Peace Army (10 page)

Unable to control events outside the ship, Titan refused to think about them further. Instead, he took in the chaos and damage on display around him. The battle that had been waged in the ship was evident. Blackened, pockmarked walls, tattered alien bodies, and liberal splashes of purple blood marked the corridors outside. Inside the command center, half a dozen alien bodies littered the floor. Much of the bright purple blood those bodies once held pooled at his feet and spread across the floor. The human boots that had so recently waded through the pools left scattered tracks throughout the corridors on their way to the escape carriers.

He would clean up the mess and get rid of the bodies right away. He wasn’t going to spend months in a ship with dried purple blood and decaying Minith soldiers scattered about.

Titan felt the first tremble as the ship’s engines powered up.

From side-to-side and floor-to-ceiling, the entire expanse of walls flickered as previously darkened screens flashed to life. Most of the screens on the left revealed dizzying bursts of alien writing and numbers. He assumed they provided information and data about the liftoff, but had no way to know. A few showed camera shots of internal corridors and rooms. The screens on the right wall, however, displayed live camera views of the outside of the ship. His eyes searched those urgently.

The initial tremble suddenly became a constant, low shudder as the ship’s internal systems entered a second stage of liftoff. Titan felt as if he were sitting in the head of a waking giant. The giant stretched and the low shudder grew into something much more powerful.

There
.

Titan sat straight up in the cushioned seat. His fingers dug deep grooves into the chair’s padded armrests. The entirety of his being was focused on a single, small screen near the upper right corner of the left wall.

He watched helplessly as Mouse tossed Grant roughly into a waiting carrier, then climbed in behind him. The carrier was off the ground and racing away from the alien ship before the door was fully closed.

The Minith engines stopped shuddering and began to roar instead. The first glimpse of flame was visible on several of the screens.

The carrier was racing away from the ship.

They might make it.

Within seconds, the screens on the right showed the same view. A growing furnace of boiling heat and rushing power.

Titan could no longer see the carrier. His only thought was,
I hope I kept my promise
.

He settled in for liftoff and wondered how long the trip to the Minith planet would really take. He had heard Grant and Mouse discussing “months,” but wasn’t sure if they were talking about the duration of the trip or something else entirely. Not that it mattered.

He settled back in the purple chair and—

—noticed a movement on one of the screens on the left wall.

He watched in wonder as a short, pudgy man staggered blindly along one of the ship’s corridors. The man struggled to keep his balance as the ship powered up fully and lifted from the ground.

Looks like I’m going to have a partner on this trip
.

Chapter 12

The pudgy man’s name was Gee Jones. And it wasn’t blindness that caused him to stagger along the corridor—he just wasn’t very coordinated. Never had been.

Gee was a casualty of the Minith’s first demand—a skilled engineer who could quickly learn new systems and technologies. As was often the case in those first days of the aliens’ dominance over Earth, the Leadership Council went out of their way to placate the slavers. The Urop’n was a youthful sensation of engineering—someone who many felt would lead humankind into the next phase of electronic, propulsion, and mechanical engineering. What Tane Rolan was to science, Gee Jones was to extensive engineering disciplines.

The twenty-eight-year-old engineer was turned over to the aliens without preamble or negotiation. It was the first of many seizures of Earth’s resources that would take place over a twelve-year period.

Gee knew what was happening with the ship as soon as the engines began their first warm-up. The Minith would not start the ship for any other reason—never had in the entire twelve years he had been a captive.

“Amazing,” was his only comment.

Gee was an anomaly among the human captives on the alien mothership. He was the only human allowed to keep his secondary eyelids. Unlike the interpreters, cooks, and general laborers, he needed his vision to perform his duties. As Gee had learned over the years, the Minith were very good fighters, thieves, and slavers, but their skills with higher technology systems were limited. As a result, they relied on his support for system maintenance and repair.

In his first year as a captive, Gee had worked closely with a Minith engineer named Tlak. Just as Gee was an engineering genius among humans, Tlak was an anomaly among the Minith. He knew a lot about electronics, mechanical engineering, and a host of other technical areas. Those were skills that Gee had never seen in any other Minith.

Tlak’s rare talents were highly valued among his race. As a result, he was reassigned after a year spent training his human apprentice. Gee never knew where Tlak went when he left Earth, but he always assumed the alien had been delivered to some other poor planet, where he was training some other poor soul.

Besides learning the ins and outs of the Minith mothership, the young engineer learned in that first year that not all Minith were the aggressive, single-minded ogres that many human beings believed them to be. Tlak, while not really a friend, had become a constant companion. They worked side-by-side in the bowels of the ship as Tlak trained the human on everything he would need to know to keep the mothership running.

Over that time, the alien transformed in Gee’s mind. He went from being a dreaded alien boss, whose every statement was a fear-inducing command, to a co-worker who had a family that he rarely saw. At the end of the year, Gee knew that Tlak wanted nothing more than to live in Peace with his wife and their family for the rest of his days.

Under normal circumstances, Gee would have been told of the ship’s departure. He would, in fact, have been responsible for ensuring that the liftoff went smoothly, and that all systems were fully prepared for the event. That the ship lifted off with no warning validated Gee’s suspicions that trouble was at hand.

The sound of explosions and yelling two hours earlier was the first indication that something strange was going on. As the ship’s human engineer, he had complete run of the vessel and, as a result, knew dozens of places to hide. The deepest recesses of the mothership had areas where no Minith would ever find him, unless he wanted to be found.

It was to one of those that he had scurried when the first sound of disturbance spread through the vessel.

Gee’s thoughts were interrupted as the lift burners shut down. They were only needed for takeoff and landing from what the Minith referred to as “undeveloped” planets. The roar and rumbling that had shaken the ship for the past ten minutes ceased abruptly. Gee waited and counted. One…two…three…

Right on cue, the space drives kicked in and a low, barely perceptible hum settled upon the mothership. Although it was Gee’s first experience with off-planet travel, he had been taught to expect the change as the vessel
transitioned from planet escape mode to interstellar travel mode.

“Amazing,” the young engineer whispered. His trepidation at leaving Earth was overshadowed by an understanding that he we about to embark on a trip that no other human had ever experienced. The possibility for which he had prepared himself over the last twelve years was becoming a reality.

The engineer pushed himself to his feet and set off for the center of the craft. It was time to find out what was going on.

* * *

Titan watched the pudgy man stumble awkwardly along the corridor. Each turn he took led him down a corridor more curved than the last, which meant the man was making his way toward the ship’s center and the command center Titan occupied.

With no alternative, Titan settled in to wait and watch as the cameras feeding that single screen tracked the other’s progress. If the man turned away or entered one of the doorways before reaching the room where he sat, Titan wanted to know. He wasn’t sure how easily he would be able to track the man in the circular ship. Except for the decreasing degree of curvature to each corridor as they moved further from the center, they looked the same to the Violent.

But the man on the screen did not turn away back or enter any doorways. Instead, he crept closer and closer.

It took the man fifteen minutes of slow, careful plodding to turn in to the scorched corridor that led to the room where Titan waited.

The sight of the downed aliens, their blood pooling bright and purple around their bodies, halted the creeper’s progress. The man’s face froze in horror. Titan watched as the pudgy plodder turned away from the bodies, placed one hand over his stomach, the other over his mouth. He gagged, but nothing came up. Even here, among the Minith, Titan surmised that the man rarely saw violence of this sort.

The man was no coward, though. When his initial reaction subsided, he took several deep breaths and turned back toward the command center. He squared his shoulders and stepped around the first Minith body, but could not avoid the bright purple pool that spread from wall to wall. The blood had already begun to congeal and the man’s steps left tracks in the muck.

The burnt, pockmarked walls that marked the length of corridor just outside the room came into view and Titan knew the man was just a few feet from the doorway. But he came no further. Instead, he cocked his head and listened. It was apparent the man was wondering if any Minith were inside the command center.

Titan sat, silent and motionless. His eyes remained glued to the video screen. He felt a whisper of guilt for not announcing himself, but he wanted to see what the man would do.

Light, curly brown hair covered the man’s ears in a bowl cut. He had a clean-shaven face, and a pale skin color that begged for sunshine. He was not short, but not tall. Titan guessed he was a few inches under six feet. Although not exactly fat, the man was heavy for his height. The one-piece outfit he wore was light purple and stretched tightly across the roll at his stomach. It was apparent the man did little to keep himself fit.

The man took another, short step toward the door.

Stumbled. Fell.

Titan had seen enough. He spun his chair so he faced the doorway.

“Get your clumsy ass in here,” he yelled at the man outside.

Chapter 13

Twelve years of living with the Minith, and Gee had never been so scared in his life. When he landed in the sticky purple mess that coated the floor, he thought he would die of repulsion and disgust. He placed his hands in the bloody slop and pushed up, anxious to be as far from the alien blood as possible.

“Get your clumsy ass in here!”

The unexpected shout clutched Gee’s heart and he slipped again. Landed full frontal in the purple pool. Again.

“Aarrg—” A childlike scream escaped his throat before he knew it was even there, but he bit it back quickly. His years with the Minith had instilled an inherent need for quiet. The aliens detested loud noise and punished their human captives brutally for any slip, intentional or not.

The scream secured behind tightly clamped lips, Gee scrambled for purchase and nearly made it. His feet slipped out again with a viscous slurping sound, but he caught himself at the last minute. His already painted hands smacked the gooey surface for the third time.

The frightened scream, now combined with more than a hint of anger, struggled to escape his lips. Failed. The relief he might have felt at that small triumph was immediately overcome by dueling pains. One ran feral up his right wrist, the other settled in brutally around his chest.

Broken wrist!

Heart attack?

Gee was still trying to interpret the messages his body was sending to his brain when he was yanked from the floor by his collar.

He dangled.

What now?

He kicked his feet in an effort to spin his body. Even as he struggled to see who or what had him, he was afraid he knew the answer.

When he saw that he was wrong, he forgot the pains shooting through his body.

“Amazing.”

* * *

Titan carried the man at arm’s length, careful to keep the blood-soaked fellow well away from his body. He picked a chair already drenched in purple blood and dropped the open-mouthed chublet onto the padded cushion. He wiped his hand on the sides of his pants and took two steps back.

The mop-headed man held his blood-covered hands away from his body and gaped at Titan.

“You’re human.”

“Yep. So are you.” If the man wanted to engage in statements of the obvious, Titan would humor him. Although curious, he knew they had plenty of time to get acquainted. Months, if what Mouse had told him was accurate.

“But, but… how? The ship left Earth!”

Again with the obvious.

“Yep. And we are on it.”

The man looked around the room, took in the carnage that surrounded them. He gasped at the sight of one particular alien.

“Zal,” he whispered. His mouth hung open.

“What?”

The man pointed at the alien that lay sprawled near his feet. The hole drilled through the dead Minith’s head revealed the cause of his death. “That’s Zal. He was the Minith Commander here.”

The corners of Titan’s lips curled up. “Yeah. Well, he’s not in command any longer. He’s been relieved of that responsibility.”

“But the violence…” The man’s voice trailed off, and he closed his eyes.

Titan watched as a shudder ran through the clumsy, gore-covered captive.

Great. Another Peace-loving citizen
, he thought.

Titan considered the man’s inability to take in the violence that surrounded him a weakness. He knew the fellow was a product of his upbringing, so could not help his reaction. But it still irritated Titan. The fact that his planet had allowed itself to be enslaved by an alien race, without fight or resistance, always angered him. Until recently, he could not do anything about it. But with the arrival of Grant, a soldier from ancient times, that had changed. Grant had freed him from Violent’s Prison. It also appeared as though he might have freed Earth from the Minith—for now, at least.