Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

“They’ve been scavenging,” said young Lieutenant Briggs beside him, eager as a preacher pouncing upon evidence of fornication. “We’ll have to search house-to-house.”

Briggs had not seen the Yosemite reports and did not yet know the enormity of their orders. Fikes nodded wearily. “They’ll try to hide as much as they can.”

During the approach to Lewisville he had spotted a feral cat crouched in the roadside weeds, a pair of crows pecking at a dead owl. But no eetees had showed themselves. On this brilliant summer morning, the distant shipwreck looked no more menacing than a junked car. In Fikes’s experience, though, the eetees didn’t surrender and they didn’t admit defeat. If even a single one had survived, sooner or later it would test his soldiers. Still, they would have to wait on more urgent tasks.

Fikes gave the order to halt in front of the courthouse. There waited a knot of local men bedecked with an arsenal of rifles, shotguns, and semi-automatic small arms. Neatly dressed and clean-shaven, they looked like Norman Rockwell banditos who’d just staged their own revolution.

Or rather, Norman Rockwell meets the Sci-Fi Channel: half of them bore red splatterguns. Eetee weapons. That would make Briggs happy. A weight descended onto Fikes’s shoulders.

As Fikes climbed out of his humvee, one of the locals stepped forward. This was a lean man in a sheriff’s khaki uniform and badge, with cowboy boots, a straw cowboy hat, and mirror shades to complete the ensemble. The only weapon the sheriff carried in plain view was a holstered .45.

“Howdy, folks,” he drawled. “Welcome to Lewisville. I’m Ben Gundersen, Lewis County sheriff.”

Fikes held out his hand. “Colonel Fikes,” he said. “U.S. Army.”

Sheriff Gundersen put out his own hand, and the two of them shook. “What brings you fellows to Lewisville?”

Under the circumstances, the question was an odd one. Fikes said, “Your community is in proximity to a downed enemy vessel, Mr. Gundersen. Assessing that threat and mounting an appropriate response is our immediate priority. But our long-term mission is to restore services and connect you to the outside world again.”

“No offense,” said the sheriff, “but with all the satellites gone, we haven’t heard much news since last summer. Who’s the U.S. Army taking orders from these days?”

“The President has installed a Provisional Congress until new elections can be held,” Fikes said. “Meanwhile, the Army is authorized under the Public Safety Act to take charge here.”

“You’re talking about the U.S. President. The U.S. Congress.”

“That’s right,” said Fikes.

One of the other banditos called out, smirking, “Didn’t they nuke Washington? I thought that was one good thing come out of all this.”

“Yes,” Fikes said. “Washington was destroyed. Now, may I ask if you have spotted survivors from the wreck? Has your town come under attack?”

“Survivors?” Gundersen tipped his hat back and scratched his forehead. “Well, now. We shot us a few last winter. They come down near town and found we weren’t easy pickings. If there’re any of ’em left, they pretty much leave us alone. They’d be camped out in the mountains, I guess.”

“Have you seen enemy aircraft at all? Any other vehicles?”

“I guess most of their fighters crashed with the ship,” Gundersen said. “Lost their guidance systems or something. Haven’t seen any recently, anyway.”

“But you think they still have some?”

The sheriff shrugged, inscrutable behind mirror shades. “Could be.”

Since his childhood in Baltimore, Fikes had learned there were large swaths of the U.S. where well-scrubbed white people said “gosh,” “shucks,” and “you bet” without irony. But this sheriff wasn’t just a folksy good ol’ boy.

He was plain bullshitting.

Fikes had already noted that Gundersen hadn’t addressed him as “sir” or “colonel,” and that the pole on the courthouse lawn bore no flag.

Reluctant to take the inevitable next step, Fikes bent to read the plaque on a nearby statue of buckskin-clad men. Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, openers of the American West, passed through Lewis County on October 3, 1806.

If the sheriff and his gang had been just your posse comitatus militia types hoping to secede from the federal government in its time of weakness, Fikes’s task would have been simple. Sooner or later he’d have won over the townsfolk with liberal bribes of booze, chocolate, condoms, antibiotics, disposable diapers, toilet paper. The sheriff he would have defanged first of all; in Fikes’s experience, those with a taste for power were easily seduced by another helping of the same.

But the solution to the problem this town presented would not be so easy to accomplish.

Not that Fikes’s orders weren’t clear or that he shrank from enforcing them. From what he had read in the Yosemite reports, from the panic still electrifying headquarters in Colorado, the rule he must now impose could not be too draconian. It was up to him, he had been told, to ensure that nothing like the Yosemite massacres ever became necessary again.

Fikes knew, however, that he could end up as lost in a repeat of Yosemite as that hapless colonel had been. In the slaughter at Upper Pines, the Yosemite rebels had demonstrated unequivocally that human beings could wield that most dreaded of eetee weapons, the handarm of the eetee elite, the fearmonger. The Army, on the other hand, had never learned how to operate the weapon—had no defense against it. The rebels who had understood the weapon had all been killed. Army scientists, such as they were now, had offered only useless speculation: perhaps the ordinary silent communication of eetees was a form of telepathy; perhaps eetees operated their terrible weapon, too, with some kind of thought wave.

No one understood how eetees used the guns. How could he anticipate by what means human beings would acquire the skill?

But he had to anticipate it. He had to prevent it. If possible, he had to acquire the power for the Army.

At least his first items of business were clear: separating the townspeople from their eetee toys, disrupting their lines of communication, bringing them firmly under Army control.

Fikes straightened. “Mr. Gundersen, may I ask how you dispose of enemy remains?”

He thought he had pegged Gundersen, but the pride that lit up the sheriff’s face surprised him. “We’re real strict about that, Colonel. I’ll show you our health ordinances. Can’t risk some kind of strange disease, I tell people. We built a special crematorium to incinerate the bodies. We use bleach to clean up anything we take from them.” He nodded toward a splattergun in the waistband of one of his deputies. “We could use more Clorox, now that you mention it.”

Fikes nodded. “That’s all very well, Mr. Gundersen, but our scientists can’t yet say what potential disease vectors would look like, how they might spread, or how they could be destroyed. I must stress that anyone in your town who’s had contact with the enemy, living or dead, is required to report to us. Any items of wreckage that people have picked up must be turned over. That includes your weapons, I regret to say. The Army will assume the burden of protecting the town from this point onward. I have strict orders on this matter. And I do have the authority to search every house. It’s a vital matter of public health.”