Felicity Ch. 66

The Captives

Twelve years after the Gulf event Cel still sent out crews looking for survivors. The few discovered were in poor shape. Shelters had been advised to keep sufficient supplies for ten years so most shelters would have run out of food and water by then.

The ones in shelters that managed to leave them usually found supplies to carry them through until the Cel ships found them.

The containers the supplies were in had been rigged with a silent pinger that alerted the searchers the unit had been activated. Four motion activated camera would then transmit the images to the nearest Akkad colony on Earth. Months had gone by since any survivors had been located.

New towns had been built on the surface of each continent and that was where the survivors were now taken after a time of observation. The towns were able to support one thousand people each but none of the towns were full yet.

The Continent of Western North America had eleven such towns and each was already self supporting.

One of those town had residents that would not be assets to any community and yet even they had managed to survive on their own for a year. That town was thousands of kilometers and large geographic obstacles from the others.

Eastern North America had eighteen such towns, three with the substandard quality beings. Two of those were nearly full. One of those contained only men. None of those three were yet self supporting, the other fifteen were.

It normally took just a week to decide the placement of the shelter survivors. On all continents the new towns were a thousand kilometers apart.

Similar settlements were on other lands with the same restrictions. There were forty two in Asia, Twenty four in Europe, and Fourteen in Africa and South America. Just one in Australia.

None of the "troubling" populated towns anywhere on Earth were the citizens capable of reproducing but did not know that.

The supply canister placed at the entrance of each known shelter was a marvel, the survivors just needed to push a button to open it. The canister then inflated to create a dome that had food and water supplies for forty people for three weeks. If there were more than forty survivors another unit would be dispatched but that had rarely happened and had not happened at all in the last two years.

The shelter created had its own ambient control so it kept itself at a comfortable temperature no matter where it was. It also had comfortable seating around its inner wall and a large flat area suitable for sleeping. A large first aid kit was also included.

I small rover camera was sent into the shelter that had been vacated to see if there were any bodies in it. If any were found the bodies were scanned to determine the cause of death.

Partially eaten human bodies had been found but by itself that did not mean the fate of the survivors was determined. If the humans had died of natural causes and especially if they had died of starvation the incidents were ignored.

Some of the bodies had obviously been murdered and that initiated a close scrutiny of the survivors. Most of those ended up in restricted towns.

Microphones had been placed throughout the dome and conversations were listened to by those trained on the workings of the human mind.

Twelve years and six months after the Gulf Asteroid and five months after it had last happened a ping was transmitted and cameras were activated. A young woman watched her screens and listened on her head set. She heard nothing. She saw small beings walking around in what seemed to be space suits. She saw two women assisted into the dome.

The women were quickly given water and after a quick search they were brought bottles of nutrient drinks. The women fell asleep and the small beings made them comfortable.

The rescue observer called the Ladies Akari and Labiba on whose island that particular unit was monitored then sent a probe into the shelter they had emerged from. It was a large cave with many motor vehicles by the entrance including buses, trucks and SUV's all marked as U.S. Government vehicles.

The Ladies had arrived by then and wondered if the vehicles still had gas and could run. It had been more than twelve years since they had driven a motor vehicle. They also saw a tractor that had apparently piled up soil to one side.

The rover then found an open elevator. The controller maneuvered it inside and before they asked themselves how they were going to get the elevator activated the doors closed and the elevator went down for a long while. When the doors opened the rover was in very large room with low ambient light.

As it proceeded into the cave the rover's camera revealed several domes. Some were dark but some were clear. The controller sent her rover to one clear dome and found it had been a habitation.

The Ladies asked the operator to stop the rover and raise the lens, the ceiling was a hundred meters high, it was artificial.

A few meters later the lens revealed what appeared to be flying machines.

"Where is this place, "Lady Labiba asked.

"Sorry Ma'm, the visuals distracted me and I have not checked. Western North America it seems. It is a designated shelter location by the United States Government."

"Send out the drone from the pod, lets look around, Lady Akari ordered. "Feed all channels we are seeing to Cel, they may know what this place is."

They saw equipment, offices, labs, then a shoe. The shoe had just stepped into view. The small rover was then being lifted and was suddenly in front of the face plate of a being in a space suit. The face was not human. Somehow the ladies thought it was smiling. They felt themselves smiling back.

The being then aimed the rovers camera upward and the women saw spacecraft on scaffolding, all gutted or damaged. It then carried the camera to a room that appeared to be a cafeteria. The ladies saw about fifty dead humans sitting at tables, apparently all had ceased to be in mid-meal. There were no signs of violence.

The camera was then carried to what looked like a control room and it showed the alien turning the units on. The receivers in the dome picked up signals and sent them to Shangri-La. The Ladies heard their computers begin to work.

"Send that on to Cel," Labiba commanded a second watcher.

The alien carried the rover with it as he went out of the shelter and did not set it down until they were back in the dome. There was an apparent conversation with the others then all just sat and waited.

It took just forty five centons for a ship to arrive. The survivors carried the women towards the ship with what seemed like tenderness. They were reluctant to release them to the crew but did.

Once in the ship the women were taken to an infirmary and the seventeen aliens to a passenger section. The were all surprised to be greeted by an Akkad, a Devl, and a human.

They were asked what air mixture they needed.

Ahn and Sehel seemed confused by their answer.

"I think they said something enriched methane, Sehel said.

"I thought they said oxygen something," Ahn said.

Lord Jim left for a few moments and brought a hand held visualizer and put up a model oxygen/nitrogen molecule. He handed the visualizer to an alien and he soon had a molecule displayed.

That it contained oxygen and methane was obvious but it took a few moments to see it also contained argon, an inert gas. They wondered how heir bodies could use it.

Lord Jim then asked what they needed to eat. The visualizer was then set to show a jar of what appeared to be baby food.

Ahn exclaimed that was what she ate.

All aliens smiled. They understood English and could hear her.

In Cel the women were taken to the medical center in Clara and the aliens to a house in Felicity that had been the mansion of a music star. The windows and doors had double seals and the house had been filled with their ambient air that turned out to be a combination of oxygen, methane, and argon.

The kitchen had all cabinets filled with every kind of baby food known and the aliens loved that until Martina and Helen brought them Clara's intergalactically famous chicken soup. All could hear them make a humming sound as they slurped up the soup.

The aliens were from a world unknown to any of the others. They related that they had visited Earth for millennia hoping to add them as friends but had instead been detained after their ships became inoperable.

Many died before they were provided with a breathable atmosphere. Some died as tests were conducted of them. They though at least twice as many as them had been captured and were certain some had been on other nations before the barrage.

They said their captors had spoken of a place called Cel they desperately wanted to get to. They were happy to see it existed.

They called themselves the Gaans and spoke in the manner the Akkad spoke, high pitched sounds emanating from flaps of skin on their skulls. The Akkad and Gaans assumed they had a common ancestor.

They were smaller than the Akkad and their eyes were slanted more. Their skin had a greenish hue. As opposed to the Akkad the Gaans had a definite nose although small. The Gaans had two fingers and a thumb as opposed to the Akkad an humans.

Messages were sent into space by Cel and relayed throughout the galaxy on behalf of the aliens asking for a ride home.

In the meantime their suits were modified so that all they needed to breathe came out of nozzles below their face. Those suits were soon discarded and they began to wear what most Akkad did, diaphanous robes.

Earth air was not poisonous to them, just insufficient as was true for the Akkad. Small air bladders of what was needed was sewn into their robes and provided the necessary gases for a full day. They were now free to roam where they wished.

The air bladders on the Akkad robes contained ozone of course.

Three of the Gaans were provided homes in Clara, they were the living captains of their ships. There were seven ships in the caves, two of their captains had died in the crash and two had died mysteriously.

Two chose a companion to come along with them. They met each day with King Jordan, Lords Marc and Jim, and their Ladies as the races learned about each other. An Akkad was always present and could hear and speak directly to their guests.

Yggs and Rah, Sehel and Klm, a Doran, were also present but they needed the newly programmed translators to hear the Gaans even though the were speaking in English. Sprites broadcast all of their meetings which were informal.

The meetings were each day at first but after two weeks they became once a week affairs. The Gaans roamed far and wide between the meetings. They were in awe of the Federation ships and more so of the triple hull ship housed in its own building outside Felicity.

The two women with them recovered quickly and were feted by all in Cel. The two had not committed suicide like the others in the bunker so they could take care of the aliens. However their reluctance to eat from the aliens food supply had robbed them of strength. The aliens had turned the tables and cared for them.

The women, Toni and Ingrid, were lured into making Felicity their home. The two were partners in a relationship. They soon had over one hundred very close friends.

After their breathing problems had been solved the remaining Gaan were given the opportunity to live anywhere in Cel. Most chose Clara although several chose Penza. Three chose to stay in Felicity and were awarded a home in a Cloverleaf subdivision. Their neighbors were humans Toni and Ingrid on one side and Devl on the other. Akkad lived across the street.

The three seemed to always be giddy as you would expect from beings that had been held for as long as fifty years and thought they were alone in the universe, except for the barbarians that held them captive.

The three in Felicity soon found themselves surrounded by six species of friends that pressed their lips to them each time one saw them. All that did so were female they had noted.

The Gaans did not have separate sexes, like Akkad each was a hermaphrodite. Unlike the Akkad the Gaans could control the form of their bodies well but most went through life as neutral. The ones in Felicity individually decided to be female.

As soon as the females of Felicity saw the feminine signs appear on the Gaan women they were ravished, much to their pleasant surprise. They decided woman mode was good and went next door to visit Toni and Ingrid.

The information stream one of the aliens had broadcast to Cel from their confinement base was decoded and shared by the Peers then sent to the scientists on the other Akkad colonies on Earth and to each Federation planet.

All concluded that although a lot more advanced than Earth they were not as advanced as any in the Federation. Their mother ships had spent many years in transit and just a few scout ships had been sent down each time. The scout ships did not handle Earth weather well.

The biological set up of the Gaans was studied and the apparent closeness of them to the Akkad vanished. Nothing internally was close. The Akkad had one small heart and the Gaan had none or six depending on your definition of a heart.

The skeletal bones of the Akkad were thin but there were two of them everywhere including the spine. The Gaan had areas of a cartilage type of material enclosed in thick muscles.

The Gaan were as different to the Akkad as both were to the Cephalians.

The Gaans knew English well and understood what everyone was saying but did not allow their captors to know that. The women who saved them however knew they understood.

It had been over two years since the suicide dinner before they were found. Numerous earthquakes had been felt in the chambers and the humans had incorrectly assumed they had been buried deeper and would never be rescued.

The earthquakes had in fact moved the facility eastward into shallower ground. It was moved pretty much like a bubble through the soil layers above them.

The aliens had been digging out for just three weeks before bursting out to the surface. They expected a package was nearby and were very happy to find it.

They knew what had happened to the planet and knew of Cel from the talks of the humans they overheard. They knew they would get to go home.

It took two years for Cel to get communication back from Gaans. They had sent a rescue ship.

Cel answered back, "You need to have room for forty six more, we found more Gaans in other locations." The one communicating was the captain of one of the downed vessels. All the Gaans deferred to him.

He was answered, "Our mother ship has five scout ships so even though all of you would not be able to come at once it would not take long."

The captain answered, "We have a place for the mother ship to land."

Lord Carlos had searched his data bases for rumored alien capture sights and found one in France, one in Russia and one in Tibet. Each had Gaan survivors and each had humans. There was one more in Brazil but it was never found.

One of the sites had humans herding the aliens like cattle and those humans were dropped off at an isolated aggressive behavior city before continuing to Cel with the Gaans.

Those three Celian rescue ships had a Gaan woman from Felicity on board to help them communicate. The three needed to reassure those rescued that no they were not just being relocated, they were being freed. They were going home.

Two of the aliens rescued from the shelter that was herding them onto the ship stood then fainted. The translator told the medical crew not to worry too much, "That may have just an overwhelming experience response. We faint when that happens."

That was what it was.

When the Interstellar Gaan ship landed at the Felicity Spaceport a delegation from Akkad was there to greet them. It included two new Protectors that were going to the Gaan planet.

The officers and beings of the crew were gifted with robes that had the air bladders and invited them to explore Cel. New translators were now worn by many on Cel and all the Gaans.

The mother ship commander had intended to leave after one day but stayed two weeks.

When their Gaan ships left the three living in Felicity stayed. They had volunteered for and had been granted status as agents for Gaan on Earth.

That avoided any possible charges of desertion since none of the three had any intention of leaving Felicity.

Like many others they commuted to Clara on the train to their offices there.

All three were pregnant by officers of the Gaan ship. Those came back to Felicity at times to visit with their children but it was a different set of officers that made the three pregnant again. A native population of Gaans was now well underway in Felicity.

The Gaan episode had brought a mystery to Earth. They said they had not been the only ones visiting Earth over millennia. They had visited Earth for over fifteen thousand years but found they had not been the first.

They had revisited Earth every five hundred years and found Earth had been visited by others each time. Several of those visitations could be easily traced to the time the Devl had visited.

The Akkad had only been visiting Earth since the first radio signals had been detected but there was some overlap there since the Gaan had increased the frequency of their visits to every twenty years after they saw humans flying.

The Kindred, Florians, Cephalians, Dorians, Saurians and Mur had never visited Earth. The Dorans and Saurians had a planet like Earth in their mythology as did the Devl but that mythology included the beings that had piloted the three hull ship still being studied at the main shore just off Felicity.

The beings of the triple hull ship were gone before any of the Federation planets had a developing civilization.

"So who were the others? Are they coming back?" was asked by all.

The answer did not come for two hundred years when the owners of the three hull ship returned for it.