Don't Mess With Earth by Cliff Ball Read Free Book Online

then warned
others. The team made their way to the dungeon, where the stench
was overwhelming, and there were groans of pain and agony coming
from everywhere. The guard on duty was killed before he knew what
was happening, and the Terrans began to search for where Galileo
was chained. The team found Galileo ten minutes later, he was a
bruised, bloody mess, and when the scientist saw the covert team,
his mood brightened considerably. They released Galileo from his
shackles and hustled him out of the building, while the men who
were part of the demolitions team, placed explosive charges all
over the building.
    Once they were all a safe distance from the
building, one of them pushed a button on a control to set off all
the charges. The resulting explosion and its fireball shook the
ground, lit up the night sky, and could be seen for miles. Everyone
who was asleep was now outside, trying to put out the resulting
fires with buckets of water, while trying to avoid the intense heat
coming from the fires. The covert team and Galileo watched as the
compound and the neighborhood near the compound catch fire and
quickly spread. They watched for nearly four hours as building
after building was consumed, destroying nearly half of Rome. The
Terrans then left Earth and headed back to Terra.
    The next afternoon, once the fires burned
out, the Pope, his priests, and his Swiss military contingent,
inspected the burnt-out remains of the prison Galileo was being
held in. Two guards reported that they must’ve been jumped because
they woke up some yards away from the building when it exploded.
Everyone went down into what was left of the dungeon, but found no
evidence of human remains, at least none they could identify as
human. The Pope was beyond furious, since he suspected that Galileo
somehow broke out, because there was just no way that these
buildings could explode the way they did for no reason. He ordered
a search for Galileo by any means necessary, leave no stone
unturned, and have people executed if it leads to recapturing
Galileo. The Pope also tried to use the opportunity to root out
more subversives and heretics, and made sure the locals also were
much more afraid of the Church than they ever were before. Luther,
Calvin, Anabaptists, and others who were never part of the Church
to begin with, were put on a most wanted list for being heretics
and teaching Biblical ideas that were not Church doctrine. Nobody
in Europe even attempted to go after the church leaders or smaller
sects, even when the Pope offered up gold from the New World; he
remained furious for the next few years, losing one’s total power
tends to do that. After a year of searching for Galileo, including
sending soldiers to the lands of the New World, the search for the
heretic was given up.
    In the meantime, Galileo was recovering in a
Terran hospital from all the injuries he had received at the hands
of the humans. Four months after being returned to Terra, he left
the hospital and was soon summoned by the Oversight of Earth
Committee to explain how he ended up in such a bad situation that
he needed to be rescued by the best covert ops team on Terra.
Originally, the Oversight Committee also tried and convicted
Terrans for interfering, but that proved to be a lot more than the
Committee could handle, so the local courts conducted the trials
and convictions. Once Galileo was in front of the Committee, they
began grilling him, “Galileo Galilei, you are here to answer for
why you tried to interfere with human development by showing one
particular human how he could build and fly a glider. We think you
should’ve known that the Church authorities in that part of Earth
would be not too crazy about the idea of flying or even the idea of
Earth revolving around their sun, since they wanted to control
human advancement and wanted no one to question their set ideas of
how things worked. What do you have to say for yourself?”
    “I thought by just helping