Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  He gazed down at the strategic map, not really seeing it; his mind was elsewhere. The aliens would be across the Suez soon; they would meet the Israelis and the remaining Caliphate forces there, Muslims and Jews fighting together against the common foe. They would take Moscow soon; Paris had fallen in the week following the desperate battle to destroy the space elevators. India was in complete chaos; his last talk with the Commonwealth’s current spokesman had warned that the Commonwealth was on the verge of breaking apart under the strains of the war. Mutual support on such a scale had never before been considered necessary…

  The aliens were pushing supplies into the Occupied Zone in America. It wouldn’t be long, according to the predictions, before they started to advance, either north or south…or even west. The generals weren’t confident; the losses in the Battle of the Elevator had been serious enough to make it hard to hold any kind of line against the aliens, let alone bring up reinforcements. How long would it be before the aliens put a knife to America’s throat? The results of a more ruthless approach to orbital bombardment didn’t bear thinking about.

  There was a chime at the door. “Mr. President,” Captain Schaefer said, “General Denny and Doctor Laura Bryophyte are here for their appointment.”

  Cardona nodded to himself. Schaefer had more or less taken over the role of both head bodyguard – almost useless within the National Command Centre – and chief of staff. Clayton Scannell had died somewhere in Washington. The remainder of the Tomb Guards had insisted on returning to the front lines; Cardona had shaken their hands as they left, wishing them luck and good hunting. Some of them had distinguished themselves in underground warfare against the aliens, although God alone knew how long that would hold out. The more aliens who came down and became used to operating in such conditions, the harder it became to maintain partisan warfare against them.

  “Thank you,” he said. He found nothing touching in Captain Schaefer’s behaviour; at least he didn’t try to mother him like some of the Secret Service agents. “Please show them both in.”

  General William Denny looked exhausted; he’d been trying to coordinate a defensive line that would have half a chance of stopping the aliens when they finally decided they’d massed enough firepower and came charging out of the Occupied Zone. Doctor Laura Bryophyte looked fresher; the President took in her dark skin and youthful appearance and realised that she, at least, could sleep at night. She was pretty enough, but her eyes glittered with intelligence and a certain excitement; the President realised she loved her job. He envied her.

  “Mr. President,” Denny said. His voice was just as tired as his face. “Doctor Bryophyte has been conducting the preliminary research on the captured aliens and their society.”

  Cardona vaguely remembered her now; she had been a specialist who had been tagged for deployment to a research team back when they thought that the aliens would almost certainly be friendly. She had been lucky not to be on the Welcome Fleet, although she probably had been unhappy, if not furious, at the time. No one on Earth knew much about alien life, with the exception of a handful of bacterial life forms found on Mars and Titan; Laura had been young enough not to have preconceived notions, old enough to know what the human race did know.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” he said. He’d been curious about the captured aliens since they had been taken into custody. “Please, I would be delighted to hear what you have found out about the enemy.”

  Bryophyte pulled a secured datachip out of her pocket and slipped it into the processor on the President’s desk, slipping through the security screens and protocols with every evidence of impatience. Cardona waited as patiently as he could; much of the information would probably be declassified eventually, but they would have to be careful about disseminating it. If the aliens realised that they had a prisoner – and there would be no other way of finding out such information – their reaction might not be pleasant.

  “The face of the enemy,” Bryophyte said, as an image of an Oghaldzon appeared in front of them. Cardona studied it with interest; it was the first time he had seen an alien naked, without the armour they wore, and he found himself looking to see if the aliens had genitals. He couldn’t see anything obvious; the grey-black creature seemed to be totally sexless. The first image vanished, to be replaced by a second Oghaldzon; this one had a crest rising up from the grey back. “Mr. President; these are the only two prisoners known to be in human hands.”

  She paused. “We subjected the aliens to all kinds of tests, ranging from simple X-rays to analysis of their sheddings, excrement and some limited samples taken directly from their bodies, including blood,” she said. “As far as we can tell, their biochemistry is different enough from ours that there is no chance of either disease spreading to us, or inter-fertility. The latter was not a surprise; a handful of attempts to crossbreed humans with animals, creatures much closer to us than the Oghaldzon, have all failed. We are fortunate that their wounds were limited; if either of them had been seriously injured, we would have almost certainly killed them while trying to heal them.

  “We have one male Oghaldzon; one female Oghaldzon,” she said. “The only real difference between the sexes is the crest” – she pointed a finger at the image – “which we believe is used to suck sperm cells out of the air and fertilise the female’s eggs. They are far less… diverse in internal structure than we are; if you will pardon the comment, my internal make-up is very different from yours, particularly my reproductive systems.

  “The Oghaldzon…seem to have much less of their bodies devoted to reproduction; from what we have been able to ascertain, talking to them, they just don’t think about sex the way we do. They don’t seem to think about it at all; the male expressed little interest in the female – sexually, I mean. They are clearly friends and know each other, but there’s no sign of any sexual tension or intimacy on such a level; we believe, now, that they mate more like frogs. The male releases his sperm into the air; the female, perhaps later, sucks it out of the air and uses it to fertilise herself. This almost certainly has an effect on their development, but as yet we’re not prepared to speculate on how this may have affected their upbringing.”

  “The female might get pregnant,” Denny observed. “Have you attempted to see if she will get pregnant?”

  “We don’t know enough to breed them,” Bryophyte said. “We did ask them and they exhibit almost no interest in their children; I had the distant impression that they don’t really care about children, certainly not at more than an abstract level. We do hope that we will see the female becoming pregnant, but…”

  She shrugged. “Apart from their sexual organs, or lack thereof, their internal structure is a little confusing,” she said. “They have no less than eleven stomachs – they eat some of our food, although they are not keen on some meats – and they seem to be pretty tough creatures. Note that the eyes are actually somewhat vestigial; their sonar would probably have handled most of their seeing back on their homeworld, while the development of space technology probably ensured that their eyes got a new lease of life. Their sonar is actually quite fascinating; the signals are phase-shifted in ways we are unable to duplicate, but will allow them to literally peer inside each other and see how they work. The aliens we have captured know a great deal about their own biology; I suspect that their version of playing doctor is peeking inside one another and working out how their bodies work. I have the impression that medical science is one branch that that are much more advanced than we are, although naturally Oghaldzon medicine would probably be fatal to humanity and vice versa.

  “The six gripping hands are individually much weaker than any human hand,” she said. “Their dexterity is actually less than a human might achieve with four fingers and a thumb, but by using two or more hands together, they meet and exceed human norms. Their weapons are generally lighter than our own; I suspect that it is more or less impossible for them to use our weapons, and we might have difficulty using theirs. Just how this will wor
k out in the long run… their hand-eye – or sonar, in this case – coordination is naturally better than ours.”

  The President listened as the doctor went on. Part of him was fascinated; part of him wanted to know if there was anything they could use as a weapon against them. He wanted to ask her directly, but he held his tongue; as long as she was discoursing on a subject that fascinated her, she might well cover a topic he wanted to know more about. He knew little about alien life forms, but perhaps she knew enough to help him find a way to defeat them.

  “There are some possibilities,” she concluded. “It might be possible to generate noise on their sonar wavelengths to blind them, although the phase-shifting would make it difficult for the system to find and permanently blind them. They found the loud music maddening, by the way; some of the aliens were apparently on the verge of madness by the time they were killed, or in the case of our captives, captured. They are both horrified at the thought of shooting prisoners out of hand; they believe that it happened because individual Oghaldzon were driven mad by the racket and higher authority was unable to intervene in time.”

  “Not bloody likely,” Denny muttered. “How do we know that they’re telling the truth?”

  “We don’t,” Bryophyte admitted. She paused. “We put them both through intelligence tests; they’re at roughly the level of above-average humans, although I must warn you that the tests were designed for humans and might be misleading. As the General’s request” – she nodded at Denny – “we concentrated on trying to learn about how their society functioned and exactly what tactical or strategic knowledge the aliens might possess, particularly something that might be useful before they resume their advance. We found very little.”

  The President leaned forward. “They’re not talking?”

  “They don’t know that much about the overall plan,” Bryophyte said grimly. “We asked them why they had come and they said that the Oghaldzon had been intercepting human broadcasts for years, and they decided that they didn’t like the thought of sharing the galaxy with us – apparently, television was not the best ambassador we could have picked to the Oghaldzon. To them, humans are dangerously unpredictable and irresponsible creatures, with no concept of absolute truth, honesty, or decency. There’s no way to know just what they picked up from their listening watch, but they were certainly terrified when they realised that we were probing into space and put the fleet together to visit Earth and… civilise us.”

  Denny barked a harsh laugh. “They – the creatures who dropped a handful of asteroids on Earth – are going to civilise us?”

  Bryophyte nodded once. “They – the captives – believe that the asteroids were an accident,” she said. “The Oghaldzon apparently believed that we would have rigged the asteroids to blow themselves up if there was even a chance that they would fall down and hit the planet. I must admit; there is some evidence that one of the asteroids was blown apart by an Oghaldzon warhead, which does add some proof to their claim.

  “What we have not been able to find from them is any clues as to the location of their homeworld, or how some of their technology works,” she concluded. “Their homeworld must be an odd place by their descriptions, but none of it seems to make any sense; I have the impression that they literally don’t know much about how the system goes together, or that they have been kept in ignorance by their leaders. It’s quite possible, of course, that we are asking the wrong questions; we did ask them about spectral class and star colours, but those would mean something different to an Oghaldzon. As for their technology…

  “They prefer lasers because chemical weapons hurt their sonar at close range,” she said. “These ones don’t know how they work; their knowledge is limited to stripping down the weapons and ensuring that the parts are all working properly, with no knowledge beyond that. It makes sense, I guess; what they don’t know, they can’t tell, even under torture. We haven’t hurt them, of course; the CIA interrogation specialist concluded that they would be unable to inflict pain without risking killing them.”

  “And the other aliens might object to such treatment,” Cardona said. The restrictions on torture might have been relaxed during the Wrecker War, but the Wreckers hadn’t hesitated to maim, rape, torture or kill American servicemen and women who fell into their hands. “There is to be no rigorous interrogation of the aliens, understand?”

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Bryophyte said. She didn’t sound unhappy, the President noted; he found that rather a relief. “They have been quite happy to answer questions, but there are some matters in which they are either ignorant or unwilling to discuss with us.”

  “I would believe that,” Denny admitted. “There are so many components that fit into a modern tank that we don’t expect the tank crew to know everything, just what they need to perform basic repairs and maintenance.”

  The President nodded. “I see,” he said. “This leads to one final question; what do they want from us?”

  Bryophyte hesitated. “At best, they want to civilise us, which would mean bringing us into their society, at first as a lowly group and then as equals,” she said. “Their history seems to have quite a few such events built in; the losers in a way become part of the winning… tribe. At worst, they would want to contain us permanently; they don’t like the idea of genocide, but if worst comes to the worst, they might decide that it’s a case of us or them, and in that case…”

  She didn’t finish the sentence.

  “The really bad news,” she concluded, “is that we now know how many of the Oghaldzon came to Earth.” She paused, just long enough for the President’s blood to run cold. “The captives claim that two billion Oghaldzon are in the fleet.”

  Chapter Forty-Six: Action Stations!

  Freeport One, Asteroid Belt

  “I’m sorry,” Kyle Short said. “Did you say two billion?”

  Lieutenant Cindy Short nodded once. Her face was not, for once, set in the challenging glower she had focused upon everyone she met. Instead it was a greyish colour of shock.

  Jake Ellsworth looked at her and very carefully said nothing; he had a great deal of respect for Cindy’s technical and tactical skills, but much less for her personal attitude. She seemed to think that the correct way to handle Rockrats – or indeed anyone – was to bark orders at them. In some environments that might have worked, but not when they were trying desperately to build a force that could fight the aliens. Trying to convince Rockrats to go in the same direction was like trying to herd cats, with the additional disadvantage that the Rockrats could – and did – answer back. They were individualists by temperament, not the disciplined soldiers, or spacers, that Lieutenant Short was clearly used to commanding.

  He decided to speak before the conversation became any more explosive. “How did you find that out?”

  Cindy’s face twisted sharply. “We have a stealth platform established near Earth, close enough for a laser tightbeam to be targeted on it – all completely undetectable, of course,” she said. “We have access to what little information has been gathered on the forces down on the planet, as well as what our agents have been able to access on the moon. The report didn’t go into many details, but they must have captured and interrogated a few aliens after the offensive.”

  Ellsworth considered the implications of the vast numbers. In the short term, nothing changed; the plan to defeat the aliens in space would proceed regardless of how many there were; unless they had somehow hidden additional ships, humanity would still have very definite figures on what the aliens could deploy against humanity. In the long term, it might change everything; Rockrats wouldn’t hesitate to stamp on alien military forces, but two billion aliens almost certainly meant that some of those would be civilians.

  “They’re going to be around after the war concludes,” he said. He didn’t see the aliens succeeding in wiping the human race out of space, although they could probably give it the old college try; it would take thousands of years to visit and destroy every asteroi
d that might carry a human population within its rocky shield. They didn’t have to do that much; if they forced humanity into hiding, they might win a victory on points and attrition. “What the hell are we going to do with them?”

  Short shrugged. “It may be more important that they have brought a large infrastructure along with them,” he said. “What happens if they have Rockrats of their own? They might decide to come and set up their own mining stations out here.”

  “If they do, we resist them,” Cindy said firmly. Ellsworth refrained from pointing out that she had the least authority of the three of them… and even the other two’s authority rested on their mandate from the voluntarist Rockrats. If Short’s position was to be openly challenged, Ellsworth might lose his post, or at the very least be forced to engage in an open discussion of their plans… plans that might lead to the aliens acting against them. “You have always resisted the attempts of others to set up mining stations in the Belt.”

  “That is not precisely accurate,” Short said. “We have absorbed hundreds of spacers from the different Great Powers who have decided that joining us was a better option than remaining slaves to The Man. We have offered a better life for the highly-trained and experienced people who are then sent out here and exploited by corporations and governments. We have very rarely resorted to naked force and then only against a handful of rogue Rockrats and Corporate Rats who have endangered other people. There is no guarantee that we could absorb aliens as well.”