fee at the tailor shop. He had them make ten pair of jeans, several white and olive-colored t-shirts, a couple of polo-style shirts, two light jackets and two pair of rubber-soled boots. As he figured, even though he had to live in an alien-dominated universe, he didn’t have to dress like one!
As he lie on the couch, Adam didn’t close his eyes. Instead, his gaze focused on the bulkhead at the end of the couch.
The wall was covered with various pieces of paper and plastic, each holding a clue of some kind as to the location of Earth or the Klin hiding place in the Fringe. For the past nine months, when he wasn’t off exterminating some smelly alien creature, Adam could be found scouring the Library or following other leads trying to track down the location of his homeworld. It was a nearly impossible task, and yet without even this activity and its thin sliver of hope, Adam Cain would have long ago placed his precious MK-47 to his own head and pulled the trigger…
Since being abducted nearly nine months before, Adam Cain had had a birthday. He was now 27, and as he lie on the couch, he began to reflect on his recent past — as well as his prospects for the future.
In the blink of an eye, Petty Officer 2 ^ nd Class Adam Cain, U.S. Navy, was at one moment on a mission in the Hindu Kush Mountains separating Afghanistan from Pakistan, and the next he was waking up in a hibernation pod aboard a deserted Klin starship. That was where he had first made contact with Kaylor Linn Todd, the gruff, yet experienced interstellar mule-driver who had rescued him from certain death at the hands of the Fringe Pirates.
Along with his co-pilot Jym, the two aliens had offered to help Adam find his way back to Earth, a mysterious planet in its own right, located somewhere in the unexplored Far Arm of the galaxy. However, as Kaylor salvaged the Klin ship, he removed the ship’s computer core — a crucial piece of information he withheld from Adam — and hid it in an asteroid belt in the Nimorian system. The computer core contained not only the location of Earth, but also the secret location of the Klin, a race of beings who the galaxy-ruling Juireans believed they had exterminated 4,000 years before. Once the Juireans had learned of the computer core’s existence, they had sent all the power their empire could muster at the two mule-drivers and Adam, the sole survivor from the Klin ship after its attack by the Fringe Pirates.
In the course of tracking down the core and avoiding the Juireans, Adam had met up with the leader of the Fringe Pirates, the only other Human he had encountered since leaving Earth. His name was Riyad Tarazi, a former Islamic terrorist, who himself had been abducted six years earlier. Tarazi provided a wealth of knowledge regarding this strange, new reality Adam found himself in, having not only survived for all those years, but actually rising to the top of the pirate hierarchy in the process.
It had been Riyad who had told Adam a startling truth, that when compared to the capabilities of the vast majority of aliens, Humans were about as close to supermen as they came. As he explained, Humans combined the traits of quickness, strength, coordination and intelligence better than any other creature he’d yet encountered. That was the reason Riyad had been able to challenge the other pirate captains for their positions, until he finally stood at the pinnacle of their ranks.
Adam had experienced this so-called superiority himself, first in a gunfight with the lizard-like Rigorians, and then in his escape from a jail cell in the Nimorian city of Gildemont. Using his superior strength in the lighter-gravity world, Adam had indeed felt like Superman, nearly able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and the like.
Yet this superman complex was easily explainable.
As the months went by, Adam learned that nearly all the planets in the Fringe had lighter gravity than Earth, making him appear stronger than any of the natives. He also found that Human bone structure was thicker and stronger than that of the various alien races in the region. This gave him added toughness and durability. And his quickness and coordination simply came from his training as a Navy SEAL, plus his natural athletic ability.
Yes, to others he may appear to possess super-powers. But as Adam Cain finally began to drift off to sleep, feeling the aches and pains from his encounter with Bundnet and his mechanical suit, he knew his mortality was very real and his super-abilities simply a product of fate. Still, he had no qualms with using them to better his fortunes…
As always, his sleep was fitful and filled with painful visions. His reality had been unexpectedly ripped away, taking from him his beautiful young wife Maria and their three-year-old daughter, Cassie. His disappearance, while on a clandestine mission in Afghanistan, would have brought about a heart-wrenching uncertainty to his family and friends. After awhile, the Navy would have closed the file on him, declaring him officially MIA. Of course by this time, the action would have been more symbolic than functional, since long before this all who knew him would have long ago accepted the fact of his death.
It was for this reason that Adam so strongly despised aliens. He had not asked for any of this to happen. He had not volunteered to be an astronaut and travel the stars. Instead, he led a simple, happy life back on Earth that he was perfectly content with. But that had all been taken from him.
By aliens.
Adam had spent many days, if not months, conflicted as to his ultimate fate. If he couldn’t return home to his wife and kids, then what was the reason for going on? He was utterly alone, more alone than any Human on Earth could possibly imagine.
And yet there was hope. His abductors, the Klin, had been to Earth — and they knew where it was located. Plus there was Riyad, another Human set adrift in this alien universe. That meant there were probably other Humans wandering the galaxy, just as lost and desperate as he. It was this knowledge that kept him going day to day.
In fact, there had been seventy-nine other Humans on the Klin ship with him, but they had all been killed by the Klin rather than have them fall into the hands of the Fringe Pirates. Riyad had logically surmised that there must have been hundreds of such trips made by the Klin that had successfully navigated through The Void unmolested, shuttling abducted Humans from Earth to some secret location. The pirate had further advanced the theory that the purpose for abducting so many Humans must have been so the Klin could build a Human army capable of defeating their mortal enemy — the Juireans. Why else would their race be so important to the Klin?
It all made sense, but how the Klin expected a singular, non-spacefaring race like the Humans to defeat a galaxy-wide empire encompassing 10,000 systems, was way beyond Adam’s limited comprehension. Still, his existence in this strange universe — as well as Riyad’s — meant that something was going on.
In fact, just before the nuclear bomb on the Klin ship had detonated, killing the Juirean Overlord, Counselor Deslor and Riyad, the technicians had been able to activate the Klin computer core. In the files, information had been revealed about the Humans that had actually scared the Juireans, members of the mightiest race of beings in the galaxy! For a moment there, just before Riyad had taken the Juirean Overlord hostage, the two Juireans had expressed more fear of the Humans than they did for their archenemy, the Klin.
Adam and his two alien companions had been fortunate to escape the Klin ship when they did, and Adam had seen his first nuclear explosion in space. But before they escaped, Adam had heard a word — Annan — that had profoundly affected the Juireans. It had to be important.
In his research, it wasn’t too difficult to find numerous references to the word Annan, the most-common of which was to a now-extinct, plant-like animal from Klinmon, the homeworld of the Klin. The creature had been quite remarkable. It was a small animal that would dig a shallow burrow in the ground and then separate into four or five equal parts, each with its own brain and higher body functions. Once separated, the Annan would send electronic signals through the ground for up to half-kilometer away, signals which carried the full memory of each individual part of the animal. Each separate segment of the creature would then absorb these signals and integrate the memories into its own existence. This way, the creature could survive the death of any of its separate parts, with fully intact memories and abilities. Only destroying all the sections could one completely kill the creature. Fortunately, Annan were herbivores, and therefore no threat to the other creatures around them, otherwise they would have been quite formidable.
So why would the Juireans have such a reaction to a harmless, extinct animal? Adam did not know, but his research had also produced other references. Annan also meant the strategy of diversifying your base of command, making it harder to be completely defeated should one of your bases be destroyed. Adam was no idiot, so he reasoned that the surviving Klin must have adopted an Annan strategy for survival after the attack by the Juireans on their homeworld. There would be no single Klin hiding place, but rather numerous ones, and unless the Juireans could locate and destroy all of them, the Klin would remain an on-going threat to them.
Adam wasn’t out to defeat the Klin; all he wanted was their knowledge, and possibly a little revenge. As far as he knew, the Klin were the only creatures in this part of the galaxy who knew the location of Earth. So rather
