Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  He glanced down at the LEO Display. The ISS maintained a permanent radar watch of the surrounding space, waiting for the inevitable moment when a piece of space junk no larger than a baseball or even a marble came right at the station. There had been a handful of chilling near-misses and the station’s crew had had to deflect several items that would have ripped the station in half if they’d struck the hull, but that wasn't the real problem. The aliens were definitely monitoring the station as part of their war of nerves.

  NASA’s UFO files were a confused mixture, but it was undeniable that astronauts had seen and reported hundreds of UFO sightings, some of which had entered the myths surrounding the space program. Neil Armstrong, according to legend, had seen massive flying saucers on the moon – “they’re on the moon watching us,” he was supposed to have said – and UFOs had followed spacecraft on their missions. No one was sure what to make of it and reports had diminished after NASA started removing pilots who saw UFOs from flight duty, but it was clear now that some reports had been genuine. The object holding station a bare thirty kilometres from the ISS had a profile that was growing to be chillingly familiar. It wasn't even trying to hide.

  “And then?” Harrows asked. “What happens then?”

  “We die, probably,” Philip said, and launched into another explanation of how fragile the station was if the aliens decided to throw a missile at it. No one knew what the aliens used for weapons, but everyone was sure that it would be something extremely deadly. They could have thrown a kitchen sink at the ISS and taken out the entire station. “Aren’t you glad you volunteered to remain on the station?”

  Harrows snorted. NASA had wanted to pull all of the ISS crewmen off the station when the alien mothership arrived and replace them with a team of dedicated contact specialists. That idea had been overruled by the President and the ISS had been left in the care of a small caretaker team, while the remainder of the crew had headed down to the planet where they would be safe. It hadn’t caused a political catfight with the other nations involved in the ISS Project, much to NASA’s surprise, although Philip suspected that the President had been quietly keeping the other members informed of what was going on. The President’s speech made it clear that the United States had known about the aliens a long time before they started contacting SETI.

  “Not really, no,” he said. “I should have listened to my old man.”

  Philip lifted an eyebrow, trying to show interest. “What did he say?”

  “I don’t know,” Harrows said, with a wink. “I wasn't listening.”

  Philip looked down at the image of the mothership. The ISS only mounted one telescope – a Japanese design used for studying distant stars – but it was more than suitable to provide an image of the alien ship. He’d seen the measurements, yet it was still incomprehensibly huge, its dimensions vast beyond imagination. It was easy to believe that there were a billion aliens cooped up on that ship, eager to set foot on the Promised Land. Philip would have quite happily traded half of America for access to the technology that had built that craft; indeed, he tended to agree with the bloggers who wanted to offer the aliens Africa and the Middle East in exchange for technology. It would have been a worthwhile bargain.

  “It was probably something about being patient,” he said, finally. The mothership looked close, but it was too far away to be targeted by any of the shuttle’s puny weapons. Looking at the alien contact watching the station, Philip suspected that the battle would be short and very one-sided. The shuttle had to obey the laws of physics. The aliens laughed at them. “All we can do is wait – and pray.”

  Cheyenne Mountain, USA

  Day 38

  Robin ran her hand through her hair as she sat back from the console. The President’s speech might have focused a few minds outside the mountain, but Robin and the remainder of the crew bringing the base back online already knew the truth. The men and women walked around the base as if they expected the skies to fall at any moment, as if they expected the base to be targeted in the opening rounds of any alien attack. Robin couldn’t disagree with that – NORAD was a logical target – but there was no point in worrying about it. NORAD was designed to stand up to multiple nuclear hits and if the aliens had anything more powerful than that, the war would be lost very quickly anyway.

  It was ironic, but there was little left for her to do. She’d overseen the creation of new warning systems for the United States and had passed responsibility over to other radar specialists. She had been given permission to work on following her own instincts, studying the alien craft in the hopes that she would discover something new, but the truth was that she rather suspected that she’d found out everything she could. There was a great deal of information on how the alien craft moved – they seemed to have problems manoeuvring at high speed, for reasons that made little sense – yet there was little she could add to it. The aliens were still watching the United States, their craft blinking in and out of existence, but they were making no hostile moves. Some of the radar technicians believed that meant that the aliens were backing down after the President had called their bluff, but Robin wasn't so sure. The contacts were high over every major military base in the world. No country had been spared.

  The one question she had tried to answer was if the aliens knew that they were being tracked? It was hard to be sure, but she had the impression that they sometimes believed that they were undetected. She and the other radar specialists had been told not to vector interceptors towards the alien craft, yet there were times when the aliens brazenly challenged the defenders and times when they tried to be sneaky. It made little sense to her because there seemed to be no pattern…but the aliens were far from human. Something that made perfect sense to them would look strange to a human. Their concepts of what made a perfect military tactic might be very different from a human concept. Robin had little experience or knowledge of fighting on the ground, but she’d been told that different cultures had different ideas of war. An alien culture might make the World War Two Japanese look reasonable.

  She looked back at the display as the console chimed an alert. A new target had appeared in Earth Orbit. The alien craft sometimes seemed to drift along in orbit before heading down into the atmosphere, but this one seemed more…purposeful, somehow. She followed it as it drifted into position; just as another contact appeared, followed by a third, a fourth, a fifth... Dozens of contacts were blinking into existence even as she watched, spreading out until they had the entire world surrounded. This was no mere recon mission, she realised in shock. There were too many craft for that. This was an attack!

  Robin reached for the alert button and pressed it down hard, sending sirens howling throughout the complex. The entire sequence was carefully programmed. As soon as she pushed the key, FLASH alerts were distributed over the entire network, warning them that an attack was underway. Defence stations would be coming online, aircraft would be launching into the air to combat any alien threat and civilian aircraft would be landing at any available airport. It wasn't something to do lightly – 9/11 had cost the United States billions of dollars – but there was no choice. She knew what she was looking at.

  She picked up the phone and pressed down on the emergency key. If the General was talking to anyone else, they’d just been disconnected. It wouldn’t please a senior officer to be cut off by a junior, but there was no choice. The country was about to come under attack. NORAD’s staff was already responding to the crisis, yet they needed political direction. The General had to clear any missile launches personally.

  “General,” she said, watching as more enemy icons flickered into existence. There were over two hundred alien craft in orbit now and there were more appearing every second. “I think the war is about to begin.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Cheyenne Mountain, USA

  Day 38

  “What are we looking at?”

  General Sandra Dyson strode into the Operations Room barely a minute after she’d been
called. She’d been in her office doing paperwork, but the alert had brought her out in a hurry. Robin was privately impressed by how quickly the General had reacted, although she suspected that no one could have moved fast enough to matter. The alien attack might already be underway.

  “We have multiple alien contacts,” Robin said, as the massive display altered to show another group of alien craft appearing. They were appearing in groups of five craft now and she wondered if they were the alien version of squadrons. They certainly seemed to fly in formation. “There are around three hundred alien craft circling the Earth in high orbit. Their intentions are unknown.”

  “It looks pretty clear to me,” Sandra said, as she took her seat in front of the big board. The massive screen at the front of the room, looming over the smaller workstations, showed the aliens settling into their flight patterns. “That’s almost certainly the first move in their offensive. Do you have a precise count?”

  “Negative,” Robin said, slowly. “The contacts are flying in formations that sometimes register as single contacts. Their flying skills are remarkable.” She paused. “They are also outside effective weapons range.”

  She keyed her console as the flow of alien craft seemed to halt, trying to pick up images from orbiting cameras on NSA satellites. NSA had been reluctant to reprogram its satellites to take a look at targets in Earth orbit – apart from the handful of satellites that had been doing just that – but the President’s orders had been explicit. It didn’t matter anyway. The best that multi-million dollar cameras - capable of reading a postage stamp from orbit - could produce were streaks of light. The alien craft danced and weaved in a pattern Robin suspected was meant to be intimidating – or perhaps they were just showing off. There was no way to know.

  “We could probably hit them with the ground-based lasers, but at that range I doubt we’d even melt their paint,” she added. She had the nasty feeling that the aliens were just preparing their next move. Groups of alien craft were dancing together, seeming to merge into one contact, then separating and returning to their positions. It reminded her of something oddly familiar, but her mind refused to process the information and come up with the data. “They’re free to do as they please.”

  “All right,” Sandra said. She looked over at one of the other consoles. “Inform all parties that I am declaring an Air Defence Emergency. Tell them to pull down all civilian air traffic now – I don’t care who they are or why, just get them to the nearest airport and down on the ground. Scramble the ready fighters, but hold the remainder on the ground until the attack patterns develop. Prepare a FLASH warning signal and forward it to me for evaluation.”

  “Yes, General,” one of the other dispatchers said. “Air Defence Emergency declared.”

  Robin barely heard him. An Air Defence Emergency meant that Sandra – in her position as commander of America’s defences – was God, as far as anyone in the air was concerned. She had the legal right to shoot down any pilots who refused to cooperate, although after 9/11, it would be a brave or stupid pilot who refused to follow orders. The priority was to get every other aircraft out of the sky to prevent the aliens using them as targets, leaving the military aircraft free and clear to engage anything in the sky. The procedures had been drafted to deal with terrorist-controlled aircraft. No one had seriously expected to use them against alien invasion.

  She’d taken part in a war game once that had assumed that Castro, on the verge of dying from ill health – had launched everything he had against American bases in Florida. It hadn’t gone well. USAF, USN and Air National Guard pilots had had real problems working together, while the Air Defence System had been completely surprised by the new threat. The evaluation had concluded that the men on the ground had believed that no one would mount such an offensive and hadn’t treated it as seriously as it deserved. The irony was that if the defence forces had reacted perfectly, the Cuban Air Force wouldn’t have gotten within bombing range of the beaches, let alone the rest of the state. If Castro had actually tried to launch such an offensive, the results would probably not have been good. The USAF could have wrecked Cuba from one end to the other and the 1st Marine Division could have occupied the entire Island, but it would have been small consolation to the dead.

  “They’re coming lower,” she said, as the display updated. The alien craft weren't even trying to hide any longer. They were showing up clearly on standard space-tracking radars. “I think they’re playing chicken with the satellites.”

  She felt Sandra looking over her shoulder as the alien craft danced closer to the swarm of human satellites orbiting the planet. The aliens seemed to delight in flying right at the satellites, then altering course so sharply that humans would have thrown up, had they felt the effects of such sudden movements. She suspected, judging from the data from the crashed alien craft, that the aliens had some kind of internal compensator. They weren't that much tougher than humans.

  “Get the Dark Sky Plan underway,” Sandra said, shortly. It was hard to remember that while Robin regarded it as a challenge and an interesting display, the General regarded it as a threat. Dark Sky was a contingency plan for losing all of the human satellites and their ability to coordinate the American forces. It wouldn’t matter so much in CONUS – there were secure and shielded landlines connecting the various bases – but it would have a real impact on America’s ability to operate outside North America. The United States depended so much on satellites that losing even a handful of them would provoke a major economic depression. “Warn all units that they may lose access to satellites.”

  Robin nodded. “Yes, General,” she said, more soberly. Losing the satellites would mean losing the ability to communicate with the assault force near the alien base. The President would have to issue the order before the aliens opened fire, if they did open fire. They could still be bluffing.

  Sandra had picked up the secure phone, linking her directly to Washington. “Yes, Mr President,” she said. “It looks like the opening moves of an attack to us. They haven’t opened fire yet, but we believe that it is only a matter of time.”

  There was a pause. Robin strained her ears, but couldn’t hear the President’s response. “We’re holding fire and I’ve declared an Air Defence Emergency on my own authority,” Sandra added. “The majority of civilian air traffic will be on the ground in ten minutes. Understood sir; DEFCON ONE.”

  She glanced over at another operator. “DEFCON ONE,” she repeated. “Get the signal out now. COCKED PISTOL: DEFCON ONE.”

  Robin felt her stomach clench, despite herself. DEFCON ONE hadn’t been declared outside of exercises in living memory. The entire United States military had been at DEFCON THREE since the mothership had been detected – and unofficially working towards DEFCON ONE ever since the alien craft had crashed – and had gone to DEFCON TWO after the aliens had dropped their bombshell in Washington. DEFCON ONE meant that a war was underway or was believed to be about to begin. It was reserved for imminent or ongoing attack on America itself. No enemy nation had attacked the Continental United States since World War Two.

  ***

  FLASH TRAFFIC CRITIC

  FRIGHTFULNESS. FRIGHTFULNESS.

  SET CONDITION DEFCON ONE, REPEAT DEFENSE CONDITION ONE

  NORAD HAS DETECTED MULTIPLE INBOUND TRACKS FROM THE ALIEN MOTHERSHIP.

  NCA HAS DETERMINED HIGH PROBABILITY THAT ALIEN ATTACK IS IMMINENT. ALL UNITS SET DEFCON ONE AND PROCEED IN ACCORDANCE WITH OPLAN 6666.

  MESSAGE ENDS

  ***

  A moment after the chilling message had flashed up on her screen, Robin blinked as a new alert tone sounded in her earpiece. A satellite had just vanished. Another vanished a moment later. “General,” she said. The interrupted telemetry from the orbiting systems made it all too clear what was happening. The signals simply cut off, without warning. The radar showed no trace of what was happening to them, or what kind of weapon was being used, yet she knew what was going on. “They’re opening fire on the satellit
es.”

  “Shit,” Sandra said. “Mr President; they’re taking down the satellites.”

  There was a pause. “Understood, Mr President,” she said. “I’ll send the signal now.”

  She put down the phone and looked down at the operators. “You are authorised to engage the enemy,” she said, formally. “Engage Fire Plan Alpha.”

  “Fire Plan Alpha, understood,” an operator said. “KE-ASAT units are responding. They’re manoeuvring now.”

  Robin watched, knowing that the system wouldn’t work perfectly, if at all. KE-ASAT had been designed to track and destroy enemy satellites and missiles, both of which followed predicable courses. The alien craft flew like starfighters out of a science-fiction movie. They would be able to easily avoid the KE-ASAT weapons or destroy them before they managed to get close enough to an alien craft to detonate. There was no way of knowing how much damage they’d do, either. The alien craft might be completely destroyed or they might not even notice.

  “Hellfire,” Sandra muttered. Robin understood. The aliens might not have realised that the KE-ASAT systems were different from the other satellites – they seemed to have ignored the stealthed satellites, which was an interesting datum – but they knew a threat when they saw it. The KE-ASAT system had never been deployed in sufficient numbers for political reasons and, even after the alien mothership had been detected, there just hadn’t been the launch capability to put enough of them in space to threaten the aliens. The aliens were wiping them out one by one. “What are they firing?”

  “Some kind of energy weapon,” Robin said, slowly. The orbiting sensors weren't picking up much, but missiles or rail guns would have shown up on radar. The entire battle was unfolding slowly, yet she knew the outcome. “I recommend engaging with ground and air-based beam weapons and THAAD missiles.”