Just before the Day, a Rhode Island-sized alien spaceship zipped past Neptune, Jupiter and Mars to park in Earth orbit. The U.S. sent up a shuttle to greet it. My dad piloted the craft. But when Mad Jack Creed tried to communicate with the alien vessel, it beamed him into oblivion. Afterward, the alien ship launched nuclear-tipped missiles. Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Washington, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Honolulu, Beijing and other great cities vanished in thermonuclear fireballs. A second wave of alien missiles crisscrossed the planet, spraying a deadly bio-terminator everywhere. That was the Day.
On Day plus one, a space lander came to Antarctica near our science outpost—
Look, I won’t bore you with too many details. This is supposed to be a quick and dirty guide, remember.
In our region of the Orion Arm, two alien power blocs waged a death struggle against each other. They had been for centuries. The stronger group was the Jelk Corporation, run by small, red Rumpelstiltskin extraterrestrials. They were few in number and were originally from a different space-time continuum. It took me a long time to wrap my head around that idea. Anyway, as energy beings, the Jelk had taken on material forms, given themselves bodies. Supposedly, Jelk lived for profits. They used other aliens to do their dirty work, mostly the lizard-like Saurians.
The other side, the Jade League, run by the Lokhars, learned that the Jelk Corporation planned to recruit hundreds of millions of Earthers as soldiers. Most Lokhars had funny ideas about religion and honor. They figured it would be doing humanity a favor to kill us off nobly rather than let us become Jelk slaves.
I’d never accepted such doubletalk, but that’s getting ahead of the story.
The Rhode Island-sized warship had been a Lokhar Dreadnought-class vessel, a hyperspace craft. The lander in Antarctica belonged to the Jelk Corporation. A Jelk fleet had chased off the dreadnought.
I’d known no such fine distinctions at the time. With my rifle, I’d gone out to do war against the crew in the alien lander.
For the sake of brevity, I’ll fast-forward the situation. We assault troopers got our start with the Jelk, with Shah Claath in particular. After the Earth smoldered in radioactive ruin, he captured us as if he was a big game hunter. Then, he injected his chosen ones with steroids, surgically put in the neuron strings and forced us to fight as corporation slave-soldiers. In doing so, we bought the survival of the rest of humanity, who lived in Shah Claath’s worst freighters, which he landed on the poisoned Earth.
At Sigma Draconis, during the middle of a savage space battle against the Lokhars, I turned the tables on Shah Claath. I hijacked his battlejumper. Unfortunately, I failed to kill the bastard, although I destroyed his body, watching him escape as an energy being.
With the battlejumper in my possession, I returned to Earth. There, my people fixed the landed freighters. Each lifted off the poisoned planet. I had plans to do whatever I needed to strengthen humanity’s odds for survival.
Before I got very far with that, the second power bloc—the Jade League—made its next move with us.
As I said earlier, the Purple Tamika Emperor led the Lokhar militarists and the league. As a race, they were religious fanatics. They viewed their greatest duty as guarding the Forerunner artifacts scattered throughout the Orion Arm.
What’s a Forerunner artifact, you ask? Any machine or device constructed by the First Ones. They’re long gone, by the way. The other extraterrestrials remember them as legends, almost as gods.
One of the ancient Forerunner relics had resided in the Altair star system. It had been huge, a gleaming silver donut-shaped object with the circumference of a medium-sized asteroid. In its center had been an artificial black hole. As Jelk-owned assault troopers, we’d tried to capture it. A maze of tightly-packed meteors had orbited the artifact, guarded by the Lokhar Fifth Legion. Before we could reach the thing, it vanished from sight.
Turned out the Forerunner artifact had gone to a portal planet in hyperspace. That had opened a gate into a dreadful space-time continuum. For many millennia, Abaddon and his Kargs, trillions of them in a billion spaceships, had been trying to get out of the dying universe and into ours. This was their big chance. They were xenophobic against everyone, desiring to annihilate all non-Karg life.
Well, after we assault troopers deserted Jelk service, Orange Tamika Lokhars showed up in the solar system. They wanted to make a deal for our help.
The various colored Tamikas were political factions among the tigers. Just so you know.
Now, I bet I can figure out what you’re thinking. The Lokhars slaughtered all by one percent of humanity. Why help the tigers at all, right?
At the time, I figured to grab whatever could help humanity out of our hole. I couldn’t afford to be choosy. By loading up assault troopers in the Lokhar dreadnoughts—hyperspace vessels—we gained warships of our own as payment, along with automated factories and anti-toxins to clean up the Earth.
My outlook was simple. Survive first. Get revenge second. Besides, if the Kargs reached our universe, neither Lokhars, Jelk nor humans were going to live much longer anyway.
As a Lokhar-allied assault trooper, I finally reached the artifact in the portal planet in hyperspace. There, I convinced the relic to teleport into the solar system’s Asteroid Belt. It appeared near Ceres, the biggest asteroid in the belt. With the artifact’s disappearance from the portal planet, the passage from the Karg space-time continuum into ours collapsed, stranding the terrible enemy. That saved our universe from the invaders, although my woman, Jennifer, remained behind as a captive.
In hyperspace, I learned that Forerunner objects were alive after a fashion. It was one more reason why the various alien races worshiped at them as shrines to the Creator. The Jelk didn’t worship, though. They needed the artifacts in order to split into halves like an amoeba, increasing their population.
The ancient artifacts were incredibly important to Orion Arm politics and war. Earth now possessed one out in the Asteroid Belt.
After our return from hyperspace, the last assault troopers became Forerunner Guardians. We even received three warships from the Lokhars as a gift. They also vacated Mars Base, which the tigers had built for themselves.
I’d become a guardian to an alien shrine parked in the solar system. With the artifact, I was able to bargain from a position of greater strength.
We desperately needed that. The reason was simple. Every alien I’d met thought of humans as beasts. If the extraterrestrials were really kind, they just figured we were hopelessly savage barbarians.
On that basis—our savagery—our bid to enter the Jade League had been denied. They said we weren’t ready to join the civilized races. Thus, we were on our own in a galaxy at war, a pimple outpost with barely the strength to halt space pirates from looting our system.
Now, to top it all off, a triad of Shi-Feng Lokhars—whatever they were—had tried to murder me. They’d hidden out in a Wyoming automated factory for at least a month. Had the industrialists known about them? Had the tramp-haulers?
I sat in a chair in my room on Mars pondering the situation.
The Lokhars under Admiral Saris—a Purple Tamika tiger—had built Mars Base beside Mons Olympia. That’s the tallest volcano in the solar system. Seems the tigers had liked tramping on the mountain in their atmospheric-suits. Even after years of vacancy, one could still find their footprints on Mons Olympia. A Lokhar flag used to whip about on the pinnacle. My best friend Rollo had torn it down. He’d put the flag in our communal urinal, pissing it out of existence particle by particle.
Rollo didn’t like the tigers much. The steroid-68 had given him massive muscles. It seemed to have made him angrier too. Naturally enough, we called it roid rage.
Mars Base was a dome as envisioned by NASA. It shouldn’t have been that bad. Lokhars were quite a bit bigger and taller than the average human, so the quarters should have been spacious for us Earthers.
The Japanese used to live in tiny quarters compared to Americans. The Lokhars seem
ed to embrace this tradition, as well. While most of the quarters felt like closets, mine afforded me a little elbow room and even sported a viewing port. Outside, red sands swirled across the ground as if Mars was a giant Mojave Desert. A star fighter lifted from a pad, hot exhaust sending it screaming up to space.
My bones still mended, bonding the breaks. Most of the tendons worked again and the ligaments had regained their elasticity.
I wore jeans and a T-shirt gratis of an underground warehouse in vanished Denver. My normal six-three frame had bulked up six years ago. Ten regular tough guys wouldn’t have stood a chance against me. It wasn’t only the greater strength, but the speed, timing and training.
My chamber boasted a military cot, a desk, computer screen, shelf of books and some weight-lifting equipment, along with a well-stocked bar, complete with tall stools. I also had a pool table. Dmitri, Rollo and I played all the time.
We were the starship captains. Each of us commanded a former Lokhar cruiser. Dmitri presently patrolled the belt. Rollo orbited Mars beside my waiting starship. The crew was on vacation.
A beep now alerted me. I looked up from my chair. A pretty receptionist appeared on the computer screen.
“Doctor Sant is ready to see you, sir,” she said.
“Send him in,” I said.
“Yes, sir,” she said, before disappearing.
Doctor Sant was an Orange Tamika Lokhar. Each tiger belonged to a different color, which indicated his faction. Purple Tamika presently held the throne and most major military commands. Doctor Sant had been one of the few Lokhars to survive the portal planet with us, along with several hundred Orange Tamika warriors. I’d first come to know him as their Alien Contact Officer. Since our return, Doctor Sant had taken up residence on Ceres. He studied the Forerunner object and devoured Lokhar holy texts. As I said, they’re religious crusaders.
During his last three years in the solar system, Doctor Sant had begun a metamorphosis from a science officer into a religious disciple. His survival on the portal planet had a profound effect on his thinking.
I should point out that during his stay on Ceres, Doctor Sant had enlightened me about several facets of Orion Arm politics. I was hoping he could explain the Shi-Feng Lokhars to me.
That’s why I’d summoned him from Ceres. I hadn’t been sure he’d come.
A chime sounded by the door.
Pushing up to my feet, I said, “Enter.”
The door slid open to reveal a seven-foot bipedal tiger who stooped at the shoulders. He was thinner than the average Lokhar. He had white in his facial fur, and the eyes were a faded yellow. In the old days, he wore a silver and black uniform with orange chevrons. Today, he wore an orange garment like an ancient Roman toga. The hand gripping the front fold showed a gaudy, plastic-looking ring a little girl might have bought in a bubblegum dispenser. A bright orange rose showed in what looked like its plastic bubble.
“Commander Creed,” Doctor Sant said in the alien language. “It pleases me you are well.”
“I’m glad you agreed to come to Mars,” I said, speaking the tiger tongue. I’d learned it aboard the Indomitable a little over three and half years ago.
I approached Doctor Sant, smelling a hint of cinnamon. Reaching out, I slid my hand against a furry palm, the tiger form of handshake. Sant was one of the few willing to greet me Lokhar-style.
Moving to the bar, we spoke pleasantries about his trip and life in the tunnels of Ceres. I mixed him a Bloody Mary. He loved the drink. I poured myself a dash of whiskey, barely wetting the ice cubes.
Since I was still feeling woozy from my injuries, I perched on a barstool.
“You seem shaken,” Sant said.
“I’m not sleeping as well as I used to,” I told him. “But don’t worry. It will pass.”
We sipped our drinks and swapped a few more kind words. Finally, Sant relocated to my most comfortable chair. Adjusting his robes, he sat his long frame down, stretching out his furry feet. As a religious seeker, he’d given up the habit of wearing shoes.
Carefully setting the Bloody Mary on the armrest, Sant told me, “I know something troubling has occurred. It’s why I interrupted my studies to make the trip here. Did the Emperor send you a message, perhaps?”
The way Sant asked that alerted me. “Why would he?” I asked.
Sant squinted. I’d been with Lokhars long enough to recognize his sudden discomfort. He thought he shouldn’t have said that. Picking up his Bloody Mary—it was his second one—he slurped slowly, as if he was trying to give himself time to think.
“Is there something brewing against Earth in the Imperial Court?” I asked.
He gestured at me with his drink. “My information is sketchy at best. It’s far too soon to be certain. Let us wait out events, as I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Okay,” I said, figuring we had time to come back to that. “I’m more interested in something else.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Yes. What can you tell me about the Shi-Feng?”
Sant’s reaction startled me. The Bloody Mary tumbled from his fingers, splashing the red liquid onto his robe, staining it. He appeared not to notice. The glass bounced onto the floor, rolling loudly. My gaze followed it until it bumped against the computer stand. When I looked up, Sant sat frozen, staring at me with his yellow orbs.
His lower jaw slid from side to side. Finally, words came haltingly. “You…you should not speak that name.”
“Care to tell me why?” I asked.
His head twitched, breaking the spell. Blinking several times, he seemed to consider what I’d said. Finally, he stared at me even more intently than before.
“I do not understand this,” he said. “How could you have learned of them?”
“Never mind that,” I said. “Who are they?”
Sant shoved up to his feet. Taking several long strides, he stood before the viewing panel, staring out at the sands of Mars.
On the bar, I rotated my shot glass on its napkin, waiting. Why was this such a touchy topic? I was more curious than ever.
Doctor Sant turned, regarding me. “They…do not exist. They are a legend.”
“Go on.”
“You cannot know about them.” Understanding lit his yellow pupils. He nodded. “Did the Forerunner Object speak to you again? Did it tell you about…them?”
“No.”
He sagged back as if I’d punched him against the chest. He sounded winded as he said, “No other race has ever learned of the ones you named. You must swear to me, Commander. Never whisper a word of this to anyone.”
“I’m afraid it’s far too late for that,” I said.
Sant groaned. On shaky legs, he returned to the soft chair, practically collapsing into it.
“They’re a legend, you say?” I asked him.
“A myth,” he said, “a wisp from the old times. It is inconceivable that you learned the name.”
I had the feeling he was lying to me. It was time to up the stakes. “Doctor, I know more than that. Some of the Shi-Feng—”
“No!” Sant said, leaning forward. “Do not speak that name. It is an ill omen to do so.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I cannot say.”
“They work in triads,” I said.
He sank against the backrest, staring at me in a stricken manner.
“Instead of killing with claw or gun,” I said, “Shi-Feng explode.”
Sant’s eyes went wide with disbelief. Then a glimmer of horror entered them. He began to breathe more rapidly. The horror deepened, and he whispered, “No. This cannot be. They…came to Earth?”
“Yes,” I said.
His panting stopped abruptly until his eyelids fluttered. He worked his jaws but no sounds issued. It seemed to take an effort of will on his part. He finally whispered, “When did this happen?”
“A little over a week ago on Earth,” I said. “They were waiting for me in the latest automated factory in Wyoming.�
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“They waited for you?” he asked. “No. That’s impossible. You would be dead, then.”
“I killed the Shi-Feng, Doctor.”
With a cry, Sant lurched to his feet. He wouldn’t look at me. He strode for the door. It seemed he might just leave without telling me what I wanted to know.
“Lock,” I said.
Inner clicks meant the door locked from the inside. Frantically, Sant pressed the exit button, but the door wouldn’t open.
“I must leave,” Sant said, although he didn’t turn to say it.
“We’re going to talk first,” I said.
“I cannot speak to any they have signaled for death.”
“You’re talking to me now,” I told him.
Sant pressed the button again. When it wouldn’t open, he began to hammer on the metal.
I waited.
The doctor’s actions became more frantic. He pummeled the door. Then, he stepped back and slammed a shoulder against it.
If we’d been on Earth in a regular house, he would have smashed through. The Lokhars had built the dome tougher than that, though. Three times, Sant hurled himself at the door. Afterward, he panted before it. Maybe he realized there was no smashing through. Finally, he whirled around. Madness swirled in his eyes.
“You leave me no choice,” Sant said in a harsh voice. Reaching into his robe, he withdrew a white handle. His thumb clicked a button. A force blade the length of a knife shimmered into existence. It was pure energy, able to cut just about anything. “Instead of sullying myself, Commander, talking to you about the indescribable, I must kill you. Prepare to meet the Great Maker.”
-3-
I hadn’t expected this. It was past time to calm him down.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Do you remember that the Forerunner artifact told me its name? You do know that none of the artifacts has ever told that to a Lokhar before.”
Doctor Sant roared. It was loud in the small confines of my chamber. With flapping robes and long limbs, he rushed me, thrusting the force blade like a rapier.
Now, it’s true succeeding bomb-blasts a week ago had beaten my body and broken my bones. The healing tank at Mars Base had also speeded my recuperation. I wasn’t one hundred percent, but I was still an assault trooper.
Star Viking (Extinction Wars Book 3) Page 2