The aliens had been reaching their tendrils into American factories and corporations, steadily rebuilding them and pushing them to support the alien agenda. His opponents had been fond of claiming that everything American was produced in China – until China had collapsed into civil war – yet the truth was that America led the world in hundreds of areas. No one else matched the sheer sophistication of some parts of the American productive plant. The British plan – to produce craft that could take on the alien craft on even terms – would need components from America, components that could only be produced under the aliens’ collective nose.
“Karen can help us do that,” Pepper reminded him. “She can insert the right orders and use their own system against them.”
“One can hope,” the President agreed. “Let’s just hope we don’t end up with a pram.”
The British officer who’d dreamed up the plan had referred him to the old story about the German Air Force, back before Hitler took the gloves off and started rearming openly. An engineer at one of the aircraft plants had believed that they were really making prams for the children, so he’d stolen all of the different components over a period of weeks, intending to put them together at home. When he’d finally completed the collection and built his ‘pram,’ he’d been astonished to find himself looking at a fighter aircraft. The story was almost certainly exaggeration, but the idea fitted together remarkably well. Have hundreds of different factories produce the separate components, then bring them together at a central location and put them all together, producing the fighter craft. If they could get it to work before the aliens caught on…
But they shouldn’t catch on, Jones had argued, and the President couldn’t disagree. They’d have to be very careful, but it should be possible to keep a coating of secrecy over the entire operation. No one apart from a handful of people would know the truth. The aliens would have no one to interrogate, no way of knowing what was being prepared for them. They wouldn’t be expecting the sucker punch…and, if all went badly wrong, there would always be the biological weapon to fall back on.
“Maybe not,” Pepper agreed. “What would we do with one?”
The President snorted. He’d never had children. His wife had wanted kids, but she’d died before they’d been able to make time to produce a family. It was something of a relief now, because there were no hostages to fortune outside the bunker, or trapped in alien hands, yet…if he were caught, there would be nothing left of him.
“I don’t know,” he said. He looked back down at the map and winced, realising that he was seriously considering a way they could escape the bunker. The delusion seemed to grow more tempting every time he looked at it. “I just don’t know.”
Pepper walked over to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “Relax,” she said, and gently started to massage his neck. “Just relax and let your cares slip away for a while.”
The President closed his eyes. A hundred good reasons why he shouldn’t allow it to go any further rushed through his mind. She was his subordinate. He’d always despised superior officers who’d taken advantage of their juniors. She was his only company in the bunker. They couldn’t afford a lover’s quarrel. She was, at the bottom line, expendable. He might have to order her into a hopeless position to save himself. He opened his mouth to protest, to gently push her away, and then closed it again. It had been too long since he’d been with a woman. His wife had died far too long ago and the President could hardly go courting. He’d never been able to understand how Clinton or Kennedy had ever found time to chase interns around the Oval Office. There was just too much to do.
Her breath was warm on the back of his neck. He was suddenly overwhelmingly aware of her femininity. Urges he’d thought safely buried rose up within him and he turned, pulling her closer, expecting her to push away at any time. The cold dispassionate part of his mind whispered that they’d been too close for too long and that stress was pushing them together, but he no longer cared. Her lips came down to meet his and he relaxed. Whatever happened, later, everything was going to be all right.
***
The Order Police had taken over the local sheriff’s office and converted it into a jail and interrogation centre. Greg sat in a chair, surrounded by bright light, while figures hiding in the darkness tossed question after question at him. There was a certain pro forma feel to it all, but he answered each question carefully, trying to avoid the central truth. He knew now that he’d made a terrible mistake. There was just too much evidence in his house to suggest that he and Nicolas were more than just passing acquaintances. His story simply wouldn’t hold water if they poked at it long enough, yet they didn’t seem to care. There was no real sense of threat emitting from them, no sense that they were going to bring out the rack and thumbscrews, just…a sense that they were asking questions purely for the sake of asking questions.
“Enough,” a voice said, finally. “You have served us well.”
The lights dimmed, revealing four figures standing in the room. Three of them were normal, all wearing the black uniforms of the Order Police; the fourth was clearly one of the Walking Dead. Greg felt another pang of guilt and fear as he looked into the cold dead eyes. Had he condemned Nicolas to such a fate? The conclusion seemed inescapable and so did the consequences. Nancy would grow up hating him even as she hated herself for the safety he’d bought her, with her father’s sacrifice. The Order Police could have dragged him off to a detention camp or simply taken him out and shot him and he would have thanked them. It would have saved him growing old alone.
Or perhaps the resistance will catch and kill me, he thought sourly. The remains of Nicolas’s team would certainly want revenge, if they ever found out the truth about who had betrayed their leader…did they even know about Greg’s existence? He’d been terrified of the possibility of Nicolas being captured and interrogated by the aliens, revealing his existence and the fact that he’d ignored orders to report resistance activity…well, ignored orders until now. It should count in his favour, in a fair world, yet no one knew better than him that the world wasn't fair. He’d had to betray his friend to save his friend’s daughter – his daughter – and all the justifications he could produce wouldn’t change that. He imagined himself facing Nicolas alone, shouting powerful arguments of self-justification, only to realise that nothing justified what he’d done.
“You may leave,” the Walking Dead man said. “We will call you if we need you.”
Greg got up on suddenly wobbly legs and staggered out of the police station, feeling as if someone had ripped apart part of his soul. Nancy had been left with a friend’s family and his children – he’d known, when he’d been allowed to leave her, that she might never see him again either. He saw a glance of sympathy from a passing woman and knew that she didn’t know the truth. She thought that he’d just been hauled in for random questioning. If she’d known the truth, she would have spat on him. The entire town would have risen up against him. Perhaps they’d even shave Nancy’s head, as a handful of collaborator girls had been treated in other towns. It wouldn’t matter to them that she was innocent, not after what he’d done. He’d betrayed a man whose only crime was fighting the aliens and their human puppets. No one would ever forgive him…
Oh Nicolas, he thought, bitterly. He wished, now, that he could trade places with him and suffer whatever the aliens had in mind for him. Instead, he would have to live with the guilt. What are they doing to you?
Chapter Fifty
Andrews AFB, USA (Occupied)
Day 184
Nicolas rattled his chains mournfully in the hope that it would attract some kind of response from the aliens guarding him. The warriors showed no reaction. They were either too well-trained or simply too alien to react to such an irritating noise. He made it again in the hopes that repetition would get on their nerves, or perhaps just to pass the time. His future didn’t look very bright.
He looked around the small compartment and scowled inwardly. It was a hu
man building, yet it had clearly been renovated in a hurry and hadn’t been prepared for prisoners. The chains binding his wrists and ankles together – preventing both escape and suicide – were proof of that, as was the shock collar locked around his throat. It made him feel absurd, yet there was nothing laughable about the accursed device. One of the aliens had poked a button, sent a nasty shock running through his body, and informed him that if he managed to get away from his guards, he’d be crippled by repeated shocks. It struck him as overkill. He’d tested the chains and discovered that whatever they were made of, escape was impossible. He could barely walk upright, shambling along like a puppet, and even without them, outrunning an alien warrior wasn't easy. Those who had fought them hand-to-hand – and survived the experience – had reported that they were very fast and very strong. He looked up at his guards and silently considered taking them, before dismissing the thought. They wouldn’t even have to kill him to prevent him from escaping. They could just trigger the shock collar and send him to the ground in agony.
Bastards, he thought, glaring at one of the warriors. He’d shouted insults in a dozen different languages at them, cursing their parents, their wives and their bastard children, but they hadn’t shown any reaction at all, even to his hostile tone. A human would have realised that the words were hardly complimentary, reacting to the tone if not to actual comprehension, yet the aliens didn’t seem to care. He wasn't sure if it was an admirable trait or something to laugh at. He’d seen POWs who had been grateful to be captured alive and made no trouble, and POWs who should have been shot out of hand, hardcore terrorists who tried to carry on the fight inside the POW camps. They were the ones who went on hunger strike, shouted and spat at the guards and afterwards, when they were released, went on television to complain about having been tortured because their asses hadn’t been wiped with silken handkerchiefs. For every actual incident of prisoner abuse since the War on Terror had begun, there were a million alleged incidents, and the world media had lapped them up, without even bothering to question the motives of the people making the accusation.
The thought didn’t keep him from thinking about what the aliens might have in store for him. It was hard to be certain, but he thought he’d been at the alien base for over a day, yet they hadn’t bothered to implant him and turn him into one of the Walking Dead. They hadn’t even shouted questions at him, let alone tortured him, although he knew they hardly needed to bother. One implant and Nicolas would have told them everything they wanted to know, enough to damage the resistance in Virginia so badly that it might never recover. He hoped that the remaining leaders had enough sense to go to ground and escape, abandoning bases and supply dumps they knew he knew about, but what if they hadn’t? The thought kept buzzing through his mind. What if they didn’t know he’d been captured? What if…what if…
He’d tried to kill himself by holding his breath, but the shock collar had shocked him awake and forced him to gasp for breath. There was no hope of throwing himself off a tall building or drowning himself, or even provoking the aliens to kill him. The thought kept nagging at his mind. They’d take him to one of their bases, implant him, and turn him into a willing slave. He couldn’t avoid it. There was no way out. Even if he somehow broke the chains, even if he somehow got rid of the collar, even if he somehow took out the warriors guarding him…a naked guy running across the base would be noticed. He didn’t even know where he was.
It had occurred to him that he’d already been implanted and that the Walking Dead conversion was underway, but he still hated the aliens. He still thought that the warriors were the ugliest monsters he’d ever seen, he still wanted to wring the worker's necks and he still distrusted the leaders. Perhaps it was an illusion, perhaps it was the last of his mind struggling against the conversion process, perhaps…there was no way to know how it felt to be one of the Walking Dead, unless he became one. Perhaps they thought they were operating perfectly normally and saw nothing odd in arresting their friends and waging war on their own country, or perhaps they were trapped in their own minds, watching with horror as alien minds used their bodies as puppets. He had a nasty feeling that he’d find out soon enough.
He looked up as a line of Order Policemen entered the room, jogging through as if they jogged through every day. Their discipline was an improvement on the last bunch of Order Policemen he’d seen, although they still had their weaknesses. Two of them glanced at him and looked away, fearful of being snared by the aliens as well. He thought about calling out to them as if they were friends, to convince the aliens that one of the Order Policemen was a spy for the resistance, but it would have been petty spite. Besides, it might have convinced them to turn all of the Order Policemen – including resistance spies – into Walking Dead.
As if his thoughts had summoned him, one of the Walking Dead appeared in the room and spoke rapidly to one of the warriors, who listened and then made a complex hand gesture. The Walking Dead man disappeared, while the warriors turned to Nicolas and helped him to his feet. He shivered at the feeling of clawed hands helping him to his feet. The warriors, unlike humanity, had armour and weapons as part of their bodies. Some of them, he’d noted, even had implanted weapons and other systems. DARPA had experimented with such systems, but the invasion had put an end to it, or perhaps they were working for the underground. There was no way of knowing.
A clawed hand poked his back and urged him forward. He walked as upright as he could, but it wasn't easy. His hands were chained and linked to his leg chains, a position that was lousy for his back. His old trainers would have laughed at how the proud SEAL had been brought low, before ordering him back to the field to get over it and get back to the fight. The aliens led him out of the building and he realised that he was on an airbase. The wrecked hangers – being repaired by swarms of human and alien workers – and the runways made that clear. He glanced around hopefully, but there were no signs that showed where he was, or where he was going.
He stopped, just to see what would happen, and was rewarded by another poke in the back. Muttering curses under his breath, he staggered onwards across the field until they reached another hangar, and then moved beyond it. It was easy to deduce that he was on an airfield that had been worked over by the aliens during the invasion, but which one? There were several near where he’d been caught – and, with alien technology, any airfield in America would be nearby. He didn’t even know why they’d bought him here. The aliens pushed him around a corner and he saw a small alien transport sitting on the runway, waiting for him. He wanted to run, but there was no escape. They’d just stun him and put him onboard the transport anyway.
“Tell me something,” he said, looking at the lead warrior. “Why?”
The warrior ignored him and pushed him into the craft. The interior was surprisingly smooth and attractive, as if the craft had somehow been grown rather than produced in a factory. They pushed him into a sitting position at one side and stepped back. There was a sudden hum and he found himself trapped, held firmly in place by a powerful magnetic field. He had to admire the elegance of the system even as he hated it. It was a simple way to restrain even the most violent prisoners.
He watched as the aliens left the craft, leaving him alone. He pulled desperately at the magnetic field, but it still held him firmly in place. He looked out of the hatch towards the ruined buildings and tried to place his location, but it was impossible. He only knew a handful of airfields and none of them had been wrecked when he’d seen them, taking part in exercises intended to test the defenders. A moment later, the aliens returned and pushed in a second prisoner. Nicolas felt his eyes go wide. She, whoever she was, was not a standard prisoner.
She was tall, only slightly shorter than himself, with long brunette hair and a very scared expression. Like him, she was naked, her hands and feet bound. She took one look at him, flushed, and tried to hide from his gaze. Nicolas took one look at her and looked away. There was no point in staring at her and terrifying her even more, alt
hough his body insisted on reminding him that it had been a long time since he’d slept with a woman. It wasn't as if they could do anything while they were chained and bound. He wanted to talk to her, to learn who she was and what she was doing on the alien craft, but he knew she could be a spy, or worse. Her eyes hadn’t looked dead, but did that prove anything?
A faint hum ran through the craft and it launched itself into the sky. The woman let out a cry as the side of the craft turned transparent, revealing that they were flying up into the air. Nicolas remembered the President’s account of his first visit to the alien mothership and how he’d seen something similar. The alien craft moved hellishly fast. Bare seconds after they’d taken off, he could already see the eastern seaboard spread out below them, showing no sign of the alien presence that infested the countryside. It was chilling and utterly terrifying. Where were the aliens taking them?
“Hi,” the woman said. She had a nice voice, Nicolas thought, without a trace of Walking Dead. “I’m Abigail. Who are you?”
“Nicolas,” Nicolas said. They’d have learned his real name from Greg. The thought reminded him of how he’d been betrayed by someone he’d trusted. A stab through the heart could hardly have hurt more. “What do they think you did?”
“Writing for the underground newspaper,” Abigail said, flatly. She sounded as if she was on the verge of going into shock. He was tempted to look at her, but he refrained, granting her what privacy he could. “And you?”
Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot Page 46