16th February 1996 (63:FS:02)
— Contact plus 00.05.13:21.45
"All right, next," Beth said, waving the next group forward. A family, a few adults and several children in a smattering of ages, along with an older woman she assumed was (some of) the adults' mother. Looking around curiously, they walked into the checkpoint, stepping onto the black strip of ceramic. "Stop there," holding up a hand, to make sure she was understood. "Do all of you speak Vietnamese?"
The group glanced at each other, before one of the men said, "Yes?"
"Good." She flipped over to the page on her clipboard for Vietnamese-speakers. Looked like they had...let's call that three families' worth — Beth had seen the set-up they had down there, the way it was divided up, they would need three. Starting to mark off the blocks on her map, she said, "Okay, I need all your names, please." The first man started speaking again, but Beth immediately interrupted. "I'm sorry, I need everyone to say their name to me, themselves."
The man gave her a very confused look, but didn't argue about it. They went through the group one by one, Beth quick noting down the names as they went. Lots of repeated surnames, though the women's were unique, which they tended to be within families — Vietnamese women usually (though not always) keep their own surname on marrying. Beth couldn't help smiling a little when a little boy added that he was seven years old and he played football. She carefully listened to each name, feeling the echo of...
And that was everyone, they all checked out. "Right, thank you. You can come forward now, one second..." Beth pulled out a card, wrote down the blocks she'd assigned, before holding it out to the man who'd spoken for them before. "Just behind me you're going to go to the right, there'll be a set of stairs to the left, and you'll take the first left. Show this card to the people there and they'll get you settled in. Okay?"
A few polite thank-yous and what not back and forth, and the group shuffled by her, slipping past the armed guards backing Beth up. "Next, please," she called, waving the next group forward.
Just as they thought they were winning — in Indochina, yes, but against the rest of the landings too — things started to turn bad. And they went very bad, very quickly.
The process had probably started months ago, but they hadn't noticed the signs of what was happening that early. The vines had been the most obvious evidence that the aliens were doing something — while doing their scouting jobs, Beth had found these odd stubborn vines with an almost rubbery texture to them, weirdly hard to cut, along with teams of aliens seeding them seemingly at random through the hills. They didn't know what the fuck the things were, but if the aliens wanted them around they couldn't possibly be good. So they'd taken samples to send back to the labcoats, and just burned the rest, whenever they found them — they might be weirdly resistant to being cut, but fire took care of them just fine.
But just burning the ones they came across didn't entirely get rid of them. The things grew surprisingly fast, spread voraciously. They'd been found randomly showing up dozens of miles away from the nearest alien settlement, just, oozing out of the woods, choking undergrowth and crops. Beth hadn't been paying attention to this at the time, preoccupied with the fighting, but she knew now that they'd been sending out teams with...well, they were magical flamethrowers, basically — devices that drew on ambient magic to produce fire, so muggles could use them, but didn't need to expend increasingly-precious fuel. They'd been trying to burn the stuff out, but it was fucking everywhere.
And then the beetles turned up. They were identified first in the Congo, after they'd already cleared out the invaders, and then a week later in Indochina — the higher-ups had already known they were there well before Beth had spotted them, but she'd been rather busy killing aliens and getting herself set on fire like an idiot. After they were found in Indochina, thousands of miles away from Africa, the science people had gotten the military people in both India and the Amazon to check, and they were found there too. They were definitely some weird alien biotech, must be doing something, it wasn't immediately obvious what. But there were fucking a lot of them, and they were spreading, the borders of the soil contaminated with the things growing rapidly hour by hour.
The effect was gradual, slow enough that they hadn't noticed at first — but, as the concentration of the odd beetle things increased, spreading further and further, the process accelerated. They were changing the environment. The air was changing, Hermione said in a letter written over two weeks ago now — before Beth had noticed the bugs, but the letter hadn't gotten to her yet — that the levels of carbon dioxide had spiked, and they were also seeing carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide...
Beth didn't know what any of that shite was, but Hermione assured her they were all very poisonous. And the levels started small, just little traces, but they quickly started to increase, noxious clouds developing where the centre of the alien landings had been — or still were, in India and the Amazon. At first it was just a bad smell, but it quickly started to become an irritant and then, over the last week or so, actively toxic. If Beth wanted to go back to the delta, where she'd first spotted those damn beetles barely two weeks ago, she would need to wear a breath mask. (Or use a bubblehead charm, she guessed.) And it'd need to be a full one that covered the eyes, because apparently the shite in the air turned into acid on contact with water...like, you know, tears, or the insides of your lungs. If she apparated back there without one, she'd be dead in minutes. Extremely painful minutes, even.
And it was spreading. First a faint smell of sulphur, or rotten eggs. Then the acid rain hit. And then...
The science types were studying the bugs, working on a solution, as quickly as they could. A more recent letter from Hermione said that her bosses were taking it absolutely dead seriously (as they bloody well should), everyone who had literally any background at all in biology or chemistry or herbology or alchemy pulled from whatever project they were on to study the beetles, figure out how they worked and how the fuck to stop them. Beth wasn't sure why the hell alchemists should be involved, Hermione just said that like it should be obvious, with no explanation — she did that sort of thing a lot, forgetting everyone wasn't as bloody brilliant as she was...
Hermione wasn't put on that project — she didn't have the expertise necessary, they kept her working on inventing magic computers instead (fuck) — but she heard that the big theory they were working with was that the aliens were terraforming the planet. Thankfully, she'd guessed that Beth might not be familiar with the concept, so she'd actually explained it in her most recent letter: it was an idea from fucking science fiction novels and shite, people going to, like, Mars or whatever and altering the environment to be more like Earth's. So, the aliens were changing Earth's environment to be more like theirs — obviously they could breathe the air here, but maybe their homeworld had more carbon and sulphur oxides and stuff, their plants might be happier with it, so they were fixing it up for themselves?
Beth didn't know about that. Yeah, sure, maybe their planet was a little different — she had a feeling their homeworld was warmer than Earth, just from how they'd mostly landed right along the equator. (And she remembered the inside of that ship had been pretty warm too.) Maybe the beetles were part of a process of adjusting the planet to their liking, sure, but she had a feeling that they were over-doing it on purpose. The last time Beth had gone out, trying to help evacuate people caught up in the edge of the cloud, they'd been attacked by a group of aliens — and they were wearing breath masks too. Weird fucking alive ones, looked like bloody starfish or some shite latched onto their faces, but. They obviously couldn't breathe the air either.
They'd probably reverse it once it was done, but Beth was positive the point was to suffocate the entire fucking planet, so they'd stop fighting back and allow the aliens to use it. They had been taking slaves, to work their fields, but it seemed like they'd finally become a big enough of an annoyance that the aliens had decided to just kill them all instead.
Beth would almost feel smug about that, if millions of people weren't going to die. Billions, literally everyone, if the scientists didn't figure this shite out...
(Millions were still going to die because of it, no matter what — the famine would have gotten bad enough to be getting on with before, but it was only going to be worse now.)
They'd tried to slow it down, with bombs and whatever magic they could come up with, but it didn't seem to work at all, the beetles burrowing deep enough under that nothing could stop them from spreading. So instead, they were just trying to evacuate as many of people as they could, and get them into shelter — and simply wait, for the science types to come up with a solution. If they didn't come up with something, and fast, they were fucked.
Building underground bunkers quickly was trivial with magic, and they didn't have to worry about fresh air, or water, or sanitation. The limiting factor was food — they could shelter millions of people down underground, away from the increasingly toxic atmosphere, but they couldn't wait forever.
Packing people together in close quarters underground was already going to be tense. Add starvation on top of that, and...
Yeah, the science people better hurry the fuck up, that's all Beth was saying.
This was the third shelter Beth had been brought to work with already. They were crawling out from the epicentre of the disturbance, relocating people away and squirrelling them down into bunkers to wait it out. Figuring out the first ring — the entrances well inside the danger zone now, huddled trapped underground, waiting — had been a bit of a mess, magical and muggle engineers debating about how exactly to design the things, figuring out a system of how to sort the people coming in, actually convincing people, no, the danger was absolutely serious, they needed to evacuate, volunteers moved on to start work on the second ring. Getting it all together, they'd underestimated how quickly the cloud would spread — it'd started to hit Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh while the evacuation was still ongoing. The survivors of the landing had decided harrying the people trying to evacuate civilians was a great idea, so there'd been countless skirmishes in the city as they tried to get people out, the sky to the southwest smeared with yellow-orange-brown poison, scrambling through the streets ducking bug-grenades, skin stinging from acid rain, occasionally having to leave someone behind as they were killed or too badly injured, or simply suffocated on the increasingly unbreathable air...
It'd been a fucking mess, was the point. They'd managed to evacuate most of the city in time, but the scramble at the end had been miserable.
Setting up the second and third rings of shelters, spreading out in tiers from the inexorably spreading poison, had gone much more smoothly, at least, as they better figured out what they were doing, and had more time to warn people to evacuate. Beth had actually been separated from her troop — they were sheltering back in the first ring — tapped to help sort the evacuees coming in. Each shelter was built different, thrown together by the people working on it, but they usually had multiple entrances, someone at each taking down names and directing them to the right section. Just for administrative purposes, they'd decided it was a good idea to sort people by dominant language, so it'd be easier to communicate with their neighbours and with support staff, and everyone doing Beth's job had maps of their chunk of the complex, keeping track of the people coming in to prevent overcrowding. If it came down to it, they could bring in portkeys to move people who didn't fit to neighbouring shelters in this ring, or move them up to the fourth, they'd figure it out. Sanitation and air and water and food and stuff was planned out for a certain population of residents, so, better to figure out how to move them on than put too many people in one shelter.
Though, keeping track of the people coming in wasn't Beth's only job — there was a reason they'd pulled omniglots and mind mages and Seers specifically.
Beth went through one family after another, a bunch of individual people or small groups. Mostly tiếng Việt speakers, or closely-related local languages — things like Xtiêng and Kaho were different enough they were definitely their own thing, but listening to them she could tell they were related, like some of the languages she'd heard up in the hills ages ago now — and also a fair number who spoke Phéasa Khmêr — the big Cambodian language, vaguely similar to Vietnamese but without the tones — and even a family who spoke klei Êđê, which was a Chăm language, different from the rest. Beth didn't actually speak that last one very well at all — she'd picked up a little over the last week, just the absolute basics — but one of the women in the family spoke Vietnamese well enough to get them through the conversation. A few people offered identification papers of some kind, but she didn't actually need those, just verbally tell her names, please. Nothing suspicious, though a lot of them looked rather strained, tired — in a lot of the adults' eyes, relief warred with worry, they'd be safe here but for how long...
There was a low hoot in the room, she glanced up to her left. The room was plain, with nothing in the way of decoration, stone and ceramic polished smooth with magic. She was standing just before a T-junction, a long hallway curving up to the surface stretching out in front of her — though she couldn't actually see most of it, crowded with a long line of people, occasional curtains every few metres enchanted to progressively filter the air of any contaminants — Vietnamese soldiers lingering behind her, playing one of the card games floating around. (Local cards, with different colours and suits and using Chinese characters, Beth knew practically nothing about it.) Behind her, short hallways to the left and right led to a few doors — living space for the army people posted here, as well as some medical stuff, a quarantine space — and stairs leading down further into the complex. Everything was pretty plain and barren, functional, the only thing sticking out a sign across the hallway just in front of her, writing in tiếng Việt and Phéasa Khmêr asking everyone to please wait their turn and follow directions.
Perched on that sign was Hedwig, in owl form. As low as the ceilings were, it was kind of cramped for her up there — Beth had actually asked permission before transfiguring the ceiling up a little bit to make room for her head. She'd been sitting there motionless and silent for...shite, felt like hours by this point. But now she'd turned her head, staring down at Beth with unblinking yellow eyes. Once she saw Beth was paying attention, she turned back forward. Couldn't tell what she was looking at precisely, but Beth got the message: Hedwig had spotted someone suspicious coming up.
After waving the family she was on through, Beth glanced back at the soldiers. "Eyes up, Hedwig noticed something." She turned back to deal with the next family, hearing the soldiers behind her shift around, an occasional click of a holster being loosened or a safety being switched off — timed in sync with footsteps or shuffling in their chairs, avoiding drawing attention to it, to not make anyone too nervous. Beth waved the family through, and then a couple lone people, and then a group of friends — university age, came together but they weren't related — waving the next family forward...
Beth spotted who Hedwig meant over their shoulders. Two men, tall and broad-shouldered, accompanied by a young girl, maybe eight or nine. The men were somewhat paler than the people around them, which wasn't inherently suspicious, nor the way they stood stiff and strong and composed. Almost regimented but, well, there were a lot of former military types in Vietnam, that wasn't unusual. The girl seemed terrified, practically shivering, tracks from dried tears down her face — but that wasn't unusual either, Beth had seen countless frightened children today. Even that the pair of men were alone with a girl wasn't odd, families got split up all the time, people sent all over the place on different jobs, or simply due to deaths. A few times, she'd run into people who'd taken responsibility for random orphans they'd found after the bombings, or who'd managed to run away from alien attacks on the ground — children unattended or accompanied by adults other than their biological parents were not an uncommon sight these days...
There was nothing immediately, obviously suspicious about them. But Hedwig had a better eye than Beth — and as she took the names of the family in front of her, she noticed how the men watched their surroundings, gaze slowly tracking around smooth and cold and distant. Yeah, she had a bad feeling too.
Directing the family on toward the Khmer-speaking section, Beth nodded at the trio. "Good, next." They stepped forward, the men's gait smooth and pantherine, the girl stiff and shaky— "All right, stop there. Do you speak Vietnamese?" She let a short pause pass, as though nothing out of the ordinary were happening — though she did loosen her wand in its holster, hidden behind her clipboard. She switched languages to ask, "Do you speak Khmer? no?"
One of the men spoke, Beth's eyebrows twitching when she recognised the language — that was Chinese (specifically Pǔtōnghuà). Hardly anyone here spoke that, at least not as a first language, that was decidedly odd.
Beth knew a tiny bit of Pǔtōnghuà, picked up over the last few months. Trying to act casual, she said, "I need your names, to write," pointing at her clipboard. Switching back to Vietnamese, she asked, "Could you tell me your name, lovely?"
The girl twitched, her eyes widened. "Ah, ah... Linh. Đặng Lưu Thắm Linh."
Good, Liz felt that — human. The men were tensing a little — suspecting she knew something was wrong — the second one said...something, she didn't follow all of it. (Her Pǔtōnghuà really wasn't very good.) She thought he was saying something about calling for...something, she didn't know.
It didn't help, trying to follow it, that she was getting absolutely nothing from him. From either of them.
Her wand falling into her hand, "Đen đen đen!" she yanked back, a silent summoning charm tugging the girl forward quickly enough her feet left the ground — and too fast for the men to react, a wild grasp for her hair missing by inches. A blink later, the girl was barely through in time, the wards snapped into place. Two walls, right along either edge of the strip of black tile, magic thick enough the barrier was semi-opaque, the aliens and hallway beyond partially washed out.
The girl slammed into Beth's middle, staggering her back a couple steps, she caught her before she could fall. There was a dull thump followed by a crackle of the wards reacting to an impact, a frustrated shout. Some hissing through teeth, rifles cocking behind her, and then a loud, stereo shout of, "Dūɦa roïku pratte!" Death to our enemies.
"You first!" she called, in her best guess at their language. "Burn!" Someone flipped the switch back there, there was a clunk, a thrum of magic.
And then the entire space within the barrier wards was filled with intense gold-white fire.
It only lasted a few seconds, flames hissing and crackling and roaring — but no sense of heat, the air motionless, held in by the wards. The girl clung on to Beth's jacket, shivering as though near freezing, not sure she'd even be able to stand if Beth weren't holding her up. Soon the fire lifted, quickly dissolving to wisps and fading, a low whoosh as the air was sucked up and out. All that was left of the aliens were a couple blots of motionless, blackened stuff on the floor.
After she'd confirmed they were dead, she called, "Đỏ, mát đỏ." The wards lifted, better revealing the remains of the alien infiltrators — skeletons white and charred black, smears of melted flesh scorched onto the floor, shells from bug grenades in fragments, burst as their innards flash-boiled. There were mutters and hisses from the line behind them, but Beth ignored them, cleaned up the mess with a quick string of cleaning charms. And that was that.
Though there was still the girl to deal with. Freed from her captors, she'd abruptly dissolved into noisy tears, stubbornly clinging on to Beth and wailing. Out of a lack of any better ideas what she was supposed to do, Beth sank to her knees, setting her clipboard aside, and wrapped her arms around the girl. Really seemed like she could use the hug — fuck, how long had those bastards had her, couldn't have been pretty. Between shushing noises, she glanced back at the soldiers behind her, "Get a medic, please, she'll need to go through quarantine."
Someone from the medical staff turned up a couple minutes later — a woman in the green uniform of the Vietnamese military, but without any of the rank stuff, Beth saw that sometimes with people who'd lost all their things for whatever reason — she crouched down with Beth, tried to gently entice Linh away. The girl was stubborn, and obviously badly shook up, it took a minute or two to peel her off of Beth. She was still crying as the medic led her off toward quarantine (she'd need to be checked for any alien implants or contagions), occasionally glancing back at Beth, not sure what that was about.
Beth took a deep, shaky breath. She picked up her clipboard, got back up to her feet, and waved the next group forward.
It was a little tense at first, stiff — everyone in sight of the incident seemed rather uncomfortable standing in the black strip of ceramic, perhaps wary of being incinerated themselves. Beth explained, projecting her voice back down the line a little bit with a quick spell, that she had a special magical ability that helped her detect alien infiltrators — she used the Vietnamese term for the Sight, Beth had picked up the term the mages used for omniglottalism but the muggles here wouldn't recognise it — all she needed was for someone to speak to her and she'd know. Security measure to prevent terror attacks inside the shelter, most efficient way to make sure everyone was safe. The next few groups went rather more smoothly after that, now that everyone knew exactly why she needed everyone to individually tell her their names, slipping back to the usual somewhat awkward routine once all the witnesses were past her.
Write names down on her map, copy out the block numbers onto a card, hand it to whoever while giving them directions, and then the next group, and the next, and the next, on and on and on...
After what felt like (and was) hours, a middle-aged local man — dressed in the slightly old-fashioned-looking baggy trousers and wrap-around tunic the mages here preferred — appeared to relieve her. She felt a faint tingle of prickly cool magic on the air, tickling at the back of her neck — mind mage, he'd be able to feel aliens in disguise as well as she could. (Better, technically, since he wouldn't have to wait for them to speak.) He politely waited for her to finish the group she was on, she handed him her clipboard and her stack of cards, and finally stepped away. Hedwig flew down off her perch, gracefully landing on Beth's shoulder, and Beth walked off, heading for the canteen. She wasn't particularly hungry, but she had maybe eight hours before she'd be expected to be up again — continuing to process people coming into this shelter, or maybe she'd be moved to yet another one, who knows — and it was probably a good idea to eat something before going to bed regardless.
First she dipped by the toilets, though. (Well, latrines, technically, but nobody gave a damn about the terminology.) There didn't seem to be anyone in here at the moment, but it wasn't as though Hedwig gave a damn — she'd hopped off of Beth's shoulder and switched back to her human shape well before Beth had even gotten her clothes out of her bag and onto the counter. Hedwig was dressed by the time Beth was done with the toilet (or whatever), though looking rather uncomfortable, grimacing and rolling her shoulders. Give her a few minutes and she'd ease into it, growing increasingly accustomed to human things, but she always looked so bloody awkward at first.
Honestly, if other people wouldn't make a fuss about it, Beth felt very certain that Hedwig would still prefer just walking around completely naked. She could play along with human cultural expectations, but it was still obviously very unnatural for her.
The canteen was rather cramped, maybe twenty people packed in here at the moment — mostly military people, posted here to guard the shelter, various other support staff — hardly enough space in the little room for all of them. For whatever reason, they hadn't gone with proper tables and chairs, instead smaller single-person lap-table things stacked here and there, the floor covered with a relatively soft mat (some kind of woven bamboo, she thought), cushions strewn around if someone wanted the extra barrier. Save space, maybe? Whatever. There was little actual conversation going on, everyone listening to the clear, natural-sounding voice filling the room, projected by one of Hermione's magical radios.
Those things were starting to get around these days, Beth had been seeing them more and more. There had been one in the canteen in the previous shelters she'd been in, and most officers were carrying them around. Supposedly (according to Hermione), they ultimately wanted to get them into the hands of as many soldiers as they could, so they could better coordinate while in combat — and that had been a problem sometimes, thanks to the increasing uselessness of mundane radios as enchantments and wards became more widely used — but they'd been focussed on outfitting people in active battle zones, in India and the Amazon. Manufacturing capability was limited, and they weren't a priority here at the moment, Beth wouldn't be surprised if she was never actually given one. Not that she minded, she was away from her troop anyway, and she couldn't imagine why she'd need one...
The radios getting around had solved the problem of how slow news could be — before, they'd have to rely on people apparating or portkeying around to ferry information in person, but now they could just call someone all the way across the world in an instant. She'd heard this station before, updates on the current progress in the war and other news running twenty-four hours a day. (There were a few different announcers, they rotated in and out over the course of the day.) A lot of the news would be repeated several times in a day — especially if it was important, to make sure everyone heard it — and she assumed some of the information was lightened for propaganda purposes. You know, didn't want to cause too big of a hit to morale by being too blunt about how terrifying of an existential, literal extinction-level threat the terraforming bugs were — literally every scientist and magical scholar they had available was on it, so anyway, about the progress of the fighting in India...
Honestly, she wasn't sure if having access to news was a net positive or negative for morale. The world was a fucking mess at the moment, but being reminded that there was stuff going on elsewhere, there were millions and millions of people working at the same problems they were here was...grounding, maybe was the word? She didn't know. She listened, when she had the time, but she didn't know if it actually did any good.
(She lost count of how many people she'd told that her best friend invented the things — they were cool, it was hard to resist the urge to brag.)
Beth detoured by the food counter to pick up a scoop of rice and beans and a bowl of broth. Unsurprisingly, as the supply situation worsened, the variety of things they had available to eat had declined noticeably — today they didn't have any meat at all, which had become normal at some point. Or, the broth had technically involved meat in the process of making it, but it was just flavouring at this point, and rather mild at that, you could hardly tell. Beans had become more common, as a replacement for the protein, and of course there was a lot of rice. (They were in Asia, after all.) The broth was still flavourful as all hell, sharp from black pepper and with a dollop of coconut butter and a bunch of fresh(-ish) herbs, but it was still a big change from the early months of the war. Supposedly that was going to change soon, due to issues with evacuating livestock ahead of the spread of the toxic cloud, but for now this was what they had.
Hedwig scowled for a second at the entirely plant-based food on offer, but took a serving for herself without complaint.
The two of them got a few nods and muttered greetings as they found spots on the floor — Beth and Hedwig were the only white people in the room at the moment, and one of them could turn into a great bloody Arctic owl, so they were recogniseable at least — but everyone quickly turned back to the radio. The announcer was a man this time, reading off the copy he was given in northern-accented Vietnamese (he was from the area of Hà Nội, Beth thought). At least some of the intermittent talking was someone turning to a neighbour and asking what the announcer just said — the people here mostly spoke southern varieties, the dialects were similar enough they could mostly understand each other, but there was occasional confusion. Beth poured a little bit of the broth over her rice, making sure to get some of the coconut butter with it, and settled in to listen.
Not that there was anything immediately relevant — it sounded like a politics story. She was aware there was a lot of politics ongoing, thanks to the world economy abruptly imploding and the necessity of everyone to work together to fight off the aliens. Beth didn't really have the brain for (or interest in) politics, so she mostly didn't pay attention, but Hermione wrote about that sort of thing now and then, she'd picked up some of it. The thing she knew about with the most long-term importance was probably the major government changes going on. Since the aliens had targeted major cities in their initial attack (and intermittently since), various governments around the world had had a lot of their political leadership knocked out — the UK had been somewhat lucky, but even they had lost a lot of the officials that actually made things work (not to mention the offices they worked out of, and all the records and shite there), basically having to start the whole administrative infrastructure over from scratch, but some countries had essentially been decapitated on day one. In those cases, they still had enough people lower down the ranks to help keep things together, but they often had to lean on assistance from neighbouring countries or just fall apart entirely.
One result of that was the strengthening of international organisations, acting as the intermediary by which more lucky countries picked up the slack for their neighbours. Also, you know, coordinating the various multinational military deployments and complex supply chains and shite they had going on, it was easier to keep all that nonsense straight if it was going through one body. Beth had noticed when her post started going through a new UN office instead of the BFPO, but apparently that kind of thing was happening with a lot of shite she wasn't paying attention to. Hermione didn't think they were going to end up with a literal worldwide government or anything, but, well, the world on the other side of this fucking mess was going to look very different than it had before, that was all.
(Assuming they made it through to the other side at all, of course.)
None of the news seemed particularly interesting — or at least nothing that was important to her, anyway. Something about some meeting happening in Beirut to do with some international politics thing, didn't care, some kind of decision by Laotian leadership, blah blah. Then there was another update about the atmospheric changes going on, and what was being done about that. There were reports that getting people to shelter hadn't gone so well in places in the Congo — the fighting had already been done there for a little while, most of the military people already moved out and attempting to move people back in to get some crops in the ground, so they'd been caught flat-footed when the air started turning to poison. Lots of people had died — probably hundreds, at least — before they could be evacuated. Probably fewer people than they'd lost here, by the sound of it, but the epicentre of the cloud here happened to be inconveniently near the largest city in the country, so. The ones in India and Amazon were still warzones, so there weren't many civilians to evacuate to begin with, so those ones hadn't been as much of a problem — the fighting had slowed down, actually, they suspected the aliens didn't have enough breath masks to go around, gone to shelter in their settlements. Either that or they were running low on people, could be either at this point.
The Korean navy off shore had called in reports of large numbers of dead fish and the like floating around. Hermione had mentioned that the stuff in the air turned water into acid, so, apparently the cloud was getting into the ocean too — that was...concerning. The Koreans and other people on boats around were trying to map out how the poison in the water was spreading, following the currents, they'd have information for fishers about that later. For the moment, the government was putting out a recommendation not to eat anything killed by this stuff, or even if you suspect it might have been, they had no idea if it was safe, wait for more information first...
There was some news coming out of Quảng Tây and Vân Nam — southern provinces of China, bordering Vietnam and Laos — but that was more politics stuff, and Beth didn't really know enough to even really follow it. And, honestly, now that she'd gotten some food and was sitting down and not doing anything she was getting kind of tired. She hadn't really been sleeping well lately, too much going on, maybe it was about time to get to bed...
Just as she was considering getting up, the presenter on the radio broke off in mid-sentence — the signal went dead for a few seconds. "Excuse me, I'm told we have an urgent report coming in. One moment..." Beth assumed there was muttering and paper-shuffling going on over there, but the 'microphone' worked through intent, so they couldn't hear any of that. The room went about as silent as the radio, the men and women stiff and tense, waiting. The broadcast was only very rarely interrupted with more news coming in. Whatever it was must be big. After a long, fragile moment, the presenter came back, they were learning just now that—
Nuclear weapons.
They'd used nuclear weapons in the Amazon and India, just earlier today.
The decision came after at least a week of deliberation between the Soviets, the Americans, and the effected countries — India and Brazil, yes, but also countries that had significant risk of ending up in the fallout...which did include Burma, but probably not them over here. (The dominant winds coming off Biển Đông should protect most of the peninsula...hopefully.) The attacks had come simultaneously, and with no warning, using portkeys to teleport warheads in to each of the alien posts in both regions they'd managed to identify, all of the nukes immediately going off simultaneously — observers noted they'd all detonated, the aliens failed to vanish any of them with their weird gravity shields before they went off. Hence the portkeys and the short fuse, Beth guessed.
There were multiple reasons behind the decision to stop playing around and break out the big guns. For one, attacks from the aliens had slowed down, yes, but their forces in both regions were increasingly hard-pressed to continue the fighting and evacuate people away and start building shelters — especially since they didn't have enough breathing equipment good enough to survive in the cloud for enough people to make a difference. Just leaving the aliens in there wasn't an option, since they'd be able to send out raiding parties and grow up some more weapons unopposed. (That they might use the break to make more of the big fire-squids was a particular concern.) Also, it was hoped that detonations close to the surface would kill all the air-changing bugs in the soil, and the radiation might slow down the spread — lab tests did suggest that the bugs could be killed with radiation, though they really had no idea whether the fallout would be strong enough to actually stop them.
Wiping the aliens out completely with overwhelming force meant they'd be able to focus on other priorities, particularly evacuating people in the area, trying to contain the bugs, and working on getting some crops in the ground to hopefully help with the worldwide food supply issues that were becoming a serious problem these days. The relative isolation of the sites meant that direct civilian deaths from the bombings should be almost zero, and they promised that radioactive fallout should be relatively easily dealt with with magic. (Not easy to do, considering how wide of an area a nuke could fling shite around, but the magic involved wasn't complicated.) A joint American–Soviet team of experts had carefully calculated how many nukes they would need to eliminate both landings, and the yield that would be most effective while still within what they could afford — the consequences for the climate from the ash and dust thrown into the air from the bombs themselves should be minimal, but the effects of secondary fires were harder to estimate...and both bombings had been in forested regions, meaning there was a lot of shite to burn. All the smoke and ash thrown up into the air might have a mild cooling effect, but then all the carbon dioxide produced by the fires — and less of it being taken out of the air with all those trees lost — would then have a warming effect, they really couldn't be sure which would be more noticeable...especially since the cooling effect would decline with time, and the warming effect might not, so the latter might be hidden by the former at first...
It was a big fucking deal, basically, the sort of extreme measure they would only ever even consider in the emergency situation they found themselves in at the moment. There were teams prepared to go in and suppress the fires as quickly as possible and start cleaning up the radiation as much as they could, but it'd probably be a couple days before it was safe to start doing that. The cloud in India was drifting north and east, over Bangladesh and toward China, as well as west-southwest further into India; the cloud in the Amazon was more spread out, and the winds were mild, but it seemed to be trailing vaguely northwest, toward Columbia. They'd have further updates as more information came in.
Even after the presenter moved on, for at least a couple minutes afterward, the room was filled with cold, shocked silence, everyone just staring blankly at the device, or glancing wide-eyed at each other.
...Jesus fucking Christ. Just blow up the entire fucking rainforest, why don't they...
In the cold, solemn quiet, Hedwig leaned closer to Beth. "What is this? What happened?" Oh, of course Hedwig didn't understand any of that...and it turned out she didn't know what nukes were either, that didn't help...
Explaining all that took a couple minutes. Or explaining it as well as Beth understood it herself, honestly — she really had no idea how nuclear weapons worked, or what the fuck radiation really was, just that they were bad. The bit about stuff flung up into the air blocking out the sun, making it colder, and different gases in the air holding heat better making it warmer, that stuff was easier to explain, at least. Hedwig was rather bemused at the claim that explosions that powerful actually existed, but not really by the idea that humans might permanently fuck up the environment by accident. She'd spent a lot of time in the wilderness in her life (or at least as close as she could find to something that could be called "wilderness"), and apparently things were really bad out there? Hedwig claimed it'd gotten noticeably worse just in her lifetime, by like a lot, which, Beth hadn't realised them fucking up the planet would be that noticeable over such a short span of time, but she guessed Hedwig would be in a better position to notice than most people, so.
Beth was getting really tired by the time that conversation was done, bed seemed like a really good idea at this point. But just as she was putting her things away, someone came in asking for her — she was wanted in quarantine. "What the hell for?"
The man's eyebrows scrunched up a little at the blunt question. "The girl from before, Linh? She has been cleared, but she is...being stubborn. She wants to see you."
...Well, fine, Beth guessed she could take care of that. As long as it didn't take too long, she really would like to get to bed.
The quarantine area was basically a hospital floor — modern muggle-looking stuff, all sterile white tile and those funny poseable beds. The room was long and rectangular, twenty beds total, ten to either side, separated off from each other by heavy cotton curtains (also white). The curtains were enchanted to isolate the internal environment, to prevent any potential alien contamination from spreading while the patients were being treated. Hermione claimed this sort of thing had adopted magical methods for isolating patients, because the clean rooms and shite muggles would use took far more space, and specialised equipment it could be difficult to move somewhere and set up on short notice...not to mention electricity. The enchantments only worked when the curtains were closed — they were told not to disturb any of the beds that were currently blocked off, let the medical staff handle them, following whatever proper procedure they'd worked up. There was a block of beds that was curtained off at the moment, from the look of it three beds in a row, the internal curtains removed to join them together. Must have had a family come in who needed to be checked out.
A little girl was sitting on the edge of a bed nearby, who Beth was pretty sure must be Linh. (It'd been a couple hours now, and she'd had other concerns on her mind at the time.) Beth didn't spend much time around children younger than Hogwarts age, but she figured Linh must be in the middle somewhere, like eight or nine, with the now familiar silky black hair, skin tone more toward the darker end for the locals — from sun exposure, Beth would guess. She'd obviously been through decontamination, changed into a pair of lose drawstring trousers and an overlong, baggy shirt, the basic clothes they had stored away in big stacks here for anyone who needed some. A little big on her, Beth thought, but it wasn't indecent, so that was good enough to be getting on with for now. She was sitting rigid on the edge of the bed, her fists scrunched up in the sheets, fixing a hot glare on the opposite wall, completely ignoring the woman talking to her.
Beth hesitated for a second — dealing with traumatised children was somewhat outside of her comfort zone — before lurching back into motion, forcing a mild smile on her face. "Hello, there. I'm told someone was asking for me."
Linh looked up, her eyes wide — a light, rich, not-quite-amber brown, somewhat rare around here but not unusual. She didn't say anything right away, the doctor (or whatever) next to her taking it up instead. Smiling up at Beth, she said, "Ah, hạ sĩ Potter, there you are. If you can get young Đặng Lưu here downstairs for me."
Despite herself, Beth felt her lips twitch. "Sure, I'll try. And I think you just gave me a promotion, Doc." She was pretty sure hạ sĩ was a corporal — before she'd gone off on this assignment, Luke had told her to expect a promotion or offer of some kind (depending on how things went and whether she planned on staying with the SCF after the fighting was over), but hạ sĩ was actually two ranks up...
"Regardless." The woman stood as Beth stepped closer, started leaving — but as she walked past Beth she caught her arm, leaning in to whisper. "The aliens attacked her family on the way to the shelter, killed them and took her. She saw them die."
Beth grimaced. Yeah, she'd thought it might have been something like that. "Understood." Once they were alone(-ish), she stood in front of the bed for a second, before deciding that felt wrong and sat on the bed next to Linh instead. Of course, then she had no fucking clue what to say. She sometimes helped out with the little kids getting all homesick or who had bullying problems — the Gryffindor prefects tended to be fucking useless — but she was kind of out of her depth here. "Hey."
Linh didn't respond at all (which was fair enough), still just sitting rigid, almost painfully still, staring up at her unblinkingly.
"...So, I hear you don't want to go downstairs with the other children." The brief-but-vicious war had made countless orphans, or children who were separated from their families for whatever reason. Beth hadn't been down there, but she knew there was a block of the living area set aside, with volunteers to look after them.
"I don't," Linh muttered — voice high and soft, a bit tense. Her throat still raw from crying earlier, Beth would guess. "I want to stay with you."
For a long moment, Beth just blinked down at the girl, dumbfounded. That that might be a possibility honestly hadn't occurred to her...though, when she thought about it, it probably should have. Beth had just saved her from the evil aliens who'd murdered her family, after all. "Ah..." She cleared her throat. "That's not going to be possible."
"Why?"
Well shite, there had to be like a dozen reasons. "I'm not staying here, for one. Once this shelter is all filled up they'll be moving me to help with the next one. And I'm just here helping out, you know — when the fighting's over I'm going back home to England."
Linh frowned. "England?"
"Sure." Beth twisted around to show Linh her left arm, pointed at the little Union Jack patch sewn into her sleeve there. "Why, where did you think I was from?"
"...I dunno." If Beth had to guess, she hadn't really thought about it that hard, but England was a lot further away than she expected. "You talk really well."
"That's magic — I can copy the language someone speaks right out of their head just by talking to them. It's why they have me looking for aliens trying to sneak in, I can't feel them like I can everyone else. And there aren't very many people like me around, so, they're going to need me elsewhere."
"Oh." Linh stared at her for another second, before turning away. And she didn't say anything more, just sitting there, hands still stiffly clamped onto the edge of the bed, small and still and silent.
...Well, this was awkward.
Beth groped for something to say — she figured Linh was feeling all scared, and alone, and... There wasn't really anything Beth could do that would make any of that better, necessarily. Honestly, she was tempted to just stun Linh and carry her off downstairs unconscious, make her someone else's problem, but that didn't seem like it was really helping. Besides, it was... She didn't want to...
"You know, I lost my parents, when I was little." Oh sure, you fucking idiot, remind her her family was just killed, what a great idea!
While Beth was beating herself up for that, Linh glanced up at her — her expression completely unreadable, blank but tense. "Really?"
"Yeah. Ah. I was younger than you — so young I don't remember them at all, honestly. There was a bad sorcerer, he... My parents died to protect me."
Her shoulders hitching up a little, Linh glared at the wall, eyes hot and jaw set.
It maybe wasn't a great idea to bring this up, she was a fucking idiot, scrambled to keep talking. She didn't change the subject, she was kind of committed now, but she couldn't help cringing a little — like watching a plane crash, there was nothing she could do about it... "Ah, I've met some of their friends, I live with my father's best friend now — or, I used to before I came here, anyway — and they tell me stories, but they often don't feel quite real to me, you know? I don't remember them at all, the things people tell me are, just, stories, about characters, might as well be fictional most of the time. And I wonder sometimes, if it's better that way or not. I don't remember them at all, all I have is the stories — but because I don't remember them at all, it...doesn't hurt as much as it probably would if I did. But I wonder if that's worth it? I don't know. I don't know which one is worse, losing your family or never having one in the first place.
"But I do..." She trailed off, not entirely sure how to word the thought she was having. Linh had hunched in even further, her face screwed up a little — Beth really had no idea whether she was helping or not, but, this part she thought was actually important to talk about. Even if the idea hadn't occurred to Linh yet, it was better to get it out right away. "Sometimes, I feel like... Well, I can be rather hard on myself sometimes — this might be a surprise to you, but I'm a bit of a mess." Not to mention, the Dursleys tried pretty hard to convince her she was a worthless freak who didn't really deserve anything at all, but that wasn't something Linh needed to know. "It feels like, sometimes, everything I touch goes wrong, and I hear these stories about what great, talented, honourable people my parents were. Much better people than me, no doubt about that. Yet they died, and I didn't. And I think, well, that seems wrong, doesn't it? The better people should have lived. That it's my fault that they're dead, somehow, because I'm here and they're not, and I hate it sometimes."
Linh had started crying, now — just a little bit, right on her edge, her leaking eyes screwed shut, her shoulders hunched up and pulling into herself, as though trying to hide. Shuffling a little closer, Beth looped her arm around Linh. The girl tensed at first, jerking away, but then she lurched the other way, tucked herself in against Beth's side.
"But it's wrong to think that," Beth hissed over Linh's head. "It's not my fault they're dead. And they wouldn't want me to hate myself because of it, that doesn't make anything better. The best thing I can do is live in a way that honours their memory as well as I can. And that's another reason why you can't stay with me — there are other little girls out there I have to go save. I fight to protect people, because that's what I'm good at, that's how I can live best, to give meaning to me still being here. And I hope you find that thing you can do to honour their memory best, Linh, I really do, but it can't be with me."
At that point, Beth had well and truly run out of words. She was honestly impressed with herself that she'd managed to come up with something that deep, but she was out of her comfort zone here, that was all she had. So, for the next several minutes, she just held Linh as she cried — she figured that was good enough for now.
(It had to be good enough.)