Christopher Nuttall - Invasion

“Yes, Your Holiness,” the War Leader said. “It will be done as you command.”

“And we should also begin the conquest of hearts and souls in the occupied area of America,” the Inquisitor added. There was a conceited tone in his voice that was at odds with the seriousness of his purpose. “We have been lax in our duty there, I fear, and thus we have been punished with many attacks and many deaths.”

“Of course,” the High Priest said. They still held the advantage over the humans. As long as they held space, they were unbeatable. Even if they lost people like Researcher Femala, they would still win in the end. He missed her… but she was lost, somewhere in the chaos of the American attack. They’d probably blown her out of the sky without even noticing. “We would not want to fail in our duty, would we?”

“I think this is your stop,” the trucker said, as the truck pulled to a stop outside a warehouse complex in the middle of nowhere. “Good luck, buddy.”

Paul thanked the driver as he slipped out of the vehicle and down onto the tarmac. The destruction of the railroads and aircraft had left most of the transport network in the hands of truckers, who risked the chances of sudden death from high above in order to keep things moving across the United States. The gas was heavily rationed now so that the truckers could keep moving, which in turn kept the country going… until the gas ran out as well. The United States had built up a massive reserve of fuel — and other vital raw materials — but no one had really anticipated such a cut-off. The results in other parts of the world were even worse.

It wasn’t that America was suddenly a poor country, but that it was much harder to move items around… and almost nothing was coming in from the outside world. There might be a surplus of one item in California, but not in Maryland, where it was needed. Some places had more than enough food to eat, other places were starving… and still others were in a state of anarchy. Two weeks after the failure of Operation Lone Star, the country was struggling to pull itself back together, a procedure marred by constant specific bombardment. The truckers, statistically, didn’t face many risks, but the odds mounted up over time. His driver had been asked to carry a single passenger… and anything out of the ordinary tended to attract attention. If the aliens had seen him getting onboard the truck, would they have blasted him on general principles?

The warehouse complex was as dark and silent as the grave, but he knew where to go, pausing long enough to see the truck vanishing off into the distance before climbing quickly up to the complex. It had been created, originally, to serve as a shipping hub for some trucking company that had gone out of business, and then Uncle Sam had taken it over. The CIA, working through a front company, had bought the entire complex and developed it for their own purposes. From the outside, it was just another bunch of warehouses… and there were plenty more of them across America. Inside, it was a very different story.

“Welcome,” Doctor Jones said, once the guards had checked Paul’s ID and fingerprints. The CIA, he’d been told, had once used the place for defectors from the USSR and, later, terrorist groups, a perfectly secure compound where they could be interrogated and debriefed in private before being given their reward. No one would think twice if a helicopter landed in the complex, or a truck pulled up to it, which kept everything secret. “You’ll be pleased to hear that we’re ready for you.”

Paul followed him down a flight of stairs into an underground complex that wasn’t on any of the publicly-available plans. “We didn’t bring the craft itself here, I’m afraid, but we were able to move it to another complex, where NASA’s best engineers have been working on it,” the Doctor continued. “We did bring the alien captives here, although alas, without Captain Kirk to court the pretty alien babes, we didn’t learn much at first.”

Paul almost gave in to the temptation to grab the doctor and shake him, hard. “Doctor, people are dying out there,” he snapped, as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “It’s not fucking funny!”

“No, of course not,” Jones agreed. He paused for a moment in the corridors. “What would you like to see first? The craft — or at least the images of it — or the prisoners?”

“The craft,” Paul said, forgetting his anger. The craft might be able to help them actually win the war. “What have the engineers found out about it so far?”

Jones led him into a small briefing room, turned out the lights and activated a PowerPoint presentation. “The craft appears — I’m no engineer and we couldn’t spare one to brief you, although they did write the notes — to be a fairly basic SSTO design,” he began. “We actually worked on trying to build one, but we never got the concept quite right and… well, NASA wasn’t too keen on it for some reason. The alien craft looks crude” — he clicked through a series of images of the conical shuttle craft — “but it is, in fact, very sophisticated. One of the engineers even called it sheer genius.”

The image changed again, this time to show the dissembled pieces of the craft. “The craft was designed on a principle that seems to allow them to take the entire thing to pieces very easily,” Jones added. “The field engineers who reached the crash-site were able to figure out how to take it apart, after which the separate pieces, all seven hundred of them, were transported to a secure complex somewhere else. A lot of the electronics were fried by the EMP — that’s probably why the craft got so far off course anyway — but the mechanical aspects were easy to understand. Hell, sir, we could duplicate it, given a few months.”

“Better get working on it,” Paul said. He’d have to recommend that to the President, if the President survived the threat of impeachment. Apparently, these days, not nuking America was considered a crime. The Russians were probably laughing over a glass of vodka. “Can we actually fly them ourselves?”

“The fuel mix is a little unusual and the electronics will have to be replaced carefully, but if we can meet those issues, we could even fly the craft we have now,” Jones said. “Building our own shouldn’t take that long; according to the engineers, it’s one hell of a lot less sophisticated than an F-22 or even the space shuttle.”

“The President will be pleased to hear that,” Paul said, relieved. It was something, perhaps, that they could use in the future. The aliens might be advanced, but they weren’t all-powerful. “And the aliens themselves?”

Jones turned the lights back on and started to fiddle with a computer, playing with it until it showed an image of the aliens, each one in a separate cell. “We think that they’re reasonably unhurt, although it’s hard to tell for certain,” he said. “We’ve kept them separate, but six of them don’t seem to speak English and don’t even seem interested in anything else. They don’t respond to our questions, not even in their own language.”

“So they could be faking it,” Paul said. “They might understand English and are just pretended not to speak it.”

“They might,” Jones agreed. “Some of my… fellow researchers have advocated a more rigorous program of questioning, but if they genuinely can’t speak English, there’s little point in trying to hurt them. We could try to get them to speak in their own language, but they could be saying anything , although samples would be useful to the linguistics people.”