Invasion

Chapter Twenty-Five

“I think this is your stop,” the trucker said, as the truck pulled to a stop outside a warehouse complex in the middle of nowhere. “Good luck, buddy.”

Paul thanked the driver as he slipped out of the vehicle and down onto the tarmac. The destruction of the railroads and aircraft had left most of the transport network in the hands of truckers, who risked the chances of sudden death from high above in order to keep things moving across the United States. The gas was heavily rationed now so that the truckers could keep moving, which in turn kept the country going… until the gas ran out as well. The United States had built up a massive reserve of fuel — and other vital raw materials — but no one had really anticipated such a cut-off. The results in other parts of the world were even worse.

It wasn’t that America was suddenly a poor country, but that it was much harder to move items around… and almost nothing was coming in from the outside world. There might be a surplus of one item in California, but not in Maryland, where it was needed. Some places had more than enough food to eat, other places were starving… and still others were in a state of anarchy. Two weeks after the failure of Operation Lone Star, the country was struggling to pull itself back together, a procedure marred by constant specific bombardment. The truckers, statistically, didn’t face many risks, but the odds mounted up over time. His driver had been asked to carry a single passenger… and anything out of the ordinary tended to attract attention. If the aliens had seen him getting onboard the truck, would they have blasted him on general principles?

The warehouse complex was as dark and silent as the grave, but he knew where to go, pausing long enough to see the truck vanishing off into the distance before climbing quickly up to the complex. It had been created, originally, to serve as a shipping hub for some trucking company that had gone out of business, and then Uncle Sam had taken it over. The CIA, working through a front company, had bought the entire complex and developed it for their own purposes. From the outside, it was just another bunch of warehouses… and there were plenty more of them across America. Inside, it was a very different story.

“Welcome,” Doctor Jones said, once the guards had checked Paul’s ID and fingerprints. The CIA, he’d been told, had once used the place for defectors from the USSR and, later, terrorist groups, a perfectly secure compound where they could be interrogated and debriefed in private before being given their reward. No one would think twice if a helicopter landed in the complex, or a truck pulled up to it, which kept everything secret. “You’ll be pleased to hear that we’re ready for you.”

Paul followed him down a flight of stairs into an underground complex that wasn’t on any of the publicly-available plans. “We didn’t bring the craft itself here, I’m afraid, but we were able to move it to another complex, where NASA’s best engineers have been working on it,” the Doctor continued. “We did bring the alien captives here, although alas, without Captain Kirk to court the pretty alien babes, we didn’t learn much at first.”

Paul almost gave in to the temptation to grab the doctor and shake him, hard. “Doctor, people are dying out there,” he snapped, as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “It’s not fucking funny!”

“No, of course not,” Jones agreed. He paused for a moment in the corridors. “What would you like to see first? The craft — or at least the images of it — or the prisoners?”

“The craft,” Paul said, forgetting his anger. The craft might be able to help them actually win the war. “What have the engineers found out about it so far?”

Jones led him into a small briefing room, turned out the lights and activated a PowerPoint presentation. “The craft appears — I’m no engineer and we couldn’t spare one to brief you, although they did write the notes — to be a fairly basic SSTO design,” he began. “We actually worked on trying to build one, but we never got the concept quite right and… well, NASA wasn’t too keen on it for some reason. The alien craft looks crude” — he clicked through a series of images of the conical shuttle craft — “but it is, in fact, very sophisticated. One of the engineers even called it sheer genius.”

The image changed again, this time to show the dissembled pieces of the craft. “The craft was designed on a principle that seems to allow them to take the entire thing to pieces very easily,” Jones added. “The field engineers who reached the crash-site were able to figure out how to take it apart, after which the separate pieces, all seven hundred of them, were transported to a secure complex somewhere else. A lot of the electronics were fried by the EMP — that’s probably why the craft got so far off course anyway — but the mechanical aspects were easy to understand. Hell, sir, we could duplicate it, given a few months.”

“Better get working on it,” Paul said. He’d have to recommend that to the President, if the President survived the threat of impeachment. Apparently, these days, not nuking America was considered a crime. The Russians were probably laughing over a glass of vodka. “Can we actually fly them ourselves?”

“The fuel mix is a little unusual and the electronics will have to be replaced carefully, but if we can meet those issues, we could even fly the craft we have now,” Jones said. “Building our own shouldn’t take that long; according to the engineers, it’s one hell of a lot less sophisticated than an F-22 or even the space shuttle.”

“The President will be pleased to hear that,” Paul said, relieved. It was something, perhaps, that they could use in the future. The aliens might be advanced, but they weren’t all-powerful. “And the aliens themselves?”

Jones turned the lights back on and started to fiddle with a computer, playing with it until it showed an image of the aliens, each one in a separate cell. “We think that they’re reasonably unhurt, although it’s hard to tell for certain,” he said. “We’ve kept them separate, but six of them don’t seem to speak English and don’t even seem interested in anything else. They don’t respond to our questions, not even in their own language.”

“So they could be faking it,” Paul said. “They might understand English and are just pretended not to speak it.”

“They might,” Jones agreed. “Some of my… fellow researchers have advocated a more rigorous program of questioning, but if they genuinely can’t speak English, there’s little point in trying to hurt them. We could try to get them to speak in their own language, but they could be saying anything, although samples would be useful to the linguistics people.”

Paul studied the aliens for a long moment. “What are they doing?”

Jones followed his gaze. “We think the males are at prayer,” he said. “The females… they talk to us, or they read the books that we give them, but little else.”

“I see,” Paul said. He peered towards the male aliens. “And that’s the male Redskins?”

Jones winced. “I wish that you wouldn’t use that word,” he said, tightly. “It has too many… issues with Americans. Call them Redshirts, if you must insult them.”

Paul ignored him. Naked, the aliens seemed somehow unhealthy, even though the doctors believed that they were in good — alien — health. They did have reddish-purple skin, their eyes dark pools of shadow… and, despite himself, his gaze slipped to the alien genitals. The alien penis — if penis it was — was a long thin sausage; it seemed to hang down further than…

“I can’t believe I’m thinking this,” he admitted. “How do they have sex?”

Jones gave him a reproving look. “As far as we can tell — and so far we haven’t seen them engaged in sexual congress — the male’s penis is inserted into the female’s vagina. I guess God wasn’t feeling too imaginative when he created these aliens.”

He pulled up the results of an x-ray. “Internally, on the other hand, they’re very different from us,” he said, changing the subject firmly. “Their biology is nothing like ours, so there’s no chance of a War of the Worlds outcome, in either direction.”

Paul scowled. “Could we come up with a biological weapon that might attack them?”

“I would prefer not to speculate,” Jones said. “They have a brain set-up that is comparable to our own, but they also have four hearts, which suggests that a heart attack isn’t going to be anything like as dangerous to them. Two of the males, in fact, have only three working hearts… and it doesn’t seem to have slowed them down any. Their legs have very little in the way of bone structure — much of their strength is concentrated in their upper bodies — and they are, in fact, very much like a human penis.”

Paul stared at him. “Now this I have to hear,” he said. “How are they the same?”

“We think that the… rigidity of the legs depends largely on an act of will,” Jones said. “When tired, their legs get more… bendy and they tend to try to sleep. It could be a matter of endurance; the males here seem to keep their legs usable longer than the females, or… really, sir, this is pretty much a new field of science. It could be that half of what I have told you is completely wrong.”

Paul looked up at the alien female, sitting in a position that would have broken the legs of a Yoga master. “I see your point,” he said. “What have you been able to discover from talking to the females?”

“They generally agree with the documents that the ambassadors brought home,” Jones assured him. “Subject Female One is seemingly completely broken. She answers all of our questions and, otherwise, just sits there. I think she’s in shock, but without a baseline for what represents normal among them, it’s impossible to know for sure. The interesting part is what she thinks of Subject Female Two.”

Paul blinked. “What does she think of the other female?”

“That she’s worthless,” Jones said. A slight hint of disgust echoed through his words. “She is, apparently, sterile and therefore worthless. The female, according to her… friend, should have been thrown into space once it became clear that she wouldn’t be having any children. That’s… odd, because as far as we can tell, the sterile female is the brightest one of the pair.”

“Odd,” Paul agreed. “I suppose I’d better talk to them, right?”

“You should talk to her,” Jones agreed. He sounded tired, pushed beyond endurance. “If nothing else, you might realise just what sort of beings they are.”

“They’re tearing up Texas and killing thousands of humans,” Paul snapped. “I think I know exactly what kind of beings they are!”

Researcher Femala — who still clung to her title, despite having lost everything else — looked up as the door opened. She assumed that she was under constant observation — it was what she would have done to alien prisoners — but that didn’t bother her much; she’d been under more overt observation while on the Guiding Star. Her clan had watched her, as they had all of the younger children, until they’d realised how useless she was… and even when she’d won her freedom, she’d been watched by the Inquisitors. The humans, at least, weren’t going to jump on her for the slightest hint of disbelief or blasphemy. They had asked her hundreds of questions, some of which she had refused to answer, but they didn’t seem to have any real plan for the interrogation. Very few of the questions linked together into one whole.

The human who entered the room was slightly shorter than her, with short dark fur on his head and hints of darker hairs on his chin, something that still looked a little strange to her. It was odd, but the more signs of similarity between her people and the humans she saw, the more her mind focused on the differences. Her people had no hair, anywhere, and the human eyes…! They seemed so mobile, so constantly in motion, compared to her own. The dark-skinned human she’d encountered first, who had cleared all hairs off his scalp, had been the most like her she’d met while held captive.

“My name is Paul,” the human said. She had noticed that most of the humans tended to have wildly varying ways of pronouncing certain words, even in their own language, that puzzled her. Surely, they would have developed a unified language by now. “What is your name, if I may ask?”

Femala smiled. If this… Paul was some version of an inquisitor, he was surprisingly polite. Most Inquisitors tended towards the ‘hit first, ask questions later’ approach. “I am Researcher Femala, Researcher in Technology,” she said, supplying her full title. “What is your title?”

The human produced the sound they made when they found something amusing. “I suppose, madam, that I could be called a Researcher in Alien Life,” he said. “I used to consider meeting people like you, you see.”

Femala didn’t. The Takaina had never seriously considered the possibility of life on other planets, not until they’d actually started to send out generation starships and colonise as many worlds as they could, all in the name of God. They’d wondered, judging from some of the human broadcasts, if humanity had encountered other races somewhere, but most of them had been unbelievable. No engineer among the Takaina could see how a starship that was nothing more than a giant cube could even function… and that had been among the more realistic designs.

The human leaned back slightly. Femala was partly repulsed and partly impressed by his motions. He was much less flexible than a male of her race — it had taken cycles just to get used to the idea of males actually working as researchers — but he moved with an odd jerky motion that seemed to hint at considerable power. God had designed the universe for her to explore and a human body was merely another engineering puzzle.

“Tell me something,” he said, finally. “What do your people want here?”

Femala blinked. “To bring this world into the Truth,” she said, puzzled. They’d told the humans that, hadn’t they? “The settlers on the Guiding Star will settle here and bring you into the light.”

“And there I was hoping that it was all a con,” the human said. Femala didn’t understand. How could anyone doubt the word of the High Priest? If he was caught in a lie, his power and position would vanish in a flash. “Tell me something else, then; why doesn’t your friend like you much?”

Femala, despite herself, started to explain. She talked about the four sects that made up the Truth and the Truthfulness, and about the clans that made up each of the sects. She spoke about how the clans saw to it that each of the children was raised to know his or her place and how they wanted, more than anything else, to increase their own numbers. As a sterile women — not even a male who could be expended in war — she’d been sentenced to death by her clan, until the High Priest had saved her.

“Why?” Paul asked. The human really didn’t understand. How did humans handle such problems among their people? “Did he… want your body?”

It took several rounds of explanations before Femala understood what he meant. “No,” she admitted. The very thought showed how aliens the humans were. The idea of someone selling their sexual services was strange. “As a sterile woman, I don’t have the… scent to draw in the males and convince them to protect me and compete for my favours.”

The human seemed puzzled, but passed on the issue. “What do you think of this place?”

“Boring,” Femala said, truthfully. It was true that they’d brought her books to read — human books, sometimes interesting ones — but it was very confining when she could have been running through the fields of Earth, or examining more of their technology in the occupied zone. “What are you doing to do to me?”

The human ignored the question. “Why are your males just… waiting for something?”

Femala almost laughed. “They expect you to kill them, of course,” she said. It had been a trait of warfare since before the Unification Wars. Females could bear new children for the victors, but the males were useless. “They’re warriors who fell into enemy hands, so of course you’re going to kill them, or enslave them. What are you going to do with them?”

“I don’t know,” Paul admitted. It sounded as if he didn’t really care, although it was hard to read the human voice. If the other female had been able to share her insights… but that was air out the airlock now. “That’s a question for my superiors.”

“You should tell them to surrender and accept the Truth,” Femala said. She pushed as much earnestness into her tone as she could, although she suspected that the human wouldn’t recognise it as such. “It’s the only way to stop the fighting.”

Paul leaned closer. The eerie human eyes peered into her own eyes. “Is there nothing else we can offer you?”

Femala sighed. “The Truth has endured for thousands of cycles,” she said, almost sadly. It had been the Truth that had condemned her to death for being sterile. “It cannot be broken. Your world will break before the High Priest chooses to leave you to your unbelief.”