Extinction (Extraterrestrial Empire Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. HAKAI

  2. BIOLOGICAL INSPECTION

  3. SEARCH AND RESCUE

  4. BIG GUNS

  5. spider WEB

  6. THE GREYS

  7. INNER THOUGHTS

  8. ENEMY’S ENEMY

  9. CIRCINUS VIRUS

  10. THE MONSTER MASH

  11. THE ALIEN GREYS

  12. GUN SLINGERS

  13. GAME CHANGER

  14. FREEDOM IS NEVER FREE

  15. DREAM WORLD

  16. dANGER OF EXTERMINATION

  17. SEX GAMING

  18. SHOOT THE ROBOT!

  19. WORTHY ADVERSARY

  20. SEX IS A DRUG

  21. AURORA—aLL GUNS FIRE!

  22. AURORA BITES THE DUST

  23. gen-6—bLOWN TO BITS!

  24. WARNING! WARNING! eNGINE OVERLOAD!

  25. THE CARDS WE’RE DEALT…

  Books by Tony Teora

  Smart Pills

  Mad Worlds Collide

  Rubicon: The Dark Side of the Galaxy

  Book co-authored with Darrell Bain

  Alien Enigma

  Short Stories

  Roppongi

  Eyes in the Sky

  Cosmic Dreams

  Arturo’s Wish

  Galactic Rosetta

  Visit www.tonyteora.com for the latest news.

  Extraterrestrial Empire:

  Extinction

  Tony Teora

  Copyright © 2014 by the author.

  Dedication

  Manager of the Fukushima nuclear plants, Masao Yoshida—who against the orders of reactor owners Tepco, and at great personal peril, flooded the reactors with seawater to prevent a catastrophic meltdown, thus destroying the reactors but potentially saving millions of lives (including mine).

  Multiverse Nonfiction

  In the theory of multiple universes, if something can happen, it has happened—and it has happened an infinite amount of times, somewhere. Thus, the story here (although fiction in this world), is a true account of events that happened somewhere else, at some other time.

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank the following folks for their editing, input, guidance, and crazy ideas in helping making ‘Extinction’ an exciting novel that I hope will help mankind avoid such an event: Eddie Kalish, Pamela Guerrieri, Kimberley Jace and Jon Hartless. Special thanks to Stephen Youll for the mind blowing book cover artwork.

  Prologue

  _________

  One Big Storm

  Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.

  – Dag Hammarskjöld

  Earth Date: February 20, 2061

  Location: Vermont, US Novus Republic State

  He hiked alone.

  He did this because he knew we are born alone, and we die alone. And sometimes, we just need to be alone. Except for a few close friends, Ace Archer lived a solitary life. No marriage, no kids—and with the unexpected death of his sixty-year-old mother, Elizabeth, he had no real family.

  The grim news from Earth Command added to the soberness of life. Man had finally discovered an intelligent alien race—a race so smart, in fact, that it immediately decided to try to exterminate mankind. A war for survival had started light-years away, yet most on Earth did not even know man had travelled that far. The governments kept the masses in the dark, and most people liked it that way. The untimely events that spy agencies secretly called “human extinction” made hiking up the snowy mountain toward Billy to read the encrypted e-letter orders even more urgent.

  The Vermont winter snow raced down in a heavy, angry spray, turning the mountain trail into nothing more than a foggy, snowy white lane in the midst of black, icy, leafless trees, its path barely showing through the semi-whiteout conditions. More than eight feet of snowpack covered the mountain path, along with another six inches of white powder that had topped off the snowy winter wonderland in the last two hours.

  Ace trekked slowly, his snowshoes requiring care for each heavy step. Did he really need to haul seventy-five pounds of food and booze up the hill? Snow melted on his mouth and nose through an opening in his winter face mask. He breathed heavily and sucked some snow into his lungs where it quickly melted, making him cough up water droplets. The twenty-three-year-old stopped to look at the surreal whiteout and catch his breath. Who would have thought that “global warming” would create one hundred and twenty-five-degree summers and ten-foot winter snowstorms in Vermont?

  The wind hissed like a screaming witch against the approaching stranger. The four-mile February hike up Vermont’s Mount Willoughby was no cakewalk. Even in the warm spring, the heartbreak hill took a good forty-five minutes. I hope Billy’s still there, thought Ace as he struggled up the last mile.

  “Billy” was the nickname of a cabin he and two other friends had built years back. Calling the cabin “Billy” somehow made the place more personal, even lifelike. And in a way, to Ace and his friends, Billy was alive; it was a place to think, to recharge one’s batteries.

  There was always the chance that some idiot had burned down Billy earlier in the year. Why people did that kind of stupid shit in the wild woods of Vermont made no sense, but then again, most of the world did not make much sense to Ace Archer. If the cabin’s not there, at least the walk down should be easier than going up… but shit, it’s gonna be a rush. I only have about two hours of light left.

  Ace rested for a moment, catching his breath. Great fuckin’ time for a storm. He relaxed, the snow slowed, and the wind ceased. It was as if the winter forest understood his burning desire to reach Billy. Ace smiled, started to walk uphill, and laughed. Fuckin’ blizzard bitch! You ain’t stopping me!

  His renewed confidence made him hike a little faster, and he soon slipped. He fell, and fell hard. With the weight of the seventy-five-pound backpack, he dropped face-first like a lead sinker. Down he went, a good six feet into a snowy hole before he hit something hard at the bottom. He cursed aloud, feeling like a dart snugly stuck into the packed snow. With no one for at least fifteen miles, and the sound muffled, he cursed only to himself in the snowpack.

  Ace calmed down and rested for a few seconds in the quiet snow hole, his body upside down. But he knew that if he rested too long, he would die of asphyxiation, so he slowly removed the heavy backpack and his tennis racket-sized snowshoes. The snowshoes would assist with his crawling out of the snow hole. He then twisted his body in the snow and got upright in the hole, careful to pull up the all-important snowshoes for traction.

  Ace peeked out of the snowy foxhole. I gotta get out of this mess. I’ll use the snowshoes to pull myself out. It’ll be a struggle, but that’s life, he thought. Man will never appreciate anything without the struggle.

  His goal was Billy, where he would build a nice fire in the Franklin stove and cozy up by himself with a good retro book and a strong drink. There were plenty of retro Steven King and Kurt Vonnegut paper novels on the dusty cabin’s makeshift wooden plank library. Stuff to keep you laughing silly, or scared out of your wits for days.

  Maybe both.

  Nothing like holding an actual, physical book and re-reading The Shining or The Sirens of Titan in a desolate mountain cabin—especially when you’re snowed in. And a drink? Could use a strong one now. But the drinks were causing problems. Two six packs of Heineken weighed too damned much.

  Ace shoved his heavy, beer-laden pack out of the snowy hole. Then, clutching a snowshoe, he carefully lifted his body out of the hole and up onto the fresh surface snow pack. Very carefully, he strapped the snowshoes back on his feet and opene
d his backpack. The beer’s gotta go, along with anything else that’s not essential. Ace tossed two six-packs of canned Heineken beers into the snow, followed by a gallon jug of St. Johnsbury orange juice.

  He withdrew a bottle of Jack Daniels single barrel and inspected it like a trophy. It was a present from his good Russian friend, Ivan, who knew Ace’s taste in liquor. You’re worth the risk, Uncle Jack. He smiled before tucking the bottle back into his now much lighter backpack. Ace strapped on the backpack, adjusted his goggles, and got ready to march ahead, this time more carefully.

  Ace looked at his VectorX altimeter watch. The screen had a crack through the middle but was still readable. Probably hit a rock at the bottom of the snow hole. He’d killed twenty minutes on the mishap. He tapped his compass; it spun in circles and stopped. The liquid display froze and stuck pointing east. Altitude sensor says I’m at three thousand feet—no… three thousand two hundred feet … shit. I may have broken the damned thing.

  Ace resumed his trek up the mountain, knowing he needed to get up another eight hundred feet or so. Was the path correct? Shit! Things never looked the same in a snowstorm. A wrong turn or direction, and voila—you would be off the path, and you might end up deep in the Vermont forest, trekking in the wrong direction. Even one directional screw-up could reduce his chance of getting back safely to the old 4WD waiting at the base of the mountain. Just like life. One fuckin’ wrong move and you’ll end up dead. Ace trudged ahead another hour before he finally saw a house-sized, hill-like object sticking out of the snow.

  Was it Billy?

  Ace’s heart picked up the pace. Yes! Finally, it was the snow-covered cabin. Billy was still there! As Ace got closer, he saw that the smokestack had collapsed under the weight of a mound of snow. It would need to be cut, or at least broken off, so that the Franklin stove’s smoke could escape the cabin.

  Ace went into the Billy’s small, makeshift tool shed and found a hacksaw. He used an old, broken ladder to climb up to the roof and brushed off the snow, exposing the bent exhaust pipe. He cut it below the bend so that smoke would flow freely. It took fifteen minutes of sweaty work, but once done, Ace knew he would have a warm cabin for the night.

  Satisfied, he inspected the winter wonderland, laughing like a twelve-year-old on a snow day. He looked down at eight feet of snow piled up in a drift. Ace let go of the pipe and slid across the roof, laughing all the way down, falling off and into the soft, fluffy drift. Still chuckling, he pulled himself to his feet and went inside.

  He found wood stored from the summer, so he fired up the stove until the thousand-square-foot cabin was good and warm, even a little hot. As it got dark, he switched on the battery-powered lights. Outside, howling wind wafted snow across the large picture window. Although the window stood five feet above ground, snowdrifts reached up to about the center. The drift actually helped protect the cabin from the icy cold February night.

  Ace settled onto the couch, sipping on a Jack Daniels mixed with melting snow. He turned on a classic Depeche Mode tune. It was one of his favorites, “Strange Love.” A song about pain—and Ace knew all about that. He sipped his Jack Daniels on snow, cooling his brain as he listened to the song.

  Finally, he pulled the e-papers from his pocket. In the dim, battery-operated light, he examined them with care. Written on the top of one was the triangular logo of Earth Command. To read the confidential notes required a thumbprint and a password. Ace pressed his thumb and typed the password on the security login section of the e-letter. A document appeared, informing him that he’d passed (with one of the highest scores) his test to join a top-secret team called the “Big Guns.”

  Ace read it and smiled. He knew earlier that they wanted him for some special missions, the kind that might determine whether the human race survived. Ace had been told during training that a dark force was coming. Mankind had pissed off some powerful aliens, and a storm was on its way.

  Was the human race really facing extinction from an alien race? Were there really secrets so dark that the governments could not tell the world? Or was that idea just some recruitment marketing bullshit?

  At the Quantico, Virginia training facility, he knew he passed when they told him they were counting on special people like him—desperately counting. Ace smiled again as he remembered, but then frowned.

  He pulled a pic-card from his shirt pocket and tapped on the first image. It showed his recently deceased mother. She smiled as she held her Yorkshire dog, Buddy.

  “Sorry, Mom,” Ace said, holding back a tear. She had begged him to get married and settle down, but she also knew that Ace had adventure in his blood. She’ll forgive me for what I did, he prayed quietly. I’m sorry that I didn’t help you when I could have, Mom. But it was too late. She was gone forever, and so were Ace’s chances of having a normal life.

  He sipped his drink and peered pensively out from the safety of the warm, desolate cabin, inspecting the cold forest through the double-pane window. The white snow spun furiously across the cold mountain landscape like some angry Tasmanian devil playing in the wild woods of Vermont. Crystallized, banged-up snowflakes sprayed around in little tornados, splashing angrily against the black trees and the oak wood cabin. Inside the cozy shelter, Ace felt safe and warm.

  His mother had reminded him many times that he was the only remaining Archer, and that he should settle down. However, Ace never did, choosing a life that others only dreamed of—or feared.

  He sipped his drink and looked at a quote next to an old, dusty picture of his late father, Joe Archer, which hung on a cabin wall. Joe stood next to President Branson, the last US President before the Second Civil War. Joe had fought in the Cyber Black Ops War years back and disappeared in battle. Ace was only twelve at the time, and the loss toughened the young Archer. It taught him to trust no one. The quote under his father’s Presidential Medal of Honor said it all: “One man can save the world; he just needs the courage.”

  Ace knew what his answer to Earth Command and the Big Guns was. That would be his new family. He would sign up as soon as the snowstorm ended. In a way, Ace knew, his whole life had been one big storm.

  Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.

  —Thomas Jefferson

  1

  _________

  Hakai 破壊

  Eight years later…. on the USS Aurora, somewhere in space, far, far away from Earth.

  “Ace, I’m fuckin’ tellin’ ya, I don’t think you should take on that damn robot. That rich whiz kid’s got it programmed for some kind of ultimate fighting.” Ace’s friend, Cruz, who was a robot weapons specialist, looked over at the refrigerator-sized M10 robot, which was wielding a lead ball on a chain and had some other, strapped-on contraptions.

  Cruz took a drag on a Cuban cigar like it was a cigarette and frowned. “It’s never lost a fight against a human. Plus, it’s coated with one inch rubberized steel, so there’s no way you’ll break it down with your hands. That thing’s like six hundred pounds … so you don’t want it falling on you, either. It almost killed the Gunnery Sergeant last week. The captain will have all our asses if you get hurt … I don’t know what he’ll do to us if you get killed.”

  “I can handle it,” Ace replied, ignoring Cruz’s concerns, standing up in the oversized ring. He snatched up a hammer and an electric saw, his weapons for the match, and eyed up his opponent, Krill. It was an old, warrior-class robot that had been used in the early raids on the Planet Kobel to clean up some barbaric humanoids who did not exactly favor colonization by Earth Command. But Hiro, the boy genius in charge of the ship’s alien communication systems, had rebuilt Krill into a modern, fighting monster. Even if you shot at the thing, bullets would bounce off or be absorbed by the plasteel shell.

  To most mortals, the M10 nicknamed “Krill” would seem indestructible. But Ace didn’t see things the same way as mere mortals, who were filled with confabulations or illusions about life. H
e wasn’t confined within those mental restrictions. He had special ideas.

  He knew he would die someday, and when that day came, he really believed he would die well. The belief made him truly powerful, even God-like. He knew life was all we had or ever would have. Ace had given up believing in an afterlife, so he knew he had to fix the game in this life of struggles and battles, blood and guts—but most importantly, he believed in living each day for some crazy fun.

  Ace flexed his firm, well-developed muscles. For a human, they were quite impressive. He had a tattoo shaped liked the Superman logo on his left arm, but instead of “Superman,” the words “Big Guns” were needled into his skin. His right arm bore two strange, Chinese characters pronounced “hakai,” a tattoo he’d gotten during a tour in Japan. In English, the characters meant “destruction” or “destroyer.” Ace didn’t remember the exact meaning because he had been having fun, getting drunk with friends when he visited the tattoo parlor in Yokosuka. But he did like the design after he sobered up and was able to see it in a mirror.

  Ace held his Thor-like hammer in one hand and the battery-operated, circular saw blade in the other. He inspected Krill, a robot who fought using strategies from an advanced artificial intelligence fighting chip. He knew Hiro could also use a manual over-ride to get into some of the action if he wanted to.

  The robot raised his metallic arms and crouched into a wrestling position. He twisted and turned, his body squeaking and hydraulics hissing, doing a self-diagnostic check on all mechanical systems. The machine was seven feet tall and strong as a jackhammer, a lethal mech unit.

  A short, pudgy referee at the center of the ring waved Krill and Ace in from their corners. About seventy-five people from the Earth Command Army and Fleet stood outside the ring, drinking, smoking, and laughing. A bald, drunk Russian yelled out in a thick accent, “I got me whole month’s credits on za Ace man! Kill za fuckin’ robot!”