Destroyer from the Lost Planet
From Heaven to Earth They Came
Book 3
Destroyer from the Lost Planet
A Sci-Fi Adventure of Gods and Aliens
by Neal Roberts
©2023 NEAL R. PLATT
EPUB Edition
Inquiries about additional permissions should be directed to: nealrobertsauthor@gmail.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.
ISBN: 979-8-9874316-3-4
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
Excerpt from A Second Daniel
About the Author
Also by Neal Roberts
Chapter 1
When the progenitor roughly seized Catharine by the arm, David crept up behind him and blew his head off; simple as that. Though David had had no qualms about his actions at the time, he was troubled by them now.
He tossed and turned in his bed, unable to sleep, and it struck him as ironic that he was feeling low now mainly because he hadn’t felt low then. He still didn’t feel guilty for what he’d done, but rather for not having felt guilty at the time. He remarked to himself (not for the first time) that the mind is a tricky place.
It’s always been difficult, Enki had said, for the power-mad to identify someone suitable to serve as a progenitor for a strain of drones. Why? David wondered. What special qualities are necessary for a suitable progenitor? David doubted that such qualities included a propensity for leadership or particularly high intelligence.
No, what a progenitor needed was the ability telepathically to receive imagery from his drones and telepathically to send them his commands. As the progenitor’s neurophysiology would provide the basis for his drones’, it stood to reason that the progenitor himself would require such psychic capabilities. And such activity was probably the only innate characteristic needed to become a progenitor. Everything else could probably be taught.
Unsurprisingly, the neurologists had recently confirmed that David’s brain showed activity associated with psychic phenomena. Did that mean that David himself would be a suitable candidate for progenitor?
His mind wandered. He thought back on shooting the progenitor, and wondered who his victim had been earlier in life. A carpenter? A pawnbroker? A law professor? Had he received the gift of long life? If so, from Anzû? How long would the progenitor have lived if I hadn’t shot him?
It troubled David that he’d become increasingly preoccupied by his own mortality, but what he found most troubling was that it had apparently been Anzû’s principal intention, during their brief discussion, to instill that very preoccupation in his mind. And he resented the feeling that he was, in a sense, running a program implanted by Anzû.
Finding his room too warm, David folded Elijah’s mantle, placed it on the nightstand, and kicked his other blankets to the floor.
Drifting off, once more he was confronted by his dream of the falling moon. But this time he was not alone … and neither was the moon.
David lies asleep in a large bed that rocks under him. A chilly salt breeze blows over his face. His eyes still closed, he caresses the hand of his sleeping bedmate. Inanna was so beautiful, so warm, so feminine all night that he feels nothing but gratitude for her persistent advances, and regret for his earlier rebuffs.
The bed’s rocking grows more pronounced, and there’s a tiny splash next to his head. He opens his eyes to find the bed floating on a moonlit ocean with no land in sight.
The cloudless night sky is lit by two celestial lights: the moon, and a planet enveloped in a smoky, maroon-tinged atmosphere. The two celestial bodies appear almost to touch each other, and seem so close to the Earth that David imagines he can feel their combined pull.
His breathing and his heartbeat accelerate. He sits up, preparing to rouse his bedmate but, looking upon her, he hesitates—so beautiful is she in the white moonlight and the maroon glow of its strange companion. Despite the immediate peril, he’s loath to disturb her. Instead, he’s tempted … so tempted … to touch her.
But reaching over to rouse her, he’s horrified by the decrepitude of his own hand, mere bones partly covered by desiccated scraps of blackened skin, the segments of each digit strung to the others with ligaments no more substantial than worn rubber bands. His arm, similarly skeletal, is covered by wasted skin like the weathered hide of an abandoned carcass, covered with the brown and black splotches of age and death. To his horror, it occurs to him that, just as his limb is rotten, his face must be a veritable death’s head.
Were he to rouse Inanna now, surely she would recoil from him in disgust. He thinks better of it and withdraws his hand.
How could he have gotten so old so quickly? For the first time, he wonders when this dismaying scene is taking place. Searching for an answer, his gaze returns to the sky.
The moon and the strange planet have each moved a few degrees of arc, but at different rates, the faster-moving planet now partially hidden behind the moon. As David watches the majestic movement of the spheres, suddenly the moon shivers, as from an impact with the planet behind it. A stress fracture appears on the moon’s face near its northern pole, where a huge chasm forms and begins ripping its way toward the southern pole, so that the moon must soon crack in half. And he realizes that he’s seeing events that will (or may) take place four hundred years hence.
The moon splits and begins to crumble. A large chunk breaks away from the main body and begins to rotate slowly, exposing a part of the moon’s core to the sun’s light for the first time in what must be billions of years. A haze of pulverized lunar soil develops around the main fissure.
David’s heart aches to witness the end of all things.
Though until now his nautical bed has remained upright and afloat, the sea has begun to heave and roll in response to the moon’s disintegration. The bed pitches and yaws, and David realizes that it cannot long remain atop the peaks of the mounting waves threatening to engulf it.
Searching desperately for some means to assure Inanna’s safety, he overcomes his self-disgust just long enough to reach out with his necrotic arm and draw her further into the fragile safety of their little vessel.
But the sleeping Inanna rolls off and disappears soundlessly under the waves. Gone forever. Dead.
He’s failed her.
His vision goes black and his mind is jarred by Anzû’s sibilant, disembodied voice.
So … you dwell upon this catastrophe? asks Anzû.
I wish to save Inanna, David replies.
Simply a pipedream, hisses Anzû. The celestial collision you imagine won’t happen for four hundred years, and you can’t live more than another sixty of those. How can you hope to save her—or anyone else—from this event, when you will have been dead more than three hundred years?
The voice fades, leaving a sickness in the pit of David’s stomach.
The next morning, David received a message from Houston that a Space Force colonel was on his way up to Inanna’s pyramidion to debrief him.
At the appointed hour, there was a knock at the door and David opened it to find an efficient-looking colonel in uniform, sporting salt-and-pepper sideburns. David offered him an upholstered seat and took a cater-corner seat for himself.
“I’m Doctor Jensen Young,” said the colonel as he sat down. “You look familiar.”
“Do I?”
“Aren’t you … the King of Connecticut?”
“No, I’m not,” said David. “In fact, I don’t think Connecticut is a kingdom. Unless you count the king from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. But, even if you do, I think Arthur was the King of England.”
“Where are you from?”
“I’m just a kid from Canarsie, which is located in Brooklyn, New York.”
Doctor Young snapped his fingers. “That’s it, the Kid from Canarsie.”
David was in no mood to be patronized. “Let’s cut the baloney, colonel. You knew who I was before you came up here. How many ambassadors to the Anunnaki are there, after all? In fact, I’d bet you have a dossier about me in your briefcase and you were reading it until you came aboard.”
The colonel gave him a confessional smile and posed a question no doubt prompted by David’s bloodshot eyes and slightly slumped posture. “How have you been sleeping?”
“I thought you came here to do a military debriefing,” said David skeptically.
“I did,” said the colonel, eying David warily. “But I’m also a psychiatrist.”
“Is that why you’re asking about the quality of my sleep?”
The colonel shrugged.
David said sullenly, “Suppose I don’t wan
t a psychiatrist.”
The colonel shrugged again. “Look, professor. You’ve been in an incident in which you shot and killed someone. It’s part of my job to see if you need some time off and a little talk therapy. Sometimes, someone who’s been through a violent incident needs to be removed from the situation for a while to ensure they’re … stable and not overstressed.”
“And that’s why you’re asking about my sleep?”
The colonel shot him a sympathetic smile. “Just making conversation,” he said. He arched his eyebrows. “So?”
“So … what?”
“So … how have you been sleeping?”
David sighed. “I’ve slept better, I suppose.”
“Something troubling you?”
David could feel his inner troll gaining strength. “Well, except for the Earth being invaded by two separate sets of aliens, at least one of which would like to see me and my lover dead … nothing, really.” He adjusted his seat. “How’ve you been sleeping?”
The colonel smiled patronizingly. “I’ll ask the questions.”
David shrugged and smiled pointedly. “Just making conversation,” he echoed. David’s insistence on controlling the interview had begun to irk his visitor, who opened his eyes wide and blew out a breath. This made it a perfect time for badgering. “So,” David observed wryly, “you’re not sleeping well either, I see.”
“I’m sleeping fine,” said the colonel as he opened his briefcase and pulled out a file devoted to David.
“I see I was right about the dossier, too,” David observed.
The colonel conceded the point with an exasperated nod. “Let’s talk about how you feel about the … incident the other day.”
David let himself feel his dismay. “I feel kind of crappy about it.”
“Crappy? In what sense?”
The question was a bit too open-ended for David to take it seriously. “In a crappy sense, I guess.” The colonel waited for him to continue. “You know, that wasn’t the first time I’d shot one of those things.”
The colonel cocked his head, obviously not following what David had said. “Do you feel like you might have done the wrong thing?”
David shook his head. “No. The choice was clear both times. To be honest, I think those freaks are less than human, anyway.”
“Those freaks?” asked the colonel.
David cocked his head skeptically. “How much do you know about these … incidents?”
“Not as much as I would like. Who are those freaks?”
“The squarebeards,” said David, and waited for the colonel’s reaction.
“Squarebeards,” echoed the colonel quietly. Clearly, he had no idea what David was talking about.
“Whoa!” said David. “What’s your security clearance?”
“Top secret,” said the colonel. “Why?”
“Then you’re not cleared for this intelligence.” When the colonel sat up with surprise, David added, “And why do you think I’d need ‘time off and some talk therapy’?”
“Well,” replied the colonel, “you’re a peacemaker, not combat-trained, so we naturally expected that your own violent action might be particularly … traumatic for you.”
“Who’s we?” asked David.
“Me … and the person who sent me.”
“Who sent you?”
The colonel checked the cover of the dossier. “Navy Admiral Simmons. Do you know him?”
David nodded. “I know him well. Would you mind if I call him before we begin?”
“Not at all. Perhaps his endorsement will put your mind at ease.”
David called the admiral, who picked up on the second ring. “Good morning, admiral. Dave Schubert. You sent me a Space Force headshrinker?”
“What?” said the admiral. “Oh, yes. Since I neglected to have you debriefed after your … trip with Catharine, I just wanted to make sure you didn’t again escape the insufferable boredom of being debriefed.”
As the colonel was within earshot, David tried to speak circumspectly. “The colonel doesn’t seem familiar with what happened after the summit.”
“Not surprised,” said the admiral. “The agency has deliberately suppressed knowledge of the whole incident.”
“Nothing’s gotten out about it?”
“There have been a couple of rumors,” said the admiral, “but they were quickly squelched.”
“Does the colonel have a ‘need to know’?”
“Ah,” said the admiral. “I see where you’re going with this. Hand him the phone.”
David extended the phone to the colonel. “The admiral would like to speak with you.”
The colonel gave David a skeptical glance and put the phone up to his ear. After a few turns of yes, admiral, I see, he handed the phone back to David.
“Listen, David,” said the admiral. “He doesn’t need to know what happened on the ground. This isn’t a military debrief. We’ve already got everything on video. I sent him up there for medical purposes only. I told him you’d had to shoot someone. That’s all he needs to know. So, just avoid the specifics, but do me a favor and make him feel like he didn’t waste the trip.”
“Okay, admiral,” said David, “and thanks.” He hung up.
The colonel reached into his briefcase for a blood-pressure cuff. “Roll up your sleeve, please,” he said dispassionately. He applied the cuff to David’s upper arm and pumped it up. “Hmm,” he said, “your blood pressure’s quite good. That’s a good sign. Are you on medication?”
David shook his head. “Whole-food, plant-based diet,” he said.
The colonel’s eyebrows shot up. “That explains it. Tell me, where do you get your protein?”
“It’s really not an issue,” said David, “but mostly from beans and other legumes.”
“Take B-12?”
David nodded. “Every day.”
“Good for you,” said the colonel as he put the blood-pressure cuff away. “Now … have you had trouble sleeping?”
David pondered how to respond. He considered saying: I’ve been having a repeating nightmare about the end of the world, which begins with a collision between the moon and a strange planet that comes around every few thousand years. In my dream, I feel like a failure because I’m unable to save the Queen of Heaven from drowning; I’ve been dead for four hundred years, you see. Also, I suspect that an evil alien planning to conquer the world with his army of plant-based monsters is trying to bribe me with an offer of immortality. But that might start a whole conversation. So instead, he said, “Not really.”
“No?” asked the colonel with eyebrows raised.
“Well,” said David reluctantly, “sometimes it takes me a long time to drift off. I keep remembering what it felt like to pull the trigger.”
The colonel nodded sagely. “That’s to be expected. Pretty normal, really.”
“That’s reassuring,” said David, pleased to have faked a normal-sounding reply on such short notice.
“You want me to give you something to help you drift off?” asked the colonel.
David equivocated.
The colonel said, “Totally non-addictive, I promise.”
“Do you have it with you?”
“I expect so,” said the colonel, reaching into his briefcase. “I was told not to expect this ship to have a normal pharmacy.” He pulled out a translucent pill box. “Yes, I have some.” He handed David the pill box. “Just don’t take more than one a day, and only take them when you’re sure you want to sleep.” He snapped his briefcase shut and headed for the door. Before leaving, he turned and said, “The admiral told me that, if you were to tell me all that happened, I’d be unable to cure your nightmares, but you’d give me plenty of my own.” He looked at his feet and shuffled a moment. “So … thanks for not giving me nightmares. But I really do know what I’m doing. If it gets to the point where you can’t handle it alone any longer, promise you’ll call me.” He handed David an old-fashioned business card.
“I promise,” said David, accepting the card and seeing the doctor out.
David realized he was already approaching the point where he couldn’t handle things alone and needed to talk with someone. Since the problem was not all in his head, however, he realized that professional help wouldn’t suffice. He needed someone who understood his predicament. But no one knew the substance of his telepathic conversation with Anzû. Not even Catharine.