Charger the Soldier

by Lea Tassie

  THE CHARGER CHRONICLES

  BY

  LEA TASSIE

  Copyright 2016 Lea Tassie

  Published by Lea Tassie at Smashwords

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be

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  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without

  prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the

  author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or

  dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 Dart speaks to Reader

  Chapter 2 Blix and Ook

  Chapter 3 Mahoud

  Chapter 4 A trip to Galactic Central

  Chapter 5 The trigger

  Chapter 6 Trouble at Gobekli Tepe

  Chapter 7 Descent into hell

  Chapter 8 Charger goes to war

  Chapter 9 The Eagles land

  Chapter 10 Conflict behind the lines

  Chapter 11 Undead reds

  Chapter 12 A new fighting machine

  Chapter 13 Capturing aliens

  Chapter 14 The mad pilot

  Chapter 15 An unexpected army

  Chapter 16 The mother ship

  Chapter 17 Celebrating the heroes

  Chapter 18 The Bat Cave

  Chapter 19 Blackmail in New Denver

  Chapter 20 Talking to Dinosauroids

  Chapter 21 Discovery in Somalia

  Chapter 22 Terrorism

  Chapter 23 Highjacking

  Chapter 24 Hanna says goodbye

  Chapter 25 Forty years postwar

  Glossary

  About Lea Tassie

  Other Books by Lea Tassie

  Preview

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A heartfelt thank you to all those people who helped make this novel better: Leanne Allen, Anna Becker, Sharon King-Booker, Laura Langston, Phil Sutton, and most of all, to my science guy.

  We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

  Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)

  Chapter 1 Dart speaks to Reader

  My name is Dart. I'm an average kind of guy, who has led an average life, with two exceptions. I am more than a thousand years old, as perhaps you can guess from my long gray hair and beard.

  And I am the last man to walk the face of this once great planet Earth.

  You sit there, Reader, hearing my story, and you ask what it's like to live a thousand years. I can only speak for myself because I'm not exactly average anymore, and not entirely human either. When I was born, the normal life span of a human was just barely one hundred and thirty years. Yes, I can see you're surprised.

  Why am I the last man on Earth? Obviously you have many questions. And I am just the man to give you the answers, which Charger has delegated me to do.

  You want to know why I wear a tall, black pointed hat and a robe embroidered with planets? Because, back about five hundred years ago when everybody decided to role-play, I chose to be a wizard.

  No, the people on Ceres voted to become Dwarves and those on Mars to become Elves. Earthers went steampunk and the population of New Eden became mostly Techno-creeps. Besides, I am tall, thin, bony, and a little hunched, so a wizard's costume suited me better than anything else popular at the time.

  Reader, my eyes are black and piercing, not black and spooky! You must stop teasing and pay attention.

  Yes, of course I am going to explain everything. As a matter of fact, I must explain everything, for you alone will carry the entire history of humanity into the future.

  Why you alone? Because in just a few days the biggest and most powerful enemies humans have ever faced will be here, bent on destroying Earth. That's why you must concentrate on what I have to teach you.

  No, Charger will save you.

  How long is the story? Well, it starts in 65,000,000 BCE and will end sometime this week, the middle of August, in 4800 CE.

  Don't sigh, Reader. The story is long in years, but not in the telling. I'll leave out all the boring bits. And yes, I do know that when humanity began, perhaps a million years ago, we were very primitive. But there were some mighty interesting and important events that happened much further back, which determined how we turned out and who we ended up fighting for our survival.

  Is Charger the hero?

  Well, I wouldn't call Charger a hero, though perhaps I should since he's my father. He began life, in the twenty-first century, as one of the saviors of Earth but eventually became a despised monster.

  How can I call my father a monster?

  Listen, Reader, he was reviled by all. To call him malevolent or evil is to accord him some high purpose in life, but nothing could be further from the truth. He became a brute who felt rage but never pity, and seemed utterly bereft of the goodness and decency possessed by the kind young man from whom he was created.

  Do I hate him?

  Sometimes. But then I remember that before he became Charger R/T, he was just Charger, and before that, Henry, a young man who willingly gave up everything but life itself to ensure the survival of humanity.

  He was a hated but necessary blackness thrust upon our very existence. No shadowy figure in the darkness waiting to strike the unsuspecting, no grand speechmaker fooling listeners with sugary words, his willingness to kill never abated. And his disdain for humanity was absolute. A paradox: humans meant nothing and yet everything to this frantic madness known as Charger.

  But, in humanity's desperate hours, in every fight for our very right to exist, we needed a hero.

  What we delivered to ourselves instead, created by our own hands, was the unacknowledged monster found in every last one of us, in the deepest recesses of our minds. The monster who denies incestuous desires, then fulfills them; the false friend who will manipulate to gain power; the molester of innocents; the preacher of divine behavior who indulges in whoring and theft. In a desperate bid for survival, our fear of death drove us to manifest in living flesh that which we all claim to despise.

  I will describe to you, Reader, a great and terrible time on planet Earth. The story will explain to what lengths we were driven, what moralities we rejected, what disgust we willingly embraced. It will explain who Charger is, and what we became because of him.

  What justifications can I give you for the atrocities humanity committed?

  None.

  This is the story of Charger and of humanity. I must leave it to you to judge. When the story is done, that will be your task.

  Chapter 2 Blix and Ook

  During the reign of dinosaurs on Earth around sixty-five million years BCE, the Grays, alien beings of an empire called Betelle, were a great and powerful race. They plied the distances in space as easily as humans back in the twenty-first century drove across the country. The Betelle Realm was so vast they needed entire solar systems to accommodate their population. And, not satisfied with simply finding new worlds to live on, these beings towed fertile planets into orbit around suns perfect
to light and heat their settlements.

  The citizens of Betelle shared many of the paths humanity took as they evolved. Much like humans, they evolved from simple to complex, warred against neighbors, and destroyed civilizations. Their life spans were triple those of the healthiest humans and their 'year' measured three of ours. They grew crops and kept animals. Most important, they developed incredibly advanced and complex technology, though this still led to the destruction and rebuilding of cultures countless times.

  The Grays also resembled us in basic body form. However, they were shorter, around four feet, and hairless, with dark gray, leathery skin. Their large heads had eyes with black pupils in gray irises. Long arms with many-jointed fingers helped them to manipulate every sort of tool. As to character, they resembled the more aggressive of our species in being acquisitive and power-hungry.

  The Grays sent explorers out into the blackness of space to find treasure and new information to add to their store of knowledge and Earth was one of their many stops. They found it to be a simple but rich place during the time of the dinosaurs. None of the existing creatures had noticeable intellect or other benefits to offer, so they decided to expunge the planet's animal forms and plunder its resources. Eventually they would tow the planet itself to a solar system already under construction.

  But fate, as it often does, intervened.

  As the Grays left the planet behind, they fired a light beam that altered the path of a large asteroid, which fell on what was later known as the Yucatan peninsula. The Grays returned a hundred thousand years later, when the atmosphere and climate had returned to normal for that particular time, and found that the extinction event had been a success.

  That is, except for a small group of survivors on an isolated southern continent. One curious Betellian decided to experiment on them. These Troodon were small dinosaurs, up to eight feet long, three to four feet tall, and around a hundred and ten pounds. Their brains were, relative to their body mass, six times larger than any other dinosaur, and they had semi-manipulatable fingers and binocular vision. The Betellian succeeded in breeding them to produce fingers, better brains and vision, and called them Dinosauroids. It seemed appropriate that these animals should be given the opportunity to use their primitive intelligence in service to the beings of Betelle.

  This proved to be disastrous.

  Never before had the Betellians encountered such devious and determined creatures. They became far more intelligent than expected and rebelled against servitude time after time. Finally, the experiment was deemed too hazardous to continue, and attempts were made to kill the project.

  The Dinosauroids had other ideas. The Betellians brought more of their own kind to Earth to contain the burgeoning population but, though they killed many Dinosauroids, they were unable to eliminate them entirely. The Betellian who had created the Dinosauroids admired the tenacity of the little mischief-makers and decided they had earned the right to exist. This Betellian searched the Grays' archives of knowledge and found what was called a 'black' project, deemed too controversial to continue and thus long forgotten.

  The time-lock device seemed the perfect solution. The creator of the Dinosauroids decided to make several of these devices and use one to lock away the creatures, hoping that time would tame the wondrous children it had created.

  The problem-solver was doomed to fail. Before he could use his devices, a migrating flock of birds, pushed off course by strong winds and carrying a new virus, landed on the continent. The virus infected all the Dinosauroids, but killed only the weak. Thereafter, the survivors carried the virus in natural body oils exuded by their fine, delicate scales. When dried, some of the oils stuck to the scales but most floated freely in the air. Inhaled by the Grays, these caused a fatal viral outbreak impossible to stem.

  Most of the Betellians fled back to their various planets, thus infecting and destroying the great civilization of Betelle. The few scattered survivors sought refuge in a different layer of time via the time-lock. They emerged, after what seemed to be only a few hundred years, to discover that the time-lock processed time at a different rate than normal space. Sixty-three million years of ordinary time had passed. Now these few, even with their advanced technology, faced a daunting task.

  The Grays embarked on a cloning program to recreate their enormous lost population and forgot the incident on Earth. But one day, primitive humans chanced on an abandoned Betelle device and accidentally turned it on, sending a signal out into the cosmos. The new clones of the Betelle empire relearned the old history of Earth, realized the planet still had valuable resources, and determined to put an end to the viral scourge. They sent fifteen of their mightiest warships to Earth. However, when they arrived in this distant corner of space, they were astonished to find, not Dinosauroids, but creatures who looked something like them.

  However, these creatures had no tails. They sported body hair instead of scaly hides. They also appeared to have more intelligence than the Dinosauroids. Once again, a curious Betellian decided to experiment.

  >>>

  Dart speaks to Reader:

  Yes, Reader, you're now hearing what happened about two million years ago. I got through sixty-three million years in almost no time, didn't I?

  Were these new creatures humans? We would probably call them apes, but they were certainly the ancestors of modern humans.

  No, the Dinosauroids didn't disappear. Remember, they were thriving when the Grays escaped into a different time-line. They will appear again later in the story. I'm afraid the Grays appear again, as well. Too many times.

  You want to know what it's like to be experimented on, to have your DNA altered? Blix will explain.

  >>>

  My eyes open. There is pain, and I cannot move. An odor strikes my senses; it is sharp and rancid. My confusion grows and panic sets in. I do not know where I am. Whatever is holding me down is painful and keeps me from looking around. I squint as a bright light hovers above me and shines into my watering eyes.

  I come to understand that I do not know who I am, or what I am. A sound emanates from somewhere near; it sounds like a scream. Then I realize the scream is coming from me, but I do not know how I am doing it.

  There are no trees and this place is cold and damp. I remember the cave of my father that I live in, the images of the hunt on the walls. There is no smell of fire here and that makes me afraid. There are more sounds, like birds chirping, but I cannot see where they come from. Then more pain comes. I twist and try to escape, but am held fast and I cry out. The sound I make before everything goes away is frightening and unfamiliar.

  My eyes open. The feel of something wet on my face causes me to flinch. There are eyes above me, looking at me. I am afraid of them. Something sharp and threatening comes into view and the wetness on my face begins to sting. I cry out against the pain, hoping it will stop. Then a burning, numbing pain enters me, causing my body to twist and heave. Unable to move, I try to close my eyes. I cannot. The sharp thing is in my eye and makes me scream.

  Why is this happening? What is going on? Then the thought of the hunt gives me a moment of peace. I feel the stone in my hand, cold and hard, and I wait for the beast to get close. We all yell and several of us attack the beast and hit it till it stops moving. My stomach wrenches; soon I will eat. Then the thought is gone and the eyes return to hang in front of my face. The face with the eyes is becoming clear and it is unfamiliar. I have never seen this face before and it makes me shake.

  My eyes open. It is dark. I hear familiar sounds. They are sounds from the others, the others from the hunt. One sound I know is family. I call out but cannot see the face that goes with that voice. This dark has no round light that hangs above in the sky, the light that returns when the bright fire goes away. We will not hunt without the round light, the beasts can smell us and hear us even when they can't see us.

  A face I know passes my eyes. I call out but it does not stop. I try again to move but my body is held fast and this angers me
. I try to fight, to move and strike out. My hands feel around, touching smooth cold, then the warm flesh of my legs. The eyes of pain return and something good nears my nose, smelling like food. I try to bite it. It is food and I am relieved; my hunger makes me eat till the food stops. I am still hungry and make the sound to let the eyes of pain know. But the eyes are gone and then I sleep.

  My eyes open. A face I know is there. The smell is familiar, for I have known this face many seasons. The look from the face is different. It is studying me, touching me, poking me. I shove the face away from me, then realize I can move. All around me is cave, the rocks cold and hard, flat and smooth, strangely even. There is no fire and no images; the cave is not that of my father. It is different. I do not understand this cave and it frightens me. More faces and sounds, sounds that are unfamiliar yet known.

  One face I know asks if I hurt. I say I do, but do not know how I said that. Other faces are making sounds and I seem to understand them, but I am confused, so I just sit and listen. The bird chirps return, but that sound is from all around me. I look about to find the birds and pain fills my back. I have been hit, or stung, like happened once before when I was young. It grows dark.

  My eyes open. Afraid of what might happen, I quickly look for shelter. I need a rock, and my hands reach out, searching. The cave is bright and I find a good rock. It is hard and I hold it near my chest. I will strike the first eyes I see. An old one from the family walks toward me. I growl and lash out. The old one says something I seem to understand but I refuse to listen. I continue to threaten; I will strike the old one if he gets too close. He backs away and I feel safe and powerful. This is a good rock. I sit until the cave gets dark, and I watch the others and wonder what is happening. No one walks toward me in the light of the cave, but in the dark, one might try. I sit holding my rock, waiting for a fight until I am no more.