Charger the Soldier

by Lea Tassie

  The real war began that day; no more ground would be given. The first of the world's alliances in this war had formed and was stalling alien superiority.

  The following week started like a rally on the stock markets, everyone scurrying about, excited about the turn of events. German and American forces, joined by what remained of the Canadian troops, were now coalescing into an effective wall of military might that seemed to stall the invading scourge, which so far had been unstoppable. Some parts of the globe had been hit especially hard in the first few weeks of chaos, including Canada, one of three major landing points for the aliens. Little could be done now to stop the advance on Canadian soil, so it was deemed best to add the Canadian strength to the fight on American soil.

  By Friday, it was obvious that those invaders being crushed by the united military front were the most expendable troops the aliens had. Even so, the standard alien soldier was difficult to stop. Its body was enveloped in some kind of semi-transparent slime, allowing the more solid center to move forward and form into a variety of weapons. Their most popular weapon was similar to porcupine quills, which were fired into enemy combatants. It took a concentration of gunfire centered on the solid parts of the aliens to have any real effect in killing them, while all the time the human soldiers tried to avoid being skewered by flying quills or directed rods resembling spears. If an alien soldier managed to get close to a human soldier, it would try to tear the human to pieces.

  Reports started trickling into command headquarters of large objects moving toward the united forces. These large aliens, or alien machines, now moving slowly toward the new front lines looked like they'd be even more impossible to stop.

  "I heard they were about twenty or thirty feet tall," Thad said to one of the young Canadians.

  "Where did you hear that?" Jeff was a tall, skinny farm boy from central Canada. He often described his home as the wheat belt.

  "One of the chopper pilots was out on a reconnaissance mission and said he saw the damn things moving, maybe a hundred of them."

  Jeff felt uneasy. Surviving for this long had been hard and the thought of facing something even more devastating was almost unbearable. He shifted, trying to find a more comfortable place behind the overturned cars and trucks being used as fortification. "Back on the farm, we got these critters called ground hogs that would eat a whole crop in a week. We found the only way to stop them was to flood the fields. Maybe we could do that here. They can't advance if they got no grip, right?"

  Thad said, "Maybe when one of the generals walks past, we should mention it."

  One of the German troops approached out the darkness and said, "I just hear, one of the big aliens he maybe fell over a nuclear missile silo. Big explosion. Command say the aliens stopped and they seem confused."

  Thad let out a whoop. "Maybe we can just nuke them, saves us having to fight."

  "Nein, they not die, just stop," the young German said.

  The youthful conversation carried on far into the night and in the morning the three were still clustered together behind their bunker of cars and trucks when a Major General with a grim expression emerged from a command tent barely fifty feet from their position. He hurried past them and into an older building, to a command room occupied by other high-level brass.

  The morning news revealed that the large aliens had resumed their slow and methodical march toward the stalled front lines. The ineffectiveness of aircraft was discussed, as well as the lesson learned from nuclear weaponry. Though the arguing went on for some time, the next step was clear. These new aliens were very different from what had been faced before, and no one knew whether or not they could be stopped. There was only the glimmer of hope that a surprise explosion of tremendous force like the one that had just happened would be an effective tactic.

  >>>

  Charger sat polishing and adjusting his plasma swords, while he listened to a newscaster summarizing the early weeks of the war. "Humanity had few choices after the attack started," the newsman said, "and we could not help feeling that using any weapon, no matter what, was preferable to defeat. Most of our cities fell victim almost at once to the mist the invaders generated, a biological weapon that first terrorized humans, then turned them into rotting corpses."

  Charger shrugged. This was old news.

  "Government arms like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, formed to help survivors of catastrophes, were faced with hellish chaos and were soon overworked and understaffed. No cataclysm ever imagined by civic planners could have prepared rescuers for the millions of corpses piling up in the streets of cities and small towns on every coastline in the world."

  Charger knew about those. He'd seen them.

  The newsman continued. "Our military at first mounted a brilliant defense, actually forcing the alien invaders to scatter. But the aliens regrouped and again began generating the mist that killed hundreds of thousands. The force of the invaders was so strong that dead bodies piled up in the streets faster than they could be put into graves."

  "Accurate tallies of those killed by the mist are available," Charger muttered, "so why doesn't this guy use them? As of yesterday, it was 53,677,431 in America. My brain maybe doesn't work as fast as it used to, but I'm still good at math." He focused again on the opinion piece.

  "The alien tactics are random, difficult for military minds to understand," said the newsman. "The thought processes of the invaders seem to bear no resemblance to the chess game of strategy, but are more like chaos theory run amuck. And, most puzzling, every time these creatures leave an area, all plant life has been wiped out, leaving not a single root or seed, nothing but the dirt. These invaders apparently don't want our home; they only want to ensure that humanity will not survive. The question is, why?"

  Charger shut off the radio. "Maybe the aliens figure we're too much of a nuisance to live. Anyway, they were going to attack sooner or later." Nobody seemed to understand that broadcasting Earth's position to the universe through radio waves would someday invite aliens to attack. Then when world leaders finally clued in, they thought switching all Earth's transmissions to digital would somehow cancel out the previous years of broadcasting the planet's strengths and weaknesses.

  The signal for boarding the plane sounded and Charger lumbered to his feet and headed for the tarmac to join the 92nd flight brigade for a jump into hostile territory. His swords felt comfortable and deadly in his hands. Many of the Hyborgs now used only the technologically advanced swords, rather than the weapons ordinary soldiers used. They were much better than bullets for killing aliens. Also, their heavy body armor combined with the leg and arm enhancements made moving and fighting the things a snap.

  Charger bared his fangs in a grimace of satisfaction. He'd seen several weeks of intense fighting since his conversion had been completed, and so far the humans were holding their ground. The aliens tried to emulate the humans in both combat and design, but they didn't seem to have any idea what they were doing. He'd seen one of them try to form itself into a human as camouflage and had concluded their vision must be way off. Its interpretation was roughly the outline of a soldier, but the texture was like that of a wet, wrinkled dishcloth. Maybe because their outsides seemed to be made of goop.

  Still, in spite of their mistakes, the aliens had gained ground, pushing survivors into smaller and smaller areas. That is, until the Hyborgs began fighting. Charger had been glad to see converts from other countries joining the ranks. Now they were all packed into aircraft flying high above the mass of alien invaders below.

  Charger drew back his lips again in what passed for a smile. The aliens had no idea what kind of hell was about to descend on their encampments. When the green light came on, signaling it was time to jump, he was first to go. The rest were pushing from behind and the speed with which they leapt from the aircraft was such that it quickly gained altitude. Descending through the darkness, he felt no fear. Being undead had eliminated fear.

  He landed hard and, with the other Hy
borgs behind him, swept forward through the alien camp. His blades swept and sliced, while a weird screaming or sizzling came from the butchered and dying enemy combatants.

  Charger covered ground fast. He had killed maybe fifty aliens when he found Dal lying on the ground in two pieces. Dal was still moving and trying to somehow pull himself together to continue the fight.

  A large green and black alien was moving through the ranks, hacking and slicing human soldiers in half. With no hesitation, and his speed increasing with each stride, Charger closed ground on the alien. Raising one sword high and leaping into the air, he came crashing down on it. As he stabbed the sword deep inside its surface, parts sheared off, but the alien kept advancing, seemingly oblivious to the assault. Sometimes Charger was slashing through liquid as hard parts gave way and the footing became treacherous, but he didn't stop.

  The alien turned to attack Charger directly and, for a brief moment, their eyes met. It had more eyes than he did. These multiple eyes were gold in color, but they were definitely eyes and they showed fear. Charger smiled, revealing all four of his fangs.

  One of those fangs already had a chip in it. Not from the war, though. He and Dal had gone on leave right after their conversion. They had been trained electronically how to fight and survive and their size had doubled, so they were impressive soldiers. But they were never taught how to go home.

  He'd been so eager to see Beth that he never thought about how she'd react to his appearance. The strain of war had affected the way she looked, too. Her hair was lank, she had lost weight, and her face was almost gray. But it was the eyes – those clear, beautiful ice blue eyes! – she was afraid of him now. That hurt, after all they'd meant to each other.

  The villagers donated blood and meat but he could read the fear in their faces, too. He was glad he'd been converted to a Hyborg so that he could kill aliens. And what made it even better was that now he lived without fear. So when the guy at the bar that night swung a baseball bat into his mouth, he decided to show them what fear really meant. He'd wanted to kill. But he couldn't. He'd beat the shit out of those guys, but he couldn't take the final step. It was like the conversion had done something to his brain.

  He only went home once after that. They didn't understand what he'd sacrificed so that they all had a chance to live. But so what?

  They gave him some blood and meat, so what?

  He could die in battle, anyway. What did they know? He missed Beth, but she was better off without him. She'd find someone else.

  Charger felt good, driving his sword through the head plate of the alien monster, seeing the gold fade from its multi-faceted eyes. The soldiers he fought with cheered his audacity and the thought of Beth faded.

  He yelled at the monster, "Look at me, you bastard! Look at me! Keep your fucking eyes open. I want you to see me as you die." When the last of the gold faded from its eyes, Charger smiled again, revealing all four fangs, three whole, one chipped.

  He took Dal's body back home a few days later. His mother didn't recognize her own son and rejected the corpse. Charger knew then that the Hyborgs would be forever outside of humanity, looking in. But he could live with that. He'd always lived with that, in one way or another.

  >>>

  Life in Russia had been especially hard during the invasion. While Germany rushed to the aid of America, Russia stood mostly alone. Refugees poured in daily, seeking refuge as the European countries quickly fell. India, China and other Asian countries followed suit. The alien invasion was global. No country was spared and many were overrun in a matter of days. By the end of that first chaotic week, the aliens' red mass and their poisonous mist covered a third of the world's landmass.

  The Russians used traditional and surprisingly effective tactics. They relied on the scorched-earth approach, used in World Wars I and II. As they retreated, they burned all the resources, leaving nothing for the enemy to consume. This confused and delayed the invaders, since they seemed to require the resources usually left behind, even though they destroyed them in the end.

  Russia had for years been working on their own method for repulsing possible alien invaders and their intelligent biological metals proved difficult to defeat. This smart-metal, first developed in the 1970s, had long been merely experimental, though the military was eager to use it. If they could create perfect soldiers, bonded with this living metal skin, no one would be able to defeat the Russians. America knew of the experiments, but took a different approach. Where Russia had tried to encase the soldier in ununseptium, element 117, considered a member of the poor metals group on the elements chart, similar to aluminum, America used it as only part of the living armor for the Hyborgs.

  Lieutenant General Mikhail Kalashnikov was placed in charge of the Russian super-soldier program in 1947, and became the driving force behind the smart-metals program. But it was his successor, Colonel Vladimir Pushkin, who won the first victory in 1972 by bonding element 117 to animals. Pushkin and his scientific team came up with some revolutionary ideas. They experimented with small rodents at first, bonding limited smart-metals most often only to the backbone, but these did serve as test cases for further study. The metals were 'smart' in that they could self-repair quickly, sometimes in seconds, acting as both a barrier to penetration and as a patch to prevent the body from bleeding out.

  The real problem the scientists faced was how to encase a soldier's full body in this living armor and still maintain his ability to breathe and move. This was not easy to do. Lungs needed to expand the chest in order to function and a chest wrapped in metal is restricted in its movement. Then they had to overcome the increased weight of the soldier and the radioactivity of the element. Initially they covered the first few human soldiers in hundreds of small flexible steel plates that made them look like human disco balls. However, the test subjects died of skin diseases and radiation poisoning, and the project was shelved until the alien invasion.

  The Russian program had a simpler approach than the American Hyborg program. The humans in the Russian program were unaltered at the genetic level, and not enhanced to withstand the deadly poisonous mist. It was soon learned that through manipulating the smart-metals in their molecular state, a stable and less radioactive compound could be quickly developed. It had the added benefit of being lighter in weight, showing that its connection to aluminum was not just an accident. The odd thing that resulted from this new process was that the smart-metals took on a deep reddish color and, as a result, the Russian super-soldiers became known as the Russian Blood Brigade.

  Ivan was an unremarkable kid from a school in the small town of Tura. Tura was located in the middle of Russia and, during the first few days of the invasion, certainly the safest place to be. Colonel Pushkin's original team of scientists was quickly reassembled and sent to Tura to restart the super-soldier program. By now, the Russian micro-engineering and biological enhancements program for strength and endurance had made impressive advancements, and many of the problems the team faced back in the seventies were easily overcome. One of these problems had been the lack of test subjects but now volunteers for the adaptation program were storming the gates. These brave young people were willing to sacrifice everything to save Russia and its people.

  Ivan was one of the first kids to volunteer, against his parents' wishes.

  "I understand most of our forces are retreating from the coasts," one of the new recruits said to Ivan as he and several other candidates sat in an office on the new military base, waiting to see if they could join the Blood Brigade.

  "I heard we are advancing on the enemy in a new direction, which just happens not to be the direction the enemy expects us to fight in," Ivan replied, with a gentle laugh.

  "That could be true," the other recruit replied, joining in on the laughter. "What better strategy for our forces than to lure them into Poland or Europe, then let those countries deal with the invaders?"

  A tall doctor entered the office and picked a few volunteers to follow him into the exam
ination rooms. There they sat naked, as nurses and doctors poked and prodded them. Many questions were asked of Ivan. He responded willingly and quickly, hoping that he would be picked, and he was.

  The process to become a super-soldier carried many risks. It had been made clear to the young volunteers that some might not survive it, but this didn't deter their enthusiasm. Posters had been placed everywhere, advertising the super-soldier, showing a blood-red metal cyborg Russian crushing the head of an imaginary alien. The poster soldiers were not even close to how the volunteers would eventually look. Being encased in a smart-metal suit didn't do much for the design of the human body. The original flexibility was lost, creating a more rigid body. Fingers lost some dexterity, arms and legs flexed very little, and the candidates would never sit down again, as the back was locked rigid to carry the weight. It was difficult to kill a Blood soldier, but not impossible, and death meant entombment in a casing of red metal.

  The process of conversion itself was relatively painless. Skin was replaced with smart-metals in a way that made volunteers look like Egyptian mummies. Many bodily functions were affected, yet after a few days, a super-soldier ready for battle emerged excited and full of spirit, willing to fight invaders. The program expanded to all of Russia, as thousands of volunteers swelled into millions. No volunteer was ever refused, and those who did not survive were reprocessed into usable materials for other candidates.

  Ivan, like the other new recruits, required no training. They were pointed at the enemy, then let loose like dogs. They tended to mob an invader, defeating it by mass assault. The poisonous mist was made harmless through simple rebreathers bolted to the soldiers, but this was only a temporary stopgap, for the poison did eventually find its way into their lungs.