Invasion

Chapter Forty-Eight

“He was scared,” Joshua said.

Loretta looked up at him. A month in captivity hadn’t dulled her much, although the aliens hadn’t set out to really break her. “Who was scared?”

Joshua watched the lines of collaborators, some willing, some unwilling, as they were escorted towards the holding camps outside Austin. They would be held there until they could be tried, but plenty of people weren’t waiting for the trials before extracting revenge. Several hundred collaborators, some of the worst, had been lynched before the insurgent network — what was left of it — had finally regained control and taken the remaining collaborators into protective custody.

“Mr Adair,” Joshua said. “I had wondered if he hated me, or if he thought I didn’t deserve a hot babe like you, but he was merely scared. Scared that one day the aliens would discover me, break in and take his children away. He betrayed me and he didn’t even have the decency to be a secret arch-enemy or something.”

Loretta elbowed him. “Stop complaining,” she said, with a wink. It was the type of wink that would have gotten a young girl arrested or whipped in a more repressive country. “You’re alive, you survived the occupation, you have a pair of quickie book deals lined up…”

“How many people are going to be buying books in the next few years?” Joshua asked. “The country’s a wreck. The war was little more than a stalemate. Millions of people are dead — do you know they’re saying that the total death toll is over one and a half billion? Half of America barely has enough to eat. The economy is a shambles and…”

“I thought I told you to stop complaining,” Loretta said, firmly. “Come on, think of all the new vistas opening up in front of you.”

“I used to think that getting the Pulitzer would have been the greatest day of my life,” Joshua said. “I never had a hope of getting it… and now, what remains of the committee is falling over itself to offer it to me, and I find it hard to care. What does getting the story mean now?”

He looked at the retreating collaborators and then around at the damaged city. “The entire country has been shaken,” he said. “What’s the point any more?”

“You beat the odds,” a voice said from behind him. Joshua jumped and spun around to see Tessa standing behind him, wearing, for the first time in his experience, a standard uniform. “You get to carry on living when armed and dangerous people wanted to kill you. What better victory can you have?”

“Damn it,” Joshua said, with feeling. “Do you have to keep sneaking up on me like that?”

“It’s good for your heart,” Tessa assured him. “It gets the heart beating and the blood pumping — I’ve probably put your heart attack off by a few extra years. You ought to be paying me for such a great service.”

“I’m broke,” Joshua said, and laughed. “Whatever I had in the banks vanished when the banks folded. God help the insurers when the claims start coming in.”

“I’m sure their lawyers will claim that they don’t cover damages by aliens,” Tessa said. Her face twitched into a smile. “Of course, all those people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens and even took out insurance against it are going to be laughing.”

She sobered up rapidly. “The Captain died up there,” she said. “That’s not common knowledge, but I thought you should know.”

Joshua winced. He’d liked Brent, in his way, even if the soldier had been reluctant to have a reporter anywhere near him. It would have been easy to take refuge in hating him for censoring his posts, but it had been Joshua’s life on the line as well; a single mistake could have killed them all… and Loretta. Brent had deserved better than death, even if he had lied to Joshua about his destination when he left the safe house.

“I’m sorry to hear about that,” he said, sincerely. “What are you going to do with your life?”

“Have a long one,” Tessa said. She shrugged. “Plenty of people are a… little upset to learn that the United States maintained insurgency groups and stay-behind units, even if they came in handy when they were needed. I imagine that there’ll be inquiries and suchlike before too long, and people questioning the rightness of our cause.”

Loretta scowled. “Can you imagine the President agreeing that the alien missionaries could travel through America?” She asked. “What about freedom of religion?”

“I doubt that many of them will survive the experience,” Tessa said. “Oh, there were a few converts who maybe actually mean it, but most people seem to be shrugging it off now and abandoning it. Freedom of religion does include freedom from religion.”

She winked. “The Captain would have wanted you to have a nice life, so have one,” she said. “I’m going to take a long vacation somewhere.”

Joshua blinked. “You’re going to take a vacation?” He asked. “Where can you go in these times?”

“Yep,” Tessa said. “They tell me that Saudi is very nice at this time of year.”

She walked off. “So, what do we do now?” Loretta asked. “You know what that meant…?”

Joshua grinned at her. “It meant nothing,” he said, and took her arm. “We’re going to cover the return of American forces to Texas, the surrender of the alien ground forces, and the end of the war. Once that’s done, we’re going home.”

“And what are we going to do with them?”

Sergeant Oliver Pataki looked over at the speaker. “I dare say most of them could be charged with something, but that’s not going to be easy,” he said. “What do you want to do with them?”

Corporal Myers blinked. “They’re guilty of crimes against humanity!”

Pataki watched the remaining alien warriors as they waited in the holding camp. Rumour had it that the ports were already being repaired so that most of the aliens could be repatriated to the Middle East, or Australia, but there were plenty of humans who wanted to extract bloody revenge on the aliens. A handful were waiting just beyond the face, glaring at the soldiers who were standing between them and the aliens. They might not have taken part in the insurgency — and Pataki wouldn’t have bet money on it — but they sure wanted revenge now.

“I don’t know if we could charge them with anything,” he said. “They might have broken the Geneva Conventions, but they certainly didn’t sign the treaty. They could be charged with breaking their own laws of war, except they didn’t… even if we find their laws of war harsh. They make the Soviet Union look nice and polite. They even punished a few of their own for being excessive…”

“And one for crimes against their own religion,” Myers added. The sight of the alien body hanging among a group of human bodies had been a surprise. “Sarge, they have to be guilty of something…”

“I imagine it will make a lot of money for lawyers,” Pataki agreed. “The normal definition of a war crime is anything the loser did that the winner didn’t like. That’s pretty much everything, but this lot have plenty of friends who are armed to the teeth, so simply punishing them all isn’t an issue. Once we get them over the waters, well… fuck them. We’ve got a country to rebuild.”

“You expected this outcome,” Philippe Laroche said, as they sat together in the conference room. “Not everyone is happy with it.”

“I know,” Francis Prachthauser agreed. Europe was, in some ways, much worse off than America, even though there hadn’t been a direct invasion. The shortages of food alone had cost them thousands of lives. The civil unrest had cost more, even though thousands of young Muslims were being encouraged to leave for North Africa and the Middle East to fight the aliens. “Does the French military have any better ideas?”

“None,” Philippe admitted. “They agreed that the aliens couldn’t be dug out of the Middle East, or Australia. The Brits aren’t happy about that, and there are going to be millions of humans wanting to leave Australia, but… it can’t be done. Maybe once we build up a space force of our own we can… renegotiate the agreement.”

“Maybe,” Francis agreed. “On the plus side, it was one hell of an argument for international cooperation.”

“Yeah,” Philippe said.

“Russia, China, Europe, America… all working together,” Francis said. “Don’t you think that we might actually have a hope of surviving the next few hundred years?”

“You think the human race has a chance?” Philippe asked. “Us, with all our prejudices and hang-ups, our silly loves and lusts and hates and fears? Now I know you’re dreaming.”

Francis laughed as the two men went down for dinner.

“It might be possible to find a cure,” Paul said. “You don’t have to be stuck that way forever.”

Femala, who by now was getting practiced at reading the human expressions, frowned. “I don’t know if I want to have children,” she admitted. “I don’t have a real clan now, apart from your people, and I really don’t want to join the Yankee Clan.”

She watched Paul’s expression shift slightly. Over five thousand Takaina had chosen to remain behind in America, mainly converts to the American way of life, although there were a handful of religious converts in the mix. They’d been moved, for the moment, to a sparsely-populated region of Nevada, but they were rapidly becoming part of the area, almost as if they had been born human. The weeks and months since the Battle of Earth and the destruction of the Guiding Star’s battle section had brought in a lot of changes. Takaina who were — legally — citizens of the United States, by Act of Congress, were merely the least of it.

The Middle East was still a hotbed of insurgency, but the Takaina had dug in under their new High Priest, who had accepted the truce and stalemate. That wasn’t too surprising; the defeat of the old High Priest had been accepted as a sign that he’d been doing something wrong, and so there had been a few changes. Femala suspected, however, that the destruction of so many human religious sites wouldn’t dampen the insurgency, but would instead fuel the flames of resistance. The Takaina might never be able to relax in their new conquests, let alone start conquering the remainder of the world. Worse, new ideas had started to enter the matrix, despite whatever the High Priest and his Inquisitors would do… and she suspected that it wouldn’t be long before there was a major social upheaval. The old system wouldn’t survive… and, now, she had a feeling that it hadn’t survived on other worlds. What was really happening out there, among the stars?

“You don’t want to be immortal?” Paul asked. “You don’t want children who could carry on your name?”

Femala laughed. Her position was a puzzle. The High Priest might have regarded her as a traitor, but not a willing traitor; the Takaina biology would see to that. The standard way of treating captured females would be to breed them with enemy warriors, but that wasn’t possible with humans. The only possible fathers were in Nevada, with the Yankee Clan, and they… were something new.

But her dispassion and her intellectual freedom had come from her sterility.

“I don’t think so,” she said, finally. She had long ago resigned herself to life on Earth. The human space program alone would keep her busy for a long, long time. The humans had come up with ideas that even the Takaina hadn’t invented, although they had been remarkably slow about actually putting them into service. It puzzled her still; if the humans had developed their own technology, they would have won the war within hours and captured the remains of Guiding Star. “I think I’m happy the way I am.”

“If you change your mind, just let us know,” Paul said. “We all owe you a great deal. The war couldn’t have been won without you.”

“I think you’d have won anyway, in the long run,” Femala said. “Your society would have broken ours apart from the inside.”

The President looked tired and drawn, but oddly happy as Paul was shown into the private room. The American Government might have been dispersed, but the President had insisted on moving the seat of government to Philadelphia, with the intention of returning to Washington as soon as possible. Recovery and repair teams were already at work in the destroyed city, but everyone knew that it would take years before Washington was rebuilt, not least because of all the other demands on the workforce. The United States had come closer to collapse than anyone liked to think.

But we survived the Civil War, Paul thought, wryly. We can survive this as well.

“Thank you for inviting me, Mr President,” he said. “I understood that you survived the vote of impeachment.”

The President smiled. “We won the war, so suddenly they all decided that unseating the President wasn’t the brightest idea,” he said. The impeachment proceedings had started because of the President’s concession to allow alien missionaries to work within the United States, a face-saving gesture on the part of the aliens. Certainly, the aliens hadn’t been concerned when two of them had died within a week of arriving on American soil. “That’s politics for you, son.”

Paul nodded. “Yes, Mr President,” he said.

“I’m appointing Francis as my Ambassador to the Takaina Government,” the President said. “Ambassador Carmichael and the other Ambassadors in the occupied territories will have to be withdrawn as part of the peace treaty, which means that we’ve written them all off for the moment, as long as the oil keeps flowing.”

“Yes, Mr President,” Paul said.

“It’s a degree of realpolick that most people would be uncomfortable with,” the President said. “Have you given any thought to your own future?”

Paul shook his head. “Operation Nightwatch is hardly required any longer,” he said. “I expected that I would be reassigned to some other task within the New Pentagon.”

“I’d like you to take over the United States Space Force,” the President said. “It seems that I can do no wrong at the moment” — he smiled, rather sardonically — “and Congress is rubber-stamping everything, too scared of losing their positions to object loudly. It comes with a promotion to General and a massive budget, as much as we can spare. We need more shuttles, moon bases, orbiting weapons platforms, tactical observation systems… everything we need to defend ourselves if the next High Priest turns out to be less fond of us, or if others turn up from their homeworld.”

“I doubt that we will see any more ships,” Paul said, and outlined his reasoning. Anything could have happened back on the alien homeworld, or the other worlds they’d settled. “Still… I accept your offer, with pride.”

“Good,” the President said. They shared a meaningful look for a long moment. “And the black operations?”

Paul paused. “They’re proceeding,” he said. The mere fact that the United States — and Europe and Russia — was supporting the insurgency in the Middle East could restart the war. It wasn’t something anyone wanted to discuss openly. “We should have the time we need.”

“All of this could have been avoided,” the President said, gazing into the future. “History will say that I, or Bush, or Clinton, or Bush Senior, or Reagan should have done something to prevent it. The largest cover-your-ass-and-voting-base budgets in the world won’t make up for history’s judgement on us. The best we can do now is make sure that it never happens again.”

“Yes, Mr President,” Paul said. “I will see to it personally.”