Sergeant Danny Kyle worked at Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington. Abigail had encountered him quite by accident, but it hadn’t taken long to realise that he was a gold mine. He worked as part of the ground crew on the base and loathed the fighter pilots with a passion that seemed surprising in such a short man. Kyle believed that he was constantly passed over for promotion, while the fighter jocks took all the local women and poured scorn on the heads of the people who kept them in the air. Abigail had courted him, promised to run interviews exposing the true nature of the USAF – at least as Kyle saw it – and picked up a handful of useful titbits from him. She consulted her other notes and confirmed that Andrews Air Force Base was one of the bases that had been given expanded security – and, one report suggested, additional antiaircraft units. It was almost as if they were expecting an attack on the base, but that was impossible. The United States Navy ruled the waves. No one could slip a carrier into attack range without having it detected and unceremoniously sunk.
“Hey, Danny,” she said, when he picked up his cell phone. Kyle lived on the base and, sometimes, he didn’t pick up her calls. He was a rat, plain and simple, with a rat’s gift for hiding his activities. He would have made a competent motor mechanic, but Abigail wouldn’t have wanted to fly in any plane he’d serviced. To hear him talk, the ground crew were permanently on the verge of accidentally-on-purpose sabotaging the aircraft that flew from the base. “How’s it hanging?”
Kyle’s voice was nervous. “Abby?” He whispered. Abigail had only given him the short version of her name because she had no illusions as to how long he’d hold out if Base Security interrogated him. It wasn't as if she were doing anything illegal, but it would be embarrassing to be discovered and her other sources would dry up. “What are you calling me for?”
Abigail frowned. Kyle had never sounded scared when talking to her before. He’d been a bombastic rat, bragging about his accomplishments at the same time as he bemoaned the USAF’s talent for ignoring his greatness. He’d hit on her gracelessly more than once and he had enough arrogance to pass for one of his hated fighter jocks. He sounded as if someone had terrified hell out of him.
“I need information,” she said. Kyle was predicable enough. She had slipped him enough money, over the years, to pickle his liver, or spend hours with the prostitutes that served the base and preyed on American servicemen. He'd tell her what she wanted to know. “Something odd is going on and I want to know what’s happening.”
“Look,” Kyle whispered. He didn’t sound reassured. “You don’t understand. Stay away from this…”
Abigail blinked. For the second time in the day, she had been surprised by one of her contacts. Anger raged up within her. “Danny,” she said, as seductively as she could, “tell me what I want to know and you’ll have a big reward.”
“No,” Kyle hissed. He sounded absolutely terrified. “Never call me again. I never want to see or hear you again. Go find someone else to suck dry.”
The phone went dead. Abigail stared at it, dazed. She hadn’t even realised that she’d been sweating until she felt the dampness on her back. It was unbelievable. The reason Kyle had been denied promotion by the USAF – she knew, even if he didn’t – was that he couldn’t keep a secret, or remain reliable over long periods. They’d been quite right. Kyle had quite happily told her things that should have remained a secret for much longer, even though much of what he'd told her had been useless. The thought of him concealing something…
He didn’t have the will to break off contact with her either, not unless someone had really put the frighteners on. She couldn’t believe that the USAF had trusted Kyle with the real secret, whatever it was, but he might have worked it out on his own. He did have a certain level of intelligence, after all, and he might have deduced the truth. If it had been frightening enough to scare him…Abigail wondered if she should be scared too. Had Senator Hamlin been scared?
The door opened and Cindy stuck her head into Abigail’s office. There was one of her in every office, a girl without a single cell in her head, yet hired because she caused blood to drain away from the interviewer’s own brain. She was blonde, stacked, and beautiful enough to make Abigail feel rather dowdy. As far as Abigail could tell, she didn’t even have a life outside the office. She barely knew that she’d been born.
“Hey, Abigail,” Cindy said, with a smile that would have seriously tested Senator Hamlin’s homosexuality. Abigail scowled at her. She had long since given up trying to teach the girl proper formalities. “I got an interesting thing for you.”
“Really,” Abigail said. The editor – who happened to be a woman – had given Cindy the Kook Desk to run, on the theory she couldn’t screw that up. Abigail privately thought that was overoptimistic. “You’d better give it to me then.”
“I was talking to one of the UFO researchers, you know, one of the serious ones,” Cindy said. Abigail rolled her eyes. The number of cranks who sent information to the station seemed to increase every year. “He said that there’d been an increase in UFO sightings, everywhere.”
Abigail stared down at her notepad. That couldn’t be right, could it?
Did the military think that it was going to encounter UFOs?
Chapter Fourteen
Washington DC, USA
Day 12
“I do not believe that it is an exaggeration,” the President said, “to say that this might be the most important meeting in the history of the United States, if not the world. We need to make a decision, and fast. We do not know how much time we have before the aliens take matters into their own hands.”
He looked around the table. The secure conference room, deep under the White House, was as secure as human ingenuity could make it, yet there was a big question mark over the capabilities of the aliens. Could they read information right out of secure computers at a distance? Could they use spy rays to probe the secret meeting and listen to the President’s words? Had they managed to affix a surveillance device to the President despite all the precautions? There wouldn’t ever be an electronic record of the meeting. The only transcript would be taken by the President’s private secretary, who would make no copies and secure the original well away from the public eye. They might be being paranoid, the President knew, but what other choice did they have?
The Vice President sat at the other end of the table. The President would have preferred to use the secure videoconferencing network to ensure that the Vice President survived any strike on the White House, but the aliens had proven that they could decipher the most secure codes the NSA had created for America. The NSA was still in denial over what the aliens had done – they had sworn that the codes were unbreakable – yet until they could produce new codes and secure the infrastructure, it couldn’t be trusted. Quite a few orders would have to be hand-carried, raising other security issues, just to ensure that the aliens didn’t eavesdrop. There had been no protests. Everyone in the room knew what was at stake.
“You’ve all seen the recording,” the President said. He had braced himself for disappointment – the aliens could have interfered with Pepper’s magic eye, or perhaps the nature of the mothership itself would have prevented it from working properly – but the entire video had survived intact. There were some odd flickers of static and a couple of places where everything became distorted for a few seconds, yet it was usable. Some of the more paranoid Secret Service agents had raised questions about what had occurred in those seconds, but all agreed that it wasn't long enough for something bad to have happened. “You know what they’re offering.”
He met his Vice President’s eyes. “They’re offering to ally with us and work with us to occupy the rest of the world,” he said. It had to be spoken aloud, just to ensure that everyone knew what was going on. “In exchange for our assistance, we maintain our independence and gain access to some of their technology. If they are to be believed, they need Earth quickly. They cannot hold in orbit while we make preparations for their arrival and
accommodation. They want – they need – a large degree of political control. In effect, they’re invaders, here to take the entire planet.
“The question is simple,” he continued. “Do we accept their offer?”
There was a long pause. “My analysis team admits that the ultimate question of what we are to do is a political decision and must remain that way,” Jones said. The President had ordered him flown from Nevada to Washington in a fighter jet, risking the discovery of the location of the crashed ship. “That said, they have made some observations that must be discussed. The interesting part is that the aliens went to some lengths to try to convince you that they didn’t really need our help. I find that rather reassuring. Why would they bother trying to convince you to help them if they could just overwhelm the entire planet?”
The President had had similar thoughts. “You’re saying that they might not be as strong as they claim?”
“Precisely,” Jones said. “The teams working on the crashed ship haven’t been able to duplicate it, but they are confident that we will be able to understand and copy their science, perhaps within a decade or two. It appears to be magical to us, yet it is rooted in hard science and they do obey the same natural laws as we obey. Unlocking their secrets will take time, yet it can be done. We should not allow the mere fact that they are aliens to blind us to the fact that they have limits as well.”
He paused. “That said, we have been unable to identify any weapons on the crashed ship,” he added. “They may not have armed the ship, or they may have armed it with weapons we haven’t been able to recognise as weapons, at least not yet. We don’t know exactly what they’re capable of doing to us, but we believe that it would include advanced lasers, coherent energy weapons, plasma cannons and other weapons, all borderline-possible now. They would also be able to use the high orbitals against us. They could drop rocks on our cities and military forces, smash us back to barbarism before they landed…there are too many possibilities.
“Yet they want Earth and, if they are to be believed, they need Earth. They cannot destroy the planet without condemning themselves to die as well. My analysts believe that they will refrain from wrecking the planet or pushing us into a corner where we will wreck the planet and call it a draw. It would be comparatively simple to damage Earth’s biosphere to the point where it could no longer support life.”
“We cannot plan to destroy our own world,” the Vice President said. “Destroying a planet – our planet, along with our entire race - to win a war is no victory.”
“We believe that it would deter them from trying to wipe us out,” Jones said. “We must not misunderstand this point. They have formidable powers and they could wipe us out completely, if they chose to do so. The only counterpoint we have is that we could render Earth completely useless to them. It is not something to be cheerful about, but it is something to bear in mind.”
The President said nothing. It was commonly said that the American President was the most powerful man in the world, yet few really understood the scope of that power, or its limits. On his own authority, the President could send America’s vast military might into battle, or launch a nuclear strike against any target on Earth. And yet, that authority had limits. The Presidency sometimes meant being a bull in a china shop, remaining very still to avoid breaking the china. He could wreck most of the planet on his own authority and, in doing so; destroy the nation he had sworn to serve.
“So,” Hubert Dotson said. “Our choices are simple. Give them what they want – an alliance – or tell them no. What will they do then?”
“We don’t know,” Jones said. “They may approach another world power and make the same offer, but there isn’t another power with the same level of deployable military force as we have. The Russians and Chinese have formidable difficulties in deploying their forces outside their borders. I can’t see the Europeans agreeing on anything, let alone an alliance to split the world between them and an alien race. No one else really matters on this scale.
“Or they may move ahead on their own,” he added. “We just don’t know.”
“There might be advantages in dividing the world between us,” Tom Pearson said. The CIA Director looked down at the table, tapping absently on it as he spoke. “God knows, we have too many problems coming from parts of the world that most of our population don’t even know exist. If the aliens settled in the Middle East, or Africa, or Russia and China…they’d have far more problems than making our lives difficult.”
“And we’d have to dominate the American continent,” the Vice President pointed out, acidly. “Does anyone else remember the exercise we ran a year ago, when it looked as if Mexico was going to collapse into civil war and send chaos flying north into the Border States? The conclusion was that it wouldn’t end well. I doubt that the aliens would allow us to leave those states nominally independent and we really wouldn’t want them on our borders…”
“They don’t need to be on our borders,” General Wachter pointed out, dryly. “Their technology could get an attack force from Africa to Washington within minutes.”
“There is much to say for removing the problems from the rest of the world,” the Secretary of State put in, “but it wouldn’t be the end of our problems. I can’t see the American population going for an agreement that cedes the rest of the world to the aliens, even if we benefit. We have lobbies here for dozens of nations that would be horrified. What would the Israeli lobby say if we sold out Israel to the aliens? What would the Polish lobby say if we sold out Poland…?”
“They already say that we sold out Poland,” Pearson said. “Does their opinion really matter?”
“Yes,” the President said, flatly. The Secretary of State was right. Ceding half the world to the aliens would probably cost him the next election, if Congress didn’t outright impeach him. Briefly, he considered allowing it to happen so that he took the blame personally, before pushing the thought aside. It wasn't just his career on the ropes, but the future of humanity itself. “I could name at least twenty senators who’d have a heart attack at the mere thought of abandoning the rest of the world.”
“And all the lobbyists would tear into them,” the Vice President added. “Every country in the world that wants influence in Washington has its own team of lobbyists working here. They’d all go mad trying to prevent the aliens from landing, or push us into taking the lead against them. The political chaos could tear the country apart.”
The President scowled. He'd done his best to clean out the State Department, removing people who had been – to all intents and purposes – bribed to serve another country, not America, but it was a nightmare. High-quality people, the people the country needed, wanted higher salaries, leaving public office to those who – sometimes – didn’t hesitate to form alliances with representatives of various nations. It was a major problem, yet it wasn't one that could be handled easily, not when there were hundreds of entrenched interests fighting to maintain the status quo.
“There are also the economic issues,” Dahlia King said. The Secretary of the Treasury smiled at the President’s expression. “I know, the economy is one of the last things you want to think about, but it is a serious concern. If we lost our links to the rest of the world, the effects would be devastating to the American economy. They’d be unpredictable, but…millions of people would become unemployed, the value of the dollar would plummet and thousands of businesses would go out of business. The remainder of the world’s economy would be devastated as well.”
“They’d probably have other concerns,” Pearson said, darkly.
“The introduction of alien technology would also cause economic unrest,” Dahlia added, flatly. “If they replace…for example, the oil industry, millions of people will find themselves out of work. Their cures alone, assuming that they work as advertised, will cause another chain reaction and put millions more out of work. They may have decided not to attempt to invade us because they know that invading the rest of the world �
� and giving us a poisoned gift – will ruin us for the foreseeable future anyway.”
“That’s a dark thought,” the President said.
“Yes, Mr President,” Dahlia said. She had clawed her way up from poverty to reach her position and she had an understanding of exactly what poverty meant. It was one of the reasons he’d given her the job. “I would be fundamentally opposed to their offer on moral grounds, but the practical issues defeat it.”
“I do not believe,” the Vice President said, “that we are considering withholding their gift from the public. Is it all that they said it was?”
Jones nodded. “My analysts confirmed that the cures they gave us are legitimate,” he said. “We could eradicate AIDS within the year if we produced the cure and vaccine, and then started distributing it to everyone within and outside the country. We could rid ourselves of cancers and hundreds of other threats…”
“And wreak huge damage on the economy,” Dahlia reminded him. “There would be a sharp drop in demand for medical supplies, causing more economic unrest.”
“Jesus,” the Vice President snapped. “I cannot believe that you are proposing that we withhold cures that people need!”
“I am not proposing anything of the sort,” Dahlia snapped back. “I am pointing out that using their gift will have more effects on our society than the obvious. They chose their gift carefully. If we use it, we have to handle an economic storm. If we don’t use it, we have to weather a political storm instead. They chose it very carefully.”
The President tapped the table. “General,” he asked, “what’s your opinion?”
Wachter considered it. “In my role as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it is my duty to inform you that occupying the entire American continent will be difficult,” he said, carefully. “We would need to increase the size of our deployable units rapidly before we could contemplate any such action. That said…
Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem Page 13