I glanced to the side at a viewing port. It showed me Saturn up close and personal. The ring nearest the ship was composed of endless floating rocks and chunks of ice. They merged together in the distance as the ring encircled the gas giant. Assault ship six was in orbit around Saturn. I hadn’t been back to Earth since the lander lifted off it.
A screen flickered into life, and I saw Shah Claath. There were no smiles from him. He studied me with his dark eyes and the evil of his intelligence shined through clearly. I must have been too exhausted from killing Saurians and too amped-up from the bio-battlesuit that day six weeks ago to recognize the devilishness there. And while on the metal slate, I’d been too concerned with the churning fish waiting for my dumped body to study the Jelk closely.
“My time is limited,” Claath said, “as is yours. You spoke about heightening your battle abilities, ensuring your coming success. You’ve surprised me in the past, and I calculated you might again. So you may explain your idea to me.”
This was it. His eyes troubled me, with their evil and their cunning. I desperately needed to get back down to Earth. Could I convince him to let me go? The trick was to tell him things he wanted to hear. I’d learned the hard way that it was easier to fool someone who wanted to be fooled. If a person spent his life trying to make a quick buck, he would be the easier one to con that an old codger gripping his dollars with a tight fist.
Be bold, I told myself.
“It’s easy enough,” I told Claath. “I and the others are concerned about the surviving Earth people back home. We’re wondering what sort of bonus we can earn for our people by our victory for you.”
“Bonus, who said anything about a bonus?” Claath asked.
“The androids are robotic and too expensive to make for good space-assault troopers,” I said. “You need thinking beings—”
“Fighting beasts,” Claath corrected.
One, two, three… I silently counted to myself. “You need intelligent soldiers using cunning maneuvers and heightened by good morale,” I said. “A bonus, a reward, if you will, encourages Earth troops to fight better.”
The Jelk stared at me. What went on behind those dark eyes? Claath finally stirred, and said, “There is merit in your idea. What bonus do you seek?”
So far so good, I told myself. “As you know, I fight for the Jelk Corporation in order to help my people survive as a species. Given greater rewards, I will fight more zealously and even sacrifice myself if it will bring aid to—”
Claath raised a hand.
I’d learned enough these past weeks to know when to stop.
“Not all Earthbeasts would fight as you suggest, given such rewards,” Claath said. “Many are satisfied with lesser and cheaper bonuses.”
I knew that to be true, but I had to shift that truth. “Yes,” I said. “But those mercenaries are not the most able among us.”
“A questionable thesis,” Claath said.
“Your observers watched World War II,” I said. “If you glance at the files, I believe you’ll find that honor-oriented combat troops fighting for something greater than themselves make better soldiers. The self-centered and more easily satisfied space-assault troopers will not give the Jelk Corporation as useful a service as the first kind.”
“Earthbeasts lack objectivity,” Claath said. “Too many of you appear to be dreamers with grandiose ideas that exaggerate your importance.”
“Dreamers…” I said, as my gut tightened with triumph. I would snare him with his own words. I forced myself to speak naturally. “You state the situation more succinctly than I could. Dreamers need dreams to help motivate them. Such motivated dreamers make the best soldiers. Our history is replete with examples.”
Claath pressed his red fingertips against his forehead. I noticed for the first time that Jelk lacked fingernails, but appeared to have hardened skin there instead. He pulled his fingers away from his head and glanced at them. He appeared to have noticed my scrutiny.
“If you fight well,” he said, “and bring me the artifact, I will grant you a bonus.”
“Excellent,” I said. This was working. “In order for me to inform the others—”
“I will inform them,” Claath said.
“Okay. If you could provide us pictures or videos of the survivors and then describe what the bonus would be in concrete terms—”
“What difference would any of that make?” Claath asked. “I have spoken. My word is final.”
“To see is to believe,” I said. “And the more concrete the reward, the easier it will be for us to conceptualize it. We are dreamers, but we must believe the dream is true.”
“You are primitives indeed,” Claath said.
“Maybe,” I said. “But we will fight better if—”
“You’ve made your point. Now I grow weary of your voice and your dull-witted appearance. You ape Jelk likeness but you are nothing like us.”
I hesitated for a fraction of a second before plunging into the meat of my reason for being here. “To add power to the videos, I suggest you send some of us down to see how the survivors are doing.”
“For what reason?” Claath asked. “So you can escape?”
“I want to save my people,” I said. “You hired me as a mercenary. If I give you what you want, you give me what I want. I have no reason to escape.”
“You are an animal no matter how hard you attempt to practice civilized behavior,” Claath said.
It was at this moment I began to envision myself putting a leash around Claath’s neck and dragging him around like a dog. With a shake of my head, I forced myself to concentrate on the matters at hand.
“Why do you care who or what I act like?” I asked. “As long as you gain profits from me—”
Claath showed off his pointy teeth. The back ones glistened. “You will go down to Earth and report back to the others. Does that satisfy you?”
I found myself learning toward the screen. I must have been inching forward the entire time. I now forced myself to sit back, to relax.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m satisfied.”
The screen turned a dull color and thereby ended the interview. I’d done it. I was on my way to Earth for a visit. I heaved a sigh of relief, even though I knew that the hardest part lay ahead of me.
-10-
The six weeks I’d been training in space could have been six years, six decades or even six centuries. The Earth had changed that much. The only animals left on Earth now—at least that I saw—were those in the Jelk junk freighters landed on Earth.
The Lokhar thermonuclear fireballs had destroyed dozens of the largest cities. They had bigger bombs, too, planet wreckers, throwing up hundreds of billions of tons of dust into the atmosphere. The purple, orange and red skies were like nothing I’d seen before.
The air was now poisonous, laced with bio-terminator. I wore my bio-suit with boots, helmet and breather as I walked through Fresno, California. Winds howled, and everywhere I looked were the dead amid rusting cars and trucks. It was worse than any Stephen King novel, a true nightmare.
Paper and debris fluttered everywhere. It made me sick walking the lonely streets. I crouched by a dead girl with shreds of a yellow dress. She wore a little U.S.A. flag pin, while a Maltese puppy decomposed beside her. The end of the leash was still clutched in the little girl’s dead hand.
The Lokhars had done this. The militarists of interstellar space figured Earth soldiers would have given the Jelk too much of an advantage. That, at least, was Claath’s version of the story. I wondered where the truth lay.
I walked past dead trees, crunching over brittle leaves. A hundred-dollar bill blew past. It was useless now. I kicked spent shotgun shells, empty beer bottles and bags of rotting groceries. Fresno, California had died: a ghost town of a bygone era.
I found the same thing in Reno, Nevada; in Billings, Montana and Kansas City, Kansas. The android piloted my air-car at my direction. We toured the U.S. I hadn’t been home since leaving for the
war in Afghanistan several years ago. Now I could never go home again, not to the Earth that had been. The aliens had stolen it from me.
It turned out that our worst nightmare never came true: that of angry nations launching nuclear missiles at each other. The aliens had launched the nukes, and more. The entire planet was like the Japanese Hiroshima of World War II. I guess the rulers of North Korea had been right in their manufacturing of a few thermonuclear bombs. In the days before the aliens came, nuclear deterrence theory said that once a country had atomic weapons, other countries would not threaten its existence for fear of retaliation.
It seemed to me as I toured the dead world, that humanity needed a few terror weapons of its own. We needed bio-terminators and planet wreckers. Part of me screamed for revenge against the Lokhars. Another part said to let it go; that humanity was going to have enough of a task coming back from the edge of extinction. We didn’t need die-hard foes. We just needed a place to call our own and a delivery system capable of threatening fearful harm against any enemy who attacked us. Hmm, maybe we did need to smash the Lokhars, to show the other space races what happened when you picked a fight with Earth. First, we needed to free ourselves from under the Jelk thumb. That’s why I’d come back. That’s what my plan—a long-term project—entailed.
For a hundred miles as the air-car slid across the sky, I ground my teeth together. Humanity had traded places. We were no longer the lords of our domain. We’d become dogs to tame and leash. At best, we were beggars living off Jelk tech.
“Where’s the nearest shelter?” I asked the android.
He turned back, seeming to measure me with his plastic orbs.
“Cat got your tongue?” I asked.
The android faced forward, turned our air-car sharp left and kicked in afterburners or something like that. I sank back against my seat. I still wore the bio-suit and helmet. If the android wanted to start something, I was more than ready to finish it.
I didn’t trust the androids, not since Charon. I didn’t know what went on inside their vat-grown brains, as their mask-like faces gave nothing away. The situation reminded me of Will Smith in I, Robot. When was the super truck going to come along and launch a hundred of these plastic men at me?
After a steady journey of some time, I looked out a window. Three giant freighters lay in a huge triangle down there at the tip of Baja, California. Each vessel was several kilometers long. Some kind of plastic sheeting bound the ends together. The same material connected the center area between the space freighters.
The android landed to the north of the freighter complex, setting us down with a thump between groves of dead almond trees.
It was at that point the android decided to speak, using his monotone voice. “Shah Claath wished me to inform you that you cannot visit them in your bio-suit.”
I’d learned how to shed the second skin on my own. I did so now, watching the black slime ooze from me. My normal skin always went from stark white to blushing red as the symbiotic substance oozed off. Then my skin finally settled back to its regular color. I wondered about that, about what caused the changes. I hefted the blob and deposited it into a warm cylinder, closing the lid and turning on the heat-lamp, what we called it, anyway.
I donned a regular spacesuit, a similar kind as the Saurian man-catcher had worn the day he walked through the tank membrane to confront me.
“Are you staying here?” I asked.
The android didn’t answer.
I didn’t like this one. Something odd was going on inside its brain. “Whatever,” I said. “I’ll be seeing you.”
I exited the airlock and crunched over dead ground. No birds sang, no beetles scurried from under kicked clumps and no spider webs hung anywhere. The destruction was worse than I’d expected. I walked through a ghost world. We’d had billions of people seven weeks ago. Now a few million were left. Didn’t the Lokhars have any soul? Were the space militarists actually androids or robots or were they something totally alien that they could contemplate genocide of an intelligent species? I suppose some humans would have said we got what we deserved. We’d been busy wiping out various Earth species. Now it was our time, our turn.
Well, I didn’t hold to that kind of thinking. It was crazy. What the Lokhars had done—
I looked up at clouds racing the wind. They seemed like alien destroyers, their purple shapes sliding faster than I’d ever seen before. Dust swirled around me and shrieks whipped past my helmet. The apocalypse had come, the angel had sounded the last trumpet and the alien Lokhars had brought us Armageddon.
In a bleak frame of mind, I approached the Jelk freighters. I expected guards in spacesuits holding rifles to challenge me. There was nothing but dead grass and deader weeds.
I banged on an airlock. Using my fist, I hammered for a solid three minutes. Finally, a green light flashed and the airlock slid open with a tortured groan of metal. I didn’t like the sound of that. Just how far gone was this thing?
I entered a steel chamber. The lock slammed shut behind me and hoses first blasted air and then chemical cleaning agents. It lasted longer than I would have expected. I thought about that. I realized if the bio-terminator made it inside the vessels, poof, there went a sizeable chunk of remaining humanity. It was good they went to such lengths. It meant some humans still had fight in their bellies. I needed that.
A second airlock opened and a voice in English asked me to strip. I complied, entered a third chamber and went through another chemical bath. In the fourth chamber I found clothes: jeans, a button shirt and running shoes.
Nostalgia slammed home. This would be the only world in the universe where I’d feel like I belonged. I took a deep breath, trying to prepare myself for the ordeal at hand. Then I entered a freighter world of sardine-packed survivors.
It was like a movie of old China or your favorite summer fair packed with jostling kids. Wall-to-wall people filled corridors, rooms, chambers, lounges and rows of seats. The smell of sweat and unwashed bodies slammed against me. The stench reminded me too much of prison or of any place that packed men together too tightly for too long.
As I looked around, I realized that was one of the problems. As a ratio of those remaining, too many men had survived, tough men, angry men, mean suckers with the look of death in their eyes as they stared back at me. There were too few children around and not enough women.
The squalor of these surroundings and the hopelessness I was seeing in so many faces made me doubt my plan for them. I didn’t doubt my goal, but I did wonder if anything could shake these people out of their despair. This place was worse than a ghetto.
Then I met the leader as she and her henchmen made their way through the crowd. They were an intimidating crew and people shrank away from them.
The woman leading the crew was tall with wide hips, large breasts and surprisingly handsome features. She had thick dark hair tied in a ponytail and wore combat fatigues, with a big knife on her hip. She seemed like the queen of the Amazons, and I had no doubt she could fight.
Four huge henchmen followed, the smallest a head taller than me, making the man six-seven. The biggest man was black, had a bald head and moved in an athletic way that told me he was lethal. The man stared at me. I’d been in Black Sand and been around some vicious guard dogs before. The meanest had been a big brute of a Rottweiler that used to just stare and I’d known he’d wanted to bite a chunk out of me. The biggest henchmen had eyes like that and I felt his desire to tear me to shreds.
The group stopped before me, and the queen of the Amazons put her hands on her hips. “Are you the man from space?” she asked. She had a seductive voice, and it flowed through me with power. I was beginning to realize how she ruled this place.
I’d had a speech prepared for the occasion, but now I wasn’t sure I should start that way. The woman, her henchmen, their glares and stances spoke volumes concerning their hostility toward me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m the man from space.”
Her s
houlders shifted. It was a subtle thing. I don’t know what she’d expected from me. “You look strong,” she said.
“Hey, how about that,” I said.
“But my men could take you…” She snapped her fingers. “Like that.”
Maybe six weeks ago they could have taken me, but not after my training, increased strength, size and most of all, speed.
“I wouldn’t bet any beer on them,” I said.
She made a show of frowning, and glanced behind me before she stared into my eyes again. “You’re brave, spaceman. I don’t see any backup for you.”
“Why would I need any?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Your alien overlords nuked our world and then packed the few survivors into these tins cans. Now you’re coming down here…what, to lay down the law?”
“How often has jumping to conclusions helped you?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t like your cockiness, mister. This is my place, my home, not yours.”
“Do you want me to beat him up?” the black henchman asked, the one with the eyes like a Rottweiler.
She glanced at him. “I want to ask him a few questions first.”
“Afterward?” he asked.
“It will depend on his answers,” she said.
“I can make him eat his teeth,” the henchman said.
“No one is as strong and quick as you, Demetrius,” she said.
The man’s chest swelled with pride and his big hands opened and closed.
“What if hurting me means the aliens burn this freighter down?” I snapped my fingers. “And all of you die like that?”
She smiled. It was a mean thing, but it had an effect. I reexamined her, the stance, the long hair, how her breasts strained against her combat fatigues. The woman had a sexual power, and she obviously knew how to use it, making her a master of manipulation. What was she trying to prove?
“What’s it like up there?” she asked.
She’d threatened me with violence and she’d done it in front of her people. Now she openly quizzed me. I had plans, but those plans included me running things. That meant I had to do things right from the start.
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