Christopher Nuttall - Invasion

“It could be a religious thing,” Paul said, softly. He hated to admit ignorance, but there was no choice, not when the fate of the entire planet was involved. “There is still so little that we understand about their society.”

“Is there a bio-threat?” Deborah asked suddenly. “Might they catch something nasty off us and drop dead?”

“I don’t think so,” Paul said, after a moment. “They took enough samples from the captured ambassadors to check that they could live here safely. I don’t think that the common cold will be wiping them out anytime soon.”

“We live in hope,” the President said. He pulled himself up to a sitting position and looked them firmly in the eye, suddenly galvanised into action. “General?”

“Yes, Mr President?”

“I am hereby ordering you to start making preparations to launch Operation Lone Star within a week,” the President said. His voice, at least, was firm; Paul noted Deborah’s surprise and wondered why she was so interested. “Keep it non-nuclear if possible…”

“We need to use some EMP,” Paul said, quickly. It wasn’t a part of the plan that could be removed fairly quickly without impinging on everything else. “We need some of the nukes, Mr President. They won’t be used on the ground.”

“Make it so,” the President said. “General, the country is counting on this. Make it happen… and may God help us all.”

The alien holding pen was massive. Ringed by barbed wire and guarded by a handful of alien tanks, it held upwards of four thousand American prisoners, spread out over a set of smaller holding pens. The soldiers and other men and women captured during the invasion occupied one large section of the camp; civilians captured in the act of resistance occupied a second one. There had been no attempt to segregate the sexes, or even to ensure that the prisoners behaved themselves; if there hadn’t been an ingrained habit of discipline and a common enemy, the prisoners would have probably started to kill each other after the first day, or fallen into rule by strength.

Sergeant Oliver Pataki, senior prisoner by virtue of being one of the first humans to be captured, stared out over the camp and winced. It wasn’t the best POW camp he’d ever seen, that was for sure; the aliens seemed almost indifferent to their comfort. They didn’t bother to provide more than basic foodstuffs and a constant stream of running water; the medical tent, where the injured had been placed in hopes that the medical staff could help them to recover, was the only covered place in the entire camp. The prisoners made their beds on the hard ground and planned, grimly, for an escape. Pataki hadn’t wanted to end up serving as the commander of the camp — in effect, the chief collaborator — but there had been no choice. The aliens had certainly never given him a choice, or even someone senior to take the burden away.

The thought nagged at his mind; where were the senior officers? The highest-ranking person in the camp was a Master Sergeant, but he was sure that all of the Captains or Colonels wouldn’t have been killed in the fighting, or maybe even a General or two. The aliens had definitely figured out human ranks and, once they’d captured a few hundred prisoners, had started to weed them out; senior officers, it seemed, went elsewhere, while the junior prisoners got dumped in the work camps and put to work.

I’m sure there’s a treaty against that , he thought, with a certain burst of amusement. It was illegal, under the Geneva Conventions, to put prisoners of war to work — or, if there was no choice, they had to be compensated for their work — but the aliens had never signed the treaty. They’d organised groups of men, each one chained up and shackled together, and marched them out of the camp and put them to work. In the week or two since the aliens had landed, Pataki and the remainder of the prisoners had dug graves, helped clear roads and airfields and countless other tasks that required manpower and little thinking. A handful of soldiers had tried to escape, only to be gunned down by the aliens, who had then left their bodies outside the camp as a warning. The warning hadn’t passed unheeded; Pataki had learned that if they escaped, they had to make certain of it… or they would die.

He’d started the Escape Committee the day after being captured, and had ensured that everyone who entered the camp was thoroughly debriefed by his people, but none of the news was good. The aliens had simply rounded up everyone with a weapon and thrown them into the camps. If they’d arrested most of Texas, he’d thought at the time, they’d have to almost wrap the entire state in barbed wire, but if they were merely keeping guns off the streets… they’d put a crimp in any resistance right there. The civilians who’d been added to the camps had told them about the destroyed churches and the ongoing fighting, but it seemed that Texas wouldn’t be liberating itself anytime soon. The aliens could move forces from place to place far faster than the insurgents could react… and, if they were pushed out of a given area, they would simply call in a strike from orbit and pulverise the resistance fighters. The more he thought about it, the more he suspected that the aliens would, eventually, secure an uneasy peace.

Bastards , he thought, as he started to pace the camp. He’d started to organise games and exercises to keep everyone as healthy as possible, but the longer they stayed in the camp, the weaker they became; they just weren’t getting enough food. He wasn’t sure if the aliens were simply working them all to death, or if they didn’t understand the problem; he’d tried to talk to them, but most of the guards didn’t seem to speak English. It was another security measure and, he had to admit, a fiendishly simple one; if they couldn’t talk to their guards, they couldn’t try to win friends. The guards couldn’t talk to them to learn that humans were… well, human… and they couldn’t talk the guards into joining them. There could be hundreds, or thousands, of frustrated democrats among the aliens… and they couldn’t make contact with them!

A whistle blew and he, tiredly, started to walk over to the gates. The aliens had a fairly simple set-up, compared to one of the camps he’d seen while on deployment, but it was backed up by an absolute willingness to kill anyone trying to escape. Some of the SF troops swore that they could get over the wire if the power was cut, but unless the aliens lost their night-vision goggles, they’d just be picked off while still on the wire. Digging a tunnel wasn’t possible; they didn’t have anywhere to hide the soil, or even conceal the tunnel entrance. It was a neat little trap… and, so far, all of his escape plans depended on being on the other side of the wire. That wasn’t exactly helpful.

The alien who stood at the gate was one of their senior officers, as far as they could tell. Most of the alien soldiers wore their body armour, which several soldiers had sworn could turn aside a shot from an M16, although Pataki had seen several die when they’d been shot through the head, but those that went without the head covering always had a tattoo on their foreheads. This one had the most elaborate tattoo he’d ever seen, a strange spiralling pattern that seemed to cover half of the forehead.

“You are ordered to form one hundred of your people,” the alien said, shortly. They were rarely interested in talking about anything else, even the weather. They hadn’t even bothered to interrogate the prisoners. “Their services are required.”