Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  “I’m…I’m reading over four hundred spacecraft,” Harrows said. He couldn’t keep the stammer out of his voice. NASA hadn’t selected a coward to command the ISS, but the worst he’d had to deal with was a possible collision with a manmade object. No one had seriously expected an alien invasion…and even after the alien mothership had been detected, they’d expected the ISS to be destroyed in the opening moves of the war. “They’re coming this way.”

  Philip watched over his shoulder. There were so many spacecraft that the radar was having problems keeping track of them all, making it hard to tell just how many there were, although it probably didn’t matter. The alien spacecraft were massive, each one large enough to land thousands of aliens on Earth…and they were all heading towards their new home. The mothership itself was hidden behind the radar distortion caused by the presence of so many smaller spacecraft, yet somehow he knew that it was entering orbit and preparing to send down the next set of alien craft.

  “Update Washington,” he said, slowly. The ISS wouldn’t last a second against the alien armada. It was overkill. So many ships could probably take out hundreds of worlds like Earth. “Tell them that we’ll do our best.”

  “They’ve taken notice of us,” Heights said. Somehow, the scientist remained calm. “One of the really big ships is heading our way.”

  Isabel Paterson peered over from her console. The brunette woman had been one of the engineers before the crew had been recalled to Earth, but her USAF commission had kept her on the station. Philip barely knew her, yet his superior officers had been impressed with her and predicted that she’d probably serve a term as ISS commander, provided she passed the political handicaps. Every country that had an investment in the ISS got a say in how the station operated. Personally, he would have operated it by the rules of the Republic of Gondor.

  “Big bastard, too,” she said. The alien craft was showing up clearly on the radar screen now as it separated itself from the stream of craft heading towards Earth. “It’s over five kilometres long.”

  For a moment, Philip quailed. What could they do against such a force, but die bravely? “Felicity,” he said, slowly. “Prepare Atlantis for launch.”

  Felicity didn’t argue as she left the control module. Harrows did. “Captain,” he said. “What do you hope to achieve?”

  “If we hit that…thing with one nuke, we’ll take it out and make life easier for those down on Earth,” Philip said. He wasn't inclined to argue, not when time was rapidly running out. “I have instructions to launch a strike on my own authority if…”

  The entire station shook violently. Alarms sounded as oxygen began to leak out of the station. “What happened?” He demanded. “Felicity! Are you all right?”

  There was no answer. “Felicity!”

  “I’m alive,” Felicity’s voice said. “I’ve got a mask on, but there are at least two breaches in this compartment and we’re probably spinning in space.”

  “Atlantis got hit badly,” Heights said. He swung one of the cameras mounted on the station’s exterior hull around to show where the shuttle had been. Fire didn’t burn in space, their only saving grace, yet the shuttle had been completely wrecked. The cockpit had been destroyed and the cargo bay had been ripped open. There was no hope of launching any of the nukes now. “Sir, the station is no longer viable.”

  Harrows gritted his teeth. “We’ll have to get to the escape pod,” he said, pulling masks out of the walls. The emergency systems had failed, Philip realised dully. They hadn’t been designed to deal with an alien attack. “We don’t have a choice, but to abandon the station now and hope that we make it back down to Earth. I’ll set the station’s sensors on automatic and they can keep feeding information to Washington…”

  “I don’t think it will matter,” Janet said, as the station jerked again. “They’ve come to get us.”

  Philip stared in frank disbelief as the looming bulk of the alien spacecraft settled over the station. The station was shuddering under its presence, as if it were generating turbulence in space, as impossible as that was. He saw a hatch the size of an aircraft carrier opening up, revealing an eerie green light that seemed to somehow reach out towards the station and pull. He felt himself drifting downwards towards the deck as a gravity field pulled them towards the spacecraft, taking the entire ISS onboard. It was completely insane, it was unbelievable…yet it was happening. He saw a look of shock on Harrows’ face, disbelief on Isabel’s face, before the station was pulled completely onboard the alien craft and crashed to the deck. The ISS had never been designed to operate under gravity and rapidly crumpled under its own weight.

  They’ve abducted the entire station, he thought, realising that they had to get out before it crushed them. He silently cursed the decision not to arm the ISS with anything more lethal that ASAT missiles, wishing that he’d strapped on his sidearm before leaving the shuttle. It hadn’t seemed like something he'd need onboard the ISS, but who would have imagined that the aliens would bring the entire station – and the wreckage of Atlantis – onboard?

  “We have to get out of here,” he snapped, helping Isabel to her feet. The sudden return of gravity was affecting them all, making him feel dizzy and weak. It would be worse for the three who’d spent months onboard the space station. Too long in orbit made the muscles atrophy. It occurred to him that the aliens might breathe poison and they’d die, except they knew what humans breathed…they’d have provided a breathable atmosphere. If they hadn’t, the humans were dead anyway. “Come on.”

  They stumbled through connecting tubes – all warped and twisted now – until they found Felicity in one of the storage compartments. Her leg had been broken by the fall. Philip helped her to her feet and supported her as they staggered out of the station, exiting through a gash in the hull that would have been lethal in orbit. The alien air smelt faintly spicy, with an odd hint of something he couldn’t place at all, but it was breathable. They could live on the alien ship. He looked over at Atlantis and winced. The shuttle might have been a creaky ship that was older than her pilots, yet she’d deserved better than to die on an alien hangar deck. There was only one shuttle left now, if the aliens hadn’t taken out the Cape and destroyed that as well.

  He turned around a piece of debris and came face to face with a group of alien warriors. He’d seen pictures of the dead warriors from the crash – and, later, from the attack on the alien base – yet seeing them in the flesh was terrifying. The aliens lunged forward, grabbed the humans and sliced away their clothes. He heard Felicity scream as her broken leg was bumped and tried to struggle, but the aliens held him too tightly.

  “You are our prisoners,” one of the aliens said. His voice was rough and very hard. It was oddly accented, spoken as if the alien had memorised the phases for the occasion. “You will not attempt to resist and you will be treated well.”

  “I understand,” Philip said. Harrows should have spoken to the alien, but he was in shock. “My friend needs medical care.”

  “It will be provided,” the alien said. The tone hadn’t changed at all. “You will accompany us.”

  The alien holding him half-pushed, half-carried him towards an exit on the far side of a room large enough to play several games of basketball in. It was massive, yet mundane, and hardly special to the aliens. He saw a group of smaller aliens moving past them towards the remains of the ISS and wished for a nuke. A single nuke would have destroyed the entire alien ship. They could have hurt the aliens badly…

  Instead, they were just prisoners, while the aliens descended on Earth.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Colorado Springs, USA/Over Atlantic Ocean

  Day 69

  Robin was a past mistress at reading and understanding the input from radar stations and the other sensor systems deployed around the United States and orbit, but even she hesitated when she saw the mothership seemingly disintegrate. The overall radar picture had been badly degraded ever since the war had started – the aliens h
ad targeted every American radar station and AWACS aircraft – yet she could still study the mothership through optical sensors and foreign satellites. It didn’t take long to realise, from the live feed coming from the ISS, just what had happened. The mothership had finally reached orbit and the aliens were starting to land on their new home.

  “I’m reading at least six hundred alien craft,” she said. She barely had hard locks on a handful of them. The alien craft were spreading out, but even so it was impossible to track them all behind the haze of distortion they caused. The mothership might not have disintegrated into nothingness, as she’d feared before realising what had happened, yet she’d lost track of it entirely. It was somewhere behind the massive cloud of alien ships.

  “My God,” General Sandra Dyson said. She looked appalling and Robin knew that she didn’t look much better. She’d never cared about her personal appearance very much – apart from one interview where she’d been assured she’d get a position if she looked pretty – and it didn’t bother her, but the General was clearly at the end of her tether. Colorado Springs had never been attacked – the aliens had clearly decided that it wasn't worth the effort of hacking their way through the reinforced rock protecting the base – yet they’d had to watch as the aliens had hammered the USAF all over America. They'd struggled desperately to coordinate the defences against a threat of unprecedented power – and lost. The sheer weight of craft slipping into orbit and preparing to descend to Earth spelt certain doom. “How big are they?”

  Robin studied the readings, trying to make sense of them. “Most of them are around the size of a destroyer,” she said, finally. So many alien craft would be able to ride out any human attack with nukes or THAAD missiles and just carry on. “There are four that are truly massive, at least five kilometres long. One of them is closing in on the ISS now.”

  As she watched, the two icons merged together. “They’ve taken out the ISS, or taken it onboard,” she said, slowly. There were some pieces of debris floating away from where the ISS had been – the station had been attacked by one of the alien fighters, but most of it had remained intact – but there should have been much more debris, or a larger explosion if the station had been completely destroyed. “One of the other large ships is heading for America; a second is heading for the Atlantic Ocean. The third seems to be hanging back, waiting to see what we’ll do.”

  “Target them with the remaining THAAD missiles and ground-based lasers,” Sandra ordered, tartly. The aliens had never attempted to take out the lasers, a backhanded insult. Clearly, they had never considered them worth the effort of destroying, even after they’d chipped away the air defence aircraft and left the lasers undefended. “Prepare a firing solution for the ballistic missiles if we can get launch authority.”

  Robin had been running that subroutine ever since the alien craft had been detected. “They’re going to be operating at extreme range,” she warned. The alien fighters hadn’t been bothered by the THAAD missiles, except when they’d tried to enter the atmosphere over America and lost a handful of craft. They’d learned from the experience and never tried it again. “I don’t think they’re going to cause the aliens many problems…”

  “Target them anyway,” Sandra ordered, sharply. She picked up a phone and tapped a switch rapidly. “Get me the President, now!”

  The massive alien craft seemed far less manoeuvrable than their smaller brethren, even in space. Robin amused herself by attempting to visualise the limits on their capabilities, such as they were, and decided that it was probably a result of how much mass the aliens were moving around. The smaller alien craft could travel FTL, but the larger ones had never shown any such ability. The general theory was that they were simply too large to be pushed past sublight speeds, even with alien technology. The analysts had concluded that the power requirements would be colossal and that implied limits to the alien tech base, yet even she had to admit that it wouldn’t matter. The aliens weren't hundreds of light years away, but sitting in Earth’s orbit, preparing the invasion.

  She tracked their fighters swooping away from their running engagements with the USAF and heading out over the Atlantic, actually evading the remaining American air defence fighters. It made no sense until she realised that there were hundreds more fighters streaming down into the atmosphere, rendezvousing with their comrades and preparing a likely final sweep through American airspace. Other alien craft seemed to be clumping up over North Africa, watching and waiting. Robin tracked them carefully, knowing that the other NATO countries would have access to the data, even though there was little they could do about it. The aliens were probing steadily eastwards, over the Middle East, India and war-torn China…

  “You are cleared to fire when ready, Gridley,” Sandra said. Robin keyed the command sequence into her console, authorising the thirty laser weapons to open fire. They had all been targeted on the massive alien ship coming over the United States, yet there was no trace of any damage. The craft seemed to be growing warmer, as if the lasers were transferring heat to the alien protective field, but there seemed to be no other damage at all. The missiles roared off their launch platforms and screamed up into the sky and for a moment Robin allowed herself to hope, before they started to vanish off the radar screens. “Result?”

  “No detectable results,” Robin informed her. The massive alien craft was an easy target, yet it was simply too large and powerful to be affected by lasers that took minutes to burn through ballistic missile coatings and incoming enemy warheads. They could burn away at it for hours without any results; indeed, she suspected that they were actually feeding the craft energy it could use. The drive fields propelling the alien craft certainly seemed to absorb energy from the surrounding area. “It’s just hanging there.”

  A moment later, the display updated again. “General,” she added, “the second alien craft is descending into the atmosphere, along with hundreds of escorts. It’s on a direct course for Washington!”

  “The President has authorised the use of nuclear missiles,” Sandra said. There was a desperate hope in her voice. “They’re going to take the bastard out.”

  Robin might have argued about the virtues of taking a ship that size out, when the debris would come crashing down on America, but there was a more practical concern.

  “General,” she said. “There is no reason to believe that the nuclear missiles would be any more successful than the THAAD missiles. The aliens shot all of the THAAD missiles down before they struck their target. They could do the same to ballistic missiles. They’re easier targets, in fact.”

  Sandra stared at her. She might have been a General, having struggled her way through the ranks, but she respected Robin’s abilities even as she despised her inability to follow proper procedure and protocol. Robin – and hundreds of nerds like her – were tolerated because they were necessary - and because they’d never be on the front line. They’d never imagined that they’d face serious danger or life-or-death decisions.

  “Do you have a better idea?” Sandra asked, finally. “That craft is dominating the sky and…”

  She broke off as a new contact appeared on the display. “What is that?”

  Robin felt her blood run cold. The contact was an object falling from the alien craft, directly towards Colorado Springs. It didn’t seem to be powered, but it hardly needed to have a power source to reach its target. It didn’t take more than a second to perform the calculations required to know what would happen when it finally crashed into the base. The entire complex would be cracked open like an eggshell. There was no time to evacuate.

  “I’m sorry, General,” she said. The object was coming closer and closer, unstoppable by the Patriot missile batteries emplaced nearby. It was simply too large to be destroyed or deflected. “I’m very sorry.”

  She heard Sandra shouting orders, transferring tactical control to other secure bases around the United States, yet Robin knew that it was too late. The aliens could stamp on any other base with as muc
h ease as they could stamp on NORAD. The war was on the verge of being lost along with the bases.

  Slowly, she closed her eyes and waited for the end.

  ***

  The massive kinetic energy weapon impacted directly with the base. Soldiers and airmen at nearby Peterson Air Force Base saw it as a streak of light and wondered if it was a laser weapon, before the massive explosion and earthquake marked the end of the complex. Those looking directly at the blast might have thought that it had been a nuclear attack, before the flash burned out their eyes, leaving them blind and stumbling around for help. The KEW punched right through the base and down into the underlying rock, melting the works of humanity and erasing them from existence.

  There were no survivors.

  ***

  “They want us to fight that thing?”

  “Quiet,” Captain Will Jacob snapped. Somehow, he’d survived two weeks of heavy fighting, only to face the aliens in one final battle. The alien craft was so massive that he could see it with the naked eye, even at such a distance. It was moving forward slowly, as if it had problems moving faster than a crawl in the atmosphere, yet there was a ponderous inevitability about its steady course. It was heading right for Washington DC. “Stow that chatter and concentrate on your duties.”