Aboard a ship of the Alien invaders:
Marcie was tired. Although bruised and broken by the beating the thralls had given her, she dragged herself to her feet, nearly screaming as one broken rib jammed into a lung. She didn't care. The alien overlord was here, and she needed to be on her feet. For just a few minutes more.
The being spoke through its favored thrall by attaching one of it's tentacles to the thrall's neck. "You are the one called Scanlon. Why do you come here to die? You cannot beat us... you cannot win" The aliens had come from Proxima Centauri b with technology superior to Earth's but they did not use the expected saturation atomic bombing. Nukes had been used, but Judiciously. Tactically The large scale bombing had been done by Fuel-Air boosted bombs. The Pentagon, Capitol, White House, Arlington Hall, Joint Base Langley and more had all been leveled by FABs. So-called concussion bombs Some said a nuke salvo would have been kinder. But the Proximans were not kind. Why be kind to ants one steps on ? Why be nice to slaves, when cruelty was more useful.
Marcie drew herself up and spat out bits of broken tooth and some blood. Hours before she had bitten down and expelled a barely seen mist. The tooth was useless now. Marcie Scanlon exhaled slowly, seeming to savor the exquisite pain breathing out produced. Finally, she inhaled again and spoke. "Your minions claim you have studied us, is that true?" The overlord pondered and then replied. "Yes . . . your history, culture, wars . . . your racial hates... all of that.” Marcie smiled and looked her captor in the eye. "Yes. but did you read our literature? Herman Melville, perhaps? It took us months. Hundreds died getting your blood samples. Thousands covered the withdrawal of the teams. We captured your thralls and let them escape, knowing they would carry stories." Stories of me... the lowly intelligence officer commander Scanlon. You couldn't resist the bait, and I killed you. It’s already too late. You'll kill me, but you'll not live long after. So tell me, did you read Melville?”The overlord looked on, in growing horror. He said nothing. "Come” she coughed, red blood now. "to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. " laughing now, her strength leaving, she sank to her knees. "I killed all of you, you sons of bitches.”
Finally, the favored of the overlord's thralls, a young handsome man, spoke. "Why? What did they do to you" Her eyes filled with hate, Scanlon looked over. "You have to ask. They invaded our planet, destroyed our cities, enslaved our people, and you have to fucking ask?" she wheezed, life leaving her, but main force of will keeping her going."And they blew up the Pentagon, And Arlington hall. My husband. Our child. You killed them, and I died then. Now you die with me"
With that, Lieutenant Commander Marcie Ann Scanlon died. But the disease she spat out had already spread in the ship's air system; had already contaminated aliens who were on their way to other ships. Within a few days they were all dying. It was a masterfully engineered bioweapon, and the aliens couldn't stop it. Their medical technology was good -- better than ours in most respects -- but they still had not managed to defeat a disease caused by prions. Their habit of meeting in person, necessitated by their biological need to share memory by physical exchange of proteins, had been their undoing. Over 80 percent of the Invaders were stricken by the disease, and of those, almost 90 percent died. The survivors had to be quarantined, and the planet Earth was placed off limits. Commander Marcie Scanlon, dull bookish academic before the invasion; had been turned into a hard, remorseless killer. A woman as hard on herself as on her subordinates – several of her command had been sacrificed in order to accomplish her end goal. Marcie had known from the beginning that her plan would require from her the ultimate sacrifice, and she agreed to it willingly. Her husband, an Army intelligence analyst, had been killed in the first few strikes of the war. Marcie’s own position at the Pentagon had placed her in danger, but she went in to work anyway, four months pregnant or not. When they pulled Commander Scanlon out of the wreckage of her wing of the Pentagon, it was too late to save her baby. The Marcie Scanlon who had left the improvised field hospital was a shell of the woman who had walked into the Pentagon the day of the attacks. The contented, quietly happy woman was replaced with a woman who burned with hate, a grieving woman whose once friendly blue eyes were now cold hard flints. A woman who dithered over what color to paint her child’s nursery now rapped out orders like a machine whom one did not dare disobey. Her grief was palpable to anyone with any sense, but somehow she forged on, pulling together strands of ideas, motes of information and threads of possibilities and weaving them together into a whole, cohesive plan. A plan that would go down in the annals of human history as the Scanlon Plan. Marcie Scanlon’s name would be remembered alongside those of Washington, Napoleon, Dyan – national heroes who gained international renown. Because of her plan the Earth would be largely free of aliens for decades to come. The pugnacious, persistent life of earth would continue. Humans had died in the millions. Cities thrown into ruin and chaos, whole regions of the planet torn up; yet humanity would survive a while longer.
©2016 DL Cochran
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