Humble Beginnings

by KA Hopkins

  They now realized they were slaves not partners, subject to his every whim and desire. It destroyed their morale and overwhelmed them with guilt to think that, without their help, the Draco could never have succeeded in pacifying Earth’s governments. The irony of the situation did not escape him. Their new role was definitely not what they had been promised. They had been promised positions as the supreme rulers of a unified world ready to join the ULIR; they were to be treated like gods by the grateful masses for their generations of sacrifices as the “one percenters” - not end up as slaves to some demoniacal alien lizard.

  Their hubris would not let them accept they had been played by experts, lied to from the beginning and suckered in by the fancy words of his alien representatives, who played off their egos and greed so well that few of them noticed the real intent behind the words. The few who tried to warn the others were lampooned by their peers as worry warts, then marginalized and pushed to the sidelines. They realized too late that an alien race willing to destroy seven billion people to expand its trade empire, just might lie to achieve its goals.

  The consequences of giving up their morality in pursuit of the money and power offered by the aliens became all too apparent when much of their money and influence was lost after the attacks on the financial centers. The Global Elite lost more than just material goods. They lost everything, their self-respect, pride, spirit and ultimately their will to live.

  Before the Chairman’s death, a few of the Elite, who had a trace of a conscience left, had tried to numb themselves from the consequences of their actions with booze, drugs and sexual fetishes; after his death and the loss of most of their wealth, they surrendered to their vices.

  His Glorious Supreme Pangalactic Commander made a mental note; he might have to rethink his overly theatrical show of violence towards the thirteen Family heads. It was not efficient for his slaves to be so scared they believed their only escape was to kill themselves; that was his right. He immediately issued orders to segregate the Global Elite family members, so if anyone of the Family heads chose suicide as an escape, their families would suffer in their place. Ruling by terror may not be the best way to motivate, but then again, seeing the fear on the faces of the family heads made even his worst day on this wretched planet a bit more bearable. Since the Global Elite openly mocked anyone who believed in God, they had no fear of divine retribution. If they had no fear of God’s punishment, they could fear him instead. He did so like the idea of eviscerating another Family head in front of the others - that thought brightened his mood considerably.

  It was something to consider, as killing another of the Family heads - or all of them for that matter - would have no consequences. He had complete autonomy granted to him by the Draco Supreme Ruling Council concerning how he dealt with mankind. As long as the pacification timetable was met, he was free to do whatever he pleased. Even if the ULIR found out exactly what was planned for this backwater planet, there was very little they could do this far out in the Milky Way. While ULIR military action was improbable, they could bury him in investigations and paperwork. If that happened, no matter how many of the thirteen Family heads he eviscerated, nothing would brighten his day. If he wanted to get off this damp rock anytime soon, the attacks on his pacification plans had to stop. It was time to quit fooling around with the anti-pacification terrorists and have the Central Surveillance AI provide a plan to exterminate the suspected Special Forces led resistance.

  Chapter 36 - Found

  As with any black operation, all of our Special Forces operators were provided with new identities, background stories and credit histories - all thanks to Guide. Guide’s favorite tactic was identity theft, as nothing stands out in an electronic surveillance world like someone without an electronic credit history. Copying someone’s financial history is not very hard - how you use it is what makes you get caught by the authorities or not.

  Usually, financial histories are copied by identity thieves to allow new credit to be obtained. This allows the identity thief to charge the credit to the limit and then skip with the goods. Credit card companies and banks are well aware of this scheme and use detailed credit bureaus to catch the fraud. Since the operators always paid in cash and large items were provided by one of the many fake corporations that Guide had set up, it was nearly impossible for the credit bureau’s normal checks and balances to catch us.

  We even went as far as building new identities and histories for the operator’s families; it was our thoroughness that got us caught in the end. As carefully as we hid everyone that worked with us, we could not hide all of their history. Despite erasing all traces from electronic government systems for the operators and their families, we could not erase old photographs and mementos. Old Lizard Face had every government organization at the Family’s disposal looking for present or past Special Forces operators. Special attention was given to anyone who had left the Special Forces of any nation in the past five years. Men-in-black agents then physically confirmed both active and retired operator’s exact locations and current employment. Armed with mission reports, old class photos and newspaper articles, Men-in-black agents identified everyone the operators had contact with during training or their career. Tens of thousands of names and billions of records were generated. By using advanced facial recognition, faces were matched to names, names to places, places to dates. Earth computers had nowhere near the capability to process the amount of unstructured data, but the Central Surveillance AI was not an Earth computer. Once the terabytes of data were uploaded, the Central Surveillance AI found faces with mismatched electronic records in seconds.

  If either scenario occurred, mismatched or deleted electronic records, that person became someone of interest. Since everyone leaves an electronic trail, a complete lack of electronic records indicated someone trying to hide with sophisticated help. Help not easily available on Earth, but well within the capabilities of a scout ship’s AI. Using similar methods, Old Lizard Face's organization tracked down the families as well. Within an hour of the data being uploaded, pictures of the hundred operators and their families were published in a worldwide BOLO to all police, military and intelligence units. Knowing that there were only a hundred Special Forces operators working against him, gave Old Lizard Face the confidence to aggressively continue pacification operations.

  Once our identities were known, we became the most hunted terrorists in the world – only, there was no hard evidence linking our organization to any of the incidents that had disrupted the alien pacification plan. Not that a lack of evidence stopped the authorities from blaming us. We were falsely accused of many terrorist acts we had no hand in, which created a great deal of paranoia. Being paranoid when working in the classified black ops world can keep you alive; it can also be an obstacle as you become afraid of every shadow.

  Paranoia and being blamed for every little thing that went wrong on the pacification operation caused the thirteen Families and Old Lizard Face's own investigators to find “ghosts in the machine.” With any complex organization, if you look hard enough, you will find facts that can always be spun into some form of an evil plot. The internet is full of nut-ball conspiracies. With paranoia getting the best of him, Old Lizard Face started a witch hunt to clear out any potential Earth sympathizers.

  Old Lizard Face's witch hunt soon caused more problems than it solved as he removed many loyal followers, believing they had changed alliances back to Earth. To exploit Old Lizard Face’s paranoia, Marc suggested a novel plan. With Guide’s assistance we helped Old Lizard Face find what he was looking for. If Old Lizard Face was looking for Special Forces and the Global Elite families helping Earth, Guide made sure that he found them, lots of them.

  Guide discovered how the Central Surveillance AI was searching for our operators by monitoring traffic between Earth and the Moon Central Surveillance AI. Armed with this knowledge, Guide set up a disinformation program, using NSA’s surveillance tools to plant information only a few forensic experts
in the world could determine was fake. Old Lizard Face believing he found the source of his pacification problems, acted before independently confirming the information, removing nearly 5000 Special Forces operators and several of the Global Elite family heads. The fact that the suspected number of Special Forces resisting the pacification jumped from a hundred to over 5000 in only a few days was of no concern. Better safe than sorry. It did not take a lot of imagination to guess what happened to those poor individuals and their families.

  Our actions were classic military guerilla warfare; understand and react to the fluid battle field events faster than the enemy. If you can do this, you can pick and choose your battles. By always fighting to your strengths and the enemy’s weaknesses, you will seldom lose any battle. In his book The Art of War, Sun Tzu said something similar 2500 years ago. What was true then is still true now.

  As usual, my conscience bothered me when I had too much time on my hands, thinking about the high collateral damage caused by our actions. It is one thing to kill someone who is an immediate threat to your safety - it’s quite another to kill millions unseen. I racked my brain and had Omni search the Earth archives, to see if history could provide a precedent where great battles had been won without killing so many people. Omni was not much help when he pulled up the sacrifices made by the Soviet Union in World War II, when nearly twenty-seven million Russians lost their lives defeating Germany, yet it was declared a “win” by historians. Given our current track record we could easily beat that number; how depressing.

  I asked Marc, “Does it bother you that so many people are killed by our actions?” Marc said, “As a professional soldier you soon learn all life is precious or you lose part of your humanity. Some soldiers handle it better than others. For better or for worse, we have kicked off a chain of events that we greatly underestimated the consequences of. Judging from the reports coming out of the cities, circumstances are medieval with causality rates in the tens of millions. This burden we will take to our graves.

  If given a choice, I would do it exactly the same way; our EM pulse attacks crippled the alien pacification activities in those cities and put a good dent in all alien activities right across North America. Cutting the funding from the offshore tax havens stopped most illegal drug operations, military-industrial complex sponsored wars and alien pacifications activities around the world. You’re right to have an attack of conscience for all those who have died, but without their deaths there is no chance of seeking assistance from the ULIR. I know it sounds heartless, but given the alien pacification timetable, these are desperate times that require audacious actions. For the record, I feel the same way you do - I’m constantly asking myself, 'why do so many have to die?' Only God knows that answer.

  If it makes you feel any better, our fate was sealed once the Draco decided Earth would look good as part of their empire. Our options are limited - we can become slaves of the Draco Empire or Earth gets turned into a cinder ball. Not much wiggle room there. The right to freedom - to make our choices free of Draco influence, or any aliens for that matter - isn’t cheap. Unless you had to fight for it, you have no clue what freedom really costs.

  When called to defend my country’s freedom, I willingly volunteered. For my efforts, I was wounded six different times and have a miserable disability pension, that government cronies are trying to claw back for political purposes. I understand the price of freedom only too well; unfortunately the only currency that seems to count is the blood and suffering of a country’s citizens.

  We have been given the ability to fight for freedom on behalf of Earth through an amazing sequence of events, and every day I wonder - are we fighting on the right side? Is our cause just? Only time will tell. When it is all over, never forget - if we win, history will judge us one way or the other.”

  “What happens if we lose?” I asked.

  “Losers don’t get to write history.”

  As usual, Marc broke down my moral dilemma into simple black and white terms.

  One of the unintended consequences of the over-the-top BOLO and the vilifying of our current cadre of operators and their families - accusing them of crimes and terrorist acts they had not committed - was that their former brothers-in-arms knew something was not right. Past experience had shown there are always two sides to any story, and the side reported in the mainstream media is best taken with a grain of salt. They had firsthand knowledge of what true patriots and heroes the vilified operators were; people with those qualities don’t become traitors or terrorists without good reason. Thanks to a clear disconnect between their firsthand experiences and the misinformation pushed by the mainstream media, their old comrades started reaching out, seeking the truth. Old Lizard Face unknowingly just handed us our next round of recruits. The harder he squeezed the Special Forces community, the more independent thinking operators slipped between his talons.

  With the influx of new recruits, there was a chance some may be double agents. Were we worried about double agents? Not really, we were always brutally honest with the facts and let the operators draw their own conclusions. Call me a naïve fool, but I just did not believe anyone of the Special Forces operators, with their love and dedication to their country, would turn against humanity of their own free will.

  Now I may be naïve, but I’m not dumb. We eliminated as many possible blackmail opportunities as we could. Because we took great care to look after the well-being of the operators and their extended families, the classic blackmail techniques of money, power, sex, political beliefs and revenge could not work.

  Money - we stole from the same place as the government, the Federal Reserve, plus operators aren’t in it for the money.

  Power - we operated independent of any government, and killing people is in a way the ultimate form of power.

  Religion - as long as you kept it to yourself, no one cared, provided you believed in something.

  Sex - not an issue. Killers by their very nature are not prudes; no one pretended to be Boy Scouts and certainly did not act like them.

  Political belief was not a hard sell, as turning the Earth over to a bunch of alien lizards would be wrong, no matter how much you spin it.

  So, the classic forms of blackmail were not a threat to us, but mind control was. This was much harder to detect and would nearly lead to our defeat.

  Chapter 37 - Old Lizard Face strikes back

  For security reasons, each one of our operational bases was compartmentalized and completely independent from other bases. To minimize communications that could be intercepted, Marc suggested decentralized command and control where each base was responsible for planning and carrying out local operations per high-level guidelines set by Mother, Einstein, Guide, Marc and myself. There was no effort to even attempt large scale coordination between bases after the attacks on the financial centers - those attacks continued to have a life of their own.

  Our directions were pretty straightforward - use Guide’s intelligence to slow down pacification efforts in your area. Given most operators have a type-A personality and do not like sitting around, they found their own ways to cause tons of trouble to local pacification activities. Nothing big that would get lots of attention, just lots of local snatch-and-grab ops that made life hell for corrupt local politicians and business leaders.

  Unlike most modern militaries - that now put helmet cameras on their operators to follow the battle, so that armchair warrior politicians can puff up their chests and take credit for other’s bravery - we did not even require the teams to provide regular status reports. Updates were provided by exception, as the teams saw fit.

  If a base came under attack, all personnel knew the location of two other bases they could escape to. By default more than design, each base was pretty much on its own if attacked. If under attack and unable to break contact with the attacking force, one of the alien scout ships, under the cover of darkness, would provide covering fire and extraction. There was no plan for the bases to support each other as we j
ust did not have the manpower.

  As hard as we tried to obscure our operating bases, Old Lizard Face figured out the location of half our bases, using surveillance cameras and facial recognition in cities with a heavy government presence. The operation required viewing billions of images in a limited amount of time, which only the Central Surveillance AI could do. When a suspected base was found, Old Lizard Face flooded the area with hundreds of police and intelligence operators in an effort to capture one of our own. This proved to be a double edged sword as there was no way to hide that many people from operators trained to spot them. When the local authorities were spotted, due to their incompetence and lack of training, the operators often made it back to the safety of our bases. When the police managed to set up an ambush, the operators never gave up without a fight, no matter what the odds. When an operator ran out of ammo, he fought with a combat knife in one hand and a live grenade in the other.

  Sergi Petrov certainly would not win a beauty contest for Special Forces operators. He stood only a bit over five foot nine inches tall, but weighed nearly 200 pounds. Even at forty-five years old, middle age for most men, the broken nose, facial scars and shaved head told of a life not spent in academia. He might have lost a step or two, but all in all he was still as lethal as he ever was. He had served over twenty years in the Spetsnaz, with a good number of those years chasing down terrorists in the former republics of the old Soviet Union. From his years of experience he felt more than saw the surveillance detail now following him. With a little careful observation he saw the same tactics he had often used to tail suspects now being used against him.