by T. R. Harris
He was right about the horn-dogs; they were tough and gamey-tasting. The rabbits on the other hand, were delicious, not tasting like chicken, but beef instead. He looked at the bloody pile of dog meat. Considering the number of rabbits scurrying about the jungle, he didn’t see any need to compromise. He carried the dog meat to the jungle edge. Moments later it sounded like an orgy of gastronomical delight, as dozens of creatures swept in for their piece of the pie.
Zac sat in the light rain on a cut log, letting the shower clean the blood from his uniform. It was mid-morning, and already he’d killed five animals, skinned them, and cooked his first meal on the planet. Now soaked to his skin, constructing a shelter beyond that of his small pop-up tent became the priority.
He returned to the crop of bamboo stalks, and using his laser blade, cut a dozen twelve-foot long lengths. Then using the rope, he looped them together and dragged the load back to the camp. He repeated this three more times until he had a decent stack of the four-inch-thick stalks.
Zac cut several into eight-foot lengths and laid them out on the ground. He then sharpened the tip of one of the twelve-foot lengths and placed it the middle of two sections of eight-foot long reeds, four feet wide. Using strips from the large palm fronds, he tied the pieces together. Next, he stood up the rickety structure and jammed the longer center piece into the moist soil, before creating a ninety-degree angle with the two sides. He retrieved the cot from the tent, stood on it, and used a rock to pound the twelve foot pole into the ground until the eight-foot tall side sections contacted the surface.
Next he fashioned a section of eight-foot long stalks together, but this one eight feet wide and with a pair of twelve-foot poles anchoring each side. He pounded the longer pieces into the ground and tied this new section to the narrower corner piece.
After a second ninety-degree section with a center anchor completed this part of his shelter. He stood back and admired his work. He now had a sixteen-foot-wide wall with two four-foot wide side sections set at ninety-degree angles, set firmly in the mushy bog.
He went out to cut more bamboo.
He didn’t finish the shelter before dark, but as night fell he set the fire to blazing and munched down another helping of alien rabbit. He drank water dripping from the large fronds, captured in sections of the bamboo left over from the shelter. He returned to the tent for the night, and as he fell into an exhausted—yet satisfied—sleep, he felt he’d made progress. Conquering this new world might not be that difficult after all.
The next morning Zac finished the side walls to his shelter and cut a door in one face. He attached longer poles to support a couple of cross beams along the center line then set to work on the roof. He constructed a sixteen-foot wide section of twelve foot stalks and secured it with strips of animal hide to a cross pole along the top of one of the walls. Then using a twenty-foot-long bamboo pole—along with much of his REV strength—he lifted the panel up until if fell over and landed neatly on the high center beam of the shelter. He repeated the process on the other side to complete the pitched roof.
He built a ladder out of bamboo and then set about placing large palm fronds across the roof and sides of the hut. He closed out the exterior construction by placing a pair of triangular bamboo sections at each end of the a-frame openings in the roof.
He was just about to move inside to begin work on the floor, when he noticed two of the horn-dogs emerge from the thick vegetation of the jungle about fifty feet away. Zac took up his six-foot long bamboo spear, scanned the surrounding foliage, and waited to see if there was going to be a problem.
The dogs stood four feet tall at the shoulders and were formidable beasts. But this time they came to him with a rabbit stuck to the horns of one and another dead animal Zac didn’t recognize on the other. They appeared docile as they approached to within twenty feet, and then to Zac’s amazement, they lowered their front legs and bowed down, as if presenting him with their catch.
Zac came up to the animals, confident in his ability to defend himself, yet feeling he wouldn’t have to. He took one of the impelled animals and used his laser blade to cut off a generous hindquarter. He laid it in front of the dog. He did the same to the other one. The beasts snatched up the fresh-cut meat and scurried off into the jungle.
Zac picked up the offerings and returned to his hut.
“Well, ain’t that some shit?” he said aloud.
These animals—like all primitive beasts—relied on scent and pheromones to size up an opponent. The combination of his alien scent, along with the natural NT-4 coursing through his system, was telling a story to the creatures of the jungle. The horn-dogs were the largest and deadliest beasts he’d seen so far, and they were now bowing down to him and bringing food to their new master.
As Zac went to work building a base for the floor to his shelter, while thinking this wasn’t such a bad gig if you could get it. Leader of the Pack had a nice ring to it.
The Aliens Have Arrived! Finally.
Headline, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 2, 2068
11
A week into his stay on the prison world of Eliza-3, Zac he’d already built a decent-sized shelter, complete with a ten-by-ten-foot deck outside the door. He cut a round hole in the middle of it and placed a bed of rock for his fire. He even had time to build a crude lounge chair out of bamboo reeds and cover it in palm fronds and the fiber of the tree bark.
He began to learn more about his environment, noticing how it seemed less hot and humid as he became acclimated to the weather. He also noticed something remarkable about the bamboo beds.
After cutting several down to the quick, he would come back a couple of days later to find they’d grown back by two feet or more. Although there were plenty of others around bamboo beds around for his needs, he was amazed at how fast they grew back.
He also noticed a frenzied increase in animal activity in the jungle. In fact, when Zac would venture out, he would often have several of the rabbit creatures run into his leg as they scurried about in a mad rush. If the damn things weren’t eating, they were humping. It was something to watch.
Another week went by before Zac—the ultimate REV warrior—became bored with sitting around on his deck, waiting for horn-dogs to bring him food, and with nothing else to do. So he packed some supplies in an animal-hide bag and set off for the mountains, which the range finder on his wrist band set at about thirty-five miles away.
There was a river about a mile from his camp which he had to ford. He delighted in the cool water, even as he watched for this planet’s version of alligators and piranha. Finding none, he moved on to the distant foothills.
He reached his destination by dusk and spotted a set of caves set in the rock at ground level. There were others higher up, and one looked particularly interesting because of the stair-step arrangement of ledges needed to reach it. He climbed up and entered the cave.
It was fairly decent size, with a powdery floor of accumulated dust covered in paw prints. Fortunately, no one was home, so Zac cut wood from the forest below and started a fire near the entrance. The smoke rose up and vented out through cracks in the ceiling, using the open entrance to help with the draw. He slept in the sleeping bag that night, since it was cooler inside the cave than outside in the jungle heat.
The next morning he surveyed more of his surroundings. The cave would make an excellent backup shelter if it came to that. By then, however, Zac was enjoying his jungle camp. In his idle time, he’d built a wall around the compound by hammering bamboo stakes into the ground in a zig-zag fashion and then placing longer stalks horizontally between them. He tied the vertical members together to lock in the rest of the wall, surprised at how strong and sturdy the barrier became. It took him three days to complete the job, but once done, he felt strangely attached to the clearing in the jungle. Zac had never had a home before, not since leaving his parent’s house at nineteen to join the Marines. After that it had been nothing but barracks and compartments aboard starships.
Growing up, Zac’s family had owned two dogs, at separate times. One came to their home already named Nikko, and when he died, Zac insisted on naming the replacement puppy Nikko as well.
Now Zac bent down and scratched the head of the huge and deadly beast before pulling the carcass from its horns.
“From now on, you will be known as Nikko,” Zac said with reverence. “Nikko the Third.”
The tail of the dog began to wag, instinctively knowing from the tone of Zac’s voice that a bond had developed between the two predators. Zac cut off a more-than-generous portion of the dead rabbit. Nikko took it up in his mouth, moved a few steps away, before beginning to eat it. This was a first. Usually he would run off into the jungle to feed.
Zac started a fire, cooked the rabbit and laid back in the lounge chair, staring up into the sky. The planet had no moon, so the nights were dark and the stars brilliant. As he was wont to do recently, he began to reflect on his life….
After joining the Marines at nineteen, Zac had gone through boot camp without a hitch. In fact, he reveled in the physical exertion and mental challenges he was put through. He had played sports in school but never excelled at anything. But now he was competing against other Marines and finding he was better than most.
The war with the Antaere had been going on for nearly a decade, with star travel a relatively new twenty-year-old event. And it wasn’t the Humans who invented it.
The aliens arrived on Earth carrying a peace sign and wishing only to share a small portion of the planet while informing the awe-struck Humans about their rightful place in the Universal Order of things. It was something out of a science fiction movie, with half the population scared shitless, and the other half welcoming them to the point of worship. They were so Human-like, standing about six feet tall on the average, with similar faces and body structure. About the only thing that set them apart from us was the pale yellow of their skin. It was soon learned that their homeworld of Antara was remarkably Earth-like, and when they developed the singularity-gravity drive that resulted in faster-than-light travel, they discovered dozens of livable worlds, yet very few that matched their homeworld almost perfectly.
Zac grinned every time he thought how the Antaere got their nickname of Qwin. It came from the sound they made when scared or hurt. Zac hoped he’d done more than his fair share to keep the slang term alive.
After a few years on the planet, the Antaere began to get resistance to their spreading of the gospel on a planet that refused to accept the aliens as gods from the stars. By then, humanity was more pragmatic and secular, so they saw the Antaere as just another species from another planet and nothing special. But the aliens wanted more. They wanted a slavishly obedient race that would do their bidding.
Opposing expectations soon led to a conflict between the Antaere and their seemingly primitive subjects.
That was their first mistake.
The battle for Earth lasted three years before the Qwin were driven off the planet.
That’s when their second—and much more serious—mistake became apparent.
In the seven years they had been on the planet, the Qwin had played fast and loose with their superior technology, bragging about it rather than protecting their secrets. By the time they were driven from Earth, the Humans had copied their gravity drive technology and followed the Qwin out into the Grid to seek vengeance, as well as territory for their own little stellar empire.
The politics was a confusing game, at least to those outside the centers of power. It had been the same throughout history. But now Gunnery Sergeant Zac Murphy was out of the fray. As he lay on his lounge chair, looking up at the distant stars, he thought how strange it was that he would find a type of peace on this planet, lost in the vastness of space. Before now, his life had been a long series of Runs and recovery, interspersed with a few brief periods of lull, with no time to think of an uncertain future. His future was Rev, as it was for everyone in the Program.
While in boot camp—and at his most vulnerable—Zac had been mesmerized by the heroic tales of the REVs. Feeling invincible at the time—as was the purpose of recruit training—he volunteered for the Program the day after graduating basic. Surprisingly, he passed the first stage of screening with little difficulty, especially in light of the huge numbers who didn’t. Once inside, however, the reality of the process became stark and terrifying. In those days, almost half the applicants died from either the screening regimen or when they moved to the NT-4 trials. The war with the aliens was in full swing and the military needed all the weapons they could get, even the more exotic, such as REVs. The Human race realized the seriousness of the challenge they faced and gave the military a pass regarding their methods. Humanity needed a win, and at any cost.
The concept for the REVs had grown out of a need for a super weapon that didn’t cost a lot to produce. In the past, the military had gone through both the robotic and mechanized phases, before discarding both as the answer to their operational goals. Robots proved too unreliable and costly. They could be easily hacked and cost a fortune to include all the artificial intelligence needed to make them an effective independent fighting force. Mechanized warriors—encased in eco-skeletons that enhanced their performance—were also costly and unreliable, and required extensive training to be operated at their theoretical potential, which was never fully realized.
When REV was first tested on Humans a couple of direct benefits immediately stood out. First, a single REV could do the work of a hundred robots or mechanized soldiers, and they didn’t need expensive and elaborate programming to do so. And second, they were cheap and plentiful. In fact, it was impossible to keep the basic structure of a REV—in the form of people—from reproducing naturally and stocking the pool with countless new volunteers, no matter the inherent risks. It seemed like the perfect solution; cheap, renewable fodder for the ever-expanding war.
And the training was inexpensive, as well. Once a candidate made it into the Program, all that was required was to drill into the REV the need to kill anything that moved. It was truly basic training of the purest form.
And it worked.
Or at least it had until one of the REVs began to think for himself.
It was going on four months since Zac had a combat dose of NT-4, with nearly all the residual gone from his system. By all rights he should be dead. Yet here he was, very much alive and sustained by the natural NT-4 his body was producing. This fact opened up a whole new set of possibilities for Zac. If—and it was a big if—he was ever taken off the planet and forgiven for his murder of Manny Hernandez, the Marines would never risk jacking up with a full dose of NT-4 again. This would change his status in the Corps, and make him eligible for retirement, possibly even with a medical disability. Seeing how he was getting by without the synthetic Rev, he was sure he could blend back into society and live out the remainder of his life as a normal human being. That was something he’d never seriously considered, until now.
Or they could just leave him on Eliza-3 to rot.
Zac’s future lie somewhere between these two extremes.
This new formula, designated NT-4, is showing great promise, not for sustained activation, but for brief periods. When used in conjunction with David’s ‘Twilight’ drug, we’ve been able to sustain maximum levels for up to five minutes and save the subject from premature termination. Time to celebrate!
Journal Entry, March 1, 2072, Dr. Clifford Slater
12
The next two weeks passed with excruciating monotony. Before being dropped on the planet, Zac had a purpose in the Marine Corps and was continually moving from one mission to another. Now he had nothing to do. Even his food was brought to him each day by his loyal horn-dog Nikko. Yet as a result of this need to keep busy he became a master at creating things out of bamboo and palm fronds, including a table and two chairs.
He had no idea who would sit in the second chair, but making it kept his mind occupied.
He built a small second shelter to store his remaining rations. He also cut back on the vitamin pills to one every three days after discovering a variety of leafy plants along the shores of the river that didn’t make him sick and provided more fiber for his diet. He found fruit in the jungle and a type of coconut milk in pods from the nearly by trees.
Zac had conquered this new environment with aplomb. Now his greatest challenge became the mind-numbing boredom.
He awoke one morning feeling a distinct chill in the air; it was a welcome relief from the heat and humidity of only a few days before. Stepping out of the shelter and onto his bamboo deck, he noticed a coating of white on the three mountain peaks in the distance. Checking the barometer on his wristband, he noticed a drop in pressure. A storm was coming, and one that promised cooler temperatures.
He was prepared. He had already cut the two horn-dog hides into long coats. They did the trick, for as long as he wore them in the heat of the jungle. He had also fashioned a set of long galoshes from the skin to cover his military boots. They came to mid-thigh and were secured to his utility belt by straps of leather. He used them now and then when the mud in the compound got too deep after a heavy rain, or when fording the river on his many explorations.
He felt he was ready for whatever the change in weather would bring.
Near the end of daylight, Nikko lumbered into the camp, a food offering stuck on his horns. Zac went up to him and scratched behind his ears, even jostling him to wrestle. His daily interactions with another living creature were cathartic, but Nikko didn’t want to play.
