Earth Valor (Earthrise Book 6)

by Daniel Arenson

  Addy said nothing. She remembered her own experience after being discharged. How she had fled Earth with Marco. How they had suffered in exile, how Marco had nearly gone mad.

  "Yeah," she finally said.

  Pinky snorted. "What would you know about that, though? I went home and found my mom where I left her. Drunk and drugged out of her mind, lying on the couch in a puddle of her own piss. My brothers were gone—one was in prison, the other shot in a gang war. That's where I come from, Maple. It's what the rest of you never understood."

  Addy reeled toward him, teeth bared. "Don't tell what I do or don't understand. I grew up in hell. My father spent his life in and out of prison. My mom was a pathetic drunk, just like yours. And after the army, Poet and I . . ." She breathed heavily. "I saw how the war fucked him up. How he changed. How I tried to save him, but . . ." She looked away. "Fuck it. It's none of your business anyway."

  Pinky blew out his breath slowly. "Even Poet? Fuck. War will mess anyone up." He lowered his head. "After the army, I fought another war. I fought on the streets. Gang battles in the alleys. Drugs and cockfights. And I realized something there, Maple. That it wasn't me. Not anymore. That I was no longer that street punk." He looked up, and his eyes were red. "I realized that in the army, I became a better man. That in the army, I was somebody. In the army, I saw what real men were. Guys like Corporal Diaz, like our Sergeant Singh, and . . . yeah, like Poet. Men I wanted to be like. Better men than I was. So when these new fuckers, those marauder pieces of shit, when they came, well . . . I put on my old army jacket. And I decided to fight again. To be a soldier. Because the army was the only time I wasn't a complete fucking failure." He nodded, eyes damp, voice hoarse. "And if I ever meet Poet again, I'll tell him that. That when he saved my life—saved me, the asshole who rode his ass throughout boot camp—he saved me from more than the scum. He saved me from myself."

  "Touching story." Addy picked her teeth, spat, and scratched her backside. "Fucking beautiful. But I need you to shut up now. We're near the camp and those marauders like to skulk around here. Keep your hands off your balls and your eyes off my tits."

  "I wasn't—"

  "Shh!"

  They walked in silence. The only sound was the snow crinkling beneath her boots and his metal prosthetics. She gazed up, gun raised, seeking marauder webs. The bastards had learned to travel between the branches instead of leaving trails in the snow, and for big aliens, they were amazingly sneaky.

  Nothing.

  Addy breathed in relief.

  She approached the cave, Pinky close behind her. Angela stood guard outside, wearing camouflage, a helmet hiding her fiery red hair.

  "I see you met our new friend," Angela said. The girl was only eighteen, had missed being drafted when the marauders destroyed the world.

  "An old friend," Addy muttered. She pulled back the leafy branches that hid the cave and stepped inside.

  They had set up a little command center here. Radio receivers, phones, tablets, and cables filled the place. Steve and a handful of others were here, working the equipment. Steve, bless his heart, had once asked Addy why Beethoven's parents had named him after a dog, and he still thought bilingual meant you were born with two tongues. But the big blockhead was something of an idiot savant; he was a genius at digital and analog communications and encryption. He had rigged this system together, allowing their cave to communicate with a hundred other camps across the forest—and to seek out rebels around the globe.

  "Hey, bitches!" Addy said. "We got grub! I'm going to gut this deer outside, so if anyone wants the entrails, let me know now before I feed them to the dogs!"

  Nobody answered.

  They were all staring at a radio.

  A voice was emerging from the speaker, staticky. Addy leaned closer, listening with them. She frowned.

  "What language is that?" she said.

  "We don't know," said Steve, face somber. "It's been repeating for hours. Priority One message. It's coming to us from Europe."

  Her eyes widened. "There are survivors in Europe?"

  Steve nodded. "And they're desperate to speak to us. But we can't understand them." He lifted a small device. "This app should be able to detect any language. German, Spanish, Italian, French, Russian, even fucking Klingon. You name it, this device should be able to recognize and translate it. It doesn't even know what language this is, let alone how to translate it. We don't know what the Europeans are saying. But they really want us to hear."

  Addy frowned at the radio. She narrowed her eyes. "It's a code. Of course it is. Some kind of fancy Pig Latin. If we have one of those translating devices, the marauders might have one too."

  Steve lifted a device in his second hand. "That's where this puppy comes in. It detects patterns in codes. It doesn't crack the code for you—you still need a key for that—but it tells you what type of code you're dealing with. Well, I ran it through. Nada. This ain't a code. It's a language."

  Addy closed her eyes, listening. The language . . . she had heard it before. Tagalog? She had heard Lailani mumble to herself in that language before. Hebrew? She had heard Ben-Ari use some of that language before. Punjabi, perhaps? Sergeant Singh used to pray in that tongue. As Addy kept listening, more and more memories fired. Older memories. Memories from her earliest childhood. She closed her eyes.

  The smell of baking cookies, corn on the cob, and fresh bread. The chinking of beads. Flute music in a parlor, and a little girl running through a garden, picking flowers, and a kindly old man, so ancient he could barely walk . . .

  Addy's eyes snapped open.

  "My great-grandfather." She hopped onto her feet. "Yes!"

  Steve looked at her. "What? What about him?"

  Addy trembled with excitement. "I know I look like a Viking princess. That's all my European blood. But my great-grandfather was First Nations. I remember him speaking this language. It's—"

  "Cree," Pinky said. He nodded. "Used to buy baseball cards from a Cree guy."

  Addy shot him a withering glare. "You just had to steal my thunder, didn't you?"

  Pinky shrugged. "Hey, sweetheart, don't hate the player, hate the game. Makes sense, don't it? The Europeans want to talk to us Canadians. They use our native tongue. They probably know it's not in the standard translating apps, in case the marauders got ahold of a translator."

  Addy nodded, the deer forgotten. "All right, we've got ten thousand people hiding in these woods. Somebody here is bound to speak Cree." She pointed at a few of her people. "Bran, Russ, Jasmine, head out to the nearest camps and ask around. Pinky, you go with them. I want this done offline. I don't want to fuck up our codes and reveal to the marauders that they need a Cree speaker, because they'll find one too. We go to every cave, tent, and bunker in this forest, and if we don't find anyone here, we move north until we reach native villages. If we have to cross the continent, we'll find a Cree speaker, and we'll translate this message."

  Steve nodded. He spoke into the radio in English. "Boat stuck in the water. Adjusting our sails and should reach the shore in a couple days." He looked up at Addy. "Old radio trick. Means we're working on the code and should have it cracked within two days." He blew out his breath, fluttering his lips. "Man, back when I learned this stuff, I waded into the lake three times before I figured it out."

  As it were, it didn't take two days. By that night, they had found Wawetseka—an old woman, well into her seventies but still tough as old leather, a rifle slung across her shoulder and two cigarettes in her mouth.

  "Grew up Cree here in Algonquin," Wawetseka said. "Still remember when we had our villages before the scum. Whatever the white man left, they took. But I still honor the old ways. I still speak the tongue. I still fight for my home."

  They sat the old woman down in their cave, and they gave her the best slice of deer, and they lit her a third cigarette. And they had her listen.

  The old woman clucked her tongue. "Their dialect is different from mine. Cree is all dialects, every vill
age with its own. Each village can understand the next one over, but the more villages you move, the more different the dialects are." She frowned, listening to the message on the radio. "Oh, this young one speaks poorly. But yes. I understand. I will translate. Bring me pen and paper."

  Addy frowned as the language was translated onto the page. She raised an eyebrow.

  "It's gibberish! It's just nonsense. 'The elephant lost his tusks, so the game of Chinese checkers was lost. Keep an eye on the children from the sea, the tides come in early this winter, but the ball is still on.' What the fuck does that mean?"

  Steve lifted one of the sheets of paper. "This," he said, "is our code. Now we have something to decipher."

  They were up all night—Wawetseka translating Cree into gibberish English, and Steve and his boys translating the code into proper sentences. The Europeans had been clever. The nouns in the gibberish English represented letters; using only the nouns, they could spell out new words, phonetically, letter by letter. The translation of noun-to-letter came over encrypted too, protected by several layers of passwords. Each password was the name of a Hollywood actor, with only the movie title given; humans would know the actors, marauders would not. Finally, they were able to unscramble the gibberish English, translated from the Cree, into proper sentences. Just before dawn, the code was cracked, the message translated.

  Bleary-eyed, Addy stared at the translated message.

  "My God," she whispered.

  Steve clasped her hand. Silently, they all read the words over and over.

  To the North American Resistance,

  Do not despair! The Human Defense Force stills stands. Our siblings in air and space have fallen, but on land and at sea, we fight on! Along the Pacific Rim, in the rainforests of the African equator, in the hinterlands of Siberia, in the deserts of Arabia, and everywhere on this small world where the enemy attacks, we will be there to resist him. Many battles were lost. Many brave humans fell. Many still cry out in agony from the inferno of the slaughterhouses. But many still fight!

  The tyrant Malphas, leader of the marauders, lurks in his hive in the city once called Toronto. And there we will strike him!

  On the first day of spring, the Human Defense Force will invade the fallen continent of North America. We will land in the ruins of New York City. From there, we will make our way north to our final destination.

  The Human Defense Force has fallen in North America, but not the human spirit! The Resistance still fights! We call for all Resistance warriors to assist our landing. On the first day of spring, meet us in New York City. Fight with us there. We will invade with all our might, and we will liberate North America—and then the world.

  The Earth is an island in the cosmic sea. To quote a great leader: We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. WE SHALL NEVER SURRENDER!

  Pinky rose to his feet. He saluted. "We shall never surrender."

  Steve rose next. "We shall never surrender."

  Addy rose with them. She repeated the words. Soon everyone in the cave, all these ragged rebels, stood and chanted these words like a hymn. "We shall never surrender!"

  Footsteps thudded.

  Angela burst into the cave. The young woman was panting, her red hair in disarray, her rifle in her hands.

  "Marauders!" she cried. "Marauders outside!"

  Addy grabbed her rifle and ran. Steve and the others followed close behind. They raced outside into the dark forest.

  The aliens were everywhere.

  From every tree, the eyes stared, black, glittering, beads of darkness. Their claws reached out. Their jaws opened, and they howled—cries that shook the forest, that cracked the icicles, that sent snow cascading and branches falling. Hundreds of them under the stars, creatures from the depths. Hunters. Marauders.

  "Never surrender!" Addy shouted and fired her gun.

  The marauders leaped toward her, and blazing gunfire and splashing blood filled the forest.

  CHAPTER SIX

  "Another ship ruined," Ben-Ari said, looking at the damage. "I sure seem good at destroying expensive starships."

  "Some women break hearts," Lailani said. "Others break their husband's bank accounts. You break starships. Nobody's perfect."

  Ben-Ari smiled wryly. "Oh, hearts and husbands are safe from me. Not so much the Marilyn." She lowered her visor and hefted her soldering iron. "Let's get to work."

  They stood in the field outside the medieval town, facing their smashed starship. Marco and Kemi were still in the forest, looking for food. Ben-Ari and Lailani had stayed behind to try to repair the Marilyn. Thankfully, no more soldiers had arrived to fire arrows, and the peasants in the field gave them a wide berth.

  They got to work. Ben-Ari worked on the cracked hull while Lailani tackled the broken wing. Both were badly damaged. Both required tearing metal panels out from the ship's interior. As they worked, the sun beat down, and sweat soaked Ben-Ari. She tried to ignore the hunger in her belly, the weakness in her arms, the pain in her temples, the trembling of her fingers.

  She let Bach's St Matthew's Passion play in her earbuds as she worked. It was one of her favorite pieces of music. She often played it when troubled. Bach's Passion. Mozart's Requiem. Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. She recognized the irony of it. She, a Jewish woman of the twenty-second century, listening to Christian liturgies from a time when the church had persecuted her people. Yet the music had always soothed her, despite its history, despite the foreign language. She found it beautiful. Soothing. Out of context, a piece of human beauty, of the soul, here in the distant sky.

  Einav Ben-Ari had always carried mementos with her to battle. The medals of her ancestors who had fought the Nazis. A book of poems by Abba Kovner. A copy of Night by Elie Wiesel. Reminders of the suffering of her people, of the cruelty of tyrants, of why she fought for the downtrodden, why she resisted the bullies of the galaxy. But music . . . music had always been different to her. She had always taken Earth's music into space. Not to remind her of her duty, of the yoke of history. But to remind her of humanity's soul. Of the beauty humans could create. In a cosmos full of cruelty, music was a reminder that humans could be noble.

  The music of Bach and Beethoven and Mozart. The paintings of Frida Kahlo and Toulouse-Lautrec and Cezanne—and her own little attempts at watercolors and gouache. Books by Isabelle Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and J.R.R. Tolkien. These were treasures that she could always take out from their box, admire their beauty, seek comfort in them. Perhaps more than the sacrifices of soldiers, more than the ingenuity of scientists, the work of artists inspired her. Art was proof that humanity was worth fighting for.

  That is something the scum, the marauders, the bullies will never understand, she thought. That we humans are not only strong. Not only wise. But that, when we are not cruel, we can be beautiful.

  She supposed it was why Marco wrote stories. Why Kemi danced. Why Lailani had dedicated her life to teaching children to read. To bring beauty into the world. That was nobility.

  Ben-Ari had dabbled with her own art. She had scribbled some poems, painted some watercolors. Perhaps in another life, she might have been an artist, lived in a studio by the beach, lived to create. But that had not been her lot.

  It's my lot to raise a sword so others can raise paintbrushes and pens. It's for them, the artists, that I fight.

  She let out a little laugh as she welded the crack in the hull. The music was making her sentimental. Perhaps when Kemi came back, they would all listen to Buddy Holly and Elvis, would dance instead of contemplate humanity. Perhaps Ben-Ari had always been more of a dreamer than a dancer. Her mother had loved music, had loved to dance . . .

  Damn it. And now tears were obscuring her vision. And damn it! Now she had messed up her welding.

  She turned off her soldering iron. She had caused more damage than helped, she suspected. She was too hungry. Too tired. Not just the weariness of the body. A deeper, older weariness, one she could not shake.

  Lailani had
paused from her work. She was looking at her.

  "I need another sheet of graphene," Ben-Ari said.

  She stepped into the ship hurriedly, wanting to hide her tears. She was still Lailani's captain. Still commander of this ship, of her crew. She needed to be strong for them, to comfort them. They were afraid, she knew. They needed to know she was in control, calm, confident, that she could save them.

  She rummaged through the ship, seeking scrap metal she could use, but she found nothing. Damn it! She would have to remove a bulkhead, maybe one between the bridge and the crew quarters. She stepped into the bunk, but the wall was solid. She would need to create a tool, some sort of saw out of engine parts. That could take hours if not days.

  We'll starve by then, she thought. And Earth needs us. And we're stuck here. And . . .

  She could stand the music no longer. She tore out her earbuds. She stood for long moments, shaking, struggling to take deep breaths.

  "Be strong, Einav," she whispered. "Be strong. Be calm. Be in control. For your crew. For Earth."

  She wanted to continue to work. To fight. She had to always keep fighting. Her crew needed her. Her planet needed her. Her . . .

  She sat on her bed, and she covered her eyes, and she breathed deeply. And tears filled her eyes.

  I always must be the strong one, Ben-Ari thought. When do I get to be weak? What if I need help?

  "Ma'am?" Lailani stood at the doorway.

  Ben-Ari turned away, her cheeks flushing. She forced herself to speak with a clear, confident voice. "I'll be right out, Sergeant."