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  Eternal Enemy

  Memories of Earth, Book 9

  James David Victor

  Copyright © 2020 James David Victor

  All Rights Reserved

  Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All people, places, names, and events are products of the author’s imagination and / or used fictitiously. Any similarities to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Laércio Messias

  Contents

  1. Old Earth, New Rage

  2. The Hunt

  3. The Improved Cread

  4. Capture

  5. The Eternal Empress/Archon

  6. New Eden

  7. The Net Tightens

  8. Attack!

  9. Arrivals

  10. Marine vs. Marine

  11. Gotcha

  12. The Fall of New Eden

  13. The Black Rose

  14. Rescue Mission

  15. The New Commander-General of Earth

  16. Cart

  17. Departures

  18. The Gene Seer Forest

  19. One Life

  20. LOHIU/Jake

  21. Gene Temple

  22. Unification Process

  23. Union

  Thank You

  1

  Old Earth, New Rage

  Sector 0, Sol

  Anders walked on his home soil of Earth for the first time in his life, but his heart was filled with trepidation.

  It wasn’t just that Old Earth was occupied territory—humanity’s home had been kept a secret from the rest of the humans in the galactic empire of the Eternal Empress, the Golden Throne. It wasn’t just all that the occupation entailed—the security and surveillance drones that would doubtless be scanning the landscape soon for signs of the four rebels trudging their way across the planet’s surface. Or the fact that they were attempting to get to the most-protected facility of the strange cult of bioengineers known as the Gene Seers, there to liberate a being who might be able to save them all...

  It wasn’t just those things, but they didn’t help. Anders clenched his teeth, but he endeavored to keep his own counsel.

  It was also the nausea in Anders’s chest that rose and fell with every step, in keeping with how near he moved to the youngest of their group, the human psychic who had once only been known as J-14, but whom Anders himself had called Jake.

  The shaggy-haired, pale youth walked silently at the head of their small column, barely appearing to notice the dense old-growth forests around them, or the sudden worry of birds exploding from the undergrowth, who had apparently been well-trained in the knowledge that humans were a bad idea.

  Perhaps we are, Anders thought dismally, as he could still smell the smoke of the downed missiles that Jake had cast about them…

  The psychic had been protecting them, of course, and the ex-policeman knew that he was lucky to have such a powerful psychic on his side—perhaps the most powerful psychic that the Golden Throne had ever discovered, save the LOHIU they were going to rescue, of course. But there was something that was...dangerous about Jake too, Anders knew. An anger was housed in him that could destroy entire starships when roused, and a power that was at least in-part channeled from the ancient god-being known as the Archon—the creature that was trying to dominate all sentient life from afar.

  What if we lose him? Anders thought as he looked at Jake’s back. And of course, he meant losing him to the other side, to the complete puppet-like control of the Archon…

  But Anders wrenched his attention away from his worries and tried to focus on what was around him. He was on the Earth, whose ancient trees with their gnarled bark looked as though they had stood for centuries. There was even a quality to the breeze that was refreshing, when he allowed himself to concentrate on it.

  What had Dalia called it? he asked himself, spying the way that the elf-like alien moved lightly from giant roof to leaf litter and back around another of the ancient trees, moving with a grace that made it seem like this was her home planet, too.

  Hiraeth-something, or something-Hiraeth, Anders recalled. A sense of genetic belonging to a place that was pregnant in the memories of every species…

  There was a movement ahead of him, and when Anders blinked, he saw that Jake had paused in his silent march and was looking back at him sharply. Almost as if he had heard what Anders was thinking...

  “Boss…” the words of the fourth of their number cut through Anders’s worry, and Anders turned to regard Patch McGuire, the human Void engineer. His people spent their lives out at the very edge of the galaxy, pondering the abyss and the mysterious forces between the stars, but right now, it appeared as though Patch was deeply concerned with the solid stuff beneath his feet.

  “Look…” He was kicking at the leaf litter and soil that was adrift between the roots.

  To reveal the blocky edge of a slab of concrete, and then—

  Patch kicked away a little bit more at the circle of something he had found, revealing what looked eerily like a manhole cover.

  “Hm…” His interest piqued, Anders moved to look, seeing that what he had taken to be humps of moss and forest boulders were similarly obscuring blocks and slabs. “Paving slabs?” Anders wondered, lifting his eyes to the forest.

  He saw it: the way that smaller lines of trees appeared to grow along straight-line vectors here and there, beside great, lichen-covered and overgrown blocks that could easily have been fallen masonry.

  “There used to be a city here,” Anders said, in awe at the sense of time that he was moving through.

  A city. An actual Earth city, from a time before the Eternal Empress…

  Schkt! There was a subtle noise, too sharp to be a cracked stick or crunched leaf. It was only the fact that Anders—and the others—were still wearing their borrowed Outcast power suits allowed him to pick it up.

  “Moriarty,” Anders hissed quickly, turning in what he thought was the direction of the noise.

  “Sir, movement detected on your three o’clock, ground level,” the smooth, cultured, precise tones of the simulated intelligence that lived inside Anders’s data-node sounded from his suit sensors.

  “Isolate,” Anders breathed. Blue light flushed over his visor, with the blue congregating at places where movement was occurring—a deeper blue for the more aggravated of motions and a lighter blue for the softer.

  Ah, Anders thought. I’m in a forest. There was a lot of blue, everywhere, but when he looked, one of the strongest lines of blue was stretched low to the ground, near where Patch had been kicking away at the sod.

  “Tripwire!” Dalia breathed, just before there was another sound.

  Schnkt! It came from behind them, followed by a short, sharp—

  “Urk!” Jake was suddenly hauled into the air, dangling from his feet.

  “Weapons down!” shouted a voice as figures leapt from the undergrowth further out in the trees and, surprisingly, from the ground beneath their feet.

  They were humans, but they wore strange, cobbled-together garb—bits of service suits fixed together with heavy canvas buckles and straps, which Anders was sure came from ship or industrial cargo bags. In their hands, they were holding up long laser rifles, more akin to the sort that Anders would have licensed for hunting back when he had been a police officer, and not for battle.

  Single shot, Anders thought, already throwing himself to one side as Jake growled and grunted, thrashing between the trees.

  “Shut them up!” Anders heard someone shout, just as there was a flare of laser fire.

  “Sir.” Moriarty’s voice was insistent.

  “Not now
!” Anders rolled across the ground, bouncing up to his feet.

  PHZT! There was another flash of purple-red meson light, and he saw Patch lifted bodily from the ground and sent flying backward into the undergrowth.

  “Patch!”

  “Sir!” Moriarty tried to get his attention as Anders was already swinging his heavy Outcast Marine rifle around, its auto-targeting computer linked up to his own visor’s holographic HUD.

  Marine Heavy Meson Rifle/Single Shot/Burst Shot/Stun…

  >>Target Acquired…

  >>Human…

  >>32 degrees right…

  “Sir!” the voice of the simulated intelligence said once more as Anders’s red targeting vector closed on the human’s leg. He fired.

  “Ach!” The man fell over.

  “Take them out!” He heard another of them shout, just as two were closing on Dalia from either side. They were too close for the Ilythian to lower her own rifle at them, but that didn’t mean she was in any way defenseless. Anders saw her turn to hook a heel in a spinning back-kick across one of her attacker’s faces, sending him spinning through the air. When her feet returned to earth, she continued her spin to slam into the other attacker with her shoulder, seizing his rifle-arm and performing a complicated series of hand movements that resulted in the man losing the rifle and dropping to the floor, nursing his injured hand.

  Anders twisted on his hip to take aim at another of the charging attackers.

  PHZT!

  Warning! Suit Impact! Rear Plate -15%

  He was suddenly thrown forward into the dirt by a blast from one of the other rifles, but it wasn’t powerful enough to even cause him a bruise, Anders thought with a savage sense of rising victory. They might be heavily outnumbered, but Anders knew that at least he and Dalia had the better training, weapons, and armor as well.

  We can finish these schlubs, he thought as he rolled away from another blast of purple-crimson energy, exploding the leaves and the earth where he had been.

  “Sir, they’re firing stun shots!” Moriarty managed to break into Anders’s awareness, just as he completed his roll and brought his rifle up.

  “What?” Anders hissed.

  “I tried to tell you, sir. They’re firing stun shots. Your attackers are humans with no Throne ID, and who have their rifles set to stun,” Moriarty said.

  Anders froze, with one of the attackers skidding to a halt a few meters in front of him upon seeing Anders’s lowered rifle, which was much larger and apparently more deadly than the puny hunting rifle the man had.

  “I wouldn’t,” Anders growled.

  “Akh!” Just then, there was a snarl and a wash of uncomfortable, teeth-clacking PK energy as Jake’s ire erupted.

  Oh no... Anders thought as a strange wind started to blow through the clearing, making the leaves on the trees start to flutter and crinkle, and the limbs shake.

  “Who did this!?” Jake was shouting, his voice strangely double-layered with spectral energies as his eyes rolled into deep black orbs.

  No, no, no… Anders thought, starting to rise, forgetting his personal attacker in favor of stopping Jake from what he could do. “Jake!” Anders held out a hand as Jake rose from the ground, still with the piece of monofilament wire attached to his ankle that had trapped him. All of the wind was flowing away from him, Anders saw, in a rising gale that was fast becoming a mighty hurricane. He could see sticks and branches starting to bend backward, with much of the smaller tree-stuff breaking apart entirely.

  “Hell!” Anders heard the human attacker beside him say before leaping to the forest floor, where he promptly disappeared.

  What!? No. He hadn’t vanished, Anders saw in a moment. There was another of those manholes there, hidden by the moss, and through which the attacker had escaped, leaving his rifle behind.

  There were other, sudden movements as the attackers—even the wounded ones—around the crew of the Unexpected Hope dove for various secret tunnels and chutes in the forest floor.

  And still, Jake’s anger poured out toward them.

  “Why are you hurting me!? What have I ever done to you!?” he was shouting, and suddenly a section of the forest floor—a spot where there had been one of the open manholes—exploded upwards into earth, leaves, and lumps of concrete. As there was no answering wail or cry from the earth below, Anders rather hoped that the man inside had gotten away.

  Hope? He growled in frustration. Why was he feeling ashamed of Jake’s actions?

  Probably because I know Jake could kill them all—or whatever works through Jake could… Anders shook his head and turned back to the PK youth.

  “Jake, it’s okay. They’ve gone. You scared them away…” Anders was trying to say, making small, placating gestures toward the young man.

  “What did you say!?” Jake’s head snapped in his direction, and to Anders, it felt like he had been hit by the necro-war machine, Commander Malady, as he was flung backward through the forest.

  WHUMP!

  Warning! Suit Impact! Rear plate -20%

  >>Initiating Self-Repair Procedures…

  “Jake! Remember, please!” Anders groaned as he struggled to push himself back up from the ground, to see that the glade that they had been ambushed in was now the scene of a hurricane, with Jake in its center and Dalia struggling toward him across the floor, holding up her hand toward him. There was a mighty CREEACK as one of the larger boughs of the thrashing trees suddenly snapped, tearing from its trunk and winging through the forest.

  “Jake, remember those exercises I taught you?” Dalia shouted up at the irate, out of control psychic. “You are yourself, Jake. Through and past all of this. Every emotion, every anger, every fear—you remain yourself!”

  The youth half-growled, half-coughed as he shook his head, and the vortex of wind only increased around them. Another explosion boomed as this time, an entire tree trunk was shattered into a whirl of wood splinters.

  “Jake, please remember!” Dalia yelled as the youth wrestled with the titanic forces inside his soul, “I am here, Jake. I won’t leave you.”

  Anders watched as the PK gave an odd little moan and another cough as he hung his head in shame. The vortex of eldritch wind turned into a gale, and then into a stiff breeze. The tree branches and limbs that were careening and smashing back and forth eased and gentled, dropping vast amounts of leaves and twigs as they did so, until finally they settled into silence.

  Jake heaved a deep sigh as he folded to his knees, and Anders saw Dalia running to put her long alien arms around him in a fierce embrace. The ex-policeman cautiously got to his feet, looking at the sight as he saw Patch doing the same, a little further away from him. They both looked warily and owlishly at each other, and, even though Anders was too honorable to say it, he knew what both of them were thinking…

  How, under the stars, are we ever going to be able to finish our mission with Jake like this!?

  Perhaps it was lucky, then, that no one had time to consider such questions as Moriarty’s voice awoke in Anders’s ear:

  “Sir, I’m picking up chatter from the nearest throne satellites. This burst of PK energy has been noted, and the nearest Throne Marine squad has been alerted.”

  “Wonderful,” Anders groaned, picking up his feet. And his rifle.

  2

  The Hunt

  “There’s a gulley forward of your position, half a klick,” Moriarty breathed into Anders’s ears, using the long-range field scanners that the Outcast power suit had built in.

  This was good news, at least, Anders thought as he saw another bright crimson flare erupt into the skies behind them and off to their right. That was the third of such flares. One was behind and far to the left—the south?—of them, and the next was almost dead center behind.

  “They’re about a klick out,” Anders said over the suit-to-suit communicator to Dalia, Patch, and Jake, following his point.

  The night was drawing in, and it seemed that night fell faster on Old Earth than what Anders was u
sed to back home on Hectamon 7. The skies had turned a dirty pink, and then had quickly dropped into deepening shades of mauve and purple. The forest about them gathered the gloom under its branches, but still, Anders had seen the strange humps and blocky shapes out there on the edge of the gloom—the ruins of whatever cityscape or Old Earth town this had once been.

  “The flares started at dusk,” Anders breathed over the suit communicator, more thinking aloud than feeling any need to report. He remembered the old search-and-destroy missions that he had been given as a trainee Marine himself.

  “Those flares are positioning markers,” he admitted. “They fire them at what they think is the limit of the prey’s range, hoping to funnel the chase.”

  “The hunt,” he heard Patch clarify dolefully behind him, and the young engineer was right. They weren’t being chased; they were being hunted.

  But if we can get to the north-south gulley, Anders was thinking, then they might be able to start tracking south, out of the expected range. They could elude the hunters almost entirely.

  “What about their scanners?” Dalia murmured, her voice sounding heavy as she had one hand around the weakened Jake. Every explosion of the PK power did this to him. Even whatever strange cyborg circuits that the Ru’at had implanted into him, and whatever meditative trick that Dalia had taught him, still weren’t enough to temper the forces that coursed through his soul.

  “We’re still broadcasting the hacked Throne Marine access codes, sir,” Moriarty explained, and Anders relayed the information to the others. “They are the ones that we used to enter Earth space initially, which means that your suit IDs don’t register on their long-range telemetries, but your heat, bio, noise, and movement will, if they get within one hundred meters.”