The Tactics of Revenge thc-4

by T. R. Harris

  “Ah, here is Senior Fellow Limmore. He has served as the senior intermediary between us and your Mr. McCarthy for some time now,” said Linuso. “He is an expert on what you call Human Nature.” He then turned to greet the other Klin. “You can see what your charge has done to our distinguished guest, Limmore. It was quite barbaric.”

  Limmore took a seat to the side of the desk. “I would expect nothing less. It is, after all, what makes the Humans so valuable to us.”

  The other two Klin came over to Adam and began their examination. After a moment, one of them pulled a jar from a small bag and began to dab some of its contents onto Adam’s swollen face. Almost immediately the swelling began to subside. The other Klin then took a small metal device of some kind and placed it against Adam’s right temple. Adam’s eyes suddenly grew wide.

  “That’s amazing,” he said. “My headache’s gone, as is most of the pain. That shit’s amazing!” He blinked several times and could now see much better through his left eye.

  One of the medical Klin address the Pleabaen, “He will be well in a few minutes; there doesn’t appear to be any brain damage.”

  “Very good!” Linuso exclaimed, appearing truly excited with the prognosis. He looked over at Limmore.

  “Almost ready,” the younger Klin said to Linuso, cryptically.

  “Good. Now I will have Ludl escort the three of you to a room where you may rest and receive nourishment if need be. The events I spoke of before are coming to fruition. I will soon have you join me in the command center for the grand finale — oh I just love the way you Humans speak, with all your embellishments and colloquialisms. It shouldn’t be more than an hour now. Ludl, please show them to their quarters.”

  “What about the others?” Adam said as he stood up, more sure of his footing than before. “We are a team.”

  Linuso was silent for a moment before answering. “Very well, take them with you, too, including your two mule-driver friends. I’m sure you will all enjoy the show.”

  Once in the anteroom, Adam was reunited with the other five from his group, looking tired yet anxious. Tobias took a closer look at Adam. “What the fuck did they do to you in there?”

  “It wasn’t them — it was another Human, an SAS commando named McCarthy. He’s working with the Klin.”

  “Follow me,” Ludl said from near the door.

  The three SEALs turned toward him; Adam could sense them tensing up for a strike.

  “Stand down,” he ordered. “It looks like we’ve all been invited to a special viewing of the latest interstellar blockbuster. Until then, they want us to wait in a room for about an hour — and that means all of us.” He made eye contact with Kaylor and winked his good right eye. He felt almost giddy from whatever the Klin had given him. Considering how shitty he had felt only minutes before, he was grateful for any relief. And if he ever saw that son-of-bitch McCarthy again….

  Chapter 45

  They were taken to a room only a few doors down the carpeted hallway from Linuso’s office. It was large and comfortable, with two beds, a couch and two chairs. Adam entered the room’s grooming station and cleaned up some before returning to the main room and falling onto one of the beds. Sherri nuzzled in next to him.

  Riyad did the courtesy of filling in the others as to what had gone on inside Linuso’s office, while Adam rested his head in Sherri’s lap. The drugs were good, but damn, this was getting ridiculous.

  “So what do you think this grand finale is,” Tobias asked Riyad.

  “It’s obviously some major battle between us and the Juireans. The Klin appear to have an absolute hard-on for the event.”

  “Do you think they’re going to interfere, to manipulate the outcome somehow?” Sherri asked.

  “Undoubtedly, but to what end I don’t know. I can’t imagine them helping the Juireans to defeat us, and they still need our manpower to continue the war.”

  “It sounds like they expect the war to end quickly…anytime now,” Master Chief Rutledge said.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” offered Lt. Tobias. “The war’s only been going on for a few months. There’s still a lot of galaxy to cover.”

  “Give it as rest, guys,” Adam said from the bed, his eyes closed, soothed by Sherri’s stroking of his hair. “All will be revealed soon, the head honcho told us. Right now, we’ll just drive ourselves crazy trying to second guess these crazy, backstabbing bastards.”

  Everyone in the room was quite — for about a minute — before John Tindal broke the silence. “I say they’ll try to help the Juireans, just so the war will go on longer-”

  “But I said it’s like they expect the war to end now,” Rutledge countered.

  Jesus Christ! Adam thought. And the debate resumed unabated.

  Chapter 46

  The Klin war room, located six stories below ground level in the sprawling estate, was a masterpiece of technology and efficiency. It was almost forty-meters square, with every imaginable monitoring device, computer terminal and graphic display that the considerable scientific talents of the Klin could muster. And on top of all this, their communication relays were faster than anything else in the galaxy, allowing for near-instantaneous links from halfway across the galaxy. This was technology the Klin had never revealed to anyone, not in the time of the Alliance, and not now in a time of war. Only the Klin could boast of such technology — and the Klin never boasted.

  And the fact that Pleabaen Linuso Summlin could receive real-time updates from anywhere in the galaxy allowed him to be one of the first Klin to receive the communique from the Fringe….

  “This can’t be accurate,” he said to High Commander Senior Fellow Olin Puennel.

  “Three separate monitoring stations have confirmed it. There is a new Human fleet moving into the Sector.”

  Linuso looked once more at the datapad in his hand. “This speaks of five-hundred thirty-five new ships. What does Senior Fellow Lumonsee say about this from Earth?”

  “We have not been able to make link with the Senior Fellow since receiving the report. We have only been attempting to contact him for about ten minutes. We are continuing to link.”

  Limmore was standing next to the Pleabaen, looking up at the graphic of the Falor-Kapel system and at the forces moving into position there. “That new fleet is too far out to assist. The battle will be over weeks before it can be in the vicinity of Falor-Kapel.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Linuso. “What troubles me is that we have had no reports of a fleet leaving Earth and heading for the Expansion. Surely Lumonsee would have known of it.”

  “That would be expected. And yet here is this new fleet.”

  Linuso smiled slightly and nodded his head. “Could the Humans have built this fleet unbeknownst to the Senior Fellow and all our spies and surrogates? If so, then maybe we have underestimated the Humans — or Lumonsee.”

  “We have thousands of 2G’s and hundreds of surrogates who have infiltrated the entire structure of Human society. I can’t imagine them being able to accomplish this without our knowledge.”

  “And that is why I am the Pleabaen, Limmore, because I can imagine it.”

  He turned to the High Commander. “You must make contact with Lumonsee. I have to know what is happening on Earth.”

  Linuso walked away, with Limmore flowing closely behind. He entered a large viewing room, lined with chairs like those in a movie theater. On one side of the room was a large plate-glass window looking out on the command center. On the opposite wall was a large screen, currently displaying the graphic of the Falor-Kapel system and the relative position of the warring parties. The differently-colored contacts were growing ever closer to each other. Linuso turned to Limmore. “Please have our guests escorted here now. It is about to begin.”

  “What of McCarthy and Thomas?”

  “Not them. When the truth comes out, I want them under close guard.”

  “Understood, Pleabaen.”

  Chapter 47

  It was simp
ly called The List, and it had taken over eight months to gather. Now the President of the United States, Daniel ‘Danny’ Ryan, was finally ready to make use of it.

  The document sat on his desk — seventy-five pages wrapped in a dark blue vellum-bristol cover and spotting no title, simply a gold-embossed Seal of the United States of America. And the desk it rested upon was not the original Resolute Desk, the one that so many presidents before him had used. Rather it was a new desk, a plain and simple desk, moved here several months before from his underground bunker in the mountains of West Virginia. It also resided in a new White House, one hastily constructed on the grounds of the old one, but looking nothing like the original.

  All that had once been the glory and majesty of Washington D.C. had been destroyed on that bright afternoon day in early November, when the Juireans had unleashed a catastrophic rain of fire from high in orbit above the planet. Nearly every major city center around the world had been hit, with the more severe damage reserved for the most-densely populated areas. New York, Tokyo, London, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Sao Paulo and so many more had suffered the most. Sprawling cities like Los Angeles and Paris had not suffered as badly. They had taken their hits, of course, yet the conflagration that followed had been more easily contained. In other locations, it had been the fires that caused the most death and destruction.

  Ryan put his hand on the thin booklet and tried to reflect on just what The List contained. It was a resolution — a reckoning of sorts — the culmination of a quest for revenge that had started the moment the first fireballs had dropped from the sky.

  It had been the Juireans who had perpetrated the attack and the devastation that followed, and yet it was the Klin who had set all the events in motion. The Klin had convinced the Juireans that the Humans of Earth were a threat to them, so severe in nature that only a preempted strike could protect them. And so the Juireans came, and they killed. They killed over a billion Human beings, most in the course of the three-hour bombardment of the planet. So many thousands more were lost in the fires, starvation and disease that followed.

  And that was what made the sins of the Klin so diabolical and unforgivable.

  In the aftermath of the devastation, the Klin had arrived as mankind’s Saviors, bringing with them food, shelter and energy — an express path out of the darkness and onto the road for revenge. They helped the people of the Earth recover in record time from an event so tragic. But what made Danny Ryan so livid was the fact that these same beings who had come as our friends were the very ones you had caused the tragedy in the first place. At least the Juireans were honest about their intentions. The Klin, on the other hand, turned out to be despicable backstabbing bastards of the first-degree.

  Adam Cain had been right all along.

  Now the Human race was about to make things right. And it was the Klin — in their rush to make Humanity strong again, strong enough to confront the Juireans head-on — who had sowed the seeds of their own demise.

  As it turned out, the superior technology of the Klin was not so superior after all — just more advanced. The science behind everything the Klin made available to the Humans — to help in their recovery and in their war against the Juireans — had been easily understood once revealed to the scientists and engineers. Across the planet there had been countless ‘ah-ha’ moments as the best minds Humanity had to offer began to dissect the science behind the wonders of the aliens. Cold fusion technology, gravity drives, advanced metallurgy and energy-based weapons systems soon became readily understood — and duplicated — in countless secret facilities around the globe.

  The transformation had been so remarkable and so swift, that already the Human race had been able to field a star fleet of their own, and right under the noses of the unsuspecting Klin.

  Whether the Klin had expected the Humans to steal the science and technology of their weapon systems, starships and means of reconstruction and energy production, Ryan would never know. If not, then the aliens truly did not understand mankind….

  All he had to do now was accept the fact that mankind had, in the course of eight short months, gained just about all the knowledge it was going to from the Klin and their surrogates. If that were the case, then The List could be acted upon, and all the months of tippy-toeing around the truth could come to an end.

  Danny Ryan, President of United States of America — default leader of the survivors of the most evil plot ever to be unleashed upon the people of the Earth — was about to authorize The Purge.

  Chapter 48

  Admiral William Keller sat on a couch in a crude reconstruction of the Oval Office, in a building that had been hastily erected on the grounds of the now bull-dozed under White House in Washington D.C. All around the area there was construction, rebuilding that which had been destroyed. However, the losses from the national museums and historical artifacts that defined America had been lost forever. The Capitol Mall was no more; gone, too, was the Capitol Building, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. Boxy temporary structures now dotted the landscape, where the great monuments of America’s great heritage had once stood, now sad reminders of all that had been lost on 11-6.

  Throughout the inner circles of all the governments around the world — among those who knew the truth — a seething anger dwelled. All this death and destruction, all the loss of life and of history, had been caused for no valid reason whatsoever. The Klin had simply used Humanity with no regard for life or property. In this way, they were so much worst that the actual creatures who had dropped the bombs.

  Every time Admiral Keller came to the new White House he had to pass through the ruins of this once great city. His office was in the Pentagon, just on the other side of the Potomac, yet a world away. Surprisingly, the massive building in Arlington, Virginia, had been spared in the attack, but not so the great monuments across the river. And he knew that Washington was just one of a hundred such cities struggling to recover after the attack.

  As he sat on the couch, watching the range of emotions cross the President’s face, Keller was anxious to get started. He carried a special Smith and Weston 45-caliber with him that he hoped he could use personally on as many of the traitorous Converts as he could get his hands on. The despicable low-life’s were about to get all they deserved.

  The document sitting on the President’s desk contained the names and locations of almost seventeen-thousand individuals from around the world. The names were broken down into two categories — the Saviors, or 2G’s, and the Converts.

  Originally, the list of 2G’s had contained over twenty-five thousand names just on its own. These were the Klin accomplices who had been born and raised off-planet, and who had come to be known as the Saviors. Yet over the months, it had been discovered that the 2G’s were more innocents than villains in the events surrounding the attack upon the Earth. Having been raised by the Klin from birth, most of them truly believed that the Juireans had perpetrated the attack upon the Earth unprovoked, and that the 2G’s had been sent to the planet to genuinely help their fellow Humans. So many of them soon discovered that the environment in which they had been raised was nothing like the reality of being native-born. Whether it was from an instinctive drive within us all to be social creatures, the 2G’s soon longed to be part of the greater Human family, and quickly rejected their Klin masters, especially when the truth was revealed to them.

  Through these new additions to the Human race, people like Ryan and Keller were soon gathering a comprehensive list of individuals who made up the second category of names in the document: the Converts.

  Keller would never understand what would make a native-born Human turn against his own race. He understood that throughout history there had always been traitors and spies, yet these had been individuals working against people on behalf of other people. The Converts were working for an alien race and against their own flesh and blood and DNA. It made absolutely no sense to Keller, and only showed how base and deprived Humanity could really be.


  “Well Admiral,” the President said, snapping Keller out of his own thoughts and back to the present, “are we sure about this?”

  “What do mean, Danny,” Keller said, truly surprised by the question.

  “I don’t mean about what we have to do, but rather are we ready to stand alone, come what may.”

  Keller now understood the question. The debate had raged on for months about whether or not Humanity could afford to alienate — no pun intended — the alien Klin. It would leave the Earth to stand alone against the Juireans, plus any reprisals the Klin may choose to send their way. It had taken a Herculean effort to convince not only Ryan, but also most of the other world leaders, that Humanity was indeed ready. Keller was now fully convinced that mankind could stand alone against any threat thrown against her.

  “Mr. President, this has to be done, and the sooner the better. For the past few months, the number of revelations coming from the Klin technology has dwindled to just about zero. There doesn’t seem to be too many more surprises left. Sure, we’re not as advanced as they are — how could we be in such a short time — yet we have the foundation we need to defend ourselves. And even with all their science and technology, the Klin have proven to be very backwards in their understanding of war, and even of Human nature. You would think that after all the hundreds of years of studying us that they would know us better. And the sooner we act, the sooner the world can learn the truth. It will be cathartic in a way.”

  “I know you’re right, Bill; we’ve been over this so many times in the past. It’s just that once the order goes out, there’ll be no turning back.”