by Mark Tufo
“Mike is one man with a rifle! He is not the answer! I'm sick of hearing you talk about that foot soldier as if he were the second-coming!” Paul had raised his voice in response to hers. “This ship, this toy as you call it, is the fucking key, Beth. Maybe I’m not the best commander she could have, but that’s the burden I bear. The decisions I make impact the lives of everyone on this ship—everyone on our planet. How could your thoughts be so clouded?”
“People, Progerians, Genogerians...they all rally to Mike; they are drawn to him. They will do whatever he asks; fight, make alliance, even die if necessary. He is more the master of our fates than you could ever be, and twice the commander. My thoughts are quite clear, Paul, it’s your denial and resentment of his power that’s put you in this situation. And somewhere deep down, Paul, you know that and you despise him for it. The competitions you have had your entire lives pale in comparison to what is happening now. He should be standing on this bridge, but you’re using this scenario to play out your ultimate victory...to prove you’re as strong as he is. The problem is, you’re just not.”
“You’re wrong on so many levels I don’t even know where to start.”
“Oh am I? Seems to me you win if the competition dies. Sure it’s by default, but somehow I don’t think that matters to you.”
“I wonder if there was ever a point in time where if I could have got you help…then maybe you could have gotten better. I want you to listen very carefully, Beth, because not one word of this is tainted by how I feel about Mike. If I thought there was any possibility I could rescue Mike and BT, I would do it, no questions asked. If I destroy one Stryver ship in a desperate bid to get to them, their mothership, which is parked out there somewhere within range, comes in and swats us away like a bothersome insect. There is no one person, not even Michael Fucking Talbot that is worth that risk.”
“He would have done it for you.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, we’ll never know.” He deliberately turned away from her, their conversation finished, he hoped for good. “Get her the fuck out of here. And whoever lets her out of her room will be shoved out an airlock within the hour. That was not a joke, if any of you are wondering.” Beth pulled away as a guard grabbed her forearm.
“I wonder what your circle of hell is going to be like when you get there.”
“Can’t be any worse than this one,” he replied. “Anyway, I guess I'll see you there.”
Captain Anders waited until Beth was gone then approached Paul. “Sir?”
“Get the message to Major Drababan. Maybe he can talk some sense into Mike. I can’t have the Stryvers see a shuttle leave this ship to retrieve someone that is actively fighting their own. That would be considered an act of war.”
“Right away, sir.”
“Do the right thing Mike,” Paul murmured as he watched his console. He knew there was some truth to Beth’s words but not the part about him wanting Mike dead. He knew his friend was more important than even he could guess; he could only wish that maybe the man wouldn’t try so damned hard to end his own existence if he understood it too.
“Proximity alert!” The comm officer shouted.
Paul could only wonder if the Stryvers had somehow intercepted and decoded the message and were now exacting their revenge.
“The signature is Progerian sir,” the officer said.
“It seems our time here runs short. Get Drababan on the line.”
The screen thankfully went from the leaping hordes of Stryvers to that of Drababan, who was holding a young Talbot in his lap.
“General,” Drababan nodded.
“Is this an appropriate time to be playing with toddlers?” Paul asked.
“I find that there is no better time than the present, sir. The future is never pre-ordained.”
Paul changed the subject; how could he argue with that? “The Progerian battle cruiser is inbound.”
“We are aware of that as well, sir.” The major replied as he cooed in Travis’ face.
“The shuttle?”
“It is en route, General, though I see no possibility of it penetrating the blanket the Stryver fighters have placed over the area. The pilots have been briefed with the minimal odds of their success, and to their credit, they have still deemed the mission of enough importance that they were willing to accept it.”
“Mike does seem to have that effect on people, doesn’t he.” Paul had been more thinking out loud.
“It is deserved; is it not, General?”
“Out,” Paul said, turning away from the monitor. He wasn’t going to risk another fight; he couldn’t right now. His fighters were exhausted in body and spirit and the ship was still in need of extensive repairs; he could not chance anything. “Let the crew know to prepare for a buckling and get us out of here in ten minutes.”
“To where?” the navigation officer asked.
“Far enough they can’t detect us but close enough we can get back in a hurry.”
“Aye aye, sir,” he responded.
The Vicieus came out of her buckle. Not fifteen minutes after the Guardian had departed, swarms of fighters and blistering fire erupted from every angle of the ship as she entered the area.
“The vessel is gone,” one of the weapons technicians said.
Asuras, the commander of the ship, smashed his fist into the cup of his hand in a very Human, very frustrated way. “They are adept at hiding. I prefer my enemy to stand and fight.”
“Commander, we are receiving a message from Grar; he is a front man for a force of Devastators.”
The commander motioned for the communications officer to continue.
“He says his troops, along with a renegade Genogerian force, are engaged in a battle with Stryver land and space forces.”
The commander spun. “Stryvers? Here? How is that possible? Place the ship on high alert. Near and deep space scans on full sensitivity. They will destroy another planet before this is over.” Asuras was reluctant to release some of his fighters with such a powerful enemy in their midst. He’d been ordered to preserve the planet, and if he bombarded the area from space he was certain to destroy the Devastator troops—and he would need them if he wanted to succeed in an occupation. “Send three squadrons.” He was watching the screens; his fighters would be outnumbered nearly two-to-one, but the odds were still on his side; they would strike before the Stryvers knew they were there, and for all their technological advances and ferocity in ground warfare, the Stryvers weren’t overly adept or skilled at flying fighters. Stryvers worked best in a hive mentality: one purpose with a collective consciousness. They’d experimented with fighters able to hold three Stryvers, but the much faster and nimbler Progerian fighters had cut through the clunky war machines with ease. The Stryvers had quickly adapted and gone back to the smaller version, but those could only fit one pilot. The machine itself was more effective; the pilot less so. Their odds had not improved greatly with the advent of the new fighter, but they were cheaper and easier to manufacture, and ultimately that had won out.
It was on the ground that the numbers began to even out. The Stryvers were unrivaled on the battlefield. The Genogerians were being slaughtered at an untenable pace. When the war had first started a century ago, the Progerian experts had predicted that at the current pace their ground forces were dying they would be out of troops in under a decade. Air superiority had tempered those numbers, but they were only staving off the inevitable. The Stryvers bred at an accelerated pace and in great numbers.
Chapter 7
MIKE JOURNAL ENTRY 4
Lumball was down. One of the Devastators had shot him just as the standoff was beginning; didn’t look serious, but he would need attention.
“No more!” Grar shouted. “Keecan you will put down your weapons. We will let the Progerian masters determine your fate; enough have died here today.”
“You realize what your Progerian masters are going to do, don’t you?” I asked him.
“Perhaps, perhap
s not. With the discovery of Stryver troops on this planet, every soldier is a valuable asset,” Grar said astutely.
“And what if they don’t want to fight?” BT asked.
“There is no option to remain neutral with Stryvers,” Keecan said. “They know no difference between combatant and civilian.”
I kept silent. I don’t think anyone here, including myself, made that distinction. When you were fighting an alien race, there was no time to make that determination. Kill them all and let their god sort them out.
“Once Stryvers make a land hold they will seek safe settlements with which to begin repopulation. They can procreate at a pace to sweep over this entire world in under ten years. They are an infestation; they know no other way but to eat through a planet until there is no more. They will exhaust their food supplies, and once this world has been turned into a lifeless desert, they will eventually begin to die off and seek another world to usurp and devastate. They have done it times beyond measure. They tried to do it to our home world; we would not allow it.”
“How does that type of race ever develop interstellar flight?” BT asked.
“I do not know for certain, but without it they would be incapable of sustaining themselves. In any case, they already had the capability when they landed upon our world. It is assumed that they adapted it from one of the civilizations they had destroyed.” Keecan replied.
“There’s that whole chicken and egg thing.” I blurted out. I continued when I got a couple of blank stares. “What I’m saying is, how did they get to the first world they destroyed to get the technology for space travel?”
“Maybe they took over from whoever was ruling their native planet,” BT said.
It was as good an explanation as any. And maybe not so far-fetched. It’s thought that on our planet alone there are two species with more brain capacity than Humans—those being the dolphin and octopus. How different would our world be if those species had evolved on land? Imagine the Stryvers; existing deep underground for untold millennia; how would any species, thinking they were at the top of the food chain, cope with billions of henceforth unknown, hideously ugly combatants emerging from hiding holes around the world and devouring everything in sight, the word “parley” not even in their vocabulary? When they had scoured through all “their” resources, they must have needed a way to get off the planet and move on to the next buffet. This was a very different version of events than I had been told by the Stryvers. The Progerians were an enemy we needed to be afraid of, I could not discount that, but right now, the Stryvers were the bigger threat.
“Take me to your leader,” I told Grar.
“I will contact the commander from where the fighters were deployed.” He replied.
“Please tell me you didn’t just say that,” BT grimaced. “Sound like a bad actor in a Sci-Fi B-Movie.”
“Hey, at least I didn’t say ‘We come in peace.’”
“Yeah there’s that, I suppose. Maybe you should grab a female and carry her off under your arm.”
“You mean like a swamp monster or something? You are really going to say that surrounded by, like, what could be considered a million Black-Lagooners? Anyway, fuck...what if they offered us one?”
“Poor choice,” BT said looking around, I guess hoping no one had heard or understood.
By this time, the Stryvers were long gone, and I was doing my best to turn them into a bad dream or at least a fading memory. The Prog fighters were still around, though they were not attacking. The mute and Geno lines were not easily discernible, it wouldn’t take more than the drop of a hat on the wrong toe to once again have them at each other’s throats. Grar had radioed up to the Vicieus. I don’t know what the conversation was all about; he had shifted to his more guttural natural language.
“What’s going on?” BT asked, looking around.
“I think Grar just said they are going to rip our heads off, scoop out some lunch and shit in the hole.”
“You speak Genogerian?” BT asked. He looked somewhat concerned.
I had to quickly tell him I thought I was mostly kidding. I could see why he would think I might be serious, I already had some knowledge of the Stryvers’ inner dialog…it wasn’t that big of a stretch to think I could do that with the mutes.
“That’s a fucking joke to you? Something that could twist our heads off like a bottle cap and that’s a fucking joke? You’re sick, man, you got problems.” BT wanted to storm off, but there weren’t a whole bunch of places to go.
When Grar was off the radio, he merely looked our way. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t direct anybody to do anything, I’m not sure if he even blinked. It was a long, tension-filled minute as far as I was concerned. Keecan didn’t seem overly taxed about the silence.
“Grab the injured Genogerian. You three will come with me.” Grar finally broke his vow of silence.
“Could you maybe tell us what is going on?” I asked, not willing to move just yet.
“I have explained the situation to the Vicieus they are sending down a shuttle,” Grar replied.
“For what?” BT asked. “I’m not going to be a prisoner on that ship. I’ll take my chances down here.”
“I’m with the big guy on this one,” I echoed.
“As am I,” Keecan chimed in. We both looked over to him, and him to us. In that moment, our previous animosity was set aside. Much like Drababan and I had, Keecan, myself, and BT were now locked in a strange friendship....it happens. We weren’t drinking buddies quite yet, but I would imagine he’d let me borrow his lawnmower if we were neighbors.
“Not as prisoners. We must get to a clearing.”
“Grar, we’re not going anywhere until we get some more information and some assurances,” I told him. He spun so fast I thought this was the trigger I had feared one of us was eventually bound to pull; I prepared for a pissing contest, one I knew could end with somebody dead.
“The defeated have no right to question the victors! I have been ordered to bring you to a clearing!”
“Hold the fuck on there, Grar. We aren’t ‘the defeated’ just yet, and I, for one, resent that implication. No one here has surrendered that I know of. We can go a few more rounds maybe, count up the score at that point, but I’m thinking your masters might be a little pissed off at your failure to comply quick-like. You tell us what we want to know or you can fuck off.”
If I hadn’t had a death clench on my bladder, the savage growl he spewed might have produced an embarrassing situation. To his credit, he got ahold of himself and spoke evenly. “I am a soldier. I am not informed as to the motivations of my superiors’ actions. I follow orders; that is my job.”
“Your orders are not my orders. Get them on the radio.”
“I cannot!”
“You will, or I imagine they will destroy your entire command for disobeying one of those orders. Seems like a characteristic over-reaction from your kind.” I thought about sitting on the ground like a spoiled toddler being denied the new Transformer in a Walmart but I wasn’t sure exactly how far I could push this order-follower. I did not want him taking me up on my threat and start the fighting back up. I was probably just as valuable to them with my arms dislocated and I didn’t want that to happen.
Grar got back on the radio and was talking. I walked up to him and demanded the device. When I had grown these gigantic balls, I'm not sure, but he handed it over to me. I looked like that previously discussed toddler trying to talk into a damn car battery; I had to use both hands to hold the thing.
“Why do you do this crazy shit? And just what do you plan to say to the savage despot with his armada hovering above us?” BT had come up with me.
I shook him off; I was on a roll here. “This is Colonel Talbot of the United Earth Marines Corps. Whom am I talking to?”
There was a pause, then, “I am Commander Asuras. I am to believe you are the leader of the Earth forces.”
There it was, it all made sense now. Grar thought, or had told his
boss, anyway, that I was the big kahuna. I sort of was, especially depending on who you asked. Although, there was a certain already ticked-off general that would disagree. Okay, Talbot; now what? Our lives could depend upon the level of honesty I was willing to divulge.
“I am one of them.” There. That covered several bases...just didn’t hit it out of the park.
“I will speak with the person that is in ultimate command of your planet,” Asuras said.
“That man is on your Julipion, our Guardian.”
“That ship is no longer in this galaxy.”
“Then right now, Commander, I am indeed the ultimate authority.” That was the truth and said with the conviction I hoped could be felt on his end.
“We need to discuss important matters,” Asuras said.
“I need assurances.”
“Assurances of what?”
“That myself and my friends will not be harmed.”
“We are not in the habit of harming those that we are in negotiations with.”
I was floored by that word; that changed everything. Negotiations meant we were working toward a solution that benefitted us all. “And the Genogerians?”
Another pause. “Are they with you?”
Another loaded word: “with.” This was a double edged sword and I had no way to grab it that felt comfortable; no matter how I answered I was potentially going to slice something off. If I said no we weren’t together, he might have no use for them, they were just loose cannons doing as they saw fit. If I said yes they were with me, he might consider them unworthy traitors and destroy them. Again I went with the truth.
“We have formed an alliance against a greater threat,” I said.
“They will not be harmed,” he said, then, “The shuttle should be there in fewer than twenty of your earth minutes. I look forward to talking to you.”