The Earthling (Soldiers of Earthrise Book 1)

by Daniel Arenson

  Jon spent the rest of the trip silently, barely looking at the view. For the first time in his life, he had seen death. Not just a closed coffin, but men and women dying.

  He felt empty.

  And it was only his first day on Bahay.

  That evening, he walked through Fort Miguel, heading toward his tent. Etty and George walked beside him. They were all silent. A few soldiers laughed nearby, kicked a ball around, and music played. But Jon could still hear the bullets.

  Jon lay on his cot that night. More cots filled the tent; an entire squad bunked here. Clay was awake, bragging about his kills. He was pretending to fire his gun, making sound effects of bullets and dying villagers. Other soldiers listened in rapt attention. When Clay imitated Jon complaining, his voice rising to a whine, the soldiers laughed.

  "Asshole," Etty muttered, lying on her cot beside Jon. It was the first word she had spoken since the helicopter ride.

  Sergeant Lizzy appeared at the tent door, shouted at them to lay down and sleep, and they killed the lights.

  But Jon lay awake for a long time in the darkness, and when he finally slept, he dreamed that he was falling from a helicopter, falling and falling into a dark pit and never finding the ground.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Revenge Is a Hot Bullet

  Bahay had broken her. Taken her arm. Shattered her soul. And now Lizzy Pascal was back, and she felt like shards of glass rattling inside a suit of armor. An illusion of strength. A broken warrior.

  Back in the Lions. Her lover's platoon.

  Back in the Apollo Brigade. Her father's brigade.

  Back on Bahay. Her people's war.

  I'm strong, but I could not fight them, Lizzy thought. They dragged me back. And now I'm broken.

  "We should never have come back," she whispered, staring out the trailer window at the jungle. "We should have forgiven."

  Carter rose from his desk, leaving his maps of the jungle, enemy camps marked with red pins.

  "Forgiven?" His face was a tense mask, hiding his rage. "Forgiven that monster? After what he did to you?"

  Lizzy nodded, eyes damp. "Yes. They say the best revenge is living well. We are not living well."

  Carter walked around the desk. There was tension in his steps. In his shoulders. He forced air in. "It's been said that revenge is a dish best served cold. What a contemptible lie! Revenge is a hot bullet in your enemy's heart. How can you forgive Ernesto for…" His jaw clenched. He could say no more.

  "For raping me," Lizzy said softly. "For burning me with his iron. For cutting off my hand. The pain still fills me. The nightmares still haunt me. Now more than ever. Cart, we should have stayed away."

  She gazed out the window again. She was in a small trailer at the edge of Fort Miguel. From here, she could see the security fence, a guard tower, and beyond it—the sprawling jungle. That hell where she had fought the enemy for two years. Where she had languished in a bamboo cage for weeks. The jungle she would soon enter again.

  Yes, her lover commanded her platoon. And her father commanded her brigade. And both men were brave warriors. But Lizzy felt so alone here. Her lover, her father, and all the soldiers here could not protect her. Not from what was out there.

  "Lizzy." Carter hugged her from behind. "We'll do this together. And it'll be over soon. It—"

  She wriggled free. "Stop touching me. It will never be over!" She spun toward him, tears in her eyes. "And if we kill Ernesto, what of his men? The men who helped him? And if we kill them, what of the whole Kalayaan? Then what of this whole world? It will never end for you, Cart! You'll always keep fighting, because…" She hung her head. "Because that's all you know."

  He took her hands. "I was born the son of a general. A general who abandoned me and my mother, leaving us to the slums. But I escaped! I proved I'm my father's son. I went to Julius Military Academy, an honor denied to most. I served, and I fought, and I killed, and I watched friends die. I saw my entire platoon wiped out, and I kept fighting. Because I'm a soldier, Lizzy. That's what I was born for. What I trained for. What I vowed to always be. But it's not all I know." His voice softened, and he stroked her cheek. "I know how to love you."

  She wept. "You don't—"

  "I do—"

  "You don't know how to love me!" Lizzy said. "You want to protect me. To avenge me. I'm just an excuse for your war! This? Love?" She laughed bitterly. "There is no love here. Not on this planet. Only hatred. Only pain."

  "Lizzy." He gripped her hands, refused to release her. "I love you. Do you hear? I love you! I would burn down the galaxy for you."

  "I never asked you to burn anything for me," she whispered. "Maybe sometimes just try to hold me. To be here for me. Not for your war. Not for your revenge. Just for me."

  He pulled her into his embrace. Lizzy lay her head on his shoulder, tears silently falling, and he kissed the top of her head.

  "I'm here for you," Carter whispered. "Just for you. Always."

  Lizzy touched his cheek. "You're a good man, Lieutenant Michael Carter. You're honorable, and kind, and brave. But you're broken. You're more broken than I am."

  "We will heal," he said. "I promise. But I can only heal the way I know how. Not with forgiveness, but with lead and fire."

  Lizzy took a step back. "You scare me."

  Carter caressed her prosthetic hand, silent for a long moment.

  "I scare myself," he whispered. "I'm scared of losing more soldiers. I'm scared of losing Jon so soon after we lost Paul. I can't let my troops see. I can't let my superiors know. But I'm always scared, Lizzy."

  She hugged him, kissed his lips, and her tears fell.

  "I love you," she whispered. "And I'm with you. If this is the path you must take, if you must walk again into the heart of darkness, into the jungle where we broke… I'll walk with you. Always. To the end of the universe."

  That night, they shared his bed, and they made love in the hot, humid darkness. Lizzy straddled him, head tossed back, his hands on her breasts, and her skin glistened in the light of Bahay's twin moons. Her skin was pale, silvery, while his was black as the space between stars. They were darkness and light, love and fire, and as Lizzy rode him, she felt like she was in the jungle again. Running. Fleeing monsters in the shadows. Lost forever in the nightmare. And when she climaxed, she cried out so loudly Carter had to cover her mouth.

  She collapsed into his arms, crying softly, so afraid. He smoothed her hair, kissed her tears away, and held her until the dawn.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Fortunate Son

  For the first time in his life, Lieutenant Michael Carter was going to meet his father.

  It frightened him more than battle.

  He walked through Little Earth, the finest military base on Bahay. This was nothing like Fort Miguel, the crude outpost where Carter spent most of his days. The Old Mig, as they called it, was a mere swath of scorched soil carved from the rainforest, peppered with trailers and tents. That place was rough. But here? Little Earth, where the generals lived? Here was a piece of paradise.

  Little Earth was right outside Mindao, the sprawling capital of South Bahay. Walking here, it was hard to believe that shantytowns, shabu dens, and despair could lurk just a short distance away—just beyond the white walls that surrounded this compound. Here, within the walls of heaven, grassy lawns rustled in the wind. Flowerbeds bloomed with color and sweet scents, attracting butterflies. Rather than tents or shanties, the buildings here looked like ancient Greek temples, boasting marble columns, glimmering white under the sun.

  Carter was wearing a dusty, dented battlesuit. The scars of war marred the armor plates: burn marks, bullet holes, a crack from an enemy's machete. He felt woefully underdressed. A few other officers were present, strolling along the pebbly paths, wearing dress uniforms. The white fabric sported golden cuff links and buttons. They looked more like Disney princes than soldiers, if you asked Carter.

  He sighed. Even after three years at Julius Military Academ
y, he still felt out of place among these people. He felt like a crude vagabond walking among royalty. Like an impostor.

  You always carry your childhood with you, Carter thought. Even the wealthiest, most powerful men are just broken boys inside. I might be an officer now. A graduate of Julius Military Academy, the most prestigious school on Earth. But I'll always be that fatherless kid from the streets of New York.

  He winced, his childhood returning like waves, beating against him. The grassy lawns, blooming flowerbeds, and marble columns disappeared. And once more Michael Carter was only a child, racing barefoot through the concrete canyons of New York City, lord of the slums. The public housing apartment blocks soared around him, draped with fire escape staircases like braces on the stone teeth of titans. Graffiti-coated brick walls, forming forests of color, the artwork of the city. A beggar reached out a shaky palm, and a junkie hid in an alley, staring from under a ragged hood. A gunshot echoed in the distance, and somebody screamed.

  But young Carter knew no other world. He did not fear the pimps, nor the drug dealers, nor the crossfire of battling gangs. He feared monsters under his bed. He feared vampires and wolves in the alleyways. Every day, people died around him, this battlefield far from any war in space. And Carter dreamed up monsters and ghosts in the shadows.

  He would spend his days on the streets, returning home after midnight. There was such sadness in his home, a concrete box on the sixth floor, overlooking an alley full of dumpsters. When his mother was away, working two jobs to survive, the apartment seemed so empty, lonely, like a prison cell. When she was home, it was worse. Even as a boy, Carter saw the hunger in her eyes, her nervous mouth. She always cooked him two full meals every night, even when she herself went hungry.

  Men came and went. A string of Mother's boyfriends. A few beat her. A few beat Carter. They stayed for a while, spent more money than they earned, then wandered off. But young Carter and his mother remained, scars deepening.

  "Your father is a powerful general," Mother told him many nights, stroking his hair. "And someday he'll come back to us."

  "I want to see his picture again!" the boy said. "I want to see Daddy!"

  That always made Mother seem so sad. But she showed him the photograph.

  "Here he is, son."

  Cart stared at the man in the photograph. A white man in a military uniform, his face hard and craggy like a boulder, his blond hair streaked with silver. The boy had inherited his mother's darker skin, wise brown eyes, and black hair. It was hard to believe this officer was truly his father.

  "Why did he leave?" the boy asked so many times.

  Mother smiled and wiped a tear from her eye. "It's time to sleep, Jimmy. No more questions tonight."

  And now, twenty years later, Michael Carter was walking here through Little Earth, a wealthy military base hundreds of light-years from home. He wore the insignia of an officer on his shoulders. His path had been long. And it had led him to here. To this planet. To this war. To finally meeting his father.

  He approached a neoclassical building, climbed an elegant staircase, and stepped between marble columns. Two guards greeted him, both men resplendent in dress uniforms. Carter showed them his tablet.

  "Here, signed by Colonel Joe Pascal," he said. "There's a holographic vidature too. I have a meeting with General Ward today."

  The guards gaped.

  "You have a meeting with General Ward." A guard rubbed his eyes. "You."

  Carter smiled thinly. "Yes, this young lieutenant in the beat-up battlesuit has a meeting with General Ward, high commander of all HDF forces on Bahay. I know it seems crazy. Which is why I have this tablet, signed by a colonel. You can view the attached hologram to confirm."

  A guard raised a minicom, a small portable computer, and scanned the barcode on Carter's tablet. A small hologram of Colonel Pascal, commander of the Apollo Brigade, appeared and confirmed the meeting. Vidatures were becoming more and more common in the military, harder to fake than mere signatures in ink.

  The guards exchanged glances, then shrugged and let Carter in.

  He walked through the building, his boots thumping against the polished tiles. People crowded the building, Earth's headquarters on Bahay. Most were senior officers. They wore dress uniforms and displayed stars and phoenixes on their shoulders, not butterbars like Carter's insignia. There were also Bahayans here—servants in livery. They were cleaning. Pouring coffee. Typing notes. Carter didn't know how trustworthy they were—after all, Earth had conquered half their planet—but the top brass considered the South Bahayans loyal allies in this war against the Red Cardinal.

  The South Bahayans hate the Red Cardinal just as much as we do, Ensign Earth had vowed in a recent video. Carter found that hard to believe.

  But right now, he had other things on his mind.

  He passed several more guards, checkpoints, and interrogations. He was patted down. The vidature was scanned again and again. He stood in line to speak to a small army of clerks. He spent a lot of time in waiting rooms.

  Finally, long after entering Little Earth, Carter entered the office of General Charles "Chuck" Ward.

  And there he sat. The supreme commander of the Bahayan War. The highest ranking officer on Bahay, answering directly to the president on Earth. The hero of Titan who had suppressed the rebellion with his iron will and flaming warships. The famed Granite General himself, his face and heart both said to be as hard as stone.

  My father, Carter thought.

  He instantly recognized the officer from the photograph. Ward had aged. After all, that photograph was a quarter century old. The hair was fully silver now, cropped close. The face was even harder, craggier, a face like a granite boulder, the mouth like a crack in stone. But the eyes were the same. Cold eyes, blue like frozen seas, like death. Eyes like a winter that never ends.

  Those eyes chilled Carter. And they weren't even looking at him. The general was busy riffling through papers on his desk.

  Carter found it odd that Ward still used actual physical paper. Carter had never touched paper. In an era of holograms, augmented reality, and even direct-to-brain video feeds, paper seemed quaint.

  But Ward was clearly a man from another era. Carter glanced at the books on the general's shelf. The Art of War by Sun Tzu. De re militari by Vegetius. De Bello Africo by Julius Caesar. The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte by Louis de Bourrienne. Hundreds more leather-bound books of ancient warfare, most of them written centuries or millennia ago. The Chronicles of the Alien Wars by Einav Ben-Ari was the only modern title, and even that was a good fifty years old. Several maps hung on the walls, but they depicted ancient Earth during the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the United Hegemony following the Cataclysm of 2093. Again, nothing from this century.

  Ward had risen to command the Bahayan Garrison, so clearly he was a capable man. But it was the year 2223. At least judging by his office, Ward was far behind the times.

  He's my father, Carter thought. The man I saw in the photograph so many times. The man I've wanted to see since I was a child. But he looks like a stranger.

  Carter stood at attention and saluted.

  "Sir, Lieutenant Michael Carter reporting!"

  For an agonizingly long time, the general ignored him. Ward kept looking through his notebooks and maps. He raised a pen, flipped a page, and wrote a note. A thick ring, set with the jewel of Julius Military Academy, gleamed on his finger. That and the phoenixes on his shoulders, denoting his rank, were his only ornamentations. Some senior officers wore medals and pins like a portable trophy case across their chests. Ward did not need to peacock his honors. Everyone on Bahay recognized his authority.

  Finally Ward spoke, though he did not raise his eyes from his work.

  "Yes, the young infantryman from Apollo Brigade. Colonel Pascal was quite adamant that I see you." The general wrote something in a leather-bound notebook. "Normally lieutenants don't step into my office. Especially not wearing dusty battlesuits." He licked his fingertips
and flipped the page. "This must be quite important."

  Carter took a deep breath. It was just the moment he had been waiting for since childhood. No pressure.

  "Sir, I won't beat around the bush," Carter said. "I'm your son."

  That got the general to raise his eyes.

  He stared at Carter for a long, piercing moment.

  Then Ward returned to his notebooks and kept writing.

  "I don't believe it. Dismissed, Lieutenant."

  Carter did not leave.

  "Sir," he tried again, "I know we don't look alike. I look like my mother, Abigail Carter." He raised a photograph, showing his mother smiling on their balcony. "You met her twenty-five years ago. She was working as a maid in the Palaye Hotel. You spent a night there in 2198, and you had dinner together. Fried octopus, she said. And—"

  "Ah yes." General Ward put down his pen, scrutinized Carter, and nodded. "Yes, yes. I see it on your face. I remember her now. A young African-American maid. Bit skinny, but she made her uniform look good enough. Her name was Anabelle, you say?" He cleared his throat, flipped a page in his notebook, and returned to work. "Dismissed, Lieutenant."

  Carter blinked. "But—" He was lost for words. "Sir, I—I'm your son. I thought that…"

  His voice trailed off. He had never imagined their reunion like this. He had not imagined warm hugs, per se, but at least… a discussion.

  General Ward looked up again from his work. His face hardened. "Lieutenant, I've got a war to run. I can't be the father you want. Dismissed."

  "Sir!" Carter took a step closer to the desk. "I've been waiting all my life to meet you! Do I mean nothing to you? Does my mother mean nothing? She told me you loved her, that—"

  "Your mother was a distraction for a night. That was all. She means nothing to me. I haven't thought about her since that night twenty-five years ago. I know you want a father, Lieutenant, but right now, I need you to focus on your duties as a soldier. You are dismissed. Leave now, or I'll have security drag you out."