In which all is revealed
Our heroes are disarmed and Sylvie has her Lash used to bind her arms to her body, before being led up to the flooded Base Commander’s office.
The Commander is sitting with his back to the door, behind a large wooden desk in a Nautiloid suit despite being underwater. He is monitoring the activity below through a huge window overlooking the hanger containing the tidal machine.
Once the captives are positioned before the desk, Nautiloid guards watching their every move, the Commander rotates in his chair to reveal himself as a Martian! “So we meet again Oriole” he says peering through the red mist contained in his suit. Oriole recognises the commander responsible for the huge invasion fleet which you will no doubt remember from that daring interplanetary adventure Red Indian, Red Planet.
“How you here, in deep past of my home?” asks Oriole, maintaining his composure by crossing his arms and holding himself proud in the face of his nemesis.
“When you destroyed my fleet you caused a massive explosion, and the wildly failing tachyon drives of our space ships caused a time distortion that threw me into the distant past of my world at the very height of the Martian civilisation. There I commandeered a space ship and flew to Earth, where I guided and moulded this promising race of Nautiloids. Manipulating their essential essences, making them as long lived as my race, I carefully selected the most aggressive of the species in a huge breeding program, which led inevitably to a new, world spanning empire capable of wiping from the face of the planet, the nascent potential of humanity before, they could forge the world that you know.
“But the islanders of Atlantis, proved tenacious and resourceful, their strange mechanical technologies thwarting me. So I hatched a plan to invade the future in an overwhelming surprise attack, oppressing humanity and stealing the technologies of your time. And, you have arrived here just in time to witness my tidal machine turn the oceans into a huge temporal vortex, allowing my amassed Nautiloid armies to sweep across the continents of your time, bending your whole planet to my will.
“Sit and watch with me” he says, gesturing to seats near the viewing window.
Doc Automatic peers down into the hanger with his expert eye at the reworking of his tidal machine, and spots a flashing warning light in an essential sub system of the grossly scaled up machinery. And, at this moment a Nautiloid scientist bursts in, hurriedly crosses the office and whispers a problem into the grim Martian’s ear.
Doc realises that the Nautiloids have not corrected the flaw in his original design which caused him to discard the tidal machine and leave it gathering dust amongst the many half finished prototypes in his laboratory. He delights in informing the Martian that the machine is doomed to failure without correcting and recalibrating that vital subsystem.
Oriel then has a vision of the Martian's fate, and pointing at him predicts that the use of technology beyond his ken will result in his destruction.
The provoked Martian raises his hand, and the Nautiloid guards level their guns at our heroes and the fiendish alien demands that Doc fix the problem or his friends will die. Quick as a flash Sylvie frees her hands and whips her lash across the room, dragging him and his chair across the room to face her.
Unphased the diabolical Commander raises a single finger and a Nautiloid fires his weapon felling our hero Oriole and leaving him on the floor, blood slowly clouding the water around his dead body.
“I do not bluff” says the Martian levelling his gaze at the distraught Doc, who screams in his distress.
“My Blood Brother!” Defeated and in shock, Doc agrees to mend the monstrous version of his machine.
Provoked into further action, Sylvie whips a Nautiloid’s gun from his grasp and into her hand levelling it at the Martian in front of her, but the Martian calmly directs her to shoot, and the gun clicks uselessly in the Martians face.
“Do you think I would let these guns work on me?” says the grinning alien commander.
No comments:
Post a Comment