Charger the Soldier
Read Charger the Soldier Online
Authors: Lea Tassie
Tags: #aliens, #werewolves, #space travel, #technology, #dinosaurs, #timetravel, #stonehenge
BY
LEA TASSIE
Copyright 2016 Lea Tassie
Published by Lea Tassie at Smashwords
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used
or reproduced in any manner without
prior written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places and incidents are the product of the
author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and
any resemblance to actual persons living or
dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 Dart speaks
to Reader
Chapter 4 A trip to
Galactic Central
Chapter 6 Trouble at
Gobekli Tepe
Chapter 10 Conflict
behind the lines
Chapter 12 A new
fighting machine
Chapter 17
Celebrating the heroes
Chapter 19 Blackmail
in New Denver
Chapter 20 Talking to
Dinosauroids
Chapter 21 Discovery
in Somalia
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A heartfelt thank you to all those people who helped
make this novel better: Leanne Allen, Anna Becker, Sharon
King-Booker, Laura Langston, Phil Sutton, and most of all, to my
science guy.
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science
and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science
and technology.
Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)
M
y name is Dart. I'm an average kind of guy, who has
led an average life, with two exceptions. I am more than a thousand
years old, as perhaps you can guess from my long gray hair and
beard.
And I am the last man to walk the face of
this once great planet Earth.
You sit there, Reader, hearing my story, and
you ask what it's like to live a thousand years. I can only speak
for myself because I'm not exactly average anymore, and not
entirely human either. When I was born, the normal life span of a
human was just barely one hundred and thirty years. Yes, I can see
you're surprised.
Why am I the last man on Earth? Obviously you
have many questions. And I am just the man to give you the answers,
which Charger has delegated me to do.
You want to know why I wear a tall, black
pointed hat and a robe embroidered with planets? Because, back
about five hundred years ago when everybody decided to role-play, I
chose to be a wizard.
No, the people on Ceres voted to become
Dwarves and those on Mars to become Elves. Earthers went steampunk
and the population of New Eden became mostly Techno-creeps.
Besides, I am tall, thin, bony, and a little hunched, so a wizard's
costume suited me better than anything else popular at the
time.
Reader, my eyes are black and piercing, not
black and spooky! You must stop teasing and pay attention.
Yes, of course I am going to explain
everything. As a matter of fact, I must explain everything, for you
alone will carry the entire history of humanity into the
future.
Why you alone? Because in just a few days the
biggest and most powerful enemies humans have ever faced will be
here, bent on destroying Earth. That's why you must concentrate on
what I have to teach you.
No, Charger will save you.
How long is the story? Well, it starts in
65,000,000 BCE and will end sometime this week, the middle of
August, in 4800 CE.
Don't sigh, Reader. The story is long in
years, but not in the telling. I'll leave out all the boring bits.
And yes, I do know that when humanity began, perhaps a million
years ago, we were very primitive. But there were some mighty
interesting and important events that happened much further back,
which determined how we turned out and who we ended up fighting for
our survival.
Is Charger the hero?
Well, I wouldn't call Charger a hero, though
perhaps I should since he's my father. He began life, in the
twenty-first century, as one of the saviors of Earth but eventually
became a despised monster.
How can I call my father a monster?
Listen, Reader, he was reviled by all. To
call him malevolent or evil is to accord him some high purpose in
life, but nothing could be further from the truth. He became a
brute who felt rage but never pity, and seemed utterly bereft of
the goodness and decency possessed by the kind young man from whom
he was created.
Do I hate him?
Sometimes. But then I remember that before he
became Charger R/T, he was just Charger, and before that, Henry, a
young man who willingly gave up everything but life itself to
ensure the survival of humanity.
He was a hated but necessary blackness thrust
upon our very existence. No shadowy figure in the darkness waiting
to strike the unsuspecting, no grand speechmaker fooling listeners
with sugary words, his willingness to kill never abated. And his
disdain for humanity was absolute. A paradox: humans meant nothing
and yet everything to this frantic madness known as Charger.
But, in humanity's desperate hours, in every
fight for our very right to exist, we needed a hero.
What we delivered to ourselves instead,
created by our own hands, was the unacknowledged monster found in
every last one of us, in the deepest recesses of our minds. The
monster who denies incestuous desires, then fulfills them; the
false friend who will manipulate to gain power; the molester of
innocents; the preacher of divine behavior who indulges in whoring
and theft. In a desperate bid for survival, our fear of death drove
us to manifest in living flesh that which we all claim to
despise.
I will describe to you, Reader, a great and
terrible time on planet Earth. The story will explain to what
lengths we were driven, what moralities we rejected, what disgust
we willingly embraced. It will explain who Charger is, and what we
became because of him.
What justifications can I give you for the
atrocities humanity committed?
None.
This is the story of Charger and of humanity.
I must leave it to you to judge. When the story is done, that will
be your task.
D
uring the reign of dinosaurs on Earth around
sixty-five million years BCE, the Grays, alien beings of an empire
called Betelle, were a great and powerful race. They plied the
distances in space as easily as humans back in the twenty-first
century drove across the country. The Betelle Realm was so vast
they needed entire solar systems to accommodate their population.
And, not satisfied with simply finding new worlds to live on, these
beings towed fertile planets into orbit around suns perfect to
light and heat their settlements.
The citizens of Betelle shared many of the
paths humanity took as they evolved. Much like humans, they evolved
from simple to complex, warred against neighbors, and destroyed
civilizations. Their life spans were triple those of the healthiest
humans and their 'year' measured three of ours. They grew crops and
kept animals. Most important, they developed incredibly advanced
and complex technology, though this still led to the destruction
and rebuilding of cultures countless times.
The Grays also resembled us in basic body
form. However, they were shorter, around four feet, and hairless,
with dark gray, leathery skin. Their large heads had eyes with
black pupils in gray irises. Long arms with many-jointed fingers
helped them to manipulate every sort of tool. As to character, they
resembled the more aggressive of our species in being acquisitive
and power-hungry.
The Grays sent explorers out into the
blackness of space to find treasure and new information to add to
their store of knowledge and Earth was one of their many stops.
They found it to be a simple but rich place during the time of the
dinosaurs. None of the existing creatures had noticeable intellect
or other benefits to offer, so they decided to expunge the planet's
animal forms and plunder its resources. Eventually they would tow
the planet itself to a solar system already under construction.
But fate, as it often does, intervened.
As the Grays left the planet behind, they
fired a light beam that altered the path of a large asteroid, which
fell on what was later known as the Yucatan peninsula. The Grays
returned a hundred thousand years later, when the atmosphere and
climate had returned to normal for that particular time, and found
that the extinction event had been a success.
That is, except for a small group of
survivors on an isolated southern continent. One curious Betellian
decided to experiment on them. These Troodon were small dinosaurs,
up to eight feet long, three to four feet tall, and around a
hundred and ten pounds. Their brains were, relative to their body
mass, six times larger than any other dinosaur, and they had
semi-manipulatable fingers and binocular vision. The Betellian
succeeded in breeding them to produce fingers, better brains and
vision, and called them Dinosauroids. It seemed appropriate that
these animals should be given the opportunity to use their
primitive intelligence in service to the beings of Betelle.
This proved to be disastrous.
Never before had the Betellians encountered
such devious and determined creatures. They became far more
intelligent than expected and rebelled against servitude time after
time. Finally, the experiment was deemed too hazardous to continue,
and attempts were made to kill the project.
The Dinosauroids had other ideas. The
Betellians brought more of their own kind to Earth to contain the
burgeoning population but, though they killed many Dinosauroids,
they were unable to eliminate them entirely. The Betellian who had
created the Dinosauroids admired the tenacity of the little
mischief-makers and decided they had earned the right to exist.
This Betellian searched the Grays' archives of knowledge and found
what was called a 'black' project, deemed too controversial to
continue and thus long forgotten.
The time-lock device seemed the perfect
solution. The creator of the Dinosauroids decided to make several
of these devices and use one to lock away the creatures, hoping
that time would tame the wondrous children it had created.
The problem-solver was doomed to fail. Before
he could use his devices, a migrating flock of birds, pushed off
course by strong winds and carrying a new virus, landed on the
continent. The virus infected all the Dinosauroids, but killed only
the weak. Thereafter, the survivors carried the virus in natural
body oils exuded by their fine, delicate scales. When dried, some
of the oils stuck to the scales but most floated freely in the air.
Inhaled by the Grays, these caused a fatal viral outbreak
impossible to stem.
Most of the Betellians fled back to their
various planets, thus infecting and destroying the great
civilization of Betelle. The few scattered survivors sought refuge
in a different layer of time via the time-lock. They emerged, after
what seemed to be only a few hundred years, to discover that the
time-lock processed time at a different rate than normal space.
Sixty-three million years of ordinary time had passed. Now these
few, even with their advanced technology, faced a daunting
task.