Now, OBF1, were once more facing Sataal and a small group of his men. Not one for small talk, which suited Tremaine, Sataal stated, “The Trimadians are openly fighting the Locum and are losing. The Locum will simply wipe them out in a matter of weeks if this destruction continues.”
“Well, it can’t be all that bad,” Tremaine understated. “They are as bad as one another.” He scratched his skull. “By the way, how do you know all this?”
“We have managed to get spies aboard several Trimadian warships. Some are amongst the Trimadians’ high ranking elite, who can send transmissions via a secure frequency to this very spot, where I can keep an eye on the situation as it happens.”
“Why not sit back and watch them all get their asses kicked!” exclaimed Tremaine.
“But you can’t just replace one enemy with another that could be ten times worse. We have to control the Locum before they kill all organic life and take over our technology. It is only a matter of time before Graffa is in their path,” Sataal shot back.
“He has a point,” Mason agreed.
The Trimadians and the Locum were indeed old enemies, and since the inception of the BSP on Earth, Divisions and the OBF project were now part of the equation. Alliances had to be formed to stop any enemy gaining power and momentum.
The conversation went flat from that point. They knew Sataal was a reliable source of information, and he had kept them up to date on all occasions in the past. He felt he owed them that.
Ironically, when the Earth humans had visited his planet for the first time, there was distrust and a battle almost broke out.
In fact, as soon as OBF1 set foot on Ahmadeus, they had landed smack in the middle of a skirmish between a group of Cantal rebels and Trimadians attacking from the sky.
They had sent a probe through but the video image sent back looked as if it had got stuck against a rock. So when the order was given for them to go through the BSP, they got the shock of their lives when they found they had landed abruptly in the middle of a fierce battle. The first meeting of the two races took a little over twenty-five minutes. A real rude awakening, as Tremaine had succinctly stated.
They had discovered Sataal, badly wounded, with his men under heavy attack. When OBF1 tried to communicate that their appearance and intentions were neutral and friendly, they almost got blown up by the Cantals. But with the quick thinking of Tremaine, barking the order to surrender they were taken prisoner by the Cantals, who thought they were Trimadian spies.
With this sudden distraction, the Trimadians, who had all their forces deployed in the skies at that time, saw and took advantage by almost blowing the team and Cantals to smithereens by shattering the ground with the most tornado–like bombing Tremaine and Mason had ever witnessed. Both parties found themselves thrust together in a circumstantial common bond just to survive the fury of the attack. Through all the obscene noise and destruction and with the group of Cantals wiped out, the OBF1 team grabbed a wounded Sataal and hid in bushes.
As this was their first visit to an alien world, the visit was a short one. They had just less than three minutes to wait until the time was right for their homebase to open the door, before the enemy stopped them. Luckily, Earth was on time. Tremaine signaled an emergency code to let them through the BSP, foregoing the necessary security scans–which ultimately saved Sataal’s life.
Sataal had gone on to a full recovery and a lengthy, but relatively friendly interrogation from the OBF leaders and Divisions’ overseer.
Pete Reynolds had studied the records himself and stealthily copied a portion of the interrogation on his personal computer diary. He was intrigued with Sataal’s recollection of his first meeting with the Earth humans:
“We were patrolling the area and had come across the probe, which was not there fifteen minutes earlier, when our last patrol had gone through. We were actually studying the probe itself when an armada of Trimadians attacked us from above. While trying to escape, the Door of Endless Light activated. The appearance of creatures that looked like us coming through the doorway was incredible. Our curiosity was replaced by suspicion as we thought the humans were Trimadian spies, accentuated by the sudden presence of the enemy attack.
“It had been thousands of years since humans or Graffites as we call them, appeared through the sacred doorway. The Cantals were a free race; the usage of the Door of Endless Light in our culture was only for exploration and discovery. We were a simple peaceful species. The Trimadians claimed though, that the doorway was their creation and any other race was forbidden to use it. The Trimadians confiscated the Door’s navigational crystals, including the sunlight–generator crystal used for opening the door, to keep the Cantals from escaping. No one knows for certain who, when, or what race had created it. However, throughout the centuries and under the Trimadians’ rule, every generation of the Cantals were brainwashed into believing the Trimadians were the creators of all.”