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

by Christopher Nuttall

  He led her into a tiny apartment, empty apart from a table, a pair of chairs and a small coffee pot. Karen wrinkled her nose as he poured her a cup of coffee; judging from the smell, it was actually cut with something to make it last longer. She’d heard stories of some experiments, most of which – according to the internet – ended in tummy aches and other problems. But right now she just needed something sour to drink.

  “You probably don’t want to know what they put in it,” her contact said. “Some of the ... people here had quite a stockpile, but I had to leave it there for later use.”

  Karen took a sip, grimaced at the taste, and then took another one. “We got the information you wanted,” she said, unsnapping her jeans. Her contact’s eyes went wide as her hand delved into her panties and emerged a moment later with the USB stick. She smiled and explained. “The Order Police frisk everyone who leaves the Green Zone, but I have enough clearance to keep them from poking too closely.”

  “Oh,” her contact said, as he took the stick. “And what happens to everyone else?”

  “It depends on how bored the guards are,” Karen admitted. She wouldn’t have come herself if she hadn't been asked to do so. “I’ve heard horror stories.”

  “So have I,” her contact said. He scowled, then looked up at her, eyes alight with a strange expression. “Did you find the other piece of information I wanted?”

  “It's on the stick,” Karen said. “A complete list of everyone who went into the Mannington Detention Camps nearby – and who was sent elsewhere, based on the alien criteria. I don't know why they wanted so many young women ...”

  “You don’t want to know,” the contact said. “Just ... just try not to be captured. And if there is no other choice, kill yourself before they place you in restraints.”

  Karen shivered at the tone in his voice.

  “There was another ... problem, of sorts,” she said, slowly. “General Howery has largely managed to play the role of a Walking Dead man to perfection, but there have been some problems.”

  She outlined everything that had happened in careful detail. “I don’t know how to handle it,” she concluded. “What do I do?”

  “The other liberated Walking Dead have had similar problems, male and female alike,” her contact said, after a long moment. “Somehow, the aliens control their lusts ... which does, I am assured, make sense. Sexual desire can be a powerful force for shattering discipline and forming new relationships between people. Now, all of those lusts are released at once. The results may not be good.”

  “The understatement of the millennium,” Karen said, coldly. “And how many others are in a position where any form of sexual activity will alert the aliens that something is dreadfully wrong?”

  “None, as far as I know,” the man said. He looked oddly uncomfortable. “Do you like him?”

  Karen couldn't help giggling. “Are you suggesting that I should sleep with him for the good of America?”

  The man blushed and muttered something under his breath about Fallujah. “My daughter will probably kill me if she ever hears of this,” he said, after a moment. “But would you consider it?”

  “Well ...” Karen sad, drawing it out as long as possible, “I suppose I could be talked into it.”

  She shook her head, tiredly. “But even if I do sleep with him, we still run the risk of being detected,” she added. “The Walking Dead don’t have sex or rape ... hell, they literally don’t have the emotions and desires that drive such acts. Howery isn't Osborne or Adam or one of the other senior collaborators who call for a new girl every few hours, then go back to work as if nothing had happened. If someone notices us together ...

  “I could say that I tried to seduce him,” she mused, “but that might get me in trouble anyway, just for trying to distract him from his work. And that wouldn’t explain all of the details. If I had one other ally in the upper levels ...”

  Her contact frowned. “I can't tell you,” he reminded her. “What you don't know, you can't tell ...”

  “I know that,” Karen snapped. “But some comfort would be nice.”

  “You have my sympathy, for what it’s worth,” her contact said. “And my respect. And it isn't easy to impress someone like me.”

  He cleared his throat. “I suggest that you be very careful,” he added. He held out a hand, which Karen took and squeezed gratefully. “One way or another, it will all be over soon.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Guthrie Castle, United Kingdom

  Day 244

  The Prime Minister looked exhausted, the President realised, as he was shown into the secure conference room underneath the castle. But that shouldn't have been a surprise; news of the alien ultimatum had broken only two days ago, despite the best efforts of the British Government. Right now, there was rioting on the streets and questions in Parliament as the British Government sought a solution that didn't involve humiliating surrender or being crushed by alien firepower. Nothing had presented itself, apart from a largely untried plan.

  “There was a lot of argument in the House of Commons,” the Prime Minster said, sitting down in front of the President. “Several members of both parties who felt that they were kept out of negotiations formed a front with parties that weren't part of the Coalition and demanded answers – or at least a greater say in affairs. If the Leader of the Opposition had taken advantage of the situation to bolt ...”

  The President nodded. One advantage the British Government had in wartime was the ruling party could form an alliance with its rivals, sharing power in exchange for guaranteeing political stability. It was something he’d often felt would be useful in America, certainly among the saner wings of both the Republican and Democratic Parties. Locking out the extremists on both sides might actually lead to some common sense. Unfortunately, as Britain also demonstrated, those left out in the cold could form alliances of their own.

  “Overall, we’re determined to resist when the alien ultimatum runs out,” the Prime Minister added. “Not that we would have much chance to resist later, when the aliens present us with their next set of demands after we disarm.”

  “Good,” the President said, although he wasn't sure if it was good. Ideally, Britain would have been left alone for much longer, long enough to build a genuine threat to the aliens. “And you have everything we could send you.”

  “Not enough,” the Prime Minister said. “Dear God – I could strangle one of my predecessors if he hadn't been caught in the Middle East and lost somewhere in the fighting. We’re short on aircraft, short on ground-based missiles to defend our airbases, short on just about everything. At least we managed to talk the French into sending us some additional war material and aircraft – we had to trade some CAS aircraft for their fast jets.”

  “To help the loyalists win their civil war,” the President observed. He had no idea what sort of France would come out of the fire; even if the French put down the remainder of the insurgency without further problems, the French economy was shattered, completely beyond repair. Spain, Greece and Italy were even worse off. “At least they sent something.”

  “Yes,” the Prime Minister said. “But we need more than just something.”

  The President nodded, ruefully. America had been able to soak up a great deal of damage before the alien mothership had arrived in orbit and ended the fighting. Britain was much smaller, with fewer facilities that could be turned to military purposes. The aliens would wear the British defences down, even if they did have a few nasty tricks up their sleeves for the attackers. And if the aliens pushed hard enough, the only plan for overall victory would collapse before it had even begun.

  He glanced at the endless series of reports. Every day since the aliens had issued their ultimatum, there were reports of alien craft penetrating British airspace, evading air defence aircraft and coming close to the mainland. They’d been doing that ever since the fall of America, but they’d really stepped up the tempo over the last few days. The analysts susp
ected that they were trying to wear down the pilots and their aircraft before they actually had to go into battle. It wasn't a bad tactic, the President had to admit. Britain just didn't have the reserves to sustain a long war without outside assistance.

  And there was little prospect of that, he knew. The United States was crushed, Canada and Australia were too far away to help and Europe was in ferment. The only power that might be able to help was Russia, but the Russians were being non-committal in the talks taking place in Moscow. With chaos spreading up from Central Asia, ever since NATO forces had been pulled out of Afghanistan completely, they might feel that they had too many problems elsewhere.

  But they won’t exist at all in a few generations, he thought, feeling helpless rage burning through him. The alien-human hybrids prove that, if nothing else.

  “They sent us an updated report from the facility studying the alien hybrids,” he said, grimly. “Did you have a chance to read it?”

  The Prime Minister scowled. “Yes – and showed it to a handful of the War Cabinet,” he said. “None of them found it very encouraging.”

  “It’s disastrous,” the President said. “Five children, so far - all clearly part alien.”

  He pulled up the report and looked at it, reading the disastrous words. The children were not, according to the doctors, going to develop along standard human lines. For one thing, they’d said, their skulls didn't seem able to expand properly. If their brains grew, like human brains, they would find themselves confined within a solid skull. The doctors had speculated that the brains were already fully developed, with the children only needing rudimentary education to learn how to talk, write and do maths. A minority opinion had warned that these were the first alien-human hybrids, as far as anyone knew, and that the process could have gone wrong. The President, who had read the reports from Antarctica, suspected that the aliens had already carried out their experiments before starting the process more openly. But there was no way to know.

  There was also no way to know just how rapidly the children would develop in the future. The report stated that two of the children seemed to have far better hand-eye coordination than the other children – and far better than purely human children at the same age – while a third was actually starting to crawl already. At that rate, the President couldn't help wondering if they would be walking by the time they reached their first birthdays – assuming that they didn't grow so rapidly that they died young. But, once again, there was no way to know.

  The detail that had bothered him most was that the hybrid reproductive system seemed to be far more mature than those of any purely human baby. While the doctors had hesitated to suggest when the female hybrids would be ready to produce children, the male hybrids were apparently already producing sperm. The President shuddered at the thought; their emotional development was likely to be badly stunted, even without adding early sexuality into the mix. And what sort of child would be produced, he asked himself, if the hybrids mated with normal humans?

  “And to think that we were revolted when we heard about the Nazi experiments,” he muttered, out loud. “The aliens left them and the Japanese in the dust when it came to performing atrocities.”

  “We do awful things to animals,” the Prime Minister pointed out, dryly. “In the name of science, we allow animal testing, testing we wouldn't carry out on a living human. And we already know that the aliens don’t think like us.”

  “No, I suppose not,” the President said.

  One of the more useful pieces of advice his predecessor had given him had been that regimes that were prepared to do awful things to their own populations would have no qualms about doing them to anyone else. The aliens, according to the alien rebels, had been meddling in their own evolution as soon as they realised that they could breed themselves like humans bred horses or dogs. Genetic engineering hadn't seemed quite so dangerous to them – and they’d considered someone acting like the Rogue Leaders to be unthinkable. It had taken a war that made World War Two look like a minor spat to teach them otherwise.

  It was tempting to hope that someone else would be coming from the alien homeworld to bring the aliens to justice, but he knew better than to believe it. Even if the aliens back on their homeworld found out that the Rogue Leaders had escaped, it would be impossible to mount a mission to hunt them down and extract revenge, not unless the aliens had somehow improved their FTL drive. No, humanity and its allies had to win on their own. Besides, he would prefer to be in a stronger position when they encountered other aliens. And it would happen, he was sure.

  “Which leads to a different question,” the Prime Minister said. “Do we let them live?”

  The President hesitated. It had been debated by everyone in the know, ever since the first baby had been born successfully. Did the children represent a threat that had to be destroyed, or a boundless opportunity to expand the frontiers of human knowledge. God knew that studying the babies had already yielded enough data to fuel genuine, original science for hundreds of years of research. Destroying them would make it impossible to learn from them.

  And yet ... who knew what sort of threat they might pose?

  He’d read the reports carefully. Almost all of the mothers, after recovering from the ordeal of giving birth, had accepted their children, even if they were somewhat inhuman. Those who weren't host mothers had reported feeling repulsed by the babies, citing their oversized heads and weird alien eyes. And even if they had been able to overlook that, there was the fact that the babies were clearly developing rapidly. One nurse had had to be taken away after suffering a panic attack and claiming that the babies were monsters, all out to get her.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  If they’d had total freedom of movement, he would have had the babies – and their mothers, if they’d wanted to go – moved to an isolated island, where they could be studied and, if necessary, destroyed. But they didn't have total freedom of movement ... and moving the babies would be a great deal harder than moving a single alien. They would just have to be held in the hidden medical clinic and studied as best as possible.

  And deciding to wait was a choice too, of course.

  “I don’t believe that the children, in and of themselves, pose a threat,” he said. “But it would be better to keep a close eye on them.”

  The other reports made disquieting reading. Apparently, the alien hybrids would be immune to all human diseases – and, they assumed, alien diseases too. Their skins seemed to change colour automatically, darkening in response to bright sunlight and lightening when they were in darker rooms. They didn't seem to have any difficulty seeing in the dark; in fact, the doctors believed that they weren't really light-sensitive at all, not like humans. And they seemed to be stronger than the average baby already.

  “They’ll be making more,” the Prime Minister agreed. “Advance warning of what they’re going to be like would probably be helpful.”

  The President nodded. The last report from Mannington had noted that upwards of three hundred girls in the right age range to be turned into host mothers had been taken elsewhere, while there were countless other missing persons all across America – and, he assumed, everywhere else that had been occupied by the aliens. And now that the aliens had blanketed their facilities in heavy layers of security, it was unlikely that the resistance would be able to take them out. The aliens had definitely learned a lesson from the first attack.

  “But that’s very much a secondary concern right now,” the Prime Minister said. “Have you made any preparations for the future?”

  “Pepper and I discussed it,” the President said. “There’s nowhere to go.”

  He scowled. Pepper claimed that the mere fact of his freedom was enough to inspire the resistance in America, but the truth was that he was becoming increasingly irrelevant. The resistance cell in Washington that had gone bad, he suspected, was merely the first crack in an edifice that had never been very secure in the first place. As the aliens deploy
ed more and more Order Policemen, along with undetectable Walking Dead, the resistance was likely to melt away ... particularly as winter gripped the United States. The population might become so completely dependent upon alien supplies that the resistance would be smoked out.

  Outside America, there were few safe places for the American President to go. Britain was about to be attacked, France was unlikely to play host to him ... the only safe place in Europe might be Switzerland, but the Swiss had their own problems. Part of him was just tempted to find a quiet place to spend the rest of his days, or take up a rifle and join the forces defending Britain. Or maybe going back to America and dying there.

  “There’s always Ireland,” the Prime Minister pointed out. “Or Iceland.”

  “Neither of which would be safe for me,” the President observed. “And apart from that, where could I go? Russia?”

  They shared a smile. “I have to go to the bunker,” the Prime Minister said, softly. “The die is thoroughly cast.”

  He held out a hand. The President shook it firmly.

  “Thank you for everything,” he said. “And I’m sorry if this was my fault ...”

  The Prime Minister snorted. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this job, it’s that apologising for things that are completely outside your control may make for good publicity, but also makes for lousy politics,” he said, stiffly. “Your only mistake was in concealing the existence of the first crashed ship – and that only delayed things by a few weeks. We still couldn’t have done anything to help when the United States came under attack.”

  “I know,” the President said. “Good luck.”

  “Your guards will help you go somewhere less ... noticeable if the aliens come here,” the Prime Minister said. “So far, we don’t know how they will react when they face the new weapons. They may choose to be more methodical than they were when facing your countrymen.”