The Human Insurgency (2 page)

"I couldn't sleep, Meiyu. I had to see my children."
Tears formed under Jin's sleep-deprived eyes. Meiyu tried to wipe
them away, but suddenly there was no need. The tears stopped like a
shut-off valve when the red alert flashed on Jin's main monitor. He
rushed to the swivel chair.

He opened the com and turned on the video-feed.
"General Secretary Jin! Sir, are you there?"

"Wei. This is he."
Goddamn the formalities. When
will they do as I ask and call me Jin?
Humanity was funny that
way. As the American saying went, the world was going 'To hell in a
hand basket.' And yet somehow many of the communist cadres still
alive were obsessed with the shape, color, and weaving of that hand
basket.

"Most esteemed Secretary, it is my privilege to
report -"

"Spit it out, man!"

"General Chao's forces have routed the carrier group
in Beijing. The city is free of threat, and the Enemy is in full
retreat."

Jin's fists clenched in triumph, but his heart sank
at the following news.

"A second carrier cluster has begun its assault on
Shanghai. General Meng is engaging the Enemy, but we haven't had
time to deploy the new weapon there yet. We may lose the city."

The slight, wiry and bespectacled leader of a nation
that had once boasted nearly two billion people could do nothing
but feel his heart drilling a pit through his stomach. "Very well.
Keep me informed as news becomes available. Is that all? "Jin
asked.

"Yes, General Secretary."

Jin found it nearly impossible to get back to sleep.
He pored over the latest worldwide reports. The situation grew
grimmer and grimmer globally. He looked at the latest report from
the northern front.

General Secretary, father and hope of the Chinese
People,

May your resolve be strengthened knowing that the
Party and the People are behind you!

Our intelligence reports show that the battlefront is
intensifying. The forces in Russia are fighting the Enemy from
Moscow to St. Petersburg. Vladivostok has fallen to the Enemy. Our
sources there have shown that the Enemy is landing troops en masse,
the first of this kind and scale that we can recognize. But the
Russian partisans are putting up a spirited defense, using the city
itself as a battlefield of carnage from which the Enemy will surely
find a quagmire.

Jin grimaced. The language of the report, probably
written by some low-level aide, was almost as appalling as the
sugar-coated optimism that made him want to choke. Despite Jin's
best efforts, most of his subordinates still told him what he
wanted to hear. It was the traditional Chinese way - save face at
any cost. It was also a damn good way to lose a war, but Jin was
fortunate to have reports coming from enough sources that his
skeptical brain could piece together what wasn't being said.

"What is it?" Meiyu asked. Her nakedness temporarily
distracted him as her gentle hands massaged his neck. "You know
what I always say?" she urged.

"Yes, yes. That it will help me if I talk about
it."

"And?" she needled, smiling despite his frown.

"And dragon's guts, is what! I've just been informed
that the Enemy has gained a rock-hard foothold in Vladivostok,
Russia and put down all resistance. For all we know they could be
swarming inland or preparing to use it as a port. My generals are
too busy fighting or dying to even give me a proper analysis, so I
have to filter truth from teenage boys while every able-bodied man
does his share. That's what I have to say to your 'And,'
Meiyu."

Jin's eyes softened though, and Meiyu recognized that
the dog was all bark and no bite.

"Come here," Jin sighed. Meiyu sat on his lap, her
arms draped around his neck. Her eyes searched his before she spoke
softly.

"I do love you. Whatever happens, consider what China
has accomplished this day."

"Accomplished?" Jin gestured disgustedly at the heap
of reports on his desk. "We've saved one city among dozens. Hardly
an accomplishment."

"I've snuck my share of peeks at what you've been
reading, Jin. I know about these carrier groups. That there are at
least 12 of them, 8 ships each, flying over nations across the
world. But now half of one has been destroyed. China has done what
all the rest of the world has been unable to do until now."

"Meiyu, that doesn't even begin to take into account
the larger vessels in orbit around the Earth." There were four of
these so-called 'mother ships' that had been so unoriginally
labeled by the worldwide media. Each one was the size of a large
island.

Jin's first aide and confidant stroked his cheek.
"That doesn't diminish what's been done. Focus for now on the
problem at hand. What will the Enemy do if we eliminate an entire
carrier group? For once they will have to react to us." He knew
what she meant. She wasn't telling him that he had to ignore the
bigger picture. But she was trying to knock it into his thick skull
that he couldn't try to divide all his anxieties across the globe.
Do what you could do something about before you lost sleep over
something ten thousand miles away
.

He nodded. "You're right." And just then an idea
struck him.

Two minutes later Meiyu was dressed and had gone to
make tea, rationed though it was. She knew better than to get in
his way when he was in such an agitated state.

Jin waited patiently, going through channel after
channel. Contacting the low-level aide, being sent up to the
lieutenant, captain, all the way up the damnable chain. He wouldn't
settle for anyone beneath General Chao. Though Jin was
theoretically the civilian and military leader of the whole
government, in this time of chaos each General might as well have
been the master of his own kingdom. At last after the better part
of an hour of cajoling and waiting, Jin heard the knock on his
door. He called for the General to come in.

General Chao was a stocky, well-built man with a
beard unruly as brambles. His hooded eyes betrayed nothing, not
even the sleep-deprived haze that Jin knew they both shared.

"General, forgive me, but this conversation needed to
be face-to-face."

The General nodded absently as Meiyu handed him a cup
of tea and then faded invisibly into the background - though not,
Jin noted, out of earshot.

"The earlier reports I've been getting have said that
we still haven't been able to salvage a single one of the Enemy's
small fighters. Apparently not a single fighter has been shot
down."

General Chao smiled grimly. "Actually I'm afraid
you've been misinformed. We can't seem to hit through the cockroach
fighter's armor with anything conventional. In this sense we
haven't shot down a single one. But we discovered during the battle
that with each carrier destroyed a large section of cockroach
fighters fell to ground. This has confirmed the strategy I
suspected, that these cockroach fighters may be unmanned drones
which require control from their carrier of origin."

My God. So this is what they call the fog of war,
where even ground-breaking discoveries aren't shared with the
supreme leadership
, Jin thought.

"Would it be possible to make any of them air-worthy
again, flying under their own power? Use them as a delivery system
for our Dragon Missiles?" This was the new weapon, the missiles
that could use fusion energy to literally obliterate matter. They'd
thrown prior known physics into chaos.

General Chao shrugged. "We are doing all that we can,
General Secretary. The truth of it is that yes, we could do this.
They are maneuverable enough so that we could even use them as a
delivery device for a Dragon Missile against the carrier group in
Shanghai."

Jin nodded. This was crucial. The Dragon Missiles had
had to be deployed as surface-to-air missiles. Even though they
could be converted for air-to-air combat, that proved moot because
the Enemy had wiped out the Chinese air force in the first wave of
attacks. If these cockroach fighters could be repurposed, God, it
could eventually turn the tide.

Wait. Did he just say what I think he said?
Jin had been hoping that they could grind out the conflict long
enough to repurpose those cockroach fighters for Dragon Missiles,
but that was a process he'd assumed would take months, even years,
a longshot that would eventually make the difference. How in the
Great Buddha's name did the General think he could use them in a
matter of hours or days??

"General, forgive me for being blunt. What makes you
think that you can even hope to get one of those fighters working,
when by all intelligent estimates it should take even our
technically skilled personnel the better part of a year to
understand their inner workings?"

General Chao replied, "General Secretary, the Enemy's
recent arrival is not the first time we've seen these cockroach
fighters."

A chill coursed through Jin's body. "Say again
please, General."

"Where do you think the technology from our Dragon
Missiles came from? Has no one briefed you on this?"

Jin put up a hand. His face had gone white. "You are
telling me that we've salvaged alien craft of this type before?
Before the invasion?"

"Many years before, yes. It gave us the ideas that
allowed us to develop the new missiles. To be honest, General
Secretary, we took the part of their technology that seems to have
been implemented purely from a transportation-design standpoint and
repurposed it as a weapon. Judging from the Enemy's prior attacks,
powerful as they've been, I don't think they ever considered using
that element of their technology in the way we are now using it to
make our Dragon Missiles so devastating."

"Let me see if I have this right, General. What
you're saying is that we don't quite think like them, and that not
thinking like them has allowed us to develop something they aren't
prepared for, even though it's based on their superior
technology?"

The General paused, somewhat confused. "That's a
wordy way of explaining it, General Secretary, but yes."

Jin sighed, his cheeks reddening as if he'd been
swigging whiskey. "Look, General, with the amount of sleep I'm
going on I'll take what I can get. Confusing or not, if that's
true, I want you to act on it
now
."

General Chao took a gulp of tea before nodding and
saluting. "It will be done as you say, General Secretary, but I
have deep reservations. We have only a limited supply of Dragon
Missiles available, and I will have to convert the cockroach
fighters so that our pilots can operate them. There isn't time to
make the missiles launch-able, so our pilots will have to ram their
craft like Kamikaze pilots. Pilots themselves are now as rare as
gold to us."

Jin solemnly shook the General's hand. "I know this
might not be a good option, General, but is it the best of all the
bad options in front of us?"

"Is it the safest option? No. Does it have the best
chance of changing our fortunes? That may be." When the bearded
face crisply nodded, Jin decided to throw the dice, come what
may.

"
Do
it."

We were on Level 3. The five of us were about to
enjoy our daily prodding and poking. They were twice our number.
They. How did you describe something that made your skin want to
wriggle off your body and burrow through the floor?

They were lithe, not like any woman's body lithe.
We're talking eel-like. Myla took my hand. "It's okay, Skye. We're
going to be all right." She did that little routine every single
day, it seemed, and I was pissed at myself for continuing to let
her.

Some things, some horrors, you got used to just by
sheer repetition. And then there were the ones you didn't.

The Glowing Ones came to us, two to each. They led us
to slabs of metal that hovered in the air. There was a sense of
weightlessness until they strapped each of us onto one of the cold
observation tables. I felt thin, prodding tubes in places that made
me squirm. I shut my eyes and tried to think of anything but this
nightmarish here and now. Even with my eyes closed I couldn't block
out the glowing orange light shed by their skin.

I felt hands slide across me, gently probing. Not
human. The fingers felt like wax paper. Visions swam in my head,
definitely not my own. But I'd learned a little trick since our
early days of captivity. The Glowing Ones seemed to communicate
through telepathy, mostly which came across as visions and less
often as vague emotion. But it had to be partly a two-way street. I
purposely focused my mind on things I didn't think they'd find so
pleasant, blotting out whatever they tried to show me.

With satisfaction I felt their awareness blanch from
my mind. It clung on but receded into the background like a
predator whose nose has been bloodied a little too badly by its
intended prey. I tried to open my eyes and look for the others. I
don't know why I bothered. It was a stupid hope, certainly not
coming from past experience. They always kept the observation
tables far apart. Level 3 was the worst not only because of what
they did to you, but because it was the only time that you felt
truly alone.

Time passed and my body felt like it was burning, but
I couldn't move. The restraints held my wrists, ankles, and neck
fast. This was the nightmare I dreaded every day, but even this was
prone to the wonderful coping mechanism called the human brain. I
focused out the strange sensations they bombarded me with, and
instead I steadied on anything, anything that would take my mind
somewhere else.

I tried to imagine what world the Glowing Ones had
come from. I populated that world with plants and animals in my
mind. What would they be like? It was like a game with myself.
Games were one of the few safe outlets to spend time in captivity.
Focusing on my family threatened grief, but imagining what the
aliens' world might be like, there was no pain from that direction.
As I let my mind wander in that vein I saw one of the Glowing Ones
approach and stand above me.