by J. Kirsch
Two minutes later Meiyu was dressed and had gone to make tea, rationed though it was. She knew better than to get in his way when he was in such an agitated state.
Jin waited patiently, going through channel after channel. Contacting the low-level aide, being sent up to the lieutenant, captain, all the way up the damnable chain. He wouldn't settle for anyone beneath General Chao. Though Jin was theoretically the civilian and military leader of the whole government, in this time of chaos each General might as well have been the master of his own kingdom. At last after the better part of an hour of cajoling and waiting, Jin heard the knock on his door. He called for the General to come in.
General Chao was a stocky, well-built man with a beard unruly as brambles. His hooded eyes betrayed nothing, not even the sleep-deprived haze that Jin knew they both shared.
"General, forgive me, but this conversation needed to be face-to-face."
The General nodded absently as Meiyu handed him a cup of tea and then faded invisibly into the background - though not, Jin noted, out of earshot.
"The earlier reports I've been getting have said that we still haven't been able to salvage a single one of the Enemy's small fighters. Apparently not a single fighter has been shot down."
General Chao smiled grimly. "Actually I'm afraid you've been misinformed. We can't seem to hit through the cockroach fighter's armor with anything conventional. In this sense we haven't shot down a single one. But we discovered during the battle that with each carrier destroyed a large section of cockroach fighters fell to ground. This has confirmed the strategy I suspected, that these cockroach fighters may be unmanned drones which require control from their carrier of origin."
My God. So this is what they call the fog of war, where even ground-breaking discoveries aren't shared with the supreme leadership, Jin thought.
"Would it be possible to make any of them air-worthy again, flying under their own power? Use them as a delivery system for our Dragon Missiles?" This was the new weapon, the missiles that could use fusion energy to literally obliterate matter. They'd thrown prior known physics into chaos.
General Chao shrugged. "We are doing all that we can, General Secretary. The truth of it is that yes, we could do this. They are maneuverable enough so that we could even use them as a delivery device for a Dragon Missile against the carrier group in Shanghai."
Jin nodded. This was crucial. The Dragon Missiles had had to be deployed as surface-to-air missiles. Even though they could be converted for air-to-air combat, that proved moot because the Enemy had wiped out the Chinese air force in the first wave of attacks. If these cockroach fighters could be repurposed, God, it could eventually turn the tide.
Wait. Did he just say what I think he said? Jin had been hoping that they could grind out the conflict long enough to repurpose those cockroach fighters for Dragon Missiles, but that was a process he'd assumed would take months, even years, a longshot that would eventually make the difference. How in the Great Buddha's name did the General think he could use them in a matter of hours or days??
"General, forgive me for being blunt. What makes you think that you can even hope to get one of those fighters working, when by all intelligent estimates it should take even our technically skilled personnel the better part of a year to understand their inner workings?"
General Chao replied, "General Secretary, the Enemy's recent arrival is not the first time we've seen these cockroach fighters."
A chill coursed through Jin's body. "Say again please, General."
"Where do you think the technology from our Dragon Missiles came from? Has no one briefed you on this?"
Jin put up a hand. His face had gone white. "You are telling me that we've salvaged alien craft of this type before? Before the invasion?"
"Many years before, yes. It gave us the ideas that allowed us to develop the new missiles. To be honest, General Secretary, we took the part of their technology that seems to have been implemented purely from a transportation-design standpoint and repurposed it as a weapon. Judging from the Enemy's prior attacks, powerful as they've been, I don't think they ever considered using that element of their technology in the way we are now using it to make our Dragon Missiles so devastating."
"Let me see if I have this right, General. What you're saying is that we don't quite think like them, and that not thinking like them has allowed us to develop something they aren't prepared for, even though it's based on their superior technology?"
The General paused, somewhat confused. "That's a wordy way of explaining it, General Secretary, but yes."
Jin sighed, his cheeks reddening as if he'd been swigging whiskey. "Look, General, with the amount of sleep I'm going on I'll take what I can get. Confusing or not, if that's true, I want you to act on it now."
General Chao took a gulp of tea before nodding and saluting. "It will be done as you say, General Secretary, but I have deep reservations. We have only a limited supply of Dragon Missiles available, and I will have to convert the cockroach fighters so that our pilots can operate them. There isn't time to make the missiles launch-able, so our pilots will have to ram their craft like Kamikaze pilots. Pilots themselves are now as rare as gold to us."
Jin solemnly shook the General's hand. "I know this might not be a good option, General, but is it the best of all the bad options in front of us?"
"Is it the safest option? No. Does it have the best chance of changing our fortunes? That may be." When the bearded face crisply nodded, Jin decided to throw the dice, come what may.
"Do it."
Chapter 4
Skye, the Abducted
We were on Level 3. The five of us were about to enjoy our daily prodding and poking. They were twice our number. They. How did you describe something that made your skin want to wriggle off your body and burrow through the floor?
They were lithe, not like any woman's body lithe. We're talking eel-like. Myla took my hand. "It's okay, Skye. We're going to be all right." She did that little routine every single day, it seemed, and I was pissed at myself for continuing to let her.
Some things, some horrors, you got used to just by sheer repetition. And then there were the ones you didn't.
The Glowing Ones came to us, two to each. They led us to slabs of metal that hovered in the air. There was a sense of weightlessness until they strapped each of us onto one of the cold observation tables. I felt thin, prodding tubes in places that made me squirm. I shut my eyes and tried to think of anything but this nightmarish here and now. Even with my eyes closed I couldn't block out the glowing orange light shed by their skin.
I felt hands slide across me, gently probing. Not human. The fingers felt like wax paper. Visions swam in my head, definitely not my own. But I'd learned a little trick since our early days of captivity. The Glowing Ones seemed to communicate through telepathy, mostly which came across as visions and less often as vague emotion. But it had to be partly a two-way street. I purposely focused my mind on things I didn't think they'd find so pleasant, blotting out whatever they tried to show me.
With satisfaction I felt their awareness blanch from my mind. It clung on but receded into the background like a predator whose nose has been bloodied a little too badly by its intended prey. I tried to open my eyes and look for the others. I don't know why I bothered. It was a stupid hope, certainly not coming from past experience. They always kept the observation tables far apart. Level 3 was the worst not only because of what they did to you, but because it was the only time that you felt truly alone.
Time passed and my body felt like it was burning, but I couldn't move. The restraints held my wrists, ankles, and neck fast. This was the nightmare I dreaded every day, but even this was prone to the wonderful coping mechanism called the human brain. I focused out the strange sensations they bombarded me with, and instead I steadied on anything, anything that would take my mind somewhere else.
I tried to imagine what world the Glowing Ones had come from. I populated that world with plants and animal
s in my mind. What would they be like? It was like a game with myself. Games were one of the few safe outlets to spend time in captivity. Focusing on my family threatened grief, but imagining what the aliens' world might be like, there was no pain from that direction. As I let my mind wander in that vein I saw one of the Glowing Ones approach and stand above me.
This was highly unusual. They only stayed near you long enough to do their tests, but this one seemed to be just staring at me. I knew that he could see the images in my head. Could he make sense of them? Even if he could, what would he think?
The Glowing One put something over my mouth and nose, and suddenly my thoughts swam for oblivion. This happened every time....every damn time. Still, I welcomed it. I imagined that I might wake up somewhere else, another silly indulgence that kept me going in this place.
When I awoke I found my clothes folded neatly beside me. I hastily shrugged into them and saw that everyone else except Myla had already stirred. We prepared to head up to Level 4. This was our 'recreation' area and probably the most contradictory part of our cubed prison. The Glowing Ones had furnished it with plunder from Earth. That had to be the assumption, unless the Glowing Ones had IKEA on their homeworld. Old, ratty couches, comfortable armchairs, stools, plush sofas, a large monitor that played random television programs, books, even board games. For a second you could be forgiven for forgetting that you were a human captive on an alien spacecraft.
That is, if you could ignore the purplish muck on the floor, walls, and ceiling, and the strange artificial light that never seemed to stay the same shade for more than ten seconds.
"Who wants to play?" Myla pulled out the game of Life. My younger sister had been obsessed with this game since age 5. We'd not only played it, we'd made up our own bonus rules and created additional house and profession cards, self-illustrated, to go with our enhanced version. It felt unreal, doing something this normal, as Oliver, Jobe, and Kane (with a noticeable sigh) sat in a rough circle around the coffee table in the center of Level 4.
Myla insisted that doing these things was important. Her argument ran that, if we could at least pretend things were normal for a few minutes each day, then we'd be the stronger for it. Oliver and Jobe had both violently disagreed, at least in the beginning. It was the one thing that those two had ever agreed on. But as the days had ground past, one after another, we soon realized that the Glowing Ones weren't our only enemy. Boredom ran a darn close second.
It was maybe a half hour into the game before I noticed that something was wrong. The lights had steadied out at a greenish tint. I looked at Jobe, and he looked sharply all around.
Oliver shrugged. "What, you guys look like you saw a ghost? So what? The stupid lights are staying the same color for once. Who gives a damn?"
I looked around at the mucous-like muck covering the surfaces of Level 4. No movement, and yet... Something didn't feel right. After more than 12 weeks here anything not part of our daily grind had to carry significance.
After a while even Oliver's face seemed to perk up. It did feel inexplicably weird. When you'd grown accustomed to constantly shifting color lighting your every movement for over three months, this felt a little like seeing sunlight after a year in the dark.
"What does it mean?" Myla asked softly.
"Do we have any idea what the Glowing Ones associate with different colors?" Jobe asked.
Kane scratched his chin. "Where are you going with this, man?"
"Red for humans usually means emergency. I know I'm grasping at straws here, but does this mean something? Is it possible that this is a ship-wide alert?"
"Wouldn't there be a siren or something audible?" I asked.
Jobe shook his head. "Not necessarily. We've never heard these things speak. We already know that they mainly communicate mind to mind through imagery. It would make sense that an alert would be purely visual for them."
Suddenly a section of the ceiling began to unravel, opening up like a slimy hatch as the muck skittered away. Usually the Glowing Ones did this to drop physical items from one Level to another - like the clothes we received each morning. Not so at this moment.
I put both hands to my mouth and gasped as the body fell through. The slender corpse still glowed a bright orange, yet its shimmering skin was fading, even I could tell that. The men, reckless as so many young men through the ages, immediately approached the body for a closer inspection.
"Get the hell back!" I yelled. Myla looked at me like I'd turned demonic as the men froze.
"We don't know what's happened to that thing. Nothing good can come from touching it. Look at it, but don't you dare touch it. Let's agree on that as a ground rule, OK?"
Jobe, Oliver, and Kane all agreed to my condition. Then, like a bunch of kids dissecting their first insect, they knelt down for a closer look.
Chapter 5
The Resistance
Jin's jeep navigated the strewn debris of what had once been Beijing. His aides Meiyu, Ling, and Yanmei, rode with him, and their convoy included a jeepful of PRC commandos in front and behind. Jin had insisted on visiting the 'front.' Jin was a voracious student of history, and past lessons had told him this: any leader who allowed himself to become too insulated would also become his own worst enemy.
Much as Jin hated doing this, much as he would love nothing more than to hunker down in his underground bunker, this was crucial. He had to see the carnage and destruction for himself. He had to know what was happening to his people. Mangled corpses, often twisted in the masonry that had crushed their fragile bodies, littered almost every street. Out of the corner of his eye Jin saw Meiyu put a hand over her face and repress the violent urge to retch. Yanmei wasn't so lucky.
"More than 95% of the city has been reduced to rubble." A grizzled soldier with awful burns scarring half his face drove the jeep and served as tour guide.
Most people didn't die directly from the bombs. It was what fell on you or the flames that asphyxiated you which spelled the end. Or, in the case of three huge carrier-type ships, a rain of deadly shrapnel which became nearly impossible for people to dodge, and this was the result. Jin couldn't help but see Beijing as a place of despair, a giant urban graveyard. And we are some of the lucky ones, he realized with disbelief. If this is what victory looks like, what can we hope to see in the face of defeat?
Jin thought of his twenty year-old son, one of the thousands of young men recruited into the People's Liberation Army's Shanghai Defense Force. It consisted of 3 divisions, each two million strong. When it became clear that the Enemy had marked Shanghai as an invasion priority, the military had pivoted in response, pouring its resources into the struggle. Where are you now, Jie? Are you like one of these poor souls, lying dead and unrecognized in the street as survivors pass you by, too busy in their own misery to even notice you?
Then Jin felt anger and shame. You don't have the luxury to feel sorry for yourself, stupid, stupid man. There's work to be done, damn you.
What would Chairman Mao say at a time like this? The venerable father of the People's Republic of China had spoken much about war and struggle. A Maoist saying suddenly trickled through his thoughts.
What is a true bastion of iron? It is the masses, the millions upon millions of people who genuinely and sincerely support the revolution.
The more Jin mulled over those words, the more he saw something else in the ruins of Beijing. He saw people salvaging any scrap of value. He saw an elderly couple being helped by their grandson and granddaughter. He saw a group of civilians that had organized themselves into a work crew, busily clearing some of the wider blocked avenues of debris. The more he saw all this, the more he realized that he'd been wrong.
Victory still did look much different than defeat. He could detect it in the purposeful resolve behind the ash-covered faces of civilians and military folks alike. Even the burn-scarred soldier at his side held himself with a kind of dignity.
"General Secretary - "
"Call me Jin. We are together i
n this revolution against the Enemy. Please, just call me Jin."
"Please Sir, I cannot." Jin was shocked to see tears in the man's eyes. "It has been said by the men and by some of the higher officers who have spoken to the General that you have hardly slept throughout the crisis. That you and General Chao have devised a plan to save Shanghai. Is this true?"
Jin hated to kindle false hope in anyone's heart. Still, he couldn't bring himself to say no. "Yes."
The soldier angrily wiped away the tears with the back of his hand and drove on. "There will be no more talk of me not calling you your title due, Sir. General Secretary, you are a hero. I am proud to fight for our country knowing that you are leading it. If you want someone to call you anything less, then you'll have to find another driver, because I'm not worthy to do that. I won't do that. Forgive me, Sir."
Jin had to suppress a grin. "I believe you've just put me in my place, Lieutenant. I stand corrected." For the rest of the tour through the battlefront, that thought kept Jin marveling. Here he was, simply doing his job, and yet his example was inspiring the common soldier on the ground. Soldiers that had never seen or even met him before were now willing to die with him in their thoughts. Is humanity absolutely insane? We make about as much sense as a puddle of mud, when you get down to it, Jin thought.
But that thought was encouraging too. If humans are capable of things far beyond what's rational, then perhaps the Enemy will be helpless to predict how we will respond in extreme conditions. Had the Enemy underestimated humanity?
The smoking fragments of a once mighty assault ship from another world stood testament to the openness of that question.
Chapter 6
The Resistance
General Meng was not an optimist. To the contrary, he was the man who did more than just say that the glass was half empty. He would also tell you that the glass was likely to spill, that any manner of causes might even crush it, shatter it, or send it flying into the nearest wall. He was a man who thought about all contingencies and prepared for them.
