Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  The craft should have slammed into the ground hard enough to create tremors on the Richter Scale. Instead, it was slowing down, coming to a hover high over the base, before it started to lower itself the rest of the way. Robin had no idea what kind of technology could do that, not even an advanced helicopter. The sheer power the aliens were showing off was overwhelming. Robin regarded it as a challenge, rather than something to intimidate her, yet even she was not unmoved. The aliens were making a show of strength.

  “They’re about to land,” she said, turning her eyes to the live feed from the base’s security cameras. Whatever happened, the entire event would be recorded and studied for years to come. “Landing…now.”

  ***

  Master Sergeant George Grosskopf hadn’t been happy since he’d been first on the scene when the alien craft crashed. The day had become nightmarish, first in trying to cobble together a plan to get the alien craft somewhere well away from the base – the base commander had ended up combining plans to deal with a terrorist NBC strike with plans to pick up crashed Russian satellite debris – and then in spending a week in a quarantine unit at the nearby NBC centre. The doctors had poked and prodded at him and his men every day, trying to determine if they’d been infected by any alien viruses…and, just incidentally, keeping them firmly out of the public eye. The days had been unpleasant and the nights had been worse. All of his men, George included, had had nightmares about the crashed ship and its crew. The culture shock had nearly torn them apart.

  George remembered spending time staring at the television and trying to come to terms with the way the world had changed. Returning to the base after the doctors had finally conceded that the security team were probably uninfected with anything apart from boredom had been a surreal experience. Those in the know had kept their mouths firmly shut. Those who were not privy to anything beyond rumours had carried on their normal lives with a blindness that stunned George, even though he knew that they didn’t know what had happened. Who cared about the death of a well-known pop star when aliens had been discovered? Who cared about who was fucking who when the world might be on the brink of interstellar war? He’d hoped that he would be assigned to protect the crashed ship, wherever it had gone – the possibility that the aliens might attack the base to recover their craft had not gone unheeded – but instead the base commander had assigned him to overhauling the defences. A dozen new antiaircraft missile batteries had been assigned to the base; along with additional handheld weapons that might add some extra punch if the aliens came back. He’d prepared as best as he could, yet…

  He unhooked his binoculars and peered into the air. The alien craft was supposed to be on final approach, yet he could see nothing, apart from the clear blue sky. The movies had had massive alien ships descending on military bases – he’d watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind when he’d been a kid – but there was no reason to believe that the aliens would send an entire mothership, or a City Destroyer. The thought made him scowl. They’d watched Independence Day two days after they’d been returned to duty and one of his men had put a foot through the television screen, raving about aliens and monsters. Rumour central had had a field day with that one.

  His radio crackled. “It’s coming down towards the crash site,” the dispatcher said. “Do you have visual contact?”

  George tilted his binoculars. The guards were stationed near the crash site, but not right on top of it. It gave his men chills to be too close to it, although no one had any idea why. Men in NBC suits had gone through the entire area with metal detectors and recovered everything they could, including several hundred bullets from a life-fire security drill the base had conducted years ago. They’d used flamethrowers to clear the remains of the crash site – and put an end to any possible biohazard – yet…no one wanted to go too near it. It made no sense to him.

  “No, sir,” he growled. He paused as something caught his eye. There was a shiny speck in the distance, falling rapidly towards them at a colossal speed. “Correction; I have one craft…”

  The alien craft rapidly took on shape and form. It wasn't the silvery almond of the first craft, but something different, a silvery egg-shaped craft barely larger than a van. It seemed to glow with a pearly light, but there was no sound, apart from a very faint bass humming. George had expected a noisy aircraft – the noise of a helicopter squadron had to be heard to be believed – yet the alien craft was almost soundless. It seemed almost to suck up the sound waves and absorb them.

  He keyed his radio, linking to two of his men, who carried cameras and other recording gear. “Make sure you get damn good shots,” he ordered. There were hundreds of cameras deployed, from the most modern NSA-designed digital cameras to old-style chemical cameras from the past, just in case the alien craft’s emissions screwed with the more modern systems. “Check weapons; keep them on safety until I authorise otherwise.”

  The question of arming his men had been hotly debated. One of his superiors had wanted the men to go out entirely unarmed, without rifles, pistols or grenades. Another had wanted them to go out armed to the teeth, adding Stinger missiles and Abrams tanks to their arsenal. They’d compromised by issuing standard weapons – and keeping substantial forces in reserve on the base itself – and ordering all weapons to be kept safe unless the shit hit the fan. A rogue shot that killed an alien, or even damaged their craft, might start a war. Looking at the alien craft, hanging almost effortlessly in the air, George understood their point. A war with a race that could do that might well be lost very quickly.

  “My God,” he heard someone say, behind him. “It’s beautiful.”

  As if it had wanted the humans to get a good look, the alien craft slowly lowered itself towards the ground, the pearly white glow slowly fading to a more sickly yellow. It threw the area into odd relief, casting odd shadows around the craft, before it faded, revealing a silvery hull. Three legs seemed to grow out of the underside of the craft, spreading out to form a tripod, before it lowered itself the rest of the way and came down exactly where the previous craft had crashed. If there had been any doubt about the aliens knowing what had happened to their missing craft, George reflected, that settled it. The aliens knew exactly what had happened to it.

  A low hum seemed to echo in the air for a long moment as the craft opened a hatch, the flowing metal somehow parting to allow light to shine out onto the ground. George had half-expected to see a spindly grey figure standing there against the light, but nothing emerged from the craft. Instead, a ramp grew out of the side of the craft and reached down towards the ground. Its arrival completed, the craft just stopped – and waited.

  George’s mouth was dry and he had to swallow twice before he could talk. “Sir,” he said, keying his radio, “I think it’s waiting for SOLDIER BOY” – the code name for the President – “now.”

  “Understood,” the reply came back. The dispatcher sounded even more nervous than George, even though he was safe in a bunker back at the base. “Hold position and wait.”

  George looked up at the alien craft. Now that it had landed, it seemed to extrude an air of glowing perfection, as if it was beyond anything humanity had even dreamed of creating. An F-22 was a piece of junk compared to the alien craft, the overworked and overused heavy transports little more than barges from ancient canals…there was something chillingly inhuman about its perfection. The aliens might have grown the craft rather than built it. It looked almost natural, and yet…the situation was so strange that it was almost beyond comprehension. The USAF had been wise, he decided, to charge George with greeting the alien craft. Someone who hadn’t seen one of the craft before, and the alien bodies, would have become a gibbering wreck.

  His radio buzzed. “The principles are on their way,” it said. “Stand by.”

  ***

  Pepper had been horrified when she’d heard the truth about where she was going, even though she had to admit that she was definitely qualified for the task. Quite apart from her artificial eye, s
he had had considerable experience in operating in other cultures, even as a Secret Service Agent. She’d served the President in Japan, India and Saudi Arabia, wearing a mixture of native clothes for each event. The Saudi one had been particularly revealing. Who would have thought that you could conceal a huge arsenal under a burka?

  But aliens? She had no illusions about her task. If the aliens wanted to hurt the President, or brainwash him, or something so alien that humans couldn’t comprehend it, there would be nothing she could do about it. She’d finally elected to wear a standard black suit and carry a handful of weapons, some obvious and some not, but she knew better than to think that she could protect the President. Her mission might suddenly become one of killing a handful of aliens before she was killed herself, if they could be killed, or simply being killed before she even knew she was under attack. She’d seen images of the aliens from the crashed ship and the warriors – if they were warriors – looked nasty customers. She wouldn’t want to meet one of them up a dark alley.

  “Come on,” the President said. Unlike her, he seemed completely calm. It was easy to believe that he’d been a decorated soldier in his time. “Let’s go, shall we?”

  Pepper took the lead as they walked out of the armoured vehicle towards the UFO. It dominated the surrounding area, even though it was tiny, smaller than a tank or the other crashed ship. Its entrance gaped invitingly, leading them on, but she wanted to run and hide. She had faced her own fear hundreds of times before, yet this was something different, something unworldly. It would have been easy to believe that it was all a trap, that the aliens were hostile, that it was merely the first shot in a war…

  And yet, what would it gain them? The President had transferred his powers to the Vice President before travelling to the meeting. There would be no delay in America’s response to any alien attack, although Pepper had no illusions. A race that could build the craft ahead of her would smash its way through the USAF with ease.

  She stepped onto the ramp and felt it move slightly beneath her feet. It was hard to walk up towards the hatch, but the thought of all those watching eyes propelled her forward. The alien craft…she was right in front of it! There was a faint haze of heat around the craft, but not enough to prevent her from stepping through the hatch. A moment later, the President followed her.

  Behind them, the hatch melted closed.

  Chapter Ten

  The Alien Mothership

  Day 11

  The President had pushed the thought of the cameras out of his mind. He knew – from long experience – that thinking about the cameras was what led to pratfalls and worse on television. For some politicians, including several who had insulted the voters by accident, it had been the end of their careers. Instead, he was concentrating on the mind-numbing series of briefings he had had to hear before he boarded the alien craft, including hundreds of different possible outcomes. Some of them – actually, most of them – had been stolen from the unpaid imagination of countless science-fiction writers, but they all agreed on one point. The aliens wanted something. They had gone to considerable trouble to get the President to talk to them and no one would have put forward that kind of effort without some expectation of reward.

  He’d seen briefing papers that suggested everything from a demand for immediate surrender to an attempt to rent the remainder of the solar system, or perhaps somewhere in the middle. There were too many possibilities and, despite the number of briefings he’d absorbed, he knew he would have to play it by ear. Oddly, he felt rather less nervous than he had the day before America invaded Iraq, although that might have had something to do with the sheer unreality of the scene. The aliens might have wanted the President so they could talk to the man making the decisions, the man who led his country, but they probably wouldn’t kill him. That would be an act of war.

  The interior of the alien craft was rather disappointing, perhaps more mundane than he had been expecting. It was a perfectly circular compartment, barely large enough for two people to sit in reasonable comfort, ringed by a sofa. The President sensed rather than saw the hatch closing behind him and sat down on one side of the sofa, motioning for Pepper to take the other side. There was no sign of a pilot and he doubted that there was room for one in the remaining unseen compartments of the craft, suggesting that it was operating on remote control. A faint shudder ran through the entire craft and then the hull started to go transparent, revealing that they were already far above the base and climbing steadily upwards. There was no sense of acceleration, nor was there any sense of how the craft was powered, but the President had never been in anything that moved so fast. Perhaps the Space Shuttle or one of the advanced fighter jets could match the alien craft’s acceleration, yet there were only two shuttles left in existence, and both of them required months of preparation before they could fly. The aliens were doing it casually. The sheer level of power that implied was terrifying.

  He leaned back against the clear hull and watched as the blue sky faded to darkness, all the stars shimmering into existence, staring down at the tiny alien craft. They weren't twinkling at him, which puzzled him at first until he realised that there was no longer any atmosphere to cause the appearance of twinkling. The stars burned coldly in the vacuum of space, leaving him to wonder which one had given birth to the aliens. The Deep Space Tracking Network would attempt to follow the ship carrying the President and his sole bodyguard, but the President had no illusions. Wherever the aliens were taking them, they would be beyond all hope of rescue. It was equally unlikely that they would be able to avenge their deaths.

  Earth itself seemed to shine in the distance, a blue-green globe hanging in space. It was easy to see why so many astronauts became religious, or embraced environmental causes; from space, there was no sign of the wars and conflicts that plagued the human race. Nothing human could be seen on the surface of the planet – there were no lights, no aircraft, no hints that humanity existed down there – and the image had a purity that contrasted oddly with the reality. A thousand years ago, Earth wouldn’t have signalled the existence of an intelligent life form to the stars, but now…had the aliens found them by homing in on Earth’s radio transmissions?

  “There are no satellites,” Pepper said. She sounded more than a little dazed; truthfully, the President felt dazed as well. “Mr President…”

  The President followed her gaze and saw the Moon as the alien craft swept past it. It had taken the Apollo astronauts three days to reach the moon, but the alien craft had done it in…he looked down at his watch, timing the entire journey, and realised that it had done it in barely three minutes. He looked back at Earth, now a tiny blue-green sphere in the distance, and felt cold. They were further away from the planet than any human had ever been before.

  To boldly go where no one has gone before, part of his mind whispered, reminding him of a handful of Star Trek episodes he’d watched as a teenager. There had been a girl he'd known who’d been into the series and made him watch it with her before she would put out…that had been years ago and he couldn’t even remember her name. Captain Kirk and his successors had had their starships, with technology they understood, but it bore no relationship to reality. The truth was that he was on an alien craft under alien control and no longer had any control over his own fate. His survival was completely dependent on the aliens.

  A massive fist clenched in his chest and he found himself gasping. The sensation ended as quickly as it had begun, but the after-effects left him feeling weak and fragile. He looked up towards Pepper and realised that she was suffering as well, her normally bright face pale and wan. Her green eyes met his for a moment in shared understanding. Whatever the aliens had done to them, it had affected them both.

  He looked past her and almost swore. Where Earth had been, there was nothing, but cold stars glowing in space. The aliens, it seemed, possessed some kind of FTL drive, kicking them out far beyond Earth. He looked around, wondering if they were in another star system, but the naked eye revea
led nothing, not even a hint of another planet. Instead, they were rushing towards a dark shape, which rapidly took on shape and form, a colossal cylinder floating in space. It was so large – he estimated that it was over a hundred miles long, even though he had nothing to use to deduce its exact size – that it was beyond his comprehension. It swelled until it dominated the sky, glittering with ominous lights, and it was still growing! It was almost a relief when the craft’s hull darkened and cut off their view of the outside universe. The President knew, intellectually, that the aliens wouldn’t want to crash them into their massive ship, but it had been hard to convince himself of that. The hindbrain had been screaming at him.

  The gravity field seemed to twist, drawing his attention back to the deck. It hadn’t even occurred to him to question the gravity field, yet they hadn’t been floating in zero-gravity, or smashed to a pulp by the force of the heavy acceleration. It was evident that the aliens could generate and control gravity at will, which provided a possible explanation for how their craft operated. A race that could control gravity would have no difficulty getting out of the planet’s gravity well and expanding across the universe.

  There was a brief final tremor running through the craft, and then the hatch melted open, allowing a warm gust of air to flow into the ship. The President had been told, in the briefings, that there was no biohazard – but all that really meant was that there was no known danger. The alien atmosphere might be poisonous, or it might carry germs and bacteria, or the wrong levels of oxygen and nitrogen…he was breathing it! He braced himself for sudden suffocation, but instead there was only a vague taste of something spicy, right on the tip of his tongue. He gathered himself, shot Pepper a reassuring look, and stepped up to the hatch. The alien mothership waited for them.

  Their craft had come to rest in the middle of a vast shuttlebay, or perhaps it was a flight deck, although the President mentally compared it to a hangar on an aircraft carrier. There were hundreds of other craft, parked in neat rows, in the hangar, following several different designs. One of them was clearly the same design as the craft that had crashed eleven days ago and he hoped that Pepper had the presence of mind to record it. The people studying the crashed ship would find the recordings interesting and perhaps useful. He looked straight down the ramp and almost stopped dead. Two aliens were standing at the bottom, waiting for them.