The Tactics of Revenge (24 page)

“Please sit him down before the desk,” the leader of the Klin said. Sherri and Riyad obliged, much to Adam’s relief. He was still quite dizzy.

The Klin moved behind his desk and took a seat, while Sherri and Riyad sat in the available chairs to either side of Adam. Ludl remained standing near the edge of the couch where McCarthy and Thomas now sat.

“I am Linuso Summlin, the Pleabaen of the Klin people. I am their supreme leader at this time. I would like to welcome you all to the planet Marishal – even though Mr. McCarthy here has already taken much of the majesty out of the moment. My welcome would have been much more cordial.”

“What’s this all about?” Sherri inquired, anger in her voice. “And who is this fucker McCarthy in the first place?”

The Pleabaen smiled. “Misters McCarthy and Thomas are the supreme representatives of your race here on Marishal, helping to coordinate all the activities of those whom you call the Converts and the 2G’s.” He turned to address the two Humans seated on the couch. “And I will now ask that you both leave and give me some private time with our new guests. I will meet up with you again later. Please leave us now.”

Adam, through his one good eye, could see the reluctance in both McCarthy and Thomas – especially in McCarthy – to grant the request. There was a power struggle going on in the room, and Adam and the others were going to win this round. As the two hulking Humans got up to leave, Adam painfully flashed a bloody grin at McCarthy. The ginger-haired Brit simply returned a glower of his own before leaving the room.

Chapter 44

The Pleabaen now turned his undivided attention to the three Humans seated on the other side of his desk. “You have all arrived at a very opportune time – at an almost magical moment. You are here at the culmination of a journey that has taken the Klin nearly four thousand years to travel, and you and your kind are playing a major role in this upcoming event.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Adam. “We’re your muscle against the fucking Juireans. But it’s been the Klin all along who have pulled the strings in this war.” In his battered condition, Adam didn’t feel like playing nice with the Klin any longer. “I hope you feel good about the deaths of billions of innocent lives you caused, people who were not part of your god-damn grudge match against the Juireans.”

Linuso was taken aback slightly by the ferocity of Adam’s comments. “It is nothing personal, Mr. Cain, I assure you. Currently throughout the galaxy, there are only about two-hundred thousand surviving Klin. Times have been tough since the days of the Juirean betrayal. We will always need surrogates, up until the time when we can come once more into the open and claim a suitable world as our own. At that time, our kind will once again flourish in the light of day and we will have no need of beings like you.”

Adam suddenly turned dizzy again and fell against Sherri. “Isn’t there something you can do for him?” she cried out, dabbed away some of the blood from Adam’s mouth with the sleeve of her tunic.

“Of course there is, Miss Valentine, my apologies. I simply wasn’t expecting this outcome from the meeting between you and Mr. McCarthy. We know everything there is to know about Human physiology, including some truly amazing medical advances which we may someday reveal to you. Let me call in some assistance.” Linuso keyed a comm button on his desk and a moment later two more Klin entered the room from a side door, followed shortly by a third.

“Ah, here is Senior Fellow Limmore. He has served as the senior intermediary between us and your Mr. McCarthy for some time now,” said Linuso. “He is an expert on what you call
Human Nature
.” He then turned to greet the other Klin. “You can see what your charge has done to our distinguished guest, Limmore. It was quite barbaric.”

Limmore took a seat to the side of the desk. “I would expect nothing less. It is, after all, what makes the Humans so valuable to us.”

The other two Klin came over to Adam and began their examination. After a moment, one of them pulled a jar from a small bag and began to dab some of its contents onto Adam’s swollen face. Almost immediately the swelling began to subside. The other Klin then took a small metal device of some kind and placed it against Adam’s right temple. Adam’s eyes suddenly grew wide.

“That’s amazing,” he said. “My headache’s gone, as is most of the pain. That shit’s amazing!” He blinked several times and could now see much better through his left eye.

One of the medical Klin address the Pleabaen, “He will be well in a few minutes; there doesn’t appear to be any brain damage.”

“Very good!” Linuso exclaimed, appearing truly excited with the prognosis. He looked over at Limmore.

“Almost ready,” the younger Klin said to Linuso, cryptically.

“Good. Now I will have Ludl escort the three of you to a room where you may rest and receive nourishment if need be. The events I spoke of before are coming to fruition. I will soon have you join me in the command center for the grand finale – oh I just love the way you Humans speak, with all your embellishments and colloquialisms. It shouldn’t be more than an hour now. Ludl, please show them to their quarters.”

“What about the others?” Adam said as he stood up, more sure of his footing than before. “We are a team.”

Linuso was silent for a moment before answering. “Very well, take them with you, too, including your two mule-driver friends. I’m sure you will
all
enjoy the show.”

Once in the anteroom, Adam was reunited with the other five from his group, looking tired yet anxious. Tobias took a closer look at Adam. “What the fuck did they do to you in there?”

“It wasn’t them – it was another Human, an SAS commando named McCarthy. He’s working with the Klin.”

“Follow me,” Ludl said from near the door.

The three SEALs turned toward him; Adam could sense them tensing up for a strike.

“Stand down,” he ordered. “It looks like we’ve all been invited to a special viewing of the latest interstellar blockbuster. Until then, they want us to wait in a room for about an hour – and that means all of us.” He made eye contact with Kaylor and winked his good right eye. He felt almost giddy from whatever the Klin had given him. Considering how shitty he had felt only minutes before, he was grateful for any relief.
And if he ever saw that son-of-bitch McCarthy again….

Chapter 45

They were taken to a room only a few doors down the carpeted hallway from Linuso’s office. It was large and comfortable, with two beds, a couch and two chairs. Adam entered the room’s grooming station and cleaned up some before returning to the main room and falling onto one of the beds. Sherri nuzzled in next to him.

Riyad did the courtesy of filling in the others as to what had gone on inside Linuso’s office, while Adam rested his head in Sherri’s lap. The drugs were good, but damn, this was getting ridiculous.

“So what do you think this
grand finale
is,” Tobias asked Riyad.

“It’s obviously some major battle between us and the Juireans. The Klin appear to have an absolute hard-on for the event.”

“Do you think they’re going to interfere, to manipulate the outcome somehow?” Sherri asked.

“Undoubtedly, but to what end I don’t know. I can’t imagine them helping the Juireans to defeat us, and they still need our manpower to continue the war.”

“It sounds like they expect the war to end quickly…anytime now,” Master Chief Rutledge said.

“That doesn’t make sense,” offered Lt. Tobias. “The war’s only been going on for a few months. There’s still a lot of galaxy to cover.”

“Give it as rest, guys,” Adam said from the bed, his eyes closed, soothed by Sherri’s stroking of his hair. “All will be revealed soon, the head honcho told us. Right now, we’ll just drive ourselves crazy trying to second guess these crazy, backstabbing bastards.”

Everyone in the room was quite – for about a minute – before John Tindal broke the silence. “I say they’ll try to help the Juireans, just so the war will go on longer—”

“But I said it’s like they expect the war to end now,” Rutledge countered.

Jesus Christ!
Adam thought. And the debate resumed unabated.

Chapter 46

The Klin war room, located six stories below ground level in the sprawling estate, was a masterpiece of technology and efficiency. It was almost forty-meters square, with every imaginable monitoring device, computer terminal and graphic display that the considerable scientific talents of the Klin could muster. And on top of all this, their communication relays were faster than anything else in the galaxy, allowing for near-instantaneous links from halfway across the galaxy. This was technology the Klin had never revealed to anyone, not in the time of the Alliance, and not now in a time of war. Only the Klin could boast of such technology – and the Klin never boasted.

And the fact that Pleabaen Linuso Summlin could receive real-time updates from anywhere in the galaxy allowed him to be one of the first Klin to receive the communique from the Fringe….

“This can’t be accurate,” he said to High Commander Senior Fellow Olin Puennel.

“Three separate monitoring stations have confirmed it. There
is
a new Human fleet moving into the Sector.”

Linuso looked once more at the datapad in his hand. “This speaks of five-hundred thirty-five new ships. What does Senior Fellow Lumonsee say about this from Earth?”

“We have not been able to make link with the Senior Fellow since receiving the report. We have only been attempting to contact him for about ten minutes. We are continuing to link.”

Limmore was standing next to the Pleabaen, looking up at the graphic of the Falor-Kapel system and at the forces moving into position there. “That new fleet is too far out to assist. The battle will be over weeks before it can be in the vicinity of Falor-Kapel.”

“Yes, I know,” said Linuso. “What troubles me is that we have had no reports of a fleet leaving Earth and heading for the Expansion. Surely Lumonsee would have known of it.”

“That would be expected. And yet here
is
this new fleet.”

Linuso smiled slightly and nodded his head. “Could the Humans have built this fleet unbeknownst to the Senior Fellow and all our spies and surrogates? If so, then maybe we have underestimated the Humans – or Lumonsee.”

“We have thousands of 2G’s and hundreds of surrogates who have infiltrated the entire structure of Human society. I can’t imagine them being able to accomplish this without our knowledge.”

“And that is why I am the Pleabaen, Limmore,
because I can imagine it
.”

He turned to the High Commander. “You must make contact with Lumonsee. I have to know what is happening on Earth.”

Linuso walked away, with Limmore flowing closely behind. He entered a large viewing room, lined with chairs like those in a movie theater. On one side of the room was a large plate-glass window looking out on the command center. On the opposite wall was a large screen, currently displaying the graphic of the Falor-Kapel system and the relative position of the warring parties. The differently-colored contacts were growing ever closer to each other. Linuso turned to Limmore. “Please have our guests escorted here now. It is about to begin.”

“What of McCarthy and Thomas?”

“Not them. When the truth comes out, I want them under close guard.”

“Understood, Pleabaen.”

Chapter 47

It was simply called
The List
, and it had taken over eight months to gather. Now the President of the United States, Daniel ‘Danny’ Ryan, was finally ready to make use of it.

The document sat on his desk – seventy-five pages wrapped in a dark blue vellum-bristol cover and spotting no title, simply a gold-embossed Seal of the United States of America. And the desk it rested upon was not the original Resolute Desk, the one that so many presidents before him had used. Rather it was a new desk, a plain and simple desk, moved here several months before from his underground bunker in the mountains of West Virginia. It also resided in a new White House, one hastily constructed on the grounds of the old one, but looking nothing like the original.

All that had once been the glory and majesty of Washington D.C. had been destroyed on that bright afternoon day in early November, when the Juireans had unleashed a catastrophic rain of fire from high in orbit above the planet. Nearly every major city center around the world had been hit, with the more severe damage reserved for the most-densely populated areas. New York, Tokyo, London, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Sao Paulo and so many more had suffered the most. Sprawling cities like Los Angeles and Paris had not suffered as badly. They had taken their hits, of course, yet the conflagration that followed had been more easily contained. In other locations, it had been the fires that caused the most death and destruction.

Ryan put his hand on the thin booklet and tried to reflect on just what The List contained. It was a resolution – a reckoning of sorts – the culmination of a quest for revenge that had started the moment the first fireballs had dropped from the sky.

It had been the Juireans who had perpetrated the attack and the devastation that followed, and yet it was the Klin who had set all the events in motion. The Klin had convinced the Juireans that the Humans of Earth were a threat to them, so severe in nature that only a preempted strike could protect them. And so the Juireans came, and they killed. They killed over a billion Human beings, most in the course of the three-hour bombardment of the planet. So many thousands more were lost in the fires, starvation and disease that followed.

And that was what made the sins of the Klin so diabolical and unforgivable.

In the aftermath of the devastation, the Klin had arrived as mankind’s
Saviors
, bringing with them food, shelter and energy – an express path out of the darkness and onto the road for revenge. They helped the people of the Earth recover in record time from an event so tragic. But what made Danny Ryan so livid was the fact that these same beings who had come as our friends were the very ones you had caused the tragedy in the first place. At least the Juireans were honest about their intentions. The Klin, on the other hand, turned out to be despicable backstabbing bastards of the first-degree.