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Born to be mild
Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: 404 Not Found
Posts: 26,996
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All right, for better or worse (definitely worse) here it is. I apologise in advance; it's ****ing awful. But I promised I'd try, so this is it. My heart just isn't in it, and I can't spend any more time on it. Hawk, you have my permission to slag the hell out of this one story. It certainly deserves it. I'm so disappointed in my efforts that I haven't even been able to come up with a title.
Sorry, everyone. Sorry.
Untitled Dinosaur Story
As midnight pealed out across Westminster, it was the last time the famous clock would ring out the hour, as a blue energy beam sliced through the tower, severing the face of the clock and splitting up the hands, sending each up into the sky amid a shower of debris. Bright orange flame erupted from Big Ben, accompanied by thick roiling black smoke, and the top half of one of London's most iconic landmarks fell to the ground, exploding on impact. Nearby, the Houses of Parliament were blazing fiercely, and the sound of ambulance sirens and fire tenders was thick in the night air as the question man had asked himself for so long - Are we alone? - was answered emphatically and brutally in the negative.
The running, screaming humans below might have been surprised to find that the attack ships blackening their skies were piloted by what looked to all intents and purposes to be large, intelligent dinosaurs. Not that they had time to think about such things, what with the running, screaming and dying that was, understandably, pretty much occupying all of their current attention.
Sitting at the back of the speeding, weaving craft, seemingly oblivious to the explosions of light and sound outside, Biltar read his comic and shook his head silently. Sucking noisily on a thick green soda, he tried to imagine he was somewhere else – anywhere else. From the cockpit came the triumphant screech of his father, the exultant cry of the warrior in the heart of battle. Zanidig leaned back towards him, his red eyes bright, his fangs showing as he grinned. “Come on, son!” he roared. “You got to admit, this is better than being stuck in school, eh?”
“Yeah, dad.” Biltar didn't even raise his eyes from the comic book, but a moment later it was snatched from his claws. “Hey!” he snapped. “I was reading that!”
His father, showing the greatest contempt for the artwork of Plebistine Minor, had balled up the comic and thrown it on the empty seat beside him. He gestured with a long talon. “Why don't you come up here beside me? You can get a much better view of things from here.”
Biltar sighed. “I'm fine here, dad, thanks. I can see everything. It's hard,” he added, somewhat archly, thought his father, “to miss it. It's fucking everywhere!”
“Biltar!” snapped his father, clashing his massive jaws together in disapproval. “Language! Look,” he continued, softening his tone somewhat. “I know things haven't been great with me and your mother recently, but you don't need to worry. We both love you. You know that, don't you?”
He didn't want this to be a chore for his son: he had hoped that “Take Your Kid to Work Day” would have been the perfect opportunity for them to bond. After all, what skaloid could pass up a chance for mayhem and violence? It was part of their DNA. He was beginning, however, to think there might be something wrong with the kid. He never went on the hunts, he hardly ever savaged any of his friends to death, and all he seemed to want to do was read those damn comics. Zanidig cursed. Bad influence, those books. Flights of fancy. Kid needed to wake up and join the real world.
The humans had apparently managed to get some sort of defence together now, as Zanidig discovered when something exploded in front of him, jarring the craft and making him curse while he righted it. There was no damage, of course. These pathetically inferior beings had nothing that could penetrate the armour of his fighter, but they were welcome to try. It only made him more angry. He kicked the craft into a head-spinning turn to the left, thumbed his weapon control and two bolts of blue fire spat from the ship's cannon, reducing the human vehicle to dust. Literally. This close to the powerful energy cannon, the craft simply disintegrated. Zanidig flew through the expanding ball of gas that was all that was left of his adversary, barrel rolled and then looked back at his son, who shrugged shoulders which, even at his young age, were massive.
“Sure, dad,” Biltar said in that way kids have that means I'm not at all sure, I'm just saying this so you'll stop embarrassing me. “Can we go home now?”
“Home?” Zanidig tried his best not to roar at the boy, but it was hard to keep his cool. “Do you know how many of your friends would give their tail to be where you are? This is history, boy! History! We're going to be famous!”
“Famous killers.” The words were muttered, and in the chaos that raged around them Zanidig shouldn't have been able to catch them, but he did. He was not pleased. His patience had limits, and he was approaching them faster than that bridge with the two towers was falling into the river as another of his comrades swooped up and away from the attack.
“Killers?” he repeated the word, incredulously. “Get up here, Biltar!” he snapped, in a tone that would accept no argument. He was pissed now. “I want to explain something to you.”
Sighing, but aware he had perhaps pushed his father too far, the young skaloid abandoned his seat in the rear of the spacecraft and climbed over the passenger seat, squeezing his bulk into the chair beside his father. Blowing another human craft out of the sky before he spoke again, Zanidig asked the child “Do you even know why we're here, son? Why we're doing this?”
Biltar shrugged. At his huge clawed feet he could see his crumpled up comic book, but he knew better than to give in to his instincts and reach down for it.
“Some time ago,” his father told him, “this planet was populated by a people very like us. Well,” he admitted, “not so much like us, as vaguely related to us. Rather a longer way down the evolutionary ladder than ourselves – possibly even the bottom rung. But still, cousins, if very very distant ones. Expeditions to this world repeatedly tried to make contact with these beings, which were called dinosaurs. They were the dominant life form on the planet, with no real opposition to their rule. But they were savage, wild, all but animals really. Our scientists tried to ARE YOU LOOKING AT THAT COMIC BOOK YOUNG LIZARD?”
The change in tone, the booming disapproval in his father's voice warned Biltar, and he returned his eyes towards his parent. “Sorry dad,” he offered, sheepishly. Zanidig growled.
“Pay attention, boy,” he told the kid. “This is important. This is your history we're talking about here.” His eyes narrowed. “Don't they teach you anything at that school I pay so much to send you to?”
Biltar decided not to comment. His father would probably not be happy to hear that his precious son spent little actual time in the school, most of it being shared with this cool female behind the ... yeah, best not to let him know about that. Besides, he knew by experience that if he didn't speak then his father would eventually start to talk again. And so he did.
“Communication was finally deemed impossible,” Zanidig went on, returning to his story, “and we left the dinosaurs to their own devices. Their brains, you see.” He tapped a long razor-sharp claw to his own scaled head. “Just not developed enough. Not at that point anyway. They couldn't even talk. The Empire decided to leave it for a few thousand years, see if evolution took its course. After the proscribed – HOLD ON!”
With that short warning, Zanidig threw the ship into a steep dive, flying down Oxford Street and releasing a thorium bomb. He threw the craft into a high climb just as it detonated, taking most of London with it.
“OOH YEAH!” he grinned, then, seeing the shocked look on his son's face – well, the kid had just seen his father incinerate most of a city! - he returned to his story. “When I tell you what happened when we returned, you'll understand,” he promised his child, who shook his head, though more to himself.
“So anyway, back we came after the allotted time, and what do you think we found?” Biltar assumed the question was rhetorical, and that, if he did not answer, his dad would supply the answer anyway. He was right. Indignant anger was written across the skaloid's features as Zanidig snorted. “Nothing! No dinosaurs. Not one. All gone. And in their place – these ... these ... these creatures! The evidence was clear,” he told his son, in a voice tinged with sadness and loss, but shaking with righteous anger. “This new race had risen against the dinosaurs, defeated them, hunted them down, killed them - and took over as the dominant life forms on this planet. They killed our distant cousins,” he ended threateningly, glaring out the window of the craft at the city below, “and so now we kill them. All over this planet strike forces are taking out the major cities, reducing their infrastructure to rubble, wiping them out as they wiped out the dinosaurs.”
As his father had been speaking, Biltar had been consulting his powerpadd, frowning as he did when he was concentrating on a problem, and now he tugged at Zanidig's sleeve, causing the skaloid to turn towards him in irritation.
“Don't do that, son,” he growled. “I'm trying to fly this thing.”
“Dad,” Biltar said, a tone of urgency in his voice, “how did we get here?”
“What?” Oh for the love of the Great Reptile! Thought Zanidig. Of all the times for the kid to want to hear about sex! “Well,” he began uncertainly, acutely aware of how inappropriate a setting this was to be having “that” talk, “when two creatures need to procreate, and there's a -”
“No, no.” Biltar sighed. “I mean, how did the fleet get here? How did we arrive?”
Looking blankly at his son, for a moment it seemed Zanidig was the child, and Biltar the adult, trying patiently to explain a very simple concept that the other could not get. “In ... spaceships?” he ventured.
Biltar tried again. He had a sinking feeling that this was important. “But how did the fleet make its way here? The Empire is millions of light years away from this planet, this Earth. How did we traverse such massive distances so quickly?”
“Oh!” Zanidig understood now. “You're talking about the wormhole.” Of course. The wormhole.
“I'm talking about the wormhole, yes,” confirmed the child. “And how does it work?”
“Well...” again a slight uncertainty: Zanidig was a little embarrassed to admit to his son that, well, he didn't really understand how the wormhole worked. It just, did. It was like one of those things you use a thousand times in your life but never ask how it does what it does. You just use it. The wormhole was a gateway in space, a corridor that joined the star system of Beta Regis IX with that of the one in which the Earth resided. It cut out all those uncounted aeons normal space travel would have entailed. But how it did it, he was not at all sure.
Actually, to be perfectly honest, he hadn't a clue.
Luckily for him, and something of a surprise to him, his son was more knowledgeable on such matters, as he now explained. “It bends space,” Biltar told him. “It folds it over. It allows us to connect two vastly distant points in space with one another, almost instantaneously. Do you know, dad, what else it bends? Time.”
“Time?”
“Well, yes, obviously, time.” Biltar resisted giving his father the kind of look he would have normally given when confronted by such an inability to grasp the obvious. “We arrive here almost as soon as we have set off. The journey should take millions of lifetimes, but it takes seconds. So we use the wormhole to bend space, and also bend time.” This, Zanidig had to admit, as he sent the craft into a high orbit, ready to switch the attack to the another part of the planet, and waiting for the order as to where he was to lead his squad, sounded reasonable. He experienced a swell of pride. His kid knew stuff! Sure, maybe he wasn't the toughest or the most savage, but he had a brain. That was important.
“But the thing is, dad,” Biltar went on, his face serious, “if time is folded, then we have no idea how long it has been since our people were last here.”
“Three thousand years.” Zanidig was very firm on that point. "The Council said we would give it three thousand years, and then check back again."
Biltar nodded. “Three thousand years,” he agreed. “Of our time. But if time is altered when we go through the wormhole, how do we know how much time has passed here, on this planet, in this system, since we last visited it? It could be millions – billions of years even.”
Zanidig was beginning to regret having brought the kid. Maybe that brain wasn't such a good thing, after all. Next time, he could go with his mother.
“So?”
“So,” said his son slowly, as if trying to explain a simple concept to a moron, “how do we know these creatures killed these – these dinosaurs you're talking of? They could just have – I don't know – died out? They may not have been murdered. You – we – could be exacting revenge where there's no need.”
The skaloid snorted. “Next thing you'll be telling me some big rock just happened to fall out of the sky and destroy them! Honestly, you need to give up those comics, son. I'm saying it as your father. I'm concerned. Oh!” he broke off suddenly. “Here are the orders for the next attack. Some place called Maryland. Hold on!”
Turning away, Biltar scowled out the window as they descended towards the burning planet. Sometimes his father could be such a dick.
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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018
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