Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Consider yourself lucky,” the bodyguard said. “If you were the President’s daughter, I’d be watching you like a hawk.”

  Karen found herself giggling, even though it wasn't funny. The thought of a bodyguard following her everywhere was just insane. Her life at school would have been different, college, dating…would he have even followed her into the toilet? How could she have dated a nice guy if she’d had a bodyguard following her around everywhere? It might have been a good thing if she’d had a bad boyfriend, but really…

  “Thank you,” she said, finally. She looked back towards the pillars of smoke. “The President doesn’t even have a daughter.”

  “The last one did,” the bodyguard pointed out.

  Karen nodded. “What now?”

  “I have no idea,” the bodyguard said. “Wait and see what happens, I guess.”

  ***

  There were more soldiers and marines on the streets of Washington than Abigail had seen in any number of unstable regimes, but with a combination of her press pass and some bluffing she was able to get closer to the Pentagon than the security personnel might have preferred. It had been an impressive building when she had first seen it, yet now it was nothing but burning rubble. The heat from the flames could be felt even at her distance and she had a nasty feeling that the firemen pouring water and foam into the blaze were wasting their time. The building would have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

  The White House, by contrast, hadn’t been touched at all, although she suspected that was a deliberate choice on the part of the aliens. She’d seen enough of the battle from her vantage point to know that they could have taken out the building if they had wanted to do so. The handful of craft that had crashed in Washington had inflicted further wounds on the city and even though they seemed to have broken off for the moment, they could return at any time. The strikes not only served a tactical purpose, but a psychological one as well. The message was clear. Nowhere was safe.

  She glanced upwards at a fighter jet racing overhead and wondered if it was hunting an alien craft, or merely providing what little protection it could. She had had no way of keeping track of the battle, yet the strikes in the heart of Washington suggested that it wasn't going well. The war was barely a few hours old and it was already being lost.

  Abigail knew that she should file a story, something to back up or disprove the hysterical nonsense being put out on the Internet by the bloggers, but it all seemed futile. If the aliens could inflict such harm on the best-defended air space on the planet, what couldn’t they do? Was she looking at the twilight of the human race?

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Washington DC, USA

  Day 39

  The President ached all over as he stepped into the underground Situation Room. The cot bed in the bunker hadn’t been very comfortable and the war news had been depressing, depressing to the point where he hadn’t been able to get much sleep. He’d slept much better in Iraq, when he hadn’t borne ultimate responsibility for every lost life, and he made a mental note to get a better bed installed in the bunker, even if he had to pay for it himself. The underground Situation Room was almost a duplicate of the normal situation room, apart from the absence of servants. The principals would have to organise their own coffee. He was sure that wouldn’t tax their abilities too far. With alien attacks still underway, their servants had more important things to do.

  “Please be seated,” he said, as he took his place at the head of the table. The group had stood when he’d entered, a gesture of respect that was all the more meaningful when the country was at war. The atmosphere in the room was grim. The President doubted that there had ever been such an atmosphere of urgency and desperation since the Civil War. Even 9/11, as shocking as it had been, wouldn’t have provoked such urgency. Only the Cuban Missile Crisis would have come close. “General, what is the current situation?”

  “Grim,” General Wachter said. He nodded towards the big plasma screen at one end of the room. The President’s hatred of PowerPoint briefings was well known, yet there was no other choice. A map of the United States – marked with red icons representing enemy attacks – appeared in front of them. It only took one look to know that the situation was bad. “First, we have lost all of our orbiting satellites apart from the stealthed units deployed by the NSA. The vast majority of our command and control system, particularly for units deployed to Iraq, South Korea and Afghanistan, have been crippled. We have had to fall back on European satellites and communications systems, but we imagine that it won’t be long before the aliens realise what we’ve done and either demand that the Europeans stop sharing their systems with us or simply take their satellites out as well. The NSA satellites were intended for covert reconnaissance and have only limited communications facilities.

  “The attempts to prevent the aliens from gaining a foothold in orbit failed completely,” he continued. “Ground and air-based lasers appear to have been completely ineffective against the alien craft. Researchers at Area 52 have speculated that the reason they failed is because the lasers simply didn’t have enough power to overwhelm their drive fields. The aliens, regardless of the actual truth, simply ignored them. The handful of KE-ASAT units that we activated was also completely ineffective. They were simply too slow to reach the alien craft before they were either avoided or taken out.

  “THAAD missiles proved to be more effective against them, with at least two confirmed hard kills in orbit and nine more against targets that imprudently chose to enter the atmosphere over Montana. They seem to have difficulty manoeuvring in the atmosphere at very high speeds and the THAAD missiles were fired right into their path. We know we stung them because they never attempted to enter the atmosphere over land again. The vast majority of their craft chose to enter the atmosphere over the ocean.”

  His face darkened. “At least three hundred craft descended on the east and west coasts, engaging our air defence forces in a series of running battles. A full analysis is in your briefing notes for later examination, but the short version is that we inflicted losses, but were unable to prevent a series of attacks against targets on the ground. We downed around forty of their craft – we may have taken out more, but radar returns are sometimes inconclusive – at a cost of sixty jets of various types. We have no way of knowing just how badly we’re hurting them. We may have taken out fifty percent of their forces, ten percent, or one percent. Missiles destroy the alien craft if they hit – analysis suggests that the impact overloads their drive fields – yet cannon fire is completely ineffective. The best guess is that the alien craft are capable of absorbing or deflecting cannon shells, but missiles are too powerful to prevent from at least inflicting some damage. Ground-based missile systems had similar results, although in at least two attacks the alien craft crashed onto the target and inflicted considerable damage.

  “Their mindset may be alien, but their targets are understandable. They targeted air bases, radar stations, support systems and political targets. A handful of air bases have been damaged to the point where they can no longer support fighter operations and we’ve had to redistribute their units to other facilities. The Pentagon has been completely destroyed on the surface and underground complexes have suffered significant damage. A handful of alien craft shot up power stations and transformers, causing blackouts in several cities before power could be rerouted. Outside Washington itself, civilian casualties have been minimal. The only significant civilian death was an idiot reporter who managed to convince a pilot friend to take him up to view the battle. The aliens blew him out of the sky.”

  There were some chuckles. “Do you think they knew who they were shooting at?”

  “I doubt it,” Wachter said. “They don’t seem to discriminate between military and civilian aircraft, although all civilian air traffic has been grounded and will remain on the ground until…the, ah resolution of this crisis, one way or the other. We’d have stripped the idiot pilot of his licence afterwards if he’d survived. The
majority of the destroyed aircraft went down with their pilots, although a handful of pilots did manage to eject in time to save their lives.

  “The USN has lost three carriers so far, two in the Atlantic and one in the Pacific, along with almost all hands. A handful of crewmen were able to take to the boats and escape before the aliens finished them off. The escorts, being smaller and less well-protected, were generally sunk quickly. Their point defence proved unable to prevent the aliens from landing blows on their vessels and battering them to pieces. The carrier air wings were either destroyed or pulled back to the mainland.”

  He pressed on, as if he wanted to finish before he broke down completely. “So far, there have been no attacks on facilities outside the Continental United States, including carriers and air bases, but we don’t expect that to continue. The George Washington is completely exposed in its current location and isn’t yet in position to assist with Operation Wilson. In some ways, they’re actually hampering their own operations – we’re still drawing radar data from facilities in Canada, England and Japan – but my analysts believe that their forbearance has a political motivation. Officially, those bases belong to the host country and leaving them alone may convince the hosts that the alien quarrel is only with America. I suspect that the hosts will eventually get demands to take the bases over or the bases will come under direct attack.

  “The bottom line, Mr President, is that we’re taking a hellish beating,” he concluded. “The fighter pilots and soldiers on the ground are doing the best they can, but the longer this war continues, the more pressure they’ll be under. We’ll have to start pulling aircraft out of their squadrons for maintenance and repair work, giving their pilots time to rest and relax and everything else. We may even run out of missiles and spare parts. We need to launch Operation Wilson now.”

  The President stared down at his hands. Operation Wilson – the attack on the alien base in Antarctica – would raise the ante quite some distance. He’d held off authorising the operation because it would have painted America as the bad guy, yet it no longer mattered. The country was under attack and Operation Wilson represented the best chance they had at hurting the aliens. The mothership was still bearing down on Earth, yet if they could take out the base, the aliens might be inclined to negotiate.

  “The diplomatic field is not encouraging,” the Secretary of State said. He looked, if anything, worse than the President felt. Hubert Dotson had spent the last day talking personally to world leaders and his opposite numbers, only to face a series of rebuffs. “Privately, we’re getting messages of sympathy and covert help – as the General described – but publicly, the message the governments are getting from their own people is that we started this war and should therefore be left to face the aliens on our own. The economic fallout from the war is hitting the rest of the world badly, Mr President; Europe, Russia and China are all suffering serious economic disasters. Europe already has mobs on the street that will grow worse over the next week, while both Russia and China have clamped down hard. I doubt the Chinese will be able to maintain control for long. Their economy has effectively evaporated.

  “And the normal suspects are acting up as well,” he added. “Iran has been bullying the smaller Gulf States and acting as if it intends to challenge Saudi. North Korea has been making threatening noises towards its southern cousin and may be considering coming over the DMZ. The economic shockwaves may sweep over Africa and the Middle East – frankly, even if the aliens all dropped dead tomorrow, we’d be spending years rebuilding. The loss of the satellites alone has crippled our economy.”

  “And our media,” Wachter said. “They’re going to have problems broadcasting their lies without their satellites.”

  The President was too tired to see the funny side. “And the word on the streets?”

  “Concerned, mainly,” the FBI Director said. “The vast majority of the population is praying, although there have been a series of nasty incidents, mainly clashes between people protesting the war and people who are protesting the protests against the war. Several thousand people have been hospitalised after violent clashes; thousands more have been arrested. The fighting has caused people to rally round the flag rather than question the underlying nature of the war; it helps, to be fair, that the aliens chose the wrong forum to drop their bombshell. The UN is not well-regarded by the majority of the American population.”

  “The UN has been working to get a peace agreement going, despite opposition by various UN members,” the Secretary of State said. “They’ve been beaming signals out from several facilities in Europe and Asia, but no response. The aliens don’t seem interested in a truce.”

  “Of course not,” the President said, sharply. “They’re coming to settle our planet. The war won’t end until we take out the mothership or force them to settle on our terms. We might as well admit now that the world is never going to be the same again.”

  “And the aliens are not UN members anyway,” the Secretary of State added. “They might not be interested in becoming UN members. Why should they?”

  The President shrugged. “Operation Wilson,” he said. “Are you sure that we should move now?”

  “The base is definitely supporting their attacks,” Wachter confirmed. “We’ve tracked alien craft heading southwards at high speed after breaking off their attacks on our facilities. We’re not sure what’s waiting for the assault force under the ice, but taking out the base – even if we recover no alien tech – would definitely have an impact on their ability to conduct operations. We can no longer afford to care what the other involved nations think of us conducting military operations in the area. We have to take the base out now.”

  “Send the orders,” the President said, coldly. The die was cast…but then, it had been cast when the aliens had forced them to fight or submit. “If the assault team is unable to occupy and loot the base, they are authorised to detonate the nuke and destroy the base.”

  No one objected. The President wondered vaguely if that was a sign of their increasingly desperate situation. Detonating a nuke for any reason before the aliens arrived would have caused a furious debate, even within his handpicked cabinet. Now, he’d authorised the deployment of a backpack nuke capable of taking out an entire city and might have to launch nuclear-tipped missiles at the alien mothership when it entered orbit, even though destroying the mothership might ruin Earth. Nukes were hardly as terrifying as public opinion would have people believe, yet there was nothing casual about their use. They’d been humanity’s final resort for far too long.

  “There is another issue,” Jones said. He looked unshaven and tired as well. “We need permission to start dissecting one of the alien bodies.”

  The President considered it briefly. He’d given the order to hold off on any intrusive research procedures because it might have upset the aliens, but now they were at war, it hardly mattered any longer. Learning how the alien bodies actually worked might help prepare for the ground offensive he knew was coming – they might even work out how to construct a biological weapon that could be deployed against the aliens. If they could present the aliens with the threat of a biological holocaust, perhaps they’d talk terms. It was a possibility…and yet he had no illusions about how difficult it would be to identify possibilities and develop such a weapon. Alien biology had to be very different to human biology. Human-alien hybrids were the product of cheap science-fiction movies, not real life.

  “Granted,” he said, finally. “Keep me informed on results.”

  “That does lead to another interesting datum,” Wachter said. “Most of the craft we shot down exploded violently in the air or crashed into the ground and exploded, but a couple crashed fairly intact and were recovered. They both had two pilots who should have survived the crash, but both of them had liquefied brains. I think that the aliens are determined that none of their people are going to fall into our hands.”

  “Why?” The President asked, genuinely puzzled. “We wouldn’t mist
reat them.”

  “We might if we wanted information we knew they possessed,” Wachter pointed out. “It might be a simple security precaution. Anyone who falls into enemy hands gets killed by an automated suicide implant. The CIA used to have a comparable idea…”

  “No one liked the idea very much,” the CIA Director said, quickly. “It became a system for volunteers only.”

  “The Special Forces do sometimes use similar implants,” Wachter admitted. “The ones for soldiers are voluntary and can be triggered by the soldier if he felt that he was at risk of being tortured for information. The ones for captured terrorists are often inserted without their knowledge and have been used to lead us back to their bases, or their fellow terrorists. The aliens may just believe that anyone we capture will be tortured…”

  “Or perhaps will talk quite willingly,” the President mused. “The only information we have about them came from one of their leaders and we know that they lied to the UN. For all we know, they might be a repressive society with soldiers convinced that the human race is composed of monsters and assholes.”

  Wachter grinned. “You mean it’s not?”

  The President snorted. “Short of capturing a live one, we’ll have to table it for the moment,” he said. “When will Operation Wilson be launched?”

  “Within the next two days, depending on conditions,” Wachter said. “Lieutenant-Commander Nicolas Little will make the final call for when they’ll jump off and hit the base. There’s a Force Recon team watching the base now, but we’re restricting communications in case the aliens locate them and realise they’re being watched. Taking out the bases in Antarctica would be child’s play for them and then they’d be safe – they’d certainly go after the George Washington as well.”

  The President nodded. The last thing a SEAL would want would be a politician – even an ex-military man – watching over his shoulder and micromanaging. He’d hated it back when he’d been in Iraq – it had been one of the reasons he’d resigned – and he trusted the SEAL to do the job. There was nothing else he could do. The only help the outside world could offer was a Tomahawk bombardment from the submarines waiting to pick up the surviving soldiers after they pulled back from the base.