The Human Chronicles Saga Box Set 5

by T. R. Harris

  Or could it? Adam had his doubts.

  It had taken considerable time and training for him to gain the level of expertise he had with his device. And Arieel had grown up with hers, as the heir-apparent to the leadership of the Formilian people.

  But the aliens Kaylor and Jym were another matter.

  For his part, Kaylor seemed more apprehensive of the device than anxious to learn how to use it. His Belsonian race wasn’t known to be overly religious, but they did have a fervent belief in the sanctity of their physical being. Having an artificial device implanted in his body that could sync with his brain was something he was having difficulty accepting.

  On the other hand, Jym welcomed the device, and all the power it gave him. As the smallest and weakest of the team, he felt the ATD put him on an even keel with the others. But an ATD is a complicated device, with a lot of training required before it could be used efficiently. Jym was having none of that. He was too impatient to concentrate on the training sessions, inclined more to learn on his own through obnoxious—and potentially dangerous—experimentation. Jym’s antics were also interfering with the training the others were going through—especially Copernicus Smith.

  Coop was new to the whole ATD thing. Sure, he’d seen Adam and Arieel operate theirs, but unlike Sherri and Riyad—who had prior experience—he was the only Human on the team who was a complete rookie with the device. Whereas Kaylor feared his ATD—and Jym experimented with his—Coop was confused by the whole concept of the brain-interface and was having a helluva time making the damn thing work.

  “You have to gain awareness of the Gift within your body,” Arieel was explaining to Coop as Adam entered the room. For two thousand years, the Formilian race considered the powers of the interface device a Gift, given to their supreme religious leader—their Speaker—as a means of communicating with the polar-opposite gods Mislin and Sufor. “At the moment, you do not feel the gift within you,”

  Arieel continued. “Once you become more aware, you will have an easier time accessing its miracles.”

  Adam was surprised to hear Arieel speak in such terms about the ATD. By now, she was fully aware that all the so-called miracles the device created were merely a result of science and technology, and not from any mystical or divine providence. But old habits die hard, so Adam gave her a pass.

  No one seemed particularly glad or surprised to see him. His habit of coming and going was old hat by now; besides, they were too distracted with their new toys to give him much notice.

  But Sherri did come over and give him a cursory hug.

  “How was your trip?” she asked flippantly as if he’d just spent a few days in Cleveland at a widget convention, rather than getting a starship get cut in half with him aboard.

  “It was fine, dear,” Adam answered, matching her tone. Sherri nodded absently and moved back to where Copernicus stood red-faced, listening to Arieel explain more about the ATD—in frustratingly-religious terminology.

  “Let’s get him to concentrate on the area under his armpit,” Sherri offered. “Take your hand and feel the unit under your skin. Maybe that will make it more real to you.”

  Arieel nodded, and the two women devoted all their attention to the bare-chested hunk of a man with the feral six-pack abs.

  Copernicus Smith was only thirty-six years old; at that age, Adam been just as cut. And now, with the tiny colony of alien mutant brain cells residing within his skull, he was more physically fit than he’d ever been in his life. But on the exterior, he was still a forty-nine-year-old man who’d seen more than his share of youth-stealing mileage. He looked over at Riyad, seated on a large couch, and shaking his head at Jym’s annoying antics. He was the oldest of the group, yet his smooth olive-skin and jet-black hair and beard disguised his chronological age. He could pass for anywhere between the mid-twenties to around forty, but never his actual age of fifty-two.

  Depressed, Adam walked to the food prep station located along an outer wall of the room. There was a large window facing north, revealing a spectacular vista of snow-capped mountains and a wide river called the Yanis. The team had the entire twenty-first floor of the thirty-story skyscraper to use as their base of operations. So far, not many operations had been planned or implemented since the Klin invasion began a year earlier. The team was still in the information-gathering stage, and the longer it took for them to come up with any viable countermeasures, the more planets would be lost to the insane aliens.

  Adam pulled a cup of steaming coffee from the processor and turned to look into the room. Yes, his team had proven themselves over and over again, but why were they always the ones drafted into saving the galaxy? To be fair, he knew there were billions of other creatures, made up of a thousand different species, all working on the same problem. But it was Adam Cain and his people who were expected to come up with a solution. It was the cavalier nature of the assumption that upset him the most.

  A large conference table was set off to his left, with a data box imbedded in its surface and a viewing screen on the wall. He walked over and took a seat in front of the control box, his shitty mood causing him to gripe about why there weren’t holographic projectors like they had in Star Wars. Instead, his presentation would be displayed on a normal-looking glass panel, resembling a large flat-screen TV. Sure, the technology under the hood was light-years beyond what Sony ever came up with before alien tech took over on Earth. But still…there should be holographs.

  Adam’s acerbic mood made everything he saw or touch piss him off just a little bit more. He also didn’t like being taken for granted.

  “Hey, you think you could stop playing around for a minute?” he barked into the room, sounding as bitchy as possible. “We have some very important things to go over. This is serious; something all of you seem to have forgotten.”

  “What bug climbed up your ass and laid an egg?” Sherri snapped back. “All you had to do was call the meeting to order.”

  “I thought I just did.”

  “Come, Jym,” Kaylor said to his life-long friend and shipmate. “Our master has spoken.”

  Adam cursed under his breath. When Kaylor got snarky with him, he knew he’d crossed a line. Even so, Adam was in no mood to apologize.

  When everyone was seated at the table, Adam inserted a data chip in the computer.

  “Getting right to it, there were some interesting developments during my time with the Tactorians. I’ve gone over some of this already with Riyad during the transit back here, but for the rest of you, this will be new.”

  He looked to the huge display screen. It was dark. He pulled the chip from the reader and inserted it again. Still, no data.

  Pursing his lips in anger, Adam glared at Jym, who was seated at the opposite end of the rectangular table.

  “I concede,” the alien said with a laugh. “Yet you must admit to being impressed. I was able to locate the control module and affect the workings of the monitor.”

  The screen flashed on.

  Through his anger, Adam had to admit the tiny bear was making progress with his ATD at a faster pace than expected. But this was not the time or the place to play games. Not with the mood Adam was in.

  The screen showed a detailed graphic of the approach of the Klin warship and the subsequent attack by the Tactorians. When the five nuclear bombs exploded in succession, Adam suddenly had their attention.

  “It wasn’t destroyed?” Copernicus asked, unbelieving.

  “No, but the ship did leave the system,” Riyad reported. He looked at Adam. “We could just keep blasting them with nukes until they leave, and then set up a perimeter to keep them away.”

  “That would take a lot of nukes,” Sherri noted. “It would also saturate the system with clouds of radiation.”

  “The radiation would dissipate over time,” Kaylor countered. “And having to avoid several restricted areas within a system for few years is better than the alternative.”

  The screen now showed the second Klin vessel entering
from the opposite direction and its subsequent unloading of millions of deadly robots on the planet Tactoria.

  “We just need to form a screen around the target planet to cover all approaches,” Riyad said. “Move the defensive line in closer. That should do it.”

  Adam leaned back in his chair as all eyes turned to him. “I’ve been looking at this from all sides, and here are my conclusions. First, there are eight thousand worlds in the Expansion, plus about fifty in the Union. We would have to arm each of them with a stockpile of nuclear weapons—devices that are archaic and rare—even on Earth. And the strategy doesn’t destroy the Klin ships. It only forces them to leave the system. The Klin could simply lay off for a while and come back in, over and over again, until the weapons are depleted. And secondly, can you imagine what could go wrong with eight thousand species all armed to the teeth with nuclear bombs? It ain’t pretty.”

  “That’s true,” Sherri said. “But you’re wrong about having to arm every civilized planet in the galaxy. The Klin have been following a very precise plan of attack. They’ve been predictable to a fault.”

  Adam smiled and changed the image on the screen, replacing it was an overview of a quarter of the galaxy. A highlighted section displayed red contacts with connecting lines.

  “You’re right, Sherri, they have. And that could be their Achilles Heel.”

  “Forgive me, Adam…their what?” Arieel asked.

  “Their weak point. Observe.” The imaged morphed into a flyby of the region under attack by the Klin. There was a wide area where the recent battles were taking place, and then a tapering until the battle points disappeared. At first, the area of devastation appeared to be an expanding triangle, until the perspective changed to show it to be a cone. And like every cone, it had a point of origin.

  “Like I said, a precise game plan.” Like all the others around the table, Sherri could see where the conversation was headed. “And with a specific starting point.”

  “Exactly,” Adam agreed. “We have a choice of either stopping the Klin’s machines or stopping the Klin themselves. There’s a base of operations somewhere, and the obvious place is right here.” He highlighted the tip of the cone with a marker. “It’s estimated that only about two hundred thousand Klin exist. Our efforts should focus on finding and eliminating them. If we can do that, the threat simply fades away.”

  “Unless their machines are programmed to go on without them,” Kaylor pointed out.

  “Without the Klin riding shotgun over their production facilities, their robots and spaceships will stop being built.” Adam waited for one of the aliens to comment on the word shotgun, but none did. His message was clear.

  Copernicus shook his head. “You know, the one thing that’s always bothered me about the Klin’s attack strategy; why haven’t they gone directly to the main planets and wiped them out? Their stealth starships can approach any system undetected, and so far—until now—there’s been no way to stop them. They could have gone to Juir, Formil—even Earth—and that would have been ninety percent of the war right there.”

  “According to that Klin bastard we met aboard the black ship when we were captured, his people are at war with the entire galaxy, all the races that turned their backs on the Klin over the thousands of years they’ve been in exile,” Adam said. “But your concern has been mine, too, Coop. If we do manage to ward off a few attacks, the Klin may decide to go for the jugular. At the moment, they’re punishing the leaders of the galaxy with their rather systematic annihilation of the Expansion. We’re fortunate their starting point is on the opposite side of the galaxy from Earth. At their current pace, it could be a hundred years before they reach the Union…unless they change strategy.”

  Riyad looked at Adam. “What you’re saying is that if we start using the nuclear option to deny the Klin access to the worlds in their direct path, they may change strategy and start hitting planets willy-nilly?”

  Even in his rotten mood, Adam had to smile at the reactions from the three aliens to the word willy-nilly. They desperately wanted to ask for an explanation; instead, they relied on logic to decipher the meaning, hoping it was right.

  “The thing I’ve come to realize about the whole Klin affair,” Adam began, “is their plans are fluid and amendable. They’ve had the upper hand in every engagement. Even at Tactoria—when nukes were used—they showed up with a second ship as if they anticipated the response. They had to know we’d use nukes eventually, and they had a counter-response already in motion.”

  Sherri pointed at the monitor. “So, the obvious point of origin could be a deception, simply because it’s so obvious.”

  Adam nodded. “Anyone with a computer can plot the attack progression and follow it to the starting point. The Klin have to know this.”

  “So why make it so obvious?” Arieel asked.

  “So, we’ll step into the trap,” Riyad answered.

  “We?” Arieel asked. “How could they have anticipated it would be this team that would propose the plan to seek out the living Klin?”

  “It wasn’t necessarily meant for us; just whatever force was sent to track down the Klin.”

  “But it will be us, is this correct?” Jym asked, his voice trembling.

  “Naturally,” Adam said with a smile. “They sent the invitation. Who are we to refuse?”

  “Did you not just say it is a trap?” Arieel questioned.

  “Yeah, but we’ll know it’s a trap,” Copernicus said, warming up to the plan. “That will give us a chance to turn the tables on the silver-skinned bastards,”

  “Turn the tables? How does rearranging furniture serve our purpose?”

  Arieel was sitting at Adam’s left. He reached out and grasped her soft, warm hand. “Your beauty and innocent charm are intoxicating, my dear.” Then he turned serious. “I don’t suppose I could persuade you to remain here while the rest of us go off to dance with the Klin?”

  Arieel jerked her hand from his and pushed away from the table. “Of course not! I do not run in fear from a challenge. And I am a gift-carrier. In fact, I am the most-proficient user of the device. You would be at a disadvantage without me.”

  “Let her come along,” Sherri said, smiling. “I could use some female company to offset the testosterone rampant in this room—including whatever hormones Jym and Kaylor have running through their bodies.”

  “It was never in doubt,” Adam said, his mood improved considerably now that he had mission…and a group of friends to share it with.

  3

  Next, Adam had to brief the bigwigs on his plan.

  The Expansion—indeed, the entire galaxy, including the Orion-Cygnus Union—was now governed by a Council of Advisors comprised of representatives from the thirteen major worlds. After Adam’s daughter Lila was kidnapped by the ancient Aris race, a leadership void was created, and a void that had to be filled quickly to resist the Nuorean invasion that started the same day Lila was taken.

  Although the Juireans had begun the process of slowly repatriating Expansion leadership back to Juir, they were content to leave most of the infrastructure and responsibility to the Formilians as the galaxy faced the new threat posed by the Klin. If the defense failed, they could blame it on Arieel and her people and their lack of experience. If they succeeded, they could say it was because of the substantial support the Juireans gave the upstart leaders of the Expansion. Either way, it was politics as usual.

  The Council met in a large conference room four stories above the team’s level in the O’lac Building. It was the fact they were so close that upset Adam the most when his request for a meeting didn’t get scheduled until two days later, and with an allocated time of only fifteen minutes for him to present his plan. He didn’t have the time to waste.

  Adam had already submitted a data brief outlining his observations with the Tactorians. He also included a rough draft of his intentions to seek out the remaining Klin population. But two days? It was as if they weren’t taking his proposal serio
usly.

  When the day and time arrived, Adam was seated at the focus of the horseshoe-shaped table—the hot-seat the Humans called it. He was by himself, with none of his team for support.

  The Council members filed in slowly. Very few acknowledged Adam’s presence, even as they spent considerable time talking amongst themselves, even laughing on occasion. All the while, the galaxy was being overrun by killer Klin….

  Eventually, Adam made eye contact with the Human representative on the Council, the Honorable Ashton Hill. He nodded at Adam with casual nonchalance, his eyes revealing nothing of his thoughts.

  The Formilian First Corusant—an alien called U’lac Vison—called the meeting to order.

  “Welcome, Adam Cain,” he said without looking at the Human. “I understand you wish to make a brief presentation to the Council.”

  Adam was taken aback by the apparent lack of seriousness to his proposal.

  “It is more than a presentation, First Corusant. It is a plan ultimately designed to eliminate the Klin as a threat to the galaxy. And I must say I’m a little disappointed at the apparent lack of urgency on the part of the Council. If I’m not mistaken, the Klin are still gobbling up Expansion planets at an alarming rate across an ever-widening arc of the galaxy.”

  U’lac frowned, his golden bronze skin and piercing blue eyes betraying his age of one-hundred ten Earth years. He didn’t look a day over fifty.

  “I take exception to your criticism. We on the Council are very much engaged in the conflict with the Klin. And to that end, we have reviewed your proposal and find it lacking in certain respects.”

  “Lacking? In what way?”

  “You request permission to seek out the Klin, after which a concerted military operation is to be launched to eradicate the threat.”

  “That’s right,” Adam said. “The Klin only number a couple hundred thousand. The combined might of the galaxy will have no problem taking them out for good. No more Klin, now or forever.”