Blood of Patriots (Book 4 of The Humanity Unlimited Saga)

by Terry Mixon

  “I can understand why you might want to keep me and my daughter away from the fighting. You have no reason to trust us. I find that acceptable. If you can capture an Asharim and bring him to me for questioning, I believe that I can provide information to the high priest that will settle any question of what we should do.”

  Harry thought that was a pretty tall order. The Asharim no doubt kept themselves as safe as they could during the fighting. Somehow, his people would have to locate one of the aliens and perform a raid to get a living prisoner.

  Wasn’t that going to be fun?

  Brenda called in every available person she had in Washington, DC, and set them to searching the abandoned base in Virginia. By the time they’d finished, it was almost dawn, and none of their mysteries had been solved. To her annoyance, they’d found no overlooked material whatsoever.

  No data chips, no tablets, and no paper of any kind. Nothing. Whoever had abandoned the space had done an exceptionally thorough job of cleaning it. Anything that was portable was gone, with the exception of the power cubes.

  For whatever reason, they’d decided to leave those in place. Perhaps in case they ever needed to return, though that didn’t quite make sense either.

  What her people did have was more infrastructure than they’d ever had in the United States. Hell, in the entire world. Not since the heavy-worlders had crushed the resistance on Earth.

  One thing she knew for sure was that they’d need to seal off the entrance as soon as possible. If it had been anyone else that had chanced upon the tunnel leading down to this base, the United States government would be all over it at this very moment. She needed to prevent that from happening without leaving any telltale signs that her people had done so.

  She pulled Victor and Granger back from the search of the base and laid out her concerns. “If we want to keep this facility, we’re going to have to make absolutely certain that it’s not found again. Victor, I want you to get a team busy gathering whatever you need to seal this entrance so that anyone who chances across it thinks that it’s a natural wall of rock.

  “If we can put a doorway in that we can use, that’s fine, but I want to be sure that no one ever stumbles into this place. Even if we do have a door, we’ll have to use it very sparingly.”

  Granger shook his head slightly. “That’s going to be complicated. You promised Harry Rogers that if he didn’t compete with us for this base, you’d give him the portable gate we’ve been using. That leaves us a little bit short of places to go, if you know what I mean.”

  The rangy doctor was right, but that didn’t change anything. “He allowed Kevin to disassemble two of the gates in the New Zealand base. We’re keeping one of those and will put it in the Vault. Cyrus will make sure it stays secure.”

  The Vault was an abandoned subway station under DC that the Families had converted into an intelligence center. It was run by Cyrus Patterson, an ex-CIA officer, and had plenty of room for something as important as a gate. The professionals there would never let word of it slip out, and if the US government ever located the Vault, it could be destroyed along with the rest of the facility. That would be a blow but not nearly as painful as losing the portable gate would’ve been before they’d had other options.

  Granger was nodding at what she’d said. “Okay, we can do that. And if we seal off the only exterior entrance to this place, the odds of us being located go way down. They’d have to bring some pretty impressive scanning equipment into the area to detect this base from the outside. It’s shielded pretty well.

  “My next question is what are we going to do with all of this space? I thought the Mars base was large, but this dwarfs it. Even if we brought every member of the Families into this facility, we’d still be underutilizing it by a huge margin.”

  She laughed. “I’m perfectly happy with room to grow. I’m thinking of offering to share with Harry and Jess in exchange for some other concessions in the solar system. We could certainly use some of those ships that they’ve got their hands on, at a minimum.”

  And the Humanity Unlimited team certainly had a number of ships they could part with. More than enough that they wouldn’t be concerned about sharing. Just based off of what she’d seen in Freedom Express and in the French base, they had to have dozens of Asharim-designed landers, and that was probably only the tip of the iceberg.

  “On a completely unrelated note, I had a chance to look at the plants down in hydroponics,” Granger said. “I’m going to have to perform a few tests, but it certainly looks as if they were abandoned less than a hundred years ago. My gut tells me that it’s been more than fifty years, but I’ll have to take some samples back to my lab to be absolutely certain.”

  One of the other security men came into the room and hurried over with a piece of paper in his hand. “I found this fallen behind some machinery,” he told Brenda as he handed it across to her.

  Even before she looked closely, she recognized that it was part of a newspaper. It was yellowed with age but not brittle. One glance at the front told her all she needed to know.

  She held it out so that the others could see the headline and picture on the front. It was an issue of the New York Times.

  “I believe we know what triggered our friends’ departure,” she said.

  The edition was dated July 21, 1969, and the headline was “Men Walk On Moon.” It amused her that it had only cost 10¢. How times had changed.

  “So, right in the middle of my guess. Let’s see, 2036 minus 1969 is… sixty-seven years. Almost sixty-eight. They haven’t been gone all that long.”

  Brenda shook her head. “My guess is that they aren’t truly gone at all. I think they’re probably from somewhere in Asharim space, and they have other ways to get back here. Or we’re making a false assumption that they were human at all. There were plenty of races that could have been interested in humanity.”

  Victor scowled. “That’s an unhappy thought. If somebody went out and got a newspaper, they were able to blend in. There had to be humans involved somewhere.”

  “Probably, but we’re going to have to do a lot more digging to find out where they vanished to before we’ll ever know for sure. For right now, let’s start securing the base. Get all the help you need to seal up the entrance and start installing a permanent gate at the Vault. The clock is ticking.”

  26

  Jess huddled behind a handy rock and tugged her borrowed coat closer. She hadn’t been dressed for the nighttime wilderness and even though Volunteer World was a fairly temperate place, it was chilly.

  Dawn was just breaking. The valley below was still bathed in shadows and would be for at least another fifteen or twenty minutes, but she thought she could see movement in the gloom.

  The Asharim slaves were maneuvering to position themselves for an assault, she was certain. Unfortunately for them, Harry and Commander Karl Krueger had had all night to prepare for this and they were ready.

  “Are they going to attack as soon as they can see us?” she asked Harry as he knelt beside her.

  “I don’t think so,” he said with a shake of his head. “I think they’ll take at least some time to assess our forces before they make their move.

  “That’s going to work in our favor. We’ve got drones in the air that will be looking them over. By the time they’re ready to attack, we’ll know where to strike first to cause the most damage to their forces. Better yet, we’ll know if there are any Asharim down there for us to try and capture.”

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about capturing one of the aliens. They were like boogie men. “If you do see any of them, how do you intend to isolate them without killing them? They’re going to be heavily guarded.”

  Her friend nodded. “Getting down to the plain is going to be a slow process. We’re up on the top of a fairly steep hill and can’t just relocate at a moment’s notice. If we had helicopters, or even one of the assault landers, we could sweep right down and land on top of them. As it is, we’re going to ha
ve to work with the forces we have at hand.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that we’re not going to be able to capture any of the Asharim until we break out from our positions here. That means we have to stop the enemy attack and chase them as they retreat, right?”

  “That’s about it.”

  He panned his binoculars over the area around the hill, and she let him do so without interruption. She knew that his gear allowed him to see in the infrared and ultraviolet, so he’d be able to see what they were facing better than she would.

  If the enemy only had black powder flintlocks, the more advanced weapons her people brought with them would decimate the Asharim and their slaves. Part of her quailed at the mass slaughter that was about to happen, but she was smart enough to realize that it was either the aliens or the Volunteers. Not the ones on the hill with her but the ones in their settlements.

  If the Asharim and their slaves gained the upper hand, it was virtually certain that they’d subjugate the humans on this world. Most would be converted to slaves, and the rest would be sacrificed to whatever sick gods the aliens now worshiped.

  “They’re moving,” Harry said after a few minutes. “It looks like they’re gathering off to the west in the shadow of the hill we’re on. I’m not sure what that gains them, but we can definitely work with their move. They’ve left forces all around us, but nothing that we shouldn’t be able to break through.”

  Harry lowered his binoculars and focused his attention on her in the growing light. “If we can penetrate their lines, we can swing our forces around behind their strongest units and pin them in a crossfire. It’s really hard to defend against two separate attacks at the same time.

  “If we break them, they’ll run, and a retreating enemy isn’t very effective. The panic that they’ll spread to the rest of their forces will let us take the area around us with minimal losses.”

  Not being a warrior, all she could do was nod and trust his experience.

  “I got something,” Krueger said over the radio bug in her ear. He was talking to both Harry and her, as well as his senior people and the New Zealander officers, over the command channel.

  “With the upgraded lighting conditions, we’ve started cataloging what the enemy forces look like. One of my drones has zeroed in on what seems to be a command pavilion off to the north. It’s behind some trees, so it’s not visible from our current location.

  “The bottom line is that a lot of the aliens we’ve been fighting are gathered around there, but they’re not alone. I’m seeing at least six beings that are not of the same species. Based on your descriptions, they look like Asharim.”

  Harry smiled coldly. “If so, that gives us a chance to get a team to their location. We have to work that into the breakout options we’ve already discussed. This complicates the process, but it gives us a chance to finally get our hands on one of them.

  “These aliens might not be responsible for what happened on Earth, but they certainly know what’s going on in the ruined city. If we can break some of their leaders, that should give us a number of benefits.

  “First, it would allow the heavy-worlders to take a good look at their former Masters. Second, it would finally allow us to communicate with the enemy forces on this planet. Since Jess can speak their language, we can start putting the screws to the bastards.”

  “Actually, I can speak heavy-worlder and read what we think is Asharim. I won’t know if that’s true until I meet one, but I’m not certain they shared their language with their slaves. If the written language isn’t Asharim either, that’s going to open up some interesting new questions.”

  She had to admit that she badly wanted to talk to one of the aliens. Just getting a grasp on how they thought might help Humanity Unlimited figure out a number of things that had been puzzling them.

  Sure, the mysteries were a thousand years old and the aliens here would almost certainly not be aware of the details, but if she didn’t start getting some of the answers, they’d never dig down to why there was a frozen version of Earth in their outer system. That was a mystery that only the Asharim could shed any light on.

  It was possible that some details would come out as they continued evaluating the research data that the Asharim from the past had gathered on that world and on the station that they’d placed above it, but that was slow going. They just didn’t have the people to make that happen, not even having formed an alliance with the Families, Brenda Cabot, and a host of other nations.

  Another angle that Harry probably hadn’t thought of was that a live alien would be something that he could use to prove to any skeptic back on Earth that everything they’d said was true. A surprising number of people had thought this was all some kind of scam, even with the high-tech ships that Harry had demonstrated for them.

  To make this happen, she’d have to rely on Harry’s battle skills to pull off what amounted to a miracle. She hoped he was up to the task.

  Chen stood outside the burning control building and raged. Not just verbally, either. Anyone that was stupid enough to stray inside his reach earned a fist to the face at his full strength. His minions quickly learned to leave him be.

  This had to be Queen. There was no other conceivable option. That son of a bitch had blown up the spaceport, including the control building. While Chen had been inside it.

  The damage reports were still streaming in, but it was obvious that the launch towers and refueling facilities were gone. With the addition of the control center and its computer hardware, the spaceport was wrecked.

  It didn’t matter that they hadn’t intended to use it anyway. It was the principle of the matter.

  The American had not only managed to strike back at him but had gotten away clean. His security forces had searched the spaceport from one end to the other and found no indication of intruders. The only non-Chinese people nearby were the locals outside the gates cheering the fires.

  Oh, how he wanted to order his men to shoot them down. Those scum, laughing at his misfortune. He hungered to see their blood.

  But that would be a mistake. He’d lost the spaceport, but if he attacked the Mexican nationals outside the gate, that would turn public opinion around the world against China. That would be bad for the Dragon.

  As much as he wanted revenge—and he knew that those bastards outside had been part of this plan—he couldn’t take it. At least not here in Mexico.

  Forcing himself to calm down, Chen searched the area around him and located his chief security officer. The man stood nearby with a handkerchief over his broken nose, otherwise impassive. He gestured for the man to approach.

  “What are the Chinese Navy’s disposition around New Zealand?” he asked coldly.

  “I will have to check, Ambassador,” the man said, his voice sounding odd because of the injury. “In general, it is my understanding that we have a number of small ships in the area, with some larger ones near the island of Nauru.”

  “What about submarines?”

  The man shrugged slightly. “The movement of such vessels is more secretive than the surface units. I will have to check with someone in Beijing to know for certain, but it would be surprising if there were not at least one subsurface unit in the area around New Zealand.”

  “Do so. Now.”

  While the man departed to discover the information that he required, Chen thought about his new plan. It entailed serious risks. In some ways, it was akin to reopening the blatant warfare with United States, only adding in the rest of the world.

  He was going to have to argue cunningly to take this action, but he intended to see the New Zealand base removed from the control of their enemies. It was likely they had other gates, but this action against the Yucatán spaceport could not go unanswered.

  Ten minutes later, his guard returned and bowed slightly. “My sources in Beijing indicate that there are two submarines in the area. One is armed with nuclear weapons and the other with a mixture of those and old-fashioned cruise missiles
. I’m given to understand that the conventional weapons are quite powerful.”

  Weapons of mass destruction were a step too far in this case. All he needed to do was use conventional weapons to deny them the use of that base. The tit-for-tat war with the United States and Humanity Unlimited would notch forward, and they would pay for their insolence.

  “Gather our people at the airstrip,” he ordered. “We depart as soon as I finish making this call.”

  As soon as the man was gone, Chen removed his satellite phone from his pocket and dialed a number from memory. The recipient answered on the second ring with a curt grunt.

  “This is Chen,” he said softly. “I must speak with the master.”

  There was silence from the other end of the line for a few moments and then another grunt.

  Chen allowed his people to drive him to the airstrip as he waited patiently to be passed along. It would not happen quickly, he suspected. This was a power play to show him that he was not in control of his own destiny. Such games were common inside the Dragon, and in China generally.

  His guess was proven correct when he was kept on hold for over half an hour. He was already aboard the hypersonic transport by the time someone spoke again from the other end. A different man.

  “I have been reviewing the news reports, Jian. It seems that you were unprepared for the American counterstrike.”

  As gallingly true as that might have been, Chen could never admit such a lapse. “It is my belief that the enemy was already present on the facility, my Lord. It certainly seems as if they had spent some time reconnecting and reactivating the self-destruct equipment.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like an excuse, old friend. While we had no intention of utilizing the spaceport as such, its loss damages our prestige. How do you propose regaining face under the circumstances?”

  Chen smiled. That was the perfect opening to offer his new plan.