Grunt Hero

by Weston Ochse

  The Stealth Bomber took off for Fort Irwin ahead of us. We took another fifteen minutes to top off our fuel. Once we began taxiing down the runway, the gunners manning the .50 cals began to leave their posts.

  “What gives?” I asked the loadmaster, who was making last minute weight adjustments to balance the aircraft.

  “No more fuel. We took it all. No more aircraft coming this way.”

  “So they’re going home?”

  The loadmaster, who couldn’t have been older than twenty-one, grinned. “Place I’d like to be right now. Cabin in the woods, bear rug, roaring fire, good bottle of scotch. Oh, yeah.”

  “Sounds like you have a good plan. Got room for one more?”

  “Sure do. Just close your eyes as you take off and we’ll pretend together because I’m afraid it’s as close as we’ll ever come.”

  I nodded. “True that.” But when we took off, I did as he told me, and for fifteen rumbling minutes, I was in a cabin in the woods, warmed on the outside by the fire and on the inside by good scotch. The world was still the world I knew and I’d never heard of the Cray.

  We flew from Red Devil to Grand Prairie, British Columbia, then took off for the final leg. We went south, staying well east of Spokane, flying through Idaho above the Snake River Canyon. The only spot of trouble came when we skirted west of Salt Lake City. The pilot reported a cloud of Cray trying to intercept. The gunners leaped to the Vulcans. While one fired— the sound of the sky opening up a giant zipper—the other made sure that there were no jams and kept the gun cool. Shell casings flew like combat confetti, causing the three of us to shield our heads with our arms. Although we wore fatigue shirts, the hot brass still burned through the material, making us wince and groan. But no matter how much the brass hurt, the alternative wasn’t any choice, so amidst our misery we laughed, cheering the crew as they laid down deadly hails of tungsten and carbine with incendiary effects produced by powdered zirconium. Meant to take down enemy aircraft, the rounds were deadly against Cray, and soon we were out of the danger zone.

  It wasn’t long after that we landed at Fort Irwin. Once the Spectre’s ramp lowered, I was too busy preparing my squad to disembark to see who’d come aboard, but when I was tapped on the shoulder and I turned around, enough emotion went through me that I almost fainted.

  The man I loved.

  The man I hated.

  The man I loved to hate and hated to love.

  “Olivares,” I managed. “I thought you were dead.”

  The left side of his face was burned horribly. The right side still held the knife scar. He flashed his switchblade smile. “Someone had to make sure you became a good NCO.” He looked around the interior of the plane, then reached out and tugged at my long hair. “Not exactly in regulation.”

  I couldn’t help but grin like an idiot. “Hadn’t planned on going on any more missions. Thought I might retire to the country and become a proper gentleman.”

  Olivares sneered. “You know you’re nowhere near a proper gentleman, right?”

  “Not even if I hold my pinky up when I drink?’

  He shook his head solemnly. “Not even then.”

  We’d never hugged, we’d never man kissed each other on the cheek. That wasn’t the sort of relationship we had. But for a solid ten seconds we stared at each other, bonded battle brothers. We weren’t friends but we were brothers in arms, compatriots, and there was no one else in the universe I’d trust more to have my back. And by the look in his eyes, he felt the same way.

  For the first time in a very long time, I felt like I was at home.

  They were watching, out there past men’s knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.

  Cormac McCarthy,

  Blood Meridian, or

  The Evening Redness in the West

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “WHAT DO YOU mean they’re human?” I asked, freshly shaved and washed and in a clean set of fatigues complete with the OMBRA Special Operations patch on the shoulder. My team was in our own special barracks and I’d been summoned to the conference room along with Olivares. My head felt more than a little heavy. Probably the result of all the beer we’d consumed last night.

  “Just as I said.” Malrimple had an abrupt East Coast way of speaking that sometimes seemed harried. “The remains you recovered from the crash site are undecidedly human, with few exceptions.”

  “Did you see how long one of the specimens was?” I should have said tall, but long was more suitable because I’d never seen it stand.

  There was no love between the Chief Science Officer of OMBRA Special Operations and me. He’d been the one put in charge of HMID research and implementation. He’d been the one to make Michelle suffer. But looking at him now it was clear that something was wrong. He’d been a middle-aged man and overweight enough so that it looked like it bothered him. Now I’d guess his weight to be about one sixty—probably a hundred pound loss. His cheeks were sunken and his skin had a sickly gray pallor.

  “Nine feet seven inches. The bone density test indicated that it had less than two thirds of the density of a normal human aged thirty.”

  “Then how could it stand?” Olivares asked, sitting across the conference table from me.

  Malrimple shook his head. “It couldn’t.”

  “That makes no sense,” I said. Then I remembered some of my readings from Phase I of training. Rendezvous with Rama, Ringworld, not to mention The Forever War. Continued exposure to zero gravity could have deleterious effects on muscle mass, but more importantly bone density. Even the astronauts on the International Space Station found it difficult to walk after only six months in space. “Unless the body was never meant to stand.”

  Malrimple shook his head again. “I wasn’t clear. It wasn’t meant to stand in a gravity environment, especially one with Earth’s gravity. This creature was meant to live and navigate in zero gravity. In fact, Dr. Wright and I surmise that it most likely lived its entire life in zero g and is the product of hundreds, if not thousands, of generations of living in zero g.”

  “Or possibly very low grav,” Dr. Wright added. She had a wide forehead and symmetrical features. Her brown hair hung to just above her shoulders. She wore a white lab coat with her name stitched above the left breast pocket. “Such modifications would have to occur across generations, tens of thousands of years, if not hundreds of thousands. Think of the skin color of an African or an Asian, or the epicanthic folds Asians have around their eyes. These are ecophysiological evolutionary adaptations based on the environment from which they derived. Without gravity, the specimen’s physiology wasn’t constrained to the Earth norm.”

  “But what about the other specimen?” I asked. “He appeared to be—how to you call it—Earth normal.”

  “Neither specimen is from here,” Malrimple said.

  “And by here you mean—”

  “Earth.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Holy Mary Mother of Fuck. Malrimple, am I going to have to jump across this table and strangle the information out of you or are you just going to brief us like you’re supposed to?” My face raged white hot at the rationing of information. I didn’t know why they just couldn’t come out and brief us.

  Olivares snorted. “Now there’s the potty-mouth non-com I know and love. No pinky fingers there, I see.”

  Malrimple stared daggers at me.

  I stared right back at him.

  The moment stretched until it felt it was about to break.

  Mr. Pink entered the room, followed by Captain Ohirra. Her wide grin shrank when she saw the tension at the conference table.

  Mr. Pink—dressed in black shoes, black pants, and a black polo shirt with the OMBRA logo over the left breast pocket—looked up from the sheaf of papers he’d been carrying. “Sorry I was late. Did you start without me?”

  Ohirra gave me a look like a mother silently urging her child to behave, but I ignored it.

  M
r. Pink sat at the head of the table.

  Ohirra, who was the ranking intelligence officer, sat to his left, across from Dr. Wright.

  Olivares was sitting across from Malrimple.

  I was sitting across from a red-haired young man in a lab coat who had yet to speak.

  “So where were we?” Mr. Pink asked, seemingly unaware of the tension.

  Malrimple looked at his hands.

  I was about to say something when Dr. Wright said, “We were explaining our findings to your First Contact Team.”

  Olivares and I looked at each other and both mouthed the words First Contact Team.

  “Yes, yes. Get on with it,” Mr. Pink said, waving his hand.

  I’d never seen him this harried. Something must be bothering the usually implacable leader of OMBRA.

  Malrimple sighed, “Where was I?”

  “You were explaining to us that neither specimen was from earth and yet they are both undecidedly human,” I said.

  “With few exceptions,” Olivares added. “You left off at they were both decidedly human… with few exceptions.”

  I nodded. “Right. With few exceptions.” I flashed a grin at Olivares, then stared flatly at Malrimple.

  But it was the man across from me who spoke. “Ya’ll can call me Reese. I’m not a doctor. The world blew up before my dissertation. But I am the only one around these parts with knowledge of proposed space travel and the effects thereof.” He cleared his throat. “We measured the GCRs on both specimens. And while they are in the safe zone, they are much higher than the norm, indicating that the specimens had been subjected to an extra-Earth environment.”

  Grand Canadian Rail Road? “What exactly is a GCR?”

  Reese shared a ready grin, showing overlarge front teeth. “Sorry about that. Galactic Cosmic Rays. From what we’ve been able to measure in our solar system, GCRs consist of 85% high energy protons, about 14% helium, and various other high energy nuclei, or HZE ions. GCRs represent the greatest risk to human space travel. The ionosphere protects Earth from the effects, but once in space, an unshielded human, over time, could get debilitating effects to the central nervous system. We’ve measured this radiation on all of our astronauts and are—were—still working on ways to properly shield a space craft.”

  “So if we go into space we get bombarded by radiation that could hurt us if we aren’t shielded,” I summarized. “Got it. And because of this, these specimens we brought back from the Arctic have a higher GCR reading than normal and therefore must be alien to Earth. Is that right?”

  Reese nodded amiably.

  “But what if the smaller specimen is from Earth and was captured by the other specimen and then was held as a prisoner? Did you see the circlet that was on its neck? Could Specimen B be the slave of Specimen A?”

  Reese’s smile fell. He glanced worriedly at Malrimple and Wright, who both looked suddenly concerned. I could almost see where their train of thought derailed. They’d been thinking all along that the tall alien humans were good, but what if they were here to enslave humanity?

  Malrimple nodded, then shook his head. “We don’t have the data for that, I’m afraid. Several of my team are trying to discern what the circlet is for, but as yet we can’t even determine from what element it’s made. With regards to the specimens, we ran DNA and found there’s a .33% genetic difference between us and the tall specimen, and a .17% difference between us and the normal human-sized specimen,” he said, using air quotes around normal human-sized.

  “Doesn’t sound like much,” Olivares said.

  Dr. Wright nodded. “It doesn’t, right? But if you take into consideration that there’s about a 0.1% genetic difference between everyone on the planet, those numbers seem astronomical. Those differences in percentages should be indicative of extraterrestrial origin.”

  My eyes narrowed. “So each of these specimens are human, but from different planets?” I thought of S.E.T.I, the search for extraterrestrial life, and realized that all of this time we’d been searching for ourselves.

  “That’s our presumption based on the facts at hand,” Malrimple said.

  I sat back in my chair. “So we’re not alone out there.”

  “It might mean something more staggering,” Reese said. He looked at Malrimple for permission to speak. The other man merely shrugged as he stared at his hands. Definitely not normal behavior for him. Something was definitely wrong. Dr Wright shook her head, but Reese was only looking to Malrimple. Not seeing any reason not to continue, Reese turned back to me and Olivares. “Ever hear of the Scopes Monkey Trial?”

  We both shook our head. We were grunts. We hadn’t heard of much we hadn’t learned the hard way, or what little had filtered from our teachers to us, and certainly not a Scopes monkey.

  “I’m from Dayton, Tennessee,” he said, “so this has always hit home for me. It pitted William Jennings Bryan against the august Clarence Darrow in what would turn out to be a case to determine whether modern science—evolution—or the bible should be taught in state-funded schools. As a result, evolution was more broadly taught—not everywhere mind you, but more broadly. Then, in 1958, the National Defense Education Act was passed because the US feared they were falling behind in science to the Soviet Union. It mandated that evolution be taught as the unifying biological theory.”

  “Reese, please,” Dr. Wright said.

  But he wouldn’t be stopped. He held up a fist. “Evolution.” He held up another fist. “Creationism” Then he slammed them together several times as he said, “They’ve always been at odds with each other, fighting, scratching, clawing.” Then he opened both fists. “But it seems like they were both wrong.”

  Dr. Wright hissed, “Reese!”

  “There’s a 1.6% genetic difference between us and the Chimpanzee. Chimpanzees and humans both share the same genetic difference from gorillas, which is 3.1%. Because of this, we’ve believed that we were both descended from apes and followed parallel evolutionary tracks. But there’s always been a missing link—a supposed gap in our hominid evolution—you know, that thing we can hold up and show that this was the transitionary fossil.”

  “Adam Reese!”

  Malrimple raised his hand. “What does it hurt? Let him finish, dear. This is exciting for him.”

  Dr. Wright sagged and bit back a response.

  Reese nodded. “Remember that there is only a .33% genetic difference between us and the tall specimen and a .17% difference between us and the normal human-sized specimen. We are much closer to these human-like aliens than we are chimpanzees. It seems a stretch now that we’re even related to chimpanzees.” Reese’s face grew serious. “Which means science and religion are both wrong. When it comes to planet Earth, we are the aliens.”

  My jaw hit the floor.

  One man’s ‘magic’ is another man’s engineering.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “NOW THAT YOU’RE up to speed with regard to the specimens, a lot has happened in the last twelve hours,” Mr. Pink said. “But first let me take a moment to welcome one of us back into the fold.” He glanced at me and grinned. “Welcome, Mason. Glad Ohirra could convince you to come back.”

  “If it had been anyone other than her, Mr. Pink,” I said, relishing using the name I’d given him, “I’d still be in Savoonga.”

  “If you were still in Savoonga, you might be dead.” His smile had taken on a menacing sheen.

  “About that,” I said. “If you’d told us about them, then we could have used the EXOs to protect the villagers.”

  Mr. Pink actually tsked before replying. “I reviewed the footage of the mission. It was a close thing getting there before the Russians. Had you stopped to save the villagers, our chance at getting to the debris field might have been limited.”

  And this was why I dislike Mr. Pink, OMBRA, and pretty much any military organization. I’d undergone an evolution since I’d first joined up. Back when I was a fresh-faced grunt and had to see the sky
rain body parts, I’d been all about mission first and damn the consequences. But somewhere along the line—maybe it was the fifth or tenth or fifteenth soldier I’d lost—I’d changed into a people-first person, wondering what the effects of the mission might be on their lives. Probably because once the world had been invaded and we’d lost ninety percent of the population, people seemed a little more important than they had been.

  “That debris field was the size of Denver,” I said. “I’m sure there were plenty of dead alien specimens we could have grabbed.”

  “As it was, you lost one of your team. You might have lost more.”

  “Or we might have lost none.” I sighed. “Listen, Pinkster. We can do this all day long. But I’ve spent the last few years dealing with your duplicity. When I was beneath the Hollywood Hive I saw things—the master shared things with me. Whether it meant to or not, I have no idea, but it showed me you.” I pointed at Malrimple. “You were with the first crew to discover the alien HMID. You all stole the technology from the aliens and now they can listen in on our conversations just as we can listen in on theirs.”

  “We’ve dealt with that,” Dr. Wright said.

  “I’m not talking to you!”

  Her eyes went wide and she jerked back.

  I noticed that both Ohirra and Olivares were giving me the ugly face and I didn’t care. Okay, yes, I did. I closed my eyes and counted to five. Then I shook my head and in a lower voice said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell.” I turned to Mr. Pink.