“You’re a troublesome creature,” Claath said. “According to this tally, you destroyed one of the teaching drones. That’s destruction of property, my property. The Family has already petitioned for your elimination. Now that you’re awake—”
“The drone was defective,” I said.
Claath studied me. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. Finally, he said, “Explain.”
“The drone abused one of your mercenaries,” I said, “one of the modified humans. I imagine neuro-fiber surgery and steroid shots cost a lot of money, your money. If the teaching drone had continued its punishment shocks, one of your mercenaries would have died and you would have lost your investment.”
“You claim to have destroyed the drone in order to save me money?” Claath asked.
“No. I destroyed it to save one of my fellow trainees. I merely point out that in doing so, I saved you funds.”
“Hmm,” Claath said. “You labor under several misconceptions. For instance, humans are cheap. Such manufactured bio-plastic drones with culture-grown brains are expensive—at least in relation to a wild fighting beast such as you. The net expenses have put you in the red. Worse, you have already cost me much by killing an entire Family cluster.”
“True,” I said. “But in doing so I showed you the utility of humans as space-assault troopers. That’s worth a lot of cold hard cash and can pay for a few busted androids.”
“You overstate your utility by an estimated factor of ten, and future profits can pay for nothing in the present.”
“Jelk don’t do credit?” I asked.
Claath’s dark eyes glittered. “You are a glib beast with a highly inflated ego. Let us say for the moment you helped restore needed profits. You’ve also asked for expenditures in a nearly useless gesture: to save a few million worthless creatures on your barren planet.”
I still didn’t like being called an animal, but I no longer lost my temper over it. In my mind, I was a mercenary. I now told Claath, “I hope to show you—”
“Enough,” Claath said. “I will not dicker with you, as the concept is insulting and irrational. What I deem interesting is your wit. It proves that wild Earthbeasts are more cunning than the domesticated pets we keep underfoot.”
The Jelk glanced at a tablet. Maybe it was an accounting ledger. “Hmm,” he said, looking up at me. “I must admit that I applaud your combat ferocity. I hadn’t believed unarmed Earthbeasts capable of destroying androids. Before this, I’d debated growing more android cultures and using them as space-assault troopers. But the ease at which you destroyed one yesterday shows I may have overestimated their fighting abilities. They also take too long to grow, and as I said, they are too expensive to throw away in the risky commando operations I have in mind.”
He drummed his fingers on the desk, not doing them in sequence like a normal person, but tapping them down all together at once. “Normally, I’d terminate such a troublesome creature like you who willfully destroys my property. The problem is that I’ve sunk too much capital into this venture. You Earthbeasts—I have an enterprise for you and your ilk. It will be a deadly proposition, do not doubt it. Yet the same monies needed to make the attempt…”
He grinned at me. “The Jelk Corporation has yet to acquire a Forerunner artifact. They are entirely rare and astronomically costly. If I could capture the Altair Object…” he mused.
Once more, the Jelk drummed his fingers on the desk. “Time is of the essence. Yes, I will accelerate the training schedule. I have bid on a raid fleet and believe—” He paused again, thinking.
Then Claath leaned forward. “Do not destroy any more property. If it will calm your mayhem, I will instruct the techs to check the androids. My advice to you is to endure, learn and refrain from incurring my wrath. One more such incident and I will let the Family indulge in one of their primitive customs of retribution. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Release him,” Claath told the watching Saurian.
There seemed something different about this lizard. For a moment, I thought the Saurian would dump me into the pool full of carnivorous fish thrashing below. Then he hissed, relaxed his posture and tapped a control, and my metal slate began sliding toward the exit.
***
I returned to the training group and the androids appeared to hold no malice toward my destroying one of their number. I say appeared, because it turned out that one of them held a grudge. It also knew how to bide its time, though.
For the next few days, we exercised and ate heartily, helping our overstrained steroid-glutted muscles to expand. Soon, we began studying insertion tactics, laser rifles, pulse grenades and a host of other vacuum-combat related topics.
Five days after the android-destroying incident, a beefed-up force of DIs took us to a small arms range. There we fired laser rifles. These were hefty things weighing fourteen or fifteen pounds. Each time a beam fired, the rifle purred with power. We could fire concentrated beams of annihilating strength, hosing and sweeping laterally as if it was a machine gun, or we could use pencil-thin rays for sniper shots. There was even a setting for wide beam.
Ammo, or power really, was supplied by the battery packs we shoved into them. Interestingly, these lasers fired visible light the better to help us to aim them. Frankly, the tech was awesome. Bullets always had some kind of drop or drift. Laser rays didn’t drop or drift, but shot in a perfectly straight line to target. Not that these things could fire effectively—or killingly—for terribly far. After three hundred yards, the beam dissipated as it lost its tight coherence. At six hundred yards, they could blind enemy troops if you hit them in the eyes, but the ray wouldn’t burn through armor at that range.
The next day we heaved pulse grenades. They flashed brilliantly. If you looked at them while they went off, purple splotches filled your vision. The nifty thing about them was that with a twist of the ring around one you could change its setting. Maximum setting would produce a violent explosion, killing everyone in a fifty yard radius.
I wondered if a pulse grenade could breach a lander’s hull.
The days merged in hard work. I’d put on thirty pounds already and with the neuro-fibers, I could move fast.
Eventually the androids brought back the bio-battlesuits. After watching the symbiotic suits slither away in the showers, I had my reservations concerning them. It was too bad Claath couldn’t have given us powered armor like those in many SF novels I used to read. I imagine the living armor was cheaper and helped the Jelk accounting sheet.
After stepping onto my blob and watching the second skin cover me, I saw the androids shove boxes at us. I opened a box and found combat boots inside. They were like blocks of metal and seemed too big. The weird thing was that the living armor moved off my feet, allowing me to squeeze the boots on. Afterward, the second skin oozed over the metal, sealing it shut.
I donned a bulky helmet next. We all had helmets, and these were sci-fi marvels. The helmet fit over my head and reached under my chin. That meant the second skin sealed this thing tight—vacuum tight. I had bio-armor, combat boots and helmet. After we fit oxygen tanks and maneuvering thrusters onto our backs, we followed the DIs into a new corridor. They took us to airlocks and onto the surface of our training ship.
I peered at the distant Earth. Out here, it was the size of the moon as seen from my back yard. Mad Jack had never made it this far into space.
I snarled, and silently renewed my vow. My dad wouldn’t die in vain. The Lokhars would pay for their infamy. I would learn everything I could, and the universe would see that Earthers weren’t animals, but the most dangerous soldiers around.
For the next five days we learned magnetic walking, thruster flying and to trust our living armor to keep us alive in the vacuum of space. The helmets contained a computer, a HUD visor and a two-way communication system. We could slave our laser rifles to the HUD so a targeting image appeared. Wherever we pointed the muzzle, that’s what the targeting circle m
arked.
We practiced flying shots, fast maneuvers and how to sail silently through the dark, enduring the loneliness of space and trusting in our helmet’s computer-calculated trajectory.
The training ship moved around the solar system, and we learned the battlesuits could take heavy doses of radiation of all kinds. Maybe as good, the bio-suits soaked up sunlight, helping them regenerate and supplying us with energized strength.
For the next step in our training we landed on Ceres, in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. There we learned about low-gravity maneuvering. Jump too hard and off you sailed into space, having reached escape velocity. You’d see the rocks below and wait to start falling, but instead you kept heading farther away from the surface. In the end, you had to rotate yourself and aim your head at the rocks, using the thrusters to bring you back down. The art of low-gravity gliding took time to master.
After we’d practiced all we could on Ceres, we inserted onto Io, a moon of Jupiter. The monstrous gas giant loomed before us with its colorful bands on the planet. I could hardly believe where I was, and how far I had come from Earth.
The worst thing about Io was the radiation pounding our suits. Jupiter’s magnetic field poured out the deadly rads. The bio-suits could take it; our skin and bones underneath not as well. The suits secreted a substance directly into us through our skin, repairing internal damage. It wasn’t fun, and most of us complained about aching bones and a metal taste in our mouths.
Later, with the sun little bigger than a star, we inserted onto Charon, Pluto’s icy moon. It was cold out here, and proved a bad idea to lay on your bio-suit for long on the methane snow. The nearly absolute cold drained life-energy from the bio-suit at a frightful pace, and tended to boil the methane from your own heat. That meant one stayed standing on his boots, clumping over methane ice.
On this training exercise, our retrieval boat took longer than normal to pick us up. The bio-suits became stiff and the cold began seeping into us. Ella figured out a solution. We set our bulky laser rifles on wide beam and carefully shot each other. That warmed the bio-suits long enough for us to survive the tardy pickup.
The android pilot who set the boat down watched us with his plastic eyes as we boarded. He seemed like a zombie in his coldness. From that moment, I began to wonder and to distrust what rattled around in their brains.
During our weeks flittering around the solar system, we learned about zero-G maneuvering, ship-assault tactics and other vacuum combat practices, including space survival skills.
We’d been talking, and Rollo shared my doubts concerning our ultimate utility to Shah Claath. In space, warships should be able to beam anything that moved, including star soldiers like us. And once a commander destroyed all opposition, why would his task force need space-assault troopers? Would enemy soldiers continue to resist in a half-destroyed space station that had no hope of surviving?
This wasn’t like the old days of Greek triremes or British ships of the line. In those old days, waterborne navies used boarding tactics. Hoplites with spears charged across, or Romans with short swords raced across a corvus onto Carthaginian galleys. Later, pirates with cutlasses swarmed merchant ships or Napoleonic sailors swung onto enemy frigates, attempting to storm and capture.
At a certain tech-point, though, that no longer made sense. During World War II, Japanese sailors never tried to storm a U.S. battleship. In the Gulf War, Saddam would have never thought of slipping commandos onto a U.S. carrier. Such a thing—space commandos swarming an enemy spaceship—seemed even less likely, not more. Maybe we would be more like swimmers trying to attach a mine onto a ship’s hull in a harbor. Yeah, I could see that, I suppose. It also seemed incredibly dangerous and unlikely to work often. Worse, it struck me as closer to a suicide mission than a soldier’s task.
Eating, fighting, space-flying, asteroid-walking—the extra weeks merged into a quick month and a half. Finally, our androids declared us battle ready.
“Yippee-ki-yay,” as Bruce Willis would have said in his Die Hard persona.
Before our first mission, I asked for a last interview with Shah Claath, our Jelk overlord.
For the last several weeks, a plan had been brewing in the back of my mind. I needed to get down to Earth, to speak to several groups of survivors. First, I needed to see how they were doing and if Claath was corrupting them. Then I needed to plant an idea, a seed, into people who could transmit the idea to others. No one else had stormed a Saurian lander. No one else I’d met so far hated the aliens like I did. Did that mean I had grandiose ideas? You bet it did. The man who considers himself beaten is beaten. The man that still strives, no matter what the odds stacked against him, has a chance.
I’d been racking my brain on how to convince Claath to let me go down to Earth. I’d finally figured out a way, but it would need a silver tongue—mine. I’d let him know—through the androids—that I could help him achieve his desired profits, a way that would also bolster our chances of success.
Surprisingly, I got the interview a day later.
Before I relate the talk, I believe this would be a good place to say a few words concerning the Jelk Corporation. I’d learned a lot about it these past weeks.
The most obvious truth about space and other star systems was that aliens should be alien or different from humans. That was a logical conclusion. How could strange species like Saurians or Lokhars act the same as humans? Such an idea did not compute. Certainly, there were things out here much different from how humanity operated on Earth for all these centuries. Still, some things were hauntingly similar or parallel enough to understand.
What I’m trying to say was that the Jelk Corporation had a similar analog in human history. Several hundred years ago, there had been a corporation called the East India Company. British merchant-traders had created it and the company had actually run most of the British foreign affairs during the colonial era, at least in the Far East and in India. They’d helped start a few wars, too, particularly against China. Those had been called the Opium Wars. The reason for those conflicts was simple: a monetary trade imbalance. The British were losing large amounts of silver and gold to China.
Like most interesting things, it was actually uncomplicated. The English loved drinking tea. Therefore, they imported gargantuan amounts of tea from China. Back then, it had been the only place that could grow tea in large enough quantities. A saying grew up because of that. “I wouldn’t do that for all the tea in China.” A person could have just as easily said, “I won’t do that for all the money in the world.”
In those days, the British were the world’s greatest merchants, and they had helped build the world’s greatest empire. As good merchants, they wanted to trade goods to China for the tea instead of shipping them silver and gold. That was because bullion was how everyone counted victory points or winning. The more you stacked up, the more you had won the game of nations. The more silver and gold you paid to others, the worse you had lost.
There was one problem with the idea. The English didn’t make or have anything that the Chinese wanted. For most of China’s existence, its highly cultured people had only wanted Chinese things. Nothing was as civilized. With increasing desperation, the merchants of the East India Company searched for a product the Chinese would want and want badly.
They finally found one: opium. The British merchants grew the opium in India and shipped it to China in trade for tea. Later, the merchants sat around their dining tables sipping tea as they bragged about the new pro-British trade imbalance. The drug pushers had done such a fantastic job that more and more millions of Chinese became opium addicts. China didn’t have enough tea to pay for all the opium, and soon Chinese merchants began shipping silver and gold back to England to pay for the drugs their customers wanted.
Now, the Chinese government didn’t approve of this. Opium dens by the hundreds of thousands had opened in China, and too many people had turned into useless slugs, opium addicts. So the Chinese government had sta
rted one of the first wars on drugs. They chopped off the heads of opium sellers and forbade any more shipment of opium into their country.
The lords of the East India Company realized they were in trouble due to this policy. If the Chinese kicked the habit, the English trade imbalance would once again tip to the Chinese.
Money bellowed: the lords of the East India Company demanded their bought politicians supply them with British warships to teach the Chinese a lesson and force them to allow the sale of opium again. It took several such wars, but the Chinese were coerced—through destroyed ships and burning port cities—and the opium dens remained open, creating endless addicts who pumped England with increasingly more wealth.
The point of this tale is that powerful, armed trading companies or corporations had been successful on Earth and also appeared to thrive in the space lanes. It appeared that the principles of economics were universal.
From what I’d learned so far, the Jelk Corporation would have made the British East India Company look like Boy Scouts. The British had used Gurkhas and Sihks as company soldiers. Those were tough mercenaries from mountainous areas north of India. Similarly, the Jelk used Saurians, and now humans and who knew what else.
I already knew most of this as an android ushered me into the pilot chamber aboard assault ship six. It had several seats; the one I sat in had a silver patch on the left part. I’d gained forty-five pounds of muscle since storming the lander in Antarctica. I wore a green coverall, had shaved my scalp and could easily catch any fly that would have dared buzz past my face. I also bore some extra scars gained during training.
Like most things Earthborn, flies were probably extinct now. Hard to believe, I know. The bio-terminator had done a splendid job. I wanted the interview for one key reason: to learn if Claath had kept his end of the bargain concerning the freighters.
Interestingly, the pilot android wore a combat suit of cyber-armor, complete with helmet, visor and sidearm. He watched me the entire time.
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