Invasion

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  LePic frowned. “You may not have kept up on the news from home,” he said, dryly. “The economy collapsed days after the aliens opened fire. Millions of Frenchmen are now on the streets, despite the… legal difficulties in firing so many at once. Millions more have decided to blame their problems on the Arabs, who in turn blame their problems on us. We’re this close” — he held up a finger and thump — “to outright civil war.”

  Philippe winced. Summers in France were often marked by civil unrest. He hadn’t even realised how badly the French economy, indeed, that of the remainder of the European Union, would have been hit by the invasion. The United States had been hit hard as well, but it had been distracted by a landing and, in any case, it was much larger. The Americans might manage to hold on, barely, but he wasn’t sure that France could survive without major upheaval.

  And that was an irony. LePic had been the most determined person in France to tackle the country’s problems. It hadn’t been easy to start breaking down some of the labour laws, but he’d been succeeding, barely. Now millions were out of work as companies folded, one by one, and without the high military presence, France would probably have seen more riots by now. The government was getting blamed, but truthfully… the aliens had caused the nightmare, and the aliens were untouchable.

  “The aliens want us to join them,” LePic said, finally. He’d clearly taken the time to go through some of the documents before meeting with Philippe. “Do you think that we should accept their offer?”

  Philippe took a breath. “No,” he said, as calmly as he could. “I think that it would be a bad idea, both for France and for the world.”

  LePic lifted an eyebrow. “Do you really think that the country can continue like this?”

  “It’s not going to make a difference,” Philippe said. “Even if the aliens stopped harassing us tomorrow, how long is it going to be before we can rebuild everything they destroyed? Years, at best. Submitting to the aliens won’t do more than putting us firmly in their camp, which means that the entire human race might lose the war.”

  “The war looks pretty hopeless already,” LePic countered. “I hate to admit it, but it is a reality that must be faced, squarely. If the Americans cannot defeat the aliens, there is no way that we can do so. I have ordered the mass production of additional nuclear weapons, but even with them…”

  “Getting them up to the aliens might be a problem,” Philippe conceded, ruefully. The American internet had been full of people condemning their President for whimping out — their words — and not using nukes when launching the attack on Texas. In their view, scorching Texas down to bedrock would have killed all the aliens and improved the real estate value no end, a point of view that ignored all of the humans — American citizens — who would have been killed as well. “If they come down here…”

  They shared a single thought. France had a long history of resistance to outside occupation, but it was as chequered as any other such history, and, at the moment, France was more likely to tear itself apart than fight the aliens. They’d have no choice, but to organise an insurgency — knowing that the population might turn their weapons on the government, rather than the aliens.

  “We don’t have a choice,” Philippe said, as forcefully as he dared. “Mr President, the aliens are not humans in suits, but… something other.”

  “You sound like one of those National Front bastards talking about the Arabs,” LePic said, toying with him. “What makes the aliens so different?”

  Philippe ignored the jibe. He’d never had much time for the National Front. “When the Nazis invaded France, there were Frenchwomen who had affairs with German soldiers and often became quite fond of them…”

  “And had their hair cut off afterwards,” LePic pointed out.

  “The Germans and us are sexually compatible,” Philippe said. “Given time, Europe might blend into one civilisation, one society, with children born to mixed parentage. Hell, given enough time, the same might be true of the entire world. The entire human race might abandon such follies as racism and sexism — maybe even nationalism — to unite as one race.”

  “And maybe the horse will learn to sing,” LePic said. He sounded disturbed, now. “Carry on…”

  “In an alien world, humans will be marked as forever human,” Philippe pressed. “They claim to have a billion settlers on their mothership and, just by landing anywhere, they will have a massive influence on the world. In time, they might take over the entire planet, or at least the important parts of the world… and create a nightmare where humans are permanent second-class citizens. We will never be able to breed with them, or create a new race, but we will be doomed to permanent inferiority. How could we reach a position of power and responsibility when we will be forever marked as human?”

  He paused. “The damned SS actually recruited Frenchmen and even Russians,” he added. “Why should the aliens even allow us to do that? Aliens will have the best jobs. Aliens will control all the weapons and defences. Aliens will accept us into their faith, but God damn me if they ever give any of us any control, or even a priesthood! If we surrender now, we are going to be under them forever.”

  “Nothing lasts forever,” LePic said. The confidence in his voice was a surprise. “Their control will weaken, eventually.”

  “Why?” Philippe asked bleakly. “They don’t have to worry about little details like internal revolt from their own… and if we do, we’d be crushed. At best, we will be second-class citizens. At worst… at worst, we will be their slaves forever.”

  “A powerful argument,” LePic concluded. There was a bitter helplessness in his voice. “But then, really, what can we do? If we fight, we get squashed. If we surrender, we get melded into their self-image. What can we do?”

  * * *

  The High Priest and his immediate subordinates gathered below a massive image of Earth, floating in space below the Guiding Star. It had been a busy few cycles, but once the main thrust of the American assault had been blunted, the warriors had been able to cut up the remaining insurgents who dared to show their faces. The occupied zone was peaceful again, for now.

  “We have studied the human writings extensively,” the researcher informed him, after they had briefly discussed the situation on the ground. “The human religions, their dominant religions, all appeared in the same general area, here.” She touched a place that humans would have identified as the Middle East. “Their dominant religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — are actually related and have their centres in that area, apart from this centre here.”

  Her finger touched Italy. “Other religions exist on Earth, but they are less likely to conflict directly with the Truth,” she added. “They can be dealt with later. This part of the world has an added advantage in that it is the source for much of their oil, although it escapes us as to why they have allowed the dependency to continue when they could build solar platforms in high orbit and get all the power they need…”

  “Humans are more inclined to consume resources than ourselves,” an Arbiter said. The scorn in his voice was unmistakable. He might have been awed by how much each individual human had, but as a race, they were remarkably poor. “They do not practice self-discipline when it comes to deciding what they want and what they need. Their failure to ensure proper use of resources has crippled their development as a race.”

  The High Priest said nothing. He could never have admitted it to anyone, least of all her, but he missed Researcher Femala badly. She hadn’t been afraid to tell him what he needed to know; after all, she had a certain freedom from most consequences. The researchers were right about how important the Middle East was to the humans, but it wasn’t as if there was much else there to recommend it, apart from the holy cities. The Inquisitors would demand that they were occupied or destroyed, in order to continue the task of destroying the human religions, but what would that do to the human determination to resist? Captured humans down on the surface of Earth had sworn that they intended to
avenge attacks on their religious buildings… and if they went after the very centres of their religions, what sort of attacks would that provoke?

  The Inquisitors, of course, wouldn’t care. They would see it as a chance to root out more human fanatics and burn them all down. The High Priest believed in the mission as much as anyone else, but he didn’t want to rule over a charnel house, with millions of humans slaughtered without being given a fair chance to convert. It was possible that the ambassadors would convince their respective nations to convert en masse, but that didn’t really seem to be a human concept.

  But there were no other places that held such significance. “We will move against their Holy Cities,” he ordered, finally. He looked over at the War Leader. “You will prepare the secondary landing force for deployment and the capture of their Holy Cities and oil wells. Once they are secure, we will begin the conquest of their hearts and souls.”

  “Yes, Your Holiness,” the War Leader said. “It will be done as you command.”

  “And we should also begin the conquest of hearts and souls in the occupied area of America,” the Inquisitor added. There was a conceited tone in his voice that was at odds with the seriousness of his purpose. “We have been lax in our duty there, I fear, and thus we have been punished with many attacks and many deaths.”

  “Of course,” the High Priest said. They still held the advantage over the humans. As long as they held space, they were unbeatable. Even if they lost people like Researcher Femala, they would still win in the end. He missed her… but she was lost, somewhere in the chaos of the American attack. They’d probably blown her out of the sky without even noticing. “We would not want to fail in our duty, would we?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Alien life can take many forms… but some are more likely than others.

  — Anon

  “I think this is your stop,” the trucker said, as the truck pulled to a stop outside a warehouse complex in the middle of nowhere. “Good luck, buddy.”

  Paul thanked the driver as he slipped out of the vehicle and down onto the tarmac. The destruction of the railroads and aircraft had left most of the transport network in the hands of truckers, who risked the chances of sudden death from high above in order to keep things moving across the United States. The gas was heavily rationed now so that the truckers could keep moving, which in turn kept the country going… until the gas ran out as well. The United States had built up a massive reserve of fuel — and other vital raw materials — but no one had really anticipated such a cut-off. The results in other parts of the world were even worse.

  It wasn’t that America was suddenly a poor country, but that it was much harder to move items around… and almost nothing was coming in from the outside world. There might be a surplus of one item in California, but not in Maryland, where it was needed. Some places had more than enough food to eat, other places were starving… and still others were in a state of anarchy. Two weeks after the failure of Operation Lone Star, the country was struggling to pull itself back together, a procedure marred by constant specific bombardment. The truckers, statistically, didn’t face many risks, but the odds mounted up over time. His driver had been asked to carry a single passenger… and anything out of the ordinary tended to attract attention. If the aliens had seen him getting onboard the truck, would they have blasted him on general principles?

  The warehouse complex was as dark and silent as the grave, but he knew where to go, pausing long enough to see the truck vanishing off into the distance before climbing quickly up to the complex. It had been created, originally, to serve as a shipping hub for some trucking company that had gone out of business, and then Uncle Sam had taken it over. The CIA, working through a front company, had bought the entire complex and developed it for their own purposes. From the outside, it was just another bunch of warehouses… and there were plenty more of them across America. Inside, it was a very different story.

  “Welcome,” Doctor Jones said, once the guards had checked Paul’s ID and fingerprints. The CIA, he’d been told, had once used the place for defectors from the USSR and, later, terrorist groups, a perfectly secure compound where they could be interrogated and debriefed in private before being given their reward. No one would think twice if a helicopter landed in the complex, or a truck pulled up to it, which kept everything secret. “You’ll be pleased to hear that we’re ready for you.”

  Paul followed him down a flight of stairs into an underground complex that wasn’t on any of the publicly-available plans. “We didn’t bring the craft itself here, I’m afraid, but we were able to move it to another complex, where NASA’s best engineers have been working on it,” the Doctor continued. “We did bring the alien captives here, although alas, without Captain Kirk to court the pretty alien babes, we didn’t learn much at first.”

  Paul almost gave in to the temptation to grab the doctor and shake him, hard. “Doctor, people are dying out there,” he snapped, as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “It’s not fucking funny!”

  “No, of course not,” Jones agreed. He paused for a moment in the corridors. “What would you like to see first? The craft — or at least the images of it — or the prisoners?”

  “The craft,” Paul said, forgetting his anger. The craft might be able to help them actually win the war. “What have the engineers found out about it so far?”

  Jones led him into a small briefing room, turned out the lights and activated a PowerPoint presentation. “The craft appears — I’m no engineer and we couldn’t spare one to brief you, although they did write the notes — to be a fairly basic SSTO design,” he began. “We actually worked on trying to build one, but we never got the concept quite right and… well, NASA wasn’t too keen on it for some reason. The alien craft looks crude” — he clicked through a series of images of the conical shuttle craft — “but it is, in fact, very sophisticated. One of the engineers even called it sheer genius.”

  The image changed again, this time to show the dissembled pieces of the craft. “The craft was designed on a principle that seems to allow them to take the entire thing to pieces very easily,” Jones added. “The field engineers who reached the crash-site were able to figure out how to take it apart, after which the separate pieces, all seven hundred of them, were transported to a secure complex somewhere else. A lot of the electronics were fried by the EMP — that’s probably why the craft got so far off course anyway — but the mechanical aspects were easy to understand. Hell, sir, we could duplicate it, given a few months.”

  “Better get working on it,” Paul said. He’d have to recommend that to the President, if the President survived the threat of impeachment. Apparently, these days, not nuking America was considered a crime. The Russians were probably laughing over a glass of vodka. “Can we actually fly them ourselves?”

  “The fuel mix is a little unusual and the electronics will have to be replaced carefully, but if we can meet those issues, we could even fly the craft we have now,” Jones said. “Building our own shouldn’t take that long; according to the engineers, it’s one hell of a lot less sophisticated than an F-22 or even the space shuttle.”

  “The President will be pleased to hear that,” Paul said, relieved. It was something, perhaps, that they could use in the future. The aliens might be advanced, but they weren’t all-powerful. “And the aliens themselves?”

  Jones turned the lights back on and started to fiddle with a computer, playing with it until it showed an image of the aliens, each one in a separate cell. “We think that they’re reasonably unhurt, although it’s hard to tell for certain,” he said. “We’ve kept them separate, but six of them don’t seem to speak English and don’t even seem interested in anything else. They don’t respond to our questions, not even in their own language.”

  “So they could be faking it,” Paul said. “They might understand English and are just pretended not to speak it.”

  “They might,” Jones agreed. “Some of my… fellow researchers have advocat
ed a more rigorous program of questioning, but if they genuinely can’t speak English, there’s little point in trying to hurt them. We could try to get them to speak in their own language, but they could be saying anything, although samples would be useful to the linguistics people.”

  Paul studied the aliens for a long moment. “What are they doing?”

  Jones followed his gaze. “We think the males are at prayer,” he said. “The females… they talk to us, or they read the books that we give them, but little else.”

  “I see,” Paul said. He peered towards the male aliens. “And that’s the male Redskins?”

  Jones winced. “I wish that you wouldn’t use that word,” he said, tightly. “It has too many… issues with Americans. Call them Redshirts, if you must insult them.”

  Paul ignored him. Naked, the aliens seemed somehow unhealthy, even though the doctors believed that they were in good — alien — health. They did have reddish-purple skin, their eyes dark pools of shadow… and, despite himself, his gaze slipped to the alien genitals. The alien penis — if penis it was — was a long thin sausage; it seemed to hang down further than…

  “I can’t believe I’m thinking this,” he admitted. “How do they have sex?”

  Jones gave him a reproving look. “As far as we can tell — and so far we haven’t seen them engaged in sexual congress — the male’s penis is inserted into the female’s vagina. I guess God wasn’t feeling too imaginative when he created these aliens.”

  He pulled up the results of an x-ray. “Internally, on the other hand, they’re very different from us,” he said, changing the subject firmly. “Their biology is nothing like ours, so there’s no chance of a War of the Worlds outcome, in either direction.”

  Paul scowled. “Could we come up with a biological weapon that might attack them?”

  “I would prefer not to speculate,” Jones said. “They have a brain set-up that is comparable to our own, but they also have four hearts, which suggests that a heart attack isn’t going to be anything like as dangerous to them. Two of the males, in fact, have only three working hearts… and it doesn’t seem to have slowed them down any. Their legs have very little in the way of bone structure — much of their strength is concentrated in their upper bodies — and they are, in fact, very much like a human penis.”