Portal Wars 1: Gehenna Dawn Read Online Free PDF

nation-states could never have stood
against the Tegeri, as a united mankind had done. Wars between
nation states were a thing of the past. All the resources and
production of human civilization were pooled together against the
common enemy.
    There were 8 known Portals on Earth…8 transit
points to other worlds, and none of these had fallen. Men were
fighting and dying on more than three dozen worlds, but not on
Earth itself. The Machines were fighting Taylor’s men, and
thousands like them, on distant Portal Worlds, not in the streets
of terrestrial cities and towns. The enemy wasn’t rampaging through
helpless villages, ravaging farmhouses like the one Jake had called
home for most of his life. They weren’t murdering civilians and
helpless children or destroying the civilization it had taken man
millennia to build. And for that, Jake would hold back the anger
and the bitterness, the resentment over his own treatment and the
tragic fate that had been his lot. He would take his place in the
field, pick up the rifle…and he would protect those he’d left
behind.

Chapter 3
     
    From the Journal of Jake Taylor:
     
    We try to help the new guys. Most of
them don’t last long. Just surviving on Gehenna is hard, and
fighting the Machines is like something out of a child’s nightmare.
They are meticulous, and you need to be cool and deliberative to
counter their attacks. Their tactics are mediocre, but there is an
inhuman relentlessness to them. If you lose your focus they will
tear you apart. It’s hard for the rookies to stay cool under fire,
and a lot of them hesitate, give in to fear. They panic. And they
die.
    I was different when I got
here…calm, resigned to my fate. I can’t really explain why. I was
bitter, of course, mourning a life that had been taken from me. All
I’d ever cared about had been stolen away – home, family, love,
writing. But for all the wrong that had been done to me, I’d always
clung to the thought that it was not entirely in vain…that my
sacrifice had been made to a good cause. I was protecting Earth,
standing between others like me, like I had been, and the doom of a
relentless alien horde bent on destruction. That was a powerful
salve, one that kept me going for years.
    Then there were the vids. They
showed them to us when we got to training camp, the records from
the first colonies. Peaceful little towns, outposts on new and
untamed worlds…and adventurous families blazing a trail into the
frontier. The first expeditions had been before the Consolidation,
and the colonists were national heroes, citizens with the courage
to leave Earth behind and help build mankind’s future.
    Then the Machines came. They swooped
down on the tiny settlements, slicing through their meager defenses
and slaughtering everyone. The videos showed it all…the hideous
creatures, manlike but grotesquely different too, rending the
helpless civilians, feasting on the flesh of the children. After a
few minutes, we all wanted to run from the room, but they made us
watch. They made us watch it all. By the time we left we were
consumed with rage, straining to get at these inhuman monsters…to
kill them, to tear them apart as they had done to the
colonists.
    Our hatred drove us, and our sense
of duty…but it was still an odd feeling, fighting to protect
something you knew you’d never see again. This was no old-style
war, where the boys would come marching home after a glorious
victory. For us, it was a one-way trip. We were soldiers for life.
Sending someone through a Portal took an enormous amount of energy,
and a return trip was far too costly for us footsoldiers. There’d
be no parades for my comrades and me, no ribbons tied to trees, no
sweethearts waiting for us to come walking through the front gate.
We were dead to our loved ones, already mourned and gone
forever.
     
    “That was pathetic.” Taylor’s voice was
angry, scolding. He knew the troops were still tired from the fight
at Blackrock, but