Loses like Fayetteville were small things – vignettes in some dull pseudo-intellectual film with unnecessary breasts and dead people pretending badly while their chest still rose, and fell, in black and white, before people really knew how to hit the emotions hard. Destruction on larger scale like that meted out by the hostile aliens in York on East Coast of the A.U.’s state-continent, or in her home country of France from Paris to Lyon which was like a scar on the landscape, now only a blackened furrow. Those fights were blockbusters with giant explosions and battles raging in torn city streets while people fled screaming, waving their hands in the air.
Africas Unified Territories fought a larger war story more like a biopic of some WWII Field Marshall - Erwin Rommel, perhaps. The broad scale land war danced with fat, heavy feet over a rough battleground all along the west-sea board cityscapes from its very southern tip at New Port Cape Agulhas to the pride of Luanda where once Africa’s billionaires had played mah-jong and roulette and won and lost fortunes greater than a thousand soldiers might ever see.
The largest picture was an epic, a trilogy far too long, lost somewhere in an untidy plot over continents with a cast of characters millions - billions – strong. The names of places so diverse no viewer could have kept track of them all. They would be relegated to the supplementary matter, or some bonus material like the rarer treasures Delphine had found in her constant search for films she had yet see.
Delphine had grown up in a loving household watching movies from around the world...anything she could, really. She’d seen plenty of those first kinds of movie – the arthouse flicks - when she’d first been a student, and though no one made movies like they had from the early 1900’s to the late 2000’s, she’d seen nearly ten thousand, and most of those more than once.
It wasn’t the films, or the plots, which always fascinated and called to Delphine, though.
It was the words.
She’d been precocious, a savant, even; she’d found languages came as easily to her as drinking a glass of water and by the age of four she hardly ever used ancient, pre-universal translation tech like subtitles, or dubbing, or even needed dictionaries or net-translations. She graduated from Université de Montpellier, then received her doctorate synchronic linguistics, all before her twenty-first birthday. The patterns of words, sounds, the way they flowed and changed and served their purpose...the way language evolved. For Delphine, language was a living, breathing organism. She saw it in patterns. Almost as though she had synesthesia and understood words in some organic form herself.
She had been perhaps six years old when she understood that she didn’t wish to study one language, or even need to restrict her love of words. And here, somewhere among the horror of humanity’s annihilation, there were new words unheard by any human before. She wanted them.
*
It was the morning of the seventh day since the invasion. The A.U.’s brightest scientists met in virtual and physical presence-conference with experts in every field of science around the world from A.U. allies to non-border territories and independents. Government laboratories and research facilities were already dedicated to examining, dissecting corpses, or vivisecting rare live specimens in an attempt to find some answers in what was clearly an extinction level event far quicker than the tail-end of the Holocene. Private labs were conscripted, all equipment and personnel now part of a sudden, massive effort to save humanity.
The A.U.’s science division, that reporting directly and employed by the military branches of the Wide Earth’s largest government, were convened mostly in person in a sprawling, secure, nuclear-rated facility that both sat above and sank beneath the Appalachians. The world’s most remarkable human minds were ferried in helicopters, repulse/impulse aircraft, command limousines, army fleet vehicles in their dull green paint. Air force heavy personnel carriers brought men and women to the facility in constant waves.
Elsewhere, private companies, N.G.O’s and concerns gathered scientists and academics to similar institutions; in Petersburg and the Siberian steppes, in Cambodia, in the Andes between Peruvian and Chilean disputed territories, in the Afghan/Pakistan/India vassal hegemony.
Other sites where research might have bettered understanding were dark tombs already, and it wasn’t a surprise. The Mediterranean Sea-Research Centre, a submerged city and one of the most important centres for oceanographic data in what had once been the watery bridge between Africa and Europe was gone. It wasn’t hard to figure out the how of the loss of nearly every sea-city or complex came about. The enemy owned the sea. Why try to take them back, or even consider working to rescue any survivors fight for one last gasp of air before pressure broke the very steel holding back the deep waters? Humanity had to fight a war for survival, not pride. The oceans were gone.
The facility Delphine found herself at was just as important as the fortified and reinforced bunkers afforded world leaders, Global Net and communications networks.
When she stepped from a relatively small regrav craft which had brought her from her post overland in Montreal in just three hours she joined the world’s foremost and most renowned biologist, xenobiologist, exobiologists, cryptozoologist, astrobiologists, mathematicians, physicists and experts in a myriad of specialties which ran the gamut from the ordinary to the unusual.
The Appalachian bunker was designated ‘Alexandria’.
It was one of hundreds like it around the world. Alexandria would house over 5,000 academics, military, adjuncts, and staffers...and, just like all those others academics flooding into the safety of Alexandria, Delphine had no idea she wouldn’t leave the facility for almost seven years.
14.
Meaningless Words
– Delphine Mamet
Delphine walked along the long halls nodding to people she’d met since coming to the facility. It wasn’t a secret why they were here – they’d been brought together to find some way to turn the tide of a battle humans had lost in the first weeks.
In the weeks since she’d arrived, she’d met people she liked, people she didn’t. She spent much of her time in the well-equipped gymnasium running on a treadmill, or running through the seemingly endless giant halls carved deep into the stone, her dull footfalls barely making a sound, or the sounds her training shoes did make simply lost in the vastness of her temporary cave home.
She wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t bored. If anything, she was excited. Those who had brought her here were in the employ of the largest Earth government. That they had a file on her didn’t offend her in the slightest. She had her own clothes, her own luggage, and they had provided most else she needed, including a closed-link net system with access to thousands of movies in hundreds of languages, dialects, accents. She was content enough...
Then.
Weeks are not months, and months are not years, and contentment is a more placid kind of intellectual state than any academic mind could achieve for long without stimuli.
Alexandria was gigantic. Delphine had barely seen more than ten percent of it, and she imagined even if she lived in the facility for the rest of her natural life, she would never see it all. That thought saddened her. She wanted to see everything, to know everything...it was why she got up each morning. The quest to find out more burned inside her and drove her on.
Now, nearly half an hour walk from her domicile, she stood before a steel double doorway, took a breath and headed into a conference room. The conference was ongoing, but it wasn’t like she was late. It wasn’t run on military, or academic protocols. The academics and scientists were given carte blanche to pursue their own interests, all, however, within one guiding principal - to understand the enemy, to know them, how to fight them, beat them, or simply anything which might help mankind survive.
The conference room was set out like an auditorium with rows of seats surrounding a stage. Almost Greek. Simple designs and simple thoughts which defied ageing, just like the concepts in words and language and the fundamentals of spoken communication.
She took a seat near the uppermost, back row, and signed into the display module on her lap so others might see her, known who she was and when she wished to speak.
For the first hour, her concentration epic, Delphine listened to the broad scope of the discussions going on intently, picking out meaning where automated translations failed to pick out nuance from her colleagues.
Delphine tuned into as many of the disparate discussions as she could follow at once. There were historians speaking quietly, basically out of their depth, engaged in irrelevant discussions. Biologist were attempting to classify kingdoms and phylums. Palaeontologists formulated suppositions on the possibility of divergent evolution on an alien planet, constantly referring to extinct sea creatures, some of which Delphine knew, and some she didn’t, but the Latin names of each were no problem for her. Oceanographers were giddy at the seemingly endless diversity of these creatures which functioned on land despite their physiological appearance. Elsewhere, there were discussions taking place on weapons systems, upgrades, armour, in other rooms just like this specialists guessed about the alien ships.
One ship known to have failed on landing that was ruined and abandoned by Lake Victoria in the Africas Unified Territories was already being examined on site, though it was mostly the exotic composites which were of interest as few of the ships seemed functional or even intact after landing – things more like meteorites which had smashed to Earth. Nothing Earth had was going to move that ship anywhere. The ‘space ships,’ she supposed, differed, but none was smaller than three miles in length. There might well have been intact, functional examples of the alien ships underwater, somewhere, but the chances of accessing one in the teeming waters of the world were nearly nil.
She still couldn’t get her head around the idea of anything that large moving, let alone travelling from...wherever. Something made these ships, came across light years, and popped them atop this world. Like hitting a pin with an atom from a billion miles away. Scale and distances were incomprehensible. It was a feat of magic to a human understanding of space travel.
A light blinked on the console before Delphine, indicating one of the several Heads, or Chairs, of various disciplines who oversaw the discussions wished to speak to the wider audience. Each member of this hastily convened group in the room with Delphine had a light and buzzer to speak any sensibly formulated hypothesis to the wider audience for consideration and discussion. None broke the simple rule, so none spoke over each other. If not, the scientists might speak happily for hours on end and get nowhere.
She brought the current voice to the fore.
‘There is, I feel, sufficient evidence that those with the elongated cranial features are a distinct being from the majority. I believe they are a ruling class, or a controlling faction.’
Delphine had seen the images. She shuddered.
‘I table a motion, until more specific classifications are met,’ said another as she followed the conversation, ‘that following consideration of our esteemed peers that we name the broader, subservient family ‘Zoan’.’
The speaker was the First Chair – ostensibly the head of all Chairs, or close enough. She only knew him as Gen. Ng, and he was the A.U.’s science liaison to the Chiefs of the joint forces.
Intel and Command hadn’t settled on names for the invaders, though all but the upper ranks had one thing in common – they were impossible evolutionary cousins to Earth’s sea creatures. Evolution if it had taken a step sideways and instead of metazoan complex organisms getting out of the sea, evolving, becoming amphibious, they just skipped a step and walked, rolled, flopped and flapped right up onto land.
A large majority agreed on Zoan. She felt it sufficed, too. Something metazoan, protozoan. Ammonites, chelons, cnidarians, nephropids, and even things like trilobites which seemed gigantic, flat-shelled and burrowing. Things the Earth had seen before the Devonian period and the explosion of life on land. Things lost since the Permian period.
Those sea-born enemy creatures – Zoan – did seem subservient, too, as though they were the foot soldiers to commanders. They were known to be equipped with advanced robotic augmentations and weapons systems which were clearly unnatural. She wondered if those ‘upgrades’ were due to the leading class, too, as well as their orders.
Their orders, it seemed, were to kill.
Minutes later, after Delphine allowed her attention to roam through the hundreds of languages and conversations through the auditorium, she tuned into a discussion on the robotics aspect which she found niggled at something at the back of her mind.
‘Every specimen we examined appears to be enhanced with technology unknown to us. It seems entirely possible – likely, even, that somewhere within this tech is contained the means to pass commands.’
‘We haven’t captured one of these evident leaders, have we?’
‘No, we have not.’
‘The exaggerated cranial features indicate a large brain, no?’
This question came from a German colleague of Delphine’s whom she knew from internationals symposiums in Paris, Berlin, and Barcelona. A linguist, like her. That fact - that someone with her particular field of interest was following this discussion – solidified the vague tickle of an idea troubling her.
The creatures – the leading echelon – had long arms and legs and hard long shelled craniums. They were the smart ones. Maybe. So far, Delphine was unwilling to assume anything.
‘They must control the Zoan,’ said someone, and she glanced around the auditorium to try to find the owner of the voice, but the conversation was moving faster than her eyes, if not her ears.
‘It’s workable, certainly. When those apparently in command have died, there does seem a distinct lack of co-ordination to the attacks from the remainder of their forces.’
‘There has been no sign perceivable to humans of any vocalisation, nor visual stimulus...’
‘Some kind of electrical or chemical impulse, or suggestion...or...’
‘No facial features at all...’
She closed her eyes to distraction and focused on listening to the discussion. There were plentiful reports that animal life was merely food for the Zoan. But their attacks, their aggression? All was aimed at humanity. There was nothing random about their behaviour. There was nothing benign about their coming, either. With or without words, one message was abundantly clear; they came to conquer.
She wondered whether the Zoans cared for the war they fought, or if they were some enslaved race. Perhaps one day they would know.
But Delphine wondered at the robotics experts’ question. From what she heard, the idea that creatures with no observable augmentations could control entire armies of diverse creatures?
Which means one governing language, or some universal translation of their own...or...
She wished they had captured one, because something did not ring true.
People left the auditorium, people arrived.
After a short while, Delphine left, too, and let her own thoughts wander as she moved nearly a mile along a travelator toward the gymnasium. She wondered the same as she nearly always did; if there was some way the higher echelon of invaders spoke with the Zoan, ordered the Zoan...then there must be some way to speak with them.
There must be.
15.
The Small World
Vidar Dawes
I learned about the Army before I learned about soldiering, same as any family - we learn what family is before we learn our place and purpose in it.
The first night they slapped some kind of styptic on my cut feet that made me a little high all the way up from feet to the hair on my head. Nothing needed stitching or chopping off.
The second day I was limping on scabs and oral painkillers, but mobile. I was given breakfast of a soy paste with something sweet but unpleasant like stevia added. I went straight to a woman standing around in a real uniform and asked where the toilet was. There, I puked and shat out everything. A little blood in the bowl
from the puke, along with white paste that looked like porridge but wasn’t. I splashed my face, stepped out and someone put a gun in my hand and told me not to put it down. I asked why and they walked away. It was heavy, an older ballistic-model automatic rifle. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know what to do with it and nobody told me anything after that except to not put it down.
I wasn’t getting paid. I wasn’t a soldier. I was a civilian who wasn’t dead and there was a very distinct lack of living soldiers. The choice was stay, work, eat, sleep and have a chance. Or, as the Sergeant who put the gun in my hands told me, ‘Fuck off back out there and die’.
My sole job seemed to be to carry the gun around. I did. I only put it down when I ate, visited a bathroom, or went to sleep. When I put it down my arms rose as though the ghost of the gun was pulling my hands up toward heaven with it. It got so it felt more natural to have the gun in my hands than to not. Maybe that’s what being a soldier was. Holding a gun. Maybe the rest of it just fell into place. I didn’t know. No one told me to do anything. They only told me to not do things. First among those was to not put down the gun. Second was to not shoot people.
I guess someone really took the whole ‘don’t lose your gun’ thing to heart.
One of the first things I learned about being in the army wasn’t to shoot, or duck, but that armies ran because of communication.
It was like being in a small village, where everyone knew your business, everyone watched, everyone gossiped. Everyone knew I was supposed to carry the gun. Everyone knew why.
I carried the gun ‘til someone told me not to and I stayed.
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