Christopher Nuttall - Invasion

“There,” the Sergeant said, pointing to a smaller section within the hatch. Stocker realised that it was a control of some kind and pulled it. The hatch unlocked, but it took the combined strength of three soldiers to pull it open and lock it in place. A wave of hot air, smelling of something indefinably alien, struck them in the face, but Stocker pushed forward anyway, shining his torch ahead of him. It was a disaster area; the entire interior of the craft had been torn to pieces, but he could see some bodies. The alien engineering had held up, barely; he barked an order and the soldiers started to recover the bodies. There were nine live aliens, in total, including two with very noticeable breasts. He had to remind himself that they might not actually be female. “Sir, what do we do with them?”

“Get them to the hideout and have the medics work on them,” Stocker ordered, after a long moment’s thought. If they could take the aliens alive, they’d have to give him a proper combat role, rather than patrolling the rear. “Check them for any kind of weapon and then move them out, carefully. We need to get them well away from here before dawn.”

The sense that the aliens would be taking steps to prevent them escaping with this treasure trove forced him forward, exploring the higher reaches of the craft. It had once stood on its end; now, lying on the ground, it was hard to reach the cockpit, but when he managed to climb inside, he found two more dead aliens. He examined them quickly, trying to determine what had killed them, but there didn’t seem to be any kind of real damage. They had cuts and scars from damaged consoles, but… there didn’t seem to be any real reason why they were dead. It was a complete mystery.

“Get these bodies as well,” he hissed, as the camouflage team arrived. Moving the alien craft before dawn would be impossible, but if they could hide it, they could break it up and move it, piece by piece. “Sergeant, get a couple of others up here and strip the craft of anything we can carry; books, files, whatever…”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said.

Stocker managed to climb back to the hatch and out into the cool air. Lights were twinkling high above him and he could only hope that one of them wasn’t an alien KEW, coming to ensure that no alien secrets fell into human hands. If they could hide the craft…

“Sir, look at their foreheads,” one of the junior lieutenants said. “They’re marked !”

“Yeah, so?” Stocker asked coldly. The priority was getting the prisoners away from their craft, not discussing their tattoos. They’d be discussing the alien breasts next. “What about them?”

“They destroy religious buildings and they have marks on their forehead,” the lieutenant pointed out. “It could be the Mark of the Beast. They could be demons, or the servants of the antichrist…”

Stocker stared at him for a long moment. “You’ve been reading Left Behind too much,” he said, dryly. “This whole war is quite bad enough without adding supernatural elements to the problem, don’t you think? They bleed and die when we shoot them, so they’re not demons, are they?”

Femala felt her head swimming as, slowly, she returned to awareness. It took her time — it felt like entire cycles — to remember what had just happened. The shuttle had crashed, but somehow, she was still alive. They had to have come down in occupied territory, then, and the warriors had recovered their craft. The gravity was slightly heavier than that on the Guiding Star’s habitation section, which meant that they were still on Earth. The field medics had probably insisted that they remain on the planet until they were fit to return to orbit.

She opened her eyes and got the shock of her life. She knew, instantly, that she was lying inside a human room. The bed wasn’t designed for her race — it was softer than any that they would have used — and the proportions were all wrong. Sprawled across the bed, she struggled to sit up, only to discover that she was strapped down. A massive black shape leaned over her and she cringed back, convinced that he was a demon and had come to drag her to the shadow pits for her disbelief. Cold logic asserted itself, eventually, and she realised that she was looking at a human. It took her a moment to realise that his dark skin tone was his natural colour, rather than a dread disease, and that he was smiling at her.

His voice was soft, but still too loud for Femala’s ears. “Can you understand me?”

She winced from the pain. “Yes,” she said, softly. She’d had to learn the human language to talk to their captives, but she hadn’t imagined being a captive herself… and stark naked into the bargain. The air was really too cold for normal clothing, let alone nakedness. Females might have bared their breasts as a matter of course, but they didn’t undress completely unless they had chosen a mate… and a father for their children. “What do you want?”

“We’re going to try to make you better,” the human assured her. His voice had softened, revealing that he had realised her problem, she hoped. Human medical science might be better or worse than that of the Takaina, but they wouldn’t know how to treat any of them. They might kill her with the best of intentions. “Once you’re well, we’ll discuss what’s going to happen to you next. Perhaps you can help us bring the war to an end.”

“What do you mean, they’re attacking us?”

By long-standing tradition, the High Priest was never woken during his sleeping periods unless it was an absolute emergency. It was something that he had learned wasn’t the great advantage of high rank that it had seemed, back when he’d been a lowly under-priest at the mercy of his superiors. No high-ranking priest could avoid his duties, not even the High Priest… and if he started to neglect them, the lower-rankers would start sharpening their knifes.

“They have launched a major attack against us,” the War Leader said, as a display of Earth appeared in front of them. “Submarines have launched missiles against us and their EMP has blinded some of our systems. Their ground forces are engaging our forces on the ground and human insurgents are making reinforcing them difficult.”

They timed their assault perfectly , the High Priest said, as the display updated rapidly. The space-based radars had been knocked out, almost completely, and the parasite ships had been given too many problems of their own to contend with. The Takaina had honestly never thought of the possibility of using submarines to launch missiles, so while the orbital bombardment units had fired back at once, it was quite possible that the human submarines had escaped and lurked somewhere under the water. Do they know us that well ?

He shook his head. It didn’t matter at the moment. “We were too gentle with them the first time,” the Inquisitor said. “We should have moved at once to convert them, rather than…”

“Quiet,” the High Priest said, firmly. He didn’t have time for recriminations, particularly not from the Inquisitor. “War leader, where are the remaining parasite ships?”

“In orbit,” the War Leader said. “They have not been engaged.”

The High Priest thought rapidly. The other human powers weren’t important, not as long as they could only kill their fellow humans, but if the human Americans managed to destroy the occupied zone, the Takaina would lose over two hundred thousand warriors and their supporting units. It wasn’t a real choice; they had to leave the Chinese and Russians without surveillance, just to maintain their whole.