by Isaac Stone
With bayonets fixed and our last few shots ready to unleash, I led the men into the cave at long last.
I made sure to have several other squads take the other caves, but after the furious combat there were only two dozen Raptors alive, and only half o them combat ready. If the Invaders had any more tricks we probably weren’t going to be able to handle it, unless we were lucky and they were just as depleted and spent as we were. That was my gamble at any rate.
We found the portal a hundred yards inside the cave. There were a few Invader guards around it, but they didn’t last long when our plasma bolts lit up the inside of the cavern. We also made the first live capture of Invader prisoners when we rounded up the technicians who were trying to install the gate.
There was a large frame, which reached to the ceiling and was connected to the alien machines designed to operate it. I had little understanding of the machinery involved. All I could tell was that it wasn’t operational. For a second I considered having the men smash it up to be on the safe side, but the Force wanted it taken intact. Personally I’d have smashed the thing, but I get it that military intelligence would want to examine it. Best to destroy it and be done with it all. Sadly I wasn’t the one who got to make that call, though in retrospect I should have torched it myself. Some people just love to leave the back door open for a sequel.
FIFTEEN
The war against the Invaders was over.
Over the next month, they withdrew their forces and vanished into the jump portals they’d placed in the human sector of space. Reports of their various insurgencies died down as their troops were abandoned and eventually hunted down. There have been many theories why this happened, my favorite is they discovered the war to exterminate the humans was too expensive. An Invader accountant ran the numbers and decided it wasn’t worthwhile. So they left. That’s how I’d tell the story.
The Invaders we captured died in captivity within a month and refused to eat or learn to communicate before they did. To this day, no one knows if they were susceptible to a human disease, there was something in the soils that was fatal to them, or if they were bio-engineered to slowly die if captured. No one was ever able to establish basic communications with them. There machine parts and captured weapons slowly disintegrated after a few weeks exposure to the atmosphere. Nothing survived long enough to be analyzed. So much for those reverse engineering plans everybody had.
To this day, no one knows much about the Invaders. No other intelligent life forms were located in the known galaxy and no other signs of their influence were found on other planets. Strict regulations on the use of the jump portals were made mandatory. There are still people who worry the Invaders may return at any moment.
As the war technically ended a few months after the island campaign, even though I never fired another shot, there wasn’t a whole lot of for me to do while I finished my term of enlistment. I had plenty of restrictions on where I could go and whom I could talk to while I was still in the Force. But I wasn’t sent into combat again. Every one of us on that island were debriefed by the intelligence corps, but I don’t think even they knew what they wanted to find out. The Invaders will always remain an enigma.
A year later, I was able to muster out of Battle Force Jurassic with an honorable discharge.
I’d sent my application for discharge in about a month earlier. It wasn’t much of a big deal. Most of the men who came in during the offer to enlist as opposed to finishing out your prison time were doing the same thing. With the winding down of the military, the government decided they didn’t need to bear the cost to maintain a huge standing military. Most of the field commission officers, such as me, were given the opportunity to cash out and return to civilian life.
If you’d been a convict before you joined up, it was a little different. You had to wait for a parole board to review your file and decide whether or not to keep you or release you to civilian life. Most of us sent our applications in early because we’d had enough of living in an institution that controlled every aspect of your life. Most of us just wanted to get out and lead a normal existence, whatever that was. One of the appeals of joining up was your prior record would be scrapped clean should you serve out your term of service. Since being an ex-convict was always a determent to holding down a job, this was an attraction a lot of us couldn’t pass up.
I’d wanted to get off that damn prison asteroid and not have to dig out cesspools and drainage ditches any longer. My problem was I’d been in for murder when they recruited me for the Force. It took them a little bit longer than I hoped. In the meantime, I was used to train new recruits on how to fight the Invaders. The battle dinosaur division was on the verge of being mothballed, so I didn’t have to teach them how to attack a position defended by a sixty-foot armored lizard that was equipped with surface-to-surface missiles. I suspected the Force would return to armored tanks eventually.
I spotted Hamid one day while I was on the base. He seemed pretty happy.
“Good news?” I asked him when we met-up.
“The best, Sir,” he told me. “I’m getting out in another week. Back home to the farm in Mosul. I couldn’t be happier. They even cleared my old sentence off the records.”
I didn’t ask him what he’d been sent up for originally and he bounced along his way.
The day came when I was finally summoned to the base commander’s office. He was an old war dog, a general who’d been through the worst fighting against the Invaders and countless rebellions before. I came into his office and stood at attention.
“So you want to leave us?” he asked while looking at a file in front of him. He had the shaved head all the Force upper rank sported.
“If it’s been approved, Sir,” I told him. I hoped it had.
“I hate to see you go,” he told me. “You’ve been very useful around here. We never know when the Invaders will return. Keep us in mind if civilian life doesn’t agree with you.” He signed off on my discharge papers and handed them to me.
An hour later, I found myself standing outside the Solar Force base, which was located near Baltimore, in regular clothes with a canvas bag over my shoulder. The bag contained all the possessions I brought into the Force when I enlisted. They would’ve let me take some personal items with me when I cashed out, but I didn’t need anything else. All I wanted from the Force was my monthly bonus check. They could keep the rest.
First thing I did as a free man was go back to that bank and make a deposit.