Cowboys and Aliens Ch. 34

Everyone was in a state of shock when the scan results started being displayed. The entire planet appeared to be in ruins, with the surface almost completely decimated by impact craters that dotted the surface and random plumes of acrid black smoke still burning across parts of the landscape. It looked like the planet had been used for target practice.

The scans eventually indicated there were only a few thousand people on the planet, all were very widely distributed, indicating they were likely in remote rural locations, away from where the impact craters were since there was absolutely nothing standing within several hundred kilometres of any of the impact craters. They guessed the centres of those craters was where cities used to be.

Commander Topos asked for an atmospheric report, as Mark asked if there were any towns that survived.

The scanner technician said, "The atmosphere shows faint traces of radiation at the impact craters, but it was within safe limits and should be completely dissipated within a week or so. Around the entire planet, it looks like there are 42 remote towns that appear to have been spared, although all are without power at this time and most of the towns are in the mountains.

Mark said, "That is likely why they survived... they were small, remote and protected from the blasts and shock waves by the mountains."

The technician then added, "Those small towns currently account for over 50% of the surviving population."

Mark was thinking out loud, "We can use those towns as bases, setup a large outreach centre in each of those locations, so they'll have everything they need to survive, plus we'll have a starting point for whatever we decide to do. They will need our help if they want to survive here."

Adam spoke to the entire ship through the intercom, 'All passenger shuttles, we have 10 of you, so get cozy as I want 12 people to a shuttle. I want shuttles escorting three people, with construx and a few security drones, to each location indicated on your shuttle's navigation system. Once you've visited your 4 assigned locations and deployed your passengers, check in and we'll dispatch you to a search grid to collect the survivors. All emergency shuttles, begin search and rescue immediately and escort them to the closest outreach centre. Use the medibeds only if you don't think they'll survive until you can get them to an outreach centre. If you have someone in a medibed, leave them there, just make sure you return them to the same outreach centre you dropped the others off at, we don't want to be splitting up friends and families.

For those of you being deployed on location... establish contact with the mayor or whomever is in charge and get an outreach hub under construction ASAP. For those of you on the night side of the planet, take it slow and don't wake people up. They've been through a lot, so let them sleep. Although hopefully you can find a location and get the outreach centre built, it would be nice for them to wake up and be able to have a good breakfast.

Talk to the people and assure them we're here to help, maybe even round up some volunteers. Once the outreach centre is online, one of you organize volunteers to get a meal going, one of you start getting people identified and the other one can run medical or assist however is required. Hopefully it won't take long until we have all the survivors rescued and the shuttle crews can stay and help.'

Mark did the math and 42 locations would need 126 people, not 120, so he mentioned that to Adam, who said, "I know, but your shuttle is not under my command, but I have gotten to know you, so I figured you would offer your shuttle. If you didn't, I was going to ask two of the shuttles to get real cozy and cram 15 people onboard."

"We're not going to just sit here, we'll split up and take the last two locations," Mark said as everyone in his group was nodding in agreement.

Adam smiled and said to the technicians that had done the scanning and were assigning the locations to each shuttle, "Assign the last two locations to the royal shuttle." He then turned back toward Mark and said, "There you go, be safe!"

Mark smiled, stood at attention and saluted Adam, as did Mark's entire crew and said, "Yes sir!"

Adam laughed, as they turned to leave the bridge, "Please tell me someone got that on video, the king and queen saluting an underling... that's gotta be a historical first!"

Upon hearing that, they all laughed as they made their way to the landing bay and to Maren's shuttle. The last two locations were both on the night side of the planet, so without power they would be landing and operating in the dark.

They were approaching the first site after about 20 minutes as Mark was sitting in the copilot seat. Fortunately the shuttle cockpit window functioned a lot like night vision, so they could see the small town quite clearly, albeit in black and white, as they did a slow flyby. Everyone seemed to still be asleep, barring a couple of people near the centre of town. So Liyana distributed everyone some glasses that looked just like basic safety glasses and said they would allow them to see in the dark.

Mark, Annabelle, Athena and Gyges got dropped off first, as the rest continued on to the next location. Security protocol dictated that they couldn't leave the king or queen without security in an unknown situation.

The shuttle did have lights on it, but because Maren hadn't lowered the landing gear, the landing lights hadn't come on. The people on the ground would've still heard the shuttle and seen the light from the interior, so as soon as they exited the shuttle, they were met by a man and woman, who introduced himself as Sam and his wife Gwen, he was the Mayor of Elavon.

The glasses were amazing, you could see perfectly for quite a distance and even had peripheral vision, but the image was black and white, they weren't even blinded when the Mayor's flashlight shone on them.

Mark introduced the group and then explained that they were there to help and that they just needed a good sized location to build an outreach hub on, preferably with some debris or rubble on the site.

The mayor directed them to what looked like a warehouse that was partly buried by a rock slide. Mark pushed the button and tossed the construx toward the middle of the rubble. Within a minute, Cricket started constructing the outreach centre, as Mark asked the couple, "What happened?"

The Mayor regaled them with his account of the event, "About a month ago, we saw a few streaks cross the sky. At first we thought it was a meteor shower, as those happen every now and then, until we heard the roar that followed the streak and felt the first impact. Then we saw more streaks and felt more impacts. It was then we realized we were being attacked from space and that they were targeting the cities. The entire planet seemed to shake for quite a while, causing rockslides, which blocked the roads and buildings started to collapse.

When the shaking finally stopped, we had no power, no radio, no communications... nothing! The two main roads in and out of here were both impassable, but one of the ski resorts had a whirlybird, so he took it out for a look and reported back that every city near here was nothing but a big hole in the ground and anything outside of the impact crater had been flattened or blown away.

Up here in the mountains, we rely heavily on food and supplies from the cities, we're still surviving, but we don't know for how long and the whirlybird has a limited range and fuel supply."

Annabelle then asked the question, "What was the population of Thulark before the attack?"

The Mayor replied, "We passed the one billion mark a few years ago. Do you know how many survived?"

Annabelle shook her head, "We only detected several thousand from our orbital scans and the only towns that appeared to have been spared are remote locations far away from any of the impact craters."

Gwen started to cry, as Sam asked, "That's it? What are we going to do now?"

Mark said, "We are here to help you, the outreach centre we're constructing will provide pretty much everything you need. It offers communications, medical and transportation, in addition to food and water.

We are currently setting one of these up in every remaining town and we have shuttles searching the entire planet for survivors and bringing them to the nearest outreach centre. Once all locations are setup and we get people identified, we will have a better picture of the status of things and then we can come up with a plan to move forward."

Just as construction was nearing completion, the sun was just starting to illuminate the valley. The little town was at the end of a lake in a long wide valley, completely surrounded by large mountains with snow covered peaks. It was a very scenic town, that that appeared to have a few hotels and numerous condominium buildings. The mayor said the population of the town varied, there were only about 500 permanent residents, but the population on weekends and holidays ranged up to about 10,000 as many people from the city used to come up here to relax or ski.

As they were admiring the scenic view of the small lakeside town, the lights came on in the outreach centre, which indicated the facility was now operational. They took the mayor and his wife on a quick little tour of the facility and by the time they finished the tour, other people had started to show up since they saw a massive white and blue building that wasn't there when they went to sleep.

Annabelle and Gyges started identifying people as they came in to the facility and then directed them to get in line for breakfast. Mark, Sam and Gwen had started making pancakes, bacon and scrambled eggs as Athena was directing people to get identified and then to go have some breakfast.

Shortly after breakfast had started, the first few shuttles of survivors arrived and, while no one appeared in need of medical attention, they all were identified and then treated to a hearty breakfast. The drink dispensers seemed to be getting the most attention though, as everyone was amazed they could get such a variety of hot or cold drinks from the same device.

That scenario was repeated at all of the locations. Throughout the day, Mark and the Mayor were in the meeting room, with the world map on the wall indeed looking bleak with only 42 dots on it, and had conference calls with the Federation staff and mayor at each town, to get an assessment of the situation. Some towns had taken quite a bit of damage and there were quite a few injuries, but most appeared to be the result of collapsing buildings.

The big question on everyone's minds was "Who did this?", and "Why?", unfortunately, with no actual proof, they couldn't give any answers, even though they suspected it was Sebastian and the Star Hunter.

By nightfall in Elavon, every survivor on the planet had been transported to an outreach centre and identified. Mark thanked all the shuttle crews and told everyone to get some much needed rest and for the rescuvac crews to take the next few days to get all those well fires plugged and sealed so they weren't polluting the atmosphere.

With status reports from every location, Mark organized a conference call with all of his advisers. In total, it appeared that only 49,862 people out of more than 1 billion survived the attack. All of the towns had hotels so rooms were given to the survivors.

Liyana had compiled some footage from her interviews and Maren had collected a lot of video showing the devastation of the planet. One particularly disturbing set of two pictures, taken by the same photographer from the same vantage point atop a mountain, was of a large city of nearly a million people, then the second picture showed nothing but a big smoking hole in the ground, no trees or anything standing, it was like the city was just wiped off the face of the planet.

It wasn't until you got outside the impact crater, that you even saw ruins of buildings and trees that had been wiped out by the shock wave or the impact debris.

Since the conference meeting was just Mark's advisers, it was not a very long meeting. Mark had sent the status reports of every location, so everyone knew that most all towns were in the same predicament. There was only one remote town that had some electricity due to some wind turbines in some mountain passes, but the turbines didn't generate enough power for the whole town.

After reviewing the reports, Kaleb asked, "So what do you think we should do for those poor people?"

Mark suggested, "I think we should just declare Thulark a Federated planet and bypass all the formalities. Without assistance, power or supplies their survivability, while not impossible, is quite improbable. The town with the wind power has a slightly better chance than everyone else, but that's only until those wind turbines break down, which they all eventually do."

Everyone on the call was nodding in agreement, so Liyana asked, "How should we go about rebuilding the planet?"

Mark said, "Anyone that has been identified, will be made a citizen of the Federation and everyone gets a new home built with construx, with all the shaking that went on, I don't trust the construction of any of their buildings. I say everyone that owns a home, move what they want to keep into the street, build them a new home in their old home's place and then they can move back in, we can also get rid of a lot of unnecessary buildings and clutter. Once everyone has a place to live, we can start rebuilding their other buildings, starting with a museum to preserve their history, then schools and stores."

Dominic then interjected, "We should also build a bank and give each Thulark citizen 1,000 credits, with their banking system collapsed, anything they currently have, is likely useless, so we might as well give them something to get their commerce started."

After the meeting ended, Liyana flew over to Elavon to meet with Mark and Annabelle. They sat down and wrote a press release stating what the plan was for the people of Thulark to move forward. Then Liyana did a live news report about the attack and showed some pictures and videos of the devastation. Soon it was broadcast on AFNN and, because of Atlantis, the story even made its way into the news on Earth.

They then recorded a short video of Mark addressing the residents of Thulark. It was a general report that went over the developments in each location, more or less a video version of the daily report, which was also sent to each location as it gave the Federation staff there ideas about what was being done in other locations.

The video would be displayed on all the public displays at preset times during the day, which was just as most people should be coming in for the communal meals, so everyone could watch it. After a few days, many of the mayors started producing their own daily update speeches, which was a more localized version and advertised some of the local events and businesses.

Since every building was more or less going to be demolished and replaced by a construx building, every location created a huge warehouse, in lieu of a museum, and had everyone collecting history worthy items and pictures for the museum they would eventually build.

Within a week, Thulark had a Sentinel in orbit and a Guardian under construction, they had also received several transports of people from all around the Federation.

After a month, the towns were all starting to look and feel like home to the residents. Everyone had new construx homes that had all of the normal amenities such as clothing synths, drink dispensers, a computer, including washrooms and beds that reset. Each town had grown quite a bit in size and population, so most of them had to add extra communal meal pavilions and schools.

They also built sports facilities such as swimming pools, skate parks, golf courses, arenas and a variety of fields and courts for outdoor sports. Since most towns were up in the mountains, most had nearby ski resorts, so those were upgraded to be self-sufficient for power and they did away with the old cable-driven chair lifts and gondolas and put in safer, maintenance-free AGC versions. There wasn't a lot of ski resorts in the Federation, so that was a very marketable tourist attraction for the planet.

With all the Federation upgrades, many of those that had originally wanted to leave, were now happy to stay. After all, it was their home, and they had the necessities to live comfortably. Plus the knowledge that they would now have scheduled transport service providing tourism and supplies, boosted their hopes, plus people from around the Federation came to help them open up businesses.

With things starting to resemble normalcy on Thulark, they decided to move on to the next planet.

Six days of workouts, sports and sex later, they were nearing the planet Trayak. As they exited FTL, the ship began to shake, alarms were going off and a call to stations was sounded throughout the ship.