Invasion

by Chris James

“No,” she said with a frown. “I don’t like being constantly distracted.”

  “It does have a ‘sleep’ feature, you know.”

  “Whatever. What’s going on?”

  “Our transport times have changed. We need to be at the station in half an hour.”

  Maria’s shoulders sagged, “I thought we’d have more time.”

  “We did. Now it’s gone.”

  “Piccolo,” Maria called, addressing their home’s super AI, “why do we have to get to the station sooner?”

  A high-pitched robotic voice answered: “Your transport’s original time has been brought forward due to changes concerning British Army logistics. Would you like me to detail them?”

  “No, thanks,” she mumbled, packing clothes and a toiletry bag. “Any delays getting to the station?”

  “No.”

  “And where is my brother, Mark?”

  “Currently in an artificial submersive gaming environment.”

  “For how long?”

  “Question unclear: please specify past or future meaning.”

  Maria did the zips up on both sides of the holdall, sighed, and said in a sarcastic tone: “How much time has elapsed since my brother, Mark, entered the artificial submersive gaming environment?”

  “Five days and twenty hours.”

  “Do you think he’ll come up for air anytime soon?” she asked, hefting the bag and putting the strap on her shoulder.

  “The highest probability is that he will emerge for food sometime during the next three to six hours.”

  Maria took a long look at her room. She saw the pictures on the walls, the four trophies she’d won for playing the piano years ago as a child, the pretty blue model tree on the shelf from which hung her earrings. Then she recalled why she was leaving: to join the British Army and begin her basic training.

  “Maz,” Martin called from the downstairs hall.

  She turned and left, almost skipping down the stairs with a sudden enthusiasm to discover the future that awaited her. At the bottom, her parents wore positive expressions but Maria made sure not to look too closely lest she see deeper truths which might make parting more difficult than it had to be.

  “Right the pair of you,” her father said, clapping his hands, “remember to take care of yourselves, got that?”

  “Got that, Dad,” Martin said.

  Maria’s throat abruptly constricted, but she managed to look at her mother and utter: “Sorry to leave you with Mark.”

  Her mother shrugged and said: “Doesn’t matter. He’s hardly ever here, anyway.” Mother and daughter embraced and Maria heard, “Look after your brother if you can.”

  Maria thought better of reminding her mother that she and Martin had been ascribed to different regiments and would be split up after the first week. She embraced her father and then she and her brother walked out of the front garden, followed by their parents.

  Martin said: “If things get really bad, me and Maz will find a way to get back here, don’t worry.”

  The reassurance sounded false to Maria. She looked up at Billy, the faded wooden rabbit that sat on the chimneystack. The bright early spring sunlight highlighted how worn he had become. She had an odd sense of premonition but put it down to the stress of the situation and the excitement of a future unknown. Her enthusiasm deflated to a subtle foreboding.

  Chapter 33

  12.44 Wednesday 1 March 2062

  GEOFFREY KENNETH MORROW had never been so scared in his life. The crowd of refugees had turned into a mob at the impact of the first explosion, and he struggled to stay on his feet in the mayhem. The monorail station he’d been approaching was surrounded by thousands of refugees desperate for transport north to escape the approaching Caliphate forces.

  Fury raged inside him: he’d been interviewing a photogenic young Spanish teen who’d lost the rest of her family when the monorail from Madrid had arrived in Zaragoza, Spain’s fifth largest city and a major hub for the evacuation of civilians northwards to the border with France, a little over a hundred kilometres away. The pleas from poor Jimena, with her scared face, tear-streaked cheeks and pretty bun on her head was viewing gold, and just what Alan in London would love—as soon as Geoff could find somewhere with comms so he could transmit. She spoke in simple, halting English that exposed the depth of her fears even more heart-wrenchingly, with the light glittering off a delicate silver brooch she wore on her jacket. But he’d barely got thirty seconds with her before the Spiders began attacking the city.

  When he’d arrived, he’d made sure to stay on the north bank of Ebro River even though he could’ve got local city transport heading south over it, and now congratulated himself on his foresight. Southwards, Zaragoza’s architectural treasures were silhouetted against palls of black smoke from which orange flames flashed and passed. Tremors from collapsing buildings vibrated through the ground all around him and the dust they threw up added to the mayhem. Explosion followed explosion, and the sky was littered with contrails as the ACA battle raged above them. If he’d gone south of the river, he’d already be dead now.

  He glanced at the innumerable figures who rushed every which way around him, desperately trying to relocate Jimena—she could not have gone far. But such was the volume and the speed of the people, he could glimpse an individual for no more than an instant. His morbid curiosity had been satisfied to the point of satiation with gruesome images of dead and injured civilians scattered on the local streets.

  He heard yet another explosion distantly and a further volley of shouts and screams went up. Geoff wished the people would stop shouting and screaming. A gout of flame erupted from a building to the northeast and Geoff convinced himself that the monorail station around which a crowd of thousands buffeted had to be on the enemy’s target list. He understood the need to get away but wanted to find Jimena first.

  He gave up. He silently wished Jimena good luck, turned, and began forcing his way against the general flow of people hurrying to the station. A large, unseeing male barged into Geoff and knocked him down. Geoff rose at once as renewed panic lent him the extra energy and dexterity to get up from the ground. He felt pangs of guilt as he tried and often failed to avoid treading on those who had already fallen. Mostly these were elderly people who, Geoff reasoned, didn’t really have a chance of getting out anyway, but occasionally he had to step over a small child rolled into a ball.

  The ground heaved under his feet and he fell again, this time on his side. Less than a hundred metres in front of him, the roof of what looked to be a large warehouse or distribution building peeled open as though a giant hand pushed it up from the inside. It fell back with a loud crash and the ground juddered. In reaction, he forced himself back up onto his feet and fled south towards the river. The people thinned out and it became easier to avoid collisions. He glanced skywards and muttered: “Where are you, you bastards?” in frustration.

  He arrived at a wrought-iron barrier and leapt over it to land on a path that ran alongside the river. Palls of black smoke drifted past in the gentle breeze. A sudden rush of falling masonry caught his attention and the spire of an ancient church collapsed.

  As the minutes passed, Geoff sensed a pattern in the destruction. He noted that certain buildings were destroyed, while the Caliphate’s ACAs ignored the general population. The aerial dogfights in the bright blue sky above lessened and then seemed to stop altogether. Geoff kept twitching the lens in his eye to see if it could link to anything and establish comms, but from what he’d read, only military-grade comms would work now.

  After more than an hour of cautiously stalking along the path by the river, taking cover by the wall on his left a number of times, the frequency of explosions seemed to lessen. The breeze picked up and pushed the voluminous smoke out of the city and over the countryside. Fires crackled and the materials within them hissed and snapped as they burned. He felt an overwhelming sense of shock and recalled a misadventure in his youth, when he’d got into a fight and a much heavier
man had beaten him almost to a pulp. Through his pain, he’d lain on the ground waiting for his punisher to do more damage. But instead, the man walked away with an air of victorious supremacy. Now, that feeling from so many years ago came back to Geoff. Like him, Zaragoza had been beaten to within an inch of its life by a much more powerful antagonist. But instead of finishing it off, the bully had turned his back as if to say: “There, that’ll do for now.”

  People began to walk upright again amid the carnage and chaos. The journalist inside Geoff insisted that he observe and note; his lens recorded everything his eye saw, but the lack of comms in his location meant it could be some time before anyone viewed these images, and probably a very long time before Geoff himself could write up his own copy.

  Survivors called out words that Geoff assumed were the names of lost loved ones. He headed back towards the monorail station wondering where the emergency vehicles could be; he heard not a single siren among the crackling flames, moans of the injured, and calls from the survivors. Then he chided himself when he realised that those vehicles would have been quite high on the Caliphate’s target list and had certainly gone.

  “Jesus,” he mumbled to himself, “what if this shit happens to London?”

  As the afternoon wore on, survivors with missing loved ones congregated around the most severely damaged locations and started their own rescue work. After touring the area, stupefied at the extent of the destruction and how a modern European city could be reduced almost to rubble in moments, Geoff began to appreciate the subtlety behind the Caliphate’s tactics. For decades, international attention had focused on powerful nuclear weapons; a single munition that could level vast areas at a stroke. But, Geoff reasoned, the Third Caliph needed to keep global public opinion on his side. So, as with the navies in the Mediterranean, as with Israel, and as with Turkey, he hit his targets with munitions which he could spin as somehow merciful in their limited destructive capabilities.

  As Geoff stood staring at the devastation all around him, he understood a key aspect of the Caliphate’s invasion strategy. Given all the chaos he could see, Zaragoza might as well have been hit by a nuclear weapon; the only thing lacking was the radiation, which in any case the Caliphate did not want if it were to overrun and dominate Europe.

  “¡Eh, tú!” a voice shouted.

  Geoff looked over at three men lifting and throwing chunks of rubble. “English!” he yelled back.

  The man who’d shouted stuck out a stubby arm at the rubble and asked: “Help?”

  With no official rescue services around, he decided to assist them. In addition, he saw that his wandering had brought him back to the monorail station at which he’d first arrived in the city. One man tried to talk to him in Spanish, but with no comms the translation feature in his lens would not work.

  Geoff found the work relieved him somehow after the remarkable stress of the day. The sky reddened as the sun touched the horizon. They pulled the first body out; an old man covered in blood whose limbs must have been broken in many places. Geoff grabbed an arm of the corpse and when he pulled he felt the lifeless limb come out of the shoulder socket inside the victim’s clothes.

  The dusk deepened. The three men conversed and Geoff assumed they talked about when to stop and where to spend the night. Still, two hours after the attack ended, there was no sign of any civic or military support. He wondered why the authorities hadn’t made any effort. Moreover, now his own safety had been secured, at least for the time being, a sense of self-preservation reasserted itself. A voice in his head urged him to find a way out of Zaragoza, for this attack had to be the prelude to the invading forces’ arrival, and he really didn’t want to be here when they did arrive. He stopped lifting and throwing chunks of rubble and looked at the ruined monorail station. He asked himself how he could or would get out if all transportation in the city had been destroyed.

  A grunt from one of the others drew his attention to the next body in the debris. Squinting in the fading light, Geoff crouched down, threw away some smaller pieces of concrete, and put his arms around the female’s narrow shoulders and pulled. When she came up, he saw that half of her face had gone, making her unrecognisable. But when the others helped him turn the small body over, Jimena’s delicate silver brooch caught a ray of light and glinted out from her dried blood.

  Chapter 34

  19.32 Friday 3 March 2062

  THE ENGLISH PRIME MINISTER, Dahra Napier, tucked her hair behind an ear and exhaled, feeling in the best frame of mind she’d been in for some days. Sitting behind the desk in her office at Ten Downing Street, she looked at the men opposite her and wondered with a little mischievousness if they considered her methods a little too unorthodox. She smiled at Monica as her aide filled her glass.

  She stood, walked around the desk and leaned back on it, taking a sip of wine. She said: “Good evening, gentlemen. I appreciate this meeting is a little unusual, but given the speed of events, I do feel we can drop certain protocols. I think an informal appraisal of what we currently know will, if nothing else, give a more… human view of the issues. Cheers.”

  Terry Tidbury tilted his scotch and ice towards Napier and returned the toast. Defence Minister Philip Gough sipped his cognac and the mercurial Head of MI5, David Perkins, nodded and drank from a glass of orange juice. From further back, standing by a large, antique sideboard, the portly Home Secretary, Aiden Hicks, and Foreign Secretary Charles Blackwood both stared at Napier as they each lifted and sipped from a glass of red wine.

  Napier said: “I would like to start with some good news. At least we should still regard it as good news: Joanne gave birth this morning to a baby boy, and mother and child are both doing well.” Faces smiled and murmurs of congratulation floated around the room, but Napier sensed politeness to be the real reason rather than any serious interest that their colleague, the present Secretary for Health, had been safely delivered of a child. Napier went on: “I’m sure you all join me in wishing her and her new family all the best, despite the rather trying circumstances in which the young man has arrived.”

  “Hear, hear,” Hicks said a little too enthusiastically, and Napier wondered if he thought he was in the House.

  She took a breath to continue but the door opened and Crispin Webb hurried into the room. “Sorry, I’m late,” he said in an apologetic tone.

  “How are you?” Blackwood enquired, his bald head leaning back.

  “Yes, fine, thank you. Still ticking,” Webb replied, tapping his chest with a flat hand.

  Napier asked: “Are you sure you shouldn’t rest a little longer?”

  “No, no need, really. A few hours with a GenoFluid pack and a decent night’s sleep is more than enough, thank you.”

  Napier didn’t know whether to believe that he had indeed recovered from the heart attack he’d had in the House of Commons two days earlier, but she did know that she needed his help and felt glad to see him back. “Very well. Monica, get Crispin a drink, would you?”

  “Just a glass of water, thanks,” Webb said to the aide as she rose to fulfil Napier’s request.

  The Prime Minister said to the room: “The Leader of the Opposition was quite shocked when my PPS collapsed like that. Said he thought it might have been a ruse of some kind, although I can’t think for a moment what. Anyway, I want to start with Charles and David. As of this evening, what is the latest on our and our European friends’ diplomatic efforts?”

  Blackwood shook his head and said: “We’d need a microscope to measure the progress. In particular, like almost all wars in the last two hundred years, now the shooting has started, the general consensus in Beijing is that it can no longer be stopped purely by diplomatic efforts.”

  “But what about the cost to Chinese investors?” Napier asked. “They’ve sunk trillions in Europe and the Home Countries. Isn’t there any pressure at all on the Politburo from those interests?”

  Blackwood glanced at Perkins and answered: “If there is, we don’t know about it. I had the
Treasury make some calculations and the worrying thing for us is how diffused Chinese investments are.” Blackwood sipped his wine and went on: “For example, most of the big Chinese conglomerates have less than two percent of their total investments in European countries. In addition, one vital consideration our embassy in Beijing has identified is that the Chinese government has agreed to underwrite a special compensation package which will pay out funds to companies that can prove losses due to Caliphate action.”

  Napier was appalled: “My god, are we, as a country, really such small fry now?”

  Blackwood shrugged and said: “PM, I’m no bean-counter, but the numbers aren’t difficult to grasp. On devolution, the United Kingdom’s economy was the seventh largest in the world. Now, if we combine the current strengths of the Home Countries’ economies, jointly we would be the thirty-seventh largest economy in the world. So, to answer your question, from the perspective of what is by far and away the largest economy in the world, we are indeed small fry.”

  Napier felt devasted. The health benefits she’d enjoyed from having two days taking a backseat, ‘recharging her batteries’ as her husband had quaintly put it, threatened to be undone sooner than she thought possible. She saw Blackwood’s blue eyes piercing into her own, the intensity of their glare heightened by the black of his thick eyebrows, and wondered what he must be thinking. No matter. She went on: “So, if we have no leverage economically to force the Chinese to bring the Third Caliph to heel—”

  “Er, sorry to interrupt, PM,” Blackwood said, “but I am not convinced the Chinese do have quite the power over the Third Caliph we ascribe to them.”

  Mild frustration flashed inside Napier, but she let it pass. “Meaning?” she asked in a neutral tone.

  Blackwood answered: “We tend to take the historical approach. Yes, the Caliphate’s existence was mainly a result of Chinese efforts, and the rest of the world has relied, and even taken for granted, Chinese assurances that the sealed political entity it created maintained peaceful intentions. But the Chinese response since this absolute chaos began does beg the question: did they even know about it?”