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From: simon_48@hotmail.com (Simon Wagstaff III)
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NNTP-Posting-Date: 16 Mar 2003 18:10:52 GMT
Subject: {ASSM} HURTLING PLANETS  Conclusion a new-wave space opera by Simon Wagstaff III
Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2003 22:10:04 -0500
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HURTLING PLANETS
A NEW-WAVE SPACE OPERA by Simon Wagstaff III
EPISODE 8 - CONCLUSION
	They prepare for the landing of the first starship. BLACK CROSS is
hailed by a black ship. They meet at last. I have all the cards. But I
fold my hand. Alien creatures regard each other. Epilogue.


	THEY PREPARE FOR THE LANDING OF THE FIRST STARSHIP. A crowd has
gathered; the seers having told them when and where days ago. The gig
with Captain Dennis of REACHER and his brain-damaged junior officer
Powter is slowly descending in its tractor beams as a white-faced
Dennis fights to force it down safely. No seers have told HIM he will
land softly, so he sweats and trembles, afraid to breathe near the
controls until the base is safely settled. He glares at the viewports,
then gapes. There are humans out there, despite his scan of the world
as unindustrial and com-silent. Perhaps it will be all right, there
will be a spaceport somewhere, hospitals for Koko.
	Ensign Karen Powter is naked and fascinatedly playing with herself
when Dennis enters her room. He slows to a halt and stares. Koko is
worth staring at, even clothed. Her body is light chocolate and her
curves are lush. Her expressive face is displaying serene lust. "Back
an' forth, back an' forth," she is crooning to her finger as it
travels around her clit. "Hi, Dennis," she spots him, "Come an' help
me, I can't stop doing this cause back 'n forth, backnforth, mmm," she
closes her eyes and shivers.
	Dennis steps closer. "Koko, we've landed. There are people here.
We've got to go out and," he stares at her brown fingers as they slide
around her lovely labia, "well, I guess, it's not THAT urgent," he
sinks to his knees, "just try to come quickly, umm, slurp" she locks
her knees around his big head as he begins to lap. She cries out
almost instantly, then goes into the orgasmic seizure induced by the
brainburn drug. Orgasm after orgasm hit her like buckets of first hot,
then cold, then hot water. Her eyes roll back and crazy words spill
from her lips; the pleasure is incredible.
	 And sobering; she opens her eyes and says clearly "Captain, we've
landed? We're safe?"
	Dennis kisses her bellybutton and tells her affectionately, "You are
safe from here on out, Powter. I promise. We may just still be lost."
He helps her dress, and they open the doors to see what awaits.
	Armida Conchon turns to Orvon Rattray as they wait outside. "Could
you feel what they were doing?" she inquired. At his headshake she
tells him, "A man landed the ship, in great fear. A woman was lost in
pleasure at the same time. The man went to her, and made her come like
I have never imagined. I want to see this man for myself."
	Orvon smiles nastily, as always. "I'll take the woman." The door
hisses open and the crowd stares. The shabby peasants at the back of
the crowd think, free men, men from the stars. The gaudy firehead
nobles in the front ready their mindwhips and think, new slaves,
worlds of new slaves. They stare at Dennis and Koko, probe lightly for
signs of mental defenses.
	Garbin Molker grins triumphantly. "As I thought, just sky-peasants.
Well, let's start training these and make ready to go out and find
their homes." Dennis looks at him in bewilderment; then five or six
mindwhips strike his brain and send him screaming to his knees. Powter
shrieks as he falls, looking blankly at the foolishly-dressed people
with predatory smiles; then the mindwhips begin to strike her.
	Her Majesty's Starfleet Ensign Karen Powter's brain has been
expensively trained to resist tampering by outside influences, then
tampered with by an extremely crude psychosurgery drug. New channels
have been burned into her nervous system by the offense and her
defenses. Almost everything she thinks or does goes through her
pleasure centers, thanks to her almost constant rape during the drug's
worst effects, and much of her forebrain is etched with tiny scars and
short-circuits. Her psychological training fought to the last as she
became a happy sex doll, allowing her to ultimately kill her
kidnappers and take the ship as her posthypnotic triggers went off one
by one, making more unknown shorts and channels. The mindwhips grab
for her pain centers, for her pleasure centers, for her mind and soul
and will, as they are gouging Dennis' brain at this instant, and she
FEELS his pain, feels the gloating bastards on the other end of the
whips, knows what they are thinking and all their hundreds of names
and faces and guilts, what they plan for her and for Dennis, for
DENNIS! and she grabs all the whips and shouts:
	STAY OUT OF MY MIND!
				and new circuits in her corroded brain sizzle into life.

	Garbin Molker has just time enough to think "shit, the mystics were
right," before Koko pulls the mindwhip OUT OF HIS BRAIN, taking his
thoughts and self with it. Koko is the center of a hurricane of
psychic force as she stands in the gig's doorway, face contorted.
Orvon Rattray sees the faces of all his victims smiling happily in the
instant that his mind rips and leaves him an empty hulk, standing
tensely beside other zombies. They are all dead, standing there,
realizes Armida. Garbin and Orvon are standing there with their hearts
beating and lungs moving, brain-dead. The constant beehive hum of
other firehead thoughts that she has heard all her life is silent; she
feels the mystics holding their minds calm in peaceful meditation,
sure that they will die next. Orvon has shit his pants. Only the fact
that she has held her whip back has saved her. The powerless peasants
are running away unharmed; all the fireheads are dead except her.
Because she hadn't attacked, she realizes. They had all reached
together, the grabby, vicious bastards, and now...
	 The dark woman stands in the doorway with what seem to be thousands
of mindwhips invisibly growing from her head. Armida can see clearly
that the woman's eyes are insane, filled with a cold fury that could
crush worlds. Her lips are snarling away from her teeth and her neck
muscles are cables. The awful eyes catch hers and hold her. The whips
draw back. Here it comes, thinks Armida in a panic. At last, oh shit,
goodbye. No, no, I only controlled a little, I hate killing, please
no! The awful eyes soften, the neck muscles relax a bit.
	YOU AREN'T SO BAD, thinks the monster that began as Karen Powter. I
CAN THINK BETTER WITH ALL THESE EMPTY HEADS HOOKED UP TO ME. IF
THEY'VE HARMED DENNIS, I'LL BRING THEM BACK AND KILL THEM AGAIN.
Armida has fallen to her knees, scraping them and her palms.
	Dennis is on his knees too, gaping brainlessly up at Koko. Her
thousands of whips bend inquiringly towards his head. Armida winces.
"Don't!" she cries. "You'll hurt him, wait, let me." The Koko-thing
seems to growl. It has extra arms suddenly, like an octopus. "Watch
how I do this," she invites peacefully, and slips her mindwhip into
Dennis' head. "See, this is where he thinks, I made him think of a
flower, and if you push here, he'll be hurt. Kill someone by pinching
this, and oo, I'll show you this in a second, but he's been hurt here,
see how you stroke it better, then he was burned a bit here, yes, you
see now! And your touch, it heals him so wonderfully. See here, this
is where men keep their love images, and you're the one he loves. Your
touch heals him. It's your face he dreams about ... This? It's his sex
button, and if you push it right here," Armida finds herself pushed
jealously out of Dennis' mind. Koko giggles crazily and Dennis at her
knees makes a mewing sound and falls over. A stain begins to spread at
his crotch, and he smiles wildly. Koko levitates the terrified Armida
up to the doorway and hugs her. She seems less monstrous, her face
less beaked; the shadowy arms are absent again.
	"You made me remember myself. I saw me in his mind. What have I done
to myself? I'm a monster? A stupid monster, with thousands of heads.
They're all dead, the whole planet,  the ones with tentacles in their
heads, all but you and some weed-smoking monks or something up in the
hills. I've pulled out their 'mind whips,' did you call them? My ship
won't fly, and we're stuck on a lost world somewhere, and I'm insane,
and now I'm a monster."
	Dennis struggles to his knees and tries to hug her. Immaterial
tentacles push him back; she accidentally looks at a place in his mind
which is choked with guilt and lust, all labelled Koko. She sees the
sleepless nights, the desperation and anguish, and the mingled lust
and love which sent this man out here to save her. Hundreds of empty
minds across the field ring with desolation as Koko realized she loves
Dennis and he loves her, that they WOULD have been a team if things
had gone right. Now? "I'm a monster," she whimpers.
	"You must be stopped," answers a voiceless voice. Koko and Armida
freeze in skin-crawling horror as a Dree appears, topaz eyes glowing
angrily. Its skin is like rock, or blue chalk.
	"Once before we let something like this happen. The result is a
blight upon the order of the universe. Listen to me, human creature.
You have killed hundreds already, hundreds of evil creatures who meant
you harm. You will kill more, who have threatened you less, and find
reasons to kill others. Soon you will begin to forget your own life
and become merely a thing, feeding on the minds of others, a creature
to be imprisoned and guarded. While you still remember who you are,
you must let me kill you." The thing waits impassively, braiding its
tentacles.
	Koko hears the ring of truth, the fear in this thing's mind-voice.
She clutches Armida instinctively. Armida hasn't had a friend since
childhood; Powter's easy acceptance has melted her heart. She steps in
front of Koko and glares at the thing. "She's good!" she storms. "They
deserved to die; she spared the mystics, and even me. Help her!"
	Powter's eyes fix on Dennis, still glazed over from the huge tweak on
the orgasm button she'd given him. I don't want to die, she mourns.
Help me, someone? HELP ME!

	*HELP ME*

	BLACK CROSS IS HAILED BY A BLACK SHIP. Sabor sits in his cabin. He
also sits on the outside of the pirate ship BLACK CROSS. Having two
bodies is disconcerting, he thinks. The creature whose psychic corpus
he has invaded is a disgusting mass of tentacles and prongs, with a
twisted, beaked face in its midst. It had underestimated Sabor's
imagination, strategic grasp, will, and quickness; he had destroyed it
and become it. Marka has kept to herself ever since she realized the
failure of the rescue effort; the monster was free as well as Sabor.
He couldn't make love to Marka without manipulating her thoughts as
well as her body; he drove her to heights of ecstasy but made her more
and more dependent on him. Finally in disgust he'd tried to set her
mind as normally as possible and tried not to touch her any more. His
monster-self stares at the galaxies whizzing by, at the beauty of the
multi-colored stars. A long life with no love or friendship stretches
out ahead of him.
	The intercom crackles, although the thought behind it reaches Sabor
with equal clarity. "Sabor. I need you fast. We're being hailed by, by
someone, I don't know, maybe aliens? Look!" Sabor reads it from his
mind; the strange accents, the unfamilar blip on the screens, the dark
face on the comscreen.
	He teleports to the control room and steps to the second chair.
Charles Soaper nods from the control chair. "What are they, Sabor?
Lost planet dwellers? I've never seen faces like these!" The brief
contact recordings flash on the screen over and over: two leathery
dark men, impossibly thin and tall, speaking English with horrible
mispronunciations. "They're here, and they were there just moments
ago. Neither the Alliance or Empire has a drive like this, Sabor."
	"Let's find out," grunts Sabor. Marka peers in the door behind him,
then comes up behind his chair. She puts a hand on each man's
shoulders. They both sit straighter; the love in her hands is
tangible. Sabor opens a window in space where the screen should be;
three dark shiny faces gape in shock and blare strange consonants. The
humans study them in fascination; every feature of the human face is
there. The teeth are a man's, with incisors and canines visible, the
eyes have whites and irii, the hair grows where a man's would. The
nasal arch is too high; the foreheads are almost spherical.
Five-fingered hands clutch at supports as they gaze on the human
faces.
	"They're not surprised to see us," Marka points out. Her eyes gleam;
Station 4BWA was a boring place. Events recently have been exciting.
Her bosom heaves; Sabor has resolutely left her alone for days. Marka
has been used to having sex anytime for many years and Soaper is
beginning to look good to her. His face is full of pride and resolve;
Sabor having offhandedly fixed the twist in his brain which made him a
callous predator. Soaper had immediately set out to undo a long life
of nastiness by rescuing his benefactor and had only succeeded in
freeing the creature.
	"You're right," snaps Soaper. "They've seen humans before, but we
don't know them. They're blacker than I am, but they're not negro
black. As different from that as I am from a blond scandinavian.
Sabor, can you read their minds?"
	"I'm afraid to," said Sabor simply, letting his power cross the miles
between the two craft. The dark men blaze like beacons in the night to
his senses; they seem to sense him and react angrily. A force field
blooms around their craft, pushing Sabor back although he knows he
could break it at need. "They...expected me. They know something!"
	The com crackles alive. "Priss-nerz of Ob," one of the dark faces is
demanding, "Can you hear? You must es-cape the shhhhip. You are in
deadly day-nnn-gerr." The dark faces are mournful.
	Sabor sits up straighter. On the outside of the ship, his other body
stretches out a tentacle, reaching across the miles to the other ship.
The force field dims and sparks as Sabor reaches out to Rakkar
Gandat's thoughts. Rakkar screams as the touch of the dreaded Ob burns
through his mind. Suddenly it is gone and the force-field begins to
regain its power. Sabor appears on the viewscreen of the dark ship.
	"At this moment," Sabor tells him in his own language, "the thing you
call Ob is MY prisoner, but I fear for my sanity in the future. I see
some of this in your thoughts, but I want to talk to you. I can
guarantee your safety." His arm waves and Rakkar vanishes from the
dark ship and appears next to Sabor in the screen. His crew react in
shock; before Anda can faint Sabor leans closer to the screen, catches
her eye, and adds, "Anda, he will be safe. My word on it." She gasps;
how does he know her? She begins to try calming the horrified crew.
Rakkar is their last hope; the best of the Secret Men.
	Rakkar is petrified. He has spent his life avoiding this thing,
insulating the fragile galaxy from it; now he faces it. Sabor is a
muscular, graying, short man with a handlebar mustache. His eyes are
humorous and confident, and he rises to shake Rakkar's bewildered
hand. "Captain Gandat, you have information I need, and I think I can
help you, too. I am Sabor Grundy, formerly a political prisoner
serving as a volunteer on a secret base called only 4BWA. I became
aware over years that something horrible was in the dim protosun we
circled; but only when we were found by pirates did it act. I see now
that we were its amusement, that it was kept from escaping partly by
our despair. It began to kill us all as the pirate ship neared the
base. Somehow, in meditation, I saw it begin to kill. I struck back as
it had struck; our minds connected and mine was more determined. We
were eye to eye, and it blinked first. My body," he waves
short-fingered hands, "lay as if dead, while my mind entered the thing
in the sun. One pirate lived; I straightened out the kinks in his
brain so that he would be fit company for Marka." He waves a hand
towards Charles and Marka, who sit silently to one side. "I fixed him
too well; as repayment he drove this ship almost through the protosun
so I could climb aboard. I'm back in my body, but also part of 'Ob,'
as you call it. You, I perceive, are the missing chapters of this
story. How do you come to be cruising the stars in ancient ships, and
why are you so distantly related to my kind of human? Earth is in
every line of your body, brother from the stars. Why are you hidden?"
	Rakkar Gandat sighs. The secret is out; the Secret Men unmasked. Yet
Sabor seems to still control Ob, and the danger is not yet severe. He
sighs again, and begins.
	"On the planet called Earth, many races of Man have emerged. We grew
in the land you now call  Australia, and found that the world was ours
for the taking. Our brothers were still wearing skins when we sent a
ship to the moon, and we took to the sky so you could live your own
lives without our guidance. Our floating worlds circled Earth and the
moon, and we reached for the outer planets. Our greatest thinker,
Obtar Bennek, learned to throw his thoughts into another's mind,
eventually teaching five of his students how to do this. Bennek made
many breakthroughs as his mind became stronger and stronger; the six
were our greatest leaders. Then it happened: Telhar Gefhek was
discovered to have a secret harem of women whose minds had been
destroyed; wives and daughters of friends as well as women he had
kidnapped. Bennek fought with him for days, killing many bystanders as
well, then investigated the others. They all had secret lives,
murders, mutilations, slavery. Bennek was forced to absorb them as he
killed them; he became more maniacal himself and finally proclaimed
himself Ob, ruler of the solar system. We destroyed him and found he
returned as an immaterial thing, more powerful than ever. We fought
back, were enslaved, fought free again. You folk remember the gods
warring, frost giants and fire giants, trolls and djinni. Suddenly one
day Ob became Obtar Bennek again, fighting the other minds he had
incorporated to tell us how to defeat him. We built the machines he
revealed to us and pulled him into space with the star drive he gave
us. He began to rave again, fighting us with incredible strength. We
launched him into a dark nebula and set a watch on him. As he grew
stronger we found that our observers were slowly destroyed; so we
began using convicts. We began to age, to reproduce less often though
we live long. Our people have gone ahead, only the Black Fleet remains
as a guard.  A secret arm of your government has carried this on
without us, knowing only that 'aliens' have made them the keepers of a
horror." Gandat stares at Sabor. "Do you understand? You will become
another Ob! You must go back to the Star Cage, or find a new one."
	Charles and Marka are frozen in horror, understanding the strange
speech through Sabor's power.
	Sabor broods. "Once I was reviled as the Bomber of Ismail. I killed
hundreds, and then found the cause I had killed for was a sham. I
turned myself in freely, confessed and implicated my co-murderers. I
am no weak philosopher or teacher, but a man of force. I have kept my
companions free of compulsion -"
	"You have meddled with their minds," Rakkar tells him. "You have no
right to this power. You lack the ability to restrain it. You must
save us all, Sabor." His face twists. "You must go back to exile."
	*HELP ME*
	Sabor stares blankly. "Someone's calling for help," he says in a
distracted voice. He reaches out an invisible tentacle, frowns.
"Someone big and dangerous -"
	*GET OUT OF MY MIND!* barks Koko, millions of miles away.
	Sabor screams and throws up his hands. Something sharp and hard is
coming at him at superspeed! He slams a barrier up just in time as a
violent impact throws him to his human knees. His immaterial body
outside the ship cringes in pain. Sabor pants; he had been
microseconds from death! What WAS that? The others are staring. He
looks into nothing -
	"My God," Sabor calls. "Another one! And aliens, real aliens. We're
not alone!" He stretches his arms wide. "I won't hurt you, girl! You
called for help! Back off and see me!"
	Suddenly they all stand in a gray nothing, feet off the ground,
staring at Powter, Armida, Dennis and the amazed Dree.
	"Fecal matter," the Dree moans. 'It is Ob."
	Dennis shakes his head, still kneeling. "Who in hell is this? What's
happening?"
	Koko stands between her man and the newcomers. "You! You're the one
I, but you're a monster, too! The alien, the alien said I, that I
would become, that I'd forget myself."
	"He wasn't lying," Rakkar Gandat tells her in perfect English,
frowning at his sudden knowledge of the language. "Obtar Bennek was my
grandfather; I remember the way he seemed to me as a child. You are
the center of a whirl of mind-probes."
	Armida steps forward, slapping Rakkar back with a fast flick of her
mindwhip. "She's the first good person I've met in years. Look at me,
at ME! I've killed other fireheads to stay alive, I've mind-ripped my
servants. I'd be dead long ago if I hadn't been strong. But I've hated
every minute, and I can give it up. I've dreamed of giving it up.
Every person is a unique situation. Please, we have to talk, to think.
Don't anybody act too quickly.
	"Look, the alien! We've suspected for ages we weren't alone. Now one
has come to us, as a messenger of deadly danger. We have a common
ground! We can't just fight. Even a lost-world savage like myself can
see it's the end of the line for the old system. We still have books,
you know. On Old Earth, they say, Neanderthal Man went along happily
for thousands of years. Then came Cro-Magnon Man, and soon there were
no more Neanderthals. Well, something new is here, and we can't just
stand by and become extinct." She stares adoringly at Koko, who is
staring wildly at her own tiny brown hands.
	"We were the new thing, once," Rakkar Gandat says softly into the
silence. "We came along after you Cro-Magnons, and could have
displaced you. We're stronger, smarter, and less anti-social as a
crowd. But with our bigger brains came a kind of wisdom, even when we
were tribesmen, and we sailed away from Australia and found Atlantis,
and we left you to grow up on your own."
	"Atlantis!" Soaper is wide-eyed. "I've heard THAT legend. Did it
really sink?"
	"No, we took it along when we left. It's on its way to the stars, or
there by now, propelled by hyperspace drives. Something for you, and
us, to look for later. If we survive Ob. If not, a hope that people
will go on beyond his reach somewhere." Rakkar stares at Sabor's calm
face.
	"Tell us about it, alien," Sabor invites. "We've always thought you
were there, somewhere. Now you've acted. Why?"
	"To prevent another you!" the Dree spits, lashing three of its limbs.
"A being not stabilized in the second level, yet active upon the third
and fourth! An abomination, and a threat to us all."
	"Why a threat?" Sabor is deceptively calm. "You seem my match at this
game; you offered to help kill this poor girl. Several of you should
be a match for two of us -"
	"You understand nothing!" the Dree hisses. "All of this mind-to-mind
play that impresses you so much, this is second and third level
understanding. We stand in a third-level plane at this moment. We have
gained a foothold in the fourth level after years of striving, and
only seven of us survived the transition. You claw and rip the fourth
level with your talons as you reshape your world. You will destroy
everything, everything!"
	Sabor blanches. He sees the truth of it; the Dree are helpless
against him. He is a giant to their ants in the fourth level of
reality. His mind has been reaching through two dimensions to return
to ours. He sees the reality of a universe built in levels, a second
and third and fourth level, with more ranged beyond. He sees -
	"My God," he mumbles. "I see a world smashed to pieces. A base of
some kind." They all see it in his thoughts and Dennis knows it on
sight.
	"Kriegplatz!" he snaps. "Big Alliance base. It's been crushed - the
whole world! What -"
	Sabor closes his eyes and spreads his hands wide. "I'm trailing
something, I've got it. Whoa." He opens his eyes. "What a mess."
	They all see it as Sabor does: a huge minefield holding back an
immense array of armed and armored planets, controlled by hyperdrives
slaved to one small ship; Vom Acht's STRIKER and Warren's REACHER have
the small ship pinned against his own fleet of planets as they
negotiate by com. Horrifying bloodshed is imminent in the Royal Crown
system.
	Dennis and Koko, holding hands, exchange a horrified glance. "Mister,
can you put us on that ship?" Dennis barks to Sabor, who laughs
shortly in return.
	"You, certainly," he says as Dennis vanishes with a pop. "You, not
likely," he smiles at Koko, who is beginning to look frightened again.
"We've got to talk to these people fast, before something tragic
happens again." He waves a hand. They begin to appear, popping into
the empty gray stage one by one. Last to appear is Dennis, snatched
back from a hasty conversation with Warren.

more to come

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