Charger the Soldier

by Lea Tassie

  In disgust, Hanna threw him hard into the rocks and he crumpled to the ground. The battle suit she wore was standard military issue, left over from the war, and Hanna was indestructible, or so it seemed.

  But it took only a second of inattention, just a second of her not watching where she stepped. Possibly it was the tears flowing from her eyes that made her footing fail, or the thoughts of the awful torment that she felt from Jill's memories. But she tripped and fell to the ground. She tried to control her descent, but the ground hit her hard, knocking the breath from her lungs.

  Then Mac was on her back, ripping at her suit with dedicated insanity. Hanna made it to her feet after some struggling, and pressed a button on her wrist that activated a stimulation pack in the arm of her suit. Suddenly she felt a huge burst of strength and the pain was gone. A quick twist and Mac was firmly in her grasp. She pulled Mac's arm from its socket and kicked hard, shifting Mac's knee cap to the side and breaking his leg. Screaming like a wild animal, Hanna lashed out, striking Mac over and over, until her mind was a blur.

  But Mac had won. In the moment he spent on Hanna's back, he had managed to shear off the back of her skull. Hanna's brains were slowly spilling out, killing her. She fell to her knees, stunned and unable to move. Her eyes blurring, she stared at Mac as he rose from the ground and approached her.

  "German bitch," Mac grunted softly in her ear. Hanna's eyes rolled back and it was over. Her body was later retrieved, but the killer was never discovered.

  Chapter 25 Forty years postwar

  The years rolled by, but the three grad students, Mark, Andy, and Mickey, who had obtained their doctorates in science and helped Earth in countless ways, still met often in their old hangout, the Bat Cave, to argue and gossip. Now in their seventies, they were nearing the end of their working careers. This day in early 2073, Mark, thin as ever and a little stooped now, wandered in to find Andy debating vigorously with Mickey.

  "Milk, the simple creation of water and fat, provided by women!" Andy shouted. "If women did not give milk to male babies, then males would not exist. God creates man, Adam then creates Eve from a rib. She is the last thing created, and yet is the most important thing for the survival of man. What kind of logic is that?"

  "Milk has nothing to do with it!" Mickey responded, still as vigorous as when his wild hair had been red, not the sandy gray it had become. "Evolution played no part in the development of mammals giving milk to their young. I tell you again, the aliens that intervened at the genesis of our time here on Earth needed to design us so that women give milk to their young. Otherwise, we would obviously stand out among the mammals of Earth. No, the aliens were clever enough to design us like mammals so that we would never figure out we are actually aliens."

  Both men stopped shouting and turned their attention to Mark. He blew out a long breath of air and said, "God did it!"

  "That's just nuts," exclaimed Andy. "Why would God create a perfect being like Adam, superior to the angels and yet have him be so dependent on woman, the one thing most hated and reviled in scripture?"

  "God did it," repeated Mark. His mind was too taken up with other news to be interested in the argument.

  "Evolution created milk so that women, when they give birth, can feed their young. That is not divine, but evidence for the process of evolution," Andy said.

  Mark stared at Mickey, then at Andy, and said, "I told you, God did it." Then he shook his head. "Ah guys, I can't do this today, something bad has happened."

  He knew that would get the attention of both men. He rarely described anything as 'bad' and the use of that word meant he was serious. "Remember a story from a number of years back, the one about a girl who was part of the team that destroyed the alien mother ship in orbit?"

  Andy and Mickey both looked puzzled.

  "The girl was German, her name was Lieutenant Hanna Massey, and she was murdered around eight years back."

  "Yeah, now I remember. She was one of the heroes in the war, always on the news," responded Mickey, then Andy nodded agreement. "What about her?" asked Mickey.

  Mark was a little surprised that his friends hadn't remembered Hanna more readily. The death of one of the four heroes had been the only thing marring the success of this new age. Hanna had been not quite sixty, and apparently strong and sure of herself when she met her demise. Her death was a shock to the nation, for she had become an icon of the war which Earth had endured. The coroner concluded, judging by the severity of the trauma to her body, that Hanna had been in an intense fight for her life and lost. Speculation on the event had continued for years.

  "Seems they finally figured out who killed her," Mark said. "Turns out it was a Lycan named Mac, a war veteran. And now General Harris is calling once again for the destruction of all the Hyborgs and Lycans as a result."

  "What? Wait, I thought he was the one in charge of creating the Hyborgs and Lycans in the first place," Mickey responded.

  "He was," replied Mark, as he drew up a chair to slouch on. Reaching into a bowl on the coffee table, he pulled out a handful of potato chips and continued, "Guess he's afraid he'll be accused of creating monsters. So rather than accept responsibility, he's decided to end the program completely."

  "Someone should really hold Harris responsible. This is just wrong," Mickey said in disgust. "I'm still not sure how that creep has escaped prosecution for so long. So many witnesses have come forward with evidence that he is a mass murderer."

  "Seems someone in government has him fully protected," Andy said, as he too began to munch chips, ignoring the fact that the solid muscle he'd had in his prime was becoming soft and flabby.

  "It's more than that," Mark said. "Seems he has ordered the Hyborgs themselves to remove the problem."

  "What!" both Andy and Mickey exclaimed.

  "He is having our war veterans kill off other war veterans?" Andy stammered in disbelief.

  "Apparently so. But that's not the only news. Seems congress decided last week to put Harris on trial. And now the guy has disappeared. Poof, no trace anywhere," Mark said wearily. He was so disgusted with the whole affair that he felt helpless. "And there is a bigger debacle," he added.

  Andy and Mickey were gazing at him, waiting to hear more.

  "Seems he's also the guy who had the Mavens engineered. You remember, Andy, the ones who helped you and Lucy with research on plants in Dhuusamareeb before General Harris transferred them into the Revenge Program. The ones who stole the supply ship and disappeared shortly after that."

  "So, have they put out an arrest warrant for Harris?" Mickey asked.

  "Yup, system-wide, from what the news was reporting this morning. You two really should get out of this office more. Sitting here in the dark can't be good," Mark said, as he wiped the potato chip dust from his fingers onto his pants.

  Andy laughed. "No way! We are clearly safer in here."

  >>>

  Four days previously, General Harris had entered the darkened room deep beneath his mansion in the hills outside New Denver. He sat at his desk and opened a small computer laptop which was connected directly with the private server the organization shared.

  "It's done. I have sent the Hyborgs off world. And I've made sure that fool of a Danny Opinhimmer, and his band of misfits leading the world, are reliant on the information we feed them."

  A voice on the computer screen replied, "En tack turelient, dell back engulf dorsal." The computer translator engaged and repeated, "Good, see you stay on track."

  Harris rose from his desk and went over to a small bookshelf, where he picked up a small flat metal disk. An image of a woman appeared on the disk and Harris spoke to it. "The time is coming soon. Humanity is progressing to the point where their technology will be sufficient to provide what we need."

  General Harris then put his escape plan into action; he had always had a plan ready. He was in his late eighties in his present incarnation and in excellent shape, though in terms of human time he had actually lived many, many thousan
ds of years. Anyway, these days eighty was no longer old; often people lived to a hundred and thirty or beyond.

  Harris had at his disposal, deep below his mansion, a small Gray escape ship. It was equipped with a blinding field which made it difficult to detect with electronics and impossible for the human eye to see. Now that the courts had put out a warrant for his arrest and his web of deceit could no longer be maintained, he stole away in the dark and made course for Neo Terra.

  He took with him secrets that would never be revealed. One secret was the fact that he had created the Hyborgs quickly when the war with the aliens began because he'd been engineered by the Grays and knew what was coming. He had started building the Hyborg program long before the alien invasion started.

  His small ship plied the distance to Neo Terra with no difficulty. Once there, he entered the planet undetected and found a small crevasse in the tunnel leading to the dock. He placed himself in stasis and set his clock for a wake-up call three hundred years into the future. Like a well-fed spider in the center of a new web, General Harris slept, waiting for the daylight to favor his return.

  >>>

  Pam turned on her tape recorder, adjusted the sound, and sat back to look around at the room full of dignitaries. The place was well-lit and boasted the latest technologies, some barely dreamed of when the war began. Yet she found it hard to believe it was already 2073 and the war had been over for forty years. In some ways, that hellish conflagration seemed like yesterday.

  Danny Opinhimmer, world president, emerged from the wings in his wheelchair and came to the dais. He stood up, gripping the stand with both hands.

  "To understand what happened in the past, it is sometimes necessary to know what transpired after," Danny said to the dignitaries gathered before him. "We often forget our true past, and then reinvent a false one in a vain attempt to disguise our own embarrassing behavior. But in time, the truth is always laid at our feet; we cannot hide from what we have become."

  Danny's voice was cracked and worn, Pam thought. It was sad to see how old and tired he looked now. She remembered how strong he had appeared as the world's president after the invasion was over. But he'd had heavy burdens to bear these forty years, and he must find the bitterness he felt about the past hard to disguise.

  Danny continued. "Yet again, you try to remove the stains of your ancestors. Yet again, you turn to your media gods to create the lies and half-truths you need to ease your consciences."

  Pam could see the dignitaries squirming. But none of them had the audacity to voice an objection.

  "I say this to you one last time. I was there. I remember what we did. I was the one who killed the last invader in space and I've regretted it ever since. I remember how it attempted to communicate, I remember the last word it tried to say." The sorrow in Danny's voice and the deep scars across his face were brutal reminders of reality to the dignitaries honoring Danny's great deed on its fortieth anniversary, to yet again try to turn Danny and the others into shining heroes.

  "The invader said, 'Why?' It said, 'why?'"

  With that, Danny's old knees gave way, and he slumped back into the wheelchair. Without another word, he left the podium and the public's view.

  The dignitaries, as Pam had expected, blamed Danny's statements on old age and frailty. The videos that followed his speech were documentaries of how the evil invaders had had only one goal: world domination, which they'd nearly achieved. The videos showed that the combined fighting forces of good Earth people had defeated the cruel and oppressive empire that had spawned these aliens.

  The footage of alien atrocities, matched with the footage of humans treating these invaders with dignity, only served to hide the true nature of war. The humans of Earth had been no better and no worse. They were merely the victors, and it was the duty of the media barons to capitalize on the heroic nature of the demoralized Earth people in order to rouse them to greater effort. To yet again send out wave after wave of media hype all over the solar system, blaming 'aliens' for every ill that Earth bore.

  Pam could not take the hype any longer. She stood up, walked away from the table, and left the room. Later, she cursed herself for leaving when she did. She should have stayed longer, at least tried to prevent this propaganda from continuing to spew forth.

  But one thing made her happy whenever she thought of it. General Harris had been branded a war criminal. He'd vanished and probably would never be punished, but at least all the world now knew what he was.

  For a brief moment, her thin, delicate face stretched in a broad smile as she remembered the Pakistani diplomat trying to infer that the Indian government was somehow responsible for the death of so many people that first year of the war. A priceless moment! It had served the fools right for starting a pointless war just days before Earth was invaded. Photographs had shown the stunned looks on the faces of the Pakistani and Indian forces as the mother ships from space began attacking both forces.

  Pam took the pins from her French roll and let down her long graying hair as she waited for the elevator to whisk her off to her room, and crossed her fingers that a good night's sleep would clear her head.

  What was left of the world's population had started rebuilding in those areas not completely devastated by the alien onslaught, eventually dividing the remaining populations into ethnocentric groups, then even further by ideological beliefs. But what gave Pam the biggest headache were the yearly gatherings in the new United Nations building to commemorate valiant fallen soldiers and reaffirm the decision to eventually exterminate the Hyborgs, who had been created to win the war.

  Reaching her room on the two hundredth floor, she entered a grand suite which had lavish refinements. This was the order of things now in New Denver, the new capital of old America. Reconstruction of the city had adopted a utopian design, as buildings now spanned entire city blocks and rose hundreds of stories into the air.

  But, due to the depleted resources caused by war around the globe, gone were the SUV and hybrid automobiles, replaced with mass transit and three-wheeled bikes that ran on electric motors. The coffee shops on every corner served coffee substitute. Children had stopped attending schools, instead plugging into a global web that, in addition to writing, reading and arithmetic, taught all the propaganda that people needed to be passive.

  Yes, Pam thought as she pulled the bed sheets up tight to her shoulders, the old ways were long gone now and maybe it was time to let the world be. The room, sensing her breathing slow down and the bed warming with her presence, automatically dimmed the lights throughout the suite and lowered the room's temperature. In spite of her dark thoughts, sleep took her while she wondered if she'd be able to speak with Danny in the morning.

  But he had already died, a broken old man, with no hope of the truth about the so-called aliens ever winning out.

  >>>

  Dart speaks to Reader:

  Danny's death that night shocked the world. Not only was he the first native Indian president, but his approval rating had never once dipped below eighty-nine percent, something absolutely unheard of in the history of presidents. The procession for his funeral put those of past emperors and kings to shame. The roads were lined with saddened people for hundreds of miles, as his motorcade passed on the way to the mausoleum which had been built especially for him.

  Yes, Reader, it's sad that he had to die. But people died so quickly then.

  I have more to tell you about Danny. The information came to light through a book that his son, James, wrote. James didn't want to succeed him in politics, but he did want Danny's life to be remembered for more than killing the leader of the invaders, and becoming world president.

  Danny had a journal, which he only ever shared with his son. His wife left shortly after giving birth to James, and Danny made every effort to ensure that his son never went without. The two would spend long nights out behind their modest home, which he refused to leave even when he became president. Danny and James camped out under the stars and burned
a small fire on clear evenings, which annoyed the security team no end. There the two would read from Danny's journal, musing over events from times past.

  James heard stories of Suzie, Beth and Bobby, Danny's old friends. When the Mahouds first attacked, Danny and these friends hid in a cave above some old mine shafts. But more importantly, James heard of the encounter his father had with a demon.

  Danny had vivid memories of it, because this event saved his life. Just as he was sliding down a side shaft in the mine, trying to escape the invader hunting for him, he witnessed a strange event just moments before he blacked out. Danny was sure the invader would kill him, for it was only a few feet from his body, its gold-colored faceted eyes gleaming, and gaining speed as he found himself falling backwards toward the shaft opening.

  Then, as if from thin air, a demon exploded into the passageway in a flurry of noise and wind and dust, blocking the invader from reaching Danny as he thumped down on the bottom of the old shaft. He was just fading into unconsciousness when he saw the demon hit the invader square in the chest. The invader fell dead.

  The demon was looking around the shaft, apparently confused, when it caught sight of Danny slumped on the floor. The huge beast bent down for a closer look, and the last thing Danny saw before he passed out was the demon's smile, revealing four gleaming white fangs below the blank white eyes.

  That sounds like Charger? You're very observant, Reader.

  Anyway, that was where the story ended for Danny, because when he came to, the demon was gone and he was safe. He liked to tell James that it was a beast from native Indian traditions, something called a Wendigo. James always loved that story when he was little and, when he got older, often recounted the event when trying to save his family's traditions from disappearing.