“I can’t talk about it,” Nicolas said, firmly. Down below, they were already high over the Atlantic Ocean and heading west, towards Africa. He’d been there as a young SEAL, back when the world had made sense…well, more sense. He'd met a pretty girl from Morocco who’d taught him that not all Muslims were utterly insane fanatics, and a man who’d risked his life to shelter and protect a SEAL team after a covert mission had gone horrifyingly wrong. “The walls might have ears, you know.”
Abigail gasped, and then sobered. “Does it matter?” She asked, bitterly. “They know what I did.”
“Perhaps,” Nicolas said, vaguely. “What did you write about them in the underground newspaper?”
“I wrote the truth about Chicago,” Abigail said. There was a note of pride in her voice, shining through the pain and fear. “I told the world what was really happening and look what happened to me!”
“That makes you braver than most reporters I’ve ever met,” Nicolas said, seriously. He placed the name now; Abigail Walker, one of the collaborator government’s tame reporters. Except perhaps not tame…he had to remind himself that she might still be working for them. They could have threatened her into cooperating with them one final time. He looked over at her, careful not to look at anything apart from her face. “There are worse causes to die for.”
“I’d sooner live for it,” Abigail said. “I thought the idea wasn’t to die for your country, but to make the other dumb bastard die for his country.”
Nicolas laughed. “Something like that,” he agreed. “Something like that.”
The shape of the Arabian Peninsula rose up in front of them. He looked over towards where Israel would have been, but saw no trace of the short violent war that had raged across the Middle East. The Israelis had deployed nukes; the aliens had deployed some kind of kinetic city-busting system, yet there was no trace of it from so high above. The desert looked as clean and untouched as ever. Down on the ground, he knew, it was a different story. The tyrants of the Middle East polluted on a scale that would have shocked even the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Saudi Arabia had entire areas that were no-go zones. The aliens would probably end up having to clear them all, just to make it safe for their own habitation.
“Look,” Abigail said. Dread echoed through her voice. “Just look at that.”
It looked, at first, like a massive island floating on the sea. As they came closer, it took on shape and form, revealing itself as a massive wedge-shaped spacecraft floating high above the Indian Ocean. Nicolas had seen a similar ship over Washington – he’d taken part in the mission that had shot that craft down over the city – but he’d known that the aliens had had four such ships…and the mothership, floating over the North Pole, utterly out of reach. His team’s assault had taught the aliens a new respect for human weapons; in hindsight, it might have been better for them to have waited until all four of the craft had been over land and attacked them simultaneously. He snorted to himself. Hindsight was so much clearer than foresight.
“They’re taking us to their command ship to execute us personally?” Abigail guessed. “Or perhaps they want to gloat a bit before killing us?”
“No way of knowing,” Nicolas said. He was resigned to the inevitable. The aliens weren’t going to let go of their prisoners so easily. He wished for a backpack nuke – he was sure that one of them going off inside even such a massive ship would be fatal – yet one refused to materialize in front of him. Wishing wasn't going to change the world. “Remain calm and wait. Perhaps the horse will learn to sing after all.”
The massive shape grew closer until it blotted out the sky. The smooth shape of the hull became that of a massive city, studied with blocks and strange alien devices that tracked their ship as it came closer. A hatch large enough to pick up an entire aircraft carrier opened up and beckoned them forward, inviting them inside. The craft’s hull shimmered back into view, cutting off the outside world. A moment later, he felt a strange popping in his ears as the pressure equalized. They were trapped. They might as well have been on the far side of the moon.
He watched as the hatch shimmered into existence, allowing the aliens to step into the craft and help them both out. Abigail was pushed into walking ahead of him and he tried to keep his eyes off her behind, concentrating on taking in as much as he could of the alien craft. It was oddly human-like, and yet it was subtly alien. It shouted its true builders to the skies. The proportions were all somehow…wrong. The entire craft looked as if the aliens had grown it out of a metal plant, rather than constructed it in a shipyard. Compared to the alien craft, the most advanced aircraft carrier the United States had ever built looked crude and unfinished.
Thousands of aliens bustled around as they were escorted through the corridors, including castes he’d never seen before. There were no humans, apart from the two of them, leaving him feeling truly alone. He didn’t know if he could trust Abigail or not, yet with only her for company, it wouldn’t be long before he found himself bound to her. The corridor stopped in front of a blank wall. A moment later, a door appeared in the wall and they were pushed gently through into a massive room.
They weren’t alone. There were ten aliens sitting on what looked like a hard sofa, facing them. There were three leaders, four workers, two warriors…and a human being. The human was so out of place that Nicolas hadn’t even realized he was human, at first, yet there was no doubt of it. He was human!
“We are sorry for the way we brought you here,” the human said. He didn’t sound like one of the Walking Dead, but somehow he didn’t sound like a traitor either. “My name is Captain Philip Carlson, formally of the space shuttle Atlantis, and these are my friends.”
He grinned, suddenly, at their expressions. “These are the ones who opposed the war,” he said. Nicolas stared at him in disbelief. “Welcome to the resistance.”
Chapter Fifty-One
Alien Command Ship #2
Day 184
Washed, dressed and sipping a cup of surprisingly good coffee, Abigail felt almost human again, human enough to put the strangeness out of her mind. Her companion, Nicolas, might have asked if they could take a moment to clean themselves up so that he could think, but whatever his motives, she was grateful to him. There was something about being naked and chained that made her feel as if she was utterly helpless – and she had been helpless. The aliens completely controlled her environment and if she displeased them, she might be thrown out of the airlock to the cold sea below.
“I watched as your shuttle was launched,” she said, as the aliens and their human ally came back into the room. “What happened up there? We thought that you were all dead.”
“We pretty nearly were,” Captain Philip Carlson explained. “One of their big command ships – this ship, to be precise – abducted the entire International Space Station, after smashing the shuttle and making it impossible for us to resist. We got taken onboard and discovered that the ship was almost completely controlled by the alien resistance, the aliens who felt that invading Earth wasn't such a bright idea. It took this long to develop a way of making contact with human resistance and so…”
He waved a hand in the air. “And so here you are,” he said. “They need your help and you need theirs.”
“Perhaps,” Nicolas said. He looked much sharper after having showered, but there was a hard glint in his eye. “Explanations first. Why did they invade Earth in the first place?”
“That is a long story,” one of the alien leaders said. The voice was more…emotional than any other alien voice she’d heard, although she couldn’t place the emotion. She had to warn herself to be careful when judging alien expressions and voices, for an alien emotional cue might easily be mistaken for something else. “It is not something we feel comfortable discussing.”
“Ulhash, they need to know,” Carlson said. “They can’t take your words on faith.”
The alien looked up at Nicolas, and then over at Abigail. “Our race evolved along significant
ly different lines than your own,” he said. Abigail was ninety percent certain she was talking to a male. “Your race all shares one genotype with purely cosmetic differences. Ours consists of several genotypes – castes – that fit together as part of a greater whole. Our…tribes are effectively alliances between castes that blur into a small nation, or super-tribe. We might have had conflicts between tribes, but we never had massive epidemic warfare as your race did. It was difficult for any tribe to reach a position of power from where it could launch a war of aggression.”
“If I understand it correctly,” Carlson put in, “they couldn’t form massive nations that could mount and sustain all-out war for long periods. They could and did cooperate with each other, but they couldn’t form empires or even republics.”
“Our tribes were often dominated by the leader caste, but the other castes always had their say,” Ulhash continued. “No leader could hope to sway a massive audience that tested and retested his every word. They had to learn to compromise in order to lead; a given leader’s influence might never spread very far. The natural competition between leaders, even from within the same tribe, led to…feedback systems that prevented leaders from becoming tyrants. No leader could just issue orders and make them stick.
“Our children were all identical until they began the transformation into their caste, allowing a certain…equality to enter our society. The child of a leader might not be a leader himself; the child of a warrior or a worker might grow up to become a leader. We didn’t understand the genetic basis for the castes and concluded that it was better to treat all castes with respect, while the hybrids between castes helped bind us together. We advanced our technology along similar lines as your own race until we developed an understanding of DNA and our own biology. And then the trouble started.”
Ulhash paused, one hand touching the side of his great head. “We learned what factors influenced a child’s development and determined their future caste,” he said. “The discovery caused what your people would probably call a crisis of faith. There were some who wanted the technology banned and others who believed that it would allow us as a race to reach new heights. They held out the promise that we might be able to change castes after maturity, adding a new level of advancement to our race. While our leaders debated the question, something nasty was growing in the darkness.
“A group of leaders – we called them the Rogue Leaders – wanted to pervert the new technology. They developed techniques that would allow them to select a child’s caste before he or she was even born. They used the technology to ensure that their children would all be leaders, developing a natural aristocracy where none had existed before. Worse, they not only ensured that non-leaders would never become leaders, but they tried to alter their biology to the point where they would accept orders without question. It was so inconceivable that they were well on their way to taking over an entire continent before the rest of our society realised what they were doing.”
“If I could inject a comment here,” Carlson said. “The leaders…can influence, sometimes very strongly, an individual from the lower castes. The more practiced leaders can train individuals from lower castes into accepting orders without question, but it doesn’t work on a group. It’s the reverse of our own situation. Where Hitler could hypnotise thousands of people during a Nazi rally, the leaders could never take over an entire group.”
“Until the Rogue Leaders developed a framework that allowed them to issue orders that were accepted without question,” Ulhash said. “The rest of our society went to war when they realised what had been born. We were at roughly the same level as you were in the 1950s, when we first visited your planet, and the carnage was terrible. The Rogue Leaders took the gloves off and pushed their biological technology to the limit, developing newer and more dangerous castes for the war. The opposition developed space-based weapons and waged war all over our star system. It took ten years of hard fighting to destroy the last of their bases and end the war. In the process, we came far too close to exterminating ourselves. Our world was devastated by the fighting.”
He looked down at the floor, and then looked back up at Nicolas. “The Council of Leaders decided that we could never run the same risk again. They ordered that our massive space-based industry, developed during the war, be turned to producing starships that could take parts of our society to other worlds. We saw no other choice. Our world was injured, perhaps dying, and we were suffering from a major population explosion caused by the war. It took years to produce the first ship – the mothership – and its complement of lesser vessels. And, all that time, the remaining Rogue Leaders bided their time and waited.
“We don’t know for sure what happened next. It’s only speculation. Somehow, a faction of Rogue Leaders survived the war and managed to manipulate events so that they were considered for integration into the new community being formed onboard the vessel. They remained hidden until after the mothership had set out on its long voyage, then took control of the mothership’s Council of Leaders. No one realised what they were doing until it was far too late to stop them. Ethos and his fellow Rogue Leaders are effectively in control of our population and your planet. We need your assistance to stop them.”
There was a long pause. “If this is true,” Abigail said finally, “why do you need us to stop them?”
“The Rogue Leaders built the Command Net that governs our civilisation,” Ulhash explained. “We are unable to take overt action without making them aware of us. They have direct or indirect control over the Council. They control most of the warriors – given time, they will introduce their biological modifications and they will be in undisputed control of the entire population, yours and ours. They will eventually develop a way to engineer similar…submission into your race and resistance will no longer become possible.”
Nicolas frowned. “But you have allies among the other castes,” he pointed out. “And you control this ship. Can’t you subvert others…?”
“Not without warning them of our existence,” Ulhash said. “You do not understand the scale of the problem. We are unable to drop off the net for more than a short period of time and every time we take that risk, we face exposure. One of our leaders attempted to make direct contact with your resistance in Chicago and died in the attempt. Anyone we subvert who stays close to a Rogue Leader for too long might turn into a double agent. It took time and careful planning to bring you two here, knowing that it risked discovery.”
“I see,” Nicolas said. “What happens if you are discovered?”
“Ethos will send his modified warriors to this ship and purge us,” Ulhash said, flatly. “The remaining Council of Leaders will be unable to prevent him from wiping us out of existence.”
“You have ships,” Abigail pointed out. “Can’t you fight?”
“The fighters on this ship are controlled by the Command Net,” Ulhash said, patiently. “We could not fly them without permission from the Rogue Leaders. They will be unlikely to allow us to defend ourselves.” There was a faint moment of what Abigail privately termed humour. “They could simply deactivate the drive and send this ship plunging into the water below.”
“I think I see your problem,” Nicolas said, finally.
“There isn’t much time,” Ulhash said. “The Rogue Leaders will eventually succeed in breaking humanity’s resistance and transforming your race into another caste. They are already working on a program of genetically modified humans who will serve them – who will have no choice, but to serve them – and hold the remainder of your race in permanent bondage.”
“Jesus,” Nicolas breathed. “Your culture will adapt ours to service yours.”
“And resistance will not only be futile, but inconceivable,” Carlson said. The former astronaut looked over at Nicolas. “We can’t let them win.”
“So answer me this,” Abigail said, suddenly. “Half the time, you’re acting as if the Rogue Leaders are all-powerful; the rest, you’re acting as if they’re not com
pletely in control. Why were they even allowed to invade Earth in the first place?”
Ulhash looked over at her, his dark eyes meeting hers for a long chilling moment. “When your world entered scoutship range, we discovered your existence,” he said. “We had had no idea that Earth was inhabited until our ships entered Earth orbit and performed the first recon missions. We arrived during the conflict you called World War Two and saw the barbarity your race produced. We watched from high above as your race seemed to wallow in its own evil. We couldn’t understand what we were seeing. We had no concept of racism, or religion, or the other curses that blighted your world. The Rogue Leaders had no trouble convincing the Council of Leaders that your race was too barbaric to be trusted, that you would either try to turn us away from Earth or destroy us. They secured permission to develop the weapons and technologies they would need to invade your planet.”
“Such as the base at the South Pole,” Nicolas said. “Why…?”
“They wanted to develop an understanding of your people,” Ulhash said. “Over the years, they abducted a number of humans and experimented on them, learning to control and manipulate human beings. The implanted humans who serve them are the fruits of those experiments. The base also served as a place to monitor human activity and base fighter craft for the coming war. Your discovery and destruction of the base – and Command Ship #3 – hampered their operations and embarrassed them in front of the Council of Leaders.”
“Ah,” Nicolas said. “So…what now?”
“So we get in touch with the President, or whoever is running the show down in America, and we figure out a way to take those sons of bitches out before they destroy the entire planet,” Carlson said. “Maybe we can smuggle nukes onto their ships, maybe we can come up with some Death Star super-laser that will take out the mothership, perhaps…we have to get on with it, now.”
Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot Page 47