The Human Insurgency (3 page)

This was highly unusual. They only stayed near you
long enough to do their tests, but this one seemed to be just
staring at me. I knew that he could see the images in my head.
Could he make sense of them? Even if he could, what would he
think?

The Glowing One put something over my mouth and nose,
and suddenly my thoughts swam for oblivion. This happened every
time....every damn time. Still, I welcomed it. I imagined that I
might wake up somewhere else, another silly indulgence that kept me
going in this place.

When I awoke I found my clothes folded neatly beside
me. I hastily shrugged into them and saw that everyone else except
Myla had already stirred. We prepared to head up to Level 4. This
was our 'recreation' area and probably the most contradictory part
of our cubed prison. The Glowing Ones had furnished it with plunder
from Earth. That had to be the assumption, unless the Glowing Ones
had IKEA on their homeworld. Old, ratty couches, comfortable
armchairs, stools, plush sofas, a large monitor that played random
television programs, books, even board games. For a second you
could be forgiven for forgetting that you were a human captive on
an alien spacecraft.

That is, if you could ignore the purplish muck on the
floor, walls, and ceiling, and the strange artificial light that
never seemed to stay the same shade for more than ten seconds.

"Who wants to play?" Myla pulled out the game of
Life. My younger sister had been obsessed with this game since age
5. We'd not only played it, we'd made up our own bonus rules and
created additional house and profession cards, self-illustrated, to
go with our enhanced version. It felt unreal, doing something this
normal, as Oliver, Jobe, and Kane (with a noticeable sigh) sat in a
rough circle around the coffee table in the center of Level 4.

Myla insisted that doing these things was important.
Her argument ran that, if we could at least pretend things were
normal for a few minutes each day, then we'd be the stronger for
it. Oliver and Jobe had both violently disagreed, at least in the
beginning. It was the one thing that those two had ever agreed on.
But as the days had ground past, one after another, we soon
realized that the Glowing Ones weren't our only enemy. Boredom ran
a darn close second.

It was maybe a half hour into the game before I
noticed that something was wrong. The lights had steadied out at a
greenish tint. I looked at Jobe, and he looked sharply all
around.

Oliver shrugged. "What, you guys look like you saw a
ghost? So what? The stupid lights are staying the same color for
once. Who gives a damn?"

I looked around at the mucous-like muck covering the
surfaces of Level 4. No movement, and yet... Something didn't feel
right. After more than 12 weeks here anything not part of our daily
grind had to carry significance.

After a while even Oliver's face seemed to perk up.
It did feel inexplicably weird. When you'd grown accustomed to
constantly shifting color lighting your every movement for over
three months, this felt a little like seeing sunlight after a year
in the dark.

"What does it mean?" Myla asked softly.

"Do we have any idea what the Glowing Ones associate
with different colors?" Jobe asked.

Kane scratched his chin. "Where are you going with
this, man?"

"Red for humans usually means emergency. I know I'm
grasping at straws here, but does this mean something? Is it
possible that this is a ship-wide alert?"

"Wouldn't there be a siren or something audible?" I
asked.

Jobe shook his head. "Not necessarily. We've never
heard these things speak. We already know that they mainly
communicate mind to mind through imagery. It would make sense that
an alert would be purely visual for them."

Suddenly a section of the ceiling began to unravel,
opening up like a slimy hatch as the muck skittered away. Usually
the Glowing Ones did this to drop physical items from one Level to
another - like the clothes we received each morning. Not so at this
moment.

I put both hands to my mouth and gasped as the body
fell through. The slender corpse still glowed a bright orange, yet
its shimmering skin was fading, even I could tell that. The men,
reckless as so many young men through the ages, immediately
approached the body for a closer inspection.

"Get the hell back!" I yelled. Myla looked at me like
I'd turned demonic as the men froze.

"We don't know what's happened to that thing. Nothing
good can come from touching it. Look at it, but don't you dare
touch it. Let's agree on that as a ground rule, OK?"

Jobe, Oliver, and Kane all agreed to my condition.
Then, like a bunch of kids dissecting their first insect, they
knelt down for a closer look.

Jin's jeep navigated the strewn debris of what had
once been Beijing. His aides Meiyu, Ling, and Yanmei, rode with
him, and their convoy included a jeepful of PRC commandos in front
and behind. Jin had insisted on visiting the 'front.' Jin was a
voracious student of history, and past lessons had told him this:
any leader who allowed himself to become too insulated would also
become his own worst enemy.

Much as Jin hated doing this, much as he would love
nothing more than to hunker down in his underground bunker, this
was crucial. He had to see the carnage and destruction for himself.
He had to know what was happening to his people. Mangled corpses,
often twisted in the masonry that had crushed their fragile bodies,
littered almost every street. Out of the corner of his eye Jin saw
Meiyu put a hand over her face and repress the violent urge to
retch. Yanmei wasn't so lucky.

"More than 95% of the city has been reduced to
rubble." A grizzled soldier with awful burns scarring half his face
drove the jeep and served as tour guide.

Most people didn't die directly from the bombs. It
was what fell on you or the flames that asphyxiated you which
spelled the end. Or, in the case of three huge carrier-type ships,
a rain of deadly shrapnel which became nearly impossible for people
to dodge, and this was the result. Jin couldn't help but see
Beijing as a place of despair, a giant urban graveyard.
And we
are some of the lucky ones
, he realized with disbelief.
If
this is what victory looks like, what can we hope to see in the
face of defeat?

Jin thought of his twenty year-old son, one of the
thousands of young men recruited into the People's Liberation
Army's Shanghai Defense Force. It consisted of 3 divisions, each
two million strong. When it became clear that the Enemy had marked
Shanghai as an invasion priority, the military had pivoted in
response, pouring its resources into the struggle.
Where are you
now, Jie? Are you like one of these poor souls, lying dead and
unrecognized in the street as survivors pass you by, too busy in
their own misery to even notice you?

Then Jin felt anger and shame.
You don't have the
luxury to feel sorry for yourself, stupid, stupid man. There's work
to be done, damn you.

What would Chairman Mao say at a time like this? The
venerable father of the People's Republic of China had spoken much
about war and struggle. A Maoist saying suddenly trickled through
his thoughts.

What is a true bastion of iron? It is the masses, the
millions upon millions of people who genuinely and sincerely
support the revolution.

The more Jin mulled over those words, the more he saw
something else in the ruins of Beijing. He saw people salvaging any
scrap of value. He saw an elderly couple being helped by their
grandson and granddaughter. He saw a group of civilians that had
organized themselves into a work crew, busily clearing some of the
wider blocked avenues of debris. The more he saw all this, the more
he realized that he'd been wrong.

Victory still did look much different than defeat. He
could detect it in the purposeful resolve behind the ash-covered
faces of civilians and military folks alike. Even the burn-scarred
soldier at his side held himself with a kind of dignity.

"General Secretary - "

"Call me Jin. We are together in this revolution
against the Enemy. Please, just call me Jin."

"Please Sir, I cannot." Jin was shocked to see tears
in the man's eyes. "It has been said by the men and by some of the
higher officers who have spoken to the General that you have hardly
slept throughout the crisis. That you and General Chao have devised
a plan to save Shanghai. Is this true?"

Jin hated to kindle false hope in anyone's heart.
Still, he couldn't bring himself to say no. "Yes."

The soldier angrily wiped away the tears with the
back of his hand and drove on. "There will be no more talk of me
not calling you your title due, Sir. General Secretary, you are a
hero. I am proud to fight for our country knowing that you are
leading it. If you want someone to call you anything less, then
you'll have to find another driver, because I'm not worthy to do
that. I won't do that. Forgive me, Sir."

Jin had to suppress a grin. "I believe you've just
put me in my place, Lieutenant. I stand corrected." For the rest of
the tour through the battlefront, that thought kept Jin marveling.
Here he was, simply doing his job, and yet his example was
inspiring the common soldier on the ground. Soldiers that had never
seen or even met him before were now willing to die with him in
their thoughts.
Is humanity absolutely insane? We make about as
much sense as a puddle of mud, when you get down to it
, Jin
thought.

But that thought was encouraging too.
If humans
are capable of things far beyond what's rational, then perhaps the
Enemy will be helpless to predict how we will respond in extreme
conditions.
Had the Enemy underestimated humanity?

The smoking fragments of a once mighty assault ship
from another world stood testament to the openness of that
question.

General Meng was not an optimist. To the contrary, he
was the man who did more than just say that the glass was half
empty. He would also tell you that the glass was likely to spill,
that any manner of causes might even crush it, shatter it, or send
it flying into the nearest wall. He was a man who thought about all
contingencies and prepared for them.

All of which made General Meng either the biggest
pain in the ass or a superb tactician, depending on who you asked.
Civilian bureaucrats had one opinion of the man, his soldiers quite
another. He had spent a good portion of the sleepless night looking
at the message from General Chao's Beijing Command. Two fighters
were reportedly being sent with the new Dragon Missiles equipped.
Two cockroach fighters. The Enemy's own technology repurposed and
used against Him. Just the thought should've made the average
soldier giddy with the possibility. Proud of human ingenuity.

The average soldier General Meng was not, and that
dour-faced old fossil, now stooped with a spine as crooked as his
front teeth, saw it as a shot in the dark with no chance to
succeed. But that wasn't his job. His job was to do all in his
power to keep his city, his Shanghai, from the hands of the Enemy.
He would launch his surface-to-air missiles at the carrier ships as
soon as he received the transmission from the two infiltrating
cockroach fighters.

Much could go wrong. Who was to say that the Enemy
wouldn't simply recognize the Chinese-manned cockroach fighters as
rogue the moment they entered Enemy-occupied airspace? General Meng
knew what he had to do, though, to make this mission more likely to
succeed, despite its hopeless odds.

So at 7:43AM he launched the missiles.

The entire night the Enemy's five carrier assault
ships had been flinging fire and death throughout the city of
Shanghai. The Bund was nothing more than a smoking crater. The
river itself was on fire with ships that had bottlenecked
themselves in the lanes, trying to escape. They'd lit up the city
like a wicked bonfire. Ash and smoke still choked the struggling
sunrise.

General Meng listened to the dispatches from his
commanders as they came over the secure com link.

"Sir, the Enemy are showing something we haven't seen
before. There appear to be two troop transports, one landing north
and one landing south of the Huangpu on Luban Road. Our mortar
shells have no effect, I repeat, no effect."

Another commander's frantic voice reached him over
the com. Gunfire rattled and spat so that he could barely shout
over the chaos. "Sir, our small arms have minimal effect on their
troops. We can't hold them! Request to pull back!"

"Do not pull back! Stay and fight," General Meng
ordered. He listened quietly to the com as entire battalions of his
men were being wiped out. He could do this with complete calm for
one very simple reason. At last his aide, a young man named Jie,
son of the General Secretary, could stand it no longer.

"Sir, they're getting slaughtered out there! My God,
why don't you help them?"

He turned to the young man. The man had a handsome
face, expressive eyes wide with alarm. He pitied this young man, a
boy who should have been wooing his sweetheart rather than watching
a world shatter.

"Jie, do you trust me?"

With some reluctance the boy nodded. "That is good."
Meng slapped Jie across the face and the young man froze in
shock.

"Do you know what you're doing, boy? You're pitying
those soldiers. They don't need your pity, you young fool. They
have a job to do, and not only are they doing it, they're doing it
with honor and courage. Now keep your mouth shut and do your job.
Have I made myself clear?"

General Meng forgave the young man for his ignorance.
For the benefit of the young man, as the fierce sound of gunfire
grew more and more desperate, General Meng revealed a tidbit of the
truth.