Chapter 8: A Fleet in Orbit

"Heh, this robotic head reminds me of that planet of robots the exploration guys found a few years back" Blackie told Sando.

"Ah yes, unknown planet 236. It's too bad we've only had a chances to send probes instead of exploration teams" Sando replied. "Have you found out anything about this creature yet?"

Blackie tapped the back part of the alien head. "Only that this thing was a cyborg. It seems to have an organic brain fused into part of it."

"You might as well put it down for a while. We need to get the cryo experiments back on track" Sando advised.

"Sure thing Sando" said Blackie as he put the head down.

"Oh, yesterday I had some of the technicians put together a few full sized cryo chambers. Twelve all together, I might even has some volunteers . . ." Blackie was cut off by Sando.

"Before I can allow you to do that I have to see your notes, and those of your team. It seems a bit too early to allow volunteers to be frozen if we don't' even know how to revive them" Sando warned.

"Well I'm sure that . . ." Blackie was cut off again.

"I'm sure you are, but every scientist on this project needs to be sure what you are doing is safe. You're not the only one on the team" Sando told him.

"Well, the rest of the scientists don't consider me as part of the team" Blackie complained.

"The rest of the team can be idiots. Just play by our rules and they will eventually except you, much as I have" Sando said.

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At the Landing strip, Formate has been working all night cleaning up the carnage left by the alien menace. Disappointed by not being able to find the alien's head, and now with news about a possible invasion fleet from the same kind of aliens, Formate grows angry.

"I want us cleared out of here in 10 minutes then we're headed for the base" Formate shouted.

His troops finished packing and headed for the undisclosed location of their military base. It was undisclosed not because the governments on Minchiva didn't want Minchivans to see what they were doing. The base was undisclosed so that Minchivans wouldn't be able to tell possible alien threats the location of the base for the safety of the planet.

At the secret Base

"We need to break out the big guns. If the all the aliens were are as powerful as that other alien was, we can only imagine the power of their ships" Formate stressed.

"What's the ETA?" a soldier asked.

"We're still awaiting an official ETA, but off hand we've got two weeks" Formate said in a toned down voice.

"If it took a team of 20 soldiers and one scientist to take down one of those creatures, what makes you think we can take out a whole fleet?" another soldier asked.

"We've got weapons far more powerful than anything we used that night. We expected the threat to be a lot less so we sent in minimum force. We just need to mass-produce as many of the class 12 weapons and ships as we can in the next five days" Formate informed them. "Against my better judgement, we'll have to put out a planetary alert once production begins in less than an hour."

"We'll never get them all up in time. There is no possible way we could complete the weapons unless we had existing weapons powerful enough to hold off a few thousand ships" a soldier protested.

"We might have the means. A few decades ago we had a threat similar to the one we have now as I'm sure you all know. What you didn't know is that a few ships were built that could hold entire military fleets, but were deactivated and buried. The powers of the ships were too great, and one of them was turned against us. We were able to take it down without having to inform anyone on Minchiva about them. The power was too great for anyone to posses, and we vowed never to use them again." Formate told his army.

"How many are left and can we use these ships to help evacuate civilians?" a soldier asked.

"Well, there are only 10 left. It will be necessary to fill all ships with civilians. If we reactivate all of them, and all available spacecraft, we should have barely enough to evacuate 75% of Minchiva. That is only if we need to evacuate" Formate told them.