Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  “A chance to strike a real blow against the Orcs,” the Bitch Queen said. “So far, we’ve gone after their footsoldiers and little else. Now we’re going to really make them hurt.”

  Edward frowned. His team had attacked two other alien convoys and planted over a dozen IEDs all around their operating area, as well as a daring raid on an alien-occupied building that had come terrifyingly close to disaster. He’d killed aliens, yet there seemed to be no limit to their numbers, and parts of Chicago had paid the price for his actions. How else could they hurt the aliens?

  “We have a source inside the Green Zone” – the term had appeared just after the aliens had taken over the heart of the city’s government and stuck – “who was able to supply us with information about our noble Mayor’s schedule for the next few days. Don’t ask who gave us the information. Let’s just take the opportunity to really hurt the aliens by taking out the Mayor.”

  The Brain spoke into the shocked silence. “The aliens have the Green Zone locked down tight,” he said. “We couldn’t get anyone through their barricades without being detected. They really clamped down hard on movement there,”

  Edward nodded. The aliens had forced out anyone who wasn't willing to cooperate with them, without regard for their possessions or their former homes. The mayor, his family and his cronies had been permanently installed there, along with the senior officials who helped keep the city running. Experience had shown that the only way into the zone was through one of two gates, where alien warriors checked ID and scanned incoming civilians with handheld scanners. An attempt to slip a bomb through the dragnet had failed and the resistance fighter had been killed.

  “He’s not going to be in the Green Zone,” the Bitch Queen said. “We’ll have at least two chances at him over the next few days. Three days from now, the asshole is going to be officiating at the opening of the new Heath Centre, where the aliens have provided some of their medical technology for the use of the human workers. Apparently they have a few hundred people with serious disabilities or infectious diseases lined up to be the first to be healed. It’s going to be a big publicly stunt for the Provisional Government. It’ll be an even bigger one for us when we blow it and the Mayor to hell and gone.”

  There was a long pause. “Tell me something,” Pinkie demanded, finally. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  The Bitch Queen rounded on him. “I’m as sane as I have ever been in my life,” she snapped back. “This is a perfect opportunity to go after the bastard!”

  “You’re talking about blowing up a medical clinic just to get one man,” Pinkie said. “Or do you believe that the aliens really intend to eat the people they say they’re going to heal? Do you think it’s a trick of some kind? What did those people do to deserve to die?”

  “Many of them became infected with AIDS through their own stupidity,” Muscles put in. “It might teach them a few lessons.”

  “I was unaware that stupidity carried the death penalty,” Pinkie said, angrily. “What about the disabled and walking wounded? God knows there’s been more injuries in this fucking city in the last couple of months than we had in the past decade! Do they all deserve to die?”

  The Bitch Queen opened her mouth, but Edward spoke first. “We cannot strike a medical centre,” he said, firmly. “The Mayor might be a legitimate target, but hundreds of innocents are not. And, for that matter, what about the bad publicity we’ll get after we blow up a centre designed to help people? They won’t be hailing us as heroes of the resistance, but dangerously insane terrorists! We’ll be public enemies numbers one through five.

  “And, less you forget, we need public support. A single phone call from the wrong person could – would – bring the aliens down on our heads. What happens if we kill a disabled man whose wife knows where one of our bases is located? Why won’t she pick up the phone and tell the Orcs just where to go? Forget morality or ethics, if you like – we need public support! Killing the Mayor won’t be popular if we cover the ground with hundreds of dead innocents.”

  “He’s right,” The Brain said. “We cannot strike a medical centre.”

  The Bitch Queen leaned forward. “And how long will you keep your scruples when we may be fighting this war for the next fifty years?”

  “Long enough,” Edward snapped. His honour as a Marine forbade massacring civilians deliberately. Even enemy citizens deserved a chance at life. “What’s the other opportunity to hit him?”

  The Bitch Queen scowled, but nodded reluctantly. “They’re opening a recruitment branch here for a division of the Order Police,” she said, tartly. “A few thousand young men are going to be recruited here and transformed into alien servants, if not Walking Dead. They’ll be given a few weeks of training and then set loose onto the streets to help keep order, right out of the enemy commander’s playbook. The Mayor is going to visit the centre in seven days – or thereabouts; his schedule might change on very short notice – to give it his official blessing. That’s our second chance at hitting him outside the Green Zone.”

  Her eyes hardened. “The only possible victims will be collaborators and their media groupies,” she added, coldly. “Do they deserve to live?”

  “No,” Muscles said. He clenched his fist. “They chose to serve the Orcs and bear arms against their fellow Americans. That’s outright treason in any book. They deserve to die.”

  “Many of them are trying to feed their families,” Pinkie said, softly. “They don’t have any other employment, or prospects for the future, apart from serving the enemy and acting as their police. Many of them see it as a chance to moderate contact between the Orcs and us. God knows, it’s something we need desperately. Every time the civilian population gets caught up in a brief battle, the results are…unpleasant. They’re caught in the middle.”

  “I understand that some of them may feel that they have no other choice,” Edward said, “but we cannot allow that to deter us from striking at them.”

  Pinkie leaned forward. “Who are we to make such decisions?”

  “We’re the ones who swore to carry on the fight until we liberated our country or died at alien hands,” the Bitch Queen snapped. “Or have you forgotten that we’re under occupation? You’ve seen the reports from the Internet. They’re slowly transforming our country into a slave labour camp! The longer it takes for us to overcome our fancy scruples, the more time they’ll have to put the entire country into lockdown and complete the job. I don’t know about you, but I am not going to let my kids grow up under their jackboots.”

  “I understand,” Edward said. “What do we do now?”

  “The obvious question,” The Brain said. “Does the Mayor deserve to die?”

  Pinkie frowned. “Shouldn’t we push this question up the chain?” He asked. “What about our senior leadership, or the President? Should we sentence the Mayor to death on our own authority?”

  “Our standing orders say that we may target collaborators at will,” Edward pointed out. “The Mayor is very definitely a collaborator. I would say that the choice is clear.”

  “I think that you have appointed yourself as his defendant,” the Bitch Queen said, to Pinkie. “Tell us why we shouldn’t kill His Honour and rid the country of a stinking corrupt political figure who currently blows the Orcs. Or don’t you have an answer?”

  Pinkie’s face, what little could be seen of it, flushed bright red. “I have no defence,” he said, “yet we do not know what is going through the Mayor’s mind. Is he a willing collaborator or is he acting the way he is because his family is under threat? If the former, he deserves to die and by thunder I’ll hang the bastard myself, but if it’s the latter…can we condemn a man for trying to keep his family alive?”

  “And how many families has your client managed to kill, even indirectly?” The Bitch Queen demanded. “Surely there are limits.”

  Muscles agreed. “And let us not forget that the Mayor has gone well beyond merely helping them out of fear,” he added. “He has don
e far more than just the bare minimum. I don’t know what is going through his mind, or what’s driving him…”

  “Ambition,” The Brain said. He was the only Chicago native among them. “His Honour has always been ambitious. I suspect that he sees the aliens as his ticket to power on a global scale. Rumour had it that he was already planning his run for President in two years. If the Party had accepted him, if he’d raised the funds…”

  He shook his head. “He’s right,” he said, nodding to Muscles. “The Mayor has become a willing collaborator. I don’t really care what motivates him. I just want him dead, killed to send a message to all other would-be Quislings. We’re coming to get you.”

  “And besides,” the Bitch Queen added, “taking him out in the midst of other collaborators would send a powerful secondary message all of its own. Nowhere is safe, nowhere.”

  “The Green Zone is pretty safe,” Muscles scowled. “They could just lurk there until we die of old age or enemy action.”

  “Or until we bring out the mortars,” Pinkie said. “A few random shells every day would serve as a powerful message in itself.”

  “How true,” Edward agreed. On one hand, it would shock hell out of the collaborators. On the other hand, the aliens would probably retaliate harshly against the mortar teams and any civilians unlucky enough to be in the area at the time. “It might convince them that nowhere is truly safe.”

  “Poor bastards,” Muscles snickered. “Poor little Quislings, so helpless and vulnerable…”

  “That’s enough of that,” the Bitch Queen said. She glanced from face to face. “Shall we vote?”

  “Death to the Mayor,” Muscles said. “Kill the bastard and have done with it.”

  Pinkie nodded. “Kill him,” he said.

  “Agreed,” The Brain said. “My dear?”

  The Bitch Queen glowered at him. “Kill him,” she said. “And you?”

  Edward smiled to himself. “Death,” he said. Part of his mind was appalled. They had just sentenced a man to death without a fair trial, or even a chance to defend himself before a jury of his peers, yet there was no choice. How could they kidnap the Mayor and put him on trial? The Bitch Queen was right. They couldn’t leave the Mayor in place, even if he was acting under heavy duress. He had to be removed. “And which of us gets the task?”

  “You,” the Bitch Queen said. “Don’t forget to make sure that the bastard suffers.”

  “I’ll settle for killing him,” Edward said. “Is there any other business?”

  No one spoke. “Then I’ll head off back to my base,” he said. “Give me five minutes before the next person leaves.”

  He left the room and tore off his balaclava, before walking outside and away from the abandoned apartment. The evening had become darkness in the time he'd spent at the meeting, a darkness barely broken by glowing streetlights. The aliens had declared a curfew over the entire city in hopes of preventing resistance fighters and drug lords from operating at night – anyone picked up by an alien patrol was either added to the work gangs or was never seen again – but it wasn't always enforced. He could hear, in the warm night’s air, gunshots in the distance. Perhaps someone was having a go at an alien patrol, or perhaps humans were fighting humans. There was no way to know.

  A shape emerged out of the gloom and ambled towards him. Edward raised his weapon and the would-be mugger thought better of it, giving him a shit-eating grin and wandering off in the distance, coat pockets clinking with glass bottles. The street bums seemed to have been the only ones prepared for the alien occupation. Edward considered going after him and breaking his neck to prevent him harming others in the future – chances were, he would have mugged and raped people in the chaos already – but there was little point. Besides, some of the homeless worked for the resistance and kept an eye on the aliens, curfew or no curfew. And, probably, some of them worked for the aliens or the collaborators.

  He glanced up as one of the alien heavy transports raced overhead, heading out northwards towards Canada. The Canucks hadn’t been invaded, as far as he knew, but they had to cope with tens of thousands of refugees from the United States. Canada was a small and very vulnerable country to anyone who could reach it, having grown used to depending on the United States for its defence during the Cold War. The Canadian Air Force wouldn’t be able to stand off the aliens for long if they decided that they wanted Canada, one day. Who knew? Perhaps the aliens would find maple syrup to their liking.

  The building they were using as their temporary base loomed up in front of him and he checked it out carefully before entering through the rear entrance. They’d prepared the building for rapid demolition if the aliens stumbled across it – anyone who came in the front entrance would walk right into four Claymore mines, among other surprises – although they couldn’t pretend to be innocent civilians. A person with half a brain cell could tell that the building had been prepared as an ambush site.

  He smiled as he passed through the second layer of defences and down into the basement. The informant had told them seven days. By then, he would have come up with a plan to kill the Mayor…and show everyone what happened to collaborators. They’d never forget it…

  Chapter Eleven

  Mannington, Virginia, USA

  Day 114

  “I think that the question is simple,” Pepper said. “Who sent you that data packet and can they be trusted?”

  The President looked down at the display. There were forty files in all, ranging from the planned operating structure for the Order Police, to the list of willing or unwilling collaborators working for the aliens. It was an intelligence windfall, yet the President had learned to be careful when anyone offered him a gift horse. The West’s intelligence services had been embarrassed before and would – if they ever beat the aliens and drove them off-planet – doubtless be embarrassed again. Nothing could be accepted without question.

  He scowled. His private email address was only given out to family and a handful of very close friends. Jacob would have known it, he recalled, and felt a spurt of hope that his old friend might not have fallen completely into alien hands. Perhaps some of the Walking Dead had more free will than others or perhaps it was a fake packet of information, intended to lure the resistance into a trap. Or perhaps it was nothing to do with Jacob at all. Who else might have the email address and the access to the alien power structure that would grant them access to such information?

  It couldn’t be a coincidence. That thought was laughable. The email address was a combination of seemingly random letters and numbers, not something blatantly obvious. An analyst from NSA had once told him that anyone experimenting with a random set of numbers could easily stumble over the phone number or email address of a Very Important Person, yet there would be no way of confirming what they’d found, or even if it was more than a coincidence. The unsigned email had been addressed, specifically, to ‘Mr President.’ That suggested that whoever had sent it was neither a close friend nor family. Besides, most of the President’s friends were accounted for. Who else had the address?

  The server existed outside Washington, without any form of oversight at all. The President’s official email address was deluged, every day, with emails, threats and spam. The secret email address was rarely used, yet the President looked at each of those emails personally. No one else, even the Secret Service, looked at them without permission. It was just another attempt to convince the President that he wasn’t living in a cage, even if it did have golden bars. His mind repeated the question. Only thirty people had the email address. Who had sent him the information?

  An answer clicked in his mind and he returned to the list of collaborators. It was an embarrassingly long list, with a number of very familiar names and faces. Some of them had been his political opponents during the last election, or his detractors ever since he had been elected into office, others had tiny marks beside their names, suggesting that they weren't acting of their own free will. He saw one beside Jacob Thornton�
�s name and ground his teeth together in rage. Whatever the aliens had done to him would be avenged, even if it cost his life. No one deserved to become one of the Walking Dead.

  And there, on the list, was a single name.

  “Her,” he said, simply. “She sent the information.”

  Pepper frowned. She would remember Karen from her visit to the White House. “Are you sure?”

  “No,” the President said, “but she does have the email address and – apparently – the access required to look inside the alien government. She’s the most likely suspect.”

  “Then we keep it strictly to ourselves,” Pepper said, sharply. “If the aliens figure out what she’s done, they’ll convert her into one of the Walking Dead and use her to feed us lies and false information. All of our communications with her is done all over the web – there’ll be no way of knowing if she’s still operating under her own free will or if the aliens have reprogrammed her and turned her into a slave. We can’t risk losing such an asset.”

  “I agree,” the President said. He skimmed through the data packet again. Some of it would be immediately useful; other parts were only of academic interest. There was little point in a list of the Walking Dead until they could put together a mission to snatch one and get him to one of the secret hospitals scattered around the nation. Perhaps what had been done to them could be reversed. Perhaps he’d be able to laugh with his old friend again. “So what do we do with the data?”

  “Pass it on to the other coordinators, but otherwise nothing,” Pepper said, practically. “The list of collaborators aside, there’s nothing here worth risking her safety over. We can ensure that that list gets out without any trace of its origin, perhaps blaming it on spies inside Washington or even the aliens themselves. They’d want to make sure that their collaborators couldn’t turn their coats at the slightest opportunity.”