Petroleum Effect
Chapter Two - The Eviloids
The Rainbow System, Local cluster, 2131
Righteous Enterprise, Mission Day 7
"They've turned off their comms", said Melissa Coldhardt, her glacial tones perfectly consistent with her name, "but suit trackers are still working. Drones, follow them at a distance and use high-gain microphone mode - see if you can hear what they are saying".
Drones 1, 2 and 4 were still online and soon the missing soldiers and their strange companions came into view - almost dots amongst the trees. The powerful military camera zoomed in until the men were clearly in view and at the same time a voice became clear. It was a high, nauseatingly sweet voice that sounded like a human child.
"I'm so glad we could be friends, Robert and Dominic. We can't wait to show you our village!"
The speaker was clearly one of the bear-like creatures.
"I'm glad we could be friends too!" The voice was Dominic's but it was strangely cheerful and guileless - almost childlike.
On the bridge, the remaining crew of the Righteous Enterprise were shocked.
"Are they under some kind of control? And how the fuck is that bear speaking English?" asked Captain Farmer.
"Psionics?" suggested Flight Officer Davies.
Professor Coldhardt frowned. The two soldiers were special forces. The rest of the crew had deliberately not been briefed on it, but the combat specialists had psionic abilities of their own. Not Transcendent powers, but sufficient intelligence and force of will to use fixed thought patterns taught to them by mnemonics. Their training gave the men a certain innate resistance to mental attacks, the ability to use minor acts of telekinesis, suggestion and with concentration to activate a much stronger mind-shield to cover themselves and others.
The Professor was with the Office of the Archlord. Her training went well beyond minor effects, with an effort of will, she activated a strong mind-shield and then a sensory effect. There was ... something ... an unfamiliar psionic effect but she lacked the knowledge to classify it. Something like remote viewing or divination?
"Directives, Professor?" asked the Captain. Although he was captain of the ship, Coldhardt was in overall charge of the expedition, in her role as a Director in the New Technologies Division of the Office of the Archlord. She thought briefly.
"We can't leave it like this Captain. There are several pieces of our technology outside and two of our personnel in the hands of the aliens. We have to retrieve or destroy them."
"We could take the ship to the village and use the onboard weapons to level it?"
Coldhardt considered the options. She had not expected psionics. It was not a contingency in the mission plan and it was not a known alien ability. If the Greys had it, they certainly had not done much with it. The Prothean archives had not mentioned it. As far as was known it was one of humanity's trump cards. If she left the bridge, her colleagues would be vulnerable to control or other alien influences. The Captain's plan was the best plan.
"We'll need to send a message to Sol on the qangle", said the Professor slowly, using the colloquial name for a quantum entanglement communicator (QEC or qangle), "and we'll need to send some of the crew to retrieve the remains of drone 3 and the guns. Let's do it. Now, recall drones 1, 2 and 4. Get Dr Stevens and Flight Officer Reeves in here".
It had taken several hours to send a lengthy report to Sol, and to brief Stevens and Reeves. The alien day had already begun to darken as the Righteous Enterprise flew low into the tiny alien village behind a deadly hail of fire. A stream of military grade kinetic rounds from two of the forward turrets destroyed everything in its path. As the ship strafed sideways, the huts came apart, blasted to matchwood. Shattered fragments of the dwellings and tiny furry bodies littered the ground. A single larger hut was left standing because suit trackers identified it as holding the two missing combat specialists.
The ship set down by the single surviving hut and its turrets automatically blasted everything that moved, including trees that had swayed slightly in the breeze, which became kindling wood. After a few minutes the sound and the firing died down. An eerie silence and stillness descended on the ruined village.
"Sensors say three inside," reported Flight Officer Davies in clipped, professional tones, "our men and another life-form on thermals".
"We know you understand our language," shouted Professor Coldhardt, not aloud but psionically, sending a telepathic burst into the hut, "come out now with your arms in the air".
The comm burst into life. "Melissa? It's me, Dominic. Stop! These creatures are our friends."
"Still under alien control", remarked Captain Farmer, grimly.
"Okay Dom", replied the Professor over the comm, "you, Rob and your ... friend ... come out and we can talk. You know what we'll have to do if you don't."
Through the exterior cameras, the bridge crew watched as two men left the hut accompanied by a small, red, furry bear-like creature. The soldiers were still helmetless. Seen clearly, it had a white patch on its stomach with what looked like - a valentine heart? - in the middle.
"Thank you", said the Professor, "Now, both of you, mind-shield now. As hard as you can. That's an order."
The Professor, her mental senses extended, felt both men comply, sluggishly at first, but hard.
"Done Professor", confirmed Dominic Hurst over the comm, "but why? There are no threats. Tenderheart Bear here is our friend."
The mind-shields were up. Whatever had been done was not simple or temporary. The soldiers were still compromised.
"Okay Dom", said the Professor, "sounds good. Now, give me a minute. I'm going to come out, in armour, to talk. Just to be on the safe side, I'm going to need you all to lie down for me, Dom". At her gesture, Davies adjusted a console and two turrets visibly turned to track the three outside.
"Professor ... ", Livingstone began to protest.
"On the ground, Rob", insisted Coldhardt.
A few minutes later, Coldhardt exited the ship via the quarantine bay, dressed in sealed heavy armour and holding a laser rifle. She approached the men and the bear on the ground, her mind shield active. Gathering her will she hit the bear with a mental blast. She felt resistance, and hit it again. The resistance ... collapsed. As far as she could tell, it was unconscious.
The Professor approached the two men and injected them with sedative. "Clear!" she announced over the comm.
A few moments later the ship's doctor, Sarah Green, emerged also in heavy armour. Together the two women dragged the two men and the alien into the quarantine bay, then transferred them through the dedicated interior airlock into the isolation room in the bio-lab, securing them all tightly to the sterile metal work-surfaces.
Leaving the isolation room, the women sealed the interior airlock and then went outside to carry out the grisly business of finding four relatively intact pseudo-ursine corpses. Having stashed the bodies in the freezer units, they sealed the bay door and entered a separate decontamination chamber between the quarantine bay and the ship proper.
After a few minutes as the room cycled through its processes, scouring their suits clean of contaminants, the women doffed their armour and returned to the main area of the ship.
The Rainbow System, Local cluster, 2131
Righteous Enterprise, Mission Day 8
Tenderheart Bear woke up with a pounding headache, which was not improved by the pitiless bright white light shining in his eyes. He let out a little high pitched groan and tried to sit up but found he could not move. He was spreadeagled on a cold hard surface. Bands of something cold were wrapped around his wrists, head, neck and torso. He could not even turn his head to look.
A voice boomed from somewhere out of his view. It was a bit like that of the two strangers, but smoother and higher pitched.
"Specimen. I can see you are awake. I need you to answer some questions. What is your name?"
"Who are you?" squealed the bear.
"My name is not important. What is your name?"
"That's not fair. Who are you?"
In the laboratory of the Righteous Enterprise, on the other side of a thick, ultra-hardened glass observation window, sat Melissa Coldhardt and Julianne Stevens. The doctor had returned late the previous evening from her own mission with Ford Reeves. Whilst the Righteous Enterprise had assaulted the village, Stevens and Reeves had retrieved the soldiers' discarded weapon and fragments of drone 3, Stevens taking it upon herself to collect some plant samples for some reason.
After a long rest, the crew had met. It had been decided to keep the soldiers sedated, at least until the alien had been interrogated. Coldhardt and Stevens had decided to combine the interrogation with a vivisection for maximum efficiency. They now sat in the lab whilst the men and the alien were restrained in the isolation room.
Stevens touched a control panel and one of several robotic arms unfolded and struck the specimen in the chest. Bzzt! The little alien convulsed in pain. Stevens spoke again, her voice carried into the isolation chamber through speakers that boomed, painfully to the bear's sensitive ears.
"The specimen will comply or the specimen will feel pain. What is your name?"
"That's mean!"
Bzzt!
"What is your name?"
"Ow!"
Bzzt!
"What is your name?"
Dr Stevens' words only carried into the isolation room when she engaged the microphone. In the laboratory on her side of the window, she had been carrying on a running commentary into her audio notes.
"Subject is ursinoid in shape - almost like a child's teddy bear. Observed to walk upright. Reddish fur, save for the belly which is white with a red mark in the centre. Two eyes, nose, mouth, ears located on the head. Two arms and legs, flexible paws on arms - handlike. Less flexible paws on legs. Two orifices in the lower torso - what looks like an anus at the rear, and another less obvious opening at the front, almost in-between the legs."
"Scans indicate two lungs and a digestive system similar to terrestrial layout. Skeletal system. Other organs less clear - brain-like mass in the head. Initially assumed subject was female but recall reproductive mechanism of species unknown - assumption consciously discarded. On investigation, scan shows that the front opening leads into pouch, muscle and configuration strongly suggests retractable appendages - kept secure when not in use. Male? Asexual? Hermaphroditic? Whichever, those organs are likely to be sensitive."
In the isolation room another robotic arm unfolded. Tenderheart Bear felt something cold roughly open his pouch and reach inside, pulling out some organs into the light. It hurt! A lot. Tenderheart Bear felt a hard pull.
"Let go! Those are my private bear parts! They're not supposed to be out right now! Oww!"
"What is your name?"
"My name is Tenderheart Bear. Let go!" squealed the bear, frantically.
"How do you speak our language?"
"I learned it. We're the Care Bears. We're made to care and make everyone else care. Gold Star made us to help everyone share their feelings. We can learn to speak to anyone really quickly, just by being near them!"
"Who is Gold Star?"
"Gold Star made the Care Bears! Gold Star made the whole world of Care-a-Lot! He made it really nice so when people come from other worlds we can make them all be friends. Gold Star said there is something wrong with the stars round here and we are supposed to stop it! Now let me go!"
With his squeal, light seemed to flare around the symbol on the bear's tummy and several of the restraints opened. Shocked, Dr Stevens frantically jabbed a control and robotic arms smashed down, shocking the specimen repeatedly. Professor Coldhardt gathered her will and hit the creature's mind with a mental blast. It went limp. After a moment, Stevens withdrew the arms.
"Specimen somehow defeated restraints. Specimen subdued with electric shocks. Specimen now unconscious but alive."
"I very clearly felt psionics, there was telekinesis there, or something like it", interjected Professor Coldhardt.
Stevens carefully used the robotic arms to re-secure the bear's restraints whilst it was unconscious.
"Gervais bring us a coffee and something sweet would you?" called Professor Coldhardt through the door to the corridor, "We'll be here a while".
"How about I remove an eye whilst it is unconscious?" suggested Stevens, "We can show it to it once it wakes up and threaten to remove more body parts if it fails to comply."
Eight hours later, Professor Coldhardt and Dr Stevens sipped yet another coffee each and nibbled on doughnuts brought from the galley by Gervais Taylor. With nothing of his official job to do he was defaulting to trying to curry favour with Coldhardt.
The interrogation had been slow, but they had secured the alien's cooperation and obtained a lot of data before it expired. The creature, which called itself Tenderheart Bear, had been a male, and it had identified its species as the, "Care Bears" and the planet as "Care-a-Lot". It had admitted to an ability to communicate with almost anything living - even most of the local wildlife.
The creature had related what they took to be a primitive creation myth, that a deity its people called the, "Gold Star" had created their world for the purpose of their befriending all other worlds and making all other worlds befriend each other. They had a number of abilities and their strongest was the, 'stare' which let them manifest psionic effects from the symbols on their tummies. Apparently, the symbols varied widely, like their fur colour and reflected their personality. It was the stare that had, "made the men be friends".
The creature had tried to persuade them that, "Everyone has to share and be friends!" Fortunately the Professor had been able to resist the insidious psionic attack that accompanied the words.
The creature did not have that much useful information. The specimen had confirmed that the species was sexually dimorphic, seasonal breeders with males and females. The male reproductive organs were kept in internal pouches like Tenderheart's at all other times. Male and female openings were so buried in the fur it was almost impossible to tell the sexes apart outside season. The bears had no central government but each village had a chief and, "Gold Star tells us what to do".
Thanking the specimen for his help, they had got to work opening up the skin and gotten some high quality video of the internal circulatory and respiratory systems in operation. Eventually, as the examination continued and they dug deeper, the creature had expired. Re-donning her suit, Dr Stevens had taken the waste out of the ship via the quarantine bay and discarded in the frontal jaws.
"You know", remarked Stevens to Coldhardt once the remains had been disposed of, "there is something really sinister about this planet. You know those trees that look like they are growing pink cotton candy? Well, it was too high for the rovers to reach, but I grapped a bundle whilst we were recovering the drone wreckage and the guns. I've analysed it. It more or less really is cotton candy - high fructose strands, wrapping seeds - or maybe spores. This whole planet is like it is meant to be a paradise - like a lure."
"Let's test the resource extraction and processing prototype", replied Coldhart, "and then we can get out of here and dump this on someone else."
"What about Dominic and Robert?"
"Physically tainted by an alien biosphere they interacted with, without their suits. Mentally tainted by alien psionics. They'll need to be thoroughly debriefed and examined. Not our department, thankfully. We'll take them back to Sol and frankly I doubt we'll see them again. Let's just get the last test done. We need to see how effective the resource converter is."
Coldhardt gave brief orders to Captain Farmer. The Enterprise rolled forward on its caterpillar tracks and its jaws made short work of a couple of the 'cotton candy' trees. Chunks of the trunk joined Tenderheart's remains in the ship's, 'mouth', and the grinders got to work. The nanobot filter behind the grinders efficiently processed the mulch, discarding waste and removing unwanted atoms. Tarry, yellowish black hydrocarbon soup - crude oil - flowed into the storage tank.
"We've got OIL!" exulted the second flight officer, Patrick Davies. The remaining crew, except for the two unconscious soldiers in the isolation chamber, cheered.
The mission had been entirely successful.
As the Righteous Enterprise lifted smoothly into the sky, heading for orbit, Dr Stevens, Captain Farmer and Professor Coldhardt held a brief conference. Officially it was to compare notes. Unofficially, they were working together to ensure their reports reflected as well on each other as possible.
"It's important we underline the threat of these ursinoid creatures", said Dr Stevens, "They subverted two mentally resilient soldiers in minutes."
"Commies too!" added Captain Farmer, "All that talk of sharing. No money system."
"I wonder ...?" began Professor Coldhardt, "Is the term ... ursinoid ... quote right? I mean they are not really bears are they? They are telepathic herbivores that have a cult-like devotion to mind-controlling all sentient life into their pseudo-communist mindset. I mean, we need a more neutral term to convey that simply so institutions and the public understand. How about ... 'eviloids'. That is a neutral, factual term that encapsulates that they are an evil threat without introducing misleading value judgements about bears."
"Brilliant!" exclaimed Dr Stevens, "eviloids it is!"
The Righteous Enterprise reached orbit, and called the Gate Ship through the QEC, requesting a portal back to the Sol system.