Grunt Hero

by Weston Ochse

  “Stay put, Earl. Help is on the way,” I said, already breathing heavily from the run.

  “I got this,” he said.

  “No—I said stay put.”

  “How’s my sister?” he asked.

  “She’ll live,” I said, hoping that it was so.

  “Okay, then. Watch this.”

  He backed up, then ran from one plane to the other. Saxton was slow bringing the .50 cal to bear and missed with his shots, while Earl didn’t miss, firing from his minigun as he crossed the twenty meters between the two planes. Most of the rounds found home in the bodies piled in front of Saxton, but at least a dozen hit the front of the super EXO, driving him back.

  I noted that both Chance and Olivares had fired missiles, which were speeding towards the target.

  Earl’s current view didn’t let me see, but in a few seconds, the super EXO known as Saxton was about to be dust.

  I watched the missiles arching up, then down through my view. But before they could reach their target, they blew up in mid-air. Had they been set for an air burst? I contacted Olivares, but he was equally confused.

  They fired again, and this time I was able to see through Earl’s POV as Saxton raised a disc and pointed it towards the sky. Again the missiles blew up in mid-air. He had an acoustic disc! Had he taken it from the spidertank? What power source was it using?

  While Saxton was using the disc, Earl took the opportunity to aim his minigun and fired, strafing the super EXOs helm with thirty plus rounds.

  Saxton went down.

  “Chance, Olivares—Saxton is down. I repeat, Saxton is down.”

  They ran around the front of the plane and were met with fire from a .50 cal sentry gun, forcing them to duck back around the fuselage.

  Earl was climbing over the bodies when the super EXO stood again. Instead of the .50, it now held an immense blade, much like our own harmonic blades, but nearly twice the size.

  Earl backed up and pulled his sister’s blade from its sheath. Then he pulled his own. He approached Saxton and twirled both blades in a complicated pattern in front of him. The kid had sword skills, that was for certain.

  I skidded to a stop at the rear of the same fuselage Chance and Olivares were behind. They began to climb over it as I ran to where Pearl lay in full view of the sword battle.

  I gaze-flicked Earl’s POV away and used only my own. I opened Pearl’s suit and saw immediately that it was a waste of time—her chest had been torn apart by the huge rounds. Her organs were visible along with boney gristle from her sternum from where the rounds had plowed through it. A glimmer of life was left in her eyes. I put my hand on her face plate, then she was gone.

  The EXO had been designed to protect the wearer from Cray claws and joint spikes. It had never been meant to protect the wearer from bullets. That it protected against small caliber ammunition was an accident of exceptional construction. But the .50 cal round was just too much; it seemed as though NUSNA had understood this and armed their own EXOs with the exact weapon necessary to fight OMBRA, something which made me hate them even more.

  I left the bags of blood and the setup on the ground beside Pearl and rose.

  Chance and Olivares had scrambled atop the plane and now crouched there. Olivares fired at where the sentry gun was and destroyed it, then he and Chance jumped down and got behind the super EXO who was closely engaged with Earl. Both Chance and Olivares pulled their blades, but held back.

  I drew my blade and strode forward.

  Earl had already gashed Saxton several times.

  As far as I could tell, Saxton hadn’t even scratched Earl.

  I called to Earl to stand down and get beside me.

  He gave Saxton another gash, then backed hastily away and stood at my side.

  I used the PA system and said, “Saxton, surrender.”

  “Fuck you,” he replied, using his own public address system. He held his sword in both hands and was heaving with exhaustion.

  I stared at the bodies of the pilots and crew. What a waste.

  “Why’d you kill them?”

  “They were traitors. All of them. Just like you. Traitors.”

  “Traitors to what? NUSNA?” I asked.

  “The New United States of North America. Say it right! The red, white and blue. George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. Pancho Villa. You are traitors to all of them. Thomas Paine said that he only regretted that he had but one life to give for his county. I feel the same way. You men and women of OMBRA are like roaches, feeding on the skin and eyelashes of a dying nation. Instead of standing apart, you could lay down your arms and join us. We’d welcome you back into the growing arms of the New United States of North America. With you we’d be stronger.”

  “So you’d suddenly forgive that we were traitors?” I asked.

  He lowered his voice and said, “You were traitors by circumstance. We know how they stole you away before The Turn. We know how they brainwashed you. Now you can return to your country and be loved again.”

  I shook my head. “You’re insane, Saxton. There are no countries any more. There’s us and there are the aliens. Why don’t you join us so that we can have a unified front against the alien aggressors?”

  “You can take my life, but you can’t take my freedom,” he said, something I’m sure came from that old Mel Gibson movie, Braveheart. “We have to have something to come back to. We need a government. We need a country. We need a foothold on tradition or we’ll lose our entire culture.”

  It was becoming clear that his rabid patriotism made him unreasonable. Not that I expected him to switch sides, I just wanted as much information about his and NUSNA’s intentions as possible. Still, I was sick of his diatribe. “You need to fucking surrender. Do you really think that as long as the ’Crealiacs are able to throw asteroids at Earth it’s important to form a government? Or do you think maybe we should concentrate our efforts on trying to kick the aliens back to where they came from?”

  Saxton’s words were like sound bites he’d heard from someone else. “What culture? American culture?”

  “Yes, American,” he insisted. “And Mexican, and Canadian. We’re more than united by borders, we’re also united by the migration of Europeans to what was once called the New World. The New United States of North America represents more than five hundred years of us trying to make this land a better place. We can’t forget where we came from and who died. We need to remember them and honor them. One way is to have a country, the same country they fought for, only better, bigger, and stronger.”

  “Don’t tell me about respecting the dead,” I shot back. “I’ve led soldiers into battle all over the world. Their deaths always mean something. You don’t need to create a country for that to happen.”

  “You tell that to all the dead you’ve made.”

  I didn’t rise to the bait. “If you’d been a soldier, you’d know that we don’t fight for objects. We fight for people. We fight for those soldiers beside us. We fight for our family. We fight for those we love. A country, a flag, a song… those are all just representative of those things we fight for. Symbols, all of them.”

  “Call it what you will. You OMBRA traitors are men and women without a country. You’ve decided that your company is more important than any country, any tradition, and any culture. Unlike us, you have no history. All you have is a capitalistic desire to steal land and keep it.”

  I remembered the negotiations Mr. Pink had had with Major Dewhurst about the translation data HMID Salinas created when he broke the ’Creliac language. OMBRA had audaciously tried to get NUSNA to trade Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming for the data, which was what had prompted Dewhurst to turn traitor and try and steal an EXO. As appalling as it was, I’d ignored it, using OMBRA as my own platform to fight aliens.

  “I don’t care a wit about capitalism,” I said. “What I do care about is fighting the ’Creliacs.”

  Saxton laughed. “You don’t get it. This is the new normal. We’re conferring with the �
�Creliacs. We have a partnership with them. They’re offering to let us be alone if we help them defeat the Khron.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. “Saxton, we are the Khron.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? We’re not aliens. They are.”

  “Is that why you’re here? To give the captured aliens to the ’Creliacs?”

  “They’re going to move on. They almost have what they want. Then we’ll be able to rebuild. We’ll start fresh and do it right this time.”

  Suddenly a scream of rage came from behind me. As I turned, Earl surged from where he’d been standing over his dead sister and pushed past me. He leaped into the air and spun. As he landed, both blades came down and swept through the side of Saxton’s head.

  Saxton fell to the ground, his brain sliding free to rest on the tarmac amidst dozens of empty .50 cal casings.

  Just when I’d learned of a connection between NUSNMA and the ’Creliacs, Earl had learned of his sister’s death. I’d have liked to have gotten more, but couldn’t possibly begrudge him.

  Earl kept hacking at the body for a full minute before he stopped.

  When he did, he went back to his sister and knelt beside her.

  “Look at this,” Olivares said.

  I climbed over the bodies and saw that the acoustic disc had been plugged into a black square about three feet on each side.

  “What do you think it is?” I asked.

  “It has to be some sort of power supply.” Olivares pulled the cable from the disc. As he did, we noted that the surface of the square block was fluid. How it kept its shape was a complete mystery. “Whoa, did you see that?”

  “Must have been how they kept their suits powered over the span of three days. We need to collect this and take it with us. At the very least, show it to Alpha. My guess is this is ’Creliac technology.”

  “Umi,” Chance said. “That’s what the Khron call them. Umi.”

  “Whatever. Chance, help me with Pearl’s body, will you? And for the record, I don’t want to lose any more of us.”

  My HUD fired a blue warning as it noted an inbound aircraft which it identified as an American MQ1-Predator. Its IFF signaled that it belonged to OMBRA. I realized it was trying to contact me and opened a coms channel... and was greeted by Thompson’s voice saying “If you are receiving this, then I am dead.” I wasn’t ready for it, so I let the message download to my EXO. It was larger than I expected. I’d have to find out what it was later. For now, I helped carry Pearl back to the dispensary while Earl walked behind us.

  An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  BACK INSIDE, WE all mourned Pearl. We removed her from the EXO and placed her on a table. Her unblemished face was visible above the blood-soaked sheet we’d used to cover her body. So many had fallen in the last few days, it was hard to imagine that any of us would survive what was to come… whatever that was.

  Earl glared at Sykes, who stood still in the corner, fear plastering his face as if he knew retaliation was but moments away. But Olivares grabbed Earl and held him in place, whispering something to him I couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, Earl finally tore himself out of Olivares’s grasp and went into one of the examining rooms.

  When we showed the strange, box-like object to Alpha, he said, “You’re right, this is a power supply. And you said that some other humans had this?”

  I nodded.

  “We’ve seen this before. As we mass our forces against the Umi, they try and divide the inhabitants, weakening the forces that can be aligned against them.”

  “Does the strategy work?”

  “If even one of the Umi offspring are able to leave the planet, then we’ve failed. They can fold space and will have moved on to the next world without us being able to follow.”

  “When you say fold space, you mean what exactly?” I asked. I sort of knew what he was talking about, but I wanted to hear it explained. We’d read books about it in Phase I training, but damned if I could remember in which book the term was used.

  “Your author Frank Herbert used it in his Dune series.”

  That was it!

  “Yes, I read it,” Alpha said. “Lovely books even if it does have those God-awful worms. So imagine that the shortest distance between two objects is a straight line, yes?” He looked for and found a pen and piece of paper. He drew a dot on each end of the paper, then drew a line between them. “Let’s say that this is Earth and this is Jupiter. To get there with your level of technology would take months. But what if you were able to change your perspective of the universe? What if there were more than four dimensions... which there are. Now you can fold space.” He folded the paper so that the dots were touching. “Now what took months is instantaneous.”

  “But can’t you fold space, too? Isn’t that how you got here?”

  Alpha gave me an apologetic look. “What the Umi can do biologically, we can do technologically. Our problem is that we’re not as precise in our navigation as the Umi. So I used the term fold space for the Umi. For us, for the collective we call the Khron, we actually crumple space.” He unfolded the paper and crumpled it into a ball. “As you see, the two points are closer than they would be in a straight line. Just not as close as they would be if the paper were folded.”

  “So the Umi can do it naturally better?”

  “It’s why they have always been ahead of us.”

  “How long has this been going on?” I asked.

  “This war has been going on for more sun cycles than you will believe. Like you, we believed that we sprung from the planet we were from, but we were seeded just as you were. The first bipedal human, as you would call them, came from a planet on the other side of what you refer to as the Milky Way. They looked much like you and I, but with various differences because of slight differences in gravity, climate, and visual and bolometric luminosity. This is all a haze in our history, so there’s a lot of dramatic hand waving to make up for what we don’t actually know. We know that a war broke out after the Umi came to their planet. We know that they couldn’t defeat the Umi, but they did have the technology and the ability to send generation ships, seeking systems and stars similar to their own. These ships seeded every habitable planet they could find with DNA in an effort to not only hide their descendants, but to let them grow until they would be needed to help join the fight. Collectively we are called the Khron. We’ve been seeded and now are being harvested for use. What you did in between is of no matter to anyone.”

  I laughed hollowly. “Grunts on an intergalactic scale.”

  “I don’t understand the reference,” Alpha said. “But the hope is that you would have developed advanced social and technological systems so that when the Umi came, you’d be better able to fight. As you will see, not everyone is as advanced as you. The Reds were so constantly at war that they spent five hundred years in the industrial age and never advanced past coal and steam generation.”

  I waved my hand and changed the subject. “I collected two specimens from a crash site. One appeared to be a normal-sized human, but the other had features like they were stretched.”

  “They are descended from many of the older seeded and live their lives in zero or very low gravity. Over the generations, their bodies have adapted to the lack of gravity. They require mechanical assistance to maneuver in gravity wells. Many of them are ship drivers, preferring the darkness between systems. We have a name for them that translates to Thinnies.”

  “Where are you from?” Stranz asked.

  “Ah, where is my home? I’ve never seen it, of course. It was destroyed so long ago. We called it home, just as you call your planet Earth. Simple names for something we took for granted, I suppose. Home was a little more than thirty-five light years from Earth. It’s in your constellation Vela and is referred to by the embarrassingly unimaginative name of HD 85512 b.”

  “Thirty-five light years doesn’t seem far,” Stran
z said.

  Ohirra snorted. “You need to bone up on your science.”

  “But they can fold space, ma’am,” Stranz countered.

  “Our ships fold space at different levels depending on the ship and model. My ship, for instance, what you would call a Viper, is an intrasystem ship only and can fold space in units of up to five sectants. One sectant is equal to roughly sixty million of your miles. Which is a miniscule increment in the ever-expanding universe.”

  “But you could also travel three hundred million miles,” I said.

  “That’s where it gets tricky. Remember the crumpling paper analogy I gave you? At one sectant the crumpled paper, or folded space, is very compact. But the more sectants we use, the looser the paper becomes. We could be off by millions of miles or we could hit our target exactly... or we could end up in the center of a planet.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t imagine that’s a good thing.”

  “Our ships are really meant for intrasystem travel only. It would literally take us forever to cross the distances between systems.

  “Let me demonstrate. The speed of light is 186,282 miles per second, and a year has 31,556,926 seconds. So to figure out how far one light year is in miles, you just multiply the speed of light in miles times the length of a year in seconds. For those who can’t do that in your head, that equals 5,880,000,000,000 miles. So if we were to fold space nineteen thousand six hundred times at max sectant, we’d be able to travel one light year. To travel to your nearest system, Alpha Centauri, multiply the number of folded space attempts by four.”

  “Then, of course, at max sectants you could be going in the completely opposite direction,” Ohirra said.

  “Maybe not the complete opposite direction, rather a deflection off the desired path. But it’s clear you understand the concept,” Alpha said.

  I just realized something. “If that’s the case, then how did you get here? Is there some huge Dreadnaught Class Battle Cruiser up there?” I asked, pointing towards the ceiling.

  He smiled. “Ah, another Star Trek reference. Wonderful.” But then he shook his head. “We don’t have such things. We do have Revenant ships and Kaleidoscope ships, but mass and energy has always been our problem with increasing the distance for which we can fold space.”