Darkest Hour 1: Their Darkest Hour

by Christopher Nuttall

  “This is the real world, unfortunately,” Lightbridge-Stewart said. He frowned, suddenly. “What I can tell you is that there is a certain...crude nature to most of their technology. We’ve captured samples of their weapons and taken them apart to study – in many ways, their weapons are actually less advanced than our own. That could be just them being practical – the more complex a piece of kit, the greater the chance it will break in the field – or their overall technology level could be less advanced than we’ve assumed. And for that matter...”

  He hesitated. “It’s hard to be sure, but their tactical doctrine sucks,” he added. “If they didn't have those starships in orbit, we would have beaten them – and so would almost every other First World nation on the planet. Hell, even the Saudis would have given them a very hard time. I don't know who they’re used to fighting, but they clearly haven't learned much from the experience. The analysts have studied the problem, yet they can't see any clear solution. It’s possible that someone else gave them their technology...”

  Gabriel stared at him. “Someone else sold them their technology...? Who?”

  “There’s no way to know,” Lightbridge-Stewart admitted. “Another alien race, we presume – or maybe they captured technology from another alien race and somehow discovered how to duplicate it for themselves. We certainly didn't hesitate to sell tanks and guns to the Middle East, even though there was a strong chance that they would wind up being pointed back at us. For all we know, they stole the starships they have in orbit – and the weapons they’re using against us on the ground may be their own designs.”

  “But there’s no way to know,” Gabriel said. He shook his head slowly. “Is there any good news?”

  “Well, I’ve had a team of signals experts – very bright boffins, these lads – studying the alien communications system,” Lightbridge-Stewart said. “It really isn’t as advanced as our own – but then, we don't really understand their language yet so we may have problems unlocking some of their secrets.” He smiled, briefly. “But we do have some idea of how their command-and-control network functions. It seems that their junior officers don’t have much independence of action. They may not even have the ability to call in strikes from orbit without permission from higher authority.”

  He looked down at the floor, shaking his head. “God knows we had enough problems with calling in strikes while we were in Afghanistan,” he said. “It may account for odd delays in their response times – we managed to get troops out of positions we knew would be bombarded before the hammer finally fell. Or we may be making a dreadful mistake because their system looks familiar to us. They’re aliens and their idea of logic may not make sense to human minds.”

  “They’ve been taking prisoners and registering the entire population,” Gabriel said. “Doesn't that make sense from a human point of view?”

  “I’m very much afraid so,” Lightbridge-Stewart agreed. “We have – had – political considerations in how we treated civilians caught up in occupied zones. It was never politically possible to impose our control with an iron hand – and that cost us badly. The aliens, on the other hand, seem to be registering our people with an eye to keeping them under firm control – and weeding out those who might be able to resist. Luckily we managed to get most of the TA and reservists called up and out of the cities before the aliens started arresting military personnel. God alone knows what they’re doing with them.”

  Gabriel shivered. The reports had all been the same, even though they’d come from places as far apart as Southampton and Aberdeen. All civilians had to be registered – and military personnel were taken away, along with police and other emergency service workers who refused to collaborate. No one knew where the aliens had taken them, but Gabriel had no difficulty picturing them being executed by alien gunfire...or simply tossed from alien shuttles into the Pacific Ocean. The aliens had set up detention camps, but they all seemed to be for civilians. He could only hope that the military personnel were kept alive, elsewhere. The alternative was too depressing to contemplate.

  “And we don’t know what they have in mind in the long run,” Lightbridge-Stewart added. “Perhaps they intend to isolate fatties and have them cooked for dinner – we believe they could probably eat human flesh.”

  Gabriel felt sick. “I don’t think that any civilised race would want to eat human flesh,” he said – but then, what was a civilised race? He’d thought that humanity, for all its faults, was making progress towards a better world for all, yet the aliens had knocked humanity down within two days of their arrival. The reports from Africa – where the aliens had almost no presence at all – suggested that mass chaos was spreading across the continent. Was the inner savage as far removed from the civilised man as he wanted to believe? “I’m sure they have something less...extreme in mind for us.”

  “I don't know,” Lightbridge-Stewart said. “I just don’t think we’ll enjoy it when the penny finally drops.”

  “I haven’t enjoyed anything since the aliens arrived,” Gabriel said, ruefully. He hesitated. Even now, there were things he didn't feel comfortable discussing. “Is there...anything we can do about their damned puppet?”

  “You mean assassinate him?” Lightbridge-Stewart said. “I admit that we’ve been looking at the possibility. But the aliens keep him under very tight guard – it's almost as if they think we might take a shot at him.” He smiled. “We’re working on the possibility, Prime Minister, but it may take some time.”

  He hesitated. “And we have to decide if we’re going to wage war on collaborators as well as the aliens,” he added. “Some are joining up because they need to feed their families; some are joining up because they believe that it’s for the best...and some are joining up because they want power. And as long as the aliens have thousands of expendable humans to deploy against us, it will be a great deal harder to convince them to withdraw.”

  Gabriel shivered. Western Governments had been alarmingly sensitive to casualties and bad publicity, something their enemies hadn't hesitated to use against them. The terrorists had targeted soldiers, intent on causing as many fatalities as possible, and done their best to provoke incidents that could be spun against the Western troops. Any civilian deaths were always blamed on the West – and the fact that they’d been used as human shields by men who wore civilian clothes, or caught in bombs planted by their fellow countrymen, was never mentioned.

  But they had no way of knowing what the aliens would consider acceptable losses – or bad publicity. Perhaps their homeworld had protest marches, with thousands of young and idealistic aliens marching to ‘save the human,’ or perhaps they were a fascist state, with all dissent ruthlessly suppressed. And if it was the latter, they might be prepared to endure terrifying losses to keep Earth firmly under their control – or blow up the planet if they felt that they had no choice, but to withdraw.

  “So we go after the aliens first,” Gabriel said, “and only go after the collaborators if they’re nasty bastards who abuse their power?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Lightbridge-Stewart agreed. “But there will be casualties, Prime Minister. We don’t even know how many civilians died in the last few days.”

  Once, Gabriel would have been appalled – hell, he still was appalled. But there was nothing he could do about it. The aliens couldn't be ordered out of Britain by the Prime Minister.

  “We have managed to set up a reasonably secure communications link with America,” Lightbridge-Stewart said, after a moment. “Most of the American personnel in Britain want to go home and fight there, although that will be tricky. The aliens aren't allowing big ships to leave harbour – we can get them to Ireland, which hasn't been occupied, but I don’t see how we can get many of them to the United States. It may be possible to use submarines...”

  “But that would mean risking a boat,” Gabriel said, slowly. Lightbridge-Stewart nodded. The remaining submarines in the Royal Navy – as well as ones belonging to America, France and the rest of Europ
e – had been ordered to run silent, run deep. The aliens didn't seem to be capable of tracking submerged boats from orbit, but they could see a surfaced submarine and drop a rock on it. “Are the Yanks going to take the risk?”

  “I don't think so,” Lightbridge-Stewart said. “They took higher absolute losses than we did and their country is much more heavily occupied. I suspect they can probably keep an insurgency going for longer than we can, but...”

  He shrugged. “If we could just get them out of orbit, we could deal with their garrisons on the surface,” he concluded. “But as long as they’re in orbit, they can hold a gun to our heads.”

  Gabriel couldn't disagree. They could hurt the aliens, but they could never beat them. And if they couldn’t beat them, was there any point in fighting at all? And yet, if they surrendered, there was no way of knowing what the aliens had in mind for the human race.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said, cursing his own weakness. “Will you stay for dinner?”

  “I have to link up with a couple of others,” Lightbridge-Stewart said, reluctantly. “We have plans to make. And then we can start reminding the aliens that we exist.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Long Stratton

  United Kingdom, Day 10/11

  The convoy looked like something out of Iraq, or Afghanistan. It comprised a handful of trucks, each one carrying a dozen policemen, and a pair of alien Armoured Personnel Carriers. It was escorted by a pair of helicopters, bristling with weapons, that flew elaborate patterns over the vehicles. From her vantage point, hidden near the town, Alex wondered if the alien pilots were showing off, or genuinely concerned about the threat of portable antiaircraft weapons. There was no way to know, but she suspected the former. The aliens, despite appearances, didn't look as if they were expecting trouble.

  She gritted her teeth as the aliens started to dismount their vehicles, weapons at the ready, followed by their tame policemen. The internet had been ranting and raving about collaborators – and so many rumours that it was difficult to know what was fact and what was fiction – but actually seeing collaborators in the flesh was a different story. They looked as if they were confident, expecting no opposition – and they might be right. The BBC had been claiming that the remainder of the British military had been destroyed; looking down at the aliens, Alex started to wonder if they had been telling the truth. She might be the last surviving servicewoman in Britain.

  No, she told herself firmly. That couldn't be true. She was isolated, but there would be others out there somewhere, waiting for the chance to hit back at their new enemies. And even if she was alone, she still had her duty. All she had to do was wait until the right moment. Until then, she just had to watch and allow the memories to become burned into her mind. The aliens and their collaborators had arrived in Long Stratton.

  They’d developed their own procedure for securing towns and villages by now. The policemen used loudspeakers to summon all of the townsfolk out of their homes and ordered them to wait on the green while the aliens searched the village. Looking at their big hulking forms, Alex felt a chill running down her spine. She would have sooner believed in a rogue military officer launching a coup than in aliens, even though she’d seen their aircraft. The clattering of the helicopters grew louder as one skimmed over her position, so low that Alex was convinced, just for a few moments, that she’d been spotted. There was no way to know what the townspeople were telling the policemen down below.

  She shuddered. The aliens had made their instructions quite clear; everyone in the country was to be registered, fingerprinted and given an ID card – no exceptions. And the internet had made it clear that the moment they discovered that she was a RAF pilot, they would take her away and no one would know what had happened to her. So she’d taken the risk of hiding, along with a handful of young men who were willing to resist the aliens. Alex hoped that it wasn't all just mindless bravado. There was no way to know what someone was made of until the shit hit the fan, by which time it might be too late. It was one of the reasons why military training was so intensive, in the hopes of weeding out the unsuitable before it was too late.

  And if her little band was caught...? There was no way to know. The aliens might simply execute them on the spot, or take them to one of their detention camps or...she shook her head, concentrating on the scene before her. One by one, the townspeople were being processed and registered. Smith and his wife had remained on their farm. They probably wouldn't be processed until later – she hoped. And they'd been warned not to breathe a word about her...

  One hand touched the pistol at her belt as the hours wore on. Watching made it seem almost surreal, with the aliens watching over their collaborators – their unarmed collaborators. Alex found that a warming sight; it was clear that the aliens didn’t trust the policemen with live weapons. Perhaps the police hadn't been so badly subverted after all. But she couldn't count on anything...

  Down below, a scuffle had broken out. She peered, wishing she’d dared bring a pair of binoculars, trying to make out what was going on. The policemen had pulled a man out of the crowd, a middle-aged gentleman she didn't know. Why...she realised why a moment later, just as she saw his crying wife and older children. He’d been in the army and returned to life as a civilian. It hadn't been enough to save him, or his son. The young man had lunged at a policeman, only to be knocked down and arrested by another. God alone knew what would happen to them.

  She gritted her teeth again, forcing herself to watch. Whatever else happened, she would not forget. And those who had been killed would be avenged.

  ***

  Night was falling as she approached the disused barn, one that had once belonged to a farmer who had sold out and left the country. It had fallen into a dilapidated state, but her small team had done wonders to ensure that no light could be seen coming from the barn in the darkness. The aliens didn't seem to patrol the country very effectively, yet there was no point in taking chances. They were taking quite enough with the elderly explosives as it was.

  “They used to put this stuff in flour,” Archer was saying to his small group of students. “The Chinese would use it to smuggle gunk past the Japanese – it could actually be baked and eaten without poisoning the poor bastard who actually ate it. We may have to use it the same way.”

  Alex frowned. The collection of weapons and explosives from World War Two had been looked after carefully, but an alarming number had decayed badly. Some of the detonator pens – designed for early IEDs – were unreliable. They’d been state of the art in 1940, Archer had assured her, but now...they would have to be careful. There were some nasty tricks that could be played with even disused explosives, yet...she had nightmares where one of the students accidentally blew up the barn or the weapons store. At least they’d managed to scatter smaller dumps around the area. Losing one wouldn't cost them everything.

  “I think it’s time for a break,” Archer said, as he spied her. The young men stood up and scattered. They’d been warned to be very careful – and avoid the aliens at all costs. “Did you find out what you wanted to know?”

  Alex nodded, but waited for the barn to empty before she spoke. “They’re parked in a camping field, some miles away,” she said, flatly. “I think they’ll have to leave the way they came, unless they intend to go cross-country.”

  Archer nodded. “I have the surprise all ready for them,” he said. “I’m coming with you...”

  “No, you’re not,” Alex said, flatly. “You know much more about these weapons than I do. We can't afford to lose you – at least not yet.”

  Archer didn't look pleased, but he accepted her comment. “Make sure you place it properly,” he said, firmly. “I spent too much trouble making it to have you fail to blow up the right people.”

  Twenty minutes later, Alex and two of the lads headed out over the countryside, heading for where the collaborators were parked. She was mildly surprised that the aliens had chosen to stay with them, but it worked in her fa
vour. Assuming that the aliens were jumpy and had night-vision gear, she kept her small force from going any closer than the grit bin she’d noticed by the side of the road. It took longer than she’d feared to empty the grit into the road and pack the bomb into the bin, but they made it. Her first IED didn't look very professional, yet it should do the trick. Or so she told herself.

  Sending the two boys back to their homes, she found a hiding place and settled down to wait. There was no way of knowing just when the collaborators would start to move, but the aliens – according to the internet – were hard taskmasters. They might well decide to start when dawn rose above the horizon, whatever their human subordinates thought. Besides, it was almost traditional to attack at dawn. Any human force would be awake and on guard at that point, at least if it was on deployment.