Invasion

by Chris James

“To the sea,” Pablo answered. “She not want to stay here. She see him in bad way,” he said, glancing down at Crimble. “She decide better to go.”

  “Christ,” Rory breathed. “She thinks she’s going to get out on a sub.”

  “What?” Pablo asked.

  Rory shook his head, looked at Pablo, and said: “But she hasn’t thought it through. Without tech, she’s got no chance.”

  The woman said: “She seemed determined.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” Rory said with a short laugh. “I need to get to her. Do you know which way she went?”

  Pablo looked askance at Rory and said: “There are many, many paths through the mountains to the sea. I not see her go.”

  The woman said: “I did. She say she go straight, that is all I hear. From this valley, there is one long path. It go to top of mountain. From then, there are three main paths, but one have more paths which go off to other places.”

  “But what about the risk? Just one enemy ACA is all it would take.”

  “She say she… work out pattern. For some time is okay to move. Then not move and hide.”

  “Thank you,” Rory said. “Thank you so much.” He grabbed Pablo’s hand and shook it.

  The old man insisted: “You need rest. Two bowls of gazpacho not enough for such trip,”

  “If you could let me have one more bowl before I go, I will be fine.”

  Pablo shrugged and Rory followed him back into the tunnel, turning to thank the woman doctor again. However, the initial euphoria had already begun to wear off as the logical part of his mind pointed out that even if the balance of probabilities went in his favour, he’d need luck to find Pip. He strained to recall briefings from before the invasion began: their unit’s area of operations, local forces, the area around the garrison. Then he remembered one piece of information that could help, which might pull the odds more in his favour. His sense of elation returned: Pip was alive, and he would see her again.

  Chapter 23

  07.45 Saturday 25 February 2062

  HUNGER GNAWED INSIDE Pip as she climbed the steep rise, and she wondered if Crimble were still alive, lying where she’d left him on that smelly straw, with that smelly doctor who spoke such poor English, and they’d amputated his arm and if he would survive with only backward tech centuries out of date. She recalled her last conversation with Pratty, as he laconically related what was happening on the transport before a Spider destroyed it and him.

  Pip’s journey from the caves had been tough but not the most demanding trek she’d ever done in the British Army. Streams flowing out from the mountains had provided her with plenty of water, but as she neared the coast a complication had arisen: without tech, she had no way of making contact with friendly forces to arrange her retrieval. She thought back to the refuge she had shared with Crimble after the firefight, when she’d first had the idea of escaping the Caliphate’s deadly embrace. It seemed incredible to her now that she hadn’t realised this simple problem.

  In addition, the final mountain range before the coast was extremely steep, and she’d thought it might be better to go around rather than over. But she’d elected to go over, and now, with at least four hours before Caliphate forces should make a pass in the area, at last she crested the final ridge with aching limbs. A thousand or so metres beneath her, the blue Mediterranean lay flat and calm and inviting. All along the coast for as far as she could see, palls of smoke marked the pyres of what had been towns and seaside resorts.

  Three hours later, Pip walked through the remains of residential areas whose names she did not know. Despite the fatigue her hunger and exhaustion caused, she hurried past blasted and blackened buildings, past destroyed super-AI controlled vehicles that were still hot to the touch.

  It was the child’s body that finally made Pip break down and cry. No more than a hundred metres from the stony beach, at a point where she could hear the whoosh of waves and where the scent of seaweed finally began to dent the relentless stench of burned material, there lay a child’s form, disfigured and charred, its legs still astride a tricycle. From the absence of a clear and obvious cause, Pip deduced that a blast from the nearest building had knocked the child over, whereupon some kind of explosion overtook him or her and created the tableau she observed, probably the only human being who would ever witness this lone child’s death.

  She forced her legs forward and beyond the destruction, down onto the stony beach. Waves lapped and the water made a shimmering sound as each wave washed back through the stones. She looked up to check the position of the sun and realised that she would soon have to take cover. Suddenly, she saw a black dot in the blue sky and stopped breathing in dread. She blinked hard a few times in the vain hope that it might be an optical illusion caused by a fleck of dirt on one of her corneas.

  Pip stood frozen in fear for some seconds. Part of her mind tried to persuade her that any danger must be too remote to be an immediate threat. Another part of her feared that even the slightest movement would be seen. Time passed. Her heart rate accelerated. She could not see if the black dot in the sky drew nearer or remained at the same distance or moved further away from her. She reflected that by the time she would be able to work out what the black dot was doing, it would be too late. She wished the Squitch were in her ear to tell her what the hell was happening. She wished she had her Pickup, half a dozen mags stuffed into her tunic, and a couple of Stilettos.

  Pip finally concluded that the black dot was coming straight towards her and she fought to control the rising panic. She sprinted for the nearest cover, a blast-damaged row of villas across a road on which charred autonomous vehicles still gave off wisps of smoke. She leapt over a row of low bushes and into the nearest garden. She entered the villa through the shattered front door and took refuge in the damaged living room on her right. She opened the pouch containing her BHC sleeve on the right calf of her trousers and began yet again the painstaking process of opening it out and rolling the gossamer-thin material up her body. She’d long since decided that it had a major design flaw as it should have two legs so the wearer could move.

  “Peacetime design,” she muttered out loud. “Only ever bloody tested in bloody exercises.” She considered that someone, somewhere had likely suggested a design modification, and Brass probably deemed it too expensive, so the troops were stuck with a sleeve for hiding in but not for moving in. Seconds later, only her face remained partly exposed. She’d worked out that the best way to move on open ground in the sleeve was to pull herself along on her backside, but now, in a rubble-strewn urban setting, she could use her surroundings to move. She pulled herself along by using the window sill. She desperately wanted to get out of this building because if the Caliphate ACA had seen her, she could not afford to be in the same location if it attacked.

  From outside, the relative peace of the sighing of waves on the beach was broken by an airborne hiss which grew louder and then terminated in a stony crash.

  “Fuck it,” Pip swore. With extreme caution, she pulled herself to the doorway of the living room and looked down the damaged corridor and out through the smashed front door. For a moment, nothing happened and she thought she might have imagined the noise. Then, twenty-five metres away on the beach, stones leapt into the air as eight metallic legs snapped open. A Caliphate Spider rose up and strode straight towards the unarmed and defenceless Royal Engineer.

  Chapter 24

  08.09 Saturday 25 February 2062

  FEWER THAN TWO thousand metres to the northwest of Pip’s confrontation, an exhausted Rory Moore snuggled inside a depression at the base of a sprawling yew tree in front of the last ridge he had to cross to reach the coast. His BHC sleeve kept him warm as well as concealed, and as much as he wanted to hurry on and continue his journey to find Pip, he found the required guesswork of estimating when Caliphate ACAs might pass overhead unnerving in the extreme.

  He pushed himself further into the morass of half-exposed roots and tried not to think about the ants and termi
tes and other pests that dwelled there. “No,” he whispered aloud, “that’s just dirt shifting underneath you because you’re moving. It is absolutely not anything alive.”

  Apart from the stress of guesstimating when the enemy’s machines might patrol this area, none of those to whom he spoke in the caves appeared to appreciate that the Caliphate might—indeed probably would—vary these times. In fact, military tactics insisted that the enemy should make sorties as random as possible to prevent to the greatest degree precisely what he and Pip were now doing. Another part of his mind countered that suggestion with the consideration that the enemy might not be troubling themselves any longer with civilians trapped in occupied territory. Perhaps, he reasoned, now the Caliphate had instilled the fear of instant death in the general population, its governing super AI will have concluded that further harassment raids were not required?

  Almost at once, Rory was disabused of this possibility when the sounds of explosions came to his ears, a series of distant crumpling thumps, like a mechanical digger dropping a large bucketful of earth. After a few moments, lazy smudges of smoke wafted high enough above the trees for him to see the gentle breeze push them further inland.

  Rory allowed a further ten minutes before finally deciding the threat had passed for another few hours. He extracted his arms from the BHC sleeve, rolled it down his body, and folded it up so it fitted inside the pouch on his right calf. He brushed imaginary woodlice and centipedes from his uniform, glanced a last time at the yew’s tangled roots, and resumed climbing. An overgrown path took him eastwards and avoided the highest part of the ridge. Twenty minutes later, he emerged to face the blue expanse of the sea, and dismay flooded his spirit. All along the coast, he saw only destruction: blasted and blackened buildings and vehicles that smouldered still, and he wondered if any of the explosions he’d heard had happened here.

  With a heavy heart at the realisation that Pip could be anywhere along this stretch of coastline and a unnerving foreboding at what awaited him, Rory advanced down from the ridge determined to find answers to the questions that burned inside him.

  Chapter 25

  08.21 Saturday 25 February 2062

  PIP’S BLOOD FROZE. She kept her body as still as possible. In the distance, her ears registered the shuddering tremors of distant explosions. But inside her, an overwhelming anger burned because she was about to die wearing a ridiculous BHC sleeve. She couldn’t walk in it and she couldn’t take it off. She watched the Spider as it approached the damaged villa in which she sheltered. A curious irony struck her: this lethal device was constructed of, and contained, the most advanced tech which, conversely, made it appear as though it were biological, a creature of the Earth that had evolved over millions of years. The fluidity of motion in its eight, triple-jointed legs amazed and appalled her in equal measures.

  The Spider reached the road and stopped. Pip wondered what it was waiting for. She had not moved any great distance since the Blackswan must have seen her from kilometres away in the sky and sent the Spider to deal with her. Could the BHC sleeve blind this advanced autonomous bomb so completely? Pip considered that it must be able to detect the heat from her partly exposed face, and would hopefully ascribe it to the presence of a small creature like a bird or rodent, but not in general something worth detonating itself to destroy.

  The Spider sat unmoving in the road. The centre of the metal body faced the shattered entrance to the villa. Pip swallowed and wondered what would happen next. Time passed. She noted the matt finish on the body and wondered from which metal it was constructed. She waited for it to move. It did not. She felt the pressure of the standoff increase. She began to fear making the slightest movement. She took the shallowest breaths possible. Her eyes began to well with tears as she fought the urge to blink. Finally, she knew she had to move. Either the Spider could see her or it couldn’t. If it could, it should attack. And if it did, that would be that.

  Pip pulled on the doorframe to slide her legs back into the living room. Masonry crunched and crumbled under her bound feet as she moved. The Spider took no action. She put her head into the living room and exhaled loudly, blinking and stretching her jaw. She mouthed a curse but made sure not to emit any actual sound. With agonising slowness, she used broken furniture to drag herself far enough into the debris-strewn room to see the Spider through the broken window, still immobile in the road.

  She asked herself how long it had been there—five minutes? Ten minutes? Time meant something different now. She decided to let it be. She would make herself comfortable and wait. Sooner or later—

  The sudden crack of a gunshot outside the villa shattered her thoughts. She turned and looked through the window. Another shot rang out and the Spider’s shielding gave off a green flash. Clicking sounds came from it as it turned. In an instant, it accelerated off along the road and out of Pip’s view. A rapid volley of loud shots rang out.

  She bashed loose shards of glass clear from the bottom of the window frame, and leveraging with her arms, she jumped through the window and fell on the grass outside. Her knees knocked together painfully on impact due to the constriction of the BHC sleeve, and at that moment she elected to take it off, whatever the risk. The thought of dying with it on terrified her even more than the increased risk of being visible and unarmed. She shimmied it off her body. Instead of packing it away in its pouch, she tied it around her waist.

  The pace of events accelerated. Ahead of her along the road, the Spider blew up, but the cause looked to have been opposing fire rather than the machine’s own decision. A black pall of smoke curled in on itself and rose up. From further away, there came another explosion. Suddenly, a military figure appeared through the smoke billowing from the destroyed Spider. He moved with the purposeful gait of a soldier who’d just survived combat.

  “Hey!” Pip yelled as she broke into a trot.

  The figure saw her and raised his gun.

  “NATO,” she shouted.

  “Detener!” he yelled back.

  Pip slowed to a walk and looked at the soldier. Suspicious black eyes stared out from a dark, dirty face that looked at her from down the barrel of a Pickup.

  “English?” he asked as she came to within a few metres of him.

  “British Army, Royal Engineers.”

  He lowered his weapon and said: “I did not expect there to be any other NATO troops left alive here.”

  “Never mind,” Pip replied feeling the urgency increase with each passing second. “You have to get rid of your gear, now.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve got minutes, that is all. More Spiders will come, many more… Just where have you been the last week?” she asked in response to the look of confusion on his face.

  “Behind the lines, special ops. We were hiding until dawn. But we hit them, just a few clicks over there. Now, we are being evacuated in ten minutes,” he said.

  “Shit,” Pip breathed. She didn’t quite believe her eyes as three more Spanish special ops troops ran towards them. She asked: “Do you know what is about to happen now you’ve engaged the Spiders?” She began to back away, realising she needed to get back into her BHC sleeve and take cover. Whatever arms these troops had, they were in enemy-controlled territory now, without friendly ACA support. She pleaded with them: “Please, ditch your weapons, comms, ditch your Battlefield Management Support Systems, all of your tech.”

  The three other men reached their commanding officer and threw her curious looks. Then they each turned to scan the sky at a different point of the compass.

  “No way,” the commanding officer said to her. “We just knocked out one of their manned posts. Killed at least twenty of them. Now, we do not wait. We get out. We fight again.”

  Pip shook her head and pushed aside the doubt that this squad could have done what the commanding officer claimed and escaped this far. She said in exasperation: “No, you will not get out and fight again. Now you’ve engaged the enemy, more will follow, and they will keep coming unt
il they kill you. Is that clear?”

  The commanding officer and the three troops on sentry duty all glanced at her with expressions she knew well: contempt. Their faces gave off faint smiles, as if the little woman did not know what she was talking about. Pip smothered her anger and said: “Don’t believe me? What about their jamming? Have you got comms?”

  The commanding officer’s face became more thoughtful. He said: “Our super AI has not worked correctly for days. It said comms were jammed but we think it might be an error or a malfunction.”

  Then it was Pip’s turn to look confused. She asked: “So how did you arrange the sub to retrieve you?”

  The commanding officer shrugged and said: “We are following a pre-war schedule. The sub—a Royal Navy one, by the way—comes in and goes out at prearranged times. If we can get out there, it will pick us up.”

  Pip shook her head, the urgency clawing at her. “Okay,” she said, backing away further. “Your super AI is not wrong. The enemy is in total control of this battle space. Please listen to me. You need to ditch all of your tech and get your BHC sleeves on.”

  “Incoming!” shouted one of the others. All four of the troops turned to face the direction of the threat and each spread to put distance between them.

  With dread, Pip looked into the sky to see another black dot. She shouted: “Guys, for the last time, ditch your tech and get your BHC sleeves on if you want to survive.” Without waiting for a response, she turned and ran, one hand gathering her BHC sleeve as it flapped out from her waist. Her mind ran with her body: how many Spiders would come this time? How much ammunition did that squad have? Where could that submarine be, and how could she get to it?

  When she had gone fifty or so metres, she turned to see the special-ops squad make their pointless and futile stand. Her heart hammered in her chest from fear and she panted from the exertion of running. Without taking her eyes off the scene on the road, she unfurled the BHC sleeve, ready to pull it over herself and disappear.