The Guardian of the Forest
Copyright ©1999 Bill Spitzak
First draft March 18 1999
Revision Feb 2008 (spelling only)
Introduce the beautiful forest
Fax's gentle old aunt is telling the stories of the evil humans, how they came and destroyed the forest. How the creatures of the forest fought back, and are fighting back even now.
Fax and his older gruffer friend Rahj, and Rahj's sister Lax, are listening. But Rahj is anxious to leave, bored with the stories. Rahj just wants Fax's father, chief of the villiage, to give them permission to get into the town forest.
Fax's older brother Taff is there. He is dressed in some sort of military dress uniform, and is packing. The battle goes on, and Taff is off to fight again. Taff is very dedicated to the battle. He loves the forest and will do anything to save it. He is a very quiet and efficient officer.
The three head into the forest from the town. Rahj has arrows, beautifully finished metal points, a small hint of technology we have not seen before. He wishes to try hunting. This is an odd request, as the Fluffies are vegitarians. Rahj intends to hunt humans someday. Fax is agahst that Rahj wants to kill a bird. Fax's goal in life is to fly just like one. The humans did give them the capability of flight...
They do not shoot a bird. The birds are frighentened away by helicopters. Three big fat green coptors sail over the trees to land in the town. They're here! They're here! Rahj is very anxious to meet them.
The rather cheerful and productive populance of the town is filling the metal cargo containers brought by the copters. They add plastic sacks full of nuts that they have been roasting for days in huge ceramic ovens in the town square. Fluffies in uniforms direct them. Fluffy grunts wearing green man the winches and other machinery. A fluffy officier thanks the town for it's immense generosity, it's donation to the Navy, to the cause of the forest and life itself! Fax finds his brother, in a line of recruits, loading into the copters. Yes! The food you have provided is destined for SkyLand, to provision the great ships of the fleet! Rahj is thrilled, and pulls Fax and Lax aside, to hide behind the crates.
The coptors lift off in a mass of dust. Fax's father is grim. What else will they take from us, he wonders aloud. A staff member glances around, worried about who heard the treason.
Rahj and Fax and Lax are cramped in a corner of one of the cargo containers as it swings from the copter. Lax is quite alarmed that stowing away is a bad idea. But Rahj is confident. All he wants to do is see the great war. Just to see SkyLand. To see the great ships of the fleet!
The coptors fly at great speed along the river over the forest. Perhaps through the night? Then the river is choked with barge and boat traffic, and they fly over an industrial area. A huge industrial area of rust and concrete and belching smoke. The copter blades change pitch as they slow, and this wakes Rahj. He pokes his head out the sliding hatch and gapes, and wakes Fax. "SkyLand". Growing out of the forest is an almost organic mass of concrete and steel, tubes and pipes and trucks and trains in an endless plain, almost a living thing. And in the middle, the blossoms, the massive ships of the fleet cluster, feeding off this root system.
The cargo containers land, and Rahj makes the others hide again. The containers are pushed around, bumpind over surfaces, up a ramp covered with rollers. Eventually it is still again. It is dark outside. "Do you think we should get out?"
In answer a massive engine explodes to life, and shakes them in more ways then one. A warship lofts into the sky atop a white-hot pillar of solid hell. They are aboard it. They scramble out of the cargo container. The hold is a odd-shaped room in the spherical underside of the ship, filled with crates and scaffolding, and lit from cracks to the outside. Fax looks through one of these cracks, a slot through three feet of steel, at landscape rapidly dropping away. Lax is trying to get her ears to pop, and is complains about it. Fax realizes they are losing air pressure, and scrambles to search the hold!
There is a big cargo door to the ship's interior, but it is obvious they can't open it. Next to it is a small fluffy-sized door, and Fax struggles at opening it. Rahj finds an iron rod and helps to knock the screw-downs loose, all of them are breathing hard from the lack of oxygen. The door opens inward, but Fax can't budge it. All three of them push at it, and it moves, letting out a blast of air. They wedge it with the rod, and much more air escapes, and then it swings open without effort. They get through into a tiny chamber and slam the door back, cutting out most of the engine noise. It's not over yet, they have to open another identical door against the same pressure. They strain and panic and almost pass out, and then another blast of air, life-giving air, revives them.
They stand in the little airlock, recovering, and looking at the interior of a warship. Another dark cargo hold, small flickering flourescents show the outlines of crates and pipes and piles of canvas-covered provisions. The engine shakes the ship like it was going to fall apart. Then the engine noises change, dropping, and then cutting off. And they are weightless. Lax discovers that this makes him sick. The ship is manuvering. They wonder what it is up to now. Exterior- in the harsh light of space, it is being grafted onto a white tube, a flower onto a stem. The white stem does not appear to be technology built by the fluffies.
The three of them discuss what to do next. They uniformly agree they are in deep trouble if discovered. But they are also in trouble if not. A deep throbbing noise builds up. Weight and gravity return, but towards what was once a wall. Everything is sideways from how it was before.
The ship is spinning on it's axis, atop that white stem, and it is already in a strange space. The universe is turned inside-out, the stars compressed into a sphere in front of the ship's nose, and the ship chases it. The white shaft is a piece of sharp-edged advanced technology. Modified here and there by the organic green Fluffy technology, it still shows it's foreign origin, even faded lower-case letters that say "esa". At the far end of the stem it flares out into an angular crystalline structure that vibrates and throbs as it manipulates space.
Soon enough a door slides open and spills light in, then slides closed. They hide. Two young adult fluffies, in navy cadet uniforms are there. They are also sneaking around, a furtive young pair of female and male. "Malk, it's not even mating season" says the young and nervous male. The female is more confident "when you go back and forth through hyperspace as many times as I have, time begins to lose it's meaning..." We never do see what Fluffy mating practices are, but Fax does. He stands up, wide-eyed, and knocks over a metal ammo case.
The male cadet stands at attention. "Yes sir we were investigating odd noises in the lower circle cargo chambers and we discovered the three of them hiding there." The woman is a formidable marine, standing indifferently against the wall, letting the guy answer all the questions. Commander Grey, a kindly but commanding old fluffy, in his spiffy dress Navy uniform, dismisses the couple with some punishments, and examines Fax and Lax and Rahj, who stand on the bridge guiltily. "Damn. Stuck in HS for three weeks, and attacking immediately as we exit. Right in the thick of it." He knows who Fax is. "Your brother is aboard this ship. It's going to be his job to watch over you three."
"No kidding, you hid in the nut containers?" Taff, Fax's brother, is with the kids in the (quite messy) officers mess. They tour the ship. Taff is a pilot, a high position that he won partly through his father's influence, but he is also a good one. We also meet the addle-brained scientists, the designers of the fluffy technology. Even now they are perfecting the weapons.
Taff also talks of what drives him to join the war. "The forest and the ground still cry out in pain. The old women, the sensitives, they can feel it, and sometimes even I hear the forest speak to me. We must save it. And we try, but still we have not done the right thing, for it is not at peace yet. I heard it at night, back at home. The forest wants me to save it's brother. What does that mean? What is the forest's brother? We must try even harder..."
Rahj tells Fax that his brother is a space case. The forest voice, and the voice of the land, is electromagnetic. A sensitive can tell when things live and die, and tell of pressure or water in the earth, but it conveys no message.
Taff is increasingly apprehensive about the future. The battle is coming.
---
The three kids and Taff are at the edge of the bridge. Taff hugs his brother goodbye. "Take care. Get yourselves out of here, and don't look back." Almost silent. "Don't watch what we are about to do." He is dressed in a flight compression suit. He backs away and leaves. Gray over the speaker system. The fluffies are getting ready for an attack, bustling about the ship in orderly confusion. "Immediately upon exit from HS we are launching an attack on the target dome, designated dome 49, in conjuction with the Guardian II and the Valley Phoenix. This dome is one of the largest and most heavily defended domes on the planet, but one of the few with the correct geology for our attack. Our initial run will be to plant at least five bombs at it's periphery. This should be suffiecient to knock their generator several yards off it's foundation. We then intend to breach the weakened dome. As you may have noticed, there is a large contingent of landing marines on board. Their job will be to invade the dome and make it ours and change change the course of this war, from one of containment to conquest!"
The tiny fighters are roaring to life. Taff is in his, being buried in machinery installed around him, the canopy closing. Hoses are disconnected, scaffolding rolled away. A tech repairs the tail of one of the fighters with duct tape.
On the bridge Gray consideres the fate of Lax, Fax, and Rahj. He gets an officer to take them. "I hope we can spare a boat. You will have to wait until we decelerate near the target to launch. Once we do so, you get these little shits back to the HS tube and back home and I don't want to see them again until they are drafting age!" The officer, a cheerful and chummy sort, takes them and gets them comfortable in a small spacecraft bolted to the outside of the warship. They have windows and can see out.
A bridge officer watches a stopwatch carefully. The seconds tick down. "off!" he shouts. The throb of the hyperspace drive dies. Explosive bolts detach the ship from the stem. "Beatiful" says Gray. "Right in the cone." The ship sails toward a looming black planet. It's engine fires Fax and Lax and Rahj look expectantly out the window. "Is that it?" they ask. "Yes" replies the pilot. "That's Earth"
Earth is a black disk marked with red spots and patches of fire and radiation. The sun is hidden behind it. The ship fires it's engine, a white flare, and accelerates toward Earth.
The engine noise threatens to vibrate the ship to pieces. A monotonous officer reads things over the intercom. "...relative velocity 47 point 4 K metre per second, distance to target 108 point 6 K K metres. We will need 17 minutes burn on the fuzes to accelerate and deaccelerate for 10 minute advance attack. Burn on main ships engines will commence after initial attack total burn 6.5 minutes. Stand by on my mark to release the ships..."
The fighters launch, flung out in a spiral from the spinning main ship. The kids watch them go. Each of them lights bright white and the speed off toward the planet. Then the main ship is slammed hard with laser shots from the planet. They bang and shake like underwater explosions. The ship has a powerful shield, a sphere of force that turns almost silver to reflect the beams. And it's engine is a gun that shoots back.
The tiny fighters dive at the red glowing craters from the ship's attack. An exciting aerial battle ensues in the dark clouds of earth. The target is an immense silver dome, thirty or more miles in diameter. The Earth is well defended with it's own fighters and anti-aircraft fire. Taff concentrates through all this on dropping a small cylinder at the base of the silver wall of the dome. He banks hard, nearly colliding with his own reflection in the dome, and retreats as fast as possible. Then the bombs go off, blinding white nuclear blasts. The shock wave takes out the Earth plane chasing him, and knocks him from the sky. His ship plows along a broken highway in a shower of sparks.
Gray orders the engines on. Nothing happens. Panic. Engineers work like crazy to try to fix the engine. They plummet toward the Earth. The boat pilot is not sure what is happening, but Fax and Lax and Rahj get quite alarmed. The Earth's particle beam weapons spot and fire on them, the ship's spherical sheild goes silver to protect it. They are in the dark now. The engineers are working to replace a large part of the engine. Everything shakes and is thrown about as they hit the atmosphere and are slowed with crushing deceleration, the atmosphere white-hot about the silver bubble. The engine is fixed! Gray orders the shield dropped and the engine fired. Immediatly they are chopped at by the particle beams, there is fire and explosions on board. They are approaching the dome quickly and fire the engines just soon enough to avoid it. They slide down next to it, the engine firing to keep them away, plummeting toward the ground. The kids see endless acres of broken concrete approaching. And the ship smashes hard into the ground. The small boat the kids are in is torn off with tons of other debris, it slams nose-first into the ground and is tumbling. The huge hulk of the warship sliding behind it, eventually stopping.
The boat pilot is dead, crushed in the nose of it. Fax and Lax and Rahj are okay. They scramble out a hatch to get away from the smoke inside the boat.
Earth fighters attack the big ship mercilessly, blasting off pieces of it. It shoots back, blowing a few out of the sky. Rahj explains that they can't turn on the shields until they get away from the Earth. It is a fascinating and deadly battle. Suddenly the engine blasts to life again, and the warship spirals around drukenly, the engine leaving a molten swath and nearly hitting the kids. It is airborne again and it's crystal shield back on and it lofts away again, into the clouds that are now lightening with morning. The kids realize they have been left alone on the planet of the enemy. They are very tiny amid the smoking black wreckage left by the warship.
Zooming underground in a modernistic high speed subway is Shiva, the firey-haired commander in chief of the western coast Earth defense forces. She and her entronage are on their way to the city of the latest attack. Shiva is a formidable character, imposing and demanding, physically powerful, and not happy.
She struts into the command center and takes over the command office. A big Ansel-Adams photo of the forest planet causes her to recall her few days there. It was the fall of the colony, helpless against the sudden suprise attack of the Fluffies. Ob Jeckel, the civilian leader and funding source for the colony, swore the fluffies were harmless cute creatures, who had only stolen a few dozen guns from their well-armed libertarian collective. Shiva, much smaller and more meek then, but still a Leutienent, orders her squad to destroy all the labs and advanced technology and to evacuate the colony. But the fluffies invade much faster than expected, and Shiva is mortally wounded by an explosion. She pleads with her followers to nuke the colony... and they refuse.
Shiva's mangled body has been almost completely replaced by machinery.
The three kids hide amid the rubbish and watch as humans and human walking tanks examine the wreckage of the warship. Rahj has taken a gun from the boat, and swears he will get a human. Fax and Lax try to stop him, but he does shoot, drawing attention to them. He continues to try to shoot things while Fax and Lax fight to stop him, until they are surrounded and forced to surrender.
They are not treated too kindly by their human captors. They are hit with the butts of the guns and forced to march around the dome at gunpoint, they run to keep up with the much larger humans. They are brought inside the dome (through a smaller dome that is created about them) and the interior is dark as night. A thunderstorm is brewing in there, over rolling hills of vegitation and a huge city. Rahj is confident the humans are going to eat them. A higher officer figures out with shock that they are juviniles!
Commander Grey is really upset. He has undisputable photographic evidence that the kids have survived and are now trapped on the planet. He can't drop nuclear bombs, what will the public think. Even worse, the youngest one is the son of some tribal chief who could raise a terrible stink in the senate. He has only one hope- an invasion.
Shiva immediately comes to see them. Gives them pecans, which they find utterly delicious. This suprises her. Pecans, in fact nothing from Earth, will grow on the forest planet, which has no bound nitrogen in it's soil. Maybe this is important. Maybe instead they will keel over and Earth will have a biological weapon. Taff is also brought in, and joins them, although in a neighboring cell. They are thrown back into a more pleasant prison. Shiva explains to them why Earth was so easily defeated. The fluffies were too cute. They resemble human infants. She even gives Fax a picture to prove it. Fax explains that their big eyes were for the dark forest, that the Earth's sun hurts them. If it weren't for those eyes... The female marine fluffy lowers her silver sunvisor and readies her weapons. She is aboard a ship in a crystal bubble, lowering toward the Earth, oblivious to the anti-aircraft fire. There are many such ships landing.
The kids before a tribunal. Taff tells the very same story we heard at the start. About the massive horrible destruction the humans wrought, about the great triumph of the forest creature's victory. Ob Jeckel is brought in, and he defends his colonies behavior. They were going to raise real cattle and live like their forefathers did, before the meddlesome government and environmentalists got into the act. This in fact would be the type of person to fund a colony on another planet.
"You say you are just trying to save the forest" says Shiva. "Do you want to see our forest? What we called the forest?" They are then in a deep basement, where Shiva shows them that all that is left are seeds, frozen cryogenically, on the hope that Earth will survive the war.
Over the radio Shiva is warned that "they are up to something. The dome has been ionized by a bomb to prevent outside radio communication" And then an earthquake hits. Deep in a valley south of the city, a fluffy ship has drilled into the hillside and planted a deep nuclear bomb. They are being directed by an old woman fluffy, who is sensitive to the pains of the Earth, who tells them exactly where a bomb will work best. The earthquake gets very intense. There is a major fault through the city, through the dome which is in fact a sphere that goes 30 miles underground as well. A white fracture extends across the dome and then it vanishes.
Light floods through the windows as the earthquake fades. Sirens wail and there is the distant commotion of panic. From far far above, the former dome is a perfect circle of green vegitation and blue water in an expanse of gray burnt ground. The city is San Francisco. From the islands in the bay, laser cannons thunder, firing horizontally. From the south, Fluffy ships float in on pillars of flame. One crashes purposely to the ground and Fluffy marines flood out and start street-to-street fighting to take the city.
Shiva is pleaded with to get out, on the subway. The fluffies will nuke the city at any moment. Shiva stands her ground, nervously. But it is not happening. She wonders why. Then she looks at the young fluffies. Taff is still examining the racks of frozen seeds, and putting some of the fallen ones back.
Shiva gets status reports over the viewscreesn. Her first target is the dome generator. The earthquake has collased lots of concrete around the huge machine, making the broken parts inaccessable up a foot-square passageway.
The big fluffy warship braves blistering fire to crash on the Oakland bridge, right next to the tunnel entrance on Ford island. It slides right up and smashes into the tunnel entrance. More marines exit and a huge firefight erupts in the tunnel, which is the entrance to the command center.
Shiva drags the fluffies and the guards with her and strides right to the back end of the firefight. Taff speaks to his brothers and sisters. He tells them to run, and to remember him. They do, against the walls, and being small, are quickly lost. Taff runs the other way and Shiva catches him almost immediately.
The kids, under Rahj's lead, make it to the ship, where they are immediately spotted by a Fluffy officer. He is quite taken aback, but drags them aboard and tells other officers and soon a wholescale retreat is called. The ship rises into the air. Fax and Lax and Rahj hear Gray calling for blasts from orbit as soon as they are clear. They are a bit agahst and plead with them not to. Even Rahj is against it.
Abrubtly the pilot screams out and he stops the ship just in time before it runs into it's own reflection. It's sphereical shield hits the inside of the city dome with a jarring bang and the ship's shield fails.
Up a twisting foot-wide shaft of broken concrete and metal, Taff has reassembled the broken wave guides that run the shield generator. Only he could have crawled through that space. He is now backing out. The ship is fired on by city guns. Defenseless, it is rocked by the explosions.
"Stop them! Stop them!" shouts Shiva. "Get that fuzzy out of there." Taff comes out on his own accord. Shiva keeps speaking into a microphone. "Ten seconds off, then on. Let them escape." "What?" comes the faint voice over it. "Do it." She speaks to Taff. "I keep my word."
The dome goes away, and the partly burning warship rises through it. Then the dome is replaced. The ship rises quietly.
An officer reports to Gray that the guns are silenced but that they could take a few of them out with engine blasts. "No" says Gray. "Perhaps not today. You know, I suddenly feel like, like, I feel the forest has been saved."