Dan had never been know as a man with a faint heart, but the things he witnessed out on that mesa in Tower colony worried him so bad that at several points he had to puke. His life, his will, his dreams were torn from him.
He had gone out into the desert to be there when the manager of Tower colony found the mystery alien artifacts. Dan had acted on intelligence that made him feel for certain that the rebel leader had been forced to reveal the whereabouts of his cache of ancient weapons. Dan planned on confronting the colony manager when he had re-emerged from the cave. That had never happened and Dan was quite certain that the manager had given his life for his colony. Dan was afraid that he would be forced to do the same.
It had seemed like such a foolproof plan when he had decided on it back in his comfortable office. He thought he had prepared himself for every contingency. He had called up four battalions of militia. He had gone to the mesa with his lead battalion. There was enough armament with him to turn the distant mesa into powder. He arrived at his camp confidant that he was ready to just take the artifacts from Tower colony by force if nothing else worked. Things started going wrong from the minute he arrived.
First he had been alerted that something was happening over near the cave entrance. The Tower colony police there had begun acting agitated then had made a retreat to the base of the mesa. People were scurrying back and forth. Then came the radio jamming. Very sophisticated his people had told him. Then he got word that all his vehicles and machinery of any type had quit working. The computers that helped him plan were down. Anything electrical ceased it's function.
Dan had decided that it was time for the president, himself, to leave. The only way out was on foot. A platoon was being picked to escort the president out of the area when the alien mother ship had appeared. That was the first time Dan Chet, president of the United Colonies League had puked in pure fear. He knew that all that ship had to do was land and it would crush his men, the police from Tower colony and a good part of both mesa.
It was a frightening experience. Dan had never felt so helpless in his whole life. The ship hung above everything filling the sky. It was so big that Dan could not tell what it's true size was. One moment he felt like he could reach up and touch it. The next moment it felt like it was many kilometers above him. He had hid between two rocks and watched as an opening appeared on top of the other mesa. Through high-powered binoculars he watched as four people emerged from the top of the mesa and got into a pilotless hover car of alien design. It had then sped off to the distance and disappeared.
"That's it." Dan had thought, "It's over now.", but he had been wrong. When anyone tried to leave the area a beam from the ship filling the sky had shone on them and they had fallen. Volunteers were sent from the UCL camp and they too were fallen as easily as a man might swat a fly. The only ray of hope was the fact that the ship seemed content to not harm anyone as long as they didn't try to either attack it or leave or communicate with the outside world. It was more than capable of killing them all.
It was like it was watching over them. It was not hostile. The men it had fallen with it's beam had recovered after ten or fifteen minutes time. It had just taken control of the situation. Dan knew he was in a wait-and-see situation. He didn't like it.
***
On the day after the ship had arrived another or maybe even the same hover car arrived and went to the top of the distant mesa. The opening on the top of the mesa re-appeared and five beings went into it from the hover car and the opening was gone again. Many opinions were offered to Dan but there was nothing to do about it except wait. Hours passed then the ship began to rise. The hover car left the mesa top by itself and went into the ship through some kind of a hatch.
It was like the ship had decided that everyone could go home now. That they should all leave and never come back.
A squad was ordered out and made it without any more beams hitting anyone. It was over as quickly and mysteriously as it had begun. It was almost like nothing had ever happened. Dan hoped it was over with. All he wanted to do was go home to be with his loving family once more. That was all that mattered to the president of the UCL.
It was nearly over. Anything that used electricity still didn't work. That wasn't too bad, Dan thought. He didn't care if he ever saw anymore military hardware again or not. Then the opening had re-opened. There was something sitting on the mesa pointing at the sky. Whatever it was it was producing a loud screaming type of a noise.
Dan could not care less. He was getting his buttercups out of there while the getting was good...
***
I lay in Sid's arms enjoying the warm afterglow of love making. Absence makes the heart grow fonder and the body...well the body was just tickled to have a man around again.
"Thank you." I told the man I loved.
"Any time--and I do mean anytime." he responded.
It was a joke. You know that man-thing, always horny. I mean we had just finished and he was just about to drop off to sleep and too tired to anything more and there he was trying to talk his way into next time already. How hard it must be to live like that...never ever completely satisfied. On the other hand, I was quite content.
***
Killer looked out over the desert. He was happy with what he saw. It was raining. His stump of a leg was throbbing but he didn't mind. Soon enough he would have a nice new leg. For a moment he tried to calculate if that would officially make him a CB. No, he would have to be the son of someone with an artificial reproductive system.
He laughed and wondered who the stupid son of a bitch was who came up with that one. He called to a nurse and told her to get him something to drink. He'd have to drink one to whoever it was that had given him the opportunity to take over the whole planet. He would be kaiser of Seco.
***
Ralph watched the rain in awe from his cell. Not far from where he was locked up he could see some CBs learning to play in the rain. They were still sort of timid in it. A lifetime of habit is a hard thing to put down. They knew the rain was theirs and it was being controlled by ther leader, Killer. Word was that there had been some kind of a power struggle and Killer had killed the colony manager but lost his leg in the process.
Ralph shook his head in disbelief and frustration. He leaned back against the cell wall not wanting to watch the rain any more but drops of cold water dripped from the ceiling of the cell onto his arm. He would not be allowed to forget how stupid he had been.
He had thought he had them all fooled then Sid had remembered seeing Ralph on his beat and they had come for him and locked him up. Ralph felt sure that they wouldn't kill him. If they were going to do that he would have already been dead. If he died it would be from neglect. Since being locked up he had only be fed on the most haphazard of schedules.
He opened his mouth and caught a few drops of rainwater in his mouth. It tasted good. Ralph wondered if he would ever get used to the idea of rain or not. He had all the time he needed to think about it...
***
"Here's your chance." Harvey thought, "Don't blow it!"
Harvey was the new colony manager, at least until a formal election could be held among the Council. If he could do anything to turn the situation around he felt sure he would be awarded the position of colony manager.
Fat chance! The old manager had tried to force Killer to tell him where the alien cache was and lost his life for his efforts. Still, there had to be a way.
Dejectedly, Harvey looked out of his window. The water was still leaking from the sky. It was like it was mocking him. Harvey got mad. His desk was covered up with reports of the damage the water had caused. Tower colony was in turmoil and the rebels hadn't even tried to contact him. It was like they didn't care if Tower succumbed to them or not.
Harvey knew what they wanted. They wanted Tower to start carrying supplies to ther camp. New Tower they called it. Up until that moment that had been Harvey's plan, until he got mad. He decided he would contact the UCL. Harvey knew the water was falling from the sky over the entire planet. The UCL would have a plan. Harvey would rather succumb to them than the dweebs.
He was curious why the UCL hadn't contacted him...
***
I had thought about what I was going to do. I didn't want to see the planet flooded with water. I don't think anyone else did either. Not really. We had all grown up on a planet not subject to the whims of weather. We had all the water we wanted underground. Eventually we would run out. That's when the rain makers would be handy. We could turn them on just long enough to trap enough water to go another millennium and then do it again.
The idea of having giant above ground pools of water thousands of kilometers across and many kilometers deep was repugnant, except to someone like Killer who had lived on earth and grew up with such atrocities. To someone like him the thought of warm and cold days meant next to nothing. To those of us who had never seen such things it was something to be dreaded.
I never wanted to see a cold snap or a heat wave. Toni, Dick, and Sid agreed with me on this, but they left it up to me to find an alternative. I didn't want to go against Killer and I didn't want to follow him either. I needed an alternative. As near as I could determine I had two maybe three.
1) Put the 'others' in charge. That would be fair. After all it was ther machines. They would probably be an excellent choice to lead us. They would probably be very fair and logical. 2) We had seen another colony when we went to Seventeen's complex, perhaps they would do a good job for all of us. Besides it would be good to reunite with what was left of the other colonies. 3) We, the actual people in the complex, had the power. One of us could take over and leave Killer out in the cold. That would serve him right.
These are put down in order of personal preference.
I approached Jet with the idea of the 'others' being in charge. She was very honest with me. She liked the idea but worried what a whole planet of humans that numbered in the tens or maybe even hundreds of millions would think of being ruled by a collection of less than one hundred sentient computers. She told me she didn't feel like a leader.
I got everybody together and asked what they thought about contacting the other colony. They liked it and they didn't like it. What we needed to do was contact them and see what kind of a deal we could cut. Unfortunately no one wanted to be the one to talk to the other colony. If it didn't go through and Killer remained in power and found out about it later then charges of treason might be forthcoming.
That kind of took care of the third possibility too. Nobody wanted to stick ther neck out anymore than they had. I could understand that too.
All the time we were talking the machines kept running. Outside things were changing. First the water was cooling things down quite a bit. There was humidity, mist and fog and clouds. The ground had sucked up the water at first but by the end of the day some of the ground had turned to mud. By the third day there were huge puddles of water everywhere. It was frightening to look at. On the fifth day we had mud slides and a wind storm.
We had taken full advantage of the complex the first three or four days but that had stopped with reports of mud slides on the video. We began spending more and more time by the radio waiting for Killer to contact us and tell us to stop. He didn't call so we called him. He ordered us to continue.
***
I was in the area we called the lounge. Sid was seated in one of the huge chairs and I was at his side. Toni and Dick were in another of the chairs next to the radio. We were all watching the news on the video. Most of the stations were transmitting nothing but news anyway.
The news was terrible. Everything was at a standstill. Each station seemed to be in a contest with the others to find something new and terrible that was happening because of the rain. Most businesses were closed. People had gone to the stores and tried to buy all the food on the shelves until the police had shut all the stores down and set up food 'stations'. They had 'stations' or distribution points set up all over the place for everything from food to clothing to bedding to materials that could be used to make most buildings somewhat more able to shed water rather than just let it leak inside.
The ideal thing to do was to abandon your house and live in your garage--it was easier to waterproof and you could heat it. That was another thing they were having problems with, there were not very many heating units working (power was out) and even if they had had power most units would not be able to deliver what was needed for long. Health officials were worried about an outbreak of colds from people not used to such cold weather and wet conditions. The temperature was down to single digits. In some places they had reports of ice forming on it's own out in the open. I tried to imagine what that would be like.
The video was, of course originating from Tower city and it was more than a little biased. They kept showing all these pictures where the CBs had it so bad like the dweebs weren't having any problems at all. They talked quite a bit about how the CBs were losing faith in the revolt and how bad the CBs at New Tower had it. Not once did they mention that New Tower was located on the top a huge mesa and Old Tower was located in one of the lowest places around. Old tower would be among the first of places to flood. I saw pictures where they already had ponds two whole meters deep and a half a kilometer across. A man would drown in that for sure.
It had been like that for days and getting worse everyday. It had depressed Jet so bad that she couldn't stand to watch it. She had been avoiding the rest of us.
There were all kinds of problems those people were having. We had built everything without ever giving a thought to water coming from the sky. We had never planned for an hour of rain let alone days and days of it.
One of our main building materials was made from sand that had been compacted and held together with a glue. The glue was dissolving when exposed to water for hour after hour. That's why most homes were unsafe to be in. The people had no shelter from the rain, the cold, the wind. It was such a simple thing and yet it had turned out to be so important.
Not all the buildings and homes were dissolving, but there were parts of nearly every structure being affected. They were bouncing back well. They just had such a long way to go. There was no drainage and nearly all of Old Tower was without power. It was really bad for them.
"Turn it off!" Toni finally said.
Sid grabbed the remote and blissfully silence reigned in the lounge.
"I wish I had let you talk me out of this." Toni told me while pointing at the video projector. "Do you see how much misery we are causing? Not only for the damned dweebs but for our own people too. This is getting us nowhere!"
"It's not our fault." Dick admonished Toni. "If the dweebs had given us enough to start out on none of this would have happened. They wouldn't let us up so we had to bring them down to our level."
"Dick!" Toni nearly squealed. "Look at all those people! How many people have died because of all of this?"
"I don't remember..."
"Don't want to remember is more like it! This is getting us nowhere. We can't even go to the dweebs for help anymore because they don't have it to give to us! Did you see all of those growing sheds that were going underwater? We are going to be faced with a famine! A food famine in this day and age! That's ludicrous! What are we proving?"
"We are proving that we can get what we need from the 'others' and the dweebs can't, Toni."
"What have you seen them deliver? I haven't seen a thing come out of this place but that beam that's going to make it rain even more."
"Hey! That's an idea!" I practically shouted. "Seventeen...Seventeen? Are you there?"
"Yes, Cookie." it sang.
"Can you get Jet?"
"Sure."
"Ask her to come in here. It's time we had a little pow-wow!"
"Pow-wow?" Seventeen repeated.
"A confab, a get together, a meeting of the minds, Seventeen."
"A meeting, a Council?" Seventeen asked.
"Yep! A pow-wow!"
***
It didn't take long for Jet to join us. She admitted to having misgivings about the way the planet was being flooded. She said it had always been intended that the re-humidification of Seco be a joyous event, instead it was turning into something horrible.
We all agreed that something had to be done. Our first step could be to call Killer on the radio. The problem with that move was that if we upset him then we could be out at New Colony struggling to keep warm while some other crew manned the complex.
I didn't like the idea of being removed from the complex. Nobody liked the idea. Toni, Jet, and myself really hated it. The guys wouldn't be too put out to leave. There was nothing for them to do. Still they knew a good thing when they saw it. Toni and I were making Dick and Sid very happy men.
"How about that idea of asking the 'others' to help, at least until we can get New Tower on it's feet. Then we could have an election or something and put whoever in charge that the majority want." Sid asked me.
"Excuse me." Jet interrupted me before I could answer. "If you get the others involved in this I can tell you right now they are going to want to bring in the other colonies."
"How many colonies are there, Jet. We broke off ties with them a long time ago. Until we saw that one colony near Seventeen's complex I wasn't sure if any of them had survived or not."
"Seventeen," Jet called, "how many human colonies are we aware of?"
"I don't know...let me set up a link with the 'others' and I'll access ther data bank."
"Good, do that." Jet instructed.
"There are eleven known colonies." Seventeen sang.
"Eleven!" Toni exclaimed. "Do they know about each other?"
"Unknown. Your colony is the only one we've ever had contact with." Seventeen explained.
"Haven't you ever listened to ther radio or video broadcasts?" I asked.
"We never had your language figured out until you came to this complex." Jet reminded me.
"Well you can figure out what they're saying now...why not pipe in some of ther broadcasts right now?" I asked.
"That's a very good idea." Seventeen told me. "This won't take a minute."
Directly I heard some commutator. He was talking like he was on the video. "I hear him but I can't see him." Sid aid aloud.
"I'll feed the video over the monitor." Seventeen told us.
Where ever this guy was it was raining too. He sounded pretty worried about it. There was some city located at the base of some mountain and all the water was washing down past the city. It was worse there than in Tower city.
"Tune in another colony, Seventeen please." Jet asked.
We tuned into place after place. Everywhere there was destruction. We watched for over an hour hoping somewhere it wasn't so bad. Everywhere people were dying from the floods.
"That's enough!" Toni finally exploded. "Seventeen, turn those damned rain makers off, now!"
"Is everyone in agreement?"
We all agreed.
"The rain makers are being shut down and returned to ther silos." Seventeen reported.
***
It took less than an hour for Killer to call us on the radio. I don't know how he found out about the rain makers being shut down because it was still raining. I took the call as the rest listened in.
"Cookie here, Killer."
"What has happened to the rain maker? I've been told it's been pulled back into the mesa. I want that thing running around the clock!"
"It had a problem. The others had to shut it down to repair it. They tell me it'll be back up and running in less than a day. They have to replace some part. They're making a replacement now." I lied.
There was a long pause then Killer came back on the air. "Ok, get it fixed then. I'll call you back in six hours to find out how things are going. We are all counting on you girls. I know about you picking up your friends and I'm not worried about that--just as long as it doesn't affect how you do your duty. A lot is ridding on you--don't let us down, ok?"
"Oh yes sir, you can count on us!" silently I added, "you lying sack of shit!"
He was probably dispatching troops to take over the complex. It would do him no good. Before anyone could get there we would be on the ships and gone. Seventeen had agreed to not let anyone in until we got back. We would stop the senseless killing. Maybe it wasn't killing, but it was letting people die...
The whole book in zipfile format.
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