Darkest Hour 1: Their Darkest Hour

by Christopher Nuttall

  Alan nodded, trying to remain dignified. It wasn't easy. “Where are we going?”

  “The only place we can,” Rivers said. “One of the alien garrisons outside the city. And pray to God that they’re not feeling trigger-happy today.”

  Outside, on the roof, a gust of wind almost sent Alan to his knees. The entire building was shaking, as if it was on the verge of being blown over. Somehow, with help from Rivers and one of his men, he managed to climb into the helicopter and close his eyes. His entire body was shaking with fear. The sound of the engines grew louder and then he felt the helicopter lurch into life. It seemed to hop into the air, falling back for a heart-stopping moment before settling out and heading away from the building. Alan opened his eyes and stared down at the crowd below.

  It struck him, suddenly, that the resistance might have hidden an antiaircraft team nearby, that they might have staged the entire protest to catch him when he was vulnerable. He opened his mouth to insist that they landed at once, before realising that the pilot wouldn't be able to hear him over the noise of the engines. Instead, he stared out at London, feeling the old fear crawling through his heart. If they were shot down, there would be no hope of survival...

  London was burning. He could see plumes of smoke from where rioters were looting shops in the richer part of town, while the crowd of savage humanity seemed to have no end. It was easy to imagine what was going on down there, the frenzy of the lower classes as they worked out their class anger on defenceless targets. And then they would become savages, looting, raping and burning their way through London. He felt anger pushing away his fear as the helicopter banked away and headed westwards, up towards the alien positions around the city. How dare they lift a hand against him?

  ***

  Tra’tro The’Stig had to fight down his fear as he dismounted, alarmingly close to the mob of humanity thronging through the area. There were thousands of the creatures, yelling and screaming as they raged against their leaders, against the few who had been smart enough to realise that they were beaten. The whole idea of a protest march was alien to those who served the State – surely, even the humans could not be so foolish as to allow protests from their juniors to shape policy. The’Stig, still in command of the mixed remains of several units, felt nothing, but contempt. Didn’t these humans have the wit to know when they were beaten? Didn't they know that further resistance would only result in a great many deaths for absolutely nothing?

  Behind him, more troop transports and tanks had arrived, bringing a large and powerful force right to the heart of the collaborator government. From what they’d heard through the grapevine – officially, they were only told what they needed to know, as determined by their superior officers – the rioting humans were tearing through the offices owned and operated by the collaborator government. The’Stig wasn't sure what they hoped to achieve. The computer records that detailed all of the registered humans weren't stored with the human government, but outside the cities at the Land Force Base. Even if they burned down the entire area, they would achieve nothing more than irritating the Command Triad. And they weren't even going to get that far.

  He hefted his weapon and took aim into the mass of humanity. They seemed to become aware of him at the same moment, changing to lunge towards the troopers and their armoured vehicles. It was absurd. What possible harm could they do to armoured vehicles? Sure, some human antitank weapons could inflict harm on the tanks, but they had none. The only weapons they had were sticks and stones, which might harm the troopers on the ground, yet they wouldn't be enough to win. If they were smart, they would have realised that they were beaten and surrendered.

  The machine guns mounted on the tanks opened fire, directly into the mob. Bright red blood seemed to splash everywhere as the bullets, designed to punch through thicker skin than humanity’s, tore through the mass of humanity. He saw human bodies disintegrate under the assault, coming apart and falling in a sickening pile of flesh. It wasn't war, but a bloody slaughter. In seconds, hundreds of humans had been killed. The few survivors were screaming in pain, abandoned by the few who were able to run for their lives. The’Stig winced as the orders to advance came in through his headpiece, sending him forward. His feet seemed to slip on the blood-stained pavement, blood splashing everywhere. The handful of wounded humans were too badly injured to help, even if the Land Force had been inclined to assist humans too stupid to know not to charge tanks with sticks and stones.

  Bit by bit, they cleared the human mob away. Panic was settling in, with thousands of humans running for their lives, abandoning others to the tender mercy of the advancing forces. He saw a handful of policemen, wearing the uniforms they’d been told to respect, staring at the troopers, their faces pale with horror. Hadn't they realised what was going to happen? The’Stig slipped on another patch of blood and stared down at the young human who had lost his upper body. A life had been wasted when he’d chosen to join a futile and pointless protest march.

  He snorted in disdain. And it had all been so futile. Didn’t the humans have the sense to know when they were beaten? He couldn't feel proud of what they’d done. They hadn’t fired on the deadly humans, the ones who had been ambushing convoys and sniping at Land Force Bases. Instead, they’d killed thousands of humans who might have been useful, if they’d had some sense knocked into their heads instead of simply being slaughtered. The State would understand what they’d done, but would others? Even he didn't want to go through it again.

  His radio buzzed. “Clear the plaza,” the order came from above. “We’re bringing in prisoners to clear away the bodies. Others will dig a pit outside the city where they can be dumped.”

  The’Stig snorted, again. Higher authority seemed stunned too. Who knew? Perhaps they would be so stunned that they’d change their tactics. Stranger things had happened.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  North England

  United Kingdom, Day 25

  “We can't go on like this!”

  Gabriel couldn't face the television set. For the last four days, the BBC had been broadcasting images from the riot in London – and its bloody end. Alien tanks firing directly into the crowd, alien soldiers crushing human skulls under their armoured feet, hundreds of orange-suited prisoners clearing away the bodies and piling them into trucks, the bodies being dumped into massive pits outside the city...the images were firmly burned into his mind. Nothing in Britain's history, at least that he could recall, matched the sheer horror the aliens had unleashed. God alone knew how many humans had been killed in the riot. The BBC claimed that no aliens had been killed, or even injured.

  The news had shocked the country. From what few reports Gabriel believed from the BBC, there had been other riots in Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Birmingham. The aliens, however, had managed to cow most of the rioters; their soldiers had quelled the other riots by their mere presence. Most of the insurgency had slipped back to IEDs and attacks on collaborators and alien patrols, although much of it seemed to be random violence. It helped that almost all human communities had a common enemy in the Leathernecks. Violent groups that ran the political spectrum from neo-Nazis to Islamic fundamentalists and ecological pressure groups were actually working together to bleed the aliens.

  But the country was bleeding too. The BBC was heavily censored these days, controlled by the collaborator government, but enough was leaking through to worry Gabriel. People were starving, families had been shattered...each disaster might have been tiny, on a planetary scale, but they added up to untold misery. Britain wasn't supposed to be like that, he told himself, even during the Blitz they’d been spared the suffering inflicted on continental Europe by the Nazis. Britons saw disasters on television and donated money to help the dispossessed. They didn't suffer disasters themselves. He’d once read a book where an extinct volcano in Edinburgh had come back to life, forcing British emergency services to cope with the disaster. They hadn't done a very good job.

  He sat back in his chair,
trying to think. How could they convince the aliens to leave? But the aliens only seemed to respect force – and the entire human race hadn't been able to convince them to back off. Barely a month ago, the United States had been so far ahead of the rest of the world that it could do almost anything it liked. It was now invaded and occupied, the massive aircraft carriers that had given the Royal Navy fits of envy sunk by rocks dropped from orbit. Russia and China had been crushed, the Chinese suffering the effects of their own nuclear weapons as well as alien KEW strikes. And Europe...

  The latest reports, such as they were, suggested that Europe was suffering from famine. France and Germany, the two powerhouses of the European Union, had been crippled, the continent-wide distribution network for food breaking down under the pressure of the alien offensive. Eastern Europe had attracted less attention from the aliens, with the result that millions of refugees were thronging through the countryside, desperately seeking a safety that no longer existed. The war in Bosnia had restarted, with a dozen different groups trying to exterminate their enemies before the aliens decided to intervene. But why would the aliens bother to intervene? Their human enemies were killing themselves off nicely.

  And all he could do was sit and watch as his country was taken apart. He stared around the library, at the old books lovingly collected by the library’s owner, and cursed himself for his weakness. His position as Prime Minister was meaningless in all, but name. Even if he were to issue orders, it was uncertain how many people would even hear them, let alone obey. The resistance seemed to be held together very loosely, if at all. He’d been assured that it was the only way to prevent the aliens from uncovering them all if they captured men from one particular cell, but it still felt flimsy to him. How long would it be before the resistance became nothing more than bandits?

  A month. That was all it had been – and it felt as if he had been cooped up in his gilded cage forever. He thought, briefly, about the soldiers on the outside, providing security for his august person...did they feel resentment or relief that they were out of the fight? And how long would they stay out of the fight? The collaborators had offered a hefty reward for anyone who brought them Gabriel’s head, preferably not attached to his body. He wasn't blind to the advantages the aliens would gain from having the legitimate Prime Minister as a collaborator, although he suspected that they wouldn’t find him as useful as they would have expected. The slaughter in London would have destroyed whatever legitimacy the collaborator government had once enjoyed.

  But what could they do? The aliens held control over the high orbitals – if worst came to worst, they could pull out of London – or any other city – and drop rocks on it from orbit. He thrilled to the stories of ambushes and IEDs planted in positions where the aliens would run over them, but they could never force the aliens to retreat and abandon Earth. And what would happen if the aliens decided to simply exterminate the human race altogether?

  Alone in the library, Gabriel continued to worry. He wanted to do something, to take a stand, but what could he do? His only contribution to the resistance was a second video, one condemning the aliens for the slaughter in London and calling on all loyal British citizens to join the fight. And how many of them would hear him and die because they’d listened to a Prime Minister skulking in a hole?

  But what else could he do?

  ***

  “There’s a great deal about this we don’t understand,” Linux said. Brigadier Gavin Lightbridge-Stewart – who was, as far as he knew, the senior surviving British military officer – nodded. Computers might have been extremely useful, but he didn't pretend to understand what went on inside them. “But the alien computer network is actually surprisingly primitive.”

  Gavin gave him what he hoped was an encouraging look. Linux – and his friends – hadn't joined the army in the traditional manner, let alone worked their way through the Combat Infantryman’s Course at Catterick. They’d been computer hackers who’d gotten their kicks by breaking into secure databases, at least until they’d been caught and offered a blunt choice between working for the government or spending a number of years in jail. They did have some sense of social responsibility, yet they had no sense at all of military etiquette. It was sometimes refreshing to chat to them, but not now. The entire country was under enemy occupation.

  “It seemed so odd that we were convinced they were screwing with our minds,” Linux continued, cheerfully. “They can travel faster-than-light, their starships are several kilometres long and they clearly have at least some form of antigravity system – their shuttles couldn't fly without something along those lines. And yet they are oddly primitive in some areas. Their precision weapons aren't very precise and their computer networks are surprisingly crude.”

  Gavin nodded, although he had his own theories about alien precision weapons. From what they could see, the aliens seemed less inclined to worry about accidentally hitting their own troopers as well as enemy positions – and they showed a frightening lack of concern for civilian casualties. If they hadn't had the political impetus to design smarter and smarter weapons, maybe they simply hadn't bothered. Besides, the aliens didn't seem to bother with inventing justifications for their invasion of Earth. They’d come, they’d seen – and they’d invaded.

  “They do have wireless networks comparable to our own, but their security technology is several generations behind ours,” Linux continued. Two SAS men had slipped close to a major alien base to establish a passive listening post linked directly to the resistance’s computer geek headquarters. They’d been monitoring alien traffic ever since. “One thing we can confirm is that the aliens are definitely top-down commanders. Orders flow down from the starships or the command base in London and the poor grunts on the ground do as they’re told.”

  He grinned. “It took a week to find a way to slip into their networks, but we’re finally starting to pull files out from their systems for examination elsewhere,” he added. “We stumbled across another puzzle almost at once. Our translation software isn't very good, but theirs seems to be better than ours – even though their computers are less capable. But it isn’t as good as it could be.”

  Gavin frowned, considering the puzzle. The aliens hadn’t done much with the civilian population, but one thing they had done was take over a number of computer-related colleges and research labs. If the alien computers were primitive, maybe they were intent on absorbing human technology into their own society. But why were they primitive in the first place? Gavin could accept that they wouldn't be so concerned with producing precision weapons, yet why didn't they have superior computers? They certainly should have possessed computers equal to mankind’s best designs.

  “One of the programs we pulled out and studied was definitely designed for English,” Linux informed him. “The others, however, aren’t for any recognisable language. You’d think they could speak French or Russian or Chinese, but they don’t seem to have programs for those translations. I assume that they might not bother to outfit a force landing in Britain with such systems, yet it’s an odd oversight...”

  “Very odd,” Gavin agreed. It struck him a moment later. “There are other aliens out there!”

  “So it would seem,” Linux said. “At least six, unless the translation programs are for other Leatherneck languages. We have different languages on Earth – why shouldn't they have something comparable on their worlds. Unfortunately, we were unable to locate any files on the other alien races. But we’re still looking. I’m afraid they didn't bother to design any search engines for their computer networks.”

  “Or maybe you haven’t found those yet,” Gavin said. “Tell me something. Can you alter their files? Twist the data they’re gathering on our people? Slip records into the registries...?”

  “I don’t think so,” Linux admitted. “I told you the system was crude – well, it’s very crudeness provides some protection from people like me. We can read the files – hell, we’ve managed to download terabytes of data we can st
udy without having to remain linked to their network – but altering them would certainly be noticed. Their core memory systems are ROM – ah, Read Only Memory. We can’t change them without physical access to the system.”

  “Which we’re not likely to get,” Gavin agreed. He patted the young man on the back. “Good work.”

  “The intelligence staff are working their way through the dump,” Linux added. “They’re finding it slow going – if there is a listing or filing system, it isn't one that we recognise. It used to be possible to lose files inside computer networks unless one happened to know its precise location. I have a feeling that their superior officers probably have their own files concealed from everyone else. Who knows? Maybe they all gather dirt on their fellows for advancement.”