LINCOLN ISLAND
By Richard Johnson
Copyright December 2011 Richard Johnson
ISBN 9781476181790
INTRODUCTION
A lot of what you see in the movies is real, it just isn’t accurate. _Jaws_ was based on a series of real shark attacks on the East Coast of the US. Benchley read about the situation, changed the shark into a megalodon and wrote a best seller that was made into a really scary movie. The _Amityville House_ was based on a real haunted house. Hollywood just added a lot of FX to make it scarier. _Battlestar Galactica_ was based on the Reptoid-Cylons from.. wherever they are, who made a robot army. They did it too well and the Robot-Cylons revolted and fought a war with the Reptoid-Cylons. But the Reptoid-Cylons also abducted a bunch of humans from Earth as slaves. Some revolted but lost their War of Independence. A lot of the survivors took off to the Pleiades where they, now called Lyrans, set up the 12 Colonies and started preparing for the final war against the Reptoids.. assuming the Reptoids win the Cylon War. Hell, I even heard that _Jurassic Park_ is based on some dinosaur survivals they found on that island that some company tried to clone. A lot of movies are like that.
Take _The Mysterious Island_. The movie isn’t much like the Novel by Verne, but it is more accurate. Basically, Lincoln Island (aka Mysterious Island) does exist. We even have a map of the place that is pretty accurate which means that Verne knew the truth, he just ignored a lot of the truth to sell books.
How do I know about this? My name is Ron Krappa, pronounced ‘crap’ so no jokes, and I’m an American.. or was an American. I’m not certain anymore. Something about a foreigner can enlist in the US military (which a lot do as it’s a fast-track to citizenship) but if an American enlists in the French Foreign Legion or any other foreign military, they loose their citizenship. Not that it matters much.
But I’m a merc. That means I hire out to foreign governments and fight their wars for them. Even the US hires mercs, they just don’t advertise it. Today I work for the Vartanians who are an alien race contracted by another alien race to secretly protect Earth from the Cylons, both of them. I won’t go into who hired them, but you’d be surprised to learn that humanity is owned by aliens. They just can’t decide who has the best claim. The Cylons discovered Earth some 50 million years ago and have been abducting humans ever since for slave labor. They’ve been gone a few thousand years or more, busy with the Cylon War. But they intend to return and reclaim the Earth as their property.
The Lyrans abduct humans because they need more DNA than was in the first abductions. Since Lyrans are essentially Cro-Magnon, they have no problems breeding with us and see us, at best, as allies in the future war or, at worst, sub-humans useful as slaves or breeders. The Cro-Mags left on Earth interbred with Neanderthals which is, in the eyes of the Lyrans, like humans breeding with chimps.
The Draconians are, Like the Lyrans, descended from Earth Humans and use Earth as a way to expand their population, fast! It seems that they needed to colonize a bunch of planets on their frontier, fast, to stop the Shitai from getting there first, then invading the Commonwealth. So they take humans, change them and dump them on the Frontier to establish some legal claim to those worlds.
Politics! Being a grunt is easier.
So, how did I get involved with all this?
Once I was a cop. I was a special officer in the DEA sent to Colombia to put down a drug cartel. It’s not as easy as it sounds. In the States, the big Dealers have so much political power we can’t touch them. Hell! Half the politicians in Congress were put there with drug money.
Now in Columbia, add to that the fact that the Drug lords have a better military than the government and you see how difficult it is to win. Like Vietnam, we cannot win. All we can do is to make it so expensive to grow and transport drugs that the Lords give up. But stop it, impossible.
One day, I was in the jungle about to hit a Drug Lord when things went bad. He had the local governor in his pocket so was waiting for us and we lost a lot of good men in that fight. Watching your buddies get shot by some skuzzy drug lord was bad enough, what happened later was worse! Nightmare worse. The kind of thing that makes Hollywood clean it up for the screen.
We had lost about half our people, mostly Colombian soldiers, to the drug dealers and when the sun set, the Vampires hit us. I guess they smelled the blood and I lived only because of the Vartanians. It seems that there are Vampires and Zombies on Earth. Real ones. The Vartanians know where they come from but since they don’t talk to any government, they keep their secrets. The story is that Drakonis hires the Vartanians to protect Earth from the Cylons and Lyrans but they also pay the Vartanainas to eliminate vampires and zombies… secretly. None of the aliens want people asking too many questions because it’s easier to sneak around and take people if no one believes you exist. Like some of the secret police teams that not even Congress knows about.
It seems that there was an outbreak of zombies in Colombia and the Vartanians sent in a Zed-Team to eliminate them. No big deal as the Zed-Teams are very good at their job. Hell! That zombie outbreak in Colorado a few years ago, the Zeds were in, cleaned the town and got out before we knew there WAS an outbreak.
The problem here is that the Zeds were being controlled by a Vamp. How, I don’t know. Not my job and when you deal with the Vartanians, never call them varts, trust me on this, the less you know the better off you are. So the Zed-Team called in Lord Obrien, the biggest military leader in this part of the Galaxy. If Lord Obrien decides to turn Earth into an asteroid belt, he does it and no one complains. He is that powerful. Thing is, Lord Obrien likes to get his feet wet occasionally. He says that it keeps him in touch with the troops. Imagine, the guy who runs entire interstellar wars that turn entire planets into dust likes to live with the grunts. That’s like the president picking up a rifle and hitting Omaha Beach with the troops. But Lord Obrien is an alien, I think. It’s complicated. First time I saw him, he was human and male, the next time I saw him, he was a woman, another time he had a tail (NEVER call him a monkey!). Drakonians are like that. They don’t really see species and gender as fixed. Must make their marriages …. Interesting. Rul;e One! You cannot be anything less than polite when you deal with the Draconians. They tend to execute you for lack-of-manners and stick your still living head on a pike while your body bleeds to death. They’ll happily nuke a planet into radioactive dust, but smile and be polite as they do so.
It seems that Lord Obrien and that Zed Team worked together in Iraq and Ethiopia and one of the Zed-Docs wanted him so she had her boobs and eyes changed to attract the guy. Obrien doesn’t like Vamps any more than he likes cops so jumped in and was about to hit the vamp stronghold when the vamps hit us. A day earlier and my team would still be alive. I’m alive only because the Vamps hit the Drug Lord first. I think Obrien let them do that but can’t prove it so I let it go. It’s safer that way.
So here I am, watching the vamps eat my buddies and the Zed-Team arrives with Obrien in the nick of time… almost, and I live. Barely.
The Zed-Team patches us all up, you have to be a doctor to get anywhere on those teams and MD’s carry rifles just like anyone else. The rest of the team is sent home, I ask to stay.
I don’t know why. Maybe I just got tired of spending a year on a case and having the guy walk because he bought a judge or the DA. Maybe I got tired of fighting a loosing battle that I knew we couldn’t win. Maybe I just wanted to take a vacation. I just got off that truck and asked to sign up.
I didn’t qualify to be a Zed-Team, lacking a degree in medicine or viral biology or such, and I had enough of vampires after watching them rip my buddies apart. And I wasn’t trustworthy enoug
h to be an Agent. So I became a grunt. In a dozen years, I may transfer, the Vartanians are like that, they go slow and NOONE makes the fast-track!
My first war was .. let’s say it was classified and leave it at that. My second was WW-II. When you can travel across dozens of thousands of light years, time travel is no problem. So I carried a rifle and fought alongside the Greeks for about three months until they ran out of money and the Vartanians left, me with them. Then I fought on some planet so far from Earth I couldn’t recognize the stars. That was weird! Now I am here. Back on Earth, back in the 21st century, back dealing with people who breathe the same air I can.