Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Mr Buckley,” Lieutenant Ho said. “What are you…?”

  The ship seemed to shake again. There was a weird taste in the air for a second, like charged or ionised air, and then green light seemed to flare over the consoles like St. Elmo’s Fire. Joe heard screams from crewmen as consoles exploded into massive fireballs, throwing bodies left and right. The lights failed, plunging the entire CIC into darkness, before the emergency lights flickered on. They failed a moment later, but by then the fires were illuminating the compartment. They revealed a scene from hell.

  Joe felt sore all over, as if his body had been put through a massive exercise period, yet somehow he managed to pull himself to his feet. He felt suddenly seasick – he hadn’t been seasick since he’d been a kid sailing with his father on the Great Lakes – and vomited on the deck until there was nothing left in his stomach. It occurred to him that the Navy Crewmen would probably have a few things to say about it, as if it was the most important thing in the world, yet he knew that something was wrong. His brain ached, as if he had been concussed, and it took him minutes to realise that the ship had been attacked. The entire CIC was in ruins. He looked over at Lieutenant Ho and knew that there was no point in trying to help him. The young man, barely out of his teens, had hit his head so hard that it had crushed it like an eggshell. The sight seemed to bring Joe back to himself. The CIC should have received an emergency crew within seconds – he knew how well drilled the crew were – and yet, no one had materialised. Were they all dead?

  “Help,” he said, stumbling over to the nearest body. It proved to be a female operator, one of the crew who helped direct the fighters while they were in the air. She was breathing, but it was laboured and forced, leaving her on the edge of death. Joe stared at her, trying to remember what to do, but nothing surfaced in his mind. She passed away without ever regaining awareness of her surroundings. He stumbled from body to body, but it was the same story. The Angel of Death had passed through the compartment and somehow spared his life only.

  The ship shook around him again, reminding him that his survival might not last. The Ford had a backup facility if the Bridge or the CIC had been taken out, yet that might have been taken out as well. Whatever the aliens had hit them with – the green fire, whatever it had been – might well have wrecked the entire ship. It was getting harder and harder to breath – the fires were consuming the oxygen – and he stumbled over to the hatch. Miraculously, it wasn't jammed and he staggered out into the passageway. There was no one around to help him, or anyone else. The carrier seemed to be deserted.

  Slowly, he made his way up to the deck. The aliens had remodelled the interior of the carrier and nothing seemed to be quite where it had once been. There were fires burning everywhere, consuming everything…it dawned on him that there was a nuclear reactor on the ship and it might be on the verge of meltdown. The USN had taken pains to assure him and other reporters that meltdown was impossible, but alien attack and a wrecked carrier had probably been outside the testing requirements. They’d probably screwed the warranty.

  He found himself giggling hysterically at that thought as he finally reached the deck. A man reached in and helped him out. Joe was so relieved to see him that he gave him a hug, to the man’s embarrassment, before he recognised him. Commander Fletcher would have been on the bridge during the fighting – did that mean that the bridge was gone too? He allowed Fletcher to pull him to his feet and stared down the long flight deck. It was burning brightly; the handful of aircraft that had remained on the flight deck, having been unserviceable when the aircraft were scrambled, had already been destroyed. The carrier had been completely wrecked.

  Fletcher slapped his face, hard enough to bring him back to his senses. “Joe, damn you,” Fletcher was shouting. “Is there anyone alive down there?”

  “They’re all dead,” Joe said, numbly. The carrier’s crew numbered in the thousands, yet he could only see a handful of survivors, trying to get the life rafts up and running. The carrier’s superstructure had taken terrible damage. He stared out over the water, hoping that he would see some ships coming to their aid, but saw nothing. The Ford’s task force had been one of the most powerful fleets the USN had assembled and the aliens had wiped it out within minutes. It felt as if he’d been crawling through the burning carrier for hours. “I saw them die.”

  “Focus,” Fletcher ordered, sharply. Joe realised that Fletcher was badly wounded and felt a moment of shame. He ached, but he was unharmed. “Concentrate on getting off the ship and back to land!”

  “Yes, sir,” Joe said. “I…”

  He broke off as he saw two dark specks rapidly falling out of the sky towards him. The air seemed to be empty of human aircraft – the carrier’s air wing had either been destroyed or escaped back to the mainland – and there was no mistaking the incoming craft for human. Blue-green bolts seemed to flare ahead of them, slamming down into the carrier’s deck. He felt, more than heard, a dull rumble, shattering the innards of the carrier and leaving it ablaze and sinking in the Atlantic Ocean. There was no point in trying to escape. The carrier was breaking up under their feet. His last impression was of a flicker of brilliant light reaching out to take him…and then nothing but darkness.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Andrews Air Force Base, USA

  Day 38

  Sergeant Danny Kyle heard the aircraft launching into the sky from his position on one corner of the massive air force base, struggling with the makeshift aircraft the USAF had liberated from the Boneyard. The Boneyard - or the Aerospace Maintenance And Regeneration Centre, as it was formally known – had been stripped of aircraft for the defence effort. Kyle and his fellow ground crew had been working their asses off to get the useless aircraft into position, just because someone had convinced the CO that the aircraft might still have a use. They might not have been able to fly – a large percentage of the aircraft in the Aerospace Maintenance And Regeneration Centre had been cannibalised for parts – but they still looked usable.

  The concept, Kyle had to admit, was sound. The USAF had gone to war against the Serbs in 1999 and bombed them back to the Stone Age, where in his opinion the area had never actually left. Or so it had seemed.

  The USAF had declared victory and gloated over their success until afterwards, when analysis teams had descended on the Balkans and rapidly discovered the reports of a crushing defeat had been badly exaggerated. The Serbs might not have been able to match the stunning level of technology brought to bear against them, but they’d played all kinds of tricks with their limited technology and successfully tricked the USAF into wasting expensive bombs and missiles.

  Dummy tanks had absorbed antitank weapons, cheap radars had confused and decoyed the most advanced guided weapons in the inventory, dozens of dummy targets had absorbed expensive weapons and Yugoslav jets had flown combat missions over Kosovo at extremely low altitude, using terrain to remain undetected by AWACS flying radars. In short, it had been an expensive lesson in the limitations of technology, one that had largely passed most of the USAF by.

  Kyle’s own bitterness over his lack of promotion – his succession of supervisors and Commanding Officers had never rated him very highly – had become a general sense of disdain towards the entire USAF. The hotshot fighter pilots had fucked up and yet they were still treated as heroes. Where was the heroism in wasting weapons that cost the American taxpayer over a million dollars per shot?

  He looked up at what had once been an F-14 Tomcat. It had been stripped of engines and most of its classified systems, but the ground crews had replaced them with heat-emitters that would mimic a jet on the ground, preparing to launch itself into the air. Any tactician would know that destroying a jet on the ground – as the Israelis had done to the Arabs in the Six Day War – was far preferable to fighting it in the sky. The aliens would come to attack the air base and would see targets that would soak up some of their fire. The Tomcat might never have seen active service – there was no time to look up its l
inage – but now it would definitely serve its country.

  “Come on,” the CO shouted. Kyle didn’t like him and suspected that the feeling was mutual. He’d seriously considered simply leaving the USAF when his time ran out, yet what else could he do? His old mother loved the idea of her son, the hero, and he hadn’t the heart to disillusion her. He worked on the aircraft and other preparations on the ground; others flew out to take the glory. “We have to get the other aircraft into position before it’s too late.”

  It’s too late already, Kyle thought, but he held his tongue.

  Andrews Air Force Base had never been so busy before, even with all non-essential personnel evacuated and the surrounding civilian populations warned to leave the area. Most had complied, but some had definitely refused to allow the aliens to scare them out of their homes, while the mob of protesters at the fence kept howling obscenities towards the military personnel they could see. The armed soldiers at the fence didn’t seem to be deterring them at all, even though they had signs up warning that the base was in a state of war and the soldiers had authorisation to open fire if they felt that they were in danger.

  Kyle hated protesters on general principles – he’d never fired a shot in anger, yet some young bastards had called him a baby-killer or worse when he wore his uniform outside the base – and found himself hoping that the aliens shot them up when they attacked the base. Perhaps their sensors – no one knew how their sensors worked – would pick up the massive crowd on infrared and see it as a genuine threat.

  He glanced up as another aircraft took to the skies, an F-16 that had been hastily refurbished and put back into service. The Boneyard had quite a number of aircraft that were still in operating condition and, with all of the reservists called back to the USAF, there were enough pilots for all the planes.

  The newcomers were less obnoxious than the normal pilots assigned to Andrews, even through the base had been forced through a series of rapid changes. New fighters and their pilots had been moved in, while other aircraft had been moved out, hoping to preserve them in the face of inevitable alien attack.

  Andrews normally handled tanker aircraft, but some had been moved out and based with the fighter squadrons that would protect them. The transports, including Air Force One, had been flown elsewhere. It was hoped that if the aliens saw them as no threat, they wouldn’t bother to destroy them. Kyle privately suspected that the aliens would attack them anyway. Air Force One was a symbol to the American people and destroying it would send a powerful message.

  Silently, he began to compose – again – the next discussion he would have with his reporter friend. He hadn’t been able to tell her about the alerts – the CO had put the fear of God into everyone on the air base, even without sharing the exact truth of what was going on – and Kyle hadn’t quite dared tell her what little he’d heard. Besides, the rumour mill had been completely wrong. They’d believed that the President was gearing up to go after Iran, or Russia, or China – or France, for God’s sake – and only a few people had bet on aliens. The ones who had had collected hundreds of dollars from the others. His mind raged over possible points he could raise with her – his stock should rise if the aliens did attack the base – when everything changed.

  Klaxons started to blare suddenly, warning of incoming attack. “Now hear this,” a voice bellowed. “Incoming hostile aircraft. I say again, incoming hostile aircraft!”

  For a moment, Kyle didn’t believe his ears. No one could attack a military base on American soil. The worst they’d prepared for before the alien craft had been detected was a Chinese or Russian skipper sailing into cruise missile range and unloading his entire complement of missiles onto the air base. There were so many possible targets that the air base had an excellent chance of remaining untouched. It wasn't as if the Russians could launch their entire air force at America. He remembered seeing the Patriot missile batteries moved into position, along with the dedicated ground-to-air defence systems and soldiers carrying handheld MANPAD weapons…they intended to try and stand off the enemy!

  His orders were simple. If the base was to come under attack, he and the remainder of the ground crew were to make their way to the shelters and hide there, so they could start repairing the damage after the aliens withdrew. Kyle hadn’t been too sure it was a good plan – if the aliens used nukes, the entire base would be destroyed – yet it did have its advantages. Andrews was huge and even if it lost half of the runways, the remainder would still suffice to launch and recover aircraft. The aliens might even waste their firepower on the decoy aircraft he’d spent the last week placing into position. He started to run, but it was already too late.

  A scream ripped across the sky as a delta-winged aircraft raced towards the Atlantic Ocean. Kyle recognised it as one of the F-16s – it was no alien craft – heading out under full military power. The sonic boom would upset a number of local residents, assuming that they survived the next few hours. The USAF had called it the Sound of Freedom ever since the fifties, but sonic booms were no laughing matter. Kyle smiled to himself at the thought of one of the fighter jocks having to explain himself to the CO before a flash of light in the sky marked the destruction of the F-16. The Fighting Falcon had been blown out of the sky!

  His mouth fell open as three strangely shaped craft seemed to materialise out of nowhere, racing towards Andrews Air Force Base. He’d been expecting something like the scene from Independence Day when El Toro had been destroyed, but instead there were only three alien craft, firing brilliant bursts of light down towards the ground. A roar echoed over the air base as the missile batteries opened fire, launching missile after missile towards the alien craft, which separated and raced away from the base, before swinging around and coming back over the base at low level. None of the alien craft were shot down as they raced over the base, their weapons blazing. The ground shook under Kyle’s feet as the aliens pounded the dummy aircraft – the ground crews had thoughtfully included a small amount of jet fuel in the aircraft, ensuring a satisfactory explosion to deceive the alien pilots – before they turned back towards the hangars. A SAM struck one of the alien craft directly and it exploded, the shockwave knocking Kyle to the ground. It saved his life. One of the alien craft was firing into a nearby hangar and the shots were going right over his head. His hair stood on end as he saw the alien craft, looking so close as if he could reach up and touch it, before it was gone, chased by a handful of missiles. He imagined the alien craft being hit and destroyed like its comrade had been, but there was no second massive explosion. The craft had successfully escaped.

  A moment later, a second swarm of alien craft descended on the base. This time, they weren't unchallenged; a flight of fighters were chasing them, forcing them to keep dodging their fire. A MANPAD accounted for a second alien craft, sending it crashing down towards the ground where it crashed into a hangar and exploded, destroying the surrounding area. Fires raged through the base as the alien craft broke off a second time, leaving the base in ruins. Kyle might not have been one of the best and most dedicated servicemen, but even he knew that it was largely an illusion. The aliens had blown up a lot of shit and it probably looked good, yet with a little effort, the ground crews would have the base working again. The highly-trained crews were already springing into action.

  He pulled himself to his feet as the fire engine raced by towards the nearest fire and followed them, running as fast as he could. The crew would need help and they’d have to deal with the most serious threats first. The air base held massive stockpiles of ammunition and a single alien hit in the wrong place would be disastrous. The fires might trigger the ammunition, including the pallets pre-prepared for the returning aircraft, and put their lives at risk. He threw himself to the ground as dark shapes rocketed overhead, then relaxed as he realised that they were human aircraft. The aliens seemed to have broken off their offensive. It wouldn’t last.

  ***

  “Dark Shadows, Langley is under heavy attack,” the dispatcher sai
d. Will Jacob ground his teeth in anger. The Raptors had fired off their remaining missiles, apart from two pilots who were now taking the lead, and would be easy targets if the aliens decided to have another go at them. Their weapons, whatever they were, had definite advantages over the Raptor’s weapons. They didn’t seem to have to worry about shooting themselves dry. “Return to Andrews; I repeat, return to Andrews.”

  “Acknowledged,” Will muttered. The Dark Shadows had landed at Andrews before, back during exercises and deployments to provide air security for the capital –why that involved shifting bases had been a mystery – yet they had never had to land on a base under attack. The HUD was pulling data from the AWACS and warning that Andrews Air Force Base, bare kilometres from Washington DC, had been attacked savagely. The aliens seemed to have retreated from the combat zone, yet he knew better than to take it for granted. They might have been waiting for the Raptors to land and allow them a shot at taking them out while they were on the ground.

  And yet, there was no choice. Will had seen it himself; their cannons, which would have been lethal against any known human aircraft, were completely useless against the alien craft. He’d wondered at first if they’d simply missed when they’d fired – the alien craft did move with astonishing speed and dodging bullets was at least possible – yet he trusted his wingmates. They’d hit the alien craft and seen how useless the cannons had been. Without new missiles, the Raptors, the most advanced human aircraft in the air, would be sitting ducks when the aliens came back. They needed to rearm quickly. It didn’t matter how tired the pilots were after their short nasty engagement. They had to get back in the air before the aliens returned.