“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
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
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
“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.
“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
