The Rise Of The Three Crater Alliance

The genetic diversity of the inhabitants of this village was just astonishing. This particular small village had more genetic diversity than some large cities in Asia... Only Africa would have something close to this... Plus almost all of the people were Black. Almost all of them had brown eyes. What I would have expected was only the lighter skinned people would have eye colors other than brown, but that was not the case. A good ten or fifteen percent of the Black people had blue eyes.

People were on the roads... fleeing to some place that offered hope of safety... except there appeared to be no safety. All along the roads, dead humans were everywhere. The drones in some cases were able to determine that the people died of the disease. In other cases they died from animal attacks. In still other cases nothing could be determined... except that they were dead and some animal had eaten their dead bodies.

Why I had the genetic determination software was a stupid story. My handlers wanted a guy dead. They knew that he was in a city in eastern Poland, but they could not find him. The guy had changed his appearance so drastically that no one could find him. The people in charge had a genetic sample of his blood. All I had to do was get blood samples of every single person in that town and PRESTO! I would find the guy... and then kill him.

I had divided the city into squares. I deployed drones the size of wasps that had drones the size of gnats inside them. Two mechanical gnats would go out and start following an individual. One would bite the person on the ankle and draw a blood sample, then come back to the wasp sized drone. The wasp sized drone would gather up multiple samples and return to a hawk sized drone that would return to a base I had set up. The second gnat sized drone would then follow the person until such time as the sample was processed. In the end I found the guy... He had changed his s.e.x... and height... and eye color... and his identity papers were just so solid that it would have been impossible to break without the blood sample. I was about to go in and kill the guy, when they changed their minds and abducted him from his apartment. Where he went after that I just did not care.

All of that took three appallingly boring weeks. To pass the time, I read up on the software that they had provided to analyze the blood samples. I compared all the DNA samples that I had collected with open criminal cases throughout the world. In 23 cases, I sent anonymous emails to police in six countries to alert them to the fact that I had found a match to their cold cases. In the process I acquired copies of all the DNA data bases I accessed. I was never curious enough to find out whether the tips were followed up.

I also discovered that the software would provide me with the haplogroups, both male lineage and female lineage. Then it got really strange. The software also provided probabilities of a given hereditary disease striking the person in question. In addition, after finding the immune factors in a given blood sample, the software could guess whether a given disease or allergy would affect someone. The list of features went on and on... the big drawback was that the software had to be run on a super computer to make all the features work in a timely fashion.

Thinking about the software was easier than thinking about the devastation that had befallen all these people.

After examining sixteen villages, I noticed something awful: All of them had run out of food long before the disease set in. What you would expect is that in root cellars and towns' common granaries, there would be food set aside for the winter. The root cellars were empty... The grain storage facilities were almost depleted. I re-examined the spring crops in the fields. Basically, they were not growing well.

Two of the towns had been hit by monster attack that overwhelmed the populace. People had been sick and unable to repel the predators. The slaughter that had resulted was just unbelievable. From what I could tell all sixteen had fallen at about the same time a month ago.

The deaths on the road had taken place two or three weeks back.

Within the area I was examining at the moment, I was finding no live humans.

My office was shaped like a hemisphere with just a very large swiveling comfy chair and nothing else. Q could then project virtual screens all around me. In truth, all the information could be fed directly into my brain through the computer interface my handlers had installed there. I had discovered over the years that I would experience information overload, if I did that.

Q provided me with still shots of the sixteen villages in sixteen different areas of the dome. I very slowly rotated my chair around, leaning back occasionally, examining the images on the ceiling. No uniformity... The houses were built in a haphazard way. Some were built using mud bricks and had thatched roofs. Others were assembled like a multicolored jigsaw puzzle with no cement, each stone exactly fitting in its place and roofs that somehow stayed in place even though they were stones instead of tile. How could there be so MANY styles of houses in the same, small village?

The interiors were no better. Some had multi-room houses, others were a single room. Some had mud floors, others had wood floors... None of them had electricity. Few had oil lamps. Most used candlelike lamps...

The roads inside the villages were pretty much the same... no cement, no asphalt, no cobble stones... just dirt. The roads between villages were made up of single-laned rutted messes. When it rained, things must really suck.

The styles of the walls around the villages were a hodgepodge as well. Some had moats, others had x-shaped formations out front to break up waves of monster charges.

I finally realized that these were scratch teams. The people had nothing in common except that they needed to band together to survive. How was that possible?

Then it hit me...

If I was here and I came from another planet, then what about these others? What I was seeing was individuals being dropped on a planet with no preparation and no one from their own civilization to back them up. That implied that the more civilized a person was, the less likely they would be able to survive in this primitive environment. It also implied that more civilized methods of organizing societies were almost impossible in such a chaotic milieu.

Q noticed an anomaly and informed me of it...

A realtime picture appeared in front of me showing a woman dressed in what could best be described as a long flowing ankle length ballroom dress, running from... giants. She had nowhere to hide. She was running across an open plain of long green grass. I could see that she was making for a forest at the edge of the plain. Q said, "You are looking at the outer edge of our in-depth exploration circle. The giants are on average 20 feet tall. They appear to be human in shape, but, Rock, a human that size would have too many problems with their feet." What bothered me was that these guys looked like really tall humans. They had long straight head hair, dusky skin that had little or no hair on it, fingernails that were too soft to be claws... And oh, yes, they had HUGE p.e.n.i.ses... which were engorged at the moment... I chuckled... That made no sense... One thrust and the woman would be split in half... There's being so horny that you will take anyone and being so stupid that you would kill your partner in the s.e.x act.

Suddenly, the woman turned and confronted her pursuers. She made a gesture and a swirling firestorm encircled one of the giants. I blinked. Q had re-positioned another drone to watch this confrontation. From the two vantage points, I could see that the flames surrounded the man in a cylinder of brilliant scarlet that rotated about him. The giants froze watching this spectacle unfold... I could not hear any screams, but I was sure the guy was making more than a few of those.

Slowly the cylindrical bonfire collapsed in on itself and left a smoldering circle of white ash. The green grass had burned to a certain extent, but the grass was too new to start a wildfire... which implied that this was early spring. That begged the question of why all the food storage areas were b.a.r.e. No one in his right mind eats his winter supplies all the way to the floor of his pantry, be it a granary or just a root cellar... unless this was not the first year of famine... That kind of s.u.c.k.e.d.

I raised an exquisitely crafted wide mouthed wine glass that I had stolen a while back and took a sip of excellent chardonnay. This vintage was light green in color and went well with viewing the end of my world. I could not remember whether I had stolen the wine the same place as the glasses. I set the wine glass into the cup holder in the arm of the chair.

As the giants were transfixed by their friend turning to ash, the woman had gained the protection of the trees. When the wind started blowing the pile of ash away, the chase had resumed inside the forest.

Meanwhile the woman had done something stupid... Forests are made up of trees and underbrush. She had been shooting off fireballs at the pursuing giants. The underbrush was now on fire. The giants were not having an easy time of cornering her in the resulting smoke.

I suddenly realized something... The woman was not using a device to produce the balls of fire. She was creating them out of the thin air. As far as I could see she was using magic.

How... SPECIAL...

I was up and moving in a moment. Internally, I told Q what I planned to do, as I ran through the corridors that lead outside. When the knee high grass was under my feet, I stored the tent and ejected an aircar I had picked up somewhere. I noticed a creature running toward me from the surrounding forest. I jumped into the pilot's seat and pushed the button to start the four engines. The thing shot up sixty feet to avoid giving the idiot predator the p.l.e.a.s.u.r.e of tearing me to pieces. The thing was so frustrated that it jumped straight up trying to rend me limb to limb. I hovered a few seconds looking down at the catoid creature before zipping off to where the woman was.

I shook my head as I sped away. How in HELL did the humans on this world survive?... Answer: They mostly did not. With enemies like that critter they could fight and fight and still be over-topped in the end.

I arrived in the area of the fire in less than twenty minutes... I was a bit surprised that the forest that was now ablaze was next to a split in the earth... The forest just ended on a cliff that fell at least 100 feet to a slow moving muddy river. The other side was a plain for about 100 yards, then low lying mountains.

I was a bit late. The woman was running along the edge of the cliff looking back. The smoke cascading off the lip into the depths of the chasm like water flowing over a falls. I eased up beside the cliff in front of her and stopped with the passenger seat nudged up to the brink.

I stood up in the hover car, grasping the windshield and casually whistled. The woman's head snapped around and she slid to a stop some distance from the hover car. I smiled engagingly and pointed to the seat beside me. The woman looked back the way she had come, assessed me and then strode up to the car in a very elegant fashion. I offered my hand which she took reluctantly, then stepped daintily into the car, lifting the seam of her dress. I sat, then she sat with a strange look on her face.

I felt danger approach, so I side-slipped the hover car out over the gulf. Out of the smoke a giant suddenly lunged. He roared his frustration that he was going to lose his prey and jumped toward us. The woman gasped and shot a fireball at him. I deftly maneuvered away from his huge grasping hands, then shot up in the sky. I looked down. The fireball had caught his copious pubic hair on fire. He screeeamed. Pounding the flames trying to put out the fire seemed to hurt more than the fire itself. He bounced once or twice on the cliff wall before creating a unbelievably large splash as he hit the muddy river below. More giants rushed out of the smoke to the edge of the cliff, saw what had happened and started throwing stones at the hovering aircar.

I began to gain altitude. The woman asked in an English accent that I had not heard before, "Who... what... Why are you helping me?" She was still out of breath.

I felt the danger before I saw it...

An honest to God dragon tried to swoop down and attack me... I had the aircar drop like a rock. The dragon made another pass. I said to the woman without taking my eyes off the instrument panel, "Quiet. I need to concentrate." One of the stones from the idiot giants grazed the aircar. I started cursing, then an idea hit me so hard that I started laughing. Two birds with one stone indeed.

The dragon would NOT give up. We played tag for a bit, then I led him back to the giants. When the dragon made another swoop, I ejected a large rock from my Pocket and tossed it over my shoulder. The rock hit the dragon in between the eyes. I pushed the virtual button on the dashboard that made the aircar invisible. By the time the dragon could focus again, we appeared to be gone. The dragon was hit by a few LARGE stones from the giants. Say what you will about that dragon, he was a quick study. I REALLY would have liked to see the look on those guys' faces when they were confronted with a one hundred foot long reptile... that grabbed one of their number in its claws and flew away.

We flew for a bit in silence, then I asked casual like, "Say, how come you can speak my language?"

Just as casually, she said, "I cannot... Look." I turned to her. She pointed to a wristband on her right hand and said, "This is a translation item."

"So that somehow takes what you are saying in your own language and automatically translates it into my language using magic. Is that it?" I asked.

"Yes. That is true," she said.

"Can you make more wristbands like that one?" I asked.

"If I have the correct materials I can, but some of the... inputs are very rare, so I do not think it will be possible," she said.

"I note that you have a Pocket, like I do. I have an extremely big Pocket. Could be that I have the material you need to make more than one of these," I said thinking.

"I call it an items box... Why would you want more translation items?" she asked now very confused. I got the impression that it had been quite a while since someone threw her off center.

"I am almost completely sure that most of the people we will encounter will not be able to speak to us in any language that we might know. What is more, they will not be able to talk to anyone else that they encounter," I said still trying to feel my way to some conclusion.

"Why? That makes no sense," she said, now quite a bit perturbed.

"Wherever we are, we are not where we were before. We are not even on the same planet... Wait... Are you telling me that you have seen giants like those fellows back there and 100 foot long flying serpents?" I asked, now REALLY interested.

Reluctantly, she said, "I have HEARD that there were giants somewhere, but never seen any myself, nor met anyone who could credibly say that they had seen them. As for that dragon... I have never HEARD of one that big. I cannot imagine how it would fly."

At the time the creature was chasing me, I had not taken time to admire the dragon. Now that there was time, I was astonished. The thing was multi-hued, from red to green. All its finery reminded me of a drag queen of old. The eyelids had been BRIGHT red, the lips were a pleasing pink, splashes of sepia on its snout and BRIGHT yellow barbels. Why the thing had orange teeth made no sense. The rest of the body was mostly shades of camouflage green. The huge bat wings were sepia like its snout. Why it had such a long tail with ancillary fan shaped wings was unclear to me. I was just happy that the creature was gone.

We passed the peak of a conical mountain made of basalt with a nearly flat top. I circled back to it and using my Pocket, I leveled the top eliminating all vegetation and random rocks. I landed the hover car and jumped out. I went around to the other side and offered my hand to the woman to help her out. She blinked, then took it. While she was not looking, I ejected one of the large houses that I had stolen over the years. This one was a single brick four bedroom, four bath house with a red tile roof about 3500 square feet.

She froze when she saw the house. She said, "What?" To say that she was dumbfounded was now very evident. She let loose of my hand and refused to take another step. She faced me, staring into my eyes.

"Oh, that. My military was going to destroy a row of houses using explosives. I wandered by and stole the houses before that happened and substituted rubble. All the people and animals and plants and other life around the house died inside the Pocket, of course, but I did not much care... Over the last twenty years, I have spent my spare time renovating them. In truth, I have fifty other homes about this size and ten twice as big, two mansions and one palace with 130 rooms. This one..." I gestured to the house. "fits this area just right." She was still very stunned. I sighed, then chuckled. "Stand out here all day. See I care."

I put the hover car back in my Pocket... which reminded me... I ejected some camouflage towers, that rendered the house invisible. Any creature coming close to the top of the peak was going to get a subsonic soundtrack that made them want to fly elsewhere. Anyone observing the peak would see it like it was before I flattened it.

The house itself was on a flat wooden foundation like a pallet in a warehouse. I had thought to make it concrete, but discovered that concrete shattered too easily, when I ejected a house from my Pocket. Wood could flex.

I opened the screen door and pushed open the front door. The woman stepped up on the front porch... hesitantly. I motioned for her to enter before me. She did. I flipped on the light as I entered the room.

She jumped. She rounded on me and said in exasperation, "How are you doing all this? I am one of the most powerful wizards in all of my world. I cannot detect you using any magic to do all this."

I stepped inside and let the screen door close behind me.

I shooed her back with a hand gesture and closed the front door.