Charger the Soldier (27 page)

Beth shivered, then went on. "I met him in
tenth grade. He was in my English class, and he was beautiful. All
my friends told me he was no good, that he was a loser and would
never amount to anything, but I didn't care. To me, he was the
kindest and funniest guy I'd ever known."

"Did you…you know…ever do it?" Anna asked, as
her breathing became more labored.

"Not at first, no. We dated for almost six
months before that happened," Beth said. "He spent most of his time
working in his dad's gas station out on the highway, so our time
together was limited. My father disapproved of him because he
didn't like Henry's father, and they never got along. And he kept
saying Henry was weird. I think my mom liked Henry's dad, though. I
know for a fact she liked Henry."

Refugees had been in the frozen reaches of
the arctic ice fields for nearly four months, and more came all the
time. Though the military tried desperately to ensure that these
survivors were well taken care of, it was still difficult to endure
the constant cold. Beth and Anna, like other young people, had
volunteered to ride out on snowmobiles every day, scouting for
invaders who might be trying to reach the survivors.

Only an hour ago, Anna's snowmobile had hit a
crevasse and flipped, injuring her badly. Beth radioed for help and
they were now waiting for the search party to reach them. The cold
of the falling snow and the bleakness of the high arctic sent
another shiver through Beth as she held her friend close.

"Tell me more. It keeps me from thinking
about the pain," Anna pleaded.

Beth drew her friend closer, trying to keep
her warm. "After high school, we planned to travel to France and
then to England. But when the school year ended, Henry's father
needed help at the gas station and we put off our travels, though
we often talked about when and how we would eventually go. The day
never came, though. The invasion put an end to that dream."

Seeing that Anna was listening, Beth went on.
"Henry and Dal, his friend, decided to run off and join the
fighting. I tried to persuade him to run away with me, go to the
mountains, but he was determined to fight. I had gotten pregnant a
few years earlier, but that ended badly. A week before he left for
the army base, I got pregnant again, but I never told him."

Anna looked up at Beth and asked, "So you're
pregnant now?"

"Yes, I am."

"You can't stay with me!" Anna coughed as
blood from her wounds filled her mouth. "I don't want to be
responsible for a miscarriage. Go! Leave me!"

"I'm sure the rescue team will find us soon.
We just have to wait a little longer." Beth's eyes welled up with
tears again. "I can't lose you too. You're my only friend."

Nor did she have a family now. An influenza
epidemic had hit the northern camps less than a month after they
arrived, and both her parents died.

Anna held tightly to Beth's arm. "Didn't you
tell Henry about the baby when he came home on leave?"

"I wanted to, but I couldn't," Beth said,
remembering the pain of that visit. He'd been changed so much that
he didn't seem like Henry anymore. It wasn't just his towering
strength and his Hyborg armor, but he seemed different mentally,
too. She'd been afraid of him. He'd seen the fear in her eyes, and
she knew he'd been hurt because of it, but she couldn't help
herself.

The two girls held each other close as the
falling snow continued covering them. When they stopped talking,
the beeping from their transponder was the only sound in the
inhospitable landscape.

Beth began to panic. Anna was becoming less
responsive and was surely moments from death, and the constant fear
that a polar bear, smelling blood, would find them before the
rescue team could get there haunted Beth's mind. Minutes felt like
hours. But, from off in the distance, the sound of the rescue team
finally came.

Two days later, Beth and Anna woke up in the
village hospital, alive but weak. When the hospital staff
discovered that Beth was pregnant, the decision was made not to let
the girls participate again in the perimeter watch program.

The village had once been a small, simple
Inuit settlement in the high north but now, because of the
invaders, it had become a sanctuary for survivors from all parts of
Canada and America. The population had exploded and buildings to
house the survivors dotted the horizon on all sides, as thousands
of beleaguered humans arrived.

Beth gave birth to a baby boy. She and Anna
found other tasks to help the village be productive, while the
refugees waited for the military to eventually drive off the
invaders. When the day came, a little more than two years later,
with news that the war was over and the people could return home,
the two friends decided to remain in the frozen north as a couple.
They wanted to help the Inuit in return for the kindness these good
people had shown them.

Beth never knew what became of Henry; whether
he had perished in battle or was still being used by the military
as the Hyborg, Charger. He'd told her they couldn't change him back
to Henry, and hinted she should find someone else.

She bore silently the sadness she felt at the
loss of her love, but every day she smiled at his reflection in the
face of her son.

And every day, the sun shone down on a
prosperous, peaceful Earth. People began to think that it would
always be that way.

"O
kay, so what you're telling me is that the invaders
we spent three years fighting were not aliens after all, but humans
who existed on earth before the last ice age?" Mark Dixon was thin,
and bore a scar on the left side of his face where a piece of
shrapnel had plowed a small furrow.

Andy wondered where Mark had found the suede
jacket he was wearing. His friend must have scrounged it from some
bombed-out house or store. Only seven years had passed since the
war ended and now, in 2040, luxury goods were still scarce.

Andy pulled a coin out of his worn jeans for
the vending machine. "That's correct. The data we've recovered and
transcribed tell a story of the protohumans of Earth. They might
have been the mythical Atlantians, though they were far more savvy
technologically than past story-tellers ever imagined. These people
knew another ice age was coming and that they couldn't survive on
Earth for long." He shook his dark hair out of his eyes. "Somehow,
by a means we still haven't identified, their colony moved from
Earth into outer space. They formed a colony on the world we now
call Neo Terra, the world that we traced from information on their
spacecraft."

Mark started to ask a question, then stopped.
Andy could tell he was having difficulty digesting this
information. It seemed contrary to all the archaeological records,
which were, however, tainted by government and military staff who
wanted the propaganda they had created about vicious aliens to
remain firm and unaltered. These people were convinced that
fostering hatred of anything alien fueled the population's drive
not only to rebuild but also to take revenge.

Andy pressed on. "They may have moved into
underground caverns, converting them to survival bunkers at first,
along with their grounded ship, or they somehow mined the planet to
get inside. We don't know how they achieved this, but we do know
what followed: towns, then cities, and finally countries."

Mark looked as though he needed more
persuasion. He'd make a fine scientist, Andy thought, but first
he'd have to truly understand, right to the core of his brain, that
no old theories nor old information were sacred.

"These people eventually found a way to
hollow the world enough that a false sky and a sun were possible.
Their adaptation to this dark, hollow world brought a change to
their own human forms. But they used their technology to create a
world very similar to the original Earth they came from."

"What you're saying makes sense, I suppose,"
Mark grumbled. "The so-called aliens apparently had no problems
breathing here on Earth. And we had no difficulty in reverse
engineering their technology."

"That's because they were us," Andy said. "We
fought humans, not aliens." He tried to sound nonchalant, but he
was excited about this incredible new information which solved so
many mysteries arising in the past ten years.

"So what about the Grays? How come we have
yet to prove their existence?" asked Mark. He looked irritated.

A third voice joined the conversation. Mark's
long-time friend, Mickey, had just joined them in front of the
vending machines. "Mark likes to believe in those theories of an
alien race that visited Earth thousands of years ago and performed
scientific experiments on captured humans."

"That's what the military wants us to
believe, too," Andy said. "They have the idea that soldiers fight
harder when they hate the enemy." He pulled a can of root beer from
the soft drink dispenser. "I don't know whether Gray aliens exist
or don't exist. So far, we've found no data regarding them on Neo
Terra. Surely we would have come across something by now."

Mark capitulated. "Okay, so that explains why
reverse engineering was so easy after the tech geeks cracked the
codes. These technologies were human in origin and so followed a
basic Earth way of thinking."

"Most things about the so-called aliens make
sense now," Andy replied. "The multi-faceted eyes were goggles. The
encounter suits protected them from their environment. The weird
envelopes of slime they wore in battle were a defense against us.
The weapons they used, the modes of transport, all things once
thought alien, arose from the human mind."

Mickey ran a hand through his rat's nest of
curly red hair. "It's said that contact with nonhuman aliens would
be very different, based of course on how those aliens have
evolved."

"I think that's true," Andy said, and paused
to suck heavily from the root beer can. "But I can't help wondering
if some parts of religion may have been correct after all."

"How do you mean?" Mark asked.

Andy belched. He should quit drinking so much
carbonated stuff. "Think about the theory that some type of god
created humans, and the fact that we have yet to find nonhuman
aliens."

"That may not prove true in the future,"
Mickey said. "Now that we have space travel, we could be in for a
few surprises."

Mark nodded. "We might discover that humans
left Earth several times in the past, reinvented themselves to
survive distant worlds, and forgot about where they
originated."

"That seems entirely possible." Andy
regretfully added, "However, with our propensity for aggression, it
also seems possible we will end up in yet another battle."

"Sad but true," Mickey said. "For a start,
there's the extinction of Neanderthals, said to have been caused by
a different human species either through war or inter-breeding." He
tried to grab Andy's root beer.

"Hey! Back off, short stuff!" Andy batted
Mickey's hand away. Mickey might be the smallest of the three
friends, but he was often the most aggressive. "We've set foot on
one distant planet, so finding a third isn't inconceivable. And, to
date, no physical record of human society from before the last ice
age has been found."

Mark got back into the conversation. "That
could change, too. I agree that all stone monuments found at
today's earth strata are from our own time period, but a friend of
mine using ground-penetrating radar has made a few discoveries of
deep structures that haven't been uncovered yet."

"Humanity builds cities next to water sources
found on the surface," Mickey said. "We've always done that. Thanks
to the invasion destroying cities and towns around the shores of
inland water as well as the ocean, it's easy now to find ancient
ruins."

"So these structures your friend found, what
are they like?" Andy asked as he eyed the mostly empty shelves in
the snack vending machine.

"He doesn't know. It's hard to get funding
these days," Mark replied. "He got some help from staff, but had
conflicts with those who still believe the world is flat, which
makes it difficult for him to proceed. But what he's found is very
deep under destroyed cities."

"Deep? How deep?" Mickey asked. He might be
able to use such information in his thesis on human evolution in
societies.

"In one find," Mark replied, "a core sample,
taken by drilling down to the relevant level, showed that the
structure was made of a type of concrete and asphalt, therefore
constructed by humans. The soil underneath the structure was
actually thirty million years old, but it's now thought, from cores
done at different locations, that the soil was exposed only during
the time the structure was built."

Mark leaned back against the wall. "The
theory is that this structure was created possibly two or three ice
ages back, dating it too roughly between forty and fifty thousand
years ago. That would be well within the range of
Homo sapiens
sapiens
evolution and the extinction of the Neanderthals. The
theory is that the structure must be of a primitive design, since
any modern building techniques would never stand the test of that
much time. So we might have the equivalent of the pyramids in this
ancient structure. Not only that, but it's possible that more
recent societies living on this site may have been the founders of
the mythical Atlantis structure."

Mickey snorted. "Well, that topic is still up
for debate! The idea of the Atlantis structure is fragmentary at
best. We should not be so quick to include myths in today's
science."

"I think we have more than sufficient
evidence from Dr. Opinhimmer's work at Gobekli Tepe," Mark replied,
with a challenging look. "The three stone rings he and his team
uncovered clearly show the location and the time at which Atlantis
existed. The first ring showed the location of the three-ringed
cities around the globe in relation to the continents and shore
lines of that time period. The second ring does suggest a time
frame in which these cities and their peoples lived here on Earth,
and the third ring shows that the only mistake to date was the
naming of that society as Atlantis."