"—tay calm. Refugees from Melantho have just been settled into auditoriums and sports stadiums in the cities of Icarius, Asphodel, and Hallack. Governor Mackenzie and Commander Van Felsen are relieved that casualties, so far, are light and urge all civilians not to resist the aliens. We turn to our cams on-site across Melantho, so far the only city the aliens have claimed in its entirety across the continents of Ithaca, Sisyphus, and Sparta. . . ."
Jennifer started as the door chimed, got up, and opened it to let Corporal Wismer in. "Hello, Jonathan," she said absently, glancing past him to see if anyone else was around.
The street, with its quaint old row houses, looked very odd, almost deserted in the bright, hazy light of late afternoon that brought out the sweet scent of the Heliobarbus trees all along the boulevard. People would have been out at this time of day, just after supper. Everyone was staying in, except for Mrs. Jarvis who insisted on her routine and was out gardening. Her Terra Originalis roses took precedence even over alien invasion. It wasn't as if bricks and mortar would save anyone should the aliens decide to flatten a block but people felt safer. In the distance she could hear the odd sound that marked an alien small ship overflying the city.
Jen closed the door behind the young corporal who set down his case just inside. "Can I offer you a cup of coffee, Jon?"
"No thank you, Ma'am. I'll just find my way downstairs." To relieve Diane. Corporal Narejko, that was. Jen liked the young man's old-fashioned Neopent manners, but having a surveillance team in the basement wasn't the world's most pleasant of things. She sighed and went into the kitchen to run a pot of coffee anyway. The surveillance team would want some, she was sure. Aside from making coffee she officially ignored the people coming and going into their basement, and like half the planet waited to see what the aliens' next move would be.
She sighed and headed out to load "Summer Day" into the truck. It was a commission she'd gotten for a local garden café and you did your best to keep on as though everything was normal, as normal as you could with one of the hastily organized teams working out of her and 'Sandro's basement.
She hadn't figured out a way to tell Alessandro yet, and it just never seemed like a good time to bring it up. She'd have to tell him soon. Her morning sickness was getting worse and now that he wasn't out in the asteroid belt half the time he'd notice soon. She settled into the cab but instead of starting the vehicle, she sat in the peculiar closed silence and put her head down on the steering wheel. I can't sit here all day. For all that she was more tired than expected, she couldn't just crawl into bed and wait for 'Sandro to come home, or for the aliens to decide that they didn't like the look of their block and reduce it to slag. At her touch on the pad the old truck hummed into life and rolled out of the alley on its parking wheels before lifting gently onto its ground effect. She'd stay at street level. It was only prudent.
The minor command center was one of a dozen on the planet and Van Felsen and the remaining Marines had abandoned the main base. This center was in the middle of a cluster of lakes on Sisyphus, chosen purely on sheer luck. The aliens seemed to favor the barren seacoasts and rain forest regions of the planet.
Outside, she knew, at this latitude the season was autumn and the rolling hills were just past the fiery display of leaves, leaving them rolling gray and flashed with bright yellow of Fell Larches. The lakes were already cold and dark under deep blue skies. Van Felsen was deeply affected by cold, even though she knew it was mostly psychological, and deep in lower levels of the base where this conference room was, she knew it was as perfectly climate controlled as a ship in space, but she still crossed her arms and tucked her hands casually into her armpits as she called the half a dozen people to order.
Around the table were mostly junior officers, excepting herself and Captain Falco who headed up the communications team. Lieutenants Heide, Adams, and Kovyazin and Ensign Monta–o were what she had. Lieutenant Heide, a weedy man with thinning mousy hair and a scholar's stoop, called up the initial analysis over the table and stood to present his findings.
"Commander, we've all seen the aliens and this is our analysis of the variations in the species." Images of the dark variants and the gold variants flashed into view. "In all of the images there is no significant change of expression and we cannot tell if the color changes of the tegument are related to emotional changes of any kind, since we don't have enough information to correlate. Captain Falco's teams has not been able to make the translators any more consistent and it is providing a significant problem in my data analysis."
Considerably more problems than with your data. Van Felsen squelched the thought and refrained from even quirking an eyebrow at Falco. Heide was the best they had. The man was a cold fish who lacked empathy and he didn't even realize that that was why his promotions had come so slowly, and why he hadn't been one of the higher-ranking officers they'd lost on Acrocotinth. Falco didn't respond but she could see the muscles of his jaw clench from here. They were all under strain, trying to cope with the invasion and keep any more people from being killed. And fight back, once we have enough information.
"Thus, we are reduced to grunting and waving of hands."
"And shooting people, Lieutenant," Van Felsen commented dryly. "I will remind everyone that when the aliens speak, they speak once and the translator does the best it can. Then if you do not comply they shoot you. Even if you happen to be three years old."
There was a clenching, a rage barely contained all around the table; that went right over the lieutenant's head. He merely looked confused and vaguely insulted that he'd been interrupted and then went on with all the grace and tact of a bull Aurochs in an art gallery. "Commander, I am forced to speculate that these aliens are like the Arachnids. We never did achieve communication with them."
Everyone else around the table reacted to that, a slight tensing, a struggle to keep a face straight instead of breaking into a fight grimace, the clenching of teeth. Van Felsen had the gut reaction herself and could see the quiver in her people all around the table at the mention of the Bugs. It didn't matter if they had combat experience or not. It was a reaction to the most horrible alien people had ever encountered, horrible in all the ancient hind-brain, atavistic ways: totally silent, hairy, multilegged, bulging bodies, swift moving, and the perfect size to prefer sucking people's children dry.
The idea of their existence still gave people howling nightmares and the mildest response was nausea at this too-casual connection. Lieutenant Heide, charmer that he was, missed it completely.
"Commander, that is what I have for you."
"Thank you, Lieutenant." With relief she watched him sit down and turned to the peach-faced youngster down the table to her left. "Ensign, if you please."
Ensign Nicholas Monta–o was surprisingly calm to be presenting, but just by the number of times he'd checked his notes before this briefing had started, she knew how nervous he really was. Of course, when this crisis was over he'd have just as tough an audience when he finished his thesis and defended his doctorate in xenopsychology. A lot of the reservists had been university students.
As he stood, Heide just had to open his inept mouth one more time. "We never did establish any kind of communications with the Arachnids."
She could just have punched him herself as the feeling of horror and despair curdled in the room. The man's effect on morale was disastrous. Van Felsen cleared her throat. "We'll trust that this is not the case this time, Lieutenant. The Bugs seem to have been an anomaly, thank goodness. I'm sure we'll eventually be able to talk to these aliens." She nodded at Ensign Monta–o, who had been patiently standing, waiting for her to squelch Heide yet again. He swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat, before beginning.
"They've settled approximately three point five million beings on planet already, with housing and infrastructure." He brought up the map, showing the alien settlements in yellow, the human cities and towns in blue. Fortunately there was very little green overlap since the aliens tended to favor the smaller islands and coastlines away from human cities.
"Infrastructure? Already?" That was Lieutenant Adams down the table. In days the alien cities had burgeoned along coastlines all over the planet.
"Yes, Lieutenant." Monta–o paused to run a hand through his thick brown hair. "They have not yet noticed our stealthed cameras—"
"—or haven't bothered to respond to them," Falco put in.
"Or that, Sir, yes. It appears that they have broken up their big ships and have used them both as smaller ships and raw materials for their cities, somewhat like a connective toy being pulled apart into components."
"They're here to stay."
"Yessir, I would say so." The ensign hesitated before continuing. "Melantho is the only city that they've just taken over entirely and almost all casualties happened there. Aside from . . ." His voice trailed off.
He stopped and adjusted the light pen lying on the desk in front of him, obviously reluctant to continue, then looked up. "The aliens are very efficient in the removal of severely injured and dead." He stopped to swallow again "They don't appear to have medics for more than minor injuries. Anyone badly injured seems to be treated as already dead. Something that the translator has not yet managed is said, the injured one is shot and incinerated. They are treating our injured in the same way."
He paused and there was silence in the room before Lieutenant Adams broke the stillness by shoving up from the table and turning away. "Excuse me, Sir." He was shaking.
Commander Van Felsen, sick at the confirmation of rumors that even she had heard nodded at the ensign. He cleared his throat, tugging at his collar slightly. "They get someone to clear up the—debris." Even the aliens' pin-sized incendiary devices didn't incinerate a body completely. When the three-year-old and his mother had been shot, and the father for trying to stop the incineration of the bodies, it had triggered a riot that had caused the aliens to retreat to their tenders and create what analysts tended to call "a salutary example." The whole town had been wiped off the map. Fifteen hundred civilians gone, just like that. Things had gotten tenser after that, but the aliens had proceeded to build their own cities and landed their own people with no further atrocities.
"They are like machines, sir. Their language has zero inflection. Their color changes, as Lieutenant Heide said, outside of the context of anything said."
"We'll take that under advisement, Ensign."
"Yes, Sir. That's all." He sat down and Van Felsen waited for Lieutenant Adams to get control of himself.
She took a sip of her water as he sat down and smiled at them. "I have some good news. Falco, the Orion news team has offered their services. Since they have military rank, however honorary, they consider themselves under command and I'll take every expert in alien thought and language I can get. I understand that Showaarth'sekakhu-jahr—" She paused to cough as her abused vocal cords protested as she made her best attempt at the Orion name. "—has an advanced degree in xeno-psychology herself, Orion style."
Falco, looking as though he wanted to say something along the lines of "Oh shit, hurrah" nodded and schooled his expression. As far as she knew he didn't belong to one of the violently anti-Orion faiths so he'd be all right working with them.
"And one of the strikefighters made it back."
"All right!" Monta–o subsided back into his chair abruptly as sudden smiles were suppressed all around the table.
"Although the expression was unorthodox, Ensign, the sentiment is appreciated," Van Felsen said quietly. "Unfortunately it is a wreck and quite impossible to fix. We, however, do not treat our people the way these tentacled horrors do and Lieutenant Chong will be back on the duty roster soon. I'm sure when this is all over some idealistic monument sculptor will have him standing heroically gazing skyward next to his wreck, but he was a bit more bashed up than that."
She shut down the faintly cascading "wait-mode" display over the desk. "Thank you, gentlemen. Carry on. Unless something of note comes up we will continue these briefings. Dismissed."
Ankaht gently closed the lid on the memory box and it sealed itself with a faint hiss of vacuum as she laid it in the hole and began burying it. It was a good place for such a cairn. Her first for this new home. (Quiet grief, acceptance.) All the old memories buried on Ardu would have no one left alive to find them, even if they were buried deep enough to escape Sekahmant. The Voices of Illudor were still debating whether planets had soul and were reborn.
She stood up and wiggled her tentacles to clear them of dirt, dragging claws over each other to clear the soil off them. The clay was white on this rise of land overlooking the cliffs and the sea beyond, and much more inclined to stick than that of the last place she'd buried a memory. But it would be a few lives before she was inclined to come back to this place and even if the purple- and vrel-colored sea below wore away the pink sand beach and the granite cliff, it wouldn't reach this spot. The sun was warm on her neck and she stretched, gloating in the sheer luxury of uncontrolled space. As shaxzhu she had less trouble adjusting to being on planet. Trouble, ha. I am positively luxuriating in it. Especially since, by necessity, my office space is unfortunately ugly. She sat down in the grass, closed her eyes, feeling the wind on her face. Wonderful. (Deep contentment, thread of worry.) She thought of the beach near her father-in-this-life's villa and was suddenly smitten with intense homesickness. A cloud passed over the sun and she did miss the fiery pinprick of light that had destroyed everything they knew. The light truly was dimmer and some colors would be forever wrong but that was a tiny price to pay for being out of the ship. This gravity could not be easily modified by anyone. She fisted up one of her hands and pounded on the dirt with it, just to feel it, just to shotan and absorb it all. It was home, it was real. (Happiness.)
Then her gaze moved away from the pristine sand to the roughed in new city of Punt and her narmata soured. Over thirteen hundred years there had been refinements and modifications made to allow the swift dismantling and creation of new homes from the ships they'd arrived in, but the Dispersal had changed over the generations of traveling and careful plans for spacious homes on the new planet had been scrapped when the settlers refused to live so far apart from each other. They had left a few of the individual homes as built and cobbled houses together in clusters of tentacles that to Ankaht's eyes looked odd and ugly. All of the public garden spaces had been cleared. None of the shiplings wanted any private gardens other than smooth-paved spaces because no one but the hydroponics engineers wanted to deal with the problems of real plants growing in dirt. Dirt. Everyone but those who remembered clearly complained constantly of dirt.
Insects were a huge problem and the younglings tended to either flee the fliers and crawlers of this world, or try to stamp them out of existence. Even though everyone had trained for planet surface with holographic simulations there were things that were just too controlled. Everyone was complaining of the blowing dust. And wind. It had rained four times since they'd begun Punt and there was an outcry that no one had warned them it would.
The weather satellites would only predict general weather patterns once they were functioning and had enough data to predict patterns on this world, with no moon and only solar tides. The sodium in the water, the stinging sea things, the odd textures and smells. It was all cause for complaint, disturbance in the narmata, the emotional storms of selnarm.
The admiral had his claws full with trying to deal with, or defend against, the griarfeksh. They were absolutely terrifying in their resemblance to real people but with no ability to communicate.
She shaded her eyes to look across the bay where the griarfeksh city lay. It was attractive in a way that she hadn't expected, graceful and fragrant boulevards and buildings of the pink granite, tucked into the opposite cliff like a leafworm scarf, but she shook her head and looked away. No matter how elaborate a structure could be built by a zifrik colony, it didn't make them people.
With the Anaht'doh Kainat having so much trouble with the planet surface, it had fallen to her and all the clusters of shaxzhu to ease the transition onto the planet. But as time went on there were increasing numbers of individuals and even whole clusters who were showing signs of xen-narmatum, mental illness that could infect the healthy through the selnarm so they had to be identified and removed from the main population before everyone was affected through the give and flow. No one had seen such illnesses in centuries before the Dispersal and everyone had assumed that the tendency had just been selected out. After all clusters and macroclusters affected with the illness tended to destroy themselves. Now it had all landed in her claws.
There was a flying creature circling far above and she watched it, her central eye shut against the sunlight. How do I break it to the esteemed admiral that a whole ship has recently decided that they will not come down? They insist that we need orbital colonies and they refuse to set foot here. Daihd passed the word on to me after the fighting stopped and made it clear that enormous numbers of the young ones consider it a dueling matter. Sometimes I think all Destoshaz are xen-narmatum.
She got up and picked up her digging tool, slinging it into the unit on her belt before walking down to her flyer. She'd already stretched the time she could reasonably allot to a sohkata exercise. It was time to get back to her ugly little office space.
"Illudor's claws and tentacles, Torhok, you can't just let them keep running around all over the planet like that!"
The senior admiral didn't pause in his slow stretching as his best friend and senior cluster commander ranted, flooding the exercise room with (Rage, fear, passion to convince.). It was just the way he was and one of the ways he tended to warm up for maatkah sparring. He was deadly when it came to jolting his opponent off balance by lightning strikes of selnarm in addition to the mock skeerba, or "claw-knives." The skeerba was a band with three teeth that projected up like an additional set of claws; there were only one or two authentic old skeerba "teeth" that they had brought for examples. It was unlikely that anyone would want to re-create that particular predator on the new world, except perhaps in animal keeping clusters. But that was still to be debated. In the meantime the traditional skeerba wasn't even carved of bone any longer but was a high-density razor-sharp plastic.
The exercise room was the common one on the Hurusankham in orbit around New Ardu, empty at this hour, with the massive reduction of personnel onboard. It was a large enough cubic that it was almost as good as having a maatkah training circle. It had no corners and all the equipment folded away into the niches, the illumination turned to maximum, like High Light on Old Ardu, washing out the pale blue walls and floor pads.
Torhok needed this workout more than he needed sleep at the moment and he ignored Iakkut's rage as he fitted a sheath over his claws. The brain would note any contact and call points. It was an ancient conceit that painted the edges of the sheaths with dye to mark skin. (Concentration, concentration of purpose, focus.) He kept up his selnarm to shield himself, to distance himself, from the narmata between them. You know they're vermin! They fight like animals—defend themselves as if they are never going to be reborn."
"Enough, Iakkut. We should be glad that whatever they are, they are providing enormous quantities of highly refined material for us, already in orbit." He stepped up to the edge of the circle marked in the matting, flexing his tentacles to settle the claw sheaths before he took up the skeerba.
"That hardly makes up for blowing up half of our fabricating facilities!" Iakkut was a hybrid form, dark skinned but tall, and a formidable Destoshaz. Even as he spoke he was stepping up to his side of the circle. They both paused a long moment before kneeling, each setting the skeerba on the mat in front of their knees. Into the silence, the mechanical brain chimed once.
Neither of them moved but they strained against one another in the traditional selnarm opening, each trying to force the other onto the defensive. A maatkah match between two masters sometimes never moved to the physical level at all, other than a twitch of inner eyelid or a clenching of grinders.
Torhok strained (Victory.) against Iakkut's (Win), shifted to (Will.) and he retreated to (Resistance.).
(Will, force, focus, I will this.)
(Resistance, stubborn, stolid, granite.)
(Water.)
Iakkut snatched up the skeerba and rolled into the circle in a fluid motion that used Torhok's selnarm flow to make it even stronger, intending to trap the other's weapon against the floor before he could seize it, but it was already in Torhok's fisted cluster and Iakkut was forced to avoid claw strike and tumbled into (Wave Rising) to make it to his feet, but he was still retreating. Torhok spun in a standing somersault and blocked him finishing but he slide into (Cliff Face) and Torhok bounced, landing hard.
(Wall Falling) from Iakkut would have ended it but (Earth Shaking) threw him off and the admiral bound his legs and landed on his chest holding a skeerba to his neck, two of the three teeth pricking skin.
The machine chimed.
"Good!" Iakkut sent. (Pleasant, pleased, surprised.) "But I'll beat you best four out of six."
"Not since we were in our birth cluster, oaf." (Relief of tension, clarity.) Torhok let his friend up and they shook out their tentacle clusters before kneeling to begin again.
At the end of six they were both wet from exertion and considerably calmer of mind. "Thank you for your input." Torhok's voice was somewhat overridden by the dryer as they stood under the jets of warm air.
"You're welcome. I'll owe you dinner any time you please." (Humor, amusement.)
Torhok paused to look (Twitch of amusement.). "Unless you find more practice time you won't ever have to suffer my choice of menu."
"It's not that, my friend." Iakkut shut the box with the skeerbah in it. "You are more convinced of the creatures' monstrosity than I am and it gives you an edge. (Revulsion, rage.) I should know better than to mention them before sparring you."
While Iakkut talked Torhok just stood, listening, leaning on the wall. "Old friend. I think you are right. And I know that we've just driven them off for now. I fully intend to make this planet safe for Illudor's children, if I have to rip open space where they disappeared with my bare claws and follow them. (Implacability.) So you don't need to push me."
"Yes, Senior Admiral! (Amusement, relief.) I'll push my cluster engineers instead of you, agreed?"
(Wall of granite.)