Alien Backlash Read online

  The next morning, Harsha reported to Sarah, “Several more want to go too. Bella and Bea of course, among many others. Is that OK?”

  “Well, no survivors have been sighted in that city according to the Cats but we will go armed anyway and anyone can tag along. Let me know when you’re ready. Ask the Zeobani if they would like a day off from fishing,” Sarah suggested, then visited the Priskya and asked them to do the fishing today.

  “What do we eat tonight?” asked one of the Zeobani.

  Sarah had noticed they were keen on their food. “The Priskya will get our dinner and I promised them a de-fluking party in payment.”

  The Zeobani stopped walking and looked at her. Sarah now recognized that gesture as a tentative questioning. She thought back to what she had just said. “Priskya have parasites, other fish that attach to their bodies. Little fish the size of my finger that stick to them and are blood and carrion eaters. They often cause infection, swelling and pain.” She wondered how to explain infection. “The Priskya can’t get them off except by rubbing against rocks, which causes some nasty wounds at times. Skin infections cause major problems for the Priskya and most are caused by these flukes. Since the seas here on Torroxell are not salty, they don’t have cleansing, mildly antibiotic, and anti-fungal properties like the seas on Terra. So these little flukes can cause severe and occasionally fatal infections. It’s easy for we Terrans to remove these flukes with a knife. It isn’t a job for the squeamish. They have to be killed or they will promptly re-infest someone else. We call them flukes after parasites Terran dolphins have that are similar. Dolphins are marine animals and are a bit smaller than Priskya. These flukes have claws to hang on with. The claws are the problem. Getting them off takes more than a scrape against a rock. However they can be pried and twisted off.”

  Sarah demonstrated those movements and the Zeobani nodded, to her amusement. She wondered if Terrans would soon be starting to mimic Zeobani mannerisms too. “Do they taste nice?” it asked.

  Sarah refrained from laughing and answered seriously. “I haven’t tried them. Most of us eat fish cooked, but not all of us.”

  “Why can’t the Priskya get them off with their teeth?”

  “Priskya teeth are not good for grasping them as they are backward-facing in order to stop the fish they are eating from escaping.”

  They set off just after breakfast the next morning. It took several hours to fly to the city but Paswalda’s ship was soon found and searched. Going in, everyone entered via the crew entrance. Bella and Bea promptly ran through, looking at everything and having fun. They followed the yells when the cargo hold was opened and joined in the search. Being little, they searched the lower shelving.

  Bea found the seeds but Bella found something else. She pulled out a carton and found in it what looked like food containers. She broke a packet open and sniffed. It smelt delicious! That made a change. “Mummy, look at this!” Rani went over to look, then sniff. She went off to fetch a Zeobani to read the label. Since they all looked so alike, Bella couldn’t remember which Zeobani this one was but she cheerfully handed over the packet. “What is this? It smells nice.”

  “This is something you add to food, to make it taste nice. Flavoring.”

  Rani and Bella looked at each other. “Do you mean we have been eating food without the flavoring?” asked Rani.

  “You do not like the packet food you have been eating?”

  “No. It’s bland.” Rani heard the beep from the Translator that indicated it did not know a word. “Tasteless, not nice, boring.”

  “We thought you liked it like that,” said the Zeobani.

  “Definitely not!”

  “Oh. The food is meant to be like that so each Race adds what flavoring they like and generally the extra nutrients needed by each Race. That packet food is not meant to be used as a complete food — it is a food base.” He/she held up the packet. “This is only one type of flavoring. There are a lot more.”

  Rani and Bella looked at each other and started to laugh. Bella scooted off to find Sarah and tell her they had been eating the food all wrong. Rani watched her go, highly relieved. Now they had found the seeds they could hopefully grow their own food and use this packet stuff as a supplement. It would have to be an autumn garden as winter was coming. She wondered how long the seasons were. They had yet to find that out. Rani decided to teach the children tomorrow how to plant the precious seeds: she would delegate an adult to check every few days that the children were watering the plants. They could not afford to neglect a crop. This was their home now and they would have to survive here.

  She and Ali had agonized over what to do after the war. Whether to stay here or go back to Terra. Their main consideration was: where would their children be safer? The trouble was, their decision-making processes were hampered by the fact that all three children — Mahmoud, Harsha, and Bella — had beaten them to it. Along with all the other children, they had decided they wanted to stay in this part of the Universe. It was much more interesting! And Ali had been fixed on keeping the Kepi safe until their ship came to take them home, which it finally had. The caves seemed so empty now without them and the kids loved exploring there if given half an opportunity. It was getting to be a bad habit all this globe-trotting, but it was such fun.

  Also, the children were also almost intertwined with the de Jonge children, Ilse and Bea. Their parents, Karl and Julia, had decided to stay. The whole family were able to talk with the Cats and wanted to help them. All the Terrans wanted to know what the Cats wanted in terms of sharing this planet. Did they want to integrate, participate, isolate, or what? The Cats wouldn’t say. They weren’t talking to others. They weren’t even talking to the Priskya.

  The Priskya said the Cats didn’t know what they wanted and were very divided. Rani had the impression that their society or government was structured in such a way that they could only make decisions by consensus and they couldn’t reach a consensus. Well, there was nothing anyone else could do: they would have to work it out for themselves.

  Only the Priskya were clear in what they wanted. They told Sarah they wanted what they thought they had negotiated with the Ridianit hundreds of years ago. They wanted to leave the organization and the politics to others and get on with their own lives. They wanted education, or some of them did, so as not to get exploited or left behind in this galaxy. They wanted their world to be looked after and not plundered, and they trusted both the Terrans and the Niseyen to conserve what was left. They were appalled at what had been destroyed, the species lost. One reason they had agreed to a Treaty with the Ridianit was so that they could explore their world and find out what was there. Non-propelled subs was not what they had asked for, nor was it what had been promised.

  The Terrans had told the Priskya that their chief motivation for leaving Terra was that its ecology had been damaged, accidentally and deliberately, but mostly from ignorance. And Terra was badly overcrowded. So the Terrans knew the consequences of not caring responsibly for an ecological system. They intended to do better here.

  She thought about what Az and Kaz had told them. The Niseyen had inherited their first planet when they overthrew their masters and took the world of Medala off them. Medala had been the Prime or capital world of the Kaldalei. It was now the Prime planet of the Niseyen. Az had explained how Medala had been damaged by the Kaldalei because the temperature had been artificially increased by climate control to such an extent that a great deal of the flora and fauna had died out. The Niseyen had spent the last thousand or so years trying to repair some of the damage, so they knew all about conservation too. Medala had been so denuded of plant life that it had to make its own oxygen, which was commonplace in this galaxy. A belief had even grown up that naturally occurring oxygen was dirty and primitive,and that chemically produced oxygen was cleaner and healthier. This was another bit of advertising that came from the Keulfyd who, said Az, just coincidentally provided the oxygen-making factories. At a considerable profit, of cour
se.

  Chapter Eight

  Continuing to update himself on what had happened while he was being treated, Cukudeopul wondered why he hadn’t heard back from Torroxell. They should have finished by now. He looked forward to seeing what booty they had this time. He had a habit of taking one souvenir from each planet taken. It wasn’t often that a planet was pirated. Not even in his long lifetime. More often, they were won in war. Even that was relatively rare these days. It was costly, it took a long time to recoup the loss, and resulted in angry trading partners.

  He checked on the population count, birth and death rate statistics and fertility rates of the Niseyen. His information was collected straight from the Niseyen Health Department. This never failed to amuse him. The Niseyen had no idea how compromised they were, even down to his direct access to checking their statistics on his warfare against them. It was delightful. He ordered a meal and continued to look through the readouts. The birth rate sex ratio was now 7:1 and climbing, despite the abortion of so many male fetuses or whatever a tiny group of pre-implanted cells was called. He wondered what the conception rate was now. The Niseyen’s own estimate was 9:1, and they were hiding this information from their own population.

  It hadn’t taken the researchers long to choose their genes to target. The Niseyen had taken years to develop medical science and had had assistance from several Races including the Keulfyd. A team of medical researchers had been officially dispatched to help, and another team to train the Niseyen up, first as nurse aids, then as nurses, then as doctors, and finally as specialists and researchers. To develop the framework of a complete science of medicine had taken five years but the study and understanding of Niseyen as a species, to fill that framework, had taken nearly a hundred and sixty years. By that time they had knowledge of what was normal and what was abnormal.

  One of their own researchers working in collaboration with an Okme team had found the weakness. It was always better to find a genetic threat and worsen it. That way lessened the chance of any suspicions. The Y chromosome of the Niseyen was degrading. A chromosome contains hundreds or thousands of genes. This particular chromosome was crucial to the survival of the species. Without a Y chromosome, the Niseyen would go extinct because they would be unable to reproduce. No men, no fathers, no babies. Like Cukudeopul’s own Race, the Niseyen needed two sexes to reproduce.

  It was a weakness because the Niseyen Y chromosome had two inherent problems. Each would be a self-destruct, eventually, on its own. The combination of the two was a serious design flaw. The Y chromosome reproduces at a prodigious rate because its job is to produce millions of sperm a day in an adult male, every day, whether he uses them or not. What a wasteful system, Cukudeopul thought, realizing it probably meant the species had been extremely stressed at some stage in its development for this to have been necessary. Each cell reproduction introduces the possibility of damage by mutation (most of which are bad) where a mistake is made during the reproduction process. But the worst problem was that the Y chromosome does not recombine, or only the tips do, briefly. So it cannot fix errors.

  The X chromosome of the female can recombine so it can fix most errors. And it reproduces at a vastly slower rate. He pondered the contrast. A female egg had had only twenty-four divisions before it was ready and the eggs would stay quietly dormant in the woman’s ovaries until released. The sperm of a man could have been through hundreds of divisions before it fertilized an egg, depending on his age. Multiplied through each generation from father to son, the damage accumulates which means many male lines go dormant. With fewer and fewer boys born, the population would decline. The Niseyen would eventually be unable to reproduce. So the policy was to speed up the process.

  Unfortunately, the blithering idiot who was the previous Commander had been impatient and had almost blown the whole thing by expanding the process. He encouraged his researchers to target other genes as well. They had this brand-new technology and wanted to play with it. Idiots! Cukudeopul got angry every time he thought of it.

  The Niseyen would have taken a few thousand years to decline naturally. With some assistance from the Cleaners to subtly speed up a natural process, they could have shortened the process to at most two thousand years. Quite acceptable in the scheme of things. But no, the short-sighted, stupid fools had decided to play with their expensive new toys. They could have jeopardized the whole plan. What arrogant idiots!

  First, they had found all the genes that led to, or supported, multiple births and targeted them all hard. All the Cleaners did their bit and within a hundred and fifty years there were almost no multiple births. There was no real point to this. They did it for fun. To experiment. Because they could. It made very little difference to the overall population numbers. It did not weaken the population as a whole, which was the whole point of the exercise. There was only a small decline in overall birth numbers. But it looked suspicious to some — and it looked even more suspicious that all the population were so affected. This is not natural, not over a whole planet. Cukudeopul’s scientists had later managed to convince some people that it may have been a virus, since those off the planet were not affected until they intermarried with the affected population. It had helped that the Niseyen, at that time, had had only had one planet.

  The Cleaners in hospitals and medical centers were the most powerful. Even children born at home were brought in for the free medical checks the Keulfyd organized for all children under three. Every child was dosed. If any children were not checked before they attended school, they were simply ordered to go by the school. Schools want healthy children who carry no communicable diseases. None of the Niseyen had any idea what the free medical checks were costing the Race. Neither did the Keulfyd administering the checks and innocently activating the Cleaners.

  At the same time, the researchers continued to play. To reduce the population and wipe it out faster, the females needed to be targeted. So they found the genes that caused the egg to emit an attractant for the sperm, the “Here I am, boys!” and targeted them. Now, in most females the sperm swam straight past. They hadn’t a clue where they were supposed to be going. They hit the egg by accident, if at all, although they knew to burrow in once they found it. The population started to noticeably decline. The Cleaners were by now in almost all homes, in all hospitals, in all medical centers and in many institutions and places of work. Cukudeopul smiled as he remembered the campaign he had led to get Cleaners in every school. He had emphasized how precious children were and how cleanliness increased health, and the Keulfyd had subsidized the cost for the Cleaners to be installed.

  The researchers found the genes that controlled the tail of the sperm to give it movement so it could swim to its target. Now, the tail developed problems and didn’t work properly. So even if its target still had the attractant, the sperm couldn’t get to it. The gene to move it was switched off in people who had received enough of the dose from the Cleaners.

  But now, finally, some judgment was being used. Only a certain percentage of the Cleaners targeted particular genes and most of the Cleaners didn’t alter any. Because now the reduction in population was causing concern and looking very suspicious.

  Discovering that piece of knowledge, how to leave a gene intact but switched off, had been a brilliant coup — but it should have been applied to another Race. That piece of arrogance had almost blown the whole thing. Cukudeopul was still annoyed when he thought of what it had cost him to undo the impact of that stupidity.

  But the idiots had carried on. Not satisfied with several targeted genes and one whole chromosome, they found the genes that nurture the fertilized ova and programmed some of the Cleaners to slowly weaken the associated genes. Women so affected could not start a pregnancy.

  All these problems, being genetic, were inherited. In the children, the problems tended to be more complicated, more extensive and were worsening with every generation.

  The researchers found genes related to sperm count and switched one off. Again, th
is was unnecessary. The sperm count was already going down due to environmental factors and the damage to the Y chromosome. This only encouraged conspiracy theorists, and there were plenty of them. Extra ammunition was not needed. Then they found the gene that rejected a female foetus. It was the jackpot to reduce the population fast. The male sperm swim faster, which means that a woman who conceives early on in her cycle is more likely to conceive a boy: conception later in the cycle is more likely to produce a girl. This method was used by some Niseyen to influence the sex of a child. But it was also the case that some women produced mostly or only boys and aborted the females. And vice versa. The researchers found the mutated gene that did this. The Cleaners peppered users with the anti-female gene. Within a generation, the sex ratio altered from 100:106 (100 females born to 106 males) to 100:179. One hundred females to one hundred and seventy-nine males. And the gap continued to widen with each generation. Statistically, this was huge — and very, very suspicious. Cukudeopul had been furious at this blatant stupidity. They needed to achieve their aims but not get caught in the process!

  It was at this stage that Cukudeopul took over. It was just the last straw in a regime which was causing the Keulfyd to be the most feared, loathed, unpopular and dangerous Race. It was typical of many decisions his predecessor was making. While the government liked this policy they were confusing the attitude of other Races, thinking it was respect when Cukudeopul recognized it as subservience born of fear, suspicion and distrust — which would inevitably lead to hatred. He saw the inherent danger in this, where they did not. He had watched all this, argued, reasoned, yelled, all to no avail. The Commander ignored him. So Cukudeopul got the numbers to support himself, ordered his predecessor assassinated and had himself instated as Commander.

  He immediately ordered changes to most foreign policy. All oppressive policies were modified, scaled back, reversed or stopped. He ordered all research on the Niseyen genes to stop. No further interference in their decline and a temporary stop to all other Races they were targeting. He ordered the researchers to start looking at the other Races they wanted to eliminate and figure out methods but do nothing. By this time the Niseyen had two planets and it would have looked terribly suspicious if simultaneous problems developed on both. For over a century, the programs of the Cleaners were ordered to stop all genetic interference on all the targeted Races — and this was one of Cukudeopul’s lucky breaks.