“That’s all right, Mr President,” Ambassador Francis Prachthauser assured him. The Ambassador had been so relieved to be back on Earth, Paul had been told, that he’d ordered a huge meal for himself and his fellow travellers before he’d been allowed to see the President. That had provided a chance for them all to go through a medical and security check, but nothing suspicious had been found. The aliens, it seemed, had played it straight with them. “We have something of a long story for you.”
He started outlining everything that had happened since the ISS had been attacked. Paul listened carefully, occasionally injecting a question or a request for clarification, while part of his mind considered everything that had happened and how it related to what was happening down on Earth. The alien communications devices hadn’t gone anywhere near the President; they were being storied in a secure compound on the other side of Washington, being examined carefully by scientists. They seemed to be fairly standard radios, if tuned and locked to a particular frequency, but the scientists hadn’t been able to swear that they didn’t have other functions. They couldn’t be allowed anywhere near the President or an important military base, just in case; two of them would be leaving the country soon, anyway.
“And so they left us to make our own way out of the occupied zone,” Francis concluded. His tale had included a long section on the alien territories and they would have to revisit that, pulling out everything he’d observed to add to their growing stockpile of knowledge, before the foreign ambassadors could be allowed to leave the country. “They knew where the base near Dallas was.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” General Hastings said, with a moment of grim amusement. “That’s a dummy base, meant to be noticed by the aliens and keep their eyes off the real base. Doubtless they will bomb it soon, with dummy bombs.”
The President smiled. “You’ve had a hell of a time,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “Are you convinced that the aliens want us to surrender to them?”
“They gave us, in effect, a demand for unconditional surrender,” Francis admitted. “They indicated that there might be some room for negotiations at the edges, at the fringes of their plan, but I think they intend to force us all to surrender and convert to their religion.”
“That’s going to really please the Bible Belt,” the President said, shaking his head. “I wonder why they think it’s going to be that easy.”
Paul shared his thought. Religion might be a collective delusion — and he had never been convinced that there was a god or gods out there — but it was deeply held, for all of that. There would be outrage across the world at the suggestion that they should abandon human religions and convert to an alien religion; there’d be resistance almost everywhere. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if the aliens landed in the Holy Land…
Something clicked in his head. The bloggers in the occupied territory, even though they saw only a tiny percentage of the occupation, had all been in agreement on one detail; the aliens had been smashing places of worship. They’d smashed, without the slightest show of regret, any religion building they’d found, from Churches to Mosques, while carting off all the priests they’d found to an uncertain fate. It had ensured that the resistance was simmering away, but it also suggested something about how the aliens treated other religions; they sought to destroy them completely.
“They’re going to go for the Holy Land,” he said, suddenly. “That’s going to be the scene of the next landing!”
General Hastings lifted a single eyebrow. “What possible good would that do them?”
“You mean apart from controlling the oil?” Philippe asked dryly. The French Ambassador had obviously followed the same line of logic. “The land is… well, Holy. We’ve been killing each other there for centuries over religion. Even now, we have Jews, Arabs, American soldiers and thousands of mercenaries battling it out for religion.”
“We didn’t invade Iraq for religious reasons,” the President said, coldly.
“That’s not what many of them think,” Philippe countered. “It doesn’t matter that much, Mr President, but if they destroy religious places wherever they find them, they will go, sooner or later, for the Holy Cities. They could devastate the entire Middle East with ease.”
The President looked up at the map. “We have to warn them,” he whispered. “We have to tell them that they might be the next targets… how long do they have?”
“I honestly couldn’t tell you,” Paul admitted. “It would depend on when then found out. They’re looting every library they come across in Texas, so they would have the information, if they bothered to use it. The more secure they feel in Texas, the more likely it will be that they will feel able to launch a second offensive against the Middle East.”
The President nodded slowly. “General, what are the odds of the Middle East beating off the aliens?”
“Piss-poor,” General Hastings said. “The Iraqis have the second-best army in the region, trained and equipped by us, as well as a large contingent of our own soldiers, but they’d take a second beating when the aliens land. The Saudi Army’s best units aren’t up to our standards and the worst aren’t good for more than cracking unarmed skulls. The Iranians could put up a fight, but they’re mainly an infantry army… which, coming to think of it, might just put them in a better position than I thought. Israel… is the joker in the deck. They’re tough, the best army in the region, and they have nukes. It could get messy.”
He paused, thoughtfully. “I can’t see them failing to crush the Middle East,” he added. “They have too many advantages. They’d still face a massive insurgency and everything would depend on the tactics they used to quell it.”
“They want to destroy religion, human religion,” Paul said. “It would get messy.”
“And they want us to surrender,” the President said. “If we surrender, what’s going to be our fate?”
Francis scowled. “They provided us with a surprising amount of data,” he said. “I haven’t had time to go through it all, but they intend to basically accept humans — converted humans — as equals in their society, where we will start rising up to join them. Its going to cause massive social unrest, Mr President; if they try to force their society and social norms on us, it’s not going to be the Middle East alone that fights back.”
“Colonel James, go through the material as quickly as you can,” the President said. “Report back to me when you’ve finished.” Paul nodded. “Gentlemen, is there anything I can do for you?”
Philippe nodded. “I have to return to Paris,” he said. He gave a slight, self-depredating smile. “I was going to have to beg you for transport.”
“That might be tricky,” General Hastings said dryly. “Anything that flies, except on very short flights, gets swatted eventually.”
“Oh, the fighter jocks have to hate that,” Gary said, with a sudden laugh. “They’re going to be pissed as hell that they have to stay on the ground. Can we conscript them as infantrymen, please?”
Francis gave him an odd look. “I thought you were a former fighter jock?”
The President ignored the by-play. “If the communications devices work, we can ask the aliens to leave your flight alone,” he said. “If not, getting you back home might take a few weeks, but we can and will do it. What do you intend to suggest that your government does?”
Philippe hesitated. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “If some of the reports here are right, I might not have a government any longer to report back to.”
* * *
The small cube-shaped room had, Paul had decided the first time he used it, been designed by a sadist. It was uncomfortable, small enough to induce acute claustrophobia in anyone unlucky enough to stay there overnight and barely habitable. The metal desk, the small computer and the hard chair all spoke of efficiency over comfort, of a mindset that prized business more than happiness. The person responsible had probably been promoted.
He opened the file of alien
documents, settled back with a cup of coffee — the only advantage the underground bunker had, as far as he could tell, was that it had excellent coffee — and started to skim through the documents, searching for the important points. The aliens… spoke excellent English, but sometimes their writing and sentence structure looked like Microsoft Word on a bad day. They might have understood English, but they were a long way from learning to compose properly… which still put them ahead of many school graduates. The spellings were a little weird as well — PHONE was spelt F-O-N-E — but it was straightforward to sound out the words and realise what they meant. The aliens had actually provided a surprising amount of data…
The problem was that little of it was of any use. Their history, according to them, had been dark and barren before the Truth had arisen and united their planet in a series of Unification Wars. They hadn’t suffered the collapse of a global empire, or even a serious heretical challenge, if the documents were to be trusted. They had already been reaching into space, in a manner humanity had only dreamed of, and they had started to expand across the stars. The documents were vague on exact timescales, but reading between the lines, Paul had the sense that they’d been expanding for a long time.
They’re burning off resources by sending the surplus population to other worlds, he realised, with a touch of awe. The religion seemed to control everything, having built a fairly stable social structure, but as the society got richer, it would face more internal challenges. Their solution had been to throw resources into building the generation starships that spanned out across the universe, slowly, very slowly, carrying the Truth to hundreds of nearby stars. It was awe-inspiring, humbling… and terrifying. Wherever the aliens came from — and the documents were silent on that point — had been sending out starships for hundreds of years. They could have settled vast reaches of space… while the human race had grubbed around in the dirt.
Hot tears of rage stung his eyes at all the missed opportunities. If the human race had just started serious space exploration, the aliens wouldn’t have stood a chance. Their only hope had been to discover a pre-space world and that had been, effectively, what they’d found. It would be aliens who studied and settled the Solar System, mining the asteroids and gas giants, while humans became their subjects, a slavery that would be sanctioned by a religion that had originated far from Earth. The human race would, indeed, adept to service them. They couldn’t even remember any other religion.
And they claim that there’s a billion of them on their mothership, he thought, angrily. The separated, larger, section of the alien starship had entered a Lagrange Point, waiting for the time when the settlers would be called down to Earth, well out of range of any possible attack. There had been a vague report from the Russians that they’d attacked the aliens in orbit, again, but that had been unconfirmed and the aliens had seemed unworried by the attack, if indeed it had taken place.
He stood up and walked through the corridors, back to the President’s suite. The President had looked better when his friend had returned from orbit, but he wouldn’t be happy to hear the news. When he was finally allowed into the room, he was surprised to see not only the President, but General Hastings and Deborah Ivey as well, briefing the President on Operation Lone Star. The name might have to be changed, he knew, before it was discussed outside the bunker; they could even borrow a trick from the British and pick something completely unrelated to the target. If the aliens figured out that Texas was the Lone Star State, they would know the target of the American attack… and take precautions.
“Colonel,” the President said, sounding almost relieved. He had the task of deciding if Lone Star should be launched or not… and, in the wake of the alien surrender demand, he might have had no choice, but to order the operation. “What have the aliens told us?”
“Quite a bit,” Paul said, and outlined what he’d read. “They seem to be determined to expand everywhere, following their own form of manifest destiny, until they have all of the stars in the galaxy.”
“But that would take them… centuries,” General Hastings protested. “Haven’t they run into someone bigger than them out there?”
“Apparently not,” Paul said. “The documents read like one of those after-action reports Saddam’s people published, ones where they could do no wrong and their enemies made every mistake in the book and were wiped out several times over, so I don’t know how reliable they are, but it all hangs together internally.”
“You mean they could be lying,” the President said. “They could be trying to convince us to surrender based on a bluff.”
“I don’t think that it’s a bluff,” Paul admitted. “Oh, based on what we’ve seen so far, I have to agree that if we can destroy their mothership, we’ve won, at least for a few centuries. Plenty of time to build up our own defences and get a massive force into space ourselves. The problem is that destroying the mothership is not going to be easy.”
“Of course it is,” Deborah said, in a rare moment of humour. “Just take the alien spacecraft at Area 51, fly it up to the mothership, plant a bomb and blow it to hell, then fly back in time for tea. Simple.”
General Hastings scowled at her. “There has never been an alien spacecraft at Area 51,” he said, irritated. The internet had been filled with speculation that there had been sixty years worth of warning of the invasion, during which nothing had been done to prepare for their coming. “Groom Lake was also hit, badly, from orbit and was seriously damaged. Recovery efforts are underway, but it is unlikely that anything there will be able to help us, apart from the lasers.”
The President leaned forward. “Lasers?”
“They’re a key part of Operation Lone Star,” Paul injected. It was something he hadn’t wanted to discuss. “If we can use them as a surprise, the aliens may find that countering our attack becomes much harder.”
There was an uncomfortable pause. They were faced with the task of ordering an attack that might fail… and, in doing so, leave large parts of the country exposed to alien attack. Thousands of American soldiers might die, for nothing. None of them were used to making such decisions and the prospect hypnotised them. Deborah, finally, broke the silence.
“If we lose,” she asked, “what happens to us?”
Paul shivered. “According to the documents, civilians will be brought into the faith, military soldiers will be offered a chance to fight for them, religious leaders will be, at best, jailed and leaders will be killed,” he explained. “They don’t intend to build a new and prosperous state, not like we did when we went into Iraq, but to crush us and completely re-work our society into their image. If they win, existence as we know it is over. At best, we will be their slaves for the rest of time, unless our descendents can organise a revolt. At worst…”
“At worst, they drop an asteroid or fry the planet and kill us all,” General Hastings growled. The frustration in his voice was easy to hear. “It kind of makes you wonder why they haven’t simply threatened us with complete devastation if we don’t surrender.”
“It could be a religious thing,” Paul said, softly. He hated to admit ignorance, but there was no choice, not when the fate of the entire planet was involved. “There is still so little that we understand about their society.”
“Is there a bio-threat?” Deborah asked suddenly. “Might they catch something nasty off us and drop dead?”
“I don’t think so,” Paul said, after a moment. “They took enough samples from the captured ambassadors to check that they could live here safely. I don’t think that the common cold will be wiping them out anytime soon.”
“We live in hope,” the President said. He pulled himself up to a sitting position and looked them firmly in the eye, suddenly galvanised into action. “General?”
“Yes, Mr President?”
“I am hereby ordering you to start making preparations to launch Operation Lone Star within a week,” the President said. His voice, at least, was firm; Paul noted Deborah’s surprise and wonde
red why she was so interested. “Keep it non-nuclear if possible…”
“We need to use some EMP,” Paul said, quickly. It wasn’t a part of the plan that could be removed fairly quickly without impinging on everything else. “We need some of the nukes, Mr President. They won’t be used on the ground.”
“Make it so,” the President said. “General, the country is counting on this. Make it happen… and may God help us all.”
Chapter Twenty
Where the laws of war have worked to migrate the horror and protect innocent life they have… done so when the combatants shared the same values and had what we might like to think of a basic decency.
— Tom Kratman
The alien holding pen was massive. Ringed by barbed wire and guarded by a handful of alien tanks, it held upwards of four thousand American prisoners, spread out over a set of smaller holding pens. The soldiers and other men and women captured during the invasion occupied one large section of the camp; civilians captured in the act of resistance occupied a second one. There had been no attempt to segregate the sexes, or even to ensure that the prisoners behaved themselves; if there hadn’t been an ingrained habit of discipline and a common enemy, the prisoners would have probably started to kill each other after the first day, or fallen into rule by strength.
Sergeant Oliver Pataki, senior prisoner by virtue of being one of the first humans to be captured, stared out over the camp and winced. It wasn’t the best POW camp he’d ever seen, that was for sure; the aliens seemed almost indifferent to their comfort. They didn’t bother to provide more than basic foodstuffs and a constant stream of running water; the medical tent, where the injured had been placed in hopes that the medical staff could help them to recover, was the only covered place in the entire camp. The prisoners made their beds on the hard ground and planned, grimly, for an escape. Pataki hadn’t wanted to end up serving as the commander of the camp — in effect, the chief collaborator — but there had been no choice. The aliens had certainly never given him a choice, or even someone senior to take the burden away.
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