The Apocalypse Troll

Plot summary

In the 25th Century, a small human warship force encounters a larger group of Kanga ships forty light-months from anywhere in particular. The Kanga are a violently xenophobic alien race that has fought a losing war against humanity for over 400 years. The Kanga force represents a final desperate attempt to use an untried time travel theory to go back thousands of years and wipe out humanity before it becomes a threat. Both humans and Kangas arrive in the outer solar system in the early 21st century. A final battle results in a single human space fighter chasing a Kanga tender and its escort of fighters to Earth's outer atmosphere. Only the accidental involvement of a US Navy task force prevents the death of humanity. The human fighter crashes into the ocean, and one enemy fighter survives. The badly injured human pilot, Colonel Ludmilla Leonovna of the Terran Marines, is rescued by a yacht crewed singlehandedly by US Navy SEAL Captain Dick Aston on his retirement cruise. She has a hole through her body, but the wound heals before Dick's eyes over four days while she remains in a healing trance. Upon waking, she explains her healing comes from a symbiote derived from a mutated Kanga bio-weapon. She also reveals the enemy fighter is crewed by a Troll, a psychopathic cyborg with a human brain created by the Kanga. Trolls hate both humans and Kangas, love to kill cruelly, and have limited telepathic abilities to read and influence about 30% of minds. Ludmilla believes the Troll will try to enslave or destroy humanity. The next ten chapters cover letting the world know about the Troll without the Troll knowing they know. Plans to destroy the Troll are made while waiting for it to reveal itself. An impossible theft of plutonium in the US concentrates plans there. The Troll eventually reveals itself by inculcating racial hatreds in a circular area of the southern US.