Invasion

Loomis shook his head as he took in the sight to the north. The air base had been attacked, somehow; there was a massive mushroom cloud forming over the base. His basic training reasserted itself and he glanced down at his terminal, relieved to find out that there had been no EMP to disable it, which suggested that the blast hadn’t been nuclear. Speculation on alien weapons had been rampant in the guard force and several of the soldiers had believed that the aliens would deploy asteroids from orbit…and, well as far as Loomis was concerned, it was as good an explanation as any.

He keyed his radio. “Base, this is Delta-Seven,” he said, as calmly as he could. If the base had been destroyed – and, from their distance, it looked to have been completely destroyed – what the hell did they do? They didn’t have emergency plans to cover the complete destruction of the base. The worst they’d anticipated had been a terrorist attack using a nuke. “This is Delta-Seven; base, come in!”

There was no reply.

Chapter Eight

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue – and thoroughly immoral – doctrine that ‘violence never solves anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

– Starship Troopers

The aliens, as enigmatic and faceless as ever, escorted their human prisoners down the middle of a long shaft. It could easily have been a corridor or a vertical shaft, Francis realised; the absence of gravity only meant that people could swim through the corridors in any direction. The shaft was as dark and featureless as the aliens, hidden behind their armour, but he could see signs of construction that suggested that the aliens hadn’t bothered with finesse. There were hints of welding scars and maybe even battle damage on the passageway, while the aliens themselves seemed bright and new. There was an uncertain crudity about the entire construction, as if the aliens had decided that ‘good enough’ was better than ‘the best,’ at least for their starships. There was a certain something about it that, somehow, reminded him of Soviet and Russian machines.

He caught Gary’s eye and watched as the former commander studied the alien technology. Francis would have given his right teeth to share observations with someone who might actually know more than pop science and speculations based on vague recollections of various stories of the space age that had never been, but they didn’t dare take the risk. Even if the aliens didn’t understand English now, they would in time, and then they would play back the recordings of everything the humans said to each other, testing their captives. Resistance was probably futile, but looking at the aliens, it was evident that they were taking no chances. Stark naked, weaponless, defenceless, they were helpless…but the aliens were still treating them as dangerous opponents.

Bastards, Francis thought, looking up towards one of the aliens. The featureless helm gazed back impassively. He tried to see some hint of the alien’s features under the black mask, but it was hopeless; the alien mask didn’t even show his own reflection. The alien, attached to the floor by obviously magnetic boots, merely gave him another push down the shaft…or perhaps it was along the corridor. It was growing harder to maintain a sense of reality as they were pushed further into the alien spacecraft.

“That’s an airlock,” Gary said suddenly, as they reached a massive hatch, set into what was now obviously the corridor wall. The airlock looked more like a typical safe door from an old movie about bank robbers, but Gary was almost certainly right. The gunmetal construction had the same crudeness about it as the rest of the ship, but there was no denying that it was actually capable of carrying out its task and keeping the air inside the ship. It opened, automatically, as the small group approached and the aliens escorted them into a small chamber, and then into a second.

“We’ve docked with a larger ship,” Francis guessed, as they passed through a third chamber. The aliens seemed to have a very practical approach to their space technology; they showed strength in depth, redundancy and over-design. He resolved not to allow the crude appearance of the technology to lure him into a sense of complacency, even though it was more than a little galling; the ISS had looked more advanced than the alien ships, and yet it was the ISS that was flaming debris falling down towards Earth. “I wonder if…”

The third airlock opened, revealing a much larger chamber, almost large enough to hold an entire squadron of space shuttles. It was almost empty, save only for pieces of wreckage that had, at a guess, come from the ISS… and a line of aliens waiting for them. Most of the aliens wore the same featureless black battle armour – he guessed that they were the guards and soldiers, protecting the leadership – but others…others wore nothing but the bare minimum. He felt sweat prickling out all over his body – the interior of the alien starship was warmer than the desert, definitely – but the sensation was swept away as he came face to face with an unshielded alien. The creature…

A sense of pure…unreality swept over him, again, as he took in the alien form. The alien was almost disappointing, in a way; it was humanoid…and yet, just looking at it, it was impossible to escape the knowledge that it was alien, that it had grown up under the light of a very different star. It was wearing nothing, but a loincloth and a golden amulet around its neck…and it was hairless. Its skin was an eerie red shade, mottled slightly around the forehead; it’s eyes were dark ovals, darker than the alien helms. It stood slightly taller than Francis himself, but it seemed almost childlike, a child’s body blown up to unrealistic proportions. Just looking at the alien, it was impossible to escape a sense that he was staring at a being that was, somehow, fundamentally wrong.

A second alien, standing behind the first, took a step forward. This one was shorter and, he had the impression, weaker than the first. It also seemed to have uncovered breasts, although they looked very different to human breasts, and he decided to assume that it was female unless corrected. The male, if male it was, seemed to be in charge, but that said nothing. Human societies might have been based, more often than not, around the principle of female subordination – however expressed – but the aliens might be a matriarchy, instead of a patriarchy. Or, maybe, they were complete sexual equals and the aliens facing them just happened to have a male leader. He looked into the dark eyes, feeling a chill running down his spine when he met the pupil-less eyes, and wondered, grimly, what they were thinking.

Another of the females stepped forward. “You are welcome onboard our ship,” she said, her voice odd, but not unintelligible. Her English was precise and finely tuned, but with an odd accent that spoke, somehow, of alien worlds. Francis had half-expected to speak to them in English – they’d had plenty of time to listen to human radio signals and several groups down on Earth had transmitted entire dictionaries to them when their starship had been detected – but still, it was a shock. “We will learn from you and you will learn from us.”

The alien leader, if he was the alien leader, watched impassively. Francis was certain, looking at him, that he was the one who was calling the shots, but how much did that mean? A democracy had its checks and balances built into the system, but a dictatorship had far fewer checks on the leader’s powers…and there was no way to know how the aliens governed themselves. They could be anything from a human society to something so alien that it would make no sense to human observers.

Francis spoke, finally, his voice soft and weak. “What do you want?”

“To spread the word,” the alien female said. Francis stared at her. The answer made no sense at all. “We have come a long way to spread the word.”

Gary drifted forward, slightly. “Why did you attack us?”

“To establish our superiority and the folly of resistance,” the alien female said. Francis felt more than heard Gary’s gasp of shock. The aliens, far from bringing technology and gifts to Earth, seemed to want conquest. Why? He had thought that there was nothing on Earth that the aliens would want that they couldn’t get from the solar system, or through trade. A single one of the alien ships, offered to the great powers on Earth, would have netted the aliens an astonishing amount of trade goods. “This system will be brought into the word.”

Francis frowned. “The word?”