B00BKLL1XI EBOK (31 page)

“No, he fucked you over because you let him. You kept insisting that they were aliens and you thought of them as uneducated aliens. I understood that they were humans. They have human brains and they think like we do. It’s not a big stretch to imagine that they can stir up all kinds of shit without thinking too hard about it. Politics and how people think hasn’t changed since ancient times.”

“I couldn’t be nice to them because Newman would look weak, a really bad image for a Councilor. He wanted to fight the Nation and I gave him the tools to do it.”

“No. You gave him enough rope to hang himself.”

“I tried to soften up the attack...”

“... and it was too little, too late and too fake. Plus that psychotic glory hound of yours didn’t help matters. How did she get that job in the first place?”

“My moron media agent hired her. God what a fucking disaster.”

“At least tell me you fired her.”

“Oh yeah, she’s gone. Now she’s pushing some conspiracy book about Lombard and talking about how Ace is a serial killer who goes on panty raids in the middle of the night or whatever.”

Tina laughed so hard that a few patrons turned her way.

“Pantry raids? What?” she giggled.

“Yeah, something about his ‘affection towards human women.’ I think she just stole that out of some old sci-fi novel about gray aliens who abducted women for some secret breeding program to create all kinds of human-alien hybrids to take over the world.”

“Those weren’t sci-fi novels. They were conspiracy books.”

“Really? No way!”

“Yeah. They were filed as non-fiction.”

Gene chuckled bitterly.

“Anyways... This guy named Kevin Holler took over Lombard’s ministry. He went for her book like crazy.”

“Don’t tell me that this Holler guy takes her seriously.”

“Lombard was more or less lucid. He knew that he was a bullshit artist and he had no delusions about it until he had some sort of mental breakdown a few days before he was killed. That’s why I let those pundits who interviewed him do it. But Holler... He’s a nut job.”

“How bad is he?”

“Umm... well... He’s home schooled by fundamentalist parents of his who pray ten times a day and think that Ace is Satan.”

“Not good.”

“He goes around saying that the attack on Earth wasn’t the army of an alien race, but a bunch of demons set loose by the Nation.”

“Ok...”

“Oh it gets better. He says that the Nation is Satan’s army which invaded Earth and because hundreds of millions of people welcomed them, it must mean that the apocalypse is near and that Ace created a one world government in the face of the Council when we was still a demon confined to Hell and that the election was meant to allow the anti-Christ to take over since the Council is now five progressives to two traditionalists.”

“Oh God...”

“Wait, wait, I’m not done.”

“There’s more?”

“Oh yeah. He says that Dot is the Whore of Babylon because she is Ace’s partner and that her magazine covers are supposed to seduce men to have sex with demons, making all kinds of hell spawns. Oh and the reason that the media publishes them is because everyone in the media world is in league with the Devil.”

“You gotta be kidding me! He actually says that?”

“I can get you a video of his sermons.”

“And of course, you’re gonna support him aren’t you?”

Gene cringed with disgust and nodded. Desperation was written all over his face.

“Yeah. I have to,” he confessed. “The neo-traditionalists are into hardcore fundamentalism by a large margin. I have to keep this up to let my clients pretend that they actually give a crap. I mean people in that voter market are so sure that they know everything, they already started predicting how the progressives will lose in six years.”

Tina winked slyly.

“As long as we have the Nation on our side, we won’t lose. The power they have in the public eye is stunning. It’s like Charles said a few months ago. We keep giving people the same old bullshit while they’re showering them with goodies. Oh and on top of that, it turns out that the cyborgs are devoutly religious so we’ll have that covered too.”

“They are? What kind of religion do they practice?”

“Some esoteric form of deism, I’m not sure. Very mystical stiff.”

“I can imagine Holler now... ‘The Satan is pretending to have an actual religion while he’s spreading evil, he teaches fornication and a disregard for my bullshit, yadda, yadda, yadda...’ Ugh!”

“Eh, he’d do that anyway.”

“Yeah, but it’s really fucking annoying when you know what he will say years before he’ll even say it. I think he just copy-pastes his sermons from some website.”

“Maybe.”

The robotic waiter made his way to their table and delivered two thick, juicy fish fillets with steamed vegetables. For the cyborgs, the end to the election meant that they could relax and enjoy being back on Earth, their cradle. For the political strategists, it meant that they could talk frankly and forget about the nastiness of the attack ads and the incessant garbage they had to encounter in their line of work. At least for the time being that is.

[ chapter _ 029 ]

It might seem odd that Ace, Nelson and Dot felt a twinge of regret the night they packed their bags and prepared to return to the stars. Even though their stay on Earth was fraught with political battles and they were often treated more like alien curiosities than human beings, this planet still felt like home. The morning of their departure, Gray paid a visit to Nelson’s apartment where the crew gathered for their last breakfast on Earth.

He was escorted by a robot butler into the big, airy kitchen. Ace and his crew greeted him warmly and congratulated him on the great success of his party in the general election.

“No congratulations are necessary,” protested Grey with a smile. “I just wanted to come by and see you before you left. Oh and thank you for your help and support.”

“Our pleasure,” smirked Nelson.

Grey flashed a smile with a similar intent to Nelson.

“Steve, Christine,” he continued. “I was really surprised to hear that you’re going to participate in this war too.”

“You did place us in the service of the Nation,” noted Steve.

“Yeah. And they like us there,” added Christine.

“Oh yes, we like them very much,” agreed Ace. “I couldn’t be more pleased that they’re willing to go with us.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” chuckled Grey. “I’m certainly not here to critique your decision. It’s just that I didn’t expect you to just run off to space only eight months after you came back.”

“Well, what can I say?” replied Steve. “Duty calls. The future of Earth is at stake and so on and so forth. You know, the usual stuff.”

“I can only say good luck and Godspeed in that case,” said Grey with a slight bow towards the humans. “And of course, Ace, Dot and Councilor Nelson... I wish you the best of luck as well.”

The cyborgs politely accepted.

“There was one more matter,” started Grey carefully. “As you’re probably already aware, there’s been quite a bit of mudslinging and all kinds of venomous garbage tossed at you by my former colleagues.”

“Eh, whatever gets their jollies off,” shrugged Ace.

“And that’s why they’re my former colleagues,” noted Grey with a hint of steely firmness in his voice. “But anyway, we want to give you a token of our appreciation for all the work you’ve done and will do in the near future to protect the Earth and the human race.”

“Ooh... Sounds promising,” grinned Dot.

“I know that you’ve taken quite a liking to your condos?”

“Well...” started Nelson. “It is a nice house...”

“I don’t wanna leave,” laughed Ace. “That place grew on me. It’s nicer then my house on Abydos.”

Dot raised her hand to speak.

“Um Ace,” she noted. “Your place on Abydos is a creepy, dark temple built on the bones of an alien civilization...”

“Exactly, the décor is so old it’s literally fossilized” agreed Ace. “That’s why the unit here is better.”

Grey couldn’t help laughing as he patted Ace on the back with a gesture that just for a moment might have seemed almost fatherly.

“Well Ace, I’ll tell you what,” he said with a gleaming smile. “If you promise to come back alive and well from this war, the house is yours. I have the deed in the car and all you need to do is sign.”

“You’re kidding!” jumped Ace.

“Are you serious?” asked Nelson. “You’re giving this guy a house on Earth?”

“Well Councilor Nelson, I think the High Commander needs his private retreat when doing business on Earth.” Grey winked at Ace.

Ace wasn’t surprised when Grey announced his title.

“I knew you had a good clue who I was from the start Councilor Grey,” he said. “I’m just surprised that no one in the press figured it out and went on debating who might be a possible High Commander working on Earth for months on end until they got sick of guessing.”

“It wasn’t that hard to figure out,” nodded Grey. “Now as for the condo offer, the same also applies to you Councilor Nelson, and of course, to you Mr. Robbins and Ms. Hayes.”

Dot gently nudged Ace.

“So?” she asked expectantly.

“You know Councilor Grey,” replied Ace. “When I was putting my uniforms in my bag, I caught myself on something odd. I wanted to stay. I really didn’t want to go back into space. After spending the vast majority of my life in space, there was something about Earth... It just felt like home. Maybe it’s because I’m a human and the aliens never let me forget it or maybe it’s something else, but there’s just a strangle feeling that this is where I really belong.”

“So I take it I should get the deeds?” asked Grey.

“You take it right,” confirmed Ace to Dot’s and Nelson’s delight and Steve and Christine’s mild amazement.

Within a few minutes, all five of them had brand new condos in the most exclusive and upscale neighborhood on Earth and a place to call home on the planet which they knew as their home world. A few hours later, they left Earth for a space city headed to Abydos. Their clothes hanged in the closets of their new homes, a kind of symbolic promise that they would return. By noon, the space city was headed to join the Nation’s main fleet as it flew past Jupiter on its way out of the solar system and towards the stars.

The human body isn’t made for space travel. Besides the lack of air, atmospheric pressure and oxygen, the body breaks down in very low or very high gravity. In low gravity, bones grow brittle and muscles are atrophied because there’s not enough stress to keep them capable of the easy locomotion we take for granted. Calcium is reabsorbed as the heart begins to shrink. In high gravity, the bones simply snap and the body collapses, unable to bear its own weight.

Adding to the stress of space travel is the constant radiation that permeates every part of the universe with deadly cosmic rays. Some places in space are so radioactive, the body simply melts like a cone of ice cream left out in the summer sun. For the less lucky astronaut, the radiation causes horrifying tumors, mutations, radiation sickness, and terrible burns. A gruesome death quickly follows.

When the Dark Gods modified humans for their experiments, they created a triumph of designer life forms. The human DNA received two additional base pairs for a total of six nucleotides. While ordinary human bodies synthesized 20 amino acids, the cyborgs generated 37 so they could build exotic enzymes that cleaned up radiation, repaired wear and tear damage to their chromosomes and allowed them to regenerate brain cells from scratch. Their RNA strands grew to adequately transcribe a new, quadruplet code.

Their cells swelled as the nuclei containing their chromosomes expanded by nearly 70% in order to accommodate the large volume of new genetic information. The population of ribosomes, the living protein assembly factories inside the cells, almost doubled to keep up with protein synthesis. Their modified neurons warped, shortening their dendrites and axons and bulging out at their core. Viewed under the microscope, they looked completely alien. Coupled with the bizarre genetic code their nuclei contained, it was more than enough to qualify the Nation’s inhabitants as a new species.

The vital organs left in their bodies were a precise, nearly immortal, self-maintaining machine. These optimal designs were reflected in the first 7,000 cyborgs custom built for Ace and his companions to kick start a new civilization, delivered as mature adults and imprinted with enough military and communication skills to be useful. The Nation refused to accept any more creatures like that, preferring to simulate human growth and development through a sophisticated and delicate method meant to ensure that their evolution as an organism would continue. Being built in a factory would negate the benefits of natural mutations in their genome, they argued.

Hundreds of thousands of years from their creation, when their offspring would evolve new and beneficial genetic adaptations they could update their genomes to make them a little stronger, a little faster and a little more efficient. They had already sought out beneficial alien genes and easily merged them with their altered DNA for better protection from cosmic pathogens and to better insulate their cell walls from cosmic rays.

Besides being conditioned physically, the cyborgs were also mentally trained for the harsh and unforgiving life in deep space. The Nation was given a cold, dark necropolis to call their home. There, amidst the ruins of a civilization brought down by the Dark Gods in their ascent to dominance, the cyborgs were forced to deal with a vivid glimpse of their eventual future. Sooner or later, teased the ruins, you will end up just like us; broken, forgotten, only a shadow of your former greatness, a testament to a dead society.

But the Nation made these ruins their calling card. They crafted a culture which presented them as a society based on the wisdom and the knowledge of forgotten ancients. Absorbing the aura of antiquity and mystery, they used their fearsome image to create the trademark combination of brutality, mystery and knowledge which made them infamous throughout the entire galaxy and beyond. The Reaper knew from the whispers his probes picked up along the edges of the galaxy that the alien races beyond the Rim watched the Milky Way, waiting for a new order to sweep away the Dark Gods. That new order was of course, the Nation. In fact, the Nation could become the first Sentry in the Milky Way which would be able to reach out beyond the Galactic Rim and find willing allies and servants.