Peace Warrior

by Steven L. Hawk

  When they were well away from the 'recruits' Grant spoke. "They will never be soldiers, Tane. Impossible."

  "What do you mean, Grant? They volunteered!"

  "Look, Tane, I don't question their loyalty. I'm sure they want to defeat the Minith as much as you or I. It's just that they do not, uh... possess the necessary traits to be soldiers," Grant finally said, unsure of how else to describe the recruits.

  "Hell, man, they can't even stand to be near me. How do you expect me to teach them anything about killing?"

  Tane Rolan's face paled and he stepped quickly away from Grant. Grant used the man's fear to drive his point home. "See there, Tane! Even you. You know what needs to be done, but can’t stomach the thought of hurting anyone. Even the Minith! I need recruits who are not afraid of violence. Men and women who can be taught to kill when killing is needed, Tane."

  "But where will we ever find such persons, Grant? Where?"

  Grant Justice looked evenly at his friend and shared his thoughts regarding the matter for the first time. "In Violent's Prison, Tane. We must recruit our army from Violent's Prison."

  Grant caught the senior scientist before he hit the ground. "I'll be damned," he muttered as he picked up his friend and carried him to his room. "The little fucker fainted."

  Tane came to in Grant's bed, and sat up. Grant, who was sitting patiently in the room’s chair, wasted no time with small talk.

  “How you feeling, pal?”

  “I feel fine. What hap—“

  “Nothing happened. You just fainted. But you’re fine now.” Not waiting for further conversation, he cut straight to the heart of his intent. "I'm leaving for the Minith Ship, Tane. I can’t wait any longer."

  The scientist swung his legs off the bed and looked closely at Grant. Grant thought he might be searching for signs of insanity. He apparently saw none.

  "How are you going to get there? The Minith ship is in the middle of the continent, over twelve hundred miles away."

  "I can fly a carrier vehicle. The knowledge was implanted just this morning. I need your help, though, to get one."

  "The knowledge was implanted? Grant, you could kill yourself if you are not careful. Carriers are very dangerous to the untrained."

  "Don’t worry about that, Tane. Just get me to one. I'll take care of getting it to the ship."

  "And back, also?"

  "Of course, I'll get it back, Tane." Grant possessed a confidence earned through numerous battles, fights and campaigns. There was nothing false about his self-possession. He had driven trucks, tanks, and personnel carriers; he had even flown helicopters on several occasions in his past life. Compared to those, the carrier seemed like a toy. Prior to flight, you programmed it with where to take you and how fast you wanted it to travel. Otherwise, it did most of the work. Taking off and landing were the only two aspects of the trip that took human action and those operations seemed simple enough to Grant.

  “Yes, Grant, you are probably correct. I think you are probably capable of doing almost anything you set your mind to do. I have a carrier vehicle assigned to my position. You may use it if you desire."

  Grant stood up, no longer in need of a place to be alone. He was excited for what lay ahead.

  "Let's go, Tane. Time's wasting and there's work to do."

  Ten minutes later, with Tane’s assistance, Grant was headed to the Bst’n museum.

  Two hours later, he was cruising a thousand feet above the ground. The crowded city of Bst'n was quickly left behind. Twelve hundred miles ahead, the Minith Mother Ship waited.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Grant brought the carrier down hard. His first landing in the simple, but futuristic craft plowed a long furrow of soil and rock before jerking to a halt with a loud thump.

  “Oops.”

  He unbuckled the safety harness and made his way back to the doorway, which sat mid-way along the left side of the craft. Although they came in different sizes, Tane’s carrier was built for carrying a pilot and up to ten other riders. Although he did not comprehend all of the engineering science he had absorbed on the vehicle, he understood it utilized electronic interactions with the earth’s magnetic fields to stay aloft, and simple thrust maneuvers to move side to side, up and down. It was not sleek, nor overly fast. The 1200-mile trip took just over six hours. More than anything else, the carrier reminded Grant of a large mini-van from the early twenty-first century. It was basically a large box designed to carry passengers and cargo through the air.

  He inspected the outer body for damage, and found the body of the carrier in excellent condition except for a minor ding or two. He cursed his own stupidity for not taking more care in putting the unfamiliar craft on the ground.

  He was six miles from the Minith Mother-ship, a mile beyond the alien imposed limit for human travel. He knew from his airborne approach that humans obeyed this limit without question. In fact, they exceeded it greatly.

  During his trip from Bst’n, he had scanned the ground closely. The entire distance had been carpeted with either cities or farms. Like Bst’n, the cities he passed teemed with humans. The borders of each city gave way to neatly planned farms that went for miles. From 1000 feet up, he could easily see thousands of workers in the farms, toiling away like ants to grow corn, wheat and other assorted crops – most of which he could not recognize. It was if every inch of ground that was not used for human industrial or residential use had been turned to food production. There were only two exceptions along the entire 1200-mile stretch.

  The first was a massive dark ribbon that first appeared on the horizon in what was once southern Ohio. What Grant first thought was a river soon revealed itself to be a mile-wide chasm of mining activity that ran as far as he could see from north to south. The mine’s intrusion upon the carefully cultivated fields that surrounded it was staggering and Grant slowed the carrier to investigate.

  As the carrier crossed the open pit mine, Grant stared down into the darkened bowels of the planet. He was stunned by what he could and could not see.

  What he saw was a beehive of activity on a massive scale. Countless men and women worked along the deep chasm. Numerous roads were dug into the sides of the steep cliffs surrounding the enormous gash and long lines of giant, empty trucks were descending into the pit. They passed similar lines of trucks that slowly made their way out the pit. Those ascending from the mine were filled with some type of ore that Grant could not define.

  What Grant could not see was the bottom of the canyon. The sun did not penetrate to the pit’s farthest depth. Grant turned the carrier northward to see how long the mile-wide gorge ran. He flew more than 30 miles north along the western edge of the mine before finally turning away. The northern end of the mine was still not in sight.

  The second exception to the humans’ careful use of land for farm or city use began fifty miles from the Minith Mother Ship. As Grant had learned from studying the human library on the Minith, this was a human-imposed border between themselves and the aliens. With the Leadership Council’s blessing, this land was abandoned by the farmers when the Mother Ship landed. It kept the population a “safe” distance from the aliens.

  Grant considered the safe zone as he viewed the terrain around him. His scan of the area from the sky had showed no ground or airborne activity of any type for miles. There was certainly nothing happening between his current position and the Mother Ship. He was alone and had no reason to expect that would change. His fellow humans had proven to the Minith that they were unwilling to enter this area and he counted on that fact to get him close to the ship. And perhaps inside it.

  Still, he covered the vehicle with the stunted shrubs and trees that grew nearby and erased the creases caused by his landing. It could be unhealthy to have an alien patrol spot the craft and investigate the whereabouts of its driver. That task completed, Grant looked across the flat, almost desolate land, toward the object of his jou
rney. Although still a few miles away, he could see the Minith ship clearly. It dominated the otherwise featureless horizon, a towering monument to the slave masters of earth, an expression of stature even from this distance.

  Grant began the march toward his goal. As he moved away from the carrier, he noticed a scorched darkness beneath the shrubs and grass. From the appearance of the ground and the sparse plant growth that had developed, the fire had occurred several years past. Grant wondered if the landing of the Minith ship caused this damage, or if the aliens had burned the ground intentionally as a means of clearing a barrier around the Mother Ship. The blackened earth was visible as far as he could see in every direction.

  The aliens had selected a location with good surrounding visibility as the site for their main headquarters. Grant knew this area had once been called Iowa, and was probably selected before the aliens knew there would be no trouble with the humans of earth. He doubted they would have bothered with site selection had they known in advance what type of population this world possessed.

  He traveled quickly, covering the flat, unspectacular ground in good time. His feet kept pace with his heartbeat. Two steps for every beat, it was a pace most men could not match for long but he felt good in the moment. Alive.

  Grant wore a camouflaged ghillie suit with the hood thrown off. The homemade sniper’s outfit was fashioned from a fishing net Grant had liberated from an unattended fishing boat moored in the Bst’n harbor. The net was covered with hundreds of narrow strips of ragged, green cloth that Grant had ripped and tied by hand during the flight. With the suit’s hood pulled on, Grant could disappear into the ground, invisible to the naked eye. Just another bush. Under the bulky getup he wore a standard gray jump suit, work boots, and a leather belt. He had a six inch knife strapped to his right calf and half a dozen shuriken throwing stars tucked inside a pocket on the left side of the belt. Although lethal with the knife or the throwing stars, Grant’s real defense – he hoped – was a late twenty-first century hand weapon stashed in one of the pockets of the jump suit.

  While not his first choice of weapons to take on this little adventure, all were compliments of the museum in Bst’n.

  What he couldn’t understand was how a culture so opposed to war would leave military weapons – fully working weapons – lying unprotected by any form of security. He wasn’t one to question good fortune, though. The museum placard that rested below the hand weapon had described it as a self-loading electro-pulse weapon. It supposedly killed silently and required a full charge of electricity in place of ammunition. That had been good enough for Grant. Over Tane’s objections, he removed the weapon from the display and tucked it into his pocket. The knife and shurikens were just as easily squirreled away. Other than a slight stomach ache for Tane, Grant and the scientist had walked out of the museum with no problems. Security was non-existent and there were no other visitors to the section of the museum devoted to that ancient vulgarity called 'war.' If the need for solitude struck again, he now knew where to go.

  Grant reached under the ghillie suit and took out the pulse weapon. Shaped like any other handgun, it consisted of a barrel, a hand grip, a trigger and a fire select switch. The switch could be moved to safe, single or burst fire mode. A tweak of the switch from safe to single and the weapon came alive in Grant’s hand. He aimed for a meter-high shrub ten feet away and pulled the trigger. A thin beam of blue light, perhaps an inch in diameter, erupted from the weapon and the plant disintegrated with a muffled plopping sound. Grant flinched as bits of plant splattered his face and jump suit.

  "Damn.” He flicked the setting to 'burst' and took aim on another plant, this one thirty meters away. The gun pulsed in his hand again as the beam left the barrel. The beam fired continuously for three seconds before shutting off. The plant and much of the surrounding area were mush. Grant pulled the trigger again, moving the weapon in an arc. The weapon chewed up a swath of plants and grass. Again, the weapon ceased to fire after three seconds.

  “Very nice.”

  A quick check of the charge indicator showed 98% charge remaining. He returned the setting to 'safe' and continued toward the alien vessel.

  Two miles from the Minith ship Grant tugged on the suit’s hood and went to ground. Information on Minith defenses was non-existent. He had no idea what detection methods the Minith used so he kept to his standard practices of silence, stealth and caution.

  Slowly, steadily, he drew closer to the ship. The ground grew darker and he suddenly knew. The extreme heat of the ship’s landing had scorched this ground. Grant shuddered at the deaths that the ship’s landing would have caused. He cursed. He slowed his pace, trading speed for concealment. Determined to stay hidden, his purpose was now solidified in his mind.

  A mile from the ship, a carrier rose from the far side of the ship and dashed away, heading in the opposite direction. Grant breathed a little easier. He knew from his lessons that the aliens traveled via human carrier vehicles whenever they left the Mother Ship. That meant there had to be a carrier fleet operation that supported the Minith – and he now knew it was located on the far side of the ship. That was one question answered and one potential problem resolved.

  Hours passed as Grant crept slowly closer to the ship. The sun had left the sky hours before but he kept moving forward. There was a sliver of moon throwing some light on the ground, but it was a lack of ground cover that Grant cursed. Over the final quarter-mile, the small shrubs had given way to sparse patches of gray-green grass. Grant had spotted a potential entry port on the side of the ship hours before and headed toward it. He slowed his approach even further as he traded concealment for complete silence and maximum stealth. More than a decade of being a professional soldier, coupled with more than six hundred years of death, had given him the patience he needed. He was invisible – a mere whisper of wind through the grass as he moved a foot closer. Then another foot. Then another. Each movement was punctuated by 30 seconds of motionless surveillance.

  Finally, just before dawn, he reached the ship. If there were Minith on duty his slow approach had worked or they were sloppy in their guard. Or perhaps the aliens believed the humans posed no threat, and posted no guards. Not that it mattered to Grant. For hours, his actions had been directed toward getting him to the entryway undetected. And here he was.

  He stood up quietly, stretched, then grabbed the large handle inset into the ship. One turn and Grant found himself peering inside the alien ship.

  As easy as that.

  He stepped inside, closed the portal, and shrugged off the ghillie suit. It was covered with the blackened soil through which he had crawled.

  Grant stared down the length of corridor and paused briefly. His body readjusted itself from hours of crawling to a standing position. He scoped out the interior of the alien ship as he waited.

  The gray metal walls extended for a hundred meters. Doors were spaced every twenty meters or so on both sides. He covered the hundred meters quickly and stopped short, taking a quick peek around the corner of the adjoining corridor. No aliens, so he wagered another look. The scan revealed a longer, larger hallway than the one he had entered. Along its length, he saw several off-shooting paths and more evenly spaced doorways. Because of the ship's circular design, the hallway curved out of sight after a few hundred meters. Unsure of direction, he turned left and headed down the larger corridor.

  He placed his hand under his belt and felt the reassurance of the shurikens. He next checked the security of his knife and removed the electro-pulse weapon. He gripped the weapon tightly and switched the fire selector button to 'single. '

  He counted each door and branching corridor as he passed. Getting lost was not an option. Thirteen doors and three corridors was enough. It all looked the same. Gray metal walls, doors spaced at even distance and no sign of life – Minith or human. Grant turned around and retraced his steps. If he was going to search room by
room, he might as well begin at the point closest to his exit. Grant turned the final corner and noted the ghillie suit, untouched where he had left it.

  He approached the doorway on the left closest to where he entered the ship. He took a breath, readied his weapon, and turned the handle on the door as slowly as possible.

  The door was not locked and he stepped quickly into a small, brightly lit room. Purple. The metal walls and all of the furniture in the room were a garish shade of purple. A well cushioned couch sat along the back wall. Purple. A low table and two cushioned chairs, colored in a slightly darker – but just as horrid – purple, rested in the center of the room. Some type of alien device sat on the table and immediately piqued Grant’s interest. Two doors, one on each side of the room, were closed.

  Not bad, except for the color, Grant decided.

  He listened at each door. At the first door, nothing. At the second he heard running water and his mind immediately flashed onto the six hundred year old memory of a shower. The shower stopped.

  Grant tucked the weapon into his belt and stepped to the side of the door. He waited. The Minith were larger and stronger but, with surprise on his side, he had no doubt he could take one of the creatures down without using deadly force. They were like men in a lot of ways, or so the mind transference machine had indicated.

  He waited only a few minutes. The door opened inward and Grant made his move.

  He reached, he grabbed, he threw.

  Hard.

  Human.

  Woman.

  "Oh, damn," Grant cursed and lifted his two hundred or so pounds from the inert body. He had been expecting an oversized alien and had gotten a human female. What would have been bad for an oversized alien was slightly worse for her.

  Seconds passed. She moaned and stirred slightly.

  Grant silently thanked whoever might be up in heaven that she was still alive and carefully carried her to the nearby sofa.

  He laid the woman down and noted that she was somewhat attractive. He turned her face toward him and changed his assessment. She was very attractive. The oval face possessed a perfectly shaped nose and full lips. Apart from the large purple welt rising quickly over her right eye, it was an unblemished face – framed by short brown hair, still wet from the shower. Her widely spaced eyes had long lashes and Grant wondered what she might look like with those secondary lids – and just as suddenly found himself not caring. A quick check of her body showed pleasant curves clad in a thin robe of silky, purple (what else?) material. The robe did not cover much and he scanned the room for something to cover her with. Nothing. He went to the second door and found a bedroom on the other side.