“They’re just killing us all,” he shouted at Brooks, as the American picked off a pair of aliens. The burst of return fire almost shattered the building they were using as cover. The fight had grown completely out of hand, but the aliens, somehow, were coordinating their advance perfectly, tightening the noose around the city. “What’s the point of this?”
“Who knows?” Brooks answered, as they found themselves stumbling into a mosque. It had taken a shell from somewhere, shattering the minaret, but the interior of the building was somehow unharmed. The worshippers, praying desperately for salvation, hadn’t found it; they’d been crushed under the rubble. “I don’t know what they’re thinking…”
Another round of explosions revealed, suddenly, that they were surrounded and alone. Karim realised, feeling absolutely calm, that he was going to die. He checked his rifle, loaded his final clip, and smiled tiredly at Brooks. The American had run out of rifle ammunition, so he’d drawn his handgun and checked it quickly.
“I don’t feel like surrendering,” Brooks said, as he unhooked a grenade from his belt. “You?”
“Hell, no,” Karim said, as Brooks prepared to throw the final grenade. The smoke from the growing fires was making it harder to think; his eyes were stinging and burning. He had a nasty suspicion that he was on the verge of going deaf from all the noise. “Hit them!”
Brooks threw the grenade in a practiced toss towards the alien position. A moment later, the aliens fired back, a heavy burst of machine gun fire that shattered the walls and tore through their bodies before they could escape. The remains of the building collapsed inwards and buried their bodies.
Both men died instantly.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I never really hated a one true God, but the God of the people I hated.
Oddly enough, pure fanatics were rare among the Takaina, those who followed the Truth. They had no problem with fighting and dying for their religion, but the idea of throwing their lives away for nothing was alien to them, allowing their commanders to cut their losses if a battle was going badly. To retreat, honestly and openly, was not a sin among them, although some of the Inquisitors might have disagreed. They, shaped into a mould that rejected all personality, all individuality, watched for heresy in their own manner, while disregarding their own safety. They were conditioned to do anything for the faith and rarely questioned their orders. The five hundred Inquisitors on the Guiding Star kept the rest of the population in line.
The parasite ship carefully altered its course and dropped into a lower orbit. Unchecked, the parasite would eventually fall into the atmosphere, but the handful of Inquisitors in command of the vessel would alter its course again long before atmospheric drag became a problem. The parasite was the single ship controlled by the Inquisitors and, also, the sole Takaina ship to carry atomic weapons. The warriors weren’t allowed to control them, not even the most capable and trustworthy of them, because of the danger. A single questioning mind in the wrong place could do untold damage to the starship. Instead, the Inquisitors not only controlled the bombs, but they controlled their deployment as well.
The Inquisitors felt no nervousness as they swept over a continent that the humans called Europe. Nervousness required a normal functioning brain, regardless of race, and they no longer had them. The conditioning process that had made them what they were had altered them to the point where they were almost incapable of feeling any emotion, from sexual lust to despair. If the Europeans had been building new weapons, ones capable, perhaps, of being turned on the spacecraft, they weren’t concerned. Besides, a handful of possibly-threatening targets had been bombed only a cycle ago and the Europeans hadn’t attempted to respond.
“Prepare to deploy device,” Inquisitor Five said. Among themselves, the Inquisitors called themselves by numbers, just to keep everything straight. It was one of the secrets that they didn’t share with the rest of their race, let alone the others under their control, because it was something they wouldn’t understand. Inquisitors had to be faceless, nameless and utterly without feelings, because feelings led to corruption. In their role, corruption could be lethal to more than just them. “Compare targeting data and enter clearance codes.”
One by one, they pressed their hands to the scanners and confirmed the targeting data. The Inquisitors, apart from watching their own people, served as the intelligence staff for the High Priest, if only to prevent warriors and researchers from being contaminated by direct access to alien data. They had researched the human religions thoroughly and had located their centres of power, preparing targeting data for the High Priest and the War Leader. The idea of physically occupying their centres of power was an attractive one, something they knew would guarantee them victory, but that wouldn’t always be possible. The Takaina couldn’t afford to occupy every human city, not yet, but they didn’t have to. They could take other steps instead.
Inquisitor Nine spoke from his seat. “Target is locked and device is armed,” he said. There was, as was right and proper, no excitement or anticipation in his voice. As far as they were concerned, what they were about to do was just a job. “We can fire on your command.”
Europe was passing rapidly underneath them. It still escaped the researchers how the humans hadn’t united into a handful of large states, but at the moment, it served in their favour, particularly when it came to religion. The Truth tended to ignore, or place to one side, religions that weren’t directly competitive, but the human religions were all going to be competitive. The Inquisitors, insofar as they felt anything, would have loved to get to grips with the religions on the ground, but that wasn’t going to be completely possible. They would have to take other steps.
“Fire,” Inquisitor Five ordered.
The ship jerked slightly as it launched the single device from its underbelly. Small rockets fired at once, nudging the device into a trajectory that would, inevitably, bring it down to Earth, hard. It wouldn’t matter; once the device had reached the required distance from the ground, it would detonate and purge one of the human religions from the face of the Earth. Without its centre of power, it would fall apart and the Truth would be there for the humans. It had worked on dozens of worlds, ever since the Unification Wars… and it would work here. The Inquisitors were literally unable to even question that doctrine.
“Weapon away,” Inquisitor Nine confirmed. “Trajectory is precise.”
“Good,” Inquisitor Five said. He would have liked to have visited nuclear fire across the remaining human holy sites, but that wasn’t part of his orders. “Take us back into orbit and prepare to return to the Guiding Star.”
Below them, the device continued its fall towards the planet.
The small observatory had been taken over by the Italian military a week before the aliens had arrived, despite the protests of its staff and students, and rapidly converted into an alien-monitoring centre. Italy, being the part of Europe that might come under attack from Iran — a trend, so far, that had remained happily fictional — had taken a progressive attitude towards defence, constructing a network of radars, tied into NATO, that monitored Italian airspace constantly. The aliens had shut down the radars with their KEW weapons, but the observatories remained, passively watching the aliens from the ground.