His voice caught in his throat as he spoke. “What are you going to do to me?”
The alien didn’t answer at first. “We must know how your race works,” she said, finally. It had the air of a brief answer intended for a child, not a serious answer, accurate and yet entirely useless. There was little point in vivisecting a live human – the odds were that they had recovered bodies from the remains of the ISS and perhaps the American space shuttle – but he doubted it was going to be pleasant. “We must know if we can live on your world safety.”
“Odd,” he observed. “You’ve started a war against us and you don’t even know if you can live on our world?”
The device lit up before the alien could answer. She moved it, carefully, over his body, paying careful attention to the implanted plate he had in his forearm, where he’d broken his wrist years ago while showing off to a girl. He couldn’t even remember her name now – she’d married someone from the army, if he recalled correctly – but at the time, impressing her had been much more important than it should have been. The alien spent an hour studying him through her sensors, the medical technology displaying a hologram in front of her of his insides, and then moved on to more invasive procedures.
“Ouch,” he said, as she started to draw a little blood from his arm. She either hadn’t heard of anaesthetic, or, more probably, she hadn’t wanted to risk an alien drug on a human. God alone knew what an alien painkiller would do to him. A normal blood sample wasn't painful, even though most humans maintained an irrational fear of needles, but the alien either wasn't gentle or simply didn’t have the right tools. It hurt. “Can you stop doing that, please?”
The alien female ignored him, examining the human blood through a microscope, picking it apart for information. The tests grew more invasive – she probed into each and every one of his orifices – and painful, but he tried to keep the protesting to a minimum. He would have sold his soul for another human in the room, even someone he disliked personally, but he was alone. It was another example, he suspected, of alien paranoia. They didn’t want their prisoners comparing notes.
Idiots, he thought, eyeing the alien out of the corner of his eyes. They would probably have learned more from what their prisoners said to one another. Instead, they’d separated them, just to keep them meek and helpless. Did they really think that they would break free of the alien guards and attack the crew?
“You will come with us,” the guards said finally, as the doctor – although that wasn't a title he would have willingly given to the alien medical expert – released him from his straps. The aliens seemed to have plenty of people who understood English. The guard caught his arm as he drifted into the air and pulled him out into the corridor, through a twisting maze marked only by alien writing, which looked like a dyslexic’s attempt at joined-up writing, and propelled him into a small cabin. It was almost empty, with only a sleeping pallet, a small toilet, water tap and a constant flow of air, blown through the ceiling to keep the air in motion. The door closed with enough force to send little shockwaves through the air; it only took a moment to check it and realise that it was locked.
Trapped, Philippe thought, and wondered what had happened to the others. He hadn’t seen them as the alien guards pulled him through the corridors. They had probably gone through the same examination as he had and then…then what? What did the aliens intended to do with them? Would they be given a message and sent back down to the planet, or would it be worse than that, or…what? Humans had done horrible things to prisoners of war in the past and the aliens might have worse things in store for them.
The wall lit up and revealed itself to be a display screen, showing an image of Earth taken from space. “You will answer our questions,” an emotionless alien voice said. It seemed to come from everywhere. “You will give us full and complete answers to our questions. Where on your planet do you come from?”
Philippe sighed and started to answer.
Chapter Nine
Honour? There ain't no honour in this war. The machine guns killed it. And if the machine-guns didn't, then the artillery did. And if the artillery didn't, then the chlorine gas sure as hell did.
-Harry Turtledove, Great War: American Front
Bastards, Joshua Bourjaily thought, as the live feed from the ISS showed the alien starship approaching the station. There’s no one going to profit from this, but NASA.
A moment later, the alien starship opened fire. Joshua came to his feet, shocked out of his complacency and cynicism by the sudden attack, as the alien weapons started to fire…and the live feed from the ISS cut off sharply. He’d seen something like it before, when watching live feeds from combat zones around the world, and that could only mean that the source of the live feed had been destroyed. The camera had been mounted on Discovery, if he recalled correctly, and the unarmed space shuttle would have been a sitting duck to alien weapons.
“They…they opened fire,” the talking head said, sounding shocked. The image switched to the live feed from a commercial satellite orbiting near the ISS. The alien starship was breaking up into an entire armada of smaller ships, spreading out from their mothership to attack the planet below. There was a graceful inevitability about the hazy images coming through the network and then the image vanished as the satellite was destroyed. “We seem to have technical problems…”
“They took out the satellite, you stupid bitch,” Joshua yelled at the screen as it switched back to the talking head. The blonde-haired girl looked stressed out of her mind. “They destroyed the system and you’re calling it technical difficulties…”
The television fuzzed once and failed. A single line of red writing appeared on the display. NO SIGNAL. Joshua stared at it in disbelief; ever since he had been a child, there had been literally hundreds of channels available to the discriminating viewer, more than anyone could have watched in their entire life. The growing presence of satellite television had only added to the constant barrage of news, entertainment and boredom from the media, but now…now it was dying, fast. He cycled the television through a set of channels and watched as, one by one, other stations vanished off the air. The BBC vanished in the middle of a stunned discourse by a professional astronomer on how the aliens couldn’t possibly be hostile; Al Jazeera flickered into nothingness during a live feed from a ground-based observatory.
His telephone rang once. When he picked it up, there was nothing, not even a dial tone. On impulse, he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and examined it, unsurprised to discover that there was no longer any link to the satellite. The modern make of cell phones used satellites rather than ground-based stations…and they were all going to be destroyed. High overhead, the aliens were blasting them out of space…and suddenly Joshua’s horizons shrunk to the four walls of his apartment. He checked the radio quickly and discovered that it was still working, barely.
“This is an emergency broadcast,” someone said. Despite the static, it didn’t sound like the President or the Governor. Joshua didn’t recognise the voice at all…and yet, it sounded vaguely familiar. “The aliens have opened fire on orbital targets. Remain in your homes. Do not go onto the streets. Do not place yourself in danger…”
A wash of static echoed through the machine. When it cleared, a different voice could be heard. “We speak now to astronomer David Berkinshaw,” it said. Joshua couldn’t tell if it was male or female. It could have been either. “David, you predicted that the aliens were friendly. How does this tie in with the current state of affairs?”
“They could have been provoked, somehow,” the astronomer said. Joshua smiled briefly as he heard the stunned disbelief in his voice. Few had considered the possibility of the aliens being hostile, as far as the news media was concerned; they had preferred to focus on how the world would change once the aliens arrived and brought the new millennium. “Science-fiction is full of wars starting by accident. I would ask you all to broadcast messages of peace towards the alien craft…”
The gro
und shook, violently. A thin layer of dust shivered down from the ceiling. “My God, they’re attacking,” Joshua gasped, and dived under the table. A moment later, the building shook again and a flare of light spilled up through the window. He pulled himself up and headed for the door, catching his camera in one hand and his recorder in the other, and ran up the stairs. If Austin was under attack, he was in the perfect position to record the images for future distribution. He passed a handful of his neighbours, all looking as stunned as he was, as he ran upstairs, ignoring their shouts to remain down under cover.
He ran out onto the roof garden and stopped dead. The starry night was ablaze with light. For a moment, he thought he was staring at fireworks, then he realised that there was a battle going on, high above the world. Streaks of light seemed to be flaring through space, rising up to challenge the aliens high above, while the aliens moved in their stately orbits around the planet. He lifted his camera and peered through the zoom function, but he couldn’t see enough to tell who was winning…and then he saw the fires.
The Austin skyline was marred with towering flames. They came from the direction of the airport and he remembered, with a sudden burst of guilt, that he’d reported on the deployment of a Patriot missile battery to the airport. The aliens had hit the civilian airport – they’d hit civilians – and had he somehow encouraged them to target the men deployed to defend the location? Had he betrayed them to the enemy? Cold logic suggested otherwise…and yet, cold logic wasn't very reassuring, not now. The entire towering furnace had to be the fuel and aircraft going up in flames; what had the aliens done to it to cause such devastation?
“I should go down to the bank and take out the rest of my savings,” a voice said. Joshua turned suddenly to see Mr Adair from the flat below his. He was watching the conflict in space through a telescope and wincing as more bursts of light sparkled out high above. “They have to give me my money, right?”
“Right,” Joshua agreed, thoughtfully. He might have joined the father of two girls, both of whom were entering their teens and knew it, but it wasn't as if he had much in the way of money. He’d kept most of what he earned safe in his apartment, where the IRS and other busybodies couldn’t find it. There wasn't enough to make it worth taking special precautions. “I think you’d better get moving fast…”
Another burst of light, high above, illustrated his point. A moment later, a streak of light appeared from space, racing down towards the planet, striking…somewhere kilometres to the west. He wondered, suddenly, if that was where Fort Hood was located; there was a flash of light in the distance, followed suddenly by a long rumble of thunder. More flashes in the distance caught his eye and he found himself wondering, suddenly, what was under attack. Had the aliens gone after everywhere? Was Austin the last city left on Earth?
It was silly, he knew, but in the air of unreality surrounding the entire war, it was easy to believe that they were alone in the world.
“Yeah,” Mr Adair said. “Do you want to come with me?”
“No, thank you,” Joshua said. Banding together, along with the others in the apartment, probably wasn't a bad idea; one of the permanent inhabitants had even started a neighbourhood watch and encouraged the other residents to stock up on guns, just in case. At the moment, Joshua wondered if he’d been precognitive, or just paranoid. The media had been full of stories about collapsing gun control programs everywhere as the reality of alien contact sank in. “I’ll stay and watch…”
An hour passed slowly. Shelia, one of the other residents, appeared with a flask of hot soup, which she distributed around to the residents. Joshua hadn’t realised that they’d been joined by five others, including two children, but he was grateful for the soup and for the quiet buzz from the radio one of the others had brought. It was a more powerful model than his own, but despite constant channel sweeps, they heard very little. The static – or, he suspected, the jamming – seemed to be everywhere.
It cleared, suddenly. “All designated emergency personnel are to report for duty at once,” it said. Again, the voice was almost impossible to recognise under the static, but it sounded like the FEMA manager he’d interviewed once in the wake of a building collapse in the city. “All FEMA volunteers are to report to their local emergency centres; all others are advised to stay inside and off the streets…”
There was another burst of static. High overhead, he heard the sound of an aircraft, racing towards…what? A wink of light flared up and a streak of flame fell towards the ground, coming down somewhere to the east. This time, the explosion was smaller and he found himself praying that the pilot had managed to eject before the sudden destruction of his aircraft. He hadn’t been a big fan of the military, but watching the death of the aircraft reminded him that they risked their lives so that people like him didn’t have to risk theirs. The pilot, male or female, had deserved better than to die like that…
“They’ve bombed San Diego,” the radio squawked suddenly. “The death toll is in the millions…the entire harbour has been destroyed!” The voice changed suddenly. “We have an unconfirmed report of an aircraft carrier ablaze and sinking off the Atlantic coast.” It changed again, again and again, each message vague, unconfirmed, and panicky. “The President is dead! My God; they bombed Washington!”
Joshua gasped and heard the others gasp as well. It had been fashionable to bitch about Washington, to complain about the IRS auditing good Americans, about the FBI wasting time playing politics when they should be protecting American citizens, about fat cats outsourcing businesses to places that didn’t have labour laws, or starting wars in far-off countries for their oil…but…but it was Washington! He hoped – he prayed – that it was a lie, or even a mistake; he didn’t want to face the possibility that it might be real. No one did.
Shelia came over to him and sat beside him. “If the President is dead, then who takes over?”
Joshua shuddered. “That would be the Vice President, in theory,” he said. He didn’t think much of the Vice President and knew that others shared that opinion; he’d only been given the role, or so they believed, because he had no embarrassing skeletons in his cupboard. “With all the disruption of communications…God alone knows who’s in charge these days…”
Another piece of flaming wreckage fell towards Earth. He remembered, with a sudden flash of dark humour, the end of Independence Day. The destruction of the alien mothership had produced the same effect, even though the mothership should have sent enough wreckage crashing down onto the planet to make it completely uninhabitable. More and more streaks of fire were burning up in the atmosphere; he found himself praying that they included alien wreckage, spacecraft destroyed from the ground, or even by the secret orbital defence systems that rumour said had existed for years. A brief flare of yellow-white light, like a bad version of a science-fiction laser, flared for a moment in the darkness, and then faded out. Whatever was happening up there was coming to a close.
“Damn it, they should be telling us what’s going on,” someone said, in the darkness. “We’re taxpayers, right? We have the right to know what’s happening!”
“I doubt,” someone else said, “that the government knows what’s happening right now. What are they supposed to tell us?”
The first man had no answer. “We now have confirmed alien attacks on almost every military and civilian airport within the United States,” the radio said, suddenly. “Alien weapons have struck them from orbit and the death toll is…”
The voice broke off, again. Joshua listened to the next two reports – and a bout of terrible elevator music – without fully hearing them. High overhead, the fighting seemed to have stopped, but the man with the telescope was reporting that there were still spacecraft moving high overhead. It was tempting to believe that NASA had launched the shuttles and somehow driven the aliens arrive from Earth, but Joshua had listened to enough NASA-bashing over the past three weeks to doubt that the NASA bureaucracy could organise a whorehouse, let alone a coordinated
counterattack against alien spacecraft. The situation called for Will Smith, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a patriotic scriptwriter. All three were rather lacking.
“This is Governor Brogan,” a new voice said. Joshua recognised the man at once. The Republican Governor of Texas might not have been one of his favourite people, but just then he’d have welcomed George Bush, father or son. “The aliens have attacked the planet Earth…”
“Yeah, tell us something we don’t know,” someone jeered, in the semi-darkness. Dawn was coming, slowly. “You useless…”
Invasion Page 9
