Outside Context Problem: Book 03 - The Slightest Hope of Victory

by Christopher Nuttall

  And we know nothing about the interior of the city, he thought, sourly. We don’t even know how many aliens live there.

  It was difficult, almost impossible, to tell the difference between two aliens, at least ones who shared the same caste. Their society didn't seem to admit of any individuality, as far as Edward could tell; the workers seemed interchangeable, while even the warriors and leaders faded into a shapeless mass. The only real signs of individuality he’d seen were war wounds; the aliens didn't seem to go in for a hair styles, uniforms or anything else that separated one person from another. Georgina had pointed out that the aliens might have their own ways of recognising one another – and that they might have the same problem telling humans apart – but Edward was sticking with his original theory. The aliens were, effectively, an ant colony.

  He was sure that there was a clue to attacking them in that theory. Years ago, as a child, he had deliberately damaged an anthill, just to watch them swarming over and trying to repair the damage. Before his mother had dragged him home, he’d learned that the ants reacted quickly to the damage, no matter how impossible it was on their scale. They just kept trying to repair the damage anyway. It rather suggested a shortage of imagination.

  There were human societies that had seemed to be short of imagination, although that was more a product of government and cultural conditioning than any intrinsic failure. He’d served in the Middle East and had decided that most of the people there wouldn't be so dangerous if they weren't allowed to buy weapons from more productive societies, or if their habits of sloppy maintenance weren’t allowed to go unchallenged. They just didn't have the mindset that would turn them into proper soldiers and their governments were unwilling to make the effort to shape that mindset. But the Middle East could parasite on the rest of the world. Who had the aliens used as the source of their innovations?

  But they can innovate, he thought, remembering the damage the aliens had inflicted on careless resistance cells. They’re not stupid.

  He shook his head tiredly. It just didn't make sense. If the aliens couldn’t innovate and couldn't progress beyond a certain point, how the hell had they developed space travel in the first place? But if the aliens could innovate, why was their society such an ... ant colony? Or was there a specific caste of innovators?

  “The parents are out again,” Georgina said, breaking into his thoughts. “Some of them look even more pregnant.”

  Edward winced as he panned the binoculars over a small group of young girls, all looking as if they were on the verge of giving birth. How long had they been prisoners? The aliens hadn't really had them long enough to get them that pregnant ... had they? But he’d seen the base in Antarctica, where the aliens had carried out their first experiments on abducted humans ... the girls might just have been taken their first, then removed before the base had been destroyed by American Special Forces. No, he realised as he caught sight of Dolly. She hadn't been pregnant when she’d fought alongside the resistance.

  “They must have done something to ensure that the children grew quickly,” Georgina said, softly. “There were theories about ways to speed up the whole process of giving birth, but I don’t think that any of them were ever tested.”

  “Because a premature baby could have mental or physical damage,” Edward said. He’d known a Marine who had had a premature child – and while she was a sweet girl, she would never be truly normal, able to find her own place in society. “Do you think that will happen to the alien children?”

  Georgina gave him a sharp look. “Biologically, it’s impossible for one species to impregnate another,” she said, crossly. “There have been cases of gorillas raping human females, but none of those ever led to pregnancy. If the aliens have somehow found a way to crossbreed humans and themselves, the normal rulebook has been thrown out of the window. There’s no data to use as a starting point.”

  She scowled. “But if they’re experimenting on finding ways to breed more humans, I wouldn't have thought they needed to bother,” she added. “It isn't as if there’s a shortage of human children.”

  Edward shivered. In America alone, there were hundreds of thousands of orphaned children, their parents killed by the aliens or by more human threats. According to the internet, several resistance cells had found themselves battling child traffickers instead of the aliens, or making arrangements for orphaned children to be adopted by rural families. At least adoption was much easier now that the government bureaucracy was gone. The alien-backed government didn't seem inclined to care about who adopted what child.

  And then there was the endless chaos in Africa, the Chinese Civil War, the meltdown in Europe ... no, the aliens hardly needed to breed more human children. They could simply round up as many as they needed, either taking them by force or simply buying them from their parents or traffickers. The crossbreed theory, as insane as it seemed, was the most likely.

  “Time to move on,” he said, and led the way towards the next vantage point. There were two more cameras to plant, then they could get back to the tent. After that, they’d have to make regular visits to the cameras to switch out the memory cards. “There’s work to be done.”

  He took one last look at the alien city, shuddering. He’d seen horrors in Antarctica – and that had been when the aliens were worried about detection. Now ... now, they could do whatever the hell they liked to captive humans. After all, who was going to stop them?

  Chapter Five

  Virginia, USA

  Day 193

  Nicolas heard the faint knock on the door and sat upright, brushing sleep away as the door opened to reveal the same masked guards. He glanced over at Abigail, sleeping deeply on her bed, then swung his legs over the side of his bed and stood upright, silently grateful that their hosts had finally provided some clothes. Being with a naked girl had been very distracting.

  “Come with us,” the first guard said. They said very little, even though Nicolas was sure that they had quite a few things in common. “Now.”

  Nicolas said nothing until they were outside the room, with the door firmly closed.

  “I’m here,” he said, finally. “Are there more questions for me?”

  The guards ignored him, merely motioning for him to follow them down the corridor. Nicolas sighed, but obeyed; they’d been interrogated every day, often going over the same material time and time again. Clearly, the resistance cells wanted to believe what he’d told them, but at the same time they were fearful that it was a trap. Nicolas hadn't really understood how frustrating the whole process of interrogating defectors had been for the defectors until he’d effectively been in their shoes.

  Colonel Oldham met him in a small room. For a moment, Nicolas wondered if they’d brought him to the wrong room; interrogation rooms were normally split between the section holding the interrogator and his subject and the section holding the observers. He’d always been in the interrogation section before, but now he was in the observation section. It seemed a little odd.

  “Good morning,” Colonel Oldham greeted him. He sounded ridiculously cheerful. “And how are you this morning?”

  “Excellent,” Nicolas said, trying to project an equal amount of cheer. It wasn't as if he wasn't used to being ordered out of bed at all hours of the day. Anyone who needed a solid nine hours of sleep each night didn't try out for the SEALs. “Breakfast was delightfully non-fattening, sir.”

  Oldham laughed, then nodded towards the transparent window. “You are familiar with these rooms, are you not?”

  “Only from the other side,” Nicolas said. Field interrogations were rare – and were never as quick and simple as the media portrayed them. “I assume that the people here can ask questions?”

  “The interrogator has an earpiece that allows us to suggest questions,” Oldham confirmed. He nodded towards the window. “There should be no clue that the interviewee is being watched, naturally. To the naked eye, the wall looks to be nothing more than solid concrete.”

  “Y
es, sir,” Nicolas said, wondering if the man was ever going to get to the point. “Why don’t we use cameras instead?”

  “Studies have proven that observers do better if they’re right next door to the interview,” Oldham said. He gave Nicolas a smirk that suggested that he wasn't entirely convinced that the studies were accurate. “That ... and the fact we were too cheap to install the cameras when they became available. This base dates all the way back to the Cold War.”

  Nicolas nodded. “Is it completely off the books?”

  “It should be,” Oldham said. “But you know what Washington is – was – like.”

  Nicolas nodded, grimly. Like all SEALS, he had developed a healthy respect for Sensitive Site Exploitation teams, the military forensic detectives who examined every captured terrorist base and found clues that often led to the discovery of other terrorist bases. It astonished him just how much sensitive data terrorists wrote down, but he supposed they didn't have much choice. Keeping track of their numbers without taking notes would have been difficult ... and terrorists were not exactly renowned for their intelligence. The SSE teams had often been able to use the terrorist lack of thought against them.

  And the terrorists had been trying to hide. No one in Washington, certainly not since the end of the Cold War, had seriously imagined that the country might be overrun and the city occupied by enemy forces. It should have been impossible for someone to slip an army over the seas to America, let alone battle their way to Washington. But the aliens had done it ... and inherited whatever paperwork hadn't been destroyed by the time they took the city. Even if the bunker was officially off the books, there might be some evidence left for the aliens to find. And, if they’d converted the bureaucrats into Walking Dead, the paper-pushers wouldn't have the option of simply keeping their mouths shut.

  “Not good, sir,” he said, finally.

  He scowled. How long had it been – it felt like years – since they’d come up with plans for post-war insurgencies? Given a few months to prepare, he was confident that they could have given the aliens one hell of a bloody nose. But no one had seriously believed that they might need stay-behind teams either. America was an invincible citadel, protected by the iron laws of geopolitics. The foe who had overrun the country existed outside human geopolitics, let alone geography.

  Oldham tapped a switch. “Bring in the prisoner,” he ordered. “At once, if you please.”

  Nicolas leaned forward, peering through the barrier, as a door opened in the far end of the room and a trolley was wheeled inside. The person on the trolley was so heavily shackled that he couldn't move a muscle, which didn't stop him from glaring around him as he was parked in the centre of the room. Nicolas shivered inwardly as he caught sight of just how solidly the man was held down. It seemed like massive overkill. Surely handcuffs and leg shackles would have been enough ...

  He scowled as he realised just what he was seeing. “One of the Walking Dead?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Oldham said. “We dare not risk giving him the slightest chance to break free.”

  Nicolas nodded in understanding. The Walking Dead might not be anything like as strong as the alien warriors, but when forced to fight they seemed to be desensitised to pain and unwilling to flee to safety. Or, for that matter, to be cowed by threats. Capturing one was not easy, nor was keeping one prisoner. Nicolas had heard that, after the first experiments to attempt to free the Walking Dead had failed, orders had been passed down from the higher ups to simply shoot all Walking Dead on sight. It would be a mercy.

  “We had to keep him strapped down for his own safety, as well as ours,” Oldham said, grimly. “He’s effectively a colossal suicide risk.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nicolas said. The Walking Dead killed themselves when they saw no other choice, just like captured aliens. Did that mean that the Rogue Leaders knew that their controlling systems were imperfect? “We don’t want him biting out his own tongue?”

  He watched as a pair of doctors fussed around the bound man. “Who was he?”

  “He used to be a military bureaucrat,” Oldham explained, drolly. “He was stationed at the Pentagon when Washington fell; we’re not quite sure why he wasn't pulled out of the city along with many of his comrades. We’re assuming that he was one of the volunteers to stay behind and keep the building active as long as possible, but we don’t know for sure. It’s quite possible that he was picked up later, identified and then implanted. Or that he answered General Howery’s call for military officials to return to their posts and got implanted then.”

  Nicolas scowled. The Walking Dead might have been completely loyal to the aliens, but that didn't make them stupid. If General Howery had commanded troops up to the standards of the pre-invasion military, the resistance would have been obliterated by now. As it was, the last reports he’d heard had insisted that the Order Police were receiving much more detailed training from the aliens and their unwilling slaves. It wouldn't be long before they were far more capable of hunting down the resistance.

  A question struck him. “What’s his name?”

  Oldham gave him an odd look. “Does it matter?”

  “Yes,” Nicolas said, flatly.

  “Peter Sanderson,” Oldham said, after a long moment. “Why did you want to know?”

  Nicolas hesitated. Peter Sanderson was about to prove that the implants could be disabled, but there was a strong possibility that he was about to die in the process. If so ... he hadn't wanted to remain ignorant of the man’s name, even if he hadn't volunteered to be tested. There was no way of knowing what kind of man he had been before the invasion, before the aliens had stuck implants in his head, but right now he was risking his life for his country. Nicolas liked to think that he would have volunteered if he’d had a free choice.

  “I thought I should know,” he admitted, finally.

  Oldham nodded. Perhaps he'd had the same thought.

  There was a buzz from the intercom. “Sir? We’re ready to inject the nanomachines.”

  “We examined them as best as we could, but our facilities are limited here,” Oldham explained. “In the end, it was decided that we should test them on a live subject.”

  Nicolas nodded. At least that explained the delay – and it was a wise precaution.

  Oldham tapped his radio. “You may proceed when ready,” he said. “We’re watching.”

  The alien rebels had explained that the nanomachines were actually small enough to slip between the molecules of a person’s skin and enter their bodies without causing any damage. Nicolas had read enough science-fiction to be thoroughly terrified of all the possibilities, although the aliens had reassured him that outright self-reproducing nanites were still beyond either human or alien capabilities. The vision of the entire planet dissolving into a mass of nanomachines was still terrifying. Who knew what would happen when human researchers started messing around with alien technology?

  They’d also explained that the nanomachines were dormant in the vials, but when they were activated – by being shot into a person’s body – they had a very short lifespan. Nicolas suspected that was a safety precaution, although he found it a little disappointing. If they managed to produce nanites that lasted indefinitely, perhaps by drawing their power from the body’s warmth, they might be halfway towards super-soldiers. What would happen if wounds healed as quickly as they were made?

  “Here we go,” he muttered. “The dawn of a new era.”

  Oldham gave him an odd look, but said nothing.

  The doctors pressed the alien device against the man’s forehead and pushed the button on the end, injecting the nanomachines into Sanderson’s skull. Nicolas’s instructions had been explicit; the nanomachines had to be injected directly into the skull, although the aliens hadn't bothered to provide a full explanation. It was possible, he supposed, that the nanite lifespan was measured in seconds, rather than minutes, and they needed to be close to their targets. If nanotechnology even halfway lived up to the promise of science-fi
ction, patients might be cured in bare seconds.

  Oldham watched grimly as Peter Sanderson’s body twitched as far as it could against the restraints, then fell silent. “He’s dead ...”

  “Wait,” Nicolas said. There was a long moment when he feared that he was wrong, that the process had failed to work properly ... and then the body twitched again. “I think he’s alive.”

  “He seems to have survived,” the doctor said, through the intercom. “We’re just running checks now, sir.”

  It was an hour before the doctors had something to report, which they did in a conference room. Nicolas sipped a cup of coffee – coffee was increasingly expensive and rare, even for collaborators – and listened as the doctors made their report.

  “We have studied several of the Walking Dead since they first made their appearance and one thing is clear; the implants warp their thoughts to some degree,” the lead doctor said. He hadn't bothered to introduce himself. “We don’t understand exactly how it works; our own experiments with meddling with brains never produced anything as seemingly reliable as the alien technology. On the other hand, we were never able to steer and direct currents in the brain without doing serious damage to the test subject.”

  You mean the victim, Nicolas thought, coldly. He’d heard rumours of experiments conducted by the CIA, carried out on unsuspecting victims, but he’d never seen any actual proof. Now ... if there were doctors who specialised in brain manipulation, they would have been pushed into service to try to break the alien conditioning.

  “We experimented a great deal on people with mental problems or incurable sociopathic natures,” the doctor continued. “What we discovered was that it was possible to push people in specific directions, but those directions were always vague. For example, we could dull the sexual lusts of sex criminals by manipulating their pleasure centres, yet we could never differentiate between normal lusts and perverse lusts. Actually reading their minds was pretty much impossible.”