Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  The researchers had made several conclusions concerning the human race, none of them good; several of them threatening the stereotype that the Oghaldzon had applied to humanity. One odd point was that humans acted in a variety of strange ways; one human would surrender, another would fight to the death, or even embrace his or her death just to kill a single Oghaldzon. One force of humans had fought to the death for a cemetery, while their governing complex had been abandoned and left to the Oghaldzon. It was a mystery, one that had only deepened when more humans had fallen into Oghaldzon captivity; some humans would quite happily attack their fellow humans, even to the point of forcing a mating…and it was always males on females. They had never observed a female forcing a male to mate; the very concept of forcing a mating perplexed the researchers. But then, of course, the human biology was very different…

  Her mating crest flexed, as if in agreement, a response to the floating sperm particles released by a male, perhaps responding to her or another female. One problem caused by suspension was that the different sets of males and females hadn’t synchronised into one overall pattern. It would have an effect on the future; normally, a space-based Oghaldzon would go to one of the motherships to release her young, but the timing was now somewhat eccentric. The Oghaldzon didn’t care for their young, not in the way that humans did, but losing children was…wasteful. The ideas of the culture had to be continued, after all; the only reason why so many Oghaldzon had been sent to Earth was to ensure that a reservoir of sane intelligent entities were present to assist in curing the humans of their madness.

  She stepped inside; instantly, the human female moved to cover her mating organs, much to Oolane’s quiet amusement. It was remotely possible that she had picked up on the mating scent running through the air, but even if she had, there was no way that she could filter an Oghaldzon sperm cell out of the air and use it to fertilise her eggs. Human pregnancy had no Oghaldzon equivalent; Oolane would grow her children on her body until they reached a certain point, where they would fall off and develop on their own, first as unintelligent creatures, and then go through the metamorphous into intelligent thinking beings. Human children, by contrast, were brought up almost at once into human society; it had shaped humanity as much as their own mating patterns had shaped the Oghaldzon.

  “I greet you,” she said, shaping the words through her speaker. She sometimes practiced speaking human words directly, but she preferred to rely on the translation software when it was something genuinely important. “I trust that you are well?”

  Humans chose to spend time on meaningless pleasantries; the Oghaldzon, who tended to focus on statements of fact, found that amusing. “Yes, we are well,” the human female said. Her name – Samra – was meaningless to the Oghaldzon; they tended to name themselves after points of principle, or fact. Her mate – if mate he was – lolled on the sleeping mat; he, at least, didn’t try to hide anything from her. It was a waste of time – her sonar could have seen everything he had – but he wasn't trying. “What do you want to talk about today?”

  Oolane gave the Oghaldzon version of a smile; her mouth, unsuited to smiling, didn’t move. They had talked, time and time again, about all manner of different subjects, from human politics to biology and religion. The Oghaldzon didn’t really have a religion, although some of their researchers, uncovering quantum theory, had accepted the presence of a ‘cosmic observer’ who kept everything in existence. The humans seemed to worship the observer, calling him ‘God’ or ‘Allah’ which were either the same entity, or two of the same entities…human religion made little sense to the Oghaldzon. If God/Allah existed, and he punished misbehaviour, why did so many humans not behave? Why had he issued so many contradictory orders to the different human sects?

  “Our forces have landed on the surface of your planet,” Oolane said, as dispassionately as she could. She wanted – needed – to think of the humans as something other than enemies; her research might point the way to developing ways to bring the human race into space as friends and allies, not eternal enemies. “We require your input in the developing situation. We would also like to know why you did not equip your asteroids with destruct devices.”

  She watched the humans carefully. One advantage of having a force on the surface of the planet was access to human libraries, all of which contained vast tracts of information – much of it contradictory – on how humans thought. It wasn’t easy to read human expressions, but she was learning; it was a shame that they had no baseline for detecting human lies. An Oghaldzon could always tell, though sonar, if another was lying; in theory, they could do the same for a human, but there was no way to know what signs meant a human was lying. The human male’s heart was beating rapidly; he, at least, had understood the possible consequences of the asteroid question…

  * * *

  Samra had expected it; they had both expected that the Oghaldzon would attempt to land on Earth at some point. The explanation they’d been given about why the Oghaldzon had come to Earth had implied, as Reynolds had put it, that the Oghaldzon would need boots on the ground to enforce their will. Even so, it was a shock…and the comment about asteroids had worried her. What did that mean?

  So she asked.

  “Five of your asteroids fell out of orbit and struck the surface of Earth,” Oolane said, seemingly dispassionate. “We destroyed others, shattered them, once we realised that they were not being destroyed, but considerable damage was done before we realised the danger. Why were they not destroyed by your people?”

  Reynolds spoke first, his voice a hiss of anger. “Maybe you killed the people who should have destroyed them,” he said, his voice growing colder and colder. Samra put a hand on his to prevent him doing something stupid, like attacking Oolane or trying to break out. He had warned her that they were almost certainly being observed constantly; if he killed Oolane, by some dark miracle, others would come and kill the pair of them. “Where did they hit?”

  Oolane showed no reaction, but a holographic image of Earth appeared in front of them, showing the battle; Samra noted with a moment of vengeful pride that several Oghaldzon ships had been destroyed by the fighting. The asteroids fell, one of them towards the Atlantic, the others heading into the Pacific, China…one of them shattering and scattering debris all over Europe…and then the tidal waves started to expand. She watched in growing horror as the waves lashed against Asia; Japan, China, India, the Caliphate…the waves marched up the Red Sea, washing over the cities there and…

  It was Reynolds who put a hand on hers before her horror could become rage. No one had wrecked so much damage on Mecca, not even the religious policemen who had threatened to destroy the city to prevent it from falling into the hands of the forces of Reform Islam, not even the American millionaire who had lost his family in New York and intended to wreak the bloodiest possible revenge. The city had been threatened before; now, the entire city might have been wiped off the face of the Earth. The entire Caliphate might have been destroyed; the projects they had been so proud of shattered and wrecked, the population slaughtered like bugs…

  Her gaze slipped east. London might claim to be the political capital of the British Commonwealth, but it was India that was the economic capital…and India had been hammered by tidal waves. It would have been struck by earthquakes as well; the asteroid that had come down in China would have sent shockwaves echoing everywhere. She had had family in India, one of the few thousand Muslims families that hadn’t migrated into the Caliphate; had they been wiped out by uncaring aliens, or were they trying desperately to survive in a world turned upside down?

  Tears dripped from her eyes, floating free in zero-gravity; Reynolds gave her a hug and she relaxed into his arms, almost forgetting the looming presence of Oolane, waiting patiently for her to recover. The images continued to play; she saw Oghaldzon marching through a ruined city, saw a handful of the aliens moving in front of the White House and entering it, others moving towards a mosque and destroying it when fire poured fr
om the windows…

  The image returned to the White House; she felt Reynolds tense against her. She had just seen enough people die to exterminate the population on the moon several times over, but it was completely beyond her ability to grasp; for Reynolds, the American was seeing the centre of his country violated and desecrated by aliens who didn’t even have the decency to intend to desecrate it. It was meaningless to them…and that was worst of all.

  “We have a question,” Oolane said. The image focused up on a printed page; WE’LL BE BACK. “What does this mean?”

  Reynolds pulled free of her. “It means that they’re going to come back and destroy you all,” he snapped, his voice filled with defiance and pride. The odd clicking sound that always surrounded the aliens seemed to grow louder. “You’ve killed billions of humans under those asteroids, and you’ve killed thousands of others in your invasion! We wanted meet you in peace, not to fight you for the possession of our own solar system, but now we know what you are, we’re going to fight you until one or the other of us is exterminated! We’re going to send ships to your homeworld and strike back, we’re going to hurt them…”

  Samra reached out and pulled him back, hard. She had never willingly pulled a man to touch her, particularly not when she was naked, but there was no choice. His eyes frightened her, they were bright with unshed tears and hot with fury and rage. He didn’t calm as she held him; she felt his body against hers and it didn’t calm him. She would have almost welcomed him forcing her to have sex, just so that he would stop providing the Oghaldzon with reasons to exterminate humanity, but he just lay against her. Like her tears, his floated across the room, drifting with what she thought was pollen, floating in the air.

  Oolane had watched it all, unmoved. “Your race is contradictory,” she said, very calmly. The dispassionate voice – how Samra hated that voice – showed no trace of her real feelings. “You can be docile in some situations, and endlessly resistant in others. Why do you not accept the dangers in how your own society works?”

  Samra held him while she spoke. “Because we work to overcome the dangers?”

  “You do not,” Oolane said, flatly. “You permit dangerous ideas to spread; you allow people infected with those dangerous ideas to exterminate other ideas. You abuse your own people. You brought a dangerous arms race into space where it could have exterminated your own race; you treat the people who fuelled your civilisation like criminals. Your willingness” – she pointed one of her forearms at Reynolds – “to hold our entire race accountable for what happened though an accident and human negligence is entirely in character with what we have observed.”

  They must have intercepted broadcasts – documentaries – on the Lawton Rebellion, or the Chinese Lunar Rebellion, or maybe even the foundation of the Rockrats, Samra thought, her mind spinning. In the end, all human wars had been based around the twin desires for resources and security; the Oghaldzon might not need the human star system for its resources – despite the whining of various eco-friendly groups, not even a billion times a billion Rockrats could exhaust the entire solar system of asteroids in less than a million years – but they had certainly worried about their security. She remembered the Message Bearer project; if the Oghaldzon fusion drive was duplicated, and she was sure that it would be duplicated by one of the science colonies out in the belt or the outer solar system, there might be hundreds of human asteroid-based colony ships heading out into space. The Oghaldzon…would be unable to compete; from what Oolane had said, their colonies were always much larger than human colonies, and they had over a billion settlers with them for Earth.

  “You will answer me a question,” Oolane said. “If we invited your people to surrender now, what would they say?”

  Samra looked at Reynolds, who looked back. “I don’t know,” Samra said, finally. She was tempted to declare that the human race would never surrender, but she suspected that that was untrue; the vast majority of the human race would be happy as long as their basic needs were met and they had a chance to live their lives without interference. “You killed so many people that no one is likely to take you at your word.”

  “Those people died because of human negligence,” Oolane said. “We did not kill them.”

  “You certainly took advantage of the devastation,” Reynolds pointed out. He seemed to have calmed down slightly. “The asteroids would not have fallen without you and your people, would they?”

  Samra spoke before Oolane could say anything. “They might surrender, but no one knows what life under your rule would be like,” she said. “Why don’t you tell them that?”

  Oolane filed the information away somewhere. Samra hoped the alien would take her advice; it was the only way in which information would get down to Earth that someone – somewhere – might be able to use. She suspected that alien rule would be strange, at least at first; violent crime would be punished with extreme force, even the most minor kind of violent crime. The aliens might even make mistakes; her roommate at the IAU Academy had liked her boyfriends to tie her up and pretend to rape her…and she had almost called the police on them. The aliens would have shot him without any hesitation. How else would they treat territory they had invaded? Would they offer humanity any stake in the future, or would they insist on taking all of the power for themselves? How would they handle human bureaucrats? Hell, did they even have bureaucrats of their own?

  Her smile vanished. They might offer to buy Helium-3 from the moon…and it was quite possible that Karl Bova and his cohorts would sell. If they made an offer, one that would include other items the moon wanted or needed, such as freedom from Earth, it might be accepted. She kept her mouth shut; she would not offer the aliens the chance to realise that it might actually work.

  “We could inform them of what would await them under our rule,” Oolane said. “Why do none of your soldiers surrender?”

  Reynolds smiled. “Because, for the last ninety-odd years, every American soldier who was captured ended up dead, or tortured, or beheaded, or worse,” he said. It would have been a more impressive declaration if they hadn’t then had to explain the concept of torture to Oolane. “We don’t surrender our soldiers and we don’t leave wounded behind for the enemy. If they can’t get out, they will fight to the death.”

  Oolane looked at him. “We do not kill enemy soldiers,” she said. Samra had the odd feeling that she meant it. “They are simply kept in a camp and prevented from doing any real harm to us or any others of their own kind.”

  Reynolds said nothing.

  “We require you to tell them that,” Oolane said. “We also require you to explain that we will not slaughter civilians and we will assist them in rebuilding once we have secured the country. Will you make the broadcast?”

  Samra stalled, frantically looking around for inspiration. She had made one broadcast already and it had almost killed her, even though Reynolds had reassured her that there had been no real choice at all. She saw one of the drifting bits of pollen in the air and pointed at it, drawing Oolane’s attention to the tiny white…thing.

  “What is that?” she asked. It had been puzzling her for a while; most spacecraft tended to try to keep air as clean and clear as possible. “They just seem to float in and out.”

  Oolane seemed completely unconcerned. “Sperm cells, in human terms,” she said. Samra felt sick and saw the same expression on Reynolds’ face; the two of them had almost certainly swallowed some of the alien sperm. Rational thought told her than there was no way she could get pregnant with an alien baby; logic and reason had gone out to lunch. “Some of them will find a female in season, others will just drift until they are filtered out of the air.”

  Samra cursed her curiosity. She hadn’t wanted to know.

  Chapter Thirty: Hidden from View

  Area 51, Asteroid Belt

  “It’s confirmed, then?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Captain Callie Brown said, her dark eyes grim. “The aliens definitely intercepted the industrial st
ation and the automatics tripped the self-destruct nuke we placed on board before launching it into the slow-transfer orbit. We don’t think the blast actually got the alien constant-boost ship they sent after it, but it’s one more nail in the coffin of Earth.”

  Admiral Paul Waikoloa stared down at the coffee bulb he held in his hand and wondered what would happen if he screamed in frustration. He had watched in horror, along with the others on the asteroid, when the alien fleet opened fire on the welcome fleet, and then had advanced against Earth and launched the invasion. Information was scarce on what had happened next – what little they had had been relayed from the moon to the Rockrats and the colonies in the outer solar system – but it was clear the aliens had invaded Earth. There was no way to know how well the aliens were doing, but the asteroids had certainly softened up the opposition; at a rough guess, at least four of the Great Powers – China, the Caliphate, the Co-Prosperity Sphere and the Commonwealth – might have been utterly crippled by the impacts. The recordings of the battle had been chilling; the observable effects on Earth worse.

  The frustration was getting to him; it was getting to all of them. Almost all of the USSF – apart from their ships and a handful that had been left at Mars – had rallied to fight the hopeless battle against the aliens, the Oghaldzon, if the captured astronomer had been telling the truth in her broadcast. The world of the USSF spacemen was a tight-knit group; he had known many of the men who had died in the final battle around Earth. He should have been there, he felt, even though cold logic told him that it would have only made the final result more human ships destroyed; the ships that had been held back at Area 51 wouldn’t have made any real difference. The aliens had held all of the cards. Even so…