Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  “At ease,” Wachter ordered, shortly. “What you are about to hear is not common knowledge. We’ve invested a great deal of effort in keeping it that way. Some of it will already be familiar to you; some of it will be new and startling to the newcomers. You’ve all been tapped for Operation Allen and, I’m afraid, there is no release from this mission. If there was another way…”

  He leaned forward. “The blunt truth is that we are losing the war,” he said. Nicolas heard the reactions only vaguely, through his own shock. A handful of men swore aloud, another thumped the ground savagely, but the majority just stared at Wachter. He could have pulled out a gun and started shooting at them and they would have been less surprised. “We’ve kept the loss rates and suchlike out of the media – no point in giving the aliens a useful source of intelligence – but they’re bad. We’re losing irreplaceable aircraft every day. We’ve adapted our tactics and scored some significant successes, yet we are being steadily ground down to nothing. We’re losing bases and support units and that is hampering our ability to keep our fighters flying.

  “We’ve effectively ceded the airspace over parts of the United States because we can no longer plug holes in the defences. The aliens have not been slow to take advantage of our weaknesses and there have been an increasing number of strikes against military bases and other vital targets. There are parts of the country without power or other essential supplies because the aliens took out power plants, transformers, bridges and other targets. They don’t seem to target civilians directly – at least as far as we can tell, although there have been some incidents where civilians were killed for being too close to a targeted base – but the civilian population is suffering. We believe that it is only a matter of time before they move on to the next logical step, a ground invasion.”

  “Like we did to Saddam fucking Hussein,” someone said, from the rear.

  “Exactly,” Wachter said. “The mothership orbits in twelve days. We don’t know why they’re following the exact targeting pattern they are, but we suspect that once they have the mothership in orbit, they’ll land vast numbers of ground troops. We may have problems stopping them from establishing a foothold and occupying the entire United States. But we cannot let the war end there.”

  Nicolas met his eyes for a moment and saw the desperation written there. “We think that they targeted us first because they believed that we posed the greatest threat,” he said. “They will probably seek to complete the job once they have the troops on hand and…I’m telling you now, we may be unable to prevent them from landing and taking the country. If – when – that happens, you men will be the core of an underground resistance movement to take back the country.

  “The President, as some of you have heard, recently nullified all laws concerning firearms ownership and suchlike in an attempt to ensure that the civilian population will be armed and ready to fight the aliens. This has not gone down well with some elements of the country” – Nicolas smiled at the thought of the multiple heart attacks that would have struck the gun control nuts – “but on the whole it has proved a popular policy. The problem is that most of the armed civilians out there won’t have the slightest idea of what to do and will probably end up being easy meat for the aliens. Your task is to change that and to prepare them for an underground war.”

  Nicolas scowled. He’d seen some of the militia movements during one of his leaves – they frequented gun shows and shooting competitions – and he hadn’t been impressed. Some of them would have made good soldiers, with the right training and leadership, but most of them were nothing more than wannabes, without even the right mindset to be a trained soldier. Their massive collections of guns wouldn’t be much use without training and discipline and they lacked it. They also tended to be frighteningly intense, sometimes fanatical, but almost all talk. A handful were dangerous and had caused the FBI some sleepless nights, some were ex-military trying to keep their skills sharp, but the majority were harmless nuts, more dangerous to themselves than others.

  He remembered a man with a beer gut who had claimed to be a SEAL. Nicolas had quizzed him without his knowledge – if he'd been close to any SEAL, it was a seal in a sea life centre – and then out-shot him in the shooting competition later that day. It had been easy to outshoot the poser, but some of the odder people had been more surprising challenges. There had been a cheerleader with a skirt that was shamefully short who had been a sharpshooter, even though she was only a few years older than Nancy. She would have made an ideal recruit for a resistance movement. Her father would have been proud.

  “You will operate with authority from the President and leave no paper trail,” Wachter said. “You will emplace weapons stockpiles around the country, including explosives and other nasty surprises, and recruit other soldiers as necessary. You will be responsible for establishing your own communications networks and linking in to the underground communications systems, although you will have to bear in mind that it might become compromised at any moment. In the event of Washington being destroyed and the National Command Authority being lost, you are authorised to continue the war until the enemy is removed from our land.”

  Or we die, Nicolas thought. He had no illusions about the task. He'd studied insurgencies during training and then fought them in his career. Insurgents could be deadly enemies, yet very few insurgencies had come close to success without massive support from outside, or an incompetent opposition. The Warriors they’d fought…how well would they handle an insurgency? Would they go in soft or hard? Would they torment the civilian population until they broke and handed over the insurgents, or turned on the aliens…? There was no way to know.

  “Your group is not the only group involved,” Wachter concluded. “You will have no contact with those other groups, however, until the aliens land. OPSEC will be maintained until we know the full extent of the threat. You will not talk to civilians or anyone outside your group about your duties – if some asshole in a procurement office refuses to hand out weapons and materials without a requisition form in triplicate, you will put them in touch with my office and we’ll send that bastard to a posting in Alaska. I suspect that there will be rumours about your activities, but your lives and success may depend on how well you maintain your secrecy.

  “If we are lucky, there will be no need for your operation and you will be able to disband and return to normal duties. I do not expect that to happen, and nor does the President. You are to assume the worst and prepare for the long haul. The country may well be occupied, but as long as one of us remains fighting, we will never be defeated. Good luck.”

  Nicolas watched him go, still unable to grasp what had happened. No one had ever seriously expected that the United States would be invaded. It just didn’t happen. NATO had created stay-behind units in Europe to prepare for a Soviet invasion, but the Soviet threat had collapsed and the stay-behind units had been disbanded, although not before getting their names into the media in the worst possible way. Stay-behind units in Italy and Germany had been implicated in political assassination, media manipulation and other criminal acts, poisoning the political scene. It hadn’t been NATO’s finest moment. The only reason it hadn’t blown up into a full-scale Atlantic crisis was because the stay-behind units had been a mixture of American and European personnel.

  And even if the aliens were defeated, the insurgents would cast a long shadow over American politics for the foreseeable future. The vast majority of American citizens had been content with their lot, but there had been plenty who’d wanted a change, even if they had to wade through oceans of blood to force change. The tactics they’d learn in the course of the insurgency would also serve well – perhaps better – against an American government. He wasn’t blind to the level of trust being placed on their shoulders, and the desperation. Nullifying all firearms legislation was one thing. Teaching thousands of American citizens how to be terrifyingly good insurgent fighters was quite another. The government knew that it was on the verge of losing t
he war. Once the mothership arrived, all bets were off.

  The soldiers spilt off into smaller groups and began good-naturedly arguing through the possible options, discussing the value of different tactics and operations. Nicolas looked up at the map and realised that most of the soldiers came from the same general area, Virginia and the surrounding states. Many of them had grown up with military families, or knew other veterans in the area who could be recruited into an underground army, men and women who would be motivated to fight for the United States. The official military bases would probably be destroyed or occupied, but there was plenty of room for covert military bases…and all the chaos caused by the alien attacks would only cover their movements. The mountains would provide a great deal of cover for insurgent operations.

  He ran his hand through his hair as he remembered Nancy. She could never know the truth…or perhaps he should tell her and her stepfather, warn them to run and hide. The aliens could have a list of every soldier in America and have them all marked down for immediate arrest and execution when they finally invaded, or perhaps they didn’t know or care about individual humans. Human history showed a wide range of possible precedents. They might be nice and concentrate on winning hearts and minds, or they might be cruel and devastate hundreds of miles to wipe out insurgent groups. There was no way to know.

  “We’ll find a base of operations over the next few days,” he said, finally. They’d discovered that he was the senior officer in the group, although he'd only have nominal overall command. Leaderless resistance would work far better than an attempt to coordinate against vastly superior firepower. He attempted to sound confident, yet he knew that it was going to be nasty. Insurgent wars were never clean and tidy. “Once we know where we’re operating, we can start gathering supplies and making contacts. The bastards won’t know what’s going to hit them.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  RAF Fairford, United Kingdom

  Day 60

  I wonder if I’m making a mistake, Prime Minister Arthur Hamilton thought, as he watched the alien craft settling down to the tarmac. RAF Fairford was something of a pointed choice for a secret meeting, one that implied that the aliens were going to make more than a few demands of the British Government. The base might have officially been a RAF station, but until comparatively recently it had actually been run by the United States Air Force and still played host to a handful of stealth fighters, although all of them had been placed in reserve. The base was currently operated by a RAF maintenance crew who’d started the task of bringing it up to full operational status after the alien mothership had been detected. The RAF might need to operate from Fairford if, as seemed likely, the other bases were hammered by alien fighters.

  The alien craft was a spectacular sight as it glided out of the air, but the Prime Minister’s thoughts were elsewhere. Britain had been in a weak economic position for the past decade and the shockwaves from the alien war against the United States had pressed huge financial damage on Britain, and the rest of the world. The country had been making slow progress upwards towards full employment when the shockwave hit and instantly put millions out of work.

  The government had done its best to prevent a crisis, but nothing had worked for longer than a day, if that. There had been rioting on the streets, ethnic warfare in a dozen cities and a massive loss of confidence in the government. Martial Law had been declared across half the country and tens of thousands of even vaguely suspect characters had been put behind the wire, something that might do even more damage in the long run. The prisoners had to be fed and watered and, after the crisis was over, would probably try to sue the government. The hell of it was that most of them were innocent, but there was no way to tell the difference and some of the truly guilty were really dangerous.

  The former USAF base wasn't that far from London and the heart of the British Government, but the Prime Minister felt uneasy at being even that far from Parliament. The Leader of the Opposition had been giving the Government his full support, which had prevented outright challenges to the Prime Minister’s authority, but the backbench MPs were muttering rebelliously. Some of them thought that the government had gone too far. Some of them thought that the government hadn’t gone far enough. Between them, they could bring down the Government.

  His gaze slipped to the SAS soldiers patrolling the perimeter with loaded weapons, including a handful carrying Stinger missiles and other weapons. There shouldn’t be any problems – protests had been banned since three of them had turned into riots and left hundreds dead in their wake – but if the aliens came with hostile intent, the Prime Minister suspected that they wouldn’t be enough. The news from America was growing darker by the day. The Prime Minister’s military advisors had been following the USAF’s battle very closely and had advised the Prime Minister that while the RAF could learn from the American experience, they would still lose aircraft and eventually run out of planes and pilots.

  Britain had one of the most advanced military forces in the world, yet it was tiny, a legacy of successive defence cuts by various governments. The Government had been trying desperately to repair the damage, but rebuilding a capability took years, and anyone who might have been willing to sell the needed equipment to the British required it for their own defence.

  “They’re coming, Prime Minister,” his aide muttered. A hatch was forming out of the alien craft – despite himself, the Prime Minister was impressed by how…organic the craft seemed to be – and allowed a single alien to step out of the ship. “There’s only one of them?”

  “Hush,” the Prime Minister said. The American President had been taken to the mothership, the UN had had three alien ambassadors…he suspected that it was a calculated slight, best handled by ignoring it. Britain probably didn’t rate as important compared to the United States, and if the aliens could grind down the invincible USAF, they were probably confident that they could do the same to the RAF. “Ambassador. Welcome to Britain.”

  The alien looked at him and, despite himself, the Prime Minister shivered. He’d seen the recordings the Americans had made of their President’s visit to the mothership – and he had no idea how they’d managed to smuggle a camera onboard – yet it didn’t compare to meeting an alien in person. It was a warm summer day, but he still felt cold. It was almost like meeting a diplomat from one of the more unstable world states, yet somehow different. The aliens could threaten Britain’s very existence.

  “Thank you for meeting us,” the alien said. He spoke in a voice that sounded like a loud whisper. “I am Ethos. I speak for my people. You speak for yours?”

  “Yes,” the Prime Minister said. The aliens had clearly done their research – probably by kidnapping a few hundred people from the UK, the Prime Minister thought sourly – and knew how the Prime Minister was elected. Britain might still be a monarchy, in theory, but as long as the Prime Minister had a majority in the House of Commons, the Government could run the country to suit itself. “I have authority to speak for my people.”

  The alien said nothing for a long moment. He had an excellent poker face, without any of the facial tells that a human would have shown. The Prime Minister was an excellent chess player – he had always regarded poker as rather uncivilised – and recognised the pause. The alien was silently running through his possible options in his mind. The Prime Minister had negotiated with countless diplomats before and had faith in his ability to bring two parties together, yet this was very different. The aliens had the power to dictate to the entire world – what was happening to America proved that – and would presumably insist on a large degree of political control. Ethos – an odd choice of name, the Prime Minister considered – might have come to demand that Britain surrender.

  “We are currently on final approach to this planet,” Ethos said, finally. The alien voice sounded slightly more human, all of a sudden. “Once we enter orbit, we will begin landing our people on the surface and establishing living spaces for ourselves.”

  The P
rime Minister’s eyes narrowed. “How will you establish living space for yourself?”

  “We will remove the local human governments and take over,” Ethos said, flatly. There was no hint of compromise in the alien tone. “It is our observation that many of the humans in the targeted area would be happy if their governments were smashed and replaced by benevolent authority. We would certainly not slaughter thousands of humans merely for being the wrong sex, or the wrong skin colour, or the wrong religion.”

  The Prime Minister said nothing, thinking hard. If the description was taken at face value, that meant Africa or the Middle East, perhaps both. It made a certain kind of sense. The aliens claimed to have a billion settlers on their ship and Africa and the Middle East was under-populated by humans who might get in the way. Ethos might even be right about their reception. Only a week ago, there had been yet another bloody coup in Africa and thousands of supporters of the defeated government had been put in front of a wall and shot, while the rebels looted, raped and burned their way through the capital city. War – and famine and drought – were the curses of Africa, curses blamed on the Europeans who had colonised the continent over a century ago. The truth was more mundane, and tragic. The African Governments, as a general rule, were corrupt and their leaders looted as much as they could before rebels overthrew them and took control for themselves. The rebels promptly repeated the same process until they too were overthrown. There were seeds of hope, but most of the continent was a hopeless disaster area.

  “We are prepared to make you an offer,” Ethos continued. “We do not intend to settle on your territory. We wish merely that you do not become involved in the inevitable and futile struggles between humans and our people. If you agree to remain uninvolved, we will provide you with fusion power systems, batteries of a vastly superior design to your own tech, and synthetic oil that will meet your requirements until you switch over completely to electric systems. We will even consider purchasing supplies we need from you in exchange for further technology and other supplies.”