It's Just Begun

Wallace walked toward the silent slab of alien metal that hung over the edge of the city, his tool bag hung over his shoulder. After the failed attempts of the combined militaries of the world, it had become obvious that the aliens were now running the show. Like most others, Wallace wasn’t happy about that.

He looked at the strange paper he held. It had writing in the alien’s language and English stating that he was ordered, as a subject of the Empire, for a work detail on the ship. Grabbing the corner of the sheet, it glowed yellow. The cashier at the minimart had tried it, and it did not respond for her.

On reaching the park indicated on the paper, he joined the queue being checked by the large alien machines, looking like oversized turnstiles surrounded by a thin support structure and bristling with unmistakable gun barrels, and unarmed humans in military uniforms. As each person in the queue was vetted, they filed into a cube-shaped device hovering an inch above the grass.

The machines made a strange noise, followed by, “Work pass, please.”

Wallace held the paper by the corner, letting it glow. The machine made another strange noise, then said, “Next.”

He started toward the cube and was stopped by one of the human soldiers. “Here ya go,” he said, handing Wallace an MRE and two bottles of water. “The best thing in there is probably the gum, but the rest is better than starving,” the soldier said.

Wallace took the offered items and thanked the soldier. As he stepped into the cube, he felt as though he were in an elevator going down at high speed. He struggled to keep himself upright and walk without bouncing and stumbling around. He wasn’t the only one.

He made his way to the wall and leaned against it. The short, stocky woman next to him did the same. She turned toward him, her golden-brown skin looking wan in the pale light, her dark brown hair looking black. Her deep brown eyes raised to meet his; pale blue. “What kind of work for you?”

He looked at his pale hands, all pink undertones washed out by the unflattering light. The strands of blonde hair that fell in front of his eye appeared grey. “I’m a mechanical and electrical engineer. I don’t know what they want from me, though. Not like I had a choice. The Empire commands, blah blah blah…pain of death, blah blah blah….”

“True,” she said. “No choices. I’m a biochemist. No idea what they want with me.”

“Wallace,” he said.

“Isabella.”

They fell silent, not really having anything else to talk about. It wasn’t until his ears began to pop that Wallace realized they were rising. He ripped open the MRE and dug through until he found the gum.

It tasted like sugar and cardboard and was like trying to chew leather until it warmed up.

“Good idea,” Isabella said and followed suit.

The cube docked inside the larger ship, the walls disappearing into nothing. Wallace wondered at it. Did they go into the floor, too fast to see? Were they made of some strange material that required energy to remain solid?

He was quickly pulled out of his wondering by the aliens that were standing around waiting for them. They were at least nine feet tall, slender, bipedal, with two long arms extending from their mid torso, with two small, seemingly unusable arms extending from what he thought of as their narrow shoulders, and another two from their hips.

There was little he could see to differentiate them from each other. In the dim light they all looked a pale, yellow grey with six black eyes above a lipless mouth and nothing that suggested ears or a nose. They were covered with a fine, downy fur that was thickest down their torso midline.

They wore no clothes beyond a sash below their upper arms, on which were alien symbols. The one that approached him handed him a small device on a soft cord that felt like silk and mimed putting it over its head.

“Put this on,” it said. “This is your translation device for spoken and written language. Do not lose it. Follow me.”

Wallace realized that the creature was making strange sounds, but the device was converting it to English. He put the device around his neck and followed the strange being.

It took him a few minutes to find a walking gait that didn’t have him tripping over himself in the low gravity. Once he was moving confidently, he began to pay more attention to his surroundings. Aliens they may be, but electricity is electricity, and the conduits began to make sense to him.

He noticed that there were places in the corridors where the gravity felt lightest and moving away from them it slowly increased. At those places, there was always a light brown conduit with bright yellow stripes going into the floor, and markings on the floor in the alien script.

As they passed one, he paused and pointed the translator at the marking on the floor. “Caution, gravity plate below. Do not remove while powered,” the device said.

“Gravity manipulation?” he asked.

“Yes,” the alien answered.

“If you can do that, what do you need from me?”

The alien opened a door into a workshop where a ground vehicle sat next to an identical one that looked like it had been crushed. Devices in various states of destruction sat on workbenches, two feet too tall for a human to work at, if not for the crude stepladder chairs that flanked them.

“You will work on improving these devices to work in high gravity.”

“Why me?” Wallace asked. “Surely your engineers can figure it out.”

“You can withstand the gravity of testing, and you are used to engineering in high gravity, so you will save us time.” It pointed at a bench on the far side of the room. “Start on the device there,” it said. “That is your critical work for the day.”

“Can you at least tell me your name?” Wallace asked.

It made a strange noise that he had no hope of repeating. “Ah, okay, I’ll just call you Lurch. I’m Wallace, by the way.”

Ignoring him, Lurch pointed to a large button on the wall. “When you wish to test at high gravity, that button will sound the alarm to clear the lab, then the gravity plate in the center of the test floor will turn off, subjecting the area to your planetary gravity.”

With that, the alien left him on his own. Wallace put his tool bag, MRE, and water bottles on the workbench and began to inspect the device he was meant to be working on.

It was a basic relay, an electromagnetic switch. Run low-voltage power through the coil and it pulls the switch closed allowing a high-voltage current across the switch. Remove the low-voltage signal, the switch opens back up.

He tested the resistance across the switch when closed. Even at the most sensitive setting, his meter could not detect any resistance. It was a superconductor. There was a spool of the same material sitting on the workbench. It felt no more substantial than aluminum foil, although it was far thicker.

In the low gravity, it was stiff enough to maintain its shape, but it would never hold up in full gravity. It would be simple to fix with a piece of light gauge mild steel, assuming the magnet was strong enough to hold it. He wasn’t about to call it done, though.

He moved to the gravity plating and placed his high-voltage meter near the cable. It was well-shielded, not giving him any readings. He grabbed the relay, pushed the large button above his head, and moved to the gravity plate.

After a few seconds of the alarm, he felt like he was again on solid ground. The metal of the switch drooped and warped, no matter which way it was turned, even when placed at ninety degrees.

There didn’t seem to be any fasteners holding the gravity plate in the floor, and he found it easier than he expected to lift out. Beneath it, he found devices he couldn’t identify, but the power connections were clear, and it was obvious that the power continued beyond the plate.

Continuing to experiment, he disconnected the power from the plate and attached his high-voltage meter. He returned to the button and hit it again. The meter hummed and he looked at it only long enough to read that it was seventeen kilovolts before pushing the button again.

After reconnecting and allowing the power to return to the gravity plating, he began looking through the materials on the workbench. As he had guessed, there was no mild steel. There was, however, the spool of superconducting ribbon. It was easy enough to cut a piece off with his snips. He stuffed it in the bottom of his tool bag for study. It would certainly give humanity a big boost if they could copy it.

Wallace considered the device under the gravity plate. There was a large amount of electricity powering it, and high-voltage systems tend to not withstand feedback very well. Coupled with how everything seemed to be engineered to very close tolerances without any thought of over-engineering, it was likely that he could rig something up.

He set to work with the materials on the workbench and had a voltage amplifier built in less than an hour. Wallace sat, eating his high-calorie meal, playing with the superconductor while trying to figure out how to place it where it would both be hidden, and would not go off while he was in the ship.

Finally, it came to him. He grabbed the now-tasteless gum from the plastic MRE bag where he had stuck it while eating and began to chew it again. While doing this, he poured the MRE salt packet into one of the bottles of water and shook it up. Saltwater was a far better conductor than clear water.

After turning off the gravity again, he lifted the floor plate and dropped down into the space beneath it where the hardware was. The actual emitter, if that’s what it was, lay beneath the hardware, while the floor plate was just a covering.

He placed the amplifier under the adjoining floor plate, in a space too small for the aliens to easily see or get to. One end of the amplifier was attached to the mechanism’s power output, with the other connected to a lead of the superconductor held above the floor by using his gum to tack it to another insulated conduit.

The bottle of saltwater was placed on the other side of the space, and he poked a small hole in the base of it. When the water was high enough, the power inlet would arc to the water, and from there to the amplifier. He just hoped it was enough.

He turned the gravity modifier back on and sat on the floor putting his tools away when the door opened and the alien he called ‘Lurch’ came in.

“Have you found the solution?” Lurch asked, looking at the warped and mangled relay on the workbench.

“I have,” Wallace said, “but I don’t have the materials here to fix it.” He continued with the meticulous process of putting his tools in his bag in just the right way.

“What material are you needing?”

“Mild steel, twenty-four gauge,” he said, zipping his bag.

“You will provide some of this when you return in six of your hours,” Lurch said. “Now it is time for you to leave, so we may go into our night cycle.”

Wallace shrugged the bag over his shoulder and followed the alien back out to the other humans standing inside a square on the floor. He recognized it as the floor of the cube. Just as they had disappeared before, the walls suddenly appeared around them, and the cube began descending; only the popping of his ears making that apparent to him.

When he stepped out of the cube, he noticed he wasn’t the only one glad to be back on solid ground with full gravity. Wallace began walking away, trying to decide where to go. He wasn’t coming back in six hours, that much was certain.

A tap on his shoulder stopped him, and he turned to see Isabella. “Hey, Isabella, right? What did they have you doing?”

“Mostly testing the nutritional value to humans of some foul-smelling paste,” she said. “They left me alone in a lab, and I left them a little present.”

“What’s that?”

“When someone moves the waste container, they’re going to have a little fire in the lab. Stunning how little care they give to things like potassium.” She winked.

“Yeah, I uh…tried to burn out their gravity system. Hopefully, sometime in the next hour or less, their whole system will be overloaded.”

They reached the edge of the park, about to go their separate ways, when they realized everyone around them was fixated on the ship. Wallace turned in time to see the ship begin to list to one side, rise, and speed away toward the hills as it began to distort, as though an unseen hand was crushing it in just before it fell from the sky.

As the dust settled, the two of them looked around. People were cheering and celebrating. The machines that had been standing guard were silent. Wallace realized, with a sickening lurch of his guts, that the ship had crashed in an inhabited area.

“All those people,” he said.

Isabella grabbed his hand and led him away. “Come now, grieve later,” she said. “They thought the war was over, but we’ll show them it’s just begun.”