“You desire to become a pirate?” N7 asked.
“No,” I said, “a Viking.”
“I do not understand your reference.”
“I’m going to raid planets and take…something valuable from each,” I said. “Once my war chest is large enough, I’ll buy the antidote to the bio-terminator and cleanse my world. Afterward, we’ll repopulate it and start over, but with advanced technology to defend us.”
“That is an aggressive plan,” the android said. “I find several troublesome features to it.”
“That’s why I’m talking to you. Let’s hear your objections.”
“If you attack others,” N7 said, “they may come and attack you.”
“That’s why I need those Jelk freighters sitting on Earth,” I said. “We’re going to lift off for a time and hide.”
“Hide where?” N7 asked.
“Don’t know that yet,” I said. “First, I need to know more about the nearby star systems. One thing I do know is that Earth history shows it’s harder to kill off nomads than a settled community. Most of the humans are dead, right? Keeping the last ones alive is going to be the trick.”
“Taken as a whole,” N7 said, “your plan strikes me as dubious.”
“Yeah, why’s that?”
“Because there are only a few million of you left,” N7 said. “A handful of enemy ships in the wrong place could destroy the freighters and end your race. You are in an extremely precarious position.”
“I know, but I have a Jelk battlejumper. I have knowledge about the Altair object and I have a few hundred of the meanest, toughest fighting troopers in the galaxy. We’re humans, and the universe is going to find out that messing with us was a big mistake.”
“Bold words,” N7 said.
“I was a slave, and now I’m free. No one thought that could be done.”
N7 looked away. When he looked back, he asked, “Do you want to check the next assault boat?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s take a look.”
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Six days later, I mourned my dead world, the sterile Earth. The bio-terminator had done its grisly work all too well.
I flew over Germany in an air-car, with Jen beside me in the copilot’s seat.
I wore another bio-suit, with an assault trooper helmet and combat boots. We’d dismantled Claath’s old defensive systems, so it was unlikely these suits would turn on us as the others had. I know, it probably sounds crazy that any of us would wear these after what had happened. But they were useful and they were all we had in terms of combat armor. To implement my plan, we needed to continue to be the galaxy’s best soldiers.
We’d combed the freighter passengers for high-tech engineers, men and women used to getting things done. I’d brought ten of them aboard to help with the battlejumper repairs.
It had been good to find that my suggestion several months ago to Diana, Rex Hodges and other leaders had borne fruit. Each freighter complex had a different form of government. One was theocratic in nature, more were democratic and two had dictators. The dictatorial ones had hardly advanced beyond the prison way of running things. I hadn’t made any moral judgments on any of them. If it worked, let them keep using their system, for now at least.
Trying to decide what to do with Claath’s codes had proven harder to resolve. Rollo had finally figured out the truth. He suggested that Claath had given us the right codes in the first place and then he’d tried to cover by telling us they were destruct codes.
How did we find out?
We emptied a freighter and electronically put in the code. Instead of destroying the empty freighter, the code had unlocked and deactivated hidden explosives. A team had carried the explosives off. We emptied each freighter in turn, and had gotten rid of the hidden explosives. Later, we set the people back on board.
The space-freighters still waited on the Earth’s surface as N7 and Ella taught specially picked teams how to fly them.
I only had two understrength centuries of assault troopers. In my mind, that limited the number of untested humans I could safely bring aboard the battlejumper.
I was dealing with the last humans, the luckiest and the toughest: the survivors. I didn’t doubt for a moment that some of them dreamed of overthrowing me and putting themselves in my place and becoming mankind’s ultimate ruler, with the battlejumper as their throne.
Right now, I had the weapons and the deadliest soldiers. I had the battlejumper and the ability to destroy any of them at will. For now, the freighter leaders agreed to my plan—as much of it as they knew. The time would come soon enough when some of them would violently disagree with me.
That was the future. Today, I mourned Mad Jack Creed. I mourned my mother, my friends, my town, my country and my world. I was going to leave Earth again for a short time. I would come back later, just as Douglas MacArthur had returned to Manila. I would make the Earth as it used to be, and it would be humanity’s planet, its stronghold against all comers.
The Jelk would hunt for me, of that I had no doubt, even if only one of them did it: an alien named Claath. Maybe the Starkiens would come and take a look here. I had to be long gone by then.
I flew over Germany, over dead forests, silent cities and vast autobahns with their empty rusting vehicles. The one time I saw movement, it was only the wind pushing down an open trunk to a car.
“The Lokhars were thorough,” Jen said.
“They brought their dirty business to our planet,” I said. “We were doing fine by ourselves.”
“Were we?” she asked. “We had nuclear weapons and biological agents.”
“Not like this,” I said.
“No,” she said, “but that wasn’t for a lack of trying.”
“Are you saying we’re no better than Lokhars and Jelk?” I asked.
“Do you think we are?” she asked.
I glanced at her. Her frown—I’ll be honest. Her beauty and her earnestness touched me. Mainly it was her beauty that did it, though. I smiled at her.
“Did I say something wrong?” she asked, stiffening.
“No.” I banked the air-car.
She cried out, and she clutched the armrests of her seat. “Be careful,” she scolded me.
I laughed.
“I’m serious,” she said.
“I know. That’s why I’m laughing.”
“Do you enjoy mocking me?” she asked.
“You misunderstand.”
“Why don’t you inform a poor ignorant girl then?” she said.
“You’re not ignorant, Jen. No one knows more about Jelk medicine than you. I owe you my life.”
“So why are you laughing at me?” she asked.
“Because you made me feel young again,” I said. “I’m only a kid, Jen. I went to war in Afghanistan when I was nineteen, twenty. I worked for Black Sand for a time. It was a lark, really. Antarctica was an adventure. While there, I kept thinking about coming home and taking a girl out. You know, go to the movies. Go out to eat and have a glass of wine. That’s all gone. It’s kaput, vanished forever. But now…riding here with you…it’s like driving along a freeway and we’re going to the beach. That’s why I laughed.”
I glanced at her, and found that Jen stared at me even more seriously than before.
It made me grin, and she grinned back, impishly. Unbuckling her restraints, she stood and crossed the distance between us.
I set the air-car on autopilot, and I shed the bio-suit. Then I took Jen in my arms. She was warm and vital, and we kissed. She tasted wonderful. We kissed harder and wrapped ourselves around each other with need.
Later, as I donned my bio-suit, I ran my hand through my hair. Jen buckled back into her seat.
“I just thought of something,” I said.
“What’s that?”
I smiled at her. She spoke differently now. Jen—Jennifer—she was beautiful.
“I want your opinion,” I said.
As we flew, I studied the German cities, and I found
an old one. I don’t know which one by name. I landed the air-car, and we outside onto the surface. The wind blew, but we were protected in our suits from the bio-terminator.
I found a cathedral and entered. It was full of the dead. A mother still clutched her bundled infant. Our footsteps echoed and the sunlight was muted. We ascended stairs and found a way onto the roof. By careful climbing, I came to a stone gargoyle perched on the roof edge, a gargoyle with sculptured stone wings. I couched up there, staring at the thing, likely chiseled sometime during the Middle Ages. Except for the wings, it looked an awfully lot like Claath had before his glowing-ball transformation.
I guess I didn’t really have a question for Jen. It had been a question for me.
I returned to Jen waiting by the opening, and we retreated down the stairs and back through the main area where the dead sat, knelt and lay in their last mass.
We returned to the air-car. There, scrubbers and sprayers washed us, and we reentered the pilot compartment. It was time to head up to the battlejumper.
“Did you discover what you were looking for?” Jen asked.
I thought about that. “Who are the Jelk?” I finally asked. “Why did that gargoyle resemble Claath so much? The Forerunner object—I believe that in some way the First Ones’ artifact is important to our discovering what’s really going on.”
I’d talked to Ella about that before. She’d had some interesting notions or ideas. She’d wondered if the artifact helped a Jelk bulk up on a special kind of energy. Or maybe a Jelk needed the artifact to help him or her reproduce. Why were there so few Jelk around? There had to be a reason.
“What do you think is going on?” Jen asked me.
“Yeah, I’d like to know,” I told her. “Maybe the Earth was a game preserve, and Claath finally broke the rules by coming here. The Lokhars figured—I don’t know. I don’t have enough data, as N7 would say. But I’m going to find out, Jen. We’re going to solve this riddle and then—”
I laughed, and I shook my head. “I guess I’d better work on one thing at a time. First we have to insure our survival. Then maybe we can scrub the planet of the bio-terminator. The human race is going Viking, Jen.”
“Raiding?” she asked.
“That’s right. We’re lifting the freighters today. I have a good idea where to hide so not even the Jelk can find us, and forget about the Jade League.”
“Where’s that?” Jen asked. “Where’s your spot?”
I didn’t feel like telling her yet, so I dodged the question by ignoring it. Grinning at her, I said, “They tried to wipe us out, but they failed to squash every last one of us. The game isn’t over, Jen. It’s just getting started.”
“We could still lose,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, knowing that all too well. “But win or lose, I know one thing.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“The galaxy—or this part of it anyway—is going to know they’ve been in a fight with the human race.”
The End
To the Reader: I hope you’ve enjoyed Assault Troopers. If you would like to see the story continue, I encourage you to write a review. Let me know how you feel and let others know what to expect.
Table of Contents
Assault Troopers
Prologue
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