Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  A voice echoed into his mind. “Who are you?”

  “Dave,” he said. It seemed as if he’d made a massive breakthrough, as if the fog surrounding his mind was lifting slowly, revealing a whole new world. “I am Dave Howery.”

  “Welcome back, Dave,” the voice said. It sounded as if it loved him. “You’ve been asleep a long time.”

  Dave smiled, dreamily. “Who are you?” He asked. “Show yourself.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave,” the voice said. There was a hint of amusement in its tone. “You will have to open your eyes.”

  Dave hadn’t even realised that they were closed. He opened them and found himself staring up into a pair of dark eyes. The alien leaned back and beckoned Dave to his feet. Dave didn’t want to look away from the dark eyes. Merely looking at them made him feel loved, as if he were part of something greater than humanity or even the People themselves. He knew, at some level, that this should worry him, yet it didn’t. It all felt perfectly natural. It all felt right.

  “Thank you,” he said. He felt tears trickling down his cheeks, even though he didn’t know why he was crying. Nothing felt right. Everything felt right. “Thank you.”

  ***

  Abigail watched from her position as the reporters were herded into the conference room. Only a handful of reporters had survived the invasion – a surprising number, she’d discovered, had decided that they had to go cover events outside the city – and the provisional government had ordered them all to work to distribute news and official bulletins to the American population. Defiance wasn't an option. A handful of people had refused alien orders and had just been left to starve. Those who engaged in open resistance were killed, or taken away and never seen again. Washington was rapidly becoming a police state in all, but name. A handful of the police had even gone to work for the aliens.

  It was easy to look at the collaborators and hate them, yet she was part of the machine as well. She and her fellow reporters couldn’t resist any longer. The collaborators might have been evil from the start, desperate for power at any cost, or they might have been forced into serving the aliens. How could she tell, she wondered, and what was the difference between collaborators and herself? There was none.

  “I have an important announcement to make,” the Vice President said. At one point, Jacob Thornton had made excellent stories. He never minced his words. Now he sounded as if he were a child actor reading a bad script. “I present to you the new commander of the United States Army, General Dave Howery!”

  Abigail had seen General Howery on television before, back after the mothership had first been detected. He’d struck her as an interesting man, yet now…now, he looked tired and worn…and conflicted. She couldn’t imagine him serving the aliens willingly, but looking at the way he gazed at them, it was easy to tell that he was loyal. He looked as if he would die for them.

  Just for a moment, she locked eyes with him and saw something else there, something screaming deep inside his mind. General Howery was damned and in hell.

  And, worst of all, he knew it.

  Chapter Five

  Alien POW Camp, Virginia, USA

  Day 100

  Second Lieutenant Michael Francis Carey picked himself off the ground as the sun rose above the horizon, sending rays of light into the POW camp. Nothing had changed in the night, nor had the POW camp been revealed as anything other than a bad dream. He’d faced the possibility of being captured by terrorists or insurgents, in Iraq or Afghanistan or any one of a hundred little countries on the verge of falling to horror and death, but he’d never seriously expected to be captured on American soil. It was the stuff of bad right-wing novels and movies. No enemy possessed the capability to launch an invasion of America.

  And then the aliens had arrived and the world had turned upside down.

  He looked over towards one of the alien warriors, pacing around the outside of the fence, and glared at it. If the alien noticed, he gave no sign, but then, they paid little attention to the four hundred soldiers they’d captured and stuffed into their POW camp. They’d sorted out the soldiers, removed anyone of high rank to another location – unless they’d liquidated them at once, which remained a very real possibility – and then just abandoned them. They’d even given the humans some medical care, better than they could have expected from any more conventional foe, and some entertainment. It was ironic. After all the horror stories about what happened to captured American soldiers in the Sandbox, he’d been captured by alien horrors who respected the Geneva Conventions far better than most humans. The worst danger in the camp was boredom.

  Michael had been stationed at Quantico when the aliens had descended and invested the Marine Corps base. The fighting had spread rapidly out of control, with Marines struggling to repel the attack, before something had exploded far too close to his position and knocked him out. When he recovered, he discovered that he was in a transit camp run by the aliens and a handful of humans who had been press-ganged into service. The handful of other prisoners had told him that the remaining free Marines had dispersed into the countryside to carry on the war, leaving the base in alien hands – along with thousands of prisoners and dead Marines. He hoped that the aliens had had the time to give them a proper burial, but he had to admit that it was unlikely. Invaders probably had no time to worry about human burial concepts.

  “Food, sir,” the Sergeant said. The Master Sergeant had served in the Marine Corps for years. The junior officers had privately joked that he had walked from the shores of Tripoli to the Halls of Montezuma, remaining in service to ensure that each successive crop of Marines retained the virtues and ethos of the Marine Corps. The aliens might not have realised that Sergeants – even Second Lieutenants – could be dangerous, even when deprived of their superior officers. If it wasn't for the fence, and a complete absence of weapons and tools, they would have been out in seconds and away before the aliens could react. “Eat up.”

  “Thank you,” Michael said, taking the bowl of alien food. It had been universally nicknamed gruel by the humans, regardless of which branch of the armed forces they came from. It had accomplished the astonishing feat of making MREs seem palatable. The handful of human doctors who had been pressed into service confirmed that it provided all of the essential nutrients and suchlike that humans required, but they could do nothing about the taste. It was probably a subtle attempt to demoralise them…and he had to admit that it was working. The four hundred soldiers, a mixture of men and women from every branch of the services, were slowly coming apart at the seams.

  After he had eaten the bowl – there was always enough food, even if no one wanted to eat more than the bare minimum – he accompanied the Sergeant on an inspection tour of the camp. The aliens didn’t bother to exercise any supervision of the interior, leaving the humans completely to their own devices. Despite having different views on how to serve, the humans had come closer together, mainly through trying to figure out how to escape. No one knew what the aliens had in mind as their eventual fate, but no one believed that it would be pleasant. The odds were that they would either be killed, like the Russians or Germans had gunned down prisoners in World War Two, or put to work as slave labour. The debates over why an advanced race would need or want slave labour had gone on long into the nights, but the Sergeant had pointed out that some people got a kick out of having slaves, even if the slaves were inefficient compared to paid servants or machines. The aliens might be more like humanity than either side cared to admit.

  There was one building in the complex and hundreds of army-issue tents, taken – he suspected – from one of the National Guard storage dumps in the state. The building served as both the medical centre and the latrines, with a constant queue of soldiers lining up to go to the toilet. Normally, they would have dug latrines into the ground to provide additional toilet space, but the aliens had declined to provide them with shovels or any other kind of tools. Anyone would think that they feared the humans would use th
em to dig a tunnel and escape! The thought made him smile bitterly as he stepped into the medical centre and winced at the smell. It was worse than a field hospital on deployment, almost primitive. The aliens might have provided medical care, but it wasn't enough for some. They’d be recovering for years, if they recovered at all.

  He caught sight of one of the doctors and winced again. Months ago, wearing a stained uniform and using improvised tools would be grounds for real trouble, if not immediate dismissal in disgrace. Now, it was the best they had. There were only two combat medics in the camp; the other four doctors were civilians, scooped up by the aliens two days after he’d been captured. One of them had worked in an inner city hospital and was familiar with trauma and gunshot wounds, but the other three had all been country doctors. They hadn’t been prepared for the sheer intensity of the POW camp. He found himself clenching his fists in sheer helpless rage. He wanted to wring the neck of every alien in the whole damned universe, yet he could do nothing. He had never felt so helpless in his life, even when, as a new recruit, the Drill Sergeant had chewed him out for leaving a button undone on his uniform. Everything had been simpler then.

  “We’re running out of supplies,” the doctor said, shortly. He looked as if he was on the verge of collapsing at any moment. Michael could hardly blame him. No one understood why the aliens had healed some people – himself included – and yet hadn’t completed the task. They were alien and that was all there was to it. If there was a reason for their actions, it made no sense to humans. “Can you talk to them…?”

  Michael shrugged. “They don’t seem to care about listening to us,” he said. The POWs had tried to talk to their captors before, but the aliens never responded, even the tall dark aliens that sent shivers down the spine of anyone who met their eyes. He wasn’t even sure if the hulking warriors could talk. They never spoke to each other, let alone their human captives. “I don’t think they give a damn about us.”

  The doctor nodded. “Does anyone give a damn about us?”

  Michael said nothing. He knew – or believed – that places like Camp Pendleton and Fort Hood were too large to be overrun easily, allowing the soldiers a chance to break out and disperse into the surrounding area to carry on the war – hell, SF soldiers were trained in insurgency warfare and slowing down enemy pursuit. The POW camp couldn’t be the only POW camp in America, yet there had to be thousands of soldiers out there, free and fighting to regain their country’s independence. The aliens wouldn’t be allowed to operate at will…

  Or perhaps they had defeated the entire country and there was nothing left, but eternal slavery. He had tried to keep his hopes up when he’d spoken to the soldiers, but in the privacy of his own head, the visions of a subjected America refused to fade. It couldn’t be the end of the republic; the American Dream would live on…or would it? Perhaps he was deluding himself and it was the end. Perhaps…

  “I don’t know, doctor,” he said. It was time for roll call, yet part of him wondered why they bothered. The aliens might have mixed and matched units purely to assist in breaking them, as the Sergeant had pointed out. “I just don’t know.”

  ***

  Nicolas Little lay under cover and stared at the POW camp through a pair of binoculars. The aliens might have been very alien, yet their POW camp design might have come out of a human manual on how to build a simple POW camp. It would have provoked outrage and horror from the people who believed that war could be tamed and civilised – there was little in the way of medical care or entertainment for the prisoners – but he doubted that the aliens would be worried. An op-ed in the New York Times meant nothing to them. It served the single purpose of keeping POWs off the streets and it did that very well.

  The aliens had fenced in a vast area and given the humans tents, with four watchtowers at each corner. They didn’t seem to have subdivided the camp into smaller sections, as some American POW camps had done back in Iraq, but perhaps they felt no particular need to further isolate the prisoners from each other. The soldiers would have broken out by now if they had tools or equipment, but without anything of the sort, they were trapped. He’d heard of POWs using their bare hands to dig under the fence, yet close examination proved that any attempt to do that would certainly be detected a long time before they could escape. Besides, the aliens had probably rammed the fence down into the ground, just to make sure. There was no way to know. The only way the prisoners would be getting out would be through outside rescue.

  Good thing I brought along plenty of firepower, Nicolas thought wryly, as he crawled backwards away from the camp. Four of his team had inspected the camp over the last few days and one of them, a Ranger with a history of successfully infiltrating enemy-controlled areas, had never returned. The aliens ran random patrols around the camp and had probably stumbled over him, although there was no way to know unless they liberated the Ranger from the POW camp. He’d inspected the faces of every POW he could see in the camp and found no trace of him. He had recognised a few old friends and comrades, all of which had made him more determined to knock over the camp as soon as possible.

  The aliens didn’t seem to pay attention to anything going on further away from the camp, but he kept low anyway, just in case they decided to change their minds. The orders filtering through the network had warned him to knock out the camp if he could – the prisoners would be a useful addition to the resistance’s fighting power – yet the final decision lay with him. There were only twenty men prepared to attack the camp – it would take days to get more fighting power into the area, now that the aliens were expanding their control still further – and if they failed…he shook his head. The aliens wouldn’t be expecting trouble. They’d get in, hit the camp, liberate the prisoners, and run for their lives. It would work. It had to work.

  He’d bivouacked the group in a small barn established near the POW camp, under strict discipline. They’d encountered a handful of locals who’d told them that the aliens showed little interest in their activities, but still…Nicolas hoped that they wouldn’t be blamed for the attack. Human history held plenty of examples of horrific reprisals carried out by occupying powers against local populations. In World War Two, partisans had successfully killed Reinhard Heydrich, one of the worst Nazis at the time. The nearest town had been completely destroyed by German forces in reprisal for the assassination. The occupation forces in Iraq had been far more civilised, yet the local population had been at risk when insurgents had used their towns and cities as bases to launch their attacks. The poor bastards had been caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

  “Great Bloater,” he said, as he crossed a half-visible line in the ground. The password had been picked completely at random, which should prevent the aliens or one of their collaborators from unlocking any cultural references and guessing the correct response. “And you?”

  “Bloated and blotted,” a voice said. A figure seemed to materialise out of nowhere. The Sergeant wore civilian clothes, yet somehow he couldn’t quite disguise his origins. “Welcome back, sir.”

  Nicolas stepped into the barn and relaxed slightly. Gathering the team together in one place was risky, but there was little other choice. Their standard equipment couldn’t be used so close to an alien base. No power on Earth had been able to intercept – or often detect – microburst transmissions from Special Forces equipment – but no one knew if the aliens could detect them. If they could, they’d tip the aliens off to their presence – they might as well send a calling card promising to attack at noon. The only hope of success lay in surprise.

  “They haven’t upgraded the camp’s defences,” he said, shortly. They’d patterned out the camp over the last few days and drawn up an excellent chart of its outline. The only mystery was what was in the single building. He’d given some thought to trying to pick up an alien – or a human collaborator – and sweating them for information, but no one knew how to interrogate an alien…and no human collaborators seemed to be involved with the camp. It w
as a smart move on the part of the aliens. He happened to know that a handful of collaborators were not all they seemed. “We attack in three hours – mark.”

  There was no dispute. They might have preferred a night assault, but one thing that had been made clear in hundreds of tiny engagements was that the alien night vision equipment was vastly superior to humanity’s best technology. Or, for all he knew, they actually had perfect night vision themselves. He missed the days when he was facing incompetent terrorists who thought nothing of smoking in the dark, or left their computers and systems unprotected. The aliens were holding down his entire country. They seemed invincible…yet he’d seen one of their massive command ships crashing to the earth in Washington. They were powerful, they could do things that humanity couldn’t, but they were not gods. Their technology could be unlocked and turned against them.

  His lips twitched. Information from the internet was always dubious, yet it was clear that the aliens had landed in North Africa and the Middle East, landing massive settlements in the former. They’d be experiencing the joys of an Islamic insurgency by now, one aided by the American and British troops that had been stationed in the Middle East. The thought of Iran and Saudi Arabia as allies was oddly amusing, although if pressed he had to admit that he preferred the former to the latter. They might have hated America and everything it stood for, but at least it was a honest hatred. Fifteen out of nineteen of the 9/11 hijackers had been Saudis.

  “Yes, sir,” the Sergeant said, after they had gone over their respective roles – and the escape plan. The support units were already in place, but Nicolas had contingency plans if something went wrong. The resistance couldn’t command obedience from its disparate units…and the entire country was badly screwed up. The support units might be out of place through no fault of their own. It was yet another reason to get the POWs liberated as soon as possible. With the aliens developing their own human army, they’d be able to put entire divisions of human soldiers in the field soon enough. “We’re ready.”