Invasion

spreading out of control, roads would be blocked and rendered impassable…and people would be fleeing in their thousands in hopes of avoiding radiation poisoning. So far, at least, it seemed that the alien nukes weren't that radioactive, but anyone caught up in the blast needed medical attention, attention they weren’t going to get. Worse, if they got out of the city carrying radioactive dust in their clothing, they might spread it further into the refugee camps.

It was barely half an hour after the nuke had detonated and the emergency services what was left of them, were already overwhelmed. The soldiers deployed around the city could bring out as many people as possible, but it would be almost impossible to save them all and, with the city destroyed, they might have to leave the fires to burn themselves out. That wouldn’t sit well with the President, but there was little other choice, not when it was so hard to get supplies from the rest of the country. They would have to save those who could be saved, which meant that thousands of people, trapped in the rubble, would just have to be abandoned.

“We will save as many as we can,” General Hastings promised. He leaned forward. “Mr President, we did prevent them from continuing their advance…”

The President gave him a bleak stare. “How many cities can we afford to trade off for preventing any further advance?” He asked. “Detroit? San Francisco? How many more?”

He rounded on Paul. “Colonel, get back to the prisoners,” he said. “Do whatever you have to do to get them working with us, just to use them, somehow, to get out of this mess.”

Paul couldn’t argue. He looked around the table and saw…a mixture. General Hastings, shocked, but determined to do whatever he needed to do. Spencer was terrified and furious at the destruction of his city. His family was somewhere within Washington, unless he’d gotten them out before the explosion. Deborah…watching the President the way a hawk watches a mouse, thinking hard.

“Yes, Mr President,” he said. He had the unnerving feeling that he was listening to the funeral bell for the United States of America. “I shall see to it at once.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

When taken prisoner, there is a tendency to attempt to become friendly with the jailors, perhaps even to assume their beliefs and ideology. This is known as Stockholm Syndrome and is a response to the near- complete powerlessness of a prisoner.

– Anon

I am becoming a heretic, Femala thought.

The weird thing, the worrying thing, was how little that thought bothered her. When she’d thought about it, the rare occasions before her capture that she had thought about it, she hadn’t expected to survive more than a week of captivity. As a sterile female, she had thought that it was likely – and would have happened in the Unification Wars – that she would have been treated as a honorary male and simply executed, along with the remainder of any male prisoners. It was true that in some cases, male prisoners would be enslaved, but they tended not to last very long if cut off from the possibility of reproduction. They could – and sometimes had – go for years without having children, if producing children was actually possible, but if they were prevented from meeting and courting females, despair overcame them and they just drifted away.

A female, on the other hand, would be treated differently. As a possible source of new children, any normal female would be accepted into the enemy clan…and treated as a mixture of junior wife and prisoner. She would become one of the enemy clan, expected to forget her old clan and become one of them, in heart and soul. Accepted into the comforting warmth and safety of a clan, treated with respect by the other females, thoughts of escape and the old clan quickly vanished, becoming nothing more than memories. Femala had read somewhere, when she had been studying biology in the hopes that she could escape the fate she had been condemned to, that their own biochemistry played a role in their submission and subversion. They literally brainwashed themselves into becoming one of the enemy.

The research hadn’t interested her as much as machines and the way they went together, but she remembered enough of it to understand the reason why. Human females, it seemed, couldn’t pick and choose their mates. Any human male strong enough could force himself upon them and into them, forcing the poor woman to bear his child, regardless of her opinion. It had happened, several times, in the occupied zone and the High Priest had been contemplating ordering a death sentence for the human male responsible, once he had been able to wrap his head around the concept. The idea was literally alien to the Takaina; Femala, like all females, couldn’t have sex unless she wanted to have sex, which was part of the reason why her biochemistry would push her into the enemy clan. Any male who tried to force himself on her would be unable to force his way into her…and even if he did, he couldn’t get her pregnant. When her condition was discovered, as it would have been pretty quickly, she would have been classed as useless and, if she was lucky, killed.

But she was becoming more…human.

The humans hadn’t treated her badly and hadn’t cared that she was sterile, although there was no logical reason for them to care, unless they wanted to breed more Takaina. Instead, they’d treated her well and given her plenty of books to read, although no access to their computers. She couldn’t blame them for that, even though it was much harder to use a computer for hacking and sabotage than most people believed, but…they had so many! Perhaps there were so many computers on their world that hacking was commonplace, while on the Guiding Star there were only a few hundred who really knew how computers worked and how to use them for their own purposes. It was an odd way of doing things, but studying the human race through the eyes of an engineer made her wonder just what the final outcome of it all would be.

And the warriors!

She’d expected – as had they – that they would simply be killed. Instead, they had been brought into the human clan, as she was coming to think of it. It was an odd clan, but one she was starting to associate herself with, and so was Fallon. The female researcher into humanity was rapidly becoming one of her own test subjects, something that was even moderating her attitude to Femala. She’d scorned the sterile female on the shuttle, but now they were almost friends, although there would always be that barrier between them. Fallon had the attention of all of the warriors, and probably always would, unless more females arrived and joined the clan…and she studied humans. She believed that the humans meant what they said when they’d offered to treat them well, and, in many ways, she had almost gone completely over to them. She couldn’t fight her own biology, while Femala, who had been brought up in a society where she was worthless, was on the verge of joining her. She almost welcomed the sight of new and different humans…

They were, she had decided, an odd race. What she had thought to be a disgusting skin disease was actually a change in skin colour that, she had been assured, covered the entire body. Their males actually did real work! She had seen a male-female pair and had addressed the female as the engineer, only to discover that it was the male who was the engineer and the female was a security guard. That had turned her world upside down; males didn’t have long-term professions. They were Priests or Warriors, not engineers or doctors. They didn’t have the mindsets to do more than rote work…or was she wrong? The human hadn’t known as much as she had about practical work in space, but he had known more of the theoretical side of space construction work…and even spacecraft design. The conversations had been productive and Femala felt the last of her doubts slipping away. She was one of them now.

It was easy to know what the humans were doing. They wanted – needed, desperately – to get back into space. They had the services of a tech expert, one of the foremost in the system, and they would be foolish not to use her. It gave her value and even a few bargaining chips; she’d traded her assistance for more human books and even entertainment. The humans seemed to be more imaginative than her own people, even though she’d watched several episodes of human science-fiction and couldn’t stop herself laughing, and yet…was it really something unique about them, or could her own people match it, under the right conditions? Her position had been permanently uncertain under the Theocracy…and yet, was that a natural law, or something invented? Had God really decreed that all sterile females were to die?

The thought blazed through her head. The High Priest had kept her alive…and, in doing so, had broken that law…if that law existed! He wouldn’t have got away with it, High Priest or no, not when