Chapter No.34. Disgusting

We achieved orbit around an Earth-like moon orbiting a gas giant in the habitable zone of a K-class star. The moon orbited out of the plane of the ecliptic, which was an indication that it was captured early in this system's formation.

"This moon is definitely habitable," Sharon said. "It must have a pretty good magnetic field in order to resist the gas giant's hissy fits."

"I think this might have been the alien's home world," Janet said. "I see several large city complexes on the main continent."

"Any activity?"

"That's the interesting point. There seems to be none."

"I don't understand this. Why are humans on the planet we just visited if this is the alien home planet?"

"Guys! The saucer is on the ground," Sharon said, pointing at the image of the surface on the main screen.

"That's the saucer we saw in orbit around the planet. Obviously, it decided to return home."

"I'm not detecting any infrared signals in the saucer," Sharon said. "It's inactive."

"What are we going to do?" Natale asked.

"We'll have to go down there and see what's going on, but we're going armed just in case."

I didn't elaborate on what the case would be.

We boarded the shuttle and flew down to the moon's surface. We were astonished by the beauty of the moon framed by a Saturn-like gas giant. It would be considered a spectacular sightseer location.

I sat the shuttle down in an open area near one of the large cities, the one where the saucer was located near. The weather on the moon was almost ideal. It had the proper oxygen concentration and was near one atmosphere pressure. Much of the vegetation appeared to be similar to what used to be on Earth.

As we walked toward the city, we were met by a young human male dressed in conventional Earth-like clothing.

"Hi!" He said, raising his right hand, palm out. "I assume you came here to find humans."

"We are what's left of three badly planned missions to Proxima-b. We managed to return to Earth and spent some time trying to reverse climate change. When we discovered that aliens came to Earth to abduct humans, we decided to determine if any of them had survived."

"I'm Jerry. Sadly, not many of us did. Fortunately, the aliens died off, leaving us to survive on our own."

"We reasoned that the aliens abducted humans as food," I said. "We assume that they were responsible for completely depleting the human population of Earth."

"If by that you mean nearly nine billion humans, that's not the case. We estimate that they brought only around a billion or so here."

I exchanged glances with the women before turning back. "What did they do with the humans they brought from Earth."

He gestured. "Come and I'll show you."

We followed him into the city complex of high-rise buildings made from some material that was not recognizable. It looked like metal, but I don't think it was. We arrived at a rather large factory-building and entered it.

Jerry gestured to the obvious industrial equipment as far as the eye could see. "Imagine these compartments containing human carcasses being butchered."

I swallowed hard. The women frowned.

"They kept the children as slaves, but the adults were separated as to gender and ordered to strip before entering disinfecting showers. When they stepped through entrances to the meat processing plants, a heavy weight swung down and hit them in the back of the head, and mechanical hooks caught them by the feet and swung them up like sides of beef. Workers slit their throats to bleed them out before starting the butchering process, which was very exact with no part of the carcass being wasted."

"That's disgusting."

"Amen to that," he said.

"It sounds a lot like the Holocaust of World War II," I reacted.

"Except for the fact that that abomination wasn't done for food," Janet said.

I nodded.

"Why did they resort to eating an alien intelligent species?" I asked Jerry.

"Actually, they abhorred the idea but became panicked when they fell ill to a wasting disease. This moon doesn't have much in the way of meaty food and they were used to eating plant-based food. Ironically, eating human meat exacerbated their condition, causing them to become extinct."

"Why are there humans on the other planet?"

"The aliens finally assumed that eating humans made their condition worse and decided to feed them to the animals on that planet."

"The animals they call grumps?"

He smiled. "Yes. I went there to try and talk the survivors into coming back here, but they refused. I guess they've gotten used to living there, or they thought I was tricking them."

"I assume that the alien craft you used travels in hyperspace," I said.

"Is that what they call it?"

"Yes. We didn't understand how it works until we were hundreds of millions of light years away from Earth. Unfortunately, it has some serious consequences."

"Yes, we realize that," he said. "Obviously, we don't age and can't reproduce."

I looked around. "This moon seems ideal for humans. It's too bad that they can't get
here without going through hyperspace."

"Yes, that would have been a perfect solution."

"Well, thanks for showing us what happened. We're going to return to Earth now. We still need to find out what happened to the majority of humans on Earth."

"Good luck and safe voyage," he said.

By that time several other human survivors gathered to gawk at us. Some of them were children, but if aging had stopped while they were transported through hyperspace, they were actually chronologically old children, which was another serious flaw with using hyperspace.

We walked back to our shuttle and went back up to our ship. When we got back to the crew deck, we gathered with the others at the command station.

"Now we know what happened to the humans they abducted," Natale said.

"Yes, but there's a major problem with this," I retorted. "It doesn't explain what happened to the majority of Earth's population."

"Maybe they died from the effects of climate change," Sharon said.

"Some of them probably did, but not all nine billion. We discovered that the climate change was not bad enough to wipe out Earth's population. I think there is something Adal is not telling us."

"We might not be able to question her if we go back to Earth," Janet said. "Earth will be at least fifty years into the future when we get there."

"I hope we can find someone who will allow us to search through their historical records. There has to be a clue as to what happened to the human population."

We returned to the shuttle and flew back up to the ship. The next step was to plot a course through hyperspace to Earth.

Janet worked out the burn duration and course correction and we strapped into the G-chairs. After the completion of the burn we faced a six-day trip through hyperspace. What we found after exiting it surprised us.