“Maybe, maybe not,” Adam said.
“What the fuck does that mean?” the man asked. Adam remembered his name was Simpson — or something like that — and he was one of the Australians.
“The Juireans have been a victim of the Klin’s manipulations, just as we have. I think we have a good chance of convincing them that we’re not really their enemy-”
“Bullshit!” McCarthy said, replacing Simpson in the face-to-face standoff with Adam. Tobias and Riyad moved up to flank him.
“It’s okay, guys,” Adam said to them. “We’re just having a discussion.” He turned his attention back to McCarthy. “Whatever’s going to happen on Juir is a couple of months away. Until then, we have run of this ship and time to assess our situation.” He looked over at Simpson. “We may find a way to escape — I’m not opposed to that — but we can’t jump headlong into something until we have all the facts. Most of us have Special Forces training. We know better than to simply react to a situation.”
There was an awkward silence in the room, as McCarthy’s team looked to him for guidance. Eventually, the hulking, ginger-hair man smiled at Adam. “Fine, we’ll do it your way — for now. But get one thing straight, mate, you’re not in charge of me or my men.”
“Roger that, Mr. McCarthy, but we are on the same team. We have to work together.”
The space opened up some around the two men as people in the room began to relax. Adam held out his hand to McCarthy and smiled.
Nigel gripped the hand tightly, squeezing it hard in a macho act dominance. Adam matched his grip — and then reeled off a powerful left hook to McCarthy’s jaw.
McCarthy fell heavily to the deck, as tensions soared once more between the two opposing teams. Adam jumped back and raised his hands. “I owed him that!”
“Stand down!” McCarthy commanded from the floor, while propping himself on one elbow and massaging his jaw with his other hand. He grinned up at Adam. “Good form, Mr. Cain. I guess I did deserve that.” He rose to his feet. “But that’s the only free one you’ll ever get.”
McCarthy turned away, shoving his way through the throng surrounding him, heading off into the ship; his men followed like a gaggle of steroid-enhanced geese.
Adam looked over at Sherri and winked.
“Men,” was all she said.
McCarthy and his nine-man team claimed the ship’s forward compartments for their own, with McCarthy in the captain’s quarters and Carter Thomas in the XO’s. This area was reserved for the ship’s Juirean contingent and therefore offered more-spacious and better-appointed accommodations.
As the ranking officer onboard, Adam should have been able to claim the captain’s quarters, but he chose not to make an issue out of it. Instead, he and his people took the more modest quarters found mid-ships. Soon a tense equilibrium was established between the two camps. In fact, the less interaction Adam and his team had with Nigel’s, the better.
If McCarthy didn’t get them all blown to vapor over the next two months, Adam would have time to think. He needed that time, because a germ of an idea had begun to percolate in his mind….
For much of the first two weeks aboard the prison ship, Adam’s two alien companions, Kaylor and Jym, had done all they could to find a way around the Juirean’s safeguards, but with no luck. And once the convoy entered gravity wells for the journey to Juir, there wasn’t much more they could do except sit back and enjoy the ride.
Unfortunately, that was easier said than done, since all the prisoners knew only death awaited them at the journey’s end.
Being the eternal optimist, Adam chose to spend his time working on an endless array of alternative endings to their predicament, ones where they actually lived to tell their tale. But now the moment of truth was at hand. In a couple of hours they would be shuttling down to the planet Juir, the capital of the Expansion — and about as deep into enemy territory as one could get. At this particular time, Adam Cain, Captain, US Navy SEAL’s, wasn’t feeling his normal cocky self.
He shrugged. Que sera, sera, whatever will be will be.
Adam was momentarily distracted when Sherri Valentine emerged from the small grooming station in the cramped compartment they shared, her expression stern, her brow perpetually furrowed these days. Unlike Adam, who had faced his own mortality countless times before while in action, Sherri was just now coming to grips with hers. “Twenty-six years is just too short for it to end here, twenty-thousand light years from home and at the hands of a group of disgusting aliens,” she often mumbled to herself when she thought Adam couldn’t hear. The passing days had only deepened her depression.
But no matter how grim the situation, Adam wasn’t about to give up. However, as the days passed — and they drew ever-closer to Juir — he was quickly running out of options.
Adam’s team had free-reign of a series of nine compartments, including a small galley and comfort lounge. Inevitably, they intermingled often with McCarthy’s men, yet both groups kept their distance as much as possible, a wise move considering the tension between the two parties.
Even though McCarthy had been instrumental in helping his people escape from the Klin, Adam still didn’t trust the large Englishman. McCarthy had been the leader of the Human Converts — and the most-traitorous of them all — voluntarily siding with the aliens against his own race. He had orchestrated the abduction of hundreds, if not thousands, of people from the Earth, sending them into captivity on half a dozen worlds. Those who did not succumb to the Klin’s brainwashing propaganda and become willing accomplices of the Klin were used as slaves or sexual surrogates to breed a compliant force of Second-Generation Humans. The 2G’s were innocent dupes of the Klin, knowing no other truth other than what the Klin told them.
But McCarthy knew the truth — at least to a point. He knew the Klin needed the Humans to fight a war against the galaxy-ruling Juireans and to help exact a vengeance aimed at satisfying a centuries-long grudge. And in return for his help, McCarthy had been promised nothing less than the Earth herself. With the power of the Klin behind him, McCarthy would be installed as the supreme ruler of the planet, once the ultimate truth came out about the Klin’s involvement with Humanity. It took a certain type of personality to aspire to such heights, a kind of ego willing to sell out his entire race to achieve it.
This made Nigel McCarthy a psychopath of the first degree.
Adam could only imagine what a traumatic event it must have been for McCarthy when he learned he’d been played by the Klin, just like the rest of the Human race. He was simply another pawn in the Klin’s ultimate game of galactic chess, to be sacrificed when the time came. Adam would have given anything to have seen the look on McCarthy’s face when he also learned that another race — the Kracori — were to be the Klin’s true partners in galactic domination and not the Humans. It would have been priceless.
Instead of partnering with the Converts, the Klin were using mankind’s primitive savagery and quest for revenge to simply reduce the Juirean military forces to a more manageable level. Then the Klin and Kracori would move in to finish the job. After that, the Human race was expendable; the Klin couldn’t allow such a potent and potentially dangerous race to exist.
But the Humans had had other ideas. Seeing through the ruse long before the execution of the Klin’s final plan, the Humans had surprised the Juirean forces off Falor-Kapel and defeated their fleet in such a lopsided victory that it left the Human force almost fully intact and much too strong for the Klin-Kracori alliance to overcome.
In the aftermath of the battle, Adam had spent some time trying to figure out what the Klin’s next move might be. In one way the plan had succeeded; the Juirean forces had been decimated, at least in this part of the galaxy. But now it was the Humans who had become the dominant military force in the region, at least until the Juirean units regrouped.