Invasion

by Chris James

  She ducked into the garden of a villa and tried to see what happened while organising her BHC sleeve. The enemy would only need to assign one Blackswan, as each Blackswan carried fifty Spiders. She’d taken part in enough NATO exercises to know that such irregular threats as those special-ops troops now presented to the invader had to be eliminated absolutely. Her memory replayed fragments of the pre-war briefings they’d had, and she could recall agreeing with her squad that the special-ops guys were the most doomed, certainly more doomed than the regular troops.

  She rolled the BHC sleeve up her body and felt her eyes well in sudden regret. The special-ops troops must think getting out to the sub would only require the shooting down of a limited number of Spiders. She looked again at the bright blue sky and cursed the unfairness of it all. She missed the Squitch telling her how many of the enemy were approaching and from what directions and at what speeds. Squinting against the brightness above her, she thought she saw the black dot multiply; but, as earlier, she could not be sure that impurities on her corona were the cause.

  An urgent shout came to her ears. Now the BHC sleeve restricted her movements again, she struggled to lean forward on the low wall and peer through the trunks of the palm trees. The Spanish squad had split into two pairs. One pair had taken up firing positions in the road, Pickups pointing skywards, while the other pair had selected one of the large rowing boats that lay abandoned on the stony beach and were dragging it to the water’s edge.

  On another shout, the pair in the road opened fire. Dozens of shots cracked out in almost-continuous fire. Pip strained her head to see an explosion burst a hundred or so metres in the air, and she let out a whispered, “Wow,” as the fire pair turned and ran for the boat, ejecting the empty magazines and inserting new ones as they went.

  Another shout went up: “Incoming, east!” The pair who had been dragging the boat unslung their Pickups and fired into the sky. The pair running from the road both slammed into the boat shoulders first. This shifted it enough that it scraped across the stones and the bow entered the water.

  For a brief moment, Pip began to wonder if they would be able to escape, but a rare breeze lifted the fronds of a palm tree to reveal part of the sky with black dots coming down in a line. Pip gasped in dismay. The troops opened up with the same rapid rate of fire that, after just a couple of seconds, ended in another deadening explosion above them. That pair then also discarded the empty magazines and reloaded.

  The squad shouted to each other again but the crash of waves kept their words from Pip. The rowing boat slid further into the slight swell and the bow began rising and falling. Two of the squad jumped into it, steadied themselves, and raised their Pickups and pointed them eastwards. The other pair paused, and then one turned and faced north, while the other turned to the west. All four of the troops opened fire simultaneously.

  Although Pip could not see the whole scene, the soldiers’ defensive reaction carried a sense of desperate inevitability. On a martial level, Pip admired the four men for their prowess, but on a human level, her spirit buckled under the strain of watching them die. For several seconds, all four fired as continuously as their Pickups allowed. Pip marvelled at their professionalism: at least three were always firing, with only one of them reloading at a time. Spiders came at them from the east, north and west, but of course the enemy’s super AI used standard military tactics to outflank its enemy. It sent Spiders flying in a straight line to come down on top of them, and then landed more on either side on the beach, allowing those to clatter their way to the target, as the troops concentrated their attention skyward. From the blue expanse above them came the sounds of explosion after explosion as the four special-ops troops worked together seamlessly doing what they had trained to do.

  The Spider that finally defeated them clattered along the beach not thirty metres from where Pip huddled against the wall of the villa. It raced past her and on towards its target. Despite the squad firing at their maximum ability, the Spider strode up to them, and although one trooper saw the danger and reacted, it detonated. In an instant, the special-ops troops, the rowing boat, and several tons of stones were picked up and thrown skywards in an explosion that Pip felt vibrate through her whole body. She stopped breathing. A wave of debris rained down around her. A sharp piece of stone hit her exposed face hard, and she sobbed in reaction. She felt her skin split and warm liquid run down her cheek and collect in the ridge where the edge of the BHC sleeve pressed against her face, before she sensed the blood trickle over.

  She looked at the beach, at the destroyed boats, at the remains of the special-ops squad, and wondered how on Earth these awful machines could ever be defeated. Pip felt an abyss of helplessness, of a crushing certainty that Europe, with all of its culture and history and its learning from which the whole world could have benefited, would soon join those empires that history had all but forgotten. A century and a half of liberal progress would now end in a vicious, overwhelming assault to which NATO had no answer.

  Other Spiders crashed into the beach and the road, and a few fell into the surf with a splash. Pip watched them as their legs opened and they clicked and clacked around the crater in the beach. With each wave, more and more water sloshed into the ditch, which in turned caused stones of all sizes and colours to slide down the sides. One Spider walked further away from the site of the explosion, in Pip’s direction. Her mouth dried and her heart rate picked up again. The Spider stopped close to a piece of debris. The two foremost legs turned upwards and acted like arms as they lifted part of the torso of a soldier and appeared to examine it. Pip peered more keenly but she could not see any other markings on the machine.

  It dropped the body part and repeated the process a number of times: selecting a piece of debris, picking it up, analysing it, and discarding it when finished. It clicked and clacked around the debris field while its compatriots moved further along the beach and onto the road. Pip stared in fascination: she’d never considered that the Spiders would do such a thing. They certainly had not during the earlier attacks; but then, she reasoned, then the enemy hadn’t been in control of the territory.

  Abruptly, the investigatory Spider made a rapid series of clicks and took off, rising straight up into the sky at high speed. The others did the same an instant later, and Pip shielded her eyes to watch them leave, noting how the eight legs withdrew to merge with each Spider’s body. In a few seconds, the black dots receded almost out of sight. Pip sagged back against the low garden wall, shattered. Her body and spirit cried out for rest. She laid down on the soft, yielding dirt of a flowerbed and told herself she could have just a micro-sleep—

  “Pip? Pip?”

  She only felt her head nod and blink, and suddenly the daylight had all but gone and a new yet familiar face was looking at her. She thought she dreamed, but her senses rushed back to her and she knew reality had returned. “Corp.?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Rory said. “Have you any idea how long you’ve been AWOL?” he asked with a smile.

  “You’re not gonna put me on a charge, are you?” she replied.

  “That depends. What happened to your face?”

  She touched her cheek below her left eye and felt swelling there encrusted in dried blood. “Lucky break. There are four squirrels on the beach who got pulverised. You should’ve been here.”

  “I wish I had been.”

  She pushed herself up to a sitting position and said: “They must’ve shot down ten Spiders. Really bloody impressive, Corp.”

  “They didn’t know they should ditch their tech?”

  She shook her head and answered: “I tried to tell them but they wouldn’t listen. Said they’d taken out actual ragheads inland and now they had a sub about to retrieve them.” Pip saw the look of suspicion on Rory’s face and was glad he appeared to feel the same, for if the special-ops squad had attacked part of the enemy’s invasion force, it was inconceivable that they could have survived long enough to reach the coast.

  Rory s
aid: “How could they contact the sub with enemy jamming blocking comms?”

  “Prearranged. The sub comes in and goes back out at set times.”

  “Jesus, we’ve got a way out of here.”

  “Just what I thought,” Pip said with a flicker of a smile.

  Rory put his arms around her with a level of intense concern Pip mistakenly ascribed to the stress of the situation. He said: “Come on, let’s get you inside. Tomorrow we catch the sub and get out of here.”

  Chapter 26

  17.11 Saturday 25 February 2062

  THE CLOSER JOURNALIST Geoffrey Kenneth Morrow got to the danger area, the stronger his sense of foreboding became. The monorail train sped south-westwards through the stunning French countryside towards Spain, and he had the whole carriage to himself. For the train’s return journey, they’d be cramming evacuees on the roof.

  He liked to think he had been no slouch as a journalist; yes, everyone read roundups and even in-depth stories written by super AI, but human journalists still existed to add more life and flavour to reportage, to give those shocking stories a sharper edge when they broke. Super AI could aggregate, extrapolate and then write copy in any one of a thousand styles, but enough people still wanted to read copy written by human hand, and even forgave the occasional typo or rare factual inaccuracy. This happened in cycles every few years: the fashion went towards the latest generation of artificial-intelligence constructs, invariably leading to headlines predicting the end of human involvement in newsgathering and reportage, until something went wrong and popular opinion swung back in favour of real people, and the headlines asked how artificial intelligence could ever have gained such dominance.

  Geoff’s most frequent editor had a favourite Orwell quote, framed and hanging behind the wall: “Journalism is printing something that someone, somewhere, does not want printed. All else is public relations.” Few people actually printed anything anymore, but the essence remained sound. On the other hand, Orwell’s famous quote had never meant as little as it did now. Never in Geoff’s memory had any international news event been so black and white. His hack-sense screamed that there must be a conspiracy, there had to be more to it. The reason the Third Caliph had given for the unprovoked assault did not convince a great many of the people of Europe.

  The media in the Home Countries and the other European countries bristled with accusation, theory, conjecture. Fingers pointed at Russia, at China, and even at the USA on the preposterous grounds that the removal of European markets would finally allow the American economy to begin to recover from the worst crash in its history twenty-four years earlier. However, once Geoff scratched the surface, none of the theories held much water, unless quite the most unlikely and outrageous diplomatic truces had been made. No, the causes of this shocking destruction might not be fully known for years or even decades—

  A flashing icon in the lower left of his vision broke into his thoughts. He said: “Lisa?”

  His partner’s voice came back tersely: “Where are you, Geoff?”

  “What? Can’t you see?” he said, wondering what might have happened to stop her knowing exactly where he was.

  “No, or I wouldn’t have to ask, would I? The government has brought in more data restrictions under emergency powers. So, where are you?”

  “About fifty kilometres from Toulouse, I think,” he answered, part of his mind suddenly running with the idea of the invasion just being a front for the current English government to carry out a massive power grab. The idea fizzled under the weight of its outstanding improbability in less than a tenth of a second. A reminder popped up from somewhere in his memory that his partner was pregnant with their child, so he asked: “How are you? How are you feeling?”

  “Yes, fine,” Lisa answered in her unhappy voice.

  “Have my parents visited?”

  “Yes, they’ve been. It was nice to see them.”

  “They can’t wait to be grandparents, can they?”

  Silence.

  “Lisa?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s going to be okay, don’t worry.”

  “I do worry, Geoff. What if it’s like Nairobi last year?”

  “No way, not a chance—”

  “You nearly died.”

  For the hundredth time, regret surged inside Geoff that he’d told her about Nairobi. “But this is nothing like that,” he said.

  “Really? You got yourself lost in a city of twenty million where law and order had completely broken down—”

  “It was a hot story, Lisa. Chinese, Russian and African mafia going at it like hammer and tongs. Kenyan officials taking bribes from all of them. The government was falling apart—”

  “Geoff… Please come back. It’s not safe there.”

  Geoff clamped his jaw shut to stop the sigh being audible to her. The monorail train whooshed into a tunnel and Geoff saw his head reflected back at him in the black window glass. The tight curls sat unruly on his head and he recalled that he’d meant to get a dry cut before he left. A second later, the train exited the tunnel back into bright sunlight and his view of the countryside returned as the train rose higher than the embankments on either side. Patches of evacuees moving on foot came into view on a road that ran parallel with the monorail.

  “Geoff? Geoff? Are you still there?”

  “Yes, Lisa. Try not to worry, will you? I’m not going to go anywhere near the frontline. Everything’s going to be fine and I’ll be back in no time.”

  “Oh, that’s a great help. Thanks,” Lisa said and ended the connection. Geoff sighed aloud in relief. He knew his platitudes sounded hopelessly insincere but could not think what else to say. He often wished Lisa would just understand and support him a little more. He’d never made any secret of his career and she’d gone into their relationship with her eyes open. Geoff thought it wasn’t reasonable to expect him to change just because they were going to start a family.

  The data feed in his lens announced the train’s imminent arrival at its destination. The names of the city’s tourist attractions flashed up for his consideration but he blinked them away, not interested in Toulouse itself, only in how he might find a connection south, closer to the action. Geoff felt the deceleration as he continued to stare at the snaking lines of evacuees that had continued uninterrupted since the end of the call with Lisa. Questions formed in his mind: why are they traipsing along on foot like that? Do they already know they won’t get official transport to take them north? As his suspicious journalist’s mind constantly queried, his lens flashed up a sudden diversion. The train was not following the monorail to the city centre as it normally would, but now turned to the east, heading into the outskirts. For several minutes, he passed urban streets.

  New data and instructions flashed up in Geoff’s view. The super AI controlling transport in this part of France had abruptly reassigned this train as a medical evacuation transport. A slight movement as it adjusted its heading made Geoff put out his arm to steady himself. He watched with growing curiosity as his transport moved towards a different terminus. Hordes of people watched in the distance as the train veered to another platform. The crowd stared but did not move.

  Geoff grabbed his rucksack and moved to the nearest door. The monorail stopped. The door opened and he stepped out onto the bright concrete, noting the handful of others who also exited. Barriers guided all of them to the exit. Geoff barely noticed the growing commotion because his lens told him he would have to travel across the city almost to the airport to get a connection south on a provincial line. He watched the display in his lens as it established for him the least-troublesome way to cross the city to his new destination. He did not feel like walking but the lens told him he had no choice.

  A growing commotion pulled him back to his surroundings. A cacophony of shouts went up distantly. Geoff had never learned French or any other foreign language because his lens would flash up working translations if he needed them, but in crowded situations like this he had to ke
ep that feature deactivated otherwise his vision would be overwhelmed with too many fragments of text—

  Abruptly, an unseen force pushed Geoff down onto his right side with crushing power. For an instant, he felt as though he were on a ride at an amusement park, but the burning heat from his cheek as the force pushed him across the polished concrete began to hurt at once. A deep boom shuddered through the air. He stopped sliding when the pressure vanished as suddenly as it had arrived. He noted human screams in the distance, shocked and scared and urgent. He lifted his head and a vicious pain stung all around his face and crawled over his scalp, as though he’d woken up with the worst hangover imaginable. His lens offered to transmit a live feed to his editor Alan in London, to which Geoff acquiesced with a painful blink.

  The screams grew louder, and as a result, Geoff deduced that he could not have been very close to the centre of the explosion. He heaved himself onto his hands and knees, noting how much effort that required, and then a voice in his head pointed out that Alan would not appreciate images of the concrete floor at the current time.

  With the side of his head feeling as though it were on fire, he pulled himself upright and saw black, smoke-filled chaos in the terminal.

  “What the fuck just happened there, Geoff?” Alan’s voice broke in. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Geoff mumbled. “Looks like a bomb.”

  “Why? Who by? What for?”

  “Give me a minute,” Geoff croaked, swaying on his feet.

  “Take your time,” Alan said. “The pictures are great. Just try to get a little closer when you can.”

  “Okay,” Geoff said, wishing there was a wall nearby against which he could steady himself. People ran to the left and right in front of him, panic on their faces. Geoff fell down into a sitting position and noticed the blood on the floor that must have come from him. He swore aloud and galvanised himself, standing up again so Alan would get better pictures. The smoke rose towards the high ceiling and the scared and wounded people became visible.