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The Guardian - Book One - Reed - Synopsis

12/9/2009

The war had been going on for years - almost generations; the enemy, the Cerfcum, was a bug race something like ants or perhaps bees, where the queen is the foundation of the nest and the population of the nest was dependent upon the queen. The Cerfcum queen had complete control of her population; she controlled whether her eggs were workers or warriors, or whether they were fertile males or females; she even controlled their shape, but the bug shape had worked well for a long time.

Reed’s father had died fighting these creatures and his mother had been dead for many years. Reed didn’t know how his father had died; all he knew was that there came a time when his father stopped coming to find him. The guardians served a vital purpose in the war, but they weren’t popular, and young Reed had been shuttled from foster family to foster family - maybe to keep them apart, and encourage Reed to find a place in life away from the war, or maybe because those foster families were afraid.

When Reed came of age, he joined the mercenary school and became an accomplished mercenary, completing several assignments successfully. When the call for new guardians came, Reed came forward to do his part. It wasn’t easy, becoming a guardian, and it wasn't reversible, but it was then that he found out what had happened to his father; if his father could do this, so could he.

The resonance that made a guardian what he was, occupied the same place in the brain normally reserved for memories. A guardian knew what they knew, but memories of everything that had happened before the procedure were gone; his existence began the moment he woke up after the procedure. Under the guidance of the one and only friend he knew, Paul, Reed learned how to use his magic. In time, if he survived, he would become quite powerful.

Guardians operated in teams of three and Reed was the newest member of his team. Their first assignment was to aid the fight at a site that had only just emerged. Wesley, the third and senior most member of their trio, was more interested in the power of his magic than he was in preserving the lives of the soldiers who fought with them. Oh, he killed Cerfcum well enough, he just considered the soldiers rabble; if they were going to fight the bugs, they could take their losses. It was this attitude that cost them the life of Paul, and earned him Reed's hatred. When another team of guardians joined their fight, Reed saw how such a team could work together, becoming a well-oiled machine of destruction.

Reed’s desire to understand more about his enemy drove him to work out in the simulator every chance he got; it also caused him to seek the knowledge of an exobiologist who was trying to study them. Thanks to his magic, she could put a name to what she studied and Reed thought it was nice to know someone who would answer his questions freely.

One day, the leader of the other team of guardians wanted them all to be lifted over the bug hole so they would have a better vantage in order to plug up the hole, thus stopping the flood of bugs, but Reed and Wesley's animosity wouldn’t be left off the battlefield. As soon as the hole was successfully plugged, Wesley knocked the chopper that held Reed out of the sky and down into the mass of bugs that still swarmed the field. For his crime, Wesley’s memories were taken away again and he was sent off to start over somewhere else.

As the sole remaining member of his team now, Reed returned to earth for reassignment. During the trip, Reed once again turned to the simulator to feed his thirst for understanding. Seeing this, the ship's captain offered to load up officer’s simulations. Officer’s simulations generally dealt with a wider range of issues beyond front line combat, but they were different so Reed agreed.

They were different, all right, and they weren't exactly officer's simulations either. Someone else had tried to do what Reed was trying to do - understand their enemy. Their tack, however, was to penetrate to the heart of the nest, and what better way to do that than in a simulator. The programs were dangerously incomplete though; far too much information was pure guesswork, but it was enough to earn Reed's curiosity.

Reed had a paid girlfriend during his stay on Earth, and amazingly enough, it was she who suggested a new approach to the problem presented by his simulations. It was she who suggested that there might be another way into a bug hole. Go in through the back door, past the workers rather than try to get past the multitudes of warriors swarming out the front door - it might work, but such a thing wasn’t written into the simulator programs; they’d have to try it for real, if they had the chance.

It was a full two years before Reed and his team got their first opportunity to try. A chopper pilot was knocked down far from the main battle by something that looked like giant bats. Reed and his men went to rescue him. They found the pilot at a farm and the farm was raided during their stay. Two of their men and a woman from the farm were taken, so Reed and a select few of his team went after them. Those long ago programs had been right about one crucial piece of information and they were successful. They found their men in the queen’s nest; they had been brought in as food, but though the queen didn't care if anyone entered her nest, she wasn’t about to allow anything to leave.

The queen’s warriors were too far away, she was alone; though a formidable spell caster, she was no match for the guardians. They didn’t escape unscathed though; the men who had been captured had been injured when they were taken, and Reed hadn’t been able to avoid all of the queen’s last attack.

This was the first queen anyone had successfully killed. Many holes had been stopped up and perhaps the surviving inhabitants had died, but never before had a queen been killed while the fight was ongoing. When Reed and his team returned to base, they discovered the battle suddenly over; when a queen died, her whole nest died.

~~~~~

However, this queen had a mother and she was furious, how had these soft creatures managed to kill one of her daughters? She wanted to understand. She ordered the capture of a human and she wanted him alive. When she got him, she raped his memories, but that wasn’t enough. She poked and prodded, punished and rewarded him, but it still wasn’t enough; they were soft, weak creatures. So she took some of his DNA and made a human of her own; perhaps then, she would understand.

~~~~~

The success of Reed's team prompted a change in the strategy and guardians began to search for back doors. The bugs were changing things too; the breed was shifting to reptiles some of which were big enough to stand against some of the war-machines the humans were using.

Though the hatching of the human infant was successful, it was very disappointing. But just in case there was something to come later, the queen ordered more captures; they would make their own human forces and win the war that way. The bugs started coming up directly into human habitations to facilitate captures and they were reemerging on previously cleared planets. Before long, the term ‘mobile infantry’ earned a whole new meaning.

Using the information acquired from killing queens, the military came to the conclusion that there just might be a queen of all queens, so they mounted a secret expedition to see if they could find such a creature. Reed and his team were among those who went to find out.

When they reached their destination, each of the teams picked a likely hole to penetrate. At the hole Reed’s team selected, they found a man; he was very sick, but he was amazingly alive. Their hole also happened to be the shortest route to the queen’s nest. What Reed saw there took his breath away; tottering around at the side of the huge queen was a two-year-old child. Snatching the child away from the queen was tricky, but they were powerful enough, and just as had happened elsewhere, all the inhabitants of the planet-wide nest died. When they returned to home space, they discovered that many of the queens they had been fighting seemed to have suffered from the death of the queen mother as well, though it wasn’t the debilitating death of those closer to a queen, and they were comparatively easy to destroy. Except for mopping up, the war was over. Reed, and those who had gone after the queen mother, were done with the war; they were going home. They had earned it.

Reed took the child with him and with a little paperwork slight-of-hand, the child became his; though they looked so very different, he became the 'twin' of the son he already had.

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The Guardian - Book Two - Adam - Synopsis

12/9/2009

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The Cerfcum child, Adam and the human child, Paul, grew up together and were very close. Over the next ten years, their family grew with two brothers and a baby sister. With the war over, Reed resumed his previous occupation as a mercenary, and every summer he took his family to some fabulous destination around the federation. But when Adam and Paul reached the age of twelve, Reed’s happy home life hit a ripple. Adam’s Cerfcum heritage asserted itself; his resonance became active. Reed could no longer put off telling Adam about his beginnings. For Adam and Paul, certain things in their history books were suddenly very close to home.

It was a heart wrenching process, but Reed explained everything he could and answered all of their questions to the best of his abilities; he even took them to see the man he believed to be Adam’s real father. The man had been living in an institution ever since being brought back from the war.

As soon as Adam saw the man, a tenuous and totally unexpected connection was established between them; it was this connection that allowed the man to throw off the dead queen’s last shroud of control and begin to recover.

When the boys were old enough to enter high school, Reed enrolled them in the mercenary high school and extra curricular activities were contingent on good grades. Both Adam and Paul got part time jobs in order to pay for some of them. Adam used his money to pay for simulator time; he had learned to fly and he couldn’t get enough of it. Paul hoped to buy a car with his earnings.

By the time Adam was fourteen, he had earned the name ‘Stress Test’. Where once, the simulator technicians had been required to set aside time to run stress tests on the simulators, now, they used Adam’s flights to run those tests, as a reward, they let him fly for free whenever they ran their tests, and he'd fly anything they asked him to.

One evening, Adam’s flight was witnessed by a lieutenant from the base and he was truly amazed at the skill Adam showed at such a young age. After watching a highly uneven dog fight, the lieutenant offered to pay for Adam’s time if he would fly a chopper for him. Other pilots flying the mission were delighted to have Adam’s participation and because of it, they decided to increase the danger level. About half way through the simulation, the mission went very wrong; someone was shooting at Adam and they wanted him dead. Death wasn’t an option in any of the simulators, but that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t be knocked out.

When Adam woke, it was to find himself still in a simulator but it was a ground simulator and he had no idea where it was. His tormentor looked like his father, but he figured it wasn’t true; there wouldn’t be any need for the simulator if it were. In an effort to turn Adam against the man who had raised him, Adam’s tormentor began to torture him, punishing him with painful simulator death every time Adam refused to use his magic against the image of Reed.

As the torture tested his endurance to the limit, Adam reached for the only help he could think of. He reached for the man who he had had such a sketchy connection to once before. He called to him, called for help every time his head was clear enough to do it, and it worked. The man was able to find Reed and lead him to where Adam was held, but it wasn’t before Adam’s resistance broke down.

Reed had taught his son well though; using logic, Adam planned his attack. He was accustomed to using his status magic, but that was as far as he could go. With no Cerfcum to draw on, his elemental magic was only so many words. The simulator could copy it after a fashion, but when Adam turned his magic on his attacker, he found the experience overpowering and he wanted so much more. He managed to suck the magic right out of the man. Wesley’s efforts to turn Adam against his old enemy had backfired. With a full array of magic, Reed now needed to teach Adam how and when to use it.

Over the next two years, word got around about what happened to Wesley, and now that there was no more bug threat, some guardians wanted to be relieved of their burden and Adam's magic began to take on a whole new dimension. Word also got around about Adam’s prowess in the simulator and he was hired to test them.

He was working on a new simulator on the base one day when the base commander was talked into allowing him to fly a real jet; it was a trainer, but it was a real plane and he would be flying in a real sky. With the gentle encouragement of a flight instructor, Adam flew his heart out all the way up until this blue tarp-like thing draped itself across their canopy and then was ripped away by their speed.

Curious, Adam circled, and then he decided to go after it. He was afraid he knew exactly what it was, and he was right; it was a Cerfcum male and he couldn’t just let it die, not like that.

Over the next several weeks, Adam and the Cerfcum male tried to understand each other, but there was very little common ground to help. When it came time for him to leave, Adam saw to it that he made it away; it was a logical decision. Keeping him hostage, or prisoner, could only entice another to come after him and the next Cerfcum might not be so amiable.

After graduating from high school, Adam joined the Air Force Academy and Paul went into the Marines. At the academy, Adam learned how to be an officer and a leader. He learned how to be the leader his father was trying to make him, but simulator troops already knew how follow a guardian, these young men didn’t. After witnessing how much damage Adam could do with his magic, the Commandant of the academy ordered him to keep it a secret, but that didn't mean he couldn't still carve his men into an engine of destruction.

Working with the troops at his permanent party wasn’t so easy. Adam was a young academy graduate and he looked younger than he was. Enlisted soldiers were reluctant to take a kid, and a cadet, seriously - they quickly learned the error of their way.

Two years later, Adam detected a vibration in the simulator he used and he recommended the bearings be replaced. Two days after that the vibration was worse, but the tech told him that the simulator had just been overhauled. Five days later, as Adam was taking off for a training exercise, the bearings froze up and the cockpit was launched through the simulator wall. It was nearly an hour before Adam’s broken body could be extricated from the smashed cockpit. After hours of surgery, and healing spells from the hospital guardian, Adam was still going to die; the damage was just too much. There was, however, one more thing to try and it was his brother, Paul, who was able to coerce him to try it. With every dimension of magic Adam had absorbed from guardians willing to be free of it, Adam’s magic had grown in strength, and by now his magic was very strong even though his body was so weak. His own healing spell just might be able to accomplish what the hospital guardian’s spell hadn’t.

Four months later, Adam was still in the hospital. His magic was healing him, but it would be a long time before he would be well again. It was during this time that another Cerfcum male came to find Adam. His queen mother wanted to rectify what she saw as an insult to Adam, her brother. She wanted to offer him a queen, but Adam was unwilling to accept such a thing. Her second offer, therefore, was wings; the Cerfcum male was made to fly his queen to her new nest and Adam had no wings. But Adam was broken; he didn’t believe that he would ever fly again. Then the queen had yet another idea; if Adam was broken, she would heal him and once he was whole again, perhaps Adam would be willing to accept her gift. The healing was incredibly powerful and accomplished in moments what was going to take years otherwise.

Adam returned to duty as soon as the doctors cleared him and he was even able to get back in a simulator - he had to - his need to fly was a very real thing.

A few months later, Adam was transferred to space duty. He didn’t like his new ship; it was sluggish and handled heavily, but it was top of the line. For the first year, the new men flew short patrols that would return them to the ground nearly every day. It was during that first year that Adam was able to test the new ship to its limit, and he found it wanting as it lack of maneuverability caused him to take too much damage. He was forced to try to fly the thing like a glider all the way to the ground. If it weren’t for his magic, he would have burned up on reentry. As it was, his landing was hard enough and he woke up in a hospital again - he hated hospitals.

When he was healed enough, he went back to his apartment, but it would be some time before he was well enough to go back to work. To fill his time, he found a program that would allow him to toy with the design of his ship. One day, he saw a truck pulling into one of the hangers and on its trailers was the remains of his ship. If he thought seeing the simulator after having survived that crash was hard, seeing the smashed and torn ship he had just flown was even worse. He was shaken so badly that he found himself on his knees.

A young woman named Cheyenne picked him up and saw him to his home. Adam had recovered from his shock by the next morning and he took the opportunity over breakfast to get to know his rescuer a little better. Over the next couple weeks, Cheyenne helped Adam heal and they became friends as well as lovers.

Back in space, Adam discovered that someone had taken the programs he had played with to heart and they had made the modification to his ship - it no longer handled like a whale.

It was now time for Adam’s squad to rotate to long-range patrols, escorting freighters and transports to their destinations. During the long idle hours, Adams magic became known, and as a reward for making it through their first year of long-range patrols without loosing a single man, Adam’s friends painted his ship to represent some of his magic.

It was a mistake to mark his ship so distinctly. Pirates, no longer wanting to take the damage Adam dealt out, singled out his squad for a mass attack. After the battle, Adam’s disabled ship was knocked off to float away into space alone.

When Paul heard about this, he did the only thing he could; he went after his brother. With Cheyenne refusing to be left behind, he rounded up the one person who had been able to find him one other time.

The connection was still good, but it was sporadic at best. By the third contact, they were at least headed in the right direction, and then they picked up a guide. Their guide, a Cerfcum male with wide bat-like wings, led them to a planet and then he led them into the heart of the nest. There, they found Adam. He was in bad shape; nothing had been done to heal the damage he had received in his fight.

Cheyenne and Paul prompted Adam to use his healing spells and he began to recover. It took a few days, but as soon as they could, they started to leave. The queen wasn’t willing to let them walk out. She was still determined to give Adam some sort of gift, to atone for the slight their mother had dealt him by creating him without planning a mating for him. It would be some time before they fully understood what it was the queen had given him.

They headed directly home, but Paul’s return wasn’t to be uneventful. He’d gone AWOL to find his brother, and now it was time to pay the piper.

After his brother’s arrest, Adam had to go back to his own unit to prove that he still lived, and to get leave to attend his brothers hearing. That accomplished, he went home.

The next morning, Reed called with the disturbing news, that Paul had apparently handed himself over to the wrong MPs; he was missing. It was Adam’s turn to find his brother, but Reed wasn’t about to let him go haring off like Paul had done - with no plan and no backup.

The wait while Reed gathered information, was grueling for Adam, but they were off soon enough, following the most likely target, though they couldn’t find any sure proof of Paul’s presence on board. Forced to pause at every likely landing point along their route, they could only go so fast. They were close to the end of their choices when Adam got the first indication of trouble ahead. He heard the hiss of a Cerfcum queen in his head.

They found the ship they were looking for at the end of the line, but it was empty, so wasn’t the town adjoining the landing strip. It wasn’t until they explored closer to the center of the town that they found something none of them had expected - a Cerfcum hole, weathered and seemingly abandoned. Abandoned until they spotted lookouts - children - the queen was using the town’s inhabitants as if they were her own hatchlings.

Entry into the nest wasn’t really all that difficult when compared to a healthy Cerfcum nest, but it wasn’t easy either, what with the desire to preserves the lives of the human puppets they encountered, one of which was Paul - they had found him.

The progeny of the Cerfcum queen were all twisted and deformed. The colony mined uranium and the radiation had proved deadly to the unprotected Cerfcum. The humans hadn’t been exposed to the radiation, and aside from being abused and half starved, they were still as healthy as could be expected.

Getting Paul away from the Cerfcum queen wasn’t easy, but they did it, putting her and her deformed horde out of their misery.

When they left the planet, Adam named it ‘Twisted Sister’. Everyone thought he named it that because it was one of two planets in that solar system and it was radioactive, but he had actually named it after the Cerfcum queen - his twisted sister - after all, this entire generation of queens were his sisters.

Their journey back to Earth went quickly, and Adam and Paul’s mother welcomed her family back with many, many hugs and no few tears. Paul’s court martial was merely a formality as all the charges were dropped. He could have continued his career with the Marines, but opted for a discharge instead. Adam too left the Air Force and together they became mercenaries like their father.

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The Guardian - Book One - Reed - Synopsis

The Guardian - Book Two - Adam - Synopsis

Anna L. Walls

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