Immortal

  Umlac oozed his glistening black, ten-ton body through a slime-lubricated tube deep in the bedrock of planet Morb. He'd dug this passageway fifty thousand years ago while mining neodymium to improve the magnetic solenoids in his cyborg body.

  His flesh—the part of his body that was protoplasmic—craved nutrients. Happily, a ship from the Entanglement had strayed into his territory. Its crew waited for him at the bottom of his feeding pit, and the thought of terrorizing his prey before ingesting them titillated his feeding organs.

  A gray blob obstructed part of the tunnel ahead—a Hydra feasting on a food-thrall who had exceeded its useful time as a slave. This wouldn’t do. Eating was no excuse for an underling to get in his way. Hydras weren't particularly tasty, but Umlac disdained incompetence. Better to make an incompetent vassal useful as food. Umlac charged the hapless Hydra and chewed it to bits, ingesting only enough to prove his point. Scavengers would devour the rest of the carcass.

  At the feeding pit, Umlac draped his glistening body over the edge, posing for a moment as a magnificent black curtain of death so his lunch would know his glory and fear his power. Cameras recorded his every move. Playing recordings of a good feeding session heightened the level of fear and obedience in future food-thralls of the same species.

  He'd long ago incorporated an Entanglement translator into the electronic portion of his cyborg body. "I am Umlac. Come to me," he thundered at the captured crew.

  None of the fur-balls cowering in the far corner came forth. This was wrong. Lesser creatures should fear and obey greater creatures. That basic principle ordered all the Immortal Ascendency.

  "A Shoggart must always be obeyed." Umlac extruded a crossbow through his flexible outer membrane. He'd manufactured the simple device with one of his internal fabricator units, so his prey would see and understand their impending death. He launched a barbed bolt into one of the puny creatures' appendages.

  The hairy creature had four permanent limbs and a sensor-laden "head" jutting upward—a Wolferlop of some kind. Umlac jerked the cord to set the bolt and reeled the line in slowly, so his lunch experienced loss of control and had time to fear Umlac's glory.

  The Wolferlop yowled and fought to escape. When it proved no match for the cord, it stretched an arm out toward the other weaklings in the corner. "Sing my story to home nest. Tell them I love them all."

  "We will," said a pitiful chorus from the corner.

  "They lie," Umlac boomed out. "None of them will tell your story. None of them will leave this pit."

  Umlac ate the Wolferlop's fingers and toes one at a time, savoring his dominance over the creature as much as its buttery taste. The rest of the creature's body followed bit by bit until only the brain remained. Umlac assimilated the Wolferlop's brain and examined its memories for any significant or unique events. He found a few access codes he would pass on to his spy network in the Entanglement, but nothing exceptional. He filed the Wolferlop's memories in a small DNA capsule along with the others in his library pouch.

  He singled out another Wolferlop. "Come to me. It all ends the same. With more or less suffering."

  The Wolferlop came, and Umlac devoured it in one gulp. This was the lesson in the recording; even in death, obedience was best.

  After feeding, he gave the recording of the feeding session to a Hydra to show future captives and went to his secure communication room to answer some calls from underlings and spies. There was no avoiding the bureaucracy of ruling fifty-two civilized planets and adjoining territories.

  A Hydra fleetmaster on the border with the Entanglement reported. "Most Worshipful Lord Umlac, the Xandor invasion was a complete success. We destroyed the interstellar commlink before Xandor's inhabitants alerted anyone else in the Entanglement. Then we crushed their pitiful defenses."

  "What about casualties?"

  "Most Worshipful Lord, I'm pleased to report we had no casualties."

  "And the enemy?"

  "All of their fighters died, along with eighty-two disrespectful civilians."

  "Fool! I can't use dead civilians. I need a fresh supply of food-thralls for my vassals and their slaves."

  "Most Worshipful Lord Umlac, forgive this humble fleetmaster. I put the bulk of the colony's population in corrals. Eight thousand new thralls are ready for work assignments."

  "In that case, as a reward, each slave in your fleet may take one captive as a food-thrall. Each Hydra vassal may have six captives, except you. Put the rest of the captives to work under my protection digging tunnels for a proper Immortal city from which to rule the planet."

  Umlac disconnected the fleetmaster and took a call from his chief administrator on Morb. "Most Glorious Lord," the Hydra began. "I have the best possible news. Deus Telekil has been interviewing your vassals about your conquest of Omuz and Xandor. He is considering promoting you to Vice Deus!"

  Umlac's internal organs twisted in fear. Deus Telekil would never take a Vice Deus. It would threaten his dominance. No, Deus Telekil, overlord of the Immortal Ascendency, was sending him a message. Umlac would have to fission soon—divide his body and divide his holdings—or else face a takeover by the one being more powerful than a Shoggart.

  "Send the full details by encrypted data capsule." He broke the connection.

  He wasn’t ready to fission yet. He wanted to leave his core of forty worlds intact for his heaviest offspring, and he was nowhere close to forty comparable worlds in the rest of his empire for the fifty-fifty split required by law. Where could he find so many planets in short order?

  Deus Telekil planned to invade the Entanglement, using his vassals, Umlac and other Shoggarts. Umlac had counted on that invasion to increase the size of his vassaldom before he fissioned.

  He called one of his spymasters—a young Hydra on a distant planet who'd proved both competent and loyal—fearing that Deus Telekil monitored his usual operatives.

  "I wish to honor you with a most delicate task, but if you fail, I will have to sacrifice you like a food-thrall."

  "Most Brilliant Lord, I will uphold your honor with every drop of my mass."

  "Deus Telekil is planning to invade the Entanglement. My brother Shoggarts know of this, but not the timeline. I want you to craft a message for each of my closest seven brothers and me as well—a message that appears to be from Telekil to say the invasion starts one month from today. Tell us not to reply to the message. Say the timeline must never be mentioned in normal channels of communication."

  "My Most Brilliant Lord, it shall be done as you command."

  "Remember, Deus Telekil won't give reasons, just orders."

  "Of course. As I would to my slaves."

  Umlac chafed at the comparison of him to a slave before Deus Telekil, but he couldn't disagree. The Hydra demonstrated the right idea for the messages.

  Umlac disconnected and called his fleetmaster on another border planet slated for
conquest. "Why haven't you called to report?"

  "Most Glorious Lord Umlac, I am happy to report that our fleet is on course and in tip-top shape."

  "What's the bad news?" Umlac asked. A fleetmaster wouldn’t begin an overdue call with trivially good news unless that was the best he had to offer.

  "Most Glorious Lord Umlac, an Entanglement ship has arrived at the target planet, and it's aware of our incoming fleet."

  So much for another easy coup like on Xandor. This invasion would be messier. "How did you let that happen?"

  "Most Glorious Lord Umlac, we avoided the standard detectors used by the Entanglement, but the inhabitants of the target system deployed non-standard instruments."

  "How can that be? The natives only have pre-Quillip technology."

  "Their inner planets are at war with their outer planets. They aimed sensitive instruments intended for each other at us. I have already executed the incompetent sciencemaster—the one forced on us by your brother Dismax."

  "One more screw-up like this and I will dine on your carcass."

  Umlac disconnected, mollified by the thought that Deus Telekil would most likely blame Dismax for the oversight. Besides, a month from now he would be invading the Entanglement, and it wouldn’t matter if they knew he was invading Earth.

  2

  Soft Invasion

  Damn, noisy crowd. Jade Mahelona cursed silently at the knot of protesters gathered in front of the clinic in Deep Indianapolis.

  Corporal Loganal Mulcraft mumbled as he stood next to her. "I don’t know if I can stand another day of this crap, let alone a whole freakin' week. I didn't sign up to be a target in a police line."

  Jade gave him a sour look. "I know. You’re an interplanetary communications specialist. Well, cry me a river. I'm an electronic weapons specialist, and I'm supposed to be piloting spacecraft in the asteroids. But when your ship is in dry dock, it's time for cross training. So, buck up, soldier."

  Loganal's brainsong screamed with resentment of her. She couldn't tell if he disliked that she was his temporary commander and she was Hawaiian, or was female, or was a Lieutenant in the Solar Defense Force instead of the Marines. Or if he was jealous of her unique ability to sense electric fields, or… Who knew? She could only sense general emotions, not thoughts.

  Jade ignored Loganal and let the noise and confusion of the crowded tunnel-street flow through her body. Her legs itched from the hum of electric powerlines under the street, and her chest prickled with bursts of static from electric cars driving by. Microwaves reflected off metallic surfaces of storefronts, cars, and police gear, giving the tunnel-street a ghostly shimmer.

  Jade concentrated on the tingling in her scalp. The electric field from the brain of the nearest protester resonated in her head with the pastoral melody of a daydream. She turned to point her head at the protester next to him, and her scalp resonated with forlorn notes of worry. The electric fields from the primitive parts of all human brains broadcast the same melodies for the same emotions, and she knew them well.

  She scowled at the crowd. They should be angrier. A man near her in a worn jumpsuit waved a sign saying Ban Alien Medicine on Earth. The crowd chanted No Alien Clinics--but they remained calm. Radical Separatists hated the aliens and wanted them out, but the protester's brainsongs lacked the bagpipe drone of anger.

  She glanced left at the pink-white face and curly blond hair of Marine Corporal Loganal Mulcraft. "I expected Radical Separatists to be angrier."

  "These are just folks who got nothing better to do," Loganal replied. "A lot of them are wearing second-hand clothes that don't fit. They got no money. They got no job."

  "Yeah." Jade stared at the crowd. He was right about that. She gave a wry grin at the example of what leadership training said about diversity being an asset on a team.

  Unlike Loganal, she didn’t resent being here. She wanted to learn, and she wasn’t about to let her rival, Lieutenant Keolo Davis, get ahead of her in electives. But crowds gave her headaches.

  Keep the aliens safe. That was her mission today. Not that she had seen any aliens—ever in her life.

  Protect the aliens' property. That was her secondary objective. Replacing alien medical equipment could be expensive. The Entanglement could fabricate most replacement items in Earth orbit, but the aliens had to import quantum-entangled devices and some special materials from another star. Interstellar teleportation was unbelievably costly.

  Facilitate crowd safety. Humans came third. Making a good impression on the aliens was paramount.

  A taxi dropped off an elderly gentleman at the police line near the door. The closest officer checked his credentials and waved him through.

  "That guy's got money," Loganal said. "Tailored jacket. Hand-shined shoes—bet he didn't shine 'em himself."

  "Insurance doesn't cover unapproved alien medical procedures," Jade said, "And they have ridiculously high prices, not to mention strange conditions, like not eating mammals or reptiles."

  "Why shouldn't the Entanglement ask for whatever they want if they have better doctors?"

  Jade glanced at Loganal's pasty European face. "You wouldn't understand."

  It wasn’t the medicine she objected to; it was the alien culture, insinuating itself on Earth ever since the first radio contact a hundred years ago and pouring into popular culture after the Quillip ship arrived a few months ago. Too many kids saw everything from the Entanglement as wonderful, and everything human as out-of-date.

  It was Jade's grandmother reciting the ancient stories of beautiful Laka and fiery Pele—telling her how distorted the popular image of Hawaiian customs became after nineteenth-century haole tourists invaded and invented the luau so they could party. It was the fallacy that superior technology implied superior societal values. She didn’t want to lose the Hawaiian Preservation on Maui where she could listen to the old stories or study hula dance and outrigger building. Where she could surf or soak in the sun on the beach while the waves serenaded her—just like her ancestors. Best of all, the electrical noise of the city was so distant she could feel the faint crackle of fish swimming in the reef. She wanted Hawaii everywhere.

  She shifted her weight uncomfortably, not used to so much standing in one place. "It doesn’t matter what price the Entanglement demands," she said, "we have to pay it. The fleet from the Immortal Ascendency arrives next year, and they will enslave and eat humans."

  "That's what the Entanglement says, but—"

  Jade lost the rest of Loganal's comment as a blaze of hate-filled anger from someone in the crowd of protesters burned through her body; a shrill howling brainsong demanded her attention. And then it was gone, lost in the electrical noise around her.

  Jade took a step forward, seeking the source of the hate.

  Loganal had fallen silent, but now he said, "You'll get in trouble if something happens and you're out of the police line."

  She took a second step forward to get away from Loganal, turning her head side to side, trying to tune in on the squealing anger. It had been so clear for a moment, contrasted against the bland crowdsong.

  "It’s a sham," Jade said. "These people don’t care if the aliens establish an Entanglement medical clinic here or not."

  If the crowd wasn’t here because of the clinic, why were they here? Before she made sense of it, loud excitement, not anger, swept through the crowdsong. A silver-domed car eased to a stop right in front of her, and an Entanglement healer stepped out.

  The Wolferlop-M healer was shorter than Jade, with a yeti-like appearance, and Jade's electrosense could tell she was female. She wore a gray and red kilt and a translator belt from which dangled alien tools and mysterious pouches.

  Like all Entanglement species, she was highly specialized. The hairs in the fluffy white fur covering her body could bristle into needles full of medicines from special glands in her skin. Her nose could detect diseased tissue; her sensitive fingers aided in probing injuries. Her brainsong pulsed unlike that of any human—a serie
s of waves, slapping to a crescendo, then retreating and coming again.

  The healer's big brown eyes focused on Jade. "May evolution favor you. My name is Tshimmed."

  Oh crap! The alien thinks I'm out front to greet her.

  Jade signaled the police line to guard her flanks, satisfied that the car behind the healer would protect her from the crowd in that direction.

  "And your descendants forever," she said. "I am Lieutenant Jade Mahelona." Traditional greeting completed. Now what?

  The healer's eyes wandered over the crowd pressing towards them, the police blocking the way. "So many patients. Yet I don't smell any ailments human medicine couldn’t cure."

  "They're not patients," Jade said. "They're protesters."

  The healer continued staring at the people. "A strange custom. Humans who don’t like something travel to see the thing they dislike. What are they protesting?"

  Jade squirmed and looked around. No one was coming to her aid. "Your clinic," she said. "Alien medicine on Earth."

  "Why would anyone object to healing the terminally ill?"

  Jade frowned. Was the healer that naïve? "The problem isn’t that you cure disease. They resent your demand for humans to join a Guild and elevate the needs of that Guild above the natural evolution of humanity."

  "It's a joy to be the best you can. It's a joy to help others. The Guild system encourages these." Tshimmed turned her full gaze at Jade. "Change can be hard, but once you come to know the joy of filling a niche in the Entanglement, you will find it worthwhile."

  The joy of filling a niche in the Entanglement sounded a lot like the joy of doing laundry for haole tourists. Once the Entanglement assimilated Earth, they would all be serving foreigners. But before Jade could say anything more, Loganal said, "Perhaps we can escort you safely inside where your patients are waiting."

  The healer drew her gaze to Loganal, her brainsong suddenly a foghorn, signaling a change in the alien's emotions. "Escort? Has Earth joined the Police Guild?"