Ambush
Bernard Wilkerson
Also by Bernard Wilkerson
The Worlds of the Dead series
Beaches of Brazil
Communion
Discovery
The Creation series
In the Beginning
The Hrwang Incursion
Earth: Book One
Episode 1: Defeat
Episode 2: Flight
Episode 3: Maneuvers
Episode 4: Insertion
Episode 5: Envelopment
The Hrwang Incursion
Book 1
Earth
Copyright © 2015 by Bernard Wilkerson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, with the exception of short quotes used in reviews, without permission from the author.
Requests for permission should be submitted to [email protected].
For information about the author, go to
www.bernardwilkerson.com
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Cover photo courtesy of NASA.
Episode 6
AMBUSH
61
A’dab Balawi raced home, aware that the time had come that Allah had prepared her for. In the house she smelled fresh baked bread. Allah had provided yet again.
She went to the back room she slept in alone, without greeting anyone, not even her sister who worked tending the kitchen fires. With little electricity in the city, most had reverted to the old ways.
It was better.
She locked the door to her room and dug out the device from where she had hidden it. She marveled that she had found it at the old man’s house, a sign from Allah that she had a greater work to do. She never questioned where the old man had gotten it from, or why she had been the first to find him dead. It was all in Allah’s hands.
She also pulled out the black abaya she had stolen, borrowed rather, from her sister. After four children, her sister had grown plump and her spare abaya would serve A’dab’s purposes. She set it on her bed next to the device.
She began to undress.
Fourth Captain First Reconnaissance smelled the fresh vegetables and fruit in the marketplace, wondering about the abundance of food in this desert land.
With the heavy cloud cover all summer and the extra rains, smart farmers in this region seeded crops that normally grew in colder climes. Shrewd farmers copied them. Stubborn farmers starved.
He negotiated payment with a man wearing flowing robes and headdress. Desert nomads on his world dressed similarly, but Fourth Captain knew none personally. The clothing still struck him as foreign. Alien. The man bickered, asking too much.
Fourth Captain looked around him, a little nervous about the many people gathered around his vehicle. Three soldiers stood guard outside. The remainder of his squad waited inside, wanting to get out, but obeying orders. His lieutenant and his chief sergeant also negotiated for food at other stalls. The planet grew critically short of food despite the abundance before his eyes, and the Hrwang would suffer as much from starvation as the inhabitants. One could not transport sufficient food for three hundred thousand soldiers across interstellar space. Once the soldiers had been awakened from hibernation, they had had to learn to forage on the planet.
In frustration, he finally agreed to the man’s terms, paying him in raw gold. Local currencies no longer had value, but certain metals always did. Gold was as prized on this world as it was on his, and the man he negotiated with had no idea that the Hrwang had liberated vast quantities of the precious metal from a different continent.
A woman in the dark, flowing robes the women wore in this region held a basket of fresh bread up to his soldiers, enticing them with its aroma. The men eagerly tried samples and Fourth Captain knew he would be forced to give her more of the gold for the bread, probably paying a thousand times its worth. He joked with himself that he should just shoot her and take the bread for free.
Watching her for a moment while the man loaded his food basket, it looked like she was trying to entice his men to buy more than just bread.
A’dab waited, wantonly flirting with the alien soldiers. Allah would forgive her the necessity. She saw the other soldier at a stall, saw the seller give the infidel a large basket of food in exchange for blood money, and saw him returning to the alien vehicle.
To delay until he arrived, she took a piece of the fresh bread and ate it suggestively, the looks in the three soldiers’ eyes letting her know they hungered after more than bread. Even dressed in an abaya and hijab, a woman could drive a man mad with lust. She smiled at them with her eyes as she took another bite, praying that Allah would forgive her wantoness. She had to do what she did to give the other soldier time to get close to them.
Her heart sank when a trader accosted the man and they began arguing. It would only be a matter of time before A’dab would be discovered. She decided she could wait no longer. She thought, with a moment’s sense of loss, of her sister and her sister’s children, of the young man at the university with dark eyes and smooth skin, and of the things she would never do in this life.
But Allah had called her to a greater purpose, and she would fulfill it.
“In God’s hands,” she whispered as she triggered the old man’s device.
The man who argued with him, who tried to take the basket of vegetables and fruit away from him, shielded Fourth Captain from the blast. Stunned and confused, lying on the ground, he pushed the man’s heavy corpse off himself, not even knowing how he came to be in the position he lay in or where he was. His head pounded and his ears didn’t work. He only heard silence.
He looked for the basket of food, but it was gone. He mourned the basket, mourned the fresh vegetables and fruit it contained, but his mourning made no sense. Something worse had happened.
He tried to sit up.
Arms pulled at him. Arms in black uniforms. His lieutenant and sergeant, farther away than he was from the blast, pulled at him, talking to him in his native tongue, not the Arabic they all tried to practice with each other. They pulled at him and finally picked him up, putting one of his arms over each of their shoulders and crossing their own arms to make a chair that he sat on. They hoisted him up.
He jostled up and down like a child being bounced by a father while they ran back to something.
To what?
A wreck of metal?
The twisted and burned thing in front of them resembled nothing Fourth Captain recognized. Fog cleared from his brain a little and he knew it was bad that the metal in front of him no longer looked familiar. It should look like something else.
It should look like a combat craft.
Soldiers.
There should have been soldiers standing in front of it.
Three soldiers and a woman selling bread.
They were gone, nothing left. Someone must have triggered an explosive device.
“Climb in, sir. We need to see if the AI is still functioning.”
Why? The craft, really a sort of flying armored vehicle capable of both atmospheric and space flight, would no longer fly again. Its heavy armor had prevented the explosive device from disintegrating it, but twisted metal was not aerodynamic. Burned seals could not hold oxygen in vacuum. He wanted to laugh at his men. The thing they put him inside was no longer a combat craft.
“It’s alive, sir.”
Fourth Captain closed his eyes and remembered nothing else until he woke up on a hospital bed.
62
