Alien Manifesto

Alien Manifesto

The Adventures of the
Human

Thomas Scott

Book I

By T.W. Embry

All Rights
Reserved

Published by

Crimson Cloak
Publishing

at Smashwords

First Edition

July 2014

All Rights
Reserved

This
book is a work of Fiction. Names, characters, events or locations
are fictitious or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
persons or events, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

This book is licensed for
private, individual entertainment only. The book contained herein
constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in
or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted
in any form by ANY means (electrical, mechanical, photographic,
audio recording or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses
permitted by the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use)
without the specific written permission of the author.

Cover by

Les Holmes

Cover Design by

Helen Rusinoff

Edited by

Veronica Castle

Acknowledgments

To the many whom I owe so much. Where
this tall tale started and to whom I owe a debt of gratitude is the
question I will try to answer here.

This tall tale started out as a short
story, a gift for my lovely and talented wife Linda on her
birthday. It was written on a camping trip, under a 500-year-old
Florida live oak tree. Whom I am deeply honored to call my oldest
friend. Its fate unsure this day, for man has designed a better way
to which the water should flow, killing us all with their ignorance
by rerouting Mother Natrure’s design of the Kissimmee
river.

To my lovely wife Linda, you are my
other half, for I could not survive without you. You are my
inspiration in things that really matter, my counsel, my biggest
fan and always and forever my love. My love, all I can say in my
defense is that the story grows taller on down the line. I beg your
indulgence once again.

A big thank you goes out to my
wonderful daughter Corri for her help when I was stuck with the
story line, for being a sounding board for new ideas. I am proud of
the woman you have become.

To my loving mother for her unwavering
and fiercely loyal support of anything I ever tried, in whose eyes
I can do no wrong.

To my Grandma Scott for passing on to
me her quiet determination and for teaching me the true meaning of
unconditional love, a lesson I hope I learned well and will always
try to live by. In life and as in the game of rook, I promise, I
will not go set until I have to!

To my Uncles Paul and Joe Scott for
their love of my tall tales, a hard-won hand of Rook and their
encouragement of my artistic endeavors.

To my brothers Paul and Don who will
love me even if I fail, again.

To my nephew Ian for all his work on
the cover art, thank you, I am and always will be eternally
grateful.

To my departed father, for telling me
I can’t do it. Too late, I realized that in his own way he was
pushing me onward to bigger things in the only way I could be
pushed successfully. For that, I am both grateful and sad that it
took me so long to see it. I do truly regret the fact that I cannot
tell him that I finally got it, and share this story with him. I
think of him often and I miss his counsel and certainly his dry
wit.

To my sister Cathy for her cheerful
and enthusiastic encouragement of my first attempts at artistic
expression, one that for once may do well. Thank you for keeping
our business out of any trouble so I could afford to take the time
to write this story.

To my extended family for all their
loving support, for cheering me on, for putting up with my absence
from many a family outing. Because of this support I could finally
finish this story, a long and difficult labor of love.

To my second father Jim, thank you for
your fiercely loyal support, for your unconditional love from which
I benefit so much.

To master Yoda for his words of
wisdom, “Do or do not, there is no try.”

Last, but certainly not least, my
gratitude to the feline masters and the canine fight masters for
being such good sports, you know who you are.

PART ONE

The Adventures of the Human,
Thomas Scott

My name is Thomas Dale Scott, chief
petty officer third class, U.S. Navy, retired. Former Navy S.E.A.L.
now soldier of fortune, minus the fortune. I was not retired either
by choice or by mandatory retirement. My career was over the minute
the hostilities first ended in Iraq then Afghanistan. Some pencil
pushing politician in D.C. decided that Tom Scott, and anyone like
me, was no longer necessary in the new Special Forces. I knew too
much and I had seen things those in power never wanted to become
public knowledge. I was a liability, turned out like the next day’s
garbage. Now if I came forward with what I knew, I would simply be
discredited, jailed under false pretenses like a common
criminal.

You see, I was with S.E.A.L. Team 4
for two tours in Iraq and then three tours in Afghanistan fighting
the Islamic radicals. I have twenty-one confirmed enemy kills to my
credit, all in hand to hand or small arms combat. I even have some
of those unconfirmed, long distance non-combatant kills. The ones I
won’t ever talk about and will try desperately to forget for the
rest of my life.

I was very good at my job. I have the
scars as proof; I’ve been shot twice, stabbed four times and hit
with grenade shrapnel in my left shoulder. Let’s not forget the
scars no one could see, I had plenty of those. Now, to the military
brass I am just a broken down has-been waiting for his shrinking
government pittance at the end of each month, discarded and
forgotten. If it weren’t for my meager disability pay, I might not
even exist at all.

In order to survive, I decided to try
my hand at a life of crime. I ran into a former comrade of mine a
while back who, like me, was out on his ear. He had been discharged
by the US Army Rangers without even a thank you from a grateful
nation for killing in the name of God and country. The both of us
were a modern version of crusading Christian knights of old. He
introduced me to some friends of his, all ex-Special Forces with no
other skills except teamwork, breaking into places, killing and
blowing shit up.

Trouble was, we were fresh out of
Johnny jihads here in the States. It would be a dishonorable thing
to kill my fellow Americans for a living. Not after I swore a
sacred oath on my personal honor, to protect them from all enemies,
foreign and domestic. Even from each other if needed.

We could start a revolution, and teach
those corrupt, greedy, self-serving politicians the true meaning of
honor and patriotism. Bring back a government that defends the
rights of the people, instead of dispensing them to us as if we
were unruly children, ignorant and unable to think for ourselves.
This was, however, not my idea of a good career choice. Since
killing and blowing shit up was out, this limited our skill set to
a kind of specialized teamwork, one not much in legal demand. I
figured I might as well put all that expensive training to good use
now that Uncle Sam could care less about me, or my
future.

I have no family; the sisters at the
Good Shepherd Home for Boys orphanage in Miami raised me. I had
bright-red hair as a kid and a temper to match. I learned to fight
bigger opponents early on, much to the anger and dismay of the good
Sisters, who ran the orphanage. To escape, I went straight into the
military on my eighteenth birthday. It was either join the
military, or a short life of crime followed by lots of jail
time.

So why not a life of crime
now that I have the skills, while I am still young enough to use
them? It might be fun. Beats the hell out of being broke, homeless
and despised like so many other of my older fellow veterans.
I missed the sound of nightly gunfire and the
camaraderie
.
I
especially missed the helicopter rides in the dark,
I thought to myself
.
What I did not know was that
tonight my whole life was about to take an abrupt turn into the
“holy shit I can’t believe this is happening to me”
direction.

My newfound associates were staging a
raid on a high security warehouse, just outside of the port of
Miami security perimeter. The plan was to steal a shipment of
recycled money scheduled to be withdrawn from circulation and
replaced with new. Having drawn the short straw and as the group’s
newest member, it was my job to stand guard over the team’s
secondary escape route. Never mind that I had more combat
experience than any one of my newfound friends. It didn’t matter; I
was the FNG so I got the shit detail.

It began when something moved into the
corner of my vision, silent like a ghost from my imagination,
snapping me to full alert. I turned my head, instinctively
scanning, and saw a black silhouette on the nearby street, silent,
stopped, waiting. The incoming threat, if that is what I saw, was
outlined faintly in the pallid flickering of the only working
streetlight left in this deserted section of the wharf district.
Probably some lost biker, getting directions from his GPS. No need
to alert the others, not yet, they would just think I was a nervous
rookie. They would be wrong because I was as far from a rookie as
any living, breathing ex-S.E.A.L. can be.

We were in the outskirts of Miami. I
was guarding a dock jutting out into Biscayne Bay, near the inlet
and the intercoastal waterway. It was hot, gusty and insufferably
humid as only it can be in south Florida at night. My black
fatigues were damp with sweat and sticking to my back. It was
pitch-black, not even the full moon shone through the thick, black
clouds. It would rain again soon, lightning was flashing in warning
of another oncoming thunderhead. Perfect conditions for a heist; no
one would venture out voluntarily in this weather.

My teammates had fanned out, moving
into attack position, headed for the warehouse, close by, yet out
of sight. We intended to escape down the inter-coastal with our
loot by the speedboat I was guarding, should the need arise. Our
backup plan, in case an alarm was raised and the land route was
blocked by the cops.

The silhouette suddenly
vanished from the flickering light, just as silently as it had
emerged from the darkness. A brief glimpse of a helmeted figure on
what looked like a motorcycle was all I had seen, in the
streetlight’s pitiful attempt at illuminating the sticky darkness.
Whoever it was turned toward me, moving closer, raising my alert
level to high.
Was it a cop on a
motorcycle? No, it was moving too fast, too quiet!

Instinctively I retreated
deeper into the shadows, trying to melt into the darkness. I
reached for the com-link to warn the others. My gut told me it was
too late
.
Damn
it!
I am better than this.
I had been made by whoever was riding that
bike.

He must have night vision, which ruled
out the local cops. This spelled a different kind of trouble.
Closer the bike came, straight at me now, silently, deliberately,
without slowing. Then, braking suddenly, he stopped about one
hundred feet directly in front of me, smashing all of my remaining
hopes of escape.

With my back to the water,
the only place to retreat was down the dock; I was trapped. I could
attempt to escape into the shallow water around the dock,
abandoning the speedboat and my teammates. It meant a long swim in
the dark. It wouldn’t be my first long, dark swim. That would be my
emergency plan. I would make my stand here; there was only one of
them.
If it wasn’t the cops, then who? And
why?

I tensed for the biker’s move, my
fighting knife drawn in my left hand, held low along my leg. It
would have to be a quiet kill. Suddenly a flash of very bright
light stunned my eyes, completely disorienting me. In those couple
of seconds my warning to my teammates went unsent, forgotten in the
changing of the situation.

Suddenly the bike was much closer than
it had been. As my eyes struggled to regain focus, I heard a deep
almost mechanical male voice hiss in perfect English, “Tom, I have
been watching you for quite sssome time, my boy, and I must sssay I
am very impressssed.”