Charger the Soldier (7 page)

Yes, I'll try to remember about the dog, but
we don't have much time.

>>>

While out of stasis, Harris and some other
hominoids had questions regarding the god fragment they now
possessed. They were programmed to carry out tasks for the Grays,
which meant they had to be relatively smart and, naturally, this
included a heightened sense of wonder. Thus, curiosity drove the
hominoids to begin experimenting on the god fragment. The ship
contained several advanced technologies which they could use to
study and explore its properties. The groups took turns, each
spending a year conducting studies, then reviving other members of
the crew to continue the study. Over the years, they managed to
unlock the mystery of the god fragment.

When the great breakthrough came, the
awakened crew decided to land on what was later named New Eden, a
planet relatively close to Earth. They decided to place a team on
New Eden to continue studying half the god fragment. The rest would
re-enter stasis and continue, with the other half of the fragment,
back to Earth.

The god fragment was sentient; this was the
shock of the hominoids' discovery. It did not speak or think, but
it could create. Like a tree creating seeds which fall to earth and
grow new trees, like an insect that through procreation creates
more insects, like bacteria that create more bacteria, the god
fragment created life. It could be given any piece of matter, even
a dead and desiccated leaf from a tree and, through contact, bring
that leaf back to life.

Now the hominoids realized that the power of
immortality was the true goal of the Grays. The center of the
galaxy was the force that created life. But what was the huge,
black, spherical object that had left the center and was pursuing
them?

Harris himself had to return to Earth for he
was one of the directors of the ship, not an ordinary crew member.
He would tell the Grays that the members of the crew left on New
Eden had perished in the first attempts on the black mass. The
Grays wouldn't care who had died as long as they got the god
fragment.

The team that remained on New Eden scavenged
what parts and technology they could from the ship, hoping the
Grays wouldn't notice the losses. This team consisted of four
members, three females and a male. They had shelters and enough
supplies to live on New Eden for several years, giving them a
chance to create a colony and get a foothold on the world.

But the male member of the team soon
succumbed to illness and died. The three women decided to subject
his body to the god fragment. Subjecting inanimate matter, devoid
of consciousness, to the god fragment created life. However, to
subject a once living and self-aware being to the fragment created
a monster bent on rape, murder and cannibalism.

With only one woman from the team left alive
and hiding in a cave from the monster that stalked the planet's
surface, she carved a small primitive statue of the god she prayed
to. Though she and the other hominoids were advanced in technology,
their understanding of art was still at the level of early
Neanderthals and
Homo erectus
. She prayed in hopes of
escaping the fate the other two women had suffered.

Her prayers were in vain.

Many hundreds of years later, one of the
children of New Eden, who fancied herself an explorer, discovered a
small statue of a woman in a cave. Most people in the settlement
thought someone had played a prank on the little girl, but she was
sure it was very old. She had no idea how right she was.

When the Grays re-entered Earth's time stream
in the 1700s, coinciding with the arrival of the ship from the
center of the galaxy, things began to change. The news about the
pursuing black sphere disturbed the rogue Gray group, and it was
decided to speed up the evolution of humanity to ensure that an
army of followers could be created in time to defend Earth from the
god sphere. Thus began the Industrial Revolution, an explosion of
technological development. Sometimes humanity wandered off course,
but a few well-chosen hominoids from the returned spacecraft,
placed at key points in humanity's technological growth, soon
brought them back to focus on the Grays' goal.

>>>

Dart speaks to Reader:

The venture to the center of the galaxy, of
course, had been a mistake.

Why?

To look for evidence of a creator flies in
the face of reason, and is the height of arrogance. No one with a
true understanding of reason and science would ever think it
possible to test for the presence of god.

Yes, I know I told you that the Grays were
brilliant. And so they were in many ways. They were far advanced in
technology but, like humanity, this rogue group had a superstitious
fascination with discovering a creator. Perhaps they thought a
creator would give them more power. Humanity fell for this line of
thinking many times in its history and, as still proves true, only
a being blinded by faith could reason that such a quest was
credible.

What happened to the black sphere following
the ship?

Oh, it arrived eventually. But when it did
appear in the solar system, humanity paid the price for the
arrogance of the Grays.

D
art speaks to Reader:

The event I'm about to relate happened
roughly seven thousand years ago, in about 2350 BCE. After that
we're going to leap ahead to 2030 CE, when the aliens invaded,
which caused Henry to become Charger, who went on to change the
history of Earth and humanity.

You want him to tell this story?

I have to remind you, Reader, that Charger
doesn't talk much. He's too busy creating history. You'll have to
make do with me.

Am I a hero? Oh, Reader, don't be flippant.
Who would ever regard me as a hero? A skinny guy in a wizard's hat
and cloak? Do I look like I could save the world?

Well, yes, I do know quite a lot. But
sometimes I wish I didn't.

>>>

It had been thousands of years since the
great city of Mahoud sailed the inky blackness of space, only to
crash into the rogue tenth planet of Earth's solar system. The
survivors adapted their mighty technology to thrive inside the
black heart of the carbon planet, Alcazaba, changing human
physiology into the small black beings they became. However, one
male human of old Earth, Si Shim, had been saved intact, to be sent
back to the home world someday to discover whether it would be
possible to return.

That time had come and Si Shim was revived
from deep cryogenic sleep and prepared for the task ahead. Using
their most recent technologies, they placed him back into deep
sleep and sent him, along with a programmed Tasker robot, in a ship
with gravity drive back to Earth. For many, many years, the small
ship traveled through dark space until it found its way to Earth.
As the ship moved silently through the clouds that blocked the view
from below, Si Shim revived and discovered that humanity had indeed
survived.

However, the humans were still dirty and
primitive and obviously hadn't advanced much since the time of
Mahoud's exodus. The other, gentler humans of differing genetic
physiology had perished, their remains discovered in the Neander
Valley of modern day Germany.

After many months of observation, Si Shim
decided to land his craft and interact with these primitive distant
cousins. Some humans had clearly built a significant culture with
towering structures of triangular design in deserts and in some
deeply forested locations. But it was the people in the south of
what was later known as Britain who most intrigued the lone man.
They appeared stoic in nature and primitive in intellect, and he
doubted that they understood the nature of the massive subterranean
power source beneath their gigantic stone ring.

The fact that they had built a stone circle
on top of an unusual underground energy source fascinated Si Shim.
His craft had detected the energy source but obviously these people
were unaware of it. Curious, he decided to dress himself in the
clothing of the local people and try to learn their language. It
was quite a trial for him to discover how to hunt animals in the
local fashion, skin them with sharp instruments, and then process
them into acceptable forms of clothing, but he succeeded.

The tribe's people were cautious, but
welcoming to the new stranger who appeared at the edge of their
village, dressed in garb that seemed somewhat foreign. The tribe
quickly discovered that he could not speak their language, but
within a short time, he had learned enough to get by. He soon
became a friend of the village chief.

"Fair day, friend," Si Shim greeted a young
woman who was busy grinding wheat on a stone wheel. He was
returning from his daily walk into the wilds of the forest, where
he secretly recorded information into the computers of his small
craft. He'd been in the village for a year now and had learned
much.

"And you, sweets, this day was especially
quiet without your face," she replied and stopped her grinding to
wipe her brow and flash him a broad smile. Her eyes lit up every
time they spoke, and secretly she was fascinated by the stranger,
subconsciously grooming her clothing and herself to look
attractive. She did not know that Si Shim was in love with a young
male named Eric of Amesbury, son of the village chief.

He entered his small hut, constructed by his
new friends, for he had no skills of his own to offer the tribe,
and began reviewing all the artifacts he had gathered. Five
funerary pots, three tiny copper knives, sixteen barbed flint
arrowheads, a kit for knapping flint, and metalworking tools,
including cushion stones that functioned as a kind of
portable anvil, and some boar tusks. There were also a black
stone wrist-guard and two red wrist-guards, a shale-belt ring, and
a pair of gold hair ornaments. Si Shim turned the artifacts over in
his hands, studying them, seeking to gain more insight into the
mindset of these people.

Eric entered the hut and greeted his lover.
"Hello, my friend, I see you still fondle this trash. Why the
longing for my father's possessions?"

"I hold a passion for your people, my
friend," Si Shim replied as he put the goods into a bag made of
animal skin and tucked the bag under his bed.

"I hope your passion includes me," Eric
said.

These two played a dangerous game, for it was
not acceptable behavior for men to be intimate and even worse for
men of such an age difference; Si Shim was twice Eric's age. Si
Shim was expected to join with a girl of the tribe to help cement
relationships between the tribe of Amesbury and the tribe of Si
Shim. But he had other plans. He would return to his own home and
take Eric with him.

"With the passing of the new moon, I will be
traveling back to my people, my friend. I ask that you take this
long walk with me," Si Shim said.

"I would travel the heavens above with you,
friend," Eric replied.

"That is good to hear spoken, though heaven
is a distant road to travel." Si Shim rose from his small bed,
walked over to Eric, and gave him a warm embrace.

The young girl that Si shim had spoken to
earlier, carrying a small snack to entice Si Shim's interest in
courtship, appeared at the doorway, only to find the two men in
each other's arms.

Shocked and rejected, the girl turned away
quietly and decided to speak with Eric's father, the village
chieftain. The two men did not notice her arrival or departure.

Later that morning, the village chief,
enraged, sent armed men to Si Shim's hut. The two men were dragged
before the chief, who had them executed immediately. Two graves
were dug near the stone rings of the village and Si Shim, with his
treasures scattered about his body, was buried as an Amesbury
archer. Eric was buried not far from him and village life went on,
the two men quickly forgotten.

Si Shim's spacecraft sat dormant for a number
of years until the Tasker's programming kicked in, based on Si
Shim's probable death since he had not returned for so long. It was
time to collect plant samples and human artifacts from other areas
of the planet. Soon the craft must return to Alcazaba, when the
small black planet did its single orbit of the sun and was closer
to Earth than it would be again for hundreds of years.

Any Tasker was capable of carrying out such
tasks, for they flew ships to asteroids and planets to mine for
materials needed by the Mahouds. Each had in its chest a complex
mechanism which directed and controlled it. Thousands of years in
the past, when Mahoud left Earth, one of the original robotic
guards had been accidentally left behind. A few hundred years
before Si Shim reached Earth, the remains of this guard were found
by some Greeks. They didn't know what the controlling device was
for but they were inspired by the cogs and wheels to create from it
an astronomical calculator. It, too, was lost but eventually found
around 1900 in a shipwreck off the island of Antikythera in Greece
and therefore called the Antikythera Machine.

The Taskers, even after the improvements made
by the Mahouds, were still quite crude compared to what they would
someday become, and they moved mechanically, like a wind-up toy.
Their 'brains' clicked and beeped and they had big 'eyes,' which
were actually windows for sensors. Their arms ended in primitive
pincers.

A few days later the Tasker landed on a
windless desert plateau in Peru, near a village which looked
deserted. It emerged from the ship and began moving toward the
huts. However, the village of Nazca was not deserted.

People began running out of the huts, picking
up stones as they raced toward the Tasker. The Tasker had no
commands to deal with this kind of movement, but when people began
attacking and the first stone struck its chest, the robot simply
turned around, got back into the spaceship and left.