25th September 1995 (63:6:4)
— Contact plus 00.00.23:01.15
A few speckles of warm water tapping against her head, Beth reflexively glanced up, the tops of the trees half-hidden in mist, back-lit by the sun into a soft white glow. She cast a quick rain-repelling charm, just in case, carefully tweaked over her cooling charm so they didn't interfere — and she would need both, the rain didn't stop it from being terribly hot down here. Beth had never been more grateful for environmental spells in her life.
Over the last few days, things had been moving very fast. Omniglots were a rare and valuable resource — Britain had more than most magical countries, for whatever reason, but even there they were at most one in five hundred — and the longer they delayed moving to help the people facing the brunt of the invasion the more time the aliens would have to dig in, so they wanted to get what few volunteers they had prepared and shipped out as quickly as humanly possible. Beth had spent maybe a week and a half at the SCF's slapdash little training camp, mostly focussed on Army stuff, a lot of the organisational and procedural whatever as well as some basic muggle combat training — though they didn't spend a lot of time on the latter, since her battlemagic had been given a stamp of approval after only a couple quick practice sessions with the senior mages there, and she was far more likely to use that anyway.
She was carrying an actual bloody pistol at the moment, tucked away in a holster strapped high up her thigh, which still seemed fucking absurd — even just that they'd give firearms to fifteen-year-old girls in the first place, though that probably shouldn't seem so weird, when she thought about it? After all, wands were way more dangerous than guns, and she'd gotten one of those on her eleventh birthday. Some of her muggle-raised sensibilities leaking through, she guessed. Not that she expected she'd ever use it — magic was far more versatile and potentially destructive, and also her aim was better with a wand — but she'd been told it was some kind of rule that everyone got one, so, fine, whatever.
She had been taught some magic, mostly things to help navigate, or communicate over distances, some stealth and environmental charms — which were kind of the same category, since controlling the traces you left in an environment was very similar to the functions needed to alter your immediate environment — and also a fair bit of healing. The team she'd been put with did have a proper medic, who'd gotten a much more thorough education in the subject, but he wasn't a mage, and even a little bit of amateur healing could make a huge difference in an emergency. (Her plan in medical emergencies was to just do whatever the hell Brad told her to.) Put together with all the muggle Army stuff, it turned out to be a lot of shite she'd needed to have crammed into her head on a very tight schedule. And apparently she did learn things even more quickly than most omniglots, for whatever reason, because after a couple days the instructors told her they were taking it up a notch, and the pace of shite they were throwing at her grew even more ridiculous.
It turned out, even with cheating mind magic shite, the brain could only tolerate having so much information crammed into it without consequence — migraines kind of sucked, she'd learned. At least when her head really started hurting they decided she was done for the day, but still, Jesus...
After a week and a half of probably the most intense study she'd ever done in her life, alternating between lessons and miserable headache episodes and sleep, a group of them were pulled away from whatever they'd been doing at the time and informed they'd be going to central Africa of all places — like, right now. There'd been twelve of them in that little meeting — all of their faces had been familiar, but she'd hardly spoken to half of them at the time — though another four had been added on the way to the airstrip, organised into four groups of four, which was apparently copying the way the SAS did things, for reasons. (Like Beth would know the difference anyway, it didn't really matter.) She'd had long enough to quick apparate back to Rock-on-Clyde to swap out a few of her supplies for things that might be more useful in the bloody tropics and tell people what was happening — she hadn't even been able to say goodbye to Sirius, he'd been busy elsewhere at the time — practically the second she got back they were being packed into trucks and ferried over to some RAF airstrip, where they were shepherded onto a plane with like a hundred other people, and they were gone.
The first couple hours of the plane flight she'd mostly spent talking to the fifteen other people in her troop (as it was called), since a lot of them hadn't gotten a lot of time to get to know each other, as crazy as things had been since the attack. Beth was one of four mages — one in each patrol, as the groups of four were called — two of the others also carrying brooms — one was a Hit Wizard, and the other was actually a professional quidditch player who also happened to be a duelling hobbyist. (His name was only vaguely familiar, she didn't know the local clubs very well.) The fourth mage, arriving with the last group of four just before the plane took off, to her surprise just so happened to be Bill, Ron's eldest brother — she'd had no idea he'd joined, apparently he'd been loaned to the SCF as part of the three-way cooperation they had going on between the mages, goblins, and muggles. He was primarily here as a cursebreaker, to do warding and enchanting and stuff, but of course he wasn't a bad battlemage either.
Beth had been warned that she and Sirius would be put in separate troops, due to some standing rules about putting close family members too near each other in the organisation, but those rules obviously didn't apply to Bill. Which was good, at least she knew someone here, even if it wasn't very well...
The muggles were all military people, volunteers for this combined muggle–magical experiment of theirs. They had a mix of specialties, but Beth had quickly noticed that they were mostly, like, scouts and snipers and fucking high explosives experts — she'd guess their job was mostly going to be to keep an eye on the aliens and occasionally blow shite up when the opportunity presented itself. They leaned older than she'd expected, mostly in their thirties, rather more experienced, qualified types than you'd get if you pulled people out of the Army at random. Which did make sense, when she thought about it, since they were expected to do a lot of weird crazy shite often without much in the way of backup, so.
It also meant she was younger than the rest of them by an even larger margin than she'd assumed she would be — the second-youngest was actually Bill, and he was a good decade older than her. Unsurprisingly, most of them were rather put off by that, Beth was trying to ignore it. They'd probably change their minds the first time they ended up in an actual fight, and Beth started blasting apart a dozen aliens with every spell. She had it on good authority from muggle fighters during the initial attack that that shite was kind of intimidating.
The plane ride was super long, going on what had to be ten or twelve hours. She wasn't sure exactly, she'd slept for part of it — they went ahead and gave everyone vaccines for various shite in the area while all gathered together on the plane, and those had made Beth kind of tired — but they'd left in the afternoon and the sun was already rising again when they landed. She'd overheard someone saying that just going straight down would have had them flying over where the main landing site was, so they'd looped around a bit, probably by a wider margin than they'd needed to just to be safe. (Getting shot down before they could even get there wouldn't do anybody any good, after all.) They'd landed in a city called Goma, sprawled out on the shore of a big damn lake (Kivu), looming overhead to the north a bloody active volcano (Nyiragongo). Seriously, an actual volcano, she could see smoke coming off of the thing from the city, it was unnerving. Beth and a couple other omniglots had immediately been gathered together and shuffled off with some locals, to spend just a couple days familiarising themselves with the local language.
Though, that was kind of a complicated question. They were in the Congo, the official language of which was French — a rather odd-sounding dialect of French, but still French, Beth didn't have any trouble understanding it. The problem was, maybe only half the country actually spoke French very well at all, if that many, the French-speakers concentrated in the major cities, especially the area around the capital. (Which was literally a thousand miles away from here, because it turned out the country was huge.) French had been the language of the colonial administration here — Belgian French, but still French — and it'd stuck around as the language the government and stuff used...but a lot of people lived basically in the middle of nowhere, the government and education systems and stuff not having much of a footprint at all. Especially in the northeast of the country, which just so happened to be where they were. So, like, the government and military people mostly spoke French okay, but random ordinary people didn't tend to.
Exactly what language people did speak was kind of hard to figure out — there were far too many tiny local languages to keep straight. The big lingua franca people tended to use in this area of the continent, learned as a second language so they could all talk to each other (when it wasn't just French), was Kiswahili, the proper name of Swahili in itself, which was basically an additional official language in the east of the country...but that didn't guarantee that everyone spoke that either. A really common one with the locals was a related-but-different language — sort of like the difference between English and Dutch — called Kinande, and there were a fair number of people in Goma, at least, who spoke another language more closely related to Kinande called Kinyarwanda (largely but not solely spoken by refugees from across the border just to the east of the city). But the people where they were being sent to probably spoke something called Balendru, which was completely unrelated to the other three (like the difference between English and Euskara or some shite), or maybe one of the dozens of tiny local languages they hardly even knew the names of, nobody could say for sure.
Beth and the other omniglots spent a couple days getting as much Swahili as they possibly could crammed into their heads — which wasn't much, but at least it was better than nothing — one day a Lendu man came by so Beth could get a tiny bit of Balendru. Nobody could tell her how useful any of this would be where they were going, which made the headaches she got from pushing herself seem kind of pointless, but whatever.
Even while focussed on picking up the language, it became obvious pretty quickly that they were hardly in a particularly stable area of the continent — the end of colonialism hadn't exactly gone smoothly down here, and they were still feeling the aftermath. These days there were a mix of communist (some allied with the Soviets and others the Chinese) and conservative governments, some countries rather stable in which international faction they allied with and others switching back and forth from administration to administration. At the moment, Congo was neutral, but kind of vaguely socialist-leaning, maybe? It was complicated. Things were equally complicated in some neighbouring countries — Angola was definitely communist these days, but had had a really nasty time breaking away from Europe (Liz forgot which country it used to be a colony of), and was pretty much constantly at war with local conservative militias and the white-supremacist governments in the south; Zambia, like the Congo, was neutral but kind-of-vaguely-not-really socialist, and like Angola preoccupied with the racist shitholes just to their south; Beth had only vaguely heard of shite going on in (conservative) Uganda and (communist) Tanzania, something about a war a decade ago and both countries being a mess ever since (resulting in a refugee crisis, a fair number of Ugandans fleeing into the Congo); and the Central African Republic sounded kind of fascist? and also a violent chaotic mess in general, who even knew what the fuck was going on up there.
Currently, there was another refugee crisis going on, due to what sounded like an ethnic conflict in Rwanda and Burundi — Beth hadn't followed the explanation exactly (it hadn't helped that it'd half been in Kiswahili), but it sounded like the same ethnic conflict was going on in both countries, but it also sometimes spilled into fighting between them...or maybe just different factions straddling the border ignoring it to snipe at each other, she wasn't sure exactly. Apparently there was a whole thing going on with that, to do with both the Congo and Tanzania threatening to intervene to put a stop to it — partially just because it was fucked up, but mostly because both countries were poor to begin with and really didn't need the added burden of looking after refugees, not to mention the risk of the conflict spilling across their borders — but if they did that Uganda would probably intervene on the other side, and with how shaky some of the governments and factions down here could be that could easily balloon into a large-scale international conflict, which wasn't a risk anybody wanted to play with. It was complicated, was the point.
(One of Beth's language instructors was in the Congolese army, who she'd gotten most of this stuff from. His personal opinion was that they should just invade already and have done with it, but Beth wasn't sure how common that opinion was. One of his cousins had been murdered by one of the militias spilling over from Rwanda, and also he happened to be a Communist, so naturally found the old tribal monarchies still holding disproportionate influence in Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda to be deeply offensive on principle. Not exactly an impartial observer, then. He also thought they should team up with Angola, Zambia, and Tanzania to help the rebels overthrow the remaining white-supremacist enclaves in the south, which wasn't really a surprise when she thought about it. So, yeah, kind of impossible to tell what the majority opinion in the country was just from that one bloke.)
Of course, that probably wasn't going to happen now, since the alien invasion gave them rather more pressing things to worry about. She'd heard that the ethnic tension especially hadn't, just, gone away overnight, there was still low-key fighting going on here and there — Beth had heard gunfire in the distance multiple times — but the large-scale war they'd been teetering on the edge of definitely wasn't going to happen now. Though, the feeling on the air she'd picked up while in Goma, she suspected the various international forces accumulating in the Congo would do something about it at some point, just to stop the tension from snapping again and making trouble while they were trying to deal with the aliens. She suspected someone would finally get sick of it before too long, and knock out the governments in Rwanda, Burundi, and maybe also Uganda, and do their best to disarm the various radical ethnic militias running around — or at least point them at the aliens, she guessed. There was little telling how long that would be, but if Beth got back to camp to hear news of fighting going on in the south had come in while they were out, she wouldn't be at all surprised.
Because, obviously fighting each other over pointless nonsense was exactly what they needed to spend their time doing right now. Not like there was a literal alien invasion they were dealing with or anything.
Goma had been kind of a chaotic place in general, even before the invasion. The refugees from the ethnic conflict just to the southeast had been numerous enough that aid had already been coming in for some time — after all, the Congo themselves hardly had the resources to handle that kind of thing, it could quickly get very messy without help. Beth hadn't known about this before, but apparently there'd been a deal between the West and the Communists that the assistance to provide for the refugees would be a cooperative effort, any necessary security forces needed to protect the supplies and aid workers provided by a neutral party at the invitation of the host countries. (The Congo and Tanzania had agreed to let in Egypt and Cuba, the latter of which Beth was pretty sure were Communists, but apparently weren't with the big international Communist alliance? Confusing, but whatever.) She was aware deals like that happened now and then — if they cooperated on projects like this, they didn't have to worry about the opposite party maybe doing something nefarious while they were at it — Beth just didn't pay that much attention to muggle news. They'd already been at it for a year or two, Goma the centre of the effort, so they'd already built up a lot of the necessary infrastructure to host the teams and supplies coming in and out, an extra runway at the airport, some patching up of roads, some rather utilitarian housing for international workers coming through, all kinds of stuff. Supposedly the Soviets had offered improvements to their water-purification system, a big plant and laying down pipe and everything, and the Cubans (with help from the Soviets and Egyptians) had built a literal hospital from scratch, it was slightly ridiculous.
Which made it a very convenient stopover point for militaries coming in to fight the aliens. Kisangani was a larger city, and closer to the heart of the landing area, so might have been more convenient...if it weren't already occupied — the people fleeing from the area said the city, of nearly half a million people, had been taken in the initial attack. They weren't entirely sure how much territory the aliens were spread over (the maps Beth had seen were very fuzzy, only estimates), but it was thought Kisangani was well behind their lines, so, Goma it was.
It was a pretty respectable city, few tall buildings but covering a large area, spread out on the shore of the big damn lake, many of the buildings painted in bright, pleasant colours, not bad-looking. The residential areas of the city were surprisingly low-density, modest little houses separated by sizeable gardens — she'd asked one of her language instructors about it, and apparently public housing included space for vegetable gardens, part of an effort to reduce food scarcity dating to one of their more left-leaning governments a couple decades ago, which was kind of neat. Set up in a few public greenspaces, or else spread out in blobby outgrowths off the city, were refugee camps hosting thousands of people, at minimum. They were relatively orderly affairs, at least, tents (and sometimes even simple wooden shacks) set up in neat little rows, gathered around temporary warehouses where supplies were kept, and even tiny little slapdash clinics and primary schools for the children and the like. Didn't seem exactly pleasant to live in, she was sure everyone would rather go home, but it could be a lot worse, she guessed.
And spreading out in more big blobs were the military camps. They had a fair number of people sending fighters in to help, so the whole thing was kind of a big mess. Apparently, it'd taken some negotiation to decide just who would be showing up where — the landings were all in former colonies, and they could be kind of sensitive about certain foreign militaries kicking around in their countries, for obvious reasons. The Congo, for example, would not react well to seeing Belgian soldiers walking around again, and some of their African allies who'd immediately agreed to send what help they could had equally intense animosity for the French — even more in some cases, since it turned out the French had intervened in their former colonies multiple times since 'independence' (which Beth had literally never heard of before her language lessons) — and the Indians had basically told Britain to fuck off, they'd rather fight with the Communists. One that had kind of surprised her, there was another major landing in, like, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, somewhere around there (she didn't know exactly), which was very near the Chinese border...but they didn't want to let the Chinese military in. They would accept help from their neighbours, the Soviets, any of the Arab and European states who were offering — but not France, since they were also a former French colony, and had fought a nasty war for independence in living memory — but she'd heard they'd basically told the Chinese to fuck off.
Apparently the Chinese had invaded the region only like a decade ago? There'd been a big bloody war and everything, which was completely new to her. How had she never heard about this? Also, weren't everyone involved Communists? What the hell...
Anyway, by the time Beth had arrived in Goma, foreign fighters had already been moving in for a week or so. The comparatively modest African militaries had gotten here in significant numbers first — she'd heard the Tanzanians were the first to arrive, followed by smaller teams from Zambia and Angola (apparently including Cuban volunteers who'd already been in Angola at the time). More fighters were gradually trickling in from their neighbours to the west further along the coast, but they were gathering somewhere in the west of the country, to come at the landing from the other side. The Soviets were the first from outside of Africa to show up, weeks ago now — though Beth had seen very few white people among them, supposedly mostly from Central Asia — an Egyptian force coming in by way of Tanzania not much later — though a rather modest one, beefing up their security forces already in Goma, most of their people with the Arab forces massing in Ethiopia to press the aliens from the north — soon followed by advance forces from the Americans and a smattering of European countries, including Britain. In the next week and continuing since Beth had arrived, more Americans and Europeans kept flying in, though they probably wouldn't see a lot of the former for at least a little while — they were focussed primarily on the big landing in the Amazon, and there were also rumours of aliens in the Pacific, but they had the capacity to spare to send a little backup their way. Supposedly the Chinese also had a pretty damn sizeable force on its way too, but it'd taken them some extra time to put it together, they weren't expected to arrive for another two to three weeks.
She was kind of looking forward to it, honestly — she'd heard they were bringing a bunch of fucking flamethrowers (because apparently the Chinese army just did shite like that), which sounded very useful for fighting in the bloody jungle.
Goma had been very loud and chaotic, with the refugees and foreign militaries all concentrated in one place — the active fucking volcano looming over the city some kilometres to the north only making everything seem more tense and dire. (Literally, an actual volcano, there was a stripe of smoke rising from the peak and everything, it was seriously unnerving trying to sleep so close to the thing.) The alien invasion going on, the volcano nearby, the low-key unrest in the refugee camps, all the foreign fighters all over, sometimes from countries that didn't like each other very much, all of it combining to make everyone very on-edge. And then, not long after Beth arrived, thousands of people started streaming in from the north — the landing had started weeks ago now, but most of the locals were fleeing on foot, so it'd taken them this long to get here — which didn't exactly help things settle down any.
Thankfully, none of that was Beth's problem anymore. After just a few days in the city, transportation had been arranged for her troop by the local mages, and they were relocated to a forward camp in the bloody rainforest a couple hundred kilometres north. From here, they were within a few kilometres of the territory held by the aliens — if she got on her broom and flew straight up, high enough to look out over the trees, she'd be able to see signs of their presence, unsettlingly nearby. Of course, Beth hadn't actually done that, since that'd be a good way to get spotted and blown out of the sky...
Beth didn't really know much about the magical governments in Africa — the situation was seriously fucking complicated, she understood that much. For the first century or so after Secrecy, most of sub-Saharan Africa had been being overseen by Egypt and the Arab and Indian countries, how much 'oversight' was actually necessary varying quite a lot depending on where you looked. It'd been handed off back to the locals in bits and pieces, the last "protectorate" dissolved over a century ago now, but there were so many different countries with completely unfamiliar names, it was impossible to keep straight. The region of the continent they were in now was relatively sparsely populated, but shockingly diverse, so many different ethnic groups and languages packed into a relatively small area she honestly didn't know how they managed it. Well, mostly they didn't? She was pretty sure the magical countries in the area cooperated to keep an eye on the area, mostly just to make sure Secrecy remained in place — there weren't really enough mages here for a full proper government to be worth it.
It turned out it was kind of hard to build cities in the middle of the fucking rainforest, who'd have guessed.
They'd come here through...well, kind of a portkey, she guessed? It was Chinese magic, supposedly, something the locals had adopted over a century ago now, since all the rainforests and mountains and rivers and volcanos and shite made floo travel pretty much impossible. They'd sketched some kind of big spell circle on the ground, just drawn in the dirt by hand, the few dozen people being moved standing inside of the circle, the mages performed some cooperatively-cast spell of some kind — and then zip, they were standing inside an identical circle a couple hundred kilometres away, instantly. It'd made Beth rather dizzy, their whole group had needed a few minutes to sit down and recover, but it hadn't been that bad. It required a fair bit of coordination — the circles on either side had to be drawn exactly the same, simultaneously — so it wasn't something that could be done without a lot of preparation, but still, much better than portkeys or the floo.
Rainforests, Beth had learned already, were kind of miserable places to hang around in for more than a couple hours at a time. Despite being so much nearer the equator, Goma hadn't actually seemed any warmer than summer at home — she suspected the elevation and cooling from the big damn lake had something to do with that. Where they were now was...somewhat warmer, she thought? It was hard to tell for sure, because it was so fucking humid all the time. Now, London was a wet miserable city, but when it was being wet and miserable it was also usually cooler. Somehow, there was so much water in the air here that there was occasional fog and mist condensating onto leaves and shite even in the summer heat, while the sun was still out, which was fucking ridiculous. Seriously, it was miserable, she was basically sweating constantly all the time, but that wasn't even the worst part — the air felt thick just breathing it, especially when she was walking around or doing something, it didn't take very long before she started feeling a little out of breath. Like there was so much bloody water in the air that it made it hard to breathe.
And the bugs! Beth wasn't squeamish about this shite like some girls could be, something buzzing around her head or occasionally finding one crawling on her or whatever didn't really bother her, that wasn't the problem — the problem was they were fucking loud! The first night after they'd gotten here, Beth had had serious trouble sleeping. Partially because she knew the nearest alien camp was only a few kilometres away, but partially because the buzzing and chirping and chittering was constant. And not a subtle noise either, she could tolerate it if it were just a low buzzing or something, but it was high and piercing and, just, fucking loud, enough it was giving her a headache, she didn't know how anyone could stand it. She'd eventually given up and put up a sound paling, anchoring it with a few runes carved into a random chunk of wood (a basic trick Sirius had insisted she learn) — maybe not a great idea, since she might not hear it if they were attacked in the middle of the night, but she wouldn't be much help in a fight anyway if she couldn't fucking sleep.
That shite was all miserable, yes, but it wasn't all bad. It rained pretty much every day, yes — normally not very much at a time, little showers sweeping through again and again and again, which still added up to a hell of a lot of rain all together — but the clouds and the fog and the mist all cut down on the sun that actually reached her kind of a lot. The sun did come out often enough, of course, but getting plenty of breaks helped. Beth was stupidly pale, she couldn't count the times she'd gotten terribly sunburned at quidditch practice, if she were stuck out in the sun all the time she'd probably literally die.
Though, the forest itself also helped with that. Some of the trees here were, just, fucking huge — trunks well wider than her armspan, with thick tentacles of roots sprawling out and out and out, eventually tangling up with their neighbours enough it was impossible to tell which roots belonged to which tree, and, just, absurdly tall. Beth had used a quick measuring charm on a particularly tall one and, after doing the conversation in her head, it was over fifty metres tall, Jesus. The trunks were pretty bare of branches for the first couple dozen metres or so (fuck), but they spread out once they were up there, enough layers of leaf-heavy branches overlapping to cast the ground far below in thick shade.
There were parts of the forest where the huge trees didn't blot out the sky, for whatever reason, those sections bright and sunny, and dense with all kinds of shite, ferns or whatever, and crawlers, and younger trees and bushes and, just, whatever, most of it unfamiliar. The locals had cut walk paths through the underbrush — one had supposedly been in use until just a year ago, and it was already half-overgrown, the forest reclaiming it shocking quickly — but where they hadn't, these sunny patches were practically impassable, the greenery so dense it might as well be a solid leafy flowery wall. The further you got from these open patches, it got darker and darker, the deepest areas almost seeming to be in permanent twilight, lit by the distant glow of the nearest open patch, the occasional beam of sunlight slashing down through the darkness.
Beth didn't like hanging around in the really dark areas, honestly. It was easier to get around, the pseudo-twilight thick enough to prevent any dense groundcover from forming, but she couldn't bloody see anything. Some of the shite around here was dangerous, venomous snakes and whatever, as dark as it was in here she could easily step on something without realising it...
Thankfully, they didn't spend much time in the especially dark areas. They didn't want to go out in the open either, concerned the aliens would spot them, so instead they traced along the edges of the open patches, still out of the direct sunlight but bright enough to see what the hell they were doing. Enough sun that there were still a lot of bushes and shite they had to make their way through, and of course there were bugs flying around all over — Beth had been stung a couple times already, but thankfully nothing she'd had a bad reaction to, just painful — and of course just breathing here was a fucking pain, but it wasn't that bad. Or, could be worse, at least the sun wasn't frying her to death...
There were people who actually lived in this place, which she personally couldn't imagine. Some of them were farmers, would cut or burn down a patch of the forest, grow shite there for a few years, and then pick up all their shite and move a few kilometres and start over again, letting the forest reclaim it — the topsoil was surprisingly thin and sandy, she could find rocky shite pretty easily just scraping at it with her boot, they probably had to move around so they didn't just exhaust the soil. There were also smaller groups of, like, hunter-gatherer types, living deep in the middle of nowhere and just living off of whatever they could find. Their guide was one of these people, who were apparently mostly pygmies — the locals who hadn't been killed or captured had all fled, with the exception of a small handful of hunters, who'd stuck around to keep an eye on the invaders. Ballsy little bastards, honestly.
(Beth had a suspicion Hermione would say "pygmy" was a slur, but she honestly wasn't sure what else she was supposed to call them. Kepfisa himself was Efe, but Beth was pretty sure that was a particular clan group...or something, she wasn't sure exactly — it didn't help that they didn't share a language, so she couldn't exactly ask. And there were multiple different groups in here, so Efe didn't work as a general term. Oh well.)
When the African mages had been scouting the place out, looking for a place they could teleport people in, they'd stumbled across Kepfisa who, after a bit of explaining, had offered the tiny little village his people had been staying in until just a couple weeks ago as a place for them to camp. Most of their first day up here had been spent just expanding the small partially-cleared space into something they could actually use — they were bringing rather more people than had been living here before, and they had equipment and stuff, they'd needed to clear some space. Luckily, that was relatively easy to do, since they had magic. Their little ramshackle shelters had been shrunk down in Goma, and then just unshrunk once they had a spot for them, very efficient. After her troop was done mapping out the immediate area, and getting a sense of what the aliens were up to, there would be more people coming in — probably hundreds — so most of them were back at the camp at the moment clearing out more space, Bill constantly tweaking the wards to keep them hidden and protected, they'd be at that for a while.
They'd needed to practically destroy the village, but Kepfisa had just brushed it off — his people were used to moving around on short notice, when they fled they'd been carrying everything of value they had on them.
Beth had done a little bit of exploring around the camp, getting the lay of the land, serving as a translator while they were told about things in the immediate area, what bugs and snakes and things they had to look out for, which plants were edible, that kind of thing. (They had plenty of food for now, but things might get spotty down the road, and there was nothing wrong with snacking on fruits and nuts around if they felt like it...except some of them were poisonous, was the thing.) This was the first time she'd gotten very far away from the camp at all — part of their job was to, yes, get the camp going so they could move more people in, but also to map out where the aliens were, and try to figure out what they were up to. The aliens seemingly hadn't noticed their arrival at all — they'd seen aircraft going by not very far away, but Kepfisa had learned they had trouble seeing very far through the trees, as long as they weren't flying right overhead they were probably fine — so they had an opportunity to observe their nearest outpost undetected. Kepfisa had been observing them for a couple weeks now, so he had some intelligence to share too.
The walk had been pretty miserable, a couple kilometres through the densely-forested terrain, the plants thick enough and the ground uneven enough that they couldn't move in anything like a straight line, weaving and twisting around. (Beth would worry about getting lost, but Kepfisa knew where he was going, and she could always resort to locator charms to get back.) The path Kepfisa led them on mostly kept to the edge of those sunny patches — because the brush was thin enough and well-lit enough to find their way relatively easily, but also so they were still partially hidden, the aliens less likely to spot them — though that wasn't always possible. They had to cut through a darker area a couple times, and once they had to force through the dense underbrush of a sunny patch, consciously avoiding any of the pre-existing paths. Those would leave them far too exposed, but even without the cover of the bloody enormous trees, the thick vegetation should keep them mostly obscured. Beth had ended up scratched to hell, the branches clawing at her — the only reason she didn't have twigs and leaves caught in her hair was because she'd resorted to just cutting it all off every morning (it grew back as she slept every time, bloody annoying) — and David had been stung by a bee or something, but they'd made it okay.
As difficult as the terrain was, as indirect as their path, it took them probably an hour to reach where they were going — the spot Kepfisa led them to had a surprisingly good view of the alien camp below, perfect. There was a stream coming through here, joining the river not far away to the northwest somewhere, the flow of the water enough to erode away the soil over the centuries, exposing the stone underneath. Obviously, all the big trees and the brush and shite had a rather harder time growing directly on the bedrock, so there was a relatively clear area around the stream, a narrow corridor surrounded by thick jungle on either side. The aliens had camped along either side of the stream, filling the cleared space, Kepfisa's lookout a bit to the south, on a little hill near a curve of the river upstream, the elevation and the open space around the stream giving them a very clear view.
Of course, since they had a clear view, they had to be careful about not being seen. The last little bit of the trip had been very slow and cautious, following the treeline up to the hill, moving in fits and starts. Kepfisa in the lead, slowly picking through the brush, occasionally he'd stop completely, holding up a hand, and dip closer to the ground, huddling close against the greenery — a moment later, one of the aliens' aircraft would pass overhead, eerily quiet, little more but a shadow, like a cloud crossing the sun. They still weren't sure how the hell the aliens' shite actually managed to fly without any obvious engines or anything, at this point they were just assuming it was some kind of magic. (The same magic their shields worked by, Beth suspected.) Once the shadow was gone, Kepfisa would wait a few counts, before getting up and moving again, leading them slowly on.
The trees didn't go all the way to the edge of the hill, instead one of those thick sunny patches — so Kepfisa had them get down on their hands and knees and crawl their way to the edge, under the protective cover of the greenery. It was kind of miserable, the dense vegetation poking and scratching at her, before long she was practically covered in mud — except for her hands, which she'd protected with an imperturbable charm early on so she could still use her wand — and there were bugs bloody everywhere. Kepfisa insisted the mud was actually a good thing, since it'd help keep them hidden from the aliens, but it still sucked. Beth heard almost constant cursing from the Captain and Nkulu, though David was quiet enough, and she could barely tell where Kepfisa even was.
The hill dropped off over the cleared area around the stream pretty quickly, the greenery running almost right up the edge. They were able to poke their heads through, getting a pretty damn good view, and still be mostly covered by the brush — close to the ground on the hill and surrounded by plants, Beth was pretty sure you'd have to know exactly where they were to find them, not a bad spot. David immediately started digging into his pack to get his equipment out, while the Captain and Kepfisa shuffled closer to Beth from both sides, so she could translate what Kepfisa had managed to learn to the Captain.
Figuring out how to translate for Kepfisa had been a bit of a pain. His first language was Lese, which was a very local language, spoken by practically nobody outside of the area; he also spoke Balendru, which was also a local language, but a rather more common one, used in some of the proper towns in the highlands east of here. Nkulu had grown up with a mix of Kikongo and Lingála — and French, in school and stuff, but he hadn't retained enough to speak it at all — but was also fluent in Swahili, and was more or less passable in Balendru. (Which was slightly ridiculous for a normal person who didn't have absurd omniglot powers, but okay then.) So, Kepfisa would say something in Balendru, which Nkulu would translate into Swahili, which Beth would then finally translate into English for the Captain. Their first few hours here, Beth had needed a second Congolese intermediary to translate the Swahili into French, but by this point her Swahili was comfortable enough (and she'd started picking up enough Balendru to help fill in the gaps) that she didn't need him anymore, the officer who'd been helping her with that hadn't even come along this time. It was still a little tedious needing to pass it through Nkulu, but as her Swahili got closer to finished her Balendru was starting to speed up, so hopefully it wouldn't be necessary for very much longer.
Of course, with her luck, they'd probably decide to move her somewhere else as soon as she actually got good enough with the local language — they were mostly only here to scout out the area and prepare for the arrival of a much larger force — but oh well.
The Captain and Kepfisa shuffled uncomfortably close to her, really, but they wanted to be as quiet as possible, so Beth guessed she just had to deal with it. Their sixteen-person group was lead by Luke Green, who'd been in some Army thing before being transferred here, Beth didn't know exactly. (It didn't really matter.) He was in his thirties, Beth thought, tall and relatively slender — like, footballer slender, not as big as some of the other Army blokes but not exactly little either — with dirty-blond hair just long enough to stick out of the bottom of his cap, darkened by sweat, scraggly stubble grown over the last few days scattered over the bottom half of his face. He was a rather stiff, professional sort, and had been less than entirely pleased at first to be saddled with a fifteen-year-old girl — he'd nearly gone to go complain at Ramsey (who was definitely literally Voldemort, but Beth still hadn't managed to convince anyone of that), and actually might have if Bill hadn't had a quick talk with him. He'd loosened up a bit as Beth picked up the local languages absurdly quickly, and after actually seeing her use magic for the first time setting up camp, but she thought he still wasn't happy about it.
Kepfisa, right on her other side, was sort of the odd man out in their little five-person party. Nkulu was in a very similar sort of modern military uniform as Beth, David, and the Captain — the jacket and trousers were somewhat more loosely fit than the British version, the camouflage pattern visibly different, and of course the Congolese army had their own patches and stuff — but Kepfisa, obviously, didn't have anything like that. He was in what looked very much like cargo shorts, made out of a heavy, durable cloth (probably cotton of some kind) — the things had definitely seen better days, stained and threadbare, a few tears here and there. And that was it, he wasn't wearing anything else, his chest and even his feet bare. Before going out today he'd sketched on his own skin with ash and natural paints, which was something Beth had seen him do before. She assumed it had some cultural or religious meaning or something, but she wasn't sure if it was appropriate to ask (it might be private?), so she'd just left him to it.
Of course, since he was a pygmy and all, Kepfisa was weirdly short — Beth was even taller than him, if not really by that much. It was honestly still kind of surreal, Beth wasn't used to being taller than grown men...
Pointing out at the alien encampment ahead of them, Kepfisa started talking. A lot of the languages around here sounded kind of similar, in that they had most of the same sounds — particularly, some consonants started off with an attached nasal sound (like in Nkulu's name), and some of the consonants did this weird thing where your breath flowed in while making it instead of out — and even a lot of the same grammatical quirks — like the types of prefixes nouns got (which were maybe kind of like grammatical gender in European languages?) and how the verbs could get a bunch of shite all smeared together — despite their vocabulary being completely different, and maybe not actually being related at all. Like, listening to them, Swahili and Balendru did sound pretty close, and there was a similar word here and there, but most of the words were all completely different. Kind of like if, say, a Chinese person were to adapt all the sound rules and grammar of English, but keep all the original Chinese vocabulary, so they ended up sounding similar but still being completely different.
She thought the languages were totally unrelated, but had just absorbed similar features from living next to each other over literally thousands of years. Which wasn't a completely new idea, similar things happened with like Spanish and Euskara or Chinese and Korean or whatever, it was just wild to notice it on her own when picking up the languages.
Anyway, Beth was starting to pick up enough Balendru to kind of get what Kepfisa was saying, in places, but Nkulu's Swahili translation a moment later was still necessary to get all the details. "Ah, Kepfisa's starting out explaining what this place used to look like, to give us an idea of how the aliens changed it, you know? This stream here, if you look how narrow it is straight down here, it looked about like that all the way up, with rocky bits around it..." Beth trailed off for a second, asked Nkulu a question in Swahili before turning back to the Captain. "His people measure things differently, we think it's like two or three metres on either side. You know, a little open area around the water, cleared by floods? And then a grassy patch, like the one we're sitting in now, before the trees start again, maybe eight to ten metres away from the water."
"Well, they've been busy, then," the Captain said, glaring off at the alien camp.
"Yeah, looks like it." Beth waved for Kepfisa to go on, following his finger as he pointed at the camp, trying to connect it to Nkulu's translation a moment later. There were two sections to the camp, a rather larger cleared area and a smaller residential area, where the actual buildings were...or, Beth decided "building" was the wrong word, since they were technically grown, but whatever. At the centre of the little village was the largest of the structures, almost looking like a big damn six-legged starfish, the outside surface hard and mottled greenish-brown, by the size of the figures she saw walking around the extended pointed segments might be three metres tall, the central segment even bigger, enough it could easily be two storeys, stretching up in the middle in these big fan-looking things, that... Were those leaves? Was it, like, a funny-looking tree? Fucking weird, but okay then. Clumped around it were a bunch of smaller buildings, the smallest only a couple metres wide (maybe storage for tools or supplies, or sleeping space for single people?) but the largest the size of a modest house — and these were made out of what were obviously shells, with the same sort of smooth spiral shape made by some animals on Earth, coming in various shades of off-white, orangeish, or a sort of greyish-blue.
They would almost be kind of pretty, if not for the fact that they belonged to omnicidal maniacs from literal outer space.
"Um, the big building, the one that kind of looks like a starfish? That's the oldest one, it just dropped out of the sky straight there. It's a little bigger than it started, and the big damn leaves at the top are new, but it hasn't changed much. Kepfisa assumes that's the heart of it, the commanders will be in there. The shells are from... They have these...big damn snail things? The people landed in the starfish, and they brought out the snails, and they ate all the plants around — growing like fucking crazy, apparently. And they can eat solid fucking rock, all the channels for the bigger flooded patch up there were carved out by the snails too."
From the Captain's other side, David interjected, "Look almost look like rice paddies." Beth would take his word for it, she'd never seen one before. Extending in blobs off the stream were shallow flooded areas, stitched through with rows of plants — still somewhat young, she assumed, comparing against the figures walking around...knee- to waist-high, maybe? Of course, she had no idea how big they were supposed to get, it was hard to tell anything about them from this far away. David could probably see details better than her — he had his camera out, the lens extended out like an old-fashioned telescope, calming snapping away as they talked. "Not rice though, probably alien. Two or three different crops."
Before she could forget what Kepfisa had said, Beth went right back to her translation. "Anyway, the snails went around eating all the plants in the way, digging out their fields there, getting really fucking huge in the process. Once they were done with them, the aliens pulled them out of their shells somehow, and they were slaughtered — Kepfisa's pretty sure they were used for food."
"Efficient," the Captain admitted. "So, we think this is just a farm."
"That's what it looks like. And, I wouldn't say just a farm — remember all their technology is biological. I'm guessing this is more like a weapons factory. Doesn't look like much, but they've probably got dozens of these dotted around the jungle. And this is just a foothold, I'm guessing they'll be a whole hell of a lot bigger if we give them a couple months at it." Beth had done some gardening in her time, and considering they'd only been here for a few weeks, those plants already looked pretty big — they'd probably engineered them to grow unnaturally quickly, she'd bet it would only take a couple months to completely finish the growth cycle and get new...whatever the fuck this was for. Considering the climate here meant they could grow all year round, yeah, they definitely didn't want to let the aliens dig in too long.
"Yes, Potter, point taken. Unfortunately for them, we're not going to give them a couple months. Does our friend here have any idea of their numbers?" The Captain had trouble pronouncing Kepfisa's name, for some reason, it wasn't even one of the difficult ones.
Beth started the question in Balendru, before realising she wasn't sure what to call the things she wanted numbers of, exactly, so she switched back to Swahili instead. Nkulu went back and forth with Kepfisa, asking for clarification on one point or another, before summarising the whole discussion for Beth. "There are a few soldiers, Kepfisa isn't sure how many — posted here permanently, maybe only half a dozen? There might be more in the starfish who just never come out, hard to say. More come by now and then, he thinks there's a bigger military camp somewhere north of here, where the aircraft fly out from. He hasn't gone to check, the patrols get thicker as you go, didn't want to risk it."
"We've heard from the local mages that they're building up at Isiro — probably moving to hit Sudan or our allies in Ethiopia. Could they be coming from there?"
...Beth asked Nkulu where Isiro was quick. "Um, maybe. I guess it depends on how fast their aircraft are." She had a thought, quick asked Nkulu to ask Kepfisa a question for her. "It sounds like the aircraft respond to signs of people in the forest in about an hour, an hour and a half, so, yeah, maybe they're at Isiro."
"You think if we hit the village, you mages will be able to set up a trap for their reinforcements before they arrive?"
"I don't see why not." Since detection and analysis spells just kind of ignored the aliens, for whatever reason, scripting the trigger element might be a problem — her trap hexes back in London had just gone off if anything moved inside their range, but that wasn't going to work in a bloody rainforest — but they could just work up something to set it off manually, they'd figure it out. "Maybe get Bill to script out a trap ward and do as much of the carving as possible ahead of time, charge up some reservoir stones for some extra power. But yeah, that shouldn't be a problem."
"Good. So, half a dozen soldiers, who are all the other shells for? Workers?"
"That's what it looks like." Beth asked another question, went back and forth with Nkulu and Kepfisa for a little bit. "None of the dinosaur-looking buggers, just the humanoid ones — Kepfisa isn't sure how many, they look too similar to keep an accurate count. Though, some of them have these weird deformities, like an infection or something, he hasn't gotten close enough to see what that's about. Maybe some kind of skin condition they can get? Looks pretty painful, maybe even debilitating, but it's hard to tell from a distance. Probably over half the camp are actually human captives, though."
"He's certain? They aren't just killing them all?"
"No, I'm sure they want people for something. Back in the initial attack, I came across them rounding up people all over the place. Of course, when we show up to rescue them, they tend to switch right to slaughtering everyone, but they do want people alive, for some reason." Now that they knew they were setting up farms down here, probably for labour. It'd been pointed out that the fleet that'd shown up here was way too small to be a whole space-faring civilisation, this group was probably just here to turn Earth into a big damn factory for them, or something. As big as the mothership out around the moon was, they definitely hadn't brought enough of their own workers to run a planet-sized operation — so, they assumed the aliens didn't want to kill everyone, they'd probably end up enslaving most of the population instead.
(Africans just kept getting fucked by foreigners coming in looking for slaves to do farm labour, didn't they?)
"Yeah, the workers in the field are mostly human. Look," David said, holding the camera over to the Captain, pointing out at the little settlement. It took a little bit for the Captain to find what he was looking for, not familiar with the device, but Beth could tell when he did — he let out a low hissing curse, the camera creaking a little as his fingers tightened.
The Captain was still looking through the camera when Kepfisa hissed, "Down, now. Beth, hide us."
Nkulu immediately started translating, but he didn't actually need to, she'd caught that one. "Incoming, get down and hold still." While everyone laid flat, wiggling a little bit more under the bushes and shite, Beth flopped over onto her back, nudging Kepfisa with her shoulder. Her wand snapping into a hand with a flick of her wrist, she sucked in a breath and, carefully, cast the frustratingly delicate concealment spell.
The local mages had been dealing with the aliens for a few weeks now, so they'd had some time to start figuring out what worked on them through trial and error. For whatever reason, the aliens seemed weirdly resistant to certain classes of magic. They were completely immune to mind magic, any magic targeting the mind (or the soul) going straight through them like they weren't there at all — like Beth's omniglot stuff didn't get anything from them, legilimens like Ramsey (Voldemort) couldn't get shite from them, not even so little as a sense that they existed. Supposedly, even the actual Morrigan couldn't feel their presence at all, and she was so absurdly powerful of a mind mage that people used to literally worship her as a god. (Some people still did, technically, it was wild.) They were just as vulnerable to physical effects as anyone else (though had a resistance to transfiguration similar to, like, trolls or dragons or some shite), but they completely ignored illusions and compulsions, which meant that the vast majority of concealment magics were fucking useless. They couldn't see through expanded space, and obviously anything that completely stopped light or sound from even getting to them still worked, but that sort of thing was used more rarely, and were much harder to implement.
And even doing that, they then had the additional problem of not really being sure what the aliens' visual range was like — or what their technology could pick up, that was a big fucking question mark. Or, it had been, they were slowly starting to figure it out. Some of their tech could smell people, that was a pain to deal with, but after a bit of trial and error they'd figured out that their cameras (or equivalent) definitely saw well into infrared. Their spaceships and planes and gliders and shite all had heat-vision, basically...and probably a lot of other stuff too — the grenade-bug things tracked their targets with infrared, for example, cancelling out your heat signature often sent them flying off in the wrong direction (which was a neat trick Beth was looking forward to trying). Kepfisa had figured out the same thing on his own, the handful of surviving local hunters quickly discovering that the aliens would show up whenever they set a fire for anything. The wards Bill had put over their camp redirected light of all wavelengths around them, sort of a much more complicated and fucking enormous disillusionment spell. The effect wasn't perfect, the aliens would probably notice something wrong if they got close enough, but at a distance it should blend into the rest of the environment, good enough that they hadn't been discovered yet.
That was somewhat finicky to do with a ward, but not really a problem; doing the same thing with something castable, though, was a fucking pain. Just doing it on herself wouldn't be too bad, but extending it to cover their whole group made it one of the most difficult spells she'd ever cast. Not only did it take a surprising amount of power, burning and crackling its way down her arm, but it was also just extremely sensitive. And they hadn't come up with a version that was, just, cast it and leave it, no, she had to maintain it the whole time — the power searing down her arm, the magic twisted into a tense, jagged, asymmetrical shape, Beth struggling to hold it together, gritting her teeth and glaring blankly up at the sky as she concentrated on keeping the spell going as hard as she fucking could.
She'd been holding the spell for maybe fifteen, twenty seconds when a shadow passed overhead. It was an aircraft, the kind they'd taken to calling a skate, because it kind of looked like the fish — she'd seen them floating along in the distance a few times, but she'd never seen one from this close. The body part was flat and roughly diamond-shaped, a bulbous cockpit and stuff down the middle (along where the spine would be on the real fish), a long narrow tail extending out behind. The surface was armoured, segments of overlapping plates coloured in deep, vivid shades of green and purple — gleaming a little in the sunlight, but not like metal, looking more like the hard outside of an insect — bristling with defensive spikes, maybe to make them hard to board and take over? In a real animal, it'd be to make it hard to eat, but that wasn't really a problem a bloody plane would have. Despite how hard the surface looked, it was clearly flexible, the flatter parts of the body undulating as it flew, almost like the real fish — that couldn't possibly actually help the thing fly, she had no idea why they'd designed it to do that. Maybe only fifteen, twenty metres over their heads, it was completely silent, no noise of any machinery whatsoever, just a faint whistling noise of wind through the spikes.
It gracefully banked overhead, turning smoothly and slowly as though weightless, spiralling in towards the camp. It came in for a gentle landing near the starfish building, one of the humanoid aliens — from here, Beth could barely make out the hard lines suggesting this was one of the soldiers — climbing out of the thing, meeting a couple people near the tip of one of the starfish's legs, before disappearing inside.
David was already up, taking pictures, Beth released the spell with a sigh, grimacing at the hot-cold tingles crawling along her wand arm. The pilot had left the skate, and it was facing away from them, they were probably safe. "I caught a glimpse of the pilot, before he went inside," David whispered. "He had one of those weird fleshy capes."
Yeah, Beth had seen those, on the ship over Paris — their best guess was that it was a symbol of rank of some kind. "The bugger in command of the group in Isiro, checking in for some reason, maybe?"
Her suggestions just got a few shrugs and noncommittal mutters, since there was really no way to know for sure. The Captain glanced over at the locals quick, before muttering to Beth. "When I was looking through the camera, I saw... The captives, they have these...chalky-looking growths poking through their skin. Did our guides mention anything about that?"
"No, I don't think so. Like the dinos?"
He frowned, glaring out toward the camp for a moment. "...Yeah. Yes, they do look similar. They're not in the same pattern, but they might be the same material."
"They're probably not for the same purpose." The mottled, rocky-looking implants on the dinosaur-looking fuckers mostly seemed to be for protection — Beth had seen them bounce bullets — and sometimes as weapons, adding more force or a cutting edge to a hit. Didn't seem like something you'd be putting in people who'd just be doing farm work. "I think I heard one of the local mages back in Goma mention something about that, but I didn't catch much. Hang on, I'll ask." Switching to Swahili, "Hey Nkulu, the Captain noticed some little rocky growths on the captives. Do you know anything about that?"
Nkulu grimaced, turned to shoot the camp a hooded glare. "Yeah, we were told about it. A few people managed to escape captivity, and the mages have done a little spying, but we don't know much. They plant what look like seeds—" He held up a hand, his pointer finger and thumb a centimetre or two apart. "—about that big, under the skin. They're quite quick about it, all their captives are lined up and they go right down the row one to the next, like an assembly line. They grow quickly, the external growths start showing in only about a week. Hurts like the devil, looks like. But it's not just outside, as soon as the thing is in you, its putting things in your blood, carried all through the body. Even if you cut out the growths, the stuff in your blood is still there. The labcoats didn't know what all it does yet, the last I was told they were still working on it — for the time being, we have orders to euthanise them all."
"Wait, what? Does that word mean what I think it means?" The word Nkulu had used was clearly academic, professional jargon, stood out from the rest of his speech — Beth was certain it was a French borrowing, the pronunciation Swahili-fied — so she wasn't entirely certain, but she thought so.
Turning away from the camp, he gave her a grim sort of nod, eyes hard and dark. "Yes, Beth, it means what you think it means. The bits in your blood, they do something to your brain, messing things around, the labcoats aren't sure how yet. It makes people behave...different. Like they aren't themselves anymore, they hardly even recognise their own families. The ones we've tried to rescue so far seem to go mad, yelling and banging at the walls, even try to tear apart their rescuers with their bare hands. Whatever it is, even mages have been taken by it, and they didn't know how to fix it any better than the labcoats do. They're working on it, cutting infected bodies up and doing tests and whatever healing magic your people do, but they don't have an answer yet. I don't like it any more than you do, but..." He shrugged. "We don't have the means to hold hundreds or thousands of violent, insane prisoners while waiting for a cure. And it's possible they'll never find one, and we'd only be drawing out their suffering. My superiors have decided, rather than take risks to save those who maybe can't be saved, to instead focus our efforts on saving those we can."
...Yeah. Yeah, she got that. Just, fucking hell, that was just horrifying — they thought these implants physically rewrote the victim's brains? Just, fuck, that was all, just fuck. With what little she knew of healing magic, that wasn't possible to undo...though maybe they could find out how it worked and how it could be prevented, like a vaccine? And, even if you did manage to deprogram them, messing around with their brains like that would probably destroy all their memories and their personality while you were at it, so they wouldn't even be the same person anymore. And even then they'd most likely end up seriously traumatised for the rest of their lives, going through that fucking nightmare, Jesus. Just, fuck these aliens, evil creepy bastards...
Once Beth had gotten her horror and disgust and anger under control enough to get her voice to work again, she went ahead and translated for David and the Captain. David stayed mostly quiet through it, only hissing out the occasional curse, focussed on taking more pictures of the camp. As the explanation went on, especially getting to the part about Nkulu's orders, the Captain's mouth dropped open a sliver, his eyes tightening with...anger, probably. Finally he snapped, "No, that's not acceptable."
"I'm just telling you what Nkulu's superiors told him."
"Well, it's a crock of shite. I'm not going to go down there and just kill all those people. There's got to be thirty, forty prisoners down there? You want to be the one to go around and execute the poor sods, Potter, because I don't."
Seeing a flash of captives being cut down in Manchester, Beth grimaced. "No sir, but I'm not sure what choice we have."
"We'll figure something out! How many captives are there, do you think? Kisangani's a proper city of, what, half a million people? and there's Isiro and all the other towns up here, there could easily be a couple million people behind enemy lines. And they're all to be consigned to death are they? What, after slaughtering everyone in this camp, do the Congolese want us to firebomb Kisangani for them next?"
"Sir, I don't think—"
"You can tell Antoine over there—" Nkulu's first name, the Captain had trouble with the nk- sound. "—that his superiors can fuck off, because I'm not going to tell my people to— For Christ's sake, do they have any idea how many people that is? We'll figure something out, have the mages freeze them or something and pack them away, there has to be—"
"Luke!" Beth hissed, grabbing at his wrist — the Captain was startled enough that he cut off in mid-sentence, staring back at her, his face flushing with anger. "They know that, sir. Nkulu says they have people working on the problem, but until then they...they have to prioritise. He doesn't like it any more than we do, but. I'm sure the people who gave the order know better than we do how many people live up here, they know what it means. They know."
For a long moment, the Captain just stared at her, his mouth silently working. And then he let out a heavy sigh, his neck going limp, forehead resting on the grass for a second. "Of course. You're right, Potter, I... Triage, I get it, I'm only..." His shoulders rising and falling, he let out another deep sigh, ending in a low groan. In a low mutter, Beth almost didn't even hear it, "Fuck this war."
"Yes, sir," David said, "that about sums it up."
The Captain snorted, his head shaking. Then he looked up again, glanced over Beth to Nkulu. "Apologise to Antoine for me, I... I wasn't thinking."
"...You know he didn't understand a word of that." He just gave her a flat look, one eyebrow ticking up a little. Well, fine, she guessed, why not — she had to resist the urge to roll her eyes until she was turned enough away he wouldn't see it. Nkulu obviously knew she'd been told to tell him something, looking over Kepfisa back at her. "It's very silly, since it's not like you can be offended if you don't speak the bloody language, but... Well, I guess the Captain just had a white person moment."
Nkulu let out a single puff of surprised laughter, his lips twitching. "That so?"
"Yeah, I guess. You know the kind of thing, these poor unenlightened savages, they can't possibly know the significance of what they're doing — freaking out over your orders, you know." Beth was maybe being a bit uncharitable, but she did have to wonder how the Captain would have reacted if they were in, like, Sweden or some shite, and the tone he'd had suggesting Beth tell Antoine that his superiors could fuck off was, hmm. His rant had had a vibe to it, that was all. "It was a brief moment, he's over it."
Smirking back at her, Nkulu drawled, "I do know the kind of thing, yes. I guess I should be glad it was only a brief moment."
"Nah, fuck that, mock him for it all you want — it's not like he understands Swahili any better than you do English, he's not gonna know."
"Well, in that case, I'm shocked that he has any problem killing my countrymen, because it's not like his countrymen ever hesitated in the past."
"No but see, imperialism is over, we're all enlightened and democratic now."
"I see, I see. I must have imagined the president of my country being assassinated by European-backed traitors a few decades ago now. Or the massacres in Kenya. Or the war in Uganda and Tanzania. Or everything happening in Rhodesia and South Africa," both names said with obvious scorn. "Because the English don't have an Empire anymore, of course."
"Oh, we definitely still have an empire, it's just a nice empire now. We bring civilisation to the world, all these bad things happening literally everywhere we go can't possibly be our fault — Africa is a mess just because it has all these black people on it, you know how it is." She made sure there was extra sarcasm on her voice for that part, just to be absolutely positive he would know she wasn't being serious. Because, she had actually heard people talk like that, Vernon in particular was super racist about Africans, it was absurd...
"I see, I see. Forgive this poor unenlightened savage for his confusion, I understand now."
"You're welcome, of course." She rolled her eyes at him again before turning back to the Captain. "It's fine, we're good. Anything else you want to ask Kepfisa while we're here?"