Issue In Doubt

CHAPTER Three

The War Room, Supreme Military Headquarters, Bellevue, Sarpy County, Federal Zone, NAU



Secretary of War Hobson’s eyes swept the room as he strode in. Everyone he had called for was already gathered around the conference table: Chairman Welborn and Major General de Castro, as well as Army Chief of Staff General John C. Robinson, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James J. Madison, Commandant of the Marine Corps General Ralph Talbot, Force Recon Commander Colonel Aquilla J. Dyess. Simultaneously least and not nearly least on the military side was Staff Sergeant Harrell, whose squad had captured the alien on Troy.

The civilian contingent was much smaller: Secretary of State Walker sat to Hobson’s right. Next to her was Secretary of Extraterrestrial Affairs Orlando E. Caruana. Jacob F. Raub represented both the medical and exobiology communities. Special Assistant to the President Ignatz Gresser rounded out the gathering.

Harrell was the only one who rose to his feet when Hobson entered.

“Seats!” Hobson barked.

Harrell dropped into his chair at the foot of the table and sat at attention, looking nervously down its length at the Secretary of War. He was comfortable enough with the flag officers, but found the high-ranking civilians intimidating.

“Before we begin,” Hobson said in a gravelly voice, “I want you all to understand that everything said here is classified Top Secret, and is not to be discussed with anybody not here without specific permission from me or the President. Violation of that will land you in a federal prison so fast your head won’t have time to spin. If any of you don’t find that acceptable, you can leave now and submit your resignation.” He stopped to fix the civilians with a glare. “By authorization of the President, that applies to you as well.”

The civilians looked shocked, and Walker opened her mouth to protest.

Ignatz Gresser’s adam’s apple bobbed as he cleared his throat to interrupt her, and said, “That is what the President said, Mary. He told me himself right before I left the Prairie Palace to come here.”

“He can’t do that!” Caruana of Extraterrestrial Affairs objected. His normally fair complexion seemed to turn whiter. “That’s not—”

“He most certainly can,” Hobson cut him off. “He’s invoked the Alien Threat clause of the War Powers Act. To refresh your memories in case it’s slipped your minds, basically what that means is that Albert Leopold Mills can do just about anything he pleases so long as it has something to do with the alien threat.”

“But...” Walker objected weakly, her fingers fluttering at her throat. She shook her head and said more firmly, “I’ll take this up with the President when I see him next.”

“You do that,” Hobson told her. To the group; “Does anybody want to resign?”

They all shook their heads, murmured negatives.

“Good, the President and I would hate to lose any of you.” He neither looked nor sounded relieved. “Now to the business of this meeting.” He turned to the sole enlisted Marine in the room.

“Staff Sergeant, I’ve already heard about it from the Commandant and J2, as I imagine everybody else here has. Now I want to hear about it from a man who was there. What the hell happened on Troy? How did more than two dozen Force Recon Marines get killed on one quick in-and-out mission?” He didn’t sound angry, just baffled.

Harrell cleared his throat, then spoke in a firm voice befitting a Marine non-commissioned officer. “Sir, it was like they were expecting us. They hit us from ambush, except for my squad...”

The basic telling only took a few minutes, then the questions began. Hobson was the first.

“Have you seen the after-action reports from the other squads?”

“Yes, sir. And I’ve talked to the other survivors.”

“All of them?” Robinson asked, incredulously.

“Yes, sir. Every one of them.” Harrell repressed a shudder at how few of the Force Marines had survived what should have been a simple in-and-out.

“And you didn’t see any people?” Walker wanted to know. “Any of the citizens of Troy?”

“Yes, ma’am. Ah, I mean no, ma’am. We didn’t see any people.”

“You’re absolutely positive that you didn’t see any people?”

Harrell looked at her sharply, but his voice was level when he answered. “Ma’am, neither I nor any of the other sur—” He paused to swallow. “Any of the other Marines saw any people.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “We didn’t see any body parts, either. Although we did find old marks that were probably blood stains.” He was gratified to see the Secretary of State flinch—he’d been offended that she’d seemed to doubt his word.

“What about alien corpses?” Welborn asked.

“Sir, the only aliens we saw were alive. Except for the ones we killed,” he finished harshly.

“Different topic.” Madison’s fleshy cheeks and jowls testified to the many years he’d spent skippering a desk. “What did you see of enemy aircraft or space vehicles?”

“Sir, you’d have to ask Commander Schonland about spacecraft. On the ground, we didn’t see any aircraft.” Harrell saw a question in the eyes of a couple of the civilians, and added, “The captain of the Monticello.”

“I know who Schonland is,” Madison growled.

“I know you do, sir. I wasn’t telling you.”

A corner of Talbot’s mouth twitched, as close as he’d allow himself to a smile at how smoothly the Marine staff sergeant put that overbearing squid in his place. Talbot looked every bit the former recruiting poster Marine he had been.

Madison glared at Harrell, but went stone-faced when his eyes flicked to Talbot and he recognized that he wasn’t going to get any satisfaction from the Marines over that enlisted man’s impertinence.

Neither Madison’s question nor Harrell’s answer meant anything at this point; Schonland had already been debriefed by Hobson and the Joint Chiefs. There had been no sign of spacecraft—or atmospheric craft either—in Troy’s space. So far as the Monticello’s sensors could tell, Troy was a dead world, not home to any sentient life, and its space was empty of anything not to be found in any similarly lifeless planetary system.

“Did you see any structures?” Raub, the exobiology representative, asked Harrell. “I mean alien structures, that is.”

“No, sir. Only what was left of the human structures built by the colonists. Damage ranged from severe all the way to totally demolished.”

“And you’re speaking for all the survivors when you say that?”

“Yes, sir. Force Recon Marines take careful note of our surroundings. Nobody saw anything that wasn’t obviously human-construction. We have the vids from all eight squads. None of them show anything that could be an alien structure.”

“So where did the aliens that attacked you come from?” Raub’s Ichabod Crane-like face jutted forward on his thin neck, obviously hoping for something that would give him a clue about the aliens. “Did they have any, what do you call them, dug-in fighting positions?”

“Sir, every alien any of us saw was on his feet and running at us.” Harrell shook his head in wonderment. “We have no idea where they came from. None of our detectors picked them up, either, until right before they attacked.” He held up his hand. “Excuse me, sir. There were two snipers that fired from inside human buildings. Otherwise, all of them that we saw were in the open.”

Raub shook his head, but in disappointment rather than disbelief.

De Castro cleared his throat and asked, “Your squad was the only one that was able to secure any alien artifacts and bring them back?”

“That’s right, sir.” Harrell took a deep breath to quell the tremble that suddenly threatened to overcome him. “The others had to withdraw under heavy fire.” He hung his head for a brief moment, then continued in a strong voice. “The only other Marines who got close enough to an alien to get their weapons or equipment died in hand-to-hand combat.”

De Castro nodded in sympathy. “I understand, Sergeant—Staff Sergeant.” He corrected himself, remembering that to Marines a “sergeant” had three stripes and no rockers, a sergeant with a rocker under his chevrons was properly addressed as “Staff Sergeant.” “You have my most profound sympathy.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Secretary Hobson looked around the room. “Does anybody else have any questions?”

In murmur or strong voice, they all answered, “No.”

“Then you are dismissed, Staff Sergeant.”

“Aye-aye, sir.” Harrell stood, came to attention, said, “Thank you sirs, ma’am,” and marched out of the room.

Hobson looked at Colonel Dyess and nodded—the Force Recon commander wouldn’t be needed for the rest of the meeting, either.

Dyess stood. “Thank you, sirs and ma’am.” He followed Harrell out.

When the door closed behind the two Marines, Hobson turned to Raub. “What do we know about the aliens, and what were you able to learn from the items that brave Marine brought back?”

Jacob Raub, the NAU’s top expert on extraterrestrial lifeforms, made a face. “Not a lot. At least not much of interest to anybody who isn’t an exobiologist. The harness is made from leather from an animal that we can’t identify, although we’re fairly certain it’s native to the aliens’ homeworld.”

“What about the weapons?” Commandant Talbot interrupted.

Leave it to a Marine to want to know about small arms right off, Madison silently groused.

“Ah yes,” Raub said with a sigh. “Weapons aren’t organic, so they aren’t a strong suit of mine.” He looked Talbot in the eye, then at Army CoS Robinson. “But the engineering people I gave them to tell me they’re not anything like what we have. Their caliber is smaller than 5.56mm and bigger than flechette, partly powered by something resembling a low-power railgun.” He shook his head. “Whatever that means.”

“Back to the gear,” Hobson said. “We can return to the weapons later.”

Raub shook his head again. “The harness is stitched together with a vegetable fiber of unknown origin. The same for the pouches attached to it. The vegetable fiber is also presumably from the aliens’ homeworld. The stitching is of a type that could have been done in a human factory.” He looked at Hobson and shrugged. “Without more artifacts, or knowledge of the place of origin of the harness, there really isn’t anything more I can say.”

Ignatz Gresser asked, “What can you surmise about the biology of the animal the leather comes from?”

“There I’m on slightly firmer ground.” Raub straightened in his chair and leaned his angular body forward. “We were able to secure tissue and fluid samples of the prisoner—non-destructively, let me assure you,” he rapidly added when Walker looked like she was about to protest. “We went to lengths to avoid injuring him.”

“Are you sure the alien is a ‘he’?” Walker asked. “I’ve seen the pictures. The creature is naked, and it has what looks like a vaginal slit between its legs.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Raub said, “but body waste comes from that slit, and there is no evident anus. We believe it is more analogous to a cloaca.”

Walker nodded. “So the sex organs are interior. Have you seen anything like a penis come out of the cloaca?”

“No we haven’t,” Raub admitted.

“Then it just as well could be female?”

Raub spread his hands. “It could, yes. But in most life forms that we’ve encountered, both on Earth and on the explored planets, the males, or male analogs, of most species are the more aggressive, more combative, of their species. Granted, there are a large number of insectoids and piscine species in which the female is the more aggressive, but the larger animals—reptilians, avians, mammalians and their analogs, it’s the male that’s combative. For all we know, these aliens have more than two sexes or genders. But it’s a convenient convention to call the alien a ‘he’ rather than an ‘it’.”

Walker turned over a hand, indicating that she was willing to accept Raub’s explanation for now.

Raub nodded at the Secretary of State, and continued. “The alien’s DNA is, of course, totally different from that of humans. But analysis of the leather of his harness showed that the animal its leather came from is closely related to the alien itself, strongly indicating that it evolved on the same world. The same goes for the threads of the stitching. Naturally, we don’t know what the alien eats. However, his amino acids are comprised of the same elements ours are: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Not, of course, in exactly the same ratios. And there are only twenty, instead of the twenty-two that we have. We don’t yet know which are the aliens’ essential acids, so we don’t know what to feed him.”

“What are you feeding him then?” Caruana asked.

Raub nodded at the question. “We’re offering him a variety of foods, both animal and vegetable, cooked and raw. He wouldn’t take any at first, but we ate samples to show him that they weren’t poison. It’s too early in the process to determine which he can hold down, and whether any of them provide him actual nutrition. He seems to prefer semi-cooked meat to other foodstuffs.” He looked around, noticing the expression of boredom on the faces of some of the military and non-scientists and decided to wrap up his presentation. “Otherwise, we surmise that he comes from a world with a similar gravity and atmosphere to Earth normal, although his lack of clothing suggests the world might be somewhat warmer, perhaps it orbits closer to its primary.” He paused and asked, “Are there any other questions for right now?”

“How has he behaved toward you and your people?” Talbot asked.

“He’s been largely threatening, but we have him in a cage and feed him through a one-way drawer so that he can’t get to us.”

“What about his talons, are they always out?”

Raub shook his head. “Our vid surveillance shows that his talons are folded away when he thinks he’s alone, but are extended when he can see one of us.”

“Wait a minute,” Caruana said. “Where does his talons go when they aren’t extended?”

“They fold back along the sides of his fingers.”

“That’s curious,” Caruana murmured. Then louder, “If his talons are folded against his fingers, how manipulative are his fingers? I mean, how could his kind build anything?”

“We believe that when his talons are, ah, retracted you might say, they become flexible. We will have to sedate him and perform a close examination, perhaps even surgery, in order to be certain of that, and learn to the mechanism if they do become flexible.”

“When do you think you’ll do that?” Robinson asked.

“In the next few days, sir. I can’t be more specific. We don’t know which sedative will put him under for long enough. Or which might kill him, for that matter.”

“The big question I have,” Chairman Welborn asked, “is, could this alien, his species, be the ones responsible for the destruction of those seventeen dead civilizations we’ve discovered?”

Raub hesitated before answering. “Sir, I have no way of knowing. Is it possible? Yes. Is it the fact?” He shrugged and spread his hands. “Without considerably more data, I can’t say.”

“Then it’s also possible that they aren’t the ones?” Walker asked.

“That’s right, ma’am.”

“I’d like to get back to the weapons,” Talbot said when it seemed neither Walker nor Raub had anything else to say.

“As I said, General, I’m not an engineer or a soldier, I don’t really know anything about them.”

“I’m aware of that, Mr. Raub. But surely the engineers told you something beyond the caliber and propulsion system?”

“Well...” Raub didn’t know what to say.

“Do the engineers think they can replicate the weapons?” the Marine prompted.

“Oh, yes sir! They’ve already disassembled them and are figuring them out.”

Talbot nodded. “Would you be so good as to have them forward their findings to me? And if they do replicate them, I want to see the weapons.” He noticed the sour expression on Madison’s face and added, without looking directly at the CNO, “We might want to modify our body armor, depending on what the weapons do to our existing armor.”

“Certainly, General,” Raub said, relieved that he didn’t have to say anything more about a topic on which he was as ignorant as he was about the weapons. Yes, let the engineers deal with the Marines.

After that, Hobson looked around. Nobody else seemed to have anything to add, or have an informed question to ask.

“All right, then. The President has already given his go-ahead to launch a military operation to Troy. We don’t know a damn thing about what might be waiting for us there. It could be a small force that the recon elements had the bad fortune to chance upon. It could be a major army of occupation. It could be the beginning of a colony.” He paused before continuing portentously, “Or we could find a staging operation for the invasion of another human world, even Earth itself.” He looked at Welborn. “Prepare a force strong enough to meet any of those contingencies. You are authorized to tell your top staffs as much as they have to know in order to plan the operation—that much and no more, and with the same resignation option and penalty as presented at the beginning of this meeting. If nobody else has anything to add, this meeting is over.”

He stood to leave, but paused when Walker asked,

“But where are the people, where are their bodies?”

“Maybe we’ll find out once we get there.” Hobson left without another word.

The Joint Chiefs began their planning, but the rest of the military continued in their normal training regimens.