Chapter No.23 Surprise

There's always something better.

Molly found another nearby habitable planet in a K1 V-class star system that looked interesting. It's a binary pair with a M3 dwarf companion. This particular system has five rocky planets and three gas giants. It's listed on Space Command data lists as an exo-planet that is 1.2 times as large as Earth with an oxygen rich atmosphere.

We came out of warp a million kilometers away from the planet of interest, but it appeared that something was wrong.

"I'm not seeing any exo-planet in the orbital position that the Space Command data indicated," Molly said.

"That doesn't make any sense," I said. "I can't imagine that their data would be that incorrect."

She held a hand up while still staring at her navigation station screen. "I think we had better stop."

I gave her a surprised look. "What do you mean?"

"Look at this," she said, pointing at her screen. "This looks like gravity lensing. See the star streaks around the black circle."

I strained to look at what she was referring to, but when I realized what was happening, I turned to Judy. "Bring us to a complete stop."

Judy used several blasts of plasma ion drive from the front facing engines to slow us down quickly to a stop in space relative to the invisible planet.

"I can't believe what I'm seeing here," I said. "This planet is being cloaked. That would require one hell of a lot of energy to do that."

"I can't penetrate the cloaking," she said. "We have no idea what's behind that."

"Move us into orbit around that cloaked planet, Judy."

Judy used the back facing plasma engines to slowly move us into an orbit around something we couldn't actually see."

"Energy readings indicate that this is different than our cloaking technology. It reads as a strong magnetic field that's full of dark photons. We use dark photons but project them as a plasma field."

"All we have to do now is figure how to penetrate it without being blown to bits."

She looked back at me. "I don't think that would happen. One way we could safely get inside it would be to use a zero-insertion maneuver with our ship at full shielding."

"Okay," I said, smiling. "I'll buy that idea." I looked at Judy. "Go to full shielding and slowly insert us at the lowest possible velocity into the planet's cloak field."

"Yes, Jason."

The zero-insertion maneuver required twenty minutes to accomplish. Our main screen slowly began to clear and reveal the true nature of the cloaked planet. It was very Earth-like with a beautiful blue atmosphere decorated with swirling clouds.

"Look at those cities!" Molly exclaimed. "The structures look as if they were made from glass."

"Interesting," I said. "The alien species that lives on this planet must be very advanced."

"I'm not detecting any evidence that they note our presence," Molly said.

"Oh, I'm sure they know we're here," I said. "Evidently, they don't consider us a threat."

"Are we going to go down there?" Molly asked.

"I don't think we have any other choice. As advanced as they are, they may possess information about other alien species."

I turned to Judy. "Prepare a shuttle. I think we'll not show any signs of violence. Have the two pilots armed with only side-arm weapons."

"You are assuming that they won't do anything, Jason?"

"I know, but you can always send down the cavalry to rescue us."

Molly guffawed. "You are a comedian, aren't you!"

"I just think that we don't always have to act like a conquering army. These aliens must be highly intelligent and probably cloaked their planet so that they wouldn't be bothered by the rift-raft of this galaxy. I'm sure that they would give us some slack because we figured out how to penetrate their cloaking system."

Molly rewarded me with a smirk.

Molly and I joined Alice and Ellen in a shuttle to travel down to the surface. The ride down was uneventful. No one shot at us or tried to divert us. We flew over a massive city with transparent crystalline buildings connected by transparent horizontal cylinders. We could see cylindrical objects moving swiftly from building to building.

Molly pointed at a large open area. "We could land there."

"Take us down," I told our pilots.

We slowly settled down onto a vast plaza near what appeared to be a fountain. A crystalline statue that resembled some sort of sleek aquatic creature stood in prominent location. Illuminated by several colored lights, water streamed out of the crystalline creature's round mouth in a gentle arch that produced a rainbow effect.

We waited for a while until a crowd gathered before Molly and I exited out shuttle and walked out in front of it with our two androids behind us.

The aliens were not what I would have expected. They were graceful with long thin arms and legs. Their hands had three fingers with an opposable thumb. Their faces were oval shaped on a long delicate neck with no sign of hair on their heads. Two black pupils in round shimmering clear eyes stared at us. Their noses were just two slits above a lipless mouth that contained what looked like squared-off teeth. This told me that they were not meat eaters.

Their flesh was almost transparent with what appeared to be tiny blue dots inside a complex matrix. They wore garments that appeared as a pure gossamer delicate fabric. My guess is that it was made from some sort of artificial material.

I had no idea how we were going to communicate with them, but I was about to be pleasantly surprised.

"Welcome to our world," one of them said in perfect English.

I tried like hell not to smile, but I ended up with a subtle grin. "Thank you. We are here because we are curious."

"You are from a planet in what you call the Orin arm of the Milky Way galaxy," the alien said. "You are what you call human."

"The truth is that we only appear as human." I gestured to Molly. "The woman and I were human but have been converted to cyborgs. Our flesh is artificial and contains no microbial life either exterior or interior. We are no risk to you from an infectious aspect."

"We are aware of your essence," the alien said.

I assumed that it meant that they had scanned us. "We are on a quest to find humans because all life was exterminated from our planet by a large meteor collision. We wish to repopulate it."

The alien gestured. "Come, and we will discuss your quest."

We followed a group of aliens to a building that was totally transparent. We could easily see aliens working in various chambers that we assumed were technical modules on the various floors. Surprisingly, they didn't look down at us.

We were escorted to a large lounge area with transparent rounded pod seats.

"Please sit," the alien told us, gesturing.

We did, but the seats weren't exactly designed for our behinds.

"How would you repopulate your planet?" another more delicate looking alien asked.

I assumed that it was a female, but that was strictly a guess. "We have many embryos, both male and female. We require a human female to gestate them."

The aliens exchanged glances before the female turned back to me. "We have several alien species in controlled settings. One of these is human."

What the hell did she mean by controlled settings?

She and the other aliens stood up. "Come, and we will show you."

We followed them to a tube elevator that shot us up to the top of the building. We were then instructed to step up on a transparent slab that had railings and what appeared to be round pits. The aliens stepped down into the pits and we did the same.

The slab ascended above the building and sped off across the city and out into a forest area of blue-leafed trees before descending to a landing spot near an enormous geodesic dome structure. We climbed out our pits in the transport device and walked over to an entrance.

What we saw inside the dome structure was simply astounding. Various alien species were confined in artificial zoo settings. I assumed that the aliens couldn't see us, but we could clearly see them. This very advanced species had essentially created a cosmic zoo.

One of the settings contained humans dressed in crude pant suits, but there was a problem.

"Interesting," I said. "However, these humans are too primitive. They appear to be early Homo sapiens. I'm not sure that these embryos would survive in one of these females' womb."

"Maybe they could try to see if they would work," Molly said.

I rubbed my jaw. "Yes, that might be an option." I turned to the female alien. "We could give you a dozen embryos to experiment with."

"That would be acceptable."

"I assume that you know how to implant them?"

"We do," she replied.

I turned to Alice. "Tell them to send a shuttle down with twelve embryos, half male, in a small portable cryogenic bottle."

Alice nodded but did nothing else.

"Their minds and ours are connected by entangled communication," I explained.

"We understand," the alien said.

The aliens took us on tour of their zoo. We saw all sorts of weird aliens. Some looked like insects with multiple legs. Others were more like lizards. Then there were the andromorphic types that had two arms and legs."

"We could sure use a list of the locations of these alien species," I said. "That would save us investigating their home worlds."

"Our ancestors ventured out to find these species," the female said. "We have abandoned that practice and prefer to remain hidden."

"We have encountered two species that are aggressively dangerous," I said.

"We are aware of them," she said. "We have taken steps to avoid them."

I wasn't sure what she meant by that, but I assume that it involved crap loads of energy. In fact, I figured that they could easily destroy any vessel that tried to penetrate their cloaking system. They allowed us in because they knew that we had the embryos.

I decided to take the more diplomatic approach. "We will go now and return if we fail to find modern humans."

The alien simply nodded. I couldn't read her actual feeling. The good news is that they allowed us to leave their cloaked planet without incident.