Outside Context Problem: Book 03 - The Slightest Hope of Victory

by Christopher Nuttall

  She’d seen horror, she’d thought, ever since the giant alien command ship had cast a shadow over Washington. The alien craft might be inefficient, but it had been hellishly intimidating, a droll reminder of alien power. Even after it had been taken down, the memory lingered. And she’d seen people turned into soulless alien slaves, or forced into servitude to the collaborator government ... and much worse. And yet this was shocking enough to force its way past the armour she’d pulled over her emotions.

  Endless lines of people, with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, were being unloaded from trucks and marched into the barracks. Some of them had children, who were glancing around as if they couldn't quite understand what was going on; Karen felt her heart break as she realised that the children would grow up in the camp, if they survived long enough to reach adulthood. Would they ever be allowed to leave? Or did the aliens intend to work them to death?

  It wasn't unlikely. Daisy Fairchild’s Department of Human Resources had jobs for everyone, even if they were nothing more than cleaning up the rubble from the wars, digging ditches or shovelling shit. There was no shortage of work that needed to be done; Washington, outside the Green Zone, still had mountains of rubble where proud buildings had once stood. Maybe Daisy intended to use the camp’s population as additional workers. Or perhaps the aliens had something else in mind.

  She glanced down at the tablet PC in her hand, tracking the trucks as they carried people through the darkening countryside towards the camp. The aliens had insisted on diverting teenage and unmarried girls somewhere else, for reasons that escaped Karen. They’d never shown any hesitation in admitting that they’d sent human girls to Order Police camps as sex slaves, so why were they being coy now? The movement orders, making their way through the bureaucracy Daisy had set up for the aliens, said that the girls were being taken well away from Mannington, heading westwards. There was no final destination listed on the movement orders.

  They probably think that it will upset us, she thought, sourly. They’re probably right.

  The final truck was unloaded and departed, leaving one final line of stragglers to enter the barracks and find beds. Karen had seen inside one of them before the first trucks had arrived; they were tiny, designed more for school-aged children than grown adults. The prisoners were going to be very uncomfortable ... she made a mental note to see what she could do about getting them some entertainment, something to distract them. If they rioted, with the guards in just the right places to machine gun the barracks, everyone inside would die.

  Part of her was proud of the logistics system she had designed for the aliens. It would feed everyone in the camp, providing them with enough nutrition to get them through the day ... but it wouldn't be very satisfying. There had been reports that people had preferred to starve to death, rather than eat the ration bars and slop the aliens provided to keep humans alive. Karen found it hard to blame them. The ration bars tasted truly disgusting.

  She turned and walked back towards the gates. The camp was surrounded by no less than three layers of wire and nine guard towers, each one armed with machine guns and guards with a proven track record of shooting when given the order. She caught their gaze and shivered inwardly, even though she knew that she was safe. Civilisation hadn't taken strong root in those men even before the aliens had ripped human society apart; if she’d been alone, without alien protection, she knew what might have happened to her. How could Daisy have found so many willing servants for the aliens?

  They wanted to enjoy power over their fellow men, she realised, not for the first time. They don’t care about the source of their power, or the price, as long as they can enjoy it. And all of the laws that would have tried to deter them are gone.

  She made a quick note on her tablet PC as she climbed into the car that would return her to the Green Zone. Everything had been completed, precisely as Daisy and the aliens had ordered; two thousand, four hundred and fifty people had been concentrated in the camp, waiting for the aliens to decide what to do with them. And, she’d heard, their hometown had been burned to ashes. Mannington was gone.

  It would have been easy to give up, she knew. She could have simply stopped sending messages outside the walls, abandoned the resistance and thrown herself into the luxurious lifestyle of the collaborators ... but she owed the President, wherever he was, more. And yet, she couldn't see how the aliens could ever be dislodged. They were just too powerful and the resistance could do nothing more than sting them.

  And in the end, they might just grind the human race down into servitude.

  “There was a sniper just outside the checkpoints,” the driver called back. “We’re taking the long way around, just in case.”

  Karen nodded. After everything she’d done for the resistance, being shot by a resistance fighter would be the ultimate irony – but it was an ever-present risk.

  She watched as the armoured, but still luxurious car made its way into Washington, sucking in her breath as she saw the makeshift camps where the population were gathered, penned in by the aliens. Some of them had jobs, working for the aliens, but others were too far gone to care about such matters. Others were still suffering the effects of drug withdrawal as supplies of drugs, no longer being imported into the city, ran out. Karen wondered, absently, how long it would be until some of the collaborators started selling drugs themselves. They had their own pipelines to Columbia now.

  Maybe the civil war will make it harder to ship drugs northwards, she thought. The Mexican Civil War was still raging, spilling over into the Southern US, while most of Latin America convulsed in agony as an ever-shifting mosaic of factions struggled for supremacy. But the rich and powerful can always get their drugs.

  The Order Police didn't bother to patrol Washington’s outskirts, not now. Karen knew that the lack of policing only made things worse in the camps; there were endless murders, rapes and other crimes, carried out against a helpless population. Turf wars between small gangs were common, even though there was a greater threat in the Green Zone. The aliens did nothing to stop the chaos, perhaps calculating that it helped their cause. Their allies knew that if they refused to work as the aliens wanted they might be thrust out of the more civilised parts of Washington.

  After all this is done, Karen asked herself, will we have a country anymore?

  ***

  Greg sat upright when the bell rang – and bumped his head into the bunk overhead. Nancy giggled as she scrambled down from the bunk; Greg had to hold himself back from swearing out loud, using words that Nancy shouldn't know yet. His head aching, he swung his legs out over the side and stood upright, narrowly avoiding cracking his head for the second time.

  The doors opened, revealing that someone had set up rows of flimsy wooden tables and stools outside the barracks. They creaked alarmingly as a cold wind blew over the camp, suggesting that they were on the verge of collapse. Greg scowled as he followed Nancy over to a grim-faced woman standing behind a pot of ... something. It looked rather like a curry that had passed through someone’s digestive system and re-emerged from the wrong end.

  “Take a bowl,” the woman droned, as they reached the head of the line. Greg held up a bowl for himself and picked up a second one for Nancy. “Take a glass of water from the dispenser behind me. Walk onwards; don’t delay, just move ...”

  Greg sniffed the bowl as Nancy collected water for both of them. It didn't smell much better than it looked, he decided; it smelt faintly of rotten meat. Carefully, he tasted it ... and discovered that they’d used spices to hide most of the favours. The only thing he was sure of was tofu – and he hated tofu. And if the meat was rotten ... he didn't want Nancy to eat it. But there was no alternative.

  They found a seat near the edge of the table and sat down. It tasted worse than it smelled, Greg decided; Nancy took a bite, then eyed the bowl with the same kind of disdain she showed for sprouts and broccoli. Greg didn't want to force her to eat, but there was no choice. How many meals could she miss
at her age before she got ill? He couldn't recall, yet he was sure that it wasn't that many. If any ...

  The water tasted flat, reminding him of the water Nicolas had produced during one of their few camping trips. He’d had something he’d brought from the military, a pill he'd dropped into the water, if Greg recalled correctly. It had cleaned the water, but left it rather flat ... he hoped that the camp wardens were at least boiling the water before serving it to the unwilling guests. If disease hit the camp’s population it would go through them like wildfire.

  As soon as she had finished eating, Nancy ran off to play with the other kids. Most of them seemed to have decided that it was an adventure, rather than picking up on the fear the adults shared. It was probably a good thing, Greg decided, as he watched his adopted daughter playing tag with the other children, although he didn't know if it would last. Sooner or later, the kids would realise that their universe had shrunk, that they could no longer go outside the wire ... and then, what? He knew nothing of what happened to children in prison.

  “Leave the bowls on the table,” the warden directed. “Collect your children and go back inside.”

  Greg sighed and called for Nancy. The kids didn't want to go back to the barracks; some of them ran around, daring their parents to catch them. Greg saw the frightened expressions on some of the adults and shivered. Their kids weren't obeying orders and it was easy to imagine that the guards might start taking pot-shots at them, just to encourage them to obey. Greg was sweating with fear by the time Nancy finally came over to him, her face glowing with life, and walked back into the barracks with him. Some of the other children were less willing to obey.

  “I’m sorry,” Greg whispered, as he helped her up into her bunk. Several people were trying to take showers, but apparently the water was cold and merely dribbled onto their bodies. And there was absolutely no privacy at all. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It wasn't your fault,” Nancy assured him.

  Greg shook his head. It certainly felt like it was his fault. He should have done what Nicolas had suggested and taken his daughter somewhere out of town.

  But now it was far too late.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Over Virginia, USA

  Day 213

  “The glitch is in place,” the alien worker said. “All is ready for the descent.”

  Philip sucked in his breath sharply. NASA’s safety-conscious mentality would never countenance deliberately causing an error, at least outside of simulations where the dangers of space flight could be explored safely. The aliens seemed to be much more casual about it, although from what Philip had seen of their technology it was a great deal more reliable than humanity’s. They might have started with a focus on biology rather than mechanical technology, but they’d progressed rapidly once they’d cracked the basics of steam technology. Philip had a suspicion that if they’d started like humanity, they would have filled half of the galaxy before the first human learned how to tame fire.

  He looked over at Theta, the alien doctor. The alien had refused to give any personal name, so Philip had chosen one for him, pointing out that he’d need it to interact with humans. Just because the aliens could tell each other apart didn't mean that humans could do the same, at least for the aliens. The aliens apparently had fewer problems telling humans apart, but then humans were far more variable than the aliens.

  Their genetics must be very curious, he thought, wishing he knew more about their evolutionary path. There was no real difference between the different subsets of humanity; hell, one could and did argue that there were no subsets at all. People might be white or black or brown, but they still bled the same colour, had the same average level of intelligence and could interbreed. From what he’d read in the alien files, there were significant differences between the various alien castes.

  Theta was as tall as the other alien leaders, but his body was slightly larger and one of his arms had been replaced by a prosthetic that ended in a series of medical tools, reminding Philip of Star Trek’s Borg. Human prosthetics were designed to be as indistinguishable from real arms and legs as possible, but the aliens didn't seem to care if they appeared mutilated to human eyes. Philip wondered if their dark eyes were implants too. It might explain their callous attitude to meddling with human genes – to say nothing of implanting control implants into human skulls – if they honestly saw nothing wrong with improving themselves.

  Humans had quibbled over the possible impact of genetic engineering, even though human science had yet to reach the point where it could improve the intellect or even the physical body. The People seemed to have had no such qualms. But then, they hadn't been created equal. Their society might have justified a caste system far more stratified than the Indians had created for themselves. He should have been impressed, he told himself, that the aliens had achieved as much freedom as they had ...

  At least until the Rogue Leaders took it away, he thought, and shuddered. Given time, they would create an ant colony in truth, combining both humans and aliens into a society with them as the absolute masters. And that would be the end of everything.

  Theta sat down on a hard alien bench and made a hand gesture Philip didn't recognise. “You may begin,” he said, as Philip sat down facing him. “Take us down.”

  The alien drive system, Philip had been told, wasn't a perfect antigravity system, although humans tended to think of it as such. He’d listened to the explanation, but he had to admit that he'd lost track of what they were talking about quickly. It was just too different from anything he’d ever used for NASA, or had considered theoretically possible. The craft had more flexibility than anything human, yet they had limits of their own. One of them prevented the craft from actually manoeuvring at high speeds.

  His face twitched into a smile. That little weakness might have puzzled humanity, but it had been noticed. Missiles had downed a number of alien craft that had been unable to evade them in time to escape, giving humanity hope that it could actually win the war. And then the mothership had entered orbit and the last of America’s resistance had been smashed from high overhead, well outside their range. Now, even if the mothership were lost, there were millions of aliens on the surface. They could still fight humanity and win.

  The craft lurched slightly as the glitch took effect, the gravity field fluctuating around them. One thing he had been assured was that the internal compensator field would keep them alive, at least unless they hit the ground hard enough to destroy the ship, but it still felt uncomfortable. None of the aliens seemed worried, even when the craft tilted and started to fall out of the sky. Maybe the field wasn't configured for human life.

  Heading down, he thought, remembering his first astronaut drills. They’d flown up high in an aircraft, then the aircraft had tilted and dived, giving the trainees their first taste of zero-gravity. It had awed him, but it was nothing in comparison to the freedom he'd felt when orbiting the Earth, even when NASA had entangled him in endless checklists and safety precautions. The Russians were so much better off. They weren't strangled by red tape and an endless bombardment of instructions from people on the ground.

  The bulkheads turned transparent, allowing him to see the country as it swelled up in front of him. He stared; from his point of view, America seemed to be lunging forwards. It was nothing more than an optical illusion, but it was a very convincing one. None of the aliens seemed to be bothered at all. They’d been born and bred in space.

  Lucky bastards, he thought. He knew what he would have done if he’d had their technology; he would have had the solar system settled in ten years, then had colony ships heading out to the stars in fifty. The thought nagged at his mind; even if humanity beat the aliens who had invaded their star system, they would still be behind when it came to settling the other nearby stars. Instead of a long expansion into interstellar space, humanity might be trapped in its own star system, unable to settle other worlds for itself. Or maybe there were other, more dangerous races out there. There
was no way to know.

  “Landing in two minutes,” the alien pilot said. “Emergency distress signal active, pulsing now.”

  Philip nodded. There was no way to avoid sending a distress signal, not unless they wanted the Rogue Leaders to examine everything in order to find out what had gone wrong, but it risked everything. If the alien rescue teams arrived before the resistance had completed its work, the Rogue Leaders would have good reason to suspect that humanity had had alien help. And if they discovered Philip onboard the craft, having somehow evaded their surveillance network, they would know the truth. No lone human could have escaped the command ship.

  “Brace for impact,” the pilot said.

  Philip braced himself as best as he could.

  ***

  “She’s coming down fast,” Bane muttered, as he peered up into the night sky. “And she’s definitely in trouble.”

  Nicolas nodded. The grief and rage that had threatened to overwhelm him in Mannington was still there, still mocking his every step, even though his training should have allowed him to push it aside. But he’d never lost Nancy before, never feared losing her so completely ... even during the custody battles, he’d never been so terrified for her life. God alone knew where she was now, but if half of the rumours were accurate, it wasn't somewhere pleasant.

  The alien craft were normally silent, unless one was very close to the craft’s hull, where a faint hum could be heard. It had allowed them to surprise resistance fighters in the past; they were quieter than drones, allowing them to drift through the air utterly unheard and unseen. If there wasn't a sensor node nearby, the first the resistance fighters would know of its existence was when the blue-white bursts of plasma fire started lashing down at them.

  This craft seemed to be screaming as it fell out of the skies, wrapped in a brilliant disc of fire that illuminated the area for miles around. There was no way the aliens would miss it, not looking down from orbit as they were; they’d have rescue teams on the way already. They hadn't had during the early days of the war, but that might well have been because humanity had a working air defence network. Now, the aliens controlled the skies and could go where they liked, daring the humans to stop them.