Christopher Nuttall - Invasion

“It’s ok,” he lied, catching on to her hand and gently checking the remainder of her body. She was well beyond his ability to treat; he realised, numbly, that she needed a proper hospital. It crossed his mind that it would be kinder to snap her neck now, but he pushed that thought away with an angry curse. “I’m a policeman; I’ll get you out of here, somehow.”

“You can’t,” the girl said, and gasped into a fresh round of sobs. “There’s nowhere to go.”

It was deathly quiet in the bunker.

Paul had expected that the aliens would retaliate in some form for the human use of nukes. It was their only real choice. Israel was probably on the verge of using them themselves, while they were pushing up against the Pakistani border and disrupting Europe’s development by holding the Middle East. They had to make an object lesson and, after Rome, no one had doubted that they had the capability. It would have been almost impossible to prevent them from striking back… and the alien craft that had bombed Washington had done so almost without being detected. That should have been impossible…

“The National Guard and the militia have been deployed to seal the area,” General Hastings said, his voice grim and very controlled. “They should start bringing people out of the city soon enough…”

“But where are we going to put them?” The President asked, bitterly. It was yet another shock to his system, Paul knew, one that might prove fatal. He had never expected to have to cope with a war on such a scale… and he’d been the one who had authorised the use of American tactical nukes. “How are we even going to save all the injured?”

We can’t , Paul thought. It was easy to say that there were so many hospitals, doctors, nurses and trained first-aid volunteers within the blast zone, but that hardly meant that they could handle such a catastrophe. The medical personnel would have been hit by the nuke as well, so they might need medical attention themselves, while all the normal effects of a nuclear blast would be taking their toll. Fires would be spreading out of control, roads would be blocked and rendered impassable… and people would be fleeing in their thousands in hopes of avoiding radiation poisoning. So far, at least, it seemed that the alien nukes weren’t that radioactive, but anyone caught up in the blast needed medical attention, attention they weren’t going to get. Worse, if they got out of the city carrying radioactive dust in their clothing, they might spread it further into the refugee camps.

It was barely half an hour after the nuke had detonated and the emergency services what was left of them, were already overwhelmed. The soldiers deployed around the city could bring out as many people as possible, but it would be almost impossible to save them all and, with the city destroyed, they might have to leave the fires to burn themselves out. That wouldn’t sit well with the President, but there was little other choice, not when it was so hard to get supplies from the rest of the country. They would have to save those who could be saved, which meant that thousands of people, trapped in the rubble, would just have to be abandoned.

“We will save as many as we can,” General Hastings promised. He leaned forward. “Mr President, we did prevent them from continuing their advance…”

The President gave him a bleak stare. “How many cities can we afford to trade off for preventing any further advance?” He asked. “Detroit? San Francisco? How many more?”

He rounded on Paul. “Colonel, get back to the prisoners,” he said. “Do whatever you have to do to get them working with us, just to use them, somehow, to get out of this mess.”

Paul couldn’t argue. He looked around the table and saw… a mixture. General Hastings, shocked, but determined to do whatever he needed to do. Spencer was terrified and furious at the destruction of his city. His family was somewhere within Washington, unless he’d gotten them out before the explosion. Deborah… watching the President the way a hawk watches a mouse, thinking hard.

“Yes, Mr President,” he said. He had the unnerving feeling that he was listening to the funeral bell for the United States of America. “I shall see to it at once.”

I am becoming a heretic , Femala thought.

The weird thing, the worrying thing, was how little that thought bothered her. When she’d thought about it, the rare occasions before her capture that she had thought about it, she hadn’t expected to survive more than a week of captivity. As a sterile female, she had thought that it was likely — and would have happened in the Unification Wars — that she would have been treated as a honorary male and simply executed, along with the remainder of any male prisoners. It was true that in some cases, male prisoners would be enslaved, but they tended not to last very long if cut off from the possibility of reproduction. They could — and sometimes had — go for years without having children, if producing children was actually possible, but if they were prevented from meeting and courting females, despair overcame them and they just drifted away.

A female, on the other hand, would be treated differently. As a possible source of new children, any normal female would be accepted into the enemy clan… and treated as a mixture of junior wife and prisoner. She would become one of the enemy clan, expected to forget her old clan and become one of them, in heart and soul. Accepted into the comforting warmth and safety of a clan, treated with respect by the other females, thoughts of escape and the old clan quickly vanished, becoming nothing more than memories. Femala had read somewhere, when she had been studying biology in the hopes that she could escape the fate she had been condemned to, that their own biochemistry played a role in their submission and subversion. They literally brainwashed themselves into becoming one of the enemy.

The research hadn’t interested her as much as machines and the way they went together, but she remembered enough of it to understand the reason why. Human females, it seemed, couldn’t pick and choose their mates. Any human male strong enough could force himself upon them and into them, forcing the poor woman to bear his child, regardless of her opinion. It had happened, several times, in the occupied zone and the High Priest had been contemplating ordering a death sentence for the human male responsible, once he had been able to wrap his head around the concept. The idea was literally alien to the Takaina; Femala, like all females, couldn’t have sex unless she wanted to have sex, which was part of the reason why her biochemistry would push her into the enemy clan. Any male who tried to force himself on her would be unable to force his way into her… and even if he did, he couldn’t get her pregnant. When her condition was discovered, as it would have been pretty quickly, she would have been classed as useless and, if she was lucky, killed.

But she was becoming more… human.

The humans hadn’t treated her badly and hadn’t cared that she was sterile, although there was no logical reason for them to care, unless they wanted to breed more Takaina. Instead, they’d treated her well and given her plenty of books to read, although no access to their computers. She couldn’t blame them for that, even though it was much harder to use a computer for hacking and sabotage than most people believed, but… they had so many! Perhaps there were so many computers on their world that hacking was commonplace, while on the Guiding Star there were only a few hundred who really knew how computers worked and how to use them for their own purposes. It was an odd way of doing things, but studying the human race through the eyes of an engineer made her wonder just what the final outcome of it all would be.