Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  The Dark Shadows were no more. Only three of his squadron mates had survived. The squadron hadn’t been officially disbanded, but pilots now flew with whatever wingmates they could scrape up, flying a disparate mismatch of aircraft. Will was leading seventy aircraft into the fight, yet it was hardly a unified force. There were only four Raptors, backed up by Fighting Falcons, Super Hornets, refurbished Tomcats, Marine Harriers, F-117s and even a pair of Warthogs. They couldn’t even fly at the same speeds, forcing the faster aircraft to either speed forward or remain with their slower brethren. The desperate struggle for survival had brought USAF, Air National Guard, United States Navy and Marine Corps pilots together, fusing them into a single fighting unit, yet it hadn’t been enough. The aliens had ground them down over two weeks of heavy fighting and now they were moving in for the kill.

  He looked at his HUD and winced, unable to believe his eyes. He’d flown enough different types of aircraft to have an idea of how much power was required to hold something like that in the air, far more than any human technology could produce. He’d watched a television show which had featured a giant flying aircraft carrier – the USAF had actually considered the concept before deciding that it would be far too vulnerable to attack – and the aliens had actually made it real. It was no mere fighter craft, or even a landing craft. He couldn’t help but draw a comparison between the alien craft and the City Destroyers from Independence Day, which boded ill for Washington if they couldn’t stop the alien craft. The only consolation was that the aliens could probably have taken out the city at any moment if mass slaughter was part of their plan. They’d certainly stripped the city of defences more than once.

  The alien craft wasn't a massive flying saucer, yet it was more than surreal enough. It reminded him of a B2 bomber, a massive flying wing, yet this flying wing was large enough to pass for a flying city. It seemed to be launching and recovering escorting fighters all the time, challenging the humans to close in and attack it, yet Will wasn't sure if they dared. The smaller alien craft had gone up in massive explosions when they’d been shot down. The massive alien craft might go up like a nuclear bomb, or come crashing down in the sea. They were so close to the coast that the results of either would be disastrous.

  “They’re coming down everywhere,” the AWACS operator said. The radio seemed to be more disrupted than standard. Will heard a wave of static and winced as his ears suddenly hurt. “There are thousands of alien craft, landing all over the States!”

  Will stared into the distance. The alien fighters seemed to be bunching up, preparing to come right at the humans fighters and sweep them out of the air before they could threaten the mothership – no, not the mothership, only a smaller ship. The aliens worked on a scale that dwarfed anything humans had ever attempted. His mouth was suddenly dry and he had to swallow twice before he could speak. The sheer presence of the alien craft scared the crap out of him. It was just hanging there, supremely confident in its ability to withstand everything the human race could throw at it…and he had a nasty suspicion it might be right. A single Sidewinder wasn't going to do much more than annoy it.

  “All right,” he said, clearing his throat. There was no point in delaying any longer. He was tempted to pinch himself, to see if he could wake up, but he knew it was real. “On my command, execute Watchman and follow me in.”

  There was no dissent, even though they knew – they all knew – just what he was asking. Watchman had been designed as an emergency option, not something that anyone sane would try without desperate need. It would almost certainly cost the lives of at least half of his force, and even so, there was no guarantee of success. The alien fighters were wheeling around, their tactics so familiar to him now that he knew when they would come at them before they finally straightened out and accelerated towards the human aircraft. Brilliant sparks of light raced ahead of them as they opened fire, forcing the human aircraft to evade. Will braced himself as the alien craft swooped closer…

  “Now,” he ordered.

  The Raptor lunged forward as he triggered the afterburners, driving right towards the alien fighters. The other supersonic aircraft followed, closing with the aliens at well over Mach Two. The aliens reacted quickly and scattered in surprise, and then found themselves under attack by the subsonic Warthogs and Harriers. The Harriers had proven themselves as fighters during the Falklands War, yet the Marines had never flown them in air-to-air combat until the aliens had arrived. They’d made up for it since then. A massive explosion marked a collision between an alien fighter and one of the human aircraft, the alien having failed to get out of the way in time to escape.

  “Lock missiles on target,” he ordered. The alien craft was so large that it was impossible to deduce where a vital system might be installed. He designated a target quickly and flashed the information to the other aircraft. The aliens had recovered from their surprise and were rapidly counter-attacking. “Fox-three!”

  The Raptor jerked as he launched four missiles right towards the massive alien ship. A moment later, the remaining fighters added their own fire, launching a swarm of missiles right into the teeth of the enemy defences. If a single missile could bring down an alien fighter, Will had reasoned, a handful of missiles might bring down one of the big alien ships. He was only vaguely aware of the AWACS vanishing off the air and the loss of radar data as the missiles bored in, before the alien craft opened fire. It filled the air with countless multicoloured sparks of light, shooting down a handful of the human missiles before they could strike home. The remainder slammed into the alien craft’s drive field and exploded, but the ship seemed undamaged. The drive field didn’t collapse. The craft didn’t fall out of the sky.

  Shit, he thought. We’re going to need a nuke.

  He yanked the Raptor aside microseconds before an alien craft could blow him apart. The aliens were counter-attacking savagely, vectoring hundreds of their fighter craft in on the impudent human aircraft, wiping them out of the sky. The formation, such as it had been, was coming apart as the aliens pressed in and picked the human craft off, one by one. He twisted desperately to avoid a second craft, realised that it was useless and expended a Sidewinder on the enemy, wasting it to preserve his life for a few more seconds. The alien craft exploded, shaking the Raptor violently. There was no hope of a clear sky. He saw a Warthog explode as an alien craft wiped it out of the sky, fired another missile to save a Tomcat from an attacker who killed it a moment before it followed its target into oblivion. If there were more than a handful of human aircraft left in the air, he'd lost track of them. His entire force had been wiped out and it would be his turn in seconds. He didn’t even have any missiles left. Once the aliens realised that he was unarmed, they’d simply pick him off with ease and put an end to the affair.

  Quite calmly, he pointed the Raptor at the massive alien craft and rammed it. There was a brilliant wave of fiery pain, a sudden awareness of his entire aircraft disintegrating against the drive field, and then nothing.

  Untroubled, unharmed, the alien craft rumbled onwards, towards Washington.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Washington DC, USA

  Day 69

  “Mr President, NORAD is gone!”

  “Gone?” The President repeated. “What happened?”

  “Unknown,” the operator said. “The report from Peterson AFB suggested that the base was nuked. All communication links with Cheyenne Mountain and NORAD are down. The base is no longer broadcasting on any frequency. General Dyson began the command transfer procedure just before the base…ah, went off the air, but most of the command links are down.”

  “They’re heading directly for Washington,” Wachter said. The display showed thousands of alien craft slipping out of orbit and heading down towards the United States. They’d be coming down all over the nation, the President realised. “Mr President, we have to get you out of here!”

  The President stared at the display. The remaining AWACS had been shot down, and the radar stations sur
rounding Washington had been hammered over the past two weeks, but the alien craft were putting out so much energy that they were easy to track. Their mammoth…invasion transport, or command ship, or whatever the hell it was seemed to be gliding slowly, but surely towards Washington, while the smaller ships were fanning out over the country. The last of the American fighters had been shot down or driven away by superior alien firepower. A direct attack would be suicide.

  “I’m not leaving,” he said, flatly. He’d refused to leave the White House when the alien attacks had begun – leaving the White House would have caused panic across the nation – and he had no intention of leaving now. The bunkers would provide more than enough protection. If the aliens could detect and destroy the bunkers directly, the war was within shouting distance of being lost anyway. “What about the SAM missiles?”

  “The batteries on the coast tried to engage the massive ship, but they didn’t cause any damage,” Wachter said. “Mr President, you cannot stay here! They’re either going to invade the city or destroy it and either way, you must survive.”

  “Mr President, we just had a FLASH message from Andrews AFB,” the operator said. “Alien craft are landing around the base and engaging the defenders. Other bases have dropped completely off the air. We’re losing command and control networks everywhere.”

  “That big bastard will be overhead in ten minutes,” another operator added. “The Marine Barracks and Air Defence Artillery are on alert, for whatever good they’ll do.”

  “It we shoot that thing down, it’ll come crashing down on the city,” Wachter said. “There won’t be much of a city left afterwards.”

  The President stared at him. It was hard, almost impossible, to comprehend the sheer magnitude of the disaster. It would have been easy to fall into delusion, or to move imaginary units around the map. The situation was so…surreal. He’d had over two months to get used to the concept of aliens, he’d met the aliens personally and knew what they had in mind, yet…no one invaded Washington, no one. The British had burned down the White House in 1814, during a war neither side had really wanted, and no one had ever repeated the feat. Lee and the Confederates had never attacked Washington; the Germans and Japanese had never had a prayer of reaching the city. Even terrorists had only managed to cause some damage and panic. The aliens…the aliens were going to take the entire city. The population had fled, apart from those who wouldn’t or couldn’t go…

  It was going to be a nightmare. Cold logic told him Wachter was right and he had to flee, to raise his standard somewhere else and organise the underground resistance to the aliens. The oath he’d sworn to protect the United States against all enemies demanded that he stayed and fought alongside the Marines now deploying to defend the White House. No other President had ever faced such a nightmare, but no other President had ever failed so badly. Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter…they’d all called America into disrepute, but they’d never done any permanent harm. President Chalk had lost the entire country.

  “I can’t,” he said, finally. He’d taken the precaution of carrying his old Desert Eagle, something the Secret Service praised and condemned in equal measure. “I won’t…”

  Wachter nodded to someone behind him. Before he could protest, he felt cold hands grasping his body and holding a cloth to his mouth. He breathed in a tiny amount of the fumes, enough to send him falling into darkness. His last thought was absurd. They weren't even going to let him die bravely.

  ***

  Pepper held the President’s body as he lost consciousness and the darkness claimed him. The drug on the handkerchief was military-issue only, causing anyone who breathed in even a tiny amount to collapse for at least an hour. There were concerns about releasing it to the public, even though it would have been very useful in riot control work, because a tiny percentage of the population suffered from allergic reactions to the drug. For someone whom the Secret Service had a full medical profile of, like the President, it was possible to calculate the precise dose required to cause a longer period of unconsciousness. Pepper just hoped that the President wouldn’t sack her on the spot when he woke up and realised what she’d done.

  “You three,” Wachter said, waving to a set of uneasy-looking soldiers. They wore nothing beyond basic combat uniforms, but Pepper knew that they were all Green Berets. “Escort the President and his protective agent to the secret bunker and then place yourself under his command. Tell him that it was all my idea and he shouldn’t blame anyone else.”

  “Yes, sir,” the lead soldier said. Pepper had never caught the man’s name, but she’d read his record. He’d protected Ambassadors and Special Representatives in several of the world’s more hostile countries and never lost one yet. “Shouldn’t we get a stretcher?”

  Pepper was already well ahead of him. The President was always escorted by a medical team, just in case of a heart attack, poisoning or another medical emergency. Two of the medics had already come into the room when the President’s monitor had revealed that he’d collapsed. At her orders, they took the President and placed him gently on the stretcher. They’d carry him through the maze of tunnels to the secret bunker. If the aliens knew where that was, the war was over anyway.

  “Send out a general signal,” Wachter was ordering, as they left. “Tell them that EGGPLANT is now underway.”

  Pepper shivered as she checked her sidearm. EGGPLANT was a contingency plan no one had ever expected to have to use. All over Washington and the rest of America, government buildings would be destroying paper files and wiping computer databases, before destroying them with shaped charges. The records of everything that America had left; from underground forces waiting to strike back at the enemy to the command codes to contact the SSBN submarines would be destroyed. The aliens wouldn’t be able to use Washington’s fondness for paperwork against it. It was a tacit admission that the war was lost.

  “Sir,” she said, “shouldn’t you come with us?”

  “My place is here,” Wachter said. “Get him out of here.”

  ***

  Abigail couldn’t remember if Washington had even tiny earthquakes, yet the entire city was shaking now as the alien craft advanced. It was incredibly massive; so vast as to be beyond her comprehension, mocking anything that humanity might have put in the air. She heard the sound of cars crashing and people fleeing – the groups that had planned to oppose the aliens having suddenly realised just how powerful the aliens were – above the sound of windows shattering into shards of broken glass.

  The alien craft just took her breath away. She’d never imagined anything like it outside of a Hollywood flick where lots of shit was blown up. She didn’t have the slightest idea how something that large could even fly, or if it intended to land in the middle of Washington and crush all the skyscrapers below its bulk. It seemed close enough to touch even though she knew that it was an illusion. It seemed large enough to be the mothership itself. As it advanced, it cast an unholy shadow over the land. She heard shooting not too far away and risked glancing away from the alien ship. A cop was standing in the middle of the road, firing madly up towards the alien craft. If the alien craft even noticed, if the bullets even hit the target, there was no sign of any reaction. It just lumbered on towards the White House.

  Its shadow seemed to leap forward and envelop her, plunging her into darkness. She felt a warm trickle running down her leg as the air seemed to shimmer all around her, casting her into sheer terror. She found herself on her knees, staring up into the darkness – Washington’s power grid had gone completely down and all of the streetlights were dark – and shaking uncontrollably. Staring up at the alien craft was like looking up into absolute darkness. A human would have outfitted the craft with running lights, surely, but the aliens hadn’t bothered. She knew she should be recording the entire scene, yet there was no point. The aliens had won the war.

  Others seemed to disagree. She heard a roar behind her and turned to see SAM missiles lancing up towards the alien craft.
She wanted to scream at the defenders – if they shot down the craft, it would come down right on her head – yet how could she blame them? She wanted to flee, back to her apartment and hide under the bed and pretend that it wasn't happening, but she was rooted to the spot, unable to move at all. The missiles splashed against the alien craft’s drive field, sending waves of oddly beautiful light shimmering out over the city, but accomplished nothing. The alien craft hung in the air, as enigmatic and threatening as ever. The soldiers fired again and again, but nothing short of a nuke would touch the craft.

  The panic down below was only getting worse. She saw a mixture of government workers, wealthy citizens and poor gangbangers from the suburbs fleeing together, suddenly rendered equal by the aliens. The shadow was nightmarish, casting the human race into gloom and setting off the worst of humanity. She caught sight of a pair of gangbangers dragging a teenage girl off the streets and into a building, then of a cop shooting the pair down without even trying to arrest them. Humans were scurrying around like ants that had had their nest smashed wide open, trying desperately to find an elusive safety. There was no hope for any safety any longer, Abigail realised. The aliens had shattered every one of humanity’s illusions about its role in the universe. The men who’d wandered the streets proclaiming that the end was nigh had had the last laugh after all. The end was nigh.

  Another spread of missiles reached up towards the craft…and this time, the aliens reacted. A beam of light, bright enough to break Abigail’s paralysis and send her hand racing to shield her eyes, lanced down towards the remains of the Pentagon. There was a brilliant flash of light followed by a massive fireball; a moment later, the ground shook violently. The entire building shook and for a terrifying moment, she wondered if it was going to come crashing down, killing her in the process. As a child, she’d had nightmares about living in skyscrapers because they seemed too fragile, yet when she’d grown up she’d dated a guy who designed them and he'd convinced her they were safe. Rick had never imagined an alien craft shaking the entire city, even though he’d assured her that tornados and earthquakes could be handled. He’d been a nice boyfriend, but their careers had clashed and they’d eventually broken up. The last she’d heard, he’d married someone who specialised in building mansions and had been trying to set up a business together. She hadn’t thought of him in years.