First Contact Read online

  Brawl of the Worlds

  First Contact

  Frank Tayell

  Reading Order & Copyright

  We want more than just a civilisation with democratic characteristics.

  Brawl of the Worlds: First Contact

  Published by Frank Tayell

  Copyright 2022

  All rights reserved

  All people, places, and events are entirely real, though some names have been changed to protect those currently living in hiding. This book was written on location, and I would like to express my deep thanks to Abi tol Demener tol Abchek for hosting me during a delightful stay on Towan III.

  Science Fiction

  Brawl of the Worlds: First Contact

  Work. Rest. Repeat.

  Strike a Match - A Post-Apocalyptic Detective Series

  1. Serious Crimes

  2. Counterfeit Conspiracy

  3. Endangered Nation

  4. Over By Christmas

  5: Thin Ice

  Surviving The Evacuation / Here We Stand / Life Goes On

  Book 1: London

  Book 2: Wasteland

  Zombies vs the Living Dead

  Book 3: Family

  Book 4: Unsafe Haven

  Book 5: Reunion

  Book 6: Harvest

  Book 7: Home

  Here We Stand 1: Infected

  Here We Stand 2: Divided

  Book 8: Anglesey

  Book 9: Ireland

  Book 10: The Last Candidate

  Book 11: Search and Rescue

  Book 12: Britain’s End

  Book 13: Future’s Beginning

  Book 14: Mort Vivant

  Book 15: Where There’s Hope

  Book 16: Unwanted Visitors, Unwelcome Guests

  Life Goes On 1: Outback Outbreak

  Life Goes On 2: No More News

  Life Goes On 3: While the Lights Are On

  Life Goes On 4: If Not Us

  Life Goes On 5: No Turning Back

  Book 17: There We Stood

  Book 18: Rebuilt in a Day

  Book 19: Welcome to the End of the Earth

  To join the mailing list, and be among the first to know about new titles, click here:

  http://eepurl.com/brl1A1

  For more information, visit:

  http://www.FrankTayell.com

  http://www.facebook.com/FrankTayell

  http://twitter.com/FrankTayell

  Table of Contents

  1888

  Prologue - First Contact

  2022

  Part 1 - A Minor Alien Incursion

  Chapter 1 - Lessons From Camping

  Chapter 2 - Harold’s First Contact

  Chapter 3 - The Sooval and the Library of Alexandria

  Chapter 4 - Flying Saucers, Crop Circles, and Area 51

  Chapter 5 - The Very Hungry Bookworm

  Chapter 6 - The Man in Black

  Chapter 7 - Jail Break

  2020

  Part 2 - Lockdown Life in an Alien Embassy

  Chapter 8 - The Battle for a Battle-Station

  Chapter 9 - Alien or Not, Lockdown’s the Same

  Chapter 10 - The Last and Holy Granddad

  Chapter 11 - The Bitter Reality of Only Being Human

  Chapter 12 - Blue Cheese, White Bone

  Chapter 13 - A Jab in the Dark

  Chapter 14 - The Pilgrim’s Progress

  Chapter 15 - How to Permanently Increase the Value of a Sculpture

  2022

  Part 3 - We Come In Peace

  Chapter 16 - The Great Prophet

  Chapter 17 - Big Fish, Small Lake

  Chapter 18 - Feel What You See, Hear What You Taste

  Chapter 19 - The Teacher’s Dilemma

  Chapter 20 - We Come in Thirst

  Chapter 21 - Meeting the Parents

  Chapter 22 - Breaking Bread (Part Two)

  1888

  Part 4 - The Consequences of First Contact

  Chapter 23 - The Greyer Angels of Our Nature

  Chapter 24 - Breaking Bread (Part One)

  Chapter 25 - Timeless Space

  Chapter 26 - All the Time in All the Worlds

  Chapter 27 - The Sandpit

  Chapter 28 - A Gentleman Joins the Quest

  Chapter 29 - Bringing an Elephant Gun to a Knife Fight

  Chapter 30 - Where No Man Has Gone Before

  Chapter 31 - The Prophecy

  Chapter 32 - The Last Prophet’s First Pilgrimage

  Chapter 33 - For the Lost Tribe, I Speak

  2022

  Part 5 - The First Invasion

  Chapter 34 - The Ever-Watching Red Eye

  Chapter 35 - Earth Force One

  Chapter 36 - Sitting on the Dock of a Bay

  Chapter 37 - We Mean You Some Harm

  Chapter 38 - A Conspiracy of Five

  Chapter 39 - Never Underestimate a Bookseller

  Chapter 40 - The Importance of Car Insurance

  Chapter 41 - Humanity’s First Stand

  Chapter 42 - The Answer to the Question of the Library of Alexandria

  Epilogue - The First Book of a New Era

  Synopsis

  For the alien towani, Earth is a holy site where their Last Prophecy will be fulfilled. They will do anything to protect the planet. Protecting humanity is an optional extra.

  In 1888, fleeing starvation in Ireland, Sean found work as a guide to the Whitechapel slums for the publisher of grisly penny dreadfuls. Not even the most lurid of those tales was as outlandish as his encounter with visitors from another world. When they take him back to their homeworld, first contact with a human will change their society forever.

  By 2020, there is a permanent, but secret, non-terrestrial presence on Earth. Negotiating our planet’s membership in the alien federation, and concealing its existence, is the responsibility of the UN. When the pandemic begins, Earth enters lockdown, and our solar system is quarantined.

  While technically not a prisoner, Serene is no more able to leave the tunnels below the alien embassy in Germany than any of her human cousins locked down above ground. Keeping busy with janitorial work, one day blurs into the next until she stumbles onto evidence of an alien smuggling ring. What begins as a hunt for a thief transporting sacred Earth artefacts off-world leads to a two-thousand-year-old mystery that threatens to bring war to the entire galaxy.

  By the summer of 2022, Harold Goodwin needs a holiday. As camping is all his bookseller’s salary can afford, he opts for a ramble through the countryside that inspired the novels he so loves. Whether by chance or prophecy, a poor choice of campsite thrusts him into the middle of an alien plot to make Earth the next proxy-battleground in a century-old war.

  Brawl of the Worlds is a light-hearted tale of intergalactic war and planet-shaping prophecies. As booksellers rise, and empires fall, the hidden history of the galaxy will be revealed. Based on real events.

  Prologue - First Contact

  20th November 1888

  On the outskirts of the Irish port of Queenstown, three plump blackbirds trilled a melodic warning as Sean approached the recently filled grave. Otherwise, the cemetery was deserted; even the ghosts had gone into hiding during the previous night’s storms. That tempest, which had nearly sunk the steamer on which he’d sailed from Portsmouth, had subsided into a late autumnal drizzle with just a promise of a chill winter soon to come. Sean didn’t mind the rain, the cold, or the ghosts, because he was home.

  When he’d left Ireland five years ago, aged fifteen, he’d never imagined he’d see the town again. So much had changed. So much hadn’t. The cathedral still wasn’t finished, though work had begun in 1868, the year he’d been born. Old Mr Donovan, and his equally ancient dogs, still stood watch over a scrawny herd in the field opposi
te. Sean’s ancestors had tilled that land in the long-ago years when the town was a village called Ballyvoloon and no one had heard of the Great Famine. Back then it had merely been a sleepy fishing harbour on an island at the entrance to Cork Harbour. Now it was a bustling port in its own right, jostling with steamships hastily provisioning for an onward journey to America or England. Those steamships had been a growing nuisance before he’d left, disrupting the fishing from which his parents had made their living. Now that they’d moved into their new and final home, living was no longer their concern.

  Sean took off his hat. It was a new hat, a new overcoat, new boots, and a new suit. They would have cost more than his family could have earned in a generation, but the funeral suit had been tailored for his employer, and hastily altered to fit his six-foot frame.

  “I did it, Mam,” he said, speaking to the recently filled grave. “It took me a few years, and maybe I’m not fully where I want to be, but I am on my way to making something of myself. Hello, Liam,” he said, turning to an older, neighbouring grave. “I’m sorry about how we parted. I don’t blame you for me having to leave. Some leaving so others can live is the way of the world, and you had a daughter to think of.” He turned back to the wooden cross. “Da, it’s a fair cruel world, and no better than you imagined, but I’ve seen some of it, and I’m about to see more. You couldn’t hope for more, and I expected much less.”

  He turned to the even older graves. Some belonged to siblings who’d died before he properly knew them. Others belonged to his ancestors. There were far too many of the former and not nearly enough of the latter. To avoid premature occupancy, too many of his ancient kin had fled their homeland, just like he had done. Unlike him, they had never returned.

  On the train to Portsmouth, and the ship to Ireland, he’d had plenty of time to rehearse what to say. Now he was here, surrounded by so much familiarity, and the ultimate finality, the words froze on his lips. Instead, as his mother had always done when she prayed, he looked up at the sky. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Sean? That’s never you!” a voice called out. Not just any voice, but an angelic call that belonged to the first woman to both steal his heart and give it back.

  “Maeve?” he said as he turned around. She’d waved him goodbye when he’d left five years ago, only a week after her first daughter was born, and nine months after she’d married Liam. Her voice hadn’t changed, but her face had, and was now aged by motherhood and widowing, yet her smile was still bright enough to illuminate the universe.

  “It is you!” Maeve said. “Would you look at yourself, dressed like a duke, no less.”

  “An earl,” Sean said. “The suit was made for my new employer to wear to his own father’s funeral. He gave it to me to wear for Mam and Da’s, but the ship was delayed in Portsmouth. We got in last night.”

  “It was a grand funeral,” Maeve said. “Your da would have approved. Your mam wouldn’t, but she was never one for a fuss. How are you here, though, and dressed so fancy? Your last letter said you’d been promoted to night-watchman at a tannery.”

  “A year ago, a week after I took the night job, there was a hue and cry by the vats of liquid gold. There’s no actual gold in them.” he added.

  “Aye, I know how a tannery works, and what London’s streets are truly paved with,” she said.

  “A gang of roughs was trying to drown a toff,” Sean said. “I stopped them and got rewarded with a job as a guide and bodyguard.”

  “Why didn’t you write to say?”

  “Because of who the toff is,” Sean said. “Everyone calls him Sir John, but he’s also the 8th Earl of Lenham.”

  “Cromwell’s Hammer? Get away,” Maeve said.

  “He’s a distant descendent,” Sean said.

  “Not so distant if he carries the title,” she said. “Didn’t your uncles, Luke and Mark, and my uncle Darragh sail to Gettysburg aboard one of his ships? You know what your nan said, first they took our land, and then they charged us to leave it.”

  “That was his grandfather. He’s dead. So is his father. The new earl is only my age. He’s a good sort, for an English aristo. He gave me the suit, and arranged the train and ship to bring me here for the burial.”

  “Perhaps he’s not so bad,” Maeve said. “Though you were right not to tell your da. The news would have put him in the grave even sooner. But why does an earl need a bodyguard?”

  “His money still comes from shipping, but he’s expanding into publishing. Back when we met, he’d just started a string of penny dreadfuls and was hunting for stories at a time, and in a place, a man like him had no business being. I started off as his guide to that bit of the world, but I’m branching out. I even wrote a story of my own.” Sean took a folded magazine from an inside pocket. On the cover was a line drawing of the sadistic butcher currently terrorising Whitechapel, though this particular sketch had been stylised into a clawed and fanged ghoul.

  “You wrote a story about Jack the Ripper?” Maeve asked.

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “The newspapers didn’t stop coming after you left,” she said. “Why did you write about him? Surely the world needs fewer stories of living monsters, not more.”

  “My story isn’t about him,” Sean said. “Do you remember the tale of Patrick O’Rourke, and how a bottle too many left him dead to the world, and so he ended up dead for good, buried by mistake in the foundations of the cathedral?”

  “I remember Father John clipping the ear of anyone who even whispered that story,” she said. “You didn’t write it down?”

  “And published it,” Sean said, opening the magazine to a well-thumbed page. “But we changed the setting to the Houses of Parliament.”

  “And to think you had a poet stuck inside you all this time,” she said, scanning the page. She handed the magazine back. “Your story’s getting rained on and so are we. Are you staying long enough for a cup of tea?”

  “Long enough for that,” he said, slipping the magazine back into his pocket. “I’ve to catch a ship to New York in two days.”

  “You’re fleeing London? Did you catch some trouble?”

  “Only the kind I was hunting. Penny dreadfuls only sell for a penny, and those don’t add up fast enough for Sir John. He’s invented a new type of book. Guinea glories, he calls them. They’re books of photographs of famous cities. He’s done London and Paris. After he gave a set to Queen Victoria, everyone in London wanted a copy. We’re off to take pictures of New York, and then we’re on to Washington to present a set to the president.”

  “You’re to meet the president of America?” she asked, shocked to near immobility.

  “No,” Sean said. “I’m only to hand a copy to the British ambassador to give to the president.”

  “Only, he says!” Maeve exclaimed. “You’re to meet with an ambassador in Washington! You really have done well, Sean.” She slipped her arm into his. “Let’s get back inside.”

  “And how are you? How are the girls? How’s young Liam?”

  “Young,” she said. “But well.”

  “I got Da’s letter, about selling the boat,” Sean said. “That only arrived with your letter saying he and Mam were dead.”

  “Your father couldn’t work the ropes anymore,” she said. “With Liam gone, it was better to sell it than to spend the profits on wages for a crew.”

  “I remember that boat. The sale can’t have brought in much,” Sean said. “I’m doing well, though not so well as to buy a boat. But I’ve a set of rooms in Sir John’s house, and there’s more space than I need. He’s looking for new staff.”

  “Did you come back here to save me?” she asked. “You always were my knight in fish-scale armour. But while your earl might want a new bottle-washer, he won’t want my brood clattering about beneath his stairs. Do you remember Peter O’Keefe?”

  “Big hands and big feet and he knew how to use them,” Sean said, wincing at the memory. “Didn’t he go for a soldier?”

 
“In France, and he lasted a week before he lost two fingers to an exploding musket. He found work in a hotel in the very south, right on the Mediterranean. He says, on a clear day, he could see Egypt, which I don’t believe, but he learned to make pastries and cakes, and better than his teacher. Liam stayed in touch all these years, and he persuaded Peter to come back to Ireland to cook his cakes, if we could buy him a bakery. That’s why we sold the boat.”

  “To buy a bakery?” Sean asked.

  “To buy Tam O’Connell’s old stables which we turned into a bakery.”

  “Has life here changed so much people now eat cake for breakfast?”

  “The cruise ship passengers do,” Maeve said. “Liam had been building towards this for years. We’re getting more ships each month, and more promised each year. Most of our catch was going straight to the ships, and bringing in far more than if we took them to Cork, but it was never going to be enough to buy a new boat. Your mam made the final decision. She said our families had survived by changing with the winds, so we’d best change before the winds shifted again.”

  “The letters must have been lost,” Sean said. “You’re actually making money selling cakes, then?”

  “We are. Every ship wants Peter’s fancies. He calls himself Pierre and speaks only in French when dealing with the English captains, and we’ve earned more in a month than we did in our best year from fishing. Now, tell me, have you ever heard of an éclair?”

  Sean’s father had often said that, once learned, sailing couldn’t be forgotten. As Sean piloted the skiff south, he proved his father wrong. He’d hired the small boat from Finn Higgins, whose gnarled hands prevented him from fishing any deeper than the bay. Sean had paid too much to borrow the boat, and probably more than it would cost to buy, but Finn needed his money. Maeve didn’t.