At least he cleared you to rejoin the ship, Alice told herself. Her status was still somewhat vague, but at least the marines had started to accept her again. Perhaps she could convince the headshrinker - or Major Parkinson - to reassign her to one of the understrength platoons. It would be hard to be a common bootneck again, after commanding a platoon in her own right, but she could cope. God knows we need every swinging dick we can get.
Her lips quirked. There was no way she qualified as a swinging dick.
Doctor Watson was sitting in a chair, looking up at her. Alice scanned him with her eyes automatically, checking for threats. He looked at ease, although she knew better than to take that for granted. They weren’t going to be exchanging physical blows. But then, the Royal Marines still laughed about the burglar who’d broken into a retired marine’s house. The bastard hadn’t known that the elderly man had been an unarmed combat instructor and boxing champion as well as a veteran of quite a few wars ...
“Alice,” Doctor Watson said. His brisk, no-nonsense approach galvanised and irritated her in equal measure. “Something funny?”
“Just a random thought,” Alice lied. A civilian headshrinker would ask her about being a woman - being the lone woman - in the marines. There would be snide insinuations about her feeling inferior to the men, because she lacked a penis. She had no idea what Doctor Watson would say, but she didn’t want to find out. “You wanted to see me, doctor.”
“Yes,” Doctor Watson said. “Take a seat, please.”
Alice sat, purposefully choosing the hardest seat in the compartment. Comfort had always struck her as an illusion, something that could be taken away at any moment. She’d learnt that when her father had murdered her mother. And, if she’d had any doubts, she’d lost them when the Tadpoles had bombarded Earth. Millions had perished when death had struck from the skies; millions more had died in the weeks and months that had followed. She knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she’d been very lucky to survive.
“A week ago, you came face to face with the infected,” Doctor Watson said. “Again.”
“Yes,” Alice said, shortly.
The doctor waited for her to continue, then leaned forward. “How did you cope?”
“Professionally,” Alice said. She hadn’t realised how much she’d missed being a marine until she’d been deputised as a consultant. The thrill of being on a ship that might explode at any moment had never lost its savour, even if outsiders thought it was thoroughly insane. “I did my duty.”
“Henry said as much,” Doctor Watson said. “He said you did the marines proud.”
It took Alice a moment to realise that he was referring to Major Henry Parkinson. She frowned, wondering what her CO and the headshrinker would have found to talk about. Had they served together? Or had she been the sole topic of conversation? She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Parkinson knew her well enough to know when she was having problems.
“It may have to be repeated,” she said. “What happens when we try to board a bigger ship?”
“It was suggested that the virus controlled the ship directly,” Doctor Watson told her. “What do you think about that?”
Alice shrugged. If she’d controlled the ship, through computers or some kind of direct brain interface right out of speculative fiction, she was sure she would have done a much better job of repelling borders. There were plenty of possibilities, from animating the remote manipulators to simply waiting for the boarders to get comfortable and triggering the self-destruct. Instead, the ship had been crewed by infected aliens and blob-like viral clusters ... her blood ran cold as she realised the implications. The virus hadn’t developed any automated systems - or robots - because it hadn’t needed to develop them. It used the infected to handle the jobs humans would entrust to robotic systems. Why not? They were expendable. It reminded her of the terrorist base she’d helped to capture, three years ago, where the bastards had been trying to build a nuclear bomb. They’d used unprotected humans to refine the nuclear material too. The virus was, if anything, even less concerned about its people.
Doctor Watson coughed. “Something you want to share with me?”
“The virus uses its people as ... robots,” Alice said, and outlined her thoughts. “That’s why it didn’t put up a more effective defence.”
“An interesting thought,” Doctor Watson said. “And how do you feel about it?”
“Fuck my feelings,” Alice said, a little sharper than she’d intended. Her feelings didn’t change the world. No amount of wishing for anything would make it real. “The priority is winning.”
“True,” the doctor agreed. “But my priority is getting you back to a healthy state.”
And watching how I cope with being the first infected person to survive the experience, Alice thought. She’d read the autopsy reports. The alien bodies had been riddled with the virus. It was unclear if they’d ever been anything more than expendable bodies. They’d certainly had no hope of freeing themselves from captivity. You’re not going to put me ahead of anything else.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Alice said. She kept her face impassive. “I’ve seen worse amongst humans, doctor, humans who don’t have the excuse of being alien viruses that need to invade and occupy bodies to survive. If I’d been infected completely, without help, I would be dead ...”
She met his eyes. “But the virus doesn’t hate us, doctor. It does what it needs to do to survive. The bastards I met on Earth are far worse.”
“But they don’t have the power to destroy us utterly,” Doctor Watson pointed out. “The virus does.”
Alice wasn’t so sure. She’d seen the settlements - and refugee camps - along the borders of Europe. They’d been creepy places, with women treated as servants and slaves and children raised to hate the people on the other side of the wall. She’d never really understood how they tolerated it, but she supposed they knew no better. A person who was raised in a restrictive culture would find it very hard to shake off if they moved to a far less restrictive environment. And yet, the oppressors were human. They could have made the choice not to be assholes. They could have given up and allowed their people to be free. Instead ...
She shivered. “Perhaps it does,” she said. “But there would be no malice in it.”
“I see,” Doctor Watson said. “And you consider it to be better than your human opponents?”
Alice suspected she’d been lured into a rhetorical trap, but there was no help for it now. She narrowed her eyes, daring him to challenge her.
“When I signed up, I was warned that I couldn’t expect mercy if I ever fell into enemy hands,” she said. “I was told that I would be raped and murdered, that my suffering would be filmed and uploaded to the datanet: I was told that there was a very good chance that I wouldn’t survive long enough to be rescued. They made it clear that I, as a woman with a mind of her own and a gun of her own, would be singled out for special attention. I resolved to kill myself if there was a serious prospect of being captured. I’d deny them the pleasure of having their way with me.”
She allowed her voice to harden. “The virus doesn’t make people suffer for the hell of it, doctor. It isn’t evil, not in the sense we understand the term. What it does is evil, and it has to be stopped, but it doesn’t have the option of being good or evil. I don’t think it can make the choice to be good or evil. It isn’t a different culture. It just is.”
“So you said,” Doctor Watson said. “But we have problems dealing with other cultures.”
Alice wasn’t sure what he was driving at, but she nodded anyway. “That’s true,” she said, remembering a joint exercise with the Russians. The Russians had been brutal, both to themselves and to their captives. The rumours of mass graves in Central Asia, never officially confirmed, seemed very believable. So did the stories about nightmarish atrocities intended to terrify the locals into submission. “But we can talk to them. We can tell them that what they’re doing is wrong. We can even threaten them into chang
ing their ways. But the virus cannot be reasoned with, let alone threatened. We are in a battle for our very survival.”
“But you feel the virus isn’t evil,” Doctor Watson said.
“No,” Alice said. “But that doesn’t mean that we must not fight it.”
She met his eyes. “Is there a point to this?”
Doctor Watson looked back at her. “One could feel that you are arguing the virus’s case. Or that it has influenced you even after you were freed from its control.”
Alice felt a hot flash of anger. “It never had me under its control,” she bit out. “The doctors proved that it never managed to reach into my brain.”
“But it might have managed to influence you,” Doctor Watson pointed out, coolly. “How do we know it didn’t manage to plant commands or suggestions into your brain?”
“It never reached my brain.” Alice took a moment to place firm controls on her temper. “I do not believe that it managed to influence my thinking in any way.”
“There are ways to ... condition a human being,” Doctor Watson reminded her. “And the victims do not know they have been conditioned. The conscious mind is completely unaware, even as the conditioning goes to work. They pass lie detector tests because, even at a sub-thought level, they believe themselves to be innocent. And, technically, they are innocent.”
Alice held his eyes. “I thought there were ways to detect conditioning,” she said. “You certainly put me through a hell of a lot of tests.”
“You are not ... blatantly ... conditioned,” Doctor Watson confirmed. “But how do we know you weren’t ... influenced?”
“Well,” Alice started. “I ...”
She took a moment to organise her thoughts. “If I was to say that the Americans built the largest battleships in known space, that might be a sign that the CIA or OSS had conditioned me at some point, perhaps when that American pilot was plying me with drinks in the hopes he’d get into my knickers. He was talking about the immense battleship he crewed - all by himself, if you believe him. Or maybe he was bragging about the size of his dick. I don’t know. Maybe I was conditioned.
“But it is also a point of fact that the Americans have built the largest battleships in known space, unless the virus has built something larger. It is a fact! And someone who repeats that fact is not a victim of American conditioning, or American alcohol, but merely a reader of Jane’s Fighting Ships. And what I told you about the virus is a simple fact. We’re not talking about a religious cult that wants to wipe out unbelievers, but an alien entity doing what it has to do to survive. It simply isn't capable of recognising us as intelligent entities in our own right.”
“You’d think it should be able to realise that we think too,” Doctor Watson mused. “It certainly accesses memories, once it has control over the infected victims’ brain.”
“We assume it does,” Alice said. She was fairly sure the doctor was right, but she was feeling contrary. “For all we know, it may deduce a great deal about us from simple observation through its senses. And the senses it steals from the victims. We’re not talking about forcible assimilation into a mass-mind, doctor.”
“Or so we think,” Doctor Watson murmured.
Alice leaned back in her chair. “I have an appointment in twenty minutes,” she said, although she was grimly aware that Doctor Watson took priority. “Is there anything else I can tell you?”
The doctor shrugged. “Do you have any insights into the alien ship?”
“Nothing I haven’t written into my reports,” Alice said, bluntly. “It was an odd environment, I will admit, but nothing too strange. It wasn’t like swimming through a Tadpole starship or walking through a Vesy fortress. They’re both very alien.”
“Nothing too strange,” the doctor repeated. “The civvies didn't feel the same way.”
“I'm sure they didn’t,” Alice agreed. The xenospecialists and diplomats might spend half their time in alien environments, learning how to cope with worlds that weren’t designed for humans, but hardly anyone else willingly chose to travel to alien worlds. Even Vesy, home to a growing cultural and technological enhancement mission, had relatively few travellers. “I think they weren’t so focused on actually sweeping the ship before it was too late.”
“I’m sure they weren’t focused on it too,” Doctor Watson agreed. “I wasn’t allowed to go over, you see.”
“You’re too valuable to lose,” Alice said. She wouldn’t have regretted it if any further meetings were cancelled and she never saw the headshrinker again, but she didn’t want him dead. He certainly wasn’t as useless as the school counsellor who’d tried to talk to her about her father. She was still surprised she hadn’t been expelled for what she’d said to him. “And besides, if someone gets infected, you might be the only one who spots it.”
She frowned. Everyone but her had had their blood checked twice before they’d been allowed to return to Invincible. And then they’d been put through a decontamination procedure that had been alarmingly through. But her? She had alien matter in her blood already. Perhaps she should be grateful she’d been allowed to leave the research base after all. The risk of infection was completely beyond calculation.
“I hope that’s true,” Doctor Watson said. “But none of us know for sure, do we?”
“No,” Alice said. “We don’t.”
Chapter Nineteen
“Alien-3,” the zampolit said. “Do we have to use their name?”
Captain Pavel Kaminov resisted the urge to shrug. “It isn’t a British or a Yankee name,” he said, instead. “It’s a designation laid down by the Alien Contact Treaty that will remain in place until we learn what they call it or rename the system ourselves, after the war.”
He turned his attention to the display, wishing - again - that the Rodina could provide holographic displays to match those he’d seen on Invincible. The display in front of him, rapidly filling up as the probes slipped into the alien system, was far in advance of the systems available to the Russians who’d first jumped through the tramlines to explore strange new worlds, but it wasn’t cutting-edge tech. Pavel was practical enough to know that weapons and sensors were more important - there, Yuriy Ivanov had the best available to the motherland - yet it was frustrating. The classified briefing he’d been given when he’d assumed command had made it clear that Russia simply didn’t have the money to keep up everywhere. Some things had to be sacrificed.
The zampolit snorted. “What does it say about us that we accept their terms?”
“Russia was an equal partner in the discussions,” Pavel said, without looking up. It was the official line, but - he suspected - it wasn’t true. Russia had been in a weak state when the diplomats met to hash out humanity’s response to any further alien threats. Thankfully, the Great Powers hadn’t taken advantage of the situation. “And we will have the inside track on any star systems discovered on this mission.”
He sighed, inwardly, as a blue icon popped into life on the display. He’d been told, time and time again, that a starship captain and his zampolit were meant to work as a team ... and that the best ships and crews had been the ones where the two men worked in harmony. Now, after far too many years in the navy to count, he rather suspected that someone at the academy had been lying to Russia’s future commanding officers. He would have blamed the GRU if he’d thought they had the imagination to come up with such a lie. Far too many of the zampolits he’d met had been ludicrously unsuited to any position on a starship. He’d been told that some of them had even met their deaths through doing things that any spacer would know were mind-bogglingly stupid.
The sensor officer turned and saluted. “Captain, we’re detecting a gas giant and a planet within the habitable zone,” he said. “The former appears to have an alien presence.”
There goes our finder’s fee, Pavel thought, although he wasn’t really surprised. The captured alien ship had certainly passed through Alien-3, even if it hadn't come from there. It was unlikely that any spe
cies would leave such a valuable world undeveloped. But then, the virus hadn’t bothered to continue to expand towards Falkirk. Maybe we can find a way to attack the world and give the bastards a fright.
“Route two more probes towards each of the worlds,” he said. A gas giant, combined with a habitable world ...? This system was prime real estate, as the Yankees would say. “And update Invincible on our findings.”
He ignored the zampolit’s snort as more data flowed into the display. Invincible was two light-minutes away, lurking near the tramline as her smaller escorts probed the alien system for prospective targets. In theory, Pavel should have asked for permission before launching the probes; in practice, he knew they needed to gather as much information as they could as quickly as possible. Captain Shields would understand. And, if he didn’t, he’d just have to put up with it. Pavel was an ally, not a subordinate.
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