The Ten Thousand: Portal Wars II Read online

  “What you have just seen is the truth. The images you have been shown before are fabrications, lies designed to get you to fight. Earth’s government is the true evil, one that must be destroyed so our friends and families – all those we left behind forever – can at last know the taste of freedom.” There was strength in Taylor’s voice, and conviction. But there was a hint of desperation too. Not because he couldn’t destroy those who ignored his entreaties. Just the opposite. He knew he could annihilate the soldiers of Alantris – and if they refused to yield he would do just that. More innocent blood on his hands.

  “Now, soldiers of Alantris. You have a choice. Drop your weapons and join us. You will not be harmed if you do. You have my word.” He paused, and when he continued his voice was dark and foreboding. “If you remain in your lines…if you stand with the evil of UNGov, we will destroy you utterly. For this battle is for the future of mankind, and there is no place for mercy or weakness with those who fight to keep mankind in chains.”

  He cut the transmission and turned slowly to face Black. “OK, Blackie. Maybe that will reach a few.”

  Black nodded. “I’m sure it will, Jake. You’re becoming quite eloquent.”

  Taylor suppressed a laugh. Words like ‘eloquent’ never sounded quite right in the thick urban accent Black had never been able to shake.

  Black knew Taylor better than anyone. He understood his friend’s need to try again, to do all he could to save some of those men. But he knew just as well that Jake Taylor would never allow pity or guilt to stand in the way of the crusade. He would see every conscript on Alantris dead on the bloodsoaked field if that is what victory required.

  Taylor turned and walked back toward his tent. “Give them 20 minutes, Blackie.” His voice was thick with sadness and fatigue. “Then launch the attack.”

  * * * * *

  The field in front of the line was covered with bodies, but Samuels’ troops kept firing, raking the formations caught out on the flat, open ground. “Pour it into ‘em, boys.” He knew what he was supposed to say. His voice was calm, just what his men expected from their commander. But inside, he wanted to drop to his knees and wretch his guts up.

  Bear Samuels had been a gentle giant from Alabama when he first arrived on Erastus, and he’d somehow managed to retain a remnant of that good-natured innocence, even after all the years of brutal combat. He’d become a good fighter and a strong leader, at least in battle against the Machines. UNGov’s propaganda had turned the Tegeri’s manufactured soldiers into pure manifestations of evil, and for years Samuels and his comrades had believed it all. It was easy to slaughter an enemy you thought of as soulless murderers, but killing other human beings didn’t sit well with him. The men he’d fought in the last battle on Erastus were government thugs, bullies and institutionalized killers, at least. He imagined all the people they’d executed or dragged away to the reeducation centers as he led his men into battle against them. It helped him get through the fight, to deal with the guilt of gunning them down.

  The soldiers his people were massacring now were different. They were ordinary men, just like he had been, like all his fellow soldiers on Erastus. The fighters out in that plain, dying in bunches under the withering enfilade fire, were conscripts, ripped from their homes and families just as he had been. They’d been kids, barely adults, when they were taken from all they’d known and sent far from home to fight a brutal war, never to return. Nothing he could tell himself made him feel better about what he knew he had to do. Nothing but his faith in Jake Taylor.

  Taylor had taken him aside one night after the battle against the UN forces on Erastus. The two of them killed a bottle of Bourbon and talked all night. Samuels never knew where Taylor found the whiskey, but the things his commander and friend told him that night would stay with him as long as he lived.

  He would draw his strength from that conversation, and he would do whatever had to be done, no matter how upsetting he found it to be. Because if he didn’t, what had happened to him, to Taylor and all their comrades – even to the men his troopers were slaughtering now – would never end. Unless UNGov was destroyed, generation after generation of young conscripts would be fed into the machine. The war wasn’t about holding back a bloodthirsty enemy; it wasn’t even about conquering the Tegeri. It existed for one purpose, as a source of propaganda to preserve UNGov’s dominance over a humanity too frightened to stand up for its own rights.

  Taylor was right, Samuels thought as he watched the murderous fire from his autocannons tear apart the hapless enemy formations, now little more than terrified mobs, as they tried to flee. There was no choice, no other way. He had to do this; his men had to do it. No matter how they felt about it.

  No more than a third of the enemy had made it past the flanking forces, and their formations were shattered. They were heading back the way they’d advanced, a tumultuous, panicked mob, fleeing wildly.

  Samuels watched them sadly. Yes, he thought, head back toward your bases. Right into Hank Daniels’ waiting line. Daniels, Samuel knew, had no pity at all for them.

  * * * * *

  “Get those guns set up and ready to fire.” Hank Daniels stood a few meters behind his firing line, barking out orders to his sweating troops. “Now!” His force had gone the farthest, and they were spread out in a long formation along the enemy’s rear, completing Taylor’s envelopment.

  The battle was already underway. Colonel Black had hit the enemy frontally, driving into them with such ferocity they broke and ran almost immediately – right past the two flanking forces Taylor had positioned along their route. He tried to imagine the horrendous losses Bear and Frantic were inflicting on the panicked soldiers as they fled past their prepared flanking positions.

  The Alantrian army was experienced from over a decade’s continuous combat, but they’d never encountered anything like Taylor and his veterans before. Supersoldiers, stone cold killers forged in the furnace of Gehenna, no warriors who existed could stand against them, not without staggering numerical superiority.

  Daniels knew what was happening, even though he couldn’t see it. The Alantrian lines, what was left of them, were buckling. Their formations were melting away under the sustained fire of Taylor’s perfectly placed flanking forces. By the time they reached his position, they would be a routing, panic-stricken mob seeking only to escape. That’s were Daniels’ people came in. His troops were stretched out all along the enemy’s rear – now the direction in which they were running – waiting. Taylor’s orders were brutally clear. Allow no one to escape. He was to accept any surrenders he could without endangering his command, but not a single enemy soldier was to get off the field. Not one.

  Daniels treated Taylor’s orders like they were commandments from heaven. Spider Daniels had served under Jake Taylor for all the years he’d spent fighting on the brutal battlefields of Erastus. His devotion to his friend was total, verging on fanatical. Daniels was a true believer, his mind and soul given without reservation to Taylor’s crusade.

  Daniels was the angriest and most resentful of Taylor’s top officers, the one most determined to destroy UNGov. Taylor, even, had mixed feelings, his convictions still tempered by doubts, despite the steel-hard image he portrayed to those around him. He hated UNGov, and he wanted to free mankind from a totalitarian nightmare. But he was uncomfortable with the cost his men – and the people of Earth - might be called upon to pay.

  Daniels was driven by pure rage. He wanted to tear down UNGov brick by brick, to strangle the life out of every member of the Secretariat personally. He didn’t share Taylor’s sympathy for the people of Earth, at least not completely. He hated the government, but he blamed the people too, for their gullibility, for their willingness to wear the shackles they’d forged for themselves. Daniels blamed the government for sending him and his comrades to Erastus, but he held the civilians accountable as well, for it was they who allowed UNGov to control them.

  “Enemy forces approaching, sir.” Captain Hollis
was Daniel’s aide and the battalion’s second-in-command. Hollis was a desert rat from the old American southwest. West Texas, Daniels’ NIS reminded him. The neural intelligence systems were enormously useful devices, and they’d saved the lives of many of his comrades – but Daniels sometimes missed being able to forget trivial facts.

  “Battalion…” - Daniels’ voice was firm, commanding - “…prepare to fire.” He looked out over the open plain, a stretch of ground utterly devoid of cover that Taylor had chosen carefully. There wasn’t a rock outcropping or small dip in the ground anywhere. Just one long ridge in the distance, a rise the enemy would crest before fleeing into the vast open space in front of Daniels’ position. It was the most perfect killing zone he’d ever seen. And it was almost time.

  He saw motion in the distance, along the top of the ridge – then, a few seconds later, a mob of panicked, fleeing soldiers rushing up and over the hilltop and into the wide open grasslands. They were running right for his position, fleeing directly into his carefully targeted fields of fire.

  He stared at them for an instant, watched as they approached, a wild disorganized mob. With his enhanced eyes, he saw them in the open long before they would spot his own dug in troopers. He felt a moment of pity, but it was fleeting. Taylor had offered them not one, but two chances to yield. Most of them had spurned both. Now they would pay the price. He spoke calmly, almost coldly into the com.

  “Fire.”

  * * * * *

  Taylor stood next to a makeshift table, really just a piece of scrap metal sitting on two saw horses. He had been listening to the reports on the com, but he’d stopped hearing them after a while. They were all the same from every corner of the battlefield. A few of the enemy were able to surrender and were taken prisoner. The rest were dead.

  Taylor had planned the envelopment as a battle of annihilation. He knew what he had to do to win this war, the level of ruthlessness it would take to give his people even a small chance of fighting their way to Earth and overthrowing UNGov. But knowing something and living with it are two different things. Taylor the general – the crusader - had planned the battle he needed to serve his purpose. But the man had to deal with the consequences of what he’d done. UNGov had ripped these men from their homes and families and sent them to Alantria – and Taylor had killed them. He had killed them all.

  He imagined the troops of the army he’d just destroyed, most of whom lay dead across 25 square klicks of ravaged ground. There were veterans out there, soldiers like himself who had adapted and learned by hard experience, surviving battle after battle. He knew there were recruits too, the FNGs who’d stepped through the portal in the days and weeks prior to the battle. They were young kids, mostly, with no idea what was coming for them. They’d have been the first to die; they would have stumbled cluelessly into his soldiers’ fields of fire or crowded together in terrified masses, presenting unmissable targets to his gunners. The veterans would have held out longer, at least a little. But it didn’t matter. They were all helpless newbs against Taylor’s hell-hardened cyborgs.

  “How many?” He was still looking out across the field, an odd expression on his face.

  Black stood behind him. He paused for a few seconds, considering playing dumb. But that would serve no one. He knew what Taylor wanted to know – and Jake was well aware that he did. Game playing would serve no purpose. “About 1,100 successfully surrendered, Jake.”

  Taylor was silent for half a minute, still staring out at the clouds of smoke drifting over the field. “So we killed 20,000 men today.” His voice was deadpan, without emotion. Successfully surrendered – the words stuck in his mind. How many, he wondered, tried to give up toward the end? How many did his soldiers shoot down in the confusion as they were trying to yield? Perhaps, he thought, he was better off not knowing. It served no purpose to dwell on such things.

  He stood motionless, watching the orange sun setting slowly over the field. And this is just the beginning, he thought…we have so far to go. He sighed softly. So many more to kill.

  Chapter 2

  The Final Report of General Zacharias Fox:

  We have been defeated on all fronts, and our inner defensive line is crumbling. This enemy is like nothing we have faced before. Our forces have been unable to stop them in any engagement. They move with great speed, and their endurance is astonishing. My forces have been unable to meet them effectively on equal terms, or even with a numerical advantage of two or three to one.

  I estimate that approximately 20% of my effectives have deserted or surrendered, and the units remaining under my command are at or below half strength. The enemy is rapidly approaching, and I don’t know how long we can hold out without immediate assistance. I am urgently requesting reinforcements before it is too late to save…

  Transmission terminated.

  “The news from the Portal worlds continues to be uniformly disastrous. It would seem that we can now add Pacifica to the list of fallen planets.”

  Raul Esteban leaned back in his plush leather chair, laying the glowing tablet and its disturbing report on the table as he stared thoughtfully at the snowy peak of Mt. Blanc in the distance. The top half of the mountain was shrouded with dark clouds. There was a storm heading toward Geneva, and Weather Division was predicting a bad one. Days of snow and sub-freezing temperatures. Esteban felt a touch of irony. There was another storm also, one currently lightyears away, but it too was approaching. And it was looking like a bad one as well. Far worse than anything he’d seen coming when Jake Taylor and his troops first rebelled on Erastus.

  “I daresay we are witnessing the effectiveness of Secretary Keita’s Supersoldier program, though in a manner we did not anticipate.” Esteban’s voice was hard to read, but that didn’t stop everyone in the room from trying. They were edgy, nervous. The Secretary General was not a patient man, nor was he tolerant of failure. The other members of the Secretariat plotted and schemed, making their plans for the day when Esteban was gone…but there wasn’t one of them with the strength or courage to go up against UNGov’s unquestioned leader. “Taylor has managed to turn a considerable number of the soldiers on Alantris, Mariana…and now Pacifica, boosting his strength considerably.” He paused, still staring out across the Swiss countryside a kilometer below. “But it is the altered troops, the Supersoldiers, who are in every way the heart of his force.” Another pause, shorter than the last. “Ten thousand men. And they are beginning to threaten everything.”

  Esteban was the most powerful man on Earth and the closest thing mankind had to an absolute ruler. He’d been one of the prime movers in the great fraud that induced Earth’s nations to surrender their sovereignty, to give up their freedoms and independence in exchange for protection from a bloodthirsty alien enemy…a danger, it turned out, didn’t actually exist. Esteban and his co-conspirators sent their thugs to murder colonists, and they framed the Tegeri for the crime. In the process, they instigated four decades of interstellar war, all in a ruthless bid for power. A very successful one. They had gained complete control over all mankind and imposed their own world order, almost bloodlessly – except for several generations of soldiers who died in the sands of distant worlds, fighting an unjust and unnecessary war. Esteban had always believed the greatest weapon for controlling people was exploiting their fears, and he and his cohorts had proven it decisively.

  But political power had its limits, and mortality was the greatest. When the cancer that was steadily destroying his brain finally killed him, the last of the men responsible for the greatest lie in history would be dead of natural causes, having reworked human society and reigned for 40 years as a ruling elite. Esteban and his cohorts had tasted more power than anyone since man had first gathered together to build crude villages and begin civilization’s ascent. But in a few months, half a year at most, the last of them would be dead.

  Earth had known many dictators and absolute rulers, but not a lot of them had managed to die peacefully in bed. Esteban drew satisfacti
on that not one of the members of the original cabal had been assassinated or deposed. They had seized control of mankind, and the miserable sheep inhabiting the world’s former nations largely obeyed their masters with almost no serious instances of rebellion. Until now.

  He inhaled deeply, turning his eyes back toward the men seated around the table. The Secretariat of the United Nations, the supreme governing body of a united Earth. The first Secretariat had consisted entirely of his co-conspirators, but now Esteban was the last of the old guard. Soon, he knew, he would be gone as well, and the grand plan for world government would finally pass entirely to the next generation of chosen elites. He and his peers had made their bid for power and succeeded. He wondered if there was anyone else at the table with the same drive and ability as the men who’d forged UNGov’s supremacy. He and his original comrades had chosen all these men, promoted them through the bureaucracy, and carefully selected those few who would ascend to the ultimate height of power…the Secretariat itself. Some had been favorites, sycophants of the most powerful of his peers, but others had clawed their way to the top on the basis of ability and ruthlessness.

  He had once thought a few of them might be worthy, but now he was questioning that assessment. They’d proven unable to deal with Taylor’s Rebellion, as it had come to be called in the closed confines of the Secretariat. And they still seemed far more interested in their internal power struggles than addressing the matter forcefully. He understood. Anyone who took the lead on solving a problem also risked taking much of the blame for failure. Esteban saw it throughout the layers of the bureaucracy he and his cohorts had built. They had been men of action, unafraid to stake their claim to power and do whatever was necessary to make it reality. But those who had come after were ruled more by caution than courage. They had been given power; they hadn’t seized it. And they lacked the dynamism of their predecessors.