I still lay in the hospital bed wondering what to do next, and considering various ploys to find more data when another memory of another world came back to me. It had followed that world where I got shot for being a square peg in a very round hole.

===============================================

I woke laying in a street, and people in suits and dresses stepped around me, averting their eyes not with judgement but with pity. Maybe they thought I was a drunk, and instead of cursing me, they wished to help me if only they knew how. Or something…

The street was paved in bricks, and two story tall buildings with an occasional three-story one to break the monotony marched up both sides of the street past the plenteous sidewalks.

I got up, and was about to consider this a pleasant world when I heard the chatter of machine-gun fire. A sandbag fort atop the Ace’s Hardware store was spitting tracers into the sky at something that came down awful fast.

Lights flashed underneath the skyfalling dot, and then the Hardware blew–inward, and then outward. Glass shards knifed across the street slashing and dismembering.

I saw one five foot long and six inch wide piece of glass fly by my head, and bury itself in a guy ten feet away from me.

The casualties were surprisingly light considering that the “lights” must have been a bomb, but everyone within ten feet of the Hardware was paste, and as many as twenty others had serious wounds.

My skills in life-saving were not that great. After all, I was a verser, that which killed me merely sent me on to a new and probably more friendly world. But I knew a few things, and started applying pressure and enlisting even more clueless help than mine to hold the pressure bandages on.

An hour later, with the blood of a braver man than I running down my arm, the last of the seriously injured were bundled off to a local hospital.

I asked the brave man what was going on, and he stared at me in wonder and worry as I tried to guess the best way to splint his arm without dislodging the bandages on his forearm. He gave me a weird look, and so I evasively said he could consider it as a check on whether he was going into shock.

He took the red herring, and ran with it. The enemy attacking America, and the whole world were aliens from another star system. They had all sorts of advanced weapons, like “air-to-ground missiles” and computers small enough to hold in your hand, and the American hi-tech propeller planes were no match for the alien landspace fighters or even their transport shuttles.

I asked what their name was, and he shrugged, and then winced as he got up off the ground. No one knew. They came busting into the solar system without a by-your-leave, and they started attacking only pausing to call for the immediate and unconditional surrender of all humans.

They were called Jaxons because they came from a star a very long way away, and the named star closest to their flight path was a star named for Andrew Jackson, so Jaxons they became. The powerful telescope at Mount Palomar Observatory had picked up their drive tail in earlier pictures which seemed to support the theory that they had crossed ten thousand lightyears in six months. This was not good news to me since I had some idea of the tech base needed to mount such an invasion.

Frankly, I was surprised that the humans were not already enslaved.

I put that thought from me as I looked at the street with its dead bodies, and a fury bubbled in me. We would get these aliens, and teach them a lesson.

The brave man, “call me Mr. East” liked my words, and asked me for my nickname since members of the Resistance went by secret names. “Ghost” I replied thinking back so many worlds to my execution of Bethleham.

He showed me to a cell of fighters hiding in a basement under a school, and I frowned a bit, and moved on. The group had a hard-edge and they were full of men willing to die for their cause, or so they said.

Its my experience that it is always that way. Talking is easier than action, so more talking than action gets done. Its probably not just human nature, its probably true for all bipeds.

Still, looking at them, I found some truly hard men, and I found some organizers who had plans. It took me over a week, and several attacks on Jaxon outposts in the city with my hunting rifle, but I was soon acclaimed as a Hero of the Human Race by this small subset of it.

I was not so certain because none of the Jaxon had bothered to fire back at me. And I was quite sure, that I had not killed any of the orange-skinned humanoids with their freakish double pair of arms. They had a manipulator set and a brute force set of arms.

Talking to the organizers, I mentioned this difficulty, and they nodded. One produced a Jaxon pulsar pistol, and handed it to me saying that I had proven myself.

It took me several hours to go from “dangerous” to myself to “pretty poor shot”. The gun was designed for someone with incredible precision of touch and movement. It was a manipulator arm weapon.

Later I saw Jaxon carrying two guns. One a pulsar pistol, and the other a plasma cannon in their brute force arms.

I asked Mr. East how they got the gun, and he grinned. It seemed that the Resistance had offered to meet the Jaxon, and the aliens had foolishly agreed. Result was one dead Jaxon and some good weapons.

Wrinkling up my face, I went upstairs, and saw that school was in session. Mr. East was behind me. We ghosted through the hallways, until I got to a quiet spot.

Then I interrogated East.

“I thought the school was out of session.”

“They started back a week ago.”

I cursed myself for being so blind and oblivious. We needed to get out of here. For all I knew, the Jaxon could have a tracer in their gun, and a landspace fighter could be targetting the school right now.

Mentioning this worry to East got me a clap on the shoulder. East was not worried. The Jaxon did not attack schools, or churches, or even historic landmarks unless they absolutely had to. That Ace Hardware store had been picked for being a historic preservation site, and people had been surprised at the attack. Still, East averred, it worked out well. They had a lot of new recruits after the atrocity.

Then the first grade teacher and her class started to walk out of their classroom, and I saw up close in the midst of them, my first Jaxon. He was ugly. Orange, scaly skin which flaked in patches, and orcish teeth extending behind the jawline. Something about him, his arrogance, his easy way moved me to fury, and I felt myself pulling up the pulsar pistol. Then I stopped, as I saw him bend over and start handing out the matchbox sized Jaxon version of the XBox with a holoscreen out to the kids, along with a gene therapy that would stop ear infection, and a polio vaccine, and of course, candy.

I stayed my hand, and backed up into an empty classroom as the strangely gingery smelling alien and the class of eager first-graders and their charming teacher passed by.

“Why stop? Do it. Are you scared?” Mr. East asked, and I turned to him, and saw that he truly did not understand. All he saw was an alien that had to be destroyed no matter the cost.

I shook my head which was spinning with worries,and that allowed East to jump me. We struggled for the pulsar pistol, and it went off, into my chest.

Slumping down against the concrete block wall, I prayed because I had done my best, and the dart had finished me. Such a little weapon, and I had a gigantic hole in my chest. Most of my ribs were not connected anymore, and I think one of my lungs was vaporized, but frankly, in the condition I was I could not muster the energy to look.

East went to the door to be met by the alien who used no weapon but his natural claws, and skill. It looked like a gangly armed Bruce Lee with the strength of Schwarzanegger stomping on a ten-year old. East was on the ground and trussed within twenty seconds.

“Assasin.” The Jaxon hissed at us both. It turned toward me, and smiled cruelly. “You shall live human. We shall fix you up so that you may be executed.”

With that heart-warming news, I passed out.

I woke in a cell with a black-and-white television, Saturday Morning Post magazines, and a football, and a Bible, a Talmud, the Koran, and at the bottom of the stack, the Wall Street Journal. So I was set if I worshipped Jesus, or just Yahweh, Allah, or Mammon.

I read some, watched some, prayed a bit, and considered the events of the last week. There was little question in my mind. We should not have been basing ourselves under a school, and banking on the decency of the Jaxon. It was not a safe bet, and besides, it was not right.

Smacking myself on the head for being so stupid as to not notice it, I began to seek refuge in prayer and tossing the football up and down repetively.

About an hour later, a Jaxon, possibly the same one, they all looked equally hideous to me, came down the corridor with several guards, and put a chair down outside my jail cell, and he sat down in it.

I should mention that I was held in the police station which Jaxon invaders had captured in the last week. They held most of the social centers in small dots all over the nation. It seemed random to most, but I could just barely see a pattern to it. This pattern made actions against the Jaxon subtly difficult. The best escape routes always seemed to be cut off before we planned an attack on any point.

“Greetings, human.”

“Why do you have the guards? To intimidate me? Not going to work. And I know you can best me hand to hand.”

The interrogator looked down at his wrist, and made a hiss of surprise I think.

“You do not lie human. You are barely afraid. I am certain if I were in your feet coverings I would be more so. We have them because you humans expect us to have them. But since there is no need, they can go back to more productive labor.”

The guards left with some relief I think at having skated out of that boring duty.

“So human, what do you have to say for yourself?”

“I’m a member of the Resistance, and I will die before I stop trying to rid this planet of aliens. Do your worst.”

“Indeed we shall. Tell me human, are you fond of using your young as shields in war?” He hissed his amused contempt at me, and I sputtered out that that was a mistake.

His nose flattened, and he said.

“Mistake for you if the machine speaks true, but not for your people.”

I started cursing him, and inviting him to come join me in the cell, and trying to reach through the bars to wring his pebbly neck. He stepped out of range, nodded, and walked away.

The next day, he came, and took me from my cell. We took a tour around the town, and then the region. First by jetcopter, and then by landspace fighter. Over and over he pointed out sites where, the Resistance hid themselves in churches and graveyards, and “protected sites”.

“This is our charge against your Resistance. They break their own laws of war. If they do not stop, we shall visit enormous destruction. We are in our rights to destroy these sites, but we are not yet angry.”

“Not angry?” I said turning to the sickening countenance of my pilot. Considering they had come ten thousand lightyears to wage agressive war and conquer our world, that seemed a lie to me.

“Yes.” And the fighter landed while he showed me pictures of other wars against other species who had angered the Jaxon. Spacestations swallowed by gravitational vortexes, precision laser strikes with terrawatt level lasers on bases, cities turned into a fine brown powder, and worse he showed me.

“These people, the Tehthani refused to be peaceful. They claimed only peace would come when we were removed from their reality.”

He showed me a picture of the Tehthani home system being engulfed by a supernova.

“We removed ourselves from their reality.”

“Why us?”

“Humans are an agressive, and expansionistic species. You are much more innately capable than the Tehthani. In a very few centuries, you would be knocking on our door. We could deal with you then with all the consequent risks of hi-tech interstellar war, or we could mould and shape you now while you are still in your infancy so that the better aspects of your species retain control over the worst aspects. We saw your broadcasts, and it was clear that the better aspects needed help. Also on a purely kindly basis, we intend to stop this tendency of yours toward the mass murder of certan groups of your people.”

“How is that different than your xenocide of the Tehthani?”

The Jaxon stared at me hard for a long moment, and for the first time I was afraid of him.

“Its different, and you know it.” He grated out.

Then he tried to smile, and he relaxed with startling quickness.

“Time to leave.”

“Back to the jail cell?”

“No, time for you to leave.”

He kicked me out, and set me free. I was back on the streets of my town near the Ace Hardware which was being meticulously rebuilt minus the machine gun on the roof.

Thing is I figured I was not really free. There were so many ways they could keep track of me. Miniature bugs, and sattellites were the two I was familiar with.

So I wandered aimlessly. Unfortunately, the other Resistance members were not so up on the capbabilities of hi-tech. They thought a radio was hi-tech.

A car pulled up, and I got dragged off the street to a party. Mr. East was already there, and he and I were feted. Evidently, the Resistance had threatened to attack the dam above town, and flood the whole town unless we were released. They were jubilant, and I figured it was a matter of moments before the commandoes rolled into the room.

Upstairs I could hear a choir singing, and I tried to make for the door to avoid a double tragedy, but East caught my arm, and whispered to me.

“Not so fast, you gutless wonder.” He pulled me with a smile on his face to the podium to adress the crowd.

“Upstairs, the Fourth Lutheran protects us with their prayers, and” He sneered. “Their bodies. The Jaxon lack the stomach for true war. We’ve proved it. Now we shall take it to them, and take their stuff, and drive them off the planet, and then chase them down to their rathole and burn them out.” Wild cheers by drunken men met this oration.

“Yes, we are hid by our own people at …” And here I began to list all the spots the Jaxon had showed me, and I had not believed. People around the room nodded at each one. And I grew sick. I had allied myself with some filthy war criminals. And worse, I was testing the Jaxon’s patience which was evidently according to the Powerpoint-like presentation, a very bad idea.

“No, my friends. Let’s not. Lets take the war to them indeed. Blow up their outposts. Gun down their patrols. Poisen their food, and cut their hideous throats, but from behind trees and rocks, not from behind our own people.” My speech provoked mostly chuckles at my naivete. I made to leave, and East did not let go.

“You’re not going anywhere, gutless wonder.” He said softly into my face. “I should have died in that street rather than let a punk like you help me.”

He’d used up the last of my patience.

“I am Tadeusz, the Hammer of Tyrants. Let go.” I spoke from within some cold space inside myself, and he let go, only to rare back for a punch. I spun, grabbed a punch cup, smacked it on the table edge to shatter it, and turned back to get punched in the gut. However, my improvised shiv rested above his jugular.

“I should have let you die in that street, East. I really should have.” He trembled and paled because he knew I was serious.

“I’m leaving these barbarians. Whose with me?” About a third walked out the door with me, and then we heard a pop on the other side, and I saw gas seep under the door. We ran as far and as fast as we could.

Over the next week, I worked up several clever plans to use my steadily shrinking patrol to attack the Jaxon, but I could never get myself to finish them. Finally, I asked myself why.

Because, they are not such bad people, my heart answered back.

Stung, I went for a walk into the local village, and I saw cars being retrofitted with solar cells, and a long line of kids getting polio vaccines, and microwave power being beamed from orbit to replace the nasty coal-fired electric plant. I also saw the White and Black drinking fountains ripped out, and replaced by one very pretty new one.

Sure the Jaxons were still as ugly as sin, but that did not bother the kids, and if I did not look at them, they seemed downright reasonable. Besides, I knew the Jaxons were capable of nova bombing our sun if they felt it was required.

I did the responsible thing. I went back to my crew, and told them what I thought. Most agreed.

Then we took advantage of the general amnesty, and turned ourselves in.

I became a figure of some fame, and notoriety over the next several years. It seemed that I was one of the most technically advanced humans on the planet, and a good fighter. Some people called me “collaborator” and “traitor” on one day, and the next they asked for my help with conncecting up some alien-designed food processor.

We continued to fight the Eastenders seeing as East had escaped the raid. Probably by tossing others in his path as shields, I thought. They turned against humanity out of frustration at our lack of following them and their ineffectiveness against the Jaxons. Also, they were, as terrorists do, they were trying to kill off the moderates on their own side. In the end their hatred drove them to trying to find a way to destroy the Earth.

And so twenty years later, I walked into my office, and saw Mr. East, prematurely solidly gray and stooped but with a pulsar pistol aimed at my chest.

“Traitor!” He breathed along with many other harsh words. They took me to their secret place, and the decades had taught them professionalism, but it was still not enough.

Then they showed me the bomb. A q-bomb stolen from the Jaxon, and capable, maybe of destroying the whole planet.

“Just wait, we’ll be there in a minute.” I heard whispered in my ear from the expected source. See I had been dangled as bait to help us find the last of the East Enders.

Mr. East looked at my face, and shrieked “Do it now; he’s in converse with them.”

He dove toward the table and the control panel, and I kicked him in the head. As blows rained down on me, and others slipped past my squirming and manacled upper body, I screamed.

“Now. Now. No time.”

“Vaya con dios, verser.” I heard, and I wondered how they knew since I had never told them. I spun to dove over the panel, and keep the fatal code from being typed in.

It worked, the room smoked for a second as microwave beams from orbit fired, and flashfried us and the q-bomb before it could be set off.

I was out of there with a plasma cannon which had been specially modified for my use. It was a gift of the Jaxons to “a friend from far away.”

=================================================

In the hospital, the memory faded. I felt fine, and the nurse came in, and told me cheerfully to get my lazybones out of bed. They were releasing me.

I walked out, and down to the Mech chamber, and my chief mechanic looked at me with surprise.

“I thought you were already in the mech. How’d you get finished so quickly?” I heard trailing away as I sprinted toward my one hundred twenty-eight foot tall mech, and a meeting with my doppleganger.

Tadeusz