Charger the Soldier (19 page)

"Gear up, meat balls," Ivan shouted to his
small group. "Command has a new objective for us. Seems they're not
happy we lost so much ground. They have decided to send us ahead to
find a possible weak point to hit, maybe cause a little
confusion."

"Just send Stinky here into the fight, the
aliens will certainly retreat from his body odor." Natasha laughed
as she shoved hard on Mikhail's shoulder, trying to put some
distance between them.

"Laugh now, woman, but you will be begging me
for a little more odor when those aliens have you by the panties!"
Mikhail said sternly.

"Shut it, you monkeys! We have to report to
the command tent in ten minutes." Ivan grabbed the gear he would
need for another kick at the enemy.

The tent was quiet as the small group
entered. Gathered inside were many soldiers and officers of the
Russian Blood Brigade, all focused on small video monitors set up
around the large tent. On the screens were images of the aliens,
speaking to the cameras of captured reporters in a language no one
understood. But the images were easy to interpret. They were
holding the President of Russia captive. Three aliens yelled into
the cameras while one of them created a weapon of glowing hot
plasma and began slowly burning the neck of the Russian President.
The man screamed in agony as his head was slowly removed from his
body. It fell, with a sickening thump, on the ground where he
knelt. The soldiers were first shocked, then outraged. Cries of
revenge filled the air.

"Seems to me that Russia has followed China,"
Chang said to Ivan. "Guess we're both on the losing side. Maybe we
should take what little we still have and head to America. Reports
say they are holding their ground, thanks to the Germans."

"Americans!" spat Ivan. "I think I would
rather go to hell first!"

Russia fell and disaster after disaster
ravaged the country. Within days, the remaining Russian and Chinese
fighters boarded planes and flew to America over the North Pole, as
their civilians massed in the frigid north, joining the civilians
of the west, abandoning their motherland to the invaders.

Survivors from all over the world were
migrating to the poles of Earth; the cold areas seemed to be the
one place where the invaders did not attack. Every day more and
more soldiers poured into General Harris's command and he sent them
into battle with little regard for the outcome. He didn't care
about the humans; only the results that the Grays sought.

With the loss of their country, the Russians
on American soil gave up the term Blood Brigade, and adopted the
term 'undead reds.' They were now the walking dead, all that was
left of what had once been Mother Russia.

A
tremendous explosion made Charger's ears ring, and
part of his side armor had been burned thin. "Stupid humans dropped
another nuke," he yelled.

Chang, fighting next to him, said in his best
broken Chinese-English, "Yah, I think I hate those guys."

"Really! And all along I thought it was just
me." Charger laughed and pulled his sword from another sizzling,
screaming alien body. It amused him to fight next to converts from
other countries. Their body forms were so much stranger than his,
and their living armor was a mess. Chang spoke bad English, but was
a good fighter. Much thinner than the American Hyborgs, he was also
shorter by a few inches, but still heads taller than any humans. He
carried three swords and often said, with a snicker, "Number three
for mother-in-law."

Charger wasn't entirely sure that the humans
were still on his side. Toward the high point of the invasion they
were relying a lot on the 'nuke option.'

"Nukes no stop invaders, neither," Chang
said. "Mostly just cook us like choy." Choy was what they had
started calling cooked meat, choy and spooge, that was meat and
blood. Charger felt hip as hell having his own slang.

At least there weren't that many nukes. Most
of the ones that did make it to Earth were launched from ships and
subs located far out at sea to avoid the alien tentacles reaching
out to destroy them. Missiles launched from these vessels had to
run a gauntlet of alien spaceships in orbit waiting to destroy them
with pulse weapons.

Charger and Chang had been assigned to the
25th combat group, a platoon of two hundred newly created Hyborgs
now stuck fighting the largest alien masses so far seen. Three of
these gigantic masses were bearing down on their position that day,
and they had been assigned to hold the center mass from advancing
on a city occupied by refugees and soldiers. The mass was simply
incredible, bigger than most of the buildings behind them and it
moved forward with ground-shaking thumps. They quickly learned that
getting close to it was a bad idea, so they waited till the alien
troops dropped from the mass to the ground to fight. Then they
would focus in pairs to slash and kill those that approached.

However, even after a full day of fighting,
alien troops were still dropping from the mass. But Chang seemed to
have spotted something; he motioned to Charger to follow him.
"Look, mass move forward on five legs, but leg number five not like
others."

Charger stared at this leg, which seemed the
size of a battleship.

Chang said, "Look at leg, it never leave
ground."

"You called me over for this?" Charger asked.
"What's your point?"

"The leg," Chang reiterated. "Mass move
forward, but number five leg never leave ground. Other four
do."

Charger decided the last nuke must have hit a
little too close to Chang's head; he really wasn't making much
sense. Then he realized that the fifth leg never left the ground
because it was attached to something below the surface.

He moved dirt away from behind the leg, and
found a thick red root maybe three feet down, slithering forward
along with the mass. "Oh hell, you think it's like an extension
cord or something?"

Chang shrugged. "Cut and find out." They both
started hacking madly at the red root. The mass shuddered and
stopped. The aliens that had been dropping into combat all day
suddenly stopped dropping on the defending platoon and started
dropping in huge numbers toward Charger and Chang.

"Yep," Charger yelled, "An extension cord for
sure." It was a big relief when their platoon comrades noticed the
change in battle and rushed to their aid. The leader radioed to
main headquarters, which then called for an air strike on this new
finding. The Hyborgs scattered to get out of the way. The center
one of the three masses was the first to stop. The air strike on
the fifth leg severed the connection between the mass and its
coastal alien base, stopping it dead in its tracks. Unfortunately,
the discovery came too late for the 7th and 13th undead platoons
attacking one of the other alien siege towers, as the barrage of
covering human gunfire focused fire on just the one central target.
This lack of coverage resulted in the destruction of both undead
groups.

The center mass stopped only as long as it
took the red tentacle to reattach itself to the fifth leg, then
started moving toward the city again. Command was made aware of
that fact just after General Harris's lack of foresight, or lack of
caring, wiped out half of the existing forces on the American
side.

Undeterred by the human devastation, Harris
ordered three of the newest attack bombers to strike the weakness
of the red roots with guided bunker buster munitions. These three
new bomber aircraft were the most technologically advanced aircraft
America had ever produced. They were shaped like a triangle and
roughly the size of a World War II P-51 Mustang. The surface was
black and had no visible controls. Instead, it used micro-metallic
feathers all over its surface, which moved in unison to direct the
airflow over the surface. This gave the small bomber-fighter craft
amazing ability to maneuver, making it impossible for the alien
invaders to bring it down.

"Holy sheep dip," Chang screamed at Charger
over the screech of the three small bombers. "What a rush!" A great
laugh erupted from deep inside his battered and bloody body.

When the bombs hit the target, they first dug
deep into the earth before exploding. Once ignited, the ground rose
dramatically, heaving upward like a gigantic breathing chest. The
explosion didn't break the surface, but vaporized everything in its
path, thus creating a gigantic hollow sphere underground. This
completely severed the connection of the alien mass from its
command structure. The heaving of the surface toppled the mass
forward, where it crashed down upon the attacking soldiers, wiping
out another platoon of German and American commandos.

General Harris, apparently pleased with the
results, repeated the same order for the second and third masses
attacking his position, achieving the same results, wiping out the
invaders, but killing thousands of human soldiers. Once the battle
ended, General Harris sent word to the leaders of other battles
raging in America, telling them how to stop and bring down these
new alien siege weapons.

Chang and Charger walked through the fields
of dead and dying back to the command base, hearing the cries and
begging of the human soldiers, but powerless to do anything about
them. From that day forward, Charger regarded General Harris as a
war criminal. But Command continued to rely on him to guide the
war.

In the weeks following, Charger and Chang
heard from Command the rumor of a new type of fighting alien, the
Shillelagh. They soon saw it in action.

The Shillelaghs were larger than most of the
aliens that had come before. They moved like a blur in the mist
they emitted, making it hard to get a fix on them, and consisted of
two parts. The solid part seemed to move around inside the liquid
part as it advanced toward them. With a sound like the scraping of
steel chains against a metal deck, the solids appeared through the
semi-transparent part only long enough to move forward. Then the
solid part would disappear behind the liquid part, then back again
to form a solid, which made it blur to the eye as it shifted from
side to side. Its one weakness was its eyes. Charger found they
were always visible, those gold, reflective multi-faceted eyes,
looming out of the mist toward him.

"Bitch!" Charger heard Chang exclaim. "Three
Shillelaghs move into our five o'clock, ten yards out and closing."
Charger turned off the detector, which was clicking a signal on his
wrist computer, and they both crouched into a guarded stance,
awaiting the approach of the three invaders.

The mist began to engulf them and, as a
result, Charger's eyepiece switched to infrared mode, then to
motion mode, to help him find his prey. But this did not turn out
to be an ordinary fight. The first of the three Shillelaghs struck
him and snapped his sword in two before he felt the piercing heat
of its body-formed weapon slice through his shoulder. Bewildered,
he lurched backward, trying to reach the broad axe strapped to his
back. Then he realized that Chang was fighting the other two, and
not doing well.

Like two cats toying with a mouse in the
middle, they kept slicing piece after piece off Chang as he swung
his sword wildly, trying to find some sort of weakness in their
armor. An impact to the axe strapped to Charger's back sent him
hurtling like a rag doll over an embankment and down into a
fast-flowing river. He gasped for air as he floundered around,
seeking the shore. When he was back on dry land, he gathered his
senses and again reached for his axe.

Only then did he realize his arm had been
sliced to the bone and was hanging at his side. His arm
enhancements were sparking and short-circuiting, holding his arm
tight to his body. He tried to compose himself and, stumbling
forward, tripped over a large portion of Chang's body. Looking up
at the mist now moving away from him, he could just make out the
three Shillelaghs darting into a line of Australian army recruits
and destroying them as easily as if they were just paper held to a
raging fire.

He needed to help them. He needed to fight,
but the wet mud at his feet made it hard to climb the embankment.
Turning and running downstream, he finally found a path upward. He
reached the top and found shredded human corpses and the stench of
gunpowder. Stumbling over spent ammunition and broken bits, he
staggered forward to rejoin the fray, only to see the Shillelaghs
vanish over the horizon.

>>>

Charger had been at the medical center for a
few weeks, being patched together, when one of the doctors there
suggested that he could have an upgrade. He thought about it for a
bit, and then remembered Chang. He had traveled this far from
humanity, what was a bit farther going to matter? So he said
yes.

"This will be a new symbiotic addition, not
new living armor," one doctor said. "The upgrades are internal to
you, like adding blue tooth. You're going to be linked mentally
with a Lycan counterpart."

"All the same to me, doc," Charger replied.
"Go nuts."

"Nurse, prep him for tomorrow morning.
Charger, try to get some rest. You will need all your strength,"
the doctor said before he left the room.

Charger knew what Lycans were. The first ones
had been small, nasty things, plain black in color and hard to
control. Charger had seen a few trainers turned into chew toys and
it made him giggle. It was only after the red hybrids, where canine
DNA was blended with primate DNA, and then blended with humans,
that effective Lycans were created. Dal had called them werewolves.
That was because he read too many comic books.

Lycans were about the size of a large man and
could stand upright, with arms and legs a little bit splayed out.
But it was no 'dog head on a human body' thing like in the movies.
These were twisted, fur-covered humans with vicious fangs and
claws, who hunched forward a little when they walked but ran on all
fours like a chimp. They were good hunters, not surprising for
something that looked more like a wolf than a human, and this
hunting trait was valuable because the aliens did a lot of their
fighting underground. They howled like wolves, too; he'd heard them
a few times. He'd heard also that the best way to control a Lycan
was to make it psychologically part of you, so you didn't end up as
a chew toy.