Invasion

His voice caught in his throat as he spoke. “What are you going to do to me?”

The alien didn’t answer at first. “We must know how your race works,” she said, finally. It had the air of a brief answer intended for a child, not a serious answer, accurate and yet entirely useless. There was little point in vivisecting a live human – the odds were that they had recovered bodies from the remains of the ISS and perhaps the American space shuttle – but he doubted it was going to be pleasant. “We must know if we can live on your world safety.”

“Odd,” he observed. “You’ve started a war against us and you don’t even know if you can live on our world?”

The device lit up before the alien could answer. She moved it, carefully, over his body, paying careful attention to the implanted plate he had in his forearm, where he’d broken his wrist years ago while showing off to a girl. He couldn’t even remember her name now – she’d married someone from the army, if he recalled correctly – but at the time, impressing her had been much more important than it should have been. The alien spent an hour studying him through her sensors, the medical technology displaying a hologram in front of her of his insides, and then moved on to more invasive procedures.

“Ouch,” he said, as she started to draw a little blood from his arm. She either hadn’t heard of anaesthetic, or, more probably, she hadn’t wanted to risk an alien drug on a human. God alone knew what an alien painkiller would do to him. A normal blood sample wasn't painful, even though most humans maintained an irrational fear of needles, but the alien either wasn't gentle or simply didn’t have the right tools. It hurt. “Can you stop doing that, please?”

The alien female ignored him, examining the human blood through a microscope, picking it apart for information. The tests grew more invasive – she probed into each and every one of his orifices – and painful, but he tried to keep the protesting to a minimum. He would have sold his soul for another human in the room, even someone he disliked personally, but he was alone. It was another example, he suspected, of alien paranoia. They didn’t want their prisoners comparing notes.

Idiots, he thought, eyeing the alien out of the corner of his eyes. They would probably have learned more from what their prisoners said to one another. Instead, they’d separated them, just to keep them meek and helpless. Did they really think that they would break free of the alien guards and attack the crew?

“You will come with us,” the guards said finally, as the doctor – although that wasn't a title he would have willingly given to the alien medical expert – released him from his straps. The aliens seemed to have plenty of people who understood English. The guard caught his arm as he drifted into the air and pulled him out into the corridor, through a twisting maze marked only by alien writing, which looked like a dyslexic’s attempt at joined-up writing, and propelled him into a small cabin. It was almost empty, with only a sleeping pallet, a small toilet, water tap and a constant flow of air, blown through the ceiling to keep the air in motion. The door closed with enough force to send little shockwaves through the air; it only took a moment to check it and realise that it was locked.

Trapped, Philippe thought, and wondered what had happened to the others. He hadn’t seen them as the alien guards pulled him through the corridors. They had probably gone through the same examination as he had and then…then what? What did the aliens intended to do with them? Would they be given a message and sent back down to the planet, or would it be worse than that, or…what? Humans had done horrible things to prisoners of war in the past and the aliens might have worse things in store for them.

The wall lit up and revealed itself to be a display screen, showing an image of Earth taken from space. “You will answer our questions,” an emotionless alien voice said. It seemed to come from everywhere. “You will give us full and complete answers to our questions. Where on your planet do you come from?”

Philippe sighed and started to answer.

Chapter Nine

Honour? There ain't no honour in this war. The machine guns killed it. And if the machine-guns didn't, then the artillery did. And if the artillery didn't, then the chlorine gas sure as hell did.

– Harry Turtledove, Great War: American Front

Bastards, Joshua Bourjaily thought, as the live feed from the ISS showed the alien starship approaching the station. There’s no one going to profit from this, but NASA.