Occupied Earth Read online

  The ship became sun-bright. Benton rolled on his side, brought his knees up, and covered his head. A huge weight crashed down on him as the world came apart.

  It seemed to go on for days. It was a giant’s baby rattle with him inside. His ears popped, and then ached, as the pressure wave tried to scrape him from the rooftop.

  Finally, the brightness faded, the noise subsided, and things seemed to settle. Benton tried to sit up, but couldn’t manage it. He realized that Chobuc-re was laying on top of him, also trying to roll into a more upright position. Benton got his hands on the sergeant’s back, and pushed. Chobuc-re teetered into a kneeling position and drew his machine pistol.

  One of the sergeant’s arms was distorted in a way that could only mean broken bones. He had lost his spectacles and was squinting through barely slit eyes. He seeped blood from dozens of cuts, nicks, and abrasions. His right cheek was beginning to swell from the blow that had taken his eyewear. The pistol was level as he twisted this way and that trying to scan in all directions at once.

  Benton sat up.

  Chobuc-re immediately started pushing him back down, “Sir, stay low.”

  “Sergeant,” Benton said, “any snipers that were out there are hamburger. Relax. There’s nothing to shoot.”

  “Yes, sir.” The sergeant continued his squinty-eyed back and forth sweep.

  Benton reached up to grab the door frame of the transport, and realized that the door was missing. He looked around for the first time. Devastation. Beyond doubt, his very large bodyguard had just saved his life. Again. If he had been exposed to the beating Chobuc-re had just endured it was unlikely he’d still be alive.

  He dragged himself up into the transport and reached across to the convenience compartment for his sunglasses. He turned back.

  “Sergeant. Face me.”

  “Sir.”

  “Chobuc-re, this is a direct order,” he placed the sunglasses on the Sergeant’s face, “you will wear these until proper eyewear can be obtained.”

  “But ...”

  “An order, Sergeant. I know these aren’t as good as you need, but they’re better than you have. Wear them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Benton stood and looked around. Arthur? Gone. Not escaped ... just gone. He tried to locate the other six members of his guard. Two were clearly dead. Two more, unsteady, but working to extricate the fifth who was trapped in debris. The sixth was wherever Arthur had gone.

  Benton felt strange. Exhilarated. He felt like he was thinking more clearly than he had for a long time. He ordered Chobuc to stay seated where he was until the others could administer first aid, and walked over to the wall Arthur had been on. He looked toward the Reserved Zone.

  The Boffins had been off on the power of their device by several orders of magnitude. This hadn’t crippled one ship; it had nearly obliterated the entire spaceport. Other ships, large and small, were scattered around like beer cans after a frat party. All the buildings in the Reserved Zone were gone, burning, or fatally wounded. Windows would be shattered all over the Vancouver area.

  It was a blessing the explosion had happened at the heart of the Reserved Zone. The very nature of the Zone worked in their favor. A huge percentage of the casualties would be Mahk-Ra, not human.

  Benton sighed. Arkum could not possibly have gotten clear of all that destruction. “Goodbye my friend,” he said, “I’ll miss you.”

  Through the floating dust and smoke, he tried to locate the building that had carried his penthouse. The only candidate that seemed in the right position was several stories too short, and quite ragged.

  Tamar-ra was a self-important, over-inflated, pain in the ass, but he had one virtue. He was addicted to punctuality. Benton glanced at the time and smiled an almost natural smile. Old Tamar had probably had time to finish one perfectly made drink and share a few anecdotes about Benton’s shortcomings with Leann before the world ended.

  Goodbye Leann. Goodbye Penthouse. Not that he would miss either very much. Leann had become a liability, and as for the other; he just didn’t care that much. Time for a new start.

  Ranny, and her “mother” would be the beginning of that.

  His brief talk with Arthur had shown him that he was too isolated. He needed someone to talk with. Someone with the intellectual capacity to keep up, and who knew the truth about him. That would be Ranny. While he didn’t underrate his late brother’s willingness to lie through his teeth anytime it suited his goals, he did trust Arthur’s evaluation of Ranny’s capacities. As for Marilyn the Mother, well, she had been hand-picked to attract his attention; she would probably prove quite interesting in her own right.

  He heard the sound of emergency vehicles in the distance.

  For now, as the ranking Talon Officer on Earth in the absence of the lately departed Tamar, he had to consider the coming investigation. With Tamar-ra missing, and he certainly was that, Benton might be able to stretch the investigation out for a couple of weeks before a new Mahk-Ra Commander took over.

  The question would be, “Is Tamar-ra dead? Or, perhaps in the confusion, had he been kidnapped by some opportunistic faction of the Red Spear?”

  Who could tell? All avenues must be thoroughly explored. He chuckled.

  Benton was quite certain there would be no evidence whatsoever of terrorist involvement in the explosion. He could be very thorough. A few people might have to die under torture, a few unfortunate overdoses of truth drugs, some people shot while trying to escape. These were details. He could handle them, now. Arthur had helped him there, too.

  The investigation would show that the explosion could only have been a horrendous malfunction. Solely down to some Mahk-Ra engineering failure. There was no need to repeat the Iranian lesson. No need to punish humans.

  They would get away with this clean.

  They couldn’t afford to use the weapon again soon, it was too hard to deploy, and too easy to counter, but it was in the arsenal. The Boffins knew it worked. In time they could improve on the delivery system. We would use it again. Not soon, but someday. Someday.

  He couldn’t wait to talk with Ranny about the possibilities. They could wait it out together--the three of them; the monster, the child, and the “mother”. This felt like the first big step on the road to a free Earth.

  He smiled.

  Time would tell. It always did.

  DETECTIVE ERIC Blocker knew the call was trouble when it came in. The whole town knew the police were on high alert because Mahk-Ra governor Aquinas-ra would be in for a visit tomorrow, yet someone had committed a murder. When the first officers on the scene wouldn’t give any details over the radio, Blocker knew they were in some deep shit. If the victim was a human, the radio would have been flooded with information. When a Mahk-Ra was murdered, though, the first responders, especially the humans, clammed up. Killing a person was tantamount to a severe misdemeanor, but murdering a Mahk-Ra was serious shit and it rarely occurred.

  The DPD detective, his dark hair a bristly cap, his green eyes the color of the Mississippi River on a good day, rode shotgun while his Mahk-Ra partner drove. The unmarked car’s emergency lights were on, siren blaring, as they sped toward the crime scene, LeClaire Park. It was a green space squished in between downtown and the Mississippi.

  Davenport, Iowa might be the backwater of all backwaters, but it did have the distinction of being the place where the big river flowed west instead of its usual south. Even the invaders hadn’t been able to change that.

  SteVannas-ra, Blocker’s partner, who seemed to grudgingly tolerate the nickname of Steve that the Earther had hung on him, sawed the wheel to avoid a car that felt no need to get out of their way. Because of the Mahk-Ra’s sensitivity to light, Steve wore sunglasses anytime he was outside.

  Steve stood better than a foot taller than Blocker’s six-one, and had an easy fifty pounds on the Earther’s two-ten. Steve was also fastidious in his personal habits, at least compared to Blocker. His uniform was always clean, like he had
just stepped out of a Mahk-Ra recruiting poster. Blocker usually looked like he’d slept in his clothes. At least Earther detectives didn’t have to wear uniforms, one of the old-time traditions left in place by the Mahk-Ra to make the transition seem smoother.

  “Who the hell commits a murder when the governor is coming to town?” Blocker asked.

  His attention still on his driving, Steve said, “Many Earthers do not have your mental acuity.”

  Blocker shot him a look, but the Mahk-Ra’s face was passive as he wove in and out of traffic. The duo had been partners for the better part of two years, worked dozens of cases together, and Blocker still had trouble telling if Steve was being serious or simply screwing with him.

  “Still,” Blocker said, ignoring his partner’s possible sarcasm, “pretty ballsy to kill somebody when we’re all on edge and out in force already.”

  “Seems like just the sort of thing the Red Spear would do. What would you call it in your sports metaphors?”

  “A grandstand play,” Blocker said.

  “Yes,” Steve said. “A grandstand play, does that not seem to be the obvious scenario to you?”

  Blocker shrugged. “I thought we might let the evidence lead us to the killer.”

  “Of course, but the mathematical probability that the killer is a Red Spear member is in at least the eighty-seventh percentile, maybe even higher.”

  The Mahk-Ra liked to think they had higher intellectual gifts than the Earthers, but the truth was when they started spouting numbers like that, they really weren’t any more accurate than the average TV weatherman, Blocker reflected. While all the aliens did that to some extent, a way of showing their superiority, Steve had risen statistical hyperbole to an absolute art form.

  “That means there’s a thirteen percent chance it wasn’t Red Spear,” Blocker noted.

  “Not particularly good odds,” Steve said, pulling the car to a stop in a parking lot just on the town side of the green space that abutted the river.

  Blocker had grown up in this once thriving community. Before the invasion, there had been a third of a million people in the metro area that covered both sides of the river. Now there wasn’t even half that.

  He also had gotten the hell out of here at his first opportunity, but that, too, was before the invasion. He had migrated to Seattle, and gotten accepted to the police academy there. He hadn’t been on the street six months when the Mahk-Ra invaded. Something inside him, sense of duty, loyalty to family, his concern for his ex-girlfriend, Hannah Perez, something had drawn him back here right after the invasion.

  Being penniless in a war-torn nation, it had taken him a while to work his way back from halfway across the country. By the time he got home, the fighting was pretty much over. Several friends from his youth, including Hannah, had joined the Red Spear and were actively working for the resistance. When it came time for Blocker to make that decision, his parents had been the ones to persuade him to rejoin the police department. The decision to turn his back on his friends had been a difficult one, but, in the end, he knew he had done the right thing.

  She had made it clear that she wasn’t interested in taking him back even before he told her about joining the police, but for him that didn’t matter. You don’t get to pick who you fall in love with and he loved Hannah. Being away from her had made that even more clear for him, even if the fire had faded for her.

  The last thing she said to him, eyes brimming with tears, had been a single venomous word, “Traitor.”

  Now, they were on opposite sides of the law. Any hope he had of returning to a life that included Hannah and his other friends was gone. Instead, he found himself working with those who wanted to stop them.

  Even though Steve walked at a slower rate than his fellow Mahk-Ras, Blocker still found himself quickening his pace to keep up as they strode toward the crime scene.

  Ahead of them, Blocker could see crime scene tape marking off a big rectangle. Cops, both human and Mahk-Ra, manned the perimeter to keep the gawkers and press back. Further inside, drones little bigger than footballs, alternately hovered or sped around to get a different perspective as they photographed and video-recorded the crime scene. Blocker was surprised to see not one body, but three, each of them covered with a tarp. Each tarp was big, bigger than one needed for a human. The victims were Mahk-Ra, all of them. Three dead aliens. Blocker’s gut turned to ice. This was the sort of thing that got entire towns exterminated as payback.

  One of the drones turned from the body it hovered above, and on its underside a laser beam shot out toward the top of the Davenport Bank building three blocks away.

  Blocker and Steve paused to watch the drone take off overhead, following the laser to the bank.

  “Sniper,” Blocker said. “A sniper good enough to take out three Mahk-Ra before they could take cover.”

  “If the rest of my existence is spent on this rock, I will not understand how that is an honorable way to deal with an opponent,” Steve said.

  Blocker shrugged. He was not going to get drug into an argument about the ethics of combat with one of the aliens that had not only defeated his species and now ran the planet, but had wiped Iran completely off the map for having the temerity to fight back. “Maybe we should go see what we’ve got first.”

  Steve took the hint and led the way forward. While the humans gave the Mahk-Ra detective a wide berth, the crowd all seemed intent on filling in to bar Blocker. He had to shuffle between onlookers who grudgingly moved aside to let him through.

  One guy muttered, “Mock lover,” as Blocker passed.

  Another voice, one the detective couldn’t identify, said, “Traitor.”

  Swallowing his anger, Blocker just kept pushing through the crowd.

  At the tape, a uniformed human, Marty Jensen, raised the yellow and black band for them to go under. Steve practically had to squat to make it and when he stood straight, he glared at Jensen.

  Blocker reached up and clapped his partner lightly on the shoulder. “It’s not an affront, Steve, he’s short.”

  The Mahk-Ra detective seemed unmoved by that fact.

  Blowing out a long breath, Blocker said, “Okay, you caught us, Jensen grew up short so he couldn’t raise the tape any higher. It was a plan by his parents just to fuck with you.”

  In spite of himself, Steve managed half a smile. “You are vulgar, even by the meager standards of Earthers.”

  Blocker shrugged. “Yeah, I am.”

  “You also make a coherent point.”

  “Ya think?”

  Still having trouble adjusting to the sarcasm of Earthers, Steve simply said, “Frequently.”

  They approached the nearest Mahk-Ra body. His queasiness grew. Aquinas-ra was not exactly a benevolent governor, if they didn’t catch the sniper fast enough, he just might exact a more widespread “justice” than simply executing the killer and all of his or her family. He had wiped out smaller settlements for the murder of a single Mahk-Ra. Some rulers kept order with a steel fist, Aquinas-ra favored more of a scorched earth authority.

  When they got to the corpse, Colonel Stanis-ra was waiting for them, and even with the obligatory sunglasses, Blocker had no problem reading the colonel’s anger in his face. He knelt next to the victim, a hand on the corner of the sheet. Looking up at them, his voice icy, he said, “I want the killer delivered to me in the next twenty-four hours, no excuses.”

  The colonel was normally a prick, but this seemed excessive even for him. In the military set-up of the Mahk-Ra, he was like the mayor, police chief, and officer in charge of Mahk-Ra forces in the area all rolled into one.

  “Who are the victims?” Blocker asked.

  Pulling the sheet back on this one, the colonel revealed the face of Aquinas-ra.

  “Shit,” Blocker said. “What the fuck is he even doing here? Are these his body guards?”

  Blowing out a foul breath that rose into Blocker’s face, the colonel said, “They never even got their weapons out of their holsters.”<
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  “But they weren’t due here until tomorrow,” Blocker said.

  “The governor and his team arrived last night. This morning he wanted to do a surprise inspection of the riverfront, just he and two guards, no commotion.”

  “Why the riverfront?” Blocker asked.

  “I informed the governor that we needed to beef up security here to keep Red Spear smugglers from using it to land supplies. He wanted to see for himself. The rebels killed him to protect their supply lines, I suppose. It will do them no good, we will squash them like the insects they are.”

  “How did they know he was here, though?”

  “Spies,” the colonel said. “That is for you and SteVannas to ferret out. The two of you need to deliver me the sniper or I will be forced to punish more than just the Red Spear. Now, get to work!”

  As he and his partner moved closer to the governor’s corpse, Blocker couldn’t help thinking that while killing the governor would be a coup for the Red Spear, it just might get the whole town wiped out if he and Steve couldn’t find the sniper within the colonel’s time limit.

  Kyla, the blonde bombshell who led the local Red Spear cell, was crafty and audacious, but she was smarter than to make a play like this. Like him, she had grown up here. She wouldn’t risk the whole town, not even to be rid of Aquinas-ra. If Red Spear cell members were behind this, it would have to be a splinter group. Someone who didn’t give a shit about the repercussions.

  Staring down at the dead governor, a good size hole in the Mahk-Ra’s forehead, Blocker thought about the past. The same Earth, but a different world. Summer days in his youth made up of playing baseball on green grass, the sun high in the sky. There were the easy smiles of his friends as they ran all afternoon chasing fly balls or stretching singles into doubles. Life had seemed so simple then. Now, everything was complicated. Every-fucking-thing. Blocker ran a hand over his face and blew out a long, exasperated breath.

  In the distance, at the bank building, he could see the crime scene drone flying around, taking photos. He hoped the little bastard found something because he had few avenues that looked anywhere near promising. There were no witnesses at this end who would have seen anything helpful. One or two might have seen the window or the muzzle flash, but the drone’s computer had already calculated all that and was taking photos of every square inch of the room the shot came from. The machine even had a mechanical arm that allowed it to collect small pieces of evidence if it found any.