Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  Dataka-War Commander-Fleet, commander of the Oghaldzon force, studied the display, then tapped with one foreleg against the deck, calling the room to attention. The clicking of sonar flickered through the room, touching each of the seven briefly, an old ritual dating from back before the days when the Oghaldzon were a united race. They gave him their attention; they would listen, dispute, and then act as the consensus decided.

  “The human ship has been analysed,” Dataka said. The researchers had been sending their robots swarming all over the human ship, just to find out as much as they could before something happened to change the balance of power. “Researcher?”

  Takalak-Researcher-Seeker lifted his foreleg briefly. “The human spacecraft is roughly five cycles behind ours,” he said, “but there are some interesting points. The first one is that most of the spacecraft was designed as modular units, particularly the command section that would have remained permanently in zero-gravity. Despite the pounding we subjected the ship to, large chunks of it remained intact and could be reactivated now, should we desire to try. It would require considerable effort, but much of the ship could be repaired fairly quickly.

  “The computer records on the ship were largely wiped,” Takalak continued. “They weren’t wiped by our attack; we found traces of specialised programs intended to erase and destroy all data, including the storage units, although power failed before they could complete that task. Human computers, in general, are roughly comparable to ours; we should be able to read them once we capture more intact computers, but the converse is also true.”

  “The humans will be able to read our computers,” Dataka said. “Is there any way that we can protect them?”

  “Don’t let the humans capture a computer,” Takalak said wryly. “Our standard precautions should be sufficient to handle any major threat, provided we have time to use them; failing that, we can ensure that no computer that contains important information goes somewhere where it can be captured. If the humans capture Seeker for Truth, we will have lost and then the priority would be ensuring that the human race knows nothing about where we come from. Incidentally, the humans paid particular attention to destroying details about their settlements, but we believe that most of their settlements will be detectable, once we start scouting properly.”

  Dataka said nothing. The sheer scale of human expansion throughout their solar system worried him; the Oghaldzon hadn’t developed their system so quickly, once they had mastered space flight. The humans should have been able to spread out faster; Dataka was uncomfortably aware that if they had started to spread out fifty years earlier, they would have been dictating terms to the Oghaldzon by now.

  He ran his sonar around the room. The main details of Takalak’s report would be in the computers for the council to read later, but one detail was clear; time was pressing. The loss of one of his ships to a human missile had not been unexpected, but he hadn’t wanted anyone to forget what it meant; the Oghaldzon did not hold a vast and crushing superiority – certainly not the vast and crushing superiority that had been used during the ThrillKill War – over the human race. Time was not on their side.

  He said as much. “We have captured humans and we have captured some of their technology,” he said. He had debated the matter endlessly with the shipmasters and the other savants the fleet had brought along to study the humans. The Oghaldzon had to force a major change in human society or keep them firmly penned up on their homeworld; the thought of genocide – MemeKill on a gigantic scale – was horrifying. “The question is simple; do we proceed or do we attempt to convince the humans of the folly of resistance?”

  It was Takalak who spoke first. “We do not hold an advantage as yet,” he said. “We lack sufficient data for real certainties, but we know that the human weapons are capable of hurting us and we have monitored a massive increase in human installations around their home planet since we were clearly detected, which has only expanded in the period since the battle. If we do not move now, we will be unable to prevent the humans from standing us off from Earth, something that will mean our certain defeat.”

  The temperature suddenly seemed much higher. “There is another issue,” Gafalae-Speaker-Seeker said. Her crest was extended as she moved slightly forward. “According to the truth, we have to send a formal warning, a challenge, to the humans, calling upon them to surrender and abandon their evil ways. I propose that we transmit the warning at once.”

  Takalak objected immediately. “That would only cause more delay,” he said. “In the time period it would take for us to reach the human world and engage the defences, the human race will have expanded the defences; the truth tells us that there must be a period for the humans to consider, during which we will have to wait here and watch as they keep expanding defences.”

  Dataka would have scowled if his face allowed such an expression. Gafalae’s position as one of the teachers on board the fleet meant that she could not be dismissed, although he felt instinctively that the humans, hardly comparable to Oghaldzon and certainly unaware of the rules that governed most of Oghaldzon society, could not be expected to comport themselves according to the truth. There were too many unknown factors involved…

  “They must be given an opportunity to change themselves for the betterment of the entire race,” Gafalae said firmly. She would have been horrified to know that human leaders had faced similar choices and reached similarly unsatisfactory answers. “Those amongst them who are held down by those infected will revolt when they realise that help is finally at hand.”

  “We do not know that that is the case,” Takalak said. “My colleague has been examining the humans we have captured and neither of them show any signs of being willing to abandon their ways and embrace the truth…because they do not know the truth. They are like the Tyake back home; they do not know that there is another way to live…and they may not be willing to embrace it, should they learn about it from us.”

  There was a long pause. To Oghaldzon eyes, human broadcasts had been an endless list of horrors, from crimes that the Oghaldzon understood all-too-well to crimes that hadn’t even been theoretically possible, until they had discovered the human race. The humans seemed to glorify violence and horror; they willingly stamped on dissident ideas and glorified it. It was as if they were facing an entire planet – no, an entire solar system – infected with the MemeKill poison.

  “We have studied the human settlement network,” Dataka said. He sent a burst of reassuring sonar clicks, the closest the Oghaldzon could come to a caress, towards Gafalae. “If they are cut off from their homeworld, they lack the ability to project power towards us and can be handled at leisure. Unlike us, their disunity ensured that when they launched their missions towards the asteroids, they did not transport a major industrial base along with them. Once we have forced change on the human homeworld, the asteroids will fall in line or fade away.”

  Gafalae didn’t look mollified. “They should still be challenged,” she said. “If they are not called upon to change, there will be deaths; thousands upon thousands of deaths, both ours and theirs.”

  “We can advance now towards the human homeworld,” Takalak said, ignoring the fact that they had been moving towards Earth ever since the battle. They could have changed course at any time without risking further contact with the humans. “We can transmit the challenge as we move; technically, we will not be firing until we reach Earth orbit, unless the humans intend to launch a suicidal attack with their spacecraft against our force.”

  Dataka clicked at him, testing his conviction. The Oghaldzon didn’t have any real habit of lying – they could always tell when one of their kind was being untruthful – but they knew that someone could be mistaken, reporting what they believed to be the truth. Just for a moment, he saw his force on the very edge of disaster; silently, he cursed the delay in launching the fleet. Had they arrived before the humans had settled their moon, the battle would have been fought and won by now.

  There was a fi
nal matter to be dealt with. “Can such an attack hurt us?”

  “Not seriously,” Takalak assured him, his body radiating sincerity. “We have tracked most of the human spacecraft in the area of their homeworld with the capability of mounting such an attack. If they are all launched towards us, we would have plenty of warning and we would be able to engage them before they could engage us. The habitation ships would be even safer; given some of the limitations inherent in human technology, they would be able to evade or destroy depending on the exact situation.”

  Dataka sought consensus. “Then we will transmit the standard warning as we approach their world,” he said. “We will include a demand that they stand down their orbital weapons as we approach and allow us to take possession of them to prevent them from striking at us when we enter Earth’s orbit. Should they fail to respond, we will proceed with the plan and engage the orbital defences as soon as we enter range, forcing them out of space. Once they are forced out of space, we will engage them on the ground and begin the task of eradicating the dangerous ideas.”

  Consensus buzzed around the room. “We proceed,” Dataka said, as soon as he had counted the votes. “Have the warning transmitted at once.”

  * * *

  Reynolds claimed that they had spent three days on the alien craft; without any way of measuring time herself, Samra had been forced to accept his word. Their days had been strange, to say the least; every day, they had faced one or more of the aliens, and tried to answer questions. It was a strange experience; the aliens weren’t ignorant about human history and culture, but they viewed everything through their own eyes and didn’t really understand it. How could they? They were very far from human.

  “I think that they’re boosting again,” Reynolds said. His senses were much better developed than hers, as she could expect of someone who had spent most of his life working in space; he could feel some of the subtle motions in the ship before it started to become obvious. The aliens had given them some instructions, but vague ones; Samra wasn’t sure if it was an elaborate intelligence test, or if it was simply a matter of them not understanding humanity very well. “They’re making a longer boost this time.”

  Samra felt herself being pushed back against the sticky mat. “Yes,” she said, unable to say more. She wanted to talk, wanted to feel human, but the growing pressure made that harder. The aliens – their name, they had learnt, was something like Oghaldzon – might take acceleration better than humans, although Reynolds doubted it. Humans had had accidents, sometimes serious accidents, caused on high-boost ships; the Oghaldzon might have their own accidents, or maybe they were just careful. The boost phase had never lasted so long before; she couldn’t help, but find that ominous. “What are they doing?”

  The second day, the aliens had given them some of their own food, strange muddy pastries that had tasted very…alien. The taste had been foul, but surprisingly, she had kept them down afterwards. Reynolds had speculated that the Oghaldzon had studied the bodies they had recovered from the Neil Armstrong and worked out which of their foods humans could eat. Samra hadn’t wanted to think about it; it was bad enough being captive on an alien ship, without wondering what had happened to her friends and colleagues. Had the Oghaldzon simply cut them open to find out how their bodies worked? It would have been callous…but they had already learnt that the aliens didn’t think like humans.

  The boost cut off abruptly, leaving the ship coasting towards an unknown destination, although she was sure that she did know the destination. Earth. She knew some of the basic laws of spaceflight as well as anyone; boosted, the ship would continue to speed along until it either ran into something or decelerated of its own free will. The odds against the former were high, unless Earth’s defences opened fire on the ship; she only wanted some gravity so that they could move around properly. The alien conditions might have been perfect for them, but the heat and the damp air and the too-bright lights were burning away at her.

  The hatch hissed open. By now, Samra had gotten used to the aliens’ complete lack of regard for privacy; she had stopped trying to cover herself when they entered. Their shapes made it easier for her to accept them; they weren’t likely to be interested in her body out of more than scientific interest. Their goldfish bowl, as Reynolds called it, allowed them to see everything; she wondered what the aliens made of his erections, which she had tactfully ignored. She wondered, not for the first time, just how the aliens mated.

  It was Oolane; there really was no mistaking her. “Hello,” she said, in that same bland voice. Samra had grown to hate the voice, although she was careful not to confuse it with Oolane herself. Each of the aliens seemed to be surrounded by a sound; Oolane’s sounded like tinkling water. “Why have you not mated?”

  Reynolds bit off a laugh. “I don’t understand,” Samra asked, her mind spinning. Was it a wild coincidence, or could the aliens read minds…or perhaps Reynolds body. “Should we have mated?”

  “You want to mate,” Oolane said, addressing Reynolds. “Why have you not mated?”

  Samra would have laughed under other conditions. The aliens must have been watching television programs where the editors reduced time, taking a courtship that lasted for days, if not months, in real life and turning it into minutes at most on the silver screen. She wondered just what they thought of that; unlike humans, they lacked the background knowledge to know that such things didn’t happen in real life, unless money was involved. Few girls would go to bed with someone on the strength of a few hours’ acquaintance.

  “I don’t want to mate,” Reynolds said finally. Oolane looked at him; Samra was starting to realise that the aliens might not be dependent upon their eyes, but they certainly still used them. “It’s not the right time.”

  Oolane seemed satisfied with the answer, for the moment; sometimes they would return to a line of questioning later on without any apparent reason. “Your world has to be brought to a proper state of being,” she said. Samra listened carefully; it was the closest she had heard to any alien reason for the war. “We intend to issue your world with a formal warning and a demand that you change your culture before you destroy yourselves, us, and any other races that might be out there.”

  Samra blinked. “Change our culture to what?” she asked. “What is the point of this war?”

  “The human race is infected with…hostile ideas,” Oolane said. Her voice remained bland, but Samra would have bet good money – if betting had been permitted by Islam – that there was an undertone of superiority hidden somewhere in the voice. “You have been unable to find a proper balance of existence and wage war endlessly upon each other and nature, slaughtering thousands just for being different, crushing others for daring to dream. You cannot be permitted to spread out across the galaxy without reform.”

  Reynolds leaned forwards, almost falling off the sticky mat. “Who are you to make such a demand?”

  “We are your neighbours in space,” Oolane said. She listed a catalogue of crimes, some of them understandable, some of them bizarre, all of them human. Samra listened carefully; humanity encouraged violence and horror, slaughtered others for race or sex or colour, or creed, had a history of suppressing people who had different ideas…the same point, returned to again and again. China, Russia, Iran, Mecca, Africa, Europe, even America, even the asteroids…humans, the aliens accused, formed into groups which promptly began tormenting other groups. “We have to prevent you from hurting others, even yourselves.”

  She paused. “We wish you to broadcast to Earth to inform them of this,” she concluded. “If you do not broadcast, one of us will have to compose it, without the understanding of humanity that you two possess. I would advise you to broadcast to spare further loss of life.”

  “They’ll fight,” Reynolds predicted. There was a note of pride in his voice. Samra smiled and allowed him his moment of defiance; she wasn’t sure if she wanted to make the broadcast or not, telling them everything about what had happened. Would they let her even co
nfirm who was alive or dead? “No one can dictate to humanity.”

  Oolane looked at him. “That,” she said, “is exactly what is wrong with humanity.”

  Chapter Seventeen: The Final Countdown

  Virginia Beach, USA

  “I told you we should have left the city,” Carola Eichwurzel said, as the television began to repeat, once again, the final broadcast of Spencer O'Dowd. The final images from the Neil Armstrong had been chilling, although some of the talking heads suggested that the government actually had more data that hadn’t been shared with the people; what had become public knowledge was quite upsetting enough. “Now look what’s happened.”

  Markus Wilhelm said nothing. The President had acted quickly, broadcasting a request for people to stay in their homes and enforcing it with the police and the National Guard. As the media stroked the growing panic, the population had tried to flee the cities, only to discover that the public transport networks had been reserved for military traffic and all roads were blocked. The small percentage of city-dwellers who enjoyed the use of a personal vehicle might be able to escape; the remainder, including Wilhelm and his wife-to-be, were stuck. He had seriously given some thought to hiking out, but the reports had given him pause; large parts of the nation seemed to be in chaos.

  “Damn it,” Carola said unhappily. “What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t think that there is much we can do,” Wilhelm said. It pained him to admit it, but unless Congress or the Senate pressured President Cardona to lift the travel ban – and that would be difficult given the clear and present danger – they were stuck. The President had invoked the bioweapon protocols; ever since Paris had been hit by a genetically-modified strain of the Ebola virus, it had been legal to seal the cities to limit the scale of the contamination. There was no actual virus, but panic was a powerful force and, if it got out of control, it would do no end of damage to the defence preparations.