Collateral Damage by Nic Steven

APRIL STORYTIME BLOG HOP

Collateral Damage by Nic Steven

Dijark the terminator activated his search screens. He would be the one to activate the solution to our problem. I was just the ship’s captain, the transport driver if you like. The preparatory work had been going on for a few years. The seed agents had infiltrated the stationery supply houses and marked one card in each pack of index cards with a very particular pattern of tear.

The invasion fleet would not be ready for a couple of centuries. In that time, the earthlings would have time to prepare defences, if they ever realised the threat. Fortunately, there was only one community of humans that was coming even close to suspecting.

The astronomers in their observatories were blissfully ignorant. The cloaking devices on this ship and those of the seed agents had kept our small force well hidden. It would do the same for the invasion fleet when it finally arrived. The earthlings had managed to discover habitable planets, including some of our home worlds but as yet they had not managed to identify us as an intelligent species.

The earth based theoreticians were equally ignorant, with their Fermi paradox and other reasons why we could not exist. And as for their military… Even the ones who admitted the possibility of a space war had convinced themselves with admittedly quite sound logic that a successful invasion from space could not happen. They would discover how wrong their logic was in a couple of hundred years.

Their religions for the most part believed that humanity was the peak of creation and if there were other peoples, then their god would save them.

Lovely complacent planet, ripe for the picking, believing their biggest threat was from themselves, global war or global warming.

There was however, one group of people who were coming close to the truth. The science fiction writers. We didn’t want to destroy all the people of the planet, we wanted slaves and possibly a food supply after all.

Fortunately, our spies had come up with a discovery. Many science fiction writers used index cards as a part of their revision or planning processes. By now our carefully marked cars will have reached enough of them to strike. Our smart bombs would shortly eliminate them. We wouldn’t get all of them this way, but it would help.

Of course, other people used index cards: non science fiction writers, artist, administrators, for instance. That was unfortunate. They would just be collateral damage.

Other Blog hops

1. Trail Of Carnage by Jemma Weir
2. A Phoenix In Hell by Sabrina Rosen
3. Friends Of The Deep by G. Craddock
4. http://nic-steven.com/2020/04/29/collateral-damage-by-nic-steven/Collateral Damage by Nic Steven
5. A Ghost’s Life by Barbara Lund
6. A Startling Revelation by Bill Bush
7. A Hiding Place by Gina Fabio
8. A Family Reunion by Katharina Gerlach
9. Better Off Alone by V. S. Stark
10. A Day In The Life by James Husum
11. Nothing To Show by Elizabeth McCleary
12. Super Grammy (Radioactive Breakfast Cereal) by Vanessa Wells
13. Bone Killer by Juneta Key
14. One More Time by Karen Lynn