Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  Alex nodded slowly. No other aliens had been taken captive, even on the ground. The aliens in the crashed UFO that had started the entire war had died, even though there had been no obvious reason why they’d died, along with the occupants of every other crashed alien ship – apart from one. The analysts had studied the bodies and concluded that they’d been killed by the plethora of implants inserted into their brains, preventing any live aliens from falling into human hands. One, just one, had survived the experience and been transported to Area 53. He didn’t like the implications of a race that was prepared to kill its own pilots rather than trade for them after the war. It suggested unpleasant possibilities about how the alien society worked.

  Human history showed a wide spectrum of precedents for prisoner treatment. The Japanese in World War Two had regarded anyone who surrendered as dead and lost to the world; they’d treated their POWs with uncompromising brutality and thousands had died. The West had generally treated POWs much better than either the Nazis or the Soviets, even during the worst days of the War on Terror. They certainly hadn’t engaged in mass torture of terrorist suspects. A handful had been mistreated, yet Alex had little sympathy. Terrorists didn’t fight by honourable rules.

  And no one in their right mind would have mistreated a captive from a far more powerful race with uncertain motives. Alex had drawn up the code of conduct himself long before a live alien had fallen into human hands. The aliens were to be kept prisoner, yes, but they were to be treated well and cared for as best as they could, even though humanity was fighting and losing a war against them. They represented a priceless source of intelligence, one that could not be rejected, for any reason. They also represented a chance to convince the aliens that humanity could be civilised too.

  “They probably think he’s dead,” he said, finally. It was the only reason he could understand why the aliens hadn’t started searching for their missing pilot at once. They’d implanted their pilots with suicide implants and if the implant hadn’t failed…the humans would have recovered nothing more than another dead alien with melted brains. “I take your point.”

  “We tried verifying what we found out against information we collected from other sources, but there was very little collaboration,” Jane continued. “I suspect that we won’t ever have collaboration until we manage to capture other aliens or liberate a Walking Dead man from his mental prison. That said, we haven’t managed to disprove anything he told us, so…”

  She clicked on the display and started the presentation. “I spent an hour putting this together so I hope you appreciate it,” she said, dryly. “PowerPoint was the only Microsoft Office product that I was ever able to use properly.”

  “We should have had Microsoft make the tender to produce the alien computers,” Alex said, with a grin. He’d once spent days trying to fix a particularly nasty virus that had exploited a security weakness in the latest Windows before giving up and switching to a different operating system. “We’d beat them easily.”

  Jane rolled her eyes. “The aliens, as we deduced, are a caste-based system, but what we didn’t understand was how their society actually fits together,” she began. “There seemed to be hundreds of different castes, some very common and some rare and almost unique, yet it didn’t seem possible to sustain such a system. It took weeks of back-and-forth discussions with our captive to gain even a vague picture of how the alien society works, and I have to caution you that we could be completely wrong. A single translation error could have misled us completely.”

  She clicked the display and three aliens appeared, with two more empty boxes marked with question marks. “The aliens appear to have five baseline castes, pure castes,” she said. “We’ve seen Warriors, Workers and Leaders on Earth. The other two – Thinkers and Brooders – apparently stay on the mothership, although our captive thinks that they might be in some of the alien cities by now. Thinkers, from what we can tell, are genius-level intellects and are responsible for most of the scientific breakthroughs and developments; Brooders serve as wet nurses and bring up the children. Thinkers don’t seem to fight; Brooders will fight like mad bastards if their children are threatened. The other castes seem to hold them in deep respect.”

  Alex held up a hand. “Hang on,” he said. “The Brooders are the only ones who have kids?”

  “Not as far as we can tell,” Jane said. “They all can have kids – well, either get pregnant or get someone pregnant – but the Brooders bring up the children and take care of them. That makes a certain amount of sense. The aliens don’t seem to have any significant dimorphism between the sexes, although they obviously do between castes, and female warriors presumably deliver their children and return to duty. I suspect that sexism and feminism would be alien concepts to them, quite literally. They just don’t have the inherent trend towards patriarchy that we do. Their society seems to form into…well, we’re calling them tribes…that encompass a sizable number of each of the baseline castes, all banded together for mutual support and protection. The community that landed on Earth is simply a very large tribe.

  “From what our captive says, all children are born looking identical and are placed in the care of the Brooders. This continues until they reached maturity and start going through the transformation into one of the castes, whereupon they are separated and transferred to their new castes. At some point, they merge back into the mainstream of society and catch up with all their old friends. The captive got a bit vague about this point and I think they find it a little embarssing, just as we can find passing through puberty.”

  She chuckled. “The really interesting part is what happens when two individuals from separate castes breed together,” she continued, clicking the display. “They don’t produce someone from a single caste, but a child who is actually a bridge between the two castes. Our friend in Area 53 is actually a Leader-Warrior, someone who is both a fighter and a commander. My guess – they don’t seem to realise that this happens themselves – is that the hybrids between castes are the ones who end up taking the lead in specialised areas. They’re genetically selected for their roles in society.”

  “Disgusting,” Alex commented. “I can’t imagine how their society works without falling apart.”

  “It’s the way they’re made,” Jane pointed out. “You might as well quarrel with God himself and demand to know why He created woman with periods and multiple orgasms.”

  “Point,” Alex said. “None of this seems to make sense, but…”

  He shrugged. “Carry on.”

  “From what we can tell, the hybrids tend to push the tribes forward,” Jane continued. “A Warrior-Worker might be their version of a combat engineer. A Thinker-Worker might be their version of a mad scientist or inventor. A Leader-Thinker might be a political statesman or theorist.” She chuckled. “They might come up with equally absurd political theories as our own political theorists do.

  “Their society seems a little odd, which is one of the reasons why I hesitated to bring this before you or anyone else. The Leaders are clearly in charge, yet there seems to be a certain amount of democracy in the system as well, even equality before the law. Our own caste systems – which were far less set in stone than their caste system, which is a reflection of their genetic make-up – were effectively natural aristocracies, with the highest caste looking down on the lowest. Theirs…doesn’t seem to have so much inequality and…well; we only have one theory to explain it. All of their children look identical until they mature, so it could be that they remember being the same as the other castes. Or perhaps we’re completely wrong. This is an alien society and God knows that there are parts of our societies that don’t make sense either.”

  “This is very interesting,” Santini said, “but it doesn’t answer the important question.” He leaned forward. “Why did they decide to invade Earth? If they’re so…democratic and sweet and cuddly, why did they decide to take our world?”

  “I asked that question,” Jane said, slowly. “The cap
tive was told that we refused to allow them to land and condemned a billion of their race to die in space. They were also bombarded with stories about how stupid we were as a race, how we’d never bothered to develop space and how we were inherently inferior to the People. Their leaders were quite happy to play on their fears and turn…public opinion against the human race.”

  “We never said that they couldn’t land,” Santini pointed out, angrily. “We just didn’t want them taking over the planet!”

  “I think it’s pretty clear that their leaders chose to sell the war to their people with such…distortions,” Alex said, before another argument could break out. “If their leadership decided to fight a war with us, I don’t think that the other castes could have dissented, not if they knew they’d die in space if they couldn’t get people out of the mothership soon. They might have reasoned that it was them or us.”

  “Perhaps,” Jane agreed. “Or we could have it completely wrong. What I just told you took weeks to gather and process, then verify and cross-check. Only a handful of details were verifiable.”

  She frowned. “They don’t seem to have a religion,” she added. “That matches up with what our sources in the Order Police told us. They don’t have a religion and they look down on us for believing in God. It’s not just us either. They didn’t think to bring along prayer rugs for the Arabs, or provide them with prayer rooms or even proper Islamic food. If the Arabs hadn’t managed to provide it for themselves, the aliens might have ended up with a riot on their hands.”

  “A wasted opportunity,” Alex said.

  “Perhaps not,” Santini disagreed. “The average Arab soldier knows perfectly well that his officers don’t give a shit about his welfare, or even his rights, such as they are. It doesn’t matter if they’re a dictatorship or a theocracy, they share that understanding. We could probably use it to create some black propaganda about their rations being made from pork or something like that. If it worked in the Indian Mutiny, it should work here.”

  Alex blinked. “No one would fall for that,” he protested. “Not in a theocratic state…”

  Santini grinned. “True story,” he said. “Back in the Gulf War, the Saudi Army had a problem; they couldn’t deploy to the borders with Kuwait and Iraq without running out of food. The Prince in charge rang up Washington and paid top dollar to get packs of MREs sent out from the States. None of these packs were suitable for Islamic consumption, but when someone pointed that out, the Prince was unconcerned about the faith. All he cared about was feeding the troops.”

  He chuckled. “And then the MREs arrived and they realised that half of them were clearly marked as including pork,” he added. “So…they gave that half to American soldiers in Saudi and fed the rest – which were also not suitable for Muslims – to their own and the Egyptian soldiers. They just didn’t give a shit. It’s certainly something to work on after they crushed Chicago. If we could convince them that the Arabs are on the verge of changing sides…”

  “It’s worth trying,” Alex agreed. He ran his hand through his hair. “Jane, did the captive have anything to say about the kidnapped women?”

  “Nothing at all,” Jane said. “I think it came as a complete surprise to him.”

  Alex scowled. The aliens generally kept very good track of who was in their various detention camps at any one time, yet at least seven hundred young women – from fifteen to twenty-five years old – had dropped completely off the grid and remained completely unaccounted for. They hadn’t been released, they hadn’t been transferred to other holding camps in the Middle East or North Africa, they hadn’t been given to the Order Police or the Arabs as sex slaves…they’d just vanished. The resistance had been working on putting together a comprehensive picture of just what the aliens were doing, but the analysts were completely stumped. The best theory anyone could come up with was that the aliens intended to use them for medical experiments, but to what end? And why all young women?

  “We’ll just have to keep an eye on it,” he said, finally. “Thank you for your time.”

  “There was another issue,” Jane said. She sounded…scared. “My team has been dissecting the alien bodies we recovered after the invasion began, looking for possible angles of attack. They found…something we might be able to use against them.”

  She leaned forward, meeting Alex’s eyes. “The aliens are completely immune to our viruses, as far as we know, so any hope of them all catching the common cold and dropping dead is pretty much unlikely,” she said. “But we dissected several aliens and found some of their own bacteria in their bodies, some of their own diseases. We might be able to transform one into a biological weapon we could use against them.”

  Alex caught his breath. “How sure are you that it’s even possible?”

  “I’m not,” Jane said, miserably. “The aliens may be humanoid, but large parts of their biology are very different from ours. We know so little about their bodies that we might well be completely wrong about what we’ve found, but…I’m fairly certain that we have found something we can turn into a weapon. If we manage to warp it into a new disease, they’d have no defence against it.”

  “Are you sure?” Santini said. “How would we even begin to test it?”

  Jane shook her head bitterly. “We have a captive, don’t we?”

  “You want to see if you can make him ill,” Alex said. He understood why she was miserable now. She was a doctor, trained to heal, not deliberately infect someone with a virus intended to kill them. “And what if it fails?”

  “We know not to try to infect them,” Jane said. She was still shaking her head in denial. “If we didn’t infect them all, if they didn’t die before realising what was happening, they’d strike back and wipe us out. Or the disease might be completely ineffective and they won’t even notice. Alex, God help us, but I think we could win this completely, or lose everything.”

  ***

  Her words were still ringing in his head hours later as he prepared for bed. He’d been trained to believe that biological weapons were obscene, both in conception and deployment. A biological warhead could so easily swing out of control and infect the good guys as easily as the bad guys, no matter what the designers promised. He’d heard rumours in the FTD that China had been working on developing a disease fatal to all, but Han Chinese, or South African factions had been working on a disease that would wipe out all blacks, everywhere. The very idea was obscene. The whole Chalk Doctrine and the Eulachon Program was designed to prevent such weapons from ever being deployed.

  And yet, it had a tempting promise. A disease based on alien DNA couldn’t cross from the aliens to humanity. It would be the perfect biological weapon, guaranteeing the slaughter of the aliens while leaving humanity alone, committing genocide to save the rest of the human race. And yet…how could it be deployed? Could they be sure of exterminating the entire alien population before they realised what was going on and struck back? A single uninfected alien ship would be able to completely destroy the Earth and exterminate the human race. There would be no promise of a cure to deter retaliation. Jane wasn't even sure if they could actually develop a weapon, let alone a cure.

  It would be genocide, he thought. It would be obscene.

  And yet…he was tempted. They had to explore the possibility.

  He just hoped they could control whatever they discovered.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Near Mannington, Virginia, USA

  Day 182

  The streaks of light came down from high above.

  Nicolas barely had a moment to realise what they were before they struck the ground and exploded into massive fireballs. He’d been under air attack before in Iran and Yemen, but this was different. The aliens had somehow moved one of their assault craft into position without being detected, and had then started to bombard the resistance camp. The flames spread rapidly as the aliens hit the fuel supply, destroying carefully horded gas in a second fireball. He felt a wave of heat strike his face as he cr
awled towards the centre of the camp, knowing that it wouldn’t be long before the alien ground forces arrived to cut off all escape.

  The camp had been organised along the same lines as a Boy Scout Camp – there were actually hundreds of civilian camps existing out in the countryside, away from towns and cities, hiding from the aliens – but he’d believed that it had been impossible to detect from the air. The network of sentries and ambush points should have made it impossible to reach without one of the watching sentries sounding the alert, yet the aliens had somehow found them. Perhaps their sensors were better than humanity had realised, perhaps they’d seeded the area with hundreds of tiny remote probes…or perhaps it was simple old-fashioned betrayal. It might not even have been a willing betrayal. A person, no matter how strong, would eventually break under a combination of drugs and torture, or they might have simply captured someone who knew and turned him into one of the Walking Dead. The thought horrified him, even as more streaks of light shot down from high above; one of his former comrades could be leading the aliens right towards his position, taking advantage of the confusion to exterminate an entire resistance cell.

  “I can’t get a lock,” one of the Stinger operators shouted. “The bastard is too high to take out!”

  “Don’t waste the missile,” Nicolas snapped. It was becoming increasingly obvious that the camp was completely untenable. They couldn’t risk remaining there much longer. God alone knew how long it would be before the ground forces arrived. “Pack the item away and head for the evacuation points, now!”

  Another explosion, deeper and darker, echoed out in the distance. “Sir, they just breached the first network of mines, at Point Lee,” Matthew Amsel snapped. The former Marine Recon Lieutenant was checking the wired terminal, linked to the network of mines and sensors they’d scattered across the area. “They’re coming up in at least company strength; they’ll certainly have more in reserve.”