My Tribute to the Late Kurt Vonnegut
Seemingly unaware of the nuclear missiles trained on them from numerous locations both on and off world, the probe continued it’s mission of information gathering above the Bacewitz homeworld in the sparkling darkness of space. The pilots must think they are secretly shrouded in in that pitiful cloud of radioactive dust which orbits the world, thought Kingi. That man and Kingi’s former friend, Admiral Chesterfield, had not the interplanetary intelligence to know that the Bacewitz had developed a new radar called intuitive compound radiance analysing. Fools! The humans really are a pitiful bunch, hardly worth crushing, but at the same time too dangerous to leave alone. They could end everything.
Kingi’s handsome form, betraying his Ngati Tahu ancestry despite his subsequent ‘improvements’ as an organism, stood slumped and illuminated over the screens. He scratched his strong chin repetitively with his bakelite mandibles as he mused over his old friend and new adversary. His low and strong form was shaken to alertness by a voice. His bristling spine and hull armour sprang to attention.
‘Should we fire, sir?’ asked a subordinate. Every other person in the entire Munitions Command Center was subordinate to Kingi and the large majority of the planet Bacewitz for that matter. This was as Kingi wanted it. It was forseeable that in the future he might rule over the whole spectrum. The Gammas, the Violets and even the elusive and hard to define Infra-reds could all be within his powers. It would only take a small intensification of his current mana to make it so. But accellerated evolution happens so slowly. If only to be the chief of control now!
‘Indeed. Fire at will, but ensure to miss with the first five missiles by finer and finer margins with the sixth one hitting, so that even these poorly cogitive creatures can perceive that they will surely die.’
The Command Center’s intuitive systems already knew what to do, having read Kingi’s mind and found the necessary authorisation to end life. The floor and fixtures rattled rhythmically as one after another, in eight second intervals the missiles left their housing and shot into the heavens at nine times the speed of sound. Bacewitzian clock seconds being 1.7 Earthling seconds, this equated to approximately 14 earthling seconds. Kingi mentally reckoned this as he imagined the mammillian suprise and horror in the dark blue night skies above. They would be counting the intervals of the approaching missiles and in doing so had a 112 earth second T-minus until their demise. Kingi had learned about interplanetary chronology at Yale in his youth.
On the cool blue nanotechnic diagram, the quadrant of observation could be seen with the probe, moving as before on a course towards the meteor field where the old homeworld once was. Between the many figures of weight, velocity and intensity of the probe something was happening. What had changed was the ceasing of the restless screening of radar, light, photographs and radiation readings. Instead the extremely powerful hull protection of the probe had sprung up and it’s own bristling missile pods were filling the sky with irridescent spots representing countermeasures, several dozen nuclear missiles aimed at the missile sattelites in space, and a couple of hundred neutron bombs aimed at the Bacewitz cities. This was a payload large enough to destroy all surface life on Bacewitz a thousand times. These weapons would be visible in the sky from the ground, and would make a very pretty light show, especially when they seperated in the stratosphere, thought King-that is before the viewer was vaporised, along with the other seven billion souls going about their lives on the surface, by the nuclear blast which was equal to one thousand times all of the explosions ever released on Earth. Kingi and his men were safe here in their bunker, and being immortal, would rise to the ashes long after the Chesterfield bloodline had withered and died along with the nuclear fallout of Bacewitz-in about 72,000 years in fact. But damn his eyes, since when had a probe carried such a payload unless it was simply a dirty trick to get near enough to Bacewitz to drop their silly primitive bombs. Kang realised he had been thwarted by a Human, and saluted him as a worthy foe.
‘Say Cheese!’
Mcgetric climbed down the ladder from the blackened probe in his radiation suite and waved mid ladder to the applause of the landing crew and the flashing and buzzing of camera drones. After walking down the glass corridor which seperated him from the crew and journalists he passed through a sensor. He then scrutinized the readout. It said his hazard suit had absorbed a lot of harmful radiation. He passed out of the hanger and into a decontamination chamber. Here he stood under a shower of boiling acids designed to break down radiation carrying compounds. After this he stepped into heated a chemical detergent shower to wash the acids off and then into a normal shower heated to seventy degrees celcius to wash off the detergents. He was then free to undress from the hazard suit and then his astronautical vac suit. Standing in his briefs, he was hailed from behind by a gruff yet melodious voice.
‘You did allright kid.’
‘I did what I had to do for my race.’
‘You still did allright.’
Mcgetric closed face turned around and face the smiling eyes of Chesterfield. His eyes dropped to a geiger counter in the older man’s right hand.
‘Just to be certain,’ he said with a concerned smile. Chesterfield was a man of sixty but he had a lightness of bearing and musculature of a man of fourty. He radiated vitality. His veined left hand reached down to the counter, switched the device on and waved it about Mcgetric’s body. It didn’t click much but it clicked all the same.
‘That’s what I call Success Through Correct Procedure.’
‘All I did was Follow The Plan.‘
‘What are you going to do now? I though maybe we could get some-’
‘No. I’ve got to see Bronwyn. She needs me. I know it is illegal but dammit, She is having my son!’
‘I know how you feel, boy, and if I were in your place I would do the same thing. But the reality is the administration puts these regulations in place for good reasons. You have a dissertaion in the matter. You know better than me how radiation can effect a foetus, and I don’t want to see you damage Bronwyn or your son.’ You have to wait a year. That was a sacrafice you took willingly and you swore upon your genus that you would adhere to the protocol of returned servicemen who have been in contact with harmful radiation. You can still be there as a hologram-’
‘I can never be there!’ snarled Mcgetric. Mcgetric turned shamefully away from his senior. Pausing for a moment he then stepped over to the window and looked over the river which eventually flowed into the Baltic sea.
