Carola frowned. “A couple?”
“A couple,” Sartin said. “They don’t recognise married couples, or merely people in a relationship, or people who are engaged to be married… I don’t think they have sex at all. They’ve told us a lot about the way their government works, but very little about how their biology works. It makes sense, I suppose; we might try to hit them with a bioweapon if we knew enough to make one effective.”
Wilhelm had a more practical concern. “What sort of questions are they going to ask?”
“I honestly have no idea,” Sartin said. “All I can tell you is that they made the request and I think that someone – some couple – in the camp is going to have to answer their questions.”
They shared a glance. It was something to do. “Fine,” Wilhelm said. He drank his glass of water; there was no shortage of water, but it grew boring after a few hours. The aliens hadn’t provided any drinks at all, apart from water; it was yet another mystery surrounding them. “We’ll do it.”
“Come with me, then,” Sartin said. He moved them out quickly; Wilhelm guessed that he was nervous about the chance of them backing out. The camp gates weren’t locked; the aliens had no need to worry about locks when they had armed guards and the bracelets, probably with an automated system keeping track of them. He remembered that there had been a series of attempts to tag children with tracker systems of one kind or another; the ACLU had always managed to prevent it from going into nationwide use. It was fine for small children, but older children in Wilhelm’s opinion should not grow up with the knowledge that they were monitored wherever they went. Cellphones were different; those could at least be turned off or left somewhere.
The outside had changed remarkably; the aliens had been busy. They’d cleared most of the rubble and started to build their own constructions on it, from what looked like strange pyramidal buildings to constructions that looked as if the Aztecs might have designed them, a long time ago. Small robots and teams of aliens moved everywhere; in the distance, just along the coastline, he could see the rising shape of the space elevator, a gossamer thread hanging taut from something far overhead. They’d tried to study it from the camp – he’d wondered if there was any way to convince the aliens to return his telescope – but they hadn’t been able to make out any details. Now, the view was still hazy, but he could have sworn he saw something moving up the cable, heading into the clouds.
“It’s working,” he said, grimly. There had been no sign of any human opposition to the aliens since the first day; the only evidence they’d heard had been occasional gunshots in the night. “Have they told you anything about it?”
Sartin shook his head.
The building they reached reminded him of a Lego construction; he half-expected to see tiny plastic men marching out before he saw two of the aliens, who interrogated Sartin in brief monotone questions before allowing them to enter the alien building. He glanced around as they walked inside; it was steaming hot, but very dim, strange tastes floating on the air. Aliens – Oghaldzon – on unknowable missions passed them as they entered a set of corridors that would have taken three humans at once, finally reaching a small office. Sartin briefly wished them good luck and pushed them inside; Wilhelm had no time to catch hold of Carola’s hand before the door closed behind them and they faced an Oghaldzon.
“Good morning,” the Oghaldzon said, in the emotionless monotone they used. It suggested that the alien didn’t really know or care if it was a good morning or not. “You may be seated.”
Wilhelm saw a pair of human chairs positioned neatly in front of the Oghaldzon, who was sitting, horse-like, on the floor. He saw down, noticing that it placed him at head-height with the alien; most of the alien’s height was in its neck. All six arms seemed to be writhing and twisting like snakes; he wondered just what emotion that signified. Carola sat next to him and took his hand; her eyes were worried. Just what had they gotten themselves into?
“I am Yehaka-Researcher-Earth,” the Oghaldzon said. The first word of its name had been spoken out loud with his or her real mouth; the other two words had been spoken through the translator system. “What are your names?”
“Markus Wilhelm and Carola Eichwurzel,” Wilhelm said. “Why do you want to know?”
“Human mating patterns are of interest to us, not least because they are radically different from our own,” Yehaka said. Wilhelm sensed genuine interest and curiosity under the damnably alien voice. “We do not have mates in the sense that you two are mates; we do not possess such emotions as love and lust for each other…”
Carola smiled. “And do you have pointy ears as well?”
Wilhelm elbowed her. The Oghaldzon ignored her, carrying on as if he – or her – was discoursing. “We do not understand your mating patterns,” Yehaka continued. “I am a female of my race, so I will address the female first; what do you see in your partner?”
Carola looked at Wilhelm, and then burst out laughing. “Do you want our entire life story?”
“Yes,” Yehaka said flatly. Wilhelm wondered just how one told the difference between male and female Oghaldzon; there were certainly no signs of breasts on Yehaka’s body. “I need to know everything of importance to your relationship.”
“We met while we were both doing a night course at one of the universities around here,” Carola said, clearly remembering that night. Wilhelm smiled; love might not have been in the air, but they had certainly clicked together like two halves of one whole. “He asked me out; I said yes, and we spent a day watching movies. I liked it enough to agree to do it again, and then we started spending entire days together, and then weeks on holiday, and then we moved in together and agreed to get married.”
Yehaka leaned forward. “And then?”
“You arrived,” Carola said. “Don’t you have a husband?”
“I have no idea which male sired my children,” Yehaka said. “I have no idea which children are mine. Have you two mated?”
Carola blushed. “Yes, we have,” she said, and refused to say any more. “How does your race mate if you don’t know who was the father of your children?”
Yehaka ignored the question. “And you intend to spend the rest of your lives together,” she said. “What benefits does this give you?”
“Tax breaks,” Wilhelm said wryly. It was Carola’s turn to elbow him. “It gives us the chance to build a life together for as long as we live.”
“But how is that different from what you already had?” Yehaka asked. “You were living together, you were… mating on a regular basis, you were captured together and you remained together in our camp. Why do you get married?”
Wilhelm considered the matter; a childish explanation would not suit the aliens. “When our race was a lot younger,” he said slowly, “it was much harder for a pregnant mother to support herself or her children. What tended to happen was that the mother would spend time with one particular man, and in exchange for bearing his children, she would be supported by him and only have sex with him. Having sex with another man could destroy that, because the father would never be sure that the children were actually his.”
He paused. “There’s a joke; it tells us about a dying man who asks his wife, mother of their seven wonderful children and one runt, if the runty child is really his,” he said. The alien might not understand human humour, but he could try. “He tells his wife that he will forgive her if she confesses now to adultery. The wife swears before God Himself that the runt is indeed his child, so the man dies happy.”
“I do not understand,” Yehaka said.
“It’s not finished,” Wilhelm said. “As soon as the man has died, the woman looks at the wonderful children and mutters to herself that it was lucky he didn’t ask about the others.”
“I still do not understand,” Yehaka said. “This is a morality story?”
Wilhelm shrugged. “As civilisations developed, the man-woman structure became formalised as marriage. At first, women had no rights, mainly bec
ause those sort of societies relied upon brute force and women were just not as good at that as men, an attitude that carried on well past its usefulness. Later, they gained rights; a woman in a marriage could not be just abandoned, and the father had to spend time supporting the children. Sexual relations were also formalised, because a woman back then could become pregnant quite easily… and that could be a major disgrace.”
“In short, it became a method of social control,” Yehaka said. “I wonder…”
A thin whistle, high enough to hurt Wilhelm’s ears, echoed through the complex. “What’s happening?” he demanded. “What the hell’s going on?”
Yehaka had come to her feet in one smooth motion. “This complex is under attack,” she said. “Your people have come to kill or be killed.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Counterattack, Take One
Stalingrad, Near-Earth Orbit
It was quiet, very quiet; everyone on the bridge was holding their voices under very tight control.
Captain Marina Konstantinovna Savelyeva had to force herself to speak loudly. There was little point in remaining quiet – they could have been having a keg party on the bridge and no sound would have translated across space to their enemies – but she found it hard to speak beyond a whisper. The bridge itself was as almost dark and silent as a grave; the four men strapped into the acceleration couches barely exchanged whispered conversation. There was nothing for them to do, but wait; the normal distractions available to them, from chess to porn, had been pushed aside by their growing nervousness. They were about to beard the lion in his den…
It would have been better, Marina had privately decided, if they had planned their ambush as a cunning strategy, rather than something that they had improvised out of an accidental occurrence. The Russian Space Force liked to boast that it put its cosmonauts through longer and harder flights than any other space force, and Marina was uncomfortably aware that that was indeed the case. The tiny Stalingrad might have been classed as a frigate, but it was more like a corvette; the ten crew under her command were crammed together, including her and two other women. There wasn't much she envied the Americans for, but their treatment of women was one thing; a woman had to be tough and twice as good as a man to survive long in the Russian Space Force. She had lost count of the number of times she’d had to smack away wandering hands, including one senior officer, who had tried his best to blight her career. That officer was dead now, killed in the defence of Earth; Marina almost wished that he had survived, along with his force. It was going to be nasty.
The force under her command, nine spacecraft, had boosted from Venus before the aliens had opened fire on the welcome fleet. The trip back to Earth had been a nightmare; she’d ordered the fleet to begin braking procedures in the hopes they could reach Earth in time to join the defence, but they had barely had time to start the long process before the aliens opened fire. She’d taken the fleet to the Lenin Cluster. The tiny shipyard there had been able to refurnish her ships with fuel and supplies, but they had been able to do nothing for their morale; they had watched from their lonely anchorage as the Rodina had been invaded and the aliens had started their conquest. She had wanted to interfere, or at least to bombard the moon to punish the rebels for daring to stab the motherland in the back, but there had been little point; the terse orders they had received had ordered them to remain in place and prepare for operations.
“We’re coming up on Point Zhukov,” her helmsman said. He was one of the few who thought that women couldn’t make good spacers; she’d watched with a smile as her tactical officer had once punched his lights out. There had been no need for further discipline; he’d treated all of the women with respect since that incident, and the tactical officer’s career would hardly suffer. Marina had seen no need to make an issue of it; besides, both of them were capable crewmen. “Do you wish to abort?”
Marina scowled. The main problem with the plan was that involved using her craft as bait, more or less; if they received no orders from the High Command ordering them to abort the mission, they were supposed to go through with it. They didn’t know if the aliens knew they were coming; the aliens hadn’t painted her craft with fire control sensors, but they could have caught a sniff of her, run a ballistic track, and left a handful of remote missiles or laser platforms in her path. Logic suggested that the aliens would have to be crazy to let them slip so close; still, the aliens were alien and might not think the way humans would.
“No,” she said. Brief flickers of laser light passed between all nine ships; they were committed now. “We will proceed with our part of the plan.”
She tensed and forced herself to relax as the ships glided onwards. They’d used up much of their reaction gas to build to the speeds they had achieved, yet they were almost standing still compared to what they could build up with the fusion drive…except the fusion drive would light up alarms right across the solar system. The only hope of success was to sneak in, launch their attack, and run for their lives…and that wasn't going to be easy. The aliens were controlling all of near-Earth space; sooner or later, they would trip an alarm and then the flotilla would have to fight for their lives.
The image, chillingly familiar, built up slowly in front of her eyes as the sensors filled in the details. The aliens had started with a massive fleet of ships; a third of them seemed to have broken up into their smaller warships and were scattered around Earth, or had been converted into small space stations floating in orbit around the Earth. Five of them, widely spaced, were attached to cables heading down towards Earth; she was impressed with the sophistication of the alien technology, even as her heart grew cold at what it meant for the motherland. Every spacer knew the fundamental equations involving spaceflight; the aliens were going to use their cables and space elevators to turn those equations on their heads. It would be easy for them to flood their soldiers down onto Earth; how large an army had they brought, anyway? Estimates, many of them tinged with panic, ran as high as ten billion soldiers.
Marina shook her head; it didn’t matter to her. All that mattered was carrying out their mission and making their escape. The Russian Space Force had unfinished business… silently, she cursed the commander of the ships that had been positioned around Mars. They could have boosted for Earth and joined her attack; if nothing else, they would have made her personal survival much more likely. They were selfish, she decided; it wasn’t as if Mars could be held once the aliens came knocking. But they probably had their own orders.
“Ten minutes,” the helmsman said, very softly. The looming presence of the aliens, invisible to the naked eye, but very clear on the passive sensors, was growing far more oppressive…and yet, there was just a chance that it could be turned against them. “Captain?”
Marina glanced down at the chronometer on her chair. “Transmit the signal in nine minutes exactly from my mark,” she ordered. “Wait for it… mark.”
“Yes, Captain,” the tactical officer said. Marina had already input the signal; now, all she had to do was wait for nine minutes to pass and then transmit it onwards to the relay station they’d left behind them. Marina found herself holding her breath; a single mistake at the wrong time could have disastrous consequences. No one knew better than she just how much could go wrong if they added even a tiny little extra burst of reaction gas to their journey; they could find themselves thousands of kilometres off course, and then the aliens would see them for sure.
The aliens had made a mistake; their massive motherships had been parked in geostationary orbit above Earth; they’d been gathered together for easier defence when they had thought that they had wiped humanity out of the near-Earth region. Their overconfidence was their weakness; they had made their dispositions under the wrong impressions and that was about to cost them. She watched as the counter ticked down, and down; only seconds left…
* * *
Fanaya-Sensor-Seeker had been impressed with the speed of the defeat of humanity; it proved, in her view, that humans si
mply lacked the long-term perspective to focus on their own good. Her department had been more concerned with locating the remaining human stations in the solar system, something that had been more than a little tricky as the humans had been careful to hide as much as possible. Now that the researchers had been examining human books, computers and other materials down on the surface, they’d found so many possible places to look that Fanaya was uncomfortably aware that the task could take Great Cycles.
It was odd, even for an original thinker, and Fanaya was certainly not one of them, to consider that humanity’s odd nature had given it at least one advantage. The humans had split into so many groups that tracking them all down and bringing them under Oghaldzon authority would take a very long time, and some of the groups might even try to head out to the stars. Some of the records had revealed details of a prototype human STL interstellar spacecraft; the Oghaldzon had never considered sending one craft to Earth, but the humans might have made that particular decision. It would have been ironic if the Oghaldzon had moved more quickly and sent only one large ship; the human welcome fleet would have smashed it and then known to be wary of threats from the other side of the interstellar gulf.
She was contemplating how the search time could be cut down when the alarms started to whistle, a noise that shocked all Oghaldzon to full wakefulness, touching some very old memories in the racial subconscious. She was on her feet at once, staring down at the readings, which were reporting disaster. Missiles, human missiles, had been launched; they were raging towards the planet, already kicking themselves up to blindingly fast speeds. Orders had already been transmitted by the automatic systems; fire authority commands loaded themselves into various automated weapons systems and the point defences of the various starships as the missiles started to alter course slightly before their drives burnt out. Fanaya didn’t hesitate; it was something that they had all planned for and practiced, enough times that she could do it in her sleep. She brought up every sensor surrounding Earth, ordering to track the missiles and provide automatic firing coordinates for the defences. At the speed of the battle, there was no time to seek permission from higher authority…
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