“If we remove the ability to conceive by removing the gametes, this does not remove our hormonal urge to conceive,” Ki!Tana explained. “Our males have no sex drive unless activated by a female’s pheromones, but we females enter a phase where our bodies demand that we conceive. And since conception is fatal to us, that phase does not end.”
Heat. She was basically talking about a sapient species going into an inescapable, unending heat of the kind that caused dogs to jump walls and cats to squeeze through impossibly small cracks. A heat that could only be stopped by a pregnancy that would be fatal.
Annette couldn’t help herself. She stared at Ki!Tana in open horror.
“We have found ways,” her companion continued, clearly aware of Annette’s reaction, “to postpone what we now call ‘the birthing madness’. Drugs. Treatments. Removing the gametes early helps. We avoid all A!Tol young until they are mature, leaving their care to immature females and related males. We have managed to push its onset past three hundred long-cycles, aligning our lives with what our doctors can allow our males.
“But the madness takes us all and it does not leave,” she said flatly. “Some choose not to have their gametes fertilized until it does, and have them reimplanted, dying as their foremothers did. We have ways to make it less painful, but it remains a minority choice. Most see their broods raised while they live, even if they don’t meet them until they are adults.
“And then, when the madness begins to take them, they quietly arrange their affairs—and then calmly arrange their deaths.”
The office was silent.
“And you are in this ‘birthing madness’, I take it?” Annette finally asked, once the mind-boggling horror of being an A!Tol female had at least partially processed.
Ki!Tana’s skin flashed a wan red, tired pleasure and acceptance.
“A small fraction of us refuse to die,” she said simply. “We make arrangements. We lock ourselves away in isolated places of meditation. Only the rich can even try, as the madness grows stronger for many long-cycles. Even among those who try, many choose to die in the end.
“Eventually, and how long varies from person to person, the madness stops getting worse. The body can regenerate removed glands, but it will eventually reach the highest production of the hormones it possibly can.”
Manipulator tentacles flutter.
“Then you adapt,” she said simply. “You rebuild your mind and soul from the fragments left behind. Understand, Captain, that I do not know who I was before I entered that cell on the side of a mountain. Even her name is lost to me; I have only fragments of her memories.
“Eventually, you walk free,” Ki!Tana concluded. “I suffer from the birthing madness every day, Captain. I am Ki!Tol: Elder. I can only barely deal with my own people, but aliens do not trigger the same issues. Most Ki!Tol eventually give in. We choose to die.”
“Ridotak called you a trickster demon,” Annette noted.
“Ki!Tol have a reputation as wise beings,” her friend concluded with a flutter of tentacles. “I give advice, guidance. It has led some I have worked with to great things. Others I have made mistakes, and they have listened with insufficient question.
“I am very old, Captain, but I am not infallible. I have placed my knowledge at your service, but do not forget that I am merely…experienced, not always wise.”
“And what is your agenda here, Ki!Tana?” Annette asked softly.
“I have walked this galaxy for multiple times what my kin would call my allotted cycle, Captain Bond. Ridotak calls me a demon advisedly: my main agenda is to not be bored.”
Chapter 39
The life of a retired collaborator was a quiet one, Jean Villeneuve reflected. No one expected him to do anything anymore. He knew nothing about the Weber Protocols, and the Resistance they were supposed to assemble had done very little in the months of occupation so far.
His neighbors in the villa on the beach knew who he was. They probably understood—the community along the southern French coast he lived in was a place for the wealthy, not the young or the non-pragmatic—but they avoided him regardless. The wealth he’d inherited from his wife’s long-dead family and the generous pension the A!Tol paid him—in Imperial marks, even!—left him with few worries.
That meant he got to sit on the top of the cliffs a few hundred meters from his house and watch the waves crash on the beach in silence. That his life contained no worries did not mean the man once charged with the defense of Earth had no worries.
The first industrial plants in Cherbourg, a hundred kilometers up the coast, had come online. A!Tol technology was starting to become available on Earth—and it was most easily purchased with Imperial marks. The aliens had set what seemed like fair exchange rates to Earth’s currencies…but the direction was clear.
If you work with us, your life will be better.
That’s what those luxuries told Earth’s people. The many millions of soldiers the A!Tol had decommissioned received pensions in marks. If those soldiers stayed decommissioned, they lived well and had access to the alien tech making life simpler.
If they didn’t…well, the A!Tol didn’t seem to go in for reprisals, but resistance was not tolerated. The Weber Network attacks so far had been met with targeted responses. UESF personnel Jean had known his entire life had died, but they’d died facing their enemies with guns in their hands. He couldn’t blame his friends, but to his surprise, he couldn’t blame the A!Tol, either. He had no illusions about Earth’s new overlords: they were here for their own reasons and their own benefit. But he’d give them the credit for their follow-up: no one was dying who hadn’t raised arms against them. Their counterinsurgency forces’ hands were pretty clean.
So far.
He sighed and shook his head, spotting an old car rolling up to the villa’s front door. That was…odd. A few of his old friends, mostly UESF officers retired before the invasion, still visited him, but they had nice cars. The A!Tol Imperial Governor had made a courtesy visit shortly after Tan!Shallegh had left Earth, but she’d come in an air-car.
The car was really old. Not much more than a beater—a cheap rental? Strange. A young woman, dark-haired and wearing a shawl and sunglasses, got out and knocked on his door. She waited a moment, then knocked again. Stubborn. Or desperate?
Jean Villeneuve’s bones weren’t as old as he sometimes pretended. He rose with ease and started swiftly striding toward the house. Whatever was going on, it was going to be more interesting than staring at the ocean, getting depressed.
#
By the time he reached the house, the young woman had knocked repeatedly, hit the announcer plate, pounded on the door, tried the handle, and settled herself relatively calmly on the steps, looking as if none of the previous activities had happened.
She managed all of this in a little under five minutes. Jean hadn’t been that far away. When he stepped around the corner of the house, however, she scrambled back to her feet and faced him, her body language twitchy, nervous.
“I am guessing, mademoiselle, you did not end up at my door by accident,” he greeted her. “So, I presume you are looking for me. I warn you,” he continued, “that you have probably caused the security bot to upgrade your threat level. If you were to, say, draw a weapon on me, it would disable you.”
“I’m not here to hurt anyone,” she told him in a soft southern American drawl—Louisiana, unless he missed his guess, “I just…didn’t know where else to turn. They say the aliens still talk to you. I need someone who can get them to listen.”
“Mademoiselle,” Jean said quietly, “I am the man who surrendered Earth to the A!Tol. Nobody talks to me anymore unless we have been friends for a long time. I don’t know why you would come to me.”
“Because nobody listens!” she snapped. “My brother, my husband—they’re both gone, but no one believes me. If anyone does…” She shivered. “I think they think the A-tuck-Tol did it and don’t want to cause trouble. Please, Admiral, I’m…desperate.�
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Jean Villeneuve was prepared to give the A!Tol some credit—enough to think they weren’t kidnapping or disappearing people at random, at least.
“Why me?” he finally asked.
The woman swallowed hard. “My name is Amy McQueen,” she told him firmly. “My father served with you aboard Endeavor. He said you were trustworthy, the best. And the aliens talk to you. It seemed…it seemed…I didn’t know what else to try.”
Jean sighed. There had been eleven hundred men and women aboard Endeavor, the first battleship the UESF had even built, and he still remembered Steve McQueen. He’d been an enlisted spacer, a career maladroit determined to do his job and unable to do it right.
“Come in, Mademoiselle McQueen,” he said quietly, opening the door.
“How is your father?” he asked a moment later, as he deftly guided her past the doglike security robot to the front sitting area.
“No longer with us,” she admitted. “Work accident about five years back.”
Jean nodded sadly. That did not surprise him. That McQueen had managed to live long enough to have two children almost did.
“All right,” he said to the young woman as he passed her a glass of wine—this was France, after all, and she’d come a long way for him to be inhospitable. “You said your brother and husband were missing? What do you mean?”
“They’re both soldiers, US Army, in the same company,” she told him. “They were in the bayou for exercises when the aliens arrived. They were out of touch with the outside world until they got back to base to find out that world had changed around them.
“I got notes from both of them the day they got back to base,” McQueen continued. “Then…nothing. They should have been mustered out with everyone else and sent home. I took a week off of work to build a small extension to our house for Dave; without knowing what the pension would be, I figured he’d need a place to live.
“Then I realized I hadn’t heard from either of them and they should have been home,” she said in a rush.
Jean eyed the young woman sitting in his living room carefully. With long, well-taken-care-of black hair and clad in a demure suit, she didn’t look like the type to engage in carpentry, but apparently, looks were deceiving.
She was right in her timeline. The A!Tol had been very careful to make sure all of the soldiers they decommissioned made it home within a week, in some cases deploying their own military shuttles to provide transport.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“I told my firm I was going to need more time off,” she replied. “I’m the most junior lawyer there, and with no one quite sure how the legal system is going to shake out under A-tuck-Tol rule, they could spare me. At a reduced sabbatical rate,” she noted, somewhat bitterly.
“I drove down to their base,” she continued after a moment. “It was empty. Everyone was gone—most of the brigade had been sent home before they got out of the bayou. Dave had told me the place was just them and a few administrators turning off lights.”
She shook her head.
“I ran into another woman there,” she said softly. “A lady I knew a little: Harry’s platoon lieutenant’s wife.” McQueen swallowed. “She was there for the same reason I was, Admiral. Her husband never came home.”
The dark-haired young woman looked down at her hands, focusing on them as they clenched around her still-full wine glass.
“Bank says Harry’s pension from the aliens is coming in,” she said. “They don’t seem to know he’s gone. Nobody seems to know where he went.
“Started poking. I’m a lawyer, Admiral. I know how to research. No one’s admitting anything, but the stories are out there if you look. A company of US soldiers from the bayou here. A ballerina troop in a plane flying home to Australia there. Hundreds of people, Admiral. Missing.”
She produced a datachip, holding it out to him.
“Everything I found is on here,” she said. “I tried to take it to the police, but they’re all scared. I think they’re afraid it’s the A!Tol, and all the high-level police systems are through them now. If the aliens are stealing people, how can we stop them?”
“That was my job, Amy,” Jean said quietly. “And I failed.”
“No!” she snapped, her voice suddenly hoarse. “You did what you had to do. This…this doesn’t make sense to be the aliens. Too few, too scattered. If they’d wanted ten thousand people, they’d have just loaded them up out of the Army divisions they knocked out.
“I…” She paused, swallowing and lifting her head to meet Jean’s gaze. “I want you to take this to them,” she admitted. “If it is them, we can’t stop it. But if it isn’t, our fear might be holding us back from the only people who can help us.”
Jean sighed, eyeing the small chip in the woman’s hand for a long moment. Then he took it.
“I have a contact number,” he admitted. “I don’t know if…”
The rumble of aircraft cut off the rest of his self-effacing statement, and shadows crossed over the windows. Out of the nearest window, he could see an orbital shuttle—an Imperial design, he thought, but the interface drive UESF ships hadn’t looked that different—settling onto his landscaping, crushing an expensive hedge.
“Mademoiselle McQueen,” he said softly, “I hope you do not take this the wrong way, but I think you should go into the bedroom.”
With a practiced hand, he flipped open his coffee table to reveal the ugly shape of a UESF twelve-millimeter submachine-gun.
“Go!” he snapped, and with a surprised look at the gun, the young lawyer went.
#
By the time McQueen had completely disappeared and Jean had fully checked over the SMG, the sound of landing aircraft had passed. A quick glance out the window showed that the shuttles had disgorged power-armored troops, bipedal, roughly human-sized soldiers.
From what he’d seen on the news, a significant portion of the A!Tol soldiers were bipeds of some kind, some of them human-sized, some smaller or larger. He was probably looking at Earth’s conquerors, if only because the Resistance was unlikely to have access to powered battle armor.
The soldiers were spreading out, forming a perimeter—an outward-facing one, which was probably a good sign—and then his thoughts were interrupted by a calm rap on the door.
Slowly, concealing the gun with his body, he approached the door.
“Yes?” he called out as whoever was outside knocked on the door.
“Admiral Villeneuve, this is Company Commander Kital,” a translated voice said through the door. “I apologize for interrupting you with your guest, but I have orders to evacuate you into orbit. We believe your life may be in danger.”
Sighing, he threw the door open, looking out at the massive, four-legged, centaur-like suit of armor standing on his doorstep. Kital had removed his helmet, presumably out of some false attempt to appear less threatening. Since the alien’s head looked like a snub-nosed but very toothy crocodile’s, it wasn’t really an improvement.
“The young lady is no threat,” Jean said quietly. “In fact, she needs to talk to the Governor.”
If they were going to drop interface drive shuttles over his property, they could look into why people were going missing.
Kital cocked his head, a gesture that looked more like it belonged on an inquisitive puppy than a two-hundred-kilo sapient carnivore.
“We can arrange that, Admiral, but you need to come with us right now,” he insisted.
“Why?” Jean demanded. “What happened?”
“The Cherbourg complex has been destroyed,” the alien said flatly. “A wave of other terrorist attacks is triggering worldwide. The Governor believes that, as the being who surrendered to us, you are in danger.”
Jean swallowed, then sighed.
The Weber Network appeared to have finally begun its full-scale movements. He knew very little about what the Protocols called for the Resistance to do, but he was quite certain assassinating him wasn’t on the agenda.
Telling the company of armed aliens that had just crushed his roses that wouldn’t help though.
“Let me fetch McQueen,” he said finally. “And then I want to be taken to the Governor as soon as she is available. I understand,” he noted, raising a hand to forestall any comment by Kital, “that won’t be immediately, but I think what this young lady has found may be hugely important to the relations between humans and the Imperium.”
#
From Amy McQueen’s wide eyes as they were loaded on to the shuttle, she’d never ridden in a spacecraft before, let alone an alien one. Even now, most people on Earth had never truly left the surface of their planet, though one of the things the Cherbourg industrial plant had been supposed to manufacture was small-scale interface drive units to help change that.
And now it was gone. Jean still had his UESF communicator, though it was in many ways worse than a civilian handset now that it had to run on the same networks. Its unrolled screen, though, showed him all he needed to know.
Cherbourg was the worst, fires still raging through the industrial site. Reporters were desperately trying to assess casualties even as mixed Imperial and human teams worked to contain and suppress the fires. The only difference from before the invasion was the lack of ambulances with brightly flashing lights—night-black military shuttles waited to whisk the injured away to A!Tol ship hospitals as soon as they were rescued from the rubble.
The shuttles were designed to be intimidating, but today, their speed would save lives.
Across the Channel, in London, fires were rising from City Hall. None of the reporters were sure if the London Assembly had been meeting when the bombs had gone off, but they were reporting on rumors saying an A!Tol had been meeting with the Mayor at the time.
North America. South America. Africa. Asia. Every continent had seen at least one attack, most of them two, in the two hours since Cherbourg had been blown to hell. The Weber Protocol–spawned Resistance Network had turned to their job with a vengeance—and a level of violence that sickened Jean.
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