Scorched Earth, Alien Wonders
Chapter 14: The Corporate Dark Side

What is that revolting stench?

I was surrounded by mist, and wandering over flat, deserted terrain...feeling delusional and lost.

As the sun descended, leaving the sky a blurred, purple color, I staggered into a place that I knew was my home. But the familiar comfort faded quickly as I realized the smell stinging my nostrils was decaying, dead bodies of my fellow prairie dog neighbors.

I started down a burrow, but stopped.

Most were underground, but a few lay on top near their entrances, with dried blood around their vacant eyes and gaping mouths. There were also carcasses of a few dead rabbits, birds and mice scattered across the field.

I looked to the far right and there was a massive sign with white letters on black background that read, “2015 Future Home of Castle Rock Mall and Drake Industries Aluminum Mine.”

I sat straight up in my fluffy, dirt bed in Suburbia, breathing deep with panic, while letting the relief that it was just another nightmarish flashback from eons ago wash over me.

Damn, I HATE this place...

The next morning, with very little sleep, I lead my team to the Rabbit Hole on our way to the lab, so we could talk to Daisy about my sleeping re-enactment of the past.

“I don’t know anything about Drake Industries,” said Daisy, in response to my questions. “But history is full of stories from long ago about prairie dogs being poisoned in places where humans wanted to build things.”

“Lovely,” said Brown, sarcastically. “How can your generation of prairie dogs like and admire people so much after what they did to your ancestors?”

“Well...it’s long been our deeply held belief that they simply didn’t know any better,” answered Daisy, with sad eyes. “They simply didn’t know that those prairie dogs felt fear, pain and grief for their dead just like they do.”

“And you think the humans who remain in the domed settlement know those things about you now?”

“Yes,” she replied without hesitation. “In fact, there were humans in the past who tried desperately to stop such barbaric killings of prairie dogs and other wildlife, because poison not only killed the target animal, but any other hapless creatures in the area, too. Unfortunately, the stories tell of more powerful forces in the human business world that often seemed to win out over compassion in the end. Apparently, they cared more about the profit they might lose if they allowed any delay for the safe removal of prairie dogs.”

“But now, there haven’t been stories of humans hurting prairie dogs for half a century,” Daisy continued. “It could be because so many of us disappeared or that they were too busy worrying about their own survival, but we choose to think the best. We don’t want to forget that good humans exist now and even in the past.”

“Why didn’t I get poisoned, too?” I abruptly went back to my horrific vision.

“What?” Daisy asked.

“Why didn’t I get poisoned, too? Since these are reenactments of things experienced by the prairie dog whose DNA they used for my subroutine...how was I spared all those years ago?”

“You were probably lucky enough to be out at a remote guard post at the time.”

Suddenly, my attention was diverted. I could hear music coming from up the exit tunnel and way off in the distance. Daisy heard it, too, but the rest of my team stood looking at us with puzzled expressions, because they didn’t have full prairie dog senses like me and Daisy... so they couldn’t hear it.

“C’mon, let’s get to the lab!” I shouted as I bolted for the exit tunnel. “That’s the song, ‘Rocket Man’, which Cassie said she would use on the loud speaker if news came in of a shuttle from Mars headed this way...remember?”

A short time later, we were all headed down the familiar path to the lab.

“What’s the hurry?” groaned Davis. “It takes six hours in super-flash speed for the space shuttle to get here from Mars and that’s assuming it has already launched.”

“Yeah, I agree,” said Moore. “There’s nothing less enjoyable than skipping along at high speed in the mid-day heat.”

“Oh, buck up! I need time to talk with Cassie and Sara about what I saw in my flashback and Drake Industries,” I replied, but slowed down anyway.

For some reason the heat wasn’t bothering me quite as bad these days, which I attributed ironically to my subroutine malfunction.

“Did you know that six hours is the time it used to take for an ancient Earth airplane to fly just from Ashville, North Carolina, to Seattle?” Brown asked.

It was a rhetorical question, because she knew that we had no clue about the geography of this dead planet, but it took the focus off the ever-present, balmy temperature.

About then an exotic, colorful bird with a puffed up chest and fanned out tail came prancing up to trot along next to me.

“And what fine manner of creature are you today, Torie?” I asked, knowing he had probably been thinking about his tantrum over the water extraction plan since I released him from stasis that morning.

Sure enough, Torie swirled into his own form, reached down, picked me up, and plopped me on to his slender shoulder then we kept moving down the trail in front of the team, as we all headed to the lab.

“It’s called a greater sage-grouse,” said Torie.

“Very nice...”

We plodded along in silence.

“Something else on your mind?” I asked, as I grabbed onto his ear for balance.

“I acted like a sniveling, simpleton the other day about the water experiment. I was only thinking of myself, and that goes against everything a bot-shifter stands for, so please accept my apology, because it is likely the last time you will ever hear one from me.”

“Sure, no problem,” I was stunned, because I had never heard Torie be so contrite. “But you know that Cassie and Sara are the ones you should apologize to.”

“Don’t press your luck. Just tell them I’m prepared to take the risk in whatever way they need.”

“As a matter-of-fact, Jones has a theory she is going to talk to them about today that should be far less dangerous for you.”

Thankfully, we had arrived at the lab, because riding on Torie’s shoulder was making me a bit queasy from his over-powering aroma, which luckily no one else could smell. If only there was a river or lake on this dried fig of a planet, I would ask him to take a swim as the aquatic creature of his choice. But that was not an option.

Torie sat me down on the lab’s porch and swirled back into the mini-binocs, which I quickly put around my neck before opening the door. I relished the cool air that blew back my whiskers before leading the team inside. The place was well lit, but there was no music playing in the background, which was unusual.

Jones yelled out, “hey, Cassie and Sara!”

Cassie stepped out from the back side of a computer screen, but we could tell she was distressed as she walked towards us, because she wasn’t wearing her usual smile or extending her cheerful greeting.

We all gathered in front of her.

“My mother is very sick,” said Cassie getting right to the point. “A passenger shuttle is on its way here from Mars to take her back to the main medical facility and my dad will be on it.”

We all circled around Cassie and tightened our distance to get close in a show of support. Jones stood in front of the anxious girl.

“She was fine yesterday. What happened?” asked Jones, with concern in her high-pitched voice.

“When we were getting ready to head over to our sleeping quarters after eating dinner at the cafeteria last night...she said she was dizzy then she passed out,” Cassie explained. “We got her to the clinic and she seemed fine for a while, then the vomiting started.”

Cassie was still talking, but I became lost in my own thoughts over how this news could be used to our advantage.

I know... I know...

Maybe I was a bad Rosenian, but all I could think of was the good fortune that Sara’s illness would bring Cassie’s father to us, when I had been turning my brain inside out trying to devise a way to get to him.

This changes everything.

Jones, Brown, Moore and I, stayed with Cassie, but Doc and Davis went back to Suburbia to let Daisy know that we were okay, but wouldn’t make it back to the entertainment session that night.

“Mom wanted me to come and let you all know what’s going on,” Cassie explained.

“Has Sara ever fainted before?” asked Doc.

“Never...at least, not that I know of.”

“Cassie, I know this is terrible timing and you need to get back to your mom, but can you tell us anything more about Drake Industries before you leave?”

I knew the question was insensitive, but I couldn’t help asking, because in reality we still wouldn’t have easy access to her father under a medical evac situation.

“Well...not much, really,” she said. “The only reason I know what I do about that company is because they built our Dome here.”

Then, she was silent for a bit as she gathered her thoughts.

“I believe the business has been in existence for a really long time...the current owners are a brother and sister. I think their names are Borish and Zatasha, or something like that. The name of the company is on every settlement on Mars, so I don’t believe they have any competition.”

A sound outside caught my attention. The hair rose up on the back of my neck, and I sniffed the air.

Rubbing alcohol?

Suddenly, the door flew open and three human men wearing surgical masks burst into the room. One pointed a gun at us that I recognized from my “killing contest” vision, while the other two waved metal pipe-like things around.

Holy fica-crap!

“Борис сказал уничтожить все!” shouted the guy with the gun.

“Get down on the floor and don’t move!” the same man yelled in English with a thick accent, waving his gun at the ceiling. “And make your animals behave, too, or I will shoot them.”

Cassie didn’t move and we didn’t move, either.

“You’ll shoot my animals?”

“Ah, let me think...YES!” barked the same man through his mask, while the other two stepped toward the lab equipment with raised crowbars.

I took the mini-binocs from my neck, while pretending to lie down on the floor, then I hit Torie’s emergency response button. Before anyone could blink there was a massive, snorting, bellowing horned-buffalo standing in the middle of the room pawing at the floor with his enormous hooves.

The men were so shocked they just looked at each other, but the leader quickly recovered, and lowered his gun to aim at the massive beast standing in front of Cassie. At the same time, the two men on either side of the leader started to circle around trying to get to Cassie from the side with their crowbars.

What happened next took less than a minute.

All three gunmen were accosted by swirling, six-foot-tall, red and black, tornado-beasts that flew out from behind the buffalo, and swatted the weapons to the ground. The spinning beasts then used the pointed bottom of their cylinders to push the men to the floor with the teeth-rattling force of a jack-hammer.

Two were dazed beyond movement, but the leader managed to reach for his gun on the floor. All of a sudden he got zapped with an electric jolt from the bifurcated tail of a Draxian monkey, as Jones let him have it squarely on the forearm before he could pick up the weapon.

The three attackers groaned with pain, but recovered enough to roll over on their hands and knees to crawl toward the still-open door. The snorting buffalo charged over and assisted with their departure by butting them all in the ass until they were outside screaming in a mad dash to escape.

The three, tornado-beasts progressively slowed until they sat on the ground in their original form of three badass, over-grown, prairie dogs—me, Moore and Brown.

Immediately, the buffalo swirled back into the mini-binocs and plopped onto the floor. Cassie still had her mouth open in utter disbelief at what she had just witnessed.

“Hey, I said we didn’t use weapons...I didn’t say we couldn’t defend ourselves,” I explained, without a hint of brashness.

Well, maybe just a little hint.

“Are you familiar with Anatomic Metabolic Hyper-speed?” I asked Cassie, using the only scientific phrase I knew.

“No,” was all she managed to say, as she was trying to comprehend what she just saw.

“As Rosenians, we have that high powered defensive capability,” I explained, “But it can only be sustained for a few minutes, and then we are usually drained and must reenergize. Our prairie dog subroutines have the same ability.”

“Yeah, and our tornado-beast defense forms are red and black...red for blood and black for evil,” said Moore, in a gravelly voice trying to sound tough. “Not that we like blood or evil, but the image itself usually scares the hell out of whatever it is that’s trying to defeat us.”

“That guy was speaking Russian,” Brown said, bringing the conversation back to what just happened.

I picked up the mini-binocs and put them over my head then we gathered close around Cassie to reassure her that everything was okay, while we took a breather to regroup.

“Yeah, he was speaking Russian, but I didn’t quite get what he said, did you?” I asked Brown, knowing the answer, because she was the best CO in the Brahams Galaxy.

“He yelled out, ‘Borish said to destroy everything!’”

“So, are those what today’s Earth weapons look like?” I asked, glancing at the crowbars and the gun still on the floor.

“I don’t know where they would come from, because we haven’t seen such things here before,” said Cassie, who was now sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of us.

“I’ll bet all the sand heibbies on Passeus they came from Drake Industries,” I responded.

Moore and Brown looked at me and nodded in agreement.

“Yeah, and if the head of Drake Industries is behind this attack by those three thugs,” I continued. “There is likely a festering well of corruption already operating at the top level of Mars government.”

“Or ...Borish could be operating his own covert group with greedy, self-serving goals to line his own pocket unknown to authorities,” suggested Brown.

Suddenly, through the open door I heard a sound in the distance that I was sure must be the arriving shuttle. I ran over and peaked out. The spacecraft landing lights were on, and it was silently and slowly descending to the ground about 50 yards away between the lab and the settlement.

“I have to go meet my father,” said Cassie, who had moved over to stand with us in the open doorway.

“No good, young genius,” I said. “We don’t know if the three Russian stooges are still out there or not.”

“I have an idea,” said Brown. “Cassie could write a note to her father and one of us could deliver it to him.”

“That wouldn’t work, either, because he doesn’t know who we are, so being confronted with an overgrown talking prairie dog is out of the question right now,” said Moore, who took the words right out of my mouth.

“And you couldn’t link with him telepathically, Brown, with so many human witnesses around,” I added.

But...

“Get the note written fast, I know how we can do this.”

Cassie and Jones scrambled to replace paper, and something to write with, since it was an obsolete form of communication in that century.

I took the mini-binocs from around my neck and sat them on the ground.

“Torie, we need your services as the owl.”

In a flash, the burrowing owl swirled up and flew above us in a circle around the room, then landed on top of a computer screen frame.

“What does your father look like?” I asked.

“He’s tall, with blond hair and brown eyes...a mustache and he will be wearing a gray, Mars government emblem and flag on the arm of his jacket,” said Cassie, as she finished printing something out from the computer.

“Here”, she folded the paper and gave it to me. “I couldn’t replace anything to write with so I used the computer to say ‘it’s urgent that you come to the lab before entering the Dome. We are in danger’, and it’s on my personal stationary.”

“Okay,” Moore stepped up. “Say the owl flies over her dad, drops the note right on his head and he just swats it away and leaves without opening it?”

“Good point,” I responded and looked at Cassie for some reassurance.

She took the blue ribbon from her pony tail and handed it to me. “Tie this around the note. He will know it’s mine.”

I rolled the note into a scroll, and I tied the blue ribbon around it.

“Think you can replace Cassie’s father by her description?” I asked, looking at the owl’s wise face and round eyes.

He winked at me, which I took to mean affirmative. Then he swiveled his head and tilted it toward Cassie, and looked back at me several times until I got the message.

“Torie wants me to tell you that he is embarrassed, ashamed and mortified by his whiny, cry-baby routine the other day over the potential risk to him in a water extraction attempt,” I said to Cassie, without taking my gaze off the owl, who rolled his eyes, while I exaggerated his humiliation.

“Thanks, that’s so wonderful, but do you think he can deliver the note to my dad correctly?”

I held up the ribbon-tied scroll, and the owl immediately swooped over to snatch it in his talons then he flew straight through the open door and was gone.

“Yes, I do.”