Invasion

Loomis shook his head as he took in the sight to the north. The air base had been attacked, somehow; there was a massive mushroom cloud forming over the base. His basic training reasserted itself and he glanced down at his terminal, relieved to find out that there had been no EMP to disable it, which suggested that the blast hadn’t been nuclear. Speculation on alien weapons had been rampant in the guard force and several of the soldiers had believed that the aliens would deploy asteroids from orbit…and, well as far as Loomis was concerned, it was as good an explanation as any.

He keyed his radio. “Base, this is Delta-Seven,” he said, as calmly as he could. If the base had been destroyed – and, from their distance, it looked to have been completely destroyed – what the hell did they do? They didn’t have emergency plans to cover the complete destruction of the base. The worst they’d anticipated had been a terrorist attack using a nuke. “This is Delta-Seven; base, come in!”

There was no reply.

Chapter Eight

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue – and thoroughly immoral – doctrine that ‘violence never solves anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

– Starship Troopers

The aliens, as enigmatic and faceless as ever, escorted their human prisoners down the middle of a long shaft. It could easily have been a corridor or a vertical shaft, Francis realised; the absence of gravity only meant that people could swim through the corridors in any direction. The shaft was as dark and featureless as the aliens, hidden behind their armour, but he could see signs of construction that suggested that the aliens hadn’t bothered with finesse. There were hints of welding scars and maybe even battle damage on the passageway, while the aliens themselves seemed bright and new. There was an uncertain crudity about the entire construction, as if the aliens had decided that ‘good enough’ was better than ‘the best,’ at least for their starships. There was a certain something about it that, somehow, reminded him of Soviet and Russian machines.

He caught Gary’s eye and watched as the former commander studied the alien technology. Francis would have given his right teeth to share observations with someone who might actually know more than pop science and speculations based on vague recollections of various stories of the space age that had never been, but they didn’t dare take the risk. Even if the aliens didn’t understand English now, they would in time, and then they would play back the recordings of everything the humans said to each other, testing their captives. Resistance was probably futile, but looking at the aliens, it was evident that they were taking no chances. Stark naked, weaponless, defenceless, they were helpless…but the aliens were still treating them as dangerous opponents.

Bastards, Francis thought, looking up towards one of the aliens. The featureless helm gazed back impassively. He tried to see some hint of the alien’s features under the black mask, but it was hopeless; the alien mask didn’t even show his own reflection. The alien, attached to the floor by obviously magnetic boots, merely gave him another push down the shaft…or perhaps it was along the corridor. It was growing harder to maintain a sense of reality as they were pushed further into the alien spacecraft.

“That’s an airlock,” Gary said suddenly, as they reached a massive hatch, set into what was now obviously the corridor wall. The airlock looked more like a typical safe door from an old movie about bank robbers, but Gary was almost certainly right. The gunmetal construction had the same crudeness about it as the rest of the ship, but there was no denying that it was actually capable of carrying out its task and keeping the air inside the ship. It opened, automatically, as the small group approached and the aliens escorted them into a small chamber, and then into a second.