HIGHLANDER: The Highlander’s Surrender Bride (Scottish Alpha Male Pregnancy Romance) (45 page)

The building itself was circular in shape and capped in a tall communication spire that made it look like an inverted dart.  It stood so tall that it was impossible to miss from a hundred kilometers away.  The flag of her country was displayed prominently on the front of the building, standing out in stark contrast to the shining steel and glass that made the whole building glimmer like a beacon on a day like today.

All around it, air cars and other hover craft flitted to and from it, reminding her of a bee hive that she had strayed too close to when she was young.  And these bees, much like the ones she had seen in her youth, could be dangerous if an enemy came too close to this place.

Walking all about the courtyard at the front of the building were other men and women in uniform.  She saw no civilians among the throngs of people anywhere, which was a normal enough occurrence anymore since a “civilian” was anyone under the age of twelve. 

All of the people were dressed much like herself, in green uniforms and all with patches on their shoulders that designated their particular functions.  Most were soldiers, others were drones like herself.  The slicker and more shapely figured people often became the combat soldiers while those like herself wound up doing the grunt work that largely went unnoticed until some combat unit or other didn’t get their socks or skivvies.

She paid the collection of people very little attention as she and Shuri crossed the concrete courtyard and entered into the building proper.  They were both retina-scanned for identification at the door and admitted before catching an elevator that took them to the top one hundred floors. 

Disembarking there they were met by two more soldiers marked with the tabs of on-site security.  One of them was an old battle axe and the other was a little handsome, Shayla thought.  But both of them had dead-serious looks on their faces that told her that neither was in the mood for social graces, however.

“Shayla Umbetki?” the cute one asked.

She nodded.

“Come with us,” added the older one.  He looked to Shuri.  “Your job is done.  We’ll handle it from here.”

Shuri nodded and to Shayla she said, “If you survive, I’ll see you on the next rotation.”

Shayla gave a quick smile to the skinny woman and followed the two soldiers as they walked on.

Chapter 2

Outside the windows of the building she could see Cape Town sprawling before her.  Since the newly minted jungle plants that had overrun much of the city had overpowered some of the original concrete and steel structures, the city was protected by an electric frontier fence that kept the overreaching greenery at bay.  On one side, the greenery of the wild jungle thrived as if it had been untouched by man since the dawn of time.  On the other, a mere few meters from the edge of the protective barrier, was civilization.  Houses, highways, storage facilities, and most importantly: military defensive structures.  There were gun turrets, bunkers, artillery posts, landing pads, and like that that punctuated the perimeter fence like dashes and dots in the old Morse code along the line set by her commanders. 

Charming place
, she thought wryly as she walked, preferring the green of the natural jungle to the site of concrete and industry. 

“Go inside,” said the old soldier.  “The general is waiting.”

The order brought her from out of her thoughts as she realized that they had come to a large pair of steel doors.  The doors she recognized easily enough: breach gates.  The kind that kings in a medieval world would have slaughtered whole countries to have on their castles.  The doors were a centimeter thick, but could take anything from plasma discharges to nuclear blasts.  A hardy material, that was. 

As she passed inside she got a good look at how the brass in this woman’s army lived.  The office was, in her opinion, a waste of space.  It was circular in shape, at least thirty meters across, and populated by nothing else but a desk, a chair, and the man who sat behind it.  The floor was a holographic projector, she could tell that easily enough just by looking at it.  High-class stuff too, considering that she knew mil-spec gear when she saw it.  Likely the whole floor was rigged to display real-time maps of the continent and the placement of SAAF assets on the ground.  But the imager was turned off for the moment. 

Her eyes went to the man behind the desk.

He was even older than the soldier that had brought her into this place.  His hair was cut short, even though he was as bald as an egg on top.  He had wrinkles up and down his face that were offset by the single massive scar that he wore that stretched across his face from the lower part of his neck on his right hand side all the way up to his forehead on his left side.  His right hand she saw was busy typing away on a tablet and she noted that it was a synthetic appendage. 

As she approached she noted that the nametag on the man’s uniform read “Haggart”.  The rank he wore was Country General.  Not only did he command the SAAF, but he ran the country as well. 

This is a first
, she thought as she came to stand in front of the man’s desk.  She put her heels together and saluted the man, standing up sharp and straight.

The old general looked up from his tablet once at her, as if he didn’t care that she was standing there, before he looked back to his tablet with more interest.  He didn’t return the salute… she knew he didn’t have to if he didn’t want to.  But she, on the other hand, had to hold that posture until he told her to do otherwise.

She waited.

She counted the seconds that passed as the general went on typing away with his prosthetic hand, more engaged in that than with her.  It was a while before the seconds became minutes.  Minutes quickly turned into nearly an hour before the general finally gave a small sigh and set the tablet aside and looked at her patiently, like he’d been expecting her to get bored and turn and leave before he’d finished whatever it was that he was working on.

“Stand easy,” he commanded. 

She dropped her salute, her arm feeling a little strange from being held upright for so long, and spread her feet apart to rest easy.  She stared across the desk to the older man as he folded his hands, the real one over the synthetic, on his desk.  He looked across at her and she could sense dislike radiating from the man as he looked on her, like how a housewife might look upon a cockroach invading a nice clean kitchen. 

“Shayla Umbetki,” he said, his voice dripping with scorn.  “I’ve heard your name a lot lately.  Specifically I’ve heard it no less than 87 times in the last three months.  Do you know why?”

She resisted the urge to smile.  “Yes, sir, I do.”

The general sighed and leaned back in his chair.  “I’ve been studying your record.  It’s pretty dull reading.  You enlisted at age twelve, just like all honest citizens.  Physically you weren’t fit to stand on the line, but you proved that you could get things done… joined the quartermaster’s corps.  You were promoted to company quartermaster for the 58
th
by the time you were sixteen.  And you’ve been there ever since.”  He paused and regarded her with a careful eye.  “You’ve been quiet about everything for the last nine years, since you were promoted.  And then, all of a sudden…” he reached out and picked up the tablet he’d been tapping at on his desk, “I get
this
.”

Again she resisted the temptation to smile.  There could only be one reason why she was here now and the idea excited her like no other.  It wasn’t a rejection, she knew.  If her request had been rejected then she wouldn’t have been summoned here when simply not saying anything to her had worked well enough before now.

It was approved!  Jesus, it was approved!
  She found it hard to not want to dance and only barely managed to keep her discipline intact.

He set the tablet back down.  “You must want off this planet something fierce if you’re willing to put in so many applications to get off world… as a bride.  Would you care to explain?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” she said plainly.

“That’s, ‘No,
sir,
’” he corrected her heatedly.  He pointed out the tablet on his desk again.  “All that this document lacks is my retinal scan, soldier.  Until I do, you’re
still
a soldier and subject to my authority.  So you’d better sharpen that point and get your shit wired straight and I mean right-the-hell-now!” he barked.

She felt the sting of his words.  Yes, she knew he was right.  He could still say no to her request and make sure that she got busted back down to scrubbing latrines if he wanted.  It was best to play the good soldier until then.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she replied.

“Better.”

She took a short breath.  “I simply want to get away from this planet, sir.”

“Why?”

“The world… it’s not the same.”

“How would you know?  The changes made to this planet were made before your great grandfather was a stirring in your great-great grandfather’s pants.”

“I’ve studied the histories, sir.  I know what life was like on this world before the first of the xeno races came.  Nothing is as it was meant to be.”

“Oh?  You know how things were meant to turn out, do you?  Are you omnipotent, soldier? If you are, then maybe I should refuse your request and keep you right here.  You can predict the enemy movements and I’ll move our forces according to your predictions… like the heathen kings of old who were led by the words of soothsayers and witches, eh?”

Again, the words bit at her, but she said nothing. 

“Perhaps you’d like to clarify your position,” the general said, folding his fingers together so that they steeple. 

She sighed. 
Just say it like you feel it,
she told herself. 
It can’t get any clearer than that. 
“Sir, I’m sure you’ve studied the annuals of history?”

He replied with a nod.

“Then you know that Cape Town used to be part of the African continent.  Now it’s an island… and we owe that to off worlders.  The Sahara used to cover a third of the northern African continent and it used to be a desert… now its marine colony for fish and other lifeforms of the Mediterranean and Nigeria is beach-front property.  The United Kingdom is a toxic wasteland.  There are animals that live on this planet that went extinct millions of years ago, but they only live now because someone thought that they might make good weapons.  There are insects imported from other planets because some head of state asked for them and for the same reason: they make good weapons.  People used to have ships that sailed on the surface of the ocean before water-dwelling creatures from other worlds were brought in because they eat anything that swims or sails on the water.”  She paused, finding that her words didn’t seem to be penetrating the hardened shell of the general.  “Sir… the world is a testing ground combined with a blending pot for alien organisms.  And our species is the one caught in the middle.  The world isn’t
natural
anymore, sir.”

“Again, I’m hearing the ring of omnipotence in your voice, quartermaster.  How do you know what the world is supposed to be like?”

“I don’t, sir,” she said quickly.  “All I know is what it seems like to
me
.  We pass laws that outlaw alien influence but we ask for their technology… their weapons… their insects… their animals… their
plants
… and they give them to us!  Sir, Earth is nothing more than a firing range of other races!  They’re fighting each other
through
us!  We’ve changed our world by using what they give us!  And now look at it!”

“They’ve helped tip the balance of power in
our
favor,” the general retorted.  “If you’ve studied history, then surely you recall that the old super powers used to dictate terms on a global scale while smaller countries – including South Africa – were left to rot! The United States, the Russian Republic, the Chinese Federation… they all came crumbling down to 3
rd
world countries because of what the xeno races provided!  Countries that were
ignored
were finally noticed!  They were feared!  They were
revered
!  People stopped dying of starvation and finally died of old age and with full bellies to boot!  People that had never seen a doctor in their lives were given top-of-the-line medical treatment!  People that assumed that writing was something for the rich and the elite learned how to read and write in
multiple
languages!  Are you telling me that you believe that all of that is for nothing?!”

“Yes,
sir
!” she replied sharper than she intended.

The general merely sat and watched her.

“So would I.”

She froze, uncertain that she had heard him correctly.

He leaned back in his chair and stared at the high ceiling of his office for a few seconds.  “Hell, even I have to agree with you Ms. Umbetki.  I
know
what the world would be like now if our ancestors hadn’t listened to our off world benefactors.  Sure… portions of the world would still be in poverty… degradation… disease… war… well, let’s face it:
war
is in all of our natures.  That much hasn’t changed.”  He blew out a small sigh and looked across at her, but gone was the baleful nature of his earlier glance.  “But the bottom line is: there would still be more
world
, wouldn’t there?  More people… more land…”

She could think of nothing to say.

“I used to read the histories, quartermaster.  It was actually one of my favorite pastimes until I realized that it was depressing the shit out of me.  I used to read about this place called “Switzerland”.  Did you ever read about it?  A place that was white with snow… high peaks that were covered in it… where people could relax indoors beside a fire and drink hot cocoa.  And war was, for all intents and purposes, outlawed there.”  He sighed reminiscently.  “It sounded like a good place to visit.  Not this place with all of its sweltering heat and having to drink your bodyweight in water every week.  It was a place that stopped existing when other countries found that the money that the xenos gave us outstripped everything that existed on Earth at the time.  The country was nuked out of spite from the grudges of other countries that had bones to pick with them.”

Shayla nodded.  She knew the history of it all.  Some people had looked on the xeno races as gods descended from heaven.  And the technology – the “gifts” – that they had brought had leveled the playing field for a lot of those people.  Lots of countries had felt superior with that kind of power in their possession.  Thinking that they had the backing of gods behind them made lots of people – everyone, really – feel over ambitious and above rebuke.

And their actions had literally changed the face of the world.

The general looked at her carefully.  “I can see why you wanted off this ball of mud so badly, kid.  To be honest, I tried myself when I was younger than you.”

She paused at that as well, words again failing to come to her mind, save one, “Sir?”

He began to gently swivel from side to side in his chair.  “The program was already a century old by the time I was sixteen,” he said plainly.  “The idea of just walking away from this…
all
of it…” he said, looking out the window at the world beyond.  He lightly shook his head as if he couldn’t believe that he’d had such thoughts… or that maybe he couldn’t believe he’d let them go at all.  “I used to think that there had to be something better out there than this.”

“What happened, sir?” she asked curiously.