Condition Zero Read online

  Condition Zero

  The Earth Saga VI

  Donald B McFarlane

  Earth Saga Books

  by

  Donald B McFarlane

  Minus Epsilon: The Earth Saga I

  Defiant Order: The Earth Saga II

  Horizons: The Earth Saga III

  Remnants of Empire: The Earth Saga IV

  Edge of the Vortex: The Earth Saga V

  Love In A Time of War: An Earth Saga Story

  Copyright Donald B McFarlane 2019

  www.donaldbmcfarlane.com

  Technical Advisors:

  John H Rogers

  Andy B.

  AJ L.

  Steven E.

  Brett S.

  Editor:

  Nick C

  Cover Art:

  Luke West

  For the fans

  Condition Zero

  1985

  Fury 161

  “You alive?” The warrior asked, flipping up her blast shield.

  “Uhh.” Sinus Fu mumbled. He had been knocked onto his back hard.

  The warrior bent down and inspected the hit point. She was old, maybe his mother’s age when she had died. He could feel her run her hand over the centre of his chest-plate.

  “You’ll be fine in ten minutes.” She patted him on the cheek. “Nice try.”

  He remained motionless. He had tried to take her out, but it hadn’t ended well for him. She was too good.

  The warrior stood up, then looked back down at the young Fu. “Now stay down.”

  Fu did as he was told. He tried to control his breathing. He wasn’t sure what had hit him since his armour wasn’t penetrated, but he couldn’t move his limbs. He was barely able to watch the figure move away from him, clutching her midsection where he had shot her. He watched as she picked up her combat rifle, drop the empty clip, then slammed in a fresh one.

  Fu could see that she was looking towards the exit of the large chamber. He couldn’t see them, but he knew there were dozens of fighters loyal to his now dead sister between the old woman and the exit. There was no chance she’d make it out of the large room alive. Zero chance.

  He lost consciousness.

  When he finally blinked himself awake, he was still lying on his back. Keeping low, he rolled onto his stomach, and gathered his disrupter, then looked around his surroundings. The first thing he saw was what was left of his sister. He could only tell it was her because he had seen her die. Her head had been blasted away from her body. Looking at the dead figure next to her, Fu spotted the headless corpse of the chancer that had brought all this death to 161.

  Looking towards the exits, Fu noticed that the room was silent. There was no music. No laughter. No words being spoken. Nothing.

  Impossible.

  There was no chance that the woman had escaped.

  Fu rose to his feet. There were dozens of fighters in the room. When he finally erected himself, he looked down the length of the hallway. It looked like something out of a nightmare.

  “No.” He said it at almost a whisper. The words were barely audible to his own ears.

  His first few steps were shaky. His body was slowly getting full control of its functions back. Fu wasn’t sure what kind of weapon he had been hit with, or what it would have done to him if he hadn’t been wearing armour, but he was very stiff.

  Walking away from his sister’s body, he looked down the pathway that cut down the middle of the room all the way to the lifts at the other end. Everywhere were dead bodies. Males, females, all killed. Fu knew that some of them weren’t fighters, but it seems that the warrior from the Etelainen hadn’t cared.

  He stopped and analysed the fight as best he could. He turned around and looked at the wall behind him. It was peppered in blast marks. Turning back to his front, he guessed that the visitor hadn’t started the fight, but once it had kicked off, she had gone berserk and killed everything in the room.

  Moving slowly, Fu kept his disruptor up and ready to use, just in case he startled a survivor, and they attacked him. Halfway down the hallway, he found the rifle that the Etelainen warrior had brought with her. It was lying in a pool of blood, the energy charge empty. Fu examined the weapon for a minute; it wasn’t unique or exotic. Once his inspection was complete, he set it back down on the ground.

  Turning around, he looked back towards the almost throne-like area that his sister had once occupied as the head of the Melcore Combine. Now she was dead, along with everyone else in the room, and if his memory served him correctly, these were all her top lieutenants. Dead.

  Reaching the end of the hallway, Fu spotted the pair of pistols that the female fighter had carried with her, and just as he was bending down to take a closer look at them, the lift gave off a low beeping noise.

  Looking up, he saw the woman inside the lift, her armour covered in blood, but her eyes alert and locked on Fu.

  “Hey!” He called out towards her, but the doors of the lift were already closing. “Damn.” He cursed under his breath, before noticing a small device attached just to the side of the lift doors, above the call button.

  The device had a small red light flashing on the top of it. Not sure what to make of it, Fu walked towards it, eyes focused on the red flashing light. When he reached the device, he spotted a tiny spool of wire coming from the device that ran to the lift doors, then disappeared. Leaning forward, Fu looked at the wire as it continued to spool out, and then suddenly stop.

  Without hesitation, he turned on the spot and sprinted away from the lift bank, running as fast as he could. It saved his life.

  The explosion from the charge that had been left on the wall was small and contained to the lift area, but it was violent enough that it would have killed him had he been standing to look at the contraption when it detonated. The shockwave from the explosion was also sufficient to throw off his balance, sending him tumbling to the ground, landing on a dead body.

  “Fuck.” Fu shook his head and looked back towards the destroyed lift banks. Rolling onto his back, he looked up at the ceiling that towered above his head. “She was better than you.” He said to himself, a grin creeping onto his face.

  In the distance, he could hear the engines of a spaceship warming up. Two minutes later, the noise was gone. Lying still, Sinus Fu took a deep breath, then suddenly burst out in tears. He was suddenly overwhelmed with the reality that his sister was dead, and maybe he should have been too.

  When he finally gathered his composure, he got to his feet and looked around the room again. It was nothing but the dead and him. Walking back to his sister’s body, he looked down at what was left of her and shook his head. Their parents were deceased, and the bodies surrounding his sister were her family. There was a stairwell on the back of the building. It was time to get off this planet and get back to his duty station in the Pohjois.

  There was a singular thought running through his mind as he trekked down all the stairs to get to the ground floor. It was to get better. He was a junior member of the elite Insertion wing of the Coalition Fleet, but it was clear to him that he had a long way to go until he could consider himself among the best in the galaxy, and today was the wake-up call he needed.

  Present Day

  8 May

  1-Fris

  The cage was small, barely big enough for the ten figures that were huddled inside. The air stank of sweat and human waste. The ten people inside barely spoke. They were huddled together for warmth, petrified about what was to come next. Steven didn’t know much. His watch was still working, and he knew that it had been weeks since he and Nikki had been grabbed in Perth. Everything else, he didn’t want to think about.

  The process so far had been physically painless, but more emotionally draining than
any nightmare he could have imagined. Picked up along with everyone else in sight from King’s Park, the journey thus far had involved people slowly losing their minds in the cages they were kept in.

  At first, it had been a large room with thousands of other Aussie’s, all confused and scared. They knew that aliens were involved, and it was the assumption that the Coalition was to blame, but Steven, like many of the other captive Australian’s, were blaming all aliens, not just the ones that had already killed millions of humans on Earth.

  After a day in the larger room, droids opened the cell and pulled out several hundred humans. Steven and Nikki had started in the back of the room and fought to remain there as more and more people were taken every so often. There seemed to be no pattern to the time between collections or the number of people removed. They just knew it was better not to be taken.

  The morning of the twenty-first day, Steven and Nikki were among thirty left inside the now almost empty chamber. All that remained of the other humans that had once occupied the space was human waste, a few pieces of clothing, bags, a few other items that people had been captured with. The hatch to the chamber opened with a clang, and in walked the regular two robots. Each was two metres tall and dark grey in colour. They never made a sound. They just moved forward, grabbed someone, and dragged them out of the room. It wasn’t an efficient process, but they always got what they came for. That morning Steven and Nikki had stayed close together but hadn’t been able to avoid capture.

  Once out of the cell, they found themselves on a long corridor and were instantly shoved into the cage they were presently kept in. It already smelled when they were put inside. It had clearly been used dozens of times before. Once the last of the ten people were stuffed inside, the cage was pushed down the hallway until they reached a large door that looked rusted over. It slid open with a creaking noise revealing a hangar bay with a single shuttle in it, and beyond that a sky that was blue in colour like the skies of Earth, only this sky had clouds that were purple in colour and a pair of moons in the distance.

  They were over eight-hundred light years from home.

  2-Hvolsvöllur, Iceland

  It was a warm summer day on the south coast.

  Anna Jonsdottir looked north, towards Route One that ran east and west. It was quiet today. It had been quiet every day since the Coalition had arrived in the system. Once they had hit the planet with an electromagnetic pulse, the world that Anna knew became a lot smaller.

  She had been alone with her youngest son for almost a week. Her husband, Gunnar, had gone into Reykjavik to buy some more medicine for their eldest son Aron, but he hadn’t returned. Two days later Aron was dead, leaving Anna to grieve the loss of one son, and probably the loss of her husband.

  Breathing slowly, Anna watched the green hills to the north of their farm while slowly finishing her cigarette. She was drinking more lately. Not ideal for a mother with a five-year-old boy, and nine horses to tend to.

  Bored with the view, she turned around and looked south towards the coast. It was just visible, the sun reflecting off the water. It was a peaceful place and had gotten very quiet of late. Her closest neighbours had packed up the same day her husband had left for the capital. They said they wouldn’t be returning, and Anna could take anything she liked. She had scavenged all she could, turning her modest house into a make-shift storage unit. She hadn’t found anything to save Aron, but she doubled her canned food and water supply. When winter came, they would be critical.

  Finishing her cigarette, Anna walked over to her horse pen. The animals didn’t seem to think anything was wrong. Ignorant that the fate of the entire planet hung in the balance. Shaking her head, she looked back to the house, the front door was opening slowly. After a few more seconds of effort, little Thor popped outside in just his shoes and shorts.

  “Swim!” He barked at her, racing off southwards.

  Anna didn’t bother with a protest, she just dropped her head and started jogging after her son. When she reached the black sand beach, she saw that Thor had already hooked himself into the safety rope system that her husband had anchored on the beach, and was sprinting the last few metres to the water.

  Anna kicked off her shoes, pulled off her t-shirt and climbed out of her jeans, then attached the second safety harness around her chest, checked the line was still anchored firmly in the ground, then chased after her son. She needed to relax, and this wasn’t going to hurt.

  3-Maputo, Mozambique

  The hotel didn’t stay empty very long.

  Once the good aliens in orbit had fled, all the foreigners took planes out of the country. Those that were left that wanted to escape took ships, many down to South Africa, many up to Mombasa. Many left Maputo by car, heading away from the coast. Shakil wasn’t sure what motivated this flight. There were undoubtedly many who wanted to go home. To be near their loved ones when the trouble started, but he only realised the truth of why most dashed away from the seaside capital after the army had taken control.

  At fourteen, Shakil wasn’t versed in politics. He knew his valet duties back to front and was the prized pupil of the manager of the Polana Serena hotel, so when all the guests checked out in a hurry, he was surprised to see military jeeps pulling up outside the front of the hotel.

  Without a second thought, Shakil went about his duties and was at the front doors of the hotel on the morning Lieutenant Colonel Nyussi, commander of the countries only well trained and equipped special forces unit, strode into the hotel. Instructions came in fast and with a clear purpose. The elected government was being replaced by the military, to safeguard the people of Mozambique. Major General Enoque would assume control of all daily activities in Maputo, while subordinate units would ensure that supplies and resources were rationed carefully in the challenging times to come.

  The coup was almost a blessing after Lagos was destroyed. Panic had spread throughout the capital, and only the ever-present military was able to keep things from collapse. The ballroom of the Polana was turned into a private command centre for General Enoque where he exercised full control over the country. On occasion or when the need arose, he would dispatch Nyussi and his band of French-trained troops to quell unrest.

  For Shakil, the safest place he could be was the hotel. It was the home that he had never really had, and Nyussi, the head of the special forces unit, was now the father figure he had lost when he watched his father drown on a fishing trip as a young boy. It was a new world, but Shakil knew his role without hesitation, and in this new world, he discovered he had a talent that caught the eye of Enoque, his skill at ntchuva. The army loved the game as much as everyday citizens of Maputo, and soon Shakil was playing for the general in tournaments set up to test players skill, which is where he not only won the favour of the general but special treatment for himself.

  It might not have been what his father had envisioned for him, but Shakil was growing up in a world that was on the brink of pulling itself apart, all the while on the verge of being annihilated from above.

  4-The White House

  The White House was quiet. Like many other institutions in the nation’s capital, it had stopped being an effective instrument of power. People were scared, and after hearing the news of major cities around the world being destroyed with such ease, many had fled. The motorways out of DC were now clogged with broken down cars and other vehicles. The local emergency services had collapsed, and except for the army, not much was running efficiently in the capital.

  “So, tell me, Colonel, how does the situation out on the street look?” The Chief of Staff, Nicholas Beaudrot, asked.

  The Colonel, dressed in fatigues and a shoulder holster, examined the contents of his glass, swirling the brown liquid around while considering the question. Raising his head, he locked eyes with the president.

  “Mr President, the first and fourth battalions have set a perimeter from the 695 on the south, Second Street and Massachusetts on the east, K Street on the north, and the Potomac on
the west. We’ve blown the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge, the Arlington Memorial Bridge, Frederick Douglass Bridge, and the 11th Street Bridge. We’ve kept the 14th Street Bridge open, and a security perimeter around the Pentagon.” The Colonel replied.

  Zach North shook his head. “Dear God, man!” He took another sip of his drink. “Was that necessary?”

  The Colonel nodded. “Yes, Sir. Things outside the perimeter are deteriorating.”

  “Colonel Jesup, what is causing the break down out there?” President Bednarik asked.

  “No cops on the streets.” The Colonel replied. “And some of the trouble makers have guns.”

  “Guns don’t people! People people!”

  The interruption came from the National Security Advisor. Zach North had been in and out of a drunken state for the last few days by the time that pearl of wisdom came out.

  The Colonel looked at North, then back to the President. “Sir, we can hold what real-estate we’ve got, but our supplies won’t hold out forever.”

  “How long?” The President asked.

  “Two, three months, depending on factors.” The Colonel replied.

  “That’s all assuming we’re not destroyed from orbit tomorrow!” Zach shouted.

  The Colonel looked at the National Security Advisor, then over to the Chief of Staff, then the President. “Sir, My 3rd Infantry can hold the perimeter. We’ve got some Tier One assets available in reserve if needed, but considering what is going on in the world, you might consider relocating to a more secure location.”

  President Bednarik shook his head. “No. This is where I will remain, regardless of what comes.”