Christopher Nuttall - A Learning Experience

Steve made a face. “I’ll talk to him,” he said, finally.

He keyed into the interface, then opened the link to the communicator they’d given the President. The Secret Service, those few in the know about the starship and the new colony, had been frantic with worry, pointing out that there was no way to prevent the President from being kidnapped from under their very noses. But the President had overruled them, showing more balls than Steve had expected from him. Or maybe he was smart enough to understand what had happened to the Taliban and deduce that Steve could easily do the same to him anyway, even if he didn’t carry the communicator.

It was late night in Washington, he realised, a moment too late. But the President was probably used to being woken in the middle of the night. Besides, Steve’s first Drill Instructor had been confident that being woken late at night was good for the recruits character, the bastard.

“Mr. Stuart,” the President said. “What can I do for you?”

“There’s one, perhaps two, alien starships heading into the system,” Steve said, quickly. “We may just have run out of time.”

He heard the President gulp. The man had only had ten days to come to terms with the reality of aliens and a group of former US servicemen in control of an alien starship and a growing lunar settlement. He’d been the most powerful man on Earth, but now Earth was merely a drop in the galactic bucket, a tiny and utterly insignificant world protected only by its isolation from any gravity point. And nemesis was fast approaching.

“You need to call a very quiet alert,” Steve said. He knew it would be useless, but at least it would convince the President he was doing something useful. “And pray for us.”

“I will,” the President said. “Good luck.”

“Thank you,” Steve said.

He broke the connection and returned his attention to the main display, now reformatted for human eyesight. The two contacts were reducing speed, slightly, as they entered the solar system, apparently trying to avoid the outermost planets and their gravity wells. From what Keith Glass and his theorists had deduced, partly from clues in alien fiction, the alien ships actually bent gravity around them and surfed through space at FTL speeds. A sufficiently large gravity well would break up the gravity waves and force them to return to normal space, if indeed they’d left it. Glass’s reports hadn’t been too clear on that topic.

Perhaps we need to hire more theorists , Steve thought, coldly.

It burned at him that the Hordesmen, despite being primitive barbarians, had access to the technology of his dreams. But they’d bought, begged or stolen it for themselves. No wonder, Steve considered, they were trapped in cultural stasis. The gulf between them and the Galactics — or humanity — was simply too wide to cross easily. They’d have to change their very mindset to start making advances and that would be tricky, if not impossible. In many ways, they were simply too conservative for their own good.

“They’re not leaving a ship on the edge of the solar system,” Mongo commented. “You’d think they’d consider it a wise precaution.”

“They don’t think Earth is dangerous,” Kevin countered. “Remember just how casually they moved into the atmosphere and kidnapped us?”

Steve nodded, bitterly. Every year, thousands of people in the United States went missing, never to be seen again. Some of them had probably just wanted to vanish, others had been murdered and their bodies hidden beyond easy discovery… and some of them might just have been abducted by aliens. God knew there were plenty of stories about alien abduction in the United States. Could some of them have been taken by other aliens? He hadn’t seen anything resembling the tiny grey aliens of X-Files myth in the database, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. There were thousands of spacefaring aliens in the galaxy.

“No, they don’t,” he agreed. He leaned forward. “Do we have the decoy ready to go?”

Kevin smiled. “It’s ready,” he said. “And they won’t be expecting it at all.”

Steve had to smile. As if to make up for being outnumbered, trawling through the files had revealed the security codes the Hordesmen used to assure one another that they were safe and not under enemy control. The latter codes, it seemed, were rarely used, as the Hordesmen preferred death to what they saw as dishonour. But, with some ingenuity, Shadow Warrior ought to be able to convince the newcomers that everything was fine until it was too late.

“We just got a message from Heinlein,” Mongo said. “They’re going dark now.”

“It won’t be enough,” Kevin said, grimly. “Maybe we should have fled after all.”

“No,” Steve said. He hadn’t been able to abandon the ranch and he wouldn’t be able to abandon Earth. It was home, despite its flaws. “We couldn’t leave our homeworld and billons of people to burn.”

He sucked in a breath. There hadn’t been a truly existential war in American history since the Civil War — and that had been against fellow Americans. The last time the American Republic had faced total defeat had been in 1812, when the British might have managed to tear the newborn republic apart and reabsorb it into the British Empire. Even Hitler or Stalin wouldn’t have been able to land troops on American soil and occupy the country. The logistics of such an invasion would be staggering, utterly beyond comprehension…

But they were fighting an existential war now, he knew. The Hordesmen wouldn’t hesitate to bombard the planet into submission, reducing humanity to a wave of slaves… slaves who might just take over, given time to learn more about their masters from the inside. No one on Earth, outside a tiny select group, knew about the coming engagement. But their lives depended on it. If Steve and his family lost, a nightmare would descend upon Earth.

Maybe Kevin was right , he thought. Perhaps we should have fled .

It had seemed a cowardly solution at the time. Shadow Warrior could easily carry a few thousand humans and their children to another star system and provide the base for a high-tech civilisation. Given time and alien medical technology, they could build up a massive population without needing immigrants from Earth, while the Horde would be faced with a disturbing mystery. Somehow, he doubted that lost Horde starships were uncommon… and with no trace of Galactic technology on Earth, it would be hard for the Horde to blame humanity for the loss. But would that really stop them bombarding the planet into submission?

He pushed his thoughts aside as the alien starships drew closer. It wouldn’t be long now.

“Picking up gravimetric fluctuations,” Kevin said, softly. “I think they’re decelerating.”

There was a ping from the display. “They’re dropped out of FTL,” Kevin added. “And they’re coming our way.”

“On screen,” Steve said. He chuckled, dispelling the tension. “I thought of that one yesterday.”

“Keith was saying that Star Trek was a poor excuse for an SF show,” Kevin joked. “We should have gone with Babylon 5 .”

Steve considered it. He’d watched all five seasons of Babylon 5 in Iraq, between patrols through dangerous cities and countryside. “Nah,” he said, finally. “I hated the fifth season.”

He looked up at the display as the two alien starships came into view. One of them looked to have been built by the same designers responsible for Shadow Warrior , as it looked like a large dagger ready to stick itself into its enemy’s heart. The other looked rather alarmingly like a giant crab, except it had three claws instead of two. With some imagination, it was possible to see how they might both be able to land on a planetary surface.