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    Genetic Cleansing
    Genetic Cleansing
    Genetic Cleansing
    Ebook95 pages1 hour

    Genetic Cleansing

    By John Pearce

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    About this ebook

    Evolution had been paralleled on other planets; most humans would not accept this. Politics nurtured this ignorance which meant that many crimes were allowed to go unpunished. Denial of the existence of these other peoples was not only dangerous for all species, but held back the whole Galaxy. Human complacency was born of their reliance on technology which they assumed put them at the pinnacle of evolution!
    Humanity hadn't changed, now it had the means as well as the motivation to exploit whole planets by purloining these other worlds. Ambition simmered at all levels to retain the resources of these luxuriant prizes and the enslaved who inhabited them.
    The battles moved from space and into the genes and jungles of the Galaxy. Scientists were being drawn into these battles which were always political, but sometimes bloody. In which direction was the arms race heading? Was epigenetics being twisted by politicians into the ultimate weapon of domination?
    Of the fourteen Federation planets, some had fractious alien species lurking in their jungles; just what would the military do to keep the peace? Eventually, someone got creative, which was one of evolution's most ambitious mutations: only a few heroes needed to be recruited, with genes that could dodge epigenetic programming, as well as lasers.
    Would evolution's multiple species win through, or was the dream of making peace with aliens, a dream too far?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Pearce
    Release dateMay 14, 2013
    ISBN9781301224494
    Genetic Cleansing

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      Book preview

      Genetic Cleansing - John Pearce

      GENETIC CLEANSING, JOHN PEARCE

      COPYRIGHT © JOHN PEARCE 2013

      SMASHWORDS EDITION

      CONTENTS:

      THE SPIRIT OF ORION

      ALIEN RESOURCES

      FULLY SCANNED

      A GIFT FROM THE SENATOR

      ENQUIRING MIND

      THE STUFF OF LIFE

      GENETIC EXPRESSION

      CONVERGENCE

      WALK AND TALK IN THE SUN

      AN ARROW SHAFT OF LIGHT

      A VIEW FROM A HILL

      THE HOUR OF THE WARRIOR

      JUNGLE RETREAT

      A FOREST OF SPEARS

      THE END OF THE BEGINNING

      THE SPIRIT OF ORION

      The small eight man craft that was a Federation patrol ship, dropped its speed to sub-light. The bright streaks soon shortening to become a myriad of tranquil stars.

      ‘Let’s see if we can pick up anything on the holoscreen,’ The Captain advised.

      ‘Should show up at this speed…it’s radio sure enough,’ The Comms Officer added.

      ‘But there’s nothing solid out there,’ a melee of six troopers observed. All eight of them stared hard at this nothing.

      One by one the young faces lit up, then spoke together. ‘A ghost ship!’

      The Captain grinned. ‘That’s the first time I’ve met one out here, or should I say not met one.’

      ‘The RF transcriber says it was just over two hundred light years away when it sent its message…at the speed of light that means just over two hundred years ago!’ continued the Comms Officer. ‘At that speed it would take twenty five thousand years to get to Earth.’

      ‘So, why bother?’ asked a trooper.

      ‘Quantum problems, who knows!’

      ‘It worked, we got the message, just a little late that’s all,’ added another trooper.

      ‘So, we have a séance on our hands.’ The Captain’s words seemed to switch the mood from light to heavy, now they were forced into reverence, ready to receive a message from this radio spirit of a long lost spaceship.

      The Comms Officer took the role of medium. ‘Looks messy, there’s mention of DNA, plenty of As, Cs, Gs and Ts, that much I do know. Then it seems to have got garbled, it mentions RNA, As, Cs, Gs, Us and Is; I’ve no idea what that’s about!

      ‘We’d better quantum an encrypted copy back to base, just in case anybody’s interested!’ The Captain concluded.

      ‘It’s been confirmed Admiral, take a look at this.’

      The Admiral screened the file the Commander had just slid at him across his large boardroom table. ‘So the rumours, ghostly and otherwise, were correct. Has Hernandez seen this?’

      ‘He has, I’ve taken the liberty of calling the Professor in, this’ll give him something to enthuse about.’

      ‘These people would rattle humanity down to their DNA. The time has come Commander, we need to put together a team that should succeed based on their genes, and that would succeed based on their deeds.’

      ‘Are we to scour the DNA Database for such a team?’

      ‘That’s the starting point, we’ll get the Professor to do it; I’ve got something else he can do at the same time.’

      By the twenty fifth century, the space fields and light speed barriers had been broken, allowing escape from an overpopulated planet to find promising new worlds. Technology had isolated travelling spaceships and quantum links from the effects of their space-time environment, hence space drag and time distortion had been eliminated. Galactic travellers could not only get somewhere but would have contemporaries to come home to. There was the much publicized scandal, scientific not familial, of the space researcher who got his sums wrong: After returning from a space flight he found that the woman at home was not his visiting mother-in-law but his wife. Earlier research was transferred from space-time warping to space field mechanics, warp factors and hyperspace were the preferred mode of travel for science fiction writers only. This meant the multitudes were free to shake off the chains of their home planet and find fourteen others to their liking.

      Outer space was not the only direction humans went in; inner space was now able to yield its molecular treasures in the form of find and fix scanning, benefiting medical as well as physical science. Gene expression allowed the transparency that suggested to humans their past, present and future, suggested to and not dictated to because of the mellowing affects that choice had on their behaviour. As of now, there had been no intelligent extraterrestrial life recognized; there had been a few humanoids scanned and dismissed as near misses. Not everybody was disappointed by this.

      ALIEN RESOURCES

      ‘What are the smugglers up to now?’ asked the big swarthy man of his Lieutenant, both sweating into their grey guard’s uniforms. They lounged on a covered balcony, overlooking a shaded clearing that was deep in the equatorial jungle.

      ‘Maybe going it alone, or worse!’

      ‘What could be worse?’

      ‘The Military could have got them, there goes our sideline.’

      ‘Thank the gods our deal is with the Cyanese Government, or else our platinum would be floating around in space somewhere!’ The Chief of the guards thought awhile. ‘Perhaps we’re not being ambitious enough!’

      The hard looking wiry man replied, ‘We’re soldiers of fortune, usually somebody else’s.’

      The Chief cursed out his next words, ‘All we’ve done for weeks is round up native Cyanese to be used as lab rats; I say we find out more about what they’re researching. Epigenetics may be the science that turns uranium into platinum.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Metaphorically speaking of course.’

      ‘Who says so?’

      ‘Every visitor we’ve checked has been from the government. They wouldn’t work up a sweat in the jungle unless there was money in it, and of course votes.’ The Chief calculated further. ‘Maybe we could replace lost earnings from another source, like those inquisitive natives that keep straying into our back yard?’

      ‘Natives? What could they do with a state of the art lab.’

      ‘Those natives had clothes on, and spoke our language better than we do!’

      Even the more cautious Lieutenant started to look interested. ‘We win or we don’t lose, that’s a better deal than we’ve got now, we’ve lost or we’ve lost. How would you work it?’

      ‘Our scientists could be encouraged, a nice bonus for extra-curricular activities…some would say bribed. There’s a hell of a lot of gear in that lab, there must be a market for such a setup!’

      ‘How do we get all this past the Government?’

      ‘The scientists continue with their Government work as well as freelance, for them they’ll be well paid and they may even be appreciated. They’ll hardly be doing anything wrong anyway, just borrowing the lab!’

      The wiry man narrowed his eyes. ‘What if the scientists are asked to do something particularly gruesome, epigenetics can be nasty!’

      ‘That’s up

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