Christopher Nuttall - Invasion

“Your capital doesn’t mean much to them,” Femala said. Now she understood the system that she had been a slave to her entire life, she felt little in the way of loyalty towards it. “The intention was to settle your world and bring your people into line with their own.”

“We don’t want that to happen,” Paul said, rather dryly. It was so hard to pick out and understand human tones, but Femala was getting better at it. “We want to stop it.”

So did Femala — now. She needed the humans to awaken her own people. “It won’t be easy to stop,” she said. “They’ll have started the settlement by now — or they will soon start it, and that will bring lots of their people down to the planet. How is the shuttle-building program coming along?”

Paul started. “How did you know about that?”

Femala explained, unable to keep her disappointment out of her voice. The human probably didn’t notice. Why else would anyone ask her about them? She might have been a victim all her life, without even the very human consolation of knowing that she had been a victim, but she was far from stupid. The humans had to be working on ways to recover control of space.

“Yes, I see,” Paul said, finally. “The building program is fine. It’s getting up into orbit that’s going to be the problem.”

Femala thought about it. Anything boosting to orbit, unless they discovered something so completely out of the box that the High Priest wouldn’t have the slightest idea it was even possible, would be very hot. The orbiting sensors would detect the rocket flame and react at once. Missiles and spacecraft would be shot down as soon as they were identified as such. It wouldn’t be easy to build enough craft to get some into orbit in the face of such firepower… and failing to retake control of space would be fatal in the long run. She could help them build thousands of shuttles, if that was what they wanted from her, but it wouldn’t solve the overall problem.

She tossed it around in her mind. They couldn’t get into orbit, therefore they would lose… and that was unacceptable. She couldn’t allow the opportunity to pass, and yet, unless they could get into orbit, it would pass. They needed to clear space of hostile ships first, but even with the most powerful ground-based weapons, it wasn’t going to be easy. In fact, it was probably going to be impossible. Unless…

“I want to make a deal,” she said. “I have, I think, a way of getting you into orbit, something that will give you a chance at victory. In exchange, I want something.”

Paul looked at her, his human face unreadable. “What do you want?”

“I want you to help me educate the remainder of my people,” she said, and explained her epiphany. She wanted, she needed, to share it with her fellows, male and female alike, and give the dissidents something to rally around. They could bring down the Theocracy, at least in one tiny system. “Will you help me?”

Paul leaned forward. “How do you intend to get us into orbit?”

Femala smiled and explained.

“Do you think we can trust her?”

Doctor Jones shrugged. “Intellectually, she’s probably the smartest person in this base and certainly among the captives,” he said. “The various Redshirts are comparable to us, but she is very definitely the smartest… and she has practical experience that no one on Earth can match. As for trust…

“We kept a close eye on them and watched, carefully,” he continued. “As far as we can tell, her conversion seems to be genuine, hers and the other prisoners as well. It’s impossible to be sure, but I suspect that she means what she says, which doesn’t mean that either of her plans will work. It’s quite possible that we’ll run into a security check she didn’t know existed, or another trap intended to snare heretics… and that’s exactly what they’re going to regard her as being.”

“But she’s becoming human ,” Paul protested. It was an interesting concept, and, if it was true, a handle on her. “Surely…”

“No, she’s adapting,” Jones said, firmly. “She isn’t human; do not forget that. Such behaviour is not unknown among humans, but it is rather unreliable. Stockholm Syndrome can kick in at the oddest places, but it is also not unknown for captives to pretend to be converted, just to get lighter treatment and a chance at escape. You know how many people are capable of fooling parole boards?”

Paul nodded. “Point taken,” he said. The thought was a galling one. Time and time again, dangerous criminals were released because they fooled parole boards into believing that they were reformed. “Still, it’s the only plan we’ve got.”

“She’s very smart, yes,” Jones said. “I’m very smart as well, but I couldn’t build a spacecraft and she couldn’t perform surgery. Just because someone is smart doesn’t mean that they’re… street-smart, or even capable. How many soldiers do you know who look like total assholes and have a string of degrees longer than mine? Her very cunning plan could be a complete disaster just because we don’t know everything we need to know about her people.”

“The President will probably agree with you,” Paul said, remembering the threat of possible impeachment. “It could be that this plan is a complete fuck-up waiting to happen. It could be that she intends to betray us… but, like it or not, it’s the only plan we’ve got and I intend to recommend to the President that we proceed at once.”

“Of course,” Jones said. “Good luck.”

Riyadh, Ambassador Simon Carmichael had decided, hadn’t changed for the better under alien rule. It had been a repressive environment in so many ways, with the religious police watching for the slightest hint of un-Islamic behaviour, and the political police watching for anti-government attitudes, but it had been fairly safe, provided that you were an Arab male. Now, aliens patrolled the streets, the Burka was banned and every mosque in the city had been destroyed. The entire city was waiting nervously for the penny to drop.

The aliens had rounded up, with the help of a number of senior princes and government officials who had fallen into their hands, every member of the religious police they could find and transported them out into the desert somewhere. Rumour, never the most accurate source in the world, claimed that the aliens had simply made them dig their own graves and then shot them, but given that rumour also claimed that the United States had been destroyed and that Mecca was burning rubble… well, it wasn’t very helpful. The only piece of truth that had been spread had been that Tel Aviv had been destroyed by the aliens… after Israeli nukes had fallen on several of their formations. The aliens now ruled from the Mediterranean Coastline — they’d overrun North Africa in a week — to the rapidly dissolving Pakistani border. They had not been short of ideas, this time, on how to treat the people who were suddenly under their control and a full-fledged insurgency was underway.

It wasn’t going well. The Iraqi Insurgency had benefited from dozens of factors, including the misuse of the Iraqi Army, the presence of literally millions of weapons in the country and plenty of outside support. The Saudi Army — and, for that matter, every other army in the region — had been destroyed. Those soldiers who had been captured — or, so rumour said, surrendered rather easily — had been placed in prison camps and carefully kept away from the cities. Insurgents had managed to break one of them open, but the aliens had rounded up most of the prisoners, leaving only a handful on the loose. Experienced fighters were rare among the new insurgency… and the learning curve was steep. The supplies being smuggled in from outside, mainly from Europe, weren’t enough to tip the balance, although the commandos and Special Forces were very helpful. The irony was thick enough to slice with a knife — they’d spent blood and treasure on suppressing radical Islam, and now they were trying to support it — but it still wouldn’t be enough. The aliens had learnt from Texas as well.