Their Darkest Hour (54 page)

Chris opened the door and stepped inside.  The alien looked up at him, his dark eyes seemingly expressionless.  Maybe the alien was hungry.  All the experts claimed that the aliens could eat human foods – they wouldn't want Earth if they couldn’t – but he hadn't touched the food he’d been given.  Perhaps he was trying to starve himself to death.

“You do realise that they will come for me?”  The alien said.  He had to repeat himself twice before Chris understood.  His English, spoken through an inhuman mouth, was mushy.  “You won’t be allowed to keep me.”

“They don’t know we have you,” Chris said.  The aliens had certainly not demanded his return.  But then, they’d said almost nothing to humanity since Operation Hammer.  “And even if they did, there’s one thing about humanity that you folks need to understand.”

The alien looked over at the wall.  “What?”

“We don’t give up,” Chris said.  “We will keep fighting until we’re free.”

The alien said nothing.

Chapter Forty-One

Deep Space

Day 70

“Don’t try to move,” a feminine voice said.  “You’ve had a nasty shock.”

Gavin opened his eyes.  He saw a young woman, wearing a shapeless tunic, bending over him.  It was so unexpected that he was almost convinced that he was in heaven.  And then he remembered...the aliens had attacked, they’d run...and something had knocked him over and out.  He was a prisoner.  There was no other explanation.

“Lie still,” the woman said.  “It takes a moment for your body to adapt to the change in the environment.  You’ll be on your feet in no time.”

She pushed something to his neck before he could object.  He felt a brief stab of pain, almost as if he’d been pricked with a needle, and guessed that he’d been injected with something.  A truth drug?  Something to make him pliable?  If the Leathernecks knew who he was, they’d want to interrogate him – and he knew what they did to make people talk.  He just hoped he could hold out long enough for his men to scatter, assuming they knew that he'd been captured.  The chaos as they’d retreated from Haddon Hall meant that they might not realise that the aliens had taken him alive.  Not even the Leathernecks could get answers out of a dead man.

He tried to sit up, only to feel his head spinning.  There was something subtly
wrong
about the environment.  The young woman put a hand around his shoulder and helped him to stand upright.  He had it a moment later, even though he’d never experienced anything like it in his entire life.  The gravity in the compartment was barely two-thirds of Earth’s gravity.  Some of the scientists had speculated that the Leathernecks came from a world that had a significantly lower gravitational field than Earth, he recalled, but he had dismissed it at the time.  The Leathernecks were so much stronger than the average human that he suspected it was the other way around.

“Who...”  His throat hurt.  He had to swallow hard before he could finish the sentence.  “Who are you?”

“Sharon Cordova, United States Marine Corps,” she said, briskly.  “I was a medic before the invasion, which is why they put me in here.”  She shrugged.  “You seem to have come through the suspension process unharmed.  Some guys swear blind that they remained aware even though they were floating in a stasis field.”

Gavin stared at her, confused.  She smiled at him.  “If you’re feeling better, I have someone you need to meet.”

“One moment,” Gavin said.  The gravity wasn’t the only odd thing about their environment.  He could feel a faint queasiness in the back of his mind, hear a constant thrumming just loud enough to be on the edge of perception.  “Are we prisoners?”

Sharon grinned.  “Not exactly,” she said, as she helped him towards the door.  It opened as they approached, revealing a compartment large enough for a small party of Leathernecks.  “Like I said, I have someone you need to meet.”

Gavin walked through the door and stopped dead, unable to believe his eyes.  The Leathernecks were humanoid, if not human.  Some of the scientists had speculated that humanoid was evolution’s default form, suggesting that all the old TV shows with humanoid aliens might have had a point after all.  But...the alien in front of him was anything, but humanoid.  A great mass of orange-gold tentacles, constantly spinning around the central egg-shaped mass...his mind almost refused to grasp its existence.  The body – he assumed it was the alien’s body – seemed featureless.  There were no eyes, no mouth...no way of deducing how the alien collected data about its environment.  Merely looking at it made him dizzy.  It seemed to be incapable of remaining motionless.

“This is Protector Hank,” Sharon said.  She had the grace to look embarrassed.  “They don’t have names, not like us – we had to call him something.”

“I am very pleased to meet you,” Hank said.  It’s voice seemed to come from a small device hanging below the central body.  The alien certainly sounded a great deal more natural than anything the Leathernecks had ever produced.  “We have a great deal to talk about.”

“I think I need to sit down,” Gavin said.  “And perhaps something to eat.”

“Certainly,” Hank said.  The alien didn't need to turn; it just started wobbling its way down the corridor.  Gavin wondered if the alien had had its back to him, before realising that ‘front’ and ‘back’ probably meant little to the aliens.  They could head in any direction they liked without turning, leaving him wondering how they saw.  Some form of mental vision?  A sense of perception?  Or maybe they saw through their tentacles.  “We have become accustomed to feeding humans over the last few weeks.”

***

“They captured me in Missouri,” Sharon explained, twenty minutes later.  They were seated around a table that had clearly been designed for humans, rather than Leathernecks...or Hank’s race.  “We had a base camp for wounded there – somehow, they discovered our location and raided us, rather than dropping a hammer on our heads.  They took us off-world, loaded us into suspension pods...and the next thing we knew, the Leatherneck ship had been captured by our new friends.  I think they’d been lurking around Earth for the past few months, waiting for a chance to stick a spanner in the works.”

“That is correct,” Hank said.  “We took advantage of the remoteness of your planet to cause one of their ships to go missing.  They will not understand what has happened until it is far too late.”

Gavin stared at the alien.  “You mean to say you did nothing while they invaded our world?”

“You misunderstand the nature of interstellar travel and communications,” Hank informed him.  “It can take months to travel between stars.  By the time we discovered that the Leathernecks had found you, it was already too late to intervene – they had already dispatched the Conquest Force.  There was nothing we could do, but watch and wait for an opportunity to act.”

There was a long pause.  “We first encountered them roughly two hundred of your years ago,” Hank added.  “It was hate at first sight.  We spent fifty years fighting them before coming to a reluctant agreement that neither of us were likely to win outright.  The victor in the conflict would be badly weakened, while the loser would be pushed to the brink of extermination.  And that would have...consequences.  We made a truce with them.  Since then, both of us have been pushing out as far as we can, attempting to gain a decisive advantage before the war resumes.  Your world was invaded and occupied as part of that process.”

“They want to add our technology to their own,” Gavin said, softly.  “And start using us as expendable fighters too...”

“They tend to think in terms of brute force,” Hank observed.  “Their socio-political development led not to the victory of capitalism, as on your world, but a fascist state that managed to overcome many of the flaws that threatened to bring it crashing down.  They were quite successful at absorbing the rebels, the thinkers, into their system.  Those who might point out that the Emperor has no clothes, to use one of your world’s sayings, end up supporting the State.”

“You seem to know us very well,” Gavin observed.

“We have...sources within the Leatherneck State,” Hank said.  “They collected a great mass of data on your world’s society, even if much of it made little sense to their researchers.”

Gavin smiled.  “People who realise that the Emperor has no clothes?”

The alien didn’t bother to deny it.  “Unfortunately, their traditional way of coping with the universe – brute force – has given them an advantage over you,” it said.  “You barely started to exploit space – they had massive space stations in orbit within twenty years of developing rocket technology.  From there, they eventually cracked the secrets behind warp drive – and they did it with computers inferior to yours.

“There is some speculation that someone else gave them a hand,” Hank added, “but there has never been any proof of outside interference.  Your world’s history should inform you that predicting technological development is a difficult task.  The Leathernecks approach problems from a different angle to your own race, but that doesn’t make them stupid.  They have already crushed your world.”

“Yes,” Gavin said, flatly.  “Are you going to destroy their ships in orbit?”

“An open act of war would restart the conflict,” Hank said.  “We would prefer to avoid outright conflict before we were ready to win.”

“You captured one of their ships,” Gavin pointed out.  “Isn't that an act of war?”

A human would have smirked.  “Not if the Leathernecks never find out what happened to their ship,” Hank countered.  “And they won’t.  Ships go missing all the time.”

“Maybe the Leathernecks are capturing your ships,” Gavin said, dryly.

“It’s possible,” Hank agreed.  He didn’t sound particularly concerned.  “Both sides have been pushing the truce to the limits.”

“Right,” Gavin said.  “So...what are you going to do to help?”

“Provide you with support,” Hank said.  “Provide you with weapons.  Provide you with tools you can use against your alien overlords.  Help you to recover your world.”

“And you’d get an ally for the coming war,” Gavin said.  He couldn’t say no.  Whatever had happened back on Earth, they needed help if they were to kick the Leathernecks off the planet.  “When do we start?”

Hank’s tentacles seemed to slow, just for a second.  “How about now?”

End of Part One

The Story Will Continue In:

The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea