Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  “The aliens want us to abandon our allies,” he added. “The aliens want the rest of the world. It is my belief that they will eventually turn on us after we have betrayed everyone who might help us. I do not believe that we should accept their offer.”

  “That does raise another question,” Pearson said. “If they launch an invasion, could we beat them off?”

  “Perhaps,” Wachter said. “I think that if we refused to go along with them, yet offered them another deal, they might agree to it. Their desire to have us as allies does suggest that they are weaker than we thought.”

  “There’s another point,” Jones added. “They didn’t ask for something they should have asked for – they didn’t ask for the ship back. Why not?”

  The President leaned forward. All of the analysts had suggested that the aliens would demand their ship back, yet they hadn’t; they had issued no demands about the ship at all. It was an odd oversight; the more so because the aliens very definitely knew where the craft had crashed and which government had it. It made no sense.

  “Why not?” He asked. “What do your people believe?”

  “The craft is something that we wouldn’t give up easily,” Jones said. “It’s our key to understanding their technology. They should have demanded it at once, yet it’s something that we would resist returning, and so they would have to force us to hand it back. Why wouldn’t they demand it back…unless they couldn’t carry out their threats?”

  “You’re saying that they might be far weaker than we believe,” the Vice President said. “You’re suggesting that they couldn’t just take the craft back?”

  “They’re not gods,” Jones said. “They’re advanced, yes, and they can do things that we can’t do – yet – but they’re not gods. I think that we can resist them, perhaps enough to get a better deal for humanity out of them.”

  “The current deal is unacceptable,” the President agreed. He looked around the table and saw no dissent. “Do you have any suggestions as to what we should offer them as a counter-proposal?”

  “There’s quite a bit of empty space on this planet,” Jones said. “We could offer them temporary accommodation in flyover country, and perhaps help them buy land elsewhere. We could help them to resupply their craft and perhaps extend its life…”

  “All in exchange for their technology, of course,” Pearson injected.

  “Of course,” Jones said. “We’d also want to inspect their craft and ensure that they are actually telling the truth. They could have lied through their teeth and we’d have no way of knowing, until we board their ship.”

  “I don’t want to rain on your parade,” Dahlia announced, “but they claimed that they have one billion aliens on that ship. That is not a small number. I doubt that we could accommodate them all on CONUS. We might have to take land for them from another country, or barter with them – or perhaps the aliens would barter with them. I cannot see it as being anything other than very disruptive…”

  “It’s going to be very disruptive anyway,” Wachter pointed out. “Even here, I doubt that we could clear a vast area for them without protest. We might end up driving people off their land for the aliens – which would cause a political firestorm, perhaps even civil war.”

  “I think we have to face one fact,” Jones said. “The world is going to change remarkably. Whatever we do, whatever we decide, the world is never going to be the same again.”

  “We’ll make our counter-offer to the aliens,” the President said. “Perhaps we can find a compromise that would be acceptable to all parties.”

  On that note, the meeting ended.

  ***

  The President’s wife had died while he’d been a junior officer and he'd never remarried, making him the first President in over a hundred years to lack a First Lady. His detractors had made much of that when he’d been running for office, claiming that he had no one who could advise him late at night, but the President had never even thought about remarrying. His wife had been something special and he’d never met another woman quite like her. The times when he wished he had found someone else were few and far between, but that night he wished he had a close confident. Only a handful of people could see him as anything, but the President…and most of them couldn’t give real advice. The buck stopped with him.

  He had never felt the weight as strongly as he did as he lay in bed. No other President had faced such a decision. Lincoln had faced his own demons and forces that sought to tear the nation apart, Roosevelt had struggled to fight a war on two fronts, Bush had confronted a whole new type of war, yet none of them had faced aliens. None of them had faced a foe who could exterminate the entire human race. None of them had risked the destruction of the entire world.

  It was a long time before he knew sleep.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Washington DC, USA

  Day 15

  “Mr President, sorry to disturb you, but we may have had a security breach.”

  “We may have had?” The President repeated. He didn’t have time for this. “What happened?”

  Janine Reynolds’ took a deep breath. “As you know, Mr President, we have agents within the majority of the UFO organisations within the country,” she said. “It was a precaution against their seeing something we didn’t want them to see, a secret project rather than a UFO. One of them reported that the World News Network has been in contact with them about the increased number of UFO sightings and how it may connect to our military preparations.”

  “That’s rather thin,” the President pointed out, mildly. “Does it connect to something they can actually run without looking barking mad?”

  “We’re not sure,” Janine admitted. “There are more and more people every day privy to at least some aspect of the secret. They may have figured out enough to patch the rest together, but we won’t know for sure unless we increase our surveillance and hack into their computers.”

  The President considered it. He doubted that the media knew enough to run with the story – he knew what he would say to anyone who brought him such a story and no editor would want so much egg on their face – but the secret, any secret, would start to fray if the media kept poking away at it. How much did they actually know? If they were just probing at random, it could be safely ignored, but if they had linked it all together…

  “See to it,” he ordered. The NSA had a wide remit for keeping an eye on the media. “Try and figure out how much they know as soon as possible, but don’t show them that we’re interested. That might as well tell them that everything they suspect is true.”

  “If they suspect anything,” Janine said, frankly. “I’ll get back in touch, Mr President.”

  “And speak to the Director of the FBI,” the President added. “If someone leaked, I want their ass in jail. No one should be privy to even the outermost aspects of the secret without having signed any number of security agreements and they’ve clearly been broken.”

  “Yes, Mr President,” Janine said. “I’ll see to it at once.”

  The President put the phone down. “I’m sorry, General,” he said. “You were saying?”

  General Sandra Dyson was a tall powerfully-built woman wearing her dress uniform. As Commanding Officer of the United States Strategic Command, she was the senior female General in America and quite possibly the most powerful woman in the world. The United States Strategic Command, which had responsibility for space defence and protecting the United States against strategic threats, was a relatively new command, but it was at the forefront of current events. Sandra was young for her rank, yet there was no doubting her competence. She’d even worked to pull all of the different space-based defence systems together, defying interservice disputes and disagreements to create a network that should have provided protection against a rogue state with nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles required to deliver them.

  “No problem, Mr President,” she said, in her thick southern drawl. The two colonels she’d brought with her as ass
istants nodded in unison. “I was briefing you on the status of our space defence systems.”

  The President nodded. Two weeks ago, no one could have proposed a defence system designed to fight off extraterrestrials without being laughed at, if not escorted away by the men in white coats. Now, there was a genuine extraterrestrial threat and the United States had been caught with its pants around its ankles. The President knew that the analysts were in agreement that the aliens were weaker than they seemed, yet it could only be a relative measure…and the aliens still held command of space. If it came to a war – and the aliens had not responded to his counter-offer – it might be the first war in history that the United States fought and lost. Vietnam didn’t count, as the United States had given up.

  Sandra hadn’t brought a PowerPoint, knowing that the President detested them. Instead, she spoke from memory. “Our defences start in orbit, with a handful of killer satellites and older stockpiled Brilliant Pebbles,” she said. “The killer satellites were designed to fire slugs of metal into enemy satellites, which tend to follow predicable courses, and even a relatively tiny amount of damage could prove fatal. The Brilliant Pebbles have tiny thrusters and use them to manoeuvre into the path of incoming ballistic missiles. They were designed during the Cold War, but they should still be useful today, once we put them up. We’ve held both shuttles on the ground and are rapidly reprioritising so that we can make the best use of our craft.”

  The President nodded. NASA had thrown a collective fit at the thought of holding one of the shuttles – which had been scheduled to launch two days after the UFO crashed – but it had been rapidly squashed. There were only a handful of people at NASA privy to the information about the UFO and those who knew nothing were screaming their heads off, complaining that the military had pre-empted their missions in favour of something militaristic.

  “The problem is that we don’t believe that they will be particularly effective against the alien craft,” she continued. “They were designed to attack targets that didn’t dodge – or fire back, for that matter – and we don’t have very many of them. Due to various political decisions, we were never allowed to orbit many KE-ASAT – that’s Kinetic Energy Anti-Satellite weapons – to provide coverage of the entire world. The aliens – like the Russians or the Chinese – could simply overwhelm our defences by firing hundreds of missiles in one mass attack. The killer satellites may be even less useful. We have no hard data on how much damage their craft would suffer from a relatively low-powered weapon.”

  She shrugged expressively. “We’re also retargeting our ICBMs to be fired upwards and detonated in orbit,” she added. “The bottom line, however, is that the enemy will definitely see them coming and probably either take countermeasures of their own or simply avoid them. They were never designed for use against attacking alien spacecraft, but rather for targeting other states on Earth.

  “Medium-range, we have a sizable number of missiles capable of engaging targets in low orbit or entering Earth’s atmosphere,” she said. “We have ground-based THAAD – that’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defence missiles – which we can use to target satellites and other threats in space. We intended them to intercept incoming missiles, but they can be retargeted on alien craft if necessary. We also have RIM-161 Standard Missile 3, a ship based anti-ballistic missile fired from Aegis ships. The Aegis Ballistic Missile Defence System proved its worth against crashing satellites and should be capable of being retargeted against alien craft.

  “We also have aerial systems, including the Boeing YAL-1 Airborne Laser, deployed from USAF-modified Boeing 747-400F. They fire laser beams at their targets and the system has been quite successful in tests, but they require considerable time on target to be effective and the aliens can probably manoeuvre away from the beams or deploy countermeasures. There are also a handful of air-launched ASAT missiles that can be deployed against targets in low orbit, but we never stockpiled very many of them.”

  The President frowned. “Why?”

  “Political reasons,” Sandra replied. “Congress didn’t like the program very much and placed restrictions on it, encouraged by the telecommunications lobby who had billions in orbiting capital at risk. The project was closed down for years and only reactivated after the Chinese deployed a comparable system. We had several other systems underway at the time and so the USAF program was never given priority.

  “Finally, we have ground-based systems, ranging from Patriot and Arrow missiles capable of engaging incoming targets, to lasers and other beam weapons mounted on the ground,” she concluded. “My teams have studied the reports on the crashed ship carefully and they have concluded that a hit from a Patriot would be sufficient to destroy the craft, unless it is protected by a force field or some comparable system out of science-fiction. We could be reasonably confident of giving them pause if we knew the weapons would be completely effective, yet we know nothing of the sort. We don’t even know what weapons they can deploy.”

  She winced visibly. “The major problem is that we only have limited numbers of these systems, Mr President. We could start mass production now, but it would take years to produce a sizeable number of such weapons and deploy them, and we may not have that much time. There are concepts on the drawing board that might help tip the balance in our favour, but even if we got the funding out of Congress, it would take years to build workable hardware.”

  “I see,” the President said. “What about other nations?”

  “The Russians have their operative Gorgon and Gazelle systems,” Sandra said. “They’re both ground-based systems and they have comparable weaknesses to our own, although we assume that the Russians have plans to upgrade the system in a hurry if necessary. They also have their own air-launched missile systems and ground-based beam weapons, although our data suggests that their operational status is…not good.

  “The Europeans, Indians and Japanese have some access to Patriot missiles and a handful of concepts that could be turned against targets in Low Earth Orbit, but they haven’t moved ahead to any deployable hardware. Both Iran and North Korea claim the ability to shoot down satellites in orbit, but our analysis suggests that the systems are unreliable, if indeed they work at all. Hard data is lacking.

  “The Chinese are the joker in the deck,” she concluded. “They have ground-based and air-launched weapons, as well as beam weapons they learned to make from the Russians. We don’t know how many deployable weapons they have – their claims range from a mere handful to the capability to provide total protection against ballistic missile attack – yet they definitely have enough to be taken seriously. If we could negotiate the use of their weapons, it would certainly give Earth some additional punch.”

  The President looked down at the table. “That might not be easy,” he said. The State Department was trying to set up a meeting between the President and the other major world leaders – the four other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – in hopes or organising a coordinated response to the alien threat, yet without providing some clue about the agenda, it was hard to coordinate a meeting. The President’s brief absence from power had been noticed. The absence of all five Security Council members would definitely be noticed and the media would draw all kinds of conclusions. “How would you rate our chances?”

  “Lousy,” Sandra said, honestly. “Our capability to take the war to them is effectively non-existent.”

  “I see,” the President said. “Can we change that in the very near future?”

  “Probably not,” Sandra admitted. “I have teams working on possibilities, everything from Project Orion to the Alcubierre Warp Drive, but unless we have a very lucky breakthrough I doubt we’ll have workable hardware in less than a decade. Orion is theoretically possible, yet we would have to take years to produce a working spacecraft…and then the environmentalists would go berserk. I’m not sure I would blame them. The costs, both in dollars and in environmental damage, would be considerable. We cannot even produce new sp
ace shuttles – God knows, NASA dragged its feet so much that we don’t even have a replacement coming within the next few years. All of the pretty pictures they produced turned out to be little more than that.

  “One of my teams did dig up an old concept for a orbital laser battle station that could be deployed in orbit, either on its own or mounted to the proposed Freedom space station,” she added, thoughtfully. “The concept was never taken beyond the planning stage, but we could mount weapons on the shuttles and the International Space Station, although I’m sure that there would be international protests if we armed the ISS. Practically speaking, I don’t think that it would do much good. The station is a sitting duck to almost any determined attack.”

  The President nodded slowly. One of the scenarios he’d seen during his inauguration briefings had been a terrorist-launched missile bringing down the station, destroying billions of dollars worth of hardware at a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars. The North Korean leadership had sometimes threatened the station – and China, of course, had long refused to accept that spy satellites could fly freely across its territory. The Chinese were rational, at bottom, but no one would say that about the North Korean leadership. Kim’s replacement was even more insane than he had been and some of the reports from refugees had been horrific.

  “That’s something to discuss when I meet the world leaders,” he said. He opened a drawer and pulled out a single sheet of paper. “This National Security Directive, issued with the full understanding and consent of the Cabinet, the Majority Leader and the Minority Leader places all space-capable defence assets under your command. The United States Strategic Command will take the lead in defending us against the aliens, when or if they choose to engage us in battle. I want you to implement the defence plans as quickly as possible. I also want you to submit funding requests we can rush through Congress and start producing usable hardware as soon as we can.”