“You speak English.”

“Yes, do you?”

Sarcasm is unreassuring generally and from a chrome-masked grim reaper type figure that has woken you from a coma to ask after your health, especially so.

“I do,” I answered drawing myself up on shaking arms. “But I went to school for it.”

He laughed and what looked like very human teeth showed within the silver mouth. “Yes, so did I, friend. So did I.” He had an accent but it was slight. It might have been a touch british or perhaps he was just trying to sound superior. “I have learned much over the years but even more in the last few months. They are missing you, down on earth. They are concerned for your well-being.”

“Me too.”

“Ah, no need for that,” he said lightly but added with unmistakable seriousness, “now.”

I could only manage to ask, “What are you?”

He thought that was quite humorous. “’What?’ and not ’who?’ That is to be expected I suppose. Well sir, Jeffrey ‘Flash’ Gordon, most recently of the University of Florida in Tampa, you may not believe it and I cannot show you my face but I am as human as you. Who knows? Maybe even moreso.”

He drew himself up straight within his shapeless black garment. He seemed to be a slightly built man but it was hard to tell and while he gestured quite a bit he was careful not to show his hands. “But for you my friend, who I am is of vital concern.”

“Okay. You’re in the driver’s seat here. Tell me what you’re going to tell me or do to me what you’re going to do. There isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.”

Finally he seemed to take a little pause. He paced a couple of steps which was about all you could do as we seemed to be in a cell equipped with some medical gear and nothing else. “Good. Very good. You seem to grasp your situation far better than we might have hoped. Believe me when I tell you, Mr Gordon, you have seen what to you is a marvel. You have seen death as none on earth have ever known. And you lived. For that you have my condolences, believe the sincerity of that, please. But that was nothing. Nothing at all. It was, as some seem to be realizing, a demonstration. And you must know just from what you have seen that we can do to you and your whole planet just as we please. At any moment.”

 

We. And by “we” he meant someone above him. This was certainly developing a fully human scent, whatever we were in the middle of. That “we” again. It reminded me that I also was not alone.

 

“Where are the others?” I asked.

 

“They are near. They are through these walls,” he said and swept his hand across the air. “They still sleep. Except for your guards. They have been killed. Anyone aboard your craft bearing a weapon has been killed; destroyed really. Their bodies were recycled many days ago. I hope you can understand we do such a thing only from caution. We have no desire to kill.”

Now it was my turn to laugh though not much. “So why do it then?”

“Because I have no desire to die, friend. No more than do you. And while it is highly unlikely that any of your men could manage to rescue you or sabotage this ship, it is not impossible. Also I had to anticipate that your leaders might have issued orders that you were not to be taken alive.“ He saw something in my face when he said this, probably that I was thinking he might be right. But then another thought….

“So, if I die you die?”

With this he seemed almost upended but he pulled himself together quickly. “It would depend on the circumstances but yes, I have been tasked with bringing you safely here. I have been ordered to have this lovely conversation with you the nature of which has, I apologize caused me to neglect my manners.” With that he took a step back, almost a bow. “I have no true name. You may address me as Praga, an insulting nickname but it is how I am known and how I am spoken of. My title is Chief Surveillance Lord of the Peerage in Righteous Service to Ming; Beloved Teacher, Father and Protector.” With that he flourished and bowed deeply. Well, I sure wanted to crack him in the back of the head as soon as he showed it to me but just as I went to jump up there was a sensation of being under water; under pressure, and it took all my strength to stay on my elbows for a moment before I was crushed down by no visible means.

Praga laughed. “Ah, finally some signs of life!” I wriggled some but it was all I could do and, naturally, he knew it. “A presser field. Again, little more than a child’s trick for us. Think of how you would laugh at the ignorance of the caveman, sir. That is how you appear to us. Yet the man and caveman may yet be brothers. They may find they are brothers or they may  become brothers. We hope that is the path before us. We certainly do.”

Again, the “we” business. But in all that claptrap I had heard one crucial word so I said it. “Ming?”

“Yes, Flash. Ming.”

 

Like the best of conmen, he didn’t demand anything but laid out the terms leaving me to make a decision knowing there was no choice. After the palaver he was pretty agreeable to my request to see the other passengers from the flight. He woke up Dale and Doctor Zarkhov, the flight attendant Judy Mier, the doctor who had been testing my blood, brains and pee, Dr. Janice Lear as well as two plain clothes marshals who were not armed, Terry Lantz and Mike Deering. The pilots and everyone else had been scavenged. There was nothing of them, less than even worms would have left.

Praga left us all in one room, a comfortable and largish room that seemed to be meant for conferences although it was furnished with reclining couches and one large central chair that could have been a throne.

 

Only now did I really make the acquaintance of Dr. Zarkhov and Dale. He was on that flight because he was the foremost authority on resonance in physics and was to address whoever the mucky was who called that stupid meeting where I was to be the show-and-tell. Zarkhov goes nowhere without Dale. The rest were just doing their jobs. Rough on them.

 

So they ask me what in hell is going on. I was a little surprised how easily they all believed it.

 

We are on a spaceship called The Righteous Will of Ming, a warship. This vessel was responsible for the attacks on earth and could easily do many times over what she had done to Tampa but was not inclined to do so for the following reason: The ship and others like her were the product of a planetoid in an eccentric orbit that brought it near to earth every four hundred and eighty-two years and that time was about a year away. No, there were no aliens. Not a one. Anymore. The aliens who had turned this rock into a safari park stocked with exotic critters from earth had taken aboard one bad specimen. This was a steppe princeling who had been taken up along with his army of ten thousand men and five thousand horses to serve as toy soldiers, more or less, but had, through intrigue, mastered their technology, killed all the aliens and become the ruler of this dismal kingdom that he called Mongo.

 

But that’s not quite enough, is it?

 

Ming, now aged some two thousand years, has decided that humanity has made earth worth conquering. The Silent Bombs were a shot across our bow. Ming wanted, like all conquerors do, the conquest without the warfare. Without the bloodshed. And since I had survived the attacks and was so notorious for it he wanted me to be a special ambassador from Mongo to earth. A shill. Yep, here was that sweet sponsorship deal that, yes, every college athlete dreams of.  And me just twenty-one. To think of all the folks who thought I would never amount to anything.

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