Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  He watched from his seat as Air Force One drifted out of the sky towards a former American air base located near Iceland’s capital city. The base had never been decommissioned completely, but had instead been revamped at considerable expense to serve as a meeting place for the senior world leaders. The Icelandic Government provided local security and a guarantee that reporters – and protesters - wouldn’t be allowed past the chain-link fence that composed the first line of defence. Having to provide so much security was something of a sore point with the locals, but the inner lines of defence had authorisation to shoot to kill, without asking questions first. The dire signs surrounding the base might be ignored by reporters seeking the scoop of the century, or locals protesting against the base’s mere existence, even though the base was an economic net gain to Iceland. It also helped ensure that the country’s neutrality would be respected by all sides.

  Air Force One touched down with the faintest of bumps and taxied to one end of the runway. A RAF plane occupied one of the hangars, informing him that the British Prime Minister had already landed, but the Russians, French and Chinese leaders were still on their way. By long custom, there would be no prior engagements anywhere else on Iceland, or any announcement of the agenda, although it wouldn’t take a genius to guess that the meeting was connected to the aliens. There were only three days until a genuine alien spacecraft landed in New York City and the world was waiting anxiously to see what the aliens had to say.

  There was no point in leaving his seat until the Secret Service had checked the security arrangements surrounding the plane and the residential areas. The Icelandic Police had responsibility for the general security – no other world leader would trust his safety to the American Secret Service, nor would the Secret Service be happy with entrusting the President’s safety to someone else – but by long-standing agreements, the Secret Service got to look over their shoulders. The other protection services would be doing the same, which would only make the experience a trying time for all concerned. The world leaders might not plan to kidnap each other – that only happened in bad movies – but all five nations had spied on each other from time to time.

  “Mr President?” Pepper asked. She wore a more conventional suit than her standard outfit, but she still looked attractive. The experience of meeting the aliens hadn’t fazed her, even though she’d endured a week of testing in the Naval Hospital, just in case she’d picked up any alien bugs. “They’re ready for you now.”

  “Good,” the President said. He put down his newspaper – the reporter writing the article had managed to get the names of half the world leaders wrong, he’d noticed with some amusement – and stood up. “Any problems on the ground?”

  “It’s bitterly cold out there, Mr President, but nothing else,” Pepper informed him. “The locals say that there haven’t been many protests near the base, even though the fact you’re coming here is no longer a secret. They’ve been concentrated mainly in the cities.”

  “It’s too cold to protest,” the President said, wryly. “Lead on.”

  Two more Secret Service Agents fell in around him as he walked through the massive aircraft and down the steps. The chill hit him at once, bringing with it a faint aroma of aircraft fuel and something he couldn’t quite identify. The base had housed overnight conferences before, but he didn’t intend to stay to eat with the other leaders, not with an alien spacecraft bearing down on Earth. They’d all made similar plans. The aliens – if they launched an attack on Iceland – could wipe out all five of the most significant world leaders at a stroke.

  The interior of the conference chamber was luxurious, to the chagrin of various protesters who thought that the millions of dollars spent on the complex could have been better spent on feeding the poor. For once, the President was inclined to agree. A life spent in the military had taught him that luxury, while never to be despised, was always something a man could do without, certainly if his own life was at risk. The ornate chambers, the carefully-concealed electronic infrastructure and the catering staff – each one a five-star master chef – cost more than he cared to think about. It served a vital role – the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council needed to talk in private – yet it was expensive. There were times when he thought that all such meetings should take place in the open. They would at least have gone quicker.

  “Welcome back, Mr President,” a woman said. The President recognised her as Vigdis Branson, the Manager of the Complex. “Do you wish to be shown to your rooms at once, or introduced to the British Prime Minister?”

  “The rooms, please,” the President said, gravely. “Please inform me when the other three arrive.”

  It was nearly two hours before everyone was assembled and the conference could begin. By agreement, there were no private secretaries or aides in the room, merely a single recorder making a copy of the conversation. The President had brought along a very old-fashioned tape recorder on a hunch, suspecting that the aliens could read information stored on humanity’s computers at will. It would have the added advantage of being difficult to copy, either by reporters or foreign spies. The other world leaders thought that the President was being paranoid, but after they had been promised a full transcript produced by the Manager, they relented.

  There was no need for formality or precedence, the President knew, and they spent the first twenty minutes chatting about families and other topics that didn’t impinge upon their responsibilities. The President found it rather relaxing. The other world leaders might not possess the same degree of power as the President of the United States, but they were the closest things he had to peers, men who wielded vast power over their nations. They might be political enemies in public, yet in private they had a great deal in common. There were people in all of their nations who would have been horrified to see them cracking jokes and exchanging information, but it help to grease international diplomacy.

  The State Departments and their counterparts hated such talks, of course. They could never trust the world leaders to stick to their scripts and concentrate on the topics the departments considered important. Worse, insults exchanged between world leaders could be considered an act of war, while an Ambassador could be recalled home in disgrace and made to carry the can for a diplomatic spat. The wonders of international telecommunications made Ambassadors less important than they had been a hundred years ago, yet there was still a place for them. The President had personally chosen the Ambassadors for significant countries and appointed men who could be trusted to serve American interests. His predecessors hadn’t always been that lucky.

  “And then they discovered that she was in the laundry,” the Russian President concluded, having outlined a raunchy tale centred on a diplomatic reception in the Kremlin. Evgeny Vikenti, President of the Russian Federation, was one of the President’s old acquaintances, even though there had been considerable friction between America and Russia over the past few years. Russia’s increasing assertiveness in Eastern Europe was damaging the balance of power. “There she was, completely naked – and stuck! I don’t know how her husband lived it down.”

  The President chuckled. It helped that the tale had been genuinely funny. “We do have an important matter to discuss,” he said, opening his briefcase. “There is the minor matter of a genuine alien starship approaching the Earth.”

  He spread the images, the latest taken by a series of orbiting space telescopes, on the table in front of them. The Chinese President picked up the first one and examined it carefully, while the others were passed around to the other three world leaders. They would all have seen similar images from their own telescopes or through the news media after NASA started leaking images of the alien mothership, but America led the field in space-based observation systems. There were some in the NRO who had wanted to revolt at the thought of showing other national leaders the results of American research and development. The President had squashed that harshly. There was no time for a catfight over who should
have access.

  “Impressive,” Mu Chun mused. The Chinese President was almost stereotypically inscrutable when he wanted to show nothing of his feelings. “Some of my Generals believe it to be an American trick.”

  “The combined space programs of the entire world could not have built that craft,” Vikenti said. The Russian leaned forwards aggressively. “A ship that size could carry many millions of aliens. Why are they coming to Earth?”

  “Invasion,” the President said, flatly. He dropped his bombshell. “The aliens contacted me a week before their mothership was detected.”

  He watched the reactions. The French and British leaders looked surprised, and outraged. The Russian and Chinese Presidents looked more contemplative. The President wondered if that meant that they had been contacted, or if they thought that the Americans were lying. He found that thought rather insulting, even though he had long since come to accept that lying was a fundamental part of international – and probably interstellar – politics. The aliens had definitely lied at least once.

  “Outrageous,” President Vincent Pelletier said, finally. The Frenchman made his pro forma protest. “You should have informed us at once.”

  The President shrugged. “Speaking bluntly,” he said dryly, “would you have informed us if you had been contacted?”

  There was no reply. “That leaves us with a single question,” the President added. “Were we the only ones to be contacted?”

  “There has been no contact between the aliens and any member of my government, to my certain knowledge,” the Chinese President said, finally. The others nodded in agreement. “It seems that America was the only nation singled out in such a manner.”

  In public, there would certainly have been outraged protests. In private, they could accept it and move on. “They have certainly studied us for longer than they admitted,” Arthur Hamilton said. The British Prime Minister shrugged. “You said they were intent on invasion. What did they say to you?”

  The President produced a set of four folders from his briefcase and passed them around, noting in passing how…normal each of the folders seemed. There was no clue on the covers as to the secrets they contained, or how they would change the world if they fell into public hands. The President’s staff had already prepared measures to cover it up if some – or all – of the data was leaked.

  “You can study the folders for yourself at leisure,” the President said. The folders contained everything apart from the details of the crashed UFO. He’d been convinced to cover that up completely. Later, there would be time for a more leisurely sharing of information. “The important points are that the aliens are not coming in peace.”

  He briefly ran through the entire story, from the message that had brought him to a preset meeting place to the flight to the alien ship and the ominous message he’d received. He didn’t leave out the details of the alien offer to America, or his own decision to refuse the offer, knowing that they would deduce its existence anyway. They’d certainly suspect if he tried to cover something up. He’d seriously considered discussing the discovery of the alien base, but a single leak would have blown the assault force’s role – now on its way to Antarctica – and made the attack impossible.

  “Impossible,” the French President said, finally. “How could they hope to occupy an entire world?”

  “They claim to have the numbers to do it,” the President said. “I have no independent verification of anything they told me.”

  “So they could have been lying,” the Chinese President said. “They may come to the UN to try to bluff us into surrender.”

  “Or they may intend to make a show of force,” the British Prime Minister said. “I was briefed that their craft could easily throw rocks at us until we surrender.”

  “It’s a possibility,” the President agreed. “We need to come to an agreement on how to react.”

  “My country will not surrender,” the Russian President said. “We have been invaded before, by Napoleon and Hitler. They both inflicted hideous punishment upon our land and people, yet we survived and bested them. We have called up our reserves and have been preparing for war. We will not tamely accept defeat and occupation.”

  “We may be unable to defeat them,” the British Prime Minister pointed out. “Our capability to launch an attack on their mothership is non-existent. They can just hammer us until we beg for mercy.”

  “Or start selling each other out to gain favour,” the French President added. “How many of us would sell the rest of the world out if the aliens offered us technology from beyond the stars?”

  The President remembered the mass of data he’d brought back from the alien mothership and scowled. “That’s beside the point,” he said. “We need to agree on how we can respond to their threat, as a group.”

  He watched their reactions carefully. It was hardly politically correct, but if all five of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council agreed on something, it would happen. They possessed the votes, the economic influence and – at bottom – the military force to shape the world in their favour. The trick was to get all five to agree and that rarely happened. The entire Iraq Crisis had blown up because the Americans and British had wanted to remove Saddam, while the French and Russians had wanted to remove all the sanctions and collect the money Saddam owed them – and the Chinese had merely wanted to avoid creating a precedent. It had been a hideous catfight and the scars were still felt over a decade later.

  And then there was the problem of enforcing the UN’s will. The blunt truth was that any of the Big Five could do whatever they wanted and the UN would be unable to stop them. They couldn’t be sanctioned or threatened with military force, which meant that the UN only had as much authority as the member states chose to grant it. The President’s strongest supporters included men and women who wanted the UN kept under strict control, but the irony was that the control was already there, just waiting to be used. Many good-natured men saw the UN as the Parliament of Man, yet it was really nothing more than a stacked deck. The Secretary-General and the entire political edifice could be ignored at will.

  “I think we can all agree that invasion, even of a small part of the planet, is unacceptable,” the French President said, finally. “Even if they only landed in…say Africa and Australia, they’d still have a massive effect on the balance of power.”

  “And yet they are going to have to land somewhere,” the President pointed out. “If they were telling the truth about their ship, they’re right at the end of their endurance and they will have to unload some of their people.”

  “Here’s what we do,” the British Prime Minister said. “We tell them that we intend to allow them to settle in land we’ll sell to them, in exchange for their technology shared between us all as a group. We insist on having our own people on the mothership so that we know exactly what we’re dealing with…and so we have options if things go badly wrong. Between us, we can offer them a choice between getting what they want for free or facing a hostile world armed with nuclear weapons.”

  “Assuming they’re daunted by nukes,” the President pointed out. “They might not care about our nuclear weapons at all.”

  “If they’re unaffected by nukes, we might as well get started on our surrender terms,” the French President said. “The world is going to change. If we can get them to settle here on our terms…well, it’s worth the risk of displeasing the rest of the world. It’s better than fighting either the aliens or your country.”

  “I refused their offer,” the President said.

  “So you say,” the Russian President said. The President couldn’t blame him for being paranoid. In his place, he would have wondered if a deal had been struck after all. “I agree to the British Plan.”

  The discussions went on for several more hours, with a brief pause for cups of tea and coffee, before the various world leaders boarded their aircraft and returned to their respective countries. The main body of the shared plan would remain
secret, but they’d prepared a joint press release that would be non-committal, informing the world that they’d agreed to meet with the aliens in New York. The President allowed himself to sleep on the flight back to Washington, but sleep didn’t come easy. His thoughts kept jumping from point to point.

  He had the nasty feeling that the aliens weren't through with their surprises, not yet.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Kennedy Space Centre, USA

  Day 31

  Someone had vandalised his locker.

  Captain Philip Carlson wasn't entirely surprised. The Space Shuttle had been scheduled to be retired from service in 2010, but NASA had kept the two remaining orbiters flying until – some said – they crashed or exploded on the launch pad. There were dozens of trained men and women who could fly the Shuttle, but simple odds meant that they would only get one or two chances to actually fly before they grew too old and had to be retired. There were astronauts who had never actually flown in space, growing older and older – and bitter, bitter at NASA and at the military astronauts who had flown dozens of missions. There were men who expected to die of old age before man built a base on the Moon, or sent a mission to Mars, or even deflected an asteroid before it hit the Earth. They took what refuge they could in picking on the military officers.

  He shook his head as he checked the contents, before relocking the locker and heading off to the preparations room. He and his co-pilot had been separated from the standard NASA protocol for pilots on the verge of a flight – another source of tension between the other astronauts and the military pilots – although they’d still found time for the traditional breakfast of steak and eggs. The vast majority of the launch preparations were hardly necessary anyway, they’d just been added to try and avoid legal liability for any accidents that happened along the way. Philip – and all of the astronauts, military or civilian – had long since accepted the possibility of a sudden explosive death and bitterly resented the bureaucrats who insisted on covering NASA’s collective ass where possible. After Challenger and Columbia, they’d taken over and imposed regulations designed to strangle any hope of initiative from the pilots. The result had been a massive collapse in morale.