And McGreevy, he asked himself. Did she know the truth?
“I see,” he said, finally. “I think you’d better start from the beginning. Why did your people come here?”
“We didn’t mean to come here,” Trahs-pah said. “We discovered your world by accident.”
Toby must have looked blank, for the alien continued without delay. “You must understand that our species has been torn between two poles — freedom and tyranny — for almost as long as we have been intelligent,” he continued. The raspy voice added a note of unreality to the entire discussion. “Our version of your Cold War was won by the Emperor, who took the technological base both societies had built and used it to start expanding across the stars. It was not long before we managed to devise a way to create wormholes that would allow us to cross from star to star without having to travel in normal space.
“What the Emperor knew, but dismissed, was that elements of the other side remained active. The Pacifists — as he calls them — still hoped to overthrow the Emperor and restore liberty. It was those Pacifists who attempted to sabotage a wormhole generator and send the High Lord’s fleet into nothingness. I volunteered for the mission fully aware that it would mean my own death, or torture and ritual execution if I were to be discovered. Unfortunately, our maths were not as perfect as I had been told.”
Toby frowned. “You made a mistake?”
“There is a slight shortage of volunteers to test certain theories,” the alien said. There was no change in his tone, but Toby suspected that he’d just heard alien sarcasm. “We believes that the wormhole would desynchronise and destroy the fleet, reducing it down to hard radiation. The loss of a conquest fleet would certainly make the Emperor look weak and give encouragement to his foes. We calculated that there would be a good chance to overthrow him in the wake of a disaster. I inserted the modified commands into the flagship’s computer core and prepared myself for death.
“What happened instead was unexpected. The fleet was hurled across thousands of light years. Many ships were destroyed in the unexpected malfunction. Others were badly damaged, leaving only seventeen starships reasonably intact. The High Lord ordered the others ships to be cannibalised in order to repair the seventeen ships, but there was no hope of rebuilding the wormhole generator. In his wisdom and paranoia, the Emperor had not provided us with a tech base capable of producing a generator without a great deal of work.”
Toby smiled. “So you were stranded,” he said. It sounded reasonably believable, although he had to remind himself to be careful. American Intelligence services had been taken in before by false defectors. The aliens could be lying… through Toby was hard-pressed to understand why they might be lying. Their other actions made a certain kind of sense, particularly when one realised that they’d been lying about their reasons for visiting Earth. “What happened then?”
“We picked up your radio transmissions,” the alien said. “The High Lord was paranoid; your transmissions appeared to indicate that you were more advanced than ourselves. We probed in very carefully, eventually establishing a listening post on your moon. Eventually, we realised that many of your television programs were fictional, even though some of your people appeared to believe in them. Your tech base was primitive compared to the Empire’s, but you could rebuild and repair what you had. The industrial ship that survived the wormhole implosion couldn’t possibly keep pace with expenditures if we invaded openly. It was the High Lord who devised the plan to take control by offering the tech your race desperately needed — tech that would come with some unseen surprises. Once your race had been tamed, we could hammer out a tech base that would allow us to start expanding back towards the Empire, or into unexplored space.”
“I see,” Toby said. “Why hasn’t he just invaded? Your race just destroyed an entire city. Millions of humans are dead. Many more will die in the coming weeks.”
“Controlling humanity would be difficult for a small force,” the alien said. “There are only a few hundred thousand warriors left in the fleet. The High Lord chose to use a subtle plan, rather than risk an open conflict that would destroy what we needed to build a technological civilisation. Your race seems far too capable of believing honeyed promises from people you know nothing about.”
Toby nodded, impatiently. The alien was right; indeed, he was starting to suspect that the alien had been one of the ones who had studied humanity closely. Adolf Hitler had once remarked that people were more inclined to believe a big lie, because they didn’t want to believe that anyone would lie about it. The High Lord had drawn up a brilliant plan and applied it with consummate skill. Right now, Toby suspected that there wasn’t a First World military capable of fighting if the aliens took over — and the pod people would ensure that the aliens would have all the manpower they needed to hold the planet. It wasn’t even as if they needed to hold all of Earth. The Middle East, most of Africa and even East Asia could be left to fester on its own. They might even systematically exterminate the human population, just to ensure that there was no trouble from the region. And in the meantime, the aliens would build their own tech base and return to the stars.
But how long could it hold? Maybe the aliens would open themselves and humanity would strike them down, but how could they do that when the aliens held the high ground? What rebellion could succeed if the aliens could smash it from orbit?
“It’s a constant problem,” he admitted. “Why did you come to us?”
The alien looked up at him. “I am not the only… Pacifist in the fleet,” he admitted. “I believed that your race represented the best chance for freedom for our own. Your technology is primitive, your mindset is beyond our understanding, and yet you have a spark that we have lost. The Emperor does not seek to develop independence of thought, not when someone might question the need for the Emperor. No, we are bred to obey. There hasn’t been a major development in the last three hundred of your years. You may be behind us, but the gap is smaller than you think.
“You were lied to by the High Lord, lies told so smoothly that you accepted them as truth. I hoped that if I told you the truth before it was too late, you would be able to help us to escape the High Lord and take control of the fleet. Without that, your world is doomed. The High Lord will not accept defeat lightly. If you beat the fleet, he will turn your world into ash and ensure that you do not become a threat to the Empire. He has the power to obliterate your world.”
Toby had never doubted that. Everything that had never quite made sense suddenly slid into focus. The aliens had never invaded openly because they lacked the force needed to take and hold humanity’s cities, even the First World alone. And they’d refrained from mass bombardment because they wanted the industrial base intact. And… a plan was slowly coming together in his mind. If there was only one way to defeat the aliens, it would have to be risked. The entire world was at stake.
For a moment, he considered collaboration. Perhaps the High Lord or his descendents would grow lazy, accustomed to humanity’s servitude, unaware that the human race was plotting their overthrow. But it wouldn’t work out that way. Any human selected for use by the aliens would probably be turned into a pod person, particularly if they were in sensitive positions. Lose once… and the human race would be lost for all time. Perhaps later generations would accept their servitude as natural and right.