by Eric Brown
The Serene Invasion
Eric Brown
The Serene are an alien race. The Earth in 2025 is an ailing world, and the Serene an end to poverty and violence — but not everyone supports the seemingly benign invasion. There are forces out there who wish to return to the bad old days, and will stop at nothing to oppose the Serene.
It’s 2025 and the world is riven by war, terrorist attacks, poverty and increasingly desperate demands for water, oil, and natural resources. The West and China confront each other over an inseperable ideological divide, each desperate to sustain their future.
And then the Serene arrive, enigmatic aliens form Delta Pavonis V, and nothing will ever be the same again.
The Serene bring peace to an ailing world, an end to poverty and violence — but not everyone supports the seemingly benign invasion.
There are forces out there who wish to return to the bad old days, and will stop at nothing to oppose the Serene.
Eric Brown
THE SERENE INVASION
For Keith and Debbie Brooke
ONE
2025
CHAPTER ONE
ON THE DAY everything changed, Sally Walsh finished what was to be her last shift at the Kallani medical centre — though she didn’t know that at the time — and stepped out of the makeshift surgery into the furnace heat of the early afternoon Ugandan sun.
The packed-earth compound greeted her with its depressing familiarity. A dozen crude buildings, looking more like a shanty town than a hospital, huddled in the centre of the sere compound, surrounded by a tall adobe wall. Beside the metal gate rose a watchtower, manned in shifts by a dozen government soldiers. When she began work at Kallani five years ago, it struck her as odd that a hospital had to be so protected, but after a few months in the job she had seen why: as fortification against rebel insurgents bent on kidnapping Westerners to hold hostage, to deter local gangs from raiding the hospital for drugs, and to stop the flood of refugees from over-running the centre in times of drought.
Last winter Sally had attempted to grow an olive tree in the shade of the storeroom; but the drought had killed it within weeks. How could she lavish water on the tree when her patients were so needful? Now the dead twigs poked from the ground, blackened and twisted.
Ben Odinga stepped from the storeroom, saw her and raised his eyebrows.
She shook her head.
“Have you finished?” he asked.
“I’m well and truly finished, Ben.”
He looked at her seriously. “Come to my room, Sally. I have some good whisky. South African. You look like you need a drink.”
She followed him across the compound to the prefab building that comprised the centre’s residential complex. He held open the fly-screen door and she stepped into the small room. A simple narrow bed, a bookshelf bearing medical textbooks, a dozen well-read paperback novels and a fat Bible.
She sat on a folding metal chair by the window while Ben poured two small measures of whisky into chipped tumblers.
She took a sip, winced as its fire scoured her throat, and smiled at Ben’s description of it as ‘good whisky’. What she’d give for a glass of Glenfiddich.
He said, “The infection?”
She nodded. “There was nothing we could do, short of flying her to Kampala.” Which, on their budget, was out of the question.
She went on, “I’m worried about Mary. They were close.”
“I’ll look in on her later, talk to her.”
“If you would, Ben.” She sighed. “Christ, I told her not to worry…” She looked up, then said, “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head, smiling tolerantly. He had become accustomed to the frequency of her blaspheming.
A week ago a mother from a nearby village had brought in her malnourished daughter. Her complaint was not malnutrition, but a swollen abdomen. Ben had diagnosed appendicitis and operated, and all seemed well until, a couple of days ago, the five-year-old developed a high fever. Mary, a nurse six months out of medical college in Tewkesbury, had committed the cardinal sin of identifying with the kid.
Sally had long ago learned that lesson.
Ben said, “What’s wrong?”
She looked up. “What makes you think…?”
“I’ve known you for years, Sally Walsh. I know when you have something on your mind.”
She hadn’t wanted to tell him like this; she had wanted to break it to him gently — if that were possible.
“I hope you won’t think any less of me for this, Ben.” She stared into her glass, swirled the toxic amber liquid. “I’ve had enough. I’ve had five years here and I’ve had enough. I’ll be leaving in May.”
She had expected his reaction to be one of disappointment, maybe even anger. Instead he just shook his head, as if in stoic acceptance. This seemed to her even more of a condemnation of her decision.
He said, quietly, “Why?”
She shrugged and avoided his gaze. “I’m burned out. I’m… perhaps I’ve come to understand, at last, that the reality here hasn’t matched my expectations.”
He said, “That is no reason to give in, Sally.”
She looked across at him. He perched on the bed in his stained white uniform, a bony, whittled-down Kenyan in his early fifties, with disappointment burning in his nicotine-brown eyes.
“There comes a time, Ben, when we have to move on. I’ve had five years here. I’m jaded. The place needs someone new, someone with fresh enthusiasm, new ideas.”
“The place needs someone like you, with empathy and experience.”
“Please,” she snapped, “don’t make me feel guilty. I’m going in May and you’ll be getting a replacement fresh from Europe, and after a few weeks it’ll be as if I were never here.”
“Don’t kid yourself on that score, Dr Walsh.”
She smiled. “I’ll miss it — you and the others. But I’ve made my decision.”
They drank in silence for a time. A gecko darted across the wall behind Ben. Cicadas thrummed outside like faulty electrical appliances. It was mercilessly hot within the room and Sally was sweating.
“Do you know why I became a doctor?” she said at last.
“You told me…” He waved his glass. “Wasn’t it something to do with your Marxist ideals?”
“That was why I volunteered to work in Africa,” she said. Ideals, she thought, that had long perished. What was that old saw: If you’re not a communist when you’re twenty, then there’s something wrong with your heart; if you’re still a communist when you’re forty, then there’s something wrong with your head… Well, she was just over forty now and had lost her faith years ago.
“When I was fourteen, Ben, my mother was diagnosed with inoperable and terminal cancer. My father had died of a heart attack when I was two. I have no memories of him. When my mother told me she was ill…” She stared into her whisky, recalling her thin, pinch-faced mother, in her mid-forties, calmly sitting Sally down after dinner one evening and telling her, with a light-hearted matter-of-factness that must have been so hard to achieve, that mummy was ill and might not live for more than a year, but that Aunty Eileen and Uncle Ron would look after her afterwards.
She felt then as if she had run into a brick wall that had knocked all the breath from her body; and, later, a sense of disbelief and denial that had turned, as the months elapsed and her mother grew ever thinner and more and more ill, into an inarticulate anger and a sense of unfairness that burned at the core of her being.
An abiding memory from near the end of that time was when Dr Roberts came to her mother’s bedside and simply sat with her for an hour, holding her hand. Perhaps it was this that persuaded Sally that she wanted to become a doctor. Not the cures Dr Roberts might have effect
ed, or the pain she might have relieved, but the fact of the woman’s simple humanity in giving up so much of her time to hold the hand of a dying patient.
Now she told Ben this, and he listened with that tolerant, amused smile on his handsome face, and nodded in the right places, and commented occasionally.
They finished their whiskies and he refilled their glasses.
“What will you do when you leave here, Sally?”
“Probably take up a practice in some leafy English village.” How her younger self would have railed at her for admitting as much. She recalled, vividly, wondering how her fellow graduates could consider taking up practices looking after privileged English patients when men, women and children were dying of diarrhoea in Africa. What a sanctimonious little prig she must have been back then!
Ben broke into her thoughts. “So, Sally — and don’t be offended when I say this — but you think that you have paid your dues?”
She said nothing, just stared down at the desiccated linoleum curling in the sunlight by the door. She felt terrible. She shook her head. At last she said in a whisper, “It wouldn’t be so bad if I did feel this, Ben. It would be… understandable. The thing is, I don’t feel I’ve paid my dues, and I probably would never think that I had, even if I stayed here for the rest of my life. My reasons are more personal, selfish if you like, than that. You see,” she looked up, “it’s just that I look at what’s happening here and I despair.”
He smiled. “Don’t we all?”
“Do you know, Ben, in the five years I’ve been here, nothing, not one bloody thing, has got better. Nothing! The government is still corrupt, full of rapacious fat cats all sincere smiles one minute, and behind your back raking off profits that should go to help their people. And then the Chinese and the Europeans and Americans… using the continent like a gameboard. It makes me sick, Ben, what the Chinese are doing north of here.”
“They’ve brought wealth, jobs, security for thousands,” he said.
She stared at him. “You don’t really believe that, don’t you? You’re not toeing the party line?” She held up her hand and counted off points on her fingers. “Eighty-five per cent of all profits made in Xian City go straight back to the mafia fascists in Beijing who still have the gall to call themselves communists. Ten per cent is raked off by Ugandan middle-men, and the rest goes to middle-class Africans who employ locals at slave labour rates. And have you seen the slums growing up around Xian, and have you read the reports of prostitution in the area? The Chinese are no better than all the other colonials who came before them — in it for what they can take out. Christ, Ben, you’re Kenyan. You should know that!”
He was smiling at her, his calm face a picture of tolerance. “Anger doesn’t help anything, Sally.”
“I’m sorry… But do you know what angers me most, Ben? Me. I’m angry at myself for letting it get to me. I’m angry at myself for giving in.”
He frowned, as if at a complex mystery. He whispered, “Then don’t give in, my friend. Stay here.”
She held back her tears and said, “I can’t. I’ve made my decision.”
With an acuity belied by his bland, smiling face, Ben said, “It’s Geoff, isn’t it?”
She looked at him, surprised by his deduction. “Partly, but I was thinking of leaving before I met Geoff. So don’t go blaming him.”
She’d met Geoff Allen a year ago when he flew to Africa to cover the drought in the Karamoja region of northern Uganda. He’d impressed her with his naïve simplicity, his apolitical childishness: drinking with him one evening in her room, after she’d shown him around the Kallani medical complex, he had admitted that the reason he was a photo-journalist was that he hoped that by reporting the conditions of people less fortunate than himself, all around the world, the results of his work might provoke the citizens of Europe to do something about the poverty and injustice.
At first she had laughed at his political naivety, wondering where the hell to begin to put this big, handsome man right in his endearingly simplistic world-view. She had restrained herself, and after a few days in his company, as she toured with him around the various medical centres in the region, she had come to understand that his beliefs, no matter how misguided, were sincerely held. He believed that as an individual he could effect change at a higher level.
Perhaps, in Geoff Allen, she was reminded of the idealism and naivety she herself had possessed in her early twenties, which had now been eroded by cynicism and experience.
And as to what Geoff saw in her? After the first time they had made love, he’d held her and expressed his admiration at what she was doing here.
They’d seen each other just six times in the following year, and the last time — a snatched weekend in Kampala where Geoff was en route to cover the terrorist atrocities in Zambia — she had told him that she was leaving Uganda and returning to London.
“I’d be going back regardless of Geoff,” she said now, “but when I get back we’ll be buying somewhere together.”
Ben raised his glass. “I sincerely hope that you find happiness. Geoff is a good man.”
His approbation cheered her. Tomorrow Geoff was flying from London to Entebbe and making the long drive north — ostensibly to do another piece on the drought, in reality to see her. The thought made her a little drunk.
Ben raised his empty glass. “Would you like another whisky?”
She was wondering whether to accept the offer — despite the fact that she had an early shift in the morning — when the sound of gunfire rattled through the hot afternoon air.
HER FIRST IMPULSE was to rush to the door and see what was happening, and she was obeying the urge by the time common sense kicked in and suggested that it might not be the best idea. She stood in the doorway, staring across the compound. She saw the watchtower bloom in a sudden orange fireball, and a split-second later the sound of the explosion hit her. Three soldiers dropped from the tower, one by one, and lay twitching on the ground as they burned.
She watched with incredulity as another soldier ran towards his burning colleagues. He directed his rifle at them, and even as she watched she assumed that what he did then was an act of mercy: he unloaded a blast of bullets into each of the three flaming soldiers, instantly stilling their agonised spasming.
Then he moved to the gate, unbolted the locking mechanism, and hauled it open. A battered Ford utility truck, with a machine gun welded to its cross-bar, revved through the gate and into the compound.
Before she could move, the soldier turned, looked across the compound, and raised his gun at her.
She stared at him, uncomprehending. His name was Josef Makumbi, and she had chatted with him in the canteen during the periods when he was not manning the watchtower.
He yelled something at her.
Behind her, she felt Ben’s hand on her arm, drawing her back into the room.
Josef fired. The bullets smacked into the timber above her head. He yelled again. “Here! Both of you!”
She stepped forward, sensing Ben behind her. She looked across at the corpses of Josef’s colleagues. They were still burning. She had the absurd urge to ask him why he had killed his friends.
Ben whispered to her, “Be calm. Do exactly as he says. We will be okay, Sally.”
Two men leapt from the cab of the truck. One was a Somali, and the other Arabic. A third terrorist, another Arab, remained on the flat-bed, manning the machine gun. He turned it on Sally and Ben as they moved across the compound towards the government soldier.
She caught his eyes. “Josef?”
The Somali and the Arab looked around the compound, spoke rapidly, and came to some decision. The Arab spoke to Josef in the local language. Josef nodded and twitched his rifle towards Sally and Ben.
“Get onto the back of the truck. Move! Do as I say or I’ll shoot.”
Sally stared at him. “Josef, how can you…?”
Ben’s hand gripped her upper arm and urged her towards the truck. “Be silent!”
She allowed herself to be propelled along. She should have felt fear, then — she realised much later — but all she experienced at the time was bewilderment at Josef’s treachery.
Ben assisted her onto the flat-bed. The machine-gunner swivelled his weapon and trained it on them. As they knelt on the corrugated bed of the truck, Josef ordered them to place their hands behind their backs. The Arab tied their wrists with twine, the cord digging into her flesh.
With a touch of sadism she came to see, later, as characteristic of him, the Arab prodded her between the shoulder blades. Unable to bring her hands up to cushion her fall, she fell face down and smacked the metal deck with her cheek. Ben fell beside her.
She wept, and rolled onto her side.
Josef grabbed her under the arms, dragged her across the flat-bed and propped her in a sitting position against the hot metal, then did the same with Ben.
Josef jumped from the truck, fastened the back flap, and stood in the compound watching the truck as it revved up, turned in a wide circle, and raced through the open gates. Sally fastened her eyes on the soldier’s, hoping to cow him with her silent accusation, but his expression remained impassive as they drove away.
The Arab sat across from his captives, rocking with the bucketing motion of the vehicle as it accelerated along the sandy track. His face was thin, and running from his right ear to his hawk-like nose was a scar, a jagged wadi suppurating with some untreated infection.
The machine-gunner, a youth with a sickle-thin face and a milky left eye, stood with an arm slung negligently over his rattling weapon. He stared down at them, his expression contemptuous.
The direct sunlight was punishing. Normally Sally would have either rubbed high factor sun cream into her arms, face and neck, or ensured she was suitably covered. Now she felt her exposed skin burn.
They were heading north, she realised, into terrorist country.
She looked at Ben. His face was a mask carved from ebony. He whispered, “Try not to worry. They will make a ransom demand. We will be free in a day or two.”
