Blood of Patriots (Book 4 of The Humanity Unlimited Saga) Read online

  Blood of Patriots

  Terry Mixon

  Contents

  Blood of Patriots

  Also by Terry Mixon

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Also by Terry Mixon

  About Terry

  Blood of Patriots

  Book Four of The Humanity Unlimited Saga

  by

  Terry Mixon

  Harry and Jess thought they had enough on their plates: genetically altered humans bent on world domination, interstellar aliens that thought humans made decent slaves, and a government determined to arrest them for treason.

  Then the universe said, “Hold my beer.”

  With war brewing over the alien technology, a secret society determined to betray Earth, and a head-to-head fight with the aliens on the horizon, they gather both enemies and allies alike to fight for humanity.

  If their shaky alliance fails, humanity faces slavery or extermination. They must not fail.

  Blood of Patriots

  Copyright © 2019 by Terry Mixon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and/or retrieval systems, or dissemination of any electronic version, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review, and except where permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Yowling Cat Press ®

  Digital edition date: 11/7/2019

  Print ISBN: 978-1947376212

  Large Print ISBN: 978-1947376229

  Cover art - image copyrights as follows:

  DepositPhotos/innovari (Luca Oleastri)

  Donna Mixon

  Cover design and composition by Donna Mixon

  Print edition design and layout by Terry Mixon

  Audio edition performed and produced by Veronica Giguere

  Reach her at: [email protected]

  Also by Terry Mixon

  You can always find the most up to date listing of Terry’s titles on his Amazon Author Page.

  The Empire of Bones Saga

  Empire of Bones

  Veil of Shadows

  Command Decisions

  Ghosts of Empire

  Paying the Price

  Reconnaissance in Force

  Behind Enemy Lines

  The Terra Gambit

  Hidden Enemies

  Race to Terra

  Ruined Terra

  The Empire of Bones Saga Volume 1

  The Empire of Bones Saga Volume 2

  The Humanity Unlimited Saga

  Liberty Station

  Freedom Express

  Tree of Liberty

  Blood of Patriots

  The Fractured Republic Saga

  Storm Divers

  The Scorched Earth Saga

  Scorched Earth

  The Vigilante Series with Glynn Stewart

  Heart of Vengeance

  Oath of Vengeance

  Bound By Law

  Bound By Honor

  Bound By Blood

  Want to get updates from Terry about new books and other general nonsense going on in his life? He promises there will be cats. Go to TerryMixon.com/Mailing-List and sign up.

  Dedication

  This book would not be possible without the love and support of my beautiful wife. Donna, I love you more than life itself.

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank the folks that support me on Patreon. You got to read this book as I was writing it and that kept me working. You have my deepest thanks.

  In particular, I want to thank those patrons that supported me at the $10 level and above:

  Bryan Barnes

  Tracy Bodine

  Dale Thompson

  Next, I want to thank my Alpha Reader, Tom Stoecklein, for his comments on the manuscript. His insight always helps me see things more clearly.

  Finally, I want to thank my readers for putting up with me. You guys are great.

  1

  Jessica Cook stared at the stars twinkling far above the Washington, DC, rooftop and sighed. Those distant stars had once brought her such peace. When she was little, her father had taught her the constellations, and they’d wondered what amazing things awaited humanity out there in the depths of space.

  As it turned out, a lot of pain and violence.

  Those days had been some of the happiest of her life. She missed both her father and the wilds of rural Maine deeply. She also missed the innocence that she would never know again.

  The light pollution in Washington washed out the beautiful view and made seeing the dimmer stars impossible. Only the brightest stellar objects had a chance of shining through the photonic fog.

  She tugged her borrowed coat close and stepped over to the battered metal rail four stories above the dirty pavement. At four in the morning, the city was asleep. That would change in just a few hours.

  Even bundled up, the chill breeze still made her shiver, but it also brought hints of life from around her. The stink of the city still bothered her. They were nothing like what artificial structures in space smelled like. Give her wilderness or space, not crowded cities.

  The scent of baking bread from down the street made her mouth water and her stomach grumble. She could almost taste the light, flaky bread slathered in butter.

  Jess pivoted her gaze across the city. They weren’t in the best of neighborhoods, so the buildings were grimy and dingy. The streets below had a scattering of trash that never seemed to get picked up. Even up here, she got occasional whiffs of stench that fought to ruin the glorious scent of the bread. That was a true war of light verses dark there.

  The roof access door behind her opened with a low squeal of rusted metal. She turned just enough to see Harry Rogers step out into the dim light. He raised a hand in greeting and walked over to her.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked softly.

  She shook her head. “No. I suppose dying does that. I can’t stop thinking about what happened.”

  “Doctor Granger doesn’t think that you actually died.”

  She snorted. “You know that old saying about how close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades? Well, it’s appropriate for near-death experie
nces, too. I closed my eyes inside that machine knowing that I’d probably never open them again, and I can’t get that out of my head.”

  No matter how she looked now, she’d taken a fatal wound in the fight with the heavy-worlders at the abandoned base outside of Paris. They’d come pouring through the gate, catching everyone off guard.

  Armed with advanced Asharim weapons and strong enough to live and work in an environment with three times Earth’s gravity, they’d been almost unstoppable. The few guards that she’d had in the gate room couldn’t hold them back for long.

  In the fighting, someone had shot her in the gut and leg. Harry’s evil brother Nathan had snatched her up and carried her back through the gate to the Asharim warship they’d stolen from Harry and her.

  He’d placed her inside a strange machine and promised that he’d see her later. No doubt he’d intended to rape and torture her. She’d closed her eyes expecting never to open them again.

  Much to her surprise, not only had she woken up later, all signs of her injuries had been healed. It was as if she’d never been hurt in the first place.

  Hell, she was actually in better condition now. The scar on her stomach where they’d taken her appendix as a girl was gone. She was more than willing to bet that the appendix was back in there, too.

  Doctor Todd Granger had thoroughly examined her once the machine had finished. Two days had passed since her injury. In that time, the strange device had seemingly repaired every flaw in her body. Even her fillings were gone.

  As a member of the Families—the descendants of humans that fled the Asharim—Granger had access to technology far beyond what the Earth possessed. He could see the interior of her body in greater detail than the most advanced medical technology she’d ever seen.

  Her mind shied away from the details of what he’d told her. She couldn’t quite decide if the machine had healed her or rebuilt her. She felt like herself, but there was a niggling little doubt in the back of her mind about whether this was her original body or a creation that the machine had somehow transferred her mind into.

  And that troubled her far more than she cared to admit.

  She was also younger, physically. Everyone else could be excused from recognizing the change, but he had to have noticed. Not that she hadn’t kept herself in shape, but the change from her mid-thirties to her mid-twenties was impossible to ignore.

  Giving her the space to accept what had happened meant a lot, but she knew that they really didn’t have time for her to dither. The list of problems facing humanity was long, and far too many of them were immediate threats. So many of them, in fact, that she wasn’t quite sure how they could address the most dangerous ones while dealing with the rest of the crap.

  She firmly put her worries aside and turned to face her partner. “I suppose that once we have breakfast, we’ll need to figure out what to do next. What’s our biggest problem right now?”

  He scratched the stubble on his chin thoughtfully. “That’s a tough one. On general principles, I’d say it has to be the war between China and the United States. Thankfully, wiser heads have prevailed so far, and no one has used weapons of mass destruction yet. An exchange of nukes would be impossible to stop.

  “On the other hand, the heavy-worlders are a serious problem, too. Their access to advanced technology and their warlike nature means that they could come back for another pass at us. We don’t know where every gate is on Earth, and that could kill us.

  “My father managed to stop my mother and brother, though he paid the ultimate price in doing so. The portable nuke that Commander Krueger left on the Asharim ship destroyed the only link between the heavy-worlder planet and Earth, if the prisoners are to be believed.”

  A combined force of Harry’s troops, US military, and New Zealand military had defeated the heavy-worlders in the abandoned French base. Fewer than a dozen prisoners were taken, including the wounded heavy-worlder military leader.

  If he was to be believed, the gates on his home world were locked down. Harry wasn’t in such a trusting mood, and neither was she.

  “We don’t know any of the gate codes to get there and see what the situation is,” she said after a few seconds. “We have the gate code for the station there, but that’s for ships, of which we have none. And that’s even if the nuke didn’t take out the station when it destroyed the ship your parents were on.”

  He nodded. “True enough, though I bet Kevin McHugh could trigger the big gate manually. Then we could take small craft through and scout. If we can fit that into our busy schedule.”

  “I knew some of this, but I have to confess that I still haven’t really caught up with what’s happened over the last few days,” she admitted. “How are you holding up?”

  He smiled a little. “You mean about my father? It was a shock, but I never really liked the man. Still, it hurts a little, which leaves me conflicted. As for my mother and Nathan, I’d have shot them down myself if I could have. They were mad dogs.”

  She nodded and took his hand in hers. “Even so, this is going to be in your mind. If you need to talk about it, I’m here for you.”

  “I appreciate that, but we have plenty of time to sort out my emotions. The same is true for you, you know. You almost died. That’s going to mess with your head. So will the other physical changes.”

  Jess stared out over the city. “The others haven’t said anything, but I’ve lost about a decade of physical aging. None of the people here know me well enough to have seen it, or they just haven’t said anything yet. What happened to me?”

  Harry turned to face her. “You didn’t see my mother. She was physically the same age as you are now. That sarcophagus is the fountain of youth, it seems. We’ll want to keep that aspect of it quiet, at least until we understand it better.”

  “Probably even after,” she agreed. “That kind of thing could be a damned bombshell. We probably need to talk with Brenda Cabot and Doctor Granger about it. They have the best understanding of Asharim technology, after all.”

  “I wouldn’t count out others from guessing,” he said. “Karl Krueger saw my mother. He’ll have reported to his superiors about her and Nathan. He won’t know that was my mother, but Queen will probably guess.”

  Secretary of State Josh Queen was a weasel, but Jess had to admit that he was probably canny enough to catch that. “He’s got a lot on his plate, too. Maybe it’ll slip by.”

  Harry laughed. “When have we ever caught a break on something like that? If an author tried to slip that kind of thing by, his readers would complain about deus ex machina. Count on Queen figuring it out, even if he doesn’t make a point of telling us he did.”

  Then he sighed. “We should get inside and get some breakfast. Not only do we need to get all our ducks in a row, I have an early appointment with my father’s personal assistant. You’ll want to be there, too, now that you’re awake. I have no idea what the man wants to discuss, but it probably has something to do with my father’s estate.”

  She frowned. “I’m sure that has nothing to do with me. Your father’s will probably includes an inheritance for you, but I was just an employee.”

  “You were his partner,” Harry stressed. “He’ll have something in there for you.”

  She shook her head. “He had to have had that will drafted years ago. He wouldn’t have made any changes since we found all the Asharim stuff.”

  “Then you don’t know him nearly as well as you think. He’ll have considered everything we’ve found and made adjustments. He has a staff to handle the details and to remind him if something needs doing. Trust me when I say that this wouldn’t have slipped by him, even with everything else that was going on.”

  She rubbed her face. “I don’t want anything from him. It feels ghoulish. He was my boss for so long that I hadn’t even gotten used to him being my partner in Humanity Unlimited. Everything happened so fast.”

  Harry clapped a hand on her shoulder. “Look at the bright side. With you around, he pr
obably didn’t leave that much to me, so one of us is coming out of this in good shape.”

  Jess laughed. “You’re terrible. I hope he left everything to you. Hell, he probably did.”

  “There’s only one way to find out. Let’s go down and see if someone can go get some takeout breakfast. We don’t dare show our faces in DC.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You don’t have to worry about that anymore. With the gate downstairs, we can go to Freedom Express and get breakfast with everyone else.”

  He shook his head and grinned. “Nothing against the cooks there or at the Mars base, but space food isn’t nearly as good as what we can get down here on Earth. I’ll trust that Brenda and her people know where the good stuff is. Hell, the way Victor Holyfield eats, he has to know what to recommend.”

  Victor was a big man, she had to admit. The heavy-worlder genes he’d inherited made him short, squat, and extremely well muscled. He needed to eat like a weightlifter.

  “Let’s do that, then,” she said. “The sooner we get into motion, the sooner we can see about stopping World War III.”