Invasion

by Christopher Nuttall

  And, even so, Loomis and his fellows had seen almost nothing of the interior of the base. Despite popular culture, Area 51’s guards and even some of the staff weren't permitted into the interior of the base; they’d been warned, in no uncertain terms, that entering the inner compound without permission could lead to a life sentence in Leavenworth, with no hope of parole. What little he’d seen had been perfectly normal – and boring. He certainly hadn’t seen an alien flying saucer, regardless of what the nuts who kept trying to sneak in believed, and he hadn’t even seen any advanced aircraft. There had been times when he and the remainder of the Company had been confined to their barracks for a few hours, but even that hadn’t been anything unusual. If it hadn’t been for Bradbury, the entire deployment would have been boring; he would almost have welcomed a second deployment to Iraq, just to see some action.

  Bastard, he thought, again. He’d been off-duty when the alien craft had been supposed to arrive – until he’d explained that the real reason why the aliens were coming was because they wanted to pick up their fellows from Area 51, after their flying saucer had crash-landed at Roswell. Bradbury hadn’t appreciated the joke and had ordered him to join the roving guard patrols around the complex for when the aliens arrived and no amount of arguing had been able to sway him. It was true that, with the discovery of a real alien craft, Area 51 had almost been under siege by barking mad loonies convinced that the USAF had a thousand grey alien bodies in the base, but most of them were harmless. The guards merely caught them and, as long as they were only in the outer security zone, escorted them out. A handful had reached the inner security zone, where they were arrested and interrogated. Most of them were just…more persistent than others, but a handful had had suspect connections to outside countries, including the Russians. They would give their right teeth for a look inside Area 51.

  “This is Delta-Seven,” he said, keying his radio. The guards were supposed to check in every twenty minutes, just in case; if they delayed for an extra five minutes, the security alarm sounded and extra guards were deployed to find the missing patrol. It had happened before…and the unlucky patrol, who had often just forgotten to report in, had to buy the beer for a month. Loomis, who was saving up to go on holiday with his girlfriend, had no intention of having to pay the same penalty. “All clear, I repeat…”

  He glanced up, just in time to see the night sky twinkling with a thousand lights. It didn’t look like a peaceful meeting now, but space war. He’d seen asteroids and even the remains of burned-out satellites returning to Earth, but this was different; it was almost like a meteor shower, but worse. The entire sky was ablaze with streaks of light. He started to key his radio again, only to be almost deafened by a burst of static…and then a shockwave picked up the Humvee and tossed it end over end.

  “Fuck,” he breathed, as the vehicle came to a rest, upside down. He’d been in worse accidents, but there was no reason for the accident, was there? They had been driving on flat ground, not on terrain that could cause an accident if not treated properly. “Sound off; everyone all right?”

  “Cole’s dead, sir,” Private Rashid said. The dark-skinned soldier managed to crawl out of the vehicle, pulling the body of his friend with him. A glance revealed the truth; Cole’s neck had been broken by the impact. The other two privates were alive, although shook up by the blast. “Did you get the number of that Abrams we crashed into?”

  Loomis shook his head as he took in the sight to the north. The air base had been attacked, somehow; there was a massive mushroom cloud forming over the base. His basic training reasserted itself and he glanced down at his terminal, relieved to find out that there had been no EMP to disable it, which suggested that the blast hadn’t been nuclear. Speculation on alien weapons had been rampant in the guard force and several of the soldiers had believed that the aliens would deploy asteroids from orbit…and, well as far as Loomis was concerned, it was as good an explanation as any.

  He keyed his radio. “Base, this is Delta-Seven,” he said, as calmly as he could. If the base had been destroyed – and, from their distance, it looked to have been completely destroyed – what the hell did they do? They didn’t have emergency plans to cover the complete destruction of the base. The worst they’d anticipated had been a terrorist attack using a nuke. “This is Delta-Seven; base, come in!”

  There was no reply.

  Chapter Eight

  Anyone who clings to the historically untrue — and thoroughly immoral — doctrine that ‘violence never solves anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

  -Starship Troopers

  The aliens, as enigmatic and faceless as ever, escorted their human prisoners down the middle of a long shaft. It could easily have been a corridor or a vertical shaft, Francis realised; the absence of gravity only meant that people could swim through the corridors in any direction. The shaft was as dark and featureless as the aliens, hidden behind their armour, but he could see signs of construction that suggested that the aliens hadn’t bothered with finesse. There were hints of welding scars and maybe even battle damage on the passageway, while the aliens themselves seemed bright and new. There was an uncertain crudity about the entire construction, as if the aliens had decided that ‘good enough’ was better than ‘the best,’ at least for their starships. There was a certain something about it that, somehow, reminded him of Soviet and Russian machines.

  He caught Gary’s eye and watched as the former commander studied the alien technology. Francis would have given his right teeth to share observations with someone who might actually know more than pop science and speculations based on vague recollections of various stories of the space age that had never been, but they didn’t dare take the risk. Even if the aliens didn’t understand English now, they would in time, and then they would play back the recordings of everything the humans said to each other, testing their captives. Resistance was probably futile, but looking at the aliens, it was evident that they were taking no chances. Stark naked, weaponless, defenceless, they were helpless…but the aliens were still treating them as dangerous opponents.

  Bastards, Francis thought, looking up towards one of the aliens. The featureless helm gazed back impassively. He tried to see some hint of the alien’s features under the black mask, but it was hopeless; the alien mask didn’t even show his own reflection. The alien, attached to the floor by obviously magnetic boots, merely gave him another push down the shaft…or perhaps it was along the corridor. It was growing harder to maintain a sense of reality as they were pushed further into the alien spacecraft.

  “That’s an airlock,” Gary said suddenly, as they reached a massive hatch, set into what was now obviously the corridor wall. The airlock looked more like a typical safe door from an old movie about bank robbers, but Gary was almost certainly right. The gunmetal construction had the same crudeness about it as the rest of the ship, but there was no denying that it was actually capable of carrying out its task and keeping the air inside the ship. It opened, automatically, as the small group approached and the aliens escorted them into a small chamber, and then into a second.

  “We’ve docked with a larger ship,” Francis guessed, as they passed through a third chamber. The aliens seemed to have a very practical approach to their space technology; they showed strength in depth, redundancy and over-design. He resolved not to allow the crude appearance of the technology to lure him into a sense of complacency, even though it was more than a little galling; the ISS had looked more advanced than the alien ships, and yet it was the ISS that was flaming debris falling down towards Earth. “I wonder if…”

  The th
ird airlock opened, revealing a much larger chamber, almost large enough to hold an entire squadron of space shuttles. It was almost empty, save only for pieces of wreckage that had, at a guess, come from the ISS…and a line of aliens waiting for them. Most of the aliens wore the same featureless black battle armour – he guessed that they were the guards and soldiers, protecting the leadership – but others…others wore nothing but the bare minimum. He felt sweat prickling out all over his body – the interior of the alien starship was warmer than the desert, definitely – but the sensation was swept away as he came face to face with an unshielded alien. The creature…

  A sense of pure…unreality swept over him, again, as he took in the alien form. The alien was almost disappointing, in a way; it was humanoid…and yet, just looking at it, it was impossible to escape the knowledge that it was alien, that it had grown up under the light of a very different star. It was wearing nothing, but a loincloth and a golden amulet around its neck…and it was hairless. Its skin was an eerie red shade, mottled slightly around the forehead; it’s eyes were dark ovals, darker than the alien helms. It stood slightly taller than Francis himself, but it seemed almost childlike, a child’s body blown up to unrealistic proportions. Just looking at the alien, it was impossible to escape a sense that he was staring at a being that was, somehow, fundamentally wrong.

  A second alien, standing behind the first, took a step forward. This one was shorter and, he had the impression, weaker than the first. It also seemed to have uncovered breasts, although they looked very different to human breasts, and he decided to assume that it was female unless corrected. The male, if male it was, seemed to be in charge, but that said nothing. Human societies might have been based, more often than not, around the principle of female subordination – however expressed – but the aliens might be a matriarchy, instead of a patriarchy. Or, maybe, they were complete sexual equals and the aliens facing them just happened to have a male leader. He looked into the dark eyes, feeling a chill running down his spine when he met the pupil-less eyes, and wondered, grimly, what they were thinking.

  Another of the females stepped forward. “You are welcome onboard our ship,” she said, her voice odd, but not unintelligible. Her English was precise and finely tuned, but with an odd accent that spoke, somehow, of alien worlds. Francis had half-expected to speak to them in English – they’d had plenty of time to listen to human radio signals and several groups down on Earth had transmitted entire dictionaries to them when their starship had been detected – but still, it was a shock. “We will learn from you and you will learn from us.”

  The alien leader, if he was the alien leader, watched impassively. Francis was certain, looking at him, that he was the one who was calling the shots, but how much did that mean? A democracy had its checks and balances built into the system, but a dictatorship had far fewer checks on the leader’s powers…and there was no way to know how the aliens governed themselves. They could be anything from a human society to something so alien that it would make no sense to human observers.

  Francis spoke, finally, his voice soft and weak. “What do you want?”

  “To spread the word,” the alien female said. Francis stared at her. The answer made no sense at all. “We have come a long way to spread the word.”

  Gary drifted forward, slightly. “Why did you attack us?”

  “To establish our superiority and the folly of resistance,” the alien female said. Francis felt more than heard Gary’s gasp of shock. The aliens, far from bringing technology and gifts to Earth, seemed to want conquest. Why? He had thought that there was nothing on Earth that the aliens would want that they couldn’t get from the solar system, or through trade. A single one of the alien ships, offered to the great powers on Earth, would have netted the aliens an astonishing amount of trade goods. “This system will be brought into the word.”

  Francis frowned. “The word?”

  Sophia unbent herself from her crouch. Nakedness had forced her to try to cover herself and the aliens had just pushed her where they wanted her to go. Her voice was shaky and weak, but she managed to speak clearly, perhaps understanding that the aliens wouldn’t understand a frantic human voice.

  “I am the representative of the United Nations of Earth, the Parliament of Humanity,” she said. Francis might have questioned her claim to superiority, but he was more curious about how the aliens would react to the claim. If they had been intercepting human transmissions, they probably had a very weird view of the UN, or, for that matter, anything else. The old jokes about the Fox or CNN generation no longer seemed funny. “If you want to talk to the human race, you must talk to the United Nations, to Earth as a whole…”

  “We will send you to pass on our message to your leaders,” the alien leader said, cutting her off. The male spoke, for the first time, and Francis listened carefully; his voice was darker, more emotional, than the females. “You will convoy our messages to your people so that they might all be saved.”

  Francis blinked. It sounded almost like a religious concept. Humans had conquered in the name of religion before; he couldn’t think of a religion that hadn’t, at one time or another, tried to convert or exterminate its enemies. The Crusades, the Spanish Armada, the Arab-Israeli Wars, the ongoing global Jihad against the secular West…all of them had been fuelled, at least in part, by religion. Had the aliens come all that way just to spark off a new religious war?

  “Saved?” Sophia asked. “Saved from what?”

  “Themselves,” the alien said, flatly.

  ***

  Philippe, like the remainder of the humans, found the entire concept rather…unbelievable, but he suppressed the suicidal urge to laugh while he listened to the alien leader and Sophia arguing backwards and forwards. It was easy enough to dismiss the alien concept, and yet…there was no denying that the aliens were powerful enough to make their presence felt. He was pretty certain that the spacefaring powers were attacking the aliens in orbit, but the mere fact that they were still alive – and prisoners – suggested that the war wasn't going well. The United States and Russia had the capability to launch attacks on orbital targets, but compared to what the aliens had shown, it was puny. The real question was simple enough; were the aliens telling the truth about their aims?

  He mulled it over as the aliens carefully separated the humans, a pair of guards pulling him through the vast hanger bay and into a smaller connection tube, trying to ignore some of the human protests. Philippe kept himself calm and docile, for the moment; the aliens would probably punish resistance, if they really were religious fanatics. He’d dealt with more than a few human fanatics, but most of them had known – or at least had believed – that France would punish any offence to his person…and, besides, he was more use to them alive. The aliens were far too powerful for the United States to hurt, let alone France…and somehow, he doubted that the French Government would seek recompense for any harm that occurred to him. It was better, by far, to act docile…and seek to profit from the situation, somehow.

  The alien guards finally pulled him into a smaller room. Despite the absence of gravity, it was set out as if it was normally used in a gravity field, with none of the modifications the ISS had had to take advantage of the lack of gravity, which suggested that the aliens would spin up the ship to generate gravity, sooner or later. It didn’t help him now – and it was a good thing that he’d recovered from his bout of space-sickness after a day on the ISS – but it was interesting to note. The aliens were advanced, sure, but they weren't magicians who could generate gravity on tap. Everything they’d shown so far could be explained, or even matched, by human technology. The aliens pushed him over to a table, pushed him down on the table surprisingly gently, and secured him down with straps. Philippe felt, despite himself, panic stirring at the back of his mind; the aliens could do anything to him…

  …Suddenly, all those stories of alien abduction and medical experimentation seemed very real…

  “Remain calm, please,” an ali
en voice said. He found himself looking up into a featureless alien face. The aliens seemed to have far fewer differences between themselves than a comparable number of humans, although maybe they thought the same of humans; the only thing he could see to distinguish this alien from the other alien females – he was sure that the breasts meant that it was a female – was a tattoo mark on her hairless forehead. Name? Rank badge? Fraternity pledge? Or merely the alien version of ‘mom?’ There was no way to know.

  He caught his breath as the alien moved a set of ominous-looking medical equipment over his naked chest. It would have been easy to speak to the alien in French, to see if she understood, but if not…why give up a possible advantage? Two of the other ambassadors spoke French as well as English and Sophia, he was sure, would have some French herself. He resolved to keep speaking in English until he was with the other humans.