by Rob Buckman
“Long night?” Scott asked, looking as fresh as a daisy.
“You could say that. We just got to bed after pulling a thirty-six-hour shift,” Karl grumped, heading for the coffeepot.
“Sorry about that, but I thought this was important.”
“Yes, sir. No doubt.” Karl yawned again as he poured coffee. “And what might that be, Admiral?”
“The security of the um …” He paused, not sure if he should say it out loud. “Let just say for security concerns, our wedding rings. You know how the new people like to steal things from us older folk.”
Karl looked at him a moment, blinked and yawned again. “Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir.” The team leader came over, but stood with his back to Scott and Karl, weapon pointing out. Karl reached over and unzipped a pouch on the sergeant’s equipment belt, and showed Scott the edge of a data pad.
“One of five, and it’s all in here, Admiral.”
Scott’s eyebrows shot up. Karl was way ahead of him. He also understood why five. No one except Karl, and possibly his team, knew which one had the real data on it.
Karl continued. “All locked up by three of five separate access codes, and locked into a safe with three combination locks at end-of-shift each day. Any more silly questions?” He laughed and yawned.
Scott laughed with him, feeling a little foolish. “I guess not.”
“Can we go back to bed now, Admiral?” one of the team asked, a shapely young woman desperately trying to stifle a yawn of her own.
“Yes, go back to bed and get some sleep. You all look like you need it. But you might want to talk to Devon when you wake up. He has an interesting new take on the rings.” He gave them a smile as they waved and walked back out of the hangar. “A word, Sergeant?”
“Yes, Admiral?”
“Do you have sufficient personnel for security?”
“Yes, sir. I have ten additional security personnel around their sleeping quarters. We’re just the traveling group, with an additional quick-reaction force out in the bushes, so to speak.”
“Outstanding. Carry on.”
“Aye-aye, sir.” And with that, he quickly trotted off after the others.
The data on the construction of the rings was about as secure as his people could make it. And with a nod of approval, Scott headed for his office.
CHAPTER SIX: …We know that the sheep live in denial, that is what makes them sheep. They
do not want to believe that there is evil in the world… LTC (RET) D. Grossman
“Good evening everyone,” Scott said, marshaling his thoughts. “I ordered this hookup so I could say a few words about something that has been bothering me for some time.”
What he was about to say would come as a shock to some, even with all their combat experience.
“Over the last four million years, we, Homo sapiens that is, have worked our way to the top of the food chain to become the alpha predator on this planet. In one way or another, we can beat the crap out of anything walking, crawling, flying, or swimming.” That brought a few laughs from the people in his office.
“There are a lot of animals on Earth that are faster, stronger, or more deadly than we are, yet we’ve found ways to beat them all, mainly by using our brains. That’s the one thing that puts us above the rest.” He waited a moment before continuing.
“That has all changed since the arrival of these aliens. You all know what they think of us: food! Like so many cattle, to be rounded up and butchered.” Now he had their attention.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re no longer at the top of the food chain, but one step down, and the only advantage we have is our brains. It’s still the only thing we have going for us.” The looks on the faces in his office told him just how many people hadn’t realized this fact: none. It was a sobering thought to realize you were just another food source for some other species, right down there on the level of sheep, cattle, pigs or chickens.
“At this point in time, we have no way to determine if the aliens are smarter than we are, and I hope to god they aren’t. Otherwise, we’re in deep shit. We do know they’re more advanced technologically.” Thankfully not too far advanced, or humanity wouldn’t stand a chance.
“Even so, we’re about to take the fight to the enemy, using whatever we can think up to beat them. This fight is more than just about who is the top predator. It’s about our survival as a species. If we lose, then Earth loses, and will in time be reduced to nothing more than a breeding ground for food.” He felt a shiver run up his spine, even as he said the words.
“That’s assuming they don’t simply exterminate every living thing on this planet because we’ve become a nuisance to them, or they need to make an example of us.” It was an option he didn’t want to think about; there were ways to sterilize a planet without invading it.
“So people, we’ll have to be better than they are, and use every trick we’ve ever learned in four million years. This isn’t about good guys and bad guys anymore, so all the normal rules of combat are out. We hit them where we can and as hard as we can, and like the man said, bomb them back to the Stone Age if we have to.” The sober looks he received told him they understood his wake-up call was a “come to jesus” moment, and what it meant.
“If we have to bomb their home world with neutron bombs and kill every living thing on the surface, so be it. I for one will not lose this fight, or a night’s sleep over it. We’re going to hit them with everything we can think of. Use every dirty trick in the book, and invent new ones if they don’t work. I intend to exterminate these aliens as I would a rabid dog or a bunch of cockroaches.” The net was silent; not even static came back at him. No one laughed, commented, or thought of a snappy rebuttal.
“For the new people in our midst, this will be something of a shock, and I can understand and sympathize with what you must be feeling. For those of us who’ve ‘seen the elephant’ as they say, this will also be something of a shock, since before, win or lose, we still had our homes to go back to, and life went on. That comfort zone has gone, and this will be a fight to the death, ours, or theirs.”
“You’ve got that right, brother!” Brock muttered.
“As of now, I want all of you to start reading history all over again. Look at it in this new light: think how we can use the lessons, good and bad, to help us in this fight. In this war, nothing is sacred, nothing forbidden. If you say firebomb the alien nursery with napalm, I’d be the first in line to pull the pin. There will be no mercy, no surrender, and no capitulation. We will never negotiate with these beings for any reason. This isn’t a war of honor, or who’s in the right, or about territory, religion, the flag, geopolitics or any of that BS: it’s about which species will survive and nothing more. Thank you for listening, good night.” With that, he cut the connection.
“Wow! You don’t pull any punches, do you, Scott,” Doc Chase muttered.
“In this case I don’t know any other way, Doc. If we don’t act, we could be condemning the human race, as we know it, to extinction. We can be nice guys after we’ve won, and we’ve convinced the enemy that we aren’t just food.”
“I know what you mean, even though I’m a doctor, sworn to do no harm. As far as I’m concerned, that oath only applies to humans, not these aliens.” The look in his eye said he meant every word.
“Thanks, Doc, I needed to hear that.”
“It might not be a bad idea to start a few experiments on our captive aliens and find out what hurts them, don’t you think?” he asked, looking at Scott.
“I have no problem with that if you don’t.”
“After what I saw in the mother ship? I don’t,” Chase growled.
“I take it this is a case of ‘take no prisoners,’” Brock stated.
“You’ve got that right, unless Doc needs a few more to experiment on.”
“Good,” Pete Mitchell muttered. “Don’t know what we’d do with the fuckers if we took them prisoners anyway. Use them for target practice
maybe.”
“Yes, and I don’t think any of us will ever let ourselves be taken prisoner,” Scott said.
“And if the aliens do take some, and try to use them as bargaining chips?” Brock asked. It was a loaded question.
“Then our official policy will be that those people are already dead, men, women, and children. From what we’ve seen so far, these aliens don’t think the same way we do about things like that, and I wouldn’t trust anything they said.”
“Yeah, you don’t exactly negotiate with your roast beef dinner before you kill the cow, do you,” Brock said, a lopsided grin on his face. That put a footnote to the meeting. Gradually the others departed, until only Doc Chase and Scott remained in the office. Scott pulled out a bottle and filled two glasses with potent brandy.
“Thanks,” Chase muttered, lifting the glass to toast him. Scott returned the toast, but his mind was elsewhere, so they sat in silence for a while, each with his own thoughts.
“You know what bothers me, Doc?” he said at last.
“Probably a lot of things right now. But what in particular has your pantyhose all bunched up?”
“I would have thought the Chinese would’ve taken over by now, but where are they?”
Chase said, “Now you come to mention it, I haven’t seen Asian people in any of the news feeds from the mainland.” His brow pulled into a puzzled frown. “Also, from what I’ve found in the data from Japan, the Chinese were the first ones to experience the plague.”
“Really?”
“And if that little twit, Kessler, is right, the damn thing was genetically engineered.”
“Can you, or he, prove it? That’s the question.”
“Not sure. But from what I’ve found out, and what he told me, he could be right. Be damned if this is a combination of our old friend the Spanish flu on one hand, and bird flu on the other.”
“Is that significant?” Scott asked.
“Hell yes. The Spanish flu killed thirty million people in the US alone, but it wasn’t airborne, and birds couldn’t get it and transfer it elsewhere. By combining the two, you had a deadly disease that could infect humans as well as birds, and transmittable four ways.”
“Four?”
“Human-to-human, bird-to-bird, bird-to-human, and the feces of the birds was also a vector medium to infect other birds and humans. It spread through China and Southeast Asia like a wildfire.”
“So how come the rest of the population wasn’t affected?”
“That’s the interesting part. Kessler thinks, and I agree after seeing his data, that the disease was genetically engineered to mostly infect Asian people.”
“Good god!” Scott murmured, understanding Chase’s reaction. It was a horrifying thought, and a cold-blooded one.
“That’s why it didn’t work so well in the UK and Europe,” Chase continued. “Partly because of the cold climate, and partly because they failed to engineer it for Caucasians, Kessler suspects. It died out before it got very far in the winter cold of northern Europe. If the damn thing had gotten farther south to a warmer climate, it would have wiped out ninety-nine percent of humanity.”
“God! These people have a lot to answer for,” Scott growled, shaking his head.
“Yeah, but whoever launched it must have had a cure, otherwise they were liable to wipe themselves out.” It was a point. Scott and Chase sat looking at each other.
Scott rubbed his chin in thought. “Reading between the lines of the so-called news, I get the feeling that the so-called World Government is nothing more than a showpiece for the people. A puppet.”
“So, the question is, who's pulling the strings?” Chase asked.
“My bet would be on this Grand Ayatollah guy.”
“Okay, I’m with you so far, but your reasoning?”
“Found out that the current Ayatollah is the last in a long line of them, going back at least three hundred years to our time.”
“I’ll be dammed. So this Grand Ayatollah’s great, great something-or-other was the one who took over in the beginning.”
“Yes, and everyone after him pushed the same line of BS policy as the one before him,” Scott said. “But then again, this has nothing to do with Islam. This is just another in a long line of asshole opportunists who saw a way to climb to power, no better than Hitler or Stalin. Hitler no more believed in national socialism any more than Stalin believed in communism.”
“It goes further back than that,” Chase said. “How many popes actually believed in Catholicism? Take Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Lanzol Borgia, in 1492. It has always been about power and money. Call it by any name you want.”
“I don’t disagree, Doc. I don’t have a problem with Islam, or any other religion people want to believe in, but it pisses me off when some swinging dick comes along and uses the cloak of religion to cover his sins. … oh this is all in the name of God … or … this is what God ordained for you … as if the dick actually spoke to God himself.”
Chase barked a laugh. “Yeah, and they never have to prove they weren’t speaking to God. Remember that story about the King’s new clothes, that only the very wise could see them?”
“Yeah, I remember that one. Guess it’s the same. They say they speak to God and God speaks back, but only the very wise can hear him.”
“It would be difficult to take down someone like that … too many true believers around him.”
Scott nodded. If he shot this Ayatollah like he did the last one, there’d be another one to take his place and start the whole sorry mess all over again.
“If we can find a way to neutralize this um … hidden government, the only good thing about this civilization is that they have this great industrial base we can use. That’s a huge advantage if we can get it to swing behind us.”
“But is it enough to save us?” Chase asked.
“I hope so, because we don’t have anything else, and that scares the hell out of me. Also, the one thing we have even less of … time.”
* * * * * *
After that, it was as if someone had pressed the fast-forward button. Gradually, troops and equipment started pouring through the base on their way up into orbit for loading on the ships. One by one, the new ships came down to different parts of the world, usually in uninhabited or sparsely populated areas, to load up on the first stocks of air, water and dirt for the larger ships. All material going into the ships was prepared months before, by first being irradiated and sterilized to eliminate any potential infestation. The environmental crew added bacteria and oxygen to the soils to start the bio-culture food chain, as well as worms and nutrients. By the time the ships went back into orbit, trees, plants and a selection of benign bugs were inhabiting their new homes. It would take time for the bio-system to mature, but even in its infancy it still worked well in conjunction with the air scrubber. In time it was hoped the air scrubber wouldn’t be needed except in an emergency. All the ships made trips to the Arctic and Antarctic to load up on ice, to start the air recycling and bio-systems and to provide a source of clean water.
Scott found himself getting more and more involved in the planning and training of his fleet as ships came onto the active list, but about the one ship he wanted, there was no word. He desperately wanted to call Devon and ask him for an update on the progress, but knew it was a waste of time. There was no way to rush him, no matter what the clock said. As of now, they were out of time, and any day another alien fleet could come pouring through the warp point. As a last resort, Scott moved into space aboard the old New Zealand and took command from there. This would have to do if the new ship wasn’t ready, even if he didn’t have a full crew complement. He did put them on standby at Alpha base just in case, knowing they could be loaded and at battle stations in less than an hour.
By this time the New Zealand’s original crew had been promoted and assigned to the new ships, but even with a diminished crew, he put them through battle maneuvers. Day after day, he set up different battle drills, splitting the
fleet in half, using one as the aggressor and appointing different captains as his equivalent. This way they all got a taste of joint command. Each worked out a different battle maneuver, coming at his half of the fleet in different formations. Some he won and some he lost, but even those lost were a win in the end as he figured out a way to beat them the second time. The joint, post-battle debriefing helped all the captains understand the ramifications of the decisions they made, the good and the bad ones. The interlinked AI units functioned perfectly, executing whatever maneuvers were asked of them. It was the human factor where they kept making mistakes. Scott knew he wouldn’t get a second chance when the fighting actually started, and he stayed up more than one night working out a different solution.
Some of the opposing captains were good, very good, and he made a note in his log to keep an eye on each one for future promotion, when and if they got more than one fleet. He and Kat saw each other as much as they could, fleeting visits, and he saw her progress through her pregnancy in leaps and bounds. They talked about the possibility of him not being there at the birth, but Kat understood, kissing him through her tears, and slept in his arms when she could. Lady Jane monitored the baby’s brain waves throughout, marveling at the increased activity as the birth came closer. It was as if the baby knew it was going to be born, anticipating the moment as the biological clock ticked down to the moment. At last, the great day arrived, but so did Scott’s ship. Devon called as Scott sat on the bridge of the New Zealand, fighting yet another battle.