The Unspeakable Ones
Darkness.
Hot darkness.
Rough straw-like material under her back.
Irina Miller slowly opened her eyes, not entirely sure she wanted to know where she was.
For a moment she saw nothing, nothing but grey obscurity before she realised she was seeing the underside of a great dome. Slowly, as her eyes adjusted, she could see massive metal struts crisscrossing the concave surface, looking like the tremendous ribs of some impossibly enormous creature.
She heard noises around her and forced herself up into a sitting position.
She was not alone; there were thirty or forty other people with her in the dome.
There was a man near her; like her, he was dressed in a functional, grey outfit comprising a featureless upper garment and ill-fitting trousers.
His face was grey and sad, seeming to blend into the monochrome gloom around him. He might have been in late middle age, or maybe that was just his demeanour. Miller did not care either way.
‘Where am I?’ she said.
Her throat was dry.
He looked at her coldly, seeing a tall, strongly built woman; one who was not young but assuredly not old.
‘Where do you think you are?’
She forced herself to stand, towering over him as he lay on the floor. It was covered in something resembling grey straw.
‘I don’t like people who answer questions with questions. I repeat; where are we?’
He tried to smile, but it was as if he had forgotten how to do it properly. There was no life in his eyes.
‘You’re in a holding pen, of course. A holding pen of the Gorathnar.’
Miller groaned.
She had feared that this would be the outcome when the Collaborators had come for her that night.
She’d fought them, of course; she was reasonably sure she had blinded one, but it had been to no avail.
The fates of most of the conquered had been simple to understand. After the Gorathnar had arrived and defeated the whole of humanity in two days, there had only been a few options given to the survivors: They could work for their new rulers in the perilous bases on the oceanic ridges or the polar regions; they could join the hundreds of thousands who were relocated from the more populated areas to work in the steppes and the deserts, toiling in mines, extracting rare metals to help build the mysterious machines that their masters were constructing: machines carrying enormous cylinders, pointing skyward as if they were the barrels of terrible cannons.
But there were other, more mysterious, possibilities.
For instance, thousands of people, always adults, were regularly shipped off-world to unknown destinations.
This, apparently, had been her fate.
‘Who are you?’ the man asked, seemingly lacking the strength to raise himself from the floor, ‘what’s your name?’
‘What does it matter,’ she said, taking her gaze from him to look around the dim enclosure, ‘we’re all going to die, aren’t we? It’s best we don’t become too friendly.’
Everywhere she looked, she saw the same thing: men and women in identical clothing, sitting, standing, or lying on the featureless grey floor. All of them showing the same emotions.
Defeat.
Despair.
The exact centre of the enormous room was a circular structure that had channels on its surface, radiating outwards to troughs that fringed the circumference. There were more people around it than elsewhere and they were all standing, looking inwards, apparently expecting something to happen.
Miller pointed. ‘What are they waiting for?’
He followed her finger. ‘You are a newbie, aren’t you? That’s where we eat.’
‘It’s almost dinnertime, I take it,’ Miller said, ‘they’re showing more life than the rest of you.’
The man did finally succeed in forming a kind of smile, but it was one Miller would have preferred he had not made. ‘It’s rather plain fare. Nothing to get too excited about.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ She glanced down at the man, almost with pity. ‘You seem to have been here longer than me. You’ve told me where I am, but I want to know why I am here.’ She looked around. ‘It’s obvious this accommodation is distinctly on the basic side. I guess we won’t be here long.’ She fixed him with a cold stare. ‘Do you have any idea why we’re here?’
But before he could answer, she suddenly stiffened and felt her heart race.
‘Wait a minute: A holding pen. Are we farm animals? Do they eat us?’
The man finally found the strength to get to his feet.
‘No, I don’t think so. I used to be a scientist, and I’ve been observing them since the murderous day they arrived. If they found us tasty, they wouldn’t wait to take us off Earth to do it. There’d be abattoirs all over the world. I suspect they’re half cybernetic in any case, so meat is almost certainly off their menu. No, they don’t eat us—why come all this way just for a meal? And I don’t think they experiment on us either, so I’m not worried about vivisection. Their science is so advanced they have no interest in studying our biochemistry or physiology.’
‘Then if they’re so advanced, why bother with us at all. Why conquer us?’
The man shook his head slowly and lowered his head, looking at nothing but the grey straw.
‘I don’t know. It’s clear they want the planet Earth itself; maybe it has a strategic location in some interstellar war they’re fighting and we just happened to be on it when they arrived; like a colony of seabirds on an island that human powers might have wanted, centuries ago.’
Miller in turn, shook her head, but more vigorously.
‘No, there’s more. I can understand putting us to work, but that doesn’t explain taking thousands of people off the planet. There’s something else.’
The man was about to reply, but some motion caught his eye and he pointed to the central device.
‘I do enjoy a stimulating conversation, but it’s time for you to eat.’
Miller turned. ‘Fine by me.’
Ignoring her companion, she strode to the central machine, elbowing her way through the throng, and also ignoring their complaints.
She stood looking down at the trough which formed the end of the nearest radial channel to her. There was a cup on a hook just below the lip of the trough. As she took it off the hook there was a gurgling sound and a stream of a viscous green-yellow liquid slowly flowed down the channel into the trough.
She stared at it. ‘Is this it? It looks like snot!’
‘What were you expecting?’ the man next to her said, ‘a juicy steak with peppercorn sauce?’
Miller dipped her cup into the glutinous mess and slowly brought it to her lips. She hesitated for a moment and then tipped it into her mouth.
It was warm and slightly salty, but beyond that, little could be said about it: it was basically tasteless. Thank God for that! she thought to herself, although its slimy texture was unpleasant as she swallowed.
There was a tap on her shoulder; turning she found a small woman glaring at her.
‘Have you finished?’ the other hissed, ‘we haven’t had ours yet!’
For a moment, Miller considered knocking her senseless, but decided she had better wait to see who was in charge first before taking direct action.
‘Here you are, bitch,’ was all she said, ramming the mug into the small woman’s hands.
She walked back to the grey man she had first seen on waking. Apart from sitting again, he hadn’t moved.
‘Not hungry?’ she inquired casually. She wasn’t really interested in his answer.
‘I ate some hours ago,’ he said, ‘we don’t move around much here, so my needs are meagre.’
‘Just as well,’ she replied, ‘I’m sure the stuff that comes out of my ass would be better. More vitamins and minerals.’
He looked at her quizzically. ‘You clearly think you’re something special. Some kind of warrior woman.’
‘Compared to you—yes.’ She joined him in sitting. ‘I’m a bit bored, so tell me—how did you get here?’
For the first time, a ghost of animation crossed his features.
‘I was a scientist, specifically an astrophysicist. I’d been trying to prove a theorem on the nature of vacuum energy in relation to the cosmological constant. My second wife and I had developed a new mathematical approach. We hadn't been married long. In 3 BC.’
‘BC?’
‘“Before Conquest”.’
‘Oh.’ She sat down, stretching her long legs out, pushing the grey straw aside. ‘I once heard some religious nut job using those letters for a different meaning. What happened to your wife—she here?’
He hesitated and looked away for a moment. ‘No. No, they took her for one of their undersea camps near the Cape Verde islands. I’ve heard nothing from her. That was in 1 AC. That’s…’
She raised a hand. ‘I’m not an astrophysicist, but I can work that one out. So the Collaborators got you?’
‘Yes. They came around 4 AM. Knocked the door in. Stuck something in my arm. And here I am.’
She yawned. ‘My, that was exciting. So what do you think our chances are?’
‘What—you and me?’
‘No. I know we’re fucked; I mean the human race.’
He rubbed his chin. ‘Look—call me Otto. We’ve got to try and keep our way of life going, our humanity.’
‘OK Otto. I’m Irina. I’m sure we’ll be great friends.’
His eyes seemed to light up for a moment. ‘We will?’
‘No. I was just kidding. We might meet up again as the filling in a Gorathnar burger, but that’s probably it. Do you really think we can ever get our planet back?’
His hands made vague movements in the grey straw. ‘Perhaps. They’re obviously a very intelligent species. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t share the Earth. We tried communicating with them when they first appeared…’
‘What—just before they blasted Washington into red-hot dust, you mean?’
‘Yes, just before, during and after!’ he snapped, ‘We had to try, we have to try! Two species, each possessing high intelligence—it must be possible to find some commonality; to pool our resources to understand this wonderful universe we both inhabit!’
She looked at him coldly, unemotionally. ‘You just don’t get it, do you? You don’t understand the world you’re now living in—you believed in all that disinterested science, all that gathering knowledge, all that hope for a future with nice, kindly human beings living in some kind of Kiddies’ Playtime Utopia where everybody loved one another. It’s all gone, dead as all those losers in D.C. who now make up little bits of the dust that’s all that’s left of their city. It’s over!’ Her voice rose to a shout; some people near them looked at her. ‘Over! It was all a kindergarten dream. As long as we sat all alone on our little ball of shit, we thought we were something wonderful, something special. We didn’t realise that we were just a load of helpless dodos watching a pirate ship show up on the horizon!’
‘That’s horrible,’ Otto said quietly, sadly, ‘how can you live believing that?’
She leaned forward, and he recoiled slightly from the intensity of her gaze, ‘Because there’s one thing that I do care about and that’s extending my life as long as fucking possible! Because that’s all there is, all there’s ever been! I’d be just the same if the Gorathnar had never come and beat the crap out of us!’
‘So that’s all you want: living in an alien dome, eating this slop. No joy, no laughter, no human company, no friends, no lovers. Nothing else.’
‘Yes. And I can tell you why I’d like that.’
‘Please do.’
‘Because this stay in the dome is only temporary. The Gorathnar have other plans for us—that’s obvious. And it won’t be an all-expenses-paid Grand Tour of this Wonderful Universe, and whatever plans they really have for us—they’ll be worse than what we have here.’
Otto said nothing, but Miller knew that he’d had these thoughts himself but not had the courage to voice them.
He spoke slowly. ‘So what kind of world are we now living in? And what kind of relationship could there be between you and me?’
She stood. ‘I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a rat-eat-rat world. That’s our status now—Rattus so-called-sapiens. And it’s best that we go our own ways—I might have to kill you at some time in the future and right now I feel sorry for you.’
Some hours later the Collaborators came for them all.
