Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  A light flared high overhead and he tensed reflexively, before realising that the alien ship had completely missed him, or had chosen to ignore him. The aliens, if the President were to be believed, had been flying with impunity through American air space for decades, but now they were flying openly. Luke, like many of the other USAF pilots, blamed the USAF’s top brass and the radar operators. If they’d paid more attention to transient returns and UFO reports, perhaps Earth would have had enough warning to build a real defence. As it was…

  He could hear the sound of shooting in the distance from the burning city. The resistance was still resisting, even pushing the damned Arabs back in places. Luke had no idea how long the aliens would tolerate the stalemate before they sent in their warriors with ground-support aircraft – or simply bombed the city down to bedrock - but the longer they held out, the better. He’d give them the best chance he could. He looked down, seeing the roads in the moonlight, and the Order Police checkpoint up ahead. They were in for a shock.

  His father hadn’t just bought the aircraft from Eastern Europe; he’d bought the aircraft’s weapons as well. It would have horrified the ATF if they’d realised that he’d purchased four heavy machine guns and some ammunition, but the ATF was no longer a going concern, not after the President had shredded all gun control legislation. Luke toggled the switch and triggered the machine guns, spraying the checkpoint with a hail of bullets. The Russians might have been bad at producing sophisticated aircraft and weapons, but they’d been geniuses at producing simple weapons that any fool could use and the machine guns still worked perfectly. He saw something explode behind him as he raced overhead and heard a pair of shots in the distance as someone shot wildly at him. The bullets didn’t go anywhere near the Kukuruznik. He saw a Bradley on the road and launched one of the makeshift missiles at it, but it missed, striking the ground and exploding there. Laughing, he swooped away, leaving chaos and confusion in his wake.

  He gunned the engine and changed course, heading further in towards Chicago. The map’s he’d memorised suggested that the Arabs had taken over Midway Airport from the aliens and were using it as a base to prepare their new recruits before sending them into the city. The aliens would have their own craft at the base and flying over it would be suicide, but the Arabs had also taken over a number of warehouses near the airport as barracks. The entire area was lit up with white lights, allowing him to navigate towards the barracks and pick his targets with ease. He chuckled to himself and pushed the aircraft into a steep dive, unloading half of his bomb racks onto the first target, before pulling up and unloading the remaining bombs on the second warehouse. The bombs had been designed to punch through the rooftops before they exploded with shattering force, sending shockwaves through the air. The Arab soldiers billeted in the warehouses would rapidly come to regret their decision to come to America. The second warehouse didn’t blow up as spectacularly, but he definitely heard screaming behind him.

  A fence surrounding an open space revealed the location of a prison camps and he unloaded his machine guns on the guard posts, swinging the aircraft around to strafe the defenders. The prisoners, if they reacted quickly, would have a chance to escape, but he couldn’t stay in the area. He'd emptied all his weapons and that meant he had to get home and get the aircraft under cover before the Order Police came looking for any private aircraft. He’d prepared an elaborate cover story about the aircraft being stolen, but he doubted the Order Police would believe it. They’d been embarrassed in front of the aliens and would be looking for scapegoats. Whoever was in charge of the barracks would probably end up being hung.

  It was another odd point, perhaps a mark in the aliens’ favour. The resistance had expected – and used propaganda to warn the public – that the Arabs would gleefully commit a whole series of atrocities against the American public. Only a handful of isolated atrocities, mainly rapes and a couple of murders, had materialised and the aliens had taken care of them with ruthless efficiency. They'd found the Arabs responsible, taken them out and hung them, or in one case allowed their warriors to chop the Arab up with their long knives. They might have been crushing Chicago piece by piece – he looked back towards the city as another billowing fireball rose up into the sky – but otherwise the Arabs were being more civilised than the Order Police. The aliens barely seemed to care what they did, provided they kept the civilian population firmly under control.

  He checked his compass and flew due south. The aliens would have their own craft up and looking for him and his only hope was to remain as low as possible. There was no point in looking for the alien craft really, but he glanced from side to side anyway, trying to pick out the threat. He flew over buildings and forests, knowing that there were entire resistance armies somewhere underneath, depending on him to give the aliens a bloody nose. The aliens had to be slowed down, somehow. He no longer knew if they could be defeated.

  Something moved high above him and he cringed, sensing more than seeing the alien craft. It didn’t seem to see him. It was racing out as if it expected a supersonic attack aircraft or even a Warthog, rather than the tiny Kukuruznik. He floated down towards the ground and flew as low as he dared, praying that the Kukuruznik’s coating would help keep it safe. He’d worked hard to minimise the aircraft’s infrared signature and anything else that could be used to track it, but nothing was perfect. A Serb air defence commander had brought down an F-117 with a little bit of luck and a sound-tracking system. What could the aliens do to him?

  The flight home was nerve-racking. He didn’t see any other alien craft, but he felt a pricking at the back of his neck that convinced him that cold alien eyes were looking down on him. They might be vectoring in hundreds of craft – it occurred to him, too late, that they might be tracking him and waiting to see where he landed – to follow him, or they might have lost him altogether. Navigating by the stars was easier the further he flew from Chicago, yet the aircraft was nearly running on fumes when he finally touched down at home and drove the aircraft towards the barn. The resistance had sent along a demolitions expert to make sure that the aliens couldn’t recover the aircraft or any of its supplies, but he feared that the explosion would definitely tell them that something had been there. They’d have to set up another airbase somewhere well away from the area. He wasn't going to put his wife in such danger again.

  He felt utterly tired as he shut the aircraft down and closed the barn doors, rewiring the explosive charges as he left. His wife hadn’t gone to bed; she’d waited for him, using their private generator to provide the power to read. She’d been reading the bible and praying out loud, pleading with God to spare her husband’s life. She stood up as he entered and ran towards him, wearing only a blue nightgown she’d bought at Frills, a lifetime ago.

  “I made it,” he said, as she hugged him tightly. He couldn’t tell her everything. “I got in and out smoother than I expected.”

  “Thank God,” Yvette said. She pulled at his clothes until he had undressed completely, and then tugged him into the bedroom. “I thought…”

  Afterwards, Luke lay in bed, smiling to himself. The aliens might catch him tomorrow, or maybe bring in antiaircraft units and shoot him down the next time he tried to raid their defences, but it wouldn’t matter. The story would be around the world by the time he woke up the next morning.

  He turned, cupped his wife’s breast with one hand, and went to sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Area 52, Nevada, USA

  Day 150

  “Explain it to me again,” Alex ordered. “What exactly am I looking at?”

  The device on the table looked as if three radios had been mashed together and fused to a laptop, one of the latest NSA-issue designs that were at least one quantum leap ahead of anything on the public market. They cost over a million dollars apiece and it was a sign of just how important the work at Area 52 was that seven of them had been sent to the base, along with billions of dollars worth of other computer and research equipm
ent. Now that Washington and the government-owned factories were occupied by the aliens, there wouldn’t be any more until the aliens were driven away from Washington, or completely defeated.

  He rubbed the side of his head tiredly. The work at Area 52 was important, yet the entire research team were beginning to develop an extreme form of cabin fever. Normally, they would only have gone into lockdown for a month or two – and even so, they could have walked outside on the disused airstrip or inside the hangar. They couldn’t do that now, not with the base’s only defence being secrecy, when everything depended on the aliens believing that the base was completely disused and abandoned. Having people walking around on the surface might draw the aliens to the base, just to see what was going on, and if that happened…he’d have no choice, but to set the nuke and run, leaving the crashed ship to be destroyed.

  And there were other dangers. The entire southern border of the United States was coming apart. The aliens had encircled the cities, but they hadn’t secured the countryside and there was now a brutal four-sided war going on that seemed to rage from Texas to Mexico. There had been a tidal wave of refugees into Mexico, another tidal wave coming out of Mexico as the government and economy collapsed, while resistance teams fought it out with the Order Police. Fort Hood was still the scene of guerrilla fighting between the infantrymen stranded there and alien warriors. Drug lords waged war on their opponents. The aliens didn’t seem to care. They merely slaughtered all comers indiscriminately and waited for the humans to kill each other off. The fighting hadn’t spread to Nevada yet, but if the drug lords decided that an old disused base made the perfect hideout…

  “I’ve been working on studying the alien computers recovered from this ship and Antarctica,” Robert Nguyen explained. The Vietnamese-American had grown up the son of two parents who had ignored him, past providing for all his material wants and needs. He’d grown up surrounded by computers and had become inhumanly proficient in understanding and developing computer software. By the time he was twelve, he was a social cripple and a legend on the World Wide Web, the boy who had written software to remove DRM and other restrictions on program use and freely distributed them around the net. He'd hacked into computers around the world and written them long involved emails telling them about their security holes and explaining how they could be corrected. When the NSA had finally tracked him down, they’d offered Bandit – as he called himself – a choice between a job or a jail sentence. Nguyen had accepted the job and the high salary that came with it. “I believe that I have made a breakthrough.”

  Alex looked up, interested. Some alien technology was understandable, even though it wasn't easy for humans to duplicate. Some other parts seemed oddly familiar, yet alien and scientists had had real problems trying to understand it, with at least two mental breakdowns in the last few months alone. And some of it seemed completely inexplicable. The ship’s computers fell into the middle category. Alex had read reports suggesting that the alien computers weren't actually that different to anything that humanity had created, but they’d wired them up with an alien mindset and so they were effectively beyond understanding. Others had believed that humanity would understand them one day.

  “The aliens created a quantum matrix within their system’s mainframe and used it to generate their own universes of code…”

  Alex held up a hand. “I’ve got a headache already,” he said, wryly. “Couldn’t you explain it with…say, ninety percent less technobabble?”

  “It doesn’t sound so clever then,” Nguyen grumbled. Alex folded his arms and waited. “Very well; I’ll do my best.

  “The aliens built a quantum computer that is at least twenty years ahead of anything we built, but its internal logic isn’t that different to systems we had on the drawing board, even though we never managed to make the system work. They don’t rely so much upon programming as they rely upon an organic…ah, self-programming matrix that is actually comparable to a human mind. I assume that it’s comparable to an alien mind as well. The bottom line is that they have a system that could literally store every last piece of information on Earth and index it without needing human or alien intervention. Calculating flight paths and trajectories would be a snap.”

  “I shall assume that all of that makes sense,” Alex said. Technobabble had never ceased to irritate him. “How does it relate to what we need to know?”

  “I managed to isolate programming segments – subunits – within the crashed ship’s computers and I was able to get a feel for the computer language they used. It’s obviously not anything as simply Java or BASIC, let alone something more complex, but ALIENSPEAK – as I have termed it – is understandable. The aliens might be alien, but they’re not that alien. Their computers exist in the same physical world as our own computers. They might be far faster and far more capable, but they’re still understandable. The basic principles are the same.”

  “I think I understand,” Alex said. “How can we use this against them?”

  “We can’t actually copy vast amounts of alien data into our systems because they don’t seem to have developed cross-platform programs that can be used across different computer systems,” Nguyen explained, “but we can hack into their systems, with a little luck. Their computer security isn’t actually that good compared to ours, which may suggest that they haven’t been challenged recently, or that they might have expected to block out access from our Internet. They wouldn’t have been wrong. The system’s defences, such as they are, would block out a human computer. With this” – he tapped the device on the table – “we should be able to sneak into their systems without being thrown out automatically.

  “Think of their system as watching permanently for IP addresses that are on a banned list, or not on an approved list,” he added. “Anything that links into the mainframe with such an address gets booted out; no warning, perhaps without an explanation. Back when I was banned from an internet forum with a really obnoxious douche bag of an administrator, I used to develop software that would allow me to slip in under the radar and wreak havoc. The asshole claimed to know everything and knew nothing…”

  He trailed off at Alex’s stare. “The thing is, with a little work, we can hijack one of their systems and use it as a gateway into the overall system,” he concluded. “We may not be able to cause much damage – the system is configured to limit the amount of damage someone could cause without permission and I suspect that it is actually capable of healing itself – but we could certainly pick out intelligence and maybe even make slight alterations.”

  “So much for any Independence Day scenarios we might have been hoping for,” Alex said. “There’s no way you could give the system a virus?”

  “The system is configured…well, you didn’t want any actual technical details, but suffice it to say that infecting it with a virus would probably fail,” Nguyen admitted, sourly. “I’ve been trying to design something that might work, but my understanding of ALIENSPEAK is still limited and the system, as I said, is capable of recognising an attack and reacting at terrifying speed to repair the damage. We may come up with something as we grow to understand their language and just how the system works, but…”

  Alex frowned. “Is the system alive? Is it a form of life in its own right?”

  “Good question,” Nguyen said. “I don’t believe that it is really anything more than a highly-advanced expert system, with limited capability for learning and growing on its own, but I suppose that it is possible. My guess, however, is that the original programmers added in hard limits – we did the same back at Fort Meade – to prevent it from developing a form of intelligence. If it actually can…we honestly don’t know for sure.”

  “I’ll read your report carefully,” Alex promised him. “How do you intend to tap into their systems?”

  “That's the hard part,” Nguyen admitted. He pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket and placed it on the table. “The aliens have, I believe, created a massive wireless network that lin
ks their ships and bases together. They must have; unlike us, they didn’t have any previous hardwired system on the ground. This has interesting implications.”

  He drew a circle and marked it EARTH, then drew a handful of stars surrounding the planet. “They don’t seem to use anything that would allow them to actually drive a signal through the planet’s mass, so my guess is that they use their orbiting fleet to create links and nodes between their bases, the mothership and the three remaining command ships,” he continued. “The craft that was destroyed over Washington might actually have provided the command and control for their invasion, occupation and settlement of America.”

  “They slowed down after we wrecked the ship,” Alex said, following the logic. “They didn’t slow down in the Middle East, or North Africa. They kept landing their transports and unloading the settlers on their new home. In America, they slowed down and built the Order Police instead. Why…?”

  “My guess, and it is an informed guess, is that those four command ships and the mothership form the core of their network,” Nguyen explained. “Losing one of them had to hurt badly. I think they probably set up new units on Earth, but they’d be vulnerable to us attacking them physically, either directly or indirectly. The system may be the only way the Leaders keep the rest of them under control.”