There’d been a brief and intense review of disaster plans, and then Aaron and his crew started evacuations. They had lists of the worst buildings in their district. The lists were made for post-earthquake search and rescue teams, but they’d been damned useful to have beforehand, too.
There were panicked people in the streets, and the highways were immediately gridlocked with families trying to leave the city, but they’d still managed quite a few evacuations.
The first quake hit about four hours after midnight, when Aaron was supervising the evacuation of one of the oldest apartment complexes in Van Nuys. The newer ones were up to code, but a few of the older apartment buildings still had cavernous underground parking lots that weren’t reinforced. Those tended to collapse down into the lower levels.
Aaron and his guys had gotten a lot of people out of the building, but some, probably those without cell phones, had not been alerted by the city and had to be roused and convinced to go. No one had seriously resisted--people were much more responsive to firemen than police--but it still took time. Aaron had been on the fourth floor of the five-story building when the first quake hit. He was alone. The last person he’d found on this floor, an old man, had left by the stairwell several minutes before.
It started silently, which was unusual, but quickly grew to a roar. He was in an exposed hall with no cover, so he threw himself to the ground and tucked his head. The shaking was intense, but it was the noise that he had nightmares about. The sound of a building collapsing, the structure being ground off its anchors, as well as the sound of the earthquake, was a squealing scream of chaos he would never forget.
He’d been hit with falling lights and tiles, and then he’d lost track of what was raining down around him, but his gear had saved him. The fact that he’d been at the top of the building meant that it stayed relatively intact while grinding into the basement below.
When the quake ended, he was bruised but managed to climb out a busted window. One of his teammates had seen him and raised a ladder to help him down safely.
Then, the real work had started. It was a bad quake, but California had bad quakes. They’d fared better than a lot of other large cities.
There were dead. The old man had not made it down the stairs. Others had been hit with falling debris in the street, and Aaron had delivered emergency first aid, knowing it could be a long time before EMTs would come.
It was bad. It was overwhelming. But he was a fireman.
“Just keep doing the next thing,” the chief told them. And Aaron had.
The next quake came barely forty minutes after the first one. They kept rolling all through that night.
The chief had gotten caught by a falling power line. It was over in seconds.
In the morning, Los Angeles had been different. Aaron had been different. The mayor reported an initial estimate of six thousand dead. None of the quakes had been above eight pointers, he learned later, but having so many moderately severe quakes in a row had wreaked havoc.
As the news slowly trickled in that day, they learned that California, and particularly Los Angeles, had been lucky. No country was untouched, but some were reduced to rubble and some were swamped with tsunamis. The cities with better warning systems and building codes had done better, of course, but even considering that, Los Angeles had been lucky.
Aaron pressed his forehead harder against the whale, his eyes shut. They had been lucky, but as the death toll rose and they began to hear what had happened all over the world, and what was likely coming, a new kind of evil set in. He hadn’t realized how many doomsday cults there were in the world or how many people would choose death over uncertainty. There had been hundreds of suicides in L.A., which, though lower in number than the people killed by the natural disasters, was almost more frightening.
And here was this animal, dying right before him, with its pod following behind. Like humanity, they were drying up and gasping their last breaths, with only an alien and a man to stand by and watch them die. Was that what the aliens would do? Stabilize the world only to watch calmly while humanity sucked its last breath and expired?
The aliens had come three weeks after the night of earthquakes. They’d come in overwhelming numbers and met with world leaders, offering aid. Aaron hadn’t had running water in his apartment, but he’d had electricity, so he watched video of the aliens on his phone.
They had aided the world, or at least, some of it—the population centers they felt they could stabilize and make self-reliant again. They had studied the environment and consulted with scientists, and they had begun making a plan for slowing the environmental freefall. As each city and town and country gasped and bled and tried desperately to staunch the wounds, the aliens tried to keep the heart beating. They would need to do more, but the fact that they thought salvation was possible gave some degree of hope.
The whale wasn’t breathing any more. Aaron hadn’t felt it inhale or exhale since the aliens walked away.
He pushed himself away from its corpse. No doubt, there would be coyotes and perhaps even bears gnawing at the corpse soon. They weren’t sure why the predators were swarming the city already--perhaps poisoned birds had been eaten and caused illness, perhaps the quakes had confused them, perhaps a hundred things. It shouldn’t have seemed so creepy that they would feed off the dead whale, but it bothered him anyway.
He hadn’t been feeling his aches and pains, but now the scrape on his face stung with saltwater and his arm flared with pain. These injuries weren’t from the earthquakes, but from a thug who’d tried to steal his canteen during his shift last night.
The roar of the helicopter jarred him out of his reverie. The rotor blades began to whir until they blurred together. It was motion, life, power, and he stood there beside a corpse. His lethargy suddenly left him. When would he ever see an alien up close like this again, especially one who displayed at least a little interest in the death of a terrestrial creature? He didn’t believe in karma or kismet or anything like that, but this was an opportunity for… something.
He’d been living at the firehouse for a while now with a lot of his crew. They’d been trying to implement some kind of modified shifts as the months passed, and it wasn’t unbearable. An apocalypse was much easier to bear with defined tasks and a schedule, but today he’d just walked away. He wasn’t planning on it. He had no destination. He’d just walked.
Last week, he’d watched in horror with the rest of the world when the aliens refused to evacuate the people in Hawaii while a storm surge washed toward it. More death. The same surge kept moving. The aliens devoted some resources to saving a fortunate few thousand from the Philippines and Malaysia, but that was it. They could’ve done more, they admitted, but they had decided that those areas and populations were not sustainable.
The tsunamis had come. The numbers of dead were astounding, not because they were worse than what had come before, but because everyone knew it was coming and they couldn’t stop it.
The aliens apparently had a very limited list of what they would do, and they had no intention of taking human input on their goals. When a group of world leaders had attempted to give an ultimatum about the priority of human life in their operations, trying desperately to maintain some control over the planet…, the aliens had summarily executed every leader involved. Along with their families. The list had been publicized yesterday.
Aaron knew that reasoning with or killing one alien would not halt their plan, whether that be subjugation or annihilation, but anything would be better than tacit surrender.
He didn’t know which he wanted more as he jogged toward the helicopter, a conversation or a fight. He just knew that if all humans felt like him—powerless and unwilling to confront even one alien—they were doomed.
He used one arm to shield his eyes from the stinging sand, and held up the other to halt the copter. It was only inches off the sand, and after a moment of hesitation, settled back down.
Aaron huffed sand out of his nose a
nd leaned over as he approached. The blades were above his head, but it felt unsafe to stand up straight—death came in horrendous cataclysms and also in mundane beheadings.
#
Eto signaled to the pilot to cut the engine. He debated ignoring the man’s signal, but decided instead to hear him out. The man had been angry and coarse, but not fearful or violent. Perhaps this was an opportunity for—something.
Eto cracked his door open. “What do you wish to say to me?”
“I—I want to know why you’re here. I want to talk to you.”
“I don’t have time to stay any longer.”
“Take me with you. I know the city, maybe I can be helpful.”
Eto gestured at the pilot. “This female also knows the city. We are fully served.” The pilot’s head twitched, and Eto supposed he had used a word she did not like. The man also looked at the woman, and they made eye contact for a bit longer than seemed normal for humans.
“Do you know him?” Eto asked her.
She shook her head briefly. “No, sir. We’ve never met.”
“Sir?” the man repeated.
She looked away from him, shrugging her shoulders slightly.
Eto did not know exactly what the tension was about—perhaps it was some question of her service to him. But it did seem that this man was not afraid of him, and that was a good enough reason to talk to him.
“I will offer you this,” Eto said. “You may accompany me for research purposes. For each answer I give you, you will answer a question for me.”
“Your research purposes or mine?”
The man was not unintelligent, but that was not necessarily enough to enable true communication. Eto did not yet understand humans, and therein lay the problem. “I will allow it to be both.”
“That’s acceptable to me.”
“No,” the pilot said, unexpectedly. “You can’t come with us. You shouldn’t.”
Eto flushed with surprise. “Why should he not?”
“It’s—we are going to the Spo headquarters later, after the school.” She jerked her head at the man. “He might get hurt.”
Eto clicked his mandibles. “If he is under my protection, he will not be hurt.”
The pilot’s nostrils flared and her mouth moved strangely. Eto found the human face even harder to read than the fleshy, mobile Tergre faces. He could think of no reason for her to object. She should be glad for a human companion during their flights today, he thought, but, of course, she was not. He sighed. Humans were ungrateful when they should be thankful, and thankful when they should be angry.
Eto clambered into the back of the helicopter to make room. The man climbed in and sat next to the pilot, as that was the only other remaining seat. The rear seats had been removed to accommodate Spo passengers.
The helicopter hummed to life again, and they slowly rose above the hills.
The city came into view. It was not lovely. Smoke rose from several large, smoldering buildings, and although many of them must have once shone with glass, most of that had been broken in the last months of tremors and violence.
Despite the wreckage, this city was one of the least affected in the world, and it also contained the necessary infrastructure to serve as a global headquarters. If the Spo decided to stay and sponsor humanity, this would be a decent city from which to direct operations. But that was still in doubt. It could be lucrative. If the Spo sponsored humanity into the galaxy, they would profit from their cultural capital, but it was an enormous gamble.
And as it would take years to undo what the humans had wrought on their world, sponsoring the humans would require unprecedented mobilization of manpower and technology. The only reason the Spo could even contemplate the undertaking was the resources made available by the recent peace with the Merith.
If they could sponsor the humans, there would be a fortune in it. Resources, except for a few very scarce materials, were plentiful in the galaxy. What was lacking was novelty. The cultural output of a new species would be in high demand for generations. Their art, food, music, languages, history, technology – it could all be sold. And the Spo, as sponsors, would receive a percentage of every Earth-franchised store, market, or sale. It would be profitable for the humans, as well as offering them a measure of protection. But for the Spo to profit from the humans, the humans would have to be accepted into the Galactic Council as a sentient, non-malignant species. The Spo emperor himself had ordered Eto and three other officers to conduct a sentience evaluation.
Sentient, they were.
Malignant? Whenever Eto asked himself this, a silence yawned within him with a lingering and slippery touch.
If his people spent years stabilizing the Earth’s ecology only to have the humans fail to be accepted into the Council—well, the waste would be colossal. It could take generations for the Spo to recover from the financial losses.
His evaluation had ended yesterday, technically. Today, he was to meet with a general who had been evaluating the potential of human children, and then he was scheduled for a rare, real-time interview with the emperor, to give his report and recommendation. The time for this evaluation had been uncommonly short, but this planet was headed toward an apocalyptic freefall. If they were to undertake the rehabilitation of this planet, the next year—even the next few months—would be critical. And if Eto and the others recommended against the investment, then every day they stayed on Earth was an unnecessary and costly risk.
Allowing an unknown man to accompany him for a short flight, was also an unnecessary risk. Undoubtedly, Eto’s investigation had tipped the scales of rational investment away from the humans, and perhaps some errant part of Eto’s psyche sought to find some mark or quality in this man to rebalance the scales.
Unlikely.
“What would you ask me?” Eto demanded of the man.
The pilot’s neck spasmed slightly, but the man merely turned in his seat to study Eto. He too had been contemplating the smoky and dispirited outline of the city.
“What is your name?” the man said after a long pause.
“Eto’ath… Born of Spo Itself, First in the Fren’nk Fleet, Second Night Warrior, and Examiner in extremis of Earth.” He’d worked out his full designation in the human language, but he had not used it until right now. He felt a certain odd desire that someone on Earth know the full name of one who would, almost certainly, condemn them to death.
The man seemed to be considering the gravity of Eto’s title, but then Eto realized the man was probably just waiting for his question. This whole experience had been extremely dispiriting. It was the first time he’d been involved in an evaluation, and he hadn’t realized how easy it was to indulge in wildly false optimism.
“How did you acquire that injury on your face?” Eto asked.
The man automatically reached up to touch the long scab on his face. “A guy tried to jump me—to steal my gear, I think—and he had a knife.”
“Did he succeed?”
“No. I knocked the knife out of his hand and my partner ran up and hit him in the back of the head.”
“Did he die?”
“No. We took him to the police station. He probably only spent a night there—they have worse shit to deal with. He might’ve gotten a provision pack, though he doesn’t deserve it.” He paused. “My turn. What does it mean to be an ‘examiner’ of Earth?”
Eto could not provide all the details—there were legalities to be observed. But he gave the man the gist of the situation, and when he lacked a word, the linguist filled it in almost as soon as he’d paused. He must remember to recommend him for a commendation.
Eventually, the man responded. “You seem very sure that we would not survive without you.”
“I am. Your own crises would be enough, but that is not all. You would not be left alone if we departed. You are known. Others would come.”
“Maybe they’d help.”
“Only a few would have the capabilities to aid you on the scale you require. Us.
The Merith. The Vel, though they would be more likely to eat you. Possibly the Crosspointers, though they have recently begun sponsoring a different species, and I do not think they can afford to split their efforts. The others… no.” Eto clacked his mandibles emphatically. “And I would ask you: If we are your only chance at survival, would you not accept us?”
The man slowly shook his head. “Accept you as what? Masters? How would we ever know if that was truly the choice? We only have your word that the Spo are the only option.”
“If it were true,” Eto pressed, “would your species stop fighting us and embrace survival?”
“You don’t know how creative humanity can be. We could rebound from this,” he paused. “We could save ourselves.”
“Self-reliance is to be respected. But this is foolishness. You do not have the technology. Or the time.”
The man stared forward as they flew into a smoky haze that hung like a curtain before them. It obscured the view, wrapping them in a moment of isolation. “Some would accept you. They’d rationalize it. Maybe they’d be right.”
“And the others?”
“We—no. Not when you allow thousands to die that you could save. Not when you execute anyone who protests. Even we could do better than that.”
“There must be priorities.”
“Lives are a priority. Isn’t that what you people say? Survival is sanity.”
The haze began to thin, and Eto felt a sense of urgency. If he could get a sane response from even one human, that could be enough. Enough to say that they had potential. But if this moment passed, he feared there would never be another.
“Yes. The drive to survive is vital. We value it. Life is transitory—valuable, but transitory. It is the drive that must dominate.”
“We have that drive. That’s why we’re so angry.”
“But do you have that drive for yourself? What would you do to survive? You came with me, surely believing that I am a murderous alien who may destroy you on a whim, if your news stations are to be believed. Do you not fear for your survival?”
Evaluate: A Spo novella (Alien Cadets) Page 2
