Tree of Liberty (Book 3 of The Humanity Unlimited Saga)

by Terry Mixon

  “I’m not sure. Maybe a small explosion or something big fell over. It happened right at the same time as something shook the ship. I’m wondering if they damaged the engines.”

  That would be a disaster. While one of the strange transport gates he and his people had used to get here from France was still intact, they couldn’t go back to the abandoned base. It had been full of terrorists.

  The ship had originally had three of the gates. Nathan had destroyed two of them and he wasn’t sure how to open the third. They’d used a space fighter to open the gate at the base in France. Since his asshole brother had managed to get his people out through them, he must’ve discovered a portable means of controlling the gates.

  He’d collected a lot of gadgets, but hadn’t had time to experiment with anything. He’d mostly been concerned with finding every weapon left behind after the fight.

  “It’s time to finish this,” Nathan said. “Either we take them out or die trying.”

  He didn’t really know how large the ship was, but he understood the sections the enemy controlled. There were four corridors connecting Nathan’s operational sector with the Islamic bastards. Both sides guarded them.

  The two forces had settled into trench warfare like back in WWI. The two groups sat behind fortifications they’d arranged and waited for any attack by the enemy, occasionally pouring forth to try to overrun the other side.

  In order to breach those lines, Nathan needed more force than he currently had available. Oh yes, he had enough men. Unfortunately, he didn’t have very much ammunition for the alien weapons.

  Over the course of the last few attacks, they’d killed a number of the rag heads. The jihadis’ guns had been crap, but Nathan’s people had enough ammunition to take care of the remaining foes. It was just going to be bloody.

  “Send runners to the other checkpoints,” Nathan told the man. “I want everyone except a skeleton crew to this location right now.”

  The man nodded and sent several people to gather the requested forces.

  Ten minutes later, Nathan had the strongest force he was going to get. Together, they advanced down the corridor until they were just behind one of his leading fire points.

  Rushing into the face of enemy fire would allow the enemy to kill a number of his people, but so long as he survived, Nathan didn’t care. They had to breach the enemy line. Once they did that, they could run amok behind the terrorist fighting positions.

  Nathan sent one man with a rocket propelled grenade launcher to edge into the corridor. The man fired the explosive right before someone shot him in the head. When the explosion shook their position, Nathan sent his men charging forward around the corner, firing at anything that moved.

  He followed, emptied his flechette weapon into the enemy position, and stepped back out of sight. Attacking a hardened position was ugly, but inside thirty seconds, they were behind the enemy barricade.

  Nathan stalked forward and took the situation in with a glance. He’d lost a dozen men. Some were dead, some were badly injured. None looked like they’d survive more than a few minutes. The enemy had only lost six. It made him angry.

  “Get their weapons and ammunition,” he said coldly. “We’re moving on.”

  “What about our men?” the team leader asked quietly.

  “We don’t have the medical care to save any of them.” Technically, he wasn’t sure that was true, but he couldn’t afford to divert precious resources at a time like this. As Napoleon Bonaparte had said, making omelets meant breaking eggs. Or something like that.

  If they continued pushing in the direction they were going, Nathan suspected the enemy would come to them. He was not disappointed.

  Filthy men screaming in Arabic came running from several cross-corridors, firing wildly as they ran. Their bullets mostly missed, but with no cover or concealment, that wasn’t always the case.

  His trained people returned fire, killing many of the enemy fighters with their skill. This was going to be a war of attrition. Nathan just hoped they had enough bodies to make this work.

  By the time they’d dealt with all the screaming jihadis, he had less than a dozen men still with him. He hadn’t seen the enemy’s cultured leader, the one who’d cut his mother’s toe off, so he knew they still had at least one heavy fight still in front of them.

  Nathan had spent enough time on regular ships to recognize that they were moving into the engineering section. The aliens hadn’t designed this part of the ship for normal crew or passengers. The amount of equipment was increasing the farther aft they moved.

  He hoped no one shot anything critical. If they disabled anything critical, there was nothing he could do to fix it.

  One of his men came back from a scouting trip. His left arm was bloody, but the man still seemed combat effective.

  “There’s another barricade in the room ahead,” he growled. “I can’t see how many people were behind it, but it’s going to be ugly. They’ve got a great field of fire.”

  One of the men had captured a rocket propelled grenade launcher. He held up two fingers when Nathan raised his chin.

  “Lead with the grenades and take them down.”

  The man frowned. “Are you sure we’re ready for this, boss?”

  “Do we have a choice? If we retreat now, they’re going to come after us. We have to end this while we have them off balance.”

  The other man sighed and headed toward the forward position without another word.

  The assault on the position kicked off with an explosion. Then there was a second one, much closer to Nathan than he liked. It seemed they had a grenade launcher of their own.

  To their credit, his men didn’t flinch from running into the hail of bullets and explosives. Nathan followed and picked up the grenade launcher from where his man had dropped it when he’d died.

  It took a moment to fit the final grenade into place, but his people kept the enemy pinned down long enough for him to fire it at the defenders.

  Ironically, he hadn’t needed to waste the ammunition. The enemy fighter with a grenade launcher raised himself from cover. One of the many bullets flying around struck him in the face, sending him staggering backward. He must’ve pulled the trigger because the grenade fired straight up.

  Normally, a rocket propelled grenade had to travel a predetermined distance before it armed, but they must’ve done something to their ammunition. It exploded the moment it struck the ceiling, delivering its lethal payload to each of the defending terrorists.

  Nathan and his men advanced and shot anyone that still twitched. He was down to five people, counting himself.

  He raised his radio to his lips. “I want every man to move forward and join me. Every single man.”

  Ten minutes later, his force was back up to just over a dozen men. If this wasn’t enough to end the fight in his favor, he was going to die.

  They probed ahead and found a large compartment ahead of them. The defenders were waiting there.

  “One final chance to surrender,” Nathan called out in French. Not that he intended to allow any of the enemy to live.

  The cultured tones of the enemy leader came back. “We only surrender ourselves to Allah. Come and take us, if you can.” He punctuated his demand with a rain of bullets.

  “Charge,” Nathan said. “Kill everyone.”

  The final assault was brutal. Even though Nathan held himself to the last position, he found himself flat behind the body of one of his people and shooting at the defenders. It wasn’t that he was a coward, but he preferred not to risk his own life. It was the only one he had.

  With a wail in Arabic, the enemy rushed from behind their position. His people gave a good account of themselves, but were overwhelmed.

  Nathan emptied his rifle into the enemy, drew his pistol, and shot several more before finally finding himself with only a knife as a weapon.

  In the smoke and confusion, he wasn’t sure how many of the enemy remained standing. At least two, since both of
them charged him.

  They must’ve been out of bullets as well, because they had curved daggers that cut toward his face and body.

  A trained knife fighter, Nathan knew the odds of him coming out this conflict with his blood still inside his body were slim. He dodged to the right, placing one of the attackers between him and the other.

  The man stabbed at Nathan’s face before slashing down.

  Nathan resisted the urge to retreat and pushed forward, accepting an intensely painful gash to his arm. The end result was worth it.

  He jammed his knife into the other man’s throat and pulled it brutally out the side. Then he kicked the dying man into his friend, sending both of them tumbling to the deck.

  While the second man was attempting to extract himself, Nathan drove his knife into his eye and into his brain.

  A slow clap accompanied him rising to his feet and looking for new enemies. The only one he could see standing was the enemy leader. He was just walking from behind the improvised barricade. Not the kind to risk his skin, then.

  “Most impressive,” the other man said. “Though you are an infidel, you are not a coward. I salute you.”

  Nathan eyed the other man. He held a pistol, but it pointed toward the deck and the slide had locked open.

  “You’re boring me,” Nathan said. “Let’s end this.”

  The other man smiled and produced a magazine for his pistol. Now that wasn’t very sporting.

  The distance between them precluded Nathan from reaching the man before he finished reloading. A thrown knife was chancy at best. He needed another option.

  One presented itself in the form of a rifle dropped during the earlier fight. Nathan had no idea if it was even loaded at this point. He’d just have to take a chance.

  He threw the knife at his enemy on the assumption it would force him to dodge and disrupt his reloading.

  Taking advantage of that hoped-for lull, Nathan threw himself to the deck, grabbed the rifle, and rolled desperately to the side while bringing it to bear. The sights lined up with his enemy and he pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  That’s when Nathan noticed his throw had been better than he’d had any right to expect. The hilt of his knife protruded from the other man’s throat.

  To his credit, the dying man was slowly raising his now-loaded pistol toward Nathan.

  But it never rose high enough. With the gurgle, the man fell backward in the pistol discharged into one of the bodies just in front of Nathan.

  To be safe, Nathan waited an additional thirty seconds before he rose cautiously to his feet. The bolt on the rifle he’d picked up had locked back, but he found another magazine with ammunition to recharge the weapon.

  The enemy leader was still alive when Nathan stepped over to him. Barely. He tried to say something, but his ruined voice box wouldn’t cooperate.

  Wordlessly, Nathan raised the rifle and fired a single shot into the man’s head.

  Taking the dead man’s pistol, he went from body to body and made sure that all his enemies were similarly dead. Unfortunately, all of his allies seem to have perished as well.

  It took him more than an hour to finish searching the area for potential hostiles. None remained. The ship was his.

  And just about his alone. Only his mother remained.

  He took the precaution of collecting enough ammunition to fight if he was wrong, but he didn’t think he was. These people had fought to the death. They’d almost been good enough to take him out.

  One thing he didn’t find was a source for the noise his people had heard. He found no signs of sabotage.

  What he did find was an observation chamber above the engineering compartment. It wasn’t very large, but it had a view of the entire ship forward of engineering. What he saw chilled him.

  The ship was now in orbit around a large planet. It was definitely not Earth, and the ship wasn’t alone. Scattered across his view were other ships.

  Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say parts of ships. While there were some large chunks, the ones he could see didn’t seem to be whole.

  There had been a battle here at some point in the past. That explained the noise and vibration. A chunk of debris had struck the ship. Obviously not disastrously, but with the amount of potential ruin he could see floating around them, that probably wouldn’t last.

  The victory he’d sacrificed his men for had been fleeting. This new danger was even more of a threat. He needed to get himself and his mother off this ship before something punctured the hull and left them trying to breathe vacuum.

  Chapter Eight

  Clayton stared at the woman in the image. She was just another question mark in the middle of the mystery people that were dressed as if they’d come from the Revolutionary War.

  Commander Krueger leaned in and gave her a close examination. “Is she a pirate? She certainly looks like someone out of an Errol Flynn movie.”

  “Whoever she is, she’s spotted your drone,” Clayton said. “They know we’re around here somewhere. How is that going to change what we do next?”

  “It doesn’t change one damn thing,” Ulysses snarled. The CIA agent stalked into the chamber and gave them all a withering stare. “They’re fucking primitives. It doesn’t matter one good goddamn what they think or know.”

  Clayton shook his head and smiled sadly. “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I’m quite sure the British felt somewhat similarly about the Zulu nation back in the day. That didn’t turn out as well as they’d hoped.”

  Ulysses rounded on Clayton, brandishing his fist in the older man’s nose. “You shut your mouth, traitor. I’ve had more than enough of your crap. You’re a prisoner and you don’t get a say in anything.

  The other man smiled cruelly. “If I had my way, I’d chain your ass to a rock and keep you there until I get you to Guantánamo. And once I do, I’ll break you.”

  The other man’s expression changed to one of panic as Gunnery Sergeant Danvers grabbed him by the back of the neck and yanked him off his feet.

  The noncommissioned officer shoved the CIA agent against the wall. He grabbed Ulysses’s right hand as the man tried to go for a weapon.

  “I’ve had enough of you, cockroach,” Danvers growled. “If we’re going to chain a prisoner to a rock, it’s going to be you.”

  “Call your dog off, Krueger,” Ulysses sneered. “We both know who’s going to win this confrontation.”

  “I’m not sure we do,” the Navy officer said. “Frankly, you come across like a congenital idiot and a man born outside of his time. You seem the type of man who’d be much more comfortable working for the Nazis. Probably torturing people for them.”

  A wave of shock traveled across the CIA agent’s face only to be replaced by rage. “If there’s an idiot in this room, it’s you. Now call him off or every single one of you gets a room next to Rogers in Hotel Guantánamo.”

  “I don’t think so. Gunnery Sergeant, I’m placing Agent Ulysses under confinement. I’m afraid the situation is too much for him and his demonstrated instability has become a threat to our mission. Secure him somewhere and search him thoroughly for weapons.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “You sonofabitch!” Ulysses screamed. “I’ll see you executed for this!”

  Whatever else the man had been about to say was cut off when Danvers drove a fist into his gut. The gunnery sergeant threw the CIA agent flat on the ground and planted a knee in the center of his back while other members of the team helped secure their new prisoner. They then roughly hoisted the CIA agent to his feet and hustled him out of the chamber.

  Clayton gave Krueger a curious look. “His superiors are not going to be pleased. Frankly, he’s probably right. They’ll throw you into a cell right next to mine.”

  The Navy officer sagged a little. “Maybe, but there’s only so long I can tolerate assholes. Frankly, Ulysses is the kind of guy that ends up being shot in the back by friendly fire bef
ore he gets a chance to report.”

  “You’d actually kill him before we go home? That’s quite a step, Commander Krueger. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  The other man sat on a handy rock. “I probably don’t. It’s wishful thinking. Frankly, Mister Rogers, I’m not certain what I’m going to do. I’m not certain what I can do. The information that you’ve uncovered—the things we’ve seen on this mission—was probably already going to get me and my men locked away.”

  Clayton considered the other man for a long moment. “I know you’ve heard a lot of bad things about me. Many of them are true. I’ve done awful things in pursuit of money and power to fulfill my goals.

  “But you also know my son. He’s not the kind to work with me on something that doesn’t have the potential to help a great number of people. You’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. There are greater threats to humanity than you can imagine and the potential to uplift us all to a new level of free society that hasn’t been seen in the United States for decades. Hell, maybe a century.

  “You’ve burned your bridges behind you. Allow me to extend a hand in friendship. Don’t trust me. Trust my son.”

  The officer rubbed his eyes tiredly. “I don’t suppose I have much of a choice.”

  “That’s not true. You have a very stark choice. You can continue to support an authoritarian regime that Mussolini would be proud of or you could become part of an organization that is trying to secure freedom for humanity.”

  Krueger considered him for a long moment. “At the moment, it’s a moot point. We’re trapped on an alien world with people seemingly plucked out of history. Until we find a way home, it doesn’t matter what I decide.”

  Clayton smiled more widely. “That’s not true either. It matters very much. If you join my team, I can fill you in on everything we’ve discovered. Everything we suspect. Then we can work together to find a solution without worrying that the other is going to betray them.”

  “How do I know you won’t betray me?” Krueger asked. “As you say, you’ve got quite the reputation.”