Extinction Wars: 02 - Planet Strike Page 16

  “If she disagrees with us…?” Murad Bey said.

  “Then the thing doesn’t happen,” I said. “But for something to pass, she needs at least one of you to agree with her.”

  “You accord her great power,” Murad Bey said.

  “He trusts her,” Loki said. “He does not yet trust us.”

  “You Americans stick together,” Murad Bey muttered.

  “It has nothing to do with that,” I said. “She had way more votes than either of you. It sounds to me as if the others trust her more, too.”

  “He has a point,” Loki said.

  “Bah,” Murad Bey said. “He makes up the rules as he goes along.”

  He was right. Still, I trusted Murad Bey much more than I did Loki. The Turk spoke his mind. Who knew what the charmer thought? Loki struck me as more dangerous, especially as a politician.

  “What now?” Diana asked.

  “We have to accelerate the recruiting process,” I said. “I want to keep the tigers out of that as much as possible. You can leave the training to me. What you need to focus on is gathering personnel for a space navy and deciding how to recolonize the planet once the Lokhars clear away the bio-terminator.”

  “Do you trust the Lokhars on a long-term basis?” Diana asked.

  “No.”

  “What do you suggest we do once you leave?” she asked.

  “I’m going to try to make sure you get as many weapons as possible. You’re going to need soldiers, too. It’s hard for me to tell you what to do. I’m leaving, probably not coming back. What I don’t want is for one of you to become the dictator and creating a hell-world for the rest.” I shook my head, thought about threatening them, and decided against it. I suspected there wasn’t much I could teach these three about power.

  Besides, my real trouble came with recruiting and training. Essentially, Prince Venturi had given me a hopeless task. How was I supposed to create a commando army in a few weeks, one that could defeat an unbeatable menace? The task seemed impossible, but for the sake of everyone, I had to give it a shot.

  -14-

  Our tight timeframe forced me to change my mind about the Lokhars and their help. Suppose I had three weeks to forge an army. That meant I had to skip parts or speed up others if I hoped to finish in time.

  Diana suggested something novel. She told me about it several hours after the first council meeting.

  I escorted her to a docking bay. Murad Bey and Loki had already left the battlejumper. N7 walked behind us, while a few Lokhars marched ahead. I could hear their servos whine in their powered armor.

  Diana stopped, and she touched my arm. It shouldn’t have, but the arm tingled.

  I wasn’t a high school kid in love with her. I loved Jennifer. Diana had sexual power, though. The lady oozed it. Maybe she wielded it with unconscious effort. No…I take that back. I think Diana always knew what she was doing. She wielded it with conscious ease.

  “Can I give you a suggestion about recruitment?” she asked.

  I shrugged.

  She squeezed my arm. I brushed the hand aside and stepped back. She laughed, a throaty sound. “There’s your problem right there.”

  “Yeah?” I asked. “What’s that?”

  She didn’t answer directly, but said, “If you want the ex-soldiers in the freighters to step forward for you, you’re going to have to tell them the truth. Talk to everyone over ship-wide intercoms. Right now, too few people trust you enough to step forward and volunteer.”

  I snorted. “Tell them the truth, huh? Who’s going to join a one-way mission?”

  “Why did you just step back from me?” she asked.

  This lady didn’t like to answer direct questions. I filed that away. “You know why I stepped back,” I said.

  “Of course I know,” she said. “I’m wondering if you do.”

  “I already have a girl.”

  Diana smiled sadly. “I wonder if you can’t admit the real reason to yourself.”

  “Admit what?”

  “You don’t trust people’s motives, Creed. You’re too suspicious.”

  “And that’s bad?” I asked.

  “Most of the time, no,” she said. “In a case like this, yes.”

  “I’m not getting you.”

  “What kind of man picks up a gun in defense of his home and community?” she asked. “It isn’t the coward, the self-server and the liar. It’s the man of honor.”

  “You haven’t been in too many armies, have you? There are lots of cowards, liars—”

  “Don’t lie to me,” she said.

  “I’m not,” I said, indignant.

  “We’re talking about a certain kind of army,” she said. “We’re not talking about conscripts or those hungry all the time that they join up for a square meal every day. We’re talking about a volunteer force, a militia, really, jumping up to save their homes.”

  “No. We’re going to have to be professional if we’re going to beat the Kargs.”

  “You don’t have time to train that kind of force,” Diana said. “I know what you’re hoping. Many of those left are former military. That’s a plus, maybe the key factor to your success. But that still doesn’t answer the question. What kind of person will step forward now? I’ll tell you what kind: the man of honor, the noble-spirited, those who understand duty. Humanity is down and almost out. Their service is going to buy us life. That idea will stir thousands of them, Creed. That will give you motivated people who will follow you to Hell—this time a literal Hell-world.”

  Maybe she had a point.

  “So why did I step back from you again?” I asked.

  “That’s easy. You don’t trust my motives.”

  She was right. I didn’t. “You’re going to give Murad Bey and Loki a real run for their money,” I said.

  “There’s one more thing,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I know it goes against every grain in you. But you need to listen to me. Against Claath and the Jelk Corporation, you had exactly the right idea. They were screw masters. The Lokhars, however—”

  “I hope you’re not going to tell me to trust them, too?”

  She stared at me. Those green eyes seemed to see right down into my soul, and she stirred something there. The corners of her mouth quirked upward the way a cat might smile upon seeing a fat limping mouse.

  I hardened my heart, and then I mentally hammered steel sheets over that, driving the studs with internal arguments. I already had a girl, one I could trust. Why did I want a succubus?

  “Creed…” she purred.

  I shook my head. “Stick to the issue, Diana.”

  “Really?” she asked, and she touched the top button of her uniform, as if she planned to undress right there.

  I would have liked to see that, but I turned to go.

  “In answer to your question,” she said, “yes, you should trust the Lokhars.”

  I faced her with a sneer. “Phht,” I said. “No way. That’s crazy.”

  She turned down the sexual wattage of her eyes and became all business. It transformed her, and I admit I already missed her trying to seduce me.

  “It’s logical, if you think about it,” Diana said. “The Lokhars desperately want our help. In this instance, you should use them as much as you can, at least to help train your army. If you think about it, you’ll realize that you don’t really have a choice.”

  “Is that it?” I asked.

  “It is.”

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  “Think about what I said.”

  “Sure,” I said. “N7, why don’t you escort her the rest of the way.”

  He did. She didn’t protest, and I walked the corridors alone until I reached a viewing port. I told myself to forget about her undressing in front of me. Diana was a viper waiting to sting. A fling with her would cost me bitterly later. Still, those eyes…

  I swore to myself and glared out of the viewing port. Daytime Greenland reflected sunlight. The ocean
water to the south of it looked so blue and clean. It wasn’t. A Lokhar bio-terminator poisoned the world’s seas and ice. Now Diana figured I should trust the murdering tigers.

  I stood there for forty-five minutes. My mind whirled and my thoughts fought each other. In the end, I decided Diana knew a few things. In these instances, her logic proved diamond-hard.

  I gave the ship-wide message, and I told everyone the straight scoop. You’d think I’d told them to sign up for free blondes, all the booze you could drink and a million bucks in the world’s glitziest casino. The mass reaction surprised me, and it put a lump in my throat. The cons in the pen wouldn’t have reacted like that. These people, though…

  I figured if Diana was right about that, maybe she had a point concerning the Lokhars. They wanted our help, our one hundred thousand commandos. It wasn’t because they loved us. No. They were desperate. It was time to use their desperation to get the job done.

  For three glorious weeks that’s exactly what happened. I felt like a rock star strumming his worldwide hits before a vast audience of screaming, cheering throngs. When I walked through the freighters, men and women clapped and cheered. Men shook my hand, squeezing with all their strength. Women hugged, pressing their breasts against my chest.

  Demetrius the enforcer joined up, and he confirmed my suspicion about him. “I used to be SAS,” he said.

  “The world’s best commandos,” I said.

  “Some people say that.”

  I put him in charge of training, along with Rollo and N7. Demetrius knew tricks of the trade—the man was scary.

  The days blurred together, and they were among the happiest of my life. My personal belief was that man was made to work. Unemployment was one of the worst evils, as it stole a man’s pride.

  I worked. We all did. Maybe I worked harder than most. With Rollo’s help and an occasional word of advice from Demetrius, I chose the tumen colonels.

  The tumen was the Mongol division, composed of ten mingans of one thousand soldiers each. The commando army would have ten colonels. I was the only Earth general.

  Maybe I should have picked my ten colonels from among the original assault troopers, but I didn’t believe that was a smart idea. Command was an art, a hard one taking years to master. One wouldn’t expect a first year car mechanic or welder to know the trade better than a ten or twenty-year veteran would. In the same way, none of the original troopers had trained for higher command. We were low-level ground pounders.

  I know what a few of you are thinking. If I wouldn’t chose colonels from among my veterans, why did I think I would make a good general? Like everyone else, I had double standards and made an exception for myself. Besides, I may not be the best leader, but I was the survivor, the symbol. Sometimes people needed a symbol more than they needed a strategist.

  In any case, I sought long-term professionals, former officers who had combat experience. I wanted them young, too, in their early forties at the latest. They were going to learn many new things in a hurry. If they couldn’t accept the new ways of combat, they would get good people killed. A good combat officer was seldom a nice person. He was a doer, a leader, a go-getter. What was the right way to pick them?

  In the end, I had N7, Ella and Demetrius read the resumes. Those they chose, I interviewed personally. After four days, I made my decisions. The Lokhars provided instructors, training vehicles and masses of weaponry. That meant working closer with the tigers than I wanted.

  Ella suggested that maybe that was a good thing. “You’re going to be swimming in tigers soon. Ten million of them, in fact.”

  From the bridge of a Lokhar vessel we watched an orbital planetary deployment, with troopers swarming down onto Mars. The Lokhar landers screamed through the thin atmosphere at combat speeds, braking at the last moment. Troopers jumped out, using jetpacks to soften the final landing. Fifty-nine trainees crashed so hard they died on impact, sending up the superfine Martian dust. Eighteen lingered in the hospital bays several days before dying. Three hundred and twenty-seven broke at least one bone. That was out of seven mingans or seven thousand troopers.

  “Not good,” I said, examining an e-reader as I stood in the Lokhar pinnace. Two of them were in Mars orbit.

  The next space drop seven hours later with another eight thousand troopers proved even worse. A Martian sandstorm rose up in the middle of the drop. The particles were superfine, as I’ve said, and the driving speeds caused them to scratch visors. We lost one hundred and ten recruits. There would likely be fewer injuries once they wore bio-suits and had thicker muscles, but…

  I set down the e-reader and glanced at Demetrius.

  “Harsh training saves lives later,” he said.

  “I know. I hate seeing anyone killed, though.”

  Demetrius’s hard face went stone cold. He said in a low voice, “There might come a time on the portal planet when you have to order twenty thousand soldiers to their deaths in order to win. Can you do that?”

  So this Rottweiler of a SAS man was tough as nails, huh? “You don’t think I’m hardhearted enough?” I asked.

  “Sometimes I think so,” Demetrius said. “Watching you fret over this…I don’t know.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “I’m just telling it to you straight, sir.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I kept wondering about him. Why had the man joined up? Was he honorable? Or had Diana told him to do it? Did the new president want someone like Demetrius on the inside of the commando army?

  Maybe the answer was a little of both.

  The first week passed too quickly. The second shot past even faster and the neuro-fiber surgeries killed three hundred and seven recruits.

  “What’s going wrong?” I shouted at Jennifer.

  She wept as she stood in a surgery center aboard the battlejumper. There were cots, with torture-looking devices overhead of each. Lokhar doctors had done most of the killing, although many of their subjects had survived the surgeries.

  My shouts only increased Jennifer’s tears. I couldn’t take it, and I consoled her. She hugged me tightly and wept even harder, with her face pressed against my chest. She wasn’t getting much sleep either, and she had been here for many of the deaths.

  “The Lokhars are too rough,” she finally said, hiccupping as she did.

  “They’re off neuro-fiber duty as of now,” I said. We didn’t have an endless supply of humans, never mind the ethics of death during training.

  “Then we’ll never met the quota in time,” she whispered.

  I closed my eyes. There had been far too many training deaths, and it weighed on me. We did things too quickly. It was one thing being a trooper in action making hard decisions. I had done that against Claath without much trouble in soul. Making coldhearted decisions as the general—sending trainees to their death because we had no other choice—that was proving more difficult than I thought it would be. Was I the right man to be general?

  “Okay,” I whispered. “We’ll keep the Lokhars here, and chalk this up for more payback against them.”

  “You’re so bloodthirsty,” Jen said.

  “It’s a character flaw,” I said. “I guess I hate seeing humans die.”

  She didn’t say much more, and soon we parted company, each of us hurrying to our next assignment.

  ***

  The Lokhar Pride must have convulsed with effort; the same with the Jade League. The Karg menace meant the end of everything. It reminded me of America at the start of WWII, well, the start of the conflict for the U.S.

  After the sneak attack of Pearl Harbor, Americans hated the Japanese and feared their navy. The Japanese flattops sailed supreme from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific. One of the only Japanese failings at Pearl Harbor came as a matter of luck. The three American carriers had been out a sea, and had thus escaped destruction.

  Washington wanted those carriers to harass the Japanese in 1942 as the American Pacific Fleet rebuilt its numbers. The carriers did just tha
t. Finally, the dreaded Japanese navy and the three American carriers fought a confused and error-prone battle in May in the central Coral Sea, the first true carrier-to-carrier action. The conflict was fought solely with airplanes, no enemy ships seeing one another. The Japanese sank Lexington and thought they’d done the same to Yorktown.

  The Battle of Midway was fast approaching. America was down to two carriers to face the grand Japanese armada. After Coral Sea, the techs estimated it would take three months to make Yorktown battle-worthy again. American workers produced a miracle, repairing it in 48 hours of around the clock labor, like ants. Yorktown entered the lists for the Battle of Midway, which proved to be the greatest David and Goliath match of the war and one of the most decisive battles.

  What’s my point?

  At the end of the third week, Indomitable returned to the solar system with its alarming damage repaired in record time, a Lokhar miracle.

  With the dreadnaught came old Lokhar cruisers and missile-ships, seven of them. There were also thirteen supply ships filled with automated factories, a bio-terminator cleansing vessel and three hundred fighter-bomber orbitals. They were all payment to Earth for the commando army.

  The time had come to test our new government. Who would get the Lokhar warships? How would that change the power structure? Could the last humans work together, or would they let the old diseases of envy, greed and vaunting ambition destroy the restart?

  I wish I knew. I didn’t have time to find out the plans or even the beginning implementations of the freighter leaders and their henchmen. I was too busy coordinating my commando troopers onto Indomitable. My last act was to divide the warships among them.

  Diana got two, Murad Bey got one and Loki one. Then I let Diana, Murad Bey and Loki each choose an ally to receive a warship. For the last vessel, I put names in a bowl and drew one out, giving that captain the prized starship. I then divided the fighter-bombers evenly among the rest of the leaders.

  As Mao once said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

  I’d given Earth a government and those people the biggest “guns.” They’d have to decide what they could do with them.